The Age of Grief - Jane Smiley [70]
Lizzie threw up for the first time while she was watching “The Flintstones” and eating her Hershey bar. She made it to the front hallway, but not to the bathroom. Stephanie was not sympathetic. Leah, carrying her Play Family garage from the living room to the kitchen, could not be prevented from stepping in it. Lizzie had already fled upstairs, Stephanie was hiding her nose in the sofa cushions, and Leah’s wet bare footprint followed her into the dining room. I went for paper towels and a bucket, and I heard Lizzie, panicky, shouting from upstairs, “Daddy! Daddy!” She stumbled from somewhere above my head to somewhere else, and began to retch again. Just then, mop in one hand and bucket in the other, I felt all the grief of the last weeks drain away, to be replaced, not by panic, but by order. I caught Leah, wiped her foot off, and spread some paper towels over the mess in the hall. Then I went to Lizzie, who was draped over the toilet, and carried her into her bedroom, where I laid her on her bed, undid her clothes, and surrounded her with towels. Her face was red and soaked with tears, and I thought, I can’t help you. I wiped her face with a cool washcloth, and then Stephanie shouted from downstairs, “She’s going to get in it! She’s getting near it! Daddy! Daddy!”
Lizzie said, “Don’t go away.”
That was the beginning.
What is it possible to give? Last fall I was driving to the office in a downpour, and I saw a very fat woman cross the street in front of the bus depot and stick out her thumb. No raincoat, no umbrella. I stopped and let her in. The office was about three blocks down, but I thought I would drive her wherever she needed to go in town. She said she was going to Kinney, a town about ten miles east, and it occurred to me simply to drive her there. She was wearing cloth shoes and carrying all her belongings in a terry-cloth bag. I don’t think I answered, but she spoke anyway. She said, “My husband works out there. I just got in from California, after two months, and the whole time he was sending me these postcards, saying, Come back, come back, and so I bought my ticket.” She fell silent. Then she looked at me and said, “Well, I called him up to say I’d got my ticket, and he said right there, ‘Well, I want a divorce, anyway.’ So here I am. He works out there.”
I said, “Maybe you can change his mind.”
“I hope so. She works out there where he works, too. I want to get to them before they get into work. If I can’t change his mind, I’m going to beat him up right there in the parking lot.” She looked at me defiantly.
I said, “Why don’t I drop you at the Amoco station at the corner of Front Street? You can stand under the awning, and there ought to be a lot of people turning toward Kinney there.”
“Yeah.”
After I got to the office, I thought maybe I could have bought her an umbrella, but I didn’t go out and get her one, did I? It perplexes me, what it is possible to give a stranger, what it is possible to give a loved one, the difference between desire and need, how it is possible to divine what is helpful. I might say that I would give Dana anything to ensure her presence in our house, our office, our family, but in saying this I have only traded the joy of giving for the despair of payment. I went downstairs and cleaned up the mess, then I went back upstairs and wiped Lizzie’s face again with a newly wrung-out washcloth. If you stimulate the nerve endings in a pleasurable way, the neurons are less capable of carrying pain messages to the brain, and the brain is fooled. Dana was an hour late from work.
I should say that Lizzie heaved twelve times in four hours, so much that we were forcing ginger ale down her throat so that something, anything, could come back up. And she was fighting every