Holly opened Vivian’s door with her key, then wondered why Vivian even bothered keeping it locked when half the town had keys. Gretchen Carlsbad, who was holding a cell phone near Vivian’s mouth, switched hands to wave to Holly as she came in.
“She’s talking to my graduate school adviser,” Gretchen said in a whisper. “He couldn’t believe some of the things I’ve told him about her.”
“Yes, I did graduate from high school,” Vivian was saying. “College, too. I have a business degree, which I use every day.”
“She’s amazing,” Gretchen said to Holly. “There’s no one like her.”
“I know,” Holly said, gathering up some used tissues and napkins from the rolling tray near Vivian’s head. She had found that the younger the companion, the less likely they were to pick up Vivian’s surroundings.
“So that’s about all there is to say,” Vivian said into the phone. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m a little fatigued right now. It’s been delightful chatting with you, though.”
Vivian closed her eyes as Gretchen put away her phone and picked up her coat and purse.
“I’d love to come again, Vivian,” Gretchen said. “You’ll let me know if you have any openings on your schedule, right?”
“Of course, dear,” Vivian said. “You’ll be the first one I call.”
Gretchen let herself out as Holly finished cleaning up and brought Vivian some fresh water.
“If she ever comes in here again, I will find a way to pull the plug on this machine with my teeth,” Vivian said. “What a bore. And she kept me on the phone with her professor for almost an hour. As if I have nothing better to do. She’s trying to squeeze me for information.”
Holly looked at the iron lung. “And you’re not easy to squeeze.”
Vivian’s face relaxed. “Of course I am,” she said, winking. “I’m full of lemony goodness . . . with very little pulp.”
Holly laughed. She knew that Vivian loved to tell her story but loved even more to pretend that it was an imposition.
“So I stopped by the gold place and had a chat with Racine today,” Holly said. “He seemed to think you’ll be seeing a return on your investment fairly soon.”
“Really?” Vivian said. “I wasn’t expecting anything right away. I assumed he’d need some time to recoup what he spent on the renovations.”
Holly wondered again how Vivian could tie up a significant amount of money without any certainty as to when it would pay off.
“What’s the podcast about this week?” Holly asked, hoping to be distracted.
Vivian lifted her eyebrows. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’m ready.”
“It’s about how even Ivy League graduates don’t know when to use ‘who’ or ‘whom.’ With all the texting and e-mailing, we judge people more by their grammar now than we ever did before. When you lose the copy editors, you strip naked the power elite. Blockbuster, huh? I’m expecting quite a reaction.”
“I like it, but it won’t bring back my copy editors,” Holly said. “They’re a luxury now.”
“My point is that the powerbrokers can’t hide behind them anymore. People don’t come out and say it, but they look down their noses at anyone who breaks a grammatical rule that they happen to know or spells something wrong that they know how to spell. There’s no hiding it now, unless you hire someone to proof all your tweets and Facebook posts. Autocorrect doesn’t fix everything.”
Holly had a Facebook account but rarely looked at it, and she barely knew how to use Twitter, but Vivian was a master of social media. Thousands listened to her weekly podcast.
“Did you see my new generator?” Vivian said, turning her head in the direction of a bright red box about the size of an air conditioner. “I’m told it will keep me going through a Category 4 hurricane that knocks out the power for a week.”
“What happens in a Category 5?”
“That was my question. I was told that we’ve never had one in this part of New York, but I still worry that I’m tempting fate.”
“If a Category 5 hurricane hits this town, the only thing left standing will be your house.”
“You could be right. Back in the ’90s, a tree fell on a transformer and burned three houses to the ground, including the one next door. I remember watching from the window as my parents hosed down the front of the house. I still miss them, Holly. They kept me going through some dark times.”
Dark times. Listening to Vivian always made Holly realize that her lot in life, while no red-carpet walk in recent years, could not compare to what Vivian had endured—and risen above. She sat down in the chair closest to Vivian, who had closed her eyes in preparation for one of her epic memories.
“I was seven when they moved my lung back home,” she began, her eyes still shut. “My parents took turns at night, each one sleeping for a few hours while the other one sat with me in case my airway had to be cleared. I had chronic bronchitis back then, and all my food had to be pureed so that I wouldn’t choke while eating. I was awful sometimes, spitting out mashed peas and sticking my tongue out at my mother when I didn’t like something. I remember one time that my mother got fed up with me and threw her dishcloth right over my face. I didn’t even try to shake it off; I just cried into it, Holly. It wasn’t her fault what happened to me, but I was a miserable piece of work back then. If I had been her, I probably would have strangled me a hundred times over . . . I’m so tired all of a sudden. Can I have my little pillow now?”
Holly placed a flattened water-filled pad under Vivian’s head—it prevented bedsores—and put a hand on Vivian’s forehead as she closed her eyes. She left her hand there until she saw Vivian’s mouth fall open slightly. Because of the iron lung’s forced and even respiration, it was sometimes hard to tell when Vivian was asleep, but Holly knew the signs.
As Vivian slept, Holly checked her calendar and saw that Marshall had a rehearsal later that night in preparation for the band’s visit to Disney World. She couldn’t afford her mortgage or her loans or the car repairs that surely lurked in her not-distant future, but at least she had been able to scrape together the money for Marshall to go on his trip. She would wait as long as possible to tell her sons that their lean existence might get even leaner. If Vivian could live with uncertainty every day, then so could she. She would have to.
CHAPTER 12
Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #4
As the country awoke to a wave of radical thinking about civil rights in the early 1960s, I had a revelation myself: I decided that I didn’t have to spend my entire life in the same room. With my mother’s help, I had enrolled in the community college and attended classes once a week. It was still a huge production to move my iron lung, but the college assisted by paying for a van and staff to move me around and by scheduling classes in places that were accessible to my bulky machine.
Professor Margolis had increased my hours in the computer lab, so with my classes I managed to get out of the house twice a week. My mother fussed and fretted about the jarring trips to and from the van and into the buildings, but that didn’t bother me at all. It was freedom, and freedom was all the rage.
The computer lab work I had started at seventeen had tripped some wire in my brain that allowed me to process vast amounts of information and to help the technicians see where the computer—which filled a room on campus—had gone wrong. The machine, of course, was never actually wrong. Programming errors were always to blame, but these could be difficult to spot. My job was to scan hundreds of punch cards—which my mother would place before me in batches of ten—and try to identify the mistake. I loved it. It was like an elaborate game to me, and finding a mistake that could set the computer back on the right path was like winning a prize. I found these only once a month or so, but when I did, Professor Margolis would shout for joy, and the programmers would applaud.
It was exciting work, and I only wished that I could be in the lab every day, but my mother grew weary of the dull job of placing the
punch cards in front of my face and moving them when I told her I was ready for another batch. The college couldn’t afford to use one of their own employees to watch over me, so my “job” was not much more than an excuse to engage my brain in something greater than self-pity.
At first the college sent a teacher to our house to work with me on my business courses. My mother would listen and take notes and then review them with me before tests and quizzes. She also took dictation if I had to write a paper. But it was taking too long for me to complete just one or two courses, and I wanted more, so I finally convinced my mother to let me line up my classes during one long day of lectures. She still sat with me and took occasional notes, but I had become adept at memorizing information after hearing it only once. It was during this time that my mother took up needlepoint and made elaborate Christmas stockings for every relative we had.
On the first day of my on-campus classes, I brought the entire place to a standstill as my van wheeled up to the door and some college custodians arrived to place a temporary ramp across the stairs to the building. My machine and I were wheeled in through double doors, and I was positioned so that I could see the professor through my angled mirror. My portable generator made a lot of noise, so they parked me toward the back of the lecture hall, which meant that I had very little interaction with students—until one finally approached me in Macroeconomics class.
Her name was Sandy. She was a petite, brown-haired sophomore with glasses that seemed too large for her delicate features. She came up to my mother after class one day and asked my name.
“How kind,” my mother said. “This is Vivian.”
I smiled at Sandy, but only politely. It had been my experience that curiosity seekers or dare takers would approach me for a lark—let’s see if she can talk like a normal person—but they never returned once their curiosity had been satisfied or the dare met. But Sandy wasn’t one of those.
“Hi, Vivian,” she said to me. “I’m Sandy. Are you enjoying the class? What do you think of Professor Simpson?”
“I’m glad I’m not sitting in the front row,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I can see him spitting from back here.”
Sandy laughed and looked at my mother as if she needed her permission to keep talking. My mother nodded.
“He’s definitely a sprayer,” Sandy said. “I have one of those for Shakespeare, too.”
“Are you an English major?”
“I think so. I’m still deciding between English and history, but I know I should take some business classes, too. Most of my friends are secretaries.”
“I thought about that, too,” I said, giving my genuine smile so that she knew I could joke about my own condition. “But I’m a terrible typist.”
She laughed again, and I felt triumphant, as I always did when I managed to make someone reasonably comfortable in my shocking presence. But just as quickly, I found myself wishing once again that I could behave like a normal college student—maybe go out for coffee or dinner with people my own age instead of having my mother stuck to my iron lung like a human-sized magnet. The resentment I felt toward her at seventeen had not completely subsided.
“Mother,” I said, and I never called her “mother.” “Would you get me some cold water?”
My mother hesitated but finally went off to fill up my cup from a water fountain.
“So what’s this really like?” Sandy said, tapping the iron lung. “Can you feel anything in there? Your arms? Your toes?”
“Nada. Crazy, huh? But this happened when I was six, so I’m used to it.”
“It’s such a trip. You’re so normal.”
“Most of what makes a person a person is upstairs anyway. It took me a long time to understand that.”
“Hey, a bunch of us are going to form a study group for this class. Want to come?”
I hesitated. I couldn’t ask my mother to cart me to the college more than twice a week; my travel days were taxing her as it was.
“What day do you meet?”
“We’ll start next week. Right after this class.”
“That could work. But it depends on where you’re meeting, too. I don’t fit through most doors.”
“I’ll see what we can work out. We’ll talk again next week.”
“Sounds good,” I said, almost unable to believe that a college student could be so kind as to include me—the horizontal freak—in any kind of group. But when my mother returned with my water, I didn’t mention Sandy’s invitation. Better to let it slip when she couldn’t do much about it.
A week later, I could barely listen to the professor in Macroeconomics as I schemed about how I could get my mother to leave me with a group of strangers. I knew she would want to go home right after class, but I also knew she would cave if I pressed her hard enough. On top of that, I worried that Sandy would forget her offer or that the other study group members would object to having me along.
But when the class was over, Sandy came straight over and said the group had decided to meet right in the lecture hall. Four other students came up behind her and took seats near my iron lung. My mother looked at me with concern, but I gave her my prepared speech.
“Mom, Sandy just offered to let me join her study group. Why don’t you go to the cafeteria and relax while we study? You can come back for me in an hour, and we’ll head home.”
I had expected resistance, but my mother clearly couldn’t believe that these students would see past my machine and allow me to mix with them.
She leaned down, her lips to my ear. “Vivian, are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Mom,” I said. “Let me try.”
So she left me that first day, and I became a valuable member of the study group—valuable mostly because I understood the material without even looking at it twice, and some in the group seemed to be math-challenged. I would often clarify points for them that the professor had “sprayed” in a particularly confusing way. By the end of the semester, we had all become familiar enough to know each other’s stories on top of knowing a little more about economics.
After the final, we had a little party in the lecture hall, and my mother left as usual to drink her Coke and do needlepoint in the cafeteria. Ian, one of the study group members, pulled out a bottle of vodka half a second after my mother left the room. He also had some plastic cups and a couple bags of chips.
The study group members dug into the chips and passed around the bottle of vodka until each had a small plastic cup about halfway full.
“What about me?” I said. “Don’t I get any?”
I don’t know what made me say it except that I so badly wanted them to keep thinking of me as a friend. I had never had alcohol before; a normal teenager would have found a way to test the waters, but I couldn’t even drink water without help.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Vivian,” Sandy said. “What would your mother say?”
“It’s fine,” I lied. “I drink all the time. They give me vodka to help me sleep.”
They bought it, and someone ran to the cafeteria for a straw. Sandy put a small amount of vodka in a glass and put the straw into my mouth. I pulled on it a little too quickly and flooded my mouth with what tasted like turpentine to my virginal taste buds. I coughed and choked.
“Oh my God, Vivian,” Sandy said. “Should we get your mother?”
I shook my head and through sheer force of will stopped coughing.
“I’m fine. I want another sip,” I said, now that I could feel a sudden warmth traveling down my esophagus and radiating, or so I imagined, through my internal organs. It seemed like a miracle that alcohol—which my parents didn’t allow in their home—could connect me to my inert body in such a profound way.
Sandy held the straw to my lips, and I took a smaller drink this time, feeling the chemical rush as it rose through the top of my head. I thought I might never have the chance to drink again, so I nodded toward the glass, and Sandy held it up again, though reluctantly.
“Be car
eful, Vivian,” she said. “This stuff will get you looped in no time.”
“I don’t care,” I said as the vodka gave me courage and bent my perception of time. The consequences seemed far away, which made them appear smaller.
An hour later, my mother returned to load me back into the van. As soon as she walked in the door, all the other students scattered, with the exception of Sandy, who, even in an inebriated state, wouldn’t have left me to face the music alone.
“Hel-lo, muvver,” I said.
My mother knew instantly what had happened and gave Sandy a look that might have stopped a freight train.
“Young lady,” she said, her voice shaking. “I counted on you to look after Vivian. What could you have been thinking?”
Sandy could have told her how I lied about my drinking habits, but she was too nice for that. She simply hung her head and apologized before slinking off behind her friends. She never spoke to me again.
After that, I wasn’t allowed to meet with other students without my mother present, which meant that no student ever approached me again. I went to my classes, did my job, and eventually graduated with an associate’s degree in business. For what, I had no idea.
CHAPTER 13
The Chronicle hit mailboxes each Thursday, which meant that Fridays were usually a light day, but Holly didn’t have time to visit the gold shop. She had to pick up Desdemona at the train station before meeting Henderson at the rehab hospital. They all needed to sit down together to review their mother’s situation, since the hospital had determined that her progress had plateaued.
Holly arrived at the station a few minutes early, so she called home to make sure Connor had remembered to take the bus home. He sometimes forgot what day of the week it was.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Connor, it’s Mom. Just wanted to make sure you got home okay.”
“Yeah, I’m here. Hey, what did we have for dinner last night? I can’t remember, and I have to write it down for Health.”
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 9
