Connor walked in the open door as she was wiping her eyes and shutting the ring in the box once more, though he didn’t seem to notice.
“I have a cold, Mom,” he said, sitting down on the bed. At thirteen, he was still on that fulcrum between boyhood and manhood during which sickness easily tipped him toward the former. She smoothed back the bangs on his forehead to check for a fever and felt the cool expanse of his unblemished skin—a blank canvas for all the acne and misery that would surely visit him in the next few years.
“Poor baby,” she said. “Get into bed, and I’ll bring you some tea.”
“I’m not that sick,” he said, suddenly shaking off the boy to her regret. “I’m going to Jason’s this afternoon. He’s got a new game.”
“Okay, hon. Hope you feel better. Is Marshall still asleep?”
“No, he’s been gone for a while. He had band practice, I think.”
Connor headed back out the door. Holly didn’t know that Marshall had band practice, although she had admittedly fallen a little behind on her son’s complicated schedule. In addition to the trip to Disney World, he had to prepare for the SATs, practice driving with his friend’s father so he could get his license when she had the money for his state-mandated classes and insurance, and start looking at colleges. Connor, of course, was right behind him. Every check she wrote for Marshall would have to be written again a few years later.
In the spirit of spending as little as possible on herself when her boys needed so much, Holly dug through her underwear drawer until she found a decent black bra that was too small to be comfortable but could be forced into service, and a pair of underwear with a navy-blue pattern that could read as black in a dark room. Now she was set for even the most unlikely outcome of her date and hadn’t spent a penny.
CHAPTER 15
Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #5
In 1970 we moved from the farm into Bertram Corners—a Podunk town, but a town nonetheless. My father’s arthritis had worsened, and he could no longer farm. My mother wanted to be closer to church so that she could attend on Sundays without leaving me for too long, but I think she also had an ulterior motive: she wanted the church and its doers of good deeds to be closer to me.
My parents sold the farm to a developer looking to put forty houses on the fields where several generations had grown corn and pastured cows. When I was young, my father would say he’d never sell, that the land was his legacy, and that it shouldn’t be carved up into a bunch of identical lots and paved over with macadam, that its value and its majesty was in its openness and all those things that farmers who make a living wage can afford to say. But as he aged, those ideals receded with his hairline. He had no one to leave the farm to anyway.
The little Cape house my parents bought in Bertram Corners had to be modified for my iron lung—the doors widened, a ramp built, the electrical system updated for my generator. I know my father missed his arms-wide-open-width view of green fields and distant, blue rolling hills, but I loved being able to see the neighbors walk by on the sidewalk outside the living-room window. I felt less isolated, even if few people in town knew I was lying there behind the white clapboards, alive only because a machine forced my lungs to expand and contract.
Within weeks of our move, my mother became a much more active member of St. John the Apostle Church and volunteered our house as a staging area for a clothing drive. That was her way of getting some church members over to meet me without it seeming like she was asking for something.
I was, as before, the unavoidable centerpiece of the living room. The door to the biggest bedroom had been widened, but there seemed little point in wheeling my heavy machine to and from the bedroom to create the pretense of privacy. On the closing day of the clothing drive, my mother and father pushed my gurney a little closer toward the window so that the church ladies would be able to sort through the donated clothes on the floor.
“We’ll have some company,” my mother said that morning before the church ladies arrived. “Won’t that be nice?”
I wondered why this would be nice for me. I couldn’t help sort clothes, couldn’t lug bags or boxes, couldn’t drink the pink lemonade my mother had made unless someone thought to bring it to me with a straw. Though it took some effort, I tried to sound positive anyway.
“Sure, it’ll be nice,” I said.
My mother brightened so visibly that I became painfully aware of how rarely I made the conscious choice to behave kindly toward her. I felt a jolt of guilt that my mother’s whole life had been spent catering to someone who had to make a special effort just to be agreeable in her presence.
When the women arrived with their bags and boxes of donated clothing, they all appeared to have been warned in advance about my condition, though one put a hand to her mouth when she first laid eyes on my iron lung. Being women of the church, they all tried to be charitable.
“So Vivian,” said the youngest one, who was wearing a pink minidress that was not flattering to her thighs, “how do you like our little town?”
I looked over at my mother. She usually rescued me from boneheaded attempts to pretend that I was normal, but she was busy setting up a system to categorize the donated clothes.
“From what I’ve been able to see, I like it just fine,” I told Thunder Thighs, thinking my mother would be proud that I had harnessed my sarcasm.
“I know it’s small,” she said, “but we do have a movie theater and some nice little diners, and you should see the town picnic we have on Memorial Day.”
As I looked toward the ceiling—it was so hard for me to get out of a conversation—another woman came over. She was about my mother’s age and wore a light blue pantsuit with matching light blue eye shadow.
“Hi, Vivian,” she said, standing just in the right place so that I could see her face through my mirror. “I see you’ve met Bernadette. I’m Charlotte. I’m in charge of the lay ministry at the church. Bernadette, why don’t you help with the sorting?”
Bernadette waddled off, leaving me with the pastel-enrobed Charlotte, who looked like she had something to say.
“Your mother has been telling me that you’re a bit isolated here,” she said. “How would you feel about joining our Bible study group? We could meet at your house so it wouldn’t require transporting you to the church.”
Everything I knew about the Bible came from the children’s version my mother used to read to me when everyone assumed I’d never need the adult version anyway. I was mildly curious about the “fire and brimstone” sections I’d heard about, but I hadn’t bothered to read them for myself.
“Sure,” I said. “I’d like to learn more about the Bible, and I’m sure my mother would love the company.”
“That’s wonderful,” Charlotte said, waving my mother over. “Vivian has agreed to study the Bible with us. I’m so pleased.”
My mother looked as if she’d swallowed a hard candy whole.
“Well,” she said. “That’s just . . .”
She looked as if she could not come up with a suitable word. Charlotte plunged ahead.
“It’s all settled,” she said. “Do Thursdays work for you? Seven?”
My mother nodded her head and went back to her sorting, giving me sideways glances every now and again.
I’d had a rocky relationship with God, who naturally had been petitioned, summoned, bargained with, and, frankly, begged to make me better, all to no avail. My parents fell to their knees every night before bed, and whole churches had been asked to remember me in their prayers, but I had seen no evidence that God deemed me worthy of his attention. Still, I hadn’t quite given up. I guess some small part of me wanted to think that God, if He chose, could step in and perform the miracle that would take me out of the machine forever—or even for five minutes. If there was some secret code in the Bible that allowed one to jump to the front of the miracle line, I wanted to find out what it was.
The Bible study group—Charlotte and about a half dozen other women—show
ed up at the appointed hour on Thursday. My mother had arranged some chairs into a semicircle, with my lung completing the loop. Charlotte introduced the other women, whose names I promptly forgot, and then opened her Bible and announced that we would be discussing a passage from the Gospel of John. She read aloud:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.”
“Let’s start with Vivian,” Charlotte said. “What does this verse mean to you?”
I glanced at my mother, who looked liked she wanted to dive under the couch in case I tossed a grenade and blew up her nice little gathering. But the passage didn’t bring out my cynical side. It gave me pause.
“I’d like to think that this means something more than, literally, if you don’t believe in Jesus, you’re doomed,” I said. “I think it’s more like God saying, ‘I was willing to give up my own child, I loved the world that much.’”
“Beautifully said, Vivian,” Charlotte said.
I nodded, and then the pious women of Bertram Corners talked about how devoted they were to believing in Jesus and snagging a piece of that everlasting pie. They didn’t use those words, of course, but it seemed to me that one was trying to out-Jesus the other.
Despite my suspicions about the Bible group’s motivations, I felt the sudden light of what I can only describe as a religious insight coming over me. I could love Jesus, too, I thought. I could convince myself that God sent his only son to the world to be tortured and killed as a way of saving humanity. And if I did this throughout the years left ahead of me, maybe I could step right up to an eternal life that did not require a generator and pureed food. Everlasting was a long time—a time that would make this life, my aborted existence, seem like the flash of a camera bulb.
When the women left, I toyed with the idea of turning myself over to Jesus, who had, after all, cured the sick, made the blind see, fed a multitude with just a few fish and a few loaves of bread. He taught humankind that the lowliest among us would have the best seats in the house once this blip of a life was over. I found solace in that thought. Maybe suffering—and who else suffered more than I did?—was just a ticket to the VIP lounge in heaven.
This beatific mood lasted into the next day, during which my mother kept taking my temperature because she couldn’t understand why I was so quiet and cooperative. She finally asked me if anything was bothering me.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I said quietly. “I guess I’m willing to look into the whole Jesus thing. I want to believe that I can live another life. This one has been so hard.”
My mother put down the thermometer on my tray and laid her hand across my forehead. “Darling girl,” she said.
In that moment, I was her darling girl again. I was the toddler who followed Darlene into the barn to watch her swing on the rope tied to the distant rafters; I was the four-year-old who demanded that my father take the training wheels off my bike so I could ride like my sister; I was the child who fell asleep in my mother’s arms as she read to me. No matter how sharply my life had diverged from the one that darling girl had been expected to live, she hadn’t disappeared completely.
My baby steps toward Christ lasted right up until I asked my mother to let me read the Bible in preparation for the next meeting. I asked her to randomly flip through the pages and to fix the Bible in the overhead frame that held my books. When she did, I came upon this passage in Deuteronomy:
The Consequences of Disobedience
But it shall come to pass, if thou wilt not hearken unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command thee this day; that all these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee:
Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field.
Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store.
Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, and the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep.
Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in, and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out.
I brought it up when the group met on Thursday night, asking whether or not the vindictive Old Testament God could be reconciled with the forgiving New Testament God.
“I’m confused. This seems to be saying that if you slip once on ‘Honor thy father and mother,’ you’re cursed for life,” I said. “That seems a little harsh to me. Wouldn’t most of us already be doomed?”
Charlotte looked around the circle but no one ventured to say anything.
“The commandments are pretty clear and basic,” Charlotte finally said. “This is just reinforcement for doing the right thing.”
“But what if you violate ‘Thou shalt not steal’ because your kids are starving?” I said. “Isn’t there some kind of flexibility there?”
“Jesus is love,” ventured a soft-spoken woman I’d never noticed before, but Charlotte jumped in before she could continue.
“We don’t generally dip into the Old Testament, Vivian,” she said.
“But it’s the majority of the Bible,” I said. “Don’t you have to study the whole thing?”
“The New Testament is more relevant to Father’s sermons. He usually tells us what he’s reading for the next week’s Mass, and we follow along. It helps us get more out of the service.”
My mother excused herself to get more lemonade as I thought about whether or not it was worth arguing. The lightness that had filled my heart drained out of me just as quickly as it had entered. I continued to read the Bible on my own, but my mother had to tell the study circle that I was no longer interested in joining them. Maybe I gave up too fast, but something told me that “studying” the Bible wasn’t compatible with asking questions, and so I let the devout women of St. John the Apostle move on to another charity case.
CHAPTER 16
Holly was fairly sure that her date with Racine would be a disaster. For one thing, their names were incompatible. Hers was solidly American and redolent of Christmas, while his seemed foreign and risky, with no trace of the Midwestern city from whence it came. She couldn’t see it on a party invitation: “Let’s watch the Super Bowl together—Holly and Racine.” They were like bologna and foie gras. But she had borrowed a dress from Marveen for the occasion—a simple black A-line that was probably the most boring thing Marveen owned—which meant that Marveen wouldn’t hear of it when Holly mentioned in the office that she might cancel.
“Oh no you don’t,” Marveen said. “He might be a player, but if you don’t go I will never let you forget it.”
“I haven’t had a date in so long,” Holly said, groaning. “I don’t even know how to act. Am I supposed to offer to pay for dinner? Half?”
Portia, who had come up behind them, offered her perspective as a young single woman. “If he asked you out, then he pays,” she said as though this were common knowledge. “Especially on a first date.”
Holly was relieved, since she didn’t think any of her credit cards were below their limits, and she had nothing in her wallet but some change.
Late in the afternoon, Marveen came into her office with a box of hair dye and a tote bag full of hair-related electric appliances.
“This is an intervention,” Marveen said. “You cannot go on a date with your hair like that. You have some grays that have been driving me crazy for a year now, so I’m helping both of us.”
Holly put a hand to the top of her head. “I know it’s bad, but I can’t afford the hairdresser anymore. I cut it myself when it gets too long.”
Marveen dropped the tote bag. “Christ, Holly,” she said, “that is indefensible.”
An hour and a half later, Holly’s shoulder-length hair was dyed an even, dark brown, trimmed of its split ends, blow-dried, flat-ironed, curled, teased, and tousled to look as if she just woke up that way. Then the whole elaborate ill
usion was locked into place with industrial-strength hairspray. She almost didn’t recognize herself.
“You’re good, Marveen,” she said into the small mirror in the office bathroom. “You could open your own shop.”
“I just had the same thought,” Marveen said, gazing at her handiwork. “You look like a million bucks right now.”
And Holly felt, if not like a million bucks, then at least like a hundred grand. She put on the dress Marveen had loaned her, black tights, heels, and some silver-toned hoop earrings she had found in her jewelry box while rooting around for gold. She was thinner than she’d ever been, due to obsessive fretting, which ironically may have been one of the reasons Racine found her attractive.
She felt put together but not beautiful, although she could remember two other days in her life during which she had embodied that coveted adjective. One was during college when she had left her dorm room in a new blue T-shirt that brought out the color of her eyes. Her hair had been freshly washed and dried, long and straight and shining, and she had just had her teeth cleaned the day before—the coffee and Tab stains polished away. She remembered turning into the sunlight on her way to an art history class, smiling at no one and for no reason except that she felt she had never looked better—a realization that arrived with the knowledge that she would likely never look that good again, except maybe on her wedding day, when a whole team of experts would be brought in to assist.
But she did, in fact, look even better on a particular day ten years later when she was a young mother on a trip to the Bronx Zoo with Marshall’s preschool. She had lost her baby weight from Connor and had the postpartum boost in hair thickness. Both boys had slept through the night, giving her a burst of energy. They had stopped to look at the elephants when a photographer started snapping her picture with them. She looked toward the clicking noise, and he caught her eye. He said nothing, only smiled and nodded, but in that nod she knew that she had attained—in that moment, at that angle, in that particular light—some measure of loveliness that only visited normal people on rare occasions. She remembered wondering what it might feel like—the magic and the burden—of being beautiful all the time.
The Virtues of Oxygen Page 11
