Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) đź“•
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- Author: John Gardner
Read book online «Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕». Author - John Gardner
Meanwhile the hospital tests dragged on. A month passed, then two. There was nothing they could find.
“Mr. Orrick,” the last of the neurologists asked Martin, “has your wife ever experienced psychological problems?”
“Not that I know of,” Martin said. “You mean you think her pain’s—imaginary?”
“That’s a possibility we’re inclined to consider,” the doctor said.
Martin looked at him thoughtfully, looked up at the ceiling, then once more looked into the doctor’s eyes. “You’re wrong,” he said.
Fourteen
They moved to the Ozarks, a stupid university, a stupid little town, or so she thought at first, though she found a nice house, miraculously—a large old farmhouse with pillars, five miles from the village. It rained all winter long. The roads turned to gumbo, occasionally glazed with ice. Martin bought wormy old horses for himself and Evan and Mary, then wormy old dogs, and he tried to make the children learn to ride, though they were afraid of riding, and his yelling made them cry. The so-called university had no buildings yet, though construction was in progress, huge box-shaped horrors towering above weeds. He had his temporary office, with six other people, in a small, white house, the kind poor people live in in drab Ozark towns, a partly fallen chimney, a rusty porch glider on the sagging, peeling porch. Hippies with squeezed-shut hillbilly faces came and smiled and hunkered on the ground and talked, asked to borrow the horses, fucked their pale-eyed, long-haired girlfriends in the woods, the mow, the garage, the bathroom, and if no one was looking stole hayforks, grain, even lightbulbs speckled with whitewash from the barn, and drove up in their vans, when Martin’s Rambler wasn’t there, and emptied the gas tank by the barn. When Martin came home from work, if that was where he’d been, he would saddle up one of the wormy horses and ride off by himself into the gray, cold woods, and the wormy black-and-tans would run behind him. She couldn’t go with him, couldn’t ride at all. Either she was in too much pain to sit up, or she was light-headed with drugs. She tried again and again, stubbornly, but it was useless; as soon as they’d begin to go fast, she would fall, cracking her ribs, wrenching her back, bruising herself from head to foot. There was very little she could do, in fact, except sleep and hate herself and read. The children came up to her bedroom sometimes, trying to cheer her, and they partly succeeded, sitting beside her, reading or drawing pictures, or playing with stuffed animals. Evan was beginning to learn card tricks now. She hated card tricks with a holy passion—she wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was because of the kind of people she’d known who’d done them when she was in high school and college—but Evan was funny, his hands small and clumsy, so that complicated tricks that went smoothly in his mind came out through his fingers with a charming clunkiness, as if done by a small clown in gloves. Mary would watch him admiringly, sometimes playing straight man or accomplice, and she, Joan, who was supposed to be watching very carefully, would close her eyes and be glad they were beside her and would wonder what was to become of them. They never seemed to fight—as she and Martin did constantly, the little he was home, not teaching or riding or sealed away from reality in his study. She should do something, he kept telling her. She laughed, furious. What a fool he was! She had too many years of experience to get a teaching job. The state had made a law against the schools’ exploiting her, with the result that the schools, miserably poor and hopelessly backward, could afford to hire only inexperienced, young teachers. They might not have hired her in any case. The one time she’d mentioned to the county superintendent—she’d been driven by desperation into bringing it up—that she’d once won the California Teacher of the Year Award, he’d looked up at her over his spectacles with undisguised loathing and said, “You don’t say. Well I declare.” She knew his kind—maybe they were all his kind, here in southern Missouri. Crooked politicians; not educational dimwits, worse than that: indifferent, even hostile to schools and teachers and children. He’d fussed with papers, waiting for her to get up and leave, and so at last she’d stood up. At the door she’d said with a Missouri drawl and a sweet smile she knew he would understand, “You ought to get some air freshener in this office, Mr. Creed. Ah b'lieve they sell it in the dimestore.” —It didn’t matter, of course, that no one would hire her. She was on drugs all the time now. She frequently wondered if she’d ever again be able to think clearly, clearly enough even to write one really good, funny letter to her San Francisco friends.
Every Saturday that year he drove her the ninety miles to St. Louis, to see her psychiatrist, though neither of them believed for a minute that the pain was psychological. At the end of the year the psychiatrist was convinced that Joan Orrick was as sane as anyone, except perhaps for that peculiar devotion, even now, to her long-haired, cave-eyed husband. The psychiatrist shook his head, pursing his lips. He was young, and in a weak way, good-looking. Joan had
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