Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  Downstairs, I washed my face. I pinned curlers in my hair. The light in the bathroom was weak, and the image in the mirror was a grim one: my cheeks loose and puttylike, deep shadows under my eyes. I was getting old; I looked old.

  The storm passed, and in the morning, I awoke to a dull, drenching rain falling outside the bedroom window. I had the memory of thunder in the night and the memory of my daughter’s terror, and I continued feeling uneasy, even as I made breakfast for my sleeping children, even as I knew that the things to be afraid of had nothing to do with the night.

  George was crossing the yard from the barn when I pulled up to the house. Lugging two canisters of gasoline, one in either hand, he nodded at me, but he was not someone who shouted hellos. Still, I lifted my hand from the steering wheel to show that I’d seen him.

  I didn’t want to have my clothes soaked, so I figured I’d just wait for Lydie to come outside. George walked toward me through the rain, not lowering his face but grimacing into it. The water ran off his head in little cascades and dripped off his shoulders.

  When he got close, I rolled down the window an inch. “What’s this about an insurance agent?” he asked, leaning down so his face was close to the glass.

  “Oh, you know,” I said vaguely.

  “No, I don’t. You didn’t mention it when I saw you—when was it? Friday. You haven’t said a thing about it. I don’t know what to think.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. When he saw my eyes dart past him, his posture changed. Lydie was coming up, shielded by a big black umbrella. She was wearing a Sunday dress and shoes, and she had a Sunday purse at her side.

  “Lookit, George,” Lydie said, coming up, “you’re getting rain all in the car. Poor Hazel, you put that window up now.”

  “I’ll see you, George,” I mumbled, and did as Lydie said.

  He disappeared around the back of the house without another word. I pulled the car back out onto the lane, and we started down the road. “So we’re going to see an insurance agent?”

  Lydie nodded. “You wanted to take a trip anyway, get some shopping done in the city. I said I’d go along.”

  “Isn’t that extravagant of us.”

  “Sure is.” She smoothed the skirt of her dress and set her purse down by her feet. “I don’t think George believed a word of it. Asked me at least a dozen questions about what and who and why.”

  I thought for a moment. Her story didn’t make much sense to me, either. I had insurance through agents in Edwardsville, just like everyone else. “Why insurance?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” She sighed. “The only reason anyone ever goes over the river is for hospital visits or funerals, and I was trying to stay away from either of those. Insurance popped into my mind. It could be a different kind you’re getting, anyway. Could be you want to add on to what you’ve got now. You’re getting older, you know. Don’t want to leave those children with nothing.”

  I laughed, and so did Lydie. But when I thought about it a moment longer, it didn’t seem that funny.

  The fastest route to St. Louis took you right through Edwardsville. We chatted about the rain, and then about this and that as I took the turns into town. By the time we’d passed the high school, though, we’d gotten quiet, and I asked if she minded if I turned on the radio. I turned the knob to the country-and-western station I usually listened to in the car. “The Wings of a Dove” was playing, and Lydie smiled and sat back. “I do like this song,” she said.

  A little while later I looked over and saw that her eyes were closed. I was pretty sure she wasn’t sleeping, and I wondered what was filling her mind. I didn’t know whether when you were sick, you thought about the big questions, whether you faced the evil possibilities head-on, or if instead you distracted yourself thinking about smaller things: what had happened the day before on your soap opera; how many jars of tomatoes were left in the cellar; how your son had gotten a low score on his last math test, and when he brought it home and you looked over the questions you realized you didn’t even know how to begin solving a single one.

  The big car rumbled over the road, and I kept both hands firmly on the wheel to keep it moving down the center of the lane. I liked driving, and despite myself, I was looking forward to seeing St. Louis. Two years ago, I’d taken Joe and Debbie and the two Hughes boys to the zoo. George hadn’t gone because there was too much work to do, and Lydie had stayed behind because her knee was bothering her and she didn’t think she could take the car ride, much less all the walking once we got over there. When we came back, she had a big meal waiting for us, fried chicken and corn on the cob and coleslaw and pie. We loaded up our plates and went outside for a picnic, where she’d spread a few quilts on the grass, and George carried some chairs out from the shed, and we ate while the lightning bugs began twinkling over the lawn. The boys all finished quickly so they could go play. After Debbie was done, she sat cross-legged beside my chair, drinking from a bottle of Coke. Lydie asked her questions about the zoo, and Debbie answered her seriously and deliberately, as if she were being interviewed and wanted to make sure she provided an accurate report.

  Nearly two years had passed since that day, but as I drove down the highway with Lydie sleeping in the passenger seat beside me, I thought about how eventually George had coaxed Debbie out into the yard with an empty jar he had on the porch. “You catch a few of them,” he said, “and see if you can’t take them to the zoo to sell. Last I heard, they’re still short on fireflies.” I remembered Debbie’s look, half doubting yet wanting to believe. Ten minutes later, when she brought him the jar with four or five of the insects batting around inside, George told her he’d take them to the zoo directors the next time he had business across the river.

  We hadn’t gone inside even as the sun slipped away. The children were all playing, and the three of us sat watching them until at last the mosquitoes got bad, and then we did pack it up. By then none of the bugs in the jar were moving much anymore, but Lydie turned to George and said, “You promised to pay her, now,” and a few days later Debbie showed up with a one-dollar bill, and I wasn’t ever sure whether it was George or Lydie who had given it to her.

  At the hospital, we took the elevator with a doctor who gazed sternly at his own reflection in the brass doors, and two nurses who were gossiping about someone named Helen. Lydie and I stayed quiet, and the nurses talked on as if there were no one else in the elevator with them. I couldn’t get over the strangeness of so many white uniforms; it was like finding yourself in a neighborhood of foreigners, with their own customs and ways of speaking and styles of dress. Like the way I felt driving through the colored area of Edwardsville, when I saw the way their clothes hung differently on their bodies, the way they stood outside their houses and shops looking comfortable and at ease with one another, and I understood that among themselves they were different from when they were among white people. An island of outsiders, they turned inward, gathered in around themselves.

  Lydie and I were the outsiders here, intruders into a world where bodies were laid out on tables and washed and cut open and then sewn back together, or sent through X-ray scanners with limbs frozen into odd positions. The elevator pinged its way up, from floor to floor, the little lights blinking on and off.

  A sign pointed us in the right direction down the hall and we came to a door with several doctors’ names on it, including Dr. Brysanski. Inside was a waiting room decorated with bright orange chairs and glass tables with curved corners made of brass. The floor was worn linoleum, yellowish with old wax, but the walls had recently been repainted, and the effect was to make you wonder how long it had been since the floor was that same bright white. There were two large ferns set down in the middle of the space and three chairs between them. No one was sitting in those chairs because it was clear that the ferns would upset your hair. They made a sort of focal point, though, something to stare at from the chairs against the wall.

  Four or five other people were sitting in the waiting room, and none looked v
ery sick. I thought they must be waiting for the people who had the appointments. Of course, Lydie didn’t look all that sick, either. There was no telling what went on inside a person: we could all of us have a crust of tumors growing, or be living the last day before a heart attack. I hadn’t noticed anything different in Karol the day his heart seized up and stopped working.

  The people in the waiting room were all city people, wearing smart clothes that looked store-made—clothes that bunched at the shoulders or tapered at the waist an inch too high or too low, with the little refinements and decorations that gave away the proud fact that they were manufactured: piping and serge, two different fabrics miraculously dyed the same shade. All these people were women, save one, and this was a man in a loose suit with his hat set upon his knee.

  After Lydie put her name in at the counter, we both took our seats. That day’s Post-Dispatch was sitting on one of the tables, and I picked it up to give us something to look at besides those ferns. I handed the paper to Lydie, but she shook her head. “You go on and tell me what’s new,” she said, and glanced again at the door where the nurses went in and out.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said. In the car, we hadn’t talked at all about our reason for going to the city, but now, sitting in the waiting room, I thought about the fact that Lydie had chosen me to come with her and reasoned that it must mean she wanted to talk. Otherwise, she would have driven over here alone. “It’ll be just fine,” I said, “you’ll see.”

  “Okay.”

  “They’ve got methods. Things they can fight it with.”

  “Things,” Lydie repeated. “Far as I know, they’ve just got the one.” She frowned and crossed her arms protectively over her chest. “And I’m not going to do that.” A moment later, she smoothed out a wrinkle in her skirt, and I knew that I’d been wrong, thinking she wanted to talk.

  The door opened, and a short, boxy-looking nurse with a tall fluff of red hair announced Lydie’s name. I patted her arm. She nodded and stood, and followed the nurse to the back, and I was left with the other people in the waiting room, the women in their smart dresses and the man in the ill-fitting suit, who’d glanced up with hopeless dread when the nurse came out, and then returned to looking at his shoes.

  After Lydie was gone, I thought about the procedure that she couldn’t bring herself to mention. When I tried to place myself in her position—wearing a hospital gown and lying flat on my back, the masked doctors coming at me with knives—it was a horrible image. They took the whole breast and lots of tissue around it. That was all they knew to do. It would be painful to endure the procedure and painful after. But it would be hard, too, leading up to it—I tried to imagine how it would feel to look at my chest for the last time, to know that when I woke up from surgery I’d be wrapped in gauze, wrapped so many times that I wouldn’t know, at first, how changed my body was.

  I snuck a glance down at my chest. It was not the same bosom I’d had when I was twenty. It was not even the same one I’d had five years ago. Still, some women my age were already grandmothers; though I was forty-seven, I figured my body was still worth something.

  When George and I became lovers, I’d figured out for the first time in my life what it was to love without any other goal than to love, and to keep on loving in the way that felt best. With Karol, we’d lived and worked together, and had children, and tried to put up with each other’s faults. But with George I understood that when it comes down to it, love is only the stuff of the body. His body, mine. In the three years since we’d begun seeing each other, I had come to love the skin and bone and muscle, the hollows and curves of my own form. My body did not look the same as it had when I was young, but he hadn’t loved me when I was young. He’d loved me when I was already heading to fifty.

  Lydie was back there with the nurse now, unbuttoning her dress. Don’t you touch me, I’d be thinking if I were in her position. Don’t you dare take away what is mine.

  24

  When Lydie came out from seeing the doctor, she glanced around the waiting room, and I saw her register that the man with the hat on his knee was gone. His wife had come out a while before. She was pretty and had little white pointed teeth, but she was bruised-looking, her whole body discolored like an apple turning bad. The man had stood up and his wife had said something like, “Ma’s got Annie,” to which her husband said, “Yeah.” Then they’d walked out into the hall and were gone forever.

  “Well?” I asked Lydie.

  “Well, it’s Bry-SAN-ski, not Brysinski. He told me I was saying it wrong.” And she went up to the desk and checked with them about something or other and then came back and said all right, that was it, we could leave.

  We went out into the hall and back down toward the elevators, and she didn’t say anything. Then we were in the elevator, with other doctors and nurses getting on and off, as they had when we were going up, and still neither of us spoke. One of the two nurses who had ridden up with us before now stood in the corner alone, facing the shiny doors. I knew she must have gotten off the elevator not long after we had, and had done some work and then gotten on it again before us, but I couldn’t help but imagine that she’d been standing there the whole time, like it was her fate to ride an elevator up and down forever.

  She got off on the third floor, and then Lydie and I got off at the ground floor and went out into the day. The rain had stopped, and the whole sky was a sheet of white, all the light spread out as thin as the glaze on an angel food cake. I squinted and fished in my purse for the car keys. I wouldn’t be the first to speak, I decided. If Lydie wanted silence, it was hers to demand.

  While I was searching for my keys, she said, “He wants me to come back. I’m supposed to return for a—he didn’t say surgery, but that’s what it sounds like. They’ll take a piece of, of skin or flesh, and study it, and he says that’ll decide if it’s cancer.”

  “You made the appointment?”

  Lydie nodded. “It’s for tomorrow morning. Normally, you’ve got to wait a lot longer, but the doctor has got some time tomorrow because—I don’t know why. But he does. I’m supposed to come here in the morning, at nine a.m. And I’m not supposed to eat or drink anything after nine p.m. tonight. So.” Her purse had slipped down her shoulder to her elbow and she pulled it back up. “We should get back, then, I guess.”

  I was still thinking through what she’d said. “You’ve got to be back here at nine in the morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can take you.”

  Lydie gave a short nod.

  “I think it makes more sense for us to find a hotel rather than drive back home, and then turn around in a few hours and drive right back here again.” I started walking toward the parking garage, and Lydie followed. “I guess if we’ve got to wait,” I said as we headed up the sidewalk beside the ramp, “we might as well save some gas.”

  “I’ll pay you for the gas. Don’t you worry about that.”

  “I’m not worried. And you won’t be paying for it, either.”

  “I don’t know why—”

  “Because I said so, that’s why.”

  A car came rolling slowly down the ramp toward us. As it got closer, I saw that the driver was a colored man in shirtsleeves, with a crumpled-up forehead that almost folded down over his eyes. He looked about our age, and I got the feeling that he had been visiting his wife. In the front seat beside him was his teenage son, whose hair was done in an unusual way that would later become normal, but which at the time grabbed my attention. The hair made a little ball around the boy’s head, a few inches long and fuzzy. “Will you look at that?” Lydie said, her voice soft with wonder. “That boy’s got a halo around his head.”

  I laughed. It did look like a halo. Though there wasn’t anything else particularly angelic-looking about the boy. He had an aggrieved, unhappy look about him. He was dressed in shirtsleeves, like his father, and you got the feeling he didn’t normally wear anything so nice and he wasn’t happy to b
e wearing it now. I wondered if his mother was dying, and if it was happening slow enough that he’d had time to feel that it was not only a sad but a tedious business.

  The car rolled past us to the parking lot booth. An arm extended out the car window, and another arm came out from the booth window. I could hear drifting from the car the refrains of a doo-wop song, and suddenly I wanted to go somewhere else, to be in a place I’d never been before. “Let’s have a night on the town,” I said. “We’re in the city, we’ve got time to kill. Let’s have ourselves a time.” I tried to think of something that would surprise Lydie. “Let’s get a pack of cigarettes,” I said, “and smoke the whole thing. Every last one, right down to the filter.”

  Neither of us were smoking women. My sister Edith had taken up the habit a decade before, and Iris would take a cigarette from time to time. They lived in town, and that was the difference. Women who lived in the country didn’t smoke. Our men all did, and it was normal for them, but a woman smoking a cigarette seemed strange, like something that only ladies in the movies would do.

  “Why don’t you call George and tell him we need to stay overnight.”

  Lydie was rummaging around in her purse, looking for a tissue or a compact. She didn’t look up as she said, “And while I’m at it, I’ll just mention to him that the pot roast is in the fridge, and it goes well with mashed potatoes and green beans, and how about he makes a cherry pie for dessert.” Abruptly she took her hand out from the purse, fastened the snap, and tucked it under her arm. When I didn’t say anything, she sighed. “Hazel, the boys’ll be wanting to eat, and Lord knows what George would do without me there to get supper on. And what about us? What are we going to do—go out dancing?”

  “Why not?”

  Lydie shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve danced since, oh, probably around the time we dropped the bomb.”