Hero Worship
“Exercise some restraint,” Celine hisses, her face pink with emotion. The director of nursing leans forward over her desk, her bovine bosom pressing down heavily on paperwork, brightly polished fingernails waving the editorial clipping in the air between them. In the chair opposite, Daisy sits stiffly, exercising restraint, but not the restraint to which Celine refers. She’s worked at the hospital a long time and has been to the edge of this cliff before, is familiar with the panorama of angry waves below and her own dizzying desire for revenge. She looks helplessly at the corner of Celine’s mouth, as it twitches involuntarily, and exercises the restraint necessary to keep herself from pounding her fist on her boss’s desk. She wants to pound until Celine’s coffee roils in its cup and the desk lurches on its legs, she wants all of it—the awful unending paperwork, the hastily scribbled reminders, the burgeoning appointment books, the pens and push pins and sticks of stale chewing gum—all of it to carve a herky-jerky path to the promontory. She wants it to pull free like a dirty splinter from the skin of her life, to release itself to salt air and flight. Forget gifts from the sea. This is a gift to the sea: one big, flying calamitous mess. Bye-bye. She almost smiles at the thought.
“If it weren’t for the union, McPherson, this would have gotten you fired,” Celine goes on. The underlying message is: You, idiot, one doesn’t write editorials about the downsizing of the janitorial staff at the hospital where one happens to be a nurse, and if one does, one certainly doesn’t sign one’s name!
On lunch break Daisy, panting down the sidewalk like some high-strung little poodle dog, flees to the Gristmill Gallery on Wellspring Street . She wants quiet. She wants the polished oak floor without reproach. She wants the gray-haired lady nodding with unconditional amiability from behind the framing counter in the back. But mostly she wants John Beswick’s beautiful art. Gristmill is full of it. She stands in front of “ Lonely Mountain ,” a pastel depiction of a mountain that has been partially strip-mined. The work was done at dawn and shows the sun just rising over the mountaintop, the sky rosy while the trees below are still thick with darkness. Along one side of the mountain crest there is a black gash left by heavy machinery. The mountain is wounded. Nevertheless, Daisy’s body relaxes as she stands before the painting, admiring the varied greens of pines and deciduous trees, the hopeful tinge of pink in morning sky. Daisy understands the harshness of that gash but even so feels that the mountain is not without hope. She knows that everything grows back after a time.
She circles the room and lingers at the back counter where a stack of glossy postcards featuring samples of John Beswick’s work sits next to a guest sign-in book. She already has this card at home decorating her and Rick’s refrigerator. She turns it over and rereads John’s bio. He lived in West Virginia for awhile after getting his MFA and was active in protesting against strip-mining. Daisy runs her forefinger over the pastel depicted on it, Red Ball. A little black girl chases a ball down a sunny dirt road. The girl is about seven years old and laughing. John Beswick has made her dark eyes shine. With a keen pull in the vicinity of her heart, Daisy touches the hem of the little girl’s dress and the soft-leaved mullein growing behind her.
Hammondsville is a town of many eateries. Daisy passes an Indian restaurant, a deli and a corner market on the four block walk back to the hospital but she has no appetite. As she walks she wraps her fingers around the cell phone in her pocket, considers calling her husband Rick, but figures he’s busy. As she walks she realizes that inwardly she is collapsing beneath the weight of a nearly complete physical exhaustion. The twins, a little past their first birthday, are still waking her up at night to nurse.
Her mind returns, inexorably, like he is the exit of a maze she walks, to John Beswick. She imagines meeting him in one of those sweet, old-fashioned sardine can diners. The diner would be in New York City , where he lives. She’s never been to New York but she knows the diner has a revolving case of pies, soft-padded vinyl booth seats, and a waitress with a husky voice. And it has John, John sitting across from her smiling, sipping coffee the same color as his eyes, and tapping her arm while he speaks. He orders a grilled cheese sandwich and looks at her like she’s the sunrise just nudging over a mountaintop. Draw me, she thinks, please draw me. Make me real.
“You’re art means so much to me,” She says, her fingers intertwining nervously beneath the Formica tabletop. John is excruciatingly talented and equally as handsome. In her mind she makes it August and so hot that he has the top buttons of his shirt undone. Below the short sleeves his forearms are smooth yet muscular. He wears shorts and sandals. She’s likewise minimally attired, having hunted a lifetime before finding and donning for him an exquisitely gossamer and other-worldly gown. She has this idea that together the two of them would defy gravity.
* * *
Three months earlier, when Daisy first encountered John Beswick’s work, she was out with Amelia on one of those outings that was so rare it felt surreal. It was February, a bitterly cold night and there was an exhibit opening at Blue Dahlia Gallery on Main Street in Croyville. Amelia, who was single, was just back from a grueling afternoon of pampering at the day spa. Daisy, on the other had, had not spent her day being pampered, but rather had spend it changing Pampers—and was celebrating her “mom’s night out” by wearing the only bra she owned that didn’t have nursing flaps.
It was late and Blue Dahlia was nearly empty when they arrived. By the time Daisy had reached her self-imposed maximum of three sips of wine (and felt that her blood was turning to Merlot) the gallery was empty accept for her, Amelia, John Beswick, and the gallery owner, Herbert Rasp. John sat with Rasp on a velvet settee at the end of the room near the hors d’oeuvres table.
“Come see this!” Daisy called Amelia over to her, trying to keep her voice low but squeaking with excitement.
In Moonrise a cloud-recumbent moon silvered a lake in some far off, remote, mountain-ringed place. Somewhere out west maybe. She’d never been out west. She stared at the platinum of the lake, the charcoal corrugation of trees over mountains, the glittering knob of the moon lighting the clouds to gray lace, and attempted to commit the whole ineffaceably to her memory. The white tag beneath the piece gave its price as a thousand dollars. A thousand dollars was nothing for this sort of rendition that was beyond verisimilitude. She wondered how any human possibly had the coordination to master a pastel crayon so completely. To render such scenes would arouse the envy of nature itself! She could hardly lift her head when she neared the end of the room and had to pass by the settee where John sat. On top of everything else, he looked like some English invasion rock star, like it was barely the 60s and he’d just dropped out of art school to tackle the world, in leather and on his own terms. Any minute a hundred screaming teenage girls might rush through the gallery’s glass door and start yanking paintings off the walls and tearing at his clothing. Walking past him, Daisy smiled at the thought, and he, responding to her ingenuousness, smiled back with a roguish one of his own.
Getting home at around eleven o’clock, Daisy found the house quiet and dark, except for a single light over the kitchen sink. The light showcased a mound of unwashed dinner dishes. The dining room table hadn’t been fully cleared. A dustpan and brush sat on the floor next to a scattering of cooked peas. It was like the Bermuda Triangle of housecleaning with everything mysteriously interrupted. Daisy swept up the peas, tapped them into the trashcan, and went to bed.
On lunch breaks, Daisy went back to the Gristmill Gallery no less than seventeen times before the pastels moved on to a new location. During one of these visits, again admiring how John had made the little black girl run down that sunny dirt road, her perfectly shaded red dress billowing out behind her, eyes filled with laughter, corn rows flying, Daisy thought, this is a man I could love. He had another show at Thompson Alley but when she called Amelia about it she was sick so Daisy went alone. Again, she skipped the nursing bra, but found herself wishing that she had something better to offer than a bra that was a tad too small and had been found on a park bench before she’d even had the twins. She’d owned it for four years and it still didn’t feel like it was really hers. Daisy wondered whether or not any man besides Rick would consider her sexy. She thought maybe so, but not in a nursing bra, and not wearing a bra she’d found on a park bench, either.
* * *
Daisy likes her new patient, Julie, because she’s an Andy Warhol fan. The young woman slumps in her hospital bed, staring at the blank screen of the TV mounted on the wall.
“Do you want the TV on? Here you go,” Daisy clicks the power button on the remote.
Julie is pale and unhappy after the removal of her kidney last week. She and her husband decided in late winter to discontinue all their psychiatric medications. After a few weeks of being off Lithium Julie went into a manic phase that rode her like a rodeo star and induced her to cover every wall, counter, and table top of their home in aluminum foil. She drove their van to the A&P and loaded up two shopping carts with boxes of aluminum foil. When she used them up she went back to the store and filled up two more. She kept going back. She wanted the house completely silver like Andy Warhol’s factory. In the end she’d made eleven trips to the store and filled twenty-one shopping carts. Her husband, Reggie, who had schizophrenia, after being off his Risperdal for two months finally conceded that the housewas, indeed, a factory and that the factory manufactured saline. The problem was that nothing could flourish in so much saline. Too much sodium chloride threw off the entire ecological balance of nature. The air and the water, permeated with it, were made unclean, the furniture and the aluminum foil were made unclean, and lastly even their own bodies were tainted as the mineral began to reach toxic levels in their organs. Julie begged her husband to operate on her. She marked a clumsy “x” on her back with a magic marker, in a spot where she was having some pain (caused by all the top-to-bottom bending and stretching she’d done to foil the house) and handed him a kitchen knife. Reggie, like any supportive husband, was used to compromising, and sometimes, because Julie was domineering in her mania, he just did what he was told. In this instance, as some small keen insight still penetrated through the wool of his delusions he resisted operating on Julie, but eventually her mania wore him down. Relenting, he pushed the knife in just a few inches to release the saline. Julie thanked him, turned round to kiss him, and fainted dead away as the pain overwhelmed her. In his panic Reggie accidentally dialed Sicilian Utopia, the pizzeria he and Julie frequented, instead of 911. Utopia’s manager got the ambulance.
The entertainment on the hospital room TV is a court show where estranged lovers are suing each other over the cost of unpaid car repairs. Like a slightly disheveled apostle, Julie lifts her eyes heavenward to the complaints of a jilted woman.
“How’s your pain?” Daisy asks.
“Okay,” Julie shifts her eyes dully from the drama on high. The remote lies before her like a dead fish.
“Ring for the Tylenol-with-Codeine if you need it. Lunch will be along any minute,” Daisy says. She pauses at the door then heads out, severing her emotional ties with Julie until afternoon. She hurries to the nurse’s station, to her locker for her backpack, to the elevators, and out the front door of the hospital. She has a lunch date with sexy underwear.
Images of peach lingerie, a push-up bra and matching skirt slip with a side slit, have been nudging into Daisy’s mind for a few weeks now. In the morning as she drives to work through budding May trees, each bend in the road makes peach lingerie sway lightly on the rack of her imagination. As she continues, the lingerie slips off the rack, folds itself, wraps itself in tissue paper and deposits itself neatly into a scented boutique shopping bag. As she steers into her parking space behind the hospital and pulls on the parking break, the boutique bag seems to plop into the passenger seat beside her, but then coyly vanishes into spring air as she locks the car.
And so it is that the broad plough of imagination eventually pushes Daisy all the way to Interlude, the lingerie shop three blocks behind Gristmill Gallery. In the fitting room she jumps into the bras and slips as fast as she can, ignoring her stretch marks in the mirror, donning a quick sheen of lipstick to see just how sexy she can make herself, holding her hair up, letting it drop, imitating Victoria’s Secret model poses while the young sales girl outside the door checks that she has brought her the right sizes. The saleswomen in the shop are unusually friendly and unpretentious and Daisy feels indulged, a sensation that is almost completely foreign to her. She has recently calculated that with the twins’ sleep pattern, if you can call what happens with them at night a pattern at all, she is after fourteen months, deprived of about 1300 hours of sleep. And her nursing bras are so strange and stretched out that they remind her of the pointy hat worn by Sally Field in the old show, “The Flying Nun.” Like that hat, they make no sense, no sense at all on her breasts, they are almost alien against her skin. How grateful she is to these young sales girls running around the store trying to please her. They have sincerity, even for her, trying on lingerie with her post post-partum body. They like their jobs and really care about lingerie. Lingerie, she can tell, is important to them. Being sexy is important to them. She wants being sexy to be important to her too. She smiles encouragingly at herself in the mirror, buys the peach bra and slip, and runs back to the hospital.
“I want to thank you,” Daisy tells John Beswick in her mind as she slams her backpack into the locker in the employee lounge. In a minute she’ll be doing med rounds or walking down the hospital hallway to get a patient a cup of cranberry juice, but right now, part of her is in John Beswick’s penthouse apartment in New York City . She is sitting on his bed in nothing but her peach push up bra and skirt slip. The part of her that is in Hammondville Hospital takes a pitcher of cranberry juice from the fridge and pours juice into two Styrofoam cups with ice. She brings one of the juices to Julie, one to the female patient in the next bed, checks Julie’s blood pressure, and thinks of various means by which she could show John Beswick her gratitude. She records Julie’s blood pressure, then checks and records that of the other patient. The part of her that is wearing peach lingerie in John Beswick’s penthouse stands on his desk in front of a floor-to-ceiling window. Behind her the evening sky is smoky and the lights of the city gather around her ankles and sexy high-heeled feet.. She is going to dance over those lights and crush them to broken bits beneath her heels. She is going to gyrate over the lights of that city until they are extinguished and John, beautiful John, loses his way in her darkness.
* * *
Online Daisy finds several interviews with John Beswick. Apparently he’s won an NEA grant and recently finished a residency in upstate New York . There are black and white photos of him working at an easel set up by a sunlit lake. His hair is longer now, thick and black with a wave in it, an anomalous crimp right in the middle as though someone has put his locks in a vice awhile, although it’s more likely that he just took a hair tie out for the photo. He has on jeans and a black T-shirt and his eyes are dark and igneous. She likes to imagine his long, delicate fingers all smudged with blue and purple pastels. She imagines him at the end of that day of drawing, packing up the lakeside easel and crouching to rinse his hands at the lake’s edge. Little fish come and nibble at particles of blueberry color before flicking back to the depths, little fish made magical ever after.
She wants to kiss his non-toxic pastels. In a beautiful imaginary white dress and a pair of red cowboy boots she knows she’ll end up alone with him one way or another.
* * *
Sukey and Jimmy both have earaches. Daisy is so sleep-deprived that approaching an intersection on the way to work her attention wavers off the road and she has to pump the breaks to avoid smashing into the rear end of the campervan in front of her. When the light turns green and both vehicles move through the intersection, the campervan, traveling abode that it is, immediately prompts her to think of beds, of sleep, of sweet somnolent nights. She glances across the road as she passes St. James Church with the Virgin Mary statue out front. The Virgin’s head is missing. Where the head should be there is a golden skull leering at her with a jaw full of awful teeth. Daisy keeps the car on the road and looks back. The skull is gone and it’s only the Virgin’s golden crown that glints against the morning sky.
Perhaps one shouldn’t touch one’s credit card on the same day that one starts the morning with a hallucination, but of course, this notion doesn’t enter Daisy’s head. On lunch break she walks to Gristmill, purchases Lonely Mountain, and walks away happy.
* * *
Mercifully, the twins are starting to sleep through the night. For now it’s just a night here and there, or one will sleep while the other doesn’t, but progress, albeit a slightly handicapped progress is limping along.
Daisy runs to the mall after work. The place is busy and it takes some time but she finally finds the perfect white baby doll dress with a bit of lace trim. Then she goes downtown and buys the red cowboy boots. Even with plans as vague and shifting as cloud formations there isn’t a day that goes by without some prop of her daily life blurring slightly into a shape or suggestion of John Beswick.
“Get over here,” Rick says salaciously as she models the dress and boots for him that evening. The twins are playing patty-cake in the playpen next to him, missing each others hands, laughing, and falling over.
“Just wait—a couple more hours.” Daisy whips the dress off over her head and walks briskly down the hall to the bedroom for more casual, dinner-making attire.
The minute the twins are down, the debauchery commences. The debauchery is impervious to pain or sleep deprivation. It is without inhibitions and heedless of schedules. It is existentially transformative and goes on for a week, interrupted only by the inconvenience of everyday life, tapering only when Daisy starts to get sore between the legs. At that point the couple is forced to shift focal points.
On a bleary morning after one such night of honeymoon antics, Rick purchases of quart of Super Green Protein drink and makes Daisy a special breakfast smoothie so that she will remain omnipotent. Daisy’s chin is chafed from Rick’s razor stubble but her omnipotence remains undiminished. For days, wherever they go people smile at them as if they know Daisy and Rick are blessed with special prowess. People greet them joyously, hold doors for them, apologize for slights and offer and supply favors for no obvious or deserved reasons. Even Celine is kind. People sense something. It’s as though just being near Rick and Daisy reminds everyone, on some subconscious level, of the best sex they’ve ever had. Without meaning to, the McPherson’s are making people blush.
* * *
The Ridge Athletic Club is only two blocks from home and the membership fee is reasonable.. Daisy starts out with a half hour workout three days a week.
“Why don’t you just walk the kids around in the stroller in the evening?” Rick asks, concerned about the expenditure.
“I can do that too,” Daisy answers. She doesn’t tell him that walking the kids in the stroller won’t get her arms into perfectly sculpted shape for John Beswick’s imminent New York seduction.
As her feet race around the elliptical track, her punk-filled IPod rams subversive music into her head. She runs in place but somehow also manages to run through space and time. She breaks through the drab edge of her own little place in the world. She is past, present and future tenses. She has been in New York with John. She is in New York with John. She will be in New York with John. Some little piece of her will exist forever in New York with John. She has to get ready. She has the wardrobe. Now she just needs the body to go with it.
* * *
It’s Saturday morning. Not overly surprised, Daisy finds her cell phone in the kitchen cupboard next to the breakfast cereal. “I’m a Little Tea Pot” is blasting from the CD player in the living room and the twins are dancing, diapered and chubby-legged, across the carpet. Rick is away, will be away for a week at a teachers’ conference in Pittsburg . She sits at the kitchen table drinking chai with soy milk, the sound of tearing paper from the living room overlaying the raucous music. She doesn’t bother to get up and see what’s being torn to pieces. It could be the phone bill or it could be her check book. With the sound of that elongated luxurious ripping though, it’s probably the newspaper, the one that she’d proudly refused to recycle, the one with her Hammondville Hospital editorial in it. She sets her teacup down, puts her feet up on the kitchen chair across from her, and moves her fingers over her still-puffy belly, feeling the small island of abdominal muscle beneath that is getting firmer, and maybe, flatter. She imagines herself in the peach lingerie that sits unworn, unwrapped even, in the boutique bag on her bureau. The bag is aromatic with the perfume of possible sexual adventure. She knows that one day soon Rick will remind her it’s there. She knows Rick. She treads the water of his devotion. They swim tides of faith, have swum every possible kind of tide over the years.
In a peach push-up bra and a matching skirt slip with a side slit she stands atop John Beswick’s penthouse desk. She is powerful, electrical, like a radio antenna, or a transmitter of cell phone signals at the edge of an endless, indigo sky. Without the wailing of any desire but her own, she towers over the room. John sits on the bed watching. He is talented beyond what reality requires, commands less patience than what is demanded of most. He wants her. Would he keep her for any length of time if she drove all those miles to deliver herself to him? Or would talent spoiled by flattery toss her out in the morning to only the thin hospitality of dawn? It doesn’t matter. This is her time, her chai tea, her soy milk, her shredding paper, her beautiful children who laugh and break existence into unequal parts. She knows the editorial is torn to pieces. And the news of the world, the weather, the dates, the days. . . rent and scattered everywhere. It doesn’t matter. She knows that in time she will do exactly what she pleases. She knows this as her babies, like barefoot little gods, run back and forth over all that they have created and destroyed.
Phoebe Wilcox lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Some of her favorite things are John Banville novels, sushi, salamanders (they have cute hands) and picking blueberries. Her novel, Angels Carry the Sun is pending publication with Lilly Press, and an excerpt from a second novel-in-progress has been published in “Wild Violet.” Recent and forthcoming experiments may be found in “The Chaffey Review,” “Emprise,” “Shoots and Vines,” “The Battered Suitcase,” “The Linnet’s Wings,” “Calliope Nerve,” “Bartleby-Snopes,” “The Big Table” and others. Her story, “Carp with Water in Their Ears,” published in “River Poets Journal” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.