THOREAU’S LAUNDRY by Ann Harleman
The morning’s first client – she never called them patients – appeared on the list as Junius Johns. This was followed by the usual basics: M/8/left ear/AA; sex/age/presenting problem/origin (auto accident). In the margin a penciled notation from Edwin, her receptionist, read: “Mad Mom + Relatives.”
Celia put her elbows on the desk and let her forehead sink onto her palms. She was tired. Not just tired – weary. Simon’s catheter had gone AWOL at one in the morning, and they’d spent the rest of the night in the ER. (How many nights did that make, now? How many hours?) Noise and cold and too-bright lights and too-bright student doctors. Repeating her husband’s history, over and over, to a succession of twelve-year-olds in lab coats and stethoscopes. Her husband in pain, and nothing in the world she could do about it. By the time Dr. Mikhailov entered the cubicle and took Simon’s hand between both of his, the sun was up. A cautious November sun that barely reddened the sky above the parking lot, where the cold fell like a blessing on Celia’s hospital-hot face and winter birds measured out thready morning sounds in the trees overhead. She called Leslie on her cell phone and asked her to meet Simon’s ambulance at the house when they’d finished with him (“No prob!” That was Leslie, best friend ever, and Celia’s cousin to boot. “I’ll call you and let you know he’s okay, okay?”). Then she drove straight to the office, where wonderful Edwin had a cappuccino and croissant waiting.
Celia brushed the silky crumbs off her desk and opened the drawer where she kept an assortment of puppets, for child clients. Though usually the adults needed the distraction more. To Celia’s continuing surprise, people found what she did for a living grisly. Maxillofacial Prosthetist: that was the official name, the phrase her accountant put at the top of each page of her income tax return. She made eyes and ears and noses – and any other parts of a face that might be needed – for people who were missing them. People whom cancer or fire or gunshot had ravaged. People whom the plastic surgeons had given up on.
She took out the first puppet she touched and pulled it on over her left hand, wriggling her thumb and little finger into the arms, comforted by the feel of velvet. An ancient, bearded little man in a midnight-blue gown scattered with gold stars, and a pointed magician’s cap. When she crooked her index finger, he nodded. She buzzed Edwin, two shorts: Ready.
The door opened. A gaggle of female voices. Then a wheelchair appeared – really a sort of wheeled chaise longue, containing a small black boy with both legs outstretched – flanked by three large women in flowing flowered smocks, all talking at once.
“ – you know he never – ”
“I’m just sayin’ – ”
“ – that’s what anybody gotta – ”
Behind this procession Edwin hovered, rolling his eyes. Celia put up her hands and shouted, “Stop!”
Instant silence, followed, inexplicably, by giggles. The largest of the three women, standing beside the wheelchair in a magenta silk dress, put a hand across her mouth.
“You must be Junius,” Celia said to the boy. “I’m Celia.”
The boy’s eyes, large and liquid, met hers for a heartbeat, then shifted to the puppet. His left leg wore a cast from hip to ankle; the right was bare, except for a layer of what looked like raw chopped meat spread all along his thigh. The harvest site for a skin graft, Celia knew. The surgeon who’d referred Junius believed in old-fashioned gauze dressings soaked in iodoform.
“He don’t talk hardly at all, Doctor,” the woman in magenta said. “Since the accident.”
“I’m not a doc – ”
“Barely a peep!” cried one of the other women, and the third chimed in, “Lord knows.”
Edwin brought two more chairs from the outer office, and the women sat down in a flurry of silk, magenta beside the wheelchair, Carnation and Tiger Lily behind it. Edwin cocked his head, and his eyebrows (so black and perfect that she’d always wondered if he penciled them) rose. This was as far as he went with worrying about her, which was why she’d looked for a male secretary in the first place. There were too many concerned females in her life already. Celia mouthed Thanks, and he left, closing the door behind him.
Celia turned to Magenta. “Mrs. Johns? I understand you’re – ”
The woman leaned forward. “The hospital made us come here,” she said, spitting the words. Edwin had been right, as usual: this woman was mad. “The insurance made us. No more surgery – that’s what they say. My boy don’t show promise. He ain’t a candidate.”
“Whatever that means,” Carnation said, and Tiger Lily added, “Yeah!”
Celia sighed. This Greek chorus thing was going to get old fast. The length of Junius’s wheelchair put the whole group at a slightly theatrical distance from her desk. Junius himself sat chewing gum with downcast eyes. When his jaw moved, the hole where his left ear should have been pulsed faintly. She was always surprised at how small the aural opening actually was.
She rose and went around the desk and crouched down next to him, on his left side. He didn’t look up. She raised the puppet in front of his face and bent her thumb to make it bow. “I’m Merlin!” she said, in a deep, plummy voice. “I make magic.”
The boy’s mouth twitched. He raised his head, but he didn’t look at Celia, only at the puppet.
“Can’t see what good playin’ dolls gonna do. Or false ears, either. The Lord alone can help my boy now.”
“Lord help him!”
“Yeah-ll, Lord!”
Celia turned her head and shot the three women a look – what Simon called her Dark-Blue Look, useful in ER waiting rooms. There was a subsiding rustle of silk around three sets of very large knees. Then silence.
Inches now from Junius’s head, she had a good view. Stumpy petals of flesh ringed the aural opening, where the lobe and helix had been sheared away; only the tragus remained. A webbing of scar tissue made the skin look like hammered bronze. It wasn’t ugly; it just didn’t look like an ear. She saw exactly where Dr. Prout would implant the gold-and-titanium abutments onto which her silicone ear would snap. (She wouldn’t mention that now; better to leave breaking the news about more surgery to the surgeon.) Junius had stopped chewing gum, and she could feel him trembling. His hand gripped her wrist.
“Ho!” she said, in Merlin’s voice. “You look like a fine, strong lad. A good candidate for magic.”
She felt the boy stiffen.
“We don’t believe in magic,” he said.
“Now, Junius,” his mother said.
Celia looked up. The woman smiled, not apologetically but as if to say, You’ll never understand, so don’t even try. A feeling Celia knew well.
“We believe in Jesus,” Junius said, without turning his head.
Celia rose and went around to the boy’s right to look at his good ear. The one she would make for him had to match this one, imperfections and all. She noted the wrinkle where the lobe attached; the too-sharply folded helix that gave the top a Spocklike point. Black skin was harder to match than white: she’d start with umber and burnt sienna, maybe add a little monastral red.
She felt the boy’s breath, with its smell of spearmint, graze her cheek. She thought, This at least is something I can do.
* * *
The evening air was full of unshed rain. In the thickening darkness a sea-smelling wind stirred the few leaves left on the trees. Homeward, she drove more slowly than she needed to. Headlights loomed suddenly behind her, slewed sideways, shot past, loomed again.
Simon would be waiting for her in the ground-floor sunporch-turned-sickroom. Would this be a Good Night, or a Bad?
Low, womanly hills replaced the clustered lights of the city. Celia turned the heat up. At the junction where 101 split off from Route 6 she looked for the turkey that lived on the triangle of grass there, in the glow of the floodlighted sign announcing the Township of Jerimoth. For the last few years there’d been an overabundance of turkeys in rural areas. That was Rhode Island for you. In Maine, it was deer. A plague of deer sounded, if not Biblical, at least dignified; but a plague of turkeys? She peered through the smoky blue twilight. If it paces past, Simon won’t be mean. If it turns its head toward me, he will.
Multiple sclerosis had made their marriage a ménage à trois. It was as simple, as complicated, as that.
* * *
“You have lucky eyes and a high heart.”
The first thing Simon ever said to her, that June night eighteen years ago. (My Shakespeare professor, her cousin Leslie had said, dragging Celia the length of the lantern-lit veranda, their long taffeta skirts rustling. He’s totally gorgeous, you’ve got to meet him.) Behind them the orchestra began tuning up, quick interrogative sounds.
“Dance with me. Every dance. With me.”
Impossibly romantic; but then, they’d been impossibly romantic. Impossibly young (her). Impossibly married (him). So impossible that they had to happen.
* * *
Her key stuttered in the lock, reluctance made physical. There was the breath-held moment – every night, now – What will I find? (Husband on the floor, blood pooling under his temple; husband sprawled headfirst down the steps to the basement; husband slumped in his wheelchair, raising a book upside down in his good hand to shelter tears of fury.) She forced the key all the way in, pushed open the heavy oak door.
“Seal? That . . . you?”
His words were halting but clear, his voice strong enough to carry across the living room. He was better, then? Celia’s breath escaped through dry lips. She bent to pick up the mail from the floor below the mail slot. Electric bill, gas bill, various catalogues, a flyer from the MS Society’s Well Spouse Group.
Simon looked up as she paused in the archway between the living room and the sunporch. For an instant his face wore the expression she remembered from years ago, from all those meetings after long absence, in those first years before they’d been able to marry – I’m so glad to see you.
The tip of his tongue touched his mustache, then retreated. “How was . . . your day?”
His eyes crinkled at the corners with the old wryness. Simon’s sense of the absurd was the thing, besides sex, that had made her fall for him in the (impossible) first place.
Relief brought the itch of tears to her throat. She swallowed. “Fine. How was yours? What’s new?”
“New York. New . . . Jersey.”
“New . . . Mexico,” they said, in unison.
Eighteen years together, eight of them healthy: Professor Simon Eisenstein had taught her a few things. Some Yiddish words, how to make risotto, quite a few lines from Shakespeare, a way of joking that kept you from falling off the edge of the world. Celia kissed him lightly on the mustache, threw her parka over a chair, handed him the remote. The sound of the Weather Channel followed her into the kitchen.
A Good Night, then. In a way, the Bad Nights were easier. The good nights made her remember. The good nights disarmed her.
And, yes, you ARE above the freezing mark, Providence – but it sure doesn’t FEEL like that!
Celia opened the freezer and peered inside. The phone rang.
When she picked up, her mother’s voice demanded, “Where were you?”
“God, Mom – I’m sorry. I forgot all about lunch. Something came up. An emergency.”
“Simon? What happened? Is he – ”
“Not Simon.” Celia took out a frozen dinner and let the freezer door slam shut on her lie. “A client.”
“Because if it was Simon – ”
“Mom! Simon’s okay – he’s fine. So, what did you do this afternoon? Teeth?” Her mother’s current lover, whom Leslie had christened the Priapodontist, was in the middle of replacing her entire lifetime accumulation of fillings with gold.
“Nothing. After lunch you and I were supposed to go shopping.” (And how she loved it, Celia thought: the cries of What?-You’re-her-mother? Bridling and beaming.) “You know, you’d look slimmer in one of those new trumpet skirts. Maybe with a cropped sweater.”
“I’ve got to go, Mom. Time for Simon’s meds. I’ll call you later.”
She put her dinner in the oven, Hungry Man servings of fried chicken and mashed potatoes and corn frozen in their own neatly partitioned tinfoil tray, a depraved appetite she’d recently developed. Then she began to grind the evening meds with a mortar and pestle.
From the day Simon had been diagnosed, almost eleven years ago, her mother had made no secret of what she thought would be best for everyone concerned. Simon in a nursing home; Celia with, married or not, a real mate; Bess herself beamingly promoted, at long last, to What?-You’re-a-grandmother?-hood. It terrified Celia that her mother’s vision matched the one (the impossible one) that tattooed itself across her closed eyelids every night as she lay awake in the bed next to Simon’s.
The medications, mingling and dissolving, smelled like sulfur. When the powder was as fine as she could get it, she stirred it into a beaker of warm water until it dissolved in a pastel cloud.
Colder air means BLACK ICE! We’ll have an update on that later tonight.
In the sunporch she turned off Simon’s feeding pump and detached it from the G-tube inserted in her husband’s stomach, slowly poured the meds solution into the G-tube, then hung a fresh bag of liquid diet on his IV pole and hooked it up to the pump. “Chief . . . nourisher . . . in life’s feast,” Simon murmured in his Shakespeare voice. Celia reattached the feeding tube to the G-tube. Snapping them together, she pulled too hard on the end that protruded from the pale, freckled flesh of Simon’s belly, and heard his sharp, indrawn breath. “Sorry!” she said.
He shook his head. “It’s . . . okay.”
She rose and turned the pump back on, stood listening for its slow, meditative clicks.
In the little bathroom she assembled the paraphernalia for his shot. Somehow, no matter how careful she was with things – G-tube, catheter, hypodermic – she always hurt him. The other Well Spouses in her support group never hurt their partners.
Kneeling beside Simon’s wheelchair, she breathed in his familiar smell: baby powder, urine, and something less definable: the remote, forest odor of decay. Okay. Choose today’s spot (there was a complicated rotation system involving arms, thighs, and belly), swab spot, insert fresh needle into holder, suck in sterile water 1.3 milliliters, inject water into ampule, turn ampule upside down until contents mix with water, suck in contents 1.3 milliliters (no air bubbles!), flick with fingernail to disperse, hold needle poised in one hand, pinch husband’s flesh between thumb and forefinger of other. People assumed that Celia would be deft. Useless ot protest that, even counting her prosthesis training from the VA a dozen years ago, she’d gone to art school, not med school. People didn’t see the difference between handling something inert and handling something that breathed.
Our Little Marvel Snowblower does all this, and MORE!
Simon kept his eyes on the TV screen. The needle glittered in the lamplight. She plunged it in. He winced.
Celia let her breath out. That was it, until bedtime. She thought of these routines, collectively, as a sort of quilting stitch that held her pieced-together life in place. She didn’t know how Simon viewed them. Perhaps, to him, they were life?
Hug him, at least touch him. Give him his body back. Slowly she drew the palm of her hand across his neck, under his woolen shirt. The skin felt warm and grainy. His eyes closed in pleasure like a cat’s. She gathered up her medical paraphernalia. In the bathroom she threw the used needle into the big red rubber Sharps container that squatted in one corner. The skull and crossbones on its belly leered at her.
At last she sat down next to Simon’s wheelchair with Hungry Man on her lap and a glass of white zinfandel on the table beside her. Two years ago, when the surgeon had inserted the G-tube permanently into Simon’s stomach, they’d agreed – or rather, Simon, with the generosity she remembered from the Well Years, had insisted – that they would still eat together. Now he watched her, and she let him: a gustatory voyeur.
His nose twitched. Wistfully?
“It tastes terrible,” she assured him. “It tastes like – like breaded toilet paper and shoe buttons,” and she was rewarded with his brief bark of a laugh.
That’s it for you folks in New England. Stay tuned for STORM STORIES!
Simon’s good hand fumbled across the remote until it met the Off button. Silence. He said, “Cheers!”
She raised her glass in a toast to his IV pole and drank deeply, the wine stinging her dry throat. Then she told him about her day.
* * *
Bedtime was hoisting Simon up, coaxing the flesh together; was the weight of him, wheelchair to grab bars to commode to bed, thudding onto her shoulders and traveling down her spine; was the separate sigh from each of them when at last he lay, more or less straight, in the bed; was the way he lay there – still, massive, eyes unblinking – his own survivor; was the cool gust from the down quilt as it settled over him; was the snap of the bedside light, extinguished.
Like putting a child to bed – the child they hadn’t had. Plenty of time, they used to think. As if there ever were.
Simon fell asleep quickly, the way he always did. Downstairs, Celia poured another glass of wine and settled into the sofa, settled into the part of the day that was hers, and thought about her lover.
Max.
Was it only a week ago that they were hiking in Maine? Three hundred feet above the Atlantic, in a light snow, the path wound up and up between stony banks and pine trees, slippery and steep. When they came out, finally, onto the view of the shining little harbor at Rogue Bluff, it took her breath away. Her breath – not theirs. Max, who for the last half hour had been a good twenty yards ahead, didn’t stop to wait for her. To see this together: the sheer drop to the sea, the curve of the bay, the blue-green water with its flock of boats sheltering beneath the cliff. Where the path – rough stone steps now, winding down and down into the trees – continued, Max’s square Scandinavian head and shoulders disappeared around a bend.
The following day, when she woke up, he was gone. Above her head the conical cloth roof of the yurt admitted sunrise. Warmth and light and emptiness. The woodstove glowed red – he’d stoked the fire. On the rough plank floor beside her sleeping bag he’d left a note.
* * *
Celia’s cousin Leslie was the only person in her life who knew about the lovers. Leslie liked Max, whom she’d met in the spring, a few weeks after he and Celia had become lovers. The Contender, Leslie had christened him. He was the first one she’d ever liked. She had nicknames for all of Celia’s lovers over the last decade. The Flake; the Field Marshal; Mr. Something-for-Nothing; the Thief of Joy. (“You said it, not me,” Leslie told her when she protested this last one. “You said he ruined every good time.”) Yet who, Celia wondered, could blame these men for not being able to handle what the Field Marshal used to call “the spouse issue”?
Leslie was the one who, whenever Celia got depressed about all this – whenever, over the past ten years, she’d referred to herself as the Well Slut – said, No.
“You’re trying to make a life out of the pieces that you have, Seal. That’s all anybody ever does. It’s just, your pieces are harder to fit together than most.”
* * *
The afternoon’s first call was her mother. Celia wedged the phone between her ear and her shoulder and looked over the appointment schedule that Edwin had just laid on her desk. “Read any good books lately?” she said into the phone. Bess read two or three at a time, putting one down and picking up another, the way a chain smoker smoked.
“At the moment I’m reading the biography of Thoreau that Leslie gave me for my birthday. And I’m in the middle of that fantastic new book, Geyser Life. Don’t change the subject. Are you gaining weight?”
“Guys Are Life? I don’t think so.”
“No, no. Geyser Life. Old Faithful, and all that. Great photographs. You could do worse, Cecilia.”
“Worse photographs?”
“Worse than give men a place in your life.”
If you only knew, Celia thought. So many men; so little place.
“It wouldn’t hurt Simon. He’d never know.”
He doesn’t know. And he never will. No one but Leslie will ever know about Max, or any of the others.
“You’d get out more. No wonder you’re gaining weight. Thoreau said, ‘Live the life you’ve imagined.’ He said, ‘Go confidently in the direction of your dreams.’ Where do you ever go in the evenings, besides Well Spouse meetings?”
“We’ve been through this a hundred times. Listen, I can’t talk right now. My one-thirty is out in the waiting room. The little boy, remember, the one that got hit by – ”
“Cecilia – ”
“Gotta go, Mom. Love you. Bye.”
* * *
Celia’s studio occupied half of the top floor of an old factory building in Pawtucket. Cold clear light poured in through the tall windows. The big, high-ceilinged room held the welcoming smells of plaster, paint, linseed oil. She turned on both space heaters, then took off her jacket and hung it on a peg by the door. The boom box, tuned to an oldies station, drowned out the rap music from the painter’s studio next door. “Two cats in the yard,” Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang, “life used to be so hard.” As always when she was in the studio, her spirits rose. Home ground: here she was deft, decisive, sure.
The mold for Mrs. De Carvalho had cured. Celia took a jeweler’s hammer from the tool rack above her worktable and began to tap the plaster all around the edges. One of the first prostheses Celia had ever made, Mrs. De Carvalho’s silicone eye – its pale green iris dusty with age, like the bloom on a grape – had had to be remade twice over the last twelve years, to keep pace with its aging mate.
She worked on the lashes most of the afternoon. It was a job requiring laserlike concentration, which Celia liked because it made thought impossible. Nothing stilled obsessive rumination like the need to lift minute hairs, two or three at a time, in tiny tweezers the size of a needle, and punch them into the silicone eyelid at precisely the right angle, over and over. On the wall at the back of the worktable was a mirror about a foot wide, to which she held up the eye from time to time to get a fresh view. She worked until the eye, checked against photos of Mrs. De Carvalho’s real one, had almost all the imperfections of its mate. The cornea and iris were excellent matches; but the sclera – she hadn’t been able to get the precise mottling of yellow on white. She sighed. As if in commiseration, the radio began to play “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” Celia blew a few stray lash hairs off the eye, so lifelike she almost waited for it to blink, then put it into a gray plastic case and set it on the Outgoing Shelf. Perfect Is the Enemy of Good – that was what they’d taught at the VA. In the end you didn’t so much finish a piece as abandon it.
The studio’s many-paned windows gleamed with sunset. Feeling she’d earned a break, Celia took the cardboard box marked “JOHNS, J. 11/04” from the Pending Shelf. Junius’s mother had cancelled his initial fitting yesterday, without explanation. Celia’s disappointment had, she knew, been out of scale, almost to the point of tears. She’d made Edwin – eyebrows raised at the inappropriateness – phone Junius’s house to ask why; but there’d been no answer.
She wiped the surface of her worktable with a chamois, sweeping silicone fragments and dust and hairs onto the floor. Then she opened the box and lifted the two wax models – Junius’s good ear and her ear – from their nest of gray silk. The replacement ear went on a stand in front of the mirror; the other one, next to it. She began comparing the mirrored ear with the other one. That little fold at the top of the helix. The angle was off about ten degrees. Of its own accord her hand reached for a small wax knife.
Why hadn’t they shown up for the fitting? The impression-taking last week had gone all right, a stoic Junius not even complaining, as most kids did, about the smell of the alginate or the creepy feel of it pouring over his ears. Eyes on the mirrored ear, Celia shaved minute curls of wax from the top, making it even more Spocklike. Junius was one of her pro bono patients, referred by the children’s unit at Shriners Burn Institute in Boston. A lot of people didn’t like taking charity; maybe his redoubtable mama was one of them. When he finally did come in for the initial fitting, he’d be disappointed. They all were. It was too hard to imagine, when she held the colorless wax pretend ear to the ravaged opening, the lifelike eventual ear that would be there. Celia sometimes thought the most exhausting part of her work was the convincing. She had to do the imagining for both of them.
She was so absorbed that when her cell phone vibrated against her stomach – the strange not-quite-tickling sensation she always thought must be like feeling your unborn baby move – she jumped and dropped the wax knife. Her cell phone number was reserved for emergencies only. She took it out of her pocket and punched the On button.
* * *
When she pulled aside the curtain, Simon lay on the gurney under a stiff hospital sheet that left his feet bare. Corrugated plastic tubing, like a pastel vacuum cleaner hose, protruded from his mouth and snaked its way to a monitor on a stand. Celia stood at Simon’s head, the edge of the gurney pressing into her pelvis, and looked down. The ventilator’s clear plastic mask flattened his beard and mustache; his face was alarmingly pale. As if in response to the sheer force of her attention, his eyelids began to flutter. Open! she said to him silently. Open, now! But they didn’t.
After some minutes, she pulled the stiff sheet over his feet, which, as her hand brushed them, felt like stone. Then she settled into the slippery vinyl visitor’s chair to wait for Dr. Mikhailov. Folding her arms for warmth – why were hospitals always so cold? – she closed her eyes and let her ears fill with the rhythmic suck and sigh of the ventilator. When she opened them again, Simon’s head was turned toward her and he was looking at her, his lips – or was it just the pressure of the plastic mask? – curved in the beginnings of a smile.
* * *
“You have got a lovely butt!”
Through the door, flung back so energetically it bounced off the bookcase next to it, came Junius in his chair. His mother, who was pushing it, was speaking over her shoulder to Edwin.
Relief – here they were, though without an appointment – flooded Celia. “Sit down, please,” she said.
Edwin hovered. She’d never seen him blush before. She waved him away, and the door closed behind him. Mama parked the wheelchair alongside Celia’s desk and settled her voluminous skirts – saffron silk, this time – into the visitor’s chair. Her face beneath the broad brim of a fake leopard-skin hat wore a confident, expectant look. Maybe she’d mixed up the appointment times?
“I’m so sorry,” Celia said. “I don’t have the model – the ear – here in the office. We weren’t expecting you. Can you come back tomorrow? Edwin will tell you what time.” To Junius, she added, “I think you’ll like it. It’s going to look totally real.”
Junius turned his head away and looked out the window.
“Junius! I don’t know what’s got into him, Doctor. Why, when we got on the bus he was so excited! Just this morning he finally agreed to do the fake ear thing. I thought we ought to come see you right away.”
Celia tried again. “You’ll be able to put it on and take it off by yourself. Just snap and unsnap.”
Without turning his head, Junius shrugged.
“It’s very cool. Your buddies will be impressed.”
Junius removed his gaze from the window and said, “He didn’t stop. I’m gettin’ down from the school bus, and I see this car coming, this blue van, and I see the driver lookin’ at me, through the windshield. I see him.”
* * *
“Simon’ll be discharged soon,” Leslie said.
They sat, Celia and Leslie, bundled in sweaters with quilts over their knees, in Leslie’s dying garden. Joe had taken their son, Tommy, up to Boston, to the Museum of Science, where a special exhibit featured two hundred species of frogs, most of them deadly. The late-morning sun was bright but cold. It gave Leslie’s hair a dark crow’s-wing shine. Leaves, faded to rose and ochre and brown, littered the flagstones and lay in drifts along the high cedar fence, and the nearly leafless maples threw an intricate net of shadows over the two women.
“You’ve been talking to my mother.”
“Aunt Bess has nothing to do with it.” Leslie’s high-backed wooden chair creaked as she moved. She was incapable of talking without gestures. “But she did happen to mention that Simon’s doctor thinks that this time, when he leaves the ICU, he should go somewhere with round-the-clock care. Round-the-clock nurses. A nursing home, Seal.”
She couldn’t afford to get mad at Leslie. Without Leslie, she’d go under. “In the first place, I can take care of him. I do take care of him. In the second place, he’d never go.”
“You’re at work all day. He falls. Concussions, a hematoma, stitches. All those trips to the ER. He’s the most pigheaded man I know. One of these days when he thinks he can manage – when he thinks, What am I, Professor Simon Eisenstein, doing in a fucking wheelchair – he’ll stand up and take off across the living room and break a hip. Then where’ll you be? Where’ll he be?”
Celia couldn’t deny that it was a relief to drive homeward each evening in the deepening dusk with her husband in safe hands, and no one waiting for her at the end of her journey. She picked up one of Tommy’s action figures, which lay in a heap on the low wooden table between her and Leslie, and began bending its arms and legs into impossible positions. Always before, she’d been able to count on Leslie to understand that she couldn’t send Simon away, not for his sake but for her own. That his presence, however diminished, was as necessary to her as breathing. Losing him, she would lose herself, Celia, the person she’d been all her adult life.
Leslie waved a hand. “If he insists on coming home, you could get East Bay Nursing to send somebody. They’re good, we had them when Dad died. Then you could go up to Rogue Bluff and stay in the yurt. Get your bearings. Commute down here to your office a couple of days a week, or move the whole enchilada up there. I’ll bet the VA and Shriners’d come to you. You’re the best around.”
Not so much best, as only. Most Maxillofacial Prosthetists went where the money was: either Hollywood or the CIA. Celia rolled the action figure between her palms. It was a superhero, she could tell from the cape and tights.
“Seal! Are you listening? Say Simon does insist on coming home. If you move out, he’ll have to face how much he demands from you. How much help he needs now, to survive.”
Celia thought, I should never have let her read Max’s letter. Then she wouldn’t know he offered me the yurt.
“Leslie – for God’s sake! I couldn’t just move out. You know I couldn’t.”
On a roll now, Leslie went on as if Celia hadn’t spoken. “How many times have you told me, Maine lets you breathe. And Simon will be safe.”
“Safety isn’t the point. No one lives in order to be safe.”
Leslie gathered up the manuscript pages she’d been working on when Celia arrived – she translated from Spanish and Portuguese, mostly legal and business documents, into English – and Tommy’s Game Boy and assorted superheroes. “Let’s go in. We can have tea. Peppermint, almond, or licorice? And there’s some of Joe’s panettone.”
If even Leslie thought she should let go of Simon, then Celia had no allies at all. Despair washed through her. Her eyes moved over the wild, leaf-strewn margins of the garden, the yellowed stalks of what used to be snapdragons, the tall skeletons of hollyhocks and sunflowers. The sun was directly overhead now – it was almost noon – but she felt as cold as when they’d first sat down. “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” she murmured.
“What?”
“Shakespeare. It was the first thing Simon said when they took him off the ventilator yesterday. At least, it sounded like that was what he said.”
Leslie rose, sloughing leaves off her lap. “Like some unknown nobody said: You can’t prevent the birds of sorrow from flying over your head but you can keep them from building a nest in your hair.”
* * *
On warm nights Max liked to open the plastic skylight at the top of the yurt. Moonlight seemed to enter their bodies. The fragrance of the pines mingled with the smell of her own sweat and then with the scent they made together; the ringing of the crickets mixed with her own quick cries.
Afterwards, she lay with Max’s body folded around hers and the sleeping bag folded around them both. Sometimes he snored, very lightly, a matter-of-fact sound, beautiful and ordinary. Sometimes the last thing she heard was the swift whisper of the zipper as he zipped them in, like the sound of a bird taking flight.
* * *
“I’ll call you back this afternoon, Mom.”
“What was it Simon used to say? When we die, God will reproach us for all the beauty He put on earth that we declined to enjoy.”
“I’ve got a full waiting room out there. Simon never said any such thing.”
“Thoreau, then. Whoever. People need partners, Seal. We’re mammals, after all.”
“Drop it, Ma.”
“If you fell in love, you’d feel better. All those endorphins. Don’t call me Ma. You know perfectly well that no one would take me for your mother.”
* * *
It had been August when he told her. More than eight years ago, now. For a week they’d been waiting, disbelief buttressing defiance, for the results of the MRI. It was a hot, somber, dark-skied afternoon. It was – though she didn’t realize this until years later – the very last time when his illness was the same experience for both of them. She bit her lip hard, blood salty on her tongue, so as not to cry. They made love, not desperately (that would come later), not despairingly (that would come later still), but determinedly. Like two people trying to say everything – past, future, now – in a single telegram.
Afterwards, they lay with their cooling bodies tight together, their heads on the same pillow. She turned her face away so that he wouldn’t taste her tears. Her hair, long then, tugged painfully against her scalp where his head held it fast to the pillow. A hot breeze sifted through the open window. They could hear the far-off rumbling and tumbling of a slowly approaching thunderstorm.
“Everything that grows,” he’d whispered into her hair, in his Shakespeare voice, “holds in perfection but a little moment.”
* * *
“A yurt – that’s some kind of tent, right? Are you crazy?”
“You’ve been talking to Leslie. That’s her idea. It’s just an idea.”
“All alone in the woods?”
“Mom. I have to hang up now. I haven’t seen Simon yet today.”
“You could stay here, in the spare room. Even Thoreau went home once a week. Did you know that? He took his laundry home to his mother.”
“There’s no phone up there.”
* * *
Celia settled in her chair and looked down at the day’s roster. A new patient, referred from Shriners Burn Institute, F/24/B; Henry Threadgill, for the third time this year (“Nose itch – a bitch,” Edwin had written next to his name); Amar Singh, the beautiful young man from Bombay, whose dark-blue turban hid the ear misshapen since birth; Mrs. De Carvalho. But where was Junius? Celia’s stomach gave a little leap, anticipating the moment when she would snap his new ear into place. Anticipating the sight of his face looking sideways into the mirror she’d hold up to him.
She buzzed Edwin.
The intercom crackled. “Yeah?”
“Junius Johns. He’s coming back today for his fitting. What time?”
“They cancelled. There was a message from Big Mama on the voice mail this morning. I put old Threadgill in their spot.”
Relax. Breathe.
Celia undid the waistband button on her good gray pants, breathed deeper, and looked out the window, blinking back tears. Outside, it was a perfect day. Burning blue sky; the last deep-red leaves twirling down from the Japanese maple, released; the sun coming in at a golden slant through its polished branches.
What was it the nuns had taught them, in Saturday Catechism Class? They’d had to chant it, a dozen seven-year-old voices piping in unison, hands clapping the beat. The SINS against HOPE are PreSUMPtion and DeSPAIR.
The thing was, she could not imagine it: the hopeful sound of zippers, the shuffle of luggage down the ramp into the driveway, the wheelchair in the doorway jerking around, presenting her with Simon’s eloquent back. Couldn’t imagine looking, one day not long from now, out her office window at her loaded pickup, its blue tarp dusted with the season’s first snow; couldn’t imagine driving, at the end of the afternoon’s work, not west, but north.
Ann Harleman is the author of a collection of stories, Happiness (University of Iowa Press), and a novel, Bitter Lake (Southern Methodist University Press). Her stories have appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, American Fiction, Ploughshares, Story, and the O. Henry Prize Stories 2003.