The Memory of Running

  “Hello, Mr. Ide,” she said, shaking my hand.

  She remembered my name! She knew now that I was connected to her patient.

  “Hello, Dr. Glass,” I said. I felt she may have held my handshake a split second longer than was necessary, but I couldn’t be sure.

  Bethany and Dr. Glass went into the office, and I read, as usual, in the waiting alcove. I read an old Outdoor Life, I remember, until a shaken Georgina Glass came out about fifteen minutes later.

  “Mr. Ide?” she whispered urgently. “Can you come in for a second?”

  I knew immediately what had upset Dr. Glass. She was always so light and airy with us all, it was obvious she had never seen the things the voice could do. The poses. The stillness. There, by the corner of the doctor’s delicate black antique desk, Bethany had thrown out her left arm, brought her shoulders into a hunch, and frozen.

  “She is not moving. She is not moving,” Dr. Glass said anxiously but softly. “Even, even . . . is she breathing? Can she not be breathing?”

  “No, she’s breathing. It’s happened enough so I know she’s breathing.”

  We stood next to Bethany and watched her closely. There is another thing about the pose. It’s mesmerizing, hypnotizing. It’s terrible because it seems so utterly unnatural, but at the same time it is amazing and beautiful.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it. Can she hear us?”

  “I think the voice hears us.”

  “The ‘voice’?”

  I looked at the doctor and stepped away from my frozen sister.

  “There’s something inside of Bethany. Always has been. It ruins things. It tells her things and tells her to do things, and she does them. I hate it.”

  “She hears voices?” Dr. Glass asked, very surprised.

  “She hears a voice, the voice. I tried to tell the other doctor . . . Glenn Golden. . . .”

  “I know Glenn. . . .”

  “He wasn’t interested. He didn’t believe it. That was before I had to go to Vietnam, where I was wounded and became a sort of hero and came home without a girlfriend or anything.”

  “You went to Vietnam? You poor boy.”

  “Well . . . you know . . . I’m a lot older than I look.”

  She stared again at my motionless sister. “Why wasn’t I told about any of this? Why wasn’t any of this in her case report?”

  Dr. Glass had none of that formal sort of pleasant stiffness that she had when she’d meet us at the door. She was so put off by Bethany that she had dropped the doctor stuff. She moved more sensually, if that’s the word, as plain old Georgina Glass. I took a deep breath.

  “Well, Georgina, you told me and Mom and my pop that you wanted to get all the dope from my sister herself. And a lot of the stuff, the voice stuff, wouldn’t be in any reports, because Dr. Golden didn’t believe it. I wasn’t around long enough while he was treating her, because I had to go to Vietnam, where I was wounded eighteen or twenty times and won the Purple Heart.”

  “You won the Purple Heart?”

  Now, some people might think I was being a little prick talking about myself with Bethany stuck right there in her pose, her still life, but there is comfort in knowing where she was at any given time. Sometimes, especially when I was younger, I used to wish there was a way she could live forever in a pose, so we would always know the voice couldn’t take her away.

  “Listen,” I said, “I know this looks like a stupid time to ask, but—”

  “How old are you?”

  “How old am I? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  I was gaining weight. I was working a job. I was twenty . . . soon I’d be twenty-one.

  “I’m twenty . . . six.”

  “You look younger.”

  “A lot of people tell me I look younger, too.”

  “I’m thirty-nine.”

  She smelled, and I will not lie about this, like peaches. Really. Peaches. The skin on her cheeks and forehead was moist. Her breasts easily supported the hang of pearls around her neck.

  “What do you think about thirty-nine?” she said, watching my eyes.

  “I think thirty-nine is wonderful. I think there’s something about thirty-nine that’s fantastic.”

  She laughed. “I said thirty-nine, not sixty-nine.”

  Sixty-nine? Did she say that? Did she?

  “So what do we do? Do you call an ambulance? How long does it last? Are you sure she can’t hear us?”

  I called my pop, and he drove over with the station wagon. We put the backseat down and spread some blankets and laid Bethany inside.

  “Will she be all right? Will it last long? Maybe we should take her to the hospital.”

  I told Georgina that she’d sleep in her room and tomorrow she’d be fine. We made another appointment for Bethany to make up for this lost one, and I followed Pop home in my Volks. I felt pretty good about myself, I will admit. I felt I had put my best foot forward with Dr. Georgina Glass and in the very near future I would, maybe, be out with her. And maybe I’d take her to the Grist Mill in Rehoboth and get a table near the waterfall and order a nice wine with my earnings from the SEAL Sam assembly line. I was very hopeful.

  But in the morning Bethany did not wake out of her pose, or the next morning, and by the weekend we had to get her back to Bradley Hospital for liquid food. Something new was happening, and we knew it.

  We never talked about it, but we knew it.

  41

  The longer you wait and put off the nice things you should do on a regular basis, the harder it is to do them, until finally you have to force yourself to be nice, to be thoughtful, and it isn’t easy, because you’re embarrassed about not having done those easy, nice things in a natural kind of way. Also, the people who you’re nice to come to expect your regular niceness. That’s it in a nutshell.

  It was raining hard in the middle of Missouri. An autumn rain, and cool. I had given up trying to stay dry. It was the fifth straight day of hard rain. The cornfields had gotten so muddy I was sleeping only in rest areas and small-town parks. My gear was so soaked that for the last two nights I hadn’t even bothered setting up my tent. What was the point? Man, I was feeling sorry for myself. Thinking about things. Talking out loud. I’d go along on that wonderful bike, those touring tires firm on the slippery road, and I’d just talk.

  “. . . and you’re a genius, too. You get on a Raleigh, and your fat ass all hangs out of the seat, and Shad Factory and people all laughing at you. Who’s gonna visit the graves? Why are you on the bike? I hate you, you goddamn slob. . . .”

  I talked for hundreds of miles and ate bananas in the rain. Now I had gotten myself sick, right here, in the middle of a Missouri monsoon. I had lost my energy, and I had a terrible headache and even the runs, which I hate in the rain especially. I had to walk the Moto maybe the last fifteen miles to this rest area. There was a restroom, a soda machine, and a phone bank with six phones. Some truckers had pulled in and, I’d say, fifteen or twenty cars, to sleep until daylight. It was past one in the morning. I used the toilet and a forest of paper towels. I rummaged for change, but if I had any, it was at the bottom of my pack, so I settled for water and, of course, a banana. When I leaned my bike against the phone bank and picked up the receiver, I was shivering so hard I had to push the number four separate times until I got it right. Even at this hour, she answered on the first ring.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello, Norma.”

  I tried to sound relaxed and comfortable, but an arctic wind blew my words to East Providence.

  “You’re shivering! You’re sick, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  “Norma, Norma, I’m sorry, I’m sorry about not calling. I’m—”

  “You’re all shivering!”

  “I’m always screwing things up, and who’s gonna visit them, I was thinking, who’s gonna, I don’t know, put the flowers and—”

  “Smithy . . .”

  “—prayers and stuff. It’s just raining and raining. I feel—?
??

  “Smithy, don’t . . .”

  “I feel so . . . old all of a sudden.”

  That was it. That was what I felt. I was so tired and so old. My long hair made the bald spot much clearer, and my beard came in with heavy strips of gray. But what was wrong with a guy crying to poor Norma?

  “Smithy. Will you listen? Will you listen? If you don’t think enough of me to listen, then tell me so and I’ll hang up! Now!”

  Norma never had one emotion working alone. Never. It was as if some mad scientist mixed all of the feelings into different combinations. Norma was very complex. But she always said what she felt.

  “Don’t hang up, Norma,” I whispered, probably in a voice as pathetic as had ever traveled fifteen hundred miles. I heard Norma fill her lungs and exhale.

  “I won’t hang up, Smithy. I’ll never hang up on you.”

  The rain sheeted down heavier than before and drummed onto the metal roof of the phone bank.

  “Is that the rain?” she asked.

  “Uh-huh, listen.” I held the phone stupidly in the direction of the metal roof. “Can you hear that?”

  “It’s a heavy rain.”

  “It’s been raining for five days. I’m so wet I don’t even pitch my tent anymore.”

  “You should pitch your tent. I want you to.”

  “I wanted to call. I . . .”

  “It’s okay.”

  “No, it’s not okay, because I wanted to talk to you about Bill and Bill’s boy. I got saved in the army. Did you know that? And now Bill is one of those homeless people, and his son wanted to kill me.”

  Norma didn’t say anything, so I leaned against the rain and told her everything. And telling everything made me feel good and less ashamed.

  “That’s so sad. Poor Bill and poor Theresa, and even though he had that gun, poor Bill’s son.”

  “I know.”

  “I wish we could help them.”

  “I know.”

  “Do you think we could?”

  “I think, I think later on, I’m going to try. I don’t know. I know a nice priest who has ideas about being strong. I don’t know.”

  The rain had lightened into a mere downpour, but it still pinged loudly against the phone bank.

  “You know what I’ve been working on, Smithy? I’ve got it spread out right here on my drafting table. I’ve been working on the blueprints of a new yacht that Blount Shipyard is building. It’s going to try to race in the America’s Cup.”

  “I bet it’s beautiful.”

  “It’s like a rocket ship on water. Do you need money?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “If you need money . . .”

  “I’m hardly spending anything. I’ve got about two hundred dollars. Really.”

  “Would you tell me if you needed money?”

  “I would.”

  “I love you, Smithy.”

  Another truck pulled into the rest stop, a couple more cars. I wonder what they thought about me, in the rain, on the phone.

  “What’s your room like, Norma? Is it . . . do you have all your favorite stuff around? I mean . . .”

  “I spend most of my time here, working and all, so really it’s my domain, I guess. Let’s see, I bought a new, very good Persian rug in Providence, and it covers all but about a foot around the edges. It’s red and gold, very intricate design. Soft. I’ve got my business things on either side of the drafting table. My table is blue, usually the drafting tables are brown or blond, but I had them put a nice robin’s-egg lacquer on it. . . . There’s my fax machine and two computers with design capability and CD-ROM and things, and the phone and printer and rolling side table that I keep my pens and paper on. I’ve got a Mary Cassatt print of a mom and her daughter. I’ve got an autographed picture of Teddy Ballgame—”

  “Ted Williams? Really?”

  “Pop gave it to me. It was Pop’s.”

  “I remember.”

  “I miss them, Smithy. I miss them so much. Pop . . .”

  Through bad weather all across the states, Norma fought off her tears. I liked that she missed them. I missed them. Sometimes now, when I see Bethany in a field or a cloud, I see Mom and Pop, too. Pop always has his uniform on. He always has his baseball bat.

  “There . . . there’s my library, too. . . . I call it my library. I have one whole wall filled with books. Reference books, novels . . . and then I have my big old brass bed. I have it on the corner of the rug next to the bookshelves. It’s a huge bed. It was made in 1844. I bought it at an estate sale in Barrington.”

  My headache was not going away, and now my ear, my right ear, was hurting, but it was better than aspirin to hear Norma describe her dry, sweet room.

  “If you were here, I’d put you to bed and keep you warm all night. I’d just hold you and hold you and, and . . . and you could . . .”

  “I could hold you, too, Norma.”

  Somewhere between the middle of Missouri and East Providence, Rhode Island, were our words. And the words hung on the line like soft pajamas. And we hung, too, even in the rain.

  After a while Norma said, “Pitch your tent.”

  “Okay.”

  “Promise?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay . . . go do it now so you can get out of the rain.”

  “Okay . . . bye, Norma.”

  “I love you so much. . . . Bye.”

  I pitched the tent next to the picnic table. I didn’t use my wet sleeping bag for anything more than a pillow, but I managed to sleep some. I woke up to sun and spread all my things out over the picnic table to dry. I had the rest of my fruit—two bananas and a pear—went to the bathroom, and waited for my clothes to dry. I read my book, Ringo. My ear didn’t hurt.

  42

  I put people off. I must. When I got back home from the Denver hospital, I realized I had nobody my own age in East Providence I was friendly with. I knew some people, sure, to nod to if I saw them in Stop & Shop or the drugstore, but as people I could, say, call up at night or go to a movie with . . . well, I wasn’t connected in that way. It’s a very New Englandy thing, this being alone even though you don’t want to be. It proves, I guess, that you’re above being lonely and can take or leave friendship. So, then, I was a loner who wished not to be alone. It’s something I have thought about and thought about, and I now feel that at any given time there are a lot of lonely loners out there. We just don’t understand the process of making some friends. The complicated format of friendship. It’s not easy.

  I was spending a lot of time at Bradley Hospital with Mom and Pop. Bethany was just not making the kind of progress she used to make. She wasn’t responding to anything, and for the very first time, her voice made no bones about being in there. It was demanding and loud and awful. It screamed at us when we were alone with Bethany. It called us horrible names in that dry, cracking desert of a voice. But it was madness, and they knew madness at Bradley, so the staff was understanding toward Bethany and comforting to us.

  It still hurt, though. It still made us wince and hold ourselves up by thinking about something else. I’m sure, when she was truly horrible, Mom and Pop thought about all the nice things our family was and what a sweet human being my sister was at the center, her poor center. I thought about the certain roundness and neatness and push of Dr. Georgina Glass’s wonderful chest. I thought about how nice her hair fell and how blossoming her smells, but mostly what turned me away from Bethany’s vicious accusations and loud curses were the doctor’s imagined breasts and hoped-for . . . well, nipples. Because I did notice these things. It was, in a way, my awareness of the world, my connection. And it wasn’t lurid or creepy either. It was a notice and then a thought. A sort of daydream with flesh. But what I’m saying is, it wasn’t a preoccupation. It was an introduction to liking someone, say, in the way a girl’s eyes or skin or lips make you want a date. That’s all. It was essentially healthy, this breast thing.

  One afternoon that week, late afternoon after work, I
met the folks at Bradley. After an hour or so of Mr. Voice, I went into the hall for a smoke. Dr. Glass was at the nurses’ station and waved.

  “Hi, Dr. Glass,” I said as I walked over.

  “Hello, Mr. Ide. Our girl is being pretty tough, huh? I changed her medication, but short of something that’ll knock her out, it doesn’t seem to be slowing her down.”

  She had on gray slacks and a light blue sweater. This time the pearls hung between her mounds. I looked at my cigarette so I wouldn’t stare at them.

  “How are your parents?”

  “They’re, you know, used to it.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m used to it, too.”

  “And the war and coming home and whatnot? Are you adjusting?”

  It has always bothered people that I didn’t have to go through some kind of adjustment. Actually, I was adjusting so many times from since I can remember, five or so, that if I did have to adjust, I didn’t notice it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She said something to one of the nurses behind the desk. I put out my cigarette. “Bethany has an appointment on Thursday, Mr. Ide. And of course she won’t be making it, but why don’t you come by yourself, same time, and maybe you can give me a better insight into your sister.”

  She wrote something on a nurse’s chart, speaking to me casually but not looking up.

  “A little one-to-one,” she said.

  One-to-one, I thought. Oh, yes, Dr. Glass. Smithy Ide one-to-one with Georgina Glass.

  “Uhhh,” I said thoughtfully. “Okay.”

  The day and a half until Thursday dragged the bottom of the oily Providence River. It trudged along like a grandfather. Thursday itself moved even slower, and the assembly line went on forever. If there were arms and legs on the wrong sides of SEAL Sam, I was too distracted to notice. At four I punched out for my one-to-one.

  Georgina met me at the door in jeans and a Brown University sweatshirt. “Hi, c’mon in.”

  I followed her into her office. She gestured to a blue-and-red wing chair opposite her desk. “Want some coffee or a soft drink?”