Excerpt
From "At the End of the Hall":
at the end of the hall
_____
My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother loved the pulps and forbade me to even touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn't. I'd stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, knives inches from the cleavage of their breasts; the glowing eyes of PIs; pinheaded little green men in flying saucers with convertible bubble roofs; and the robots, always the robots with their cylindrical torsos and pincer claws for hands. I'd want to tear off the cover, or at least flop another magazine on top of it to hide the thing, but I wasn't allowed to touch. So I studied the picture, memorized every detail.
Later, I was afraid of being raped and killed on some quiet street rounding through the woods. Glowing headlights, unctuous come-ons by a too-slick man with thin lips, then his meaty hand over my mouth—what would it smell like?—the knife held high in the dark with those headlights glinting in the steel . . .
After I got married and had children, I was afraid that I'd come home from some errand or maybe just wake up one morning and my little boys would be dead and blue in their beds. Then it happened and I swallowed every pill in the medicine cabinet, lost my husband in the fog of grief and hospital stays, and spent the rest of my life typing addresses on envelopes for a community college library and baking cakes for office birthday parties. If I liked the co-worker, pineapple upside down cake. If I didn't, devil's food cake from no-frills powdery mix. I was afraid someone would realize what I was doing, but nobody cared.
Forty years later, I'm in a hospital bed again, sans one lung, tubes everywhere, my roommate humming her way through a BM while a fat nurse boredly watches, and I fear nothing anymore, not even death. My son, my surviving son William, was just here visiting, his mouth full of wishes for my recovery, and he stoked my distaste for his visits with every platitude.
It's not William's fault, well, much of it isn't anyway. He's just another foolish man with balding pate and a necktie my granddaughter Madicyn—and what a name that is, whatever happened to Betty?—bought him for his birthday with money I gave her for her own birthday. That's the circle of life, these days. After Harold died, I'm afraid I just never liked William that much. I loved him, I love him still dearly, and my heart leaps whenever he comes to visit, which is daily and more than my roommate gets from her loud clan of rawboned mustachios.
William, unfortunately, picked up the awful habit of wishing from my husband and father. Harold wasn't like that; he never wished for anything. Me neither, and not because I'm one of those sour women who keeps hopes and dreams at arm's length, the type who loudly declares over coffee that she "doesn't hope" so she "won't ever be disappointed." Disappointment is a birthright, there's no avoiding it. But I don't refrain from wishing for fear of my wishes not coming true, but for fear of one of them, and only one of them, coming true.
"I wish I were dead." I nearly said it the day I saw Harold, cold and still in his little room, but I swallowed the wish along with sleeping pills and I'm glad I did, despite it all. There have been moments of joy since. Madicyn's birth, for example, or the time I went to Egypt on vacation and saw the pyramids; I even rode a camel down to Cheops and the kind men who worked for the tour laughed like American men rarely do. Joyfully, not ruefully. I don't wish I were dead, not yet. There is one last thing to do.
William's visits rake me over the coals. What a fool I raised. He expends wishes in the way only someone who knows they won't ever come true could. If only one or two had come true, he might have learned something, but I'd be the worse for it. I remember when he was three, his face oddly serious when he announced at dinner "I wish I were an ice cream man!" I cringe at the thought of him shuffling in to the room every day during visiting hours in a paper hat and white slacks. With sticky hands. With loose change jingling in his pockets.
