Lithium for Medea

20

I crossed the bridge over Eastern Canal and wound down an alley to the beach. It was early. The sky and sea were a lively blue. I thought of Jason curled small in my bed, his breath slowly rising and making the sheet softly sway. The morning waves sashayed onto shore, pastel blue, petticoat blue, and I wondered how it had all gone so bad. I walked along the wet sand to the place where I had strangled the cat, the place where the waves curved around his body in a black embrace. The sand was deserted, pale yellow, popsicle yellow. Waves curled slowly and lapped at the shore. And I thought, how did it happen, the ruin? Like everything else, one sad blind step at a time.

I drove to the hospital. The day was clear, finely etched, the edges distinct, the centers solid. Lawns and slices of sidewalk pushed up spring flowers. Pink and white lilies, mouths starched and wide open. Dark stalks of purple iris. Yellow and red and lava-colored cannas. Gladioli, roses, and the bougainvillaea that never slept, never went into remission, but just kept spreading across garden gates and roofs, luxuriant. And plateaus of red and pink geraniums, azaleas, blue clusters of agapanthus. The city almost looked real.

Francine was sitting in the hospital cafeteria. She was wearing white slacks and a white straw beach hat. A vision in white. She was reading The New Yorker magazine. “Borges is a great writer,” she announced. “Márquez. Neruda. All those greasers are great writers.” She closed the magazine.

We considered the great greaser writers in silence. I drank another cup of coffee. I was conscious of the round black and white clock embedded in the wall just above my head. Why, it was a kind of eye. It saw something, measured something. It breathed and blinked.

“He looks so much better,” Francine said, sparkling. “I’m taking the day off. I’m going sailing.”

“You deserve it,” I said.

Francine leaned across the small table. She brought her face very close to mine. “Phillip has fallen in love with me,” she whispered. “Totally smitten. But he’s afraid to get involved. He knows he could become serious. He’s afraid to be vulnerable. What do you think?”

“I’m tired of what men are afraid of.”

“I know what you mean. I thought about that reading the Wall Street Journal yesterday. News is merely the way men gossip.” Francine stared at me, stared into me, through the skin, directly into my brain. “It’s tedious pretending to be subservient, isn’t it? But Phillip is a whole new ball game.” Francine leaned her face so close to mine I could feel her breath against my face. “He’s a Scorpio,” she whispered. “You know what that means.”

It was becoming clear to me that Francine was missing important cards from her personal deck. An ace and two kings at the least. Maybe it had something to do with the mice that fell out of the ceiling and bounced across her ten-year-old head.

“They want him to walk. He says he’s waiting for you. By the way, I called his bluff.”

“How?”

“He asked for the TV Guide,” Francine said. She laughed. “He didn’t ask for it. He pointed to the TV up on the wall. Then he put out both his hands like a book and pantomimed turning pages. I ask you, would a man planning to die want a TV Guide?” Francine stood up. “Make sure he walks,” she said.

“Francine, have fun today,” I said softly.

My mother looked stunned. “You’ve never wished me a good time in my entire miserable life,” she said. “And you’re going to be one guilt-ridden woman someday.”

My father was sitting up. The oxygen and IV were gone. The other machines were gone. He was reading Playboy. When he saw me he shoved the magazine aside and removed his eyeglasses. His expression darkened. He had already written a note.

BUYING TIME AT THIS EXPENSE CRAZY. PUT U & F. THRU THIS. F. ACTING NUTS. MICE ON HER BRAIN AGAIN. AFRAID 2 DIE. U & F. CANT TAKE CARE OF SELVES.

I read my father’s note. He looked alert. His eyes were a dark brown. The inky liquid was gone. They had removed more of the bandages from his face. He looked incredibly sad.

“Are you in pain?”

My father nodded his head.

“Do you want a shot?”

My father nodded yes. He reached for his pad. ASKED NURSE 4

SHOT. NO DICE.

“They won’t give you a shot any more? They must think you’re getting better.”

B.S. THEY R SADISTS.

My father stared at the floor. After a while a young nurse padded into the room. “Time to go on your first walk,” she said cheerfully. She gave my father a big smile.

My father stared at the nurse. He gripped his blanket with both hands and pressed it tightly against his chest. I could see a grayish scab on his hand where the IV needle had been embedded. My father shook his head violently from side to side.

The nurse smiled sweetly and left the room. She returned with another nurse and a doctor I had never seen before. “Time to walk now,” the new doctor said. He sounded as if he meant it.

My father studied the new doctor. Then he gave him the finger.

Everyone sprang into action. One nurse pried the sheet from my father’s hands. The other nurse and the doctor gripped my father under his armpit. They were pulling him by his good arm, the one they hadn’t taken skin from. I tried to help my father put his bathrobe on. His shoulder was too thickly bandaged from the skin graft. He couldn’t push his arm through the sleeve. I draped it over his shoulders.

My father was standing on his feet. His legs were trembling violently. He seemed startled and breathless, clearly in pain.

“One foot in front of the other,” the doctor said firmly.

My father gave the doctor a brief black stare. With his eyes he said eat it motherfucker.

We edged into the corridor. My father leaned against me. He took tiny broken steps. I tried to match them. My father has always been a good walker. It was one of his hobbies. After the divorce, my father had tried to walk his rage out. He would walk from his house in West Los Angeles to City Hall downtown and back. Or he would walk west, to the ocean, and back again. Walking. Walking. Once he walked forty miles in a single day. He went back later to measure his route exactly by the car odometer. Forty-two miles, he told me proudly.

On his sixtieth birthday my father bought a set of weights. His arms were suntanned and strong. He showed me new muscles in his back. My father wasn’t planning on growing old gracefully. He wasn’t planning on growing old at all. He was deeply motivated. He wanted to outlive Francine, he said.

Now he was bent, thinned, a Lear in his gauzy white storm. He walked the distance of two hospital rooms and collapsed shaken against the corridor wall. They brought him a wheelchair. My father lay trembling in his bed. He seemed to be gasping for air. He could barely hold on to his pen.

AM DYING.

“I think it just feels that way. The doctor told me he saw new pink skin under the bandages. The graft is working.”

DR. LYING. COVER-UP. OPER. WAS FLOP.

“Look at it this way. You’re turning for home. It’s the stretch drive. Anything can happen.”

My father seemed to think of something. He picked up his pad.

CANT WALK FROM PARKING LOT 2 TRACK. COULD PHONE IN BETS. SUCKER PLAY. CANT SEE ODDS OR BANDAGED HORSES. BUT I CANT TALK!!!

“We’ll work out something.”

My father gave me a long hard black stare. THERES NO PT. 2 ALL THIS SUFFERING. WHY???

I thought about it for a while. When I looked back at my father he had closed his eyes. I reached over and felt for his pulse. One thing was certain. The old man was still breathing.

I walked into the corridor. I passed the chaplain. He smiled at me and tipped an imaginary hat. I was struck by his pallor. It occurred to me that the chaplain would know about that bastard death stalking the corridors, that foul-breathed monster. But no. The chaplain wasn’t considering the evil serpent with its coiled stinger and claws. The chaplain seemed to be discussing the dispensation of an unclaimed philodendron with the head nurse. I kept walking.

The emaciated woman in the room next to the alcove where they kept the morphine had her first visitor. He was wearing a business suit. He was writing something down on a large yellow pad. I assumed it was her will.

I darted into the morphine alcove. The nurses were organizing the lunch trays, scurrying like white mice, phones ringing in the nurses’ station, visitors crowding through the narrow gray enamel channel of corridor between carts stacked with half-eaten plates of food, mounds of too-green and too-yellow ground-up mush the dying were served. The morphine alcove was deserted. The key was stuck in the locked drawer. It dangled out like bait. I unlocked the drawer.

What’s the point of all this? my father had asked. I held the morphine bottles in my hand. They were warm, charmed. I was holding plucked hot moons, clear white stars. I could have put them into my purse. I didn’t.

A certain disease had been cut from my father. He had been mutilated, skinned, patched, gouged, stitched. I thought of my father’s painful broken steps in the corridor. My father had always been a good walker. I could barely keep up with him at the track. My father. A short man with broad shoulders and a sturdy, purposeful stride. He had a firm grip. When I held my father’s hand it felt warm like the earth, felt like sun-bloated grains just pulled from the ground.

I put the morphine bottles back into the drawer. I walked into the crowded corridor. There had been a man in the room closest to the elevator. Now the room was empty. I had known the man was dying. There had been a sudden flurry of visitors with too bright, too expensive bouquets. Now the bed was newly made, white and empty. The plants and baskets of fruit were gone. The IV pole and machines were gone. The blinds were open. Sun spilled lazy onto the crisp white sheets. The room was ready to kill somebody else.

I sat down on the strip of grass near the emergency room entrance. I put my head down in my hands and cried. Perhaps someone would come and help me, a kindly churchy-looking older woman with hair sprayed a stiff white-blue under a pastel pillbox hat.

I prepared an explanation. My mother, Francine, had gone sailing. I was worried about her. She was both my mother and my child. In a sense we were sisters. Francine had been a foster child, repeatedly beaten and abused. She lived in homes where she never had a key and the refrigerator was kept locked. And mice fell on her head. She wasn’t surprised when the mice scampered across her skin. She had known they were there in the sewing machine all along.

The man who had been her lover and husband, friend and protector, was lying mute and haunted in the cancer ward, poised between life and death. My father.

And he thinks he is going to die. It’s the second time the black cells ambushed him. And he was up four grand on the Santa Anita meet. And he doesn’t know how he will manage walking from the parking lot into the track. He could bet with a bookie. It isn’t good that way. You can’t see the changing odds. You can’t see if the horse comes out with bandages. Not that bandages mean that much. Bandaged horses win, too. But he can’t talk anymore. He doesn’t know if he’ll be able to drive a car again. You see, the skin graft is pinching his shoulder and neck together so that he can’t really turn his head.

Just today I stood in the morphine alcove just now and put the bottles back. I’ll never be a small white star again. I’ll never dance draped in moon hide again. Or feel a Santa Ana wind slam through my lungs and know myself as young, naked, my navel filled with platinum. I’ll never drift past the last reefs draped in white garlands, eating grapes, the sea a glazed blue eye unblinking.

I cried a long time. I waited for the kindly woman. I would tell her about Jason and my seven years of paralysis and suffering. I sensed feet passing near me. I heard steps. I caught a glimpse of pant legs, a brush of white skirts. The hospital doors snapped open and shut, open and shut. A cold gray mouth.

I waited for something to happen. No one stopped. No one said a single word to me.