Duse’s Epilogue

Duse always blamed the doctors. She had never liked the way they kept your own body a secret from you, the way they used language to camouflage your own inner workings. She was always sure she could have cured herself if given the time. Before Isadora had come home, she had tried. Duse used to shut herself up for whole long afternoons, taking the phone off the hook, muffling the receiver with dishtowels. She ignored the doorbell and the sharp stinging raps on her front pane of glass. Sometimes she heard her name shimmying into that house, sometimes she saw a face peering at her, waving so she’d notice, but Duse always turned away. She had never seen anything wrong with putting herself first. The clients who understood always came back, the ones who didn’t relieved her by their departure.

She sat in her rocker, pushing it to the hot, sunny window in the dining room. She shut her eyes, she visualized herself as healthy. Sometimes she could go ten minutes without coughing, without feeling that pressure against her rib cage. She kept a pocket watch on the table by her so she could time everything—her coughs and her silences. She was going to will that cough right out of her, she wasn’t going to let illness be part of her destiny.

When she started having headaches, she thought about her father. It made the pain worse. She began fussing with her hair, preening in front of the mirror, all the time pretending her head wasn’t pushing right up from her body. She took aspirin, swallowing three with a quick gulp of orange juice, or she kneaded her pulse points with her thumb, a form of Chinese massage a client had taught her. Sometimes, too, it worked.

She was nauseated a great deal. She took salt and it seemed to help, although sometimes she thought her stomach was feeding on itself. The tissue seemed to burn. Everything’s peeling away, she thought. She tried to see that burning as a cauterizing process, she tried to see a spigot of water flushing out the heat, she made it so real in her mind that she almost felt wet, and she told herself that she really did feel better.

She wasn’t surprised by Isadora’s coming home, but it did bother her that Isadora seemed so lacking in strength; that a good part of what that girl did involved aimless brooding walks about the neighborhood. She saw too how the girl would hunch up over the obituary columns, ruining her eyes on the patterns those names made, on the way they seeded the pages like mines. Duse had never needed any death pages to tell her who was dead and who wasn’t, she had never let her eyes burn so much that she would have to dim her own vision with dark glasses. She had never had sight spasms. She had had her own way of knowing about death. For her, the death pages were simply a check, a proof for the unbeliever. When she said that to Isadora, Isadora looked up at her. “For people like me, you mean,” Isadora said.

“You’re my daughter,” Duse told her.

“Duse’s daughter would know what happened to Daniel. Duse’s daughter wouldn’t be sinking in questions,” said Isadora.

Duse couldn’t stand for Isadora to feel that way. In the end, to give that girl some sense of control, some sense of power over something—anything—she let Isadora badger her into seeing a doctor. She wasn’t fond of the tests, and she didn’t like the careless way the nurse needled her blood from her veins. The doctor told her that she had dangerously high blood pressure and he gave her some pills. He asked about her diet, and he was annoyed about the salt. He told her that she had better stop that nonsense or she would be in trouble.

“What trouble?” she said.

“You never mind, you just believe me,” he said.

Isadora offered to go to the medical library and look everything up for Duse. She said she was good at that research and that she had done it for Daniel. Duse let her go, just to have Isadora busy at something other than her endless yearning for Daniel. Duse took the pills the doctor gave her. She could try it for a while, she thought.

The pills made Duse depressed. She felt her vision clouding, so much that once she bumped into the end table, bruising her shins, cursing. It embarrassed her; she felt suddenly old. She tried to walk a straight, even line, and when she couldn’t, she took those pills and flung the bottle along the floor.

In the end, the thing that made her dump out all those pills was what they were doing to her lifelines. Her fate line had a twist in it now, and she saw how her lifeline frayed, right in her hand, how pieces of it whispered and grew thin and strayed off the surface of her palm. It terrified her. She studied her hand, she made charts and drawings of it, all the time frowning, and then she went to see Isadora, who was copying out her medical notes for Duse to read.

“It’s there,” Duse said, making Isadora look up, making her push that tangle of hair from her face.

Duse held up her palm. “I’m dying,” she said.

Isadora tilted forward. “No, you aren’t,” she said. “The doctor never said anything like that. You’re just tired, your skin is just clenched up from all the fists you make.”

‘Isadora—” warned Duse.

Isadora focused on her own hands, on the way they looked, white, silhouetted against the black of her jeans. She had a sudden sharp image of Duse falling, swaying and looping down until Duse was one of those spin-the-bottles, whirling around, stopping to position herself to Isadora, to blame.

“You think I said that to get attention?” Duse said. She leaned on the wall. “What are you going to do without me?” Duse said.

“Nothing,” said Isadora. “Nothing, because nothing’s going to happen. Please stop talking like this. Please. It makes me crazy inside.”

Sometimes Isadora found that she could joke her way out of her worry. She told Duse that the one good thing about Duse’s illness was that it made her forget about Daniel for a while, it seemed to temporarily stop up her grief. “I never could stand to be second,” Duse said, smiling.

There were things Isadora could do now. She got up in the night and started cleaning salt out of the house, throwing out the pretzels and the candy and the chips, snacking on the dips and the crackers before she tossed the containers out. On one occasion, she methodically ate her way through a whole box of Cheese-Ta-Bits. In the morning she was sick. She would never eat anything salty again, she vowed, but that night, she polished off the Doritos.

She cooked the meals. She bought vitamins in clear yellow capsules. She dripped the oily A and E into the food. She took the other vitamin pills and ground them into the meals. Duse complained about the bland boredom of the food, but Isadora, determined, said that it was just Duse’s medication working on her palate.

Isadora liked the sense of cause and effect, the way she was making Duse better, almost forcing her to get well. And Duse, too, encouraged it; she let Isadora section her days up for her into TV and reading and meals, and it was only when Isadora asked Duse if when she felt better she might try to see if she could sense something on Daniel that Duse got angry.

Isadora knew Duse had headaches. The doctor said it was just tension and to let Duse rest them away. So when Isadora saw Duse sitting in her rocker, thoughtfully staring, almost in trance, Isadora assumed that Duse was just trying to cure herself, or maybe trying to get something on Daniel, and she left her to herself.

Duse woke in a hospital bed. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and when she came to, she floated. She tried to speak, but her mouth had turned damp, her speech dribbled out of her like a baby’s. She was irritated with the doctor. She kept trying to prop herself up so she could hear him. He said she was very lucky, that she had had what he liked to call a warning stroke, right in her rocker. He told her that it had been Isadora who had rushed her to the hospital because Duse had kept nodding off, her motions cranky, unresponsive. I know about luck, Duse thought, I don’t need you to tell me anything. She didn’t want to talk to him, although he kept asking and asking. She was ashamed of the way her mouth worked, so she made writing pantomimes, she asked for paper. She got a yellow legal pad and she wrote, in her crabbed hand, that she would be fine, no thanks to anyone but her own self.

“Mrs. Michaels,” he said, and she thought DUSE, as instant and automatic as her own heartbeat. She averted her face, she buried it into the clean starch of her pillow.

Isadora came to see her. Duse felt heavier, as if her mass had increased while she had slept. She wrote something out for Isadora and handed it to her. Isadora’s face panicked. “I can’t do anything for you,” she said. “I don’t have a gift.”

When the night nurse whisked in, reminding Isadora that Duse had to get her sleep if she ever wanted to be well, setting down a plastic pitcher of water for Duse, Isadora reached for her mother’s hands. The whole time her fingers were flexing over Duse’s, Duse was turning Isadora’s hand over in her lap, not letting go until she saw the marking, still alive, still riding in her daughter’s palm.

Duse didn’t like the food and she picked at it. She asked for salt. She took the medication the nurses brought her, she tipped the white paper cup down against her hand, but when the pills started making her depressed and dizzy, she stopped. She flushed the things down into the toilet. It all seemed so useless, anyway. She was dying.

Duse dreamed about Martin twice. The first time they were walking over the money boxes her father Richard had buried. Her own was still there, marked by a stone. She saw Martin, his back hunched, the spade glittering in the night like some earth-bound star. She saw him trying to dig out her box, to free it from the black earth before someone else claimed it. They were treating the whole adventure like some treasure hunt, and her smile was secretive and knowing on her face. When she woke up, she was shivering, her whole body pulled back to the dream, but when she shut her eyes, she was more awake than before. She couldn’t talk about it. She tried telling Isadora, but when she saw how it made Isadora jitter a step back, she turned that dreamtelling into a yawn, she said it was probably nothing.

The second time she dreamed about Martin, that night, they were on top of the money. It was scattered, green new bills, all over the damp earth, and she and Martin were making love. She thrashed around and the sheets turned into dirt, she could feel something sharp against her. The earth must be seeded with stones, with walnuts from a tree. She moved about so much she was tangling in her sheets, she knocked over the water pitcher, drenching herself, making a wet rag out of her sheet. A nurse rushed in and shook her awake. Duse was angry when she blinked in the bright hospital white, when the damp earthy smell gave way to liniment, to antiseptic. “I haven’t finished,” she said. She meant the lovemaking, the tenseness that swelled her body, but the nurse thought she meant ripping that room apart, ruining the hospital things, and the nurse clucked her tongue. “We could strap you down to this very bed,” the nurse told her, readjusting the pitcher, stripping the sheets from the bed, not caring how Duse winced against her touch.

Duse tried to shut her eyes, to find the dream again, and when she couldn’t, she moved her own hand under the sheets. She bucked and tumbled in that bed, holding herself in just enough so she wouldn’t knock anything over, but then she was weeping, because without Martin, it wasn’t enough for her. She was fretful for another skin against hers, another passion, and she had to go to sleep so she could dream it. For the first time since she had been in that place she buzzed for a sleeping pill. The nurse smiled at her. “Now we’re being smart,” she said.

She never dreamed about him again.

Duse kept studying her hand, watching that lifeline mark itself off, seal out the years. She had never seen a deathline thwarted. That had always been the one line you just couldn’t change. In a way, it made things easier for her. She stopped trying to visualize her health, stopped wasting her energies trying to stay nourished, and she refused to cooperate with anyone in the hospital. What difference did it make what they did to her now?

She did try to make things easier for Isadora. “I won’t come back,” she said, speaking in her raspy voice. She said that only because she wasn’t quite sure she could manage to get back, and she didn’t want Isadora making that appearance a test of her gift, and then, disappointed, fragile with anger, concluding once and for all that it was all a hoax.

“Don’t talk like that,” Isadora said.

“I wanted to make you feel better, and look at you, crying.” Duse lifted up her hand to Isadora, she touched her girl’s arm. “Daniel’s not dead,” she said. “You remember that.”

“I don’t know what to do with that,” Isadora said.

“You will,” said Duse.

She didn’t do very much after Isadora had left. The nurse came with her pill, and she slid it under the pillow. She could toss it out later. Duse hoped she didn’t die in her sleep. That seemed like the worse kind of cheat to her, the worst of all deaths you could have. When she told the doctor why she wouldn’t take any more sleeping pills, he gave her a queer, hard look, he told her he had no intention of letting her die, that in fact, she was getting better, and talk like that wasn’t conducive to getting well.

When Duse had her second stroke, the next morning, she was just starting to rouse, sliding into that half stage before waking, never really sure whether she was moving toward getting up or just dreaming that she was.