Donna Has Left the Building

by Susan Jane Gilman

  Brenda and I regarded each other. It was like a shared old song between us, sweet and mournful and symphonic.

  “Look, sweetie. I can give you actual directions. Like, how to get onto I-95. But your life?”

  “You know me better than anybody. Bren, you couldn’t just do a reading—maybe just to humor me?”

  Sighing, she glanced at her phone again. “Okay. Look. You have a car?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you still up for driving a bit?”

  “Yeah. Sure, sure. Absolutely.” Though, secretly, I hoped she didn’t want to go too far. I was beginning to feel light-headed.

  “Eli’s teacher just texted. He forgot to bring in his big social studies project this morning. A model of Nevado Sajama. Don’t ask.” She massaged the bridge of her nose. “I’ve also got to go over to see my mom and bring her some stuff.”

  “Your mom’s here?”

  “Yeah. I moved her up last year. The commute was becoming impossible.”

  “Oh no. Is she okay?”

  Brenda frowned. “When she’s lucid.”

  “Oh, Brennie.”

  “Yeah, well.” She threw up her hands.

  “Look, if you need me to drive you to see her, I’m more than happy to do it.”

  “That would be a huge help, actually.” Brenda’s eyes met mine. She smiled weakly. “And after that, if you want to crash here this evening, we can make up the couch. I’m sorry I can’t put you up for longer, but I let the other residents crash here between their shifts when I’m on night rotations so I have someone to look after Eli. Hotel Peebles has been booked for weeks.”

  “No, no. I totally understand.” I tried to hide my disappointment. “But we can have a girls’ night, Bren! Like back in college. Ramen noodles and Diet Pepsi—play ‘Purple Rain’ fifty times in a row—”

  “Wow. Does that ever seem like another lifetime.” She smiled wearily. But she must’ve sensed my desperation—because she added guardedly, “And then maybe—just maybe, we’ll see what kind of shape I’m in after Eli goes to sleep. But this is not something I’m inclined to do for anyone anymore, you understand? Absolutely no promises.”

  I tried not to betray any nascent hope. “Sure. Sure. Yes. I totally get it.”

  “And if my fellow residents do stop by to shower or nap, you don’t mention anything about cards or predictions or Madame LaShonda Peyroux at all, okay?”

  “They don’t know?”

  Brenda rolled her eyes. “One of them, this white girl, the first week of our residency, she goes, Oh my God. You look like somebody totally famous. You’re not Maya Angelou, are you? As if I’m, like, eighty. But I’ve gone to great lengths to scrub my profile and keep my two identities apart, and I want to keep it that way.” She shook her head. “You know, until I shaved my head, people were still coming up to me, begging me to tell their fortunes? At the supermarket, the dentist’s. Even in an airport bathroom once. I do not want that at my workplace.

  “Besides.” She grinned at me in her old sly, ironic, Brenda-ish way. “Trust me. No one ever wants to learn that their spinal tap is being performed by a former television psychic.”

  As I drove Brenda around Manhattan, every time I glanced over at her belted in the passenger seat, my insides stopped quivering. I felt better somehow.

  When I pulled up to where her mother lived, however, a sign over the entrance read THE HEBREW HOME AND HOSPICE.

  “You’ve put your mom in a home with the Heebs?” I tried to make a joke to hide my uneasiness, though Brenda didn’t pick up on it.

  “It’s one of the benefits of working at Mount Sinai,” she said, looping her arm through mine. Clearly, I was expected to accompany her inside.

  I took a deep breath.

  The lobby was bright, hung with Chagall prints—someone was making an effort. But still. I could smell it immediately. That euphemistic, chemical stench of industrial cleanser and floral air freshener designed to mask human decay. Same as it had been thirty years ago.

  Brenda twisted and untwisted her plastic bakery bag around her index finger like a tourniquet as we waited for the elevator. She chewed her lip. I could not abandon her here. Just breathe through your mouth, I told myself, though my leg was spasming again furiously.

  As we moved hurriedly along the carpeted hallway, just as I had as a teenager, I tried to focus on the ceiling tiles and pretend I was in an office. But the plaintive moans emanating from the rooms, the blare of televisions as we passed the dayroom, the sound of a woman rambling loudly, Morris, he said he put it in the valise! and the occasional beep and wheeze of respirators were inescapable. When I nearly tripped over a medicine cart, I saw two West Indian nurses pushing a pair of shriveled white women in wheelchairs down the corridor. A bulletin board by a watercooler announced the activities for that day: bingo and a lecture about the Holocaust.

  The door to Dr. Peebles’s room was only partially ajar.

  “Are you sure I’m not intruding?” I said. “Really. I can wait downstairs if you want.”

  Brenda squeezed my hand. Hard. Then she straightened her blouse and took a deep breath herself.

  “HI, MOM. IT’S ME. YOUR DAUGHTER, BRENDA.” Her voice was suddenly higher-pitched, full of artificial cheeriness as if she were talking to a small child. I stepped in behind her miserably and looked around. The room was no bigger than the dorm room Brenda and I had shared as freshmen. A few homey touches had been brought in to soften the standard-issue furniture provided by the home: a Danish floor lamp, plum-colored throw pillows, a brocaded blanket.

  Photos were everywhere. In frames, on the walls, printed out from a computer and hastily taped up. Beneath many of them were labels on large, Day-Glo Post-its: ROLAND, YOUR SON. MICHAEL ALBERT PEEBLES, 1934–2011, YOUR HUSBAND. DANA, WILLIAM, AND ROLAND JR., YOUR GRANDCHILDREN (ROLAND’S). I recognized the print as Brenda’s. I could see family reunions, people smiling on a beach in Trinidad, nephews and nieces and grandchildren graduating from schools, her father’s memorial service. A whole chunk of her life I’d missed.

  I tried to fix all my attention on the photographs. The bed, however, was in the center of the room, putty-colored and unmistakably mechanized and unavoidable. So, too, was the bedpan. And the tray full of pill vials.

  “LOOK, MOM. I BROUGHT YOU A PRESENT,” Brenda said.

  Dr. Peebles sat stone-still in the corner by the window in one of those newfangled “gliders” that didn’t rock so much as slide back and forth on a set of wooden skis. A show was blaring on the television across from her, though she didn’t appear to be watching it: On-screen, a real estate agent was trying to convince a couple of prospective home buyers that a large closet was really a “bonus room.”

  Dr. Peebles turned her head, slow as a turtle. I got a shock. Although she now wore thick, plastic-framed glasses and was dressed in wine-red velour “activewear” and slippers, she otherwise looked almost exactly as she had twenty-four years ago at Brenda’s and my college graduation. Her thick, dark hair was still impeccably styled, her cheekbones high, her jawline taut. Even her long, slender doctor’s hands were devoid of any of the knobbiness or gnarled veins that usually come with age.

  Reaching up, she slowly took off her glasses as if removing a mask. She looked at us with utter blankness, a milky scrim of incomprehension.

  “Kimberly?” she said in a papery voice.

  Brenda snatched up the remote and hit the Mute button on the television. “NO, MOM. KIMBERLY’S YOUR DAUGHTER-IN-LAW. I’M BRENDA, YOUR DAUGHTER.”

  Dr. Peebles leaned closer and peered at her. “You turned off my program. They were hunting for a house in Baltimore.” She blinked at Brenda. “Kimberly?”

  Brenda set the bag from the bakery in her mother’s lap and placed a new pair of Isotoner slippers on the table. “I BROUGHT YOU THE PEANUT BUTTER COOKIES YOU LIKE, MOM. SEE?” Reaching over, she undid the bag and dug out one of the big cookies, crisscrossed with tine-marks, proffering it in a slip of filmy paper.
<
br />   Dr. Peebles frowned. “Stop trying to feed me! I’m not hungry. I want your husband.”

  “ROLAND ISN’T HERE. HE LIVES IN WASHINGTON, DC. I AM BRENDA, YOUR DAUGHTER, AND WE ARE IN NEW YORK.”

  “Eli lives in New York City. My grandson.” She looked over to the wall with the photos and the Post-its. “Oh,” she said. “Of course. Brenda. Here you are.”

  “That’s right, Mom,” Brenda said, her voice quieting.

  “I was just testing. I have to test you, you know, or you’ll get lazy.” She pointed to the television. “You were on television.”

  “That’s right, but I’m not anymore, Mom.”

  For the first time, Dr. Peebles looked over at me. She seemed to decide I was some innocuous bystander. “That was terrible. A terrible, terrible show,” she said. “I was so embarrassed. So ashamed.”

  I saw Brenda’s mouth twitch. “I’m a doctor now, Mom. A doctor just like you.”

  Dr. Peebles stared at me. “I don’t want to eat. Where’s my daughter?”

  “I’m right here, Mom.” Brenda knelt down in front of her so her mother could see her in full.

  “Is Eli coming?”

  “No, Mom. He’s in school.”

  Dr. Peebles looked at me. “He’s not a real grandson. He’s adopted.” Brenda stood up. Her mother added quickly, “But we love him just the same. Don’t we?”

  Brenda had begun unwrapping the slippers, yanking apart the plastic tie that bound them with her teeth. She motioned for me to take a seat on a hospital stool I’d been avoiding.

  “Mom, I brought an old friend. Do you remember Donna?”

  “Hi, Dr. Peebles.” I waved foolishly, the same way I did the very first day in the dorm room as an awkward seventeen-year-old.

  Dr. Peebles leaned forward and squinted at me. She had it, too: that same Mercurochrome-y hospital smell that my mother had had. Just a whiff of it made me recoil.

  Ovarian cancer had desiccated my mother physically; in the end, her flesh seemed to have dehydrated around her bones. Except for her distended abdomen, she’d looked vacuum-packed, homuncular, gray. Now, I wasn’t sure which fate was harder to take: losing the body or losing the mind. Dr. Peebles had been so formidable and elegant. It was like seeing a great civilization gone to ruin.

  “DR. PEEBLES. DO YOU REMEMBER ME?” I said like an imbecile. “BRENDA’S OLD ROOMMATE?”

  Unsteadily, Dr. Peebles pointed to my neck. She said shakily, “Padlock.”

  “Ha!” Brenda gave a bark. “That’s right, Mom.”

  “Oh, good God,” I said. “That’s what she remembers about me?”

  “Hey, you’re the one who showed up wearing shackles to meet your black roommate.” Brenda snorted.

  “Yeah. Well.” I guessed there was no living that down.

  “The driver,” Dr. Peebles mimed.

  “That’s right, Mom.” Brenda nodded vigorously. “Donna drove me.”

  “The funeral,” Dr. Peebles said. “You came in the snow.”

  I brought a hand to my forehead. Of course. That was why the drive through Pennsylvania had felt so familiar. Freshman year, Brenda’s grandmother had died. It had been during a massive snowstorm. All the airports in the Midwest had shut down, so I’d borrowed Toby’s four-wheel drive. At some point during the thirteen-hour trip, we began referring to me as “Smedley,” joking that I should show up to the funeral in a chauffeur’s uniform. All we’d brought along to eat was a jumbo box of Double Stuf Oreos and a few bags of sour-cream-and-onion potato chips. One of Toby’s tapes had gotten stuck in the cassette player, so we’d had to listen to The Very Best of Conway Twitty the entire way. It had been near-whiteout conditions. Whenever the truck fishtailed across the snowy highway, we shrieked with laughter as if we were on a roller coaster. If my own kids did anything like that now, I’d kill them.

  Dr. Peebles’s memory was like a shortwave radio. “We buried my mother in her pale purple silk dress. Roland, he took some of the money she left him and bought that Pontiac, didn’t he?”

  A knock came on the door; an orderly in flowered scrubs came in. Her nametag read ROSADO. “PAULINE, I COME TO TAKE YOU TO PHYSICAL THERAPY, YES? COME.” She tapped her watch.

  Brenda’s mother got a wild look on her face. “Where are you taking me? I don’t want to go anywhere. My daughter is here.”

  “I’m sorry, Pauline.” The orderly glanced at Brenda with a conspiratorial frown. “But it’s time. We have to take you, remember? It’s Tuesday.”

  “Physio is good for you, Mom,” Brenda said encouragingly. “You know that. You’re a doctor.”

  “I don’t want physio! I don’t want to move! Who turned off my television?”

  “Pauline, we need you to go to physical therapy now so they can come in to clean your room.”

  “Why are you people barging in here? Why are you harassing me like this? Turning off my television! Forcing me to eat!” She flung the bag of cookies Brenda had brought her onto the floor. “Get away from me! I want my children! Where’s Kimberly? Where’s my husband?”

  She started to flail. “You’re all going to hell! You know that! You know that!” She stabbed the air repeatedly at Brenda with her finger. “Don’t act like you don’t know! Don’t be ignoring the signs! You see the world! You read the Bible! You see the end times coming! You want to suck me down with you! Get away from me!” she screamed. A buzzer rang and another aide arrived.

  Back in the Subaru, I didn’t turn the ignition on right away. I sat quietly, staring out the windshield, giving Brenda time to collect herself.

  Finally, she tugged on her seat belt and clicked it in place and cleared her throat.

  I looked over at her. “You okay?”

  She stared out at the street. “How did you do it, Donna?”

  “What?”

  “Watch your mom die.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Oh, wait. I drank like a fish.”

  “Why does she still make it so difficult for me? I mean, you heard her, right? Even with her mind half gone? Eli isn’t a ‘real’ grandson; I’ve been a total embarrassment.”

  “Oh, Brenda, you are an amazing daughter. Seriously. She’s a sick woman, is all.”

  Brenda looked down at her hands, knitted in her lap. “What kind of horrible person gets furious at her helpless, dying mother?”

  “Uh, everyone. Being left is the worst.”

  Slowly, I turned the key in the ignition.

  Brenda blew her nose again. She leaned toward the radio. “I’m going to find some Conway Twitty just to torture you.”

  After a moment, she glanced over. “So hey. What happened, exactly. With you and Joey?”

  I took a long sip of water from the bottle I’d left in the cup holder. During my midnight drive across the country, I’d constructed elaborate, prima facie arguments for myself like an attorney. But sitting across from Brenda now, I suddenly felt foolish presenting myself as any sort of victim, as someone whom things happened to.

  “I caught him cheating, dressed up as a French maid with a dominatrix in our kitchen, and I beat the shit out of him,” I said plainly. “With a Privileged Kitchen stainless-steel fish spatula.”

  Brenda’s hand went up to her mouth. The corners of her eyes scrunched. “Sorry,” she said after a moment. “You still have that way of saying awful things that just makes them sound really, really funny.” She shook her head. “Wow. Okay. I did not see that one coming.”

  She blinked at me. “Is he seriously injured? Pressing charges?”

  “No, no. It was an accident. It was—” I looked out at the street in front of me, hoping some succinct, ready-made explanation might present itself amid the cars and trucks and pedestrians hurrying back and forth before my windshield. We were stuck in traffic. I took a deep breath and spit out the whole sordid story. Recounting it, I felt increasingly queasy. Joey hadn’t just wanted to be humiliated as a woman, of course, but also as a slave. “It’s unbelievable, isn’t it?”

 
Brenda sighed. “Unfortunately, no.” An ambulance whooped past, throwing fistfuls of red light across the interior of the Subaru. “Fifty percent of men over forty have regular erectile dysfunction. Apparently, some of them need to go more and more hard-core just to get off at all. And I wish I could say it was news to me that men have all these fantasies full of sexism and racism, but nope.”

  “Fifty percent?”

  “Yeah. You learn a lot in medical school. Between that and being a psychic…” Her voice trailed off. “I’m only sorry it’s happened to you. You know I always thought Joey was fundamentally decent. The big doofus.”

  I felt myself tear up.

  “What almost shocks me most, though,” she said as she shifted around in her seat toward me, “is that he lied to your kids about your drinking. And all the disrespect.”

  “Exactly! Thank you!” I pounded the dashboard. “I tried telling him, ‘It’s not so much about the dressing, Joey.’” We were at a red light. I turned to face her. “He broke the deal, Brenda.”

  “You made a deal?”

  “Well, I did. Okay, maybe without telling him. But Joey was supposed to be stable and trustworthy, Bren. You know that. I traded ‘hot’ for ‘reliable’ with him. Hell, if I’d known he was going to cheat on me, I could’ve just stayed with Zack—or any number of those toe-curling bass-playing man-whores I used to fall for. Now look at me.” I snorted. “Medea in a Subaru, married to a philandering dentist.”

  “Sorry.” Brenda chuckled. “That’s also really funny.”

  We sat blinking at each other. A taxi behind me honked.

  “Bren,” I said after a moment. “Do you ever miss it? Even just a little?”

  “What? Being young?”

  “No, a celebrity.”

  She shrugged. “I miss the clothes.” She considered it a moment. “I miss the help. Having a cleaning woman come in every week. A doorman, sure. And the town car sent over by the studio was nice.”

  I grinned. “Well, at least you’re getting Smedley back for a day.”