Jennifer Greene - Trouble in Paradise

Barbara came into the kitchen yawning. The uniform it took her nearly an hour to get into consisted of jeans and a clinging sweater-mohair this morning. Her hair was brushed back simply. Her eyelashes looked suspiciously dark and velvety, but that was one of the few battles Susan had subtly won about a week before. The tiniest touch of Vaseline accomplished the same thing as mascara, and Griff didn’t threaten to disown her because of Vaseline. Barbara, on a rare day, could see reason.

“Morning, Susan.”

“Morning, honey.” She served Barbara’s toast and Tiger’s waffles, along with three large glasses of milk-Tiger’s was chocolate-then rapidly took away Tom’s empty plate and opened a fresh package of cheese for Barbara’s sandwich, keeping one eye on the sink to be sure Barbara didn’t try to pour her milk down the drain.

Smoked cheddar. She’d always loved it. Yet when she opened the package, Susan stepped back, feeling waves of nausea engulf her. She took a deep breath, and then a second. “Barbara,” she asked idly, “do you think you could make your own sandwich while I throw in a wash?”

All three kids suddenly looked at her. Barbara got up from the table, rubbing her hands together to brush off the last of the toast crumbs. “Sure. We wouldn’t want to overtax you, Susan. I got the drift last night.” Her look was bitter and her tone sarcastic.

Susan swallowed. “If your father said something to you,” she started quietly.

Barbara laughed.

“Shove it,” Tom suggested to his sister.

Barbara clammed up, and began to slap cheese slices between pieces of bread, not looking at Susan.

“Honey, I only asked you to help with the sandwiches because-”

“Like, it’s perfectly all right. I got the message,” Barbara snapped.

Tom pushed back his chair, glaring at his sister in disgust. Tiger looked from brother to sister, wide-eyed. “Susan,” he said finally, “did you forget we were talking about getting a cat?”

An hour after the kids had left for school, Susan walked into the store, past Lanna, past the stacks of books and crafts, and into her office, where she promptly closed the door. Five minutes later, she emerged and motioned to Lanna at the cash register. “We’re going to have to close for a few minutes,” she said absently.

“Fine.” Nothing threw Lanna.

“I need you to drive me somewhere,” Susan said.

“Fine.” Lanna grabbed her coat. “Your car or mine?”

“Yours.”

Susan turned the Closed sign around, walked to the parking lot in silence and gave directions as Lanna started the engine. Lanna’s face carried a smug, relieved look, which no amount of careful lip-biting could hide.

“Look. I’m not ill,” Susan informed her irritably. “All I’m going to do is spend thirty dollars to find out that I’m not only not ill, but that I seem to be turning into some kind of hypochondriac.”

“You are as far from being a hypochondriac as anyone I’ve ever met in my life. Look, Susan, you haven’t missed a day of work in four years except for vacations. In my particular scheme of things, I call that kind of virtue an illness.”

“So cynical,” Susan said wryly.

“Realistic.”

“I just hope there’s a pillow under you when you really fall, because I have this terrible feeling you’re going to fall hard.”

“You came to work this morning looking green,” Lanna commented pleasantly, always eager to steer the subject away from herself.

And Susan felt green. She was damned tired of feeling green. Once the kids were off to school, she’d felt suddenly so dizzy she could barely stand, and being alone in the house had oddly frightened her. So had driving alone to work. She was worried about Griff, and Barbara had hurt her, and what she had finally told herself was that she needed to…cope better. That seemed to be all it amounted to. And how could anyone cope well when their stomach was turning somersaults on a regular basis?

“Did you tell your husband?” Lanna questioned as they pulled in to the parking lot of the doctor’s office.

Susan ignored her. Obviously, she wasn’t about to burden Griff with a bunch of hypochondriac nonsense. For that matter, she thoroughly resented wasting money on a physical examination. T-shirts for Tiger, jewelry for Barbara, popcorn for a year for the teenagers who devoured junk food at all hours of the day and night… “Just go back to work,” she told Lanna.

“I’ll wait for you.”

“You will not wait for me. You will return to the shop and reopen it. I’ll take a taxi back later.”

Lanna shifted too fast in response, chugging the car out of the parking lot like a bouncing Jeep. Susan would have smiled if she hadn’t been entering the doctor’s office. The place smelled of alcohol and disinfectant; the walls were white, with an occasional framed print that jarred with violent color. Susan remembered the magazines from the one time she had had bronchitis; undoubtedly, they still carried those latent germs.

The nurse ushered her into the examining room, all serenity and efficiency.

“I’m really perfectly all right,” Susan told her.

“I was just looking at your chart. It’s been ages since you’ve had a complete physical.”

“I don’t need a complete physical.” The nurse stuck a thermometer in her mouth, then took it out and examined it before resterilizing it. She took Susan’s blood pressure, and then made a sound in her throat that Susan couldn’t interpret. Such dramatics. One could be dying and this nurse would never say so.

“Please take off all your clothes now, Mrs. Anderson…”

Which was one of the reasons Susan hated to go to the doctor. Nudity and Griff went together. Nudity and cool examining rooms and strangers simply didn’t, and she had the terrible feeling she was going to feel the same way when she was ninety. And Dr. Grey was worse than a stranger. He had delivered her some twenty-eight years before, and had taken far too much for granted ever since.

“Hi, honey,” he began, and went downhill from there.

“I’m perfectly healthy,” she told him.

He nodded, all gray hair and endlessly patient smiles. “You sounded terrified on the phone. You say you’ve had a number of dizzy spells?”

“No one has dizzy spells nowadays. There is nothing wrong with me. I skipped breakfast one day. And lately maybe I’ve been a little tired…”

“Lie down, Susan.” His soft blue eyes peered at her over his spectacles, when the first part of the examination was over. “You can relax anytime.”

The last of the reasons why she hated doctors. Relax-the most popular of orders. She closed her eyes, waiting for pain that never happened, wishing that Griff were with her and at the same time extremely happy that he was not, and feeling miserably sick to her stomach. Dr. Grey redraped the sheet over her less than five minutes later, and his kindly eyes viewed her with a rueful expression.

“About seven months to go, sweetie. I hope to heaven your husband wants to be present for the delivery, because you’re going to make one hell of a patient.”

The drugstore was across the street. Vitamins for this, supplements for that. The dizziness and nausea…even Dr. Grey had nothing for that; evidently it just occasionally affected some pregnant women. It would undoubtedly pass in another couple of weeks.

Pregnant.

Griff’s baby.

“There wasn’t the least thing wrong with me,” she told Lanna later, and worked with a daunting speed until closing time. Like a buried burst of energy in her system, elation would suddenly surge forth out of nowhere. She kissed Mr. Riverton when he came in with the mail; she hugged Mrs. Bartholomew for doing a proper stitch on her crocheting. She ate a peanut butter sandwich for lunch and then forgot and later ate another peanut butter sandwich.