Don't I Know You? Page 15

  “Have a shagadelic day, ma’am.”

  Then the two hockey boys left, shouldering their duffel bags. I didn’t want them to go.

  “Thanks, Van,” shouted the last one out. “Stay cool.”

  “Ding-a-ling-aling, ding-a-ling-aling,” he sang back.

  Now it was just the schoolgirls and me. Outside, the fields had given way to a forlorn strip mall, where the late-afternoon sun flashed gold in the windows of a Blinds to Go outlet.

  “Excuse me, is this seat free?” It was the Winona girl. “I just need to make a private call.”

  What, is sitting beside me like being alone?

  She tilted her head toward her friends chattering in the back.

  “It’s quieter here.”

  I took my briefcase off the seat. There was nothing in it but my three-page résumé and two magazines, for bulk. Winona sat down and applied a phone to her cheek.

  “Rebecca? Can you hear me? I’m on the bus. So…”

  I took my CV out and pretended to read it. Honors B.A., English Language and Literature. Maybe I should add “with a minor in bath fixtures.” Winona held her phone and said nothing for quite a while. I could hear rushed, tinny words on the other end, an inflection of hysteria. She shielded her mouth with her other hand and spoke quietly.

  “Are you, like, bleeding a lot?” The gulping sounds on the other end ran together. “Did Evan go with you?” The pitch of the phone voice rose.

  “Sorry. Dumb question. What if I came over—I could bring you something … a chai latte?”

  “The cool room,” sang the driver softly into the mike, “Lord, it’s a fool’s room.”

  Outside, flakes of snow began to whirl down. I checked my watch; five minutes left to make it to my interview. Clearly, this was not going to happen, which filled me with a wave of relief and even optimism. My future was changing, right this minute! Of course, I could call Flo-Q and reschedule, but what would I say—that my bus got lost? The driver likes my writing?

  “Hey don’t worry, Becca,” Winona said into her phone, “it’ll be okay. But what’s the story if your mother calls me, or like, the school…” More burbling. “Of course not, I’m not a moron. Call me later.”

  She hung up and looked down at her phone with a sigh.

  “Is your friend going to be okay? Sorry, but it’s hard not to overhear…”

  Winona looked at me for a beat and decided I wasn’t crazy.

  “She had to have an abortion. She just got home from the clinic.”

  “Oh dear, I’m sorry. How old is she?”

  “Sixteen. But she wants to be a vet, which takes like eight years. And her boyfriend’s a total douche.”

  “Sounds like she did the right thing then.”

  We rode together, as I thought about how it could be the right thing and yet feel like just the opposite.

  “I had an abortion once,” I said. The words fell out of my mouth, I don’t know why.

  “You’re kidding,” said Winona. “Really?”

  I ignored her amazement. I thought my generation had invented sex too.

  The fact is that I rarely think about it, except around the anniversary, in early December. Or whenever I have to fill out medical forms. Then I remember that my “number of pregnancies” is not one, but two. (My daughter is in Hong Kong right now, doing an exchange semester in engineering. She thinks the bath-fixture job is a terrible idea. Eric’s son is back living with him in Philadelphia, so I’m on my own for the first time in ages.)

  “How old were you?” Winona asked.

  “In my early twenties. I was using a diaphragm. A very unreliable method, by the way. You might as well use a tube sock.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I picked a gynecologist out of the phone book because I was too embarrassed to go to my family doctor. Remember, these were the days before the pill, the days of secret shameful homes run by churches for unwed mothers.”

  “What about the guy? The father?”

  “He was good about it. He paid for half. But we weren’t in love—we weren’t even a couple, and I had no job, I was trying to write. There was no way I was ready to have a child on my own.”

  “I don’t think even people who have children are ready to have children,” said Winona spiritedly.

  The driver smiled at us in the mirror. He was happy to see his passengers getting along.

  “We were so insouciant about abortion back then. It was almost a feather in your feminist cap. I remember a girlfriend came to pick me up at the clinic, and brought a bottle of champagne.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “It was. But in fact there’s nothing merry about it. Afterwards the body grieves, whether you think you care or not.” I looked at Winona and corrected myself. “Which is not to say that abortion’s wrong. Nobody else should make that choice for you.”

  “Right. Cause it’s like, our bodies…”

  “Right. But it’s not something you forget, either.”

  “So what happened with the guy?”

  I laughed.

  “Well, he sort of lost interest in me after that. I didn’t blame him. It’s hard to have casual sex when your body is plotting the future.”

  Winona laughed too. Her blue drop earrings swung.

  “I still check him out online now and then. He ended up owning a vineyard near Niagara-on-the-Lake. Ice wine. Married, divorced. No kids. But he changed his status recently. He’s with someone new, a young actress, and they just had twins.”

  “Yuck. Twins scare me.”

  “A boy and a girl.”

  Outside, fake-looking white flakes whirled around, melting as soon as they landed. We were back in rolling farmland with thin rails of snow in the creases of the fields.

  “Where the hell are we?” I asked Winona.

  “Oh, he never takes the same route twice. It’s okay. He just likes to improvise.”

  The snow dithered away.

  “But it did make me wonder, when I found out about the twins.”

  “Wonder what?”

  I hesitated. Usually I am the listener.

  “I wondered if I could have been pregnant with twins too.”

  We rode in silence for a while.

  “Anyway,” I said, “it was absolutely the right thing to do, for me. And it sounds like this was the right decision for your friend too.”

  “Her boyfriend told her that pulling out was better for the environment.”

  “Hah. Good one.”

  “She’s super-serious about the environment.”

  “Well, he’s right, technically. Unless you factor in the overpopulation it causes.”

  Winona’s chin trembled.

  “She doesn’t want me to come over, but I think I’ll go see her anyway. Should I?”

  “Definitely. Is she going to tell her mother?”

  “Probably not. Her mother’s sort of a nutcase.”

  We looked out the window. Some fine-boned horses, their muscles shining copper in the low sun, grazed in a field.

  “Your original face,” sang the driver, “before time and place … before the world was made…”

  “So what’s up with our driver?” I asked. “He seems to know you all pretty well.”

  “He used to be a musician, some sort of jazz person I think. Once he drove us right to our front doors. Another time he took the bus to an Il Fornello in Richmond Hill and we all ordered pizzas. I can’t believe he doesn’t get fired.”

  “Look at where we are, though. It’s so incredibly green—it could be Ireland. It keeps on snowing, but the snow just disappears.”

  “His name is Van,” Winona said. “Don’t worry. It might take a while but he’ll get us there.”

  * * *

  I fell asleep for some time. When I woke up, the highway had narrowed to a two-lane road that wound through a landscape of billowing, waist-high grass. Winona and the girls were sleeping too, sprawled against one another, white ear buds in place. I could he
ar a murmuring leakage of music. For some reason the sun was higher than it had been, although it shone with a diminished intensity. The snow had stopped. Cirrus clouds brindled the blue sky.

  Up in the driver’s seat, Van raised his arms off the wheel in an exaggerated stretch that ended in a yodel. Honestly, what a show-off.

  We were driving on the left side of the road now, and passed a sign that said DUBLIN 120 MILES. A cement structure came into view on the horizon. It was low and long, with small windows and a tall, ominous smokestack.

  “We’ll be making a quick stop here, people,” Van announced. “Feel free to stretch your legs and use the loo.”

  The girls woke up and ruffled their hair, smoothed down their skirts. We followed Van out of the bus down a walkway between beds of daffodils and tulips. The day felt both springish and autumnal, with cooler currents threading through the air. Clamorous birdsong came from somewhere, although there were no trees in sight. The air was extraordinarily clear, with a carbonated sparkle, like an alpine meadow on a sunny day.

  The building was divided into two wings, “Ambulatory/Long-Term” and “In Transit.” We headed down the “In Transit” one with Van ahead of us, walking fast. He had a shapely little ass, for a guy.

  A nurse in a white uniform came toward us. She smiled—a small, complicit, beatific smile, like Meryl Streep in The Hours. She didn’t speak, but her smile had the most powerful effect on me, as if it were passing right through my body.

  I never wanted to leave this place, wherever it was.

  At the end of the corridor Van turned into a room, where the air felt cold, almost refrigerated. The rest of us stood shyly in the doorway. We could see a woman propped up in a hospital bed with her long dark hair spread on the pillow. She looked young, pale, and very sad.

  “Hey Julie,” Van said. “Sorry I took so long. The bastards keep changing the routes on me.” He took her hand between both of his big ones and chafed it.

  “How’re you doin’, angel?”

  Julie gave him a look, half-annoyed, half-grateful. Then she coughed a terrible cough, liquid, harsh, and deep. Van let go of her hand and went over to the window. He wrestled with the sash and lifted it a couple inches.

  “Open up the window, I need some air,” said Van, making funny little pig-snorts. Julie didn’t laugh. Van pulled a chair up close to her head. She turned away from him.

  Some of the girls had drifted into the room. They were the same age as the girl in the bed, no more than sixteen. I couldn’t figure out Julie’s relationship with Van. Daughter? Niece? Underage ex-lover?

  The peace and sparkle of the gardens had vanished in this chilly room and I found myself longing to go, to get back on the bus. Van looked uneasy too. He took a vase of wilted tulips to a little sink in the corner, poured the brackish water down the drain, and refilled it. But most of the petals had dropped. Only dusty black stamens remained.

  I went over to the other side of Julie’s bed and she gave me a faint smile. Her face had the underwater look of someone on serious painkillers.

  “Let me fix your pillows,” I said. She curled forward and I gave them a few whacks, then stepped on a bar to raise the level of the bed a few inches.

  “Thank you.” She gave me a searching look. “Are you here … to see the twins?”

  Twins again. “No, I’m just here because of our driver,” I said. “He hijacked us.”

  “They’re right across the hall, waiting to transition. You should see them before they go, they’re gorgeous.”

  A nurse came in, a different unsmiling one. She looked at all of us disapprovingly and strode out, the soles of her shoes squeaking.

  I went to the window. This wing overlooked a manicured expanse of grass that might be a golf course. The view was picturesque but static and depthless, like a film set.

  Van leaned over Julie and said something into her ear. Then he tried to organize the nest of her sweat-dampened sheets. She coughed into a tissue and added it to a crumpled pile on the table beside her. There was blood on some; Winona saw it too, and gave me a look.

  A humidifier in the corner of the room hissed out an opaque white V, like a lighthouse beam. Julie had a grip on Van’s arm and now he had panic in his eyes.

  The unsmiling nurse returned.

  “I’m afraid I have to ask you all to leave, it’s time for a perfusion.”

  “Hey, we’re done here anyway,” said Van brightly. He fumbled for something in his pocket.

  “So Julie baby, I’m leaving you some tapes.” He put a couple old-fashioned cassettes on her lap and waggled one of them.

  “You’re singing on this one. You sound fantabulous. When you’re better we’ll work up that tune you always thought I should do. The Crystals song.”

  Julie said nothing. She shut her eyes. Van tapped the edge of her bed.

  “But I should go. I gotta go now. I’m running two days late.”

  Winona rummaged in her bag and put a plastic Starbucks card on the night table. Julie opened her eyes.

  “It’s got at least fifteen dollars left on it,” Winona said.

  “Thank you,” Julie said. “But we don’t have Starbucks here.”

  “But they’re everywhere.”

  “This isn’t everywhere,” said Julie. “In case you haven’t noticed.”

  The other girls were out in the corridor, spying on the other rooms.

  “That girl is not a happy camper,” Winona said to me, stopping at the open door of the room across the hall from Julie.

  “Rebecca!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  A girl in a blue cardigan and skintight jeans leaned over two bassinets.

  “I was just visiting the twins,” she said dreamily. She smiled at us.

  I stepped into the room. Rebecca waved me closer.

  “Aren’t they beautiful? They’re so much bigger than the last time.”

  The babies, wrapped as tightly as cocoons, had blond hair, quite a bit of it. I watched the one in pink, her eyes moving beneath their lids as if following the action in a dream. The other baby made a comical series of grimaces, like a fast-forwarded training video on how to master facial expressions. I let the one in blue grip my index finger, a fierce grip that could support a chin-up. He held my gaze and I felt my face soften. Time eddied peacefully around us. In another place. The baby’s solemn eyes were a milky blue, like my mother’s.

  Julie’s nurse came in. The baby’s hand uncurled.

  “Oh, you’re not supposed to be in here. These are in transit.”

  “In transit? What do you mean—are they all right?”

  “Of course,” the nurse said with a sharp look at me. “But visiting hours are over now.”

  “Rebecca, hurry up,” said Winona, “or we’ll miss our ride.”

  “Just a minute.” Rebecca freed one small fist from the swaddling so the baby could suck on it. Which he did, noisily.

  In the hall Winona and I stopped at a fountain, taking long sips from the arc of water. A sign on the door beside us said HYDROTHERAPY and I pushed it open. The tiled white room was empty except for a high-sided porcelain tub with hoselike attachments and a portable set of steps leading up to the lip, like a tiny Mayan shrine. Aha, I thought. The water feature.

  A sound came from outside. Someone honking a horn.

  Winona took my arm and stroked it like a cat. Rebecca caught up to us and took my other arm. We walked down the corridor like that and out into the peculiar sunlight, where Van was already behind the wheel.

  Shovel My Walk

  If it snows overnight, the silence in the early morning has a different quality, as if a duvet has fallen over the city. I lay there wondering how deep it was. Then I heard the scrape of a shovel, like winter clearing its throat. Our neighbor Barry was already out there, even before the snow had stopped or the plows came through. Sometimes it’s a lovely sound, shoveling. Sometimes not.

  It was mid-January. I was still in bed, dragging my heels about getting the
ad copy in for Flo-Q’s new line of indoor wave pools. “No more sand in your suit” didn’t do it for Leanna, who oversees me. She doesn’t like me calling her boss. “We’re co-creators” she always says before slashing away at my copy. I gave her a little cartoon that I’d drawn, of a couple in bed beside a big standing wave in the lap pool. The wife is saying “Surf’s up, at least.” Too negative, Leanna said. She was right.

  I turned on my phone, then turned it off. I’ve been trying to stop tracking my novels on Amazon. The last time I checked, The Bludgeoning was in 789,470th place. Which is not the bottom, by a long shot. I repeated this to myself: “Not the bottom.” My therapist, Katrine, has instructed me to take every negative thought I have and turn it into a positive one, like doing origami. Newsprint into bluebirds. I’ve also started a gratitude journal. “I’m grateful to have started my gratitude journal” was the first entry. How can I be sarcastic even with myself? I know it’s important to take the exercise seriously, but it feels like I’m joining a cult of one.

  Gratitude does work, though. I can feel my thinking shift ever so incrementally toward the light, an ocean liner changing course. And whatever works, I want. Eric’s affair (I mean, his recent remarriage) is still livid in my mind, like some ghastly patterned wallpaper that you can’t not see every day as soon as you open your eyes. And I’m still waiting to hear back from that e-publisher about Havoc.

  I should be starting something new, but I don’t have the heart for it.

  Another thing I realize is that writing is a mirror you can’t trust. On Monday the words look supple and fit, a fine dancing partner. On Tuesday the same words look contrived and flat. Who cares? Blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, I do not trust people who never doubt, who just plunge on. They seem like babies.

  I should get up and shovel the walk, I told myself as I lay there ruminating, the term Katrine prefers. The new mother across the street might be wrestling her stroller out there right now, her child encased in clear plastic like a bunch of bananas. And sometimes Barry clears our walk too, if I don’t beat him to it.