Cameron had been coughing intermittently, but now he had a prolonged fit that left him gasping. Uma tried to hold him upright and Lily hurried over to help. He had to push their arms away to get at his pocket and extract the inhaler, which he used. When he held his breath, Uma found that she, too, was holding hers. He handed the inhaler to her—so frighteningly light—and she put it back in his pocket. Another puff and he might as well throw it away. “Tell your story,” she said to Cameron.
“I can’t,” he whispered, rubbing his chest. “It isn’t ready.”
She knew what he meant. Hers wasn’t ready either.
Then Mrs. Pritchett cleared her throat.
14
I apologize in advance for my story. I know it will cause my husband pain. The way I see these events is not how he views them; it cannot be. I only hope that he—and all of you—will see by the end why I had to tell this story.
You’ve been speaking of events that shatter lives in a day’s time: wars, betrayal, seduction, death. In my case, my life was turned around by a man I didn’t know helping his wife take off her coat.
THAT FATEFUL DAY BEGINS WITH MRS. PRITCHETT ENJOYING A cup of lemon tea in her morning kitchen, closing her eyes and breathing in the tangy steam. She believes in life’s small pleasures. Around her, the kitchen gleams: immaculate granite counters, a purring Sub-Zero refrigerator, a blue ceramic bowl she made in pottery class. The bowl is filled with apples and pears, her husband’s favorite fruits.
Mrs. Pritchett has sent her husband off to his office on a wholesome breakfast of oatmeal with almonds and brown sugar and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. Until he returns in the evening, the day lies ahead of her, luxurious as a stretching cat waiting for her to stroke it. She makes a mental list: go into her dewy garden and pick an armful of irises; tidy the house in preparation for dinner guests, Mr. Pritchett’s old clients, grown into friends over the years; visit the local market to pick up strawberries for an English trifle she’s planning to create. After shopping, she may stop for lunch at the little deli nearby. Their sandwiches are excellent, made with bread they bake each morning in the back. At teatime she’ll meet her monthly book club, intelligent, pleasant women, several of them in their late sixties like her; she is ready for the meeting, with a page of notes on The House of the Spirits. When she gets home, she’ll put on a Satie CD and lie down on the couch. (This need for rest would have irked her when she was younger; she accepts it with equanimity now.) Then it’ll be time to prepare dinner—an easy task. The lamb has already been marinated, the greens washed and patted dry.
It does not strike Mrs. Pritchett that her life is small and contained, filled with bourgeois pleasures. If it did, she would not consider that a bad thing.
SHE IS RUNNING LATE, AND THE LITTLE CAFÉ IS EMPTY WHEN she gets to it, the lunchtime crowd gone. This disappoints her for a moment; she loves to people watch. But no matter. She orders ham and melted cheese on rye and bites into the crusty bread with vigorous pleasure. Then she sees the couple walking in. They’re old; the husband has age spots on his face and trembly hands with which he guides his wife. She has aged worse than he. She wears thick, Cokebottle glasses and shuffles with painful slowness, leaning on a cane, one of those ugly aluminum quadruped things. Mrs. Pritchett watches them with a mix of pity and fear. One day soon, she and her husband will come to this.
The couple has reached a table. The old man lets go of his wife’s arm and pulls a chair out for her. He helps her off with her coat, an action that takes some maneuvering as she shifts her cane from one hand to the other. But he is patient, and when it’s off, he hangs it carefully on the back of her chair. He flicks a speck off the sleeve before he turns back to his wife and helps her sit down. The couple discusses the menu, the woman pointing with sudden animation to items while the man inclines his head toward her to hear better. Then he nods gravely and summons the waitress. Mrs. Pritchett dawdles over her sandwich; she is curious about their order, which turns out to be a sugar-dusted lemon square and a decadent, oversize éclair. The man cuts each in half so they can share them. It’s the flicking of the speck off the sleeve that gets Mrs. Pritchett—the caring behind the gesture, even though his wife with her poor vision would never have noticed whatever was on the coat sleeve.
THROUGHOUT BOOK CLUB, MRS. PRITCHETT CAN’T STOP THINKING about the couple in the café. In her distracted state, she forgets to bring up her best points during discussion. At home, the Satie makes her want to weep. She stares blankly at the oven while the lamb roasts, trying to figure out why she is so obsessed with the old man and his wife, and when she finally understands, she cannot move. By the time Mr. Pritchett returns from the office, she has made a decision. After dinner, when the men swoon over her trifle and the women clamor for the recipe, which she writes down for them on monogrammed notecards, she tells Mr. Pritchett that she has a terrible headache. Would it be okay if she slept in the guest room? He agrees easily, as she knew he would.
In the room that has rarely harbored guests, she thinks about the children Mr. Pritchett and she could never have. This not-having has been a dull ache at the back of her mind all her life, but today she’s happy about it in a bitter way. If there had been children, she could not have done this. She takes from the pocket of her robe a bottle of sleeping pills—they belong to Mr. Pritchett, who occasionally suffers from insomnia—and takes the entire bottle, along with two glasses of wine.
At first all goes well. On the bed she lies on her back, her fingers linked over her chest like an image on a sarcophagus. The pressed sheets smell of lavender. She feels herself suspended like a jellyfish in the darkening waters of her mind. A little more, a little more. But then her body, wiser perhaps than she is, rebels, forcing her to double over with cramps. She starts to vomit and can’t stop. Mr. Pritchett, who has been catching up on some work—there’s always work to catch up on, even though he’s seventy and could have retired years ago—hears her and comes running, and she ends up in the hospital, getting her stomach pumped.
WHAT TERRIBLE DISCOVERY DID I MAKE THAT PUSHED ME INTO this desperate action? It was this: my husband did not love me the way I needed him to.
Don’t misunderstand me. Mr. Pritchett was a good husband. He provided me with everything I needed and many things I did not need. At dinner he listened (though often with only half his attention) when I told him about my day. How can I complain? When he spoke of his achievements—new companies he’d acquired as clients, or old clients whose financial disasters he’d adroitly avoided—I struggled to hide my own boredom.
There were many things we enjoyed together. Mr. Pritchett was proud of the beautiful and expensive house we lived in, and now that I’ve heard his story, I understand his pride better. He loved to show it off to people he knew, and I loved to show off my cooking skills. And in return we got invited to beautiful, expensive homes with pleasant people in them. (But when I was about to kill myself, I couldn’t think of one person among them whom I would miss, or who would miss me.) We went to the theater and had dinner afterward in a little Italian restaurant on Columbus where the food was superb and the maître d’ knew us by name. We went to the movies, mostly action films and sci-fi, which he liked and I didn’t mind if there wasn’t too much gore. Early in our marriage we used to travel. Europe, Canada, even New Zealand. One year we went on an Alaskan cruise. But it was hard for Mr. Pritchett to be away from the office. He would carry his computer with him everywhere. And when I saw how he struggled upon returning to catch up with his clients, I didn’t feel like suggesting further trips. My favorite activity was lying in bed after dinner, reading, he with his business journals, me with a novel, snuggled under a quilt that I had made.
But after I saw the couple in the café, a great dissatisfaction washed over me. I remembered the old man tilting his head attentively, listening to his wife making her menu choice. Her eyes had shone through her thick glasses as she watched him cut up their desserts for sharing. There was nothing like that
tenderness in my life. And without it, what use were the things I’d built my days around? My garden, my home, my activities and friendships, even the time Mr. Pritchett and I spent together—they were all so many zeroes. With the “one” of love in front of them, they could have been worth millions, but as of now, I was bankrupt, and it was too late to start over.
THE FIRST DAY IN THE HOSPITAL, I MOVED IN AND OUT OF A haze that was alternately pain and numbness. On the second day, I began to feel a great shame. I refused to talk to the people waiting to see me: my doctor, the hospital psychiatrist, a social worker, and my husband. I spent the day with my face buried in my pillow, my arms aching with IV needles, plotting how I could do this more efficiently once I was released.
I wasn’t sure when the night nurse came into my room. I awoke and found her standing at the foot of my bed. The lights were off and she left them that way. In the glow of machines I could only see a silhouette, short and thin. Her hair was tied back neatly in a bun. The darkness had turned her uniform gray. When she greeted me, from her accent I guessed—because Mr. Pritchett had many clients from that country—that she was Indian. I pretended to be asleep. Being a nurse, she could probably tell I was awake, but my pretense didn’t annoy her. She hummed softly to herself, a foreign-sounding tune, as she stood there. I waited for her to do nurselike things—check the machines, feel my pulse, give me a shot—but she just stood there. Then, in a whispery voice, she told me that this was her last night at the hospital, and I was her last patient.
I hadn’t expected that. Surprise made me blurt out, “Are you retiring?”
“You could say that,” she said.
“What will you do now?”
“Some people think I should go back to my birthplace,” she said. “But I’ve decided to go where no one knows me. I want a new life.”
Moving to live where no one knew you, shucking off your worn-out life like old snakeskin! The idea ran through me like a shiver. And though I’d been determined not to give anything of myself away in this place filled with concrete and chemicals and cheerlessness, I found myself saying, “That’s what I want also. A new life. This one’s too painful.”
“Why?”
Maybe it was her casual tone. Or the fact that we would never see each other again. I said, “It’s like The Matrix.” (I wasn’t sure she would be familiar with the movie. I’d gone to see it only because Mr. Pritchett insisted—though then I had been captivated by it. She nodded, however.) “All this time I thought everything around me was beautiful. But in reality I had been squeezed into a cramped, loveless cell. I chose death. I couldn’t see any other way of breaking out.”
“Death is a breaking out of sorts,” she said. “But you won’t necessarily end up in a better place. Especially if you kill yourself. Terrible karma, that. You’ll just have to go through everything you tried to escape, in a different form. In any case, this husband whom you consider to be the bane of your existence, he came to you because of your own desire. Don’t you see it?”
Her words shot through me like voltage, charging the dead battery of my brain, bringing to life a lost memory. I was astounded because what she said was true.
IT IS THE DAY AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. VIVIENNE SITS in her mother’s Formica kitchen (lemon yellow, baby-chick yellow, color-of-hope yellow), eating the world’s best peach pie with Debbie. Debbie has just told Vivienne she has persuaded her father to let them run his bakery for six months.
“We’ll be in charge of everything!” Debbie ends, smiling all over her good-natured, freckled face. But instead of the squeal of joy Debbie is waiting for, Vivienne can only say, in a hollow tone, “That’s wonderful, Debbie. But I have some news, too.”
“Don’t tell me—” Debbie starts. “You’re getting—” Then something in Vivienne’s expression silences her. Vivienne holds out her left hand, which she has been hiding in her lap until now. On her finger is a ring.
“Lance proposed, and I said yes. He’s got a job offer in Tulsa. He wants us to get married next month, before he moves.” She talks fast to keep Debbie from saying the things she doesn’t want to hear. Debbie doesn’t think Lance is right for her—too intense, too serious, his black eyes boring into whomever he looks at. “He wants too much,” she told Vivienne once.
Debbie also thinks Vivienne hasn’t known Lance long enough. (He started working for Pete Albright, who owns a secondhand car dealership, two months ago. A week after he moved to town, he came into the bakery where Vivienne and Debbie work after school to buy pumpernickel bread. He ended up asking Vivienne out.) But that’s exactly what Vivienne finds exciting about Lance: he doesn’t talk about the usual boring things—his family or where he grew up. That’s all behind him and of no importance, he tells her. Only the future matters, and about that he has a lot to say. The high-powered jobs he’s determined to get, for instance, or the mansion he plans to buy for his wife.
And that’s just fine with Vivienne, thank you, because she has lived in the same house since she was born: three bedrooms, two baths, aluminum siding, dripping kitchen faucet, dark, practical carpets that stubbornly hoard odors. She has gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten. Her parents’ friends, whom they meet for church picnics or bridge, have known her since she was a tantrum-throwing toddler. She’s ready to take a little risk, to follow the yellow brick road into romance and a house on a hill with all-white carpeting. (Tulsa, they’ve both decided, is only a stepping-stone.) She’s ready to want too much, along with Lance.
So now she speaks to Debbie about decorating their beautiful new home, baking her best desserts for Lance, holidaying in exotic destinations, eating at restaurants where the menu is in French and the wineglasses are crystal. And having babies, lots of babies. Already she’s imagining the birthday cakes she’ll create, confections extravagant as Disneyland that will be the talk of the neighborhood.
“You’ll do fine without me,” she ends, trying not to look at Debbie’s fallen face.
(Debbie will, indeed, do fine. She’ll get one of her other friends to join her, and Debbie’s Delights will become a hit in their hometown. But Vivienne? How will Vivienne do? In forty years, when she looks into the ledger of her life, at the profit and loss columns, what will she see?)
“I want you to be the maid of honor,” Vivienne says. “Will you? Please please?”
And because ultimately a girl can’t resist the tinsel lure of weddings, the happily-ever-after she’s been conditioned into dreaming of since her first memory, Debbie examines with some envy the minuscule diamond in Vivienne’s ring, and agrees.
THE MEMORY SEEMED TO SPOOL FOREVER, BUT IT MUST HAVE taken only a moment. When I came out of it, the nurse was holding my hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Feeling your palm,” she said. “That gives me a sense of what’s waiting for you.”
The machine light tinged her hair green, but her features were in shadow. I felt heat radiating from her fingertips.
“Is it like palmistry?”
“Not exactly. It’s possible for you to break out, if you really want to. But changing your karma will not be easy. You’ll have to be alert and intelligent at every step.”
Much as I wanted to break out, I wasn’t sure I possessed these prerequisites. Karma-changing sounded complicated, and every part of me—body and nerves and heart—felt overwhelmingly stupid.
Still, because I liked the sound of her voice, I asked, “What do I need to do?”
“Stop blaming your husband,” she said. “And yourself. Accept. Forgive. A path will open.”
I didn’t like the sound of this advice. Maybe Mr. Pritchett had sent her to talk to me. Maybe she wasn’t even a real nurse.
“Your husband didn’t send me,” she said, startling me. “I came because you need help, and I need to help you. Let me tell you something that happened to me. Some years back, I had a supervisor I really disliked. She was a harsh woman, always finding fault. I was positive that she hat
ed me. I should have ignored her. Or quit. But I obsessed over it until I did some bad things—to her and then to me.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have spent so much energy hating her. I should have focused on the little things I loved.”
I scowled in the dark. Hadn’t I been focusing on little things all this time? And hadn’t the biggest thing then slipped away?
“What I want is to go somewhere I’ve never been,” I said, “like you, to start a new life.”
“You don’t want to be like me,” she said.
I was only half listening. “I’m not sure where to go,” I said. “Can you tell which would be the best place for me?”
“I don’t think going anywhere will help.”
“Why not?” I asked angrily.
“You’ll still be carrying yourself. Even into another lifetime, you’ll carry your old, tortured self.” Was it my imagination, or did her fingertips turn chilly as she spoke? “Remain where you are and work on your heart. Once you’re dead, it’s much more difficult.”
Was this a joke? She seemed serious. “What I’m telling you is, don’t try to kill yourself again. I have to go now. Remember, if you change inside, outer change will follow.” At the door she waved good-bye. I tried to see her face, but the light from the passage shone in my eyes.
A few minutes later, another nurse came in. This one was square and bulky and carried a clipboard. She turned on the night-light, checked my vitals, and forced me to take a pill. When I grumbled about her disturbing my sleep by coming so soon after the first nurse, she pursed her lips and wrote something on her clipboard. I asked for a damp towel to wipe my face, and while she went to fetch it, I glanced at the board. In the comments section at the bottom, she had written delusional.
WHEN I RETURNED HOME, I TRIED TO RISE ABOVE LETHARGY and follow the first nurse’s advice. (Had she actually been a nurse? Was she even a real person?) But her words had grown indistinct, a landscape seen through smoke. The smoke seeped inside me. Was it the result of the numbing medications the psychiatrist insisted I take, or was it a deeper malaise? She had said something about enjoying my days, and I tried. The fact that I was alive was a miracle. But the seeping smoke had filled my cavities. It was hard to feel thankful with Mr. Pritchett hovering, bags of worry under his eyes. And harder still to admit that it was I (a foolish I, a too-young-to-know-better I, but I nevertheless) who had brought calamity upon myself by choosing to marry, against the advice of friends and family, a man I had not understood. One thing had changed: I no longer wanted to commit suicide. But secretly, I increased the dosage of my medication. The numbness brought some relief. Still, I was carrying my old unhappy self inside, I didn’t know how to get away from it, and I felt guiltier. So when Mr. Pritchett showed me the picture of the Indian palace, those curtains delicate as spiderwebs blowing in a foreign breeze, and asked if I wanted to go there, I was struck dumb with joy. It was as though the universe had opened a door.
One Amazing Thing Page 17