III
With Sam Kensington, her physician-husband, Dr. Elsa worked alternate days in the medical centers of Barclay and the nearby Wickrath community. Being in Barclay this Tuesday, she had no objection to Stevie’s popping over to commandeer the ancient Smith-Corona in the rear examination room.
“Come ahead, honey,” the older woman had said. “You might want to wear a surgical mask, though.”
Indeed, Stevie found the tiny facility’s two waiting rooms (once upon a time, whites had sat on one side and blacks on the other) teeming with flu victims, lonely pensioners in need of either prescriptions or official reassurance, and worried mothers with colicky babies. February always overburdened the Kensingtons, but, marvelously panic-proof, the fiftyish Dr. Elsa gave Stevie a smile from the doorway of one of the examination rooms up front, motioned her down the hall to the spare typewriter, and apologized for not being able to stop for a chat.
“Do whatever you’ve got to do, Stevie.”
“Thanks. I’ll try to be out of your hair in an hour or so. Marella expects me to be waiting for her when she gets home from school.”
Pounding out the final four paragraphs of her article for The Columbus Ledger, Stevie felt acutely uncomfortable. She had no real fear of catching a flu bug from one of the sufferers out front, but she did regret preempting the use of this room for the examination of patients. The little clinic was bursting at the seams, and here she was occupying space that rightfully belonged to the sick. Had Dr. Sam been on duty today instead of Dr. Elsa, she would never have thought to impose. Although she was taking advantage of the older woman’s friendship for several cogent reasons—the imminence of her deadline at the Ledger, the care and feeding of her family, the furtherance of her uncertain free-lancing career—she could hardly justify intruding a second time this week. Maybe she should simply take the Smith-Corona home with her. The Kensingtons, after all, had another typewriter, and she would be closer to her reference books, her files, and her telephone.
Unfortunately, Stevie despised the Kensingtons’ old machine. Frequent occurrences of type clash cut down her speed, the platen was loose, and ten minutes of playing the damn thing at the requisite energetic fortissimo reduced her arms to limp, sodden rags. Besides, the c, q, u, o, and e produced by the dilapidated Smith-Corona all looked like miniature bowling balls or piratical black spots, so greasy were the raised characters on the typebars. You came to such a machine only in an emergency. Because the Kensingtons put their other typewriter (a newer electric model) to regular daily use, Stevie could hardly ask to borrow that one. She had to get her Exceleriter repaired as soon as possible.
But where? And by whom?
At ten minutes to three Stevie shuffled her manuscript pages together, made more than a dozen hurried corrections with a leaky Bic pen, and prayed that her editor at the Ledger would forgive her the unconscionable messiness of the final few paragraphs. After arranging a dust cover patched with grimy strips of masking tape on the boxy machine, she bumped into Dr. Elsa in the clinic’s narrow hall.
“You’ve been a lifesaver, Elsa. I’ve got to drop this off at the post office and get home to meet Marella.”
“What about Teddy?”
“Oh, he’s got basketball practice at the middle school. Thirteen years old and Dr. Sam measured him at five feet seven last month, half a head taller than You-Know-Who. Seems like yesterday he was in swaddling clothes. Crap-laden Pampers, anyway. I don’t expect him until six-thirty or seven.”
Dr. Elsa, her habitual haggard cheerfulness giving way to a penetrating concern, gripped Stevie by the shoulders. “You all right, kiddo? Every time I see that vein ticking in your temple I want to take your blood pressure. Kids aren’t the only ones need checkups, you know.”
“All I’m sick about’s my typewriter, Elsa.”
“If you’re in a real bind, take ours. Not that clunker in there, the good one Sherry’s usin’ up front.”
“No. I couldn’t. I’m not going to.” Grasping one of Dr. Elsa’s bony red hands, Stevie squeezed it companionably. “I need someone to talk to, though. You think you could come by this evening? Drop in for some wine and cheese dip? I’ve had the wine since Christmas, but the cheese dip’s new—I promise.”
“You’re on. Look for me around eight. I’ll leave Sam home. This’ll be our own cozy little hen party.”
“Teddy’ll be there, Elsa.”
“That’s all right. He’s not a rooster yet.”
During her time in the clinic, it had begun to drizzle, a depressing histamine mist from on high. Barclay huddled beneath this drifting moisture like a toy city in the hollow hemisphere of a paperweight.
Back in her VW van, Stevie stifled a sneeze, swung past the post office to deposit her article in a curbside box, and eventually, behind a pair of yolk-colored buses, pulled into the elementary school’s oily-looking parking lot to pick up her daughter. Marella did not need to walk home in the rain. She was a willowy girl with a delicate constitution, a lively ballerina of a third-grader if you overlooked her occasional indispositions. Stevie usually did. Before Ted’s death she had smothered the child with affection. Since then, however, she had adopted a more levelheaded approach to raising her daughter, primarily to keep from spoiling her. Gratifyingly, Marella had never shown any signs of resenting this deliberate change in tactics. She appreciated whatever Stevie or anyone else did for her, and she would be pleasantly surprised to find her mother waiting for her outside the school in this icy mistfall.
Or so Stevie believed.
Perversely, then, Marella climbed into the microbus as if it were a taxi tardily arrived from the dispatcher’s. She slumped sideways in the seat next to Stevie’s and let her notebook drop to the floorboard with a rude resounding thump. Her eyes had the hungry cast of one of those children in a television commercial for the Foster Parents Plan. You came because you felt guilty, they seemed to say. Then they filmed over and seemed to say nothing at all.
“Marella, sit up!”
“Mama,” the girl managed. “Mama, I’m sick. I’ve been sick since lunch. Didn’t tell anybody, though.”
Stevie put her hand on Marella’s forehead and found it alarmingly feverish. “You didn’t tell anybody? Why in the world not?”
“So you could work, Mama.”
So I could work, Stevie mentally echoed her daughter. You didn’t tell anybody so your typewriter-poundin’ mama wouldn’t have to forsake her rolltop to fetch you home. The girl’s selfless, foolhardy bravery annoyed as well as touched Stevie, evoking the terrible suspicion that for Mama to ply her semireputable Grub Street trade in her upstairs study, maybe her children had to sacrifice more than she did. She ought to go back to teaching. Her hours would correspond to the kids’, she’d have summers off, and the local board of education would guarantee her nearly two weeks of sick leave every year. Most important, Teddy and Marella, not to mention Dr. Elsa, would no longer have to treat her like an emotional invalid just to keep her from falling apart over the slightest unforeseeable reverse in her daily schedule.
Like the snapping of an itty-bitty typewriter cable.
“Oh, baby,” Stevie crooned. “Oh, my silly, thoughtful baby.”
Once home, she lit the space heater in the den, folded down the sofa bed, and arranged Marella on its lumpy mattress with three or four quilts and a paperback copy of Beverly Cleary’s Runaway Ralph. (Now there was a woman, Stevie reflected, who had made a successful career of writing; unfortunately, Theodore Crye’s widow seemed to have no talent for fiction, not even the sort children might like.) Stevie also spread some newspapers on the floor near the sofa and positioned a yellow plastic bucket atop them in case Marella found her gorge rising faster than she herself could scramble to the bathroom. This was the quintessential winter ritual in the Crye household, and Stevie carried it out to the letter.
Thank God it wasn’t leap year. If February had had even a single extra day this year, she would have probably used it to take a header from the rustic stone viaduct up in Roosevelt State Park.