Page Utilities
Alix Kates Shulman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (page 5 of 6) Page 5 of 6
Why have I never compiled such a list? (Nowadays I keep one in each of our wallets and all over our loft.) I get the pills, but before I begin to write, I see a stretcher being readied. Afraid of being left behind, I quickly snatch up Scott’s things — his wallet, medicines, clothes, shoes, glasses — and, together with a flashlight and my cell phone, throw them into my still partially packed backpack. Everything is happening so fast! I’m barefoot when the men start out the door with Scott on the stretcher. Frantically I fumble to put on sneakers. Greg stays behind to help me close the studio and with his powerful torch guides me back across the decks, down the iffy stairs, and on across the narrow path from Singing Sands to the longer South Beach, where the hazards of high tide await us.
Usually the beach is wide and firm enough to run across, but at high tide it shrinks to a strip of wrack strewn with treacherous driftwood, rocks, rope, and plastic — too narrow for a stretcher and its bearers. Nevertheless — another miracle — somehow the men manage to carry the stretcher in relays across that long beach without stumbling, though it’s almost impossible to see the ground for the soupy fog. I trot along at the rear, trying to keep up, afraid of being left back as superfluous or worse.
At last we reach the end of the beach, where the road begins in front of Heather and Norm’s house, and the island’s ambulance truck awaits us. I look up. Their windows are dark, the house is still. Can it really have been only a few hours since we sat on that porch and laughed through dinner, carefree and confident? I see through a scrim to that distant world where life proceeds by days and nights, not minute by terrifying minute; it occurs to me that we’ve left that calm, carefree world behind forever.
But there’s no time to think. The men are already transferring Scott from the stretcher to a gurney and lifting him into the truck. Someone leads me to the truck’s cab, where I can ride beside the driver. Someone else thrusts my bag onto my lap, and off we go, racing across the island through the fog, down to the dock where the fireboat from Portland, fitted out as an ambulance, awaits us. In the fog I can just make out Dickey Clarke, the fire chief — whose day job is to run the island Dump — standing on the wharf directing the rescue with radio and bullhorn. Despite the hour, some of the island women have also turned out to lend support; Robin, who is part of the rescue team, wishes me luck as Scott is wheeled onto the boat. Now we’ve pulled anchor and are heading out to sea. The island recedes, our friends are gone. Seeing it disappear, I feel a wave of overwhelming gratitude toward those heroic men and women who showed up in the middle of the night to save my husband. Without them, how will I be able to protect him from further harm?
Inside the truck’s cabin, the gurney is secured to the floor. A medic claps an oxygen mask over Scott’s mouth and nose. At last I can see his pale blue eyes, study that handsome face. It’s changed; it radiates less light. He’s trying to say something, but behind the mask his words are too muffled to make out. All I can do is stroke his forehead and hands and try to reassure him that things are under control and that he’ll be okay.
“How long before we get to Portland?” I ask the medic.
“Maybe twenty, twenty-five minutes,” he says of a trip that by ferry would normally take forty-five minutes, including stops. I check my watch. Almost 4:00 a.m. — two hours since the universe flipped over. Silently I urge the boat to go still faster.
More than half a century before, at the end of our second week of summer school, Scott finally took me out on a genuine date. He picked me up in his secondhand blue Ford convertible and drove us to the Sea Fare Lounge, a smoky cocktail bar with live piano music and leather banquettes, at the edge of Cleveland Heights, halfway down the long hill to the city — more sophisticated than the high-school hangouts I was used to. On a platform just inside the entrance, a gaunt brunette, cigarette dangling from her lips, played show tunes on a baby grand and nodded to Scott as we entered. When he told me she was a classmate of his, I felt intimidated and jealous. Could she be the reason we’d come here?
We slid into a booth and ordered shrimp cocktails and martinis. Though Scott sat with his back to the pianist, giving me his full attention, I bridled when she dedicated a song to him. That a Heights High girl could or would have a job playing music in a cocktail bar was unimaginable to me. Though I was prettier, she was at least twenty, and far more accomplished. What cards did I have to play?
(“Don’t kid yourself, you had plenty of cards,” Scott tells me decades later when I read him this passage off my computer screen.)
After my second martini I played the sex card, my one trump, and lightheartedly challenged him to find us a bed where we could make love. No backseats for us! I said it with enough flippant bravado that he could dismiss it as a joke if he wanted to, though I’d already tried to make clear that I disdained prudery and considered myself not bound by Heights High conventions.
He said nothing, just leaned over to light my cigarette — a Chesterfield, my mother’s brand — though he himself, like my upright father, was not a smoker. Was he shocked by my invitation? When he took me home and chastely kissed me good night on the front porch, it was as if he had not heard my challenge. So I was surprised when, on our next Saturday night date, instead of taking me dancing or home, he headed across the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River to Cleveland’s West Side, where neither of us knew a soul, and turned into the entrance drive of a motel.
A motel! In the movies, motels were where seductive fallen women and doomed married lovers begin their plunge.
“Wait here,” he said, getting out of the car and heading toward the office.
Embarrassment and exhilaration battled inside me as I waited. Motel sex was supposed to be sordid, base, degrading. But I was relieved that it was finally going to happen and ecstatic that despite his inhibiting shyness, gentleman that he was, he had accepted my dare. Seeing him return to the car waving a room key, my admiration for him soared.
From To Love What Is by Alix Kates Shulman, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2008 by Alix Kates Shulman. All rights reserved. To view or the book, go to www.amazon.com. For more information about author Alix Kates Shulman, go to www.alixkshulman.com.
