She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter twenty-three

  DAYS OF AFFLICTION HAVE TAKEN HOLD

  BANG, BANG, BANG. Smokey is fed up waiting for her and wakes her up rudely. Again. She opens her eyes and blinks rapidly against the light from the sun squeezing through the shutter laths. She’s hot. The air is cool. She stretches underneath the covers, turns over, and closes her eyes. The mediation was only a week ago; she’s still recovering, even though it’s but a distant memory to her now.

  Bang, bang, bang. Meow.

  She opens her eyes and stares at the door, turns over and blinks at the alarm clock time. Damn, it’s almost 11:00 a.m. She reaches over and turns on the radio in time to hear the weather report: cloudy, mild, a high of fifteen, right now twelve degrees Celsius. Her eyelids fall again as she marvels that she actually absorbed the weather report in one go.

  Bang, bang, bang. Meow. MEOW.

  She sits up fast, her heart racing. Sighing, she heaves the covers back and puts feet on floor. Ow. Her feet always hurt when meeting a firm object at the start of the day, that object being the floor. She sheds her pyjamas, limps across to the shelves next to her closet, extracts a T-shirt proclaiming “Love Hurts,” pulls on her sweatpants from yesterday, and then finds her overlarge Roots sweatshirt, and limps to the door. She pulls it open. Smokey yowls at her then thumps halfway down the stairs, pausing to look back to see if she’s following. She’s not. She needs to pee, wash her face, and snort up her flowery anti-stress-induced rhinitis medication. Sheesh, such an impatient cat. Her face softens as she looks back at her cat. Her cat is the only being that puts up with her with total devotion. That cat bounds back up the stairs and follows her into the bathroom to stare at her unblinkingly.

  “Okay, okay, I’m coming.” Poor thing. It really is well past her feeding time. At least she remembered to give her fresh water last night. She hopes. She’s sure she did. Suddenly she rushes out of the bathroom down the stairs, almost tripping, and peeks round the dining room wall to look at Smokey’s dishes. Phew. Water still in the bowl. She hadn’t forgotten. Good thing she still pays attention to her Palm’s aggravating alarms, the ones to feed and water Smokey, the ones to feed herself, the ones to remind her to check her email, the ones to tell her to go out for her appointments, the ones to remind her to rest, the ones that say exercise, the ones that ensure she pays her bills and mails out the cheques on time, well, usually on time.

  Smokey is winding round her ankles, and she almost trips. Feeding her cat first becomes a self-defensive move. To the accompaniment of loud crunching, she pulls down a bowl for herself, pours in a package of instant oatmeal with oat bran — organic, of course, courtesy of her grandmother. She’s ready to admit that her relative knows better. This oatmeal tastes pretty darn good, even through her screwed-up taste buds that make everything taste metallic and leave a salty taste behind. Ugh.

  After adding a sprinkle of Salba and nuking it with milk, she puts in some walnuts, covers it with wheat bran — her grandmother insists only the Big Carrot has the right-sized flake and colour of wheat bran — almost forgets the Thompson’s raisins, and spoons in a dollop of Manuka honey. Carrying the bowl to the table, trying not to drop it as it burns her fingertips, she sits down and looks at her place. She forgot something. Oh yes, juice. Cranberry-orange, Grandmother had insisted. Well, actually Grandmother had wanted her to drink only cranberry, but she had balked at the sour taste. Now she’s ready to eat. Uh, no she’s not. Her pill cup looks lonely. Picking it up, she scrapes back her chair, goes to the pill cupboard, and shakes out of each bottle into the cup the medications, supplements, and antioxidants for her pain and nutritional needs. She sits down again. Now she can eat. Nope, she forgot to get her paper. She shoves back her chair and troops to the front door. She opens it and suddenly realizes Smokey is right behind her, about to bolt between her legs for the spring outdoors. She slams the door shut. And turns to stare down at her cat, yelling No!

  Smokey blinks back up at her, tail waving slowly. They stare at each other while her oatmeal grows cold. She’s too slow and sleepy to open the door again and not let the cat out, yet she wants something to read during breakfast. She needs her paper. It’s her habit. So what if she hops and skips around the articles, not reading a whole one from beginning to end, never finishing a letter to the editor, skimming through the comics, managing only to read the advice column through on a good day. Finally, Smokey stalks to the sun room chair, two metres away, leaps onto it, her muscles rippling their strength under her coat, curls up, nose under tail, then props one eye open. She waits a moment and then opens the door as fast as she can, grabs the paper, and closes it practically on Smokey’s nose. Her cat squawks then stalks back to “her” chair.

  She walks back to her chair, opens the paper, sits down, pulling the chair into the table, and then eats and reads. The front page has an interesting article. She starts to read it, it continues on another page, she flips to the first page the paper allows her to, begins reading another article, midway through decides she wants to finish reading the first one, searches for it, looks back on the front page for the page number, finds it, finds the article, reads a bit, gets bored, reads the last paragraph, gets confused, checks out the middle paragraphs in no particular order, becomes slightly enlightened, but is too bored to try again, and goes hunting for the comics. She used to read every one. She likes Between Friends. She eagerly reads the first panel, skips to the very familiar For Better or For Worse, reads its first panel, then the second, moves back to Between Friends, and finishes up with Doonesbury, who confuses her this morning. She flips through the newspaper to find the advice column. In the middle of one angst-filled question that piques her interest, she finishes her oatmeal and swallows the last of her supplements, 500 mg of Vitamin C. Forgetting all about the half-read question, she takes her crusted bowl to the sink and runs water in it. Weariness suddenly infects her bones. She should brush her teeth, but the very thought of that effort drains her more, and she heads to the couch for a nap. She lies down, knowing she can’t sleep, but too tired to do anything else except listen to music. Sinéad O’Connor’s album Faith and Courage is still lined up in the Bose her grandmother had given her for her last birthday. She turns it on. O’Connor breathes out, “I have a universe inside me …” Humph, some universe she has.

  She yawns and stretches, and the song’s words fade out of her consciousness. She admires her new living room. She finds the creamy white so soothing. She hadn’t wanted any curtains up on the living room’s arched window in the original outside wall. The sun room is the original porch closed in. She doesn’t have any curtains on its windows either, preferring to look straight out when she’s lying on the couch. But Grandmother had informed her that people can see right into her house at night and that she needed to do something. And believing that it would take her the rest of the year if left up to her, Grandmother had hauled her ass to IKEA, gave her a choice of two solid-white heavy curtains, arranged to have the brushed silver rod she chose screwed in at the top of the living room wall, and hung the drapes across the entire width from ceiling to floor. Since they were on rings, she can easily close them at night, which she rarely does. Too much work. But she likes the look, so much so that she’d replicated it in the dining room, had taken the creamy white paint all the way up the stairs and into the tiny upper hall, and had then covered over the pink walls in the kitchen with pale yellow. Grandmother had insisted she move the computer off the desk in the dining room. She’d come over one day, having seen the light in ensuring her place is as free of visual distraction as possible. She’d come bearing storage boxes that hide under beds and couches and had cleared the desk in the dining room of everything but the phone and a notebook and pencil. She’d arranged her book shelves upstairs so the books were all neatly lined up, creating places for paper, office supplies, all in their own trays, saying that her own work was not good enough, and then cleared the glass table of everything but her computer, a phone, a pencil holder, a lined pad of paper, and a tray f
or holding her chequebook, envelopes, address labels, and stamps. She had to admit she felt much calmer after Grandmother had blown through.

  And she likes her couch too. Grandmother had suggested a slipcover, and she had chosen a turquoise blue. They had also bought four feather pillows from IKEA, dressed two in a heavy brocade in solid green and two in silvery-grey striped silk. They’re so comfortable to lean against. “Yup,” she sighs, “this transformation works.” She turns off the stereo and flips on the television. Suhana Meharchand fills the screen. Damn, it’s the news. She’s too late for Martha Stewart. She flips the television off, reaches over for the stereo remote, and turns that on, switching it to radio mode. The radio is tuned to a Top-40 station. Listening to the bouncy pop reminds her that she has to look at her Palm. Creaking herself up, she flips off the stereo, tosses the remote onto the coffee table, and goes to look for her Palm. It’s next to the phone. Checking her schedule for the day, she sees she has course work to do. She’s getting good feedback, but doing the work saps the mental energy out of her, and she always thinks it’s dreck. She’ll start with checking her email.

  She climbs to her music room and turns the computer on. Impatient for Windows XP to start, hating the flickering clicking sound of the computer revving up, the endless whirring of the CD player, she hightails it for the silence of the bathroom and brushes her teeth. Teeth cleaned, leaning heavily on the sink, she looks into the mirror and sees balloon face peering back at her. She doesn’t know why her features have drowned in water or why her arms are like sausages in her sleeves or why her feet refuse to squeeze into the confines of many of her old shoes. She doesn’t know why her skin burns or why she pants for simply answering the phone or why her heart races. And she’s stopped asking Dr. Basset, who is himself exasperated with the cardiologists he’s sent her to, their response is always her ECG is fine, her stress test is fine, she’s fine. But at her last visit he had said the D-word. He’d said if she didn’t eat less sugar, exercise more, she’d become diabetic. It’s all too much. Too much. She looks away from herself and scrubs her hands.

  Going back into the music room, she averts her eyes from the covered keyboard, that reminder of fallen dreams. The irritating whirring has stopped, thank goodness. Now she can tolerate the computer. She starts up Thunderbird, the free email reader one member of her Bible study group had mentioned to her and helped her set up. She’s being troubled less by viruses since switching from Outlook.

  The ringing of the phone makes her jump. She looks at the Call Display. Unknown Name, a 1-866 number. Stupid telemarketer. But now she has to listen to the phone ring four times right in her ear before they give up. She hears the answering machine in the dining room click on, the recorded voice telling the caller to leave a message, and then blank silence. Refocusing, shaking off her irritation, she starts reading her email: some newsletters, forwarded chain letters, nothing personal. She thinks today she’ll read a newsletter. The headline is no big deal, but then the first paragraph eludes her attempts to make sense of the sentences, what energy she’s regained since breakfast begins to fade. She clicks Delete. She doesn’t know why she remains subscribed to all these newsletters all these years.

  She double clicks on the Firefox icon. She’s been searching for treatments for Akaesman syndrome or AS. There has to be more to recovery than simply learning compensating strategies and pacing. There has to be real treatment. There has to be a way to recover fully without being permanently affected by him. She types “Akaesman syndrome” into the Google search box and taps the Enter key. A mind-boggling number of entries shows up, one million, two-hundred thousand to be exact. She’s not sure if she’s seen the first ten or not before and clicks on them one after the other. For the first few minutes, she assesses each website for treatment potential quickly. But by the sixth website, the text is blurring into nonsense, her body is slowly, slowly sagging down into her chair until she props her head up with her left hand and squints at the screen, hoping to make sense of these badly designed websites.

  Her stomach devours her. Lunch time. She heads to the kitchen. She hates this time. Grandmother wants her to eat an egg a day, but cooking every day is exhausting. Asha, the woman who had introduced her to the Bible study, had suggested microwaving an egg with some herbs in a little container. It’s quick, but she hates the taste. Too often though, that’s all she has the energy to do. She nukes her egg after popping a slice of whole wheat bread in the toaster. She pauses and then drops in a second slice, to hell with Grandmother’s edict to eat only one slice per meal. She wants to mask that egg in butter and bread.

  She wolfs it down with a glass of ice water in a futile attempt to cool herself down. Yet though hot, she’s chilled. So weird. She gets up and stands before the thermostat. It’s at seventeen degrees Celsius; she better raise it to twenty. But how will she feed the bill? Well, it doesn’t matter when her body can’t regulate its temperature properly — she doesn’t really understand why as no one has explained it to her or even paid much attention to her complaints, including her insanely fast heart rate and her up-and-down blood pressure. Sometimes she thinks her body has gone to the circus to become a flame-thrower, acrobat, and dumped-on clown all at once.

  She picks up her Palm and checks her schedule. Time to exercise. Damn. She should have done that before lunch, but her stomach had screamed starvation and she’d forgotten all about exercise. Oh well, she’ll lift her puny weights on a full stomach.

  The phone shrills.

  She leans over to check the Call Display. It says, “Cand Diabt As.” There should be another ‘s’ there, she thinks uncharitably. No money, she silently screams at the phone. No money, no spare clothes to donate, no nothing. She stomps into the living room, drags her weights out from under the coffee table, turns the television on — Steven and Chris on CBC cheerily greet her — and starts hefting her three-pound free weights. She finishes her routine with stretches. She’s supposed to go for a walk, but getting herself out the door is beyond her most days unless she has an appointment to go to. She walks every Sunday though, church being her motivation to get dressed for the outdoors, open the door, and walk out. Good enough, well, realistic enough.

  She drops down on to the couch, slowly lies on her side, and finishes watching Steven and Chris from a horizontal position. She flips channels to CityLine. Marilyn Denis is leaving the show she’d heard somewhere, and it’s one of her final ones. After that, she flips to Oprah. About halfway through, when the commercials start to exceed the programming, she sits up and goes to the kitchen for some water and a cookie. Sitting back down on the couch, she continues to watch Oprah empathetically interview her sob story of the day.

  Smokey lands on her lap. Ooph, she blows out a stream of crumbs.

  “Smokey!”

  Smokey ignores her exclamation and places her paws onto her shoulder. Heaving herself up higher onto her right shoulder, she starts to nibble at her hair.

  “Christ!”

  Smokey leaps off, then proceeds to serenade her with meows before leaping after phantom dust bunnies and bouncing back onto her lap just as Oprah has caught her attention again.

  Ring.

  Startled, she inadvertently throws Smokey off, as she rushes to the phone only to see it’s telemarketer number one again, the 1-866 number. Well, she’s up now. Better check her Palm. Oh yeah, she was supposed to work on her course, and she’s now supposed to get dinner ready. She is so not in the mood for cooking. Fatigue makes her arms heavy, her chest like a hollow filled with lead, her head wrapped in cotton batting, her legs like solid sticks. And her feet ache. Some days she wonders if the fatigue will ever leave her or if it will always be ebbing and flowing from the time she awakes until the time sleep finally comes. But she must eat, and Grandmother has decreed that only good nutrition, home-cooked meals where she controls the salt and fat and sugar, not convenience frozen meals, not take-out pizza, will help her heal. Of course, Grandmother doesn’t cook for her. She cooks only fo
r herself and expects her to do likewise.

  Shaking off her resentful thoughts, she walks to the fridge and stares in. Smokey joins her. Cheese, milk, eggs — she’s already had her egg for the day, thank you — bread, jam, a couple of apples. She doesn’t see the lettuce or leeks in the vegetable drawer where Grandmother had put them in a rare moment of helping her put away her shopping. She doesn’t even think to open the vegetable drawers and to check for food. She closes the door and opens the freezer.

  Slap, the mail slot goes. She pushes at the freezer door while turning toward the front door. Junk mail lies all over the floor. She bends down, picks it up, stands up slowly, hand on lower back, and then opens the front door and tosses it all in the recycling bin next to the stairs. Slamming the door closed, she stomps back to the kitchen. Whipping open a cupboard door, she stares at tomato sauce cans, dried pasta and rice packages, and more jam. She frowns. How much jam does she have? Bored, Smokey pads back to her chair, which is now receiving the western sun, while she grabs a can of tomato sauce. Thank the gods that she had bought a can of prepared pasta sauce. She’ll have to adulterate with salt-free crushed tomatoes, which means half of the combined sauces will eventually go bad before she thinks to finish it, but she can’t have that much salt in her food. She sucks at her salty tongue. Sighing, she also grabs an open package of whole wheat spaghetti. She’d kill to have regular spaghetti, but that’s verboten. She agrees with Grandmother, but she’d really like not to have to think about food so much.

  She places a Pyrex dish filled with water in the microwave to heat up; opens the cans slowly; drops the spaghetti in the water after the microwave beeps; punches in eight minutes on the microwave; and when it beeps, takes out the spaghetti, carries it carefully to the sink, finds a colander, and drains the spaghetti into the sink. She forks some of the spaghetti into a bowl; scoops three spoonfuls of the combined sauces over the spaghetti; fetches the pre-grated cheese out of the fridge; scatters some over the top; and nukes that until the cheese is melted. She takes the bowl, along with a towel, ‘cause, let’s face it, she isn’t the neatest eater around, and carries it to the living room where she slurps and chews it up while watching the 5:30 p.m. news. Global National with the hunky Kevin Newman is a must-see on her calendar.

  She tries to watch the local news afterwards, but her attention keeps wandering. She feels like she’s missing something. She hears a truck rumble past her house. Garbage. She has to put out the garbage, for tomorrow is garbage day. She heaves herself up and walks into the kitchen. Plastic and paper towels litter the top of the counters; food decorates plates; paper boxes lean against empty plastic containers; and a drunken milk carton stands beside the sink. Her shoulders slump. She has to sort all this out, plus get the newspapers out of the grey box standing at her door and put them into a large clear bag, and every week it’s a mental contest as to who will win: obedience to the city’s imposition of transfer station status on her and every person’s home in Toronto or her fatigue and mental confusion. Usually fatigue wins. But she isn’t feeling too bad today.

  She opens the cupboard under the sink to fish out two different bags: one for recycling and one for greens. The third one, the one for garbage is already sitting half-full in the plastic garbage container screwed into the inside of the cupboard door. Is there a fourth one she needs? She has a feeling she does but can’t think why. Silently telling herself to get on with it, she begins by confidently tossing the crinkled plastic wrap in the half-full garbage bag. She pauses. She looks down at it, lying innocently on top of a crumpled Kleenex. It’s plastic. The city recycles plastic, and it’s always changing what can and cannot go in the recycling garbage. Maybe they’re recycling plastic wrap now. She ponders that for a moment and then starts pondering the Kleenex. It’s made of paper, yet it has lotion in it. Surely they don’t recycle lotion. Hmmm … the city does believe it’s good to grow vegetables from diapers, so why not lotion as fertilizer too? Thus it really belongs in the green garbage. Or maybe not. Her head hurts. She straightens up and starts working on what she does know: food belongs in the green garbage. She scrapes the small splotches of food left on plates and bowls into the expensive biodegradable garbage bag. She picks up a scrap of food-stained paper towel and is about to toss it in after the scraps when she hesitates. Does paper towel go in with the food because it has sauce and some dried vegetable stuck on it or does it go in because it’s considered biodegradable or does it go in with the recyclables because it’s considered paper? But it’s been bleached, and so doesn’t that mean it’s garbage, regular old garbage, like in the old days? She studies it. Well, it looks bleached because it’s white. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it can go in to the recyclable garbage bag with the newspapers. She hesitates. It is paper, right? But one is supposed to clean out all the tins and cartons, and it’s hard to clean paper towel when sauce has soaked in. She starts to spiral into confusion. No, no food goes in recycling so it goes into the food garbage, green garbage. But it’s not organic.

  Still holding the soiled paper towel in her right hand, she looks around for the city’s garbage calendar. She finds it in the third drawer she looks in. Flipping through it with her left hand, looking for answers about paper towel, plastic wrap, and Kleenex, she blinks at the cacophony of text and colours that assault her eyes. Focus on the paper towel, she tells herself. Forget the others till you find the paper towel. But the volume of information overwhelms her brain. Suddenly she tosses the calendar back in the drawer, which she slams shut in frustration. Tears spring from her eyes; her breath catches in her throat. She will not, will not let this make her cry. She cries. Standing, holding the paper towel, she cries. And then the tears are gone, but not her frustration. Tight-lipped she tosses it in the garbage.

  “It’s all effing garbage anyway,” she yells toward the void of City Hall. “Why do we have to sort it for you, you effing cheapskates?!”

  It’s for the environment.

  “Bet the vegetables love ‘diaper fertilizer,’” she mutters under her breath as she starts tossing the remaining counter detritus into the garbage. It’s too difficult to decide where to put it, just like it is every week. She’s tired and cranky and overwhelmed with the amount of information she has to learn and remember about garbage and with having to make a decision about where to put every item of trash, including the batteries she’s just found that had rolled behind an apple on the counter. Damn. Where are these supposed to go? Of course, that’s the fourth bloody bag! Toxic garbage. Well, there isn’t going to be a fourth fuckin’ bag. She’s not a garbage storing station, a feeding place for mice and bugs to play in. This is her home! She throws the batteries into the regular garbage bag and slams the cupboard door shut. She breathes hard for a moment. She glares at the open bags sitting on counter and floor. She has to haul them out now.

  Luckily, the city has a policy for people like her who have trouble with the ugly big plastic bins Toronto had insisted all house residents use; she only has to put her garbage in bags and leave them outside her door. She was so relieved when she learnt of this city policy and amazed at how much energy she has gained and how much less pain she is in from not having to wrestle with bins. But she can never remember what garbage week it is. Looking out the window to see what others have done doesn’t work as the dark blue of the recycling bin and deep grey of the garbage bin look the same to her from far away. She retrieves the dreaded calendar again; finds the date; squints at the little icons; compares them to previous weeks; and finally decides the icons for this week must be for recycling and food garbage. Regular garbage can stay in her cupboard, building up for another week. She ties and lugs the appropriate bags outside and then flops back on the couch, in time for the weather report, which she promptly forgets as the forecaster is giving it.

  It’s 7:00 p.m., and the phone is calling her again. Another telemarketer. Another check of her Palm. Oh yeah, she really has to sit down and do that course. She heaves herself up to her music room, sits down at he
r desk, moves her mouse, and waits for the computer to come out of standby. No wonder her hydro bill is too high — well, too high for her, low according to Grandmother — when she leaves the damn thing on all day without using it. She clicks on the email with her coursework for this week and reads. And reads it again. And reads it again. She pulls a pad of Post-its toward her and breaks down the work into steps, writing each step on one Post-it, sticking each Post-it left-to-right across the bottom of her monitor. She peers at the first Post-it: “Step 1: do a free association exercise in response to the topic, Spring.” She sits back in her chair and thinks. She fishes a pen out of the pencil holder and waves it between her fingers. She pulls the pad of paper toward her and leans over it. Her blank mind remains stubbornly blank. A snort from below penetrates the silent air. She trundles downstairs to gaze upon her curled-up cat, returns upstairs to her chair, and the waiting paper. Remembering her timer, she fishes it out from behind the flat panel monitor, turns it to twenty minutes, sets it down, and once again stares at the paper.

  Just write!

  Bending over the paper, pen in right hand, she writes “spring,” circles it, draws a line upwards, and prints “end” in all capital letters. She circles that, draws a line from that upwards again, and prints in all caps …

  Bring, the timer vibrates. She sits up, shakes her hand out, and looks at the ink-covered paper. Who knew that was hiding in her blank mind. She turns off her computer, watching the shut-down sequence expressionlessly, before slowly pushing back her chair, going downstairs, and refilling her water glass at the kitchen sink. Pulling a bag of popcorn out of its cupboard, the bag she bought behind Grandmother’s back last Sunday after church, she shuffles to the couch, plunks herself down, puts her feet up on the coffee table, and turns on the television. She flips, flips, flips through channels 5, 9, 11, 17, 19, 23, 25, 29, 41, 44, 49, and 57 over and over until she finally recognizes the program she wants to watch. Soon she realizes she’s not following the plot and turns the volume up, all the way up so that she can understand what’s being said. She settles down into the couch and munches on popcorn. Smokey lifts her paws up onto the couch, then pulls herself up to sit beside her, staring at the popcorn bag. She eats one, gives her one, not noticing when Smokey nips her fingers, while watching her favourite programs fixedly until bedtime. Another day done.

  ~~~*~~~