The Way to Live Wisely

by Susan Choi Original Issue: Fall 1990

Later on she realized there must have been a reason for everything, for three women at a time, for the nurse who did nothing but talk and for chit-chat about morning news and a facial cream before they got started with it. Nice women, their talk, a dry, papery little hand she was given to hold. Then they went at it but extolled her bravery as they did. She should have been an example, they told her, keeping so still except for those rigid legs and even letting those down when they said. And quiet. And no tears. Kept her eyes open on advice and glued them to a vaguely visible smudge on the opposite wall, on advice. Better to keep them open than closed, closed eyes breed dark thoughts. And in the room after it was done she got more juice and an old-fashioned pad on a belt. Then it was the next woman's turn and she got curtains around her bed. Though told to rest for fifteen minutes minimum she took off and later felt badly about it. There was a reason they told her to rest, they had been very, very nice and she was grateful and her attitude to doctors and hospitals was very changed. She should have rested because in the bookstore the novocaine still in her blood made her so dizzy she fell. But enough.

She told me she had nothing but gratitude. Never knew there could be such kindness in a hospital, and it was an inspiration. I took her out that very same night but the restaurant had a bad effect. I took her home instead and made her a fancy omelette but she couldn't eat it. I was feeding her lately, she hadn't felt like cooking or eating in awhile.The last time she had had any pleasure in eating was at a diner when she folded a tuna melt on wheat right in half and stuck the whole thing down her throat in a single gratifying fill. She said she had been so ravenous, at the time she didn't know why. Out in the parking lot that thing came right back up the way it had gone down, quickly in a single whoosh with a little fanfare and a rattly cough. Since then she didn't feel like eating anything at all, and that is proof that eating-for-two is just a myth.

The night before her appointment I had her to my house as we’d been doing all that week. It was winter break and she and I the only inhabitants we knew of in the whole town; everyone else was home for Christmas. I had no other home and lived at school full-time; she had been at home but when that tuna melt shot itself liquified out of the pit of her stomach she hopped right on a plane and came back. She was on the student health plan and they would do it on the house, she'd called in advance to make sure.

She was a little jittery because she wanted to know how to expect the pain. How would it hurt? she kept asking me. Like having your lungs pulled up through your throat? Like ear-piercing? I made her a bowl of split-pea soup and are-heated crescent roll, nice and simple, but she still couldn't get even a half of it down. That's when she asked me Did I have film in that camera? I did. Color. It wasn't going to look too good with this indoor nighttime light and no flash, but she was insistent. Didn't like her picture taken regularly but this, this seemed necessary. She said to me, It's the least I can think of to do. She made me promise to take them over to the one-hour place the next day and have them for her when she got home. I said I wanted to go with her but she said No, absolutely no one but myself and my thought. She had a singular thought of that thing, the fetus, a mental picture of it. She wanted to be alone with it in the morning. Of course that was a mistake. I should have gone but too late. I got her those pictures.

They all came out full of golden haze, that orangy indoor nighttime light that only shows itself on film. Her brown skin showed mustard in the frame, behind the single upright glowing leaf of a candle flame with its waver frozen still in that moment. She sat still for those photos, that was something new. She sat still and looked the camera right in the eye. There are funny things in the frame to remind me of that night, like a container of ricotta cheese sticking up into view like a skyscraper, in the foreground. And a half-empty bottle of wine. She wasn't drinking, and had quit smoking too. I thought it was a funny idea, but she said it was not intentional. Liquor and cigarettes and anything else like that actually had been making her ill these past weeks, she couldn't take them even if she wanted to. She said, God has his way about it. And she then said, Christ on earth, just listen to me. You'd better watch out for me. Promise you'll watch out for me, I don't want to start sounding tragic, but I have ideas, and dreams... I've never been a religious person, not at all. And I believe in my rights, and I don’t think I am a selfish person.

I had never known her well but I got to know her fast.When she had called me I knew it was because none of her good friends were in town but I said, I'll hold your hand. I'll go and hold your hand and tell you bad jokes and complain about my weight and if you squeeze too hard I won't say a thing.

No, she said. Just hang around with me awhile, that's good enough.

***

My place is large and well-stocked; when you're a twenty-six year old junior in college this seems the wisest way to live, far and away from the campus life with a world of your own things. I was once somebody's wife but I doubt if I'll ever be somebody's mother. Keeping the refrigerator full of nice unnecessary things is for nobody's benefit but my own.

The day she went in was a Wednesday and since she wanted those pictures and her appointment was for eight AM sharp I figured I'd better hustle with the film-developing. But noon came around and she didn't show. When I called up I got her machine; she came on sounding thin and higher-pitched, with worry in her voice and a tart little say-so about not being home. That was an old message, made even before she went home and had the projectile tuna melt. She told me that before she had left there was already something: a gagging of all the muscles in her throat, a rippling-upward convulsion that would shudder her without warning. Vomiting with nothing coming out. And she had tiredness, but who wouldn't at the end of the term with exams.She hadn't had any idea. Well, yes she had. And, she confessed to me, she had liked the idea. She had liked it. She had wished it would go on forever.

Liked it how? I said.

Liked it like I liked having it. I could attribute weird feelings to it. I felt sad, it was that. Or, I went bowling one night and bowled a sixty-seven, and it was because of that. I liked being in the power of it. I miss it.

I said, Other than that are you feeling right?

Alright. There's a weird smell of iodine when I pee, though.

She had finally turned up at my place past four, holding a bag of new books and some packets of aromatherapy bath crystals. She set it all down without saying anything and proceeded to stick most of her upper body into my fridge. She was looking at food all the time, but she wouldn't eat any of it. I saw her moving herself gently, as if she thought something was going to fall out. I asked her if there was pain.

Just blood, she said. A real pungent smell, it's mixed with a disinfectant.

I asked Was there a whole lot of blood?

Not a lot but it's of a different kind. Thick, like tissue. Color of brick. I keep taking a look at it.

Don't get any ideas about it, I said. 

No, she said. Just that it looks foreign.

I asked what the books and bath crystals were all about and she said that the books were her own treat and the crystals were for me. She said, I bought the bath stuff before, because I thought I could treat myself to baths after it was over, something special. But they said no baths. The books are my consolation prize.

Then she crawled onto my couch and that's pretty much where she stayed until the term started again. That first afternoon sleep came to her quickly but after that she wasn't so lucky. Sometimes it came, but it bore to her anxious dreams of fishes and deep water, her father hidden in an attic, and filth. Most of the time she did not sleep.

When we went out to the restaurant, like I said, something funny happened to her. And it was all the people, she said. Not the food. There were just too many people, too many stories. For every single person in here, she said, Two people made love and one woman got pregnant and the handful of jelly she had inside at seven weeks turned into a person capable of ordering Chinese and making their own life. Not to mention everybody here was had, by someone.

Their mother, I said.

It's actually making me feel a little bit sick, she said.

I took her home and made her this beautiful omelette but that, like everything else, seemed too complicated for her. Too much had gone into it.

Can I see those pictures now? she asked me.

Truth be told, even with the orangeness and the tower of ricotta cheese, they were nice pictures. Because she looked tired, and beautiful.She was resting her chin on her hand, in one of them, and gazing straight into me. There was something magical about her beauty that I knew she was noticing. Maybe it was just the fuzzy light. She looked like a woman who had been sanctified, and knew about it. She looked like she had a rich secret.

In that picture, she said to me, l'm a mother.

***

It was dead of winter when she was with me and although it was only for a week it felt like longer. Those are slow days. The way they end so quickly only makes them seem slower, longer instead of shorter. My apartment was on the fifth floor in a corner, and from my couch we had a wrap-around view, sort of, of the changing sky. Sunset came on early and was stronger, deeper in feeling and more acute, than summer sunsets. While watching it, behind your head the other side of the sky would suddenly turn its dusky cornflower velvet, that thick winter color, and just when you turned around to notice it it was gone, and the night came on, all by six o'clock. For awhile we wouldn't bother with lights, or we'd light up a few candles. The world was small, for that week she had only me to be with and this strangely simplified. Other things were forgotten.

She said, I'd like to clean out my life. Get rid of everything I don't need, go through my clothes and give them away, send my stereo home. Sell my records and go to cassette. I'd like to have as little as possible.

I gave her my philosophy of life then: The best way to live is off by yourself and with your own things, don't be afraid of your things, they can be a comfort.Cook yourself dinner, have a warm robe and fuzzy slippers. Keep those bath crystals because six weeks isn't so long and when you can bathe again you'll want them, they're your treat. Get a nice cat.

She said, I don't want a lot of things, I want to live wisely, simply, purely. No more pain,no more clutter.

The way to live wisely, I said, is not to resolve. Let be. Take a bath, go to sleep.

Of course she couldn't do either of these things.

Sleep got a little better for her but the dreams got worse. She dreamed people were speaking to her but she couldn't hear what was said, that they were taunting her and fading away on purpose. She dreamed of the bathtub drain choking up clots of blood and hair, and that she was being driven quickly away in a car from somewhere she had to be. She did not want to sleep while this was happening, she stopped trying. I bought her a blank book, a beautiful one, and a pen, and I told her to write them down, to fill up a book, to make the dreams her dreams, something she had. You don't want to forget this pain, I told her. This pain is special, you told me that yourself.

She had said she was afraid that she was forgetting it all. She had told me, that week, the way the procedure went, both in the nurse's words and in her own words: the nurse who did nothing but talk described the whole procedure beforehand, step by step, and then in the room she told it to you again,while it was going on. That way there wasn't much to fear, each pain was familiar because you'd heard about it before. The nurse would say, 'Here comes the next dilator –– You'll feel crampy –– ' and then you did. And the talking nurse held your hand, also. She stood quietly with your hand in hers, or she talked, but she never looked away. She looked down into your face while you gazed furiously at that spot on the wall and she said You are brave. You are so brave.

The term started up again and I didn't see her much anymore. She called me once to say there were narcissus blooming in her apartment, I ought to come on over. In her own place she seemed longer, stronger. The narcissus in bloom had gotten so tall they were keeling over, failing their sharp scent all around the room. She tried tying the stems together with twine, strength in numbers, and made me a cup of tea. Her place was still full of things, in spite of her resolution, but they were strictly tidy. Magazines in neat stacks, glasses all lined up by size. In her bedroom she had a little plant next to her bed that she said she looked at before she went to sleep; first she had had a little goldfish but that hadn't worked out. Only her bedclothes were messy, wrung together and flung by the wall.

We were awkward with each other; it didn't look like we'd make good fair-weather friends. She seemed to feel like there wasn't much to talk about but her condition, that she was supposed to keep me posted. I was quiet. Then she gave me the book back; it was full of a fierce black scrawl. She said,I'm done with it now. I don't know why, I thought it'd make a nice gift.

I said I would read it.

***

In the last dream, she says to me, Everything happens exactly as it did in reality, only it takes the dream to bring it back. I am trying not to be angry at the doctor, and I start thinking of her as a warrior who's on my side. In the dream I feel but I can't see, and I hear the talking nurse saying, as I feel the coldness, Here comes the speculum – it's metal – it's going to be cold – and as I feel dull shooting cramps I hear the talking nurse saying Here comes another dilator... and another one. Then the doctor tells me, I'm turning the machine on now, and when I hear this I think, Oh god, here comes the vacuum cleaner, and I wait to feel a sucking, torn feeling. I wait for the ripping sound. I’m expecting it. But all I feel is a little fluttering inside of me, as if of wings. And what I think at that moment is, There'll never be a person like that again. Good-bye, little flying thing.

And the doctor says, We're done.