Abbott Awaits (11 page)

Just this morning Abbott came up behind his wife while she was at the electric range, and he put his arms around the hard lower slope of her belly. She did not lean back into him, and she did not make that small, wonderful sound from the back of her throat. She did not stop tending her omelet. And now, hours later, she leans over the wobbly arm of the couch, trying to kiss him while he reads, but Abbott closes neither his eyes nor his big book.

At the end of the day, after helping his wife get their daughter to bed, Abbott lies facedown on the carpet of the family room. He is unclean and unshaven. He knows not the date. His joints ache from what the Internet has diagnosed as either hepatitis or Lyme Disease. There is something (is it Yellow Turtle?) jutting into his ribs. Still, that old-time languor does not descend. He rolls over onto his back, regards the pattern of paint and texture on the ceiling. The pattern of paint and texture he finds uninteresting. Abbott recalls the hours spent lying on floors, staring at ceilings, awaiting a
feeling
, any feeling at all. (The music from a band that tuned its guitars irregularly.) He remembers the moves—high chin, slow blink, heavy arms out in Savior or up in Surrender—but the moves don't feel natural. Abbott is—tonight it's evident—no longer listless. He's bored, angry, exasperated, worried, gloomy, tired, sad, hot, afraid, and content, but not listless. Moreover, he's hungry. He gets off the floor, puts a doll where she goes, and walks to the kitchen.

“I just pray this one is a good sleeper,” Abbott's wife says, pointing to her abdomen. “Well,” Abbott says, “the big sister was not too bad.” This morning they are up before their daughter, and it is amazing. Abbott is happy and optimistic, though lurking at the far edge of his contentment is the knowledge that the coffeepot is almost empty. There might be enough for another half cup. “Are you kidding?” his wife says. “She was terrible. Completely terrible.” “I mean, she wasn't great,” Abbott says. “You don't remember?” his wife says. Abbott smiles in the manner of someone whose personality has been drastically altered by head injury. Abbott's wife always wants to know why there are long drips of coffee on the outside of Abbott's mug. He says the mug rims are too thick, but the real answer, he suspects, is that he is gulping the coffee. “She was a monster,” Abbott's wife says. “There was that stretch where you had to take her out in the car to get her to sleep.” Abbott's memory is stirred very lightly. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “I remember doing that a few times.” Abbott's wife says, “A few times? You did it every night for five weeks.” Abbott envisions himself driving through the foothills of the Rockies with a sleeping infant in the
backseat. It's not quite a memory, but it's a nice image. Still, he understands that you couldn't see Pikes Peak or Mt. Cheyenne because it would be dark outside. And also, there's NORAD. “Did I like doing that?” Abbott asks. “You mean driving around with her?” “Yeah.” “I don't think so,” she says. “And that one time you were gone for nearly an hour, and I was almost puking I was so worried. My breasts hurt, and my incision still hurt. Remember that? I was still having that feeling like my guts were shifting around. I was supposed to be getting some sleep while you were out, but I was pacing around the house, wondering what I would do if both of you were dead.” Abbott pauses at this fork in the story. He can choose. He says, “What happened to us?” His wife laughs. Abbott says, “No, I mean where were we that night? Why were we so late?” “You honestly don't remember?” his wife says. Abbott shakes his head. He remembers now, but he wants to hear it from her. “First you got stuck at a train crossing. It was a long train, and then something happened to it.” “Oh, yeah,” Abbott says. “It just stopped.” “And of course when the car stopped moving she woke up and started screaming.” Abbott says, “Oh, man.” “It was a long time,” Abbott's wife says, “and when it finally moved, you were trying to rush home and you got pulled over by that cop.” “You've got to be kidding,” Abbott says. “He pulled you over because our front headlight was out.” “I do remember that headlight,” Abbott says. “And remember, you bought a headlight, and you kept saying you were going to put it in yourself because you weren't going to pay someone else to replace a stupid headlight, which is what we ended up doing.” “But I don't think I got a ticket,” Abbott says. “No, because the officer said he had a little one at home about the same age. You two had a little moment. You shook hands and agreed that there wasn't any sound worse than that.” “And then what happened?” Abbott says. “And then you finally came home,” his wife says. “When I heard the car pull up outside—I had actually been praying. Like actually saying a prayer.” Abbott says, “Was she asleep?” His wife says, “She was going insane. And she was hoarse by then. And you—I've never seen you look like that. You were like some kind of POW.” Abbott drops his head, rubs his palms on his knees. “I can only imagine,” he says.

Right there on the brick wall of a Pioneer Valley bakery: HERE. WE. COME. DEVILS. The spray-painted letters are eerily neat and uniform, and the punctuation is terrifying. Had the vandal chosen a comma for direct address, the effect would have been lost. And then that ominous first-person plural … Everything about these words is calculated to inspire dread. All day long Abbott has been rattled by the bakery graffiti. This is no time for procreation, no time to make something that can get hurt. Late tonight, on a whim, Abbott types “here we come devils” into a dog-themed search engine and then clicks FETCH! The search turns up twenty-three thousand hits. Abbott learns that the phrase is featured loudly in a video game based on the career of General George Armstrong Custer (1839–1876), infamous American cavalry commander and Indian fighter who lost his life at Little Big Horn. Custer in Internet photographs has the kind of droopy, creeping mustache that obscures the mouth. Abbott is nearly giddy with the information. He feels emancipated. He wants to go look at his sleeping daughter and put his hand on her head again, but his wife has asked him to stop doing that because it disrupts
the child's sleep. He stays in his chair for quite some time, considering whether to assemble the crib, the pieces of which are stacked against the bookcase. A scrap of paper on the desk by the laptop is blank except for the word
rash
. Gradually, Abbott becomes less sanguine. Gradually, he returns to his prior state of agitation, what researchers might call his
set point
. The problem, Abbott realizes, is that the bakery graffiti signifies exactly what he thought it signifies.

Abbott's unborn child's head is still facing the wrong direction, and his wife is quiet the entire ride home from the obstetrician's office. “Maybe it will still flip,” Abbott says as his family lingers in the car in the driveway. “Or it won't,” she says. Later, he finds her sitting in a chair she never sits in, her hair over her eyes. Nobody ever sits in this chair. “I'm sorry,” he says. He offers to turn on a light, not because it is dark in the room but because it would give him something to do. “Are you crying?” Abbott says. He stands near the doorway, ten feet from his wife. His impulse to leave the room prevents him from approaching his wife's chair. His impulse to approach his wife's chair prevents him from leaving the room. The countervailing desires create in him a radical stillness. He is near the doorway but not in it. Both his feet are on the rug. His arms hang loose at his sides. “I'm sorry,” he says again. Abbott's wife says, “I was just thinking of a story about this guy I once knew. He told me that one time when he was eight or nine he had a horrible earache during a sleepover at a friend's house, and he didn't want to wake anyone up, so he just lay there and suffered all night. He said it was excruciating. He said he just gripped the
side of his head and rolled around in bed, whispering for help, hoping his friend would wake up, but he didn't. It turned out to be a bad infection.” The phone rings once and then stops. Abbott looks down at his wife, who is looking through the window at whatever can be seen from the chair. The wind has picked up. “Who knows what made me think of that,” she says. “Isn't it awful, though?”

The change to Abbott's life-insurance policy requires that a nurse visit his home to make sure he is not about to perish. She arrives this morning, right on time, carrying a large black bag. She moves up the driveway like a blade. What Abbott knows about nurses is that they are honed to a sharp edge. They don't get paid enough, they work weird hours, they lift heavy things, they get dirty. They deal with ridiculous doctors and ridiculous patients within a ridiculous health care system. They've seen it all. Nobody appreciates them. They are righteously aggrieved. They have strong opinions, which they voice as facts. They develop their own strange, contradictory, and wildly divergent theories of well-being, illness, and recovery. They smoke. They are disgruntled, and their disgruntlement gives them purpose, energy, a quick step. They are not hopeful or cheerful or optimistic—just competent. Abbott admires them quite a bit, though naturally he is scared of them. First, Abbott and the nurse fill out paperwork at the dining-room table. Abbott reviews the policy. He understands that he can't commit suicide for two years, and he initials. He understands, at least vaguely, what “the death of the policyholder” means. He understands
they'll be checking his blood for the very worst diseases. The thought is so sad Abbott can barely remain seated. It's nearly impossible to imagine not being there to watch your children grow up. It seems easy to imagine, but when you imagine them without you, you imagine it as if you're still watching from behind a tree or within a closet with the door cracked. The nurse pulls a scale from her bag, and Abbott steps on it. She measures his waist size. “What do you teach?” she says, and Abbott tells her. “Oh, God,” she says, laughing. Her hands are powerful. She smells like cigarettes. “Go pee,” she says, “and just leave this cup in there.” Abbott pees in the cup and leaves it in the bathroom. The nurse has been here less than ten minutes, and she has already made him feel like a visitor in his own house. When he comes back, she goes to the bathroom to handle his urine. Abbott hears the flush of the toilet. She returns to take his blood pressure and pulse. When she breaks the seal on a plastic bag and removes a needle, Abbott extends his arm across the table and turns away. “You're one of those?” the nurse says. Abbott says, “I'd just rather not look.” The nurse begins a conversation to get him to relax. She talks about all these campus shootings. The guns, the mental illness. She asks if the university has been running any workshops or drills. She puts the needle in his arm. “I think so,” Abbott says. He looks out at the street, where three neighbors are talking and pointing up at something on a house—a gutter or a chimney. Abbott can hear the shouts of children, the rhythmic creak of a metal swing set. “I worry about society,” the nurse says, removing the needle from Abbott's arm. He turns and sees the dark vial. “You know?” she says. “Society is just getting worse and worse.” This notion is central to Abbott's identity. He has held it for many years. For a long time it was a way to choose friends and television programs. It was something like an animating force. It wasn't necessarily that he wanted Society to be getting worse and worse, but the undeniable worsening of Society gave him a way to be in the world. “I think you're right,” he tells the nurse. He still believes it. The difference now, though, is that he wishes he didn't.

Unconsciousness, however, eradicates the possibility of surprise. A man who remains conscious may find himself living a day he never imagined, various elements of his life coalescing, like words in a sentence, to create something new and fantastical. For instance, tonight Abbott bathes his young daughter, puts her to bed, and then bathes his wife. (Her hair, enhanced by pregnancy, is a gleaming rope. The shampoo he rinses with an orange cup shaped like an elephant.)

It came as a revelation to Abbott when, several nights ago, he gleaned from an offhand remark of his wife's that the tomatoes the family has been enjoying this summer are not from the grocery store but from some private residence on Rolling Ridge Drive, about a mile away from Abbott's house. He found it simultaneously threatening and spiritually arousing that his pregnant wife could have been buying produce out of some vegetable gardener's driveway for weeks without his knowledge. It wasn't quite jealousy. It was the shocking autonomy of the loved one. “Is it like some kind of farmer's stand?” he asked, trying to comprehend. “Or produce stand?” “No,” she said, with a nonchalance that may or may not have been feigned. “Just people. People with a card table.” Abbott then requested, with the firmness of a demand, that he accompany his wife the next time she buys tomatoes “right off the street.” “OK,” she said. “Sure.” So here we are, a sunny late morning in which Abbott drives his wife and daughter to Rolling Ridge Drive for tomatoes. On the way, Abbott learns that his wife has been making this trip on foot for most of the summer, but the heat and advanced pregnancy now make it difficult to walk. “So you drive?” Abbott asks. “Yes,” she says. “How many times?” he says.
“What does it matter?” she asks. “A ballpark figure,” he says. Abbott's wife says, “I don't know. Four? Five?” (What must be most disconcerting to a spouse about a private investigator's manila envelope of telephotographs, Abbott thinks—but certainly not right now—is not the demonstration of infidelity but the demonstration of separateness.) Abbott considers asking why she never told him about the tomatoes, but he does not. He wonders why he has not once seen his wife enter the house with a bag of tomatoes. Has he been that dazed and inattentive? Does he in a sense not
want
to see the bag of tomatoes? Or has she been sneaking the tomatoes into the house? These tomatoes—they are first-rate. Only a man desperate to believe they come from a grocery store could believe they come from a grocery store. “You might see a big black cat,” Abbott's wife tells their daughter. “Sometimes there's a big cat.” Abbott's wife's familiarity with the tomato vendor's pet does not sit well with Abbott. “Tractor,” the girl says, transposing her adventures. And here they are in front of a split-level ranch on Rolling Ridge Drive. Abbott might have driven right past it had his wife not pointed it out. In the driveway there is indeed a card table, on top of which are small cartons of tomatoes and a sign too small to read from the road. Abbott takes his daughter out of her car seat. “Where is the proprietor?” asks Abbott. “They're usually not around,” his wife says as she walks up the drive. All—or many—of Abbott's questions are answered when he approaches the card table, on which he sees not only the sign and the small cartons of tomatoes, but a stack of plastic bags pinned down by a rock and an old Folger's can with the lid on. The sign asks patrons please not to take the containers, but instead to put the tomatoes into one of the plastic bags beneath the rock. The sign also indicates that a carton costs two dollars, payable to the coffee can (in which a patron also might find ones to make change). Abbott's daughter is on the front porch of the ranch, squeezing the tail of an enormous black cat. Abbott's wife transfers two cartons of tomatoes to a bag, then returns the empty containers to the table. She takes the lid off the coffee can, puts in a five-dollar bill, and removes a dollar as change. She has obviously done this numerous times, perhaps nine or ten. Abbott can see quite a few bills at the bottom of the can. “So,” Abbott's wife says, “this is it.” Abbott collects his daughter and buckles her into her car seat. On the short ride home, all three members
of the family are in high spirits. Abbott's wife loves these tomatoes. Abbott's daughter loves animals with furry tails. And Abbott loves the theory of human nature that the unattended coffee can allows him to cling to. If Abbott's wife has had occasion to speak to the elderly owners of the house and if she knows for a fact that thrice this summer some human has made off with the coffee can in broad daylight—the last of whom actually pelted the house with tomatoes before absconding—then that is something she keeps to herself.