Bridge of Clay(129)

He walked back to the truck in the shade.

“I’ll tell Ted, I’ll tell Catherine, okay? But I don’t think they’ll ever take it. It’s yours when you come and unlock it.”



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—

And that was how he drove away:

He climbed inside the truck again.

He held a broom-hand, fleetingly, up.

He waved to the boy out the window, and the boy walked gradually back.





So they gave her six months—and maybe that would have been better. It certainly would have hurt less, or at least shorter than her epic Hartnell job, of death but never dying.

There were all the sordid details, of course.

I pay them scant regard:

The drugs all sound the same in the end; an index of variations. It’s like learning another language, I guess, when you’re watching someone die; a whole new kind of training. You build towers out of prescription boxes, count pills and poisonous liquids. Then minutes-to-hours in hospital wards, and how long the longest night is.

For Penelope it was mostly the language, I think.

There was death and its own vernacular:

Her pills were called The Chemist Shop.

Each drug was an oxymoron.

The first time she’d said that was in the kitchen, and she’d studied them almost happily; all those stickered boxes. She read the names aloud, from Cyclotassin to Exentium to Dystrepsia 409.

“Hey,” she said, and configured them; her first stab at a towering pharmacy. It was like she’d been duped (and let’s face it, she really had). “They all just sound the same.”

In so many ways, she’d found the perfect name for them, too, because they did all sound like anagrams, of oxy and moron combined. The ridiculous element, too—the moronic nature of fighting it—of killing yourself to survive. They really should come with warnings, like the ones on cigarettes. Take this and slowly die.



* * *



—

    As futile as it was, there was still one operation, and the taste of warmed-up hospital.

See, don’t ever let them fool you, when people talk of the smell of hospitals. There’s a point where you go beyond it, when you feel it in your clothes. Weeks later, you’re back at home, and something just feels like—it.

There was once, one morning, at the table, when Rory got a rash of the shivers. As they rose, then fell on his arms, Penelope pointed across.

“You want to know what that is?” she asked. She’d been staring at a bowl of cornflakes; the riddle of trying to eat them. “It means a doctor just turned in his sleep.”

“Or worse,” said Dad, “an anesthesiologist.”

And “Yeah,” said Rory, so willingly, as he stole from our mother’s breakfast. “I hate those dirty bastards the most!”

“Hey—you’re eating all my Goddamn cornflakes, kid.”

She pushed the bowl at him, and gave him a wink.



* * *



—

Then the treatments came in waves again, and the first were wild and whip-like, like a body gone down in a riot. Then slowly more professional; a casual breaking down.

In time they came like terrorism.

A calculated mess.

Our mother, burning, falling.

A human nine-eleven.

Or a woman becomes a country, and you see her leaving herself. Like the winters of old in the Eastern Bloc, the threats came on more quickly: The boils, they rose like battlegrounds.

They blitzkrieged over her back.

The drugs wreaked havoc with her thermostat; they scorched her, then froze, then paralyzed, and when she walked from bed she collapsed—her hair like a nest on the pillow, or feathers on the lawn, from the cat.

    For Penny you could see it was betrayal. It was there in the green-gone eyes; and the worst was the sheer disappointment. How could she be let down like this, by the world and by her body?

Again, like The Odyssey and The Iliad, where gods would intervene—till something spiraled to catastrophe—so it was with here. She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself, and sometimes she even believed it. At best we soon were jaded: The stupid light of hospital wards.

The souls of lovely nurses.

How I hated the way they walked:

The stockinged legs of matrons!

But some, you had to admire them—how we hated to love the special ones. Even now, as I punch what happened out, I’m grateful to all those nurses; how they lifted her in the pillows, like the breakable thing she was. How they held her hand and spoke to her, in the face of all our hatred. They warmed her up, put fires out, and like us, they lived and waited.



* * *



—

One morning, when the toll hit close to breaking point, Rory stole a stethoscope—taking something back, I guess—as our mother became an impostor. By then she was the color of jaundice, and never again the color she was. We’d come to know the difference by then, between yellowness and blond.

She held on to us by our forearms, or the flesh of our palms and our wrists. Again, the education—so easy to count the knuckles, and the bones in both of her hands. She looked out through the window, at the world so bright and careless.



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