I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird

by Susan Cerulean

  One evening, I ran into Jill, a midwife and a nutritional counselor, in the market. She was part of our larger circle of friends, free-spirited and easy to talk with, and Jeff and I both liked her a lot.

  “Would you be interested in some part-time caregiving work?” I asked. We stood between shelves of canned beans and soups, where I was searching for my dad’s between-meal snacks. Jill named her hourly rate.

  “Come and meet my father, and let’s talk.”

  Jill cut a lively wake through the Landing’s male residents when she arrived to interview for our job. She wore tight velvet pants tucked into black boots and a lacy, low-cut, cream-colored blouse. Her lipstick was brilliant crimson. Looking back, I wonder if Dad thought I’d bought him a girlfriend. Years later, after his death, Jill told me he was the best boyfriend she’d ever had.

  The urge to procreate, to physically mate and bond, is not restricted to the human species. One of the most intimate, life-affirming acts I’ve ever witnessed is the courting ritual of the larger tern species.

  On the first of May, I walked along Dog Island under a sky purple with storm. The wind blew grit and rain against my skin. I was so happy to be out among the many sea- and shorebirds. Given the weather, I knew I would not have to share the beach with any other humans.

  It was a black-and-white shorebird day on the front beach: it seemed that every bird was sharply drawn and freshly feathered, ready to breed. There were snowy and black-bellied plovers, two avocets, dunlins, and sanderlings. I couldn’t remember ever seeing so many ruddy turnstones, especially in their fine spring feathers. A clutch of black skimmers had fallen asleep, with their beaky faces propping them up on the sand. They lounged like fat cigars, their crimson bills long red embers, burning.

  At the last tip of the land, three kinds of terns—slim, graceful seabirds—royal and Sandwich and least—negotiated their courtships.

  I dropped to my knees behind a small dune, moving carefully to keep my rain pants from crinkling. I didn’t want to disturb the pair of Sandwich terns standing closest to me, side-by-side, on the beach. The male elongated his neck and drooped his gray wings, like shutters. The female spoke to her mate, insistent, cheeping. It’s time, it’s time, she seemed to say. I’m ready, my eggs are ready! Now!

  He obliged, skipping up onto her back. Double-decker, the two faced into the wind. The male planted his feet into her feathers, and she pressed her own breast into the sand. She leaned her head against his sternum, craning her neck and pointing her bill to the sky. The pair gazed eye to eye, and then the male twisted his underparts to join with hers. He beat his wings softly, balancing his body aloft, intensely chattering. A minute passed, then two. Steady rain pelted me and the mating terns equally. Then she shrugged him head over heels, and again they stood side-by-side on the beach, facing the sea, rousing, then smoothing their feathers.

  A few weeks after Jill began work, Dad and I sat in the waiting room of a gerontologist recommended by family friend Ken Brummel-Smith. I’d wheeled Dad close to a big window, so we could enjoy the sun. I opened a lined notebook I’d labeled “Dad’s Healthcare.”

  “Let’s make a list of the physical issues you’d like the doctor to address, so we don’t forget anything,” I said.

  “For starters, if I really do get married, it’d be fun!” He tilted his head, eyeballing my expression, hoping I’d go along with his dream. “But I had a vasectomy thirty years ago. I’d like to see if it could be reversed. That’s number one on my list.”

  My own list for the doctor did not include a vasectomy, so I tried to insert a little perspective.

  “Who was your favorite of your wives?” I asked.

  “The one I’m planning to marry next!” he grinned. He was eighty-four years old, but he giggled like a boy.

  “There are probably some questions you should ask if you’re getting married,” he mused, looking out the window at the pine trees lining the parking lot.

  “Like what?” I stuck my pen back in my purse.

  “Number one: Do you snore? Two: Do you treat money cavalierly? And then there is housekeeping. I don’t think I’d be happy living in a complete shambles.” I had to agree.

  “And then, there is this: Who were those two guys in Jill’s garage anyway?”

  I pondered that remark, really no more odd than the rest of the conversation.

  A nurse slid open the glass door separating us from the doctor’s examining rooms.

  “Mr. Isleib?” she called. I undid the brake and wheeled my father through wide double doors.

  I steered the conversation with the new doctor toward my concerns: diabetes, mobility, and constipation, and asked him to take a look at Dad’s scalp.

  Dr. Wallace ran his fingers through Dad’s fine white hair, noting the scabs: “Neurodermatitis,” he said, and prescribed a soothing cream.

  Could we take Dad off one of the three medications prescribed by former faraway doctors for high blood pressure, I asked. “Dr. Brummel-Smith suggested we stop the blood pressure medication since his numbers are fine.” Dr. Wallace agreed.

  Only one set of body parts remained unaddressed: the genitals. I asked Dr. Wallace to check out locations where we’d identified irritation and reddening skin.

  “Shall I leave the room so the doctor can examine you in private?” I began to edge past Dad’s wheelchair toward the door.

  “Do you want your daughter to step out?” asked the doctor.

  “No,” said Dad. So I sat. The doctor performed a quick exam, prescribed zinc oxide and an antifungal. Now it’s coming, I thought to myself. Dad is going to talk about sex.

  Dad’s illness had forced the end of a lifelong modesty. I’d never seen his lower torso unclothed until he was eighty-two years old; now, as primary caretaker, I saw it all. Wiped and diapered. Inspected every inch for rashes and bedsores.

  Actually, I did see my father naked one single time, when I was fifteen years old.

  “Time for supper, Dad!” I had called, knocking on his closed bedroom door. “Mom says we are eating outside on the patio tonight.” I turned the knob to make sure he had heard me.

  My unclothed father was so startled and disturbed, he executed a spontaneous jeté—a leap I’d only seen before in ballet class—and of an elevation I wouldn’t have thought him capable. He held his striped boxer shorts in one hand. His privates dangled between his thighs. Deep red shame flooded his face.

  “S-s-sorry, Dad!” I said, slamming shut the door. We never talked about that incident. That’s how circumspect he had always been.

  Dr. Wallace had peeled off his exam gloves and stood at the sink washing his hands.

  “I would like to get my vasectomy reversed,” said my father.

  The doctor was ready to sign off on Dad’s chart and move to the next patient, but I give him full credit for what he did next. He pivoted back to us, lowered his body onto a round stool, graceful as a dancer, and heard my father out.

  My father was a very old white man crumpled in a lightweight traveling wheelchair.

  Dr. Wallace was young and agile, born and raised in Dominica. His skin was very, very black and his teeth were white as pure salt crystal.

  “Why?” asked the doctor. “Are you thinking of having more children?”

  “No,” Dad replied. “But things aren’t working very well down there. I’d like to be more functional in that department.”

  “Are you in a relationship or planning to get married?”

  “Yes,” said my dad. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was.

  “Well,” said the doctor. “We may have to separate issues here. Reversing a vasectomy is one thing. I’d have to refer you to a urologist to see if that’s even possible. How long have you been experiencing erectile dysfunction?”

  “About fifteen years,” said Dad.

  “I suggest an alternate plan,” said Dr. Wallace. “Why don’t we focus on seeing where you go with this relationship before we get into surgical options? Then we
can come back to this issue.”

  The doctor did not crack the tiniest smile throughout the whole of that surreal conversation. He was completely respectful of my father but more than a little relieved, I suspect, to return the problem to me.

  A few days later, I paced alongside my father, escorting him to his room. Dad bent over his walker, moving one very slow step at a time, heading for his room. We used to have a physical therapist who loved Dad and could get away with saying things like “Bob, don’t crouch over like Mr. Magoo! Stand up straight!” And he would, for her. But I didn’t say that now.

  We were only halfway down the hall, as far as Mrs. Smith’s old room, when he stopped. While I waited for him to continue, I noticed that the nameplate had been pulled off Mrs. Smith’s door. She had died a week ago, and her room would soon be occupied by someone new. Dad scoured his scalp with his fingernails, the way he did when he had a problem he couldn’t solve. I knew that his own mortality was not on his mind. It was a question, really, about Jill. She had taken several days off of work, and I knew he missed her.

  “Are you worried about Jill?” I asked. “Are you worried that your relationship with her is off somehow?

  “Yes,” he said, trying to articulate why. Once we settled ourselves in Dad’s room, I dialed up Jill. Mercifully, she picked up her phone.

  Dad straightened tall in his high-back wheelchair when he heard her voice through the speakerphone. We stared out the window together, watched the light shift into evening.

  “Don’t worry, Bob, I’m still committed for the long haul,” said Jill. She had driven her daughter to the train station in Jacksonville, that was why she’d been gone.

  Dad brightened and brightened. He cuddled the phone containing her voice against his cheek. A smile crept over his face. His eyes were half-closed, picturing her face in his mind. He took a big leap, his biggest leap, offered up his heart.

  “Well, then, Jill,” he said, “can you handle a ring?” He spoke happily, beseechingly, confidently. “How about a diamond the size of a lozenge?”

  In that moment I could see exactly how his face must have looked when he proposed to my own mother, tendering his best offer, a golden promise. It was this moment of offer and likely acceptance that was peak for him.

  Given a “yes,” he could know himself claimed, coupled, and safe.

  Jill smiled, and Dad was satisfied.

  After we ended the conversation, I gave my father a quick shampoo and clipped his nails. I noticed he wasn’t wearing socks, so I slipped off his shoes and pulled a clean stretchy pair over his feet. The socks still bore his name, labeled in his dead wife Mary Jane’s script: “Bob Isleib.”

  “Sue, do you really think I can pull it off?” His voice was full of excitement.

  “Pull off what, Dad?”

  “Managing Jill! Can I still handle a woman that lively?” He was greatly cheered at the thought. One at a time, I levered his shoes back onto his feet.

  Atul Gawande in Being Mortal wrote, “Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged, is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe, and living longer. The chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.” What passed between my father and Jill was born of deep and genuine feeling, despite vast gullies of difference in age and ability, despite the fact that Jill had a primary relationship with a man her own age.

  In my journal, I wrote:

  Birds bind with silver, not with gold. And to my eye, their marital arrangements are far less complicated than those of humans. I floated in my kayak on the azure Gulf near a place where least terns nest on the shore. I chose a distance that would not disturb a pair of courting birds standing on the shining sand. The female shirred her wings, fluttering soft like a dove, the very image of receptivity. The male stood before her. His bill pinched a living fish the size of a soup spoon. As he moved his head side to side to tempt his mate, the last angling of the sun struck the body of the fish. My breath caught: it appeared that the tern offered elemental silver to his mate. She accepted his nourishment, both actual and ritual. Fish dies into bird, bird fertilizes an egg, and life proceeds through the intricate lovemaking of terns and the sacrifice of small fish. The terns bind one to another, vowing to protect and feed a pair of chicks until they can arrow the waters from the bow of the air and confidently obtain food for themselves.

  Such lovemaking, that fragile and that powerful, is the source of rare eggs this pair will brood on the sand. Such lovemaking is what continues life on this planet. We humans make our desires the measure of all things, and that has left little room for wild birds. Like the sick and the aged, like the poor and the very young, they are profoundly marginalized in our present-day world.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Many Forms of Grace

  ”When it’s your turn to live here, when you are too old to care for yourself, who will you be like?” I addressed a playful question to Ashley on a slow Friday afternoon in the Landing’s dining room. Our eyes traveled over the faces of all the elderly residents around us. “Miss Annie Ray!” she said, indicating the tiny old woman sitting at the table next to my father. “No question about it.” “Why?” I asked. “She’s always ready to be happy,” Ashley replied.

  Miss Annie’s eyes were magnified by huge, pink-framed glasses smudged with her own fingerprints. She had a quick smile and loved to hold your hand.

  Ashley passed Miss Annie a book of carpet samples. The Landing staff was planning a redecoration. “Which is your favorite?” asked Ashley. “What color should we pick for the living room floor?”

  “Goodness gracious,” Miss Annie exclaimed. “Gracious me!” She ran the tips of her fingers over each vivid square, one after another after another.

  “Red!” she said, no hesitation. She brushed the square of carpet dyed crimson, and through her eyes, all of us shared in the simple amazement of red.

  “Miss Annie, I’m going to get some milk for my dad from the kitchen,” I said. “May I bring you something?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  She clasped the heavy glass goblet to her lips. “Gracious!” she said. “Apple juice!” Her sips were sacramental, awe, the taste in her mouth.

  Grace was easier to find in the daylight hours, for Dad had become an unreliable narrator of his own life, and if anything, less able physically, than ever before. I now paid someone to be with him from 8:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. every evening of the week. In shifts, five capable women operated like a hive of bees in that room, attending one immobile larva in his chair. You could say: what a waste of resources for one old man. Some people did say that. And besides, some people said, no matter how much help you hire or provide, you cannot protect your father from the course of his disease.

  But I thought the network of care in Dad’s room was transforming each one of us into something we may not have imagined and it had everything to do with love. Infused into this room were Jill and her warm vitality; Beulah’s prayers; Shirley’s great humor and energy; Gail’s serious attention to duty; Esmine’s tender and vigilant heart. Dad would appear to be at the center of this world, but many lives were being lived in this room. Also orbiting Dad’s dense planet were hospice staff and other caregivers and the voices of Dad’s faraway children and brother. I was in the web too, but I was not central, or even, perhaps, essential. I solved problems, praised, supported, wrote checks and schedules, brought a thread of constancy to my father’s care, but my efforts were nothing without the rest.

  Still there were the long stretches of the nights, from eight in the evening, when our paid caregivers helped him to bed, until eight in morning, when another of our own trusted staff returned. Other families whispered rumors of rough treatment at night. How was I to know?

  Very, very early one morning, I was awakened by a nightmare in which my father was calling my name and pleading for help. I slipped out of bed, pulled on my clothes, and drove the two miles to the Landing. The facility’s massi
ve front door was locked, so I sneaked through a low hedge of boxwood shrubbery and let myself in through the kitchen. I hoped I wouldn’t startle the staff.

  No one moved about the silent facility, but Dad’s door was open, sending a triangle of light into the hall. Inside, a young woman was making up his bed. She heard the door creak and turned to face me. Her name tag read “Iclene.” She smiled at me, somehow unsurprised.

  “His bed was soaking wet so I got him up and changed him,” she said. “We check on them all night long.”

  Dad was dressed in daytime clothes, resting in the recliner, awake and still.

  Iclene bundled up the soiled sheets and left the room.

  I crouched beside Dad’s chair, took his hand. “Iclene seems very kind,” I said.

  “Sue, see if there’s some food we could eat together for breakfast,” he said. His demeanor was very calm.

  In the kitchen I found Iclene. I’d been wanting to meet her. I’d been told she sang to Dad by the gas log fire in the living room, in the middle of the night sometimes when he couldn’t sleep.

  While I rustled around for wheat bread to make toast, I asked her about herself. Iclene was twenty-four years old, a student of nursing at Tallahassee Community College, an employee here at the Landing on the 11:00 p.m. to 7:00 a.m. shift, and a member of Bethel AME Missionary Church on Tennessee Street. “You’ll find me there every Wednesday and Sunday night,” she said. She wore black plastic glasses, was very tall, and kept eye contact as we talked.

  And she stood very still like a graceful forest animal, her hands folded together in front of her diaphragm, as if she were at that moment—perhaps in all moments—in prayer. And it was true.

  “I pray for strength all the time,” she said. “I ask Him for strength. He gives me what I need.”

  The bread rattled in the toaster. Iclene reached in the industrial refrigerator for butter.

  “He got me this job,” she said, referring up beyond the ceiling, to her God. “So I know He’ll give me the strength to do it.” Ashley had told me Iclene worked the eleven to seven shift four nights a week and attended classes in the daytime.