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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780983976387 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pfp Publishing |
| Publication date: | 11/09/2011 |
| Pages: | 180 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.41(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
She wondered if anyone recognized them. The ushers, the ticket sellers. No one seemed to. Not the one who looked familiar, who stood beside the ticket counter to rip tickets for every theater behind him because it was a slow weekday night. He was a young Hispanic man, with a flat-topped haircut, shaved close on the sides, a mustache she could see through. He was big shouldered, and he didn't fit too well into the light-blue polyester jacket he had to wear. He glanced down at her husband, then straight at her, putting the two together. She wondered if he'd been the one who'd once smiled at them and asked like a tavern keeper, what'll it be tonight, when some years back her husband had decreed every Monday movie night.
"Don't underestimate the importance of ritual," he'd told her, one of the many things he made her think about that she'd never thought about before. Ritual. But it was also his desire to never let a good thing go unrepeated. A good day fishing on a charter boat, and every summer ever after they had to do it again, a good party, and only a month or two later they gave another one. And after a good movie in an empty theater on a Monday night, he'd insisted they return every Monday night after. And she indulged him, amused, sometimes teasing, for he was like a child who pleads, Again, Again, certain he could recapture the very same pleasure felt from a moment already past.
Still, they had to have been considered regulars, going at least once a week over years, Monday or not. Even after their first daughter was born. And it had been one of the last thingsthey'ddone. Gone to see some silly romantic comedy. A forgettable movie for a night she would so often recall.
The girl at the concession stand gave them no sign either; maybe she was new, maybe not. She tried to remember her, black hair dyed that odd pinky-red that she supposed had said "copper" or "auburn" on the bottle. Like the other people around them, the girl only looked at him as they approached, but she knew it was not from recognition of the couple they'd been before.
Always unusual. She'd worn her thick blond hair waist length, parted just off center, same as when she was a seventies teenager who had worn platform shoes as well, bell-bottoms and a peasant blouse. He did not want her to ever cut it, so she never had. And he always wore some hat, a beret in winter and fall, or a wide-brimmed fawn-colored cowboy hat, or in summer, a straw fedora, and he wore, too, a full beard, thick and well-trimmed and permanent. He'd grown it when, just before Vietnam, he'd resigned from the Marine Corps and had never shaved it. And since she'd first known him, it had changed color from shades of red and brown to white, the white creeping down from his sideburns in increments, over years, like the slow maturation of fledgling feathers. He was twenty-two years older than she.
This had always drawn looks and people's wrong assumptions, which for a time she'd corrected with the kind of glee that comes from having played a successful practical joke. But then it had grown tiresome, maybe after their first daughter was born; and then, finally, she couldn't blame people for their error. The assumption was logical. They were less unusual, more freakish, even to her, after a time. And when the very first doctor made the predictable daughter mistake that very first night and said more defensively than apologetically, "You're very young," she simply replied, "I know."
"Small, plain popcorn, large Coke, Nestlé's Crunch," she said. Still, no sign of recognition, but then it had always been he who gave this order, while she, uninterested in concession food, found them seats. But he was too low. Child's height, he looked now straight at the rows of candy bars of such unwieldy sizes that they looked magnified. He could not be anything else but slightly behind her, and she could tell he hurried to unhook from the chair handles the cheap green, canvas backpack she'd bought long ago at some army-navy store for an outing she couldn't remember, and had never imagined would be this one.
He dug into it for his wallet, to have the cash ready this time, because she'd paid for the tickets. She'd named the movie because even though she'd been standing behind him, the ticket seller had looked to her, and she'd been taken off guard, not quick enough, here, in a public setting, to indicate by not answering, or by rude instruction, that he, too, was capable of saying what movie they wished to see, and buying with his own money, the tickets, informing the ticket seller and everyone in line behind them, that her husband's seated position did not mean his brain was impaired.
But they both were not used to how long things took now, and so she'd paid, something she'd done before, yet now the act took on a significance she did not intend it to have, implied that she, like the ticket seller, judged him incapable of the task. And she'd imagined everyone watching, the ticket seller, the couple behind them, and her, watching him twist, unhook, unbuckle, open, take out, everyone watching, everyone waiting for him to complete something that had once taken seconds.
Now she was ordering, because she thought he'd feel foolish shouting up the steep slope of glass. Quickly she had to decide what was worse, and his lack of protest felt to her like acquiescence. Still, she was terribly relieved to take from his hand the ten dollar bill.
She gave him the change, which he threw loose into his backpack, both realizing then they'd not yet devised a new way for him to keep his coins. And she handed down to him the Coke, then the popcorn, and just placed the candy bar in his lap, feeling as she did so, that she felt like she was doing something else, and then she smiled, nearly laughed when she realized: loading a grocery cart.
She wanted to tell him because suddenly, amazingly, it could all become so comical, and she loved it when that happened. We're so pathetic, she'd screamed, both of them laughing until they gasped, had to wipe tears and blow their noses and then start laughing again, because eight-and-a-half-months pregnant, and he just home, she'd had to navigate a climb onto his raised, rented bed, and over his prone body, to lie beside him to watch a video. And just the thought of it, for days afterward, had made her smile.
But not tonight. He wore his new Marine fatigue cap, and the hair she could see at his temples looked sticky. His face was flushed, his baseball jacket snapped to the chin, the collar tight at his neck, pressing. All his clothes looked like that now that he'd gained enough weight back to fit into them again. But the fit was different, his shirts, jackets all looking now pushed up, or he squashed down into them. No longer was he just a man in children's clothing, the eccentric costumes she'd tease him about, his hats, cowboy snap-button shirts, and this jacket he loved so much, made of blue satin with the two big red socks stitched onto the left side, their texture that of the bumpy swatch on her older daughter's touch-and-feel book. Now it was children's clothing on a man's body confined. And there was nothing really funny in it, as though it had been forced on him for someone's sadistic pleasure, his face, his eyes, always, an unnerving contrast.
He looked past her, as if as long as he didn't look at her, he would not really be there. But his eyes were dark and they glittered, looking like they did when he was angry. She felt uncertain. She thought, not angry at her exactly. It was the look that followed the other one, the one he'd had when they'd gotten there, at the ticket counter, his eyes like those of a brown dog she'd seen long ago running between cars on a crowded ramp up to a city bridge. How he'd looked in the hospital when she'd decided he was able to see people and too many came at once, or at home when the same thing happened. There was no appeal in it, no fear, just a dreamy confusion, like he'd been deprived of oxygen. She knew her reassurance would be harmful, the way it is to wake a sleepwalker. He would be startled, he might scream or strike at her. In the hospital and at home she had gently shooed the people out, but she always kept her distance from him, waited for it to pass to this. This rage that she also knew not to approach, that he hoarded, would keep her from with raised lips and a snap, like it was something he was feeding on.
A little afraid, she took up her position behind him, but knew it was not a solution either, for pushing him when he was like this became a taunt. And even if she'd chosen to walk beside him, as she had in the parking lot, even if she'd let him now control the chair's speed himself down the long, sloping theater aisle, she'd still be no better than the ticket seller, just like everyone else, no better than the general enemy whom he called "Bipeds."
"So what are you going to do with it?" he'd asked. "Pickle it?" Asking after the doctor explained how it would be done.
"Just like a chicken bone," the doctor had said, holding his hands up before his gold-rimmed glasses and twisting them in opposite directions. They had both groaned and laughed, the room full of celebration and relief because it had almost killed him.
She arrived one day during the third week to know immediately something had changed from the day before. His face looked thinner, more exhausted, in a weirdly peaceful way, and bags of blood hung from the hook that had once held clear ones before his body had been able, finally, to provide for itself what they had. And all he needed was the shots, always the shots they both yearned for, watching the clock.
But never blood, and she heard that his had been all over the floor. She saw for herself one overlooked drip, dried like paint on the steel bed frame, left there like damning evidence. A young nurse on a routine four A.M. check had screamed and run to find another nurse who had turned out to be Gordon, their favorite, who left his smell of sweet aftershave and whatever he put in his pompadoured hair, behind him. And who would stop off in her husband's room on his break to peer down from the window to Emergency and announce who was dead or alive on their short trip from ambulance to entryway. They loved him, and his hands that could lift and turn and touch her husband's limbs in a way no one else could. It was he who'd clamped the artery before any doctor arrived.
"Just a floating bone chip," their doctor had said, so offhandedly that she was confused. Did he not want her to be alarmed? Or did he want to downplay it, so he could have a few more chances to save it, knowing they would, as they did, beg him to just take it off.
"I mean it looks like a fucking casserole," her husband had said to him.
Not a casserole, she thought. Just meat. Like a cow's, a pig's. Pale, red, and bloodless. Open from knee to ankle, gray bits of bone, flat and rough as shale, held fast in a crooked line, steel pins crisscrossed right through and attached to four horizontal bars. She said, "It's not often one can see the very bones of the man she loves," for she washed it everyday, the nurses being so busy, and she needing to do something for him, something besides sitting and knitting, and watching.
She could not touch him, or read to him, or even sing to him, as she had on the other floor, in the windowless room with no time, when his eyes were swollen to slits and his ability to speak taken away by the greater importance of his breath, given to him by the machine that reached his lungs through his mouth and throat, and so all he had were his hands and a red felt tip pen and a yellow pad, always remembering to write "please" after his requests. And sometimes drowning, it said. Drowning. So she sang to him, leaning close down to his ear. She had a good singing voice and now she used it like an additive to morphine and tranquilizers. Knowing it kept him calm, and her calm, through the sudden bleating of machine alarms, his and all the still peoples' around them that the nurses moved through like fish between stones; slipping quickly, stopping, tapping, flicking switches, shaking tubes, touching metal, flesh, bringing, taking while she sang, and looked at his chest. The mole just where his chest hair gave over to smooth skin, his chest hair, thick and curly and swirled white just at his solar plexus, reassured by this part of him that it was still him.
But in this next room, she couldn't sing to him anymore. It was not the room of survival as the first one was, but the one for healing, and the morphine barely touched what waited there for him. The pain, which forbade her touch, too. A captor of them both, his torturer, and her torture to watch. His task was only to be silent and still, to make his concentration a kind of placation to save himself. And so her songs, or her hands, broke this fragile defense. And she could only sit, until she asked to do for him what the others had to do, hold the urinal, wash his hair, clean him and the stainless steel pan — when finally his body got that part of it working again — and clean the left leg, the one so hurt, it didn't even hurt much. Not like the right one, strung up with ropes and black cylindrical weights.
All of the pain in that leg collected in his perfectly unscathed big toe, a phenomenon that could sometimes make them laugh, his astonishment at the illogic of it, the blatant injustice of it. "My fucking toe," he'd say. "My fucking toe," and asked for its removal before he made his lower left leg the subject of this demand.
Because dying flesh doesn't hurt. And she knew the bath of peroxide the nurses had taught her to administer and the new gauze she wrapped round the metal cage, the shiny wrenches in the toolboxes the orthopods carried, his repeated trips to surgery, were not working. There was always more dead to take away. And she could not believe there would be enough living left to ever stand on.
She said good-bye to his foot. Pretty and white, his feet were small, and his toes crouched close in a perfect diminished line. And she kissed his foot, feeling its waste, how wasteful it was that this part of him appearing as whole and healthy as it did when the leg above it was as well, had to go. "Poor little guy," she said to it. "Too bad you weren't the right." And they laughed. Still so relieved.
It meant he could go home soon, the right in a cast, looking finally like a normal broken leg, she'd said. And then a fake leg for the other. Kind of cool. Kind of cocky. Would look good with his leather jacket, baseball jacket, vests, hats, and cowboy boots. A sexy limp, she said. Canes the new accoutrement to collect along with his pipes.
Like it had been the hospital that kept him broken, and made the life they'd had before he went there something they could not retrieve. Until he came home. And then, like an explosion reversed, everything would fly back together again.
They stopped at a row three down from the center, just a little closer than most would prefer, their usual place, and when he leaned forward to put on his brakes, she heard the candy bar smack just beside the aisle carpet, onto the concrete floor. "Shit," he said. And she said, "I'll get it," realizing as she did, the words implied a choice. She walked around his chair, bumped her shin on the chair leg, always extended because his right leg could only bend sixty degrees. That's what the therapist measured with her compasslike gadget after each session she spent pushing firmly, steadily on his lower leg to bring it maybe up to eighty someday. But when she let go, the leg always sprang back with the resilience of a diving board.
She held his popcorn and Coke, while he put his candy bar in his coat pocket, and to her relief, unsnapped his coat and shucked it from his body the way he had when he'd driven. She handed him back the popcorn, the drink, and moved past him to sit in the aisle seat, the one he'd always chosen for himself. Now, in the aisle, he sat higher than she. The chair arm, attached to a flat, vertical square of metal, rose just next to her face. It was a reach, but she touched his hand, just as he raised it to perhaps scoop popcorn from the container he'd placed between his thighs, so the gesture seemed less one of affection, more like restraint. But she held on, and said, "Well, here we are." He didn't answer. "I'd say it's an accomplishment," she said. He squeezed her hand and let go. And though she couldn't see over his chair arm, she could tell he'd placed his hand on top of his popcorn container, and she remembered that that was what he did, never ate until the movie began, but put his hand on top, as though he were hiding the contents, or holding them in. And the gesture amused her and startled her a little. Its very familiarity making it odd. It might have been something she would have remembered about him back at the movies for the first time, had he died. And it felt a little like that to her now, as did many things, like something recalled, not real. And strange because it wasn't strange. As if nothing should have survived what they had, unaltered.