The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted

by Elizabeth Berg

  “Have you had marijuana?” Ethel asked, astonished, and Birdie said no, not yet. But she would have it. She didn’t think she would like to smoke it, she had never liked smoking; instead, she would have it in those brownies. She said it would probably help her glaucoma. She’d get hold of some, she said, and she and Ethel would stay in and watch Cary Grant movies and order out for Chinese, wouldn’t that be something? They would have to draw straws for who would answer the door in their condition.

  “But where do you get it?” Ethel asked, and Birdie said she had no idea and that was that, they had never spoken of it again.

  Birdie lives in a high-rise with other older people, and she hates it. She calls it a prison with wall-to-wall carpeting. When her daughter moved to Los Angeles last year, she talked Birdie into moving from her house into the high-rise so she wouldn’t have to worry about her, and Birdie is plenty mad at her daughter now. Getting madder every day, too. Her daughter had wanted Birdie to move to L.A. with her, but Birdie had refused. And Ethel had seconded the motion. What would Birdie do in L.A.? Well, what would Ethel do without Birdie, that was the question.

  On the bus, Ethel sits on a seat for the handicapped. She doesn’t need it, but no one else knows that—wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want. She stares out the window at all the different kinds of people walking down the sidewalk: men with briefcases talking on cell phones, kids with backpacks talking on cell phones, mothers pushing strollers that look like lunar landing devices and talking on cell phones. Ethel likes to watch the children best. She was never able to have any, and Ed wouldn’t adopt, kept holding out hope that Ethel would get pregnant. Finally, it was too late, they were in their forties, and they made their dog their child. Though not like today! No, no dog bakeries or miniature Harley-Davidson jackets or playdates for their Archie. He just got to sleep on the bed, and on his birthday he got a hot dog.

  The hospital lobby is crowded today, a woman dressed in an elegant black pantsuit and quietly weeping, holding on to her husband’s hand. A couple of young women laughing about something that’s in one of their purses. There is also a group of about ten people all of whom seem to be together, and they look positively giddy—Ethel guesses they’re taking turns visiting someone up in Maternity.

  Sometimes Ethel thinks everyone should come and hang around in a hospital for a few minutes every day. The things that go on here! The births and the deaths, the miracles and the failures. The anxious questions, the careful answers. The sad conversations about what to do next, the joyful ones addressing the very same question.

  Ethel sees the doors of one of the elevators opening, and she walks quickly toward it—sometimes the elevators here can take a long time, and nothing makes her more impatient than a slow elevator. She’s one of those who will punch the Up button again and again, though she knows it doesn’t help. Well, it helps her.

  Inside the elevator, there’s an orderly standing beside a gurney on which a patient is sleeping. “Going up?” the orderly asks. He’s come from the basement, where the cafeteria is, but Ethel doesn’t think he’s coming from the cafeteria.

  “Yes, thanks,” she says and looks quickly over at the patient. He’s an old man, his arms full of purplish bruises. Ethel winces and looks away. She wonders if the man is sleeping after all—she hears no sound of him breathing. And that orderly was overly cheerful. She sneaks another look at the patient and sees his chest rise. There. Thank goodness! Well, silly of her to suppose they transport dead bodies on the elevator mixed in with everyone else. Though maybe they should. Really. Because if there’s one thing you’re aware of in a hospital, it’s that people die. They die and probably get sent to the morgue in those terrible body bags with handles that allow you to carry a person like a duffel bag. But maybe they just use sheets, that would be nice. Ethel hopes when she dies she gets wrapped up in a sheet with a decent thread count.

  The elevator door opens, and the orderly pushes the gurney out ahead of Ethel, the patient still sound asleep on it, or pretending to be, Ethel supposes he might be pretending in order to spare himself the stares of the other passengers. And wasn’t she one of them, someone standing there stealing looks at the poor man: his knobby collarbones, the tiny constellation of moles at his temple, the wedding ring worn thin on his finger.

  Ethel walks the short distance down the hall to the station where Birdie is. She smiles at the nurses as she goes past the desk. So young, so pretty, and many of them are really very nice, though they certainly don’t spend much time with their patients, not like they used to. And they don’t wear white uniforms and caps anymore, either. Why not? What was wrong with those caps? They were badges of honor! And they let people know who was in their hospital rooms. Now everyone wears scrubs, and you can’t tell the IV therapist from the psychiatrist from the cleaning staff. Birdie only yesterday asked a woman she thought was a nurse for a pain pill and the woman said in broken English she was just there to “take out it the trashes.”

  Nurses don’t have time for anything anymore. Back rubs? Ha! But they used to do back rubs at least twice a day. Ethel had a friend named Vicky who’d been a nurse years ago, and she told a story about once giving a back rub to a young man as part of his “HS” care, “hour of sleep” that stood for. You changed the draw sheet, helped the patient wash his face and brush his teeth, and finally used the thick, unscented hospital lotion to give him a back rub. After Vicky had finished the man’s back rub, she’d asked if there was anything else he needed. “Well,” he’d said, “my testicles have been feeling really dry….” Ethel shrieked and covered her mouth when she heard that story, then asked from behind her hand, “So what did you do?”

  “I handed him the bottle of lotion,” Vicky said. “I told him, ‘Here you go, try this.’ And then I walked out of his room.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” Ethel said, shaking her head. To have a young man so boldly ask you for…Well. Those nurses. They saw everything.

  When Ethel comes into Birdie’s room, she sees that her friend is asleep. The head of the bed has been raised, and Birdie is bent far over to one side. Her meal tray is still before her, mostly untouched. She has gotten a roommate, Ethel sees, and she smiles and waves to a woman who appears to be somewhere in her thirties. The woman is pale, with dirty blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, but she is cheerful, and attractive, too, in a country-and-western kind of way; she smiles and waves back, then says, “I think she’s asleep.”

  Ethel looks at Birdie. “Yes. She is.”

  “Not for long, I’m afraid,” the woman says. “My family is on the way up, and my kids are loud.”

  “That’s okay,” Ethel says and goes to sit down beside Birdie. She’s going to wake up with a neck ache, positioned that way. Ethel pushes the button to lower her friend’s head, and it wakes her up.

  Birdie’s blue eyes, still beautiful after all these years, open round and startled, but when she sees Ethel, she relaxes. “Oh,” she says. “Hi, you.”

  “Hi, darling.”

  “What’s it like outside?”

  “Warm! You’d think it was the middle of summer.”

  Birdie’s face clouds. “What’s…What day is it?”

  “Friday.”

  Birdie nods. “And the month?”

  A flash of cold down Ethel’s spine, but she answers normally. “May.”

  “The twelfth,” Birdie says, then rushes to add, “Two thousand and eight. Bush is president. Fifteen, twelve, nine, six, three. You’re holding up zero fingers.”

  “You didn’t eat nearly enough,” Ethel says, and Birdie says, “Did you meet my roommate? I got a roommate last night.”

  “Kind of,” Ethel says, then calls over to the woman,

  “I’m Ethel Menafee. Birdie and I have been friends for over fifty years.”

  “Oh, wow!” the woman says.

  Ethel shrugs.

  “I’m Angie Larson,” the woman says. “I’m going home tomorrow.”

&
nbsp; Well, la-di-da, Ethel thinks but she says only, “Nice to meet you.”

  “Uh-huh.” Angie flips on the TV.

  Birdie turns to Ethel and rolls her eyes. She hates television, won’t have one in her house. But what can you do. They’re starting to put TVs on buses, now.

  “You know, there’s a McDonald’s right next to the hospital,” Ethel tells Birdie.

  “There’s a McDonald’s right next to everything.”

  “What I mean is, I could bring you a Happy Meal. It would stay hot. It would be better than—”

  “No,” Birdie says. “Thanks.”

  Ethel settles back in the hard chair and looks over Birdie’s IV and the clear green tubing that delivers the oxygen into her nose. As if she knows anything about it. As if she’s in charge. Still, it seems one must acknowledge the equipment. Let it know that someone’s keeping an eye on it. “So,” Ethel says. “Any news?”

  “I got a roommate.”

  From the corner of her eye, Ethel sees the roommate give a little absentminded wave.

  Ethel lowers her voice. “You said.”

  “I know. But that’s the news. The only news.”

  There is a great hubbub at the door, and then two little dark-haired girls come running in the room, yelling, “Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!”

  Instinctively, Ethel pulls back in her chair, and just as instinctively smiles at the children. They appear to be about six and eight years old, and are dressed in look-alike pants and tops—hot pink pants and white, ruffled blouses that expose their midriffs—uselessly, Ethel thinks. She hopes it’s uselessly. They have ponytails high on top of their heads, and they wear star-shaped studs in their ears. Their shoes are pink, see-through plastic, with gold glitter embedded in them. Each carries a Barbie doll whose hairdo makes her look as though she’s just been ravished, and the older girl carries a pink plastic suitcase with “Barbie!” written across it in silver glittery script.

  Ethel feels an old, familiar stirring inside. She would like to see what’s in that suitcase. She loved playing dolls as a little girl and in fact gave up doing so only because her family and friends shamed her into it. She pretended she wasn’t really playing after she turned twelve, but she was. She played her doll was a flower girl at a lavish wedding. She played her doll won an Academy Award. She played her doll had been told she couldn’t play dolls any longer. The doll let her say everything she was feeling, let her know everything she was feeling.

  Ethel had loved Emma Jean. She loved her just-right length of thirteen inches, her turquoise-colored eyes fringed with thick black lashes, her red lips painted on to look as though she were puckering up or musing, dimples at the sides of her mouth and at her knees. She had a slightly rounded belly and a flat little chest, fat auburn curls that were tolerant of multiple brushings, a faint pink blush on her cheeks. She had dress-up clothes and play clothes: a blue silk dress with a wide ribbon tie; red pedal pushers with a red-and-white-striped shirt. She had a pair of yellow flannel pajamas with light blue piping, and Ethel’s mother had embroidered “EJ” on the pocket. She had black shoes and red shoes and white shoes, little plastic Mary Janes; and she had a pair of fuzzy white slippers that looked like little, little dogs. She had a lace-trimmed slip with a rosebud at the bodice and white organdy underpants.

  Ethel doesn’t know if those Barbies wear underpants, but she wants to know. Maybe she could ask one of the little girls. Maybe she could—

  “Ethel!” Birdie says.

  “What?”

  Birdie smiles. “You didn’t hear me?”

  “No, what did you say?”

  “You’re getting worse than I.”

  Their old battle. They fought about who was getting worse in order to amuse and comfort each other. Starting in their late fifties, they’d begun giving themselves terrible pretend diseases, so that Birdie might answer the phone in those days and Ethel would say, “Today I have diabetes mellitus and essential hypertension. Also gingivitis and a worrisome fatigue.” Or Ethel would answer the phone and Birdie would say, “Well, it’s uterine cancer, and it’s bad, it’s very bad.” It made them laugh. It made them happy to understand that they didn’t have any of those things they were beginning to fear. Yet.

  “I’m not worse than you,” Ethel says. “You’re worse than I by a long shot. Now, what did you say?”

  Birdie stares blankly and finally says, “Well, fine, now I’ve forgotten,” and they both start laughing. Oh, what relief, to laugh about such a thing. No, Birdie could never move to L.A.

  “That’s MIIIIIIIINNNNNNE!” the older girl screams, a high-pitched, bloodcurdling scream, and Ethel and Birdie both turn to stare.

  “Knock it off!” the girls’ father yells. “Didn’t I tell you guys you’d have to behave in here? There are real sick people in here!” He smiles at Birdie, raises his hand. “How you doing.”

  “But it’s MIIIIIIINNNNNNNE!” the girl screams again, and, unbelievably, the father ignores her. He grins and sits on his wife’s bed. “Ready for a tall cold one?” he asks her.

  “I’d say so!”

  The man lowers his voice, but Ethel can still hear him say, “Ready for a long, hot thick one, too?” He licks her neck.

  “Baby, don’t,” the woman says, laughing, but it is from a place low in her throat that changes the meaning of “don’t” to “yes indeed.”

  Ethel gets up and closes the curtain that separates the beds. They don’t have to see it.

  When she sits back down, Birdie says, “Why’d you close the curtain? Do you want to LICK MY NECK?”

  Ethel’s eyes widen and then she begins to silently laugh, her body shaking. Birdie laughs right along with her, not silently. The younger little girl comes over to their side of the curtain and stares solemnly at them. She’s holding five dolls.

  “Hello,” Birdie says. “Can I do something for you?”

  “No.” The little girl shifts her weight, one foot to the other.

  After a while, Ethel says, “Can I?”

  Now the girl nods and walks slowly over to Ethel and lays a boy doll in her lap. “Ken’s head keeps popping off,” she says. And indeed his head has popped off; it falls from Ethel’s lap and rolls across the floor and under Birdie’s bed. The girl scrambles to get it.

  “Ow,” Birdie says, and Ethel asks quickly, “Are you all right?”

  Birdie waves her hand. “Yes, I’m fine. I don’t know why I said that. I guess I thought she might hurt me.”

  Now the girl moves close to Birdie to say, “I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re sick.”

  “That’s right,” Birdie says. “But I can fix your doll. Give him to me.”

  The girl points to Ethel. “She can.”

  Birdie says, “Give him to me, or you can’t be on my side of the curtain.”

  The girl looks at Ethel, and Ethel raises her eyebrows, offers up her palms.

  The girl places the doll and his head in Birdie’s lap as though she is offering a piece of meat to a dog she doesn’t trust.

  “Wash it off first,” Ethel tells Birdie.

  “What?”

  “Why don’t we wash the doll off, it was on the floor.”

  “Oh,” Birdie says. “Right. All right, then, to the shower!”

  “Where is the shower?” the girl asks.

  Ethel points to the sink in their corner of the room.

  “Use that sink right over there, honey, it has a control you work with your knee. There’s some antibacterial soap right on the wall.”

  “Huh?”

  “Tell your dad to help you,” Ethel says.

  The girl looks at the curtain as though she can see through it. “He’s busy,” she says, and sighs.

  “You can do it yourself,” Birdie tells her, and now they hear the girl’s sister. “I’ll do it!” she says. “Let me.”

  “No,” the younger girl says, doubtfully, but here comes the older one charging over, her mouth open and ready to scream again.

  “Don’t you dare,” Bi
rdie says in a low, authoritative voice that stops the child cold. “You let your little sister do it. You go back over there with your parents. This was not your idea.”

  “DAAAAD!” the older girl yells, and her father says,

  “Come on, Jessie. Leave us be for just a minute.”

  Jessie wrinkles up her nose as though she is smelling something bad.

  “Come over here,” Ethel says, “and you can sit with me. We’ll just watch, how’s that?”

  “NOOOOOOOOOO!”

  “All right, that’s it, we’re out of here,” the father says, and the girls’ faces turn quickly toward him, though they do not otherwise move.

  “Don’t forget your doll,” Birdie says, and the little girl says, “I don’t want him. He’s busted. You can have him.” She looks over the other dolls she is holding and lays a brunette with a shorn haircut on Birdie’s lap as well. “You can have her, too. Her name is J.Lo.”

  “Did you cut her hair?” Birdie asks, and the little girl shakes her head no, then points to her older sister.

  “She wanted me to!” the older girl says.

  The younger girl picks her nose and shakes her head.

  “Nuh-uh, you made me.”

  “I said, let’s go!” the father says, and the little girls run over to him. The sounds of their voices carry down the hall and finally disappear.

  Ethel gets up to pull the curtain open but sees that Birdie’s roommate has closed her eyes, and so she leaves the curtain as it is.

  “Yes,” Birdie says, when Ethel sits back down. “Keep it closed.”

  They sit quietly for a moment, and then Birdie whispers, “Did you see how she didn’t think I could fix the doll?”

  Ethel nods.

  “Well, that’s it,” Birdie says. “That’s what happens.” She closes her eyes. “That’s what scares me.” She says nothing more, and shortly her breathing changes to a deep and regular rhythm.