Machine Dreams (3 page)

Outside, the other girls were talking. One of them was sobbing and Lindstrom was saying there was no one to take over, I would have to finish the shift. I went back out. None of them looked at me and I finished: thirty-five minutes. I started walking home and Mother had someone meet me at the bottom of the hill, in a car. Who was it? Oh yes, Shinner. He’d been there when it happened and had seen Tom lying on the floor, then had gone to my mother in a panic. She sent him after me but he stopped the car at the hill and waited; he couldn’t be the one to tell me. We went home and sat on my bed and wept for hours. He said Tom lay there in his pants and no shirt or shoes, on his side, his feet reaching into the hallway. His face just empty, like you wouldn’t believe anything could look.

They asked me to plan the funeral and we buried him with his parents. All of that is a blur. I’ve almost no memory of it. A few days later Peggy and I went down to North Carolina for a month, to visit Nate and his wife and their new baby. In pictures from that time, I look like somebody’s grandmother, my face puffy, my hair tied in a kerchief. And Peggy is so blond and bright, too bright, her hair perfectly curled, light blue eyes straining above a set smile. She looks perpetually surprised, but scared and insincere, like a play actor. She felt guilty because she’d insisted they sell the house; Tom was off with his friends all the time and there she was with the cleaning and the upkeep and her teaching job as well. But the fact was he’d had to move out and she hadn’t, since the college turned the place into a girls’ dorm and Peggy stayed on, in her own room, as house mother. She and Tom had argued and three weeks later he was dead—she hadn’t even known he was sick. She thought I blamed
her but wouldn’t say so. I did blame her some, but with such a resignation there was no anger. It was all muddled. I kept thinking Tom and I might have broken up anyway when he went off to college, and said so, but they all denied that, as though his honor were at stake. We talked about him endlessly. Finally I sickened of the whole thing and told myself it was his business, his death. We all seemed to have so little to do with it, and no right to such feelings. I suppose I was stunned. All the days were like some repetitive dream—sometime next week I would wake up and be in the real world.

Mother said, “You’re young. Your life’s not over.” A girlfriend of mine moved in with us and Mother gave us the whole top floor of the house. We moved the Victrola upstairs, played records loud, and practiced dance steps. “Fascination” is a song I remember from that time:
I might have gone on my way empty-hearted
; every jukebox had two or three versions. I wore anklets and heels and did the furniture in gaudy colors. Took one of Mother’s beautiful antique vanities, painted it pink and black, and hung a starched white ruffle around the legs. Wow, I said, isn’t it pretty; Mother said yes, it certainly was. Anything I did was fine with her. My girlfriend and I had jobs as checkers at the grocery, and clothes, and dates—I never went out with the same boy three times. I forced myself to be happy and flip. Really, I was mad at all of them, and mad at Tom for leaving me. There in town with all the same people and sidewalks and buildings, it was as though he still existed but wouldn’t come near me. Like he was watching me all the time, disappointed and sad-faced. What had I done wrong? Nate and Peggy had made copies of all their snapshots of Tom, then given me the originals and the negatives. Envelopes of those stiff dark negatives, squares that rattled when I shuffled them. I kept them in my high school scrapbook. Sometimes I took them all out and held them to the light one by one. We all glowed up like angels. The smiles and unsuspecting gestures made more sense, full of a secret everyone ignored, but what was it?

So the time went on quietly. I worked, took classes at the college. Life wasn’t like it is now. Look at you—born here and
think you have to get to California, go so far, do so much so fast. Crazy situations, strange people—all this I hear about drugs. We had the Depression and then the war; we didn’t have to go looking for something to happen. And the things that happened were so big; no one could question or see an end to them. People died in the war and they died at home, of real causes, not what they brought on themselves. Living with that was enough.

Late in ’44 I enrolled in the Cadet Nurses’ Program in Washington, a special accelerated course subsidized by the army. My mother’s trouble, the cancer, had started the spring before—but she wasn’t ill except when she had the treatments, and she so wanted me to have the training, some security. So I went. I lived in a dorm at American University. The food was terrible and we all smoked cigarettes to cut our appetites. Washington was exciting in wartime, choked with soldiers and service people. And I loved the classes. But I only stayed four months; Mother got worse. My brother was in the service, my sister was divorced and had a child to support—there was no one to help but me. At that time we still thought she’d recover, but I didn’t want her to be alone. I was twenty years old, almost an adult, and felt I should earn the money to support us, the money to get her whatever treatment she needed. And that’s what I was doing two years later, just barely, when I met your father.

How did I meet him? I met him at a VFW dance. Veterans of Foreign Wars had fixed up an old house down near Main Street. There was a bar and jukebox and no furniture in the parlor so couples could dance on the hardwood floor. He was there with Marthella Barnett—she was wearing a purple sweater with cheap pink glass buttons down the front—and he left her and asked me to dance. I don’t remember who I was with; I was dating Bink Crane and Jimmie Darnell at the time. I was always going out with older fellas, but not as old as Mitch Hampson, and I was a little scared of him. What year was it? 1947. And he was thirty-eight, a man about town since the war was over. He was so much older that even though he’d gone to high school in town I’d never heard of him, and no one I knew had heard of him, except he was related to the Bonds who owned the hospital. He was wearing a
nice suit and drove his own car, and asked me to lunch. I said no; I didn’t have enough time, my lunch hour was too short.

But we must have had lunch, because we certainly started going out. I remember him then as very patient, a perfect gentleman, none of the cussing and bad temper he was full of later. Of course it’s not hard to be a gentleman for a three-week courtship. Three weeks, and we were married! Drove to Oakland, Maryland, with a wedding party of eight people. I wore a white suit I’d bought on sale and altered, and a white broad-brimmed hat I’d done in pale blue net and sprays of silk honeysuckle. What little fool would marry a man after three weeks? I should have had my head examined. But it seemed the right thing at the time. Mother said from her bed, “What’s your hurry?”

She and I had been through a lot those years she was sick. Mitch and I were married in June and she died in December. He really was good to her. Every evening he went down to the drugstore to get the paper, and he’d go into her room before he left, sit and talk to her about the weather or the news, ask if she wanted anything.

She was bedfast about the time I started seeing him, and I guess I felt the ground going under me. We were alone in that big house, living mostly on my salary. I did office work for Maintenance at the State Road Commission; I balanced the payroll, answered phones.… I kept a telephone on her bed so she could call me if she got in trouble. The cancer had gone clear through her and her body just didn’t work. She was so afraid she’d offend people. She’d drag herself to the bathroom every day and wash herself out with a syringe. I kept a big bowl of gauze pads on the table right next to her, gauze cut to measure from long strips I bought at the hospital. She kept herself clean with them all day, and every night I washed them along with her sheets.

Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if she’d never gotten sick. I didn’t want her to die thinking I was alone. It seemed the least I could do for her, but really I suppose I was scared for myself. I had no idea what I would do without her.

I’ll never forget the day she found it. One of those first warm days in early April, and a woman had come from Winfield to measure the couch for slipcovers. She’d spread material samples a yard wide, five yards long, all around the living room—a bright blue and a pale blue, a green floral, a beautiful off-white cream they called “oyster.” I was standing in the dining room doorway looking in at the colors. Mother came out of the bathroom and said she was spotting. She was fifty-one then, just past menopause. She said she would call Dr. Jonas just to be safe. The seamstress had opened a window and there was a smell of mown grass from across the street.… We chose the cream; it really was lovely, textured with raised threads and very rich. A little more expensive, but Mother said the material would make the room seem lighter, summer and winter—and later we could have the chairs done in a print, maybe the floral.

Those slipcovers were the last thing but necessities we bought for three years, and the last housewares I bought until she was gone and the house was sold and I was buying for my own house. You never see the everyday the way you might.

She did call Dr. Jonas that very day and made an appointment. He diagnosed it and said there was no problem at all, not to worry, they could cure her with radium at Baltimore. So she went to Kelly Clinic by train. They told her it was a spot the size of a pinpoint on the mouth of the uterus. She went every three months, always by herself—we couldn’t afford anything else. Sometimes they wouldn’t find a trace in her whole body. The disease seemed to come and go like a shade. For a long time she had no pain, she would just get terribly tired.

Once she hemorrhaged and I took her by ambulance to Baltimore. They gave her radium and deep X-ray, and she was so quickly recovered that we walked to the hotel. The room was depressing—two little single beds on steel frames, no rug on the floor, dusty, like the place was never aired. I was upset to see this was where she’d been staying all those times, but she seemed accustomed to it and talked about all the fine people she’d met at the clinic. She said the doctors and nurses were generous and kept her informed; that the patients were interesting and came from all sorts of places.

She had every amount of hope.

Even after the disease metastasized, she wasn’t as afraid as most people would be. Her life hadn’t been easy but she was never a downhearted type. In an odd way, I suppose she was prepared.

The last eight months she was good and bad; then she was bad. She stopped the treatments and I kept her at home and kept her comfortable and clean. What did we give her? I don’t know, I don’t remember—whatever they gave then. Morphia, maybe. Why do you ask me all these questions? Living through it once was enough, and I hate for you to know her through these kinds of stories. I live with the fear of it, I’ll tell you. When I had the hysterectomy, I woke up in that bed in the recovery room and thought—even through the terrible pain—“good, now there’s nothing there to go wrong.”

Right before she died, she seemed to come to herself. After two days of drugged sleep, she opened her eyes and looked all around the room. It seemed she saw everything at once without looking at any one object. She was perfectly calm, and the air of the room went still. Only for a moment … as if the room had detached from the house and come clear, the way light looks when a hard rain suddenly stops. Then she turned her head and was gone.

I felt the difference in her hand. Her body was empty; it lay there, familiar and strange. So many months we had tended it. Then I absolutely felt her absence, and left the room.

It’s true the body turns empty as the shell of an insect, or like something inflatable but flattened. You don’t know that until you’re present at a death. And if it’s someone whose presence is so known to you, so specific—you feel their movement, a lifting—you recognize them in what moves. Not ghostly, but amazing and too much to understand.

That winter, my breath caught each time I heard a sigh of heat from the register in the hall. Small, silly things. I did sometimes talk to her in my mind, and answered myself with memories of things she’d said or particular details. An hour before her death, I’d given her a drink of water from a teaspoon. Months
afterward, I felt us frozen in that instant, the spoon at her mouth. She was semiconscious and I had the feeling, as the wetness touched her lips, that I was only taking care of things—the house, the rooms, her body. Then or later, I wasn’t aware of any anger toward her, or even toward the disease. But there was so much sadness, and constant measuring up. Those cold months, I sewed or read in the evenings. Her sayings seemed present in the walls of the house—
between
the walls, as unseen as the supports and beams. Alone, without her sense of humor, the words were prayerful and heavy.
Anything worth doing is worth doing well. Sit down and collect yourself. Look until you find it and your labor won’t be lost. Hitch your wagon to a star. The Lord helps those who help themselves. Lay it in the lap of the Lord.