The Next Best Thing (4 page)

I spent my summer on the fourth floor, in the bed by the window in a room for two, where a bulky air conditioner wheezed and rattled day and night. Most of the children on the floor with me were there for simpler surgeries. They were having their tonsils or appendixes taken out, getting tubes put in their ears, having broken bones set or birthmarks removed. These kids would come and stay for a night or two. Parents and siblings and grandparents and friends would crowd into the room with balloons and presents and get-well-soon cards, cups of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee with the orange-and-pink logo, and sheet cakes from Stop & Shop. They’d draw the curtains and imagine I couldn’t hear what they were saying through the flimsy cotton.
What’s wrong with her? Jesus. Poor thing. Theah but for the grace ah God,
I heard somebody’s mother say in a thick Boston accent.
Well, can they fix it?
a boy once asked, and his mother had shushed him and hadn’t answered. Once, someone’s little sister wandered through the curtains. She stood at the side of my bed, looking down at me thoughtfully.

“Do you have cancer?” she’d asked. She was, I guessed, maybe five or six years old.

“Uh-uh,” I said, and shook my head back and forth the few inches I could move against the pillow. This was between Surgery Two and Surgery Three. Most of my head and face was swathed in tape and gauze. The left half of my mouth worked fine, but the right half was immobilized by the bandages, so everything I said came out of the corner of my mouth, sounding like a secret. “I was in a car accident. I’m having operations to fix my face.”

She looked at me steadily, staring in a way grown-ups and older children wouldn’t let themselves. “What’s it look like underneath?”

“There’s a scar.” With my fingers, I traced the raw red line that extended from the corner of my right eye to the edge of my mouth.

“Does it hurt?” asked the girl.

Because Grandma wasn’t there yet, I could tell the truth. “Yeah, it does,” I said, “but it’s going to get better.”

She considered this for a moment. “My brother had food poisoning,” she confided. “He’s ten. He throwed up everywhere.”

I smiled, wincing as the right side of my mouth tried to mimic the upward motion of the left. “Is he feeling better?”

She frowned. “He got a new bike! And he says I can’t even use his old one!”

The side of my face was throbbing. It felt like the flesh was being squeezed by a giant invisible fist, a hand that would never let me go. A tear leaked out of the corner of my right eye and trailed underneath to soak the bandage.

“I wish I had food poisoning,” the girl said. “I’d throw up if someone would give me my very own new bike. I’d throw up everywhere.”

Rage rose inside me, swelling like I’d swallowed a balloon. I found myself suddenly furious at this girl, at her desire to be sick, to be here, and furious at her brother, who, I knew from experience and eavesdropping, would puke and poop for a few days and then go home a few pounds lighter, essentially fine. I was beginning to suspect that I would not ever be essentially fine. My face might never stop hurting, and even if it did, it would probably never look right, no matter what the doctors kept saying.

Just then, a woman pushed through the curtain, coming to collect the little girl. Her gaze touched my face; then she quickly looked away. “Katie, are you being a pest?”

Katie, who had clearly already decided that the universe was a cruel and unjust place, screwed up her face in preparation for a tantrum. “I’m not bothering her, I’m just telling her about how stupid Jared got stupid food poisoned!”

The woman gave her daughter a tight smile, then gripped her shoulders and looked at me . . . or, rather, looked in my direction
without looking at me directly, with her gaze focused a few inches above my forehead. It was something I’d noticed grownups doing a lot that summer—some of the nurses, most of my roommates’ parents. “I’m sorry if she disturbed you, honey.”

“’S okay,” I said as clearly as I could with the half of my mouth that moved. Distaste flickered across the woman’s face. I could see it before she turned away. I thought about how I must look, my head like a baseball, white and round, with stitches; my hair, normally long and pretty, in two greasy pigtails that lay limp and curled and crusted with blood and the reddish-gold stuff that oozed from my drains, because the doctors hadn’t yet given Grandma permission to wash it.
It’s human nature,
Grandma had told me when I asked her why people looked at me the way they did, why their eyes went cold, like they were insulted by my face, like it was my fault.
People don’t like to see things that aren’t perfect. It reminds them of what could go wrong in their own lives, I guess. Their own mortality.
When I’d asked what
mortality
meant, she had told me.
We’re all going to die, but some people—most people—don’t want to think about that. They want to think they’ll live forever, but nobody does.
Grandma did not believe, as she said, in sugarcoating things for me. Life was hard. I’d learned that much already.

“We’ll leave you alone, then,” the woman said, and steered Katie back through the curtains, where I could hear the new-bike-owning Jared entertaining the crowd with details of how he’d been stricken. “I started feeling sick in fifth period, and I thought I could make it to the bathroom, but then . . .” He made an extremely realistic retching noise. “All over the hallway! Right in front of Mr. Palley’s room!”

Everyone laughed. I closed my eyes, falling into a doze, waking to the
click-click
of Grandma’s heels in the hallway at six o’clock sharp. It was dinnertime. Every night, a nurse would place my meal on my table, removing the tan plastic cover to
reveal whatever the cafeteria had deemed appropriate fare for patients on a soft diet: grayish-brown meatloaf, gummy mashed potatoes, overcooked canned carrots and peas, all of it whirled in a blender and reduced to a paste . . . and every night, Grandma would replace the lid, take the tray, and carry it back out into the hall. Her reasoning was that I was suffering enough that I deserved to have only my favorite things for dinner, and so that’s what she would bring me: macaroni and cheese, mashed by hand, matzoh-ball soup with the carrots and celery carefully strained out, corn cut off the cob, topped with a pat of salted butter, chopped up fine. When I could manage real food again, she’d bake cookies and rugelach for the whole floor, preparing tins of baked goods whenever one of the doctors or nurses had a birthday. She’d bring éclairs and glistening sugar-glazed fruit tarts from her favorite bakery on Newbury Street, and I’d tear them into tiny bites with my fingers, letting each bit of pastry or chocolate or cream dissolve slowly on my tongue, filling my mouth with the tastes: rich, salty, bitter, meltingly sweet.

Dinner would be served each night on the china she’d brought from home. There would be real linens, napkins and tablecloths in bright patterns. Grandma would sit in the green plastic-cushioned armchair next to the bed and pick at her own dinner, keeping up a cheerful conversation about what she’d done that day. When she was younger, after my mother was in school, she had worked as a saleswoman at Mills Fine Furniture, the store her husband had founded in downtown Boston. When he’d died, she’d become the owner, but, after a year behind a desk in the back office, she’d decided that she preferred being out on the floor, helping customers decide on the perfect lamp or chair or a just-right dining-room table. She’d hired a manager to handle the payroll and the paperwork, the hiring and the firing, the vendors and the taxes and the rent, and had gone back to work as a saleswoman until she’d retired and moved down to
Florida. There she had stayed, in the same gated community as some of the people she’d known in Boston, playing bridge and mah-jongg and canasta, going on power walks and attending water aerobics classes, until she came back to Massachusetts to take care of me.

Grandma told me how when she’d been, as she put it, “a working girl,” she would unlock the store’s front doors each morning at ten o’clock, with her hair, in its modified beehive, perfectly arranged, her lipstick freshly applied and her nails manicured and polished pale pink. She would position herself at just the right distance, never hovering or crowding but never too far away, smiling at whoever came through the door: young couples, single women, sometimes entire families, with babies bundled into snowsuits and great-grandparents with walkers and canes.
How can I help you?
she would ask, always managing to sound as if helping them would be the highlight of her day, even if it was 7:55 and the store closed at 8:00 and she’d been on her feet since lunch.
What do you love?
she would ask, instead of
What do you need?

“Furniture’s something people have to live with,” she explained to me that summer in the hospital. “A kitchen table, a dining-room chair, the couch in their living room, those are things they’re seeing and using every single day. It can’t be enough that things are functional,” she’d say as she plucked a wilted flower from the bouquet that stood on the table just inside the front door, or brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They have to be lovely. You have to feel good every time you look at them.”

My grandma, I knew, was beautiful, even though she denied it. “Oh, you should have seen me at twenty. Then I was a looker!” She’d shown me pictures of herself on the beach in Atlantic City, in an old-fashioned swimsuit, modestly cut, but still displaying her tanned, rounded shoulders and the tops of her breasts. Her
lips were dark with lipstick, and she smiled coyly, her brows lifted in a knowing expression and her hair thick and brown and wavy, the same hair my mother had inherited and passed down to me. Her figure was a perfect hourglass, full hips and bosom with a tiny waist between, and her face was heart-shaped, with generous features, wide-set eyes and full lips that looked pursed for a kiss. She loved clothes and dressed beautifully, in the cuts and fabrics she’d learned would complement her curves—A-line skirts and fitted jackets, narrow belts and blouses she’d have tailored to accommodate her chest.

“Here we are on our honeymoon,” she would say, resting her fingertip on her younger self’s belly. “And in there . . .”

“My mom!”

“Your mom,” she would say, and pull me against her, settling my scarred cheek against the scented warmth of her clothes.

After the accident, Grandma had stayed home with me for a year, and then, when I was four, she’d enrolled me in nursery school at the JCC and gone back to work part-time at Mills Furniture, which she’d sold before moving to Florida. (My father’s father had died when he was a child, and his mother, suffering a slow decline from Alzheimer’s, was in a nursing home in Maine and in no position to help.) That summer, the summer of my surgeries, Grandma’d go home after work to pick up the food she’d prepared the night before, and then come to the hospital to feed me. “Let’s get organized here,” she would say, snapping a tablecloth over the table, then wheeling it over to my bed, positioning it over my chest. She’d adjust the bed until I was sitting up, fussing with the books and flowers and water pitcher, straightening my slippers, hanging my robe in the closet. She’d unwrap silverware and napkins, setting me a place even if I was drinking dinner through a straw.

“The Sitter came in again,” she’d say, perfectly erect in her chair, with her legs crossed at the ankles, the tip of her right
pump resting on the tiled floor and her gold bracelets twinkling on her wrist. She would wear tweed suits in cool pinks and beiges, with sheer stockings and high-heeled T-strapped shoes and, always, a vintage Hermès scarf elaborately wrapped around her neck, because, as she’d confided, “the neck is always the first to go.” (
Go where?
I wondered, but I was twelve before I asked.)

“What did you do?” I would ask. The Sitter was a man—Grandma and her coworkers had never been able to determine whether he was homeless or just odd—who would come into the store and then proceed from one chair to another, until he’d sat in every single chair in the entire place. Armchairs, easy chairs, Parsons chairs, and La-Z-Boy recliners—the Sitter would position himself just so, then sigh, and close his eyes, and rock back and forth, “like a man,” Grandma said, “who’s having a hard time in the bathroom.”

“Bite first,” said Grandma. I lifted my straw to my lips and took a slurp of chicken-corn chowder, letting it slip down my throat, waiting until she pressed her lips together. “I offered him coffee.”

“Really?” To my knowledge, the Sitter never spoke, never acknowledged the presence of other people in the store . . . he just moved from chair to chair, grunting his grunts, wiggling his hips deeper into the cushions, until it was closing time and one of the salesmen would take him by the shoulder and gently steer him out the door.

“Really. I could see him thinking about it.” Grandma sank back into her own chair, letting her chin drift toward her chest, pooching out her lips and frowning, and, in that instant, she became the Sitter, a man I’d never seen but could easily imagine. It was a kind of magic she could do, a gesture, a shift in posture, a subtle rearrangement of her features that turned her into someone else. “I didn’t think he was going to answer me—you know,
he never talks—but after a minute, he said . . .” I leaned forward, all of my pain forgotten, until she said, “‘Do you have tea?’”

“So what did you do?”

“Made him a cup of tea, of course, and I gave him some of those thumbprint cookies.”