Range of Motion (12 page)

Wanda comes in carrying Jay’s feeding and I get out of the way, go to sit in the corner. After the stuff starts dripping in, she pulls an extra chair up to sit beside me. “I’d like to tell you what happened, why I got fired.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

“All right.” Actually, I do want to know.

“I was working nights,” she says. “There was a woman who was dying, Irene was her name, sweet woman, and she had these sandals she kept at the side of the bed. They were so small. She never used them, she was too weak to get up, she just wanted them there. I think she thought maybe if she kept them there, she’d get to use them again. And I also think it was a way for us to know her—you know, a way of her saying, ‘Look, I wasn’t always a patient lying here in this bed. I went shopping. These are the shoes I picked out.’ ”

She looks at me, and I nod.

“Anyway,” Wanda says, “she was in a lot of pain. I’d been taking care of her for a long time, a few weeks; every time I was on, I had her. I knew this was going to be the night that she died. After a while, you can just tell.

“It was really busy when you worked nights, you had at least eleven patients, you didn’t ever have time to sit with any of them. I went in to see her as often as I could, I increased
her morphine drip, I turned her and rubbed her back, but it wasn’t enough. She was really restless. She asked me to put her on the floor. I said I couldn’t do that. She said, Why not, she wanted to be on the floor, she was so sick of the bed, it was making her feel crazy to be in that bed. She wanted to be on the floor where there was more room. So I said, Fine, and I put a bunch of blankets down and got an aide to help me and we put her on the floor. And she smiled at me and said thank you. And the next time I came in she had died. I called the resident to pronounce her, and he said, What the hell was she doing on the floor? And I told him. He told someone else, and the next time I came to work they told me to punch out, I was fired.”

She smiles ruefully at me, shrugs. “And that was it. They were not interested in any explanations. They didn’t care that the other nurses all tried to defend me. They didn’t care that all my evaluations had been excellent.”

I don’t know what to think about what she has told me. I don’t think what she did was wrong, yet it doesn’t seem quite right, either. Suppose Jay woke up and asked her to put him on the floor. Suppose I walked in and found him there, wouldn’t I be angry? But he would say, “No, Lainey, I asked for this.” Unless he was dead. Suppose I came in and he was dead on the floor. Wouldn’t I be angry? Even if I knew he’d asked to be put there? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.

“What made you become a nurse?” I ask Wanda.

“Oh well, I wanted … I had a need to express my compassion. I wanted to help.” She looks carefully at my face. “I care for people. They don’t always let you show that.”

“No.”

She leans back, sighs. “I’ll tell you, nursing school was murder. Once we were learning about hearts, and the instructor held up a beef heart—that’s what we had to study, a heart from a cow, only the medical students got to look at a human heart. But anyway, he stuck his finger through a valve to show us the connection between the atrium and the ventricle, then wiggled it a little like he was playing a game, and I passed out. Not because it was gross. Because it was unholy. I understood we needed to learn. But I thought we should learn with reverence. I mean, there was a cow, born to a mother cow, living on the earth, and now here was that cow’s heart in the hand of a human who was making fun of it.”

“Yes,” I say, as though I know exactly what she is talking about. And I sort of do.

“From the time I first started nursing,” she says, “patients would do things for me they wouldn’t do for other nurses.”

“Like what?”

“Well, once I took care of this woman psychiatrist who’d been horrible to all the other nurses, she was really hard to get along with. She wouldn’t let anyone bathe her, and she was bedridden, believe me, she needed to get bathed. By the
end of the day, I’d washed her. Turned out she was embarrassed to have anyone see her feet. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, the tenderness of that?”

I smile.

“And then when I was just an aide, a woman who’d had a colostomy picked me to be the one to ask about sex. She told me to close the door and then she said, ‘What about my husband? How does one have sex with this thing?’ She was quite formal, you know, a very rich woman, lying in bed in her turquoise negligee, her face all made up. ‘How does
one
have sex?’ I was sort of scared, but I knew she needed me to tell her something. I knew she wouldn’t ask anyone else. So I said, ‘Well, you just take off the bag and tape a little cotton square over the stoma. And then you forget about it. Because that’s not what he’s making love to.’ And then I asked her what was so attractive about the original exit, anyway. You know. A stoma is no worse than an asshole, was my opinion.”

She leans forward again, speaks softly. “I’m just trying to tell you I know what you’re doing with all these things around your husband—his clothes, the kids’ drawings, all the things you bring in from home. And the way you talk to him, read to him. I support you one hundred percent. I think it really helps.”

I look back at her, and my heart feels like a full bucket, hanging heavy in my chest. “Do you really?”

“Yes.”

“The kids have started doing it too,” I tell her. “They tell him little stories. Well, the younger one, Amy, does. Sarah’s
still not sure. But she’s starting to come around. Last time we visited she told him she’d gotten an
A
on a test just before we left. She sort of yelled it from the middle of the room. I hope it’s okay. I hope it’s not … I don’t know, damaging or anything for them.”

“I think it’s fine. I think it’s a good way for them to feel like they’re doing something too. And may I tell you something? I also think you should take care of yourself. You can crack up a little when these things go on for so long. You’ve got to bring a healthy self in here. That will help him most. He needs to feel your strength. And you need to do what you have to to keep it.”

“Well, yes, I know. I know that. In fact, I just wanted to see him this morning, and then I’m going away all day. To a farm, with my neighbor and our children. To relax.”

“Good.”

I pick up my purse, pull it tight against my belly. “So, do you … honestly now, do you really think there’s a chance he’ll come home?”

“I absolutely do.”

“Yes. Well, I believe it too. I don’t know that anyone else does, though.”

“You’d be surprised. When I told you we talk about you, that’s because we admire you.”

I put my hands over my face, start to cry. Wanda puts her hand on my shoulder, speaks softly. “We’re going to get him back to you, Mrs. Berman.”

I nod, sniff loudly. “Please call me ‘Lainey.’ ”

“Okay. You know what the nurses where I used to work called me?”

“What?”

“ ‘Wonder.’ ”

“Oh. That’s good.”

“Yes, I thought so, too.” She stands up. “Go out to the country. Have a good time. And don’t worry, we’ll take care of him.”

I come out into the hall, close the door quietly. I’m a little nervous. I wonder if I’ve said too much. I feel as though I’ve unzipped myself and handed my shy insides to a nurse named Wonder. If that was a mistake, it’s too late now.

A
lice and I are sitting at the edge of the brook, making circles in the water with our winter-white feet. The water is so clear it’s nearly invisible, so cold it feels like it’s biting. Still, when winter is newly gone and you can sit on the grass, it’s hard to pass up a stream running at your feet. We dangle past the point of ache and into numbness, then pull our feet out for a while, hold them in our hands to warm them. The kids are letting caterpillars crawl up the inside of their arms for the sticky tickle, shrieking out their pleasure. I have an image of the caterpillars rolling their eyes.

“I wish I could live here.” Alice sighs, reaching out to stroke the low-hanging leaves of the tree beside her.

“Why don’t you?”

“Oh, you know. Jobs. Schools. Plus once I got here I probably wouldn’t like it anymore. I’d miss having things close by: movies, the dry cleaners. Broccoli. You know.”

“Yeah. And me. You’d miss me, right?”

She smiles, dips her fingers into the brook, flips water at me. Confirmation. Then, leaning back on her elbows, she says, “Isn’t it lucky that we live next door to each other? I never liked my neighbors before. Well, I liked them, but I couldn’t really be friends with them. Not like with you and Jay.”

Jay. I realize I have actually had a moment of not thinking of him. But now his spirit wedges itself between the two of us. If he were here, he’d put his feet in the water too, maybe stand up and walk down the stream a ways. And then he’d turn back, look toward me, hold out a hand. We shared. Whenever possible, that’s what we did. Fudgsicles. Quilts. The pleasant burden of raising children. Money, and the lack of it. Once, when it was a week until payday and we had only a five-dollar bill left, we started fighting about what to do with it. Finally, Jay lit a burner on the stove and stuck the money in the flame, burned it right up. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there crying, saying, “Jesus, Jay, we could have gotten groceries. Why did you do that?” And he said it was because we weren’t ever going to do that again, fight about money. That we would never allow it to become that important in our lives. And we haven’t.
It’s funny; I came from a family that was very, very “comfortable” financially, but I feel more comfortable now.

God, I miss him. I sigh, shake my head.

“I’m sorry,” Alice says. “I shouldn’t have brought him up. I knew it as soon as I said it. But it was too late, then. I hate when I do that.”

“It’s all right.”

Alice looks over at the kids, then back at me. “Let’s talk about my misery, so you’ll feel better. Do you think I should divorce Ed?”

It surprises me, that she would say this. I feel kind of punched. But then I think of all the times I felt so odd around Ed. The way I couldn’t quite ever connect with him. I would get the feeling, when he was looking right at me and talking, that he still wasn’t looking at me. That he wasn’t quite present. Maybe Alice feels like that.

I remember a time Ed was out playing football with the kids. They were having a great time, and I was smiling, watching from the window, thinking, Why am I so nasty about him? He’s a nice guy. He’s just shy or something. He stopped playing, told the kids he needed to rest, and went to sit on the porch steps. I almost went out with him. I was thinking I’d sit down, maybe offer him a beer. I was thinking if only I’d try harder, I’d get to know him, and then I’d like him. But before I could go out with him, Alice did. She sat beside him and he moved just the slightest bit away. It was tiny—he didn’t move anything but his shoulder, so that it
wouldn’t be resting against hers. I thought it was so awful. I thought, what is this? And I thought if I had to put a name on that kind of behavior I would say it was withholding. And I would say that it is one of the worst kinds of poisons that exist in human relationships.

When Ed pulled away from Alice, a thin blade of sunlight pushed its way between them. I had to look away. It was hurting my eyes.

I am tempted to say to Alice, “You know, the truth is I never liked Ed. Never trusted him. You can do much better.” But that is so dangerous. And so I only say, “Well, I don’t know if you should think about divorce already. I mean, have you even talked about it?”

“No.”

“Not any of the times that it happened?”

“No. But I … It didn’t happen before.”

“I thought you told me it had!”

“I did say that. I thought it would make it easier to deal with, to say it had happened before. That it was just an arrangement, something I was used to. I thought maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much then. But this is the first time, at least as far as I know. And it’s so weird. It’s so weird. One minute I want to do anything to keep him. The next I want to leave. Just leave. Or tell him to.”

“Do you know who it is? The woman?”

She shakes her head. “No. Someone he works with, I’m sure. I can see her getting ready for work, fixing her hair,
checking her teeth, thinking,
I wonder when he’ll be in today. I wonder if we’ll have time to do it. I wonder when he’ll get rid of his dippy wife
. Whenever he sees her, she’s all put together. Pretty gold earrings on clean ears, perfume behind them. Her underwear matches. She’s not in her bathrobe, lying around with menstrual cramps, farting.”

“I have to tell you something, Alice.”

“What?”

“You look fabulous in your bathrobe.”

She looks at me.

“I mean it.”

“Right. See, I know you mean it. I know you do. But Ed’s not the kind to think like that. He likes … Huh. You know what? I don’t know. I don’t know what he likes. I mean, he’s eating dinner and he says he likes the chicken and I think,
Do you really? Or is this bullshit too?
We watch a movie, and I think,
Are you really watching this? Or are you thinking about her?
I hate him, is the thing. Which is very inconvenient, because I love him.”

“Alice, you’ve got to talk about it.”

“I don’t want to. I just don’t. I’ve been waiting for this. Now it’s happened. What’s to talk about?”

Everything, it seems to me. But it’s not my job to drive Alice’s car. It’s my job to verify the scenery.

“Well, should we feed the kids?” she asks.

“Are you hungry?”

“Sure.”

No, she isn’t. But we call the kids over to us. When they sit on the blanket, I see grass stains on their knees, wildflowers
tucked behind their ears. I’m so glad we came. Alice and I will handle the trouble off to the side. Let their brains be taken up with spring.

P
at Swanson meets us when we come in the door to the nursing home that evening. “Could I see you for just a minute?” she asks.

I tell the kids to go ahead, and follow Pat into her tiny office. She’s got a yellowing philodendron in a basket on her windowsill, stacks of papers that nearly obscure a dusty photograph on her desk, a gigantic schedule taped to the wall. She points to a chair beside her desk, then sits in her own. “So. How are you doing?”