My question, "Is that a real camera?" is followed by only dim, delirious howls. Staggering through the hall, which keeps changing shape as I try hard not to spill an overfull glass of … what was it they said was in it again? Who poured it? Back down in the basement that collapsed pile of giggling from the beanbag chair in the middle of the room turns out to be Krishna. “How did she get down here? I thought she was upstairs.”
"What's so funny?” I sway and nearly fall on her.
"Over there." She points, so high pitched and contagious that I too become an incoherent giggler even before I turn my head to see Dave crawling away from the litter box a few feet to throw up from the stench.
***
"Can we get back to what we're here to talk about?" Miriam snatched me out from the past again.
Why did she keep doing that? How could she not want to hear about these parties? I heard myself saying.
"Because it's no longer important. Only one of those parties matters."
"Oh that one," I sighed. "Why are you dragging that up now? Why? It's been twenty years."
"No, you see, the real question is why are you dragging it up now? We are just beginning to get somewhere in our sessions and I think you agree with me."
"I brought this on myself didn't I?" I smiled. "If I hadn't had that dream …"
"Talk about the dream."
“Of course. What else do I do but dream that damn dream? I wish I could stop. I fell asleep watching TV on the couch and woke up soaking wet with sweat at three o'clock in the morning. The whole house was dark, you know, like it used to be. It's creepy in that house with my parents asleep. It's as if nobody lives there."
I shivered at the thought.
Climb the red-carpeted stairs.
I imagined sleeping again in the little room that I slept in when I was really little, and it gave me the creeps. And it had been such a long time ago that I had abandoned the guest room I slept in as a teen, on the uncomfortable cot. We bought a comfortable bed from Mrs. Barnard next door. Actually, we bought it from her son after she died. Well, actually, not from her son, but from the auction her estate had. Her son had long hair like a witch and lived with her even till he was forty or fifty years old, and when she died he lived on the streets.
It used to bother me to sleep in Mrs. Barnard's old bed. Sometimes it still did—like last night. Lying there on the open sheets stifling from the heat and the sweat, which had been water in my dream.
Open windows didn't seem to help, as there was no breeze. I finally got up because I couldn't stand it anymore and went into the room next door, the one I slept in as a child of six, and pulled the fan out of the window. There was my dad sleeping on my old single bed. Did anyone in this house ever sleep in their own rooms? Oh yeah, my mom did. I guess she was the only one.
But of course when I lie back down again I couldn't even close my eyes, let alone relax and go to sleep. The water, Krishna's screaming—the cold air blasting in my face and me not even feeling it.
"One thing I don't understand or remember is my window," I said to Miriam. I stared down. My leg had begun to shake uncontrollably. "It's no use …"
"We'll stop for today; just think about it when you can. Don't make yourself worse thinking about it, though. We don't need you ending up back in the hospital again."
3
Ten minutes to three. I sat in my car finishing my cigarette. My stomach churned and my head throbbed, but I couldn't very well get out of work or go home early on my first day, now, could I? So I was just going to have to grin and bear it. I had already been through the two weeks of training and been paid so I'd had money to buy my own cigarettes, junk food if I needed it, and my own coffee, and boy had I ever used it. I put some in savings too, like I usually did. It never even occurred to me to offer some to my parents, but I know if I had, my dad would have refused the money anyway, saying I needed it more.
I'd always been pretty good about putting money in savings. I sat in the car until the last minute in my pink, polyester nurse's aide uniform. The only thing different about me, I thought as I checked my reflection in the car mirror, is the crease in my brow line from worry and thinking too much, (it figures) and my fine, thin, blonde hair had become even more fine and thin, to the point where I—and hopefully only I—could notice the scalp underneath.
But there was that one spectacular time, I reminisced as I put my pink lipstick on, that my savings went puff in a cloud, literally. I laughed aloud at the memory.
"It was just a good thing cocaine wasn't so readily available back then," I had told everyone at a meeting recently, "because that stuff is soooo addicting."
And it was.
I had saved over three hundred dollars by that time.
***
"You bet I'm gonna try it."
I had said this aloud when asked, back then, if I wanted to try cocaine.
Ziggy said it was the one drug he would never do.
"Because," he explained, sitting back in the green faded Easy Boy up in his apartment above his parents' house, eyes in a half-closed smile, "I'm afraid it will be too good."
"How can anything be too good?"
Well now I know.
But I didn’t know then, not sitting there in Krishna's boyfriend's room, the third, or maybe the fourth guy she had gone through in the time I'd known her, like so many tissues. Like all her discarded boys, he remained willing to do whatever it took to be near her. This time he’d perhaps had dealer motives though. He’d found cocaine and he had offered it to all three of us as samples, so we would come back for more. And we did of course.
I knew it was very expensive. Everyone knew that. It was the high-class drug we'd all been waiting for. It made everything so great, the sky, the trees, the air, the music. All the music began to sound so good, I mean so very, very good, like, like nothing we’d ever heard before, like sirens.
"I love this song, now we have to smoke another joint." Krishna and I said it at once and then, startled, looked at each other and laughed.
And he'd sent us each home with our own tiny little baggy full of white powder—not too much, just enough so that we would all be back the next morning with the sun to buy more.
At first we had been able to pool our money. Everyone had 'borrowed' some from their parents. Gay, of course, had just stolen hers off her mother's dresser. We had run quickly through all we were able to purchase.
It had been the next day I believe, after a coke-filled evening of dancing by myself, twirling through my fixed-up-like-the-TV-series-M.A.S.H. bedroom, the former guest room of our house. I had been pacing and floating, dreaming and feeling excited about my fantasies of great things to come for me, at how amazing I was to look at, and how brilliant. Then, somehow together again, like we always were, all three of us, Gay, Krishna and me, had come to realize we'd run out of money and cocaine and we began to work out a strategy to get more.
Vaguely I heard Ziggy's warning in my head. "I'm afraid it will be too good."
***
Pursing my pink lips in the mirror and checking for lipstick on my teeth I shut off the engine, thinking how great it was that now I knew I would not take my money out of savings and watch it be sneezed into the air like I did that week. Thank God cocaine was not available.
Pot was hard enough to get off of, I thought, walking in through the double glass doors at the back of the nursing home.
A new start, having money, respectability for once. I was working, and not just a bum on my parents' couch.
I reported at the front desk to a woman named Francine, as I'd been told to do. I didn't like her. She refused to smile at me or look me in the eye, and bossed me around the minute I arrived. Oh, and she mentioned that I was late, which I thought was rude and petty.
"No not really," I argued, "I was supposed to be here at three o'clock."
"Well, it's two minutes after three," she snipped, "and anyway you were supposed to be here fifteen minutes early to get your stats filled in.
"
She wore too much hairspray. It made my eyes water, and if I had to be around it much longer I might start to get an even worse headache than I had now. Should I say something? Were they allowed to wear that much of any toxic chemicals around the elderly? I think it was bad for the patients, actually. I know it was bad for me, and if it was affecting me like this, imagine how it must be affecting them.
If only I'd finished high school. The GED probably help me any. Was college out of the question? I could become a doctor and fire this hairspray magnet.
"I don't remember anyone saying I had to be here at quarter till three. Do I get paid for those extra fifteen minutes?"
"You better start writing things down if you're going to forget them."
She directed me into a stifling room and gestured that I should sit down at a gloomy, brown desk.
"Have you been shown how to do your stats?"
At any point did this Francine woman think it was appropriate to greet a person? Or did she not think of me as a person? It figured. The old lowest-man-on-the-totem-pole routine. I was so sick of this dynamic.
"Yes," I said coldly. "I've been shown." And I made sure it was real cold.
"Okay, get them finished. I'll have to have someone watch your hall until you are able to take responsibility for it.”
She snipped on down the hall and out of this stuffy room. Good. It was bad enough I had to sit here. Was there a pop machine?
I looked in my purse for quarters. Not quite enough. I was parched. My whole mouth felt dry. Fifty cents for a pop and I only had a quarter and two dimes. One stinking nickel, that's all I needed.
I looked around the dusty, old room. Did they ever consider painting these depressing rooms? What was with the dull pink? To match my uniform? Was there any particular reason they had to make everything so dull and depressingly institutional?
Hadn't I had enough of these?
"Well, I better not think about that now," I said out loud. "But I think a pop would help."
I got up to go to my car. I knew there was some change in there somewhere. In the ashtray, maybe? Or behind the seats? Oh shoot I forgot my stupid purse in there. Now I have to go back in there to get the keys.
I walked back in, but at this point I noticed the back of Francine's poufy head. She hadn't been there on my way out.
Well, wasn't I a human being? Didn’t I have the right to get a drink?
I sauntered right past her proudly.
"You are finished with your stats?"
"Almost. Need to get a pop. My coins are in my car."
"You're fifteen minutes late as it is."
"It is important to stay hydrated."
"There is a water fountain in the hall."
"I can't drink that disgusting-tasting water. It tastes like metal pipes."
***
I had worked here before. I remembered it during my training classes. I’d kept this job for three months, back then, and it was a hard job to keep, too. I’d watched a woman die here. She turned a light blue and trembled ever so slightly and then she was gone. I stood gaping at the edge of her bed while the nurses held her hand. I wore this same polyester, pink uniform. The three hundred dollars I sneezed everywhere I had earned right here.
"And what impresses me is that you've stayed there," Ziggy had said. "It's a hard job, too. Not many people could do it, and you've actually stayed. Even my mom’s impressed. She said you could never do it."
I don't remember when it was I finally did leave it. I know it wasn’t until after Christmas, because that was when I was shocked to look up from the bedside of one of the white-haired, sweet old ladies to see a drunken Krishna saunter incoherently into the room laughing, and actually, to my disbelief, eat Christmas cookies out of my patient's gift basket that hadn't, until that moment, even been opened yet. She just dived right in.
"Krishna!” I exclaimed. "What are you doing? That's her present from her family!"
"Sorry," she giggled with her mouth full of crumbs. Her eyes spilled out with her laughter like root beer foaming over from shaken bottles. Her black hair fell around her shoulders in large, unkempt curls. She wore some kind of red kimono-like outfit that still managed to look rock and roll. "Are you ready to go? There's a party over at that friend of Ames's?"
"I can't leave yet; it's the middle of my shift!"
She reached for another cookie.
"Krishna!” I started toward her. "I have to get you out of here; you are so wasted."
Funnest party ever. I’d call that a traveling party. We had moved from house to house like a nomadic tribe, with long, winding, midnight drives in between that ended inside an old, abandoned farm house sheltered from the cold by the alcohol and the down coats and the warm bodies of each other. Gay and I had found a girl in faded jeans and a red bandana who’d looked and sang just like Janis Joplin. We had toasted her, and begged her to sing, "… busted flat in Baton Rouge … waitin' for a train …," and we had oohed and awed over her amazing sound—for a moment I remember thinking we really were sitting next to Janis …
***
I got a Sprite, set it down—all icy and wet on the sides—next to my stats. I began filling them out. Now let's see, how did it go again? Sign your name, date it, initial that, date it again, write your employee number down in the corner, circle the name, and acknowledge that you will be monitoring all voids and bowel movements. Then do so.
I lost my appetite for the Sprite. Only it's not called an appetite, is it? But you can't say I lost my thirst because it implies something completely different.
These nurses’ aides never lost their appetites. I'd seen them eat M&M's over the most disgusting sights. Catheters and colostomy bags and diaper changes and they would just eat them right in front of it.
"I don't know if I can stay there. It could make me jaded about bodily functions," I told my mom later that night.
She said nothing. She was wiping down the counters as I spoke. Then she shook out a really filthy dishrag.
"Oh please!” I shouted. "Would you stop shaking that disgusting water on me? That's abuse."
She shook it again without a single thought to my feelings.
"That thing is dirty. You need to get a new dishrag."
She hung it over the sink.
"Turn out the lights when you’re not using them," she said as she left the room to go upstairs.
Oh great, I thought. All I get to do is come home from that miserable job and go to bed and have another nightmare and then get up and do it all over again.
I headed over to the phone. I'd try to call Krishna one more time.
"Are there any phone messages for me?” I called up the stairs.
She shut the bedroom door. I walked up and asked again.
"No," she said, "and don't make any long-distance calls."
"I won't," I said, and headed downstairs to call her in Minnesota.
I let the phone ring and ring, and finally an answering machine picked up. I started to speak, but found that I couldn't and quickly hung up. I started sweating in that old familiar way again. Why did I always do that? I was practically soaked. Why had I called? Short-term memory loss?
Of course we all know what caused that. Should I call back and leave a message? I did try, but this time the machine didn't pick up. Maybe I could try writing her a letter. But I had misplaced her address years ago. I guess it could wait a bit longer. After all, I didn't really know what to tell her. You've been appearing in my nightmares? It sounded like I was trying to put her on a guilt trip. Nah. Better wait.
I knocked on my mom's door and she said come in.
"Have you ever heard the sound of ice cracking on the frozen lake?"
"What?” she asked. She looked puzzled and frightened.
"Don't tell me you can't remember either."
"Remember what?” She looked around the room as if the answer were somewhere in there.
"Didn't you tell me about it once?” I waited. "The sound?"
> "Why on earth?” she asked, sitting up a bit in her faded, threadbare, blue nightgown, her eyes glazed over with that sleep look peculiar to the aged, adjusting to the lamp I knew she didn't want to turn on.
"So you didn't hear it."
"No," she said, "go back to bed.”
She turned out the light.
"I think I'll go to a meeting," I said, closing her door, and she said that was probably a good idea.
4
I backed my car out of the driveway, and leaned my head out the open window and looked up toward the stars. The lilacs loomed above my head, a strange-looking shade of violet in the moonlight. As children we had played under those bushes. Ziggy, the only one tall enough to reach those lilacs back then, would pick two bunches of the tiny purple flowers and ceremoniously hand them to us—to Krishna and me—with great dramatic seriousness, bowing prince-like, calling us M’lady. Once, under those bushes, we splashed his long, silly raincoat by stomping near him in puddles, giggling and then twirling our umbrellas proudly. Mine was turquoise, with a sparkly, gold handle.
I turned left into the church parking lot only a few blocks away, the same one my parents dragged me to when I was a child. I shouldn't say dragged. I actually enjoyed it, even though I was unendurably bored. I enjoyed it because I used to draw on the handout stuffed in the slot in front of the pews. My dad would always give me a pen to draw with, if there were no pencils provided in the schedule holder. He always took me out for a doughnut afterward. He let me put the quarter in the basket as it went by. And later, when I went to Sunday school, he gave me a quarter to put in the basket there. I always thought how easy it would be to steal it and buy a pop in the machine—they were only a quarter then—but I never did. I thought the crime too horrible to even contemplate. Surely once you had done a thing like that your soul was damned forever. I had been thinking about this on my way to the AA meeting, and it carried over into my sharing there.
"I know now that my soul would not have been damned for this," I said, waxing philosophical, but I didn't see a lot of understanding nods. "Even though stealing those quarters still seems like the worst thing you could do. It's funny. Cause I've done a lot worse things than that, and I don't even feel guilty for them."
The Oshkosh Trilogy 01 - The Dark Lake Page 2