by Fannie Flagg
Dorothy sighed. “But bless his heart, he did the best he could, and thank heavens, he let me help, because everything he had done—the oceans, the trees, everything—was a muddy gray.”
“You don’t mean it?”
Dorothy nodded. “I do, he’s as color-blind as they come; to this day, I have to pick out his socks or else he winds up with one blue one and one brown one.”
“I’m glad you caught it in time,” said Elner. “It sure would have been a dull old place if we hadn’t had any color.”
“Thank you, but you know, Elner,” she said thoughtfully, “speaking of color, I wonder if I didn’t make a mistake.”
“How so, honey?”
“With people? I wonder if I shouldn’t have made them all one color? I had no idea it would cause so much trouble, and I just feel terrible about it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about that, Dorothy, things are changing in that department. My niece Linda just adopted a Chinese baby and she’s a real pretty color, everybody says so.”
“Well, I’d like to think it’s getting better, and I must say, even with all the problems, Raymond is very optimistic about the future.”
“I know he is, and after talking to him, I feel a whole lot better,” said Elner. “And I felt pretty good before.”
Just then Raymond came out onto the porch and pointed to his watch. “Ladies, I hate to break this up, but Elner has to get on back.”
Dorothy looked at her watch. “Oh, dear. I was having such a good time, I’ve kept you far too long.”
Elner was totally surprised. “Am I not staying?”
“No,” said Raymond, “as much as we would love to keep you, unfortunately, we have to send you back home.”
“You mean, I’m not going to get to see Will?”
“No, honey, not this time,” said Dorothy.
Elner slowly put her coffee cup down on the table. “Well…I’m very disappointed, of course. I sure wanted to see Will. But mine is not to question, I guess. Anyhow, it was sure nice being with you again, Dorothy, and visiting with you, Raymond.”
“Wonderful to see you too, dear,” he said.
Dorothy wrapped a piece of cake in a napkin. “Here, honey, take this with you.”
Elner said, “Are you sure you don’t want it for later?”
“No, you take it, I have half a cake left in the kitchen that we’ll probably never finish.”
“All right, then,” she said, standing up and putting the cake into her pocket. “You know I’ll enjoy it.” She looked at both of them. “Is there anything I can do for you? Any messages you want me to take back?”
Raymond thought for a second, then said, “You could tell them that things are not really as bad as they seem, more people are getting educated every day, more women are voting, new technology is coming, new medical discoveries—”
“Wait a minute, hold it, Raymond,” said Elner, looking around for a pencil. “Shouldn’t I be writing all this down?”
“No, that’s all right,” he said. “Just tell them we love them, we’re pulling for them, and to hang in there, because good things are just around the corner. Anything else, Dorothy?”
Dorothy said, “You might want to remind them that life is what they make it, to smile, and the world is sunny, and it’s up to them.”
“All right,” said Elner, trying to remember it all. “Good things are coming, and life is what you make it, anything else?”
Dorothy looked over at Raymond, and he shook his head. “No, I think that’s basically it.” Suddenly Elner felt her robe filling up with warm air and expanding all around her; then she slowly began to rise up off the floor and gently float off the porch, on out into the yard like a big hot air balloon. As she rose higher in the air, she looked down to see Raymond and Dorothy standing in the yard surrounded by pink flamingos, and blue swans, who were all smiling and waving good-bye to her. “Good-bye, Elner!” they said. “Well, bye-bye…thanks for the cake,” she called back, as she floated higher and higher right over the top of the Elmwood Springs water tank and on over toward Kansas City.
Saying a Final Good-bye
2:46 PM
When Norma looked up and saw her daughter, Linda, walking down the hall, she burst into tears all over again. After they had pulled themselves together a bit, they discussed the matter of the autopsy and agreed not to have it done. As Linda said, if it couldn’t bring her back, then what was the point? The harsh reality of death was so damned final, so irreversible. They would just let her go in peace and not prolong the inevitable. They would follow Aunt Elner’s wishes and go ahead and arrange for the remains to be picked up for cremation. Norma burst into tears again. When she heard the word remains, she couldn’t bear to think of someone who had been so alive just this morning as just “remains.” Reverend Susie Hill said, “I know it’s hard, Norma, but I think it’s what she would have wanted.” Macky and Linda agreed. After a while, Macky got up and told the young nurse who was waiting that they were ready to go and see their aunt and say good-bye. Norma asked Susie if she would like to come, but Susie said, “No, this is family, I think it’s best that just the three of you go, I’ll be right here in the hall waiting.”
The three of them walked down to Elner’s room, and the young nurse opened the door, and they all stepped into the room, and quietly walked over to the side of the bed. Macky put his arm around Norma and held Linda’s hand and they stood there together looking down at Aunt Elner. The young nurse stood back from the bed as the family had their last moment with the woman before she was to be taken downstairs. Seeing her was not as frightening as Linda had thought it would be. Just as her daddy had said, Aunt Elner looked as if she had just gone to sleep. Norma leaned on Macky as tears welled up in her eyes. Elner looked so sweet and peaceful, it was hard for her to realize she was actually dead. They did not speak and the room was so quiet all they could hear was their own breathing. They were standing there in dead silence, each mentally telling her good-bye in their own way, when Elner said, “I know you’re mad at me, Norma, but I wouldn’t have fallen if those wasps hadn’t gone after me.”
Macky literally jumped back a foot from the bed. “Jesus Christ!”
Upon seeing Elner open her eyes, the young nurse at the foot of the bed let out a bloodcurdling scream and ran out of the room, shrieking at the top of her lungs. Linda screamed at the same time, threw her purse up in the air, and ran out right behind the nurse. Macky’s feet were glued to the floor and he could not get them to move or he would have gone out the door with them. But for once in her life Norma, who was far too stunned to faint, said, “Aunt Elner? What in the world do you call yourself doing, pretending you’re dead? Do you have any idea what you have put us through? We called Linda and everything!” Elner looked over and was about to answer, but before she had a chance, a woman’s hysterical voice came blaring out over the hospital intercom.
“Stat! Stat! Room 212, Stat!”
And the next moment, sounding like a herd of wild buffalo, doctors and nurses came thundering down the hall at breakneck speed and stampeded through the door, pushing machines and three or four IV stands before them, knocking Macky and Norma back against the wall. When the young doctor from the emergency room came running into the room, he turned as white as a sheet when he saw Elner sitting up on her elbows in bed and talking, and he began frantically barking orders. As the room filled up with more staff and machines, Macky and Norma were shoved outside into the hall, and it wasn’t until then that Norma realized what had just happened, and fainted again.
Back in the room, Elner was now surrounded by screaming and yelling doctors and nurses, and being hooked up to several machines all at once, and lifted out of bed, rushed down the hall on a gurney. As Elner, traveling at least forty miles an hour, sped by Linda, who was leaning against the wall still in a state of shock, she called out, “Hey, that’s my niece! Hey, Linda!” By this time the young nurse who had been the first to run out of the room had made
it all the way down six flights of stairs, and she ran screaming past Nurse Boots Carroll, almost knocking her down, through the lobby, out the double glass doors, and was now past the parking lot headed down the block, still running as fast as she could. Within five minutes the entire hospital was alive and buzzing with the news. Dead woman talking! As Elner whizzed by Reverend Susie Hill standing down at the end of the hall, she called out, “Hey, Susie, what are you doing here?” “That’s my niece’s lady preacher,” she said to a nurse, who was running alongside her. After they had run all the way down to the end of the hall with her, turned the corner, and rolled her into a waiting elevator, Elner asked, “Where am I going now?”
A male nurse barked at her, “Just relax, Mrs. Shimfissle, calm down.”
Elner said to herself, “I am calm, you’re the one who’s huffing and puffing.”
Once the elevator doors opened again, they ran down another hall and then right through the open door of the intensive care unit. Once inside they quickly sat her up, removed her robe, and started hooking her up to different machines a mile a minute. As they were doing this, Elner was not happy about it, and said, “You know what, I need to get on home. Norma and them are here to get me, and I don’t think I fed Sonny yet.” But the doctor and the nurses completely ignored her and acted like she wasn’t even there. They just kept talking about her vital signs, looking at screens, and shouting out numbers. Elner figured she must be all right, though, because in between the numbers, they kept answering “Stable” and “Normal” to the doctor’s questions. Elner made a vow right then and there that if she ever got out of there, she would never come back to a hospital, because once they get you, you can’t get away. “Does this hurt?” the doctor asked as he pushed all over her body. But he did not wait for an answer, and said, “Let’s get her downstairs. I need an MRI right away.” And off she went again…being pushed down another hall, and pushed onto another elevator.
When they got downstairs, they rolled Elner into a large room that had what looked to Elner like a big washing machine.
As they lifted her from one gurney to another one, she asked, “Am I going in that thing?”
“Just for a little while,” said a nice new nurse she had not seen before.
“Is it going to hurt?”
“No, you won’t feel a thing, Mrs. Shimfissle.”
“What’s it for?”
“We just want to look and make sure you don’t have any broken bones or anything. It won’t take long. Are you claustrophobic?”
“I don’t think so…never had been.”
“I can give you headphones, if you like. Is there any special kind of music you prefer?”
“That might be nice. Do you have any good gospel music? I like Minnie Oatman.”
The nurse shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I could try to get a radio station.”
“Oh, do you get Bud and Jay?”
“Who? I can try, do you know the station?”
“No, that’s all right, they are probably off the air by now, I don’t need to listen to anything.”
“All right, Mrs. Shimfissle, I’m going to be right in the next room,” the nurse said. “And I’ll come back as soon as we are finished, OK?”
As she started heading into the machine, Elner realized she had no idea what time it was. The last time she had looked at a clock, it was eight in the morning, and now Linda was here all the way from St. Louis. “Where had the day gone?” she wondered.
Nurse Calls Ruby Back
2:59 PM
Boots Carroll was at her station at the hospital doing her paperwork when the order came down from upstairs to change Mrs. Shimfissle’s condition from deceased to stable. “What?” she said, as she read the change. She immediately went upstairs, marched down the hall with paper in hand, and found the floor nurse who had called her in the first place. “What in the Sam Hill is going on with Mrs. Shimfissle’s report?”
Her original source looked very distressed and whispered to her, “Dr. Henson made a mistake, she’s back in OR and sitting up and talking.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure…. They just rolled her by here two minutes ago, and she sat up and waved at me.”
“Good God! Heads are going to roll on this one. Does her family know yet?”
“Oh, yes. They were in the room when the old woman started talking. The niece fainted dead away.” She pointed down the hall, and Boots could see a group of people standing around talking.
“I’ll go down and see them in a minute, but I need to make a phone call first.”
Boots picked up the phone, but could not reach Ruby at home. She then called the nurses’ exchange and they gave her Ruby’s emergency cell number.
Ruby was at Elner’s, busy going through her refrigerator, wondering what might go bad and what she should throw out. She figured Norma would not be able to deal with it for a few days. She was trying to read the expiration date on a carton of milk when her cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Ruby, it’s Boots. Listen, I was given the wrong information about Mrs. Shimfissle, she was not a DOA like I told you.”
“What?”
“They just took her back up to OR. Apparently she’s recovered and is doing just fine, at least that’s the latest report. I don’t know what’s going on here, but I called you the minute I heard.”
Ruby was flabbergasted. “What do you mean, she’s not dead? I was just fixing to throw out her milk!”
“I am so sorry, Ruby, somebody made a mistake. I’m so mad at that bunch upstairs, I could spit nails. I’m telling you, if you knew half the things that go on here now, it would just curl your hair.”
Ruby said, “Oh, dear. Well, let me get on the horn and pass this along…good Lord, we were practically planning her funeral.”
After she hung up, Boots felt terrible; she had broken the rule of patient confidentiality, but they had been so sure upstairs. She and Ruby had been in nursing school together, so it was not as if she had told a civilian, but if they ever found out she had released the condition of a patient to a nonfamily member, she would lose her job, and at her age they were looking for a reason to get rid of her as it was. The one good thing was she knew that Ruby would protect her. There was always that unspoken nurse to nurse loyalty she could depend on. And it was true. Ruby would have protected her source with her life. But right now Ruby didn’t even have time to stop and be happy that Elner was alive. She would have to do that later. Right now she had to get busy and stop this thing at the pass, before the news of Elner’s death went any further than it had. She immediately called Tot down at the beauty shop. Not more than thirty minutes before, Tot had had to get up out of bed and drag herself down to the beauty shop, because Darlene could not find the formula for Beverly Cortwright’s hair color.
Luckily, Tot answered the phone. “Beauty shop.”
“Tot, it’s Ruby, I just heard back from the hospital and Elner’s not dead after all.”
“What?”
“They made a mistake, so call whoever you told and tell them, pronto. I’ve got to go,” she said, and hung up.
“Good God Almighty,” Tot said to herself. “A mistake?” And here she was with a beauty parlor full of upset and crying women, thinking Elner Shimfissle was dead.
Tot walked around the room and turned off all the dryers, told everyone to take the cotton out of their ears, and made Darlene turn the water off and stop washing the dye out of Beverly Cortwright’s hair. When she had everyone’s attention, she announced, “Everybody, I just got a call from Ruby Robinson, and as it turns out, Elner Shimfissle is not dead after all. They gave out the wrong report at the hospital.”
Everyone gasped and as a shock wave went around the room, Marie Larkin dropped her Modern Style Cuts onto the floor, and Lucille Wimble spilled coffee down the front of her dress. They had all spent the past hour crying and talking about how much they were going to miss Elner. Some were even going so
far as to plan what they would wear to her funeral, and what kind of casserole they would make to take over to Norma’s. What a shock! Lucille was beside herself. “I’ve never heard of anything so crazy in all my life!” she said, blotting her dress with a paper towel. “What would possess them to do such a thing, tell everybody she was dead and get people all hysterical, I had started my grieving process and everything and now they say it was all for nothing?”
Vicki Johnson agreed. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Well, I’m just stunned,” said a teary, red-eyed Beverly with brown dye running down one side of her face. “I don’t know what to think or feel.”
“Me either,” said Darlene, reaching into her pocket for the other half of her candy bar.
Tot said, “Well, I don’t feel much of anything right now, I just took two Xanax an hour ago or so, but I’ll probably have a fit once the pills wear off.”
Elner’s niece in California was on the Internet looking up the best flights from San Francisco to Kansas City. She didn’t know when Elner’s funeral was going to be, but she wanted to see what flights were available. When the phone rang, she picked it up, and it was another collect call from Macky and he sounded quite upset.
“Dena, I don’t have time to go into detail, but I wanted to let you know, Aunt Elner is not dead like they thought, there was some kind of mistake.”
“What?”
“Not dead. I’m sorry I called you the first time, but I was just telling you what they told us.”
“Not dead?”
“No, apparently they gave us the wrong information, anyhow she’s in intensive care right now, I’ll try and keep you posted just as soon as I know something…. I have to run, Norma’s having a fit, talk to you later.”
Dena was still standing with the phone in her hand when her husband walked in the door.
When she saw him, she dropped the phone and ran to him and threw her arms around him. “Oh, Gerry, Aunt Elner’s alive! Isn’t that wonderful?”
