Separate Kingdoms (P.S.) Read online

  “Wow,” Arnie said before thinking, unable to suppress his surprise.

  “Yeah, she’s something, huh?” said a voice behind him.

  It was a red-haired woman about his age sitting and smoking at one of the tables on the patio. The man sitting next to her had removed his C-Leg and was poking at the knee joint with an allen wrench.

  “You’d think she’d want a prosthesis at least just for balance,” Arnie said.

  “Too high up,” the woman said, touching the side of her hand to the top of her thigh. “You have to have something to fit it on.”

  Arnie’s face reddened. “Of course.”

  “Shoot, sometimes I think I’d be better off without this one,” the man next to her said, tapping his leg on the table.

  It was nice of him to try to put others at ease like that. They introduced themselves—Bill and Cheryl Tider, from Arlington Heights—and gestured for Arnie to join them. He sat down at their table, all the while keeping his eye on Marion as her group got into their carts and jerked into motion, speeding over the little bridge and down toward the fairway. It felt like the morning, decades ago, when he first brought their daughter Elizabeth to her new school in Elgin after he’d been transferred. “Give ’em hell,” he had said, patting her shoulder to nudge her toward the other kids on the playground. She’d refused to say good-bye or turn back and wave, though he stood there for twenty minutes, even after she’d gone in the building.

  “So, she just gets around with those crutches like that?” Arnie asked this couple, shifting his thoughts back to Marion’s golf partner.

  Cheryl gave a big nod. “Lost her leg as a little girl, some kind of farming accident. She told me once, but I can’t remember the specifics. Anyway, big farm family like that, she had to just get around however she could. They’ve got three kids, too.”

  “Hooh.” Arnie shook his head.

  “I always find it inspiring here,” Cheryl said.

  “Where’s your inspiration when I’m searching for the remote control?” Bill said.

  “You poor baby.”

  Arnie watched them closely. “Can I help with the leg?” he asked. Until last year he’d been a mechanical engineer all his life, designing and reconfiguring parts for generators. After the accident it seemed best to retire a couple years early, but he missed the job sometimes, the figuring and drafting, the public demands on his time.

  “I’m not getting the right swivel action in the knee joint,” Bill said, glancing around at the last few groups of golfers, who were about to leave without him.

  “It’s because you’ve gained weight again,” Cheryl said. “It always breaks down when you get heavy.”

  “Ah!” Bill cried, snapping his hand back. “That’s it. I got it.” He picked up the leg and showed Arnie the swivel action of the knee.

  “There you go,” Arnie said, feeling useless again.

  Bill pushed his shorts up to his hip and fitted the leg back onto his stump, pulling the Velcro strip through the hole at the bottom of the socket and securing it into place on top of his thigh. He stood up and took a few tentative steps and turns.

  “That’ll have to do.” He kissed Cheryl on the forehead and shook Arnie’s hand, then went off to join the others. Most of them were men who, like Bill, wore their artificial arms and legs without the flesh-colored covering that was meant to help them blend in. In their shorts and polo shirts, they let their plastic and metal parts glint freely in the sun.

  “Did the women go out in earlier rounds?” Arnie asked. Aside from the woman Marion was playing with, Arnie had only seen two or three ladies among the dozens of players.

  Cheryl shook her head. “There just aren’t very many ladies at these things for some reason. Never have been.”

  “Huh,” Arnie said. He’d hoped Marion would make friends, lady friends, with people who had gone through this and come out the other side. It seemed to Arnie that she was still in the middle, alone, drifting further from him all the time.

  While the patio emptied out Cheryl chatted with a few other wives that she knew, and two of them sat down at the table and joined them. Arnie relaxed into their small talk, letting his eyes settle over the manicured stretches of fairway reaching out around them. Marion’s group had gone out of sight behind the trees, but if he understood the map correctly, they would come back into view in another few holes, far off in the distance where he could make out the sixth tee. The golf course was old and elegantly designed, with impressive oak trees and water hazards and artfully carved out sand traps. The perennial gardens near the tees and greens were overflowing with blooms, and the cart paths were solid tar black, recently repaved. He was concerned about Marion, but he had to admit it was pleasant, sitting here, making conversation in the morning sun with such cheerful women. He’d been living on tiptoes, keeping quiet, for so many months.

  The others at the table had been coming to these tournaments for years and knew all the stories about the different players. Cheryl and Bill had even gone to the national tournament twice, in Arizona.

  “He’s not terribly competitive though,” Cheryl said, giving Arnie and the other women a look.

  “Well.” Arnie understood her meaning. “All my life I never once beat Marion in a golf game. Until now.” The mood was light, and he had smiled when saying this, but once it was out of his mouth the comment felt sour. “It’s awkward,” he said, after a moment.

  “Oh, and who cares about scores,” another woman said. “Such a stupid game, paying all this money to get angry at a little ball.”

  Everyone laughed, and Arnie relaxed again.

  “Well, I don’t know about you all,” Cheryl said, “but I was toying with the idea of embarking on a cocktail.”

  The sun had risen in the sky, it was after eleven, and they were all leaning close to the table to catch the shade of the umbrella.

  “It is sort of a holiday,” one woman said.

  “Count me in.” Arnie smiled. They got a deck of cards from the bartender and passed the time playing gin rummy and drinking Bloody Marys. For a long time Arnie kept his gaze on that sixth tee, looking for Marion in her pale yellow outfit and visor. He liked to imagine she was making friends too, or at least shooting well. With so few women in the tournament, he realized, she was practically guaranteed to win a trophy.

  “So your wife just recently lost her leg?” one of Cheryl’s friends was asking him.

  Arnie nodded. “Not quite a year ago.”

  Cheryl shook her head. “How did it happen?”

  “Car accident,” Arnie said. The women held his gaze, waiting for something more, the full story, because by now Arnie had been filled in on the sad, terrible stories of all their husbands and several of the other golfers as well—people he hadn’t even met. He inhaled and stared back at them, tempted. He had heard Marion brush off this question so many times that he always automatically followed her lead: Dumb luck, just a car accident. It could happen to anyone. For the most part, this was the truth anyway, or as much of the truth as mattered.

  But in the bright sun like this, after those cocktails, staring at these kind women, Arnie felt maybe he could say something more about what he had seen that day in the car with Marion. Something, maybe, about how it had felt being pinched in next to his wife in that small, crushed space, feeling the strange new jabs of pain in his back while they waited for what seemed like hours for the sirens to come. Marion had drifted in and out. When she was conscious, terrible moans and wheezing came from her mouth, and her eyes blazed into him with raw animal shock. In the moments she went under and got peaceful again Arnie couldn’t help himself: He shook her arm and yelled at her to come back, come back right this minute. In a revolting trick of memory, the smell of those awful moments returned to him—blood, tires, urine. But just then he saw her, Marion, not small and far away on the sixth tee but driving right up to the clubhouse in that golf cart, glaring at him. It was unsettling to see her behind the wheel, for she rarely drove anything
anymore. She was alone, without her partner, without her group, and her face was stricken. He closed his mouth. He got up and went to her.

  Well, that was fun,” Marion said, her eyes dark, steely globes. Her face was pinched up and damp.

  “What happened, honey?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “Can we please just get going?”

  “Sure.” Arnie squatted to hoist her golf bag off the cart and shouldered it up. He waved to the others and followed Marion slowly back to the parking lot.

  “You don’t have to walk behind me like that,” she said. “It’s like you’re constantly waiting to catch me in some horrible collapse. It makes me nervous.”

  Arnie set his jaw and counted to five. He let her open her own car door. He wrestled the clubs into the trunk and got in on the driver’s side. It was less than a quarter mile on the empty resort road from the clubhouse to the hotel over by the lake’s edge, but he took the route slowly, thinking of the cocktails. “Is the leg bothering you, Marion?” From the others today he had learned that the type of suction socket she used gave a lot of people trouble, especially on hot days—blisters, heat rash, chafing. But Marion had never mentioned any of these problems.

  “Arnie, you asked me to try this tournament and I tried it. Can we please just go home now?”

  “Sure,” he said, pretending she had said hotel instead of home. “We’ll just go check in and you can take a nap if you want before the banquet.”

  Marion shivered and turned from him, but she didn’t put up a fight. Arnie could feel her removing herself from her body, from the car, drifting out the window and away from him so that none of this could touch her.

  “Marion,” he said quietly, to bring her back.

  She didn’t move.

  In the hotel room Arnie unpacked their things and drew her a bath. He unfolded the walker she used whenever her leg was off, and put it next to the armchair where she was sitting. At home, lately Marion had been dressing and undressing in private, but here there was just the one big room and the bathroom. Arnie wondered if he ought to excuse himself, go downstairs awhile to give her some space, but he was tired, and tired of giving her that. Exactly when things had come to be this way was unclear to him; in the early weeks after they got out of the hospital, she had let Arnie help her with everything—bathing, the bathroom, dressing. She had let him see her in every imaginable state. And he didn’t mind it. He was good at it. This was his wife, alive and conscious; they had survived. But over time, once she started walking with crutches and then the new leg, Arnie felt her pulling away from him, hiding everything, using each new bit of independence against him.

  From her chair she looked at her leg, then at him, then gave a sigh and went into the bathroom fully clothed, taking the walker with her.

  “Would you like me to help you?” he said, but she closed the door.

  Arnie lay back on the bed and tried not to think so much. He took his pain pills and did his back stretches, then found his phone and dialed their daughter out east.

  “Well, I just wanted to give you the number here,” he said. It was a silly excuse—she didn’t need a hotel number when he had his cell—but Elizabeth let it go.

  “Your mother’s just resting after the first round.” Arnie stared up at the dusty globs of spackle on the textured ceiling. He tried to picture Elizabeth’s new condo outside Boston, which he hadn’t yet seen. “She did real well. I imagine she’ll probably get a trophy.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, there aren’t that many women,” he admitted.

  “Dad,” she said, searching for words. “Just don’t…I mean, do you have to—?”

  “She loves the golf, honey.” Arnie tried to make his voice bright. “You should see her. She’s still better than half the women at our club.” There was no way to tell Elizabeth about the days and days Marion had spent curled up on their bed with pillows over her face, refusing to brush her teeth or wash, refusing to speak. If Elizabeth wanted to think he was pushing Marion too hard, he could live with that.

  “Sure. But a tournament’s a whole different thing from a quiet game at home.”

  “You should see the people here, Lizzie. How well they handle it.”

  “Like how?” she said.

  “I don’t know. Just, they do. Very pleasant people.”

  Elizabeth waited for him to elaborate.

  Triumphant was the word that came to him, though it seemed ridiculous to say such a word aloud.

  “Well, that’s good, Dad,” Elizabeth said politely. “I’m glad it’s good for you. Can I talk to Mom?”

  This was the way most of their phone conversations ended. Arnie tapped lightly on the bathroom door, then opened it a crack and spoke without looking in.

  “Honey, Lizzie’s on the phone. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Hang on,” Marion said. “OK.”

  When he opened the door the beige shower curtain had been pulled across the tub so that only Marion’s arm stuck out, disembodied, reaching for the telephone. He put it in her palm and left again.

  In the other room Arnie sat in the armchair against the bathroom wall and listened. The words were muffled and bleary, but the rise and fall of her voice was unmistakably lively, the way it used to be, with Arnie and with everyone. There was no reticence. After a while he even heard the traces of laughter. It occurred to him that maybe Marion was only putting on an act for Elizabeth. But again, the laughter rose up, and he heard Marion cry, “Exactly!” before the words drifted back into mush. If it was an act, it was a pretty good act.

  Outside, the sky was putting on its evening colors over the lake, and Arnie sat staring out at the water, trying to remember better times. There were lots of them, decades and decades of them. They had been very fortunate, as a family, but now, when he tried to reconstruct a scene, say, from one of their old camping trips or holidays, it would crumble and drift away from him before he even got through the first moments. He concentrated on their vacation in Alaska two years ago, when Marion surprised him with a daylong boat trip, though she always got sea-sick, because she knew how much he wanted to see the whales. He could picture her there, rocking at the back of the boat, trying to put on a smile though her skin was downright greenish. She kept pointing out at the whales and telling him to take pictures so that he would look away from her when she needed to be sick. He could get that far into the memory, usually: the blue-black lumps of flesh breaking the surface, their white scars like chalk marks in a foreign language. Then a crash of the tail and the water hid them again. He held her hand. And now, focusing everything he had, he could also remember the two of them curled up on the hotel bed that night, eating mashed potatoes they’d ordered from room service to settle her stomach. But from there the scene quickly faded and escaped him. He knew in his brain what they had done next and next, but he could no longer see it or feel it. It was gone.

  After a while the bathroom grew quiet. Arnie decided to get dressed for the banquet, so he’d be ready when Marion got out. But a long time passed and she didn’t come out. There were no sounds of movement or water for over an hour.

  He knocked on the bathroom door. “Marion, honey?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He believed in her right to privacy. He did. This was not a thing you took from a woman. But he also had a sudden piercing vision of her, passed out asleep in the tub, under the water. Her naps were so deep and demanding these days that she could fall asleep sitting upright in broad daylight; he could only imagine the effect a warm bath after a hard day might have on her. He called her name again, then opened the door.

  The shower curtain was drawn halfway across the tub, and Marion was dead asleep, though her face, crooked against her shoulder, was several inches from the water. “Marion,” he said, blinking the lights. “Wake up.”

  She opened her eyes and stared at the water for a long time, opening and closing her mouth. When she finally turned her face to him she gasped. She shifted in the wate
r, trying to cover herself, then remembered the shower curtain and pulled it closed again.

  Arnie sat down on the toilet seat next to the bathtub. “Marion, I have seen you naked for forty-odd years.”

  “Please, Arnie.”

  He sat quietly, elbows on knees, chin on hands, waiting for some kind of words to come to him.

  “It has been my privilege,” he said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Marion said, but with a lilt of laughter in her voice.

  “I remember that time in the Wisconsin Dells,” he said, “when you did that little striptease in our motel room.” Marion grunted behind the curtain, but Arnie went on thinking about it. This was when Elizabeth was about six months old, once Marion was starting to feel like her own person again, and Arnie’s mother had agreed to watch the baby while they went away for their anniversary weekend.

  “I remember thinking how strange it was. Don’t get me wrong, it was sweet. That you still thought any of it mattered, the physical stuff. The visuals.”

  They were quiet for a moment, then Marion said, “I’m not going to that banquet tonight.”

  “Who’s talking about the banquet?”

  “You’re trying to butter me up, and I’m just saying, it’s not going to work.”

  Behind the curtain the water sloshed around, and Marion turned on the faucet to add more hot water.

  “Marion, if you gave these people a chance.”

  “I gave them a chance. And to tell you the truth”—she searched for the right words—“they disgusted me.”

  “Marion—”

  “I spent the whole blessed morning watching them show off their fake parts. I must have heard the words bionic man five times. As if they’re proud of it.”

  “Maybe they are proud of it.”

  “Give me a break. And then”—she got more excited, even pulling back the curtain a few inches to make eye contact with him—“they started telling these horrible stories,” she said. “You couldn’t even say ‘pleased to meet you’ without having to hear all about their miserable tragedies.”