The Way It Happens In Novels

by Kathleen O'Connor

  At 12:30 Cheryl carried her brown-bag lunch into Mr. Derrigo’s empty office. His desk was bare except for a marble-based pen set and an old photograph of his now college-age children in parochial school uniforms. She spread out a paper towel and pulled out her sandwich and diet soda. She used to eat her lunch in Software International’s makeshift cafeteria of folding tables and microwave ovens, but avoiding the greasy food and pretending to be married in front of the other secretaries became too much of a strain. Nowadays she took her brown bag and a Regency romance novel down to whatever office was vacant.

  Though she read fiery contemporary romances at home, Cheryl felt Regency novels were more subdued and better suited to the office. Through Derrigo’s closed door, she heard the soft, intermittent hum of an unanswered phone in the distance, but she did not stop reading. As a secretary of six years, she had lost the anxious-to-please intensity that required her to answer all phones—along with the belief that she would be rewarded for doing so. Nothing would change.

  She was also not in the least threatened by the new word processing center. No production typist would be able to decipher Mr. Derrigo’s abbreviated scrawl or comprehend Raymond’s acronyms. But sometimes she wished a machine would be invented that could perform her entire function. No one should spend a lifetime doing what she did.

  Infinitely more appealing were the contretemps that occupied the heroine of Heart’s Masquerade. Lady Waverly, resisting pressure to marry, was on the lam, dressed as a man and riding in a stagecoach. Her driver, a fair-haired member of the gentry, was disguised, for reasons undisclosed, as a peasant. But Cheryl knew what would happen. She often imagined that the heroines of these novels possessed her own type of moist-eyed, puffy prettiness, and she endowed the heroes with Richard Olsen’s athletic handsomeness.

  Olsen had been an attractive man, but with a regularity of feature and a lack of menace that prevented him from achieving sex symbol status. Cheryl had always been relieved about that. But she was grateful to Olsen for more than his good looks and accessibility. He had helped her develop standards.

  On the night she attended her first football game, she felt like a failed woman, one without a meaningful relationship. After her breakup with Stu, she had joined singles’ organizations, pen pal clubs, and allowed boring, unattractive losers to press too close and demand, “What’s wrong with you?” or “What are you afraid of?” Then she watched Olsen bound gracefully across the field and immediately she felt less impoverished. She decided she would either date someone like him or go without. And going without proved to be not all that difficult—not much different from dieting. It was just a matter of substitution. She began staying home and reading romantic fiction. The novels might be a diluted substitute, but they were safe and spared one the cold, grimy feeling of single activities.

  It was soon after that the idea of the bubble gum came to her. It was a way of conveying—anonymously—a token of her esteem and affection for Richard Olsen. There was also a kind of excitement and awesome finality in standing to the other side of the Elgin Avenue mailbox and knowing that she, a passive, indecisive person, had just completed an absolutely irreversible act and that no amount of plunging of her freckled arm could retrieve that small Jiffy bag.

  But Richard Olsen had taken sick and sunk from public view as completely as a stone thrown in a pond. And now there was only the vicarious excitement of the novels. At 1:30 she slammed the book closed. From reading so much she had begun to apply a fictional narrative to her own life and as she stood, she stated softly, “Cheryl Farrell Freedman returned to her desk with a solemn resignation.”

  As soon as she left the solitude of Derrigo’s office, she dashed to answer a phone. “Mr. Raymond’s office. He’s at lunch, Mr. Krupa. This is Cheryl. Could I help you with something? Hold on. I’ll get the file.”

  At five o’clock her lipstick-stained second cup of coffee was still three-quarters full. She tidied her desk, covered the typewriter, clicked off her desk light, dumped the undrunk coffee in the hall water fountain, then threw away the cup in the ladies’ room. Martha Austin, a secretary from the Marketing Group and a newlywed, stood in front of the double mirrors carefully combing her long blonde hair. Cheryl did not pull out her own comb. She was not going home to anybody. “Good night, Martha.”

  “Good night, Cheryl.”

  Cheryl was relieved it was a Thursday, and she was not required to say “Have a nice weekend” and answer Martha’s inevitable question, “Big plans?” The older she got the more repetitious her conversations became. She smiled at Martha and went out to her car.

  The car, a vintage Vega, was very dependable, thanks to Al Valerino, her stepfather. Her mother had remarried only a few months earlier, and, at first, Cheryl had been looking forward to Al’s joining the family. The swarthy, muscled, sometime carpenter and school bus driver was just ten years older than she and could never be a father figure; but she had hoped he would prove to be an ally in the alien world of men. And though she did not want her mother’s new husband to be interested in her, she had hoped he would find her interesting. Instead Al viewed her as a disintegrating mess, like Jell-O left too long at room temperature. All her topics of conversation pained him. He did not want to know any details of her brief failed marriage with Stu or hear her reminisce about her dead father. So when he and Rose occasionally came for drinks and dinner, to avoid small talk, Al would first check the upstairs pipes, then go out and inspect the car’s battery and spark plugs. If it was a long drawn-out holiday dinner, he would change the oil. Right after the coffee was poured he would excuse himself by saying, “Giving you ladies some time for girl talk,” then, still carrying the white fluted cup, he would go outside and set to work. Though this strained relationship was hard on her ego, her car ran like a top.

  When Rose married Al, she had given Cheryl the condominium, which was set in a row of attached two-story houses with similar though different-colored fronts. Tonight, when Cheryl emerged from the car, a neighbor, wheeling a baby carriage on the bit of sidewalk adjoining their homes, smiled appealingly at her. Cheryl waved and was on the brink of saying “Nice now that it stays brighter in the evenings,” when she remembered that the woman was from Quebec and spoke no English. She waved a second time and went inside.

  Having decided on chili for dinner, she began dicing an onion and a green pepper. The knife made a savage sound as it hit the porcelain cutting board: Screw Al, Screw Stu, Screw Mr. Raymond. The onions hissed as she dumped them into the too-hot frying pan. She threw out the last bit of green pepper rather than tangling with all those seeds. Her mother would not have been so thriftless. No, she would have hacked the skinny green slice free and frozen it. Now Rose, the most economical person Cheryl knew, lived with a man who had never held a full-time job.

  Right after dinner Cheryl headed upstairs, looking forward to finishing the Brushfire romance she had begun the night before. She started counting in increments of 1.2 as soon as her foot hit the bottom step. It occurred to her that such constant involuntary caloric computations were nearly as handicapping as a facial twitch. But she could not stop. An unchallengeable mix of vocation, habit, and disposition made her always listen for phones and count calories.

  Cheryl had left off in the novel with the hero and heroine drinking an amber colored liquid; she wished the writer had just named the beverage. The novel was full of coincidences and foreshadowing but nothing truly upsetting. Just as the couple were getting amorous the downstairs phone began ringing.

  Cheryl bounded down to the kitchen, not counting calories but orienting herself. She need not answer “Mr. Raymond,” “Mr. Derrigo,” or “Software International.” She was at home. It was probably her mother. “Hello” would be sufficient.

  “Is this C. F. Freedman? This is Vernice Johnson. I work at the Michael Keep Nursing Home on Birch Lake Road.”

  A fund-raiser, Cheryl cautioned herself. She decided to pledge no more than fifteen dollars. That’s what she had given th
e Police Athletic Association.

  “You sent a package to Richard Olsen?”

  Cheryl thought of the package of bubble gum stored in her desk at work. It had been months since she had sent any to Olsen. She had stopped not because he was sick but because she no longer had a current address for him. “I mailed that last one a long time ago. To a rehabilitation center in Manhattan.” Then she added: “It was his trademark when he was playing—the gum, you know.”

  The woman did not seem to know. She sighed. “God love the U.S. mail. He’s lucky it was forwarded. He’s been here about three months. What I wanted to ask is: do you want to come and visit Richard? Those that get company get better care.”

  Cheryl flushed. For over a year she had entertained the fantasy that when Richard Olsen had his comeback conference, she would be tight by his side, smiling proudly. “Does he want to meet me?”

  “He doesn’t know what he wants. But like I said, those that get company do get better care.”

  Cheryl felt as if an ice cube were slowly sliding down her spine. The woman was saying that Richard was both abandoned and a vegetable. There was never going to be a press conference.

  “Why don’t you come around noon tomorrow: Birch Lake Road. I get off at three.”

  Derrigo was on the Coast and Raymond would be in Europe. She could take a long lunch. “All right.”

  She hung up the phone. Unwilling to imagine what lay ahead, she walked back upstairs and reread the last sentence on the page where her bookmark lay.

  Her eyes blazed like diamonds.

  Instantly Cheryl realized she was no longer in the mood. She should have gone swimming at the YWCA or performed other activities that burned up calories. Disgusted, she stared at her idle hands.

  Richard used to stare at his hands, too, when the pass was high or underthrown. Though she had only attended that one football game, she often read about him in The New York Times, where he would be pictured with his dog, Heinz, or his girlfriend, fashion model MacLogan Ross. And you could tell by that interchangeable, thoroughly fabricated name what kind of a woman she was. Ross was soft and easy to say; so of course, the model had chosen MacLogan, which required both a forward and backward thrust of the tongue to pronounce, as her first name.

  MacLogan was long gone now. And tomorrow Cheryl would meet Richard Olsen herself. She had intended that to happen, but only after she had lost twenty pounds and he had recovered. Certainly not now—not like this. Nothing was working out the way she had planned.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The women had discovered a new instrument of torture. After Vernice rubbed cold, greasy slime on his backside, she would tease and threaten him with a blowtorch. All that heat directed at his exposed ass reminded him of those Daffy Duck cartoons he had watched as a kid, where Daffy was always getting his tail feathers singed or blown off by dynamite kegs. For all Richard knew, his own rear end might have become feathered and downy. It was part of his anatomy totally lost to him now.

  Vernice switched off her machine and ran her freezing cold hand down his crack. (The women always chilled their hands before touching him.) “This bedsore is looking better, sugar. Like I been telling you, we’ll lick this sucker yet.”

  They had already licked this sucker. At the beginning he had vowed to fight to the death. But it was taking too damn long. Even now if a chunk of plaster fell out of the ceiling and landed on his head, Vernice would not let him slip away. No, she would thump him on the back to force the dust from his lungs, then keep him awake in case there was concussion. The women wanted him to live and suffer more.

  “Lift your good foot, Richard.”

  He lifted nothing but watched as Vernice pulled slippers on his faraway feet. The yellow slippers meant the Indian was coming. Richard did not know if the orderly was truly an Indian, but he was moon-faced and resembled the Seminoles who sold stringed beads and skirted dolls at the orange groves where he had worked part-time as a high school student.

  After the Indian had him sitting in the wheelchair, Vernice pushed him into the bathroom. First, she threatened to strangle him with a towel; then she poured cold water on his head.

  “I told you if your visitor was a woman, I’d wash your hair.”

  “Help. Help.” Richard no longer bothered to raise his voice. He had lost all hope of help.

  Vernice had done a bit of maneuvering so he would face the wall instead of the door. Richard knew she did this so he could not peek out and see his window. She had troubled herself unnecessarily. By now he could conjure up the window at will and superimpose it on any flat surface.

  The window had twelve panes—three across, four down. He had consecutively numbered the panes beginning with one in the upper left-hand corner and ending with twelve in the lower right. The sum of these numbers was seventy-eight. The totals of the numbers on the three vertical rows were: 22, 26, 30. Horizontally they were 6, 15, 24, 33. And both totals were always seventy-eight.

  The paneless picture window in the sitting room, where they dumped him every morning, was no good. It overlooked Birch Lake; he and the old folks were supposed to be content spending hours staring out at that dirty pond.

  Today after Vernice left him there Richard managed to get one brake off his chair so he could twirl around and face the other way. The lady in front of him tried to do the same and, when she could not, began to cry. Instead of lifting the brakes, her veined hands moved up and down picking lint off her nylon bathrobe. “She wants to be moved,” Richard told the nearby volunteer. The pink-jacketed lady volunteer, startled by his unaccustomed garrulousness, flinched but made no move toward the old lady.

  The side of the woman’s chair was stamped with a cellophane logo containing the name Everest & Jennings. Everest Jennings, Richard thought, would be a good name for an American explorer, an Admiral Peary type. MacLogan Ross had been a good name for a model. As good as any.

  She probably did not need to work anymore. Perhaps after offering him as a victim she would have been allowed to retire to some Palm Beach hideaway. Though he doubted Logan would want or enjoy that much. She wasn’t high-class enough to consider privacy a privilege. Still, she must have received something for her sacrifice. He wasn’t too curious about her compensation. He wondered why she had done it.

  Their last night together she had left in a huff. An hour before that they had been sitting in the living room drinking sherry—the expensive kind. Now, in an effort to remember the brand name, Richard dragged his left arm toward him and began massaging it. That did not jog his memory, just caused an uncomfortable tingling in the dead hand. He looked at the ragged-edged blanket on the lap of the sobbing old woman facing him and remembered that the sherry was called Dry Sack.

  Even though MacLogan was at her sexiest that night, with shirt open, it had not been a romantic finale. All they had been able to hear was the click, click of the dog’s toenails hitting against the tile floor of the bathroom above them. Heinz, always jealous of MacLogan, in a few more minutes would have ripped down the shower curtain. To avoid that, Richard went upstairs on a mission of canine comfort. When he came back, MacLogan was gone.

  He had been relieved she had left. His head ached so, he wished he could remove it, like a screw top, and set it across the room. MacLogan must, he realized now, have driven directly to the place (a draft board of some kind) where helpless victims have their lives signed away. Maybe she had heard an advertisement on her car radio. Who knew? He had never known such barbarous practices existed.

  He had not even known it when he was lying on the emergency room table, and some damn fool doctor was asking him if he had ever been able to use his left arm. Three days later those lady physical therapists were dragging him around, and he still did not know. It was a full seventeen days before he realized he was the sacrifice, the man offered to the women for torturing.

  That was the day someone announced he had not had a BM since his stroke. Hospital people used more acronyms than football coaches. By that time he w
as aware that he was a CVA (cardiovascular accident). A CVA seventeen days without a BM. The information passed from LPN to RN and that afternoon a tight-lipped, broad-assed blonde with a peaked cap came in and pushed him on his side. He heard paper crinkling and then with no warning she forced what felt like a fire hose up his rectum. He screamed for help. When none was forthcoming, he asked the blonde if there was a lot of blood.

  “You’re all right.”

  People were always telling him he was all right when he knew, for a fact, that he was not. Though the nurse had pulled the curtains closed, underneath, not three feet away he could see a pair of men’s slush-stained shoes. He called to the man, “Help me, sir. Help me, please. For God’s sake, help me.” The shoes backed away. That was when Richard recognized incontrovertibly that he was the sacrificial offering.

  In his freshman year at Iowa, he had been required to read a short story called “The Lottery.” The idea of an annual stoning had horrified and upset him. Maybe he had been upset because he had subconsciously suspected that the practice of human sacrifice still existed and horrified because he sensed that he, too, would have backed away from the victims.

  Vernice walked into the sitting room and laid an icy hand on his forearm. “I’m taking him back to his room,” she said to nobody in particular. Even though it was still winter, Vernice never wore sweaters. Richard knew she let her brown arms dangle bare out of short puffed white sleeves so he would always be chilled by her touch.

  Maria, the chipmunk-cheeked one, wore thick white sweaters and never paid much attention to him. But now when he was looking forward to moving, she appeared. “It’s not time,” she said authoritatively.

  Vernice pulled his left brake off and glared at Maria. “Richard is having company. I want him to eat lunch and relax in his room first so he’ll be sociable.”

  “Richard is never socieeeable.”

  Vernice was moving him anyway. He was not going to ask her about his company. He would not give her that satisfaction. Though halfway down the hall, he was tempted to wave his arm in a wide looping arc and scream like that game show master of ceremonies: “Come on down. Come on down.” Instead he kept his arm tight by his side. Any display of enthusiasm was dangerous.