by John Fulton
“She wants you to have dinner with her,” Mr. Alan said, surprising me with his sanity. “You shouldn’t sit there. She’ll do that to you every time. You’re just going to have to pass the potatoes now. It wouldn’t be fair to disappoint her, would it?”
“I get it,” Jenny said. Then she reached out into the air in front of her, picked up the potatoes and passed them.
“Don’t do that,” I said. It bothered me. There were no potatoes and we had no obligation to amuse a crazy old woman.
Mrs. Smith now looked directly at me—though still without seeming to see me—and said, “Please pass the potatoes, dear.” I looked down at my hands. I didn’t want to do it, but I did it anyway. I reached out and passed the potatoes. “Thank you, dear,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, not sure why I was being polite.
After a moment, she nodded and said, “Please pass the green beans, dears,” and Jenny and I both reached out, took the nonexistent beans, and passed them. “So very kind of you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, after which Jenny said the same thing.
Nodding again, she said, “Please pass the mutton, if you would, dears.” Of course, we did. She said thank you in her roundabout way and we said you’re welcome, even though we had absolutely no reason to be polite to this stranger. The game continued. Whatever dinner we were having, it was large and included every food you could think of—yams, stuffing, sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, dark gravy, blond gravy, pumpkin soup, noodle soup, beef barley soup, potato salad, Jell-O salad, three-bean salad, coleslaw, pumpkin, pecan, cherry, apple, chocolate, and banana cream pies. There was no end to the dishes, and as Jenny and I passed them and said you’re welcome, Mr. Alan continued his campaign against himself at the checkerboard, carefully turning the board around and speaking to himself in two distinct voices—the voice of the winner and the voice of the loser. The odd thing was that old Mrs. Smith, tiny and withered, so thin that you could see the cords and knotty cartilage in her neck bob as she spoke, was obviously not a big eater. She never once moved her hands or pretended to help herself to the dishes. Instead, she surveyed the table where she seemed to see a number of people stuffing themselves with food as it came around. There was a twinkle of satisfaction in her eyes, a deep happiness at whatever it was she had created for herself. Meanwhile, as she asked for dish after dish to be passed, her hands lay in front of her, barely trembling. It might have been Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter dinner or some combination of all those dinners. “You’re welcome,” Jenny and I kept saying. “You’re welcome. You’re welcome.”
It wasn’t until Mr. Alan stood up and began to inch out of the room with his walker that I started to feel hateful toward old, crazy Mrs. Smith. “Damn it to hell,” Mr. Alan was saying in defeat as he slowly made his way out of the game room. I had to wonder why he’d decided to get up from that table as the loser, since he had won there, too, and could have left the room in victory. I had to wonder that, just as I had to wonder why my sister, and I were being so damn cordial to this woman. She was Curtis Smith’s mother, after all, and for some stupid reason I was at her family dinner. I was making her happy, and it made no sense at all. And after Mr. Alan took what seemed like five minutes to leave the room, I looked right at the old woman’s face and refused her most recent request. “No,” I whispered at her. But she just asked for the collard greens again, a food I didn’t even know existed. Jenny looked at me, but she didn’t say anything. We were all alone now, so I said it again, this time a little louder. “No. I’m not passing the collard greens.” But nothing seemed to reach the old woman. Her insanity had sealed her away in a happiness so complete and vast that she could register nothing else.
“Steven,” Jenny said in a worried voice.
“Shush,” I warned.
Then I looked into the old woman’s eyes. “There are no stupid collard greens!” I shouted across the table at her.
She just nodded and said again, “Please pass the collard greens, if you would be so kind, dears.”
Jenny passed them. “There. I passed the greens.”
“There’s no damn food. None!” I shouted. I slapped the empty table with my hands and finally the old woman looked a little frightened, though it was difficult to tell what she felt with all the wrinkles and creases and spots on her face.
“Don’t shout at her, Steven,” Jenny said.
The old woman put a hand to her chest and swallowed, and that one gesture of shock might have satisfied me and I might have stopped there had I not noticed how her hair, white as cotton, was combed so nicely, pinned at the sides and held down by two barrettes in the same style as Jenny’s hair, which my mother had done for her that morning. “Look at her hair,” I said to Jenny.
“What?” Jenny asked.
“Don’t you see it? How could you not see it?”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” We both knew then that my mother had done crazy, old Mrs. Smith’s hair, had done it carefully, lovingly, had combed through it and pinned and tied it back earlier that day, probably not long after she had done Jenny’s hair for her, and probably before Colonel Warner had died and changed everything.
“Damn!” I said. Jenny grabbed at my arm, but I pushed her down in her chair and walked over to the old woman, stood behind her and began to pull the pins and barrettes out of her hair, at first carefully, and then fast and too forcefully. Her hands paddled up toward me, but I was out of her reach. “Help,” I heard her say. When her hair hung down in strands over her shoulders and face, I grabbed a fistful of it and pulled until Mrs. Smith yelped. It didn’t sound like a person. It was a terrible, weak cry, and I let go of her hair and backed away as quickly as I could.
“Stop,” Jenny said, even though I had already stopped.
“I’m sorry,” I said. The old woman pulled her hair away from her face and looked at me. She was afraid and had begun to cry. I had utterly destroyed whatever dream she’d been dreaming, her family dinner or whatever it was.
Jenny kneeled in front of her and began picking up the hairpins from the floor. “Please don’t cry, Mrs. Smith,” she said. The old woman’s lips were trembling and wet with tears. “My brother’s sorry.” When I walked toward them again, the old woman started to shake and hold on to Jenny. “Stay away,” my little sister said. “You’re scaring her.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, this time apologizing to my sister, who was now combing through the old woman’s hair with her hands.
“We’re going to fix you up,” she was saying softly to Mrs. Smith. “We’re going to do your hair up nicely again. Okay, Mrs. Smith?” Mrs. Smith nodded. She seemed to have understood my sister. Jenny kept combing through the old woman’s hair, very gently and rhythmically, as she began pinning it down again. “There,” she said. “That’s looking better, isn’t it?”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said, still angry. I just wondered why old Mrs. Smith should be so cared for, considering what was about to happen to our family.
“Do what?” Jenny asked.
“Her hair. You don’t have to do that.”
Jenny stopped and looked at me in a way I had never seen my sister look at me before. She was disgusted. “You can leave,” she said. “You can please leave.”
“Leave?” I said.
“The room,” she said. “Get out. Leave.” I didn’t know what to do. I looked back at the open door behind me. I had always been the one to tell my little sister what to do before, to tell her how to behave. “We don’t want you here,” Jenny said.
“You’re nothing,” I said to Jenny. “You’re just a stupid Billmorette. A drill team girl.” I could hardly believe how dumb I sounded.
“Bye,” she said, waving a hand at me. Her gaze was cruel and dismissive.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. And then I turned around and left.
* * *
I followed the bright hallways for a while—they seemed to go on and on—try
ing not to think of what I’d just done, the look of terror on old Mrs. Smith’s face, the anger and disgust in my sister’s. I saw a number of old people and a nurse or two, though no one wondered why I was there or asked me who I was. I must have looked like anyone’s visiting grandson, so much so that one old man hugged me in the middle of the hallway. He was dressed in the same loose blue pajamas that Mr. Alan had been wearing, the uniform at Oak Groves. I stood stiffly and received his embrace. He smelled dirty, of body odor, of mustiness and old age, though his ashy hair was nicely combed and he looked clean. In the hand he wasn’t hugging me with, he held a metal pole on wheels from which hung a transparent bag of some liquid—urine or IV fluid, maybe. A tube ran from it and into the loose top of his pajamas. He released me and looked at me, taking me in, beholding me as if I were too much glowing light, a miracle, his old, wide eyes full of shameless love. He called me a boy’s name that wasn’t mine. “No,” I said. “That’s not me.” But he wouldn’t listen. He had a soft, chubby, teddy-bear face, and he kept touching me, shaking my hand, caressing my arm, sort of petting me, as if I’d disappear if he let go. “Your grandma’s here somewhere,” he said. “We have plans for you. We’ve been discussing them all week. Great plans,” he said. His eyes glowed with some ridiculous vision of the time we would spend together. “You’re a lovely boy. Lovely. Where is your grandma?” I knew she was dead. It was obvious. He was adrift without her. And as he looked around, calling out her name and seeming frightened by her absence, he gripped my arm tightly, anchoring himself. “She’s always off somewhere,” he said. “Oh, well.” He looked at me with a terrible neediness now, and I almost wanted to stay because he believed in me. His conviction that we belonged together seemed that absolute.
I had to yank my arm out of the old man’s grip and move quickly. “Boy,” he said. He followed me but was too slow, inching along with his metal post in tow. He shouted the same boy’s name—not mine—down the hallway at me, his old voice cracked with heartbreak.
I was still trying not to think of old Mrs. Smith, how I’d terrorized her, ruined her hairstyle, bullied her into crying, and turned Jenny against me. I was used to being a good kid. My father was a slob, a slob with a big heart whom I loved more than anyone. But nonetheless a slob. And so I had to be good. I had to be the one to make Jenny study and finally earn the B’s she’d promised months ago to earn. I had to be the one to make sure my father would stop spending money. I had to be the one to make sure our mother wouldn’t finally make good on what she had promised to do for years now and leave him. I had to be the one to make sure she remained forward-looking and kept on loving him whether he deserved it or not. But now that she had taken a lover, now that she had groomed and cared for Curtis Smith’s old, insane mother, she was no better than he was. And now that I’d done what I’d done, I was bad, too. We had all sunk into it, and I wasn’t sure what was left to save now.
I wandered around until I found a storage room where dozens of collapsed gurneys and folded-up wheelchairs and metal poles on wheels for IV and urine bags were kept. I unfolded a wheelchair, sat in it, and began to push myself around in the empty center of the room. Closing my eyes, I imagined that I was a cripple, that I could do nothing else but sit and feel the soft press of gravity. My legs felt leaden and dead. Upturned in my lap, my good hand was absolutely immovable—a cold piece of flesh. For a moment, I felt the weird sensation of my neck and face, the only vital, prickly parts of me. It was a terrible feeling. So I went back to being a kid who was just playing around in a wheelchair, being a troublemaker for once in his stupid, well-behaved life, misbehaving exactly as Nurse Brown had feared he would.
I wheeled myself over to a large stainless steel refrigerator against the wall and pulled it open. Inside in a metal rack were dozens of glass containers—urine samples of everyone in Facility Six—labeled and arranged in alphabetical order. WARNER, H., COL., said the label on old Mr. Warner’s vial. I tried to review the Ten Commandments quickly in my head and was able to remember some of them—“Thou shalt not commit adultery,” for instance—though I couldn’t remember if “Thou shalt not steal” was one or not. It certainly seemed like one of the ten. But, as far as I knew, it might have been something Jesus said or just a rule, a law, something that everybody knew but that nobody in particular—God or Jesus or anybody—had said. I wanted it to be a commandment because when I took Mr. Warner’s vial out of the rack and zipped it up in my coat, as I did then, I wanted it to matter. I wanted it to change something. I wanted that little theft to be a desecration, the most terrible violation of Oak Groves, of Colonel Warner himself, of my mother and Curtis Smith and his mother, of everyone, all humanity. At the time, I could think of nothing worse to do. And that’s why I stole the old man’s urine. I was going bad, getting used to it, I thought, and this would be my pact with the devil, the act that would change my allegiances forever, even though it was just a stupid act of vandalism, and I half knew it.
With that small item zipped into my coat, I walked through a set of double doors and down a corridor and through another set of double doors where a nurse finally stopped me. “Who are you?” she asked.
I didn’t think I could tell her. Not at that point. “I don’t know,” I said.
She laughed awkwardly, led me down another hall, and asked me to take a seat. She would be back in a minute. Without thinking, I followed her instructions. I sat down and picked up a book called Talking to Your Elderly Parent about Money. “If talking about money has been something your parent just can’t seem to do,” the first sentence read, “you should keep in mind that often their silence has to do with a generation gap. Many older people were reared and brought up in an age in which money was a taboo subject.”
I closed that book, realizing that sitting there waiting to be identified was not the best idea. So I moved on, walking through one and then another set of double doors and down a number of windowless hallways and through a few windowless rooms, wondering where everybody was, wondering where the rooms with windows began, where I might find a place to look at the world outside the blankness of Oak Groves. I wanted that place to fulfill at least the smallest part of what its name promised. I wanted there to be oaks at Oak Groves. I wanted it to have rows and rows of those trees—thickly leaved, sleepy giants that turned golden in the fall and exploded in the spring. I wanted there to be miles of green lawn and hedges and flowers where old people could wander and gather in times of good weather. And when the weather was no good—as it was that day—at least they could look out at the gray winter grounds and imagine it in summer. But I couldn’t find one window in that place.
I walked down one corridor after another and through one more set of double doors and into an unlit room where I just stood in the dark. Oak Groves was so white, so glaringly white. The walls and floors and ceilings were white. Everything exposed, naked, with no shadows. My eyes felt scorched, burnt out. I was tired of seeing so damn much, and I understood why my mother hated her job. I maybe even began to understand why she would do just about anything to get out of the place. And so I stood there looking into the shapeless dark, adjusting to it as things—tables, counters, a chair, and then another chair—began gently emerging from all that soft, contourless nothing. I thought then that if you ever had to fall into nothing, if you had to die and experience nothing, a nothing of darkness would be much more bearable than a nothing of light. That would be my preference, anyway. I had a moment or two more with that thought before the doors flung open and the world exploded, suddenly bright. I squinted and put a hand above my eyes the way you’d do to keep the sun away, though it had no effect in the whiteness of Oak Groves. In front of me stretched over a table lay old Colonel Warner’s body, covered in a green hospital blanket up to his naked shoulders. His forehead was huge and as white as an unused bar of soap, with the same waxy, clean texture. Thick black hair grew from his ears, which were large and wooden-looking with rubbery lobes. I knew it was Colonel Warner because he was dead and
because on top of a box of clothes at the end of his table lay a dark blue military jacket, glittering with decorations. He had been a tall man and his feet stuck out of the blanket, one of them bare, bleached like a sun-dried bone, and the other covered in a black sock that stopped just below his white knee. “What are you looking at?” Nurse Brown asked me. Her face expressed disgust. “Did you do that?” she asked. “Did you put that sock there?”
“No,” I said.
She walked over to the colonel, removed the sock from his foot, and put it in the box. She blamed me. I could see that in her face. She thought that I had put that sock on the dead man’s foot. How she could have thought that I didn’t know, except that her belief in the corruption of children went far deeper than I could ever imagine. God, how I wished she hadn’t removed that sock from old Colonel Warner’s foot. The socked foot hadn’t bothered me so much. But the naked one had, and I’d wanted her to find the other sock and put it on him. Then I wanted her to find his other things in that box—his boxer shorts, his white button-up shirt, his necktie, his dark blue military pants, his shoes, and finally his decorated jacket—and put them on him one by one until Colonel Warner was dressed as if for dinner or formal tea or even war, for anything that a military officer did.
“Stop that staring,” Nurse Brown said.
I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I just had to look at him and keep on looking at him until I was sick. My face heated up and sweat beaded my forehead. I felt that deep, painful movement in my gut. It came over me too suddenly, too powerfully to control—a pinprick of heat that blossomed and gushed out. My stomach muscles clenched as hot liquid seeped into my pants. I had shat myself. I looked down, and Nurse Brown, who saw people do that sort of thing daily, knew right away what had happened. “Well,” she said, taking me by the hand and pulling me along, “it looks like you’ve made a mess.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I could not believe the sound of my own voice—the smallness of it. Nurse Brown marched on, gripping my hand firmly in hers until she left me at the door of a large closet. “Don’t move,” she said. She came out with a folded pair of sky blue Oak Groves pajamas and a roll of white plastic garbage bags. As we walked, I smelled myself—the simple, unmistakable smell of shit—and felt it trail down my legs and touch my socks. “I’m sorry,” I said again, and felt as though I were apologizing for a great deal more than messing myself, though I was not about to admit to terrorizing the old woman or stealing Colonel Warner’s urine.