Edith Pearlman - Honeydew - Stories

Afterward, a mute shower, his second of the day, while the chatter that had clung to him drained into the hospital’s sewer.

One day, shortly after a rain, something unfortunate happened. While sliding on her backside down the bank toward the stream, Acelle was stabbed by what felt like a dagger. It was in fact only a bit of narrow branch. It would have done little damage had she been wearing jeans, but today she’d worn last year’s party dress. Below the striped mini her legs were bare and her upper thigh and even part of her buttock were vulnerable to the miniature weapon; worse yet, the thing had its own pointed twiglet, which had entered the flesh easily enough but, Joe saw, would be a bitch to dislodge.

“It’s like a fishhook, pointing backward,” Joe explained to Acelle. “They make fishhooks that way on purpose…so they can’t be pulled out the way they came in, and the fish can’t get loose.”

She was lying on her stomach. “Pull it out anyway.”

He bent and looked closely at the little bit of tree that seemed to be feeding on her tenderness. “No, the fishhook will rip you. It went in slanted, like a splinter. It’s very near the…skin, the surface. Maybe I could cut your skin and lift it out.”

“Maybe you could stop talking and do it.”

He took out his imitation Swiss Army knife. The two of them had been enjoying it all summer. It was his birthday present. Even this knockoff was so expensive that all his relatives had to chip in. “I should sterilize the blade.”

“Spit on it.”

Instead he turned around and urinated on it and on his hands. Then he gave her his wadded-up and filthy handkerchief to hold between her teeth. He stretched the affected area between his forefinger and middle finger, and made a swift cut with the point of the blade, just deep and long enough to flip the twig out with the flat of the blade. The nasty twiglet came out too. The thing lay on her thigh; he brushed it off. The bleeding narrowed to a trickle.

“It hurts a lot but not as much as before,” Acelle said. “I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

Near the main entrance — the de facto main entrance, not the original one that Zeph entered every day with his stick under his arm — was the gift shop that had recently become Victoria Tarnapol’s to manage. Victoria had been born in the Castle but had rarely been back since that uncomplicated event nearly six decades earlier. Returning now, even to run the silly gift shop, seemed momentous.

The gift shop was a place where an empty-handed visitor could pick up a box of scented soaps or an embroidered handkerchief or a glass candy dish to delight a moribund patient. A rotating rack of paperbacks was useful, as were the games and puzzles for children. And since Victoria’s ascendancy, two round café tables and little chairs had appeared, and she served coffee and tea and slices of the pastry she baked at home early in the morning. Her mini-café became popular — many visitors did not like the hospital cafeteria, where you could overhear conversations between doctors about conditions you’d prefer not to know existed.

Mr. Bahande, a security officer, was posted near the glass-walled gift shop. In those first days he merely nodded to the new manager. But one morning he had to skip breakfast because his older daughter — she had a face like a goddess, she had a spinal deformity — had trouble settling herself at her workbench, and the younger one, who usually helped out, was late for school, and so he had to make all three bologna sandwiches: his, Camilla’s, Acelle’s. On his midmorning break, when he would normally be walking in the hospital garden, he headed hungrily for the cafeteria instead. But he stopped to look at a ship in a bottle in the gift-shop window — he’d like to try making one of those things — and then, looking up, looking farther in, he saw the café tables, one of them occupied by a man slumped with worry, and behind him, in a little recess, the manager. Her gray hair was cut close to her narrow head. The slide of her nose was interrupted by a bump, adding beauty to a face which was already distinguished. She was slicing something and the sight of that something pulled him right in. It was linzer torte. It turned out to taste better even than Marie’s, God rest her soul.

Thereafter he came in every morning at 10:15. He ate various breads, various coffee cakes, various pies; also citron gâteau and baklava and a puff inside which seemed to float not chocolate but its divine essence. He liked them all but he preferred the less sweet pastries. She began to make more of those, fewer of the sugary ones.

Since the gift shop was rarely busy before eleven, they were able lightly to pass the time of day. One morning — the treat was gingerbread with pieces of ginger in it — he asked her to join him at his table. After a moment of confusion, during which her palms reached for her sculpted hair, she washed her hands again and cut a slice for herself and sat down opposite him.

Without discussion Joe and Acelle went to the Castle, using the old entrance, the one Zeph favored. In the emergency room Acelle gave her name and the family’s insurance number. She knew it by heart because of her sister’s frequent visits. The doctor thought Joe was Acelle’s brother and allowed him to remain in the cubicle, but when he examined Acelle he pulled the curtain.

“I’m going to give you a shot of Novocain and then wash this out for you. Have your mother change the dressing every day and put on this ointment, and don’t take a bath tonight. I’ll give you a tetanus shot for good measure.” After doing exactly what he said he’d do, he rolled her onto her back and lifted her easily — she was a small girl — and stood her up. “Dizzy?” he asked. His hand on her shoulder steadied her for a couple of necessary minutes. “Sitting will be painful for a few days.” He flicked open the curtain to reveal Joe, waiting on a stool, and on his lap a plastic bag holding Acelle’s bloody underpants. “Did you make that incision, dude?”

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Good job.”

“Good job,” Acelle echoed as they left, and she attempted to take his hand, and after a few moments he allowed it to be taken.

And now Zeph prepared to visit patients scheduled for surgery tomorrow. He put on fresh scrubs because people like to see their doctors in costume.

The first was an old childless widow with cancer of the tongue. It was advanced — she had ignored it, had skipped appointments with dentist and doctor, had worn a kerchief whatever the weather, had invented excuses not to visit her few friends still living, all incapacitated anyway. But yesterday, fate in the form of a fissure in the sidewalk had tripped her. The ambulance attendants, placing her swelling hand on her thigh, gently removed the telltale babushka. The lesion bulged like an apricot. The emergency-room doc splinted her broken fingers and she was whisked to Head and Neck, and examined, and talked to, and scheduled for surgery.

Of course the mutilated tongue slurred her speech. But Zeph understood it all, giving her the occasional gift of a direct gaze.

“I taut…go way,” she fabricated.

He knew she had not thought it would go away; she had thought instead that discovery would mean instant yanking out of the organ and death shortly afterward, whereas secrecy would mean prolonged if solitary life.

She wanted to know — she had resorted to a pad of paper now, managing the pencil with her less damaged hand — how much of her tongue they would leave. Her surgeon wouldn’t say.

“She can’t say, Mrs. Flaherty. Neither can I. But I can tell you that there are many ways therapists can restore some patients’ speech.” She had to be content with that, and also with his now averted gaze, though he did press her hand.