by Lynne Hinton
“You are not my friend!” Beatrice got up from the table as if she was wounded.
“Oh, come back, Bea,” Margaret called after her.
“Bea, come here!” Louise hollered into the kitchen. “I was only kidding.”
“You’re not that funny, you know,” Beatrice said as she walked to the table. She had gotten a banana from the fruit bowl.
“I know. And my hook shot is a little off, too.” Louise punched Beatrice in the arm. “Must be because I don’t have a penis.”
Margaret shook her head. “Bea, I know what you meant.”
“Thank you, Margaret.”
“And I really have thought about what it means to lose a breast. I have thought that it will make me less a woman.” She slumped a bit in her chair.
Louise folded her arms about her chest. “It’s just not so, Margaret. Being a woman isn’t about body parts. It isn’t just about science and genes and penises.” She leaned away from the table. Her voice was strong and steady. And she finally sounded ready to confront her friends.
“Then what’s it about, O wise one?” Beatrice asked as she peeled her banana, waiting to be enlightened.
“Okay, I don’t know. Or maybe I do know.” She hesitated. “Of course, it’s about what’s on the outside, our physical makeup. It does have to do with breasts and wombs and not having a penis. I don’t deny that.”
Beatrice nodded knowingly.
Louise continued. “But it’s also about giving birth and having periods and…” She paused. “It’s also about the nature of our hearts.”
Margaret and Beatrice were surprised to be hearing this from Louise.
She fidgeted with the bandage on her hand, trying to think of the right words she wanted to say. She mumbled at first and then spoke loud enough for the other women to understand her. “I think we have a greater capacity to love than men,” she said.
“What?” Beatrice asked. She was confused by what her friend was saying.
Louise shifted, placing both hands on the table. “I think women make better friends. I think we know more about love.”
Margaret sat up in her seat and considered this line of thinking. “Do you really think that, Lou?” She wanted to believe it. “I mean, do you really, actually think that?”
The mood changed, and the women became quiet.
Louise seemed a bit embarrassed that she had suddenly become so vulnerable. She simply nodded her head.
“Well, I think it’s a lovely thought,” replied Beatrice as she continued to eat the banana. “And frankly, even though I hate to admit it”—she picked up a napkin and pulled it along the edges of her lips—“I think she’s right.” She wrapped the peeling in the napkin.
“Well, it ain’t basketball!” Louise said jokingly. “But I just can’t believe that being a woman is only a physical arrangement. There’s got to be more to it than that.”
Margaret seemed satisfied that what her friend had said was true. It comforted her, pleased her, and she was glad to have spoken her fears out loud.
Louise held up her half-full glass. “Being a woman is like water,” she said, as the other women waited for her to finish.
“You can freeze it, boil it, drink it, spill it, leave it in the sun and evaporate it; but it will still be water. And being a woman is the same.” Louise took note of her wounded hand. “You can remove her body parts, take away her children, her capacity to bear children, bind her, break her, dismiss her; but it will not stop who she is.” And this she said with the greatest confidence, “We will always be women.”
Margaret smiled. And just at that moment, while three friends sat together and measured their womanness, the sky opened up and the rain fell hard.
VOLUME 1, NUMBER 6
Hope Springs Community Garden Club Newsletter
BEA’S BOTANICAL BITS
Knowing Your Parts
“Parts is parts,” I was told once by an old salesman. “Gotta have ’em working whether you’re talking about a long-legged tap dancer or a lawn mower.” Everything counts.
Plants, like us women, are made up of several parts. These parts include the root, the stem, and the leaves.
Now as I have mentioned in previous articles, soil, water, and light are all important to the health and condition of the plant. But the truth is, the plant itself holds the secret to its life. It’s got to be strong, with its parts in good condition, in order to survive and flourish. You can wine and dine and shine it, but if the parts of the plant aren’t stacked up and putting forth effort, you might as well yank it by the roots and bury it. That sucker’s already dead.
6
When Nadine confessed that the accident had been an attempt at suicide, her third, the doctor stepped away from the bed as if she were contagious and made a note on her chart that sent nurses and social workers and the chaplain in and out of her room with faces of worry and faraway gazes that seemed to Nadine to be made up of genuine sorriness.
“We’re transferring you somewhere you can get better care,” he had said. And she was moved to the psychiatric unit as soon as she was able to get up and walk to the bathroom.
She was placed in a private room on the sixth floor that was sparse of furniture and color but never devoid of light. During the day the overhead tubular bulb could not be turned off, and at night a large and bright lamp burned outside the window, which was covered with iron bars but had no curtain or blinds.
“Darkness frightens many of our patients,” a therapist had replied unapologetically when she asked about the constant light.
And even with the glaring brightness outside and above her, members of the hospital staff often came to her bedside to shine a flashlight in her eyes.
“Are you doing this to see if I’m asleep or dead?” she asked, but never received an answer. And after five weeks in the behavior modification ward, Nadine became accustomed to the light and the hourly checks, learning how to sleep in fifty-minute increments.
She attended all the groups, had individual sessions with a psychiatrist and a therapist, and watched television in the dayroom with the other patients, who were not always coherent or polite. She learned stories of violence and deaths that kept her dreams grave and horrific. She eased into the program without a lot of difficulty; but she often felt frightened at the amount of pain she encountered both within herself and outside in others.
In the thirty-five days of treatment she saw teenagers lost to anger and disillusionment, old people crazed and forgotten, and many, like herself, somewhere between youth and maturity, caught in an event or circumstance that seemed to overshadow everything else.
She heard countless stories of suicide ventures, too many accounts of rape and abuse, numerous ways to get high, and repeated patterns, like her own, from those who did not know how to move forward in the lives they had been given. Those she met lived hard and brutal lives. They were rough and spindly souls with very shallow roots.
In her stay at the special ward, she signed in only two visitors, her mother and Charlotte. When Nadine heard that Ray had given his mother-in-law the message that he would like to come and see her, she offered no reply and merely lowered her eyes away from her mother’s face and turned to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, which was blaring from across the room.
It wasn’t that she was mad at Ray or regretted that their relationship had ended. It was just that he was so physically altered by the death of their daughter, so broken by it, that she could not stand to find her face in the eyes of someone who suffered too close to the surface. It was like staring into the mouth of hell, tortured souls and grasping hands calling her down and away from any remote possibility that she had manufactured for herself that she would be okay.
She figured that Ray would like her to die, for both of them to die, but that he did not have the stomach to kill either of them, and he would simply rather live his life pushing and pulling himself through a ragged grief that cut and maimed him, a kind of slow and agonizing death that Na
dine couldn’t choose.
The last time she had seen him he tore at his temples until they bled, and when she had given him the gun to shoot her and then himself, he only dropped his face in his hands, a sign, in her mind, of his cowardice. She left him then and decided that if she was going to die, she would have to do it for herself, and if she was going to live, she would have to find some way other than the diminished one he had chosen for himself.
Nadine told the doctor about her daughter’s death and her divorce. She told the counselor about the drug use and what she had done on the three occasions of her attempts at suicide. She told her grief group and her substance abuse group that she didn’t remember anything about Brittany’s funeral but that everyone said it was lovely, and that she did not always enjoy how it felt to be drunk or high but that she preferred it to how she felt when she was sober.
It seemed to everyone assigned to Nadine Klenner’s case that she was open and honest and making relative advancement toward a more healthy means of coping with the loss of her child. She was given red checks beside her name and had moved up from step 1 to step 4, which meant she was working the hospital program and could receive more benefits. Step 5 was the highest you could go before you were discharged. And although the nurse and social worker agreed that she was ready, Nadine wasn’t sure she wanted to have her own television in her room or be released to other parts of the hospital like the solarium and the cafeteria. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of getting closer to being discharged and having to try it again on her own. She wasn’t sure she was ready for the real world or the paralyzing grief that waited for her at home. She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to leave the hospital and face again the shock of darkness.
Besides, she was satisfied with step 4, where she stayed confined to the unit, eating in the small dining room with plastic utensils and very little flavoring and watching TV with the rest of the patients. She was comfortable with the rules and predictability of the staff and their suicide checks. She was at ease with the daily schedules and the locked doors and the lack of visitors. She was completely relaxed with how things were done for the patients who had not graduated to the final level. And so, this is where she stayed right up until her last two weeks.
Other than Nadine herself, only Charlotte knew what the others did not. Nadine was not, as the nurses reported in their meetings, “well and recovering.”
She was not, as her therapist had said, “beginning to function in a normal capacity.”
She had merely learned the meaning of the title “compliant patient” and was acting it out, and it was working for everyone except her.
She knew that the staff would not see it because they were invested in her success: they needed her to get better, they needed the bed for the next mental patient. The doctor hadn’t noticed because he was busy trying to fill out paperwork and decide which insurance companies to align himself with. Her mother would not acknowledge it because she had no room left in her heart for disappointment. Only Nadine and Charlotte saw and knew it for what it was. Nadine identified it because it was her own shrunken soul. And Charlotte understood because she was clearly proficient in recognizing the fake appearance of good faith.
Nadine wrestled with her demons between the bed checks, after the beam of light shone in her eyes and before the next knock on the door. She tried to pray, without success, and asked for God to kill her himself, so that she might at least be saved from that curse and judgment. She pleaded for death in the lighted darkness, and only when the sun rose did she wipe the tears from her eyes, repeat the mantras of healthy grief that everyone wanted to hear, and pretend that she was heading up and away from her sadness.
Charlotte saw it right away, during the first visit, and couldn’t decide how it might best be said and whether she should say it to a staff member or just save it for Nadine. She wasn’t sure how to broach the subject with anyone. She was uncomfortable in the setting anyway. So she did not know whether she would be able to talk coherently about what she had observed with anybody who worked there.
The minister visited Nadine on Thursdays, since most of her office work was completed by then and her sermon was done. It did not interfere with Bible Study or the afternoon youth program. There were no regularly scheduled committee meetings in the evening, so she had time to unwind when she returned.
She was uncomfortable when she went to the psychiatric unit because she did not like the ward and its prisonlike accommodations. When she visited Nadine she had to leave her purse with the charge nurse, sign in at two separate desks after displaying her photo identification, and walk through three secured doors that buzzed when a staff member read her paperwork and decided she was allowed to enter.
The entire process to visit her parishioner was unnerving, and usually Charlotte asked to talk with Nadine in her hospital room rather than in the dayroom, because the other conversations and the television noise just seemed more than she could stand. Nadine didn’t care one way or the other and would lead her pastor down the hall and into her room, slumped and slow.
This particular week Charlotte came early because Margaret was going in for her surgery the following day, and the Cookbook Committee was planning a special dinner in her honor. Charlotte wanted to get home in time.
It was rainy and windy, an unseasonably cold day for the mild climate of North Carolina, and Charlotte had not dressed appropriately. The weather had changed quickly and the pastor had not prepared herself for the sudden chill. She shivered, sliding her hands up and down her arms as she followed Nadine to her room.
“Cold outside?” the patient asked.
“Yep. Wet, you know, like it was already Halloween or November.”
Nadine pushed open the door to her room and they both walked in.
“Here, use this blanket,” Nadine said as she yanked the cover off the bed and threw it to Charlotte.
Charlotte took it and wrapped it around herself while Nadine jumped on the bed and leaned against the wall behind her. Charlotte pulled the chair away from the desk and turned it toward Nadine; then she sat in it.
“You’re not cold?” she asked as she gathered the blanket around her.
Nadine shook her head and peered beyond Charlotte out the door at another patient walking by.
“Grandma, say a prayer for me.”
The old woman made a huffing noise and then replied, “You ought to pray your own self and you ought to quit smoking. Goin’ kill you and it makes your hair stink.” She shuffled past the room.
“That’s Grandma. She thinks she’s at a church.” Nadine spoke quietly. “And she’s got a thing about everybody smoking.”
Charlotte turned and watched as the old woman moved away from the door. She was small, wiry, and sharp; and she pushed her walker in front of her, paused, then pushed on toward the end of the hall. She was humming a song that Charlotte remembered from her early days in church, an old spiritual, “Swing Low” or maybe “Jacob’s Ladder.” Charlotte wasn’t sure. She turned to face Nadine.
“So, what’s this week been like?” Her tone was light, friendly. It was her third time in the hospital room; and it was as she remembered and as Nadine’s mother had reported, dismal and empty. The pastor didn’t understand why they couldn’t at least paint the walls a more cheerful color or put a wallpaper border around the top. It seemed so sterile and unfeeling, so devoid of any possibility of healing.
“Well, we still haven’t done any leather crafts, if that’s what you’re asking.” Nadine began to pick at her nails.
Charlotte teased, “Shoot, I was sort of hoping for a new wallet.”
Nadine smiled. She liked Charlotte, always had. “I’m doing okay,” she responded as if somebody else had asked, and Charlotte again recognized the untruth.
“I forgot to ask you last time about what happened when you told your doctor. Your mom said he sort of freaked.” Charlotte stretched her legs out in front of her. She tried to get comfortable. “What was that about?”
> Nadine shrugged. “He was out the door before he even finished examining me. I swear you’d have thought I yelled out the word malpractice!” She shook her head.
“But it’s all right. I knew this is where I needed to be anyway.” She pulled one of her legs across the other.
“It took a lot of courage to tell him, Nadine.” Charlotte met her eyes. Then Nadine turned away.
“You know, I think you’d like my psychiatrist.” Nadine changed the subject, and Charlotte could tell she was only trying to keep the conversation at a particularly superficial depth.
“Yeah?” Charlotte asked, playing along.
“Yeah, he’s cute, wears clogs.” Nadine lifted her chin and tried to sound interested. “Single too, I think.”
“Yeah? What makes you think that?” Charlotte was curious about this assessment.
Nadine slid her right hand over her left fourth finger. “No ring,” she answered.
“Well, that doesn’t mean he’s not married,” Charlotte responded.
“Yep, but he flirts a lot with the nurses,” Nadine replied.
“Well, that certainly doesn’t tell us for sure if he’s single.” Charlotte tucked the blanket under her legs. “Married people do flirt, I hear.”
“Has a married man ever flirted with you?” Nadine asked innocently.
Charlotte narrowed her eyes. “I wasn’t speaking from personal experience.”
Nadine blurted out the next question quickly. “When’s the last time you went on a date?” She knew lots of people in the church had wondered, but she figured no one had ever asked the pastor.
“Lord, Nadine, I don’t know.” Charlotte considered the question. “I guess a couple of years ago. I went to a wedding with another preacher. We drove together and had dinner afterward, so I guess that would count as a date.”
“You like him?” Nadine threw her arms behind her head and waited for the response. She liked being able to ask the questions.
“Not really,” Charlotte answered. “Preachers, I don’t know. I don’t think I’d want to be with a preacher.”