The Tides (9 page)
Authors: Melanie Tem
Billie got to her feet and stood by the table, hoping
she'd be able to catch somebody's attention, hoping Marshall wouldn't wake up. Faye, of all things. To have to think about Faye again at her age. She waved to Shirley, but couldn't catch her eye. Shirley was arguing with Dexter McCord, who didn't want to leave the dining room yet, didn't want to take a bath. He was holding onto the edge of the table and bellowing. Shirley was prying his fingers loose. One of them was going to get hurt.
Billie looked away from the unpleasant scene, wished she could close her ears. Except for Shirley and Dexter, herself and Marshall, and that man hunkering by the back door, the dining room had been emptied. Billie had the feeling somebody else was there, but she scanned the room more than once and saw no one. The radio was on in the kitchen, but it was always on and she couldn't tell whether Roslyn was back there or not.
Her legs went wobbly on her and she groped for the back of the chair, sank into it. If she weren't so heavy she'd be better off, but she couldn't see herself losing weight now. She rested her elbows on the table and her head on her hands, defeated, bent over like Marshall but a little less so. This was beyond her. All she could think to do was wait for somebody to notice that Marshall wasn't in his room and come looking for him. It shamed her that she couldn't handle her own husband. That's why he was in a nursing home, because she couldn't do right by him.
Roslyn came out from the kitchen, as she did most mornings, to have coffee with some of the residents who lingered. She wasn't supposed to do that; she was supposed to be cleaning up after breakfast and starting prep for lunch. Let the girls do that; if they didn't know what to do by now they were all in trouble. She had enough on her mind, like Adele. The salesman from ARA
would be here this morning and she didn't have her order ready. Screw it. What was the point of this job if she couldn't take a few minutes to talk to the people she was cooking for?
Not that she liked all of them. She kept trying to explain it to Adele. Just because they lived in a nursing home didn't mean they were all interesting or decent human beings or even - Roslyn's bare minimum - not irritating. Bob Morley, for instance, was practically nothing but irritating. There he was now, hulking just outside the back door. Smoking, probably, or feeling up Petra, or jerking off. Ros wondered if he'd eaten breakfast. A lot of the time he wouldn't eat with the others. Ros suspected he couldn't stand their company, and she could relate to that, so more often than not she'd fix him a tray later, by himself. She wasn't supposed to do that, either. Screw it.
Beatrice Quinn was one of her favorites, but the old broad was still in the hospital. The last time Roslyn had visited, Beatrice had patted her hand and said not to worry, she'd be back in a few days, but who knew? Roslyn missed her. Shame, what had happened. Ros wondered whose fault it was. The driver's? The nurses' and aides', for not watching her better? Beatrice Quinn's? If she didn't knock it off, Bea was going to wake up in one of those locked wards someday. But if Ros herself was ever in a nursing home, she'd be doing her damnedest to escape all the time, too. They'd have to tie her down. Maybe that's what they ought to do with Beatrice.
Juggling her enormous coffee mug and the morning paper, she pushed aside the dishes and crumbs on one of the vacated tables the girls hadn't got to yet, brushed off some sort of cobweb or the back and seat of the chair, and
sat herself down. Sooner or later somebody would join her. By now it wouldn't surprise her if Rebecca showed up, never mind that the administrator had no business here this early in the morning. Rebecca was naive and in over her head, and according to Diane the only reason she had got this job so' young was because she slept with Dan Murphy. To hear Diane tell it, everybody from the new little housekeeper to the Health Department nursing surveyor was sleeping or had slept with Dan Murphy, which, looking at him, was hard to believe, and as if Diane would know anyway. But you couldn't accuse Rebecca of not working hard.
Having in this way started thinking about sex and trade-offs for sex, Ros was well into thinking about Adele some more picturing herself in Adele's arms, fantasizing about Adele's tongue and her own
—
when Bob slammed open the back door and strode toward her. 'Hungry,' he grunted.
Over the top of the paper Ros fixed him with a baleful stare. 'Should've eaten your breakfast, shouldn't you? It's a long time till lunch.' She knew and he knew she'd get him a tray, but she wasn't going to make it too easy. One of Rebecca's more ridiculous ideas was that residents ought to be able to get snacks whenever they felt like it, just as if this really were their home. Roslyn openly scoffed at that one.
'Fuck you.' Bob said clearly.
With difficulty Ros stopped herself from decking him; the muscles in her arm actually clenched. She didn't even raise the verbal obscenity stakes, though a dozen more imaginative rejoinders sped through her mind. 'And the horse you rode in on,' was what she said back, which was probably over his head. With a furious rustle and snap she
raised the paper in front of her face again and simply pulled rank, an option always available to her and any other staff person no matter what Rebecca said about equality and shared power. 'Get out of here.' she ordered. 'Breakfast's over.'
'You'll be sorry,' he snarled, then stormed out the back door, slamming it. She was surprised that he'd left without a struggle or at least an argument. If he got hit by a car it would be her fault for not giving him breakfast whenever the hell he wanted it, no matter how obnoxious he was. Ros scowled.
There was nothing worth reading on the front page. She tried to fold the paper to page 2, but it buckled and the inside sections slid out onto the floor. Bending to pick them up, she grunted and cursed.
The intercom crackled: 'Roslyn Curry, call on line 1. Ros, line 1, please.' So Rebecca was here already; who did she think she was? The page broke into the relative quiet of the early morning, started the yap that would go on all day. Even at night there were phone calls to announce and nursing staff to summon from one wing of the facility to the other, and occasionally, when things were slow, the night shift would play on the intercom, sing or tell jokes or call mischievously to each other, just to break the monotony and keep themselves awake. Not everyone who lived there was awakened by this. Some were deaf. Some were so inured to the erratic stimulation of their environment that even the electronically enhanced shouting, laughter, crackling, and whistling didn't really bother them. Those who were disturbed often didn't sleep again that night unless they were sedated, for which all of them had standing doctor's orders in their charts; the insomnia and the medication were, most of the time, duly charted
and reported as a problem in patient-care conferences, but regarded as routine.
Ros sat there, not wanting to answer the phone. She spent half her goddamn life on the phone. It was just the ARA guy, confirming their appointment, which was his sneaky way of making sure she was ready for him, which she never was. She successfully ignored the page until Rebecca repeated it, then slapped the paper down on the still-uncleaned table, said, 'Okay, okay, keep your pants on; and stalked into the kitchen to pick up the phone.
'Roslyn?' came Adele's voice, and she sounded funny. Adrenaline surged through Ros, making her queasy.
'What's the matter?' Silence, and Ros had to ask again, 'Adele, what's wrong.?'
MS
Adele took an audible breath and said in a rush, 'There's somebody else.'
For long moments Ros didn't consciously know what Adele was talking about, although the sudden gauziness of her senses, followed by abrupt, terrible claritythe cracks in the ceiling three-dimensional, the odors of pancakes and syrup and coffee acrid
—
probably signalled comprehension at some visceral level. Everything that came into her head to say seemed both ridiculous and dangerous, life-threatening. She heard the back door open and didn't hear it shut. The son-of-a-bitch never did shut the door.
Adele said, 'I'm in love with somebody else,' and now there was no question what she meant.
Ros said, stupidly, 'Who is he?' and Adele gave a shriek of outraged laughter. The salesman from ARA knocked on the doorframe, stuck his head in, gave a jaunty wave, and settled himself and his order forms at the nearest table, still in full view and earshot. Ros said, 'Shit. Okay, who is she?'
Predictably, Adele said, 'It doesn't matter who she is, Ros. Things just aren't going to work out between us.'
Roslyn was having trouble breathing; her throat was clogged and scratchy, as though a fine net scarf had been shoved into her esophagus. She turned her back on both Bob Morley and the salesman and managed to ask through the obstruction, 'Why not?' She didn't know what the rules were here. Did a lesbian lover
—
that was the first time she'd allowed herself even to think the word 'lesbian'
—
break up with you the same way and for the same reasons a man would?
Apparently so, because Adele said, 'Oh, Ros, we just aren't right for each other. We haven't been right from the beginning, but I kept hoping things would get better,' and Roslyn had the same Alice-in-Wonderland headrush she'd had when her husband had left her, telling her things she should have known all along and had never even guessed.
She found that she had been staring at the flickering ceiling fixture; her vision was starred now with bursts of multicolored light and their auras. Her head buzzed, less like a swarm of mosquitos than like the electric zapper that incinerated them.
'I won't be here when you get home,' Adele finished, and broke the connection. Ros did not hang up right away.
Since Billie Emig had heard her daughter's voice on the PA, sounding awfully bossy coming out of the speakers all over the building like that, she'd been waiting for Rebecca to come into the dining room, see her father, and help her mother get him to his room. No such thing happened. Billie sat there. In a fierce undertone, she said to Marshall, 'You notice who's here taking care of you now that you're senile, don't you? Not Faye,' but of course he didn't have anything to say to that.
A man she'd never seen before, in a suit and tie and carrying a briefcase, walked past their table, whistling. He smiled down at her and patted her shoulder. 'Good morning, dear.' Rebecca hated it when people talked to Billie like that; she said it was patronizing, but to Billie he was just being nice. The man peeked into the kitchen, waved to Roslyn, and, still whistling, sat down at a table near the door, where he opened his briefcase and spread out papers.
Rebecca didn't come, and neither did anybody else. Billie resolved to ask Roslyn for help; she hated to do that, since it wasn't really Ros's job and the man in the suit was obviously here to see her. Billie hesitated, increasingly angry and afraid.
With a cry, Marshall woke up and jerked himself back so hard that the chair moved. His eyes bulged, and there were bubbles in the corners of his mouth. Billie got to her feet and went to him. He tried to get away from her. 'Leave me alone!' he was hollering, all the more awful because his voice was raspy and hollow, stuck in his throat. He struck out at her, batting her hands away. He'd never hit her before.
'Ma'am? Need some help?' The salesman pushed back his chair and came across the room. Before she'd told him what she needed, he'd caught Marshall's flailing hands. 'Now, you don't want to do that, sir.' The 'ma'am' and the 'sir' emphasized, somehow, that he was in charge of the situation, which Billie found immensely reassuring.
'He thinks I'm somebody else,' she confided to the man. 'Sometimes he gets a little, you know, confused.'
'Oh, that's okay, I get a little confused now and then myself,' the man said heartily. He had dropped one of Marshall's hands now and was pumping the other one
gently, pretending to be shaking hands. Billie thought that was nice. 'Sir,' he went on, bending close as if Marshall couldn't see very well and raising his voice as though he couldn't hear, 'my name's Stanley Bartlett. I'm the guy that supplies your food here.'
Saying by rote, 'Glad to make your acquaintance,' Marshall heard his own voice and suddenly snapped into an understanding of where and who he was, what was happening, what was expected of him and what he could expect. The residual effect of the earlier state of mind
—
a sense of having been terrified and with good reason
—
threatened to leave him tremulous, but he managed to steady both his voice and his grip as he, in fact, shook hands with Stanley Bartlett, repeated gravely, 'I'm glad to meet you,' and even added, comprehending almost completely what this interaction concerned, 'We appreciate all that you do.' He still saw Faye superimposed on his beloved Billie, but now he knew she wasn't real. It wasn't the first time he'd dreamed about her, or imagined he glimpsed her in a crowd (or felt her hands on him the way they would be when she was loving him, or felt his hands on her).
'Would you mind helping me walk him back to his room?' Billie appealed to Mr Bartlett, although she wasn't sure she'd need his help now that Marshall was almost himself again, as much himself as he ever was anymore. She spread her hands apologetically. 'I don't know where the girls are. They must be short-handed today.'
'Sure,' Bartlett agreed, but she could tell he didn't want to and she was embarrassed that she'd asked. He glanced toward the kitchen and at his watch. 'Looks like Ros isn't ready for me anyway.'
Marshall stood up on his own. Bartlett
reached
helpfully for his elbow, which threw Marshall off-balance; he tipped sideways but righted himself by pushing off against Billie's shoulder, eluding her grasp. Then at a respectable pace he got himself out of the dining room and down the hall to the right, which was the direction of his room. Billie and the salesman followed to make sure he got where he was going. Faye followed, too, a short distance, before spinning back to meet Ros as she slammed out through the swinging kitchen door.
Distraught as she was, Roslyn Curry would be easy to enter. Faye slid right in, just as Bob Morley stepped in front of her demanding his breakfast. 'Sure! No problem!' Ros hissed, bringing her face close to Bob's and locking gazes with him. 'Sit down right there, sir, make yourself comfortable, and I'll be just pleased as punch to serve you.'
Bob didn't know what to do. He was slow; he didn't always get things. He sat down. He was hungry.
But she didn't come back out of the kitchen. She didn't bring him his breakfast. He got hungrier and hungrier and madder and madder. He could hear funny noises from back there, like a woman crying. It pissed him off when a woman cried. He got up. He knocked over the chair. 'Hey! I'm hungry!' Nobody did anything.
Fists clenched, mind completely focused on food, Bob kicked at the metal swinging door into the kitchen and it opened. He hadn't exactly known it would open, but when it did he barged in. Somebody was over by the big refrigerators. She was shaking, and all kinds of colors fizzed out from her. Bob stayed away. He looked for food. The stove that didn't look much like a stove didn't have any food on it. There was a garbage can in the corner with its lid off, and he peered down into it and saw pancakes.
