MARY AND O'NEIL (8 page)

She nods. She cannot help herself; how marvelous, she thinks, to be called a girl. “The next one.”

She watches O’Neil head back into the crowd; she realizes that for the first time that evening, she is alone. And yet she does not feel alone. The wonderful music, the spinning lights, all O’Neil’s friends there (for more have arrived; he seems to know everyone); she has the uncanny sense of stepping into his life, and all the promise it contains. With her eyes she searches the open floor again and finds O’Neil dancing with a dark-haired girl she does not recognize; she sees Arthur dancing with Eliza, and Stephen, a solitary figure at the base of the stage, swaying his hips and pumping his fist, a beer in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other; she sees Sandra swinging her trombone back and forth in time to the music’s joyful rhythms. She knows that O’Neil has left her, that his life has begun, but the thought does not grieve her. It is as if time has thrown off its moorings, revealing all—that she, Miriam, has disappeared. She thinks of her father, gone twelve years, and her mother, too, sleeping her way into death not long after, as if it were not possible for her to remain in the world without him. A hole had opened; she had only to step through. After the funeral, the second in a year, Miriam walked alone through the Brooklyn apartment, not so much missing them as marveling at their absence. The places they had been, had sat and stood and walked and slept and eaten: fifty years of life in this place, and now they were gone. And yet their presence was vivid, palpable—a thing not seen but felt, like a parting of air. It was as if she were walking through the rooms of memory. She is remembering this, and watching too; the music stops—not the end of a song, merely a break in the action—the dancers stop in their tracks, and she sees O’Neil, the dark-haired girl swung out to the very tips of his fingers, throw back his head and laugh. The words, half remembered, form in her head.
See? It is all so simple. The children are gone; they have flown away from you.

And this is when she feels it—the first pain. What she has experienced until now has been more of a presence, a sense of something
there
. It was this awareness that brought her fingers to her breast to find the lump two weeks ago. But now, at this moment watching her son and his friends dancing, her mind adrift in the past, a tiny ball of fire ignites within her. It rockets through her body with a nauseating rush, leaving her hands and feet tingling, her brow glazed, her throat constricted with bile. The room lurches below her; she reaches one hand outward to brace herself, but finds nothing to hold, to stop her fall. The wall, she thinks. The wall will save her. Three more steps and she is there.

Then someone has taken her by the elbow: it is Sandra, standing beside her. Wasn’t she just onstage?

“Mrs. Burke?”

But Miriam cannot speak; she knows if she doesn’t leave the room immediately she will be sick, or faint. The gymnasium seems like an enormous fishbowl, colors and shapes bending in the crooked, swirling light. At some impossible distance she sees Arthur and Eliza dancing, like two figures swimming on the far side of a lake.

“I’m ill,” she manages.

“I know. I’ll help you.”

A pair of metal safety doors, then the sudden white light of the hallway: guiding her by the elbow, Sandra leads her away, though Miriam is barely aware of any of this. All she knows is that the music is gone, sealed away behind her. Another door opens and she finds herself in a small room full of instruments; she is backstage, where the band keeps its supplies. Relief overwhelms her, like oxygen to the lungs. She realizes that she is sitting on a bench of some kind, and that Sandra has gone, but the moment she discovers this she looks up and sees that Sandra has returned, carrying her purse. She holds a paper cup of water before Miriam’s face.

“Drink this,” she says, and guides her hand around the cup.

Miriam lifts the water to her lips. It is cool but not cold, and she sips at it, thinking only of the water’s taste, and her own pounding heart. The pain is gone, but in its wake it has deposited a kind of tingling numbness, scattered throughout her body like a luminous dust.
So this is what it will be like,
she thinks.

A few moments pass. She finishes the water, and Sandra takes the cup. “Do you need the bathroom?” Sandra has pulled a chair up, and is sitting directly in front of her.

“I don’t think so.”

“Do you want me to get Mr. Burke?”

Miriam shakes her head. “You’ve done more than enough. I just need to rest here a minute.”

Sandra’s eyes search her face. They are very blue—the blue of sapphires.

“He doesn’t know,” Sandra says then.

But before Miriam can say anything, Sandra goes on. “I didn’t mean to surprise you. You haven’t told Arthur, have you? Or O’Neil.”

Miriam shakes her head. “No.”

“And it’s cancer? A kind of cancer.”

Miriam nods, amazed beyond words. “Yes. I think so. I have a tumor in my breast. How did you—”

“It’s all right.” Sandra takes her hand. “I just do.”

For a while they just sit there, their hands together. And Miriam is glad she has said it. Finally, she has used the words.

“I’ll tell you how,” Sandra says gently. “I don’t know if it’s the real reason, but I’ve always thought so. I was six years old, and I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Do you know what that is?”

“I think so.”

“Most people don’t. I spent most of two years in the hospital. Little kids who get it nearly always die, but I didn’t know that at the time. My parents sure weren’t going to tell me. But I found it out, later. Chemo, radiation, things they’d never tried on anyone before. I had it all. And when it was over, I could always tell when someone was sick, even if they didn’t know it yet. I guess I’d been around cancer patients so long, I could just read the signs.”

“When did you know about me?”

“Well, when we first met, at the race, I thought it.” Sandra tips one shoulder and frowns; Miriam can tell she has returned to the moment, to feel what it was like. “At dinner too. It was just an inkling. You’ll probably laugh. Sometimes it’s lights, or a sort of ringing sound. Sometimes it’s just a feeling, like I’m remembering what it was like to be sick myself. I wasn’t certain until I saw you just now, outside.”

The understanding hits her all at once. “The hats,” Miriam says.

“You’ve discovered my secret.” Sandra smiles warmly, shrugging. “I just don’t feel dressed without one.”

The door opens then, washing the room with music and noise, and a heavyset boy steps inside. Like the other band members he is wearing a navy suit and a gold necktie, and his face is flushed with the exertion of playing. He stops when he sees the two of them.

“Christ, Sandy. Where have you been? We had to shuffle the playlist twice already. You were supposed to be off break ten minutes ago.”

Sandra barely takes her eyes off Miriam. “Just a minute in here, all right, Joe? I’ll be done soon. You can get along without me.”

His face falls. “You don’t have to be such a crank about it. We need charts for the third set, anyway.” He kneels and rustles through a cardboard carton to find it, then leaves the two of them alone.

“We should probably get back,” Miriam says.

“When you feel up to it.” Sandra gestures toward the stage door. “They can fake it for a while.”

A question occurs to her. “Does O’Neil know about you?”

“About the cancer?” Sandra shakes her head. “I think he knows I was sick, but not the details. I’ll tell him sooner or later. He thinks I’m just some kind of superachiever, and to tell you the truth, I don’t want to spoil the illusion yet.”

Her purse is at her feet; she remembers Sandra returning to get it. Miriam asks Sandra to bring her some more water, and Sandra leaves with the cup, reappearing almost at once. Miriam drinks it down—she hadn’t realized she was so thirsty—and opens her purse to remove the small package with the glass trombone inside. She places it in Sandra’s hands.

“It’s just something small. I saw it today, and thought of you. But open it later. I don’t want O’Neil to know just yet.”

Sandra looks at the package in her palm. It is wrapped in thin white tissue paper, with a crinkly green bow. “I don’t know what to say. Thank you, Mrs. Burke.”

“You’re welcome. And it’s Mimi, okay?”

Sandra smiles. “Mimi, then.”

They have risen to go when Miriam stops. “Sandra, this thing you can do.” Miriam pauses, wondering what words to choose. “Can you tell if someone’s going to be all right?”

Sandra doesn’t answer. For a long moment she looks at Miriam, studying her, though her expression is nothing Miriam can read. Then she removes her hat, a dome of green felt, and places it on Miriam’s head. The band is warm, and a little damp against her forehead.

“I’d say you will be,” she declares, “if you go to the doctor.”

Hours later, beneath the floodlights of the dormitory parking lot, they say their good-byes; Arthur and Miriam will be leaving in the morning, and won’t see O’Neil and Sandra again. Miriam hugs each in turn, and watches as Arthur, awkwardly, does the same. As they are turning to go, Sandra hugs Miriam again, and whispers quickly in her ear, “I really believe it. Just remember what I said.” O’Neil and Sandra are still standing in the parking lot when Miriam and Arthur drive away.

In the morning they awaken late to rumors of snow. They eat their breakfast and pack the car, and while Arthur is paying the bill, Miriam waits outside. The sky is gray, a northern gray; the air is very still. Around her the town and the campus are quiet, as if everyone is still asleep.

Arthur steps from the hotel. “I called O’Neil. I thought we might change plans and buy the two of them lunch.”

“And?”

Arthur rubs his bare hands together in the cold. “He wasn’t there. Or he wasn’t answering. I left a message.”

“It’s just as well,” Miriam says. In the pocket of her coat she carries Sandra’s hat, folded, like a letter. “It’s a long drive ahead. And they have things to do.” She takes Arthur’s hand. “It’s time for Mom and Dad to let the kids be alone. Us too.”

His face is incredulous. “You’re okay with this, then?”

A new mood has filled her, a sense of lightness. “I think I was always okay,” she says.

They drive away. Woods, houses, the limbs of the bare trees: Miriam watches the scenery from the passenger window, letting it all flow past, like pictures in an empty museum. Beside her in the quiet car Arthur drives with both hands on the wheel; with deft precision he negotiates each curve, each dip in the road ahead. She will tell him, she decides. She will tell him today, or else tomorrow, and he will be with her when she visits the surgeon on Tuesday, and then whatever happens, happens; but they will do it together, this last thing they have never done before, worrying together that one of them is finally dying.

They have driven just twenty miles when they see, up ahead, the low, barracks-like shape of a roadside motel, set against woods on a small rise above the highway. The sign hangs on a chain: Glade View Motor Court. Cable TV. Welcome Skiers! A dozen dismal rooms; they have passed it many times before, and each time she has imagined their interiors: the narrow, caved-in beds, the frayed shag carpeting reeking of old smoke, the floor-standing lamp that is also an ashtray. The idea arrives in her consciousness so fully formed it is like a memory of something that has already happened.

“Turn here,” she says.

Arthur taps the brake. As the car coasts to the shoulder, he turns to her and raises an eyebrow in happy surprise.

“I’m not arguing. But, really?”

It is a little past noon. “Oh, just turn, love,” she says.

November 12, 1979, Sunday afternoon. In room 106 of the Glade View Motor Court, Arthur and Miriam make love. They make love to one another in the icy room—the decor is just as bad as Miriam imagined—piling all the blankets they can find on top of themselves for warmth, and when it is over, they sleep—the happy, dreamless sleep of lovers.

It is after four when they awake. Dusk has fallen; through the paper-thin wall above their heads they hear the murmur of a television, and a man’s voice saying, “Honey, watch this—you can see where the makeup stops on his neck. If that’s a real gorilla, then I’m president of the United States.” But they hear no reply; Miriam wonders if the occupant of the next room, whoever he is, is talking to himself. For a while they lie awake and listen, side by side but holding hands, though they hear nothing more from the other side of the wall; eventually the television goes off, and they hear the door of the next room open and close again. Outside in the parking lot a car engine roars to life.

Arthur rises to shower. Alone in the room, Miriam listens to hear if the man in the next room will return; when he doesn’t, she flicks on the television, looking for the program he was watching, but can’t find it. She watches a few minutes of a soccer game and then switches to a local station, where a woman in a canary-yellow pantsuit is giving the weather report, making broad, approximate gestures at a map of New England. Arthur is still showering; a slice of steam puffs under the bathroom door. She turns off the TV, settles back into the saggy bed, and then picks up the telephone from the nightstand. Kay answers on the second ring.