The couple did not last. How do you learn to live with a ghost? How do you live as a ghost? Geraldine shook her head at the magazine – the gall, to publish such a strange, head-spinning story and then leave it in the waiting room at the breast-cancer clinic. Did they not understand that people like her – widowed at fifty-two, lumpy boobs – wanted outfit contests and gossip, not contemporary tuna casseroles and explorers risen from the dead? She closed the magazine. Jerome appeared to be sleeping. His chest was rising with some regularity and his hands hung relaxed off the ends of the chair’s arms. Perhaps Geraldine should also sleep. Sleep took her suddenly these days; often the mere thought of it sedated her, bringing weight to her limbs and eyelids.
When Jerome woke up, the woman, Geraldine, was still sleeping, her messy bun lopsided on the top of her head. He wondered if she was sick like his mother. He wondered if she had children, and where those children were now. He imagined dinnertime at Geraldine’s house. He saw speckled granite countertops – he had learned about these from his magazine, they were the rage. He saw eggshell-coloured walls and eggs lined up in the fridge like little round white soldiers. He saw a long wooden table and a place for everyone. The food on the plates was colourful and subdivided, complete.
At his house, Jerome was the cook. It had not always been this way; the arrangement had evolved. There were a few things he was really good at – sausages and mashed potatoes a babysitter had taught him (she called it bangers and mash – rude in his opinion), a jerk chicken his auntie cooked, a beef stir-fry he just made up and refined with some help from the internet. And he made sure the fridge was full of the types of sauces that could make plain pasta taste fancy, the freezer stocked with pizzas and pot pies. He never wrote it down but he had a schedule in his head too: what dinners for which day, a checklist for what was running low. He knew the aisles of the supermarket, the placement of products, like he knew the stairwells of his apartment complex – which were sketchy, which might mean the right kind of business.
His girlfriend Carla was a terrible cook. She was like a kid in the kitchen. The one time he went to her house for lunch she slapped together a peanut-butter sandwich for him – it was like a flat little cake made of white bread and brown frosting. Not nutritious at all. But he didn’t say anything. She was an only child. Two parents but mostly TV.
Jerome stared at Geraldine. She looked like an animal asleep – a dog dreaming, legs twitching, eyeballs all crazy with chase under the lids.
Geraldine woke up with a start and a sob that was followed by another sob and another, until she was shaking in her seat, her arms wrapped around herself for protection and warmth and something else she did not want to name, or could not. Intimacy, maybe. Love. A poor approximation of the touch of someone she had known and not known for twenty-three years.
And next to her, Jerome’s face, alarmed.
‘Do you have cancer? Do you have breast cancer?’ he called to her as if the sobbing might have deafened or retarded her somewhat.
‘No,’ said Geraldine. ‘Well, I don’t know. My husband’s dead.’
‘Fuck,’ said Jerome. ‘That sucks. When?’
Geraldine breathed more deeply, calmed by his concern. ‘Six months ago. I’m sorry, Jerome. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘'S’okay,’ Jerome said. ‘I wasn’t really upset. How did he die?’
'A car accident,’ she replied. ‘A drunk driver.’
‘I never knew anybody died in a crash,’ Jerome said. His friend Tyrell was stabbed in middle school by his other friend Joseph, and his friend Rogelio once drove his mother’s car into a cement planter because he smoked too much pot, but no one hurt or killed by cars. ‘Did you see the body?’
Geraldine loved this question, its clueless indelicacy and important curiosity.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But only after they had cleaned him up.’
Jerome nodded.
‘I wanted to see him bloody and broken. The social worker said no, to live with that vision would be … terrible.’ But it would be real, Geraldine had said. Real is not always the best thing, her therapist had said later. But Geraldine wasn’t so sure.
‘Maybe,’ said Jerome. ‘But you’d know.’
‘Exactly,’ said Geraldine. She thought at that moment that she would gladly buy crack from this boy, whatever it took for him to feel accepted and useful. ‘What ’bout you? What you in for?’ Geraldine made her voice a bit twangy and cowboyish.
‘Oh,’ said Jerome. ‘My moms. She had to have a breast removed. A mastectomy.’ He said this last word carefully, reverently, cognizant of its seriousness, the power and respect that accuracy commands. Jerome had never encountered the word euphemism; nevertheless, he was not a boy who believed in the cloaking of facts. ‘Tell me,’ he sometimes said to the boys in his crew. And what he meant was: The Truth.
‘I’m sorry,’ Geraldine said. ‘How awful.’ Something about Jerome moved her, even as his attitude and general comportment continued to irk her.
There was a feeling Geraldine got sometimes, talking to people who, like her, had endured a terrible loss. It was not a kind feeling. She felt almost disdainful of those who believed that what they had endured – a mother whose MS had wasted her slowly over the years; a brother who hung himself in the garage, using the box that contained his children’s old board games to stand on; a dear friend whose heart attacked while she was teaching a Grade 2 class; a child, dear God, a child – was somehow equivalent to her own pain, her own cavernous emptiness. Really, she would say, how terrible. But these were mere words. She did not feel them. Instead, what she felt was indignation. She had been wronged, terribly misunderstood, and knew it was up to her to set matters straight. This very burden of proof, this responsibility, also angered her. She could not say exactly what it was she had done or who she had supposedly harmed, although on some level it seemed she knew.
She had a friend when she was in high school – potty-mouthed and beautiful – who used to say her mother made her so angry she could feel it in her cunt. Geraldine disliked the word, of course, how could she not (half cat, half blunt, all back-of-the-throat bile), but she understood what her friend meant. Perhaps she did not have the empathetic reserves required; they had all been exhausted in missing Simon. Or perhaps she had always been selfish and it was only now, when forced to confront her own vulnerability, that this selfishness was coming boldly to the fore. She could not feel sympathy for any of these people in her cunt. In her core.
But she felt it now. She felt it for Jerome. But no, not sympathy but kinship – like they were rowing along together in the same little rickety boat.
‘Yeah,’ Jerome said. ‘It’s awful. What about you?’ His eyes flicked down to her chest, then up to her face. He cleared his throat.
‘Yeah,’ said Geraldine. ‘These.’ She cupped her breasts with two hands briefly, hoisted them up to her chin and released them. ‘I get a lot of lumps – fibroids – and they have to check them out. Just to be sure. To be safe.’
‘Right. Fibroids. To be safe.’ Jerome spoke quietly, robotically.
He looked suddenly stricken, Geraldine thought. With grief? Confusion? ‘Better to be safe than sorry!’ she sang out.
‘Sorry for what?’ Jerome said. Anger had seized him by the nape and was shaking him so that his brain butted up against his skull. Carla said his temper would be his downfall one day. Tragic flaw were the words she used.
‘I don’t know,’ said Geraldine. ‘I mean ... I’m sorry.’
‘Better safe than sorry,’ Jerome parroted. He kicked his foot out in front of him violently, but there was nothing there to kick, no physical connection, and the movement unbalanced him, sent him reeling into Geraldine, who pushed him gently back into his seat.
He closed his eyes. I have to have one lopped off, his mother had said wryly, holding his hand. At first Jero
me had not understood the word. It sounded like chop, but also like floppy, and the French word for rabbit, alpine (he had always remembered that one, and vache for cow). He saw a cartoon bunny, but knew there were breasts involved, and for a horrible moment he pictured his mother with two floppy ears protruding from her chest. He saw a cleaver glinting on the counter.
‘Oh, God,’ said Geraldine. ‘Can we just start over?’ She felt terrible.
Jerome shook his head, then turned to face her. In fact, he got right up in her face.
Geraldine recoiled as much as her seat allowed, then corrected herself.
Jerome shook his head again, and sucked his teeth reprovingly. ‘You got kids?’
‘A daughter,’ Geraldine replied. ‘But she’s gone.’
‘Dead too?’ He looked like he might cry.
Geraldine understood. He was primed to see tragedy everywhere. And tragedy was everywhere, if you peered through the right lens. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Away at school. McGill University – in Montreal.’
‘Oh,’ he said.
Geraldine might have said Mars. Still, she persisted. ‘She came home for the funeral, of course. But I didn’t want her to interrupt her studies, the momentum of what she’s doing. It’s important to have a purpose, I think, at a time like this ... She’s studying chemical engineering, still unusual for a woman, really.’
‘How old?’ Jerome said.
‘Oh, she’ll be twenty next month – I can’t believe it. Twenty. It’s just such a large, round number, isn’t it?’
Jerome nodded. He had imagined younger children, despite the streaks of white in Geraldine’s hair. He tried to picture Geraldine’s daughter, but instead thought about Carla, and how she’d let him do it to her for the second time. How it felt in there. How much he wanted it and the deep expansive sadness he felt when he got it. She was a Brazilian girl, long hot-pink fingernails and soft melting brown eyes. She did something with her eyelashes so they stuck straight out like zombie fingers reaching up from a grave. The effect was disturbing and gorgeous. She was smart too, and not just on the street. Had an 80 average she hid like a prison record. Jerome was a little bit scared of her and probably in love with her. He wanted to keep doing it with her so he could find out.
‘What about you, Jerome? What do you want to do?’
Jerome was startled by the question. Maybe she’d seen the thoughts playing across his face? He imagined saying it: I wanna do Carla. He laughed.
‘No, I’m serious. A fine, sensitive man like you, you must have ambitions.’ Geraldine was smiling encouragingly, like a guidance counsellor.
‘I need to make money. Take care of everybody.’ Jerome sniffed and looked away. He had a little brother, a littler sister. No dad. But he had connections. And people who were loyal to him.
Geraldine watched him pull something from his pocket. A handkerchief? No, it was his cellphone, one of the new ones with a screen and a keyboard and a headpiece, and probably a refrigerator in there too somewhere. Jerome was staring at the screen, his brow furrowed.
‘Is everything okay?’ Geraldine didn’t mean this. She meant: Put that thing away while you are having a conversation.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ Jerome waved at her as if she were his secretary.
Just then a woman entered the waiting room from the direction of the examination rooms. She was wearing a lab coat and carrying a clipboard. She looked at Geraldine, then at Jerome, then at the rest of the seats, untenanted, in the waiting room. Then she looked down at her clipboard with the same frown Jerome was giving his cell. Geraldine was getting used to feeling lonely, but this was a new strain of the same disease, the exclusion she felt while the two strangers deciphered messages and weighed options.
‘Are you Alice Yanofsky?’ the woman finally said.
‘No,’ said Geraldine. ‘I’m Geraldine.’ For some reason she felt it unnecessary to give her surname. ‘I’m waiting because my machine, my ultrasound machine, it was broken.’
‘Oh,’ said the woman. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’ She frowned again.
‘That’s Jerome,’ said Geraldine. She pointed with her thumb towards Jerome, who was still busy with his phone, although the introduction of a new human to their surrounds seemed to have piqued his interest somewhat. He held up a casual pointer finger and nodded at the lab-coat woman. One minute. Geraldine raised her eyebrows.
‘I’ll check back in a few minutes,’ the woman said. Then, somewhat quizzically: ‘Thanks.’
Jerome pressed many buttons on his phone, then slid it back into his pocket. ‘What did she want?’ He gestured towards the exam rooms.
‘Oh,’ said Geraldine, ‘nothing.’ She pulled a stick from her bun and let her hair tumble down to her shoulders. Then she twined the hair around her hand and fixed it back into a neat knot.
Jerome watched her, amazed.
‘Nothing to do with us,’ Geraldine added.
‘Nah,’ said Jerome. ‘Still, we been waitin’ a long time.’ He knew something about waiting. When he and his mother arrived at the hospital the day of the mastectomy he could follow her only so far. A nurse had led Jerome’s mother away, and she returned wearing a hospital gown and a shower cap, wheeling an IV beside her, the long tube finding a home in a pale green vein in her arm. She looked old, Jerome thought. And young too. He didn’t like to think about what that might mean. She sat next to him just like Geraldine and they read magazines. Then a man wearing purple scrubs – why would they let a man wear those? – came and said Jerome’s mother’s name. He smiled at Jerome and said, You can come this way – there’s a special room for friends and relatives. Jerome did not like the sound of this. He had been to funerals, and this procedure – these quiet rooms, this general hush and formality – had the same unsettling feel. But he nodded and followed the man, then was too busy reading all the signs along the hallway to notice when his mother left him. He had not said Goodbye, or Good luck, or I love you or even Kanga-poo, which was their thing they sometimes said to each other.
He nodded at Geraldine in case she had asked him a question.
‘Yeah,’ said Geraldine. Waiting was the worst; she wanted to help. ‘Let me tell you a story.’ She paused.
Jerome made a sound she took for assent.
‘It’s an old story about making choices in life. It’s one of Aesop’s fables. Do you know Aesop?’
‘Yeah,’ said Jerome. He didn’t. The guy sounded Jewish. And the story sounded lame. He didn’t trust anybody who told him he had choices, that he should make smart choices. People didn’t choose; they reacted and survived. Or sometimes not. ‘Tell the story,’ he said.
Geraldine was nodding quickly. Jerome had pleased her.
‘Okay, great. So this is the story of A Man, His Boy and His Donkey. Once upon a time, there was a man who decided to go to the market with his boy and his donkey. On the way the boy got tired, and the father decided to let his son ride on the donkey’s back. A group of men passed the man and told him the boy would only get lazier if he let him ride, that the father should be riding because he was older. So the father pulled the boy from the donkey and rode it himself ... ’
Jerome half-listened to Geraldine as the group of travellers met another group of haters who said the father was cruel for letting the son walk, and another who said they should both ride, and still another who said the poor donkey was being overworked and abused.
It was lulling, the way Geraldine spoke, and Jerome could imagine having her voice in his life on a regular basis, a favourite track on his iPod. He was trying not to, but he liked Geraldine. He felt sorry for her, but he liked her too. He could tell she wanted something good for him even if she was old and white and mostly clueless. As a rule, Jerome didn’t appreciate people expecting things from him. It made his throat close up a little. But he had noticed something surprising about G
eraldine: she needed him.
Finally the father and his son tie the donkey to a long pole and carry the animal to give him a break. Jerome found this inexplicably sad.
In the hospital that day, Jerome had taken his seat in the corner of the Visitors’ Waiting Room next to a small, low table covered in pamphlets about healthy eating. The pamphlets made Jerome hungry but he couldn’t leave, could he? What if they needed to contact him? What if his mother needed him? And he had read a sign on the way in that said No Food or Beverage Allowed in Visitors’ Waiting Room. Jerome was not a strict rule follower by nature, but this directive seemed somehow related to the outcome of his mother’s surgery. That there was a way of keeping the sick, starving and sad alive through the solidarity of the living, hungry lot who surrounded them seemed reasonable to Jerome. It was a complicated superstition but as soon as he had created it he believed it absolutely. No food then. And no moving from his chair. It was two hours. He could do that.
Except it was not two hours. The surgery was scheduled to finish at 3:15 pm. At 3:17, Jerome thought there was a delay, which is why no one had come to talk to him. He had seen the messenger who scurried back and forth between the waiting room and some secret space at the end of the corridor. He was a short brown man with slicked-back hair. Jerome broke his own rule, got up from his chair and asked the man where his mother was. Write her name down here, said the messenger in a hushed voice. I’ll go see what’s happening. Thank you, said Jerome with the same hush. He printed the name carefully, in caps, on a small slip of pink paper. The messenger took the paper solemnly and was off down the corridor. He returned after four minutes. Still in surgery, he said to Jerome. That’s all the information I have. Jerome slumped back to his chair. He felt incredibly hungry and also like he might throw up at any second. He put his head between his knees and stayed like that, trembling, until the messenger nudged him at 3:49 to say his mother was out of surgery; she was being transferred to recovery. What Jerome knew about life was perhaps contained in that space between 3:15 and 3:49 pm. It was a barren island he had inhabited during those thirty-four minutes. Nothing but the cutting wind of his own thoughts for company. He understood that the island was much worse than the pain of poverty or prison. He never wanted to go back there.
Mad Hope Page 8
