They must heal their dolls with loving thoughts. The instructors will take the doll’s temperature in the morning and at day’s end. See who can get their doll down to 98.6 degrees. Break the fever.
Given the personal nature of this exercise, each mother’s loving thoughts will be different, the instructors say. They should feel free to anthropomorphize the illness. Picture themselves doing battle with the infection.
Frida pursues the illness lessons with vigor. She was a sickly child. Asthma and allergies. Bronchitis every winter. Doctors, she knows. Medicine, she knows. The lessons make her think of Popo. The square of cloth her grandmother kept tucked into her cleavage because she always felt cold there. Her grandmother’s lipstick and hair spray.
She used to help her grandmother dye her hair, touched up her roots with an old toothbrush. She sometimes helped her bathe. The only socks her grandmother wore were flesh-tone nylon knee-highs from the drugstore. Until the very end, she wore full-body girdles, even beneath velour pajamas. The texture of her grandmother’s skin is as vivid in her memory as Harriet’s, tight and shiny on her shoulders, on her hands, loose and silky like fabric. After her grandmother’s lung cancer was diagnosed, Frida sometimes slept over. They shared a bed again as they’d done when she was a child. Her grandmother requested that someone sleep next to her, and the whole family took turns. She always scolded Frida for not taking better care of her hands. She’d startle Frida awake with a wet, cold plop of lotion.
Frida missed saying goodbye by twenty minutes. Her taxi was caught in traffic. She crawled into bed with her grandmother, held her as rigor mortis set in, felt the warmth leaving her body, saw the cancerous lump below her collarbone. It was hard as stone. The size of a child’s fist.
Emmanuelle has a temperature of 103. Her hair is matted with sweat. She shivers. Frida takes a blanket from the crib and folds her inside it. “Mommy will make you better. We can do it. I can do it.”
The counselor would tell her to stop thinking, stop doubting. It doesn’t matter that love can’t break a fever, that love can’t be measured. Anything can be measured. They have the tools now.
Linda undresses. She holds her doll against her bare breasts. Meryl and Beth copy her. Frida doesn’t want anyone to see her body. She’s been eating three meals a day but can’t keep the weight on. She’s now smaller than she was in high school. She has the sharp jawline she always wanted, the cheekbones, the gap between her thighs.
The instructors nod approvingly at her classmates.
“Try it,” Ms. Khoury tells her.
Frida sets Emmanuelle in the crib and unbuttons her uniform, reluctantly pulls off her T-shirt and bra. “Here, I’m ready for you. Come cuddle with Mommy.”
Emmanuelle’s heat against her bare skin is startling, uncomfortable. Harriet has never been this hot. When she first held Harriet, she worried she’d kill her just by sneezing nearby. She washed her hands incessantly. Each day, she searched Harriet’s face for signs that death was imminent.
There must be people who thrive under pressure, but not Frida. Maybe she shouldn’t be trusted with any kind of life. Maybe people should have to work up to children, from plants to pets to babies. Maybe they should all be given a five-year-old, then four, then three, then two, then one, and if the child is still alive at year’s end, then they can have a baby. Why did they have to begin with a baby?
* * *
The classroom is quieter than it should be. From fevers, they’ve moved on to stomach viruses. Days of projectile vomiting has dampened their enthusiasm and slowed their motherese. The instructors want to know why no one is making progress. The mothers should know the correct sequence of embraces, kisses, and kind words to nurse their doll back to health. The love that awakens the spirit and heals an aching body.
Linda finds their current state of failure unacceptable. At breakfast the next morning, she leads the four of them in a prayer. They join hands while Linda prays to Our Lord Jesus Christ for the strength to persevere. She prays for wisdom and the safe return of her son Gabriel. Beth prays for alcohol. Bourbon would have made this week easier.
Meryl prays for her doll. Look what happened to Lucretia’s.
Frida goes last. She prays for love, for a full heart. “I pray for a miracle,” she says.
Everyone nods. Yes, they say. A miracle.
* * *
Ceremonial snow removal continues. Frida and Meryl are asked to shovel the track, an especially insulting assignment since it’s too cold to exercise outdoors.
Frida tells Meryl that her mother turned sixty-eight this week, that her cousin is getting married in Seattle today. Before her very bad day, there was talk of Harriet being the flower girl. Frida would have carried her down the aisle.