1000 words from
The Bartons of Yalecrest Avenue
in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake
Sylvia might have expected that the Elders, having lured her to Temple Square, would deliver her safely home. Given, however, the medical personnel dispatched, and Betsy’s recitation of her mother’s recent “spells,” such expectation must meet disappointment. Two minutes following the strapping of her body to a gurney, Mrs. Barton was delivered into a Gold Cross ambulance and whisked away to the LDS Hospital, sirens blaring.
For the moment, our lady laid her head back on the tidy puff of a pillow and shut her eyes. All submission. The nurse slipping a thermometer under her tongue and gently inflating a blood pressure cuff round her arm seemed the creature of a dream, her manner so cool, so perfectly professional, so oddly comforting. When the nurse began loosening Sylvia’s clothing at neck and waist, when she carefully slipped the high-heeled shoes from Sylvia’s feet and adroitly rolled each nylon stocking off, a rush of well-being flooded the patient’s very brain. Like a drug. She had not been thus pampered since Bill. The nurse applied a cold compress to Sylvia’s brow and ran cool wet washcloths over her arms and legs. The sensation was so heavenly that tears of happiness soon flowed out her closed eyes, her high cheekbones channeling the drops sidewise into her dark damp hair. The pleasure of it! The joy of such small corporeal services! She wished she might pay the ambulance driver to take her five hundred miles, a thousand, to never stop. He had already driven her to heaven!
All things must pass.
Sylvia never intended Dan Cannon to witness her in another state of disability. Yet fate would have him just now leaving the side of a patient headed to emergency surgery, an appendix, and Dan Cannon so firmly set in the path of Sylvia’s gurney that had he been blind he’d have nonetheless run smack into her trundling bed.
“Mrs. Barton?” he queried in astonishment. “Is it Sylvia Barton?” He halted the gurney and put a hand to her hair. “It can’t be!” He turned to the nurse, then to the orderly standing at the foot of the gurney, and back to the nurse, “What’s wrong with this woman? Where did you pick her up?” he demanded. “What’s her condition?”
Sylvia’s eyes opened. “Doctor Cannon,” she whispered, reaching out a hand to his arm. “You must lower your voice. This lady has been so kind to me. My condition is perfectly normal. I’m tired. That’s all. Some of your Mormons tired me nearly to death. And now they’ve made a fuss and here I am.”
“What? Where’ve you been?” To the nurse: “What’s this about? What’s her blood pressure? Her heart rate? Have you got her temperature? Is it heat illness? Sunstroke? Speak up, nurse! Speak up!”
“Everything appears normal, doctor. BP 112/72. Pulse, oh I’ll have to check, but no more than 80, resting. And her temperature is 99 on the dot, hardly a fever in this weather. She was over to Temple Square with her daughters, as I understand it. It was a long afternoon. The dispatch said they had a woman who’d fainted.”
“Did she ever lose her heartbeat?” Dan asked, almost ferociously. “Did she stop breathing?”
“Nobody said anything of that sort. She fainted, doctor. The elders had her on her feet three hours. Imagine. For heaven’s sake. Poor girl’s lucky she doesn’t have heat stroke. We’ll just wheel her in here and keep an eye on that temperature, make sure she’s got plenty of fluid. Shall I have one of the girls give her some fluid? One bag? She’ll be good as new in a few hours.” The nurse seemed to regard Dr. Cannon with no more concern than she would a bee buzzing round a patch of petunias.
“Mrs. Barton,” Dan spoke more softly now. “Sylvia. Did you have another, another spell?”
“No,” Sylvia replied. “I told you. I got tired. I fell asleep on my feet. Honestly. That’s all. And I want to go home now.”
Standing across the gurney from Dr. Cannon, the nurse patted Sylvia’s hand and said, “And you will, indeed you will. Just let us keep an eye on you for another hour or so—”
“Another hour, my foot!” Dr. Cannon was very nearly shouting.“She’ll be here the night. She has a history. And I’m her doctor.”
This was news to Sylvia, and rather interesting. But she suddenly wondered what had become of her children. Were they waiting for her back with those oxes? She imagined Betsy having climbed onto one broad ox and fallen asleep, arms around the animal’s massive neck, her head between its great antlers.
“But Dr. Cannon, I can’t be here all night. What about my children? Why, Betsy might fall off an ox and drown.”
The nurse said, “I think you may be right, Dr. Cannon.”
“Dash your children. Somebody’s got them. They can spend the night with Mother.”
“I will not be indebted to your mother! She scarcely glanced my direction when I called hello two days ago, perfectly friendly. Trying to be a good neighbor. Hello, Mrs. Cannon! And how are you this morning? Your mother’s an icebox and for no reason I can imagine she’s decided to freeze me out.” Sylvia wondered if perhaps she’d let her tongue run a bit wild. But—maybe the heat had gotten to her—she hardly felt in possession of it. She felt as if anything might pop out of her mouth. Revelations inappropriate to the circumstance, that sort of thing. She said, “Excuse me, I didn’t mean anything about your mother,” and closed her eyes again.
“Dash my mother. Nurse Higbee, I’m already late to my appendix in OR 2. Listen carefully. Mrs. Barton is to be admitted to the medical ward. Please assign one of the nursing students to stay with her—and not let her budge an inch!—until I can check back. I won’t be an hour.”
I sometimes imagine I have suffered a concussion and awakened with amnesia in a hospital. My first question is always, reflexively, Where am I? Notably, it is not Who am I? This snippet of daydream has led me to suppose that place—the where in which we find ourselves—is perhaps the most basic question people must answer as they orient themselves in the world.
It also seems like the most basic question I ask myself when I’m writing a story. I cannot know who my characters are until I know where they are and observe what the people around them are doing (that what is the content of culture).
When I began writing The Bartons of Yalecrest Avenue in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, my first thoughts were of Salt Lake City in the early 1970s. A particular house on Yalecrest Avenue (where I’d spent time with friends as a teenager) further pinpointed the place. The identity of the diverse individuals in the novel is revealed through their relation to Salt Lake and its culture and, more often than not, to this one house and those who live in it.
My own time in that house and city was happy. The story I tell is fundamentally happy, at points comically so. I embarked on telling it because I was exhausted and overworked and needed a happy diversion. At most every turn, I’ve made narrative choices based on how much pleasure they gave me to write. If some line of action bored me I changed it. Always, I referred to Salt Lake City and the house on Yalecrest Avenue to anchor my way. 🕮