My One Hundred Adventures (2 page)

Mrs. Parks's Thrombosis

My Second Adventure

L
ater in the day I look at Max and Maya and Hershel. Does any of us look like the clothes hanger man? It doesn't feel possible to me that my brothers or sister or I could have a father. And we are all so different. Max is small and dark and Hershel and I have sandy hair. Maya is round and rosy and light. It doesn't seem to me that such a person as the clothes hanger man could have fathered us. If it were important, wouldn't my mother have mentioned it before now?

Perhaps my mother was having a poet's flight of fancy. She is always finding things on the shore or in the lagoon and bringing them into the house to dry, rocks and shells and starfish. She sometimes brings things home from the sea that we don't recognize. Odd bits of sponge and sea life. Then she names them. And in that moment we all believe her. It is mermaid hair, seahorse halter, Persephone weed, your father.

This is always how I thought she found us. Washed up on shore. Carrying us home in her pockets. Jane, Maya, Max, Hershel. That she is enough in herself alone to have made us. That she has dreamt us into being.

And now I think she has found this man and decided to give us a father to view. She has found him on the rocks, aired him out, brought him into our house, and will later return him to the sea. This feels right to me and I return him happily there myself. I don't need this father, I want to say to her. I am happy with things as they are. You don't have to scrounge one from the sea to satisfy me.

I am thinking these thoughts and staring out the window when I see a woman making her way across the beach to our house. It is Mrs. Merriweather from the church. Finally she reaches our door and knocks on it and my mother answers. Mrs. Merriweather has news! She doesn't know my mother very well but they both know Mrs. Parks. Mrs. Parks has had a thrombosis!

“My heavens, when did this occur?” asks my mother, always concerned for the sick and dying. She writes them poems when there is nothing else to be done.

“Nobody knows exactly when it
occurred,
” says Mrs. Merriweather. She is eyeing the big plate of just-made oatmeal cookies on our kitchen table. She sits down and eats three rapidly as if afraid that at any moment we will tell her to stop.

When she speaks again it is with a full mouth. “But she
noticed
it early this morning when she was out with her geese.”

“Those geese would cause anyone to thrombose,” says my mother, sitting down and eating a cookie herself.

“They are evil birds. All birds are evil as far as I'm concerned, but geese are the most evil. Bad intentions bespeak bad hearts, and geese come at you and bite. Well, anyway, I would be happy to stay with Mrs. Parks—she's taken a notion that the thing may travel up to her brain and snap out her lights like this!” Mrs. Merriweather snaps her fingers to demonstrate.

“My, my,” says my mother. She has laundry on the line, and a look at the sky tells us it might have to be taken down anytime soon, but you don't leave a neighbor to have her lights snapped out by a wandering thrombosis over a trifle like clean clothes.

“I would normally be happy to stay with her and keep watch for any unusual brain activity, but you know it's strawberry season and I've promised to drive up to Maine today with some for my sister Beatrice.”

“Is she jamming?” asks my mother. “I am making strawberry jam myself this week.”

“It isn't just
that,
my dear. I wouldn't leave Mrs. Parks for
that.
No, it's that I promised her berries. Their strawberries are no good up there. It's a queer dark tree-laden state. Full of old lumberjacks and bears and those dark, tart blueberries. Not like here, where our sweet little strawberries grow.”

“All they have are bitter berries,” agrees my mother.

Mrs. Merriweather nods, thankful that my mother understands. They are fast becoming friends. “No…flavor…a-tall,” whispers Mrs. Merriweather as if to seal their friendship with a conspiracy. “Now, I don't like to be a fussbudget but even if I took the day shift with Mrs. Parks and drove up tonight like the very devil, I'm afraid those berries when I got them to her would be
mush.
They're already picked at their peak. You know berries. But, of course, if this is not convenient for you, what with the children…”

“The children can come with me. Or Jane can watch them here. But I think they should come. They might cheer up Mrs. Parks. Perhaps they could take turns reading to her. Or rub her feet.”

Maya and Max and Hershel look a bit wild-eyed at that. We are hovering in the background, waiting for the upshot of this visit.

“I'll come back for the night shift, then, dearie. I will be late but I will be here,” says Mrs. Merriweather.

“I'm sure you're one hundred percent reliable,” says my mother, and shakes Mrs. Merriweather's hand, which seems at once an oddly formal and a too intimate gesture. She is overcome by emotion at the thought of Mrs. Merriweather's goodness. Of her own.

“Summer storms are so fierce,” says my mother as she finds her purse. Mrs. Merriweather nods. I know my mother is thinking of the laundry again and whether or not to take it off the line before we go. Mrs. Merriweather does not know why my mother is talking about storms. Mrs. Merriweather nods and smiles all the same. My mother is doing her a great favor.

“I don't want our underwear carried out to sea,” my mother goes on.

“Well, no, of
course
you wouldn't. Of
course
you wouldn't want
that,
” says Mrs. Merriweather, hustling us all out the door. She is passionately agreeable in her hurry to get us to Mrs. Parks's.

“No, let's leave the laundry where it is,” says my mother as we start across the beach for the parking lot and Mrs. Merriweather's car. It is always a treat to get a car ride. “Let's be optimists.”

“I like your attitude,” says Mrs. Merriweather, huffing and puffing as her feet sink, leaving deep prints in the sand.

Mrs. Parks's house is a grim, old, narrow, gray thing, as parched and slit-eyed and suspicious-looking as Mrs. Parks. I do not know Mrs. Parks well, only from church and the looks she gives me or Maya or my brothers if we wiggle too much during the service.

My mother has brought a basket of her good lettuce for Mrs. Parks. When she opens the door, I can see that she needs stronger measures of hope than even my mother's lettuce can provide.

“I'M DYING!” Mrs. Parks cries. She grabs my mother around the neck and propels her down the steps.

“Oh no!” says my mother, who has not anticipated being sucked into such a climactic occurrence quite so early in the visit. “Oh no.”

“It's only a matter of time before THE THROMBOSIS REACHES MY BRAIN!”

“Mrs. PARKS!” shouts my mother. “Why has Dr. Callahan not put you in the hospital? Oh my lord, what is he
doing
? He mustn't let you die like this!”

It turns out this is Mrs. Parks's way of thinking as well. She explains that Dr. Callahan has not put her in the hospital because her illness is too boring.

“Well, it isn't boring for
you,
” says my mother in her most supportive manner.

“They're all the same, these doctors. They want young patients with interesting illnesses. People whom it makes sense to save. Suppose he saves me? So what? It won't be long before I just up and die of something else, that's the way
he
looks at it. I'm eighty years old. When you're eighty they whisper, Well, if you won't tell anyone you're thrombosing, Mrs. Parks, I won't either.”

“Oh no. To say such a thing to you!” declares my mother.

“Or something like that,” says Mrs. Parks, looking shifty-eyed. “He told me Mrs. Nasters has cancer, but he sent
her
to the hospital because she's got an
interesting
illness. They can all stand around and
stare
at her.”

“I'm sure they're not going to stare at Mrs. Nasters. She wouldn't stand for it,” says my mother. “What is happening to our congregation? Both you and Mrs. Nasters struck down in the prime of life.”

We all look a little startled at this statement, but especially Mrs. Parks.

I think what it will mean to have both Mrs. Nasters and Mrs. Parks missing from church on Sunday. They wear hats with fruit on them. When I get bored I stare at their fruited hats. I wonder if we can convince some of the younger old ladies to take up fruited straw hats. Like passing the torch. Or will they regard this as some kind of next-inline-for-the-tomb designation? My mother wears a straw hat to guard against the sun but her hat is fruitless. I think sadly of her in old age, adding every year a cherry.

“He hardly talked about my thrombosis with me. He had no interest. He just wanted to gossip as usual. As if nothing much were wrong!” says Mrs. Parks.

Dr. Callahan is the only doctor in our small Massachusetts town and the clearinghouse for a lot of gossip. My mother says we don't even need a newspaper with Dr. Callahan around.

“He sent me home to die but I'm not going to do it,” says Mrs. Parks.

“Good for you,” says my mother.

“I'm going to go visit my sister in California instead.”

“Well, that seems like a better plan,” says my mother, putting down her basket and folding her hands. She still has Mrs. Parks draped around her neck like a barnacle.

“He doesn't think so. He says not to take an airplane unless I want my leg to explode!”

“Oh dear,” says my mother, trying to disengage herself gently from Mrs. Parks's grip. I know she is just trying to keep from being strangled but the timing is unfortunate because now it looks as if she is afraid Mrs. Parks will explode on
her.

“So you gotta drive me,” says Mrs. Parks. “We must leave right now. Who knows how long it takes to get there—all the way across the country—and how long I've got? We mustn't put it off. We must seize the day.”

Mrs. Parks hustles us out the front door, locking it as she goes, and herds us to her ancient car, where she pushes the four of us children willy-nilly into the backseat with no regard for the natural pecking order. Thus I end up without a window.

My mother looks uncertain as Mrs. Parks tosses her the keys. My mother doesn't often drive but I don't think that is wholly what is bothering her. She debates quite often the efficacy of her good deeds and I think this is what she would like to do now except that the answer seems pretty clear-cut. Here is someone dying who has told her
exactly
what my mother can do for her. How can she refuse? Even with laundry on the line? So she puts Mrs. Parks in the front passenger seat, where she can pass her gum and climbs into the driver's seat.

We drive like lightning all day, stopping now and then for food and bathroom breaks. All of us children are mesmerized by the big wide world to either side of the interstate. Mrs. Parks snoozes off and on and Hershel asks considerately from time to time, “Are you dead yet?” but she never is.

“But thank you for asking,” she answers.

My mother tells Hershel to stop asking Mrs. Parks if she is dead but Mrs. Parks says it is okay. Like Mrs. Merriweather, she is bowled over by my mother's easy accommodation to her needs. As if contagious, it brings out an uncharacteristic affability in her. And I think, We affect people around us so much with our moods. A depressed person can make a room gloomy and a sweet nature can cause the lion to lie down with the lamb. I think how lucky we children are to have randomly landed a mother who inspires a spirit of goodwill. Then I crawl over Hershel to take his window seat.

Halfway across the state and halfway into the night we stop at one of the restaurants perched on overpasses crossing the interstate. They seem to look down on us with their large glassed-in eyes, beckoning us up for saltwater taffy and pecan logs. Mrs. Parks buys a bag of saltwater taffy and we amble out to the parking lot overlooking the highway while my mother uses the restroom. We are all chewing thoughtfully and looking down at the tops of cars when Mrs. Parks decides she has had enough.

“I don't like all these freeways and their big trucks,” she says to my mother on her return.

My brothers spit on the backs of trucks, like huge migrating animals, rushing on below. All the lovely colors of the taffy lull me. I am sleepy. I keep staring at the bag in Mrs. Parks's hand: yellows, greens, blues, whites, pastel colors so soft they look as if they have faded in the sea. The washed colors of sea and sleep. Pajama colors. The colors of baby clothes. In my nose is the smell of my brothers' heads after they are born. Maybe this is why people making journeys buy saltwater taffy. It gives you the lovely dreamy sense that you can start all over again from the beginning.

We get in the car and start driving back the way we came, hurrying down the highway. Going through a tunnel of dark, it is as if the car is going through the birth passage, being born to morning light, bearing the gift of saltwater taffy and the soft, unbloomed hearts of my brothers and sister and the worn, hopeful hearts of my mother and Mrs. Parks and my own heart, buzzing with the excitement of the night, full of want.