Anna in Chains

by Merrill Joan Gerber

  After a while Anna said, “That’s enough about family trees. What else can you tell me?”

  Her daughters exchanged another glance. This time an alarm went off in Anna’s head. She caught something in their look—they were keeping something from her.

  “What is it?” she demanded. “What happened? Are one of you sick?” Her girls were no spring chickens. If one of them had cancer, Anna would kill herself! Under no circumstances did she intend to outlive her children.

  “It’s about Aunt Gert,” her older daughter said finally.

  “What about her?”

  “She’s been very depressed lately,” her younger daughter said.

  “What could she have to be depressed about!” Anna demanded. “She lives in some fancy Beverly Hills place where they take them on tours to see movie stars’ houses and the shark from Jaws.”

  “She’s old, Ma. She lonely, she’s widowed, like you. She’s sick, her back hurts, she’s going deaf, her eyes are failing.”

  “So? I can’t walk! I can’t eat! I’m paralyzed. I’ll never play the piano again. Do you see me being depressed?”

  “Never mind. Maybe we shouldn’t talk about this.”

  “Let’s talk about it. So what else about Gert?” Anna felt a sense of alarm that Gert was about to gain some critical advantage over her.

  “Well, the truth is, we think she tried to kill herself.”

  “How, by eating pork?” Anna asked.

  Her daughters were silent.

  Anna had to think about this. Finally she said, “Is she dead?”

  “No. It seems she took too many sleeping pills. When she didn’t come down for breakfast, they sent someone up to her room, and found her there.”

  “So what happens now? She’s not going to live with one of you girls, is she?”

  “No, but the fact is we’ll have to visit her more often, keep a close eye on her.”

  “I wouldn’t bother if I were you,” Anna said. “All she wants is attention.”

  Anna’s daughters exchanged the “Let’s get going look.” She saw them both stand up at once.

  “Okay, Ma. We’ll be back to see you soon.”

  “Gert should have had children of her own if she was going to need so much attention. I hope she knows she isn’t going to get it from my children.”

  “Don’t worry. We know we belong to you. You never let us forget it.”

  All night Anna was distraught. She hadn’t felt this worried in a long time. Gert, even without an Italian husband, without a dentist or a fire escape, had almost accomplished what Anna most longed for—oblivion. Now Gert would probably have a fancy psychiatrist (a luxury Anna had never had in her entire life), and the next time she took too many pills they’d take her to that hospital in Beverly Hills where all the movie stars went—George Burns, Elizabeth Taylor. This was not acceptable.

  Anna considered her options. Even if she had pills, she couldn’t take them by mouth. She would need a mortar and pestle to grind them up and then would have to bribe someone to shoot the mixture into her feeding tube. If she had a gun, even if she knew how to use one, she was righthanded and her right hand was paralyzed. What were the words of that Dorothy Parker poem? Anna had memorized it in her youth—about how razors pain you, rivers are damp, acids stain you, drugs cause cramp—and the rest of it, gas smells bad, nooses give, guns aren’t lawful, you might as well live. Dorothy Parker was only playing with words—she’d had something to live for, all that fame and money, till she drank herself to death. If Anna had some Manischewitz wine here, she would gulp the whole bottle down at once. (She could still use her mouth, she could still swallow. She simply chose not to, she let the feeding tube do all the work.)

  The tube, then, was the only way she could kill herself. The “Gevity” that slithered day and night into her guts had to be cut off, stopped. If her sister Gert had the guts to take sleeping pills, Anna could at least starve herself. There were two ways to do it—stop the machine from pumping, or pull out the tube itself. Could she do either one?

  For days and nights, Anna pondered this subject. She organized her thoughts; she hadn’t been a legal secretary for nothing. She knew how to reason, she was simply waiting for the moment to act. On shower days, which were Tuesday and Saturday, the aide always turned off the feeding tube pump and unplugged the feeding tube from the segment implanted in Anna’s belly in order to wheel Anna into the shower room. Once or twice, after she returned Anna to her bed, she forgot—in her hurry to get to the lunch room and have her enchiladas—to restart the pump. But eventually the nurse or the aide discovered the error and corrected it. Besides, Anna had heard that starving to death could take a month or more. That did not actually appeal to her very much. She had always been an impatient person, and she liked immediate results. However, if that was her only option, she could deal with it. She was sure the appropriate opportunity would present itself—she simply had to be alert enough to seize the moment when it arrived the way the wolf, in the ancient story, finally seized the boy.

  On a Monday when Anna had already been disconnected from her feeding tube and hoisted into her wheelchair, waiting to be taken to the scale to be weighed—which was the monthly ritual here—the old guy in the blue slippers came back, peered into her room, and guffawed. “Hah, Lady—I see you’re still alive, whether you want to be or not.”

  Anna knew the moment was upon her.

  “Oh hello again,” she said. “How nice to see you.

  What’s your name, by the way?” she asked sweetly.

  “Ludwig,” he said.

  “So you remember our talk?”

  “What talk?”

  “I wonder if you would wheel me down to the chapel.”

  “You want to pray?”

  “I’ve had a lot of time to think. I’ve come around to a whole new way of seeing things.”

  “I think you should wait till Sunday when they have a priest here to say Mass. He does the whole business.”

  “No, I want to go now. I have no time to lose.”

  “I have more time than money, myself.” The old man shuffled into the room, unlocked the brake of Anna’s wheelchair, and began pushing her down the hall. She didn’t like the way he was driving—maybe he was drunk, he reminded her of a drunk, with the stubble on his face, without all his teeth—but his driving record wasn’t foremost in her mind. He was pushing her so fast she felt the wind on her face. Wildly they sped past the nursing station, past the shower rooms, past the activity room—she hadn’t been on a trip like this since the roller-coaster in Coney Island.

  He pushed open the door of the chapel. Two skinny stained-glass windows threw green light into the room on either side of a wooden cross. In the corner, just as she remembered it, was the upright piano.

  “Could you leave me right there?” Anna asked. “In front of the piano?”

  “I’ll wait while you pray,” he said. “Otherwise, you could be left here till Sunday.”

  “Don’t worry,” Anna said. “You go on ahead. I’ll be fine. Just push me in a little bit closer to the keys, maybe I can play a hymn.”

  It was that easy. He probably didn’t want to sit around while she played hymns. He just left her there—he didn’t even preach to her. He had probably already forgotten why he’d come, one of the benefits of senile dementia.

  In the muffled silence of the chapel, Anna bowed her head over the keys. The greenish light descending in long rays upon the keyboard was full of sun-lit dust motes. With enormous effort Anna lifted her left hand from her lap and laid it on the keys. She remembered a song from her childhood songbook, and began to hum it:

  Seated one day at the organ,

  I was weary and ill at ease...

  And my fingers wandered idly

  Over the noisy keys...

  Anna tried to play a chord but her shaky fingers had no strength in them and collapsed on the discolored ivories without calling forth even one clear note.

  “It doesn’t m
atter,” she said aloud. “I didn’t come here to play at Carnegie Hall.” Using all her strength, she wrenched her buttocks from the seat of the wheelchair and tumbled to the floor. She began to roll. She had had much practice in rolling, the aides rolled her from side to side every two hours, day and night, in her bed to keep her from getting bedsores.

  Anna rolled herself around to the far side of the piano—it took her an hour or two to cover the distance—and succeeded in wedging herself in the space between the back of the piano and the wall. That was all. Now she would die here, unobserved, slowly departing life in the shadow of the great instrument that she loved, the piano that was the passion of her life. She would die heroically, suffering as Beethoven suffered, and thus doing she would accomplish all her goals, mainly beating her sister Gert to suicide, and finally dying and getting out of this place.

  Anna woke in chains. She was bound, hand and foot, to the rails of her bed. She seemed also to be in some kind of a straitjacket—she couldn’t tell exactly. The feeding tube was humming away beside her, she was clearly alive and in business again.

  “Get me a doctor!” she screamed, and was surprised at the fierceness in her voice. She had never called for a doctor in the past, she had only called for death. Perhaps she had suffered brain damage, being stuck behind the piano for so long. “A doctor! A doctor! Get me a doctor!”

  At some point in the day, a handsome bearded fellow materialized beside her bed. He looked like Abram, her dead husband, when he was young. His eyes were greenish-blue and had a Jewish sweetness in their gaze. The boy—he couldn’t be more than thirty—pulled up a chair and took Anna’s paralyzed hand tenderly in his own.

  “Hello, Anna. I’m Dr. Arthur Kramer. I’m a psychiatrist and I’ve been called in to help you. My plan—with your permission—is to visit you often from now on with the goal of getting you back to a place where you can enjoy life again.”

  “Would you really call this ‘life’?” Anna demanded. “Tell me the truth, Doctor. I know you’re a smart boy, a dummy doesn’t go so many years to medical school. Is this condition I have what you’d call ‘life’?”

  Anna indicated her shackles. She rattled the bed rails with what little strength she had in her good hand. Something about the vulnerability in the boy’s face suggested she could take liberties with him. He looked a little frightened, in fact. She might even be his first geriatric patient.

  “It is your life, whatever you call it, Anna. It’s what you’ve got.”

  “So who needs it? Would you want it?”

  “I don’t think we should talk about me, Anna. We’re here to talk about you. We’re going to do a lot of talking, and I’m going to start you on some medicine that may help you adjust.”

  “Adjust to what?”

  “The many losses you have suffered, the losses we all suffer as we age. My job is to teach you how to grieve your losses.”

  “Maybe you should find another job then,” Anna said. “I don’t need a teacher for suffering. I’m already an expert in the field.”

  “Maybe you’ll see it differently after a while. Perhaps in time you will, with the wisdom your years have given you, be willing to take on the new challenges of great old age and try to conquer them.”

  “Do you always talk this way?” Anna said, “because though you’re a very nice boy, I don’t have much patience.”

  The doctor was looking down; Anna had a sense that he might have choked up, even have tears in his eyes. She wanted to take him in her arms and assure him that her torment wasn’t really as bad as it looked to him, that she liked to exaggerate for effect. On a good day she could even consider this life of hers an adventure.

  “What’s the matter, Arthur? You have a grandma about my age?”

  He raised his head. “Will you work with me, Anna? I’ll try to be brief when I explain things to you.”

  “Tell me something. You’re married? You have children?” Anna asked.

  “I have a wife, yes, and a son, a little boy,” the doctor said.

  “I understand. You have to earn a living,” Anna agreed. “Look, so I’ll cooperate, Medicare will pay you. I’ll let you come and keep me company and talk till your half-hour or whatever is up. But you should know I don’t really believe in this psychology baloney. You talk but I don’t have to listen. I’ll ignore you, which is exactly what I do when my daughters come to see me. But I want you to understand, Arthur-the-psychiatrist: there’s nothing you can teach me about life. I’ve lived three times as long as you have. So if I’m not paying attention, you’ll be kind enough not to force yourself on me. Maybe I’ll be thinking about how I danced with Abram at my wedding, how the gardenias he gave me smelled like the entire Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in springtime, how the edges of the corsage were already turning brown when we got to Atlantic City for our honeymoon. You can rest assured—I have enough to think about till the end of time.”

  MERRILL JOAN GERBER is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer.

  Among her novels are THE KINGDOM OF BROOKLYN, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,” ANNA IN THE AFTERLIFE, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002” and KING OF THE WORLD, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award. She has written five volumes of short stories. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mademoiselle, The Sewanee Review, The Virginia Review, Commentary, Salmagundi, The American Scholar, The Southwest Review and elsewhere.

  Her story, “I Don’t Believe This,” won an O. Henry Prize. “This is a Voice From Your Past” was included in The Best American Mystery Stories.

  Her non-fiction books include a travel memoir, BOTTICELLI BLUE SKIES: An American in Florence, a book of personal essays, GUT FEELINGS: A Writer's Truths and Minute Inventions and OLD MOTHER, LITTLE CAT: a Writer's Reflections on her Kitten, her Aged Mother…and Life.

  Gerber earned her BA in English from the University of Florida, her MA in English from Brandeis University and was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fiction Fellowship to Stanford University. She presently teaches fiction writing at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

  She can be reached by e-mail at: mjgerber@caltech.edu

  See her web page at www.its.caltech.edu/~mjgerber

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