Read More: A brief Q&A with Lisa K. Buchanan
When Sheldon felt the familiar jolt, he turned toward the wall, hooked his fingers on the edge of the mattress and squeezed his eyes shut. Please, an earthquake this time. Please.
“My heart” said his wife, groping the percale trough between them.
According to the faint melody of the pantry clock, it was past midnight and his plane for Milan would leave in twenty-three hours. The trip had taken some lobbying. Plans finagled, credibility staked, a chance to avert a rumored offer of early retirement. Sheldon rolled over and put a drowsy arm around Sandra’s middle.
She wrenched his hand to her chest. “Feel it? My heart is doing The Hora, my arm is tingling, and I can’t get a full breath. I’m scared, Shel. I wanted grandchildren, piano lessons, cruises.” She put two fingertips to a carotid. “It’s the margarine. You know, they’re saying it’s worse than butter. I knew this diet would kill me. Didn’t I say so? Didn’t I? Don’t be a lump, Shel, take me to the hospital!”
Yawning, he made s-motions on her chest with his palm, avoiding the trouble spots: a biopsy scar near an armpit, a décolletage gone huckaback, the fleshy stomach about which she was sensitive. Sometimes, he could soothe her to sleep. On this night, however, she gave the lampchain a decisive yank.
“Shel, Shel. Thank God, you’re here. My father–”
“–died at fifty-four.”
“Don’t belittle me.”
Halfway across the room she dropped to her knees, clutching her nightgown at the chest, reminding Sheldon of an asphyxiation scene from a movie they had recently watched. He was tempted to stay in bed for the current performance, but plodded instead to the closet. His eyes were sandy; his hair, stalagmitic; his paunch, defenseless without its daytime tuck. When he emerged, misbuttoned and half-buckled, Sandra was smoothing her auburn highlights in the mirror.
You are aging me, he thought.
The waiting room was crowded, quiet but for soft murmurs and the drone of the wall television: O.J. Simpson fled police on replay, a major paper manufacturer would lay off a third of its workforce, and an international conference for something called the World Wide Web was set for Chicago. By the time Sandra’s name was called, the green figures in a corner of the screen blinked 8/4/94 Th 1:57am.
The nurse said Sandra’s vitals were normal. Was she under any particular stress?
“I’m married, aren’t I?” Sandra replied.
“Hear ya on that.” He was Irish with pea-soup eyes and a faint brogue. Sheldon tried to talk to him about the World Cup, Ireland having beat Italy in New Jersey, but the nurse focused on Sandra. “Anything else, Mrs. Galinsky?”
“I’m being checked for colon cancer next week,” Sandra said. “Plus, our landscaper has been on a three-week lunchbreak and our oldest girl and her husband, they’ve decided no kids.” The nurse nodded, “Our second girl wants a baby, no husband. And our son—still a boy, really—just moved across the country with a girl who wears torn-up jeans, and an earring in her nostril. At first, I thought, with all that cross-ventilation, no wonder she has a nose drip.”
Sheldon looked away.
The nurse raised an eyebrow, implying that Sheldon didn’t take his wife’s worries seriously enough. Earlier, lest Sheldon take them too seriously, the admissions coordinator had chided him to “calm that woman down when she does that to herself.” It was Sandra Devorah Galinsky’s third emergency visit in five months.
Still wired to machines two hours later, she whispered, “It’s killing me, Shel.”
“The margarine? We’ll go back to butter.”
Her eyes flung open. “Can’t you see? I eat when I’m lonely.” She filled her hand with dimpled hip-flesh. “Listen, Shel. The waitresses and barberettes are hard enough, but who’s the Contessa in Milan? Not someone you love, is it?”
“I’m going alone. The trade show, remember?”
“You? Alone for nine days?”
“It’s Europe, Sandl. I should cross the Atlantic Ocean for the weekend?”
She stared at the bed rail. “Suppose I divorce you while you’re gone, Shel.”
“Easy, you’re messing up the ticker-tape.” He nodded toward the heart monitor. “If you’re so interested in Milan, pack a bag. Be spontaneous for once in your life.”
She glared at him. “Acrophobia is in the DSM. But the point is, Shel, you’re about to slither off—”
“Nobody is slithering.”
“—to Italy for the week of my procedure. They could perforate my bowels! Or what if some deranged orderly is contaminating IV bags?”
“Sandra, you booked a routine colonoscopy for the middle of my business trip–”
“Suppose I bleed to death on the operating table while you’re off in some secluded villa licking olive oil from some woman’s pupik. Nurse?” she asked the woman who had arrived to check the machines. “Do you believe in biological determinism? My husband says some men’s sexual appetites preclude monogamy. A law of nature, man’s imperative to spread his seed.”
The nurse muttered a syllable and kept her gaze on a machine.
“Last year I called his hotel in Cleveland and was told that Mr. and Mrs. Galinsky had just left.”
The nurse spoke with tired authority. “Your wife should rest, Mister…” she checked the chart “…Galinsky.”
At sunrise, Sandra was home in their bed and Sheldon was at the office, skimming the twenty-six sticky notes framing his computer monitor. As the national sales manager of a paper-distribution company, he was most content while talking on the phone with a call on hold, inbox overflowing, and a meeting about to begin.“ My name is Sheldon and I’m a workaholic,” jeered a lunch-room poster the sales staff had made with an enlarged photograph from 1974. Two decades later, the framed image hung in his office, diploma-like. He was proud of his thirty-six years at the company and fifty-hour weeks, proud of being one of the older guys at the gym, proud of needing only six hours’ sleep. Sheldon considered himself a doer rather than a spectator; museums and concerts bored him. Each person was born alone and buried alone. Each was responsible for his own short, human life, and only the most deluded man saw himself as uniquely essential to other short, human lives.
“Let’s say I’m the butcher, the baker, or the sandwich maker. Is your meal a result of my generosity?” he’d posit to sales trainees. Sheldon had delivered the words so many times, he thought they were his own. It was not his goal to paraphrase Adam Smith on enlightened self-interest, but to convince new hires that their ten-hour work days were not for the benefit of Chaberton Paper Source, but for themselves.
Meanwhile, a luxury hotel suite in Venice was a mess of shoes and boutique bags; garments flung onto the couch; a leather jacket hanging from a doorknob, tags still attached. On the coffee table, a newly purchased glass carafe with gold filigree caught the late afternoon sun. The bathroom floor was carpeted with damp towels. One bedside table featured reading glasses, a novel, and a guidebook; its twin was empty.
Forty-four with long, inky lashes, Doreen had been told she looked like the quintessential airline stewardess of 1970s comedy, though she was hardly as ditzy as the likeness implied. A sole proprietor of handmade papers in Atlanta, she often quipped that designing high-end wedding invitations had immunized her against matrimony. She attended trade shows in Chicago, Cleveland, and Toronto, and was happy to try Milan. Before Doreen, Sheldon hadn’t ordered a wine flight or tried cunnilingus, hadn’t had a passport.
When she returned from her spa appointment, the suite’s phone had recorded two messages: Reception said there was a problem with the credit card linked to her room; Sheldon said he couldn’t get away because his wife had been in the hospital.
His message did not, however, mention his latest humiliation at the office: Lon Chaberton had hired away a competitor’s national sales manager who’d once worked for him. According to the company bulletin, Hotshot Joe Fusco would launch an Internet Sales division and “optimize” the trade-show circuit. Fusco would encourage the “team members” of Chaberton Paper Source to align their personal goals with that of the company’s “restructuring,” to commit to long hours at high intensity, to exceed their own expectations of themselves. Privately, Sheldon was informed that his job would “evolve” and his desk would be “repositioned, but still in the middle of the action.”
Evening traffic was heavy as he neared the pharmacy to pick up his wife’s prescription. Tormented by the vision of Doreen sitting in a charming cafe on a charming piazza where a charming stranger might join her, Sheldon darted into a parking space for which another car had signaled. The driver, a peacenik with a silvering pony-tail, leaned on the horn. Sheldon busied himself with the radio until the pony-tail drove away. It was simply more expedient to tolerate a fleeting outburst than to hunt for another parking space. The loser might fuss before folding, but Sheldon knew he himself would be immediately forgotten, indistinguishable from every other stranger behind a steering wheel. He had done it for years. The pony-tail would do it, too, if he understood how small he was in the grand scheme.
On the Saturday after the hospital episode, Sandra had risen early and begun excavating faded linens from a cupboard, making a pile for donation. At breakfast, her movements were crisp and efficient, reminding Sheldon of the old Sandra, who fought with the girls and resigned from motherhood in morbid exasperation only to embrace it again the next day. The boy was a late surprise, however. With him, she’d been calmer.
“Sandl?” Sheldon blinked at her suitcase in the foyer and thought of his own, still packed for the aborted trip. She had asked, in front of the doctor, for an overnight in the wine country, a two-hour drive.
She slid her coffee across the table to share. “Actually, Shel, at the hospital the other night, you said I should be spontaneous and pack for Milan. We could still make it to your trade show.”
Sheldon’s left eye began to twitch. “Your colonoscopy…”
“Rescheduled for next month. My sister’s coming with me.”
“Your sister?” he protested. “I thought it was me you needed. Torrential bleeding, homicidal hospital workers…”
Sandra’s cheeks colored. “So, I was anxious. What about Milan?”
“You? On a plane with your textbook acra-thing?”
Sheldon counted the obstacles on his fingers: last-minute transaction fees, thieves on the trains, crucifixion figures dominating the place. “If you hadn’t flushed the medication,” he added. “I’d say it made you giddy.”
“But I didn’t flush it this time.” Sandra took a piece of popcorn from a bowl, balanced it on her nose and then tossed it into her mouth, a trick she’d taught the family dog when the girls were young. “C’mon, let’s go to Milan.”
“But Sandl, so sudden. What if your heart does its Hora thing again, and there we are in a strange place…”
“I have my anxiety pills now. Let’s go.” She stretched out her toes, nails painted in Italian flag colors.
“Actually, they need me at the office.” He hadn’t yet told her his tradeshows would be retired. Nor about the papers he’d seen after hours in the accounting department—a sweet deal for Fusco; a new title for Sheldon—Consultant—with a question mark in the compensation column.
She focused on her breathing. “If we’re absolutely, positively not going…” She paused again. “I’ve spoken with our rabbi.”
“Jacobs? What’s he got his hand out for this time?”
“Jacobs left three years ago. I spoke to Naomi Kipperman about a Get.”
“A Get?”
“The Jewish part of the divorce, Shel. Before the civil procedure.”
“Procedure? What procedure?” While others got dry mouth or palpitations when hit with stupefying news, Sheldon cracked jokes. “A Get? As in Get Lost? Forget the Get. And the kids? All that begetting just to get a Get?” In her eyes he detected a faint smile.
“By Orthodox law, Shel.” She inhaled; she exhaled.
“Since when do you care about Orthodox law?”
“We’ll both want to remarry at some point.”
“What for? We’re already married. Sandl, you’re scaring me.”
“The other night, you said I loved you the way a tapeworm loves an intestine.”
“I was tired. And this Get business. It’s just another panic you’re having.”
Sandra reminded him that she’d been going to therapy and reading books about marriage. Other people had higher expectations. A relationship could be dynamic. It could grow, deepen, change shape. It could age well. It could evolve.
“Everyone seems to be evolving all the sudden. Let’s go to the wine country.” He nodded toward her suitcase.
“Shel, you should make peace with that woman in Venice. The one in Cleveland bought out the gift shop when you arrived a day late.”
“Look, I told you, the trade show is in Milan and I’m going alone.”
Sandra produced the hotel fax, rotating it to face him. “Perhaps, if you tell the woman in your room at The Palace Gritti that you’re getting a divorce from the woman at The Casa Galinsky, she’ll stop with the consolation purchases. One adult movie, nine wet-bar items, monogrammed spa slippers…”
“How many pills did you take, Sandra? I’m calling Dr. Edlin.”
“Edlin? I haven’t seen him in years.”
“You’re hyster-… Our boy moved away and you’re upset.”
She busied her hands at the sink while taking deep, deliberate breaths. “Our boy is just twenty,” she said. “Same age I was when–”
“We’re clear if we go right now.” Sheldon pressed an ear to the traffic report on the radio. “Bring one of those marriage books if you want, the kind you mentioned. Oh, and the insulation for the attic…” Sheldon trailed off, struck by Sandra’s gaze. Even now, her beauty could be startling.
She sat down across from him again, sliding her hands forward to be held, a shy smile pointing downward.
I’ve hit a nerve, he thought. Perhaps she’ll own up to the phobias and panic attacks, the hypochondria, the Empty Nest histrionics.
I’ve hit a nerve, she thought. Perhaps he’ll own up to his multi-decade fuck pageant.
He ambled his fingers up her forearms. “Look, I’ll just tell the higher-ups how it is. No more trade shows.”
Her gaze flattened. “It’ll be a tough transition, but my lawyer isn’t the aggressive type. More of a peacemaker, really.”
“Your lawyer?” He tightened his grip.
She yanked her arms free.
“You were all smiles a minute ago.” He stood up.
“Yeah, and I giggled at Aunt Minnie’s funeral. Can’t help it, remember? I smile when I can’t cry. Do you even know me?”
“Fine,” he spat. “Hire a suit with fangs. I’m not signing any Get!”
After his car squealed out of the driveway, Sandra resumed her breathing technique and her packing.
In 1961, Alessandra Devorah Blechel was nineteen. Her married sister lived in a small apartment with three kids, her brother was in the navy, her father was six years’ dead, and her stroke-stricken mother was coming apart in a county-operated facility in New Jersey. Sandra had attended five different schools while being volleyball-tossed between her parents’ sisters, each aunt successively older.
Aunt Minnie, a widow in San Francisco, was the last hope. She kept the heat high and the windows shut. She was kind and chatty with glasses that enlarged her watery blue eyes. Her voice was harsh from smoking and it took Sandra awhile to realize she wasn’t being scolded when her aunt announced that they were out of toilet paper. With coffee breath and yellowed teeth, Minnie told the family stories other aunts avoided: Cousin Herschel had a trunk of size-twelve women’s garments, though his late wife had worn an eight; Uncle Syd had a secret son; Bubbe Sylvie had arrived at Ellis Island, a child with her name pinned to her coat. Minnie never tired of saying she’d met her late husband on the Pico streetcar in Los Angeles: “Jordy and I, we took a P together.”
Sometimes, when the smoke became suffocating, Sandy walked four blocks to the ocean. However, the San Francisco beach was not the reputed paradise with warm sand and bronzy biceps. Rather, the relentless fog left her hair smelling like gefilte fish.
Yet, Minnie welcomed her niece warmly (as the other aunts had not) and didn’t require (as the other aunts had) that Sandra telephone her mother and suffer being confused for Mrs. Yamamoto, the postal carrier from her childhood neighborhood. Sandra loved stepping onto an empty streetcar in the fog, then stepping off forty minutes later into the clip-clop crowds and her job at the bank in sunny downtown. She also loved Sheldon Galinsky, the dapper sales rep who came in to make deposits and take orders for the stationery firm where he worked. At twenty-three, he had dark curls and thick brows. Sandra, in charge of supplies, could hardly speak if their eyes met during the order, and it was all over for her if he betrayed his nervousness by hooking her paper clips into chains. They’d been dating for four months when he showed up one night, ecstatic because he’d applied to run the sales department of his company’s branch office opening soon near Chicago. “Plans,” he boasted. “I got big plans.” He had given Sandra a split-coin necklace, clasping one half to her neck and the other to his own, but now he warned her not to get too attached. When he was alone, he hummed Goin’ to Chicago. When she was alone, she hummed Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? Weekends, they’d skate at the roller rink or stroll through the amusement park. Evenings they’d go to North Beach for comedy, then to Sheldon’s bedroom while his parents slept down the hall.
When Sandra realized she was pregnant, she couldn’t bring herself to be wholly upset: soft, blurry eyes opening for the first time; a living creature who had never been taunted as the new kid at school, had never overheard relatives lamenting the expense of extra groceries, had never thrown a handful of dirt onto a descended coffin. Growing in her belly was a sparkle of promise, a human soul bound to love and outlive her. Sandra kept the secret as long as she could. She, too, had big plans. She, too, was ecstatic.
When the news broke, the sister-aunts blamed Sheldon’s parents for “what your boy did to our niece.” The Galinskys financed the wedding—a hush-and-rush affair witha sale-rack gown and a rented suit—and leased “the kids” an apartment nearby. Sheldon’s mother tried to console herself by planning the baby-shower, but Sandra was gallingly vague about the due date. To appease his mother, and perhaps a more ephemeral chafing in his gut, Sheldon visited the obstetrician alone.
Dr. Edlin had been delivering babies so long that he had come to resemble them. His eyes were small and squinty; his pale head, downy and smooth. He held himself in a slightly fetal hunch, elbows close to the ribs. In his white coat, he sat across the desk from Sheldon, intrigued. Few husbands bothered to meet their wives’ doctors so early in the pregnancy, much less sacrifice a lunch hour to the cause. This young man was jittery, a foot bouncing like Mrs. Edlin’s sewing-machine needle at home. At the mention of the baby’s due date, however, the foot abruptly stopped.
“That seems late,” Sheldon said. “I mean, we’ve talked, but perhaps you could…”
Some of Dr. Edlin’s colleagues described unplanned pregnancies as nature stepping in to bestow the deeper obligations on those who had lived blithely. Dr. Edlin, however, was less inclined to couple biology with justice. He sympathized with young people—dreams thwarted, plans derailed—and observed that most of them simply hadn’t grasped the gravity of their instincts.
“Pseudocyesis is a big word for what we call Hysterical Pregnancy,” the doctor explained, “an imagined pregnancy thought to stem from a woman’s suggestibility and strong desire for motherhood.”
Imagined? Sheldon forced his mouth not to grin. Was he off the hook?
“Her symptoms were real,” Dr. Edlin urged. “Swollen breasts, food cravings, the absent menstrual period. She had every reason to think she was pregnant.”
“So, she’s not actually…” Sheldon bit the insides of his cheeks.
“Oh, she’s pregnant now. Tested positive for human chorionic gonadotropin levels. ‘HCG,’ we call it.” The doctor continued. “When Sandra first came to my office, her uterus was empty. She and her aunt didn’t believe me. I had to send them upstairs for a second opinion.”
“But after she said she was pregnant, we didn’t do it again,” Sheldon blurted. “Except on our wedding night.”
The doctor smiled. “Then, you and your wife conceived on your honeymoon.”
While Dr. Edlin shuffled papers, Sheldon thought back to their fourteen-hour stay in a downtown hotel. Sandra insisted they have sex. “Don’t curse the marriage with a desecrated wedding night,” she had pleaded. Superstition, Sheldon figured at the time, though her calculations were now clear. While he’d been secretly hoping their intercourse would dislodge the contents of her womb, she’d been coolly consummating the marriage to prevent an annulment, timing their coitus with her ovulation.
Two years later, Aunt Minnie had quit a half-century smoking habit, and Sheldon’s mother had warmed considerably. If the former liked to dress her toddling grand-niece in animal-themed cotton pastels and the latter chose frilly dresses for her first grandchild, the women managed a truce. Meanwhile, Joey Fusco had been “exceeding expectations” at the new Chicago office of Chaberton Paper Source. This griped Sheldon to no end. But Sandra, pregnant again, was sure that he, too, would exceed. Maybe end up running the headquarters. Maybe fall in love with her again someday.
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Lisa K. Buchanan lives in San Francisco. Notable, Best American Essays 2023; First Place, Short Fiction Prize, CRAFT, 2022; Finalist, Lascaux Review Prize in Flash Fiction, 2021. Here’s what she has been reading lately: The Nightstandwww.lisakbuchanan.com X: @lisakbuchanan
Read More: A brief Q&A with Lisa K. Buchanan