The Box… and The Gift

Remember my box of unpublished and unfinished stories? It also contains the ones I did send out into the world. The Gift was one of my very first published stories. It appeared in About Such Things Literary Magazine in the spring of 1999. It has not seen the light of day for twenty-six years I thought I would share it today because I feel like its message is still, if not more, relevant now than ever. For those who live with and love a person who struggles with mental illness, every good day, every good hour, can seem like a gift…

The Gift

…when he hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold. Job 23:10

The first thing James Spencer does when he gets to work in the morning is to straighten up the wallpaper sample books. It is a quirk he has- a striving after some small measure of control. Disorder makes him uneasy these days – nervous, almost unable to function. He plows through the stacks of books that are scattered across the tables. Fabric-backed and satins. Contemporary and miniature. He separates them into piles and painstakingly slides them into their appropriate slots. Kitchen. Children’s. Bed and Bath. Mondays are always the worst.

“James?”

Steve, the office manager, is standing in the doorway. “You’ve got a call on line one. It’s your wife.”

A simple statement, but it fills him with dread. He feels the fear, a rock-hard fist thrust in his stomach. It’s only 9:30. When he’d left the house- not more than forty minutes earlier – Rebecca had been sitting in the breakfast nook, buttering her toast and saying something about October’s bright blue weather. Forty minutes ago, she’d been fine.

He hurries past his co-workers and into Steve’s office. As his hand hovers over the blinking red light above line one, he whispers a prayer that he was not remiss in his judgment. That she was all right. That this time, she still is.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.”

His ear, sensitive as a safecracker’s, listens for the tiniest of changes, the merest inflection. “What’s the matter, baby?”

Nothing is the matter, she tells him. She’s feeling good this morning. She’d like to take the bus into the city. She’d like to treat herself to a hot oil treatment, and maybe a trim.

He listens- like a robin with its ear to the ground listens for rhythms- for movement beneath the surface. He listens until he’s satisfied that he’s hearing nothing more than the simple words she speaks.

At 10:00 she stands before him, lost in one of his old sweaters. Her auburn hair is damp and curling at her waist. He thinks how vulnerable she looks, how childlike. He smiles and pulls his wallet from his pocket, flips it open. For a moment his eyes rest on the picture, the one taken six years ago, on their wedding day. She wears a white cotton dress and carries a spray of daisies. Her eyes are bright with innocence and promise.

He pulls out the fifty he’d intended to use for an oil change and hands it to her. It is safer than turning her loose with the one credit card he still keeps for emergencies.

“Rebecca?”

“Hmm?”

“You’ll call me when you get home?”

She smiles. Turns to leave. “All right.”

“Rebecca?”

She turns back.

“You won’t have it cut short, will you?”

She shakes her head. No, she will not have it cut short.

In that moment she is the girl in the picture and his heart breaks She kisses him, lightly on the cheek, tucks the bill in the pocket of her jeans and walks from the store. He watches her leave, like a mother watches her child leave on the first day of school.

Also watching her as she departs are the customers. And Steve and Bob and Mike, his co- workers. They follow Rebecca with their eyes until she is out of sight, then glance back at James- much too thin these days and already balding at twenty-eight- as if in disbelief that Rebecca is his. James sighs, certain that none of them has even an inkling of what he lives with. Or maybe they do, and what he perceives as envy is merely a figment of his imagination.

He returns to his customers. They are looking for something to brighten up the mud room. A stripe, perhaps, or maybe a plaid. Something to match the priscilla curtains and the green-on-green flecked tile. He pulls a book of samples, recommends vinyl for easy cleaning, He is professional, mechanical, a salesman through and through. He rests his hand on his stomach and tries to calm the sickness that will build until she calls.

It used t be good with Rebecca, but that seems like a long, long time ago. She used to grow vegetables and religiously tended her little herb garden. There were vases of wildflowers all through the house, pots of homemade soup on the kitchen stove. Loving her was easy then.

By 1:00 she still hasn’t called. James pictures Rebecca lost in the city, lost in herself. She hasn’t driven in over a year. Not since the onslaught of medications began. Not since her hands began to shake and her vision began to blur. She isn’t familiar with the bus routes. Maybe he shouldn’t have let her go alone.

He hangs up after getting no answer, tells himself it’s early, that she met up with friends and stayed in the city for lunch. He digs some coins from his pocket and drops them in the Coke machine. He tries to forget that Rebecca doesn’t have friends anymore. He never should have let her go alone.

He met Rebecca his first year at Brockport. Eighteen and away from home for the first time, he’d been lonely. Rebecca had been his salvation. As self-assured as he was self-conscious, she had been his first lover, and he’d loved her fiercely. He hadn’t cared about her family history, about the blood and chemistry that raged in her veins and made her what she was- or rather, what she wasn’t. He’d loved her. That seemed like enough.

Anymore, he never knows. He might go home and find the Virgin Mary. On those nights he lies, frustrated and silent, beside her, unable to touch her night after night after night. On other nights he might as easily go home and find a street walker. And then it’s worse. She greets him at the door with a box of mail-order toys and wants him to do and say things that sicken him. But he does them- God help him- because he never knows when the pendulum will swing again.

At 2:00 a young couple comes into the store. The girl is glowing, her belly bulging. They want to know about nursery paper, whether he stocks pin stripes, polka dots, Winnie the Pooh. He directs them to the pastels, the solid sheet vinyls, because the salesman in him knows they will pay the price. For their first offspring, they will spare no expense.

The vasectomy is just one of many secrets he keeps from Rebecca now. He made the decision six months ago, when she was six weeks late. When her lateness turned out to be the result of a change in medication, Rebecca became obsessed, talking morning, noon and night of babies. He wandered through the empty bedrooms, the reason he’d bought the rambling old Victorian in the first place. He listened to her talk, sharing her dream of children which he knew, in good conscience, he could never allow her to create.

At 3:00 he tries again to call her. Jenny the secretary brings him a sandwich from the deli across the street. She tells him he’s too thin, that he needs to eat. Her intentions are clear as water, and he knows how easy it would be to have her.

He thinks about it sometimes, when things get really bad. He sometimes lies next to Rebecca in the coldness of their bed and thinks how Jenny’s love would warm him. Then he mouths the words of Job and prays for forgiveness. And prays for strength to love his wife.

By 4:00 she still hasn’t called. His stomach rages like the Atlantic at high tide. He pictures Rebecca, head shaved and naked on a street corner, pounding her Bible and screaming scriptures. Rebecca, wandering the city, lost in herself again. Why had he let her go alone? Dear God, why had he let her go alone?

By 4:30 it has broken him. He rings out his cash drawer and walks past the sample books that are scattered across the tables. Steve the office manager looks at his parchment face and agrees that James is very, very sick.

Home is a ten minute drive but it takes an eternity. There is music on the car radio but James can’t hear it. All he hears is his own voice screaming in his head, pleading with God to let her be home. To let her be all right.

Oh that I knew where I might find Him! That I might come even to His seat.

When he pulls in the driveway he knows instinctively that she is home. On the porch, he hauls in a breath, braces himself. For what? For scathing, scalding retribution? For silence? For Rebecca, huddled on the floor, eyes closed, moaning, crushed beneath the weight of a sorrow she cannot name. He braces for the worst, because he never knows.

I would know the words which He would answer me and understand what He would say unto me. Will He plead against me with His great power? No, but He would put strength in me…

The house is quiet except for the hum of a distant radio. His footsteps echo on the hardwood planks as he follows the sound of the music. It takes him to the kitchen doorway.

But He knoweth the way that I take; when He hath tried me, I shall come forth as gold.

She stands at the stove, her back to him. He sees her hair, imperceptibly shorter, gleaming in the fluorescent light above her head. He sees the table set for two, the last of her daisies and black-eyed Susans arranged in a Mason jar in the center. Beside the jar lies a crumpled ten-dollar bill. Sensing his presence, she turns.

“Oh! You’re early.” Her smile fades with a look at his face. “James, are you all right, baby?”

“I…I…” His voice cracks. “I thought you were going to call me.”

“Was I? I’m sorry. I guess I forgot.” She brightens. “Wait right there, I got you something.”

She leaves the room, returns moments later, carrying a flat cardboard box. Through the cover he sees a wallet. Cheap imitation leather with a Velcro strip. She hands it to him. “ I noticed your old one was getting a little ratty.”

He pulls her into the circle of his love. He smells the jasmine they used in her hair, the fresh air and sunshine on her skin. He hold her close, fighting tears—disproportionately grateful for the gift.