The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  Holly put the water bottle on the tray, certain that Vivian knew less about the way of the world than she thought she did.

  “I’ve always wanted some brick and mortar in my portfolio,” she said. “And if it goes well, maybe I’ll buy the whole shebang and put my name on the sign: Vivian’s Gold Emporium. I can see it now.”

  Holly smiled at the thought of Vivian the gold tycoon, but she still wasn’t sure she should take money from her, even for work. She didn’t want a financial entanglement to change their friendship.

  “I’m not saying I couldn’t use a second job,” Holly said, a sigh escaping involuntarily. “Chris would turn over in his grave if he saw the house. It’s a wreck.”

  “It’s not your fault, sweetie. Or Chris’s. No one expects to die that early. Except for me. I expect to die every day, and then I surprise myself by staying alive.”

  Holly didn’t think she’d last a day if she couldn’t even drink water without assistance. Though she never said it out loud, it sometimes made her unbearably sad that Vivian could only see the world from her horizontal position inside the lung. She couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be perpetually abed, forever parallel to the floor, unable to move anything except her head and neck, feeling nothing in her limbs or torso. The first time they met, Holly had been shocked by the sight of the massive machine with its stainless steel brackets and its yellow enamel cylinder, though now it seemed as normal to her as a couch or a refrigerator.

  Thunder boomed overhead. Holly walked toward the living-room window to look at the rain, which was pummeling the sidewalk and creating puddles on the lawn. Whenever she moved around at Vivian’s, she felt bizarrely conscious of the dexterity of her hands, the muscles in her legs, the rhythm of her unassisted breath. She went back to Vivian’s side and positioned the water bottle at her lips again, and Vivian took another sip.

  “You need to stay alive,” Holly said. “Bertram Corners would lose ten points off its average IQ if you weren’t around.”

  Vivian laughed and then coughed, a noise that always made Holly nervous.

  “Are you okay?” Holly said, hovering over Vivian’s face.

  Vivian cleared her throat. “I’m fine. Do you mind turning on the TV? I think they’re showing an old American Gladiators tournament. I’m thinking of using the show as a metaphor for the contraction of the American dream on my podcast this week.”

  Holly picked up the remote and turned on the television, then angled the screen positioned over Vivian’s head so that she could see it. In the intermittent lightning flashes, the yellow enamel reflecting from the iron lung made Vivian’s skin look even more sallow than usual.

  “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be me?” Vivian asked over the television commentary.

  Holly sat down, surprised that Vivian had never asked that question before in the many years she had been among the volunteers who supplemented Vivian’s medical team. Vivian could never be left alone, even when she was sleeping, because the slightest bit of mucus or phlegm could block her breathing.

  “I think I would have given up a long time ago,” Holly said, wondering, as she often did, how Vivian had survived as long as she had.

  Vivian pressed her lips together, a private little smile that said Holly’s answer was just what she knew it would be.

  “You may think so, but the human will to live is primal. Think of the people who lived through the Holocaust, surviving on a bowl of soup a day, wasting away, the threat of death hanging over their heads every minute. If you were me, I think you’d be right where I am now, wondering if you’ll get one more day, then watching the days add up to years, and the years add up to decades. And you just keep going, because what else can you do?”

  Holly looked down at her pale, freckled hands—hands that merely typed and therefore revealed none of their labor—and realized that Vivian couldn’t even see her own useless hands, had never turned the ignition of a car or touched the face of a lover.

  “Do you ever wonder what it would be like to be me?” Holly asked. Her voice sounded tired even to her.

  “You specifically? An overworked editor? A widow trying to raise two teenagers? A middle-aged woman who needs a dye job even more than I do? No, but I do wonder how my life would have been different outside the lung. If I had the use of my body . . .”

  Vivian looked as though she had something to say but changed her mind. She sometimes caught herself before making one of her inarguable pronouncements, and Holly admired this immensely.

  “I’d probably be watching this same show, only sitting upright and eating Doritos.”

  They both laughed, and Holly turned her attention again to the TV screen angled above Vivian’s head. “Who’s ahead?”

  “Venom. The man is nothing but muscle. Look at him. He’s a god.”

  He looked to Holly like one of those rubber action figures, distorted and overly shiny, but she nodded. “Whatever you say.”

  Another thunderclap echoed outside, and Vivian turned her head toward the window. “Could you check to make sure the light on my generator is on? I’ll need it if the power goes out.”

  Holly followed a long cord from the iron lung to the generator. The light was flashing.

  “The light’s on,” Holly said. “But it’s blinking.”

  “Blinking is not good.”

  Another round of lightning illuminated the room like a flashbulb. Then every light, every electronic beep, every faint hum of current abruptly ceased.

  “Vivian, oh my God,” Holly said. “What do I do?”

  “Don’t panic,” Vivian said, pushing out the words. “Call 911, then check the generator again. It should kick on automatically, but I don’t hear it.”

  Holly pulled out her cell phone, dialed 911, and told the dispatcher to send help immediately. She knew that every policeman, firefighter, and paramedic in town would be at the door in a matter of minutes, but that didn’t prevent the panic that gripped her chest. She ran back to the generator.

  “The light’s not even blinking now,” Holly yelled.

  “I’m losing pressure,” Vivian said, her voice a step lower in pitch. “You’ll have to hand-crank it.”

  “Where is it?” Holly said. “They showed me in training, but I’ve never had to use it.”

  Vivian nodded toward a device on the side of the lung, which Holly began to turn with as much strength as she had. The crank resisted her efforts. It felt to Holly as if the internal mechanisms had rusted.

  “Keep turning,” Vivian said, now in a loud whisper.

  Holly leaned into the crank, using her weight to help her pull it down and then getting under it as much as she could to bring it back around. Vivian started to let out rasping noises that sounded as if she were breathing in repeatedly without breathing out. Holly felt her own breath getting more and more shallow. Sweat broke out under her arms.

  “Hang in there, Vivian. They’ll be here soon. Stay with me.”

  Vivian nodded weakly as sirens finally overtook the thunder outside. Two firefighters came through the door and went straight to the generator.

  “Toggle the switch,” Vivian said hoarsely, though Holly could barely hear her over the sirens and the thunder. “The on-off switch.”

  Two policemen came in next, and one took over from Holly on the hand crank while the firefighters banged, and swore at, the generator. Holly ran over and held Vivian’s head in her hands, terrified that she wasn’t getting enough oxygen to her brain. She was turning slightly blue around the mouth. Her eyes were closed and her breaths were weak, rattling versions of the robust and even ones her iron lung pumped out of her.

  “We’re losing her,” Holly yelled at the firefighters, who had started arguing about the best way to fix the generator. “Do something!”

  One of them tried toggling the switch again, and the lung suddenly let out a long hiss as though it had been holding its own breath. The machine began to pump away at Vivian’s lungs like a bellows. In a few min
utes, the blue faded from Vivian’s lips, and her breathing became less strained. She said nothing, but Holly could see the relief in her eyes, which must have mirrored the relief in her own.

  Even with Vivian breathing again, Holly’s heart still beat in double time. She and all the volunteers lived in fear of being responsible for Vivian’s death through inattention or incompetence. They didn’t discuss it, but each one knew that the town would despise anyone who botched the remarkable joint effort to keep Vivian alive.

  When the electricity came back on, Holly let out a deep breath she didn’t even know she had been holding. Her arms ached from turning the crank.

  The firefighters began to shift in their heavy uniforms and gear, seemingly unsure of what to do, since the emergency appeared to be over. One policeman began writing a report as two others huddled around him.

  Vivian looked as exhausted as Holly had ever seen her.

  “I’m okay now,” Vivian said in a small voice. “It’s all over.”

  The firefighters soon ran out to another emergency, and the policeman writing the report made Vivian promise to get a new generator. Eventually, the policemen said they would check on Vivian again before their shifts ended and left.

  When Holly and Vivian were alone again, Holly found Vivian’s eyes in her angled mirror. “We almost lost you,” she said, an ache rising in her throat. “What if the generator hadn’t kicked in?”

  Vivian closed her eyes and sighed, then opened them. “I’ve probably been that close or closer to dying a dozen or more times. It comes with the territory.”

  “You need to replace that generator,” Holly said, still shaken. “And have the crank fixed.”

  “It’s never been this stubborn. I’ll have to call my technician, I guess, to order me a new one,” Vivian said, sounding to Holly strangely calm and almost disappointed, as if she would miss a piece of machinery that looked like it came from the Roosevelt era.

  “Tell him to get one today. I don’t know about you, but I can’t go through that again.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It was someone’s idea of a joke, Holly had always felt, to name the town Bertram Corners. There were few actual corners, because some early architect of the town streets apparently had an aversion to right angles. Instead, a map of the town showed arcs and curves, traffic circles and cul-de-sacs, with the exception of Main Street, which held the town up like a spine, running north to south. Such small hamlets in upstate New York could barely be associated with the city that shared the state’s name, Holly thought, and yet they weren’t all that far from the glass-heavy skyscrapers, the white-walled art galleries, or the punishing traffic and noise of the Big Apple.

  Bertram Corners had its share of small-town small-mindedness, but Holly had had very little trouble convincing Chris that it was the best place for them to buy their first home. He had loved her stories about the Fourth of July bike parades, the annual fried pickle festival (now defunct), and the Main Street sidewalk sales during which the merchants handed out candy like it was Halloween. Holly’s parents had wanted them to consider the exclusive neighborhood where Holly had grown up and even offered to help with the down payment, but Holly and Chris wanted the house to be theirs, not three-fifths theirs or two-thirds theirs. They wanted to pull off the grown-up act of buying a house all on their own.

  They had looked at three inexpensive starter homes with trendy open floor plans, but Chris always knocked on the thin drywall and shook his head. He wanted plaster. He wanted crawl spaces and foundation stones and crown moldings and trees taller than the rooftop. He wanted generations-old dust to fill their lives and their lungs. He brought Holly into his quest for something grounded in the past.

  “Otherwise, it’s just us,” he had told her as they drove out of yet another new development. “There should be layers of memory, you know? Doorknobs that have seen people live and die.”

  Holly remembered shaking her head, though, when they first toured the house they would eventually buy. It had doorknobs turned by many a generation, but it also had decrepit plumbing, rotting clapboards, and a kitchen with Depression-era appliances coated in rust.

  “It’s got great bones,” Chris had said, though Holly thought he was referring to whatever might be buried under the dirt floor in the basement. What sold her was the china cabinet built into the corner of the dining room. They didn’t own any china, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the tiny windowpanes of that cabinet. A month later, after they had pulled together the down payment and figured out that the mortgage was only slightly higher than what they could reasonably afford, she found herself signing dozens of papers, committing herself to a relationship that felt almost as emotionally complicated as a marriage.

  Within a year Chris had replaced the rotting clapboards and repaired the plumbing using a book from Home Depot. They bought a new refrigerator and stove, though they ran out of money before they could buy new countertops or install the tile backsplash they had spent months planning. Even with its imperfections, the house was loving and safe, chipped and charming. The house was them.

  Now the house was her. Its endearing flaws had aged into liabilities. The plaster walls and ceilings had developed the same sorts of fine lines that had appeared on Holly’s face. The speckled Formica countertops that had seemed so retro and cool now looked dated and worn; she had scrubbed the speckles right out of them in spots just as her own childhood freckles had faded. And yet the roof still sheltered Holly and her boys. The house still embraced them as much as it possibly could. The doorknobs and the china cabinet and the creaking floors had witnessed their memories. She, Chris, and the boys were in the layers of paint and in the dust beneath the furniture. She never wanted to leave.

  Holly had agreed to meet Racine, Vivian’s cash-for-gold connection, in a coffee shop just down Main Street from the weekly newspaper she ran. As she walked toward the shop, she peered in the window of the pharmacy and saw a line already forming at the medication pickup window. The pharmacy seemed to be the one business in town that still thrived, and Holly assumed it was because it both indulged vices—cigarettes, fattening snack foods, sexual aids—and treated the medical issues they caused. Next door to the pharmacy was a liquor store that had a few customers at ten in the morning on a Monday. Past two empty storefronts was the coffee shop, which had a sign in the shape of a quaint whistling teakettle. The aroma of coffee and bacon greeted her as she opened the door. Nodding to the waitress, she found a seat in a booth by the big plate-glass window adjacent to the street.

  When Racine walked in, almost everyone in the coffee shop turned to look, first because he was a stranger, and second because he wore jeans with a narrowly cut suit jacket—a combination rarely seen in Bertram Corners. He also had a leather messenger-type bag with a long strap that crossed his body, which told Holly that he either didn’t care what other men thought about him or cared very much what certain other men thought about him. Even though they lived less than two hours away from one of the most clothing-obsessed cities on the planet, most of the men Holly knew were so afraid of looking fashionable that they erred on the side of flannel.

  “Holly?” he said as she scooted her way out of the booth and stood up to shake his hand. He was slim and well dressed, and his curly hair was cropped close to his head. He had a wide, welcoming smile showing a line of exceptionally white, straight teeth. At the same time, his eyes kept Holly guessing. His lids were somewhat heavy and guarded, which gave Holly the impression that the welcome in his smile was conditional and possibly superficial. The conflict between two such essential parts of the face fascinated her.

  “You must be Racine,” Holly said, motioning for him to sit down. “I’ve been wondering how you got that name ever since I heard it from Vivian.”

  “Not that interesting, really,” he said in an accent that Holly couldn’t quite place. For the most part he sounded American, though not when he said certain words with long vowel sounds.

  “I was born in Argen
tina, but my parents met in Racine, Wisconsin, when they were in college, and they liked the name, hence . . .”

  “Hence,” Holly repeated, extending a palm as if this explained everything. Nice-looking men always brought out her awkward side. She wished she had worn something chicer than a V-neck T-shirt and jeans.

  “So Vivian tells me you’re my contact for her investment,” Racine said, running a hand lightly over his hair. “She recommended you highly.”

  “I’m at your service,” Holly said, because she now believed Vivian, who had told her that Racine could sell milk to a dairy farmer or ice to Eskimos, or one of those. She could now picture everyone in town parading into the cash-for-gold store, clutching a handful of the pathetic gift-giving efforts of former husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends: the thin gold chains that had broken in the first few months of devoted wear; the chunky earrings purchased from the sale rack because chunky earrings were out of style; the low-end tennis bracelets with diamonds so small they qualified as a vision test; the needlessly heavy class rings worn for a few months and then abandoned in a box of old souvenirs. These would be deposited with a smiling Racine, who would turn them into cash as cold and hard as the hearts of the men and women who sold their memories.

  “Would you mind explaining to me how this works?” Holly asked. “It seems like these places are cropping up everywhere, but that must be because they make money, right?”

  “Of course,” Racine said. He took a white binder out of his messenger bag and put it in front of Holly. “This should have everything you need to know, but basically we set up the shop for a minimal outlay. If gold dips too low for an extended period of time, we close up and move on, but right now we’re looking at a significant profit for every ounce we collect. Gold is a much safer investment than the real estate market these days.”