As Good as Dead (19 page)

“Tell him what you said earlier, Ellen. About Magritte! Go on!”

The man gave Ellen a hard look. “Have no fear,” she said as she stowed her empty glass on top of the nearby cigarette machine. Then she stepped behind Olivia and settled her hands on Olivia’s shoulders, gave them a jiggle and, as if starting her engine, made a
vroom-vroom
noise. Olivia let herself be steered through the open door and onto the sidewalk. Something about that—Ellen
wanted
to be angry, but then she was so glad that she and Olivia were together, now, heading back to their apartment, that she couldn’t help loving Olivia, too.

“Ellen!” Olivia spun around and set her own hands on Ellen’s shoulders. “Bob Devereaux’s going to be a star! He’s the only person in the program worth knowing—besides you, of course.” She raised her eyes toward the tarnished sky over Dinkytown. “Bob Devereaux. Isn’t that a great name?”

Ellen laughed. She realized that she was a bit drunk, too. As she and Olivia made their unsteady way to the apartment—the sidewalks were all up and down, akimbo from the monster tree roots that had cracked and heaved the concrete over the frozen Minnesota winters—they kept bumping into each other, which struck them both as very funny, and, when they reached the apartment, Olivia brought out a foil-wrapped lump of what turned out to be powerful hashish, and soon, feeling very close to her dear new friend—such a perfect audience, so attentive, her dark eyes glowing while she yipped with glee or frowned and shook her head and said a woeful
Oh, Ellen, you didn’t!—
Ellen spilled the details of her undergraduate life (serial monogamy followed by a brief, scary fling at promiscuity; then artistic celibacy in black Louise Nevelson drapery, Bloody Marys her preferred company when away from the college’s painting studios).

The two had come to a rest on their favorite spot for conversation, the apartment’s ugly orange sofa. Periodically, Olivia reached for Ellen’s hand and squeezed it reassuringly while Ellen told the story of how that crazy life had come to an end.

Chapter 14

The tale that “Ellen” told “Olivia” was a pretty accurate description of that era in which I wound up, blotto, in front of the farmer’s pickup truck.

I remember nothing of the actual accident. Have no memory of where I was headed. Never did learn whose bike I was riding. In the story that I was told, after the pickup hit me, I flew right over its cab. My short trip to the bed of that pickup truck loaded with treacherous farm implements had resulted in a ruptured spleen, seven broken bones, and a concussion. I made an excellent recovery, the only residual effects being the deaf ear, some bones that ache in rainy weather, and a wide silver snake of scar on the back of my skull that has prevented me from ever again wearing a ponytail.

At some point during in my hospital stay—I’d been transported by ambulance to the big hospital down in Iowa City—I once overheard a pair of doctors speculate as to what my head had hit: the edge of a shovel or maybe an auger of some sort?

A customer at a nearby gas station subsequently would claim that the hog farmer was at fault, but the gas station owner and one of his workers said,
No, the girl drove right out in front of him,
and I certainly didn’t blame the farmer or wish that he had been charged.

I was chastened.

Later, my mother told me that she had fainted when she got the call about the accident; and, then, again when she drove over from Webster City and saw me at the hospital. My head, she said, had looked like a rotten pumpkin, and I was hooked up to monitors and IV lines and there were things going up my nose and down my throat. “When your dad came, the next day, he almost fainted, too!”

By the time that the doctors declared me out of the woods, and I became aware of my mother’s visits, all that I saw was mortification. My parents were almost sixty years old, and conservative, small-town people. For years—truly, until the time that my sister’s son was arrested for selling MDA—they would view the fact that news of my drunken accident had appeared in not only our hometown newspaper but also
The Des Moines Register
as our family’s greatest catastrophe.

Poor Mom. Having a kid at forty-one had not been in her plans. She shimmered with relief at my high school graduation. She imagined that I’d go off with my scholarship to the nice little college in pretty Mount Vernon, Iowa, and find a husband and have kids and stop moping around and writing poems in my bedroom—although she herself, a married lady who’d had kids, secretly resorted to a variety of tranquilizing pills and, when my dad was away, sometimes showed the full extent of her depressions by locking herself in her bedroom and not coming out all day. She did act more normal when my dad was at home but there were migraine headaches that sent her to bed and hives that bloomed from her neck down to her toes. During certain stressful periods, the skin on her fingers and palms and feet formed a thick, pearly bark that she picked at, exposing the tender flesh beneath, shockingly pink, fissured. On dish towels and bars of soap and kitchen sponges, she left behind little stars of blood. The very first time that I went to the ocean and saw jingle shells on the beach, I thought of the silvery disks of skin that marred my mother’s otherwise lovely hands. During my hospital stay, one of my professors—the young Renaissance literature scholar and poet named Lydia Ott—came to visit me, and even then my mother could not stop her furious picking. “What is she
doing
here?” my mother had whispered to me when Professor Ott left the room to get herself a soda.

“She’s being nice,” I said.

Professor Ott had come to let me know that I wasn’t to worry about my final project.
No rush
, she’d said,
concentrate on getting well!
I admired her and was very moved by the visit. I knew that she was from a small Midwestern town, too. At twenty-eight, she already had published a book of poems. I was determined to be more like her when I got out of the hospital; to give up wearing makeup and simply gather my hair at my nape each morning in a broad, flat barrette of Navajo silver. She couldn’t have been kinder, sitting there on the opposite side of the bed from my mother in the bland and much too sunny hospital room, asking about Webster City and its Kendall Young Library.
And did you come from Webster City originally, Mrs. Price?
It was so generous of her to have driven down from Mount Vernon to visit me! To have bothered with hospital parking and all! Despite my hard times socializing with other students, I’d loved my college classes and my teachers, too. Once, a sleepy winter afternoon in her minuscule, overheated office in South Hall, a rim of snow piled up outside the windowsill where her avocado plant barely survived in its salt-rimed terra-cotta pot, Professor Ott actually had confided in me, telling me that her father had shot and killed her mother in a domestic dispute. I began to worry that my mother would say something awful, offend Professor Ott or make her think less of me. I knew that I looked hideous, then, all bruised and swollen, and I was dopey with pain medication, too, no good to the conversation at all.

As if she sensed my anxiety, Professor Ott stood up to go. My mother fixed her face in the manic smile—my smile, too?—that she used so hopefully during anxious moments when she longed to be taken for a peppy and utterly normal person. “This”—she waved a hand at me, flat in the hospital bed—“it’s not typical of our family!”

Lydia Ott stopped at the end of the bed, and she squeezed my toes through the heavy hospital sheet. “You should know, Mrs. Price,” she said, “all of us at the college think the world of Charlotte.”

This was a very kind exaggeration, no doubt meant to reassure both my mother and me regarding my return to the college. I appreciated it. My mother didn’t. As soon as the professor was out in the hall, my mother leaned close to me and huffed, “There’s somebody who thinks she’s pretty special! La-di-da!”

A few weeks later, a silent ambulance transported me to Webster City; delivered me to the rehabilitation center that, in that small town, meant one wing of a nursing home. Being nineteen, wheeled up to tables for meals with people whose rheumy, drooping eyes looked like dissolving cough drops; people whose mouths often hung open—dark, shiny, toothless caverns—and, in the middle of the night, cried out in a panic over something they could not remember, I was inspired to work very hard at my physical therapy, and, after three more weeks, my parents moved me into my old room.

The room had been transformed, after I left for college, into the storage space that my parents always had longed for in their tiny two-bedroom house. I had for company, among other things, my dad’s table saw and a fully decorated artificial Christmas tree. Given how glad I was to have escaped the nursing home, I did not mind too much. As I said, I was chastened.

Heeding the advice given me by several very grave-faced people at the hospital, I began (to my parents’ horror) attending the Wednesday and Friday noon AA meetings held in an A-frame-style Episcopal church that, as a little kid, I had passed every day on my way to Sunset Heights Elementary. A very old lady in penny loafers and grandma jeans put her tiny, cold hand on mine at the end of my first meeting and said, “You don’t ever have to have another drink, honey,” and though there would be plenty of occasions when I would want to drink again, at that moment, the consequences of my drinking were agonizingly fresh—I had used a cane to walk to that first meeting—and the old lady’s words were a balm to me. I bought a copy of the AA Big Book and I read it. It
interested
me. The wisdom outweighed the nonsense. The people at the meetings were working to live decent lives, and they interested me, too. I wanted to live a decent life, too. Although I could not accept everything I heard, I appreciated the fact that everybody at the meetings seemed to be there in earnest.

While staying at my parents’ house that summer, I did waste some time trying to figure out a way to transfer to another college for my senior year (despite Lydia Ott’s reassurance, I couldn’t bear the thought of facing my old classmates). Of course, it did not take long for me to learn any transfer would prevent my graduating the following spring. So it was that, passably restored—wearing a scarf to cover the area on the back of my skull that had been shaved and stitched, limping a little, deaf in one ear—at the end of August, I took the Greyhound back across the state to Mount Vernon. A pretty town, a hilly oasis among the cornfields, the gray stone tower of the campus’s landmark chapel sticking out of a grand bouquet of summer-green trees. The bus made its stop on the little main street, and, after settling into my backpack, pulling my wheel-along behind me, I went into Sprague’s Drugstore to buy a pack of cigarettes.

I was standing in line at the checkout when I heard the voice of Professor Ott behind me. I turned—in the wrong direction because of my bum ear—and so I faced not Lydia Ott but the tall, seriously handsome young man standing beside her.

This was Will Ludlow, Lydia Ott explained, a friend from her undergraduate days at Carleton. Will Ludlow was renting in Mount Vernon while he worked on his doctorate in art history down in Iowa City.

Will Ludlow shook my hand. His deep
How do you do
set off thrilling vibrations in my ribcage, like a drum passing during a parade.

“I read a story of yours,” he said. “While I was on Lydia and Scott’s porch, waiting for them to come home.” It seemed that there had been a copy of the college literary magazine on the porch’s coffee table. Under his heavy brow, Will Ludlow’s light eyes were difficult to read. A little uncanny. A little like looking at the eyes of a blind person. He did not smile at me, but he said, “You’re the real thing,” and then he turned to Lydia Ott and asked, “Have you read that story? Do you have enough food for her to join us for dinner?”

I knew that etiquette forbade his asking such a thing of his hostess, and I said—while hoping the answer would be yes—“I don’t want to impose!” Lydia Ott smiled and said, “Of course I’ve read her story, and, sure, Charlotte, join us!”

A few minutes later, we three—I kept sneaking looks at long-legged Will Ludlow, who had insisted on taking charge of my suitcase and backpack—walked to the home of Lydia Ott and her lawyer-husband, Scott Anderson.

During the candlelit dinner, loopy in Will Ludlow’s presence—his lips were not large but looked very tender; a good, animal smell emanated from under his plaid flannel shirt—I felt as if my legs might start to dance against the underside of Lydia Ott’s picnic table, dash the plates of pasta and salad onto the floor. A delicious feeling, but also scary. I wondered what Will Ludlow made of the fact that I did not drink the wine that was his contribution to the dinner. After I left, of course, Lydia Ott would tell him about my accident. Of course, he would write me off as a loser.

So it was that I experienced a positive sense of release—I would get out of there with my heart, after all!—when, elbows on the table, forehead furrowed, Will Ludlow began to talk about his struggle to understand the work of a certain poststructuralist critic.

“You’d be in more trouble if you thought you did understand her!” I blurted.

He and Lydia and her genial, round-faced husband—all three looking startled—turned my way, while, hot-cheeked, I went on:

“I trust myself to find the logic in what I read. It may require work, but I ought to be able to find it, right? I ought to be able to rephrase the thinking without using any ambiguous jingo. So far, the only people I’ve known or read who act like they know what she’s talking about are people who parrot her.”