A Private State: Stories (3 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 9
well to Juliet, draws her back to the classroom. "Here will I remain / with worms that are thy chambermaids; O here / will I set up my everlasting rest, / and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars / from this world-wearied flesh," Kim makes a bold sweep with her sword, a metric ruler she's borrowed from Mary Ellen.
The class starts to clap and it's not even over. From the floor, Tim, as Juliet, says, "God, that's good, Kimberly."
Mary Ellen wonders if she's the only one unmoved. She tells Kim to take it down a notch or two. This is not opera. Juliet has to have his moment, too.
No one else says anything. Is she merely being crabby? Is it because she can no longer imagine anyone feeling so strung out about love? It has always bothered Mary Ellen that Romeo and Juliet don't know a damn thing about the toll of ordinary days and how that slows the pulse and grays the hair.
Tim says, sitting up, "They love each other. They can't live without each other." Kimberly flushes and tries to pull her turtleneck over her mouth. Mary Ellen notices the purple "Kimmy" on Tim's cast and the lopsided heart over the "i.'' There's the brink of a sneering giggle in the room that doesn't quite break out. They are all paying attention.
These days, Mary Ellen doesn't have time for love; she spends her evenings peering at bald photographs of fractures and burns. It has perhaps made her a little implacable.
"OK," she relents. "Go to town." They plunge in: Romeo and Juliet are united in death. The Capulets and Montagues relent, forgive. As the bell rings and makeshift Verona disperses, Mary Ellen hears Tim say to Kimberly, "This is so deep."
deep:
pertaining to or situated inside the body and away from the skin.
Mary Ellen is talking to Louise, who is staying at home tonight with Glen, to see a movie. She'd like to ask Louise if she has ever
 
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been really aware of her heart. Did she know, for example, it was only the size of an orange? But what an orange, with its separate circuitry, its dire need for air. Instead, she tells Louise the rib cage is a poor design for protecting vital organs. Too many gaps.
Louise is silent on the line. "Do you think this class is a good thing right now?" she finally asks.
"Louise, I'm learning to revive people!" Mary Ellen says. "It's very good for me."
Mary Ellen knows Louise is feeling like she wants to see hearts as they appear on packs of cards; she doesn't want to think about the tangle of aortas and valves that thunk away in everyone's chest, even those of new boyfriends. She can understand that. The heart is so ugly really. The organ of romance and it's just dark, muscled chambers.
"What movie are you going to see?" Mary Ellen asks, propping up her turban.
The Battleship Potemkin
, crows Louise. "He says it's one of his favorites." Score one for Glen. He must be lying to please Louise. No one but hoary professors of film and Louise like
The Battleship Potemkin
, could actually have watched it more than once. She hopes Glen will have the sense to keep his hands off Louise during the movie. She watches every frame.
They say good-bye. Mary Ellen turns off the dim lamp, but it is still not black enough. Mary Ellen is jealous of Louise, of the tingle of attraction she and Glen are feeling. Hand touching hand and seeing it whole. Reveling in contact.
In
EMT
class, Keith announces they will break into groups of three to practice binding soft-tissue injuries on Junior Hans. junior, the size of an eight-year-old, has feet made of foam, but he sports real Keds. Red ones. Mary Ellen works with one of the firefighters and a girl who wears what Mary Ellen thinks of as a Stevie Nicks dress.
Keith shows them the assortment of plastic horrors that strap
 
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onto Hans with Velcro. There are avulsions, punctures and gun-shotsentrance and exit woundsfrom which to choose. The skin around the gashes does not match junior's skin. The firefighter introduces himself as Bruce. The girl says her name is Dawn.
Dawn. Mary Ellen feels her face freeze. Frank's Dawn? She mustn't say her real name, just in case. No one in this town is double-barreled. Frank will surely have complained of some terrible intimate habit of the old wife as a sign of allegiance to the new woman. How she propped her heel on the edge of the sink to trim her toenails and that was hardly the worst. "My name is Murray," she blurts.
"Murray?" Dawn says, frowning a bit.
"Yes," Mary Ellen hears herself say. "Murray." The firefighter also looks at her.
Dawn takes Junior and smoothly attaches and binds a nasty avulsion. Mary Ellen eyes her. It is quite possible she is Frank's girl. She might not be seventeen but she's not that far past twenty. So he liked his women the way he liked his deer. Tender. "Want to try?" Dawn says to Bruce and gently passes Hans's spongy body over.
Mary Ellen toys with a gunshot wound and asks Dawn, "So what do you do?" When Dawn says that she's working part-time at a vet's office, Mary Ellen runs a hand through her hair and raises a field of static that causes several strands to levitate like nervous antennae.
For the first time, Mary Ellen understands what might push Frank to the woods with a gun. Legal annihilation. Sanctioned stalking. And underneath that, the desire to see what was once alive, wild, and inviolate opened wide and stopped.
Mary Ellen drops the wound on Junior's thigh and asks Dawn if she'd like to attend clinical observation together.
Mary Ellen starts thinking of Sven as the Fawn Tracker. She lurks in the parking lot and follows Dawn one night and discovers she is
 
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indeed living with Frank. Mary Ellen could scream at the top of her lungs inside Sven and no one would ever hear her, he's that substantial.
Questions to Ask Patients About Their Pain:
P Provokes: What brought on the pain?
Q Quality: Sharp, dull, achy, burning?
R Region: Where is the pain located?
Mary Ellen can't bring herself to tell Louise about Dawn. Her sister is too excited about Glen. Not only does he like
The Battleship Potemkin
, he wrote a master's thesis on Eisenstein. He runs a classic-film society in Atlanta. He's taking Louise to Paris for a Chaplin festival. Louise is in the grip of something big. She sounds thrilled and stiff with fear at once. It is as if she has glimpsed for sure some creature that's been rumored to live in the woods. Louise is in the woods.
The students beg to stage the playreading before the whole school. During the performance, Tybalt, a basketball player named Samantha, lunges at Romeo and hits a plywood column instead. Her sword promptly snaps in two. Tybalt, staring at her maimed weapon, cries, "Shit!"
Mercutio says, "Tybalt, thy wit is mightier than thy sword."
Later that day, Mary Ellen receives a note in her box from the principal, saying, "M.E. West: come see me re: assembly." Mary Ellen hasn't noticed in a while that her initials spell "mew."
Mary Ellen waits for Dawn at the entrance to the emergency room. "Hi, Murray!" Dawn calls cheerfully from the parking lot. "Ready?"
"No," says Mary Ellen, just as cheerful.
The
E.R.
smells of cotton and hydrogen peroxide, prim and almost cozy. Mary Ellen wants to report herself to the triage
 
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nurse. So soothing, that nursely touch, those pearly nails. What's the matter, dear?
Well, nurse, I suffer from jealousy so severe it's warped my liver. My husband is in love with a girl named Dawn. I am dying from Dawnorrhea.
The charge nurse, a blonde with great skin welcomes them with a pair of yellow nametags. After "Hi, my name is," Mary Ellen pauses for a moment then writes "Murray." The nurse peers at the tags stuck just above their breasts and says, "Who do we have here? Dawn ... and Murray."
"It's her mother's maiden name," says Dawn quickly.
Mary Ellen gives the nurse a rueful smile. Dawn is smarter than her feathery hairstyle lets on. Mary Ellen wonders how much her smarts show up with Frank. He liked to be the one in charge of knowing. But maybe that has changed. Maybe love has made him a better person.
For the next few hours, it's everything from separations of the shoulder to dogs turned vicious on a master's hand. Mary Ellen remembers the stars of healed bites on Frank's palms. He treated the punctures himself, swearing and splotching his fingers with iodine. But mostly, she and Dawn see broken bones. The nurses and doctors handle the bad ankles and wrists as if they weren't quite attached to the rest of a body. "Look at this," they say and lay the injured part back down. Then there's an invitation to look at someone's cervix. Mary Ellen declines.
In the staff room, fingers laced around a cup of black coffee, Mary Ellen plans her next move. She'll lure Dawn to the house, load the box of Frank's possessions into Sven and deliver the old goods and the new girlfriend in one fine ironic swoop. In a mood of utter cool, with a slightly tilted smile, she'll appear on his doorstep, the flaps of the box neatly tucked in, and say, "Well, Frank, here are the last remains." Louise would approve. It's very Bette Davis.
"You're in luck," says a nurse. "We've got a code coming in."
 
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"Great," says Dawn, looking sparkly after her encounter with the cervix. Mary Ellen hopes Dawn won't feel compelled to describe it. Maybe it's just the approaching heart attack that's got her happy.
"Come on, you two," says the nurse. "It's quite a show."
Mary Ellen as Murray is tucked into a corner of the trauma room, her back against the cold cylinder of an oxygen tank. She can't quite believe she and Dawn are allowed to witness such wildness in the body of someone whose name they do not even know. There's a cool, carbolic smell of medicine and, just as sharp, the stink of sweat. The patient, an elderly woman, looks as if she'd been caught in a thunder shower. Every inch of skin gleams with wet. Strands of hair curve as distinctly as scars on her cheeks. Nearly the worst is watching the body's mindless jump as the current flows from the paramedics' paddles into the chest. "Doc!" someone calls. "The nitro's not doing it." A nurse plugs another plastic tube into the iv already in the left wrist. The patient's eyes have flown open. That is the worst. They are a dark, speckled brown.
Two doctors bend to decode the
EKG
as it spews its spikes and valleys onto graph paper. A paramedic crouches near the monitor where the slight hills of heartbeats blip past. A professional buzz of people in soft-soled shoes surrounds the patient and her shiny gurney, her tubes, her unsteady heart. The woman's lips are flushing blue. "Doc!" a paramedic calls again and one of the doctors turns around to see what's going on.
What's going on is that the heart is giving out. Its special circuits have refused to fire. Mary Ellen and Dawn, their nametags curling slightly at the edges, stand in the corner and watch. In the woman's face, there is something wild and lost and slipping.
Frank always said he could tell when an animal was going to die. They got this look, he'd say, turning his hands palm up. Even vicious ones just lie there.
After fourteen minutes, a doctor says, "That's it. I'm going to
 
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tell the husband.'' A nurse gently tugs the needles from the arm, whose skin is already looking, in some small, intangible way, unalive.
At the nurses' station, Mary Ellen can see the white back of the doctor as he tells the husband that his wife has died. "I want to see Maria," they hear the man say. He comes straight to Dawn and Mary Ellen and says, "Did you see it? Did you see Maria die?"
Dawn takes the man's hand and says, "I'm sorry Maria died." Maria. Knowing her name makes it a hundred times worse. It occurs to Mary Ellen, too, that Maria is not so many letters away from Murray.
The man's hand is loose in Dawn's. It is as if he's not aware of the girl's fingers, the push of a pulse in her thumb. He says, "She was old. But she was younger than I was." It is time to go. The nurses wish them luck. The fractures keep flowing. A new shift starts. The fresh nurses unwrap the steamy layers of their coats, ask if it's been busy. The ones still on duty say no worse than usual.
Dawn's battery has failed in the cold night and Mary Ellen offers to give her a lift. She can put her Bette Davis plan into action, but feels no excitement at this idea; all she thinks is that she'll have to ask Dawn to help her with the box. They are still wearing their nametags, but Mary Ellen doesn't bother to tear hers off. Since Maria died, Mary Ellen has felt more like Murray than Mary Ellen. Having an alternate name to slip into has proved useful. It has made certain things possible.
Frank once admitted he had a totem name for himself when he hunted. A sort of secret, tribal invention. He would never tell her what it was. She understands that be was right not to speak it aloud. She doubts as well his secret name was Murray.
Dawn says she'll call a garage, but Mary Ellen tells her, "I'll take you home." She doesn't want to expose Dawn to lewd and barrel-shaped mechanics. The girl's arms are so spindly. Besides, it is snowing again and Frank will worry if she's late.

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