Chilly Scenes of Winter (2 page)

“Don’t take anything. We’ll be right there,” Susan says, putting the phone down. “Come on,” she says to Charles.

“Where the hell is Pete?” Charles says.

“He’s not there. Aren’t you coming?”

“Shit,” Charles says. He hands the unopened coffee jar to Sam.

“Charles, she’s in pain. Please come on,”

“She’s not in pain. He’s out with some barfly and she’s acting up.”

Charles stalks through the kitchen to the closet, gets his jacket. Susan puts hers on without buttoning it and walks out the front door.

“Shit,” Charles says to Sam, “Even your dog had the good sense just to lie down and die.” He opens the door that Susan slammed behind her and goes out into the rain. He knows the Chevy won’t start. It never starts when it’s wet. He fishes around for his car keys, finds them—can’t lose any time there—and reaches around Susan to unlock her door.

“Susan, you’ve got to stop letting her upset you. She’s either drunk or in a bad mood because he’s out with some woman. She’s done this a hundred times.”

“Are you going to lecture me or drive over there?” Susan asks.

“Shit,” Charles says. He slams her door and walks around to his side. The car starts the first time he turns the key.

“What are you worried about?” he says. “You know she’s faking. Isn’t she always faking?”

He is driving fast. The “cold” light is still on. The car skids around a corner. Susan is biting her nails.

“You
know
it’s all in her mind,” he says.

No answer. He puts on the radio, slows down a little. Maybe if the situation lacks drama she’ll be calmer. He hates it when his sister gets nervous. He hates it when his mother makes crazy phone calls. On the radio, George Harrison is singing “My Sweet Lord.” Charles rummages in the ashtray for a cigarette, finds one, rummages in his coat pocket for a match. There is no match. He throws the cigarette back in the ashtray.

“Don’t be nervous,” Susan says.

In five minutes they pull into the driveway. All the lights are out in the house. Deliberately, to make it hard for them to find her.

“Upstairs!” their mother calls. They run up the stairs and find her naked on the bed, her robe bunched in front of her. There is a heating pad, not turned on, dangling from the bed. A small light is on, for some reason on the floor instead of the night table. There are things all over the floor:
The Reader’s
Digest
, Pete’s socks, cigarette packs, matches. Charles picks up a book of matches and two cigarette packs. Both empty. He drops the matches back on the floor.

“Where’s Pete?” Charles says.

“The pain’s over here,” Clara says, running her hand across her side. “I didn’t take a laxative. I knew I shouldn’t take a laxative.”

“Where’s Pete?” Charles says.

“Chicago.”

“What’s he doing in Chicago?”

“Leave her alone,” Susan says. “I think we should get the doctor.”

Their mother has stringy dyed-red hair. Charles puts the light on and sees red smeared all over her pillow. Lipstick. She wears purply-red lipstick, even to bed. She had silicone implants before her marriage to Pete. She is sixty-one now, and has better breasts than Susan. Charles stares at her breasts. She is always naked. The television is turned on—a picture, but no sound.

“You’re going to be all right,” he says automatically.

“You hate me!” she says. “You don’t want me to be all right.”

“I despair of your ever acting normal again, but I do want you to be all right.”

“My side,” she says.

“You’re going to be all right,” he says, walking out of the bedroom to the hall phone.

“The bathtub,” Clara says to Susan.

“What about the bathtub?” Susan says.

“It’s full of water. I tried to soak the pain away.”

“Let it be full of water. It’s all right.”

“Empty it,” she says.

“What does it matter if the tub has water in it, Mom?”

She looks like she might start crying. Susan lets go of her hand to go empty the tub. Charles is on the phone. He is arranging for an ambulance.

In the bathroom there is another heating pad, plugged in and turned to “high.” Susan pulls the plug out. There are movie magazines all over. Susan walks through them to pull the stopper. A cigarette is floating in the water. Susan reaches down carefully, not wanting the wet cigarette to touch her arm. There is a magazine at the bottom of the tub. Susan jerks her hand out.

“They’re coming,” Charles sighs.

“Help me!” Clara screams.

Charles puts the light on in the hallway, goes into her bedroom and holds her cold hand. She grabs his hand tightly, her false fingernails digging into him. He pulls her robe over her.

“I was going to kill myself,” she says.

“I know,” Charles says.

“Of course you weren’t,” Susan says.

“What are they going to do to me?” Clara says.

“Examine you at the hospital. I would have taken you in my car, but I know you like the ambulance better.”

“Which side is the appendix on?” she says.

“The right, I think,” Charles says.

“I think the left,” Susan says. “Maybe the dictionary.…”

“Don’t go!” she says.

“All right,” Susan says.

They sit on either side of her, Charles holding her hand, Susan resting her hand on her mother’s hair.

“What day is it?” she says.

“Thursday,” Susan says.

“What day?”

“Thursday,” Susan repeats.

“He said he was coming home Thursday,” Clara says.

“Believe me, I wish he could be here,” Charles says.

“I know it’s my appendix,” Clara says. She moves in the bed. The robe falls off her.

Susan rides in the ambulance. Charles follows in the car, deliberately driving much too fast in order to keep up with the ambulance, even though he knows the way to the hospital. Once he nearly turns the car over. When he gets to the hospital he is shaking—at least it looks like appropriate emotion. He sits with Susan, waiting. She bites her nails. He puts money in the cigarette machine. Nothing happens. He pushes the coin release. Nothing happens. After a while the doctor comes out and tells them that there is nothing physically wrong with their mother. She has been given a sedative. Her doctor is on the way.

Charles and Susan leave the hospital, go out to the car, begin the drive home. Soon the doctor will call and hint strongly that their mother should go back to the mental hospital.

The rain has stopped. Charles turns on the radio. Elvis Presley is singing “Loving You.” Elvis Presley is forty. Charles turns off the radio. Susan wipes tears out of her eyes.

When they get back to Charles’s house, all the lights are turned off. Charles goes out to the kitchen, still in his coat, and opens the refrigerator for a beer. Susan comes into the dining room and sits down across from him.

“I wish I had some cigarettes,” Charles says. “You don’t smoke, do you?”

“No.”

“Or drink?”

“Wine, sometimes.”

“You don’t even like beer?”

“No,” she says.

He finishes the can, says good night, and goes into his bedroom. He puts on the overhead light and sees Elise and Sam naked in his bed. He turns the light off, closes the door quietly, and stands in the hallway staring at Susan, still at the table.

“I should have known,” Charles says, going into the living room. He puts two pillows side by side at one end of the sofa and lies down, still in his coat.

“You should have,” she says.

“If you don’t smoke or drink, do you do that?” Charles says.

“Yes,” she says.

“Figures,” he says.

“I’m turning off the lights in here,” he says, getting up and turning them off.

“Okay,” she says. She is still sitting at the table when he falls asleep.

TWO

R
iding to the hospital in the morning, Charles remembers going to the hospital with his father to get his mother and the new baby sister. There were two baby sisters, but one of them was born dead. His father told him that, but he told him not to let his mother know that he knew.

“How did they get there?” Charles asked.

“You don’t know that? I thought you already knew that.”

Charles had asked his father that question before, when he was sitting on a stool in his father’s workroom. His father said: “I guess you’ve heard of screwing?” Charles had not. He nodded that he had. Charles’s father gave him a nut and a bolt. “Imagine that this is you,” he said, pointing to the bolt. His father gave it a twirl. Charles took it back from him and tried to twirl it, but he dropped the bolt. His father thought that was very funny.

Charles’s gift to his new sister was a package of four number two Unger’s Westover pencils (yellow). He put them on the mattress under her feet. Later he took them back and used them.

Charles liked his father. He died suddenly, at thirty-nine, on the bus coming home from work. He has foggy recollections of Pete at the funeral. Pete worked with his father. When his father died, Pete came over one evening with a bag of oranges. He came other evenings, too, at his mother’s invitation, bringing with him apples, grapefruit, pears, and finally boxes of Whitman’s chocolates, flowers, and a briefcase with his pajamas and toothbrush. One night not long after his mother married Pete, the fuses blew. Pete climbed downstairs and called up a lot of questions. He couldn’t fix it. Charles went down to help, carefully trying one fuse, then another, just as Pete had. “Could your Dad fix the fuses?” Pete asked. “Yes,” Charles said. Pete had cursed and beat his hands on the cinder block wall above the fuse box until they were bloody. Another time when Susan took some of Pete’s wood to make arms for a snowman, Pete pulled the wood out, spanked her with it, made her look out the window at the snowman as she got her spanking.

“If he’s at the hospital, he’s sure to want us to hang around to go to dinner with him. We’re not going to do it,” Charles says.

“I feel sort of sorry for him,” Susan says.

“You can go to dinner with him if you want.”

“No. I’m not going to go to dinner with him.”

“You just feel sorry for him.”

“I do. She’s crazy almost all the time now. And something you don’t know. This will really make you feel sorry for him. He thought she’d be less depressed if they got out more, so he signed them up for six months of dancing lessons. She wouldn’t go, and he couldn’t get his money back, so he went alone the first night. He said they were all old people, and he didn’t go back either.”

“He’s a jackass,” Charles says.

They are only a few blocks from the hospital. It has started to snow.

“I’ll just take what I can get,” Charles says. “We can walk.” He pulls into a parking place.

“I don’t want to get out,” Susan says.

“She’s okay. She can probably come home.”

“This is a lousy vacation,” Susan says.

“We’ll have a turkey on New Year’s Day. We’ll have Sam over.”

“I don’t even like turkey.”

“We’ll have a ham.”

“You’re always thinking about food.”

“Susan. Get out of the car.”

“Do you love me?” Susan says.

“What the hell are you talking about? Will you please get out of the car?”

“You curse all the time. Can’t you answer me?”

“Of course I love you. You’re my sister.”

“You don’t act like you love me. It seemed when I came back like I’d never left because nobody missed me.”

“Susan. I work five days a week at a lousy job and miss my lover at night. On the weekends I go out and get drunk with Sam, and then I get sick. Your mother gets sick all the time and calls me in the middle of the night and at work. I’m just not in a very good mood.”

“Well, it shouldn’t be like that. You should do things you enjoy.”

“I don’t have any money. It’s all I can do to pay the bills and buy Sam drinks, because he doesn’t have any money either.”

“But you could get that girl back.”

“I can’t get her back. She’s not coming back. Christ.”

“You curse all the time.”

Charles opens his door, gets out, and closes it. Susan’s door does not open. He goes around to her side of the car, bends over, puts his mouth against the window. “Get out or I’ll kill you,” he says. She opens the door.

“You’re in a strange mood,” he says. “When I was growing up this would have been called ‘an identity crisis.’ ”

“You always try to make yourself seem older than you are. Why do you do that?”

“I guess on second thought you’re a little sure of yourself to be having any sort of crisis.”

“Were you nice to that girl? If you criticized her all the time, that’s probably why she left you.”

“Stop talking about her. It’s depressing me.”

“What did she look like? Then I’ll stop talking about her.”

“She was pretty tall. Maybe five-nine. She had long brown hair. Blond. Brownish-blond. She was the librarian in the building I work in.”

They go up the steps to the hospital, across the circular drive, and through the revolving door. There are brown plastic sofas everywhere. Charles puts his hand on Susan’s shoulder and guides her to the left, where several women in white uniforms sit behind a desk. He asks his mother’s room number, thanks the woman, and guides Susan toward the elevators. To the right, down a short corridor, is a chapel. There is no one in it.

“You meant it, huh? You really aren’t going to ask anything else.”

They get in the elevator. He stands to one side, pushing floor numbers for the people who enter. It’s a slow day—only one man in a gray overcoat, one man in a brown jacket, a teen-age girl with a yellow ski-jacket and hiking boots, and a fat oriental nurse.

Their mother’s room is the first to the left when they get off the elevator. She shares it with another woman, who is white-haired and fat, a little older than their mother. Both women are asleep. Charles and Susan look at each other, then back out the door.

“I’ll talk to a nurse,” Charles whispers. Susan follows him. At the nurses’ station, Charles asks how his mother is. The nurse says that a doctor will talk to him about what she calls “her condition.” He asks to see the doctor. The doctor isn’t in yet. When will he be in? The nurse thinks two o’clock. She calls it “
P.M
.” She has square, shiny fingernails and a perfectly round, auburn bun. She looks down at sheets of paper. All Charles can see is her neck. She has a long neck, fairly thin, skin quite pale. He asks if the doctor will call him. He will. He leaves his number. They do not go back to the room.