Sweet Talk Page 6

  Now the screen is foggy blue, and I can hear the deep sighs of my mother’s sleep float in the stairwell. I think of how at nine o’clock she rose from the chintz-covered chair and went up the stairs with a fierce, eager step, the hem of her white robe rippling behind in a satin fury, like water swooshing uphill. “Don’t forget the lights,” she said. “Electricity costs money.” And that simple injunction, which I have heard all my life, smoothed out the fabric of our terrible day. Don’t forget the lights, don’t let the screen door slam, don’t tramp snow across the carpet—this is the language that circumscribes domestic life, making it compact and manageable. I snap off the television and turn off the lights—this one between the chintz-covered chairs, this one by the sofa, and this one on top of the newel post—grateful for the small instruction that tells how to end the day. If my mother could choose the loved ones who would meet her at death’s threshold, I wonder whether she would choose my father and grandmother, the people who established the narrow pattern of her life and handed down the judgments.

  It’s come to this—a linen-covered table, shrimp salads in a country club. Ruda brought us here to meet the “medical counselor,” a youngish woman who wears a silk dress and heavy jewelry. I can see that she makes my mother feel awkward, almost obsequious, yet cautiously hopeful. My mother handles her silverware with too much care, as if the knife and fork had razor tips. On the way here, Ruda cheered us up with cancer success stories. There was one about a man who laughed himself into good health while he was locked in a hotel room with a movie screen and prints of all the Three Stooges films.

  “Is this woman a psychiatrist?” I asked. “Is she an M.D.?”

  “She’s a professional,” Ruda said. “She studied at an institute.” Ruda says she does not feel well herself. She has high blood pressure, and heart attacks run in the family, she reminds us.

  “I always like to have the family here on the first session,” the counselor says. She puts a hand on Ruda’s arm and a hand on mine. “I want you to close your eyes and think of this image. It came to me in a dream last night when I knew I was going to meet you.” Her voice is like Muzak—an uninspired hum, too sweet. Ruda closes her eyes and bows her head, as if in prayer. My mother looks at me quickly. She did not expect dream therapy.

  “The image is a bowl of pink crystals. Can you see them? Translucent and pure. I want you both to imagine that you are eating these crystals every day. I want you to say to yourselves, ‘I am eating the wholeness of crystals, and they are faith, hope, and responsibility.’ ”

  My mother looks at me again, anxiously. Ruda’s eyes are still closed; so are the counselor’s.

  “I have trouble picturing a bowl of pink crystals,” my mother says.

  I remove my arm from the counselor’s hand. “How about a bowl of chocolate buttercreams?” I say.

  My mother says to the counselor, “I know my daughter and Ruda already have faith, hope, and responsibility. They don’t have to pretend.”

  When I was about six, I nearly died of a kidney infection. It was very cold outside, perhaps twenty degrees below zero. On the inside corner of my bedroom window a frond of ice bloomed and unfurled across the glass. I was feverish, my face felt like burning paper. I got out of bed and laid my cheek against the ice. My mother took me to the hospital in an ambulance. It was night and we were alone. My father was in another state on temporary duty, and my grandmother had not come to live with us yet. My mother carried me out to the ambulance herself and sang a little song as someone placed ice packs around my body. She sang the little tune, and made up words in her soft, airy voice as she went along. “We’re going on a little trip, we’re not afraid of the night.” It was cold in the ambulance. She leaned over me as she sang, and put her hand on my forehead. I could see her breath misting white in the darkness and it seemed to me that she was exhaling light.

  The weather has been peculiar this summer—first the clear days in June and now a fog in early August, as a cold front sweeps across the state and the warm ground sends a mist into the air. It is after midnight, and my mother and I are walking arm in arm along the sidewalk under the maple trees. A while ago, she got out of bed and came downstairs to find me in front of the television. “You can’t sleep, either, can you?” she said. “Neither can I.” She made us cups of hot cocoa, as if I were the young child again, and she the young mother. “You’d think we could sleep now that it is cooler,” she said.

  I watch her breath as we walk—white puffs of light that seem to phosphorize the air around us.

  “Actually, what I’d like to do sometime is go to Japan and have a meal at one of those places where you get the soup with the fish eggs,” she is saying. “Or maybe to China, where they bring the soup to the table with the chicken feet still in it.”

  I nod. It is not too late to sell the house. We could fly around the world. We could eat grape leaves in Greece. We could eat camel ankles in Ethiopia. “They’re very frugal, those people,” I say. “They can make anything tasty.” I imagine the two of us seated serenely before a small meal in a house in the Himalayas, where the Hunzas, who live to a hundred but have no term for old age, feast on apricot blossoms in the spring.

  “Your grandmother never liked foreigners. They weren’t Christian enough for her, but I’ve always thought they were probably as happy as we are.”

  The word happy surprises me. All summer I have regarded us as miserable. My mother stops under a halo of light. The fog hangs among the trees like veils of trailing lace. She smiles. “Well, if it’s going to be this cold in the summer, I just wish for your sake we could be cold someplace fun, like Bavaria.” She pulls the sweater together in front of her breasts and hugs herself. It is late and she is tired. We have walked too far. I reach out to touch her, to offer the support of my arm around her shoulders, and she leans easily against my body, as if I were the mother, strong, cheerful, controlling a small bubble of space in which there is no time, only light and warmth. I recall the German woman doctor on television, earnest and importunate, making the plea for faith: We never die alone. A car skids on rain-slick pavement, an airplane dives into the sea, a hospital bed defines at last the perimeter of a mortal life—yet we are never alone. Embracing my mother, I embrace belief itself. Suddenly, I want us to be back at the house, rooting through the refrigerator for leftover chicken and sweet tomatoes—a midwestern feast.

  “It’s all right,” I say to my mother, holding her close in the fog. “Everything will be all right.”

  Other Women

  Suddenly the world is composed of infinitely divisible parts, and things, it seems, grow bigger as they grow smaller. An atom, once a tiny creature, is now a giant compared to a quark. And inside the quark, who knows? Maybe a whole universe of colliding specks, some of them red-haired, some blond, some sleek and dusky skinned, some of them with silicone implants, and some of the plainer ones, like me, still going to the shopping center in thrift-shop shoes.

  Harvey has a former wife named Susu, and who am I? A single woman and not getting any younger: I can settle for a compromise.

  Harvey’s former wife has given us both lice, serially, of course, first to Harvey, who passed them right along to me. For the two years since the divorce she’s been living in Italy, where she uses the money from the sale of their house to finance the reinvention of her face and figure—a thinner nose and bigger breasts. Also thicker eyelashes—three hundred dollars per transplant from an unspecified part of her body. For two weeks now, she has been sleeping on Harvey’s sofa, but, you know, as my friend Lila likes to say, people who did it once can do it again, and anyway with husbands and wives there’s always the long good-bye. “Smile,” Lila says. “Keep your sense of humor. Everything will be all right.”

  “She was my wife,” Harvey says, as we drive around the shopping center looking for a space near the self-serve drugstore. “I was married to her,” he says, enunciating the word married as if it were part of a foreign language I have not yet mastered.


  “It’s certainly a comfort to know these are just post-connubial crabs,” I say, and Harvey laughs.

  He stops the car in a loading zone and hunches over the wheel like a getaway driver. When I push through the plate-glass door I look back and see him glancing over his shoulder for signs of people who will recognize us and, with their extrasensory perception, discern immediately that we are on a shady errand. At the rear of the store I find what I am looking for, a selection of colorful boxes advertising a cure for certain skin conditions and, in smaller print, for three different kinds of lice infestation. These boxes are prominently displayed next to an arrangement of condoms and spermicidal jellies, and free pamphlets describing sexually transmitted diseases. Next to them is a line of eight people, most of them well-groomed older women waiting for their prescriptions. I decide to linger near cough remedies and hemorrhoid preparations, but now here come two more people to the prescription line.

  “Take me to the Women’s Health Collective,” I tell Harvey back in the car. “We need the privacy of a prescription.”

  “You know you can get these things off of toilets now,” he says. “You can even get them off of sofas and chairs in even very clean houses.”

  “We know where we got these, Harvey.”

  “Okay, you take the wheel, and I’ll go in.”

  Now it’s my turn to drive around the shopping center, through the clots of Saturday morning traffic and fearful pedestrians. This is the very place where Harvey and I met just nine months ago only moments after I hit his parked car, and now here we are raising a family of tiny creatures.

  “I was daydreaming,” I said. “I didn’t think to look before I made my cut.”

  “It’s my fault,” he said. “I parked too close.” It was his voice that attracted me to him first, rich and golden like oak turned to sound, a big, solid voice a person could lean against. Then there was his height, six feet four inches of him; even now I think there must be enough of Harvey to go around, while there is so little of me that when I offer affection to someone, I feel as if I am handing over some of my very cells. Harvey loves everyone, and I love only Harvey.

  “I don’t know much about small cars,” I told him. I was driving the enormous old Ford I had had since college. “Is yours a Datsun or a Toyota?”

  “It’s an Audi,” he said, and then he added, before I had the time to become depressed by the prospect of increased insurance premiums, “Don’t worry. I’m very handy. I think I can knock out that dent with a hammer.”

  Now he stands by the curb in front of the drugstore, a huge man with a very small sack in his hand. “I hope you got enough for three,” I say. “Well,” he says, “I ran into someone from the office. I had to buy this instead.” Inside the sack is a bottle of dandruff shampoo.

  “Why can’t we get Susu to do this?” I say as we enter the freeway traffic on our way to the Women’s Health Collective, which is twelve miles from here and suitably anonymous. I love to say the name “Susu.” I say it so that the name sounds ridiculous, and it helps me to think of Susu as a ridiculous person instead of a lovesick woman just like me. Every morning for two weeks Susu has been going into the bathroom with ordinary, sleep-flattened hair and emerging an hour later with a rococo tangle of back-combed frizzes and knotted tendrils. “Her hair looks like a place where small animals go to browse in the night,” I say to Harvey. “But what am I saying? Her hair is a place where small animals go to browse in the night.”

  “She’s always on the verge of a nervous collapse,” Harvey says.

  This much I know about the marriage. Susu took many weight-reducing pills and cried a great deal, while Harvey was complimentary and apologetic. When Susu was angry, she threw plates. When Harvey was angry, he went to his office and spent the night designing small houses that will never be built—modular units for the common people, each unit embellished with a medieval detail. “But who wants lancet windows when they can have a second bathroom instead?” Harvey likes to say, making the houses sound like a fool’s invention. But the houses—and there are dozens of them now—are his secret hopes, the places where he can curl up in his mind’s eye when times get bad.

  “Look,” Harvey says. “It’s not like this is AIDS or anything. It’s not even herpes. It’s not even a urinary tract infection.”

  My friend Lila is an engineer who would like to be an antiques dealer or maybe the curator of a small museum. “I think I missed my century,” she likes to say. “I think I would have been very happy doing needlepoint pictures in 1750.”

  Instead Lila has worked for ten years in the semiconductor industry developing new ways to make a computer smaller than your hand. “In 1750 you would have been a washerwoman,” I tell her. “Or maybe a slave.” Lila is an adopted child. She has dark skin and light gray eyes. She could be anybody, a Scandinavian Indian or an Irish black woman. She grew up in a series of mobile-home parks and now lives in an apartment full of authentic Chippendale and Hepplewhite, baroque silver, and antique beaded purses.

  “Be sure and ask for Dr. L’Heureux,” she tells me now as I stand at a pay phone across the street from the Women’s Health Collective. “Dr. L’Heureux is the one who will be lighthearted and make you feel that the situation is very funny.”

  As it turns out, Dr. L’Heureux is on vacation in Hawaii, and the young receptionist at the desk does not think that anyone is available right now. You would think that a place called the Women’s Health Collective would be staffed with sympathetic, generous-hearted people. But except for the absence of men, this place is like any other large clinic, with people on the front desk who make you feel that dealing with your medical problem is an inconvenience.

  “This is a gynecological problem?” the receptionist says very loudly. “Yes,” I say in a low voice meant to be a cue.

  “And you can’t come back and see us on Monday?”

  “No,” I say, trying to give the word just the right degree of quiet urgency.

  She consults once again the form I have just filled out. “You have an infection?”

  “No, that word is infestation.”

  “You have a yeast infection?”

  “No, I don’t.” I am thirty-one years old and have never had a yeast infection or cystitis. I also never have had gonorrhea, syphilis, or an abortion. I have a checkup once a year and am a healthy specimen. I bend close to the small curve of the woman’s ear and say, “I have”—and here my voice drops away altogether as I feel the loathsome word scraping along the back of my throat—“I have the crubs.”

  “CRUBS? You have CRUBS?” She is perplexed, then amused. She smiles, unsure whether I have intentionally made a joke or am one of those patients the medical people like to laugh about on their coffee breaks—uneducated women who cannot name their parts and say “bajiva” instead of “vagina,” or rich women who say they got the clap from the cleaning woman who brought germs to the bathroom. “I have the crubs,” I say again, this time as loudly as the receptionist, because now everyone in the waiting room has already heard it anyway, and the doctors will be told, and the nurse practitioners, and the med techs and the janitors. Suddenly I can imagine the lice down there building a new life for themselves in the wilderness of my pubic hair, clearing the forests, planting farms, and sending east for a spinster schoolteacher. “I have the crubs,” I say. “And I need help now.”

  • • •

  “Well, at least you know nobody’s going to have any sex for the next few days,” Lila says. We are resting at the edge of the apartment pool between our laps. I admire Lila’s slender, muscular legs and think that Susu would pay ten thousand dollars for those legs if the surgeons in Italy could figure out a way to make them. It is early evening, the water is cool, the oleanders are still in bloom, there is a fragrance of invisible eucalyptus trees in the air, and behind the apartment building, the red sunlight billows like sheet silk. This is not a bad life.

  “My first husband’s ex-wife was just like her,” Lila says. “Sh
e had lots of affairs but always went back to him in between to be told that she was still a desirable woman.”

  “You think this could go on indefinitely?” I have a vision of Harvey and me seated at a candlelit table twenty years from now in one of his small Gothic houses, and in from the kitchen comes Susu with her large Italian breasts and a nose that is beginning to slide out of place like an old boxer’s.

  “Maybe she’ll marry a plastic surgeon,” Lila says.

  We look up toward Harvey’s lighted kitchen window, where Susu is preparing supper. Harvey is bent over the dining table like a willow tree, while Susu stands by the counter like a box hedge. “I think the time has come for me to have a little talk with the happy couple,” I say.

  • • •

  Susu’s meal for the three of us consists of a packaged spaghetti dinner and, on the side, some slices of canned pineapple decorating small bowls of cottage cheese. “Look what Susu did,” Harvey says, giving me a cautious glance.

  “How nice, Susu. Did you learn this in Italy?”

  Susu laughs as we sit down at the table. That is one good thing about her: she can usually take a joke.

  “Susu was always a rotten cook, wasn’t I, sweetie?” Susu says to Harvey. Why does she have that coy way of referring to herself in the third person, as if she’s a character even in her own life?

  “Really, this is great,” Harvey says. I see that he has decided to discuss this meal at length in order to avoid more delicate topics. “Would you believe that she did all this in only twenty minutes?”

  Already he is halfway through his meal, and I realize once again that this is a Harvey I have not seen much of in the nine months since I dented the side of his car. This is a Harvey who is attracted to food largely because it is fuel, and whose heart is gladdened as much by the sight of the kind that comes pulpy from a can as by my own aromatic sauce, simmered for hours with fresh herbs. In the last two weeks I have discovered that Harvey really cannot tell the difference between scrambled eggs and a soufflé or between Campbell’s chicken noodle soup and the kind I make from scratch.