Ethel sits for a while in a room where the two women sleep, and there is something about the sounds they make that reminds her of birds settling down into the nest. Doves. She leans over to whisper into Birdie’s ear, “But you did fix it.” Birdie has a few fine hairs matted into an S shape at the side of her face. Her skin is the color of pancake batter. Never mind, she heard Ethel. She heard her. After a while, Ethel, too, dozes off.
“Swedish meatballs over multigrain pasta, mashed potatoes, Prince Edward blend vegetables, peaches on a cloud,” Birdie says.
“What’s the cloud?” Ethel asks.
“Fake whipped cream.”
“And the Prince Edward vegetables?” This was the best one yet, better than last week’s fiesta blend, which did not even have corn and red pepper but rather broccoli and cauliflower.
“It was a mix of green beans and yellow beans. Oh, and carrots.”
“So…what is the Prince Edward part?”
“He liked green and yellow beans and carrots mixed together?” Birdie asks. She’s laughing. She’s in a good mood today.
“He liked to wear green and yellow and orange together?” Ethel asks.
“His yellow hair had green and orange highlights?” Now Birdie’s snorting a little in her laughter, an endearing little snort that always makes others laugh more.
“Wait! I know why they’re called Prince Edward!” Ethel says. Because they came from a can, she wants to tell Birdie, remember that old telephone joke, where you call someone and ask if they have Prince Edward in a can and if they say yes you say, “Well, you’d better let him out!” and hang up.
So long ago that Ethel did that. She was still playing jump rope in those days, she remembers making chicken calls one Saturday afternoon with her friend Emily Bean-blossom and then going outside to jump rope.
But, “Hold on,” Birdie says. “The doctor’s here. I’ll call you back.” Ethel hangs up the phone, worried. The doctor is there to deliver the news. She’d wanted to be there when he did that. Now Birdie will be all alone if it’s bad news. And even if it’s good news, it would be nice to have your friend there.
Ethel dresses quickly. Never mind waiting for Birdie to call back. She ties a scarf beneath her chin and looks at herself in the small hall mirror. She is crying, just a little, that’s the way these things go, good news, tears; bad news, tears. And her hands are shaking! Well, now, this is too much. She needs to calm down. On the way to the bus stop, she chants a jump rope rhyme under her breath, just to keep her from thinking about anything else: “First grade babies, second grade tots, third grade angels, fourth grade snots.” What else? “Mabel, Mabel, set the table.”
Ethel imagines the doctor clearing his throat, asking Birdie if she has any relatives nearby. Birdie saying, “No. Why?”
“Strawberry shortcake, blueberry pie.” And there was “Postman, postman, do your duty”—oh, that was a nasty one, she used to like that one. It ended with “She wears her dresses above her hips.”
On the bus, Ethel watches a man sitting opposite her nod off, snort awake, then nod off again. He appears to be homeless: he’s wearing layers of filthy clothes and is carrying a variety of plastic, overstuffed bags. His skin is sallow, unwashed. Sometimes homeless people look mean—sometimes they are mean, asking for spare change in a way that is just plain threatening, stepping forward to block your way and, if you don’t give them money, saying “God bless you” in a way that sounds like “I’m going to get you.” Other times they look sad, or kind, or even happy. But this man looks like he’s trying to understand something that just can’t be understood. Even in sleep, his forehead is wrinkled, and there are two deep vertical lines between his brows. Perplexed, that’s how he looks. Ethel wonders if he’s trying to imagine how he ended up that way. It wouldn’t be so hard to get that way, really. Miss a few mortgage payments, start talking to yourself a little too often.
She turns to stare out the window, counts down the three blocks remaining, then quickly exits the bus.
When she gets to Birdie’s room, she walks past the empty bed—the roommate has indeed gone home—and kisses Birdie’s cheek. She flops down into the chair and fans her face. “Whew. Out of breath.”
“I tried to call you back, but I guess you had left,” Birdie says.
“Yes. I figured I’d just go ahead and come down. I was coming down anyway.”
Birdie nods, staring into her lap. She tears a Band-Aid off the back of her hand, winces.
Ethel waits. An announcement is made over the loudspeaker, code orange, whatever that is. “What’s code orange?” she asks.
“Oh, just another soul gone to heaven, I imagine,” Birdie says. She sighs. On the bed beside her are the dolls from yesterday. She picks up the Ken doll and, lowering her voice, speaks for him. “Your friend’s got some bad news for you, Mrs. Menafee.”
Ethel sits with a smile frozen on her face. She looks like an idiot, she knows, but she can’t think what else to do.
“It appears the treatment hasn’t done her one bit of good,” Ken says.
Now Ethel lets some air out of her chest. “So what are you going to do, Birdie? What do you want to do?”
Birdie bites at her lower lip, stares straight ahead. Behind her blue glasses that she says make her eyes look like an owl’s, tears tremble, then disappear.
“Birdie?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
But then Ken speaks. “She wishes she were already done with everything. If she’s just going to die, why can’t she be dead now?” Birdie has been moving the doll up and down while she talks; now she keeps moving him, up and down, up and down, though more slowly. Then she stops.
Ethel picks up the other doll, the one with the shorn hair. “Ken?” she says, in a high voice.
A faint smile, and then Birdie bobs Ken around in the air again. “Yes?”
“I think she should just move in with her friend.”
“What a dumb idea, J.Lo. Her friend has enough problems of her own.”
“What problems do I have?” Ethel asks, and Birdie doesn’t answer.
“What problems does Ethel have?” J.Lo asks.
Ken goes up in the air, then down. Up, then down. Then he says, “It would just be too much. Trust me.”
Ethel presses J.Lo up to the bed rail to say, “I don’t think I can trust you, Ken, as you are an imbecile.”
“Am not. Don’t make me mad. Don’t make me pop my head off.”
Ethel laughs. Then she lays her hand over her friend’s, and they sit for some time in silence. Carts rattle down the hall outside the door. Someone speaks loudly, not entirely kindly, to a hard-of-hearing patient, asking if he needs the bedpan. Announcements are made over the intercom, some serious, some not so. Once, the person making the announcement fumbles over her words, and laughs. Someone comes in to pick up the menu Birdie has filled out: she has ordered the Healthy Baked Fish, the Sicilian grande vegetables, the baked potato, and the apricot halves.
Finally, Ethel clears her throat and says, “Birdie?”
“What.”
“What are Sicilian grande vegetables?”
Birdie snorts.
Ethel leans forward to say, “I mean it, about your living with me.”
Birdie sighs. “I suppose I should go to L.A.”
“But why?”
Silence.
“Birdie?”
“Wait. I’m thinking.” She laughs, in spite of herself.
Ethel rearranges herself on the chair, centers her purse on her lap. “I have a lovely guest room.”
“So does my daughter.”
“Well, but…” Ethel taps her heel rapidly against the linoleum floor. What to say? I can imagine how you feel. No. Too trite. You’re going to die, so why not be with your best friend instead of a daughter who, no matter how much she loves you, has no time for you? No. Too blunt and, in a way, too mean. What she wants to say is something she is having trouble articulating even to herself.
She studies Birdie, who is not looking at her, who has her head bent down in a way that makes it look like she is praying, though Ethel knows she is not, they neither of them believe in all that. But what relief if they did! If they did, they could be talking about how they’d meet again, how, in heaven, they might be young again, dressed in blue and wearing pearls! But it’s not true for them, they’ve discussed it at length. You’re born, you live, you die. We are lonely visitors to a small planet. We are minuscule links in a long, long chain. And yet.
Ethel thinks about her Grandma Mo, short for Moselle, a name Ethel has always loved, her grandmother was named after a river in Germany. But her grandmother was right, such a delicate, feminine name didn’t suit her. Grandma Mo used to sit out on the porch in the evening smoking a pipe, a habit that displeased her husband and all her other relatives but Ethel, who loved the smell of the tobacco, loved too the rhythmic puffs of smoke that came from her grandmother’s pooched lips. And there was the fact that Grandma Mo let her try the pipe, too, anytime she wanted.
When she was nine years old, Ethel sat at Grandma Mo’s kitchen table one day to help peel apples for a pie. She had just started on one when a worm crawled out of it. Ethel shrieked and dropped the apple and the peeler, and when her grandmother looked over at her, her pale blue eyes calm, a bit amused, Ethel said, “There’s a worm in there!”
“Would you like a different apple to peel?” Grandma Mo asked.
Ethel nodded. Saved again by her grandmother, who was as good as any cowboy.
“Try this one.” Grandma Mo handed her an apple from the little pile she held in her lap.
Ethel began peeling it, but it was full of brown spots. “Look,” she said, holding up the apple. Her grandmother nodded, and handed her yet another apple. A worm hole in that one. “Every one I pick has something wrong with it!” Ethel said, exasperated.
“So should we not have pie?” Grandma Mo asked.
Ethel shook her head no.
“I guess what we’ll have to do is cut around those bad parts, huh?”
Ethel said nothing, her lips still in the pout position. But then she sat up straighter in the chair, stopped pouting, and put into the mixing bowl all the apple parts she could salvage.
Well. An overobvious allegory. Sentimental slop, Birdie might say. Still, Ethel wants very much to share that story with Birdie. But when she starts to speak, she hears herself saying a jump rope rhyme:
“All in together, girls.
It’s fine weather, girls.
When is your birthday?
Please jump in!”
And now Ethel speaks very quickly, as the rhyme used to demand:
“January—February—March—April—May—
June—July—August—September—October—
November—December!”
Birdie looks over at Ethel. Her face is hard to read. “I know that rhyme,” Birdie says. “You know what comes next?” She recites:
“All out together, girls.
It’s fine weather, girls.
When is your birthday?
Please jump out!”
And now Birdie speaks rapidly:
“One—two—three—four—
five—six—seven—eight—”
“I have the finest sheets you’ve ever slept on,” Ethel says, interrupting her.
“Oh, you do, do you?”
“Yes, and I have a mailman I give lemonade to in the summer, and hot chocolate in the winter. He’s a very strong young man, a wonderfully good-natured man, and he has told me if I ever need anything to put a clothespin on my mailbox and he will knock on the door, and whatever it is, he’ll take care of it.”
Birdie considers this. “What about Sundays and his days off?”
“911,” Ethel says.
“I suppose.”
Ethel sits still. She can’t force her. She waits. She thinks of the homeless man she saw on the bus that morning. She thinks of how things could just as easily turn around for him. Really. He cleans up, for God’s sake, could it really be so hard, there are people who can help. He cleans up, he gets a job flipping burgers, which everyone makes fun of but which Ethel thinks is perfectly honorable work and she would do it herself. He gets a job flipping burgers and gets promoted a few times. He buys himself some new clothes at Sears, short-sleeved blue polyester shirts, some pants that fit. He meets a woman there, she’s the cashier who rings him up, a Hispanic woman with dimples and an endearing little potbelly, for which she makes no apologies. They get married, and he is a better father to her kids than her ex-husband was. It could happen. Or he could deteriorate further, end up a black-eyed, shivering soul sitting over a grate and unable to articulate anymore his request for spare change, for anything. Either way, the birds will sit on the wire and sing.
Birdie has spoken. “What?” Ethel says.
“Deaf as a post.”
“But what did you say?”
“I said I have my own sheets I can bring.”
“Ah.” Ethel’s eyes fill, and she sits back in her chair. For one moment, the weight of what she has taken on frightens her. But then she is fine, settled, complete in a way she hadn’t known she wasn’t.
“I think when you’re dying, you can get a prescription for marijuana,” Birdie says.
“Everything’s still negotiable,” Ethel tells her.
Over the top of the bed rail, Ken’s head appears and he says, “She can’t even say how grateful she is. Why don’t you get her clothes out of the closet and you girls can blow this pop stand.”
“We have to wait for your discharge order,” Ethel says.
“Well, I’ve got a minute,” Birdie says, and Ethel says she knows it.
DOUBLE DIET
Last time Marsha was dieting and her husband, Tom, wanted to go out for dinner, she took his arm before they left the house and said, “Now listen. I am fifteen pounds up from where I want to be. I’m going to need you to help me, okay?” She had been told at Weight Watchers that people who had supportive partners did a lot better at losing weight. And he said sure, he’d help her, he understood, he didn’t like it when he felt overweight, either.
At the restaurant, Marsha ordered a tuna steak and a salad, dry, some lemon wedges on the side. Baked potato, dry. “Anything to start?” the waiter asked, and she said “No, the entrée will be plenty.” “To drink?” “Water,” she said. “Thank you.” The waiter then turned to Tom, who ordered French onion soup as an appetizer. “And for your entrée?” the waiter asked. Tom said, “I think…the chicken Kiev and some garlic mashed potatoes.” What did he want on his salad, the waiter wanted to know. “Oh,” said Tom, “maybe…blue cheese, I guess. And hey, how about mixing it with French?” “To drink?” “Scotch to start, and a nice Chardonnay with dinner.” Tom started to ask Marsha if she wanted wine, but he saw her arms crossed tightly over her chest and so he did not ask her after all. “Would you like bread and butter?” the waiter asked, and Tom looked meaningfully at Marsha and declined.
She watched Tom eat the stringy, salty cheese from the top of the soup while she nursed her water. She watched him cut into his deep-fried chicken breast and saw the butter come running out while she poked at her salad. She kept her plate with its little tiny bit of tuna left on it so that she might have something to do while he ate his Snickers pie. “Whew!” he said, after a few bites. “Full. I can’t finish it. You want it?” He pushed the pie toward her, and she devoured it.
But now, Marsha and Tom are double dieting, and Marsha is very excited about it. It has become a bone of contention between them, though. Tom would prefer that Marsha keep it a secret, but Marsha thinks they should celebrate it. “What’s to celebrate about it?” he asks her. “It’s not an engagement or anything.”
“Actually,” Marsha says, “you didn’t want to celebrate our engagement, either. You wanted to keep that quiet, too.”
“Altogether different,” Tom says.
“What is,” Marsha wants to ask. “Di
eting and getting engaged? The reasons for keeping it, whatever ‘it’ is, secret?” Oh, but why get started. He was very shy back then, she knows that, he was unsure. For her part, she was pregnant, diffidence was not so much an option, action was her only option. It was the early seventies. And although abortion was legal in some states, although Marsha in fact made an appointment to get an abortion and Tom drove her to the clinic, in the end she could not do it. When they took some blood from her arm before the procedure, she thought, Don’t. That’s the baby’s. And then in the waiting room, when she looked around at all the faces of the women who would also be terminating that day, she had a sudden rush of feeling that made her leap up and bolt from the clinic. She stood on the sidewalk, her purse pressed hard against her middle. Tom followed her, took her arm, and said, “Me, too.” That was their engagement announcement.
But that was years ago. Now they’ve been married for so long, the kids grown and gone, and Tom and Marsha are starting to worry about the things fifty-somethings worry about, including cholesterol and blood pressure and carcinogens. Last time Tom went to the doctor he came home with a bad report card and orders to lose at least twenty pounds or else he’d have to start taking medication. He sat glumly at the kitchen table and said, “I’m not going to a goddamn gym, either. I’m not going to bench-press next to some nineteen-year-old who has oiled up his muscles and can’t take his eyes off the mirror.”
“There might be a lot of men your age at the gym,” Marsha said. At which he gave her a look, and Marsha understood that Tom just didn’t want to go the gym, period.
“We could walk together,” she told him. “And you can come with me to Weight Watchers.” She had recently reenrolled.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I’ll take the heart attack. I am not going to Weight Watchers.”
“You don’t even know what it’s like,” Marsha said.
“You’ve never been to a meeting. Why don’t you just—”
He held up his hand, traffic cop style. “Marsha?”