by Nancy Thayer
Trying to counteract her fear, she made herself think of Julia. This morning when Julia drove her to the airport, she told Sara about a D&C she had had a few years ago. As she was being wheeled into the operating room, Julia had said to the anesthesiologist, a handsome smiling Oriental man, “If I wake up with brain damage, I’ll sue you.” And he had smiled ever more handsomely and said, with a lovely lilt to his voice, “If you wake up with brain damage, you won’t know.” Julia had thought that terrifically funny. Sara was not quite as amused. But she was determined to approach all this cheerfully, with, as Julia had said, “grace.”
Steve was quiet when he came home from work, but that was often the case: he was working hard during the good weather. After dinner, to Sara’s surprise, he said, “Let’s leave the dishes till later. It’s still light out. Let’s walk down to the Jetties and look at the water.”
“What a lovely idea,” Sara said. She stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss him, her clever husband. Her body, under her cotton slacks and sweater, was taut and healthy, her husband was tall and affectionate, the night was luminous and warm, promising eternal summer. How could she be unhappy?
The ocean was dappled with dark and silver blues. Far out, a white sailboat slipped like scissors through the waves. They sat in the sand, still warm from the day, and listened to the summer sounds: the gulls calling, the sea sighing, the laughter skating across the smooth water from sleek anchored yachts in the harbor. Sara stretched and leaned against Steve, rubbing her cheek into his chest.
“Mmmm,” she murmured, affectionate, in love.
“Sara,” Steve said, “I need to talk to you.”
His tone of voice alerted her; something serious was going on. Her heart dropped like a rock in a shaft.
He was going to tell her he wanted a divorce. So he could marry someone else and have children. She knew it. She had been waiting for this.
For a moment she could not speak.
She pulled away from him. She did not look up at him. “What is it?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking about something for a while now,” Steve said. “A major change in my life. Our lives. It’s something I think I have to do. I can’t go on any longer this way.”
So this was it. So this was how it was to happen. She could understand, she really could. She could understand, even forgive, there was nothing to forgive, he was doing only what any normal man would do, he should leave her, why would he want to stay? She would survive, she would go far away, she would never love again, she would be solitary and as cold as stone. Or maybe she wouldn’t survive. She wrapped her arms around her knees, hugging herself protectively. She didn’t speak. Couldn’t.
“I want to go into business for myself,” Steve said. “I’m tired of working for others. I know more than most of my bosses—about building, about architecture, about handling money, about dealing with people. And I know this island and I love it. I think if I set up my own contracting business, I could build some decent houses instead of the crap they’re putting up these days. And maybe I could have some influence on what’s going up. It would be an enormous change. If I left Mack’s crew, I’d leave all the easy security. It would take some money to set up my own company, and it would take time before I could build up a reputation so that I could get jobs. The first few months I wouldn’t have any idea how much money I’d make, and maybe I wouldn’t make very much. We’d have to rely on your income to keep up the mortgage payments and so on. On the other hand, I’ve been saving up money for this, to carry us while I got started. And I could always hit up Dad for a loan. But it would mean a massive investment of my time as well as money, and I’d probably be anxious and busy at first—but then, I like the idea of that, not of being anxious, but of being busy, getting my own company organized.… What do you think?”
“I think it’s a wonderful idea!” Sara said honestly. “Oh, Steve, I think it’s a marvelous, exciting idea.”
“I called my lawyer yesterday. I’ve got an appointment with him tomorrow to find out about incorporating. Mick and Alex have already said they’d go to work for me if I set up on my own.…”
Steve continued talking, his words coming fast with his excitement. Sara leaned against him again, smiling, listening. She was amazed—not that he wanted to go into business on his own, but that he was so very much engrossed with anything that didn’t have to do with having children. It seemed really possible that he was not as caught up in the desperate desire as she was. At any rate, he was not thinking of leaving her, he was happy with her, he loved her.
Steve told her about the problems he had been having with his boss, about his sense of shame and anger at the shabbiness of the work they were doing, the corners they were cutting, the minor rules they were breaking. He told her what he hoped he could achieve with his own company. My God, Sara thought, how have I let myself get so absorbed in my own problems? I didn’t realize all this was going on. For a long grand moment, she felt her heart swell out toward Steve so that she felt maternal toward him, protective, hopeful; he was the one she cared for most in the world, he was the one she wanted to help. After all, he was young, his life wasn’t over yet, there were things he wanted to do. She did not have to stake the meaning of their lives on having children. She had forgotten this, or had not known it. It made everything more bearable.
Darkness dropped around them, bringing with it a gentle breeze. From across the water came an exotic almost-Oriental sound of wind chimes tinkling; it was the gentle clanging of wires and shrouds hitting the masts of the boats anchored in the harbor. The sand at their feet grew black. The sea disappeared into darkness, except for an occasional ruffle of wave that caught the slight moonlight for an instant. The breeze was cool. Summer was not eternal. Fall was coming. Changes were on the way. Sara and Steve rose and walked home through the easy streets, comforted by each other’s presence in the dark and fluid night.
Chapter Nine
Morning.
They caught the six-thirty ferry. Today Sara would have lab tests done at the hospital. Tomorrow she would have surgery.
They had told Steve’s boss and their friends, the people in their group, that they were going to Boston for the rehearsal dinner and wedding of a friend of Sara’s, a business colleague. Sara still was not on intimate terms with the women on Nantucket, so she knew no questions would be asked.
Now that they were actually on the way, Sara was relaxed. She had indulged herself one last time in maudlin self-dramatization; she had written Steve a long mushy good-bye letter and included it with a will (leaving Steve everything); both were in an envelope, lying on her side of the dresser where Steve could easily find it if he were to come home alone.
It was a pleasure to drive up over Cape Cod Canal and then along Route 3 to Boston. Already they could see the beginning of fall in the flame-tipped trees that bordered the road. The dunes and short, scrubby trees that fought to grow on Nantucket and the Cape soon gave way to thick bushy evergreens and majestic maples, which in turn gave way to the splendid rampant Boston skyline.
Brigham and Women’s Hospital was really a city all its own. The entrance to the day surgery unit was much like an airport terminal on a busy day; there was the same information desk with the same beleaguered woman answering the questions of lost souls; the same gift shop selling the same overpriced stuffed animals and anonymous kitsch; the same kind of crowd milling and surging through the echoing foyer, as if from one continent to another.
It took almost an hour for Sara and Steve to deal with the first step: sitting in a cramped cubicle, they told a harassed secretary every sequence of numbers that had or ever would have any relevance to their lives. Birth dates. Social Security. Address. Phone. Health insurance policy number. Then they were sent off to give the hospital a check for fifteen hundred dollars, the deductible amount of Sara’s health insurance.
They found the day surgery admissions room in the basement of the building. Here they were very organized. They presented Sar
a with a blue plastic card with her name and hospital account number stamped into it, a white file card telling her that her surgery would take place at eleven-thirty the next day and that she should be at the hospital no later than nine-thirty or she would be considered late and the surgery would be canceled, and several Xeroxed papers entitled “Pre-Operative Instructions for Day Surgery Unit,” “Pre-Op Instructions for Diagnostic Laparoscopy,” and “Pre-Op Instructions, D&C.”
Sara and Steve sat in the crowded waiting room, waiting for the anesthetist to call her name. Steve looked at old magazines; Sara read the information she had been given. It all seemed very simple and straightforward, nothing to be alarmed about. And, she reasoned, if there were so many of these operations that material was Xeroxed to be distributed, they must be very common operations. Everything would be fine.
Finally her name was called, and she was sent down the hall to a small office where an anesthetist took her “anesthesia history” and explained how the anesthesia would be administered. The anesthetist was a surprisingly beautiful young woman, even in her green scrubs with her hair stuck under what looked like a shower cap. She radiated health, and she had the longest, reddest fingernails Sara had ever seen.
“Do you have any questions?” she asked Sara.
To Sara’s slight surprise (but then all this seemed unreal, and she felt so unaccountable, for on entering the hospital she had let go of certain inhibitions), Sara heard herself say, “Yes, I do have a question. How did you get your nails so long? They’re beautiful.”
The anesthetist laughed. “Oh, they’re fake,” she said. “I had terrible nails, really, so I wear these. My eyelashes are fake, too.”
Surely, Sara thought as she walked back down the hall, surely something as dreadful as death couldn’t exist side by side with that gorgeous woman with fake fingernails. She was extraordinarily cheered.
The lab tests were conducted in the Admitting Test Center. Sara gave them urine, asked Steve to hold her hand while the nurse took blood from her arm (it didn’t hurt! She thanked the nurse, who looked amused by her gratitude), and had an electrocardiogram. When she lay down on the table for the EKG, her shirt and bra undone, exposing her bare breasts, she felt vulnerable for a moment, alarmed.
“Will this hurt?” she asked, looking at the funny little suction cups attached to myriad wires that the nurse was placing in semicircles around her breasts.
“Honey,” the nurse said with what Sara recognized as a Jamaican lilt, “when I get through doing this to you, you going to ask me to do it to you again.”
And it didn’t hurt. It was over in a flash. The lab work was over—they were free to go.
The rest of the day flew by; they went to some bookstores in Cambridge, and to dinner at Pistachio’s and a silly movie, then to the hotel to bed. Sara thought at first that she wouldn’t be able to enjoy making love, that she would be too overwhelmed with emotion, thinking, “This might be the last time I’ll ever make love. Tomorrow I might die.” But all such thoughts vanished when she crawled into the hotel bed with Steve. It was fun to be in a strange bed with him, between crisp white sheets instead of their colored ones, fun to feel a little illicit; here they were just the two of them, together in an alien world. They made love for such a long time that Sara fell into a contented and exhausted sleep immediately afterward.
She awoke at six o’clock and couldn’t get back to sleep. Two months ago she had had her thirty-fifth birthday. She felt so old, and so young. She slipped from the bed and into the bathroom to take a very long, very hot shower. She looked down at her naked body, which she had so often been so critical of. But it was a perfectly fine body, really, all of a piece, soft to the touch, but firm beneath. What would she look like after the surgery? Would Steve be grossed out by her scarred body? Really, she thought, they were living in a society that was too rational, too scientific. It would be better for everyone if some magic and ritual were included, too; if, for example, Steve also had to go through some procedure involving anesthesia and loss of consciousness and control and necessitating the slight scarring of his body. Then they would be more of a couple, then he would understand her better because he would have been through similar experiences, then they would not be forced further apart by their differences. She was certain that she had read of such mirror behavior in primitive societies. She wished something like that could be done here and now, for more than anything else she was aware of the fact that when it came right down to it, she was going through it all alone.
She could not have anything to eat or drink. Not even a sip of water. She brushed her teeth carefully, using little water, spitting it all out, not swallowing a drop. She dressed—and undressed; for the nurses had warned her to take off her engagement and wedding rings. When her hands were bare, she felt sad; she had never taken her rings off before and it seemed wrong to do so, a violation.
She could not wear any makeup; another hospital rule. She peered in the mirror at her pale morning face, the eyes slightly puffy (they had had a lot of wine last night), the eyebrows too fine and light without penciling; they seemed to blend into her skin, her six tiny pastel freckles jumping out across the bridge of her nose without powder to obscure them. She looked young and fragile: too young to die.
After she opened the door from the bathroom, fully dressed, ready to go to the hospital, the day blossomed before her with the startling rapidity of time-lapse photography. Steve dressed quickly, they drove to the hospital, they were in the waiting room. When her name was called, Sara was led to a woman’s dressing room where she took off her clothes and put on a blue-and-white-striped gown with a blue-and-white-striped robe and squishy blue plastic foam slippers. She tied the robe tightly, thinking Steve might admire her slender waist, but when he saw her he said, “Seersucker, huh. Pretty classy hospital.”
They sat together inside the day surgery unit, waiting for Sara’s name to be called again. Nurses and doctors hurried past. Two healthy young men joked with each other from adjoining hospital beds. A pitiful-looking young woman pushing her IV pole with one hand and with a nurse on her other side holding her arm crept past them into the restroom. A man in a wheelchair, wearing a hat to obscure the fact that he had lost most of his hair, sat next to them, begging his wife to take him home, he did not want to face the treatment today. The day deepened around them.
At last a nurse came to get Sara. In front of the room full of people, Steve pulled Sara to him in a long embrace. “I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you, Steve,” Sara replied.
The nurse led Sara to a barred hospital bed in the large open room and helped her climb in.
A tall young man approached, introducing himself as her anesthesiologist. Sara listened as he told her what they were going to do, nodding, not understanding a word. I have already given up control, she was thinking. I would not any more jump from this bed and run away than stand up and curse in church. Even here, where I’m afraid I’ll die, I’m polite and bound by etiquette. I could leave now if I wanted to; I’m not hampered. But I won’t. I’ll sit and smile at this guy, who, if he makes a mistake, could kill me or maim me, and I won’t say any of the things I had planned to say, like “Don’t goof,” or even “Please be careful.” I don’t care that he’s good-looking and might be judging me, I don’t care if he sees my breasts or thinks my stomach’s flabby. The world operates by a completely different set of rules here and I instinctively know them. I have already given up control.
Dr. Crochett appeared then, smiling, chatting, joking. “Don’t worry,” he said, “I’ve already done two of these this morning, I’ve had plenty of practice.”
Sara was glad to see him, someone she knew, yet at the same time she felt estranged from him; he was part of them. She looked away while he put an IV in the vein of her left hand, surprised at how little it hurt, surprised to see the nurse still with her, on the other side of the bed.
Then she was being wheeled down the hallway and through a swinging d
oor. She saw a sign, pointing in another direction, that said DELIVERY ROOM.
“I’d rather be going there,” she said.
“That’s next time,” Dr. Crochett told her.
She was helped from the rolling bed to the stationary table in the operating room. She felt drowsy, warm, and relaxed. Someone placed a mask over her mouth and nose; she was alert enough to mind.
“I don’t like this mask,” Sara said.
“You’ll be asleep in a few seconds,” the nurse said.
“I don’t like losing control,” Sara said, for she could feel it going, or, rather, feel herself going.
“Try counting backward from one hundred,” the anesthetist said.
“I really don’t like this mask,” Sara said, and then, with complete awareness, but with no feeling of alarm, she felt herself go under.
“Hi,” someone said. Sara opened her eyes and saw that she was in the recovery room, blankets over her and a blurry nurse standing near her.
“Hi,” the nurse said again.
I’m alive, Sara thought. I’m alive and I thought I’d jump for joy when I woke up, but I’m too drugged out. She raised the blankets and lifted her gown and peered down at herself. There was an enormous Band-Aid just under her belly button and another one just above her pubic hair. It’s the same day; they didn’t do a laparotomy, she thought, and drifted off.
“Hi,” Dr. Crochett said from the foot of the bed, “You’re just fine. A little endometriosis that I could take care of without a laparotomy, and we did a tubal lavage and you’re all opened up. I did a D&C, too, so you’re all squeaky clean. You’re in great shape and ready to go.”
“You didn’t do the laparotomy?” Sara asked.
“Didn’t need to. You do not have severe endometriosis,” Dr. Crochett said. “I’ll tell you more later. You won’t remember anything I tell you now.”
