Vivian rolled her eyes. “You’re used to me, Holly. You know my brain hasn’t been affected. But I learned the hard way not to tell business partners that I’m in an iron lung. They can’t wrap their minds around it. If they do find out, they start talking to me like I’m frail and elderly, and eventually they find a way to get out of the deal.”
“So how do you get around it?”
“Usually I give the impression that I’m constantly traveling or too busy to meet in person. It makes me seem important.”
“And you are,” Holly said. “As important as they come.”
Vivian smiled. “My financial adviser takes care of most of my investments anyway, but this one was different because Racine’s company wanted local investors with a hands-on approach. His group doesn’t want to be one of those fly-by-night gold operations, which is smart in my book. I didn’t want to scare him away.”
Holly forgot sometimes that most people under fifty had never heard of an iron lung and would have been shocked to find that any were still in use. Bertram Corners had grown so used to Vivian’s unique situation that the town had lost sight of how the rest of the world might regard it. If it weren’t for Vivian, Holly realized, her kids wouldn’t have known that iron lungs had ever existed.
“I gave Racine the check, by the way,” Holly said. “I hope it pays off.”
“I’m sure it will,” she said. “And maybe things will get easier for you with a little extra coming in. Maybe you can save up a bit and invest some of it in the store.”
Holly nodded. It was nice to imagine having enough of a nest egg to put some money toward the service of making more money. She considered telling Vivian the full extent of her cash-flow problems now that her mother wasn’t sending a monthly check. The bank wouldn’t let her stay in her house indefinitely if she couldn’t make her mortgage payments, and even with the checks Vivian’s accountant sent her each week, she was still behind and likely to make another partial payment for the upcoming month. She instantly imagined the boys curled into sleeping bags in the back of her car. But she decided against telling Vivian. Not voicing the extent of her problems made them feel less dire. At least she still had a job. However small the salary, she had an income and health benefits, which was more than some people could say. If she could cut back on her expenses a little more and work more weekends for Vivian, maybe she could make her own investment.
When she left Vivian’s, she was tempted to stop at the gas station to buy a lottery ticket, but she stopped herself. Every dollar she didn’t spend was a dollar she might one day invest.
A few hours later, Holly remembered with a start, then a sigh, that she still needed to pay the remainder for Marshall’s band trip. When she ran into Marveen in the parking lot behind the Chronicle, she decided on the spot that she was the right person to ask for a loan, since she reported to the publisher and not to Holly. Marveen always had cash in her wallet, because her husband didn’t believe in using credit cards.
“Hi, Marveen,” Holly said, as though she hadn’t seen her in ages. “Nice hair. You must have gotten that new curling iron.”
“Well, thanks,” she said, giving Holly another hug as if she hadn’t seen her in months. “I did touch it up before coming over.”
“Hey,” Holly said. “I hope you don’t mind if I ask you something kind of personal.”
Marveen pulled her tote bag out of the backseat of her BMW. “Did you want me to do some highlights? Like I did for Vivian?”
Holly did want the highlights, but Marshall’s trip was a higher priority. She shifted from one foot to the other. Asking Marveen for a loan was like standing on the roof with a megaphone to announce that she couldn’t manage her own finances, but Marshall had to go on that trip.
“This is kind of embarrassing, but I’m a little short for Marshall’s band trip, and I was wondering if I could get a small loan from you until we get paid next week. I hate asking, but I’m pretty much out of options.”
“Really,” Marveen said, squinting at Holly as though she were a child caught in a fib. “Because I heard you met with that cash-for-gold guy. How are you talking to him if you can’t pay for your son’s field trip?”
Holly could have told her that Vivian had hired her to meet with Racine, but she thought Marveen might be upset that Vivian hadn’t chosen her, with her bookkeeping experience and her love of bright and shiny things.
“It’s a cash-flow problem,” Holly said, feeling the blood creep up her neck. “Never mind, though. Forget I asked. I’ll figure it out.”
“Don’t be silly,” Marveen said, reaching into her purse for her wallet. “I’m happy to help. I just wish you had told me about the gold place. I might have wanted in on it. How much do you need?”
Holly couldn’t meet Marveen’s eyes. “Sixty,” she said, looking down.
“Is that all?” Marveen said, handing over three crisp twenties as if they were singles. Holly was jealous of how Marveen treated money. It reminded Holly of the days when her mother used to carry a hundred dollars in cash for emergencies, which seemed to come up every time she passed a shoe store.
“Thank you,” Holly said, putting the twenties in her purse. “I really appreciate it.”
“No problem. Though you can do me one teensy favor.”
Holly sighed, knowing she should have expected to pay a price for Marveen’s generosity. “What’s that?”
“Introduce me to this guy Racine. I’m hoping he’ll let me in on his next store.”
Within two weeks, Racine had the cash-for-gold store, now called The Gold Depot, up and running. A crew of workmen had gutted the small storefront and put up drywall, then hauled in some glass cases for the resale items and built a few cubbies with chairs along the back wall, where prospective clients would hand over their gold for an estimate of its value.
Holly walked over from the newspaper for the grand opening. A single white balloon floated from the handle on the front door, which was propped open, but no one was inside except for two bearded men wearing green visors, who sat on the other side of the cubbies, presumably waiting for the cascade of gold soon to come their way.
When Holly walked in, Racine was pouring a bag of wrapped peppermint candies into a large glass bowl on one of the front counters. He looked up and smiled at Holly.
“What do you think?” he said, looking around.
“It’s exciting,” Holly said, running a hand along the glass counter. “The opening of a new business is big news in this town. One of my reporters is writing a feature story for this week’s paper. I’d do it myself, but it’s a conflict of interest.”
Racine set the bowl of candy in the middle of the counter, then moved it over to the right a few inches. Holly noticed that the glass cases were filled with jewelry, watches, pins, letter openers, and comb and brush sets. Each item had been buffed and cleaned, but they all looked a little dated and fatigued, as though they were housed in the retail equivalent of a nursing home.
“Where did all this come from?” she said.
Racine took a bottle of glass cleaner from behind the counter and began wiping it down, even though it already looked clean. She noticed as Racine turned to one side that he had a bump near the bridge of his nose, a slight flaw that made him more likeable. She still sensed the conflict between his welcoming smile and the caution in his eyes, but she couldn’t begin to guess what might have caused it.
“We buy out estate sales. People don’t want to see their neighbors parading around in their grandmother’s old brooches, so we try to mix it up among stores.”
“I see,” Holly said, finding it surprising that any sensitivity at all went into the store’s operation. She nodded toward the visored men in the back. “Where’d you find them?”
“They’re on loan from one of our New York stores for the opening. They’ll work here for a month or two, get us established, then we’ll hire some appraisers of our own. It’s a growing field.”
“I imagine it is,”
Holly said. One of the men in the back was polishing a small eyeglass, and the other was adjusting the strap on his visor.
Just then their first customer walked through the door. Holly recognized her as a Stop & Shop cashier, though she didn’t know the woman’s name. She was in her late sixties, small boned and slightly stooped, and she wore the kind of putty-colored orthopedic shoes that Holly associated with giving up on life.
Racine gave her the full force of his smile. “Hello, ma’am. So glad you could come in on opening day,” he said. “How may we help you?”
The woman opened the clasp on her purse and took out a plastic sandwich bag with some tangled jewelry in it. “I thought I’d come in and see what this is worth,” she said with a self-conscious smile. “I never wear it anymore.”
“Right this way,” Racine said, leading her to a chair at one of the cubbies.
The store was small enough that Holly couldn’t help but witness the transaction. The visored man sitting on the opposite side of the table took the baggy and emptied it into a tray lined with black velvet.
“Thanks for coming in today,” he said, looking at the jewelry and not at the woman in front of him. He sorted it quickly, viewing some of the items through an eyepiece. He examined a small pocket watch several times, turning it over and opening its engraved cover. He weighed each broken hoop and each bracelet fragment, adding numbers on a calculator. The appraiser looked up briefly, and Holly turned away so that she wouldn’t appear to be eavesdropping, though she could hear everything he said.
“These two aren’t real gold,” he said, handing the woman a thin bracelet and one of the earrings. “And the pocket watch is an amalgam, so we can’t take that, except for resale. The clasp is broken, so that would be fifteen dollars.”
The woman shook her head slowly and took back the pocket watch. The appraiser piled the small handful of jewelry left onto a tiny scale and wrote down a number on a small white pad, which he then turned toward the woman, who nodded meekly. The appraiser swept the tokens of her past into a plastic bowl and counted out the cash. He placed the money in a white paper envelope, and the woman took it without changing her expression. She walked slowly past the glass cases, pretending to look inside them, as if she might spend the cash she had just received on someone else’s discarded trinkets.
When she passed Racine, he gave her another smile, to which she responded with a smile of her own that said, At least a nice-looking man acknowledged my presence today.
“Thank you for your business,” Racine said, bowing slightly. “Come again.”
The woman nodded vaguely and left, which was Holly’s cue to leave as well. She glanced at the men in the back, then turned to Racine.
“Looks like you have everything under control,” Holly said.
“Business will pick up in a few days. It takes a while for the word to get out. Actually, I was thinking about putting out some flyers.”
“My boys could help you with the flyers,” Holly said, brightening at the thought of being helpful in a concrete way.
“Sure. Have them come by.”
“I will. Take care.”
She hurried out the door and walked right into the path of the Sister Sisters—the town’s elderly sibling nuns—who were strolling down the street in the long black habits they wore long after the Catholic church stopped requiring nuns to be identifiable from a block away. They were carrying a basket between them.
“Is that Holly?” one of them said. Their names were Sister Eileen and Sister Eleanor, but no one ever knew which was which. The sister closest to the door of the gold shop looked up at the sign.
“Are you investigating?” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“Investigating what?”
“These gold places. They take your treasures and give you a fraction of what they’re worth,” the nun said. “It’s all over the Interwebs.”
“You two have a computer?” Holly asked the sister who spoke.
“Vivian gave us very good instructions about how to use one at the library,” she said. “We check our e-mail every week.”
“What are you up to today?” Holly asked them, intent on changing the subject. Talking them out of their misconceptions about the gold business would have taken too much time.
“We’re on our way to . . . where are we going, Sister?”
The other sister put a hand in the pocket of her habit and pulled out a small scrap of paper ripped from a notebook.
“Ellen Crandall,” the other sister said. “She tore her ACL playing basketball, so we’re bringing muffins.”
“How wonderful,” Holly said. “Well, have a good day, Sisters.”
Halfway down the sidewalk, Holly looked back to see the sisters still standing in front of the gold shop. One of them was peering in, her nose right to the glass.
CHAPTER 9
Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #3
The placid acceptance I had displayed at twelve eventually morphed into a simmering rage that I wasn’t a) dead and glorified as a martyr, or b) the beneficiary of some amazing medical breakthrough that made it possible for me to escape the iron lung. I had given up worrying about my body—I was so detached from it that I felt no shame or embarrassment when doctors and nurses fussed around it. I couldn’t feel it anyway. I just let them take care of the business end of things. But I knew from watching television that people in wheelchairs could travel just about anywhere. If I could breathe on my own or even use a portable apparatus, I would be able to attend movies, concerts, plays, or just sit in the park on a sunny afternoon feeling the wind caress my face. I missed being outside, where I felt closest to Darlene.
My parents tried their best to take me out as often as possible, but it was such a production. Several grown men were needed to set up the ramp, take the door off the hinges, and wheel me into a special medical van with restraints to prevent my lung from banging around. Other than two or three hospital visits each year, I saw the outdoors maybe once a month or so.
By seventeen I was old enough to realize that the doctors had been completely wrong about my prognosis—which was discussed in whispers and asides that I had no trouble overhearing—and clearly had miscalculated my parents’ ability to survive without sleep. I became aware that I could live for a very long time. That revelation made me all the more furious that I couldn’t be a part of the world—couldn’t visit other places, couldn’t go to college, couldn’t see much of anything outside the room that was my prison. I was about to graduate from high school—I took all my tests orally or dictated to my mother—and I had excelled. I was near the top of my class, and yet I couldn’t contemplate a career or anything besides lying in the same room as my parents wore themselves frail and thin caring for me.
Just before graduation, my mother’s friend dropped off some cookies for the high school picnic that followed the ceremony. My parents had gone to a lot of trouble to get the school to accommodate my iron lung. They had moved the graduation outside so that I could be wheeled on a gurney behind my classmates and could receive my diploma with them.
“Are you excited about graduating, Vivian?” my mother’s friend said in a voice more appropriate for a five-year-old.
“Thrilled,” I said deadpan. “I can’t wait to see what life has in store.”
“Vivian,” my mother said. “Please.”
“Please what?” I said, oblivious to her friend or to her feelings. “Am I supposed to be grateful for whatever you call this? Because it’s not a life. I’m like some weird science experiment. I shouldn’t even be alive.”
“Don’t say that,” my mother said. “You are an amazing person, and you have so much to contribute.”
“How do I contribute when I can’t do anything for myself? I can’t even blow my own nose. Do you know how humiliating that is?”
My mother turned to her friend with a look of apology and showed her to the door. After the wretched woman left, I finally said what I had wanted to say for months.
&nbs
p; “I can’t take it anymore. Just turn off the machine and let me die.”
My mother looked distraught. “You’re in a phase. Everyone goes through it at your age. You want to get away from your parents and make your own decisions, and you will someday, but this is not the day.”
The misplaced anger I felt at that moment would have taken my breath away if the iron lung didn’t force my respiration.
“You can’t possibly understand,” I said, yelling loud enough now to bring my father on the run. “I am trapped in this goddamned machine forever. How could you let this happen to me? Why didn’t you keep me inside that summer? I was only six. I didn’t even know what polio was.”
My father stepped into the room just as I said those words.
“That’s enough, Vivian,” he said in a tone I had never heard him use with me before. “That is more than enough.”
He came and put an arm around my mother, who was trembling and crying in the chair next to my iron lung. I knew it was wrong, but I thought I would explode if I couldn’t blame someone for my misery, and my parents were the easiest targets. I began to turn my head rapidly from side to side, which was one of the few ways I could release frustration. When I had exhausted myself, my mother rose from her chair and put her hands on either side of my head, squeezing just a little too hard.
“You are not done yet,” she said through clenched teeth. “I won’t let you be done . . . Just tell me what you want, and if it’s in my power, I will try my best to get it for you.”
“That’s the problem,” I said, turning my head away, out of her grasp. “It’s not in your power at all.”
After graduation, I sank into a depression that seemed to have no bottom. I spent many of my waking hours trying to figure out how to sabotage my own medical care. I couldn’t hold my breath, because the lung forced me to breathe. I couldn’t choke on food, because someone was always there to clear my airway. I began to fantasize about death and about how it would release me from Shakespeare’s “mortal coil,” which I pictured literally as a giant metal spring wrapped around my inert body inside the machine.
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 6
