gods with a little g

by Tupelo Hassman

  When they are not rolling people this way and that or feeding them or undressing them, bathing them and re-dressing them, the aides are doing laundry or folding laundry or rolling laundry here and there. The aides are tired from all this rolling and laundry. Their hands are so dry and red it hurts to look at them.

  Maybe this is what we’re really here to learn. What it is we don’t want to be when we grow up.

  There are no real visitors. At least, I never see one, and judging by the way the old folks look up at us, if they are able to pay attention enough to notice we are there in the first place, well, they would really, really like some visitors.

  The ones who notice us latch on, excited, like they are waiting for us to perform. The expectation is so strong, it feels like we should break into song. And that’s what Winthrop does. Sings. There is nothing else to do. No games, no music, no arts and crafts. Roll in, roll out, roll in, roll out, roll on forever, amen.

  * * *

  Mr. Sturm says he hopes we will “make a special friend” with one of the “residents” at the Piazza. He says that here we have “the opportunity to make connections that will last a lifetime.” And it is pretty clear whose lifetime he means.

  And we do make friends, it turns out. On accident. Some of us.

  Mrs. Gillespie is always stuck on the end of the row of wheelchairs because her room is farthest from the television and she can still get herself moving, so she rolls in last. I sit next to her on our first day, in one of the folding chairs Mr. Sturm has strategically placed throughout the Piazza.

  Winthrop has turned his chair toward the man he’s decided is his special friend, leaned in, and after a while I can hear him singing quietly, a song I don’t know. Rain is already holding the hand of another old man. She isn’t trying to talk, just sitting there, being Rain. Meanwhile, most of the Thumpers around us are squirming, all but gagging. I am embarrassed for them. Mr. Sturm, unconcerned by their behavior, stands off in a corner by a dusty rack of videos, talking with the aide in charge.

  * * *

  At first my old person doesn’t notice I’m there, and I am only pretending to pay attention to her anyway because I’m busy judging the Thumpers. Then I hear Dad’s voice in my head muttering about scorecards, so I remove the stone from my own eye or whatever and that’s when I realize that underneath the quilts draped over the body of my Piazza companion, the ones pushed up all the way to her shoulders, there is a circular movement, around and around and around. A little flurry in her lap.

  I don’t stare, but I am kind of clocking how long this goes on, which is seven minutes and fifteen seconds, and then nothing. Stillness. And the woman whose body and hands are under the now-still quilt says, loudly, but to no one, “I did it.”

  She sounds so proud. She says it again, louder. “I did it!”

  Here she is in a race to nowhere with a team of wheelchair zombies and she’s winning, because if this isn’t winning, I don’t know what is. But no one notices.

  So, I say, “Good for you.”

  She looks around then, not toward me, but around, up at the ceiling, in the corners. Then, finally, to her left, at me and my folding chair, unusual additions to the room. She looks me up and down and then she repeats, “I did it!” And smiles with a set of full and strong, real and hungry teeth that surprise the heck out of me.

  “Good for you,” I say. To her teeth. To her bright joy. To the simple, human experience of getting off.

  And then she pulls a trembling, painful-looking hand out from under her blankets. I watch the lump of it travel from her lap, up and up toward her shoulder, like when I used to watch Rudolph crawl out from under the blankets in the morning. And then it is out in the air, her hand. And she presents it to me.

  “Well, hello, dear. I’m Beatrice Gillespie.”

  * * *

  I could do a couple of things when faced with this quivering husk of a hand, and only one of them is reach right out and shake it, firmly and with respect, even though only a minute before, this same hand was working itself into a gnarled frenzy inside an adult diaper.

  * * *

  Beatrice Gillespie’s skin feels silky smooth for all of its wrinkles, and her grip is stronger than the warped shape of her fingers promises it could be. Still, when I shake her hand, I can tell that a lot more work went into this single act of masturbation than it might seem possible to someone as young and nimble-fingered as me.

  “Hi, Mrs. Gillespie, I’m Helen Dedleder.”

  “Well, Helen Dedleder”—and there is that smile again—“I did it!”

  “Good for you, Mrs. Gillespie.”

  You can tell a lot about a person from their handshake.

  BLOOD TIES

  Even though the Rosary Psychic Encounter Shoppe has a reputation for the minor issue of being in league with the Devil and all his lesser demons, Aunt Bev doesn’t mess around with anything really creepy. She makes an herbal tea on Sky Radio nights, a brew that kind of brings the room together, helps us listen in, but there is no backward writing or newts’ eyes or anything like that to be found at the shoppe. And there was just that one time she poured deer’s blood all over me while I slept, in order to put a spell on Dad. It couldn’t have been more than a gallon and it wasn’t even warm.

  * * *

  Aunt Bev’s the expert on how women always get a bad rap for being witches because of bleeding on the regular and not dying, and how all of this has been freaking men out since Eden gave us the big heave-ho. She’ll go on about the patriarchy for a week or ten days before she realizes I stopped listening on Tuesday. But this business of soaking me with blood was not really a witch move so much as a political one, and even then, a medical one. Aunt Bev would talk for a month of Tuesdays about how these are one and the same.

  The thing was, I started my period. I was fourteen and it’s not like I had any friends, much less like I was about to do the deed, but Aunt Bev had been looking into the future like it was the new copy of the TV Guide and she needed to know when her shows were on. She was sure that if I wasn’t extra-careful, I’d be pregnant before you could say, “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.”

  Or, maybe, she was looking into the past and remembering being a teenager and making decisions that she later wished she’d had more guidance about. I don’t know how she prognosticated this one, exactly. What I do know is that she acquired and then poured about a gallon of fresh deer’s blood on me, so I wouldn’t become pregnant until I planned on it.

  This is an old witch’s trick for when a girl crosses the line into womanhood. Deer are a symbol of both fragility and fertility. Once a deer’s blood has been poured onto a young woman, the dead deer’s spirit stays with her, acting as a guide across the threshold. Thereafter, its spirit settles in the woman’s womb, curling up there like her uterus is a wooded glen and the deer is guarding its fertility. It’s called Deer Moon.

  Just kidding. I made all that up about the deer’s spirit. I can’t explain all the shit that Aunt Bev gets up to, but sometimes she asks me to try, to sell it in some occult-style way as practice for the future I don’t see myself having as her psychic sidekick. Like I need more homework.

  So, there’s no Deer Moon. This thing with the blood has a nearly scientific basis. Rosary, for obvious unscientific reasons, doesn’t allow any teen to have access to birth control and does its best to deny birth control to adult women as well. However, if a girl’s period is out of control, she can get help. If she is bleeding too much, say, soaking through, as the old-school pamphlet from the nurse’s office says, “more than twelve pads a day,” that is out of control. Thus, she can get a legal prescription for birth control pills. Birth control pills help turn the bleeding down to non-torrential levels. Among other things.

  Despite the intense and irrational fear of women’s menstrual blood, hunting and all the bloodshed it brings is very popular in Rosary. Aunt Bev had no problem acquiring some fresh deer blood for me. She made a trade for it, to celebrate my coming of age,
handed it to me in a cleaned-up plastic milk jug, and said to hide it in my room. The first morning of my next period, she let herself into our house before the sun rose, came into my room, and poured the jug out onto my bed, my pajamas, and me.

  “You can open your eyes,” she said. Then she whispered, “A good long shower is coming up,” in that reassuring way she has, and I gave her a big bloody thumbs-up as she clicked my door shut. A second later, she slammed the front door like she had just come in.

  “Good morning!”

  I could hear Dad snort in his bedroom, could hear him getting up. Aunt Bev’s visits are unusual, and he always makes the most of them. He considers it his duty to make little dents in Aunt Bev’s damnation, and so he was out there in a hot second, talking, the coffeepot gurgling.

  I climbed out of bed and, looking down at myself, I felt sorry for my dad and the heart attack he was about to have. But this was his own fault, a curse he’d brought on himself. I’d seen his council letters stressing the importance of keeping clinics out of Rosary. So I turned the door handle, went into the hall, and tried not to touch anything. In a shaky voice I said, “Dad?”

  It’s a real horror show, becoming a woman.

  ELDER GOALS

  Beatrice Gillespie and I are becoming fond of each other. Some of the other kids bounce from old person to old person, but I always put my folding chair next to Mrs. Gillespie’s rolling chair when I come in to the Piazza, and I spend the afternoons only with her. I wait to speak until she’s done getting off, which she seems to do precisely at 1:45 p.m. every Thursday. I can only hope it is the same every day of the week, because watching this triumph gives me renewed hope for mankind. And America. Which, I’m pretty sure, is what history class is meant to teach.

  Each day, she makes the same smiling report. “I did it!” And then she’ll pause, like she is sure she knows me and is reaching for my name.

  “Helen, Mrs. Gillespie. Good for you.”

  Sometimes she gets confused and adds, “Good for you,” to her greeting, like that’s my name. I sit down, and she looks over at me and says, “Good for You!” and then she studies my face for a while. Sometimes she takes a nap, warm in her own afterglow. Once in a while she makes some small request.

  “I would like some water, dear.”

  The first time she asked, I found one of the aides and told them and twenty minutes later, long after she had forgotten she was thirsty, Mrs. Gillespie was given her water in a paper cup. Then I watched the aides moving around in the kitchen, figured out where everything is, and now I get water for Mrs. Gillespie myself. In a mug.

  The aides seem relieved that I’m not bothering them, and I feel pretty good about myself. And that is a new way to feel.

  Soon enough, the other residents start wanting water too. It’s a riot. No wonder the aides avoid meeting these small needs.

  Not really. It’s not a riot. It isn’t a problem at all. It is just people daring to want anything in a place that every second is telling them their wanting days are over. Most of the residents are so used to being ignored that they never notice any of us or anything, but when they see me walking by with that mug, their eyes follow it across the room like it’s the old Mustang they used to drive. The tips of their tongues poke out as they prepare to speak, testing the air. Remembering.

  Oh, how good it felt to be behind the wheel with a full tank of gas.

  I get water for everyone who asks.

  I feel like I should run for mayor.

  * * *

  Sometimes Mrs. Gillespie asks me questions I have to create answers for. This is commonly known as lying, but in a political arena, like a U.S. history class being conducted in a questionably located nursing home so old white people’s votes are funneled where Rosary wants them to go, the act of lying feels quite natural, even required.

  For example, she’ll ask, “Did I get a postcard today, dear?”

  I feel this hollowness inside my rib cage when she does. It’s like the aide with the industrial vacuum, the one who is always vacuuming, every single day vacuuming, because the residents can’t hear the television anyway, because this is a more attractive chore than actually talking with forgotten people, I feel like that aide has turned the vacuum’s hose on me. He’s suctioned it straight to my rib cage and is cleaning out all the pesky feeling bits in there.

  And on this Thursday, April 11, the anniversary of my mom’s death, I wish the vacuum on full blast.

  I say, “Let me go check,” and then I get up like I’m going to the front desk where the mail is supposedly dropped off but really I get up and go to the wheelchair-accessible bathroom. The bathroom has no lock because none of the doors here have a lock. Because if there was a lock, these old people might lock themselves inside in a fit of human desire for the dignity of a little privacy while they sit on the giant plastic safety seat that goes over the toilet so their old and tired asses don’t fall in. Instead, the bathroom has a child-safety plastic ring around the outside knob so that it is hard for confused and arthritic people to open. This way they won’t walk in on someone being showered, and this way it is the safest room for me to catch a breath and stop feeling sorry for myself.

  HOW TO NOT FEEL SORRY FOR YOURSELF

  1. Find a potentially private space, hopefully with a mirror.

  2. Look in the mirror at your own dumb face. Look hard.

  3. If there are tears in your eyes, rub them with tight fists like the little baby you apparently are.

  4. Say the following words to yourself in the order they appear: Do not cry.

  5. Cry.

  6. Add your own name. Maybe you weren’t clear on who you were talking to: Do not cry, Helen Dedleder.

  7. Even better than adding your own name, add a nickname given to you by someone who actually has a right to feel sorry for themselves but chooses not to: Do not cry, Good for You.

  SAD CRABS

  It is an actual Saturday, the kind that only happens on a weekend, and Dad insists that we spend it “as a family,” by going to the beach with Iris and “her family.” For a terrifying second I am lost in the fear that there are more of them, more Birds and Irises, coming at us like the undead, tearing away the plywood we’ve put up to protect us like it is so many thin pages from Dad’s Bible. But he just means the two of them. And he means the two of us.

  * * *

  The sky and the water of Rosary are like bookends to the city, holding nothing up. They are both gray and they both stink. There is really not even a beach here, only a tiny bit of sand that is barely a dune, just close enough to the refinery to still see it. People come to throw tennis balls into the water in order to strengthen their dogs’ immune systems, I guess, and that’s it usually but here we are today anyway. Dad and Iris stand at the edge of the water where a flock of sandpipers run in and out with the waves and they are laughing like we are on vacation in Hawaii or something. That is, Dad and Iris are laughing like they’re posing for a tourist brochure for someplace you never want to go to. The birds are full of murder, chasing the crabs as they send their feelers up through the sand, making it bubble up when the water rolls away. The birds stick their beaks into those holes the bubbles leave behind, sucking up as many crabs as they can before the next wave.

  Bird and I are sitting on the sheet Dad brought. Sheets, he says, are better than blankets because they don’t hold the sand when it is time to pack up. I didn’t know my dad had any hot tips about the beach before. I didn’t know he could relax so easily, bask in the circle of life displayed before us again and again as one crab after another is swallowed up, killed just for trying to be.

  “Don’t you just want to smash them?” Bird asks.

  “Our parents?” I don’t know what he’s talking about and I hate how he does this, throws me off guard. I wish I could throw him off guard for once. Yet another thing I wish I could do to Bird.

  His stupidly perfect white teeth flash against the gray sky. “Yeah,” he says, and looks at me for too long
. As usual.

  “No,” he says, and he pours out the root beer Iris had given him and digs into the sand. He fills his plastic cup with tiny crabs and holds it to my ear. “Listen,” he says, “these would make great cereal. Mmmm.”

  I shiver at the snap crackle pop of the crabs’ desperation, at the way Bird’s Adam’s apple vibrates when he says, “Mmmm,” and at the way his fingers brush against my ear when he moves the cup away.

  An older couple, even older than our parents, have come down to the water from the parking lot. The woman is wearing a long red dress, and as she sinks into a folding chair next to her husband the dress puddles beneath her.

  “What do you think her job is?” I ask Bird. A stupid question. To change the subject from all of the above.

  “She’s the wife,” he says, his words weightless, not even heavy as a thought. Because Bird doesn’t think.

  “You are a caveman.”

  He smiles at me like this is a compliment. “Yeah,” he says. At least he spares me the obvious joke about his giant club.

  He points to the waves. “There’s stingrays out there,” he says. “What do you think you’d need to catch one?”

  I shrug.

  But I think of light.

  I don’t tell him this because I don’t know why I think of it and because I’m afraid I’m right. If I was, I know what he would do. He’d hook a piercing strand of light to a fishing line somehow, sink it into the water, hypnotize a stingray, drawing its cold, curious body closer and closer, and when he had it there, slippery in his hands, he’d shake his head at it for being so willing and ready to be caught.