when the roundtable is a rhombus

They all answered an ad posted in a café. A Xeroxed sheet of paper tacked to a bulletin board: “Want to get feedback on your work? Want the support of a community? Published Writer New to City Seeks Group.” There were even pre-cut tabs with an email and phone number.

Ken. Jenna. Tracy. Petra. James Elliot.

Today, we are with Jenna, 30. She’s missed writing group. She’s in a darkened room, sitting in a corner. She’s on the phone.

It stops time, you know? I don’t even know how long I’ll be here. Right now? I’m hiding in some closet I found by the nurse’s station. I just needed to breathe.

My mom goes into surgery as soon as she’s stable. (Pause.) I know, thanks.

(Longer pause.)

Did Ken go to group? I know I shouldn’t care. My mother was crushed in a car accident, and I shouldn’t care about anything else. (Pause.)

But did he?

Oh good, I’m glad he went.

Yes, he texted me. They all did. Petra and James Elliot even sent me a video they made. Everyone was so sweet. And I really didn’t expect you to call, Tracy. I know you don’t like me.

(Pause.) Okay, I know it’s not about like. It’s about . . .difficult.

How am I feeling?

I feel smelly. I can’t get the BO out of my nose. It’s my BO. At least I think it’s mine. (She sniffs her armpit and makes a face.)

I just sit in the room with my mom who looks like a broken doll. I never noticed how small she was. She’s barely a bump in the sheet. And my dad just sits there holding her hand. And me? I just smell. There, in that room, I smell yeast infection. I know, I know that’s gross. I’m sorry. But I do. And I wonder, does my dad smell it too?

Ken texted me that this was fodder for a memoir, fodder for my fiction.

My mother told me she wants to die if she loses her leg. That’s what she told me.

But you know what I noticed through all of this, what makes me sick? Is that it is all fodder for me. Am I so cold that I don’t live in my life?

I saw my father sitting in the hospital room, and the first thing I thought was how low his jowls were. And then I thought about the word, jowls. How until I saw his jawline sagging into his chest I hadn’t truly embraced that word before. I noticed the mole by his nostril and how it looked like an old man’s mole. I had never noticed how large and bulbous it was. I noticed how his skin looked not wrinkled, but cracked. I could see all his blood vessels, broken and spreading.

What does it mean that I didn’t see him, the man, first?

My mother told me she doesn’t want to live if she’s in a wheelchair. That’s what she told me.

I don’t know if she tells my dad these things. He just sits there in the chair and holds her hand. Yes, I know it’s sweet. But he’s useless. She wasn’t getting fed because the nurses kept telling me she was going to surgery soon. And when I finally tracked down the surgeon, he told me he wanted my mother more stabilized before they went to surgery.

The hospital was starving my mother, and he was sitting there in a chair holding her hand.

When they finally brought her food, she ate the dessert and asked for more.

You try getting more dessert from a hospital. So I stole the dessert from the woman in the bed next to her who never seems to wake up and my mother ate that too.

I mean I always said I couldn’t live with an amputation, that by not being whole, I’d rather be dead.

But I live in my head. My whole is my imagination. So I would live with an amputation. I would live in a wheelchair. I would survive that. I would even maybe thrive. And my mother is retired. She tutors children in French, hosts a French reading group, and sells her mason jar creations on Etsy. They’re rich. If anyone could live a full life in a wheelchair or without a leg, it’s her.

I know. You’re right. She has to grieve.

Yet I always thought my mom was an optimist. She was with me. Of course you’ll publish your novel, she always told me.

(Pause.)

Can I ask you something?

(Pause.)

Do you feel alone?

I know that sounds crazy. But I just. My dad. He just sits there and holds my mother’s hand.

And it makes me feel like I’m the useless one. I’m running around and doing what? Administering fairness? He’s sitting and telling her stories. He’s a lawyer, and he’s not chasing the asshole who ran her off the road. He’s telling her about the time they went to some small village in Italy, and she saw this man walking a donkey. And he’s telling her how she was trying out her Italian, and she asked if she could pet his burro. And how the man laughed and laughed and said in understandable English, “you want to pet my butter?”

I’m calling her friends to tell them she is in the hospital. I canceled her reading group. I called the whole family. He just sits there.

He just sits there and loves her.

(Pause.)

I don’t think anyone loves me like that.

(Pause.)

Tracy? Are you there?

Jenna hangs up the phone. She sits for a minute and then looks at her phone screen. She texts Ken: I’m thinking of you.

Alexandra D'Italia grew up in New Jersey, left her heart in San Francisco and lives in Los Angeles. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Red Rock Review, Arcadia, South Loop Review, among others. Love Creek Productions produced her short play, The Fix Up, in New York, New York in 2012. She has a play coming out in NorthNorthwest Anthology of Ten-Minute Plays. One of her stories recently won the Edward W. Moses Graduate Writing Award for fiction. She is an Associate Artist with Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and a member of the Los Angeles Women Playwrights’ Initiative. She has her masters in creative writing from University of Southern California. You can contact her at: alexandra.ditalia@gmail.com.

For more work by Alexandra D'Italia, visit her page at our Online Sundries site.

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