At the Far End of Nowhere

by Christine Davis Merriman

  When Stephanie returns, we move on to the women’s section. We have to lift a short but amazingly heavy old lady nicknamed Turtle onto a potty chair beside her bed. Turtle’s gray hair is clipped very short, and with her false teeth removed for the night, she strongly resembles a snapping turtle. When asleep, Turtle snores, and the air escaping her puckered lips makes a popping noise. Turtle shares a room with three other old ladies, one of whom is called Squirrel.

  Squirrel likes her hospital bed cranked up to its most elevated position. There she perches, chattering to herself as she rummages through crumpled bits of paper and colored cellophane candy wrappers that she hoards in the folds of her sheets and blanket. When the volume of Turtle’s popping and Squirrel’s chattering gets too loud, it wakes the other two ladies in the room, who begin to moan in unison like a weird Greek chorus.

  Over the first week, the nursing supervisor teaches Stephanie and me how to take a patient’s pulse and blood pressure. She teaches us how to change a bedridden patient’s soiled bed linens while the patient’s still in the bed—roll the patient onto her side; roll up the soiled sheet behind her; unroll and spread a fresh sheet halfway across the cleared section of the bed; lift and roll the patient over the soiled roll onto her other side and onto the clean sheet; finish rolling the soiled linen and take it off the bed; unroll the fresh sheet the rest of the way across the bed; roll the patient once more, so that she’s lying flat on her back. Easy enough when the nurse is helping us do it. But when the nurse is called away and Stephanie and I are left to do the same thing for the next patient, we wind up rolling this poor patient, a Mrs. Pettipoint, back and forth more than we should, getting her catty-cornered and nearly off the bed a few times before we finally get it right.

  We apologize to Mrs. P., but she only smiles sweetly and says, “It’s nice to spend time with you girls. My children never come to visit me.”

  Stephanie resigns after the first week.

  I arrange to work on weekends, so I have two nights off in the middle of the week. On those two evenings, I go to modeling classes. Now I regret dropping out and forfeiting my college scholarships. I’m trying to save my paychecks and put them toward college tuition for the coming fall semester, but right away, I have to lay out money to buy a professional makeup kit, complete with false eyelashes. Spence keeps forking out money for me. He doesn’t seem to mind paying for me, but I feel guilty about it. I really do want to be independent someday.

  “I’m going to get my college degree someday,” I keep saying. “Then I’ll pay you back, Spence. I promise.”

  Beautiful young models instruct aspiring student models like me about skin care, nutrition, the tricks of applying professional makeup, how to do walks and turns on a runway, how to diet, how to dress, and which kinds of bras and girdles to put on underneath it all. The instructors are very tall and very thin.

  All the modeling students are given a diet plan, which I take very seriously—too seriously. I make a goal in my head to get rid of all my fat and become model-thin. I carry a pocket-size notebook replete with charts that show me how to calculate calories and serving portions for everything I eat. I compete with myself to take in fewer and fewer calories each day. I learn to fill up on things like quarts of plain nonfat yogurt, piles of steamed cauliflower, a hard-boiled egg.

  My skin begins to dry out. My legs start to show indentations around the insides of the knees where fat used to be. Watching the fat melt away makes me feel good. I’m achieving the goal in my head. I’m making progress! I’m obeying the strict rules I’ve set for myself. For now, I’m safe.

  Every day, I measure my waist with Jimmie’s old yellow cloth tape measure. I check my weight on the scales several times a day. I buy myself a new white nurse’s aide dress at Ward’s. I’m so proud of myself. I’ve gone from a size eleven down to a size seven. I’ve lost twenty pounds, and still counting!

  In June 1972, Hurricane Agnes wreaks havoc from Maryland through New York State, inundating the Mid-Atlantic Region with nearly ten inches of rain. In Maryland, Agnes takes nineteen lives—among those, the father of a girl who graduated from my high school a year ahead of me. Her father drowns trying to drive through the old underpass on York Road in Cockeysville. The local roads are flooded. My supervisor at the nursing home advises me to stay at home until the waters recede.

  I spend the flood days at home with Daddy, surrounded by dark storms. I run around the house, setting out pans and buckets to catch rainwater as it seeps through seams in the ceiling, drips down walls, and leaves ugly stains on the wallpaper. Daddy frets that water dripping down through the roof into his woodshop will rust his precious machinery. He wears himself out drying off, oiling, and buffing the woodworking lathe, the table saw, the jigsaw, the shaper, the grinders.

  In the evenings, Daddy and I retreat to the dining/living room and pass the time with storytelling. I listen to Daddy’s stories about his younger brother, Francis, and about how Daddy saved his brother’s life.

  “I was the next youngest of eight children,” says Daddy. “Francis was the only one younger. Soon as he was born, my mammy told me I should be my brother’s keeper, so I always tried to look after him. Francis was always the quiet one.”

  Daddy keeps a picture of Francis in an oak frame on the table beside his armchair. Francis looks back at us with gentle gray eyes behind gold-framed glasses. His smile is thin and fragile.

  “I took Francis under my wing and taught him all I knew about watchmaking. You probably don’t remember your Uncle Francis. You were just about a year old when he died. He and I were the only two left, after my brothers Clement and Bradley died out at the old Eudowood Sanatorium. They both got tuberculosis working as shirt pressers at the Empire Steam Laundry on Fayette and Front Streets. They worked hour after hour in a fumy closed room, using gas irons that leaked.”

  Sometimes, this story, like so many others, changes with the telling, and Daddy takes me down a different rabbit hole, in which these brothers—or at least one of them—developed TB after being exposed to poison gas while fighting on the Western Front in World War I.

  “My mammy died when she was eighty-six. I remember she had cooked supper and washed up the dishes, like always. Then, after she’d been sitting a while doing her mending, she looked over at me, and said, ‘Well, Stouten, I guess my little day’s work is done,’ and went up to bed. She died in her sleep that night.”

  “I think that’s how I’d like to go,” I say. “Nice and peaceful.”

  “Well, let’s hope you’ve got a long ways to go yet,” Daddy says, and continues his story.

  “So, me and Francis, just the two of us, we set up a watch repair shop at the front of our old row house at 629 Franklintown Road. We each had our own watchmaker’s bench, facing opposite walls. We sat with our backs to one another. Each bench was equipped with its own lathe, its own glass alcohol burner, and a container of benzene solution for cleaning watches. We bent down close over our work, each of us wearing a loupe screwed into his eye.

  “Well, one gray day in autumn, Francis knocked over his alcohol lamp. The flame followed the trail of spilled alcohol, leapt up onto the cuff of Francis’s work coveralls, and raced up the long gray sleeve. I heard the lamp fall, and turned around just in time to see my brother go up in waves of flame.

  “I lunged over to Francis, grabbed the container of benzene, and moved it away before it could combust. Then I ran to the hall coatrack, seized my own heavy wool overcoat, pushed Francis to the floor, rolled him in the overcoat, and smothered the flame. Smoke and the smell of singed cloth hung in the air, but Francis was okay, with only minor burns up his right arm.

  “That time, I was able to save my brother’s life.”

  Daddy pauses in his storytelling to stare out at sheets of rain coursing down the front windows. Then he resumes. “But there came a time I couldn’t save him. He got so he couldn’t walk right. Didn’t know what was wrong. Had trouble stepping down off curbs. Looked like he was drunk
. Came to find out he had a brain tumor. Died on the operating table.”

  After the flood, I go back to work at Bonnie Blink. All summer, I work the graveyard shift. It’s weird driving home in the morning when most everyone else is driving in the opposite direction to go to work. It’s also hard to sleep in the daytime. Even though I pull down all the paper shades in the bedroom, sunlight seeps in below them. My sleep is sporadic. Vague, unsettling dreams are interrupted by traffic, lawn mowers, and the shouts of kids from a nearby swimming pool.

  My supervisor moves me to the independent-living wing where residents are still ambulatory. Here, there’s not much to do during the night except give out a placebo—a sugar pill—to one woman if she rings her bell, and make one round toward morning to collect and clean potty chairs that residents set outside their doors at night.

  Mrs. Mott, the old woman who gets the sugar pill, rings for it at least once every night. Her room is at the very end of the hall, a long walk from the nurse’s station. Each time she rings, I make the long journey, carrying a paper cup containing one white sugar pill.

  “Did you bring my calming pill, sweetie?” Mrs. Mott resembles so many of the residents here. Old age has shriveled her stature, sagged her skin, melted her features, distorted her voice, blurred her vision, stolen her teeth, and confiscated most of her hair. She is barely distinguishable as a woman, or even as a human being. Like the Saggy Baggy Elephant, her skin sags everywhere that skin can sag—under the eyes, at the neck, under the arms, at the ankles. Her nightgown covers amorphous bulges. Age has turned her into a blob of unrefined flesh.

  Every night, Mrs. Mott and I go through the same routine. First, she examines the pill with a magnifying glass. “Are you sure this is my calming pill, sweetie?”

  “This is your pill, Mrs. Mott.”

  “Well, all right. If you say so.” Her hand trembles so much, I have to pour the water for her from the bedside carafe and support her wrist as she lifts the water glass to her mouth.

  “My husband was a Mason, you know.”

  “Yes. That’s what you told me.”

  “Name was Charlie. I sure do miss my Charlie. We were together for nearly fifty years. That’s why it’s so hard for me to stay calm at night. He was a lovely man.”

  “Good night, Mrs. Mott. Sleep well,” I say.

  Each night, as I reach for the wall switch to turn out Mrs. Mott’s light, I pause to look at the photograph on her dresser—a beautiful and radiantly smiling young woman—a dead ringer for Rita Hayworth in her prime.

  Finally, I ask Mrs. Mott. “Who is this beautiful woman? Is this your daughter?”

  “That was me,” Mrs. Mott says. “Who took my face?”

  That wing is kind of spooky at night when I’m sitting by myself at the nurse’s station, staring down the long shadowy hall. Occasionally, a resident will awaken in the middle of the night and come wandering toward me, restless or disoriented. One old fellow gets up routinely at about three every morning, shuffles down to the nurse’s station, pulls up a chair, and does a crossword puzzle. I try to chat with him, but he’s extremely hard of hearing, worse than Daddy.

  One night, I hear a helicopter hovering over the grounds; through the windows I can see its searchlight sweeping across the lawn. A guard comes by with a flashlight to alert me that the police are searching outside for an escaped prisoner.

  And one morning, not long before I go off duty, there’s a kerfuffle down the hall in Room 16, when the nursing supervisor tries to give old Mrs. Foster an enema. The old lady goes berserk and tries to assault the nurse with a butter knife purloined from the dining hall. I see orderlies called in. A wild-eyed Mrs. Foster is put in a straitjacket and hauled off to Sheppard Pratt—and not for the first time, I’m told.

  Another night, I’m told the resident of Room 9 has been moved to an intensive care unit. Passing the foot of her bed, I can see her lying flat on a narrow bed, her massive form rising and falling heavily under an oxygen tent. When I arrive the next night, I’m told she will probably pass tonight, and sure enough, by morning, she is gone.

  Every morning at about 5:30, I make my potty chair rounds. Wheeling a clanking metal handcart, I pick up the filled potties residents leave outside their doors during the night. I clean them in the bathroom and deliver them back to the appropriate room no later than 6:45 A.M. As I set each clean potty down, I rap on the resident’s door, then move on down the hallway. Each potty is labeled with the resident’s last name. I’m careful to return the correct potty to its owner. I’ve been told the residents make quite a fuss if their potties get mixed up.

  The little lady in Room 11, I’m told, never speaks to anyone. Apparently, she has no visitors, no family. Her name is Miss Andersen. She is tiny and birdlike in her movements, always quick to come to her door when I rap on it. Each morning, she smiles and bobs her head in appreciation. On my last morning at work before starting back at school, when Miss Andersen comes to grab her potty, she smiles, places something in my hand, darts back inside, and quickly shuts the door.

  She’s given me a hand-embroidered lace handkerchief. Nestled inside the hankie is a tarnished silver pin. I will treasure it.

  Modeling school graduation is marked by a fashion show for our parents and a photo shoot with a professional photographer. I model a hot pink boiled wool sleeveless sheath dress—a hand-me-down from Paloma’s older sister, Phoebe—and a floor-length satin gown the color of black cherries I found packed away in my mother’s hope chest. Daddy tells me he bought it for Jimmie for their honeymoon. Nobody in my family comes to see me in the fashion show, but I’m okay smiling and posing for the other girls’ parents in the audience. The photographer puts together a good portfolio for me, wishes me luck, and says he’s enjoyed working with me.

  I have a final consultation with the fashion school director. She tells me I should have my nails done professionally, and suggests I have red highlights put in my hair.

  I keep working at Bonnie Blink until the end of summer. One night, hunger pangs get the best of me. I go off my model’s diet and binge on ice cream in the nursing home’s kitchen. When I go home, I eat half a loaf of bread, then try to make myself throw it up.

  It’s then I realize it’s time to go back to college. My body is starving, and so is my mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  BIDING TIME

  IN the fall of 1972, I go back to college part-time in the evenings. I’m trying to complete two majors: French and English.

  This year, a little before Halloween, I decide to take on another job. I go through the classified ads in the Sunpapers and find that Hutzler’s, Baltimore’s iconic department store, is taking on additional staff for the upcoming holidays. I apply for a part-time job as a salesgirl at their Towson store. I am able to schedule my work hours for the evenings I’m not taking classes. This should work out; I can fix supper for Spence and Daddy right before I leave, and Spence will be home with Daddy while I’m away in the evenings.

  Hutzler’s is a high-end Baltimore clothing store, one of the three H’s—Hutzler’s, Hecht’s, and Hochschild’s. My family always shops for clothes at five-and-dimes like Woolworth’s or Kresge’s or at lower-end department stores like Montgomery Ward. In fact, before getting this job at Hutzler’s, the only time I ever stepped inside one of their stores was the summer when I was fourteen and Paloma and her mom took me shopping for a new school dress at Hutzler’s downtown.

  After my initial training sessions at Hutzler’s Towson, I’m assigned to the handbags and music box department, a square space enclosed by four counters on the first floor. My supervisor is a veteran saleslady, a matronly woman who wears a tasteful skirt and sweater set and peers out at me over half-glasses attached to a jeweled lanyard.

  Under her watchful eye, I greet customers who come to my counter, show them the merchandise they’re interested in, and pull down sumptuous leather handbags from display racks or gingerly remove delicate music boxes from glass cases beneath the counters.
If I make a sale, I fill out a sales slip and its carbons in a small notepad, ring up the sale on the cash register, and put the item into a Hutzler’s bag of the appropriate size.

  For me, the hardest part of the job happens one evening when a customer asks me to put her purchase in a gift box. As I attempt to unfold the cardboard box and awkwardly begin to line it with tissue paper, the woman becomes increasingly impatient, glares at me, and finally yells, “Stop! Stop!” Displaying great frustration, she grabs the box away from me, shouting, “Here, let me do that.”

  With a self-satisfied flourish, she completes what should have been my task, gives the more experienced saleslady a knowing look, and exits, bearing her package with stiff-backed pride out to the parking lot.

  I feel pretty inept as a salesgirl, so I’m not surprised when I’m laid off before the end of the holiday season. I am called back for one day to help with inventory, and wind up spending my day in a large supply closet, clipboard in hand, poking through shelves of miscellaneous merchandise and recording the stock on hand. I am surprised to learn that Hutzler’s stocks toilet paper. Tallying roll after roll of bathroom tissue and other items seems to reactivate my earlier struggles with counting. I find myself counting and recounting each item multiple times to assure myself that I’m entering the correct numbers on the tally sheet.

  Daddy’s prostate trouble is getting worse. He gets up more and more frequently at night to pee. The urine doesn’t want to come out, and when it does, it stings.

  Rather than see a doctor, Daddy submits himself to all kinds of home remedies. He reads somewhere that elevating the bottom of your bed can reduce the urge to go at night. Using two paint buckets, he props up the foot of his bed.