The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  “If Racine wasn’t taking you out, I’d date you myself,” Marveen said, stepping back to take in the whole picture. “Knock ’em dead, Holly.”

  They met at the Bertram Corners Inn, which was housed in a historic home that dated back to 1789. Each room had a fireplace and a different damask wallpaper. Holly couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten there, though it had been her father’s favorite place. She ordered the salmon en croûte in his honor.

  “I can get a little spoiled sometimes by all the choices in the city, but it’s this kind of place that never dies,” Racine said, looking around. “Solid and reliable.”

  Holly wondered if “solid” and “reliable” really qualified as compliments, but she gave Racine credit for trying. She was finally starting to relax a bit around him as she discovered that he wasn’t as pretentious as a man with his looks might believe he had a right to be.

  “Tell me about your boys,” Racine said as dinner neared an end and they both began pushing food around on the overly large plates. “What are they like?”

  Holly smoothed her napkin across her lap, wondering if this was just a polite question or he really wanted to know. She decided to give him the capsule version.

  “Marshall’s a junior. He’s a pretty serious trumpet player, which means he’s always at band practice or on band trips or marching in a parade. I guess you could say he’s a band geek, but he’s just in love with his instrument.”

  “Good for him,” Racine said. “Girls love a musician.”

  Holly nodded, not wanting to hear what else Racine knew about what girls loved. She went on. “Connor’s in eighth grade. He’d play video games all day if he could, but he’s a sweetheart. He even lets me hug him once in a while. He’s the one who seems to miss my husband the most, maybe because they’re so much alike.”

  Holly hadn’t meant to raise the specter of her dead husband in the middle of the Bertram Corners Inn, but there he was, hovering above them in the dusty draperies. Racine looked down at his plate.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bring that up.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” he said quietly. “I feel sorry for your boys. My father traveled all the time, but he was very important to me. A little distant, but important.”

  It was Holly’s turn to look down at her plate. She tried not to think about what her boys were missing, because it could start a spiral of regret. “Thanks,” she said. “They’re strong kids. They’ll be okay in the end.”

  And yet, even as she said it, she realized that there was no “end” until they carried you out in a box like the purloined casket that housed Aunt Muriel. Maybe her boys would be more than okay during some adult phases of life and less than okay in others, just as she had been and was now. Much less than okay. She suddenly felt like she might vomit all over the white linen tablecloth.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not feeling all that well. Do you mind if we leave?”

  “You look white as a sheet. I’ll get the check,” Racine said, concern etched on his face. He signaled the waiter.

  “I think it’s the rich food,” Holly said, and it was true that she had not eaten so much butter and cream in years. She wondered vaguely whether the rich had more sophisticated digestive systems so they could break down their overly complicated meals.

  Racine walked Holly to her car. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive?” he said. “I could take you home.”

  Holly, who was focused on keeping her dinner in her stomach, looked up for a moment.

  “I’m fine,” she said, not wanting Racine to see the exterior of her rundown house. “I mean I’ll be fine.”

  Racine gave her a chaste kiss on the forehead. “Go rest and feel better.”

  Holly drove home and went to bed, feeling that Racine would simply cross her off his list and move on to the next option, which upset her more than she thought it would.

  Holly’s boss, Stan, was sitting in her office when she came in on Monday morning. Stan was middle-aged, a shrug of a man who wore a good toupee, though it wasn’t good enough to avoid looking like a toupee. Darla used to joke with Holly that she liked to run her fingers through Stan’s hair—even when he wasn’t around.

  “The news is not good, Lois Lane,” Stan said as Holly stowed her purse under the desk and took her seat behind it. Stan had called her Lois Lane from the moment she had started working for him, and she called him Clark Kent, although the joke, as they both aged, was wearing thin.

  “What’s wrong?” Holly asked. “Did we have a typo on the front page again? I told you we shouldn’t have laid off the copy editor.”

  “It’s not that, Holly,” he said. “It’s the ad revenue. It’s gone down so much in the last few months. I’m not sure how long we can keep publishing. They’re talking about closing down some of the weeklies, if not the whole chain.”

  Holly felt as if Stan were telling her that some mutual friend had died. Newspapers were never just a business. They were democracy’s lifeblood—even small operations like theirs that devoted a whole page every week to the school lunch menu.

  “But what’s changed? We’re at every school board meeting, every pumpkin-carving contest, every high school football game. What more can we do?”

  “That’s just it,” he said, gripping his knees. “The news we print is not the issue. It’s the economy—layoffs, housing prices. Businesses are scared to spend a dime even to bring in more business. And that includes the outlets, which have been keeping us going for years.”

  Somewhere inside Holly the tiny flame of hope that she could find a way to pay the mortgage, her bills, maybe even save some money, went out. She felt dull and hollow. Then she looked through her office window at Darla, who was on the phone laughing and talking as she took notes. She couldn’t see Portia or Marveen, and Les was almost always out covering a game or school event, but she knew they would be devastated.

  “I don’t have a timeframe,” Stan said. “The owners are meeting next week. Maybe they’ll only close one or two. Nothing’s been decided, so don’t say anything.”

  “I won’t,” Holly said, even as she had already decided to tell them right away. They needed to know in case they had to make plans.

  After Stan left, Holly found Darla, Marveen, and Portia, and learned that Les was out covering a mock disaster drill at the high school. She brought them all into her office.

  “I’m not going to sugarcoat this,” she said. “The paper’s in trouble.”

  The three of them looked at each other, their faces grim, then back at Holly, as if they had been expecting the news.

  “I can’t say I’m all that surprised, since I do the books,” Marveen said, crossing her arms. “The revenue’s way, way down.”

  “Stan didn’t want me to tell you, but you’re my friends, and if you have any connections I would completely understand if you want to start job hunting,” Holly said. “You can use me as a reference.”

  Portia cleared her throat. “I think I speak for all of us when I say I’m more worried about you, Holly,” she said.

  Darla and Marveen nodded as if they had all discussed this before.

  “C’mon, I’ll be fine. It’s not like I can’t find another job.”

  Even as the words came out of her mouth, Holly saw herself surrounded by even more bills she couldn’t pay. A future without a paycheck looked like a dark, open maw into which she would pour all her worldly possessions—tossing in tablecloths and Christmas ornaments and dining-room chairs until there was nothing left. And what about her boys? Who would give them a future? Even if they went to community colleges, the cost would eat her alive if she didn’t have a paycheck and benefits. It was bad enough as it was. Darla, Marveen, and Portia were all looking at her as if she had announced she had a terminal illness. She couldn’t bear their pity, so she transitioned into boss mode.

  “So who’s covering homecoming tomorrow night?” Holly said. “We need a big photo gallery.”

&nb
sp; After the meeting, Holly allowed herself a few moments at her desk to brood about Racine. He hadn’t called her over the weekend, and she hadn’t called him to thank him for dinner. Marveen came back into her office just as she was starting to dial his number.

  “So, let’s talk about something far more interesting than all this doom and gloom,” Marveen said, sitting down in the chair in front of her desk. “How did your date go?”

  Holly knew Marveen’s real motivation in coordinating her date night makeover. It was to give her leverage in insisting that Holly spill when it was over.

  “We had a nice time,” Holly said, not wanting to admit how sadly her date had ended after Marveen’s Herculean efforts.

  “That’s it? That’s all I get? It was ‘nice.’ Jesus, Holly, we’re not in high school. Did you or did you not sleep with him?”

  “No, Marveen,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, defeated. “I did not sleep with him. In fact, I thought I was going to throw up, so I went home early. I didn’t even enjoy my dinner.”

  “All that work for nothing,” Marveen said, slapping a hand on the desk. “Well, get him to ask you again. You deserve a little fun in your life.”

  “He hasn’t called me, and I’m not sure if I should call him or what.”

  “Under no circumstances should you call him. That’ll look desperate. You have to wait for him to come around, like a prize marlin. You have to let out the line to reel him in.”

  “Are you seriously comparing him to a fish?”

  “Look, Holly, this is no reflection on you, but he probably has a woman in every town with one of these gold joints. If you want him to stay interested, he has to think you’re not interested.”

  “See, this is why I don’t date. It’s way too complicated.”

  Marveen stood up to go. “It’s always been complicated, Holly, from time immemorial—which I date to about 1976 and my first movie with a boy. I was afraid my hand would be clammy if he tried to hold it, so I kept eating popcorn one kernel at a time. He never called me again, and it still hurts.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #6

  During the years that most of my former schoolmates started careers, got married, had children, and bought their own homes, I existed. There’s not much more to it than that. I slept, I ate, I watched television, and read; my breath went in and out; my heart pumped. I endured countless doctors and medical procedures, and I lived for the days when my parents could muster up the energy to take my iron lung outside for a few hours so that I could see the trees, smell the perfume of the lilacs in our yard, and gaze at the sky, which changed so beautifully, unlike the living-room ceiling.

  I existed.

  Toward the end of what I would later come to call, ironically, the Endless Years, I became aware of another person who had been in an iron lung for about the same amount of time that I had. His name was Lance, and he had almost my identical diagnosis.

  I was thirty-three years old when I saw Lance on a television program about polio that displayed him smiling at the screen from a lung that looked almost exactly like mine, down to the yellow enamel. They didn’t interview him, but I deduced from his face that he was intelligent and kind and just as frustrated by his circumstances as I was. I began to lay the groundwork to get my mother to arrange a meeting.

  Lance lived in Pennsylvania, so I asked my mother if I could be brought to New York City for my thirty-fourth birthday, which was in April.

  “I know it’s a lot, Mom,” I said. “But I’ve always wanted to see New York. We could just drive around, and I could look out the windows.”

  “Oh, Vivian,” she said. “Where would we stay? I’m not sure a hotel would even allow it or if they could get you inside a room.”

  “It’s less than two hours away,” I told her. “We could leave early in the morning and come back at night. You and Dad could take turns driving. Please, Mom. I don’t ask for much, and it might be my last chance.”

  I had long since stopped feeling ashamed for the way I could manipulate my mother. It was nonsense that I didn’t ask for much—I asked for things all the time—but in the context of my narrow existence, it wasn’t like asking to walk again. I knew that, if she could, she would try to give me anything I wanted.

  So we planned a trip to New York, picked a date the week after my birthday, and once it was all on the calendar, I told my mother that I wanted her to write to Lance. I had some movie-of-the-week transcript of how it would all go in my head, but I needed my mother’s help to make it happen.

  “Remember that man we saw on the TV program about polio, the one who’s been in an iron lung all his life?” I said one day.

  “I remember,” my mother said cautiously.

  “It turns out that his home hospital is New York-Presbyterian. Maybe we could meet up with him while we’re in New York.”

  “And you just thought of this,” she said, smiling.

  I think it made her happy to know I had come up with a scheme to relieve my own boredom.

  My mother managed to track down Lance’s address in Pennsylvania, and she sent him a letter that I dictated to her. I’m sure she worried about the outcome, but she also knew that a little adventure might be good for all of us. The Endless Years probably felt endless to her, too.

  When Lance answered back—via his caregivers—that he would absolutely love to meet a fellow iron lunger and could arrange to be in New York that day, I began to construct elaborate fantasies that involved the two of us falling desperately in love from the moment we met and being kindred spirits who, despite our physical limitations, would share an emotional bond so powerful that it transcended the corporeal. I tried to temper my expectations, but the fantasy was too powerful: Who else but a man in an iron lung would understand my futile hopes, my restricted world? Who else would ever fall in love with me? And despite my realization at the age of twelve that I would never have a romantic relationship, I let myself fall into a dream that culminated in a long, passionate glance. I wasn’t sure our lungs would let us get close enough to kiss.

  When the day came, we left for New York before dawn. I dozed the whole way as my father drove the van, but before we got to the city I asked my mother to put a little makeup on me. It seems pathetic now, but I wanted to look my best for a stranger in the overwrought hope that he might find my face attractive and want to spend time with me. We arrived at the hospital by 9 a.m., although it took until almost ten o’clock before they could safely transport my lung into the operating theater—one of the few rooms large enough to accommodate two iron lungs.

  Lance’s caregivers obviously thought it was sweet to have two iron-lung patients of about the same age and opposite sexes, and they had brought flowers for him to “give” to me. I was first in the room. They wheeled in Lance, who lifted his head a bit to smile at me. They parked us side by side but facing in opposite directions because we were both more comfortable turning our heads to the left.

  “Hi, Lance,” I said, giving him the most genuine smile I had used in the last decade.

  “Hi, Vivian,” he said. “Great to meet you. So glad you got in touch.”

  My heart jumped. He had a bit of rosacea and a prominent forehead, but his smile transformed his face from bland to almost handsome. One of the hospital administrators asked if she could take a picture, and we did our best to pose for the camera. The caregivers on both sides of our lungs began shaking hands and talking to each other, no doubt sharing stories of close calls and testing each other’s tolerance for iron-lung humor. I didn’t listen, because I was too caught up in Lance. I wanted him to speak again, so I asked him a question.

  “What kind of music do you like?”

  “You don’t have to try so hard,” he said. His smile was gone. His eyes held little more than hostility.

  “I’m not. I’m just wondering if we have anything in common besides this,” I said, nodding toward the lung.

  “I agreed to this because it made my mom hap
py,” he said. “Believe me, you don’t really want to know me. I’m not in a good place right now.”

  “But that’s why we could help each other,” I said, so disappointed that he hadn’t been sincerely happy to meet me. “I know exactly how you feel. I’m one of the few people in the world who could possibly know.”

  Lance’s face softened a bit, but he didn’t seem capable of pretending that he wasn’t there under duress.

  “Do you fantasize about dying every day?” he said. “Do you wonder how you can stand another twenty-four hours with your parents hovering over you?”

  “I have good days and bad days. But I know what you mean. After all this time, it’s like a contest to see how many days they can get out of us.”

  “Not a contest I want to win.”

  Before I could respond, the hospital administrator who had taken our picture decided to make a little speech about our incredible will to survive and the amazing advancements in medical care that kept both Lance and me alive when no one had believed we would live past childhood. Lance smiled again and turned his head toward his mother, who had approached him from the other side.

  “Have you two had a chance to chat?” she said in a singsong voice that gave me some indication of why Lance was so desperate to escape. “I think it’s just remarkable that you found each other.”

  Found each other, like this one-day meeting justified a life stripped of mobility, a life that subsumed other lives in its neediness. It made my fantasy—already juvenile—just sad. I called my mother over and told her I wasn’t feeling well. All I had to do was cough a few times to end the conversations and congratulations.

  Before the medical teams could regroup to move our iron lungs again, Lance asked if we could have a moment alone. Since we were in an operating theater and could be observed through the glass walls, our parents agreed. It took several minutes for them to all file out, during which time Lance rolled his eyes a few times and made me laugh.