A History of the Present Illness

by Louise Aronson

  “We’re still waiting on our fourth.” Stanley pointed his spoon at the last open seat at their table. “A recent arrival,” he said. “And supposedly a very big deal in St. Louis, but the daughter and grandkids are here.”

  No matter how functional they were, the New Israel residents were assigned seat placards so they could be served whatever diet their physician had ordered. Sitting down, he saw that Gisela had diabetic/weight reduction and Stanley had renal, low salt. He had regular and could only hope the others had noticed.

  Gisela spoke with her mouth full. “We met her at breakfast, but big deal or not, if she keeps with the lateness, they’ll move her to Eilat like that Tova Fishman last month.”

  “What’s she like?” he asked.

  “See for yourself.” Gisela, still chewing, jutted her chin toward the path between the tables behind him.

  He tried to turn his head but found he couldn’t rotate it far enough, so instead he backed up his chair and stood just as the new person approached the table.

  “Oh,” said a voice on the low end of contralto. “A gentleman.”

  He pulled out her chair. She wore a white silk blouse over a black and white striped skirt and had tied back her silver hair with a thin velvet ribbon. She was gorgeous and clearly knew it, taking her time as she reached the table. In her right hand was a silver-tipped ebony cane that matched her outfit but that she didn’t appear to need.

  He waited as she leaned the cane against the wall and greeted the others. Finally, she turned to him and extended her hand as Stanley made the introductions.

  She wore a perfume he didn’t recognize. He let his wrists brush her shoulders as he pushed in her chair. Returning to his seat, he realized he was still smiling.

  Gisela looked from him to the newcomer. “Mary O’Brien,” she said. “Not exactly a Jewish name.”

  Mary nodded at the server who brought her plate. “My fourth husband was Irish.”

  “Fourth?” Stanley repeated with raised eyebrows.

  “Unlucky in love,” she said, tucking her napkin over the large bow at the neck of her blouse. She added both salt and pepper to her soup before tasting it, then tore her bread into chunks and dropped it in as well.

  It was all he could do not to stare. He took a bite of his sandwich and concentrated on chewing, aware of Gisela’s eyes on him and also, for the first time, of how he might inadvertently have raised her expectations of their relationship.

  On the far side of the room, an argument erupted at one of the tables of Russians.

  “Luck, schmuck,” Gisela said to Mary. “Maybe you’re like those gold diggers over there, just pretending to be a Yid to get in here.”

  “Oh come on,” Stanley said. “Who would have the last laugh if Russian Christians started posing as Jews in order to find comfort and security in America? Honestly, who would even make that up?”

  Once, he might have been as oblivious as Stanley, at least where it came to females. Now he realized he had only seconds to defuse the situation with Gisela. Pointing across the aisle, he said, “So that guy over there with the schnoz, that Vladimyr Moyshe Vaynshteyn—he isn’t Jewish?”

  Stanley and Mary laughed.

  Gisela’s nostrils flared. “I didn’t say they were all crooks, but you can’t always know what people are up to.”

  “No,” he said with a wink. “And they are often up to something.”

  He watched her relax. She knew perfectly well she was the only one he’d consulted about leaving Ruth and moving to Jaffa.

  Mary blew on a spoonful of her soup. “What does it matter? Maybe some things are quite simply other people’s business.”

  “Take that approach around here,” Stanley warned, “and you’ll die of boredom.”

  “Here, here,” seconded Gisela, raising her water glass.

  After each sip of her soup, Mary licked the corners of her lips to make sure she had it all. He could not imagine that a woman with an appetite like that wouldn’t have other, equally compelling passions.

  “And the name Mary?” he asked as the servers cleared their plates.

  “Oh, that.” Mary laughed. “We lived in Crown Heights, a world of Malkas and Leahs. To my mother, it was both original and wholly American.”

  He laughed, unable to contain himself. He couldn’t wait to get into his new room and start his new life.

  The knock on the door came just as a hideously tattooed young chef on TV poured chipotle chocolate sauce over potato-chip-crusted pan-seared elk. “Come in,” she said when Zeni was already well into the room.

  “You do not drink?” asked the nurse, lifting the full can of liquid food from the bedside table.

  She hated the supplements and how Harold and the staff seemed to believe they would transform her, somehow solving all her troubles. Every day, the little cans arrived at ten in the morning, two in the afternoon, and before bed. And without help, she couldn’t even pour the sick-sweet liquid down the sink or find a place to hide the unopened containers.

  Zeni pulled up the shades and opened a window. “It is good for you.”

  “Like hell.” She pushed the can away and pulled the pillow over her head.

  They went through this every day. Early on, Zeni had tried to coax her, offering different flavors, occasionally attempting to bargain or command. Eventually they’d reached their current standoff, neither of them with any illusions about the outcome of the conversation.

  Now she waited. Soon she’d hear the door shut, and then she could decide whether to go to the trouble of sitting back up to see which chef had made the best use of the required crazy ingredients in order to win the contest’s cash prize.

  The bed moved behind her. Surely, today of all days, Zeni wasn’t going to force her to drink the so-called food?

  A hand touched her back and began gently rubbing. She tried to shrug it off, but then a second hand began massaging the other side. The hands, small and strong, moved up and down her back, then side to side. They kneaded, pressed, and pounded, lingering on the tightest and most tender spots. She could hardly bear it at first, and then she wished it would go on forever. Why had Zeni never done this before? Warmth rose from her neck and along her spine, where for the longest time there’d been only pain.

  After a while the hands slowed, then stopped. “Me too,” Zeni said quietly. “No more husband.”

  She rolled over, and they looked at each other.

  “What happened?”

  “He said I have too many opinions, and I am too fat.”

  Zeni definitely had her opinions, but she wasn’t fat. It made no sense.

  The nurse ran her hands along her torso, showing the shape hidden beneath her scrub top. “Now I am not fat, but before, yes. For one year I ate only dinner. No breakfast, no lunch, no McDonald’s, no pancit. I wanted him to feel sorry about leaving.” She stood up. “You can do the same.”

  Ruth waved away the idea.

  Zeni parked the wheelchair alongside the bed. “In the Philippines, we have a dog. This dog, she love another dog down the road. For a long time, you see one dog, you see both dogs. Then that other dog he found a different dog to be his friend. For a while, my dog stayed only at home. She did not run around like before. Then one day I see her go down the road to the house of the other dog and pee. They shoo her, but every day she go back. She pee again.”

  “Did she get her boyfriend back?”

  Zeni shook her head. “You do not understand. Harold goes everywhere. He meets many people. You stay always on Tel Aviv five.” She dropped soap and shampoo into the carry bag at the back of the wheelchair. “Maybe some people do not know even that he has a wife.”

  Clearly, she had underestimated Zeni. Not only did she have chutzpah but she understood perfectly what made Harold tick.

  *

  He stared in disbelief at his closet. While he was in the music room, Ruth had had one of the aides take his suits to Jaffa 314.

  “You said you were moving,” she explaine
d. “I figured you’d want out right away.”

  “The damn room’s not ready yet. I can eat in the dining room, but I can’t move in until after the High Holidays.”

  “Poor man. How will you bear it?”

  “Look. I didn’t have to tell you now, but I did so you’d have time to adjust before I left.”

  “So considerate. Always a gentleman. Now, that should impress your friends.”

  He didn’t have time for this. Not one jacket remained, and he had to find something nice enough to wear to temple. He’d never make it to Jaffa and back with a suit in time for services.

  She rolled up behind him. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen her propel herself. If his leaving got her up and moving, it would be a bonus beyond his wildest dreams. She too could be happy at the New Israel if she let herself. He was sure of it.

  “What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why you’re going to services in the first place. You don’t believe in God. You never went before we moved in here.”

  So she was up, but otherwise unchanged. He moved pants right to left in his closet. There was nothing appropriate for him to wear, certainly nothing nice enough to impress Mary O’Brien. “I believe in community. Everyone’s going.”

  She laughed. “Everyone? The atheist Russians? Those living corpses on Masada who don’t even know their own names anymore?”

  “Of course not. What’s gotten into you?”

  Incredibly, she didn’t offer another snide retort. She looked as if she were actually thinking about the answer to his question.

  “Get out of my way,” she commanded. When he did, she rolled up to the closet and scanned his clothes. Suddenly he realized what had changed. They’d finally convinced her to take a shower. There was a special one down the hall with a waterproof support chair and room for an aide. Her hair no longer lay along her head in greasy clumps. She smelled of soap and shampoo.

  “The linen trousers,” she said. “The blue shirt, the belt with the banjo buckle, and your navy silk tie. It’s not a suit, but you’ll look pretty sharp.”

  He held the outfit against his body in front of the mirror. She’d always had a good eye for style.

  He sat down on his bed to change. Midway through untying the laces of his sport shoes, he stopped and looked up. “I appreciate the help, I really do. And I’m very grateful. But it doesn’t change anything.”

  “I didn’t imagine it would.”

  He wished she’d turn on her television the way she usually did, blaring the absurd food shows one after the other as if to reprimand him for taking her away from her kitchen and her favorite restaurants. But she just sat in her wheelchair studying him.

  He pulled on his trousers, careful not to wrinkle the linen, then buttoned the shirt and secured his belt and tie.

  Ruth gave him the once-over. “Handsome,” she declared. “You’ll stand out in the crowd as usual.”

  He checked himself in the mirror, pleasantly surprised that she was right. If he hurried, he might still be in time to have his choice of seat and seatmates.

  She kept her head down as Zeni rolled her to Jerusalem, not that anyone was likely to recognize her. At the synagogue, they slipped in through a side door; it would be just like Harold to be watching the main entrance. Inside the temple, the fluorescent lights and heavy, stale air surprised her. At the New Israel, it seemed, worship took place in a room that looked and smelled like a high school gym.

  She easily spotted Harold’s blue shirt in front on the left. He was surrounded by women. She pointed to a spot in the same section, far enough back that Harold wouldn’t see her and close enough that she’d be able to wheel herself to the front. Zeni parked her there and pretended to set the wheelchair brakes before touching her shoulder and walking away.

  And then Ruth waited, watching as late arrivals crowded into the wide, windowless space and scanned the room for the best of the remaining tan folding seats. Her neighbors, with their round faces and heavy sweaters, appeared to be Russian. She nodded and smiled, and they did the same, so either they weren’t Russian or Harold was wrong about San Francisco’s most recent Jewish immigrants. But since no one said anything, not even hello, there was no way to know.

  A walker squeaked as its owner hurried by. Every few seconds she touched the wig on her head, the huge glasses that actually did help her see, and the corners of her lipsticked lips, but everything had stayed in place.

  The lights flashed off and back on. At the front of the room, a stylish Filipina lit the candles and the rabbi signaled to a young man who lifted the huge double-twist shofar to his lips and blew: a piercing, primitive blast that echoed through the room.

  One of her neighbors reached up to adjust his hearing aid. Seconds after the sound ended, she continued to feel it in her chest. Maybe that was what life was like at the end: one long cry that wiped out everything else.

  The next blasts were shorter, nine staccato sobs that sounded as if they came from deep inside a wounded animal. Harold was right that sometimes instruments were more eloquent than words. How often she had wished she could make such a sound herself.

  As the shofar’s last note faded, she reached for the cool metal on either side of her chair and pushed. The wheelchair rolled down the side aisle faster than she would have thought possible. They had always been different, she and Harold, and she hadn’t put up with him for so long to end up like this.

  The rabbi moved to the podium and adjusted the microphone.

  As she reached the front of the room, one of the women beside Harold leaned over to whisper in his ear.

  The rabbi cleared his throat.

  “Wait,” she called. “Me first.”

  Only then did she realize the fault in Zeni’s plan. In her wheelchair and with everyone seated, only those close to Harold would see what happened next. That would ruin everything. But if she stood up . . .

  Harold saw her then. His mouth opened.

  The wig shifted on her head as she rose.

  Harold jumped to his feet.

  The plain gold band slid easily from her fourth left finger, and she held it out to him even as she felt her legs give way.

  He stayed with Ruth all night at the hospital, as much to have time to sort out what had happened as to monitor her condition. Had she hoped the fall would kill her? Or had she gambled that it wouldn’t? She would have known that he would never walk away if she were injured, and also that he’d blame himself for not understanding her as fully as she understood him. With the entire community as witness, she had known that her downfall would become his as well.

  It was lunchtime when he got back to the New Israel. He entered the Jaffa dining room with his back straight and his face closed like the heavy wooden doors of a boardroom. Crossing the short distance from the doorway to his table, he walked a gauntlet of whispers and stares. Even the Russians looked away when he glanced in their direction.

  “Afternoon,” he said to Stanley and Gisela. He didn’t say good.

  “That it is,” Stanley replied, holding out a hand, though they didn’t usually shake except at council meetings.

  Gisela took a bite of her sandwich.

  “Soup? Sandwich?” asked a server once he’d sat down.

  He nodded, then looked over at their table’s empty chair. “Late again?”

  “Mary moved to table six,” Stanley said. “At breakfast this morning. She insisted.”

  A second server put a bowl and plate before him. His favorites: tomato basil soup and grilled cheese on rye. He tried to feel pleased but failed.

  “So,” Gisela said, “have they told you much?”

  He poured himself some water. “She’s got a broken hip, a broken arm, broken ribs, and a concussion. She’s in intensive care.”

  “Conscious?”

  He shook his head. “Sedated.”

  Stanley stroked his mustache, his index finger tracing from the center down one side, then the other. “It’s always something in a marriage,”
he said. “No way to be ready.” Stanley’s wife, in her thirteenth year with Alzheimer’s, had been moved to Masada 4 that summer.

  He didn’t tell his friends the worst of it, that the doctor had said the fractures wouldn’t kill Ruth, only make her more fragile. That she’d need lots of help from him through the months, and possibly years, of her recovery.

  In silence, they ate. He chewed and swallowed, tasting nothing, and then began again, moving his spoon from bowl to mouth and back, repeating the motions of eating as he would be repeating the motions of his life from here on out.

  Lucky You

  Wednesday, the day the boy fell, Perla Weldon walked her afternoon dogs out over the saddle of Bernal Hill. Because it was early December, after the first of the El Niño rains, the mud was orange brown, slippery in some places and as thick as peanut butter in others. It clung to her boots and splashed on her jeans as she threw sticks and rocks for her charges. Perla and her dogs covered most of the hill’s twenty-four leash-free acres that day, from the Monterey pines in a lonely cluster on the highest peak to the grassy eastern slopes and short red rock bluffs to the west. She praised the dogs in her usual voice—which was childishly high—and reprimanded them in deep tones that required her to lower her chin to her chest. Heading back to the K9 Safari truck, they walked along the cliff path that would be closed off three hours later and planted with indigenous grasses the following week.

  I watched as a group of neighborhood volunteers planted the grasses. Perla had told me her version of the story by then, and my wife had read the brief account in the Chronicle aloud one breakfast as a warning to our boys, but I wanted to get a sense of the place for myself. Leaving work early, I drove to the gate at the top of Bernal Heights Boulevard and retraced Perla’s route. I wondered how many afternoons she had passed the boy, walking home from school with his friends. The paper said the friends always walked together, Maya Cohen and Jessica Fernandez, both age ten, and Dylan Hunter, age eleven, who had been admitted to San Francisco General Hospital in critical condition. Perla had said she couldn’t remember seeing them, but she didn’t pay much attention to kids unless they were harassing her dogs. Children, she believed, were cute one minute, unspeakably cruel the next, the demands of their bodies and imaginations endless and unpredictable. She much preferred animals.