“Yeah? What?”
I don’t say anything. I am thinking of something, caught up in a memory as though it had gained human form and pulled me up off the bar stool to hold my ear against its beating heart. Sometimes, when we were making love, I would put my fingers into Jay’s mouth. It was not only for the eroticism of feeling the talented tongue, the warmth and softness and differing surfaces of that pink inside. It was to reach toward something. Once I rose up from where I had been lying on his chest, and pulled my fingers out of his mouth, used them to trace his lips with his own damp, then put them back inside his mouth. “Open,” I said, and he smiled, a little embarrassed, but then he did open his mouth. “No,” I said. “More.” And when his mouth was as wide open as it could go, I put my own mouth over his. I wanted everything. I wanted to give everything, I wanted to take everything. We came so close it scared us. We had to laugh. We had to start giggling and get up and go into the kitchen. It was just after midnight. We made cinnamon toast and ate it quietly, so as not to wake the children. So as not to wake ourselves.
If he dies, and I am a young widow expected to date, what will I do? Come to places like this, where someone will say, “So. Tell me about you”?
“Lainey?”
Well, there it is. I’m starting to cry. “I can’t be here, Alice,” I say, and I wipe my eyes quickly with the damp napkin from under my beer. “I feel so … disloyal. I feel like I need to be paying attention all the time, just in case.”
“What? In case what?”
“Well, what do you think? In case of anything! What if they were calling me right now, saying he woke up?”
“Then Ed would call us here. And we’re closer to Jay than we would be at home. By a good three blocks.”
“So we’d just go there right from here?” I say.
“Yes,” Alice answers softly, and I feel her compassion move out of her and settle on my shoulders like a coat.
I push my hands into my face, overwhelmed by the simple image of my husband walking in the door of the house where we live. “I don’t think I can stand up,” I say.
“You don’t have to for a while,” Alice says. “That’s the idea.”
* * *
I have been there. How can I tell you this, other than to sit somewhere below you and look up at you, the sun all around me? What can I do but rock back and forth, my hands wrapped around my ankles, my face smiling, my eyes weeping, my throat closed and my heart stretched to the bursting? Say I drew the line in the dirt. Would you know to lower yourself to touch it?
Eleven o’clock. I don’t know why I try to read. I can’t make sense of anything. I turn off the light, close my eyes, sigh deeply. Like a waking dream, I imagine the ghost woman sitting on the bed beside me. She is in her nightgown, her hair loose about her face. “Well now, what good does this do?” she says. “This fretting. You’ve got to go right on and live your life, don’t you see?” She smiles at me, leans forward and says in a low voice, “He’ll get better. It’s just a matter of time.” Her voice is so strong, so real-sounding I shiver.
“How can you say that?” I ask. I hear my own voice, talking out loud.
“Well, you just have to,” she says. “I don’t know how you’ve all gotten so weak, you people nowadays. You think things are always going to be easy? You have to be strong!”
“Well, I’m trying,” I say.
She nods slowly, stares out the window. Then she turns back to me and what is in her face is this: try harder.
I open my eyes, turn the light on, see nothing but the curtain moving in the slight breeze.
I know what this is. I’ve heard about things like this. You have a desperate need, you fill it in any way you can. You feel alone, you make someone up to be with you. That’s all this is. It’s harmless.
I go to look at the kids sleeping, check to see that the doors are locked, then get back in bed.
I startle awake, thinking I’ve overslept, but it’s still night. The clock says 2:50, and then, as I watch it, the green numbers change to 2:51. I call the nursing home. The phone rings sixteen times before someone answers. “This is Elaine Berman,” I say. “I’m Jay Berman’s wife. I was wondering if you could tell me how he is.”
A pause, and then a woman’s lazy voice says, “We have no one here by that name.” Then, before I can protest, “Wait a minute. Hold on.” She puts her hand over the phone and I hear her ask someone if there’s a John Berman here. Then, coming back to me, “Oh. Sorry. Yeah, he’s here. Jay Berman, right? And … what was the question?”
“I just … I wondered if he was doing all right.”
“Far as I know, he’s fine.”
Tomorrow I will do whatever I can to have this woman fired. “Could you just go and look at him? He’s in the third room down on your right. 203.”
“He’s not my patient.”
“Well, whose patient is he?”
“I believe he’s Theresa’s. I’m not sure. But she’s on break.”
I sit up on the edge of the bed. Should I go down there? Or am I creating an emergency out of nothing?
“Please,” I say. “Could you just go and look in his room and see if he’s all right?”
She sighs. “Hold on.”
I tap my heel against the floor, bite at my lips. Then I hear the woman—girl?—pick up the phone and say, “He’s fine. He’s sound asleep.”
“He’s in a coma,” I say.
“Oh,” she says. “Sorry.”
“Yes.”
“But he’s asleep anyway. You know. He didn’t say nothing.”
Maybe later I’ll laugh about this. Maybe when I tell Alice this later, we’ll hold on to each other’s arms, laughing, and she’ll make that little wheezy sound she makes when she laughs hard, that always makes me laugh harder.
“Thank you,” I say. Unbelievably.
“Sleep,” I hear the ghost woman saying. “For heaven’s sake, go to sleep and stop this hysteria. You have children to care for in the morning. You have a husband to visit. That’s enough to do.”
I am walking down the hall of the nursing home when I hear a voice behind me. “ ’Scuse me,” it says, and then, louder, “ ’Scuse me!” I turn to see a gigantic black man, squeezed into a wheelchair, attempting to get past me. He smiles, revealing king-sized dimples, then steers past me down the hall. He stops suddenly, yells into a room, “Yo, Candy! I need some orange juice. You done fucked me up with that insulin. Get me some juice. Two packs of sugar.”
A weary-looking woman, fortyish, with half glasses on her nose, emerges from the room she was in. “I hear you, Flozell. I’ll get you some juice. And my name is Mrs. Thompson, and you know it.”
“You be ‘Candy’ today, darlin’,” he says. And then, turning to wink at me, “And you be … ‘Peaches’!” He looks me up and down with lascivious pleasure, readjusts his belt buckle. He wears a shoe on one foot, bandages on the other, shiny blue slacks, a white T-shirt and a gold necklace with a round medallion. Jay used to be wearing pants and a T-shirt, no shoes, when he came down for his second cup of coffee in the morning. The first cup, he’d bring in to keep him company while he shaved. His hair would still be wet. He’d smell so good, like soap.
I get to Jay’s room, close the door behind me. I can hear the sound of the birds outside, and this seems such a sad thing.
“It’s Sunday, Jay,” I tell him. “It must be sixty out there. And the air is so soft!”
This suit is too loose, Lainey. Take it off. I am drowning in soft folds of dark. I am being pulled along, the air is so thick. Is it insects I hear? Violins?
“I guess spring is really here,” I say. I have his head raised about thirty degrees, and I have positioned pillows on either side to keep it from leaning. I’ve put his hands out on top of the covers to rest over his stomach in an arrangement of some normality, though he does have rolled-up washcloths in his hands to keep them from closing up too tightly. And of course his eyes are shut. Nobody would be fooled for a second
.
But this is my new plan: I will attempt to make things around him as normal as possible. He used to like to watch the news shows while he was getting dressed in the morning, so I’ve taped a sign to the television: PLEASE TURN THIS ON TO THE TODAY SHOW FROM 7 TO 9 EVERY MORNING. It’s hard to say if they’ll do it, but it’s worth a try. I also want to dress him, to put different kinds of fabric against his skin. I brought a blue striped shirt today, maybe he’ll smell something on it that will get him going. It was hard getting it on him. I was afraid I was hurting him when I put his arms through, but of course I couldn’t tell. Gloria, the fat black nurse’s aide taking care of him today, frowned when she saw the shirt. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s a shirt he wears to work,” I said. “I want him to wear things from his normal life.” I buttoned one of the tiny collar buttons that had come undone.
“Well, it’s going to be in the way,” she said. “I got to hook up his feeding tube right now. This shirt don’t move out the way like the patient gowns do.”
I got up, raised his shirt. “There,” I said. “I’ll hold it out of the way if you want.”
She scowled, hooked up the tubing, hung the bag on an IV pole. Then she opened the roller clamp, started the drip. She was wearing heart-shaped earrings that as far as I was concerned were lying. “It’s going to get all stained,” she said, “I can tell you that. Big yellowish stain, it don’t come out easy. And then you be all the time having to wash his shirts, carry them back and forth.”
“Yes, well,” I said. “That’s all right.” She had no idea what exquisite pleasure it would give me to pull his shirt from the dryer.
And so now I am telling him it’s Sunday in my normal voice, rolling the bottom covers up over his feet to put his favorite argyle socks on him. They don’t exactly match his shirt, but they’re his favorite. I’ve brought his favorite sneakers, too.
“It would be your turn to make the pancakes today,” I tell him. “You actually make better ones than I do. You make that and Caesar salad better than I do, but that’s all. Not that you couldn’t improve. Maybe we should take a cooking class together. There’s a good one at the Y, on vegetarian cooking, we should do more of that kind of eating. A lot of people do it. They say it’s easy to get used to. There are much better recipes now than there used to be.”
I finish tying his sneakers, put the covers back over him. I don’t want Gloria to see the shoes quite yet. I pull my chair close beside him, my back to the door, facing the window so that when I look up I can see the veil of new leaves on the tree outside. Hope. “You remember when we first made Caesar salad?” I ask. “You’d given me The Joy of Cooking for Christmas, remember? We’d just started living together. And we got stoned from the roach your friend Dave left behind, remember your friend Dave, who wanted to be a hippie and lived on a commune? Remember how he told us his girlfriend had a baby and they ate the placenta and buried the cord under a tree? God! Do you think they really did that? I don’t think so. But anyway, we started looking at recipes and it seemed so impossible that there were instructions for making all these fabulous things, they weren’t secret, they were in English, black and white, there you are, anyone could do it. Just go buy the stuff, do what Erma says, and there, you get to have Caesar salad! You have rack of lamb, prime rib, potatoes au gratin; you get to have chocolate mousse! We walked to the Red Owl on the corner, it was so cold that day, remember? The stuff in our noses froze. I remember we got anchovies which we’d never bought before and we got all the other stuff and then we came home and made the salad in a Dutch oven, because we didn’t have a big enough bowl, and we didn’t use forks, we just picked up those big romaine lettuce leaves and ate it like Erma said was the best way to do it and it was so good. And then we found the recipe for brownies and made those. That was the best meal I ever had, Jay. When you come home, we’re going to do that again. Do you want to?”
I look at him. He’s lost weight; his cheekbones are too visible. A crystal-clear line of drool has started down from the side of his mouth and I wipe it off with the sheet, I don’t know where his Kleenex has gone to.
“Jay?” I say, aware of my own foolishness, feeling it like a wadded-up thing on the bottom of my stomach. “Jay? Did you hear me?”
What I know now, I can never tell you back. Here are my hands, immersed in water they remember. Here are the stirrings of the elements. I can look in here, in the clearness, and see every atom, every spark. If I could pull this all in, carry it back with me to the other life, if I could sit out on the porch steps with you and start to talk the real language, we would only end up weeping, holding each other against the terrible beauty that is always our lives. We cannot say so much. We cannot even pretend to see it. We must live as though we don’t know. We must keep the secret. This is the real curse that came from the Garden.
“Jay?” I say. Behind me, I hear someone approaching and I turn around to see Gloria.
“He can’t hear you,” she says, a wise sorrow in her voice. “He’s in a coma. You know.”
I look down at my purse, wonder how much she heard of what I said to him. Then I say, “Well, actually, people in comas can hear, Gloria. I’m surprised you don’t know that.”
“Oh, that’s what they say, I know that. But I never saw no evidence myself. I never saw people waking up, saying ‘Remember when you said this to me, remember when you said that to me?’ Uh-uh.”
Here would be the obvious place for me to say, “So … you do see people wake up, then? Here?” But I say nothing, watch as she squeezes the bag with Jay’s feeding. It’s almost gone, and she clamps the line, starts to remove the tubing.
“There’s more in there,” I say.
“I beg your pardon?” She is fumbling with his shirt, frowning all over again.
“I said there is more in there. In the bag. Of his feeding.”
“There ain’t but thirty cc’s or so.”
“I would like him to have it, though.”
She turns to me, and I can see her deciding if it’s worth arguing. Then, “Fine,” she says. “But I’ll be busy now, and this thing will run out, and I won’t be here to flush the tubing. And then the feeding tube’ll get all stuffed up. That stuff turn to cement, you leave it there too long.”
“Well, I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ll flush it.”
“You know how?”
A hand of fear, clutching the back of my neck. “Just … I’ve seen it. You just use that big syringe, put some water in, right?”
“That’s it.”
“I’ll do it.”
She nods, leaves the room.
I don’t know why I said that. I can’t do that. What if I hurt something? That tube goes right into his stomach, which is some pink-colored, pouch-shaped thing, from what I recall from sixth-grade health. I think it’s wrinkled on the inside, little ridges on the lining, or is that some other organ? I don’t know. But I should know what the stomach looks like before I put things in it! I can’t do this. I could put too much water in and hurt something, rupture it, whatever they say. I’ll have to go get Gloria or someone else when the thing is empty. And now I’ll have to watch the bag until everything is gone, which suddenly seems so hard. Sometimes I just talk too much.
When the bag looks like it’s empty, I go out into the hall. I’ll find Gloria, apologize, bring donuts in to her tomorrow, I happen to know she favors lemon-filled, powdered sugar on top.
I don’t see any nurses in the hall, and so I start looking in rooms. Behind the third door is Flozell. He is sitting in bed with his chest bare, washing exuberantly under his arm from a blue plastic basin. I notice the fatherly smell of Old Spice. “Well, looky here,” he says. “There’s my new girlfriend. How you doing, Peaches? You want to come on in here and help me?”
I close his door, and then I see Gloria coming down the hall. “It’s empty,” I say. “And—”
“I know, I know,” she says, waving her arm, and walking quickly past me. “I’ll
do it.” And then she mumbles some more things that I can’t hear. But can certainly guess at.
She reaches the room before me and I hear her say, “Who put the damn sneakers on him?”
“I did,” I say, coming into the room. I lean against the wall, watching her. “I’ll take them off.”
“Leave them on,” she says. “They’ll help prevent foot drop. That I have heard of.”
The kids are gone to a movie when I get home. Doubleheader matinee. Alice again. How will I ever, ever repay her? I step out of my shoes, leave them in the hallway, which I would yell at the kids for doing. There’s a stack of letters from yesterday on the floor below the mail slot, which I now pick up and sort through. Bills. A car magazine for Jay, which makes my throat ache. A letter from my mother, which I open and read on the spot. She will have enclosed a check, which I can use. Yes. One hundred dollars. And on pretty floral stationery the usual stuff about what she’ll put in her garden this year; how she has fallen behind in her housework, she’s not as young as she used to be, don’t we know that, ha ha. And then, “You know that Dad and I are praying every day for Jay, and for you, too. We know everything will be just fine. Remember, if you want us to come, we will.”
I reread the letter, then throw it away. We live skimming, eating the small bugs off the surface. I will cover my children tonight. I will decide on the food they will eat. I will fold their small socks and put them back in their drawers. “I love you,” I will say, and press their growing shapes into me. “I love you,” I will say, and run my brainy finger down the oblique line of their shoulder blades, their old angel wings. This is as far as we are allowed to go. Inside, love roars louder than we can hear. Outside, we write letters that don’t begin to say what we intend, and fold our children’s socks.
I don’t want my parents to come. I don’t want Jay’s parents to come anymore either. What can they do? Distract me from my sorrow when what I really need is to occasionally immerse myself in it? It’s like a big hand pushing at me all the time. And sometimes I just need to give in to it, sit in the bathtub and cry hard. I don’t do it when the kids are around. With them, I act as though everything is fine. Different. But fine. I’m glad they’re not here now.