The Evening News Read Free Page A

years of traction and corticosteroids had been a mistake. They gave her a drugstore full of pills then. They told her to lose weight, to exercise each night.
    A small blackboard hangs over the kitchen sink. The markings put there each day appear to be Chinese. Long lines for these pills, dots for those, the letter
A
for yet another. A squiggly line for something else.
    The new doctors taught her the system. When you take over thirty pills a day you can’t rely on memory.
    My father called again. He said there was nothing new. Mary is in the hospital again, and she’s been joking that she’s somewhat of a celebrity. So many doctors come in each day to see her. Interns. Residents. They hold conferences around her bed. They smile and read her chart. They question her. They thump her abdomen. They move her joints. They point. One intern asked her when she had her last menstrual cycle. My mother looked at the young man, then at the other doctors around her bed, then smiled and said twenty-some years ago but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you which month. The intern’s face quickly reddened. My mother’s hysterectomy is written there in plain view on her chart.
    They ask her questions and she recites her history like a litany.
    Were the Ohio doctors right? Were they prophets?
Please give her to us. Maybe we can experiment.
    My father and I walk along the street. We’ve just eaten, then gone to Osco for the evening paper—an excuse, really, just to take a walk. And he is next to me suddenly bringing up the subject of my mother’s health, just as suddenly as the wind from the lake shakes the thin branches of the trees. The momentis serious, I realize. My father is not a man given to unnecessary talk.
    I don’t know what I’d do without her, he says. I say nothing, for I can think of nothing to say. We’ve been together for over thirty years, he says. He pauses. For nearly thirty-four years. Thirty-four years this October. And, you know, you wouldn’t think it, but I love her so much more now. He hesitates, and I look at him. He shakes his head and smiles. You know what I mean? he says. I say yes and we walk for a while in silence, and I think of what it must be like to live with someone for thirty-four years, but I cannot imagine it, and then I hear my father begin to talk about that afternoon’s ball game—he describes at length and in comic detail a misjudged fly ball lost in apathy or ineptitude or simply in the sun—and for the rest of our walk home we discuss what’s right and wrong with our favorite baseball team, our thorn-in-the-side Chicago Cubs.
    I stand here, not used to speaking about things that are so close to me. I am used to veiling things in my stories, to making things wear masks, to telling my stories through masks. But my mother tells her stories openly, as she has done so all of her life—since she lived on her father’s farm in Ohio, as she walked along the crowded 1930 Chicago streets, to my father overseas in her letters, to the five of us children, as we sat on her lap, as we played in the next room while she tended to our supper in the kitchen. She tells them to everyone, to anyone who will listen. She taught Linda to read her lips.
    I learn now to read her lips.
    And I imagine one last story.
    Diana and I are children. Our mother is still young. Diana and I are outside on the sidewalk playing and it’s summer. And we are young and full of play and happy, and we see a dog, and it comes toward us on the street. My sister takes myhand. She senses something, I think. The dog weaves from side to side. It’s sick, I think. Some kind of lather is on its mouth. The dog growls. I feel Diana’s hand shake.
    Now we are inside the house, safe, telling our mother. Linda, Bob, and Jim are there. We are all the same age, all children. Our mother looks outside, then walks to the telephone. She returns to the front windows. We try to