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Authors: Carol Anshaw

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BOOK: Carry the One
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“Everything that could have gone wrong, did,” he said.

Fortunately, their courage had seen them through the grim weeks when the granite for the counters was held up in Forti dei Marmi, the wood for the cabinets stuck in some port difficulties in Africa. Then the bread drawer arrived two inches too short to accommodate the particular baguette Abby gets in Wicker Park (at a small bakery that had no sign; you just had to know where it was). Then the carpenters disappeared completely on an unscheduled Florida vacation. But now, finally, the dust had settled and the drawer was remade and the unbearable standard chrome knobs were replaced with nickel.

Now that all was said and done, though, they were pleased, Abby told them, trying to bring the subject to a close. But there was no stopping Jeff. Abby eventually gave up, like a sufferer of Stockholm syndrome, in thrall to her captor. Jeff moved on to the artisans who were able to find time for Abby and Jeff in their busy schedules. These were specialists who were booked solid; no one could get them. Abby and Jeff got them, though. Jeff subscribed to a merit-badge view of life. His sash was filling up.

Carmen felt shackled to the evening. (
Back on the chain gang!
Chrissie Hynde sang in her head.) They hadn’t even gotten to dessert. She had noticed a built-in espresso maker so there would surely be an elaborate cappuccino ceremony. As it turned out there was also a dessert ceremony. A soufflé was slowly on its way. Carmen had been tired coming into this social evening. She was phone banking for John Kerry in a ghostly town in western Michigan. Buchanan. Spirits ran high there. They already had their Kerry re-election voter list. She told
Jeff and Abby a little about the hard-working, small-town effort. The continuous transfusion of doughnuts and coffee, the separate room for the smoking volunteers.

“Too bad he listened to some image enhancer or whatever. Saluting off the prow of that boat,” Jeff said. “That was where he lost my vote.”

Until this moment, Carmen thought she didn’t personally know anyone who had voted for Bush. Not to mention voting for him for a second term. The table talk hit a vacuum, like the startling thwup made by a hurtling train as it enters a tunnel. Abby turned the conversation toward the two years they recently spent in Guatemala, which PVC piping was bringing into the modern age.

“It must’ve been something,” Carmen tried, “having all that voluptuous nature everywhere you turned.”

And of course it was. Also the fruit was magnificent. And the two of them took up snorkeling, which changed their lives. And on and on in such a lulling way that Carmen was snapped to by Jeff’s reference to a slowdown in pipe-laying on account of the lassitude of the “teeth-sucking natives.” She felt chilled by this piece of code. She understood that if she or Rob picked up on this complaint, they would fall into a soft conversational circle of shared assumptions. She felt like Eddie Murphy in the old sketch from
Saturday Night Live
where he disguises himself as a white man to see what happens when the last black person gets off the bus, and finds they start mixing martinis and fox trotting.

Carmen looked to Rob, but he sat silent as a monk. At first she flared a little with anger, then saw that he wasn’t being indifferent or cowardly, he was just totally tuned out. She could read him by now, the way he could sit and smile and nod, even inject little prompts into the conversation while he was in fact totally absorbed in his own thoughts. Sometimes she could even make a pretty good guess at what these thoughts were. In this particular moment she was almost certain he was thinking about a new promotion at MarcAntony—Revision—a section at the front of every salon where no appointment was necessary, only the impulse for immediate change.

Without backup, Carmen was on her own in the task of stopping Jeff in his tracks.

“What were you paying the workers?” she asked. “I’m just wondering if it might be easier to stop sucking your teeth and find your inner ambition if you’re being paid something that might get you out of the hole of your life.”

His expression lost its social composition as he saw the enemy approach.

“Right,” he said. Slowly, as though the word had a dozen syllables.

“Free, free, good God Almighty—free at last!” She clutched Rob’s arm to her side when they were out on the sidewalk, walking to the car through the pungent, wet-metal night air of autumn.

“Oh, he’s not so bad.” Rob avoided summary judgments. She usually counted this as one of his best qualities, but tonight it just made her feel totally alone. “I mean, I’ve heard worse. You hear everything in beauty shops. You learn to turn a deaf ear.”

Then, “Oh, I’m sorry.” His expression was so sincerely pained she had to laugh.

“Oh honey,” she said. “Oh honey.”

The night had been long and arduous. And pointless. She had not moved Jeff to think in a larger way about the world. She only pissed him off and put some final punctuation on an already run-on friendship. She was losing her belief in the possibility of changing people. It wasn’t so much that they were in opposition to her, or that they held their own beliefs so strongly. Rather, they appeared to have lost interest in belief itself, as though belief were tennis, or French film. And this was so discouraging Carmen had to put a lid over the abyss or risk falling in.

“Hey,” Rob said later, slipping under the covers next to her, trying to lift her spirits. “Tomorrow let’s have big sex when we wake up. Read the paper in bed. Make pancakes. Not answer the phone. Let the rest of the world get along without us.” He brushed her cheek with his
knuckles, then sat her up, got her out of her bra and into one of his T-shirts.

“Alice called. Before. You were in the shower. I forgot to tell you. You were supposed to call her back. About your mother. I’m a terrible secretary.” He turned out the light. “You should fire me.”

touch and go

Loretta was not going without a fight, or at least a small scuffle. In her living will, she had checked the box saying she wanted all those extreme and heroic measures everyone else forgoes. She did not, she made clear, want her plug pulled.

And so Alice used connections and did some research and was trying to give her mother a death that was state-of-the-art. She had her hooked up with the best oncology department in the city. She had three specialists, was on a protocol so experimental that so far it had only been tried on mice and Loretta. Something like that. In the hospital, she had a private room with mahogany furniture, indirect lighting, maroon drapes, a window seat striped like a rep tie, the window itself affording a view of the lake.

Bags of thick, transparent plastic hung above the bed, also dangled beneath it. There was an industrial cast to this, as though Loretta was part of some manufacturing process, filtering the plentiful clear and pastel fluids dripping from the bags above the bed into the meager, viscous yellow and dark-green liquids filling the bags below. While she was at work in this way, resisting the firm pull of death, her progress and regress were chronicled by the orange numbers on one small
black screen next to her bed, the blipping green line on another, accompanied by a thin, high-pitched beeping. Alice and Nick watched the numbers and the lines, listened to the beeps. They were waiting this out together.

When Loretta surfaced a little from the fog of drugs she began singing, softly but with jazzy, piano-bar inflections,
Do you know the muffin man?

This prompted Nick to his feet to inspect today’s IV bags, which were different from yesterday’s.

“Excellent upgrade. Self-regulated morphine drip,” he reported. Then tapped the control clutched in Loretta’s hand. “A person could get a little trigger-happy.”

“How’s she doing?” Alice asked when Dr. Pryzbicki came into the room, pulled Loretta’s folder out of the rack on the room door, then read the latest notes.

“It’s pretty much touch and go at this point,” the doctor said.

Dr. Pryzbicki then checked the bags and the orange readout and peered at the green line and listened with a stethoscope to their mother’s breathing. In conclusion, she wrote something impressively detailed on a fresh page, then by way of leaving, patted Loretta’s hand and told them all, “Just hang in there.”

She turned in the doorway to say to Alice, “Of course, if you have any other questions—”

Alice unfolded herself from one of the visitor armchairs, left behind the book she was reading, and followed the doctor out of the room. They didn’t talk the rest of the way down the hall to the small room where Dr. Pryzbicki—Diane—who was the resident on this floor on the overnight shift, slept when she got any free patch of time at all. They didn’t talk once they were inside the room, which was over-air-conditioned and contained only a single cot. So far they hadn’t used this. So far they’d only made out pressed hard against the door, which did not have a lock.

Technically Alice wasn’t even attracted to Dr. Pryzbicki, who was too young, also overweight but not in any interesting way, and whose doctor coat was cheap and shiny and pilled, its pockets stuffed with pens, note pads, the translucent yellow tubing of the stethoscope coiling out. If this were a fantasy, Dr. Pryzbicki would be a little older and more sophisticated, tall and lean and dark and brooding. But even just the fact of her being a doctor, specifically the doctor in charge of these long nights of Loretta’s death, eroticized her and impelled Alice to follow her to the little staff sleep room for these rushed necking sessions. She was disappointed to find out that Dr. Pryzbicki had a first name, although of course she would have to. Since that revelation, though, Alice had been trying to keep further confessions at bay. If she found out that Diane had a hobby or a vacation time-share, the fantasy would collapse in on itself.

“You are so hot,” Dr. Pryzbicki said, dragging her lips down Alice’s neck.

“Sometimes,” Alice said, “and even in my hot moments, the heat hasn’t always worked to my advantage. Sometimes it just jumps me a few squares into somewhere I really shouldn’t be.”

When Alice came back into Loretta’s room, Nick was reading an astronomy journal, but with his free hand covering one of Loretta’s.

“I got caught up in a discussion with the doctor. About success rates with this new infusion.” She was lying just for the fun of it. “I lost track of time.”

Nick waved off her excuse with a flippy hand. “You can lose track of it all you want. No problem. Time may just be a way we have of ordering events, a human construct. Some guys—some of the important guys—think everything may actually be happening simultaneously. We may have just put in time ourselves, so we don’t get confused.”

He had another subject he wanted to bring up for discussion. He had been throwing money at a couple of tough hookers, both named Mandy. Now he told Alice he had fallen in love with one of them.

“I’m just guessing,” Alice said. “It’s Mandy, isn’t it?”

He pulled a folded snapshot from his wallet and handed it to Alice.

“What do you think?”

“She wears an awful lot of makeup for someone in her underwear.”

Loretta’s illness had brought Alice and Nick into a closeness that, for once, didn’t have anything to do with his troubles. It was a free, floating sort of intimacy, as though they were sitting inside one of the rainy-day card table tents of their childhood. Once they started shuffling through shared memories, though, they found they had quite different versions. Tonight, Nick went into a long rhapsody about his days on a little league team called the Boilermakers, playing shortstop in games to which Horace never came. Apparently it was Carmen who helped him, tossing sock balls to teach him to catch without fear.

Alice was surprised at being unable to retrieve this memory. Back in those days, she kept a close watch on her siblings, the three of them partners in a buddy system critical to getting them through Horace’s despotic reign. Loretta’s part in this only required her to sacrifice her children to her marriage.

What Alice and Nick and Carmen held on to from the long days before they were allowed to leave their bad childhoods was different for each of them. Alice’s own indelible moment didn’t even belong to her. It was watching Horace cuff Nick, who was maybe seven or eight, on the side of the head, hard but under the guise of genial roughhousing.

“That’s for nothing,” he said. “Wait until you see what happens when you actually do something.” The smooth way he said this made Alice sure he had heard the line somewhere, and was trying out the joke at home, for a little extra fun. Like when he would suggest to one or the other of them, “Why don’t you go outside and play in traffic?”

The cuffing moment still came to mind from time to time. A few weeks ago she read a terrible news item about hunting resorts stocked with bears drugged to make them slower, goofier, easier to shoot. And
the story, of course, made her think about the bears, but it also made her think about that capricious whack, and the moment immediately following when Nick stood cupping his reddening ear with one hand, his fear stained with confusion. He didn’t get it yet, that he had already been designated by Horace as the family fuckup. She could also see clearly the next moment in which Loretta looked up vaguely from the fat paperback she’d been reading to say, “You listen to your father now. Next time there’s going to be real trouble.”

And now Horace was in the end stages of dementia. He lived in a nursing home on Fullerton. He confused the shows on TV with the commercials. He had moved beyond the reach of their hatred.

Their mother, they had forgiven more or less—Alice more, Nick a little less. Carmen not at all. Carmen thought there was a point to not forgiving. Alice was more romantic. Her belief system still included changes of heart, overdue apologies, dramatic reconciliations, resolved misunderstandings. For her, hanging around at the hospital was mostly waiting for her mother to come up with something last-minute and significant, something that would explain her distracted, casually irresponsible version of parenting and reveal a hidden devotion to her children, particularly to Alice. Carmen, of course, would never allow herself this sort of cheesy fantasy. She had given up on Loretta long ago, had absolutely no expectations of her anymore. If she came to visit, she would be doing this for Alice. She both envied and pitied Carmen—traveling always on firm, flat ground, breathing in the fresh, gusting air of reality. Power walking through life.

BOOK: Carry the One
8.97Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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