The Sweet By and By Read online

  “Anybody in here like to play poker?” she holds the nearly completed heart up to her face and peeks one eye through a club-shaped cutout.

  “Not with you they don’t because you always win.”

  “Alvin taught me real good. I can teach you.”

  “The only time I see Alvin is when one of the nurses is looking for him to do something that he was already supposed to have done. I guess now I know where he spends his free time.”

  “Alvin’s real good at cards,” Bernice goes on undeterred.

  “Evidently.”

  “Have you got some valentines?” Bernice asks with her eyebrows raised, looking over at my pitiful pile of work.

  “I’m sorry to say I’ve only got five, and only four usable.” One of them is shaped more like a potato than a heart.

  “No. Real valentines,” Bernice giggles. “Sweethearts.”

  “You’re my only valentine, Bernice, you know that.”

  “Well that’s sad then because a valentine is somebody you hold in your heart. That’s why I’m making hearts. I’ve got lots of hearts.”

  She is pushing for something and I don’t know what. I search for what to say. My husband was a good man. I did not love him, but he was good. I reckon I was waiting for a real valentine, and what I found was Charles Clayton. We married; that’s what a person did. And we made a life together, that’s also what people did. My heart never changed, but it did soften, with time, and I found some room for him in it that I didn’t know I had. I don’t really feel like talking to Bernice in one of her crazy spells right now.

  “Won’t you be my valentine? I will be your valentine.” Bernice is singing to herself a tune that sounds vaguely like “Old Dan Tucker.” She sings the same two lines over and over and I think I might lose my mind but I don’t want to tell her to stop because she’s smiling and happy.

  “Who is your valentine then, Bernice?”

  “Mister Benny.”

  “I know that. Who else?”

  “Everybody.”

  “That’s not an answer.” I try her out, not knowing whether she’ll keep going.

  “I love some people. They don’t know but I love them.”

  We are silent now. It’s as though she said something meaningless and profound at the same time. I look at her and see my sister. My Callie, whom I would like to tell that I love her. I focus all my attention on the construction paper and glue in front of us. So much paper, as many memories. Bernice and I are making valentines for people we barely know.

  Down the hall, the same hall where we live, there’s a sixteen-year-old boy. He was in a car wreck. No drinking, no drugs, he ran off the road with some friends late at night after a football game. One of them died. Jamie will never move anything but his eyes ever again. He will spend the rest of his life here. I know his brain works fine because I see him respond when his mother takes his hand and tells him “If you don’t get a haircut I’m going to stop speaking to you.”

  I used to wonder why Jamie wasn’t at some other place where there were young people, people like him, rather than in a nursing home with the ancients, but there’s not such a place anywhere close by. This way, his mother is here every day like clockwork, lots of times his father too.

  Once in a while, they put Jamie on something that looks to me like a combination of a wheelchair and a stretcher, and for a change, bring him out into the lounge. Yesterday his preacher came, I didn’t know preachers made visits for Valentine’s Day, but there he was, with his wife and a bunch of red carnations in a green vase.

  “Are any of these nurses flirting with you?” she said in a real loud voice and then laughed even louder.

  Lorraine looked at me with caution in her eyes. She knew what was going through my mind. I know they mean well, but when I hear something like that I feel like I’m going to cry. I want to scream out the truth that we make ourselves dance around because we don’t know any other way to get through. Jamie will never flirt with anyone, not in a way that they will know it, and if anyone does with him, it will only be out of pity. That child, alert as he ever was, is trapped in a body, and I would trade my own body for him to get out of that withering shell and live like every sixteen-year-old should. He needs to be able to make his parents mad, figure out who he loves, find out what he can do and what he can’t, make mistakes that he doesn’t have to pay too dearly for. Instead Jamie lies still, his boyish skin touched by his parents or a rare visitor, or by the brash arrival of a cheap washcloth cleaning him up because he is authorized to be bathed in bed rather than taken in a heap down to a room where the shower and the tub are, stainless steel like a factory or a morgue.

  “Won’t you be my valentine? I will be your valentine,” Bernice sings.

  “Honey, I love you, but you have to stop. Please stop,” I say, and she does, but I occasionally hear her humming under her breath. I have stopped working on my sixth valentine. I feel like a fool cutting paper. Why do holidays have to be parties, all of them? Not everything is a party.

  “Bernice, there’s going to be a change of plans. We’re going to decorate Jamie’s room. What do you think?” I feel excited, spontaneous.

  “What are we putting up?” she asks.

  I look around us at the crepe paper, hearts, and helium balloons blown up by Ada’s husband using a big metal tank. “All this, every bit of it,” I tell her.

  “The whole party?” she asks, but she’s not really asking because she is already gathering up all the decorations and some things that are not decorations like salt and pepper shakers and bottles of toothpicks in her arms and putting them in the empty cardboard box that originally contained all the supplies.

  The door to Jamie’s room is closed. That most likely means he’s sleeping or getting a bath or having a diaper changed. We start to go back to the dining room when the door swings open and Lorraine puts a rubber wedge under it to hold it.

  “What are y’all doin? I thought you was decorating the dining room this morning,” she says.

  “We’d like to decorate in here, Lorraine. Are you with us or against us?”

  Bernice pipes up. “We’re giving him the whole party.”

  Lorraine is standing in the doorway. “Ada Everett knows what y’all are doin?”

  “No ma’am, without question, she does not,” I answer.

  “Hmm.” Lorraine steps aside. “All right then.” She can’t help grinning in spite of herself.

  Bernice starts riffling through long strands of crepe paper, while Lorraine tries to keep it untangled. I attempt to direct them. “Now don’t put too much pink, Bernice, he’s a boy.” I hesitate. “I don’t know, never mind, maybe he likes pink, so just do what looks good.”

  Bernice says to Lorraine, “We need you up high,” pointing to the ceiling.

  “Yes Lorraine, please,” I add.

  “I got to put on some lower shoes before y’all get me climbin up on things.” Lorraine scurries out. “Y’all wait for me, I mean it now.”

  Jamie is wide-awake, his eyes darting, dancing. I could swear I see a smile. I lean down to him. “We’re giving you all the valentines in this place, honey.”

  Bernice leans down too. “Won’t you be my valentine? I will be your valentine,” she sings. Jamie’s eyelids flicker, and Bernice takes hold of his limp hand and sings again. I tape our construction paper and lace cutouts all over the wall, and a potato-shaped heart onto my blouse. The party is starting early this year.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  APRIL

  The Asian woman at the desk said, “You go right back, it fine. You find her back there,” without looking up from her work, which seemed to be dominated by a large chart and Sharpies in several colors, all very neat and orderly. “She working on B Hall. You find her.”

  “Which one is B again?” I asked, leaning slightly over the top of the high reception desk. I had forgotten the layout.

  She burst into a giggle, then composed herself immediately, “Over there, no problem. You se
e?”

  Whenever I came home from Shaw on a weekend, Mama let me use her car on Saturday to run errands as long as I promised I’d be on time to pick her up after her shift. On this rare occasion, I was early. I thanked the receptionist and pointed again to B Hall to reiterate, waving to her as I walked away.

  The hall was lined with railing to prevent falls, and a linoleum floor was easier to clean than carpet, as well as being an optimal surface for wheelchairs. Some patients pulled themselves along in their chairs via hand over hand movement, clasping the rail as tightly as they could with arthritic wrists and fingers. Less skilled drivers often banged into the wall, which was why the floor molding was brown rubber, marred by countless bumps and bruises.

  I had been here so many times that the smell didn’t bother me the way it used to, as if it were something that one could ever really become accustomed to. The most pronounced odor was that of a strong citrus-infused bleach that masks the ubiquitous presence of urine. It is a smell that is found in this particular form of offense nowhere, as far as I can tell, except nursing homes.

  On each door was a Magic Marker cartoon drawing—a star, a teddy bear, a rainbow, there may have been other shapes as well. Mama told me the importance of these when I was still in grade school after I had managed to take some of them off the doors and was adding my own creative expression via crayons. I understand now that they are a code to remind nurses and clue new staff into special needs or problems of the patients. A star means to check dietary notes before allowing them to eat anything other than prescribed meals. Mama said she had once seen a new aide sit watching reruns of game shows while a newly diagnosed diabetic man helped himself to a bag of bite-size Snickers bars that somebody had brought in. The teddy bear, if I remember correctly, means that the patient isn’t ambulatory, often she can’t get out of bed. And I definitely remember the rainbow because it showed up in at least one or two new places every time I came here. It is the code for a patient who has signs of senility or outright dementia. Mama said most of her coworkers didn’t look forward to dealing with “the rainbows,” but she didn’t mind. She said it was harder on her nerves some days, but she wanted to think that she could help make up for some of the psychological health they might be lacking by making sure they were physically comfortable in any way she could and that the establishment allowed. More than a few times, I suspect she offered help in the form of things the establishment did not allow if she felt strongly enough about what kind of help was needed.

  I was three-quarters of the way down B Hall when I heard Mama’s voice. “Mathilda, are you out there? I need some help please.”

  I laughed. I knew enough stories to know that Mama didn’t care for Mathilda. She called her “Mean-tilda.” “Mean ’til da end of time” were her words.

  “Sorry to disappoint you,” I answered her. “I thought you’d be ready to go.” I had started speaking while in the hall and turned into the doorway only to stop dead still. Mama was standing by a bed with an elderly white woman lying in it, or rather, sprawled awkwardly on top of it. The covers were pulled back and the woman’s pajamas and underwear had been pulled down to her ankles. She was completely naked, gray flesh hanging on knives of bone that were her ribs and hips. Mama was wiping her with what had been a white cloth, now covered in near-liquid brown shit, as were the rubber gloves Mama wore. The stench hit me like a towering wall falling apart, I felt immediately nauseous. Instinctively, I turned away and saw that the sheets piled at the bottom of the bed were also stained all over with dark splotches of diarrhea.

  Mama spotted me and did not say hello. “Honey, pull that curtain. Mrs. Clayton had an emergency.” I was frozen in disgust. “Go on now. Pull it and wait for me in the hall,” Mama instructed, sensitive but undeterred. I felt myself gag as I pulled the curtain around the woman’s bed. Walking to the door, I heard Mama’s labored moan. No more than a few seconds elapsed, and she grunted again. Instead of racing into the hallway, or even back to the car in the parking lot, I couldn’t move, thinking something might be wrong. “Mama?” I meekly asked and took steps back toward the bed. I pulled the curtain back only slightly and saw Mama bending over the prostrate woman, using her full weight to try to raise the woman up far enough to pull off the soiled bottom sheet and replace what looked like a square thick pad underneath it. Mama, sweating glass beads on her forehead, succeeded in rolling the patient onto her side, at which time the woman’s eyes landed on me. At first it occurred to me that she had died until I saw her face, leaking more humiliation than I thought possible for a person to feel, outside of being beaten or raped. I was sure she would speak. I prayed she would not speak.

  I shouldn’t be here, watching her, I thought. No one should watch this. I wanted to be invisible, but there was also a curious part of me that wanted to hear what she would say. Would she yell at me, rightly so, for intruding on her privacy? Would she cry out in pain, because even though my mother was strong and doing the best she could, it could not have been comfortable to be wielded and maneuvered like a side of beef? Maybe the woman would curtly tell me to help, anything to bring a more immediate end to her embarrassment and physical misery. Instead she said nothing, her large damp eyes fearful, like an animal going to slaughter. My mother couldn’t hold her, and I watched her fall back onto the waterproof pad before Mama had gotten her cleaned up properly. I wondered why she had put a clean pad down, but no sooner realized that if she hadn’t done so, a thin mattress cover that looked like wax paper was the only thing protecting the bed. The mattress should be covered in plastic, why didn’t they plan for these things? Maybe it was covered, I don’t know, my hands were sweating. I felt sick, I wished I had never eaten food. I wanted to touch the woman’s hand, I had the urge to pull the curtain closed, but I couldn’t make myself do it. Mama was wiping between the woman’s legs, spread fleshy and gray with knots for knees. All the while she continued looking at me, her mouth slightly open, a fine line of saliva running from one corner. That spit made me mad, I wanted her to wipe her mouth. I understood that she couldn’t help what had happened but at least she could wipe her own mouth. Then I immediately saw that she couldn’t because one of her weak arms was pinned underneath her side while Mama stood between her body and the other arm, still cleaning her with moist baby wipes.

  “I’m almost finished, Miss Margaret. You hold on now and don’t you worry about it. You just need to get yourself cleaned up here and then you’re gon rest and you’re gon feel better. Don’t you think one more thing about it. Maybe I’ll bring you a Co-Cola directly and the bubbles might help your stomach some.”

  The woman sounded so exhausted that almost no sound issued when she finally managed to move her lips. “No Lorraine. I don’t want it.”

  “That’s all right then. I’ll bring it and put it by your bed so you can have it later.” Mama was drying her hands at the sink and returned to the bed to pull the woman’s pajamas back up. “I know how you are and if I don’t bring something, your mouth is gon be gettin dry, and you’ll be buzzin that buzzer all night, only I won’t be here.”

  “Where then?” the woman asked, barely a whisper.

  “My baby girl came to get me, she’s home from Shaw for the weekend. She’s gon graduate, you know, come May.”

  “I declare I didn’t know she was that old.” The woman looked more comfortable now, covered in new sheets and a soft-looking blanket. She looked like she might fall asleep any minute, which was probably as good as anything for her.

  I knew I would not leave without saying something. I needed to let her know that her privacy was a sacred thing, that I would never mention even to my mother what I had seen. I could only think of her searching eyes, scanning the room. I knew she wanted to flee. I also knew that she used to stand and dress and go out to dinner and chat with other ladies, and carry a purse and wear shoes. I knew that she used to send Christmas cards and wrap birthday presents. That she knew what it feels like to laugh until you start to cry. That she used to plan
her tomorrows by herself. Her eyes revealed everything.

  “Mama?” I pulled the curtain open slightly wider.

  “I thought you prob’ly went to the car. You been waitin out there?”

  “I wondered if I could help you.”

  “Baby, it’s against the rules for you or anybody but family to help us. Insurance.” The woman in the bed was looking at me to see what if anything I was going to do. My mother broke the silence of anticipation. “This right here is Mrs. Margaret Clayton, she’s one of my patients. Miss Margaret, this is my daughter I was telling you about. She’s home from college. Says she might be gon go to medical school, now ain’t that something?”

  The woman opened her eyes wider, more energetic. “She might have it in her, Lorraine, judging from looking at her. What’s your name, shug?”

  “April.” I didn’t like her calling me “shug.” It was too familiar.

  “You’re April and you graduate in May,” she continued, rather satisfied with her own wit.

  “Nice to meet you.” I started to put out my hand but retreated and I’m not sure why.

  “Nice to know you too, April. Now y’all go and get on with your business.”

  Mama half snorted. “I thought we might go have us something to eat this evening, but April don’t want a thing in this world but for me to cook, ain’t that right, baby?” I didn’t have time to answer.

  “Well you need to bring me some of whatever you make, Lorraine, that’s what you need to do, even though I can’t imagine not wanting one of the delightful entrées that are on the menu here.”

  “You feelin better already, I’m gon leave you.”

  “If you don’t, I’m going to start telling April the truth about you.”

  Mama dimmed the light and turned on the lamp by the bed. “All right then. You want to watch TV?”

  “Put it on without sound. I’d rather look at them running around and try to figure out the story myself.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”