by Mark Dunn
So I got this call at about five o’clock today, just as I was getting ready to head home. I work at a temp agency, conducting interviews, giving typing tests. It’s something any monkey could do, but it keeps me employed, and I happen to like meeting the beautiful, desperately needy young women who come through my door. I’m still waiting for the floodgates to open after last October’s stock market crash, with virtual legions of anxious, out-of-work young temp prospects filing through, but the economic prognosticators still can’t agree on whether or not we’re going into a full-blown recession. I mean, didn’t we just come out of one?
So I pick up the phone and it’s my niece Lindsey, and I’m thinking she might have been calling to ask how her Gran is, since my mother has been in intensive care for almost two weeks because of the stroke, and I got the chance to visit with her today and Lindsey didn’t. It’s been touch-and-go, but over the last couple of days things have started looking a little more hopeful, though Mom still hasn’t been given very good odds for long-term recovery. She’s responding well and even getting a word or two out every now and then, which my sister Sibyl is attributing to all the prayers being sent up on Mom’s behalf by members of Sibyl’s church’s prayer chain.
I pass no judgment on Sibyl for her religious faith excepting the fact that she and Doc tend to wear their religion on their sleeves like big neon armbands. They have charitable hearts, I grant you that. Through their open-handed love offerings they’ve pulled probably a half-dozen Peruvian kids off the street and into a church-run orphanage and filled their bellies with nourishing food while bringing them to God. Not the Catholic God of South America, but the Protestant God of North America. I make a special effort to keep my feelings about all this to myself. I just duck my head at family functions and keep quiet.
You see, I’m basically a non-confrontational…okay, I’m a coward.
But not Lindsey. Lindsey, as I quickly find out, is bound and determined to get Winnie in to see her grandmother before things take a turn for the worse. Sibyl has made it clear that our mother is to have no visitors besides family. And of course it doesn’t matter that Mom and Winnie have been living together for the last eight years. They even rode together on the Lavender Panthers float in one of those West Coast gay pride parades, for Chrissakes, but this is where my sister has decided to make her stand.
The doctor agrees with Sibyl that, as Mom’s daughter, she has every right to ask that the official visitor list be limited to family members only. Not that the hospital doesn’t have a similar policy of its own, since access to ICU patients is pretty tightly restricted as a rule.
I would have argued against this position on behalf of Winnie, but again, I am, as I have previously noted, a coward. All I’ve really been able to do is come downstairs to the main waiting room every other day and report to Winnie how Mom is doing. That’s not quite what Winnie needs, obviously. She wants to see my mother. She wants to sit and hold the hand of the person she loves most in the world.
My niece Lindsey agrees.
Let me tell you about Lindsey. She’s the conscientious kid who volunteers to take all the classroom animals home over summer break. She’s the principled kid who stands up to her classmates, and even sometimes stands up to her teachers when something gets said which she considers disparaging of a particular group. I call Lindsey our family’s little “Catcher in the Rye.” She’s like Holden Caulfield stationed in the rye field, keeping everybody from going off the cliff. It’s hard work looking out for everybody. Do you think you know a Lindsey? Because I happen to think there isn’t another thirteen-year-old girl quite like her.
Well, she calls me up just as I’m about to transition to weekend mode. It’s Friday night. It’s pizzas and Buds with a couple of the other lifelong bachelors who live in my apartment building. I’m in a hurry to start my weekend R & R. But I sit down and listen. Lindsey says she’s going to tell her parents that she’s spending the night with a friend of hers, but really she’s going to the hospital where they have Gran.
“Aren’t they going to check with the kid’s parents—the one you’re supposed to be having the slumber party with?”
“Are you serious? I spend, like, almost every Friday night at Tiffany’s house.”
“So Tiffany’s in on it?”
“Oh, totally. She’s got a really cool lesbian aunt who’s going to send her to Europe when she’s eighteen.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Oh, nothing.”
Pregnant pause. Third trimester kind of pregnant.
“I’m a little confused here, Lindsey. ICU visiting hours are over at seven. Besides which, they wouldn’t let you see Gran by yourself anyway.”
“Duh. That’s not why I’m going. And I’m not asking you to go either. It’s somebody else who’s coming with me tonight.”
“Who?”
“I am so not telling you. You’ll go straight to Mom.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t trust your generation anymore. Gran and Winnie’s generation—they’re pretty cool, I think, but I don’t know about you, Uncle Matt.”
“I’m devastated. What team do you think I play for anyway, O-Niece-O-Mine?”
“I soooo need to leave to meet Winnie.”
“Winnie.”
“Well, duh. I have to take the bus, you know, since I do not happen to drive.”
“I’ll drive you. Would that put me on your team?”
“Oh my God, are you serious? Because that’s the reason I called you.”
Part B of the plan seemed, at first glance, to be the trickier part. It was making a personal, deeply heartfelt, pull-out-every-stop-in-the-emotional-manipulation-handbook attempt to get the night nurse supervisor, Ms. Gibson, to break two hard and fast rules of Intensive Care patient access: to allow a patient to see a visitor past seven o’clock, and then to allow in a visitor who by traditional definition isn’t even a member of the patient’s family.
By traditional definition, I’m smiling. I’ve known gay couples who’ve been “married” for more years than most straight couples of my acquaintance. And of course it wasn’t Mom and Winnie’s fault they got a late start. Winnie knew all along who she was. Maybe Mom knew too, but she’d always tamped it down. Coming out as a lesbian in the pre-Gay Rights era, especially coming out after you’ve been “traditionally” married and already raised two kids—that would have to be classified as one of life’s most difficult decisions. But, to her credit, she did it. I once asked Winnie how my mother could possibly have taken such a bold step, knowing the consequences. (Sibyl didn’t speak to Mom for over a year.)
Winnie didn’t bat an eye. “Because she loves me.”
Added to the mix was the fact that Nurse Gibson doesn’t even come on duty until nine o’clock. Roughly calculating the odds in my head, I gave my niece’s scheme about a fifty-to-one chance of success. And that was being optimistic.
We met Winnie at her and my mother’s favorite Chinese restaurant over on Second Place. Winnie was worried. She’s generally a tough old broad, just entering her seventies, sharp as a tack and very much her own woman. Now she seemed emotionally, well, fragile. It had been almost two weeks since she’d seen Hallie. And she was the one who brought Mom to the hospital in the first place, for Chrissakes. By late that same day, Winnie’s access to Mom had been totally cut off. I think this was Sibyl’s way of getting back at Mom and Winnie for all the embarrassment she felt they’d caused her. If so, it was hateful and punitive. I should have confronted her that first day.
But in case I haven’t said it already, I’m a…right.
Winnie poked at her General Tso’s chicken. She didn’t seem to have much of an appetite. “Lindsey, honey.” She closed her eyes. “I admire what you’re trying to do. But what makes you think that the head night nurse is going to put her job on the line just so I can spend a few minutes with your grandmother?”
“Because she’s, like, one of the
nicest people I’ve ever met. I talked to her one day at Ward’s.”
I gave my niece a quizzical look. “Based on one brief conversation at the supermarket, you’ve decided that this is the kind of woman who can make miracles happen?”
Lindsey put her chopsticks down. They had been a struggle for her and I had twice suggested that she be an ugly American diner like Winnie and me and resort to the fork. “I think it’s wrong the way my mother has stood in the way of you getting to see Gran.” Lindsey was looking at Winnie. Both had tears welling in their eyes. I felt like a heel because I wasn’t likewise moved. And besides, I wasn’t really involved in this little escapade. I was just Lindsey’s chauffeur for the evening. Although, if it ever got back to Sibyl that not only had Lindsey lied about where she was that night, but that I had tacitly approved of the deception, I’d probably get put on Sis’s shit-list for a couple of years, at least. I’d have to miss all those great Saturday backyard cookouts with Doc bending my ear about infusion pumps, blood pressure cuffs, and peripherally inserted central catheters. On second thought, maybe being on my sister’s bad side wasn’t such a bad place to be.
“Hey, it might take a little convincing,” Lindsey went on, “but I’m totally not giving up. Is it almost nine?”
Winnie glanced at her watch. “No, honey. It’s just a little past eight.”
“Really? That’s all?”
Winnie nodded. We all picked up our forks and tried our best to eat.
In the main lobby of the hospital, Winnie and I sat down on a couch, while Lindsey approached the information desk.
“General visiting hours are nearly over,” we could hear the woman saying to Lindsey. It appeared from all the activity behind the desk that the woman was in the process of closing down her station for the evening.
“I know,” said Lindsey, glancing up at the clock on the wall. The clock read 8:55.
“I was wondering if all the nurses who come in for the next shift, if they, like, use that door there, or is there a back door—a staff door or something they might go through?”
“Are you waiting for one of the nurses?”
Lindsey nodded. “Nurse Gibson. She works in ICU on the fifth floor. Does she come in through this door?”
The woman, who was holding her purse against her stomach and looked ready to go, thought for a moment and said, “I have seen her come in this way.”
“Can we wait for her here—the three of us?” asked Lindsey, indicating Winnie and me with a twitch of the hand.
“If you wish. At some point, though, the security guard will come by and ask you to leave. The emergency room waiting room is the only public space in the building that stays open past nine.”
“Yes, thank you,” said Lindsey. I noticed that nearly all of the Floridian Valspeak had disappeared from Lindsey’s delivery. My niece was determined to succeed in her mission; she’d even created a new persona for herself: the ultra-polite and earnest young woman who would carefully watch every syllable that left her mouth so as not to give offense to those who found the youth of today lexically lazy.
Lindsey sat down between Winnie and me. “She was, like, totally nice.”
“Lindsey, honey,” said Winnie, reaching over and touching Lindsey gently on the arm. “I just want to let you know that regardless of what happens tonight, I very much appreciate what you tried to do for your grandmother and me.”
Lindsey nodded.
“Where did you come from, honey?” Winnie cocked her head. “They don’t make girls like you very often.”
In the midst of all of her worry, Lindsey allowed a glimmer of a smile to peek through. “Twice, Winnie, Gran’s asked for you. Both times was while I was with Mom. One time she just said your name. The next time she said, ‘Where’s Winnie?’ She said it out of the side of her mouth but I, like, understood her perfectly.”
“And how did your mother respond, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“She lied to Gran. Both times. She said that you weren’t able to make it.”
There were angry words that seemed poised upon Winnie’s lips—words that she would not allow herself to say. But I was under no such self-restraint: “Your mother was dead wrong to say that, Lindsey.”
“Très wrong,” said Lindsey, nodding in sad agreement. Then she said in a half-whisper to herself, “Worst. Mother. Ever.”
I should have defended my sister, maybe just a little bit. After all, Sibyl, for all her wrong-headedness and duplicity, does have some good points. I just couldn’t remember what any of them were at that moment.
Nurse Gibson arrived a few minutes past nine. Obviously aware of the fact that she was late, she came flying through the front door, a large knitted raffia carry-bag swinging wildly from her bouncing shoulder. Her nurse’s hat seemed almost swallowed up in her Working Girl big hair—which was both prodigious and somewhat untamed.
She had almost made it to the elevators by the time Lindsey popped up from her seat and called out to her.
Nurse Gibson turned. “Yes?”
Lindsey went to her. Winnie and I both stood. Winnie, generally a tower of composure and strength, seemed a little faint. I wondered if I was going to have to hold her up.
“Hello, Ms. Gibson.”
“Hello, Lindsey.” Nurse Gibson looked surprised to see my niece.
“I want you to meet someone,” said Lindsey. “This is Winnie Habjan. She’s, like, my third grandmother.”
“Hello, Ms. Habjan,” said Nurse Gibson. Walking over to shake Winnie’s hand, she added, “I was wondering if I was ever going to have this opportunity.”
Winnie looked confused.
Nurse Gibson went on: “Hallie—Ms. Walters—well, she asks about you quite often. It was hard for me to understand what she was saying at first, but I got her to use her good hand to write things out for me.”
Winnie began to cry. Something with which I wasn’t familiar began to form in my throat. A lump. Is that what they call it?
Nurse Gibson pulled out a tissue and offered it to Winnie. “I said, ‘Now, Ms. Walters, who is Winnie? She isn’t on the family list. Is she a neighbor, a good friend?’ I have Ms. Walters’ response here somewhere. I’ve kept the piece of paper she wrote it on.”
Nurse Gibson dug around a moment in her oversized tropical bag. Then she produced the slip of paper. It had jagged handwriting on it. The stroke had immobilized my mother’s right side, so it was a challenge for her to write with her unaccustomed left.
In answer to Nurse Gibson’s question, “Who is Winnie?” my mother had labored to scratch out the following four words: “She is my everything.”
Nurse Gibson smiled. “I’ve been half waiting for you, Ms. Habjan. Let me go up first and swear my co-conspirators on the nursing staff to complete secrecy. Then I’ll be back down for you. As for you two—” She was now pointing to Lindsey and me. “I’m afraid you’ll have to stay down here tonight. You’ll have ample opportunity to see the patient tomorrow.”
Winnie dabbed at her eyes with the tissue. “Taking me up to see her—that won’t get you into trouble?”
Nurse Gibson shook her head. “Not if we’re careful.”
Later, when Lindsey and I found ourselves sitting on the front steps of the hospital, both of us having been shooed out of the building by the aforementioned security guard, I asked my niece how it was that she was so sure that Nurse Gibson would do this for Winnie.
“Ohmigod! I totally forgot to mention that there was another woman with Nurse Gibson at the grocery store that day. The way the two of them were looking at each other, you could tell that they were, like, so totally in love. Nurse Gibson gets it.”
Fer shur.
1989
MELODIOUS IN OHIO
The singing career of the Ludden Sisters lasted roughly a dozen years, from early 1959, when the four teenagers were “discovered” by bandleader Augie Rausch, until late 1970, when the quartet, wishing to devote more time to their husbands and to their growing young
families, decided to “retire.” Their whirlwind years of appearances on Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour and tour performances before large, appreciative crowds led to significant fame and no small fortune. The girls—and they were just girls when they first started out (the youngest, Brenda, only thirteen years old when Rausch plucked her and her sisters from obscurity)—were the most popular members of the bandleader’s “musical family,” and as such received more fan mail in a day than all of Rausch’s other performers did in a month, mostly from women of a certain age who wished that their own daughters and granddaughters could be more like the adorably wholesome Ludden Sisters.
Three of the four sisters married wisely. Patricia wed a successful railroad attorney twenty years her senior; Janice a popular NFL quarterback; and Brenda, a multiply published author and Yale history professor. On the other hand, Frances Kay married a scheming huckster named Burt Squires, whose most recent claim to fame, after a long series of failed business enterprises, was leg warmers made of Old English Sheepdog fur.
Frances Kay and Burt Squires married in 1971, divorced in 1973, remarried in 1976, and divorced in 1982 after Squires, without his wife’s permission, invested every last penny of her large financial holdings in an ultimately disastrous non-alcoholic wine cooler venture. (“Isn’t it just, you know, juice?”) Although Frances Kay continued to receive residuals from her appearances on the syndicated version of Augie Rausch’s Variety Hour (its network incarnation cancelled in 1971 in the midst of CBS’s “Rural Purge,” an attempt to clear the network’s airways of all programs that appealed to an older, less sophisticated, less urban demographic), and though she received royalties from the re-release in compact disc format of some of the Ludden Sisters’ more popular LPs, the third-oldest member of the singing group was, by 1989, struggling financially. She and her physically challenged teenaged daughter Carly Ann moved from their large five-bedroom/three-bath ranch-style in Brentwood to one of Hollywood’s more seasoned garden apartment buildings, the Oleander Arms, where the two lived next door to an elderly cigar-chomping character actor named Irv Miller. Irv was best remembered for his hardboiled 1940s newspaper editor roles and for the enduring catchall catchphrase, “I’m running a newspaper here, not [fill in the blank: the Ladies’ Home Journal, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, a corn-shucking contest for hoedownin’ hayseeds, etc.].”
