Anywhere But Here (65 page)

Jimmy talked in the phone but he held it away, so I heard everything they were saying. Right then we had to choose. We could fly him down to Milwaukee to a big city hospital or keep him where he was, in this little Emergency Room. And we couldn’t ask anybody, we didn’t have time. I was wearing rollers, I touched them to make sure and then I remember staring at Jimmy’s hand and my hand on the dinette table. Both our hands looked familiar and old, like gloves, something you’d wear every day that would take on a shape.

Well, neither of us knew.

And I was surprised, because for all Jimmy’s wanting to be the man, he looked at me and asked me what to do. Real even. And I knew he’d listen.

“I don’t know, Jimmy,” I said. I looked and just begged for him to choose. We saw into each other’s eyes and they went back and back and back and neither of us knew. He waited. And so I said, “Maybe we’d best keep him here.”

He told the man on the phone and in no time, the next thing I knew, we were in the car, on the highway, driving. I don’t know how we ever got our clothes on. Times like that, there are miracles you hardly notice.

I remember riding that night. It was eighteen miles to the hospital and Jimmy drove fast. We were the only car on the road. We didn’t say anything to each other, but we had the windows open and I could smell. That was the only time in my life, there in the car, when I really felt the word married. We were married. Other times words like that meant other people.

Outside, earth rushing in, and the wetness of pine. Jimmy turned the radio on to country music, a woman singing, “I Fall to Pieces”; her voice whining like the whine of green air just out the windows, clinging. “Always,” she sang. And I felt almost happy.

I’d been to the Emergency Room in Bay City so many times with Benny. He’d had to have stitches, he’d had sprains and once the cast. When he was real small, he’d tried to jump off the garage roof. He wanted to fly like Peter Pan. He had you up there too, but we didn’t know. I’d found him, curled and bloody, and raced him off to the hospital in the car.

You had been afraid to jump. You kept so quiet up there that even after we came home in the station wagon, nobody knew to get you down. I fixed cinnamon toast and Benny was watching cartoons in the breezeway, and it was Benny who remembered you all of a sudden.

No one else ever died. Granny didn’t. It was the same leg, the left, and they took it off just above the knee. Mom thought a long time whether it was the right thing, but there was a tumor, they had to get it out. They operated in winter. And I remember the shock in spring, when I first saw her walking out with the crutches. She wore big high rubber boots on the one leg and a
jacket. But she wasn’t wearing any stockings and you could see where the leg ended against the fabric of her skirt. The skirt was blue, a real girlish print, and the leg was white and wrinkled and old. It came to a point and a knot, they tied her skin at the end like a sausage. She went outside every day to feed that pony. But Mom said later what broke her spirit were those crutches. She couldn’t ever get used to walking that way. She was ninety-one years old. And once she couldn’t be outside, running everything, bossing the world, then she didn’t want to live anymore.

With Hal in the army, that was the left leg too. He said those army doctors thought he was crazy, that second time he came out of the hospital. They made him march and at night, when they couldn’t see, his knee swelled up to the size of a basketball, and it hurt him. But then, when he went to the infirmary in the morning, it fell down again. They made him march. Finally, he said if they’d give him a camera he’d take a picture. And then those doctors wanted to operate and he said no. Who knows what they would have done, those army doctors. And once he came home, it healed by itself. It still hurts him, when it rains I notice a limp.

Jimmy got to be the strong one, after he’d had the operation. When he came home from the hospital, we both worked together and that’s when we really got started in the health. That’s how I learned the vitamins, he had to take so many pills every day. I made an effort to do the right things. I took them, too, we changed our whole way of eating. I did everything the way we were supposed to, fruits and vegetables and fibers. I threw out the frying pan. And Jimmy really was good. They told him to lose thirty pounds and he lost it. They told him one drink a day, that’s it. And that was it. He had to walk five miles and he did, all the way past the tracks on the new road over on Brozek’s land, where they put the developments. He got to know some of the people in duplexes on those spoon-shaped drives. They’d wave at him when they went out to water their lawns. He bought the walking machine and he walks in the laundry room when it’s too cold outside. He built muscle, he kept telling me he was in better shape than he had been for years. And I think that gave him a new lease. I think that was the turning around for him.

People told me, after the operation, a heart gets scars and creases, wrinkles, lines like a hand.

He took an interest in new things. He read up on solar. He dreamed the idea for a swimming pool. He’d walk in his aerobics clothes past Brozek’s land and come home wanting to sue.

“Not yet,” I told him. “Nothing doing.”

I was still in the dark, with a long way to walk before the end. I’d be doing the dishes, my ring on the sill, looking out the window to the backyard and I’d try to imagine how Ben would have walked on the grass, without the leg. Sometimes I’d see him walking on water, crooked over the wavy green. Then I’d have to rub my eyes. I couldn’t imagine him with crutches, even limping, I couldn’t imagine Ben slow. He always loved speed, for the feel of it. When he was real little, he used to haul a stick in the backyard and spin, he’d go so fast, he wouldn’t hear you if you called. He got like that sometimes when he ran. And then later, the machines. The minibike, dirt bike, tractors, lawn mowers, snowmobiles. And then the car. I think, truthfully, Benny sped, too, on those empty peninsula highways late at night, sure. It wouldn’t have had to be Jay. It could have been Benny alone. He loved anything that went fast. Nobody could keep up with him.

I thought and I thought and I didn’t get anywhere. I felt a place in me where it hurt every time I touched, the stone. It was the darkness I swallowed.

I told myself: he could have died those minutes on the helicopter in the air, between the peninsula and Milwaukee. But the way it was was the only way it was: while that old doctor fooled, fussing with the leg, pinning it, the heart stopped.

You were the one who let Gram see him. When a person thinks the same thoughts again and again, they each take on a shape and a color, almost a taste in your mouth. And my thinking, Well, at least Gramma saw him, was clear relief, like green-white air, antiseptic as an after-dinner mint from a nice restaurant, that cleans out all your head. It let me go on to other things.

That day in the hospital was a court of law. Gram was already
in for a stroke and then we’d had to tell her about Benny. And even under the drugs, she was fighting us. She wanted to go and see her Ben.

Her arms pushed up, beating out of the blankets, and Adele was standing on one side, keeping her down. When I watched that I remembered years ago, opening the bathroom door and you were standing in the big clawfoot tub. It was the same thing—you were hitting, fighting to come out, and your mother stood pushing you down.

In the hospital, Gram was yelling. “You let me alone. Get away you.” But from the drugs, her voice sounded different, real small and far away. “Get,” she said, as if she were spitting out the pit of something.

“Mom, you’ve got to stay here,” Adele said.

“I want to see him once more and I’m going to,” Gram was saying, but she really wasn’t all right. She bit her own lip so hard it bled. I was on the other side of the barred bed from Adele. I saw that bright blood trickling down her chin and I wiped it off with the hem of my dress.

I think maybe what really hurt Adele was Gram didn’t seem the least bit interested to see the two of you. It had been years already since you’d been gone. That, I’m sure of it, was the drugs. She could only think of one thing at a time and that was, going to see him.

You sat away from us all, in a chair in the corner. Your mom stood on the one side of the bed with a young doctor in those mint green clothes they wear. He kept fingering his stethoscope.

I had the priest over by me. He was fingering his beads. But neither of them said anything, they let us fight over her.

I wanted Gram to go. It was selfish, because I didn’t really know how sick she was either, but I wanted her to go, no matter what. I wanted Adele out of there, back in California. This was our life here. She’d left it.

“She’s got to stay, Carol. She could have a stroke and DIE,” Adele said. Right there, over Gramma.

Gramma started crying, fingering her sheet. “I am
not
going to die,” she said.

Adele turned to the doctor. It was like an instinct in her, turning to men more than women, looking up, and to MDs more than ordinary men.

The doctor dropped his hands from the stethoscope. He seemed reluctant to say. “We can give her another sedative, but it is a risk.”

“Do you really want to go, Mom?” I said. Here I was leaning over and shouting loud as if she were a child. Her hearing was just fine. “You know, if you aren’t so good, you don’t have to go. Benny would understand.”

“OF COURSE he would,” Adele interrupted, yelling. “In fact, he’d RATHER. He’d rather you not go.”

“I want to go and I’m going,” she said. She sat up on the bed. “I told you. I want to see him.”

I looked at my priest. He bent his head down so I could see the freckles on his balding head. He prayed.

“Carol, I just don’t think she should go. It’s not going to help Benny anymore and it could, you know—”

I just didn’t know. “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

Your mother turned all of a sudden and looked at you. “What do you think, Ann?”

We all looked at you then, in the corner. You were wearing scuffed-up cowboy boots, like they wore around here, and your legs crossed. That was the first time I’d noticed you’d grown up. Your legs were long and you moved your arms like someone definite.

“Let her go,” you said. You recrossed your legs, put the other one on top. Your boot was worn down in the heel. “She should go.”

“You really think so, Annie?” your mom asked.

And you nodded.

So she had a sedative and we held her, me on one side, Adele on the other. Just that walk from the station wagon to the back door of Umberhum’s, it seemed like a long ways. I parked as close as I could to the door. The sun was so bright she couldn’t look. We walked real careful but her face was confused, as if she
thought her ankles were going in different directions, out of control.

I’d driven by Umberhum’s Funeral Parlor a million times, but that day I felt like I owned it. Adele and I almost carried Gram in, she was so light, like nothing on our elbows, as if we were fooling, playing the Emperor’s New Clothes, and everyone stepped back, hushing, for no one who was there.

Then her weight seemed to fall back into her in a heap from the sky when she knelt on the pew by the coffin. For the first time she seemed to me an old woman, the way she settled on that pew. She reached over and touched Benny’s hand. I was thinking how weak and helpless she looked, that we still had to get her up and back, and maybe Adele was right and this was a mistake. I couldn’t tell from her face if she knew anything that was going on. She stayed a long time before we realized she’d fallen asleep.

But it wasn’t a mistake. She didn’t die, either.

I didn’t like anything, anymore, for a long time and that’s why I had to go away. I saw the bad in everyone around me. As soon as she was well, my mother bored me. Her life seemed like a windup toy. She traced the same steps, through the same little rooms, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, every day. She ate her meal off the same dish and then she washed it. And that’s all she talked about, what food she put on that same plate in that same kitchen and how much she paid for it.

Hal was worse. Merry left, Tina was gone, they lived in a truck up out of town by the bay, with Merry’s new boyfriend. And Hal had a girl, that Patty, who I’d always liked, but he treated her like dirt, like nothing. I saw him hit her, plenty, he used to hold her jaw and slap her. And she didn’t even fight back. She just stood there and her bangs shook.

There was nothing I did. I went into the store one day to balance the books. I had a cup of coffee from the Big Boy, I was just going to concentrate down in the darkness and do the numbers of the books. I wasn’t going to pay any attention.

Then Hal walked in. “How’s Patty?” I said, trying to be nice.

He shrugged. “I only like her because she goes down on me.”

I shut the drawer in my desk that was open and got my keys out of my purse. I went out to the car and drove home. For a long time, the books didn’t get done.

Adele always called, always asking for money. Once she said she had cancer. She sent Gram a Polaroid of herself opened up, in operation on the surgery table. I’m not sure why, but I knew right away she was lying. That made me so mad, she gets you down. It was the first thing Jimmy and I did together for a long time. We needed to find out for sure. She’d told us the hospital she’d been in and from them we found the doctor. He confirmed it to us: there was no cancer. My sister was a fine, healthy woman. Her operation had been purely cosmetic. He turned out to be a plastic surgeon. Apparently, sometime in college, your mother had silicone implants. One had shrunk and now she was having her breasts evened out.

Well, we told Gram and, that once, Adele didn’t get her money.

See, it was around that time I found the stone in me, that hardness I’d swallowed. I felt it, a cold dark, it pressed back against my fingertips. I didn’t tell anyone, I hoarded, kept it to myself. It stayed under my left breast, always. The hook was there. As soon as I found it, it stopped hurting. I touched it many times, to test. I couldn’t sit still, I always wanted to be alone. I excused myself four, five times in an hour to go to the ladies’ room to touch it. I went into a trance like that, I didn’t think. Touching the stone in me.