Reading Madame Bovary

by Amanda Lohrey

  Other women

  Other women who know her say she was a meticulous mother. That the children were always immaculately and fashionably dressed, that they had every opportunity and dance class going, that she interrogated teachers on parent nights with an unrelenting fierceness of demand, that she was hungry, always, for whatever was the right thing, the right circumstance; hungry for opportunity.

  At work she was a stickler for deadlines and protocols. For the correct format. Simple, clean, immaculate grooming. At night she cooked carefully considered, balanced meals. Her dinner parties had a clinical propriety about them: all the right linen, the right silver, the right porcelain; the candelabra just the right size and the flowers set just so; the food cooked to look like the glossy illustrations in her Cordon Bleu series. She herself, of course, ate little, making excuses about eating the children’s leftovers beforehand (‘Can’t bear waste’). Yet she was, I imagine, too fastidious a woman to eat even a lover’s leftovers.

  When our lease expired

  When our lease expired and our time was up we wandered about the house, flat-footed, doleful. The interior of the house became repugnant to us; its bland department-store style which had once amused us and we had so comfortably patronised now provoked us.

  We sneered at those complacent books in the bookshelves. We were grumpy and scornful. We were mourning in advance for the loss of the sundeck.

  The morning we left we were querulous and accident-prone. Ben grazed his shins badly when he fell on the steep drive, loading his bike onto the roof-rack; in the kitchen, Carla cut her thumb on a broken glass that had smashed in the packing. As we drove off, Ben slouched down as far as he could into a corner of the back seat, staring ahead. ‘Goodbye suburbia!’ exclaimed Carla theatrically, but as we drove away down the steep winding drive I could see her in the rear-vision mirror, casting a last look back at the redwood sundeck.

  In just under an hour we had returned to our inner-city terrace. The mould grew in smoky green smudges on the wallpaper; the small courtyard, now more claustrophobic than ever, was cluttered with dried leaves. We hauled our suitcases, our boxes and our jumble into the dark hallway, turned the lights on in every room of the house, locked the car (no off-street parking) and then walked up the hill, exhausted, to our local Italian restaurant, Rugatini’s. Ben said (too emphatically) that thank God he didn’t have to eat any more frozen pizza and could get the real thing, and I drank a toast to smog, cigarettes and good coffee.

  Carla didn’t say anything.

  At night, sometimes

  At night, sometimes, I lie awake and try to recall her living room or her kitchen. And the odd thing is, it’s all become a blur. I can barely recall a single object; I know there were copper saucepans and leather couches and tapestry cushions but I can’t see them in my mind’s eye. The outlines merge and blur. Even the sundeck recedes into the native bushes that encroach on it, the banksia, the wattle and the fern. And yet I can visualise, with the utmost precision, that little book in the dark cupboard. The diary of her body. Her fine handwriting, neat and precise; the catalogue of her weights; her mileage in the pool and on the road; the Thursday evening ritual with the scales and the clinical notation of her weight underlined in red; the repetition of that one phrase, like a mantra, So tired. The strict format, day after day; no deviation, except, now and then, in the margin, the drawing of a dolphin.

  It’s then, near to sleep, that I close my eyes on the headline. WOMAN TURNS INTO DOLPHIN. SWIMS AWAY AND LEAVES FAMILY DISCONSOLATE ON THE SHORE, WAVING. And there she is, streamlining through the dark water; sleek, poised and perfect.

  The Art of Convalescence

  They told her to be at the hospital by seven in the morning, so she set the alarm for five-thirty. Greg got up and dressed Annie, who was already awake and calling from her cot. While the two of them munched on toast she packed her bag and tried to ignore the feeling of dread.

  They drove first to her mother’s house to drop off Annie, who sang all the way. Her mother was in the kitchen in her red Chinese dressing-gown, sipping from a mug of tea. As they left she put her weathered gardener’s hand on Toni’s arm and said: ‘Ring me as soon as you know anything.’

  Greg dropped her at the entrance to the public wing of the big private hospital. ‘I’ll see you up there,’ he said, and went off to park. It was a hospital in the east of the city made up of a motley complex of buildings from different eras and built in different styles, some newer than others but none that was attractive. The public wing was an old building, ten storeys high, and uninviting. She made enquiries in the foyer with an elderly nun and then walked the length of the main corridor until she found the lifts.

  The eighth floor was shabby. The air was stale. In the middle of the floor was a circular desk-station where three women sat at computer screens. Corridors and rooms led away from them in all directions. When she presented herself to a middle-aged woman whom she took to be a receptionist, the woman was offhand. ‘Sit over there,’ she said, ‘and someone will bring you the forms.’

  She carried her bag over to the waiting area, which faced the reception desk. There were old vinyl chairs pressed against the walls and a small coffee table of scuffed wood. She had brought a book with her but was not yet in a mood to settle to it so she looked at the magazines on the coffee table and counted them. There were five: three yachting magazines that were four years out of date and two golfing magazines that were even older.

  Greg emerged from the lift looking ill at ease and anxious. He sat beside her on a chair that had a rip in the vinyl and the stuffing let out a sigh of escaped air. He put his hand on her knee and rested it there. Neither of them felt like talking. There was an old portable TV perched high on a shelf and they could see the presenters of the breakfast show mouthing away but there was no sound. After a while Greg got up and went over to the reception desk.

  ‘Is it possible to adjust the sound on the TV?’ he asked.

  The woman looked up. ‘Someone stole the remote,’ she said, and went back to her keyboarding.

  Greg came back to his chair and they exchanged a look. He reached across and picked up a magazine, glanced at the cover and tossed it back on the table. ‘Nineteen ninety-eight,’ he said, almost wheezing in disgust. ‘Can’t they do better than that?’

  She tried to make a joke of it. ‘I’m sure there are a lot of yachties in the public wards of hospitals. We’re an affluent country.’ It wasn’t helping that he was jittery.

  After about forty minutes a young nurse presented herself with a clipboard and forms. ‘My, you’re here early,’ she said.

  ‘They told me to be here by seven.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t know why they would have said that. You needn’t have got here until nine-thirty. You’re not scheduled until noon.’

  Noon. That was a five-hour wait.

  ‘Well, they told her seven,’ said Greg, with irritable emphasis, and she could tell he was beginning to burn a fuse.

  An old man sitting opposite got up and shuffled over to the reception desk and they heard him ask for a toilet. With a curt gesture the woman pointed back to where he had come from and they realised that the toilet was a small room, like a broom cupboard, in the middle wall of the waiting area. My God, she thought, no privacy. The door of the toilet was only a metre away from where she was sitting and the smallness of the waiting room, and its drabness, seemed to enlarge the awkward intimacy of its nearness. The old man looked embarrassed and glanced at no-one as he opened the door. They could hear the sound of urine trickling into the bowl. Greg leaned back into his chair, folded his arms and sighed.

  She realised that she didn’t want Greg to wait with her. Bad enough that she had to sit here all this time. She turned to him.

  ‘You go,’ she said.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I brought a book. And I’m tired. I might doze a bit.’ This was a lie. She had never in her life managed to sleep while sitting upright in a
chair.

  ‘Will you be okay?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was reluctant to leave but she insisted, even if, as she watched him disappear into the lift, she felt a pang. He was so worried about her, she could tell, but she knew he hated hospitals and it didn’t help to have the place inflicted on them both.

  At around ten-thirty a brisk young nurse appeared and told her she was to get up and go into an office across the way to see Dr. White. The doctor was a gangly young intern who rose from his seat, introduced himself and shook her hand. For the next ten minutes he proceeded to take her details and he was so polite, so considerate that he made her feel vaguely tearful. She had been in the building over three hours and he was the first person who had been nice to her. Perhaps, because he was new here, he had yet to take on the institutionalised brusqueness of the others, although she saw in his manners the kind of shy, well-brought-up young man, earnestly academic and well-intentioned, that she recognised from her days as a teacher.

  Although it must all have been in her file, to her surprise he asked her to tell him why she was there. Perhaps it was a first-line precaution, a way of checking that they had the right person. She told him about the pain, and the slight breakthrough bleeding, and was as matter-of-fact as she could be. She did not say that she had gone to work on one of those radiant mornings that make her feel glad to be alive, a morning when the light glitters on the river and the birds warble beside the deck of her apartment and the young water dragons scamper insouciantly along the drive in a way that makes her laugh out loud. She had gone to work and gone to the loo and found the blood there, and thought, ‘Shit!’

  Her doctor, Pamela Kerr, was thorough. Two years before, she’d had a patient die of ovarian cancer, diagnosed too late, and she wasn’t going to let it happen again. She had dispatched Toni, without delay, for an ultrasound and sure enough that ghostly picture had revealed some kind of growth inside her left ovary. The ultrasound specialist was perplexed. He had not seen one like that before. He could not say whether it meant trouble.

  She did not have private health cover but she was busy at work and did not want to spend a long time waiting in the corridors of a public hospital so she booked into a specialist as a private patient just to get a quick diagnosis. She did not want it to be preying on her mind. She was thirty-nine, and while in her own mind she was still young she knew that she had moved now into that bracket where women begin to die. She did not want Death to be shadowing her every move; she did not want grey areas; she wanted clarity and results.

  The gynaecologist’s name was Neil McCormack and he was a young man, she guessed around her own age. He said it would be best to open her up and have a look.

  ‘And then what?’ she asked.

  Well, he said, he would begin with a laparoscopy. If the ovary looked ‘dodgy’ he’d snip it out and have it tested. Couldn’t he tell by looking? she asked. No, he said, only by taking it to the pathology lab. And if he found ‘something else’ in the abdomen, if it looked ‘ugly’, he might have to ‘remove the lot’, by which he meant a complete hysterectomy. If there were ‘other signs’ – if it had spread – he would call in an oncologist who would take over. ‘It’s impossible to say’, he said, while her mind reeled at the open-ended scenario he was constructing here. She knew doctors were nervous now, that they feared litigation, that they made no promises, offered no assurances; they must cover themselves against every eventuality. But the prospect of going into surgery where there might be nothing at all wrong, or there might be everything wrong, unnerved her. How do you prepare mentally for the unknown?

  She thought of the second child she was desperate to have. There was nothing she wanted more. She even had dreams about this child, this child as yet unborn. She thought of what it might mean to die in early middle age, with Annie left behind. Who would look after her?

  ‘Aren’t ovarian cysts common?’ she asked. She had of course Googled them. ‘And I gather most are benign and you can’t take all of them out or thousands of women would be in surgery.’

  He shrugged, and reached for a tissue to wipe his nose. He had a cold. She glanced across at the tissue box, which sat beside a photograph of three small children. His abundance, she thought, his own sweet fruit.

  ‘I don’t have private health insurance,’ she said. ‘I take it I’ll have to get a referral to see a surgeon at a public hospital.’

  He mentioned the name of a big hospital. ‘I could see you there as an intermediate patient. In that category you pay just for the hospital facilities,’ he said, meaning he would bulk bill her for his own services.

  ‘How much?’ she asked.

  ‘Around three thousand dollars.’

  They had cut to the chase quickly. It was a business. She shook her head. ‘I couldn’t manage that.’

  ‘I also do a public list there,’ he said, ‘and I could arrange for you to be put on it, but this is your choice, it’s up to you.’

  It wasn’t until she got home that she realised he was offering to do her a favour, and she wondered why. It wasn’t as if she were manifestly poor. She wished she could like him more, but he was cold. He had pale skin, pale-blond hair and a wart on his forehead. He wore austere rimless glasses that made him look like a lab scientist.

  After she had signed yet more forms for the intern, Dr. White, she returned to the waiting area and rummaged in her overnight bag for the book she had brought with her. But it was no good. It wasn’t that she read the same sentence over and over again – she managed to get through three pages – but that the words were transparent; meaning leached out of them, and the more she tried to concentrate the more they floated off the page.

  ‘Toni?’

  She looked up and saw her friend Cathy leaning over her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I had to deliver some parcels to Jackson’s and I thought I’d pop in and see how you were going.’

  She smiled. Cathy worked nearby, but still, she was touched.

  ‘Won’t you get into trouble?’

  ‘It’s alright. I’ve got flex-time owing. It must be awful just sitting here.’

  She knew that Cathy was referring to the uncertainty of the outcome, of not knowing what to expect, rather than the dullness of being in this shabby space. But she was relieved to see her. At a time like this it was good to have the company of another woman.

  Cathy began to fossick among the magazines. ‘A new take on the winged hull,’ she read, and rolled her eyes. ‘These magazines are off.’

  ‘Tragic.’

  ‘Want me to get you some from the kiosk?’

  ‘I brought a book.’ She retrieved it from her bag and held it up like a flag.

  They talked for a while, a little gossip, a new movie that Toni must see when she was – here Cathy hesitated. What was the right word? When she was out? When she was better? And the question hovered between them: what if she were not better?

  After a while Cathy stood up and said, in the muted, confidential voice that people use in hospitals, ‘I’d better get back to work.’ They kissed lightly and for a moment the waterworks threatened to return. Cathy had been a welcome distraction, concerned for her but not stricken with anxiety like Greg. None of that angry masculine fuming that sent up smoke in an attempt to conceal the fear. It was bad enough dealing with her own dread. Did she have to read that article last week about a woman in Sydney, not much older, who had gone into surgery for a facelift only to die unexpectedly of a stroke on the operating table? When she was in her twenties the idea of a general anaesthetic hadn’t fazed her. Why now did she hate the idea of going under? She was older, that’s why, and her youthful sense of invincibility had been mislaid, somewhere in the vicinity of thirty-five. Or was it thirty? These things crept up on you while you were busy filling in your diary and planning your next holiday. A week on the south coast in November? Sure. Oh, and by the way, suddenly I’m aware of being mortal, a body in decline.

  She
could smell Death in the corridors of this place. In this place, this big public institution, there was no attempt made to camouflage it. No vases of fresh flowers, no elegant artwork, no pastel drapery at the windows, no coffee and basket of muffins and latest Vogue, all of which were in the private wing across the way where she had visited a friend last year. Here there were only the bare essentials: a chair, a bed, a surgeon, a knife.

  At their second consultation, McCormack had repeated to her that it was ‘her choice’. The blood samples he had sent off for cancer analysis had been ‘inconclusive’. The growth might be benign. It might be that it could sit there for years with no ill effects. ‘It’s your choice,’ he said again. She went away and thought about this, but once the idea is planted in your head, the idea of Death, it becomes impossible to rid yourself of it. It begins to stalk you like a shadow that has no body of its own and is seeking to attach itself to yours. In the weeks before her admission to hospital she was unable to shake free of it, and at night her dreams were lurid. There was one where she was lost in a series of dark alleys and searching, with sick terror, for a child in old-fashioned swaddling clothes, a child who ran ahead of her and disappeared into the crowd. She woke in a sweat, and groaned aloud so that Greg rolled over and put his arm around her. Then there was the dream where she was trapped in a damp, dark room with walls of spongy tissue that breathed and bled.

  The brisk nurse came over again. ‘Sorry, but we’ve had an emergency admission and we’ve had to put you back until two-thirty.’ Two-thirty.

  Nothing to eat, and only water to drink. I can’t stay here in this ghastly room, she said to herself, and got up suddenly and walked to the lifts, leaving her overnight bag behind on the vinyl chair.

  For the next hour she walked around the industrial area that surrounded the hospital: warehouses, tyre depots, trucking companies. It was all grey and gritty. She went into a small shop that printed slogans onto T-shirts. Yes, they did one-offs, said the swarthy young man behind the counter. What did she have in mind? She thought of a souvenir shirt she might commission, some words of black humour, but her wits were dulled by fear and nothing came to mind.