I marched halfway to the nurses’ station. Two nurses stood there staring, and here came another one.
“These trays on the floor?” I said, trying so hard to remain as ladylike as I possibly could, when I just wanted to scream. “He’s not a dog. He’s not gonna come out and eat off that tray. Stop it. I don’t wanna see that again.”
“He doesn’t eat,” said one.
“How can he? If you don’t want to go in there, put a tray table outside that door and you put that there food on that table. Would you eat something off the floor? I wouldn’t, and I am not gonna have you disrespect a human being like that. It’s not right.”
Sister Angela emerged, like some sort of devil. “You need to calm down,” she said.
“I am calm,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “Look, here’s the deal,” I said, looking back at the nurses. “You might not like him. You may not want to go in there. But one of you, I know, will.”
I turned to the sister. “One of you has God’s love in your heart.” Back to the nurses. “Why don’t you trade off if you don’t want to go in there, but don’t be a jerk about it. One of you has the strength. Find it. Do what you do and help him.”
“The patient . . .” Sister began to say.
“Howard. He went to New York. He had a whole life . . .” Sister Angela stared at me so I met her eye. “I could just go home,” I said. “I could go home and not come back. This is the deal.”
She curled her lip ever so slightly so I could see her disdain for me. She shot a look at the nurses and walked away.
“Now, may I please have a box of tissues?” I asked.
As they stared at me, I started to take off my space suit, removing the balloon-cloth pants and the huge top. A nurse handed me a box of tissues.
“Thank you,” I said, throwing back my hair. I clicked my heels hard on the floor on the way back to his room, stopping to throw the space suit in the garbage.
I never wore one at any hospital again.
Howard became less lucid with each day until he died a few days later. It was like he was drowning in bed, he had so much fluid in his lungs. He never saw the leaves change again. His mother told me she didn’t want him, so I asked to speak to Howard’s father.
“He can’t come to the phone,” she said. I heard a dog bark, and she hissed, “Lucky, heel.” I wondered if she had even changed his dog’s name.
I buried him near Jimmy in Files. I told no one but Bonnie about the hospital visits. She was my sounding board, and we talked just about every night. Bonnie was adapting to her new life with a feeding tube and had managed to regain something like a voice. To be honest, she sounded a lot like Daffy Duck. And the thing is that Bonnie was so smart that she always used the big words. Maybe from all her years doing the typesetting at the newspaper. When I took her to her doctor, and he asked how she was, she might joke, “Resplendent.” That would take about five minutes of decoding.
Her oncologist was Bruce Leipzig, a rabbi from New York. So, you know, he stuck out in Arkansas. He taught me how to care for Bonnie, help her with her medicines and her feeding tube. This wasn’t new to me. I didn’t have any medical training, but I had cared for my father when I was a little girl. His lungs would fill with fluid, and my mother would hear him gurgling in the night. She’d wake me up to suction him. She had married him for his military pension, and he had married her because she was a nurse, so it was a trade-off they both were aware of. She was sick, very sick, and sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed, so I was her caretaker too. Daddy had a hole from a tracheotomy, and he would help me put the tube down his trachea and into his lungs. We would do one lung and then the other, usually filling half a jar with fluid. Which was about all I could carry at that age anyway. Then I would have to take the jar and empty it. I would gag, but you do what you have to do.
Bonnie was hardheaded too, and she wanted to live. When Dr. Leipzig told her she had only a three percent chance of living through the chemotherapy, she said, “I’m gonna die anyway, try it on me.” He shrugged and smiled. “We’ll try it then.”
On one of the visits, I told him I’d heard about AIDS “on TV” and I wondered what he thought.
“You know, we doctors thought for a while that we had all the answers,” he said. “Cut out the tumor, use this antibiotic.”
“Done,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “I can tell Bonnie, ‘Hey, let’s try this.’ I can tell another patient, ‘This will prolong your life.’ These people, what can you do? There’s no answer. I can’t imagine looking at a patient and saying, ‘I have absolutely nothing to give you.’ I mean, can you imagine?”
“No,” I said, lying. Bonnie looked at me, knowing exactly what I was up to. “What do they think is causing it?”
“I guess they’re saying it’s a virus, and when you get it at first you have the worst flu of your life, and then it passes. But it starts to destroy their immune system. They’re sitting ducks for anything that comes along. You have these young guys getting old man diseases.”
“Like a monster movie,” I said.
“I mean, as a doctor, it’s fascinating,” he said. “But it’s people. I guess the only thing you can do is prevent it. There’s talk about quarantining them, but how do you go about doing that?”
One day I was at St. Joe’s looking for a doctor.
“Oh, I think he’s looking up something in the library,” said a nurse.
“The library?” I said. “You all have a library here?”
“Yeah, it’s by the doctors’ lounge,” she said. “The medical library. They sometimes hide in there doing ‘research.’”
I just smiled, but as soon as the coast was clear around evening time, I marched myself back there. The lights were off, and I turned them on to see shelf after shelf of not just books but also the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of the American Medical Association, the Lancet . . . I let out a breath, and then I started, taking the most recent copies of each and turning pages until I found any mention of AIDS. The articles confirmed what I knew: HIV was a virus spread through sexual contact, blood transfusions, sharing needles, or mother to child. It was not like the cold or the flu, and they had ruled out what they called insect vectors, which I realized meant mosquitoes. There were long articles about statistics and projections about AIDS, and letters about the ethics of mass testing and the importance of prevention in the absence of a vaccine or therapy. Even the words “epidemic” and “vaccine” gave me hope someone was trying to create a cure.
Then I discovered the larger library at the Med Center in Little Rock. Every week I had to take Bonnie to a social worker there who did touch therapy. She was an older woman named Tweed—“like the fabric,” she’d say. She clearly cared about people, and we got to talking about what I was doing, and I told her I was on the lookout for any kind of information I could use. Tweed got me into the Med Center library, which was even better than the one at St. Joe’s because this was a teaching hospital. It was larger and more formal, and there was always a librarian stationed at the front.
“I’m going in to do research, and she’s helping me,” Tweed told the librarian.
“Okay,” was the answer. “How’s your day going?”
“Oh, it’s good, thank you,” I said. And I was in. We went back several times, doing this routine where Tweed would leave to check on a patient and then simply not come back. After a few visits, I was able to go in without her, smiling at the librarian and maybe paying a compliment as an entrance fee.
Interns and students in their final years of med school, all male, used the library for studying and dozing off. I sat among them reading, and soon they were used to me too. The library had a microfiche reader, and I scanned through articles on-screen, taking notes. It brought back memories of using one in the school library when I was a kid. I didn’t learn like other kids, and nobody�
��including me—figured out that I had a form of dyslexia. I just thought I had to work harder than everyone else. So I had spent hours in the school library alone, trying to catch up, reading the same sentence twice, three times if I had to, anything that would help. This was no different.
Bonnie had me help take her feeding tube in and out for when she left the house, but it hurt her so much that she just started leaving it in. She would unplug it and kind of tuck the tube behind her ear. People watched us as I took her around the grocery store. She was a sight. No hair, radiation burns all on her face and throat, quacking at me, with her feeding tube up in that jaunty tuck. “Here we come,” I used to say to her whenever we walked in anywhere.
Bonnie didn’t have two pennies to rub together and was living in a shotgun shack out in the woods. She was what my mother would call “froggy.” Anyone poor and white, she said they lived out with the frogs in the woods. All Bonnie had for heat was a pot-belly stove to burn wood in. That first December after the surgery, the temperature went down to the twenties. I went over to check on her, and the house was freezing.
“Bonnie, you gotta put more wood on,” I said. “You can’t live like this.”
“I’m fine,” she said.
I went over to the stove and saw a box full of twigs. She had been gathering her own firewood herself, though she couldn’t carry anything. Twigs was it, because they were light.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” I said.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“No, it’s not,” I said. I had been doing so much to care for her, and she was living like this. “It is not okay. It is not right.”
The truth is that Bonnie had lived that way even before she was sick. Making do. Her dad was a hit-and-run who probably didn’t stick around long enough to even call it a full one-night stand, and that was back when having a single mom made them outliers. Her mother worked as a switchboard operator, so they never had any money. Bonnie was just used to running on fumes.
I called the housing assistance office for her, right there. Looked it up in the phone book and called before she could yell at me. They were giving me the runaround, so we just went down there. This was how I learned to solve all of Bonnie’s problems. Just walk in with our little traveling show. If she needed a new form at the social security office or a hospital administrator wanted to charge for something, I’d wait until they got exasperated with me, and I’d say, “Well, here, Bonnie, you tell him.” She’d pause, then start in with that Daffy Duck voice, and that would do it. Any place we went, they wanted us out so bad they would be like, “Well, here, take this chair with you. These flowers? Anything else you want. Just get out.”
We found her a place on Music Mountain Road, another dilapidated shotgun shack so she’d feel at home. The rent was two hundred dollars a month, and housing assistance cleared that no problem. I couldn’t get anyone to pay for her water though. But that’s what got her out of the house and kept her social. She’d gotten to a point where she could drive again without me, so she’d go over to the cold-water fountain at Happy Hollow with her little bottles in her hoopty Toyota pickup. It’s down the mountain from where there’s a hickory tree with a nozzle in it, and that same water comes out of the fountain with the four faucets down below. People brought their milk jugs, their bleach bottles, whatever they had, and it was a social thing. You waited to see what people brought and started talking. Then she’d get a big jug of hot water from another fountain to bathe and wash her hair, which was slowly growing back salt-and-pepper. Bonnie could always spark conversations when she wanted to, even with that voice, so she developed a whole jungle-dazzle of friends there, a bunch of lost souls. She was like Hot Springs—she either drew you to her, or she sent you away.
As open as I was with Bonnie about helping people as they died, it was the opposite with my friend Sandy. I knew she hated gay people. “Why ruin a good dick?” she loved to say. “It’s unnatural and against God.” She wasn’t a religious person, but you know how there are people who find religion when it’s handy. And she really resented the ones that got the straight tourists looking for a bit of strange when they were in for a convention. “They have no reason to live except to take men way from me.”
But at least Sandy kept everything very surface, and that was what I needed. She didn’t want anything from me except an ear for her stories. We’d crash the hot tub at the Arlington Hotel, and on the milder days in December we kept up our winter tradition of canoeing down the Ouachita River. We’d rent the canoe from these hillbilly country people. Little kids and grown men staring at us in our bikini tops like we were aliens. We’d wear shorts or pants, because it did get cooler as the sun began to set.
“Did I tell you I had to kick this guy out last night?” Sandy said one day as we drifted on the water. “Dick like a cigarette.”
“Sandy, one of these men is gonna beat the hell out of you someday.”
“Oh, no, this was false advertising,” she said. “Don’t sell me Marlboro Man and then give me Virginia Slim.”
“We should get jobs out at the Dairyette,” I joked. That was where the country girls who weren’t big on working would meet the guys with the company cars—work trucks from the water and sewer companies.
“Exactly, Ruthie,” she said, playing along. “Get the sweet eye from one of the guys, and you give it back.”
“Then he comes in later by himself. ‘Where’s the rest of the guys?’ I’ll say. ‘I like that tooth you got.’”
“And you say you can’t meet men,” she said.
“Who needs them?” I asked. I turned my head as I heard a low roar in the distance. “Oh, here they come.”
A jet was coming in low over the river. When we were out the flyboys from the military base in Jacksonville always flew as close to the ground as they could.
“Hello, boys,” I yelled as the jet soared over us, so loud I could barely hear myself.
Chapter Four
I kept tidying up, walking quickly from room to room, like guests were going to stop by. But it was just Allison’s daddy, and he wouldn’t even get out of the car. Not that I wanted him to. When he brought her back from his place in Little Rock on Sunday mornings, I could swear that he drove slow just so I would get anxious about being at church on time. First United Methodist had two Sunday services: an 8:30 one that only the oldest and littlest of the little old ladies attended, then a 10:50 service that ended promptly at noon. We had to beat the Baptists out, or we’d never get lunch. Between the services, there was an hourlong Sunday school. I wanted Allison to be raised in the Bible, and I also wanted to be there for the Bible study for adults. It’s where everybody talked, and if you weren’t at the table you were on the agenda.
I went to First United because no matter what, God was always there. Every Sunday. I just felt His presence and love. I’d been raised Southern Baptist, but I wanted Allison raised in a softer religion. Her paternal grandparents were strict about church, and her daddy hadn’t wanted anything to do with religion. He didn’t care where I took her. What’s good about the Methodists is they don’t have enough religion to offend anyone. But from the first time I went into First United, it was sacred to me. Being in the building made me feel safe, and it felt like that’s where God lived in Hot Springs. His vacation home.
A lot of people chose it because it was the social church—First United was where all the doctors and bankers went. Stone gray and built in a Gothic Revival style, it sat on Central Avenue and made Central Baptist across the street look like a poor relation. When I put my address in the church directory, I made sure to use a P.O. box, so nobody would judge where we lived. It was bad enough to be listed with the title of Ms. with no Mr.
When I finally divorced that man in October 1983, I moved him out to Little Rock. I went to his daddy and told him I needed his truck and why. I needed a truck that had a hitch on it for a U-Haul trailer. When my h
usband came home from whomever he was sleeping with, I had all his stuff packed up for him and told him he was moving to Little Rock. He didn’t want to leave Hot Springs.
“Yes, you are,” I said. I wasn’t sharing my town.
By the time Allison was born I was already out the door mentally, but it took some time for my body to catch up. He was sleeping around, which you would think would make him demand less sex from me, but what did I know. Before I met him, he’d been married and had a son with a woman named Linda, and his parents still acted like she was their true daughter-in-law. Linda was invited to every holiday, and I soon learned that meant I wouldn’t be. He didn’t even have the nerve to tell me that first Thanksgiving. He let me get all dressed up, and I was confused when he took the turn to head toward Files Cemetery.
“I thought you’d like to be with your family,” he said.
I got out of the car. He didn’t.
“Linda’s gonna be there,” he said. “I’ll come back and get you when it’s done.” He looked at me expectantly, and I realized he was waiting for me to close the door so he could leave. I did, and he drove off with the pies I’d made to impress his mother. Now they were Linda’s to eat.
“Well, shoot,” I said aloud. If I’d known I just had to impress the dead I wouldn’t have spent so much time on my hair. So I sat with Daddy under the pines. He’d died on Thanksgiving, so I just kidded myself and decided it was God putting me where I should be.
Their son was about eight when Allison was born, and that boy hung, decorated, and lit the moon as far as his family was concerned. I liked him plenty too when I saw him, but I think Allison’s grandparents had done such a terrible job raising her daddy that they thought that child was their second chance at proving they were good people. They showered him with love and gifts, and didn’t even pretend to do that for me and Allison. Linda had all the power, and they worried that if they didn’t pay her house off, or whatever the new thing she needed was, she’d take their grandson out to Jessieville, out north of town. Raise him out there as a country hick. She was no dummy, I’ll give her that.
All the Young Men Page 4
