Calamity and Other Stories by Daphne Kalotay

Author:Daphne Kalotay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307425140
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T10:00:00+00:00

Anniversary

It was ten years ago today that Eileen found herself leaning up against a building on Bowdoin Street, out of breath and barely able to stand. Though she had been smoking happily and basically nonstop for thirty-five years, the inability to breathe came as a shock.

At the hospital, she was asked to blow into a balloon, to make a little arrow rise on a dial. When the dial refused to move, the nurse called in a small charge of doctors, and Eileen could see in their faces that they thought she was about to die. She was too weak to explain that she had decided not to. And so they scurried around in emergency fashion, preparing her deathbed, making the call to her son, wearing serious faces, and treating her with that fearful kindness people affect toward the dying.

And yet here she is, skinny as ever, her bony fingers swollen at the joints, ankles so thin she once broke one just by stepping the wrong way. She is alive. It pleases her to think that she is a statistical improbability, a living refutation of scientific fact. Each morning, rain or shine, winter or spring, she pushes her long feet into orthopedic sneakers and rides her three-speed bicycle down back streets to the foundation in North Cambridge where she works. In the bike’s padded basket are the water bottle and thermal container of broth that she takes wherever she goes. She hasn’t smoked a cigarette since that day at the hospital.

“You have to live,” her best friend, Annie, told her back then, “or else Mack will be an orphan.” It wasn’t a particularly helpful thing to say, and Eileen suspects that Annie, who never had children of her own, would have been more than happy to take over all parenting duties. But Eileen does feel a bit of guilt for putting Mack through such a scare. He was only a sophomore in college the day when they called him from the hospital, and pretty much everything else in his life had been easy. Even now he has that same relaxed, sheltered way about him, though he’s almost thirty and should have seen some sort of trouble by now. A week ago he proposed to the wrong woman, who told him yes. Eileen hasn’t informed him of his mistake; it’s his life, and she refuses to be made to feel responsible for it.

“What happened to that other girl?” Annie asked when she heard the news.

“Oh, she was too much for him.” That’s Eileen’s assessment, although she wishes he had dared to try to make it work. There was something just slightly off-kilter about Rhea, and Eileen liked the way that her occasional bracing comments revealed an unyielding, if submerged, fervor. But she was doomed to the sludgy life of a scholar, misunderstanding and defeat part of her daily grind. It was clear to Eileen that Rhea would always take the more difficult path—which is nothing Mack has ever had the patience for.

Callie, meanwhile, works at a television station.

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