by Larry Watson
“My choice,” Calvin says. “I had my years aboveground here.”
His shirts hang from nails, and the narrow bed is neatly made. On the straight back chair next to the bed is a book, and Beverly can’t resist picking it up to read the gilt letters on the spine.
“Catullus. My goodness.”
“Helps me fall asleep.”
Beverly opens the book. She had two years of high school Latin, but she can’t understand a word. “Yes, I believe I’m feeling drowsy already.”
He takes the book from her hands. “Go ahead and lie down.”
“It was a joke, Mr. Sidey. A joke.”
For answer, he sticks his finger inside the armhole of her sleeveless blouse. He knows what he’s doing because he gets inside the strap of her brassiere and runs his finger down to where the strap attaches to the cup. She knows she should twist away from him and slap his face, but forces—as overpowering as the heat that pressed in on her only moments before—freeze her in place.
This man is, after all, in spite of his age and years of absence from Gladstone, a Sidey, a name that connoted power and influence in their town, and to be looked on with favor by one of them still means something to people who grew up in the family’s shadow. And yet Beverly Lodge has never had a problem telling any boy or man—she would have said it to President Kennedy himself—to put his hands back in his pockets. Is she letting this moment go on so she’ll have something to tell her aunt Doris the next time Beverly visits Spokane? You’ll never guess who made a pass at me. Calvin Sidey! That’s right! Who’d have thought he’d turn out to be nothing but a lecher in his old age. But most days her aunt doesn’t remember Beverly; why would she remember someone from half a century past?
All of these thoughts, however, are an attempt to locate outside herself a reason for why she doesn’t bat his hand away, and if she stops scrambling for just a moment from another thought—this one more frightening and inexplicable than any other—she’ll admit: Yes, she likes the feel of this man’s finger on her skin, and yes, she wants more.
FOURTEEN
The family and friends of surgical patients are provided a special waiting area on the third floor, a long windowless room furnished with mismatched chairs and couches pushed back against the walls. In the middle of the room, there’s nothing but dark green carpeting, a blank space so large it seems as though it’s waiting for a performance of some kind. At one end of the room is a console television that commands the attention of most people in the room. Bill doubts that anyone is truly interested in Queen for a Day or Guiding Light but that they, like him, look at the snowy black-and-white images to keep from staring rudely across the room at the grim, drawn faces waiting to receive the news that their loved one will live or die.
That news is never delivered in the room. Instead, an elderly nun knocks on the door, peers in, and calls out the last name of the patient who has been operated on. The family then steps out in the hall in order to learn whether they have drawn the joy or grief card on that day.
As noon approaches and passes, Carole repeatedly suggests to Bill that he go down to the hospital coffee shop for something to eat; she knows he hasn’t eaten since breakfast, and even then he had nothing but a slice of toast and coffee. No, Bill insists on waiting right where he is. He says he’s not hungry, but that isn’t quite true. He has found a way not to notice hunger, just as he learned early on to ignore the uncomfortably hard curve of his chair’s back. Carole lights cigarette after cigarette, but Bill has let go of that craving as well. He knows that only by numbing himself—paying as little attention as possible to the passage of time or the requests of his body and mind—will he be able to endure the hours of waiting.
This skill, and Bill thinks of it as a skill, the ability to fold his hands and wait without agitation or expectation, is not something he developed or discovered for the first time that morning. Marriage to Marjorie has been one long training session in patience. He waited for Marjorie’s dark moods to brighten. For her brooding silences to break. He waited—is still waiting—for her to explain how she had replaced the abandon of her youth with the fearful caution of adulthood. And this patience he believes, he has always believed, will one day be rewarded, though he has no real idea of what the precise nature of that reward will be.
He permits himself a quick glance around the room. The obese woman with her clicking crochet needles. The old farmer whose pale forehead tops a face burned to leather by years in the fields. The young couple who never look at each other but never let go of the other’s hand. They all wait without any expression or sign of impatience, unless you count the cigarettes. Perhaps Bill Sidey isn’t unique. Perhaps they all have their own anesthesia to get them through the hours of surgery.
Finally, however, Bill and Carole are the only ones left in the waiting room. It’s midafternoon, hours past the time when Marjorie was scheduled to come out of surgery.
“This isn’t right,” Carole finally says. “I’m going to find someone who can tell us what the hell’s going on.”
Just as Carole reaches for the door, however, the elderly nun comes through from the other side. Carole stops abruptly, and when the nun says, “Sidey?” Carole steps back so clumsily Bill thinks she’s about to reel. He rises and moves toward her, ready to rescue the wrong sister.
“You can sit back down,” the nun says. “The doctor will talk to you in here.”
Carole sits down again next to Bill. “How’s that for service?” she says.
Although Bill expects the doctor, when he comes through the door it’s with such haste that Bill startles at the sight of him. Underneath his white coat Dr. Carlson wears a white shirt, a blue-and-green-striped tie, and dark trousers.
“Don’t get up,” the doctor says, a useless remark since neither Carole nor Bill make a move to rise.
Dr. Carlson is a tall, ruddy-complexioned man who adds to the effect of his height with his erect bearing. His reddish-blond hair is close-cropped, but he has a luxuriant waxed, curled mustache, an improbable affectation in a man so rigid and conservative in other respects. The tips of his mustache point upward now, and since Bill doubts they could have held that shape when they were pressed under a surgical mask, that means the doctor has taken the time to freshly wax his mustache as well as change his clothes after surgery. Bill wishes the doctor would sit down so he and Carole won’t have to keep staring upward, but Dr. Carlson stands before them with his hands behind his back as if he’s about to scold two wayward children.
“The operation went fine, just fine,” he says in his too-loud voice. “You know what was involved, don’t you? Do you want me to run through the procedure again?”
Carole relaxes visibly, but Bill thinks something in the doctor’s manner indicates more is coming.
“No? So I don’t have to give the anatomy lesson?” He probably believes his smile puts people at ease, but he flashes it too quickly and doesn’t allow it to linger on his lips. “Was it without complications? It was not. The human anatomy always has a few surprises for us. But what we set out to do, we did.”
Bill is aware that his hands are poised on the arm of the chair as if he’s about to push himself to his feet. “How’s Marjorie doing now? Is she ready for visitors?”
“Where Marjorie is now visitors are generally not allowed.”
Something in the carefully worded phrase makes Bill think the doctor isn’t talking about an actual physical location but a psychic state. He can sense Carole staring at him—it’s still Bill’s place to ask the questions, but he has no idea which one is supposed to be next in the sequence.
But since the doctor used the word where, Bill decides he will too. “Where is she?”
“She’s in recovery. As I said, she came through the surgery just fine. And came out of the anesthetic without a problem. But her body must have needed a bit more rest, because she went right back to sleep.”
“Sleep . . . And is she still sleeping now?”
> Grudgingly, the doctor nods.
“When do you expect her to wake up?”
“When?” Dr. Carlson permits himself another tight smile, although Bill didn’t think there was any humor in his question. “We don’t have any particular schedule that says ‘when.’ She’ll wake up when she wakes up.”
Bill looks questioningly at Carole. Since she had this operation perhaps she wants to make a comment or raise an issue that corresponded to her own experience. She’s staring at the floor, however, and when Bill follows her gaze, he sees something that angers him. The doctor wears white shoes, like all medical personnel, though his look to have once been another color and material—tan suede perhaps—but they are now painted over with white shoe polish. On the toes of both shoes are small red spots—blood, without question, and it could certainly be Marjorie’s. This man has the effrontery to stand before Bill, to evade his questions, with Bill’s wife’s blood on his shoes.
“Have you tried waking her?” Bill asks.
“As I said, she came out of the anesthetic fine.”
Bill pushes himself to his feet, and the doctor pivots slightly as if he expects Bill to walk past him and out of the room. Bill, however, simply wants to stand so that the dark dots he concentrates on will be the doctor’s glistening pupils and not the circles of blood on those white shoes.
“Other patients, patients who have this surgery—when do they wake up?” His tone of voice, Bill realizes, makes this question sound more aggressive than he intends, but he doesn’t care.
Dr. Carlson glances down at Carole as if he expects her to answer.
Bill pushes a little harder. “Patients are supposed to be awake by now—isn’t that so?”
The doctor keeps looking in Carole’s direction.
“Don’t look at her,” Bill says. “I don’t give a damn what happened with her. Is Marjorie supposed to be awake now and she’s not? Is that what you came in here to tell us?”
“I’d prefer that Marjorie had come around by now. Yes.”
To the floor Carole says breathlessly, “Oh, God. She’s in a coma.” Like her mother, Carole runs to greet bad news as soon as it comes into view, and though Marjorie has a similar tendency, her pessimism isn’t her sister’s or mother’s eager variety. Yet even knowing this about Carole, Bill can’t keep from having the sudden urge to drop into a crouch when he hears the word coma. Instead, he gropes backward for his chair and as soon as his hand touches the hard wood he sits down hard.
Carole’s remark seems to restore Dr. Carlson’s authority. “Coma! My God!” he says. “Where in hell did that come from? She’s barely out of surgery!” He shakes his head in disgust. “Television? Women’s magazines? Is that where you people get such ideas? You don’t hear any of the medical personnel mentioning anything about a coma, so I sure as hell don’t want to hear talk of it from either of you. I’m going back up to check on Marjorie right now, and I won’t be a bit surprised if I find her sitting up in bed asking for a steak dinner. And if that’s the case, I’ll come right back down here and escort you to her room.”
As soon as the doctor leaves, Carole begins to sniffle. “I knew it. I had a bad feeling about Marjorie’s surgery. I just had a bad feeling.”
Bill grits his teeth at this remark, but he says nothing. He leans toward his sister-in-law, thinking that if he does nothing more than place his hand on her shoulder the gesture might bring some comfort to both of them. But something in her attitude stops him. She seems to draw inward, clenching her entire being like a fist.
“Are we supposed to keep waiting here?” Bill asks. “Was that your understanding?”
“Get up and leave this place, I almost said to her last night. Something just didn’t feel right to me. But I bit my tongue, and look where we are now . . .” Carole lowers her head as if to sob, but no sound comes forth.
Now Bill finds himself in the uncomfortable position of having to defend a surgical procedure that he had doubts about. “You can’t let yourself think those thoughts, Carole. Marjorie needed this operation. And now we need to have faith that everything will be all right. We have to believe that.”
With her red-rimmed, slitted eyes, Carole glances up at him, a look so feral he almost expects it to be accompanied by a low growl.
“What I mean is,” he says, “we shouldn’t automatically expect the worst.”
For much of the day Carole has kept a tissue balled in her hand, and now she wipes her eyes with it. Then, apparently deciding it’s too frayed to stand up to the sorrow that likely lies ahead, she rises and crosses the room to the box of Kleenex next to an African violet. She pulls two fresh tissues out of the box. “Do you want to call the kids now,” she asks Bill, “or wait until tonight?”
“No sense calling before I have something definite to tell them.”
“Would your father bring them out here?”
“Bring them . . . here?” Is Carole referring to the arrangement that she and Marjorie had discussed—Ann and Will moving to Missoula if Marjorie doesn’t survive the surgery?
Carole says calmly, “If there’s a crisis. If it looks like they won’t have another chance to see their mother.”
Bill would not have been able to utter such a sentence, but the new Kleenex seems not only to have dried Carole’s tears but also to have dammed the source.
“I can’t hear that kind of talk, Carole.”
“You don’t want to listen now, but your next chance might be too late. They should be standing by.”
“Jesus Christ, Carole! You heard what the doctor said—the operation went fine. He expects her to be all right!”
She simply arches her eyebrows, and Bill knows Carole and her expressions well enough to interpret this one: Believe what you like.
Carole sits down heavily in a chair across from Bill, crosses her ankles, and stares away from him and toward the television where a program called Up and Down Missoula plays. The show is apparently devoted to informing viewers of the notable events upcoming in the community. “The host of this show?” Carole says. “He goes to our church.”
After this remark, they fall silent. If someone were to enter the room now, they would never guess that Bill and Carole are together, a judgment that Bill thinks might not be far from wrong. Between Carole’s bleak outlook and his more hopeful view lies a distance as great as any that separates strangers.
TULLY HECKAMAN LIVED FOR a time with a cousin who had taken up residence in a rundown farmhouse ten miles outside of Gladstone, and one night Tully took Marjorie to the farm for what was supposed to be a family gathering.
Marjorie soon discovered that the gathering was really a drinking party, and the house was so packed with people there to drink the cousin’s homemade beer and moonshine—Marjorie believed he sold both out of the house—that she never knew for sure who Tully’s actual family members were.
In order to put herself at ease—and to enter into the party’s spirit—Marjorie drank too much too fast, and by the time Tully led her down into the basement, she was drunk and needed help negotiating the open stairs.
The cellar was dirt-floored; musty-smelling; and cluttered with boxes, barrels, empty burlap bags, and broken furniture. They both knew why Tully had brought her down there, but even in her drunken condition, Marjorie would not consent to lie down on the damp dirt. Tully spread out a few of the burlap bags, and once Marjorie was lying on the coarse fabric, she could smell that the bags had once held potatoes. When Tully turned out the light, the basement was totally lightless, and the earth’s chill rose up through her. Marjorie was grateful then for that odor of potatoes; without it, the sensation of lying in a grave might have been too much for her. As it was, she tried to hurry Tully to a conclusion, but he mistook her efforts. Believing she was intent on her own pleasure, he slowed down, and by the time they finished, she was exhausted and had to reach out and press her hands and arms down on the dirt to halt the sensation that she was spinning through a lightless void.
She soon fell asleep—or passed out. When she came around, Tully was gone, or at least he was not near enough for Marjorie to hear his breathing or to reach out and touch him. The blackness she opened her eyes to was so complete she couldn’t see if he—if anyone—was also in the cellar. Or had she opened her eyes? Since there was no discernible difference between opening her eyes or closing them, she wondered if her waking was only a dream of waking. She was still drunk enough that the state didn’t panic her. She gave in to it, and toward morning when a blade of light was finally able to slice its way through a crack in the farmhouse’s foundation, when she could open her eyes and know with certainty that they were open and know with certainty that her waking was real, Marjorie laughed at herself. Potatoes! Why hadn’t she relied on her nose to tell her the difference between dreaming and waking? Dreams had no smell . . . or did they?
The experience was unlike anything Marjorie ever lived through again . . . until she struggled free of the anesthetic after her surgery only to find herself in a blackness like that cellar’s.
And she finally relaxes into that state too when she determines that it doesn’t matter whether she wants to be awake or asleep: Neither condition is susceptible to her will.
FIFTEEN
I think I know what’s going on here,” Beverly says, “although it’s taxing my memory a bit. But isn’t it more than a little strange—we don’t even call each other by our first names.”
“Beverly,” Calvin says, and tries to tug her a little closer.
“At least you know the name.” She takes a small step forward, easing the strain on her undergarment. She notices now the spicy sweet smell of his after shave. She has to ask, “Did you have this in mind all along or are you just making it up on the moment?”
He brings up his left hand and curves that index finger around her brassiere strap also. When he does, Beverly has a new thought that won’t be kept away: He has his hands on the reins.
“This moment or any other,” Calvin says, “I’m looking to take some pleasure out of this life.”
