Salem's Lot

3

Tony Glick woke up on Saturday morning when his wife, Marjorie, fell down in the living room.

‘Margie?’ he called, swinging his feet out onto the floor. ‘Marge?’

And after a long, long pause, she answered, ‘I’m okay, Tony.’

He sat on the edge of the bed, looking blankly down at his feet. He was bare-chested and wearing striped pajama bottoms with the drawstring dangling between his legs. The hair on his head stood up in a crow’s nest. It was thick black hair, and both of his sons had inherited it. People thought he was Jewish, but that dago hair should have been a giveaway, he often thought. His grandfather’s name had been Gliccucchi. When someone had told him it was easier to get along in America if you had an American name, something short and snappy, Gramps had had it legally changed to Glick, unaware that he was trading the reality of one minority for the appearance of another. Tony Glick’s body was wide and dark and heavily corded with muscle. His face bore the dazed expression of a man who has been punched out leaving a bar.

He had taken a leave of absence from his job, and during the past work week he had slept a lot. It went away when you slept. There were no dreams in his sleep. He turned in at seven-thirty and got up at ten the next morning and took a nap in the afternoon from two to three. The time he had gone through between the scene he had made at Danny’s funeral and this sunny Saturday morning almost a week later seemed hazy and not real at all. People kept bringing food. Casseroles, preserves, cakes, pies. Margie said she didn’t know what they were going to do with it. Neither of them was hungry. On Wednesday night he had tried to make love to his wife and they had both begun to cry.

Margie didn’t look good at all. Her own method of coping had been to clean the house from top to bottom, and she had cleaned with a maniacal zeal that precluded all other thought. The days resounded with the clash of cleaning buckets and the whirr of the vacuum cleaner, and the air was always redolent with the sharp smells of ammonia and Lysol. She had taken all the clothes and toys, packed neatly into cartons, to the Salvation Army and the Goodwill store. When he had come out of the bedroom on Thursday morning, all those cartons had been lined up by the front door, each neatly labeled. He had never seen anything so horrible in his life as those mute cartons. She had dragged all the rugs out into the back yard, had hung them over the clothes line, and had beaten the dust out of them unmercifully. And even in Tony’s bleary state of consciousness, he had noticed how pale she had seemed since last Tuesday or Wednesday; even her lips seemed to have lost their natural color. Brown shadows had insinuated themselves beneath her eyes.

These thoughts passed through his mind in less time than it takes to tell them, and he was on the verge of tumbling back into bed when she fell down again and this time did not answer his call.

He got up and padded down to the living room and saw her lying on the floor, breathing shallowly and staring with dazed eyes at the ceiling. She had been changing the living room furniture around, and everything was pulled out of position, giving the room an odd disjointed look.

Whatever was wrong with her had advanced during the night, and her appearance was bad enough to cut through his daze like a sharp knife. She was still in her robe and it had split up to mid-thigh. Her legs were the color of marble; all the tan she had picked up that summer on their vacation had faded out of them. Her hands moved like ghosts. Her mouth gaped, as if her lungs could not get enough air, and he noticed the odd prominence of her teeth but thought nothing of it. It could have been the light.

‘Margie? Honey?’

She tried to answer, couldn’t, and real fear shot through him. He got up to call the doctor.

He was turning to the phone when she said, ‘No… no.’ The word was repeated between a harsh gasp for air. She had struggled up to a sitting position, and the whole sun-silent house was filled with her rasping struggle for breath.

‘Pull me… help me… the sun is so hot… ’

He went to her and picked her up, shocked by the lightness of his burden. She seemed to weigh no more than a bundle of sticks.

‘… sofa… ’

He laid her on it ‘ with her back propped against the armrest. She was out of the patch of sun that fell in a square through the front window and onto the rug, and her breath seemed to come a little easier. She closed her eyes for a moment, and again he was impressed by the smooth whiteness of her teeth in contrast to her lips. He felt an urge to kiss her.

‘Let me call the doctor,’ he said.

‘No. I’m better. The sun was… burning me. Made me feel faint. Better now.’ A little color had come back into her cheeks.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes. I’m okay.’

‘You’ve been working too hard, honey.’

‘Yes,’ she said passively. Her eyes were listless.

He ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it. ‘We’ve got to snap out of this, Margie. We’ve got to. You look… ’ He paused, not wanting to hurt her.

‘I look awful,’ she said. ‘I know. I looked at myself in the bathroom mirror before I went to bed last night, and I hardly seemed to be there. For a minute I… ’ A smile touched her lips. ‘I thought I could see the tub behind me. Like there was only a little of myself left and it was… oh, so pale… ’

‘I want Dr Reardon to look at you.’

But she seemed not to hear. ‘I’ve had the most lovely dream the last three or four nights, Tony. So real. Danny comes to me in the dream. He says, "Mommy, Mommy, I’m so glad to be home!" And he says… says… ’

‘What does he say?’ he asked her gently.

‘He says… that he’s my baby again. My own son, at my breast again. And I give him to suck and… and then a feeling of sweetness with an undertone of bitterness, so much like it was before he was weaned but after he was beginning to get teeth and he would nip-oh, this must sound awful. Like one of those psychiatrist things.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

He knelt beside her and she put her arms around his neck and wept weakly. Her arms were cold. ‘No doctor, Tony, please. I’ll rest today.’

‘All right,’ he said. Giving in to her made him feel uneasy.

‘It’s such a lovely dream, Tony,’ she said, speaking against his throat. The movement of her lips, the muffled hardness of her teeth beneath them, was amazingly sensual. He was getting an erection. ‘I wish I could have it again tonight.’

‘Maybe you will,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘Maybe you will at that.’