Household Words

by Joan Silber

  Thirteen days—that was the most disheartening piece of information she’d received so far. In the afternoon they brought her a dish of Cream of Wheat with no butter. Rhoda ate with her free hand. “Cream of wallpaper paste,” she said, mushing it with her spoon. “Glug.” Claire was there; she held out a glass of watered-down juice and tilted the straw to Rhoda, who sipped at it greedily. After lunch they made her walk back and forth to the window, just to be moving; the nurse helped her drag the pole behind. When the nurse was gone, Rhoda adjusted the clamp on the I.V. tube so the fluid flowed more rapidly, thinking they might come take it away sooner that way.

  In the evening an intern did come and slip the needle out without putting a new one in. He was gone before Rhoda had a chance to thank him, but she walked up and down the halls to celebrate.

  Just before lights out, another of the interns edged into the room, wheeling before him the I.V. tank on its pole. “That’s not for me,” Rhoda said.

  “Just for a few hours,” the man said. “Hold your arm still.” He was having trouble finding the vein. “There.”

  “I’m supposed to be through with all this,” Rhoda said. “It’s depressing.”

  What do they think I am? Rhoda thought, lying in bed after the intern had left. She ripped off the adhesive which held the needle in place and slid the needle out from under skin. Her arm was sore and bruised. She got up out of bed and began searching on the floor for her slippers.

  They were not under her bed and she went to the closet. When she put them on she felt how long her toenails had grown, like the nails of the dead growing underground. Then she put her coat on over her nightgown; she had trouble with the buttons and she had to start over again a few times until she got them lined up properly. She went out into the hall.

  Who do they think I am? she thought again. Obviously they had no idea. For weeks they had hardly understood a word she said. All my life I’ve been talking to idiots. Lying like a stone day and night in that ghostly ward, with its weird milky light, she’d gone way, way beyond them.

  She passed the mousey little nurse who had come to her in the night before her operation. She really looks scared now, scared out of her wits; maybe she thinks I’m a zombie, Rhoda thought, and smiled to herself. Harry Belafonte sang a calypso song about the zombie jamboree, all the zombies dancing in the graveyard. Maybe I’ll do a dance, Rhoda thought. She kept walking down the corridor.

  The bounce of her own motion was painful—but she felt all hot and glowing, rapturous with escape. She shuffled, but she could still walk a brisk step, like a sensible person. A person like her didn’t belong in a place like this. It seemed to her that she was finally acting on something she’d known for years.

  A big black nurse was walking alongside her. “Going on a trip?” she said.

  “It’s depressing being in the hospital all the time,” Rhoda said. “It’s very depressing here. I think I would do much better if I just got out.”

  “Well, there’s a good bit of logical truth in that,” the nurse said. “Only you have to think about whether you’re ready or not. I think you’re probably not ready yet.”

  “I’ve been here for weeks,” Rhoda said. “I’ve got bedsores.” But she let the nurse take her arm and lead her back to the room.

  “Another day,” the nurse said, unbuttoning Rhoda’s coat and hanging it up.

  “I know you understand,” Rhoda said, “because you know all about voodoo.” The nurse laughed softly and tucked the covers around Rhoda’s shoulders.

  When Rhoda came awake again, she found that she couldn’t raise either of her arms; it felt as though her sleeves were caught on something, perhaps the bed-frame. They’ve put the sheet in too tight, she thought, but why isn’t it giving when I push against it? She began crying out for the nurse, since there was no way to push the buzzer. When no nurse came, Rhoda was suddenly afraid that she had been tied in a gunny sack and left in a back room of the hospital, as a punishment for walking around when she wasn’t supposed to.

  But it seemed to be her same room, with her bottle of Dierkiss talcum powder and her blue-handled hairbrush on the table next to her. It looked like Claire sitting on a chair near the bed, Claire and another person Rhoda thought might be Suzanne, but then she saw it was one of the boys who came to the house to visit Claire. “Nesser,” Rhoda was saying. That wasn’t the right word, no wonder no one was coming. “Nurch,” she tried again. She knew how to say the word but on the way to saying it she forgot.

  The boy ran out of the room and when he came back he had the red-haired nurse with him. “This is awful,” Rhoda said. She said it perfectly clearly. “I’m strapped to the bed! It’s like a strait-jacket.”

  “No, no, stop pulling at it,” the nurse said. “It’s only for a little while. They have to do it. Try to just lie back and rest.”

  Rhoda struggled and kicked at the sheets, but in the effort she saw that she was really very, very tired, and in a moment she lay back. “Claire,” she said. “Are you cigrit?”

  “Am I what?” Claire said. “Try to speak a little more slowly. It’s hard to understand you.”

  “Are—you—cigrit?” Rhoda said. She was getting annoyed. “Moking a cigrit.”

  “I think she wants to know if you’re smoking a cigarette,” the boy said.

  “It smells,” Rhoda said. “It smells in here.”

  “You can’t smoke in the rooms, nobody can,” Claire said. “They don’t allow it.”

  “It stinks,” Rhoda said. “Farkel. Farkel dreck. Fumpfen in farfel.”

  “Is she speaking Yiddish?” the boy asked.

  Claire said, “I don’t think so.”

  “Soap and wincher. Wincher,” Rhoda said, and then she began to laugh to herself because she knew that wasn’t right. “Winchik. Pinchik. Itzik.” She was giggling to hear how it came out. Then she remembered that she had been trying to tell them something and they weren’t listening. “Please!” She shouted. “Soap and wincher!”

  “I can’t understand you,” Claire said. She was crying.

  “Ope—and—wincher,” Rhoda said. “Where’s air?”

  “I’m right here,” Claire said sniffling. “And Suzanne is at college. She’ll come later some time.”

  “Air,” Rhoda said. “Air I want.”

  The boy said, “I’m going to try opening a window.”

  “Hooray, hooray. A brain,” Rhoda said. She heard the boy pushing open the sash. “Better.”

  Claire was sniveling. “Don’t you have a Kleenex?” Rhoda said. “Blow your nose. Really blow it and stop all the sniffing. I could never teach you to blow your nose right.”

  “All right,” Claire said, dabbing at her face.

  “It’s disgusting,” Rhoda said.

  “She’s right,” the boy said. “Don’t you have any more tissues?”

  “They’re all in shreds,” Claire said. “I can’t help it.”

  “Winchik,” Rhoda said, and laughed till she was breathless. There was a long and terribly difficult discussion with either Claire or some other people, during which she kept trying to correct something they were getting wrong. She knew she was being noisy but she had to be. She cried, “Stop that snot!” over and over. Then she moaned because talking made her so tired, and she went to sleep again.

  When she came to, there was no one in the room but a nurse. She wanted to get up, the bed under her felt damp, but she was still strapped in. “This is awful,” she said. “I can’t get up to do anything or anything.”

  “They’ll probably come and undo it soon,” the nurse said. “Feeling better, are we?”

  “I was out there, off into a little trance like one of those voodoo people,” Rhoda said, when Frank came to visit the next day.

  Frank shook his head. “It’s the drugs,” Rhoda said. “They know what they do by themselves but they don’t know what happens when they combine in your system.”

  “The human body is a mystery,” Frank said.

  Rhoda
still felt stunned and exhausted. She dimly remembered having been harsh to Claire, and she felt a flush of shame. One of the nurses had told her about her attempt to leave the night before, and her determination rather amused her now. Walking around like Ophelia in her nightgown.

  “It’s a shocker,” she said. “Of all things I expected to happen, this was never one of them.”

  “Who knew?” Frank said. “Who could foresee something like that?”

  “Beyond the pale,” Rhoda said, and shuddered. “But what do I ever know. The trouble with me is that I’m too much of an optimist.”

  “But you’re feeling better now, that’s the main thing,” Frank said.

  “Up and at ’em. Full of the devil and fit to be tied. Every day in every way I’m getting better and better.”

  “That’s good,” Frank said.

  “I think it’s their fault,” Claire said, when Andy brought her by in the evening. “The hospital.”

  “I must have been pretty far gone. Did you know they had me strapped to the bed?” Rhoda said.

  “Of course,” Claire said.

  “It’s a good thing Suzanne wasn’t here to see it,” Rhoda said. “She was always the sensitive one. With all her biology experiments, she was still the one who always got queasy at the sight of blood.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Where is Suzanne?” Rhoda said. “I got one get-well card and one phone call before the operation.”

  “That was a cute card, with the picture of the old lady in longjohns.”

  “She could be here. It’s not so hard to take the plane from Florida.”

  Claire said nothing. “It’s too much for her,” Rhoda said. “She can’t take it, it would be too emotional for her.”

  “Hospitals depress a lot of people,” Claire said. “It’s because she cares for you, it’s too much for her.”

  “Don’t give me that crap,” Rhoda said. “If she cared so much, she would be here.”

  Several days later a resident told Rhoda that her surgeon was coming in to talk to her about the question of further surgery. “They must be kidding,” Rhoda said. “Let him talk, I’ll laugh.” But she was frightened.

  After lunch the little colorless doctor who looked like a math teacher showed up at her bedside. He explained to Rhoda that in a week she was going home “on probation” and they were suspending decisions about another operation according to what they saw when she came back for periodic check-ups. Rhoda said, “I’d love it if I never walked into this hospital again.”

  “They all say that. It must be the cooking here.”

  Rhoda sighed and closed her eyes. When she opened them, the doctor was making his way out of the room. She started to ask, “So when is Dr. Findlay coming to have an iced-tea orgy with me?” but he was already gone from the room before she had a chance to finish.

  It seemed to Rhoda, as she made plans to return to the house, that someone should have fetched Suzanne before this; Florida wasn’t on the other side of the world. Rhoda had the feeling they were all slightly afraid of Suzanne—or they had thought it pointless to summon her because they despaired of her cooperating. Rhoda saw that she would have to take matters in hand—her life at home, at least for a while, was going to be severely limited and she would need help. Suzanne would have to be made to understand this.

  “We can’t find her,” Andy said.

  “What do you mean?” Rhoda said. She was sitting up in bed, instructing Lainie which things to take home early to wash. “They have to sign out and say where they’re going before they can leave the campus. The school has rules.”

  “Something funny has been going on,” Andy said. “First we tried calling, and her roommate kept telling us she was out—she was obviously covering up for her. I finally called the Dean of Students. She tells me Suzanne sent them a note three weeks ago saying she was dropping out and suggesting that they refund any remaining part of the tuition to you. I haven’t noticed them rushing to send you any checks, incidentally.”

  “I knew it,” Rhoda said. “I was afraid of this.”

  “So I started calling the roommate again. I finally got her to admit that Suzanne tried to volunteer for the WACS—that was her first idea, apparently—but they turned her down because her vision wasn’t good enough. So now she’s living in a rented room in the town and she found a job working in a school for retarded children. But we can’t get the address. The roommate keeps saying she doesn’t know but of course that’s baloney. My feeling is that when the summer is over she’ll get fed up and go back to school.”

  “She only had a month more till the end of the semester,” Rhoda said. “What makes you think the school would take her back now? They probably don’t want to have any more to do with her. I don’t blame them. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  It was very irritating—Andy’s businesslike way of reporting this as though it were something commonplace and expected. When she raised her voice at him, he blinked—an old habit from childhood—he still had the same thick, pale lashes (he had been a rosy, pretty child)—and she saw, in his nervousness, that he was only trying to keep from humiliating her with the real shock of the news; he was no more liberal or calm about Suzanne’s behavior than she was. Probably more appalled, in fact: her brothers were very loyal to her.

  “We sent a registered letter in care of her roommate—the girl signed for it, but Suzanne never bothered to answer it.”

  “That’s stinking,” Rhoda said. “I never knew she was so rotten.”

  “What can I say?” Andy sighed. “When’s she ready, you’ll hear from her. She has her own way.”

  “I have to wait for her to be ready, while I’m lying here? That stinks to high heaven.” Andy and Lainie were both silent.

  When Rhoda arrived home, there was a pile of mail waiting for her, and she went through it at once, thinking there might be some word from Suzanne. From her father (who had not been told about her illness and had been given some hokum story about how she’d gone to the mountains for a vacation) there was a Mother’s Day card—gold-stamped forget-me-nots and a rhymed verse inside—which was signed, Love, J. Spansky (POP). There were get-well cards (some, through clerical error, forwarded weeks ago from the hospital) from Bev Davis, Mrs. Leshko, Hinda, Annie, Liz Hofferberg, Dr. Aaronkrantz, Natalie’s mother, Addie Shulman, and Leonard’s brother. Harriet had sent a copy of Kon-Tiki with a note that said, “Read up. This is how we’re going to Europe the next time.”

  Lainie wanted to arrange all the cards on the dresser, the way people did with Christmas cards, but Rhoda scotched the idea. “It’s bad enough I have to pretend to use all the toilet water and powder they bring me. Gawd, we’ve got boxes of the stuff. There must be a general belief that sick people smell.”

  Sally Finch and Hinda were there to visit that afternoon, bearing (with an almost touching, naïve faith in their originality) their wrapped boxes of Bluegrass and Evening in Paris. Throughout the evening the doorbell continued to ring, bringing visitors, and Rhoda grew vivacious, warming to the company, telling hospital stories, until Lainie had to guide them all out and remind Rhoda that she wasn’t up to round-the-clock reveling.

  The heavy flow of callers continued through the following days; between Maisie’s shifts (she had agreed to “give” a few more days a week) and Claire’s tending to her when she came home from school, Rhoda found that she was rarely alone. In fact she was by herself far less than she’d been in years.

  “It’s like Macy’s basement or Grand Central Station here,” Hinda said, on a day when no fewer than six people had overlapped their visits and extra chairs had had to be carried up to Rhoda’s bedroom from downstairs. “See what a star you are, Rhode.”

  “She holds court, that’s what she does,” Annie said. Annie, who had gotten even skinnier and more ropy-necked with age, had developed a cackle.

  “Like Miss America with her entourage,” Rhoda said, casting her eyes upwards. “Let’s lay it on real
thick while we’re at it.”

  “Claire’s getting to be quite a looker,” Evvie Fern said, “speaking of beauty queens.”

  “You hear that, gorgeous creature?” Rhoda said. Claire was unfolding a bridge chair; it was from the same rickety set Leonard had played pinochle on, and the joints were too loose for it to stand upright easily. “It’s since her braces came off,” Rhoda said.

  “So how old are you now, a sophomore?” Evvie asked. Rhoda hadn’t seen Evvie for some time, and she was, as always, garishly dressed and somehow brightly attractive. “My Sary’s a junior. Getting the college catalogues already. Mostly she’s not a scholar, she’s primarily interested in boys.”

  “That’s very normal,” Annie said.

  “So how is Suzanne liking college these days? What’s the word from Florida?” Evvie said.

  Hinda said, “I think junior colleges are really a good idea for a certain kind of kids. That way they can transfer after two years if they want to and if they don’t they still have something.”

  “Stop talking like a guidance counselor. I want to hear about Suzanne,” Sylvia Shepp said. “What do you hear? Does she have a boyfriend, you think? She was always an unusual sort of kid.”

  “I haven’t heard from her for a while,” Rhoda said. “When she needs money, I’ll hear.”

  “Well, she knows you’re all right now, she figures you don’t need her,” Hinda said. “Young people are like that—they think everything gets fixed fast.”

  “I’d like to give her a good belt where it would do some good,” Rhoda said, “only I can’t do it through the mail.”

  “Ha, ha,” Annie said, “a belt in the mail.”

  “If it were my kid, she would be on the phone to me every night,” Sylvia said. “I don’t know how you stand it. You’re making jokes because that’s your way, but no one is fooled by your cheerful demeanor. We all know it must be a heartbreak for you, Rhody. Look at your face. I think it’s shocking, I really do.”