by Carol Anshaw
When Loretta surfaced a little from the fog of drugs she began singing, softly but with jazzy, piano-bar inflections, Do you know the muffin man?
This prompted Nick to his feet to inspect today’s IV bags, which were different from yesterday’s.
“Excellent upgrade. Self-regulated morphine drip,” he reported. Then tapped the control clutched in Loretta’s hand. “A person could get a little trigger-happy.”
“How’s she doing?” Alice asked when Dr. Pryzbicki came into the room, pulled Loretta’s folder out of the rack on the room door, then read the latest notes.
“It’s pretty much touch and go at this point,” the doctor said.
Dr. Pryzbicki then checked the bags and the orange readout and peered at the green line and listened with a stethoscope to their mother’s breathing. In conclusion, she wrote something impressively detailed on a fresh page, then by way of leaving, patted Loretta’s hand and told them all, “Just hang in there.”
She turned in the doorway to say to Alice, “Of course, if you have any other questions—”
Alice unfolded herself from one of the visitor armchairs, left behind the book she was reading, and followed the doctor out of the room. They didn’t talk the rest of the way down the hall to the small room where Dr. Pryzbicki—Diane—who was the resident on this floor on the overnight shift, slept when she got any free patch of time at all. They didn’t talk once they were inside the room, which was over-air-conditioned and contained only a single cot. So far they hadn’t used this. So far they’d only made out pressed hard against the door, which did not have a lock.
Technically Alice wasn’t even attracted to Dr. Pryzbicki, who was too young, also overweight but not in any interesting way, and whose doctor coat was cheap and shiny and pilled, its pockets stuffed with pens, note pads, the translucent yellow tubing of the stethoscope coiling out. If this were a fantasy, Dr. Pryzbicki would be a little older and more sophisticated, tall and lean and dark and brooding. But even just the fact of her being a doctor, specifically the doctor in charge of these long nights of Loretta’s death, eroticized her and impelled Alice to follow her to the little staff sleep room for these rushed necking sessions. She was disappointed to find out that Dr. Pryzbicki had a first name, although of course she would have to. Since that revelation, though, Alice had been trying to keep further confessions at bay. If she found out that Diane had a hobby or a vacation time-share, the fantasy would collapse in on itself.
“You are so hot,” Dr. Pryzbicki said, dragging her lips down Alice’s neck.
“Sometimes,” Alice said, “and even in my hot moments, the heat hasn’t always worked to my advantage. Sometimes it just jumps me a few squares into somewhere I really shouldn’t be.”
When Alice came back into Loretta’s room, Nick was reading an astronomy journal, but with his free hand covering one of Loretta’s.
“I got caught up in a discussion with the doctor. About success rates with this new infusion.” She was lying just for the fun of it. “I lost track of time.”
Nick waved off her excuse with a flippy hand. “You can lose track of it all you want. No problem. Time may just be a way we have of ordering events, a human construct. Some guys—some of the important guys—think everything may actually be happening simultaneously. We may have just put in time ourselves, so we don’t get confused.”
He had another subject he wanted to bring up for discussion. He had been throwing money at a couple of tough hookers, both named Mandy. Now he told Alice he had fallen in love with one of them.
“I’m just guessing,” Alice said. “It’s Mandy, isn’t it?”
He pulled a folded snapshot from his wallet and handed it to Alice.
“What do you think?”
“She wears an awful lot of makeup for someone in her underwear.”
Loretta’s illness had brought Alice and Nick into a closeness that, for once, didn’t have anything to do with his troubles. It was a free, floating sort of intimacy, as though they were sitting inside one of the rainy-day card table tents of their childhood. Once they started shuffling through shared memories, though, they found they had quite different versions. Tonight, Nick went into a long rhapsody about his days on a little league team called the Boilermakers, playing shortstop in games to which Horace never came. Apparently it was Carmen who helped him, tossing sock balls to teach him to catch without fear.
Alice was surprised at being unable to retrieve this memory. Back in those days, she kept a close watch on her siblings, the three of them partners in a buddy system critical to getting them through Horace’s despotic reign. Loretta’s part in this only required her to sacrifice her children to her marriage.
What Alice and Nick and Carmen held on to from the long days before they were allowed to leave their bad childhoods was different for each of them. Alice’s own indelible moment didn’t even belong to her. It was watching Horace cuff Nick, who was maybe seven or eight, on the side of the head, hard but under the guise of genial roughhousing.
“That’s for nothing,” he said. “Wait until you see what happens when you actually do something.” The smooth way he said this made Alice sure he had heard the line somewhere, and was trying out the joke at home, for a little extra fun. Like when he would suggest to one or the other of them, “Why don’t you go outside and play in traffic?”
The cuffing moment still came to mind from time to time. A few weeks ago she read a terrible news item about hunting resorts stocked with bears drugged to make them slower, goofier, easier to shoot. And the story, of course, made her think about the bears, but it also made her think about that capricious whack, and the moment immediately following when Nick stood cupping his reddening ear with one hand, his fear stained with confusion. He didn’t get it yet, that he had already been designated by Horace as the family fuckup. She could also see clearly the next moment in which Loretta looked up vaguely from the fat paperback she’d been reading to say, “You listen to your father now. Next time there’s going to be real trouble.”
And now Horace was in the end stages of dementia. He lived in a nursing home on Fullerton. He confused the shows on TV with the commercials. He had moved beyond the reach of their hatred.
Their mother, they had forgiven more or less—Alice more, Nick a little less. Carmen not at all. Carmen thought there was a point to not forgiving. Alice was more romantic. Her belief system still included changes of heart, overdue apologies, dramatic reconciliations, resolved misunderstandings. For her, hanging around at the hospital was mostly waiting for her mother to come up with something last-minute and significant, something that would explain her distracted, casually irresponsible version of parenting and reveal a hidden devotion to her children, particularly to Alice. Carmen, of course, would never allow herself this sort of cheesy fantasy. She had given up on Loretta long ago, had absolutely no expectations of her anymore. If she came to visit, she would be doing this for Alice. She both envied and pitied Carmen—traveling always on firm, flat ground, breathing in the fresh, gusting air of reality. Power walking through life.
“I was thinking of asking Mandy to come here to the hospital with me,” Nick said to Alice after a long while of silent consideration. “To kind of bring her more into my life.”
Alice didn’t bother to address this.
Nick and Alice were only alone in the hospital room at night. During the day, Loretta had a brisk traffic of visitors. Agents from her Re/Max days. In these past few years of being no longer really a wife, but not actually widowed either, Loretta had blossomed in unexpected ways and had acquired a surprising new circle of acquaintances. Once Horace, a strenuous atheist, was no longer around to be withering about her religious impulses, she joined a Presbyterian congregation, which turned out to be a high-yield community in terms of corporal works of mercy. These women took “visit the sick” seriously. They showed up with soft pillowcases and verbena water they misted around Loretta’s head. They read to her from religious novels, books she would hav
e ridiculed at any previous point in her life.
Another surprise: Despite all the years spent at the center of a hipster crowd, Loretta had belatedly taken up the corniest possible interest—ballroom dancing. Two dapper guys—one old, one disconcertingly only in his forties—had turned up as frequent bedside visitors these past days. From them Alice and Nick had learned of their mother’s reputation on the dance floor, particularly with the tango and West Coast swing. Alice thought this was kind of sweet, but it bugged the hell out of Carmen—Loretta having moved on, not to an old age filled with sorrow and regret, but rather to catching a second wind—twirling and dipping in God’s grace, and a little limelight.
Alice had come to Diane’s apartment. She’d brought along a video of Lianna, the old John Sayles movie. She thought this would come off as touching and innocent, that she could show Diane something of what it was like to come out when she, Alice, did. That this would serve as a bridge between them. Instead, she saw maybe twenty minutes in, that it was way too late to watch Lianna. When it got to a hideously embarrassing scene in a dingy dyke bar, everyone lurking and leering, Diane, like a good student, said, “This is kind of like Colonial Williamsburg. You know—pioneer folkways.”
Alice did not want Diane to be the appreciative tourist. She did not herself want to be the docent in the dirndl skirt. She flipped Lianna off with the remote and they got down to business.
A few afternoons later, Diane was naked on a creamy leather sofa, where she had been quite commanding and masterful for the past hour or so. Initially Alice had hoped to keep this affair absolutely superficial, but everything had moved rapidly in an unexpected direction. She had no understanding of her attraction to Dr. Pryzbicki. It seemed, by this late-ish point, that she should have a type or at least some guidelines for whom she would get into bed with. Instead she still wound up in situations like this one. Not as often as when she was younger, but still.
“I’d better get back to the hospital,” she said, pulling herself up against the arm of the sofa, dragging Diane, who was on top, along with her, the air around them thick with sex and sofa leather. “How do you think my mother’s doing?”
Diane cocked her head. “Oh boy. I’d say at this point, your mother is kind of beyond doing. We’re taking her off the protocol. How can I put this? You know those old doctor-patient jokes? Like the patient asks his doctor, ‘How am I doing?’ and the doctor says, ‘Well, I’m sorry but you only have ten to live.’ And the patient says, ‘Ten what?’ And the doctor says, ‘Nine. Eight. Seven—’” Diane looked at Alice earnestly with squinty eyes and said, “I hope I’m not speaking too frankly.”
Loretta slipped in and out of consciousness—back and forth between the uninteresting world of this hospital room and a pageant of scenes from her earliest years. She called out to her own mother, dead now for decades. It wasn’t a cry of distress, rather a joyous shout, as though she was asking her to watch how high she could make herself go on a swing set.
“She’s way back there,” Alice said to Carmen, who had finally come to the hospital. She was just back from three days in New Orleans. She had gotten pissed off watching Katrina on TV, and rallied Jean to rent a bread truck with her. They went to Costco and filled the truck with all the bottled water it could hold. Then they just drove down.
“It’s not an island in the Pacific, for Christ’s sake,” Carmen said. “It’s like two states away.”
And apparently they were able to get through and unload the water someplace where it did some good. Rob was really upset. Carmen did this without telling him in advance, just left a note. He said you couldn’t be married and be a unilateral operator. Carmen said her political and social work were part of who she was. “I can’t see something so wrong and not do anything about it. I’d start not liking myself.”
She had come to the hospital for Alice. Through the revelations of Jungian analysis and studying the texts of her dreams, Carmen had dispatched Loretta to a place where she didn’t have to expend energy hating her. Her way of talking about Loretta now was to damn her lightly with the faintest praise possible. “Well, she didn’t drown us in the bathtub. She didn’t leave us on the median strip on the highway,” she would say. Or, “She didn’t sell us on the black market for parts like that Russian woman with her grandson.”
Alice gave it her best shot. “Look, I know she could have done better. But she was trapped under Horace’s thumb. Women in her generation had to hitch their wagon to a guy they thought would take them someplace. You know about her childhood. They didn’t have enough chairs for everyone at dinner. Some of the kids had to stand. She slept in the basement, by the furnace for warmth; she and Aunt Ella.”
But Carmen was not impressed with the lack of chairs or the basement sleeping. She didn’t find these extenuating circumstances. “She looks so harmless. Imagine that,” Carmen said now, as they watched Loretta wave across the backyard of her girlhood.
Alice was in the shower with Diane. They’d been there awhile, since Alice followed Diane home in the morning when her shift was over. The water had run down from hot to lukewarm. They were by now well beyond frolicsome lathering and rinsing.
“Don’t stop,” Alice said.
“I might have to, though,” Diane said. “Stopping might be the best thing for you.”
“No,” Alice said in a voice so small and distant she could hear it echo vaguely off the shower tiles. Alice was falling into something soft-focus and emotion-bearing with Dr. Pryzbicki, something she could not have predicted. She had been toppled by kindness. Outside of bed, or the shower, where Diane withheld to put a little spin on things, she was generous in a bounding way. It had only been two weeks, but already there had been small presents—unusual cut flowers from a Japanese shop on Belmont, a book of poetry. Autobiography of Red. But also a whole new category of sideswiping gesture. Like yesterday, on her day off, she asked to borrow Alice’s car and brought it back washed, waxed, oil changed, tires rotated.
Diane wasn’t any sort of person Alice ever thought she’d be interested in. Alice had spent most of her adulthood longing for Maude or falling for and recovering from adventures with Maude surrogates—good-looking, lightly cruel, mercurial women, all of whom seemed initially different from one another, movies in a darkened theater, opening against the backdrop of one or another exotic locale, stories so filled with potential she could become euphoric imagining herself into them. By their endings, though, these stories turned out to just be slightly different versions of the same story—an essentially dull tale pumped up with bursts of emotional squandering. Still, all along this bumpy way, the idea of Diane had never occurred to Alice. She hadn’t considered someone serious and constant, someone who wouldn’t make her nervous.
Diane knew nothing about art. Her apartment was decorated with pre-framed prints from Bed, Bath & Beyond. Parisian boulevard in the living room, water lilies over the bed, giant radish in the kitchen. When they met, she had no idea who Alice was. When Alice said “painter,” Diane at first thought roller and scaffold. Even now she didn’t really understand that in another—albeit small—part of the universe, Alice was famous. And, if she did understand, she wouldn’t care. She would just be happy Alice gets to do what she likes.
Diane wasn’t an oncologist, only rotating through on her way to becoming an emergency room doctor. She liked the frontline aspect of doing good. She also wanted to take care of Alice. If you’d asked Alice a couple of weeks ago, this wouldn’t have sounded appealing. Now, she wasn’t so sure.
When Loretta died, she did it so quickly no one could get there in time. Alice, who had gone home to get a night of something better than chair sleep, got a call at 3:30 in the morning from Diane, who was on duty and had just signed the death certificate. Alice called Nick but there was no answer, then tried Carmen, but just got voicemail. Rob battled insomnia with a white noise machine set to Tropical Rain Forest; once the machine was on it was raining like crazy in Brazil and you couldn’t reach them. Which
left Alice heading down to the hospital alone. She expected to find Loretta in some grim basement morgue, slid by an attendant from a wall cabinet on a steel body tray, her skin gray eliding into blue. In fact, her mother was still in her deluxe room, in the bed with the mahogany headboard. The machines and bags of fluids were gone, though, there being nothing left to monitor or measure. Loretta’s face held no expression at all. She didn’t look peaceful or angelic, only as though she was off somewhere else and had left herself behind.
Alice took her mother’s cooling hand and waited for something significant and terrifying to open up around them. What she saw instead was that death wasn’t going to offer much of anything, just reshape the longing for Loretta that Alice had always carried. She would remain as elusive in death as she had been in life; missing her would just seem more appropriate. Maybe Alice had been looking for the wrong person, maybe the mother she had sought for so long had turned a corner in the supermarket when Alice was small and the person she caught up with in produce was a woman who was willing to pitch in a little, but would always remain a stranger.
Alice went over to Nick’s apartment, buzzed twice, then let herself in with her key. It was always a little scary going in. Today a familiar bayberry aroma filled the place, the product of a large candle on the scarred Formica counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. The ceiling above the designated candle-burning spot was black with thick, furry soot.