ROOMS LIKE THESE HAVE NO DOORS by Nicole Miller
In Urgent Care, no one asks her to take off her blouse and put on a paper smock, as she remembers doing when she was a girl. The doctor is wearing a sweater. He carries no clipboard or files. He shakes her hand when he enters the examining room and takes the chair beside her as though this was some sort of speed-dating thing.
What do you do for a living? he asks.
Which publisher?
And your parents? Are they in good health?
He asks her age. When she tells him, he laughs. The desk thinks you’re eighteen, he says.
She laughs, too, at the error and is suddenly aware that this man has appraised her and made some assumptions; has seen, maybe, the pleats under her eyes, which have only recently begun to gather and pucker in patterns that gall her when she finds her face in the glass.
You were thinking, she says, that life hasn’t been kind!
Is there anything in her family history he should know?
Marie can’t think what, if anything, is relevant. She thinks of her mother, who lives, now, in the Hudson Valley, having left the city years ago. Of the building on 83rd where she raised Marie.
They used to cross the street to visit the museum on those afternoons when her mother woke late – too late, in any case, for school! I’ll take you to see the mummies, she’d say.
She meant: the museum, at least, would be quiet.
Marie remembers the Sabbath hush of the high-ceilinged rooms. While her mother slumped on a bench, digging in her purse for something for her head, Marie roamed through the rooms, imitating the other patrons with their arms behind their backs or folded over their chests.
There was the plaster model of Cupid and Psyche – the woman, wasted with waiting, reclines, poured out of Cupid’s arms. Her mother likes to remind her that those figures were her favorite but what Marie remembers is all those pins. The sculptor preparing his figures for marble, working the metal into the plaster, drawing a map in their flesh.
The lover: was he coming or going?
Now, behind the house on the Hudson, her mother spends her afternoons in the orchard. She stands among the trees like one of the plaster forms, putting her body through a range of motion, which, from her watching place at the window, looks to Marie like standing still.
This is what the Zen Buddhists do, her mother tells Marie. Or, if not the Buddhists, then that performance artist from Minsk? This is the thing that has saved her life, her mother says with real conviction. She’s sniffed out a way to trick time.
At the window, as the afternoon drains, Marie watches her mother’s shadow lengthen in the yard. Standing there, her forehead against the cool pane of glass, it isn’t time that’s altered, but space. She feels that she might almost stoop down and cross some threshold into the room of this moment which has grown, suddenly, spacious. She could take up residence here, if she wanted, in the length and breadth of a single clock-tick.
When the visit is over, her mother says, Oh, next time you’ll have to come and stay longer!
No, Marie tells the doctor. Nothing in her family’s history to report.
He asks her if she smokes.
Occasionally, she tells him.
Drink? he asks.
Of course.
She thinks of her mother, that afternoon plague, diving into her handbag for the cure.
I drink socially, Marie tells the doctor. I mean, I don’t carry a flask!
Their laughter, Marie feels, comes at her expense.
Are you married? the doctor asks.
Do you have any children?
Have you ever been pregnant?
It’s a sore throat, she tells him. She’s had it for days. And there’s all this mucus.
He peers into her mouth.
Everything I’ve ever managed to get done, she thinks, is because I was avoiding doing something else. She feels herself about to cry. She knows it’s because she’s sick. Her white blood cells are taxed. She has no resistance, at the moment, to tears.
The doctor asks if she takes anything: pills, tonics – anything for the pain. He asks if she’s had surgery before. For example, he says. Has anyone ever slit open the envelope of your abdomen to lift out and read its folded contents?
Has anyone ever peered between the bars of your ribs?
Ever watched the feathering draughts of your lungs, or seen the braided architecture of your spine?
He wonders whether anyone has crossed county lines, raced down dirt lanes to track the electrical storm in her brain.
Has anyone, he asks, ever cracked your chest to spy on your beating heart?
No, she tells him. No one ever has.
His hand on her back is warm. The stethoscope is cool, even through her flowered blouse.
He listens to her heart, then hangs the instrument around his neck and tells her that it’s viral. He can offer her a nasal spray.
Will it cost? she asks.
Of course.
If only he would let his hand linger there, pressing lightly against her back, she might tell him other things and ask for his understanding; for instance, about the man she once worked for, who had taken her, once, to see a play in a deconsecrated church across town, a production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, in which the woman he was seeing had a part. During Act II, he’d leaned toward Marie and said in her ear, You’re wearing my favorite perfume, a disclosure that pleased her – likes, dislikes, preferences, tastes being the kind of thing about a person you learn over time and take for granted until it’s offered, whole kernel, like a gift.
After the play, she’d waited with him in the lobby for the actress, who, when she appeared, un-corseted, scrubbed, accepted the tulips he’d bought at the bodega, but couldn’t accept the praise offered by Marie, who in truth, didn’t care for the production, thought the actress played Irina with a heartless cheer; it didn’t matter, anyway, what Marie thought, because the actress was irritated with one of the crew, who in Act I missed a lighting cue and what’s more, they’d got the gels all wrong; not one of them could fucking work a followspot.
Marie watched the actress as she spoke, her auburn hair released from its pins, and while she could see why the actress might charm him, she struck Marie as the kind of woman who insists on a hammer when what’s needed is a nail. She’d spend her whole life fed up, Marie thought.
And then the actress had gone – drinks with the cast! – and the church was empty. Marie climbed the stairs of the stage and – forget the followspot – stood in the dark.
Before her, the pews stretched in rows toward the arched doorway where the man waited, his jacket over his arm.
What she remembered that night, in the Proserov parlor, was her mother, dropping into one of the pews at St. Pat’s, saying, Minnie, I’m tired. Her hand on the clasp of her bag. Taking from it something for the heat.
Her mother called it the afternoon drift. Marie assumed, for many years, that the drift was a certain time of day, like cocktail hour or dawn. They would wander for blocks, her mother never stumbling or slowing her pace, until she consented finally to sit in some church or museum – the only place in the city where the human form was accustomed to the thrill of barbs.
Her mother could make a loaf of bread disappear overnight.
Her mother once promised her a trip to Bucks County, PA.
And how angry Marie felt toward the actress, who loved that man in bad faith.
In the doorway of the church, he stood watching Marie, who was suddenly shy – no lines and nothing to do with her hands – and afterward, inside the dark cab, the lights flickering across his face and over the trench coat on the seat between them, she heard him say, You’re a splendid, wonderful woman.
I know, she said softly. I love that line. Vershinin, finding Masha after all those years, astonished at his good fortune. What ill-luck, to have already wed.
I’ll tell you the line that comes to mind, she said. Can you guess?
He couldn’t.
Try harder.
But the man couldn’t guess it and they were pulling up to her building and she felt the thing in the dark between them dissolve.
Marie would like the doctor to hear her confession. If only he would let his hand linger there for a while.
Just as well, she thinks, that the lovers are stuck with pins. Each one exquisitely placed. For parting – for exile – for wandering the earth – only the steel point of daggers will do.
The man Marie worked for had one day, at the end of the day, called her into his office and pulled open the drawer of a filing cabinet and poured them both something to drink.
The man said, That night, when you stood onstage.
Marie accepted the glass she was offered.
He was watching her, having come out from behind his desk so that the two of them sat together on his couch, the lights of the city in the large window pane tearing small holes in the darkness.
He said, That night. Onstage.
I remember.
You looked so youthful. But like you’d always be that way. Even twenty years from now.
You’re a splendid, wonderful woman.
In another part of the building, the vacuum cleaner was screaming and Marie was thinking of a different line. It was Vershinin who said it: There’s no happiness for us. It’s just something we wish for.
She put down her glass and picked up her bag, her jacket and umbrella and waited, alone, for the elevator to take her to the ground floor, where she stepped onto the sidewalk and off the curb, keeping this conversation with her as she left, socked away where she could always find it, though she never again saw that expression – or looked for it – on his face.
Nicole Miller’s short fiction has appeared in the journal Image.