Carter Clay (3 page)

The balding nurse who sits at the station looks up at M.B. His smile reveals a set of silvery orthodontic appliances that take M.B. by surprise, but she manages to smile back, to work her way out of the hospital's gloves and mask and gown and shoe covers, deposit them in the correct bins; then she carries off her juice and doughnut to the outer hall.

What a start she receives from her reflection in the crash doors! Under normal circumstances, M.B. takes pride in her appearance. She upped the red in her hair before the gray became an issue. Had her “colors done” when she hit her fifties—an investment that she has always believed saved her from becoming one of the pale matrons that she and her pals at Field's called Dust Bunnies. Today, however, the bright tunic top that she was wearing when the police officer arrived at the condominium—that tunic top's bright patchwork of gold and emerald and sapphire silk is now wrinkled and rucked-up on one side in the elastic waist of her capri pants. The skin that surrounds her eyes blazes forth in queer white wrinkles, while her usually perfect cap of hair is in disarray and exposes pale scalp.

No getting around the fact that she reminds herself of a certain sick parrot that Kitty once stole from a neighbor's snowy back porch (
rescued
was the term that Kitty used).

With her fingertips, M.B. touches the deck of cards that she tucked in her tunic's left pocket back when the police officer rang the condominium doorbell. M.B. does not like callers to catch her with her cards out. Sometimes, to avoid picking up a game, she simply does not answer the door. She considered not answering the doorbell yesterday, but then she looked at the clock and saw how late it had grown. She supposed that it was Kitty at the door, returning with her family from their day's outing.

A deck of cards weighs a scant three ounces, not much at all, but after so many hours, those three extra ounces have made M.B.'s shoulder ache, and she shifts the deck from one pocket to the other to relieve the strain.

This morning, the majority of the reception area's vinyl couches—two melon, one turquoise, one a grimy yellow—are given over to the slumber of a large family of Dominicans whose beloved son/nephew/brother/grandson has been injured in a grisly motorcycle accident. The family speaks only Spanish, but M.B. is certain she knows which woman is the victim's mother: the one who is always painfully awake; the heavy-lidded one who sits on the floor, legs extended straight out before her, shoes removed, the feet of her nylon stockings now in such ruins they form a frill around her ankles. M.B. nods hello. The woman, hands resting on her thighs, raises an index finger by way of greeting.

Over by the windows, a man named Mr. Hurley weeps. M.B. has spoken to Mr. Hurley several times, and so knows about his grown sons and daughters; his office supply store in Owatanna, Minnesota; and his collie, Mr. Chips. Poor Mr. Hurley. Beneath his royal blue jogging suit, he appears to be a creature made up of wire hangers. Still, when he sees M.B., he blows his sad gray sponge of a nose, holds up a palm as if to say
Wait
, then stuffs his kerchief in the pocket of his jogging suit and steps to her side.

“Mrs. Milhause.” Because so much of him remains in the intensive care unit with his wife and her embolism, Mr. Hurley's voice comes from far, far away when he asks, “Any news?”

M.B. shakes her head.

Unlike M.B., Mr. Hurley feels a need to speak, and he moves his tongue about in his mouth, searching for helpful moisture. “I pray, for your sake,” he says—again, tears fill his eyes—“I pray they find the son of a bitch and give him the chair.”

M.B. nods to show that she appreciates the thought; then, quickly, she retrieves the items she has stashed under the magazine table (jacket, package of Salem cigarettes with disposable lighter on top, black plastic bag containing items that someone—who?—thought to remove from the rental car and bring along to the hospital). She points toward the set of telephone booths.

“Of course,” says Mr. Hurley. “Don't let me keep you.”

Once inside the telephone booth, M.B. picks up the receiver, holds it to her ear, pretends to dial. She moves her lips, yes, but does not go so far as to invent sentences. Actually making sounds would frighten her too much, make her worry that someone might answer.

It is Lorne to whom M.B. would actually like to speak. Lorne would know who to call, what to say.

Joe's parents are both dead. Joe's actor brother—how will M.B. ever find him? Tom? Dave? No. Sam. Sam Alitz. M.B.'s own brother, Dick, disappeared into the army some forty years ago and never contacted the family after his return from Korea. Really, when you come right down to it, M.B. has no one she
needs
to call. When her mother died, M.B. cut all ties to Wyoming, and, truthfully, she cannot think of a soul back in Gary or Chicago to whom she would want to speak.

Might there be someone from town? From Vineyard Christian? No. The only person at Vineyard Christian that M.B. can abide is Pastor Bitner himself.

Eventually, she
will
have to telephone Palm Gate Village. People at Palm Gate Village notice an absence, and if the Today's Date calendar on M.B.'s doorknob goes unchanged for twenty-four hours, someone will call the manager and—a distressing thought—the manager will use his passkey to enter her unit, to see if she has broken a hip, slipped in the tub, kicked the bucket altogether. M.B. supposes that the person she will have to call will have to be Patsy Glickman. Patsy Glickman is a widow also. The two women met the morning M.B. discovered that Lorne was dead. It was Patsy who helped M.B. back into #335, and called 911, and waited with M.B. until the ambulance came.

Still, M.B. does not mean to tell Patsy more than this: “There's been an accident. I'm at the hospital.” Not a word more—though she knows Patsy will want to drive to the hospital, immediately, with her Tupperware container of Mandelbrot, and advice about tears being good for the soul—

So M.B. cannot call Patsy yet. She is not up to that just now. Now her teeth chatter, and she must press her forehead against
the back wall of the telephone booth to conceal the horror she feels overtake her features.

“Lorne,” she whispers. “Please, God.”

Maybe she and Lorne should have kept Kitty out of college. Maybe that would have prevented all of this. She remembers a night when Kitty was still in high school. M.B. and Lorne sat in the front room, watching the Golddiggers dance on
Dean Martin.
In came Kitty. For some reason, she had put her hair in braids. Trying to make herself look like a hippie, M.B. thought, but Kitty—bouncing around the room, grinning—Kitty waved away M.B.'s objection to the braids. She didn't want to talk about
braids
, she said. What she wanted was for M.B. and Lorne to listen to something. She waved around a book that she said proved that birds were the descendants of dinosaurs! Could she turn off the TV and read them a couple of paragraphs?

M.B. had not gone to school beyond the ninth grade. Then, as now, she tended not to believe in the possibility of things that she did not understand. Hence, she appreciated the decisive way in which Lorne said, “Keep away from the set, kid,” and did not even look away from his show while the girl went on about her intention to study with the book's author.

Who turned out, of course, to be Joe Alitz. The Professor. Mr. Knows Everything Better Than You Do.

So maybe Lorne should have paid attention?

As she steps out of the hospital telephone booth, M.B. is careful not to glance Mr. Hurley's way, get caught in his sad eyes once more.
I'm going outside for a cigarette
, she will say, if he tries to stop her.
Going for a smoke. Gotta have a cigarette.

Luckily, the buffed stainless steel doors to the elevator stand open, and she is able to step inside without ever having to look Mr. Hurley's way.

She knows this elevator now. The black scuff mark someone made on the wall to her right is something she has come to recognize. Also: that bobby pin wedged in a crack where linoleum meets door tread. Yesterday morning, she took this elevator down to the first floor before making her trip to the morgue. At the morgue, the face of her dead son-in-law was his own, yes, but no
longer under his management, and that was enough to make M.B. temporarily set aside old bitterness and weep for the end of a life.

The new morning proves a harsh phosphorescence, but M.B. is able to stay in the portico's sweet honeycomb of sunbeams and shade. Thanks to the hospital's rules against cigarettes, she now encounters odors she is usually too smoke-cured to detect. Sunshine heats the landscaping gravel; this, in turn, heats the underlying dirt, whose cakelike fragrance is also released by the needles of water that hiss from black plastic emitters—one gone a little haywire, spray shooting up out of the rocks to produce a nervous rattle on the underside of a small but sturdy croton leaf.

Others have stepped outside to smoke, but M.B.—taking a seat on a brick planter—pretends not to notice: two teenage girls in identical black jumpsuits, one of them singing, pretending to hold a microphone to her lips; an administrative sort in aqua silk dress and name tag; a young mother with two small children, one wailing because she wants the mother's cola drink rather than her own orange soda.

Usually M.B. would give the young mother a sympathetic smile:
kids.
Today, however, she has only enough strength to stare at the new oncology center across the street: white, almost puffy-looking. In the
Gulf News
, fans of the oncology center's Italian architect have made a number of dubious claims for the design, but M.B. is not alone in believing the thing pure silliness, Frosty the Snowman, Pillsbury Dough Boy.

Kill me?
Is that what the teenage girl is singing? Sometimes M.B. feels she has extracted every last bit of pleasure the world has to offer; all that remains is husk, the lightest crumbs, ready to shatter, and, oh, what wouldn't she give, right now, for a glass of Patsy Glickman's MD 20–20? Two glasses? To fall back into the arms of that sweet, dark wine, which sometimes feels—it
does
—like life itself flowing into her veins?

Is that fair? That the universe holds goods capable of making a human being feel so much better, yet fails to circulate a supply in the blood?

M.B.'s face goes red at the thought of what Pastor Bitner would say to such a question.
The Bible makes clear its prohibition
against strong drink and drunkenness. The wine Jesus mentions here and there would have been a watery fruit drink, more like your kid's Kool-Aid than what you'd find in today's liquor section.

Kill me?

The teenage girls spin out into the covered drive. The laughing one glances M.B.'s way and tries to keep her hand over the singer's mouth while the singer jerks her head this way and that, bits of her words escaping through the other's fingers—

Oh! M.B. shivers. Her eyes begin to tear, and she squeezes them tight as she prays:
Lord. Dear Lord. Dear Jesus. Please heed the words of your most humble servant, Marybelle Milhause, and spare the lives of Jersey and Kitty. Take me, Lord. Kill me. Right now. Take me, instead, Lord.

It is a great disappointment, but not a shock, that upon opening her eyes M.B. finds herself still seated in front of the hospital entrance. Smoke from the cigarette in her hand continues to waft upward. The croton leaf rattles. The teenagers have disappeared, and a very large man—bearded, wearing a red bandanna—now steps out of the bitter sunlight and into the portico's shade.

But wait: M.B. stubs out her cigarette and makes fists with both hands. The points of her fingernails bite into her palms with perfect familiarity. Alive. She gives the hair at the nape of her neck a discreet yank.

Alive.

Unless pain endures even after death. Everything endures after death: the dull ring that sounds when the child drops her empty pop can, the sick-sweet smell of diesel fuel from a passing bus. No relief, ever. But wouldn't that be hell? M.B. feels certain
this
can't be heaven, but suppose she is in hell?

Hell feels just like life?

In an effort to regain her equilibrium, she forces herself to eat her pink doughnut and drink the carton of orange juice.
Calm down
, she whispers to herself. When this does not help, she tries to put the same words in the voice of Lorne—
Calm down, M.B.
—but the fact that she cannot make that voice move out of memory and into her ears is merely painful.

She lights up a second cigarette and, for occupation, begins to pull the items from the black plastic bag at her feet: Colored pencils held together by a rubber band. Hairbrush. Binoculars. An army surplus backpack, upon whose drab canvas someone has boldly drawn a maze that has as its goal the name
JERSEY ALITZ
. A little red book with pagodas and flowers and tiny people and boats stitched into the cloth cover, and a pattern of roses pressed into the binding: the girl's diary, M.B. realizes with a start and immediately sets the book down. Half-empty box of chocolate chip granola bars. Binocular case holding an unused postcard from a place called Arles' Mineral Springs. A book containing graphs, and drawings of noses and apes, and diagrams that explain the fertilization of the egg by the sperm—a coloring book, apparently, though its heavy paper and schoolbook illustrations and text look nothing like what M.B. remembers buying for Kitty (pulpy things whose themes were fancy-dress weddings or movies like
Oklahoma!
and
The Swiss Family Robinson).
Sometimes M.B. herself used to “color” with Kitty—though when M.B. looked up from her own careful work (opalescent watered silk one of her finest effects), often as not, she found Kitty across the room, working logic puzzles or reading some book brought home from the library.