by Nancy Thayer
“Oh,” Sara said. She watched the doctor rise into the air at her feet and slowly float along the ceiling away from her. It was amazing that he could do that, but she was too tired to watch.
A while later the nurse returned. “Want to get up?”
“No,” Sara said. “Never.” Vaguely, in the Sahara Desert of her mind, she remembered her sister’s advice: the sooner you get up and walk around, move around, the sooner the effect of the drug dissipates.
But her sister hadn’t told her that she would feel like this: overwhelmingly sick to her stomach. Her vision was murky with nausea. If she moved her head, bruise-colored waves splatted at her eyes. So how was she to move her body?
But the nurse was pulling back the covers and assisting her from the bed. Sara’s robotlike body plopped down one leg, then the other, and the three of them, nurse, Sara, and the tall stainless steel IV pole, clunked along the floor away from the bed.
They had not really operated on Sara. They had really just beaten her up. They must have straightened up the bed so that she was strapped in a standing position, and then taken turns beating her over and over again just under her rib cage. She was so sore there she could scarcely breathe.
“My abdomen hurts,” Sara said.
“That’s right,” the nurse said. “That’s the carbon dioxide. They used it to blow up your abdomen so they wouldn’t hit the bowel. It’ll only last for a day or two.”
“If it lasts for a day or two, I won’t last for a day or two,” Sara said.
The nurse giggled. “You’re doing just fine,” she assured Sara.
Together they shuffled and clunked their way across the recovery room, covering entire inches in hours. Sara’s head was thick, her abdomen and shoulders ached, and the nausea retreated slightly only to return in ever more violent waves.
“Why don’t you just go in here and see what you can do?” the nurse suggested, guiding Sara into the same bathroom she had earlier in the day seen another woman enter. Vaguely she wondered if she looked as pathetic as that woman had.
Sara sank down on the toilet and looked at the pad she had automatically pulled down. It was soaked with blood. But she couldn’t feel herself bleeding. She couldn’t feel anything but nausea and the intense pressure from the gas on her rib cage. Through the vast wasteland of her mind came the knowledge that she was urinating.
When she had finished, she stood up shakily and washed her hands, careful not to get the IV tube on her left hand wet, then leaned on the sink, looking deep into the mirror to find her reflection. Yes, there she was. Alive, in a way. It was interesting that her face could look this way; at once pitiful and bland, like a piece of paper someone had stepped on. Slowly she opened the bathroom door and wobbled back into the recovery room.
“Did you urinate?” the nurse asked.
“Yes,” Sara replied.
“You won’t be needing this, then,” the nurse said. And she took away the IV and pole.
Sara felt bereft without the pole. It had given her something to hold on to. Now she slumped forward, in slow motion, knowing that sooner or later she would just sag right down to the floor.
“I wish you could make me feel better,” Sara said confidingly. “I feel like shit.”
“Just sit down here awhile,” the nurse said. “You’ll be better soon. “Why don’t I bring you some crackers and a 7UP.”
The nurse brought a little packet of saltine crackers and a cup of 7UP.
“Would you like me to get your husband for you?” she asked.
“I really don’t think so,” Sara replied. Surely the nausea would pass in a while. She had with great effort managed to find the clock on the wall. She had even managed to decipher the time. It was three-fifteen. She was sure she would be better soon.
“Why don’t I give you a shot of Compazine to help your stomach?” the nurse said.
“Whatever,” Sara said. She was aware of the shot being administered in the way one is aware of a mosquito biting in a dream.
At four the nurse brought Steve in to her.
“She’s doing just fine!” the nurse said cheerfully.
Sara looked up at Steve. She had not realized he was so tall. She had to crane her neck backward to look up at his face, which wavered before her thirty or forty feet in the air.
“Hi,” she said and leaned forward and vomited on his shoes.
This left her shaking with weakness, but amazingly clear-headed. She was aware suddenly of the nurses scurrying around, of people giving Steve paper towels, of Steve sitting down in the chair next to her to wipe off his shoes.
“I’m glad you wore your wing tips instead of your sneakers,” Sara managed to say. “It would have soaked into your sneakers.”
“Do you feel better?” the nurse asked.
“A little,” Sara said to the nurse. To Steve she said, “I didn’t do that on purpose, you know.”
“I know,” Steve said. He put his hand on her shoulder. Someone should tell him that his hand weighs as much as a car, Sara thought. “How are you?”
“Better,” Sara said. “Alive at least.”
“I love you,” Steve said. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“I love you, too,” Sara told him.
By four-thirty she was ready to leave. Steve drove her back to the hotel and Sara shuffled through the lobby and into the elevator. Steve opened the door, helped her take off her clothes and get into her nightgown, helped her get into bed. Her shoulders and abdomen were still pressured by the carbon dioxide, which in certain positions even made her wince. She arranged herself on several pillows, and lay there, fading into and out of the evening. She was aware from time to time that Steve had left the room, had returned with a paper bag from Brigham’s. She was aware that he was watching TV, eating, calling his parents, talking to her.
At last Steve turned off the television and the lights, undressed and crawled into bed with her. Vaguely Sara recalled the time she had called Dr. Crochett in a panic to ask how long they would have to wait after her operation before making love. “About two weeks if you have a laparotomy,” Dr. Crochett had said. “And if you just have the laparoscopy, the same night if you feel like it.”
“Yeah, right,” Sara said to Dr. Crochett.
“Did you say something?” Steve asked.
“Good night,” Sara mumbled.
“Good night, Sara,” Steve said.
He leaned over to kiss her. His movements made the bed rock like a ship in a stormy sea. The slight touch of his lips set off waves of rolling thunder in her head and stomach. Finally he lay down and was quiet. He slept. Sara stayed in the position she had spent the evening in, propped against pillows—if she lay down the gas surged up into her shoulders and burned to get out. She was aware that she was listing sideways and that if she continued to fall she would have to make the monumental effort of righting herself or enduring pain. Her mind was stumblingly tackling this problem when she really fell, into the blessed black bliss of sleep.
Morning.
Glorious, ecstatic, celestial morning.
Sara woke up sane and whole and hungry. Ravenous. It had been thirty-six hours since she had eaten (the crackers and 7UP didn’t count, and anyway she had lost them on Steve’s shoes).
Steve came out of the bathroom, trailing smells of soap and shaving cream. He was wearing slacks but no shoes or shirt, and when she saw his bare chest, all hairy and muscular, she felt the most delicious surge of lust pass through her.
“Oh, God!” she cried. “I’m back to normal!”
Well, almost. In the bathroom she found that she was still bleeding slightly. She peeled back one of the bandages that covered her incision—which was torture, the hospital clearly had used Elmer’s Glue to stick the bandages to her—and saw nothing very remarkable, only a messy wine-colored slit with plastic threads sticking out. Not very attractive, but on the other hand, nothing to get pitiful about. How pretty she looked, how young and fresh and healthy and whole.
And how beautiful this hotel room was with its geometric 1950s faded green-and-blue curtains and bedspreads, its chipped veneer bureaus and chairs. Oh, how wonderful the morning was with its heavy gray clouds scudding across the sky—life was grand! She was alive and well and not nauseated, and never again in her life would she complain about anything!
They dressed and went out for breakfast at a fancy hotel restaurant. Sara had scrambled eggs and sausages and country-fried potatoes and English muffins with piles of strawberry jam and butter and a tall glass of grapefruit juice. But first she had coffee, hot rich, dark coffee, thick with cream and sugar; it melted in her mouth like chocolate and expanded through her body like LSD. She didn’t think she had ever been happier in her life.
Back home, the next day she awoke feeling truly normal—happy but not manic—and tired. She decided to spend the day in bed. She began reading a novel she had bought for just this day, and was delighted to see rain streaking down her bedroom windows, as if the weather were giving her approval to be lazy.
In the middle of the afternoon, the doorbell rang and she opened it to a florist delivering a magnificent arrangement of flowers that Fanny had sent. She put them on her bedside table where she could look at them, and then turned back to her novel. But now she could not concentrate. The flowers made her think of Fanny … something special about Fanny … she rose from bed and shuffled to the living room to get her Xeroxed copy of the manuscript of Jenny’s Book. Back in bed, she leafed through the book, then stopped to read, carefully, the final two pages in Fanny’s novel.
Some of us are meant to fight with fate. Not that it’s ever a fair fight, not that we can ever win completely, but the occasional triumphs we wrest away are so glowing, like golden trophies, like prizes we have never dreamed of, that finally, bad taken with the good, it is worth the effort.
And sometimes it is the fight itself that matters: the daily battle that makes our senses blaze.
The trick is to find the fight that belongs to you. In Kansas I knew even as a child I could never defeat the elements—that wind, killing frost, blistering heat, hateful air. The people who stayed to battle there I honor in my heart: they are mythic to me, humans who pit themselves against nature over and over again. They win simply because they stay to fight, their victories and defeats are often the same, their nobility becomes etched in the lines of their faces.
My battle was of a different sort. It is not over, nor will it be, until the day I die. I battle against elements almost as deadly as the Kansas weather—against dullness, stupidity, insensitivity—against nonsense. I would so much like for life to be comprised of something other than nonsense, and for people to be handsomer, more articulate, and kinder than they are. Also, of course, I would like them to admire me, I would always like that. Growing old, as I am, I am also growing, in my own way, more vain, and more demanding—imperious and difficult I have often been called.
But I have learned some things and in my wisdom feel superior enough to attempt to pass them on. As I grow closer to death, which if nothing else is the absence of the life I know, I have discovered the meaning of life. It resides in the books I love and the animals that surround me; in present friends and in memories of lovers and enemies, too; in silk, champagne, an applewood fire, and Mozart. It resides in what I can wrest from each day that I live.
It’s here.
It’s here.
“Well, Fanny,” Sara said aloud. She put the manuscript down on the bed beside her and spoke aloud to herself, to the air, the flowers, to Fanny’s spirit. “Good for you! You did it. You fought with fate and won, and this book is your victory. And you know, it looks as if I’m meant to fight with fate, too. I’m trying! I did have the operation, you know! I was terrified of it, but I did it, I did try to take control. But it’s different for me. I’ve found the fight that belongs to me, but for me it’s not the fight that matters—I want to win! I want the prize! I want a baby. And there’s only so much I can do!”
Sara ran her hands over the manuscript. White paper, black print. It had taken Fanny a lifetime to accomplish this. Fanny’s fight with fate was all about creating, and so was Sara’s, but in a different way. She had helped Fanny bring her book to the light of day, but it would take a different source of help for Sara and Steve to have a child. It would take that spark, that flash, that gift from nowhere seen, and Sara could have operations and use charts and pray, but still her fate relied on more than determination and persistence; it relied on something beyond her control.
Still. Still, as Fanny said, the meaning of life was not about having babies, but in the present, in wresting what she could from each day she lived.
That night when Steve came home, he brought pizza, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, and later they made love, gentle, careful, easy love. In the dark deep night Steve lay against her, Sara held him, he was inside her, she enclosed him, they were two halves of a whole, blended and blurred and complete. And Sara thought: It’s here. It’s here.
Dr. Crochett had told Sara that many women got pregnant the first cycle after a laparoscopy, so when Sara’s period started at the end of September she was nearly wild with surprise and grief. But when she called his office, he calmed her, “No, no,” he said, “this doesn’t count, next month is the important cycle, not this month.” She hung up the phone, feeling foolish and weak with relief. She should have known; and after all, it would have been expecting a miracle for her to get pregnant right after the operation, because she had bled for almost a week. And she had taken strong antibiotics for two weeks in order to forestall any infection from the operation—that wouldn’t have been good for a developing embryo. So it was all right that she wasn’t pregnant. Logically it was all right.
She went to Boston to have the stitches removed. Dr. Crochett pronounced her in great shape. “Go home and get pregnant!” he said.
“Should I use the ovulation-indicator tests?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, “don’t bother with all that, don’t even think about it. It will only get you nervous. Just have a great time with your husband. Make love a lot.”
It was the beginning of October. The days glowed. Sara took on as much editing as she could, needing to keep occupied and needing to replenish the money they had spent on the operation.
She spoke with Fanny on the phone several times a week—Fanny had received the galleys of her book for proofreading, and she was getting nervous about its publication. The book was due out in January; the earliest reviews would appear in December.
Caroline and Clark Kendall closed up their ’Sconset house and went back to Florida. Sara felt enormously (and guiltily) relieved to see them go.
The island emptied of tourists. Shops and stores and sidewalks were no longer crowded. Steve had stopped working for Mack and, with two men working for him, had gone into business for himself. He was up and out early and home late and dirty and tired. But he was happy, and Sara was happy for him. And happy for herself.
They made love a lot that month. And it really was love. Sara stopped using the thermometer and didn’t try to make love when she wasn’t in the mood—but she was gratefully aware of the fact that they made love every night during the week she was to ovulate. After they made love, without even mentioning it, she slipped a pillow under her hips, remembering how Morris Newhouse had held her bottom in the air to help the semen enter her uterus.
The last two weeks of October were golden. Sara biked every afternoon, luxuriating in the sun on her face; in the evenings she and Steve sat by the fire reading or talking. She started to needlepoint another pillow. She felt radiantly happy, in an almost sinfully contented domesticity.
Why was it that the group always got together on exactly the day that signs of her period began?
“I can’t believe I’m so significant or wicked that the universe is conspiring against me this way!” Sara said aloud to the mirror as she got ready for the evening out. She was tense today, tense and worried, and she talke
d aloud to herself, chiding herself, cajoling herself, trying to control herself: if she didn’t think her period was going to start, it wouldn’t start. But there was no doubt that her stomach was bloated and swollen, her breasts were stinging, her spirits had plunged. And this afternoon, when she got out of the shower, she had been horrified to see a splot of blood on her ankle. At first she thought she had cut her leg somehow, then realized what it was, where it had fallen from.
“No,” she said. “No. No.”
She had sunk down onto the floor, knocked out with dismay. Tomorrow was the twenty-ninth day. It looked as if she was going to start her period again. It looked as if she, unlike other women, was not going to be pregnant the first cycle after her laparoscopy. She sat on the bathroom floor, stunned, stupid, unable to think of a reason for getting up.
Finally she put her hand to her crotch, then pulled her fingers away and looked. No blood. No sign of blood. Perhaps—perhaps anything. Oh, fuck, Sara thought, perhaps anything at all. Ellie had said that quite often women still bled a little when they were pregnant, and that sometimes women even thought they had had their period when they were pregnant. She did not have to give up all hopes because of that spot of blood.
This thought gave her the courage to go on as normal. She took her time in front of the mirror, putting on her makeup carefully, trying on various clothes. She wanted to get just the right look. Tonight there was a party at the Danforths’ to celebrate Wade Danforth’s birthday, which was today, and Sheldon Jones’s birthday, which was tomorrow. It was a potluck dinner, everyone was bringing something, and there would be champagne, and since the Danforths had a big house, there would be dancing. A real party. Sara felt that she had often dressed inappropriately for the group’s get-togethers. She often wore a silk dress, which was what she would have worn in Boston, only to find that all the other women had worn jeans or slacks. Tonight she put on a huge loose almost-ankle-length cotton sweaterdress she had ordered from Bloomingdale’s. It was bright red and had big shoulder pads and a boatneck with a plunging V in the back. It was a great-looking dress, sloppy yet elegant, unstudied-looking. She put on a pair of long dangling gold-and-red earrings and lots of makeup.
