The Daughters of Erietown

by Connie Schultz

  The waitress lowered her pad and looked at Ellie. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have to do everything once I get home. It just never ends, you know?”

  “I sure do,” Ellie said. “I guess that women’s lib just passed us by. I’m Ellie. Ellie McGinty.”

  “Maggie,” the woman said, shaking Ellie’s hand. “Maggie McGuire. Aren’t we a couple of Irish lasses?”

  Ellie laughed. “I’m Irish, but McGinty is my husband’s name.”

  “Same,” Maggie said, “except in my case, Mr. McGuire is an ex-husband.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I couldn’t be happier. Married twenty-five years to the slug and says he’s in love with one of the cashiers at the Stop & Shop.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I felt released. I told him he could pay me for my share of the house and I wouldn’t take anything else but my clothes and my dog, Lance. He was so stunned, he gave me everything I wanted. I bought one of those little condos in Reynolds Way.”

  “That new development,” Ellie said, “where Smitty Field used to be.”

  “Townhouses they call them. Shared walls, smaller yards. I never thought I’d live in a brand-new house. Everything in it is being used for the first time by me.”

  “Everything must be so clean.”

  “Spic-and-span,” Maggie said. “Friendly place, too. There are a lot of girls our age who live there. Mostly divorced or widowed, but a couple have husbands. We take pottery classes together at Sullivan’s Ceramics and meet once a month for book group. You get your privacy when you want it, but you never have to feel you’re alone.” She took Ellie’s menu. “Listen to me go on. The developer says I bring in more potential buyers than that fancy marketing firm he hired.”

  “Lenny Kleshinski.”

  “That’s him,” Maggie said. “Nicest guy.”

  “A childhood friend of my daughter’s. He’s made quite a name for himself here in Erietown.”

  “Wait’ll you see his brochure for Reynolds Way,” Maggie said. “I’ll bring you one when I come back with your food.” She was gone before Ellie could tell her she needn’t bother.

  Ellie opened her folder and pulled a pen out of her purse. She had decided the night before to write her note like an outline.

  October 28, 1994

  The Duties of a Nurse Assistant on a Mental Health Unit (The Day Shift—7:00 A.M.–3:30 P.M.)

  Admitting a Client

  Take patient’s temperature, pulse, respiration.

  Fill out top part of assessment sheet.

  Give patient an Orientation Booklet with patients’ rights.

  Orient patient to his room and the unit.

  Give patient admission pack.

  Check that all the patient’s belongings, such as suitcase, purse, and all things that are not appropriate on the unit, will be sent home or safely locked up.

  Number six was harder than it sounds. It’s hard for people to part with their things, especially when they think those things are all they have left of who they used to be.

  If the patient is suicidal or upset, stay with him after admitting.

  Easier said than done, because of all her other duties on the floor. It wasn’t like one of the other aides did her baths and food trays or changed her beds when she had to spend a long time with one patient.

  The Duties Performed During the Day

  Listen to report and receive assignments for the day.

  Make sure all patients get to the solarium for their meals. Assist those who are unable to eat in the solarium.

  Maggie set down a plate on the other side of the table. “So you’re a writer,” she said.

  “I’m just writing a letter. To my husband. Sometimes it’s easier to get him to listen if I—”

  Maggie held up her hand. “You don’t need to tell me.” She reached into the front pocket of her apron and pulled out a shiny brochure for Reynolds Way. “I wrote my number on the back, in case you ever want to come visit without one of Lenny’s people breathing down your neck.”

  Ellie opened the brochure. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Call me ahead of time and I’ll round up some of the girls for you to meet. You don’t have to live in Reynolds Way to join our pottery club. And we’re thinking of starting a canasta club.”

  Ellie smiled. “I haven’t played canasta in years.” She slid her finger across the picture of townhouses stacked side by side in shades of beige, cream, and soft yellow. “It looks so pretty, and calm.”

  “Until all us girls get together,” Maggie said. “What a hoot.” She tapped the brochure with her pencil. “Just take it and think about it.”

  Ellie got back to her note.

  Make sure you record how every pt. ate and that their menus are completed.

  Chart on the daily flow sheet of each patient. Also chart on the progress notes.

  So much paperwork, every day.

  Conduct an exercise class with patients every other day.

  Act as assistant to the Recreational Therapist during groups three times daily.

  Conduct the groups on the days the Recreational Therapist is off, on vacation, or absent.

  Document all activities performed by patients on the activity flow sheets.

  Conduct an Orientation Class twice a week.

  Brick would only make fun of her if he knew she had to exercise with the patients. When Reilly was fourteen, he’d been so excited to use his lawn-mowing money to buy a set of barbells, the kind with interchangeable disks. Brick had laughed at him. “You want muscles?” he’d said to Reilly. “Come work at the plant for the summer.”

  Reilly had looked stricken, and Ellie hadn’t talked to Brick for a week. “Let him make fun of me,” she whispered, pressing the pen harder on the paper.

  Talk with patients—collect information and share with the team.

  Be able to discuss patients’ progress with the doctors when necessary.

  Some of the doctors sought out Ellie, instead of one of the nurses, because they knew she spent more time with patients, and they trusted her. “I heard there’s something about you, Ellie,” Dr. Marino recently told her, in front of all of the nurses at the front desk. “They say when you show up, patients live longer.”

  Ellie tapped her pencil and smiled. “Carson and Sam. Never saw that coming.” There was no mistaking the happiness in her daughter. “Sam will always be a perfectionist, but there’s a softening about her,” she’d told Mardee. “She’s wearing her hair down all the time now, even at school. It’s like she’s given herself permission to be more than one thing in life.”

  Sam had called Ellie last night to ask her to go shopping with her soon for new work clothes. “Let’s face it, Mom, anyone who has a hard time with my being a woman in this job isn’t going to be persuaded otherwise by those stiff old suits. I’m tired of feeling confined to a uniform.”

  Ellie had let that comment pass. She missed her old “urine-yellow” uniform, but most of the aides preferred the smocks and slacks they all wore now. As one of the younger aides, Tiffany Newman, put it to Ellie, “Life is a roller coaster and change is the ticket. Kahlil Gibran said that.”

  “Yeah, no, he didn’t,” Sam said over dinner that evening. “Kahlil Gibran would never have used a county fair metaphor for love. He did, however, say, ‘You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts.’ Lay that one on Ms. Tiffany and watch what happens.”

  “How do you know he said that?”

  “It’s in The Prophet. Carson gave it to me.”

  Ellie started to pull out a pen, and Sam patted her hand. “No
need to write down the title, Mom. I’ll lend you my copy so you can tell me Carson’s intentions.”

  Ellie pulled out a blank sheet of notebook paper from the back and wrote across the top, Reasons You Should Be Happy for Sam, Period. She’d give that one to Brick soon, too, to help him get used to the idea. The whole west end of Erietown was abuzz about Sam and Carson. It was a miracle Brick hadn’t already heard.

  She looked at her watch and decided to cut down the list.

  Do not be afraid to stay with a violent patient.

  Last July she’d had to stay late for a report after a patient punched her and pinned her to the floor. Brick had been sitting on the porch steps drinking a beer when she eased herself out of the car. “Ellie,” he said, motioning toward her with the bottle. “It’s eighty-nine degrees out here. Why are you wearing a sweater in this heat?” He stood up at the sight of the large purple bruise on her left arm.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Brick, he was disoriented,” she said, trying to walk past him. “That happens sometimes with patients.”

  Brick was livid. “Nobody should be touching you. What kind of woman wants a job like this?” She pointed to her chest. “This woman, Brick. It’s my decision, and I’m staying.”

  Ellie folded the list into thirds and wrote on the back:

  Dear Brick,

  I hope this list of my nurse’s aide responsibilities will help you see how hard I work, and why what I do matters.

  I love you.

  Ellie

  She stared at her signature for a moment, and decided to add Pint in parentheses. She hated that nickname now, but she knew why Brick still used it sometimes. He would always miss who they used to be.

  She wrote a note on her paid receipt and left it with a fifteen percent tip.

  Dear Maggie,

  Thank you for being so nice to me. Thanks for the brochure, too.

  Ellie McGinty

  555-4262

  On the drive home, Ellie decided to leave the note on Brick’s dashboard Sunday night, after he fell asleep in the recliner. He’d see it when he got in the car on Monday to drive to work. He was on the porch swing when she pulled into the driveway. She walked up the stairs and smiled at him. “Get much yard work done?”

  “Hair looks good,” he said, taking a swig of beer. “Did you know our daughter is dating a doctor?”

  Ellie froze midstep. “I just heard,” she said. “His name is Dr. Carson Marino.”

  “Italian.” Brick took another swig. “Don’t tell me this guy’s Catholic.”

  “No, no,” Ellie said, sitting next to him on the swing. “His mother’s a Methodist.”

  Brick put his arm around her and started rocking the swing. “Ma was a Methodist.”

  She patted his leg. “She surely was.”

  Brick zipped up his softball jacket and headed out to the toolshed in the backyard. It was still nippy, but the morning clouds had given way to a sunny October afternoon.

  He reached for his favorite clippers and winced as he flexed the handles in his right hand. He held up his left hand, spreading his fingers wide. His swollen joints were mirror images of his mother’s in her last years.

  He scooped out a pile of rubber bands in the glass ashtray on his workbench and smiled at nine-year-old Sam looking up at him. Her teacher had had the bright idea of gluing kids’ school pictures on the bottoms of ashtrays for Father’s Day, and Sam had been so excited to give it to him. He could never bring himself to crush out a butt on his daughter’s face, and he couldn’t part with the ashtray even after he’d quit smoking.

  He rubbed his thumb on the well of the ashtray to clear the dust from Sam’s face. He tried to imagine a little brown version of Sam, with big chocolate eyes instead of blue, calling him Grandpa. This was going to take some getting used to. He blamed Motown. Maybe if he hadn’t made such an issue of her music back then she wouldn’t have fallen for this guy. His daughter sure could nurse a grudge.

  She was smitten, of that he was certain. He could tell by her face, the way she looked happy even when they argued about politics or how he still called women “girls.” Methodist mother. Ellie must think her husband is an idiot. The Erietown Times had done a front-page story on big-city doctor Carson Marino within months of his arrival. He was looking forward to Sam returning his call so that he could give her a real shock. “Bring your new boyfriend over for a cookout,” he’d tell her, and then sit back and enjoy her stammering.

  He reached down and grabbed the handle of the wicker flower basket he’d bought for Ellie the summer after they moved into this house. “So you can cut your own bouquets anytime you want,” he told her.

  She never did. “I like when you pick ’em, honey. I like looking at them and thinking, ‘Brick grew these flowers, and he picked every last one of them just for me.’ ”

  Brick walked over to the flower garden along the fence. The dahlias and goldenrod were nearly as tall as Ellie. If she were standing next to him right now, he’d joke that four feet eleven wasn’t much of an accomplishment even for a flower. He still knew how to make her laugh. Ellie was at work, though, and she thought he was, too.

  Their fight in the car over that goddamn soap and her job had helped him make up his mind. He would use up all his vacation days, starting today, before the buyout kicked in. He’d tell Ellie tonight, over steaks already cooking on the grill by the time she pulled into the driveway. She’d love that.

  Brick had left the house at his usual time this morning and driven to the diner across town, the one where he used to take Reilly on Saturdays when Reilly was a little boy. He walked to the car planning to relax over breakfast with the latest Sports Illustrated—the subscription had been a Christmas gift from Reilly.

  Ellie’s list had changed those plans. When he saw her handwriting on the back of the folded pages of yellow legal pad, his skin crawled. This was it, he thought. Ellie wanted a divorce. The kids were grown and she had a job now. She had no reason to stay.

  He was so relieved to discover a list of her job duties that he read her every word over bacon and eggs. Once again, she had misunderstood him. He hated her job. Everyone at the hospital took advantage of her.

  If she wanted to take care of somebody, she could start with her husband. She was still the only person who really knew him. “You’re my dream come true,” she’d recently told him, for the first time in years. He’d felt forgiven. For just a moment, he’d been eighteen again, with his whole life in front of him.

  “Soap,” Brick grumbled as he clipped the stems of the largest mums and dropped them in the basket. That was his second surprise for Ellie. On the way home from the diner he’d stopped at the Kmart and picked up a dozen bars of her favorite soap. He’d lined them up along the edge of the bathtub stall.

  He clipped six of the bright orange dahlias for Ellie, and a handful of the burgundy and dark pink for Sam, gently laying all of them in the basket. He looked at the row of helenium and remembered what Ellie had said just last night about their red-and-yellow petals. “They look like they’re on fire,” she’d said, pointing to them from across the yard.

  He picked up the basket and walked toward the row of foxglove against the shed. They had stopped blooming weeks ago, and needed trimming. He had planted them the first spring in this house, a year and a half after it all happened. If Paull ever stood in this yard—he never would, but if he did—Brick could point to them as proof he’d never forgotten. Foxglove, he’d tell him, where she was born.

  Brick grabbed a handful of stems and started cutting them back. A spear of pain shot up his arm, and this time, bile rose in his throat. Goddamn bursitis. It had been acting up for almost a month now, but nothing like this. He dropped the clippers and pulled his arm across his chest. He grabbed the stems again and stumbled as he tried to catch his breath.
His eyes started stinging from beads of sweat sprouting on his brow.

  Maybe take a break. Maybe go sit on the porch swing.

  He reaches down for the basket, but now his chest is on fire. He grabs a bundle of the dahlias from the basket and presses them with both hands against his heart.

  The porch is miles away.

  He counts as he walks down the driveway.

  One, two, four, five

  Once I caught a fish alive.

  He squints at the brown dog wagging his tail.

  One, two, buckle my shoe.

  His right foot is so heavy. Take off the shoe. The thought flies away.

  Harry!

  His brother turns around and smiles. My little Brickster! He is running in the cornfield, waving for Brick to follow. He’ll never find us here, buddy.

  Little Paull has something in his hand. That’s the Johnny Lightning Chevy Camaro, Reilly yells. I have one just like it.

  He looks down at Sam’s little hands tugging on the shirt at his waist. Daddy, don’t cry.

  Bic! Bic!

  If the pitch is outside, go with the pitch.

  The one-eyed dog runs up to him, yapping at his feet. Brick drops the flowers. Patch. Here, boy. Brick collapses backward against his car and grabs the side mirror as he slides to the ground. This jacket is too damn small. He tears open his shirt. Two buttons dance through the air and bloom into basketballs.

  Brick! Clap, Brick! Clap, Brick! Coach grabs his shoulder from behind. Good game, son. Come back to the bench. Brick runs toward the bridge. Hit the brake. The brake! The car soars into the sky. Why’d you go and do that, Roe?