Louise (7 page)

S
omeone in Janet's book club is having a makeup party. The woman says it's the kind of makeup you can't buy in drug or department stores—you need a representative with a sticker on her car. As the woman speaks, Janet stares at her spiky-stiff hair and jingly charm bracelets. Still, Janet thinks. Socializing will be good for Louise.

Janet drives the two of them to the woman's house with a wax-papered plate of cookies balanced on her knees. The plate keeps sliding off and bumping the gear shift, but she is afraid to ask Louise to hold them. Louise gets annoyed at everything these days. Her vision is still doubled. Her right hand is unusable and she still has trouble walking without her cane.

“Isn't it fun, being a girl?” Janet asks Louise.

Louise looks the other way.

The kitchen is full of brownies and women. The representative and her daughter, both in sparkly blusher and eye shadow, sit at the head of the table. The daughter is around Louise's age, and has dyed black hair that flips at the sides. She sips a can of Diet Coke through a straw. The daughter says she and her husband are trying to get pregnant. They want a little girl. She asks Janet and Louise to pray for them.

Some ladies gather around Louise and ask about the job she had in California, the one she was supposed to start the day she went to the ER.

“Well, everything happens for a reason,” one of the
ladies says, and the rest of them nod their heads in agreement. “God has a plan. You know, plenty of places need good writers. Even factories need someone to make sure their labels read like they should!” another says.

“I'm going back to California,” Louise says. “My boyfriend's there. He's a journalist, too.”

Janet turns away. She doesn't need to see their expressions to know what they are thinking: What would a girl like Louise do out in California now?

•

The women have removed their makeup and now look like they have woken up in the middle of the night. At each place setting is a small bag filled with products and a hand mirror. The women are told to apply Shimmer Glimmer to their faces. Janet sees Louise clumsily slap the stuff on, too much, so her face looks slippery. She won't look in the little compact mirror. She's just smearing the stuff on her face.

Next comes hair, and this requires individual counseling. The mother and daughter team go from woman to woman, talking strategy. They get to Louise and say, “May I?” and pull out her ponytail, unsnagging the hair from the elastic band of the eye patch. The daughter fluffs and flutters Louise's hair so the elastic band is hidden. Her fake nails click.

Janet remembers getting a phone call from Louise when she first moved to California. Louise had been sitting under the dryer at Lazlo's Salon and Spa, where she was getting her hair done by Lazlo himself. Louise told her that Lazlo's clients were all rich and famous, but that Claude had a connection from his newspaper gig. That day Louise received a full set of foils, a deep conditioning treatment, and a sexy shag cut. She'd been there three hours and they still weren't done! Janet had shaken her head at the time, thinking her daughter a bit frivolous.

Janet wonders now if she hadn't been a little jealous.

A
t night, Claude plays tennis by himself against a wall at the Coral Club—he is a complimentary member now, thanks to a story he wrote on the club's thriving business. He thinks about his phone call with Louise earlier. She said she'd found a surgeon, a famous neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Claude had let her talk and talk. The time difference meant that he, in California, was three hours earlier than she. Louise had already watched her fill of TV for the day, eaten, and was now in bed. He was still full of energy.

Claude had told her, softly, that he didn't think he should come. “I won't be any help, baby. I'll lose my job. You'll be back here before we know it.” Louise had hung up on him. He called her back and she'd called him horrible names. He'd mostly stayed silent. He's used to her being miserable now. In fact, he can't really remember her ever being in a good mood. Even the night of the premiere, the night her foot first went numb, they'd been fighting in the car. He'd been late to pick her up, and she'd slammed the car door on the way in. She had a toothpaste stain on her shirt. She had been frowning.

He knows that if he goes to the clinic and sits in chairs with Janet and the rest of Louise's family, if he shares a hotel room with her bearded brother, Tom, and teenage Michael, if he eats hospital food in a booth with Warner and Elizabeth, that he will be a good boyfriend in their eyes.
They'll assume he's in it for the long haul. He imagines himself sitting by her bed for months. He imagines her crossed eye. None of this is going away soon.

•

Claude's parents met in France at a dinner party and got married soon after. “Still very much in love,” they say frequently and without prompting. Claude's parents now live in Atlanta. He and Louise had spent Christmas with them, and their house had been heavily scented with pink sweeping curtains and a white carpet. His father had cooked king crab. They picked the meat out of the claws with small, gold forks, and dipped the chunks into pots of butter. His mother, a beautiful French woman with black hair, had only eaten crackers. She hadn't said much.

Claude had once told Louise, after drinking too many strawberry margaritas, that he thought his father had cheated. He wasn't a hundred percent, and it was years ago, when his father was traveling to Germany a lot for work. Claude said there was no way his mother knew; if something like that ever happened she'd leave his father forever. Claude always regretted telling Louise this because he sensed it made Louise think less of his father, and maybe less of him.

•

Claude thinks of J'Ayme. Thank god that didn't happen, he thinks, and thwacks the ball as hard as he can.

T
hings in the brain move around like prizes in a Jell-O salad. This is the analogy that the surgeon gives Janet, Warner, Elizabeth, Louise, Tom, and Michael as he explains the difficulties of the upcoming operation. It is the day before the surgery, and they are all crammed in an examination room at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The surgeon draws diagrams on a notepad that illustrate how he is planning on entering the base of Louise's skull. He circles an area. “Here is the prize,” the surgeon says. Louise is cheerfully watching the surgeon scribble. She is wearing her eye patch and holding her cane. Janet watches her.

Everyone but Janet oohs and aahs and narrows their eyes in concentration as the surgeon speaks. Janet cannot engage. She cannot think of her daughter's brain as Jell-O salad, which belongs in the grocery store next to the hummus and cheese. It is rainbow colored and comes in a clear plastic mold. It's the fruit-flavored stuff at picnics that nobody eats. Janet never made it for her children. She made cookies sometimes, and brown birthday cakes. She made crisps and cobblers.

Janet doesn't like the idea of food prizes, either. She has heard of marriage proposals that happen at restaurants where the ring is in the center of a crème brûlée, or at the bottom of a bubbling champagne glass. But Janet always thinks of what could go wrong in situations like that. The ring could break someone's tooth, or be swallowed. If the
woman finds the ring in her dessert it will be covered with sticky goo. It will have to be rinsed off and cleaned before it is put on the finger. Janet cannot see the fun in that.

•

Janet is getting tired of hearing from the doctors that Louise's cavernous angioma is in the worst possible place it could be, in the pons, which is attached to the brain stem. This is not helpful, she thinks. They are already scared enough. They already walk around the hallways in a daze, confused by doctors who carry sandwiches in plastic baggies and doors that open into gilded chapels. Too many times Janet has gotten off the elevator looking for an ATM and ended up in an unlabeled corridor, clueless about how she got there or how to get back. The cavernous angioma is causing them to buy things like travel pillows so they can sleep in chairs. It has brought them here, to a world-famous clinic with a brain surgeon who says he will try to get it out of Louise's brain so that no one will ever have to worry about it bleeding again.

•

Claude is not here, and Janet hates Claude for this. Her own boyfriend isn't here and she hates him, too. She broke up with him after he told her he couldn't come, right there in the hospital lounge. There had been no unkind words or crying. She feels like she is able to do things now, easily, cleanly, and induce no pain on herself whatsoever. She is like a janitor at the clinic who sweeps up a pile of dirt and tosses it into the garbage. It had taken place in a matter of seconds.

•

The morning of the surgery, Janet, Louise, and the rest of the family get up when it is still dark and walk across the street from the hotel to the clinic. It is a commanding place, a huge block of red brick. They carry water bottles and books. Louise uses her cane.

Janet had spent a lot of time in the hotel bathroom that morning, staring at the mini soaps and shampoos in the shower. She thought about how Louise had been getting better, able to bathe without help, bracing herself against the sides of the stall. Louise will be in bad shape for a while after the operation. The surgeon has told them this. There are no guarantees that the operation will work at all. For instance, removing the cavernous angioma might damage the neurons that control the function of swallowing. That would mean that she would have to be fed through a tube. Forever. And if the nerve connectors are damaged, she will have to be hooked up to a machine that will push the breath in and out. It will be plugged into an electrical outlet. She will have to stay in a bed, or a chair, connected by a cord that comes out of a wall. It won't be like now, how she can go up and down stairs. How she can hold a knife to cut cheese. How she can shake crackers out of a bag.

The surgeon assures them that all of this is unlikely. It is almost certain that swallowing will not be a problem, his assistants say. Or breathing. They say the operation will be worth it.

•

It takes three elevators to get to the small, steel room where a woman has them sign life and death papers. Should something go horribly wrong, who would decide whether or not to keep the patient alive? Louise just sits there.

Janet helps Louise into a hospital gown. They forgot to bring an extra bag, so Janet stuffs Louise's regular clothes into her purse. Janet covers Louise's feet with nonskid socks. She helps Louise into a hairnet. Louise says nothing, does nothing, lets Janet do it all.

In pre-op, the nurse leads Louise to a gurney and helps her lie down. The room is large and white and Janet stands close by. Louise stares at the ceiling squares, eyes wide. There are many others lying here, too, probably fifty of them with blankets covering their legs, waiting to be wheeled off to
surgery. Nurses quietly ask questions and consult clipboards. The surgeon comes by. He has on red fleece socks and leather sandals that buckle. A mask covers his mouth. He writes on Louise's forehead with a Sharpie: craniotomy.

When he leaves, Janet bends over and hugs her daughter. She kisses the word, covers it with her cheek.

•

The surgeon and his assistants shave a back strip of Louise's head and use a saw to open a bone flap in Louise's skull. This is a “suboccipital craniotomy.” They want to find the cavernous angioma and cut it out, and then they want to seal the veins together again so there is no more bleeding. But they can't find it. They take a tiny camera inside and see only healthy brain. All they see is Jell-O. No prize.

They sew her head back up. They will have to wait another day before they can go back in again.

W
arner has brought a stack of books to read but opens none. Instead, he walks laps around the hospital. The place is huge. If he adds a visit to the library and ducks outside to get some air, he can spend a good hour in motion, which is better than staying still.

Tom is trying to keep Janet from crying. He gets her paper cups of water and makes her come with him to the cafeteria, where they move through a hot-food line like grade-school kids. He tells her stories about his friends at school. He tries to make her laugh. Then he feels awful when her smile turns.

Michael keeps everyone supplied with coffee. He explores. He walks wings with nothing but patient rooms containing somebody lying in the bed like they have been there a very long time. The little TV, suspended in the corner, always blares. Those people will never leave, he thinks.

Elizabeth keeps trying to talk to Warner. He's pacing, distant, hard to reach. She wants to find out what he is thinking. She tries to comfort him, and he looks at her like he doesn't know who she is.

In California, Claude is sure that the surgery will go fine. No one has called him, which he takes as a good sign. He is glad that something is finally getting done.

•

Janet works on a needlepoint pillow cover during the two days in the waiting room. When she is finished she throws it away.