The Unfortunates (25 page)
No. She can’t bear to write Patricia this morning. What she needs is exercise. Her eye falls on her new walking stick. It leans beside the door. The landscaper made it for her, cut a branch not far from her window and made it smooth and level. Those first days she was recovering from the pneumonia—“We haven’t connected with your son. Is there anyone else you’d like us to try?”—the landscaper made it a part of his day to check on her, by passing her window and glancing in. She suspects that since she called to him for help, he’s felt a minor responsibility for her welfare, as if by doing her one favor he owes her another. She began raising her hand hello whenever he appeared. Even when she was tired, each morning she took the ghastly walker to the garden’s closest bench, hoping he’d be by. The other day, surprising herself, she called to him from the bench, “Where are you from?” From Yemen. He told her his name, Yasser, and that he has a son and a daughter, “this high, and this high.” He flies back twice a year to see them.
“I also have a son and a daughter, this high, and this high.” She raised her twitchy hand as high as it would go. He looked down at her—right into her eyes—and said, “I’ll make you a stick,” and the way her heart knocked it was as if she’d fallen in love.
She looks out the window but doesn’t see him. For a few days, she’s listened to them again pruning the trees with the chain saw across the lake, too far for her to walk. Nothing left but to go find Dotty. She gropes her way past the wheelchair, folded against the wall—bedeviling, relentlessly leaning there, like a person waiting for her to make conversation. Today is a good day—she rejects the walker too, with the ironic horror that is the addition of bright green tennis balls to its feet. She takes the stick. She ejects herself into the hall. For some time there’s nothing but air vents and the bar to steady her hand. She peers into the open rooms as she staggers past—the patients lumped under the sheets like gray octopuses—that can’t be good. Farther down, she passes a room from which she hears an unusual commotion, a large man with a sparse white beard flung on the wave of seizure. Someone inside closes the door. She’s never seen that before. More closed doors—145, 147, 149, the numbers shuttling away until she reaches the stark little gym with the wall of glass. She waves to the two women who walk a steep incline on the treadmills, who she’s seen walking behind the glass all the days before. She reaches the bulletin board. Activities sheets and smiling photos of the physical therapists, with one or two salient details—“Did you know Inez plays the ukulele?”—pinned beside. Down, down, down. A purple-faced man shuffles toward her, gingerly escorting a mobile IV, eyeing the rod and bag as if it’s a spirit companion he can’t believe has chosen to walk the earth beside him. She is obliged to step out of his way.
Water for the ghosts
, another unlikely phrase that loops her thoughts. She wonders how her mind’s underground stream—when the bucket is lowered, she is no longer sure what will be pulled back up. Like—
shitcan
—where had that come from, so obscene, so unlike her? The man with the IV turns through a door that someone’s opened from within. A visitor’s pocketbook hangs on a chair.
Down to Dotty’s room. Knock, knock, knock.
“Come for a walk?” she asks.
“I’m tired,” Dotty says. “Let’s play cards.”
But how to account for the hours? For it’s another day and they are still or again playing cards. As if no time has passed, as if no other experience has intervened. The humidity’s climbed. In the distance, the shabby racket of thunder. They are playing gin with the air-conditioning on and the window closed. In CeCe’s opinion, Dotty, being from Arizona, is excessively interested in temperature control. Dotty in the recliner. As they play, black-winged clouds roll high above the lake, churn inward, bring sideways sheets of rain.
“—no other way you and me would have become friends,” Dotty’s saying, moving on from an elaborate oral diagram of the politics and allegiances of her church. “You hiding in your room. Good thing I don’t have a dime’s respect for the wrong side of a closed door. Otto and I got lost in Mexico one time, in San Crist
ó
bal, and I marched right up to—”
“Your discard.”
“Oh, yes. Have you been to Mexico?”
“Once.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about. Breathtaking!”
They
have
become friends, CeCe realizes, with a disagreeable twining of mortification and gratitude. It’s as if she’s known the scrap of Dotty’s brow and the puddle of Dotty’s mouth opening and closing forever. How many times already have they double-caned it down the lawn to the water, CeCe scanning the landscape for her friend from Yemen, this woman like a bundle of white rags, ruffling at her side?
Dotty uses her good hand to pull a card from the fan she’s arranged in the waxwork of her stroke arm and drops a two of spades.
“We have much in common,” CeCe says. Better than talking to the wheelchair or the wall. Onward and upward.
“Back home they call us Dotto because his name is Otto and my name is Dotty, from when there was Deano and Dingo and names like that going around in the popular—”
“A dingo is a dog.” CeCe says, not paying attention. The landscapers are not in sight. Dotty is telling her for what might be the fifteenth time that Otto is in charge of the Spanish-language division of Greetmark Greeting Cards, and would you believe, it’s bigger than the English-language division, and she can get CeCe as many cards as she wants for free, and Otto is bringing his famous chef salad tomorrow, he’s doing such a good job being on his own, flying out to visit every other weekend and never complaining about the trip.
No Yasser. They don’t work when it rains. But the blimp that harasses her sanity is there, floating above the horizon in a bath of light, far beyond the storm. Floating as it does every weekend, moseying a circle. It’s silver with a red bull’s-eye logo she can’t make out. She’s been told it’s the name of a brewing company.
“Isn’t that pretty. Over the football stadium. Watch your cards!”
CeCe’s fingers have slackened without her noticing. Her hands tremble. Now that Dotty’s brought the situation to her attention, she can feel the jerking sting that connects the tip of her index finger to the inside of her shoulder socket. The jack and queen and king of diamonds she’d organized at the left corner of the fan loosen and slide over her shuddering thumb onto the table. She scoops them back up and switches hands. It’s awkward, like playing from inside a mirror.
“I don’t think there’s a football stadium around here,” she says.
“No? Let’s keep going, I’ll pretend I didn’t see. Anyway, knock on a strange door in a strange land, that’s how we met our Fernanda—my honorary Mexican granddaughter—now we do a house stay every year. To keep familiar with the culture. Even the oldest traditions change here and there! Fernanda was in the Christmas pageant, two feet tall and wearing a beard and a sheet and carrying the urn for the myrrh. Nearly toppled each step she took to baby Jesus. They have a special day for the Three Kings? The sweet little children leave their shoes out at night and find presents tucked into the toe in the morning. Otto’s done a whole line of cards called ‘What’s in your shoe, peque
ñ
a?’ Wouldn’t it be nice if we woke up one day here and had presents in our shoes?”
How is it that even in front of this prattling and vacuous woman she’s ashamed to have lost control of her hands? How can she endure another moment of this chattering—from her only companion, of her nervous system? Her head’s shaking too, agreeing, despite the disagreement of the mind within.
“If I woke up here and found a present in my shoe,” CeCe says, trying, mostly successfully, to keep the anger from her voice, “I’d consider myself terrorized, and I’d look for a way to escape before the arrival of breakfast.” The trembling ebbs. “Gin.”
“Will you look at that. Can you shuffle, do you think?”
“Yes, I’ll try.”
“When I get the shakes, Otto calls me his hummingbird. Every moment he isn’t here I miss him. Passionately. Know what I mean?”
Maybe Dotty will die instead of me, CeCe thinks. “Do you think,” she ventures cautiously, for they’ve never discussed it, “the Astrasyne is having any effect on us?”
“How would I know?” To CeCe’s surprise, Dotty’s voice rises. “Oh, I can’t tell!” She chucks her cards onto the table.
“I ask only because you look much stronger lately,” CeCe says quickly and untruthfully. “Pinker.” She pats Dotty’s hand.
“Really?”
“Really.” If Dotty dies, it will be simple because Dotty believes in God and Dotty has a husband. God will hold her spirit and Otto will hold her body and that will be that. “I myself feel much better.”
“That’s great. Come to the pool with me today? Don’t say no!”
“I swam when I was young. But I don’t want to swim here.” As a girl, CeCe had an instructor who wore a floral bathing cap and treaded water with a cigarette puffing out her mouth, while clutching an umbrella to keep the wrinkling effects of the sun off her skin—an elegant and rakish feat of synchronization CeCe admired. Many Saturdays, CeCe dangled over the lip of the pool, under the glass ceiling on the top floor of her childhood home, now repurposed as a recital space for the John Stepney Somner Library. When the instructor wasn’t present, Toto or a maid would sit on the edge of a lounge chair. Toto’s hem was starched and the mica-speckled concrete glinted and the lines on the bottom of the pool shifted blue. “I was a strong swimmer. Or was I? Maybe I was a poor swimmer and it’s only they told me I was strong. I don’t know.”
“I forget lots of stuff. Facts. But nothing physical like that. Not memories you can feel.”
CeCe returns to her room and lies down. She wants to be awake when they bring lunch. She’ll close her eyes a few minutes—and. In her dream, she’s Fernanda of Mexico. She’s also a nurse. She’s in a hurry to get dressed for work. With a gathering desperation she searches for her puffy white nurse shoes—she’ll be fired by Dr. Orlow if she’s late one more time. But she can’t make rounds barefoot, and how will her feet survive the pilgrimage to Jesus over the hot sand? The shoes must go under her robes, her costume for the pageant. She’s the king that carries the myrrh. She’s sure she remembers setting the shoes neatly beside the bed. They must be under the bed! Carefully she bends and ducks her stiff head through the hanging blankets, but the shoes are gone. They
were
there, she’s sure of it. Instead, here are the red sands of the desert, stretching for miles. She sets out across it, the myrrh in her hands, scouring the shimmering landscape for her shoes. The myrrh releases a reddish-brown sap that makes her hands sticky and drips onto her legs and her frying feet. For a flash, her father’s hog-gum trees are in the dream and she’s
his
nurse, whispering a filthy deal to him in the dark, ushering unsuspecting little Fernanda into his room. The shoes must be in the closet! She rushes to the closet. Gone. God, why, it’s God. He’s playing a mean game with her. God keeps moving her shoes. Just as she discovers their location—now on the windowsill, now buried in the red sand, now on a shelf too high for Fernanda to reach, he puts them somewhere else.
George. The wife, by his side. They are leaning over her, calling her from sleep. Why, she isn’t put together! And she hasn’t yet decided how to be! She will—she pretends she can’t be woken. She watches through her eyelashes as they bend upright and confer.
“Go get someone,” Iris whispers.
“She looks okay to me,” George says. “How about lunch and we come back later?”
From the side of her eye she sees George turn away, his fine, firm profile, handsome, though still a copy, less the rangy verve, the beautiful glint of his father. George could almost be a stranger to her in his middle age, except for the nervous way he’s raking his hair, his oldest habit despite all her corrections. She’ll forgive him. Not right away, but forgive him she will. Her son. And Iris, wearing something ugly.
“Wait! Stay. I’m awake.”
He’s been mulling how to ask her for days: “You appreciate opera almost as much as I…” or “I’ve been working on the libretto to this new…” or “As a patron of the arts, I know you will…” and “In an age of diminished public funding for innovative, independent…” or “When an increasingly conglomeratized media control the very institutions that might serve to question…” (this from one of Vijay’s early e-mails, and probably the wrong tack). And “If you ever doubted me, I want to thank you, because it’s only pushed me to test my courage, and tested it I have…” His skull jangles like a bell. He’s not slept. He has no reason for sleep, in his now-usual state of wired exhaustion, with his increasing appetite for everything and nothing. He watches his mother wave away Iris’s help, prop herself in a chair at the table, tidy a pile of blue-backed playing cards into a stack beside some magazines. He tries to hide his restlessness, to keep his foot from tapping, his leg from bouncing. Her mobility is confusing him. He ducks over the table to kiss her cheek. She receives him without comment. Her hair, usually so neatly flipped, is fluffed in the pale halo of the aged and napped behind the ears. She’s perfumed, though, her same perfume that smells of orange rind and violets and that he’s always vaguely thought of as Soviet. In the old days, her habit had been to spray it in the air and step through the sinking mist, wearing one of the boucl
é
suits she favored for meetings in the city, but now she’s stuck squirting it right on. In the last year, he smelled her illness underneath the perfume—a different kind of sweetness, like molasses crossed with the odor pennies leave on the fingers. Today this is gone. Maybe she really is improving.
“Seriously, you look fantastic!” Iris says. “How do you feel? Tell us everything.”
“Strong as an ox. I’m walking every day.”
“I’m so happy for you. I can hardly believe it.”
He should say something too. He forces himself to sit on the stool beside the bed, to pin his shaking hands. The midday light branches across the sheets. It had rained most of the trip but cleared as the car wound up the drive, the sun breaking through as they parked. He doesn’t feel well. Queasy. Why doesn’t anyone ever show an interest in how
he’s
feeling? His mother won’t look in his direction.
