The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Anything you like in here?”

  Connor shook his head. “If you can’t plug it in, I don’t want it.”

  Holly laughed and pulled him into an awkward hug. “At least you’re honest.”

  When they met Marshall back in front of J. C. Penney, his girlfriend was nowhere to be seen.

  “Ready to go?” he said.

  “Sure,” Holly said, for once forcing herself not to ask any questions. “I’m all shopped out.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #8

  My mother died in her sleep. Marveen let herself in the door for a 6 a.m. shift and found the previous volunteer, Sid Mahoney, fast asleep—a fact she later shared with the entire town. She told me that she poked Sid in his “fat gut” before making sure I was breathing and then checking on my mother, who was not. She called an ambulance before she woke me.

  “Vivian,” she said, running a hand across my forehead. “Are you awake?”

  “I am now,” I said, still bleary-eyed and, as usual, wanting to stay inside a dream where I ran and jumped and drew air into my lungs without even thinking about it.

  “Viv, I’m so sorry. It’s your mother. The ambulance will be here any minute.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” I said, now fully awake. “She was fine last night when she went to bed.”

  “Oh, Viv,” Marveen said, stroking my hair. “She must have died during the night.”

  I didn’t believe her. It wasn’t possible. I thought it was some ugly attempt at a joke, despite the numbness creeping down my neck.

  “That can’t be true. She was fine last night. She was absolutely fine, I swear.”

  When I saw the look on Marveen’s face and realized she was telling me the truth, I remember feeling that I had failed. I hadn’t been there—or made sure someone else was there—when she most needed it. But Marveen reminded me that volunteers had been there through the night—she didn’t mention right away how she found Sid unconscious that morning—and said my mother had gone peacefully.

  “I thought she was still asleep,” she said, shaking her head. “She looked so serene . . . Really, Vivian, it was just her time.”

  I cried long and loud, and Marveen let me. She mopped my face with tissues at appropriate intervals and nodded sympathetically.

  “How could I have outlived both my parents?” I said. “They opened their veins and poured their blood into me, and for what? What did they get out of this life?”

  “They did what they had to do, and you thanked them,” Marveen said, as if she knew. “They understood how much you appreciated them.”

  I shook my head. I realized she could never fully comprehend what my life had been like, but I didn’t want to be falsely martyred. I didn’t deserve it.

  “I was horrible to them for decades,” I said, still crying. “I really was. You just didn’t know me then.”

  “But I know you now, and I knew your mother, and she didn’t regret one day at your side.”

  The EMTs opened the door and nodded sympathetically toward me while moving a stretcher into my mother’s room. I cried like a child as they wheeled her body past mine in the only possible path toward the door.

  “Wait,” I said. “Just let me look at her for a minute.”

  They parked the stretcher next to my lung, and though my mother’s face was several inches below mine, I could see clearly that she had, as Marveen said, died peacefully. There was no trace of pain or struggle on her well-lined face, the gray hair pulled into the long side braid she always wore to bed. I wasn’t worried about what would happen to me—I had long since managed to direct my own care—but it did crash down on me that I was all alone in the world.

  I was the end of the line, the last to survive in our immediate family. It made me sad that my parents had never experienced the joy of grandchildren. Their genes would never assert themselves in a generation down the road. Nor would mine, and all because I had been unlucky enough to contract a disease just before it became preventable.

  I often thought about the nature of viruses and how they sought opportunity, just as people did. They had no moral code, of course. They didn’t infect criminals or adulterers or racists any more than they infected kind, good-hearted people. They simply went where they could stake a claim and grow, just as families did. You couldn’t blame a virus for doing what it was programmed to do from the moment one cell divided into two. But still, I found it difficult to reconcile my own loss of opportunity with the virus’s success. Yes, it won. It took down my body and thrived for some limited period of time, but to what end? No virus walks away with a medal or a certificate or a bonus that buys an in-ground swimming pool. It seems like such a waste.

  When I was born, no one could have expected that Darlene would die first, then Dad, then Mom. The invalid in the iron lung would be last.

  CHAPTER 23

  In the hours before Racine was due to pull up in his Jaguar for their date, Holly decided that the exterior of her neglected house needed an extreme makeover. She ducked out from work and ran to the hardware store to get a can of spray paint and some advice about the garage door from Nip, the owner.

  “You checked to make sure nothing was stuck on the track? Like a rock or a stick or something.”

  “Nothing’s stuck that I can see, but I can’t get it to go up or down.”

  “Sounds like your wheels are off the track, or the track got bent somehow. I think you need a handyman.”

  “Nip,” Holly said, looking around to make sure no one could hear. “I can’t afford a handyman. I need a quick fix, even if it means taking the garage door off and propping it up against the house.”

  “Let me get my tools,” Nip said. He called his daughter over to watch the register and followed Holly back to her house.

  As Nip walked up the driveway, Holly could sense his dismay at how she had let the paint peel and the walkway crumble and the garage door rust into its present position. A man in Nip’s business, Holly knew, could not comprehend how anyone could sleep until every hinge was oiled, every screw tightened, every air filter cleaned.

  “I’m gonna help you out here, Holly,” he said. “I just wish you had asked me earlier.”

  “What can I do?” she asked. “Just give me a job and I’ll do it.”

  “Well, you can’t paint the whole goddamn house in an hour, but you can spray those bare patches and tighten that wonky front rail while I deal with the garage door. What time does your boyfriend get here?”

  “He’s not my . . . never mind. Around seven.”

  “And I take it you need some time to freshen up,” he said, giving Holly the feeling she needed more fixing up than the house.

  “Like a half hour.”

  “Let’s roll,” Nip said, striding back over to the garage.

  An hour and a half later, the garage door was down, the patches where the paint had peeled away were covered just enough in the waning light, and the railing was upright. Holly tried to give Nip a loaf of frozen banana bread she had in her freezer, but he refused it, which made her feel even more needy.

  “Just enjoy your date,” Nip said. “And when you’re ready to take the plunge, I’ve got a great house painter to recommend.”

  Holly nodded, even as she knew it would never happen.

  Racine arrived at her door promptly at 7 p.m. with flowers. She left him on the front steps and dashed inside and left the bouquet on the kitchen counter, still not ready for Racine to see the shabby carpeting and outdated furniture.

  “Hi,” Racine said when she returned, kissing Holly lightly on one cheek. “Don’t you look lovely. I hope you don’t mind, but after our first dinner experience, I thought we’d drive into the city instead.”

  The boys were both busy and had sleepovers planned, so she said, “Why not?” and climbed carefully into Racine’s low-slung Jaguar.

  An hour later they were zipping down the Henry Hudson Parkway at a speed she found disturbing yet exhilarating. Her
city driving was overly cautious, which threw off the taxis and veteran drivers and labeled her an annoying and unpredictable tourist.

  They parked in a garage in the Meatpacking District, a neighborhood into which she had never ventured, first because of its unappealing name, and lately because it was too cool for middle-aged suburban mothers like her who mostly came to New York on school field trips and rarely ventured far from Fifth Avenue. Racine led her to a small doorway that had no sign on it.

  He opened the door for her, and when it closed again she could see only about a foot ahead in the dark hallway. Racine squeezed past her and proceeded down a narrow flight of stairs, which led to a graffiti-covered door, behind which lay a cozy fondue restaurant with exposed brick walls and ten or so intimate tables that ringed a bubbling fountain.

  The hostess offered to take her coat as she looked around at chic couples dipping chunks of bread and vegetables into bubbling pots of cheese or chocolate.

  “This is charming,” she said, catching her breath, which had left her suddenly. The place was almost too perfect, arrogant in its exclusivity. But then she chastised herself for being hypercritical. The point was that Racine had wanted to impress her. That in itself was to be appreciated.

  Dinner turned out to be a rather brief affair, since the fondue pot had only so much cheese in it, so an hour later they were back out on the street, and Racine asked Holly if she wanted to take a walk on The High Line.

  “What’s The High Line?” she said. “I hope it’s not some sort of code for drugs. My slang is way past its expiration date.”

  “No,” Racine said, throwing his head back with a laugh. “It’s a raised railway a couple blocks from here. The city has been converting it into kind of a long, narrow park where you can walk above the street level. You get great views of the river.”

  “I’m so out of it,” she said, taking the hand he offered. “It’s embarrassing.”

  “No, it’s kind of refreshing. Most women I meet in the city are a little jaded.”

  She blushed in the darkness and felt delightfully warm and cheesy inside. They strolled down the sidewalk until they came to an iron stairway that led up to The High Line, which was aglow with lights on a crisp night. They walked south, gazing alternately across the Hudson on their right, which came into view like a painting every few buildings, and across the city streets on the left. Since they were elevated, it was easy to see inside many of the windows in the buildings to the left that were uncurtained and illuminated from inside.

  “See, up there, a man playing a violin,” Racine pointed out as they walked. “And over there, a woman putting spaghetti into a pot.”

  At one point a large hotel straddled The High Line, and as they were about to pass under it, Holly glanced up and let out a small gasp. A couple was performing some kind of bizarre sexual performance art in front of a well-lighted window. As she and Racine paused, they noticed that the act had generated a small crowd on The High Line, as well as on the street below.

  “Now that would not happen in Bertram Corners,” Holly said. “We don’t take our clothes off with the lights on.”

  “You don’t?” Racine said. “What a shame.”

  Racine then brought her hand up to his mouth and kissed the back of it. That simple gesture gave her such unexpected pleasure that she didn’t know how to react. She wondered whether she should squeeze his hand in acknowledgment, and then how much pressure to return. She worried that her hand would start to sweat, and while she was assessing all the ways she could ruin the evening, Racine led her to a stairway that descended from the Highline.

  “My apartment’s right down this block,” he said. “Would you like to see it?”

  Holly was fairly sure that her answer would be a response to a more significant question. She wanted to sleep with Racine because he was beautiful and made her feel attractive again, but she had been celibate since Chris died, with the exception of one horrible night with a fireman who had responded to one of Vivian’s crises and took Holly to his house for a “nightcap” that turned into a fumbling of sorts under green polyester sheets.

  “Okay,” she said, not looking at him.

  He pressed her hand almost imperceptibly.

  Ten minutes later they were at a plain brick industrial-looking building. Racine used his key to open an unmarked door and led her up the narrow stairs to a hallway on the third floor. Holly felt as if the hallway were getting more narrow and the air thinner as they approached a white door at the very end. Racine quietly unlocked the door.

  Racine’s apartment was small but impeccably decorated in masculine browns and beiges. Pieces of art that might have been original lined the exposed brick wall over the compact leather couch in the living room. In sum, it was the interior design equivalent of Racine himself—vaguely foreign and therefore appealing, but with an air of nonpermanence, as if it all came from the pages of a high-end catalogue.

  Racine didn’t bother to offer Holly a glass of wine or even turn on a light. He simply closed the door and faced her as the light of the city streamed through the windows. He kissed her gently and slid her coat off before she could even say a word about her fears, her reservations, why this might not be a good idea, or even how lovely his apartment was. It was hypnotic, how he knew exactly what to do, and so she let him, with a small sense of anticipation and curiosity.

  He kissed her again and moved her through the door of what she presumed to be his bedroom. He guided her toward a bed with a snow-white duvet, the antithesis of the fireman’s green sheets. As they shed their layers, she felt herself growing lighter, detaching from what was actually happening so that she could observe it and cut and paste it into her scrapbook of one-time experiences. Racine was a man who logged women—she thought of this even as he was caressing her hair—like entries into a spreadsheet.

  She wanted to turn off the commentary in her head, but it didn’t seem possible, even as he moved into her and she felt the perfect skin of his hips between her hands. She disassociated the sensations in her body with the cool dialogue she was already having with Racine in her head, a week afterward, when he would surely call to discuss the gold shop, never mentioning their liaison, which she was sure was how he would categorize it. Just two people intersecting on a given night.

  But then he kissed her in the most tender possible way, and something broke open inside of her. She had to hold back tears, and she lost track of how it ended, because she was so engulfed in emotion. Racine rolled away, breathing hard, but she continued to stare at the ceiling, afraid to move. She chased the words to describe it, but they skittered away like forgotten names with only the first letter as a clue. She felt exposed—no, revealed. She was a cold egg cracked on the counter, the perfect yolk spilling out. It was all too much.

  “I have to go,” she said, sitting up.

  “Not yet,” Racine said, smiling and taking her hand. “It’s still early.”

  “I have to go,” she said, putting on the garments rapidly in reverse order of their removal.

  Racine kept telling her she didn’t need to leave, but that only made her dress faster. She hurried outside and flagged a cab, taking it to the Port Authority, where she found a bus that would take her home.

  As she finally approached the driveway, she could see the patches of white spray paint, which glowed under the streetlamps with a different sheen than the rest of the paint. Her house looked like the surface of the moon.

  Holly put down her purse on the hallway table and turned on the light in the living room to find a decorated Christmas tree in the corner. She could hear rustling in the basement and then saw Connor emerge with a handful of tinsel.

  Connor ran to the bottom of the stairs. “She’s home!”

  Marshall came pummeling down the stairs, and the two of them stood grinning in front of the tree, which upon closer inspection was not precisely in the traditional conical shape. It was more like a fat cylinder that leaned a little bit to one side.

  �
�Surprise!”

  Holly wavered a little on her borrowed heels—she still hadn’t returned them to Marveen—and felt faint. “What is this all about?” she said. “When did you do this? I thought you both had sleepovers.”

  Marshall started in. “We said we did, but instead we went to the park with my friend Brian, and he had his dad’s handsaw—”

  “And,” Connor interjected, “we brought work gloves, so it was completely safe.”

  Marshall continued: “And we went way back into the forested part—you know, behind the dugout on the baseball field—and we found this perfect tree and cut it down and brought it home. We’re not completely done with the decorations, but it’s getting there.”

  Holly dropped to the couch and put her hands in front of her face. She knew she should tell them that chopping down a tree on public property was a criminal offense, but she couldn’t. An avalanche of affection for her children swept her into a place of overwhelming gratitude.

  “Boys, this is the nicest present anyone has ever given me,” she said, tears running down. “C’mere, you two.”

  The boys sat down, one on each side of her, and she pulled each one toward her, alternately kissing them on the top of the head.

  “Okay, Mom, jeez,” Connor said, pulling out of her grasp, though Holly could see that he was pleased with her reaction.

  “We know it’s been hard lately,” Marshall said. Of course they knew, she thought. She tried to hide it, but they were old enough to see her stress when the bills arrived. “We wanted to help out.”

  “You did,” Holly said, wiping her face with a tissue. “So much more than you know.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Holly put in a few early hours at the newspaper so that she could accompany Vivian to the gold store. When she arrived at Vivian’s, she had to walk half a block because of all the cars and vans near Vivian’s house. Inside, she was greeted by Vivian’s medical team and a half dozen of her volunteers, all of them running into each other in the suffocating space of Vivian’s living room.