Joan Zimmermann was born in New York, New York and currently resides in the state of Virginia. She has been a writer and editor since 1994, largely in technology and biomedicine. She has been an independent consultant with NASA since 2001. She holds a B.A in English literature/pre-medical studies and an M.S. in Biology. She selects her reading material from a number of large and disorganized bookcases, and divides her remaining time between her grandchildren and a sweetly disobedient senior shiba inu. She has been writing fiction and poetry since she was a child.

Guy Wire

By Joan Zimmermann

I had seen his type a hundred times. Swaggering around the curtained treatment areas, alternately happy beyond measure or depressed with a vengeance, he slurred his loosely strung words like false pearls with their gloss eaten away. Most fellows like him fell into a drunken sleep after stumbling into the ER. He was energetic by comparison to some.

“Doc,” he peered up at me, sprawled in a plastic orange chair like a tired resident.

“Doc,” he said, “aw, whyncha crack a smile, pretty girl like you?”

His eyes were free of rheum and jaundice, while the rest of his face screamed rummy. Smashed red nose set over the middle of his face, a lumpy ridge of scar like the living spine of a mountain range. About half his teeth were left. No amnesia or the flap-footed walk common to alcoholics. Extremities somewhat wasted, probably because he rarely ate meat or quality protein on his drinking budget, but otherwise he was reasonably nourished. He possessed the remnants of fine musculature, discernible under his thin shirt; he might have been an athlete at one time. He hoisted himself up from the chair, looking around for the guy causing all the trouble, the guy with the real problems. He had come to the ER with a foot ulcer, quite a gruesome one, and I was waiting for a nurse to return with a medicated footbath. It would take a good soaking to uncover the many layers of city grime before I could debride the wound. Thus far, my nose had detected only the sad, mousy odor of established liver disease and the lack of regular bathing habits, but not the foul presence of bacterial colony. He could not have been more than 50, and he would be dead within 5 years.

Rene came in with the footbath as I was marking down my notes in his chart.

“Name?” I asked his back. He was now peering closely at an AIDS poster taped up on the institutional lime-green wall. Actually it was a SIDA poster. I doubted he spoke Spanish, but I prompted him incorrectly in street patois. No response.

Rene looked at me, shrugged, and rolled her eyes. She was a small Somali nurse practitioner with strong, slender hands and a sharp intellect, quick to detect weakness and to abhor sloth. Her days and evenings in the ER were nowhere near as horrific as her days and evenings in Somalia, and she was entirely unsympathetic to my occasional grumbling. The first time she took me to task, I was stunned, and then I asked her if she would come home and yell at my husband and kids for me. She had laughed for about fifteen minutes, and I had laughed with her for the last ten. Now, months into our working relationship, we enjoyed each other’s quiet company when work flurries subsided. She left the room after lightly touching my shoulder and softly running her hand down my arm.

I asked him again, “Name, sir?”

He slowly raised his head and focused his gaze on me, and his eyeballs jerked with a hint of nystagmus on the leash of his inebriated effort. Under lowered lids, and with a smile, he intoned, “’There are more things on Heaven and Earth than dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.’”

Then he closed his eyes and dozed, one hand shoved comfortably into the waistband of his jeans. I let out a held breath and lowered his foot into the water.

It wasn’t until the end of my shift that the ghosts started to shift and moan in the back of my head. I wasn’t sure that I knew their names, so I thought to consult my sister, the family exorcist. She remembered every twist and turn in our collective memory, events I had long relegated to a dark silent room in my brain. I was the lucky one, I had always told myself.  I survived. Cheryl hadn’t. She was alive, of course. Thirty-nine years old, two years younger than me, with a primary addiction to Valium, replaced by her recent weaning onto Xanax, and a Prozac chaser every morning. She still lived at home with Ma, trudging each day to her secretarial job at an insurance company in Manhattan, handmaiden to paunchy lechers who gave her raises when they felt like it, and that had not been often. Some years before, I had threatened to personally and non-surgically castrate a vice president who had cornered Cheryl with his manicured hands and an open zipper. With threats of attempted assault charges and counter-threats of attempted rape charges, and roars of simultaneous lawsuits rattling in our throats, Cheryl eventually won a quietly permanent position in the company. And then to Cheryl’s relief, she put on a bit of weight, aged a little, and became invisible. In fact, the old codgers in the upper echelons came to fondly refer to me as the old butch in the family, and Cheryl the femme.

Cheryl had moved Ma into her apartment when Ma became a little disoriented thanks to years of devotedly hard living. Ma didn’t drink anymore; couldn’t in fact, unless she truly wanted to commit suicide. While lifelong she had shrieked for death and the easy forgetfulness, in the waning predation of her dotage, she clung to her corporeal being with her claws sunk deeply into Cheryl. I had no idea why Cheryl tolerated it. Together we had explored various social service options. Ma had no money, had never saved a dime in her life. I begged Cheryl often to get Ma into an assisted living community, but to no avail.

“The devil you know,” she would always say.

“The Supreme Executive She-Devil of Queens!” I would retort.

“Ma needs someone to take care of her,” Cheryl would say.

I would sigh and Cheryl would say, “Who has seen the wind?”

I drove home in a haze. The drunk in the ER had stirred a nest of geckos, efts, wet and clinging salamanders with tenacious suction-cupped feet. Did I really remember some of these things? Or did they fashion themselves from my middle-of-the-night horrors, these chimeric creatures with their delicate limbs twisted into my hair, unshakable. They woke me from sleep, my damp nightgown clinging to my body, my disappearance from the bed jolting my husband half-awake, his helpless fingers reaching out to steady me. I could usually fend off nightmares with a glass of cold water, which served as an icy defibrillator to punch my galloping heart back into its normal rhythm. But this was a daymare, and it had me in its clutches while I drove, sick at heart and dizzy. I rung up Cheryl while still driving, thinking at the very moment she answered that it was a bad idea. FDR drive was at a crawl. The oldies station was playing another of Gary Puckett’s imbecilic paeans to defloration.

And suddenly there was Ma was bawling in the background, probably talking to the television, gravel and spite in her voice. Cheryl interrupted the noise with a cheerful Hello.

“Cheryl, am I crazy, or do I remember New Year’s Eve and a gun?”

“Ah yeah, you’re thinking about Earl.”

“Who?”

“That would be New Year’s Eve, 1971 going on 72. Remember that guy Ma met at AA?”

“Oooh… yeah, the best place to find a drinking buddy,” we said it almost simultaneously.

“Yeah,” Cheryl continued, “and he was a psychologist, for Christ’s sake. A real loon. Earl Schreiber, short guy with those girly hands. Quoted Shakespeare like a little corduroy Pez dispenser.” I heard her bite into her dinner, and she chomped noisily through her narration.

It came back to me in pieces, the way these things did, a feeling of raw December, cold and snowy in the city, the lights blinking on and off on the desolate Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit, the heated odor of asbestos pads pressing on the steel wheels of the subway car. The faces of the few riders. Ma sobbing quietly and drunkenly, Cheryl and I, fourth and sixth graders, pressed together on the clay-red, torn vinyl seat next to her, mortified and exhausted at three o’clock in the morning.

Earl had been typical, at first sanely calm and promising as so many of Ma’s boyfriends had been. As they were always paraded before us as potential stepfathers, Cheryl and I soon developed an instantaneous sense of what constituted a single man (or a married man masquerading as single, another common species that employed a reverse Batesian mimicry) and his suitability for Ma. We quickly became premature cynics. But Earl had come far out of left field, a surprising emotional athlete who could take the grand heft of Ma’s line drives; both Cheryl and I had approved of him initially. Dangerously educated and upper-middle class, his Manhattanesque vowels were as fluidic as the Art Deco lines of the Chrysler Building, so markedly different from our own elastic, workday Brooklynese. He wore expensive tweed blazers that were frayed at the cuffs, utilitarian brogans, also high-priced but appropriately battered, and tailored shirts. He shone like a Samaritan clothed in samite, and Ma heaped much hope and effort into cultivating him as husband material. With her meager months of secretarial college, she admired his degreed presence and equally important, his sure command of small talk at cocktail parties.

There had been a few men who lasted more than a collection of months, but eventually failure would occur and hope would turn to another bout of despair, decomposed of six-packs and endless nights of Ma keening and moaning, tearing up pictures and date memorabilia and slamming walls, or kids, if they were within reach. But for the time of Earl’s ascendancy, peace reigned. Attached gaily to his arm, she would breeze out the door with shining eyes on Friday nights, and Earl would take her away for the evening, leaving Cheryl and me with dominion over the television, the Cheetos, and the Pepsi. On some nights, it was better than summer vacation.

We developed faith in Earl’s beast-taming ability, demonstrated early on when he would come to our apartment late into the night during Ma’s periodic benders. He had a professionally soothing voice. I could easily picture him on call at Bellevue, calming inmates under bright fluorescent lights in the ward for the exceptionally agitated. My relief at being spared her rage, at least temporarily, floated like the scent of jasmine when Earl came to the door. I don’t know what Earl murmured during these episodes of Ma’s bottomless grief; I just remember the descent of calm where before there had been a shifting pillar of smoke and fire. That ashy memory still smoldered beneath my doctor’s reassuring smile. 

By the time I had reached third grade, I could not help my response to my mother, drunk or sober. She could see the misery in my eyes and if in public, she would smile sadly at me, in ostensible pity. In private, she would spit at me: “Bitch! You slut, you good-for-nothing, you goddamned mutt! You act like such a princess. You have everything, you whore, but you are nothing.” 

Earl could stop these sorts of events, and so for me he hung the moon.

Earl had been around a good six months when New Year’s Eve loomed on the horizon. We had had a reasonably successful Christmas. Ma had not gotten too terribly drunk, just juiced enough to be happy. My father had sent Cheryl and me an abundance of gifts to make up for his absence, and we had to endure a moment of tension when we thought Ma might tip over into a fit at the sight of his mocking wealth. But it passed. I was able to glean from the season my usual deep pleasures; the forest scent of bayberry candles, my favorite surviving turtle dove ornament covered in tired gold glitter, and the dream-faced fraying electric angel that had once propelled me across the living room on a swift bolt of house voltage. Tradition, even a dangerous one, is a device that soothes youth of all stripes, and I, as the consigned family worrywart, was always in great need of soothing. Thus Christmas, while dicey with its potential for drunken catastrophe, was a cistern of hope from which I drank deeply each year.

That Christmas, I had put every effort into cultivating happiness to last me through to the next year or perhaps beyond. I took day trips to the city with my sixth-grade buddies and smiled through my thin scarf and chattering teeth. We visited Rockefeller Center, admiring the magnificent tree and its old-fashioned lighted bells, and skaters gliding beneath its piney skirts. Chestnut and hot pretzel vendors stamped on the street corners, shouting their wares to shoppers. Our eyes watered as we walked from Bloomingdale’s to Macy’s to the display window at FAO Schwarz, the winter winds racing through the Manhattan canyons and striking us in the face as we rounded each corner.

 

On New Year’s Eve, Earl invited the three of us into the city to have dinner and visit his apartment. He had what was then termed a co-op, slightly uptown of Times Square, sufficiently far away to begin to absorb the warmly lit glamour of the 50s and 60s and the Upper East Side. From Brooklyn, Ma, Cheryl and I rode the BMT into the 42nd Street subway station, where Earl met us and piled us into a taxi, taking us to a small Italian restaurant close to the theatre district. The Checker cab was a phenomenon to me. Its vast interior practically echoed between its black leather jump seats and sofa-length back seat. The cabbie’s head was crammed into a tweed porkpie hat, and he ignored us behind the flimsy plastic divider. For us this was a treat of large proportions, to be borne in the expensive confines of a cab where a bus might have performed the same service. At the end of our short jaunt Earl escorted each of us out of the cab with a courtly hand to the curb, and then tossed a bill into the front seat, not even checking to see that it had landed. For some reason his carelessness irritated me; it was the first time I had registered the callous behavior of someone I thought should know better.

My toes were numb by the time we stopped in at the final destination of the evening, where Earl and Ma had decided to get themselves another drink. They had been steadily consuming on and off, hopping through dark little avenue bars where Cheryl and I drew on the cardboard coasters and drank Shirley Temples. To pass the hours, I would save all my maraschino cherries until the ginger ale and grenadine was nearly gone, and I occasionally felt magnanimous enough to hand one over to Cheryl when she whined. I kept a nervous eye on Ma and her mood. By this time, I could sense a change brewing.

I was well aware that I was a veritable mood ring, and my cabochon of skills had been polished to translucent blue perfection through the office of Ma’s white-hot insanity. My emotions were rarely entirely my own. This night I sensed a change in Earl, who seemed to be melting outside the contours of his civilized sartorial boundaries. I felt his eyes on me, searching and louche. I hated scrutiny of any kind, subject as I was to the exacting, continual, and minute suspicions of my neurotic mother. In addition, sexual scrutiny was to be found in abundance at school and on the Brooklyn streets.  It nauseated me under the least personal of circumstances, but in these close quarters, I could not mistake Earl’s intention. My next worry sprang from the realization that if my mother were to catch a mere hint of this interest, she would without a doubt blame me for instigating it. At home she held me responsible for everything, from Cheryl’s inability to understand arithmetic, to the dog’s incontinence, to my father’s dishonesty. I suddenly became rigid and unresponsive, afraid I would telegraph the truth. This was a bad move. Ma instantly reacted.

“What’s the matter, butterfly?” she asked with superficial gaiety. Earl chimed in, leaning close to my ear. “Parlez-vous francais?”  he asked, knowing I had been studying French in my school’s gifted program. I tried to smile normally as I responded automatically, “Oui, monsieur, un peu.” Earl launched into a rapid-fire assault of French, little of which I understood beyond a conjugation of “coucher” and an inexplicable mention of “le pipe.” I rapidly translated to myself the “going to bed” portion, as I knew my regular verbs, but I did not understand the latter reference. At the time, even in my unnecessary training bra, I did not need a dictionary. I smiled at him stiffly, and turned away to check the soles of my shoes. It would not do to unleash the truth, not if I valued my life and Cheryl’s. Cheryl slumped against me, growing tired. My mother looked perplexed. A river of meaning was flowing right beneath her uncomprehending eyes, but all she could see were the waters stained with stinking, churned mud.

At around 10pm, Earl and Ma decided to trade the bar for Earl’s co-op. Snow fell in large fat flakes, and I held Cheryl’s mittened hand as we trudged uptown. Rounding a corner, a street bum approached us, thin as a guy wire, stretching out a bony hand and requesting in a voice full of tacks and nails: “Hey buddy, got a dollar?” He was dressed in a filthy cotton shirt and old dress pants that looked to be salvaged from a dumpster. He had no teeth and his full head of hair was greasy, overlong, and marked with sad bolts of gray. I became colder just watching the flakes settle on his eyebrows. Earl thrust a bill at him, adding with a snort, “Enjoy your beer.” My face grew hot and at once I hated Earl even more intensely than I hated my own helpless youth.

We walked into the posh vestibule of his building, where a doorman admitted us through a locked glass door into a larger lobby. Light from brass sconces melted into cool beige carpeting, showcasing a vase filled with a riot of fresh flowers. We glided upward silently to Earl’s apartment, which appeared to be little more than a large beige sofa sprawled over more close-napped beige pile, lit by an enormous, globular ceramic lamp on a glass end table. Off to the side of a long mocha-colored wall was a doorway, which did not have a door. This was apparently the kitchen. At the end of the large room was a wall-to-ceiling window that looked out upon the city, undulating in the swirling snow. Cheryl and I settled ourselves on the enormous sofa, mesmerized by the view. I must have fallen asleep.

My mother shrieked and I was instantly awake.

I heard Earl say, “It’s okay, I just want you to look at it.” They were in the kitchen and I could see their shadows grappling.

My mother screamed again. “Get it away from me! You’re crazy! Oh my God oh my God oh my God- girls! Let’s go, let’s get out of here! He’s crazy!”

She bolted through the doorway, her wrinkled silk dress half-unbuttoned, pulling on her black winter coat and slinging her purse over her shoulder like a bandolier preparing for battle. She was drunk out of her mind. Earl was quietly but profoundly drunk, following behind her in no particular hurry, holding a metallic pistol loosely before him with a half-smile on his face. He looked as if he were, with great and deliberate tolerance, humoring hysterics, and seemed immensely satisfied with himself.

“Just touch it, it won’t hurt you.  Don’t be silly,” he said.

All horrid people say this, as they flay you alive.

“Don’t be silly, I’m not hurting you.”

I do not remember how we got to the subway station, or even most of the long subway ride home. I just remember Cheryl’s hair cool against my cheek, and the lights flashing on and off as we passed beneath Manhattan bedrock. I don’t remember whether we took a bus home from the subway station. I don’t remember falling into bed. I do remember the warmth of Cheryl’s body, somewhere in that cold cavern of a night, when she crawled in beside me to share the narrow twin bed. I remember scooting over to give her some room. I remember throwing an arm around her fragile rib cage and drawing her to me, needing the warmth as much as she. Children, some children, are elastic. They snap back no matter how hard you stretch them, and they never flinch when you let go and the rubber band snaps and stings.