Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) (3 page)

T
HEY DROVE THE
eighty miles from Elgin up to Delavan Lake on cruise control without saying more than a few tight, courteous words. Marion had been experimenting with reticence lately. Though she had told Arnie not to take it personally, he found it hard not to add this to his list of worries. When they parked at the golf course he wanted to help her out of the car and stand next to her as she took her first look at the place, the event, but she flapped her hand at him and made the face that said he was starting to act old again. She pushed her door open wide and scooted herself around sideways, lifting her left leg with one hand and setting it down outside on the pavement. From inside the car he watched her hoist herself upright onto her good leg and then straighten her pants out where they tended to catch in the socket of her prosthesis, though they hadn’t caught this time. She didn’t get her cane out of the back seat. One of the things she liked about the golfing, he suspected, was that she could use her driver for support instead. And she was getting better with the walking. She could go eight or ten steps on a flat surface without a cane or a golf club or anything. All in all she was doing really well, Arnie thought. That was what he told everyone. There was nothing to be afraid of; she’d be fine.

But when he got out of the car he could see the shadow of a grimace on her. “Nothing,” she said when he asked her about it. It was a bright blue day, already hot before eight in the morning, and the golf course stretched out calmly around them, as if waiting. Marion wasn’t looking at the soft curves and dales of the ninth fairway though; she was squinting with distaste at the big orange plastic banner overhead, which made a rough clapping sound each time the breeze shifted.
SIXTH ANNUAL MIDWEST REGIONAL AMPUTEE GOLF TOURNAMENT
it said in black letters.

“Subtle,” she muttered.

She avoided the vocabulary of this new predicament, threw away the booklets from her prosthetist and physical therapists, stashed the ointments, kept the leg itself perpetually hidden under pants.

“Sixth annual. They must be doing something right,” Arnie tried, but she wouldn’t meet his gaze. “Let’s get someone from inside to help with your clubs.”

“Oh. Can’t you do it, Arn?” she said absently.

He hesitated. “Sure. Sure.” He bent over the open trunk and braced himself for the needles that would punch into his back and legs, starting with the two herniated discs between his shoulder blades and moving down past his knees.

Suddenly Marion gasped. Poking his head out of the trunk, Arnie saw it too: pairs of suntanned players, smiling, chatting, moving with their mismatched limbs and herky-jerky gaits from the clubhouse to the neat rows of golf carts waiting in the shade. “Oh God.” Marion turned away from them. “Here they come.”

A
rnie himself had never been any good at golf, though he had always appreciated the tidy green isolation of golf courses, the way people’s voices dropped naturally to church tones, as if there were something in their midst to worship. He liked the cocktails and groundskeepers and the old-fashioned shoes, and the way serious adults could abandon the jagged concerns of their lives to focus for a few quiet hours on the flight of a small dimpled ball. There was a kind of frivolous beauty in that, a weightlessness.

When they were first married, back in the sixties, Arnie had often caught men watching Marion as she teed off. In the brief seconds following her swing, while she stood, mouth ajar, eyes tracing the ball’s quick sweep over the fairway, Arnie liked to glance back to watch the people watching her. From the clubhouse lawn or adjacent holes, they shook their heads, eyebrows raised. Sometimes a faint whistle escaped through their teeth; he could hear it.

Now he stood on the cart path behind the first tee, watching as Marion bent low to the ground to tee up her ball and then wobbled herself upright again. She’d spent weeks getting this move right in physical therapy, and each time he watched her do it, Arnie felt himself clench up and concentrate, praying she wouldn’t fall. If she glanced back at him now, he would give her a quick thumbs up. But she didn’t. She just took two quick practice swings, then squared up to the ball, inhaled, and hit it. Nowadays, she really only took half a swing, all from the shoulders and restrained, as if she feared she could knock herself off her feet if she really let loose. But still, he liked to watch her. Each skill she reacquired seemed like a brick rebuilding her. When her ball cleared the water hazard and landed just a few feet off the fairway, in the fringe but not the rough, he couldn’t help clapping and saying, “There you go, girl.”

The other golfers in her foursome made encouraging noises, but Marion just shook her head and walked back to Arnie.

“It’s a good start,” he said. “Really.”

“So you’ll wait here at the clubhouse?” she asked. Most of the other spouses and friends had already cleared out, looking for other things to do at the resort.

“I’ll sit right there on the patio.”

“In case I get tired or something,” she said. This had been one of her conditions before agreeing to come: If she wanted to quit early, back out, he’d be right there to take her home. No questions, no guilt trips.

“I remember. I promise.”

“OK, then,” Marion said, moving away as he reached for her. “Off you go.”

He walked back to the clubhouse patio to join the few remaining spectators, leaving her alone then, shyly withdrawn from her foursome. The organizers had put her with two men from Indiana who appeared to be friends, and a woman from Black Earth whose left leg stopped just below the hip. She wore no prosthesis, and Arnie watched as she dropped her crutches near the edge of the tee and hopped into place. After only one practice swing, she steadied herself again and smacked the ball low and straight, almost a hundred yards.

“Wow,” Arnie said before thinking, unable to suppress his surprise.

“Yeah, she’s something, huh?” said a voice behind him.

It was a red-haired woman about his age sitting and smoking at one of the tables on the patio. The man sitting next to her had removed his C-Leg and was poking at the knee joint with an allen wrench.

“You’d think she’d want a prosthesis at least just for balance,” Arnie said.

“Too high up,” the woman said, touching the side of her hand to the top of her thigh. “You have to have something to fit it on.”

Arnie’s face reddened. “Of course.”

“Shoot, sometimes I think I’d be better off without this one,” the man next to her said, tapping his leg on the table.

It was nice of him to try to put others at ease like that. They introduced themselves—Bill and Cheryl Tider, from Arlington Heights—and gestured for Arnie to join them. He sat down at their table, all the while keeping his eye on Marion as her group got into their carts and jerked into motion, speeding over the little bridge and down toward the fairway. It felt like the morning, decades ago, when he first brought their daughter Elizabeth to her new school in Elgin after he’d been transferred. “Give ’em hell,” he had said, patting her shoulder to nudge her toward the other kids on the playground. She’d refused to say good-bye or turn back and wave, though he stood there for twenty minutes, even after she’d gone in the building.

“So, she just gets around with those crutches like that?” Arnie asked this couple, shifting his thoughts back to Marion’s golf partner.

Cheryl gave a big nod. “Lost her leg as a little girl, some kind of farming accident. She told me once, but I can’t remember the specifics. Anyway, big farm family like that, she had to just get around however she could. They’ve got three kids, too.”

“Hooh.” Arnie shook his head.

“I always find it inspiring here,” Cheryl said.

“Where’s your inspiration when I’m searching for the remote control?” Bill said.

“You poor baby.”

Arnie watched them closely. “Can I help with the leg?” he asked. Until last year he’d been a mechanical engineer all his life, designing and reconfiguring parts for generators. After the accident it seemed best to retire a couple years early, but he missed the job sometimes, the figuring and drafting, the public demands on his time.

“I’m not getting the right swivel action in the knee joint,” Bill said, glancing around at the last few groups of golfers, who were about to leave without him.

“It’s because you’ve gained weight again,” Cheryl said. “It always breaks down when you get heavy.”

“Ah!” Bill cried, snapping his hand back. “That’s it. I got it.” He picked up the leg and showed Arnie the swivel action of the knee.

“There you go,” Arnie said, feeling useless again.

Bill pushed his shorts up to his hip and fitted the leg back onto his stump, pulling the Velcro strip through the hole at the bottom of the socket and securing it into place on top of his thigh. He stood up and took a few tentative steps and turns.

“That’ll have to do.” He kissed Cheryl on the forehead and shook Arnie’s hand, then went off to join the others. Most of them were men who, like Bill, wore their artificial arms and legs without the flesh-colored covering that was meant to help them blend in. In their shorts and polo shirts, they let their plastic and metal parts glint freely in the sun.

“Did the women go out in earlier rounds?” Arnie asked. Aside from the woman Marion was playing with, Arnie had only seen two or three ladies among the dozens of players.

Cheryl shook her head. “There just aren’t very many ladies at these things for some reason. Never have been.”

“Huh,” Arnie said. He’d hoped Marion would make friends, lady friends, with people who had gone through this and come out the other side. It seemed to Arnie that she was still in the middle, alone, drifting further from him all the time.

While the patio emptied out Cheryl chatted with a few other wives that she knew, and two of them sat down at the table and joined them. Arnie relaxed into their small talk, letting his eyes settle over the manicured stretches of fairway reaching out around them. Marion’s group had gone out of sight behind the trees, but if he understood the map correctly, they would come back into view in another few holes, far off in the distance where he could make out the sixth tee. The golf course was old and elegantly designed, with impressive oak trees and water hazards and artfully carved out sand traps. The perennial gardens near the tees and greens were overflowing with blooms, and the cart paths were solid tar black, recently repaved. He was concerned about Marion, but he had to admit it was pleasant, sitting here, making conversation in the morning sun with such cheerful women. He’d been living on tiptoes, keeping quiet, for so many months.

The others at the table had been coming to these tournaments for years and knew all the stories about the different players. Cheryl and Bill had even gone to the national tournament twice, in Arizona.

“He’s not terribly competitive though,” Cheryl said, giving Arnie and the other women a look.

“Well.” Arnie understood her meaning. “All my life I never once beat Marion in a golf game. Until now.” The mood was light, and he had smiled when saying this, but once it was out of his mouth the comment felt sour. “It’s awkward,” he said, after a moment.

“Oh, and who cares about scores,” another woman said. “Such a stupid game, paying all this money to get angry at a little ball.”

Everyone laughed, and Arnie relaxed again.

“Well, I don’t know about you all,” Cheryl said, “but I was toying with the idea of embarking on a cocktail.”

The sun had risen in the sky, it was after eleven, and they were all leaning close to the table to catch the shade of the umbrella.

“It
is
sort of a holiday,” one woman said.

“Count me in.” Arnie smiled. They got a deck of cards from the bartender and passed the time playing gin rummy and drinking Bloody Marys. For a long time Arnie kept his gaze on that sixth tee, looking for Marion in her pale yellow outfit and visor. He liked to imagine she was making friends too, or at least shooting well. With so few women in the tournament, he realized, she was practically guaranteed to win a trophy.

“So your wife just recently lost her leg?” one of Cheryl’s friends was asking him.

Arnie nodded. “Not quite a year ago.”

Cheryl shook her head. “How did it happen?”

“Car accident,” Arnie said. The women held his gaze, waiting for something more, the full story, because by now Arnie had been filled in on the sad, terrible stories of all their husbands and several of the other golfers as well—people he hadn’t even met. He inhaled and stared back at them, tempted. He had heard Marion brush off this question so many times that he always automatically followed her lead:
Dumb luck, just a car accident. It could happen to anyone
. For the most part, this was the truth anyway, or as much of the truth as mattered.

But in the bright sun like this, after those cocktails, staring at these kind women, Arnie felt maybe he could say something more about what he had seen that day in the car with Marion. Something, maybe, about how it had felt being pinched in next to his wife in that small, crushed space, feeling the strange new jabs of pain in his back while they waited for what seemed like hours for the sirens to come. Marion had drifted in and out. When she was conscious, terrible moans and wheezing came from her mouth, and her eyes blazed into him with raw animal shock. In the moments she went under and got peaceful again Arnie couldn’t help himself: He shook her arm and yelled at her to come back, come back right this minute. In a revolting trick of memory, the smell of those awful moments returned to him—blood, tires, urine. But just then he saw her, Marion, not small and far away on the sixth tee but driving right up to the clubhouse in that golf cart, glaring at him. It was unsettling to see her behind the wheel, for she rarely drove anything anymore. She was alone, without her partner, without her group, and her face was stricken. He closed his mouth. He got up and went to her.