Turtleface and Beyond (7 page)

One of the residents was a strikingly pretty woman named Elsa. I couldn't figure out why she was there. She seemed to be in control of herself most of the time, though she did walk with a limp. She had a shock of gray hair running from the top of her forehead and very intense piercing eyes. Several times when I was in the cafeteria I noticed that she was looking at me. Her face had these sharp features and at first I thought she was angry with me about something. But then I began to understand that it was a look she always wore. Some people are just like that. They look angry even when they are feeling calm, or merely curious. I wondered if this was part of the reason Elsa had found herself residing here in the first place. One time I took Joseph, the resident whom I was accompanying, over to her table and we sat down next to her. Joseph had a visual disability and would feel all of his food with his fingers before he ate it.

“I hope you wash his hands before he does that,” said Elsa.

I said, “We always wash up before we eat, right, Joe?”

“That's right,” agreed Joseph, though now that I thought of it we had neglected to do so on that day. Elsa regarded his dirty fingers with disdain.

“My name is Georgie,” I told her.

“I'm Elsa,” she said.

I was going to extend my hand for her to shake, but I hadn't washed my hands either, and I figured she could tell. We ate the rest of the meal in silence.

Joseph told me that Elsa was “mental,” that she would fly off the handle sometimes and then she would have to be restrained.

“They give her drugs now,” he said, “and she's more calm.”

I hadn't had much experience with women up until that point. In school, my advances had been met mostly with amused dismissal and it wasn't until later, when I fell in with the bass player of a local band, that I had what could be described as a relationship with a woman. That bass player was ten years my senior and left me for another woman, a turn of events which I took hard. I realized then that I had developed an attraction to older women. Elsa was perhaps thirty-five years old, and I found myself thinking about her quite a lot.

I suppose she could sense my interest. One time when I was eating with Joseph she walked by and brushed her hand across my back. I was very startled by this. I followed her out of the cafeteria and she handed me a folded-up paper towel and then turned away.

On the square of paper towel she had written, in crayon, “I am not crazy. Meet me. OK?”

By the time I had read it she was gone. I tried to figure out where she wanted to meet me and was frustrated at the vagueness of this request. But then, that afternoon, as I walked away from the main building toward the bus stop to go home, I saw her sitting on the side steps smoking a cigarette. Most of the residents were not allowed to smoke. She had permission though.

I walked up to her. “I read your note,” I said.

“Good,” she said.

“What did it mean though?”

“I can't discuss that right now,” she said, looking away.

“Okay,” I said.

We talked a while longer about things unrelated to the note. She told me she was from Wisconsin. She fidgeted a lot. Abruptly, in the middle of a sentence, she stood up and limped back up the stairs and went inside.

Like I said before, I knew it was irresponsible to be flirting like that with a resident. But she didn't seem “mental” to me. She just seemed nervous. And she was older than me. At that point in my life I assumed that wisdom came with age.

A few days later I was working an overnight shift and she startled me. It was nearly 4:00 a.m. and I was on the covered walkway between the residential halls. She darted out from the shadows and took hold of my arm.

“This way,” she said.

We went into the exercise center and there she removed my clothes and then she took off her pants. I wanted her to take off her shirt too, but she wouldn't. She lay me down and climbed on top and we had very quick, hurried sex on one of the firm vinyl-covered mats. When it was over she grabbed her pants and shuffled off, leaving me there naked. I gathered up my clothes and finished my shift.

From that point on, whenever I had a night shift, we would meet up in the exercise room and have awkward, half-clothed sex. We rarely spoke and when my shift was over I would walk home in the dim morning light wondering if it hadn't been a dream.

This pattern continued for perhaps two months and then she stopped meeting me. I tried to catch her eye in the cafeteria during the day but she wouldn't even look my way. I was sad and a little heartbroken, but took it in stride. I was beginning to notice a pattern in my relationships with older women, or so I thought.

Elsa and I hadn't spoken or made eye contact in over a month when she approached me in the hallway and shoved another folded-up paper towel into my hand. This time she stayed there and waited for me to read it.

It said “pregnancy test.”

“You took one?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “I need you to buy one,” she said. “Buy one for me.”

“You're pregnant?”

“I need you to buy a test,” she said, “from a drugstore.”

“Okay…” I said.

I fretted over this for hours until my workday was done. Then I went to the pharmacy and picked out the simplest-looking test. I was mortified to be seen buying such an item. I looked over the directions and it explained that the woman had to pee onto a strip of paper. The paper would show one red line if she wasn't pregnant and two if she was. What was it about pee that told you a woman was pregnant? I considered tampering with the test, peeing on the strip of paper myself so that the result would come out negative, but then I realized this wouldn't actually change things. I wasn't thinking rationally.

I returned to Riverwood and slipped the testing kit to Elsa. She thanked me and went on her way. I wanted to wait around for the result, but there was no good excuse for me being there after the end of my shift. So I went home and didn't sleep at all.

The next day Elsa handed me the little plastic tube which held the all-powerful strip. I took it from her, trying to gauge the results by the look on her face. I couldn't tell what was going on behind those pale eyes, though. I realized then, as I looked at her for an answer, that she really was crazy. By that I mean she wasn't living in the same world as the rest of us. Something about her gaze suggested an irrational state of mind. And then, a minute later, I stood alone in an empty closet looking down at the strip of paper she had peed upon, and I saw the two red lines declaring she was pregnant with a child we had made together.

I was terrified. I ran out of the closet and searched the hallways for Elsa. That crazy woman! We were going to have a crazy child! A nutcase baby! She was gone though, and people were staring at me running around like that. I left work early, without telling anyone, and I considered never going back.

I returned to the hospital a few nights later though, and I had a talk with Elsa. She sat on the cement steps looking up at me with her wide, shaky eyes, smoking one cigarette after another.

“I don't think you should smoke now,” I told her.

“It calms my nerves,” she said.

“It's bad for the baby.”

“Babies don't smoke,” she said, as if that somehow refuted the facts.

I asked her if she would consider having an abortion.

“No. Never,” she said.

I felt the blood rush from my head and had to sit down. I sat next to Elsa and put my head between my knees. I know they say it is a miracle, the act of creating life. I know they say it changes you forever, for the better, when you see your first child born into the world. But I felt only fear that night, fear and some kind of awful wrath unleashed upon me for the things I had done. I began to cry and Elsa rubbed my back with the heel of her hand. She hummed a song too, a strange song I'd never heard, and it made no sense at all.

I wondered when the doctors would know about this. I wondered when I would get fired and if what I'd done was against the law and if so would I be put in jail. Over the next few weeks, as I watched Elsa walk around, I was sure I could see her belly growing. Other people must be noticing, I thought. I moped along thinking,
When, finally, is the shit going to hit the fan?

I had a strange moment though, when I was back in that drugstore. I walked by the shelf where I had picked up that little pregnancy test and I stared at all the different-colored boxes thinking how each one was a box full of fate. Next to the boxes was a row of plastic bottles and some of them were labeled “Prenatal Vitamins.” I grabbed one of those, stuffed it in my pocket, and left without paying.

I gave the bottle to Elsa and told her to take one a day, like the directions said.

“More pills…” she said to me.

“Take them,” I said. “And stop smoking.”

It would be an exaggeration to say that I loved Elsa, a huge exaggeration, but I did feel affection for her. And on this day I felt responsibility too. It was a new feeling.

It was during the night shift, a few days later, that I heard Elsa calling out my name. She wasn't yelling, she was just repeating my name steadily and it echoed down the hallway.

I ran to her room and saw that it was empty. She was in the bathroom down the hall. I tapped my fingers on the door.

“It's me,” I said.

“Go away,” she said.

I stood outside the door for two hours. Other staff members came and looked at me and one of the nurses called security. I wasn't supposed to be in the women's wing at that hour. I wasn't supposed to be standing outside the bathroom door like that, blocking the way, and not listening to anything anyone said.

The security crew arrived and I stood my ground. They hauled me away and as they did Elsa came out of the bathroom, finally. Her face was white and drawn and her eyes met mine and she nodded. The baby was gone.

They call it a miscarriage and it happens one time out of every five. That's what I read. Oh, maybe it happens more, maybe when the parents are like me and Elsa it happens every time. I never even saw Elsa after that. I was fired from my job at the Riverwood Retreat and in return for my silence on the matter my record stated only that I was terminated for personal differences, or something like that.

I'm a bit older now and I find myself wondering about the child that Elsa and I could have made. Children, I believe, can exceed the sum total of their parents. Perhaps in their little genes lie lessons learned from all of our past mistakes. We never could have raised that kid right, Elsa and I, but maybe she would still have grown up to be beautiful and strong.

 

TRAVELS WITH PAUL

 

I had been fired from my job for a stupid indiscretion and needed to leave town. I packed up my belongings quickly and caught a ride with an acquaintance who was headed out West. I say “acquaintance” because I'd only met him once before. He was an Irish fellow named Paul O'Malley and he was the cousin of a woman I used to date, or maybe they were lovers, I don't know. She had introduced him to me one night in a bar by saying, “This is my cousin Paul.”

Paul was passing through town on his way to the West Coast and had announced that he would be gone in the morning. I saw him two weeks later though, right after I'd been fired from that job. He was wandering downtown, looking a little dazed and strung out.

“I haven't slept in three days,” he told me.

“I thought you were going west,” I said.

“I am.”

“But you said you were leaving two weeks ago.”

“I got hung up. Wait, two weeks? It hasn't been that long.”

“Yes, it has.”

“Oh.” Paul scratched his head. His hair was thinning at the top. He was a skinny guy with a long neck and an enormous Adam's apple which bobbed up and down as he spoke. He needed a shave too, or maybe he was growing a beard. The stubble was at that awkward scruffy halfway point.

“I got fired from my job,” I told Paul. “I'd like to leave town.”

“You want to ride with me? I'll leave tomorrow.”

This idea seemed to perk Paul up. He clapped his hands together and rubbed his fuzzy chin.

“Sure, yeah, okay,” I said.

“We'll leave in the morning.”

“Great, fine.”

We left two days later. Paul picked me up at my place, still looking tired and run-down.

“I can't sleep,” he said. “I can't even shut my eyes.”

“What's wrong with you?” I asked him.

“Nothing. Insomnia. I'm fine.”

“You don't look fine.”

“Well, I feel fine,” he said, “I just can't sleep.”

“Listen,” I told him, “I don't want any funny business. I just need a ride out of town.”

“Sure, right, I understand that,” he said.

Paul's car was a small Ford hatchback. It was already crammed full with his stuff, so I had to leave several of my belongings behind. I left them at the house of a friend with the understanding that I'd return for them later. I never did.

Anyway, we hit the road and began our journey west. Paul's car was equipped with a set of very worn-out seats. The one I was sitting in, the passenger seat, had something wrong with the backrest. If I leaned back it would slope off to one side and I'd twist around uncomfortably. I'd been hoping to get a little sleep while he drove, but I could see now that this wouldn't be possible.

After about three hours of driving Paul pulled off the highway and stopped in front of a pizza shop. He unbuckled his pants and pulled them down to his knees. Then he looked at me.

“What are you doing?” I asked him.

“I thought maybe you'd like to give me a blow job,” he said.

“No,” I said. “No, I wouldn't.”

Paul pursed his lips and nodded his head.

“All right,” he said, pulling his pants up in a hurry. He put the car in gear and sped back out onto the highway.