A Private State: Stories (2 page)

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Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

BOOK: A Private State: Stories
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Page 2
back on their chairs. "Don't tilt," Mary Ellen says reflexively. But it is hard to focus on the airy hope of "Easter Wings" again.
Mary Ellen begins to explain the homeworkwriting a poem about anger in the shape of an arrowwhen Tim's chair crashes backward. He is on the floor and screaming. "What is it, Tim?" Mary Ellen shouts. "Where does it hurt?" Then at his wrist she sees a flash of bone and blood, but his face has shrunk to something dried and crumpled, like a currant. Someone moans, "Oh Jesus.''
"Jesus!" Mary Ellen repeats loudly from the floor. She turns to face the huddled students: "The nurse, I mean," she yells. "Someone get the nurse!" They don't know what she wants: Jesus, the nurse, to stay, to go. Tim's blood stains her sweater the way buckshot would pepper the chest of an unwary doe.
Magically, Tuesday is worse. The pipes at school burst and Mary Ellen creeps home to suspend her disbelief in the tub. But a steely whine is all that comes from the taps. In a haze of old habit, she finds her fingers pressing Frank's work number. Repairing damage to their home had made them feel married in some dense, authentic way. Suddenly, he's on the line and Mary Ellen freezes. "Wrong numbah," she says in an accent that floats somewhere between Maine and France. Mary Ellen is from Maryland.
"Mary Ellen?" Frank says. "What's wrong?"
"The pipes have frozen," she tells him. Talking to Frank makes her acutely conscious of the ticking of her blood. Frank hangs diagrams of animal hearts in his office, fists of muscle wrapped in festive ribbons of veins and arteries. As if hearts were weird but special gifts. Mary Ellen drops on the sofa and pulls a cushion onto her stomach.
Frank sighs. "Here, too."
"What about the animals in the surgery?" Mary Ellen sits up straight. She feels Frank is rougher than need be with domestic pets. He prefers cows and border collies in muddy barns. Work-
 
Page 3
ing animals, not pillows with a pulse, which is what he calls creatures named Fluff and Pussums.
"We went to 711 and bought water for them."
Mary Ellen wants to ask if he got Poland Spring, but doesn't. She wonders who the "we" is. His assistant, Carlos Morales, nearly the only Latino in the county, is off on Tuesdays. "Mary Ellen?" Frank says.
"I don't want to know." She pulls the cushion over her head. "Just don't tell me she's seventeen."
"Her name is Dawn. And she's not seventeen." Dawn. It is remarkably close to "fawn."
Why Mary Ellen married Frank, a list Mary Ellen makes from the tub, after the plumber has visited and left her an appalling bill. Bubbles sink from peaks to flat and ratty foam.
A) He never lied: if a dog was going to die, he said, "Tiger is going to die."
B) He could build anything. They had the bluebird houses to prove it. And a hutch for black lopears, who'd escaped and mingled with the local rabbits. Summer nights, they'd wait for a half-breed, brown bodied, one dark ear coquettishly limp, to nibble its way across the yard. A little wild success.
On Wednesday, Mary Ellen receives an announcement that faculty will spend the next four Saturdays learning what to do in case of "malfunction" at the nuclear plant. As everyone within five states knows, the plant's a shaky affair, though protesters long ago stumped back home, throats hoarse. From her classroom, Mary Ellen sees the funnels of the cooling towers. It occurs to her, not for the first time, that if the plant does explode, not even Manitoba will be safe. It occurs to her safety is a relative issue.
In the faculty lounge, Mary Ellen spots a notice about training emergency-medical technicians. She immediately glances away. Cars wrapped around oak trees. Blood on windshields. Part of what is so terrible about hunting for Mary Ellen is that what's
 
Page 4
supposed to stay inside a body does not: she cannot even look at the word "appendix" in a table of contents without feeling queasy. But her eyes dart back to the flyer. She thinks of Tim in the rigid mitt of a cast. Two nights a week, the red poster says. Learn lifesaving techniques.
"Welcome to
EMT
-land!" Keith, the instructor, spare and brown as a winter twig, bursts into the room. Mary Ellen has never thought of traumatic injuries and their treatment as an actual destination. She imagines it as a place of gleaming ambulances, citizens with arms in tidy slings. The other studentsfirefighters, moms, and kids who want to join ski patrolsseem nonchalant about crossing the border from daily life to crisis management. Everyone's notebook is cracked open to the first ruled page.
Keith wears a T-shirt printed with endangered bugs despite the fact it's glacial outside and in this drafty classroom at the back of a fire station. He ticks off the topics they will cover: anatomy,
CPR
, trauma, poisoning, animal bites. They have to spend fifteen hours in an emergency room. In three months, Keith says blandly, they'll be ready to handle train wrecks.
There may arise an occasion when a disaster situation is so horrible that you are paralyzed and unable to respond. Do not be ashamed of those feelings, which affect approximately 20 percent of all people who are involved in such events.
EMTS
in training don't start with trauma, though. They start with
CPR
and Little Hans, who lives in a piece of American Tourister luggage. Little Hans is a head and a chest. His mouth is slightly open and he is horribly pale, even paler than Mary Ellen and most of the other students, who, like all white people in the middle of a New Hampshire winter, have a greenish tinge. He looks depressed and northern European, something sprung from Edvard Munch.
 
Page 5
Keith plops Little Hans on the table, so the class can see his clean, sad profile. ''Now," he says, "The first step is to make sure your patient is truly unresponsive." Keith walks up to the dummy and shakes him so that all his moving parts rattle. "Little Hans, Little Hans," Keith says loudly. "Can you hear me?''
Keith goes through the motions of performing one-person Live Free
CPR
he blows air between Hans's rigid lips, pumps on his sternum. or Die The students look on earnestly, but when they've finished taking notes, their fingers press through wool and cotton to feel the bones and motion below the layers. It is impossible, Mary Ellen finds, not to make sure your own heart is still following its steady, two-step rhythm.
"
ABC
," says Keith, his palm on Hans's nose. "Airway, breathing, circulation. This is bread and butter for the
EMT
. When you don't have
ABC
, what you have is someone very dead." Hans appears to qualify. But what about
D, E
, and
F
? Dismemberment, eczema, flat feet. It is calming to think of all the body's problems parceled into neat groups of letters. Mary Ellen tells herself she will like this class.
But they haven't finished with
ABC
. Keith tells them there are some exceptions to routine attempts at resuscitation: rigor mortis, decapitation, charring, and other injuries not compatible with life. Mary Ellen knows what's not compatible with life. Husbands who date fawns. Fearing New Hampshire is permanently tilted away from the sun. Fearing your life is permanently tilted away from the sun. Mary Ellen's hands drop to her lap.
G, H, I
. Grand mal, hostility, inertia.
It is early Saturday evening and Mary Ellen is as usual on the phone with her younger sister Louise, a math teacher who lives in Atlanta because it's a city deeply in its region. They grew up on the Eastern Shore, in a state that wanders uneasily between the North and South: Maryland has its slave-owning past, but isn't swampily mythic enough to be truly southern. Louise likes Geor-
 
Page 6
gia's unequivocal heat and fatty food though she herself is trim as a nail. "Four out of five people die even with
CPR
," Mary Ellen tells her. "When you do it, you break ribs. You hear them crack. It's called crepitus."
"I don't care what it's called. It sounds disgusting. Hold on, I have to find my sandals." The phone falls with a thud. Louise is often dressing for a date when they talk, inching herself into pantyhose and testing lipstick colors on the back of her hand.
Mary Ellen waits and tries to imagine being warm enough to wear sandals. She doesn't try to imagine having a date. That's beyond her right now. Like her sister, she'd been in search of an authentic place and had tried to embrace New Hampshire for Frank. Five years ago, she'd imagined Yankee initiative would help her dust more often. She hasn't even swept Frank from the house yet, though she has started to toss his stray belongings into a refrigerator carton in the front hall. The box is halfway full, and late at night, she hears things inside it settle into sedimentary layers of golf balls and training leashes.
When Mary Ellen talks to Louise these days, she has more than likely wrapped herself in a huge white robe, and, if she's washed her hair, to have crowned her head in a towel. She feels then like a sinking peak of whipped cream, the kind that rapidly loses body. In this insubstantial state, her mind starts to wander.
Every morning Mary Ellen reads "Live Free or Die" on countless license plates and studies the green profile of the Old Man of the Mountains. She wonders how many people know that if the state lived up to its motto, the Old Man would die. It is thanks to massive surgery with stout wires and superglue each spring that the formation can stand the granite's shifts and swells. Otherwise he'd tumble to the bottom of Profile Lake. "Louise? Did I ever tell you the Old Man of the Mountains has wires up his nose?"
"How did we get from
CPR
to the Old Man?" Louise asks. "I gotta go. Glen's coming in half an hour."
Mary Ellen half-listens to Louise's rating of Glen as potential
 
Page 7
mate and partner. Louise screens her dates through a fine filter of assessment. She has turned down men because of how they set a table. She does, however, entertain tempered hopes for Glen. "Mary Ellen?" asks Louise. "Are you all right?" Mary Ellen tightens the belt on her robe and turns the three-way bulb in the lamp down to the dimmest setting. She thinks Louise goes out with men whose names sound like they could hitch themselves with ease to developments: Glenwood Pastures, Ellis Estates, Cartwright Bluffs. But Frank, what could you do with Frank? Frank Manor. Acres on the Frank. Frank has great big red hands. He could have been a butcher with those hands. He is a butcher. He hunts those fragile deer all fall. How could he look at the holes his gun tears in their necks and not notice their blood is the same color as his?
Mary Ellen can't stop thinking about the futility of rescue efforts; the crumbling emblem of her adopted state; a marriage she thought was as gray as an old steak at the back of the icebox that turned out to be fresh and bleeding after all. "Louise, we have had twelve feet of snow already this year and the deer are starving in the woods."
Louise snorts. "Stop sounding wispy. Are you eating?"
"Yes," Mary Ellen says but she doesn't say that the only dishes in her sink are bowls and spoons. She only touches food that can be served in things she can cradle to her chest. Sometimes the beat of her heart is so strong it sends a faint ripple through her soup.
That week, Mary Ellen slices her thumb nearly to the bone while opening a can of cream of tomato and thinking about Frank and his Dawn. The blood tendrils into the soup, maroon against the orange. Mary Ellen can't quite believe she's responsible for that strangely lovely blend of colors. She has suffered what her textbook would call a laceration: an incision with a neat edge. Then it starts to hurt.
Statements such as "Everything will be all right" or "There is nothing to worry about" are inappropriate. A person trapped in a
 
Page 8
wrecked car, hurting from head to foot and worrying about a loved one, knows very well that all is not right.
After
EMT
class one night, Mary Ellen talks with Keith about cars that provide the greatest protection during collisions. Of course he recommends the big-boned Scandinavians, hugely expensive and prone to breakdown. The next day, Mary Ellen takes out a loan and purchases a blue Volvo she names Sven.
They are lurching toward the tense goofiness of Valentine's Day when Mary Ellen succumbs to the request of her juniors to stage a reading of
Romeo and Juliet
, a play she's never really loved. How could they be so stupid to marry after meeting only once? And all those selfish adults. At least Mary Ellen insists the girls play men's parts and the boys play women's. This appeals to the students in a slightly giddy way. Besides, it is still snowing. The
Farmer's Almanac
, right on the money for the past three years, predicts storms like cold wet compresses 'til April. Sven takes the bad weather majestically.
Frank hates the winter. It keeps him indoors. They used to play Scrabble, and Frank would insist he could use medical terms. Mary Ellen let him get away with it. She made up words that looked like they had Greek roots and said they were used in prosody. Their final game, she'd achieved a splashy win using the T in "moot" to spell "disquiet." Last night, she threw the board in the refrigerator box and listened to the sharp rain of the tiles as they hit the cardboard sides.
ROMEO
: Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, too rude, / too boist'rous, and it pricks like a thorn.
MERCUTIO
: If love be rough with you, be rough with love.
The students are deep in Verona, where civil hands make civil blood unclean, but Mary Ellen's eyes keep drifting toward the cooling towers. Kimberly, plunging into Romeo's wretched fare-

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