Say Say Say

by Lila Savage

  · 19 ·

  Once, when Ella was sixteen, her high school study group had met at her friend Dai’s house. Dai had spoken perfect, unaccented English, but Ella had known that his family still spoke Vietnamese at home, and as he led the study group up to his bedroom, Ella felt him watching her absorb the foreignness of his house, the unfamiliar food smells, the strange silence of the adults, and, especially, the un-American lack of clutter, the sparseness of the furnishings—not the minimalist sensibility of the wealthy but an austerity that seemed somehow embarrassing to observe. It wasn’t exactly deprivation, it was like they didn’t understand, or didn’t have access to, the material indicators of middle-class America.

  The students sat on the floor of Dai’s immaculate bedroom, unfurling the familiar paraphernalia of textbooks and papers as if setting up a picnic. Everyone’s self-consciousness had begun to dissipate, although Ella still felt as shocked by how orderly the room was as she might have been if it were unlivably filthy. Where were his things? She thought of her own room at home, with its dirty linoleum floor, and walls scarred with nail holes and ragged posters and cheap prints from the thrift store, almost every inch covered, framed greeting cards, her collection of dusty antique hats hanging on a crooked mug rack, pictures of Jesus, and the junk that filled every imaginable surface, psychedelic candles she never lit, and wrinkled scarves used as runners, and paperbacks crammed everywhere the eye might rest, and CDs, and abandoned dirty dishes, laundry, and homework assignments, and bottles of nail polish, and a space heater, because the room had no heat vent and the windows leaked so badly that an inch of ice would form on the inside in the winter, and she could melt her handprint into it if she could tolerate the biting cold.

  She marveled at the emptiness of Dai’s room, like a monastic cell, and carelessly tipped open the door of a shallow cupboard. Everyone stared in silence at the narrow shelves, perhaps four inches deep, and the symmetrically stacked bundles of white sport socks alongside tidy, meager squares of folded briefs. “Ella!” her friend Naomi scolded as, shamefacedly, Ella pushed the door shut.

  Now, standing in Bryn and Jill’s bedroom, she revisited that feeling of voyeuristic unease as she took in the absence of ornamentation, of any kind of comfort. The room had been stripped down to the necessities so that there would be less for Jill to get into while Bryn slept, but it was more than that. The down comforter had no cover; Ella imagined that, when Jill had been well, such details were seen to, and in this light it seemed like a symbol of Bryn’s helplessness and defeat. The pillows were flat, the sheets smelled stale, the walls were almost bare, and Ella felt as though she were seeing Bryn naked. It was like walking in on him taking a shit, or masturbating, or weeping, something terribly intimate and solitary. Ella came here only when, like today, she needed to change Jill’s clothes.

  She leaned against the bed and tried to form a strategy. Jill was busy at the dresser, where she had discovered a glass of water. First she put her hand into it, as deeply as she could, so that water spilled over the edges, and then found a hairbrush to stir it with. These days Ella never knew whether to be slow and gentle or quick and efficient, to get it over with before Jill could work herself up into a storm of violence. Neither approach made things easy, and, like so much with Jill, it just seemed arbitrary, whether she was moderately or excruciatingly uncooperative. Ella said, “Jill, I’m going to help you change your clothes,” and she felt a little like a hunter thanking a slaughtered animal for feeding her family, a ritual of respect, unheard in any literal sense by the violated.

  Carefully, she removed Jill’s reading glasses, which sat crookedly on her face and were so dirty they compromised her sight more than they aided it. Jill protested in her inarticulate way, but as soon as they were swept from view they were forgotten. Next, Ella contemplated Jill’s soiled sweater with foreboding; it was such a battle to remove the garment that they did this only once or twice a week, as the food particles accumulated and the cuffs became dingy with whatever her eager hands reached into. Ella gripped the hem of the sweater and pulled it over her head as Jill screamed like she’d been stabbed, or like she had just received the news of the death of her child, a tortured sound, painfully loud, as loud as a person could keen, and she hunched protectively, clutching her thin undershirt, as Ella gripped it from behind and pulled it off, wincing at both the volume of the cries and also the suffering she was unwillingly inflicting, and Jill’s small breasts hung slack on her wasted frame, the notches of her spine were visible, and her shoulder blades, and her mouth was twisted open in a howl as drool ran from the corners, but like a child who produces more noise than tears when throwing a symbolic tantrum, her eyes were largely dry. Now cold, Jill did not fight against the new undershirt and turtleneck, which was not the same thing as cooperating, for Ella still had to snake twitching, flaccid arms through tunnels of cloth, had to guide her head through the collar like a midwife with a crowning infant.

  Next came the difficult part, and Ella winced in dreadful anticipation. As rapidly as she could, she unbuttoned Jill’s pants, gripped the waist of her jeans, and yanked them to her ankles, while Jill pounded Ella’s face and shoulders with both fists as if she were being sexually assaulted. And perhaps that was indeed what it felt like, which was a horrifying thought to Ella, but it would be no more of a kindness to leave her draped in filth, to let urine and feces encrust her, and it would be a terrible unkindness to leave this to Bryn, with whom Jill was equally resistant, and so, blocking the blows with one hand, Ella used the other to guide Jill into a sitting position on the towel she had draped over the edge of the bed, and then she pulled pants, slippers, and socks off in two calculated tugs, and Jill moaned and slapped and hollered, her saliva dripped to her skinny bare legs as Ella coaxed her resistant feet into jeans gathered into two pleated doughnuts, and she jerked them up until Jill buttoned them, reflexively, wanting to be covered. Ella pulled on clean socks and slippers with a mounting sense of relief, and then she sat beside Jill and stroked her back, then hugged her and told her she had done a good job, and Jill quieted like this was good news or, maybe, like she was entirely spent.

  These encounters were unlike virtually anything Ella had experienced, at least in her adult life. Even the safest childhoods involve physical struggle, the battle of a will that doesn’t know its own interests pitted against the almost divine strength of grown-up forces, capable of effortlessly pinching tiny feet together and lifting them skyward to shove a cold wet wipe between diarrhea-smeared buttocks. Adulthood like Ella’s—which is to say, removed from poverty and war, minus prison or domestic violence or sexual assault—involved a kind of physical freedom that was easy to take for granted. Nobody touched her with anything resembling unwelcome force; violence remained, happily, an abstraction; and her physical space felt, if not so cherished as to be sacred, at least secure. No adult had ever struck her before Jill. It was physically jarring, the stinging fist against her cheekbone, her ear throbbing painfully, her own shirt torn askew, but worse were the internal repercussions.

  It felt strange and awful to overpower a vulnerable person, to cause another person fear. If Ella was slow and tentative, as she sometimes was, especially in the early days, ten minutes of unpleasantness would stretch instead into thirty minutes of chasing Jill around the bedroom as if she were prey, Jill screaming with such deafening ceaselessness that Ella became convinced the neighbors would call the cops. She left no gentle approach untried before mostly settling on speed and efficiency. She never hurt Jill, never so much as spoke sharply to her (she was not a naughty child, capable of learning a lesson); Ella received her blows and scratches with passive determination, for her hands were seldom free to block a fist, to protect her face or eyes. Still, she felt like a malevolent bully, like a sadistic prison guard, though she experienced no anger, or pleasure, in thwarting Jill’s will.

  Beyond this struggle, she further had to contend with the unavoidable violat
ion of Jill’s privacy, a result of Ella’s uninvited gaze. Ella’s familiarity with Jill’s body was unsettling in part because she didn’t like to imagine anyone gaining such dispassionate knowledge of her own. Who besides herself knew, or cared, that one foot’s arch was higher than the other? That a freckle sat companionably next to her belly button? Ella imagined that Jill had looked at, say, the contours of her own small hands a million times in the decades before her accident, had memorized the shapes of her fingernails, the rosettes that formed the knuckles of her thumbs. All of this remained except for the once-freighted familiarity of these traits, the memories of her child hand holding dripping fruit or her father’s shirttail, her adult hand grasping that of her lover or the steering wheel on the day of the accident. Now it was Ella who knew Jill’s body, but only in this stark context of helpless anxiety, of wincing under the hot pins of the showerhead, of eternally bracing for injury that couldn’t be anticipated or precluded.

  · 20 ·

  “Do you think she has another UTI?” Ella asked Bryn, and they both glanced over to Jill, who was sitting on the toilet crying with the bathroom door wide open.

  “I guess I’d better bring her back to the doctor,” he said. They were so often matter-of-fact about these things that Ella could sometimes pretend that Bryn could summon the same state of detachment she did. This pretense permitted Ella to say things that might otherwise feel impossible, like “She’s definitely getting worse” and “We should plan now for when she will eventually have to move” and, calmly, “It’s amazing how well she is able to articulate her sense of loss and isolation.” All true, though not things you could say to someone visibly broken, unless their endless brokenness wearied you, started to break you, until you were hoarse, rough, blunt with fatigue and grief. Bryn shrouded his brokenness in quiet. It wasn’t for Ella’s sake, it was just who Bryn was, how he coped with the impossible, but it benefited Ella just the same.

  Later, when Ella thought of her frank appraisals of Jill’s condition, sometimes she couldn’t believe herself, that she had spoken to Bryn as if he were just Jill’s nurse, as though they could both regard moving Jill to a facility as simply the next necessary step rather than the next impossibly painful thing that must somehow be endured. And, in that light, Bryn’s stoicism didn’t make things easier, because then Ella had to live with the knowledge that she had been tactless, whereas with a cue, she might have been gentle, might have been able to look back at her words with the soft glow of assurance that she had done her job well. Ella felt bad about this for a while, and then it occurred to her that maybe, when one daily confronted the Abyss, the fragility of everything one loved, the permanence of loss, pussyfooting around difficult truths was not desirable. Maybe there was no place for coy euphemisms at the front lines. Maybe a blunt appraisal suggested that, truly, they faced this together, that Ella was looking at the Abyss squarely, too, and she had Bryn’s back.

  Bryn essentially lived in hell, Ella knew this even if she didn’t always acknowledge it. It was like he was confined to an empty white cell with nothing to do but observe the sights and sounds of the torture of the person he most loved. Jill was able—surprisingly, painfully able—to communicate her loss of self, her impenetrable solitude. She would chant a mantra of loss, “Crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy. I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody. I have nothing. I have nothing. I have nothing. And I’m a nobody. I’m a nobody. Say say say say say. Stay with me! Stay!” And then the weeping, mouth wide open, drool and tears, hunched and clenched tight in helplessness. And then the rage, the poisonous incoherence. The meals eaten like a toddler, or an animal, furtive, desperate, or uninterested, or pizza dropped in the water glass, the water poured on the plate. The endless messes, also like a child, except one who doesn’t learn, who does the opposite of learning, one who forgets how to use the toilet rather than becoming toilet-trained, one who will fight having their clothes changed as though their life depends upon it, only with the strength of an adult, screaming as though assaulted, naked terror on her face, hitting, kicking, slapping, scratching.

  In certain moments, Ella felt an intense desire to enter into Bryn’s grief truly, not to sample it like an emotional voyeur, not to pretend she could be heroic and save him, but to offer his suffering a united front. But then she would suspect that maybe, truly, she was just a child who knew nothing about real loss, who playacted at expertise she only knew how to mimic, who naïvely refused to understand that observing suffering gave one merely a vicarious sort of knowledge—flat, misleading, even dangerous. Maybe her advice was smug, maybe it wasn’t really necessary, only gave her an opportunity to feel important, to pretend that this work both bequeathed and required some sort of skill, some sort of hard-won insight, that it wasn’t just glorified babysitting, washing soiled sheets, microwaving some leftovers, passing a glass of apple juice to whichever client so that they might swallow the baby aspirin, and the Coumadin, and the statins and the Celexa, lisinopril and metformin and Sinemet and the Aricept and the stool softeners and nitroglycerin, as necessary.

  Maybe it wasn’t about Ella at all. Maybe Jill and Bryn stood on this pinnacle of grief, and the decades of their shared lives spooled out behind them, and then the delicate, fading years before they met, adolescence, childhood, infancy. Maybe they stood in this tenuous, haunted place and looked out upon the vastness of their lives, their accrued wisdom, their pooled joys and disappointments and triumphs, and Ella was outside of all of this, observing from behind glass as she pushed the vacuum in haphazard lines around their coffee table, behind their sofa. Maybe all of living was taking place somewhere else, somewhere Ella wasn’t, in a skyscraper in New York, in a gallery in London, even in memories of places she had never seen and, it seemed, never would.

  Sometimes Ella tried to imagine what Bryn thought about her. The temptation, of course, was to imagine flattering doses of gratitude, but she didn’t fully permit herself that pleasure, not without tempering it. She imagined that the first thing Bryn liked about her, before they really became acquainted, was the way she threw herself into loving Jill with a reckless determination, as though there were this one thing she knew how to do well and she would do it with messy exuberance, like a stout little girl clutching her new brother a little too tightly, kissing his crumpled face resolutely: you are my brother, and while I can’t know you, screaming wet ball that you are at this moment, I will love you. I will sing to you and talk to you as if you understand, and pour you tea you won’t drink, and tuck blankets about you that you don’t want, and wipe food from your face, which will make you turn your head angrily, but it is an act of love, because to see you wet or dirty, to imagine you hungry or scared, it is unbearable to me, it makes me fierce, and I will put that sock back on your bare foot, fight all you like, but it will be done, because it’s cold, and how else can I show you I love you? She imagined that this touched Bryn in a way competent professionalism wouldn’t, this inept fumbling for a grip on the beloved, the total absorption in the task at hand, as though it mattered to Jill, and who was to say it didn’t? Perhaps in Jill’s unreachable place, she could feel the warmth even if she couldn’t understand the words.

  Yet it couldn’t go on endlessly, this arrangement, even if Bryn’s endurance were infinite, which, Ella guessed, he must increasingly suspect it wasn’t. Ella thought his fatigue must have begun to feel like a part of himself, like a physical disability that could always be counted on to complicate the tasks of daily living. But Jill was getting worse. Ella figured that at this point she probably almost never slept through the night, which would mean that Bryn remained near the surface of sleep all through the dark hours and into the haze of dawn, on edge, tensed, now dreaming, now listening, now dreaming, until morning, or until Jill got up, muttering, pacing, splashing in the toilet, removing books from the shelves to destroy, laughing mirthlessly, her reading glasses crooked and smeared, her breath like death. And the evidence that any of her circumstanc
es influenced her quality of life was increasingly scarce; it was undeniable now that living with Bryn, in the house they had bought together—sharing meals, sharing their bed (although, for many years now, just for sleep)—mattered only to Bryn. Jill would mutter or shuffle just the same somewhere else, would weep and grieve somewhere else, would clutch an inanimate object like a baby somewhere else, would, perhaps, hold another hand as willingly as Ella’s or even Bryn’s.

  An outsider might think that there was relief to be found in these thoughts, that the rewards were so scant and the demands so intense that Bryn might even be yearning, in a distraught way, for this next step. Ella knew, or at least believed, that was not the case. All that Bryn had left of Jill was her physical presence and her need. When she was no longer present and no longer needed Bryn, she would be gone. It would perhaps be like the day of the accident, Bryn’s terror that he would lose her, Bryn’s relief that she had survived, now, fifteen years later, reawakened only to be extinguished. It was like planning Jill’s death, it was like pulling the plug, the guilt was unfathomable.

  · 21 ·

  Bryn left the house quickly now when Ella arrived, the slight of this offset by how reluctantly he released Ella at the end of her shift. Ella had some sense of how harrowing the hours before her return must be because her own time with Jill had become increasingly painful. It wasn’t that the work had become much harder. She was still mostly sitting, mostly turning off the sink, battling to change soiled clothes or trim grotesque toenails, trying to prevent the destruction of stray objects—paperbacks, tubes of lotion, even table lamps, the laptop computer. But it was as if the frequency at which Jill’s despair hummed had been sped up, the atmosphere of the house charged with a frenzied anguish.