Holding Wonder

I haven't been lost even once since Greta died. It's as though I had been purged of some dark sickness-which doesn't comfort me as I huddle on my bed listening to the papery rustle of rain across my darkening windows.
I wish I didn't have that other lost self. She well could have dreamed up the whole thing. People who are bankrupt of legitimate interest and excitement often take refuge in imaginary terrors. They're much more engrossing than imaginary delights. My lost self may have done just that. Or perhaps that last meal of Greta's in the cafeteria actually did have death in it-natural death-and my lost self sensed it and misinterpreted it giving it a local habitation and a name.
Anyway, today the personnel office asked me if I'd pack Greta's things and get them ready to send back home to her folks-back in Tennessee somewhere, I believe. As soon as I gather myself up a little more, I'll go get it done. There are cardboard cartons in the hall awaiting the overflow from her suitcase and trunk.
Well, they told me to pack everything-but what good will all these little charts do them? Little hand-drawn charts something like the ones you find on the foot of hospital beds, with Greta's temperature and pulse and all the other tickings of her body for the last three years-temperature graphs that stubbornly stay on normal. One excited chart kept in red pencil is of her flu last winter.
What will they do with all these notations of prescriptions-these lists of pills, powders and vitamins? How did she ever find room for meals if she took all this junk? And why keep the lists? Look at this one.
`Pick up at pharmacy. Tuesday 12th PM' and a bunch of abbreviations. I ought to throw them all out. But then they said to pack everything. Let me ease my knees. I've been folded up here on the floor too long. Tuesday. Tuesday the 12th. That rings something. Tuesday, 12th. Oh, I remember. That's the afternoon we practically had old home week at the pharmacy. There had been a sudden flurry of colds and hayfever, diarrhea, aches and pains and other unpleasantnesses. I was trying to untie the knots in my breathing apparatus with antihistamines and had plodded heavy headed and streaming eyed to the hospital pharmacy and slumped against the wall by the prescription window. I was but completely miserable and sort of-dozed-I guess, waiting in the empty silence for Our Pharmacist to come back from wherever he'd gone.
That's odd. I can't remember. I slumped against the wall. Then there I was, trying to go out the door as someone was trying to come in. I almost dropped my little box twisted in that ugly buff paper. She steadied me and laughed a little and said, "You make the third one of us I've bumped into so far. I saw the other two out in the parking lot. What's going on? A convention?"
My answering snort of laughter ended disastrously and I was muffled in Kleenex all the way out to the car-too busy to wonder. But now I'm wondering. What happened in that time I lost? Lost? Maybe that was the first time I really got lost, instead of the time at the office.
Maybe I leaned through that window and helped myself from one of those cryptic jars. Maybe my lost self needed more excitement. Maybe it was fun to hold death in her hand, even if she never meant to use it. Oh, cuss this paper! I wish I'd never seen it. Quick. Pack everything. There there there. Let them sort it out in Tennessee. The list is still by me on the floor. Even if I crumple it as tight as I can, I can't erase the sick fear that's welling up in me. What happened to me in the pharmacy? That day must have been my first honeycomb bell.
All of Greta's things are gone now. All except the crumpled list. I've smoothed it out and crumpled it up again so many times that it's beginning to be limply flexible. I've been feeling odd of late as though Greta's death pulled up a long string in me somewhere and tightened me all together like a pearl necklace. Now each facet of me is so tight up against every other facet that there's no room for wandering or losing myself. Even these days of monotony seem fuller because they're more a cohesive whole-but rather a dull whole. That's why I haven't thrown the list away. It's a sort of touchstone for excitement.
Cleo leaned her arms on the cafeteria table. "You know, it's awful, but it seems as though Greta has been gone a hundred years."
"Or never existed," said Dorothea. "You have your sleeve in a puddle of coffee."
"Oh-darn! My clean sweater." Cleo mopped at it with a paper napkin.
"If those busboys would get off their fat and start bussing-" Allison dabbed fretfully at the table in front of her. "And this floor is a disgrace." "I'm eating out tomorrow night." Kit's face softened cross the cheek bones. "Bunny's taking me to The Settlement." "Forty miles for a meal?" Allison gulped her coffee.
"And I hear the food's as lousy as it is expensive and who on earth is Bunny?"
"Yes, who is Bunny?" Dorothea chased the last quivering morsel of red gelatin around her plate. "Have I missed something?"
"Oh," said Cleo, flushing awkwardly. "Bunny's her GS 12, isn't he, Kit. His real name is Brunford, I think."
"Yes," said Kit shortly. "He's the one I wanted to kill the other night. He's so pigheaded sometimes."
Kill? A ripple ran around the table. Kill? To make unalive? To extinguish? To take Being away from someone? "But he'll do," Kit went on.
"Until someone better comes along?" Allison smiled unpleasantly.
"Until someone better comes along! Precisely. Anything wrong with that?" Kit's face was wooden.
"You know, I thought you were real gone on Our Pharmacist," said Dorothea, trying to stir some warmth into her cold coffee. "It's a shame nothing came of it."
"Huh!" Allison deftly shoved a falling piece of lettuce back into her mouth. "It looked suspiciously like he dropped her. How's that for a switch! Now maybe I'll have half a chance with him myself. He's worth six Bunnys."
"Please, girls, don't fight!" Cleo pleaded into the wrath on Kit's face. "Not so soon after Greta-?"
"What on earth has that got to do with it?" Kit stood up, shoving her chair back abruptly. "And what makes you think she was ever living? Pill to pill-pain to pain– She's well out of it. "
"Who are we to say she's well out of it?" Cleo's eyes flashed unaccustomed fire. "She didn't ask to die!"
Then why did she? Why did she die? She shouldn't have. Invalids like that outlive us all. But she did die. Whose hand dropped death in a cup and why? Why? Maybe she died of Tuesday the 12th. Why should Tuesday the 12th be so fatal? Who else was at the pharmacy? Did they have to wait for Our Pharmacist, too? Where was he? In some back room bandaging his emotional wounds-cast aside for a G S 12? Oh let me back! Let me catch the thread of conversation. I won't get lost again.
"It must have been something she took. Sit down, Kit." Allison's tone was half
an apology. "What kind of a car has this Bunny of yours?"
"An Olds-like riding on air," Kit's face filled out subtly as she fed on the interior vision of such a car.
"Do you think he might be The One?" Dorothea turned her spoon over and over in her hands.
"The One?" Kit laughed shortly. "Naive, aren't you? There is no One. There's only a make-do."
"That's awful cynical," protested Cleo.
"It's true," said Kit. "You can't fool me when it comes to people. They're what they are because of the pressures moulding them at the moment. Relax any one of the pressures, or increase one, and you get a different person."