On Shifting Sand (29 page)

The day the blinds arrive, as I work to affix one above our living room window, a new kind of blackness rises up against my eyes. For a moment, I think it to be a sudden, ferocious storm, but then dizziness overtakes me and—as Ariel, who is playing nearby with the ever-growing Barney, will tell me later—I drop off my stool like a sack of potatoes.

When I wake up, two days have passed. I find myself in a clean white room, covered by a crisp white sheet. The sound that brought me out of the darkness was that of my husband’s voice, brimming with prayer.

“. . . and for how I’ve failed her, Father. How I’ve failed you, and the children you’ve given over to my care . . .”

He is praying for the restoration of our marriage and our land, seeing the two of them as coconspirators in the ravaging of my body. I lift my
finger in a nascent effort to reach out, to beg him to stop. His confession rings like blasphemy in my ears, as my waking thoughts are consumed with the sin that has managed to weave itself within my bones, bringing a constant, familiar ache that springs to life not long after I’ve eased into consciousness.

I try to say, “Russ, stop,” but the only sound that comes is a soft, snakelike hiss, which frightens me more than silence. I’ve willed my eyes open to the bright whiteness around me, and wonder briefly if I haven’t died. If this isn’t heaven, and the voice I hear that of an angel speaking a petition on my behalf. But when I see his head bowed low, his shoulders slumped, hands clasped, Bible open across his knee—it is a sweeter sight than any glimpse of heaven could afford.

This, again, another day. Another chance, brought back from near death. Or so it seems. My mind hearkens back to the bits of conversation floating beyond my dreamless sleep.
“Dehydrated. Severely malnourished. Near starved.”

When my eyes are finally fully open, I find a needle plunged within the deep vein running the length of my forearm and a rubber tube attached to a glass bottle suspended from a pole beside the bed. The sight of it frightens me—like something out of that terrifying monster movie Russ and I had seen on a rare film date early in our marriage.

“What is this?” I ask, and am nearly frightened again by the immediate reaction of Russ. He springs to life, knocking the chair out from underneath him and his Bible to the floor.

“Nola!” He comes to my side, his warm, soft hand pushing the hair away from my brow before he bends low to kiss me. “Thank you, Jesus.” His lips speak the prayer into my skin.

I return his kiss to my lips as best I can, given I haven’t the strength to lift my head, and I don’t dare embrace him lest I rip the needle out of my vein. “What happened to me?” I say the minute he settles back in his chair.

“I should get the doctor.” He looks poised to jump up again.

“Not yet.”

“At least the nurse.”

“Russ. Just you. Tell me, what happened?”

“Oh, darling. You gave us such a scare.”

“I remember falling. I heard Ariel—”

“Yes, you fell. And hit your head pretty hard. You probably feel it. . . .” He touches his fingers to his own temple, prompting me to do the same, where I find a raised, tender bump. “But that’s not the worst of it.”

“What’s this?” I lift the arm tethered by the rubber tubing.

“The doctors estimate that you weigh under one hundred pounds. And when I saw you, when they’d stripped—” His words break away as he buries his face in his hands. Not crying, but with an anguish I’ve only seen twice before in those moments when he held the empty shell of a lost child. I know the gesture that will come next. His hand takes on the function of a dry cloth, wiping the pain away, his face emerging inch by inch, a visage of reliable strength. This time, though, I see a man reeling from shock and devastation. “How could I not have known?”

I want to reassure him in that moment, the way I have in so many moments leading up to this one, that I am fine. A little tired, maybe. Bit of a headache, but fine. Nothing a cool drink of water and an aspirin won’t set right. And when he unfailingly brings both to me, I’ll smile, tuck the pill under my tongue, and spit it out once he leaves me alone to lie down with a cool rag on my brow and a fan cooling the air around me. In all those times, he was my caregiver and pleased to do so, as there’d come to be so few people for him to minister to. Now he appears beside me, a victim of some cruel twist, and a deep fear takes hold. Somehow, during my days of darkness, I’ve been betrayed. By my own mouth, maybe, speaking aloud in sleep as I’ve been known to do. Or by Merrilou Brown voicing her suspicions in those long hours when people waited and wondered. Perhaps Jim himself, lurking out of the range of my perception, breaking his vow as I’ve broken mine.

“Known what?” I ask, dreading the answer.

“That this happened to you. That your body—that you were
dying
right in front of me.”

“I’m not dying. And even if I were, you couldn’t have known.
I
didn’t know.”

But then, I think, maybe I did know. I must have known, disappearing meal by meal, becoming more of a shadow in the light of each day, and at night . . . those nights. Always a reason to avoid his touch. The bedroom was “unmercifully hot.” My skin felt “like a field of sweat.” I cooled myself with alcohol rubs, and his touch “took all the coolness away.” I slept on top of the sheets, rigid and alone, a valley of emptiness between us. I dressed and undressed when he was out of the room—better, out of the house. I sated him with kisses to the back of his neck and spun out of his embrace as if I were flirting, keeping him as far away from my body as the confines of our tiny apartment would allow. And then, during those times when my defenses were down, when his arm would encircle me, and his handsome brow would frown, and he’d say, “Darling? You’re getting to be so thin . . . ,” I’d flash a bright smile and toss off something about his mistaking me for some Hollywood actress and playfully bump him with my hip.

Only Ariel hadn’t been fooled. While Ronnie spent every moment he could outside the stifling confines of our home, and Pa regarded me with the same judgmental scowl he had all my life, Ariel had, on more than one occasion, looked me right in the eye and asked, “Where are you, Mama?” Once, when I complained that it was too hot for her to cuddle on my lap, she crankily retaliated, saying my lap was “too pointy, anyway.”

Suddenly my arms long for the feel of her, and I ask Russ if the kids are here somewhere.

He shakes his head. “They’re back home, with your dad.” I must have communicated some discomfort with the idea, because he smiles and reassures me that Mr. and Mrs. Brown are keeping an eye on them as well. “All three of them.”

“And you’ve been . . . here?”

“Day and night, dearie. Day and night.” This from a bustling, white-uniformed nurse who has crept inside the room in thick, rubber-soled shoes. She is a large woman, the first genuinely fat person I’ve seen in years, and that alone brings me comfort. Older, too. Probably close to fifty, and she carries her girth around her as a monument to commemorate better times. “The man slept right in that chair.”

I have no time to reply, as she takes the thermometer she’s been vigorously shaking and pops it into my mouth with an unmistakable, if silent, command to keep it shut.

Russ and I both obey, our eyes finding each other behind her healthy white posterior.

“Perfect,” she pronounces, and I feel so pleased with myself. She turns to Russ. “Now, mister minister, time for you to skee-daddle out of here while I help her freshen up a bit. Go to that diner next door and ask for the special. Tell ’em Nurse Betty sent you, and they won’t charge you but a nickel for the whole plate and all the coffee you can drink.”

He starts to protest that he isn’t hungry, but Nurse Betty stares him down so hard I marvel he has the strength to stand beneath it.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” he says, grazing his hand against my cheek. I don’t think he dares bend down to kiss me. And then he is gone.

“Nice fellow you have there,” Nurse Betty says. She lifts the glass bottle off its perch on the pole, detaches the rubber tube, and reattaches it to a new, full one.

“He is,” I acknowledge, knowing instinctually that she won’t answer my question unless I acknowledge her. “What is that?”

“Fluid. Keepin’ you hydrated. You know you’re fixin’ to turn yourself into a tumbleweed, don’t you? Need to work on gettin’ some food into you next.”

“I’m fine.” My reply comes automatically. “I’m not hungry.”

“Don’t matter.” She is finished with the bottle and the tubing and helps me to sit up straight. The ache in my bones is a new, unfamiliar sensation, and I wince at her prodding. “C’mon now, stand up.”

With her help, I do. I’m wearing a gown made of thin, white
cotton, draped across the front of my body and tied along the back. Nurse Betty tugs at the strings before she eases my right arm out of the sleeve, leaving the entire garment to dangle off my left shoulder. Though she surely has seen her fair share of bodies in all states of undress, I curl myself against the shame of my nakedness, trying to step away from her grip.

“Now,” she says, her voice brimming with no-nonsense compassion, “ain’t everybody can take a look in a mirror and see what’s ailin’ them, but you can. So—” she makes sure I am steady on my feet before stepping away and coming back with a mirror, not unlike the one that sits on my dressing table at home—“you take a look. Bit by bit. Don’t you take your eyes off the glass.”

She holds it first in front of my face, and I confront my eyes, large and brown, growing enormous in the sharp planes of my face as she steps away. Prominent cheeks; thin, dry lips. My neck, thin enough to dissect the middle of the image. The hollow of my clavicle, deep enough to hold rain, should any ever fall.

Nurse Betty steps back, moves the mirror down, until I see my breasts—always small, now depleted of any purpose. They sit atop the shadow of an emerging rib cage, beneath which a concave stomach still bears the scars of stretching. Prominent hip bones jut from either side. And then—

“Stop.” I look away, unable to take any more.

“Got a good two inches of daylight between your thighs,” Nurse Betty says. “That man of yours said he wouldn’t have recognized you if—”

“He
saw
me? Like this?” With a shaking hand I reach for the gown and cover myself, save for the aching emptiness in the back.

She ignores my question. “Said you hadn’t been sick, far as he knew.”

“I haven’t been. I’m not.”

“Well, this ain’t healthy. An’ I know well as anyone that times are tough, but it don’t seem to me you have it so bad that you need to starve to death.”

“I’m not starving to death.” I turn my back as a request for her to
fasten my gown, and she obliges, giving a little tug and a pat when she’s finished.

“Doctor did some lookin’ to see if you didn’t have a worm or somethin’. That happens sometimes—people swaller some little tiny thing, and it goes on livin’ in their stomach, eatin’ and eatin’ so’s that person don’t get a bit of nothin’.”

“I don’t have a parasite.” I inch my way back to the bed, steadying myself on her arm as I sit. “But there might be something else.”

She fluffs the pillow and eases me back against it.

“Thought there might be.”

“Could the doctor test—is there a way he could tell me if I might be pregnant?”

She stands back, hands on her ample hips, bringing me to envy her softness. “Think you might be?”

I look down, staring at the deflated fabric of my gown.

“When’s the last time you had your flow?”

“Ten weeks.” I’ve been watching, calculating daily since that afternoon. It’s the first time I’ve ever had such a conversation out loud. Our pastor’s wife gave me a booklet when I was twelve years old, with pictures to explain the “Mysteries of Womanhood.” When that mystery first came to life, I found my mother’s abandoned, half-empty package of Lister’s Towels and a tangle of belts. I wish I’d known Nurse Betty then.

“And you’ve had relations, I assume?”

“Yes.”

“With your husband?” The question holds no judgment, only a deep understanding of my fear.

“Of course.” But I don’t fool her. She takes my answer and responds with a slight incline of her head, enough to exaggerate the roll of flesh around her neck, and she holds her tongue long enough for me to come clean with the entire truth. When it’s clear I have no intention of elaborating, she offers soft congratulations, saying, “You’re safe for now. Doc would have made a note of it if you weren’t.”

I bring my hand to my mouth to capture my prayer of relief and
whisper, “Thank you, God,” before another concern arises. “But then why haven’t I had my time?”

“Because your body can’t spare it. You’re not takin’ in enough to support your own life, let alone another’n.”

She puts her hand on my arm, and it is the first touch since his that doesn’t make me want to pull away. It is warm and dry and soft, an entire embrace in its strength.

Her hair, gray at the temples, is pulled loosely away from her face, with her crisp white nurse’s cap nestled within. Before my eyes, she becomes a figure of both authority and affection as she lifts my hand and folds it between her own.

“Now you have to get yourself better so you can get yourself home.”

“I’m fine now, really. Just let me rest—”

She shakes her head at the word
fine
. “You’re not fine, and it’s not about rest, darlin’. You need to eat. Doctor says five pounds, and you can go home.”

“Bring me a steak,” I say, my smile weak.

“No such luck.” Nurse Betty pats my thigh as she stands. “Now that you’re awake, though, I’ll send the doctor in, and then I’ll be back with your lunch. Gon’ keep hubby out of here until you’ve eaten. Might hurry you along.”

With that, she is gone, the curtain left slightly ajar in her wake. Not enough for me to see any of the occupants in the other beds, but I hear them. Rustling, coughing. I realize if I can hear them, they can hear me, and I commend myself for not making a full confession to Nurse Betty. Not that I needed to. It was in her eyes, a full understanding of both my fear and my relief.