The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Watch this,” he said, moving his right eyeball toward his nose with perfect control. “I’m not as good with the left, but I’m working on it. What else do I have to do?”

  “Why did you send them out?” I said, confused about the sudden change in his attitude. “You’ve made it pretty clear that you’ve given up. Why even bother?”

  Our faces weren’t that far away from each other, maybe eighteen inches, so I could see the anguish in his eyes.

  “I really like looking at your face,” he said. “You’re a pretty girl.”

  This was not what I had expected to hear from a man who had numbered his own days, but it was a compliment, and I took it.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’re not half bad yourself.”

  He laughed a little, but I could see that any emotion took its toll. His face was so pale, as if he never saw the sun, not even one day or so a month, as I did.

  “When they’re gone,” he said, nodding toward the glass where our parents kept vigil, “or even before they’re gone, you’ll have to find some other reason to wake up in the morning. Something that motivates you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. If I could figure that out, I wouldn’t be where I am now.”

  Normally advice was easy for me to ignore. Who are you to tell me to hold a paintbrush in my teeth and “create” when you can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to have an unimpaired brain inside a body that might as well be made of wood? But Lance was different. He knew. He knew that I needed to find that motivation before I slipped off the ledge from which he had already fallen.

  “I’ll try,” I said. I felt tears sliding down my nose, but I couldn’t brush them away, so they dampened the sheet where my cheek rested.

  “Please try,” he said. “I want you to try.”

  Our parents had figured out by then that we were both crying, so they sent in the cavalry and pulled our lungs apart, steering us to different destinations.

  “Good-bye, Lance,” I said, turning my head to watch him for as long as I could.

  “Bye,” he said in a muffled voice, and I never saw him again.

  As we drove away from the hospital, I pulled myself together long enough to glance through the windows of the van at the sidewalks packed with pedestrians and at the massive buildings, though I couldn’t look up far enough to see how tall they were. The density of it all scared and thrilled me at the same time. At one point my mother got out at a street corner while my father drove around the block. She climbed back into the van with a giant pretzel crusted in salt and a bottle of Coke, a drink I wasn’t normally allowed to have, because the caffeine kept me awake at night.

  “A treat,” my mother said, smiling. “What a very special day this is.”

  She broke off a small piece of the pretzel and placed it in my mouth, then let me wash it down with a sip of Coke through a straw.

  A few weeks after the trip, we heard from Lance’s parents that he had died. No explanation of how, just that he was gone. I wept upon hearing the news—both in grief for myself and in joy for him.

  CHAPTER 18

  After work, Holly decided to stroll by the gold shop to see if Racine might still be there. She had decided against calling him but thought he might happen to see her walking by and come out to say hello. But the door was locked and the lights were off, so Holly walked back to the office, kicking stones just in case Racine was still in the vicinity. When she reached her car, she felt foolish and drove home.

  Once there, she made pizza for the kids and helped Connor with some homework before the boys went to bed. Then she spread out her bills on the kitchen table so she could calculate whether or not they could afford anything at all for Christmas. She had already solved the Thanksgiving dilemma by convincing the boys that they should volunteer at a soup kitchen, since Grandma wasn’t going to be able to spoil them with a turkey and three kinds of pie anymore.

  For the hundredth time, she added up the basic monthly expenses that weren’t automatically deducted from her paycheck—the mortgage, the heating oil bill, the electric bill, the water bill, the car payment and the car insurance payment, the interest on the home equity loan, and the interest on her credit card bill. Then she looked at her income. There was a gap of about five hundred dollars a month even with the extra money she was making from Vivian, and even if she continued to have a job. Her retirement funds, as small as they were, had already been raided. She had shut off the cable and eliminated the landline. She bought the cheapest food she could find without sacrificing all nutrition. She bought as little as possible for herself, using Q-tips to dredge out the remains of her waning ChapStick and lipstick supply. Even if she could have sold her house—and that was questionable, given the market—it wasn’t worth what she still owed to the bank between the mortgage and the home equity loan. And the bank was already circling, closing in.

  When her mother was sending her monthly checks, she viewed her family as a tolerable kind of lower middle class. They couldn’t afford much, but when one of the boys had a growth spurt and needed new jeans or a few dollars to chip in for a teacher’s gift, she could always find it. Now she was one of those people she had always pitied—the ones who kept watching their credit card balances compound on a monthly basis, continually widening the chasm between financial stability and bankruptcy as the rope bridge across it stretched and frayed.

  Being without money in a First World country had its parallels to being chronically ill, Holly decided. It hampered the ability to move freely. It meant exposure to unpleasantness, discomfort, even pain. It made the future seem bleak. It had even more parallels to Vivian’s situation, Holly thought. If money were oxygen, she was the one flopping around like a fish outside the iron lung. Society expected people to have money. It really didn’t know what to do with people who found themselves outside the norms of earning and spending and paying taxes.

  And Vivian, who couldn’t do much of anything that an able-bodied or even most disabled people could do, had all the oxygen she needed. She couldn’t feed herself, but she could manage her own mini-empire from the confines of her iron lung. Holly was momentarily jealous. She almost wished she could spend a week or two inside the iron lung—detached from her body, no more or less than a cerebellum interacting with an adoring public and entertaining fans on the Internet. Never a worry about calls from a collection agency or Vince from the bank. She shook herself out of the fantasy almost immediately, but the shame of it stayed with her after she went to bed, chasing her into suffocating dreams of being trapped in the trunk of a car with the air running out.

  Holly arrived at Vivian’s house for her volunteer shift with two avocados. She somehow felt she had to make amends for wanting, even momentarily, to trade places just because Vivian didn’t have to worry about money.

  “Look what I have,” Holly said, showing Vivian the avocados as she came in the front door. “A little something to brighten up your day. They need to ripen a bit, but when they do I’ll make guacamole.”

  “Thanks, Holly,” Vivian said, though she barely looked at them.

  Holly walked around Vivian’s head to sit in the chair to her left. Vivian smiled and turned her head toward the window.

  “Is the sun in your eyes? I could close the shades,” Holly said.

  “No, it’s nice,” Vivian said. “I don’t often get to feel the sun on my face anymore. It’s been so gray lately.”

  “It has, hasn’t it? Maybe we’ll even have some snow.”

  Holly sensed some melancholy in Vivian, who occasionally succumbed but usually snapped out of it before long. She tried to think of something upbeat to discuss.

  “So Marshall got back yesterday from his band trip to Disney World, and I think he might have a girlfriend. He’s been on the phone constantly, and he’s been mooning around the house, bumping into furniture, whistling. It’s really pretty sweet.”

  “That is sweet,” Vivian said. “I hope she’s a nice girl who deserves Ma
rshall. All I see on TV are these trampy girls who swear like sailors.”

  “I’m not even sure how to ask him about it. This is when I miss Chris the most. We would have talked about this for hours.”

  Vivian’s face fell again. “Do you ever wonder, Holly, why God allows people to suffer? I’ve spent considerable time on that one, and I’m no closer to an answer. If you believe that God doesn’t get involved in human affairs, then there’s no point in believing in God. But if God does orchestrate anything at all, then why do nice, hardworking people suffer the way they do? Why did God take Chris from you at such an early age and leave your beautiful children without a father? Why is your mother hanging on—breathing effortlessly, I might add—when she doesn’t even know what’s going on around her?”

  Holly, who was a nonpracticing Episcopalian, didn’t know what to say. She knew Vivian had been raised as a Catholic but hadn’t received Communion—which, in her case, required a personal visit—in years. They had talked about God before, but only in the context of the afterlife. When Chris had died, Holly remembered Vivian assuring her that there had to be a heaven for people who hadn’t gotten a fair shake on earth.

  “I don’t know, Vivian,” Holly said, looking down at her hands. “I rank that as one of the great mysteries of life.”

  “Most people don’t have time to ponder life’s mysteries, because they’re too focused on their daily responsibilities,” Vivian said. “I, on the other hand, have all the time in the world to wonder why God didn’t just kill me off right away like my sister. What purpose did my suffering—my parents’ suffering—have for anyone? The first time I overheard someone refer to me as an ‘invalid’ I was shocked. But that’s what I am. Have you ever thought about the meaning of that word? In-valid. I don’t count. I don’t even register except as a burden to other people.”

  Holly was about to suggest that Vivian had, in fact, inspired many people to make the most of their circumstances, no matter how limited, when Vivian answered her own question.

  “Any God I could believe in must have had some grand plan to use my suffering as a way to motivate others, right? But then I think of the poor souls like Chris, and I come right back to where I started. If there was some grand plan in killing him off, why do you and your kids have to suffer when so many other families don’t? I don’t buy into the idea that God doesn’t give us more than we can bear. Sometimes I can’t bear it, Holly, but I can’t do anything about it.”

  In all her years as a volunteer, Holly had never heard Vivian speak of her condition that way. She felt compelled to counter her argument.

  “You know what? We’ll never really know why one person suffers tragedy after tragedy and the next person skates through life with all their relatives and friends dying in the right order with a minimum amount of grief. So we struggle. We wonder and we curse and we kill each other in religious wars, and we really don’t get any closer to the answers, but we try. That’s all we can do.”

  “I need a tissue, Holly. Can you . . . ?”

  Holly was surprised to see a tear running down Vivian’s temple, and she pulled a tissue from the box.

  “Has something happened?” Holly said. “This isn’t like you.”

  Vivian nodded almost imperceptibly. Holly dabbed at her damp face with the tissue.

  “The one thing I could really take pride in was my economic independence,” Vivian said. “But now I’m not sure how long that will last either. My accountant called me yesterday. He told me I’m now worth somewhat less than I thought. My stocks are all in the toilet.” She sniffed loudly. “But I don’t want you to worry about me. I’ve got other resources, and I have the gold store, which seems to be doing pretty well, right?”

  Holly had never seen Vivian in such a vulnerable state. She really didn’t know anything about the internal operations or even whether the store was making money, but she needed to say something reassuring.

  “I can tell you that Racine is a huge draw,” Holly said. “The place seems to have customers most of the time.”

  Vivian sniffed again and seemed to compose herself. Her face took on its business expression, one that said she was making mental calculations, adding columns of numbers and carrying the one.

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Vivian said. “But I’ll need a better idea of when it will start paying off, so I can adjust my other investments.”

  Holly considered launching into her date night story but thought better of it. She now realized how foolish she’d been to go on a date, even a failed one, with Racine. Now it would be even harder to ask him for the information Vivian wanted.

  “Just tell me what you need,” Holly said.

  “I’d just like a forecast for the year. Expenditures and expected revenue. He’ll know what I mean.”

  “I’ll track him down. Is there anything else I can do for you? Do you want a little snack, maybe some ice cream?”

  Ice cream was the one food Vivian cherished, because it went down so easily and soothed her throat. She was a connoisseur of the high-end brands that were all about intense flavor.

  “I wouldn’t turn down some Häagen-Dazs,” Vivian said, finally smiling. “See, I do have something to live for.”

  After her stint with Vivian and a few hours in the office, Holly decided to take a walk down the street to the gold store at lunchtime. It might be awkward to see Racine again, but now she had a job to do for Vivian. Along the way she turned in to the pharmacy, which had an extensive cosmetics counter with samples she had recently discovered. Once there, she was surprised to find Darla manning the register in a drugstore-issued smock.

  “What are you doing here?” Holly asked. “Aren’t you supposed to be back at the newspaper working for me?”

  “Hi, Hol,” Darla said. “They asked me to fill in for the regular cashier’s lunch break. Most of the time I just work on the weekends. Didn’t I tell you that Phil got laid off from the distribution center? You’d think beer would be the last thing people would stop buying, but I guess that isn’t true.”

  “I’m so sorry,” said Holly, wishing that her friend and colleague didn’t have to wear a smock of any kind just to make ends meet. “I wish you’d said something.”

  “Why? So you could reach into your magic bag and pull out a job for Phil? Or a big raise for me? We all just do what we have to do to keep body and soul together. I was lucky to find this.”

  “I have a second job, too. I’m helping Vivian manage her gold store investment. In fact, I’m headed over there right now.”

  “Well, if you’re going to see that Racine, you came to the right place. I’m gonna make you look like a movie star.”

  Ten minutes later Holly walked out of the pharmacy wearing a new shade of rose-colored lipstick, light brown eye shadow, and some blush, and thinking about what Darla had said: “We all do what we have to do to keep body and soul together.” She wasn’t sure that her body and her soul were even compatible anymore. The latter seemed like a luxury she could no longer afford.

  A few customers were sitting at the back of the gold store having their offerings evaluated when Holly walked in, but she didn’t see Racine right away. As she looked at the glass cases full of old jewelry, watches, and silver-plated brush sets, he emerged from the back room.

  “Holly!” he said. “I was literally just dialing your number.”

  “You’re making that up,” Holly said, until Racine thrust his cell phone in front of her and she saw the first eight digits of her cell phone number. Racine came around to the front of the counter and put a hand lightly on her shoulder. He had a physical sureness that she envied and admired.

  “I enjoyed our date,” he said, now touching the top of his head. He touched it so often that she wondered if he was afraid of losing his hair. “I was hoping we could go out again.”

  Holly felt certain that he was just trying to be nice. What could he have enjoyed about paying for an expensive meal, then leaving before dessert because his date thought s
he might throw up? But she had to give him credit for trying.

  “Sure, that would be great,” she said slowly. “But I really came down here to get some numbers for Vivian. She wants a report on your expenses and projected revenues.”

  “Of course, of course. I’ll get all that together and send her an e-mail.”

  “Soon, okay?” Holly said. “She’s a little anxious about it.”

  “Nothing to worry about. Business is good, especially with the holidays coming. Everyone needs that extra cash.”

  Holly thought about the wedding ring again, wondering how many presents she could buy if she sold it. Somehow, knowing it was there in her jewelry box made her feel less poor, so she mentally put it back.

  “So when can we get together?” he said. “Is there a good day this week?”

  Holly felt another lurch in her stomach, knowing that she wouldn’t fall gently if Racine kept pursuing her. It would be more like a cliff dive into rock-strewn waters, and then how would she get out of it intact once he was ready to move on?

  “The boys are busy on Wednesday night with a band fund-raiser, so that might work.”

  “Wednesday night then,” he said. “I’ll come to your house around seven.”

  Leaving the gold store, Holly felt somehow as if she were walking on marshmallows, uncertain of how to step and overpowered by a sweet and expectant scent.

  CHAPTER 19

  Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #7

  I took Lance’s advice and found a reason to open my eyes every day: investing in the stock market. I had received a small settlement as part of a medical malpractice lawsuit involving faulty catheters, so I had a small nest egg that wasn’t earmarked for my medical care.