Authors: Elizabeth Berg
“You play guitar?”
“Yeah.”
“You play
guitar
?”
“
Yes
. Quite well, in fact.”
“Well … Jesus, Alice. I didn’t know that either. Why don’t I ever hear you?”
“I don’t play anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, because Ed …” She stops, stares at me. “Listen. Do you want to hear this story or not?”
“Yes!”
“All right then. So this woman pokes her head in and listens for a while and then she says, ‘Buffy Sainte-Marie, right?’ and I say, ‘Right.’ She comes in and we start talking about Buffy Sainte-Marie and she asks me to play a few more songs and I do and then she says she loves music and the only thing she might like more is dancing and did I like
dancing? I said it was all right. She said how about if I danced for her. I said I didn’t think so. She said, Oh come on, she’d close the door, no one would see. I said I had to go somewhere.”
“And?” I say.
“And what?”
“And what happened?”
“Nothing. That was it.”
“That was it?”
“Disappointed?” Alice asks.
“I don’t know. Yes. Of course.”
“Real life hardly ever does it the way you want to tell it later, Lainey.”
“I guess.”
“I should have done it. I’ve always been sorry I didn’t do it. Now it’s too late.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You have a kid, you stop picking up hitchhikers. You know.”
I nod, stare at the rising bubbles in my glass. I’m a little drunk from just one beer. It makes things easier. I feel insulated from myself, a sympathetic bystander to my own predicament.
“So what
is
it like being hit on by a man?” Alice asks. “Is it fun?”
“I was never hit on that much. I was never really into the whole bar thing. The closest I ever came was before I met
Jay, when I dated this fraternity guy. He was like … You know what? He was like a wild pig. I swear to God. Like a big hairy boar. I don’t know why I dated him except that he was in this big-deal fraternity, and my roommate was crazy about him. When he called me the first time she said, ‘Jake La
zar
? Oh my God, are you kidding? Jake La
zar
? Do you know who he
is
?” So I went out with him and we partied a lot and I always felt like I was doing exactly the wrong thing. I’d be putting on all this makeup and borrowing earrings and thinking, I don’t even want to go. I don’t want to do this at all. I thought I had to do it. I thought I’d never meet someone I could say the real things to. And …”
“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?
E
leven 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?”