AFTER YELLING AT her boss, fleeing the office, and calling in sick for almost two weeks, Jem found herself returning to work one morning, as if it were any other Tuesday. She got in the car, snaked through the traffic, around and around the overfilled parking lots, parked, and marched up the hillside, past the gardeners bent under trees beginning to fleck with orange, yellow, and red. She took a gulp of air, a look at the lowering sky, grabbed the door, and went inside.
Jem had the sense that her plans were too drastic, too strange really to act on. When she walked in everyone in the office stared, like she was Lazarus, still wearing the death rags. No one spoke to her beyond necessary exchanges. Jem felt she was trapped in the same fear as the rest of them, the sticky tendrils of routine, drawing her in; she was afraid to do anything else, and she was maddened and exhausted by that fear. The spell of Portia Porschman and Johnson-Crowes Hospital had worked itself into her; she was good for nothing in life but staring at blips of computer light, doomed to her phone and desk, until she keeled over on top of the filing or Portia came with leg irons.
It was a way of being that Jem had been raised with. She’d watched the ancient trailers around Euclid cave in, their siding disintegrating into rust and red tears, while families still lived inside. Dolores Otts was her age. Jem had read the small item in the Euclid Town Crier about Dolores’s death. An “accidental fire,” it said. Jem imagined Dolores wading through the newspapers, rags, the boxes of takeout food, the spools of thread her kids described in the paper, past the branches of trees forcing through her windows, taking a box of matches, and setting fire to a copy of Good Housekeeping. Fire leaking across the living room, rising in the doorways, racing the walls. What lightness she must have felt in setting it all aflame! What was a place like Euclid anyway, Jem thought, but a charred house, sticks and bones. A broken wish that no one could escape.
WHEN PORTIA DID emerge from her office, looking haggard and reddish around the jowls, Jem felt the air suck out of the office as if every woman there had taken in her breath at the same moment. Jem was facing her computer, fingers on the keyboard, and she could see Portia’s reflection in the monitor glass, a demon wafting in from the microchips and dancing over the screen. She felt as if ice were creeping up between her fingers. Suddenly she thought that Portia might not call the police at all; she might just haul Jem back into that office and mete out punishment personally.
Jem turned in her typing chair, poised to face her head on. Portia was already there. The big head nodded down at Jem, a great arm lifted, then a piece of paper, folded in the shape that kids at school used to call footballs, tumbled into Jem’s lap. It took Jem a while to undo the tight, elaborate system of folding. By the time she did, and had read the note, Portia was gone. The message was written in big, black letters: “I LIKE YOU, WHY DON’T YOU LIKE ME?”
DAYS LATER, ON Friday, an hour before quitting time, Portia deposited a new note. The message was lengthy, and the gist of it was that Portia needed Jem to stay on until they found a suitable replacement, which might not be until a year or two from that date, due to hiring freezes, and that, if Jem quit, Portia would find ways to make her life “unpleasant, if not a total, living nightmare.” Jem read the note over two then three times, all the while aware of Portia watching from behind her office window. Then the phone rang, and when Jem answered it, there was no response, just a sound like rain in the background, then a dial tone.
She thought she could see an eye peering from Portia’s door. Jem fiddled with a few keys at her computer and tried to make it look like she was working. Even after she’d hung up, the sound of rain lingered and distracted her; it mingled with the whir of the office machinery and the murmuring of her co-workers that rose inside the office walls like water in a glass. There was no easy escape from the place. No windows, no back doors. The only way to leave was to walk past Portia. Then she thought, why not? She had quit, she had confronted Portia, she had even—though this now seemed distant and unbelievable—defied her. Leaving should have been the easy part. But she looked at that eye in the doorway, and wondered if she could do it.
The phone rang again. “Well, what are you waiting for?” It was Melvina.
“What?” Jem looked around her desk for a hidden camera. “What do you mean?”
“When, exactly, was it you first gave notice?”
“Oh, maybe three months ago, give or take a week.”
“That’s what I mean,” Melvie said. “What do you think? Even our father, Mr. Chicken, finally disembarked. Granted, your escape to Jordan is a feebleminded plot, but I thought the idea might have inspired you with enough gumption just to get out and look around. Life is change, flux, movement. You move or you shrivel up. Case closed.”
“It’s not safe out there!” Portia’s voice, on an office extension, cut in. “This job is life.”
First Melvie’s and then Portia’s lines clicked dead. Though Jem could see Portia coming first, Melvie materialized at Jem’s desk seconds ahead. “You’re out of line, Nurse Melvina Ramoud,” Portia said.
Jem could see eyes rising around her at the other desks. The mailroom girl froze in her tracks. There was a moment of great silence.
Melvina crossed her arms and said, “Don’t mess with me, lady.”
A murmur from the office staff swelled up, and Portia rocked with it, her large body swaying lightly, to and fro, sizing up her adversary. Melvina’s reputation had spread to all corners of the hospital, even the business wing outpost, and Portia eyed her cagily. “Hey, I’m on your side,” Portia said, after a pause, in a new, offhand voice. “We’re all women here, aren’t we?” She lifted her hands, indicating the staff around her. Jem contemplated their faces a moment, gray and pearly-eyed like the long-drowned, the tight set of their mouths, unhappiness flowing out of them. “I hire women, you see, to help them,” Portia was saying. “You know a lot of people would be saying these women should be home having babies. Not Portia Porschman.”
“You’re warped, Ms. Porschman,” Melvina said. “Emotionally disturbed. I don’t blame you for what you are, just for staying that way. You don’t do them any favors through criminal exploitation. The business office is the last non-unionized wing of the hospital, its women the most underpaid of all staff, and they work the longest hours. Their right to employment isn’t in question, but their working conditions are!”
Jem thought she heard a few voices lifted in agreement. But Portia’s eyes were lit now, hands open, arms raising like Zeus’s. “Don’t you go using that union word around here. These girls are mine. They answer to me and they work for me. I trained each of them like a mother, and without me they’re nothing. When I say eat, they eat; when I say breathe, they breathe. They’re my flock. I love each and every one of them. When they’re good, I reward them; when they’re bad, I’ll be the one to punish them. I made them, every one.”
Melvina ran her eyes up and down Portia once, then said, “Oh really? And who taught you to say that? Who trained the trainer, Ms. Porschman?”
Something in Portia’s face withered a little. Then, feeling a shadow, Jem noticed the black undertaker suit of the mysterious Mrs. Pinoire, chief supervisor of business, briefly gliding through the back of the room.
“She’s right!” A voice from another part of the room wafted up. It was Virge. Eighty-eight years old in support hose, a jumpsuit, and neck brace; she shuffled to the front of the room. “Miss Porschman’s right!”
“Why, thank you very much, Virginia,” Portia said, clasping one hand around Virge’s entire shoulder. “What did I tell you? My women love me.”
“Why yessuh, yessuh, good, white massuh,” Virge said suddenly. “All us slaves is so thankful! Now Lordy, oh, Lordy, won’t you let my people go?”
Portia didn’t move, twitch a lip, or flick a muscle. Her face turned gray; she seemed to be turning into a wall of flesh. Then Virge extricated herself from Portia’s grasp, reached over, and offered her hand, tiny and curled as a bird’s claw, to Jem. Jem took it. “See?” Virge said to her. “That’s the only thing my hand is any good for anymore, holding hands or adding up. The arthritis got it curled into the shape of my adding machine. It’s time for you to move on, before the same happens to you, doll. You better go or I’m going to, and I’d just as soon stay, what with this hand and all.”
Melvina jerked her head at the door. “That way out,” she said.
Slowly and with some production, Portia shut her eyes.
Jem grabbed her pens, notebook, and address book. One of Gilbert Sesame’s telegrams slipped out, the words “My darlin’” face up. She left it on the floor. She stopped before Portia, whose eyes were still shut, then realized she had nothing to say to her. She walked, leaving a trail of silence behind. She tucked her ID into the time clock, punched out. Then she and Melvina—acting as military escort—opened the door into a slight shower washed with sun.
“You know she’s not a such a bad sort once you get to talk to her,” Melvie said as they walked toward the car.
“Portia? You’re kidding?”
“Not at all,” Melvie said. “She’s got some managerial talent, I’d say, but lacks soul. Genghis Khan, you know, was an underrated manager.” She opened the driver’s-side door for her sister. “So now what?”
“You’re not going to tell me?” Jem said, standing by the door.
Melvie tilted back her head, drizzle on her nurse’s cap and on the backs of her lowered eyelids and caught in her hair. “No. Don’t tempt me. I’m working on personal growth this week; reducing the need to control and colonize, for today. So I relinquish all claims on your future—graduate school, marriage, Jordan, as long as you give me two weeks notice on all decisions and an option to accompany you or veto the plan entirely if it’s some unbalanced scheme.”
“Well, I’m going home. Do you want to come along?” Jem asked.
Melvie shook her head. “Sorry. You go, but I can’t just leave. Nursing to me is not an act of volition, of ‘free will’ if you like. It is as necessary and immediate as using my limbs.”
“For you, maybe. Some nurses quit.”
Melvie wagged a finger at Jem. “They’re kidding themselves. Radical self-delusion. Once you become a nurse, it’s branded into your flesh—like a tattoo—you can’t simply rub it out—”
“In all cases?”
“Either that or they were never nurses to begin with. False nurses, I call them, poseurs, who never really had a calling, but were lured by the status, glamour, and other worldly enticements.”
Jem got into the car. She thought for a moment, fingers on the ignition. She started the car then leaned out the window. “What about going back to school yourself? You’d make more money if you got a graduate degree and went into nursing administration.”
“Hah!” Melvie propped her hands on her hips. “I’m no easy-chair pencil pusher! It’s the front lines for me or nothing.”
Jem waved, put the car in reverse, and the sky broke into beads over the windshield as she drove away.
ON THE HIGHWAY, Jem remembered something to tell Melvie: the time they went to the amusement park in New Hampshire, when they and their mother were visiting her relatives. Jem was nine, Melvie two; it was just a few weeks before they would leave for Jordan.
Jem had been attracted to the words “Fun House,” which sounded like a charming, candy-colored place built for children. She and her cousins, all between six and nine, wanted to go in. She remembered distantly that Melvie, a toddler who hated to be carried and wrestled with strollers, had reached both hands toward Jem and kept crying over and over: “No! No! Me, me, me!” Jem couldn’t tell if Melvina wanted to be included, if she wanted to exchange places, or if there was some other message in this. Until their mother’s death, Jem had been called Jemmy, which Melvie had shortened simply to “me.”
When Jem entered the narrow shaft of darkness at the door to the Fun House, she saw she’d been mistaken about the place; Melvie’s voice from outside echoed back at her from every odd and crooked angle of the structure, “No, no, no!” The sound didn’t fade until the children had walked to the interior recesses. Jem had little recollection of the house itself: sweeping plastic spiderwebs and dangling tarantulas, people in warts and peaked hats jumping out at them. What she did remember clearly was walking, suddenly, into a room of shifting blue lights; nothing else was in the chamber but black walls and blue lights, soft and suspended in the room. It gave her an enchanted feeling, like sleeping in the snow, and if her cousins hadn’t been with her, she might have forgotten about the rest of the house and hung back, captured by the lights.
She pressed forward with the rest and stepped out of the room of blue lights into a place with no light at all. It was separated from the other room by a heavy, swinging door which, as they entered, flashed a blue beacon in, briefly illuminating the other place; Jem thought she saw faces, tongues, and staring eyes, covering the walls around her. Then the door shut behind them, snuffing out every particle of light and the flash-lit faces.
It was a darkness more thorough than she’d ever experienced before; darker than anything she could have imagined. It seemed thick, like water, a substance that would float her away. The other children put out their hands, they laughed and cried out, “Oh!” and tried to find their way to the next room. Only there were no doors out. Jem ran her hands over the smooth surfaces; there was no crack, not a breach or flaw in the walls that went on, seamless and smooth as a womb; the children moved around and around, finding that the door through which they’d entered was gone. It was as if none of it had ever existed, not the door, not the sign outside, the dancing letters laughing out the words Fun House. The outside world disappeared.
Someone began to whimper, and then it rose like a wind in their ears; one by one, automatically, they joined in, crying, climbing to full-scale wails. Jem couldn’t remember how long it went on; she had lost herself in crying. Noise and darkness went on and on, full and keening with lost souls.
The next thing she remembered was hearing an even more piercing sound, a voice, “no, no, no!” cutting right through the crying. As it grew louder and closer, the children gradually quieted. Jem’s mother and baby sister appeared in a rectangle of intense blue that opened from a corner. Melvie was clamoring in her mother’s arms, trying to snatch the flashlight away from the fun-house employee with them, never once ceasing her alarm: “No, no, no! Me, me, me!” When she finally spotted Jem in the ribbon of blue light she quieted down and said with two-year-old weariness, “Oh, there you are.”
“We went looking when you didn’t come out, and Melvie led us straight to you,” Nora said. “This place is a maze, but she kept pointing out the way. It was really something.”
“Kid’s a goddamn bloodhound,” the worker grumbled, holding his flashlight away from her. “Well, goddamn it.” He switched the beam around the room while he propped the blue room door open. He spoke into a walkie-talkie. “Goddamn it, Hal, looks like we got a circuit out in Purgatory.”
“Don’t swear,” Melvie said.
Moments later something flickered and the room was bathed in a red tide of light. Now Jem could make out the writhing eyes and faces on the walls; they grimaced and moaned silently, eyes bulging. Then cousin Huck said, “Hey, look here!” and pointed to the words Push Me painted squarely in the center of a yawning mouth. He did and the apparently seamless wall swung open to the next chamber. “Neat-o,” he said, the traces of his tears now barely noticeable in the half-light. He walked through.
The man offered to escort Jem the rest of the way with a flashlight, but she shook her head, taking her mother’s hand and allowing Melvie a fistful of her shirt. They walked back to the entrance from which she’d started.
Jem wanted suddenly to thank them for that rescue. Gratitude, love, and regret all rushed at her, like the beating of wild wings, the feeling that her mother had been there, pressing her hand for just the briefest moment. The thought came to her that she always tried to suppress: Not fair! To have had so little time with her, no time to show her love or remorse for whatever bad might ever have been between them. Jem missed her then so fiercely that her eyes burned and it felt like something was torn out of her.
There was no way to bridge the space. It could not be covered by travel or in the course of a love affair, not even in marriage. The space was inside her now, she could feel it, a thing to be valued, the edges of her loss. Jem looked into the sky, its canopy of rain, and thought of a pair of bright wings that might enter the gap and lift her thoughts up high, a love letter on every point of water, filling the distance. Even if it were only to come to the solitude, silence, and the gentle foundering of the body into the earth, even if it were only that. So be it. Take my thoughts to her, Jem thought, let her know.