Real Life (19 page)

The walls of this waiting room are a cream colour, the floors black-and-brown-speckled marble. The doors—extra wide to accommodate stretchers—are a pale wood, oak, perhaps, or maple. No, ash, Lucia decides. She doesn’t actually know what ash looks like, it’s just that ash seems the appropriate wood down here. She thinks she’ll have to remember to tell George this the next time she manages a few days at home.

She glances around the room. People stare at the floor or gaze forward into space, the colourlessness of their eyes indicating that they see nothing, or perhaps it is a memory they’ve fallen into of some distant moment; the way the leaves in the yard crunched underfoot one fall day, maybe, or how the light used to stream through the bedroom window mornings when it was time to get up for school.

How shabby this room is, Lucia thinks. How dismal in its very shabby ordinariness. She thinks, If I were one of these dying people, what would I see if I looked? And in a visionary flash she sees how purely unendurable the thought of leaving even it behind must be.

This is more than even she, the non-dying, can bear. No one in this room is thinking what she’s thinking, or they’d be on their knees, banging their heads against that marble floor, they’d be wailing and tearing their hair.

She drags herself back from this moment, some emotion well beyond mere pity forcing her to make another glance around the room at the men and women sitting in absent silence. She remembers the silly joke she cracked a few weeks earlier with her professor-friend and, annoyingly, tears rush to her eyes.

She has promised Elaine, on the evidence of a reply given
her by a nurse, that this time there’ll be no needles, but when they’ve been waiting twenty minutes, they’re called into a cubicle across the hall so that a technician can find one of Elaine’s tiny veins and inject a radioactive fluid into it for the machines to pick out as it circulates through her blood. Elaine goes weekly for lab tests where blood is routinely drawn; she endures the chemotherapy needle and the finger pricks and the palpation of various lumps and sore spots. So far she’s never protested, except for a whimper at the pain or, once in a while, an angry “ouch!”

Today, as the technician struggles to get his needle into a vein, she begins to cry. She sobs quietly, not protesting, not pulling her arm away, not asking Lucia to make the technician stop. She cries hopelessly, as if there will never be an end to this. Lucia holds Elaine’s head pressed gently against her abdomen. The technician gives up, goes away, comes back with the department head who succeeds in hitting a vein on his first, extremely careful try.

She’s into the first-person accounts now, one by a man and one by a woman. The male writer, about twelve at the time his family had been seized, had been lucky enough to stay with his father. He tells of how time and time again the father saves them both with his hard intelligence and a cunning that seems somehow able to cut through the trauma around him. The father never dwells on the monstrousness of what is going on, but instead he approaches the routine of each day with supreme but well-hidden alertness, always calculating what the best chances for their survival are in each situation. And he never takes his eyes off the day he knows will come when he and his son will escape or be freed. Nor does he ever forget, nor allow his son to forget, that outside these walls there is still a normal world to which they will return. When she’s finished
this book, Lucia thinks, I thought it would be so much worse than this to read.

The next night she begins the book by the woman. This memoirist can barely bring herself to tell her story. Every line—written, she says, only because her children say she must—is filled with an emotion deeper than mere sorrow or disgust or rage. There is no name for it in Lucia’s vocabulary, but whatever it is, it is so deep and terrible that, thinking about it, Lucia can’t see how the author has managed to live the fifty or more years since the events happened, and now, when she tells them.

It is with the woman that Lucia gets the sense of the daily horrors of camp life. Some images of Nazi cruelty she knows she will never be able to erase, and lying on the sagging, narrow little cot at night while Elaine sleeps fitfully, the condenser roaring, and sirens wailing down the street below, or the balcony doors rattling in sudden gusts of prairie wind, she tries to grasp some meaning out of this that she feels sure must be there beyond the general horror, the barely utterable cruelties, the awful suffering. Something moves in the darkness of her consciousness, well back from light. It is huge and, so far, shapeless. She doesn’t know what it is, only that it isn’t ready yet to come forward, to sweep her up into some new level of awareness. Or to madness, she thinks suddenly, when she sees it at last in its true form. Or perhaps in the end she will decide not to let it come forward into light. Perhaps she will have to turn away.

Elaine is not eating much now, and it’s a chore to get her to drink anything. One eye has a slight infection, so added to the round of daily chores is the task of flushing it twice a day with a medicated fluid. Elaine tries to cooperate in this, but she blinks as the fluid falls from the eye dropper so that most of it trickles down her cheek.

“I’m sorry, Luce,” she says, crying a little, and Lucia says, “If I were the one getting stuff poured into my eye, I’d blink too.”

Elaine’s nose is crusted and bloody inside from the irritation of the oxygen tubes constantly resting in it, which means nose drops and eventually antibiotics. The flesh between the oxygen tubing that hooks behind her ears and her skull grows more irritated and sore all the time, and Lucia and the home care nurse have had to devise padding that will stay in place there. Besides these small miseries, pains come and pains go, often in strange places, usually without explanation, as do other afflictions that can’t be ignored: a rash, a swollen arm and hand, a swollen foot, a discharge, a painful shoulder, a painful hip. Each one requires phone calls to the home care staff, to the cancer clinic, to the family doctor.

Consultations take place, advice is given, then Lucia makes appointments at downtown laboratories for X-rays, or blood tests, or other, more complicated investigations. First, she has to order the wheelchair van since, as Elaine has grown weaker, Lucia can no longer get her in and out of her own car; then she has to take Elaine out for more waiting in other waiting rooms. In these, Elaine is always the sickest person present, and seeing this, the staff nearly always accelerates her admission into the inner sanctum. This is a kindness Lucia is always more grateful for than is Elaine who, falling into her peculiar waiting-room reverie, seems not to notice.

Over and over again Lucia has had to step outside these examination or treatment rooms and say softly to the attendant, “My sister is mildly mentally retarded, she does not understand what you are telling her,” filled with shame for humiliating Elaine, irritation with the doctor, nurse, or technician’s inability to see what appears to Lucia to be the obvious, and pity for Elaine. She finds herself, too, caught between guilt for betraying her sister, who is intelligent enough to know she
doesn’t think as well as other people and is permanently sick with disgust at herself because of it, and fear that the medical person she’s talking to won’t believe her, since in a brief, polite social exchange, Elaine simulates normal intelligence so well that no one would ever guess that she can’t read or write.

Nothing much ever comes of these visits. If they reveal a new problem, it’s always trivial in the light of the cancer, and if it’s another symptom of the cancer’s spread, there’s nothing more that can be done than already is. Knowing all this in advance, or learning it as she goes along, Lucia has moments close to real despair, until she begins to view these usually weekly trips—in addition to the sometimes twice-weekly trips to the cancer clinic for various tests, examinations, and treatments, although they’ve given up on the chemotherapy—as outings for Elaine, a way of passing another day on the seemingly endless road to her demise.

George has given Lucia another survivor’s story about her experience in the camp-village called Theresienstadt, and there’s still the book about a Canadian Jewish committee’s post-war struggle to find some Jewish orphans to bring to Canada. She spends a couple of hours on each, although neither does much more for her than to confirm what the memoirs have already seared into her brain. She puts them back without finishing them.

One night, she realizes she’s finished the first stack of books. She moves to the second pile, which consists of the books that on George’s advice she borrowed from the library. Elie Wiesel’s
Night,
the thinnest of volumes, barely a hundred pages long, is on the top. Having seen him on television, and knowing him to be a Nobel Peace Prize winner, she’s pretty sure this will be an exceptionally hard book to read. She hesitates while the electric clock on the wall above the table ticks erratically and the concentrator makes its breathy roar in the other room. After a
moment she puts it back, crawls into her cot, and drifts into the state of semi-consciousness that these days passes for sleep.

She’d been home for the weekend. Five, or is it six, women have been involved in caring for Elaine over the three days she’s been gone, an arrangement that took Lucia ten days to set up and then to ensure that the arrangements had gone down the full chain of command to the people who would actually be coming. More than once there’s been some kind of bureaucratic foul-up at home care when Lucia, having made arrangements to go out to a hurried dinner with a friend, comes back to Elaine’s apartment to find that the person who was supposed to make Elaine’s supper hasn’t shown up. Elaine is propped against the cushions on her couch just as Lucia had left her two or three hours earlier. Elaine is frightened beyond reason when this happens. According to the arrangements this time, Elaine should have been alone only for about an hour between the nurse’s visit and Lucia’s promised arrival by two.

She’s driving up the three-mile-long avenue of fast-food restaurants, service stations, and motels that leads into the city. She’s about halfway up it when she notices that so far she hasn’t hit a single red light. Ordinarily it takes her as long as half an hour before she reaches the narrow side streets that lead to the apartment building where Elaine lives. There must be a dozen sets of traffic lights along this road, and not to have hit a single red one is so unusual she laughs out loud in surprise. Far ahead she sees another green light, almost brakes, thinking that by the time she reaches it, it will be red. But it stays green, and it stays green, and she sails right on through, and through the next one too, and then she knows. She knows absolutely that Elaine needs her. She puts her foot hard on the
gas, knowing there’ll be no red lights today, and in five minutes she’s parking in front of Elaine’s.

She finds her alone, instead of resting against the pillows, sitting forward on her couch, her forehead beaded with perspiration, her white face paler than Lucia has so far seen it no matter what atrocities are being done to her in various clinics around the city. Her lips, in this paste-white face, are blue. Her chest pumps in and out with a rapidity that appals Lucia; she can’t begin to guess how many times a minute Elaine’s chest is going in and out. Elaine stares at her with large, desperate eyes, barely able to speak.

“Where’s the nurse?” Lucia asks stupidly.

“She … left …” Lucia tries to think what to do, runs into the bedroom and gathers the nebulizer—Elaine is supposed to use it twice a day but refuses to if Lucia isn’t there to help her—the mask, the potent asthma-type drugs that the nebulizer converts to mist for Elaine to breathe in. Quickly she puts the drugs into their container, plugs in the nebulizer, pulls the mask up over her sister’s mouth and nose. She takes Elaine’s pulse as the machine whirrs away on Elaine’s lap and the mask clouds with vapour and Elaine’s head continues to bob with each breath. Her pulse is—Lucia almost can’t believe it—150 beats a minute. The phone sits on the sofa beside Elaine and now Lucia dials the home care nurse’s mobile phone.

“Call an ambulance,” the nurse tells her. “Don’t wait. Call an ambulance. Here, I’ll give you the number.”

She copies down the number, but Lucia finds herself reluctant to dial it, Elaine hates hospitals so, but she can’t imagine now what will happen if she doesn’t obey—how long can Elaine go on gasping this way before—she doesn’t know what, only that surely Elaine will die. She dials, and in less than ten minutes, during which time Elaine continues to pant, her torso
jerking and her head bobbing with every breath as she struggles for air, three ambulance attendants, a stretcher, and some bulky equipment have taken up all the available space in the small living room.

“She had polio as a child,” she tells the attendants, just as she has had to tell everyone in every clinic and waiting room and doctor’s office through this whole odyssey, because no one ever seems to realize that Elaine can’t walk. “You’ll have to lift her.”

The ambulance attendants, all young men, are kind, and gentle, and reassuring. Stethoscopes appear, and various other medical paraphernalia which Elaine can’t recall later, but she remembers a hypodermic syringe and vials of medication. They change Elaine’s oxygen supply to the portable tank they’ve brought with them. In mere minutes they have Elaine half sitting on the stretcher and are wheeling her out of the apartment, Lucia reassuring her, “Don’t worry, I’ll be right behind you. I’ll be at the hospital as soon as you are.” Elaine continues to gasp for breath with her whole frame as the elevator doors close on the stretcher.

Lucia beats the ambulance to the hospital. Nobody is more surprised by this than her, she can only be grateful she wasn’t stopped for speeding, and when the ambulance does arrive nearly ten minutes later, it remains parked next to the Emergency entrance, motor running, for another ten minutes with nobody emerging. She waits, pacing, not daring to knock on the ambulance doors, afraid of what’s happening on the other side of them.

Finally they open and her sister’s stretcher is lowered and wheeled into the hospital through doors Lucia isn’t allowed to pass through. When she rushes inside and asks if she may go into the treatment room, she’s told, absolutely not, and it looks as if the receptionist/nurse telling her this wouldn’t hesitate to
wrestle her to the ground if she shows the slightest sign of disobeying.