Lionel Shriver - So Much for That

Sure enough, he could hear the girl’s nasal screech from the back of the house while he was still out on the stoop. (“No, I didn’t wear the Vest, I hate it, I hate everything, all this stuff about how great it is at least to be alive, I don’t know what you see in it!” Brief lulls were doubtless filled in with Carol’s ritual assurance that she shouldn’t talk like that, that “life was a precious gift,” sentimental homilies guaranteed only to further their daughter’s rage.) He was still feeling afloat and unfocused himself; he’d been warned not to drive, and had ignored the injunction. The sedative seemed to have brought on an after-high, for when he’d filled the tank over on Fourth Avenue his chatter with the attendant had been manic even by his own standards.

“Why don’t you just let me cut out? It’s not worth it!” Flicka wailed from the kitchen.

Walking in on this foofaraw confirmed his conviction that, Christ, he’d earned doing one thing for himself, hadn’t he? Just one?

“I don’t want your stupid scrambled eggs!” Flicka was wheezing when her father entered the room. “I don’t want to spend all Saturday afternoon with my speech therapist, and occupational therapist, and physical therapist. I’m going to die anyway, so just let me watch TV! What does it matter?”

Carol had grabbed the girl’s hair and was squeezing more Artificial Tears in her eyes. (One of the first signs of FD, that the baby couldn’t cry, was something of a sick joke; any infant with a future like this had every reason to weep.) As Flicka was rasping, “Just leave me alone! Let me fall apart in peace!” she started to hyperventilate.

Granted, it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the symptoms of FD from the side effects of the meds; nausea, dizziness, tinnitus, canker sores, backaches, headaches, fatigue, flatulence, rashes, and shortness of breath came with both territories. But the nature of this episode grew clearer when in the midst of her gasping Flicka started to retch. The dry heaving was excruciating to watch, somehow more so than before the fundoplication, when she’d have spewed what little she’d ingested of Carol’s unwanted plate of scrambled eggs in a six-foot projectile plume. At least proper vomiting had seemed to offer relief. The retching was ceaseless and unavailing, as if an alien embryo in her guts were clawing its way out.

“It’s a crisis,” Carol told her husband grimly. Most wives would make such a statement in the spirit of hyperbolic melodrama; for Carol, the verdict was coolly clinical. “Thank God you’re back. Hold her.”

Jackson clutched his tiny writhing daughter to his chest. After wrestling with the button and zipper with some difficulty from behind, Carol pulled Flicka’s jeans down, hastily coated her own middle finger with Vaseline, and slipped a tiny tablet the color of marshmallow peanuts as far as she could up her daughter’s ass. Without taking a reading that they didn’t have time for, it was always tricky to discern whether Flicka’s blood pressure was soaring or plummeting, but Carol made an educated guess at low – the girl’s skin was clammy, pale, and cold – and administered a pink tablet of ProAmatine in the same rude fashion. Flicka’s whole digestive system would already have shut down, and even meds administered through her g-tube wouldn’t absorb.

“Now, remember—” said Carol.

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Jackson interrupted. “We gotta keep her upright for the next three hours.” Carol never gave him any credit. He knew perfectly well that lying down after ProAmatine could send Flicka’s blood pressure from knee-high to through the roof.

All this time, Heather had been mooning on the sidelines looking envious, and envy in these circumstances made Jackson worry that she was far dumber than she tested.

For good measure, Carol inserted yet another tablet of diazepam, and within a few minutes the convulsive retches in his arms spasmed farther apart. Fortunately, Carol had crammed Flicka full of Valium fast enough to avert a full-blown crisis – the human equivalent of a hard-drive crash – which would have sent them straight to New York Methodist. However, the rescue did cost the cake, which was now filling the room with the sharp, not altogether unpleasant smell of charred chocolate.

I apologize for the store-bought cake,” Carol said at the door. “We had a mishap with the home-baked one.”

Carol never used Flicka as an excuse, a discipline Jackson admired. Nor would either of them mention how much they’d be out of pocket for the sitter. Flicka having been volatile, they’d called Wendy Porter, their usual registered nurse, who was FD au courant. Hell, they’d have cancelled altogether if it weren’t for Flicka. “I like Glynis,” she’d stressed while they hovered, making sure that she didn’t lie down. “She never treats me like an idiot. She asks me about my cell phone collection, and not only about my stupid FD. She can be, like, sort of wicked, too, which I like tons better than all that goo-goo sweetness I get from those fawning therapists. And now she’s sick. Sicker than I am, even if that seems totally impossible. She’ll be looking forward to tonight, and if you suddenly don’t show up she’ll be crushed. So if you stay home on my account, I swear I’ll swallow some milk the wrong way and give myself pneumonia.” Blackmail, but it had worked; Flick didn’t make empty threats.

Jackson bustled into the kitchen with an overkill of booze – two bottles of wine, two more of decent champagne – meant to impose festivity on an occasion that didn’t easily pass for celebration. Marking the end of an era, this was the last gathering of their traditionally garrulous, fractious foursome that wouldn’t be undermined by dietary restrictions, fatigue, pain, or disappointing blood test results, and the very end of any era was really the beginning of the next one.

Shep had taken the same obfuscating approach to the food. Enough appetizers crowded the table on their enclosed back porch to feed a party of twenty-five: hummus, grilled chili-shrimp on skewers, out-of-season asparagus, and scallops wrapped in bacon; the dim sum, which didn’t quite fit in, had clearly been provided in order to employ Glynis’s forged silver chopsticks. The windows were lined with tea lights. Glynis came downstairs draped in a floor-length black velvet number, which matched Carol’s glittery jet cocktail dress; between the candlelight and the women’s attire, the atmosphere on the porch was that of a séance or satanic ritual. When Jackson wrapped their hostess in a fervent embrace, his fingers sank alarmingly into the velvet; that was a lot of fabric and very little Glynis underneath. Her shoulder blades were sharp as chicken wings. That was no size in which to undergo major surgery, and now he got it about all that food.

“You look fantastic!” Jackson cried. She said thanks with girlish shyness, but he had lied. It was the first of many lies to come, thus another reminder that tonight marked more beginning than finale. Glynis had applied more makeup than usual; the blush and rich red lipstick were unconvincing. Aging anxiety was already etched into her face. Nevertheless, she was a tall, striking woman, and this was the best she was liable to look for a while. That it could well be the best she would look again, ever, was a thought he tried to block.

They settled into caned armchairs while Shep fetched champagne flutes. In the olden days, meaning six weeks ago, Glynis would have hung back on the sidelines conversationally. Wised up to the fact that sparse comment carried greater weight than garrulity, she was the sort who let everyone else argue forever over details, and then made the one sweeping pronouncement that brought the fracas to a close. But now her bearing was regal, as if she were holding court, Queen for a Day. In turn, he and Carol were solicitous, careful to stop talking as soon as she opened her mouth. They let her lay out the procedure scheduled for Monday morning step by step, though they’d already got the whole lowdown from Shep. If Glynis was the center of attention tonight, it was the kind of attention that anyone of sound mind might gladly have skipped.