Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  Anna had seen her own daughters do it (to her satisfaction): pass right by some babbling crone who was slipping down out of her restraints (whose chin was snagged on the straps of her wheelchair), pass right by without so much as a glance as she begged and pleaded. Why should they help anyone here, anyway? If her daughters were coming to see her, they shouldn’t waste one second on some crazy old coot whose mind was in Minnesota and who had one foot in the grave.

  Anna was shackled: straps and ropes and chains and tubes entrapped and surrounded her; Houdini couldn’t have got out of this place. Two cords (which since her stroke she couldn’t pull) were for the light switch and the call-buzzer. There was a silver chain that attached and locked her five-inch TV to the bed table (otherwise it would be stolen in five minutes). On her wrists were plastic bracelets, in various neon colors, identifying her, her medications, her doctor, her room number, and one bright red bracelet blazing out “Do Not Resuscitate!” There was no chance she’d have the good luck to have her heart stop; the bracelet might as well have read “Miss America 1993” or “Lottery Winner, Five Million Dollar Jackpot.” In fact, Anna could see no way that she could possibly die. She couldn’t fall (her hand was paralyzed and had no strength, her hip was broken and she couldn’t walk), she couldn’t starve or even choke to death since she no longer ate anything by mouth, but was on a feeding tube that pumped “Gevity” (a milkshake-thick potion of enzymes and vitamins designed to threaten her with eternal longevity) into a hole in her belly, she couldn’t take poison (nothing was in reach of her two working fingers but the On/Off button of the TV next to her bed), she couldn’t depart this world via pneumonia, the supposed friend of the aged (since the minute she coughed they’d start pumping antibiotics into her feeding tube—and besides, she’d had the pneumonia vaccine injected into her), she had no history in her family of cancer or cirrhosis of the liver, and she never had smoked or taken a drink. Clearly this was going to be one deadly long last chapter.

  “So what do you do all day, Ma?” her daughter Janet asked during one of her many obligatory visits in the second year of Anna’s incarceration, “Do you just sit there with your mind blank?”

  “I’m never blank!” Anna snapped. “Never.”

  “What do you think about?”

  Anna stared at her daughter; how do you tell a child who is still running to Las Vegas for vacations, still redecorating her home, still looking forward to her daughters’ weddings, still dyeing her hair, that there were things to think about that no one could dream could ever be thought about? How much truth was a mother allowed to reveal to a child, even if the child were fifty-five and the mother eighty-five? How much protecting was there left to be done?

  “I think about Daddy,” Anna said. That was neutral; it could be taken as a sentimental, reverential reflection. She saw her daughter breathe with relief. The fact was Anna hardly remembered him.

  “I think about him, too,” Janet said. (She had her purse in her lap, clutched in her fingers, as if she wanted to leave as soon as possible.) “He was a wonderful father,” she added, smiling at Anna to reassure her that no mistake had been made in Anna’s choice of a husband. “He was always so full of life, he enjoyed things so much, he had such an appetite for living!”

  Anna screwed her lips shut. This wasn’t the track she was on, she wasn’t going to accommodate to this. Her mouth was dry as old corn flakes. (She was entitled to a spearmint-flavored swab if she wanted it; the nurse would jiggle it around on Anna’s tongue if she complained loudly enough, but she didn’t want even that, hadn’t swallowed anything, food, water, even sucked on a Lifesaver, for more than a year now.)

  “Oh, he was such a good father,” Janet went on. “He would have done anything for the family, for his children…He often said how much he loved us…”

  Impatiently, Anna cut her off. “I just want to be in the grave next to him!” There, it had burst forth despite her pledge to herself that she would tone it down for this visit. Her daughters often left her bedside in tears, and Anna occasionally felt the slightest pang of guilt about how far she pushed them. But these outbursts were her pleasure, and she couldn’t deny herself, even in the interest of sparing her children. “That’s what I think of in my blank mind, since you want to know! I think of that space next to him, that blank space in the Jewish cemetery, right next to where he’s laid out. I want my coffin, I want my peace, I want to be in it. NOW!”

  Janet got a scared look on her face—her daughter was not young any more, she was getting heavy around the hips, she had already given up her womb and her gall bladder to the surgeon’s knife. My God, Anna thought, one day my darling baby is going to be tied up in one of these torture chambers, too.

  On TV, she had seen a computer-artist change a woman’s face from age eighteen to age eighty-eight in a series of quick overlays. She stared at her daughter’s face and repeated the process privately, lengthening her daughter’s nose and chin and bringing them toward each other, creating wrinkles, bags under her eyes, dewlaps, jowls, turkey neck, long hanging earlobes, liver spots; finally she removed her daughter’s teeth and let the mouth that had nursed from Anna’s breast undulate and pulse like an octopus. She was transfixed by her own projection, but her daughter was chattering on, unaware of what lay ahead for her.

  The curtain, which had been drawn shut between Anna’s bed and The Crab’s bed, billowed slightly with movement on the other side. Anna knew exactly what the old witch was up to, clacking the beads of her rosary, rolling around the room in her wheelchair to look at one sickly picture of Jesus after another that decorated the walls on her side of the room. Her daughter would be in here any minute, Christmas trees hanging from her ears. The woman must think she was an interior decorator, bringing in paper turkeys to glue on the wall for her mother in November, elaborate crèches in December, red Valentine hearts in February, green shamrocks and leprechauns in March, yellow Easter baskets in April. The rest of the time, when she visited, she leaned head-to-head with The Crab as they listened to soap operas and reruns of westerns turned to top volume. Deaf as Anna’s roommate professed to be, she could hear like a lioness the instant Anna hummed her private aria, her prayer, her wish, her command, her passionate entreaty: “I wish I were dead.”

  “You spoil my digestion when you say that,” The Crab complained to her the minute a nurse pulled the curtain back. “It’s bad for my appetite and makes me feel as if I’m in a mental institution.”

  An appetite? Anyone who had an appetite here belonged in a mental institution. Before Anna had had her stroke, she was forced to partake of the food they served on this toothless wing: green slime for salad, brown mush for steak, red and yellow ribbons of Jell-O, pink liquefied syrup they called cake.

  “To think,” Anna said to her daughter now, “that people want to live to a great old age. They should have their heads examined.”

  “Would you rather have died young like Daddy?” her daughter challenged her. “Dead from leukemia at fifty-five? Never to live to enjoy his grandchildren? Or see the world change the way you have?”

  “So he didn’t get to see a microwave,” Anna said. “But think how lucky he was that he never got old. Am I lucky—to see every power taken away, piece by piece, till nothing is left? Look at me. I used to play the piano, I used to walk, I used to eat, I used to smile. Now I’m a piece of meat, they turn me over like a roast, they poke things into me, I’m an open village, anyone can come into my private roads.” She saw her daughter throw a look of exasperation at the ceiling. Anna looked, too. What were those reddish spots up there—blood? Had someone’s high blood pressure, once-upon-a-time, burst through the top of her head and shot a geyser up to the ceiling? Was that someone’s lucky stroke out of here?

  “If only you had a better attitude, Mom,” her daughter began. “Other people in here, after a few months, accept their situation, they don’t carry on like you do, they recognize that when a person lives this long, this is the price you pay; when you get
to be very old, your body finally wears out. At least be grateful your mind hasn’t worn out; you know everything that goes on, you’re as sharp as ever.”

  “That’s my problem. I’d be better off a vegetable. I could babble all night and think I was a flying cow.”

  “But Ma—after two years here, can’t you at least try to accept…?”

  Accept? Accept? What was she talking about? Anna didn’t want a sermon. She already got sermons from the nurses, who told her she made too much fuss about every little thing, sermons from The Crab, who didn’t approve of her death wish and told she had to wait until The Good Lord called, sermons from the aides who soaked her gown every time they injected medicine into her feeding tube and then blamed her for letting the tube clog up.

  The Orthodox Jew who owned the place marched into her room (and the rooms of the two or three other Jewish residents) on High Holy Days, holding up a ragged piece of matzo or a couple of Chanukah candles and giving sermons about “Our Heritage,” and “Our Magnificent History.” He was maybe twenty-five, with a beard like an octogenarian, and hard little black eyes. What did he know of heritage and history? Anna could see he hadn’t lived life at all; he was a small-minded, tough, mean businessman, making babies with his orthodox wife who wore a babushka like from the old country. Anna knew he sat in his office all day peering at charts on his computer and schemed ways to have the nursing home make more money. He watered down the prune juice, he served horse-meat, he refused Anna her disposable diapers.

  Even her daughters didn’t know about the diapers—what the nursing home did to Anna after she came back from her second surgery. (The first—she reminded herself—was to get the circulation going in her leg so they wouldn’t have to cut off her rotting toe; the second was after her stroke, when she tried to get out of bed in the hospital and broke her hip. Why they’d bothered to replace her hip she didn’t know. She hadn’t walked a step since.)

  It was then, upon her return to the nursing home, that the aides starting using diapers. They claimed it was easier than having to run when she called for a bedpan every ten seconds, easier than hearing her complain of pain when they hoisted her on it, then complain again when they left her on it too long before they came back to take it away. So Anna got diapers. What did she care? She knew the seven ages of man. Why should she be different? Like Methuselah, like anyone who lived past eighty, she was becoming an infant without teeth, a baby who peed in bed, who couldn’t walk, who couldn’t turn over herself, a baby who was going backward into the sea of time till soon she’d sink under, her head disappearing, and be gone. (But not soon enough!)

  When Medicare stopped paying for the diapers after a hundred days, the Orthodox Jew and his henchman came in and told Anna they’d have to call her daughters and report that her time on Medicare was up. If her family wanted diapers for her, they’d have to pay fifty dollars a box for them.

  “Not on your life,” Anna had told the men (who looked to her like Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum with beards). “I won’t have my children wasting a penny on me. If your aides weren’t so lazy, if they were willing to bring me a bed pan, if they treated me like a human being, I wouldn’t be in diapers to begin with. So now you figure it out. It doesn’t matter to me if I don’t have diapers. I’ll just wet the bed.”

  The men stepped into the hall to hold a feverish consultation. They argued in great agitation as if over a point of law in the Torah—this pettiness was in their genes. Also, they had seen Anna carry on and knew she wasn’t bluffing.

  The solution they reached was a device now in place between her legs—some kind of thick rag (supplied by the nursing home) which, at intervals, was pulled out by an aide and replaced with a new one.

  No, there were tortures in this existence her daughters had not yet begun to imagine: the bowel impactions, for example, which had happened to Anna several times due to her inactivity and her lack of solid food. When this occurred, when the aides noted that a week had passed without results, they set upon her some young Mexican aide (sometimes a young fellow just over the border and working cheap) who was given license by the nurses (who hated to do it themselves) to thrust his gloved fingers into Anna’s private recesses to unstick the stalled products of digested “Gevity.” She had to submit. She had no choice. She sometimes screamed in pain during the procedure. And in recent weeks she imagined the worst, that maybe one certain aide enjoyed doing it to her, came in during the dark hours after midnight and turned her on her side, did things to her behind her back, said it was orders on her chart from the doctor. He took a long time doing it, with her turned on her side, away from him. She couldn’t see his face or tell exactly what he was doing (and maybe not doing things only to her). She didn’t know his name. She didn’t even know if he worked here. Who would believe her if she told anyone her fears? And if she reported him and he was fired, who knew what he would do, come back with a gun and kill her? Kill her children! Never mind. What did it matter? She wasn’t a woman. She was no longer human, no longer a sexual being.

  When her turn came to be showered here, by male aides or female aides, it was all the same, they sat her naked on a chair with a hole in it, wheeled her under the cascading blasts of water—first too cold, then too hot. They used a washcloth first on her body, her private parts, and then, last of all…on her face. She was outraged; she sat there, freezing, burning, singing her tune, “I wish I were dead,” saying it out loud and to herself, shouting it, like a Hallelujah chorus, filling her mouth with water and spitting out the words.

  So how did her daughter have the nerve to tell her she should have a better attitude?

  Her attitude had worsened after she had learned the cost of her hospital bill from her hip surgery. She still couldn’t believe it. Eighty-seven thousand dollars! For consultations and tests and machines and technicians and therapists and surgeons and heart specialists and lung specialists and blood specialists and brain specialists and stomach specialists and several psychiatrists to find out why she wanted to die. (Their brilliant diagnosis was: “Depression possibly related to recent health setbacks.”) All this knowledge for Anna’s benefit, all these geniuses gathered around her singing gibberish:

  There was an old lady who fell out of bed,

  We can’t make her well,

  We can’t make her dead.

  No wonder Medicare had no money left for her diapers. But what bothered her was the stupidity of it. Eighty-seven thousand dollars? Anna had never seen that much money in her life, not at one time, not in one place. But to think what money like that would have bought her at another time of her life, another place. An education! Music lessons with a master teacher. A house for herself and her husband and children. Freedom, space, the ocean, the mountains, rivers, eagles flying overhead. Maybe even vacations (which she and Abram could never afford to take), a night in a hotel, good meals in restaurants, a car that wasn’t fifteen years old. She couldn’t bear to think about this; the tube in her stomach, the machine pumping in the “Gevity”—this alone cost eight hundred dollars a month, more than Anna had ever paid for rent, ever, anywhere, in all the places she had lived in her life. For the conveniences she had now, a narrow bed, a five-inch TV, and all the complimentary tortures of this existence, someone was writing a check for thousands of dollars every month to the Orthodox Jew with his beard and his matzo crumbs.

  “How can I get in touch with Dr. Death?” Anna asked her daughter. “This Kevorkian doctor. I want to speak to him.”

  “He would never consider you, Ma,” her daughter said. “You’re not terminally ill. You’re not even dying.” “What would you call this?” Anna asked.

  “That’s not the point. You don’t have a fatal condition.”

  “I have the human condition.”

  “Yes, but you’re not dying. Not right now.”

  “Excuse me,” Anna said. “Are you suggesting I’m dancing the night away?”

  “You make it hard for me, Ma. I don’t know what to say. If I could fix
you, I would. I’d do anything if I could. But I’m only human, too.” Her daughter looked over toward The Crab’s side of the room; Anna knew what she was thinking. When The Crab’s daughter visited, the two of them chatted briefly, played three hands of gin rummy, prayed to Jesus, watched TV, and then said a brisk goodbye. No operatic crescendos, no Sarah Bernhardt pronouncements, no farewell deathbed scenes. But The Crab didn’t have Anna’s grasp of the nature of existence. She didn’t see the long view and therefore couldn’t make judgments. She didn’t excoriate the universe; she simply didn’t have the brains for it.

  “Janet, have a little human sympathy for me.” (She knew she should leave it alone, but she couldn’t.) “I have nothing to do here all day but think of how I’m in pain, how I’m suffering. How they turn me over every two hours. How I have a bed sore at the base of my spine. How my right arm is swollen and paralyzed. How my heels hurt. How I have a pain in my chest all the time.”

  “Ma, maybe if you thought of something else besides yourself. I always offer to bring you books on tape and a cassette player. You could listen to all the great books you never read. You could finally get your education!”

  “I’m not interested. What do I need an education for now? To help me in my future career?”

  “To enlarge your horizons. You could listen to tapes of all the music you love. For pleasure. Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart. “

  “Just thinking of a piano makes my heart break. Hearing one would kill me.”

  “So it would kill you. I thought that’s what you want, anyway,” Janet said. “Look, I’m sorry, Ma. I didn’t mean that. But what is, is. This is where you are. This is your fate now. You have to make the best of it.”

  “Give me liberty or give me death,” Anna said.

  “If I actually handed you a poison pill, would you take it right now?” her daughter demanded. For an instant, Anna thought her daughter was going to produce one from her pocket.