The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  “I’ve got the generator,” one doctor was saying to a nurse. “I’m going to put that in the van first, and then we’ll wheel the lung out.”

  “Holly,” Vivian called to her. “I’m almost ready.”

  Holly made her way through the crowd as various technicians fussed around Vivian.

  “What a production, right?” Vivian said, already looking a little tired. “It’s like a circus in here.”

  “You’re excited, though, right?” Holly said. “It’ll be great to get you outside.”

  “Absolutely,” Vivian said. “The only thing I’m worried about is Racine. He doesn’t know I’m coming.”

  “I thought you were going to tell him.”

  “I changed my mind. I decided that he would behave differently if he knew about”—she looked around—“all this.”

  “But he’ll know as soon as we squeeze you through the door.”

  “Right, but he won’t have time to prepare. I’ll see the operation just as it is.”

  A nurse put a straw into Vivian’s mouth to give her a sip of water as Holly unwrapped one of the mints Vivian kept on a tray for her volunteers. She was now overly conscious of her breath around Racine, to whom she had not spoken since she ran out of his apartment. Holly stepped aside as the medical team approached to wheel Vivian’s lung into the waiting van.

  “Onward!” Vivian said as the wheels began to move.

  Holly thought she sensed a slightly manic edge to Vivian’s sudden cheerfulness, but she dutifully followed the iron lung out to the van and crouched inside as the other volunteers huddled in a group on Vivian’s lawn, their arms wrapped around their chests, since they had left their coats in the house. A doctor stood next to Vivian’s head monitoring her oxygen levels during the ten-minute ride to the gold store. At one point Holly heard a siren, which she assumed meant that the van had a police escort.

  “This town would do anything for you, Vivian,” Holly said.

  “Oh, stop,” Vivian said, though Holly could tell that she enjoyed it.

  When the van pulled up in front of the gold store, the technicians had to perform a number of complicated maneuvers to set up a ramp and release the iron lung from the restraints that kept it from sliding around in the van. Holly wondered if she should go inside to warn Racine, but she sensed that Vivian wanted to make a grand entrance. The store’s entrance was at street level, and fortunately the front door was fairly wide, which meant that Vivian could be wheeled inside on the gurney that supported her iron lung without too much banging and cursing. Holly followed at the foot of the lung and came inside just in time to see Racine emerge from the back room. He looked stunned.

  “Racine!” Vivian called out as the technicians pushed her into the center of the room. “I’m Vivian. So nice to finally meet you.”

  Racine looked toward Holly, who gave him a slightly embarrassed shrug. Then he turned on the high-beam smile, as though he saw iron lungs every day, and opened his arms wide.

  “Vivian! I’m so glad you’re here! So what do you think?” he said, gesturing toward the glass cases and the three customers in the back of the store having their gold evaluated.

  Holly could see that Vivian’s vision was limited, so she said, much more loudly than necessary, “Vivian, can you see the customers?”

  “Turn me around,” Vivian said to the team of technicians. It required a three-point maneuver, but they managed to turn Vivian so that she could look toward the back of the store.

  “Excellent,” she said. “I apologize for dropping in like this, Racine, but I wanted to check the place out for myself. I like the way you’ve set up these front counters.”

  “Thanks,” Racine said. “We’ve actually seen an uptick recently in our resale items because of the holiday.”

  As Vivian and Racine chatted, Holly took a moment to gaze into the glass cases and look at the watches, brooches, strings of pearls, and rings she could never afford. Jewelry had never consumed her the way it did some of her mother’s housewife friends, who collected precious stones over the years as recompense for their boredom, but she appreciated the workmanship. Her eyes then fell on a black-velvet-lined case of engagement and wedding rings, which called to mind her recent trip to the pawn shop. She scanned the diamond rings, most of them standard solitaires, but then saw a large pear-shaped stone with emerald baguettes on each side.

  Her mother’s ring.

  “. . . so as I’ve told Holly, we’re set to make all our targets this month,” Racine was telling Vivian. “I think you’ll be very pleased.”

  “Racine,” Holly said. “Can I look at the rings?”

  Racine looked reluctant to leave Vivian’s side, but he walked around to the back of the counter and unlocked the sliding door of the glass display case, putting the rings on top.

  “Are you in the market?” Vivian asked.

  “I just saw one that reminded me of my mother’s,” she said, picking it up. Holly slipped it over her left ring finger and felt a chill. Her own hands—blue veined and almost translucent in the harsh fluorescent light—looked just like her mother’s had looked when Holly had been a teenager. She was sure this was her mother’s ring, but she didn’t want to alarm Vivian until she could talk to Racine. She put the ring back in the box.

  “Well, everything looks tip-top,” Vivian said, sounding ready to leave. “I’m sure you can see now, Racine, why I hired Holly to be my stand-in, since I literally cannot stand. I hope I haven’t startled you.”

  Racine shook his head. “Of course not, Vivian. You’re welcome here anytime.”

  Holly admired Racine’s composure, because she knew it was Vivian’s intention to rattle him a bit. The thought of Vivian “dropping in” again would surely keep him on his toes more than Holly’s occasional visits.

  Holly stayed behind as the technicians prepared to move Vivian back out into the van.

  “Do you have a minute?” she said to Racine.

  “Of course.”

  “You told me once that the resale items come from different stores. Is there any way to trace them?”

  Racine looked back at the case, but before he could answer, Vivian called from the doorway.

  “Holly, let’s go,” she said. “I’d like to be back in time for Judge Judy.”

  “I’ll stop back in tomorrow,” Holly said, following Vivian, though she was reluctant to part from the ring, which now represented all that had been lost when her mother—her real mother—disappeared down the rabbit hole. At the same time, she had no idea how to tell Racine that her own mother’s missing ring was in his jewelry case. He would surely tell her there was some mistake. Money, especially easy money, had a tendency to make people lie. She had seen it time and again while reporting on the larceny and embezzlement that happened even in a quiet place like Bertram Corners. And if she sensed he was lying, she wouldn’t be able to trust him. She would never again be broken like an egg and revealed.

  “So what did you think?” Holly asked.

  The technicians and volunteers were all gone, Judge Judy was over, and Holly sat once again alone with Vivian.

  “He was pretty much as I imagined him to be,” Vivian said. “His voice is very much like his appearance. There’s something incredibly smooth about him. Maybe a little too smooth.”

  “I meant the store. But I know what you’re saying. It’s tough to be around someone who is twice as charming and attractive as you are.”

  “I don’t know about twice,” Vivian said, smiling.

  “What about the store, though? Is it what you envisioned? Do you think it will make money?”

  “I think Racine will make money. The minute he walks out to start up a new one, it’s not going to be nearly as enticing to go there.”

  “Does that worry you?”

  “It’ll be okay. The unemployment rate isn’t likely to go down soon, so we’ll have a decent base of customers.”

  Holly could not dispute the wisdom of that unfortunate statement. She cha
nged the subject.

  “Did I tell you that Marveen asked me for a leave of absence so she could renovate her kitchen? Some people aren’t doing so badly in this economy.”

  “Some people always benefit from the misery of the masses. I guess I should include myself, since I’m the one backing this store . . . Still, I feel sorry for Marveen sometimes. She’s married to that house like it’s a living thing. If she had children, she wouldn’t care about having the latest nickel-plated faucet. And what does it get her in the end? How does society benefit from an overdecorated home?”

  Holly had never heard Vivian criticize Marveen in quite that way. She agreed completely, but something made her want to stick up for Marveen, since she wasn’t there to defend herself.

  “At least she’s keeping the kitchen people employed,” Holly said, though she didn’t mention that Marveen’s husband had gotten promoted by laying people off.

  “This is true,” Vivian said, suddenly sounding tired again. “Marveen should do what makes her happy.”

  “Not having to pay her salary might give us another few months of life at the Chronicle,” Holly said, trying to sound cheerful. “Maybe it was meant to be.”

  Vivian’s eyebrows pulled together in a look that Holly had seen only once before, when one of her volunteers accidently threw out her telephone headset.

  “Nothing is ever ‘meant to be,’ Holly,” she said. “It’s nothing more than an excuse. I’m the perfect example of that kind of thinking—everyone’s always telling me I was spared for a reason, and I’m getting too old for it anymore.”

  Like most people, Holly wanted to believe there was some lesson to be learned in her own misfortune, some developmental pain required to reach a gentler phase of life. If she didn’t subscribe to that notion, she would have a hard time putting one foot in front of the other. And yet she knew that Vivian was probably right.

  She said none of this to Vivian, who, she suddenly realized, might secretly hold the opposite point of view. Otherwise, how could she go on?

  Holly found a letter from the bank in her mailbox when she got home later that night. This one wasn’t from her old friend Vince but from some corporate official, who told her she had until January to submit her missing mortgage payments. If she failed to do so, foreclosure proceedings would begin. She had no idea if foreclosure took a month or year, but the thought of closing the door to her house one last time and being out on the street with her boys and all her belongings gave her another panic attack—which is what a WebMD search told her she had had before—as she sat alone in her kitchen. She put her head between her knees and tried to breathe. When the attack subsided, she went into the living room and saw the fully decorated Christmas tree, its white lights aglow in the semidarkness. Connor was on the living-room couch doing some homework. She sat down and put her arm around his shoulder.

  “The tree is beautiful, honey,” she said. “It really makes me happy that you boys thought of it.”

  “Everything’s going to be okay, Mom,” Connor said. “Really, it will.”

  “You think so?” she said, squeezing his shoulder. It made her simultaneously sad and proud that he would try to comfort her.

  “My band director says hard times make us appreciate the good ones, and you may never know why you’re being tested,” he said. “Some things are just meant to be.”

  Just as she could not dispute Vivian’s logic, she couldn’t dispute Connor’s either.

  “I’m sure your band director is right, sweetheart,” Holly said, rubbing his head.

  She sometimes wondered how her boys might have turned out had she been able to give them whatever they asked for. Entitlement had its own pitfalls.

  “He’s absolutely right,” she said. “Now go to bed.”

  CHAPTER 25

  Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #9

  I was one of the first to use a long stylus between my teeth that let me manipulate a cursor. I would work at it for hours, because it gave me something I had always craved—direct connection. I could write—write!—without dictating to someone else, just by pressing letters with the stylus on my customized overhead keyboard. It was painstaking, but I was so grateful to eliminate the middleman that I didn’t care how long it took.

  As far as the online world was concerned, I was no longer a medical anomaly trapped inside a machine; I was the equal of everyone else with a computer—just as whole, just as nimble, just another seeker, no longer in-valid. My screen name was VBucks—genderless, ageless, without disability, suggestive of wealth. I was a complete person who could navigate the world and its resources without moving more than my head.

  It would be years before the rest of the world reached my level of Internet obsession. I was one of the first to start an online diary, which later evolved into a blog and eventually into my weekly podcast. I felt like a prisoner who finally emerges from captivity, blinking into the daylight.

  Of course, connectivity had its downside. I repeatedly fell in love with people I met online and always had to tell them eventually that a face-to-face meeting would never happen. Once I let it go too far with a guy named Dennis (screen name: Indie D). We met in a forum devoted to independent films, one of my passions, and began corresponding via instant message:

  VBucks: Can’t believe Steven Soderbergh is willing to direct Andie MacDowell in another movie.

  Indie D: He’s in love with her. Can’t you tell from the long, lingering close-ups of her face?

  VBucks: You must be right. There’s no other explanation.

  Indie D: I’m definitely right. Mark my words, they’ll be married within a year and divorced six months later . . . You ever been married?

  VBucks: No . . . you?

  Indie D: Once, but it didn’t last much longer than what I predict for the MacSoderberghs . . . You know, it’s been so great talking to you. I feel like we have so much in common.

  VBucks: Me too.

  Indie D: I hope this doesn’t sound weird, but would you send me a picture?

  Long pause.

  VBucks: OK, but you’ll have to send me one, too.

  I knew it was risky, but I didn’t want to lose contact with Dennis, so I had Marveen take a picture of my face without showing the iron lung. When he sent me his, I almost cried. He was a lovely man, probably in his midforties—a little tired and lonely around the eyes. We talked every day, sometimes for hours. He finally said he would be in New York for business and wanted to know if I’d meet him in the city.

  I had to end it there. I couldn’t bear to tell him about my condition online, and I certainly didn’t want him to see me. I did the cowardly thing. I switched my screen name and never went on that forum again. I didn’t respond to any of his IMs or e-mails. In the moments before I fell asleep each night, I pined for Indie D the way I had pined for my fellow iron lunger Lance and for an end to my life when I was seventeen.

  I never talked about these crushes with my caregivers, though, because of the inevitable questions. No, I could never have a physical relationship with another person, or at least not from the neck down. But that just proves that love is primarily a mental connection. What we truly crave—at least from what I understand of it—is a reflection of ourselves. People can’t walk around with a mirror in front of their faces all day, so they seek out someone who reflects back their own self-worth. Love, when you think about it, is a value proposition, much like the stock market, which is probably why I never quite gave up on it.

  As the Internet became more accessible and more people bought home computers, my list of volunteers grew exponentially. Everyone wanted to get my advice about what kind of computer to buy, how to set up an e-mail account, and to ask me what a gigabyte was. I was the Steve Jobs of Bertram Corners.

  It was around that time that I met Holly, who had come back to live in the town where she grew up. She was newly married and working as a reporter for the local weekly, but she had some time on her hands and volunteered to sit with me a few times a week dur
ing the unpopular 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. shift. We clicked instantly. Holly seemed like the kind of person I would have become had it not been for the polio. She was bright and funny, open and caring, attractive but not obsessed with her looks. She loved a good pun. She was one of the few caregivers I was always sad to see go at the end of her shift. “I really admire you, Vivian,” she said once, after we’d known each other for about a year.

  “Why?”

  “Because you say what you think. I’ve never been able to do that. I usually say what I think people want to hear.”

  “But you’re a reporter. Don’t you have to challenge politicians and dig up dirt on people?”

  “I’ll let you in on a little journalism secret. Most of what I do could be categorized as PR.”

  “Why did you go into journalism then?”

  “You can’t know what it’s like until you’re actually doing it. And maybe it would have been different on a big-city daily, but Chris and I wanted to live in a small town. I loved growing up here. So you take what you can get. And I won’t be doing this forever.”

  I recall being a little disappointed in her attitude. You don’t just take what you can get when you’re young and able-bodied and reasonably intelligent. You set lofty goals, climb the ladder, fighting for every step. You scoot up to the wall between the sane and the insane and at least look over. Does anyone have an excuse to live an ordinary life? Not when you have all the resources you need to succeed. Not when it’s just about motivation.

  It wasn’t long before Holly was pregnant with Marshall and settled into a fixer-upper that would never get fixed up or outgrown or paid off. Connor arrived three years later, and despite her new-mother responsibilities, Holly never took a leave from her schedule on the rotation. Sometimes she even brought one of the boys with her in a car carrier.