Sea buckthorn juice, the girl said. Try some.
Kath selected a cup, sniffed its contents.
It tastes better than it smells, the girl assured her. She was fresh-faced with smooth, plump skin of astonishing clarity. She looked familiar. Kath couldn’t place her.
It’s full of antioxidants. Genghis Khan made his soldiers drink it.
The stuff slid down Kath’s throat, cold, bitter, but not, for all that, undrinkable. The plastic cup felt oily against her lips.
What do you think?
It tastes character building.
The girl laughed. She had good teeth, well spaced and regular.
The juice was expensive. Kath took a bottle anyway. She was stirred up. A dumb expenditure wouldn’t kill her.
She was in the parking lot when the insight came: she’d always felt a bit left out among that lot, the residents. Paul had stimulated her envy by retelling that story in the office as if she’d not even been at the pub. Admittedly, she’d ceded the field by visiting the bathroom, but surely that was no reason to punish her. In other words, it was standard Paul behavior. He was a monster at bridge, snide about small errors. She hated to play opposite him, knowing she’d have to hear all about every hand she might have played differently. Was an inference to be drawn?
Something was wrong with Stolz’s story.
Juice pushing’s just a sideline. So’s waitressing at the ex-presidents’ bar. Dorinda does her real work here at the nursing home. She doesn’t get paid, not yet. She’s just a volunteer. But she knows it’s the work she’s meant to do because she struggles just to show up. The work puts an important strain on her, her teacher says. Her body arrives at the job before she does and it will sometimes be fifteen or twenty minutes before she feels herself click into place, a tumbler turning somewhere within. Sometimes she doesn’t arrive at all, and on those days, she can’t make her body and her mind line up. The tumbler doesn’t turn; the pins don’t get a chance to click. Her teacher says: That’s how you know.
She clings to her teacher’s faith. That he only teaches yoga doesn’t matter. It’s his presence in her life that makes the difference. At the nursing home she feels like she’s stuck in a vat of vanilla pudding: vanilla walls, vanilla sheets, vanilla protein drink for the patients who can’t be trusted to chew, which is to say, most of them. It’s dull work, vanilla work, pushing the cart down the vanilla-colored hall and back again, doling out one cup at a time, waiting for the patient to drink its contents, taking the empty cup, marking the sheet: who swallowed, who didn’t. The television blares in most rooms. Slack faces watch, eyes tracking slow. Dorinda believes people don’t understand this kind of living—the lessened pitch, all colors greatly faded. Vanillaed. Occasionally while with a patient she catches a flash of the person who’d once fully inhabited that flesh, and knew what it meant to have a memory, to have had the experience of having seen someone before. Since she herself needs so much more experience, she’s inclined to patience. She’ll apply to medical school someday. She doesn’t have the grades but grades aren’t everything. She wants to specialize in geriatrics or suicidology. She’s interested in forms of life just this side of dying. Try putting that in a personal statement.
She stops outside the old doctor’s room, 4B. He’s in the armchair, wrapped in his fancy jacket, slippers on his feet. The room has an echoing quality that makes it peaceful when television is off, which it usually is. He doesn’t like television. He likes staring out the window.
Doctor.
His face contorts as he struggles to recall her name. Finally he says: Dorinda.
She responds with a puppy’s wide-mouthed smile. She can’t help it. What she feels for him is hard to explain.
You wouldn’t know it to look at me, would you, the doctor says, as if he’d heard her thought.
She’s been told he’s a psychiatrist. Aren’t they supposed to be intuitive?
Wouldn’t know what? Now he’s asking the questions.
She hands him the cup. He swallows, grimacing. He’s obedient.
That’s awful, he tells her.
I know, she says.
You know.
He says it gently, so she feels the blade. Which she does, every time—even that one time, when the gangly middle-aged dude with the beer gut and the whiskey breath had come to visit and she was on her guard with both of them. She’s supposed to be on her guard at all times. But she isn’t. She likes this patient’s feisty quality, how he mocks and flirts, insulting her so she can’t feel like she knows everything. She doesn’t know everything. Maybe she doesn’t know anything.
That’s why I’m going to medical school, she adds. To know.
We have to stop, he tells her. That’s what he said to Whiskey Breath too. We have to stop.
Another staffer might call him agitated. But his statement has a lively quality, consistent with his smoking jacket and wry flirtatiousness. It doesn’t have the dully repetitive quality of a perseveration. He’s trying to hit the right note, she thinks. It must be like trying to make a shot in tennis. You keep at it until you hear the ball against the sweet spot and then you know.
See you tomorrow, she says as she takes her leave. Looking back from the doorway, she sees that he’s already gone, staring out the window again at the empty service road.
When she returns with the cart, the station nurse asks wearily: Did something happen?
In 4B, she says.
A charmer, that one. Was he aggressive?
Dorinda takes the cups, one by one, and throws them in the trash, leaving the doctor’s cup for last, the vanilla dregs still in it. She looks behind. No one is watching. She lifts the cup to her mouth.
Stanley remembers so little now. But he still remembers the excitement of early July, when the university vouchsafed to him another litter of first-year residents. Always they were eager to please him and not anywhere near as eager to exercise restraint with their patients. Oh, how they resented the outpatient ward, where they interviewed mere neurotics whose problems, they more or less secretly felt, could be resolved through the application of a little willpower. They saw those patients as inferior to the more exotic pathologies inhabiting the locked wards on the upper floors, where they, those greenhorns, preferred to be.
They needed time on the locked wards themselves, he caught himself thinking. Then they would see how far their ideas about will and power would get them. They would be improved by such done time. But there was no wishing for that. Sadism went around like the flu. He’d figured out how to use that energy: he’d created a whole pedagogy and even—quelle horreur—won a teaching award. How they’d bristle at the tasks he assigned: Yes, by all means, take a history, but submit it to me in the form of a sonnet. A sonnet? He’d smile and nod, all innocence. Talk about will and power. He’d edit the results, make the students read aloud. He’d interrupt: That’s where the line should break. Does it? Break? Just there? They’d blush, stutter. Now and then he’d get a weeper. The sting of humiliation was meant to take some of the starch out of them, so they wouldn’t sting, or starch, a patient. That was the idea, to protect. Wounding them in this small way would make them more sensitive to the wounds of others.
Or so he hoped. How easily he fooled them all, not least himself. He was getting it back now, though. Take that fool Jack Stolz, who still had to mock him, projecting death wishes (“You have to stop”) and threats (“chemical restraint”). But wasn’t restraint always the watchword? Soon the nurse will arrive with her syringe full of euphemism. He won’t fight. No sarcasm, no stink-eye. He’d just float; for once he’d remember how evenly to suspend his attention; he’d try to imagine what life was like for that candy striper. Not the way he might have imagined her once, not the old luscious fantasy, but as she might actually want to be imagined. Although he can do very little for anyone in his present, diminished state, he can still dream. And while he can, he will.
They gathered again for Stanley’s service—a memorial, since he’d b
een cremated—at a church that, despite its age and historic significance, displayed exactly zero ex-presidents in its windows. There was no beer, either—although Stolz, swaying in the pulpit as he delivered his eulogy, seemed to have made do, nipping from a flask he slipped in and out of a pocket while everyone pretended not to notice. Paul was sitting with Lorraine, folding and refolding the paper on which he’d scrawled notes for the dull eulogy he’d just delivered. He suspected Stanley had planned the whole affair in the days after his diagnosis, before the dementia could interfere with his desire to control everything. The event had an overly rigid quality, even with Stolz nattering drunkenly on. How little control he seemed to have over his long arms and legs. Thank heaven it would be over soon. Rory would give a speech, Kath would read what Stanley’s wife had prepared, they’d attend the catered luncheon for as long as Stolz could stand upright, and then they’d adjourn to the ex-presidents’ bar. In fact, Paul was looking forward to it.
Seated in a pew across the central aisle, Kath was slightly masked, her face obscured by a large-brimmed straw hat that matched her suit, tropical wool in a bruised purple that was almost black, a color he felt as a rebuke. He’d offended her somehow, in recent weeks. Perhaps they’d make it up tonight. King hadn’t made it; bad weather tied him up in Tampa. Rory wasn’t showing well and perhaps should not have come either: he looked like he’d been stuffed into his shirt, already the armpits were dark, and he kept running a finger under his tie—a pointless gesture, as he could no more loosen his necktie than he could loosen his grip on his own identity. Identity: in the end it was nothing more than the armored bunker in which they had all entombed themselves, gladly for the most part. Or so it seemed to Paul.
The last benediction given, Stanley’s family filed out ahead of the congregation, which had risen as a body. The first and second wives, with their children and stepchildren, spurted up the center aisle, making no eye contact, exchanging no greetings, as if they too were ready to move on to some more special and bearable after-party, some ex-presidents’ pub of their own. Following them, Stolz managed to trip over his own feet and go sprawling down the aisle before popping up again—thank heaven—like a tweed-coated jack-in-the-box. Paul stepped out next, offering an arm to Lorraine as she picked her way down the pew. She scowled, pulling her shawl around her, and surprised them both by stumbling into his arms. Christ, she muttered and huffed off. He trailed behind, breathing urgently by numbers. Was it so necessary to have a hissy fit now, in front of his colleagues? As if to prove the point Stanley was forever making about relationships—how no sooner had the bride and groom sworn to love, honor, and protect than the one would move too fast or too slow for the other on the way up the aisle, and the stranger within would show its talon and snarl, as one of Paul’s patients, a poet, had once put it.
He found Lorraine outside the coatroom. He could tell from her gestures and tightened expression that she was speaking angrily about the gathering, insulting his friends, no doubt. But he couldn’t hear anything above the band, which had started up a gospel number. The Dixieland horns mocked the solemnity of the architecture. The effect was sheer Stanley, too clever by half. Yet something had changed: what should have irritated today only caused Paul to brim with tenderness. What a teacher Stanley was, what a magician! And what a miracle Lorraine seemed to him then, still standing patiently by, sticking with him despite his faults. Bending to her ear, he whispered, What did you call them, my love?
Oh, when the saints—
The Cardinal
Brandon Hobson
When I was a teenager, I knew a boy named Monfiori who lived in the neighborhood. He was pale skinned and thin with wiry hair. Everyone at school hated him, but for a while he was my only friend. He ate cockroaches for a dollar and huffed paint behind the woodshop building. He smoked cigarettes in my bedroom despite my weak lungs and my coughing. My mother was worried people would think I was a troublemaker for being friends with him.
“We’re like hemophiliac brothers,” Monfiori said. “They tell us don’t bleed, don’t bleed, but we’re dying anyway. They don’t know anything.”
Sometimes he played jazz on a toy trumpet. Variations on Monk in C, his own creation, this arrangement—or so he claimed. “Psychedelic funk,” he called it. We drank cheap vodka in his basement and I played drums on upside-down buckets. I liked being at his house because I could drink and smoke over there without anyone knowing.
“My mom has jazz records,” I told him. “She listens to them on nights she wants to be left alone.”
“She’ll be alone soon enough when you die,” he said.
Monfiori said we were both dying. “Might as well poison ourselves,” he said. “At least that way we’ll die in our sleep.” He’d already gotten two blood transfusions. He had bruises and moles all over his body. He was the ugliest boy in our school, and maybe the meanest.
One time in his basement we smoked a joint and he told me he was going to set the school on fire. “We’ll watch the whole place go up in flames,” he said. “I’ll send smoke signals to the Indians. Fuck the police and everyone else.”
Monfiori and I had to do twenty hours of community service for stealing guitar strings from the music store downtown. We were going to use them to tie the spokes and chain of his brother’s bicycle so that he would crash. They caught us later in his backyard. We had to go to juvenile court.
“My son’s not a bad kid,” my mother kept telling everyone.
That winter I fell ill with a stomach virus and my asthma flared up. The breathing machine they put me on was loud enough to hear all through the house. At night the dogs next door kept me awake with their barking. They belonged to our neighbors, who were an old couple, immigrants from Poland. Their names were Milosz and Gertrude. They brought me soup and crackers and a dessert called faworki, which they said was known as angel wings.
“They’re for good luck,” Gertrude told me. “It’s a Polish specialty.”
My mother and Gertrude became close. They talked about bread and sausages and red wine. Milosz made paper airplanes for me. From my bed, in my sickness, I watched him pull up a chair. He folded a piece of paper into an airplane and tossed it across the room.
“I had a son once,” Milosz told me. “My wife and I lost him. He was about your age.”
He stared into the floor. He seemed to be searching for the right words. We could hear my mother and Gertrude laughing in the next room.
“His name was Aleksander,” he said. “He liked to play the piano.”
I could see the lines in his forehead, the loose skin of his jowls.
“My son, my son,” he said.
He folded another piece of paper. I watched his fingers move, all bone and skin. He concentrated on each fold, creasing it, holding it up to the light to make sure he got it right. He folded the paper into a bird and handed it to me.
“You can name it anything you want,” he said.
“Aleksander,” I said.
I held the paper bird. I noticed Milosz’s hands were trembling.
“Aleksander it is,” he said. He stared into the floor.
When I think back, I know I was a very lonely child. My mother called me imaginative. Those days I was sick I would often see a male cardinal appear on the branch outside my window. One morning I opened the window and he flew in. He was such a beautiful bird. He flew wildly around my room. He glided from desk to bedpost, from bookshelf to lampshade. His wings were red like velvet. He was proud but silent. He seemed to be attentive to some inner presence, as if he had a clear point to make as he strutted across the windowsill. Once, he spread his wings proudly for me. This was his own show, a brief abandonment of the natural world, his own strange fantasy. The last time I saw him, that winter day I was ill, he flew in and shook the frost from his body. I let him eat sugar from my hand. In the pale gray light of my bedroom, in one final, cool gesture of farewell, he cocked his head to look at me, then flew out the window.
For severa
l weeks Milosz continued to bring me paper birds made from colored construction paper. I hung them with string from my ceiling so that they twirled constantly. There were red birds, blue birds, yellow birds, purple birds. Monfiori didn’t like them. “Can we set them on fire?” he asked.
“No.”
“Aren’t you too old for this? Look at this place.”
He challenged my integrity. He dared me to cut myself and bleed. I challenged back and he laughed it off. One Friday I stayed the night at his house. We drank his mother’s vodka until late. I fell asleep on the floor in his basement and woke up at some point in the middle of the night, feeling sick. I found him sitting in the corner of the room, watching me.
“What is it?” I asked.
He mumbled something.
“What’s wrong with you?” I said.
“We’re both dying,” he said. “We’ll die together.”
I was sick the whole next day. In my room, Milosz sipped wine and told me stories about a boy who kept birds to fend off devils. “The birds protected him,” he said. “They changed colors and held healing powers, like tiny gods or angels. They showed courage. They taught the boy to believe in himself.”
Milosz wheezed and coughed. I coughed too. His glass of red wine seemed to glow in the dim room. The paper birds twirled above our heads.
One night I woke to something knocking at my window. I sat up in bed, pulled back the curtain, but saw nothing. Outside, the wind was blowing. It was a tree branch, I told myself, and went back to sleep.
Later I dreamed of the cardinal at my window. The cardinal spread his wings, glowing red in the night.
Weeks passed and Monfiori left as quickly as he entered my life. I saw him for the last time later that winter. We sat in his basement drinking cheap vodka and smoking cigarettes. I watched him wrestle his little brother to the floor and punch him in the chest until the boy started crying and ran out of the room.
“You need to stop being mean,” I told him.
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