Black Tickets

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Today I put him down and draw away. But he has clutched my wrist. Yellow fingers tight, pressing, I shake them, pull, finally try to pry them off. Panic, think … this strength, involuntary … a stroke? … but then I see his face. The eyes recognize. Escaping them I look down, the floor. There is blood, trickles of it from his hand, his drawn white fist. He lets go; his palm opens. Couched in his thin flesh, the locust has eaten a small gash with its jagged gold. It drops to the floor and rolls, glittering. Yours, he says. The spasm builds, he shakes to hold it back. Skin around his eyes so white it seems to glow, and there are tears. Sounds. He releases me.

  I step back but he is whispering. I am drawn to him, closer. His violet eyes and the whispers, a name. Closer. He beckons, frail hand turning like a leaf. I bend, his fluttering lips at my ear. He wheezes, breath a rotted weight; yet from his skin there is a light perfume, drying of an ancient herb. He whispers, softer. Love, my love, he whispers. Don’t leave me.

  Strangers in the Night

  LIKE EVERYONE else, she thought a lot about eating and sleeping. When she was sleeping she felt like death floating free, a white seed over the water. Eating, she thought about sex and chewed pears as though they were conscious. When she was making love she felt she was dancing in a churning water, floating, but attached to something else. Once she almost died and went so far she saw how free the planet floated, how it is only a shadow, and was frightened back to herself. Later, when she explained this to him, he put his arms around her. She thought she had come home and they were in a shadow, dancing.

  Souvenir

  KATE ALWAYS sent her mother a card on Valentine’s Day. She timed the mails from wherever she was so that the cards arrived on February 14th. Her parents had celebrated the day in some small fashion, and since her father’s death six years before, Kate made a gesture of compensatory remembrance. At first, she made the cards herself: collage and pressed grasses on construction paper sewn in fabric. Now she settled for art reproductions, glossy cards with blank insides. Kate wrote in them with colored inks, “You have always been my Valentine,” or simply “Hey, take care of yourself.” She might enclose a present as well, something small enough to fit into an envelope; a sachet, a perfumed soap, a funny tintype of a prune-faced man in a bowler hat.

  This time, she forgot. Despite the garish displays of paper cupids and heart-shaped boxes in drugstore windows, she let the day nearly approach before remembering. It was too late to send anything in the mail. She called her mother long-distance at night when the rates were low.

  “Mom? How are you?”

  “It’s you! How are you?” Her mother’s voice grew suddenly brighter; Kate recognized a tone reserved for welcome company. Sometimes it took a while to warm up.

  “I’m fine,” answered Kate. “What have you been doing?”

  “Well, actually I was trying to sleep.”

  “Sleep? You should be out setting the old hometown on fire.”

  “The old hometown can burn up without me tonight.”

  “Really? What’s going on?”

  “I’m running in-service training sessions for the primary teachers.” Kate’s mother was a school superintendent. “They’re driving me batty. You’d think their brains were rubber.”

  “They are,” Kate said. “Or you wouldn’t have to train them. Think of them as a salvation, they create a need for your job.”

  “Some salvation. Besides, your logic is ridiculous. Just because someone needs training doesn’t mean they’re stupid.”

  “I’m just kidding. But I’m stupid. I forgot to send you a Valentine’s card.”

  “You did? That’s bad. I’m trained to receive one. They bring me luck.”

  “You’re receiving a phone call instead,” Kate said. “Won’t that do?”

  “Of course,” said her mother, “but this is costing you money. Tell me quick, how are you?”

  “Oh, you know. Doctoral pursuits. Doing my student trip, grooving with the professors.”

  “The professors? You’d better watch yourself.”

  “It’s a joke, Mom, a joke. But what about you? Any men on the horizon?”

  “No, not really. A married salesman or two asking me to dinner when they come through the office. Thank heavens I never let those things get started.”

  “You should do what you want to,” Kate said.

  “Sure,” said her mother. “And where would I be then?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Venezuela.”

  “They don’t even have plumbing in Venezuela.”

  “Yes, but their sunsets are perfect, and the villages are full of dark passionate men in blousy shirts.”

  “That’s your department, not mine.”

  “Ha,” Kate said, “I wish it were my department. Sounds a lot more exciting than teaching undergraduates.”

  Her mother laughed. “Be careful,” she said. “You’ll get what you want. End up sweeping a dirt floor with a squawling baby around your neck.”

  “A dark baby,” Kate said, “to stir up the family blood.”

  “Nothing would surprise me,” her mother said as the line went fuzzy. Her voice was submerged in static, then surfaced. “Listen,” she was saying. “Write to me. You seem so far away.”

  They hung up and Kate sat watching the windows of the neighboring house. The curtains were transparent and flowered and none of them matched. Silhouettes of the window frames spread across them like single dark bars. Her mother’s curtains were all the same, white cotton hemmed with a ruffle, tiebacks blousing the cloth into identical shapes. From the street it looked as if the house was always in order.

  Kate made a cup of strong Chinese tea, turned the lights off, and sat holding the warm cup in the dark. Her mother kept no real tea in the house, just packets of instant diabetic mixture that tasted of chemical sweetener and had a bitter aftertaste.

  The packets sat on the shelf next to her mother’s miniature scales. The scales were white. Kate saw clearly the face of the metal dial on the front, its markings and trembling needle. Her mother weighed portions of food for meals: frozen broccoli, slices of plastic-wrapped Kraft cheese, careful chunks of roast beef. A dog-eared copy of The Diabetic Diet had remained propped against the salt shaker for the last two years.

  Kate rubbed her forehead. Often at night she had headaches. Sometimes she wondered if there were an agent in her body, a secret in her blood making ready to work against her.

  The phone blared repeatedly, careening into her sleep. Kate scrambled out of bed, naked and cold, stumbling, before she recognized the striped wallpaper of her bedroom and realized the phone was right there on the bedside table, as always. She picked up the receiver.

  “Kate?” said her brother’s voice. “It’s Robert. Mom is in the hospital. They don’t know what’s wrong but she’s in for tests.”

  “Tests? What’s happened? I just talked to her last night.”

  “I’m not sure. She called the neighbors and they took her to the emergency room around dawn.” Robert’s voice still had that slight twang Kate knew was disappearing from her own. He would be calling from his insurance office, nine o’clock their time, in his thick glasses and wide, perfectly knotted tie. He was a member of the million-dollar club and his picture, tiny, the size of a postage stamp, appeared in the Mutual of Omaha magazine. His voice seemed small too over the distance. Kate felt heavy and dulled. She would never make much money, and recently she had begun wearing make-up again, waking in smeared mascara as she had in high school.

  “Is Mom all right?” she managed now. “How serious is it?”

  “They’re not sure,” Robert said. “Her doctor thinks it could have been any of several things, but they’re doing X rays.”

  “Her doctor thinks? Doesn’t he know? Get her to someone else. There aren’t any doctors in that one-horse town.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Robert said defensively. “Anyway, I can’t force her. You know how she is about money.”

  “Money? S
he could have a stroke and drop dead while her doctor wonders what’s wrong.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You know you can’t tell her what to do.”

  “Could I call her somehow?”

  “No, not yet. And don’t get her all worried. She’s been scared enough as it is. I’ll tell her what you said about getting another opinion, and I’ll call you back in a few hours when I have some news. Meanwhile, she’s all right, do you hear?”

  The line went dead with a click and Kate walked to the bathroom to wash her face. She splashed her eyes and felt guilty about the Valentine’s card. Slogans danced in her head like reprimands. For A Special One. Dearest Mother. My Best Friend. Despite Robert, after breakfast she would call the hospital.

  She sat a long time with her coffee, waiting for minutes to pass, considering how many meals she and her mother ate alone. Similar times of day, hundreds of miles apart. Women by themselves. The last person Kate had eaten breakfast with had been someone she’d met in a bar. He was passing through town. He liked his fried eggs gelatinized in the center, only slightly runny, and Kate had studiously looked away as he ate. The night before he’d looked down from above her as he finished and she still moved under him. “You’re still wanting,” he’d said. “That’s nice.” Mornings now, Kate saw her own face in the mirror and was glad she’d forgotten his name. When she looked at her reflection from the side, she saw a faint etching of lines beside her mouth. She hadn’t slept with anyone for five weeks, and the skin beneath her eyes had taken on a creamy darkness.

  She reached for the phone but drew back. It seemed bad luck to ask for news, to push toward whatever was coming as though she had no respect for it.

  Standing in the kitchen last summer, her mother had stirred gravy and argued with her.

  “I’m thinking of your own good, not mine,” she’d said. “Think of what you put yourself through. And how can you feel right about it? You were born here, I don’t care what you say.” Her voice broke and she looked, perplexed, at the broth in the pan.

  “But, hypothetically,” Kate continued, her own voice unaccountably shaking, “if I’m willing to endure whatever I have to, do you have a right to object? You’re my mother. You’re supposed to defend my choices.”

  “You’ll have enough trouble without choosing more for yourself. Using birth control that’ll ruin your insides, moving from one place to another. I can’t defend your choices. I can’t even defend myself against you.” She wiped her eyes on a napkin.

  “Why do you have to make me feel so guilty?” Kate said, fighting tears of frustration. “I’m not attacking you.”

  “You’re not? Then who are you talking to?”

  “Oh Mom, give me a break.”

  “I’ve tried to give you more than that,” her mother said. “I know what your choices are saying to me.” She set the steaming gravy off the stove. “You may feel very differently later on. It’s just a shame I won’t be around to see it.”

  “Oh? Where will you be?”

  “Floating around on a fleecy cloud.”

  Kate got up to set the table before she realized her mother had already done it.

  The days went by. They’d gone shopping before Kate left. Standing at the cash register in an antique shop on Main Street, they bought each other pewter candle holders. “A souvenir,” her mother said. “A reminder to always be nice to yourself. If you live alone you should eat by candlelight.”

  “Listen,” Kate said, “I eat in a heart-shaped tub with bubbles to my chin. I sleep on satin sheets and my mattress has a built-in massage engine. My overnight guests are impressed. You don’t have to tell me about the solitary pleasures.”

  They laughed and touched hands.

  “Well,” her mother said. “If you like yourself, I must have done something right.”

  Robert didn’t phone until evening. His voice was fatigued and thin. “I’ve moved her to the university hospital,” he said. “They can’t deal with it at home.”

  Kate waited, saying nothing. She concentrated on the toes of her shoes. They needed shining. You never take care of anything, her mother would say.

  “She has a tumor in her head.” He said it firmly, as though Kate might challenge him.

  “I’ll take a plane tomorrow morning,” Kate answered, “I’ll be there by noon.”

  Robert exhaled. “Look,” he said, “don’t even come back here unless you can keep your mouth shut and do it my way.”

  “Get to the point.”

  “The point is they believe she has a malignancy and we’re not going to tell her. I almost didn’t tell you.” His voice faltered. “They’re going to operate but if they find what they’re expecting, they don’t think they can stop it.”

  For a moment there was no sound except an oceanic vibration of distance on the wire. Even that sound grew still. Robert breathed. Kate could almost see him, in a booth at the hospital, staring straight ahead at the plastic instructions screwed to the narrow rectangular body of the telephone. It seemed to her that she was hurtling toward him.

  “I’ll do it your way,” she said.

  The hospital cafeteria was a large room full of orange Formica tables. Its southern wall was glass. Across the highway, Kate saw a small park modestly dotted with amusement rides and bordered by a narrow band of river. How odd, to build a children’s park across from a medical center. The sight was pleasant in a cruel way. The rolling lawn of the little park was perfectly, relentlessly green.

  Robert sat down. Their mother was to have surgery in two days.

  “After it’s over,” he said, “they’re not certain what will happen. The tumor is in a bad place. There may be some paralysis.”

  “What kind of paralysis?” Kate said. She watched him twist the green-edged coffee cup around and around on its saucer.

  “Facial. And maybe worse.”

  “You’ve told her this?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Robert, what is she going to think if she wakes up and—”

  He leaned forward, grasping the cup and speaking through clenched teeth. “Don’t you think I thought of that?” He gripped the sides of the table and the cup rolled onto the carpeted floor with a dull thud. He seemed ready to throw the table after it, then grabbed Kate’s wrists and squeezed them hard.

  “You didn’t drive her here,” he said. “She was so scared she couldn’t talk. How much do you want to hand her at once?”

  Kate watched the cup sitting solidly on the nubby carpet.

  “We’ve told her it’s benign,” Robert said, “that the surgery will cause complications, but she can learn back whatever is lost.”

  Kate looked at him. “Is that true?”

  “They hope so.”

  “We’re lying to her, all of us, more and more.” Kate pulled her hands away and Robert touched her shoulder.

  “What do you want to tell her, Kate? ‘You’re fifty-five and you’re done for’?”

  She stiffened. “Why put her through the operation at all?”

  He sat back and dropped his arms, lowering his head. “Because without it she’d be in bad pain. Soon.” They were silent, then he looked up. “And anyway,” he said softly, “we don’t know, do we? She may have a better chance than they think.”

  Kate put her hands on her face. Behind her closed eyes she saw a succession of blocks tumbling over.

  They took the elevator up to the hospital room. They were alone and they stood close together. Above the door red numerals lit up, flashing. Behind the illuminated shapes droned an impersonal hum of machinery.

  Then the doors opened with a sucking sound. Three nurses stood waiting with a lunch cart, identical covered trays stacked in tiers. There was a hot bland smell, like warm cardboard. One of the women caught the thick steel door with her arm and smiled. Kate looked quickly at their rubber-soled shoes. White polish, the kind that rubs off. And their legs seemed only white shapes, boneless and two-dimensional, stepping silently into the metal cage.

 
; She looked smaller in the white bed. The chrome side rails were pulled up and she seemed powerless behind them, her dark hair pushed back from her face and her forearms delicate in the baggy hospital gown. Her eyes were different in some nearly imperceptible way; she held them wider, they were shiny with a veiled wetness. For a moment the room seemed empty of all else; there were only her eyes and the dark blossoms of the flowers on the table beside her. Red roses with pine. Everyone had sent the same thing.

  Robert walked close to the bed with his hands clasped behind his back, as though afraid to touch. “Where did all the flowers come from?” he asked.

  “From school, and the neighbors. And Katie.” She smiled.

  “FTD,” Kate said. “Before I left home. I felt so bad for not being here all along.”

  “That’s silly,” said their mother. “You can hardly sit at home and wait for some problem to arise.”

  “Speaking of problems,” Robert said, “the doctor tells me you’re not eating. Do I have to urge you a little?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and shook the silverware from its paper sleeve.

  Kate touched the plastic tray. “Jell-O and canned cream of chicken soup. Looks great. We should have brought you something.”

  “They don’t want us to bring her anything,” Robert said. “This is a hospital. And I’m sure your comments make her lunch seem even more appetizing.”

  “I’ll eat it!” said their mother in mock dismay. “Admit they sent you in here to stage a battle until I gave in.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said. “He’s right.”

  Robert grinned. “Did you hear that? She says I’m right. I don’t believe it.” He pushed the tray closer to his mother’s chest and made a show of tucking a napkin under her chin.

  “Of course you’re right, dear.” She smiled and gave Kate an obvious wink.

  “Yeah,” Robert said, “I know you two. But seriously, you eat this. I have to go make some business calls from the motel room.”