Final Stroke

by Michael Beres

  Lydia glanced back toward the kitchen door where Ilonka had stood while giving her toast, then turned back to Jan. “I like the name Ilonka.”

  “It’s Helen in Hungarian,” said Jan.

  “My mom’s name was Helen. She named me Lydia because she saw Groucho Marx sing ‘Lydia the Tattooed Lady’ once.”

  As Lydia spoke, she touched the scar on her left cheek with her finger and Jan could see the change that always came over Lydia when she spoke of her past and touched her scar. The scar started at the cor ner of Lydia’s mouth and went to her eye. Lydia had long black hair, fair complexion, and a thin face. When the scar had been at its worst, it masked Lydia’s beauty and even her personality because, no matter what people said, when they saw a woman with a scar like that, they couldn’t help thinking she must have deserved it.

  The scar had been made by a knife wielded by a thug who worked for a downtown pimp disappointed by Lydia’s repeated refusal to join his harem. It was the pimp’s final blow after having gotten her on her oin. Helping Jan get Lydia into drug rehab and in to see a Michigan Avenue plastic surgeon was Steve’s doing.

  Lydia was special. It was largely because of her that Jan had got ten out of the massage parlor business years earlier. Before the massage parlor business, when they should have been halfway through college, Lydia and Jan were strippers at a club just over the state line in Wis consin. After the club folded because of all the Chicago and Milwau kee executives building their weekend “farms” in the area, Lydia and Jan ended up on Chicago’s north side at a massage parlor frequented by some of those same “farmers.”

  Later, when the massage parlor business cooled and went under ground and got dirtier, Lydia told Jan she was getting the hell out and took Jan with her. Jan got a job as a Loop secretary. Lydia was also sup posed to have taken the high road, and insisted she had, but got sucked back into the underbelly of the city by a bastard who said he loved her, and would love her even more if she did certain things for him.

  And so here they were, two hardened ex-strippers and massage parlor girls sitting at a small Hungarian restaurant packed with Hun garians drinking wine. As Lydia said when they were out last minute Christmas shopping last year before Steve had his stroke, “You figure in a crowd this size, a few have got to be hiding a past they’re not ex actly proud of. Someone’s got to be ex-hookers and ex-strippers in this crowd of faces, Jan, so it might as well be us.”

  Lydia spoke as she worked on her goulash.

  “We should have my plastic surgeon attach these dumpling guys directly to our waists instead of eating them.” Lydia chewed for a mo ment, then said, “Crazy calling these things guys. Maybe we’ve all had strokes to one degree or another. You said Steve used to call a thing him, or a male nurse she, or even it. How’s that any different than call ing a dumpling a guy?”

  “Steve’s better with pronouns now” said Jan. “Slow as hell, but a lot better than he was back in the hospital. When I first got him the portable computer he was fixated with the idea that the world had changed, not him. Or he’d see news on television about storms and war and earthquakes and look down and shake his head. When he fi nally started typing on the computer, he wrote, ‘It’s official, the world has had a stroke.’ Back then I wasn’t sure if he’d ever talk again.”

  When Lydia did not respond, Jan continued. “But he is getting bet ter. For a while he was fixated on a mystery man from the past, some guy with dark eyes. One of the therapists said since Steve has dark eyes, maybe he was thinking of himself. They run them through the mill at that place. He’s quizzed every day on the names of other patients and people on staff. In one of the hallways on the first floor, they’ve got an employee bulletin board with mug shots and names. And in vocational rehab they’ve got another board without names and they make them put names with the faces.”

  Lydia stopped eating and stared at Jan, a familiar sad smile on her face, a smile that had come to mean, “Go ahead, let it out.”

  “It’s funny, yet not so funny,” said Jan. “During the last couple years we’d really been watching our diets, trying to avoid things that would gum up Steve’s arteries. We started doing it as soon as we found out his cholesterol was high. I guess we were too late for that one damn clot that went into his speech center and shot the place up.

  “But I shouldn’t complain because, despite having to speak slowly to him, he seems to understand most of what I say. He likes to cheer me up when I arrive and usually has a funny story to tell. Did I tell you we made a pact to be cheerful as hell for the rest of our lives? Steve said that since the stroke made him a cheerful son of a bitch, he wants me to be one so he won’t look foolish in public. I suppose saying cheerful things is a lot better than the first few things he got out. A couple days after the stroke, he wrote down that he’d always wanted to die fast, not like this. It was jumbled up, but I managed to decipher it.

  “It’s the old emotional roller coaster. When Steve first called Saint Mel’s Hell in the Woods, I assumed he’d coined the phrase and thought it was a breakthrough. But the next day I found out everyone who works there, and most of the residents, call it Hell in the Woods. A woman in the business office told me about it. When Steve was moved from the hospital I thought I’d see more of him. But they keep him busy. ‘Living the rehab,’ they call it. I guess that’s part of the reason they call it Hell in the Woods. I’ve really gotten to know the place, walking the halls when I’m there and can’t see him because he’s in therapy. In the hospital they were more concerned with the physi cal, like working on using the walker instead of the wheelchair. But here, although they seem reasonably concerned with his physical abili ties, the main focus is on memory and speech.”

  “Don’t stop talking,” said Lydia. “You need rehab, too.”

  “I guess so. But sometimes I feel selfish doing what I’m doing. It’s as though I’m trying to remake Steve into what he was, and I’m not sure if that’s right. Sometimes I think I’m trying to use the stroke to my advantage by ignoring the lousy life I had before I met him. I’ve had difficulty telling him about the years as a stripper and about the massage parlors. I can talk to you about this because it’s something we share. But to not share this part of my past with Steve now, when he needs everything filled in … well, it’s like trying to make him love me more than he did. And that’s not right. I know I shouldn’t go overboard about my past because it’s not something we talked about much before his stroke. But I feel that at some point I’m either going to have to spell it out in detail, or I’m going to keep feeling guilty as hell about it.

  “About a month after the stroke, Steve said something that really broke my heart. At first I felt angry, then I realized that, because of his difficulty communicating, he was unable to express all the qualifying baggage we sometimes hang on our statements. He could only say it bluntly. He said I should leave him. He said I should find someone else. After I got over the shock, I told him I couldn’t. I told him I had a mystery to solve and that I wouldn’t stop until I’d solved it. I told him I had to solve the mystery of who my lover was.

  “We’ve made love in his room at Hell in the Woods. We propped a chair against the door a couple of times and made love. It was … different. He’s like a kid. Goddamn, he’s like a kid. Right in the middle of things, he recites a jingle from when he was a boy and asks if I know which is correct. Was it, ‘Hi, my name’s Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. Here’s my dog Tag. Look for him in there, too.‘? or was it, ‘Hi, my name’s Buster Brown. I live in a shoe. My dog’s name is Tag. He lives in there, too.‘?

  “When he latches onto something from the past, he can’t let go of it. It’s like he needs to relive his childhood. Unfortunately he’s stuck in this Hell in the Woods place where the average age must be sixty. He’s one of the youngest patients on his floor. And at the rehab cen ter on the second floor the average age is even older because a lot of the stroke victims are from the nursing home wing. The other day Steve wrote on his computer
that one of the residents from the nurs ing home says the wing sticks out in the woods as a kind of metaphor for death.”

  Lydia picked up Jan’s glass and handed it to her. “Have a swig.”

  Jan took a drink of wine and put the glass down. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go on.”

  “You weren’t going on,” said Lydia. “But Steve is doing much bet ter, isn’t he?”

  “Sure he is. Of course. And he always puts a positive spin on things.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Well, he’s been told his muscle tone is nearing full-spasticity stage. It’s when you try to move one joint, the other joints in the same leg or arm move. But he’s using the spasticity to his advantage. He exercises a lot, getting himself ready for when the normal-tone stage arrives. He doesn’t need a hand splint anymore, except when he sleeps. The big success was getting rid of the arm trough on the wheelchair to keep his arm from falling. But he still has to wear a right leg brace to keep his knee from buckling. He does fine in the walker now, but he prefers his wheelchair and says he’ll miss it.

  “In rehab they stress working on both his left and right sides, but Steve had me get him a pair of handgrips and a pair of dumbbells and has been working on strengthening his left hand and arm. He says it’s just in case his right arm and leg don’t come back fully.

  “His occupational therapist is a really nice gal named Gwen. When I spoke with her the other day, she said the way he’s mastered the computer and elevators and everything else he can get his hands on, that before you know it he’ll be driving.”

  Lydia had just taken a sip of wine and put the glass down. “I’ve got a friend up at school named Gwen, Gwen Africa. Great name, huh?”

  “Isn’t there a black group where everyone changes their last names to Africa?”

  “Yeah,” said Lydia, “but I don’t think she belongs to it. Although she is black. But I interrupted …”

  “You want to hear more about rehab?”

  “Of course. Does Steve use his computer a lot?”

  “Yes. Unlike the hospital, where things were more traditional, the rehab center has lots of computers. Steve gets on the Internet, sends messages to other stroke patients in other facilities. He’s even sent e-mail to Tamara.”

  “That cop he used to know?”

  “Yes. She visits once in a while. Pretty ironic that an ex-lover of Steve’s turns out to be a good friend of mine. Sweet Jesus, I sure can see why he fell for her. She says ‘Sweet Jesus’ a lot. Here she is a black female homicide cop and she also sings in the church choir.

  “But, yes, Steve uses the computer I bought him quite a bit. He’s stopped carrying around the electronic thesaurus to help remind him of words. Says he doesn’t carry around the thesaurus anymore because it’s too much like carrying around part of his brain in a box.

  “Even though he was on the melancholy side before his stroke, Steve always had an ironic sense of humor. The other day he took me down to the rehab computer lab. There’s this program that’s sup posed to help stroke victims rebuild vocabulary, and on this program there was this button on the screen you were supposed to click with the mouse in order to show a comparison of two words, I guess if they had any meaning in common. Anyway, the name on the button was misspelled. Instead of saying Comparison, it said Comaprison. Steve laughed like hell at this, and after he stopped laughing, he managed to get out the irony in this. He said it was funny because if a stroker clicked on the button, they’d go to this Comaprison, which he said was a pretty fair description of where strokers do go sometimes.”

  Jan and Lydia were silent for a moment, then Lydia spoke.

  “Last time we talked you said Steve’s mind wanders a lot. Does that still happen?”

  “Not quite as much. But he still has this thing where he sees something, like on television or out in the parking lot, and it reminds him of something and that reminds him of something else, and so on. And when this happens he says it always seems to end up with some thing having to do with the environment. Since his stroke he’s gotten very concerned with the environment, especially global warming and the problems society is leaving behind for future generations.

  “He was looking out his window the other day and could see some people waiting out at the bus stop at the main entrance. He managed to get out that the entrance was far away and there were trees in be tween, but with the leaves still not out, being that it’s only March, he was able to see the people and judged that since they were taking the bus they were poor people. He said people waiting for a bus have no control of what goes on in the world. He said people waiting for buses no longer wear business suits like in old movies on television. He said they’re at the mercy of corporations. He said they have no control over the air they breathe or the water they drink. And, although he smiled as always, I could tell this made him sad.”

  “Did he actually say those things?” asked Lydia.

  “No, he wrote it all on his computer. He also wrote that the dete riorating environmental situation in the world was like a long sad song played on a violin.”

  “Did Steve take up playing the violin again?”

  “No. After I brought it to him in the hospital and he played it a couple times, he put it aside and finally told me to take it home. For some reason the stroke left him with the memory that his performance of melancholy Hungarian music was nothing but a series of horrible scratchings.” Jan laughed. “Now he claims this was one positive result of his stroke, giving him an objective ear and making him wonder why he had fooled himself all those years.”

  “Didn’t he used to be nicknamed Gypsy?” asked Lydia.

  “Yes, but I’ve never mentioned it to him.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. I guess it’s one of those things I hope he’ll mention on his own.”

  “Does he still put on a sour face when he says the wrong word?” asked Lydia.

  “Sometimes, but I think he realizes he’s on the right track even if an inappropriate word comes out now and then. Like the speech ther apist says, the idea is to stimulate memory, not to relearn speech.”

  “You said you were doing rehab. How do you work with him?”

  “We go through old magazines together. ‘To stimulate the old egg noggin,’ as he put it the other day. He says when I bring in magazines it’s a lot like bringing in old friends he’s forgotten. I’m not sure if he says that for my benefit, but it’s what he says. I bring in Time, Atlantic, Newsweek. We go over each one together. When one of the therapists found out, she suggested he make a chronological chart. So now he fills out his chart while we go through the magazines. It’s a huge fold out thing for the last ten years. It’s already filled in with tons of notes. Sometimes I quiz him on the notes in the chart.

  “You should see the back seat of my car. It’s filled with old maga zines. I get them at the library. The librarian knew Steve because he did a lot of research there. I used to go with him. We spent a lot of time in the library. It was one of our favorite places. Anyway, one day when I was taking out a few magazines from the shelves, the librar ian took me down to the basement and told me I could take all the magazines I wanted because the articles were on the info system and they were going to recycle the paper. Steve was always fond of the li brary. When I took him out in the parking lot for a walk one time so he could see how full the back seat of my car was, we joked that if I was ever afraid I’d get lost I could throw magazines out the window and leave a trail behind. That was pretty ironic, I guess, because Steve’s the one who’s lost.

  “The reason I use magazines from the last ten years is because those were the ones available in the basement stacks. At least that’s what I try to tell myself. How coincidental that Steve and I have been together ten years. But there are things from further back that he finds out for himself while in rehab, or while watching television. For example, when he found out about Jimmy Carter, he seemed re ally sad. For some reason he identified with Carter’s defeat by
Rea gan. Something about Carter’s name being repeated over and over by another patient in rehab. One day, when I got to the facility, I found Steve looking out the window. When I went to the window I saw he was watching a car being hooked up and towed in the parking lot. He had tears in his eyes and he was saying, over and over, ‘Poor Jimmy Carter. Poor Jimmy Carter.’

  “So here I am back to my original dilemma. Do I try to fill in only the past ten years because these were what I consider the good years? Or do I go back more than ten years to the good old days when Jan Kowalski was a stripper, or when she got boozed up so she could stomach giving massages to bug-eyed hairballs with hard-ons?”

  Ilonka Szabo stood at the side of their table. “I hope everything is all right. And I hope Steve will be back soon. Don’t feel bad if you do not finish. I understand.” Then Ilonka turned to the next table.

  “Ilonka has dark eyes like Steve,” said Jan. “She reminds me a little of Steve’s speech rehab partner. Marjorie’s older and Italian, not Hungarian, but there’s something about her. Maybe the fact that she’s so straightforward. Last time I saw her, Marjorie said some very spe cial things about Steve. It was hard for her to get it out—her speech problems are worse than Steve’s—but I understood. She told me that in rehab when she gets upset, Steve holds her and keeps repeating over and over, ‘It’s okay. You’ll be okay.’

  “Sometimes Marjorie kids me, saying if she were only younger. And one time she said she trusts Steve more than her family. I guess that’s understandable because her husband was in the mob. What other family members she’s talking about I’m not sure. Anyway, ac cording to Marjorie, Steve’s a real babe. I guess Steve must have heard about Jimmy Carter when he was with her because she told me once she always liked Jimmy Carter, and that Steve has a smile like Carter.”