Three Weeks in Spring

Chapter 12

She tried to explain to Ace later why she didn’t want John to know. He was shaving, she was dressing.

“If we all know,” she said. “The evening will be awful. But if three of us are keeping it from the fourth it will give us a chance to have fun and a way of dealing with the gloom. You know?”

“Yep.” He leaned in closer to the mirror and stretched his upper lip down to get the whiskers on his upper lip, close to his nose. “I go along with that.”

“John can still think of me as sexy, or attractive, or whatever. You know?”

“You don’t have to worry about that, my love.” He ran the tips of two fingers, over the shaved area under his nose. “He thinks you’re a hound anyway.”

“Well, just once more he can think of me as a two-boob hound anyway. Okay?”

“Okay.”

The Hilltop Steak House was an enormous milling flamboyantly middle-American restaurant, which served excellent food. The various dining rooms in the Hilltop were named after western cow towns and seating was by the deli-counter numbers method. A loudspeaker ran during the entire dinner: “Number three sixty-seven for Kansas City... Number eighty-one for Dodge City.” The Hilltop served large quantities at low prices. It was crowded with fat people in stretch fabrics, managed and controlled by several tough-looking Saugus cops, all of which offered the Marshes and the Parkers frequent opportunity to say something funny. And they always ate and laughed in a kind of camp good humor at the unstylishness of it all.

“Nice outfit,” John murmured, as they sat in a booth. A short fat man came in with a tall woman who wore a lot of rouge and had artificially blond hair teased high in a bee’s nest. He was wearing red-checkered pants and white shiny loafers with a matching white shiny belt, and a trendy-looking maroon Qiana body shirt unbuttoned halfway to his navel. His hair was modishly cut and heavily sprayed and he had beads, worn tight around his neck. A thick roll of fat wallowed out over his belt.

“It’s a look I’ve been trying to achieve,” Ace said.

Judy said, “Oh, my God, look at her.”

The blond woman had enormous breasts that pressed against restraint like silicone torpedoes. Joan felt the twinge. How much of our humor is boob humor. How awkward it will be.

“Where do you suppose she buys bras,” Joan said.

“They probably make them out of the material you broads don’t use,” John said.

“Maybe they’re falsies,” Joan said.

The steak came and they ate. Joan was funny and animated that night. The part of her that sat in the balcony and looked down was very impressed. That’s a hell of a performance she’s putting on. Joan drew strength out of the good performance.

For Ace the doubleness was more complicated. He was enjoying himself. He loved to see her talk and hear her laugh. He enjoyed being in the room when she talked on the phone, so he could hear the bubbling talk and see the brightness in her face when she laughed. And here she was animated and lively and he felt the muscle-tightening physical sensation he had felt so often near her in the last twenty-five years. Jesus Christ, can she he dying? Beautiful and funny and dying? And me laughing and making fun of people and eating my steak and drinking the beer, they always get it cold enough here, and not many places do, and at the same time I’m thinking about the cold beer I’m thinking about her having cancer and dying. It can’t he true and yet it can he and may he and I can’t do anything about it. Thinking about it is not a plus. Avoid that. And so his life went along on two parallel levels. He enjoyed the steak, he liked the laughter. He kidded with his friends. He watched the sports events. And he feared the death of his wife. And he did these things simultaneously. Amazing.

Sunday, April 20

Joan woke up at four-thirty. It was still dark. Today I go. I’ve got all those tapes to do. She got up and went to the kitchen. She made some instant coffee, took out a bran muffin, and sat down at the table in the family room and began to tape. Ace had set it up for her the night before: Daniel’s little white Panasonic tape recorder with the built-in mike. Extra cassettes stacked beside it, a long yellow heavy-duty extension cord, three-pronged, the kind he used with his power tools, stretched across the table and plugged into the wall. It overpowered the little recorder. She almost smiled. He couldn’t use a regular extension, a little white one.

There was something about the taping. About knowing that her voice would be heard in days ahead by people who didn’t know. That when the tapes played things would have happened to her. In her robe and with her hair up and her face smeared with cream, she sat in the darkened family room and began to talk to the students who wouldn’t hear her until Monday at the earliest.

“Hello, ladies. I’m not going to be able to be with you for a few days. I’m having some surgery and it can’t be avoided. Big Bobbo will be bringing these tapes in...” and she went on. Child Growth and Development, and Reading Methods, one week’s worth of each, six hours of tape. As she talked her voice got hoarse, there were pauses, long sighs, stretches when the voice quavered. The sky lightened. The sun came up. The dog moseyed out of the bedroom and sat at her foot and panted at her. Ace woke up and made coffee in the kitchen. The boys appeared, Ace made them breakfast. Still she taped. “Now,” she said at the still, white recorder, “we can look at the Orton Method.”

In the kitchen he was angry. None of the other turkeys down there would do this. Who gives a shit about the Orton Method? Spend her last day busting her ass for Ding Dong School. They wouldn’t do it for her. A professor at a large urban university, he was continuously amazed at the amount of intrusive busy-work Joan encountered.

“You do this for those assholes,” he said.

She stopped the tape. “Please don’t,” she said. “I do this for me and the kids. I love those students. They need this course. They have a month, most of them, till graduation and they will be all screwed up if they don’t get this. I need to do this.”

“I know. I know.” He shook his head and went away. It was beyond him. His concerns were more primitive. They didn’t extend much beyond the campfire. That’s their problem. Let the goddamned school thrash that out. They’ll graduate them. He half knew that his anger went beyond that. He hated the intrusion of alien factors in the family. All his life he’d left his work at the office. Even now he never wrote on weekends or in the evening. He resented the fact that she allowed the job in. He knew also that the taping was something she should do for herself. Like everything else she did, it was a way of managing a slippery universe. Imposing some order on a situation that threatened dissolution. And he knew if she weren’t doing this they’d have to find something else to fill the day. Sitting together, watching the clock tick toward check-in time, would be crippling.

So he went away and said no more and regretted saying anything, but his fury toward the school, a fury deflected from her by his affection and by her need, simmered without outlet. He relished the fantasy that when he brought the tapes in someone would give him trouble. When this is over maybe I’ll go down and kick in their fucking library.

In the late morning Norma called to say that Gretchen Benjamin was away, at the Cape, and wouldn’t be back. There was no way they could talk. Joan was disappointed, but somehow a numbness had set in and the latest disappointment seemed somehow inevitable and right. She never did get a chance until after it was over to talk with a woman who’d had breast surgery. The comfort that would have provided was not to be. In early afternoon the traffic in the kitchen and family room was interfering with her lectures, so she took the recorder into the bedroom, where she could finish it up. He watched the Seattle Supersonics and the Chicago Bulls on television.

Brent Musburger’s voice, as he called the play by play, was full of confidence and pleasure. Certain and permanent, as if growing old and getting sick didn’t happen. And Slick Watts, moving with the ball, his headband garish on his shaven head, framed in the television tube, resurrected by instant replay, seemed immortal. It was an illusion and he knew it, but it was illusion to which he gave himself fully. Appreciating Tom Boerwinkle’s pick-and-roll with Jerry Sloan, caring about the execution of a game. The results of games are mostly produced by the players. Maybe that’s part of the charm.

At half time he went and looked in at her and she was crying. It scared him. He didn’t know what to say. What could he do to change the way it was? What solace could he bring? The fear overwhelmed the sorrow. He didn’t feel sorry for her at that moment, he felt frightened that he’d fail. Jesus I wish it was time for the hospital.

He sat on the edge of the bed and put his hand on her back between her shoulder blades and moved it in a slow circle. He didn’t say anything. It was the first time he’d seen her cry.

“I can’t stand it,” she said. Her voice was thick and teary. “I can’t stand it.”

“We have to,” he said. “We haven’t got any other option.” He was uncomfortably conscious of how trite it was, what he’d said. How like the dialogue in an unsuccessful movie. He had always said we, from the beginning. Both on impulse and by design, he had included himself in the sickness; he hoped it made her less alone.

“I don’t want them to chop me up a piece at a time. A boob, then the other boob, the ovaries, what else. I don’t want to live like that. I would rather die.”

“We don’t look down that road. There’s nothing there,” he said. “We just take it as it comes. And we don’t guess and we don’t think about the next thing. We just look right at this thing. Today. Now. We don’t think about maybe, and what if.”

“You won’t let them chop me up, Ace.” Her face was red and distorted with crying and she pressed it into the mattress muffling what she said. His hand moved around steadily between her shoulder blades.

“No,” he said. “I won’t let them. I promise. If I have to I will kill you.”

“Promise.”

“I promise. You know I will. You know I can do what I have to do.” I can too. He had thought of that already and knew that it was serious and knew that she meant it and knew that he did, but he also knew in the other ironic part of him that was open-shuttered and recording that this was melodrama of an intense kind. I could never put this dialogue down in fiction, he thought. It is very hokey.

“But that’s tomorrow, or next month, and we don’t think about that. We’ve got to concentrate on what we know. Today you check in. Tomorrow you have tests, Tuesday you have tests, and Wednesday you have surgery and maybe a mastectomy. That’s what we know and that’s all we know and we gotta concentrate on that and not speculate. We have to, otherwise we go crazy.”

“I know.”

As he talked his hand moved in the same steady circle between her shoulder blades. She had stopped crying.

“I think you ought to get ready to go,” he said.

And now she wanted to. But there were things she had yet to do. “Pretty soon,” she said.

He left her alone and went back to the porch to watch the second half. It had been harrowing, but he’d done it. He hadn’t failed. What he’d said was what he should have said. It was hardly fresh material, he thought. But it was true. Throughout that spring he noticed how commonplace were the things of suffering and fear, and how commonplace their defense. Remarkable.

In the middle of the third quarter, with the score 69 to 63, Seattle, Sharon and Mike appeared at the front door with a box of candy. As he opened the door he said to himself, Not this time, and stood in the open doorway and smiled but didn’t invite them in.

“Joan’s asleep right now,” he said. “She’s going to the hospital for a little surgery later today and needs to rest.”

They gave him the box of candy. Mike asked for and got a glass of milk. They thanked him for Joan’s help, and it was clear they wanted to stay.

“Okay, kids,” Ace said. “Thanks for the candy. We’ll see you.” He gently herded them toward the door as he spoke. When they were gone he ate two pieces of candy and went back to watch the rest of the game.