Grab Bag (23 page)

Her family reacted much as she’d expected. Jim grinned and rumpled the hairdo she’d fussed over. “Hi, Gorgeous. When do we eat?” Peggy demanded, “Is it a party, Mummy? Why, Mummy?” The twins yelled, “Who gets the presents?”

It was Mike who knocked over his goblet. Jim got most of the milk in his lap. “Why did you give it to him?” he roared, sopping frantically with his napkin.

“I’ll get a sponge.” Betsy jumped up, caught a spike heel in her too-long skirt, and went sprawling.

Jim was beside her, his big hands under her shoulders. “Can’t you watch where you’re going? Come on, kid.”

“Jim, don’t!” She hadn’t meant to scream. “My leg.”

“Let’s see.” He clawed away at the slippery velvet, cursing its endless folds. The angle of the bones sickened him. “Oh my God!”

He ran for the telephone. The children were all around her, trying to help by crying and patting her face with sticky fingers and offering to kiss it and make it better. Then Jim was back, shooing them off. “They say don’t try to move. The ambulance is on its way. It’s okay, kids, Mum’s going to be fine. Oh Christ, who’s going to stay with them?”

“Get Martine.” She was talking from inside a tunnel. “Call Martine.”

“That’s it. Martine will know what to do.”

From then on it was all bits and pieces: Jim’s hand holding hers too tight, voices saying things like dislocation and compound fracture, then a needle in her arm, then nothing. When she woke up, she was in traction.

“They’ll have to get me out of this. I have to get home to the kids.”

She must have said it aloud. Somebody said, “Relax and enjoy it, honey. You won’t be going anywhere for a while.” Red hair and a red satin bathrobe with
I’m the Greatest
embroidered in white on it. Kind hands, raising her head, holding a glass with a straw in it. Something cool and wet going down her throat. Then more sleep, then a terrible business with a bedpan that started the hip and leg throbbing, then it was night and Jim was with her. She held his hand against her cheek and drifted into a pleasant nothingness where the pain was something happening a long way off. She could hear Jim talking. Sometimes it made sense.

“Martine was teaching the kids to finger paint. Peg did a mural for the playroom.”

“That’s nice.” She supposed it was her own voice answering. “Did you eat?”

“Oh sure. Martine had a real gourmet meal waiting when I got home.” After a while, he kissed her and left.

The next day Betsy was less groggy, which meant she felt the pain more. She was in a room with three other women. She hadn’t quite grasped that fact before. One was very old and groaned a lot. One had a tube up her nose and lay watching the little television set over her bed. The redhead in the red satin bathrobe prowled around wearing a pair of white gym socks for slippers. She had friends all up and down the corridor. When they took their shuffling walks, they’d stick their heads into the room looking for her. “Hi,” they’d say to Betsy when they saw her eyes open. “How’s it going?”

It was a comfort having people around. Even the old lady who groaned was nice, the redhead said. It was just the medication that made her like that. The redhead herself was feeling great and didn’t see why they wouldn’t let her out. Those goddamn doctors thought they knew everything. Betsy said she hoped they did. The redhead laughed.

“Hey, you’re going to be fine. How about if I get you some juice?”

That night, Jim brought her ice cream. She ate a little, but the plastic spoon was too heavy to keep lifting. “Here, you finish it.”

“Thanks, I couldn’t. Martine put on a Spanish meal. We had gazpacho.”

“What’s that?”

“Cold soup with a lot of stuff floating around in it.”

“Did the twins eat any?”

“Sure, they thought it was great.”

“What else did you have?”

“Don’t ask me. Some kind of chicken and rice thing. She served Spanish wine with it. Only half a bottle,” he added rather embarrassedly. “She used those glasses Aunt Florrie gave us. She says it’s a shame not to enjoy them.”

“You yelled at me when I did that.” Betsy just barely kept herself from saying it. Did Martine always have to make such a howling success of what she herself fell flat on her face trying to do? Jim misunderstood her silence, of course.

“Don’t worry, she’ll take good care of them. She’s got the place shined up so you wouldn’t know it.” On the whole, his visit was less of a comfort than Betsy had expected it to be.

She’d just finished her lunch the following day when Martine blew in with a big box from the most expensive florist in town and a book on Guatemalan folk art. Martine stopped in the doorway and stared around the crowded four-bed ward, at the woman with the tube up her nose and her television blaring, at the old lady groaning in the corner, at the redhead’s white gym socks and
I’m the Greatest
bathrobe. Before Betsy had a chance to ask her, “Who’s staying with the kids?” she was gone. Maybe ten minutes later Martine was back leading a troop of doctors, nurses, attendants, technicians, and an orderly wheeling a gurney.

“It’s all fixed, Betsy,” she caroled.  “You’re moving.”

“To where?”

“A private room, of course. You can’t stay in this rat trap. Now don’t worry about the extra charges, darling. I know Jim’s insurance won’t cover them, but Big Sister’s will. I carry a special rider just for you. Just lie perfectly still. You’re going to be joggled around a bit, so they have to give you something for the pain first.”

That was that. When Betsy woke again, she was in a tastefully decorated room with a handsome floral arrangement on the dresser, a book on Guatemalan folk art ready to hand on the bedside table, and no ministering angel in a red satin bathrobe and white gym socks to offer her a drink of juice. And who was staying with the kids?

She was still groggy from the shot, she supposed. She’d missed supper, but they brought her soup and some whitish stuff in a little plastic bowl. She picked at it, then turned her head away and shut her eyes. Jim didn’t come. She wondered if he’d stopped by on his way home from the office and couldn’t find her in the new room. She asked the nurse who came to fix her up for the night. The nurse said she wouldn’t know; she wasn’t on duty then. Maybe Jim had stayed home to take care of the kids. Betsy took her medication like a good girl. There was nothing to stay awake for, not in this lonesome place.

The next day lasted forever. When she couldn’t endure lying there staring at her flower arrangement any longer, she got the attendant to turn on the television, and lay there watching soap operas, like the woman with the tube up her nose. They were all about people falling in love with people they weren’t supposed to be in love with.

Jim came at last. He said he was sorry to be late. Martine had rearranged the living room furniture, taken the children to the art museum, and served coquilles St. Jacques with an amusing little sauterne. Betsy said how nice.

After that, one day was as bad as another. Betsy lay there watching men make love to other men’s wives and women chase after other women’s husbands. They started getting her up for physical therapy. It hurt, so they gave her something for the pain. She asked the nurse what would happen if she took two of the little red pills together instead of one at a time. The nurse put on her professional smile and said. “Oh, you wouldn’t want to do that.”

She got cards and flowers, but not visitors. The aunts were too far away. The neighbors were either working or taking care of their kids. Martine didn’t come again, either. She must be too busy repapering the walls and feeding the whole child. The children couldn’t have come even if anybody had tried to bring them. Nobody under eight was allowed in the rooms. Betsy asked for a telephone so she could at least hear their voices, but the floor nurse said she couldn’t have one. Orders. The nurse didn’t say whose.

Jim came every night but he never stayed long. He always told her what Martine had served for dinner, but he never told her what they talked about over the candlelight and wine after Peggy and the twins had been tucked in their beds with visions of Guatemalan hand-weaving dancing in their heads. He was beginning to look drawn and anguished, like all the Joshuas and Jeremies in the soap operas who dreaded having to hurt the Jessicas and Jennifers they’d married on a boyish whim and had to stick with on account of the children.

How could it have happened? Martine was years older than Jim. She’d always gone for suave, sophisticated middle-aged types who held important positions and got divorced a lot. But the current fashion was for glamorous older women in important positions to form attachments with less glamorous younger men in relatively insignificant positions, some of whom had never been divorced at all. Betsy could see it happening every day, right there on the television screen.

Jim wouldn’t walk out on Peg and the twins. He’d hang around looking anguished and noble, Jim who seldom looked anything but glad or mad or quietly content except when he did his barnyard imitations for the kids to laugh at. He wouldn’t give up Martine, either. Martine wouldn’t let him. Sooner or later, Martine would decide it was best for all of them that Betsy give Jim a nice, quiet, uncontested divorce.

Then what? Jim didn’t earn enough to support two households. Even Martine wouldn’t be able to make him live on her money. Betsy would have to get some scroungy, ill-paid job as a clerk or waitress and try to scrimp by. What sort of life would that be for Peg and the twins? And who’d look after them while she was at work? Inevitably, they’d wind up with Jim and Martine.

Martine would broaden their horizons. She’d break Peg of needing to run in out of the sandbox for a quick cuddle now and then, sand and all. She’d send her to boarding school, turn her into a slick young sophisticate. At least Peg wouldn’t grow up listening to her great-aunts moaning, “What a shame she’s not more like Martine.”

Martines didn’t mess up their lives. They took what they wanted and hung on to it while the Betsys floundered around breaking their bones and wrecking their marriages. When the nurse brought her the little red pill, Betsy asked for two. The nurse said sorry, she couldn’t have two.

Her leg was progressing nicely. The therapist was proud of her. The doctor said she could go home Saturday. She told Jim that night and he said, “Great!” But he looked awfully anguished when he said it.

After that, when they brought her the little red pills, she pretended to swallow them and didn’t. When she couldn’t sleep, she lay there dredging up, one after another, all her memories of Martine acting for the best. Always Martine’s kind of best, never Betsy’s. Always having to knuckle under and be grateful. How she hated being grateful! Or was it Martine she hated?

How could she? Sisters didn’t hate sisters. Except in soap operas. Would those millions of viewers stand for so much sororal venom if at least some of them didn’t hate their sisters, too? By Saturday morning she had half a dozen red pills hidden inside her toothbrush holder. Six should be enough. Only she still hadn’t made up her mind who was going to take them.

As far as herself was concerned, there was no problem. If she had to give up Jim and the kids she’d have nothing left to live for, so why bother trying? But why must she give them up? Martine didn’t really love the kids, she’d barely glanced at Peggy’s potholder. She’d do her duty by them the same way she’d always done it by Betsy, snatching them away from the dirty old sandbox, packing them tidily inside an impeccably tasteful cage.

Nor did she love Jim, not the way Betsy did, not the Jim who let his whiskers grow on the weekends and took the kids wading in the swamp to see the bullfrogs. Once the trend to not-so-handsome younger men had spent itself, she’d stack him away on the shelf with the rest of the back numbers and find somebody who’d do more to enhance her corporate image. It was appalling to think of murdering one’s own flesh and blood, but if it was a matter of keeping Jim and the kids from being smothered in Guatemalan folk art, there was no choice Martine could make for her.

After Betsy was dressed and the nurse’s aide had left her to pack her few things, she wrapped the six red pills in a tissue and stuck them in the pocket of her blouse. She’d know what to do when the time came.

And the time was at hand. When Jim came to get her, he was so wired up she wanted to scream at him, “Go on, say it. Get it over.” But they were almost to the house before he pulled off the road.

“Betsy, before we get home, there’s something I have to tell you.”

When she spoke, the voice didn’t sound like hers. “It’s about Martine.”

Jim took a deep, deep breath. “Betsy, I know how close you are to your sister. I fought it, Betsy. You’ve got to believe me.”

She could only wait.

“But goddamn it to hell, Betsy, I couldn’t stand her! Japanese flower arrangements in my fishing creel. The kids whining for peanut butter and getting gazpacho. When I got home that third night and she threw it in my face how she’d gone to the hospital and got you switched to a private room because she could take proper care of her baby sister even if I couldn’t support my wife, I went straight off the deep end. I told her it was her own goddamn fault you got hurt in the first place, her and her goddamn crap about gracious living. I told her to butt out and let us run our own lives. I told her to take her goddamn gazpacho and … all right, get sore. But honest to God, Betsy, if I’d had her around for one more day, I actually think I’d have killed her.”

His arms were trembling as he pulled her against him. “The doctor said you needed absolute rest and no worries, so what could I do? I had to keep telling everybody you weren’t allowed phone calls or visitors so they wouldn’t spill the beans and get you all upset. But oh God, it’s been tough! If you only knew the strain I’ve been under.”

She got one hand free after a while and ran it over his face, making sure he was really there. “Jim, it’s okay. Believe me it is. But who kept the kids?”

“I did, mostly. I called the office and told them I was on vacation as of then. We’ve been giving the hamburger stand a lot of business.”

Incredibly, she could still laugh. “No candlelight dinners?”