Holly

May 19, 2021

Barbara enters the hospital lobby in a hurry, not quite running only because Marie has told her this is no emergency, just routine. At the main desk of Kiner Memorial, she asks which floor oncology is on. The woman at the desk directs her to the west bank of elevators. Barbara emerges in a pleasant lounge with pleasant pictures on the walls (sunsets, meadows, tropic isles) and pleasant music wafting down from overhead speakers. Plenty of people are sitting here, hoping for good news and fearing the opposite. All are wearing masks. Marie is reading a paperback John Sandford novel. She’s saved a chair for Barbara.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” is the first thing Barbara says.

“Because it would have worried you needlessly when you didn’t have to worry at all,” Marie says. She’s perfectly calm. Fawn-colored slacks and white shirt as usual, minimal makeup perfectly applied, not a hair out of place. “What Olivia wanted you to worry about is your poetry.”

“I’m worried about her!” Barbara tries to keep her voice down, but several people look around.

“Olivia has cancer,” Marie says. “What she calls, no surprise, ass-cancer. She’s had it for a very long time. Dr. Brown—her oncologist—says it’s a cancer you die with, not the kind you die of. At her advanced age it just crawls along. Over the last two years it’s crawled a little faster.”

“Malignant?” She whispers the word.

“Oh yes,” Marie says, still calm. “But it hasn’t metastasized and may not. She used to get its growth checked twice a year. This year it will be three times. Assuming she lives another year, that is. Olivia herself likes to say her equipment package is long past the warranty. I called you here because she has something to tell you. Are you missing school?”

Barbara waves this aside. She’s a senior, she’s carrying an A average, she can take a day off any old time she wants to.

“What’s up?”

“She’ll tell you that herself.”

“Is it about the Penley?”

Marie only picks up her novel and begins reading again. Barbara didn’t bring a book. She takes out her phone, goes to Instagram, looks at a few boring posts, checks her email, and puts it away again. Ten minutes later Olivia comes out of swinging doors behind which is machinery Barbara doesn’t want to know about. Olivia is walking with both of her canes. Her satchel purse swings from one thin shoulder. An orderly is holding her arm.

She reaches Barbara and Marie, thanks the orderly, and plops down with a sigh and a wince. “I have once more survived the indignity of being entombed in a noisy machine while my poop-chute is examined,” she tells them. “Old age is a time of casting away, which is bad enough, but it’s also a time of escalating indignities.” Then, just to Barbara: “I’m assuming Marie informed you of the cancer, and why we kept it from you.”

“I still wish you’d told me,” Barbara says.

Olivia looks tired (tired unto death, Barbara thinks), but she also looks interested. “Why?”

Barbara has no answer. This woman will be a hundred in the fall, and somewhere behind those doors there may be bald children who won’t live to see their tenth birthday. So why indeed?

“Can you scream, Barbara?” The eyes above her mask, which is imprinted with red, white, and blue peace signs, are as bright as ever.

“What? Why?”

“Have you ever screamed? A full-out, full-throated scream, the kind that leaves you hoarse afterward?”

Barbara thinks of her history with Brady Hartsfield, Morris Bellamy, and Chet Ondowsky. Especially Ondowsky. “Yes.”

“You won’t scream here, this is no place for screaming, but perhaps later. Here you must be quiet. I could have waited until we got home to have Marie call you, but the older I get the poorer my impulse control becomes. Besides, I didn’t know how long the MRI would take. So I asked Marie to ask you to come here.”

She slides her big purse from her shoulder and fumbles it open. From inside she takes an envelope with a quill-and-inkpot logo Barbara recognizes at once. Her heart, which has been beating rapidly ever since she got Marie’s call, goes into overdrive.

“I took the liberty of opening this in order to give you bad news gently, if the news was bad. It isn’t. There are fifteen poets under the age of thirty on the Penley shortlist. You are one of them.”

Barbara sees her hand take the envelope. She sees her hand open it and pull out the heavy sheet of folded paper inside. She sees the same logo on top of the letter, which begins The Penley Committee is pleased to inform you. Then her eyes blur with tears.

They go back to Ridge Road in Marie’s car. Barbara sits in back. The radio, tuned to Sirius XM, plays a constant stream of forties tunes. Olivia sings along with some of them. Barbara guesses when they were first popular, Olivia wore penny loafers and did her hair in a pageboy. On the drive, Barbara reads the letter over and over again, making herself understand it’s real.

When they get to the house, Barbara and Marie help Olivia out of the car and up the steps, a slow process accompanied by several loud farts. “Just backfiring,” Olivia says matter-of-factly. “Clearing the exhaust system.”

In the foyer, with the door shut, Olivia faces Barbara with a cane gripped in each hand. “If you want to scream, now would be a good time. I’d do it myself, but I no longer have the lungpower.”

Barbara is still in the running to win the Penley, and to be published by Random House. She thinks it would be nice, she could certainly use the money for college, but that isn’t the important part. Olivia has all but assured her that her poems will be published even if she doesn’t win. They will be read. Not by multitudes, but certainly by people who love what she loves.

She draws in breath and screams. Not with horror, but for joy.

“Good.” Olivia is smiling. “How about another? Can you manage that?”

She can. Marie puts an arm around her shoulders and they scream together.

“Excellent,” Olivia says. “Just so you know, I’ve mentored two young men who were longlisted for the Penley, but you, Barbara Robinson, are the first to be shortlisted, and by far the youngest. There are more hurdles to jump, however, and they’re high ones. Remember that you’re in the company of fourteen men and women of immense talent and dedication.”

“You need to rest, Olivia,” Marie says.

“I will. But first we have things to discuss.”