Louise (2 page)

An ambulance takes me to Los Angeles.

•

This has been manageable until the ambulance. It was manageable yesterday with my uncle in the cafeteria, and at home, with Claude. But now a man puts a tube in my nose and tells me to breathe in. Now I know it is serious. Now I know something very wrong is going on.

I don't want to tell the nurses in LA about the double vision because this makes my case sound much worse than I want it to be. I pretend my left eye has not turned inward. I pretend the right side of my body does not feel full of sand. I pretend this is not me, that this is happening to someone else, and it almost works. When a nurse inserts a needle into my right arm I almost don't feel it.

The doctor sweeps into the room. He says the cavernous angioma must be cut out of my brain immediately. The operation, called a craniotomy, is very dangerous, but the lesion cannot be shrunk by radiation, or the pons will suffer. It cannot be cut out by a gamma knife, because the slightest
error could kill me. And it cannot be left alone because chances are it will bleed again—no one knows how much or when. Another bleed could be fatal. Surgery is the only option. The neurosurgeon will be back in town in two days. I must wait, here, in the hospital.

I become hysterical. The nurse injects me with a tranquilizer that makes me claw at my skin, and I try to leave the room, dragging all of my tubes along. Nurses hold me down.

My mother arrives and gets into bed with me, smelling like plane. She is small and fits well. Her name is Janet and she lives in Kansas. She wears practical clothes, leather sandals with socks, jeans, and T-shirts. She is the publisher of the town newspaper and is the boss of some people. When I was growing up, she was one of the best players on our town's tennis team. She has a boyfriend. She leaves the hot, dim room to find a wet washcloth for my face.

By the time Claude arrives it has been dark for a long time. It is an hour and a half from Montecito to Los Angeles. He apologizes. The newspaper, he explains. The traffic. He's so sorry.

•

For two days my mother and I watch the mounted hospital TV. Finally, the neurosurgeon we've been waiting for returns from a conference in Sweden. He says he cannot perform the craniotomy, at least not right away. He wants to consult some other specialists. Mom and I think he's stalling, covering his ass, afraid of lawsuits. I am told to wait for a phone call. It will take about a week.

Claude picks us up outside the hospital and waits with the engine running. I am in a wheelchair. Claude has brought sunglasses because the bright sunlight hurts my eyes and face. The engine sounds like a drill inside my skull so my mother puts soundproof headphones over my ears. I do not know if my mother and Claude talk or not. They have
only met a few times. I don't know much of anything right now, only that we are driving out of Los Angeles and along the coast back to our apartment in Santa Barbara, and that every minute it is getting worse.

I
was on the student newspaper at the University of Kansas before any of this happened. I liked journalism, though I was bad at it. Careless. As a reporter, I wrote stories on athletes volunteering at soup kitchens and fashion trends like the Brazilian bikini wax and low-rise jeans. I quoted my roommates instead of talking to strangers like I was supposed to. I rarely took the extra step to look up a word in a dictionary or check a calendar. I was used to getting by on my looks. I was used to not having to care too much.

The paper came out at midnight, and every morning the journalism professor who oversaw the operation would pin a copy on a bulletin board in the newsroom. He would have marked every mistake with a red pen; the really bad ones in green. Ones that meant
libel!
were underlined in black. Sometimes “good” was written by someone's byline. I loved that moment, when we crowded around the bulletin board to see what kind of job we had done. I liked getting chips at the vending machine and sharing cigarettes with everyone out back by the dumpster, laughing about something, usually something someone had done while drunk.

I went to lots of staff parties, and there was lots of drinking, and lots of regrettable sex. We did what people do when they work together day after day, barely out of their teenage years—stupid things. I stole another girl's boyfriend at least once, and wore a fringed leather jacket everywhere. We made up group dances at bars after late-night copy-editing
shifts. After concerts I'd crowd in tiny backstage rooms with shaggy band members, and as we all smoked pot, I'd scribble quotes on gum wrappers from my purse. I threw lots of parties, themed, usually. Expected ones, like disco and white trash. The best was prom, where everyone wore their old dress or tux. Mine was light blue stiff taffeta with a full bubble skirt. I was the kind of girl other girls only pretended to like.

I grew up in the Midwest, restless, thinking I was meant for something different. Something better. We all did.

C
laude knows Louise from the student paper. They work together in a small stone building in the center of campus. After flirting with him for months, Louise finally invites him over for dinner. She's sexy and bronze from a spring break trip to Jamaica, where she says she broke up with her boyfriend, an older guy named Davy, who has a band and no job. Claude likes Louise, but does not want to send a message that he will be an easy, obedient boyfriend like all the others. Louise knows guys love her, he can tell from watching her sail around the newsroom, looking back to see which guys she imagines are watching her hips. He's heard things about her, that she dumps guys after two months and drinks whiskey out of a red plastic cup, and that all the professors in the journalism school think she's a slacker who comes to class hung over with a giant bottle of water and writes “filler” stories with pretty art that land on the front page. Claude saw Louise with her last boyfriend, once, in the grocery store—she'd been talking on the phone while he trailed behind her, not objecting when she tossed a bunch of dried fruit and gluten-free cookies into the cart.

“Maybe I'll come,” Claude tells Louise. “Won't know for sure until the last minute.”

Louise shares a soggy bungalow with two friends, and when Claude walks in, half an hour late, it smells like incense and floor cleaner and her roommates are not there. Louise is making sushi, and the rolls are big and lumpy. Claude paces
the kitchen, talking on his cell phone, and Louise continues to assemble the meal alone, slicing and arranging, probably waiting for him to help her or tell her how pretty she looks. She's evidently used to guys who walk right up and cup her small face in their hands. Claude tries not to watch her. He tells himself, Don't touch.

During dinner she banters, scooting her chair so close, letting him look right down her white V-neck T-shirt to the little yellow bow on her bra, that he gives in and kisses her.

Claude doesn't call the next day. Or the next. After he graduates he's moving to California and will meet tons of girls, models, probably. Because of his mother, Claude speaks French, which has helped him always have a girlfriend. In Santa Barbara he has a job waiting for him, writing for a local paper, and will soon be really doing something, not sitting around in this wheat-filled state with these farm kids.

•

All semester, Louise has been watching Claude. He tells funny stories that the staff pass all around the newsroom. “Did you hear Claude's latest?” they ask, referring mostly to his ex-girlfriends, who are all beautiful, but troubled—one had shown up at his apartment in the middle of the night, crying and supposedly holding a pink teddy bear. The collars of Claude's shirts are always popped up, his sleeves rolled, hands gesturing while he talks. He's not the type to sulk in the kitchen at parties, hiding behind his hair while he nurses a bottle of Pabst the way Davy would. Davy's neediness embarrassed Louise. Claude she'll have to work for.

•

Claude runs into Louise at a party and finds himself leaving with her. Soon they are together for whole weekends, in her bedroom, watching TV and leafing through magazines. He loves spending time with Louise, how she looks at him, how quick she is to laugh, but he can't stand her friends, how
they order blue drinks at clubs and dance crudely, spilling on themselves, and is glad when he graduates. He likes the longing that distance creates. He likes sharing dreams via email, seeing their plans typed up on a computer screen. They joke about their future apartment, one with a shiny chrome kitchen and floor-to-ceiling windows where they will stir-fry things in woks and drink sparkling wine. At night the hills of Santa Barbara will glitter with lights from outdoor living rooms and yards called “grounds.” They will do yoga on a sunny balcony with cacti in pots, and drink water with fresh-squeezed lime. Louise will walk down the clean, white sidewalks with arms full of shopping bags.

Louise arrives on New Year's Eve, 2005, and for one month their lives are not so far from this. They drink Mexican beer and wear bathing suits indoors. They do drugs and wander through organic markets, spotting celebrities. They wear aviator sunglasses and fearlessly turn their faces toward the sky. Their apartment complex is called Summerville.

This would be their life now. That is what they believed.

W
hen Janet's daughter was in the fourth grade, she collapsed at a Civil War site in Alabama. They were coming back from a family vacation in the Gulf Shores, famous for the squeaky sand. They had stayed in a high-rise condominium and swum in salty water for a week, and were now crowded in the station wagon again, pushing up north to their home in Michigan. This was before the divorce. Janet and Warner both wore gold rings and took turns driving. The children—Louise, Tom, and the baby, Michael—were sunburnt, and sipping apple juice from small tin cans. Warner had wanted to take a break and see a battlefield, so they had stopped at sunset. The air outside was so hot it made them pink, their stomachs and scalps stung with sweat. Then, right there in the graveyard, nine-year-old Louise fell and balled up on the scratchy yellow grass. She said she saw double and had a headache so bad she couldn't move. For a second, Janet thought Louise was psychic, feeling the pains of those killed beneath her. Then she saw that Louise's left eye had turned toward her nose. She couldn't walk straight; Warner had to guide her to the car. Janet followed, carrying the baby and holding Tom's sticky hand. He was five, silent and staring. Janet could do nothing.

At first the doctors had thought Louise had a brain tumor. Then they said no: It was a clot of blood pressing down on her brain stem, a genetic irregularity. Their prescription: complete bed rest to allow the blood to reabsorb
into her brain. She had to miss the last three months of fourth grade, but her symptoms all went away. Her eye rolled back to the center and locked there. In gymnastics, she could walk across a balance beam. The blood was gone. She was allowed to go to summer camp with her friends, but the doctors had said she should abstain from “contact sports” just to be safe. She ran track. Not much was mentioned about it in the family again, except every so often, someone would say how strange it all had been.

A
fter four days in the critical care unit in LA, I'm back in Santa Barbara. Back in our apartment. I have to wear an eye patch. Claude calls me Captain Hook. I call him a jerk. He says he's just trying to make things around here a little more lighthearted. My mother buys patches in pink, blue, and beige, but I never wear them. I wonder where she got these, in the costume aisle at some specialty drugstore?

The eye patch helps me not see double. Without the eye patch, I cannot tell which of the two doorknobs is real. I hold a glass under the faucet, but it will not fill up. It's like being very drunk, or like a baby, trying to walk.

J
anet knows she has done something wrong. She should have worried about Louise more. She didn't call Louise for a week after she moved to California—she had wanted Louise to feel like a grown-up. Maybe she fed Louise bad foods when she was a baby?

Claude is thinking that this has happened because he has bad luck. He is always wrecking cars and losing things. He got picked on in grade school, and is short. He has a string of ex-girlfriends who hate him.

•

Janet leaves the apartment to buy a vacuum cleaner. The carpet has a lot of sand in it from the beach. The building is on a steep dirt hill overlooking four lanes of speeding cars, and then there is the water and sand. The apartment is designed like a motel, with the bedroom window looking directly onto a walkway and the parking lot. In place of a curtain, Claude and Louise have pinned a large piece of tie-dyed fabric over the bedroom window. More privacy is needed.

Janet gets off the freeway at Wagon Wheel Circle. She goes fast, around and around the wagon wheel, until she sees her exit. In the vacuum aisle of the superstore she talks to herself, observing the qualities of one device over another, and buys the best vacuum. What else would her daughter like? She picks up a little picture frame, a cinnamon candle.

For dinner, Janet steams three artichokes and beats butter, eggs, and hot pepper sauce in a bowl. She warms the mixture over the tiny electric stove. Artichokes and hollandaise sauce has been Louise's favorite meal since she was small. In Kansas, Janet is so busy that she mainly eats cereal and bananas, cold cuts and cheese, shrimp with cocktail sauce. But that is OK. This is the food she likes.