Walk It Off

by Ruth Marshall

  “She understands everything. She’ll talk when she’s ready.”

  The day my grandmother presented her bribe, I promptly left my room where my new pair of underwear lay fanned across my bedspread like a cotton gusset bouquet. I went straight to my mother.

  “Take these diapers off. Now.” I was ready to talk.

  After my family meeting that day at Lyndhurst, I felt as fierce and determined as my two-year-old self. From then on, at the slightest flurry of nerve activity, I wheeled myself to the washroom. I would transfer myself to the toilet. Then I would wait, and wait, and wait. It’s fine, I told myself. No rush. You can sit here all day. Even though I was lucky enough to be in a private room, the word private was open for interpretation. I always slid the bathroom door shut, but that didn’t mean the nurses wouldn’t walk in unannounced. The first time this happened I screamed, “Hey!”

  The nurse laughed. “Oh, you’re shy?”

  “Not really,” I said. “Just kind of don’t want company in the bathroom.”

  She hooted, then turned on the tap. “Listen to the sound of the water and meditate.”

  Another nurse advised me to “get angry” in order to get things moving. Yet another suggested that I tap my stomach to wake my sleeping bladder. I tried everything they said. My attempts were often frustrating, tear-inducing, fruitless, until I started to listen more carefully to the new signals my nerves were sending, and in turn my body started to respond. It was like overhearing a secret and then acting on the information before someone—or something, like my IC—did it first. I praised my bladder as though it were my child. Good bladder. You’ve got this! I hugged my belly and whispered to it in a quiet voice. Eventually, the number of times I had to return to my room for an IC was outnumbered by the legitimate bathroom trips I initiated on my own. The nurses were cautiously encouraging; I could tell they didn’t want me to get ahead of myself. Every day it was milligram this and milliliter that. Although I still cooked based on the imperial system, and calculated my height in feet and inches and my weight in pounds, it was important for me to nail the metric system down in order to understand what dosage of which drug I was taking and, of even greater importance, how much I had to pee to keep that snake-like tube away from my hoo-ha.

  It turns out the answer lay not in how much I peed, but in how much I didn’t.

  “Talk to me like I’m a child,” I said to Juliette, my rock ’n’ roll French nurse. “Exactly what are you measuring?”

  “No matter ’ow much you pee, there is always some urine that remains in your bladder, oui? There is both an acceptable and an unacceptable amount.”

  “Which is?”

  “If I do a bladder scan after you pee and there is less than one hundred mils remaining, you will not need an IC.”

  “I can do that!”

  “Wait, madame. You need a reading of one hundred mils or less, three times in a row,” she clarified.

  “How about three times over the course of a week?”

  “In a row.”

  “How about twice, but then there’s a blip, say, but then the next time the reading is under one hundred?”

  “Three times in a row.”

  Until that point, I hadn’t fully accepted exactly how crucial my nerves were to every single function in my body. My whole life, I had put muscles and bones at center stage. I never gave much thought to my nerves, even as they plugged away behind the scenes, making only brief but dramatic appearances before exams, big auditions, and saying “I love you” for the first time to Rich.

  Now I listened to my nerves and waited, after two perfect bladder scans, for that crucial third time in a row to pee.

  I felt it!

  I rolled quickly to the bathroom, peed, rolled quickly back to bed, pulled my leggings down below my belly button, rang for a nurse before my bladder filled up again, and waited impatiently for a scan.

  Juliette answered the call. She rolled the scanner over my stomach as I watched. Her face betrayed nothing.

  “FOR GOD’S SAKE, WHAT DOES IT SAY?”

  She looked at the scanner and sighed dramatically before very slowly turning the screen my way.

  Less than 100 mils! The magic number!

  I burst into tears.

  “You are ’appy, uh?”

  I would never have to look at that clear rubber tube of evil again.

  12

  A Taste of Home

  One Wednesday morning in October I woke up crying, but it wasn’t for the same old reasons. Amanda and Heidi had informed me that they needed to do an analysis of my house before I was fully cleared to go home that weekend on my official Thanksgiving day-pass. I would accompany them on their visit. It would be for a couple of hours only, but still—home.

  We piled into the taxi, my wheelchair disassembled and tossed into the trunk. I sat with my face pressed against the window, weeping soundlessly, completely overwhelmed by what lay ahead. Amanda and Heidi didn’t even try to engage me. They whispered quietly to each other like they were in church. They were armed with notepads, pens, pencils, and measuring tapes. They needed to make sure my home would be a hospitable environment for someone in a wheelchair. I felt like a harvested vital organ. Was it possible that my own house would reject me?

  When we pulled onto my street, giant sobs burst from me, all manner of honking and gasping and nose-blowing that was wildly out of proportion to the actual event, which was a simple right-hand turn into my driveway. Amanda and Heidi looked alarmed. Lyndhurst felt as far away as Iceland when in fact it was less than fifteen minutes from my house.

  Rich was on the porch waiting for us. He remembered perfectly how to unfold my chair, working in his assured and confident way, and then he helped me out of the car. I cursed our “modern aesthetic,” which prevented us from getting a railing for our front steps because we thought it wouldn’t look cool. I saw Heidi jot something down in her notebook. With or without a railing, I had to get up the stairs—the first hurdle between me and my house.

  “Do you remember how to do this?” Rich asked, holding his hands out.

  “I’m scared.”

  “I’ve got you.”

  Rich held me close. I tried to remember what I had been taught about climbing stairs; how to step up and down and over and around things, and how to balance against my partner so that we moved in sync, with me leaching just enough of my partner’s strength to keep myself upright.

  It wasn’t long before we had an audience. Our neighbor across the street leaned on his rake and waved an uncertain hello. People on the sidewalk, supportive strangers, slowed to watch. Then my older sister, Karen, appeared, walking her dog. She lives right behind us and of course she knew, as my whole family did, that I was coming home that day, but she couldn’t possibly have known how auspicious her timing would be.

  “Ruthie,” she called, but didn’t come closer as I struggled up the stairs with Rich’s help. Even her yappy dog stopped yapping so he could stare. I wanted to say something, but I was capable of only two things: crying and gripping Rich’s arms.

  Our stairs were uneven, the distance between one step and the next changing each time. It was Amanda who noticed this discrepancy and called out a warning. She and Heidi hovered over me. Amanda was watching as nervously and excitedly as I had when Joey took his first steps. Would she be more proud of me for getting myself up the stairs or for teaching me how to do it? Who cares? We were all wrapped in the same hug of victory when I made it to the top.

  Amanda and Heidi lingered a few steps behind me when Rich opened the door.

  “You’re home, babe.”

  I walked in. The house was bursting with color. The red carpet made the whole dining room glow pink. The blue glass wall behind our stove sparkled. The windows at the back of the house framed a few quivering yellow leaves still hanging on to their branches. The sun highlighted the tiny pinpoints of dust spinning in the air. I wanted to touch everything, kiss everything, clean everything. My kingdom, I thought, f
or a Swiffer, a DustBuster, and some wet paper towel. I wanted to shake out the rugs—something I had never done before in my life. I wanted to touch every surface and say: mine mine mine. But instead, I settled for doing what I did best: drinking in as much as my eyes could hold and then bawling it all back out.

  Heidi and Amanda left Rich and me in the front hall.

  “Can we go upstairs, Richie?” I asked. “I need to see our room.”

  We danced slowly up the steps; I counted each one as we went—fifteen in all. At the top, I made good use of our banister. The hardwood floor was slippery, inspiring me to drag myself along rather than load my feet down with the still mystifying concept of lifting and landing.

  Rich helped me onto our bed, which was so high up that my feet dangled when I sat on the edge. I lowered myself onto my back, not caring how much it hurt, and then turned my head to the side.

  “I love our bed so much!” I cried.

  Rich hopped up beside me and I spoke directly into his armpit. “So much!” I repeated. We held each other and didn’t let go, even when Heidi and Amanda came into our room without knocking—just like we were still at Lyndhurst. I had been so lonely without Rich and my kids, so lonely without my things. I missed my crisp white duvet and my puffy pillows. I missed all my books and Rich’s poker manuals. I missed my overstuffed bedside table drawers and my dumb Ikea lamps that always tipped over. I missed Henry’s warm body stumbling into our room before school and wedging between us. I closed my eyes. I didn’t have the strength to walk around and peek inside every room. I already knew what I would find in Joey’s room—a tangle of clothes on the floor and one inverted sock—the other sock would surely be in the bathroom where he always left it after his shower, specifically to make me crazy. I felt an almost hysterical greediness. I didn’t want to make do anymore with the dribs and drabs of home that I had at Lyndhurst. I wanted all of it back.

  But I wouldn’t have to miss any of it for much longer. My twenty-four-hour day pass was for that very weekend, three days away. Everything was going to be perfect.

  •

  “I’m going to make lunch.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Ru, you need to rest. That’s what Dr. Zimcik explicitly told you. She said you have to take it easy, that you can’t do too much, that—”

  “I know what she said. I’m making lunch.”

  Lunch was all I could think about once Rich and the kids picked me up at Lyndhurst to bring me home for the day. We stopped at the little produce store around the corner. I had no idea what we had in the fridge, but I had a pretty good idea what we didn’t. I wrote out a quick list in the car: avocado, cherry tomatoes, red peppers, corn, feta cheese, tuna—all the things I would need for a big, fat salad. Ah—and cheddar cheese! I would make grilled cheese sandwiches for the kids. We would all sit around the table and laugh and talk over one another, just like a reality TV family.

  Rich helped me inside the house, just as we had practiced, and got me settled into my favorite chair by the fire. He unpacked the groceries and started preparing lunch. I insisted, again, that he let me make it. My instinct was to jump up and run over if he so much as touched my tomatoes. The fact that I couldn’t do either didn’t stop me from making a threatening move forward. With a heavy sigh, he helped me into the kitchen where I got to work.

  I used everything within reach—and, miraculously, everything was within reach—to pull myself up. I had only to swivel and pivot and take just one step here or there without letting go of the kitchen island in order to prepare lunch. Amanda and Heidi were thrilled with the layout of the house and had shown me how effectively I could get around just by using the walls and countertops as my touchstones.

  I had been craving something fresh, something made with my own hands, something with color. The closest I’d come to anything resembling vegetables, other than the sad broccoli served most nights at Lyndhurst, were the dried green edamame pods I got inside my Asian cracker mix, the snack with which my mother kept me well supplied. I could feel Rich’s worry and agitation while I busied myself. I ignored his pleas for me to sit down.

  The boys were right behind me on their computers in the sunroom, as if it was any other day, as if everything was totally normal.

  “Mom,” I heard Henry say. “Mom.”

  I turned around.

  “Mom,” he said again, and there were tears in his eyes. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I know, Hank. Come here.”

  He came to me and we hugged standing up. I shoved my nose in his hair like he was a baby again, only his head didn’t smell like a baby’s—it smelled like cheese.

  It wasn’t until we sat down for lunch that I realized I had been standing for several minutes. My walker was always right behind me in case I needed a rest, and Rich’s eyes were practically glued to me, on the lookout for any treacherous signs of sway from which he might have to rescue me, and yes, I had slid from spot to spot in the kitchen while gripping the countertops instead of actually lifting my feet, but it all counted, didn’t it? I would be sure to report my progress to Amanda on Monday. Maybe I was ready for the next step.

  For the rest of the day, I made myself ostentatiously comfortable. I stretched my legs out luxuriantly on the ottoman and angled my feet toward the fire. The heat soothed every nerve in my body. I rubbed my hand over my legs and noticed, quite by accident, that a small patch on my right thigh had quietly returned to its former self. Being home was already working its magic.

  The pressure was off my boys to stay close, something they tried to do when they came to visit at Lyndhurst. At home, they didn’t have to be right there with me—it seemed to be enough to know that I was in the house. When I heard a toilet flush upstairs, I was happy. When the boys left their dishes all over the place, I shrugged. I was floating inside a bubble where pain and discomfort, no matter how sharp, could not prick my happiness. I was just about as relaxed as I could be, right up until dinner.

  I don’t remember how the fight began or who started it, only that without warning Rich and I were scrapping with each other. He was going back and forth from the table, clearing the dishes and piling plates up in the sink without rinsing them first. Couldn’t he see he was doing everything wrong? And where were the kids? Why did they just disappear without helping? Why weren’t they fawning all over me, tripping over each other to tell me stories and to hug and kiss me? And why was there no music playing? Had Joey been practicing the piano at all since I’d been gone? And what was this I heard about him getting a lousy mark on his science test? Was nobody making sure that the kids were doing their homework after school? And Jesus Christ, when was the last time somebody actually took a wet sponge and wiped down the goddamn table?

  Rich valiantly tried to avoid the fight. “We’re doing the best we can, Ru.”

  I leaned into my tirade, until Rich shook his head and walked away.

  “That’s not fair!” I said. “You can’t just leave me stranded here. I’m mad and I want to walk away too but I can’t just pop up and stomp out of the room. FUCK!”

  Rich’s body language changed as he came back to get me. He bent forward and brought his hands under my elbows, the same way he does when he’s helping his ninety-seven-year-old mother into the car. Over the years, I have often thought that I could take a lesson from him on how to treat people with respect and kindness.

  My stomach hissed and rumbled ominously. When it turned on like that, I couldn’t concentrate. In my quest to chase down the origin of the signals my nervous system was sending, I thought it was necessary to act on every one my body received. Consequently, I would find myself rolling to the bathroom at the tiniest inkling of a warning that something worthwhile might happen. My body cried wolf ten, twenty, thirty times a day. But standing in my kitchen, far from the intensity of Lyndhurst, I finally wised up and saw my body for what it was—just a big bag of tricks that loved to fool me, loved to make me think that somethin
g momentous was about to take place just so it could call me out for the sucker I was. Well, I had no time for its dramatic rumblings that led nowhere.

  Rich helped me up. I slid the three or four steps it took to get to the kitchen island. I grabbed the edges and looked up at him, but just then, the noise from my stomach increased. I opened my mouth to alert Rich to my potential need to get to the bathroom, when out came the longest, rollingest, loudest, most shofar-blowing, bloat-reducing fart. Rich and I listened in awe. It went on long enough for me to remember all kinds of things, like the movement teacher I had in theater school who made all the students lie on the floor and imagine breathing in through their anuses and out through their eyes, which prompted my friend Fli to whisper: It would probably be easier if we reversed that. I thought about how every couple has its own rules, some as obvious as not having an affair to as idiosyncratic as not eating apples in bed. Our rule was quaintly civilized: no tooting in front of each other. Amazingly, after so many years together, we had managed to honor this rule, even when I was in the hospital. But there it was, the last bit of mystery between my beloved husband and me, gone. I stood shakily before him: a lame, angry, farty little wife. It was hard for either of us to stay mad after that.

  I watched Rich do all the dishes and I didn’t complain once.

  13

  Walkabout

  Color was a big deal at Lyndhurst, mostly for the lack of it. Men often wore flannel pajama bottoms to their physio appointments, and women defaulted to the drabbest colors in their wardrobes. Even I had edited my clothing down to only those pieces that were variants on concrete: sand, mushroom, pewter, black. My fashion sense was in mourning for the old me. When my friend Liza visited one afternoon, she defied rather than deferred to my drab environment. She arrived in an outfit that made her look as dazzling as a peacock in a field of goats. She wore a pair of tall boots and a multicolored wrap over skinny jeans. It was like having a front row seat at Mardi Gras.