Oh my poor back—
Where are you, nurse? I need a bedpan—
Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten—
Tom? You there, Tom?
Holy Mother of God, pray for us—
Dass ich so traurig bin—
I’ve called and called and no one hears—
Health of the weak, Refuge of sinners—
Tom, you there?
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten—
Ifs like to break, my back—
Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs, pray for us—
Das geht mir nicht aus dem Sinn—
Tom?
The drug is swirling me downward into the cold depths of a sea.
Temperature, Mrs. Shipley. That’s it. Wake up and open your mouth. There—”
I’m hauled out of sleep, like a fish in a net.
“What is it? What’s all this? Who’re you?”
Even though I see she wears a uniform, at first I’m not quite certain where I am. Then I know. They’ve caught me. They’ve put me here and I can’t get out. Then, as I remember why, the pain returns all of a surge, a sudden visitation, and I grab at the nurse’s hand.
“Oh—”
“Hurts, eh? Well, Doctor Corby said you were to have a two-ninety-two whenever you need it. Can you just hang on a few minutes, my dear, and I’ll get something for you.”
She’s spoken so placidly, and said “my dear” so unaffectedly, that I’m certain she means her promise. She’s not the pill nurse. This woman’s different, ample, with specks of gray in her brown hair. She’s not condescending. How I like her matter-of-factness. But it weakens me, all the same, and undermines my nerve, as always when I’m sympathized with, and I find I’m shamefully clinging to her arm and crying and cannot seem to stop.
She puts an arm on my shaking shoulders.
“There, there. It’ll be all right. You just wait a minute. I’ll get you something right away.”
She brings the garish pink pill and I seize it from her and gulp it down. Finally I’m able to compose myself.
“Thanks, nurse. You’re very good.”
“It’s my job,” she says briskly, but she smiles.
And then I see it really is her job. I needn’t feel beholden. That’s a help. I can’t bear to feel indebted. I can be as grateful as the next person, as long as it’s not forced on me. When she’s gone, I try to sleep again, but I can’t. All around me, people are waking, emitting morning noises, open-mouthed yawns, rustling of bedclothes, gaseous belches, volcanic wind from various bowels.
The woman in the next bed is humming and from time to time she bursts into senseless song.
“Loo, loo—” she sings.
She’s so scrawny, it’s a wonder she can stand up at all, but she eases herself cautiously out of bed and walks bent over, holding her hands to her abdomen, as though afraid something would become dislodged there if she didn’t take care to hold it in place. She’s just skin and bone, a hag from the illustrations to a frightening fairy tale. She can’t be more than five feet tall, and when she’s bent she looks a dwarf woman, such a measly little creature that if she shriveled a trace more she’d disappear altogether.
“Well, what kind of a night did you have?” she asks. “Kinda disturbed, eh?”
Her voice has that insufferable brightness that I loathe. I’m not in the mood for her cheerfulness. I wish to heaven she’d go away and leave me alone.
“I scarcely slept a wink,” I reply. “Who could, in this place, with all the moaning and groaning that goes on? You might as well try to sleep in a railway station.”
“You was the one doing most of the talking,” she says. “I heard you. You was up twice, and the nurse had to put you back.”
I look at her coldly. “You must be mistaken. I never said a word. I was right here in this bed all night. I certainly never moved a muscle.”
“That’s what you think,” she says. “Mrs. Reilly will bear me out.”
She shrieks across to a bed opposite.
“Oh, Mrs. Reilly, are you awake, dear? You heard this lady last night, didn’t you? Wasn’t she up and down? A regular jack-in-the-box, wasn’t that a fact?”
A mountain of flesh stirs slightly in the crumpled bed, but when the voice emerges it is clear and musical with a marked Irish accent—so much at odds with the swaying mound of her body that I’m fascinated and can’t help staring.
“I heard her, the poor lady. I did, surely.”
Then I realize what it is she’s saying. It can’t be true. I have no recollection. I feel there is some hidden malice in this tiny crone who stands at the foot of my bed. What’s it to her, anyway? She’s lying. I know it,
“You’re wrong. I lay here half the night, wide awake, listening. I couldn’t get to sleep at all, for the racket. Is someone German?”
“That’s her, Mrs. Dobereiner,” the creature hisses, pointing across the way. “She don’t speak much English, but she sings a treat. A regular meadowlark. I wisht she could sing so we could get the sense of it, though. A lotta foreigners around these days, ain’t there?”
She leans and screeches. “We’re just saying how we like to hear you sing, Mrs. Dobereiner.”
She evidently believes that if she talks loudly enough, it will pierce the wall of language.
“Sing, you know—” she yells. “Loo, loo—”
She breaks off and shakes her head in my direction.
“She gets pretty down sometimes,” she says in an unnecessary whisper. “Not being able to make herself understood, you know. It’d try the patience of a saint. Well, too bad you didn’t get a good night. It makes all the difference, a good night’s sleep, don’t it?”
“I’ll never be able to sleep, with so many around,” I say irritably. “Never in this world. They had to put me in this place, Marvin said, because they had no semi-privates. I’ll not sleep at all, I can tell you that.”
“Semi-privates?” she says sharply. “Well, lucky for you if you could afford it, that’s all I can say. Me, I couldn’t go there if they had ten million semi-privates this very minute. Marvin’s your son? I seen him yesterday. Fine-looking fellow. You’re lucky. I got no one like that.”
“No children?”
“Never had a one, although not through lack of wanting them. It’s God’s will, I guess. We’ve neither chick nor child, Tom and me.”
“Tom? Oh—you’re the one I heard last night, that kept asking if Tom was there.”
“More than likely,” she says calmly. “I wouldn’t put it past me. I’m used to him there at night. I oughta be. We been married fifty-two years this August. I’m seventy. Wed at eighteen. What’s your man’s name? John, ain’t it?”
I can only gape at her, and she chortles. “See? Told you I heard you in the night. Believe me now?”
I turn my face away. There is nowhere to be alone here. The curtains are perpetually open. I put a hand over my face and the little creature hops alongside my head.
“Hey—don’t take on so,” she says. “I never meant no harm. Is he—he’s not living, then? I’m real sorry. I never meant to make you feel that bad.”
She means well, I suppose. The hospital gown she wears comes only to her knees—a child’s size, it looks, and her bony blue-veined shanks protrude. Like bleached flour sacking it is, that gown, tied with tapes at the back of her neck, and it flaps open as she bends to peer at the card on the foot of my bed, revealing buttocks dented and hollowed with leanness. I almost have to laugh, until I realize I’m wearing the same kind of gown myself.
“I see you’re Mrs. Shipley,” she says. “Might as well get acquainted. I’m Mrs. Jardine. Elva Jardine. That there’s Mrs. Dobereiner, like I said, and Mrs. Reilly’s the big lady there.”
She bends close to me.
“Did you ever see such weight in all your born days? They had to bring her in on a wheelchair, and it took three orderlies to hoist her into the bed. It’s her glands, I should imagine. A real cross to
bear, if you ask me. Tom was always saying to me—Elva, you’re light as a feather, you oughta get some meat on your bones. But now I’m glad, I’ll tell the cock-eyed world. You ain’t exactly skinny yourself, Mrs. Shipley, but you’re not a patch on her.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake—” I hardly know what I’m saying, in my frenzy for quiet. I’m not feeling well. Can’t you leave me alone?”
“Oh, okay,” she sniffs. “If you feel that way about it.”
Offended, she marches off, still bent nearly double. The hours are long. I manage to sleep for a while. Sometimes I listen to the cars on the street outside. They sound so busy, so preoccupied. Yet they’re unreal. They’re only toy cars out there, and the street is only a creation of the imagination. All that is, is here. Sometimes I’m dizzy, nauseated. The nurse, a new one, brings the soothing pills. I settle into hazy lethargy.
“Mother—”
It’s Marvin. Can he be here already?
“Doris wasn’t feeling well. She’ll come tomorrow. How are you?”
He towers there, looking at me uncertainly, trying to think of things to say. His broad reddish face is sprinkled with perspiration. It’s been a warm day. I hadn’t noticed. He wipes the sweat from his upper lip with the back of his hand. I’m strangely pleased to see him. I don’t mean to complain. But when I speak, out it all comes.
“You’d not believe it, Marvin, the row that goes on here at night. I never heard such snoring, and talking in their sleep. I barely slept. The woman next to me—such a talker. She can’t keep her mouth shut one minute. It’s pester, pester, all the time. Oh, if you knew what it’s like—”
“I’ll ask again about a semi-private.”
“Anywhere would be an improvement on this place. You’ve no idea.”
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll see what I can do. Anything you want?”
“No, I guess not. What would I need, here? Oh, you might ask Doris to bring my two satin nightgowns—the pale pink one, that is, and the blue. I can’t abide these gowns. Like sackcloth, they are, so heavy, and they itch. Oh—and the bun for my hair. I’ve lost the one I had. There’s a spare one in the top drawer of my dresser. And tell her to be sure to bring the hairnets—not the heavy night ones, the others. She’ll know. And some hairpins. She might just bring that bottle of Lily of the Valley that Tina gave me, too.”
“Okay. I’ll try to remember it all. You want anything like food or anything?”
“I’ve no appetite. The food they serve you here is slop. Just mush, that’s all. No one could eat that kind of stuff. I’ve no stomach for it. You know what they handed me for supper? A poached egg. Fancy, that was all. Not a scrap of meat. I hate eggs. Red jelly for dessert, and not a blessed thing more. They’re doing mighty well on patients’ money here, I can tell you.”
“You’re on what they call a soft diet,” he says unhappily. “It’s what the doctor said. They’re not trying to gyp you.”
“Soft diet, indeed. Soft in the head, you mean. That doctor—what’s his name? That Doctor Tappen—I never thought much of him.”
“Doctor Corby. Tappen was in Manawaka years ago.”
“Yes, yes, I know. I wasn’t thinking, that’s all—”
I’m humiliated by his correction, and it makes me cross at him. Tact was never his long suit.
“If you had to eat this sloppy mush, you’d soon see—”
“Would you like some grapes? He said fruit would be okay.”
“Well—” I’m mollified a little, and yet embarrassed, unwilling to give in, for I know I’ve been unreasonable. It’s not Marvin’s fault. It’s no one’s fault, the soft disgusting egg, the shrunken world, the voices that wail like mourners through the night. Why is it always so hard to find the proper one to blame? Why do I always want to find the one? As though it really helped.
“I’ll bring you some tomorrow,” Marvin says. “You try to sleep, eh?”
People are always telling me to sleep, as though it were some kind of cure for what ails me.
“I will. I’m all right, really.”
“Sure?” He looks anxiously at me, and I can’t bear the memory of my whining.
“Certain. Don’t you concern yourself, Marvin.”
“Well, I am concerned,” he says. “Naturally.”
He is, too. I can see it in his face.
“What’s wrong with Doris? Nothing serious?”
“Oh, she had another of her spells,” he says. “Her heart’s none too good, you know.”
He stands there, frowning.
“It worries me,” he says.
And I see he’s afraid, for her and for himself. He’s fond of her. She means a great deal to him. It’s only natural, I suppose. But it seems unfamiliar to me, hard to recognize or accept.
“Well, you get along home now,” I say.
I feel ashamed, all at once, still to be here, to be around. What if she goes before I do? That would be unfair, unnatural.
“I’ll see about the room,” he promises. And then he walks away, and I’m alone once more, surrounded by this mewling nursery of old ladies. Of whom I’m one. It rarely strikes a person that way.
At the next bed, Elva Jardine’s man, Tom, sits on a straight-backed chair and clenches his hands together, cracking the knuckles. He’s a bald old man with a yellow-white mustache. He’s very quiet. No wonder, living with that woman. I don’t suppose he ever got a word in edgewise.
“The doctor said the stitches would come out tomorrow,” she’s rattling on. “That’s quick, he says. You’re a model patient, Mrs. Jardine, he says to me. They’re not often out this soon, the stitches. I can nearly walk to the bathroom by myself now. That’s pretty good.”
“He never said when you’d be back home, Elva?”
“Well, no, he never said in so many words. But at the rate I’m going now, it won’t be long.”
“I sure hope not.”
“You okay, Tom? You’re managing okay?”
“Sure, I’m managing. But—oh, you know. It’s not the same.”
“Yeh. Well, it won’t be for long. Did Mrs. Garvey have you in for dinner, like she said?”
“Twice,” Tom says heavily. “She’s a rotten cook. I was grateful, mind. But she can’t cook for beans, that woman.”
“Never you mind. I’ll soon be back.”
“Well, gee, I sure hope so, Elva. You want anything?”
“Not a thing,” she assures him. “I’m dandy.”
“How’s the food? Not too bad, you said?”
“Oh, it’s quite good lately,” she says. “It’s fine. I had a piece of ham tonight, and a bit of chocolate cake. Quite enough for me. I never was much of a one for eating.”
“You never ate enough to keep a bird alive,” he grumbles. “You gotta try to eat, Elva. If you don’t stoke the furnace, the fire will go out.”
“That’s what you’ve always said,” she says.
There is such a tenderness in her voice that I’m ashamed to be listening. I turn my head and lie still. The bell rings. Visitors leave. Tom Jardine clumps off along the corridor.
Everything is quiet. And then 1 hear sounds from the next bed. It’s the Jardine woman, and she’s crying. Soon I hear her blowing her nose.
“Well, this won’t speed me none,” she mutters, “and that’s a certainty.”
She pulls the drawer of the metal bedside table and begins to paw through its contents.
“Where’s my hairbrush got to? Oh, here we are. Mercy, does my hair ever need a good wash—”
She brushes at her scalp with its thin gray quilt of hair.
“Loo, loo—” She warbles with the hairpins in her mouth. Despite myself, I turn to watch. She takes the pins carefully from between her lips and jabs them at her head. I can’t see why she needs hairpins—she’s got so little hair to anchor down. She sings again, this time with words. Her voice is reedy and flutelike, sharp or flat in all the wrong spots.
“You’ll get a line and I’ll get a pole, honey.
You get a line and I’ll get a pole, habe.
You get a line and I’ll get a pole
And we’ll go down to the crawdad hole,
Honey, baby mine—”
Her dental plate clicks like a snapping turtle. She reaches in her mouth and pulls out the offending teeth. She holds them in her hand, regarding them morosely. Then she sees me watching her. I turn my head away, but not quickly enough.
“Tom hates to see me without my plate,” she says. “But the blame thing’s never been a good fit. I only put it in when he’s here. I can chew just as well without it, except for crusts.”
I don’t reply. She calls across to the bed opposite, where under the bedclothes the human mount palpitates and gurgles.
“How’s your daughter, Mrs. Reilly? I seen she brought you some flowers.”
“Gladioli, they are. Pink gladioli. They’re a lovely flower, the gladioli.”
The voice of the mountain shocks me once more with its clarity, its musical sweetness. Mrs. Reilly lifts an arm to touch the flowers, a white and giant arm, larded inches deep, the fat rolling and undulating.
They’re a good-lasting flower,” Elva Jardine concedes.
“My daughter’s had trouble with her feet, the poor soul,” Mrs. Reilly says. “It’s the standing does it. Behind a counter all day. It’s a hard thing, altogether.”
“She’s a heavy girl. She’s got quite a load to carry around, there.”
“She can’t diet. She can’t diet at all, Eileen can’t. It makes her go very faint. I’m the same myself. It takes the heart out of me, entirely. You’d scarcely believe what I was given for my dinner tonight, Mrs. Jardine.”
“Yeh, you showed me. Well, it’s a crying shame all right, but it’s for your own good, Mrs. Reilly. Your doctor said so, dear. You mustn’t lose sight of that. So much flesh is a danger to your heart.”