Once they were inside the room, Vernice did a mean, vicious, nasty thing. She pushed his chair up against the bedside table so that the table’s crossbar was between his wheels. He was locked in place like a raccoon with its leg in a trap. Then Vernice set his lunch tray in front of him, lifted the metal cap off the plate, and announced, “Beef stroganoff over rice.”
Richard was skeptical. To him the congealed mess looked like muddy Birch Lake frozen over with snow around its sides. The salad looked inedible, too. When Vernice had her back to him, he started to eat the strawberry ice cream. She turned when she got to the door, gave him a look of pure disgust, and said, “No wonder you are always bound up.” Nothing he did ever suited Vernice.
After he was finished the nurses generally left him for a long time to stare at the unwanted food on his plate. But this time before he could even begin to count the kernels of rice, Vernice was back to release him and wipe his face. “Got to get you tidied up,” she said. “There’s a lady coming to see you.”
A lady! He tried to keep his disappointment from showing. He did not want Vernice to know that at this point in his persecution, he was still lunatic enough to hope for something better. He pointed to the bed. “I need to rest for the company.”
“Lord, sugar. There’s no time for that. You can rest all night.” Then she patted his shoulder. “You really do listen sometimes, don’t you?”
She had no idea how much he listened. How damn tired he was of hearing about her delinquent kids.
Vernice took his tray, and he heard her smack it down on the cart in the hallway. In a few minutes she returned with a pale, matronly red-haired woman, wearing a camel hair wool coat belted at the waist, and though he found it hard to judge anymore, she appeared to be short. The redhead approached him, dipped her head nervously, transferred her purse strap from hand to shoulder, then extended her hand to him. He shook it. This politeness visibly amazed Vernice. He could not understand why. He had been shaking hands with the opposition all his life.
The woman bent down again, looked him full in the face, and asked, “How are you feeling?” He found her intense gaze unnerving. When he did not answer, her sad eyes began to scrutinize him all over. He supposed he had done the same thing to Heinz, when he had first seen the sick mangy mutt at the pound. He wondered where Heinz was now.
Richard gestured to Vernice for a tissue, but she was too busy telling the woman, “Them with strokes cry real easy; it doesn’t mean anything.”
The woman pulled a pink Kleenex out of her shoulder bag and handed it to him, then Vernice began steering her out of the room. At the doorway the redhead bobbed her head again, birdlike, and said, “Goodbye, Mr. Olsen.”
Mr. Olsen! Good Lord. Nobody had called him that since he had lectured at the grade schools on the importance of physical fitness.
After she left he stuffed the pink Kleenex into his left fist. Vernice found it there two days later when she was bathing him. “Aw, Richard. Don’t tell me you’re sweet on that redheaded girl. You should’ve been nicer to her. Maybe she’d’ve come back.”
He was tempted to bite her. Instead he just snarled, “Curses on you, women.”
CHAPTER THREE
The place exhausted her. As soon as the heavy glass doors closed behind her, Cheryl began to yawn. She slumped against the elevator railing on the short trip upstairs. Once she emerged onto the third floor the flickering lights of TV sets in the individual darkened rooms began to make her head ache. But as she got to the end of the corridor, the lethargy lifted and her heart began to pound erratically.
Richard’s room, the last on the right, was slightly darker than the others. He had no TV set, and the only illumination was a reading light attached to the hospital bed.
“Hello, Richard. How are you?” Though Vernice said he was capable, Richard never spoke; so further inquiries were unnecessary. Cheryl moved to her usual spot, the heat register under the window. The brown paint around the vents was chipped away, and though it was a cool evening, no heat was emerging. Cheryl could not tell whether Richard was cold or not. His face was stiff, inexpressive. The sheet and white-knit blanket reached to his abdomen, leaving his chest and shoulders covered only by a bedgown printed with small blue snowflakes. She quickly looked away because something about those snowflakes caused an ache deep in her chest.
She chipped a bit of the peeling paint with her fingernail and watched the brown splinters fall down the vent. Her legs ached and she wanted to boost herself up on the windowsill, but that would have looked too undignified. She turned slowly as if asked a question and said softly, “Maturity is knowing when a man calls you Honey, it’s because he can’t remember your name.” This was her third visit, and each time her performance for Richard Olsen was different.
Tonight she was the cynical secretary, Mary Berrill—the heroine of her latest Brushfire romance, Love Conquest. She lit a cigarette, then quickly stepped forward and stubbed it out in the coffee saucer on Richard’s bedside table. She had read somewhere that stroke victims were likely to have respiratory problems. Maturity was knowing when not to smoke.
Though Cheryl immediately moved back to the window, she kept glancing at the bedside table. It had been shoved away from the bed and the dinner tray on it had slid perilously close to the table’s metal edge. The completely untouched food on his tray reproached her; if there was anything truly charitable about these visits, she would try and feed him something instead of just babbling on like a would-be actress in an empty theater.
Richard was dangerously thin, and this had altered the contours of his face. In the newspaper photographs, his big boyish grin had always dominated. But now he was unsmiling, his cheeks were hollowed, and the athlete’s broken nose became his most prominent feature. The hooked nose combined with the togalike bedgown and straggly blond hair made him resemble the intense young Roman that Cheryl remembered from her eighth-grade ancient history text.
But Olsen was only aristocratically handsome from the distance of the window. Step a few feet closer and he was simply cadaverous-looking. Deep indentations had formed in the skin around his lower neck and some crusted milk had collected in the well under his Adam’s apple. Apparently he occasionally took some nourishment. But not much. Not much. She should really try and feed him something. It was her Christian duty. She moved two steps closer to the bed. Richard remained steadfastly staring at the window, oblivious of all her movements.
On his table, behind the small institutional tissue box and to the right of his dinner tray, she noticed a long-necked, Grecian-shaped plastic jug. Though she had never seen one before, Cheryl instantly knew this was a man’s urinal and retreated to the safety of the window. She should never have come. It took a special talent to visit someone this sick, and she did not possess it. The breezy blonde matchmaker at One Plus One Dating would have been good at this. It must take the same knack to deal cheerfully with the socially desperate as with the dying.
Dying! Was he really dying? Vernice had hinted that unless he soon took an interest in food or began to cooperate with the staff, complications were inevitable. But if starvation or dehydration was imminent, why wasn’t someone on the staff assisting him with his dinner? Perhaps they were encouraging him to be independent? No. He was too ill for it to matter.
She really should try and feed him something. She pushed herself away from the window with the same reluctant arm motion she used to force herself into the pool at the YWCA. “Break a task into manageable portions,” the instructor at Software International’s time management class had advised. Cheryl decided to go as far as the vinyl visitor’s chair and just sit down.
The chair was slanted back and so low that she had a restricted view of the bedside table and Richard’s midsection. She glanced at the urinal again and knew she could not feed him. If only Stu and her mother had not insisted on that annulment. (Neither wanted her to be burdened by a marriage that never was. They both wanted her to be free. But free for what? To be as purposel
ess as a leaf in the wind?) Still married, she might have clung to her Catholicism with a stoic dignity and been nearly a saint. Because Stu had so conscientiously filled out the forms requesting an annulment, she was now free, a wishy-washy woman unable to help a dying man.
Wounded by this self-indictment, she stood, walked rapidly to the bed, balanced a bit of the tuna noodle casserole on a fork, and held it in front of Richard’s mouth. When he did not respond, she set the fork back on the tray, and said gently, “Is it too cold now?”
Richard had not acknowledged her presence since that first noontime visit. Perhaps he felt safer when Vernice was with them. The aide had cautioned Cheryl not to be overly encouraged by his handshake. But she had been sure Richard sensed her sympathy and would open up as soon as they were alone. What a naive soul she was to think a prior relationship based solely on the receipt of bubble gum would call him back to life. “Touch him and he’ll curse at you,” Vernice had warned.
At the time Cheryl had not believed her, had thought smugly: oh no, not at me. Now she knew better. In fact, she almost welcomed the curse; as soon as he did snarl at her, she could go home, conscience free, to her book and never feel obligated to come back.
But where to touch him? She surveyed his hands. The left arm was bent at the elbow with the wrist humped upward. The hand was asymmetrical and ugly, but Cheryl felt if she touched him there the gesture would signify she was more than just a fair-weather friend. Sure, she had worshipped him in his hero days, had obsessively dreamed about him rather than grieve for her miscarried marriage, but she was still willing to be his friend. If he cursed at her now, she could leave knowing he was the one who had done the rejecting. That was important. Even though her mother and stepfather might consider her a perpetual child, she would know that in this one desperate situation she had done her adult best. Cheryl poised her hand over the bloated fingers and quickly went … tap. Nothing. Then she flushed with embarrassment. Richard probably had no feeling in that stroke-affected arm. So much for symbolic significance. She gently applied her perspiring fingers to his right wrist. His knuckles were the size of walnuts, and for a second she felt pure quaking physical fear. Even in this weakened state he could probably kill her. She applied more pressure to the wrist. When nothing happened, she slowly lifted his hand and decided never to call herself a coward again.
Richard remained silent and inert. But when she looked into his face, Cheryl noticed that his eyes were slowly shifting from left to right. He appeared to be counting the panes in his window. If it took him that long to count twelve panes, his brain was as far gone as Vernice had implied.
“You like to count, Richard? I do, too. I’m always counting calories.”
“Calories?”
Whomp! She dropped his hand and stood there terrified. It was as if a face in a familiar painting had begun to speak. There was nothing parrotlike about his voice either. No, it was loud and clear. Cheryl cleared her throat, tried to compose herself. “Calories—you know, in food.”
Slowly he turned toward her. His hair had looked curly in all the newspaper pictures but constantly lying in bed must have flattened it. “You been on planes?” he asked.
“Airplanes? Yeah, a couple of times,” Cheryl answered in her soft, pleasant phone voice, pretending there was nothing extraordinary about this conversation.
“You know those packages of peanuts they give you on a plane? How many in one?”
“How many peanuts? Oh, they’re generally broken so it’s hard to tell, but I guess there are between twenty and twenty-five.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Is that a fact?” Her voice began to tremble. In an effort to calm herself, Cheryl glanced at her watch. It was nearly nine—time for visitors to leave.
“I have to go, Richard.” He was staring at the window and paid no attention. He was like all other men—got the information he wanted and then ignored her. She edged toward the door. “Good night.”
“Help me, help me,” he chanted, then in a softer voice added: “For God’s sake, help me, Cheryl.”
Cheryl’s eyes began to tear, and she grabbed the metal doorframe for support. “I’ll try, Richard. I’ll try.”
On the way to the car she berated herself for being so moved by the sound of her own name. After all, Cheryl was considerably easier to say than MacLogan.
CHAPTER FOUR
He dipped his comb into the sink, shook it, then parted his hair. Vernice was waiting to shave him. Even though his gold razor had been recovered, Vernice still preferred using a plastic, disposable one. She believed it gave a closer shave. Nurse’s aides were supposed to be trained in shaving patients. Vernice probably felt shaving her legs once a week made her an expert and did not attend those classes.
Richard gestured for his razor and the cartridge of Trac II blades, then set the plastic cartridge on his right thigh. As he brought the blade toward the cartridge, it slid into the valley of his lap. The third time this happened, he grabbed the cartridge before Vernice could. At first he intended to hurl it against the wall but instead he just held onto it and let the sharp edges of the plastic dig into his fingers. Then he set it back in his lap and, using his left index finger as a lever. threaded the blade onto its track.
“Very good,” Vernice cooed. “Reflexes are improving. We should have gotten you a girlfriend a long time ago.”
She used the word girlfriend jokingly, like a game show host. In fact, he did have a woman friend. At first he had not been certain. But last night he had tested her again and now he was positive. As the redhead was leaving, she said, “Good night, Richard.” He said nothing, so she repeated herself. When he still said nothing, she pouted, stamped one of her short, wide feet and exclaimed, “Damn you.”
To soothe her, he merely uttered her name. He pronounced Cheryl slowly, carefully, as if he had a pat of melting butter on his tongue. But it was this ability to wound that heartened him. Not that he was a sadist or anything, but right now if he said fuck you to Vernice, she would pleasantly reply you, too and go on cleaning his razor. Her calm negated his very existence.
However, even she noticed his lighter mood. Generally she wheeled him down the hall and left him in an isolated spot by the window. But today she let his chair face the couch where two elderly residents were talking. “Hi,” he said. Neither the old man nor the old woman responded.
He knew the woman. She wore wire-rimmed glasses, resembled a frightened field mouse, and lived across the hall from him. Every weekend a woman, probably her sister, would come and scream at her. “Jesus Christ, Francine. Can’t you pick up your underwear? It’s a disgrace in here. You should be ashamed. You were brought up better.”
Francine would whimper and say, “I think they’re stealing my jewelry.”
“No one,” her sister always replied, “would want your jewelry.” The two had probably never gotten on.
The gentleman sitting beside her was bald but well dressed in vest, slacks, and recently polished cordovans. Richard stared down at his own legs. The left one was slack, swollen, and shaded pink and purple toward the ankle. The right still bulged with muscles. Richard tugged the bedgown down, pulled his terrycloth robe around him, then set the left hand in his lap. Often at night he would wake unable to find his left arm. “Arm is gone,” he would holler. “Leg is frozen,” he would scream. But this was the first time he had surveyed himself in daylight and acknowledged what a wreck he had become.
Francine, the field mouse, touched her hand to her fresh permanent. “Beautician downstairs is no good,” she said.
“Looks pretty.”
She blushed. It was not rouge. She actually blushed. “Thank you,” she said.
Along with his improving vision, maybe he was regaining his touch with the women. Francine displayed fingernails painted a hideous shade of pink. “Maria polished them.”
“Real sexy,” Richard told her, then wondered if he was laying it on too thick.
The old man looked skeptical, but
did not contradict him. “Moving to my son’s pretty soon,” he murmured.
Richard nodded. “I’m getting married.” He shocked himself with that statement. But still it sounded like a good idea. Besides, announcing events in advance often guaranteed their occurrence.
To be honest Cheryl was not the woman of his dreams. Had he to do it over again, he would have married Janey Birch, his high-school sweetheart. She had had long skinny braids, never kept track of his yardage, and taught him how to bake a two-egg cake. But they had both been scared, beaten into submission by the dire forebodings of parents and school assembly sex-education movies like Wasted Lives and The Birth of Twins. And he always had the premonition that something better was waiting up the road. He used to accompany his mother to St. Ann’s Church, look at the trumpeting, pink-tunic-clad angels over the altar, and see not angels but the Iowa Hawkeyes’ cheering squad bugling him a welcome. By his junior year of college, he had come to his senses, but Janey was already married to the assistant branch manager at the Lake Worth Savings & Loan.
MacLogan Ross was another story. Incompatibility marred too many facets of their relationship. If he opened a window, she would sneeze; so there had never been much promise of anything permanent between them.
He had no romantic illusions about Cheryl either. She was a recognizable type. The little fat girl who had dieted herself into a dumpy adult. He had seen anxious women like Cheryl, sitting rigidly behind their steering wheels. While driving they would bob their heads up and down like feeding birds to ease their stiffened neck muscles. But if it was possible to will oneself into loving someone, he was going to love Cheryl. He was a twenty-nine-year-old wreck of a man and knew nothing better was waiting down the road. She was his only chance of escaping from here. And it would not be a relationship without reciprocity. Hell, no. He had never been a freeloader, and though he had few remaining physical or financial assets he would, at least, say the right things to her. He knew by her reluctance in removing her belted camel hair coat that she did not much like her shape. So when she complained about her thickness, he would tell her she possessed an amazing abundance of femininity. Though writing poetry had always seemed a sissy occupation, he now knew that if she required it, he could write the stuff.
The Way It Happens In Novels Page 3