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llBRARY
Michigan State
University

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

WET DREAMS: A NOVEL
presented by

Deborah Beth Davies

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Master of Arts (kgeem English

M V @103

Major professor

Date IIQ&£W/vf .270 (75.7

0-7639 MS U is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

MSU

LIBRARIES

 

 

 

 

RETURNING MATERIALS:
Place in book drop to
remove this checkout from
your record. FINES will

 

be charged if book is
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:. '. I'M-w”

§1N051221

 

 

 

 

WET DREAMS: A NOVEL

By

Deborah Beth Davies

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of English
1987

 

Copyright by
DEBORAH BETH DAVIES
1987

ABSTRACT
WET DREAMS: A NOVEL
By
Deborah Beth Davies

Liz and Joe Holt, Frank Medlar and Laurel McKay are four
friends facing the hurdles of middle age. Sagging muscles,
sick kids, contraceptive problems, parental loss, career
setbacks and political woes are eased by friendship and
sardonic humor. The stakes become higher when they meet

a local waitress, Sally, who hitchhikes wearing only a
gold ankle bracelet. Liz believes Sally has a role to

play in her life....

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

This work owes much to the encouragement of Sheila Roberts,
who allowed me to have faith in these characters.

iv

CHAPTER 1

The year 1983 was the year I became obsessed with
a waitress. I didn't choose her. She appeared in our
lives, unexpected as an iceberg on Outer Drive and
Woodward. She wore a gold ankle bracelet with a heart
shaped clasp, and her name was Sally Ann.

Nineteen eighty—three had been a bad year for my
family. One of those years when everything broke, but this
year, along with the television, the dishwasher and the
toaster oven, we broke too.

Wendall, my husband's father, died after a bout
of pneumonia. His lungs had been weakened by fifty years
of chain smoking, and he lay for weeks in a hospital bed
in a coma, an oxygen bubbler beneath his nose like a jaunty
handle bar mustache. Wendall died owing the bank
$200,000, and Joe and I inherited the firm and the debt.

When I met Joe I was in art school in Ann Arbor,
and he was working on a degree in sociology. Wendall
begged, bribed and browbeat Joe to join the family
construction operation, and when Joe agreed he unexpectedly
thrived on the work. There's a lot of applied sociology
in building. Joe was as happy as a pig in mud with
population studies, earthquake predictions, radon pollution
charts and tensile metal strengths. We moved to be closer

1

2

to Wendall's business, and I quit school but kept up my
interest in art. Wendall and Joe didn't always agree about
the firm's future, Wendall belonging to the "no guts, no
glory" school of finance, but the partnership went better
than I'd expected, right up until the time when the
recession hit Michigan.

In no time, banks were giving employees lessons
on how to hotwire bulldozers in the middle of the night.
Joe and I were Sane members watching our private lives go
under with the Midland Nuclear Power Plant. Half our
friends and neighbors lost their jobs and moved to Phoenix,
Houston or the Silicon Valley, and four houses on our block
were up for sale.

In first grade, my daughter, Ellie, was a
precocious youngster who kept crickets in her underwear
drawer. In January, she fell off a swingset, wearing ice
slicked red mittens, and broke her wrist. By the time the
cast was off, she had started on a pilgrimage through the
stations of every known child's ailment. Strep throat,
chicken pox, mononucleosis, stomach flu, measles...you name
it, she had it. It took the better part of six months to
discover she had an infection in the recently mended bone,
and the infection was dumping gunk into her system, making
her vulnerable to every passing germ. Massive antibiotics
solved the problem; odd sounding products that made
pharmacists crow with pride. By the end of May, Ellie was

better, but behind in school and a stranger to her friends.

About the time that Ellie got better, I hurt my
back. I twisted my ankle, carrying in groceries, went down
with the Trix and Crisco and came up with torn ligaments.
My doctor, a rotund blond, prescribed Aspirin, rest and
swimming. She advised I avoid elaborate cures and
resulting complications. Learn to swim a mile, she said,
and I would save my life.

There I was, the epitome of the uninsured
housewife, unable to lift our ten pound cat, Quince. I
couldn't rake, vacuum, clean toilets, carry laundry or
stand two minutes without bursting into tears. For a month
I lived on the couch, staring at the fraying patches on the
arms, where Quince determinedly sharpened his claws. We
were trying to keep the heat bills down. I huddled under
blankets like an irritable cave woman, trapped in a squalid
cave.

Joe is never cold, or irritable either. He's
kept his rangy build from inspecting outside work. If I
look at him through a stranger's eyes, I see his brown hair
is thinning, and his middle is going to flab a bit, though
not so much as mine. Something about his shoulders and
eyes makes him look predatory; actually he's easy-going to
a fault.

After Wendall's death Joe crossed an invisible
line into slobdom, the line that determines which men end
up paying child support. He would sporadically help Ellie

with her homework, run a load of wash, or read Dr. Seuss.

h

The next three nights he'd fall asleep watching "Dukes of
Hazard" reruns, leave the stove on, burn pans, break glass
and not clean it up. Never loquacious, he now was so
quiet, particularly when we were alone, I wondered whether
he'd tell me if the kitchen caught on fire. He picked his
cuticles bloody, and was hurt and offended when I said he
seemed depressed.

I alternated between bouts of housework and
reading escape fiction. I noticed that year, a very
strange thing about those stories. I began to see emerging
from the pages, a repetitive background character I had
never noticed before. This character was invariably a
hard-eyed woman pushing forty, sometimes younger, going
downhill and embittered at nineteen or twenty eight. She
often had some outward physical sign of inward
disintegration, such as telltale sagging breasts or
graying nostril hairs. Something about the presence of
this woman made me nervous. I scowled, curled on my
fraying couch, and tried to analyze why.

Sometimes I thought about getting out my art
equipment, the tiny bottles of paint that cost as much as
Ellie's prescriptions, the spirit soaked rags, the
stretching box I used to silkscreen cards. When Joe was in
school, I had built up a small business, making greeting
cards and selling them to campus stores. They were
beautiful cards, if I say so. Clouds of mauve wysteria,

blue gray Hokusai tempests, tiny red and gold teddy bears,

stylized white and black lambs. When we lived in Ann
Arbor, I'd sold enough to buy art equipment, but it's
difficult to market work long distance, and when Ellie was
sick it had become impossible. My portfolio was stored
between the wall and Joe's desk now, and both the desk and
folder were gathering dust.

The spring of the year had been the worst; by
late summer I was moving gingerly about. Ellie slammed
around catching toads and drawing colored chalk sidewalk
pictures, belatedly learning how to ride a bike. She
didn't have to get to bed early, that summer; she spent the
night with friends and came home stuffed with waffles and
good times. There were days when I managed to feel almost
human. Nights, when the windows were open, and the soft
damp smell of late summer rains washed into the house, I
felt restless and wondered what exactly I would do for the
rest of my life.

I thought it would help if Joe and I got out more
often. We began a Friday night round of rural bars, trying
to avoid other familiar, worried middle class faces. We
often drank with our science fiction toting, divorced
friend Frank Medlar. Frank is a plastic surgeon, a
specialist in cleft palate cases. He carries a notebook of
before and after pictures, infants whose misaligned faces
have been broken and rejoined. His ex-wife, a cool
brunette, has moved to a Mexican commune where she lives

with a woman and raises Saint Bernard dogs. Frank is thin,

6

smallboned, short, mustached, blond and sardonic. He
drinks anything, bootleg beer, blackberry schnapps,
Guiness, vodka and koolaid, and seems less a doctor than a
facial carpenter.

Joe and Frank talk movies, Frank and I talk
books. We never talked about sex until we met Sally Ann.

One rainy Friday I ordered pizza for the sitter,
and Frank, Joe and I went driving in the rattle-trap black
pick-up truck Frank bought to haul firewood. I held myself
upright, braced against the springs, and we headed east,
through an August rain. The country smelled of last year's
oak leaves and cat urine. X-rated video rental shacks
alternated with seasonal fruit stands and bargain shoe
emporiums. We ended up at the ramshackle Connie's Bar and
Grill. Connie is the owner, an amiable platinum blond who
knows her customers by name. Most of the waitresses were
just people, women with short cropped hair and fallen
arches. There was a jukebox, and someone was playing
"Honkey Tonk Angel." The place had pizza, nachos, chowder,
cherry pie and Sally Ann.

Sally stood out like a pearl in a rubbery oyster
gut. She had shoulder length white-blond hair and wore
white knit shorts and a tank top. As I say, she had an
ankle bracelet. She wore white, flat heeled plastic
sandals. She should have looked tawdry, but she didn't.
Marilyn Monroe must have looked like that. She a blank

child's face, the face of a sleeping madonna, and she

7

absolutely, undeniably radiated sex. She maintained an air
of stupified distance, taking orders as though stepping
over dead bodies. When she bent over to take our order,
you could see the whole of her small, sungold breasts. She
smelled of aloe. Frank claimed to be sick of women, but
his eyes followed her as though leashed to her fanny like a
dog.

Two tables away, some construction workers were
drinking. One man with a receding hairline lurched over
and dropped a napkin over Joe's eyes. It slid to his lap
and lay there, a small white patch on the crotch of his
blue jeans, showing women with curlers and rolling pins,
and husbands cheating on their wives.

"You, Joe, better keep your hands off that one."
The man belched. "Her mother, Connie, owns the bar, and
she'll cut you off. Not to mention your wife, here'll cut
you off from something, or maybe she'll cut something off'a
you."

"You know him?" Frank asked, watching the man
step into the back parking lot.

"An asshole," Joe nodded. "I want some nachos.
What about it, Liz? Want to share them with me?"

Sally Ann brought the pitcher of beer and nachos,
but was soon replaced by a woman in her sixties who called
all three of us "Hun." We drank a little longer, and drove
home. I put my head on Joe's shoulder, and listened to

Frank sing "Plastic Jesus on the Dashboard of my Car."

8

The next Monday I dragged my whimpering body to
the Y Center. The chlorine smell brought back memories of
seventh grade gym classes when I'd still worn undershirts
and hated open showers. Then I'd been one of the last
girls not to wear a bra; now I was one of the few women
there who wore one. Why, I thought, did I never get this
right?

Disinterested in housewives' bodies since time
immemorial, the Y was now competing in earnest for working
women's newly won bucks. In the last year the locker rooms
had added celery green carpet, pink and lavender painted
lockers, a masseuse, weight lifting equipment, a sauna, a
steam room, and a tanning booth. The smell of new paint
still hung thick in the air. The last time I'd been there
the lockers had been gray, and women had had their choice
between cooking and volley ball.

I came to try the small therapy pool that
sheltered men and women who flexed stiff shoulders, aching
bones and assorted broken parts. The maimed ranged from
basketball players with ruined knees to feisty old women
who wore bathing caps over nonexistent hair. The lanes of
the real pool were blurred with lap swimmers, noon time
athletes, hairy chested men who walked as if their pricks
were made of gold.

I loved the therapy pool. The warm water relaxed
me, took away pain so that I could curl like an embryo,

like a fish.

9

Soon I had a September routine. I'd send Ellie
off to school. Then, stepping over towels, toast crumbs
and Quince, I'd rush to the Y. I'd change and get into the
small pool, float for a while, then switch to the large
pool and swim a length front crawl. Then I'd get back to
the small pool. For a week I swam one length. The next I
swam two. By the end of September, I swam ten lengths, an
eighth of a mile. I was drying myself with a rusk-rough
towel, congratulating myself, flushed with pride, when the
tanning booth door opened, and Sally Ann stood naked next
to a sign that said "Get Tokens at the Desk."

There were women standing all around. Young
women bemoaning first stretch marks, society matrons with
electrolized eybrows and tummy tuck scars, and old women
whose breasts hung like withered grapes. Nakedness is a
strange thing. All my life I've seen women naked, but
generally the naked women have been my own age, plump when
I was, shapely when I was, nursing and sagging when I was.
This was the first time I had seen an entire room full of
women, ages eighteen through eighty, united in dislike. It
wasn't so much Sally's boyish thighs, the gentle rise of
her stomach, the breasts improbably upright. Something
about her glowed; gave off an essence. She was in some way
burning, sparking cold energy.

I stared at Sally, entranced as the other women.
I could not imagine Sally having been an awkward child, or

an adolescent picking pimples by fluorescent light. She

10

seemed to feel herself the ultimate gift, perfection frozen
in the present.

I pictured her stepping through a door in the
middle of the night, naked like this, with a sheen of sweat
on her breasts.

She began to rub lotion methodically over her
body. Hands, arms, breasts, ass, thighs, calves, flawless
heels. She was blocking the aisle. Other women had to go
around her, stepping over benches in order to get by. She
belonged, I thought, with champagne in a bucket, brass
bedposts, and black silk sheets.

I jammed my tennis shoes on over damp, sockless
feet. Outside, the air was unseasonably chilly.
Disconsolate pigeons squatted on orange tile church roofs.

The Aspirin I'd taken felt raw and sour in my
stomach. I could picture someone in bed with Sally,
fucking her, that was certain, legs and arms waving in a
glorious scramble. Someone who ought to be there, all
tangled up with her.

Joe, I thought. I wanted to send Sally to my
husband, the way you send bellygrams or clown—toted mylar

balloons.

CHAPTER 2

Joe had news that night at dinner. A friend of
Wendall's had referred a client to him, a Lapeer farmer who
wanted site work done before construction in the spring.
The project was a pig hotel, the first I'd ever heard of, a
building where pigs never see the light of day. I hated
the idea, but Joe was joking and cheerful. He likes
learning anything new: DNR drainage regulations, what mix
of concrete resists porcine urine, what fans ventilate
rooms rendolent of pig. When the firm built a dialysis
center, Joe spent hours reading about kidneys. When they
built a warehouse he came to greatly admire fungus. The
same all-accepting nature makes him like his clients as
well.

This particular client, Elliot, had made money
raising soybeans, and now hoped to turn corn and railroad
access into pork. Joe brought home a bottle of Cutty Sark
from said client, as well as some chocolates he'd picked up
for Ellie. He went to bed early, but I didn't resent it.
Drunk, he looked comfortably tousled and familiar, not like
days when he was sober, silent and withdrawn.

Ellie played outside in the September twilight.
That's the closest kids get to dusk in Michigan, now that

daylight savings has taken the world of summer shadow from

11

12

them. Inside, the lights reflected back from the windows.
I looked around, aware of the creaking house we'd said we
would remodel. The granite foundation and Michigan
basement give its age away, as had, at first, the furnace
and the plumbing. No two walls were exactly plumb, no
floors truly level. You could put a marble down anywhere
in Ellie's room, and it would roll, with increasing speed,
to ping against the baseboards. There were days when I
cursed the cracked plaster, smoothed over in layers by
successive occupants. Other days, I loved the high arched
doorways. The oak doors with their leaded glass panels had
long ago been stripped, not of varnish, but from the house.
The house felt open, for an old house, with nine foot
ceilings, large windows, and odd gables and bays. That
evening everything looked good: the old, cracked oak
mantle glowed in the light of two hundred watts and
promised solvency.

I spent the last of the evening helping Ellie
make Kleenix birds, laboriously tying string around stuffed
Kleenix heads, and fluffing out Kleenix wings. She was
pink with pride and effort. In the midst of it all, a
surfeit of chocolates caught her and sent her rushing to
the bathroom, hand over her mouth. I ran her tub, found
her clean pajamas, and, magnificent in crisis, tucked her
into bed.

"I'm sorry, Mom," she kept saying. "I just

couldn't help it. Will it hurt your back, cleaning it up?"

 

13

I felt guilty, hearing the fear in her voice, the
fear that I'd start crying, the fear that things would be
bad again, as they had been.

"I'm fine, darling," I reassured her, and kissed
her damp, clean—smelling hair. I reached around behind her
to pour cleanser in the toilet, which promptly began to
foam alarmingly. No wonder, because I'd grabbed Mr. Bubble
instead of scouring powder. Vomit-flecked froth came
rushing up at me. I cursed, rattled the handle, and
stuffed rugs around the toilet base.

With no warning, I was bone tired, exhausted as
a runner who has hit the wall. I washed up and lay down
next to Joe, who was warm and snoring. The sheets had come
untucked and were shoved up around my rib cage. I pushed
the cool smooth cotton down around my ankles, and fell
asleep with the nubby blankets soft against my skin.

Ellie was fine in the morning and went off to
school singing. I grabbed my suit and went straight to the
Y. I didn't see Sally and I didn't stay long in the small
pool. I changed to lap swim, working on my front crawl,
eyeing the way that other swimmers brought their elbows
back midstroke. I started trying to pick up bits of
swimming style, instead of windmilling madly with my arms
and thrashing my legs.

Because I didn't need so much energy, swimming,
it was easier to think. I remembered I'd left a crate of

cards in the basement, and wondered if the spring damp had

14

ruined them. One set, with small, sunbright marigolds, I'd
never tried to market. My cards are expensive by the time
I cover my printing costs, because I like to use good stock
and color that will last.

I wondered if some of the local stores would let
me display my work. Selling on consignment is not easy.
Most big stores don't like to lose the counter space, and
even in small stores, you need some say about where and how
cards are displayed, or you just get the boxes back,
crushed and flyspecked. My thoughts were interrupted when
a swimmer crossed my lane, crashed into me and swam on
without a second look. I think there's something
pathological about male speed swimmers. If he did it
again, I thought, I would shove his bald head down.

Strange that people couldn't get along, even
swimming. I remembered an experiment I had read about.
Scientists had put white mice under water in globes made of
translucent, lung—like tissue. The globes filtered air
from the water like external gills. There had been
pictures of surprised mice treading water, each in its own
little bubble of oxygen. People would all have gill
implants one day, scientists told us. We would live in the
ocean's rise and fall, swimming easily. I let myself float
lazily to the bottom, and came up gasping and rubbing
chlorine from my eyes.

On my way out of the building I ran into Laurel

McKay. Laurel is second ward city commisioner and the

 

AA:

15
vice mayor, an honorary title of little importance that
lets her run meetings when the mayor has the flu. She is
also a good friend; a tall, flat-footed woman with tortoise
rim glasses and a cloud of soft brown hair. We get along
because we don't make each other defensive; she's had
problems during the same years that I have.

I asked her to come by for lunch. She brought a
bottle of white wine and served it while I chopped cheese
into tuna fish. We'd met through Newcomers when we'd first
moved here, and had been united by mutual boredum with the
group. I hadn't seen her as often since she'd divorced
Forest and first run for office two years ago.

Their divorce had made chairs of worthy causes
tear their hair with Vigor. Both Laurel and Forest, a
department head at Eastern, had been active in every
Republican fund raiser, every fine arts project, every
abuse prevention board. Now when both are invited to a
party, their friends quiver and separate into two pulsing
groups, like maimed jellyfish longing to regenerate. Less
from bitterness than consideration to the hostess, where
Laurel goes, Forest does not, and the reverse is true.

Most of my friends blamed Laurel, and chose to
kibbitz with Forest, who wears button down shirts, corduroy
pants, and tweed jackets with the elbows patched. Forest
had reputedly been faithful to Laurel. They had not had
children, and no one knew what they felt about that.

I'd stayed in Laurel's corner. We'd spent hours,

 

1

16

sorting emotions. Forest said we were neurotic, comparing
private lives. We were anthropologists, seeing if
fragments mattered, would fit a pattern, could be named,
categorized. We hoped to find opalescent glass; mostly we
found potshards. We trusted each other not to reveal our
discoveries.

Laurel poked at her tuna fish and drank chilled
wine by the glassful, laughing when Quince jumped on the
table, bunghole to her face.

She lifted him down and gave him some tuna on a
napkin.

"No respect from the masses," she said. "He's
voting for Stevenson."

Laurel was managing her own campaign for
reelection. Why she wanted the aggravation was beyond me.
Laurel was, however, an innately political person, one of
those people who tell you, all too correctly, that the air
you breath and the water you drink are pure politics. She
had an accounting degree but had not worked as an
accountant. While she'd been married, she'd run three
successful campaigns for Forest's friends. She recruited
armies of white—haired ladies to check voter records, gave
cocktail parties, sent fund raising letters, gave radio
interviews. Saying she is good in math is an
understatement. She is one of those dreadful people who
sing Handel's Messiah while doing income tax. Her opponent

was a twenty—year-and-out Ford employee who had

17
gone to school for one year at Albion. He drove for Meals
on Wheels and was an excellent bowler. You could see him
out every Sunday, raking the lawn.

"You really love politics, don't you?" I said,
looking at Laurel. She looked relaxed. Smug. Like Quince
eating tuna fish.

"I guess I do," she said. "A lot of people
didn't talk to me after I left Forest. Not that they cut
me, exactly, they just didn't know how to take me. I'd
been Forest's wife, then nothing. They didn't know what to
say."

"You've never been just Forest's wife!" I
thought, appalled, of the parties, the faculty picnics, the
drinks after concerts she had arranged for him.

"You weren't his wife," I said indignantly. "He
was your project."

"All the same," she said. "Do you have any idea
what it's like to be stuck in an elevator with someone who
works with your ex-husband?"

"Laurel, there isn't one elevator left in this
town."

"I was speaking figuratively." She frowned and
patted her lips with her napkin, then poured herself a
slosh more wine.

"It's better now." She grinned. "If I got stuck
now, people would say, 'Hey, you old bat, how's about the

potholes on my street?'"

 

18

"And you like that."

"Hell, yes. I'm good at potholes. I have a
lover," she added, as an afterthought.

I myself poured the rest of the wine.

"Where did you meet him?" I asked her.

"It was easy. I ran an Agony Column ad."

"You what? You did what? You did what?" She
put her hand to my mouth, to shut it.

"Last July," she said. "I don't know why I did
it. I was bored; I'd been working on the campaign for
weeks and weeks, Forest started seeing Thessaly, who has
the verve of a douche bag, and I wanted to see what I had
that still functioned, besides my brain. I thought about
putting an ad in the Ann Arbor News personal column,
reading 'Unitarian Seeking Same.'"

"You're not a Unitarian," I said, peeved.
"You're a lapsed Catholic." Laurel has this tendency
toward pragmatism. I, for instance, recall when she was a
Democrat.

"I know, but Unitarians sound so safe. The ad
was worse than that," she confessed, "by the time I'd
finished. What's the point in being tacky if you can't
have fun?"

"What did the ad say, Laurel?"

"Unitarian Shepherdess Seeks Swain of Same
Persuasion.”

"Laurel, that's disgusting. What if you'd been

 

hurt?"

"I just couldn't resist," she said. "It had
been years since I'd done anything silly. What could
happen? I have Unitarian friends in Ann Arbor; they
checked out the responses and gave one their O.K. We met
at a bar. It was perfectly safe, in public..."

"What went wrong?" I recognize Laurel's big
build-ups.

"We got in a fight and he hit me."

"Laurel! He didn't!"

"He certainly did. We got in a, ah, heated
discussion, drinking peach schnapps and contemplating
Social Security. You know how I hate forced savings
programs. He lost his temper and slugged me."

"Don't tell me you felt sheepish, Laurel," I
warned her.

"Mostly I felt my jaw," she said. "He got up and
left. I don't even remember his name now, but it was the
start of something, Lizzie. The bartender was so sweet.
He fixed me an icepack. His name is Al, and I spent the
night with him."

"It doesn't sound romantic," I said.

"Maybe not. But it was peaceful. Al's about
thirty five, I'd guess. Younger than I am. And he just
seemed so relaxed. He didn't say much. He certainly
didn't try to fast talk me, Lizzie, and he didn't say a

blessed word when we were in bed."

 

20

I was surprised. I'd always thought Laurel would
talk anywhere, about anything.

"Forest always talked when we were in bed," she
elaborated. She bent down to stroke Quince, who was lying
in a patch of light. "If I started fast, he'd say, 'Slow
down, you're rushing your emotions.‘ So I'd slow down.

I'd look at the ceiling, and take deep breaths, and he'd
say, 'Loosen up, Laurel! You're not spontaneous!'"

"Did you tell him to go stuff himself?" I asked
her.

"I tried to, Liz. But he'd tell me I was
hostile, defensive and inhibited. If I tried to talk he'd
tell me I was saying the wrong things...."

"He must think he's a psychiatrist."

"I think it's his teaching style. He runs
workshops that sound like S and M clubs."

"Was he always like that?" I asked her.

She shook her head and Quince batted her swinging
hair.

"It just kept getting worse. I couldn't do one
thing to please him. Don't scold me, Liz. I know I
shouldn't mess around before the election, but it's such a
nice feeling. Just sort of whole and natural."

It seemed to me Laurel would be in a good mood to
listen. I sat on the couch with the Kleenix birds, and
talked about Sally Ann.

Laurel was impressed. "That's really sick," she

21
said.

My feelings were hurt. "Come on, Laurel, I've
never said that to you."

"I'm not hung up on some bleached blond bimbo."

"I don't think her hair is bleached," I
responded, stung.

"Are you sure you're not attracted to her?"
Laurel queried. "That would be a lot healthier, you know."

"I wondered that, at first," I admitted. "But I
don't think so. There was only one time when I thought I
was turning on to a woman, and then it turned out she was
smoking the brand of cigarettes Joe smokes. She smelled
like Joe, that was all."

Laurel was delicately picking a Kleenix bird to
pieces.

"I just want to do something for Joe," I tried to
explain. "He's not like Forest. He never criticizes; he
never complains. I find I'm keeping a mental scorecard
lately. He cleans up when Quince barfs, so that's one
point for him, but I get up when Ellie cries, which is
worth a lot more points. I catch myself reciting a list of
things he's forgotten. I‘m tired of asking him to wash the
tub or straighten Ellie's bed.

"I can't help him in his job," I added. "I can't
build fucking pig farms. He never asks for anything and I
ask and ask and ask."

"You know," Laurel said, "you're developing a

22

complex."

"You try being an invalid. It's trickier than I
thought."

"He did that stuff before, right? Hefted
laundry, tucked the kid in?"

I felt like shaking Laurel. She was completely
missing the point.

"I don't feel his help is freely given. I feel
as if I'm extorting it, by needing it."

"Tell the truth," said Laurel. "This is really
about your sex life."

"It is not about my sex life. We're always good
in bed. If we could spend all our time in bed, our lives
would be golden. In bed I don't have to ask him, Do This
Joe, Please Do That."

"You can't hand out women like saran-wrapped
butter brickle."

"She looks like saran-wrapped butter brickle.
That's just it."

"Why would she want to go to bed with Joe?"

"Why not?" I asked Laurel. "I told you, Joe is
good company, in bed."

"What's your standard of comparison? How much
experience have you had? That's what you need...you're
probably sublimating, yourself."

"What do you mean? You think I ought to go to

bed with a stranger?"

 

 

23

"The right stranger," she said, ”is not all bad."

There were times when it sounded good, the
zipless fuck romance. Falling in bed with someone who had
never heard you fart.

Having Ellie had been morally stultifying. My
closest childhood friend had had a mother who slept around.
Not only had my friend known, her friends and teachers had
known. She'd shed enough tears into my pillows to convince
me that children know and suffer when their mothers have
affairs. Fathers may avoid detection through distance, but
mothers are too busy and too close. They end up taking the
kid to the doctor at the very minute they should be burning
the Pink Sands Motel Receipt.

Was that what I wanted? I asked. I certainly was
lonely, waiting day after day to see if Joe would talk to
me. To see if he would turn into the person I remembered.
I didn't want a stranger. I wanted Joe.

"You're wrong, Laurel," I told her. "Logical,
but wrong."

"Bullshit," she said, scattering shredded bits of
Kleenix. "It‘s like sending Joe to the PTO. You're
sticking him with your work!"

After she left, I sat and thought over what
she'd told me.

It didn't ring true. Just for once, I wanted
him to go to bed without thinking of the mortgage, the

doctor bills, the gas bills. I felt as though all those

 

24

things shared my bed with me, as though he went to bed
fucking a houseful of problems. And what he felt I didn't
know; he wouldn't talk to me.

One thing I had gained from talking with Laurel.
I had been wrong about those black silk sheets. That made
Sally's room too much like Laurel's image. A white painted
wood or iron bedframe would be better, maybe with a quilt

draped over the foot of the bed.

 

CHAPTER 3

It took me a while to pick up the house the next
morning, including tossing the awful bathroom throw rugs
into the wash. By the time I got to the Y Center, the
locker room was empty but aloe scented. I looked about
wondering if Sally would be there.

There was no one in the room with hair driers.

No one's feet showed under the john doors; the tanning
booth harbored no escaping subliminal glow.

I slouched toward the pool, glancing in the sauna
and the steam room. Both were empty. The showers harbored
two women, each close to seventy. One was stick-thin, her
flat stomach creased and wrinkled. The other was a massive
woman, thickly padded with lard. Vericose veins stitched
the backs of her legs to her buttocks. Her enormous fleshy
bottom showed a thumbprint bruise.

The thin woman stood with her arms crossed over
her chest and let the steaming water pour over her full
force.

"I can't get warm, I simply cannot get warm," she
repeated. "The therapy pool should never be so cold."

"I found it warm enough, Livie," her friend said.
"You know it's hard to be vigorous if the water is too

warm."

25

 

26

I skipped the therapy pool entirely that day,
telling myself I didn't need it as much as some people did.
While I swam lengths I found myself thinking about Laurel,
about Laurel saying I was projecting my own lust.

Was there something wrong with me because I like
to look at women? I've never had the chance to look at men
in a locker room. The few nude models I saw in the art
program made me think of polymer based reproductions of The
Discus Thrower. I don't know what I would have wanted to
see them do, instead of traditionally posing. Not
aerobics. Gardening, perhaps.

It wasn't just the locker room, with its
unstudied postures. Women's bodies do fascinate me. There
is something eternal but varied in the drooping curves
women blandly and so improbably produce. Breasts flat as
baking powder biscuits, breasts pendulous as goat scrotums.
Nipples with brown tips extruded as though from a
lipstick, nipples inset, cushioned in bulging rose.

Women's hips, their derrieres sometimes truly, marvelously
heart—shaped, sometimes molded like thumb pads, sometimes
planked on bone. We live, I defended myself, in a linear
landscape, a stick drawing punctuated by women, discs of
sunlight, full moons, peonies, peaches, and eggs. What
else was round or rounding? Some slugs...I gave up the
theory, and thought about Reubens and Gauguin, Kollwitz and
Cassat.

I thrashed on, musing about good old art and

 

27

nature, when my nemesis churned by me, splashing me in the
face, cutting in front of me so that I had to break stroke
and splutter. His pointed elbows, moving away, looking
like shark fins through the foam. I began swimming again,
determined I would outswim him.

The women in the shower had depressed me, the one
bulging and breathless, and the other thin and cold. My
mother, I thought, had been their age when she died.

My mother had been a tall woman, with thin blond
hair. As a child, I had of course thought her the most
beautiful woman in the world. She was so calm. I had
never, as a child, known her to be unhappy. She made pies
from cherries we had picked and pitted, so that even now
the scent and sight of cherries brings back the remembrance
of twisted wet black tree limbs, the heady scent of
fermenting fruit fallen into the grass. I remember working
with her in the kitchen, feeling the round of pie dough
splay out beneath my hand. She made smoky tasting tea in
an old blue china tea pot, and kept a painted rocking chair
against one kitchen wall. I would pull the chair out into
the middle of the kitchen, and rock and talk to her while
she went about her work. To me she owned a world slow
moving and sensuous. I had been sure when I was grown, I
would own that self—created world. I had married Joe, to
some degree, because he loved my mother, his own mother,
Elaine, having died when he was ten. My mother silently

influenced my decision to leave art school. I craved a

 

28

sense of time, of physical leisure, a sense of the life I
believe she lived.

She had died of a stroke the year Ellie was born,
and my father, still dapper, had remarried within two
months. He and his wife live in Florida with her young
children. He sends Ellie packages of seashells twice a
year.

I swam twenty lengths before I quit. The S.O.B.
was swimming in a lane he now had all to himself. I
dressed stiffly, struggling to get my shoes on. The aloe
lotion still hung in the air, displacing the pungent,
stinging chlorine. I ran a comb through my hair and
suddenly knew where the scent was coming from. In one
corner of a room that held stored equipment, a rarely
employed masseuse kept a three sided screen. When Rhonda,
the masseuse, was not busy massaging, she folded towels and
bemoaned her children's health. I knew why I hadn't seen
Sally. She was behind the canvas screens, lying on a
linoleum topped table while Rhonda's hands kneaded her
smooth as polished stone.

Holding my breath, I stepped into the room and
around the screen. I could tell Rhonda we were out of
towels. Rhonda continued speaking, annoyance in her voice.

"Sometimes she breaths through her mouth. It
must be adenoids," she concluded.

I stared at the woman exuding aloe, the not-Sally

woman corporeal as bread. She was, I realized, my doctor,

 

29

Isabel Hibbs.

"Elizabeth," she said. "It's good to see you."

"Isabel," I managed.

"How are you doing?" she asked. "I'm glad to see
you've been swimming. I myself swim a mile four days a
week."

I tried to keep my eyes on her face and ignore
her beet red thighs.

"I'm swimming," I told her. And added, "My back
hurts."

"As long as you're getting exercise. That's
what's important."

"It does hurt, though," I said, rebellious. "It
hurts whether or not I swim."

"It may always hurt." Her voice was cheerful.
"There's more and more evidence that if back pain isn't
stopped soon after an injury, it becomes like the pain
after amputation. The brain cells keep on registering pain
after the source is gone."

I stared at her.

"You mean, this pain is all in my head? That
it's not real?"

"Oh, no, I don't mean that. It's like a jammed
electric circuit. It's real...it's just not treatable, you
see."

She nodded, head on one side. "So you see, it's

important you don't strain those muscles. Swim, by all

 

30

means swim, that's mostly stretching, but don't lift. And
try a massage," she said.

I drove home, tonguing an old filling. I'd never
noticed this new rough edge. Joe would be late that night.
He'd driven to Lapeer that morning to look for an
apartment where he could stay in the weeks ahead. His car
couldn't take daily commuting, and besides, there might be
snow. He was gone by the time I got back, leaving cupboard
doors open and garbage in the sink. I scooped Quince off a
pile of clean towels, took the garbage out, and carried the
rugs upstairs. Then because I needed something to distract
me, I went down to the basement and got my old boxes of
cards. I sat sorting through them until Ellie came home
from school.

After we ate, Ellie helped with the dishes. I
brought down a load of laundry and started it. Ellie sat
drawing at the kitchen table, one of those pictures you
make when you're very young, starting out with a rainbow of
crayoned color that covers the entire page. Then you
crayon over the colors with thick waxy black. It was my
day for metaphors, I thought with irritation. Isabel
Hibbs' talk about pain had reminded me of marriage; Ellie's
overwhelming black looked familiar too. Later you take a
knife or pen and scratch black from the top layer.

Delicate tracings of life and color seem to be etched
through. Ellie had four pictures in front of her, each

blacked over. She had been peeling crayons and throwing

 

31

the scraps on the floor. She worked with concentration,
crayon smearing her arms, face and fingers.

I turned away from the sink and dropped the dish
cloth. As I bent over, I felt aggrieved muscles pull in my
back. Scattered across the floor, I saw the crayon
shavings, Joe's cigarette butts and two pairs of dirty
socks.

I thought of Isabel Hibbs. Heal now, she had
said, or never. I simply could not live with pain all my
life.

Anger poured through me like adrenaline. I
turned and without thinking, slammed my fist into the wall.
It hurt, a nice solid hurt I could deal with.

Ellie's eyes met mine and flooded with
apprehension.

"Would you please have the decency to pick this

stuff up?"

I heard my own voice, bitchy, and cold as an ice
age.

"I am so sick of finding bits of garbage all over
the house." My voice stormed on beyond control. "If your

goddamn father would ever do one goddamn thing, if he'd
ever pick anything up—-"

"He does pick up sometimes," Ellie said. She
had to say it, but hearing her words made me shake with
rage.

"Pick up these goddamn pieces of paper," I

 

32

ordered.

She scrabbled up a little heap of torn crayon
wrappers, and stood up, struggling to apologize.

"I'm sorry, Momma," she began. I knocked the
wrappers out of her hand.

"That's what your father says. I'm sorry. I'm
sorry! You'll all be sorry when I'm a cripple!" I
screamed. I heard the words and winced. How utterly
cornball. And yet I meant a cripple, of one kind or
another. There are a lot of women with tears collecting in
the hollows of their collarbones.

Ellie fled to her room. I poured myself a juice
glass full of scotch and bolted it, feeling a wave of
warmth distance me from pain. I put Ellie's drawing on the
table and tried to smooth it. One corner was torn and the
thick black crayon smeared on my hands.

I drank another scotch, then brushed my teeth in
slow motion before mounting the stairs, right leg, left
leg, stiff. Ellie was lying under the covers. She
wouldn't turn to face me. I sat down next to her and
rubbed her back. It hurt to sit on the edge of the bed,
but I sat there. There was no one else who could do it;
Joe wasn't home.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I hurt a lot, Ellie. I
shouldn't talk about it; they say it only makes children
worry about their own health. But I do hurt, and I get

angry with you, because I'm tired. I need more help, but I

 

33
should ask. I shouldn't yell like that."

She turned to me and threw her arms around me,
hugging me fiercely, drawing me down.

"Oh, Momma, I love you," She whispered. "I'll try
harder."

My eyes blurred but the scotch kept my voice
steady. I disentangled her hands from behind my neck and
held them in my lap.

"You don't always have to try harder," I told
her. "Pretend you don't hear me. When I get like this,
tell yourself it will all be over soon, and that I love
you, and that I'll always love you, and it's just hurting
that makes me yell like this."

"I know," she said. "When I was sick last year,
sometimes, I couldn't help it, I just felt as though I
hated everyone."

I felt calm spread through me like mercury
expanding. She understood. I clung to her, letting her
comfort me.

I thought she would fall asleep. Instead, she
asked a question.

"Mom?" she asked. "Will I really die some day?"

"Everyone seems to," I admitted.

She was solemn.

"Will I go to heaven with Gramma, then?"

I told her stories about people who had pretty

much died and been revived, people who had insisted there

 

34

was Something Out There. People who said they woke to
light and music. A sense of someone waiting. What we all
want.

I didn't say if I believed the stories. She
nudged up against me, after a while drifting into sleep. I
felt her frail ribs rise and fall against me, and lay
curled around her, warm with her warmth.

I would start over, find some way to keep giving,
would not become hard, closed, cold, brittle and dead. I
would prove I was Joe's friend, and not the bitchy woman
wielding a rolling pin on the napkins at Connie's Bar. How
could strangers joke about me like that? Saying that Frank
could lust after Sally, but if Joe strayed, mamma—wife
would spank? I thought of the dreams I'd had when we were
married. They none of them included being judged a
termagant by assholes. None of my dreams had included
being worn out with pain, screaming at a child, and
failing, failing utterly to enjoy my life.

I would send Joe away. I would send him to
Sally.

I wanted someone to mother Joe so that he would
love me.

Sally could take him into a room like my
mother's, the fire shining like melted copper through the
old fashioned stove's isinglass, the feather bed swallowing
the lovers into its center, soft on the surface, compact,

unyielding below.

 

35

I saw her coming to him, stripping off her
clothing, her breasts like crocus blossoms, her hips,
smooth, unmarred.

She straddled him on the bed, lowering herself

slowly—-

She leaned down over him, pressing her lips to
his—-

She arched back, her lithe body shadowed on the
ceiling——

Shit. I sat up, aggravated. I could get her
that far, but no further. I wanted to see her take him,
mother him, love him, fold him into the soft oyster world
of sex, and the best my mind would give me was soft

commercial porn.

 

CHAPTER 4

Sometime after midnight, I drifted up to the
surface, uncomfortable, and unable to get back to sleep. I
pivoted my legs out of bed, got up and took more Aspirin.
I ran water into the tub, which hadn't been washed in
weeks. I told myself the sticky gray ring was mineral
deposit. Thin scummy bubbles floated across the steaming
surface, but I lowered myself into the water with a
thankful sigh.

I sat in the tub, adding hot water and rereading
Peter Beagle's Last Unicorn. After a while the hot water
tank was empty. I was sitting in tepid water when the
bathroom door opened and Joe looked in.

"I was just getting out," I said.

"Couldn't you sleep?" he asked me.

"No. It‘s my damn back. How was your trip?"

"Fine," he said. "I found an ugly, cheap
apartment. Just what I wanted. Come to bed and I'll rub
your back."

"It's late," I said. "You'll get horny."
"I'll risk it," he decided. "For you, anything."

We lay down together, shoving aside rucked up
blankets. Joe's warm square hands felt comforting. I

started to cry and he mopped up my tears with a corner of

36

 

37

the wrinkled sheet.

"You have to see a doctor again," he said, his
voice muffled.

"I saw Isabel at the Y Center today." I told him
what she'd said.

"You need to see a different doctor."

"I've done that," I reminded him. "Remember Dr.
Nagash?" When I'd first hurt my back, I'd seen a doctor
who has a stellar reputation for dissolving ruptured disks
with papaya juice. The man had looked like Ghandi, but had
told me my problem was out of his realm, not in the bone,
but in muscle and ligament.

"If your vertebrae fuse then come see me," he had
reassured me.

"See another doctor, then," Joe urged.

"I am better," I said. "I can swim a lot
further."

"You're not much better," he insisted. "You
still hurt, and you still cry."

"What about you," I asked him, rolling over to
face him. "Have you thought about seeing a doctor? You're
so quiet, these days."

He traced a line from my forehead, down to my
neck and breasts.

"I don't need a doctor," he said. "I'm not sick.
I'm just inconsiderate."

"Are you happy?" I asked.

 

38

"If I'm not, a stranger won't help me. Anyway,"
he added, "right now, I'm happy enough."

After a while, when the ache was massaged out of
my muscles, we made love slowly and carefully. Playboy
therapy, Laurel calls it. She says the hormones make your
muscles relax. Our sex life really is all right. In fact,
it's better now than it's ever been. When I first hurt my
back we couldn't use traditional positions, and I'd learned
a lot about oral sex. I'd come to think of his penis as a
compact Gumby I could encourage when I could’t encourage
Joe.

That night I kept on trickling tears right
through orgasm, and fell asleep holding Joe's T—shirt to my
face.

Joe took Ellie to school, and I slept in the next
morning. It seemed strange, waking to a sunlit, empty
house. I groped for my slipper, tripped over Quince, and
made a quick decision that just this once I'd forget my
back and improve my mind.

I got a cup of coffee and sorted through my camel
hair brushes. Some were clotted with Ellie's poster
paints; some, Joe had used to touch up knicked enamel.

Most were smooth and finicky as cat's whiskers; they lay in
their cotton beds and stared up at me. I drank my coffee
and stared back. Where, I wondered, was my stencil cutting
knife?

The doorbell rang. It rang again. Laurel

 

39

stepped into the kitchen, pulsing with energy a Geiger
Counter could read.

"I don't have to stay,“ she said, "if you're
working."

"Do stay," I begged. It was so nice to spend
time with a consenting adult. I had the rest of Joe's stay
in Lapeer to work at whatever it was I decided to work at
while Joe stayed in Lapeer. She talked, I fixed coffee and
counted brushes. Where was the squeegee and was it
hopelessly gummy? I thought.

"Milk, or sugar?" I asked her.

"Kahluha, and Black Russians," I heard Laurel
saying when an hour had gone by. My teeth were floating on
three cups of coffee. I now knew that Al liked sushi and
Duck's Breath Theater. Any minute now I expected to hear
about his first baby tooth.

"He hates contraceptives," Laurel confided.

My mind lurched to attention reluctantly.

"Repeat," I said. "Start with that last
sentence."

"He says condoms make him feel like a tap dancer
wearing rubbers, and diaphragms make him feel like he's
poking a water balloon."

”May I remind you," I said, "that at nine months
pregnant, you would feel like a tap dancer wearing cement
galoshes, and resemble a giant water balloon?"

"Al doesn't mind if I use something," Laurel

 

40

reassured me. " So long as it isn't——"

"A diaphragm. I know, I know."

"I'm new at this," she said. "It wasn't a
problem, with Forest."

"Maybe you ought to give Al up," I told Laurel.
"What if someone found out you're screwing around?"

"Male candidates date," she said. "They've been
known to sleep with women. Look at Kennedy, look at
Johnson, look at Basil Brown buying it with coke—-"

"Laurel, you're talking big time. Most of the
local elected have church—going spouses who cheer for their
hubbies at buffalo chip throwing contests."

"Why would anyone know?" she said. "None of his
friends are political. Besides, he works in a
non-political bar."

"I think all bars are political. Like air. And
water."

"So, I don't meet him at the bar anymore. Al's
apartment is way out of town, one of those townhouses that
never really got going before a nicer one came along.
There's almost no one there to see us. And Liz...listen,
really Liz, he's so good for me."

"You sound like a moonstruck child explaining how
meaningful it was being laid in a Corvette."

"Now that's bitchy. I didn't mean the sex, if
you must know. Though that's good too, if I didn't have to

be, well, so nervous about--"

 

41

"About what? For heaven's sake Laurel, tell me
you're using something."

"We're improvising," she said, and gave me a
dignified look. I hoped she meant they were improvising
positions, not timing. In and out fast works in door to
door sales, not in sex technique.

She stubbornly refused to keep her mind on the
issue.

"Can't you see?" she said plaintively. "I'm sick
of toadying up to people, making rounds of parties where
culture is the higher priced spread. I owe so many
people, Liz. Mert McNamara gave me a coffee, so I buy
symphony tickets from her, though I can't tell an oboe from
a bassoon. Timothy Moore introduced me at the Chamber of
Commerce, so I'm going to do radio plugs for the United Way
Campaign...Mick Brewster designed my yardsigns and didn't
charge me, so I have to go see his wife in the chorus of
"Flower Drum Song." Everything I do in this town has a
follow up obligation. Al doesn't know one thing about
politics, Lizzie. And I absolutely love knowing that, when
we get into bed. It's as though when I'm with him the pace
slows and I'm a private person. I'm a kid again. I chew
grass stems, stretch, rub my stomach."

"Pretty soon you can combine those, chew grass
and rub your stretch marks."

"I'm worried," she admitted. "When I started

going with Forest, we frogged around, but we hadn't really,

 

M2

um, consumated the union until after we were married. Then
I wanted to be pregnant. It took us five years to figure
out our bodies wouldn't work. I'm not the most fertile
person in the world, and neither is Forest. For Forest
that's an overstatement, and for some reason my body
doesn't like his sperm, and rejects it, forthwith. I
wanted to adopt, but the waiting lists are long, and Forest
is older. We spent some time talking about a mixed—race
baby; they've just liberalized the rules on that, but by
then our marriage had sort of worn out with the strain. It
was years before we admitted it, but both of us knew."

"Could you use pills?" I asked her.

"I'm over thirty five, Lizzie. Besides, after
watching Marian, I'm not crazy about that."

Marian was a good friend who'd developed cervical
cancer. Surgeons had in theory saved her by taking bits
and pieces out of her insides, starting with the basic
female equipment, shortening her vagina through plastic
surgery, and generally paring her abdominal cavity. She
still looks like Dollie Parton, but one leg drags, and it
may drag the rest of her life. Marian had taken birth
control pills since she was twelve, for acne. Three women
we knew had lost a breast or breasts, and every one of my
friends had been sent to a doctor in a panic at least once,
for a mammogram. "We're going to make a little breast
sandwich," the technician would say, as your flesh

disappeared between squeezing metal plates. Always they

 

 

43

asked about birth control pills. We had a grim feeling.
It's not nice to fool mother nature, and dangerous, as
well.

"Besides," Liz added. "I watched my mother die
of cancer."

So much for estrogen. I still remembered my
first prescription of little white pills, lined so they
could be broken in half. In their slim blue plastic case,
they had seemed like a miracle to me, meaning I could go to
bed with Joe as a princess, and not wake up a pregnant
chimney sweep. That was a lot of years ago, before we'd
chosen to have Ellie. Jumped into bed wanting her and
never changed our mind.

"Al's last girl had an IUD," Laurel continued.
"Al didn't mind once the doctor shortened the tab end of
string. They're pretty much off the market now, because of
lawsuits."

I'd once had a doctor who prescribed a Dalkon
Shield for short term contraception. The nurse, I
remembered, had scolded me when I cried with the pain.

Laurel went on petting Quince in silence. I
didn't know what she wanted me to say, about contraception,
or about Al. As far as I could tell, Al was not an answer
to Laurel's problems, but what was she doing that a lot of
middle aged men didn't do? She was hiding from time,
finding a niche with someone younger, someone who's life

wasn't bugpinned to the community wall.

._‘...._..._

 

 

 

AM

"I'm getting a tubal ligation," she said
abruptly. "I always start to say tubal litigation. The
appointment's for the second week in October." She looked
at me with Ellie's look that said, 'Don't scold.’

Joe had had a vasectomy after I hurt my back.
The procedure, he'd said, was about as much fun as having a
root canal done, but we both enjoyed the aftermath.
Sterilization had done anything but sterilize our lives.

"Why can't Al have the operation?"

"He's younger than I am," Laurel said. "He might
want children."

"Mightn't you?"

"I don't think so." She rubbed the bone above
Quince's eyes and he leaned into her hand.

"I don't think I will," she said, and then
changed the subject. "By the way I saw your blond at a
party Al had."

"What would Sally be doing at a party in Ann
Arbor?"

"A line of coke," Laurel said. "Al doesn't use it
but he smokes a little grass. He says it's more natural
than alcohol."

At any minute the conversation would turn to
natural healing.

"What makes you think you saw the woman I know

from the Y Center?"

 

115

"For one thing, there's the name. She was
wearing a monogrammed white sweater over white wool slacks,
with black high heels. She looks like walking heartbreak.
For another thing, I could see the ankle bracelet. She
came with a small town hunk from Ypsi, and left with a
lobotomized law student dressed in maize and blue. They
were talking about going down to his parents' place on
Marco Island...."

"Marco Island!" I was appalled. How could Sally
leave now? What if she never came back? How would I prove
I was generous, then?

"When's she going?" I asked Laurel. "How long is
she staying?"

"How should I know?" Laurel was amused and
indifferent. "Listen," she said. "All this coffee is bad
for you. Have you got any Camomile? Al says it's good for

the nerves."

 

CHAPTER 5

Frank stopped that evening, bringing a case of
beer, a frisbee for Ellie, and a new set of pictures. I
sat on the couch and examined a child's malformed face, the
damage in this case including a separated lip, a misaligned
nose, and a lumpy, lopsided forehead. Joe opened a beer
for me and glanced at the pictures.

"Can you really patch that up?" he asked Frank.

"That's a messy one," Frank said. "People think
of these cases as cleft palate, but often the cleft travels
up the top of the skull. Once these tykes were put out on
hillsides. We'll need to schedule repeated surgery. We'll
graft bone from the hip to shape the chin, and move those
teeth—-"

He gestured, slopping beer on the open pages.
When Ellie came downstairs and gave him a quick hug, he
turned the book face downward so she could not see.

When Ellie went outside, clutching the frisbee,
Frank wiped the plastic protecting the scrapbook.

"The face will never be perfect," he admitted.
"But we can make improvements. This kid will need years of
speech therapy. He'll need orthodontic treatment. Some
children like this have severe reading problems, because

they, like the deaf, have trouble reproducing sounds."

46

 

47

"One more face for the notebook," Joe said.
"Don't parents bitch, having you charge in with a camera?
If that had been Ellie, I'd have seen you in hell."

"Some mind at first," Frank admitted, "until
they've seen the scrapbook. Then they're usually glad to
have me there. After one of these babies is born, most
obstetricians and pediatricians don't like to talk to the
parents at all. If they do, what they say is minimal.
They are too worried about malpractice cases to predict if
the kid will live, or discuss brain impairment. The
parents are in shock and no one will take time for them,
until I arrive with the infamous book."

He stretched his legs, and popped the top of
another beer can.

"I can show them other children born in the same
condition. Some that started in better shape, some,
worse than theirs. I can show them how the child will look
at twelve, at twenty. I'm old enough so I can show them
pictures of patients who've married and had babies of their
own. I think for parents any picture is worse than being
ignored, almost ostracized."

I felt queasy and was glad when he closed the
notebook.

"I was glad to see Laurel running for
re—election."

Frank and Laurel do not get on overly well. He

makes her feel six feet tall and aggresive; she makes him

 

48

feel like a counterculture dwarf. There's just a shade of
unintentional animosity between them. I was surprised at
the interest in his voice.

"Frank," I said, "I'm astounded. I thought
politics bored you."

"She helped a friend of mine," he said. "He
wanted to get a zoning exemption, and build an office on
the east side. It was zoned neighborhood business, mostly
boarded up housing and sleezy queer bars. Laurel helped
ease the transition to general commercial use."

"Are you going door-to-door for her?" I asked

him.

"Well, no. But I might be convinced to go bar to
bar "

"That reminds me," I said. "I saw that waitress,
Sally."

"You're hanging around Connie's turning into a
lush," he accused me. "Why I haven't I seen you there?

I've been back four times."

"I didn't see her in the bar," I said, and added
on impulse, "I'm probably the only one here who knows how
she looks in the buff."

Frank looked up startled.

"No tan lines," I informed him, "except for the
ankle bracelet."

"Damn," he said. "Are you two cavorting in a

coven?"

L19

"Just getting my exercise," I said, virtuously.
"We both use the Y Center Women's Club."

"Son of a gun," he said plaintively. "Can I come
with you?"

"Why not ask her out?" I was serious.

"No good. She'd love me for my looks or my
money." I think Frank looks fine, sexy, even, but he is
self—conscious about his height. When his marriage
foundered, he nearly went bankrupt. His wife had invested
in his office and wanted her cash out fast; refinancing had
gutted him.

"You might at least ask," I said, feeling
repetitious.

"Then again, I might not. Actually, I've tried
twice to start a conversation. She won't look at me
crosseyed."

"What's the Kipling line?" I asked. "Third wave
goes farthest on the beach?"

He flicked beer at me.

Joe pulled out his own version of before and
after pictures. He too had a portfolio, pictures of pig
hotels. He and Frank talked building costs. I expressed
the opinion that all such places stink in the nostrils of
God.

Joe said I was always complaining about poor
people starving. Pig hotels and the like mean cheaper

protein for all.

 

50

"Oh, pig shit," I said. "How many people with
real money problems are out buying pork chops? Animals are
supposed to grunt and roll and get dirty. There's
something obscene about those porkers living like processed
food."

"You have a romanticized version of farm life,"
he told me. "What about the lambs the French raise in such
small cages that the animals can never turn around? That
way the flesh doesn't develop muscle. What about geese
that are force fed to produce liver pate? Do you think
chickens still peck around the barnyard?"

"It's not the same," I said. "Everyone knows
about dumb poultry, and lambs and cows are vegetarians."

"Vegetarians?" Frank hooted.

"Herbivores, then. It's not the same. Any
biologist will tell you, carnivores and omnivores have a
different mentality. They don't just stand around
contentedly munching hay. They range, they wander, they
develop acumen. Keeping a pig in a cage is like keeping a
cat in a cage."

"Let me know," Frank suggested, changing the
subject, "if this man has pigs with palate problems. I
could be a consultant...for sizable recompense."

Joe and Frank were soon discussing engineering
principles involved in shifting teeth. Ellie banged
opened the door, wet, cold and triumphant, clutching the

frisbee she had recovered from a pond.

 

51

"I can't stand it," I said. "Ellie, how could

you do it?"

"First I used a stick," she said. "The stick was
too short."

"If you get sick..." I threatened.

"Hey, there. What's this I hear, parental
complaining?" Frank gibed. "When you signed up for this

job, you knew the risks."

Joe hustled Ellie upstairs and ran her tub.

"Frank," I said, taking advantage of Joe's
absence, "what do you think about monogamy?"

His eyes widened over the top of his beer can.

"An academic question," I reassured him.

"Well," he said. "I tried it; I didn't like it."

"I've been thinking about Joe," I confided. "If
he wanted to sleep with someone else——to have a chance at
something special, I wouldn't want him to give that up."

"Something special," Frank said. "You're talking
what, perversion?"

"No, you oaf. Someone special. Someone like
Jessica Lange."

He eyed me owlishly.

"That sounds reasonable," he told me. "That
means you get to sleep with Richard Gere."

I was aware of a flush of irritation.

Richard Gere had always struck me as humorless:

I can't bear to stand in line with someone with no humor.

 

52
I thought about going to bed with someone I couldn't laugh
with. The thought was ludicrous, unpleasant, to say the
least.

Joe had put Ellie to bed. I went up to kiss her
goodnight, and when I came down he and Frank were watching
"The Magnificent Seven" on television. I couldn't help
sulking, though I tried not to show it.

Nothing was going right in my fantasy with Sally.
I decided to turn the problem over to Joe, and see if he
could or would make it behave better. I talked to him that
night, after we were in bed.

"This has been a lousy year for me." I fumbled
through the explanation, ending, "I don't like the idea
you're just looking out for me. That you're not, uh,
having a good time yourself."

"Then would I be here?"

"Yes," I said. "You would. You're too nice to
leave."

"I'm alright. I'm fine," he said.

"Well, I worry. I remember how much I wanted to
go to bed with you, when we were in school...I walked all
over the campus, obsessed with you. It seems like such a
waste. So if you find you really want someone"——

Joe was amenable. "All right," he agreed. "I'll
tell you what, if Jessica Lange makes me an offer, I'll hop
into her bed without a qualm in the world."

I laughed; it was nice of him. But then, that was

 

53

the trouble with Joe; I never knew what he really wanted to
do. I rubbed the silky edge of the blanket, thinking
whether I wanted to try the discussion again, and while I
was deciding, heard Joe's peaceful snoring.

The next day my giving index was way, way down.
Ellie woke up crying with a fever and sore throat. She
ached all over, and her lymph nodes were swollen. The
pediatrician agreed to fit her in, and I left in a hurry,
bundling her, clinging and protesting, into her last year's
winter coat. Her wrists stuck out from the coat sleeves,
looking like bits of bone.

The doctor said she had an ear infection and a
solid case of strep throat. He gave her another
prescription for augmented penicillin, a super drug that
chews its way through Virus walls. When I got home after
waiting in line to pick up the prescription, Joe had left
for work. He might have never been there, I thought. He
had disappeared completely except for his dishes on the
table, underwear on the floor, and urine on the raised
toilet seat.

The day was long and difficult. This was the
second day I hadn't been to the Y Center, and I missed it.
My back hurt, and I realized for the first time how
important swimming had become for me psychologically. It
released my tensions, structured my day, gave me the
feeling that I was doing something productive with my life.

I read to Ellie, warmed soup, picked up, cleaned the

5A

toilet. She fell asleep on the couch with Quince tucked
next to her face. I gritted my teeth and got the really
old boxes from the attic: the stencil patterns I had made;
the discolored tins. There had been a time when I had run
amuck with this stuff; stenciling placemats, curtains, sets
of dishes and napkins. I had known it was schmaltzy, but
the color, the play had been fun, something I could do
while Ellie napped. I rubbed the bits of dried paint with
my fingers, and sorted through more shoeboxes full of
cards. There were gold waddling ducks printed over waving
celery; a child's multicolored beachball on a plain white
card. How had I forgotten these things? I remembered
myself, working on them, my hair falling forward around my
face on summer afternoons, secure, and knowing Ellie slept
in the cradle I had stenciled with love.

The phone rang: someone wanting to sell me
health insurance. Ellie woke, crying. I poured myself a
drink.

That night when Joe came home I exploded into
temper. I asked Joe if it would kill him to pick his socks
up, to clean the tub or carry the wash downstairs once in a
while. He said, he did those things whenever I asked him.
Why did I lose my temper? Why didn't I just ask?

I tried to explain how difficult asking had
become lately. Joe was patronizing because I was angry. I
grabbed my coat and stormed out of the house.

I walked in the grass, not on the cold hard

 

 

outside.

 

CHAPTER 6

I started October with an appointment to have the
rough edge of that filling filed down. I have never
minded dentist appointments. Having anything cleaned for
me, instead of by me, is acceptable. I sat in the office,
waiting, and picked up a copy of a health and fitness
magazine. I thumbed through, looking for calcium
requirements.

What I found was a chart on facial wrinkles. I
stared at the diagrammed dissolution of a face. There was
the woman in her twenties, her thirties, her forties,
fifties, sixties. They didn't bother going further, which
said something in itself. I didn't mind most of the
gruesome descriptions. Bags under the eyes, crows feet,
turkey wattles, and parentheses around the mouth. What
stopped me cold was the cheerful description of the tip of
the nose beginning to slowly droop. "The eyebrows
flatten," the italicized print informed me. "And the nose,
from gravity, thickens, and droops, as does the chin. The
nose looks thicker, enlarged and beaky. It and the chin
seem out of proportion with the rest of the face." The
column ended brightly, "The face is now older. It is a
changed face. But it is an interesting face!"

In non-italicized print, at the bottom was a

56

 

57

single note about men aging. Men have fewer problems, the
article noted, because men have thicker skin.

Amen to that, I thought, and went in to get my
teeth cleaned. It was almost noon when I got out; too late
for the Y. Sucking my teeth thoughtfully, I drove to
Laurel's apartment, parked the car and walked up the broad
flight of hardwood stairs. The building was one of the
better downtown apartments, with plaster moldings, ornate
carved oak lintels, and gray wool carpet that was worn but
dignified.

Laurel let me in. I always needed a minute to
defeat a feeling of trompe l'oeil here. Forest had kept
the house but she had kept the living room, bedroom, and
dining room suites, which filled the current apartment like
oversized doll furniture. The solid walnut kingsized
bedframe filled her bedroom, so that she had to climb over
the footboard getting into bed. A long table with
Chippendale chairs backed into the kitchen; part of a gold
velvet wingback chair blocked the front door. Laurel
dodged the obstacles and led me to a massive, green striped
couch. She walked hunched slightly, as though someone had
poked her in the ribs.

"Hello," she said. "Do you want to see my
Band—aid?"

She pulled up a long yellow cotton jersey,
revealing unzipped bluejeans and a red and green plaid

Band—aid where five o'clock would have been if her navel

 

58

were a clock.

"How are you feeling?" I asked her.

"Awful," she said. "I thought this surgery
didn't hurt."

"What hurts?"

"Not where he did the surgery. I just ache all
over. My muscles, from my feet to my throat. I feel as
though a giant smacked me right on the breastbone and
knocked me ass over applecart. I'm nauseated, too."

"How long does this last?" I asked. I reached
for an apple from a bowl on an end table.

"Not long, supposedly." She shifted her weight
with a grimace. "My cousin's a nurse. She says, when they
do a larascopy, they pump your abdomen up with gas, sort of
like a helium balloon, so they have a good view of all the
bits and pieces. When they stitch you up, some of the gas
is still inside you, and it gets absorbed into your
bloodstream and causes muscle cramps. She says the faster
they stitch you up, the more it hurts."

"Can I get you some tea?" I asked.

"No thanks. I've got some Tylenol with codine I
could take. This shouldn't last long. A friend of
Forest’s did the surgery."

"He probably sewed you up full of gas on
purpose."

"No, he did not. Actually, he was very nice,"

she said. She squinted her eyes, as though trying to

 

59
remember a good meal.

"He waited," she said, "till I was out of
anesthetic, and spent a long time talking to me."

"Oh, that," I said. "Frank says that's now
routine. Studies show that doctors who do post-op chats
have fewer malpractice suits."

"That may be." Laurel looked superior and
patient. "He wanted to know what I thought of the lawsuit
over the new hospital helipad site."

"He lobbied you while you were still moaning and
writhing?"

"I was dignified and still," she said. "It
hadn't started to hurt yet. I loved it, I loved it, I
loved it. He wanted information so much, he practically
kissed my feet!"

"Newsflash: helipad site controversy is
aphrodisiac."

"Power is an aphrodisiac. The last time I had
surgery, I was just so much red meat. Move here, that's a
good girl, move it there, darling, suck it in, hold it,
honey, this won't hurt. This time everyone knew who I was.
And I liked it. It's safe to say I liked it quite a lot."

"What's with the helipad question?" I asked her.

"Well, they've got the helipad, you know that.
Remember the drunk fireman who walked into a collapsing
wall? They got him to Ann Arbor in less than half an

hour."

 

60

"It doesn't take much more than that by car."

"It does if there's a football game, or
construction, or slick roads. At any rate, the helicopter
lift works for a lot of people. They transport burn
patients, blue babies, heart attack cases and serum for
snake bites."

"And the problem is?"

"The problem is, it makes a hellacious racket.
You've heard how those things sound coming in. And the
litter the blades kick up gets blown right across the
street, into one of the last, nice quiet, east side city
neighborhoods. Or it used to be quiet. Nowadays, the
residents are out in front of the building with picket
signs, and you can hear the housing values drop."

"How do you feel about it?" I asked, intrigued in
spite of myself.

"The hospital ought to have landscaping done to
break the noise pattern. It's going to court. It really
doesn't matter what I think. But the doctor thought that
what I think might matter, and that was...nice." She
patted her stomach absently.

"I take it the campaign proceeds unimpaired
without you?"

"The campaign is gathering momentum at the
moment. As soon as I can zip myself into my clothes, I'll
be going door to door. You'll hear some radio interviews

this week on the local station. I timed it so they'd be

 

61

on the air while I was out of sight."

She waved a relaxed hand at the Chippendale
chairs all around us. As usual, they were stacked with
manila envelopes, hardbound notebooks, and computer
print—outs.

"It's giving me a chance to catch up with some of
this stuff."

"You really thrive on this," I observed, half
provoked.

"I like it," she said. "It gives me the feeling
I had as a child, when I learned I to do cat's cradle games
for hours on end. There's pattern, and variety, and, I can
do it. I can do it well. I can make things work...as well
as anyone can. I've never been the picture straightening
type, you know that Lizzie, but it bothers me to see
programs botched because of carelessness. It depresses me
to see grants lost, contracts bobbled because someone
didn't do the rudimentary preparation. You don't have to
be a genius for this kind of commitment. You just have to
work at it. And I do. You know I do."

I did know. This was the side of Laurel a lot of
people refused to recognize...the woman who got her teeth
in, and wouldn't stop. Laurel could seem hard at times.

If the commission was asked for money for an organization
that couldn't document spending, she'd turn them down so
fast that heads would spin. I also knew she would work to

find alternate funding. And if anyone involved in writing

 

62

the proposal cared to try it, she would spend hours showing
them how to document it right.

Some of the women artists I liked best were like
Laurel. They weren't hard. They were concentrating on
long range results.

"What gets me," she said, "Is that this doctor
didn't have any idea I wasn't the person to see. He was so
condescending when I couldn't tell him certain things. He
wanted to know when I started menstruating. Good heavens,
Liz, that was years ago. I don't remember when. I wasn't
the youngest of my friends, or the oldest...sometime in
seventh or eighth grade, I said. And he looked at me as
though I was senile. If he'd asked me which year I ran the
school newspaper, I could have told him that. But the
other...it was just one of those things, like getting spots
and braces. He said to me, 'Most women keep track of
things like that.‘ I wanted to tell him most voters keep
track of legal issues they're interested in, but I guess it
isn't true. Smart voters don't. Not even doctors do."

I noticed an envelope sitting on the table. It
was stamped to mail, and pre—addressed to the local branch
of Right to Life.

"What's this? Are you sending these people a
contribution?" This was long before the great medicaid
cut—off controversy. We were then only beginning to sense
the swell of the tsunami to come.

"Nope, nope. I'm returning a questionnaire they

 

63

sent me." Her nose wrinkled the way Quince's did at the
scent of old sardines.

"They want you to say you're 'pro—life,‘ quote,
unquote?" I asked her.

"Mmmmmm." She nodded, picking at her Band-aid.

"Meaning what?"

"Honestly, Liz, what do you think it means? To
Forest's mother, Adelaide, it means distrusting convenience
abortions. To this particular group, it means denying an
abortion even if the mother is twelve and knocked up by
Uncle Ned."

"You don't agree."

"Of course not. And if I did, Lizzie, I'd still
fail some of their other tests to define the pure in heart.
This group, for instance, opposes Dignity in Death and
Dying legislation, because allowing the terminally ill to
die without extreme medical procedures might in some way
reduce our respect for life. Having seen my mother die of
metastasized breast cancer, I'd like to have had these
people sit with her one afternoon."

"You didn't sign it, then."

Laurel shrugged. "My opinion doesn't matter. My
job has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with issues like
that. Plumbing codes, trash pick up, live traps, cemetery
vandals, curb repair, pest control, ask me about those. I
could be a commissioner from now till the Resurrection, and

never, never be in a position to save one embryo."

64

"Oh, Laurel, damn it, you signed it! You're a
hypocrite," I said.

"Better a live hypocrite than a dead reformer.
What does it hurt? I know Stevenson will complete the
questionnaire. We'll be even that way, and I can avoid
the whole question. Besides," she said. "Sometimes I have
qualms about convenience abortions myself. I might have
had a child if the adoptable children hadn't been flushed
and vacuumed from existence...."

This was not the kind of conversation condusive
to continued friendship. Most of my friends are prickly
and opinionated, and I don't believe I'd like them, if
their views were easy to change.

There was a batch of short stemmed roses jammed
in a glass on the table.

"Are those from Al?" I asked.

"No. He's been busy. He called me. Those are
from Forest."

"I thought he didn't do that sort of thing," I
told her.

"Maybe he thinks we're on a more even footing
now."

As I drove home, I thought of a bitchy friend
saying Laurel would never need a dildo; she just used
politics. I wondered what would happen if she ever did
lose an election, and I suddenly, soberly believed she

would come entirely apart.

 

65

I asked Joe that night if he still had the wood
he had stored for Laurel's campaign signs. Joe had made
the signs for her before her first election. Her opponent
that year had used white on red signs, very flashy, and
later confided he had been reading about color psychology.
I had designed Laurel's signs with plain black block
letters. It rained all that October and her opponent's
signs fell, and when they put them up again, the bottom of
the stakes rotted and the signs sagged drunkenly. The
signs Joe built stayed sodden but dignified.

"The wood's in the shop" he said. "Maybe I ought
to get it, in case the bank puts a lock on the door."

"You don't think that will happen?"

"Not if I build this pig farm," he said glumly.

"Well, then, let's not put Laurel's wood out on
the street. She really doesn't have a place to store it in
that apartment."

"She could have someone else store it. What
about that guy--Al?" he asked.

I'd told Joe about Al after I talked to Laurel.
She'd known I would; knew that I was likely to share
confidences unless she asked me not to repeat them. Joe
and Laurel got along well. He'd always admired her.

Just now, though, I could hear his disapproval.

"I don't think someone living in Ann Arbor would

be much help," I said.

"I don't think he would be much help if he lived

 

66

in Laurel's apartment. He sounds like a drip."

"A drip?"

"You know what I mean, Liz. Why does Laurel want
to date a bartender? Why does she want to date anyone, in
the middle of a campaign?"

"You may not know it, but Laurel's had some
problems with her ego."

"Laurel? Give me a break. She's got an ego like
the Great China Wall."

"There's a lot you don't know about Laurel," I
told him. "Forest wasn't always so nice, once he shed his
elbow—patch jacket." I had a vision of Forest standing
over Laurel sporting a silk vest, an erection and a copy of
The Joy of Sex.

"I will not believe Forest hit Laurel. She'd
knock him into next week."

"Joe, there are other ways...other ways to hurt
people. Maybe even not meaning to. And maybe it's easy to
hurt older women. It's such an awkward age....I'm coming
to see that now. All your life, men praise your
naturalness. Suddenly, those same men go past you talking
to someone who‘s twenty, praising their...naturalness. I'm
lucky; I've got you for a husband. I'm almost the only one
of my friends still married, still married to someone nice.
Sometimes I think I ought to loan you out, on a round robin
basis...."

"That's a laugh," Joe said. "The bank would

 

6?

repossess me."

He sat on the bed and began to unlace his shoes.

"I'm exhausted," he added. "Where is the Racine
machine when we need it?"

"The Racine machine? I'll bite."

"You remember it," he told me. "There was a
young man from Racine, who invented a fucking machine.
Concave or convex, it could screw either sex, and amused
itself in between."

"0h. That Racine machine," I said.

"Think we ought to have one?"

"Why not?" I answered. "We could stay home, and

rent the bugger out."

 

CHAPTER 7

Sally got back to the Women's Club before I did.
I heard her being discussed the next morning when I walked
in.

A horsey looking woman was shaving her legs in
the shower, and discussing Sally with a rotund friend.

"Lupus," she announced, rolling the word in her
mouth like a marble. "She'll never lollygag in a tanning
booth again." The speaker, shaving under her arms,
stretched one fist toward the ceiling, unconsciously
raising a power salute.

"Lupus?" her blond friend asked. "What's that,
kidney failure?"

"Some sort of allergy to sunlight," came the
answer. "My second cousin once removed developed it in her
twenties. She was engaged to a man who sailed for a hobby;
the disease just naturally broke them up, what with my
friend stuck inside, and him wanting sun on ocean waves."

"Surely they can treat it?" The round woman was
massaging cream rinse into streaked hair. It ran like
melting ice cream down her ample body.

"Sometimes they use cortisone", the equine woman
said, flicking her razor with a negative finger tip. "You

know how that bloats a face."

68

 

69

Her friend blotted cream rinse out of her hair
with a long white towel. Her voice was muffled by
terrycloth.

"I heard she was pregnant. You know your skin
gets dry and itches. That's why she can't use the tanning
booth any more. I also heard she was pregnant, but had an
abortion, and the Florida trip was hogwash anyway."

"She has lupus," the first woman insisted.

"Maybe," her friend declared, shucking off the
towel. "Maybe she went to Florida, and someone broke her
heart."

The woman next to her farted resoundingly.

I walked into the pool room. The water, lit from
below, bloomed on the surface with splashes of light that
looked like rippling water lilies.

The idea of swimming lengths was exhausting.

Gossip, it was all gossip, I told myself.

The small pool harbored the thinnish seventy year
old and her elephant seal companion. I slid into the water
across the pool from them, but the accoustics carried their
every word.

"Too cold, too cold," the first woman complained.
"Like my mother's apartment. She's more difficult every
year."

"It was hot in Australia," the heavy woman
pronounced.

"I keep saying, mother, you're going to be ninety

 

70

five soon. You can't eat baby food for breakfast and then
drink your lunch!" The thin woman pulled off her cap in
exasperation. Tufts of hair stuck up rakishly from a
nearly bald scalp.

"Shipboard food is excellent," the fat woman
assured her, bobbing up and down in the water like a cork.

"Another thing," the Jack Sprat counterpart said
darkly. "I'm getting sick of chopping wood for that wood
stove. I got her a kerosene heater, but will she use it?"

"Cockatiels," the heavy woman said. "And wombats.
And the opal mines were marvelous."

The thin woman ran her fingers through her sparse
spikey hair.

"I can't figure out where she gets the pot,
either," she announced with considerable pique. "Sometimes
I think the paper boy brings it, but it could be the drug
store delivery boy. She buys enough toothbrushes from the
Exchange Club to stock a motel, and her cupboards are full
of molding Civitan fruitcake. Sometimes I think one of
those groups delivers it to her."

The fat woman skulled in a clockwise circle.

"I enjoy visiting your mother," she said.

"Mother likes you. Come show her your slides of
Australia. I'll go through her cupboards while you
entertain."

The peripatetic woman pushed herself

counterclockwise, dabbling at the water contentedly.

 

71

"I'm not sure your mother would like my slides of
wombats," she said slowly and thoughtfully. "You know she
liked those closeups of the Elephanta Caves. Your mother,"
she added, "is a dirty old woman."

"My mother," her friend said, "is a bloody old
bitch."

I stood in the shower afterward, pleasantly
distracted, letting the water play on the small of my back.
I wondered how the nonagenerian would describe her
daughter. And where, indeed, did she keep her stash?

That was when I saw Sally step into the sauna.
And I saw there was something wrong with her.

She had walked past the shower room, naked and
holding a towel. The pale almost white hair still brushed
her shoulders; the ankle bracelet rode the small well
formed ankle bone. She didn't look heavy; she didn't look
pregnant. She didn't look as though she suffered from any
disease.

She looked calm but introspective, a unicorn with
its head in a maiden's lap. I turned off the shower. I
don't like saunas. They are really too steamy for me.

If I let her go, I would be a perfect coward.
Jessica Lange my eyeball, I thought.

The redwood benches crisscrossed one another in
the small wood lined room. You could nest high, near the
ceiling, or closer to the floor. The air had an odd,

thick, sweet smelling density.

 

72

I sat facing Sally. She was sitting with her legs
stretched out, hands resting on her thighs. She seemed
remote rather than tense or unhappy, but the aloofness had
somehow changed. Before, there had been a subliminal
exhibitionist awareness that strangers' eyes were
appraising her. She now gave the impression of having left
the shades up, of moving in thought, unaware of an
audience.

It was hard to tell in the dim light, but I
thought she looked pale, and her hair was limp from the
steam. After a minute, she realized she was being
inspected. She looked across at me with a small frown.

"You don't sit on a towel either," she said.

"No," I agreed. "I don't sit on a towel."

"My friends say you can get Aids from a bare sauna
bench."

"What?" I was startled.

"From putting your bare, you know, cunt, on a
sauna bench. That's silly. I think that's really silly.
What do you think?"

Now or never if I wanted to ask a question. The
heat seemed solid and unbreathable.

"Silly. Absolutely. How was your Florida trip?"

"The Aids thing. It's more than just, you know,
silly. It's dumb." She eyed me as though classifying me.
"Were we at a party together?" she guessed.

"I, uh, know Al. From Ann Arbor," I said.

 

73

"Oh. Al. Who doesn't? Honestly, that guy...."
she let her voice trail off. I was losing her again.

"I don't know him well," I said with some
understatement. "He's more like a friend of a friend."

She shifted her weight, curling her legs in front
of her. I noticed her left breast was slightly smaller
than her right.

"I used to know him real well," she said
matter-of-factly. "I lived up there weekends for most of
two years. He is nice, isn't he? He‘s a real generous
person. I haven't slept with him," she said. "He's a lot
older than I am."

"Thirty—five," I said, automatically.

"Thirty—eight," she told me. "I've seen his

I filed the information away for later.
"Besides," she said, "Al has this hang-up about
birth control. I take care of myself," she explained.
"I just think it's tacky. My mother's given me birth
control pills since I was ten."

"Progressive," I said. My word. Three years older
than Ellie.

"She had me when she was fifteen," Sally
explained. She pushed the damp white hair out of her eyes.
"Connie--that's my mother—- works her tail off. She's
always given me everything I need."

She extended one delicate ankle.

 

74

"She gave me the ankle bracelet," Sally said, "for
my eighteenth birthday. It's eighteen karet gold. Isn't
that sweet?"

"It must have cost a lot," I said, eyeing the
ankle.

"Connie can afford it. She's a good manager. She
owns two other bars besides the one we run. Last year she
had to get an accountant to do her taxes."

The heat in the sauna was leaving me muddled.

"I think I know you from somewhere else," Sally
said.

"Well," I said, "I swim a lot." I tried to look
helpful.

"You know what? I think I've seen you at my
mother's bar. The one she bought most recently. Don't you
come in sometimes with two guys, one tall and one short?"

"Um," I said.

"Sure you do. "Connie's Bar and Grill. Beer and
nachos. Gets a lot of shop workers. Your husband's cute."

"Um," I said.

"I like short men," she continued. "They make me
think of my first boyfriend." She looked at me cautiously.
"Your husband kids a lot," she said.

"Um," I said again, getting my thoughts in order.
I pictured Joe and Frank, sitting with me. Joe a little
withdrawn; quiet these days, a watcher. Frank with his arm

around me, Frank mussing my hair.

 

75

Frank propositioning Sally.
"Your friend's cute too," she said.
I looked at her, stunned. I must have looked
like a very stolid matron.
"Your friend. He's in real good shape. Does he
work out, or something?"
I thought of Joe, filling in alongside the
construction workers.
"Yes, he does."
"I thought so. There's something about him
that's appealing. I like quiet men," she said.

There's quiet, and then there's quiet.

"Al was always quiet," she elaborated. "His
first wife was a dumb kid too; now he goes for smart dames.
He's screwing some classy lawyer—type broad. Everybody's
gone on women getting an ed-u-ca-tion." I looked up,
startled at the bitter tone of her voice.

"How was the trip to Florida?" I repeated.

"Pukey," she said. "Just pukey." She stood up and
poured a cup of water over so—called coals.

"I went with this law student, Bruce," she
continued. "His folks have a place on Marco Island. We

drove together and spent the night in Knoxville, Tennessee.

We had a nice time." She stretched luxuriously,
remembering. "We drank two bottles of Dom Perignon
champagne."

About that time I began to blank Sally out of my

 

76

budget. I had hoped she would drink Gallo.

"His parents' place is beautiful," she told me.
"They have brass tables made from ship portholes, and his
father owned the ships. They have Karistan rugs and
sliding glass doors that open out to the beach, and the
drapes are raw beige silk."

She sounded like Ellie describing the Mackinac
Bridge lights.

"And?" I said.

"We made love when we got there. Four hours
later, we were asleep on one of the Karistan rugs, and his
mother and father drove into the driveway."

I stared at Sally.

"They walked in and found you on the rug? With no
clothes?"

"Not exactly." Her jaw jutted slightly, and she
fingered the ankle bracelet.

"Bruce knew who they were when he heard the car
door slam. At least he must have. He opened the sliding
doors, scooped me up, raw, and chucked me out. I saw the
drapes closing, and there I was with sand stuck to my ass."

"Then what?"

"His parents went in and they all three locked me
out."

"They locked you out?"

She nodded, her expression lost in contemplation.

"At first I thought, I'll stay here. After all,

 

77

the View is nice. I could hear people talking -—-not
yelling, but sounding angry. I put my back against the
house and I watched the ocean. There wasn't anyone around.
They own a huge stretch of beach, but the house isn't near
the water. People on the shore looked like cartoon
figures, and I thought if I didn't move it would be
alright.

"After awhile the voices stopped and everything
was quiet. I kept thinking Bruce would come out and let me
in, or open the bathroom window in his bedroom. Nothing
happened and I started to get mad.

"Then I thought, the fucker just can't do this.
If he thinks I'm going to stay out here, he's wrong, wrong,
wrong. Because," Sally added resentfully, "Connie would
never do that. If she'd come back then she'd have made a
joke of it. She'd have done her best to make the poor
schmuck comfortable. She'd have given me hell later if she
didn't like him, but she would have been nice at the time.

"I pounded on the door," she added, "but nobody
answered. The garage was locked. All the doors were
locked. I prowled around the house. The drapes were
closed but one was caught back a little. Bruce and his
mother were sitting at the table, and his father was mixing
drinks.

"I thought about throwing something through the
window, but I couldn't find a good sized stone. The longer

I looked, the more the idea seemed stupid." Sally sighed.

 

78

Her white-gold breasts rose and fell.
"Anyway," she said. "It wouldn't have hurt them.
It would have convinced them I wasn't good enough."

Sally had little beads of sweat on her upper lip.
Her lower lip protruded in the kind of pout that shows
stubbbornness.

"It's nice of you to listen to me like this," she
said.

"No, it's not," I assured her. "How did you get
home?"

"I hitchhiked," she said.

"You went out on the Marco Island causeway stark
naked and hitchhiked?"

"I didn't have much choice, did I?" she said.

"Who picked you up?" I asked, my eyes wide with
wonder.

"Some boys," she said indifferently. "They were
college boys, but they were alright. One of them gave me
his jacket, and they bought me jeans and a T shirt before
they put me on the bus."

"What are you going to do about Bruce?" I asked
her.

"Him? He's just a momma's boy." She dismissed
him completely. "I just don't want it to happen again. I
always thought I fit in when I went to Ann Arbor. I think
it's because I'm pretty, and people are wasted a lot."

"You don't think you fit in?"

 

79

"Bruce's parents didn't think so. That's why I
decided," she said, "I might as well go to college."

I took a gulp of prickly, suddenly cactus—dry air.

"When I was in high school," she said, "I had
700's on my S.A.T.'s, and I took the tests hungover."

"Where would you go?" I asked.

"U. of M.," she said. "I know some girls in
sororities there."

"It's a nice place," I said absently.

"Did you go there?"

"I did, yes."

"Did your husband?"

I floundered mentally and chose Frank.

"He, uh, went to Wayne."

"What about your friend?"

"My friend?"

"Yeah, you know. Your friend. The tall guy."

"He went to U.of M.," I said. "He was in a
fraternity there." Joe had stayed two months, then gotten
his own apartment.

"It's too bad he's so old," she said. "He's
really kind of cute."

I was getting tired of sitting on the hard
redwood bench.

"Older men are nice," I lied. "They listen to
your problems."

She looked at me thoughtfully as I opened the door

 

80

of the sauna.

"Weren't you scared?" I asked. "Hitchhiking
naked?"

"Don‘t be dumb," she said. "Men never hurt me.
What do you think? Do you think college is a good idea, or
not?"

"Sure," I said, standing up and clutching my
slipping towel. "Sure it's a good idea. It's just not
what I'd pictured for you.

While I walked to the car, I tried to imagine how
Joe must seem, seen through Sally's eyes. She didn't think
he was married, and she liked him a little. What could
that mean? Not much, I thought, with Joe staying in
Lapeer.

I felt tired and let down. I heard Sally's voice
saying, 'It's too bad he's so old.‘ Joe wasn't all that
old, I thought. I wasn't that old, either. We'd both just

had a bad year...and now, Sally was moving away.

 

CHAPTER 8

The next week Laurel and I drove into Ann Arbor.
I brought my portfolio of greeting cards, meaning to stop
at the store that had most recently carried my work.
Laurel wanted some papers from the Ann Arbor city
treasurer, but more to the point, she wanted to see Al,
platonically. Al had gotten himself stuck babysitting, and
she thought she'd see he had some food in the house. She'd
made a pot of chili sauce and a tuna casserole. It seemed
funny to me to think of Laurel in the kitchen; cooking was
one thing she'd never liked to do. Even when she'd given
parties for Forest, she'd found a caterer who did delicious
vegetarian fare. Her baked walnut and cheese balls
bechamel, with white wine, had been applauded as well as
cheap. Unsure of bechamel's appeal to the child Al was
watching, Laurel had rushed for the onions. Her Buick
reeked of chili sauce.

We drove the back roads and got lost going into
Ann Arbor, exploring steep, gold—maple lined hills;
splashing through sandy low spots filled with stagnant
water, scolded all the way by butternut fat squirrels. We
found ourselves at the corner of Eusades and Fishbine
roads; all about us were wild grape Vines looping like

endless kite string, the sunlight pouring down like Madeira

81

 

82

wine. We laughed, sang camp songs, I smoked Laurel's
menthol cigarettes; she smoked a big black cigar she'd
found on the dashboard, left behind by some Visiting
dignitary. It was so good to be with someone I could talk
to—-someone to lob a conversational ball back to me. Good
talk between women is like vollying at tennis. Find the
right angle to catch your opponent's serve, get it back,
with backspin if you want, make the reply short or use
distance, but keep in mind that you expect and want a
return. Men serve conversations like Bjorn Borg.
It was a marvelous afternoon. I felt years

younger than I did in the confines of my silent house. I
pictured Ellie, with her bright vivicious promise, living
as I did and my heart ached for her. At the same time I
thought she would not leave, any more than I could. She
was stubbornly loyal in friendship, I praised her for the
trait.

Also I knew that laughing Laurel, cigar smoking
Laurel, would be back to business by the time her stitches
had dissolved, once again preoccupied with fat stacks of
paper. None of my smart friends had time for back road
jaunts, these days; most of the bright married women I knew
worked full time, reading briefs while they spooned in
supper and matched the kids' socks. Those that didn't work
juggled children's needs and husbands' promotions, or
mesmerized themselves with shopping and rounds of lunch.

It had, I thought, been easier when Ellie was younger,

 

83

there had been more iconoclastic women home.

I didn't know, though, where that left me.

Working would suck more of my energy and temper, leave me
aching and more likely to pound on walls, particularly if I
had to cope alone with each family crisis. I felt the car
jounce and shudder over ruts in the road.

The idea of Joe with a second wife was becoming
very appealing. I didn't want to lose him. He had once
been the best friend I'd ever had. How could you leave
someone you really cared for because they kept falling
asleep in a chair? But how much I would love to have
someone to talk to...maybe even if it meant sharing Joe for
sex. I began to reconsider the old stories of oriental
women who went out shopping for their husbands' additional
wives. That was the rub. I wouldn't want someone like
Laurel. I wouldn't want someone, I thought with a shock,
who was smarter than me. Someone like Sally would be
better, because these days I trusted my sex life more than
my mental life.

Although not someone quite like Sally. Someone
more bland would be better. Someone malleable.

"Being with you is such a nice change," I heard
Laurel saying. "I'm tired of politicians; they're so
obsessed with control."

Eventually the road meandered back to the highway,
past a series of white clapboard houses, a Grange Hall and

steepled churches. Then we were back to sixty three miles

 

8h

an hour, reading billboards for Briarwood Mall. The
conversation slowed to a trickle. Laurel's forehead was
creased with deep tension lines.

"Your middle hurt?" I asked her.

"A little."

"I could drive," I said.

"No, I really like to drive."

We picked up the papers she wanted from City Hall,
and stopped and ordered sandwiches at the Whiffletree. Ann
Arbor was full of the oddest young people, most wearing
corduroy pants and wool sweaters over button down shirts.
There were a few token visionaries and holdouts. An old
man in white shorts and shirt brandished a butterfly net.
Girls wore pink silk shirts unbuttoned to their navels; a
girl with her nose pierced sported black mohair unionjacks.
On the whole the campus looked tame, like what might
happen if a Savings and Loan threw a Come As You Are party
Saturday night.

Driving through the campus raised a lot of
memories for me. Some of them were wonderful, some
uncomfortable. I remembered being the kid from a small
town, on a small income, walking to one of the two jobs I
always held, watching students demonstrate on the Diag,
never joining in, wondering what caused my reticence. I
remembered girls in bluejeans and Salvation Army T-shirts
worn under hand—tooled leather belts and full length racoon

coats. "Off the pigs," they had chanted. Pigs, always

 

85

pigs, damn it. My motto had been, don't act until you
think and think and think.

We passed the apartment Joe had rented in his
senior year in college. I remembered snuggling in his bed
mornings, listening to the sound of mourning doves on
telephone wires outside; the sun coming through venetian
blinds in slabs of dust—filled light. I could still smell
the cheap rose wine, the candles that had burned down. I
hadn't thought then, I'd acted as soon as I had gotten my
birth control prescription, and those had been some of the
best moments I'd ever had. The year had been tension
filled, with both of us working, arranging our wedding, my
mother's illness, Wendall's pressure to join the firm. All
problems had run off us as though we were waxed,
impermeable with glory. Nothing ran off, now, I thought.
All the pain soaked in.

Al's townhouse was out past the mushrooming North
Campus. No Robber Ralph markets, no pornographic magazine
stores grew here. North Campus has the feeling of a
planned suburb. A little tackiness would have done wonders
for the neighborhood.

Whoever owned Al's place was endeavoring to supply
the lived—in look. Gravel and crabgrass had replaced the
ubiquitous sodded front yards; curtains sagged at
not-too—clean front windows. The place looked like regular
dorms that had been converted to married housing. Kids'

tricycles and broken plastic toys littered the lawn.

 

86

Laurel pulled the car up in front, and slid out
of the car quickly, her skirts pulling up to reveal long,
graceful legs and knobby knees. She took the casserole and
handed me the pot of chili. Her face looked younger, less
self assured.

"Damn," she said, when no one came to the door.

"He didn't know I was coming, but he's always
home during the day...."

She pressed the bell again, and used the knocker.

"I can hear the T.V.," she said. "Someone has to
be home."

"Not necessarily." I put the pot of chili down on
the hood of her car. Holding the heavy pot was making my
back ache.

"It'll scratch the finish," she said.

"Then let it. I'm not going to stand here holding
that pot while you scratch on the door."

"All right, you scratch on the door and I'll look
in the window," she said, and left me on the step. I tried
to turn the knob, but it was locked.

"Nobody in the living room," she said.

"Mmmmm...no one in the bedroom. He's still got stuff all
over the floor...bathrobe, the morning papers. I'll bet
he's home. He never goes out without picking up. Maybe
he's in the bathroom...." She moved toward the back of the

house, and I moved to the kitchen window. I peered inside

 

87

and saw something that made me blink.

Al. Most likely Al, I thought. Blond and
engaging, wearing a blue denin shirt and jeans; barefoot,
an almost Robert Redford presence, the kind of man who, ten
years from now, would still get carded in bars. He sat
with a section of the paper open on the kitchen table, his
legs spraddling a high chair with a chub-legged toddler
inside. I remembered Laurel saying he was watching a
friend's child, but something about the picture gave me
deja vu. Joe, feeding Ellie, that was what I thought of,
getting the spoon unerringly into her mouth, periodically
wiping her mouth with a napkin, and all the time reading
the sports page. The same slouched posture, the careful
concentration first on the pruney looking mouth, next on
the winning play.

Without thinking what I was doing, I rapped on
the window. He waved the empty spoon at me.

"He's here, Laurel," I said.

Al met us at the door with the kid carried on one
hip.

"Oh, you're with Laurel," he said beaming. He
put the child, Chad, down on the living room floor. Chad
promptly began to eat the funny pages.

"You brought me something," he guessed. "I'll
bet it was chili sauce."

"How did you know?" Laurel said.

"You've got some on your shirt sleeve," he told

 

88

her, and used the diaper on his shoulder to dab it off.
Laurel blushed. I felt out of place. They couldn't be
romantic; not with Laurel's pulling stitches and Chad in
residence, but I could feel Laurel's barely checked
pleasure. I had to admit that Al seemed promising.

He had heavily muscled arms, and his shirt was
open at the neck, showing some gray hair in with the blond.
He moved easily, spoke easily, didn't seem to be posing.

I had, I realized, been expecting an aging beach boy. I
liked the way he kept an eye on Chad's determined munching.
The apartment had a pleasantly shabby look. There weren't
any books or magazines, or even any records I could see,
though those could be in his bedroom. There were no
pictures or calendars on the walls. Al made me think of a
nomad, but the apartment was a comfortable place, with no
image to maintain.

Al insisted on heating the tuna casserole for
lunch. His pleasure in the offer made us ignore the
Reubens and beer we'd consumed. The three of us sat
watching Chad's determined explorations, eating Laurel's
casserole, which was topped with blanched almonds, and
drinking perked coffee out of cracked, mismatched cups.

Al didn't have a lot to say. He seemed pleased
to see Laurel. Once he came over, lifted her hair and
kissed the side of her neck before he went back to the
footstool where he was sitting. He asked about her

operation and laughed in the right places.

 

89

"I'd have told him what he could do with his
helipad," he said.

That sounded like it might be Al's all—purpose
comment, used to cover all dilemmas in his life; however it
did seem to express concern for Laurel. He obviously was
proud and amused when Laurel talked.

I went to the bathroom and stalled around to give
them some time together, reading bottles in the medicine
chest. Three blow driers, a bottle of Aspirin, and a
bottle of liquid Tylenol. "Safe for children," the label
said.

Al's bedroom door had been open when I walked
through the hallway. His bed had been piled deep in
rumpled acryllic velour blankets, beige and brown. I
thought of stately Laurel in that bed; Laurel in a room
with no books at the bedside table. Al didn't seem to have
toothpaste, but he did have white teeth.

I pictured Sally staying here in Al's apartment.
Oddly enough I could picture her, sleeping on the couch, or
in Al's bed, wandering about in green bikini jockey shorts
and a matching undershirt; sharing Al's funnies, drinking
Al's coffee, but not sleeping with Al. Why not? I
couldn't tell you. Something about the way that he looked
at, treated Laurel. He struck me as being....

Well, a specialist. A man who likes a certain
kind of woman. Someone accomplished. Someone wry.

Someone to mother him.

 

90

Was that bad, or good for Laurel? Good,
according to everything she had ever said.

I banged the bathroom door to give them a little
warning. When I came in the room they were seated on the
couch, their arms still entwined. Chad was now chewing one
of Laurel's sixty dollar shoes. Al extracted the shoe
adroitly and picked Chad up again.

Chad reached out and squeezed Al's nose. Al
startled me, and Laurel, by emitting a loud, beeping sound.
Chad laughed and squeezed again with a vengeance. Every
time he squeezed, Al obliged with a beep.

"How much longer are you going to have Chad
here?" I asked him.

"His momma is going to pick him up this
afternoon. She's been filling out job applications"

"If she gets a job," Laurel asked, "are you going
to be the sitter?"

"Nope," he said. "I'm just pitching in what
little time I can."

He'd forgotten to beep, during this exchange.
Chad, who was getting tired, began standing up, bracing
his feet against Al's chest. Al followed us to the door,
rumpled but undiscouraged. He gave us a wave, and flashed
Laurel a smile.

"Come back soon, honey," he said.
"What did you think?" Laurel asked me.

"He'd pretty nice. He's sure laid back with that

 

91

baby. The most relaxed I've ever seen a man with a
baby..." I let the thought trail.

"...that wasn't his," Laurel finished. She shook
her head and laughed.

"Even if it was his, I'm not sure I'd care.
Maybe I just use him...I can't see myself, married to him."

"Wouldn't you be mad about having had that
operation?"

Laurel put the keys in the ignition but didn't
start the car.

"No...no, I wouldn't," she said. "I might be
mad, but not sorry. I'm still a little sore, but I feel
free this way, Liz. Somehow I feel like a kid again. The
whole question of children is over. There were years when
I cried, earlier, nights when I couldn't sleep, days when I
would have given anything in the world to get
pregnant...those years are gone. I walked to the car this
morning and there was kind of a tough looking kid in the
parking lot, and my mind clicked in and gave him a
nose—thumbing 'nya—nya.’ For the first time in thirty
years, I could be knocked down, bruised, assaulted,
traumatized, mutilated, raped-—but pregnant I could never
get."

She sat there a minute, trying to get the keys
in the ignition. "Maybe you better drive," she said. "I'm
tired, all at once."

I came around to her side, and she slid out to

 

 

92

come around. We were both standing when a battered Ford
Pinto pulled in beside us and a young girl with freckles
and short brown hair got out.

"Hi," she said, looking at Laurel. "Are you Al's

new girlfriend?"

"Yes, I am," Laurel said. "Are you Al's old
one?"

The girl laughed.

"Lord, no," she said. "Al's my dad. He babysits
for me."

We drove back toward central campus in silence.
Laurel's face was white with fatigue, and her tightly set
mouth said she didn't want talk yet. Which was just as

well. I certainly didn't know what to say.

 

CHAPTER 9

Laurel and I drove back through the campus and
stopped at the first bar near a parking space. Laurel had
two doubles, and then sat in silence, pursing her lips in
and out, so that she looked like Nero Wolfe. I asked her
if she was thinking, and she said, no, her lips were numb.

I'd hung on to my portfolio when we got out of
the car. I don't tend to leave it when I'm parked in town.
A friend of mine once had two acrylic paintings stolen
from the back seat of a locked Volkswagen bus. Even though
he never sold a single painting before or after being
burgled, and later made a mint in interior design, he still
mourns for his lost work.

I propped my file in the corner, behind the
garlic toast, and took a menu. The selection was basic.
Pizza, hamburgs, Greek salad, and imported beer. None of
the waitresses looked like Sally Ann. Laurel took a long
time making up her mind.

At last she said, "I want a hamburg. How about
you?"

"We just had tuna casserole."

"I didn't eat much," she said. When I thought
about it, I remembered her spreading spinach noodles
artistically about the plate. She'd had a half sandwich

93

 

94

when I'd had the reubens. In fact, I hadn't seen Laurel
eat since she met Al. She didn't look lighter, with her
still bloated stomach. She ordered a hamburg with fried
onions, and a side of fries. I had coffee. I watched
while she ate the hamburg, licking her fingers the way a
cat fastidiously cleans its paws. She ate the onion rings,
first sucking out the onions. She used salt and vinegar on
her fries and then ate some garlic toast. She finished up
by chewing the ice left in her drink glass.

I didn't say much. After a while, she said, :i
"Fuck it. Maybe, at some level, tubal ligation and all, I
still want to be Blondie Bumstead."

"Did Al lie to you about having kids?" I asked
her.

"No," she said. "He didn't exactly lie."

"Did you ask him?"

"No, I didn't exactly ask him. We were talking,
the first night I went to his apartment. I said I'd been
married, and he said he'd been married, and we talked about
being married. You know. Then I said I was divorced, and
he said, he was divorced too, and we talked a little bit
about how it feels, being divorced. Then I said I'd wanted
to have kids, but I'd never had kids."

"And?"

"And then he kissed me, and we made love for the
first time. I thought," Laurel said, "we were having a

parallel conversation. I guess it was just

 

95

horizontal...there were other times when he could have told
me. He just never did."

"Are you going to see him again?" I asked.

"I don't think so," she said. "I may want to, but
I think I'm going to contemplate my navel...and my navel
scars. Let's see your portfolio, Liz. I need something to
distract me. And, there's no point in your wasting a trip."

She paged through my work carefully.

"Why always cards?" she asked me. "Why not
something to please a big spender?"

"Some people do frame cards," I told her.
"Especially grouped cards."

"Grouped greeting cards can't be where the money
is."

"It isn't," I admitted. "That isn't what I
intended. When I left school, I wanted to do some kind of
work that people could buy if they didn't have a lot of
money. The Chinese philosophy of value in utilitarian
things. Beautiful cups for everyday use."

I cringed inside, thinking of the scratched
tupperware glasses and bowls in my cupboard at home.

"That sounds good enough," Laurel said. "Let's see
if it will sell."

We crossed South University and stopped at the
bookstore which had once carried most of my cards. The new
manager was a buxom blond past sixty, who looked like

ambrosia, plasticized.

 

96

I gave her my alumna introduction, explaining
that the store had helped me in the past. She flipped
through the portfolio, her interest transitory.

"Nope," she said, "Sorry. I just don't have the
space."

"You've carried my cards within the past year," I
said.

"Look around," she told me. "Once, commercial
cards were boring."

It was true. I wandered around the shop's
addition. A lot of the work didn't appeal, but there were
hundreds of styles printed on good rag paper. Cards that
looked like silkscreens, although they were printed,
hand—made cards with features that popped out, like a
child's book. A series of golden mandarins with real hair
mustaches. Cards that held balloons and chocolate.
Reproductions of Renoir. Cards spattered with color like
Ukranian Easter eggs. Many of the most colorfrul cards
came from Red China. I particularly liked the gold
mandarins.

All were less expensive than those I'd sold in
the past here. I'd gotten three dollars a card. Few of
these topped a dollar seventy-five.

"There's a store on State Street that might take
some on consignment," the buxom woman said. "I only have
extra space for students' cards."

"I was a student here," I said.

 

97

The woman nodded. Her amber beads shook and
sandalwood perfume billowed from crepey skin.

"You had your foot in the door," she said, "and
you took it out. Maybe you should display your work at art
fairs. It's good exposure."

At the moment, I felt exposed enough.

Laurel and I stood for a minute on the sidewalk.

"Want to try the store on State Street?" Laurel
asked.

I tried to scrape up the energy. The pavement
was hard, and my back hurt. The ride in Laurel's car,
sitting on the floor at Al's place, slouching in the bar,
and waiting while my work was examined had left six of my
vertebrae feeling like cracked teeth.

How in the world would I sit through an art fair?

"I'm tired," I decided.

Laurel nodded thoughtfully. "I hate days like
this," she said.

I drove back and took the expressway. Laurel
slept, or seemed to be sleeping. I opened the windows, but
the car still smelled like chili sauce.

Joe and I spent the next week involved in adult
packing, finding athlete's foot powder, Rolaids; and buying
socks. He had found someone who would let him use a fifty
ton trailer at cost to transport his bulldozer and grader
to Lapeer. The construction yard looked empty without the

old behemoths. I felt as though an invisible tar pit had

 

98

swallowed two faithful friends.

I rarely saw Sally now at the Y Center. She no
longer swam or used the tanning booth. She'd joined a noon
aerobic dance session. Her tan faded and her ankle
bracelet was tucked into a sock.

Laurel determinedly got herself back to business.
She bought a three hundred dollar rust colored walking
suit, borrowed a golden retriever, and went door—to—door in
the transient part of her ward. Kids came around to pet ,
the dog and adults followed the kids.

I already knew what Laurel wanted for the city.
She lusted after funding for neighborhood centers, like
those Toronto's City Council had voted in. Each center had
playground equipment, a basketball court, and a modest
building which housed adult education classes, shop
classes, and abuse counseling. There certainly were no
taxes available in the city, but sometimes funds could be
pried out of foundations and wealthy individuals.

I saw Laurel speak, Saturday night, on television.
She looked like a competent stranger, not like the
laughing woman who'd found herself lost at the corner of
Fishbine and Eusades roads.

The night before Joe left, he went down to the
basement and pounded away on Laurel's campaign signs. I
sat on the steps, but he couldn't hear me, and I couldn't
hear him, over the hammering. After a while I went

upstairs. I didn't think he noticed. I arranged samples

 

99

of my work on the floor. I still liked some of the cards
very much. But how long had it been since I'd designed any
new cards? And if I did, what kind of cards would I
design? The mauve clouds of wysteria belonged to another
woman; as did the trim gold—jacketed teddy bears. I didn't
see anything of the person I was lately. Toilet bowl
cleanser cards, perhaps. Or maybe, potatoes. Wasn't there
some theory that potatoes were like art? What is the state
of a natural potato? Do you leave the dirt on, or scrub
it? One of those Do You Like Raw Carrot questions.

"What are you doing?" Joe asked. His voice
startled me.

"Nothing," I said. "I was thinking about
potatoes." He shrugged, accepting it, and poured himself a
drink.

He stood hunched against the counter. It was
the last night he'd be home for a week. Maybe I'd get
something done, nights when I wasn't waiting to see if he
would ever talk to me.

"The man I'm working for looks like a potato,"
he observed.

"Elliot does?"

"Sort of a lined potato. Maybe a sweet potato.
The shape is right, but his face has all up and down
lines."

"Sounds more like celery."

He considered.

 

100

"Blanched celery."

"Do you like him?" I said.

"Not much, no," Joe answered.

"You once said owners were half the fun."

"Half what fun?" he asked.

"You don't like it, do you," I asked. "Building
this pig farm. Then, knowing I shouldn't, I said, "Do they
have room to turn around?"

"Who?" he said. "Are you talking about pigs, or
people?"

"The pigs." I had to know.

"No, they don't," he said.

He looked so miserable that I stood up and
hugged him. He hugged me back, but it wasn't much of a
hug.

"I'll call you tomorrow night," he said. "From
the apartment."

"Tell me again what it looks like."

"It's nothing special. It belongs to one of
Elliot's friends. There's a sink, a stove, a toaster...."

"Skip that. Tell me about the pink bathtub."

"The bathtub is pink," he recited. "The
bathroom tile is black and pink."

"I like to know these things," I said.

"There's a dining room table, dining room chairs
with plastic seat covers, and new lampshades, with

celophane wrap or some such thing. There's a green chair

 

101

and sofa the color of wilting dandelions. The sofa
material has little metallic tufts for decoration. If you
sat down on it naked, you'd be scarred for life."

"You'd better plan on getting out of the house
in the evening."

"Elliot got me a ticket so we could go to Th3
Sound of Music."

"Lucky you," I said.

"Lucky, lucky me."

"Joe," I said. "You still seem depressed."

"My father died and his business is going belly
up. What do you want, Liz? Mazel tov and pink champagne?"

A lot of angry answers came boiling up then; a
list of the things I wanted, starting with shared grief.
Somehow I choked the explosion back. I could feel my
mother's presence blow into the room like one of Chagall's
loving ghosts. She hushed me, putting her warm palm over
my mouth and nostrils. I felt calmer, but I could hardly
breath.

I tried again.

"Joe, do you think being married is boring?"

"No," he replied with disinterest. The answer
wasn't enough.

"Sometimes I think sex just messes up people.
Sometimes I think marriage doesn't work," I said.

"So?"

I thought, how many two letter words are there?

 

102

"Joe," I said. "Sometimes I don't feel I even
know you. You never talk to me-—"

"That's not true."

"-—unless I talk to you. If you want to sleep
with someone else, please just do it. I don't want to be a
damn boulder around your neck."

"Mmmm," he said. "It doesn't seem very likely.
Did you see that the Daisy Beebee Gun Company is being sued
for fifteen million dollars?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Some kid shot out his best friend's eye."

"Joe," I said, "did you hear what I was saying?"

"I'm here, aren't I?" he asked. "How could I

not hear?"

 

CHAPTER 10

The weather became worse as we moved toward
November, overcast, drizzling and dreary every day. Ellie,
down to her last antibiotic capsules, went
trick—or—treating in a cheap plastic costume, and showed no
signs of reccurring strep. Joe called home to report his
progress on the pig farm. Willow topped hummocks had been
bulldozed, then graded level, and the reservoirs begun.
Each plastic—sheet lined, sand—filled reservoir was an
achievement, a goal met before the long delaying, sticky
mud siege of Michigan spring. Joe said the land was mostly
flat as a highway, stretching unbroken toward Lake Huron
under bleak gray skies. I knew Joe's knuckles would by now
be cracked and bleeding, his lips split by exposure, his
eyelids reddened by wind-blown grit. Elliot was at least
proving to be a paternal employer, a widower who took Joe
home, fed him pork roast, and told him stories about Grampa
and the bear.

I spent my own evenings helping Ellie with her
homework. There was wash to do, dishes, a little cleaning,
PTO night, groceries to buy and unpack. If Ellie had
friends over, I produced punch and cookies; if the punch
spilled, I wiped it up. When we were alone I could ask

Ellie to help me, but when she had friends with her, asking

103

10H

stuck in my throat.

Some nights after Ellie went to bed I spread my
cards on the table, and they looked back at me with
enigmatic gloss. The night I baked Ellie an apple pie for
her birthday, I was aware of straddling two periods of my
life. There was the pillow textured, crumbly dough beneath
my fingers, the clean apple scent, the bitter,
back-of—the-nose nutmeg smell. Those seemed to me
something from my childhood, as well as from my own
mothering, when it worked. I had to stand with my legs
apart, an invisible bar spreading my ankles. The posture
somehow relieved the pain in my back, but it also kept me
aware of my own body, of aches and pains, time passing, of
the not—apple world. I felt as though my hands, gummed
with dough, belonged to one person; my feet, awkwardly
planted, belonged to someone else.

I didn't see much of Laurel. She had, she told
me, ended her friendship with Al by sending his daughter a
mixed boquet of pink sweetheart roses and baby's breath.
She put her energy into the campaign now. The newspaper
had not yet made endorsements, but it certainly seemed
infatuated with Laurel, always carefully referring to her
as "Commissioner McKay." Pictures appeared showing her
meeting with businesswomen, and cutting the ribbons for a
Transit System terminal she had championed. She gave me
the rest of her Tylenol with codine, along with a note

saying I should try a another doctor. I didn't have enough

 

105

mental energy to try a new kind of toothpaste, let alone
tackle the world of medicine.

I still swam, but no longer saw Sally. The
receptionist said she'd had her membership transferred to
the Y Center in Ann Arbor. I pictured Sally nude in the
rain on eastbound I-94.

I felt restless after Sally left. As though I
was looking for something. Impressed by an article about
back health and walking, I started trying to walk every day
as well as swim. Mostly I headed west of town, where there
were dirt roads and nettle thickets, ranch houses and dirt
bikes in a ratio of two to one. It was wonderful to breath
air free from chlorine. I saw dead garter snakes, a dead
mother opossom. Gray canes rattled, dry sumac dotted the
fields.

Laurel scolded me because the streets there were
often deserted. They weren't safe, she said, when she
picked up her campaign signs. I kept walking because I
liked the freedom, the sense of anonymity I found. I liked
the scraggly landscaping done with spare tires, the
cheerful cast-concrete yellow painted ducks waddling up
walks, small posed madonnas, trucks on blocks, the general
sprawl of the land.

All the exercise ate precious hours. An hour to
swim, an hour to walk, an hour getting both places, tying
shoes, showering, finding parking meter change. My health

had become a part time unpaid occupation. And through it

 

106

all, my back still hurt.

Sometimes I drank to keep myself cheerful.
Sometimes in addition to Aspirin I took Laurel's Tylenol.
It was Tylenol number three, which has very little codine.
When I took one the pain would not go away, but it backed
up in my mind, helping me keep my temper, and I counted the
remaining pills several times a day. I pictured death as a
round white tablet, a door that swung silently open like
the door of a bank vault.

The first Friday in November, I was swimming the
nineteenth of twenty planned laps when the paging system
blurred out my name. I had to dress to answer the phone at
the reception desk.

Eliie's voice met me. "Momma? Can you pick me
up?"

"What's wrong?" I asked her. I'd barely toweled
off, and my clothes felt stuck to me.

"I itch," she said.

"You itch?"

"I want to come home," she told me.

"Does your teacher think you should come home?"

"No." The voice was reedy and glum.

"Are you going to get her?" the receptionist
asked me. "You could finish your swim first."

"I just finished," I said.

When I got Ellie home, I began to think her

teacher and the receptionist had been right. She didn't

 

107

have a rash, she didn't have hives, she didn't even
scratch. She watched the Smurfs and had seconds on soup
for dinner. We watched a PBS special on otters before she
went to sleep. I limped downstairs wearing wool socks and
Joe's ratty old blue bathrobe, just in time to see Frank
let himself in the front door.

He looked worse than I did.

"Are you alright?" I asked him.

"No, I'm not," he said. He sat down on the sofa
and patted the cusions for me to join him.

"Can I get you a drink?" I asked.

"Not now, thanks, Liz. I'm too upset to drink,
and you know how serious that is. I'm being sued for eight
hundred thousand dollars," he said.

"What on earth? Who's suing you?"

He shrugged. "I can't remember. Bart. Barth.
Bartholomew. Some name like that."

"Why are you being sued, Frank? Don't make me
hand you straight lines."

"Actually," he brightened, "it isn't just me.
There are four of us. Yours truly, an obstetrician, an
intern, and an anesthesiologist. We're being sued jointly
for three million dollars."

"What's the case about?" I said. "Did something
go wrong in surgery?"

"Nope," he said, shaking his head. "Something

went right. I helped deliver a baby, fool that I am. I

 

108
haven't done obstetrics since my residency."

"Frank, what the hell did you have to do with
delivering a baby?"

"Very little," he mused. "Very damn little. I
had just checked in to see how labor was progressing.
Ultra-sound had showed some facial abnormalities, and I
like to visit the parents right after delivery. That's
when they need to see someone."

"So you told us."

"I could hear the woman screaming; not screaming,
exactly. You know that gutteral sound of labor gone wrong;
half moaning, it peaks high, like a dog's howl. Regular as
a siren, involuntary as a hung man's last crap."

I nodded, remembering.

"I stopped and talked to the nurse. Her
obstetrician had had the resident induce labor, which was
part of the problem. The contractions don't fade; the
woman doesn't get much rest. To top it off, the poor
little cheese had an anterior presentation, so that the
back of the baby's skull was against her lower vertebrae.
She wasn't even feeling the pain of labor contractions.

She felt as though someone with hobnail boots was kicking
her in the spine."

Frank stopped, and I saw his face was wet with
perspiration.

"It's cases like this that made me become a

plastic surgeon. Thank God my patients are all

 

109

anesthetized."

"They couldn't give her any more pain
medication?"

"They can't give much. You know that. Things
were worse because her own doctor wasn't there. He had
another case going, a really bad one. The other name in
the firm was stuck in a fender bender, and there wasn't
another obstetrician who wanted to get involved. It's not
considered good ethics, you know. Interfering with someone
else's O.B. case is sort of like rustling; most doctors
won't step in unless there's an emergency. So here's this
poor little cow, absolutely lowing, and I'm sure she
couldn't have been more than sixteen. Her boyfriend was
with her, but he was in a state of stark terror. I kept
saying, talk to her; she can hear you. I might as well
have been talking to a rabbit. He sat there, clutching her
hand, not saying one goddamn word.

"When I was a resident," Frank continued, "we
dealt with anterior presentations by turning the patient
from side to side. Sometimes, a sharp change of position
turned the baby. If that didn't work, it was considered
correct for the obstetrician, once the cervix was dilated
reasonably, to reach through the pelvic opening, up through
the dialated cervix, and turn the child so that its face
pressed against the mother's spine. That's the normal
position," he added. "That's why most newborns look awful.

Their noses have been flattened against their mamas'

 

110

bones."

"Frank," I said. "Somehow I thought you were a
plastic surgeon."

Frank was examining his well scrubbed hands.

"The process to turn the kid has been going out of
favor," he admitted. "It isn't medically necessary, it
just relieves pain, and any non-medically justifiable
action brings about an increased risk of post—delivery
suits."

"You didn't."

"It worked fine." His voice was stubborn. "I got
both the mother and father's consent. The mother was as
game as she could be, and as soon as I turned junior, she
stopped that sound and looked at me...she'd had her face
turned to the wall."

"Couldn't you have used forceps?"

"No," he said. "Not without risk."

"Was the obstetrician angry?"

"I don't give a rat's ass. He delivered her
normally six hours later. It's not as though I stole his
case."

"Why didn't the intern do what you did?"

Frank gave me a wry look and picked at a hangnail.

"Among other things," he said, "I had small enough
hands. Christ, I'm tired. I'd take that drink now, Liz."

I got out the last of the Cutty Sark.

"Could you have hurt her?" I asked him.

 

111

"I suppose it's happened. There are risks
connected with anything. There are also women who don't
walk for days after delivery because of pressure on the
spinal nerves. There can be cord damage. I'm not a bit
sorry."

"Is that why they're suing?"

"No. Oh, no," he said. "They're suing because
the kid died twelve hours later. The brain wasn't
developed....there wasn't a chance it could live."

"Then why sue you?"

"Liz, it's standard legal procedure. People are
sued who aren't even remotely connected with a case. I've
got a friend who was sued when his partner lost a patient.
The boy died in surgery before my friend ever saw him. He
was at his daughter's kindergarten graduation when the kid
croaked."

"He didn't lose."

"The case was settled out of court...as this case
will be."

"Are you in trouble with the hospital?"

"The director's mad as hell. He says I risked
legal complications...I'll be on his shit list, no doubt
about that. Ah, well, life goes on," he said. "Tonight,
I'm crashing early."

We sat in morose, companionable silence. I

wondered what it would be like to cart Frank off to bed.

 

112

As if in judgment the glare of carlights pulling
into the driveway skewered us on the couch. Someone had
turned in fast, crunching on gravel. Someone slammed the
car door and was coming up the walk.

Laurel stalked into the room, her raincoat
swinging open.

"Oh Christ, it's Frank," she said. "Have you seen
the headlines?"

"It's been another long day," I said. "The
paper's still in the mailbox."

Frank shook his head.

"I missed Brenda Starr," he said.

"Take a look." She waved the front page of the
paper. "Isn't this cute?"

"Local Pro-Life Group Endorses," the headlines
informed us.

Halfway down the page, were pictures of Laurel
and her opponent, Jim Stevenson. "McKay fails to return
Pro-Life Questions. She dodges issue, says Pro—Life
Stevenson." I noticed they didn't give Laurel her
"Commissioner" label.

"You told me you completed that questionnaire," I
said.

"I did. It's still sitting on the dining room
table, all stamped and ready to mail."

"Why didn't you mail it? You never forget

anything, Laurel."

 

113

"That's part of the problem. I still remember my
mother biting through her lower lip the night before she
died."

"It doesn't look good. Not returning the form,"
Frank told her.

"Thank you, Dan Rather. How insightful you are
tonight. I did send a note to the paper, explaining my
position."

"Do they say so in the paper?"

"On the second page. Three other candidates
refused to return the form, but I'm the one that gets the
attention."

We all stared at the article that monopolized the
front page. There was Laurel's statement, "Not pertinent,"
showing in bold black and white.

Under Stevenson's picture ran a much longer
quotation.

"No one belongs in government at the local,
state, or national level who does not at all times and in
all ways support life."

"I waited for this," Laurel said, "all through
October. I just didn't expect the timing to be so
professional."

"Professional?" I asked.

"The weekend before the election. The paper cuts
off all publicity as of Sunday afternoon."

"Could you get a letter to the paper tomorrow?" I

 

114
asked her.

"I don't know if I should," she said. She
collapsed in a chair near us. "Almost anything I do looks
defensive now."

"In what way," Frank asked, "does the city rule
on abortions?"

"Stevenson says the city could refuse to grant
zoning changes to medical facilities where abortions take
place. In the past ten years, not one such facility has
built inside the city. I handled this wrong, damn it. I
should have faced this group. But every time a woman opens
her mouth on this issue, she gets taken apart, labeled..."

"Surely it's not as bad as that," Frank said.

I thought I heard Ellie stirring, but when I
checked her, she was asleep. I came back downstairs to
find Laurel and Frank regarding each other with mutual
fatigue and antipathy.

"Can I bum a drink?" Laurel asked. "I really
need one."

"I'm out," I said.

"Hell," said Frank. "Liz, can you get a sitter?
We could all go out. I don't like drinking alone."

I hesitated.

"I'll pay for the sitter," he offered. "After
all, my frisbee put Ellie in the soup."

"That‘s forward," I told him. "I've heard stories

about men who pay for the sitter."

 

 

CHAPTER 11

I got dressed and called one of the neighbor
girls, Janet Babcock. Janet trudged across the street, the
streetlight gleaming on her fuzzy pink slippers. I left
instructions, and Frank left money for pizza and coke.

I wasn't worried about leaving Ellie with Janet.
The Babcocks were home, for one thing. It was Janet who'd
taught Ellie how to jump rope and ride a bike.

We stepped out of the house into damp November
weather. It smelled like high school football games, like
fog on Halloween night. Laurel sat next to Frank in the
truck and I sat next to Laurel. She looked oversized and
awkward next to him. She'd left her coat and was wearing
jeans and an apricot cashmere sweater. Her hair hung
loose, and she should have looked relaxed, but the lines
around her mouth were set like wood putty. We drove to
Connie's listening to Frank's repertoire of off-color
limericks.

Connie's had a new outside light. It was much
brighter, and the bar looked garish, the parked cars and
trucks showing dents and scrapes.

"Where is this? Hell's Half Acre?" Laurel asked
us.

"Never you mind," Frank answered. "It's a

116

 

117

non-political bar, this."

"There's no such thing," she said, using my line,
"as a non-political bar."

"This one is. You could dance bare—ass on the
tables, and there isn't a soul here who would recognize
you."

"They'd know I was too old to dance on tables."

"There you go with that negative thinking again."

"A-political," Laurel snorted. "Does it have
indoor plumbing?"

"You betcha," Frank said. "Just empty the bucket
when you're done."

Inside, the bar was quiet, nearly empty. A
handful of regulars were drinking at the bar, watching
television, drooling over Maureen O'Hara in Spencer's
Mountain. Sally was gone. The atmosphere seemed empty,
flaccid, the place defined by old varnish, stale beer and
smoke.

We started drinking Bloody Marys which came
served in beer mugs with leafless stalks of celery
surfacing like periscopes. Then Frank insisted we have a
round of Margueritas, licking coarse salt off the glass
rims, sucking on undersized limes. When we switched to a
pitcher of beer I started drinking slowly, which wasn't at
all what I wanted to do. It was nice to be out of the

house. It was nice to be with adults. Drinking till I

 

118

slid under the chipped black wood table sounded good, but I
knew Ellie was home, and Joe wasn't. Parents Without
Partners ought to offer a special service: someone to mind
the farm while you tie one on and then dry out. Since no
such service exists, I sipped my beer slowly. Frank was
telling Laurel about being sued and she couldn't help
laughing. For her, he had given the story brassy
overtones; the mother's suffering diminished, the child's
death skipped over. It became a saga of Frank On The 1
Carpet, Frank playing Cyrano, trying to cheer her up. 1

Laurel's hair had sprung into soft,
light-catching tendrils, a great cloud of it, all wild
around her face. Her apricot sweater clung, showing off
her figure. I faced a heavy set balding man who was
leering at Laurel, recognizing him as the man Joe had
called an asshole the first night I'd been in the bar. As
I watched him I saw his face take on a sullen expression.
He approached our table.

"I've seen you," he said. "You're that woman on
the news."

Laurel's eyes widened.

"I saw you on T.V.," he continued. "You're one
of those pro—abortion women."

Noise blared as Connie turned up the volume on
the television set.

"Isn't that right?" The man said. "Aren't you

pro—abortion?"

 

119

I was aware of Frank sitting next to me, tense
and watchful. For the first time, I realized that yes, he
was small. The man must outweigh him by easily a hundred
pounds.

"Well?" he asked. He spoke slowly. He was very,
very drunk.

"At the moment," Laurel said, "I'm pro privacy."

"You're a real pretty woman," he said. "A real
looker." He reached out and fingered one of her damp t
curls.

"Bet you use one of those special cream rinses,"
he told her. "The ones with dead babies in them. My wife
and I, we never could have kids."

He belched and walked back to the bar stiff
legged. Passing Frank, he looked like a giant. Frank put
his hand on Laurel's thigh.

"Liz?" Laurel said. "I'm going to lose this
election. If someone in this podunk bar cares, I'm out of
it."

"No, you're not," Frank said. "Don't be an
idiot, Laurel."

"How am I going to go on campaigning through this
shit? I have to speak Sunday at an East Side Baptist
Church potluck. How will I ever manage to face the people
there?"

"They're not all going to be like him," I told

Laurel.

 

120

"He's so sure," she said. "They're just so darn
sure. They never have a moment's doubt. Never, never,
never. If I ever saw one of them at a loss, I wouldn't be
so scared."

"Come on, Laurel," Frank put in. "This guy found
his conscience in a bottle. Drinking coffee tomorrow,
he'll have some doubts. Everyone has doubts."

"Not this group," Laurel said. "I've been
listening to them all October. You hear them everywhere,
and they're all so simplistic. The woman who cut my hair
today gave me quite a lecture. She said if women who are
raped can get treated, women will lie and say they are
raped."

"I clipped a letter from the paper," I admitted.
"Someone wrote that no one ever put a gun to a woman's head
and made her get pregnant."

Frank shook his head.

"Never, huh?"

"Never," I repeated.

"Never a knife or a billy club, either, I
suppose."

The man was still watching Laurel.

"Excuse me," Laurel said abruptly. "I have to
pee."

She got up and left the table in tears.

"Don't sit down on the bucket," Frank called

after her. ”I knew a girl who got a spectacular bull's—eye

 

121

bruise from a pail."

"Frank," I said, "shut up."

"It's not funny," he agreed. "I've got pictures
of some terrific kids this guy could adopt."

"You and your a-political bar," I scoffed. "We
should get going when Laurel gets out of the can."

"Let's not rush," he said.

He touched his left eye, and flicked a brown
tinted contact into the palm of his right hand.

"Soft lenses," he said. "I've got a spare pair."

Without the lens, his left eye twitched and
watered. I watched as he took the back of a spoon and
mashed the lens to a pulp. By the time Laurel came back to
the table, the lens looked like a slightly thickened smear
of gelatin.

"What's he doing?" Laurel asked, returning.

"Playing Mad Genius. Hush and watch," he told
her. Next he found an antihistamine capsule in a pocket of
his shirt.

"Allergies," he said. Twisting and pulling the
two halves of the capsule open, he dumped the multi—colored
time release beads out on the floor.

He slid the gelatinous lens into the transparent
capsule and eyed his creation, unsatisfied.

He had his back to the man at the bar.

"If I add just a drop of the Bloody Mary..."

The crushed lens floated, embalmed in thick,

 

122

viscous red. He slid it into his shirt pocket.

"Wait here," he told us. "The title of tonight's
program is, 'The Sure Shall Be Unsure.'"

"It sounds like PBS special on birth control,"
Laurel mused. Her face was white but interested, watching
Frank make his way to the bar.

"I don't think he should do this," she said.

"I'm sure he shouldn't," I concurred.

Both of us waited, mouths agape, as Frank started
a conversation. Both of us expected to see Frank go
crashing to the floor.

Frank said something, and gestured for a pitcher.
The man replied. Since their backs were toward us, our
View was limited.

Laurel finished her drink while I poured the last
of the beer.

We sat in silence watching the television. O'Hara
and Henry Fonda were a class act all the way. I was
daubbing my eyes when I felt Laurel stiffen beside me.
Frank was approaching our table, with the big man in tow.

"Meet Bernie," Frank said. Bernie carried a
pitcher of beer, and sat down without meeting Laurel's
eyes.

"The doc tells me you're O.K," he said. "Sorry
about my mouth."

"I'm not O.K.," Laurel said. "Frank, what are

you doing?"

 

 

123

"Don't get emotional," Frank cautioned. "This is
a rational business discussion." As he spoke, his eye
twitched violently.

"Research costs money," he said, turning to
Bernie.

"Fifty," Bernie said. "I told you. Fifty is all
I've got."

"A medical breakthrough," Frank argued.
"Government intervention keeps the quantities limited, but
some rich bastard will pay up fast enough."

The man swallowed. He ran a hand over his
glistening forehead.

"You really make a hair restorer, out of——out
of—-"

"Placenta," Frank said smoothly. "You yourself
mentioned the collagen in cream rinse. Ask youself what
would be a more logical next step?"

The man nodded, his eyes on the capsule Frank was
holding.

"This is the next step," Frank said. "Lifelong,
luxurious hair. It‘s all a question of hormones."

We all four watched the small, smushed lens
floating in a bloody haze.

The man reached out and touched the capsule. He
pulled his hand back as though burned.

"One hundred dollars," Frank said.

"Fifty," the man repeated.

 

124

The waitress who called everyone Hun brought
another pitcher of beer.

"Ninety," Frank said. Both of them drank. They
haggled, and slowly, the price went down until they settled
at seventy.

"Wash it down," Frank told Bernie.

"Wash it down!" Bernie's eyes bulged. "I thought
I rubbed the stuff into my skin."

"Nix," Frank said. "I tell you, you've got to
start trusting your doctor. The thing is systemic. The
hormones have to react with your chemistry."

"This won't make me impotent, will it?"

Frank turned to me, his eye jumping.

"Noticed any problems?" he asked me.

"I have a hard time getting any rest," I said,
which was certainly true.

Frank gave Laurel a lecherous wink.

"How about you, sweetie?"

Laurel's face flushed dull red. The purchaser
guffawed. He spread out the dog—earred ten dollar bills on
the table, dropped the "hair tonic" on his tongue and
chugged it down with beer.

"Let me buy you another drink," Frank said before
the glass was lowered. "Let's make it a friendly
transaction, while we're here."

Frank bought two more pitchers of beer, using the

bills on the table. He and Bernie drank and talked

 

125

football spreads. Laurel and I made no attempt to keep up
with their drinking, seeing Frank was already starting to
spill and slur.

At last Frank belched, a huge, satisfying
eruction. An introspective look appeared in the eye that
didn't twitch.

"Son of a gun," he said. "I forgot to ask about
piles."

"Piles?" Bernie said stupidly.

"You know. Bloody piles. Get it? Ructions on
your arsehole."

Bernie shifted his weight uneasily in the chair.

"What's my arsehole to you?" he asked Frank.

"I just hope you don't have piles. Frank
shrugged. "We counteradvise with piles. I should have
asked."

"What the hell difference would it make, goddamn
fripping piles?" the huge man demanded. "I don't plan to
grow hair on my fucking ass!"

"I don't expect you will," Frank soothed
urbanely. "It's just that if something went wrong, the
piles could get worse."

"What the fuck are you talking about?"

"Just if something did go wrong." Frank smoothed
his own hair back.

Bernie's face was taking on an increasingly

ominous glower.

 

126

"Nothing better go fucking wrong." He poured
himself more beer.

"Of course it won't," Frank agreed. "The odds
are astronomical. Still, I wish I'd asked about the piles.
I really shouldn't drink. That's why those sons-a—bitches
took away my license."

Bernie raised the glass to his mouth. "The hell
you say," he muttered.

"Of course, it makes sense that there could be
trouble with piles," Frank considered philosophically.
"Any sudden weight gain can cause hemorrhoids to act up.
The same is true with varicose veins, and it doesn't help
your heart much. Bloat is mostly cosmetic, unless your
blood pressure's bad."

"Tell me what you're talking about or I'll cut
your fucking cock off." The man's hands shook as he put
down the beer.

Frank glanced about nervously. "There's no
problem," he repeated. "It's only that this specimen was
fresh, and warm, in the pocket of my shirt."

The customer looked bilious. "Still warm," he
said. "Mother of God."

"It's not just as simple as snipping the stuff
into hair cream," Frank said waspishly, glaring with his
one good eye. "The capsules ought to be irradiated to make
sure the cell matrix doesn't have fertilized cells, but

when you have incompetent help, what do you expect?"

 

127

Bernie burped thoughtfully.
"I expect hair," he said.
"I guarantee you'll grow that hair," Frank

replied promptly. "The other possibility is too remote for

concern."
"Try me," Bernie said. He had grown suddenly
quiet.
"Have you ever heard of an ectopic pregnancy?"
"No." Bernie's face was blank and worried.
"That's when a baby doesn't develop in the
uterus," Frank lectured. "There have been premature babies

taken from intestinal lining. One young woman in Detroit
recently carried a baby four months that way, and it lived,
delivered Caesarian. In other cases when the embyo is
carried in the blood stream, say to the brain, it develops
as a tumor would-—"

He broke off. "Never mind," he said. "I'm sure
all you'll grow is hair. You've got major medical, I
trust?"

Bernie rubbed the back of one hand against his
mouth, staring.

"This had better be a joke," he said. His voice
was shaking. "It had better be a Christly joke, that's all
I've got to say."

One hand shot out, undeterred by liquor, and
grabbed Frank by the collar.

"You motherfucking joker," he said. "I'll teach

 

 

128

you to laugh at me!"

"Wait!" Frank screeched, terrfied. "I'll give
you back your money! Remember all medical breakthroughs
carry a certain risk!"

He was pushing bills and change frantically
across the table. "Keep your money. Keep it," he urged.

"I ought to flush you down the toilet head
first," Bernie threatened. He let go of Frank to count his
money.

"You've drunk half my money," he said. "I'll get
the rest out of your lying hide! I'll bet you're not even
a doctor. You'll finish this night sorry you tried to con
me, you shit. You fucking sleaze."

The tension at the table was broken by a high
pitched beeping.

"Excuse me," Frank said. "That's my pager.
Probably that Mexican poor woman expecting twins."

He turned to Connie who had appeared when voices
were raised at our table.

"Where‘s your lovely blond ass—waving daughter?"

"She's registering for school now. You folks can
leave," Connie added. You've had enough to drink."

We quickstepped to the parking lot. Frank's
victim lagged behind us, his arm gripped firmly by Connie,
who loudly lectured him.

”Stay away from that crazy Dr. Medlar," she

warned Bernie. "He's got a notebook full of babies'

 

129

pictures, and all the kids are deformed."

We turned in time to see Bernie bolt for the
shrubbery, one hand to his mouth.

Frank slid into the pick-up truck, resetting his
wrist alarm.

"What you saw there," he said dreamily, "was a
miscarriage of justice."

"Oh, shut up," Laurel said, laughing and wiping
her eyes. Then her shoulders began to shake and she was
weeping, leaning against me.

"What's the matter?" Frank asked. "I dealt with
your positive pro—lifer."

"Sure you did," said Laurel. "Now all you need
to do is get Forest's mother drunk. I'll send Adelaide
over, and then you can work on my cousin, and while you're
at it, you can talk to the woman who cuts my hair."

"It will take a great deal of time and
commitment," Frank admitted.

"Shut up," Laurel repeated.

"Fuck you, then," he said, suddenly very drunk.

I sat between them while Frank slept and Laurel
drove home barefoot.

"I'm getting corns," she said, "from going door

to door."

 

CHAPTER 12

Saturday morning I had a hangover. It was the
first time I'd ever awakened wincing and not felt Joe
breathing by my side. Ellie was downstairs watching
Saturday morning cartoon shows. I went down and put the
coffee on.

It was a quiet day. I tried to call Laurel but
her phone was busy. She either was making calls or had the
receiver off the hook.

Late that afternoon, Ellie started fussing. She
itched, she insisted.

"Let me see your stomach," I said skeptically.

Her thin hands rucked up the "Save the Seals"
t-shirt. There was nothing visible there except ribs, and
the thin blue tracings of veins beneath the skin. I
checked her hair for lice and told her to take a shower. I
sat on the couch, watching the last lemon wedge of sinking
sun.

We watched a rerun of the show on otters and ate
leftover chicken from T.V. trays. I sipped coffee and my
head still hurt.

"I itch," Ellie repeated. "I itch, and I've got
a hive."

"Let me see the hive," I told her, and she held

130

 

131

out the arm she had been rubbing with the heel of her hand.
Near the inside of her left elbow was a raised spot that
looked half silver dollar pancake, half spider bite.

I had seen hives like that. My roommate in
college was allergic to peanuts, and protein allergies are
the worst. If she is kissed by a peanut butter eater, she
breaks out from her head to her toes in itching mint—sized
lumps.

Ellie had begun to scratch near her wrist. I
watched her ragged fingernails scrape thin red streaks on
her arm.

I called her pediatrician's answering service,
and he promptly called me back.

-"It's the antibiotic," he told me
matter—of—factly. "Just go ahead and throw out whatever is
left."

"What if she gets strep again?"

"We'll deal with it later. I'm going to
prescribe some Benadryl to take care of those hives."

The only open pharmacy, six blocks away, was
busy. I stood in a line with people buying Preparation H
and condoms. I was tired and cold, and wished I had more
gas in my car.

I got back to the house and found Ellie crying
behind the sofa, a refuge she'd used when she was three and
wet her pants. The hives were starting to appear in

earnest. She soon had coin—sized welts on her stomach,

 

132
arms, and scalp.

I ran her a tub and poured in half a box of
baking soda. She was crying and angry, tossing about, and
insisting the hives now hurt. I got the Benadryl down her,
spooning it in while she was in the tub.

By the time I slid her into her worn pajamas. she
had hives between her fingers and toes, and hives on the
soles of her feet. The hives that were in swollen clumps
pulled at the skin, making it sting like drying burn
tissue. Her hair was matted with a paste of baking soda
and the home-made poultice had cracked off the worst welts.
I'd sprayed her stomach and chest with Chloraseptic
throat spray, because a nurse had once told me it numbed
chicken pox.

I sat by the edge of her bed, and she wound her
fingers in my hair, sending white flakes of baking soda
down my neck. I hummed old songs to her while she
whimpered. Froggy Went a Courting, He Did Ride. Songs Joe
used to sing. About the time light drained from the west
window, the blue—green, syrupy Benadryl made her fall
asleep.

I edged away from Ellie little by little, went
downstairs and took two of Laurel's Tylenol. I tried to
call Laurel, but there was no answer, and when I tried to
call Joe, the phone rang and rang. I cleaned up the
kitchen, shooing Quince off the table and giving the rest

of the chicken to him. Not having Joe to talk to made me

 

133

nervous. Ellie was sick and I wanted someone else to know
about it, but I couldn't think who else would be
interested. Frank might laugh at Ellie's hives, if he
wasn't still hungover, and my father was in Florida, twelve
hundred miles away. I gave up and hauled Quince up to my
bedroom, Quince who usually prefers to sleep alone. The
shades were stuck and wouldn't pull; the thick frost
patterns looked eerie. Quince must have known the
temperature was dropping, because he snuggled up to me.

Sometime during the night, Ellie crawled into bed
beside me. I lay still, back hurting, feeling her warm
against my side. She was streaked with green Chloraseptic
and caked with baking soda; she breathed open mouthed, her
hair was stuck back from her face.

When she finally woke Sunday morning, she looked
worse but felt better. She had hives on the corneas of her
eyes; you could see the raised ridge of white near the
iris, and she had little bloody tracks all over her body,
around each of the hives she could reach to scratch, but
overnight it most of the itching had stopped. I fed her
popsicles and read to her. Though mostly she read Beverly
Cleary, these days, now she wanted the old favorite picture
books by Margaret Wise Brown. Anything familiar, that was
what she wanted.

I tried to call Joe, and got no answer. Laurel
called.

"Are you ready for this?" she told me.

 

134

"Adelaide went to church this morning, and the church
bulletin had an announcement urging voters to support
'pro-life' candidates. The blurb was stuck between bingo
announcements and marriage enrichment schedules."

"What did Adelaide say?"

"She's mad as hell," Laurel said.

I told Laurel I'd make some phone calls for her.

I fed Ellie macaroni, put her in the tub and made
six calls. I got three not—at—homes, two people who liked
Laurel, and a woman who told me women have no place in
politics.

I could hear Ellie calling me. Christ, you
stupid child, I thought, give me a minute: I'm doing this
for you. But the sound escalated, the fussing sound
children make when they will not be ignored. Hoo, hoo,
hoo, I thought and went upstairs to find Ellie was sitting
on the edge of the tub, her poor pelvis dotted with welts
like non—pareils.

I started to pat her dry.

"My ankles hurt," she told me.

I kept on patting, short on patience. What next,
I thought.

"Ow! Mom!" she said. I clasped one ankle,
intending to guide her foot into pajama pants. I was cross
and grabbed hard. She had said the hives were better.
Ellie gulped with pain, and I could feel her ankle hot to

my touch.

 

135

I scooped her up and carried her dripping into my
bedroom and set her down in the middle of my bed. She sat
in her pajama tops, rocking on her bare bottom, hugging her
knees and whimpering.

Both ankles were as red and inflamed as bee
stings, swollen thick as a grown man's muscled calves.

"What else hurts?" I asked her. The room seemed
silent around us.

"My elbows," she said. "And my knees. And my
hands...they hurt a lot."

I called her pediatrician's answering service,
and once again he called me back immediately.

"Can she breath?" he asked me.

"Yes," I told him.

"She's not having any breathing difficulty at

all?"

I considered. Ellie was still whimpering and
rocking.

"No," I said. "No, she is not."

"Well then, it's not dangerous." He sounded
tired and patient. "She's developed a serious allergic
reaction...."

"I don't understand," I said. "She's had
penicillin before. Even in its ultimate and penultimate
forms."

"That's the pattern," he said. "People who have

a reaction don't usually become sensitized until the second

 

 

136

or third time the medication is used. She took this
successfully with that bone infection, and it cleared the
infection up. You can't really blame the drug."

"I hadn't thought to."

Ellie gave a moan that sounded angry. She began
to knead first one, then the other swollen wrist.

"I'll prescribe cortisone," he said. "Be sure
you follow the instructions. You'll notice that the
initial doses are spaced close together. You should keep
her away from penicillin now."

"I cerainly will," I said.

The pharmacy sent the bottle of cortisone
tablets. By the time I started Ellie on the drug, she was
sobbing, and so was I. Her knees were swollen as though
both kneecaps were broken, her elbows throbbed a rich,
infected red, and arthritic looking nodules thickened her
fingers. After I gave her the cortisone I put her in the
bathtub. The cortisone, mercifully, soon made her groggy
and she drowsed, half floating, as long as I sat by the
side of the tub and read.

When the hot water tank was out of hot water, so
that I could no longer keep her bath warm, I took two more
of Laurel's Tylenol tablets, woke Ellie and once again
carried her to bed. By that time all my thoughts had run
together, the light in the room seemed haloed from my
fatigue, my mouth was dry and the house echoed with

midnight silence. I slid Ellie into my empty bed and

 

137

looked at her. Her breathing was slow and even. Between
the hives on her face and the pudgy joints of her fingers,
she looked like some small alien, a moon child. I knelt
down by the bed and took her hand and kissed it, feeling
the angry heat pulsing beneath the skin.

I thought of Frank's comment. "You knew the
dangers." I didn't, I thought; no one knows the dangers.
This child was not, to the doctor, even dangerously ill.
Some women kneel by a sick child every day of their lives;

Ellie might someday kneel by such a child.

 

She looked so different, and so distant. Moved
by some impulse out of my past, I padded barefoot into the
bathroom and scooped baking-soda water out of the tub. I
carried it back dripping from the palm of my hand to her
bedside. There I dipped one finger in the water, and
traced a cross, up, down, left, right, on her forehead
under her bangs. It left little cloudy white tracks of
water.

"I baptize you, Elizabeth Ellen Holt," I
whispered, "In the name of the Father, the name of the Son
and of the Holy Ghost." Please God, I added, whether
you're a man or a woman, let this child be able to choose
whether or not she has children, and if she has them, let
her love them as much as I love her now.

I dried my hands on the covers and slid in by
her, thinking of times I'd wanted Ellie out of that bed.

Of times when Joe and I had wanted to make love, and

 

138

nightmares had roused her with visions of vampires
slithering out of overhead lights. Of waiting for
Joe...waiting to feel his hand, under the covers, cupping
my breast, moving slowly down to my thighs. Of his hand
tracing the melon arch of my stomach when I was pregnant.
Of the nights when he'd come in late from a construction
site, and burrowed against me, pressing against my
buttocks, sometimes waking me so that we made love,
sometimes both of us falling back to sleep. I thought of
waking up to the smell of coffee and bacon; of all the
times I'd stayed awake, waiting and watching for him. How
young we had been, I thought. How young we'd really been.

I was half asleep when I saw the beam of light
are the ceiling. There was a car pulling into the drive.
Laurel, I thought, or Frank, and then I knew Joe had come
home. I struggled out of sleep and stood at the head of
the landing. Joe came in carrying his suitcase. Thinking
Ellie and I were sleeping, he had started toward the
kitchen before he looked up and saw me. I stood shivering
in a pink flannel nightgown.

"Where have you been?" I asked. "I tried and
tried to call you."

"I was driving home," he said. He could hardly
have been driving all weekend, but he put the suitcase
down.

"I wanted to come home," he said. "I missed you

and Ellie. I told Elliot that was all we could do, this

 

year."

"Was it?"

"Almost. The ground is deep frozen. He'll have
to decide if he wants me back, in the spring."

"If he wants you back! You have a contract."

"Not for the building. Just for site
preparation," he said, and then took a closer look at me.

"What's that green stuff on your nightgown? You

look as though you've been rolling in Easter egg dye."

I looked down at myself. I was spattered, more
than spattered, with green Chloraseptic throat spray. I
looked as though I'd butchered a pig with mint-green blood.

I'm glad you're home," I said. "Ellie's sick."
My voice quavered, and Joe started up the stairs two at a
time.

It took a while to explain. He looked at her,
disbelieving.

"Are you sure she's alright?" he said. "She
looks half dead."

Actually, she looked pretty good. She was still
breathing evenly, with her hair spread over her face, and
her fat, star—fish fingered hands clutching her blankets.

"Jesus," he said.

We were both too tired to talk. Joe made himself
a bedroll of pillows and blankets and curled up on the

floor next to Ellie's side of the bed. I fell into a

 

thought was that I was 2"

 

in the drive.

 

 

CHAPTER 13

I woke up four hours later, knowing, even in my
sleep, that Ellie was due for her cortisone. She took it,
mumbling, and fell back on her pillow. I gulped four
Aspirin with water, set a clock, and went back to sleep.

By the time I woke she and Joe were downstairs, watching

.a‘

some awful gameshow; actually Ellie was watching it,
sitting in Joe's lap while he slept. I looked at him, his
head tipped back, jaw slack, his legs sprawled. Quince was
curled half on Ellie and half on Joe. I fixed myself bacon
and eggs, and sat reading the Sunday papers. There were
letters for Jim Stevenson and for Laurel, and there was the
newspaper endorsement, waffling at the end. McKay had more
experience, and more education, but wasn't it lucky the
city had two good candidates? Laurel was at the Baptist
potluck. I finished making my phone calls. Most people
were noncomittal, and one hung up on me.

Joe slept in front of the T.V. while the Lions got
slaughtered. Ellie spent her afternoon in the tub, but
was more cheerful. She took her watercolors with her and
painted murals above the soap ring. The water would turn
charcoal gray, then I‘d add hot water, diluting it, and she
would set to work again.

I had a strange feeling of time being suspended.

141

 

142

I walked around the house, touching familiar things. Too
much Aspirin had made my ears ring, adding to my sense of
unreality. One fragment of my brain wanted to do more work
for Laurel, but the impetus was lost in a vast blancmange
of fatigue. By evening Ellie was tired and fractious. She
and Joe watched television, and she yelled at him for
teasing her every time she yawned. She talked and sounded
like a much younger child, and ended up asleep in his arms.
I set the clock to remember her next cortisone tablet. As
time went by the doses came farther and farther apart. Joe '
took Ellie up to bed. I locked up, and on an impulse, left
a light on in each room, because it made the house look
safe.

Lou Christie, in the 60's had a hit song that
chorused, "Lightning is striking a—gay-hin," and described
a passionate couple clenched in a car in the rain. That
morning fate whomped us with one more lightning bolt. My
mother always said problems came strung together like
teething beads. It started with Janet Lamb leaning on our
doorbell at three in the morning, her pink slippers soaked
with rain.

"It's my dad," she stammered. "He's having
this-—this operation, because he's been having trouble with
his leg, and it wasn't supposed to be so bad, but Mom
called and she's crying and crying. I don't know what to
do, and I could see your lights were on...."

It was an odd situation. I barely knew Janet's

 

143

father, a big bear of a man who had an artificial right
leg. He was an engineer for Commonwealth; he traveled a
great deal, and when he was home he spent his time with his
wife and brood of kids. I knew his wife on a casual basis
only; a spare, pleasant woman whose daughter sat for me.

"Do you want me to go down to the hospital?" I
asked her.

"N--no." Janet looked miserable. "Mother
wouldn't let me come. She kept saying to get a man, to get
Uncle Arnie, but Aunt Jane says Uncle Arnie's working

second shift...."

"I can go." I heard Joe's voice over my
shoulder. "I hate to leave you alone with Ellie again,
Liz."

"Maybe I could drive with you." I was speaking

on an impulse, the words pouring out before I could stop
and think. Fresh cold air blew into the living room,
tugging at me; I wanted with sudden intensity to get out of
the house, to run, run away, to be free of illness, free of
the people Joe and I had become.

"I could stay with Ellie," Janet said. "One of
my sisters is old enough to watch the other kids."

Joe gave Ellie another cortisone tablet. Janet
sat down on the couch and pulled a green afghan over her
feet. She'd stopped crying but her breath came in
hiccoughs. There were tears on her glasses, so I cleaned

them and handed them back to her.

 

144

The night was crisp with cold. We drove through
the city, never stopping, because all the traffic lights
were set to blink. I had the sense of being on a journey
that hospital visits evoke; a feeling one is going farther
than can be measured in city blocks. The new wing of the
hospital, with sliding glass doors and low—static carpet,
reminded me of an airport terminal at night: the long
empty corridors, people carrying baggage, visitors passes
held like passports in white—knuckled hands.

We found Christine Babcock in the third floor
lounge, listening to a nurse.

"It's no good," Mrs. Babcock said. "It's a
stroke, or his mind's going...."

The nurse looked sympathetic but exasperated.

"Are you family?" she asked us.

"Neighbors," Joe said. "But we'd stay, if we
could help."

Mr. Babcock had not had a stroke, she told
Christine firmly. "He's having an unusual post—surgical
reaction, that's all."

"He's had so many operations," Christine
insisted. "Nothing like this has ever happened before.
You don't know him, anyway," she added with sudden spirit.
"How could you tell if he had changed?"

"Janet asked us to come," I said. Christine
looked at us, blinking. It was, I think, the first time

she'd realized we were there.

 

1115

"Maybe you should call Janet," Joe said. "She's
very worried."

Christine nodded wearily.

"All right, I'll call her."

"She's at our house," I told her. Joe talked to
the nurse, then followed the nurse down the hall. I
couldn't help listening while Christine talked to Janet.

"So much worse than last time," I heard her
saying. "The doctor came by and checked him...I just can't
believe it....he's not himself at all, and how would the
doctor know?"

I turned to study a poster and found the nurse
standing beside me.

"If you could get her to go home and rest, that
would be best," she said. "She can't help him, and we're
having to take care of her as well as him."

"Has he had a stroke?" I asked.

"No, it's just what I told her. Older people
don't take anesthesia very well. It's processed through
the liver, but age slows the process. He's disoriented,
but he's not disorderly. The confusion is unusual, but we
sometimes see it. His wife needs all the rest she can get
before he goes home."

Just then a doctor walked by, looking rumpled, and
Christine hung up the phone and launched herself after him.

I found Norm Babcock's room. My eyes took the

details in slowly. Joe's back, the back of his head,

 

146

definitely thin on hair; the hospital white, the lights,
the tubes, Joe's coat on a footstool, the empty second bed
in the room, the open bathroom door.

Norm lay propped in a pile of pillows. His color
startled me. He wasn't white; he was gray, the pale gray
of self-kilning clay. His big head lolled, his sheets were
rucked up, showing the operation that had brought him to
this condition. Trouble with the leg, Janet had said.
Trouble with the left leg, and now the left leg too, was
gone from the knee down.

Diabetes, my mind said, but my feelings were
absent, detached with shock at the sight of the man I knew,
lying nude to the waist. The stump of his right leg jutted
crookedly out toward Joe. It looked healed and at peace.
The left leg, recently amputated, was swollen at the knee,
so that the knee was as thick around as the thigh. A flap
of white, bloodless skin had been tucked over the kneecap
and sutured in place like the flap of a child's glued
envelope. Between the two truncated legs a catheter
centered in his penis, the tube surrounded by a drop of
blood the color of pomegranate juice. It hung wobbling,
like milk from a huge engorged nipple. Norm was mercifully
unaware of the disarray.

"He won't stay covered," Joe said. "Maybe the
sheet rubs him."
"No wonder Chris didn't want Janet to come."

"Hello, hello," Norm said. He gestured for me to

 

147

come forward. "Are you here for the concert? Arnie should
have saved you a seat."

Joe shot me a look. "That's me," he mouthed.

"Damned poor service," Norm was saying. "Didn't
used to let cats in here. Damned foolishness.

"Is this going to bother you?" Joe said.

I realized he was talking about Norm's poor body,
splayed out in plain view.

"He looks just like I did when they put me in
those stirrups," I said. "It's not quite the same
position, but it's close enough."

It was true. Something about the pulled back
sheets, with the traces of blood stains, his upright knees,
the I.V. tubes did remind me of labor. Even Norm's
meandering mind made me think of a roommate who'd given
birth lost in a cloud of sodium pentothal. She'd screamed
at her husband for taking flying lessons while she was
having his goddamn kid. Her husband had silently held her
hand through the criblike bed railings, and later confided
woefully that he'd never been in a plane. Now Norm was
caught in the meshes of some alternate mental life.

"Have a seat," he told me. "Mind that ginger eat
there. I've told the young man sweeping floors he ought to
put it out. Are you here for the Leontyne Price concert?
Damn it, Arnie, don't hover over me!"

"So far as I can tell," Joe said quietly, "we're

at a concert at the Masonic Hall. He's mad at me because

 

148

the last time we fished, I caught all the bluegills."

Norm noted us talking and gave me closer
attention.

"Are you one of those prostitutes that've been
hanging around here? I told those girls to give up.
Christine wouldn't like it, you know."

"This is my wife," Joe said.

"I won't hold it against her," Norm allowed.
"The bluegills, though, that was damn cheap, you taking my
line like that."

He took another look at me, turning his head
sideways the way a bird will when it wants to examine
something.

"Maybe I'm talking too much," he announced
abruptly. "The doctor keeps telling me there aren't any
cats here. I've seen a big ginger tom, hanging around for
three days. It sits under the chair by the bathroom." A
sudden worried look crossed his face.

"My damn bladder," he said. "If you folks will
excuse me, I've got to go see a man about a dog." He'd
propped himself up on his elbows, scooting toward the edge
of the bed, the catheter tube swinging wildly, when Joe put
his hands on Norm's shoulders.

"You have to have a nurse here," he said. "You
can't get out of the bed."

Appalled, I pressed the emergency button, and

stood watching. Norm struggled for a minute, trying to

 

149

lift himself On his arms; Joe pushed back as though he was
trying to contain a hot air balloon rising, trying to ease
something fragile gently down. In a minute the nurse came
in, a different nurse, this time. She brooked no nonsense.
She came up to Norm and shouted right into his face.

"Mr. Babcock! You have a catheter! If you try
to get up, you'll fall and hurt yourself badly. If you act
like this, we'll have to strap you in."

Norm lay back. "Don't do that," he pleaded.
"I‘ll lie still." But she had already fastened a strap
across the bed, and was adding a second strap.

"I'd like to give him a sleeping pill." She
sounded angry and defensive. "We're understaffed
tonight...I can't keep running in here to check him. But
his doctor doesn't want him taking any more medication, and
he really must not fall or dislodge that catheter."

"I could stay," Joe said. I waited for her to
tell us that visiting hours were over.

"That would be fine," she said. "He'll improve
more rapidly with someone here. I'd like to tell you to
use the empty bed. I can't do that, but the big chair
opens and I'll send blankets and pillows for you."

She was out of the room in three strides, the
squeak of her shoes audible behind her. I heard
Christine's voice in the hall and Norm, who'd been tugging
at the bed strap, stopped and turned his head to it.

"Hello, Christine," he said, when she came into

 

150

the room. "There's a stray cat hanging around here.
Sometime, I'll show it to you."

I saw her face brighten when he said her name.

"When are we going to have lunch?" Norm asked
her.

Joe was holding a cup of cracked ice to Norm's
mouth when I last looked back. Then I was involved getting
Christine home, calming her, trying to tell her I really
did think Norm's mind would be all right. She sat huddled
in the corner of the front seat, a small woman in an
incongruously cheerful tartan coat.

"I just can't stand it," she said. "I just can't
stand it."

"Sleep four hours," I said, "and he'll be better
when you get back."

Janet looked up when I opened the front door.

"Ellie's still sleeping" she told me. "I looked
just like that when I had four impacted molars out."

Then she caught sight of her mother and
remembered.

"Was it a stroke, Mom?" Janet asked her.

"No," her mother said. "It was—-it was just
some medicine he took."

Janet, reassured, turned back to me.

"I hope you don't mind," she said. "I woke up
once and ate most of your peanut butter."

"I don't mind." I watched the two of them walk

 

151

across the street together. I took two more Tylenol with
scotch and went to Ellie‘s room.

As Janet said, Ellie was still sleeping. Quince
lay against her, a round gold ball with measuring eyes.
Ellie's sausage—fat, pale fingers were hooked in his soft
fur. I looked around at the room, the clutter, the pale
yellow curtains, the stained carpet, the snow-filtered
early November sunlight bright on the floor. I carried
Joe's pile of blankets into her room, drank the rest of the
scotch, and fell fast asleep.

Joe came home at noon. I came downstairs to find
him fixing breakfast for Ellie. She'd had her next dose of
cortisone, and the smell of burned toast filled the house.
Ellie was sitting in a chair, watching "Pinwheel" on
television, where a clay model dog chased a clay cat up a
paper tree.

"How's Norm?" I asked.

"All right," he told me. "Now he says, 'I know
it's silly, but I seem to be seeing cats.’" He launched
into a description of Norm Babcock's progress, but I was
inexplicably angry with him. Joe's decision to talk to me
made me nervous. I would start counting on him, if he kept
on that way, and if I started counting on him, I might get
hurt again. I answered him monosyllabically, but it didn't
slow him. He even described the breakfast items he'd
checked for Norm's first meal.

Later, we took turns watching Ellie, and voting.

 

152

In spite of November sunlight, and the few remaining maple
leaves, the wind was bitterly cold. The turnout at the
polls promised to be light, which was bad for Laurel. I
listened anxiously to the news.

The people I saw in line at the polls made me
additionally nervous, and what was worse, a lot of them
were people that I knew and liked. Apple—cheeked older men
and women came, with the men driving up to the curb to let
their wives off. Some were my neighbors, people like
Christine and Norm Babcock. We'd bought their kids' school
calendars and fed each others' dogs. I loved this
neighborhood because the church held it together, gave it a
life beyond social status and carefully manicured lawns.
Now I thought of the church bulletin on Sunday, thought of
Laurel, thought of Ellie, and got a stomach ache.

The only reprieve in the day came while I was
voting. I stood in line with a group of people who knew
one another. They chatted over my head about Kiwanis
travel films. It was an innocuous conversation, but I was
so tense that my hands shook.

I stopped at the women's room. Coming out, under
full sail, were the couple from the Y, the richly padded
woman and her gothic friend.

"Look at these sweet wool lambs the Sunday school
classes made, darling," the heavy woman said, plucking the
other woman along.

"Mother will be out any minute. She'll be cross

 

153
if I'm not waiting."

"Let her be cross. There's no harm in looking at
lambs, is there? By the way, this church has the nicest
new curate..."

I pushed open the heavy oak door and found myself
facing a small, curious, squirrel—shaped face under a mat
of gray hair. Definitely the mother, I thought, the
famous, infamous mother. The woman was small, and her
shoulders tremendously hunched. She was wearing snagged
polyester pants and a fox fur jacket. In her hand was a
man's razor. She was shaving her chin.

"Don't just stand there," she said. "If you're
coming in, come in." She waved the razor at me. "Go on,
go to the can."

I went to the can. When I came out, she was
putting away the razor, and patting at a bit of soap foam.

"Startled?" she said. "My daughter never likes
to see me shaving, but it's cheaper than electric needles,
and nobody gives a damn if I've got stubble, anymore."

She squinted at me. "It's hell to be old," she
said. "The first half of your life they tell you you're a
hussy, because you're a woman. Then you get old and grow a
bitty bit of hair on your chin, and ratty—ass kids start
peeking at you, and laughing. If I had a razor strap, I'd
strop their behinds good."

She fingered one spot where she'd knicked a bit

of skin.

 

154

"How are you voting for this ward's
commissioner?" she asked me.

"I voted for Laurel McKay," I said, and held my
breath.

"So did I," she said. "Mind you, I don't hold
with abortions. If I did, my daughter wouldn't be here
voting today. A damned inconvenience, a natural born
fusser she has been. But," she said, ominously, "I've
never seen a man I'd trust to take the trash out. Until
God gives us some new sex, I'll vote the woman every time."

She ran her hand over her chin and eyed me in
parting.

"Be good," she told me. From somewhere out of my
childhood the answer surfaced.

"If you can't be good, be careful."

She sniffed. "Anyone can be good, if they work
hard enough," she said.

I went home to find Joe playing Crazy Eights with
Ellie.

Laurel won the election by only nineteen votes.

 

CHAPTER 14

Laurel's win—lose—or-draw party was held at
Forest's house. We left Ellie propped up on pillow playing
Yahtsee with Janet Lamb.

Once inside the door a wave of noise engulfed us.
Forest's friend, Thessaly, met us with champagne, and
hovered, the anxious blond hostess, until we downed a
glass. It wasn't the kind of furniture I like myself, lots
of pecan wood, oversized mirrors, and crystal chandeliers.
Thessaly was a stick thin blond who usually wore retainers.
Tonight she looked poised and lovely in a Navajo sweater
dress.

"So glad you could come," she said. "Forest
and I are so proud of Laurel," making it sound as though
they'd hatched Laurel from an egg. Across the room, I
spotted Forest's ubiquitous tweed jacket. He was talking
to a woman wearing an Indian Dashiki. The crowd was the
usual motley election crowd mix. Thessaly's son Michael
was home from Stanford. He stood near by, wearing Rebocks,
an open necked dress shirt, and blue jeans, trying to
impress a woman wearing a red wool suit and pearls.
Neighborhood children crossed the room bearing hazardously
tilting paper plates. All the food was finger food. Bite

sized bits of lasagna, chicken puffs, melon balls, frosted

E5

 

156

grapes, dinner rolls and brownies threatened to momentarily
be ground underfoot.

Laurel came up to me and gave me a bearhug.

"I did it!" she said, and launched into a
recount. My neighborhood, I learned, had split their vote,
roughly half voting for Laurel and half for Stevenson.
Midway through the rundown, she was interrupted by a
reporter, and was then swirled away by the crowd.

I noticed there was a young man following in her
footsteps. He made me think of the heavy set woman's
description of the cleric. He looked about twenty seven, a
lost lamb, young and blond.

I drank three glasses of champagne, and mingled.
The people were as diverse as their dress. Forest's
mother Adelaide was there with Catholic neighbors who
glowed with stories about Laurel as a child protegy. There
were three women lawyers, a nun, and a DSS administrator
discussing blue movies. Frank was in the kitchen showing
how he made tacos. Four cases of Great Western champagne
were stacked on the back porch.

I went to the bathroom, which was more glass,
tile and pecan wood, and talked for a while to a woman who
did junk metal sculpture and taught modern dance. She went
out. I looked at myself in the mirror, and swallowed. The
fluorescent light made my skin look yellow, and I had great
dark circles of pain and fatigue under my eyes.

"Liz, it's me, let me in." The voice at the

 

E?

door was Laurel's. I let her in, and watched as she ran a
comb through her hair.

"Who's the lamb?" I asked.

"He's the new assistant city attorney. Isn't he
a love of a man?"

"He certainly looks like one."

She gave me a rueful smile. "No scoldings, no
warnings? No saying my heart needs to be a-political?"

"No advice. But I wonder. Do you still think
about Al?"

"When you were a kid, did you ever have a friend
you didn't really talk to? You just sat around together
and read comic books? Al was like that, and I do miss him.
But not as much as I would have missed this party," she
said.

"That boy out there likes you," I told her.

"Mmmm. I know it. The trouble is, he seems
like a child. I keep wanting to tell him...eat your soup.
Wear your coat. Speed up. Slow down."

"Oh, hurry up," a woman wailed. "I'm out here
with my legs crossed."

"I'm glad you won. I really am."

"So am I," Laurel said.

Downstairs, I found Joe and started edging him
toward the back door. The dining room looked out on a
patio. We were near the windows and could see our

reflections, wraithlike against the night, toasting us

 

158

back.

"I've given Laurel a hug," I said,"and stepped
on thirteen different insteps."

"I've been kissed by more women than could fit
in downtown Hudson's."

"Downtown Hudson's is closed," I told him.

"Strewth," he said. "Look at that. Isn't that
Frank?"

Out on the patio stood Frank and Sally. Sally
was wearing black four inch spikes and white wool dress out
down to her tailbone. Her hair had been cut short and
feathered over her cheekbones. She had added a string of
baroque pearls and left the ankle bracelet home.

One of the men standing next to us saw where we
were looking.

"Quite a cupcake, isn't she?" he beamed. "Came
with Thessaly's son. A friend of a friend of a friend."

Friend of a friend of a friend! I thought. That
was my husband she was wooing! Or that's who I thought she
thought he was. Or had she found out I was married to Joe?
This was too confusing. I watched as Sally and Frank went
into a long, slow passionate clinch—~a real bottom grabber.
Frank was just her height. They swayed there with the
cold November wind blowing leaves around their ankles, a
judicious crowd watching like judges waiting to score an
Olympic event.

When she broke away from Frank, Sally saw the

 

 

159

group of admirers. Her eyes skimmed, unconcerned over the
faces of the crowd until they caught my eyes. I know it's
dubious to claim you can read an expression, but just at
that moment I knew to the bottom of my female soul that she
was looking for me, and daring me to stop her. It wasn't a
look of malice, just a flat look saying, I am what I am. I
have noticed you exist, but feel no obligation to you.

"What's wrong?" Joe said. "You feel stiff. Does
your back hurt?"

"That's my husband she's got there."

"Sure it is. In that case, she's wearing my
coat."

We watched as Frank took the suit jacket from his
shoulders, and placed it like a cape over Sally's bare
back. They walked slowly away.

No! I thought. It wasn't fair. I wasn't sure I
wanted Joe in Sally's arms any more——though I didn't know
why not—~but she shouldn't have taken Frank instead of Joe.
I'd used my dreams about Sally to convince myself I still
loved Joe, and now Sally was cheating. She was ruining
everything! It was all coming down to Joe and me, and an
absence of Sally. Somewhere behind me, I heard Thessaly's
son's voice.

"Sally and I are friends, and that's all we've
been since we were thirteen. She doesn't tend to retread a
romance, you see."

"But why would that gorgeous girl leave with such

 

160

a queer bloke?"

That was Forest. Slowly, slowly, then quickly,
quickly go fuck yourself, Forest, I thought.

"She's hard to predict," Michael said.
"Mercurial, that's what she is. She had some story about
the fellow making her mother split her sides, in a bar.
That doesn't make sense, does it? Well, it might with
Sally. Besides, she said, she could tell Frank's wife has
the hots for some tall old geek."

"That's odd," Forest said. "I thought Frank's
wife liked women now."

I walked with Joe to the car, still clutching my
champagne glass. My feet hurt, my back hurt. Poor
fantasies, I thought.

Driving home, Joe kept up a mindless
conversation. No wonder they say only shallow streams
babble, I thought. I wanted to ask Joe if he wished he
were Frank now...wished his hands had clung to Sally's
heart-shaped bottom, wished his hands were sliding the
pearls from around her neck. I looked hard at the tall old
geek Sally said I loved.

"The girl Frank was with looked familiar," Joe
said brightly.

"She what? Looked familiar? That's Connie's
daughter," I stuttered. "You've seen her in Connie's Bar!"

"I guess I never really noticed her," Joe said.

He'd never really noticed her! He'd never really

 

161

noticed? What else hadn't he noticed, this whole past
year? I could hear my mother's counsel of noble restraint
and understanding, but my impulses were way beyond me now.
To hell with noble restraint! I felt my wrist jerk,
automatic as a knee struck with a rubber mallet, and I
tossed my remaining champagne squarely into Joe's face.
Drops of Great Western beaded in his eyebrows. How could
he be so utterly blind! He hadn't noticed her?

"Just what was that about?" He pulled to the
curb, blinking. I stared at him. He wasn't pretending
disinterest, I could tell.

"How could you ignore someone like that! What
are you, a zombie? Don't you notice anyone or anything,
anymore? I'm sick of this, do you hear me? I'm sick of
you never talking to me, I'm sick of you always sleeping.
I hate it when you say you'll do something, and then you
don't!"

"I tried talking to you this afternoon, and you
wouldn't answer me."

He fished out the hem of his shirt and daubbed at
his face. I could still see bubbles inside each tiny drop
of champagne.

"I tried to talk to you about Norm Babcock," he
told me. "I told you tomorrow they're going to try him on
a bedpan."

"Joe, I said, "Joe, I think you're schizophrenic!

 

162

Half the time you don't talk at all. Then you're off on a
roll, discussing urine output. You're driving me nuts,
Joe, do you hear me? Driving me fucking nuts!"

He ran a hand over his now dry face.

"Say something about your feelings," I said. "Go

on, I dare you. Talk about your feelings! Say anything at

all."
"I had an affair," he said, "when I was in
Lapeer." H
Snow flurried against the window.
Say anything, I thought.
"Who was it?" I asked.
"A woman named Charlene. Elliot's daughter."
"How long?"
"Once. Only once. The night before I started
home."

The phone had rung and rung for a long time, I
remembered. I didn't say anything. I sat there, feeling
as though I'd bought Joe a marvelous present, and found out
he had returned it for a K—Mart bowling ball.

Except that I had never given him the present.
All I had really done was to window shop.

We went home, paid Janet, and checked on Ellie.

Joe locked up. I slid out of my high heels and

eased my nylons off. I sat on my edge of the bed, the silk

 

 

163

feel of my dress cool beneath my thighs. I took off the
oversized earrings that had been pulling at my ears.

Joe took off his tie, trousers and suitcoat. I
noticed he had mustard from the party on his tie. He sat
on his edge of the bed and picked at his toenails. I
massaged my earlobes. Outside, the snow scoured against
the window pane.

"It isn't just a joke," I said. "You know, the
farmer's daughter? It's pushing it, Joe, you have to
admit."

"It isn't a joke," he said.

"Is that why you thought Elliot might not extend
your contract? He's ticked with you for tumbling his
daughter in the hay?"

"No. No," Joe said. "I think he wanted what
happened to happen. He and I went to see her, in The Sound
of Music, and after that he kept talking about Charlene.
How unhappy she's been since her divorce. How much talent
she has. The voice lessons she's taken, and the prizes she
used to win. He took me to see her sing, and he sent me to
fix her plumbing."

"Her plumbing."

"Her hot tub plumbing." Joe said.

"There wasn't much wrong except a circuit breaker
Charlene had forgotten to trip."

Of course she had, I thought.

"That last week, Elliot kept telling me I was

 

164

like a son to him. He'd cuff my shoulder and say he liked
a hard-working man."

"It sounds disgusting," I said. "I think you've
commited incest."

"I drove to her house," Joe continued. "It's not
much of a house, though it's in a new suburb. It's got one
of those porticos that are too big for the design...."

"I'm not interested in designing houses."

Joe looked woebegone. "Charlene has black hair,"
he told me. “Sort of white streaked. Frosted. She made
me think of Laurel, but with more, um, fat."

I had a feeling I knew where the fat was.

"I fixed the tub. She fixed me a drink." Joe
rubbed his jawline, recollecting. "Then she put her arm
around me, and said she was glad I was there, and that she
was lonely. I remembered you saying it was hard for older
women, alone."

"It is for some women," I allowed.

"At first, I thought she was shy," he said.
"She's not pretty, but she's not ugly. We ended up in the
hot tub with the spouts gushing and steam as thick as fog."

"It doesn't sound like a fate worse than death,"
I told him coldly.

"It wasn't," he admitted, "but I didn't like it
much."

"Poor man," I said.

"It started out alright," he sighed. "I liked

 

165

the hot tub. They sure relax tight muscles, Liz. Getting
one of those would really help your back. The problem is,
screwing in a hot tub isn't easy. I think it would take
some practice, if you're going to do it right."

Practicing sounded fine to me. All those
bubbles, and the water swirling.

"Her breasts floated on the bubbles," he
remembered. "They made me think of plane pontoons."

"Will you tell me what happened?" I asked him.

"First we just sort of slopped around. Then she {,
started to get determined. Did you know," he asked
somberly, "oral sex is hard in a hot tub?"

"I hadn't thought about it much," I admitted.

"There wasn't any rim to sit on," he complained.
"A rim would have made it easier. Every now and then she'd
duck under the water, play pearl diver, and pop back up."

I eyed him, fascinated.

"You didn't like it?"

"No dependable timing," he said. "It made me
nervous. I was afraid she'd want me to reciprocate."

"Then what?"

"She dried me off and we went up to her bedroom.
She wanted me to wear a rubber."

"But you had a vasectomy," I reminded him.

"You think I didn't tell her? She said she was
afraid of AIDS, and men lie about things like that. She

had this packet of immense French Ticklers, big old

 

166

rose-colored creepy crawlies." He shuddered. "There I
was, bobbing over her like a demented caterpillar, about to
ah, engage, when I noticed the way she smelled."

"Um," I said.

"She'd just used a douche or something. And she
smelled like Mr. Bubble. She made me think of Ellie, and
you."

"And?"

"I ran out on her."

"You didn't do it?"

"No," he said. "I didn't. But I would have. If
the hot tub had had a ledge. If she'd let me, without a
rubber. If she hadn't smelled like Ellie does when she's
clean and ready for bed...and then coming home and finding
Ellie was so damn sick...."

Men ought to learn to cry, I thought. Like
screwing in a hot tub, it takes practice if you want to do
it well.

"Then I had trouble on the way home," he
continued, swallowing hard.

"Driving home."

"That's right. I'd just grabbed my clothes and
run out the door with my coat and my shoes on. No socks.
And I still had that thing. I peeled it off in the car. I
meant to throw it out the window, but it sort of poinged
off the dashboard and landed out of reach. I stopped to

get dressed at that rest stop where they've had trouble

 

167

with gays lately. And I...and I...."

"You got stopped by the police."

He nodded.

"Thank God no one else was there...just me and the
cop. I tried to tell him I just wanted a place to put my
clothes on, and he said, good, because that's all he'd let
me do. I was terrifed he'd charge me with indecent
exposure, or worse...and when he looked into the car, there
was the rubber. I got dressed somehow, but I lost both
socks, and that pair was almost new."

"You didn't have an affair," I said.

"I don't know if I did or didn't. I don't know
if I have a job or not. God only knows what Charlene will
tell Elliot. Are you angry?"

"I don't if I am or not," I said. "Let's go to
bed."

"I may never get it up again," he told me. "I
tried to masturbate the first morning I was home."

"Nothing happened?"

"Absolutely nothing."

I reached over and fondled him through his
shorts. The material was soft, the way cotton gets from a
lot of washing. I would figure out how I felt later.

It was obvious Joe was going to recuperate.

After Joe turned on his side in sleep, I stayed
awake, thinking we're all held hostage by our

chemistry...allergies, immunities, musks, hormones. We're

 

168

each of us like the surface tension of a river. The shape
of our private lives flickers below the surface. Our needs
surge, rise and dive like dolphins: would that they could

sport in us, swimming painlessly.

 

CHAPTER 15

Joe recovered. Ellie recovered. I recovered.

The business didn't recover. It went bankrupt
instead.

Joe got a letter from Elliot, thanking him for
services rendered. It sounded as though Joe had been
strained like boiling fat. Without the likelihood of a
spring construction contract, the bank couldn't see its
way clear to carry us any longer, and Wendall's faithful
mudflecked machines were sold to pay the debt.

Frank took us out to dinner when the firm
officially folded. We drove to Detroit and he fed us
dinner at the London Chop House. Frank had pork
tenderloin, Joe had prime rib, I had lobster Newburg, and
we all drank cold duck. The waiter was an absolute lamb,
and I pictured him with Sally, then wondered if Frank
thought of Sally any more.

"What happened to the Great Romance?" I got up
the nerve to ask Frank.

"Ah, yes, whatever happened to romance?"

"You're dodging the question," Joe contributed
for me.

Frank eyed his mint jelly, and pushed it toward
his pork tenderloin with his knife.

169

 

170

"It was great," he said dreamily. "Like a
terrific dinner...like this pork tenderloin."

We stared at him, astounded, and he had the grace
to blush.

"You can't describe the nuances of some things,"
he muttered. "It was nice. Quite nice. Maybe a little
lonely. I almost wished I had someone I knew to share it
with."

"How did she pick you up?" I asked him, half
afraid she'd used my name.

"She just marched over to me, and said, 'My feet
hurt. Let's go some place so I can take off these bloody
clothes.'"

"You must have felt incredibly macho," I said.
"Forest was so jealous his tweed coat turned sloth green."

"To tell the truth," he said. "I felt like a
failure."

"Why?"

"I dunno, Liz," he said, poking a pomme de terre
frite with his fork. "I just kept thinking, if this woman
knew I was having my hospital privileges suspended for six
months, she'd be out of bed, gone like a buff-breasted
Canada goose. She made me so nervous I could hardly
function. Not," he added severely, "to say that I did not
function. Fortunately, lust overrode introspection,
allowing me a unique, yes, unique, learning experience.

Pass the blue cheese."

 

171

"Will you see her again?" I asked.

"Don't know. .I doubt it. She got very irrational
when I said I was divorced."

I looked at Joe while I passed the blue cheese
dressing. I doubted Sally cared about Frank's hospital
privileges, but for some reason, he had believed she would.
I wondered if Joe would have felt like a failure, with
Sally. That was something Joe never seemed to me, but now
that I thought about it, my favorite people are failures.
Laurel seems invulnerable, but I know how frightened she l
was that she would lose that election. And people have
told her she is marked in this state; she'll never be a
candidate for higher office. If she'd been coldblooded and
clearheaded about it, she would have checked the questions
"yes" and won the landslide she deserved. She couldn't do
it, any more than Frank could leave a sixteen-year-old girl
whose pain he could relieve. Any more than Joe could have
left Wendall to founder without him, or I could have
silkscreened cards the year Ellie was so ill. Maybe
failures have more fun in bed with other failures. I
thought about it while I dabbed a potato with sour cream.

I also thought about the counsel of Bill Fry, the
banker who had steered us with relative safety through the
shoals of bankruptcy.

"It's a pity Wendall was so set in the way he did
business," he told Joe. "People know what happened, and

you won't have trouble finding work in this town."

 

172

Within a week, Joe had a job as a construction
foreman. He doesn't like the work but it's tiding us over.
He's eloquent and funny when he's complaining; I think
he'll eventually start a business of his own.

Norm Babcock came home from the hospital in
December. He has one of those lightweight mechanized
wheelchairs, and a customized van. Neighbors keep the
sidewalks clear for him, and take turns shoveling his
drive. The curbs in this neighborhood are wheelchair
access, and worth every cent. 1

"You know," Norm said to me, "I had crazy dreams
after that operation. I can just remember bits of what I
said to you and Joe."

"Sometimes," I said, "It was hard to understand
you. You talked a lot about a big ginger cat."

He looked relieved, and I watched him wheel
himself manually up the block. There was a light drift of
snow over the leaves now. He hit an incline and the chair
turned on with a smooth, bumblebee buzz.

I watched him go with a great deal of fondness.
I think taking care of Norm Babcock was what saved Joe,
finally. When Wendall was in the coma, Joe had spent hours
with him, holding the hand that did not move, waiting to
make some small joke, daubbing spittle from the mouth that
would not respond. Joe and Wendall had vehemently
disagreed, that last year, about the business; Wendall's

anger had been followed by Joe's impotence to help and his

 

173

withdrawal from us all. Laurel, who fancies herself an
analyst, says people grieve hardest when the parent lost
does not approve, and now, never will. I hadn‘t
understood, but I had instinctively wanted something to
give Joe's heart the galvanizing shock I could not give.
Maybe Charlene's bobbing breasts started the healing
process; maybe losing the firm was the best thing for Joe.
Helping Norm let Joe constructively relive his father's
illness, and I'll never know if a night with Sally would
have done as well.

Ellie's swollen joints gradually subsided. She
has not gotten strep. She has a new friend who says
"shitty" all the time.

Laurel is getting along with the Lamb, though I
think he bores her. She and Forest get along better.
Sometimes I think she still misses Al, but she wouldn't
change her life.

With Ellie better, I am working again. Laurel
has commissioned me to do a mural for her office, anything,
she says that represents daily life in this town. The wall
is huge and I've been sketching, sketching, sketching, but
so far I have no idea what I'm going to do.

My back is better. After the election, I went to
a rheumatologist Frank suggested, and admitted Laurel's
pills had been keeping me sane. Doctor Najuri has soft
jowls and thick trifocals. He eyed me sadly under lank

graying hair.

 

171

"What does this tell us?" he asked. "The
important thing it tells us. The codine says to us that
your body wants no more pain."

Oh, Lord, I thought. A medical Simple Simon.

Majuri continued. "Aspirin does not work in all
cases. Some people excel, their kidneys excel at excreting
Aspirin. Sometimes Aspirin is the drug of choice.
Sometimes, not."

He suggested a drug athletes use to reduce
inflammation.

"What about side effects?" I could already hear my
friends' warning voices. Majuri pointed to a poster of a
three-year-old child suffering from rheumatoid arthritis.

"Some individuals have adverse reactions. So we
monitor your blood, yes?" He peered at me. "In my
practice, I have learned that pain also causes adverse side
effects. People drink too much, despair too much, and give
up on living. Try what I suggest," he said. "Try it for
two weeks."

I stopped spitting up blood from taking too much
Aspirin. The ringing in my ears stopped, and the pain
stopped, most of the time. Sometimes I still use Tylenol
with codine, but the use is occasional, and I own my life
again.

Once I felt better, I lost the urge to send Joe
packing. I know I could survive without him now, as a

parent, if I had to; it wouldn't be easy but it no longer

 

175

sounds impossible. Earning a living sounds hard, but not
impossible, either. And once I knew Joe could leave, I
believed he wanted to stay. The house is littered with
drawings for his spring project; he is designing the hot
tub he's going to build. There are days when we quarrel,
but there are days when we are happy. There even are days
when we are still in love.

I did see Sally once after she moved to Ann Arbor.
Frank has been dating a redhead named Camelia, a big—boned
Boston Celtics fan with an engineering degree. The bars we
go to with them are chosen for projection T.V. screens.
We'd been watching a Pistons game at Frank's apartment, and
Frank and Joe were in the kitchen, scrounging for beer,
when the camera unexpectedly panned in on Sally. She was
with a very collegiate group of students sporting bright
wool scarves, sweaters, and fraternity pins. She was
looking away from the camera, which lingered over her
cheekbones and the shine of her hair.

I thought she looked a little sad, a little
distant. She did not look as though the game interested
her at all.

I felt a sudden surge of protective instincts.

Run. Run away, I thought. Find your ankle
bracelet. You were a goddess, in Connie's Bar and Grill.

She turned, and seemed to look right at the
camera, which meant she seemed to look right at me.

I will do, the look said, what I choose to do.

 

    
 

The crowd

"Enough tit shots," 1:11,;;

back to the game."

 

 

 

 

 

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