by Jane Smiley
We ate dinner.
We watched “Family Ties,” then “Cheers.” We put the children to bed and watched “Hill Street Blues.”
Dana was sitting beside me on the couch. She yawned and turned toward me. I saw my face in the pupils of her eyes, then I saw that she was smiling. She said, “I can’t believe I’m so tired. Are you going to sit up?”
I was, and I did, alone in the silent living room, with the lights off and a beer warming in my hand. It seemed to me that the unexpected peace of the day had left me dizzy with pleasure, such pleasure that its prospective loss made my stomach queasy. Feelings are in the body as well as in the mind, is what he said. I lay back on the carpet, on the floor of the organ that was my house, and felt my family floating above me, suspended only by two-by-fours as narrow as capillaries and membranes of flooring. My pulse beat in my ears and the walls of the house seemed to throb with it. I closed my eyes and took some deep breaths. From China, from California, state by state, patient by patient, the flu had arrived.
I wonder if it is possible to prepare yourself for anything. Of course I lay there, saying, This is the flu, it isn’t supposed to last more than two or three days, I should find the Tylenol. In the moment I didn’t feel bad, really, a little queasy, a degree feverish. The disease wasn’t a mystery to me. I know what a virus looks like, how it works. I could imagine the invasion and the resistance. In fact, imagining the invasion and the resistance took my attention off the queasiness and the feverishness. But when I opened my eyes and my gaze fell upon the bookcases looming above me in the half-light, I shuddered reflexively, because the books seemed to swell outward from the wall and threaten to drop on me, and my thoughts about the next few days had exactly that quality as well. I did not see how we would endure, how I would endure.
There are many moments in every marriage that are so alike that they seem to be the same moment, appearing and vanishing, giving the illusion of time passing, and of no time passing, giving the illusion that a marriage is a thing everlasting. One of these recurring moments, for Dana and me, has always had to do with getting ready—finding a clear position to take up before the avalanche of events, like semester exams, births, vacations. Perhaps we practiced for this every night that we coasted down Cloud Street on my bike. That hill was not only long, it curved sharply to the right and had three steep dips. I suppose, looking back, that the precipice, such as it was, lasted seven or eight blocks before flattening out. Dana’s apartment was about a block and a half from the top of the hill, and the first night I took her out I was so exhilarated that I put my feet on the handlebars of my bike and coasted all the way to the stoplight, eleven blocks from Dana’s house.
The next time we went out, I suggested that we coast down it together. I remember the way that her eyelids snapped open at the idea and her stare locked into mine, but it took her only a second to say yes, and then we had to do it. I said, “Sit on the handlebars, then,” and she did. She put her hands in front of mine, balanced with the small of her back, and looked straight ahead, straight at the first dip, and I thought, We are going to die now. I settled the bones of my ass on the seat and tightened my fingers on the grips. I pushed off and pedaled. I did not want to drift into it, whatever it was, I wanted to pump into it. It was agony. The bike was surprisingly front-heavy. I could hardly manage the dips, and skidded dangerously to the left when the right-hand curve came up. Our weight carried us a block past the stoplight, which, fortunately, was green.
After we had stopped, we didn’t even speak about it, but resumed our conversation about dental matters while walking the thirteen blocks back up the hill. This time we didn’t stop at Dana’s house, but climbed to the top, where I stood holding the bike while she hoisted herself on. Looking back, it is that moment I remember, that recurring moment, always the same, of her hands and her thighs and her back, their stillness, the lifting of my foot onto the right pedal. Taking a clear position. I wonder why she trusted me so. I do not discount the possibility of simple stupidity.
Now, the flu. Three steep dips and a sharp curve to the right. People without children don’t begin to know the test that these illnesses present. But there was no clear position to be taken, and no one to take it with. I lay on the floor until about three, when I went upstairs and puked into the toilet. Then I lay in the hallway outside the bathroom, shivering with fever and waiting to puke again. At six, Dana found me, gazed down with a knowing look, and went to find the seltzer, the Tylenol, the thermometer, the cool washcloth, my pajamas, a pillow so that I could remain in the hallway, where I found a kind of solitary and rigorous comfort. The children thought it was very peculiar and amusing to step over me. I was too dizzy to care.
They abandoned me. The children went to school and day care without a backward look; Dana went early to the office to take care of my patients, with only a shout from the front door that she was leaving now, would I be all right? I got my own juice, my own blanket, drew my own bath, because it seemed as if that would ease the aches and pains. I did everything for myself, because they were all off, doing as they pleased, healthy and happy. I could see out the window that it was a beautiful day, and I imagined them all dazed by the sparkle of the light, on the street, on the playground, all thoughts of me blasted out of them. Lizzie would be working in her reading workbook, Stephanie drawing pictures of the family, Leah making turtles out of egg cartons and poster paints, Dana mixing up amalgam on her tray, all of them intent only on their work, no matter how much I might think of them. Just then the phone rang, and it was Dave. He said, “Dana wanted me to call and ask if you needed anything.” I said, “No. I just took some Tylenol.” After that I got into the bathtub and floated there for an hour, resenting the fact that I had left my juice next to the telephone in the bedroom. Drying myself, I was dizzy again and nearly fell down. I entertained myself with thoughts of hitting my head on the bathtub and suffering a subdural hematoma; then I staggered into the bedroom and fell across the bed, already mostly asleep. Three hours later, I resurrected. I was clear-eyed, cool, happy. The forces of resistance had won an early victory.
Lizzie threw up for the first time while she was watching “The Flintstones” and eating her Hershey bar. She made it to the front hallway, but not to the bathroom. Stephanie was not sympathetic. Leah, carrying her Play Family garage from the living room to the kitchen, could not be prevented from stepping in it. Lizzie had already fled upstairs, Stephanie was hiding her nose in the sofa cushions, and Leah’s wet bare footprint followed her into the dining room. I went for paper towels and a bucket, and I heard Lizzie, panicky, shouting from upstairs, “Daddy! Daddy!” She stumbled from somewhere above my head to somewhere else, and began to retch again. Just then, mop in one hand and bucket in the other, I felt all the grief of the last weeks drain away, to be replaced, not by panic, but by order. I caught Leah, wiped her foot off, and spread some paper towels over the mess in the hall. Then I went to Lizzie, who was draped over the toilet, and carried her into her bedroom, where I laid her on her bed, undid her clothes, and surrounded her with towels. Her face was red and soaked with tears, and I thought, I can’t help you. I wiped her face with a cool washcloth, and then Stephanie shouted from downstairs, “She’s going to get in it! She’s getting near it! Daddy! Daddy!”
Lizzie said, “Don’t go away.”
That was the beginning.
What is it possible to give? Last fall I was driving to the office in a downpour, and I saw a very fat woman cross the street in front of the bus depot and stick out her thumb. No raincoat, no umbrella. I stopped and let her in. The office was about three blocks down, but I thought I would drive her wherever she needed to go in town. She said she was going to Kinney, a town about ten miles east, and it occurred to me simply to drive her there. She was wearing cloth shoes and carrying all her belongings in a terry-cloth bag. I don’t think I answered, but she spoke anyway. She said, “My husband works out there. I just got in from California, after two months, and the whole time he
was sending me these postcards, saying, Come back, come back, and so I bought my ticket.” She fell silent. Then she looked at me and said, “Well, I called him up to say I’d got my ticket, and he said right there, ‘Well, I want a divorce, anyway.’ So here I am. He works out there.”
I said, “Maybe you can change his mind.”
“I hope so. She works out there where he works, too. I want to get to them before they get into work. If I can’t change his mind, I’m going to beat him up right there in the parking lot.” She looked at me defiantly.
I said, “Why don’t I drop you at the Amoco station at the corner of Front Street? You can stand under the awning, and there ought to be a lot of people turning toward Kinney there.”
“Yeah.”
After I got to the office, I thought maybe I could have bought her an umbrella, but I didn’t go out and get her one, did I? It perplexes me, what it is possible to give a stranger, what it is possible to give a loved one, the difference between desire and need, how it is possible to divine what is helpful. I might say that I would give Dana anything to ensure her presence in our house, our office, our family, but in saying this I have only traded the joy of giving for the despair of payment. I went downstairs and cleaned up the mess, then I went back upstairs and wiped Lizzie’s face again with a newly wrung-out washcloth. If you stimulate the nerve endings in a pleasurable way, the neurons are less capable of carrying pain messages to the brain, and the brain is fooled. Dana was an hour late from work.
I should say that Lizzie heaved twelve times in four hours, so much that we were forcing ginger ale down her throat so that something, anything, could come back up. And she was fighting every drop, and screaming in panic, and throwing herself back and forth among the towels on her bed. We didn’t have dinner, of course, but we did laundry, all the nightgowns, all the sheets, all the towels. About eleven, Dana said, “You’re better,” as if she had just noticed.
“Thirteen hours, normal to normal in thirteen hours.”
“That’s something, anyway.”
“Not a basis for confidence, though.”
She pursed her lips. “I wish you weren’t always so pessimistic.”
“As long as this lasts, why don’t we avoid talking about how we always are?”
“Okay, but no sarcasm, either.”
“A deal.” We shook hands. Lizzie threw up four more times before morning, then six times on Saturday. When I called the pediatrician for a little reassurance and told him she had thrown up twenty-two times, he said, “That’s impossible.”
Dana says that they are formed at birth, and that they spend their whole childhoods simply revealing themselves. With a sort of arrogance that you might say is typical of her, she says that she knew all this in advance, as soon as she laid her mother’s hands on them, that Lizzie did not care to snuggle, that Stephanie’s neonatal thoughts were elsewhere, that Leah wanted to melt into the warmth of Dana’s flesh. Some people cannot, will not be comforted. Lizzie is this way. She tosses off the covers and complains of the cold. Her joints ache, and she won’t take the medicine. A swallow of seltzer gives her mouth such cool pleasure that she won’t take another. She writhed about among the towels, needing and fighting sleep, and I sat near her, sometimes smoothing her forehead with the wrung-out washcloth and contemplating her doom in much the same way that you contemplate their future glory when they do well in school or learn to read at three and a half. Then she fell asleep about ten and slept all night, not doomed, but saved one more time.
Dana lay next to me in a snore, and I thought of the soul, nacreous protoplasm, ringed in the iron of the self, weak little translucent hands on the bars, pushing, yanking, desperate for release. The moonlight stood flat in the window glass, as if caught there, and I turned and pressed myself against the warmth of my disappearing wife. Leah awakened at four. She would consent to be held only by me, and there was no sitting down allowed, only walking. A torture, in the middle of the night, that could have been devised by the KGB.
That was Sunday, the resurrection of Lizzie and the marathon of Leah, kitchen, dining room, living room, an endless circle. Sometimes Dana handed me food and drink, as in the old Kingston Trio song about the fellow who got stuck on the MTA. Dana kept putting on records, to keep me occupied, and sometimes she took Leah from me, but the screams were unrelenting. Sometimes I put her down in her bed, when she seemed to be asleep, but she always woke up and called out for me. Sometimes I staggered under the weight. Sometimes I got so dizzy from the circling that I nearly fell down. I had a chant: Normal to normal in thirteen hours. Maybe it was a prayer.
For dinner Lizzie and Stephanie wanted pizza. I circled. Leah’s head rested back on her neck against my shoulder. Her mouth was open and her eyes were closed. One arm was tossed around my neck and her fingers hung in the collar of my shirt. From time to time I sat down in the rocking chair (this was always accompanied by a groan of protest from Leah) and rocked until the protests grew unbearable. The pizza came and Lizzie didn’t want any. Stephanie ate only a single piece, because Lizzie pointed out to her that mushrooms had been put on by mistake. Dana screamed at them, threw away all the rest of the pizza, said we would never order another one, and sent them to their rooms; then she flopped on the couch, ashamed and unhappy, and followed me with her gaze while I circled the downstairs.
She said, “You’re such a hero. I can’t believe it.”
“What else is there to do?”
“Yes, but you don’t even seem to want to strangle every one of them. I do. Put us all out of our misery.”
I headed for the kitchen and returned. “Are you miserable?”
Her eyes lifted to mine. She said, “I expect to be.” I stopped walking and looked at her, then started again. She looked away and shrugged. “The flu always hits me like a ton of bricks.”
“I didn’t have it too badly. Maybe this one is worse for children than adults.”
“But you never really get sick. I always think there’s a kind of purity about you. Untouched. You remind me of some kind of flower.”
“A flower?”
“I don’t mean that you aren’t masculine. You know that. I don’t know.” She looked out the window, speculating. “You know when you lean down and look right into a tulip? You know the way the petals look thick with color, but thin with light, permanent and delicate at the same time?”
“I suppose.”
“That makes me think of you. Always has.”
“Do you think of me?”
She looked back at me. She smiled slightly and said, “I have been lately, for some reason.”
“Dana—”
“I better go and release them from bondage, or they’ll be furious for the rest of the night.” And then the whirlwind swept us up again.
However the flu took Leah, with nausea she couldn’t puke out or give voice to, with aches and pains, with lethargy, it took her for three days, and I walked her for most of those three days. At first I was tired and bored: she was heavy, and the urge to put her off was more pressing than hunger, more like a raging thirst. I would panic at the thought of the hours, even the minutes, before me, of walking and carrying until my whole left side, the side she leaned upon, was numb, and my legs were leaden. After a while, though, say late Sunday night, it was as if Leah and our joining had sunk more deeply into me, so that I only did it, didn’t think about it, didn’t rebel against it. They say that this happens with the KGB, too.
Dana had gone to bed, leaving one lamp in the living room dimly lit. I remember looking at my watch, at the way the time looked there, eleven fifteen, and the previous four weeks of nights, myself lying awake in fear or hope or whirring thought, suddenly seemed like a deck of shuffling cards to me, and yet each moment had been a lengthy agony. That was why the face of my watch was so familiar to me—I had looked at it repeatedly in disbelief at the tormented slowness of time. Then I remember looking down at Leah, whose face, as familiar as the face of my watch, glowed with fever a
nd sleep. Her mouth was partly open and she breathed at me. I felt the tiny rush of it on my lips, where the nerves cluster, on my cheeks, like the first breeze after you have shaved your beard, even on my forehead. There was a fragrance to it, too, sour and pungent, the odor of sick child, but so familiar, so entwined with the lasting pleasure of holding the child’s flesh to your own, that I drank it in. I lifted her higher and kissed her hot cheek, hot silk against the searching ganglia. I shifted her over to the right and she settled in. It seemed to me that I had never loved anything—object, or feeling, or person—the way I loved her right now. Love is in the body as well as the mind, a rush of blood to the surface, maybe, an infinitesimal yearning stretch of the nerve endings. I looked at her without seeing her, blinded by the loveliness of her nose, the grace of her forehead, the curl of her upper lip and the roundness of the lower. I will never see her, hard as I try to look past love. My eyes will always cast a light over her, and I will always think that this love, mine for her, is a dear thing. But it is as common as sand, as common as flesh.
After all, it was harder to cherish hers for me. Hard to appreciate the way she climbed the stairs looking for me, held my leg when I was trying to walk across the kitchen, yearned for my presence in the middle of the night, hard even to appreciate her glances into my face, her man-pleasing chatter, the stroke of her baby fingers on my forehead. And these hours of walking were unbearable, although I was bearing them. I stopped and looked down at her, thinking, Open your eyes. After a long while, she opened her eyes with a sigh, and I said, “Leah, it’s time for bed.”