Ordinary Life (7 page)

Jim said, “I would say, ‘What? You mean, that’s how it is? You just go slogging through life only to die?’ ”

“So you’d pass, huh?” I asked him.

“Hell, no,” he said. “I’d probably push to be first in line.” Then he reached for me in tender hopelessness and I stared over his shoulder and said, “I don’t understand anything.”

“Nobody does.” He held me tighter.

I had been asleep for a while when I heard a loud noise coming from downstairs. It took a while for it to register that it was the front door slamming. I ran to the window and saw my mother outside in her slip, walking purposefully down the sidewalk. I put on my robe and went after her. She startled when she heard me call her. “Oh, you scared me!” She laughed.

“Mom,” I began, out of breath. “Mom.” I couldn’t think of anything to say. I began to cry.

“Why, darling, what’s the matter?” she asked, and suddenly I wanted only for her to be my mother again. I wanted to tell her what the matter was, and I wanted her to fix it. Instead, I said, “Let’s go in the backyard.”

We sat in two lawn chairs, facing each other. The night was warm, beautiful. I showed my mother the full moon, and she smiled appreciatively and lifted her face up to it. Then I said, “I love you, Mom, and I want to keep you safe. You can’t live by yourself anymore, so we’ll find you a place where you won’t be alone. I’ll do everything I can to help make you happy there.”

She was still, listening to me. “I know this is difficult,” she said. And then, softly, “I know I’m ill.”

“Do you, Mom?”

“Oh yes, I know. Sometimes I forget—do you know?”

“I know, Mom. It’s part of the disease.”

“It’s Alzheimer’s disease.”

“Right.”

“And where is Joey? And Jim?”

“They’re asleep, Mom.”

“Oh, are they?”

“Yes, it’s—well, it’s late.”

“Oh. I wondered.” She turned to me then, and her eyes were not clouded or confused, and she looked glorious in her slip. “Well, you know I love you too, of course,” she said. I nodded, two parallel lines along my throat aching. “And I trust you. I’ll go where you say.” She looked around the yard. “Such lovely flowers,” she said. “I wish they would last forever.”

Her voice seemed so small in the pale darkness of the night, against the infinite number and complicated history of the stars in the sky above us. I moved closer and put my arm around her, as though I could protect her. As though I could save us both.

When I was a visiting nurse, I got a reputation for liking the hard patients. So when a case came up involving a man with cancer of the pancreas who was “difficult to manage,” he was assigned to me. He was being sent home from the hospital to die, and he needed someone to do dressing changes on his chest catheter, to help him with his morphine pump, and to provide emotional support. He was extremely angry, they said. Mean. Did I want him? And I said yes, because an immediate alliance had been struck between that patient and me as soon as they told me he was angry: he was thirty-one years old.

I went to the hospital to meet Richard the next day. One of the floor nurses led me to his room, talking in a low voice about how I could expect very little in the way of cooperation. “Sometimes he simply refuses to speak,” she said. “Don’t be surprised.”

We entered his room as he was emerging from the bathroom. A haze of marijuana smoke hung suspended in the air behind him. “Oh yes,” the nurse told me quietly. “He also smokes a lot of dope.” She spoke up then, told Richard, “This is Abby. She’ll be seeing you at home.”

I smiled, held out my hand. “Abby Epstein,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

He didn’t take my hand. He walked over to his bed, sat on it, and stared out the window. He was heartbreakingly thin, but still quite handsome, a light-skinned black man with wire-rimmed glasses.

“I’ll just leave the two of you alone to get acquainted,” the nurse said. She rolled her eyes at me, then left the room.

I moved over to stand in front of Richard, cleared my throat. “I just wanted to say hello, and to tell you that I’ll be coming to see you every day.”

Nothing.

“I wondered if eleven o’clock would be a good time.” He looked up at me, then away. “It could also be ten,” I said. “Or twelve.”

Nothing.

I waited. I heard the dripping of the bathroom faucet. The dope smell was still thick in the air. I wondered who sold it to him, what their conversation had been.
I’ll give you a discount, man. I mean, you’re checking out, right
? I shifted my weight, bent down a little to try to look into his face, but he turned away. “Well, I won’t take any more of your time now,” I said.

He laughed. “Yeah. I’m pretty busy.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven.”

I was almost out the door when I heard him speak again, but I couldn’t quite make it out. “Pardon?”

He looked me slowly up and down. “Fuck. You.”

I took in a breath, breathed back out. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Richard.”

When I was a freshman in college, I worked weekends at a hospital cafeteria. My job was to push a heavy steam cart up to a little
kitchen where I’d dish out meals for the patients on that particular unit. The nurses lined up to carry the trays to the patients. At that time, they still wore little white caps, each different from the other, and stud earrings. They wore their hair up off their collars. Their uniforms were white, their stockings were white, their shoes were white, even their watchbands were white. They were always busy, but they were remarkably cheerful. I admired them: their understated makeup, their calmness in the face of ever-impending disaster, their absolute willingness to help. I had gone to school intending to become a teacher, but after watching the nurses for a few weeks, I decided to change my major. “I’m going to go to nursing school,” I told one of the nurses, and she said, “Good. We need you.”

After I graduated, I got my own white cap with a navy blue stripe. I thought it looked great. I used white bobby pins to anchor it and I wore white pearl studs. I was cheerful, like my mentors. And I worked happily in hospitals until the time my husband picked me up after work one night and complained, again, that I hadn’t come out on time. “I was pushing on someone’s chest,” I said. “I was making his heart pump so he wouldn’t die. It didn’t particularly matter that my shift had ended.”

My husband stared straight ahead, shifted the car too precisely.

By the time we could afford two cars, I’d had children and needed to be home more often. So I started working part-time, visiting patients in their homes. As it happened, I liked doing that even more than working in hospitals. Because I saw all of those patients. They weren’t stripped of themselves, sitting alone in a hospital bed with a wrinkled patient gown tied on them. Now they wore their own clothes and sat in their own chairs, surrounded by the things that made them themselves: their newspapers
and coffee mugs, their exuberant dogs and various family members, their pictures on the walls. I liked that I could check their temperature while I smelled their dinner cooking, that I heard their phones ringing, saw their gardens blooming. I liked being closer to them. That’s what is best about nursing: you get close to patients, because when people are sick, they don’t bullshit. They are real, and you can be real back. What I understood about myself the day I decided to become a nurse is that there’s nothing I prize more than looking into someone’s eyes and seeing them true. I thought if I were a nurse, I could do that over and over again.

Richard lived in a brick building with six apartments. It was an old place in fairly good shape, with high, interesting windows and gigantic screened-in porches. I stood outside looking at the place, wondering what he’d thought when he first saw it. Probably he didn’t think,
So this is where I’ll die
. Probably he thought,
This will do for now
.

I rang number five and was surprised to be immediately buzzed in. I was afraid I’d have to get the super, that Richard might refuse to admit me, but when I reached his door, I saw why I’d been let in so promptly—someone else had done it. A red-haired woman, pale and beautiful and wary looking, held out her hand. “I’m Richard’s girlfriend,” she said. “Laura.”

I shook her hand, told her my name. “Is he up?” I asked.

She motioned me inside the living room. “Yes, he’s in the bedroom. He’s lying down. You’re going to do his dressing, right?” I nodded. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette. “I was taught how, you know, but he doesn’t like for me to do it.” She exhaled in a straight line, up into the air over her head. There was some
anger in it. Then she looked levelly at me. “I thought I’d watch, though, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “You can help me if you want.”

“No,” she said. “Richard wouldn’t like it.”

“I need to do an interview first,” I said. “First-visit stuff—just some routine questions.”

“He won’t tell you anything.”

I hesitated, then said, “Well, maybe I’ll just try.”

She shrugged. “Call me when you’re ready for me.”

She was wearing a pair of tight blue jeans and a white blouse, knotted at the waist. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a deep red. She wore large gold hoop earrings and her hair was in a falling-down bun that was lovely. There were violet-colored smudges under her eyes, and I wondered when she’d last slept through the night. When was the last time she’d worried over something at work, over the cost of groceries? What luxury most of us enjoy, complaining about the things we do: long lines, uncomfortable weather, the numbers on the bathroom scale. I couldn’t imagine being Laura, waking up at night to someone you loved and knew was dying. Surely she watched, sometimes, in the moonlight, for the rise and fall of his chest. Surely she rose up on one elbow, full of fear, to look, then fell, relieved and aching, back onto her own pillow. Usually people die at night, late. Three
A.M
., four-fifteen. They are being polite, I suppose. They mean not to grieve everyone so much.

I thought about when Laura went with Richard to hear about what was wrong with him. I knew they’d been told in his doctor’s office, with its pale colors and diplomas on the wall and pictures of the doctor’s children tanned and smiling. I saw them hearing the news and then getting back in their car, very different people
from the ones who’d left it an hour ago. They’d locked their doors. Things would never be the same. They’d buckled their seat belts. Things would never be the same. What anguish there is in knowing that things will really never be the same! Once, when my daughter was seven, I came into her room to tell her dinner was ready. She was standing at her window, looking out at the sunset. “Time to eat,” I said. And she said, not turning around, “There will never be another day exactly like this one ever, ever again.” I only swallowed, full of a mother’s regret for the necessary lessons of childhood. I only said, “It’s fried chicken, honey. Wash up.”

“Who is it?” I heard Richard yell. Laura stood, ground out her cigarette. “Wait here,” she told me. She went into the bedroom and I heard her say, “It’s the nurse. The one who came to the hospital to see you yesterday.” There was a silence then, and Laura came out and nodded. I wasn’t sure, suddenly, and I stood there until she said, “Go ahead. He’s waiting.”

The bedroom was dark, filled with bookshelves. The one over Richard’s head held hardback volumes about theater. I looked at them quickly, then at him. “Are you the one interested in theater?”

His look was one of contempt and astonishment mixed. He was lying on a bed that had been neatly made. There was a beautiful quilt, rose colors and greens, folded back at his feet. He pulled up his T-shirt to reveal his dressing. “Do it,” he said.

“Well, I need to ask you some questions first. I have to take this … sort of … health history.” In my armpits, I felt the deep tickle of perspiration starting. I opened my bag to pull out his chart.

“I’m dying,” he said. He meant that was all I needed to know.

I looked at him. “I know. And I need to tell you that I don’t have any particular way of being about that, Richard. I know it’s unfair
what’s happened to you. I know you have a lot of pain. We can talk about it, if you want to. But I come in here and I see your books and my inclination is to try to get to know other parts of you. There are still other parts to you.”

He looked around me, yelled, “Laura!” She came into the room and he gestured angrily toward me. “Get her out of here.”

She sighed. “Richard—”

“Get her the fuck out.”

“Fine,” she said. “Then I’ll do your dressing.”

“No, you won’t.” He struggled to sit up.

“Look,” I said. “I’ll do it. I’m sorry, Richard, if I offended you. I’ll do your dressing and that’s all for today, okay? I’ll just do it and go. All right?”

He sat, swaying slightly from side to side, as though remembering a dance. I noticed the scent of lilacs coming through the open bedroom window, that bold, little girls’ perfume smell. I regretted myself, my too rapid move toward an unearned intimacy. After a moment, though, Richard lay back down, closed his eyes, and pulled up his shirt. I nodded at Laura, and she stood back, leaned against the doorjamb. I worked quickly, quietly. I finished in seven minutes. I said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, same time,” and left the bedroom.