Household Words

by Joan Silber

  “We look like a family convocation,” Rhoda said, gesturing around her to the group that was walking with her through the halls of the hospital. Her brother Frank walked ahead, carrying her overnight bag, while she leaned against Andy, and Claire and the two sisters-in-law fluttered about her, trying to be helpful.

  They settled Rhoda into her room, putting things in closets and beating at the bed-pillows and drawing the curtain that separated her from the sleeping old lady who was Rhoda’s “semi-private” roommate. They flustered the young nurse with bantering pleasantries while she fastened a plastic name-bracelet on Rhoda’s wrist. “If found, drop in the nearest mailbox,” Rhoda said. The nurse shook her head, and smiled uncertainly.

  “Isn’t she a beauty, though?” Frank said. “A strawberry-blonde beauty.”

  “It’s her own natural color, I’ll bet,” Rhoda said, as the girl fled with her clipboard.

  “You’ll get good service here, I know,” Andy said.

  “Better than at the Ritz,” Rhoda said, waving them off with the flapping gesture one used to wave bye-bye to babies. Only Claire remained to help her change into her nightgown. Claire was flattered at having been singled out to give help, but she wasn’t much good at it, and Rhoda had to swing herself into the sleeves while leaning on Claire’s shoulder, which was, however, a handy height.

  When she was changed and lying in bed, Rhoda closed her eyes and said, “I’m so weary.”

  “Do you want me to do anything else?” Claire asked.

  “No, you can go,” Rhoda said, with her eyes still closed. “Tomorrow I’ll show you how to crank up the bed.” She heard Claire banging the Venetian blinds as she fussed with the pulley, and then she fell into the drifting sleep of the hospital.

  Five days later Rhoda lay in the same bed and watched, with grim outrage, the nurse draw blood from her finger. “Twice a day they wake me up to do this,” she said. “What are they, vampires down there in that lab?”

  She saw Andy and his wife Lainie standing hesitantly in the doorway and she waved to them with her free hand, and called out “Hi-dee-hi. You can come in, the ghoul is just leaving now.”

  “Well, you look so much better,” Lainie said, drawing up a chair. “How are you doing?”

  “Everything’s copacetic,” Rhoda said—an expression she hadn’t used since the forties, but which seemed to fit the sickroom.

  “So what do they know about you that they didn’t know before?” Andy asked.

  “Some of these tests are real zingers,” Rhoda said. “They shoot you full of air, they shoot you full of barium. You got to have guts to have any guts left after this business.”

  “It sounds awful,” Lainie said gently.

  “You’ll be happy to know that we’re arranging,” Andy said, “to pack up all your troubles and send them directly to Gamal Abdel Nasser, where they’ll do some good.”

  “That’s a very efficient idea,” Rhoda said. “There’s a man who deserves a good shot in the kishkes.”

  They were working out an elaborate system of smuggling her problems into Egypt by a relay of disguised couriers, when a very old, old man shuffled through the doorway. He was wearing street clothes but he looked as though someone might roll him into a hospital gown at any moment; he nodded slowly at them, and made his way to the other side of the room. “He visits his wife,” Rhoda said.

  “He’s the healthy one in the family?” Andy whispered. “Oooh, they’ve got problems.”

  “One of the nurses was saying they shouldn’t allow very old people as visitors the same way they don’t allow very young children,” Rhoda said. But in truth she was sometimes jealous of the old man’s visits, which consisted of his sitting and reading a tabloid newspaper and listening as his wife, from time to time, complained softly to him, while Rhoda lay on her side of the partition and watched the TV, dateless.

  Claire came to visit around noon. Her school had recessed for Easter vacation, and she had found a way to come by herself by bus; she always arrived a bit breathless from walking up the hill from the bus stop to the hospital. “I’m not better,” Rhoda said, picking at the lunch tray in her lap, as she talked with Claire, “but I’ve been mapped and graphed and plumbed like a piece of valuable real estate. They know things about me even the rabbi doesn’t know.” (This was mostly a joke—Rhoda was not on confidential terms with any rabbi, and had in fact shooed one away from her bed when he’d shown up to pray with her.) “One thing I would like to know about hospitals—what is it with them that they think Jell-O is a fit dessert for grownups? You want some of this?”

  “I didn’t even like it when I was little,” Claire said. “I’ll eat some of the peas you left, though.” Rhoda liked it when Claire shared her lunch; it made the routine seem more human and social.

  Rhoda was beginning to get fretful at how slow the tests were to show conclusions—although she felt vaguely proud that her ailment was serious and subtle enough to elude easy classification. Her one fear was that they were going to send her home uncured, having suffered the tests for no reason. When Claire left, the nurse whispered that a surgeon was coming to talk with her. Rhoda was so startled that her first thought was that she wanted time to tell somebody about it. Nasser should only go have some operation, she and Andy could say.

  Two men were already walking toward her bed. The first was the most innocuous-looking surgeon Rhoda had ever seen, a bland, thin-lipped man with rimless spectacles like the ones Woodrow Wilson had worn. He’s like the quiet young man no one ever thinks will commit a murder, Rhoda thought. With him he had another doctor, tall, very red in the face, with iron-gray hair. Rhoda had the immediate impression that he was blustering and eccentric, and she wondered if he resembled an actor who played character parts. “I know you,” she said suddenly. “I sat next to you at a dinner for the Community Chest about ten years ago. You’re Dr. Finney.”

  “Findlay,” the man said. “Did you, now? You see, you never know—little did you think then you’d be sitting in bed having a conversation with me in your nightgown. You weren’t wearing that nightgown then, were you?”

  “I was wearing a black skirt. My husband was very active in the fund-raising.”

  “Well, he must be a more patient man than I am, then. God, they had awful food at those dinners. My wife used to drag me. You didn’t know my wife, did you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “She passed away two years ago. They still having those dinners?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Rhoda said. “I guess so.”

  “Oh, they were boring. I hope I behaved well, since you remember me. I told you, Ken, I know all the pretty girls in the hospital.”

  “You’re still a character,” Rhoda said.

  “We’re making Ken jealous here,” Dr. Findlay said.

  The other doctor took this as his cue to lead them back to the purpose of their visit. He squinted when he spoke and he was hard to follow; he seemed to be explaining in schematic detail the workings of the human liver and digestive system. Rhoda wasn’t listening—he was so much like a high-school math teacher. “You can understand that under these conditions,” he said, “we have no choice but to go ahead with exploratory surgery.”

  There was a pause, and Rhoda realized that he expected her to nod, which she did. Dr. Findlay explained that he would be acting as a consultant, and if they found that her system had really managed to clog itself with its own scar tissue—at this point he became hearty in his description—like tailors, they would re-route her innards, making a permanent detour out of some bypass out of the liver. Suddenly Rhoda saw, in a wave of horror, that these alterations would be permanent. “My own intestine, that I’ve had since I was a little girl,” she said, parroting an old line.

  “That’s a good one,” Dr. Findlay said. “I have to remember that.” It was when he was reassuring her about the danger of the operation that she stiffened with panic, and she realized that for some time she had been afraid to move or blink, alth
ough she was sitting up at an uncomfortable angle “Everyone has a natural fear of major surgery, but you know that Dr. Weintraub here takes especially good care of my old girlfriends.”

  She felt the need to ask serious, intelligent questions, but instead she said, “I’m sure that both of you will do the best job possible. I have every faith in you,” and surprised herself at how perfectly all right that sounded.

  “The important thing is to get your beauty sleep,” Dr. Findlay said. “And no martinis on the sly.”

  “You’re still a big kidder,” Rhoda said.

  “We’ll whoop it up with iced tea afterwards,” the doctor said, winking as he left.

  The wisest course, Rhoda advised herself when they were both gone, was not to dwell on this, especially not to dwell on the morbid aspects. She made the nurse’s aide put the television on, and throughout the afternoon she refused to let anyone turn the volume down, no matter how the patient in the other bed complained. It made no difference, of course; she might as well have been watching a blank screen; but neither was she able to think in a focused way. Dreadful images from horror movies came to her, coffins opening. Dark as the grave, As I lay dying, When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me. Her head rang with phrases, all of them useless. For many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and something. She thought naturally of Leonard, who was so absolutely gone from her, and then she recalled, of all things, a line from General MacArthur: In war there can be no substitute for victory.

  She couldn’t think!—she had a sense of time racing, and her thoughts running skittishly in circles—she kept seeing a door closing against her, she was trying to get out of a room, where she was shut up alone. And then a shudder passed over her of pure loneliness and terror, and she saw that the only thing to do was to hold onto her mind and wait.

  When the nurse brought her dinner tray and then clucked over its contents left uneaten, Rhoda made a face. She was musing over whether it was worth it to frame a sarcastic reply, when she heard footsteps halting outside her doorway. Everyone in the family had already been to visit once that day, and it was almost at the end of visiting hours. She saw a short man, too stocky for the old lady’s husband. I might have known, Rhoda thought: it was the rabbi, come to visit her again.

  In Rhoda’s own congregation the rabbi was a smooth-faced liberal, but this was one of the old school: hairs grew from his nose, he had red wet lips, and he breathed heavily when he spoke. “I thought you might want company,” he said. Rhoda greeted him in Yiddish, she asked him what a handsome young fellow like himself was doing hanging around a hospital full of old sick people. “I only come visit the beautiful young girls like you,” he said. Listen to him, Rhoda thought. My, my, there’s life in the old boy yet, and then she flinched at the phrase. The life that lives in the spirit when the body dies, was he going to talk about that? If he did she would turn away and shrug, roll her eyes rudely. She was loyal in her religion, but without thought, as she would have been loyal to a somewhat simple relative. She believed in God, of course, but not personally, and she certainly regarded Him as a Being with the decency not to force an intimacy. Everything in her went against the idea of a life continuing without an attachment to normal daily occupations. She had never seen the need to bother with what Leonard, in one of his melioristic philosophical phases, had called “developing spiritual muscles,” and the last thing she wanted now was any scarifying arguments, any intimations of mumbo-jumbo.

  The rabbi touched her shoulder. He was talking about the history of the Jewish people, what tragic and difficult times they’d had, and how brave they were. “Even in the camps,” he said. Why do they let him in here? Rhoda thought. She considered ringing for one of the nurses, but she couldn’t think of an excuse that wouldn’t backfire. She let him go on about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (“Through the sewers they escaped, like rats”) until a nurse finally did come to brush visitors away. She brought with her a sleeping pill, which Rhoda took without complaining, for once.

  Rhoda lay awake in the hospital room in a flat anguish, blocked from speculation. She was just drowsy enough to feel that she was in horror of something dreadful, but not to think clearly what it was. She had a great desire to get up and do something in the ward, to go to the little sink in the corner and wash out one of her nightgowns, to write out her car payment check, which was due this week, to make a list of the things she wanted Claire to bring if she was going to be here longer—but she hesitated, because she knew that if she started anything one of the nurses would come in and stop her from finishing. She would have to argue with some snippy supervisor, But I’m not done. And then she remembered what she was afraid of was not being able to finish anything.

  That made her so violently anxious that she actually rose up, but the drug had made her groggy so that her own weight was hard to support, and she slid back on the pillow with her arms at her sides. At this point she cried out. A nurse came at once, a young mousey thing—they must put the students on at night—she hardly looked older than Suzanne. She stared at Rhoda in the half-light without saying anything, timid to ask and perhaps waiting for Rhoda to volunteer her complaint; between them there passed a moment of deep embarrassment. “Was it you?” the nurse said. “Is there a problem?”

  “They gave me a sleeping pill that wasn’t any good,” Rhoda said.

  “I don’t think I can give you another one but I’ll check the chart at the station,” the nurse said, and she left the room.

  You could wait till Labor Day till she figures out the chart, Rhoda thought. She lay awake, listening, but the nurse never came back, and she lapsed finally into a twilight sleep.

  In the morning, when they woke her for breakfast (although she wasn’t to be given any breakfast), the glaring dailiness of the hospital made Rhoda feel that she’d been foolish to let herself get carried away with sick fancies the night before. Andy phoned at eight to wish her well in the operation, and they had a fairly intricate conversation about the logistics of exporting surgical misery to Nasser.

  Presently Claire arrived. She was more dressed-up than usual, wearing a pink spring coat; her face was very pale. “This is the day I get to be chopped liver,” Rhoda said.

  “At least they’re getting on with it so you can be out of here sooner,” Claire said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Rhoda said.

  A male orderly came in the room, wheeling before him a white metal gurney with a sheet hung over it like a tablecloth. “You’re Mrs. Taber?” he said.

  “It’s too late to deny it now,” Rhoda said.

  Pulling and banging, the orderly extended the two end-panels so the cart lengthened into a cot. “I can get onto it myself,” Rhoda said, as he reached his arms under her. “Please don’t lift me.” She had already been changed into a hospital gown and when she swung herself onto the cot she tried to keep it over the back of her with some modesty. She slid down and lay back, Claire standing by one side.

  Rhoda reached out and took Claire’s hand, and immediately Claire’s grip closed around hers—she would never rebuff you physically, that was one thing about Claire. The man was still fussing with the brake release, and there was a long minute during which Rhoda felt the flow of sweetness from Claire’s hand and the panic of her own grip. She could tell how frightened she must seem from the look on Claire’s face. Claire held the look, and then her features wavered, she was having trouble being this serious. Of all the family she should have been the most prepared for it, with her taste for poetry and her quick tears in movies; but her expression faded to an artificial stiffness, except for the open-eyed gaze which still held a shimmer of pity. The man was backing Rhoda’s cart out of the room, and in order to keep Claire in view, Rhoda had to raise her head as best she could, rolling her eyes to one side, as he wheeled her out of the room.

  When Rhoda came out of the anesthetic she found, first, that something was burning, in a blurred way,
under her rib-cage, and then that they had put tubes up her nose. Her nose—of all things—one up each nostril—of all the hideous, unnatural practices—there was nothing wrong with her nasal passages. She reached up to pull the things out, but a nurse stopped her, stood over her and said, “No, no, we mustn’t do that yet.” Rhoda whimpered and fell back to sleep.

  When Rhoda woke again she knew that she was still drugged because she was in pain but she didn’t mind; her body felt fuzzy and indistinct; it felt, in fact, like the cotton around a wound. She fell in and out of sleep—for days and nights, it must have been—at times she would lift her head and try to ask the nurses questions, but no matter how many times she repeated herself they couldn’t manage to understand; they shook their heads, puzzled and polite, and blinked sympathetically.

  Finally one of them seemed to be answering her. She pointed to her wrist and held up four fingers and mouthed, “It’s four o’clock.” Rhoda realized that she must have asked her what time it was, but that wasn’t what she’d meant. She wanted to know how long she had been there, but she couldn’t think of the phrase for that.

  Once she woke and the room seemed crowded with visitors—people she hadn’t seen for years—Addie Shulman, Mrs. Leshko, the man who’d bought Leonard’s drugstore, children she’d taught at Rock Street school before the girls were born. The room was much too full—she knew perfectly well the hospital had rules about how many were allowed in the room, and she announced that some of them would have to leave, but they only backed away and made themselves smaller. She saw the couple who’d run the hotel in Paris and she didn’t understand how they could have paid their way from Europe; she had an argument with them about it in French.

  “This is ridiculous. I’m getting batty,” she said to one of the nurses. She was talking much better now.

  “You’ll feel much better once you’re on solid food,” the nurse said. “You’ve had infection. Thirteen days on an I.V. makes anyone restless.”