Like Family (33 page)

“Virginia,” she said. “Liver, liver, liver.”

“That’s right,” I said, nodding, and she settled back into her chair, beaming like it was Christmas and she was getting liver.
My first shift started at seven the next morning. I wore a white zip-up-the-front nurse’s dress and stockings and squeaky
white shoes that would never be clean again. At my ten-thirty break, I met Teresa in the nurses’ lounge, and she toasted me
with a paper cup of coffee. “Do you hate it yet?” she said, offering half of a stale donut. When I shrugged, she said, “1’11
ask you again at two.”

M
OST
DAYS
I
TOOK
care of the eight ladies in rooms 215 and 217. Eleanor was hell on shower days, but otherwise wasn’t a problem. She spun
her circuit just outside the perimeter of my attention. Five of my eight weren’t even ambulatory. Vertie, for instance, just
got shifted from her bed to the diaper-lined vinyl chair right next to it. I wrapped a restraint around her waist, then through
slats on the back of the chair, double-tying it like I would a big gym shoe. If she weren’t restrained, she’d have keeled
right over onto her forehead. Her body had become its own knot — her legs crossed so tightly and completely that it was a
struggle to even get slacks on her.

Vertie’s husband came to visit on Saturdays and stayed through dinner, pulling up a chair to spoon-feed her pureed squash.
He’d read to her from
Good Housekeeping
and rub her papery hand. Vertie was the only one of my ladies who was obviously married. The rest didn’t seem to have families
at all, or none I’d seen. We never knew, though; someone might show up, so on weekends we were supposed to dress every patient
in their best whatever, give their dentures a good soak and scrub and put makeup on the ladies. We all carried lipstick for
this purpose — along with thermometers, plastic gloves and blood-pressure cuffs — thumb-size lipsticks from Avon in the tackiest
pinks and corals. Thin skin tears if you press too firmly, so we just dashed a little lipstick in the general area of their
cheekbones. Most of them looked like transvestites in the makeup, but we talked it up, shouting: “You look so pretty today,
Mrs. Escobedo! You’re a vision! A dream!”

Across from Vertie in 217 was Beatrice, who was mean enough to have been lonely her whole life. She dressed and fed herself
and wouldn’t have been any work at all if she had ever shut up. She fired up monologues the way the chain-smokers in the rec
room did filterless Luckies.

“Blood vessels and corpuscles and knee joints,” she’d say, over and over again — and with such bile she was nearly spitting
it. Or: “Extra-long, extra-thick, extra-wide sheets from JC Penney,
not
Montgomery Ward, JC Penney.”

Beatrice directed most of her attention at Ruthie, who occupied the bed to her right. Ruthie could not have been less present
in the world. She was as quiet as a book in a lap, and yet Beatrice was tormented by her. Tormented because she could cuss
and spit, could do a burlesque show in front of Ruthie, and get no response. Ruthie was as cool as a stone in water, a calm
that was craziness, surely, and deeply private, but Beatrice took it personally. Beatrice wanted to make Ruthie cry. She couldn’t
even get her to blink.

Like it or not, I understood this dynamic. It reminded me of Hilde and myself. I don’t know when I decided she didn’t love
me, or love me enough, anyway
(what would be enough?).
I wasn’t her real daughter, and if she thought about me at all, it was to wish I were long gone. If I couldn’t make her love
me, I would make her hate me. I prodded and poked, raised my voice, called her names, went too far until she snapped and reached
for the nearest thing: a shoe, spatula, cutting board. If she was seething, then I had made her feel something.

And what did Hilde want from me? I couldn’t guess, and I couldn’t stop pushing, pulling. It seemed we were locked that way,
like binary stars, spinning and spinning, always at the same distance. By the time I was eighteen, we were nearly nothing
to each other. When she spoke to me it was to say, “Don’t stand with the refrigerator door open“; “Don’t track dirt“; “Don’t
let those flies in.” I only spoke back when I absolutely had to. This wasn’t difficult since I was so busy, taking afternoon
and evening classes at Fresno City College, waking up at 5
A.M.
to do homework before my seven-to-three shift at the nursing home. I was almost never home, and when I was, things were quiet
between us, as quiet as something dead, which was and wasn’t what I had wanted all along.

One day, I came home from work in the late afternoon to find Hilde napping on the couch. She was huffing like a warthog in
the heat and had her cotton housedress pulled up nearly to her underwear. I could see the fine, long hairs on her thighs,
the moles and pockmarks that were always hidden beneath one of her ugly muumuus. Sweat pearled on her nose and upper lip.
How strange to see her this way, completely unguarded.
Has she seen me this way? Has she stood over my bed while I dreamed? Has she ever
seen
me at all?
As I stood there, a fly landed on one of Hilde’s hands, but she didn’t move. And what, I thought, if I put my hand on hers?
Would she wake up then? Would she cringe? Cry? Gather me in her arms?
I never touch her,
said a fly voice inside.
She never touches me.

I
T
WAS AGAINST EVERY
rule to read patients’ charts, but we did it anyway, sneaking behind the swinging door of the nurse’s station when the RNs
were out on med rounds. I always felt a little sickened by what I read, like how Mary — a woman who dragged one leg behind
her like a piece of cordwood, whose larynx was so ratcheted by gravel in a motorcycle accident she could only make deep growls
and screeches — gave birth to a little girl while in another institution. The father was some orderly or security guard, no
one knew who, maybe not even Mary herself. Eddie V. had undergone a lobotomy. Esther Feinstein had been administered so many
rounds of electric shock therapy that she literally foamed at the mouth. I began to understand that everyone had a sad story.
There was no end to them.

Several months after I started working at the home, one of the veteran girls took a vacation, and I was shifted on the schedule
to cover her usual assignment: five huge men, all needing daily tub baths. Most patients got two showers a week, which were
easy enough. The shower chairs were toilet seats on metal frames with wheels. We simply transferred the nonambulatory patients
to the chair, threw a sheet over them backward and wheeled them down the hall to the shower room. Tubs, on the other hand,
required lifting a sometimes two-hundred-pound man — who might as well have been a bag of gravel — into the low-slung bath.
Out was infinitely harder, of course, because the gravel bag would be slick with soap.

One tub a day was manageable; five seemed impossible, especially since they all had to be finished before the lunch cart arrived.
My first day on the new assignment, I worked like a dog and still only got three done on time. The nurse bringing Ned’s lunch
found him still in bed, his gown soaked through and cold. I thought she was going to chew me out but instead she sent Berry,
one of the more experienced nursing assistants, to help me after the trays had been cleared. Berry weighed maybe a hundred
and ten pounds, but she lifted as efficiently as a backhoe. She helped me lower Ned into the tub and left me to the scrubbing,
the lifting and lathering of his thick arms and legs. I knew I was supposed to wash Ned’s penis, but was squeamish about it.
I’d never seen an uncircumcised penis before: it looked like one of those cave fish that live without light or eyes. I swatted
at it with my washcloth and called the bath done. By the time I got Ned back into the chair and wheeled him down to his room,
Berry had made all of the beds. Each of the other four men sat straight and clean in their wheelchairs with lab robes tucked
behind their hips. When I tried to thank her, she shrugged it off.

“It’s a shit job,” she said, and strode off toward the break room and her cigarette.

What I liked about Berry: when she was up to her elbows in some patient’s nasty linen, she could laugh about it, her face
saying
Look at my life. Can you believe this, can you even fucking believe it?
Once, when I was on my afternoon break with Teresa and some of the other girls, Berry walked into the room with her arm around
Andy, a patient who lived upstairs with most of the other ambulatory men. Andy was sweet and harmless and nutty as a squirrel.
He spent his afternoons plotting with his roommate Albert about how they were going to make a break for it, right out the
gate to hop a train to Reno. Berry stood there, gave Andy’s shoulder an elaborate squeeze and said, with perfect gravity,
“Mom, Dad, Andy and I are getting married.” Andy grinned beneath the brim of his John Deere cap, his hair tufting from the
sides like spring weeds.

Berry was fastidious about her cigarettes. She never lit one unless she could finish it, and when she got down to the filter,
she stabbed the butt against the ashtray or asphalt or upturned sole of her shoe. She wore her waist-length strawberry-blond
hair in a low ponytail.
Stoner hair, I
might have said in high school, and she did remind me of the girls who cut classes to hang out in the parking lot of the
Circle K drinking rum-diluted Coke in huge paper cups, their boyfriends draped over their shoulders or hanging from the back
pockets of their tight jeans. Berry used charcoal to line the inside rim of her lower lids, something else those stoner girls
did, but her skin was so fair it made her look a little like a witch, dark and hard and knowing.

Because I knew she’d laugh her ass off, I wrote a song about the aftermath of laxative day and left it paper-clipped to the
back of Berry’s time card. We decided the tune should be “Roll Out the Barrel” because Tuesday-night shit detail involved
hosing out the linen from four or five garbage cans. The smell could have killed a cat. We wrote another song together, in
the parking lot on our breaks. This one was to the tune of “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” and was called “Is Your Penis Circumcised?”
Every time we got to the “Is the foreskin smooth or scaly?” part, we cracked up and had to start over. We laughed so hard
we bent low and held our sides; we laughed so hard we cried.

O
NE
OF MY TUB-MEN
was Sam Barnum, a collapsed house of a man. He was huge, maybe six foot three or more, and his long legs jutted wildly from
even the largest wheelchair. When I first saw Sam, I couldn’t stop staring at his forehead, which featured a dent the size
of a Rubik’s Cube and impossibly deep.
Where is the brain matter that used to be there?
I wanted to ask, but it was just me and Sam in the room, and he was drooling juice from breakfast. Sam didn’t scare me so
much as make me sad. I learned from his chart that he tried to blow his head off with a shotgun some ten years before. Because
his forehead was sweaty, the muzzle slipped as the gun discharged. A large portion of his frontal lobe was dislodged, but
he lived. The left side of his body, including his face, was heavy and slack, unreachable by motor impulse. His speech slurred
like a lifelong alcoholic’s. When his wife and teenage son came to visit once a month, he said to them what he said to us
all, “Kill me. Please, kill me.”