The Cutting Edge

Mulak Reader - The Cutting Edge

When I used to work out of San Francisco, there was an old man who played trumpet with a jazz band at a little dive down on the waterfront. He had a few songs that he would routinely introduce by saying, “I wrote this next number back in the ‘40s, and even though I never made no money with it, I’m gonna keep playing it ‘til it’s a hit.” His line always got a laugh, but that’s the way I feel about The Cutting Edge: I never tried harder to sell a story: For three years it never spent a night under my roof. I sent it to every magazine from Seventeen to Boys Life, but it always came back. I could wallpaper the living room with the rejection notices this story generated.
I based The Cutting Edge on an incident that occurred when I tried unsuccessfully to cut off the fingers on my right hand. The hero of this story is my older daughter. I had the idea that the story would best be told from the viewpoint of the 13-year-old girl she was then.

Hmmm. Maybe I should have told the editors my name was Stephanie.

THE CUTTING EDGE

          Stephanie stirred the pitcher of iced tea, then poured out four glasses and brought them to the table where her sister was putting out place mats and plates. At the counter, her mother was slicing tomatoes for sandwiches. “Steffy,” she said. “Call your father for lunch, please.”
          She went to the open cellar door and yelled down the stairs, “Dad! Lunch!”
          “Okay,” he called in reply.
          Her mother shook her head as she set the platter of cold cuts on the table. “You didn’t have to yell like that.” Then she looked at the neatly set table and added, “This looks nice, girls.”
          Her father came into the kitchen and went to the sink to wash his hands. Sawdust still clung to his clothes.
          “How’s it coming in the cellar, Maurice?” Her mother teased her dad by calling him Maurice the French carpenter whenever he was building something.
          “Mai oui!” He affected a French accent. “I cut zat board tree time, but she still too short.” He grinned, and her mother and sister laughed. Stephanie was feeling sullen and only looked away.
          “I’ve just got to cut a few pieces of plywood and then put it together.” He said. They sat down at their places around the table. Her sister was dressed in a leotard and leg warmers.
          “I see you’re going to gymnastics, Laura.” Her father spoke to her sister. “Are all your chores done?”
          “Well, I’ve got yard work and K.P. this week. I helped Mom in the kitchen and cleaned my room, but it’s raining out, so Mom said I could do the outside stuff tomorrow.”
          Her mother passed the bread basket and they began making sandwiches.
“Is it your turn to take the kids to South Hadley?” Her father spoke to her mother, inquiring about the car pool for her sister’s lessons.
          Her mother nodded. “I’m going to do some grocery shopping after I drop off Laura and her friends. Steffy is going to stay home with you. She still has chores to do. And practice, too.”
          Her father turned to her. “What happened, Kiddo? Those things are supposed to get done in the morning if you want to do something after lunch. Did you sleep late again?”
          She shrugged. “I was reading last night.” But she didn’t want to say that it was quarter of three when she finally put her lamp out.
          “School’s starting soon: eighth grade.” Her mother leaned toward her as she spoke. “This business of staying up ‘til all hours of the night is going to come to a screeching halt. You walk around all the next day like a zombie…”
          Her father held up his hand in a “stop” signal. Then he turned toward her. “Okay. Get to it this afternoon. No friends until it’s all done. And pound the piano for a while, too. Now then: Laura, say grace.”
          They folded their hands as her sister recited the prayer. She looked down. Lately, it seemed everything she did was wrong. Read, they said. But when she read, all they could do was yell at her. It was going to be a long afternoon.

She sat at the piano and opened the book to her recital piece: Hungarian Rhapsody. She frowned. Some of the other kids at the recital had gotten to pick their own songs. One had played Total Eclipse of the Heart, and another girl did Almost Paradise. But not her. She had to take “something that will challenge you.”
          She began, flubbed the second measure, and started over again. In the cellar she could hear her father working. He was whistling as he hammered.
          The phone rang. It was her friend, Jennifer. “Hi. What’s up?”
          “Nothing much: I’m practicing.” Stephanie took her favorite pen from her pocket and began doodling on the pad by the phone.
          “Want to hang around?”
          “I don’t think I can, but I’ll ask.” She turned to call into the cellar. “Dad, can I hang around with Jennifer?”
          The noise stopped, and after a pause her father answered. “Come on, Steffy. When are you going to do the chores you were supposed to have done this morning? No, I don’t think so.”
          “But Dad, I can do them later…”
          “The answer is no.” As if to finalize his statement, the sound of the electric saw started up again.
          She turned back to the phone. “Did you hear? I can’t. I’ve got to do chores.” She resumed doodling.
          “Like what?”
          “Stupid stuff: I’ve got to sweep the garage, dust the furniture, comb the dogs—Stuff from the list. You know.”
          “That’s stupid.”
          “I’ve got to get back to practicing or he’ll start hollering.”
          “Okay. I’ll call you later.” Jennifer hung up.
          She sat at the piano, doodling on the back cover of her music book. She felt like crying. Sure, she thought, It’s okay for Laura to get excused from her chores, but not me. I should have asked him if he thought that was fair—That’s his sort of argument. Why didn’t I think of that when I needed to? He tells me all the time that he’s reasonable, but when I try to reason with him all I get is “The answer is no.”
          She opened the music book again, ripping one of the pages as she did. She played the Hungarian Rhapsody through, then turned to her regular lesson. Her father called to her from the cellar, “Steffy, run through it again. You’re rushing that right-hand-alone section.”
          If he knows so much about piano, how come he can’t play? She thought. The lights dimmed a bit as they did whenever he started his power saw. She hardly noticed. She heard her father curse, then his footsteps on the cellar stairs.
          “Steffy, go upstairs and get my wallet quick. We’ve got to go to the hospital.” There was an urgency in his voice. “It’s in the pocket of my dungarees.”
          For just a moment she thought he was carrying something that was leaking all over the kitchen floor. Then she realized that the messy stuff blood, and she felt a sensation in her stomach as if something there had dropped, leaving an empty space behind her wishbone.
          Later. When she would try to recall her actions, she would draw a blank. She returned to the kitchen without finding her dad’s wallet. Her father was wrapping his right hand in a dishtowel.
          “Calm down and think for a moment: Where’s my wallet?” She wasn’t entirely sure if he was talking to her or to himself. He pointed at one of the kitchen cabinets. “Check in my junk basket.”
          She opened the cabinet and found the wallet right where he suggested. He took the keys to his truck from their peg and started for the door. “Let’s go,” he said, but then paused and surveyed the scene. The splotches of blood had created an irregular pattern back and forth across the linoleum floor, tracking the path of the footsteps he had taken. “We’d better take a minute to clean-up this mess or your mother’s going to come home and think we’ve both been murdered.”
          He took a dishrag from the sink and Stephanie unrolled several paper towels, but it quickly became evident that they were not going to clean up the blood in just a few minutes. There were droplets of blood falling from the towel around her father’s hand, creating a new mess as they cleaned up the old. She felt the sickly shock in her stomach again.
          “We’re not getting anywhere, Dad.” She heard a strange quiver in her own voice.
          Her father nodded. He looked vary ashen.
          The rain was falling heavily as they dashed out to the truck. He reached awkwardly across the steering wheel to put the keys in the ignition with his left hand and started the motor.
          “Okay, Kiddo. I’ll drive, you shift. Here, buckle this for me.” He handed her the end of his seatbelt, and kept his wrapped right hand tucked into the armpit of his left. “Reverse.” He said.
          Stephanie pushed the gearshift to the right and forward, but as her father let out the clutch the gears ground loudly.
          “Try again,” He said, and this time the shift leaver slid farther forward and the truck started backing out of the driveway.
          “No sweat,” her father said, and managed a thin smile.
          She looked away, and the empty feeling in her stomach was stronger than ever. She remembered being a little girl and playing the “shifting” game. Her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat back in the seat of her father’s truck then. With her hands over her father’s she would make airplane noises as together they shifted through the gears. Later, if Mom wasn’t with them, her father let her shift as he drove. It had always been fun. Until now.
          “Third gear,” he said.
          She shifted, then ventured, “Is it bad, Dad?”
          “I’m not sure. I cut the fingers of that hand pretty well, but I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at them.” He shook his head, then tensed and leaned forward. On the steering wheel the knuckles of his left hand were white. “It’s really starting to hurt now.” He spoke through clenched teeth.
          She looked away, not wanting to think of what she would do if he passed out. He said something she didn’t hear.
          “Come on—fourth gear.”
          She snapped alert and shifted into forth. Part of her mind was screaming for her to think of something else—anything but this terrible situation. But another voice spoke to her, too, urging her to calm down and pay attention because there were things that needed to be done. She tried to listen to the reasonable voice, but the fear she flet in her stomach had her in its grip. Just a little longer, she told herself. Don’t think. Just pay attention a little longer.
          “I’ve done stupider things in my life,” Her father muttered, “But I can’t recall just when. I’m the first one to laugh at other people for doing things as stupid as that…” He grimaced and shook his head. “I picked up the saw to see how it would fit on the shelf I made for it, and never unplugged the damn thing. What a jerk.” He hugged himself again, gritting his teeth.
          “Don’t be mad at yourself, Dad.” She wanted to sound encouraging, but when she heard the tremble in her own voice she decided to say no more. She felt her hands shaking. A little longer, she told herself again.
          They sped down the highway, passing every other car and truck the came upon. Even the windshield wipers seemed in a hurry.
          “Armory street, isn’t it, Steffy?”
          He didn’t give her time to say she wasn’t sure. “Yes, I think we’ve got to get off at the Armory street exit.” He put the signal blinker on and swung into the right-hand lane. There was a blue sign with a white “H” attached to the exit sign. Stephanie felt a bit of relief. We’re almost there, she told herself. Just a little longer.
          “Now watch for signs for the emergency room. I’d be pretty stupid to speed all the way here and then miss the entrance.”
          “Here it is, Dad.”
          “Okay—Downshift to second—see any parking spaces?”
          “Over there,” Stephanie pointed against the glass of the windshield. “Oh no. It says ‘Hospital Personnel Only."
          Her father pulled into one of the forbidden spaces near the door. “I’ll send somebody out to move the truck later. Take the keys, Steffy.”
          With the keys in her hand, she ran ahead and held the glass doors open for him. She had heard stories of people waiting hours in emergency rooms before being attended to, but the fact that her father’s hand was dripping blood on the emergency room floor must have made a difference, because a nurse immediately came around the counter to look at her father’s hand while another woman dialed in a call to the public address system. She could hear the woman’s words repeated from the loudspeakers around her as she called for Doctor Smith.
          “Is this your daughter?” asked the nurse.
          Her father nodded. “She’ll be able to give you whatever information you need to fill out the forms.” As the nurse examined his hand, her father held onto the counter with his other hand, and seemed to be steadying himself. Stephanie thought she had never seen him look so drained and lifeless. She realized he must be feeling the same sort of shock that she was.
          The nurse sat her father in a wheelchair and started toward the swinging doors that led to the emergency operating room. He turned to Stephanie. “In my wallet is my Blue Cross card. You’ll need that. Answer as much as you can—you know my birthday and all that. Then take a dollar bill and get some change and call your grandmother. See if she can get in touch with your mother so she won’t think we’ve been kidnapped by pirates or something.” They had reached the doors. The nurse backed through them, pulling the wheelchair behind her. “And shut the lights off in the truck, okay?”
          She nodded, but the doors had already closed behind her father. Her lip was trembling again.
          At the counter, she answered the questions as the secretary typed the information onto several different forms: name, age, occupation, religion—the only thing Steffy didn’t know was her father’s blood type. When she was done, the secretary made change for her out of her handbag. Stephanie went to the pay phone in the foyer and dialed her grandparents’ number.
          “Hello?” It was her grandfather.
          “Poppi? This is Steffy. My dad cut his hand and we came to the hospital. He asked me to call you so you could call Mom and let her know that, well—there’s a lot of blood in the kitchen and…”
          “Where are you now?”
          “In the emergency room. Well, in the lobby…”
          “How bad is your father’s hand?”
          “I don’t know. They’re taking care of him now.”
          “How did you get there?”
          “Dad drove the truck.”
          There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Well, he can’t be all that bad, then. Where’s Susan?” He meant Stephanie’s mother.
          “She went to bring Laura to gymnastics, then she was going to go grocery shopping. I’ll call home if you want…”
          “No, no. I’ll go over there and take care of things. You stay there with your dad. He drove, you say?”
          “Well, I shifted…” She trailed off, remembering.
          “Good girl. You stay there, and call if you need anything else. Your grandmother will be here. I’ll see what I can do at your house.”
          “Okay, Poppi.” She hung up. With nothing left to do, she took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a magazine. Her back ached between her shoulder blades where her muscles had been knotted for the past half-hour. Little by little, the tension began to leave her. In its place came all the thoughts she hadn’t permitted herself during the anxious drive to the hospital—thoughts of people she had seen with artificial hands or missing fingers. There was an image of blood squirting up onto Hawkeye from an unseen soldier on MASH. Worst of all, she remembered her reaction whenever her father wouldn’t let her do something she wanted, and she would wish something would happen to him—not anything in particular, just something to get even with him for being mean. Her father wasn’t mean, she knew, but she always found herself wishing she could get even with him anyway. Now she wondered if one of those secret wishes might have been floating around in the cellar workshop that afternoon, and maybe all this was really her fault… She wiped the teardrops from her cheeks and held the magazine up so that the other people in the waiting room wouldn’t see that her face.
          Hiding behind the magazine, it took Stephanie a moment to realize she was holding it upside down. She laughed for the first time that day. The open page showed an automobile advertisement, with a car racing along a road at night. Its lights were on. She suddenly recalled her father’s request, and went out into the rain and unlocked the truck’s door and reached inside to shut off the lights. There were a couple of droplets of blood on the seat and on the floor. Where she had sat her favorite pen was lying on the seat. Her father had brought it for her from San Francisco. It must have fallen out of her pocket. She took it back inside with her.
          There was a crossword puzzle in one of the magazines that she tried to do, but it was designed more to stump people than to entertain them. She ended up covering the page with doodles. She tried watching TV, but there were just soap operas on every channel. She knew her friend Jennifer was probably watching them, but they didn’t interest her. A Puerto Rican family seemed to be arguing about something, but they were speaking in Spanish and eavesdropping was impossible. The nice woman who had been working at the desk left and was replaced by another volunteer. The afternoon dragged.
          “Are you Stephanie?”
          She looked up at the nurse from the emergency room and nodded.
          “Your father would like to see you.”
          She followed the nurse through the swinging doors. The smell in the emergency room reminded her of a freshly opened band-aid. There were a dozen or so operating tables, each partitioned by white draperies to form it’s own little room. Still dressed in his work clothes, her father lay on one of the tables. A doctor was seated next to him, attending to his hand. She didn’t look in that direction.
          “Hi Kiddo. How’re you doing?” Her father’s voice lacked the fear she had heard earlier, and his eyes smiled as he spoke. She felt a flood of relief and knew instantly that things were going to be all right. “They took some x-rays,” he said, “And it doesn’t look like I cut anything important, so the doctor says I should be okay.”
          “Would you like to see this?” The doctor looked up from his work. He had a tiny curved needle in one rubber-gloved hand. Stephanie shook her head.
          “Did you call your grandmother?”
          Stephanie nodded. “Poppi said he’d take care of the mess at the house.”
          “Good. Any problems at the desk? You found my Blue Cross number and everything?”
          She nodded again. She was aware of her own relief at seeing that her father was himself again, and felt her lip trembling. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
          “You spent a long time out there in the waiting room. Any problems? They didn’t happen to have a piano out there so you could finish practicing, did they?”
          She smiled, feeling silly.
          The doctor looked up at her. “You play the piano, do you?”
          “You should hear her,” Her father answered for her. “She does a great job—very smooth. She played the Hungarian Rhapsody the other night at her recital and nearly brought the house down.”
          “You must be very good,” the doctor said. He thought for a moment, then added, “I’ve always liked Liszt, but I understand he’s very difficult.”
          “Steffy always makes us proud.” Her father smiled at her as he said this.
          She looked down, embarrassed now, and noticed that she still held the special pen. She gripped it tightly, knowing tears were on the way and wanting only to postpone them until she wasn’t in front of her father. In the silence that followed, her father slipped his free arm around her waist Stephanie’s waist and pulled her close to him.
          “You did a good job today, Kiddo. You were a big help when I need help. You’re a gutsy lady.”
          Tears stung her eyes. She looked at her father and he winked at her. Seeing him at the hospital desk listless and defeated had been something she couldn’t accept, and she wanted to say she was happy to have the real Dad back again. She wanted to tell him that she was glad she had been home to help him, but she knew that would only bring on the tears she was fighting so hard to hold back.
          “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be all done here in a little while. Go ahead and wait for me out there, and I’ll see you in a few minutes. I wanted to be sure you were okay.” As she turned to go he caught her hand. “Thanks, Steffy.”
          In that moment she could see herself through her father’s eyes: The person he was proud of, and the person that at times needed his prodding; the little girl she used to be and the young woman he saw her becoming—and the teenager he loved. It was the first time she had ever seen herself quite that way, and she was a little bit surprised to find she liked what she saw. She took a breath as if to say something, but then instead she bent and kissed him.

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This site was last updated 09/21/06