One Amazing Thing

But after I saw the couple in the café, a great dissatisfaction washed over me. I remembered the old man tilting his head attentively, listening to his wife making her menu choice. Her eyes had shone through her thick glasses as she watched him cut up their desserts for sharing. There was nothing like that tenderness in my life. And without it, what use were the things I’d built my days around? My garden, my home, my activities and friendships, even the time Mr. Pritchett and I spent together-they were all so many zeroes. With the “one” of love in front of them, they could have been worth millions, but as of now, I was bankrupt, and it was too late to start over.

THE FIRST DAY IN THE HOSPITAL, I MOVED IN AND OUT OF A haze that was alternately pain and numbness. On the second day, I began to feel a great shame. I refused to talk to the people waiting to see me: my doctor, the hospital psychiatrist, a social worker, and my husband. I spent the day with my face buried in my pillow, my arms aching with IV needles, plotting how I could do this more efficiently once I was released.

I wasn’t sure when the night nurse came into my room. I awoke and found her standing at the foot of my bed. The lights were off and she left them that way. In the glow of machines I could only see a silhouette, short and thin. Her hair was tied back neatly in a bun. The darkness had turned her uniform gray. When she greeted me, from her accent I guessed-because Mr. Pritchett had many clients from that country-that she was Indian. I pretended to be asleep. Being a nurse, she could probably tell I was awake, but my pretense didn’t a

I hadn’t expected that. Surprise made me blurt out, “Are you retiring?”

“You could say that,” she said.

“What will you do now?”

“Some people think I should go back to my birthplace,” she said. “But I’ve decided to go where no one knows me. I want a new life.”

Moving to live where no one knew you, shucking off your worn-out life like old snakeskin! The idea ran through me like a shiver. And though I’d been determined not to give anything of myself away in this place filled with concrete and chemicals and cheerlessness, I found myself saying, “That’s what I want also. A new life. This one’s too painful.”

“Why?”

Maybe it was her casual tone. Or the fact that we would never see each other again. I said, “It’s like The Matrix.” (I wasn’t sure she would be familiar with the movie. I’d gone to see it only because Mr. Pritchett insisted-though then I had been captivated by it. She nodded, however.) “All this time I thought everything around me was beautiful. But in reality I had been squeezed into a cramped, loveless cell. I chose death. I couldn’t see any other way of breaking out.”

“Death is a breaking out of sorts,” she said. “But you won’t necessarily end up in a better place. Especially if you kill yourself. Terrible karma, that. You’ll just have to go through everything you tried to escape, in a different form. In any case, this husband whom you consider to be the bane of your existence, he came to you because of your own desire. Don’t you see it?”

Her words shot through me like voltage, charging the dead battery of my brain, bringing to life a lost memory. I was astounded because what she said was true.

IT IS THE DAY AFTER HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION. VIVIENNE SITS in her mother’s Formica kitchen (lemon yellow, baby-chick yellow, color-of-hope yellow), eating the world’s best peach pie with Debbie. Debbie has just told Vivie

“We’ll be in charge of everything!” Debbie ends, smiling all over her good-natured, freckled face. But instead of the squeal of joy Debbie is waiting for, Vivie

“Don’t tell me-” Debbie starts. “You’re getting-” Then something in Vivie

“Lance proposed, and I said yes. He’s got a job offer in Tulsa. He wants us to get married next month, before he moves.” She talks fast to keep Debbie from saying the things she doesn’t want to hear. Debbie doesn’t think Lance is right for her-too intense, too serious, his black eyes boring into whomever he looks at. “He wants too much,” she told Vivie

Debbie also thinks Vivie

And that’s just fine with Vivie

So now she speaks to Debbie about decorating their beautiful new home, baking her best desserts for Lance, holidaying in exotic destinations, eating at restaurants where the menu is in French and the wineglasses are crystal. And having babies, lots of babies. Already she’s imagining the birthday cakes she’ll create, confections extravagant as Disneyland that will be the talk of the neighborhood.

“You’ll do fine without me,” she ends, trying not to look at Debbie’s fallen face.

(Debbie will, indeed, do fine. She’ll get one of her other friends to join her, and Debbie’s Delights will become a hit in their hometown. But Vivie

“I want you to be the maid of honor,” Vivie

And because ultimately a girl can’t resist the tinsel lure of weddings, the happily-ever-after she’s been conditioned into dreaming of since her first memory, Debbie examines with some envy the minuscule diamond in Vivie

THE MEMORY SEEMED TO SPOOL FOREVER, BUT IT MUST HAVE taken only a moment. When I came out of it, the nurse was holding my hand.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Feeling your palm,” she said. “That gives me a sense of what’s waiting for you.”

The machine light tinged her hair green, but her features were in shadow. I felt heat radiating from her fingertips.

“Is it like palmistry?”

“Not exactly. It’s possible for you to break out, if you really want to. But changing your karma will not be easy. You’ll have to be alert and intelligent at every step.”

Much as I wanted to break out, I wasn’t sure I possessed these prerequisites. Karma-changing sounded complicated, and every part of me-body and nerves and heart-felt overwhelmingly stupid.