By the end, when Mimi tried to pinpoint the origin of the relationship’s long decline, she would think of the day they’d gathered at the hospital to wait for her to fart. They were a jury-rigged family composed of her carroty Aunt Jan and him, Bennett, the man she’d lived with for four years, to whom she’d given, she already thought, because she was thirty and because everyone she knew was in their twenties, the best years of her life.
“Please, you guys,” she said, flushing. “You’re just making it worse.” She was splayed out like a bug pinned to a chart, and even though she had a sheet over her she felt panicked and exposed. First, she’d nearly died when her appendix ruptured. Then Aunt Jan said, “If you kids got married, wouldn’t Bennett’s health insurance pay for all this?” She actually said it! Bennett turned bright red. The M-word! They never mentioned it in their household. Respond, Mimi willed Bennett. Make a joke, something, anything to break this horrifying tension! But that small kindness was beyond him.
It was true that Mimi’s insurance was inadequate in an emergency, and that this latest bout of illness was getting expensive. It had been nearly two days since the surgery and Mimi’s bowels had not yet resumed their ordinary functions. She had to “pass gas,” as the nurses put it, making it sound as harmless as breathing, before they would let her eat and then eventually leave, and she could not “pass gas” in this room full of people. The thought of it! She and Bennett still closed the door when using the bathroom. They just weren’t those kind of people. Bennett couldn’t stand the way Aunt Jan was always talking, talking, talking about her bodily functions, orating endlessly on the failure of her kidney, holding forth on the texture of her bunions or the duration and frequency of her hot flashes. Which was why it struck Mimi as especially mortifying when, as the nurse poked her head in and waved a trough of colorless broth at her, a fart ripped through the room.
This was no wheedling exhalation of gas. It was tremendous: glass-rattling, still-echoing. It had the rich vibrato tone of grade-school boys winging their armpits against their hands; the brownish hue of air-raspberrying lips against dirty palms; the exact rude, bellowing, quavering sound you would use to describe flatulence to an alien who had never encountered it. It was an encyclopedic toot, the platonic fart.
Everyone started to cheer. Aunt Jan collapsed into the armchair in a pantomime of Victorian-era relief, while the nurse let out a happy “Woo!” and home-run-slid the broth in question onto the tray by Mimi’s bed. Mimi sat up in alarm, wincing at the pain in her gut. “But!” Aunt Jan slung a bony arm around Bennett’s shoulders — Mimi anticipated his cringe- and said, “How do you like your old girl there, eh? Whatta trooper! Now you should be home by tomorrow!” — the last part to Mimi. Which was true, and which she was thankful for. The buzzing fluorescent lights in the hospital flensed her skull away from her brain, bamboo-stripping between the layers, adding, she was sure, to her wooziness, and she was anxious to get back home to her cat and her things, to rest without the constant, chirpy interruption of the nurses. The only problem, the only kink in this orderly progression of events, was that Mimi hadn’t farted.
No, her gas still percolated beneath her new wound, bowels stretched out lazily, like limbless guinea pigs. She tried to meet Bennett’s eye. He avoided her, but she saw that his ears were turning red. Why didn’t he say something? Bennett! She tried to will it. She was much too embarrassed to embarrass him, though. She needed him to be on her side right now. And she guessed she knew by now how touchy he got. “You’re accusing me!” he’d accuse her, his small pale eyes going crazed and bunnyish, and then he’d be distant for the next few days, passing her in the hallway like an ambulatory thunder cloud; she knew this much. And she’d need his help as she healed. So she didn’t say anything, and he didn’t meet her eye, and he left with Aunt Jan a few minutes later. Mimi propped herself up on one elbow and tipped the broth into the trash can beside her bed, burying it with a flurry of Kleenexes just before the nurse returned with the ice chips.
“Well,” said the nurse. “Someone was hungry!”
Mimi had never been sick until her thirtieth year, when as if on cue everything started to break. Being a waitress at the chintzy steakhouse near the ski resorts she had only the lamest of health insurance, purchased herself the day Aunt Jan heard her kidney disease diagnosis. So now she watched her credit card bill balloon to ridiculous proportions while the ailments piled into her clown car of a body. What could she do? She needed three cavities filled. She missed an entire week of work that winter when she contracted a grisly case of strep throat. She got too drunk at the steakhouse after hours one night, slipped on an icy patch, and needed four stitches on her forehead. Then the month of yeast infections, which made Bennett go growly and indignant; then the grinding, cleansing bout of stomach flu. And now this.
Spring was already her least favorite time of year, and this year it had come in February, an oatmeal-faced guest who showed up early and ruined the party before it began. The world went gray, pocked with slush. It was a dismal place to be in the spring, though Bennett tried to convince her of the joy of spotting crocuses during muddy hikes in the mountains. They had been on one of those very hikes when Mimi suddenly doubled over in pain. “Ugh,” said Bennett. “You didn’t eat the venison chili, did you?”
She tried to ignore the pain for as long as possible, but a few days later came the fever, and then, most worrisome at all, the numbness. It was like falling out of love: first pain, then nausea, then the ache of unfeeling; the body poisoning itself. Maybe it knew something she didn’t! Ha! One morning she woke up early and ran to the bathroom to vomit into the toilet filled with Bennett’s beer-scented pee. “Can’t you ever flush?” she managed to say when he came to the doorway, looking adorably tousled in only a pair of boxers. He raked his fingers across his abdomen.
He was the handsomest man she’d ever seen, completely, officially Out of Her League. This had always gnawed at her, vaguely, as if there were some unspoken boundary they’d crossed in getting together, as if this meant there were something she owed him. They would walk down the street through the heat of female gazes, and Mimi would feel the confusion like a UV ray. “Oh, he’s your boyfriend?” co-workers would say. “I thought — no, I just thought you were roommates or something.” And here was her too-handsome boyfriend, gazing sleepily at her, as she vomited again into his happy-face-yellow pee. “You okay, baby?” he said. “You’re not pregnant, are you?”
She’d scowled and told him no, of course not, but as soon as he said it she was convinced that she was. She went back to bed and palpated her belly. It did feel distended, unnaturally rounded and firm. Despite everything, a joy filliped in her chest. A baby! She enjoyed a brief vision of she and Bennett in chunky wool sweaters by the ski lodge fireplace, cradling a bundle of baby. Bennett’s child, inside her! Then she got up to vomit again.
Of course it wasn’t a baby at all. It was her body gone septic, her ruptured appendix spewing sludge from her intestines like a firehose. She was filling up with her own waste, she discovered later, when they had to drain her guts through a tube crammed up her nose. She was literally so full of shit that she’d almost died.
“You’re certainly fragile lately,” Bennett observed from her hospital bedside. It might have sounded affectionate from someone else, from someone who enjoyed taking care of his sickly girlfriend, but from Bennett, who’d managed Mimi’s illnesses and mishaps that year with ever-decreasing zest, it just seemed accusatory. “Sorry,” Mimi said, not knowing what else to say.
Part Two
Once home she moldered on the couch until her sweatpants started to lose their elasticity, the butt sagging like post-tummy-tuck skin. She lay very still beside the cat, watching the worst things she could find on TV — “People’s Court” spin-offs, reruns of the previous day’s celebrity news programs, a lengthy special on Shirley MacLaine.
“Anything you need before I go, baby?” Bennett said. He was already putting on his coat, so she assumed her answer was meant to be no. “Shouldn’t you at least shower?”
Mimi buried her nose in the cat’s ear, which twitched away from her. “I’m still grieving.”
“It was an appendectomy!”
“Well? Can’t I grieve my appendix? I’ve had it my whole life, and now I don’t.”
“Baby.”
“You know what’s weird? I was thinking about this in the hospital. Who decided that love comes from your heart? What if it comes from your appendix, or your kidney?”
Bennett smiled slightly and bent to kiss the top of her head. “I’m working a double shift,” he said. “So I won’t be home until late.”
“And that’s supposed to be my fault?”
He didn’t disagree. “Try to get some sleep.”
Because during the off-season he also waited tables at the steakhouse, so now he was in charge of picking up her shifts, which made enjoying her convalescence a little more complicated. During the on-season they worked at the ski resort. Bennett was a trail-clearer, swift and strong and competitive, shark-like on the slopes. Mimi taught the ski-baby workshops. It turned out to be true that you were best at what you cared about the least. Someone had said this to her once and she had dismissed it as too depressing, but now she saw that it was undeniably true, and that this was why she made a terrific waitress but a fumbling teacher, and she thought that it said something, too, about she and Bennett. Though Mimi liked her work, loved leading coats stuffed with wobbly children down the bunny hills, lived for the days spent entirely on skis gliding through the gelid wind, it was risky with no real insurance. Insurance, insurance — Bennett had told her he was sick of her talking about it all the time — but it was easy for him to say, since his rich father on the East Coast still paid for his, and besides Mimi’s mother had been so ill for so long, and now Aunt Jan was ill, too, and it was a thing that preyed on one’s mind. So she stayed cautiously to the gentlest of bunny hills, sometimes looking up at the mountain and trying to pick out Bennett’s bright coat weaving between the other skiers.
Aunt Jan called at around 10. “Feeling better?”
The truth was that Mimi was feeling much worse, encased in her haze of painkillers and starvation. To her knowledge she still hadn’t “passed gas,” and so she’d only sucked at ice cubes, swallowed cautious hunks of frozen yogurt. Maybe she had farted in her sleep and just didn’t know it? That was her only hope. If not — who knew? Maybe when she finally relented and ate it would all well up beneath her stitches and then explode, another ruptured organ, scar burst open, bloodied smears of scalloped potato clinging to the ceiling in a gruesome spackle job. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “a little.”
Mimi, swaddled in a blanket with cat hair woven into each stitch, peered into the glow of the computer screen. Apart from the moony light of the Internet the room was dark, and her eyes felt sore, overworked. Bennett didn’t know that she visited these sites, and though she assumed he would disapprove, she guessed it didn’t matter much. After all, hadn’t he, while downloading a clip of “barely legal” porn, contracted a virus that had raged syphilitically through their shared computer, and hadn’t she responded with only a tight-lipped smile? So she clicked through the boxes stacked on the site like mini showcases, half-listening to Aunt Jan’s litany of complaints. “Exclusive: several strands of Julia Roberts’s hair!!” “Jerry Seinfeld skin cells, Big Discounts.” “Ashlee Simpson urine, SOLD OUT.” “Pamela Anderson fecal matter, SOLD OUT.” It wasn’t that she wanted to buy any of it, more that she found it fascinating that such things were available for sale: the chewed bubble-gum of a pop princess, the barbershop debris left by a reality show star. Mimi didn’t remember how she’d even learned that such websites existed, trafficking in celebrity skin, but now she couldn’t get enough. Where did people keep their purchases? In display cases in their living rooms? Squirreled away in false-bottomed cigar boxes? As the centerpiece of makeshift shrines? Were most of the buyers interested in a particular celebrity, or just in the idea of owning a piece of someone? Mimi was especially grossed-out and therefore fascinated by the fingernail-clipping gallery. Princess Diana! Beyonce! Simon Cowell! Bea Arthur! Ugh! Why did she want them so bad? She stopped at a vial of Shirley MacLaine’s blood. It was on sale.
“What do you know about Shirley MacLaine?” Mimi said.
“What?” Jan sounded annoyed.
“Nothing, nothing. What were you saying?”
“I was going to tell you that I’m finally on the donor list,” Jan said. “But really, really far down. I start dialysis next week.” No one had been able to come up with an explanation for her kidney disease. It was just arrived one day, ruthless as a shipload of Vikings, setting up camp and unceremoniously commencing to beat her organs to death.
Mimi shuffled into a sitting position. “Well, that’s a good step, isn’t it? Being on the list is better than not, right?”
“I’m writing up my will. I want to know if you and Bennett are getting married.”
“Jan!”
“It’s just for the legal document. I don’t want to have to rewrite it in from my deathbed if you all finally decide to get married. He really ought to marry you or let you go already, don’t you think? And I’m not just talking about the insurance thing. I mean, Meems, he doesn’t seem like the most devoted boyfriend in the world, you know? I just mean, he doesn’t seem too… present.”
Mimi turned off the computer and watched the cat fussily clean itself, a whiskery debutante. “He’s fine, Aunt Jan. We’re fine.” Her voice sounded flat, even to her. She sounded as if she were doing her best impression of herself. Of course she suspected Bennett was seeing someone — she would have been an idiot not too — but what was she going to do, move out? While the pain in her gut kept her from breathing, and she had $32 in her checking account? When she thought of Bennett seeing someone, of that someone knowing who she was and hating or maybe pitying her, the pain ballooned, threatening to engulf her entire body.
“What’s that, dear?”
“Aunt Jan,” said Mimi, without meaning to, “you know I’d do anything to help you. I wish I could give you my kidney.” Her stomach felt sour, colorless. Already there was a buoyancy where her appendix had been. She would get rid of as many organs as she could, and then, how light and lovely and free she would feel! “When I get better I’ll take all the tests to see if I’m a match. What do I have to do? I’ll do it.”
“You don’t mean that,” said Jan. “You don’t even know what you’re saying.”
“I do! Of course I do! Of course I would!”
“I have another call,” Jan said. She clicked away. Mimi wasn’t sure whether or not she was meant to wait, so she held on to the phone until the dial tone began to bleat in her ear.
When a key finally scraped in the door sometime around 3 a.m., Mimi arranged herself pathetically on the couch just in time for the entrance of Bennett, beer-stumbling forward, and — dread pouched in her chest, palpable as a sponge left by a careless surgeon — why hadn’t she just gone to the bedroom? — a group of people, tumbling into the living room. She feigned sleep.
Bennett didn’t seem to notice her.”What’ll you have, girls? Beer? Whiskey? I think there’s some champagne somewhere.” No, thought Mimi, there isn’t. It sounded like there were hundreds of people in the living room, standing in the half-light and watching her sleep. Bennett and who else? Who said, “Aw! Wait, what happened to her?” and who else whispered, “Some kind of surgery, didn’t he say”? — they spoke gently, boozily, like roustabout angels, derelict nurses watching her sleep. Mimi would have stayed there if they’d let her, sunbathing in their generic pity.
“Rise and shine, kiddo,” said Bennett, coming in from the kitchen, strangling two long-necked beer bottles in each hand. Mimi opened her eyes and pushed herself into a seated position. There was Holly, a waitress she sometimes worked with, and a guy she recognized from the restaurant bar — Ted? Ned? — and a girl she had never seen before, standing over by the desk, blinking towards Bennett as if confused by something. The girl was tall and whip-thin and much too pretty, with silvery-blond hair pouring down her back like a cape. Mimi immediately disliked her. “Excuse me,” she said. “I didn’t realize we were having a party tonight.” She meant this witheringly but everyone burst out laughing. Mimi scooped up the cat, pretending that it didn’t try to squirm from her arms, and took it into the bedroom — their cat, this was meant to say to Bennett and everyone else in the room, their cat that she and Bennett had rescued from the pound, had agreed not to name, the furry child surrogate they shared, together, yes, this cat was coming with her. She lay in bed watching the cat paw clawlessly at the door. The blond girl was laughing way too hard at whatever it was Bennett was saying. Mimi knew Bennett, and he wasn’t that funny.
What if love was secreted in the skin? What if it coalesced in the lungs?
Part Three
In the morning Mimi dressed in elastic-waisted pants and an oversized sweatshirt of Bennett’s — who cared, just so long as it didn’t scrape against the Frankensteiny weal of stitches — padded the sweatshirt pocket with some crumpled bills, and left the building while he snored into his pillow. Her skin felt gluey, her tongue carpeted as the cheap rental apartment. The only place to walk around there was a kind of a rut running alongside the highway, gone muddy with spring. Mimi trudged through it now, regretting her choice of running shoes over galoshes. She blamed this all on Bennett — the fact that there was nowhere to walk; the queasy warmth of spring pulverizing the snow; the whole town melting into this mucilaginous muck; the hunger howling through her like a virus; the truck that sped by, splattering her side with dirt-flavored Slushy; her sopping sneaker just missing a gelatinous lump of dead squirrel; the stitched slash in her stomach sensing the last breath of winter and sucking it inside. Bennett!
What if love was made, like hair, only out of what was already dead?
Finally she reached the strip mall, stepped inside its not-unacceptable coffee shop and ordered a four-dollar cappuccino and biscotti, almost forgetting to say “please” and “thank you,” she was feeling so reckless and starved. She paid on her credit card and to sign the receipt she pulled a pen from her parka pocket. She twirled the pen in her fingers, looking at it unfocusedly, waiting for the receipt to print. Then she held it closer to her eyes. It was a cheap white ballpoint with a red clip attached and a promotional slogan printed on it in red: “My blood saves lives,” above a stamped-on blood and plasma collection company logo. A flare lit beneath her breastbone. What was this? She fished her cell phone out of the other parka pocket, and was about to call Bennett — but what would she say? — Have you been donating blood without telling me? Could she say, But Bennett, what if love is stowed in blood cells, churning along veins like hamsters in balls? He’d demand to know what difference it could possibly make to her, and she wouldn’t have a response, so she was trying to think ahead — what difference did it make? — when the phone moved in her hand. She let it buzz two times, a vibrating, mechanical heart.
“I’ve been thinking.” It was Aunt Jan.
Mimi sighed, started paging through a dissolving People that had been left by her table’s previous occupant. “Fine, thanks, and you?”
“About what you said.”
Mimi paused over a homely family posed in front of their house — the damp-looking child had survived some illness — and sipped at the milk froth in her cup. Everyone was so full of stuff that it turned out they didn’t really need. How much could you clean out and still be alive? Blood, appendixes, kidneys. Mothers, fathers, love. What was it that kept her alive, if not all of these things?
“About the kidney.”
Mimi breathed in froth and coughed. The scorched milk vapored too-sweetly around her throat, bubbles clinging to cilia. “Oh, right,” she managed. “How’s that going?” She tried to make her way to the water pitcher on the counter without knocking anyone’s table with her ridiculously rotund jacket, collapsing her throat around the coughs until she poured herself a paper cup of room-temperature tap water and sucked it down. Aunt Jan was saying it was bad, oh it was very bad. The water just made Mimi cough more, and she gasped for air and honked out a goosey cough that masked, she hoped, oh how she hoped, the screeching, burning, churning fart that finally, now, erupted from her guts. It sounded like a steamboat warning another steamboat of its approach, like an animal in distress, shrieking out from her sweatpants. It was so hot and fumy it stung her skin.
Mimi froze. Looked around. No one had skipped a beat — the people at the café all bent politely over their fruit smoothies and newspapers. Oh, please, please, let that not have been as loud as it had sounded, as earth shaking and cup-in-saucer rattling as she suspected! Even so, there could be no disguising that rotted stench. She thought she caught a snicker flickering across the face of a college kid on the couch by the door. “You all right there? You choking on something?” Aunt Jan asked only now, only now that the coughing fit had subsided — the way Bennett offered to help with dishes only when she had finished them all. Mimi refilled her paper cup of water, squeezing the phone between her ear and shoulder like a tiny, toneless violin, and slunk back to her table. “I’m fine, Jan.” She felt her face burning, liquefying, sliding off her skull in plasticky drips. “What did you want?”
“So I talked to my doctor about it. He called you an angel. You are, you know. You’re an absolute angel. After all you’ve been through! He said we’d have to give you some time to prepare, to get well, and then we can start running all the tests. I know our blood types match — I saw your charts at the hospital — so, I don’t know, hopefully this will work. With any luck, we could be scheduling a transplant this summer.”
“Oh. Ah, good. Good!” Mimi weathered the wave of panic. Goodbye appendix, goodbye kidney. Still, she did like the idea of a test you could take to scientifically determine whether you were a good match with someone. Maybe she and Bennett could sign up, and solve this once and for all!
“Of course, I mean, they have to run the tests first to make sure we’re a good match and all of that. I can’t even tell you, oh, sweetheart. I can’t tell you how much this means to me. How much you’ve given me. If your mother were alive! Oh sweetheart, she’d be so proud of you.”
Jan now dinged something into her ear. Ding, ding, rattlewhoosh. Mimi pressed the phone closer, as if this might help her decipher this robotic new language of Jan’s. A faint thank you wafted across the line. She was at a store. Aunt Jan was calling her from a store, multitasking the guilt trip with a shopping spree.
“I have to go now,” Mimi said. “I’ll call you tonight.”
“Okay, dear. Love you,” said Aunt Jan. She had never said “Love you” to Mimi before, and now here it was, an oozy fungus sprouting orangely after the rain. Mimi didn’t know how to respond, so she just clicked the phone off. She looked down at her cappuccino. It looked dull and silly, wads of cotton posing as food.
What if love was manufactured in the genitals, just another biological lubricant? Mimi had always wondered where the pretty, voluptuous shape of the Valentine’s Day hearts had come from. The heart wasn’t so pretty in real life. In real life, the heart was just another muscle.
Part Four
When she got home Mimi took the most delicious shower she remembered ever having taken, the whole bathroom steamy and sweet with Bennett’s minty shampoo. She idly wondered whether she should call her doctor because she still hadn’t really had a solid bowel movement, but the thought of admitting this over the phone, and admitting, therefore, that she had lied to the nurses to score an early discharge, was too much to bear. And besides, the stitches were dissolving and everything was fine. Another chunk of the ceiling plunked into the tub — there was a mold problem — and even that couldn’t disturb the gloriousness of the overly hot water basting Mimi’s spongey-feeling skin. She spent too long in the bathroom, blow-drying her hair, clipping her nails, plucking from her eyebrows a few errant hairs, applying mascara and lip gloss. She stepped out in her bathrobe.
Bennett didn’t look up from the computer.
“Whatcha doing?” she said. She sidled up and stood behind him, pressing her hands onto his shoulders. She’d turn him around and kiss him and maybe they’d even make love. She still felt a bit weak, woozy, but it had been nearly a month, and she knew Bennett had certain limits. This would be her gift to him — her clean, scented body, a few pounds lighter since the surgery, hairless and white and open to him. She leaned down to kiss his cheek, but he turned his head jerkily and their teeth clanged together. “Ow!” cried Mimi.
Bennett circled his jaw around like he’d been punched. “Were you reading over my shoulder?”
“What? No, why would I?”
Bennett still hadn’t looked at her. “I just need to finish this email before I leave for work. Can you give me a sec?” Bennett had a way of sounding wounded and tired like she’d been nagging him to death. It was so convincing she almost believed it herself.
“I’m feeling much better. I was even thinking, you could tell Hans maybe, I was thinking maybe I could come back earlier than I thought.”
“Yeah, that might be good,” he said. He put his palm to his forehead and described three tense circles. Maybe Bennett had been sick this winter, too. Maybe Bennett had undergone some surgery he hadn’t told her about, and masked doctors had extruded his soul, dissecting the kernel of kindness from inside of him, convincing him it was superfluous as an appendix. “You might feel better if you went back to work anyway. It would definitely make things easier.” She’d had to borrow money from him to pay her half of the electric and phone bills this month. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand.
After he left, she searched around for her car keys, then sat for a minute in the cold car. It smelled of mud, plastic, unwashed bodies. She’d read once that the way your house smelled when you came back after vacation and everything had been closed up, that stale, stifling stink of house, was the way it smelled normally to visitors, and she assumed the same was true of cars. Bennett’s car smelled of pine air freshener and spilled beer. Their apartment, when she’d come home from the hospital, had reeked of cat hair, incense, a particularly husky human musk. It smelled like sex, she tried not to think.
She drove to the blood bank on the other side of town. There was a waiting room like any other. A sign on the wall like a menu explained that you got this much for a pint of blood, this much for plasma. The receptionist squinted at her expectantly. Mimi moved slowly towards the counter, gripping the pen in her hand but unsure of how to present it. Her face went hot. She eked out, “I have a question.”
“Yes?” The receptionist was dressed in street clothes, like anyone. This made the whole operation seem shadier.
“I’m wondering –” Mimi held up the pen. “This might sound funny, but do you give out these pens here?”
The receptionist blinked. “Pardon? You need a pen?”
“Er, no. I found this pen, and I’m wondering where it came from.” She waved it like a tiny baton before handing it over.
“Yeah, maybe these were from the big drive a while back? I think so. But that was before I started.”
Mimi took back the pen, sheepishly stuffing it back in her pocket. “Okay. Sorry,” she mumbled, and she was turning away when the door beside the receptionist’s nook opened and a doctor or nurse or technician or whatever they were called, a blood-taker-person, in a white lab coat, leaned out and displayed a vampiric grin. “Bye, Beth! Take care!” The blood-taker-person held the door open for a blond girl who inched past Mimi.
Beth collected her money from the receptionist and stood by the door zipping up her white cottontail of a ski jacket, which gave Mimi time to recognize her. Beth! It was the girl Bennett had brought home from the restaurant with Holly and Ted/Ned! Beth, that bloodless creature, the ghost in the corner of the living room, her long white hair a torch in the night — was Beth the champion donor? Sure, what need did an ethereal, pale-lashed creature like Beth have for something so pedestrian as plasma? Mimi thought she might be sick. She sat on the edge of the couch, watching Beth walk mincingly down the path, avoiding slush puddles. She wore those huge, furry boots people were wearing then, and they gave her the look of a woodsy changeling, an arctic deer about to dart back into the forest. Mimi held the pen inside her pocket, willed herself not the look out the window, but her will was weak, and she peeked out just in time to see Bennett’s car pulling out of the parking lot. How generous of him! Giving his mistress a ride to sell her own blood — what a sport Bennett was, what a terrific specimen of a man! The pen’s plastic clip snapped off in her hand, drawing a pinprick of blood. It was inescapable, Mimi wanted to tell Bennett: the body was just a messy thing perpetually about to flood its banks; this there was no escaping.
The package arrived the next day, because despite being beyond broke she’d paid extra for overnight shipping. She found it languishing like an orphan in the vomit-colored mire puddled on the front stoop of their apartment complex as she was heading to the parking lot. She was going to meet Aunt Jan for lunch and it was at least a twenty-minute drive and she was already running late, so she scooped up the cardboard box and threw it in the passenger seat of the Honda.
As she drove out to Aunt Jane’s she calculated the cost of the gas she was using and tried to enjoy the scenery. The mountains melted pinkly in the edges of her vision, softly pretty as blood disintegrating in water; her car skimmed through the wet streets, waves of slush fanning out from the wheels like dorsal fins. The pine forests looked brownish, exhausted. The sky was weak tea. The road was an unstuck zipper.
“What’s this?” Aunt Jan greeted Mimi as she heaved herself into the passenger seat. “A present?” She weighed the box in her hands.
“No! Oh, that’s .. .nothing.”
“Celebrity Skin, Inc?” read Jan. “What is this? Meems, I’m dying here.” With Jan you couldn’t be sure if that was meant literally or figuratively. Both were sort of true. She moved slowly, like a tired old woman. Her face was puckered and yellowish, her hands swollen into Mickey Mouse-ish paws.
Mimi shrugged. What was there to lose? “I ordered it. Err, as a present. A surprise. For Bennett. So, don’t tell.”
They pulled up to the empty row of metered spots in front of the diner. Jan raised her eyebrows at Mimi, shook the box. Aunt Jan was saying, “A gift! Well, that’s not what I would give him. A gift for what? Tell you what, that boy better get his head screwed on a little tighter. You’re not getting any younger.”
Oh, but she was: Mimi already felt much younger she’d been last spring. She was getting younger and lighter and freer with each passing day, shedding unnecessary organs, mining a wad of hair from the drain trap each morning, flaking a porridge of skin cells when she ran a fingernail across her arm. Each illness seemed an expulsion of that which she did not need: bacteria jumpshipping from her body into Kleenexes and toilet bowls. She wanted to wring herself clean and then leave this muddy mountain town and wake up somewhere new. She wanted to get pure. She wanted to eat only air and moonbeams and dewdrops, the way Beth, she was sure, grazed in the hilltops.
By the time they were seated at the diner she was ravenous, though, and the whole place smelled of bacon. “Your poor mother would be so proud of you,” Aunt Jan said. She was in one of her lugubrious moods, blinking back tears, overthanking the waitress for bringing them coffee, for everything.
If Mimi focused on the dusty Christmas decorations, the accordioned paper bells and metallic reindeer still taped to the diner’s light fixtures — did they leave them up year-round? — she thought she could shield herself from Aunt Jan’s dizzy hysterics. “That’s nice of you to say,” she said. “Sometimes I’m not so sure. She really thought I should finish school, become a teacher, like I’d planned. She thought I was all talk, that I never follow anything through.”
Aunt Jan shook her head, distracted by the menu. “Don’t say that, dear. She just wanted you to be happy! Besides, you’re a teacher now, sort of, aren’t you? In a way?”
“Hmm.” Mimi’s mother had never been one for Jan-style pablum. She’d met Bennett once — by then she was already sick — and had hissed at Mimi when he left the room: “Enjoy him for now, but he’s not worth it, long-term.” When Mimi had protested, she’d waved a hand. “I’m not saying I would kick him out of bed.” She’d also said during that visit, “Another resort town job? You can’t be serious. How long do you plan on keeping this one? When are you kids going to grow up?” The illness had been nasty, brutish, not short enough, the kind of thing where the stench of death wafted up from the instant of diagnosis and reeked around the edges of things for months, years. Mimi had only been able to stand a few short visits, blaming her lack of money. “What’s that smell?” she would catch herself saying each time. Now that her mother was gone, she had the luxury of the pale brand of guilt that accompanied powerlessness. She didn’t have to worry about visiting anymore, about doing the right thing. There was nothing more to be done.
When the waitress came she ordered without thinking. Aunt Jan went on about dialysis and the pain, oh the pain, oh and could Mimi actually give her a lift to the hospital for tomorrow’s treatments, and oh, what an angel Mimi was. “Of course, of course,” she said. “Whatever you need.”
When they got back in the car, Aunt Jan pounced again upon the box. Mimi understood suddenly what it was to be a mother — she was too exhausted to keep saying no, and just watched as Jan extracted a Swiss army knife from some inside pocket of her purple fleece jacket and stabbed the box. “Careful!”
“Oh, is it fragile?” Jan sawed away, pawed through the packing material, finally finding its lumpy heart and unwinding the strips of butcher paper that had been wrapped snugly, like a cast, around the vial. She dropped the vial into her lap. “What is this?” she shrieked. “Blood? Is this blood! Did I just touch a vial of blood?!”
Mimi scooped up the paper, protectively cradling the tube of blood in its bed of packing. “Careful! This was very expensive!”
“But — what?”
Mimi regretted having shown it to Jan. Some of the magic seemed to have worn off, already. “It’s blood, yeah. It’s … a celebrity’s blood.”
“A celebrity? What do you mean? Who?”
Mimi didn’t want to say. “Well. Shirley MacLaine,” she admitted.
Aunt Jan inched away. “What?”
“It’s Shirley MacLaine’s blood. I bought it online. It comes with a certificate of authenticity. I guess… well, don’t you think it could have some healing powers?” Mimi said. “You know, since she’s so spiritual and everything?”
Aunt Jan looked straight ahead now. “Oh, Mimi,” she said, shaking her head. “I just don’t know about that.”
.
She made the appointment without telling Bennett. She and Aunt Jan would meet in the parking lot, clandestine as lovers; they would wait for the achingly slow elevator. They would move aside to let a gurney trundle by, carting a sick body on cockeyed wheels. They would ascend into the spire of the hospital. Shirley’s blood would glow in Mimi’s pocket like a talisman. “Test me,” she’d say to the doctors, while Aunt Jan nodded, while the light filtering in from outside illuminated the fine golden hairs on Aunt Jan’s face, which was her mother’s face, which was her face. “Take out whatever you can,” she’d say, “and give it to her.”
She uncorked the blood vial and touched her tongue, tentatively, to the fluid.
Part Five
But the keloid grin on Mimi’s abdomen, she noticed while taking a shower the day before she was to return to work, was not getting any less red. Nor was the general wound area becoming any less sore. In fact, her whole torso still felt like she’d done a thousand sit-ups, or else eaten a cactus; the scar practically glowed in the dark it was so Rudolph-y red. She didn’t know how she would stay on her feet all night at the steakhouse. She couldn’t imagine it at all. She hadn’t gone on any follow-up visits to the doctor because she really, really couldn’t afford to, not unless the thing literally burst open, not unless she literally had to. Now Mimi wondered if this was what she was supposed to be feeling, if she was supposed to sway like this, to run so shiveringly hot and cold, whether her scar was supposed to be so mobile and leaky and hot. Maybe she should pray, she thought dozily. Maybe she should buy some healing tea at the health food store and light incense and pray. Maybe she should crack open the vial of Shirley’s blood and swallow a tiny sip, douse it over her scar. Maybe there was some way to fix this without acknowledging what really was wrong with it.
In the living room, Bennett was waiting with a fan of brochures and a toothy grin. “Hey beautiful,” he said. He held out an arm, welcoming her onto the couch. He didn’t even complain when her wet hair dampened his sleeve. Something was up. “I’ve been thinking.” He geisha-fluttered the brochures at her.
“Oh?” said Mimi. She’d almost forgotten whatever it was she had come out of the bathroom to tell him.
“About… Rhode Island.”
Mimi smiled.
“Newport, Rhode Island, to be exact!” Bennett looked very pleased with himself, the grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. “Baby, you’re 100% right. This town is a drag. I think we need something new. Turns out an old college roommate of my dad’s sails with the head of the yacht club in Newport and he says he can get us boat jobs. He’ll even teach us to sail!
“What?” Mimi snuggled up against Bennett’s chest. She didn’t really care what he was saying, so long as he held her close as he was saying it. When Aunt Jan died of kidney failure or whatever eventually killed her, Bennett would be all Mimi had. The cat glared at her, twitching its tail from its perch on top of the TV. Oh no you don’t, the cat’s tail seemed to say. Don’t let’s start up with all that.
“Isn’t it great?” Bennett stroked her hair, nuzzled his nose into her part. “I know you’ve been dying to get out here. And you’re totally right. I can’t believe how sick of this place I am.”
“Really? Since when?”
“Since — I don’t know. Since now. The thing is, we have to leave, like, ASAP, if we’re going to get all settled before their season starts.”
Oh! The thought thudded in Mimi’s stomach, heavy as a half-formed shit. It was over with Beth. That’s what he meant. Beth had dumped him. Well.
Bennett sat up a little straighter, shunting her into his lap before she caught herself and sat up beside him. Her gut twanged with a rich, orangey, C-chord of pain. He said, “And here’s the best part. I was telling my dad that this was great and all, but you know, we’d need some time to save up money and all that. And he said that he and my stepmom would love to have us closer to them, and that Newport would be ideal for us, and so baby, he’s going to pay for our move! Isn’t that great news? He’s sending a check to cover a security deposit and U-Haul and everything!”
Mimi leaned back into the corduroy couch cushions. They were too soft, clumpy as spoiled milk, each groove in the fabric clotted with cat hair.
“What about Aunt Jan?”
“What about her?”
“I can’t just leave. I — I promised her my kidney.”
Bennett guffawed. “C’mon, Meems. You’re not giving anyone your kidney.”
Mimi’s scar throbbed, trying to say something. Bennett! it would say, its puppety mouth emitting rank breath. Where was your daddy’s fucking money when Mimi was charging thousands of dollars in hospital bills to her fucking Discovery card?!
“Meems? Baby?”
She just had to lie down for a minute and then she would feel okay. She just had to lie down beneath a blanket. Bennett shoved the pillow under her head, frowning. She had to lie very still and get the gut-mouth to shut up, to stop mumbling there underneath her bathrobe, but even when she pressed the blanket against her skin she could hear the mouth singing a mean, taunting little song. Who’s afraid of the big bad Beth? The big bad Beth? The thing was fucking possessed! “Okay!” said Mimi. “That’s enough!”
“Enough what?” Bennett had stepped back now. “Do you need something? What’s wrong?”
Me! Me! Me! cried the scar.
“I’m going to call the doctor,” said Bennett uncertainly. But he didn’t know who her doctor was, did he? Mimi thought that he might be calling Aunt Jan and tried to warn him to stop. Aunt Jan would never take the kidney off her hands if she knew Mimi was sick, sick, sick, if she knew how diseased and rotten Mimi was through and through. Bennett was ruining everything! The toxic pulse of the scar made Mimi hot, made Mimi cold, made Mimi’s vision go spangly like fireworks one minute, dull as felt the next. She had been lying on the couch for hours, hours, hours. We’ve got to get Shirley’s blood, she tried to tell her stomach-mouth. The blood will know what to do.
It had been hours, hours, hours. “Yes,” Bennett was saying into the phone. “I guess it’s gotten infected, yes, you’re probably right.” Infected? No, he didn’t get it at all, not at all. “I don’t see how it could have happened.” This part, Mimi was sure she heard through the crash of blood in her ears, he repeated. “I sure don’t get how this could have happened. I guess you’re right. It must have gotten infected. Yes, I’ll bring her in. Of course, as soon as possible. But doctor. She’s going to be okay, right? Doctor, doctor, how could this have happened?”
