Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  “You know I can’t swallow anything by mouth,” Anna said in self-defense. “I’m on a feeding tube.”

  Anna checked the large-print schedule taped to the wall and saw that there was an “activity” taking place in Unit Nine. She was getting bored by her own histrionics.

  “You’ll wheel me over, I’ll enlarge my horizons,” she told her daughter. “They drag in all these unconscious souls who sleep and drool the whole time, while some poor girl from Mexico, who can hardly speak English, asks us if anyone knows how much two-plus-two is, and then she reads us recipes from the paper for chili beans. Tell me, Janet, are any of us going to be cooking chili beans in the near future?” Anna motioned with her movable fingers to her daughter. “Go get the nurse now and tell her to unhook me from the feeding tube. It’s pumping me so full that I’m gaining five pounds a week. I never weighed more than 105 in my life and now I’m 133 pounds. Tell the nurse I want to be put into the wheelchair.”

  Anna braced herself for the ordeal. Two male aides came in and, chattering to each other in Spanish as if Anna were not there at all, they rolled and jerked her around on her bed. First they needed to put on Anna’s cotton robe. They needed to change the wet diaper-rag. They needed to undo the feeding tube from its socket and insert the sealer plug. Anna’s daughter waited discreetly in the hall while they got her dressed and lifted her into the padded wheelchair. Anna screamed repeatedly as they pinched her skin, hoisted her roughly, dropped her down too hard, nearly broke her ribs as they let go of her. When her daughter finally wheeled her down the corridor past the reflecting window of the beauty parlor, Anna turned away her head. “I haven’t looked at myself in a mirror since I’ve been here. Why would I want to look at a corpse?”

  “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

  The song coming from the activity room hit Anna like a hot wind. “I forgot. Bible Study is on Thursday,” she told Janet. “Turn me around.” They were in the breezeway between units; the goldfish fountain gurgled and sloshed gum wrappers among the mottled, bloated-looking fish. White-coated aides, the beautiful dark-haired young men and women on their breaks, sat on the hard metal chairs and flirted, teased, laughed, as if this place they worked in were a carnival, a celebration on the outskirts of town where the freaks were incidental, where the true purpose of their work was pleasure, laughter, and seduction. They had shining skin, ebony hair, brilliant smiles; they were aching to start making their thousands of babies together, Anna could feel the urgency in their voices.

  Janet had stalled the wheelchair; Anna didn’t really want to go back to her room and stare at The Crab, not after all her arduous preparations, repositionings, and mechanical adjustments, nor did she especially want to hear that Jesus loved her. Clapping could be heard from the activity room; a man’s deep voice exhorted everyone to join in.

  “Oh, wheel me in, anyway,” Anna conceded. “What can we lose?” Janet turned her in a circle and pushed on. Inside it looked like a train station full of the lame and the halt waiting for passage to Lourdes. Anna wondered how it would be now if she’d been raised a believer. Jesus up on a cloud, arms extended, to welcome her into heavenly bliss, Jesus to forgive her meanness and sarcasm, Jesus happy to bathe her brow in the waters of peace. Jesus her handsome lover there to soothe her pains, console her for her losses, cherish her tenderly for eternity.

  Instead, what legacy did she have from her own pale religious beginnings? Nothing but the memory of a father who forbade her to sing the name of Jesus in Christmas carols at the public school. And now what did she have? An Orthodox Jew-businessman with a long beard waving matzos at her.

  Janet bumped her over the threshold and found a place for Anna under a vent that already was blowing cold air on her neck and would probably give her pneumonia that wouldn’t kill her. Janet herself took a seat on a torn plastic couch beside a Down’s Syndrome woman (she could have been fifteen years old or thirty) wearing a pink apron with bunnies on it.

  Anna scrutinized the crowd; she didn’t recognize a single person. These inmates were young—they had to be from some other circle of hell, not the toothless wing or the Alzheimer’s wing. The young man conducting Bible Study, the one with the deep voice, was very tall, very handsome. He wore tight blue jeans with a silver belt buckle, and a plaid shirt open at the neck with a bolo tie hanging loose on his hairy chest. He was talking now in deep, low tones that resonated right up through the wheels of Anna’s chair and shivered into her lacelike, filigreed bones.

  “Are you impatient?” he asked. “Are you tired of waiting for the miracle? Do you think it will never come?” Anna looked her daughter’s way and rolled her eyes. Janet seemed to be listening attentively, without hostility. “Do you wake up every day and think, ‘Today I’ll be saved? Today I’ll be released and go home to my Heavenly Father?’ “

  There was a murmur of agreement in the room. Anna glanced around again, looking to see if any of the usual senile vegetables, the living dead, the comatose catatonics, had been wheeled in. But around her were only the hollow-eyed young, the MS victims, the severely retarded, the quadriplegics, the Lou Gehrigs, the anorexics past the point of no return. Her heart skipped a beat then landed in her gut like an anchor thrown from a ship. (Was this going to be her fatal heart attack? Here, now, with Jesus flapping his wings overhead?)

  “My wife left me years ago,” the handsome man said, “and every year, on our anniversary, I ask myself, ‘Is this the year she’ll return to me?’ I always set out some flowers on the hall table, and I look out the window for her, hoping to see her, with her beautiful gold hair, coming up the walk. Like all of you, I’m tired of waiting. I’m full of despair. But then one day it occurred to me: the longer I’ve waited, the closer I am to the day it will happen! So you see? We’re all closer! Every one of us. We’re almost there! Don’t you just feel it? If the miracle wasn’t yesterday, isn’t today it may be…tomorrow! Even tonight! Because it’s coming, we all know that, don’t we?”

  A shimmer of assent, like the whirr of hummingbirds’ wings, fluttered across the room. Anna felt the breeze of it lift the hair on her neck (unless what she felt was the air vent). Just in front of her was a tiny girl-like woman on a downy fluff of deep padding, in a wheelchair designed like a reclining couch. The girl was emaciated, weighed less than a bird, couldn’t have been more than twenty. Her short fine hair was cut like a boy’s. She was watching the handsome man with her huge, dark eyes, beautiful eyes, she was following his every movement, taking in his power, his sweetness. Anna had an impulse to call out to him, “Never mind about your wife, come and take care of this girl, she’s lonely, she needs you. Put your arms around her. Kiss her with your lips. Give her a taste of love before it’s all over.”

  Now Anna noticed a young man strapped upright into a wheelchair, his face newly shaven (she saw a spot of blood on his cheek, the aide must have nicked him), but he had red lips, blue eyes, he was beautiful. He, too, was listening to the handsome man who promised the coming miracle. Next to him was a wasted young man, displaying the angles of his skeleton. He looked like the AIDS victims Anna had seen on television. Perhaps he had tasted too much love and was dying of it. She saw spastics and cripples and mutes—with their faces radiant and lit from above.

  “So let’s sing a song of praise now,” the handsome man said. “We have much to be thankful for since every one of us will very soon know ultimate love in Our Father’s embrace. Just hang on, brothers and sisters. These troubled days are just a lightning flash on the vast skies of eternity.”

  He pushed a button and a scratchy recording came blasting out of his tape player on a card table: “Jesus loves me, this I know…”

  Those who could sing, joined in. Those who were unable watched the sunbeams dance in front of their eyes and imagined their deliverance. Anna saw her horizons widen. She saw her mother and father waiting for her on a cloud in heaven, their arms outstretched. The gentle face of her husband was smiling out of the blue skies
at her. He waved, with the hand wearing his horseshoe ring; his eyes were sparkling with anticipation. She could feel herself in his strong arms, feel the power of the hug he was waiting to give her.

  Anna reached over toward her daughter with her two good fingers. Janet grasped her hand tightly, bending her head and kissing her mother’s fingers, one by one, over and over.

  “Everyone here is young,” Anna whispered to her, “but I’m very old. I’ve lived my whole life.”

  “Yes, you’re very old, Ma.”

  “I’ve had the whole thing,” Anna said, amazed. She actually felt peace descending on her, heavily, without grace, like a pelican coming to land on a rock. “There’s nothing more for me to do. I just realized, darling—I’m at the very end. I don’t have to worry anymore. That’s all there is to it.”

  ANNA IN CHAINS

  Anna had sung her song, her mantra, her aria for the last five years to any one who would listen, to a world audience, bigger—she estimated—than the Pope himself commanded.

  “Shoot me, get me a gun, bring me a poison pill! I want to be dead! I want to be in my grave! I want to die.”

  When the aides didn’t answer her call bell, she loudly intoned the stanzas of her libretto; when her daughters visited (then went out in the hall to get something for her from the nurse), she whispered it. In the dark of night, when the other crazies up and down the hall were singing their own songs, she chimed in with her lyric: “Dead oh dead oh give me—dead.”

  “You don’t mean it,” her roommate, The Crab, told her. “Don’t be like the boy who cried wolf.”

  Anna knew all about the boy who cried wolf. Like her, he had been rehearsing for the real thing, for the moment of greatest need—but no one seemed to understand that a person had to practice, had to find the right tone, the perfect modulation, the impeccable rhythm, as in any piece of music. Anna knew all about music—she was nothing if not a musician.

  Besides, the reactions engendered by her litany entertained her during the endless hours of her incarceration. Just as when she used to play the old upright piano—briefly—in the chapel of the nursing home (she had only a few weeks of being ambulatory before her stroke, before her broken hip), and people used to wag their heads in awe at her rendition of the “Moonlight Sonata,” she now—when she sang her tune (“Bring me cyanide, bring me arsenic!“)—took satisfaction in watching all those about her rushing away in alarm.

  Each tender new young Mexican aide scurried to the nurse with the desperate news: “The lady in room 615 says she wants to die.” Anna cocked her ear for the reply: “Oh—that one. She says that all the time. Pay no attention.”

  “It’s a sin,” one young black-haired beauty reprimanded her as she changed the wet sheets on Anna’s bed. The child, angelic of face, with dazzling black eyes, was only eighteen and already had three babies that her mother cared for while she worked. “You mustn’t say that anymore. You have to be patient and wait till Jesus calls you.”

  “I don’t know from Jesus,” Anna said. “And I don’t want to.”

  News of her daring got around. All the aides at the nursing home were recent arrivals from Mexico and staunch Catholics; all the nurses were Protestants; the owner was an Orthodox Jew. Those who attended Anna feared she was daring God—tempting destruction to rain down upon all of them. An earthquake might strike, a fire might rage through the nursing home. What did Anna care? She’d take death any way it came, the sooner the better. Besides, she didn’t believe anyone was up there listening to her dares. She had once seen her suicidal son-in-law fling a can of beer up into the branches of a tree, screaming, “Fuck you, God!”—and that she had to admit was going a little too far. But the poor demented man was dead now, and God had had nothing to do with it. Her daughter’s husband had done himself in with means Anna could never find the strength or technical ability to execute.

  She reflected on the suicides that had passed through her history. In 1933, a first cousin of hers named Bertha had secretly married an Italian bartender. For the first year, too ashamed to tell her family she’d done the forbidden thing and married a non-Jew, she lived at home with her parents and only met him once a week, in the back room of the bar where he worked, to have sex with him in the storeroom among the liquor bottles. When one day Bertha’s mother discovered a wedding band hidden in her daughter’s box of sanitary napkins, she locked Bertha out of the house. After the young bride had moved in with her Italian husband, it turned out he found Bertha too dull and demure for his loud family gatherings. One Sunday morning—as the story went—he told her he didn’t want her coming to his brother’s wedding, he would have more fun without her. As soon as he left the house, she stuffed towels in the cracks under all the doorways, put the cat out, and turned on the gas.

  Gert, Anna’s younger sister, told the story repeatedly as a cautionary tale, as a warning against intermarriage, and as purely ghoulish gossip. In fact, Gert had always had a fascination with suicide. She often recounted the story of her best friend, Tessie, who was in love with a dentist. The dentist had given Tessie an engagement ring and convinced her “to go all the way” before their marriage. But he broke the engagement when he fell in love with one of his patients. (Gert relished adding: “And this ‘patient’ had a bust bigger than Jane Russell’s. Men are animals, they can’t control themselves.”) Tessie, as Gert told the story, climbed up onto his fire escape one night, knocked on his window, and slit her wrists. The dentist wasn’t even home—all Tessie’s efforts were for naught. The dentist, putting out some buttermilk to cool on the fire escape the next morning, found her there, dead, with her blouse open and a suicide note in her brassiere.

  Gert had always kept a little Swee Touch Nee tin tea box in her handkerchief drawer filled with yellowed newspaper clippings about suicides. Anna thought about her sister, now rich as a queen, having buried two husbands, the last one of whom had squirreled away half a million dollars. He’d bought Lane Bryant stock in its early days, correctly predicting that women would keep getting bigger and fatter and would keep buying Lane Bryant clothes. Gert lived now in a fancy Beverly Hills retirement home, from which she never stirred to come and visit Anna. Anna’s daughters pled excuses for Gert: the hour’s ride was too much for her, she suffered from arthritis, she soon needed cataract surgery, she had to stay near her bathroom because her bladder was so weak.

  Anna was not impressed. Her sister, always busy doing good work for Jewish causes (for which she always got medals and plaques at donor dinners to hang on the walls all over her apartment), didn’t have the kindness of heart to come and visit her helpless, paralyzed, invalid sister. To do a “mitzvah” for her own flesh-and-blood was beyond her goodness of heart.

  The truth had been evident from their childhood on—Gert had always been jealous of Anna. She had always wanted everything Anna ever had—including Anna’s husband and Anna’s daughters. Luckily for Anna, there wasn’t a single thing about Gert that Anna had ever envied.

  One rainy afternoon, after the nurse had pumped the afternoon medications into Anna’s feeding tube (she could feel the pulverized pills, diluted by water, rise up cold and sour into her throat as the nurse shot them into the tube with a fat syringe), a tall, unshaven, toothless old man, wearing a bathrobe and blue nursing-home slippers, padded into Anna’s room. He was carrying a Bible. His skinny wrist was decorated with colorful plastic bracelets including a red one (like one Anna wore) indicating “Do Not Resuscitate!”

  “I understand there’s a woman in here who keeps saying she wants to die,” he announced. “Is that you?” he demanded, sticking his grizzly face a foot away from Anna’s.

  “What’s it to you?” she said.

  “I came to save you,” he said, brandishing the Bible. “You won’t want to die if you accept the Lord.”

  “Beethoven is my lord,” Anna said. She gestured toward the plastic bust of Beethoven she kept on her side table, the only decoration she permitted, whereas her roommate had junk everywhere�
��fake flowers, stuffed bunnies, crucifixes, leprechauns.

  “Him! That deaf German? He can’t give you everlasting life, Lady. Do you know Satan hears your wishes? He’s going to have you if you’re not careful.”

  “So let him have me,” Anna said. “I’m no bargain.”

  “Do you ever think about the devil?” the old man demanded.

  “No,” Anna said. “Never.”

  “Well, he thinks about you.”

  “Oh, go away. I ought to know what I want to think about,” Anna said fiercely. “I’m eighty-eight years old, as old as there are keys on a piano.”

  “You could be saved! You should find the Lord!” the man said, wild-eyed, beginning to back out of the room.

  “Is he so stupid that he’s lost?” Anna yelled after him. “Just stay out of here, you lunatic. You…nothing. You…no one!”

  “Are you my children?” Anna said to her daughters when they next visited her.

  Anna’s daughters exchanged a glance. “Yes, we’re your children, Ma,” they both said at the same moment. They pulled the two pink plastic chairs allotted to visitors closer to her bed.

  “My memory is losing me,” Anna said. “What did my husband die of? What did he look like?” She really couldn’t remember. “Do you girls have any children?”

  Her daughters began their patient, extended explanations. One had three daughters, one had two sons, one of the sons had two babies, a boy and a girl—the names swirled around Anna’s head. These descendants of hers meant nothing to her—did they ever come and visit? She let her daughters talk and took none of it in; while they set the record straight she would have a little time to rest and think about what pleased her.

  On the other side of the curtain, Anna’s roommate, The Crab, mumbled, “blah blah blah.” She hated when Anna’s daughters visited, because apparently they all talked too much for her taste. So what? The Crab always had a rosary in her hands—let her commune with the Lord if she felt neglected.