The Forever Marriage

by Ann Bauer

  Olive fixed her eyes on Carmen now, but gently. She was asking.

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” Luca muttered and rose, stumbling a little in his haste to get away from the table. It was exactly the sort of self-conscious thing any young man would do if his mother and grandmother began discussing an old affair. And Carmen had never loved him more than she did at this very moment.

  “Did you?” Olive asked once Luca was out of earshot.

  “Did I what? Date him? I don’t think you could call it that. Dance with him? Not that I recall. Sleep with him? Yes, once.” She was looking down at the table. Some time during her response the waitress had come, set down the drinks and grape leaves, then departed again without taking their dinner order. Carmen didn’t care. As far as she was concerned, the entire restaurant could hear. The only thing that mattered was what Olive thought. And—if he was truly eavesdropping on them from some dust beam—Jobe, as well.

  “Then why did you marry my son?” Olive’s voice was stiff and cold, exactly as Carmen had been afraid it would be on the day she found out the truth. “Why didn’t you just fornicate with the cute, young real estate agent and leave Jobe alone?”

  It was like being slapped. But Carmen deserved it; she’d deserved it for more than two decades. “Because Rory wasn’t nice to me,” she said softly. “Jobe was.”

  “Even though he knew.”

  Luca had emerged from the men’s room and was making his way across the restaurant. Carmen didn’t have much time. “What do you mean by that?” She picked up the wine flask and filled their glasses, leaning closer to hiss at Olive. “Are you saying Jobe knew about Rory?”

  Olive nodded regally. “He told me you were seeing someone else, that you didn’t love him, and I …” She picked up her glass and stared at it, Carmen watching and recalling the night they first met: this woman holding a glass of wine while ambivalence, like two opposing weather fronts, rose inside her. She had been living perpetually with this feeling, Carmen noted, ever since that day.

  “I lied,” Olive continued without taking a drink. “I told my son that he was wrong. I knew what it was like to be a young woman in love, and the things you were doing were normal. Your affection for him would grow as you became more confident. I told him”—Luca was, at most, two tables away now—“to be patient, believe in himself, go ahead with the marriage. Because he deserved a wife like you.”

  Luca pulled out his chair, sat, picked up a grape leaf.

  “We always want what’s best for our children,” Olive said. Her tone had changed, becoming airy for Luca’s sake. “We’re just not always clear on what the best thing is.”

  The next day, Carmen walked into a discount salon and asked for a haircut. She had never been in one before: It was bright white with colored curtains hanging between the chairs. Packed with people. She had to wait twenty-five minutes before someone called her name, but at least here the magazines were plentiful and up to date.

  “I’m Lori,” said the girl who led her back across a floor strewn with hair clippings in every color. “So what are you thinking about today?”

  “I want it all cut off,” Carmen said. She put her purse on the floor and settled into the chair, her increasingly bony backside painful even against the cushioned seat. “Leave about a quarter-inch all the way around.”

  “Are you sure?” The girl squinted in the mirror. She was about twenty-three, with bright butterfly tattoos peaking out of her cleavage. So, some women put needles into their breasts on purpose. What a luxury to have that choice. “I mean, you have really nice hair and it’s flattering with your face shape.” The girl began using the edge of a comb and her long fingernails alternately, trying different arrangements, causing Carmen’s scalp to tingle. “I could just layer it a little, give you a whole new look, without—”

  “I have cancer,” Carmen interrupted. The man in the adjoining chair turned to look at her. She hadn’t considered how communal this place was. It had just seemed ridiculous to pay seventy-five dollars for someone to hack off her hair. Ridiculous to pay anything at all. “I’m going to lose it all anyway.”

  Abruptly the girl stopped what she’d been doing and raised her hands a couple of inches. “Oh, God, I’m really sorry,” she said.

  Then go back to doing what you were doing, Carmen wanted to tell her. But she didn’t, of course. One more sensation lost—it hadn’t occurred to Carmen previously. Without hair to run one’s fingers through, a scalp massage was no good.

  The hairdresser was all business now. She pulled a ruler out of her drawer, grasped Carmen’s hair at the end and pulled it out long, then measured and squinted like a carpenter preparing to saw a length of wood. “Another inch and a half and I could give you the cut for free,” she said. “Locks of Love. We’d donate it. But it has to be ten inches.” With that she stuck the ruler back in her drawer, pulled a pair of scissors out of its blue disinfecting bath, and cut off a hank that dropped to the floor.

  Carmen winced. “What’s Locks of Love?” she asked.

  “A benefit for kids with cancer, I think,” the woman said, and her face reddened in the mirror. “They make wigs out of it. You know.”

  “Yes, I do know.” The right half of Carmen’s hair had been shorn off to the ear; her left still had long, puppy-tail curls. “I tried to get a wig made out of human hair. They said it would be six months and a thousand bucks.”

  The girl paused and shrugged. “I guess sick little kids get a better deal than sick grown-ups,” she said simply.

  “Yeah …” Carmen watched in the mirror as the girl circled her and began on the left. “I really hope they do.”

  Slender and shorn, Carmen looked like a punk teenager, or a war-protesting rock star. She compensated for this youthful appearance by draping herself in long shawls and scarves that she wound around her head. It was a hot summer, hotter even than the one when she’d arrived, but Carmen felt perpetually cool. Icy, almost.

  “You’re lucky,” the woman in the adjoining chair told her at her next chemo session. She pulled out knitting needles with exactly half a flossy baby sweater—the breast panel and back, plus a single arm like a tiny elephant’s trunk—and spread it neatly over a fleshy lap. “Chemo is like divorce: some women lose weight, others gain.” She shook her head. “I’m a gainer and when you’re fat, your head’s really the only place you release heat—no way I was covering it up. Plus, there was the tamoxifen. Whoo, boy! Instant menopause. Hot flashes that just scorch you up inside.”

  Under any other circumstances, Carmen might have wished she could get away. But the woman’s chatter distracted her while a young, dreadlocked nurse prepped her hand and slipped the needle in, then hung the amber bag.

  “This is my third time through.” Her knitting needles clicked and flashed in the overhead lights. “First time I was just forty-four, lost the right breast. That was seventeen years ago and I went through treatment without the anti-emetics. Now, there’s a party. Spend so much time in the bathroom, you get to know every tile. But I still managed to gain about ten pounds. How?” The woman shook her head vigorously. “I have no f-ing idea. But there it was. Size eighteen when I was finished. Can you believe it? They say chemo does that to some of us really unlucky ones. Talk about adding insult.”

  Carmen waited, uncertain if the woman’s monologue was done. Sure enough, she took a breath and swept in again. “I didn’t do that breast reconstruction they talked to me about. I don’t know why—too expensive, I was tired of doctors. It took a while to feel normal walking around all tilted to one side. I mean, really, I never really did get to feeling normal. But I got used to it. Then, a couple years later, howdy do. There’s a big honkin’ rock in the other breast and all I could think was, Okay, at least now I can get this body evened out.”

  The woman rested for a moment and actually closed her eyes. Carmen breathed. Maybe she was done.

  “But you know what?” Nope. The woman’s stream of words just kept flowing on. Carmen wor
ked hard not to sigh. “My husband, Glen, he just never seemed to mind. Fat, de-formed.” She pronounced it as if it were two words. “Barfing all day. He’s not a man who does much, mind you: It wasn’t like he was bringing me tea or checkin’ the drains after my surgery. He went to work, like always. And then …” Her needles stopped moving and the woman looked at Carmen, more slowly than she had done anything else to this point. Her eyes were beautiful, socketed in a pouchy face but deep blue—the color of midnight stars. “He came home.” She resumed her knitting, but slowly, concentrating on picking up each individual stitch. “I was going to these support groups with other women my age. Mind, this was back—remember?—I wasn’t even forty-five. And there were all these young women there, pretty like you. One of ’em, her name was Sarah, I think. She told us her husband wouldn’t touch her anymore.”

  Carmen could relate. Perhaps if she’d had this disease twenty years ago, she could have gone somewhere to talk about her problems with Jobe. He won’t make love to me…. Of course, I don’t want him to. It was a problem like a Möbius strip, with no beginning, no end, and no way out.

  “She tried everything, Sarah did,” the woman continued. “She had the reconstruction and let them stuff her with corpse parts.” Now, Glen’s beloved wife shuddered and stuck out her tongue. Even it, Carmen noted, was fat. “That’s how they did it back then. For all I know, still do. They take those dead bodies that get donated to hospitals and pull off the skin, then sew it together into a fake boob. So Sarah, she’s walking around with old parts of someone else inside her all so’s her husband can pretend she’s real, but you know what? It’s not good enough for him. He wants a nipple. That’s what she tells us. He doesn’t like seeing her naked because she’s got a scar where the nipple oughta be. And she told him she could get one tattooed but he doesn’t like that either because it would be flat—you know, just like painted on. Wasn’t good enough.”

  This time, when the woman closed her eyes Carmen waited anxiously for her to open them and begin speaking again. But she didn’t. She continued reclining, hands holding the needles loosely but not moving.

  “So what happened?” Carmen asked.

  “What do you mean?” She lay like a heap of used clothing in the reclining chair, eyes still shut. Carmen missed the starlit blue.

  “To Sarah?”

  The woman shrugged. “He left her. Around Thanksgiving, if I remember right. She stopped coming after a while. Odds-wise, she’s probably here.” The woman looked around the room and Carmen actually believed, for a moment, that she might spot Sarah, with her cadaver-filled breast. “Or dead, I suppose.”

  Carmen flinched and the woman watched her coolly. “Sometimes,” she admitted, “it’s hard for me to work up a lot of love for people like you and Sarah. Been gorgeous all your life. Everything came easy. So something like this happens and you know how the rest of us feel.” The woman adjusted herself in the chair. “But I’m sorry. That’s not very Christian, is it?” There was an awkward pause. “You got a husband?” she asked.

  “He died,” Carmen said. “A few months ago. Cancer.”

  “You’re shitting me.” The woman’s eyes opened wide; unfortunately, this eliminated their appeal. “Just goes to show, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I guess you’ve suffered your share.”

  Not really, Carmen considered saying. I didn’t suffer nearly enough. Every situation was a new opportunity to lie or tell the truth. “It was complicated,” she said, finally. “We had some problems before he got sick, too. It wasn’t … perfect.”

  The woman snorted. “I been married thirty-eight years, never is.” The knitting went back into a bag and a can of Coke came out. She fished in and pulled out another one. “Want some?” she asked, and though Carmen couldn’t remember the last time she’d drunk a soda, she nodded and was handed a warm can. Holding it away from her to open it, she got only a little spray of the sugary stuff.

  “You stayed with him, ’til the end?”

  Carmen nodded. This felt oddly intimate. She wasn’t even sure she liked the woman and it was too late to ask her name.

  “Counts for a lot in my book,” Glen’s wife said, leaning over to pull a shapeless, gray, acrylic sweater out of her endless bag and put it on. Apparently, her knitting was for other people. “I gotta get some sleep now, okay?” the woman said and turned away, as if it was Carmen who had been chattering away, asking questions and preventing her from getting her rest.

  Time moved weirdly on the ward: so slow all morning that it seemed like a purgatory, everyone’s sentence stretching infinitely on. But then there was always a flurry at the end, with people being disconnected in their turn, standing and testing their bodies for new symptoms, gathering their things. This was the treatment, Carmen had been told, that would change things: cause her hair to fall out, make her nauseated and anemic and weak. She had maybe—she checked her watch—twenty-seven golden hours left before the drugs kicked in.

  “Carmen?” came a soft voice from above. She shifted and tried to focus. She hadn’t been sleeping, exactly, just floating. Now she felt a broad hand first on her cheek, then her arm. “Since when do you drink Coke?” asked Danny, as he removed the sticky can from the grip of her hand.

  “I, um …” Carmen’s eyes darted over to the woman who slept curled in the chair like a homeless woman on the library steps. “I don’t. Really. Someone just gave it to me.”

  Danny sat in the empty folding chair at her side, eyes wide. He looked around at the rising specters: one old man tottering out of his chemo chair and nearly crumpling, reaching out for a passing nurse who caught him just barely in time. Then Danny shifted his gaze back to her and looked at her as if she were a stranger, or a painting. “I meant to get here sooner. I thought I could sit with you.”

  She examined his face. Was this true? “It’s okay. I told Olive to stay home this time. It turns out it’s not during the chemo that I need …” She paused, unable to go on. “The hard part seems to be a couple days after.”

  “Good. That’s good, I guess.” Danny nodded. A blank-faced nurse was approaching. Any moment she’d be pulling a needle from Carmen’s hand and reciting a list of instructions that included what to do in case of nosebleeds or explosive diarrhea. “So, I have some answers for you. I mean, potential answers. Some people we can consult to find out—you know—if Jobe was right.”

  “You’re not making much sense. Are you talking about Riemann?” Carmen held her arm out straight as the nurse compressed the bag to drizzle the last few drops of poison down the clear tube, then slid the needle from her hand.

  “Uh-huh.” Moisture made Danny’s face shiny at the hairline and along his cheeks. She had never before seen him sweat, other than during sex. “Did you know there’s a math conference?”

  “There are hundreds of them. Jobe used to fly all over, presenting papers.” As if prompted by these words, the nurse handed Carmen a sheet of instructions and moved on to wake the woman in the rumpled sweater and pull out her IV.

  “Yeah, but I mean …” He stopped and swallowed then changed course completely. “Car, I didn’t even recognize you when I came in. You look so different, I was standing at the door for about ten minutes trying to figure out if it was really you.”

  Carmen ran her hand over her bristly head, then down past the collarbones jutting out in points beneath her chin. What had felt sleek just hours before now seemed only sad. “Cancer will do that. It’s going to get worse, you know.”

  But Danny went on, as if he hadn’t heard her. “You look ethereal, like … Tinkerbell.”

  “Tinkerbell?” She laughed, too loudly. No one else in the place was laughing. “Are you serious? Like, you’re going to ask people to clap if they see me and my light will get stronger?”

  Danny grinned and looked like himself for the first time since he’d arrived. “Something like that,” he said.

  All around them people were bending to retrieve their pouches and purses and bags full of drug
s, shuffling toward the door. It was a death march. Standing, Carmen imagined them color-coded, the ones who would live and the ones who would die. Rose would be the indication of life, brown—the hue of curled, desiccated leaves—the mark of those for whom chemotherapy was pointless. She raised her own left hand. It was white, nearly translucent, fingers so slender she had to grip to hold onto her rings.

  “Hey, Car, you ready to go?” Danny was behind her, touching her lightly at the waist.

  “I need to get my medications from someone,” Carmen said. Antinauseants, heartburn tabs, laxatives. Everything she did was focused on moving food from the top of her body through to the bottom.

  “You wait here,” Danny said. “I’ll get them.” And he walked off, leaving her with her hand still held up to the light.

  Glen’s wife was up, too. She stared at Carmen openly while she removed the fabric slippers she’d been wearing and wedged her feet into a pair of blocky brogans. Once she was done, she took the three steps over, wincing with each one. The shoes seemed to hurt her. Standing, she came up to Carmen’s neck.

  “So you stayed with the husband.” The woman’s breath was stale. “But you had a little bit on the side.”

  Carmen nodded.

  The woman looked her over, piercing blue eyes moving from Carmen’s face to her knees and back up in a loop. “Now, it looks like this man’s gonna stick by you,” she said with what could have been a sneer. “It all comes around.” Then she nodded, picked up her bag, and was gone without another word.

  Carmen felt like weeping. She turned her hand slowly, so instead of staring at the back, now she faced the palm. It was completely unlined, which she was sure had not been the case before. The back—where her knuckles lined up—felt cradled in midair.

  “I’ve got them, Car.” Danny was back, holding up a white, waxed bag that could, in another place and time, have contained a jam-filled croissant. “It’s time.”

  “I know,” she said. Then blinking, she took one more look. There were now creases and networks in her palm, like the seams of a stuffed bear, and from the fleshy part a hue. It was faint but distinct, like the light before dawn. A pale rosy glow.