Taming the A Train
Sue Mellins
Each morning Joanne put on a visitor’s badge and rode the elevator to his floor at the hospital. If the door was shut she’d hesitate—a visitor to some unfamiliar life. Sometimes a nurse called out for her to please wait outside a minute longer. Joanne would turn in the direction from which she had come, imagining that soon the two of them would be walking back down the corridor to the elevator, down and out and away. Soon she would have him back.
Meanwhile, lest he lose heart, she enticed him back to normal life with magazine clippings and sweet smelling peaches from the corner vendor. Costume designers never have time to shop for themselves, but Joanne had found that by juggling T-shirts and jean skirts, she could manage a different look each day. “Hey, who’s that pretty girl?” Carl would ask as soon as she walked in.
But this morning she was staying home. “You’re off the hook tomorrow,” Carl had told her last night. “Don’t show up here until they phone you. You can watch Regis and Kathy Lee commenting on beach fashions …”
“Splendid idea.” In fact, she had felt relieved. She had fallen behind in her work, the apartment was a mess.
Once it was clear they were going to operate, Carl had wanted her to take some dictation. “But I know where everything is,” she said. Hadn’t she bought him file cabinets, and helped to organize his papers and labeled his keys? “What have you done with my chaos?” he had grumbled.
Last night she had stayed with him as late as possible, holding tightly to his hand. How poorly designed hospitals were for intimacy—beds too high, chairs too low. Her wrist poked stiffly through the side rail, and his hand felt as clammy as a teenage date’s. But he was a physician as well as husband and patient. Joanne, who wasn’t scientifically inclined, was paying strict attention these days. The surgeon, Heinz Steinfeld, had drawn an eloquent diagram for her. “Heinz” to his colleagues—to her he was always “the surgeon.”
At home at ten after eight, she scolded herself for watching the time. No point. After breakfast she put on The Most Happy Fella tape. “Ooh my feet, my pore pore feet.” She was designing costumes for a repertory company production in Aspen next month and the music helped her visualize another world, another time, when hemlines were ruffled and women longed to settle down. She hummed along with joyful duets and brooding soliloquies—Amy was a mail order bride going off to meet her fiancé for the first time, headed for shock and disappointment. But it would all work out in the end. Joanne was glad to be working on an upbeat show.
The hair against her neck began to feel hot and prickly—she decided to braid it. In the bedroom, as she stroked with her brush, the air conditioner gave a sick cough, and glancing around, she half-expected to find Carl beside her. Wheezer, she called him. Sometimes he was the dread Fafner, the flaming dragon of German folklore, expelling hisses or snorts. Or a drowning man gasping in his sleep. She had nudged him awake the first time she spent a night—“What’s wrong, love?”
“Just a bit of apnea. Nothing to worry about.”
Apnea?
The dictionary had offered an explanation. “Transient suspension of respiration.” It was “nothing,” she guessed, as long as you didn’t stop breathing for good. Seldom without a puffer tucked away in his pocket and adept at swallowing balloons, her husband coached asthmatic children on exercise bicycles, riding one alongside. At the Christmas party a lab technician had confided—“I wish he’d take it easy on that bike. Sometimes I can tell he’s in distress.”
“Oh, but he’s really very strong,” Joanne assured her.
The technician blushed as if at some indiscreet disclosure, as if at age 54, the juices were not meant to flow so smoothly, rapidly, heedlessly. Neither his asthmatic wheezing nor the “apnea” had put him in the hospital. It was a cold that had turned into pneumonia and now there was some kind of complication. They were going to have to scrape pus from the lining of his lung, the surgeon explained: “I think it will do the trick.”
Phone. A winged creature took off in Joanne’s chest each time it rang; it was always some familiar voice.
“Why aren’t you at the hospital?” her mother asked.
“I’m waiting to hear. They’re going to call me when it’s over.” “They?”
“Someone from the surgeon’s office; his secretary I suppose.”
“Dear, wouldn’t you like your father and me to come down? I hate to think of you all alone there. I’m sure Carl’s in the best of hands, but one does worry. I remember how it was with your father’s gall bladder. I met some very nice people in the waiting room and it was quite comforting.”
“I’d just rather wait at home, Ma. I have plenty of distractions here.”
“Well, you always did have nerves of steel. Perhaps it’s a good thing.”
From her mother’s point of view, worry was supposed to be a sign of maturity. Her parents were both pharmacists. When there was talk of illness at the dinner table Joanne would develop headaches and excuse herself. (The old admonishments rang in her ears now—Life isn’t a picnic. Stop dreaming. You and your friend Buck and your sly bohemian ways, where do you think you're going? Not far, I’ll wager.”)
Sadness washed over Joanne after they hung up. It wasn’t so surprising that in a small community, where no small malady went unnoticed; her parents often seemed burdened by the remedies and fine print they carried around inside their heads. (The pharmacy had been a busy place when she was younger. Joanne had helped out late afternoons, making deliveries on her bike along with their neighbor’s son, Buck. Later on she had been put in charge of cosmetics and Buck worked the soda fountain.)
The older girls who rarely acknowledged her existence at school clamored for her attention in the drugstore. “Revlon or Clairol? Your hair’s so pretty. Which do you use?” At night she would draw them from memory—she and Buck, both, taking a break from homework in either one of their kitchens. She had pasted the caricatures onto cardboard, and then cut them out. Inanimate and one dimensional, those girls were at her mercy, paper doll mannequins. She created period costumes with mop caps, crimped hair, or no hair at all, gave them bloomers to wear and cruel stays that pushed their bosoms up to their clavicles. A way of getting even? Her family’s position had been nebulous in a roughshod farming community—professional people yet not of the town either, living, as they did, far out on a wooded peninsula.
Buck Quincy had been her closest friend. When she was small, his mother had looked after her while her parents were at work. His family owned a dappled gray horse named Silver; Buck had taught her to ride bareback. Straddling the horse behind him, she would rocket across the stubbled fields. They took turns at the reins. Buck could do war cries. He could do bird warbles and mimic his teachers. He could do the minister’s stammer. In fifth grade he had played Christ in the Easter pageant. Never would Joanne forget him standing against a cross painted onto the backdrop, arms outstretched, chin sunk onto his chest. “Oh my father, why hast thou forsaken me?” The two of them were always dressing up and acting out plays at home. His mother kept a trunk of old clothes in the attic. Joanne’s favorite scene was the one in The Importance of Being Ernest where Gwendolyn and Cecily get bitch over tea. With his reedy body and delicate feature, Buck was a beautiful Cecily.
In high school they went to movies and proms together. That too was part of the show; everyone assumed they were a couple. His lips were always cool and gentle when he kissed her goodnight at the foot of her porch. A kiss or two—it never went any further than that and something told Joanne it never would.
Then one summer night Silver was lame and couldn’t be let out to graze. They went out to the stable to check on her. “Alas, poor Silver,” Joanne exclaimed. “You’re bored. How shall we entertain you?”
“We’ll do passion and lust for her,” Buck said.
He stood Joanne against the wall and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. She held her breath while he spread the flaps of her shirt and stared. Her brother, her dearest friend, was it possible they would be lovers? Galloping across the fields together. Holding on until every limb ached. Falling, you could die, who cared? She’d always felt embarrassed listening to other girls talk about it. Now she wanted to know. What was a lover? Buck suddenly shuddered and looked away. “Oh God,” he said and burst into tears.
They had planned to go into business together as designers. But the week before graduation Buck was run down by a truck, his face and body crushed beyond recognition. Buck couldn’t be gone—it was somebody else wearing the same clothes. She had refused to go to his funeral. When Joanne rode his horse, she heard bird calls that sounded just like him. He was in the air all around her. No more secrets, nothing to hide.
This time when the phone rang, it was the hospital. Carl was now in the recovery room.
~ ~ ~
When Joanne got there, he was lying on his back in the narrow-railed bed, eyes half-closed. She touched his cheek and drew her hand back. How cold he felt.
“Post-op,” said the nurse. “Body temp has to adjust. Takes a couple of hours. Maybe more …” Evidently only half sentences were spoken in this arctic zone.
She was allowed into the I.C.U. for ten-minute intervals every hour. In between visits she either sat or paced in the lounge.
It was not a particularly well-endowed hospital, serving, as it did, a largely indigent population of drug dealers, pensioned widows, illegal immigrants, children who nibbled at leaded paint. The waiting room was a windowless alcove with a frayed brown couch and a wobbly wrought iron standing lamp at the end where she sat. Joanne stared fixedly at the entrance to the I.C.U., the hateful steel doors that kept her from him.
Later that afternoon, she had a chance to talk to the surgeon who stopped by. “When is he going to come to?”
The surgeon removed his glasses and rubbed the red dents in the bridge of his nose. “He’s a bit pokey. However, everyone’s different. I’d say tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Do you think he hears me talking to him?”
The surgeon slid his wire rimmed glasses carefully back into place. He patted her shoulder. “The key word here is patience.”
There was no such thing as privacy in the I.C.U. A long room with beds on either side. At first Joanne had felt self-conscious, doing those monologues in earshot of everyone else. She could hear the visitor directly across the aisle who was also doing monologues—by coincidence her husband’s name was also Carl. A bony man, skin the color of incinerator smoke, his head wrapped in bandage. Brain surgery, Joanne guessed. He was conscious, able to sit up, but she never heard him speak. His wife called him “Carlie.” “They say I’ll be able to bring you home in a week, Carlie. Isn’t that fantastic. Wait till I tell the kids. They miss you so much.”
Listening in on the other Carl’s wife inspired Joanne. “You know who called?” she said and told about this one and that one. “And I’ve got a good start on the costumes for Happy Fella. You’d better hurry up and get well so you can visit me when I’m out there. Otherwise I won’t go.”
He had been almost as excited as she about the job; they were planning to take a few days’ vacation after the production was over. Now, out of the corner of her eye she watched the other Carl dangle his legs over the side of his bed. He leaned forward suddenly and began to unbutton his wife’s blouse.
“Oh no, honey. Carlie, no, not here!” She glanced over at Joanne. “No, no, baby, I’m telling you, what will people think?”
Joanne felt the nurse’s cool fingertips tapping her elbow to let her know it was time to go.
Each time she came out of the I.C.U. she was trembling. This afternoon, the other Carl’s wife was waiting ahead of her in the cafeteria line. “I’m Bethanny,” she said, pointing to a table by the window. “My favorite spot just opened up. Let’s grab it.”
Bethanny was tall and pleasant looking, with high cheekbones and sloping shoulders. Joanne liked the sound of the name, Bethanny, the short “a.” She added it to a list she was keeping in mind for her own children.
They carried their trays across the cafeteria to a table in front of a plate glass window overlooking a courtyard. Bordering the lawn and walks were beds of purple and white iris. Groups of doctors, students, and nurses strolled outside. Mothers pushed their children in wheelchairs.
Bethanny was plucking leaves from the window planter. “Look at these coleuses, they’re infested with mealybugs.” White mites crawled on the underside of the mottled pink and green leaf that she held up for inspection. “Their saliva is poisonous, it destroys the plant.”
The bugs were revolting, Joanne thought. She’d never seen one before.
Bethanny crushed the leaf between her fingertips and dropped it into the coffee at the bottom of her cup. “The best thing I know to do is to take a Q-tip dipped in alcohol. The mealybug shrivels up as soon as you touch it. I don’t have any qualms killing these bastards. I’m sort of a plant freak. I’m doing a series of books about them for kids.”
“You’re a writer?” asked Joanne.
“An illustrator. Freelance. What about you?”
“I’m a costume designer,” said Joanne.
Bethanny nodded. “Since Carl got his diagnosis, I haven’t been able to get much work done.”
“I can imagine.”
“Why is your husband here?” Bethanny asked.
Hesitating, Joanne took a sip of tea. “Pneumonia,” she murmured.
“The coffee’s lousy in this place, but I don’t care,” said Bethanny. “This spot reminds me that it’s summer out there.” She nodded toward a group of I.C.U. nurses conversing in a corner. “Don’t know what I would have done without those guys. It sure helps to have someone to talk to, doesn’t it?” She smiled at Joanne.
Tea sloshed out of Joanne’s cup. She mopped it up with her napkin. The tea was cold, and she was cold inside.
Joanne placed her empty cup back on her tray. “I really should go,” she said.
As they walked from the cafeteria, she paused to look back at the window. A kitchen aid was wiping off their table. In the courtyard the irises went right on blooming.
The resident was gone. “Where have you been?” Carl asked anxiously when she walked in. “They just gave me a shot a moment ago. I’m not myself.”
Joanne leaned over the rail to kiss him. “I’m crazy about you whoever you are.”
“I’ll be a lot nicer tomorrow.”
~ ~ ~
The phone shrilled while she was getting dressed the next morning. She heard her mother’s voice on the answering machine while she boiled water for coffee. “Are you sure you don’t want us to fly down? I’ve sent you a food package. You’ll get it in a day or two.” Joanne looked inside the refrigerator—one egg and two shriveled plums. She thought of the winter mornings of her childhood, her mother downstairs, preparing a hearty breakfast for the family. Many times, Joanne, like most of her friends, ordered out, avoiding cooking chores. Inside a cupboard Joanne found ketchup and molasses bottles, boxes of corn starch and peppercorns, instant corn muffin mix. Carl was a much better cook than she was. On Sundays he would concoct all kinds of delicious meals for them to eat during the week. Maybe if he was off the I.V. tomorrow, she’d take him a batch of muffins. He loved muffins.
Surely he’d be better by then. Today was just a little bit of a setback. His condition was listed as “fair,” according to the floor nurse. Good, satisfactory, fair, serious, critical—those were the official ratings. Joanne crossed her fingers.
The train was slow coming today. A group of children crowded into the car with her. The counselor in charge of them had shaggy, short gray hair and a brusque, commanding manner that reminded Joanne of someone she knew. She figured out that it was Carl’s Aunt Charlotte, who had raised him after his parents died in a plane crash. Charlotte had been an ambulance attendant. When Carl was old enough, she would take him with her sometimes. Carl said he had learned quite a lot about medicine. But he was shocked the first time he heard her badger a patient’s family for on the spot cash. It was the only insurance a private ambulance company had against a patient’s death, Charlotte explained. “No checks, no credit cards,” she would bark. She did, however, have a romantic streak. When Charlotte had been hospitalized with cancer, she had made the two of them stand one on either side of her bed. “Now,” she commanded, “promise to love each other for keeps. Kiss,” she said, and reached up and pulled their heads together--“Just in case I don’t make it to the wedding.”
Joanne was upset this morning to be thinking death thoughts. Carl was going to be fine, she told herself. Soon he would come home. She would take wonderful care of him. Just might have to go slow for a while.
~ ~ ~
The nurse peered at the thermometer. “Spiking a fever,” she announced in the usual shorthand. “Heart’s a bit racy.”
“I know that,” Carl said crankily. His cheeks were flushed. He was annoyed that Joanne hadn’t brought a newspaper with her.
“I’ll get you one when I go out later,” she promised.
He ran his fingertips over his cracked lips. “Would you bring me some chapstick too? None of that fancy mint or strawberry flavored stuff. You know, the mentholated kind I always get.”
Out in the street, Joanne bumped into Dave Anderson, negotiating with a vendor for a bag of peaches. He and Carl had roomed together their first year in medical school.
“It’s probably some kind of post-op infection, Joanne. If the antibiotics don’t bring his fever down, they’ll have to look harder.”
“Look for what?”
“Hemorrhages, embolisms—they occur in a small percentage of cases.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Not intentionally, but you asked. He’s putting up a good fight.”
Temperature was up in the middle of the day. Even his smell was different—sour and sickly—this body of his she’d thought she knew so well: the compact bones, strong thighs, supple back. Joanne hated the thermometer for turning in evidence against him, the programmed machines that might detect pockets of weakness.
~ ~ ~
“No call for alarm.” Dr. Moore-Blanding has just come in. “I’ve ordered a scan first thing tomorrow, and we’ve started him on an anticoagulant that’s proved very effective.”
“What is it?” Joanne said, scared. The small percentages. “Effective against what?”
“Pulmonary embolisms. We don’t know yet if that’s what’s going on, but it’s a possibility.” Dr. Moore-Blanding patted her shoulder. “Now my dear, don’t worry. We’ll lick this thing.”
We? she thought. If only there was something she could do.
At home, she tried to clear away some of Carl’s mess. Stacks of paper everywhere, color coded. You’ve taken the chaos out of my life, he had once told her. It was a fair bargain. He had taken the dreariness out of hers.
What didn’t interest him? She loved his small bright eyes, the knots of intelligence in his forehead. They went out three or four nights a week to theatre, opera. He talked her head off in swanky restaurants. Perhaps they should have stayed home more—his work was very tiring. But it was hard to slow him down. “Nonsense, I’m not tired,” he would say. Joanne was startled now by the shrill ring of the phone.
“Honey,” Carl said, “what are you up to? I’ve had a stream of residents probing me everywhere this morning, I need some distraction.”
She laughed. “I need some distraction too from all your piles of papers on the dining room table. I’m planning on getting to the hospital in a couple of hours.”
“Good. I can’t wait.”
At times like now, the A Train was user friendly, the same express Carl ordinarily took to work each day, lugging a briefcase filled with medical journals. Perfect timing—the train pulled into the platform as soon as she arrived. She felt like flinging her arms around the silvery sleek car thrusting open its doors in front of her. At this hour, there were few passengers. She spread the pleats of her skirt on the seat around her. Inside her tote she carried yesterday’s batch of Get Well cards, plus a box of thank you notes she had designed and printed up—she had sketched the image of an invalid, reclining like a Roman in a toga before a platter of goodies, with the caption: I RELISH YOUR GOOD WISHES—Carl would be amused, she was sure.
The moment she walked into his room, he pushed himself higher onto his pillow. “You came at the right time. I was having a bad dream … I was out on the fire escape. There was this puppy out there going down the ladder, and it fell …”
Joanne caught her breath. “Think about something nice. Do you remember the day we went for a walk in the park, and all at once hundreds of pigeons flew out of the meadow and spread across the sky, it was such a joyful scene.”
Carl smiled. “Sure, I remember.”
The sky today was the same pale shade of blue it had been that day. Was it only two weeks ago? The higher the pigeons had flown the whiter they had appeared to be, as if the air contained bleach.
Was all that whiteness a good omen?—that is, if you believed in omens, and at the moment maybe she did. Some people might think of blizzards or flags of surrender, but for Joanne white conjured up dogwood blossoms, or these days, a thrift shop dress perfect for a wedding scene.
What a leap. She was always pleased when people would ask how they’d met, as if the telling made it more real.
It had been a hot summer day and there she was, miles from town, trying to pump air into a flat on her bike. A rented Dodge with a fishing pole sticking out the window had pulled up. A guy with a good summer tan opened his door and got out, without saying anything. Rail thin, he looked like he’d emerged from a pencil sharpener. “Could be a valve.” He offered to give her a lift to a repair shop.
Usually Carl would come in on cue at this point: “There I was coming in empty handed from a morning of fishing and she hooked me.” Sometimes she wonders if he’s being corny for her sake. Joanne will either abbreviate matters—“And he’s been helping me ever since”—or else continue to describe the courtship step by step.
Dave offered her a lift home that evening. “The nurses will call if there’s any change. You could use a good night’s sleep.”
She shook her head. Sleep … If only …
~ ~ ~
She turned over with a groan the next morning. ‘7:30’ the green digital letters flashed. It was the hour she usually rose and got ready for work. Projects delayed, a costume she should’ve designed. Everything was on hold now. An image of Carl flashed through her mind—still lying flat, eyes squeezed shut.
“Wake up my love.” Hospital routines always began early. Bedpans, breakfast, visits from doctors.
She picked up the receiver—dialed his room. The phone rang a dozen or more times before frowning, she hung up.
Where could he be? She felt a pang of concern.
Joanne dressed quickly. The express was already sitting in the station when she got there, engines vibrating. The motorman looked out through his window and grinned at her as she ran toward him. “Come, come,” he seemed to be saying.
But just as she reached the door, it slid shut and the train took off without her. “Damn!” she screamed, and slammed her palm against the moving steel.
Her hand was on fire.
As luck would have it, another train arrived almost immediately. The doors swung open and she stepped inside to a corner seat apart from the other passengers. Why hadn’t he answered the phone? The train pounded around a curve. The window behind her reflected in the window in front of her. She saw it—like some enormous mouth ready to snap shut—she saw it twice, a huge yawning cave.
Sue Mellins
Each morning Joanne put on a visitor’s badge and rode the elevator to his floor at the hospital. If the door was shut she’d hesitate—a visitor to some unfamiliar life. Sometimes a nurse called out for her to please wait outside a minute longer. Joanne would turn in the direction from which she had come, imagining that soon the two of them would be walking back down the corridor to the elevator, down and out and away. Soon she would have him back.
Meanwhile, lest he lose heart, she enticed him back to normal life with magazine clippings and sweet smelling peaches from the corner vendor. Costume designers never have time to shop for themselves, but Joanne had found that by juggling T-shirts and jean skirts, she could manage a different look each day. “Hey, who’s that pretty girl?” Carl would ask as soon as she walked in.
But this morning she was staying home. “You’re off the hook tomorrow,” Carl had told her last night. “Don’t show up here until they phone you. You can watch Regis and Kathy Lee commenting on beach fashions …”
“Splendid idea.” In fact, she had felt relieved. She had fallen behind in her work, the apartment was a mess.
Once it was clear they were going to operate, Carl had wanted her to take some dictation. “But I know where everything is,” she said. Hadn’t she bought him file cabinets, and helped to organize his papers and labeled his keys? “What have you done with my chaos?” he had grumbled.
Last night she had stayed with him as late as possible, holding tightly to his hand. How poorly designed hospitals were for intimacy—beds too high, chairs too low. Her wrist poked stiffly through the side rail, and his hand felt as clammy as a teenage date’s. But he was a physician as well as husband and patient. Joanne, who wasn’t scientifically inclined, was paying strict attention these days. The surgeon, Heinz Steinfeld, had drawn an eloquent diagram for her. “Heinz” to his colleagues—to her he was always “the surgeon.”
At home at ten after eight, she scolded herself for watching the time. No point. After breakfast she put on The Most Happy Fella tape. “Ooh my feet, my pore pore feet.” She was designing costumes for a repertory company production in Aspen next month and the music helped her visualize another world, another time, when hemlines were ruffled and women longed to settle down. She hummed along with joyful duets and brooding soliloquies—Amy was a mail order bride going off to meet her fiancé for the first time, headed for shock and disappointment. But it would all work out in the end. Joanne was glad to be working on an upbeat show.
The hair against her neck began to feel hot and prickly—she decided to braid it. In the bedroom, as she stroked with her brush, the air conditioner gave a sick cough, and glancing around, she half-expected to find Carl beside her. Wheezer, she called him. Sometimes he was the dread Fafner, the flaming dragon of German folklore, expelling hisses or snorts. Or a drowning man gasping in his sleep. She had nudged him awake the first time she spent a night—“What’s wrong, love?”
“Just a bit of apnea. Nothing to worry about.”
Apnea?
The dictionary had offered an explanation. “Transient suspension of respiration.” It was “nothing,” she guessed, as long as you didn’t stop breathing for good. Seldom without a puffer tucked away in his pocket and adept at swallowing balloons, her husband coached asthmatic children on exercise bicycles, riding one alongside. At the Christmas party a lab technician had confided—“I wish he’d take it easy on that bike. Sometimes I can tell he’s in distress.”
“Oh, but he’s really very strong,” Joanne assured her.
The technician blushed as if at some indiscreet disclosure, as if at age 54, the juices were not meant to flow so smoothly, rapidly, heedlessly. Neither his asthmatic wheezing nor the “apnea” had put him in the hospital. It was a cold that had turned into pneumonia and now there was some kind of complication. They were going to have to scrape pus from the lining of his lung, the surgeon explained: “I think it will do the trick.”
Phone. A winged creature took off in Joanne’s chest each time it rang; it was always some familiar voice.
“Why aren’t you at the hospital?” her mother asked.
“I’m waiting to hear. They’re going to call me when it’s over.” “They?”
“Someone from the surgeon’s office; his secretary I suppose.”
“Dear, wouldn’t you like your father and me to come down? I hate to think of you all alone there. I’m sure Carl’s in the best of hands, but one does worry. I remember how it was with your father’s gall bladder. I met some very nice people in the waiting room and it was quite comforting.”
“I’d just rather wait at home, Ma. I have plenty of distractions here.”
“Well, you always did have nerves of steel. Perhaps it’s a good thing.”
From her mother’s point of view, worry was supposed to be a sign of maturity. Her parents were both pharmacists. When there was talk of illness at the dinner table Joanne would develop headaches and excuse herself. (The old admonishments rang in her ears now—Life isn’t a picnic. Stop dreaming. You and your friend Buck and your sly bohemian ways, where do you think you're going? Not far, I’ll wager.”)
Sadness washed over Joanne after they hung up. It wasn’t so surprising that in a small community, where no small malady went unnoticed; her parents often seemed burdened by the remedies and fine print they carried around inside their heads. (The pharmacy had been a busy place when she was younger. Joanne had helped out late afternoons, making deliveries on her bike along with their neighbor’s son, Buck. Later on she had been put in charge of cosmetics and Buck worked the soda fountain.)
The older girls who rarely acknowledged her existence at school clamored for her attention in the drugstore. “Revlon or Clairol? Your hair’s so pretty. Which do you use?” At night she would draw them from memory—she and Buck, both, taking a break from homework in either one of their kitchens. She had pasted the caricatures onto cardboard, and then cut them out. Inanimate and one dimensional, those girls were at her mercy, paper doll mannequins. She created period costumes with mop caps, crimped hair, or no hair at all, gave them bloomers to wear and cruel stays that pushed their bosoms up to their clavicles. A way of getting even? Her family’s position had been nebulous in a roughshod farming community—professional people yet not of the town either, living, as they did, far out on a wooded peninsula.
Buck Quincy had been her closest friend. When she was small, his mother had looked after her while her parents were at work. His family owned a dappled gray horse named Silver; Buck had taught her to ride bareback. Straddling the horse behind him, she would rocket across the stubbled fields. They took turns at the reins. Buck could do war cries. He could do bird warbles and mimic his teachers. He could do the minister’s stammer. In fifth grade he had played Christ in the Easter pageant. Never would Joanne forget him standing against a cross painted onto the backdrop, arms outstretched, chin sunk onto his chest. “Oh my father, why hast thou forsaken me?” The two of them were always dressing up and acting out plays at home. His mother kept a trunk of old clothes in the attic. Joanne’s favorite scene was the one in The Importance of Being Ernest where Gwendolyn and Cecily get bitch over tea. With his reedy body and delicate feature, Buck was a beautiful Cecily.
In high school they went to movies and proms together. That too was part of the show; everyone assumed they were a couple. His lips were always cool and gentle when he kissed her goodnight at the foot of her porch. A kiss or two—it never went any further than that and something told Joanne it never would.
Then one summer night Silver was lame and couldn’t be let out to graze. They went out to the stable to check on her. “Alas, poor Silver,” Joanne exclaimed. “You’re bored. How shall we entertain you?”
“We’ll do passion and lust for her,” Buck said.
He stood Joanne against the wall and slowly unbuttoned her shirt. She held her breath while he spread the flaps of her shirt and stared. Her brother, her dearest friend, was it possible they would be lovers? Galloping across the fields together. Holding on until every limb ached. Falling, you could die, who cared? She’d always felt embarrassed listening to other girls talk about it. Now she wanted to know. What was a lover? Buck suddenly shuddered and looked away. “Oh God,” he said and burst into tears.
They had planned to go into business together as designers. But the week before graduation Buck was run down by a truck, his face and body crushed beyond recognition. Buck couldn’t be gone—it was somebody else wearing the same clothes. She had refused to go to his funeral. When Joanne rode his horse, she heard bird calls that sounded just like him. He was in the air all around her. No more secrets, nothing to hide.
This time when the phone rang, it was the hospital. Carl was now in the recovery room.
~ ~ ~
When Joanne got there, he was lying on his back in the narrow-railed bed, eyes half-closed. She touched his cheek and drew her hand back. How cold he felt.
“Post-op,” said the nurse. “Body temp has to adjust. Takes a couple of hours. Maybe more …” Evidently only half sentences were spoken in this arctic zone.
She was allowed into the I.C.U. for ten-minute intervals every hour. In between visits she either sat or paced in the lounge.
It was not a particularly well-endowed hospital, serving, as it did, a largely indigent population of drug dealers, pensioned widows, illegal immigrants, children who nibbled at leaded paint. The waiting room was a windowless alcove with a frayed brown couch and a wobbly wrought iron standing lamp at the end where she sat. Joanne stared fixedly at the entrance to the I.C.U., the hateful steel doors that kept her from him.
Later that afternoon, she had a chance to talk to the surgeon who stopped by. “When is he going to come to?”
The surgeon removed his glasses and rubbed the red dents in the bridge of his nose. “He’s a bit pokey. However, everyone’s different. I’d say tomorrow morning at the latest.”
“Do you think he hears me talking to him?”
The surgeon slid his wire rimmed glasses carefully back into place. He patted her shoulder. “The key word here is patience.”
There was no such thing as privacy in the I.C.U. A long room with beds on either side. At first Joanne had felt self-conscious, doing those monologues in earshot of everyone else. She could hear the visitor directly across the aisle who was also doing monologues—by coincidence her husband’s name was also Carl. A bony man, skin the color of incinerator smoke, his head wrapped in bandage. Brain surgery, Joanne guessed. He was conscious, able to sit up, but she never heard him speak. His wife called him “Carlie.” “They say I’ll be able to bring you home in a week, Carlie. Isn’t that fantastic. Wait till I tell the kids. They miss you so much.”
Listening in on the other Carl’s wife inspired Joanne. “You know who called?” she said and told about this one and that one. “And I’ve got a good start on the costumes for Happy Fella. You’d better hurry up and get well so you can visit me when I’m out there. Otherwise I won’t go.”
He had been almost as excited as she about the job; they were planning to take a few days’ vacation after the production was over. Now, out of the corner of her eye she watched the other Carl dangle his legs over the side of his bed. He leaned forward suddenly and began to unbutton his wife’s blouse.
“Oh no, honey. Carlie, no, not here!” She glanced over at Joanne. “No, no, baby, I’m telling you, what will people think?”
Joanne felt the nurse’s cool fingertips tapping her elbow to let her know it was time to go.
Each time she came out of the I.C.U. she was trembling. This afternoon, the other Carl’s wife was waiting ahead of her in the cafeteria line. “I’m Bethanny,” she said, pointing to a table by the window. “My favorite spot just opened up. Let’s grab it.”
Bethanny was tall and pleasant looking, with high cheekbones and sloping shoulders. Joanne liked the sound of the name, Bethanny, the short “a.” She added it to a list she was keeping in mind for her own children.
They carried their trays across the cafeteria to a table in front of a plate glass window overlooking a courtyard. Bordering the lawn and walks were beds of purple and white iris. Groups of doctors, students, and nurses strolled outside. Mothers pushed their children in wheelchairs.
Bethanny was plucking leaves from the window planter. “Look at these coleuses, they’re infested with mealybugs.” White mites crawled on the underside of the mottled pink and green leaf that she held up for inspection. “Their saliva is poisonous, it destroys the plant.”
The bugs were revolting, Joanne thought. She’d never seen one before.
Bethanny crushed the leaf between her fingertips and dropped it into the coffee at the bottom of her cup. “The best thing I know to do is to take a Q-tip dipped in alcohol. The mealybug shrivels up as soon as you touch it. I don’t have any qualms killing these bastards. I’m sort of a plant freak. I’m doing a series of books about them for kids.”
“You’re a writer?” asked Joanne.
“An illustrator. Freelance. What about you?”
“I’m a costume designer,” said Joanne.
Bethanny nodded. “Since Carl got his diagnosis, I haven’t been able to get much work done.”
“I can imagine.”
“Why is your husband here?” Bethanny asked.
Hesitating, Joanne took a sip of tea. “Pneumonia,” she murmured.
“The coffee’s lousy in this place, but I don’t care,” said Bethanny. “This spot reminds me that it’s summer out there.” She nodded toward a group of I.C.U. nurses conversing in a corner. “Don’t know what I would have done without those guys. It sure helps to have someone to talk to, doesn’t it?” She smiled at Joanne.
Tea sloshed out of Joanne’s cup. She mopped it up with her napkin. The tea was cold, and she was cold inside.
Joanne placed her empty cup back on her tray. “I really should go,” she said.
As they walked from the cafeteria, she paused to look back at the window. A kitchen aid was wiping off their table. In the courtyard the irises went right on blooming.
The resident was gone. “Where have you been?” Carl asked anxiously when she walked in. “They just gave me a shot a moment ago. I’m not myself.”
Joanne leaned over the rail to kiss him. “I’m crazy about you whoever you are.”
“I’ll be a lot nicer tomorrow.”
~ ~ ~
The phone shrilled while she was getting dressed the next morning. She heard her mother’s voice on the answering machine while she boiled water for coffee. “Are you sure you don’t want us to fly down? I’ve sent you a food package. You’ll get it in a day or two.” Joanne looked inside the refrigerator—one egg and two shriveled plums. She thought of the winter mornings of her childhood, her mother downstairs, preparing a hearty breakfast for the family. Many times, Joanne, like most of her friends, ordered out, avoiding cooking chores. Inside a cupboard Joanne found ketchup and molasses bottles, boxes of corn starch and peppercorns, instant corn muffin mix. Carl was a much better cook than she was. On Sundays he would concoct all kinds of delicious meals for them to eat during the week. Maybe if he was off the I.V. tomorrow, she’d take him a batch of muffins. He loved muffins.
Surely he’d be better by then. Today was just a little bit of a setback. His condition was listed as “fair,” according to the floor nurse. Good, satisfactory, fair, serious, critical—those were the official ratings. Joanne crossed her fingers.
The train was slow coming today. A group of children crowded into the car with her. The counselor in charge of them had shaggy, short gray hair and a brusque, commanding manner that reminded Joanne of someone she knew. She figured out that it was Carl’s Aunt Charlotte, who had raised him after his parents died in a plane crash. Charlotte had been an ambulance attendant. When Carl was old enough, she would take him with her sometimes. Carl said he had learned quite a lot about medicine. But he was shocked the first time he heard her badger a patient’s family for on the spot cash. It was the only insurance a private ambulance company had against a patient’s death, Charlotte explained. “No checks, no credit cards,” she would bark. She did, however, have a romantic streak. When Charlotte had been hospitalized with cancer, she had made the two of them stand one on either side of her bed. “Now,” she commanded, “promise to love each other for keeps. Kiss,” she said, and reached up and pulled their heads together--“Just in case I don’t make it to the wedding.”
Joanne was upset this morning to be thinking death thoughts. Carl was going to be fine, she told herself. Soon he would come home. She would take wonderful care of him. Just might have to go slow for a while.
~ ~ ~
The nurse peered at the thermometer. “Spiking a fever,” she announced in the usual shorthand. “Heart’s a bit racy.”
“I know that,” Carl said crankily. His cheeks were flushed. He was annoyed that Joanne hadn’t brought a newspaper with her.
“I’ll get you one when I go out later,” she promised.
He ran his fingertips over his cracked lips. “Would you bring me some chapstick too? None of that fancy mint or strawberry flavored stuff. You know, the mentholated kind I always get.”
Out in the street, Joanne bumped into Dave Anderson, negotiating with a vendor for a bag of peaches. He and Carl had roomed together their first year in medical school.
“It’s probably some kind of post-op infection, Joanne. If the antibiotics don’t bring his fever down, they’ll have to look harder.”
“Look for what?”
“Hemorrhages, embolisms—they occur in a small percentage of cases.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Not intentionally, but you asked. He’s putting up a good fight.”
Temperature was up in the middle of the day. Even his smell was different—sour and sickly—this body of his she’d thought she knew so well: the compact bones, strong thighs, supple back. Joanne hated the thermometer for turning in evidence against him, the programmed machines that might detect pockets of weakness.
~ ~ ~
“No call for alarm.” Dr. Moore-Blanding has just come in. “I’ve ordered a scan first thing tomorrow, and we’ve started him on an anticoagulant that’s proved very effective.”
“What is it?” Joanne said, scared. The small percentages. “Effective against what?”
“Pulmonary embolisms. We don’t know yet if that’s what’s going on, but it’s a possibility.” Dr. Moore-Blanding patted her shoulder. “Now my dear, don’t worry. We’ll lick this thing.”
We? she thought. If only there was something she could do.
At home, she tried to clear away some of Carl’s mess. Stacks of paper everywhere, color coded. You’ve taken the chaos out of my life, he had once told her. It was a fair bargain. He had taken the dreariness out of hers.
What didn’t interest him? She loved his small bright eyes, the knots of intelligence in his forehead. They went out three or four nights a week to theatre, opera. He talked her head off in swanky restaurants. Perhaps they should have stayed home more—his work was very tiring. But it was hard to slow him down. “Nonsense, I’m not tired,” he would say. Joanne was startled now by the shrill ring of the phone.
“Honey,” Carl said, “what are you up to? I’ve had a stream of residents probing me everywhere this morning, I need some distraction.”
She laughed. “I need some distraction too from all your piles of papers on the dining room table. I’m planning on getting to the hospital in a couple of hours.”
“Good. I can’t wait.”
At times like now, the A Train was user friendly, the same express Carl ordinarily took to work each day, lugging a briefcase filled with medical journals. Perfect timing—the train pulled into the platform as soon as she arrived. She felt like flinging her arms around the silvery sleek car thrusting open its doors in front of her. At this hour, there were few passengers. She spread the pleats of her skirt on the seat around her. Inside her tote she carried yesterday’s batch of Get Well cards, plus a box of thank you notes she had designed and printed up—she had sketched the image of an invalid, reclining like a Roman in a toga before a platter of goodies, with the caption: I RELISH YOUR GOOD WISHES—Carl would be amused, she was sure.
The moment she walked into his room, he pushed himself higher onto his pillow. “You came at the right time. I was having a bad dream … I was out on the fire escape. There was this puppy out there going down the ladder, and it fell …”
Joanne caught her breath. “Think about something nice. Do you remember the day we went for a walk in the park, and all at once hundreds of pigeons flew out of the meadow and spread across the sky, it was such a joyful scene.”
Carl smiled. “Sure, I remember.”
The sky today was the same pale shade of blue it had been that day. Was it only two weeks ago? The higher the pigeons had flown the whiter they had appeared to be, as if the air contained bleach.
Was all that whiteness a good omen?—that is, if you believed in omens, and at the moment maybe she did. Some people might think of blizzards or flags of surrender, but for Joanne white conjured up dogwood blossoms, or these days, a thrift shop dress perfect for a wedding scene.
What a leap. She was always pleased when people would ask how they’d met, as if the telling made it more real.
It had been a hot summer day and there she was, miles from town, trying to pump air into a flat on her bike. A rented Dodge with a fishing pole sticking out the window had pulled up. A guy with a good summer tan opened his door and got out, without saying anything. Rail thin, he looked like he’d emerged from a pencil sharpener. “Could be a valve.” He offered to give her a lift to a repair shop.
Usually Carl would come in on cue at this point: “There I was coming in empty handed from a morning of fishing and she hooked me.” Sometimes she wonders if he’s being corny for her sake. Joanne will either abbreviate matters—“And he’s been helping me ever since”—or else continue to describe the courtship step by step.
Dave offered her a lift home that evening. “The nurses will call if there’s any change. You could use a good night’s sleep.”
She shook her head. Sleep … If only …
~ ~ ~
She turned over with a groan the next morning. ‘7:30’ the green digital letters flashed. It was the hour she usually rose and got ready for work. Projects delayed, a costume she should’ve designed. Everything was on hold now. An image of Carl flashed through her mind—still lying flat, eyes squeezed shut.
“Wake up my love.” Hospital routines always began early. Bedpans, breakfast, visits from doctors.
She picked up the receiver—dialed his room. The phone rang a dozen or more times before frowning, she hung up.
Where could he be? She felt a pang of concern.
Joanne dressed quickly. The express was already sitting in the station when she got there, engines vibrating. The motorman looked out through his window and grinned at her as she ran toward him. “Come, come,” he seemed to be saying.
But just as she reached the door, it slid shut and the train took off without her. “Damn!” she screamed, and slammed her palm against the moving steel.
Her hand was on fire.
As luck would have it, another train arrived almost immediately. The doors swung open and she stepped inside to a corner seat apart from the other passengers. Why hadn’t he answered the phone? The train pounded around a curve. The window behind her reflected in the window in front of her. She saw it—like some enormous mouth ready to snap shut—she saw it twice, a huge yawning cave.
