Women in Bed

by Jessica Keener

  “You’re doing fine,” the nurse said. “You just sleep.”

  She took my arm and wound the pressure gauge around it. Afterward I felt my heart relax as the hisses from the air pump released its grip on me. But night accelerated the swirling inside. I had to push myself up, lean over the unsteady edge and expel what was left in my stomach. It spewed out effortlessly, yet it was quiet. Just my bed squeaked when I heaved nothing into the metal tin. I didn’t fight it. Repeatedly I pressed my palms against the sheet and pushed my stomach to my throat before falling back.

  “What do you need, El?” the nurse asked.

  She had a name. Rose.

  “Another tin; some water.”

  “Hand me what you got,” she said.

  My gut in a tin; she took everything and didn’t seem to mind.

  “Keep it up, El. You’re doing great. Sleep.”

  I waited for morning. It was a long way down my brain. I held onto the bedrails for cold comfort, waited there and listened to the rumblings under my skin.

  There was a grey light in the room on the fourth day. We kept the overhead lights off. Rose held my bare leg and I tried to sit as she ran a cloth over my skin. My thoughts were simple, the same thoughts. I’m cold. This bath is cold. I’m cold.

  Finally, I lay back on a clean sheet in a clean cotton gown. Rose gone, I watched images on the TV move above me the way light moves inside my eyes when I shut them. The screen wrinkled and talked. I floated uncomfortably in space.

  “Where do you ache, Elizabeth?” the doctor wanted to know. He stood outside the transparent curtain and waited for me to respond. I liked him. I was glad he was there.

  “All over, like the flu.”

  “Serum sickness,” he said. “That’s a common reaction.”

  He walked out of my small radius of vision. Faces came and went above me. The hands on the clock on the wall opposite me pointed one way, then another. I saw things from underwater, my canoe flooded and useless. Sound and light hurt.

  “But I can’t see,” my mouth echoed.

  “That will go away,” he said. “We think it’s the Procarbozine. Give it a few days.”

  I shifted and saw a shadow that was his head and something white holding up the shadow. My grandmother was blind in her final years, but I was not an old woman.

  On the sixth night the light shone in my room like sun off a snow bank. My liquid self hardened, the shape of me snow granules packed into flesh. When I moved I felt particles rearranging to fit the bed.

  Rose came in and sat in a chair next to me. She wore multiple masks and gowns. Her body was blue and her face, brown. Air vents behind me blew filtered air out the door.

  “Dr. Roberts isn’t here yet,” she said.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “He’ll be here, don’t worry.”

  She took my blood pressure and wrote it down.

  “I’m going to do this every fifteen minutes while the drug is being infused,” she said. “Then every thirty minutes until midnight. It’s seven-thirty now.”

  “Just let me know when it’s over, please.”

  “The traffic was bad,” he said when he came up to the curtain.

  “But you’re late,” I said. “Rose, are you here?”

  “I’m coming in right now.”

  I heard her in the chair.

  “Okay, we’re going to start now, Elizabeth,” he said.

  “Sing to me, will you?” I asked.

  As the Nembutal took effect, sound was an elastic pulling at my ears. I struggled with it. The ventilators behind me hummed louder until my existence was humming. Someone singing petered away. I circled inside a large tunnel vibrating with sound until it deafened all other sounds. The tunnel filled with water and sloshed me against myself. I bumped against the curving sides. It was dark. Quiet.

  “The infusion’s over, Liz, and you’re doing fine,” Rose said. “Honey, you’re a trooper. That was your last dose. You’re done.”

  It was the small things: the way the pillow held my head, the layers of blankets covering me, the ease with which I could reach the bedpan before soiling myself. On the seventh day the chemotherapy eked out of me, a human sponge drying out, my bones evacuated. Everything converged through a second tube connecting between my legs to a bag on the floor outside my room.

  On the eighth day he walked up to the curtain and held my life in two bags, one in each hand. He held them as a hunter holds his prize: freshly harvested bone marrow from my brother’s hip. He attached the red stuff to the tube in my leg and nodded. My vision was clearing. I saw his eyes pause like birds after a long flight. Mom and Dad hovered next to each other and my brother called to me as a nurse rolled him back to his room. He was sore and happy. It took four hours for life to inch its way back to me.

  I gripped the creases of the curtain and knelt on the bed. My brother stood on the other side bending slightly at the waist. His hips were bound with surgical tape.

  “You’re wired up, Liz.”

  “I can’t stay in here.”

  “Keep talking—talk to me.”

  I walked to the opposite wall of the room and looked at him through the plastic barrier.

  “Come back over here,” he said. “I’ll give you a backrub.”

  He fit his hands in the rubber gloves that were attached to the curtain. I got on the bed and sat with my back facing him. He pressed his hands against my shoulders but it wasn’t a hand, it was the texture of rubber. I asked him to stop. I stood up. I went to the other side of the room three steps away. I walked back to the bed and sat down. I got up. “Rose!” I heard myself shout.

  “What is it, El. What’s going on?” She stood at the curtain.

  “I don’t know. I can’t stay in here. I want out.”

  “El, you’ve got to relax.”

  I watched her features change shape as she pressed her face against the plastic.

  “You’re wound up from the chemo and the transplant. I can get you a sleeping pill.”

  “No. I don’t want one.”

  “But it would help. You need to sleep.”

  “I’m not making any sense. My head is expanding. Am I making sense?”

  “Yes, Liz,” Dave said. “You’re doing okay.”

  “But where’s Roberts?”

  “El. It’s after midnight. He’s home. You need to sleep,” she said again. “What can we do?”

  “Get me out of here.”

  I looked at them both standing freely outside the curtain. Frantically, I scanned all the walls holding me in.

  “Liz, come back over here,” Dave urged.

  “What?”

  He had his hands in the gloves.

  “Come here and give me a hug.”

  I held my arms at my side and let him wrap the rubber gloves around my shoulders. The gloves were warm from his hands. I felt layers of ice starting to thaw, the obstruction in my stomach loosening.

  “Cry, Liz.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Let it go.”

  “Let it go,” he said again.

  I pulled at it, wrenching, uprooting a block that was cold and hard.

  “Let it go,” he said, his voice quieter than before. “We’re all here.”

  The next morning Roberts sat in a chair and looked at me through the curtain. I was eating a plateful of scrambled eggs, bite after bite.

  “I’m better today,” I said.

  “Good. Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “Well, there’s nothing to say. I was out of it.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  He leaned back and crossed his legs. I tapped my fork on the plate.

  “Who told you?”

  “I know everything that goes on in here and with you.”

  “It’s
being here I suppose and those drugs. Anyway, it won’t happen again. Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. There’s nothing to be sorry about. I’d be surprised if you didn’t feel that way.”

  He watched me tear off pieces of toast into uneven shapes.

  “And there’s the letdown,” he added.

  A decline, I thought.

  “Well, the worst is over,” I said.

  “Step one is over.”

  “That’s great,” I said, pushing the tray away from me. I stared at my blanket-covered knees. “Must you be so negative?”

  “I’m being realistic, Elizabeth.”

  “Negative. Say something good before you leave.” I looked at him and waited. He stood and leaned toward the curtain.

  “You got through chemo and you’re eating,” he said. “That’s a lot.”

  “Thanks.”

  I turned my back and heard him walking away.

  “Elizabeth,” he called from the outer door. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  I switched on the television.

  “Bermuda!” the announcer said.

  A panorama of ocean, white sand and sun burst apart in front of me. It was Christmas time and cold where I was. Everyone said I was lucky to be inside. Snow was expected but even so there would be no way I could know except from outsiders’ reports or the news. There were no windows in my room. I pressed the remote control button and watched stations spin around, past Bermuda again, until I shut it off. The second hand calmly made its way around the clock. It reminded me of second grade. Instead of listening to the teacher talk, I would stare at the clock above her head until the minute hand flinched toward the next number. Those movements, I had thought, were signs of God.

  Every day Rose entered the anteroom and dressed in sterile gowns so as not to infect me when she came into my bacteria-free space. I stayed on the bed, and followed her activities: washing the walls, the chair, the plastic curtain and finally, me.

  “Don’t be slow now,” she said. “I’m in a rotten mood and if you don’t behave, I won’t be kind.”

  “Scare me,” I said. “What happened? Did you see Leroy last night?”

  “All night, and it’s always the same. He loves me but he won’t marry me. He doesn’t want me to leave,” she said as she tossed the worn pillowcase out the door, “but he doesn’t want to get tied down.”

  “Makes a lot of sense,” I said, snorting.

  She handed me a wet cloth. I ran it up my legs, rinsed it out, threw the cloth in a basin, took another clean cloth, dunked it in sterile cleansing solution, ran the cloth across one arm, threw the cloth in the basin, took a clean cloth, ran it along the other arm until I had used 17 washcloths to clean myself.

  “Bend your head,” she said.

  I obeyed and let her pour a basin of the solution through my hair. I rubbed my scalp but as I lathered the soap, clumps of hair stuck to my hands.

  “My God, Rose.”

  “Don’t do that. Throw it out, Jesus. I hate to see that but it happens every time.”

  “I’ve got to look,” I said. “I’ve got to see the mirror.”

  “Honey, you’re gonna be here for a while. The mirror’s where it always is.”

  I slipped on a fresh nightgown and pulled the mirror out of the utility table. My hair was thinning. In a few days, just as the doctors had warned me, my entire head would be bald.

  “So what will you do?” I said as I stared at myself, tilting my head this way and that.

  “I think I’ll marry Ken.”

  “What do you mean, Ken?”

  “Ken wants to marry me. He has money and a good job.”

  I closed the tabletop and looked at her. She had two blue masks over her face but it was easy to read her eyes.

  “You’re not in love with him.”

  “He’s very nice.”

  “Nice, Rose.”

  “Honey, I’m tired. I raised four kids on my own, and lady I’ve got an itch behind this mask that I can’t scratch. You’ve got me talking too much.”

  She gathered up the basin full of wet facecloths and stepped out of my room. It was almost time for lunch. Afterward, I would nap, later eat dinner and then Dr. Roberts would stop by before going home. I’d watch some more TV and sleep.

  Nighttime. The big lake was flat. I drifted on it, gliding on the surface at peace. The horizon curved fifteen years back in memory. I was ten on an overnight trip at summer camp. My two friends and I knelt by the water’s edge and made silent wishes. I prayed for my own happiness and for happiness in the world. Homemade roof-shingle boats the size of our hands floated next to our knees. Each boat balanced a candle that had been melted onto it. There was a large half-moon over the middle of the lake and on the opposite shore, someone’s living room shone through the pine trees. We wondered who lived there. Did they see us the way we saw them? One of the counselors rang a small bell. The whole group, forty-one of us, leaned forward and pushed our lighted boats toward the center. The current carried them toward the left bend and it seemed as if stars had fallen and reemerged in a water-sky.

  When we awoke the next morning, the moon looked like a cloud. I was late for swimming class, but as I ran from my cabin to the dock I saw a shingle boat, candleless, caught in the foam near the reeds where we never swam. The sun was white and gave off a crisp, practical light. I flung my arms straight above me, dove into the water and when I resurfaced, sat up in bed and stared at the floor.

  The linoleum tiles were speckled. I wore Styrofoam slippers to protect my feet from germs. In the evening I got up and walked eight feet from one wall to the other, eight steps from one wall to the other. I circled the square tiles searching for anything that moved in my mind that would lead me somewhere. I circled and listened. I learned the songs on the radio. I watched a show about galaxies. Time towed me in and out of myself, a tireless current in my brain.

  One afternoon Rose ushered a woman up to my curtain.

  “This is Celine,” she said. “She doesn’t speak English. She’s French and she has what you had. I told her you’d talk to her.”

  Celine looked old and young at the same time. Her clothing emphasized mature breasts and hips yet she wore red ribbons in her hair. The ribbons shook when she laughed. We stared at each other through the plastic. I pointed to my bald head and we laughed.

  “It’ll come back,” I told her in French.

  “I don’t want this,” she said.

  I struggled to remember her language though the instant familiarity we felt didn’t require words.

  “Neither did I.”

  Her husband came up behind her and wrapped his hairy arm around her waist. They kissed without embarrassment. She told him about my hair, pointing to my head as he listened and smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said in English. “I’m glad you are here.”

  They walked out arm in arm.

  I didn’t see her again until the afternoon she was admitted to her transplant room next door to me. Her husband stayed until evening and stopped by my curtain before he left.

  “My wife is glad you are here,” he said, chewing on the “r” the way Celine did. He pointed again to my head.

  “It comes back.” I said, nodding to reassure him.

  After he left, I could hear the television in Celine’s room. Over the next several days I would hear it running all day and night. The nurses whispered a lot outside her door and Roberts no longer stopped by my room three times a day but came only once at night.

  “Well, how is she? What’s going on?” I asked Rose the moment she walked into my room for my morning bath.

  “Okay.”

  “The details, Rose.”

  “She’s having trouble. Turn the radio on will you?”

  I got off the bed.

  “What trouble?”


  “Some kind of pain, El. We don’t know what it is.”

  She filled the washbasin and stood back to watch me.

  “When you get off those pills, you’ll lose that ring around your hips.”

  “What kind of pain?”

  “We don’t know. We had to stop the treatment.”

  We turned to watch a technician roll a machine toward Celine’s room, the machine so large it barely fit through the doorway and knocked against a wall.

  “Rose.”

  “They’re probably taking an X-ray. She’s got some fluid in her chest.”

  “I can’t take this. Where’s Roberts?”

  “Sit down, Liz.”

  “I can’t. The damn bed’s dirty.”

  “Listen to me.”

  She held the basin in her arms. A wet cloth dangled from her gloved hand.

  “There’s nothing any of us can do except wait and hope her body recovers.”

  “Hand me that cloth please,” I said.

  I washed quickly, methodically casting off one cloth after another, paying too much attention to each limb as I dried off.

  The next morning I awoke early from the sound of Celine crying. It was muffled because of the air vents but persistent. I pushed the call button. A nurse I didn’t know appeared in the dark.

  “Can someone stay here with me?”

  “We really can’t, Elizabeth. We’re short-staffed. I’m filling in from another floor.”

  “Well, I’ve got to see someone. Who else is out there?”

  Minutes later, Roberts came through the door and up to the curtain. He hesitated.

  “Your counts are going up, Elizabeth. I doubt you’ll be needing any more transfusions.”

  “But is she going to be okay?”

  I listened but I couldn’t hear.

  He was slow in answering then shook his head. I got up and put on my green slippers.

  It was a summer day. I was older. Thirteen. Eight of us rode in the back of a pickup truck down a winding dirt road. All summer we had been swimming between docks to strengthen our bodies for lifesaving. Now we headed toward the big lake to be tested. The truck jostled our bare legs and we held on to the sides while dust formed spinnakers in the air. We talked to calm ourselves, but when a rock hit the floorboard we grew silent. Pebbles shattered the fenders as we came upon the clearing. Then the truck stopped. We hopped out, pulled off our T-shirts, and lined up along the shore. Three counselors swam out shouting instructions. I waited for the whistle and ran in.