“Doesn’t sound stupid to me,” he said. “If you were a child none of this would be happening.”
I looked up again. “What do you mean?”
“If you were a child, you wouldn’t have a lover, and he wouldn’t be quadriplegic.”
A lover. Heat filled my face. I thought of Mike above me in bed, using his knee to sweep my leg aside so he could plunge into me. Then Mike up in his room earlier tonight, being maneuvered into bed by the orderly.
Dave King was watching me. “I see what you mean,” I said, but I
couldn’t look at him now; I looked past him, into the darkness, to the memory of Mike suspended over me. We’re in my apartment, in my bed, and he’s got his weight on his forearms, placed on each side of me, and he’s inside me, arching, his eyes closed tight, his entire being straining forward; and I rise up to the feeling of him.
No. No, I don’t rise. I rose.
C
HAPTER
12
Simon Rhodes called me one evening near the end of August, and we talked for almost three hours, the longest I’d spent doing anything but sewing in months. “So what’s new in the Carrie Bell saga?” he said. “Wait’ll you hear the latest in the Simon Rhodes saga.” He told me about life in New York: about his problems with his boyfriend; about the big, dilapidated brownstone he shared with a bunch of Yale friends; about the Park Avenue law firm where he worked as a proofreader. It had the unlikely name of Biggs, Lepper, Rush, Creighton and Fenelon, but he said all the proofreaders referred to it as Big Leper Rush. What he really wanted was to be an illustrator.
I told him about Mike’s sadness, about how difficult it was to watch. About the rare moments when some piece of his former self came through: when he joked with Stu or Bill, ribbed Rooster about Joan. I’d catch his eye, and there’d pass between us a recognition of the fact that he didn’t have any of that available for me right now. “It sounds hard,” Simon said, and I was grateful: I could tell him anything and it would be OK, the words zooming away from Madison, safely gone just moments after I’d uttered them.
Before we hung up I said I wanted to pay for half the call, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I played Twister at Nicole Patterson’s birthday party in fourth grade.”
I laughed, but I knew what he meant. Fun might not be the word, but there was something about talking to him that was deeply satisfying. Just like Twister, he would’ve said if I’d told him, so I didn’t.
Julie was leaving for her sophomore year at Swarthmore, and she called and asked me to come say goodbye, a surprise given that I saw her at the hospital all the time.
I hadn’t been over there since my talk with Mrs. Mayer back in June. Their street had some of the tallest, most densely planted trees in town, a row of soaring maples whose topmost leaves were just beginning to fade and curl. I stepped out of my car, and the thick, warm shade they cast achingly reminded me of every end-of-summer I’d had with Mike, of the feeling of things being about to change.
No one else was home, and Julie and I sat in the kitchen drinking diet sodas, talking idly about this and that—how she needed a new backpack; how Dana, her best friend from Madison, had been a pain all summer. The two of them had been inseparable—like me and Jamie, I’d always thought. They were like us still.
“I can tell you this now,” Julie said. “Remember at Lake Superior? The time we had the place by Oulten’s Cove? It was Dana who spilled the bug juice on your white sweater. She made me promise not to tell you.”
“You think I didn’t know that?”
We both smiled, and I thought back to that summer, Mike and I sixteen, Julie and Dana twelve. I bunked with them, fell asleep to the sounds of their voices saying the names of the boys they preferred. They thought it was boring that I preferred Mike; they were always asking who I liked second-best.
“Did you guys write letters last year?” I said.
“A few.”
“Maybe it’ll just peter out this year.”
Julie stood and went into the dining room for her purse, a book-sized black velvet bag on a braided cord. She fished around in it until she’d found a pack of cigarettes, then she laid them on the table between us and stared at me. Nothing could have horrified the Mayers more than smoking: both grandfathers had died of lung cancer.
She gave me a defiant smile. “Yes, Carrie, I smoke. I also drink, and when I’m inclined to I fuck.”
“Fucking’s fun,” I said. “At least I think I remember that.”
She stared at me until all at once we both broke into laughter. We laughed for a long time, eyes right on each other—loud, convulsive laughter that hurt after a while deep in my stomach.
“Shit,” she said. “I can’t believe you said that.”
“Neither can I.”
We sat there looking at one another, surrounded by Mrs. Mayer’s familiar kitchen: the bread-and-noodles smell, the matching ceramic canisters, the collection of ornamental plates hanging over the range. I felt giddy and strange, like the laughter might take over again. On the refrigerator, a familiar-looking grid caught my attention, and I stood to go look at it, glad to be moving.
It was John Junior’s practice schedule for hockey.
“John’s probably going to start this year,” Julie said, tapping a cigarette out and lighting it.
“As a junior?”
She nodded, and I knew we were both thinking:
Just like Mike
. He’d been starting varsity right wing two years in a row. When he decided not to go out at the U, everyone tried to get him to change his mind except me. I understood it, how he could be ready for that part of his life to be over.
“You know what I really hate?” Julie said suddenly. “Flying. I’m scared to get on the stupid plane. I wish I could just wake up and be there.”
I pictured her beamed from her mother’s kitchen to a plush green lawn in front of a centuries-old fieldstone building. On the basis of a single photograph from a pamphlet she’d shown me once, I imagined I knew just what Swarthmore was like: towering trees, emerald playing fields, old, old dormitories, creaking classrooms, dining halls all paneled with dark wood. At the beginning of twelfth grade my guidance counselor had pressed on me an armful of brochures about colleges from Vermont to Virginia, but although I studied them carefully, fascinated by the photographs of students walking across quadrangles or sitting in classrooms taking notes, I never even applied. I cited inadequate funds to the counselor, but the truth was it would have meant leaving Mike.
“Maybe I’ll transfer,” Julie said.
“Here?”
She inhaled hard on her cigarette. “It’s a good school.”
“Because you’re afraid to fly?”
She gave me a look: not because she was afraid to fly.
“I think he’d be really upset if he thought you were thinking that. Really upset.”
“Do you really think so?” she said. “I doubt he’d care. He doesn’t care about much these days.” She stood up and crossed to the window. She wore a skinny black tank, and her shoulders looked bony, not an
ounce of extra flesh on them. As I watched she raised her hand unsteadily and dragged on the cigarette again. Then she turned and looked at me. “Are you still going to get married?”
I felt a gasp catch in my throat, and my face burned. Julie stared at me with her gray eyes wide, eyes so much like Mike’s that it was eerie, his eyes in her face. She was the last person I would have expected to ask me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you think I should?”
She blew a plume of smoke into the air above her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “Do you want to?”
Do you want to? Do you want to? Do you want to? By the time I got home from the hospital that night the question had permeated the very air around me, and I couldn’t even think of sewing, let alone going to bed. I sat and paced and sat, then finally went out onto my porch. I was barefoot, and as I stood there looking into the night I absently brushed the grit from the bottom of one foot onto the opposite calf, then did the same with the other foot, until I became aware of what I was doing and started pacing again.
I knew I could continue, in Rooster’s words, to be there for Mike; I knew I could wait out his sadness or at least that part of it that was most acute. I knew I could stand by and applaud as he slowly, slowly learned how to get around in his wheelchair, how to use what little function he could marshal from his hands to eat, to help dress himself, maybe to turn the pages of a book. But what then? Be his caretaker? His cook, nurse, helper, chauffeur, attendant? And his wife, somehow, too? And also myself? Who might that be?
But I didn’t want to walk away—I didn’t want to
be
someone who could walk away. Not from Mike.
Out at Picnic Point once, lying on a bed of fallen leaves on a warm October day, we talked about dying. About what we’d each do if the other died. “I’d want to die, too,” Mike said, and I felt a narrow gap open up between us because I wouldn’t want to, couldn’t see thinking in those terms at all. I reached for a yellowing leaf and folded it along the center vein, and I imagined myself in a small cottage somewhere, alone, sweeping the steps and waiting to feel ready for the world again.
It was nearly midnight, but I put on some shoes and went down to my car, the urge to move propelling me across the isthmus and around Lake Monona, the big, round darkness of it glinting with reflected bits of the half-moon. I got on the Beltline heading west and drove, past Rooster’s
Honda place, past the turnoff to Verona, just drove and drove through the darkness, the road disappearing under my headlights again and again, highway signs blinking by, the twin staring eyes of oncoming headlights. I passed the exit for West Towne Mall, the last of the motels out there. I was coming around onto Middleton when I finally got off, and I slowed to wind through cul-de-sac land until I’d reached the strip of big, faceless restaurants that had been our destination so often, on countless nights when we’d been cruising too long and wanted pancakes, or big, wide platters of French fries. I hadn’t been that far west in ages, in I didn’t know how long—it was like a strange, foreign land where you’d never see anyone on foot, just oceans of parking lot and low-slung buildings. The Red Barn. Jack Sprat’s. Five or six of us in a booth, Rooster across the table wise-cracking, Jamie tipsy, Mike and I side by side, pressed close, my leg over his and his hand cupping my inner thigh.
I was about to get back on the Beltline and head for home when I glanced across a nearly empty parking lot and saw a woman standing by herself under the front light of the Alley, a ratty cocktail lounge I’d heard about but never been in. There was something familiar about her, something in the way she stood, but I couldn’t figure out what.
I pulled into a gas station and swung around so I could go back out the way I’d come. I drove into the Alley parking lot, skirted the few cars that were parked there, and then I saw: it was Lynn Fletcher, Jamie’s younger sister. She was standing just in front of the entrance, one leg crossed in front of the other, wearing a short skirt and an oversized jean jacket. Her hair was big and disheveled, as if she’d just teased it and doused it with hairspray. I stopped in front of her, and she glanced once at my car and then looked away.
Reaching across the seat, I rolled down the passenger-side window and called her name.
She glanced at me again, this time stooping to look through the open window. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Carrie!”
“What are you doing here?”
“Nothing. Waiting for someone.”
“Come here,” I said, motioning her to the car.
She hesitated, then took a few steps closer to me. She had Jamie’s small mouth and wide-set green eyes, but she was shorter than Jamie, a little chubby.
I shifted into park and let the car idle. Through the window, Lynn looked scared.
“Who are you meeting?” I said.
“A friend from work.”
The restaurant where she waitressed was nearby, I recalled—Spinelli’s. I wondered how she was going to get into the Alley, if she had a fake ID. Or maybe no one would card her, though she looked about sixteen, standing there in her too-short skirt, big silver hoops hanging from her ears.
She took a step closer. “Don’t tell, OK?”
“Don’t tell who?” I cut the engine and after a moment leaned toward her and opened the door. “Sit with me for a sec, I haven’t seen you in ages.”
She looked toward the road, then shrugged and got into the car. She was wearing four or five bracelets, and they clinked together as she settled into the seat.
“I mean don’t tell Jamie.”
“Don’t tell her I saw you at all?”
She looked at me hard, a little frown pulling at the corners of her mouth. She wore a streak of iridescent green on each eyelid, mascara thick as paint.
“What are you up to?”
She raised a pudgy hand and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “Nothing.”
“Lynn.”
“I just have a date.”
“With a man?”
She gave me a look.
“Who?”
“Just someone I met at work.”
Now I was confused—earlier, I’d thought she meant a co-worker. “You mean a customer? Jesus, do you really think that’s a good idea?”
“It’s fun.”
A car pulled up behind me, and she turned and peered through my back window, blinking at the headlights and craning her neck until she turned back, apparently having decided it wasn’t the guy she was meeting. In the dark car her profile looked vulnerable, her chin soft and sloping. I wondered what I’d do if the right car drove up, if I’d let her go.
“Do a
lot
of the customers hit on you?”
“Carrie!” She gave me a hurt look. “They’re just friendly.”
“I’ll bet.”
She shrugged, tugging a little at her skirt.
“Do you let these guys think you’re twenty-one?”
She laughed and I realized that she’d had a drink or two already, that she was in fact on her way to being drunk. I wondered what was in her purse, a big, slouchy hobo she’d dropped between her feet. A pint of something, probably something cheap and sweet, like peach schnapps, Jamie’s favorite drunk when she was eighteen.