Beautiful Girls (4 page)

Libby walks the twenty blocks from Penn Station to her apartment just to feel the cold breath of air on her face. On the way, she stops in a Korean market and buys a beer and drinks it out of a paper bag. It’s late, but when she gets to her door she finds Hugh sitting on the stoop, holding a bag of laundry as if it is a small child. “Maybe you’d like this,” he says.

“You can’t give me someone else’s laundry,” she says, peering into the bag.

“It’s been in the lost and found for a year, man.” He looks at her kindly. “You could probably use some underwear, right?”

“Well, you’re sure this is nobody’s?” Maybe there are some towels inside. She needs a clean towel. Bingo. Inside are four towels, several aprons, knee socks, a large shapeless sweatshirt with many zippered pockets, and a daisy-printed muumuu.

And so this becomes her routine: in the mornings, Libby pulls on her soft and comfy horror clothes and puts Bilox’s coat over the colorful, shabby mess. Then she dashes to the office, sits at Imelda’s desk chewing a nail, waits for Marianne Switzer and her wire cart, runs the forms in to Bilox, then Gautreaux, then Sodder, adds her own initials in four minutes flat, phones Marianne Switzer for a pickup, dashes down the hall at the sound of the breakfast cart, shovels a doughnut into her mouth, tosses Miss
Perry a buttered sesame bagel, snatches Bilox’s coat from the east wing coat closet, runs for the elevators, thinks bad thoughts all the way to the lobby, flies through the double doors, takes the shuttle across town, hops on the 2 or 3 to Penn Station, scrambles for a ticket, steps onto the Jersey-bound train and falls into a wicked hot sleep.

Libby’s mother calls late one night from Chicago, where she’s married to a placid radiologist. “Tell me how I can help,” she says.

“Do you want to see Dad?”

“Well, no, not that,” she says. “I’ll come visit you!”

“But I’m never here.”

Today Libby’s cab sits in a traffic jam en route to the hospital. She pays the driver and gets out and walks, her feet crunching over autumn leaves. Directly across from the hospital is a mini-mall with a deli, a clothes shop and a laundromat. Above the stores are apartments with tiny curtained windows. I should move here, she thinks, digging her hands in Bilox’s pockets, which are filled with crumpled bills, sticks of gum, train tickets, ATM receipts.

Her dad’s pulled through the sepsis, and he’s looking good. In fact, as he becomes sicker he’s more alert and the color has returned to his cheeks. Maybe this is some kind of crazy antibiotic flush, a crazy
antibiotic buzz.

A boisterous nurse with a smock that pulls across her stomach announces it’s time for cognitive tests. “Mr. Meyers, who’s the president of the United States?” she asks, checking his intravenous bags. As his body grows waterlogged and inert, they need to check and see that he’s still home.

Her dad makes little effort to hide his irritation, but he is more of a charmer than a crab, even in sickness, and finally he smiles wearily. “George Washington,” he mouths.

“All right, wise guy,” she says. “Let’s try movies and entertainment for $500.”

He scribbles on his pad, “Frankly my dear I don’t give a flying,” and then for modesty’s sake he’s drawn a line.

“Oh!” she hollers. “Mr. Meyers is getting fresh.” He offers a half-smile and a silent laugh. He’s always been handsome and easy in a reluctant way. Sometimes while he sleeps, the nurses will confide to Libby, “I like your father.”

Now as they joke, Libby sees he’s already folding in on himself. “Are you in pain?” she whispers. For a moment he’s quiet, then shakes his head. He can’t name it. They don’t have a language for any of this. Libby pats his hand, and his fingers wriggle against the sheet as if movement might carry him somewhere else.

As Libby walks down Eighth Avenue, shivering and drinking a beer out of a paper bag, she bumps into Hugh from the laundromat, who tells her he will personally do her laundry this time. Funny, she asks, but isn’t it his personal job to do all the incoming laundry? He tells her he will protect her garments as if her jeans and underwear are the Ten Commandments delivered by God to Moses. She considers letting him wash her horror clothes, but she doesn’t trust him. Instead she asks him if he wants to sleep with her. He arrives a bit later, shyly slurping on a chocolate drink, and she greets him at the door wearing the daisy-printed muumuu.

Her law school friends start taking her out for dinners when she arrives back at Penn Station late in the evenings. They eye her speckled clothes, the same mess of a wardrobe she wore through law school, and her headbanded friend Marcy suddenly offers to take her shopping at Loehmann’s. “Maybe it’s time we found your softer side,” she whispers. Libby, tired and drunk, says, “Maybe it’s time for one of my friends to do my frigging laundry.” But the laundromat can do it for her, Marcy insists. Libby just smiles. They have better jobs than hers, and they insist on tiramisu and picking up the checks. Hang in there, they say nicely.

Her horror friends bring over Chinese food late at night when she’s already under the covers in a bathing suit and knee socks, and they spread out all over the floor, eating lo mein with their fingers and discussing tracheotomies, incontinence and hemorrhaging. Sleep, they tell her, we’ll lock up when we leave.

Late one evening, Peter the cyclops calls. He’s heard about her dad and wants to know if there’s anything he can do.

Libby, though wound up and hungry, feels touched. “Come over and do my laundry for me one day.”

“No, really?”

“Really.”

He hedges and then suggests she take it to the laundromat, where they’ll wash, dry and even fold it. Imagine that. “One, two, three,” he says.

“I did that and they lost my freaking laundry,” she tells him. “It’s gone. Vanished!”

“Really?”

“What do you want, Peter?” He’s quiet, and it’s clear he has nothing to offer. But never mind him; what can she expect from a cyclops? Libby discovers deep in the recesses of her dresser drawer many wearable things—old tank tops and lacy bras with the tags still on. She’s running out of clothes again,
but there’s still something for the morning.

She stuffs her laundry into a backpack, all of it, including the bathing suits and the muumuu, and she takes it to the office, where she packs it up in one of Gautreaux’s Seagram’s boxes. She addresses the overnight packing slip to the hospital, calls the mailroom for a pickup, and ten minutes later a young man with a wire cart carries the box away.

There is some problem with the elevators. Flashing lights, a bleating noise. Misbuttoning Bilox’s coat, Libby weakly considers the stairs, but then she spots the handsome kid who looks like Neil Lubin, who didn’t take her to the prom, as he rolls his empty wire cart down the hall. “Is there another way out?” she asks.

“There’s always a way out,” he says slyly. “Freight elevator.”

“Show me,” Libby says, hanging onto his sleeve. She’s bone-tired and wants a helping hand. Without thinking, she hoists herself onto Imelda’s desk and lowers herself into his wire cart. “I have a freaking headache,” she explains. He is as kind as he is good-looking. He finds her an aspirin and gives her a paper towel to blow her nose and deposits her outside the service entrance at 44th and Lexington, where a light rain mists their heads.

The next day, the doctors make another attempt to wean her dad from the ventilator, but he struggles for breaths and his eyes dart wildly around the room. Libby stares anxiously at the monitor, which measures his vital signs, as if this will make his lungs work better. He starts mouthing words, and she stands there dumbly, trying to understand until finally she runs into the hall yelling, “He can’t do it! He can’t!”

Now, exhausted, he sleeps. Libby sits beside him, patting his hand. She wears a cocktail dress, argyle knee socks and the large, shapeless sweatshirt with many zippered pockets. On her dad’s nightstand she notices a trick-or-treat bag decorated with goblins and witches. There’s a note attached that reads, “Libby, provisions for the long haul. How you doing?” Inside are a combination of sweets and health foods and multivitamins. Libby’s eyes tear up, and she is overwhelmed with love for the girlfriends and finds herself wishing they were her friends, wishing her dad could have another chance with one of them if he wanted it.

A friendly nurse brings in the Seagram’s box and says, “Do you know what this is?” Before Libby can get out of the chair, the nurse tears off the cover of the box, and together they stare down at the dirty, faintly smelly laundry.

“Mine,” Libby says.

Libby grabs quarters from her purse and then
shifts through the trick-or-treat bag, stuffing one of her zippered pockets with a V-8 juice, another with homemade chocolate chip cookies and another with a bottle of multivitamins. The Seagram’s box is large and cumbersome, and she weaves unsteadily down the hall until she finds an abandoned wheelchair to place it on. Outside, she rolls the wheelchair across the street to the mini-mall and into the laundromat, past the long line of washers, all of which are in use. The attendant, an elderly man who jingles with coins, looks at her strangely and tells her to come back later. She leaves the Seagram’s box and wheels the chair back to the hospital.

Later, when she returns, the air has changed. The darkening sky is a swirl of winter grays, like an old bruise. The same attendant pushes a mop and tells her he’s closing in five minutes. She sits on the folding table, as if her unmovable presence will make him soften. The cocktail dress rides up her thighs, exposing the bare skin above her argyle socks. She touches the stubbly hairs.

The attendant sweeps lint into a pile and eyeballs her sitting on the folding table. “I can lock you in, if that’s what you want. Do you want me to lock you in?”

“All right.” You can never be locked in, only locked out, she reasons. “I’ll be very neat,” she tells him.

The man finishes sweeping and ties up several garbage bags, turning to her every so often to see if
she is still there. Libby tries to smile, but can’t quite pull one off. Her body feels leaden and she’s struck with the terrible feeling that maybe she, too, is dying. She pats her ears and then feels her neck for enlarged lymph nodes. Reaching into one of the zippered pockets, she pulls out the vitamins and dumps a couple on her tongue. She unzips another pocket and washes them down with a V-8, then unzips another pocket and nibbles on a cookie. She slides her hand under the sweatshirt and does a discreet mini breast exam.

As soon as the man leaves, she separates the whites and darks, gathers her quarters and gets three loads going. She stretches out on the folding table, looks over at the sloshing, soapy water and feels a kind of hope. Please God, she thinks. She doesn’t wish for anything in particular, just that things remain as they are a while longer; she simply needs to be suspended in the moment. Time, she believes, is a kind of hope.

The police escort her back to the nurses’ station, where the nurses gather around her. There’s whispering. The elderly laundry attendant confides, not quietly, that “she looked like a crazy to me.” Dumpy Downer impatiently eyes the small crowd and moves toward Libby, touching her elbow.

“I need to speak with you and your father,” he says.

“What about my laundry?” Libby asks, looking at the cops, then the nurses and then the mean-spirited
laundry attendant. Everyone talks at once, and the cop’s radio sputters at noisy intervals. “We know her. It’s fine,” the friendly nurse says. “There’s no need to make a fuss,” the boisterous nurse says. Dumpy Downer is now yanking on her arm. Finally, the cops and nurses wind up flirting with each other as Libby is pulled into her dad’s room, and the door is closed behind them.

The bottom line, begins Dumpy Downer, is that her dad can’t live without a ventilator. His lungs can’t do it. They’ve made every effort. Sad to say, but there’s no justification for keeping him in the CCU. He’ll have to go upstairs to the ventilator wing. The doctor frowns. He’s been through so much. There is another option. They can put him on a morphine drip, make him as comfortable as possible, turn off the ventilator and leave it in God’s hands. Libby reels, feeling static travel up her neck and gather in her head. She slumps into a chair. God, she thinks; what does He have to do with it, the slacker. Staring at Dumpy Downer’s round, freckled head, she can tell he’s not a believer. He believes in medicine, and medicine’s failed here. Well, off to the ventilator wing.

“Let’s turn off this goddamn thing,” her dad writes on his pad. He’s sitting up, a picture of health. You flip the switch on invalids; her dad looks as if he could be going to the grocery store. Really, if anyone were to ask, she would have thought that a dying person
would be half-gone, unrecognizable, yet her dad is here, terribly present, cocking his head to the side when he hears something dumb. When a vein quivers beneath his eye, he reaches up to touch it.

“Think good and hard,” the doctor says, with a finger raised for emphasis. “Good luck, sir.”

The doctor shuts the door behind him, and Libby and her dad are left staring at each other. “What an asshole,” her dad mouths. She sobs, lowering her head to the bed, and she feels his fingers dance across her hair, light and graceful as Fred Astaire. They are quiet for some time. Finally, she closes her eyes and almost reaches sleep, but at the last second she rushes back from it and lifts her head.

He’s laughing without sound. On his pad he’s written, “Would you want to go to ventilator wing? What kind of characters are up there?” He’s drawn a picture of a skinny little figure covered in a cobweb. She shakes her head. Why make decisions? She wants to hang out. She’s got this crazy routine down.

But then he does the unthinkable. He reaches for her hand, tells her how much he loves her, how everything will be okay. He’s reaching for movement, to move beyond this moment; his decision’s been made. How dare this hospital rush them, how dare they. She simply isn’t ready. She heads for the door, throws it open and yells into the quiet, pale hallway, “DO NOT RUSH US!”

The nurses’ station is unoccupied, but on a wheelchair by the door is the Seagram’s box filled with clean, folded laundry. She touches it, and it’s still warm.