Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  She began to imagine her funeral: what she wanted was for the girls to play a tape of herself performing Mozart on the piano; maybe a little Chopin, a page or two of the “Pathétique,” a little “Claire de Lune”—a sampling of her well-rounded repertoire. Maybe even “The You and I Waltz,” the first piece she had ever learned by heart.

  But definitely no fancy ceremonies. Certainly no rabbis, those crooks. No strangers either, just a tasteful gathering to the tune of great music, played by Anna’s gifted but deceased fingers.

  She sensed a breeze passing over her face and saw some papers flutter in front of her eyes.

  “Ma?” she heard. She blinked.

  “Janet and I have some papers we think you should sign.” A thin tube—a pen—was slid into her hand, a hard surface appeared beneath her forearm. They unstrapped her straps.

  “What papers?” she said.

  “We think you need to let us handle your money from now on, Ma,” Janet said. “If you give us your money—then after two years the government will pay for your bills here.”

  “Two years?” Anna yelled. “You think I’m going to stay in this zoo for two years? You’re crazy!”

  “A lawyer advised us to do this, Ma. It’s perfectly legal. It’s just a protection.”

  “You’re seeing lawyers about my money?” Anna said. “Who are you protecting?”

  She knew the look they were giving each other, it was the look you give over the head of a crazy person.

  “What’re you doing, Ma?”

  Anna rolled out of bed and landed with a clunk on the floor. The stroke victim in the next bed peered down at her and began to hum.

  “Listen,” Anna said, on her hands and knees, “a Brownie troop is coming tomorrow to bring candy canes. The aides are putting up a Christmas tree in the hall. A chaplain is coming to pray with us and remind us of the suffering of Jesus. You want me to be here for that? I’m still your mother, children,” she said fiercely, “so get me out of this joint right now.”

  At Carol’s house they argued with her all night. They wanted her to give up her apartment. The time had come. All right, she was a reasonable woman. She could see the sense of some of their arguments: it was dangerous to live alone, hard to shop, she never liked to cook much anyway. In a retirement home she’d have better nourishment, security, care, protection, and, if she fell, help on the spot. The two of them would take care of everything, move her to a place nearby, they’d visit her all the time. (No one said anything about her living with them, but, fine, she was a modern old woman, she knew children didn’t take you in anymore.)

  “You wouldn’t have to visit me all the time, believe me.”

  “So you’ll agree to move?”

  “I’m helpless in the hands of fate,” Anna said. What can I do?”

  She moved her two pianos with her; it wasn’t easy fitting them into her room, but Anna was gratified to see it made quite an impression on the staff of the Country Gardens Retirement Home, how their mouths dropped open when the elevator groaned under the weight of her instruments, one baby grand, one upright. In her room, she directed the movers to set her bed between the two of them so that she could reach up with either hand and find a keyboard waiting for her.

  “So children: this is the last stop,” she said lugubriously for her daughters’ benefit as the three of them signed registration papers at the desk in the lobby, but she was noticing a bunch of old ladies watching her, ladies with legs like elephants, ladies with eyeglasses like Pyrex plates. She saw a couple of old men, too; nothing to get excited about, stooped over, with walkers, with canes, but she had a feeling it wasn’t going to be so bad as she thought. Who knew what energy she still had in her? When had she last had a chance to try out her popularity?

  At the end of her first week, one of the old ladies got hold of Anna and said, “Unkind things are being said about you in the dining hall, my dear. Bend lower and I’ll tell you.” They were examining the menu for the week, tacked on the bulletin board.

  “I might slip a disc if I bend down,” Anna said. She was very careful now, with the threat of the nursing home in her mind. “Just talk louder.”

  “You’ve got to wear your skirts longer,” the woman whispered to her. “I’m telling you this for your own good. It isn’t your fault you have such pretty legs.”

  “What should I do, cut them off?” Anna asked. The menu in front of them was unbelievable: crab quiche, Louisiana frogs’ legs, chimichanga, chile relleno. At moments like this, Anna wished she had not dismissed so viciously the Jewish Home for the Aged. There at least they would occasionally have potato latkes, blintzes, kreplach.

  “Also, certain people have noticed, I won’t say who, that you don’t wear earrings. You don’t curl your hair.”

  “So tell them not to look,” Anna said. “Tell them I believe in natural beauty.”

  “And one more thing we think you should know: stay away from the man in the brown plaid shirt. He has only one thing on his mind—sex.”

  “Believe me,” Anna said, “I wouldn’t go near the King of England if he had sex on his mind.”

  The joke going around was that everyone at Country Gardens had AIDS; “Guess what kind of AIDS I have?” “You have AIDS?” “Yeah—hearing aids.” Or: “Guess what disease I have?” “What disease?” “Oldtimer’s Disease.” If it made them happy to be comedians, let them be comedians, like the old lady who came down to dinner one night wearing a Groucho Marx nose. Anna hadn’t liked vulgarity as a young woman, and she didn’t like it now. Thank heaven she hadn’t got coarse with age. Mozart and Culture were her creeds—she’d tell the old ladies to put that in their pipes and smoke it the next time someone asked her what church she attended on Sundays. Or she’d answer that her religion was Beauty, that she got spiritual insights from Rachmaninoff. What else could she say to all those clanking pearl earrings hanging between scrolls of blue-white hair and flowered polyester dresses; how did you defend against a little army of Church Ladies?

  Anna wore what was left in her closet from the old days—graceful pleated skirts, sheer stockings, high heels (these she had to wear because of a spur on her instep), and a tailored blouse with a roadrunner pin (a gift from Abram) on the collar. She weighed a hundred pounds; the other old ladies weighed two hundred. She saw them looking at her calves, at her short skirts, and she swung her hips more grandly as she walked down the carpeted halls.

  The shape of Anna’s days had changed—at home she had had no structure: a walk to Fairfax was her outing, or she could lie there all day like a dog. But here they had everything: an exercycle room (a nurse right next-door), a beauty shop, a library, a crafts room, a bingo room, a banking room where once a week you could cash checks. A maid came and gave you clean towels and sheets. How could she afford this? The fact was she had no money at all anymore; her girls had stripped her of every cent in the interest of some future good. They were paying her bills, and they told her to put money worries out of her mind. If she couldn’t trust her children, who could she trust? Her life of responsibility was over. She was free as a bird.

  Coming toward the dining hall she smelled the luscious odor of frying onions (the thought of onions alone used to make her sick; now her mouth watered). She felt as if this were the college she had never attended, the dormitory life she had never had. Heads turned when she came into the dining hall; if she could still see to thread a needle, she’d sew the hems on all her skirts and make them even shorter.

  Of course, when her daughters called her, she complained; the food was awful, the heater didn’t work, there were roaches in the bathroom—and when they came to visit, she let her knees buckle, she told them she had headaches, that her sciatica was back, her osteoporosis was going wild. The instant they were gone, she went downstairs and climbed on the exercycle and did a mile.

  The man in the brown plaid shirt took a seat across from her at dinner. “I’m Harvey and I’m eighty-six,” he said. “I understand you have two pianos. Fanc
y that. I have two cellos.”

  “I don’t do duets,” Anna said.

  “I can see you’re a smart cookie,” he said. “I can see you’ve been around. Now me,” he said, “I am a famous architect. I built 280 houses in the San Gabriel Hills alone. I can prove it.” He reached into his pocket and handed her a photocopy of an article, telling how famous he was.

  “I’m not impressed,” Anna said, handing it back. “At this point in my life, only Arthur Rubinstein could impress me.”

  “I have it over him,” the man said. “I’m still alive.”

  “Maybe, but only barely,” Anna observed. She ordered her dinner from the waitress. “Easy on the onions,” she said. “I might have a date later on.”

  That night Harvey-plaid-shirt knocked on the door of her room. When she opened the door, he pulled a gun on her.

  “Stick ‘em up,” he said. Then he pulled the trigger. A flag that said “BANG!” fell from the barrel.

  “They told me you were a sex maniac,” Anna said. “You go around armed, too?”

  “Only when I meet my match,” he said. “And I think I have, kid, with you.”

  “You certainly are conceited,” Anna told him.

  “See what I mean?” he said. “I met my match. You and I are a pair, kid. We’re survivors. You don’t get to our age unless you’re smart, tough, and lucky.”

  Just then the phone rang. Anna’s sister Gert said: “How come you weren’t in your room last night?”

  “I had Bingo.”

  “A gambler you’re becoming in your old age?”

  “Don’t worry,” Anna said. “I use plenty of self-control.”

  “And the night before?” Gert asked.

  “I was at Potpourri. We have an entertainment night. I was playing the piano for my friends.”

  “What’s this with the nightlife?” Gert asked. “And what kind of friends? You never made a friend in your life.”

  “You sound a little jealous,” Anna said. “Someday, after Harry dies, you can move in here. You’ll see for yourself.”

  “Don’t tell me you like it there!”

  Harvey was aiming his gun at her again.

  “Don’t aim for the eyes,” she warned him.

  “You have someone there?” Gert asked.

  “A friend, he just stopped by for a minute.”

  “A man in your room already! And you sound cheerful,” Gert accused her. “A week ago you told me this is the last stop!” Gert said. “In your own words you said so. ‘I hope I die in my sleep,’ you said.”

  “Now I see it could be a long last stop,” Anna said. “It could be a vacation.”

  Harvey fired his pistol.

  Anna laughed. She had the clear impression she was getting younger.

  WHEEL OF FORTUNE

  Twice a week, maybe more, Anna saw the aides from her wing run up and down the hall of the nursing home closing the doors to the corridor. Anna was not so dumb, but she played dumb—she liked to see what excuses they came up with. “Why are you doing that?” she cried out, clarifying her right to have her door open, that it was her business if she wanted to see the riffraff passing in the halls or have a little diseased air circulating around her bed.

  Usually they answered: “We’re cleaning the hall.” Sometimes they confessed something closer to the truth: “We have an emergency”—and whap, the door was closed and no further conversation was possible. Once they even told her they were spraying for bugs.

  Today the young Mexican aide seemed stumped, paused in her rush to pull the door closed. “A rat is loose,” she said finally (but her eyes showed the guilt of lying). All the Mexicans who worked here were Catholic and worried constantly about sin. One of Anna’s male aides told her as he changed her sheets one day that he envied her because her sinning days were over.

  For a brief moment Anna believed there might be a rat at large. A rat! That would be an interesting change from the daily visitors who popped their heads into her room without invitation: the lady with the cart of toys (she passed out sheets torn from a child’s coloring book and some knobby crayons for those who still had motor control of their hands), the lady who carried her pet poodle from room to room, urging the inmates to pet the dog because the elderly, as Anna had heard her tell a nurse in the hall, needed “sensory nourishment and the comfort of touch.” But that was no rat they had closed the door against just now—that was a dead body rolling past. Anna envied the lucky duck who had the good fortune to have the arrow (she was thinking of the Wheel of Fortune) land on her. Though, given the odds, it was probably a him. Men seemed to have more luck in every way.

  Wheel of Fortune was the only TV show Anna permitted herself to watch. (All the others were designed for idiots.) Anna happened to be a word wizard—she always got every question right before the contestants did—even the champions. Furthermore, the show supported her certainty that luck was everything—the questions you got, where the arrow landed, who was spinning the wheel—the kind of urgent factors over which a person had no control, whether it was on TV or in real life or in the gambling casino.

  Anna’s daughter Janet had recently gone to Las Vegas and brought Anna a picture of the three sevens that won her a jackpot on a slot machine. The snapshot was pasted up on Anna’s wall now (777 on the center line), although Janet had said it was illegal to take pictures in a casino, and she could have been thrown out for doing it. She just wanted, she said, to prove to herself she had been lucky at some point in her life.

  Had Anna been lucky? She could have died young, like her husband. She could have been a famous pianist, like Horowitz, like Rubinstein, only she was born a woman (another accident of where the arrow landed). She could have been born into a better, richer, smarter family, not having had a peasant for a mother and a sickly tailor (with a love for Caruso) for a father. She could have married a lawyer, a doctor…oh what was the use of it?

  Even here at the nursing home, accidents of fate were everything. Which roommate you got, which aide was assigned to give you a shower, which cut of horse-meat they gave you for dinner. Luckily, Anna’s esophagus had clamped shut after her series of misfortunes: her stroke, her fall, her emergency hip surgery and all its complications (pulmonary blood clots, pneumonia, heart arrhythmia, but nothing worthwhile enough to kill her). Due to that particular stroke of luck (who had the strength to chew after all that?), she chose to excuse herself from eating for the rest of her existence.

  Various visitors who stopped in to see her appeared shocked when they noticed the pulsating snake of her clear plastic feeding tube, pumping a malted of nutrients that disappeared under the covers and went into a hole in her belly. These were people still under the delusion that eating was one of life’s pleasures. Anna had long ago passed beyond wanting to deal with gristle, fat, egg-white slime, or the seeds of small berries. Quite a few burdens had been taken from her: she could no longer walk, go to the bathroom at her own discretion, move her right arm; she therefore was no longer held responsible for making lists of things to do or washing dishes or making phone calls to repairmen-crooks. In fact, she’d arrived at the situation in life she’d always secretly longed for. Anna truly didn’t have to lift a finger in order to stay alive. And since this service didn’t cost a penny, all she had to do was lean back and enjoy it. The state paid for everything.

  Anna felt a certain satisfaction that at eighty-five, paralyzed and penniless, she was finally sitting pretty. She could summon servants at will and she didn’t have to eat another gristly bite of meat in her life. It could be said, she thought, that the blessed arrow of the Wheel of Fortune had finally landed upon her.

  When the rat was caught, or the corpse loaded and dispensed with, an aide opened the door and announced to Anna they were moving her to another room. They did this with regularity—and without explanation. They’d dump her few robes in a cart, pull her family snapshots off the wall and tuck them under her pillow, grab her personal items out of a drawer, unscrew her little TV fr
om the table, and off they would go, a parade of sorts, a big strong Mexican fellow at each end of her bed, a girl rolling the cart, and another aide pulling along her feeding machine. Anna had to caution them not to go too fast or the tube would pull out of her stomach and where would she be then?

  They wheeled her down one hall and up another. She scowled at all the old geezers vegetating in the halls as they gawked at her. She didn’t want those dummies in their wheelchairs drawing erroneous conclusions about her, possibly assuming she was infected with some dread organism and would end up in a room with a big red star on the door. She definitely didn’t want them thinking she was being moved to the Alzheimer’s wing, having lost the last of her marbles. They might even think she was dead and was going to be transported to the morgue. Well—let them! Let them get good and scared. In fact, Anna closed her eyes and let her jaw go slack, to look as dead as she could. A song from childhood came to her mind:

  Did you ever think, when the hearse went by

  That you would beeee…the next to die?

  Death! She’d give her right arm to be the next to die. Even her left arm, the one that still moved.

  Why should she have to go to the trouble of making the acquaintance of a new roommate? How many faceless old ladies had Anna lived with already? They all looked alike, they were all useless to her, could teach her nothing, introduce her to no one, improve her circumstances not at all. Anna had made it the main rule of her life never to cultivate people who were not important. What was the sense of wasting your time with the poor, the stupid, the ineffectual, the powerless, and now, here, with the deaf, the lame, the blind, the catatonic?

  When the aide wheeled her into the new room, she knew she was already at a disadvantage. “This is Mildred Pierce,” the aide said. “Mildred, this is Anna Goldman.” Anna could see at once that Mildred had the bed by the window, the one with the superior view of the hallway, the one from which she could see whomever came and went through the outside door. Mildred, it was clear, was the owner of the room, and that meant she had the upper hand.