by Amity Gaige
“A drink,” he said. “A toast.”
The man went to his desk and pulled out a bottle.
Charlie licked his lips. “I don’t drink. I’m sorry. I’d really love to but—”
Gregorian waved him off. “God forbid, don’t be sorry. Be happy.” The man closed his eyes and lifted the glass. “To the baby. May he be healthy and happy. May he be strong. Wise. Successful.” Gregorian looked over. “May he have your wife’s ears.”
Charlie laughed again, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Did I forget anything?” said Gregorian.
“May he be good,” Charlie said. “That’s enough. May he just—be good.”
At the hospital, Hal and his parents had waited in a small, carpeted room with folding chairs. Hal sat in the middle, with his parents on either side, and a baggie full of sugared water hanging from a pole behind him and connected to his wrist by a tube. He’d been in the hospital for several hours and had been seen by several kinds of doctors, and gotten his head photographed and his IV connected, all of it seeming so cruel—not the tests or the needles—but the insistence that his life was this important, to be protected at all costs, when he wanted to die. Finally they were told to go to a separate room on the medical wing, where they waited for a long time. For a long time, nobody came, and the only thing that kept Hal from bolting was that he didn’t want to go running down the hallway dragging a baggie full of sugared water.
His mother wore her green dress and ate, with puppet-like deliberateness, the caramels that she had bought in a package out of the candy machine, which hummed enormously in the room with them. His father ate some caramels too. They were all eating sugar together. It was an anonymous and shadowy room, and his parents appeared queer and deceitful and deliberate, moving like circus elephants, but it was also the first moment in several months in which Hal experienced a faint, faint, faint mercy toward them, toward all whose lives were small delicate violets with the whole black sky closing over them. He watched his father eat a caramel. He watched his mother. He liked them, these carnival animals. He smiled. His smile made his father blink back happy tears, not understanding.
Finally, a man came in with a clipboard, breathing heavily. He had thin blond hair and didn’t look much older than Hal. His shoelace was untied, and in pulling back a folding chair he tripped over his shoelace, blushing and apologizing, and they all felt rather custodial over him, which was nice because it took the attention off Hal.
The young man introduced himself. He was a social worker, and in charge of interviewing the new patients and helping direct them to the right place in the hospital. He was new to Admitting, but he was pleased to meet with them and help them and he was very proud of Hal for coming to the hospital and for waiting so patiently, because let’s face it everybody hates hospitals, and when you are disoriented, when you are sick, you hate them especially, because they don’t make sense, you know, all those hallways hither and thither. Why, said the young social worker, he himself had gotten lost on his way here, since he usually admitted people downstairs.
Do you want a caramel? Hal’s mother asked the young man.
Yes, said Hal’s father, holding one out. Do. Have a caramel. Hal’s father went to the water cooler and got them all little paper funnels of water.
Thanks, said the young man, wiping his forehead.
Thanks, said Hal’s mother.
Hal was looking at all of these gestures and trying to perceive what they meant. There was something absurdly ritualistic about them. They all seemed like components, corollaries: caramels, cups, clipboard. For some reason, at the moment he might have burst out in injured laughter, Hal decided to go along with it. The social worker was flipping through his papers and wiping his brow when, out of nowhere, he looked up and smiled. He put out his hand.
Forgive me, he said. My name is Charlie Shade.
Hal took his hand and shook it.
You got me, said Hal. It’s all code.
The young social worker looked at him for a second and then shook his head. Don’t you worry about all that, he said. Some things aren’t as important as they may seem right now. What’s important is this: you’re here. Things are going to improve.
All right, said Hal. He focused on the young man’s face and eyes. The young man’s eyes suddenly sort of glowed and popped out but Hal tried not to get too hung up on that. He tried to just believe. His mother reached out and put her hand on his arm. She was crying softly.
Do you want to know why your mother is crying? the social worker asked Hal.
I know already, said Hal. It’s because of me.
His mother wiped her eyes. She smiled at Hal.
I love you, she said.
Hal knew he was supposed to love her, and yet he knew that he did not love her, but he suspected that he had loved her once. He looked back at the social worker imploringly.
I just don’t see what that has to do with anything, said Hal.
Let’s just take this one step at a time, said the social worker. We don’t have to figure everything out at once. Why don’t you tell me the story, if you can, of what brought you here. How you stopped eating. How you got sick. Tell me how you are.
And that’s what Hal did.
Looking back, it was the telling of it, like a last-minute angel, that stepped between him and death.
part
two
One morning in the autumn of the following year, Alice and Charlie Shade became the parents of twins. Small at birth but extravagantly fat about the tummy, the infants were quiet, easily manhandled, and given to sighing, which endowed them with a certain air of forbearance or ennui. They were girls, one fair and the other dark. The fair one’s head was a tuft of golden red, like a spring bud, and was endowed in miniature with the famous, winglike ears of her father’s side of the family. The other wore a dark whorl of hair and the slanted, subtle eyes of her mother. So delicate were their features, they appeared to have been crafted under a magnifying glass. Side by side in their plastic boxes, they were the beauties of the maternity ward. The sense of conspiracy between them was palpable, and the first time they cried was when they were carried off separately.
During the first few days of their lives, they could not bear to open their eyes. They needed time for the world they had imagined to burn out of their minds. In the dappled light of the apartment’s shady canopy, they rested. They preferred to be carried around in car seats rather than be left in the distant nursery at the end of the hall, and were perfectly happy to cry in order to express this preference. When they cried, they cried in unison—one sounding the first note, as with a tuning fork, the other joining in. They were like two old deaf women singing from memory. Blindly they tried to eat at their mother’s breasts, pinching her white opulence, reaching with heat-sticky hands for her long hair. She would cry out, their mother, caught in the sticky trap. But just then, out of the blur, a second shape would emerge, a whole other set of hands, to disengage the mother’s hair. This soapy headless energy ran around squawking and making their mother’s breasts shake with laughter.
Later, at an hour no one could later remember, they opened their eyes and relinquished unreality. Their eyes were bluer than the bluest idea. Roving around the hazy whiteness, the straight shapes and corners, their gaze rested on the face immediately before them. It was a large face, with tiny pins sticking out all over it.
“Alice! Alice wake up!”
Alice raised her head weakly from the bed.
“They’re staring at me,” Charlie cried. “They’re staring at me.”
Alice smiled. Her red silk robe was open, her breasts splayed to either side, as one recently ravished by love. “How do you know?”
“They can see! Holy God!” Charlie leaned over the crib, his shirtsleeves wet with dishwater. “Hello, pretty girls. I’m your Daddy. I’m your Daddy. Yes yes I am.” Unable to be still, he scooped up the fair-haired child. The infant’s head swooned back into his open
palm. He bent over her and told her, “Some day you’ll refuse to go out in public with me but for now I think you like me. Be honest. What do you think of me? Don’t you sort of like me?” He lifted her into the air. She sailed across the wallpaper, contented. “Is that a smile? Did Daddy make you smile?”
“That’s not quite a smile,” said Alice huskily from the bed.
Charlie lowered the baby to his chest. “Hey, this is life. This is life, Frances Shade. Ain’t it grand?”
Alice laughed. “Are you high, Charlie? Have you lost your mind?”
He brought the baby over to her. “Look at what I found! Will you look at what I found at the hospital?”
“Don’t forget the other one,” said Alice.
“There’s two of them?” Charlie tiptoed back to the basinette. “They gave us two?”
He lifted out the other baby, who sailed more skeptically through the air. Up in the air, the baby looked out the window, purple blue eyes fixed on the sunlight.
“What did I say? She can see. Look at that philosophical expression. What are you thinking about, you deeply thinking baby?”
He came and sat next to Alice on the bed and they lay there gazing at the babies. Outside, an ice cream truck came down the street playing its daffy song. It wasn’t summer anymore. Nights were already cold. It was as if the ice cream truck was the very last one, lost on its way home from summer.
“Yum,” said Alice, collapsing backward on the bed. “Ice cream.”
“Do you want some ice cream?” Charlie propped himself up on one elbow. He smelled ointmenty. “Do you want ice cream? I’ll go get some for you.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “You can’t catch the truck in time. Look, it’s already halfway down the street.”
Charlie looked out the window.
“You want ice cream? You want ice cream? I’ll get you ice cream.”
He sprang toward the door and swung open the latch in one movement, grabbing his jacket off the hook.
“Don’t be silly!” cried Alice, sitting upright. “You’ll never catch it!”
But he had already begun running down the stairs, his feet making a drumbeat against the old wood. As he pushed open the outside door, he slung his arms through the jacket. The air was clean and cool. He saw the big clumsy truck in the distance, with a clown face painted on the back of it.
He ran. His strides felt miles long. The jacket made slippery nylon sounds as he pumped his arms. The air was in his mouth and he was laughing. Leaping off the curb, he tore a leaf from a tree and then whipped it to the side. The clown face pulled forward again, and the truck swung heavily around the corner, its flange swinging. Stop! He shouted. I want to buy some ice cream, dammit! Two kids arguing over a jump rope on the sidewalk stopped and watched him. He could feel them looking after him. Stumbling on a root, he bellowed, and sailed out into the street itself, pursuing the truck. He was going to get that goddamned truck. It was ridiculous, he knew it. But he wanted to run. Suddenly he knew he could do anything. He loved Alice. He was going to be a good father. He wanted to run. He wanted to catch that truck. He wanted to run after the truck and to catch it, and then walk home breathless, her sweet, cold prize in his hands.
He had been working on the Maynard County Mobile Treatment Team for five months by then. As soon as he had arrived, he had been given a modest caseload of clients with whom he had to meet at least twice a week, but because he liked them and wanted to do right by them, he called almost daily. It was his job to mediate between these people and a host of others: doctors, counselors, landlords and lawyers, bill collectors, bureaucrats, disappointed parents, disappointed children. Gregorian was right about the job—Charlie had far more responsibility. For he was a guest in their lives. He sat on their sofas and drank from their mugs. He appeared to be, in most cases, his clients’ only advocate. He took them shopping, he hung drapes, he tried to explain the nuances of social expectation. With one man he even played hostage/audience to a weekly banjo concert. He was responsible for disbursing money to those with poor impulse control, this being the only role in which he felt uncomfortable, as it was often the source of contention. He did not like contention. He wanted to be the kind of clinician that clients could confide in. It was less important to him if they drank or took street drugs than that they called him when the voices were calling for the final payment. He had heard stories from other case managers who had lost clients to suicide. One-minute-too-late sorts of stories. To Charlie, the idea was absolutely unbearable. And because it felt unbearable, it also seemed impossible.
He barely had time in his day to form opinions, but it seemed to him that some of his clients were having success in the program. Therese, for example. Dressed cockeyed, spaghetti-sauced, she was a favorite among the staff, blessed as she was in her manic periods with a beatific charm. When they first started together, Therese claimed at the gynecologist that she was pregnant with Charlie’s baby (a claim he was somehow too embarrassed by to write in his daily log, for she was nearly his mother’s age for godsakes, and hairy under the chin). But over time, with the fine-tuning of her medication and a new boyfriend from Highgrove House, Therese’s existence seemed to settle somewhere within the parameters of the mainstream. In fact, to Charlie, her extravagant ideas had a moral reflection: If she was not Saint Catherine of Cranston, then perhaps he was not everything he thought he was.
George Delgado played the banjo. All he talked about was Miami, where the girls wore nothing but cornhusks, and they all lived orgiastically on rum-soaked cherries. George was fond of making things up, but told his lies with unerring truthfulness, and Charlie, such was his natural fondness for old people, was so seduced by this Latin grandfather that it took him a while to realize George was drunk most of the time. Charlie had not easily recognized the signs: the sociable flush, the scent of Breathsin, the exaggerated spoiling of the poodle Britney. When Charlie finally got it, he was surprised. He knew all about substance abuse, but somehow it was hard to accept that it wasn’t just Charlie’s company that made the old man so cheerful and voluble. He wondered if he would’ve gotten it sooner if he knew what it was like to be drunk himself. The case managers were supposed to leave when a client was drunk or high. Leave for your own safety. Leave; write it in the log. Charlie learned to turn away whenever George staggered to the door. But it was hard to write incessantly in the damned log and it felt like tattling: client visibly intoxicated.
There was a handful of more challenging cases, the ones insulted by Charlie’s very presence, the indictment of it, but all of them had his attention, even the ones who looked at him with pity, that he should be so crazy to think they were crazy. Many times Charlie had stood outside clients’ houses and tenements waiting for them, knowing they were hiding inside or drinking or avoiding their medication or dentist’s appointment or court appearance or haircut, all the various irritating appointments that even healthy people “forgot.”
Aside from a problem with lateness, largely brought on by his inborn difficulty ending conversations, Charlie was already a success for MTT by the time the twins were born. He had become known on the team for his reliability and persistence. He was the one you went to in a pinch. There was something about him, he did not feel like a slave. He would not have felt like a slave no matter how enslaved he was. He made the most degrading tasks productive. In order to track down a particularly resistant client, he would sit on a stoop and wait, and the neighborhood kids would stand on his shoulders and pull at his ears and innocently tattle on their neighbors, and in this way, Charlie’s complete approachability kept him always in the know, just as it had in the schoolyard in Mattoon. The director of the mobile treatment clinic and his new supervisor, Bruce Zabilski, had taken a liking to him. Zabilski was the sort of man who kept quiet for long stretches, in what seemed like an attempt to offset the frivolity of what most people said. After Charlie had given his first summary in the daily staff meeting, Zabilski held up his hand, giving a sort of poetic beat t
o Charlie, and grinned a sprung-open, large-jawed grin. Later, the team psychiatrist, a graduate of Johns Hopkins, lent Charlie a copy of Pragmatism and suggested they “get together for a cocktail one of these nights.” The word “cocktail” was so high class Charlie didn’t even demur with his usual explanations. Most of the other social workers on the team were women. They were lifers, not like Charlie, who had an air of someone on his way to something big. He liked them all. He liked women. He liked frazzled working women in particular. They were the pulse sustaining everything, and reminded him of his debt to his mother and grandmother. They drove around in their beat-up Japanese cars in all kinds of weather, reading maps, eating grinders. They had a soft, tired way of laughing at Charlie’s jokes. They smoked and smelled of fruit and smoke. These women had perpetual colds, and were often, in between appointments, on the phone bargaining with their children. Pleased by the news of his wife’s pregnancy, they had pooled money to buy a Diaper Genie, which Charlie now considered a finer invention than the steam engine.
Charlie’s team manager was a broad-faced black woman named Harriet. Harriet had been at the clinic longer than anyone, since the inception of Mobile Treatment itself. A favorite among clients, she was otherwise notoriously difficult to work with. But even Harriet liked Charlie. She called him Champ. Making her rounds in the hallways on the institutional blue carpet, her big thighs swooshing in her panty hose, Harriet would stop by his small cinderblock office and gaze at him with a bemused, custodial look. Sometimes she’d crow, on her way down the hall, “We just can’t scare you off, can we, Champ?”
After they gave him the Diaper Genie, Alice nine months huge with twins, Charlie had sat down in his office listening to the bustle in the clinic hallways and the telephones ringing, and realized, with triumph, that he morally approved of his own life. He knew that he had been handed his blessings as a child, but that he had built this adult life with Alice on his own. It was scary to love so much as they did but they had gone ahead and done it anyway.
