Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

me and lowered her voice. “What would happen is this,” she said, squinting at me. “Somebody’d buy theclubs, Irving would wake up or come out of this”—she waved her hand toward the corner as though to indicate the whole mess, the adjustable back of the bed, the box of diapers, the catheter bags—“and he would say, Selma, where the hell are my clubs? You sold them? What, Selma, you thought I was going to die?” She shrugged, her pillowy torso rising and falling with certainty and resignation. I looked over at Irving, a yellow mummy with rheumy dark eyes, his fingers twitching, his breathing the closest he came to conversation. The bed was angled so he had a panoramic view of the cluttered random landscape of Lake Plata, one small roof after another broken only by the skeleton supports of the water tower and the boxy sprawl of the Wal-Mart and Kmart, but he seemed to see nothing, hear nothing. Perhaps he could still feel the drumbeat of his heart beating in his body; who could tell? It was hard to imagine him demanding his nine iron.
    “Never mind,” Mrs. Levitt said. “What do you think about this girl went missing in Orlando? The boyfriend killed her, you take my word for it.” Oh, I believed that.
    Listening to Mrs. Levitt talk about Irving was like sitting out back at a barbecue talking to the other cop wives the way I’d done dozens of times during my marriage. Sometimes, on those summer afternoons, I’d think Bobby was right, that I exaggerated things. I’d sit in the backyard of Bobby’s friend Buddy’s split-level out on Long Island, and listen to Buddy’s wife, Marie, and her sister, Terri, who was also married to a cop, and Marie’s neighbor Annmarie, whose husband was a firefighter, and they all made it sound like marriage was the Stations of the Cross, like that was the natural order, trial by husband.
    “He can sit out there like Father of the Year, but God forbid heshould bathe one of them or buy them a pair of shoes,” said Marie.
    “A pair of shoes?” said Terri. “What are you, dreaming? A pair of shoes? What about putting the goddamn mayonnaise away after he makes a sandwich?”
    “He makes his own sandwich?” said Annmarie, and we had to laugh. Had to.
    Oh, lord, the stories they told, and all of them funny and sharp, like Mrs. Levitt’s. About how Terri was so tired from the kids one night that she fell asleep in the middle of sex. About how Buddy showed up at one of the girls’ birthdays drunk and passed out on the couch, where the party carried on without him, around him, how someone put a butter-cream rosebud on his nose and he never even stirred. About Annmarie’s husband, Kevin, and the toast he gave at his brother’s wedding that was so full of profanity and references to the groom’s previous girlfriends that the bride burst into tears.
    “Honest to God, it’s like having five kids, and the girls are easier,” Marie said.
    The working girl, they all called me. Hey Fran, they’d say, what’s up in the real world? And I’d tell stories about the hospital. About the girl who came into the ER ten centimeters dilated and named her baby Benedetto because she kept staring at my name tag, yelling and cursing and using her long toes against the laminated footboard of the bed for leverage while she pushed. About the gunshot victim who tried to grab the bullet as a resident held it high on the blade of his retractors and raised a ruckus when we wouldn’t let him have it for his collection. “I got five of those suckers on the headboard of my bed, man,” he moaned. “Five, alllined up nice. Gimme that one.” About the couple who came in hemming and hawing and finally managed to say that somehow the condom got lost. A female resident put on rubber gloves and retrieved it. “You’re supposed to unroll it as you put it on,” she said to the guy.
    “Damn,” he said.
    We’d sit in the kitchen and I’d tell those stories and they’d howl, those women. Never the