by Jon Cohen
Iris watched the mourners start to pull out of the cemetery parking lot. She walked on. Last month the Tube Man completed his sentence: “The man in the window.” Whatever that meant. She knew it meant something, though, because every time she said it, she got a nervous, excited feeling, a strange sense of anticipation. Over the years she’d heard many odd words from her patients: delirious cries, jumbled utterances, fragments from drug dreams, mumblings from the dying. Just one week ago, she’d taken care of a man with a stroke who, when you asked him if he needed a urinal or if he was hungry, always replied, “The cat in the hat? The cat in the hat?” He said it so that it came out a question. And the old Italian lady last year, Mrs. Mellace, who did not speak a word of English until the moment of her death, which Iris witnessed. Mrs. Mellace, who hadn’t moved in three days, suddenly sat bolt upright, her eyes huge and white-rimmed, and said, “I feel a certain clarity.” Then she died, still sitting, her eyes unblinking. Iris had heard plenty over the years, but she’d never carried anything with her, or pondered a set of words as she had the Tube Man’s “The man in the window.”
The poor Tube Man, Iris thought, he doesn’t have much longer. The poor part wasn’t that he’d die soon, the poor part was that he’d lived so long in such discomfort. Iris believed, even though she knew that it couldn’t really be true, that a comatose person still felt things in a kind of way. Felt the presence of the tubes, the humiliation of all the wiping, and the suctioning, and the bed baths, felt the pain of constant exposure and the endless days in bed. The Tube Man had tubes in all his orifices, and in some places two or three. When he ran out of orifices, the surgeons made some more, one in his belly and another in his chest wall. He had IV tubes in three different veins through which he received, according to the time of day or night, three different fluids—clear, yellow, and thick white. Yes, there were worse things than death.
The cars from the funeral drove past and Iris looked up. She recognized the man in the hat and scarf in the window of one of them. Without thinking, she nodded ever so slightly as he went by. And did he nod back, or had the car window reflected the passing road? Why had she done such a thing? The last of the cars in the procession disappeared into the glare of the afternoon sun.
CHAPTER TWO
HERB, THE ancient security guard, held open the door to the employees’ entrance for her.
“Iris, my love,” he said.
Iris pushed past him to the time clock. “If I’m your love then you’re a desperate man, Herb.”
They’d had variations on this dialogue for two years. Herb sidled over to her. He always got close enough to touch, but never did. He knew better. “A man my age knows a thing or two about love,” he said.
Iris looked him over with a nurse’s eye. “A man your age knows a thing or two about blindness and senility. You got to be afflicted with both to love me.”
“You’re a peach.” Herb tried a smile, and his dentures dropped down about a quarter inch.
“Herb, take a deep breath and get some oxygen to your atrophied brain, then squint your cloudy eyes in my direction. I’m four foot seven, weigh one hundred and fifty-five very poorly distributed pounds, have a nose like a boxer’s, and the complexion of a corpse.”
“I’m in the market for a woman like that.” Herb let out a wheezy laugh.
“You don’t sound so good, Herb.”
“If I collapse, you’re the one I want doing mouth-to-mouth.”
Iris started off down the hall. “If you collapse, I’ll help put you in the body bag.”
“You’re a peach!” he shouted after her. “You’re my love!”
Iris stopped at the soda machine to get her two Pepsis, which she always drank regardless of which shift she was working. Then she put forty cents in the candy machine for her candy bar. She was working evening shift so she got a Mars bar. On nights she bought a Goldenberg’s Peanut Chew because it didn’t matter that her breath smelled of peanuts, since all the patients were asleep. On day shift she bought a Three Musketeers, which she immediately washed down with her first Pepsi for the double sugar kick that would get her through the morning craziness. She caught a glimpse of herself in the vending-machine glass. Like peering in a fun-house mirror—she looked stepped on, like she should pop back to her normal shape, lithe and long. Nope, she thought, that’s me. Sometimes her unattractiveness surprised her. The only thing I haven’t got is bad breath. Except on nights with my Peanut Chew. She had her body odor under pretty good control, too. So what? Who’d answer a personal ad that read: “Short, dumpy, thoroughly unappealing woman, who bathes regularly and flosses nightly, seeks mate, preferably not Herb.”
Iris walked down the back steps to the Intensive Care Unit, absently devouring the Mars bar she usually managed to save until just before dinner.
“Ooh. Calories, calories,” came an all-too-familiar voice.
Iris looked down at Leona Richards, the hospital dietitian, prancing up the stairs. Shit, she thought, here we go. Leona obviously had never partaken of a Mars bar in her life. She packed her petite frame into the tightest white slacks in the hospital, and the only male Iris had never seen react to her was the Tube Man. Even Iris always turned her head to watch Leona’s ass move down the hall, with a feeling of one part awe and two parts despair.
Iris bit into her Mars bar defiantly, and said, “How’s it going, Leona?”
“You should at least be eating a granola bar,” said Leona.
“Not enough sugar.” Iris sucked a piece of caramel off her front teeth.
Leona winced at the sight. “I’m giving a talk on alternative carbohydrates tonight at seven in classroom B if you’d like to come.”
“Sweet of you to offer… get it, sweet? But I’ll be too busy.”
Leona pressed. “Don’t you care about your body? I can get you a free pass to my gym.”
“Leona, this conversation’s absurd. I have to get down to the Unit.”
“How about walking? You can burn off—”
Iris had reached it. “Hey. What do you think will happen if I lose some fat? There’s just more fat underneath. It’s fat all the way. And here’s something else. Has it ever occurred to you that I like being fat and ugly? You ever thought about that? Huh?” Iris’s voice boomed in the stairwell.
Leona backed away, then turned and ran up the stairs. Iris couldn’t help herself—she watched until Leona’s marvelous ass disappeared from view.
Iris put a quarter in the pay phone just outside the Unit, the one anxious family members always used to relay bad news about a relative. There’d be four or five of them, looking shocked and blank, handing the phone back and forth, probably scaring the hell out of whomever they were calling, because each of their stories would be different, even though they had all talked to the same nurse or doctor. Fear caused them not to hear straight, and Iris knew that even when they nodded their heads yes, little of what she said ever got through. They saw her lips move, but what they heard was, It’s bad, then it’s going to get real bad, then it will get worse.
Iris dialed her father’s number. She had moved up from Maryland two years ago to look after him when her mother died. Her father, Arnie, and mother, LuLu, had lived in Waverly only five years. Iris had moved ten times since she was born. Arnie, a retired auto mechanic, would suddenly say at dinner, “I feel itchy, you know?” and Iris and her mother would sigh. They knew that before the month was out, they’d be sitting down to dinner in a different house in a different town. When LuLu died, Arnie went into a deep funk. Iris said, “You going to get itchy again?” Arnie said nope, he didn’t think so, looked like Waverly was a keeper. That scared Iris, so she invited him to stay in her little twin in Towson, Maryland, but he said nope again. Which scared her even more, so she moved up to Waverly to keep him from going out to the garage and inhaling carbon monoxide or taking a big gulp of battery acid—she imagined that if he did himself in, he would honor his profession and somehow involve a car. Not kill himself in a crash, he�
��d never take a car down with him, but maybe plug himself into the electrical system and hit the ignition, something like that. Arnie never actually brought up the possibility of suicide after LuLu’s death, but Iris, ever the nurse, had to consider it. She’d worked a year in Emergency and had seen people who killed themselves for the smallest and unlikeliest of reasons.
The phone rang seven times before Arnie picked it up. Iris held the receiver away from her ear in anticipation of his clearing his throat loudly, which is what he always did before he spoke. “Hello,” he finally said.
“That’s a disgusting habit,” said Iris.
“Hello?” Arnie said again. He used his deaf left ear, the ear he’d pressed against car engines for forty years to listen for the little clicks and gurgles only a mechanic can decipher.
“Don’t clear your throat—”
“Wear my coat?” said Arnie. “Who is this?”
“Iris!”
“Iris? What you calling for, girl? You forget your coat?”
“It’s summer, Arnie. Why would I be wearing a coat?”
“I don’t know. You’re the one who called.”
“Forget it.”
“Okay, then. See you later.”
“Arnie!” Too late. He’d hung up. The pay phone swallowed her quarter. She waited for the dial tone to return, then she put in another one. Fifty cents to talk to that old fool, she thought, dialing.
She waited for him to finish with his throat noises. “Hello,” he said.
“Arnie, this is Iris. Don’t hang up.”
“Why would I hang up?”
“Well, you hung up on me last time.”
“Girl, don’t they give you enough to do at that job of yours, you got all this time to spend on the telephone? It’s no wonder people are always dying in hospitals.”
“Arnie, you’re a pain in the ass,” Iris said. A visitor frowned as he walked by, and she frowned back at him.
“That’s why patients are dying, because nurses are talking dirty and spending all their time on telephones.”
“You’re in rare form today, Arnie.”
“Thank you. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in forty years.”
“I’m thirty-seven.”
“It seems like forty years,” Arnie muttered.
“Listen, will you please. I forgot to feed the dog. Will—”
“Need a dog!” Arnie shouted. “What the hell do we need another dog for, girl?”
Oh Jesus. Iris slumped her head against the pay phone.
Arnie’s pump was primed. “Another dog? Ain’t we got enough piss on the floor? You want two dogs pissing all over the place? And you know how much a can of dog food costs? Kal Kan went up to fifty-three cents, and you multiply that by two dogs, and that comes out to something like five million dollars a year for dog food. And they won’t eat the dry stuff you see taking up all that room in the stores. Fifty-pound bags. Who buys fifty-pound bags, and what do they use it for? Mulch? ’Cause no dog will eat it. Ours won’t, anyway, and if you think I’m going to take that from two dogs, you’re wrong, girl.”
“Arnie. Arnie, I have to go now,” Iris said, restraining herself mightily.
“Do you? Too bad. Enjoyed talking to you. Call anytime.”
CHAPTER THREE
ARNIE HUNG up the phone. That’s a strange girl, he thought. How old she say she was? Thirty-seven? How’d she get to be thirty-seven? I thought I was thirty-seven.
“Where’s the time go, eh, Duke?” Duke was Arnie’s dog, a big reddish-brown mutt he’d hit with his car on the way home from the grocery store five or six years ago. Arnie had stopped the car and gone over to the dog, and when the dog licked his hand, that added another layer to Arnie’s guilt, so he gathered him up and took him home. The dog’s recuperative powers were remarkable—all it took was one big bowl of Kal Kan, and he turned absolutely frisky. Arnie eyed him and decided he’d been had. The dog was probably an old pro at throwing himself in front of cars for a free meal. Arnie said to him, “Okay, Duke,” (he didn’t know why he called him Duke, the name just came out of him) “you’re welcome to stay as long as you pull your own weight.” Arnie wasn’t sure what he meant by that, since he had no sheep to herd or dogsleds that needed pulling, but he thought he’d better put his foot down, especially with a dog that made its living throwing itself in front of cars. Over the years Duke proved himself better at gaining weight than pulling his weight.
“Where’s the time go?” Arnie said again. “Come over here and get your scratching, Mr. Duke.”
Duke ambled across the kitchen to Arnie, then turned himself one hundred and eighty degrees and let out a kind of sigh. The scratching would begin at the base of his tail, then move up his spine, and leave him paralyzed with pleasure. Duke sighed again. Only Arnie could deliver this sort of scratching, which had less to do with technique than with equipment. Arnie had a metal hook where his right hand used to be—he’d lost his hand twenty years ago when an engine block from a Chevy Impala snapped a hoist chain and crushed it. The hook, with its opposable device for grasping, while something of an inconvenience on his job as a mechanic, was great for scaring children and even better for scratching dogs. Arnie gave Duke a long one. When he finished, the dog shuddered, then collapsed in ecstasy on the floor.
Iris kept bugging him to “update your prosthesis. You don’t have to look like Captain Hook, you know. They got better things on the market these days. You’d have more freedom, and you wouldn’t be scaring the hell out of little kids anymore. You notice how the Girl Scouts avoid our house during cookie season? I haven’t had a chocolate mint Girl Scout cookie in ages because of that hook of yours.”
But Arnie wasn’t having anything to do with any “prosthesis.” Prosthesis sounded like prophylactic to him, which shifted matters into the realm of the sexual, a place he never liked to be in discussions with Iris.
He rubbed Duke with his toe, thinking about Iris. He wondered, not really wanting to wonder, what she knew about sex. As a nurse, she had to know something, they take all those body courses in school, but what did she, and this made him really uncomfortable, know on her own? He came, as always, to an immediate and inevitable conclusion. Nothing. Not one damn thing.
Iris had been an unappealing baby—and babyhood, as it turned out, was her physical high point. She went from unappealing to unattractive, and by the time she moved into adolescence she’d become undeniably homely. Even her parents, who loved her, who gave her every benefit of the doubt and then some, could not dispute the evidence. LuLu would despair, “She’s just so, just so…” “Homely,” Arnie would finish for her, because he thought it best to face the facts. “But what’s it matter?” he’d say. “In the end, who gives a good goddamn?” And then he’d think, Just about the entire male population of the world, that’s who.
Like the boys in Iris’s senior high school class. Iris’s looks compelled them, as beauty would have compelled them in the opposite direction, toward unkind acts. During the month before the senior prom, she received a phone call every night from some unknown, and ever-changing, male voice. “Hey, Iris, how about it, you wanna go to the prom? Just get a face transplant and I’ll take you.” Hysterical laughter from five or six boys. “Hey, Iris. If the prom was a costume party, you could go as a bowling ball.” Ha ha. Click. Arnie caught the tail end of one or two of these, and when he went downstairs to comfort his ugly duckling of a daughter (who would never become a swan), she shrugged him off. “Fuck ’em, Daddy. I don’t care.” Quite a word to come out of his teenage daughter’s mouth, but he let it pass. Of course he let it pass.
Duke groaned and shifted on the kitchen linoleum. Now that Iris had moved back in after seventeen years out of the house, not this house of course, since he and LuLu had moved four times since Iris left, she had become his burden again. When she arrived, she said cheerfully, “Well, Arnie. Looks like you’re face-to-face with my face again.” He could not pretend, as he and LuLu had tried, that away f
rom home Iris might have some sort of luck. Seeing her every day, his bowling ball daughter, rolling around the house, made him smile at the folly of his hope, as thin as it had been.
“She’s my burden, Duke. And I’m her burden. And you’re everybody’s burden, ain’t that right?” Duke got up and went over to his bowl and let out a low whine. Arnie regarded him for a moment, then said, “I forget to feed you? Is that right? Now where’d she get a notion we needed another dog? I can’t even feed you.” Arnie reached up into the cupboard and snared a can of food with his hook. He opened it, then dumped its contents into Duke’s bowl. Duke stared at the bowl, then gave Arnie the dog equivalent of a puzzled look.
“What’s the matter with you?” Arnie examined the contents of the bowl, which did look kind of peculiar. He picked up the can. Spaghetti-O’s. He’d just filled up the dog’s bowl with Spaghetti-O’s.
He tried to cover for himself. “Hey, look. I thought you might like a change.” Duke stared at him, unblinking. Obviously he wasn’t buying it.
“So I screwed up, okay?” He tossed out the Spaghetti-O’s and filled the bowl with Kal Kan. “You won’t tell Iris? It’s between you and me, right?” he said, half-jokingly.