I am such an idiot. Sometimes I look at myself and I think: No wonder Nick finds me ridiculous, frivolous, spoiled, compared to his mom. Maureen is dying. She hides her disease behind big smiles and roomy embroidered sweatshirts, answering every question about her health with: ‘Oh, I’m just fine, but how are you doing, sweetie?’ She is dying, but she is not going to admit it, not yet. So yesterday she phones me in the morning, asks me if I want to go on a field trip with her and her friends – she is having a good day, she wants to get out of the house as much as she can – and I agree immediately, even though I knew they’d be doing nothing that particularly interested me: pinochle, bridge, some church activity that usually requires sorting things.
‘We’ll be there in fifteen minutes,’ she says. ‘Wear short sleeves.’
Cleaning. It had to be cleaning. Something requiring elbow grease. I throw on a short-sleeve shirt, and in exactly fifteen minutes, I am opening the door to Maureen, bald under a knitted cap, giggling with her two friends. They are all wearing matching appliqueéd T-shirts, all bells and ribbons, with the words The PlasMamas airbrushed across their chests.
I think they’ve started a do-wop group. But then we all climb into Rose’s old Chrysler – old-old, one of those where the front seat goes all the way across, a grandmotherly car that smells of lady cigarettes – and off we merrily go to the plasma donation center.
‘We’re Mondays and Thursdays,’ Rose explains, looking at me in the rearview.
‘Oh,’ I say. How else does one reply? Oh, those are awesome plasma days!
‘You’re allowed to give twice a week,’ says Maureen, the bells on her sweatshirt jingling. ‘The first time you get twenty dollars, the second time you get thirty. That’s why everyone’s in such a good mood today.’
‘You’ll love it,’ Vicky says. ‘Everyone just sits and chats, like a beauty salon.’
Maureen squeezes my arm and says quietly, ‘I can’t give anymore, but I thought you could be my proxy. It might be a nice way for you to get some pin money – it’s good for a girl to have a little cash of her own.’
I swallow a quick gust of anger: I used to have more than a little cash of my own, but I gave it to your son.
A scrawny man in an undersize jean jacket hangs around the parking lot like a stray dog. Inside, though, the place is clean. Well lit, piney-smelling, with Christian posters on the wall, all doves and mist. But I know I can’t do it. Needles. Blood. I can’t do either. I don’t really have any other phobias, but those two are solid – I am the girl who swoons at a paper cut. Something about the opening of skin: peeling, slicing, piercing. During chemo with Maureen, I never looked when they put in the needle.
‘Hi, Cayleese!’ Maureen calls out as we enter, and a heavy black woman in a vaguely medical uniform calls back, ‘Hi there, Maureen! How you feeling?’
‘Oh, I’m fine, just fine – but how are you?’
‘How long have you been doing this?’ I ask.
‘A while,’ Maureen says. ‘Cayleese is everyone’s favorite, she gets the needle in real smooth. Which was always good for me, because I have rollers.’ She proffers her forearm with its ropey blue veins. When I first met Mo, she was fat, but no more. It’s odd, she actually looks better fat. ‘See, try to put your finger on one.’
I look around, hoping Cayleese is going to usher us in.
‘Go on, try.’
I touch a fingertip to the vein and feel it roll out from under. A rush of heat overtakes me.
‘So, is this our new recruit?’ Cayleese asks, suddenly beside me. ‘Maureen brags on you all the time. So, we’ll need you to fill out some paperwork—’
‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I can’t do needles, I can’t do blood. I have a serious phobia. I literally can’t do it.’
I realize I haven’t eaten today, and a wave of wooziness hits me. My neck feels weak.
‘Everything here is very hygienic, you’re in very good hands,’ Cayleese says.
‘No, it’s not that, truly. I’ve never given blood. My doctor gets angry at me because I can’t even handle a yearly blood test for, like, cholesterol.’
Instead, we wait. It takes two hours, Vicky and Rose strapped to churning machines. Like they are being harvested. They’ve even been branded on their fingers, so they can’t give more than twice in a week anywhere – the marks show up under a purple light.
‘That’s the James Bond part,’ Vicky says, and they all giggle. Maureen hums the Bond theme song (I think), and Rose makes a gun with her fingers.
‘Can’t you old biddies keep it down for once?’ calls a white-haired woman four chairs down. She leans up over the reclined bodies of three oily men – green-blue tattoos on their arms, stubble on their chins, the kind of men I pictured donating plasma – and gives a finger wave with her loose arm.
‘Mary! I thought you were coming tomorrow!’
‘I was, but my unemployment doesn’t come for a week, and I was down to a box of cereal and a can of creamed corn!’
They all laugh like near-starvation is amusing – this town is sometimes too much, so desperate and so in denial. I begin to feel ill, the sound of blood churning, the long plastic ribbons of blood coursing from bodies to machines, the people being, what, being farmed. Blood everywhere I look, out in the open, where blood isn’t supposed to be. Deep and dark, almost purple.
I get up to go to the bathroom, throw cold water on my face. I take two steps and my ears close up, my vision pinholes, I feel my own heartbeat, my own blood, and as I fall, I say, ‘Oh. Sorry.’
I barely remember the ride home. Maureen tucks me into bed, a glass of apple juice, a bowl of soup, at the bedside. We try to call Nick. Go says he’s not at The Bar, and he doesn’t pick up his cell.
The man disappears.
‘He was like that as a boy too – he’s a wanderer,’ Maureen says. ‘Worst thing you could ever do is ground him to his room.’ She positions a cool washcloth on my forehead; her breath has the tangy smell of aspirin. ‘Your job is to rest, okay? I’ll keep calling till I get that boy home.’
When Nick gets home, I’m asleep. I wake up to hear him taking a shower, and I check the time: 11:04 p.m. He must have gone by The Bar after all – he likes to shower after a shift, get the beer and salty popcorn smell off his skin. (He says.)
He slips into bed, and when I turn to him with open eyes, he looks dismayed I’m awake.
‘We’ve been trying to reach you for hours,’ I say.
‘My phone was out of juice. You fainted?’
‘I thought you said your phone was out of juice.’
He pauses, and I know he is about to lie. The worst feeling: when you just have to wait and prepare yourself for the lie. Nick is old-fashioned, he needs his freedom, he doesn’t like to explain himself. He’ll know he has plans with the guys for a week, and he’ll still wait until an hour before the poker game to tell me nonchalantly, ‘Hey, so I thought I’d join the guys for poker tonight, if that’s okay with you,’ and leave me to be the bad guy if I’ve made other plans. You don’t ever want to be the wife who keeps her husband from playing poker – you don’t want to be the shrew with the hair curlers and the rolling pin. So you swallow your disappointment and say okay. I don’t think he does this to be mean, it’s just how he was raised. His dad did his own thing, always, and his mom put up with it. Until she divorced him.
He begins his lie. I don’t even listen.