Things Withered (12 page)

So of course, when David found Beddy, they knew. Myra told them everything: about the soup, the Bible, the broken bowl, the paramedics, and even about David sobbing his heart out on the steps. They knew that he called her instead of the police. They knew that Beddy had been the one to tell Myra about the facts of life, a fact that she wasn’t sure even David knew. They knew that.

They also knew all about Lorna, because work was the only place that Myra allowed herself to vent about the other woman in David’s life.

But they also knew that David, only months later, had found his boss hanging from the rafters in the warehouse office and that David had called Myra to come and get him.

Two bodies was two too much.

“Hey, Crypt Keeper,” someone yelled at least once a day, “what’re you and Death doing this weekend, digging up a couple of old friends for a night on the town?”

“Hey, Crypt Keeper! If you ever come to my place, don’t bring Death. I’m too young to die.”

“Hey, Crypt Keeper, where’ll you two be tonight? I want to make sure I’m somewheres else.”

So she kept the wedding plans to herself until Friday. She had to tell them. It wasn’t like they were family, it was something different, something more than that. It was like they were a kind of diary, a human record of the steps she—all of them—took in life. It wasn’t about judgement or advice, or even sharing. It was a registry system.

Myra had been unusually quiet for most of the week. She’d been asked twice if she was feeling all right. They even let up on the Crypt Keeper thing, suspecting not that they’d offended her, but that she was sick or something, and so left her out of conversations altogether, leaving her to ail or recharge. By Friday she was almost sweating the information out of her pores and had to speak.

She told Tammy Faye, feeling probably closest to her because they were only a year apart in age, and yet Tammy Faye had already planned out most of her life (marriage, kids, house in the country eventually) and was struggling to make it so, with thus far disastrous results.

So just before biting into her boloney sandwich at lunch, she said casually, “David and I are getting married.” Then she chewed and flipped the page of the
People
magazine she was reading. It was from an April three years before.

Tami stopped eating her own sandwich and punched Myra a little too hard in the upper shoulder. “Fuck
off
!” she said, a little too loudly. Dube and Henry (new guy, no nickname yet) were sitting at the next table and Dube leaned back on his chair and looked at them.

“Hey, keep it down girls, unless you want me to get out the oil,” he chuckled.

“Like from your hair?” Tammy Faye said. The new guy laughed. She turned back to Myra. “Well?”

Myra shrugged, but found herself smiling. “Well, what?”

“Tell me everything! How did he ask you?
When
did he ask you?”

“A couple of days ago.”

Tami-Faye lifted an eyebrow and was silent for a moment. She sipped her coffee and stared forward. She nodded a little.

“Okay. Well, have you set a date or anything?”

“We haven’t really—”

“So, is this supposed to be a secret?” she asked in a whisper.

Myra shook her head, but didn’t deny it, and kept her voice low when she said, “Just, you know, with the Crypt Keeper thing . . .” Tammy Faye nodded and winked.

She nudged her with her elbow. “Just bring it up low key when the whole thing dies down,” she said. Then she laughed. “So to speak,” she said.

In the days following David’s almost impromptu proposal to Myra, a feeling of chaos began to overtake him. He felt like the triangle ship from that old
Space Invaders
game at the bar, spinning around, shooting wildly, just trying to keep it all together.

He was getting married. He wasn’t sure what that would entail from him, but he suspected he was supposed to do something.

He was looking for a job again, and wondering why Myra wasn’t pushing him to apply at the meatpacking plant. (It was suspiciously apparent: when they were together he told her where he was applying, what they were paying and where he was interviewing, the whole act, after awhile, designed to get her to say
something
about the meat plant. But she didn’t. It made him want to apply there. That would make him think she was practising some kind of stupid reverse psychology on him and he would stop, rethink the whole thing, and his brain would swim because he was: getting married, looking for a job, and—)

He was suddenly afraid of everything. Jumpy.

After the dinner with his mother on the Sunday after he and Myra had told her they were getting married, he figured he’d better meet his mother for lunch or something. Her nose was seriously out of joint and that wasn’t something easily discussed with Myra present. Since he wasn’t working and was out and about most days anyway, he called Lorna and said they should have lunch. She said they should eat at the hospital.

His mother always wanted to eat at the hospital, just like she always wanted to have dinner at her place, and always wanted to feed them on major holidays.

In the morning before their lunch, David applied for a job at a car dealership, not because he wanted to work at the dealership, but because it was near the hospital and seemed both convenient and responsible. And something to bring up over lunch, because his mother would ask. She
would
ask.

He parked in the paid lot and went through the front entrance. The receptionist waved to him. “Hello, David! Here to see your mom?”

David smiled and waved back. “Yup, having lunch.”

“Well, you have a good time,” she said and he stood in front of the elevator with an older couple who were waiting to go up. The button was lit up, but David gave it a push anyway, just for something to do. The hour bothered him; it was not quite noon. He wondered if the couple thought he didn’t have a job (which he didn’t). He gave the button a second push, as though in a hurry to get somewhere (as if he had to get back to work). What did they know anyway, he could have a sick grandma up there. Maybe he was on a mission of mercy. Maybe he worked in the hospital. There were all kinds of reasons why he might be wandering around on a weekday before noon. All kinds.

While they waited, a nurse showed up to stand with them, pushing a wheelchair awkwardly, her other hand pushing an intravenous pole, with a bag filled with suspect-looking yellow liquid. It looked like pee. He also thought that it could be apple juice, the two were nearly indistinguishable. He wondered whether or not to push the button again.

Man in a hurry here
. (Which he wasn’t.)

The guy in the wheelchair was slumped forward, clearly incapable of pushing his own intravenous pole. The elevator doors opened and they all pushed inside. The nurse and the chair came in last, cramping things up enough that David and the chair stood side by side. There was a brief tangle as the man and the nurse pushed the buttons for their floors at the same time. The nurse pushed six, David’s floor.

The man was from the Chronic Care ward. His mother’s ward. He wondered what was wrong with him. His age was hard to gauge. He could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy. The grizzle on his chin showed patches of grey and he was as wrinkled as any old poop David had ever seen, but he didn’t really have that sucked-out look that the truly old seem to have. But if he was in CC, then—

The realization hit David like a hot flash. Sweat suddenly appeared in his armpits, and the hair on the back of his neck stood at attention.

What if he pops off?

A stray heebie-jeebie crawled up his spine, sending his skin to gooseflesh. His mouth dried up, all his saliva busy making sweat stains on his clean white shirt (put on that morning in anticipation of dropping off his resume at the car dealership near the hospital—they always wore suits and ties in that place).

Oh gawd. What if he pops off in the elevator? Right beside me?

The nurse was a pretty young woman, who smiled professionally at him. No clue there. She
seemed
calm enough. He smiled back a little roughly.

The elevator cranked its way up to three and the doors opened. There was some shuffling about as the older couple worked their way around the nurse and the man in the wheelchair. They mumbled smiling
excuse me’s.
The woman, slightly rotund, bumped the wheelchair gently on her way past, sucking in as best she could.

Don’t bump the chair!

David’s face grew red and sweaty. The nurse looked at him sideways, her nursing skills kicking in; he noted a slight concern cross her face. Then there was a muffled grunt from the chair and she looked down at the guy in the chair just as the doors were shutting.

“Is he all right?” David asked, too quickly.

She bent over him. “Mr. Gumble?” she said loudly. There was another small noise.

“Is he all right?” David asked again, too urgently.

She patted the man’s shoulder. “He’s fine,” she said stiffly. “Just a little breakfast coming back.
Isn’t that right Mr. Gumble?
”

The elevator laboured past four. Then five. There were no more sounds from the man in the chair and David’s situation was increasingly panicked. What if he was dead? What if that breakfast coming back on him was really a death rattle?

I’ve killed him.

David leaned over slightly and snuck a look. He stared at his chest. It didn’t seem to be rising at all. He stared intently, willing either the doors to open or the man’s chest to rise in breath.

“Excuse me?” the nurse said, peevishly.

The man’s chest rose, barely perceptibly, but it did. David sighed.

“He’s all right,” he said, grinning.

“Of course he is,” she said. She stared ahead. Her cheeks were pink.

The doors opened on six and David pushed his way out first, in a most ungentlemanly way. Although he did say
excuse me
.

By the time he found his mom he was better, but his hands were shaking, his face was flushed and he’d sweated through his shirt.

“Good lord, David,” his mother said, pressing her palm to his forehead. “You look terrible. You must be coming down with something.” And then she made him sit through his temperature and pulse being taken. He sat on a chair in the hallway, the thermometer sticking out of his closed mouth, hair stuck up in the back from his mother’s hands feeling his head, looking like one of the deranged patients from another floor. Psych Ward.

His pulse was elevated. She snuck him some meds from the cupboard and they went to lunch.

After his experience at the hospital, David began avoiding things without really meaning to. He avoided, for instance, going back to the hospital, which began to seem to him to be filled with people who could, at any moment, die.

He also had problems with people who were sleeping.

Days after Myra told Tammy Faye about her pending marriage, Myra started making plans. She was careful to poll him on any and all decisions, but he had been with her long enough to know that she was really just telling him what she was doing, not looking for input per se. This was fine with him. While he didn’t actually say it, all he really needed to make the experience a grand and fulfilling one for him, was a date and a time to show up. Maybe a little help picking out a suit.

It was to be a small wedding, just a little something at the church, followed by a lunch at the Olive Garden downtown, and then a few hours down time before a big party at their friend Hugh’s place. He had a big basement, partway finished, with a wet bar.

“It’s not like we’re inviting the whole world,” Myra told Grace, her youngest sister on the phone. Grace was protesting having the reception in someone’s basement. Her next youngest sister, Ellen, said it was tacky.

“It’s not a reception anyway,” Myra said. “It’s just a party. Like, to celebrate.” All that sounded fine to David, because until Myra started talking about the how-to, he was very worried that something important like a hall or a caterer would be dropped in his lap. He was all for cold cuts and cheese squares in someone’s basement.

It should have helped.

The whole event, considering how little planning it was taking, was still more than a month in the future. But to Myra this seemed somewhat of an emergency and just a couple of weeks after he’d proposed, she started looking for a dress. She said she wasn’t going to get one of those princessy things, but just an ordinary dress that she might be able to wear again someday. “Maybe at my next wedding,” she would joke whenever she told someone about what she wanted for a dress.

Ha ha
, David would think.

But she did want the dress to be perfect. Same for the shoes, the jewellery, her nails, hair and skin. All of these things had to be sorted out, appointed to a day in appropriate reference to the wedding time, and it seemed only the shopping was flexible. But not that flexible. She and her sisters started shopping for the dress just a couple of weeks after the decision had been made.

“You have more than a month,” he said to Myra and her sisters as they got ready right after dinner to “hit some stores.”

Her sister Peggy, the one closest to Myra in age, turned to him, hands on her hips and said, “You know, David,” she said, “some women get married just so they can buy and wear one of those big dresses.”

“So?”

“
So
,” she said, shaking her head and curling her lip slightly, “
that’s
how important the dress is.” Myra kissed him and said she wouldn’t be more than a couple of hours.

She did that every night for a week, the only variation being who she went with—Peggy, her other sister, Grace, or her mother. Sometimes they went back to the same stores they’d already been to, to get the opinion of the other females, who talked on the phone about the dresses they saw on a daily basis. It seemed exhausting to David and he was very worried that the same attention would have to be applied to his suit.

Without working, and still performing the frequently discouraging task of looking for a job, David’s life began to feel very confined and dull. By the time Friday had rolled around, he was about ready to whine if necessary to get Myra to stay home. He came home early from job-hunting and started supper. He made spaghetti. He’d bought a bottle of cheap wine to go with it, hoping that it might inspire in Myra a bit of romance. Between working all day and shopping all night, she hadn’t been feeling exactly romantic, and it was heading into a week. David had much more time on his hands and so spent a good part of the day thinking about sex, only to be ignored at bedtime.