Range of Motion (17 page)

I say nothing.

“Right?”

“No,” I say. But I’m lying. I do get a little charge when everything fits.

“It’s all right,” Alice says. “I admire you. I think you’ve got a good way of thinking.”

Not always. Not lately. “Alice?” I say. “I have to tell you something. I think things are starting to fall apart on me. My mind, I mean. I feel sort of shaky. I’ve been having these thoughts …”

She stands, holds out her hand. “Come on. Let’s go out in the backyard. Tell me out there. It’s nice outside.”

We go outside and settle ourselves in the grass. I can hear the kids’ voices on the other side of the house.

“So what’s going on?” Alice says.

“Do you remember reading some old letters that were here in the basement?” I ask.

“No. What letters?”

“You know, from the woman who used to live here.”

“No. Are there letters down there?”

“Yeah,” I say. Maybe Alice wasn’t with me. Maybe I read them alone. “Never mind,” I say. “I just … I’ve been feeling sort of crazy.”

“You’d be crazy not to,” Alice says. She lies down, closes her eyes. “Did you know that Ed never proposed to me? I did it. I asked him. Twice.”

“Did you?”

“He was on the rebound, he’d just been dumped by somebody. I never met her. I’m so sorry he said yes.”

“Oh, Alice, maybe it’s just a bad time. You know? Maybe you’ll work it out. People do.”

“No. Now that I know what’s going on for sure, I can’t wait for him to leave. Really.”

“Right,” I say. And then, because I don’t believe her and we need to move on to something else, I say, “I’m ready for the hot weather. I can’t wait for the kids to run through the sprinkler. I can’t wait to run through the sprinkler myself.”

“Me neither,” Alice says. And then, “You know, it’s funny that you should mention those letters. Today, I was sitting at the kitchen table feeling really terrible and I all of a sudden started thinking about the people who might have first lived in this house. And I had this vision of a woman. She was sitting at the table in the kitchen with her kids. There was a tablecloth, and a fan on the table turning from side to side, and she and the kids were playing a game with those wooden markers, drinking lemonade, the old-fashioned kind that looks white. She had on a sleeveless blouse and a skirt, all ironed, remember ironing? And the boy was wearing this striped T-shirt and the little girl a dress with a bow that tied in the back. It was so clear, everything!”

Every hair on the back of my neck is raised. “You saw this?” I ask. “I mean, literally?”

Alice leans up on one elbow, looks at me. “No! What do you think? No, I just saw it in my head. It was just a little daydream. Nice diversion, though. Took my mind off things for a minute.”

No it wasn’t a daydream, I think. But I don’t say anything. Potato salad was in the refrigerator, hamburger shaped into patties and ready to get fried. The woman straightened her back, stretched it, when the game was over. She had a mild ache between her shoulder blades, a good kind of fatigue. She moved to the sink to slice tomatoes while the kids put away the game, looked up at the clock, got glad.

M
onday morning, when I get to Jay’s room, I find Gloria straightening his sheets. She must have just bathed him; his hair is slicked back in a way he would never comb it.

“Anything new?” I ask. Gloria shakes her head.

“Okay.” I lower the bed rail, sit beside him, kiss his cheek.

Lainey. Your flesh smell. The small breeze of you bending over me
.

“He had one eye open today, like to scare me to death,” Gloria says.

I look at Jay’s face.

“Just a reflex. He wasn’t seeing nothing. I shut it again,” Gloria says.

No
.

“He can’t be doing that, he’ll get an infection. You tell me if you see it open again; I’ll tape it shut.”

“His eyes? You’d tape his eyes shut?”

“It doesn’t hurt. You put a little dressing there, some tape over it.”

“But what if he wakes up? He won’t be able to see.”

“He wakes up, he’ll rip it off. Take it right off.”

“All right,” I say, though it isn’t.

“What’d you bring him today?” Gloria asks. I suppose it’s amusing to the staff, the things I do every time I come here. But they show me a certain amount of respect, too. Most of them.

“You want to know what I brought?”

“Show me.”

“Okay.” I open my purse, show Gloria small plastic bags, knotted with rubber bands.

“Dope?” she asks, incredulously.

“No,” I tell her. “Spices.”

“Spices.”

“Yes.”

She straightens, nods. “Uh-huh.”

“Where’s Wanda today?” I ask. Wanda would say, “Spices! Great!”

“She’s on nights this week. Working the moonlight shift. And there’s a full moon tonight. I feel sorry for her, all hell breaks out nights when the moon is full. Mrs. Eliot be screaming her lungs out all night long, I can guarantee you
that. That woman’s evil, one of those old ladies be squinting out the window from behind the curtains, don’t let no kids come on her lawn. ‘Git on out of here, now, don’t you be stepping on my grass!’ You know what I mean. She takes the balls away from the children, keeps them in her creepy old basement.”

“Oh, come on.”

“It’s the God’s truth. Her daughter told me. Mean woman, her whole life long. Used to wear her daughter out she come home one minute late. She pinches you every time you give her a bath. Hard! One time I’m washing her leg and she kicks me in the stomach. I nearly laid her out flat. I’m telling you, they say respect the patient, respect the patient, but that’s hard to do when they trying to kill you.”

“How’s Jeannie Nichols?” I ask. I haven’t seen Ted since we last talked.

“Oh.” Gloria’s face changes. She looks away from me to fiddle with Jay’s sheets. “She died last week. You didn’t know?”

“No, I … Nobody told me.”

“She got pneumonia. She fried herself. Temperature off the chart the night she died. Hundred five, hundred six.”

“Was her husband here?”

“Oh yeah. He was with her the last whole day. You really didn’t know?”

“No, I haven’t seen Ted for a while. Do you have his phone number?”

“Yeah, I think we still got it. You want it?”

“Please.”

Gloria leaves the room and I sit still for a moment, thinking. And then I turn to Jay. “That won’t happen to you. I brought you something, Jay. I’ve got some spices here. Just … for fun.” I put the cinnamon under his nose. “Now, here. Isn’t this nice?”

A call to the table, my mother’s hands. Breakfast
.

“How about this? This is sage, Jay. You know? What’s this remind you of? Thanksgiving, right? You remember that turkey platter we always use, that the woman down the street threw away and we snuck out that night and got it?”

I take out the nutmeg, rub some between my fingers, hold it beneath his nose. “Christmas, Jay. Eggnog.” I open the clove bag. “Easter. Ham.” I keep going. I line up the little spice bags all across his chest. All across his University of California T-shirt are requests from the kitchen. Come back, says the curry, the oregano. And me. Sometimes when I’m doing this, when I’m trying really hard to reach him, I’ll start to perspire. Which I’ve never done before. I share this with an aunt of mine, we never perspire, it’s kind of a family joke about how Aunt Mary and I are too repressed to sweat. But doing this, calling Jay, I often feel a wetness come under my arms, across my forehead. And almost every time, I start to cry a little, too. I try not to let him know. Sometimes I feel so hard that he’s just so close to being ready to answer me. I can feel it in me like a taut line extending from
my brain to my heels. It may be what’s holding me up. I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. I wish he could tell me, somehow. Even if he were to wake up for one second, take hold of my wrists, look into my eyes and say, “I can hear you, Lainey. Keep trying. It’s going to take three more months.” Fine, I would say. Just so I know.

On the surface, the soft shell of skin, and I am only below here, loose, unmoored, bumping up against the sides of myself. Look deeper. The will to turn over is a handful of empty air, a concept amusing and useless. I am seeing the genius of being alive, and it holds me. I have the ear to hear now, I have the original eye, there is an understanding. I try, I think hard, use the dim light left to pull my muscles in and up, suspend myself from dropping deeper. Though it does seem soft and so welcoming. Though the black space does form a mouth calling my real name, and it is heard with such clarity I cannot yet move from listening to it. A rare directness. The source
.

G
loria gave me not only Ted’s number, but his address, and that is where I am now, parked on the curb in front of a smallish, modern house only about fifteen minutes from mine. There is a car in the driveway; I think he’s home.

I look at myself in the rearview mirror to see if I’m ready, if I know what I want to say. What I see reflected back is a tired-looking woman with dirty-blond hair in a ponytail,
who looks scared. I had a fantasy on the way over, that I would walk into Ted’s kitchen, which would look remarkably like mine. There would be a storm going on in his face. He would be wearing black pants, a black turtleneck. I would sit at the kitchen table, my folded hands in my lap, my knees together, and he would pace in front of the windows, stopping occasionally to smash a pane out with his fist. I would not react too much. I would understand. When he was finished, I would help bandage his hands. Drive him to the ER.

I put a little lipstick on, push back the stray hairs on the sides of my head, go up to the house. Ted answers the door almost immediately, which surprises me. “Lainey!” he says, surprised himself, and then, “God. How nice to see you. Come in.” He is not in black. He is wearing a plaid shirt, tucked into tan pants. The sleeves are buttoned at his wrist, and he has buttoned every button on the front, too. I believe I know something about the way he got dressed this morning. About the way he finds relief in simple activity.

We go into his kitchen, which is not like mine at all. It is mostly white, with the exception of a black stone counter. Granite, I think. It’s very modern. Not particularly warm. But pretty. I sit at the kitchen table. The chair is a hard white metal, black cushion on the seat. “Something to drink?” he asks.

“No thanks,” I say, and then, “Ted, I want to tell you how sorry I am. About Jeannie.”

He nods, sits down with me, so purposefully mild in his movements and his manner I think he might explode. “It was pneumonia,” he says.

“Yes, I heard.”

“Oh? Who told you?”

“Gloria.”

“They’re still talking about her, then.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Well, that’s good. That’s good.”

“Was the funeral …?”

“Day before yesterday. It was very odd, Lainey, picking out a dress for her to get buried in. It’s odder than you think it’s going to be. Not that you will. I mean, I hope you don’t have to.”

I say nothing, realize I am holding my breath, exhale quietly.

“So, here I am. It’s over. Which I used to wish for, you know, I used to wish it would just get over with. I would pull into the parking lot of that goddamn nursing home and I would hate it so much, I would just hate the sight of it.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I wanted it to be over with. I probably shouldn’t have wanted that.”

“No one would blame you for that, Ted.”

He nods, then looks up at me. “Something to drink?”

“No thanks.”

“I asked you that already, didn’t I?”

“Yes. But that’s okay. Ted, are you … Is there anything I can do?”

“No.”

“Is there anyone who’s helping you?”

He looks up. “There’s nothing to help with. That’s what’s so hard. There is only her absence. I suppose it’s like an illness I’ll have for a while. God, Lainey, when I wake up in the middle of the night … I can’t tell you what it’s like. I have this tiny moment of not knowing what’s wrong. And then this overwhelming …” He stops, attempts a smile. “It’s so quiet, real grief. I guess I didn’t know that.”

I open my purse, write my phone number down on a piece of paper, slide it across the table to him. The numbers look so black against the white. “Just in case you want to call,” I say. “You can call any time. Really.”

“Uh-huh,” he says. “Okay. Thanks, Lainey.” He folds the paper into fours and puts it in his pocket. “I think … You know, I hope you don’t mind, Lainey, but I don’t think I’m quite ready to talk to anyone. I’m sorry.”

“Oh, no, it’s … 
I’m
sorry. I should have called. I just wanted to tell you, you know …” I stand up, slide my purse over my shoulder. “Okay, so …”

“Yes,” he says. “All right.”

I let myself out. What I know is that I will never, ever see him again. I’d thought we might embrace when I left. Somehow.

What I want, on the drive home, is to not think of anything. Of course this does not happen. I think, what outfit would I pick out for Jay? What would I do with the rest of his
clothes? What would I do with the kit for the diesel airplane he was going to build? When I came home from the funeral, what would I do? Ask the kids to go to their bedrooms because it would be unbearable to see him in them? And then open the refrigerator, and stand there?

I think, he was only in the middle. He didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye. Isn’t it better if you get a chance to say good-bye? And then I think, maybe not. Maybe it’s better if it’s sudden and you don’t suffer. But maybe he’s suffering now. How would I know?

I put my hand up to my face. I pinch my cheek, to feel something else. It doesn’t work. I pinch my chin, my ear. It doesn’t work. I turn on the radio, then turn it off.

How foolish to think as often as I do that the force of my will can save him. But I can’t help it. It’s human nature. It’s because, once catastrophe has occurred, we expect our lives to behave. We accept the Awful Event because we have to. But after that, we would like our lives to follow a certain order, a design of our own making. This seems like reasonable compensation. This seems like what ought to happen. Only it hardly ever does.