The Virtues of Oxygen

by Susan Schoenberger

  “Holly, it’s Racine. I know you’ve been trying to reach me, and I’m so sorry. It’s kind of a long story, but I still have your mother’s ring. I’ll give it back as soon as I can. Please don’t forget about me. I’ll be in touch soon.”

  Don’t forget about me? Holly couldn’t get over what a strange thing that was to say, especially since she could never forget what it felt like to be unearthed and turned inside out after being entombed in her worries for so long. She was not in love with Racine—at least she didn’t think she was—but she wanted to be. She wanted to lie awake in bed thinking about the way he touched the small of her back when they walked into the Bertram Corners Inn, drop his name into conversations, moon over his smile or the way his suit jacket fit his shoulders. But she found it hard to sigh when she couldn’t breathe. Too many anxieties crowded her every thought, leaping and pushing each other as they shouted for her attention. She had no time for love or even lust when every day was a marathon of maneuvering just to keep from slipping further behind.

  CHAPTER 27

  Vivian’s Unaired Podcast #10

  The online world was hot and dense through the ’90s, but then the Internet exploded like the Big Bang into billions of particles of potential energy. Most of them went flying off into space without consequence, but some connected and grew and changed the world at an exponential rate.

  It wasn’t just me and my geek friends chatting on message boards anymore; the entire population of the First World was suddenly typing and sharing every thought that had ever entered their excitable little heads. I was a little annoyed at first that everyone suddenly seemed to have a computer and could use it without much, if any, specialized knowledge. But then I realized that my sphere of influence had expanded once again. I e-mailed back and forth with an iron-lung patient in Ireland, and I contributed to a polio study being conducted in Ukraine. I was able to download more and more movies to my computer and watch them whenever I wanted instead of waiting for them to arrive on the cable channels or network television.

  My investing took another leap forward as information went online at an accelerating pace, and in turn I purchased the best, most powerful personal computer I could afford. I had become so adept at using my voice-recognition device that I could send an e-mail almost as fast as a typist with ten working fingers.

  But as the Internet opened doors for me, it also took a jackhammer to Bertram Corners and left jagged holes in its economy. The small paper mill that employed a quarter of the town closed down because envelopes and paper became a quaint notion associated with prior centuries. Many of the local shops couldn’t compete with the new online retailers and closed their doors, leaving sad little orphaned storefronts that no one loved anymore. The schools and the churches and the institutions like Holly’s weekly persevered, but they had to fight for every dollar. The Internet revolution—which should have eased our lives—instead threw a pall over the town, which couldn’t seem to adjust to a new way of thinking.

  I tried to help. I volunteered my services to the library and recorded tutorials so that the little old ladies of Bertram Corners could sign up for e-mail accounts and learn how to check a website when they wanted to book a flight to Las Vegas. Holly called me the Cyber Siren, claiming that I wanted to lure everyone to my own dark side.

  “Sometimes I just get tired of these blogs and these long e-mail strings where you have to hear about every random thought that ever crossed someone’s mind.”

  “You don’t get it,” I said. “I spent decades, Holly, with only my mother around, and she wasn’t much of a talker. If you want to tell me that you’re drinking coffee or that you just mowed your lawn or that your kid lost a tooth and that made you cry, I’m all ears. I want to know everything. I am the definition of living vicariously.”

  “Really? Because it all just seems like oversharing to me.”

  “Well, you’re living it,” I told her. “But you’re also reporting and writing about Bertram Corners, so maybe none of it’s new to you.”

  “I could say that about you,” Holly replied. “You’ve got the whole town circulating in and out of here on a weekly basis. You know more than I do about what’s happening.”

  Holly was right to some extent. But what I knew wasn’t posted online; I knew the scars and the scabs underneath the makeup. I was the one who told Darla to leave her first husband after he came home drunk one night and gave her a black eye.

  “What happened to you?” I asked her when she came for her volunteer shift.

  She touched the bruised, yellowing skin under her eye, and burst into tears.

  “I’m supposed to say that I walked into a door,” she said. “That’s what Harry told me to tell everyone.”

  I looked at her with pity. I was completely vulnerable to anyone’s abuse, and yet I had never been mistreated. I didn’t really know what it was like to be punched or kicked, but I did know what Darla needed to do.

  “Do you have a suitcase with you?”

  “I can’t leave,” she said. “I have nowhere to go.”

  “You do. You can stay right here with me. In the morning you’ll go to the police station and report him.”

  Darla put a hand over her mouth and stifled a sob. “He’ll find me. He’ll make me pay for reporting him.”

  “So he gets away with it? He gets to beat you up whenever he wants?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “You’re right,” I said, holding her gaze. “I can’t understand at all. He’s a monster, and you need to leave him and start a new life. Look inside yourself and find the strength to do it.”

  Darla stayed over that night, and in the morning she reported the assault. Eventually, she divorced him and got the house and the dogs when the bastard moved to Florida. Then she met Phil and had a real marriage, the kind where the only battles were over the TV remote.

  I was the receptacle for all the subterranean drama in Bertram Corners because I listened. I was a captive audience, and I needed my volunteers, but I paid in lost sleep and free therapy. Maybe that’s why I didn’t mind the online chatter about the quotidian stuff. It seemed like the best part of the life I never had.

  CHAPTER 28

  Years later Holly remembered that first week in January as the dividing line between one phase of her life and another. She had to tell her newspaper staff that they would be shutting down in a few weeks, and she had to tell her boys they would be leaving the only home they had ever known.

  “But why so soon?” Portia asked when Holly broke the news at the Chronicle. “Can’t they give us a little transition time? A few more months to find new jobs?”

  Darla began to cry, and Les, who for once wasn’t out covering a high school game, put an arm around her. Les, Holly suddenly realized, had aged significantly in the ten years they had worked together. He had a paunch now from eating too many vending-machine dinners in overheated gymnasiums and much of his hair was gone, circling the drain with his dignity. Les, who had once covered the State House for the daily paper in Albany, had been a victim of the great contraction of the American print media, a vicious game of musical chairs in which more than half the chairs were eliminated with every round, leaving the remaining few reporters grappling over what was left.

  “Did Stan say there was any hope?” Les said. “Maybe someone will buy the paper. It’s happened in other places.”

  “It’s remotely possible, but I wouldn’t pin my hopes on it,” Holly said. “The strange part is that we still make money, although the margins are smaller than they used to be. Apparently we just don’t make enough to keep the owners happy.”

  Darla wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her drugstore jacket, which she had forgotten to remove when she came back from lunch.

  “I can’t go home and tell Phil,” she said, sniffing loudly. “I just can’t.”

  Portia was the one to finally ask the question Holly knew was coming. “What will you do?” she said.

  Holly looked around at th
e cluttered office and saw the desks piled halfway to the ceiling with back issues of the Chronicle and old phone books, the empty water cooler in the corner that they kept even after they couldn’t afford to refill it, the hole in the suspended ceiling where Les had punted a football one day while demonstrating the exciting finish of a high school game for a group of visiting Cub Scouts, the line of Smurf figurines that Darla had set up on the edge of her cubicle, targets for Portia’s remarkable skill in launching a rubber band. It was a scrap heap, a landfill, but in the articles long yellowed and the notebooks filled with the quotes of widows and widowers, science fair winners and grieving parents, school superintendents and principals, mayors and police officers was the history of Bertram Corners. The sum total of a town.

  Holly shrugged and tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth trembled. “We’ll be okay,” she said. “I’ll find something. And Vivian has offered to let me and the boys move in.”

  “You’re selling your house?” Les asked.

  “More like giving it back to the bank. That was inevitable even without this news. This just puts us on the sidewalk a little sooner.”

  Portia put her hands up to her face. “Holly, no.”

  “Look, guys,” Holly said, “this is not the end of the world. We’re all going to figure out how to move forward from here. In the end we’ll probably all be grateful that we weren’t stuck here until retirement. Try to see it as an opportunity. I do.”

  Holly guessed that her optimistic sentiment might be true for at least a few of them. But she knew that this would break one or two of her colleagues, perhaps permanently. They would drift around, writing freelance for too little money and taking on short-term projects, sending out résumés and going to interviews until one day they just gave up and folded themselves into a small corner of the world they once knew, biding their time until Social Security kicked in. That might be her story.

  At home the news did not go down any easier.

  “How will I get to school?” Connor said. “Vivian’s on the other side of town.”

  “I’ll still drive you,” Holly said. “It really won’t be much different. You’ll have to share a room, but Vivian has a basement we could fix up.”

  Marshall looked down at his hands and rubbed them together. “I hate this, Mom,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I do not want to move into that freak show, with all the volunteers coming and going every hour of the day and night.”

  Holly rubbed her temples. She hated to disappoint her kids in any way, but this seemed so primal, so essential. She felt like she had let them down, and yet she had to hold it together. Someone needed to be in charge. Besides, she thought they were being unfair to Vivian, who was saving them.

  “It’s not a freak show, Marshall,” she said at a volume that surprised even her. “We’re very fortunate that Vivian is generous enough to give us a place to live rent-free. I know it’s not ideal, but we don’t have too many options right now.”

  Connor left for the basement without saying another word. Marshall looked like a young child trying to hold back tears.

  “I have a girlfriend now, Mom. Did you know that?” he said. “And I haven’t even invited her here, because of how everything’s falling apart. Don’t you think the whole town is going to find out that Vivian took us in like charity cases? How do you think that makes me feel?”

  Holly looked around the living room. The Christmas tree was half brown, but she hadn’t been able to bring herself to take off the ornaments and remove it. The couch—secondhand to begin with—was now so worn and frayed that most of it was draped with throws. She turned the cushions to their slightly better side on the rare occasions they had company.

  “You have every right to be upset, Marshall,” she said. “But in some ways this is going to be better for all of us. If I don’t have a mortgage to pay, maybe we can find the money for your driving classes.”

  “Don’t even say that, Mom. You’re losing your job, too. There won’t be any money for driving classes . . . I just want to graduate from high school and start my own life.”

  “Marshall,” said Holly, who felt her son’s pain as keenly as her own, “I’ll find a way.”

  “No, Mom,” he said. “I’ll find a way.”

  As difficult as it was to accept, the plan to move in with Vivian gave them all purpose, things to be checked off a list, which required forward motion. The first thing Holly did was organize a yard sale so that she could pare down the belongings they would be cramming into Vivian’s small Cape. Since it was January and their yard was covered in snow, she called it an “estate sale” in the classified ad she snuck into the paper for free. That had a better ring to it, although she was afraid it might attract people looking for things of actual value. She invited Desdemona and Henderson, who both wanted to sell a few things of their own, and she got the boys to plaster the upscale subdivision near their house with signs and flyers.

  In preparation Holly and the boys set up folding tables borrowed from the newspaper office in the living room and kitchen. They all scoured the house looking for items they could live without. Holly told the boys they could keep the proceeds of whatever items they sold, so they were highly motivated to part with their possessions. Maybe too motivated.

  “What’s this?” Holly said. She was putting white sticky strips on each of the boys’ items so they could determine a price.

  “It’s the Xbox Uncle Hen gave me,” Connor said. “And all my games. Maybe some kid will want them.”

  “But you love these. This is your favorite form of entertainment.”

  Marshall heard them as he was dumping two old tennis rackets on a table. “Who would want that anyway?” he said. “It’s ancient technology.”

  “I’ve outgrown it,” Connor said.

  Holly had to turn away so the boys wouldn’t see her face. “Help me with this,” she said, pointing to an empty bookshelf from IKEA that she had dragged up from the basement. “Over here.”

  They moved the bookshelf, then Holly slapped a sticker on it and wrote “$10.” She had no idea how much to charge people for her worn and practically worthless possessions, but she had to start somewhere. She put a sticker on the beat-up couch that said “Move it and it’s yours” and went on to the kitchen items, which included a hot-air popcorn popper and a blender with a cracked lid.

  Desdemona soon showed up at the front door with a canvas bag full of scarves, old costume jewelry, and some tutus and ballet skirts she no longer used.

  “This is great, Des,” Holly said. “We’ll set you up over here with your own table. Girls will love this stuff.”

  “All right,” she said, sounding tired.

  “What’s wrong?” Holly asked. “You look like you haven’t slept in a week.”

  “It’s the collection agency for Aunt Muriel’s casket. They’re calling me day and night. I’d turn off the phone, but I’m always afraid I’ll miss a call about Mom, or maybe a dance company call. It’s horrible, Holly.”

  Aunt Muriel was gone, Holly thought, and yet she still owed money on her final home. Death, apparently, was no escape from bill collectors.

  “Why are they calling you?” Holly said. “Henderson picked it out.”

  “I guess my name was first on the documents or something. They’ll probably hit both of you next.”

  “How much do we owe them?”

  “Close to eight thousand.”

  “What were we thinking?” Holly said. Looking back on that day at the funeral home, she had trouble believing they hadn’t even discussed the price tag of the casket.

  “We thought Mom would pay for it. Or Henderson. That was back when at least some people in our family had money. Poor Aunt Muriel. She’d be mortified to know she was buried in a stolen casket.”

  “Luckily, she won’t ever find out.”

  Holly looked around her living room at the dozens of items displayed on tables and draped on racks, the detritus of her life, which would be sold piecemeal to
others who might repurpose it, give it away, or sell it eventually at another tag sale. She needed very little of it. She wasn’t sad to lose the items themselves, but she was sad to lose the memories they embodied: the antique rocking chair was the first piece of furniture she and Chris had purchased together; the toboggan made her think of snowy afternoons when the boys were too small to walk through the snowdrifts without losing their Velcro’d boots; the silver-plated teapot had been tarnishing in her mother’s basement until she rescued it a few years ago. Each triggered other related memories, a whole vast canopy of intertwined branches. Her sale was like the gold store—forced amnesia in the name of profit.

  Henderson arrived with his carload of boxes, and Phoebe got out of the car with her trombone case.

  “Phoebe,” Holly said, giving her a hug and kiss. “I haven’t seen you in ages. Look at you.”

  They all looked at Phoebe, who was slightly overweight and sported wire-rimmed glasses that gave her face a pinched look. She was wearing her school uniform of a white blouse and plaid skirt even though it was a Saturday.

  “I surprised Phoebe,” Henderson said. “I picked her up at her brass ensemble rehearsal and came right down here.”

  “Well, we’re happy you came,” Holly said, shooting Henderson a look. “Let me find Connor and Marshall.”

  “I’ll find them, Aunt Holly,” Phoebe said, looking resigned. She walked into the house with her trombone case as Henderson and Holly followed her in.

  Connor was putting prices on his individual Xbox games.

  “Hey, Phoebe,” he said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  Though Connor was thirteen and Phoebe was twelve, they looked like they came from two different eras. Phoebe had the battered air of a retired schoolteacher, while Connor still seemed like a child and sometimes watched cartoons on Saturday morning. Holly could attribute some of the difference to gender, but both had had to deal with adult issues like death and divorce, foreclosure and bankruptcy. She didn’t know why Phoebe had the kind of fatigue and resentment that wasn’t supposed to settle in until at least forty.