I take in a breath, start to say something, then don’t.
“The night before, we’d been to the Carnation Ballroom. I used to get my hair done once a month, cost me fifty cents to get it all poofy, and then we’d go out dancing. Yes, we’d had a good time. It helped me later, to think about that.”
“Please,” I whisper. I want so much for her to go away. And she does.
In the morning, I awaken to the sounds of kids talking. I come down to start coffee and see Sarah, Amy and Timothy sitting at the kitchen table before empty bowls. They are dressed already. I look at the clock and see why: it’s ten-fifty.
“Are you sick?” Amy asks.
“No,” I say. “Just tired, I guess.” I feel terrible that they got their own breakfast, even though they like doing that. It’s their chance to eat with odd things: cereal poured in a coffee cup, then eaten with a fork; a sandwich served on the lid of a Dutch oven. They think it’s fun. Once Amy poured orange juice over spoon-sized Shredded Wheat, then ate it with chopsticks.
I start the coffee, sit at the table with them. “What are you guys up to?”
“My parents went out somewhere,” Timothy said. “They told me to stay here. They thought you were up, you always get up early.”
“I do, usually. I’m sorry I was asleep.”
“It’s okay.” His voice is so tiny, his forgiveness so vast.
But it’s not okay. I need to tell Alice never to do that again, leave without telling me.
“Where did they go?” I ask Timothy.
“I don’t know. They were in a bad mood.”
“How come?” Amy asks, as though she’s reading my mind and asking for me.
He shrugs, pushes his glasses up on his nose. “Beats me. Let’s go finish.”
“Finish what?” I ask. “What are you doing?”
“A play,” Timothy says.
“Really!”
“Yes.”
“Can I watch?”
“No,” Sarah says.
“Yes, she can,” Amy says, and it occurs to me to say, Come along, Amy. I’m going to take you to a toy store and you can have everything.
“It’s not ready yet,” Sarah says. “We’re practicing.” She’s being evasive. But she is entitled to her privacy.
“Okay,” I say.
I go to the cupboard, take down a mug, have a flash of memory about last night. Maybe I need to call a therapist. I pour milk into the creamer, sit at the table to wait for the coffee to finish. I watch the kids as they pile out the door. They are all talking at once, all hearing what each one is saying, I’m sure. The other day I found Sarah in front of the television. The stereo was on, a book was in her lap, and she was talking on the phone. “Turn something off!” I said. And she said why? And I said because she couldn’t do all those things at once, and she said sure she could. I think she was right. We get narrow in our old age. We lose so many talents.
I hear the door slam, see Amy come back in. She stands before me for a second, then says, “You’re not sick?”
“No, I’m really not, Amy.”
She goes back out, hollering, “Wait! Don’t start yet!” She is wearing shorts, which are on backwards. Over them is her pink tutu, worn once in a dance recital. At least she’s getting some use out of it. And on top, a sweatshirt and a plastic necklace featuring glitter and water captured in a plastic heart. Why don’t we elect little children to Congress, I wonder? Why don’t we let them run things? They have such fine imaginations. They are almost always in a good mood.
I pour the small amount of coffee that has dripped into the carafe into my cup, then stand at the window, watching. Timothy lies on the ground, puts his arms across his chest and closes his eyes. Sarah and Amy stand on one side of him, then squat down and start to roll him over. “Ow!” he says, and opens his eyes, sits up. “You’re hurting me! Don’t make your fingers so pointy!”
Sarah stands up, hands on her hips. “You’re such a baby. Just shut up. Anyway, you can’t talk. You’re in a coma, stupid.”
I back away from the window. I don’t want to watch this. Then I go back over to it. Yes, I do.
“Close your eyes,” Amy says. “This is the part when you’re going to die.”
I take back every tender thought I ever had about children. They are little savages. I open the window wide, yell out, “Hey!”
They all look up. “You stop fighting or I’ll make you all come in here.”
“We’re not fighting,” Sarah says.
“I heard you.”
“It wasn’t fighting,” Timothy says. “They were just hurting me. Accidentally. It wasn’t malicious.”
“Why don’t you just come in and play?” I say. “Why don’t you come in and we’ll make cookies? Chocolate chip.”
They stand still for moment, and then Sarah says, “Mooooom! Just close the window.”
I do. I don’t want to hear this after all. They are going to face what I never can.
Amy and Timothy are watching television when Alice comes home. Sarah is at a friend’s house until after dinner.
Alice greets the kids with a weary cheerfulness, then comes into the kitchen with me, slouches in a chair, her legs straight out before her. “Well. We had quite a talk. The upshot of which is, he denies everything.” Then, looking up at me, “I think he’s scared. He wants to talk to you.”
“Oh, God, Alice, I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”
“You’re not in the middle. You’re on my side.”
“I can’t talk to him. I need to go see Jay.”
“Yeah, I know. Afterward. When you come back. Okay?”
I don’t answer.
“Okay?”
“Well … I don’t know, Alice. Do you really want me to?” If she really wants me to, I have to. I owe her and owe her and owe her.
“Lainey, I feel like my head is spaghetti. My brain. I’m so confused. I want you to talk to him and listen to what he says and then tell me what he means. I just don’t know anymore. God! I’m in a bad mood! It’s like walking around in an itchy coat. I don’t feel like dealing with anything.”
“You want me to take Timothy with me to the nursing home?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s such a great place for him.”
“It’s not usually too bad. Amy likes some of the old ladies. They show her all their pictures on their little dressers. She wants to have doilies in her room, now. And she loves Flozell. I’ll give them money to buy soda from the machines. They’ll be all right. I’ll just be a couple hours, and then I’ll take them out for dinner. Pizza, or whatever they want. I need to be back before Sarah gets home, around seven.”
“Yeah,” Alice says. “Okay. That might be good. Thank you.”
“It’s all right. It’s the least I can do. You know that.”
“Can you keep him a little longer than seven?”
“Sure. Till when?”
“I don’t know. Till he’s twenty or so.”
“No problem.”
“I didn’t think so.” She tries to smile, but it doesn’t work. It just looks like she’s smelling something bad.
Ted leans into Jay’s room, waves at me. “Hi, there.”
“Oh. Ted. Hello.” It feels strange to see him; it’s been a while. I feel as though I need to meet him all over again.
“How long are you going to be here?”
I look at my watch. “Another forty-five minutes or so.”
“Save five minutes for me?”
I don’t like how he has said this. It’s creepy. Greasy. Like the married guy at the water cooler, wearing a bad suit and flirting with all the single women. But I nod okay.
“I’ll be in Jeannie’s room.”
“Yes, all right. I’ll come and get you.”
“How is he?” Ted asks, perfunctorily.
“Much better,” I say. Coldly. I’m not sure why. These visits to this place, they pull your emotions taut as violin strings. Sometimes th
e damage shows up in unexpected ways.
After he leaves, I say, “That was Ted, Jay. I told you about him. Sometimes I like him, but sometimes I just don’t. You know.”
I hear the rattle of the food cart going down the hall. “You should wake up now,” I tell him. “You’d get to have some wonderful nursing-home food. Chicken à la king. Chipped beef. God. Who likes that stuff? Well, your mom does. Remember when I first came to meet your parents and we had chicken à la king for lunch? I don’t think I ever told you, but I went upstairs and threw up afterward. Very quietly. It wasn’t because the food was that bad. It’s just that I was so nervous. And then I stood in your parents’ bathroom looking at their mouthwash, which wasn’t the kind I used, and thinking I was all wrong for you, they’d never approve. Your mom had some really expensive perfume sitting out there, Joy, I think it was, and I picked it up and the scent got on my hands and I was terrified she’d notice it and look at your dad and raise an eyebrow, be telling him you’d brought home a thief. I washed my hands about six times to get rid of the smell. Then I came out and passed by your old bedroom. I went in and I was looking at your single bed against the wall, at the little square window above it. I was thinking about all the times you woke up there in the morning, and at night too—to get a drink, maybe, or from bad dreams. What did your mother do when you had bad dreams, Jay? How did she help you?” I wait, then say, “Jay? What should I do?”
I take a drink of water from the glass at his bedside, stroke the side of his face. Then, putting my fingers inside his slightly clenched fist, I try something. In a clear, authoritative voice, I say, “Squeeze my hand if you can hear me, Jay.” I have never tried this before. It seemed too obvious. “Just give a little squeeze,” I say. Nothing. “You won’t have to do anything else, I promise. Just do that, so I know you hear me, can you?”
I wait a moment; again, nothing. The feeling is that of standing in the middle of a large, white room with a high ceiling. It is soundless there. And then the walls recede, and the ceiling rises, and the room gets bigger and bigger and bigger. And there I am, a dot of a person, standing in the middle, doing nothing.
I blink, clear my throat. “That’s okay,” I say. “You just listen. That’s fine. What were we talking about? Oh yes. Your bedroom. Right. On the wall there was that plaque you made in Cub Scouts, using little white letters like in alphabet soup, you’d shown it to me when we took a quick tour of the house. But then when I was alone I looked at it really carefully and thought about how your hands put all the letters there, lined them up so neatly. And I was wondering if you had your uniform on when you made it, if you had that little hat on, if you were hoping really hard your mom would tell you it was wonderful. And right then I thought if I didn’t marry you and have children with you, I’d die. I just had to have you. And I never regretted it, never regretted marrying you, even when we fought. Did you, Jay? I really never did. Your parents call every Sunday. I tell them you’re going to be fine, that it’s just a long process.”
Gloria comes into the room, nods wearily at me. She’s tired today, stayed up late last night, she told me, visiting with friends who’d come to dinner. Pork tenderloin, she’d made, stuffed with prunes and lemons. That surprised me. It didn’t seem like the right recipe for her. I told her that and she said, “Suppose I told you we had collard greens with it, sweet potato pie. That make you feel better?”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Uh-huh.”
I’d imagined her in a silky print dress, too, dark green, as a matter of fact, pulling the roast from the oven. I’d imagined her at a dark wood dining-room table, set with her good dishes, a pastel floral pattern. I’d seen her smiling and talking, passing the butter. I didn’t tell her that.
Gloria pulls Jay’s covers down. Then she snaps a rubber glove on her hand, squeezes lubricant onto her fingers.
“What’s up?” I say.
She shows me a suppository, one eyebrow raised at the aptness of my question.
“I’ll come back,” I tell Jay. I do hope he’s aware, but only selectively.
Big dog, sniffing at the back of me. I push his great head away. He puts it back. Stop. Whose dog is this? Outside in the darkness, the smell of summer around me, cut lawns, the honeysuckle, perfect open offering. I am barefoot, the concrete rough beneath my feet. Gray ripples, tiny craters. Here, the yelling of the children playing, I can’t see them, it’s too dark, but I hear them; and the fireflies, there they are, the moving bright lights, they flick on, they flick off. There. The shore.
Ted is sitting at the side of Jeannie’s bed, his forehead against the side rail, his eyes closed. He startles when I call his name, then smiles.
“Break room?” I whisper.
“Yeah, sure.”
I expect we might find the kids there, but see them instead when we pass by the day room. They are standing before Flozell, being entertained by his card tricks. I tell them where I’ll be, and they barely listen. They don’t want to know where the adult is; they want to be awestruck.
Last time Amy was at the nursing home, she spent a little time alone with Flozell in the day room. He played Go Fish with her, then showed her some tricks. When we were driving home, she told me she’d asked him why he was there. I’d never felt comfortable enough to do that, but I’d always wanted to know. “So what did he say?” I asked.
“Diarrhea of the foot.” She spoke loudly and clearly, as thought she were giving a lecture in a white coat, pointing to a chart.
I thought for a minute, then asked, “You mean diabetes?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “That was it. Diabetes.”
“Of the foot?” I said, and Amy said yes, that was what he’d said, he had diabetes of the foot. I could tell she was beginning to regret sharing what she’d found out with me, so I didn’t ask any more questions. I didn’t know if Flozell tried to explain his condition in language Amy would understand, or if that is his belief about what he has. The next day, I’d asked Wanda and she said Flozell had a chronically infected ulcer on his foot, huge, that he just wouldn’t take care of at home. Plus he constantly cheated on his diet at home—and in the nursing home, if they didn’t watch him. They found candy wrappers in his drawer. Snickers. Butterfingers. When Wanda once confronted him, Flozell said that there was a Time/Life book that would explain to her ignorant self how it was all right for diabetics to eat candy, as long as they drank enough water. “We’ll heal him up, send him home, and then see him come back again,” Wanda said. “Believe me. I know these types.”
Ted and I get some coffee from the machine, sit opposite each other at a table in the corner. “I haven’t seen you for a while,” I say. “I guess we’ve been coming at different times.”
“Yeah, I guess,” he says. And then, “Well, I haven’t been coming quite as much.”
“Oh.”
“I can’t … Jesus, you know, I just don’t think I can do this anymore. Come every day, aching for her to wake up, seeing that she doesn’t and she doesn’t and she doesn’t.”
I stare into my coffee.
“Lainey, I’ve gotten involved with someone else.”
“Uh-huh.” I don’t look up. I don’t want to be here anymore. Where is my purse? I shift my feet, feel it beside me.
“Do you think that’s terrible?”
“No!” I say. And then, looking up at him, “I don’t know, Ted. What do you want me to say?”
“I just need to talk to someone, Lainey. I guess it’s awful, what I’m doing. But this woman knows if Jeannie wakes up, it’s all over. She knows that. She just … she cooks at my house sometimes, she makes dinner for us and we … It’s a kind of service, you know? She’s lonely; I’m lonely. It’s like that.”
“If it feels okay to you, Ted, then I guess it’s okay for you. For me, I … just wouldn’t do it.”
“But for how long? Jeannie’s not going to wake up, Lainey. I love her. I love the memory of her. But she’s not goi
ng to wake up.”
“Who said that? Did Pat Swanson tell you that? Who told you that?”
“God, who hasn’t?”
“Well, you don’t have to accept it. I don’t accept it about Jay. I believe he will wake up.”
“Maybe he will. He doesn’t have the same kind of injury that Jeannie does. They never did promise me anything, but I kept hoping.…”
I know what Ted wants. He wants a woman who has seen his wife to say she forgives him his need for another woman. I’m not sure I have that much generosity in me.
“Do you talk to Jeannie?” I ask.
“Yes.” He sighs. “Well, not so much anymore. I don’t know what to say anymore. I’m so … amazingly tired, Lainey.”
I nod, and suddenly I’m not mad at him anymore. “I know,” I say. “I’m tired too. When you get that tired, you get sort of crazy, don’t you think? I mean, I’ve been—well, I’ve been …”
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