Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Anna refused to look Mildred in the eye or even greet her although she could see the woman was considerably younger, probably not a day over seventy. Installed by the window in her wheelchair, she was within arm’s reach of her own private phone which fact immediately annoyed Anna enormously. She’d be chattering all day and Anna would have to listen to it. Anna also noticed that the curtains over the windows were drawn shut. She took the opportunity to make a major fuss.

  “I’m entitled to see outside!” she complained to the aide. “Do I have to live here in the dark like in a grave?” She had found in the course of her life that it was most effective to leap to the extreme interpretation of any plight.

  The west side of the nursing home looked out at a park where high school boys played ball. Though the rooms were at street level and set back only two feet from the sidewalk, Anna had been assured that people passing by couldn’t see into the windows—anyone trying to peer in would see only his own reflection. Anna observed that her new room was positioned at the end of a long corridor, just beside the outside door. The door (like all the doors here) was supposed to be locked at 8 p.m., but the security guard never bothered to lock any of them. When Anna complained, the nurses told her that no criminal would want to come into a place full of old, helpless people.

  The fact was that all kinds of people came in, day and night. There was constant traffic—doctors popping in and nurses changing shifts and aides leaving and ambulances stopping, and hearses arriving. Whatever room Anna was in, a cold breeze was always hitting her on the back of the neck.

  The aide pulled back the curtain. The new roommate, Mildred Pierce (what kind of name was that? It was the name of an old movie that Joan Crawford starred in, did this woman think she was some kind of a movie star?) said, “If she wants the curtains open, by all means, leave them open.”

  “Oh drop dead,” Anna muttered under her breath. “Don’t do me any favors.”

  The woman appeared not to hear Anna and actually smiled at her. It wasn’t going to work—her trying to be nice. Anna would not allow it.

  Mildred Pierce picked up a big paperback and opened it. Hawaii, the cover said. Did this woman Mildred think she was going on a vacation any time soon? Besides, Anna knew of no one in this place who had enough eyesight left to read even a billboard. Why pretend? Did she think she was impressing Anna? Anna—in fact—could impress the ears off her and anyone else in this place if she tried. All she’d have to do was state her credentials. Anna had worked for a New York state senator. Anna had flown on one of the first commercial airline flights. Anna had owned a piano autographed by Lily Pons, the opera star. Anna had had Barbra Streisand buy something from her antique store, and not only Streisand, but Zsa Zsa Gabor, John Wayne—the Duke himself. Vivien Leigh had been in to buy a picture frame. Robert De Niro had bought for his baby son an old red wooden high chair that Anna’s own granddaughter had sat in. (If only she had the high chair today, it would be worth a fortune. What did she sell it for, fifty dollars? It had been an antique even then.) She had once had a Frederic Remington painting that she sold for two hundred dollars. She had given away for a song a signed Lalique statue. If only she had held onto everything, she’d be a multimillionaire now, and wouldn’t be on Medi-Cal, and could have her own private nurses, live in her own house and not have to put up with rats and dead bodies in the halls.

  “I used to be someone,” she wanted to tell this Mildred Pierce, but she knew it wouldn’t carry any weight. They all thought they used to be someone. In the retirement home where Anna had lived for five years (what a waste, it had cost a fortune and she hardly remembered a minute of it), the old men carried around newspaper clippings of what big shots they used to be. This one said he’d owned a car dealership, another one said he’d built the Brooklyn Bridge, the next one was a famous architect—one was always trying to prove he was a bigger deal than the next. So what? They were all slumped over little men with pacemakers or colostomies who wore their waistlines pulled up to their chins with suspenders. The women, too, liked to talk about how many husbands they’d had, how many diamonds were in the vault, how their children were fancy surgeons. Many of them had photos of themselves at age twenty on their walls. Every great beauty’s face was now steam-rollered by age into the same generic old lady. Anna, too, had been beautiful; men had been after her from the day she put on nylons and got on the subway to Manhattan and took a job in a legal office.

  She didn’t remember much of what happened yesterday, but she had perfect recall of what had happened sixty-five years ago—how she had lied to get her first job, said she’d had years of experience. And how, on her first day at work, a man came in the door and asked her for the process server. She started opening the draws of her desk—she thought it must be something like a cake server.

  “Hah!” she said aloud. A rush of other memories came back: how one day she wore a white linen suit to work and bled red menstrual blood on the back of the skirt, and how her boss (the New York state senator!) wrapped his suit jacket around her waist and tied the arms in front. He did that for her, bending over her, despite her humiliation! She was touched right now, a lifetime away, as she hadn’t been then. A few days after that, he invited her on a three-day business trip to upstate New York, by train. He said he needed her stenographic services. But by then she was going out with Abram, who said she could only go on the business trip on the condition that he could come along, too, and be her bodyguard. Anna had assured him he was wrong to worry, that the senator had a wife and wasn’t interested in her. But Abram said he knew better, that if Anna ever had to work late typing legal contracts, she must call him and let him sit with her in the office.

  Suddenly she felt a longing for Abram, though she couldn’t remember his face now. He had big hands, though—she could see them quite clearly in her mind. Big, powerful, hairy, gentle hands.

  “You want a Lifesaver?” Mildred Pierce asked.

  “I don’t eat by mouth,” Anna said.

  “You could have a Lifesaver anyway, you still have saliva.”

  “How do you know what I have?”

  “I see you have legs,” Mildred Pierce said.

  “And you don’t?”

  “I don’t.” Mildred pulled away the knitted afghan from her wheelchair and Anna saw the stumps of her legs, cut off above her knees.

  For once she was speechless. What could she say? Finally she thought of something.

  “What if I wanted a Lifesaver, how could I get it? I can’t walk out of this bed and you can’t walk over here.”

  “I can roll,” Mildred Pierce said. She began rolling her wheelchair toward Anna. She held out the roll of brightly colored hard candies.

  “You’re going to be a pest, I can see,” Anna said.

  “We might as well be on speaking terms,” Mildred said, “as long as we’re stuck here. Though I’m hoping to get out soon.”

  “Who isn’t?” Anna said.

  Anna felt momentarily sorry for Mildred Pierce. She wondered if her legs were already buried and waiting for her. She knew of a woman who had “one foot in the grave,” a gangrenous foot (amputated) that was buried in her grave and patiently awaiting the rest of her. Anna still had everything but her teeth and her appendix. She had come close to losing a toe, but the surgeons got her circulation going again by cutting out the clogged artery and putting in a plastic one. Whoever designed the universe (she didn’t mean God, how could there be a God in charge of this mess?) could have arranged for things in the body to last the same amount of time and then just fail all together. One minute you’d be up and swimming the English Channel, the next you’d shut off like a light bulb that blows out. But this arrangement! A toe goes, an esophagus closes up, a hipbone crumbles, an artery in the brain gets clogged, the pancreas stops making insulin, and the legs get cut off. What kind of an education did this dummy have—whoever it was that designed the human anatomy?

  When bedtime came, Mildred Pierce did an amazing thing: she whe
eled herself as close to her bed as she could, and, using her arms on the armrests, she lifted herself up and swung herself back and forth, back and forth until she had enough momentum to vault into the center of her bed! Anna gasped. What if Mildred Pierce missed her target and cannonballed herself right across the room to land on top of Anna?

  “I’m strong,” Mildred confessed to Anna. “I lost my legs young. I have arms like a wrestler.”

  In the morning, when the phone rang, Mildred leaned out of her bed to answer it. It was a yellow Princess phone, old-fashioned, the cord black with grime. Anna noticed that she lowered her voice and whispered. So she was going to keep secrets! What kind of secrets could an old lady have? Maybe it was money she was talking about. (She knew of rich old people in the nursing home who had hidden their millions and were letting the state pay for them.) But then she heard Mildred whisper:

  “I love you.” Then she whispered, “I miss you, too, darling.” Then she said, “I’ll see you this afternoon. Yes. It can’t be soon enough. I count the minutes.”

  Just to hear such drivel Anna felt like throwing up. What was this baloney? She decided she would have to ask for another room change. For some reason a devil of jealousy was hammering in her chest: I’ll see you this afternoon. It can’t be soon enough. What was that all about? The people living their leftover lives here didn’t have intrigues. Didn’t have love affairs. For all of them, that was in the distant, dead, dessicated past. What was going on? Mildred had to be pretending. Maybe she had arranged for herself to be called by one of those party numbers, where lonely people say sexy things to strangers. Anything was possible in this world; there were varieties of sickness so varied, so perverted (Anna knew this from the Oprah Winfrey show) that nothing could surprise her.

  In the afternoon, Elena, the aide, came and helped Mildred put on her earrings. Anna watched as Mildred applied rouge, lipstick, perfume. Then Elena wheeled Mildred into the hall.

  “Where are you taking her?” Anna heard herself plead. “Is there an activity? Can I go too?”

  “She’s going to see her husband!” said Elena, throwing back her head and rolling her eyes. “He’s waiting for her in the Medicare wing.”

  “What husband?” Anna said, choking.

  But they were out the door and gone.

  Late that night, after the halls were hushed, after the eleven o’clock shift had changed, when the lights were out and the call bells had stopped ringing, long after Mildred had come back from her visit and tossed her torso into the center of her bed, long after Anna’s mind had continued sizzling with confusion, pain, and especially with jealousy, the outside door creaked open slowly and Anna saw two big hulking boys come in. They stood in the corridor for a moment and then ducked straight into Anna’s room, which was the first door nearest the street. She could see them in the glow from the hall—two ugly boys of about fifteen, wearing turned-around baseball caps and big baggy pants.

  “What do you want?” Anna said hoarsely.

  “Hey old lady,” one of them said. “Don’t say nothin’ or you’re dead.”

  From where she lay, Anna could see one of the boys open the chest of drawers opposite her bed. Her clean robes were in the top drawer, her bedpan was in the middle drawer, her soiled robes were in the bottom drawer.

  “There’s nothing in there anyone could use,” she said. “This is a nursing home. What could you want here?”

  “You got a TV, don’t you?” The boy came close to her bed and put his big hand on her little five-inch TV.

  “You can’t take that,” Anna said. “It’s screwed into the table.”

  “Then maybe we’ll take you instead,” the boy said.

  “Yo,” the other boy said. “You’re some prize.”

  And suddenly, one of them whipped her blankets off her and exposed her body beneath the bunched up hospital gown. She could see with horror what they saw: her slack white belly with the hole in it, the naked tube pumping its tasteless life into her gut, and below it, the forgotten part that was once her sex.

  “Get away from me!” Anna screamed. “Help, help, somebody help!” she screamed. But she knew the nurses wouldn’t come; if they heard a scream they’d think it was just some old person out of her mind. It was skeleton-shift time; if any nurses or aides were on duty, they were having coffee, or sitting together talking in the lounge.

  “We got to have something from you,” one of the boys said. “We came in here to get us something. What prize you planning to give us?”

  Anna was frozen. She clutched her heart and felt there the ticking of her useless, burdensome life—and found it precious. She wanted it.

  “Let’s see what’s up here,” one boy said, trying to lift her gown over her breasts. Her paralyzed arm held her gown down firmly on one side. One of the boys bent over her face; she could smell the beer on his breath. And then the cannonball hit her bed. Like a boulder shot out of a slingshot, the torso of Mildred Pierce landed on Anna’s bed! She could feel the weight of it smashing like a wrecking ball into those boys, spinning like a dervish, her wrestler’s arms punching out at those boys, her furious mouth cursing those boys and hissing like a banshee at them. Anna covered her face with her good hand so she didn’t get a broken nose.

  In no time, there was a commotion in the hall and the security guard ran in with his keys and his flashlight. He grabbed both boys by their necks and threw them down on the floor.

  When a nurse turned the lights on in the room, Mildred bounced her torso up toward Anna and began stroking her face. “You’re okay, honey, you’re fine, don’t worry, I almost killed those little bastards.”

  Long into the night, after the police had come and gone and taken the boys away in the squad car, after the nurse had put a sedative in Anna’s feeding tube, after Mildred had been carried back to her bed by an aide, Anna thought about her saved life, and about how much she wanted what she still had.

  “Are you sleeping, Mildred?” Anna asked.

  “No, how can I sleep? I’m thinking,” Mildred whispered across the space between their beds. “I can hardly believe the guts I still have in me.”

  “Me, too,” Anna said. “Me, too.”

  “I wish we could live backwards,” Mildred said. “Go the other way.”

  “Yeah,” Anna said. “Then we could be college roommates . “

  “I never went to college.”

  “I never finished high school,” Anna said.

  A buzzer went on at the nurses’ station. It buzzed through Anna’s bones like warning of an electrocution to come.

  “I used to push the buzzer ten times every night when I first came here,” Anna confessed to Mildred over the chasm between their beds, “just to talk to someone. But an aide once told me if I bothered him again, he’d hold a pillow over my face. But all I wanted was to talk. To anyone.”

  “I just want to talk to my husband,” Mildred said. “I just want to be with him.”

  “Your husband?”

  “He’s dying of heart failure. He’s in the Medicare wing, hooked up to oxygen and a heart monitor.”

  “How come you two don’t live in the same room?” Anna asked. “It’s only right.”

  “We can’t. The state has rules about same-sex rooms.”

  “The state has rules?” Anna said. “So what? You can’t let that bother you. At our age we don’t pay attention to rules. Maybe you can fool the state. Maybe we can. Think of what we did tonight! Those boys might have killed us.”

  “We are tough cookies,” Mildred said. “Look how long you’ve lived already. And me—I used to live on a farm. I drove a tractor. When the red fox went for the chickens, I killed him with one shot. Little punks like them don’t scare me”

  “Listen,” Anna said. “Tomorrow night you tell Elena to bring your husband in here. We can switch. She can put me in his bed for the night.”

  Mildred was silent for a minute.

  “You really think we could pull it off? You really think we could ri
sk it?”

  “So what could be so bad?” Anna said. “They’ll give us a demerit? You’ll lose your virginity? Don’t worry.” “What if they catch us?”

  “What would the punishment be?” Anna asked. “Life imprisonment? They’ll arrest us?”

  Mildred considered this for a moment. Then she said to Anna, “You’re a doll. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “So maybe you could throw me a Lifesaver now,” Anna said. “After all the excitement, my mouth is a little dry.”

  HEAR NO ENTREATIES, SPEAK NO CONSOLATIONS

  Anna was diminished. If she thought she’d been compromised when she lived in the retirement home, she now realized that the other had been fireworks, a festival, a parade, a county fair, the “Star-Spangled Banner.” This. This was…she didn’t have the words for it. This was a hovel in a graveyard, this was the…paws of an animal on her back as some two-hundred-pound dumb cluck turned her from side to side every two hours. This was the supreme insane asylum as moaners and screamers sang a chorus every night of “Call the Police, Oh Momma, Momma, come and get me, I’ve missed the train, untie me, when are they serving me my sand?” You could hear anything here, and you did. You could scream anything and no one cared. You could be slumped over in your wheelchair in the hall and beg a passer-by to call the police and get you out of here—and no one would help. You could tell them you were being held here against your will, that you had plenty of money to pay a lawyer, that you wanted to go home, that you could afford to hire round-the-clock private nurses, and they’d pass you by, nice-looking, decent people, here to visit their screaming mamas and papas, but as soon as they entered this charnel house, they were in a special hell whose sign above the entrance specified: Hear No Entreaties, See No Atrocities, Speak No Consolations.