Dry Your Smile (44 page)

Larry is alternately nasty as hell or coolly cordial when we speak by phone about logistical matters. He prefers to be out of the loft when I come by for mail or whatever, which is probably sensible. But not knowing what the mood is going to be when I ring up to alert him that I'm coming makes me prey to the yo-yo effect. There's a sub-level, too: when he's nasty, it hurts but feels bracing, it gets my self-righteousness up, makes me think I was right to leave and who needed that crap anyway. When he's “nice”—as in expressing sympathy about Hope, however hypocritical that might be—it tears me apart. (Come back, Hypocrisy?) Attacks of guilt, sorrow, and longing ensue. But if we attempt to talk about my coming back, the conversation soon veers off into accusation and diatribe—and he hangs up on me. Borrowing
her
technique, the one he knows always made my brain melt with frustration. Once he and I did cry together over the phone—but then, within seconds, it turned venomous again.

My eyelids are drooping, so I'll close this entry. What a cheerful journal this is! It could've been written by Typhoid Mary or Little Nell. Tomorrow should be a beauty. Now that I've winnowed down the nursing-home list the hospital social worker gave me, tomorrow is the day Iliana and I start visiting them.

This too will pass, I tell myself. When? I ask myself.
When?
And
how?

May 1, 1983

Well, well, Happy May Day to all. Now at Georgi Fraser's apartment: career-woman-modern-Danish functional. She virtually lives at the office from early morning to late at night, keeping Athena afloat—and the apartment shows it. Diet soda, one wilted Singapore orchid, vitamins, and three containers of yogurt constitute the total refrigerator contents; diet sweetener packets, a tin of pâté de foie gras, a jar of instant coffee, and some stale Earl Grey teabags are about it for the cupboard.

But it's splendid, because she has a spare bedroom, and she isn't even in her own bedroom very often, traveling around to distributors and book fairs, wheedling manuscripts out of various authors, zipping off to Europe to buy or sell foreign rights. Even when she's here, we're mostly out of each other's way, and she actually seems to enjoy my presence when we do cross tracks over a late-night cup of coffee or snack. She accuses me of having a closet domestic personality, since I've stocked the fridge with such minimals as English muffins, butter, cheese. When I'm not having dinner with Iliana, I either skip food from lack of interest or wind up snacking while standing at the open fridge door. It's too expensive to eat out all the time, and neither can I let Iliana keep on “keeping” me like this.

It would be enough of a miracle if all she'd done was accompany me through these past days, my Virgil in the circles of the Inferno. We've been over to Brooklyn and up to the Bronx, out to Staten Island and back to West End Avenue, down to the Village and up to Yorkville, casing the “homes.”

The homes. What abominations. And these are the
better
ones. Some secular, some run by Jewish organizations. We even checked out a Catholic one which was supposed to be nondenominational in practice. But the minute I saw nuns and crucifixes I knew that Hope, however out of it she is, would be sufficiently sane to think I'd walled her up in a convent. Most of the homes seem to be in one way or another religious; there's no Old Atheists' Home in New York—and if it isn't here, it isn't anywhere.

The simpering euphemisms: Senior Citizens, Golden Age Clubs, Girls' Floor and Boys' Floor (some are “coed”). A saccharine patronizing of the occupants, combined with an indifference to them as individuals. The sham busyness: “craft therapy” (baskets, painting by number, clay molding, paper cut-outs done with blunt kindergarten scissors); “social events” (the monthly “prom,” the weekly movie showing). Civility as oppression. At the West Sixty-sixth Street one, the admissions supervisor recognized me and asked if I'd be willing to come and volunteer a short lecture about feminism to her “ladies.” I was touched by the request, and said yes. But when I phoned the next day to check with her about a specific date, she embarrassedly informed me that her director had turned down the idea as being “too contemporary and agitative” for the patients. Tell it to the Gray Panthers.

It's mentally and emotionally bruising to tour these places. What must it be like then to
live
there? We haven't yet seen one where I'd stoop to put Hope. For one thing, despite their antiseptic atmosphere (complete with plastic flowers), they're not even very
clean
. When I saw a giant waterbeetle scurry out from under the wheel as one old woman tried to turn her wheelchair around in the “day room” I thought I'd pass out. We've now learned we must demand to inspect the kitchens, where sometimes shining cauldrons hang for display from the ceiling but muck-rimmed pots are in use on the stoves.

They're all stupendously expensive: the cheapest we've seen is $2500 a month,
not
including physician's services, prescription drugs, and any “special equipment” a patient requires. Not surprisingly, we've seen only three black faces in all the homes so far—among the patients, that is. Among the probably underpaid aides, there's a disproportionately high number of those faces.

Most of the facilities verge on the totalitarian in their rules: We don't allow private radios or TV's in the rooms because our ladies might use them to disturb others (!) or get agitated at what they hear or view (!!) and “inmates” (!!!) can go to the day-room television if they like—at certain hours. Visiting admitted only at certain hours. Telephoning in—or out—only at certain hours (most don't even permit private phones in the rooms). We allow one or two pictures on a lady's nighttable, but we really can't have them bringing in a lot of personal items; it makes for clutter. We permit only three nightgowns and one “wrapper,” plus two changes of front-closing day clothes; the closets are small and we really can't have
clutter
. (It seems these days that no sooner do I arrive at one conclusion than it's immediately overturned: so much for being judgmental about the state of Hope's co-op; it was her apartment and her clutter and her
right
, dammit!)

But the worst of seeing “facilities” is seeing the women in them, both staff and patients. The worn, harassed, exasperatedly beaming faces of nurses and aides, their singsong whine as they address the patients, acidic burn-out eating through the tarnish of efficiency. Not even to blame: witnessing such daily suffering, with no prognosis of recovery except the inevitable release of death, must necessitate calluses on the soul. Because
what
they see—dear god.

The patients sit in chairs or wheelchairs or lie in bed, each utterly alone in herself. Each alone in her room, alone even in her attempt at fractured corridor conversation as she laboriously inches her wheelchair along, or shuffles by leaning on her walker with intense concentration. Step, drag foot, slide walker ahead, step, drag foot, slide walker ahead—futile reflex courage. I don't know which are more shattering—those faces blank of everything but expectation of the ultimate blankness, perpetually silenced in a waking stupor, all expression except a fleeting wince or shudder wiped from the wrinkled features, or those who still cling to a frayed connection with living, who smile crookedly back at you, try to respond to your passing greeting, attempt a gesture of communication despite the censoring nerves, muscles, bones. Some even risk fighting back.

One woman confronted an aide in the corridor, daring for a second to release herself from her walker so she could shake both trembling fists with rage, shouting, “I
want
to! I
want
to! I have some rights!” What did she “want to”? Go to the toilet by herself? Watch the “agitating” television news? Make a phone call? Visit a prisoner in another cell? Boycott the prom? Just make it down to the hall's end and back without being hovered over?

I seem to have developed a twitch in my left eyelid, which Iliana claims comes from too much seeing. Yet she herself watches everything without flinching: the patients, the “caretakers,” details of filth or signs of authoritarianism that have slipped by a dazed me. She brought a camera to the first place we went, but it was confiscated at the door (“for the ladies' privacy, you understand”). She has since resorted to an ingenious little pocket Pentax, so small it fits in the palm of her hand. Whenever I see her linger by a nurses' station or a wall bulletin board, or stop and casually chat overlong with a patient, I know she's focusing by her Braille-like feel, her fingers moving on that camera hidden in her pocket, her brain estimating approximate distance, light, exposure. Then she backs away a bit, slips it out of her pocket, slides it up alongside her hip or makes a fiddling waist-level gesture with her belt, and swiftly gets her shot. The click is a soft whirr inaudible to anyone not standing right next to her. It's a marvelous act to watch. It also works. Just yesterday I saw the first prints. They're absolutely staggering.

So we go on our way, witnessing. The doors to the rooms are almost always open. As you walk along the corridors you get quick-shot glimpses into what's left of whole human lives, framed in those doorways. The woman rocking back and forth, scanning her window to the blank wall beyond. The woman who sits there crying soundlessly, clutching a picture frame to her chest. The woman who waves shakily at you and beckons you in, but when you're stopped by the aide accompanying your tour, turns her head aside in bitterness. The woman trying gallantly to rearrange a pillow behind her back without calling for help. The woman who cries out weakly, “Nurse? Please? I need a pan? I've been calling and calling …”

Then there was the door that rooted me to the spot until Iliana drew me away, the door that framed a vignette of death playing itself out before our eyes: three staff members in rough, rapid labor over an inert body, two of them taking turns pushing down violently on the chest, the third giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, a pantomime of frenzied action—until one of them suddenly stopped, listened at the heart, shook her head, and pulled the sheet up over a gape-mouth, dessicated face.

Oh Hope, where can you live where
I
can live with your being there? No home of my own to take you in—not that it would've worked back at the loft, even if I were still there. Where can you go that you won't wake into a slice of sanity and see how I betrayed you by putting you there? How can I live with your thinking that?

I can't write anymore. Too beat. Georgi just knocked at the door to the spare bedroom, back from some late-night hassle over the impending printers' strike, wanting to unwind and have a cup of tea. It's the least I can do.

There's not much, it seems, that I
can
do.

May 18, 1983

Not a moment or a jot of energy to write anything here since the above entry. Almost three weeks of blur.

The Feminist Grapevine is onto the separation. Which means that whenever I make the error of going to an unavoidable meeting, at least five women approach me and express differing concerned versions of “How
are
you?” It also means that everyone sooner or later asks the Feminist Question: “Why did
you
leave? Why are
you
homeless while
he's
comfortably ensconced back there?” So I go through the thumbnail-version explanations: how I had more options than Larry, more friends; how it's just as well, because I'm on the road so much; how it's all really temporary anyway. What I rarely say is that I've discovered first-hand certain realities our political rhetoric has so far failed to penetrate. Fight back? Throw
him
out? Stand up for
your
rights? There's more to “victimization” than that. For one thing, there's pity—the feeling that I'm “strong,” he's fragile. Then there's fear—that
he's
strong and
I'm
fragile. It gets all mixed up with love and optimism and pride and memories and humiliation and disbelief. Finally, there's weariness—the yearning for peace at any price, to hell with “honor.” Some women understand when I say this, some don't (as
I
haven't, for years, emitting pompous-ass answers in Q–and–A sessions). I've begun to dread being “supportively” interrogated. That's the bad news.

The good news, though, is that with only a few exceptions of snide remarks (“So
that's
where the perfect marriage wound up!”) most of these women have been managing to act in a “postrevolutionary manner” even in a “prerevolutionary context.”

Marie reappears from the old 1960's firehouse women's center collective: she has a Central Park West apartment now and her two kids are off to college; do I want to stay there indefinitely? Sue shoves a note into my pocket: “Anything, anytime, anywhere. Not much money and a Lower East Side fourth-floor walk-up but it's yours and I can stay with my lover as long as necessary.” Clare leaves phone messages all over town, at Athena, at Ginny's, at Georgi's: “Single mother with little space and two yowling children can't offer home but would be delighted to extend dinner, solace, bitchery at men, whatever.” Karen has one of her aides track me down and calls (from
Congress!
) urging me to use the New York flat which she's “only in on weekends, anyway.” Betita wires from Los Angeles that she'll be on location filming for the next two months and why don't I chuck it all, fly out, and stay in peace at the Malibu house. Marta magically always has an extra ticket for a concert, Alida surfaces from the imminent deadline on her own new book to offer a small loan, Kathryn and Carol want to know if I need help with any errands—cleaners, laundromat, jobs regarding Hope, anything. Blake wangles her department chairman at Manhattan University to offer me a poetry reading for three hundred dollars. Edith places her husband (did she
ask
him??) at my disposal, together with his rental limo, when he's not on a hire-job. Lesley volunteers to visit Hope in the hospital anytime I can't make it, “'Cause I live just a block away.” Suzanne, Joanne, Pat, Glo, and Bunny invite me to join their Brooklyn living collective, no rent contribution required. Marilyn drags me off to the gift of a Shiatsu massage, where the Korean masseuse diagnoses my neck and shoulder muscles as being the Great Wall of China. Toni offers free legal advice, Fran free medical advice, Vivvie free couple-counseling if that would help Larry and me, Loretta free typing of the book manuscript if any of it is ready.