The Convalescent (19 page)

I can’t imagine why. I’m only a filthy little Hungarian wearing a pink sweatshirt that says
DISNEYLAND
on it. I’m only limping along the road in boots without laces, dragging one leg behind me. I’m only holding one arm tightly to my chest—

A rumbling, abused pickup truck approaches fast. Just as it passes, the truck squeals to a stop, smoking the tires. A Virginian jumps out. His face is round and tough, burning under a leather hat. “Hey!” he shouts. “Hey you!”

The Virginian staggers towards me. He reminds me immediately of the field ticks, swollen with blood. He runs right up and stabs my chest with a thick, shit-faced finger. “What in the hell are you
doing
?” he slurs. “You’re walking in the middle of the goddam road.” He gives me a pause to say something.

I give it right back.

When he sees that I’m not interested in answering, he removes his little hands from his pockets. “Say something,” he says, and tugs the lapels of my coat. “C’mon, say something.” He flicks my beard.

I don’t say something.

So he shoves me. I stumble backward, down in the ditch, onto a rock. Blood opens across my hand in an oily smear.

“You stay out of the road!” he yells. “Or I’m callin’ the police!” Then he walks back up the highway mumbling “
Midgets
,” like I’m an unwanted species that’s invaded his country. I hear him slam the door to the truck. The engine sputters to life. As he drives off, I try to keep the seizure at bay by thinking of Asimov: “
The Gravitational Force
,
by far the weakest of all
,” but the shaking has already begun.

Here, in a watery ditch off a dusty highway in Northern Virginia, a seizure feasting on my innards, the Indian stands right next to me, holding his sack of colorful textiles. He shakes his head. “You’re just an image,” he says, “an illusion.” In the distance, a car tears around the corner, making so much noise it sounds like it’s hurting the road. Trees lean back to make
room. The telephone poles which line the road brace themselves for the impact. Nature holds her obsequious breath.

One particular telephone pole, leaning in the same spot that it’s been leaning for twenty long Virginia years, is about to be set upright.

There’s a human being at the scene: a boy, wearing pants two inches too short and a brown cowboy shirt two sizes too big that’s been worn so many times it looks shredded. The back of the shirt is freshly torn. Cuts and bruises pepper his arms and legs. His eyes, the telephone pole notices, look hollow. “Go on,” it wants to say. “Get out of the road!” But of course, telephone poles cannot speak. And the car is not a car after all: it’s a truck. Inside, a woman with sloppy brown hair is blasting a Carly Simon pop song on her stereo. The woman loves Carly Simon. Coming around the bend, listening to her favorite song in the world, the woman feels a rush of gladness and freedom. What
isn’t
there to be glad about? She’s in her truck. She has a boyfriend. She likes horses. It’s June 15, 1985. The sky is blue.

And it’s
Virginia
, for God’s sake.

She presses her foot on the gas and closes her eyes, singing, “
I haven’t got time for the pain—
” and just misses the boy in the road.

At the Back Lick Bar and Grill later that evening, the woman tells her friends over a pile of nachos that it had to be a moment of premonition or something. How else could she explain why she opened her eyes just seconds before hitting the boy?

“I slammed my foot on the brakes,” she says, “and held the steering wheel so hard I thought my fingers were gonna fall off. My heart was beating so fast in my chest, I thought it might pop right out.”

Her friends are curious. “Then what happened?” they ask.

“I got out of the car and went over to him. He was just standing there. There was a horrible look on his face,” she says.

“What did he look like?”

She thinks for a second. “Steady,” she says. “Even.” The woman takes a long drink of her beer and then continues. “I was so worked up, I shouted, ‘What’s wrong with you? I could have killed you!’ But he didn’t answer,” she says. “He didn’t even
look
at me. So I grabbed him by the shoulders. ‘Do you speak, kid?’ I asked him.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t say anything. So I pulled him to the side of the road and told him to go on home.”

This was not
exactly
true. The woman, in a swell of fear and anger, actually slapped the boy across the face. “Speak!” she demanded.

But this particular boy does not speak. So she yelled, “Then stay in the damned road for all I care!” and returned to her truck. She started the ignition. Carly Simon started wailing. The truck tore off down the road, and just in time.

Another car was coming.

Mrs. Himmel is not at all pleased to see a Pfliegman come in on an UnPfliegman day. She sees me stumble through the front door and groans, “This is all we need.”

“We’re
extremely
busy today, Mr. Pfliegman,” says Adrian.

Dr. Monica is extremely busy. The Waiting Area is hot and loud. The Sick or Diseased children are tumbling all over the place.

I find a seat next to a girl in an examining gown, waiting for Dr. Monica to prepare for her X-ray. She’s a handsome child with chubby cheeks and long red hair. She’s sitting tightly in her chair, holding a homemade cookie and staring intensely at the Berber carpeting. She looks up at the other, fully dressed children, who are at the moment comparing shoelaces and do not have to go underneath a Big Machine. She sniffs, pitifully. Her mother has given her the cookie for a snack, but she’s not eating it. She holds it limp in her hand, like a boring toy.

“You don’t want it?” her mother whispers.

The girl frowns. She takes an unenthusiastic bite and keeps it in her mouth until her mother turns away. Then she spits it out behind the chair.

I reach through my coat pockets and find an Evermore. It’s my last one.

I offer it to her.

She looks, but does not see it: she only sees the hairy little face looking back at her. The unruly beard, the papery cheeks. The weird woolen cap and the filthy pink sweatshirt. The eyeglasses, thick as ice. She sees all of this, and, like any Good Child who can spot a Bad Adult, living proof that there’s a fundamental flaw in what she believes is God’s design, leaps from the chair and climbs onto her mother’s lap, looking at me through squinting, terrified eyes.

I shrug and peel off the wrapper. Then I glance up—

Mrs. Himmel is staring at me with her mouth open. She shakes her head in disbelief. She picks up the phone and holds her hand over her mouth as she speaks, as though I couldn’t possibly imagine what she’s telling Dr. Monica: that the Creature is here on a
Friday
and not a
Tuesday
; that he’s offering the children candy when they’re all trained
not to take candy
from such unsavory persons as himself; and that she’s
forty-five minutes
overdue for lunch already.

She slams down the phone.

Moments later, the pediatrician appears in the Waiting Area. She’s not in her usual outfit today. Today, she is wearing a dress. The dress is silk. Red. Soft-looking. She shoots me a brief, exhilarating glance, and then goes to Mrs. Himmel’s window. She says a few things to Mrs. Himmel that I cannot discern because her back is to me and I’m far too immersed in memorizing the heart-shaped contour of her ass to even begin to imagine, but I am marginally aware of the contents of the conversation as Mrs. Himmel’s face goes purple, as her lips curl into a bitter, pusillanimous pucker—

Dr. Monica gives Mrs. Himmel a box of powdered jelly doughnuts. “I just want you to know how much I appreciate everything you do for us, Mrs. Himmel,” she says, and then returns to her office.

Mrs. Himmel waits until Dr. Monica is gone, and then grabs the box and opens it. She selects one doughnut and takes a large bite. White powder sticks to the corners of her mouth. A smear of purple jelly threatens to drip out the butt-end, but Mrs. Himmel, a professional, anticipates this emission, and quickly spins the doughnut in her palm to lick the jelly from the hole.

“Can I have one?” a voice asks.

Daughter Elise is here. She’s sitting in the far corner of the room next to the ficus, chewing gum and staring vacantly at
Vogue
. Her long legs are
pressed into stylish jeans, and she’s wearing flip-flops to dry her freshly painted toenails. Her hair is glossed with chemicals, styled into a corpulent, complex bun.

“Ha,” says Mrs. Himmel. “Fat chance.”

Elise turns a page and mumbles something.

“You just
watch it
, missy,” Mrs. Himmel says.

Elise rolls her eyes.

“Don’t you roll your eyes at me,” her mother says, and wipes the sticky powder on her jeans. “You’re gonna get it!”

Adrian walks in, carrying a stack of folders. Her red hair is pulled back in a thick ponytail, and she’s wearing a brand new windbreaker, the kind you can unzip and roll into its own portable pouch.

“I’ve got the twins’ folders for you, Annette,” she says, and places the folders on Mrs. Himmel’s desk, next to the computer monitor.

Mrs. Himmel sees Adrian and the new windbreaker and stops in mid-chew. She examines the jacket with narrow eyes; how it form-fits Adrian’s sporty figure.

Adrian sees the doughnut balanced in Mrs. Himmel’s paw and licks her top lip. She yearns for one. No doubt it’s tempting: the powder sprinkled on Mrs. Himmel’s blond, feminine mustache, the undeniable waft of sugar in the air. But then she considers the route the doughnut will take, down the throat, with the aid of Mrs. Himmel’s meaty, elastic tongue, and all yearning disappears as quickly as it came.

She unscrews the cap of her water bottle and takes a long gug of it.

One of the Sick or Diseased children, calmly removing the pages from a
Time
magazine, also sees Mrs. Himmel’s doughnuts. He asks his mother for one.

She offers him one of Dr. Monica’s sugar-free lollipops.

The boy will have none of it. He throws it on the floor, breaks loose from his mother, and runs to the front of the reception desk where the doughnuts sit perched like whole cakes. He leans in close, and gently lifts his hand to touch one. It’s clear that he doesn’t want to eat all of it; he only wants to put his finger on the white sugar and have a taste. He’s been watching Mrs. Himmel enjoy the dessert, and there was something in the ecstatic way her tongue leapt out at the jelly before it fell that has driven the boy beyond reason. “Please!” he shouts.

“No, Billy,” says his mother.

“But it’s so
round
,” Billy wails, as though the shape is a problem that needs solving.

Mrs. Himmel smiles to herself. She enjoys having things that others want. She sips her dry tea and spins around in her swivel chair for a sugar packet. The receptionist keeps a long box of sugar packets on the shelf behind her desk and now selects three, delicately nibbling each packet open with the corner of her mouth.

I watch the sugar pour from the packets and my tongue goes fat and sticky, filling my mouth. I search the pockets of my coat for another Evermore, but it’s no use—I’m out. The only place to buy them is at the G&P, and that’s halfway across town. I reach around to scratch my back and fidget in my chair.

Daughter Elise sighs and looks at her watch. “It’s almost three o’clock, Mother,” she says. “Daniel says we have to be there at five.”

“Relax,” Mrs. Himmel says. “We’ll get there when we get there.”

“This whole dumb thing is
your
idea, not mine,” Elise says.

“Just cool it!”

“You cool it,” Elise mumbles. She snaps a page of her magazine.

“
Natural Selection
,” writes Darwin, “
will modify the structure of the young in relation to the parent, and of the parent in relation to the young
.”

Then the front door opens. A gaggle of fifth graders stumble in.

They’re all wearing child-sized suits and dresses. They quickly fill the center of the Waiting Area because there’s no place to sit. A pair of twins in blue are holding hands and weeping. There was a birthday party, and one of the mothers served the children fresh cow milk from the farm to go with the birthday cake. Unfortunately, the milk was sour and has made all of the children sick. The mother, once Good, now clearly Bad, is beside herself. The other mothers smile politely but grit their teeth. They pass around knowing looks: the children won’t be attending any birthday parties at
that
house again.

The birthday girl stares out the window at the darkening clouds, her yellow dress pulled tight into her fists. A look of quiet rage upon on her face.

Mrs. Himmel slides on her eyeglasses and begins handing out information sheets and organizing everyone.

The mothers all thank her, looking grateful.

“Don’t be silly,” she says, “I’m just doing my job.” But when she’s finished, she walks over to Elise and says, “Well, that’s it. It looks like I’m stuck here. Go to the salon across the street to get your hair done, and then stop by the supermarket. Your father will have to take you.”

Elise throws her magazine on a side table. “My hair
is
done, Mother,” she says.

Mrs. Himmel stands back and examines it. “It is?”

“I did it myself.”

Mrs. Himmel snorts. “This is a
professional modeling shoot
, Elise. This isn’t prom.”

The women gather together bundles of outfits and hair accessories and hair chemicals. Elise hoists a backpack full of makeup onto her shoulder in one hefty tug. Mrs. Himmel spits on her thumb and nabs a fleck of dust that has fallen on the daughter’s cheek.

The daughter, annoyed, whacks the hand away.

“Will you just
let
me?” Mrs. Himmel says.

“Leave me alone!”

Mrs. Himmel removes her horn-rimmed glasses and breathes on them. “If I left you alone for one second, you’d gain ten pounds,” she says. “You’ve gotten awfully chubby, Elise. You’ve got to be taking better care of yourself and watching that figure.”