by Ann Bauer
“Should what, dear?”
“Should have a career, something that made me of use, beyond being just a wife and mother.”
“You’ve been of use,” Olive said starchily, turning into the parking lot. They’d arrived. The torture was about to start. Carmen got out of the car as slowly as she could, then reached down to get the gifts Olive had brought her. “No matter what you might think,” Olive said, as they walked up the concrete path. “You were necessary.”
It was such a strange comment, Carmen remained distracted during the battery of invasive questions and tests that followed. A lab tech dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt had Carmen leave a urine sample, drew her blood, and inserted a needle with a short, floppy tube into the back of her hand. Then he led her into a barnlike room whose walls were lined with chairs that looked like they’d come from a dental office—with padded headrests and feet that could be raised. Each one had an IV stand next to it, a small metal table, an emesis basin. Two patients were lying back already with bright amber fluid flowing into them.
“You’re early,” he said. “Pick your spot.”
“You mean?” She stopped. This was worse than anything that had happened so far. Jobe’s treatments had taken place in a small, private cubicle at Johns Hopkins; now she understood that it had been a favor to someone in his department. “We’re all in this room together? Isn’t there anywhere else?”
At precisely that moment, one of the two patients already receiving treatment lurched forward and vomited with a noisy slosh into his basin; he paused then repeated with a deep, rumbling throat-clearing sound. Then he lay back in his chair and closed his eyes, as if nothing had happened.
The tech seemed not to have noticed. “Nope, this is it. Better for the nurses, you know. They can keep an eye on all of you at the same time.”
Carmen walked forward into this new nightmare. She chose a chair as far from the other two people as she could get, and the tech gamely went to retrieve a folding chair for Olive. But just as Carmen was getting settled in, her feet up and head back, a bald woman with a pinched face, penciled-on eyebrows, and a bag of knitting in her hand came and took the chair immediately to their right.
“I just want to get this over with,” Carmen said to Olive. But they sat for nearly fifteen minutes in tense silence, waiting. A nurse came out with a bag she was holding by the ends and tipping from side to side, but she went directly to the stand behind the bald patient and hung it there, fussing as she attached the tubing to the woman’s IV. “But we were here first!” Carmen cried, loud enough for the woman in the adjoining chair to hear and turn.
It’s no honor, her small eyes seemed to say. Just you wait.
Then another nurse appeared—the twin of the first—with her bag, an even brighter, more luridly orange concoction, and hung it above Carmen’s head. Reaching for the end of the tube that snaked down, she uncapped it without a word and clipped it neatly into the needle in Carmen’s hand. Both she and Olive looked down as the first of the poison entered her body. I can’t believe I’m doing this. Carmen put her head back. This is insane. But she didn’t object. Rather, as in the MRI machine, she lay perfectly still.
“Does it hurt you, dear?”
Carmen looked up and Olive’s face was twisted. Clearly she was in pain, and love for her mother-in-law swelled in Carmen. “No,” she said, reaching out with her free hand to brush the sunny yellow sleeve of Olive’s suit. It was the one bright spot in this barren room, Carmen realized. Like a daisy in the desert. “It’s just, I think about Jobe.” She watched Olive flinch inside her clothes, but it was a small movement and she covered it well. “After watching him go through this, the treatments. You know they killed him—maybe slower than the cancer would have. I don’t know. But doing this …” She glanced at the glowing bag above her head. “It feels like an invitation. Like I’m just inviting death in.”
Olive shook her head. “You’re wrong. This will help you. I saw it in a dream.” She blinked, as if she was appalled at what she’d just said. “Or at least, I think it was a dream. Jobe was there.”
Carmen stared at the ceiling—beige acoustic tiles with tiny holes—and wondered if perhaps she was the one who was sleeping. Or crazy. Or dead already. None of this seemed real, not the chemicals coursing into her arm or the old woman sitting beside her, talking about clairvoyant dreams. She closed her eyes and then recalled something.
“Luca talks about this, too, getting messages from Jobe.” Now Carmen was floating, the hum of other voices in the room comforting rather than intrusive, her legs heavy in the chair. “I didn’t believe him.” Was this true?
“Believe him,” came Olive’s voice through the haze. “And believe Jobe when he comes to you.”
Carmen shook her head, side to side on the padded cushion of the chair. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.”
Carmen peeked. The room was full now, lit with fluorescents, but thankfully cool. Some people had covered themselves with quilts. “What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about my son, how he loved you. And how you …” She stopped and examined the back of one liver-spotted hand. “Loved him.”
“Olive, I …” Carmen’s stomach twisted. Was it the chemo, already making her sick? She waited, reminding herself to vomit on the side of the chair where Olive wasn’t sitting, to avoid spattering the brilliant yellow suit. But the twinge passed. “I’m sorry about that. I thought …”
“No, no.” Olive held up her hand. “If anyone’s sorry, it should be me. Believe me, Jobe let me know that.”
“You mean from the great beyond?” Carmen struggled to keep the derision out of her voice and failed.
“No.” Olive laughed and sat up even straighter, knees crossed. Damn, the woman had Tina Turner legs. Carmen could easily imagine her mother-in-law on stage. “I mean when he was alive. We talked about it, a couple times, just before he died. He was pretty upset about the way we—I—railroaded you. He said I did it like I was acquiring a small company. Or snaring you in my web.” She flashed a grin. “He started calling me the Black Widow, after George died.”
The smile faded, slowly, until Olive’s expression was smooth and serious again. “I told myself over the years that it was the right thing, that you were too young to understand your own feelings. My son was such a wonderful man, so intelligent and fine, I was sure you’d grow to love him over time.” Tears gathered in Olive’s eyes and she blinked. Her training was ingrained. She would never, under any circumstances, weep in public. “Before your wedding, I told him the same thing.”
“I did love him.” Oddly, when Carmen said this, it actually felt like the truth.
“Yes, you did, but not the way …” Olive looked into the distance, as if watching something unrelated to the twenty sick and dying people in the room. “Not the way you should have.”
Carmen was silent.
“When you had Michael after all those years had passed, I told myself it had happened. You’d fallen for Jobe, just the way I planned. The way couples do in an arranged marriage. Then he got sick and you stayed, you took care of him. When he died I thought—no, I convinced myself; I was sure—you were mourning the love of your life. You seemed so remote, so inconsolable….”
Next to them, a stick-thin man called for his nurse. He had to go to the bathroom, immediately. There was a scuffle, but they didn’t reach him in time. Urine leaked onto the floor in an acrid, yellow stream.
Remote, inconsolable. The words echoed through Carmen’s head. It was not an inaccurate description of the way she had felt.
There was an odor. She looked down and saw that the trail of urine had snaked its way over. “Here, your shoes will get ruined.” Carmen nudged Olive. “Pick up your feet. Put them on the end of my chair.”
Olive did so. And they sat watching the clean-up team come in with mops and buckets, their feet clustered together, close enough to touch.
JULY 1986
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There was no real reason to rush the wedding. Carmen wasn’t pregnant; Jobe wasn’t shipping out to some foreign war. It simply made sense, Olive explained to nearly everyone they encountered that summer. Carmen heard the argument so many times, it echoed through her head every time she thought about the ceremony that would be held during the most oppressive days of summer.
Olive and George were giving the couple a honeymoon trip to Italy as a wedding present—one of several gifts, actually, but this went unmentioned—and it would be better for them to travel then. It would be warm there, too, Olive would concede; but the purpose, mostly, was for their darling new daughter-in-law to tour museums and study great art. Also, Jobe had taken a post at Johns Hopkins that would begin in the fall and they needed time to settle in before he began work.
Carmen sat in the plush dressing room of a bridal shop so exclusive, it did not have a street-facing entrance, listening as Olive went through her spiel for the sales clerk. “Perfectly understandable,” the woman said. Everything in this place was soft and rich, including the clerk’s voice and hair—a cloud of silky blond floss she had pulled back with a wide jeweled scarf.
“We need a dress that’s formal but not heavy to wear. It could be ninety degrees. We don’t want the bride fainting from heat.” Olive laughed. “I was hoping you could help us find something pretty—and appropriate—but cool.”
Carmen sat on a huge, pale pink toadstool holding a glass of white wine. She sipped and made a face. This place might be fancier than any dress shop she’d ever seen, but their wine was cheap. A year’s worth of meals at the Garretts had taught her what to look for. This one had no structure at all.
“I think I know exactly what you’re looking for,” said the woman in a breathy, lackluster Marilyn Monroe voice. She turned to Carmen, who was busy trying to set her wine glass down. But the carpet was too deep, everything in this place was pillowy. There wasn’t a firm surface in sight. “Would you stand up for me, hon?”
Carmen rose grudgingly. She felt trapped and this stranger had become her enemy, one of her captors. Hon? What a simp! She probably spent her time guzzling Coors at sports bars when she wasn’t hawking trillion-dollar gowns.
“You’re what, maybe a four?”
“More like a six.” Carmen sighed. There was no way the sales clerk had made a mistake; she could probably guess a woman’s weight to within an ounce. Carmen hated being falsely flattered and condescended to this way.
“Excellent. That’s our standard size!” She looked as pleased as if she’d spun all the dresses herself out of hay. “You wait here and I’ll be back with some things for you to try on.”
She left and Carmen was relieved. There were a few minutes of silence. She sat again, leaning back, and drank more wine. But when she straightened and looked at Olive, Carmen felt a quiver of fear. The older woman’s face was dark, her eyes gleaming—this was precisely the look Carmen had been expecting when she was caught, last summer, coming out of Jobe’s room.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“I’m … surprised,” Olive said. She hesitated then went on. “It is important, in my view, to treat service people with respect. Having money doesn’t give us the right to be rude. Nor, frankly”—she paused again, considering, eventually deciding to go on—“nor do I understand why anyone would want to.”
Carmen’s face burned. She recalled her own mother, pale with a smooth scarf-covered head, insisting that she was well enough to shop for prom dresses. How she had nearly expired after only two stores and Carmen had had to abandon the search in order to call her dad. She wished now that Olive had been there that day, too—not only to take charge, but to put Carmen in her place and demand that she be kind.
Just then, the clerk came bustling in with an armful of dresses so bulky, it was a mystery how she carried them. One by one, she hung them on the rack that lined one wall. “I think you’ll find something you love here,” she said over her shoulder as she clinked the hangers onto the rod. “But if you don’t, no worries. We’ll just keep going until you fall head over heels.”
“These are just lovely. Thank you, dear.” Olive smiled at the woman and gestured at one of the dressing room’s three cushioned chairs. “Do you have time to sit with us and help us decide? It would be so nice to have your professional opinion.”
“I’m yours for the duration, ladies,” the woman said and sank gratefully into a chair. She and Olive both turned to Carmen, like audience members.
“Should I, just …” Carmen turned her hands so her fingers pointed loosely toward her body. “Change right here?”
“Do you mind?” Olive asked. “We could step out if you’d prefer, but then it will take an awfully long time.”
“No, no. That’s okay.” Again, Carmen looked for a place to put her glass but the room hadn’t changed. She drained the last of the wine and propped the empty glass on the floor, tipped against the wall. She slid her skirt off and placed it on the toadstool. Then she began unbuttoning her shirt.
It made no sense that she felt reluctant. As a freshman at Michigan, Carmen had been that girl who walked around shirtless in her dorm room, not even caring when the door swung open and girls from her hall streamed in and out. She liked the feeling of air on her breasts, and while she wasn’t exactly attracted to women—at least not in the hot, powerful way she was to men—it was a turn-on to show off her bare, rounded shape, especially when it was obvious they were watching and assessing, comparing themselves to her, often falling short.
But undressing in front of this woman and Jobe’s mother was strange. It could be, Carmen decided, because this was the first time Olive would see what her son panted for and groped and stabbed with his hard penis at night. It could also be that for once, Carmen was faced with a woman—thirty years older—whose body was probably better than hers.
Working at it with studied diligence, she managed to talk herself through. Off came the shirt and silky camisole she wore underneath. Now Carmen stood in her bikinis and lacy bra and the sales woman jumped up, as if they were about to dance. The woman took the first gown from its hanger and expertly opened it. Like a small child, Carmen ducked, held up her arms, and dove upward into a frothy dress that the clerk then tugged and fastened around her.
“Oops, we’re never going to get this one buttoned up,” she said from behind Carmen’s back. “You’re a deceptive one, aren’t you? I’d have thought you’d just slide into a six but you’re quite a bit bigger in the chest than you look. What cup size do you wear, hon?”
“C,” Carmen said sheepishly and looked at Olive, who was impassive. She seemed not to find this at all strange.
“Well, most of our ladies in your size are about a B, so we’re going to have to alter whatever you buy.”
“That won’t be a problem,” Olive said. “As long as you can have it done fast. Remember, the wedding is in just a few weeks.”
Carmen could have sworn the woman glanced at her midsection, looking for signs that this rush to marry had a baby behind it. But this was the one place the dress fit perfectly.
“But that’s not the one,” Olive continued. “It’s adorable, but not quite right for Carmen. Too much tulle.”
They went through two thirds of the gowns on the rack and though she was getting used to the process, Carmen was bewildered by the fact that it felt like so much work. “I’m sorry. I’m starting to sweat a little,” she confided at one point. As if the woman to whom she’d been lifting her arms was unaware.
“Happens,” the clerk said. “Don’t worry about it, hon. These are just our testers and you’re all sweet and clean. You’d be amazed what other girls get on them: lipstick, wine, God knows. I’ve found stains I can’t figure out and don’t even want to touch.” She wrinkled her nose like a rabbit and Carmen laughed. In the background, Olive did, too. Suddenly, the room righted. Everything was better. The next dress, a sheath, slipped over Carmen’s jackknifed body like Cinderella’s shoe.
&nbs
p; “Mmm,” Olive said. And Carmen knew, even before she turned to look in the mirror, that they had found it. “Isn’t that just beautiful?”
Carmen revolved and saw that it was. Also that she looked like someone she had never met. The pink streaks in her hair were gone, and where she used to shave her head, soft, long curls had grown out. She’d begun seeing Olive’s stylist, who cut the longer pieces at a slant so they came to a point at her chin. In this dress, with its wide neckline, tight-fitting bodice, three-quarter-length skirt and soft scatter of pearls on satin, Carmen appeared in the mirror like a woman who’d stepped forward from the 1920s. A passenger on an ocean liner, a mistress to Hemingway or Picasso. She twisted her body from side to side and watched the material shimmer in the dressing room’s soft light.
“We have the same problem here.” The woman continued to fuss at Carmen’s back, straining to pull the dress closed. “I could zip it up all the way if I really had to, but you probably wouldn’t be able to breathe. So I’m just going to hold it so you can get a better idea of …”
“Oh, no need,” Olive said. “This is the one. That is.” She stepped forward and reached out to touch the fabric over Carmen’s heart, her voice dreamy. “If you like it, dear. What do you think? Would you like to try on a few more?”
“No,” Carmen said. “This is perfect.”
All she wanted was to be the woman in the mirror. Beautiful, sophisticated, mysterious. The only problem was she couldn’t imagine someone like that spending a lifetime with Jobe.
At home, there was remarkably little to do. A pile of invitations sat stacked in a box on the dining room table and Carmen had brought out her calligraphy set from senior seminar. She sat on Saturday addressing envelopes for a couple of hours, but then her back and neck grew stiff and the quiet started to feel heavy around her. She wandered through the rooms. There was something Poelike about the weird stillness: dust motes floating above the staircase, furniture lurking in unexpected corners, portraits on the walls hanging straighter than she remembered.
