Make Believe

by Joanna Scott

  But Marge wasn’t thinking about any of this when she sat down to dinner that night. She was thinking about how fine it all looked — roast chicken with mashed potatoes, homemade gravy and green beans, apple cobbler for dessert. She had no pretensions as a cook, though she had a director’s instinct for timing and combination, and she enjoyed basking in the glow of Eddie’s appreciation, which more than made up for Ann’s absence. All the effort Marge put into a meal and Ann would only grab snacks and soda and an occasional slice of processed cheese snatched at odd hours so she wouldn’t have to eat with the grown-ups. Just another phase, and Marge had resigned herself to wait it out, as she did any other phase, having mastered long ago a great talent for patience.

  Now she was more patient than ever, for she had all the time in the world. She was fifty-seven years old, a grandmother already yet still fit for many kinds of work. But Eddie worked hard so Marge wouldn’t have to work. A husband should support his wife, he believed, and though Marge wouldn’t have minded a job that took her out of the house, she was content with the arrangement and found that she loved Eddie most when she pleased him.

  Mashed potatoes and roast chicken pleased him. So did the cobbler, with its apple slices as thin as fingernails but still crisp, topped with a sugary crust that rose up in dark peaks. He ate slowly, suspending each forkful in the air and examining it to be certain of its perfection. He didn’t demand perfection — he simply expected it, and Marge could satisfy him as long as she let him think of her as an extension of himself. He measured the world against his own formidable strength of character and impeccable decency. Such a man could only have a perfect wife.

  The kitchen was perfect — so clean, so neatly cut into white planes and shadows by the track lighting. The cobbler was perfect, Marge agreed between her first bite and her second, smiling with closed lips at her ridiculous pride as she watched Eddie eat.

  Marge had two living daughters to complain about, and in the next moment, tickatick, she had only one. She lifted a second heaping forkful of apple cobbler to her mouth, Eddie chewed with a deliberate grinding motion, upstairs sixteen-year-old Ann Templin listened through headphones to music, the wind rattled a window loose in its frame, and a crumpled cigarette pack scooted ahead of a gust across Hanks Lane, the pack having been emptied of its last smoke by Marge’s former husband, Tony, who a day earlier had visited as he did without warning every couple of years, midmorning on a weekday in order to catch Marge alone in the house. She’d given him a cup of coffee and all the cash she had on hand and without telling him anything that mattered had shown him the door. Then she’d gone upstairs to put on earrings and get ready for her dentist appointment, and while she’d watched herself in the mirror maneuver the clip around her right earlobe she had felt Tony staring at her, or staring at the tidy sky-blue vinyl siding of the front of the house, which instead of hiding her revealed her all too clearly to anyone who cared enough to look. Tony shouldn’t have cared as much as he did, which made him pathetic to Marge, and as she watched herself in the mirror she whispered what she’d shouted at him in the past — go away! He’d gone away eventually, he always did, but first he’d fished in his pocket for a cigarette, crushed the empty pack in his hand, and dropped it on the side of the lane.

  So now the pack slid and skittered across the wet road, the rain fell lightly, and Marge opened her mouth to receive the sweet burst of apple and cinnamon sugar and butter, encouraging herself with some chagrin — forget the calories — and at the same time wishing she’d invited her next-door neighbors, the Jelilians, to come share the cobbler, an impulse that prompted in her a sudden urge to wince, for the thought of Dorrie Jelilian reminded Marge that Dorrie disapproved of Marge’s girls, especially of Jenny. When Dorrie learned that Jenny’s son had been fathered by a black man she’d made her repugnance explicit: How could Marge and Eddie have let it happen? But Eddie could always one-up Dorrie Jelilian when it came to the subject of Jenny. No one was a sharper and more pervasive critic of moral shortcoming than Eddie, a fact that made Marge vaguely aware as she lifted her fork that the guilt she felt was in some way connected to Eddie and his impressive capacity for indignation. Even before the mound of cobbler reached her mouth she raked her eyes across Eddie’s face in an effort to understand his role in the abrupt shift in her mood and at the same time thought without quite knowing what she was thinking that time would make forgiveness possible. And so with her teeth she scraped the cobbler off the fork and welcomed the feeling of inexpressible relief, believing that her conflicting emotions had to do only with the perfect dessert she’d made, the pleasure of taste, too many calories, and the undeniable success of her effort.

  While Marge was about to enjoy her second bite of apple cobbler, Sam and Erma Gilbert were sitting beside each other on their couch, concentrating too intently on the game show to allow the intrusion of random thoughts. Rain coated the windows with a fine glaze, and a swell of wind broke against the front of the house, causing the clapboard to creak softly. Sycamore Street was deserted except for a gaunt yellow dog that loped along, bounding for a couple of strides, then cowering, scrambling forward with its belly close to the wet road, then bounding again and disappearing around the corner onto Field Street.

  The television screen in the Gilberts’ living room was filled with the blur of a spinning wheel. Erma settled deeper into the cushions. Sam’s stomach gurgled, and he belched into his fist. Together, Sam and Erma were working to solve the puzzle of a word, both of them thinking hard to fill in the blanks with letters and beat the contestants to the answer.

  The Gilberts would have been Jenny’s in-laws if Jenny and Kamon had married. Instead they were just Bo’s grandparents and Jenny’s good friends. Erma had worked for thirty years as a librarian in the public schools; Sam had been an electrician until his knee gave out. Now they lived comfortably enough off their pensions and Sam’s disability, and they took care of Jenny’s little boy five days a week. Jenny had been late picking Bo up this evening, though at least she’d called from the store where she worked to let them know, and Erma had given Bo his supper and was getting ready to dress him in the extra pair of pajamas she kept handy when Jenny had arrived to fetch him.

  Then Erma had called her daughter Merry to check in, Sam had turned on the television to watch the news, and after ten minutes or so Erma had settled in beside him, dousing a tea bag in her cup of hot water and chattering over the newscaster’s voice about Merry’s daughter, Miraja, who had won a prize in school for her artwork. They’d gone on to watch the game show as they sometimes did on weeknights, grateful for the peace of the hour when they could sit back and enjoy each other’s company — just an old married couple, sure, luckier than most, that’s the way they saw themselves, though a certain rigidity in their tired bodies betrayed something besides gratitude. You could see from the way they leaned against each other, like two wide boards propped at a slant, that they weren’t fooled by a day’s routine. No, these were two people who knew the worst could happen and who were determined to stay wary.

  They’d been hit hard before — they’d lost Kamon, their youngest boy, and not a day went by without one of them somehow acknowledging that loss to the other through a glance or a touch. Each breath they took was a kind of preparation — and every exhalation a relief. Phew — they’d been through it and survived, wouldn’t you know, life will play some dirty tricks and you just got to stand fast, spit in the eye of the devil, do good work, and come out singing your victory song at the end of the day.

  Wouldn’t you know, everything adds up once you do the figuring, nine letters still missing in a five-word phrase, b or d or s, no, n or o or maybe g, k, p…

  The wheel turned, the arrow bounced past meager sums and finally tripped across the last section to six hundred dollars. All you had to do was guess the phrase, a phrase now worth a grand prize of six hundred dollars added to thirty-five hundred, a fifteen-letter phrase with an r, an l, two a’s, and three t’s.

 
Four thousand dollars plus some, Sam was thinking.

  Tale, Erma tried, taps, tank…

  Shoulders rubbing. Breathe in, breathe out. Erma had a flash of an idea, a phrase made up of five words, tack or tame or take…

  “Take it or leave it!”

  Sam grinned and took her hand in his, telling her with the pressure of his squeeze that he still loved her even though she’d beaten him to the answer. Beaten everyone else as well. And to think she could have won them a fortune if she’d been a contestant on the show. Wouldn’t you know the way luck works, Erma thought, returning Sam’s squeeze. She yawned, looked absently around the room, and rested her gaze on the boxes of books stacked against the wall — dozens and dozens of books needing to be sorted by subject for the church sale, enough work to fill a few empty hours, a task that would occupy her more usefully than the game show. She’d better get to it if she hoped to be done by midnight.

  “Take it or leave it,” Sam echoed. The rain softened all at once to a feathery mist, and the yellow dog ran along the sidewalk up Field Street. At a bus stop on East Main a teenage boy ripped a purse from a woman’s arm, over at the high school an intramural basketball team ran through drills, people across the city ate spaghetti, dumplings, buffalo wings, tacos, red hots, french fries, sauerkraut, snap peas, flounder, chicken pot pie, and anything else available, a truck idled along the shoulder of the inner loop highway, radio deejays shrieked, children laughed, keyboards clicked, men eyed women in aerobic gear, women eyed men lifting weights, men and women heaved together, somebody wept, somebody crapped or talked on the telephone to a relative in LA or nodded off, and just as the odds would have it, everyone within the city limits kept right on breathing for at least another minute.

  The examination should be as formal and complete as time permits. Inspect the abdomen for distention, contusion, abrasions, or lacerations. Consider the possibility of cardiac, pulmonary, hepatic, and splenic injury. Auscultation is helpful, along with palpitation to search for signs of peritoneal irritation. Pelvic fracture can be assessed by bi-iliac compression. Check for the presence of blood in the rectum, subcutaneous emphysema, and sphincter tone. Remember that severe pain at extraperitoneal sites can obscure clinical manifestations. Unexplained hypotension may suggest the disruption of the thoracic great vessels. The standard upright posteroanterior chest film is often recommended. Look for obliterations of the medical aspect of the left or right paraspinous stripe, opacification of the aortic pulmonary window, and deviations of the nasogastric tube. Bear in mind that plain radiography is limited in the evaluation of blunt abdominal trauma in children. Special diagnostic studies, including DPL and CT scans, must be considered in pediatric patients with suspected intra-abdominal injury.

  Hey you, Bo! They want you to wiggle your toes!

  Of course he could wiggle his toes, but even if he’d understood what they wanted him to do he would have refused. Leave me alone! The words were hidden inside him, but he let out one shriek again just so he could hear himself and fill the air with something other than the voices of strangers. Mama! What was the word for mama? He could remember the idea of her, the smell of smoke and lemons, the green flecks in her gray eyes, the taste of chocolate milk, the click of the spoon against the side of the cup as she stirred in the syrup, the sound of her humming voice, the thousand different browns of her hair, her face slippery like wet clay when she came to pick him up at Gran and Pop’s after work. He could remember the sharp slap of her hand on his ass. Who was she? The same person she’d always been, except that she had no name. Nor did Bo. Nor did anyone or anything.

  What if he opened his eyes? He couldn’t keep pretending that the strangers didn’t exist as long as he couldn’t see them. They were stealing his clothes and digging the tip of a little rubber ice pick into the soles of his feet. So what if he opened his eyes just a little? What if he peeked between his lashes and tried to see out without letting the strangers see in? Then he’d catch a glimpse of a woman’s arm emerging from a green sleeve like Play-Doh pressed through a tower mold. And then, of course, he’d get scared and close his eyes again.

  It didn’t occur to him to ask what they were doing. This was their world, not his. They would use him for their pleasure and he would stay here forever. But he still had a private world, a world of old memories that belonged only to him, that could comfort him, even if he couldn’t remember the words. What use did he have for words? He’d given up on the telling part. Not the looking, though. Careful, Bo! He squinted again, saw instead of the woman’s arm and shirt a dirty white wall about ten feet away. No windows and no blue sky. Just a wall with a thermometer and bag attached to it, and white cabinet doors — closed. A metal counter. Another green shirt. A woman’s neck, cream-colored like his mama’s. The tip of a woman’s chin, like a little cup on a platter of flesh. A woman’s fish lips moving close to him. Whispering. A woman whispering.

  He shut his eyes, fled from the woman who’d caught him looking and who had looked back, though not in. She hadn’t had time to look in and see Bo and all his thoughts. He’d escaped this time, and he wouldn’t try looking again, not if he could help it. He would keep his eyes shut forever, he would —

  — Would not! The woman with the teacup chin was lifting the lid of his right eye, separating it so she could see what, exactly, Bo wanted to hide. She even shone a little flashlight into his eye so she could find his secrets in the shadows. He heard laughter. He wondered what they considered so funny. Even without words to describe it he recognized the expression of relief in the sound of their voices, but he could not connect that relief to their concern and never suspected that these strangers meant to help him. He was far too convinced of their cruelty to change his mind and blamed them not only for bringing him here and pulling off his stinking pants and cutting away his shirt with scissors but for leaving his mama behind.

  Behind where? He couldn’t remember where he’d just come from. His mama had been dancing — he’d been somewhere standing on his head and watching his mama dance. No, that was all wrong! He’d been catching rivers of quarters in his cupped hands as they fell from the mouth of the slot machine. No! He’d been curled up in a barrel and was bobbing along a river toward the edge of the earth. No! He’d been sleeping, dreaming a terrible dream. Now that would be a fine explanation, and it meant he’d wake up and find his mama sleeping in her own room, and oh would she sure be angry when she saw how late it was. She’d grab his shoes and clothes and stuff him in the car like a pillow into a pillowcase, and he wouldn’t dare complain, not with Mama in one of her monster moods; he’d have to wait until she picked him up from Gran and Pop’s after supper, then he could tell her about the strangers and what they’d done to him, or hadn’t done to him because it was just a dream, Mama, and dreams aren’t real.

  What is the word for dream, Bo?

  He didn’t need to know the word to know that he wasn’t dreaming. No matter how much he wished it, he couldn’t turn what was happening into a dream, just as he couldn’t turn a dream into something he could feel and smell and touch. Even if he couldn’t remember how he’d come to be here, he was here, no getting around it, and his mama wasn’t here and never would be here. How could he be so sure? He knew it because the walls were white and voices spoke nonsense and he was naked and smelled of piss. To have come this far from his mama meant that she could never, never catch up to him, no matter how much she wanted to, no mater how many people she asked for directions, no matter how mad she got or how much she wanted him, no matter how loud he shrieked.

  He couldn’t even remember her name. Her name, his name, or the word that described what he felt when he thought of her. He couldn’t remember what had happened back on Route 62 and didn’t know what was going on and couldn’t find any sense in all the nonsense — “no tamponade, no pneumo—”

  “Maintain trac— that’s right — let me have a…”

  “— no dyspnea, adequate urine output, no hypotension, no local swelling, no tachy
cardia…”

  “Keep those handy, will you?”

  “Anybody seen…”

  “No deterioration so far.”

  “Lucky son of a gun…”

  So once they’d sewn up the gashes on his face and had taken a set of X rays to ensure that his body wasn’t hiding any terrible secrets, they could take him off the board. Hear that, Bo! You comedian you, Mr. Macaroni, number 7153 on the chart, insurance carrier unknown, you’re going to be all right! He couldn’t remember any of the names he’d ever been called, but he could remember how he’d laughed when he heard some of them. He remembered the ache of laughter and how Pop pressed a smooth knuckle into his side to make him laugh even when he was feeling angry. He didn’t know that the doctors and nurses working on him couldn’t have guessed his name even if he’d given them three tries. He didn’t know that strangers had their own names, and if he’d been able to read and willing to open his eyes he would have learned what they were called from their name tags.

  Dr. Amy Ratigan

  Dr. Gordon Metzger

  R.N. Carlie Fitzwilliams

  R.N. Marianne Walsh

  Bartholomew Kowalski the respiratory technician, who called himself Bart. He was waiting to tell his name to Bo, waiting for a chance to tell a joke or sing a song, waiting for the smile that would start to tug at Bo’s lips sooner or later, sooner, hopefully, because Bart’s shift ended at eleven, and it was already half past nine.

  Nor did Bo know this: that the nurse Marianne, who planned to change her name to Mercy someday, was silently praying for Bo as she washed the dried blood from his face with wet gauze pads, asking God to give him a good home after he was released from the hospital, a better home than the one he’d had, judging from the unkempt clothes he’d been wearing.