“Jesus, Leda, you remember having sex with people for the first time, don’t you? Deep dives into childhood trauma sort of ruins it for everyone. Did you tell Steve about your appendix the first time you slept with him? He must have seen the scar.”
She shook her head and smiled at some private memory.
Later on, when Jonathan became True-Love Jonathan, I never found the right moment to correct myself. “If he thought Mom slammed a car into a tree, well, Jonathan never liked her anyway.”
She nodded. Had it been a tennis match, I would have gotten a point off of her. “So you want to hear something crazy?”
“These are crazy times.”
“You never told me about the car accident.”
I looked surprised. How had she forgotten? “Of course I did.”
“When?”
“When you came home from the hospital.”
“When I was seven.”
We shared a room in the little house in Winchester, twin beds with a nightstand between them, a lamp with a shade made of dotted swiss. Leda was allowed to have popsicles, Jell-O, Cream of Wheat. She was directed to rest, and when she wasn’t resting, I was directed to read herHarriet the Spyand play Go Fish. I asked her what had happened in the hospital, and she asked me what had happened in the car.
(FRIDAY, JANUARY 18, 1980. WINCHESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.)
The younger of the two Zabriskie sisters had been quiet all morning, but she ran towards quiet anyway. Then, in the school cafeteria, she put down the second half of her egg salad sandwich and vomited the first half onto the floor. The lunchroom lady, as patient Mrs. Valenti was to everyone known, came with a rag and cleaned the girl’s shoes and sopped up the pooling mess, and after she’d dropped the rag in the bucket and washed her hands, she went back and found Leda at the table alone, her feverish head pressed against the cool tin of her Camp Snoopy lunch box. When Mrs. Valenti told her they needed to walk to the nurse’s office, Leda vomited again. Mrs. Valenti left the mess and the lunch box and the little pink backpack and picked the girl up in her arms, disregarding the inevitable consequence for her own shirt and slacks. She carried Leda to the nurse’s office herself.
How could a child who’d spent the morning in reading grouphave gotten so sick so fast? The thermometer, which the nurse had to hold because Leda wasn’t able to keep it beneath her tongue, registered 103.5. When offered ginger ale, she gave a nominal turn of her small head and then vomited into the pan she’d been given. Remarkably few children managed to vomit into the pan. The nurse got an ice pack and picked up the school directory to find the name Abigail Triplett, mother, beneath the names Daphne and Leda Zabriskie. No father listed and a different last name for the children. It was all the story she needed to know.
Lunch for first and second grade started at eleven fifteen, which was lucky because Mrs. Triplett had a twelve o’clock launch meeting for the fall list. If the call had come any later, she would not have been at her desk. The nurse reported the symptoms and said Mrs. Triplett would need to come and get Leda as soon as possible, and maybe she should call her pediatrician.
Abigail Triplett hung up the phone and sat for a moment tapping her pencil against her desk. Wasn’t the purpose of having a sick bay at school that the child could rest on a nice cot and be monitored by an actual nurse so the parent could work without worrying about losing her job? This was January of 1980, neither the dark ages where working mothers were concerned nor the age of enlightenment. Abigail was not an unsympathetic character. She wanted to take care of her children, but part of that care meant keeping her job, a job, it should be noted, she both loved and was good at. She had just finished the scramble of getting through the Christmas holidays when the office reopened on the second andschool reopened on the seventh. Abigail looked at her watch and decided she had enough time to walk over to editorial and talk to Eddie.
Eddie had recently been promoted from the cluster of desks left out in the open room of editorial and into what had once been a storage closet. Abigail and Eddie put that closet to use whenever possible. Not for sex—neither of them was as brave or stupid as that—but given a closed door, they kissed like teenagers. Let the record show that Eddie Triplett was a magnificent kisser with a clever pair of hands. Things progressed quickly even though no clothing was removed, so much so that Abigail experienced a Pavlovian arousal climbing the stairs to the third floor and had to remind herself that her daughter was sick, little Leda was sick, and she was going to tell her husband she was leaving for the day.
“How much must he love you to take on two children?” her own mother had said when she called to report the happy news. “Two children with another man who is two years behind on child support and hardly ever takes them for the weekend? I can’t even imagine what it would mean to love someone so much you’d want to get into that.”
No, Abigail thought, you can’t.
Eddie had bought two standing lamps so he could keep the buzzing fluorescent strips in his office-closet turned off and still have plenty of light by which to read. When his wife came in, he smiled, and then stopped smiling. “What?”
“Leda’s throwing up. I’m going to have to go to school and get her.”
“Virus?” Eddie asked.
Abigail didn’t know. “We’ll have to wait and see if the rest of us start throwing up in a day or two.” School was a petri dish, and the children brought home everything that was offered: pink eye, strep throat, lice. “We’re supposed to be at the meeting for the fall list in”—she looked at her watch—“seven minutes. I’m wondering if I shouldn’t pick her up an hour from now. I could tell them I got stuck in traffic.” The meeting would be in the conference room. They were bringing in lunch from Fill-A-Buster’s.
Eddie shook his head. “Go get her. I’ll tell them what happened. I’ll make it sound dire.” Eddie would do a better job framing it than she would. They both knew that. This was the benefit of working for the same company: they could cover for one another, which meant that he could cover for her since Eddie never had emergencies. He handed her the car keys. “I’ll take notes at the meeting. Everything here will be fine.”
Right away Abigail felt better. There were a million reasons to love the guy, but put this at the top of the list: He kept his head. He did not roll his eyes, change the subject, or rant over circumstances beyond his control. He helped her think things through. She would take the commuter rail back to Winchester, collect the car from the parking lot, and drive to the school. He put his arms around her and kissed her, not because he wanted something but as a means of demonstrating his support. She had to go.
“Hey, Abby,” he said when she was halfway down the hall. She turned around. “Make sure it’s not appendicitis.”
“How do I do that?”
He put his hand on the right side of his lower abdomen, below his belt. “Push a little bit there, on the right. If she screams, take her to the ER.”
She should have asked the school nurse to do it, but when she saw her daughter there, she forgot what Eddie had told her. Leda on her cot was crying to go home, holding up her arms so her mother would pick her up like a baby. When they were home again and she was helping her daughter out of her sour-smelling clothes, Abigail remembered. Leda, hot and dry, weighing as much as a feather pillow, screamed as soon as her mother touched her stomach. She didn’t have to press. Was she going to get the child dressed again and put her back in the car? She didn’t want to go to the hospital for any number of reasons, including that January meant a new year’s deductible to pay, but Leda was sobbing now, heaving up teaspoons of bile, of nothing.
The minute Abigail said the word “appendicitis” to the nurse, the staff of the emergency room heard her. Poor Leda, there were people lining up to press on her lower right abdomen now, then each one stuck a needle in her. Abigail held her daughter’s hand but turned her head, thinking she might faint. Things moved so quickly that she didn’t have the chance to call Eddie until Leda was wheeled off to surgery.
