Range of Motion (20 page)

I
t is fall, and I’m working a lot of hours at Beverage World. Business has picked up; Frank may have to hire another person. Dolly has insisted that this time she does all the interviewing, and he has agreed. Although we usually eat at our desks, I had lunch out with Dolly last week, and she told me about her new boyfriend. “He’s nothing like Frank,” she said, “but he’s a real nice man. We have a good time together.” She was looking out the window when she told me that, and I saw reflected in her bifocals a couple walking down the street, arms around each other. “Well,” she said, looking back at me. “You know, at some point, you just have to move on.” I smiled, nodded. I felt so badly for her, sitting there in her powder-blue cardigan and smelling only slightly
of a safe perfume. But she does not seem unhappy; she continues to enjoy the little relationship she has with Frank, and I have come to see that in the way they are able, they love each other. He notices anything new she comes in with, from a piece of jewelry to shoes to a slightly runny nose; she continues to carry his coffee in to him and I am careful to never put phone calls through at that time. There was a Friday when she was in there a good twenty minutes, and she came out with a color in her face that I thought made her beautiful.

Jay is back to work almost full-time. He lost quite a bit of function in one arm and he goes for therapy at the hospital every afternoon. They say in a week or two he’ll be all done, good as new.

It was a funny thing when he came home. Amy was afraid of him for a long time, weeks. I think she saw him as risen from the dead. Well, so did I, I guess. I was afraid he’d fall back into a coma; for a long time, I’d wake up several times a night and make him wake up, too. Finally we were both exhausted, and Jay asked me, in the gentlest of ways, to cut it out. He doesn’t recall anything specifically from when he was in a coma: for him, it was a long, strange nap. “Cinnamon?” I’ll say. “Do you remember smelling cinnamon?”, and he’ll say, “… No. Was there cinnamon there?” He does occasionally have a shiver of something, though, a gloved tap. He says it’s a feeling of nearly remembering something, then not. Losing it. He describes it as the way that none of
us can remember being born, and yet we do seem to remember anyway, in that nearly all of us have a vague longing to go back somewhere. Jay says what else can it be but the womb, where all our needs were met before we knew we had them? I suppose that might be true, although my fantasy as a child was that I was from a superior planet whose most important members would soon come to reclaim me, hopefully when I was in Mrs. Menafee’s geometry class where, due to certain mathematical failings, I functioned as inadvertent class clown. I waited every day for people dressed in silver to walk into the classroom and astonish her—and save me. I intended to ask what took them so long.

I told Jay all that I remembered about him being in the hospital, then in the nursing home. I had that turkey dinner for all the people who took care of him at the nursing home, too. I had to have it at the home, in the rec room, because otherwise a lot of people would have been working and wouldn’t have been able to come to our house. Gloria and Wanda and Pat, all Jay’s nurses came up and told him they were the ones who did this and that, and Jay listened in a kind of polite wonder. Flozell smacked him on the back and sat beside him the whole time; it was like they were war buddies. Jay goes to visit Flozell at least once a week or so now, and Amy goes along most of the time.

It took me a while to tell Jay about seeing Evie. It was a Sunday night; we’d had Chinese food just like we always used to. The kids were in bed, and the little white boxes were
all over the family room, sauces thickening at the bottoms. Jay started to clean up and I told him no, just to wait a minute, I wanted to sit there with him for a while and think about how happy I was that we were doing this again. He put his arm around me and we had our stocking feet up on the coffee table and I said, “You know, when you were gone, I had regular hallucinations. I saw a ghost, a ghost woman.” He pulled away, looked down into my face, concerned. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t a bad thing. She actually helped. She talked to me, made me feel better.” He wanted to know what she said, and I told him mostly just things that happened in this house, in this neighborhood. “Like what?” he’d said, and I told him about how there was a war bride from Japan a few doors down who’d renamed herself Shirley and who kept trying to whip cream with chopsticks, so the women in the neighborhood chipped in and got her a mixer. I told him about how Walter once came downstairs after he’d put the kids to bed, changed into his best suit, slicked his hair back. Evie was in the kitchen, finishing the dishes. He’d called her into the living room, turned on the radio, low, then bowed and asked her to dance. She’d felt a little embarrassed, but then she’d taken off her apron and her glasses, slid out of her shoes, turned off most of the lights, and stepped into Walter’s arms for Harry James and “I’ll Get By.” “Huh,” Jay had said. “That’s nice.” He’d looked at me for a long time after that, checking to see if I was all right, I guess.

It was about a month after he was home that we finally had a fight, Jay and I. I have to say it was what let me know he was really back, that I could relax. I slammed the door and went over to Alice’s house and told her Jay was an asshole. She poured us glasses of wine and toasted me. She’s doing so well, Alice. I’ve met Ed’s lover, Sloan, and I like him. I asked Alice if Sloan was his real name or if it used to be Elmer and she said who knew. I know it’s an awful cliché, but Ed seems to have blossomed, really, to have opened up into himself, and he’s so much easier to be with. I’m not sure what the kids really think; I know they talk about it, but not around me. I tried to eavesdrop once, and they caught me, which is pretty embarrassing.

Alice is dating a gorgeous-looking Chinese man who teaches astrophysics over at the university. Their favorite thing to do is go roller-skating at the big wooden rink a few blocks away. I don’t know. You tell me. He appreciates her; it’s a pleasure to see the way he watches her talking, the careful way he takes her hand. And she tells me he is the most fantastic lover. She won’t give me too many details, which I think might be the sign of something really special. Still, I keep after her. I’m dying to know.

Sometimes when I’m alone in the house I kind of ask for Evie to come back, but she never does. I wish she would. I want to tell her something. I want to tell her about the day Jay came home, what it was like when he opened the door to his house and walked back in. How he stood for a long
moment in the hall, and didn’t say anything. There were, of course, no words. There was just the slow lifting of his hand to the familiar banister at the foot of the stairs, the glint of the wedding ring that has never left his finger since the day I put it there. I want to say that I understood something at that moment, which was this: the gift is not that I got to bring Jay back. The gift is that I know what I brought him back to; and so does he. I suppose Evie knew that, though. I think that was all she was ever really saying.

And so I am out here on the wooden stoop in my sweater worn thin at the elbows, and it is early morning, and I am looking out at my own backyard and at the trees beyond that and at the sky beyond that and I am thinking this:

I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of getting my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint—I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, “Yes, here.” I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are
the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of m y might.

For ten years before I began writing for a living, I worked as a registered nurse. Never mind that the work was hard—more than once, I literally had not time for even a bathroom break. (My husband never believed me about this, but it was true.) Never mind that I had to work on holidays and every other weekend and on people’s birthdays, my own included; I loved the job.

There were many reasons for that. The biggest one was that it’s incredibly rewarding to offer care and comfort to someone in distress. I became a nurse because I wanted not to feel helpless in the face of severe illness; I wanted to get in there and make things better. And as a nurse, you get to work with such lovely people: compassionate, intelligent, dedicated people in the habit of putting others first, people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and their hearts a
little broken by becoming deeply involved with patients they can end up losing.

I learned a lot about medicine in those years, but I learned more about human nature. I learned about bravery and resilience, about the many forms of grief, and especially about the importance of the little things in one’s life. I’ve said many times that nursing taught me the value of the “little” things that individuate and define our lives—the things that ultimately make it worth living. When you are really sick, what do you want? Honor and prestige? A big salary and a corner office with a spectacular view? Fame and fortune? No. What you want is your yellow mug that you drink coffee from every morning. You want the familiar landscape of your own home, the feel of your own bed beneath you. You want your friends and family, you want to appreciate a sunset from your front porch, a snowfall from your kitchen window, a Christmas pageant offered by five-year-olds. You want your own kind of cooking, your dog. All these small things are the glue that keeps you bound to your own life. They are the things that make you you. And in that respect, they are not little at all. They are huge. They are grand.