Hyster

Clothes and dishes littered the floor of the tiny square room. Groaning, Vera envisioned the shin-high trudge to the door, and she shoved her face deeper into the soft safety of her pillow. Her toes curled with renewed pain that accompanied the memory of the steel slinky slicing the tender webs between the first three toes on her right foot. The infernal gadget was concealed deep within in the substrate of the jumble, probably by her youngest, how old was she now? A hazy memory of a recent birthday party flickered around her memory. No, that was Tommy's party, her firstborn. Anyway, she had fought bitterly with her husband over the giving Tommy the slinky, warning him that a coil of sharp metal would not be an age-appropriate gift. 

"This is a death trap! Just look at it, they will slice their hands open, you just watch."

Theo, the perfect vision of tall, dark, and dangerous, was not one to back down. It was one of the things she had loved about him, once. Appalled by the suitor, Vera's mother disinherited her daughter for marrying him. Vera's eyes were so full of starry love, she paid little mind to her mother's bitter objections and happily closed the door to her old world, forever. Together, Theo and Vera fought the world back-to-back, conquering foes and taking no prisoners. Until, one day, they turned on each other and never stopped.

Light seeped in through the cream linen pillowcase, despite pushing it into her face so forcefully, the pronounced bridge of her nose began to ache. Vera grudgingly surrendered the struggle for sleep and cast the useless pillow aside. Her doleful, saline eyes soured behind the squinting barbs of her tawny lashes as her pupils reluctantly dilated to restrict the unfriendly morning rays. The bedframe whined as she wriggled into a comfortable form between the sprung bed coils. Finally flopping into a comfortable position on her back, the automatic sigh of defeat made her realize she had been holding her breath, and her lungs throbbed with relief, and the purple tinge drained from the edges of her vision. The rest of Vera's body also throbbed. It was the aches of motherhood, she told herself. Even before she was pregnant with Tommy, her body and stomach groaned in protest at greeting the day. Theo grumbled that Vera was always complaining about some ache or another. Now with two willful children running her to the bone, she argued that she could hardly be faulted.

"Vera!" Theo's voice boomed down the narrow hallway, and then came the echo of the smart clops made by his dress shoes on the hardwood floor. She practiced telling him about being right about the slinky, even if it was only she, and not the children, who suffered from it. The bedroom door swung open, but instead of slamming into the wall, as Vera presumed was Theo's intention, the laundry in the corner of the room squished up against the wall, bringing the door to a gentle, padded halt. Vera snorted a quiet laugh at the anti-climax of Theo's entrance.

"What the hell is all this?" He waved his upward-facing palm across the havoc. Then, without waiting for a reply, he continued, "Have you been out of bed at all today? God damn it, Vera, you have responsibilities!" His volume raised with each word, and Vera, immediately inflamed, readied herself to match. Flinging the covers forward and ignoring the pain slicing up her spine, she sat up in bed and met his judgemental eye with a look so full of wrath, the devil, himself, would be envious. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled to speak, but again, Theo raised his palm, this time to silence her. He tossed an unadorned brown folder onto the creamy tatted-lace bedspread. 

"Never mind, this..." he paused, sneering again at the disheveled scene, "... utter hysteria is not my problem anymore. You are on your own from now on; I am filing for divorce." 

Looking at the neatly typed pages in her lap, Vera felt all the breath drain from her body. Divorce. The word slapped her across the face, and she could barely move. The familiar tension crept into her chest, like a snake circling her torso and crushing her ribcage. Refusing to show Theo that her breathing was distressed, she tossed the offending folder to the foot of the bed. Commanding her final reserves of air, she pushed out the words, "Good luck with that." before hurling herself back to the pillows and pulling the covers over her pale, quivering face. 

"Oh, Duckie," Theo chortled, knowing he was in position with the upper-hand, "you should read things through. I have filed on the grounds of your continued refusal to receive the procedure ordered by your physician." The rigidity in Vera's chest spread down her spine and out to her extremities, tingling and tightening like butchered sinew laid out in the sun to dry into strings. 

********

"God damn it! God damn it! God damn it!" Rita screeched so loudly, her dry throat burned in protest. Two of her four children scurried around her, finding rogue toys and brightly colored socks to tidy up out of sight. The eldest artfully concealed herself when the dark clouds of rage started to form on the horizon, and the second-to-youngest, Annie, wailed in the corner of the living room, clutching her blanket to the hot, wooden spoon-shaped welts on her still bare backside.  

"Do you want something to really cry about, Annie? Do you? Why do you make me scream and yell like this? Are you happy now? Why can't we just have a clean home? Why do you make me fight with you?" Wild chestnut tendrils, darkened with sweat, flew out from her carefully placed, black headband. She clawed at her hands, although they did not itch, digging flakes of dried skin underneath her fingernails. 

"Daddyeeeeeeeeeeee!" The syllables sputtered from Annie's lungs as she ran to her father, who appeared in the doorway. Quickly juggling his briefcase into his other hand, he caught his daughter in the crook of his elbow before she plowed headfirst into his kneecap. 

"Oh, Phil... Thank God..." Stammered Rita, gasping for air. Walking toward his wife, Phil motioned to the other two children to collect Annie from his arms, and he placed a gentle hand on each of Rita's quivering shoulders, pulling her close to his chest. Relaxing into the support he offered, Rita fell from the heady rush of rage into deep, guttural sobs. 

"I don't know what to do, Phil. It is so hard to stay calm when..." she grasped at her hands, this time as if she were trying to pull her fingers from their roots. "I don't know if I can handle one more snotty doctor looking at me like I'm hysterical. The guy today, ugh! He was so offensive."

Phil breathed a staccato laugh through his nose, making Rita's ear bounce against his moving chest. "Snotty, huh?" he joked, "You mean, like Annie when she wakes up in the morning?"

Rita's sobbing elevated to broken chuckles for a moment, and then back to the dispirited tone of an aching soul. 

"Shhhhhh. It will be okay." He said nothing more but held her, stroking back the frayed tendrils of her glossy hair until she shuddered into the realm of restless sleep. 

********

Alice blinked in disbelief. Like a cassette spitting out lengths of gnarled tape, her mind struggled with a sudden overflow of information after spending a significant portion of her adult life ignoring her crippling pain and fatigue, and the other half losing jousting matches against doctors, boyfriends, bosses, teachers, friends, and others who punished her deficiencies. 

"Lazy bitch." The scathing voice of her ex-fiancee led the chorus of accusatory recordings inflexibly preserved within the most critical parts of her mind. Each time her body failed her, she wondered if their piercing remarks were justified, despite her most earnest efforts. Impossibly complicated medical terms swam around the warm New Patient Intake pages Doctor Samson printed from her mobile workstation where she still stood, clicking notes into her integrated system. Tilting her chin to see over the top of the glowing screen, Doctor Samson paused her typing and noticed the glassy expression Alice wore as she stared at the forms. 

"It's a lot to take in, isn't it?" She pushed her thin, navy wire-rimmed specs up her forehead to rest atop her silver-stranded ebony locks. Alice jolted at the break in the quiet, hypnotizing lull of the clicking keyboard. Her glassy eyes stung with salt, but she swallowed the lump of breath that would have sent the tears streaming down her cheeks.

"Uhm," Alice swallowed hard one more time, "yeah, I mean... so I've had this my whole life?"

"It's entirely possible. As with most auto-immune cases, this is a genetic condition that usually develops during late adolescence. We will have to wait for the test to come back for an official diagnosis, but just from our initial examination, I am confident they will show what I am expecting to see. The research on this is relatively new, and there is still a lot we don't know, but the symptoms you have been experiencing in your hands combined with the overall pain and fatigue are the tell-tale sign. Hopefully, with the supportive diet, physical therapy, and prescriptions, you should start to see some relief soon. If you can believe it, doctors used to treat this with hysterectomies. You know, the whole 'crazy woman' thing."

Alice drove in silence after she left the clinic. The noise of the car stereo raked against her raw nerves, so she punched the power button with more force than was necessary. 

"Call Mom." 

"Calling 'Mom.'" the mechanical voice confirmed the order. 

"No, end call." One ring trilled through the speaker and then beeped to indicate the end of the call. Alice spun her steering wheel hard to the left and whipped her car into a hasty u-turn across the double yellow line. The mysterious lineage her mother worked so hard to reject was the obvious source of a genetic condition. Unanswered questions and a lifetime of her mother's denial swelled like moistened cement inside Alice, crushing her internal organs under the pressure. 

"Mom?" Alice flung open the heavy olive door to her childhood home, catching the brass handle at the last minute before it slammed against the beveled glass windows that framed the entry way. 

"Whoa! There's my favorite oldest niece!"

"Uncle Tommy!" Alice, for a moment, forgot the angry swarm of wasps raging inside her and jumped to hug the tall shoulders of her beloved uncle.

"What are you doing here? When did you fly in?"

"This morning! Your mom picked me up from the airport, we tried to call you to meet up for breakfast while we were in your neck of the woods, but we couldn't get through." 

"Yeah, I was..." Alice trailed off, "Where is Mom, anyway?"

Tommy sucked a deep breath into his diaphragm, cocked his head back and hollered to his younger sister, "RIIIIIIITAAAAA!" The deep bellow resounded through the wooden house. 

"Goddamit, Tommy! What?!" Rita's voice approached from the upstairs hallway before she appeared on the landing. 

"Oh! Hi, honey! I didn't know you were coming over today!" Her bare feet pounded down the stairs, and she smothered her daughter in an awkwardly long embrace. Alice shifted her shoulders several times before finally pulling away. "We tried calling you this morning. Sweetie, your GrammieVee died yesterday."

"What? How? She was only like, 80?"

"I don't know, honey. I hadn't talked to her since that last time we saw her when you were little. I think it was before Annie was born, she probably never knew she had two other grandchildren, now that I think about it. But, you know, she always thought she was dying. She kept going to doctors insisting there was something wrong, but obviously, there wasn't, otherwise they would've found it. Anyway, Uncle Tommy is here to help me clear the crap out of her apartment at the facility because I just cannot deal with it. You know how I get about clutter."

Her mother prattled on for a while, and Tommy followed with a response, but Alice had gone numb. She pictured the gaunt, frail woman she had not seen in twenty-five years, alone and unvindicated, slipping away from her life of pain surrounded only by garbage and dirty laundry. Hope quickly turned to grief as all of Alice's unanswered questions perished along with her misjudged grandmother.