But after I saw the couple in the café, a great dissatisfaction washed over me. I remembered the old man tilting his head attentively, listening to his wife making her menu choice. Her eyes had shone through her thick glasses as she watched him cut up their desserts for sharing. There was nothing like that tenderness in my life. And without it, what use were the things I’d built my days around? My garden, my home, my activities and friendships, even the time Mr. Pritchett and I spent together-they were all so many zeroes. With the “one” of love in front of them, they could have been worth millions, but as of now, I was bankrupt, and it was too late to start over.
THE FIRST DAY IN THE HOSPITAL, I MOVED IN AND OUT OF A haze that was alternately pain and numbness. On the second day, I began to feel a great shame. I refused to talk to the people waiting to see me: my doctor, the hospital psychiatrist, a social worker, and my husband. I spent the day with my face buried in my pillow, my arms aching with IV needles, plotting how I could do this more efficiently once I was released.
I wasn’t sure when the night nurse came into my room. I awoke and found her standing at the foot of my bed. The lights were off and she left them that way. In the glow of machines I could only see a silhouette, short and thin. Her hair was tied back neatly in a bun. The darkness had turned her uniform gray. When she greeted me, from her accent I guessed-because Mr. Pritchett had many clients from that country-that she was Indian. I pretended to be asleep. Being a nurse, she could probably tell I was awake, but my pretense didn’t annoy her. She hummed softly to herself, a foreign-sounding tune, as she stood there. I waited for her to do nurselike things-check the machines, feel my pulse, give me a shot-but she just stood there. Then, in a whispery voice, she told me that this was her last night at the hospital, and I was her last patient.
I hadn’t expected that. Surprise made me blurt out, “Are you retiring?”
“You could say that,” she said.
“What will you do now?”
“Some people think I should go back to my birthplace,” she said. “But I’ve decided to go where no one knows me. I want a new life.”
Moving to live where no one knew you, shucking off your worn-out life like old snakeskin! The idea ran through me like a shiver. And though I’d been determined not to give anything of myself away in this place filled with concrete and chemicals and cheerlessness, I found myself saying, “That’s what I want also. A new life. This one’s too painful.”
“Why?”
Maybe it was her casual tone. Or the fact that we would never see each other again. I said, “It’s like The Matrix.” (I wasn’t sure she would be familiar with the movie. I’d gone to see it only because Mr. Pritchett insisted-though then I had been captivated by it. She nodded, however.) “All this time I thought everything around me was beautiful. But in reality I had been squeezed into a cramped, loveless cell. I chose death. I couldn’t see any other way of breaking out.”
“Death is a breaking out of sorts,” she said. “But you won’t necessarily end up in a better place. Especially if you kill yourself. Terrible karma, that. You’ll just have to go through everything you tried to escape, in a different form. In any case, this husband whom you consider to be the bane of your existence, he came to you because of your own desire. Don’t you see it?”
Her words shot through me like voltage, charging the dead battery of my brain, bringing to life a lost memory. I was astounded because what she said was true.
IT IS THE DAY AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. VIVIENNE SITS in her mother’s Formica kitchen (lemon yellow, baby-chick yellow, color-of-hope yellow), eating the world’s best peach pie with Debbie. Debbie has just told Vivienne she has persuaded her father to let them run his bakery for six months.
“We’ll be in charge of everything!” Debbie ends, smiling all over her good-natured, freckled face. But instead of the squeal of joy Debbie is waiting for, Vivienne can only say, in a hollow tone, “That’s wonderful, Debbie. But I have some news, too.”
“Don’t tell me-” Debbie starts. “You’re getting-” Then something in Vivienne’s expression silences her. Vivienne holds out her left hand, which she has been hiding in her lap until now. On her finger is a ring.
“Lance proposed, and I said yes. He’s got a job offer in Tulsa. He wants us to get married next month, before he moves.” She talks fast to keep Debbie from saying the things she doesn’t want to hear. Debbie doesn’t think Lance is right for her-too intense, too serious, his black eyes boring into whomever he looks at. “He wants too much,” she told Vivienne once.
Debbie also thinks Vivienne hasn’t known Lance long enough. (He started working for Pete Albright, who owns a secondhand car dealership, two months ago. A week after he moved to town, he came into the bakery where Vivienne and Debbie work after school to buy pumpernickel bread. He ended up asking Vivienne out.) But that’s exactly what Vivienne finds exciting about Lance: he doesn’t talk about the usual boring things-his family or where he grew up. That’s all behind him and of no importance, he tells her. Only the future matters, and about that he has a lot to say. The high-powered jobs he’s determined to get, for instance, or the mansion he plans to buy for his wife.
And that’s just fine with Vivienne, thank you, because she has lived in the same house since she was born: three bedrooms, two baths, aluminum siding, dripping kitchen faucet, dark, practical carpets that stubbornly hoard odors. She has gone to school with the same kids since kindergarten. Her parents’ friends, whom they meet for church picnics or bridge, have known her since she was a tantrum-throwing toddler. She’s ready to take a little risk, to follow the yellow brick road into romance and a house on a hill with all-white carpeting. (Tulsa, they’ve both decided, is only a stepping-stone.) She’s ready to want too much, along with Lance.
So now she speaks to Debbie about decorating their beautiful new home, baking her best desserts for Lance, holidaying in exotic destinations, eating at restaurants where the menu is in French and the wineglasses are crystal. And having babies, lots of babies. Already she’s imagining the birthday cakes she’ll create, confections extravagant as Disneyland that will be the talk of the neighborhood.
“You’ll do fine without me,” she ends, trying not to look at Debbie’s fallen face.
(Debbie will, indeed, do fine. She’ll get one of her other friends to join her, and Debbie’s Delights will become a hit in their hometown. But Vivienne? How will Vivienne do? In forty years, when she looks into the ledger of her life, at the profit and loss columns, what will she see?)
“I want you to be the maid of honor,” Vivienne says. “Will you? Please please?”
And because ultimately a girl can’t resist the tinsel lure of weddings, the happily-ever-after she’s been conditioned into dreaming of since her first memory, Debbie examines with some envy the minuscule diamond in Vivienne’s ring, and agrees.
THE MEMORY SEEMED TO SPOOL FOREVER, BUT IT MUST HAVE taken only a moment. When I came out of it, the nurse was holding my hand.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Feeling your palm,” she said. “That gives me a sense of what’s waiting for you.”
The machine light tinged her hair green, but her features were in shadow. I felt heat radiating from her fingertips.
“Is it like palmistry?”
“Not exactly. It’s possible for you to break out, if you really want to. But changing your karma will not be easy. You’ll have to be alert and intelligent at every step.”
Much as I wanted to break out, I wasn’t sure I possessed these prerequisites. Karma-changing sounded complicated, and every part of me-body and nerves and heart-felt overwhelmingly stupid.