Gerard stares at me, uncomprehending. “You made her up? You made up an imaginary daughter?”
“Of course not,” I say. “What, you think I’m an idiot? I made up a real daughter. Yeah.” I can feel the sea, the heat behind my face. “I don’t go around making up imaginary daughters.” I pause. “That would get too abstract. Even for me.” I think of Pinocchio. Of Thumbelina. Of the children in Hansel and Gretel living much of their lives as baked goods.
Gerard tries to be kind. “What is she like?”
The late afternoon light tinkerbells around the room. I want to talk about something else. I feel embarrassed. “Would you like me to read or pour you some ice water or something? You’re too injured to be interested in this.”
But Gerard’s interested. “Do you imagine having conversations and everything?”
“Everything. Babysitters, the whole bit.” I can hear the defensiveness in my voice. I wonder if he thinks I’m mad. “Since my brother got divorced and my niece Annie lives off with her mother in Michigan, I don’t get to be Aunt Benna very much — so I made up Georgianne to keep me company. She’s a cross between Annie and my husband George. I pretend she’s his child and sometimes we talk about things. It seemed one of the few decent ways to bring someone into the world.” I shrug. “I just kind of gave in to the idea of her. You know how kids can be.”
“I’ll bet you’re very cute together.”
“We’re disgustingly cute together.”
“Do you plan things in advance? Or does she pretty much take care of things on her own?”
I hesitate, not knowing what he’s asking and whether he’s asking it seriously. I twist my watch around on my wrist. “You know what the Bible says: Even the lilies of the field, um, make it the hell up as they go along. I also have a friend named Eleanor.”
Gerard’s right eye has come back and both of them are trying to fathom me, scrutinizing like a couple of old concierges. “Do I dare ask who she is?”
“She’s, uh, a very heavily made-up woman. Heavily, heavily made-up.”
Gerard laughs and I’m relieved. “What is she like?”
“Like me only with a wig. She tends to shout things like, ‘What, wait until I’m forty and have a Mongolian idiot?’ Things like that.”
“Is there anyone else you’ve made up?”
People come and go so quickly here. “No,” I say, doubt at my lips like an old breakfast.
Gerard lifts up one puppeted arm and places it on my knee. “You’re sort of neat and sort of crazy, Benna,” he says.
What he means, I think, is that I’m depressing the hell out of him. Out the window the sky has gone all hazy slate. There are churchbells playing at the Christ Methodist church across the way. “How embarrassing. I can’t believe I told you.” I’m determined not to cry. “I can’t believe you fell in a goddamn bathtub.” I put my hands to my face, then peek out at him from between my fingers.
“I have secrets, too, you know,” says Gerard, growing thoughtful. “Things about my past I’ve never told you. I have a real nightmare that took place in a restaurant years ago. I’m surprised to this day that I can even go out to dinner anywhere. I know how it is needing to make things—”
“Gerard, you don’t have to go into this. You’re in the hospital, for pete’s sake.”
He looks at me, startled. I suddenly know what he’s going to say. He’s going to say, “That’s it with you, isn’t it? You don’t really want to talk about anything, do you? You know invention and indignation and slamming car doors, but what about serious conversation, Benna? People have lives. As difficult as your own has been, there are others whose lives have been even more so.”
But he doesn’t say this. What he says is, “You know, don’t you?” I try not to look at him. “Maple told you.” Gerard’s face, his bare scrubby face, grows tight and sad. He looks down at his bedsheets, then he looks back up at me, tries to look insouciantly amused. “I never knew you knew.”
“I knew.”
“And all this time you liked me because you felt sorry for me.”
“Yup, that’s the only reason.” I want here to be able to tell Gerard how it is that I care for him. But I remain still, like someone being mugged, while the church chimes land on the last vibrating note of “Silent Night.”
“Mom, watch me hold my breath.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Why?”
“It’s not good for you.”
“How come?”
“It affects your personality.”
“What are we having for dinner?”
“Donuts. I thought we’d go to Donut-O-Donut.” She used to love to go there for dessert. I figure if we go there for the main course, she will love me for life, though her skeletal system will suffer and fail to grow.
Instead she says, “That’s no fun. Can I eat at the Shubbys’ tonight?”
And though I hesitate, I finally say, “Sure,” and let her go, though it’s hard.
· · ·
Eleanor, too, seems to have become unavailable. Perhaps both she and George are simply being resentful. I have exposed them, like opening an oven door on a couple of soufflés: They will never forgive me.
I phone Darrel, but there’s no one home.
I go to the hospital over the weekend and read kiddy-lit to Gerard. “Dis kid Alice,” says Gerard, doing a bad Marlon Brando imitation. “She really had like some life.” He seems to be doing fine. They are talking about letting him out before Christmas, perhaps even later this week, though he still has tubes in his arms and throws up once a day.
The man with the magazine behind the partition is always telling us not to bother with him, to pretend he’s not there. Nonetheless I read the stories loud enough for him to hear. Sometimes he asks to see the pictures. His wife has brought him a poinsettia. “Hate plants,” he grumbles. The nurses call him Sal. Gerard says it’s short for Salvador.
“He’s had a life that makes yours and mine look like Jack and Jill,” Gerard adds in a portentous whisper, though he doesn’t tell me more about it, and I don’t ask. Maybe I’m afraid to hear. Maybe I’m thinking about Jack and Jill, how they had it pretty rough themselves. “I know for somebody else my life might seem easy,” Eleanor said once. “But for me it’s extremely difficult.” It wasn’t stupid people who managed to be happy in life; it was people who were extra clever.
Monday was the teacher’s last day of classes, and there were puddles all over the floor. Students stomped snow from their boots, and winter coats slipped from the backs of chairs. The teacher passed out cookies and cups and wine and then course evaluations. “Be as honest as you feel is absolutely necessary,” she said.
“You forgot napkins,” someone wailed.
An older, black student named Darrel arrived late after not having been there for a week. He spent twenty minutes filling out the evaluation and refused offers of wine.
At the front of the room the teacher was calling: “When you’ve finished with the evaluation you can put it face down on the front desk and go. Those of you who still owe me work, get it in by Thursday. Otherwise, have a wonderful Christmas break and it’s been nice working with you this semester.” She had always been told that nice was an empty, insipid word, but lately she’d come to rely on it quite heavily. If you can’t say something’s “nice,” you can’t say anything at all, she decided.
Someone on their way out left a carefully wrapped present and a card on her desk. She would take it home. It would be either a coffee mug or some Charlie cologne. “Thank you,” she said.