Keri Healey: Serious

Keri Healey was commissioned by Hugo House to write a new piece on the theme of Truth or Dare as part of the first event of the 2009-2010 Hugo Literary Series. Healey presented her piece at Truth or Dare on October 23, 2009 along side novelist Rebecca Brown, poet Eric McHenry and rap artist Macklemore.

Serious

It’s line 847 on the deposition I gave in the inquiry after my sister’s death. When my family joined with her husband in suing the hospital that made the medical error that killed her, it was the question that asked, “Why didn’t you attend your sister’s wedding?”

And my answer to that, the answer that I remember giving, was that she didn’t really have a wedding, not a wedding-wedding, it was just a, you know, a little get-together after they got back from the justice of the peace, with the kids and some drinks and chips and salsa and a cake and all that, and well, of course that she invited all of us, her family, her brothers and sisters and parents to come, but that we were all living in different states and she didn’t expect us to actually make it, and besides it was only a week away and even if I had wanted to be there, I couldn’t really afford to get a plane ticket at that point—and that she understood this and it was no big deal—I mean, as far as I knew, she and Palmer never mentioned getting married before. And so, yeah, I didn’t go. I didn’t watch her get married. But it was no big deal.

But now when I look at line 847 on the deposition again, it just reads:

She didn’t have a wedding.

My sister Tracey had a little boy who was five years old when she met Palmer Prewitt (who had custody of his one-year-old daughter at the time). They were seated next to each other at the blackjack table at the Little Six Casino in Prior Lake, Minnesota. He was showing a three and a seven on the table when she split her tens and, miraculously, got dealt two aces right before his next turn, breaking the only rule of table etiquette that ever mattered to him.

“You don’t do that, you know,” he leaned over to tell her. “You’re never supposed to split your tens.”

She just smiled at him.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Seems to have worked out all right for me.”

And that’s the story Tracey and Palmer would tell for the next decade, about how their romance started. How they met like people in the movies do, easily, with sass and gumption and charm to spare. How they winked and laughed and told each other their individual stories over drinks—how she was an up-by-her-bootstraps single mom who was studying to be a respiratory therapist and how he was a daring entrepreneur with a few lawnmowers and a pickup truck who took one look at all of those Tudoresque suburban mega-houses and verdant golf courses peppering the Twin Cities and saw buckets and buckets of gold.

They dated. They moved in together. Melded their families: two parents, two kids. They never got married, though, not until 2002, three years before Tracey died sometime in the middle of the night. On a Tuesday. Or really, I guess, a Wednesday morning, early early on a Wednesday morning. She went to the emergency room the night before, a local clinic out near her place in Shakopee, her teenaged son driving her there. She went to the emergency room with stomach and chest pains that had sent her home, earlier that day, from her job at Merrill Lynch where she worked as an administrative assistant. (She never did finish that respiratory therapy program; sick people just got to her, she had said.) The little emergency clinic knew she had something bad going on down there inside her, something they didn’t have the right equipment or medical expertise to deal with, I suppose, and they sent her on to Minneapolis, to a hospital there, where more important doctors with bigger machines could look at her. Sent her on with her teenaged son driving her. And in Minneapolis, she and her teenaged son sat in the waiting room for three hours before someone looked at her, and even then, only looked at her because she could no longer breathe very well and needed her teenaged son to speak, to yell in that teenaged boy-I-have-no-control-over-this-situation-and-can’t-you-see-my-mother-is-dying way.

“Your mother isn’t dying,” the man in the scrubs said to the teenaged son.

“She’s crying,” the boy protested. “She never cries. And she can barely sit up.”

But the doctor in the scrubs did not want to be transacting this moment with a teenaged boy and so he talked directly to Tracey, who was by then hoisted up onto an examination table, struggling for breath and words.

“Where did the pain start?” the doctor in the scrubs asked her.

And this is the question that I implore you to consider carefully when it is asked of you at some point in your life. Where did the pain start? Be careful. Because if you, like my sister Tracey, try to paint an honest picture of the origin and trajectory of your pain, if you try to be accurate, try to tell your doctor or your shrink or your lover or lawyer or psychic someday that your pain started out small, in your belly, like a stomachache that could be from some bad chicken salad at lunch…if you try to tell him that your pain became sharper and more defined as the day went on, causing you to lose concentration and mix up names and forget even how to answer the phones, and then moved up, into your chest where it pounded and became warm, flushing your upper chest with a lava-like feeling, a blood explosion, before once again turning into sharpness, into tiny edges of broken glass that cut at your tissue, that stabbed at you from the inside over and over again…if you tell him things happened in this way, then you might risk being overlooked, shooed away, misdiagnosed. He might misread your pain, this pain that started in your belly, might assume it to be indigestion, because it started in your belly and not in your chest. Might believe that you, a 38-year-old woman, mother to one and stepmother to another, sister to five siblings who are at this moment asleep in their beds or maybe making love or watching late-night TV in other states, might believe you are a hypochondriac and might tell you that you’re overreacting. Maybe he will jack you up on lidocaine to take away some of that sharp, pulsating, and ever increasing pain, and send you home, even if your teenaged son protests even more, protests loudly, says you’re really, really sick, might tell you to just go to bed and call tomorrow if you don’t feel better. Just because you told him it started in your belly and not in your heart.

Learn to lie, I think, as I sit at home on a Friday night, reading the depositions over again for the millionth time. The case will probably settle out of court within the next week, our lawyers tell us, but to me it’s still not done yet. Learn the right answer, I think. Find out what they want to hear and tell it to them. Learn to lie and live with it.

You’re glum— exclamation point reads the Post-It note affixed to my office computer monitor when I return from getting another cup of coffee from the break room late Monday morning. Pamela, the bookkeeper who works two days a week at the “floater” desk outside my office, has put it there. I peel it off the screen just as she ducks her head in my doorway.

“Well, ya are,” she chirps, with that empathetic quality so finely honed by the women of the nonprofit sector.

“I don’t think it calls for an exclamation point, however,” I tell her. “That’s really an imprecise use of punctuation.”

Impulsively, and I now understand, mistakenly, I told Pamela several months ago about how I felt ready to get back into dating. Jonathan and I got divorced a couple years ago. Our marriage had been unraveling for some time and although, to his credit, Jonathan stuck around a good long time after Tracey died and tried to pretend things were going to work out, he ultimately couldn’t negotiate my unrelenting funk.

The idea of getting set up with strange men by my friends and co-workers makes my face get hot and gives me that pre-diarrhea feeling. I just can’t risk all the potential pitying looks and the break room chatter about blah blah lack of chemistry blah blah. No, online dating is much more efficient. If you go into it knowing what your niche market is, then you have a fair to decent chance of at least a pleasant conversation from time to time. And sometimes noncommittal sex. I had a few dates early on with men I met off the e-Harmony.com, but—boy—are those fellows goal oriented! And cut from virtually the same bolt of terrycloth. Each of the e-Harmony men I met had a strong work ethic, but wasn’t what you would call “spicy.” Plus, there seemed to be a common and overbearing emphasis on marriage plans in their banter. Like: Did I enjoy being married? What would my perfect marriage look like? Did I see myself marrying again? And God forbid you should use words like “maybe” or “eventually”. These guys wanted to lock things down. They weren’t interested in wasting time or coffee on tire kickers like me.

So, I eventually downgraded to using the Yahoo personals. I cast a pretty wide net and for a while was going out on about a date a week. Nothing more than a few coffees, usually. It was nice rattling off the same facts about myself over and over again to different strangers each week. My friends had all grown a little weary of hearing about the machinations of my grief—the sadness, the glacial pace of the lawsuit, the tribulations of my poor parents who not only had to mourn a daughter taken so young, but who in the months after her death also took on the additional burden of raising her teenaged son after he was thrown out of his stepfather’s house. (Palmer Prewitt, in fact, severed all communication with his deceased wife’s family and our lawyers, securing his own separate counsel, no doubt setting his daring entrepreneurial eyes on the jackpot that her unfortunate death would bring him now in middle age, the lawnmowers and weed-whackers of his youth an inconvenient memory.) Yes, what I had always considered to be my sweet and nourishing family life was falling apart a little more each day we moved further away from Tracey’s death, and my friends—lovely people though they are—were showing signs of battle fatigue as they patiently marched through the paces of mourning alongside me.

With strange men, I could polish my patter, identify which tidbits from my past would bring about smiles and “ahs” of familiarity. And sure, you start out on this process hoping that each date has a chance of leading to another, to a lifetime even, but you soon realize (based on the recognition of patterns) that most of them will end up being “onesies,” so any lies you might tell—whether to deepen your date’s curiosity or just to amuse yourself—have no consequence at all, really. Truth becomes a control group against which you measure the impact of alternatives.

Pamela wants to see if I want to go to lunch with her and with Kristy and Ben from the development department. Thai food. They want to bitch about the new timesheets we’re supposed to use now, the ones on which we have to break down our workdays into the most intricately detailed and insignificant segments of activity. I just want to study the chair rail on my office wall. I give Pamela a 10-dollar bill and ask her to bring me back some mussamin beef, then I open my e-mail and look for the last thing sent to me by Eddie.

Eddie is a fellow I met on Yahoo about a month ago. I got ambitious one night and sent out a dozen e-mails to various men. I got back four responses and Eddie was the second one I went out with. He wanted to take me to dinner, but I suggested coffee after work. He countered with a drink on a Saturday afternoon and I said yes, I know a place.

We met at a small brew pub in my neighborhood, rustic in that rarefied way that makes brew pubs different from bars. Eddie was uncomfortable from the start. He got there before I did, which I didn’t expect since I always arrive about 20 minutes early, thinking it’s wiser for me to be the one watching the door. He was already through half his lager by the time I introduced myself.

“You come to this place a lot?” he asks me as I slide into the booth.

“Sometimes,” I say. “They have good soup.”

“Well, they got shit for beer,” Eddie warns me.

“What’s that one you’re drinking?” I ask.

“I wanted Salitos.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

He explains to me that Salitos is a Mexican beer made with tequila. He grew up drinking it. I unfold the menu and when the waitress comes, I order a seasonal pumpkin flavored ale.

“Could we get some chips or something with that?” Eddie asks.

Eddie’s looking at me now. Not entirely unpleased. His beer is kicking in.

“Mmm…mmm…mmh,” he evaluates me, smiling a little.

“What?” I ask him.

“Oh, so that’s how it’s gonna be with Eddie, huh?”

“Tell me about your job,” I prod him, and he continues the story he started in his e-mails, about how he works with at-risk youth, kids who’ve been on the streets, in and out of juvenile detention, kids with drinking problems, drug problems, no parents, shithole parents, kids with gangs after them, with no future but a prison future unless they hear it straight from someone who’s been there. He’s been there, Eddie tells me, he was one of them and should probably be dead now, but he got saved in time. He doesn’t quite remember what I told him in my e-mails that I do for a living, but as I remind him that I also try to help kids and that was one of the reasons I was attracted to his profile, he flags down our waitress and orders two more beers.

“No, I’m OK,” I tell him and point to my still full glass.

He nods at our waitress. “Bring it,” he says. “I’ll drink it.”

For another hour or so, Eddie and I go back and forth clumsily. I try to draw him out, but he seems to grow increasingly defensive. He watches the other tables and every now and then stares out the big window overlooking the street, watches the local hipsters having animated conversations, talking about nothing, laughing, not letting Eddie in on their jokes. This is not his neighborhood, he tells me a couple of times, not his people. I tell him about the work I do getting free books to families with low literacy skills and he says, so what/that’s books/what they need is a life, some food, a bed/that’s just books. I’ve never been in quite this position before. Not with a date. Maybe with Palmer. Yes, that time I visited Tracey for Christmas, the year after they were married. He was unhappy with how I folded the sheets I used on the couch I slept on. Something like that. He yelled at me. Told me to get back here and refold these sheets and I think I laughed, not a laugh-laugh, but a kind of shock laugh, a kind of what-the-fuck laugh. I looked over at my sister (who was cooking breakfast at the time) for some kind of recognition that this was ridiculous, that this was how insane people acted, that this was just an elaborate “gotcha” joke Palmer was playing on me. But she didn’t smile, she didn’t jump on my side. She, uh, actually she flinched the tiniest bit, her head, no, not even her head, just her eyes twitched, begging me be quiet, please, be quiet…please, please don’t make him mad.

Our date clearly over, Eddie offers to walk me to my car and I tell him no thanks, I live nearby. He says he can drive me home, but I say that’s OK, I like to walk. He’s a bit wobbly, but I feel him trying to keep it together as we both sort of dawdle uncomfortably outside the doorway to the brew pub, saying our goodbyes.

“Well,” I say to him. “You take it easy,”

“Hey now,” he says, his eyes tired and sad. “Don’t say ‘take it easy’ like it’s the last time you’re gonna be seeing Eddie.”

It starts as a parlor game in childhood. Choice A is to answer a question truthfully. Have you ever stolen something? Have you ever cheated on a test? Who in this room would you do it with? Choice B is to do something, do whatever the person whose turn it is asks you to. I am 13 and after a childhood of choosing Truth, I pick Dare. When you’re 13, the Dares generally consist of kissing someone, making a prank phone call or vandalizing something. I am prepared to do any of these things. Chris Jacobs is the one who gets to pick my Dare, though, and he tells me he wants me to get fingered by Matty Devlin.

No, I tell Chris. Then I pick Truth.

You already picked Dare, too bad.

Well, I take it back. I pick Truth.

You’d only lie.

No. I’ll tell you something good.

No, you picked Dare, you do Dare.

Matty Devlin is rolling up his sleeve.

It’s not fair, I say, everyone else just had to kiss somebody.

Nobody here wants to kiss you, skank, Chris says and Matty laughs.

Kiss me, Tracey says when she and her two best friends Susan and Donna Jo barge into Chris’s basement. They are 14 and wear makeup and scare boys. I’ll trade ya. Give her Truth and you can kiss me instead.

“For God’s sakes, a dissecting aortic aneurysm,” I tell Eddie for the millionth time. “It was like her heart just ripped in two.”

It’s always a mistake to drunk dial. I know this. It’s an even bigger mistake to drunk dial an ex-convict with whom you’ve had a bad date.

I call Eddie the following Friday night because I need his help getting my hands on a gun. The lawyers were right. The case settled. The doctor in scrubs got spanked and maybe his insurance rates went up a bit. The hospital got a little bad checkmark next to their name on a list somewhere. The lawyers got their 40 percent, as did Palmer Prewitt; 10 percent went to Tracey’s son, now a Marine recruit, and the remaining 10 percent was divided among the rest of her blood survivors. All done. All done. Except for line 629 on the deposition the teenaged son gave in the inquiry after his mother’s death. It was the question that asked, “And where was your stepfather that night?”

It was sitting right there, under the surface of all my misdirected hate. The man who should have driven her to the hospital that night, the man who should have been on her side, who should have argued with the doctors in the way only a bully can, who should have comforted her son instead of tossing him out of his home, was instead out for the evening. Drinking. Knocking up the cocktail waitress he would marry eight months later.

“Let’s face it, Eddie,” I say, “You could be useful to me here. You know people. You could make a difference in your community by getting a gun off the street and into my hands because I will be very responsible with it. There’s only one murder I’ll commit and then I’ll turn that gun right on in to the police. It’s a win-win for everybody.”

Eddie’s been listening to me quietly for a few minutes. He waits just another moment before he asks me: “Where does he live?”

“Minnesota. Out in the middle of nowhere.”

“So. You gonna try boarding a plane with a gun, are ya?”

“No, don’t be stupid,” I slur just a little. “We’re gonna drive there. We can make it from Seattle in one day if we drive straight through. Day and a half at most. You’re gonna have to drive the first leg, though, ‘cuz I’m a little too buzzed.”

“OK. It’s OK. You’ll be OK.”

“You don’t think I’m serious, do you? Her heart, Eddie, her heart just tore in two.”

“I know you’re serious, hun,” he assures me. “Text me your address. Eddie’ll be right over.”