She dialed, reached Mr. Fennel’s secretary, was informed that she sounded “awful, honey,” assured the nosy woman that she would be returning tomorrow, was strongly encouraged to take Wednesday off to make sure she was well enough to come back (lest she get her coworkers sick), then thanked the woman, and hung up the phone.
Without food in her stomach to absorb the medicine, Rebecca felt more dizzy than healthy after she swallowed her morning dose. She daydreamed even more vividly about her imaginary relationship with John. The hypothetical dates in the fiction section of her mind started to implant themselves as memories in her non-fiction section. Fitful naps filled with dreams of televised images spliced with imagined scenes, fueled by her loopy mental state only deepened her certainty that John would be coming soon to check up on her. After all, he was a doctor.
Feb. something. A few days after the other day.
John is coming over soon to make me some food and check on me. He will probably set out my medicine and bring me flowers. Water is good. I remember when mom took me to the pool to teach me how to swim. I miss her smile. Her skin was always warm. I wonder if John will ask me to marry him. It seems like we’ve been together forever. We’ll teach the children to swim together. A girl for me and a boy for him. I love John. I love him. I love him and he loves me. He is going to take care of me. I am going to be safe. No more bullies, no more alone. No more sick.
As the hours ticked by and Rebecca received no call from John, she started to worry. With the television still muttering dramatic and slightly implausible stories in her ear, she worried about every Murphy’s Law-type of scenario she could dream up: A food allergy. A complicated surgery. A car wreck. A terrorist attack on the hospital. A forgetful lover. A “Dear John” letter from her dear, John. She remembered one of the last things he had said to her at their first meeting: “I do hearts.” He had certainly done a number on hers. As the worries built, and the tauntingly silent blazer seemed to stare her down, Rebecca’s mood grew from concerned to enraged, and she promptly picked up her journal again.
February again.
John hasn’t called all day. What an arrogant ass. How could he forget about me? I’ve done nothing but love him all this time. How could he be more invested in his patients than in me? I can draw him a picture. It will be of my middle finger sticking straight up. Bastard. I bet there’s some slut nurse distracting him. Whore. She should get a job that more aptly suits her skills than trying to keep up a charade of a woman who cares. Where is she? If I find her, I’ll… What would I do? How can I measure up if he cares about her more than me? I’ll throw a fucking encyclopedia at her pretty little Barbie head. Tell her to look up the entry for “Hell.”
Rebecca suddenly felt more alone than ever, and buried her face in her withered hands. Helpless, she let hot tears dribble through her fingers. She realized she probably never would have met John if it wasn’t for the smell of books that drew her up that spiral staircase. All this, just for the smell of books. She snorted a disgusting blob of snot and finally regained composure. She then noticed her stomach felt like it was caving in on itself, and that it was well past time for lunch. She made herself some soup in the microwave, but still couldn’t seem to get warm enough. She turned up the thermostat a couple of degrees, and then saw the blazer sitting by, watching her suffer. She stalked toward it, like an angry stepmother coming to punish an unwieldy Cinderella. She snatched up the blazer quickly, so as not to let it wriggle away, and then swung it around her back and slipped her arms into its silky sleeves.
The broad shoulder seams drooped well out past her own thin frame. As she pulled the button-holed edge around her tightly, she couldn’t help but be reminded of stealing her father’s clothes to wear to school after her mother died. It took her a few months to even be able to don a bright tank top she had purchased, thinking it would cheer up her ailing mother. Swamped in the twill blazer, Rebecca dragged her feet across the floor back to the kitchen. She made herself some hot cocoa, which never failed to soothe her, and then trudged back into the living room.
When she plopped down on the sofa, she noticed a corner of something graze her chest. She set down the steaming mug and patted the breast pocket of the blazer; there was something in there. She stuck her finger down in the handkerchief slot and found nothing, so she opened up the front of the jacket and slid her fingers into the inside pocket. There, she found a thin booklet, similar to her own journal, hovering over her heart.
The corners of the cover were worn, and the pages were yellowed with oily fingerprints and years of use. She opened it cautiously, as the thing was stiff and brittle. Inside the cover was a note scrawled in nearly indecipherable handwriting, which was reminiscent of the spikes of a heart monitor reading.
“To John, on your graduation. Congrats, --Dr. Williamson. This book always helped me with the small ones. 1989”
On the facing page was a faded print of a cartoon junebug, smiling. Rebecca turned the pages delicately; she imagined herself as an archaeologist who had just found an important scroll in the earth. She read the short story of a junebug named Janie who had been separated from her mother. She had been playing in the grass and suddenly looked up, to find herself alone. Rebecca swallowed hard.
She continued reading, taking in each word deliberately. Certainly the blazer intended for her to find this treasure. Surely it would help her get through this messy sickness, of her sinuses, and her heart. The story carried on with Janie the junebug wandering around the yard in search of her mother. She is helped along, although at first rather dubious of strangers, by other insects and small rodents who were able to climb up taller plants, or jump above the grass, in search of Janie’s missing mother. The two are finally reunited by a silly incident involving Janie being chased by a spider, who is running from a toad. When Janie smacks straight into her mother, who is in the middle of digging a new nest in the dirt for her family, her mother is happy to see her, and Janie recounts the adventure, highlighting all the new friends she made in the yard. The moral of the story read, “Your mother always tells you never to talk to strangers; but when you find yourself to be a stranger, new friends can help bring you home.” Rebecca reflected on the two instances in the last couple of days when she had allowed strangers to help her; she decided that isolating herself from humanity probably had been doing her more harm than good over the years.
As she finished her hot cocoa, and slipped the brittle book back into the blazer, Rebecca felt a new sense of motivation. She no longer wanted to wade in self-pity and perpetuate her illness with neglect. She no longer wanted to blame John for leaving her alone. She recognized that her mother did not desert her, and could very well be digging a little nest for Rebecca and her now-estranged father up in the clouds. It was time to make her existence on earth meaningful; it was time to be human. It was time to make new friends her home, instead of idealized settings inhabited by people who only lived in the minds of their authors.
Rebecca made a sandwich and mapped out a plan for the blazer. The new sustenance invigorated her, and Rebecca recognized that the smell of the blazer was one completely unfamiliar to her: John was not her lover. Instead of letting this small epiphany unravel her, Rebecca straightened her spine like the sturdy columns of Scarlett’s Tara, and decided it was time to seat her thoughts in reality. She snapped the journal open again and wrote:
Tuesday, February 6, 2000
Fact No. 1: This is not my blazer. It is John’s. It should be returned to him. Fact No. 2: John is little more than a stranger. While a nice stranger, and having the potential for being a friend, he is not my lover. I do not know him. Fact No. 3: The book club people seemed to be relatively familiar to him; he must be at least a semi-regular attendant. The club meets on Friday evenings and the meetings begin around six. Fact No. 4: I am strong. I am alive. I can cope. I must learn to relate with real people. Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships. Fact No. 5: When one door closes, another opens. Maybe I should get a pet, so I can start to re-socialize myself. Fact No. 6: Everything is going to be OK.
Rebecca read over the short catechism she had just created, and decided parts of it needed to be integrated into her everyday life. She wrote facts four and six on a note card and taped it up next to her bathroom mirror, where she finally faced herself. While her pallid complexion was definitely startling, there was a new sparkle in her eyes. She smiled at how childish she looked in the droopy blazer, and removed it, returning it to the dining room chair.
She spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday drinking lots of fluids, taking the rest of the medicine every eight hours, and forced herself to eat regularly timed meals. She went down to her parcel box and retrieved her new novel and only allowed herself to read one chapter at a time, before going to bed at night. She wrote Fact Number Four on her bookmark, so that she would not allow the fiction world to lure her out of the real one for too long. “Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships.”
On Thursday morning, she arrived early at work, as usual. She busied herself, trying not to think about the impending meeting at the bookstore. She went out of her way to try to engage in friendly conversation with her coworkers at lunch, and on coffee breaks. It was a difficult transition, but after some practice, she found it to be less awkward than she had expected. After all, she had listened attentively to thousands of normal conversations go on around her for years.
On Friday, her nerves were slightly more on edge, as she had brought the blazer with her to work. It laid across the back seat of her car, neatly folded in half, with the shoulder seams kissing, like she had found it. Rebecca started to worry about John’s reaction to her returning the blazer, which had been missing without a trace for an entire week. She was concerned that he might think she had stolen it—especially if he had called the bookstore looking for it, only to be informed that the strange girl had run out with it.
After work, Rebecca took the detour to the bookstore. She walked inside slowly, taking in the room and the smells filtered by her new attitude. While she was still skittish, she bolstered herself, repeating Fact Number Six under her breath. “Everything’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be OK.” She made her way to the spiral staircase, with only about twenty minutes left until six o’clock struck.
When she reached the reading circle, she found the club chair in which John had sat seven days before. She wasn’t sure whether she should sit down on the sofa and wait for him, or if she should leave the blazer with the woman standing behind the snack table for safe-keeping. She would not allow herself to walk out of the store with the blazer still in hand. She forced herself to take deep breaths and think rationally.
As her heart thumped more heavily with the minutes slipping away, Rebecca perched on the arm of the sofa, going over alternate scenarios in her head of how the reunion with John would be. In one scene, he was relieved and thankful for her keeping the jacket, and the book, safe. In another, he was peeved, and took the blazer from her with a forced grin plastered across his face.
In a final moment of frustration and unease, Rebecca decided it best to just leave the blazer right where she had found it. She worried about the other group members coming up the stairs and asking her about it, which they might recognize. She decided she wasn’t quite ready to face all of those people. She needed to take baby steps. She placed the blazer over the back of the chair just as she had found it, and walked calmly out of the store. As she drove out of the parking lot, she thought she saw John in her rear-view mirror, entering the store. At the inkling of hope that the blazer would finally be reunited with its rightful owner, Rebecca let out a sigh of relief. She decided she would return the next Friday after work, and audit the book club meeting. She thought she might even bake muffins for the occasion.
Without food in her stomach to absorb the medicine, Rebecca felt more dizzy than healthy after she swallowed her morning dose. She daydreamed even more vividly about her imaginary relationship with John. The hypothetical dates in the fiction section of her mind started to implant themselves as memories in her non-fiction section. Fitful naps filled with dreams of televised images spliced with imagined scenes, fueled by her loopy mental state only deepened her certainty that John would be coming soon to check up on her. After all, he was a doctor.
Feb. something. A few days after the other day.
John is coming over soon to make me some food and check on me. He will probably set out my medicine and bring me flowers. Water is good. I remember when mom took me to the pool to teach me how to swim. I miss her smile. Her skin was always warm. I wonder if John will ask me to marry him. It seems like we’ve been together forever. We’ll teach the children to swim together. A girl for me and a boy for him. I love John. I love him. I love him and he loves me. He is going to take care of me. I am going to be safe. No more bullies, no more alone. No more sick.
As the hours ticked by and Rebecca received no call from John, she started to worry. With the television still muttering dramatic and slightly implausible stories in her ear, she worried about every Murphy’s Law-type of scenario she could dream up: A food allergy. A complicated surgery. A car wreck. A terrorist attack on the hospital. A forgetful lover. A “Dear John” letter from her dear, John. She remembered one of the last things he had said to her at their first meeting: “I do hearts.” He had certainly done a number on hers. As the worries built, and the tauntingly silent blazer seemed to stare her down, Rebecca’s mood grew from concerned to enraged, and she promptly picked up her journal again.
February again.
John hasn’t called all day. What an arrogant ass. How could he forget about me? I’ve done nothing but love him all this time. How could he be more invested in his patients than in me? I can draw him a picture. It will be of my middle finger sticking straight up. Bastard. I bet there’s some slut nurse distracting him. Whore. She should get a job that more aptly suits her skills than trying to keep up a charade of a woman who cares. Where is she? If I find her, I’ll… What would I do? How can I measure up if he cares about her more than me? I’ll throw a fucking encyclopedia at her pretty little Barbie head. Tell her to look up the entry for “Hell.”
Rebecca suddenly felt more alone than ever, and buried her face in her withered hands. Helpless, she let hot tears dribble through her fingers. She realized she probably never would have met John if it wasn’t for the smell of books that drew her up that spiral staircase. All this, just for the smell of books. She snorted a disgusting blob of snot and finally regained composure. She then noticed her stomach felt like it was caving in on itself, and that it was well past time for lunch. She made herself some soup in the microwave, but still couldn’t seem to get warm enough. She turned up the thermostat a couple of degrees, and then saw the blazer sitting by, watching her suffer. She stalked toward it, like an angry stepmother coming to punish an unwieldy Cinderella. She snatched up the blazer quickly, so as not to let it wriggle away, and then swung it around her back and slipped her arms into its silky sleeves.
The broad shoulder seams drooped well out past her own thin frame. As she pulled the button-holed edge around her tightly, she couldn’t help but be reminded of stealing her father’s clothes to wear to school after her mother died. It took her a few months to even be able to don a bright tank top she had purchased, thinking it would cheer up her ailing mother. Swamped in the twill blazer, Rebecca dragged her feet across the floor back to the kitchen. She made herself some hot cocoa, which never failed to soothe her, and then trudged back into the living room.
When she plopped down on the sofa, she noticed a corner of something graze her chest. She set down the steaming mug and patted the breast pocket of the blazer; there was something in there. She stuck her finger down in the handkerchief slot and found nothing, so she opened up the front of the jacket and slid her fingers into the inside pocket. There, she found a thin booklet, similar to her own journal, hovering over her heart.
The corners of the cover were worn, and the pages were yellowed with oily fingerprints and years of use. She opened it cautiously, as the thing was stiff and brittle. Inside the cover was a note scrawled in nearly indecipherable handwriting, which was reminiscent of the spikes of a heart monitor reading.
“To John, on your graduation. Congrats, --Dr. Williamson. This book always helped me with the small ones. 1989”
On the facing page was a faded print of a cartoon junebug, smiling. Rebecca turned the pages delicately; she imagined herself as an archaeologist who had just found an important scroll in the earth. She read the short story of a junebug named Janie who had been separated from her mother. She had been playing in the grass and suddenly looked up, to find herself alone. Rebecca swallowed hard.
She continued reading, taking in each word deliberately. Certainly the blazer intended for her to find this treasure. Surely it would help her get through this messy sickness, of her sinuses, and her heart. The story carried on with Janie the junebug wandering around the yard in search of her mother. She is helped along, although at first rather dubious of strangers, by other insects and small rodents who were able to climb up taller plants, or jump above the grass, in search of Janie’s missing mother. The two are finally reunited by a silly incident involving Janie being chased by a spider, who is running from a toad. When Janie smacks straight into her mother, who is in the middle of digging a new nest in the dirt for her family, her mother is happy to see her, and Janie recounts the adventure, highlighting all the new friends she made in the yard. The moral of the story read, “Your mother always tells you never to talk to strangers; but when you find yourself to be a stranger, new friends can help bring you home.” Rebecca reflected on the two instances in the last couple of days when she had allowed strangers to help her; she decided that isolating herself from humanity probably had been doing her more harm than good over the years.
As she finished her hot cocoa, and slipped the brittle book back into the blazer, Rebecca felt a new sense of motivation. She no longer wanted to wade in self-pity and perpetuate her illness with neglect. She no longer wanted to blame John for leaving her alone. She recognized that her mother did not desert her, and could very well be digging a little nest for Rebecca and her now-estranged father up in the clouds. It was time to make her existence on earth meaningful; it was time to be human. It was time to make new friends her home, instead of idealized settings inhabited by people who only lived in the minds of their authors.
Rebecca made a sandwich and mapped out a plan for the blazer. The new sustenance invigorated her, and Rebecca recognized that the smell of the blazer was one completely unfamiliar to her: John was not her lover. Instead of letting this small epiphany unravel her, Rebecca straightened her spine like the sturdy columns of Scarlett’s Tara, and decided it was time to seat her thoughts in reality. She snapped the journal open again and wrote:
Tuesday, February 6, 2000
Fact No. 1: This is not my blazer. It is John’s. It should be returned to him. Fact No. 2: John is little more than a stranger. While a nice stranger, and having the potential for being a friend, he is not my lover. I do not know him. Fact No. 3: The book club people seemed to be relatively familiar to him; he must be at least a semi-regular attendant. The club meets on Friday evenings and the meetings begin around six. Fact No. 4: I am strong. I am alive. I can cope. I must learn to relate with real people. Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships. Fact No. 5: When one door closes, another opens. Maybe I should get a pet, so I can start to re-socialize myself. Fact No. 6: Everything is going to be OK.
Rebecca read over the short catechism she had just created, and decided parts of it needed to be integrated into her everyday life. She wrote facts four and six on a note card and taped it up next to her bathroom mirror, where she finally faced herself. While her pallid complexion was definitely startling, there was a new sparkle in her eyes. She smiled at how childish she looked in the droopy blazer, and removed it, returning it to the dining room chair.
She spent the rest of Tuesday and Wednesday drinking lots of fluids, taking the rest of the medicine every eight hours, and forced herself to eat regularly timed meals. She went down to her parcel box and retrieved her new novel and only allowed herself to read one chapter at a time, before going to bed at night. She wrote Fact Number Four on her bookmark, so that she would not allow the fiction world to lure her out of the real one for too long. “Novels are for recreation, not replacement relationships.”
On Thursday morning, she arrived early at work, as usual. She busied herself, trying not to think about the impending meeting at the bookstore. She went out of her way to try to engage in friendly conversation with her coworkers at lunch, and on coffee breaks. It was a difficult transition, but after some practice, she found it to be less awkward than she had expected. After all, she had listened attentively to thousands of normal conversations go on around her for years.
On Friday, her nerves were slightly more on edge, as she had brought the blazer with her to work. It laid across the back seat of her car, neatly folded in half, with the shoulder seams kissing, like she had found it. Rebecca started to worry about John’s reaction to her returning the blazer, which had been missing without a trace for an entire week. She was concerned that he might think she had stolen it—especially if he had called the bookstore looking for it, only to be informed that the strange girl had run out with it.
After work, Rebecca took the detour to the bookstore. She walked inside slowly, taking in the room and the smells filtered by her new attitude. While she was still skittish, she bolstered herself, repeating Fact Number Six under her breath. “Everything’s going to be OK. Everything’s going to be OK.” She made her way to the spiral staircase, with only about twenty minutes left until six o’clock struck.
When she reached the reading circle, she found the club chair in which John had sat seven days before. She wasn’t sure whether she should sit down on the sofa and wait for him, or if she should leave the blazer with the woman standing behind the snack table for safe-keeping. She would not allow herself to walk out of the store with the blazer still in hand. She forced herself to take deep breaths and think rationally.
As her heart thumped more heavily with the minutes slipping away, Rebecca perched on the arm of the sofa, going over alternate scenarios in her head of how the reunion with John would be. In one scene, he was relieved and thankful for her keeping the jacket, and the book, safe. In another, he was peeved, and took the blazer from her with a forced grin plastered across his face.
In a final moment of frustration and unease, Rebecca decided it best to just leave the blazer right where she had found it. She worried about the other group members coming up the stairs and asking her about it, which they might recognize. She decided she wasn’t quite ready to face all of those people. She needed to take baby steps. She placed the blazer over the back of the chair just as she had found it, and walked calmly out of the store. As she drove out of the parking lot, she thought she saw John in her rear-view mirror, entering the store. At the inkling of hope that the blazer would finally be reunited with its rightful owner, Rebecca let out a sigh of relief. She decided she would return the next Friday after work, and audit the book club meeting. She thought she might even bake muffins for the occasion.
1 comment:
I enjoyed these. I think they're quite intriguing. I like the peek into this, painfully shy, womans internal life. However, in part three I felt like she resolved to pull out of it all way too quickly... If there were indicators throughout parts 1 & 2 that she recognised that she had a problem I would be more willing to by into her quick resolve. In parts 1 & 2 I didn't get a sense of her knowing that her internal life and vivid imagination was a problem. She seemed to be ok with it, for the most part. The only register (pardon the Milesism) of this being a problem for her is the imaginary relationship that she builds up around the jacket. Perhaps I missed it, but I would like to see her yearn to get outside of her fantasy world and make real friends.
I like that you don't have her suddenly all better, the struggle is there and it's obvious but it's proportionate to her issues and handled well. Overall I really enjoyed all three of these!!
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