Джоан Силбер - Improvement

The male nurse was named Silas and he knew what he was doing. You could tell in about a second. He got the oxygen machine set up closer to where Amanda liked to sit, he talked to her and not just to her husband, who’d come home early for this. He said, “You people are doing well. I see that. In the situation.”

Darisse had heard them squabble but Fred the husband was good most of the time. He held Amanda’s arm when she took steps; he called her Honey. Would Claude ever do as well for her if she was sick? She could imagine it, but a person could imagine anything.

Darisse walked the nurse to the door. “Very nice to meet you,” he said, more warmly than he had to. He probably looked better out of the white smock. She herself was in green, with those ugly matching pants. Never mind.

On Friday she got to Lionel’s mother’s house exactly at five, because he could be a real prick if she was late. Lionel opened the door and said, “You come here dressed like a janitor, in those green things. What’s that going to mean to Jeshauna?”

“What’s she know about janitors?”

Jeshauna, who heard her voice, began screeching in excitement from inside the house. Lionel’s mother was saying, “It’s okay, baby. Don’t have to scream.”

Lionel just stared. “I should make you go home and change into something decent.”

Darisse didn’t talk about it. She just stood there.

“Next time you look better, okay?”

Once Darisse got past the hallway she was stormed by Jeshauna, the world’s fastest toddler. Darisse scooped her up and said, “Princess girl.” There she was, chunky body, pointed chin, round soulful eyes, at last. Lionel’s mother had put her hair in cornrows with tiny pink barrettes. Darisse always thought that she braided it too tight for such a little kid but Jeshauna never complained.

Lionel’s mother had packed a backpack large enough for a whole kindergarten, and Darisse had to put it on and carry it to the car while she pushed Jeshauna in her stroller. The weight of no-Claude was still on her, but she could get lively for Jeshauna. She had to do some degree of acting at her job, keeping the more useless forms of despair under the rug, and she could certainly do as much for her own girl.

And the weekend went very well. Jeshauna, who was almost three now, picked over her French fries at McDonald’s with her usual obsessive rapture, and later she was content watching cartoons on a tablet in the small, dark bedroom that was Darisse’s. She did fine with Darisse’s grandmother when they were all in the kitchen at breakfast—she sang a tuneless nonsense song for her, and Darisse’s grandmother laughed in appreciation, which she didn’t always do. The weather was sunny and not too hot all weekend. Frances brought sandwiches on Sunday and they had a picnic by the river, with Jeshauna running around the playground so much that she actually tired herself out. They napped together, back in Darisse’s room, and Darisse dreamed something about Claude that wasn’t good. And it was late when she woke up—she had to hustle them both to get back to Lionel fast. “Why’re you always so slow? You do it on purpose,” she yelled at Jeshauna. And they didn’t get to his house till eight fifteen instead of seven.

Lionel’s mother had a house that had been her father’s, a narrow two-story wood-frame on the edge of Jackson Ward. Lionel had set up his own apartment in the basement, but he was out on the porch when Darisse pulled up. The last time she was late he’d cut her back to three weekends a month. “Waiting waiting waiting,” he said, though she’d phoned from the car. His mother, who didn’t hate Darisse, beckoned her in and took the sleeping Jeshauna from her arms. Kids slept through any number of things.

Lionel said, “You never change.”

“We fell asleep, wasn’t on purpose. You know that. Listen, I’m sincerely sorry,” she said. This was a code between them.

Sincerity meant a favor. After he took the backpack into the house and came out again, she followed him around to the back entrance to his apartment. When he flicked on the light they were in his living room, which had an old red sofa and a straw rug from somewhere; he’d made an effort. They sat on the couch together and she put her hand on his knee.

He took her hand and put it on his crotch, with a faint smile on his face, a teasing look, and she rubbed him with the flat of her palm. This had been her idea, this strategy, when he first decided to start making rules about when she could and couldn’t see Jeshauna. Darisse had very little to bargain with and had in fact been relieved to come up with this. Now she waited while he unzipped his pants, and she leaned toward him and went down on her knees. He liked seeing her kneel, she could tell. Once she had loved sex any way they did it, once she had loved him. Now his body had a different meaning; the hardness and the taste of him were not stairways to heaven but a kind of work. But it was nothing, to do for her kid. People did much more than this. She felt him growing and moving under her tongue and there was some triumph for her in that. It kept him from having all the cards, if you wanted to look at it that way, though most people wouldn’t.

She’d done this just once after meeting Claude, and that had been in the very early days, when Claude was just a new rush of excitement. And it wasn’t entirely bad then to have Claude to think of, no matter what Lionel was doing. She liked having her own precious secret. Now, as Lionel began to thrust inside her mouth, she did feel like weeping. A person as sad as she was shouldn’t have to do this. And there was more work in this part of it, so she began to feel that she was after all betraying Claude. Doing too much. She went on with it, what was the point in stopping?

When she drove home that night, she was thinking too much about what Claude would’ve thought if he’d known. Maybe he did know, maybe he’d been told by Lionel, maybe that was why he was gone. Not that she ever said a word about her private life to Lionel, but Richmond wasn’t that big a place—someone could’ve mentioned seeing her, saying she had this New York guy now. But it wasn’t like Lionel to take that much trouble to spite her. He wasn’t given to big evil gestures or tricky plots, he was lazy. She was just making up a story now, getting stuck in her own mind.

It was only a short drive back to her grandmother’s, over the other side of the highway to Gilpin Court, a neighborhood nobody was rushing to gentrify. Darisse had spent half of her childhood in this same apartment, in a low-rise housing project on one of the bare and treeless blocks. She was safe here, she often said, because people knew her, but her grandmother always snorted, “Yeah, safe, right.”

Maybe Claude had been shot. No one had suggested it, but he could’ve been on the wrong corner at the wrong time; he didn’t know Richmond and his friends didn’t either. And maybe it was true that gangs were moving in to control the cigarette routes. Maybe Claude and the others hadn’t known what they were getting into. Even she could tell they were bullshitting half the time.

Silas the nurse came back that week to check on how the plan of care was being implemented and see how the supplies were holding out. “What kind of name,” Amanda said, “is Silas?” She was pausing longer for breath these days.

“In the Bible,” he said, “he goes traveling around preaching with Paul. They get locked in prison but an earthquake breaks their chains and opens the door.”

“Are you religious?” Darisse asked.

“Not me,” he said, “but my parents, oh, yes.”

Darisse was secretly becoming more religious, but in private; she had her own rituals. She sat on her bed with her eyes closed; she thought of the walls of the room turning into air. Air from a larger space. The point was to ask for strength. Improvement wasn’t coming any other way. She was doing this almost every night and there was an aftereffect that pleased her.