Makeovers by Marcia

by Claudia Mills

  The phone rang. Marcia ignored it. There was nobody she felt like talking to right now Alex wasn’t the type to call.

  Then Marcia’s mother pushed open the bedroom door. “It’s for you.” She held out the phone to Marcia.

  Marcia shook her head, irritated at the interruption. “Tell them I’m not here.”

  “It’s one of your teachers,” her mother said, sounding concerned. “Ms. Williams.”

  Marcia slowly accepted the phone. Why on earth would Ms. Williams be calling her at home on a Friday night? She couldn’t think of a single thing she had done wrong so far this year, except for letting Madame Cowper see her picture. Ms. Williams couldn’t be calling about that. Maybe her mother had heard the name wrong.

  “Hello?” Marcia said tentatively.

  “Marcia, it’s Ms. Williams. I hope I’m not reaching you at a bad time.”

  It sounded exactly like her. “No,” Marcia lied. It’s just the last half hour before my eighth-grade fall dance.

  “I’m afraid I have some sad news.”

  For a bizarre moment Marcia almost expected Ms. Williams to say that Alex wouldn’t be taking her to the dance, after all.

  “I just had a call from West Creek Manor. They couldn’t remember which of my students was the one doing the beauty makeovers with the residents there. I told them it was you, and they asked me if I’d call you.”

  Marcia still didn’t understand what was happening. Had one of the residents complained about the makeovers? Who could it have been? Everyone loved the makeovers, except for Agnes Applebaum, but Agnes Applebaum wasn’t going to say anything against Marcia to one of her teachers.

  “Marcia, Mrs. Mavis Getty had a heart attack this afternoon.”

  “No,” Marcia whispered. Ms. Williams couldn’t be calling to tell her that Mavis Getty was … She couldn’t be. She had danced in her wheelchair with Melvin from Nashville just last Saturday at the Oktoberfest.

  “She’s still alive, but they don’t think she’ll last the night. She’s been asking for you. Well, they think it’s you. She keeps talking about ‘Diana,’ but she also said something about the ‘pretty little girl’ who did her nails for her.”

  “She always calls me Diana,” Marcia said, her voice breaking.

  “She’s at West Creek Community Hospital, in intensive care. I don’t know whether you’d be willing, or able, to go see her, but …”

  “I can go. I want to go.” She had to go.

  “This is the first time something like this has happened since I started doing the service learning program with my students. I’m so sorry that it had to happen to you.”

  Marcia couldn’t speak. She was terrified that Mavis Getty might die—and deeply touched that her pitiful little manicures had meant so much to Mrs. Getty at the end of her life.

  “I’d better let you go, then,” Ms. Williams said. “Thank you, Marcia.”

  Marcia turned off the phone.

  “What happened?” Her mother put her arm around Marcia’s shaking shoulders. “Honey, tell me what’s wrong.

  “I’m not going to the dance.” Marcia’s voice came out oddly steady, as if someone else, some unrelated stranger, were speaking. “Sarah, tell Alex I can’t go. Mom, can you drive me to the hospital? Like, right away? Mavis Getty—she’s this friend of mine at the nursing home—well, she’s had a heart attack, and Ms. Williams said she’s asking for me.”

  “Tonight?” Marcia’s mother sounded incredulous. “You have to go see her tonight? It can’t wait till tomorrow ? Honey, this is your big evening—the dance … your dress … and you look so pretty …”

  “They don’t think—” The rest of the sentence choked her. She couldn’t say it out loud: They don’t think she’ll still be here tomorrow.

  Sarah hugged her. Marcia stood there and let Sarah’s arms enfold her, and the tears came in a hot torrent.

  “Can you drive me now?” she asked her mother when Sarah finally stepped away.

  “Do you want to get changed first?”

  Marcia shook her head. Mrs. Getty might like to see her little black party dress.

  “Well, get your coat, at least.” Then her mother gave Marcia a long, hard hug of her own. “I’m proud of you for this.”

  “Don’t let Alex fall in love with anybody else tonight,” Marcia told Sarah, trying to force a smile. “No pine nuts!”

  “I won’t.” Sarah’s eyes were streaming, too.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Marcia’s mother asked her as they stood together outside the door of Mavis Getty’s room in the Intensive Care Unit. “Sometimes it’s better to remember people in their healthy state, not spoil your memories by associating them with tubes and things.”

  Marcia wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do this. But she knew she wasn’t about to turn back now.

  She poked her head into the room. Mavis Getty’s large bulk filled the narrow hospital bed. Mrs. Getty seemed to be asleep. At least, Marcia hoped she was, and not in a coma, or … But if you stopped breathing in the ICU, didn’t that make bells and sirens go off, and all the nurses come running? No nurses were in the room with her now

  Marcia tiptoed over to the bed. An I.V tube was taped to Mrs. Getty’s left hand, and an oxygen tube ran beneath her nose, but otherwise she looked the same, her face pale and peaceful beneath her red hair, the polish on her fingernails chipped in a couple of places. Heading to the car, Marcia had remembered to grab her Jay-Dub tote bag, just in case.

  Was it better to wake her up or let her sleep? Sick people needed their rest, but Marcia couldn’t imagine that Mavis Getty would want to sleep through a visitor.

  “Mrs. Getty?” she said softly.

  Mrs. Getty opened her eyes. “Diana! You did come!” She took a wheezing breath. “I didn’t think … they’d be able to find you. All I could tell them was … Diana, who does my nails.”

  “What about the real Diana, your great-granddaughter? Is she coming, too?”

  “She’s in California. They’re all in California.” Mrs. Getty struggled for another breath. “Well, they’re on the plane now. They told me they’re coming. But you’re … you’re here right now.”

  Marcia’s throat tightened. She smiled her brightest smile. “Have there been any more developments with …”

  “With Melvin?” Mrs. Getty tried to laugh, but the laugh turned into a choking cough. Marcia shot a worried look at her mother, still standing silent in the doorway. Then her mother disappeared, probably to find a nurse. Marcia patted Mrs. Getty’s hand.

  “We went to the chess tournament. Yesterday.” Marcia had to lean closer to hear her. “And that man gave me … a corsage to wear. Pink carnations. You know how pink clashes … with natural red hair. I wore it anyway. Sometimes I’m still amazed”—Marcia could hardly hear her now—“at what men don’t know.”

  “Did he win?”

  “Win?”

  “The chess tournament?”

  Mrs. Getty closed her eyes. Maybe it wasn’t good for her to talk so much. But if Mavis Getty had talked through everything in her life except for Elvis Presley on TV, it made sense that she’d talk through a heart attack, too.

  Marcia’s mother reappeared, with a stern-faced nurse. The nurse bustled over to the bed, checked the placement of the tubes, scanned the monitor by Mrs. Getty’s head. It still had lots of squiggles on it, so she had to be alive. Besides, Marcia could hear her breathing, slow and raspy.

  “Maybe you should think about going now,” the nurse said in a low voice.

  “Don’t go yet, Diana,” Mrs. Getty whispered. Her eyelids fluttered open, and then shut again.

  “Is it all right if—well, if I fix her nail polish? A cou- ple of the nails are chipped.”

  Marcia waited to see if the nurse would say this was the most ridiculous thing she had ever heard in all her years of nursing: to do the nails of an eighty-four-year-old woman who might well be dead in another twenty-four hours.

  The nurse’s face softe
ned. “Go ahead. Do you have what you need with you?”

  Marcia held up her tote bag.

  The nurse shook her head, as if bewildered by a girl in a short, slinky, sleeveless black party dress carrying a tote bag full of manicuring supplies to somebody’s hospital bed. “Try not to disturb the I.V,” was all she said.

  Marcia started to remove the chipped polish from two of Mrs. Getty’s right-hand nails. It felt good to be doing some service for Mrs. Getty, however small. Mrs. Getty’s fingers felt soft and warm, the way they had always felt. Suddenly Marcia wished she had brought a tape of Elvis Presley for Mrs. Getty to listen to. But Marcia certainly didn’t own any Elvis Presley recordings, and her parents didn’t, either. Besides, there was nothing in the room for her to play it on.

  The nurse stood at the foot of Mrs. Getty’s bed, reading the clipboard that had been hanging there.

  “Is there any kind of CD player, or tape player, or something?”

  “There’s one in the nurses’ station on the second floor.” The nurse’s expression was guarded, her tone noncommittal. Maybe she thought Marcia wanted to blare rock music all through Intensive Care.

  “Mrs. Getty was—is—a big fan of Elvis Presley, and I thought she might like to hear”—Marcia tried to remember the song that Mavis Getty had sung into Lizzie’s tape recorder on the day they had met—“‘Love Me Tender.’”

  “And you happen to have a collection of Elvis Presley tapes in your tote bag, too?” The nurse was smiling now

  “No, but—Mom? The mall isn’t far from here, and the stores are still open …”

  Marcia’s mother stood up from her chair by the door. She, too, looked relieved at having something to do. “You’ll be all right by yourself?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Half an hour later, Mrs. Getty’s nails were drying, the CD player from the second-floor nurses’ station was plugged in beside the bed, and a CD of Elvis’s greatest hits was ready to play

  “Mrs. Getty?” Mrs. Getty didn’t open her eyes, but her grip on Marcia’s hand tightened. “I have a surprise for you.”

  Marcia signaled to her mother to press the PLAY button on the CD player. “Love me tender,” Elvis crooned into the quiet room.

  Mrs. Getty’s eyes flew open. “Diana. You’re still here,” she whispered to Marcia. “I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

  Mrs. Getty drifted back to sleep as Marcia held her freshly manicured hand, and Elvis Presley kept on singing.

  fourteen

  Mr. Morrison stood next to Marcia’s desk a week later, gazing down at the four portraits she had brought in to show him: Mavis Getty, Mabel Thompson, Alberta Estes, and Agnes Applebaum. Marcia wasn’t afraid of what he would say this time. She knew the pictures were good. Not as good as she wanted them to be, not as good as Rembrandt’s, but so much better than her quick sketch of Madame Cowper. Her work had come such a long way

  Mr. Morrison was silent. Maybe he didn’t like them, after all? Maybe he was trying to find the right sarcastic remark?

  “It’s wonderful, isn’t it,” he finally said, “what you can do when you learn to look with your eyes and your heart. We’ll hang these in the fall show”

  Marcia felt herself flushing with proud pleasure at his praise. It was a major honor to have your work included in the fall art show. And Mr. Morrison definitely wasn’t the type who displayed work he didn’t respect just to make a student feel good.

  He turned to go to the next desk. Marcia somehow couldn’t bear for him to walk away not even knowing about Mrs. Getty.

  “Mr. Morrison?”

  He turned back.

  “This lady here? She died. Last weekend. She was all excited about this big party at the nursing home, and she had gotten a new boyfriend, and everything, and then she had a heart attack, and died.”

  It was clear that Mr. Morrison didn’t know what Marcia expected him to say. “I’m sorry. Would you rather not display this portrait in the show?”

  “No, it’s just that—I never knew anybody who died before. And she was the most alive of anybody there.”

  “And she’s still alive here,” Mr. Morrison said. “This is why artists need to speak the truth, while they can.”

  The art show was part of the West Creek Middle School fall open house. The featured art hung in the hallways for parents to admire as they stopped by various classrooms and chatted with their children’s teachers. Marcia’s pictures had been placed outside Madame Cowper’s room. Marcia hoped Madame Cowper wouldn’t see them and remember her other drawing. But Madame Cowper was probably too busy showing off her students’ French compositions to spend time loitering in the hall.

  Marcia let her parents wander on their own from classroom to classroom while she stood guard by her pictures with Gwennie. “Why am I standing here like a dope?” she asked Gwennie.

  “Because you’re proud of your work, and you should be.”

  “What if someone doesn’t know they’re mine and says something bad about them?”

  “They won’t, and if they did, it would say more about them than about you. Come on, Marsh, your teacher wouldn’t display them if he didn’t think they were good.”

  Marcia had a sweet, bragging thought that she wouldn’t have shared even with Gwennie: her teacher wouldn’t display them if he didn’t think they were outstandingly good.

  Lizzie and her mother stopped by first. Lizzie pulled her mother to a halt in front of the pictures, and they both stared at them in unmistakably appreciative silence.

  When Lizzie looked away, she had tears in her eyes. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered. “All four of them. Four completely different, completely beautiful women. I can’t believe …” She gently touched Mavis Getty’s broad, smiling face, her bright red hair. “I can’t believe she’s gone. But I look at this picture, and she isn’t gone.”

  Lizzie’s mother gave Marcia a quick hug. “You’re a very talented artist, Marcia. There’s nothing harder than a portrait, in my view Anyone can draw an apple. An apple doesn’t have a soul.”

  Marcia remembered her struggle to draw an apple that didn’t look like a red tennis ball.

  “Apples have souls!” she and Lizzie both said together.

  Mrs. Archer laughed. “I stand corrected. When the great artists paint an apple, they make us believe that it does have a soul. But I still insist that portraits are more challenging. And these are especially fine ones.”

  “Would you let us publish these in the literary magazine?” Lizzie asked. “I’d understand if you think they’re too private to be published, but they’re so beautiful. They’d be the best thing in the magazine.”

  Marcia looked at Gwennie. “Sure,” she said. Mavis Getty would get to be a “pinup girl” in a school magazine, after all.

  As Lizzie and her mother wandered off, Sarah and Travis ambled down the hall, his arm draped over her shoulders, too focused on each other to pay any attention to the world of art. Marcia still felt a pang of jealousy at the sight of them. She and Alex had talked a few times since the dance, enough for her to know he wasn’t mad at her for standing him up, but not enough to bring back the moment they had shared at the Oktoberfest.

  Then Alex himself appeared, with Dave, Ethan, and Julius. The boys stopped to check out the pictures. Marcia wondered if Alex would make a wisecrack. “Look at those old bags,” was the kind of thing Alex might say But he had spent time at West Creek Manor, too.

  “Wow,” Ethan said.

  “I didn’t know you could draw like that,” Julius said.

  Dave struck the pose of The Thinker, fist to chin. “Draw me!”

  Alex shoved him. “Yeah, you could call it Portrait of a Jerk,” he jeered good-naturedly. Dave shoved him back.

  The other boys drifted on. Alex remained behind. Gwennie shot Marcia a meaningful look and obligingly disappeared.

  “How’s it going?” Alex asked her. “That has to be rough-having someone you know die like that.”

&n
bsp; Marcia felt tears stinging her eyes. Alex reached out and took her hand. For a moment they stood there together, in front of the portraits, hand in hand, without speaking.

  Then: “Saturday,” he said.

  “Saturday?”

  “The day of reckoning. The day of leaf raking. The day on which I rake the leaves of the Faitak family’s famous tree. I was hoping we’d get one of West Creek’s eighty-mile-an-hour winds and all the leaves would blow away. But my mom says I can’t put it off any longer. So—one o’clock? Will you be there?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Alex finally let go of Marcia’s hand when Ms. Williams descended upon them.

  “I’ve always been committed to service learning as a wonderful way of teaching social studies,” she said, “but now I can also claim that it’s a wonderful way of teaching art.” Ms. Williams wasn’t the hugging type, but she put her arm around Marcia and gave her shoulder a small squeeze before she went on her way.

  Alex left to catch up with his friends. Old Mr. Adams poked his head out of the math room.

  “Miss Faitak,” he greeted her, in the stiff, formal way he had.

  Marcia gave him a friendly wave. “Come see my pictures!” It was time to launch her dating service for the elderly. She had decided against introducing Melvin-from-Nashville to Alberta Estes. He belonged to Mavis Getty forever. But Mr. Adams was definitely a possibility.

  “First-rate, Miss Faitak!” Mr. Adams waggled his thick white eyebrows at her.

  “This one’s my favorite.” Marcia pointed to the portrait of Alberta Estes. “I couldn’t make her as beautiful as she is in real life, but I tried. She’s beautiful on the inside, too, so sweet and kind. Oh, and she’s good at math. She was a whiz at math when she was in school.”

  Was Marcia imagining it, or was Mr. Adams studying Alberta’s portrait with special interest?

  “You’re … single, aren’t you, Mr. Adams?”

  He gave a wheezing laugh. “Miss Faitak, are you matchmaking?”

  Marcia gave him a wide-eyed, innocent smile. He headed on down the hall. Well, a seed had been planted, at least.