That witch of a nurse had probably reached the Interstate by now. And Rose was staying at some rustic cabin where the only phone was at the motel office. Everyone has deserted me, Cheryl thought as her eyes began to tear.
She shook her head savagely. “Stop it. Stop it,” she admonished herself. Richard needed her to be calm right now. However bad she must feel, he must feel worse. And with that realization, she returned to his room.
“Richard, are you all right? I’m sorry about that woman. I’ll never let her come again.” She rubbed his back with long rhythmic strokes. He had become so gaunt and frail this last week. Leaving him to Mrs. Elter’s devices would have been like throwing a baby bird in front of a truck. Richard appeared to be asleep, but she was not certain, so she knelt beside his bed. “I’m very sorry.” She wished he would acknowledge her once before she had to send him away. But first she wanted to give him a chance to see his dog.
The phone rang, and Cheryl ran to it with relief. It was just like that adage: always darkest before the dawn. Rose and Al had come home early. Everything was going to be all right. They could stay with Richard until she got back from the airport and then help her get him admitted to the hospital.
But the soft childish voice was not her mother’s. It was Lucy’s. “Cheryl, I can’t find Mr. Derrigo’s customer files for Europe.”
She took a deep breath, tried to remember where the chronological files were. “The cabinet by the water fountain. Third drawer down.”
“Hold on.” And then: “I don’t see it.”
“It has a red tab.”
“Oh, I found it,” Lucy said happily. “How is everything going?”
“Fine.”
“Lucky you not to be working.”
Cheryl hung up the phone, then walked over to the counter and lifted the top off the tin of homemade cookies her mother had brought. The oval lid was decorated with a still-life mural of clay crockery, one bowl containing fresh cherries with stiff stems. She set down the top, then stared down into the tin. The cookies were lumpy with chocolate chips and nothing Richard would be interested in. Cheryl decided to eat just one.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Richard spent a lot of time thinking about his grandmother. During his preschool days, he had spent most of his time waiting for her. Each day after his mother went to work, Grandma would coax him into action with the promise of a trip to the park. He got dressed, tied his new blue sneakers as best he could, and waited. Then in boredom he rolled his socks up and down and picked at his mosquito bites. Finally he went to check on her.
She was generally standing in front of her bedroom mirror wearing a yellowed slip and flapping her flabby arms up and down like some mammoth bird about to ascend. “My deodorant isn’t dry,” she would explain. When he had abandoned all hope of leaving their hot one-bedroom apartment and had settled in front of an I Love Lucy rerun, she would appear in the living room to ask, “Aren’t you ready yet, pumpkin?”
His grandmother had been the dominant influence on his young life because his mother was totally preoccupied with self-improvement. She usually stayed in West Palm Beach after work and ate at the diner because she was enrolled in a Dale Carnegie course or attended an art appreciation class or an Arthur Murray dance lesson. But on Wednesdays she bowled, which caused Richard to suspect that merely keeping away from their too-small apartment was a prime motivator in her constant quest for improvement.
Regardless, his days rolled along with regularity. While his grandmother rested he spent the hot afternoons throwing a tennis ball against the brick wall of their apartment building. He always came back at 4:30 because he knew she would have set a plate of Ritz crackers smeared with pimento spread on the glass-topped coffee table. It was cocktail time and while he drank ginger ale from a juice glass, she had a manhattan with two cherries.
At six o’clock they ate supper. They usually had pork and beans or canned spaghetti. Because Richard was a growing child, there was a salad and a dish of canned fruit cocktail set to the side of his plate. Grandma liked cans because they spared her from ever having to touch the food. Even the cherry tomatoes in his salad had come from a Winn-Dixie can. Grandma would spoon the plump tomatoes onto the lettuce, then sprinkle the salad with dehydrated onions that had been soaking in the shot glass.
After supper she always carried her coffee into her bedroom to say the rosary. Sometimes she misplaced her mug and had to summon him. He would shift through the jumble of magazines, jewelry, and glow-in-the-dark statues on her dresser until he found the still-warm mug. Then she gratefully patted his arm. “You’re a good boy, Richie,” she would proclaim confidently. “A good, good boy.”
As he approached school age his mother began to take a more active interest in his life. She signed him up for the Pee-Wee Softball League. His athletic coordination might already have been apparent, or she may have observed that her son and her mother were becoming isolated in their oddness. But if she intended to change him, she was too late. He had already developed a permanent preference for canned food and solitude.
Cheryl ventured to the door of Richard’s room and gave him an anxious look. She periodically walked by to see if he was still alive. Besides turning him from side to side and emptying his urinal that was all she could do. Despite her lack of nursing skills she had profoundly changed his way of thinking.
Before coming here he had been convinced there was a national organization of women whose goal was to make him suffer. In an attempt to make peace with the enemy he had married this woman; but the torturing continued. Cheryl merely hired other women to do it.
Surely his bride didn’t wish him harm. To be capable of intentional evil, a person needed to be blindly complacent and have absolute convictions; but Cheryl regretted her every act five minutes after its completion. Therefore, Richard concluded, she had to believe these people helped him. These cruel acts must be perpetrated upon all sick people. If that was the case, then there was no national conspiracy, no enemy to fight, and consequently no reason to live. Starving could take a long time but, fortunately, some sticky substance was wrapping itself around his lungs the way Spanish moss engulfed the weeping willows down South. Maybe it wouldn’t take so long.
Cheryl sat on the floor and looked up into his face. He absolutely hated when she did that. It was unfortunate that he had gotten involved with her, but he had not understood the hopelessness of his situation until after they were married. He wished he had married Janey Birch. He kept coming back to that the way one probes a sore tooth. But it was too late for regrets. It was too late for everything.
“I am such a pig. Do you know what I just did?”
He was dying, and she was confessing. It made no sense. He stared past her, stared through the sliding glass doors and out into the untended patio. The bricks composing the floor were made of a decorative fleur-de-lis pattern, but he had no desire to count them.
“I ate a whole tin of cookies.” She brushed her hand against the rug. “I don’t know why I did that. I’ve been so good up until now. I didn’t eat your Cream of Wheat, and it really smelled good. All I had all day was coffee, a banana, and a sandwich. Then I blew it. God, I’m worthless.”
Was she asking for comfort? Forgiveness? Either way he was completely unequal to the task. He did perform one feat of gallantry for her, but he doubted she was aware of it. His hand shook so that using the urinal without spillage was difficult, but he hoped he could continue managing it up until the end.
“I should have cooked a balanced meal for us. I would eat more sensibly if you were eating something. I should have cooked chili. Except for the kidney beans, chili is very low-calorie. But you don’t eat ground beef, do you?”
He raised his right hand in a reflexive, protective gesture, but the bombardment of words continued. He stopped listening. How could she accuse him of not eating ground beef? He had almost completely subsisted on White Castle hamburgers from his sophomore through senior years of high school. After his grandmoth
er died his mother started coming home after work. But he was intent on revenge and he never made it home in time for dinner. When questioned, he would plead practices to attend, game films to review, laps to swim. This cruelty might have been passed on from generation to generation, except now there would be no next generation.
Cheryl, defeated by his inattention, adjusted the TV, then let him be. She reappeared later to give him some cough syrup, which had a thick, cherry taste. She plunked the bottle on his table. “I’ll leave it here in case you need it later.” When she patted his arm, her hand felt warm and dry.
Her hands still felt warm when she touched his forehead that night. Seeing her pendulous breasts and thick silhouette, he thought he was again being caressed by his grandmother and he fell back into a dreamless, secure sleep.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Cheryl was a masterful driver. She maneuvered the Saw Mill Parkway, the Hutch, and Interstate 84 with equal ease. Driving had never worried her, but she had always been terrified of dogs. She could not see Heinz in her rearview mirror. Even so, there was too much potential danger involved to forget he was there. At any moment the dog might jump up and bite her neck or leap into the front seat and stick its damp, licorice-colored nose into the crotch of her lime slacks. Cheryl shuddered and gripped the steering wheel tighter. She was afraid to turn the radio on. There was no telling what effect music might have on the creature. It was best to stay calm and speak softly. “We’ve just passed White Plains, Heinz, and now we’re getting onto 684. In a half hour we’ll be with Richard. You remember Richard?”
That sounded both idiotic and patronizing; but perhaps she was merely being boring, for Heinz yawned. She could hear his formidable teeth click closed. She had paid a limousine driver whose fare had not arrived twenty dollars to walk Heinz from the luggage area to the car. The dog had been orderly enough, and Cheryl watched the somberly dressed young driver, relieved she did not have to speculate on his marital status or potential earning power. In fact, she did not have to do anything but pay him. This was no once-in-a-lifetime fateful encounter. She was a married woman now. A married woman. But after the man left she again became simply terrified. She was alone in her Vega with a dog, a very big dog.
When they arrived at the condo, she opened the back car door. Still reluctant to touch him, she commanded, “Get out, Heinz.” The dog slid just far enough forward so that its head prevented her from from closing the door. She stared down at his black toenails, worn white at the tips, and wondered what to do. If she went to check on Richard, the dog might leap from the car and never be found again. But Richard had been left alone for nearly four hours. She tentatively pulled on the metal leash. When Heinz did not budge, she got out her car keys and edged forward to open the front door.
It felt as if the bathroom rug brushed by her knees, but it was the dog, pushing past her and running toward the living room. “Stop. Stop!” He shouldn’t do that, Cheryl reasoned. Richard was too ill for surprises. She lunged forward, but her purse strap caught in the door latch, and by the time she had disentangled herself, the dog was already on the hospital bed. The side rails had been no deterrent at all. He had simply leapt forward from the base of the bed and was now licking Richard’s face. Oh, God, the germs.
But they were regarding each other so tenderly, she thought it best not to interfere. Heinz was kind of pretty. His coat was composed of the colors carpet salesmen show samples of: tawny, rusty brown, champagne, and golden brown. Richard looked like a child on Christmas morning as his large-knuckled hand began to caress the dog’s side. She waited there proudly, impatient to tell him about the effort involved in locating Heinz. But Richard continued stroking the panting dog, apparently requiring no explanation for the creature’s miraculous presence. The invisible woman—that’s what she was. Whatever she did, it wasn’t enough to capture anyone’s approval. Her bosses misunderstood her. Waitresses never remembered to take her order. Husbands forgot her. She stomped off to the kitchen to make herself some instant coffee.
She had stood by a similar stove on the day after her wedding to Stu, drinking black coffee and crying herself sick. She had been brought up to believe that scraped knees were followed by lemon sherbet. But nothing happened except nightfall, so she washed her bloated face, put on one of the nightgowns she had intended to take on her honeymoon, and went to bed.
The teakettle began to whistle. Cheryl dumped the boiling water into her mug and began to relive her marriage day with Stu. She rehashed this incident so often that now the process of memory was barely involved. It was more like slamming a tape into a cassette. Detail after detail came to mind as effortlessly as listening to canned music.
It had all begun in the morning. Stuart had called Rose and told her he was not willing to go through with the wedding. That he called Rose just illustrated how hopeless it had all been. Since guests were already traveling, her practical mother advised him to attend the nuptials, cancel the honeymoon, and request an immediate annulment. Cheryl had come down the aisle on her mother’s arm, thinking what a touching sight they were—and all the while Rose knew it was a joke.
On their wedding night Stu acted in a strictly professional capacity, not as a groom. Stu spoke rationally and offered her Valium, which she hurled across the room. The pills formed a green clump, which transfixed her while he tried to explain himself.
“It’s like buying a shirt in the wrong size and hoping it will shrink or stretch. It’s too big a gamble for us.”
Whether she was too much woman for him or not enough, she never knew, for he quickly switched from the general to the specific. He had just run into an old girlfriend, whose name was June; he knew he still loved her. He spoke with an urgency that implied his intense feelings were completely unprecedented.
“June,” Cheryl had repeated, “just like the month most people get married in.” For a second or two he regarded her with his former soulful sympathy; but it was just a friendly gesture. By then she had lost him completely.
She had not even been allowed one solitary Saturday night to sit with her feet up and think about all those singles still out searching. Instead she was still single herself. At work she pretended to be a blissful newlywed. On her own time she paid a professional matchmaker four hundred dollars to fix her up with three so-called referrals. They were awful (all of them) and far more awkward than blind dates, because there were no shared friends to discuss and no common ground at all—except for disgust over the enormity of the matchmaker’s fee. That perky blonde at One Plus One Dating was not the pay-later type, and Cheryl was pretty sure she charged women more than men. Nothing personal—just business, governed by supply and demand.
Cheryl sipped at her coffee, which was too strong. She wanted to add milk and sugar; that, however, would elevate the caloric total to an unacceptable sixty.
“Cheryl, Cheryl!” She took one more gulp and went back into the living room. The dog was down on his haunches now, lying beside Richard with his tawny, rusty brown, champagne, and golden brown feet stretched forward. Richard smiled at her shyly. It was the first he had acknowledged her in days and made her realize how vastly she had reduced her expectations in the last week. Now all she wanted was to let him enjoy his dog for a few hours.
“Heinz is hungry.”
She clamped her hand to her mouth. “Dog food! I never bought any dog food. God, I’m a jerk. No cans, no biscuits. Nothing.”
Richard gave her a tolerant, amused look. “Heinz doesn’t like dog food. Do you have peanut butter?”
“Just the low-calorie kind.”
“Could I get up?”
That request made her eyes water. He used to have entire grandstand crowds sitting on the edge of their seats, and now he needed her assistance in leaving bed. “Oh, sure,” she replied bravely, though she was terrified of using the hydraulic lift. She wheeled the clanking machine over by his bed. “Could the dog get down?”
He patted the sheet. “Down, Heinz.” The dog scampered off the b
ed and regarded her woefully. She rolled the nylon sling as if it were a diploma, then slid it under Richard. His back was sweaty. When she cranked him into a sitting position, he gagged up buckets of yellow phlegm.
“Oh, God,” she whispered as she ran to the kitchen for paper towels.
Richard regarded the soaked front of his bedgown, then said calmly, “I’m all right.” It was the dog he was trying to reassure, not her. Heinz was howling loudly, which made Cheryl more nervous. By the time she had Richard cleaned up and in the wheelchair, her hands shook, her legs quivered, and she was exhausted. God give me strength, she pleaded. She just wanted to give her husband one pleasant day with his dog.
She wheeled him into the kitchen, where Richard asked, “Could you get me the peanut butter, two slices of bread, and a knife, please.” He spoke like a man accustomed to issuing polite orders. When she forgot the knife, he pointed to the open silverware door. His commanding directness was a sharp contrast to her own apologetic manner of requesting things. The uncomfortable thought crossed her mind that Richard had the potential for being very domineering. It didn’t really worry her. He was going to the hospital shortly. What power could he exercise over her there? But even though he could not live with her, she was not getting another annulment. Never. She would continue as Richard’s wife and keep him as comfortable as possible wherever he was. She twisted her little garnet ring. No matter what happened she was through with being single.
She watched as his shaking hand dipped the knife into the peanut butter. Making an adequate sandwich took him at least forty strokes, but she forced herself not to help.
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