Sputterpub's Blog

Emma tore her toe on the metal threshold at Jake’s doorway. It happened on the February Tuesday when Jake’s asthma and dust allergy were diagnosed, three hours after Dr. Blankman gave her the pamphlet with the picture of the grossly-enlarged dust mite and the terrible tales about carpets and curtains.

Of course she should have waited for help before de-installing the wall-to-wall in Jake’s room. But Emma is energetic to the point of impatience, so eager she is called impulsive. She changed into sweatpants, pushed up her sleeves, and started ripping. She lugged heavy rolls of the musty stuff down to the garage. She sweated and sneezed, but she got all that mite-harboring blue junk out of her son’s bedroom before dinner.

The job exhausted her. After she dragged the last of the carpet pieces out to the garage she was so tired that she finally stepped in the dog shit she’d been avoiding through all prior passes. Her own retriever had left it there that afternoon, fresh and soft. It stuck in her textured sole like butter on a cold waffle. She bent to untie her shoes, nearly keeling over with fatigue, and then she went barefoot back upstairs.

Unshod, tired, it was easy to shuffle. She lifted insufficiently as she passed into Jake’s room, tearing her right big toe on a nail that protruded from the metal strip that used to hold down the bad blue carpet. She was surprised at how much it bled. She was also surprised at how much it hurt, until she inspected the nail head and saw its dull edge. Walking was painful and awkward. An inconvenient injury.

No sooner had she finished the carpet removal than Betsy arrived and it started to rain. The events were unconnected but both made Emma happy. She was always glad to see her friend, especially on their regular Tuesday evenings and Sunday afternoons. She  loved rain, and today the weather made her glad she’d already dragged the carpet pieces into the garage; if she had left them in the driveway, as she thought of doing at first, they’d be getting wet and heavy.

As it happened, Emma came to regret both events. Maybe she was irritated by all the carpet-pulling and her bleeding toe, but she didn’t have any patience for Betsy’s rambling mysticism. She didn’t want to hear about her friend’s recurring dream any more than the usual astrology. “I don’t know, Bets,” she said more caustically than she felt, “but it seems to me it’s too easy to push one’s dreams around, interpretation-wise. Kind of like the old Ouija board; you always knew someone at the party was steering it, you know?”

“No.  I don’t know that.” Betsy’s fair complexion reddened with emotion. “I for one have had some true predictive experiences with the board you’re disparaging. And I certainly am not pushing my own dream around. I’ve had it so often that I know what it contains.”

“But that’s just it. You’ve had it so often. Don’t you think your dreaming self could be recognizing some familiarity and then some part of you could be filling it in so you recall it as identical?”

“Look, Emma. Since I was a little kid, I’ve dreamed about this one house. I’m not too sure about the outside, but I can draw you a plan of its interior. And the thing about it is, there’s a windowless room in the center of the place, off the kitchen, hidden away. Each time I have the dream, I rediscover the room. And each time I find the room, I become sad that I haven’t been using it. I vow to remember it and use it.

“But I think I’ve figured it out. I think the room is a simple metaphor for a part of me that I’m not using. I have to find my own interior room and live in it.”

Emma knew she should retreat at that point. But her toe was still bleeding and she was still irked. She distrusted dream devices in books and movies, and she wasn’t much more receptive about them in a friend’s narrative. Instead of smiling or nodding and changing the subject, she mumbled something about dream interpretation being as useful as astrology.

“What’s with you tonight?” Betsy got up then for a glass of water, and didn’t sit down right away. She continued talking as she paced Emma’s kitchen. “Don’t try to tell me there’s nothing to astrology. I’ve invested years in its study, and there’s so much to it that I’ve barely begun. I can pick a person’s sign after fifteen minutes of conversation. How could I do that if there’s nothing to it?”

“Because you’re dealing with a bunch of people who know about astrology! Let’s find an island somewhere, where no one has ever heard of the ‘science’ and therefore can’t act his sign. Then I’ll bet you have trouble.” No sooner were those words out of her mouth than Emma regretted them. “Oh, I’m sorry, Bets,” she said. “Sit down. You want a stronger drink?”

But by that time neither had the energy to retrieve feelings. They shared a few minutes of delicious criticism about their friend Pam’s continuing cosmetic vanity (the woman was getting into “toxic” facelifts – injections of botulism bacteria that temporarily paralyzed small muscles and thus prohibited wrinkling), but Betsy left for her own place without sitting down again.

Emma fed Teddy the dog and Jake the fourteen year-old boy. She wasn’t hungry herself, but she nuked a Lean Cuisine and chewed through it. She tried not to walk on her toe, but stepping around on her right heel didn’t work very well. She went early to bed.

At 3:30 in the morning her bladder woke her up. Stepping out of bed right foot first, she forgot about her injured toe until she put her weight on it. At the same moment that she felt the pain, she felt the liquid.

Her first idea was that the dog had peed. But Teddy was a middle-aged retriever with good control; he never went inside. “What the?” Emma said aloud, as she limped to her lamp.

She had stepped in a four-inch wide stream of water coming from under her bed toward the fireplace. She hop-stepped over it and around the bed, to discover that the stream originated under one of the French doors to the small porch off her room. Under the door, across the Pakistani rug, beneath the bed, toward the fireplace. The water was definite evidence that her floor wasn’t level. It didn’t take long for her to find the bent metal weatherstripping under the door.

“Why now?” was her next frustrated thought. On her knees with her emergency flashlight she couldn’t see the problem, but she felt with her fingers the rippled edge of old metal. For who knew how many storms, that strip had held wind-driven rain outside the door, but some critical event that night, some perhaps hair-thin, feather-weak force, had pushed the stripping just far enough to let rain in under the door to flow across her room.

She fetched old towels. She wiped the floor, blotted the rug, created a roll of terrycloth threshold where the weatherstripping had surrendered. She limped to the washer with the wet towels, and then returned to bed, but she didn’t settle into good sleep for the rest of that night.

She and Jake managed to repair the weatherstripping the next afternoon, after he returned from school and she came home early from work. She and Betsy spoke that evening and normalized their relations. In fact, except for the continuing every-other-step annoyance of a toe injury, Emma felt better. She recovered from the frustrations and fatigues of her Tuesday.

On Saturday morning, however, she woke with a stiff neck getting stiffer. She knew she carried her stress there, and she did the exercises to relieve it, but throughout the day her mobility decreased and her discomfort grew. By that night she could barely turn her head, and she was irritable and drowsy. She considered her condition for some time before deciding that the pain merited prescription relief. She got into the Vicodin in the medicine cabinet and slid, eighty minutes later, into a pleasant restful sleep.

She woke Sunday morning on a soggy pillow. There was a slime of saliva on the pillowcase, below and around her mouth; she didn’t know why she had been mouth-breathing without a stuffed nose, but she assumed she’d slept mouth agape and drooled steadily from her left side.

As she raised her face from the pillow she realized that her neck stiffness had increased overnight. She was not happy. She struggled to an upright posture and continued to drool. She began to speak her frustration and found she could barely flex her jaw. She couldn’t enunciate. She panicked.

She woke Jake and managed to communicate the urgency of her situation. Grunt-talking and gesticulating, she made him understand enough that he called 9-1-1. Then he called Betsy. She normally came by on Sundays, but on that day her visit started early and went long, at the hospital.

Luckily Emma had had the prescribed series of tetanus vaccinations as a child. Unluckily, when she stepped in the bedroom water it had been far longer than the recommended ten years since her last booster. She became very ill, and her initial statistical chance of survival was less than eighty percent. But the doctors reacted promptly. They’d never treated a tetanus infection, but they loaded Emma with antibiotics, dosed her with muscle relaxants, and provided respiratory support for the brief time she needed it.

They conjectured that the source of infection was the rust- and germ-bearing water that flooded past the old weatherstripping and into the cut on the bottom of her toe. They read that the incubation period averages ten days but can be any number from three to twenty-one, so onset four days after exposure was not improbable.

What was improbable was Betsy’s reaction to her friend’s infection. She didn’t introduce crystals or candles or incantations to the sick room. She brought reference materials. Something about the event made her softly scientific. She was able to explain the infection to Emma (“It’s a little bacterium, called Clostridium tetani, which is actually a nerve poison.”) She was even able to entertain them with her knowledge (“Dig this! You know how your problem is Clostridium tetani? Well, Pam’s Botox? Those were injections of Clostridium botulinum – one of the eight bacteria of botulism – used to temporarily paralyze small facial muscles so they can’t contract and the face can’t wrinkle. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t it a trip that a cousin of what tried to kill you is ‘helping’ her?”) Emma would have voiced responses to these and others of Betsy’s comments, but lockjaw isn’t conducive to speech. She would have nodded but her improving neck still didn’t permit easy movement. She used her hands and eyes on Betsy to convey her appreciation.

Emma recovered fully. She was out of the hospital in five days and after another ten there was no sign that she had been ill. Within three weeks of the Tuesday night exposure, it was like the accident never happened.

But Emma-and-Betsy were changed by the infection. Betsy’s ventures toward science continued; before long she could talk about her own digestive problems with authority and confidence. Without abandoning most of her mystic interest, she added some with scientific method.

As for Emma, she’s remembering her dreams now. She wakes up most mornings and jots down her impressions. She finds there’s a recurring motif in her nocturnal visions. Emma is dreaming about thresholds.

The group isn’t what Susan expected. Afterward she admitted that she really didn’t have any expectations about the other travelers, but while on the bicycle vacation she was struck by conditions that shouldn’t have surprised her. There were two dozen other people around, and no one smoked. Some had a bit of extra flesh but no one was obese. All were white and middle-class or richer. They generally seemed happier and healthier than folks Susan saw on public transportation, on cruises, or in casinos. The married folks seemed more in love. This apparent happiness made the group more interesting to Susan than such homogeneity would normally be. She observed them with more attention. She found cracks in the happiness: tales of babies unbegotten, estranged offspring of old marriages, false smiles on salesmen. She saw insecurity in the tanned wobbly thighs of blonde wives and the excessive luggage of all couples. She witnessed weary longing in the faces of males returned to competition. Her observations made her more interested in and tender toward the others, and more satisfied with her own life.

Above everything else, she is surprised at the quality of solitude she has achieved on the trip.

She hadn’t known she would ride alone. But even the wide highway shoulders don’t permit easy companionship; only the engaged couple on the tandem (walking the bike up every steep hill) and the inseparable newlyweds (he tenderly slowing to her frustrated pace) made the effort to converse. Susan saw her fellows, but she spent her days pedaling, braking, leaning, and looking out at glaciation and in at her reserves.

She hasn’t encountered her own heart in a great while, but that happens on this the fourth day of the ride. She knows her cardiovascular fitness; she isn’t surprised that her heart and lungs are up to it, but today she meets her own hearty determination.

Only eight of their 26 opt to ride up the pass. The climb is an unremitting eight miles, into a headwind, and it’s happening after four and a half hours already spent on the bike. Susan and Julie are the only women who try it.

The effort doesn’t take any particular technique, except the trick of maintaining enough forward motion to balance when pedaling in such a low gear. It takes work, and the continuing decision to keep pedaling.

Susan tries to distract herself from her tender crotch and her pushing feet by looking at the scenery. That helps, but it takes more than beauty to start up the third incline. She wonders if Julie is ahead of her chanting “muf-fins, muf-fins.”

Several times she considers giving it up. Once she almost dismounts for good. But she keeps telling herself eight miles equals 12 kilometers equals 12,000 meters; what are 12,000 meters? Do them one at a time…keep pedaling to that post up ahead on the curve…now go for that clump of wildflowers against the boulders…

When she tops the climb and hits the level stretch to the pass marker she begins to cry. These are not anything as corny as tears of joy. She cries hot tears of hard-effort-with-reward. Glorious clean hot tears evaporating in the chill air of the pass, diamonds on her cheeks, as she pumps her fist and tells the world “I did it. Godammit I did it. Like a 20-year old, I can bike. God: I have heart. Yes!”

Greg and Julie and Jerry are waiting for her at the crest. Again. All eight riders made it and Susan is last, but her personal victory is enormous. The cold beer Jerry hands her is the best she’s ever swallowed.

After she and Gregory get to their room that evening, after Susan takes first shower and flops on her bed before dinner, she gets the shakes. She can’t get warm. It’s like her body went into shock after the effort. She doesn’t have much appetite for dinner.  But she has immense self-gratification.

Some of that feeling will stay with her. She has remembered something about the profound relaxation that occurs after hard work. She will improve in shape, but she will fear her success is fragile. She’ll think it isn’t owing to a higher power as much as to a lower one; she’ll believe that with each body lesson she curves closer to her goal, in a race for the rest of her lifetime.

She’ll keep looking fitter, but within she’ll run from the compliments of her friends. She won’t want to replay their praise if she regains.

Julie knows all this. She’s the only woman Susan will ever meet who doesn’t have an eating disorder. She fakes one, chronically, because that’s her entry into relationships with all other women, and she’s observed other women so much that she’s an expert on the subject. She knows the cure. She understands that a sufferer has to assume control over her whole life before she will drop control about calories. And she realizes that behavior modification – whether it’s to eat less or stop smoking or tone down Calvinism or curb shopping – behavior modification is a grief experience, and the modifier has to receive time, support and consolation for the loss of a dear friend.

Julie knows enough not to offer that wisdom until she is asked. And she never is asked.

Gregory and Julie are waiting for her. So is the van and Jerry, along with the 18 folks who have decided to shuttle over the pass. She describes her encounter to Jerry. He tells her the animal was probably a coyote but maybe a wolf. If Susan could give a better estimate of size or color (was the scruffy coat more grey or brown?), Jerry would have a better idea, but Susan’s adrenaline response had been more to power her feet than to enable her eyes. He assumes it was a coyote.

He also assumes Susan will ride in the van, but she tells him otherwise. “At least, I was planning to try the pass,” she says as she unwraps her sandwich, “but the look of surprise on your face makes me think maybe I’m making a mistake?”

“No. No. Do the pass. I don’t mean to discourage you.” He takes a break from racking bikes to look at her. “It’s just that I assumed everyone who was here was waiting for me to finish the racking so we could go. I think it’s great that you want to ride it. Do it. Really.”

“But come on, Jerry. How hard is it?”

“Oh it’s a slog; don’t get me wrong. I don’t want to mislead you. I’d rather you finish it and give me shit about making it sound too hard than the reverse. But the thing is… anyone who wants to do the pass does it.”

Greg and Julie wait for Susan to finish her lunch and they push off together, but they pull out of sight on the first of the three long inclines in the 12-kilometer pass. Susan returns to her own thoughts, safe in the knowledge that the route is obvious and won’t permit a wrong turn.

She didn’t realize that she was on her fourth course to fitness when she booked them on the bike tour. She had always wanted to try a bicycle vacation, and Gregory was now well enough to enjoy one. She thought it would be an adventure to share. She figured it would be good for him to experience the exertion and reward.

They travel well together. That isn’t a big surprise; they live well together too, but each has a separate bedroom at home and different schedules and intentions. For the trip they are spending nine nights together and ten days in close proximity. On other vacations they’d gotten on each others’ nerves after three days. But not this time. They pedal 30 to 60 miles a day, and hike a bit too, all of which make her too tired to worry and him too beat to complain.

She can see the good effects on him – his glowing face, new muscles starting in his arms and calves, the improved posture and vigor in his paces – but she’s not sure whether he has noted them. Once only, on the second morning of the ride, as they pushed off on the road again after stopping so he could shoot pictures of a natural terraced waterfall against granite and limestone walls, Greg marveled aloud about how wonderful it was to travel so far through beauty on one’s own power. “Wow,” he sent his words back to her as he pedaled down right foot first. “I can’t believe I’m moving through here on a bike. I feel so sorry for these people in cars…”

For herself, Susan thought the trip would give her a lot of exercise and some quality time with her son. She was a bit nervous about the exercise. Even though she is active for her age, her sports consist of a stationary bike for 30 minutes a day and a lot of walking. She knew that a week of full-time cycling would be a challenge, and she was anxious about that before the trip and edgy again each morning as the guides described the hills and turns of the route ahead. As it happened, she calmed down each day when she began pedaling, as if her nerves were really an adrenaline factory that begged for activity.

Of course she got the exercise she expected, especially since she opted to skip the support van and ride the full route. She was surprised that her legs gave her no trouble: no aches or cramps or strains. But she felt the ride in her extremities; she strained both hands with all the downhill braking, and she often had numb feet when she first walked after some time on the bike. She was surprised about the genital tenderness. Everyone commented about the fundamental problem before and during the trip, many brought gel seats or covers with them, and all added layers of crotch padding as the week went on. Even so, Susan wasn’t prepared for how much the pressure on her pelvic bone got to her.

“Oh you poor baby,” Julie blurts. “You didn’t realize that giving up cigarettes was like a death. You needed support. You needed time.”

Susan looks at her with a mixture of disbelieve and awe. She even cocks her head to the side like a bird. Julie wonders if she said too much. She sits back and recaptures a receptive attitude.

“I kept working out, but I also kept giving in to late-night urges for quantities of fatty and salty snacks. I just couldn’t seem to stop. Every morning was a new vow and every evening was another binge. And Gregory got fat along with me. He’d always been more sedentary than active, inclined to sit in front of the TV either watching or playing, and he began to get wider. I suspected Greg wore the fat to get back at his father, and I knew from personal experience that there was nothing a mother could say on the subject that would be effective, so I didn’t talk to him about his weight. I worried, though, and I bought a lot of carrots and cucumbers.

“He started getting better when he was 13 and was quite an altered child by 15. He improved once he got old enough to have more power over himself; once he understood it was up to him to make a person of himself he took to the job with a vengeance. It was almost as if he wanted to get back at Jack by being the better man, but Gregory began to sculpt his own personality. As he improved and received returns for improving, his rate of improvement increased. Soon he wasn’t eating as much.

“His awakening was infectious. Before long I was eating less too. At first I overate to counterbalance him; whenever he was ill and lost his appetite I tended to eat more myself, as if we’d be okay if as a twosome we consumed the usual amount. When Gregory ate less without being ill, at first I reacted out of habit. But I settled down after a short time. Greg’s example showed me that it was simply unnecessary to overeat.

“He slimmed down fast. Not only did he have the benefit of youth and increasing height, but he had the passion of a born-again. His middle-aged mother kept exercising regularly and eating too much but less, so she slowly got smaller and firmer.” Susan smiles now, as she always does when she notes Greg’s improvement, and she looks toward the adjacent room, from which she can hear the sounds of social pleasure. She laughs a little at her videogame-addicted son, obviously enjoying a deck of cards and good company.

The next day everyone rides slowly at first, as if they are pacing themselves for the climb ahead. Even so, Susan soon falls behind the others. Lost in her own thoughts, it’s awhile before she realizes that she can see at least half a mile ahead, and the sight contains no cyclists.

She keeps pedaling but she pays attention. Within a few kilometers she concludes that she’s lost and she pulls over to consult the route description. She’s sorry she didn’t take one of the maps.

She has to bear down on her memory to recall the route she’s just traveled. She soon satisfies herself with dissatisfaction. She has to backtrack about five kilometers.

That wouldn’t be so bad, except she thinks she came downhill before the last turn. She prepares herself for a climb.

Getting lost may have been her biggest fear about this trip. She’s a ready worrier, quick to envision calamity. But as usual her fear realized is less than her fear imagined. She settles into pedaling.

She passes a bear warning sign. They are placed at irregular intervals on these roads, and they advise the traveler to stay in the vehicle. There’s not much protection on a bicycle, she thinks. Some of the women in the group have expressed bear anxiety, but Susan didn’t go there till now. She tries to calm her what-if thoughts by reminding herself that it’s the cute little ground squirrel, popping up and startling cyclists, that sends most folks to the hospital around here. Then she hears panting.

She thinks it has to be herself. She’s climbing the last stretch back to her wrong turn, and she’s breathing hard. But she can’t maintain that theory, not after she quiets her own respiration and the sounds continue. Behind her. Something else is climbing the hill, and she has no reason to believe it’s human.

She checks her side-view mirror. Nothing. The noise is more from the right. She turns her head that way briefly.

It isn’t a bear. It’s a serious-looking dog-type animal. It does not look friendly.

She shriek-gasps, and pedals harder. Maybe the animal doesn’t like the sound she makes, but it peels away and down the slope to the right. Susan’s relief is immense. Maintaining her increased speed, she finds the route and soon arrives at the lunch spot.