Again


Before I drank my martini, I ate the olive. It was salty and bitter. Jennifer was sitting on the other side of the table on a high barstool, drinking a rum and coke. She liked everything sweet. I thought about telling her why I had wanted to come out tonight. I didn’t say anything, though.

Jennifer and I knew each other because our ten-year-old sons were best friends. We were two divorced women who spent most of our time working or with the kids. So usually when I saw her she wasn’t dressed up. But tonight she looked beautiful. She was in a black dress and sandals, and she had lipstick on. Her eyes were shining as she looked around the room.

I had told her I really needed to get out this weekend. But I hadn’t told her why. I just said come on, neither one of us has been out for months, I have the night free for once, please please come with me. I looked at her and thought about telling her that my son was having surgery again next week. But that was the thing I was not going to think about tonight.

No, I would tell her tomorrow.

I finished my first drink. Maybe it would help me forget about the last time we went to the hospital and how it was going to happen all over again. I didn’t drink often, so it made me feel dizzy right away.

Dizzy, that drunken feeling. Early in the morning, an hour before surgery, when we were waiting in the room with the crayon pattern on the wallpaper, the little plastic cup of medicine they gave him made him goofy and he wanted to jump or dance around and the nurse said be careful because he could fall and hit his head and that had happened to one boy before. He was already wired from all the steroids, now he was really hard to calm down, and when the nurse came back she shook her head and told me to hold him still and then she put a white cream on the top of one of his hands to numb it for the IV they were going to put in later.

Stop, I told myself. And listen to the music.

I looked out in the middle of the dance floor and I saw a couple dancing. The woman was in a dress with a skirt that rippled around her as she turned. She had long blond hair streaked with gray and her hair flew out as her dress rippled. Her partner was a slender young man with a hooked nose, wearing a white shirt and suspenders. The song ended and he dipped her low, almost to the floor. And they held that position for a few seconds. Perfect timing. Real life was a lot more awkward than that.

A short guy came and asked Jennifer to dance and she went with him to the dance floor. I sat and watched and ordered another drink. I was starting to feel like I couldn’t sit still anymore. I got up and walked to the bathroom, past the policeman by the front door, just to be doing something. The policeman gave me a look and I couldn’t quite figure out what kind of a look it was, curiosity maybe. I didn’t know whether I looked good or bad. I wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

In the bathroom, I looked in the mirror. Maybe it was the amber light bulbs, but I couldn’t see the worry on my face. I didn’t look too pale, or too thin. My dress fell in a slim line and curved over my hips and ended in a fringe. The red and black threads fit together into a tight pattern. Too bad everything didn’t fit together the same way. I imagined a ray of morning light coming through the small window on the outside wall, like a laser, and breaking the mirror into little pieces. A pile of shattered glass on the floor. That would be my life.

I needed to stop thinking those things.

I was here now. And I was wearing this dress. Tonight, I didn’t have to step into that suit with the thin whitish green transparent paper and zip up the front and put on a mask and slip more paper over my hair and feet before we started down the hall to the operating room. The nurse was pushing him in a wheelchair and I was walking beside them, I felt like I was in a moon suit, walking on the moon, with nothing to hold me down and nobody to hold on to.

On my way back to my seat, I walked by the table at the end of the bar that had pitchers of ice water and glasses. There was a group of single guys on the raised floor above the table, standing around and drinking and watching the dance floor. It was starting to get crowded and the air was warmer. I got a glass of ice water and I went and sat down at our table again.

As I sat down, the salsa ended and a merengue started playing. A man appeared at the side of the table. He was about my height, muscular, with strong features and a close shaved head. He held out his hand to me and I followed him to the dance floor. When we got there, we started dancing in circles.

Circles were better than straight lines. Better than walking that straight line down the hallway to the operating room. In the room when he got out of the wheelchair that the nurse was pushing and got on the table, they put electrodes on his chest and told him about the anesthesia and asked him what flavor he wanted, bubble gum or strawberry, because they could put a scent inside the mask. He chose bubble gum. His body was so little lying there and breathing, the anesthesiologist was counting backwards and when he got down to zero then he said mom you can give him one last kiss and the nurse walked me out of the room past a bunch of machines and a computer that had a sign on it saying do not play games on this computer.

What kind of idiots would play games in there anyway? Didn’t they know that people could die?

I was still dancing. I saw Jennifer still with the same man, but at a respectable distance, the way you should dance with a man who’s not your husband or your boyfriend. Meanwhile, my partner was holding me close. I could feel the hard muscles in his thighs and the pulse in his abdomen. And I could feel the vibrations from the floor that rose up through the soles of my feet all the way up to my ears.

I wanted more noise. Other people’s music, another heart beating. Better than my own heart, beating in the silence of a waiting room, there by myself and thinking about how much I hate the stupid wallpaper with crayons on it, and how much longer will it be, maybe I should eat some lunch but I really don’t feel like it, besides I can’t leave the room and go to the cafeteria, and how times like this are the times I really can’t stand to be alone.

A new song started. I looked over at a slim woman with short red hair and a red leather dress. She had a tattoo of a butterfly on her shoulder. She looked free, like she had no obligations. But who knew? Anybody could have a tragedy going on, you couldn’t always tell by looking. The man I was dancing with said his name was Eric. He was talking to me in Spanish, because my Spanish was better than his English, and besides I wanted the Spanish words to fill up my brain so there was no room for anything else. Back in Honduras, his father owned horses and cows. The music was still playing.

His hands were on my waist, they were masculine hands with square fingers. There was a burn on one of his arms he got from welding. That’s what he did in the daytime. My fingers were on his back, right between his leather belt and his cotton shirt. The heat of his body comforted me. I put my head down and smelled the cologne on his collarbone. Wood, citrus and sweat. “Give me a kiss”, he said. I kissed him, even though he was a stranger. His mouth was smoother than a man’s should be, and so warm.

I followed his movements almost unconsciously. My legs were trapped between his. But I didn’t care. I was tired of deciding things, and scheduling things, and signing papers. I didn’t want to think, and I didn’t want to lead.

I only wanted to close my eyes, and follow.

I didn’t want to think about holding my son in my arms in the recovery room, when he rose up howling out of unconsciousness, just beginning to realize how much pain he was in, with the big bandage over his head and metal shield over one eye, and how after he woke up he was sick to his stomach and he could hardly sip the ginger ale and ice in the tall Styrofoam cup and he never ate the crackers they gave him. And how even a day later his breath and his skin smelled like the chemicals from the anesthesia, it took a long time to get that out of your system.

Finally, we walked off the dance floor. Jennifer was back at our table. She wanted to go home, she said. It was fun, but she had things to do in the morning. Suddenly I felt exhausted. Eric stood by the table, leaning toward me, talking about how he wanted to take me out to dinner, please give him my phone number, when could he see me again. I didn’t give him my number. He wrote his down in pencil on a bar napkin and gave it to me.
“I’ll be waiting.” he said.

Yellow neon. Blinking red lights. Jennifer and I were driving back to her house, heading toward the morning. The only thing I had from the night was a paper with a name and number that still smelled like cologne.
“Are you going to call him?” Jennifer asked.
“Oh, no.”
I told myself that tomorrow morning, I would throw that paper away. And I would look at the pre-op instructions.

Please God, let me be stronger tomorrow.