I walked back to my husband and said, “I’m going to sit in the car.” My voice was husky and dark. As much as I loved him, what he was doing did not feel right to me. I just could not be a part of it. He did not look up at first; he finished the last line of what he was writing. Finally he turned up his head and nodded, then threw himself back into his confession.
In the car I stretched out in the backseat and crossed my hands together over my belly. I pretended I was a corpse. I pretended I could feel nothing inside and nothing outside and all that was left was my soul, waiting to be released somewhere. I tried to imagine flying above Omaha and looking down at the Helping Hands Center, and then over the highway back to our hometown. I would probably just head back and hover over our farm for eternity. If I died right now, I would haunt my husband for the rest of his life.
On the way home, Thomas talked, and I listened. He talked about the prick of a needle into his skin. It only hurts for a few seconds. And then you are out. I started to feel a lurch of heat in my stomach. He talked of inches, and injections, and insertions. I wrapped my right hand around the handle on the car door and pressed my left hand to my stomach. He told me about the recovery process. How many days he would sleep, how many pills he would take. How long it would take to heal. The unwrapping of a bandage like a gift under a Christmas tree. How his penis would suddenly be normal. How he would be whole. I told him to pull over, I told him I was going to be sick, I told him, “Now, now, now!” I fell out of the car and hunched over on the ground and my skirt rode up high around my thighs and a truck drove by and honked at the revelation of my flesh while I heaved onto the gravel.
“YOU CAN’T JUDGE THE MAN for wanting to fix himself,” said Valka. She aimed her hand into the shape of a gun and poked her right breast. It moved only slightly. “I mean, they
are
perfect now.” She smiled. She loved those breasts of hers just like they were the ones she was born with. There was probably no real difference in the end except for some plastic. “But it should have been something you wanted, too.” I was not sure if she was saying that because she believed it, or if she was just trying to be supportive.
“Marriage is about togetherness,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Valka. “Two people making decisions out of love. Not one person out of ego.” She sat up in bed. “Let’s think about luck. And let’s think positive. We should toast to togetherness.” She rolled out of bed and swaggered over to the minibar and rustled around in it until she found a half bottle of champagne. “May I?” she said.
“Sure, I got a hundred and seventy-four thousand left anyway.”
“That’s a long ways to go,” she said, and popped the cork.
14.
O
ne month after our first visit to the Helping Hands Center I sat in its waiting room, legs clamped together, ankles crossed, sweatshirt wrapped around me to keep me warm. Right then my husband was going under, someone was shooting him up, or sliding a gas mask over his mouth, and telling him to breathe, to trust and to breathe. I did not trust them, but I trusted him. That he knew what he was doing, that he was going to be all right when it was over.
Elective surgery
, that is what the paperwork said. It sounded like he was running for office, but really it meant he was choosing it, choosing to let them put him to sleep right then.
There had been times in the past when I wondered what he was thinking as he slept. I wished I could peek inside Thomas’s head. I would write down all his dreams and keep them forever, read them when I missed him, or wanted to understand him better. Going under, underneath, that is where the truth lay.
“I ALWAYS HATED GOING UNDER,” said Valka. “And then all of a sudden I liked it. Because anything was better than my life awake.” She finished her glass of champagne. Mine lay untouched. I was thinking.
I REMEMBER THE ONLY TIME I went under, the beginning and end of it anyway. I was fourteen years old. I did not talk much then, not because I was sullen or shy, but because I did not have much to say. It was like my insides were not fully formed yet. It was the summer before my freshman year started, and I still rode around on a bicycle with a banana seat with thin shreds of pink glittery streamers tied to the handlebars. They blew in the wind, along with my long blond hair. It was even longer than it is now, long enough that if I stretched my body at a right angle, I could sit on it. My mother hated when I did that. She thought I looked unruly. She swore she would take me to the beauty shop before school started, and I remember it was the first time I hated her.
I was not the kind of girl to hate anyone, especially my mother, but I was having a bad summer. I had all these extra responsibilities, for starters. My mother had gotten a new job doing ad sales for a radio station in Lincoln, and she was working long hours, longer even with the commute. She did not need to work—my father’s drugstore was still doing okay then. But off she went every morning, lipstick, jacket, skirt, her hair done up nice in a little twist. Her heels would echo on the driveway in the quiet of the morning. I would wave goodbye from the front stoop and silently pray the car would not start, but it always did.
So I was stuck with taking care of Jenny, who had just turned six years old. From seven to seven, she was in my care, and I did not feel like being careful. It was not that I was wishing for danger. I just did not want the responsibility for someone else, especially not a whiny little baby, which Jenny was. She was just terrible when she was younger, or at least that was how I remembered her that summer. I had to walk her to the pool in my old red wagon, dragging her and all her toys. Otherwise she would fall and cry every five minutes, or lose a toy, or lag behind so far sometimes I would be a block away before I even knew she was gone. Sometimes we would leave the red wagon at home and I would give her a piggyback the entire way, and that was when we were closest. She sang made-up songs in my ear and I liked the feel of her hot breath on the back of my neck. Her tiny fingers tenderly clutching my neck. Then at the pool I had to watch her while she was swimming, her flopping around in her floaties. She would splash and laugh and flirt with everyone. I could not take my eyes off her for a second. She was my precious cargo, and secretly she gave me fresh hope for the future. Even then I knew my mother was so sour, and yet she had created this sweet, bubbly creature. From a pile of dirt grows beautiful wildflowers. Nobody knows where they come from; still, there they are. But if you had asked me that summer how I was doing, I would have moaned up to the heavens about how bored I was. Because all day long, all I did was watch Jenny.
And there were other things happening back at home that made life unpleasant. Dinner was always quiet now, except for the sound of Jenny clacking her silverware and chattering away about nothing in particular. My parents never joined me out back anymore to look at the stars on the summer nights. I began to forget which constellations were which without my dad reminding me as he stood behind me. I missed his hands squeezing my shoulders, the slim strands of hair near his knuckles glittering under the light of the bug zapper on the back porch. We could see so far off into the distance; we were only a quarter mile from where the farms started, where there was practically no light at all.
Instead my parents were inside snapping at each other. I could almost hear their jaws clicking from where I sat. I did not know what they were fighting about. I had an idea, but it was only that, and there was a haze around it, like the way the horizon looks after a daylong rainstorm: like the air and the earth will never dry up.
A month before school started my mother took a day off work and dragged Jenny and me around to a bunch of appointments. Jenny needed new gym shoes for school, I needed notebooks and a binder and some pens. We both had to see the dentist, one after the other. I did not want to go. I did not like the dentist.
His name was Howard Muttler and he was from Germany, and he had gigantic teeth that were so flat I was sure he filed them every night. He had a big head of blond hair, and he wore some sort of macho cologne and his shirts were always unbuttoned one button too many. He had married a local girl, Tracy Bottoms, after a whirlwind romance during her senior-year trip to Munich, followed by a long-distance courtship that had required Tracy to seek translation assistance regularly from the German teacher at the high school. Howard learned English when Tracy moved to Munich, and she had perfected her German. They lived there for a few years while he finished dental school, and then returned to our town to start his practice. Sometimes I wondered if he was really allowed to be a dentist. Were teeth the same in Germany? But there they were, with an office with his name on it two blocks down from the library. Tracy assisted him, and they would murmur to each other all day long half in German and half in English. I had heard that on Sundays they went to a special church in Lincoln, and I knew they went back to Germany for Christmas, which my mother always asked about.
“Planning another trip abroad?” she would ask, as if “abroad” were some special place that only she and the Muttlers knew about. As if she had been abroad herself more than once in her life, which I could guarantee she had not. And their office had weird new furniture, shiny and with sharp angles. Like all the regular stuff the rest of us had was not good enough for the Muttlers. It made me nervous. I knew everyone in town from the ground up, but here he was coming from nowhere, and with an accent, no less. And who knows what had happened to Tracy while she was over there? But my mother liked Dr. Muttler a lot. I think she thought his accent made him exotic, and she had always loved foreign languages in general. I thought he sounded like what a horse would sound like if it could talk.
During my visit with Dr. Muttler, he made a few noises like he did not approve of my teeth, or maybe even me in general. A little
tut-tut
sound here, a little
tsk-tsk
sound there. I always felt like he was pressing up against me. His wife, on the other hand, seemed scared to be near me. He left me in the chair for a while and then Tracy came in and took some X-rays. She looked older than she was, like being married automatically aged you. Or maybe it was just being married to a German. Her teeth were filed down, too, and there was gray hair coming in around her face. She had a sharp little figure though. The Bottomses were always an athletic bunch. After a few minutes, Dr. Muttler came back in with my mother. He was holding the X-rays. He put them up on a lighted board and pointed to a couple of teeth. He told us I would need to have my wisdom teeth taken out. Immediately, like the next week. He asked my mother if she felt comfortable with me getting anesthetic shot into my system.
How does she do with needles?
is what he said. She would have to sign some paperwork. All these things had to happen at once. Everything was changing, that was how I felt. My mother touched Dr. Muttler’s big German forearm and laughed about something. Every man in the world was suddenly funnier than my father, who was now not funny at all. It was a mess.
The morning of my next appointment with Dr. Muttler, my mother decided to cut my hair. We had been having a bad day already. “I have a million meetings I’m missing today,” she said to nobody in particular as she handed Jenny a glass of orange juice at the kitchen table. My father had already left for work, his good-looking head ducked down as he kissed Jenny and me goodbye, his white pharmacist’s coat loose around his body, no farewell to his wife, not even a silent wave goodbye. Looking back now, that must have been the summer he lost all the weight. He never gained it back, and ever since he had been getting thinner every year.
As soon as he was gone she started in on us, as if she was carrying on her own fight with him through us. “It’s like no one cares that I have a job,” she said. And we did not. We did not care how many meetings she missed, and we did not care that she wanted her own career. Jenny wanted her home to take care of her, and I wanted to have fun that summer. And now it was the last few weeks of summer, and I was going to have these teeth removed and my cheeks were going to swell up and I was not going to be able to leave the house. That meant Jenny had to stay home, too. The last moments of freedom before I started high school and Jenny started kindergarten, and our mother was worried about a meeting in a faraway office with people we had never met but assumed we would not like. Mysterious people who kept her late, away from us, and away from our father.
“I think I have a fever,” I said.
“Right,” said my mother.
“I’m serious.” I put the back of my hand to my head. “I feel warm.”
Jenny put her hand to her head, too. “I have a fever, too,” she said.
“And also I feel like I’m going to hurl everywhere,” I said.
My mother sat down at the kitchen table and stretched one tiny leg over another, and then put her palms together and then rubbed her index fingers together. She had always reminded me of a cricket when she did that, only no chirping.
“We will not play any games today,” she said.
“I want to play a game,” said Jenny. “I like games.”
“I cannot help it if I am sick,” I said.
My mother put her index fingers to her chin and studied me for a moment. “You still need that haircut,” she said. She looked at the clock. “I think we have enough time.”
“I do not want to cut my hair,” I said.
“You’re getting your hair cut, that much I know, Catherine. It’s either now when I have the time or later when I don’t. If someone were cutting my hair, I’d want them to have the time to do it right.”