New Fiction: "Patient" by JoAnna Novak
An excerpt from a new short story collection, Meaningful Work by JoAnna Novak, published by FC2/The University of Alabama Press.
On Saturday nights, I am haunted by cumbrous memories of my mother. Nine months ago, on these nights, my mother would call from the other side of the country to read me her woes. Her fat Polish fingers would squeeze a juice jar of red wine as she spoke of her muddy yard, her cracked cuticles, shit in the yard, shit on her boots. I was a young wife at the time, walking after supper to help myself digest. What I wanted to digest was a baby. So alone with child, so alone on Saturday night. So cumbrous, my mother.
Now I wander the ward and look for friends or TV. It is not like when the baby was born, pushing him in a plastic bin on a wheeled cart, being stopped to receive a hand massage, a cookie and milk. Here in the promise of health and its lies: snacky self-care is exposed for the rot it is. I am supposed to want arm strength enough to lift my child, the mirage of a robust pulse, a BMI of bright binomials. The tolerance to swallow what I chew.
Luck has her eye on me, and after pacing the corridor a few times I hear faint voices coming from the art room. I follow them. Past the nurses’ station, where computers sleep, guarded by a row of nail polish bottles, glittering stuff the staff steals from us. Past the listening library. The door to the art room is barely open.
Baby girl, where is your fear? You could lose visiting privileges, phone privileges, day passes, dinnertime decaf. What sublimity do you seek? You know the art room: construction paper, dull pencils, crayons, markers, glue sticks, National Geographic battlements.
Yet, I slip inside. The lights with their saline chill. On TV, a flip-haired actor wrings his leather jacket and paces like a panther. There is an orderly sitting on the couch. Dorota. Dorota tells everyone to call her Dorothy.
She has unlocked the supply cabinet and removed the bin of safety scissors. They have rounded points and squeaky plastic handles the color of 7 UP bottles. Dorota’s big blond hair is behaving like a beehive, her breasts are multiparous, her storm-blue nails are round as a pinup’s rump.
She is cutting fashion magazines, the ones we’re not supposed to see.
This ward is a test with all wrong answers; the scale goes up instead of down. This ward is staffed by people who ooze over fireworks and switch their hips to Fleetwood Mac. They wear scrubs and crosses, and so does Dorota, stalled mid-snip, scissors alligator-mouthed. She gawks at the TV. Her crucifix bobs in her cleavage as she cachinnates over Chandler.
Chandler is locked in a vestibule. He is scrambling and antic, but at least he has gum. Torching seven calories an hour.
Dorota snips around a dress of eel-gray sequins and adds it to the array on the coffee table, next to a barge-sized box of tissues.
She doesn’t say anything when I sit down next to her, only twists to hide the inside of the magazine. She licks her finger, the chalky underbelly of a long nail, as she pages. On-screen, the Village is in a blackout; New York is going haywire; the other friends are running out of candles and patience. In our ward, the power is human. The wall vent clears its throat and cycles on the heat. The honeycomb fixtures flicker, and I am strobed by the luminance of caged madness.
“My daughter and I are going shopping,” Dorota says during a commercial. “Do you like this?”
She tap-taps the jut of my knee with the green part of the scissors and shows me the dresses. I am nauseated and calmed just seeing them—those girls, those girls, those dresses on girls. They are backless, haltered, sequined pageant styles that skim the models’ bodies. The models are thin, but not thin like me, and not thin like the others on the ward, and their flesh is not dry or scaly but tan and moisturized, supple, nubile, luminescent—precious words, words that are supposed to remind me of my baby.
“Pretty,” I say. “Very glamorous.”
“Very expensive,” Dorota says. “But it’s a special time. She should enjoy it. I do not want to ruin it for her.”
“‘Show me the gold tunnel,’” I say. “‘Show me where the gold tunnel goes. ’”
Dorota’s scissors pause.
“It’s a Nevada thing,” I say. “From the Gold Rush, all right? Don’t be scared. I’m all here. I’m with it. I’m fine. ”
“She is a seal on my heart, a seal of gold,” Dorota says, peeling back the flap of a Shalimar sample. “You have a child, and you think you know anything about this life? Forget it. You see that gold tunnel you imagine all along, and it is not so easy to find your way. You get lost in the tunnel, no? Even if you do not end up in a place like this.”
“You’re not lost,” I say. “My mother would never have looked for prom dresses for me. My mother called me a—”
“Now, but not always. When my daughter is two, three, I had headaches. Very bad headaches. My husband says I was a demon. I tell you, Joanna, I wanted to smash my head against the wall.”
Dorota digs in her pocket, rummaging away the gravity of her admission. And that is how I know she is good. Caring. The kind of mother I’ve never had and never will be. She does not cavil to emphasize her own suffering. She does not answer “how are you?” with “fine,” where fine is a mortal wound. She does slake her thirst to starve and shirk her production of milk. Dorota unwraps a cough drop. On TV, the loft lights flicker in the Village, and the two people with the most voluminous hair are kissing.
“It’s almost Sunday,” she says. I hear the lozenge clack against her teeth. “I still have to drive home, get home at twelve-thirty, clean up, go to sleep, wake up, make blintzes before church.”
I cringe at the old memory of myself, a chunky girl, mi-crowaving eggs into a plasticky omelet for my mother, the hor-rid smell of zapped Velveeta.
“For my mother, my mother-in-law. We celebrate them, every year. We give them roses, yes, yellow roses.” She pauses and then speaks more forcefully. “Don’t you have happy memories with your family? Didn’t your mother like to cook?”
In the Village, the sarcastic friend has said goodbye to a model future. The heat has cycled off. All the dresses in front of us are the color of deep-water fish or grape soda.
Dorota shakes her head. “I’m sorry. I know. I should keep my beeping mouth shut.”
“It’s me, Dorothy,” I say. “I ate her kluski, her fruit dumplings. I swallowed them. All of it. I swallowed it with bleach.”
The credits come in their chatty font. There it is. If you starve yourself, you starve your child. Poison yourself, poison your milk. Midnight.
“I hope you have a beautiful Mother’s Day,” I say.
“C’mon, mama.” Dorota sweeps the gowns into a hospital envelope. “Let’s go back. You need your rest. Your little boy is coming tomorrow, yes? Your little one and your husband. I bet they’re bringing you flowers. You need flowers in your room.”
She flicks the light switch with her thunderhead nails and leads me to my room, pats my bony shoulder, and waves her badge in front of a sensor that controls the ward’s doors.
Sunday is here. Dorota, buxom, stable, constant, has gone home. My visitors have left me a gasping succulent. Shrimpy, spiny, the color of fatigue. My mother used to send me flowers, back when I was in that pregnant apartment, lush ballets of pink and cream and green and gold, stigma and stem, a bullet or a blade. Every time, the cursive in the card said the same thing: Do I need a reason to tell you I love you?
Reprinted by permission of FC2/The University of Alabama Press.
JoAnna Novak’s debut memoir, Contradiction Days, will be published by Catapult in 2023. Her short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and will be published by FC2 in 2021; her third book of poetry, New Life, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in the same year. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher Tammy.
