Taking Care of Terrific (4 page)

"I wonder if Dr. McCracken took your braces off too soon. That left incisor doesn't seem quite straight to me, Enid."

Or: "You haven't been snipping at your own bangs, have you, Enid? Call and make an appointment to have a trim tomorrow. You look very jagged across the forehead."

Or: "I really think it's time to bundle up some of your clothes and take them to a Goodwill box. You're not still
fond
of that shirt, are you?"

(It all goes with the name. Enid. Squalid. Sordid.
Putrid.
)

But some nights all three of us are home for dinner. Then Dad doesn't read, and Mom doesn't scrutinize my skin, hair, teeth, and clothes for flaws. Mrs. Kolodny wears a clean white apron; she sets the table with grandmother's silver and lights candles. We have Conversation.

Here is what Conversation sounded like that night at my house:

Me: "This afternoon I babysat for this really cute little boy who lives over on West Cedar Street."

Dad: "Where on earth did Mrs. Kolodny buy this beef, Evelyn? It's like shoe leather."

Mom: "I assume you saw this morning's
Boston Globe.
Can you imagine
nurses
threatening to strike? It's an absolute outrage."

Me: "His name is Joshua Warwick Cameron the Fourth. How about
that
for an outrage?"

Dad: "This beef is an outrage. Did she get this at DeLuca's? Enid, go out to the kitchen and get me a steak knife. You shouldn't need a steak knife to cut roast beef."

(Enid exits, stage left, to kitchen. Enid returns, with steak knife.)

Mom: "What ever happened to
humanity,
anyway? If those nurses go on strike, who's going to suffer? The patients, that's who."

Dad: "I was served better beef than this in the army, in 1951, in Korea."

Me: "I'm going to take care of him every afternoon, from three to five, if the weather's decent. I'll take him out for walks and to the Public Garden and stuff."

Mom: "And can you guess what their so-called
grievance is? That they weren't consulted about the changes in scheduling. How on earth can the administration consult every single employee in a hospital, for heaven's sake? Scheduling is an administrative decision."

Then a weird thing began to happen. Up until that moment, the conversation had been absolutely boring to me. I didn't care about the texture of the beef; mine seemed just fine. And I didn't care about the administrative problems of the hospital where my mother works. But all of a sudden, a little bell began to go off in my head. It was dinging "Root beer. Root beer. Root beer." I looked up from my plate.

Dad (laying down his knife and fork): "Enough. I have to battle with partners and clients all day long. I'm not going to fight with roast beef on top of that. I'm going to go watch the news. Speak to that woman about the purchasing of meat, Evelyn."

Exit Father, stage right.

Then Mom and I were alone at the dinner table. She took one last bite of baked potato, sighed, and pushed her plate a little bit away from her. She looked tired and exasperated. But for once the exasperation wasn't focused on me.

"Mom," I said, "what would happen if just
one
nurse complained about the changes in schedules?"

"One nurse? Nothing. She'd be told to take it or leave it. They can always replace one nurse."

"What's going to happen if all the nurses go on strike?"

She sighed again. "They'll negotiate. The hospital can't function with all the nurses out. Eventually they'll come to some satisfactory arrangement. In the meantime, I have several patients who..."

She went on talking, but I stopped listening. My mind was off in the world of root beer Popsicles. Okay; so root beer Popsicles aren't as important as people lying in hospital beds; I know that. But the principle seemed the same. I kept thinking of that old woman, sitting all alone on a park bench with her worldly goods in a big black pocketbook and maybe no place to sleep that night except in a doorway, and I could hear her muttering, "They never asked anybody really, they decide things without consulting anyone, they always do that..."

Maybe it wasn't as important in the great scheme of things as nurses, whose schedules had been changed without anyone consulting them.
Maybe it wasn't as life-and-death as people in hospital beds, people who were sick and needed nurses to bring their medicine and take their temperature and maybe just talk to them a little bit if they were scared.

But it was the same basic thing. It was comfort. What if all you had in the whole world, besides a black bag and a chilly doorway, was a memory of a father who once made root beer, and sometimes a Popsicle that brought that memory back? And what if they took that little bit of comfort away without asking you?

One old lady. As Mom said, one person complaining means nothing. Take it or leave it, they would say. But if a
lot
of people went on strike...

And Joshua Warwick Cameron IV, Tom Terrific, champion counter, bless him, had told me that there were twenty-four bag ladies in the Public Garden.

After dinner was over and Mom went into the study to watch the news with Dad, I wandered out to the kitchen to visit with Mrs. Kolodny while she cleaned up the dishes. She was puttering around, humming, and she had all the machinery running: the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, even the washing machine and dryer.
Mrs. Kolodny says she likes to run the machinery; it makes her feel like Captain Kirk in
Star Trek,
gives her a sense of power.

"Hi," I said. She didn't hear me. It sounded like the Industrial Revolution in there, with all those engines going at once. I pushed the buttons that stopped the washing machine and dryer, then the switch for the garbage disposal, and finally she turned around, startled by the silence. Only the dishwasher was churning away now.

"Oh," she said. "Hi. You didn't eat your broccoli."

"I know. I hate broccoli." I flopped down in a kitchen chair and kicked off my sneakers.

"Me too," said Mrs. Kolodny. "You want some junk food?"

"Sure. What do we have?"

She reached into the back of a cupboard, pulled out two Ring-Dings, and tossed me one. "Don't tell your mother."

"I won't," I said, talking around a mouthful of sticky chocolate. "Hey, Mrs. Kolodny, I want to talk to you about something."

She sat down heavily in the opposite chair and unwrapped her Ring-Ding. "You ever read
Jane Airy?
" she asked.

I told you already that Mrs. Kolodny is a
reader. Almost every afternoon she goes over to Newbury Street, to the secondhand paperback bookstore.

But I haven't told you what she looks like. Mrs. Kolodny is without a doubt the most
colorful
person I know. Her hair is blue. Honestly. She dyes it that color; she told me so. It's actually white, but once, years ago, she put on some stuff to "brighten up the white"—that's what the label said it was supposed to do—and her hair turned blue. And she liked it. So now she uses the same stuff, once a month, and dyes her hair blue.

Her skin is sort of yellow-gray. Her nose is bright red, and the whites of her eyes are pink. Through her support stockings, you can see that her legs are crisscrossed with knotted purple veins.

She's an honest-to-God human rainbow.

My mother says that with the exception of the blue hair, which is just an idiotic idiosyncrasy, everything else is a visible symptom of a serious illness. I heard her tell Mrs. Kolodny that once. She wanted her to make an appointment with an internist.

"You have visible symptoms," I heard my mother say, "of liver damage, high blood pressure, and inefficacy of the peripheral vascular
system. I want you to go to Dr. Goldberg for a complete check-up. You are a seriously ill woman."

"Dr. Crowley," Mrs. Kolodny said huffily, "do I get the housework done to your satisfaction?"

"Yes," said my mother.

"Then you and I got no problem. The housework you can complain about if you want. My body, that's
my
problem, not yours."

"But—" said my mother.

"Butt out," said Mrs. Kolodny.

If I ever told my mother to butt out, she would hustle me off to Wilma Sandroff's office for intensive therapy, and I would have "hostile interpersonal relationships" stamped forever on a chart.

But nobody hustles Mrs. Kolodny.

"No," I said to her, licking frosting off my fingers, "I never read
Jane Airy.
I never heard of it. Lend it to me if it's any good. Listen, I want to ask you a personal question."

She tensed up. She doesn't like personal questions. Her bloodshot eyes narrowed to slits and she looked at me very suspiciously.

"How much does my father pay you?" I asked. "Just in general terms. Do you consider yourself well paid?"

She relaxed. She didn't consider money too personal. "Yeah," she said. "He pays me enough."

"Well," I asked, "what if he didn't? What would you do if you thought he wasn't paying you enough? Or if you didn't like the working conditions?"

She shrugged and began licking frosting off her own fingers. "I'd tell him so," she said. "Listen, in that
Jane Airy
book—"

"Wait a minute," I interrupted. "What if you told him so and he said, 'Tough'? Then you'd be out of a job, right?"

"I suppose," she said with a sigh. The sigh meant: so what?

I was getting excited. "You'd be out of a job because they could get another housekeeper, right? But what if they
couldn't?
What if every housekeeper on Marlborough Street—no; every housekeeper in
Boston
—got together, and they all said they wouldn't work unless everybody's pay was raised?"

Now she looked suspicious again. "Look, Enid, if you're trying to get me to join some
club—
"

(Notice that name,
Enid?
The sound of it? How it has the same ending as
stupid?
)

"No." I sighed. "It was just hypothetical. I've
just been thinking about something. About the power that people have if they band together."

Mrs. Kolodny heaved herself to her feet. "I'm not the banding-together sort. You want to band me together with someone, it better be tall, dark and handsome. Listen, in
Jane Airy,
she goes to work for this guy named Mr. Rochester. Now this Mr. Rochester, he—"

"You mean
Jane Eyre!
" I said. "Sure, I read that in school! That's a pretty good book!"

"Don't tell me how it comes out," she warned. "I'm just getting to the good part now. But listen, if I ever want a different job, that's the kind of job I want, with a guy like Mr. Rochester."

I got up and headed toward the kitchen door. I could tell she was dying to turn all her machinery back on. "I wasn't really talking about jobs, anyway," I said. "I was sort of talking about root beer Popsicles."

But she didn't hear me. All the engines were chugging away again, and she was humming at the top of her voice. A love song. Mrs. Kolodny, the Technicolor lady, is a real romantic at heart. Wait till she reads further and finds out what Mr. Rochester has locked away upstairs.

Bearable would be staying home today, Tom Terrific said. He had come down with polio. So we were minus Bearable and heading down the front steps of his house when the door opened and his mother called us back.

"Here, Enid," she said. "Excuse me, I mean Cynthia. Take this with you, and maybe you and Joshua can identify birds in the Public Garden."

She handed me a book and I glanced at the title.
A Field Guide to the Birds.
I stood there looking a little puzzled.

"I heard him as you were going out the front door," she explained, "asking if Hawk would be there today."

I laughed nervously and put the book into my backpack with my sketch pad and pencils. "Oh," I said. "He was probably thinking of a robin or a pigeon or something."

Tom Terrific was down on the brick sidewalk, examining a caterpillar who was trying to make it
to his destination without getting squooshed. He looked up, overhearing us, and said, "It was a pigeon. I only said hawk for a joke." He squatted, picked up the fuzzy caterpillar carefully, and deposited it on the roots of a sturdy tree that was growing out of a rectangle of dirt near the curb.

"Joshua!" called his mother in concern. "Nasty, nasty, nasty! Cynthia, do you have a Kleenex? Wipe his hands off, would you?"

I sighed, quietly so Ms. Cameron wouldn't hear me, and wiped Tom's spotless little hands. On the tree root, the caterpillar snuggled into his little yellow furry coat, glad to be rescued from the sidewalk. Probably the instant we were out of sight around the corner, Ms. Cameron would come out with a can of insecticide and blast the poor thing away, muttering "Nasty, nasty, nasty." Then she would go off to pour tea at her meeting of the Save the Earth Society.

"You better watch it," I told Tom as we turned the corner and headed down Chestnut Street. "Don't mention Hawk in front of your mother."

"Or the bag ladies," he replied.

"Or Popsicles."

"Or dogs," he said, pausing to pat a scruffy one that had just lifted its leg against someone's
steps. The dog wiggled its behind, trying to wag a stump of a tail, and followed us down the street a short distance until it was distracted by something edible in the gutter.

"There he is!" called Tom, dropping my hand and running ahead of me as we entered the park. "There's the Hawk!"

Hawk was on a bench near the entrance, his saxophone case open in front of him with a few quarters in it, tossed there by passersby. He was wearing the same faded jeans, the same monster sneakers, and a torn shirt that said
PROPERTY OF UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT
across the front. There was a hole through
ATHLETIC
. He had sweat on his dark forehead; it trickled in streams down his face and glistened in his beard. The saxophone glistened in the afternoon sunlight, too, as his fingers slid from key to key. He was playing a song I'd never heard. When Tom plopped down in the grass beside the bench, Hawk winked without taking his mouth away from the sax, and he eased into the melody of "Hush, little baby don't say a word."