thing?” I say incredulously.
He gazes at me. “It’s very rare, very rare indeed that a son will be so good as to donate his heart. In a few cases it has been done. But it’s so rare to find such a son. A rare and beautiful thing.” He takes off his glasses and polishes them on his sleeve. Without them, his eyes are small, piggish.
He puts them back on and his eyes are sad and soulful once more. “You must love your mother very much,” he says, gripping my shoulder with a firm hand.
“Oh, he does,” Fran says. I shift my feet and knock over the cup of coffee and it spills on the floor, a sudden ugly brownness spreading over the empty white.
A nurse leads us to the intensive care unit, where my mother is lying attached to machines and bags of fluid. The room has no outside windows. There is an inner window, through which I can see a nurses’ station, where they are watching our every move.
Aunt Fran rushes to one side of the bed, Aunt Nina the other. I shuffle awkwardly at the foot of the bed. I touch my mother’s feet.
“Sylvie!” “Are you all right?” the aunts cry. They are afraid to touch her because of the tubes snaking into her arms, the needles held by strips of tape.
My mother opens her eyes. There are purple circles around them. She looks pale, but not so different from usual. Hardly on the verge of death. “I’m fine,” she says, gazing at them.
I look at them, the three sisters. To me, the aunts are just variations on my mother. Fran, the oldest, is like my mother, only stretched—tall, hair strained tightly back, thin drawn-on eyebrows, cheekbones jutting up under the skin, long front teeth resting on the lower lip. And Nina is my mother plus some extra—her cheeks are full, her chin sags, and her eyes are heavy-lidded.
My mother is just my mother. Not a young woman, but not an old one. Gray hair spread on the pillow. She’s young for a heart attack, I suppose; she’s still got many years to go. She smiles dully at her sisters. “Oh, Sylvie, you look wonderful! Just the same!” they say. Then she raises her eyes to me.
“Oh, Arnie, you look terrible,” she says. “That jacket—I told you to throw it away. I’ll find you another. There’s no reason to go around looking like a mess.”
“Arnie has some good news,” Nina says.
“Then why does he look like a thundercloud?” says my mother. “Arnie, is something bothering you?”
Fran says, “Arnie wants to give you his heart.”
“I never said that—” I cry.
There is a pause.
“Of course, Arnie, you shouldn’t. You don’t need to do that for me. Really you don’t,” my mother says. She looks terribly sad. The aunts’ faces have gone stony.
“You have your whole life ahead of you, after all,” my mother says. She looks down at her arms, at the branching veins that creep up them like tendrils of a vine. “I never expected anything from you, you know,” she says. “Of course nothing like this.”
I look down at her feet, two motionless humps under the blanket. “I’m considering it, Mother. Really, I am. I want to find out more about it before I decide, that’s all. It’s not as simple as changing a car battery or something.” I force out a laugh.
No one else laughs, but the aunts’ faces melt a little. My heart is pounding. My mother closes her eyes. “You’re a good boy, Arnie,” she says. “Your father would be proud.”
A nurse comes in and tells us we should let my mother rest for a while. Aunt Fran and Aunt Nina head back to the waiting room. They sit down in the same seats and look up expectantly, waiting for me to sit between them.
“I think I’m going to take a little walk. I need to stretch my legs,” I say.
“He probably wants to go call one of those tarty women he runs around with,” Nina whispers loudly. “Tart” and “run around” are as close as she gets to profanity.
I walk up and down halls of dull white where patients shuffle in slow motion, wheeling their IV’s along beside them. I can feel in the floor the buzzing vibration of motors churning away somewhere in the heart of the building. I take the elevator and wander through more humming white halls until I find a pay phone.
I call up Mandy. She picks up on the first ring. “Hi,” she says. “Where have you been?”
“My mother had a heart attack this morning,” I say. “I’m at the hospital.”
“Oh, I knew this would happen,” Mandy says. “I burned my hand on the radiator this morning, and right away I thought, Uh-oh, an omen, something bad’s going to happen. How old’s your mother?”
“Fifty-seven,” I say.
“Ooh, that’s young for a heart attack. And she wasn’t fat or anything. I feel like it’s my fault; I should have warned you or something.”
This is how I met Mandy: One day last spring she got some takeout Chinese for lunch, including a fortune cookie that told her that she would soon meet a mysterious stranger in a blue coat. That afternoon I happened to take my car to get fixed at the garage where she worked. Lucky thing: I was wearing the old blue jacket my mother hated. Mandy asked me out to dinner right then and there. That doesn’t sound like a sound basis for a relationship, but for some people it is. Mandy believes in signs and predictions the way some people believe in religion. She’s usually right about things. She sure did a lousy job on my car, though.
Mandy’s asking me something, but I can’t hear because the woman next to me is sobbing Spanish into the phone. Mandy says again, “Where did it happen?”
“At the bank. She was working,” I tell her. “There was an ambulance, and her sisters are here, and I got here as soon as I could. Mandy, could I—”
The woman next to me is screaming. “I need to ask you something,” I shout into the phone.
“What—what?” Mandy’s voice calls.
Finally I tell her to come to the hospital and she says all right and hangs up. I don’t need to tell her where to go; she always seems to be able to find me. She says she just follows my smell.
I wander down toward where I think the entrance of the hospital is. I stop some stretcher attendants and ask directions, but I can’t understand their English.
Mandy never gets lost. And she never has to wait in line. Strangers on the street talk to her. Jobs fall in her lap. She’s nice-looking: freckles on her nose, good straight teeth. She keeps telling me that my signs indicate that my life will be on a big upswing soon and that I am just in a transition period right now. I hope she’s right.
Lately she’s been dropping hints about getting married. And Mandy drops hints like she’s dropping a load of bricks on your foot. My mother hates Mandy. She doesn’t put it that way; she says Mandy is “untidy,” “irresponsible,” and “has no future,” but I get the message.
I finally reach the lobby, and just as I do, Mandy comes bursting through the doors, beaming at me. She doesn’t smile; she
