by Sally Mandel
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Margaret looked away.
“Mother,” Sharlie said, and waited until Margaret faced her reluctantly. “Tell me what you mean.”
“Well, it’s hard to put my finger on it exactly, but you seem very … tense.”
Sharlie laughed, and Margaret began to look flustered. “I’m sorry,” Sharlie said through her laughter, “but there’s nothing like a heart transplant to make a person tense. Besides, what does that have to do with going home?”
Margaret looked down at her hands folded in a tight ball in her lap. “I meant the tension between you and Brian.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Is all this because of dinner last week?”
Margaret gave her daughter a significant look, and Sharlie sighed. “There’s nothing wrong with a good battle now and then. Don’t worry about it.”
Margaret’s voice sounded injured. “I only wanted to help. After all, I’ve been married to your father for nearly thirty-five years.”
“And you never fight with him, do you?”
“Some things are worth an argument. Most are not. A husband’s career, for instance. For whatever reasons he’s out late. Even if it’s not strictly business—”
“Oh, Mother, don’t insinuate. Just come out with it.”
Margaret took a breath and faced Sharlie squarely. “All right. I just wanted to say that you shouldn’t let it upset you if Brian has another woman.”
“What?” Sharlie’s outburst was half laughter, half shriek.
“You’re not a normal woman, don’t forget, despite the transplant. You can’t blame him if he … strays. Men do, even under the best of circumstances.”
Sharlie stared at her mother in horror. Margaret interpreted the look as attentiveness and felt encouraged to continue. “I don’t want to get into a discussion about your father. That’s neither relevant nor fair, but suffice it to say that I have had my suspicions. Certainties. And I had the sense, thank God, to remind myself that fidelity is not within the framework of a man’s character. I wouldn’t want you to hold Brian to any foolish notions. He’s obviously devoted to you, no matter what he may do just for the release.” She hesitated, finally realizing that her daughter’s face contained more menace than gratitude.
“I never heard such crap in my life,” Sharlie said.
Margaret shifted uncomfortably in her chair. “Don’t be crude, dear,” she said in a quavering voice.
But Sharlie went on. “I don’t know about you and Daddy, and as a matter of fact, I’d just as soon keep it that way. I like sex, Mother, and so does Brian, and he even likes it with me. I intend to wear him out until the day I die—in fact, that would be a damn good way to leave this world, wrapped around the man I love instead of lying in some cold, sterile hospital bed thinking about the women he’s screwing because he’s such a wild animal he can’t help himself and I’m too refined for such filthy goings-on.”
Margaret’s face was very red, and her eyes threatened tears. Sharlie took a deep, shuddering breath and softened her voice.
“I’m sorry about you and Daddy. But don’t you pass the system on to me. I don’t accept it.”
Margaret’s expression suddenly shifted. Along with the tears, there was heat behind the eyes, and secretiveness. “And don’t you make assumptions about your father and me,” she said quietly.
The memory of her parents sitting together on the living room couch flashed into Sharlie’s head—her mother’s hand touching her father’s knee, the meeting of eyes in a communion that had excluded their daughter.
The two women looked at each other carefully until finally Sharlie began to smile. Margaret smiled back, and there was a flicker of intuitive shared joy between them. Then Margaret’s eyes clouded, and the moment passed.
“Anyway, we have to get you well so you can go home to your husband, where you belong.”
“Okay, Mother,” Sharlie said softly. “Whatever you say.”
After Margaret left, Sharlie lay awake for a long time. Something had lifted inside, and she felt lighter.
I do believe I just did something important, she thought. She felt strong enough to leap out of bed and perform a dozen pushups in the hallway.
Had she really stood so close to her mother that she was forced to view the world from the same narrow box that Margaret did?
Well, no more. She’d spent too long in that elevator, shuttling up and down between floors, with her mother, with her father, even with poor Udstrom. She had finally reached her stop, and a tiny bell sounded—a small, ordinary ding, and yet, when the doors slid open, she walked out free.
Chapter 51
Brian arrived that evening, exhausted after his day in court, with the sleepy, fuzzy look Sharlie loved—his beard was very light, and with a day s growth his face seemed almost frosted, the angular lines softened.
After he had kissed her and sat down on the bed, she smiled at him and said, “So, do I look different?”
He rubbed his eyes and gazed at her blearily. “Cute. Healthier.”
“I’m a new woman,” she said. Brian looked confused. “I’ve got this incredible feeling, Bri. It’s like there’s been a war raging in here.” She put her hand to her chest. “And it’s over. Or at least there’s a truce. The troops took off their helmets and shook hands and went off for a beer together.”
Brian stared at her as if she were demented. She laughed. “They did not raise my Valium dosage. I swear it.”
“Something happened.”
“Mother was here, and we had this discussion, and all of a sudden I feel so terrific.” She threw her arms apart. “What do you think? Am I born again or something?”
“I would say that you have more likely reached a new plateau of self-realization.”
She stared at him, and he grinned.
“But I didn’t think it happened in one fell swoop,” she protested.
“It doesn’t.”
“Well, how come it feels that way? Oh, never mind. I think I know.”
“Why?”
She lowered her eyes. He waited for an answer, and finally she said, “I’ve been saving up my delayed adolescence for all these years, and finally it just exploded all at once.”
Brian leaned over to kiss her again and went to hunt for her dinner, which was already twenty minutes late. After he left, she lay back and watched the sky outside turn dark blue. What’s happened, she thought, is that I’m in more of a hurry than other people. If I don’t grow up today, I won’t ever get the chance. Basically, I’m a dying person.
Sobering thought, no doubt about it But along with today’s new feeling of integration had come the realization that she had known the truth for some time. Maybe some unconscious part of her mind had absorbed that knowledge and was pressing her to achieve the kind of freedom she had finally begun to experience. She wanted to spend three days wide awake in her bed thinking it all over. In fact, it would be nice to stay permanently awake all the time from now on. A waste, sleeping.
Brian arrived with the dinner tray. Sharlie sat up on the edge of the bed as he produced two plates, one with broiled fish and one with pot roast and potatoes.
Sharlie stared enviously at Brian’s dinner. “How did you manage that?”
“Marylou-the-dietician’s a great friend of mine.”
“Oh?”
“She had a problem with her kid, and I sent them to the ACLU. Worked out fine.”
“What can I do to get pot roast?”
“Don’t worry, one of these days they’ll get the trays screwed up.”
He plowed through his dinner quickly, but when the aide arrived to remove the dishes, Sharlie’s plate was barely touched. She leaned back against her pillow, tired from sitting up so long.
“Brian.”
He was holding a bare foot that stuck out from beneath her sheets. “Yeah?”
“When I get out of here, I want to g
o on a trip.”
“Where to?”
“Pennsylvania.”
“What for?”
“Silver Creek.” Brian was silent. “I want to meet your father,” she said.
“You’re not missing anything.”
“And see where you grew up.”
“I don’t want to do that.”
“Please.”
“Let’s go to Florida. Or Delaware. I don’t care, wherever you want.”
“Except Silver Creek.”
He nodded.
“Oh, Bri, what can he do to you now?” Brian shook his head. “I’ll bet he doesn’t even have any teeth left to bite you with.” He didn’t smile. “Not funny, huh?”
“Not particularly.”
“Will you think about it?”
“Yeah.”
“No, really. I mean think about it. I want to go.”
He squeezed her foot. “All right.”
“Give us a kiss,” she said. He kissed her once, and she brought his face back down to hers for another, longer one. “Okay,” she said. “Now go away. Go to the movies. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He left. Now when she looked out her window, the sky was black, and there wasn’t a star to be seen.
She woke up in a cold sweat, her limbs rigid. It was as if an icy wind had suddenly swept her empty inside. The sensation was so powerful that she had to hold tightly to the edge of her bed for fear of falling out. Dizzy, she closed her eyes to wait it out.
The wind passed through her, howling, and left by the window, sucking the substance of her with it. Instead of the flesh-and-blood Sharlie of a few moments ago, she felt vacuumed out, so light that it was as if she were merely a tiny slip of paper fluttering helplessly in a black and furious universe. She saw shadowed horizons curving endlessly before her and enormous orbs—dark, menacing red—revolving slowly: omnipotent, magnetic shapes drawing her weightless body into a suffocating, malevolent universe.
She clung desperately to her connection with humanity—details of her daily life, the people she knew and had touched: Brian, her parents, the staff at the hospital—but they, too, seemed ghostly paper figures, powerless against the forces looming around her. The only realities belonged to her dark vision—a grotesque parade of disease, torment, dying children, war, senseless suffering. Death, her death, linked just outside the window, a swirling, twisting blackness that waited to slide inside and obliterate her. She reached deep within herself for the calm acceptance of this afternoon, but terror rose up in her throat, her screams emerging as whimpers. She groped for her call button.
A nurse she’d never seen before appeared in the doorway.
“Yes?”
“Where’s Mary?” Sharlie choked out.
“At the desk.”
“Can’t she come?” Her own words felt as if they belonged to someone else, sounding far, far away.
“Better not. She’s got a cold.”
“Mary has a cold,” Sharlie repeated numbly. Mary would never have a cold. Mary would never get sick.
Suddenly she was crying and pleading like a child. “I want Mary. Please. I want Mary.”
Mary was beside her in less than a minute, masked, but with the familiar pink skin visible above the gauze. Her hand was soft on Sharlie’s wrist. “Jesus God, you feel like you just ran the marathon.”
“I’m scared. I’m scared,” Sharlie whispered.
“Anything hurt?”
“Just my soul. Oh, Mary, I feel all used up.”
“Let me give you something.”
“Will you stay with me until it works?”
Mary nodded.
“You’re sick. Are you all right?”
“A rotten cold, that’s all,” Mary answered, pouring Sharlie a glass of water from the pitcher beside her bed.
“You can’t be sick, not you,” Sharlie said, gulping the sleeping capsule.
Mary laughed. “Well, why the hell not, I’d like to know?”
“I wish you’d take it off, that mask.”
“Oh, no, m’girl, I don’t want you getting my germs.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Sharlie’s face had stilled. Mary took the slim hand between her own round ones.
“Remember what you asked me to do once upon a time?” Mary asked.
Sharlie nodded her head slightly, eyes closed.
“Are you glad I didn’t do it?”
Sharlie nodded again. “Stay with me,” she said groggily.
“As long as you want me, honey.”
Chapter 52
The next day Sharlie began to pester the doctors to let her out She made fervent promises about eating and taking care of herself and checking in every few days for tests. Mary MacDonald allied herself with Sharlie, and together they made such nuisances of themselves that Diller finally, reluctantly, allowed her to leave.
It was Saturday morning, and Brian came early to pick her up. Her body was so wasted now that he could lift her with one arm. She seemed calm and cheerful, though, and bursting with plans for the trip to Pennsylvania. In the cab home she told Brian she’d hole up in the apartment for a week and eat nonstop, storing up energy for the five-hour car ride.
“It’s a harebrained idea, Sharlie,” he said as they pulled up in front of their building.
“Is that when your brain gets all coated with fuzz?”
“No, no,” he said, holding her under the elbow and steering her into the lobby. “H-a-r-e. Derivation early Bugs Bunny. My God, you must weigh about seventy-two pounds.”
“Fritos,” she moaned, tottering unsteadily out of the elevator. In reality, the thought of eating anything at all triggered her gag reflex, but she would force herself to gain a few pounds before the trip.
For six days she rested, took short walks, ate whatever she could choke down, and reveled in being back home with Brian.
She sent him off to work each morning, his face tense with worry. She would catch him looking at her fearfully, and when she smiled at him, he responded with a ghastly forced grin. He lingered at the doorway, not wanting to leave her, and she always ended up shoving him out with a laugh and instructions for what to bring home for dinner. Then she would fall exhausted on the bed.
She was not unhappy. The freedom and serenity she experienced after her conversation with Margaret remained with her for the most part, despite isolated moments of nightmare and grief. She was grateful to have emerged into a new awareness of herself before it was too late.
But Brian worried her. He refused to discuss the future. Every time she hinted at the possibility of her never recovering, his face became rigid. She longed to talk to him, needed to speak about what was happening to her. He would tell her she was just being morbid and should remember how many crises she had lived through, most of them worse than this. The avoidance disappointed and saddened her.
They would lie next to each other at night, her slim body curled next to his, and he would stroke her and hold her. But that was all. Brian was immobilized by fear, and Sharlie was too exhausted to feel aroused. He tired her out. Everyone tired her out.
But the afternoon they set out for Pennsylvania she seemed more animated than she’d been in days. For a while she sat watching Brian pack his suitcase, but suddenly she got up and began to snatch things out again. She grabbed a T-shirt and stood swaying her hips provocatively, humming a torch tune. She put it on over her blouse, reached into the suitcase, and extracted a sport shirt. She wriggled her eyebrows at Brian, who was standing stock-still, staring at her. She pulled the shirt on, sleeves dangling almost to her knees, and fastened each button as she ran her tongue over her lips seductively. Finally Brian sat down on the edge of the bed and folded his arms, the better to enjoy the show. By the time she was finished, she had donned the T-shirt, the sport shirt, Brian’s heavy Irishknit sweater, his jeans, his jogging shoes, and a trench coat She had all but disappeared under the layers but was still humming. Like a prec
arious walking tepee, she swayed over to Brian and leaned down to whisper in his ear.
“Hey, big boy, come on backstage and I’ll show you a good time.”
Brian pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. They both laughed until Brian held her a little too long and a little too fiercely. She scrambled away from him and hopped into the suitcase, perching in the midst of his underwear.
“You might as well just pack me.”
“Why bother with the suitcase? Stick a toothbrush in your ear and we’re off.”
The trip seemed very short to Brian, maybe because they talked so much on the way, and maybe because he wasn’t really anxious to get there, the familiar landmarks of Devon County appearing all too quickly. But they had a good time, chatting together in a lazy fashion both had found difficult lately.
Sharlie confessed a one-time preoccupation with celebrities. “Every time I went out for a walk, I’d see somebody who was somebody. I got an enormous thrill out of it.”
“I never noticed you do that,” he said, watching the sky grow cloudy in the southwest, probably right over Silver Creek.
“I don’t need the vicarious stuff anymore. I married a star.”
He laughed. “How come I never see anybody?”
“Listen, my love,” she said. “I have strolled with you up Madison Avenue and you have practically kissed Howard Cosell and Walter Matthau and you never noticed.”
“Thank God,” he said fervently.
“Howard Cosell’s tough to spot because he’s not half as repulsive as you’d think.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you’ve given it up. Who’d you see yesterday?”
“Greta Garbo and Dustin Hoffman.”
He laughed and put his hand on her thigh. He squeezed very gently, feeling the bone under the thin layer of flesh.
“God, you’re a pretty lady,” he said. Her eyes were deep gray-green in the sunlight, and he found it difficult to drag his attention back to the road.
“I wouldn’t look half so pretty with a telephone pole sticking out of my head.”
“Nag,” he said, both hands back on the wheel.
