WHO’S TO SAY?
When I left—on such a soft breeze—the silence surprised
me after all that to-do wheeling me into
surgery through those halls
that emit a breeze when you’re lying on the gurney and moving fast. I suppose it
amounted to no more than a transfer from one type of breeze to another. Two
doctors in green were scrubbing up. A rupture, they said. They were in so
wistful a hurry that in less than a minute I didn’t see them at all.
#
Far too many people waiting
around, down the hall, talking, with not one of them really aware of what’s
happening. I do not refer to surgery as what’s happening but to something much
bigger which I don’t much understand as yet myself.
My
breathing seems nonexistent as I lift myself up, to the scent of lilacs out of
season. These people seem not to notice the scent, or notice me moving about. What
are all these people waiting around thinking about me anyway? Do they recollect
my culinary skills? What about the roses from my garden? And the latest poem I
wrote? Or is it money they’re thinking of? Let me get away.
I
waft myself about the hall. Between and above shoulders that will be in black
tomorrow. Or the day after. Or the day after that. One shoulder seems familiar.
I pause. . . . He makes a keen quarter turn of his head, looking into space
just a bit lower than his own head, as if he senses something going by. I am
the one going by him. I wait a moment. But we don’t connect. I wonder who he is.
Light red hair he has, a full head of it and curly. Did he ever love me? Did I
love him? As I turn away, it seems as if I drop off a heavy burden. Something is
gone. I imagine bones or flesh but both of those are still in the room I just
left, not with me.
I’m outside
now. Not waiting for a call back. They don’t know. They think I’m still lying
there on that operating table, wearing one of those hospital gowns with the
little blue doodads all over it. I scan the high building I’ve just escaped
from, set among numerous other such buildings, taking up umpteen city blocks.
At least Hopkins
is one of the best in the world to escape from. I mean the best in which to be
operated on and then escape from. I waft myself again to maneuver around the
oldest building there, built in 1889, that contains just inside the original
main entrance a bigger than life-size marble likeness of Christ. It looks just
like Him from Sunday School days. But it dawns on me my wafting is only
room-high or less: I cannot really fly.
I
begin my journey not knowing where I am going. Still on the hospital campus, I
stay close to the brick wall along the right edge of a sidewalk, hoping not to
be noticed. But what can be noticed? I’m not visible.
Then
two big fellows approaching and carrying arms of books seem to take the entire pavement
for themselves. One brushes against me and sends me spinning. News to me that I
can spin.
“Hey!”
He looks back, addressing me.
“I
think I’ve just seen a ghost,” he says to his companion.
“How so, Derek?” the other asks.
“Well,
I don’t see a solid thing but I ran into something. Something that wasn’t
there. What could it be but a ghost?”
“What would Prof Tucker say to that?”
“I
am going by evidence, just like the book says, and I say I ran into something
that was not there! Didn’t you see anything?”
“No,
Derek, and I didn’t feel anything either. You’ve been studying too hard.”
They
cross the parking lot diagonally, the companion leading the way and Derek
dragging along, still looking back at the spot where I was last . . . felt.
That’s
how I know what I really am; that I’ve lived only twenty-nine years on this
earth. But where’s the bright light people who died and lived to tell say they
saw? Perhaps there’s something I must do to gain that honor. Everything that
went wrong to fix.
Suddenly
a siren startles me. I’m somehow carried along to the water’s edge of Chesapeake Bay where a blue helicopter waits on its pad.
I see the flight aces in their black uniforms rush to their jobs. Someone
somewhere needs them. I watch them take off and an idea strikes me. If I can’t
fly, why not fly anyway . . . on an airplane?
#
Before an airport finds me, I
run right into vertical iron bars that look regimental to me. Because of the
guards? What are they guarding? Beyond the bars . . . oh . . . what a splendid
sight! A big white building with columns. I recognize it, but I’ve never seen
it in my . . . other life. Just on film and in history books. I suppose I could
hop over the bars or even slide through and have a good look inside the
edifice. But what would I do if I ran into Mr. Lincoln? Or one of the others? I
don’t recall which others. But aren’t
they ghosts enough for such a majestic place? I have jobs to do and I head
south.
#
A bit of Millay’s poetry
speaks aloud . . . or I think it does . . . as I squeeze on board. “. . . there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, No matter where it’s going.” Only I say plane, not train. No one seems to hear me; so, I conclude I’m not really
speaking. Bump. Bump. Bump. I’m bumping into everyone. They look right at me to
apologize and see nothing. We land in Nashville.
#
In
no time I see into a window of the Bolton
house. Well over a hundred years old now. They are, the Boltons, not the house.
My father leaves me there one morning while he studies John Bolton’s sick
trees. I go along to see the new house that is not quite built. The Boltons are
camping out in it. I stand at their window to watch my father through the glass.
The hot water with lemon and honey that the Boltons drink at breakfast scents
up the air. It surely settles into the unvarnished wood surfaces in the house
and will be there forever. Somehow I know that at this age . . . like a poem .
. . brewing; the scent settling there .
. . in the wood . . . forever. But what is important is the Boltons do not offer
the little child even a snippet of toast, a child who has been taught not to
ask. Their toast is with jam, red colored. They have no children. They don’t
know that tiny girls, age three plus three months, are almost always hungry. Almost
always.
The journey here tonight is to forgive them. I do forgive
them, though I must have done so years ago. In another minute I’m in the
graveyard where John Bolton and his wife Effie lie buried and I say goodbye. I
will not frequent graveyards. I don’t like them, particularly after dark. Many
humans think we belong in graveyards,
but that’s not true. I’m a bit scared in a graveyard. Scared of people trying
to scare up a ghost. My departure from this place is as fast as I can get away.
#
Soon I find a town at the
foot of the Smokies where we lived. Once. I was in second grade. This is where
I told a lie—the only one I ever told knowingly in my life. Probably only because I was punished. Severely. For
the lie. My parents never knew why I lied. No explanation was asked for. I did not
know why myself till many years later. Why
I lied.
That
day I had begged to wear my new patent leather Mary Janes to school. Mother
finally acceded. That’s a good word—acceded. But she demanded a promise from
me: I would not get the shoes dirty or damaged in any way. I promised, truly
intending to keep that promise.
But
it rained that afternoon before school was out. Our house was one of two new
houses on a back street where the road was not yet paved. Ruts in the lane
where a corner would someday materialize had filled with rainwater. Someone had
dumped fireplace ashes here and there. I stopped to figure out just where to
step. Some of the finer cinders made mounds that looked like stepping stones. I
would step on those and keep my new shoes out of the water. I did just that.
The mounds turned out to be as soft as whipped cream and my Mary Janes
swallowed up the stuff.
When
I got home, Father was already there from his office. My parents asked what
happened to my shoes. I told them a boy playing around the corner with his
little bucket and tiny shovel had covered my shoes with the muck, my older
brother’s favorite word. (I did not know what muck meant, but it seemed to fit
everything, according to bro.) Father disappeared for a few minutes and
returned. He asked me to go with him to the corner. The shape of my new shoes
on the mounds was generous evidence of my lie. That spanking went on and on and
on and on. That is why I keep my promises today and do not lie.
#
I was in my second year of
college when I realized the reason for that lie. In an elective class of
creative writing, our first surprise assignment was to write in thirty-five
minutes a true episode from our childhood that had shaped a trait of character
that could help us become good writers. I sat and thought while others wrote
with amazing intensity. What were they doing, writing fiction instead of fact? The
clock on the wall ticked away each idea that came to mind even though I knew
what I must write, to be honest. Truth.
Truth to live by. While I made up half-lies for fiction.
At
ten minutes till the fatal moment, I began a private cry as my fountain pen
started to move across the page. Others had finished their assignments and were
leaving the room. I didn’t look up at them but I sensed them leaving. I felt their looks burning the back of my neck
with little pinpricks of superiority.
My handwriting
was almost illegible when I turned in my two pages, with apology, as I looked
up at the clock. Fifteen minutes late.
“It’s
okay. This is my last class today,” the professor said. “I don’t have to be
anywhere else for another hour. I have kept busy reading the papers that have
come in.” He smiled.
He
placed my paper on top of the others and stood. He was nice to wait for me to
finish my paper. Many professors call time and students suffer the consequence.
I wrote about my very first short story—in second grade—about how I learned to
tell the truth for the rest of my life. I stuffed my tear-stained tissues into
my sweater’s pocket, too embarrassed to drop them into the trash basket beside
the professor’s desk, and left the room. He left too, but went in the opposite
direction.
#
On Monday the professor
returned the papers, all of which he said he had read himself, not an assistant.
He announced he had given only one A.
“This
A goes to a student who demonstrates at
this point in the course the most promise for a successful career in
writing. Next time it may be someone else. Keep writing every day and try to—try hard
to avoid clichés and those -ly how something does adverbs.” He frowned
and then clucked.
Our
papers were folded down the middle with the grades tucked inside them. When he
handed me mine, I slipped it into my notebook without a glance. I knew I had not made the A. After all, I was
an art major, not a writing major.
That night I found my A and ached anew for not being
able to tell my parents why I lied. I was trying to write then, in second
grade, without pen or paper, and did not really know how. Except to lie. I now
glanced at the stack of drawings from an art class, all of which had A- or B
grades. It had not hurt to sketch the
bridge (that the art instructor said looked too realistic) or the man playing
an accordion (with too much detail to his old shoestrings). I was not the least
bit receptive in any class to a grade
below A period. So, art classes did
not hurt as writing did. I determined to see what I could really do with
writing, which so far, had hurt.
Perhaps that’s what it takes. To write. Hurt.
Hemingway came to mind, something about an unhappy childhood being the greatest
training for a writer. But that did not fit my situation. I’d had a happy
childhood making fiction in my head. I remember writing a child’s story with
hundreds of fireflies in a cone design blinking like a nervous Christmas tree.
Why did I imagine that? Was I not happy otherwise? As I see it now, perhaps
creating fiction made me happy.
I had used the word acceded in my paper and the professor made a note in the margin
“excellent word choice.” I almost missed his note at the bottom of page two:
“Why not come to see me to talk about your gift for
writing? You are surely at an advanced level, an adept?” That sentence ended
with a question mark.
I did as he asked and eventually he turned me into a
famous author. Last year I won a Pulitzer, one of the youngest writers ever to
do so. Maybe the very youngest.
#
I can’t seem to remember everything—now in this new
milieu—that I should remember. Perhaps earthly memory is supposed to fade away.
That would make sense. But I want to
remember!
However there are other jobs to tend to tonight. So, I
just wish it and touch my father’s tombstone—touch somehow—and know that people
are waiting, perhaps not aware that I am dead.
#
I
hurry to the Tomlinson house, where at a birthday party for one of his six
children, the father had flirted with my thirteen-year-old sister in a kissing
game. I understood it at nine (because I read books), while Lucy (who read no
books), had no idea that kiss was wrong. That father was not supposed to play
the game in the first place. But he did. When he saw Lucy was playing it. This
was a time when such conduct was not acceptable. By most people’s standards.
But the Tomlinsons were different from the rest of us in a number of ways. Came
from somewhere else, they did.
Tonight their house is dark. Not a window shows
lamplight. The electric power must have an outage, as the wind is whipping up a
gale.
However, somebody is on the front porch, perhaps
anticipating the storm. Two somebodies. I sylph down to their level and startle
them. They may think it’s the rattle of leaves. But there aren’t any leaves
lying around to rattle. Maybe these two see white. Ordinarily, mortals think
white when we pass by and prefer their Halloween pranks in white. But this is
no ordinary passing by. . . . It’s my inauguration ceremony.
I chuckle. Can they hear me? I never heard of ghosts
chuckling. Actually, I’ve never known anything about ghosts before. Maybe they
do chuckle whenever there is anything on earth to chuckle about.
Now, about this couple. They don’t converse, even with
interjections. I surprise myself by shedding beside me a pale splash of yellow
with its pivoting like a Japanese fan closing. The yellow may be so pale that
it looks white to them. Then it disappears. They don’t know what they saw and I
don’t know how it worked.
The scent of wax myrtle foliage pervades the air. They
smell it too, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. Not from their part
of the country.
The air is colder. The woman folds her arms across her
breast. Why doesn’t the man put his arms about her to keep her warm? I remember
arms around me. . . . Someone’s. . . . But whose? . . . I fold my imaginary
arms about myself to suggest they follow the idea—I watch as the man folds his
arms around her—and for it to mean something for good. The wax myrtle gets
stronger, till they’ll never forget this moment. Never.
#
There
is the Jackson
house to see. She has moved. I don’t know how long it takes a private plane to
fly from San Francisco to Honolulu, but this one appealed to me for it
is carrying sixteen couples on their way to a Lions Club convention. One
couple’s little son, about ten years old, goes along and sits beside me in
front of his parents. After take-off, he begins trying to put his feet onto my
seat. He can’t. His shoes always hit something that stops him. He looks at the
seat and tries again. No luck. He isn’t paying for my seat and neither am I,
but if humans had bought every seat on the plane, I would stand all the way to Honolulu. But now for
Molly Mae Jackson.
Who would ever dream the daughter of a
one-man-grocery-store clerk in our residential community would end up here in
this paradise? She sat in front of me in fifth grade and always looked back at
my sketching. I’m here to apologize to her. Once, when she was staring at my
drawing a flight of stairs—just six steps really but done with perfect
perspectives—I said to her, “Turn around.” That was mean. I want to make it up
to her. But how? I’m not a fairy god-mother. Thank God for that. I’m just an
invisible soul wandering around on the earth, not just on land but by air,
while others are about to put the hospital-grade cotton sheet over my face.
The paid passengers buckle their seat belts, for we
are to land soon, and then the Captain suggests it again with greater emphasis.
We are running into trouble! Pandemonium breaks out. Something fell off the
plane and then another one did. The Captain says for us to brace ourselves: the
Coast Guard is on its way! The Co-Pilot comes back to sit with the little boy
but he can’t fit into the seat beside the boy. So, as he is squirming about, I
manage to escape into the aisle.
We land in the ocean and the Coast
Guard rescues all on board. Except me.
#
Without
a seatbelt, I am thrown about and in seconds am away from the wreckage. I am
spinning—yes, I can spin without help from schoolboys, spin in a whirlpool like
a volcanic eruption some distance from land. It’s small and wet but powerful
enough to hold me right there and I don’t make progress. I . . . struggle . . . unable to make the beach
. . . and sink lower and lower, twirling in a vortex that seeks to pull me . .
. under. I get weaker and weaker . . . with Molly Mae Jackson on my mind. I
must get to her . . . and apologize. Molly Mae . . . Molly Mae . . . I sink even lower . . . and can hardly breathe. Coast
. . . Guard . . . I . . . can’t . . . brea . . .
#
My
eyes open a tiny slit to see an expanse of faces hovering close to mine, faces
without noses and without mouths, but with huge eyes under goggles. The better to see you with, Grandma
says. These aliens have been beating on my chest and I’m too tired to fight
back. I am so tired. So tired. I sigh deeply.
“She’s alive!” one male voice says.
Silence reigns. Then a soft click as if a voice
recorder were turned on. I’m used to that slight noise. I recognize it when one
clicks on.
“Give her space,” says another.
Hands are on my throat, both wrists, and I think both
ankles, feeling for a pulse.
“Good! She’s going to be all right,” came from the
first doctor.
They seem to have lowered their masks to their necks
and have earth noses and earth mouths. A hubbub of noises starts up. Something
metal is pushed aside. A drawer shuts. Water is running. Someone peels off
plastic gloves with a snap. Drops them into a receptacle. But I don’t hear
grandma again.
“Five minutes and 33 seconds that was,” came from a
female singsong voice.
“What was?” That was from the man with the familiar
shoulders who has just come rushing into the operating room, summoned, it
seems. He comes over to me.
“That’s how long she was . . . uh . . . not alive,”
the female voice said.
“Charmaine . . . Charmaine, my darling, my love!” He
didn’t make a big to-do about things. Maybe I just heard these words through
his face. His eyes. But mine were still closed. In any case, I felt him saying
these words. Just to me.
#
So,
that’s what dying is like, I think. But I suppose I have to fix all those
things . . . all those things that are wrong, to see the bright light. I must
see Molly Mae.
I speak her name.
“Who is Molly Mae?” a second female voice asked.
“She . . . she . . .”
“Please, don’t make her talk. Let her rest.” That was
the guy who kissed me and who called me his darling. He is holding my hand,
kisses it, and holds it against his jaw. He needs a shave. He’s been here a
long time.
A lab technician comes in. I can tell what he is by
what he says.
“Negative.” He passes someone a paper. It crackles on
contact with the other’s hand.
“Wonderful! A major surgery and resuscitation and
you’re going to be all right!”
“Will I?” I ask.
“Yes, you are. Your husband is right here beside you,
and your mother. They’ve been here in the waiting room all this time, waiting
for you to come through this.”
“But I wasn’t here.”
“Then where were you, Mrs. Van Sinderen?”
“I . . . I was almost to Hawaii, I think, but I went down in a
whirlpool and didn’t breathe anymore.”
I know the doctors are not looking at each other,
questioning my words, but each one is posing as if expecting the other to look
at him to question my words. These guys stand on a mountain of egoism or
perhaps of hubris. But they are the best in the world. They can work miracles.
“How did you get there?” Number one asks.
“Oh . . . I was just there, sort of floated there, I
think. Couldn’t land, caught up in that . . . But I died before I went there.”
“How do you know you . . . died?”
“I bumped into a guy who said he’d seen a ghost. Two
med students, I think they were. One called Drink or something like that. Drink
or Break. But now I recall his name had two syllables. Drinker? Silly name.”
In sotto voce one doctor says to another, “We’ll find
those guys and hear what they have to say.”
“Doctors, isn’t that enough for now?” That is my
husband Roger’s voice. Roger with the familiar shoulders. “Let her rest.”
But I wonder why I cannot remember Roger the same way
I remember my parents and others from my childhood. Because I didn’t know him then? During my childhood? Was that it?
And perhaps the first memory to fade away? That’s something to think about.
My husband says, “When she’s completely recovered from
all this, I’m sure she’ll be only too happy to write the whole story for you.”
He gives my hand a soft squeeze.
My eyes open wider. I see them all. Three busy nurses,
one of them male, keeping an eye on me. The lab man still there almost
transfixed. My mother Anna who gives me a kiss as if nothing unusual has
happened, for this is Charmie, always doing the unusual. But she hugs me a
clinging hug.
“Why do I feel so tired and sore?” I ask, holding on
to my Mother’s hand.
The head doctor takes a stance. “My dear Charmaine Van
Sinderen! You’ve had a burst appendix. We fixed that this morning, but then
your heart gave out.”
I interrupt. “This morning?”
“Yes, that surgery happened this morning. The heart
gave out right after.”
“What is it now, night? It was night just minutes ago.
Where I was.”
“No, it’s only half past three in the afternoon. You
were resuscitated. We beat on you for five minutes and . . . it just wasn’t
your time to go.”
I try to adjust the top of my gown and find it loose,
my arms free but needing a little help. A nurse comes to assist me.
The doctor continues. “You’re still with us.”
He pulls my ear a mite, and then adds “Now you’re
going into Coronary Care for a short period of time with nurses around the
clock. But that surgery on your appendix will take some time to heal. But rest
assured all of us are on call at any time. I don’t think you’ll need us, but
nurse Sandy is
going to order you a nice bowl of soup right away.”
I reached for this doctor’s hand, too full of
gratitude to talk, and then shook hands with everyone else in the room,
including the maintenance crew who had come to strip and clean the place,
ending with my hand in both of Roger’s hands. I began to remember him more as
the minutes passed.
He walked beside my gurney and held my hand. Tight. I
looked into his blue eyes and at his red curly hair and recalled the day I met
him. He gave me the only A in the class. And now, in this fresh gown with
different doodads on it, purple this time, I was already feeling a new story—a
hazy one at the moment, just one line of thought—one about Roger’s sensing
something pass by him, smaller than he, right after I died—when we didn’t
connect. How did he realize that anything
was passing by?
