Читать книгу Indentations and Other Stories - Joe Schall - Страница 11

Mrs. Lilly’s first name was Lillian. She had no middle name. In the beginning, she had toyed seriously with the notion of refusing to marry John because of the last-name issue.

“If only it was the other way around or something,” she had said quietly when she was twenty-three. “Lilly Lillian sounds better than Lillian Lilly at least. It’s all backwards.”

“So you go by Lill,” John said, shrugging and twiddling one end of his moustache, an hourly habit in those days. “And nobody notices. Not backwards at all. Perfectly natural. Lill Lilly. Sounds very sure of itself. Confident. Like a President’s wife.”

He chuckled lazily and cuddled closer to her on the couch, but she wasn’t quite convinced. Nothing was wrong with her own last name, she supposed out loud, and maybe it wouldn’t be so strange if they both took on her name instead of his. It was 1969, she argued—people were ready for radical things to happen. But John pointed out again that her current last name—Smith—would end up being silly and embarrassing for them both, especially at the wedding.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” John said, standing up in front of the couch and blessing the congregation in imitation of a priest, “it gives me great pleasure to present to you, for the first time in history, Mr. and Mrs. John Smith. Applause, applause.”

Lillian didn’t clap along, but managed a grin.

“Then,” John said, “they’d give us enough bus fare to explore Virginia on our honeymoon. Someone would slip me a little pickax and a compass and a condom at the reception, and you’d turn into a fat old prairie-wife.”

He guffawed, delighted with his articulate wit.

“What about a different last name?” Lillian suggested. “Like Esterhaus or Stockholm. Something foreign. What about our kids?”

Then John explained carefully, squaring his shoulders and using both hands to shape his point in the air, that his father was a Lilly, his mother was a Lilly, and so on, and he wasn’t about to snub his parents or defect to another country or even talk about children just yet, and thus ended their first real tiff.

Two days later when they went to the courthouse to get the marriage license the last-name issue was all settled, and a smiling woman handed them their license and a congratulatory Newlywed Gift Pax—a drawstring plastic bag stuffed with one tube of Crest, a six-ounce bottle of Tide, some generic cologne, a sampler of Stayfree Minipads, two Tampax tampons, six caplets of Midol Maximum Strength, a packet of food and car coupons, and two Massengill disposable douches.

Lillian was responsible for taking care of the Gift Pax, as she was for ordering the flowers, choosing the wedding music, and filing for the name change. In a pensive mood a week before the wedding, she dumped the insides of the Gift Pax bag out onto her bed when her parents weren’t home and arranged everything into categories. The contents of the largest pile, she realized, had been chosen for a woman, aimed at some mythic deirrigation that was to be a natural part of her life to come. The messages stamped on the items were unescapable—“Open This End” and “Do Not Flush” and “It’s Easy”—the same cadences and commands she’d been marching to for ten years, since she’d first noticed her body emptying itself against her will, but now it was all somehow intimately connected with John. Tiptoeing barefoot like a naughty adolescent boy, she chose a tampon and one caplet of Midol from her pile, took them into the bathroom, and filled the sink with water. Dropped in the sink, the tampon burst out into a languid white butterfly-shrimp, while the Midol steamed up into mystic fragrant pebbles, eventually finding their way into the white fluff. This was what womanhood must be, she thought—floating around bloated with bits of debris clinging to you, until finally the weight made you sink. Or lying dormant, dissolving away into white space—silent while the world watched; suspicious that what really mattered was that a woman learn to properly stanch and flush her own blood, to embrace both the vitality and the ugliness of her flesh. Lillian paced around the upstairs rooms, swinging her arms—feeling herself a lonely teenage girl, emptied of all that was dreamy or glorious. She lingered in the bathroom and leaned her head against the cool window, breathing mouthwash mist onto the frosted glass. She thought about calling off the wedding, or asking John to somehow prove his love, or at least demanding that he learn to poke fun at his last name.

After she and John had been married for two years, Lillian developed a secret fondness for her new name, saying it aloud over and over with her hands sunk to the wrists in warm, sudsy dishwater, enjoying how the name jaunted and clicked between the teeth and the palate. She stared into the little lemony bubbles nestled into a teaspoon and delighted in watching her lips say the name upside down.

She got to the point where she could say the name, over and over, without noticeably moving her lips. For the first time, she wondered if she had the stuff to be a ventriloquist. She noticed that only the “Lill” part of the name required her to expel any air. When she was pregnant with Bub, something seemed cozy and instinctual and dogmatic about bobbing her head slightly as she repeated the name, and during her labor it all became her mantra, her cradle, her “Lillian Lilly Lillian Lilly Lillian” way of rocking herself through childbirth.

John greeted Bub’s birth with far less certitude.

“Why doesn’t he moan or something? He’s too quiet,” John said, scowling and nervous. He laid his son’s four-hour-old little body in the crook of Lillian’s arm and leaned over the hospital bed a bit nearer to her lips. The woman in the next bed coughed loudly.

“They said they’re going to put him on a respirator,” John whispered confidentially. “What’s wrong with him?”

Lillian tilted her head on the pillow and looked at his face, gingerly stretching out her lips a bit as he kissed her. The moustache was gone now and had been replaced by several tiny pinches in the upper lip. John’s one of those people, she thought, whose lips you just never really notice until the moustache is gone. The moustache had made him droopy-mouthed and serious, but its absence revealed new edges to his smile and a squirminess to his mouth that Lillian had never imagined. She learned how to grin as she kissed him.

“Piss,” said the woman in the bed next to Lillian’s, turning on her side to face the Lillys.

“Don’t worry hon,” Lillian said. “He’s just delicate. Like a flower. Like a wet new flower. He’ll be fine sweetie, he’ll be fine.”

“They said his lungs aren’t big enough yet,” John whispered. “He’s breathing through his nose, I think. Listen.”

“He’s okay.” Lillian stroked her husband’s forearm. Bub had already spent fifteen minutes clutching her pinky finger in his fist, crying and squirming in healthy little jerks, and she knew he would be all right.

“Pissss,” the woman insisted, sitting up in her bed. “I stink like shitty, shitty, pissss.”

John looked over just as she struggled her hospital gown off her front, revealing coin-sized purple blotches dotting her sides, her skin folding downward in a pattern that suggested her body was dripping away into a slow, patient puddle.

“Get these damn things off me,” she said, scratching up and down her sides, squinting directly at John. “Get them. Off.”

John looked away and stared down at his own son, who was as buoyant and fat as a puppy.

Bub was on the respirator for two days, and they had to listen to his breathing carefully at home for about a week.

“I think he’s groaning a little,” John said anxiously, sitting on the couch at home, holding Bub against his shoulder to burp him. “I heard him gurgle, sort of, but it wasn’t like a wet sound or anything, it’s like he has a little pebble stuck in there. A couple of pebbles. It was a groan, sort of.”

“He’s fine,” Lillian said, gazing at them both dreamily from across the room. This was her favorite part of motherhood—the watching. She had never seen John so childlike, so worrisome. If Bub sputtered a little of her breast milk out of his mouth, John wanted to call the ambulance. If Bub frowned hard John laid him on the carpet and stuck his ear to the small chest to make sure the heart was still beating. Inside Bub’s chest, he could hear a perfect, pumping cadence, with just a touch of congestion rolling around once in a while—“It’s like, like a tiny tumbleweed that blew off course,” John told Lillian excitedly, “but it sounds healthy too, just blowing around happy there, warm and safe. A good sound. An ocean.” Lillian had never known her husband to be quite so imaginative and childlike, and she loved to sit back and watch.

But sometimes his imagination failed him, and John felt at a complete loss with Bub.

“You burp him,” he would finally tell his wife, carrying Bub by the armpits across the room. “You do it better.”

“I hear him burp better than you do, that’s all.”

“What does it sounds like to you, anyway?”

“I do it like the dolphin,” Lillian said, patting Bub’s back. She had recently become vegetarian, and used animal metaphors generously. “I use my sonar to find the air bubble, and poke it right up out of him with my long nose.”

Bub eeped out a burp in confirmation.

“That kid is turning you weird,” John said, shaking his head and walking off.

Lillian had to admit it was true. Since she’d had Bub, she’d been getting weird. She had cravings now not for juices and popcorn and carob, but for words and facts and cleanliness. She’d spend hours at a time just on the letter “p”—musing over the definitions of words like “plaid” and “plutonium” and “pluvial”—fascinated that she and Bub were just along for the ride, while all the words were out there reverberating somewhere near the stratosphere whether anybody liked it or not. She told Bub about some of the words when they were alone the way some parents sing softly to their children long after they’ve fallen asleep.

Facts were no less fascinating for Lillian, but pure trivia was useless. Facts were those things which had historical significance but were usually misunderstood—like the fact that Henry the Eighth, infested not with a burning groin but with bleeding gums, had not really died of syphilis but of scurvy—probably as payment, Lillian thought, for hoarding mountains of meat—and the fact that the four gospels for the New Testament were selected by a timid monk with a facial tic in the south of France, and the fact that Isaac Newton really did get hit on the head with an apple, forcing the thing that fixed Lillian’s feet to the earth to be set into motion. She sought a similar kind of motion through cleaning. She cleaned their apartment with ruthless abandon—adding or removing smells almost daily—resting Bub on her hip while she dumped something pine-scented into a bucket or sprinkled baking soda over the carpet. When the apartment was finally filled with enough of the cleaning smells, she would sit on the rocker with Bub and smell everything and not talk at all for awhile.

After twenty-three months of perusing, with Bub at her side, most of the weirdness she could find, Lillian agreed with John that it was time she did what she was trained for and she took a job teaching social studies at the Hilton Senior High School. Fridays in her classroom were devoted entirely to facts.

John’s story was entirely different. Along with Bub’s birth and Lillian’s flair for weirdness came John’s new-found imagination, usually spilling out of his lips in strange half-metaphors, sawed-off similes, and quasi-cliches. He couldn’t quite squeeze his imagination shut; selectivity wasn’t important as long as he had an audience, and his usual audience was either his eighth grade class of inattentive algebraists or a skinny, starchy-smelling Bub. If John thought of something to say he said it. And what he usually thought of were things tactile, wistful, and tawdry. Like a huge brown shopping bag with no writing on it. Like short lengths of rope knotted together into two legs of a monstrous nearly-equilateral triangle. Like spit on a skewer. Like the name “Bub,” which John had chosen himself.

Such inspirations occurred suddenly to him and just as suddenly he gave them birth through speech, dropping them out on the ground where one of his students or Bub or any passerby could give them a quick once-over. But as Bub grew, John seemed to have less and less time to think of things to say, and before he knew it Bub was six years old, then seven, then almost eight and John hadn’t told him even half of what he meant to yet.

He made up for some of the lost words while Bub was in the hospital recovering from his first bad asthma attack. He sat at the foot of his son’s bed for hours, explaining to him that Lillian was at a P.T.A. meeting and would be in to see him afterwards, and that he had bought Bub a trumpet for his eighth birthday, which he could learn to play the same way AH boxed if he practiced hard enough, and that they were getting a specialist in to see him who knew every cough in the book; Bub half-listened and smiled and was glad to just lie down for a few days and not have to think about anything but the mysterious illness budding in his chest, which didn’t hurt really as much as it reminded him that he was breathing all the time.

When the doctors agreed that Bub simply had plain old asthma, which had, in this case, combined with a virus to form a bad bronchial cold, Bub’s doctor—Maynard Masters—had a private talk with Mrs. Lilly.

After five minutes of restraint, Doctor Masters finally got to the point.

“When you breastfed him, did you switch back and forth from the bottle to the breast at random, or were you careful to be consistent?”

Lillian thought about throwing out her arms and raising her whole chest at him defiantly, as if this would be evidence enough that her son had been properly nourished since birth and that Bub’s asthma had evolved in his own chest, not hers. Instead she just shuffled around in her seat.

“He hardly touched the bottle until he was almost one-and-a-half,” she said. “Until he started making sounds like words.”

“Good.”

“We’re lactovegetarians,” Lillian said, trying to sound superior. She wanted to show him up on at least one thing—this man whose name sounded like a half-hearted apology and who, since she’d sat down, had been twisting apart paperclips and dropping the segments in meaningless patterns on his desk. She was half expecting him to accuse her of weaning Bub on spinach and peanuts, or claim that her breast milk ran green, but the doctor just gave a quiet satisfied “Hummph.”