Carter Clay (20 page)

The wheelchair ramp that leads to Fair Oaks' front door is bowed plywood covered with black corrugated rubber.
Brunk, brunk
, it rudely announces the arrival of Jersey's wheelchair, and she does her best to appear unaware that the sound makes the yellow-haired receptionist, Cherie, poke her smiling face out the window of her drywall cubicle even before the automatic door opens.

“Howdy-do, Jersey!” Cherie holds needle and thread and a piece of cross-stitch canvas that depicts a computer monitor whose “screen” will soon read:

But when I bought this thing

They said it did Windows!

Cherie explains that she recently saw Jersey's mother in the TV room, and Jersey says thanks, and wheels into the nursing home's now familiar territory.

“Nuh!”

A resident—also in a wheelchair—makes his way toward the girl. David: nineteen years old, afflicted with cerebral palsy; retaining enough of his good looks that in his face Jersey spies the face of a famous American heartthrob—but lifted from a newspaper photo with Silly Putty, then stretched by a cruel hand.

“Cah!” David says. Jersey knows what he wants: for her to come close so that he can thump out a message on the smeared word board lying across the arms of his wheelchair. Today, however, Jersey is too weary to stop, to crane her neck in an effort to read the words that David spells out with such difficulty, and so she only smiles and says, “Got to get to my mom, David. See you later.”

Slits of Florida sunshine make a brilliant frame around the TV room's drawn shades, and in the half-light provided by the shades, Jersey makes out a retarded man by the name of Mr. Fleiss; her mother's roommate, Helen Radosovich; and her mother.

Though Katherine has regained most of the thirty-five pounds she lost after the accident, she continues to look so unlike herself that Jersey still suffers a shock at the beginning of each visit. Before the accident, Katherine was not so fashion-conscious as certain of the mothers of Jersey's friends. She sometimes complained that her thighs were fat or whatever, but she looked nice in her long skirts and T-shirts, hair pulled back in a soft bun, big silver hoops in her ears. Today, Jersey cannot stop herself from noticing that Katherine (stretch-waist skirt, dull gaze, pasty skin) looks like the Mutter that came with the expensive German doll-house that Jersey received from her Alitz grandparents one Christmas.

And Jersey herself? In her equally ugly easy-off-and-on clothes (Velcro fasteners and wide necks and dark prints that hide “accidents”), Jersey does not doubt that she is Mutter's daughter, Anna.

“Katherine?” Smiling at Jersey, tiny Mrs. Radosovich leans forward to lay a hand on Katherine's knee. Mrs. Radosovich wears an attractive jade-green suit and matching jewelry and holds a purse in her lap. As far as Jersey can tell, there is not a thing wrong with Mrs. Radosovich beyond a certain frailty and—as M.B. says—“wetting” problems.

“Katherine!” Mrs. Radosovich says. “Here's your Jersey, dear.”

Katherine's laugh—who knows what provokes it?—is the laugh found in comic strip bubbles over the heads of big bullies.
Har, har, har!
It makes Mrs. Radosovich put her little hands over her ears, and wince. “That hurts,” she says, then smiles faintly at Jersey. “Literally, it does something to my eardrums.”

Jersey nods in commiseration—she hopes Mrs. Radosovich won't ask for another roommate—then turns to her mother.

“Mom?”

Since the accident, Katherine's right eye tends to wander, and her efforts to focus her gaze make her appear suspicious of her visitor, but Jersey leans across the arm of the wheelchair and lays a kiss on Katherine's cheek. “I've come to see you, Mom.”

Katherine looks back at the television. Her loss of memory is not nearly so entertainingly transformative as the amnesia of TV and movies. Damage is what one sees in Katherine. Big D.

Mrs. Radosovich gives a tug to Jersey's sleeve. “She was supposed to get that hair washed today, weren't you, Katherine?”

Katherine makes a nasty face, then raises one of her slippered feet and gives a kick in Mrs. Radosovich's direction. “I gow ouw towe!” she says irritably.

“Mom”—Jersey pats Katherine's arm—“you head to your room for your shower, and I'll go get you a Coke. For when you're done.”

Immediately, Katherine stands, and offers Jersey her ruined smile, and booms, “GO GEH COH!”

Carter Clay is in Terence White's room, cutting Terence's pork patty into tiny bits, talking to Terence's mother, when Jersey rolls past. That nervous drumming in his chest when he sees the girl—it feels a little like the way he remembers feeling when he saw Becky Pattschull in the halls at high school. A little like the way he always feels before first blows are exchanged in a fight.

“You see? Nineteen sixty-seven?” Terence White's mother points to the date printed along one edge of the photograph in her hand. A view of Terence, home from boot camp. “His hair was lighter then, of course.”

Carter can tell that Terence's mother worries that Carter might not believe that Terence ever had a life other than this one, in which slack-faced Terence lies in a bed, crippled with MS or MD or some such thing.

Of course, Carter believes it. He has to believe it. “Good-looking guy!” Carter says, then turns his attention back to Terence's plate. Apple crisp, mashed potatoes, pork patty, carrot coins. When the Fair Oaks staff make up their menu, they always call cooked carrots
carrot coins
, just the way Carter's school did when he was a boy, and though he knows it is silly, Carter still feels cheated each time he sees cooked carrots, and not some sort of treasure.

Yes, Katherine has returned to her room by the time Jersey gets back with the sodas. Seated on her bed, back to the door, she rolls a bit of blanket fuzz between her fingers. From the doorway, however, it is clear to Jersey that Katherine has not showered, and, quietly, Jersey moves the Cokes from her lap and into the carryall that hangs from her chair, before she wheels herself into the room (sprigged yellow wallpaper and matching curtains, print of
Pinky
on the wall).

“You need help with your shower, Mom?”

Katherine turns her way. “Where Coh?”

“You'll get Coke after you wash your hair.” Jersey wheels to the window. Tries to appear nonchalant, interested in the view. At the end of the driveway, a little man sits perched on top of the dumpster, and Jersey calls to Katherine, “Mom, come look at this guy.”

That could be us.
That was what her mother would have said in the past, and she probably would have darted out and given the man a dollar or two.

“Come here, Mom. He's got on a Yankees cap. Remember the Yankees?”

“No.”

“They were Dad's favorite team.”

“NO.”

Jersey hopes she does not show that she is a little afraid of her mother. Recently, she read in a book called
States of Mind
about a woman whose left hand continually rose up to her neck in an effort to strangle herself. The woman insisted she had to sit upon this murderous hand to quell its impulses, and after her death, sure enough, an autopsy revealed that the woman had a damaged corpus callosum. The two sides of her brain were disconnected; and, disconnected, they considered themselves at war.

“Coh,
now
,” Katherine says.

Jersey nods—a distraction—before she says, “If you don't want to wash your hair before you have your Coke, how about doing some flash cards instead? Flash cards, then Coke?”

Katherine stands. “NO WAY! NO WAY! NO WAY!” she barks; then she grabs the metal bar at the end of her bed and begins to rock it, back and forth, bam, bam, bam.

“Mom!” Jersey grabs for Katherine's hands. “Stop it!”

“What's going on here?” In the doorway, hands on her hips, stands the ferocious nurse that Jersey knows as Mary: wild black hair, pinpoints of red on her white cheeks and the great white sheaves of arm that push out from her uniform.

“It's okay,” Jersey calls above the din. “I'm going to read to her. I'll read from your book again, Mom. How will that be?” The girl reaches into her carryall for
Rethinking the Evolution of Birds
. “I brought your book, see?”

“COH!” Katherine shouts.

“That's enough, you,” warns the nurse.

“Here. Wait.” Jersey begins to read where she left off during her last attempt—something about crocodiles and convergence—

“NO!” Katherine plugs her fingers in her ears and makes a terrific noise, a grinding whine, like the sound of a child pretending to be an airplane.

The nurse peers over Jersey's shoulder. “WHY READ HER THAT?” she shouts above Katherine's sound effects. “SHE DOESN'T UNDERSTAND THAT!”

“SHE WROTE IT!” Jersey shouts back.

Katherine's bedside clock, thrown through the air, hits neither Jersey nor the nurse, but—harmlessly—the wall just to the pair's right. Still, in an instant, the nurse has Katherine by the
front of her ugly blouse, the fabric choked up around her tracheostomy scar.

“SO YOU WANT TO BE SEDATED!” the nurse shouts.

Jersey pulls at the nurse's skirt. “Please! She just wants her Coke! I have her Coke! It's my fault—I was trying to get her to wash her hair—”

The nurse, clutching the flailing Katherine, glances down at the girl. And receives a slap from Katherine. “You'll be sorry for that!” the nurse trumpets, and releases Katherine's collar, and starts for the door.

“You're not supposed to sedate her!” Jersey cries. “Call Dr. Mukhergee! All she wants is her Coke!”

The nurse does not respond but pushes her way out through the little group drawn to the door by the commotion: David in his wheelchair, an angel-haired lady with a walker, the large aide that Jersey met at her grandmother's church, Carter Clay—

“My mom—she's not supposed to be sedated!” Jersey cries to Carter Clay; then turns as, behind her, the closet door slams and Katherine shuts herself up inside, and screams, “I KILL MYSELF!”

“Out of my way,” says the returning nurse, needle and syringe in hand.

“Mary.” Carter Clay lays a hand on the nurse's shoulder. “How about you let me and the girl try and quiet her first? Give us a few minutes?”

The nurse stares at the hand on her shoulder until Carter Clay removes it; then she informs him that he is
not
a doctor and patients at Fair Oaks are
not
allowed to act out. But go ahead. Try. By all means. Be her guest!

“Thanks, Mary,” Carter Clay says, and pulls the door shut behind himself and Katherine and Jersey.

“Katherine? It's Carter Clay, here.”

Behind the closet door, hangers ping. There is a rodentlike scratching.

Carter Clay smiles at Jersey. “You got to come out, Katherine,” he says. “Nobody's going to bother you, but you got to settle down.”

“We won't let anybody hurt you, Mom,” Jersey adds.

“Tell Jers go ‘way!” Katherine calls. “Go and leave Coh!”

Carter Clay gives the girl a sad smile. “She don't mean that,” he whispers.

“I wan' go home!”

“I know you do, Mom. That's why you can't have temper tantrums. The sooner you stop, the sooner you can come home! You and me—back to Arizona. Won't that be nice? Swimming every day?”

When Katherine does not respond, Carter Clay pulls something from his back pocket: a pulp magazine, which he displays to Jersey.
Josannah!
read the red-hot letters on the cover. “Hey, Jersey,” Carter Clay says in a loud and enthusiastic voice, “what do you bet your mom would like to see this new issue of
Josannah!
?”

Jersey remembers reading
Josannah!
at the home of a grade school classmate whose family believed in Jesus, the devil, the NRA, and killing doctors who performed abortions. She longs to tell Carter Clay that Katherine would not have the slightest interest in his comic book. She also recognizes that his stagy announcement is a ploy that she ought not to damage, and so she keeps her mouth shut, and, sure enough, the door handle turns and a slice of Katherine's face appears in the crack between the wooden frame and the door.