Shorts - Sinister Shorts (20 page)

Mike began to pace in front of the television, slapping his knee. His voice, an emotionless, unaccented one, changed to a Southern dialect and rose in pitch. “See up there,” he said, parading, prancing back and forth, and she could see his father forty years ago, proud of some remembered or imagined glory. Mike lifted an arm straight up and pointed to the set, still talking in his father's voice. “See, kids? That there's Guadalcanal…”

“Mike, where are you?” said a voice over the loudspeaker.

He startled, putting his hands to his sides as if standing at attention.

“I'm taking Ms. Watkins's vital signs,” he called out.

“Could we borrow your muscle for a minute?” the voice said. There was affection in the words.

“Sure thing.” He walked out the door.

While he was gone, she noticed the pile of best sellers on the refrigerator. She didn't want to make an extra trip back to clear them out when the time came to leave. She had her toiletries, the flowers… too much to carry in one load, even with her husband helping. Once she left that room, she never wanted to return. Maybe she could give them away.

Mike returned almost immediately and started toward her with the cuff. As he adjusted it around her upper arm she said, “You a reader?”

He stepped back from the bed and fiddled with his machine. “Oh, I sure used to be,” he said. “As a kid, I read everything. History and science were my favorites.” He flipped a switch, punched a few buttons.

“Because I wondered if…” she began, but Mike was still talking.

“But I don't much anymore. Got bad eyes,” he said.

She was thinking, how strange. They were so alike, and she had thought them so different. Her dad bought steak on payday and the kids ate take-out burgers for a treat when she was a kid, and now she had two pairs of glasses, one for distance, and one for close-up. Neither one seemed to work worth a damn.

“I was in Vietnam,” he said.

The mumbling of visitors in the rooms nearby grew louder, and the bright stars outside looked brighter. Her mouth was open, but she closed it without speaking.

Mike was lost in thought. Suddenly, he turned his back to her and reached behind his head. “See this?” He pointed up at the back of his skull to a lumpy scar, significant-looking. About six inches long, it curved like a long evil smile above his neck underneath his nubby hair.

“Yes.”

“I spent eighteen years in the hospital,” he said. “There was shrapnel stuck back there and they couldn't take it out. Looked like I had a second head. Couldn't go anywhere, anyway. Looked like a freak.”

He turned sideways for a moment, long enough for her to imagine behind him, his second head.

He put the cuff on her arm, puffed it up, and watched the red numbers on his machine going down.

“Had me on psychotropic drugs. Everything. Because sometimes, I'd feel bad about what I missed.”

The highest reading ever. He noted it on a piece of paper.

“Then they found a way to take it off.”

He pushed the machine toward her door. “Sometimes I think about life,” he said, passing under the television, “how much I missed.”

She would leave the thrillers behind, she decided, find something better to read now that her mind had awakened, something like the books she had read in the summer. She had learned in those books what made mountain climbers climb and people go to war. Not courage, she had finally decided. A mysterious force drove them on. That same mysterious force had motivated her to go under the knife-something beyond survival, some greedy spirit full of valor, something vestigial like her anomaly, something as outlandish as Mike's second head.

She lay back against the pillows watching San Francisco blink, and thought of a young man and how long life should be and what it should be. Her husband came into the room, greeted her, and pulled a chair closer to her bed. He took her hand. “How are you?”

She squeezed his hand. “Better,” she said. “They say I can go home on Sunday.” Days, as opposed to years… a lifetime that could so easily be cut short by misery, bricks, metal.

Let the kid live. He had been hanging from her like shrapnel, but Mike had cut him off her.

“But… you're ready? They won't make you leave if you aren't ready…” She saw now how afraid he was. “Why are you smiling?” he went on.

“Come here.” Her husband bent down and she kissed his bald head. “Because the operation was a success.”

Chocolate Milkshake

One night, after a movie, she and a woman friend dropped into one of those anachronistic ice cream parlors modeled on the fifties, where an actual soda jerk in a white cap sponged behind the counter and silver-haired denizens licked their spoons as they no doubt had been doing for years. They sat across from each other in a mahogany booth. Her friend ordered a root-beer float from an ornate leather menu. That started her thinking about when she was sixteen and Charlie Almquist took her to the Bob's Big Boy on Willow Street and they ordered the most wonderful dripping burgers and huge thick chocolate milkshakes with whipped cream. For old times' sake and in a spirit of middle-aged daring, she ordered the chocolate milkshake, thinking you can't bring back the past and that she must be out of her mind to order such a mountain of calories. When the milkshake arrived it was better than the Bob's, taller, with cream that tasted freshly whipped and semisweet chocolate tempered to bland mild perfection with milk. She sipped it slowly through the straw, finding it difficult to make conversation because it had been thirty years since anything tasted this good. When it was all gone she was full, really full, her brain still savoring the taste and her cells still lapping up the cream.

She did not dare to repeat this experience, nor did she tell her husband about it, because although they had smoked pot and even sniffed cocaine once in younger wilder days and had drunk about a thousand bottles of wine together, this was an experience he could never share with her, a truly illicit, downright obscene pleasure, and besides he was a saturated fat and salt eater, who at night in front of the TV snacked on salted nuts and nacho chips, while she usually tried to content herself with tea, since she gained weight easily and had to be careful; but after the milkshake experience she began sneaking Hostess Cupcakes in the kitchen, eating two sandwiches in the daytime when he and the children were not at home, and having a second breakfast of microwave waffles with loads of real maple syrup, which helped her sleep better and maintain the bland sweetness which he and the children needed, deadening her to the irritations and lack of money and the fact that she really didn't seem to care about her husband anymore; and then she started to put on weight, and she had to buy some bigger clothes at the Penney's on their charge card, which is how he first noticed she was getting fatter.

Meanwhile she felt deeply ashamed, as though she were having an affair, which began to be quite unlikely, as she was really piling on the weight, having stored the scale in the garage so she wouldn't have to think about it after it read two hundred one morning; but eclipsing her shame was an exhilarating feeling of fighting back, an obscure defiance, and also that delirious pleasure of letting go completely and filling up, so much better than sex with her husband, who had no idea how to please her even after all these years; so she just wanted to continue eating brownies and corn bread and her children's dreadful cookies which had to be constantly replaced; she stopped looking in the mirror and there was an extra layer between herself and her husband when they made love, but they didn't talk about it; never anything to worry about there, her husband was as faithful as the lighthouse light; he would never leave her; they had married for life and they both believed in the sanctity of marriage.

After six months she had gained eighty pounds and decided she had to stop; people were staring at her thighs on the street and she was getting embarrassed to go out to the grocery store; she had to drop out of coaching the school play, which disappointed her daughter and the teacher, and when summer came she had to avoid the swim club, where she had spent years chatting desultorily with the neighbors; tennis with her husband was out of the question; so she joined a diet center, and for four months, until Christmas, she starved herself faithfully, castigating herself after each tiny slip, suffering horribly from hunger, until her hair was falling out in little clumps and the skin under her arms hung in small quilted bags, but she was no longer fat.

Then at a Christmas party down the block she noticed she was looking longingly at the husband of her neighbor, admiring the blond downy hair glowing on his forearms, and he noticed her looking and pushed her into the kitchen with him and ran his fingers up her now thin thigh and stuck his tongue into her mouth, all slimy and tasting of beer, until she finally pulled away and headed back into the living room where people smiled at her, and she found a tray of small quiches, spinach and Monterey Jack, and she had a couple, which sent her off and running again.

After that, in the middle of the night sometimes she would gently slide out from under the comforter and flit to the refrigerator while her family slept, and the day came when she could wear nothing but muumuus and it was hard to fit into her chair at the dining room table, and all the while her husband tried to be nice and pretended things were like before, and was supportive about her therapy, which gave her a weekly excuse to visit the McDonald's for an extra lunch of two Big Macs and a large fries, even though sex with him was really impossible by now and he was depressed, but trying not to show it, loyal and true man that he was.

As the fat enfolded her legs, her arms, her neck, even her fingers and toes, she continued to eat assiduously, not for the taste or the feeling of fullness but because she had to, the fat had taken on a life of its own, and within she had shrunk to a mere pinprick of existence; she found it hard even to make the school lunches and to wash the dishes, but her husband took over these chores as he had taken over the laundry and vacuuming and bed-making; at this point all she could get up for was the cooking, and the meals she produced were odd, even she knew it, buttered garlic bread and noodles in oily pesto and chocolate cake, and her husband never got the dishes he loved anymore.

Then one evening, he caught her in the bedroom eating a dozen Mounds bars under the covers, dropping melted chocolate onto the clean sheet he had patiently fitted that morning before work. At six P.M. he was hungry, as he always was, but she hadn't started dinner and although it was obvious she was in no shape to get up, he wouldn't leave her alone; he burst into tears and told her she was killing herself and had to stop, and, the words disgorging from somewhere inside she blurted out: you could leave you know, and he sobbed, oh, no you don't, marriage is forever, we agree about that, and the children were whining in the kitchen for their dinner, their voices piercing as bird beaks, pecking at her, and her husband pounded on the dresser, saying, why, why, why, and it sounded to her like I, I, I. She felt muscles under her fat tense as every ounce of her shook, and he made the mistake of pointing his finger at her like he was pushing a cap into a dynamite stick, and she was exploding, they were killing her so in pure self-defense she took her husband's loaded gun out of the bedside table and shot him, and when the children came running with shrill shrieks she shot them, too, until the whole family had shut up.

She pulled herself up laboriously from the bed and, stepping over the bodies, wrapped herself in her men's extra large parka. Wiping her shoes on a dish towel, she found the keys to the car he had left, a cheap Japanese car they had bought when they were first married. She drove straight to the ice cream parlor, wedged herself into the booth, and ordered the chocolate milkshake. Beige-gray in color, like mud or weak vomit, the milkshake had a sour aftertaste. After the one sip, she pushed it away, asking for the check. She wasn't hungry. Back at home she put her key in the lock, peering in, but they had not stirred. She heard no TV. No high sharp voices demanded her attention.

Cool silence seeped into her. She sucked in the quiet gratefully, allowing it to invade and fill her, standing utterly still in the dark hallway, savoring every last drop.

The Young Lady