Turn of Mind

by Alice LaPlante

  I am sitting at a table with two young people. They are getting up to leave. The girl had retreated somewhere, was no longer mentally present. Then she suddenly comes back.

  Mom, I hope you’ll forgive us. There are tears in her eyes.

  Fiona, she won’t even remember. This conversation was pointless. I told you that.

  The girl is pulling on her sweater, wiping her eyes. And then there’s Magdalena. She’s been so important to us over the eight months. That is hard, too.

  The boy shrugs. She’s an employee. It was a business relationship. A quid pro quo.

  Ass, says the girl. Then a pause. I’m still glad we came, she says. Funny, I never knew how she felt when she realized what was happening to her. How she figured it out. That part was always a mystery.

  Well, she’s never exactly been one for sharing feelings.

  No, but I feel . . . honored somehow.

  She has squatted down beside my chair.

  Mom, I know you’ve checked out. I know you won’t remember this. And it’s all so very sad. But there have been moments of grace. This was one of them. I thank you for that. Whatever happens, know that I love you.

  I’ve been listening to the rise and fall of her soft voice, paying attention to the cadence. Wondering who she is. This brightly colored bird in my kitchen. This beautiful girl with the face of an angel who is leaning over to brush her lips against my hair.

  The boy is looking amused. You’ve always been sentimental, he says.

  And you’ve always been an ass.

  She gives him a little push as they walk toward the door. The end of an epoch, I hear the boy say as he closes it behind him.

  The end, I echo, and the words hang in the now-empty house.

  TWO

  The woman with no neck is screaming again. A distant buzzer and then the muffled sound of soft-soled shoes on thick carpet hurrying past my door.

  Other noises emerge from other rooms on the floor. The calls of incarcerated animals when one of their own is distressed. Some recognizable words like help and come here but mostly cries that swell and converge.

  This has happened before, this descent from one circle of hell into the next. How many times? The days have morphed into decades in this place. When did I feel the warmth of the sun? When did a fly or mosquito last land on my arm? When was I last able to go to the bathroom at night without someone materializing at my side? Tugging my nightgown down around my hips. Gripping me so hard I look for the bruise after.

  The screaming, although subdued, hasn’t stopped, so I get up. I can stop this. Prescribe something. One of the benzodiazepines. Or perhaps Nembutal. Something to relieve the anxiety, stop the noise, which is now coming from all different directions. I’ll order a round. Drinks are on me! Anything to prevent this place from descending into true bedlam. But arms are pulling at me, not gently. Heaving me to my feet before I am ready.

  Where are you going. To the bathroom? Let me help. In the dim light I can barely make out the speaker’s face. Female, I think, but I find that increasingly difficult to tell. Unisex white scrubs. Hair short or tightly pulled back from the face. Impassive features.

  No. Not the bathroom. To that poor woman. To help. Leave me alone. I can get out of bed myself.

  No, it’s not safe. It’s the new meds. They make you unsteady. You could fall.

  Let me fall then. If you’re going to treat me like a child, then treat me like an actual child. Let me pick myself up when I fall.

  Jen, you could really hurt yourself. Then I would get into trouble. And you wouldn’t want that, would you?

  It’s Dr. White. Not Jenny. Absolutely not Jen. And I wouldn’t care if you were fired. Another would just take your place. You’re interchangeable enough.

  Dozens of people come and go, some lighter, some darker, some speaking better English than others, but all their faces blending into one another.

  Okay, Dr. White. No problem.

  She doesn’t let go of my arms. With a grip that could subdue a 250-pound man she pulls me to a standing position, puts one hand on the small of my back and the other at my elbow.

  Now we can go together and see what’s happening, she says. I bet you could be of service to Laura! She sure needs it sometimes!

  Still holding on to my arm, she walks me into the hall. People are milling aimlessly, as if after a fire drill.

  Oh good, see, all over! Would you like to go back to bed now or have some hot milk in the dining room?

  Coffee, I say. Black.

  No problem! She turns to a girl, this one in an olive smock. Here. Take Jennifer to the kitchen for some hot milk. And make her take her meds. She refused at bedtime. You know what will happen tomorrow if we don’t get them into her.

  Not milk. Coffee, I say, but no one is listening. That’s the way it is here. People will say anything, promise anything. You can ignore the words, even on the days when you can retain them, because you need to keep your eyes on their bodies. Their hands most of all. The hands don’t lie. You watch what they are holding. What they are reaching for. If you cannot see the hands, that is the time to be concerned. The time to begin screaming.

  I study the face of the girl walking me to the dining room. My prosop-agnosia, my inability to distinguish one face from another, is getting worse. I cannot hold on to features, so when a person is in front of me, I study them. To try to do what every six-month-old child is capable of doing: separate the known from the unknown.

  This one strikes no chords. Her face is pockmarked, and her head brachycephalic. She has an overbite and her right foot is slightly in-toed, probably due to an internal tibial torsion. Enough work there for many expensive medical specialists. But not for me. Because her hands are perfect. Large and capable. Not gentle. But this is not a place where gentleness thrives. Natural selection takes care of that, for both the caring and the cared for.

  It’s a much-used word here, care. He needs long-term care. She is not qualified for home care. We are currently hiring more caregivers. Take care of her. Be careful with that. The other day, I found myself repeating the word over and over until it was meaningless. Care. Care. Care.

  I asked one of the male attendants for a dictionary. The man without the beard yet who is not clean-shaven, the one whose face I remember because of the hemangioma on his left cheek.

  He came back later with a piece of paper. Laura looked it up online for you, he said. He tried to hand it to me, but I shook my head. That was not a reading day, very few of them are anymore. He held up the paper and haltingly spoke, stumbling over the words. He is from the Philippines. He believes in the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life. He makes the sign of the cross in front of the statue of the haloed woman on my dresser. He has asked me several times about my Saint Christopher medal and clearly approves of me wearing it.

  Care: a burdened state of mind, as that arising from heavy responsibilities, he read. Watchful oversight. Assistance or treatment to those in need.

  He paused and frowned, then laughed. That’s a lot of definition for such a short word! It sure makes my job sound hard!

  It is hard, I said. You have the hardest job. I like this one. He has a face I approve of, in spite of—or perhaps because of—his birthmark. A face you can remember. A face that makes my anguish over my prosopagnosia dissipate a little.

  No, no! Not with patients like you!

  Stop flirting! I told him. But he got a smile out of me. Something this girl with the good hands is not going to do.

  We reach the dining room, and she deposits me in a chair, leaves. Another will take her place. And another.

  As with my patients at the free clinic I volunteer for every Wednesday: I focus on the symptoms, ignore the personalities. Just this morning I saw a case. If not for the puffiness around the hands and ankles, I would have simply diagnosed a mild case of depression. He was irritable. Unable to focus. His wife had been complaining, he said. But the inflammation made me suspicious, and I ordered tests for endomysial
and anti-tissue transglutaminase antibodies.

  If I’m right, a life of deprivation to follow. No wheat. No dairy. No bread, the staff of life. Some self-dramatizing, self-pitying people would see being diagnosed with celiac as a death sentence of life’s pleasures. If only they had known what lay in store for them, what would they have done differently? Indulged more? Or restrained themselves sooner?

  My milk arrives, along with a small cup of pills. I spit into the milk, hurl the pills so they scatter under tables, into corners.

  Jen! someone says. You know that’s against the rules!

  People start bending, going down on their hands and knees to retrieve the red, blue, and yellow pills. I resist the urge to kick the one closest to me in the backside and instead head back to my room. Yes. I will break every rule, transgress every line. And I prepare myself for battle as reinforcements begin arriving.

  Something nags. Just out of reach. Something to be shuddered at. Something bloody but unbowed by my resistance. This dark shame. A pain too lonely to bear.

  Visitors come and go. When they head toward the exit, I always follow, I quietly move in, ingratiate myself with the person or persons leaving. When they pass through the door, I will too. It’s that simple. No matter that I’ve always been stopped. One day it will work. No one will notice. No one will realize until mealtime. Then I will be long gone. I will eventually make it. Next time for certain.

  There is a woman here who is always surrounded by people. Visitors, night and day. Beloved by all. She is one of the lucky ones. She doesn’t know where she is, she doesn’t always recognize her husband or children, she wears diapers, and she’s lost many of her words, but she is sweet and serene. She is descending with dignity.

  The Vietnam vet, on the other hand, is alone. No visitors. He continually and loudly relives his glory days or his nightmares, depending on the day or even the hour. He either did or did not participate in a massacre, one of the famous ones. Some of the details ring truer than others. Heaving a goat carcass into a well. The way blood mists when slicing a vein. Like me, he understands that he is incarcerated for crimes past.

  James has come home today from one of his trips. From Albany this time. A tedious case, he says. His schedule is as draining as my own.

  Like me, he hasn’t slowed down with age. Still as urgent, as engaged as when we were in graduate school. And for me, always that thrill, that sense of discovery, no matter how brief his absence. Not a conventional sort of good looks. Too sharp, too angular for most tastes. And dark. Where Mark got his darkness, darkness within as well as without.

  James starts to sit down, then changes his mind and strides across the room, straightens my Calder where it hangs. Then comes back. Finally settles in the chair, but is not relaxed. On the edge of his chair, his foot tapping. Always in motion. Putting people on edge, wondering what he will do next. An extraordinarily useful weapon in the courtroom and in life. In a world where people usually behave as expected, James is exploratory surgery: slice and probe, and you discover things. Sometimes a malignancy. But frequently something that delights. Today he is unusually quiet, however. He waits a few moments before speaking.

  You look like crap, he says. But I imagine that’s just a shadow of how you feel.

  You always call it like it is, I say. And because his features are fading into the early morning gloom, Can you turn on the light?

  I prefer it this way, he says, and falls silent. He is fiddling with something in his hands. I lean forward. It is some sort of engraved medallion on a chain. It is somehow important. I hold out my hand, palm up, in the universal gesture of give me. But he ignores that.

  You forgot about this, he says. He holds it up by one finger, the medallion swinging slightly back and forth. It could be a problem, he says.

  I am trying to remember. There is a connection I must make. But it eludes me. I reach again for the medal, this time intending to take rather than ask. But James swiftly pulls back his hand, denying me. And suddenly he is gone. I feel a sharp sense of loss, the prick of tears on my eyelashes.

  People come and go so quickly here.

  Mark sits with me in the great room. He pleads. Please, Mom. You know I wouldn’t ask for it if it weren’t important.

  I am trying to understand. People are watching us. A scene! The television is off, they are hungry for drama. And here it is, with Mark and me as the central characters. Yet I still don’t comprehend what he is saying.

  Mom, it’s just until the end of the year. Until we get our bonuses.

  His hair wants cutting. Is he married yet? There was a girl. What happened to her? He looks so terribly young, they’re all so terribly young. I’ve asked Fiona but she says no. Mom, can you understand me? Mark at ten. My tender boy. Fiona even younger, but watching over him. He has broken the Millers’ garage window with his baseball bat on a dare and it’s Fiona who knocks on their door and offers to cut their lawn for six weeks to pay for it.

  You shouldn’t have done that, I tell him. You should have taken responsibility.

  Mom? Stay with me here.

  And you came home drunk last night. I caught Fiona mopping up the vomit on the living room rug. Fiona watches out for you.

  Yes, always Fiona. You don’t know how sick that makes me.

  What have you done that even your little sister won’t cover for you?

  Mom, I swear, I promise, this time will be the last. Now he is getting angry. You have more than you need. You’ll be giving it to me and Fiona anyway, eventually. What’s a little in advance?

  More people are stopping and staring. Even the Vietnam vet pulls up a chair. Entertainment! Mark’s voice continues to rise in impotent fury.

  If you just told Fiona that you agreed, she would give me the money. Why won’t you do this for me? Just this one last time.

  I was a reluctant mother. And Mark was difficult to love, I remember trying to cuddle him when he was three or four and crying about some playground injury, and I felt frustrated by the awkwardness of it all, the sharp elbows and bony knees. Yet he is my boy.

  Mom? He has been watching me closely.

  Yes.

  You’ll do it?

  Do what?

  Give me the money?

  Is that what you wanted? Why didn’t you say? Yes, of course. Let me just get my checkbook.

  I get up to go to my room for my purse, but Mark stops me. Holds out a notebook and a pen.

  Mom, you don’t have a checkbook anymore. That’s in Fiona’s hands. All you have to do is write a note here saying you’ll lend me the money. Just those words: I will lend Mark $50,000. No, you need a couple more zeros on there. That’s right. Now sign it. Great! Wonderful! You won’t regret it, I promise you. I’ll show you that I can make things right.

  He’s halfway to the door before collecting himself, turning back, and kissing me on the cheek. I love you, Mom. I know I’m a son of a bitch sometimes, but I do. And it’s not just the money talking.

  Show’s over, I tell the people who have gathered around. Go to your rooms. Shoo. They scatter like cockroaches.

  Love, love is everywhere. People are pairing off, two by two, sometimes three. Couplings that last perhaps an hour, perhaps a day. Junior high for the geriatric set.

  The woman with no neck is utterly promiscuous. She will be intimate with anyone. Here that means holding hands. Sitting in the lounge side by side. Perhaps a hand on a thigh.Very few words spoken.

  Husbands and wives show up, are looked at blankly. Some of them cry, all are relieved. A burden lifted. But these lovers. To be eternally seeking, to be besotted, to retreat to and be stuck at the most ignoble stage of life. God preserve me from ever going through that again.

  I was that foolish just twice. There was James. And then there was the other. It ended badly, of course. How could it not? His young, aggrieved face. His sense of entitlement.

  He would be close to fifty now—how odd to think that. A decade older than I was then. I never cared to see how he f
ared after leaving. I assume he did well, things are easy for the beautiful ones.

  But it wasn’t his beauty that attracted me. It was his feeling for the knife. I thrilled at that. His grip on the handle as if grasping the hand of a beloved. Still, to have that passion, that desire, but not the talent. I pitied him. And then pity turned into something else. I never used the word love. It couldn’t compare to what I felt for James. But it wasn’t like anything else either. And that counts for something.

  When thinking over one’s life, it’s the extreme moments that stand out. The peaks and the valleys. He was one of the highest peaks. In some ways looming larger than James. If James was a central mountain in the landscape of my life, then this other was a pinnacle of a different sort. Higher, sharper. You couldn’t build upon its fragile precipices. But the view was spectacular.

  There is colored tape on the rich carpet—somewhat spoiling the effect of luxury they work so hard to maintain here, but useful. This is a linear world. You go straight. You make right turns or left turns.

  Following the blue line takes me to my bathroom. Red leads to the dining room. Yellow to the lounge. Brown is for the circumference walk, which takes you round and round the perimeter of the great room. Round and round. Round and round.

  Past the bedrooms, past the dining room, the TV room, the activity room, past the double doors to the outside world with exit painted seductively in red letters. And on you go, in perpetual motion.

  Something nags. Something that resides in a sterile, brightly lit place where there is no room for shadows. The place for blood and bone. Yet shadows exist. And secrets.

  An extraordinarily clean place, this. They are constantly scrubbing, vacuuming, touching up the paint. Dusting. Fixing. It is pristine. And luxurious. A five-star hotel with guardrails. The Ritz for the mentally infirm. Plump cushy armchairs in the great room. An enormous flat-screen television in the TV lounge. Fresh flowers everywhere. The scent of money.