Typical American (14 page)

Callie oohed and ahhed. Mona drooled. "And when will you be grade four?"

"Soon, soon. Though of course grade three is okay too."

"Very fine, are you kidding?" said Helen proudly.

Tenure, tenure, tenure. If Ralph gets tenure, this, they said. If Ralph gets tenure, that.

"Of course, it is possible I won't get it," Ralph said one morning.

Helen swept this dust ball away. "But won't you?"

Theresa did not comment.

"Don't you think?" Helen was sure. "If nothing else, Old Chao—"

"Is that what his wife says?" asked Ralph.

Helen picked an eyelash off Mona's cheek.

"It's not up to Old Chao," he went on. "Plus, I don't want to get it because of him. I want to get it by myself, the honest way."

As, honestly, he thought he would. Not because he was so

brilliant, but the government had just announced plans to send a satellite spinning around the earth, and most of his department seemed to be planning on being launched with it. Wasn't the school still going to need someone in Mechanical Engineering, though?

"Hmmm," said Theresa.

"Are they crazy?" said Helen. "How can they make such a big machine stay in the air forever? Even airplanes have to come back down to refuel."

Ralph drew pictures. Fields, he explained, forces. Curves, velocities, orbits.

Helen was impressed.

"Yes, theoretically, they can do it But it's not easy. Of course, Old Chao is going to work on the space program anyway. You know Old Chao. He doesn't ask questions. Everyone says the space program is great, he goes to work on the space program. But you know what I think? I think the world will always need mechanical engineers. The world will always need machines, right? Factories? Gears make everything turn."

"Very true."

"You think I'm afraid to start over in a new field? I'm not. But I'm a mechanical engineer. That's what I am, that's all." He banged the table hard, as if he were arguing with somebody. "Let everybody else go up in the air. That's what I am! That's what I am!"

Theresa worked through her last admission. She had already done seven earlier in the day; she would not finish for another hour. There had been two car accidents. In one, a motorcyclist had broken his spine. In the other, a teenager had come in with no heartbeat. Her belly had been opened to locate the bleeding, and her chest too, for open heart massage. Theresa did an arterial stick, as the resident crunched through the patient's breastbone with a bone cutter. The room stank; a medical student fainted. The resident, swearing, began to work the heart — a gruesome

sight. Theresa looked away, noticing that though the girl's jewelry, like her clothes, had been removed, her nail polish remained. This was a summery, watermelon pink, just the sort of color that a carefree young lady with her life in front of her might pick. Theresa shuddered.

And yet what was hardest about training was not such horrors. It was not the hours. It was not the responsibility, or the pain, or the patients, or the politics, or the masses of information tumbling and reeling in her head like cars on a circus ride. It was not the mnemonic devices, as hard to recall as the facts. ("The Argyll-Robertson pupil accommodated but did not react." What was the joke, though? Something about a prostitute.) It was not the fatigue. Or not exactly. What was hardest about training, for Theresa, was having to sleep in that dank, little room the interns all shared, with men. "If there were more women..." someone had explained, with a shrug. Now, as weary, she headed that way — finally, finally done — she thought about how soundly the men slept. She thought about how the men snored and tossed. They cried out. They moaned. They farted. They scratched themselves, and worse. Even the still ones, who slumbered soulfully, who curled up neatly, even they disturbed her; she could feel their radiant presence, against which she had to stand guard. Maybe they bothered her most, the sweet ones. So peaceful, but what dreams they might stir up in her if she slept, all throbbing, and sliding. A spinster's hot heaves; how pointed her needs were, it was impossible to sleep. It was impossible to think about people witnessing her sleep. What if she moaned, and cried out, and scratched herself, or worse?

And so it was that when Old Chao phoned, Theresa was lightheaded with fatigue. Taken aback, she not only dropped the receiver but admitted to him that she had — a small intimacy. Who would have predicted the larger ones to follow?

"So clumsy," she said. "1 don't know what's the matter with me."

He laughed. The conversation could have loomed, a mountain range of awkwardnesses. Instead, it rolled. Anyone would have thought they spoke on the phone all the time. "And I don't know what's the matter with me either" he said. "Do you know, I managed to leave my briefcase in the examining room. Under that chair" They agreed on a time for him to come pick it up.

But she could not find the briefcase. The next day, she called and left a message at the department.

"What message?" Old Chao adjusted his belt in the hospital hallway.

"Anyway, since you're here, we can have another look around for it."

The examining room was occupied. They waited in adjoining chairs, chatting. The weather. His various ailments. And, at one point, "Why isn't your Little Brother attending the conference next month?"

"What conference?"

"The space conference. Everyone else in the department is going."

The door opened. No briefcase, and no one they asked had seen it. The lost-and-found was closed for the day.

"We should have tried there first" Theresa lamented.

"It seems I'll have to return tomorrow," said Old Chao.

She was surprised, Theresa told Ralph, that he didn't go to more conferences. She herself was rather looking forward to going to conferences, she said. She wondered, Did schools pay for engineers to go to conferences the way hospitals sometimes paid for doctors?

"They do," said Ralph shortly. "In fact there's a space conference coming up that Old Chao wants me to attend. But I'd rather finish this paper I'm working on."

"He has a paper to write," Theresa reported to Old Chao. "He thinks his time would be better spent on that."

They went together to the lost-and-found. There it was! Old Chao's briefcase. Old Chao rifled through the manila folders.

"Nothing missing?"

"Nothing!"

To celebrate, he treated her to a Spam sandwich in the cafeteria.

Was Ralph right or wrong? Was he headed for disaster? Theresa couldn't decide. All she knew was that, crossed with shadow, their family life took on a poignancy sharper than she could stand.

"Brew." Mona was blithely pointing at a red turtle.

"Red," said Callie. "Red."

"Brew." Mona gnawed on her knee.

"Mona, it's red. Red!"

"Brew."

As if she could tell from her sister's tone that there would be no setting her right, Callie diplomatically went on to the next page, a green horse.

"Brew," said Mona.

"Green."

"Brew."

"Green, Mona, green!"

Mona looked bored. Callie turned the page impatiendy; Helen had to yell to be careful with the book. But then the girls settled into a sweet disharmony that brought tears to Theresa's eyes.

"Purple," said Callie.

"Brew."

As if her sister had agreed with her, Callie simply turned the page. "Yellow.'

:iiuw," "Brew.

Ralph made up stories for them. One about an ant climbing a tree. Another about a monk hiking a mountain. Up, up, up, he said. Higher and higher.

And every time he told a story, as if to counterbalance the motion, Theresa's heart sank.

What should she do? Theresa analyzed the relative merits of action versus inaction until her choice seemed not so much between paths, as between going blindly left or right in a featureless wood. How tired she was! The problem began to expand to levels at once more profound and absurd. How had they come to this crisis? What use was reason to her now? Why try to alter fate?

It was a release to be paged for a phone call.

"I've forgotten my briefcase in the cafeteria," said Old Chao.

"Not really!"

"I don't know what to think." Old Chao's voice was strangely rough, perplexity cut with cheer. "I can't seem to keep hold of it."

"I'm just sorry I won't be making a real salary sooner. Then you could buy a place right away."

"Oh, that's okay."

There had been a time, Theresa remembered, when Helen had held the paper gingerly, to avoid getting her hands full of newsprint. Now she grasped the pages with enthusiasm, her fingers so black they left their prints in the margins.

'Two bedroom cape with add-on potential. Nu to market, builder's special. Contemporary ranch with extras galore." She looked up. "Today Janis took me to this house with a winding walkway. Really darling! However, it was very overpriced, they're going to have trouble selling it for anything near what they're asking. And yesterday I saw a breakfast nook with built-in benches —"

"Be careful you don't fall in love," laughed Theresa, wagging her finger.

Helen laughed back.

Six weeks later, though, Theresa came home from yet another lunch with Old Chao (her fourth) only to find Helen aglow with dismay.

"Oh! You'd have to see it. It's beautiful, perfect, brand-new, and you wouldn't believe how affordable. Janis says no one in her office has ever seen such a good deal, ever. It's on an odd lot, which makes it a little cheaper to begin with, plus the builder wants to sell quick. The only reason he has it is because the original buyer's mortgage didn't go through, and he's got a shopping center going so he needs cash." Three bedrooms, one and a half baths, a walk-out basement. "And so many extras/" A nook off the kitchen. A brick planter. A big backyard. "Plus the location's perfect, on a dead-end block, very quiet, with all young families." Helen stopped. "We'd fit right in. And good schools."

"This one's the one."

Helen's eyes misted over. "Of course, there'll be other houses.

But not like this one, not at this price. We'll never be able to afford one like this. I guess I really didn't expect to find anything."

"No one knows what she's going to find." Theresa sighed heavily as she unbuttoned her coat.

Once, while Theresa was taking his history, a glittery-eyed patient grabbed her waist and put his mouth to her ear — or so she gathered later. What she remembered better was her scream, the scream of someone she didn't know and didn't trust, a screech so bloodcurdling that even the emergency room, whose very livelihood was disaster, stopped dead still. As the chief resident joked later, it was as if Theresa were Vesuvius, and the rest of the staff, Pompeii. "Never knew you to be such a show-stopper," he quipped. And, "You sure do know how to get a man's attention."

What she would have done then to get him to leave her alone! He didn't seem to realize how shamed she felt. How exposed. Everyone saw me, she kept thinking. Everyone saw me, everyone heard me. Yet he continued, with just that sort of relentless bantering she seemed to attract from men who were married; until finally, happily, it did begin to seem almost all right, what had happened. This was months later. In the end she'd felt grateful for his help, that was true, for the help of all married men. What was the harm of their flirting?

Or so she'd thought. Was Old Chao in love with her? And was she in love with him? It seemed to her that great harm could indeed come of their flirting. If to sit and talk was flirting — if, indeed, it was anything at all. She should talk the situation over with Helen, she thought; but then said nothing. And what about Old Chao? Had he said anything to Janis? She plucked up the nerve to ask him. He answered, quietly, no. Conspirators, they were then. She would not have guessed him a conspiring type. But then she would not have guessed many things about him. That he loved to watch ice skaters, for example, and surfers on

TV, and that he could skip stones — one of his students had taught him how on a field trip. So much he knew about water, about its freezing, its surface tension, its turbulence and flow; he once explained to her about eddies, and how they broke away in certain alternating patterns as they drifted downstream. Yet he could forget his learning too, baldly enjoying the phenomena produced. She had realized this slowly. She had admired it, deeply.

Was this "getting to know someone"? How litde she'd understood the joy of it! Here she could envision a man's skeleton, his musculature; she could describe the workings of his lymph nodes. But what he remembered, valued, feared — all this was news. Listening, she revelled. His mind was nothing like hers; she tried to understand in which ideas his maleness lay. She spoke too, and was heard; she spoke more, surprising herself with what she said. What more could anyone ask? Their talk was enough for her, more than she'd dreamed of. She did not consider passion. Passion! Guilt kept its cold grip on that pleasure.

"If only I could do something!" Theresa lamented, trying to console Helen. "Do you want me to go see it?"

That would only make things worse.

"Maybe there's some other way?"

Helen shook her head, practicing acceptance. She was pretending she was ill. There was nothing to do but rest. "Don't ask me how I could get so silly over a house, anyway" she said. "A house! What is it? Four walls and a roof"

Three days later, Theresa found Helen jumping up and down. "A special kind of loan," Theresa told Old Chao, glumly. "A new program to encourage people to move to the suburbs." She explained how they only had to put ten percent down. The monthly payments, however, were quite high. "For our income, they figured out how much I'll make, added that to how much Ralph will make once he gets tenure."

Old Chao was surprised the bank would agree. "Don't they realize — f"

"Janis arranged it."

Old Chao played with his fork. "My wife, you know, will do anything for anybody. Everyone has to like her. Everyone has to like me." He set the fork on its tines. Their booth was so close to the kitchen that their napkins leapt and settled to the bursting rhythm of the swinging doors, which did not so much swing as boom. "So what are you going to do?"