We So Seldom Look on Love (8 page)

“Two?”

“One in each place.”

He reached for her hand and squeezed it but kept his eyes on the ceiling. After a moment he said, “We can pretend it never happened, you know. You see, technically speaking, you have not had intercourse. By you I mean you the autosite, the host body.”

“Nothing has changed,” she said, but it was a question.

“No, no,” he said. “Not as far as you’re concerned.”

Back at the hotel, he is waiting for her on the sidewalk. He pays the taxi and takes her up to their room. He is very excited. The amputation (he uses this word for the first time) is set for three weeks today, here in New York. Wonderful, she says. He reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips. He won’t deceive her: the first operation isn’t entirely without risk, and there will be a long and not altogether comfortable recovery. But the follow-up operations will be less strenuous and will contain almost no risk. When the bandages come off, she is not to be frightened. The scarring will eventually be reduced by plastic surgery.

“I won’t be frightened,” she promises.

During the next three weeks, whenever she is with him, she has no doubts. But alone at night, in her bedroom, she starts to worry. Her little legs kick and fret. They know, she thinks, horrified. They know. They are licentious. Between her own legs, there is nothing, but between her little legs the urge for him is almost past bearing. She is overcome by terrible memories—her mother burning her scrapbooks, burning the picture
of her father’s mother in its filigreed frame … burns on her father’s hands. She doesn’t know why, maybe it was Merry Mary’s offer of the burial plot, but baby Sue’s perfect face keeps appearing to her. Will she forget baby Sue’s face? What if her freak memory is connected with her freak legs? What if she becomes somebody else for whom nothing that happened to the person she was will be worth preserving?

The mornings after these nights she can’t believe what went through her mind only a few hours before. “You’re a candidate for the loony bin,” she tells herself. The housekeeper brings in her tea, that bitter tea she’s starting to acquire a taste for. John pours it. If he has any misgivings about the operation, he never shows them. He talks about the future. They are going to have four children. They are going to visit her father’s village in Portugal.

Two days before the operation they return with the surgeon to New York City. Blood tests have to be done, more X-rays need to be taken, and John and the surgeon are giving a news conference. The surgeon wants Sylvie at the conference, but John is afraid that some of the questions might upset her, so she’s not attending, which is fine with her.

As the conference is scheduled for the afternoon of their arrival, John has time only to take her up to her hospital room. After he’s gone she lies on her bed and listens to “Vic and Sade” on the radio.

About ten minutes go by, and then a nurse barges into the room and hands her a hospital gown to change into. Throwing open the curtains, the nurse says that Thursday is the big day. She pretends not to be dying of curiosity, but Sylvie isn’t fooled and she undresses facing her, letting her catch a glimpse.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon nurses and interns arrive to take blood and her temperature or just to plump her pillow, and cleaners keep coming in to mop the floor and to empty the empty wastepaper basket. Sylvie sits on her bed with
her skirt hiked above her little knees. Why not give them a thrill? she thinks wistfully.

Around six o’clock John returns with their dinner on a tray, and they eat at the desk. “The news conference went very, very well,” he says. Pushing away his half-eaten meal, he gets up and prowls the room. “This is a very, very important operation in terms of certain precedents,” he says. He reminds her of Mr. Bean on opening night in a big city. Before he leaves for the hotel, he fills her coffee cup with water and has her take two sleeping pills.

The next day, Wednesday, it’s mostly doctors who keep coming into her room. They don’t have to put on any acts. They pull up her hospital gown and take good looks, and if a couple of them arrive at the same time, they talk with each other about her little womb and menstrual cycles and bowel movements. Sometimes they ask her questions, sometimes they don’t even say hello. Off and on John pops in to see how she is. He isn’t as keyed-up as he was the day before, but he has meetings and can’t stay for long.

When she is wheeled out on a stretcher to have X-rays, patients are lined along the corridors, waiting for her. She feels like a float in a parade. When she returns to her room, John is at the desk having his dinner, but there’s no meal for her because she isn’t allowed to eat now until after the operation. “Am I allowed sleeping pills?” she asks anxiously, afraid of what she might start thinking, and remembering, if she lies awake. John pulls out a bottle from his coat pocket. “How many do you think you’ll need?” he asks.

A nurse wakes her before dawn to wash her and to shave the pubic hair from herself and from Sue. Several minutes later John and another nurse and an intern come in.

“This is it,” John says.

He keeps her calm by holding her hand as she is wheeled down the corridors and into the operating theatre. She is
brought to the centre of what seems like a stage. John scans the rows of doctors seated behind glass in the encircling tiers. “There are some big names here,” he says quietly.

“John?” she says.

He bends toward her. “Yes?”

She gazes at his beautiful face. She can’t remember what she was going to say.

“Are you ready, darling?” he asks.

She nods.

A doctor places the ether mask over her mouth and starts the countdown. Still holding her hand, John leans to look into her eyes. The doctor says nine. John’s eyes bore into her. The doctor says eight, seven. Sylvie’s eyelids drop.

Light hits glass and magnifies something. A polyphemus moth! she thinks excitedly. The light and the magnification grow stronger and stronger until she realizes that what she is looking at is even more infinitesimal than the moth’s atoms.

It resembles a vast pine forest. A needle on one of the trees is magnified and becomes a million exotic fish, then one of the fish’s scales is magnified and becomes a galaxy of fireflies.

The magnification stops there. The fireflies are lit. “They must be alive,” she thinks, and later, weeks later, John will try to cheer her up by telling her how she said this in a loud voice just before going under, and how it drew a laugh from the doctors seated in the gallery.

S
ometimes Beth floated. Two or three feet off the ground, and not for very long, ten seconds or so. She wasn’t aware of floating when she was actually doing it, however. She had to land and feel a glowing sensation before she realized that she had just been up in the air.

The first time it happened she was on the church steps. She looked back down the walk and knew that she had floated up it. A couple of days later she floated down the outside cellar stairs of her house. She ran inside and told her grandmother, who whipped out the pen and the little pad she carried in her skirt pocket and drew a circle with a hooked nose.

Beth looked at it. “Has Aunt Cora floated, too?” she asked.

Her grandmother nodded.

“When?”

Her grandmother held up six fingers.

“Six years ago?”

Shaking her head, her grandmother held her hand at thigh level.

“Oh,” Beth said, “when she was six.”

When Beth was six, five years ago, her mother ran off with a man down the street who wore a toupee that curled up in humid weather. Beth’s grandmother, her father’s mother, came to live with her and her father. Thirty years before that, Beth’s grandmother had had her tonsils taken out by a quack who ripped out her vocal chords and the underside of her tongue.

It was a tragedy, because she and her twin sister, Cora, had
been on the verge of stardom (or so Cora said) as a professional singing team. They had made two long-play records: “The Carlisle Sisters, Sea to Sea” and “Christmas with the Carlisle Sisters.” Beth’s grandmother liked to play the records at high volume and to mouth the words. “My prairie home is beautiful, but oh …” If Beth sang along, her grandmother might stand next to her and sway and swish her skirt as though Beth were Cora and the two of them were back on stage.

The cover of the “Sea to Sea” album had a photograph of Beth’s grandmother and Aunt Cora wearing middies and sailor hats and shielding their eyes with one hand as they peered off in different directions. Their hair, blond and billowing out from under their hats, was glamorous, but Beth secretly felt that even if her grandmother hadn’t lost her voice she and Cora would never have been big stars because they had hooked noses, what Cora called Roman noses. Beth was relieved that she hadn’t inherited their noses, although she regretted not having got their soft, wavy hair, which they both still wore long, in a braid or falling in silvery drifts down their backs. Beth’s grandmother still put on blue eye shadow and red lipstick, too, every morning. And around the house she wore her old, flashy, full-length stage skirts, faded now—red, orange or yellow, or flowered, or with swirls of broken-off sequins. Beth’s grandmother didn’t care about sloppiness or dirt. With the important exception of Beth’s father’s den, the house was a mess—Beth was just beginning to realize and be faintly ashamed of this.

On each of Beth’s grandmother’s skirts was a sewed-on pocket for her pencil and pad. Due to arthritis in her thumb she held the pencil between her middle finger and forefinger, but she still drew faster than anyone Beth had ever seen. She always drew people instead of writing out their name or their initials. Beth, for instance, was a circle with tight, curly hair. Beth’s friend Amy was an exclamation mark. If the phone rang and nobody was home, her grandmother answered it and tapped her
pencil three times on the receiver to let whoever was on the other end know that it was her and that they should leave a message. “Call,” she would write, and then do a drawing.

A drawing of a man’s hat was Beth’s father. He was a hardworking lawyer who stayed late at the office. Beth had a hazy memory of him giving her a bath once, it must have been before her mother ran off. The memory embarrassed her. She wondered if he wished that she had gone with her mother, if, in fact, she was supposed to have gone, because when he came home from work and she was still there, he seemed surprised. “Who do we have here?” he might say. He wanted peace and quiet. When Beth got rambunctious, he narrowed his eyes as though she gave off a bright, painful light.

Beth knew that he still loved her mother. In the top drawer of his dresser, in an old wallet he never used, he had a snapshot of her mother wearing only a black slip. Beth remembered that slip, and her mother’s tight black dress with the zipper down the back. And her long red fingernails that she clicked on tables. “Your mother was too young to marry,” was her father’s sole disclosure. Her grandmother disclosed nothing, pretending to be deaf if Beth asked about her mother. Beth remembered how her mother used to phone her father for money and how, if her grandmother answered and took the message, she would draw a big dollar sign and then an upside-down V sitting in the middle of a line—a witch’s hat.

A drawing of an upside-down V without a line was church. When a Presbyterian church was built within walking distance, Beth and her grandmother started going to it, and her grandmother began reading the Bible and counselling Beth by way of biblical quotations. A few months later a crosswalk appeared at the end of the street, and for several years Beth thought that it was a “Presbyterian” instead of a “Pedestrian” crosswalk and that the sign above it said Watch for Presbyterians.

Her Sunday school teacher was an old, teary-eyed woman
who started every class by singing “When Mothers of Salem,” while the children hung up their coats and sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of her. That hymn, specifically the part about Jesus wanting to hold children to His “bosom,” made Beth feel that there was something not right about Jesus, and consequently it was responsible for her six months of anxiety that she would end up in hell. Every night, after saying her prayers, she would spend a few minutes chanting “I love Jesus, I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” the idea being that she could talk herself into it. She didn’t expect to feel earthly love; she awaited the unknown feeling called glory.

When she began to float, she said to herself, “This is glory.”

She floated once, sometimes twice a week. Around Christmas it began to happen less often—every ten days to two weeks. Then it dwindled down to only about once a month. She started to chant “I love Jesus” again, not because she was worried any more about going to hell, she just wanted to float.

By the beginning of the summer holidays she hadn’t floated in almost seven weeks. She phoned her Aunt Cora who said that, yes, floating was glory all right, but that Beth should consider herself lucky it had happened even once. “Nothing that good lasts long,” she sighed. Beth couldn’t stop hoping, though. She went to the park and climbed a tree. Her plan was to jump and have Jesus float her to the ground. But as she stood on a limb, working up her courage, she remembered God seeing the little sparrow fall and letting it fall anyway, and she climbed down.

She felt that she had just had a close call. She lay on her back on the picnic table, gazing up in wonder at how high up she had been. It was a hot, still day. She heard heat bugs and an ambulance. Presently she went over to the swings and took a turn on each one, since there was nobody else in the park.

She was on the last swing when Helen McCormack came waddling across the lawn, calling that a boy had just been run over by a car. Beth slid off the swing. “He’s almost dead!” Helen called.

“Who?” Beth asked.

“I don’t know his name. Nobody did. He’s about eight. He’s got red hair. The car ran over his leg
and
his back.”

“Where?”

Helen was panting. “I shouldn’t have walked so fast,” she said, holding her hands on either side of her enormous head. “My cranium veins are throbbing.” Little spikes of her wispy blond hair stood out between her fingers.