Shaken and Stirred

Sometimes, I think my story is about addiction and adultery. Other times, I think it's about bad luck with the Avon lady. And not just one—one I could chalk up to chance. Two rotten Avon ladies feel more like a curse.

So begins the story of Poppy Koslowski. She's trying to recover from a hysterectomy, but her family has other ideas. She's the one with the legal right to call time on her alcoholic grandfather in North Carolina. So she's dragged back across the country from her rebuilt life into the bosom of a family who barely notice the old man's imminent death.

Poppy understands why her grandfather is dying alone. She remembers how his drinking terrorized his family. But she also remembers the man who made her feel worthwhile and wanted after her parents' marriage collapsed, a time when she felt like she was dying alone.

Plunged into a crazy kaleidoscope of consulting doctors, catching fire with an old flame, and negotiating lunch venues with her mother and grandmother, Poppy still manages to fall in love. With her best friend. Because nothing in the Koslowski family is ever straightforward.

2002

Chapter One

My surgeon lied to me. A hysterectomy is not like an appendectomy. No one misses a vestigial organ, particularly one that’s trying to explode inside her guts and kill her. There is also no comparison between a hysterectomy and having your gallbladder removed, your tonsils out, or your bunions shaved, and as for the friend who told me it was no worse than having a root canal, well, that’s just proof that friends lie, too.

Nothing prepares you for the feeling of loss. You have a hysterectomy because something has gone very wrong, because you’re in pain, and because you want that pain to stop. I was only thirty-four. True, I didn’t have any children and I didn’t plan to. I’d come to think of my uterus in purely metaphorical terms. It was there, but it didn’t work—kind of like a broken-down muscle car in a redneck’s driveway.

But I liked children, and, from time to time, I’d had vague ideas about finding the right partner, settling down, and maybe having a few. I didn’t find the right partner, and so there my uterus sat, up on blocks, leaking oil all over the driveway.

Still, it wasn’t until I was popping Vicodin like Pez—until the fibrous cysts and a raging case of endometriosis made a hysterectomy inevitable—that I thought about what I was losing. Posterity. Parenthood. A legacy. Had I known that my window of fertility was only open a few inches above the sash, would I have done anything differently? Would I have married hapless Dave, the guy I’d dated in high school? Would I have gone to a sperm bank? What kind of mother would I have been?

I tried to imagine myself pregnant. It was surprisingly easy. I closed my eyes and saw me, Poppy Koslowski, only this time, everything would be right. No wastrel father, no alcoholic grandfather, no hand-wringing women making po-faced excuses. Best of all, no me in the middle, causing trouble but also keeping the peace. No acting the family clown. No feeling tied down. The small me I’d give birth to would rise above it all, borne aloft on the raft of my experience. She’d go to Smith, she’d be a poetic genius, and she’d talk like she had a horse’s bit between her teeth.

Yes. Probably best that the Koslowski line came to a screeching halt with me.

In my post-surgery haze, I’d blamed Abby for the hysterectomy. She was the one who’d insisted I see a gynecological surgeon. You know what they say—never see a surgeon unless you want surgery. Abby was a nurse and, when it came to medical matters, she was a tinpot dictator. She was also my best friend. We’d known one another since we were thirteen and, though I never questioned her off-the-cuff diagnoses, I occasionally resented her medical infallibility.

“Would you like pelvic inflammatory disease?” she had asked. “If you think this is painful, try that. You’ll wish you could pull your guts out through your vagina with a pair of salad tongs.”

“Thanks for that image. Who says it’ll come to that? You do exaggerate.”

“Nonsense.”

“Okay, you fib.”

“I do not.”

I went for the low blow. “Do you remember that I wrote your term paper for Kaye Grabbel’s class?”

“That was in the eleventh grade, and you didn’t write it, you edited it.”

“Believe me,” I said. “In your case, it’s the same thing. You sprinkle commas on a text like pepper on your eggs.”

“You’re high,” she replied blandly. “How many Vicodin have you taken?”

“Two,” I said.

She frowned. “Let’s try this again. I know you take two at a time. I mean how many have you taken today in total?”

I tried to think. Abby waited, her head tilted to one side.

“You’ve counted the bottle,” I accused.

“Of course I did. Your prescription was filled two days ago. Forty-five pills with the proviso that they must last the whole month. You’ve got thirty pills left. Either make an appointment with a surgeon or check yourself into rehab. Your choice.”

I went to see the surgeon. Three weeks later, I was minus a uterus and one ovary. Abby took time off from her job in the Trauma ICU and hovered around me in Med-Surg being bossy and efficient. It was amazing to watch her in action. With the surgeon, she was cool and intimidating; with the nurses, funny and irreverent. A few minutes after the anesthetist put the sedative into my IV, I told Abby that I wanted to be a nurse. She said I wasn’t nearly sick enough. The other nurses laughed.

Beneath the surface irritation, I was insanely grateful to Abby. Some small, irrational part of me was convinced I was going to die on the operating table. The surgeon would open me up and find a big cancerous blob, or a blood clot would form in my toe and travel to my brain.

Whenever I’d done something stupid or dangerous as a kid, like jumping from the garage roof onto the trampoline, my mother would say, “For God’s sake, do you want to wake up dead?” I didn’t want to wake up dead. I wanted to wake up alive, and the first thing I wanted to see was Abby’s familiar, cranky, reassuring face.

I didn’t tell her any of this, of course. We’d been inseparable for nearly twenty years. I loved her, and I knew she loved me, but we didn’t gush. We cracked jokes. I asked the surgeon if I could take my uterus home in ajar. Abby offered to take pictures of the nurse giving me my surgical shave.

She stayed with me all three days that I was in the hospital, sleeping on the recliner in my semi-private room, and, when I went home, she moved into my spare bedroom. She said she’d stay for a week, enough time for me to get back on my feet. It was a cozy arrangement, just as it had been when we were roommates in college. We fell into a comfortable routine. We talked, we watched movies, and we enjoyed one another’s company. Apart from the fact that my stitches itched and I had one hell of stomachache, it was better than a week at the beach.

On the morning of the seventh day, Abby left for work, and I turned to my stack of paperbacks. I’d read only ten pages of Agatha Christie’s Postern of Fate when the first wave of grief washed over me. Abby was leaving. This was her last night. I’d have no one to talk to, no nurse at my beck and call, no one to share the sublime and the mundane of everyday life. I tried to shake it off. I threw myself into the usual distractions. I played cards on the computer. I watched television. I listened to music. As the day wore on and the drugs wore off, I realized there was more to my melancholy than just feeling sorry for myself.

I was in my mid-thirties, I lived alone, and I was at a genetic dead end. Three million years of human evolution, from Lucy of the Australopithecines to the unlikely union of my parents, a Southern Baptist and a Polish Jew—all of that ended with me. The human race would go on, but I wouldn’t. I was the last of my kind, no great loss, maybe, but when I was dead, I’d be well and truly gone, and I’d take all of my ancestors with me.

The fact that in Lucky Eddie’s case I’d be doing the world a favor was no consolation. My worthless father had managed what I couldn’t. He’d helped to make me. I’d helped to make no one. I wept for my lost uterus until I felt thoroughly stupid. I cried until Abby’s dog, Belvedere, stopped trying to comfort me and took refuge in a far corner of the living room. I ran out of Kleenex and shuffled through the house, looking for something softer than the roll of paper towels in the kitchen. The toilet paper I ended up with was no improvement—I’d bought it in bulk from a cheap warehouse store and it might as well have been fine-grain sandpaper. I wiped my eyes and blew my nose until both were red. Then, even though I wasn’t in any pain, I took two of my wicked, addictive painkillers and fell asleep. At three, I woke up and took two more. When Abby’s key turned in the lock at a quarter to six, I felt numb, like a longtime resident in an opium den. I swam over the living room carpet and met her at the door.

She was wearing her green scrubs and a baggy purple cardigan, the pockets of which were stretched out from carrying pens, wrappers, and all the other assorted detritus of her work in the ICU.

“You’re upright,” she said, smiling. “Drop your drawers and let’s have a look at your incision.”

“This is so sudden. Can’t I have a drink first? Or a kiss?”

“I wouldn’t kiss you on a bet,” she said, “and I think you’re already drunk.”

She closed the door behind her, leaned me against the wall, and bent over to examine my incision. The plastic beads on the ends of her braids made a clicking sound as she moved, like hundreds of tiny castanets. I liked her hair braided, though I’d kept my opinion to myself. For years she’d worn it straightened and brushed into what she called the modified mushroom. When I’d suggested that she grow it into an Angela Davis afro, she’d given me a sharp look and said that a black woman’s hair was a sensitive subject and not open for discussion. I didn’t ask why. I expected it had something to do with her mother, who had “opinions” about Abby’s hair. Abby’s mother had opinions about everything to do with Abby, and none of them were positive.

My own hair wasn’t interesting enough to discuss. It was dark brown with little bits of gray, and I wore it short. Every five weeks, I had a standing appointment with a hairdresser named Clyde, who kept up a non-stop commentary about my cowlicks.

“The incision is a little inflamed on this end,” Abby said. “You need to clean it with some hydrogen peroxide.”

“I put Neosporin on it this morning.”

“That’s good, but you still need to clean it. Okay, exam over. Pants up.”

“What a disappointment. As long as you were down there, I thought . . .”

“Yes, of course you did. And how sexy you are—a drugged-out woman with a five-inch wound. I had six babes just like you in the ICU today. There was a wreck on the interstate. A semi-truck hit a bus full of women on their way to some Christian hootenanny. Two DOAs.”

Belvedere trotted up, and Abby scratched him behind the ears. “Do you need to go outside, you evil hound? Do you need to go?”

Belvedere wagged his tail furiously. He was an ancient border collie of noble bearing, who had more decency and common sense than all but the best of humankind. Abby should have named him Jimmy Carter or Mahatma Gandhi, but she couldn’t resist the chance to spend a dozen years calling out, “Belvedere, come h’yar, boy.”

She fixed me with a sharp brown stare. “Have you let him out today?”

I thought for a moment. “I don’t know. If I did, I don’t remember.”

“It’s a wonder you’re not swimming in dog pee.” She opened the sliding glass door in the dining room and Belvedere stepped out onto the patio. He sniffed the air, savoring it like the cork from a wine bottle, before trotting off in the direction of the single tree in my backyard, a Japanese maple in full autumnal glory.

“When did that happen?” I asked.

“What?”

“Those leaves. Look how red they are.”

Abby shook her head. “Where have you been? That tree turned two weeks ago.”

“I was preoccupied.”

We stood at the window, watching the dog and admiring the tree. Belvedere chose to heist his leg on my last living rose bush, wobbling a bit as he tried to maintain his balance.

“His joints are getting so stiff,” she said.

“That’s not surprising. He’s twelve. That’s . . . what?”

“Eighty-four in dog years. Look how white he is around the muzzle.”

“He’s as lively as ever, Abs. What’s he taking for the arthritis?”

“Glucosamine, chondroitin, and forty milligrams of entericcoated aspirin twice a day. It’s time for his second dose. What did you do when I left this morning? Did you start on that pile of murder mysteries or did you sleep all day?”

“I invented a new card game.”

“Oh?”

“On the computer. Lesbian FreeCell. You play it just like regular FreeCell, only you can’t lay a queen on a king. It makes for some tricky moves.”

“I’ll bet. So you felt good enough to log on. Did you check your email?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to check it?”

“No. Can you help me over to the couch? I’m starting to feel dizzy.”

“Okay,” she said, her beads clicking as she shook her head in disapproval. “You’re not off the hook, Koslowski. That woman is a psycho. She’s stalking you.”

I backed up to the sofa and slowly sat down, placing my left hand on the armrest and leaning on it heavily while Abby held my right hand in her firm, professional grasp.

“Thanks,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine I’ll ever sit like a normal person again.”

“It’s hard for me to imagine that you think you can change the subject.”

I didn’t want to talk about Dolores Sanchez. She was the latest in a long line of romantic mistakes, all of which I preferred to forget. I closed my eyes and rested my head on the back of the sofa.

“I’m recovering from major surgery. I want to forget about my fuck-ups.”

“You’ve had a hysterectomy, not a lobotomy.” Abby sat down in the recliner opposite and put her feet up. “What are you going to do about Dolores?”

“What do you want me to do? Call a cop? That’s how I got into this mess in the first place. Fucking burglars. It would have been cheaper just to buy a new stereo.”

“Call her sergeant,” Abby said. “Cops have rules about cops stalking crime victims.”

“She’s not exactly stalking me,” I objected. “She’s just persistent.”

“Ten emails a day for ten days straight? She filled the tape on your answering machine. ‘Call me, call me, please, call me.’ She’s probably on her way here right now to boil a rabbit in your crock pot.”

“She’s not that bad, Abs. She didn’t bother me at all when I was in the hospital.”

“You didn’t tell her where you were going.”

“She’s a cop. She could have investigated.” I opened one eye. Abby was frowning at me. I sighed heavily. “Look, she’s angry now, but she’ll get over it. I’ve told her so long, farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. She’ll meet someone new. Someone will rob someone better than me, and she’ll forget that I ever existed. She’s probably already forgotten. No calls today.”

“You really are out of it,” Abby said. “I unplugged your phone.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” Slowly and carefully, I slid down the sofa and flipped the switch on the telephone. “I’m not afraid of her, Abby. I just don’t want to date her.”

“You live on wishful thinking,” she replied. “You hope she’ll forget, but you of all people should know better.”

“What do you mean me of all people?”

“You know exactly what I mean.” She paused for a moment. We stared at one another, and Abby backed down. She was sensitive about her hair. I was sensitive about other things.

She said, “It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. You pretend to be all casual and lah-dee-dah, but you never let anything go, Koslowski. You brood. If the shoe were on the other foot . . .”

“Belvedere wants in,” I interrupted.

“Belvedere can wait.”

“Poor dog. Are you really going to make him stand there on his stiff old joints?”

Abby had long since perfected the nurse’s glare, the one that said, “You can have the problem, or you can have the solution.” She gave me a healthy dose of this, but she got up to let Belvedere in. I feigned oblivion.

“Fine,” she said. “We won’t talk about Dolores. How about your other source of discomfort—any resolution yet?”

“I am not going to talk to you about that either. Stop asking.”

“Don’t get testy. I’m a medical professional. You can’t shock me. I get paid to ask about these things. Besides, it’s not like it’s a personal failing. Constipation is routine after surgery.”