Honeydew: Stories (4 page)

“Maybe you could stop talking and do it.”

He took out his imitation Swiss Army knife. The two of them had been enjoying it all summer. It was his birthday present. Even this knockoff was so expensive that all his relatives had to chip in. “I should sterilize the blade.”

“Spit on it.”

Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded-up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He stretched the affected area between his forefinger and middle finger, and made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came out too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.

“It hurts a lot but not as much as before,” Acelle said. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

Near the main entrance—the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm—was the gift shop that had recently become Victoria Tarnapol’s to manage. Victoria had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades earlier. Returning now, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.

The gift shop was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a glass candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, as were the games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria’s ascendancy, two round café tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and slices of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-café became popular—many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you’d prefer not to know existed.

Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the glass-walled gift shop. In those first days he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter—she had a face like a goddess, she had a spinal deformity—had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one, who usually helped out, was late for school, and so he had to make all three bologna sandwiches: his, Camilla’s, Acelle’s. On his midmorning break, when he would normally be walking in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria instead. But he stopped to look at a ship in a bottle in the gift-shop window—he’d like to try making one of those things—and then, looking up, looking farther in, he saw the café tables, one of them occupied by a man slumped with worry, and behind him, in a little recess, the manager. Her gray hair was cut close to her narrow head. The slide of her nose was interrupted by a bump, adding beauty to a face which was already distinguished. She was slicing something and the sight of that something pulled him right in. It was linzer torte. It turned out to taste better even than Marie’s, God rest her soul.

Thereafter he came in every morning at 10:15. He ate various breads, various coffee cakes, various pies; also citron gâteau and baklava and a puff inside which seemed to float not chocolate but its divine essence. He liked them all but he preferred the less sweet pastries. She began to make more of those, fewer of the sugary ones.

Since the gift shop was rarely busy before eleven, they were able lightly to pass the time of day. One morning—the treat was gingerbread with pieces of ginger in it—he asked her to join him at his table. After a moment of confusion, during which her palms reached for her sculpted hair, she washed her hands again and cut a slice for herself and sat down opposite him.

Without discussion Joe and Acelle went to the Castle, using the old entrance, the one Zeph favored. In the emergency room Acelle gave her name and the family’s insurance number. She knew it by heart because of her sister’s frequent visits. The doctor thought Joe was Acelle’s brother and allowed him to remain in the cubicle, but when he examined Acelle he pulled the curtain.

“I’m going to give you a shot of Novocain and then wash this out for you. Have your mother change the dressing every day and put on this ointment, and don’t take a bath tonight. I’ll give you a tetanus shot for good measure.” After doing exactly what he said he’d do, he rolled her onto her back and lifted her easily—she was a small girl—and stood her up. “Dizzy?” he asked. His hand on her shoulder steadied her for a couple of necessary minutes. “Sitting will be painful for a few days.” He flicked open the curtain to reveal Joe, waiting on a stool, and on his lap a plastic bag holding Acelle’s bloody underpants. “Did you make that incision, dude?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Good job.”

“Good job,” Acelle echoed as they left, and she attempted to take his hand, and after a few moments he allowed it to be taken.

And now Zeph prepared to visit patients scheduled for surgery tomorrow. He put on fresh scrubs because people like to see their doctors in costume.

The first was an old childless widow with cancer of the tongue. It was advanced—she had ignored it, had skipped appointments with dentist and doctor, had worn a kerchief whatever the weather, had invented excuses not to visit her few friends still living, all incapacitated anyway. But yesterday, fate in the form of a fissure in the sidewalk had tripped her. The ambulance attendants, placing her swelling hand on her thigh, gently removed the telltale babushka. The lesion bulged like an apricot. The emergency-room doc splinted her broken fingers and she was whisked to Head and Neck, and examined, and talked to, and scheduled for surgery.

Of course the mutilated tongue slurred her speech. But Zeph understood it all, giving her the occasional gift of a direct gaze.

“I taut…go way,” she fabricated.

He knew she had not thought it would go away; she had thought instead that discovery would mean instant yanking out of the organ and death shortly afterward, whereas secrecy would mean prolonged if solitary life.

She wanted to know—she had resorted to a pad of paper now, managing the pencil with her less damaged hand—how much of her tongue they would leave. Her surgeon wouldn’t say.

“She
can’t
say, Mrs. Flaherty. Neither can I. But I can tell you that there are many ways therapists can restore some patients’ speech.” She had to be content with that, and also with his now averted gaze, though he did press her hand.

“U eye oy” were her parting syllables.

He didn’t feel like a nice boy. In two days, when he made his post-op visit, she wouldn’t be able to manage even those vowels, and if therapy could help this half-tongued woman it would be a miracle. But he hadn’t lied.

He looked at the next patient’s chart. An unsingular history. White female; thirty-six years old; unmarried; healthy; one pregnancy, terminated. No immediate family. Complaint: back pain lasting several months, recent inability to walk without severe pain. X-rays and an MRI of the vertebrae showed a mass obscuring L4 and L5 but revealed nothing more about this secret. A needle biopsy had told more. Stage 4.

Her name was Catherine Adrian. Faint lines fanned from the corners of her eyes. Shallow vertical grooves, one on each cheek, enclosed her sculpted mouth in loving parentheses. Her jaw was long and slender. He could make these observations freely because she was asleep and he could comfortably look at her face.

He glanced at his clipboard. He had three more patients to visit, to reassure about tomorrow, to convince that they were in good hands, or at least that their pain from the knife would be managed to their satisfaction. He’d come back to Ms. Adrian later.

As if on cue, she opened her eyes. They were blue, almost as dark as the ones he avoided in his mirror.

“Hello, Ms. Adrian. I’m Zephyr Finn, your anesthesiologist.”

“How nice.”

In Ms. Adrian’s room there was both a chair and a stool. Zeph chose to sit on the side of her bed. “Are you worried about tomorrow?” he asked.

“Say that I’m curious.”

“About…?”

“I want to see what it looks like, this alien that’s wrapped itself around my spine. I’d like to watch on a screen while they disappear it.”

“Some back operations are done with regional anesthetic,” he said as if reading from a script. “Patients on the table can watch a monitor. Most close their eyes. But we don’t know the depth of your growth and we can’t risk touching an organ while you’re awake.”

“Can you preserve the thing in alcohol?”

“I can ask the surgeon.”

She sighed. “Whatever they find, there will be an end to my pain.”

She would soon be paralyzed, he guessed. “Yes,” he said with assurance.

And then—as if she were under his care already, as if he had administered a nerve block and a sedative and was keeping her lightly awake—he talked. The volumes by the side of the bed were children’s books—
The House at Pooh Corner,
the novels of Peter Dickinson, the Grimms. “I read those too,” he said. “My only genre. That small amount of magic.”

“Chaste pleasures.”

“Endings never final…”

She taught mathematics at a local junior college, not a very good one. “I do mainly remediation, I try to make things interesting; some of them fall asleep anyway. I’m a soporific—perhaps I’m really in your game.”

Game
took them to chess and Scrabble and the Red Sox—he avoided mentioning participatory sports; she probably had played tennis, poor thing. An hour went by. More time would have passed had the surgeon not entered the room to find his best anesthesiologist sitting on a patient’s bed.

Robotic again, Zeph got to his feet. “Good afternoon, Dr. Schapiro.”

Dr. Schapiro nodded and took Ms. Adrian’s hand in his. “How are you feeling today?” he began.

Zeph walked toward the door, turned, flashed his eyes at hers. She flashed back.

The mass, as she was about to learn, had wangled its way inward from its claw hold on L4. A frozen section done in the OR confirmed that the tumor was a ferocious beast; it had already eaten bone; bits of it must be all over the place.

Hector Bahande and Victoria Tarnapol gradually exchanged life stories. Hector spoke of his hopes when he’d come to this country and of the things that had bedeviled him one after another—his child’s affliction, his wife’s death, rest her soul, the necessity of finding a job near home. Victoria told him that she had been a youngest daughter persuaded by her sisters to quit art school and take care of their ailing mother. Mama kept ordering her to find a husband who could install all three in a better flat.
Maybe if you cooked better…

“She won’t last forever,” Victoria’s sisters had falsely assured her. Well, Mama was dead at last. Victoria was not sure she would ask God to rest her soul. “How does your older daughter occupy her time?” she said to Hector.

His face shone. He was short, he had a little paunch (helped along by his recent indulgences), a lumpy nose, not much of a neck, a noticeable mole on one cheek. “She carves,” he said, his homely face continuing to beam. “She carves animals and small human figures.”

Oh Lord, sweet little lambs, darling odalisques. She was sorry she’d asked.

“Shall I show you?” His hand was already in his pocket. “Most are bigger; this is a mini.”

It was the figure of a dog—a puppy, really—peeking in solemn distress, with no cuteness at all, from the jacket of a man. You knew it was a man because the buttons were on the right side and he was wearing a tie, its stripes delicately incised. He had no head and his torso ended just below the frayed jacket.

“Are there more of these?” she asked sharply.

“Many, many, but bigger.”

“Does she sell them?”

He shrugged. “There’s a man comes to look, takes one or two, comes back with a little money.”

A pimp, she thought…“Perhaps I could do the same, and give you a bigger percentage.”

He carefully wiped his mouth. “Miss Tarnapol—”

“Victoria.”

“Hector is my given name. Victoria, forgive me, who buys a carving here? People want tissue boxes decorated with shells.”

“Yes, of course…but I still have friends in the art world. I was also a sought-after window dresser for a time. Hector…may I come and see the others?”

“I will bring you two tomorrow.”

He brought a unicorn and a round figure that looked at first like an unpainted Russian doll. The unicorn was smiling. The Russian doll’s carved face was not smiling, and her arms in relief, pressing themselves to her stomach, suggested that this would not be an easy labor, that she would perish from it, that the nine or ten dolls nested within her bulk would crumble there.

“Your dealer probably gives you ten percent of what he actually gets for these. Let me try to sell them, and
I
will retain the ten percent and give the rest to you. I’ll peddle the unicorn first and put the doll in the gift-shop window as advertisement. ‘Not for Sale,’ the card will read…intriguing.”

“Nobody will be intrigued by a woman about to die in childbirth.”

“We’ll see.”

She placed the unicorn in a gallery about to open in her own town of Godolphin, just over the Boston line. Then she persuaded the owner of a flourishing dress shop in fashionable downtown to display the next piece Hector brought her, a mynah bird with a stocking cap, each stitch visible. An environmentalist bought it, perhaps making sense of its ambiguous message. Victoria split her own commission with the dress-shop proprietor and from then on one of Camilla’s pieces always occupied a place of honor there. Some people began to come in not for the clothing, primarily, but to see what was on display, though everyone usually bought at least a skirt and sometimes a whole outfit.

As the weather grew colder and school began, Joe and Acelle abandoned the woods for Joe’s house. They had to be quiet during this one shared afternoon hour. Neither of their families would approve of their blameless activity: reading Zeph’s anatomy book in Zeph’s monkish bedroom. They called the room Castle 3.

Anatomy wasn’t altogether strange to them. In sex education, they had seen a coy diagram of a sperm shooting up toward his partner, the ovum; and they knew there were times he would fail to reach her—because of her monthly, maybe, or fate, maybe. “But fate may be against you,” the teacher warned. In the anatomy book they had seen artists’ renditions of various tumors, some like sacks of vermicelli, some like furry fungi. And when a popular football player injured his knee, the television anchor informed them—separately, for each was at home, though they conferred about it later—that the knee was one of the most complicated joints in the body. Certainly it seemed loaded with ligaments, menisci, tendons, and cartilage. The whole apparatus looked untrustworthy, Acelle told Joe.