7 Abbott and the Visiting Nurse
The change to Abbott’s life-insurance policy requires that a nurse visit his home to make sure he is not about to perish. She arrives this morning, right on time, carrying a large black bag. She moves up the driveway like a blade. What Abbott knows about nurses is that they are honed to a sharp edge. They don’t get paid enough, they work weird hours, they lift heavy things, they get dirty. They deal with ridiculous doctors and ridiculous patients within a ridiculous health care system. They’ve seen it all. Nobody appreciates them. They are righteously aggrieved. They have strong opinions, which they voice as facts. They develop their own strange, contradictory, and wildly divergent theories of well-being, illness, and recovery. They smoke. They are disgruntled, and their disgruntlement gives them purpose, energy, a quick step. They are not hopeful or cheerful or optimistic — just competent. Abbott admires them quite a bit, though naturally he is scared of them. First, Abbott and the nurse fill out paperwork at the dining-room table. Abbott reviews the policy. He understands that he can’t commit suicide for two years, and he initials. He understands, at least vaguely, what “the death of the policyholder” means. He understands they’ll be checking his blood for the very worst diseases. The thought is so sad Abbott can barely remain seated. It’s nearly impossible to imagine not being there to watch your children grow up. It seems easy to imagine, but when you imagine them without you, you imagine it as if you’re still watching from behind a tree or within a closet with the door cracked. The nurse pulls a scale from her bag, and Abbott steps on it. She measures his waist size. “What do you teach?” she says, and Abbott tells her. “Oh, God,” she says, laughing. Her hands are powerful. She smells like cigarettes. “Go pee,” she says, “and just leave this cup in there.” Abbott pees in the cup and leaves it in the bathroom. The nurse has been here less than ten minutes, and she has already made him feel like a visitor in his own house. When he comes back, she goes to the bathroom to handle his urine. Abbott hears the flush of the toilet. She returns to take his blood pressure and pulse. When she breaks the seal on a plastic bag and removes a needle, Abbott extends his arm across the table and turns away. “You’re one of those?” the nurse says. Abbott says, “I’d just rather not look.” The nurse begins a conversation to get him to relax. She talks about all these campus shootings. The guns, the mental illness. She asks if the university has been running any workshops or drills. She puts the needle in his arm. “I think so,” Abbott says. He looks out at the street, where three neighbors are talking and pointing up at something on a house — a gutter or a chimney. Abbott can hear the shouts of children, the rhythmic creak of a metal swing set. “I worry about society,” the nurse says, removing the needle from Abbott’s arm. He turns and sees the dark vial. “You know?” she says. “Society is just getting worse and worse.” This notion is central to Abbott’s identity. He has held it for many years. For a long time it was a way to choose friends and television programs. It was something like an animating force. It wasn’t necessarily that he wanted Society to be getting worse and worse, but the undeniable worsening of Society gave him a way to be in the world. “I think you’re right,” he tells the nurse. He still believes it. The difference now, though, is that he wishes he didn’t.
8 Abbott Concedes
Unconsciousness, however, eradicates the possibility of surprise. A man who remains conscious may find himself living a day he never imagined, various elements of his life coalescing, like words in a sentence, to create something new and fantastical. For instance, tonight Abbott bathes his young daughter, puts her to bed, and then bathes his wife. (Her hair, enhanced by pregnancy, is a gleaming rope. The shampoo he rinses with an orange cup shaped like an elephant.)
9 Discretion is the Better Part of Discreteness
It came as a revelation to Abbott when, several nights ago, he gleaned from an offhand remark of his wife’s that the tomatoes the family has been enjoying this summer are not from the grocery store but from some private residence on Rolling Ridge Drive, about a mile away from Abbott’s house. He found it simultaneously threatening and spiritually arousing that his pregnant wife could have been buying produce out of some vegetable gardener’s driveway for weeks without his knowledge. It wasn’t quite jealousy. It was the shocking autonomy of the loved one. “Is it like some kind of farmer’s stand?” he asked, trying to comprehend. “Or produce stand?” “No,” she said, with a nonchalance that may or may not have been feigned. “Just people. People with a card table.” Abbott then requested, with the firmness of a demand, that he accompany his wife the next time she buys tomatoes “right off the street.” “OK,” she said. “Sure.” So here we are, a sunny late morning in which Abbott drives his wife and daughter to Rolling Ridge Drive for tomatoes. On the way, Abbott learns that his wife has been making this trip on foot for most of the summer, but the heat and advanced pregnancy now make it difficult to walk. “So you drive?” Abbott asks. “Yes,” she says. “How many times?” he says. “What does it matter?” she asks. “A ballpark figure,” he says. Abbott’s wife says, “I don’t know. Four? Five?” (What must be most disconcerting to a spouse about a private investigator’s manila envelope of telephotographs, Abbott thinks — but certainly not right now — is not the demonstration of infidelity but the demonstration of separateness.) Abbott considers asking why she never told him about the tomatoes, but he does not. He wonders why he has not once seen his wife enter the house with a bag of tomatoes. Has he been that dazed and inattentive? Does he in a sense not want to see the bag of tomatoes? Or has she been sneaking the tomatoes into the house? These tomatoes — they are first-rate. Only a man desperate to believe they come from a grocery store could believe they come from a grocery store. “You might see a big black cat,” Abbott’s wife tells their daughter. “Sometimes there’s a big cat.” Abbott’s wife’s familiarity with the tomato vendor’s pet does not sit well with Abbott. “Tractor,” the girl says, transposing her adventures. And here they are in front of a split-level ranch on Rolling Ridge Drive. Abbott might have driven right past it had his wife not pointed it out. In the driveway there is indeed a card table, on top of which are small cartons of tomatoes and a sign too small to read from the road. Abbott takes his daughter out of her car seat. “Where is the proprietor?” asks Abbott. “They’re usually not around,” his wife says as she walks up the drive. All — or many — of Abbott’s questions are answered when he approaches the card table, on which he sees not only the sign and the small cartons of tomatoes, but a stack of plastic bags pinned down by a rock and an old Folger’s can with the lid on. The sign asks patrons please not to take the containers, but instead to put the tomatoes into one of the plastic bags beneath the rock. The sign also indicates that a carton costs two dollars, payable to the coffee can (in which a patron also might find ones to make change). Abbott’s daughter is on the front porch of the ranch, squeezing the tail of an enormous black cat. Abbott’s wife transfers two cartons of tomatoes to a bag, then returns the empty containers to the table. She takes the lid off the coffee can, puts in a five-dollar bill, and removes a dollar as change. She has obviously done this numerous times, perhaps nine or ten. Abbott can see quite a few bills at the bottom of the can. “So,” Abbott’s wife says, “this is it.” Abbott collects his daughter and buckles her into her car seat. On the short ride home, all three members of the family are in high spirits. Abbott’s wife loves these tomatoes. Abbott’s daughter loves animals with furry tails. And Abbott loves the theory of human nature that the unattended coffee can allows him to cling to. If Abbott’s wife has had occasion to speak to the elderly owners of the house and if she knows for a fact that thrice this summer some human has made off with the coffee can in broad daylight — the last of whom actually pelted the house with tomatoes before absconding — then that is something she keeps to herself.