I knew everyone was looking, I just knew it. But there was one person not looking, I knew, ’cause I saw him out of the corner of my eye looking down, looking to his right, not over here to his left, arms folded, legs crossed way out in front of him. When I had to leave the classroom a second time, he moved his legs back so I wouldn’t trip over them. But he never looked up.
I walked down the hall. I was wearing Glinda’s alligator pants, which I had mended. I sat on a bench in the cafeteria by myself. Of course, my coughing had stopped immediately, once again.
Yale might look like Disneyland, but Oshkosh North looked a zoo. White cages, monkey-bar picnic tables, plastic trays. I bet they had nice dishes to eat out of at Yale. I bet they were fine china, stuff my mother wouldn’t let us eat off.
I didn’t know why we had fine china. If I had thought of it while drunk, I probably would have hurled those fine china plates across the kitchen one by one, along with the dainty little teacups, and the beautiful tiles she had on the walls in the blue dining room, with little pictures of windmills and maidens done in blue paint.
There was a question forming in my brain. Somewhere down near the reptilian base. It tickled. It reached up and clawed me from time to time. I couldn’t quite articulate it.
That night, an hour past midnight, it sank its claws in deep and refused to let go. “Mom!” I screamed. I felt like I was suffocating. I thought someone was trying to kill me. I screamed her name at the top of my lungs. “Mom!”
How did she hear me through the godless, spinning, gold living room, around the corner into the red hallway and up the red staircase, up to the door of the bathroom where the tub and shower was, left into her blue and white bedroom where the passageways behind the walls led? My back bedroom door wasn’t open, out into the darkness of the backyard.
The infinite backyard. You could wander way out into the night. You could wander barefoot, carrying an empty champagne bottle, and feel the wet grass between your toes. You could wander in circles under the bushes, the lilac bushes. Then you could turn around and take another drink from the empty bottle and wander out back behind the neighbor’s garage. There you could pass out completely, until you woke up kissing some nameless face.
16
My dad walked into the kitchen. “There is a job opening at the Sunnyside Retirement home,” he said.
I had been sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. I set the cup down on the table, leaned my chin on my hand, and rested my elbow on the rippled glass. Outside, the leaves were still green. They had not begun to turn colors yet.
“In order to apply, you need to call, or go down there and talk to a woman named Francine. It is located on Bowen Street. Here is the address.” He handed me a piece of paper. I didn’t take it, so he set it down on the table. “You be sure and follow up on this.”
“Yeah. I will, Dad,” I said, and lit a cigarette. I smoked and drank coffee. I liked to let the ash on the end of the cigarette grow long. I liked to see how long it would become before falling off from its own weight.
My dad went downstairs to his office. He had a desk at the bottom of the stairs that was always covered with papers to grade.
I did nothing to follow up on the job. I never picked up the piece of paper. A few days later, however, he brought it up again. This time he approached me in the living room. I was alone watching TV and he came in and said, “I’ve been to the Sunnyside Retirement Home.”
“What?” I said.
He turned down the TV.
“Hey, I was watching that!” I said. “That’s the Andy Griffith Show. I love that show!”
He turned it back up again. “I went to talk to them about the job.”
I ignored him and watched the show.
“They said you could come down there and apply any time. They have a job waiting for you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
He stood there a minute. I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He wore a tie and short-sleeve shirt with light-tan stripes, sort of crisscrossed. He had glasses and pens in his shirt pocket. He only had a shirt pocket on one side of the shirt. He usually didn’t wear his suit coat with it, but when he went to office he usually put that on, on his way out the door. “Do you want to sit down and watch the show with me?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, and sat down in the big, green easy chair. I remembered the day my grandmother had bought it for him. I remembered her saying to my mother, “He needs an easy chair. I’ll get him a La-Z-Boy.” I remembered thinking at the time that the last thing my dad was, was lazy. What on earth did he need a La-Z-Boy for? And this was one of the few times I ever saw him use it. To watch the Andy Griffith Show or M.A.S.H. with me. He never watched TV for himself. Usually he was reading or working, and the books he was reading weren’t easy books. They were history texts or philosophical treatises or the college papers he had to grade.
When the show was over, Dad asked me if I would come in the car with him and go down to the Sunnyside Retirement Home.
“Okay, I guess I’ll go with you.”
I wasn’t sure why I said that. I didn’t want to go, but didn’t have anything else to do, and he had watched the show with me.
We rode in his car, the one I was almost never allowed to drive, the one he’d named Mitsy.
I went into the flat building with him and down the hall. I had a sense of unreality. I wasn’t really stoned, although I was always a little stoned; I just didn’t know why I was there. Francine, a woman who wore too much hairspray, greeted me and invited me into her my office. My dad waited in the hall.
She had me fill out the job application. It was funny. The minute I started filling it out, I suddenly wanted the job. But I hadn’t cared if I was given the job before I started filling out that paperwork.
Francine looked at the paperwork and started asking me questions. I was polite in my responses, answered her questions, and was informed that I’d start next week. She asked me what size I wore, handed me a pink, polyester uniform, and told me that I needed to buy some white nursing shoes.
“Make sure they’re comfortable. You’ll be on your feet a lot.”
With that, she opened the door for me. I walked out. My dad was waiting for me. He had the half-smile he sometimes wore.
We drove home. I started work the following Monday. My work day went from after school till 9:00 in the evening. It never occurred to me to quit, or that it interfered with my party lifestyle.
I had been working for several weeks when I received a letter from Ziggy. It said, “I can’t believe you took on a job as a nurse’s aide. That is a difficult job. And you didn’t take it and quit, like my mom said you would. You actually stuck it out. I’m impressed.”
I thought about what he’d said. I guessed it was a hard job. I’d never thought about it before.
Sure, at the time, some things happened that I did think about. We had to change colostomy bags, diapers, and clean up areas of the body I would have preferred not to see. We had to clean around feeding tubes inserted into the stomach, and open cancerous holes. Certainly it was gross, but whenever I worked on the patients, I was thinking of the person. I usually tried to talk to them while I dressed their wounds or cleaned them. The most difficult patients were the ones who were comatose.
I liked to hear their stories. I really did. They told me about their lives. They had such interesting stories that I would become caught up, and forget about the gruesome sores. Whenever I could, I looked in their eyes and not at their wounds.
It grew to where I would find myself thinking about their stories at home. I would tell my mom about the people. I would sit at the kitchen table, or walk around it while she was cooking, and tell her. “And then there is this woman named Rosie. She is adorable. You should see her. She is tiny. And she has this husband who is at least twice her size. How do you suppose they got together? Don’t you ever wonder about that?”
“I suppose so,” Mom said, and stirred the potatoes with an amused
smile. She was like me—or I should say, I was like her. She loved to people-watch.
“I always wonder that,” I said, “when I see a tall person with a short one.”
“Like your dad and me,” said Mom. “Only I’m the tall one.”
“I know,” I said, and laughed.
“I’m a whole head taller than your dad.”
“It’s pretty strange. And I always wonder how you two got together. Why you would date a man much shorter than you.”
We had the conversation we always had about how they met in Kansas. She had been a tall girl of seventeen who ran around barefoot, and he had been on leave during the war and hadn’t been able to take his eyes off her.
I never had much homework—or if I did, I didn’t bother with it. The days were growing shorter, the leaves were falling off the trees, and the first snow was just around the corner. Mostly, I worked and went home, and saw less of my friends. Usually the only time I saw them was at school. I opened a savings account and began saving money. I didn’t know what I was saving the money for, but I knew it was a good idea to save money. I had close to $300 by the time the first freeze came along, and when the snow started falling in earnest. By the time Oshkosh became like a Christmas card, I was fully used to my job at Sunnyside Retirement home. Soon Christmas would arrive.
All Krishna and Gay and I could talk about was that soon Ziggy would be home for the holidays.
17
We had been talking about it, Ziggy coming home for Christmas. We had gone down to Satori Imports to buy him a present.
“Look at this one,” said Krishna, her sparkly eyes lit up.
We had been browsing in the back room, through pot paraphernalia. The room was hidden behind a curtain made of beads. We had been in this room many times before, for pipes and rolling papers. We were regulars at Satori Imports.
“That’s perfect,” I said. I held it up to the light. The light reflected all sorts of colors in the crystal ball held in the dragon’s claws. It was a dragon bong, and it was perfect because Ziggy and his dad were always playing Dungeons and Dragons.
We wrapped it. It wasn’t like us to wrap presents, or buy presents, but the excitement of having Ziggy home for Christmas had overtaken us. We spent lots of time up in Krishna’s room reading his letters to each other. Since he had left, we had lost interest in a lot of parties. We would still go, of course, but it wasn’t the same. Raj had left also, but he was around a lot more than Ziggy, since he went to school in Milwaukee. He was usually home on weekends. In fact, he was there that day. We showed him the bong.
“Do you think he will like it?” we asked.
Raj picked it up and turned it around in his hand a few times, with some amused curiosity. “So you guys actually get smoke out of this thing? How exactly does it work?”
“You have to put water in it. See?” Krishna showed him the water container inside the dragon. “It’s a water pipe.”
“What do you need the water for?” Raj asked skeptically.
“It makes the smoke more potent in your lungs,” said Krishna.
I wasn’t sure she knew what she was talking about. I’d always wondered that myself. I had my own bong at home and used it religiously. My mom had found it one time and was completely horrified, and I’d known she knew it was for drugs. She’d tried to get rid of it but thankfully, I was there, and snatched it out of her hands, telling her it was none of her business, that it was not mine and that she better not mess with it.
“You could get me in big trouble with people who would kill me!” I’d shouted at her. “It’s not mine, and if anything happened to it, something would happen to me.”
I’d only half-wondered if she would believe such an absurdity. I had been able to believe it myself as I’d stood there contemplating it. Sure. There were drug dealers who killed people, who killed customers who didn’t pay.
Probably not in Oshkosh, but the idea was believable. I’d had no idea if she actually bought it, because she’d scoffed, walked out of my room, and said, “The only person you’re fooling is yourself.”
That was another thing, about drug dealers. Since Ziggy had left, we’d had to scrounge to find them. We’d had to make new friends, none of them as interesting as he was. We met this one guy who had a garage apartment and a wife and baby. Somehow Krishna had found him and we went there about once a week. He was friendly and all. His wife became angry every time we went over there to buy pot, but that certainly didn’t stop us.
I had money to buy pot, and that was a nice feeling. I didn’t constantly have to con my dad out of it. He had always bought my stories too. I couldn’t believe some of the ridiculous things he’d bought. For example, one time I had needed $500. I can’t remember what it was for, because we never bought that much dope at a time, but for some reason I’d really needed it. It could have been these leather pants I’d wanted. Anyway, when he’d asked me what it was for, I’d told him it was for school clothes. I’d then asked Krishna if I could borrow some clothes to show him when he checked out if my story was true, but he never did. I’d shrugged and given the clothes back to her after a few days.
Around this time, Gay started needing money too. She didn’t have a job like I did, but was pretty resourceful. You see, I had these records. I must have had 300 record albums, almost as many as Raj, but not quite. But they were always scattered.
“How about you pay me twenty dollars to sort and categorize your records for you?” Gay asked. I was sitting cross-legged on the floor of my living room, completely frazzled, unable to find my copy of Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.
I was a bit confused. She had never said anything like that before.
“Okay,” I said, and sat on my gold, scratchy couch with my back to the TV, watching her work.
We passed the bong back and forth, taking hits. When she came across Teenage Kicks, she showed it to me with a big, happy smile and we played it right away. A week later, my records were disorganized again and I thought she might be angry, but she wasn’t. She quickly offered to sort them again for another $20, and we were both happy. I could find my records and she had a steady, if small, income.
18
There was a woman there at the Sunnyside Retirement Home whom I liked. No, it’s misleading to say it that way. I liked a lot of the people, but I liked this woman in particular. Her name was Dorothy.
What I liked about her was her regality. She was young in comparison to the others. She didn’t like to share the way many of them did. Her life was a private affair, and she rarely spoke about who she had been before she’d been admitted to the Sunnyside Retirement home.
That was unusual. Most of them loved to talk about who they had been. I didn’t ask prying questions; I liked to let them tell me about themselves naturally. Or, I should say, I didn’t think about it that way. It was just that while I was in the process of cleaning them or fluffing their pillows, they would begin talking and I would listen. Then something they would tell me would spark a question. But it wasn’t that way with Dorothy.
Dorothy loved to read. She read all the time. I liked that about her. When I thought about whom I wanted to be when I was old and decrepit like she was, I knew I wanted to be someone who read all the time.
I didn’t think of her as old and decrepit. I thought of her as a queen sitting on her throne, although she was in her dressing gown in a bed with hospital-bed lights. Those rooms were somewhere between a hospital and a frilly, old-person’s room.
The residents always tried to make the rooms homes. They had their crocheted blankets and their personal pictures. Their families would visit and bring them things from home to make them feel comfort and love even though they were here and essentially had been abandoned by their loved ones.
Their families couldn’t take care of them anymore. It had become too difficult.
I fluffed Dorothy’s pillow. She thanked me and asked me to turn on her reading light.
I had a few more beds to check before
the end of my shift. I went next door to one of the less-responsive patients. She was asleep, so I went in to turn off her main light and pull up her guardrails. Then Krishna walked in the room.
I didn’t have a clue how she came into the nursing home. She was drunk off her ass. She stood giggling in the doorway, wearing some kind of black leather getup and gold-and-orange glitter over her eyelids and catlike up her temples. She opened the patient’s unopened gift of Christmas cookies and started eating one.
“Krishna! What are you doing? Put that back!”
“But I took a bite out already; I can’t put it back!”
“Krishna!”
“Oh man, these are delicious!” She reached for another one. They were little Christmas trees with green and red sprinkles.
“Oh my gosh.” I checked the lady in bed. She looked like she might be asleep. I took Krishna out into the hall. She was giggling and unsteady on her feet.
“Gay’s out in the car,” she said.
“Do you have any idea how loud you’re talking?”
“You need to come to this party!”
“I’m working.”
“No, it’s great! It’s Ames’s friend’s party,” she said, as if that would make a difference.
“I’m working.”
My supervisor, Francine, leaned her head in the room. “Are you finished with your rounds?”
This was her way of expressing disapproval.
“Almost,” I said.
“Who are you here to visit?” Francine asked Krishna.
“How do you make your hair do that?” Krishna asked Francine, really loudly.
“This isn’t visitor hours,” said Francine
“Your hair stays like that when you shake your head. It’s great,” said Krishna.
Thin Ice (The Oshkosh Trilogy) Page 8