Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes (21 page)

The famous chant sounded determined, but only about a dozen voices had joined in.

“That wasn’t the President talking!” croaked a woman.

“
No,
that last voice was somebody else at that sick funeral and you
deserve
it!” yelled a man on the Rent-a-Womb side, giving a kick to two youths in white sweaters from the Mighty Right who seemed to be trying to manhandle him. Then a girl and two young men plunged in to help the man being menaced by the two white sweaters.

“Day and
night—
outa my
sight
!” countered the Rent-a-Wombers. The new chant grew. “Day and
night—
OUTA MY SIGHT
!”

“Alicia!”

Alicia recognized the voice of her mother, saw her mother with upraised hand or finger several yards away, as if her mother were admonishing her or maybe warning her of danger, and at that instant at least twenty people surged between them from the hospital side of the lawn toward the street side. Several people got knocked off their feet. A couple of women screamed, then it was a free-for-all, and nobody spared the elderly on either side.

“Keep your cool! No rough stuff!” Stephanie yelled to the Rent-a-Womb side, raised her arms for attention, even tried to jump into the air, making Alicia wince, because Steph looked as if she carried a bushel basket beneath her raspberry-colored woolen dress.

The town whistles went off for noon, police sirens screamed from nearby, and Stephanie screamed, all at the same time.

“Oh, Geoff!” Alicia yelled. “
Here!
” She had spotted him coming tentatively down the hospital’s steps.

Geoff ran toward her, and his white gown parted with his speed. “Good thing there’s a hospital near! Ha-ha!” Geoff neatly dodged a tall young man who was falling backward on to the lawn, having been shoved by someone.

“I saw Steph a minute ago,” Alicia said, “and now I can’t find her. She shouldn’t be in this fracas!”

She and Geoff were dodging swinging arms, and sidestepping people who might have walked backward into them. The police blew whistles and yelled for order. A few people had fallen, unconscious or stunned.

“Stretchers!” someone cried.

Stretchers were coming. Five or six interns hopped down the hospital steps with stretchers and first-aid kits.

“Hello, Alicia! I’m Frances, remember?” Frances had a bloody nose. “We’re trying to protect Steph. Come this way!”

Steph wasn’t on the ground, but she looked in pain, and was being supported by a couple of Rent-a-Womb girls who were plainly trying to move her in the direction of the hospital but without much success because of the crowd. Geoff grasped the situation, and called to an intern whom he knew by name. “This job’s my department, I think,” Geoff said to Alicia.

Within seconds, Steph was being borne on a stretcher toward the hospital, and Frances and a couple of other Rent-a-Womb girls were walking alongside her. Alicia heard a couple of taunts from Mighty Righters, something about “another factory baby there,” but Alicia managed to put it out of her head. She wasn’t even angry about it. She knew that Steph had stated publicly today that she was going to have “her own” baby, and if certain people hadn’t heard her, too bad.

“We’ve won! . . . We’ve won!”

“We’ve
won
!”

Which side was chanting that? Both sides. Which side had won? Which side would ever win, Alicia wondered as she crouched on the lawn, helping another nurse bathe a bad scrape on a woman’s arm with disinfectant, getting a bandage ready. Many people were leaving the scene, which made the dozen or so fallen figures more visible. A few zealots on either side still shouted insults at one another. Glancing up from her next first-aid job, Alicia saw the Rent-a-Womb girls, some of whom Alicia now knew by sight, putting away their banner, picking up fallen flyers from the lawn.

When Alicia entered the hospital, walking alongside a scared young man with a cut on his forehead that was still bleeding, she realized that she didn’t know how much time had passed since the chaos of noon. She got the boy on to a chair, took care of his cut, and assured him that he wouldn’t need a stitch. Alicia found another nurse to take over and persuade the boy to lie down for a few minutes, and then she looked at her watch. Nearly half past 1! She had been thinking of Steph.

She went up to the fifth floor, where both delivery and predelivery rooms were, and got the Hall Attendant to inquire, because she wasn’t supposed to barge into delivery.

At that instant, the delivery room door opened, and Geoff came into the hall. He opened his arms and laughed when he saw Alicia.

“It’s a girl! Easiest birth I ever saw in my life!”

“She’s really okay?”

“It’ll be hard to hold her down. Ha-ha! How’re things on the battlefield?”

Alicia was suddenly sick of the battlefield. Steph was fine and with a baby girl! Babies were what the whole fight was about,
wanted
babies, that was. And neither side had won, she remarked to Geoff, and Geoff agreed, because neither side had listened to the other.

“But both sides are happy, don’t forget,” said Geoff. “Mighty Right always thinks it’s won. And Steph was telling me Rent-a-Womb got a lot of names and addresses of people who want babies, so she thinks Rent-a-Womb won.”

Alicia’s mother had a black eye. Of all injuries not appropriate, Alicia thought, this was the worst, and it looked comical on her mother’s face. The atmosphere was worse in the house, really intolerable, so Alicia eased herself out. All it meant was that she and Geoff married a little earlier than planned, and they concluded the house deal earlier, and moved in.

No End in Sight

She lies now, certainly a hundred and ninety, some say two hundred and ten, and with no end in sight. She doesn’t know Sunday from Wednesday, couldn’t care less, has refused to wear her hearing aid for the past ninety or more years, flushed her false teeth down the toilet at least a century ago, causing the nursing home staff to have to grind her food for her ever since. Now she’s spoon-fed three times a day, four if you count “tea,” and pees in bed in a diaper. Naomi’s diapers have to be changed ten or more times in twenty-four hours, round the clock. The Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home charges extra for their diaper-using guests.

Naomi can’t or won’t bother pushing a handy red-glowing electric button that hangs over the edge of her night-table, she just lets go. When it comes time to change the bed linen, which is twice a week, two nurses lift her to a nearby chair which has a hole in its seat and is called a commode. The nurses spread Naomi’s gown in back, in case she is in a mood to relieve herself while they are remaking the bed. Two nurses lift Naomi with ease, because she doesn’t weigh much, into a wheelchair twice a month, and she is rolled to the “beauty parlor” down the corridor for a shampoo and set, manicure and pedicure. This costs seventy-four dollars. Her thin white hair looks like a puff of smoke, but still her scalp has to be washed, the hair fluffed to make it look more like hair, though Naomi hasn’t asked for a mirror in decades, and couldn’t see into it, if she did: Naomi deliberately broke her glasses many years ago in a fit of temper, and those being the fifth pair the nursing home had had made (at Naomi’s account’s expense, of course), the home did not have another pair made. Or maybe the optometrist demurred, remembering how disagreeable Naomi had been the last time he had tried to fit her with glasses.

But if a pair of specs had lain by Naomi’s bedside lamp, would she have put them on? No. What was she “seeing” with her eyes half shut, as they were most of the day and night? What was she seeing in the rare moments when they were more open? What was she remembering? Were childhood memories more vivid than the events of her mature years, as everyone said? Maybe. Naomi mumbled, talked to imaginary characters sometimes, but seldom could the nurses understand what she said, and who cared? Naomi didn’t say anything funny about the people around her now, as she’d done a hundred years ago when she’d used to walk, assisted by a nurse usually, into the refectory for a meal. Generations of nurses had come and gone since then, and Naomi’s bizarre and snide remarks, being airy things and unwritten, had not been handed down to the memory of the current nursing staff.

Naomi’s only offspring, her son Stevey, had not been wealthy when he died, but he had left his all to his mother, some seventeen thousand dollars. Stevey had never married. Of course his small fortune, which he had invested as well as possible in Time Deposits and suchlike, had long ago run out. But such is the luck of people like Naomi, that she was bequeathed another small fortune from an uncle of Stevey on Stevey’s father’s side, and that had lasted incredibly long, though not as long as Naomi was lasting. But more later of the odd financial situation. Stevey has been dead for about a hundred and ten years. He had a normal span of life, and died before he was eighty.

There’s a TV set in Naomi’s room, and she used to stare at its blank, oyster-colored screen for a few moments now and then, as if she were seeing something, would talk back to imagined personages in sitcoms, but no more. Stevey had bought the set for her when she was eighty (Naomi had been seventy-eight when she entered the Old Homestead), but as she grew more batty, the nurses had slipped the set out to other patients’ rooms (charging the inmates for its use, of course), and when the set went on the blink finally, nobody had bothered fixing it, and it had been put back, kaput, in Naomi’s room. In case any of her relatives turned up and remembered talk of a TV set and asked where it was, there it was. But Naomi’s relatives—living, walking, visiting ones—had always been conspicuous for their absence.

The Old Homestead’s administrative staff and the nurses male and female sometimes chuckled over Naomi Barton Markham. Close to two hundred, they said, if she was a day! And still going! No
reason
for her to die!

Nobody of Naomi’s family had visited in a century, the story went. The uncle of Stevey had died without issue and, remembering his brother Eugene with admiration, had left what he had to Eugene’s widow Naomi, whom he’d never met. Very kind of that uncle, as Naomi had married a second time to one Doug Villars, who had not been a great earner. Amazingly, Naomi’s legacy had held out for sixty years or so against the marauding of the Old Homestead administration, the adding of “special care” hours, and prescriptions for unnecessary items, the most absurd being Tums for the tummy, which Naomi did not at all need, but which the pharmacy was delighted to add to the list of items that she did need. It was a hell of a racket.

Naomi Barton Markham’s room on the ground floor of the Old Homestead Nursing and Rest Home in southern Oklahoma was a small room with one window and a private bath, which Naomi had not set foot in since she had been about a hundred and twenty. The room held, besides Naomi’s bed, a chair for visitors, a night-table with little bottles and a drinking glass with water in it, and on the floor near the bed a bedpan that the nurses were seldom in time to push under her, if the bedpan was needed during the times of diaper-changing.

Someone of the staff had remarked, “Babies
are
a bore with wet diapers and all, and it doesn’t last long, maybe just two years. But Naomi—its been fifty years or so now.” Then later, “It’s been eighty—a
hundred
years now, hasn’t it?” And a circle of nurses and maybe even a staff doctor or two would join in the laughter in the Old Homestead’s round-the-clock cafeteria in the basement.

Some stories got passed on like folklore.

“When Naomi was eighty or ninety and quite lively, she used to creep at night from one room to the other, switching glasses of people’s false teeth—or she’d flush ’em down the toilet! That’s what I was told when I came to work here.”

This story had inspired laughter and tears of mirth in dozens of young nurses and doctors. It was true! They felt it in their bones, it was true!

And there were stories of Naomi going into the kitchen during that short period around 3 a.m., when the cooks weren’t busy with something, and Naomi would pour the salt into the sugar containers and vice versa, pull the plugs on the deep-freezers, anything to be mischievous. It was a fact that Naomi had had to be confined to a big armchair for a period of several weeks, given sedatives, shortly after she had entered the Old Homestead, and any nurse could verify this, as it was on record. Some nurses had looked it up, then asked for shorter hours or more pay for caring for Naomi, because the Old Homestead was not supposed to be a loony bin.

The truth was, Naomi Barton Markham was insane, besides being senile, but insane in a way that no one could label, or define. Multiple infarcts of the brain? Why not? Good as anything, and it implied an insufficient supply of blood to the brain, a condition a couple of doctors had told Stevey that his mother had, as if that summed up and dismissed the variety of oddnesses that Naomi had displayed over the years. Whatever she had, it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

Further truth was, Naomi had cursed out, since the age of seventeen or so, nearly everyone around her, abused them in one way or another. First her boyfriends, who of course hadn’t been good enough for her; then her husband Eugene Markham, said to have had the patience of Job; then her second husband Doug Villars, who had had even more patience than Eugene (Naomi knew how to pick them), and finally Stevey, who had at first worshipped the ground his mother walked on, then turned against her in an emotional and Freudian sense (he hadn’t been in love with her any longer, after the age of fourteen, say), but not in a filial or legal sense, for he had always written to her if they were apart, and had continued to pay her bills as long as his rather lonely life lasted.