Traveling Left of Center and Other Stories Read online

  “Is everything all right?” I asked when it seemed it was taking him an awful long time to listen to my heart.

  “Uh, oh, just fine,” he answered hurriedly, turning bright red. I felt kind of bad about teasing him, especially when it would be six weeks before I could do much more than smile. But a doctor—now, that had possibilities.

  “Is my little girl all right?” I asked, all concerned as any proper mother would be. And I really was. She was cute as a button. “I’m going to name her Rebecca,” I added.

  “What a coincidence,” he said. “That’s my mother’s name,” and after that, the rest, as they say, was history,

  Doctor Bill and I saw each other pretty steady, although I wouldn’t let him get a good look at me, if you know what I mean, ’til the crunches did their stuff. He was a nice guy, doing his residency or something at the hospital. No wife, either. —“A doctor doesn’t have time for a wife,” he had explained seriously, as we lay together on hot summer nights.

  “Later, I’ll marry, of course,” he added, “Once I’m established. Then, there’ll be time for golfing at the country club or having dinner parties. That’s my plan.”

  It sounded good, just the way he said it. But somehow, I just didn’t picture myself entertaining all those rich wives, mixing Martinis and serving those silly cucumber and butter sandwiches with all the crusts cut off. I’d rather have a beer and pizza any day.

  But I’d let him talk, and all the while I’d be curling up against him, running my fingers up and down his chest and kissing the side of his neck. Pretty soon, he’d stop talking about the future and get on with the present. For all his busy schedule, he certainly had enough energy left over for me.

  Even Mama was impressed with him, and willingly watched the kids when we went out to a fancy restaurant or to the first-run showing at the movies. One thing about him, he sure wasn’t cheap.

  “Why, Doctor Bill,” I would say teasingly, when he brought me roses or candy or took me out for a big steak dinner, “you sure are spoiling me!” Then I’d run my nails down his arm and he would get that glazed look on his face.

  Mama even spared me the lecture on birth control, figuring, I guess, that a doctor would know how to prevent babies. But when we ran out of rubbers one night, and I had my sexiest nightgown on, well, what’s a man to do? All the self-control in the world can’t withstand lacy black lingerie and “Tangerine Touch” nail polish.

  I knew his residency was almost up, but I figured he’d stay when he found out I was pregnant. I thought it was all just talk—his plans of being a big-city doctor, having a big-city wife. After all, everybody has dreams, even me. I just never figured he really believed in them.

  And it isn’t helping that this baby has been ornery from the start. I’m spending more time in the bathroom than anywhere else, and my belly is swelling so big you’d think I was carrying twins, although the clinic said it’s too early to be sure. My face is splotchy and my hair stringy, too. No wonder he found it so easy to leave.

  I’m six months gone now, and he’s gone too—off to a bigger hospital in a bigger town. He’s promised to send me money—“for you and the child”—but I’m not holding my breath.

  It’s a rotten shame the way these things go wrong for me. I don’t do a damn thing and yet I’m always left holding the bag—or the baby. It’s not my fault he didn’t go to the drug store. And I didn’t ask to be so damn fertile.

  Mama is fit to be tied. She says I need a keeper, not a husband, and she’s threatening to glue my kneecaps together from now on. She says if I so much as look at another man, she’ll slap me silly.

  She’ll come around though. She always does, especially when she’s holding the baby. Besides, I promised her that this time it would be different. After the baby comes, I’ll take some classes so I can become a first-class beautician.

  “Then I’ll do your hair up and paint your nails every week, Mama,” I promised her, when I brought home the pamphlet from the school. “If you watch the kids, I can finish this course in one year, and then I can work at the beauty shop down the street.”

  Mama just sniffed, but she didn’t say she wouldn’t help. I’ll be home free as long as she doesn’t come see the instructor. His name is Pierre, and he has the cutest French accent and wears the best cologne I ever smelled on a man.

  He says I have great potential and could look just like a model—after the baby comes, anyway.

  “With your eyes and cheekbones, you’d be a natural,” he said one night, when I stayed late to look at some new hairstyle books.

  “Oh, Pierre, you say the silliest things,” I laughed, resting my newly manicured nails (“Black Lace”) on his arm. “Why, here I am, big as a house—how can you think of me as a model! Land sakes,” I added, brushing my hair away from my forehead, “it’s hot in here,” and I unfastened the top button of my maternity smock.

  Pierre was too polite to stare, but I knew my cleavage had caught his eye. My old maternity bras were barely big enough to hold me in place.

  “There’s so much I could do with you,” he said, and the way he looked at me in the mirror, I had a suspicion that he didn’t just mean my hairstyle.

  Now Pierre wants to dye my hair jet-black and give me a manicure—“Ravishing Rose” is the shade he had in mind. He’s offered to do it for free. I might just let him.

  Alice in Wonderland

  “Alice! Alice! Where are you?”

  Her mother’s shrill voice crept up the stairs, seeping around the corners, through the cracks and under the door like a damp chill until it found Alice, sitting cross-legged on her rumpled bed, a scratchy woolen blanket wrapped around her, holding tightly to her book.

  She heard the words as though they came from a great distance, not just the floor below. But instead of responding, she kept on chewing, tearing off more bits to slip into her mouth and onto her tongue. “Cairo . . . Alexandria . . . Mozambique . . . Tangiers . . .”

  “Alice! I want some tea!”—complaining, demanding, the words pulling at Alice like a rope around her neck.

  “Nebet, the master awaits your presence,” said the servant, bowing before her with the respect due to one of great beauty and power.

  “Tell him to wait,” Alice answered calmly. She extended one slim leg to allow the servant girl to free her delicate, high-arched foot from its sandal. “I will bathe first and then see him. Perhaps. Or, perhaps not”—the control she wielded evident in her tone, her attitude.

  Alice rose to her feet, slipping the golden bracelets from her fine-boned wrists before allowing the silken caftan to fall from her white shoulders. Then she freed her golden hair from the silk ribbon that had kept it bound at the nape of her neck, the lustrous strands cascading down her back. The heat from the Sahara desert permeated the room, melting her muscles and bones into a sinuous form, curled and waiting like a cobra. The perfumed water tempted her . . .

  “Alice! Dammit, you get down here right now!”

  One last bite, one final swallow, and then Alice reluctantly set the book back on the shelf, the bangles and caftan vanishing as the cover closed. Twisting the dull brown strands of her thin hair into a bun, the ends damp from where she had absentmindedly chewed on them, she pinned them halfheartedly in place before leaving the narrow, dark bedroom.

  She had tarried too long and the price she paid for any delay, any deviation from the daily routine, was an endless litany of complaints and grievances, lasting until her mother was fed, bathed, and finally put to bed.

  The schedule was set in stone, like hieroglyphics incised on the walls of an ancient tomb. Breakfast at eight, then pills, then empty the catheter bag hanging on the side of the bed of its smelly yellow liquid. Bathe the bits and pieces of a body that, each day, seemed less human and more like a shrunken mass of skin and muscle tissue barely attached to bone.

  Change the bed, bundling the sheets into the washer with the requisite amount of bleach in a vain attempt to get rid of the stains and odor. The
n, before she knew it, it was time to make lunch—canned tomato soup followed by a processed cheese sandwich on white bread (no variations allowed)—before she had to clean up again, bag and all.

  Dinner, another sponge bath, more pills—Alice didn’t know where the day went and sometimes she wondered if she too wasn’t disappearing—if, with each chime of the clock at the hour, a little more of her wasn’t slipping away.

  At the end of the day, she would look in the mirror, and even though she saw a face that she knew was hers—the untrimmed brown hair, the faded blue eyes with dark circles underneath, the chapped lips and sallow skin—she didn’t feel there. It was just her reflection, nothing real. Most days, she felt as insubstantial as that mirrored image, unreality reflecting unreality into infinity—powerless, hopeless, loveless.

  But when she opened her books, the world shifted and changed. It was a different reality, a glittering wonderland of power. And she was a different Alice—no longer the one being commanded, but the one commanding. Men bowed before her, bearing gifts of gold and jewels and silks. Servants waited for her commands, their one goal in life to please her. She had only to lift her hand and the world was at her feet.

  With each turn of the page, the walls of the old row house gave way to whatever place the words conjured up—sometimes the pyramids and temples of Egypt, sometimes the streets of Marrakesh, crowded with snake charmers and magicians. But it was always somewhere hot and dry, where the air burned her skin and enflamed her spirit. Each bite of paper took her to strange lands among strange people, the sights and sounds and smells almost (but not quite) blocking out the reality in which she lived.

  If one could call it living. If, in fact, this was life.

  “What took you so long? I’ve been waiting! And don’t be so noisy!”

  Her mother always accused her of being noisy, although Alice herself could never hear the sound of her own footsteps. She was as noiseless as a wraith, as insubstantial as a ghost. Not even the dust in the stuffy, cluttered sitting room was disturbed by her entrance.

  But in her riad with its courtyard of fragrant flowers, she had only to breathe, and like a strong wind that one hears even in a deep sleep, her servants heard her and responded, ready to do her bidding. She would sit beside the fountains, where the scent of damask roses and white campion mingled in the air and turtledoves called their mournful cry. Her presence infused the palace the way the heat from the sun infused the air—the world was hers, all hers.

  “God knows I don’t ask for much,” the resentment in her mother’s voice reflected in her eyes. “The least you could do for an old, sick, helpless woman is to come when she needs something!”

  Not much—just the very life that coursed through Alice’s veins. But—“I’m sorry, Mother . . .” plumping up the limp pillow behind the woman’s back, adjusting the blanket over her lap, gazing with a practiced eye at the glass of water and crackers—had the woman drunk enough, eaten enough? And if she hadn’t, did it matter after all?

  “I’ve been waiting forever for my cup of tea! Where did you go?”—always the same question, even though she knew Alice hadn’t left the house but was instead trapped somewhere within its four walls.

  Alice held her tongue, although there were times when she was tempted to answer her with the truth. “I was kneeling on the tasseled prayer rug in my palace in Istanbul, my head bowed to the ground, listening to the muezzin finish his morning call to prayer—‘Allah is most great . . . come to prayer . . . come to salvation . . .’—his voice wavering in the thin clear air. A small gold and brown lizard crawled through the strands of my hair. I held his life in my hands but chose to let him survive . . . my power, my choice.”

  Or, “I was lying on the white sands at Kunduchi Bahari beach at Dar-es-Salaam . . . the ‘haven of peace.’ I watched the fishermen offload their catch from their dhows while my servants waited patiently to choose the freshest ones for my evening meal. And the air was filled with the screams of cormorants as they dove for the discards cast overboard.”

  Or, “I was walking the swarming streets of Morocco, sand-colored leather balra protecting my feet from the rough ground. Basket in hand, servant at my side, I shopped the souks for lamb and spices—coriander, cumin, harissa—for the evening meal, hearing in the distance the sound of the flute as it enticed the cobra to perform its swaying dance.”

  “Nowhere. Do you want anything with your tea?”

  “No. And I don’t want tea now anyway. I changed my mind. I want something cold—juice. Do we have any juice or did you forget to buy it?”

  Her mother knew full well that Alice had bought juice. After all, she was with Alice when the purchases were made, pulling crumpled bills from her cheap black wallet, carefully picking out the coins from her threadbare change purse, then handing them to the cashier as though Alice couldn’t be trusted to do even that one simple thing.

  She never let Alice forget that it was her money that bought the food they ate, paid for the gas and water and electricity they used, her money that put the clothes on Alice’s back and the shoes on her feet—not that Alice spent much on a wardrobe these days. Once she had given up her job to care for her mother, she had no need of “outside clothes.” That’s how Alice thought of the world. It was “outside” and she was “inside”—trapped forever in this house with a woman who said she was her mother but who lacked anything remotely maternal.

  “When do I go to the doctor’s again? Did you make the appointment like I told you to? I’m a sick old woman, you know”—as though Alice could ever forget—“and I need to see the doctor and get my pills!”

  Alice hated those doctor visits, the seemingly endless delay until they were taken to an examining room, the incessant harping monologue her mother kept up while they waited for the doctor to appear, the false cheerfulness of the staff who didn’t know how horrible her mother truly was.

  “How good to see you, Mrs. Humphrey!” the nurse exclaimed each time, wheeling the chair-bound old woman down the corridor to the examining room. “How are you doing?” the feigned concern in her voice fooling Alice’s mother but never Alice. This woman didn’t care how her mother was doing. She was just one more in a long line of almost dead bodies.

  “Oh, I’m just holding my own, but you know me—I never complain,” her mother’s pretense of humility and long-suffering grace grating on Alice’s nerves. “I’ll go when the good Lord calls me, I guess. Until then, I’ll just have to be a trial to my daughter.”

  “Oh, I’m sure you’d never be a trial to anyone,” the nurse invariably responded, helping the old woman into a gown as though it was her supreme pleasure to provide this level of personal attention. “I’m sure your daughter is more than happy to take care of you, aren’t you, dear?”

  Alice never answered, never looked up at the two of them. She didn’t want to encounter the nurse’s quizzical look or worse, her pity. As for her mother—the mix of malevolence and sadistic pleasure in her eyes was more than Alice could bear. She knew Alice felt trapped, was trapped, and took a cruel joy in intimating that this parasitic arrangement could go on forever.

  Instead Alice simply would sit there on the hard plastic chair, holding her mother’s cracked black leather purse and faded beige sweater and plastic bag of pill bottles, fantasizing that this time the doctor would utter that longed-for word—“terminal”—that would be the key to Alice’s release. Her liberation. She counted the minutes until the doctor arrived but when he did, it was always to tell her what Alice dreaded to hear: that her mother was not dying—not now, not yet, not soon enough.

  “Heart sounds good, lungs sound good,” he would report, pressing his stethoscope first against the flabby breasts, then the bony back so like a chicken’s. Slipping the black blood pressure cuff around her mother’s blue-veined upper arm, he would inflate it, then listen intently for the pulse of her blood through her arteries.

  Through it all, Alice kept her silence, simply accepting the sheaf of prescriptions th
e doctor handed her. In theory, they were necessary to keep her mother alive for another 30 days. But Alice knew she didn’t need them. The old woman had no intention of dying until she was good and ready.

  “You are doing very well, very well indeed!” he said heartily as he finished making a few notes in his file with an air of importance.

  Did he think he needed to justify the time he spent in that room? Alice asked herself. Did he think she cared if he took notes, performed his cursory medical exam, wrote indecipherable words on his little note pad? The one thing she wanted from him was the promise of freedom, but that he was unable to offer. “I expect you to outlast me!”—his final words falling like a life sentence on Alice’s ears before he left the room to minister to more old people who had long since outlived their usefulness.

  She just might outlive the doctor—Alice’s mother was stubborn enough to do that. In any case, she would certainly outlast Alice who, every day, was fading more and more into nothingness like the Cheshire Cat. Except it wouldn’t be her smile that would be the last to go since she never smiled—at least, not in the here and now—hadn’t smiled within this hard reality in so long that she wondered if her face muscles remembered which way to contract to make the corners of her lips turn upward. Sometimes Alice thought her mother would never die but instead last forever like a vampire, draining Alice not just of blood but of life itself.

  This state of affairs had been going on for so long that Alice had lost track of the years. Was it five years, ten, twenty? Was she thirty, forty, fifty? Had there ever been a time when she didn’t spend her days and nights caring for a woman who had first given her life and then took it away, day by day, minute by minute, breath by breath?

  Long ago—so long ago that she barely remembered—Alice used to leave the house. Each morning she would put on her sensible black shoes, her navy skirt, white, long-sleeved blouse and navy jacket and take the bus into town to her job at the travel agency. There she would file papers, answer phone calls, accept packages—she would complete whatever task that fell her way with precision and accuracy. Day by day, she used to watch the clock tick away the hours of her life, and sometimes, when she had allowed herself to think about it at all, she had wondered if she would be in that office, at that desk, until the day she died.