Alice & Oliver

by Charles Bock

  His retreat is a slow, almost guilty strut, and it’s not long before the thrill of his goodbye phrase gives way to bureaucratic cinder blocks.

  “Unfortunately,” I am told, “this office is on a tight schedule.”

  —

  Since I was late, they had to bump me to the next slot, which created a logistical nightmare. After this test I’m supposed to have chest X-rays, an EKG, and a meeting with a dentist, who will need to take care of any cavities. While I was being wheeled up here, the receptionist and Oliver were juggling my next three days, whether I can move my bone marrow biopsy, my meeting with the hospital psychiatrist (who’s supposed to assess my mental state and, more important, prescribe anxiety medicines), my group consultation with Eisenstatt and Blasco to talk about the first rounds of test results.

  It’s enough to make a girl swoon. But the secretary is promising it will get taken care of. And Oliver, who wouldn’t spit on a hospital bureaucrat to save her from burning, assures me: “We’re straightening it out.”

  “Can I bother you for some orange juice?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry,” says the receptionist. “You aren’t supposed to eat or drink for four hours before the heart stress test.”

  “I haven’t had anything all day. You ordered me not to eat or drink before—”

  “It’s horrible. I know. Please hang in as best you can. We’ll get you in as soon as possible.”

  —

  How long do I lie on a waiting room couch, wrapped in my family quilt, with Oliver holding me, brushing lightly at my temples, sheltering me? His pulse throbs in my ear. His care is at once horrible and tender, but I can’t break away, don’t know if I want to.

  During the first month of our courtship, he came down with a flu. I spent an afternoon in my impossibly small kitchen with all the burners going. It was so important to show him what I could do, let him know I could take care of him. I remember sweating rivers, second-guessing myself over a recipe I’d made countless times. I hauled that huge vat of lentil soup to him, which meant a subway transfer at Times Square, walking about eight miles through its underground tunnels. Just a mess of a haul. Of course he had two bowls and chucked the rest, assuring me he ate every delicious morsel. I miss being able to take care of him that way. I miss being able to take care of myself. I miss taking an early afternoon dance class—following the pounding, ecstatic drum rhythms, the tribal syncopations and flails and stomps and gyrations, me and the rest of the room, so many similarly concentrating, sweating, glorious women. Those rare mornings—a month at a time of them—when I was motivated and somehow rose early and jogged along the Hudson. The bliss of fully occupying my body. I miss just standing in my kitchen, losing myself in the slow meditations that come with making tea. Me and my simple, stupid rituals. My unspectacular, operating body, that wonder.

  Oliver wouldn’t show me the kitchen until he’d finished every last installation. When he finally brought me up the elevator and removed his hands from my eyes, it took me a second to take it all in—he’d made so many promises, and I’d known it would be impressive, sure. Still I squealed and hopped in place. Then I started laughing. I couldn’t believe it, what he’d made for me. Right now I’m not sure there will be another time that he sidles up behind me and puts his hands beneath my hem and caresses. It’s hard to believe I’ll ever again grab on to the counter edges and widen my stance. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the chance, if I even want it. This realization sends tremors through me; I’m repulsed and turned on at once.

  I think about the two of us on the couch after a dinner party. We’ve finished gossiping and tied up loose ends, and are at once wired and weary. I think about the joy of his alcohol-soaked kisses, about that combination of desire and exhaustion, when you are teasing, wanting to play, while also wanting nothing more than to sleep. He’s the only person in the world who knows my longtime fantasies: old fat men of power taking me, using me, their little slut.

  Right now, my desire has me ashamed. Worse than my shame is fear. Will I ever stand in our kitchen and make a big Sunday breakfast for Doe? Will we ever lick the frosting from the side of a bowl?

  “The transplant is very stressful on a heart,” explains a new, stooping doctor. “Let’s make sure your heart is strong enough.” He speaks as a nurse grasps and kneads the long muscles in my arm, my biceps going squishy, giving way as if she were squeezing a tube of warm whipped potatoes. After an excruciating amount of time, she summons a vein. Hurrying so she can keep it, she punctures my arm. When I am not wincing, I notice the syringe is odd looking, lined with a slate-gray metal.

  The IV withdraws my blood; I’m told it will get mixed with radioactive isotopes, then shot back into my body. The nurse secures the line, helps wrap my feet in paper footies, leads me to a stationary bike in the room’s corner. A technician enters from the other side of a glass wall and starts adjusting the bike seat. He guides my still-tender chest against a special camera. I’m supposed to place one arm on the bike for balance, while the syringed arm must hug the camera, keeping it close. As best I can understand, the camera will track the radioactive isotopes through my bloodstream.

  “We’ll do the bike at three levels of resistance,” the doctor says. “Twenty miles per hour at first level. Then thirty. Then the most difficult. We want you pedaling harder and harder so the cameras can check the different chambers of your heart.”

  I start out okay, eager to show that I can do this. But holding the camera to my chest is awkward, and not easy, especially with the technician telling me, “Keep it still.” Before long the pedals start feeling weighed down: getting them to roll over to each next rotation is a slog, as if I’m pushing through thick mud. I start breathing hard, but manage to finish the second level. The third is too much, I can’t do two pedal rotations.

  When the doctor comes in, I am bent over the bicycle, sucking for air. I look at him and feel the desperation in my eyes.

  “All righty.” The doctor watches me, hunched over the bicycle, watching him. I see his concern, that familiar pity.

  He turns to the technician, behind the glass in an adjacent room. “Do the second level again. Maybe that will get it.”

  —

  They salvage eight decent photos; twenty would be ideal. I traipse around cones, drink radioactive dye, sit under scanners. Results are inconclusive. No one’s pumping a fist and shouting You can do it, but then we don’t need bells and whistles. Ambiguity is solid. The powers don’t have a clear case for pulling the plug, and not stopping us is more than enough. It’s astonishing, the relief. This is going to happen. And an all but hysterical panic. This is happening.

  —

  My mom comes back down for the weekend, energetic and helpful as always, wanting to get everything, pack everything, take care of me. I feel her love for me. Just as obvious is how excited she is to take the baby back to Vermont. Her anticipation. Being a parent is supposed to give you a true appreciation for what your parents went through for you. Maybe I need to try to concentrate on appreciating my mother more. But I am small. I feel so jealous, robbed yet again, in yet another way.

  I remember my own girlhood, surviving snowy afternoons playing dress-up in Mom’s closet. I remember leafing through her magazines, admiring pretty ladies, their spectacular frocks. I so clearly remember playing Mommy, pretending to be a grown-up. That I might not get to see my own daughter do these things, that I might not get to model the grown-up, the mommy, for my girl, it is too much. If I start to think about my Doe, lonely, forced to occupy the same rooms I was in, without me…

  I know these thoughts aren’t good for anyone.

  —

  So here I am, suffering through yet another Last Night Before I Go Back In. Tonight, I’m wishing I had a lobotomy—if they’d scooped out my frontal lobe, I wouldn’t have to be present for what they’re going to do to me.

  This last weekend has been impossibly beautiful, and it has been slow-drip torture. The specter of one of those hospi
tal beds, the beeping IV tower, the fluorescent light—it’s all coming. I watched Doe sleep this morning: she kept snuggling closer to me, her face an inch away from mine, slack and soft, pacifier hanging half out of her mouth. She reaches for my hand; hers is so tiny in mine, so trusting. She takes me for granted; I want her to be able to take me for granted. But I wonder if she’s clingy because she understands things better than I give her credit for. I watched her this morning, tried to soak in her breaths. Nothing is more important than feeling her, hearing her, smelling her baby smell, melting next to her, knowing this peace. At the same time, the pressure I feel to enjoy these moments, it crushes me.

  If I really believed all the chants I repeat, if the lessons and meditations had actually stuck, then not having a guarantee could become beautiful.

  I know I don’t want to die. I’m not ready for that—to not see her or put her down for bed or change her diaper or eat her toes.

  But I have to let go of when we will see each other again. I have to trust that it will be when we are both healthy enough to enjoy each other.

  I can still taste the blood running inside my mouth, damage from the mouth guard I had to wear during my EKG test. I had to get a drug for my throat that makes my tongue hard, and also makes it feel too large for the inside of my mouth. My fingers keep tingling, and seem dense to me, not the numbness that comes from sleeping on your hand, but an impenetrable, unworkable density, peanut brittle that’s been left on a counter for days. I am under orders to wash my chest tonight. I have to stop eating and drinking at midnight. I need to learn the words to prayers I am afraid to speak.

  —

  She’s in my arms, heavy-lidded, eyes unfocused and gunked. I rock her into my bosom, inhale her slightly sour scent. I transfer everything I have through my eyes—all my love, lifetimes of love—through my pressed hand on her chest, through my pounding and suspect heart. Oliver pays the driver, instructs him to take my mother and Doe back to the apartment. He asks if my mother has the spare keys. I barely acknowledge him, and say nothing about his newly shaved scalp.

  —

  That dead-stretch stillness before the dawn. Whitman’s church façade looks even more ancient when coated with shadows. The lobby is a mausoleum, everything muted and somber.

  Waiting at the admissions desk, I see another version of myself: a wraith of a woman, diminished in her sweatpants. She already has on the same protective mask and rubber gloves that I’ll be wearing. I recognize, from behind the desk, those familiar and gorgeous braids; today they’ve been knotted in an intricate pile of tight cornrows. Flesh spills over from kitty-cat scrubs, Yolanda is doing her thing, growling throaty denials into the phone. Now she grabs the phone from out of her neck’s crook. She pounds it onto the desk, then shouts back into the phone’s speaker end: “Gertie, why the fuck you think this woman coming up in here at the ass crack of dawn? You gonna get this woman to surgery fore doctors go they rounds, fore them patients is up and wanting breakfast. I ain’t playing now.”

  Oliver wheels me toward the desk. Brows rise; chocolate irises go cartoon large.

  “Listen, Mrs. Culvert, we backed up to shit. I’m doing what I can, but you gonna have a wait.”

  “May we go outside?” I answer. “To get some air?”

  —

  Without help, I shuffle through the automatic opening doors and embrace the morning dew soft and light on my face. Frost comes into my lungs, spreads out a solid chill like a picnic blanket. The sky is still in prelude to dawn’s silver hours, a royal and depthless blue. I head southward, toward the towering Queensboro as it trails off. Beside me, Oliver’s concern radiates like heat. He’s right; I need to be careful.

  “Walking feels good,” I say. “The air is refreshing.”

  Two men have finished pushing their bagel cart into place at the corner. They’re breathing heavily as they unlock the stand. Though my orders do not allow me any liquids, a bottled water sounds deeply satisfying, and we get in line behind two people. I find myself ravenous for that first sip, and stare at a picture taped to the cart’s smudged glass—the freckle rash of poppy seeds on the bagel’s dough, the paste-thick schmear of cream cheese. Cars whoosh down the FDR. I imagine starched hospital sheets against my skin, that stale air recirculating.

  A month, if I am lucky.

  We sit on a bench, the air sharply cold, the damp wood soaking into my jacket and sweatpants. I remember staring out the window, as a girl, while the sun rose over green mountains. I remember looking up into the night sky from that stretcher and seeing the snow come down. I stick out my tongue again, this time licking condensation from chapped lips. Chewing at his roll, Oliver watches. I know he wants to comfort me; but he doesn’t, allowing me these moments. Dawn has started in double time now, the sky lightening in a way that to me seems layered and spectacular and wholly indescribable.

  Then the hospital beeper goes off. Then Oliver looks at me, his eyes hurried, questioning. I see that he’s afraid, but also pressing. I recognize his utter investment, his belief, in what is about to happen. I brace, start to get up, then think, No. Releasing my grip from the side of the bench, I lean back and look up, toward the gloaming, and give my face to the morning dew. Oliver moves to help me upright, then lets me be, and I keep looking. It is all so plain; it is all so beautiful.

  —

  Powdered plastic gloves snap around wrists: low-dosage morphine drips. I hear background murmurs, exchanged remarks. Above me are a trio of masked and scrubbed bodies. They are concerned with how frail I look. A looming nurse is aware enough to distract me with small talk. Casual as a dowager discussing a Broadway play, she asks if I am ready for my transplant month. She uses rubbing alcohol to coat a nozzle, which is attached to the end of a plastic tube. The tube seems oddly large: “Like something frat boys suck beer through,” I slur. Someone is slathering brown cleaning goop on a cotton swab stick: in three widening rotations, the goop is swabbed around that bruised juncture, right before jugular meets clavicle.

  “It’s going to be a long month,” the nurse tsk-tsks. “I just hope you’re ready.”

  What’s wrong with you? I want to respond. Why would you say that? Except some sort of honeyed light is spreading through me. It’s nice enough, and I start to fade, feel my eyes flutter. Then a sensation hits, sharp pain, more concentrated, more focused, than any I have experienced during any central line installation. I wince, and moan, and shut my eyes so tight that I can feel the sides of my face cracking. The pain corkscrews further, boring in deeper. I hear myself, an animal in distress. “More morphine. Give me more morphine.”

  “There there,” says the scrub nurse. “Why the central is bigger, and it hurts so much. If you had a thinner line, the stem cells could break.”

  —

  My next awareness is a pulsing. At the base of my neck.

  My mind is dull, packed in cotton; my body feels fragile, every outer layer peeled away. I check the throb. Near my clavicle, gauze and plastic tape pile; a series of butterfly stitches keep the tube embedded in my skin. I follow the plastic line and discover I’ve been connected to an IV, they already have something pumping. I’m in a room that is all shadows, not much natural light, these weirdly angled walls jutting together like the sides of a huge, three-dimensional pizza. It’s a small room, though. Small and triangular. Now, someone is stroking the side of my face.

  I’m not used to seeing Tilda like this, in a fitted coffee-colored jacket. The satin blouse beneath is the color of a cinnamon stick, and flashes as she moves. Tilda’s hair has been styled into a layered bob, the bangs cut straight across the middle of her forehead.

  “Vision of loveliness,” I say. “Gorgeous woman.”

  Tilda smiles. “This old schmatta? Part of the gig. I took a few hours off. Schlepped over from the magazine.” Her bellow brings me joy. “I never get tired of that joke,” she says.

  Now the nurse wheels in a sturdy IV stand, its base visibly wider than the regular ones, its pole more broad
. Branches extend for extra bags. Four battery packs are attached. Now the glow of level monitors imbues the room in radioactive green.

  “All that talk about the rooms on the transplant floor being nice and big,” Tilda says, pretending to speak to me. “The only window is actually behind your bed. You don’t even get a view.”

  The nurse pauses from plugging in the final pack. “I checked like you wanted. Ward’s in capacity. There are six people ahead of Mrs. Culbert for the other rooms.”

  I ask Tilda if my backpack is near. She hands it over, and I withdraw a small journal, its pink suede cover still pristine. My newest Receiving Journal; I made Oliver take a special trip to get it. Flipping to the first page, I ask the nurse for her name. Half a page is scribbled with dates, corresponding names, and a note, including, I quickly see, Donnay, Orderly, “stay black stay strong.” On the first unused line, I write. Maggie. I write vitals. Will run my first day itinerary. This is part of my plan. Whenever somebody is going to do something for me, take me somewhere, give me anything, I am going to make a note. A series of short, sweet anchors. This is how I will survive.

  —

  Not five minutes in and we’ve got beeping, one of the battery consoles blinking red. Maggie rolls her eyes. Checking, she resets the battery, doubles back to get my blood pressure sleeve and start my vital signs. She scans my chart and says my name, but this time with a question. Am I the one friends with Yolanda?

  A smile. “Girl, Yolanda put the word out. We supposed to keep an eye peeled on how you doing.”

  I thank her again. Maggie opens up, embracing me as one of her own. In short order, she confirms what I’d begun to suspect—that my radiation will not begin today, which makes sense, but still disappoints. Maggie commiserates, lets me know that Dr. Blasco also will not be in today, but is monitoring my numbers and test results. Maggie has procedural forms for me to sign and initial. She has guidelines. She has a sheet that asks if scraps from my biopsies can be used in teaching labs.