by Edie Meidav
In the ninth century, in remote parts of the world, children were told to eat parents who outlived their usefulness, the geographer son with his undiagnosed Asperger’s said, and then, sensing a faux pas, fell silent.
This particular home trapped members of the husband’s tribe because it boasted reps of their faith on certain holidays, and gave clients the possibility of roommates who shared not just snore-space but ancestry. Because the wife’s constitution prevented slowness, she barely talked it over with the somber children, each with a sticky relation to the father. Though the father had outwitted all actuarial odds imagined, though already ten years past the age of his own father who had died of an unjust dose of anesthetic during a minor operation in a far less litigious era, as the nurses would be told many times, their father was actually not so old.
To the children the wife listed reasons she could not keep him in her home anymore. First he had transgressed against her but no one talked of that, though the children fumbled hints, catching them or spinning them off into forgetful ether.
Secondly: the father had squandered money she in her public job had accrued, despite her attempts to squirrel it away year after year. He’d had one unsuccessful business venture after another, his gambler optimism and lofty-minded ideals no match for anyone’s checkbook. No one talked directly of this either; instead, she said she had to hold onto what was legitimately hers, especially as she was no spring chicken, she said, straightening her spine, inadvertently appearing more like one.
Thirdly, you had to consider Virnella.
For years, the wife had enlisted the services of a maid named Virnella, a woman unhappy with the lot she found herself in given that her dreams would have had her be a film star living in a salmon-pink house with a curved grand staircase and children conveniently stowed in various corners, brought out clean-faced and docile to wear fancy fluffy dresses, accruing compliments as evidence of fertility, the children’s elite comportment and looks thrown into the bargain. Instead, because the shadow of the bottle had crossed her household and she was gifted with canniness, she had to use her workable English to clean rich people’s houses, sometimes able to bring her outwardly sullen, secretly joyous daughter to one of her houses, compliant about being stuck in front of television shows in which young girls shook their hair wild in dancing out the life the mother should have known, the one the daughter would, long after diabetes felled Virnella at the age of fifty, find herself seeking as a barmaid at Día de los Muertos, a country-themed bar along an interstate.
Years before any of that, Virnella’s rebellion against her current situation took subtle forms, her mutiny a trickster coyote near the wife’s speed. In every room V, as she was called, cleaned, she turned on a radio blasting a rhythm beating out the better reality in which tall men whispered entreaties, though sometimes she also liked the lubricious wheeze of the advice shows with their resonant boom. On Sunday mornings, she lay in bed with her daughter, watching soap operas, and when tears came, as they did whenever one particular televised wife was barred from fulfillment, her daughter would sneak V a glance, hungering to be let into the depths.
The daughter was named Nemesis because the mother had seen the word in that first doctor’s office and it sounded pretty, only a joke on the first day of school and then forgotten until junior high, Nemi for short. If V made a few bad choices—her daughter’s father being an alcoholic not unlike her own father whose fists she had escaped—she would set things on a better course. She saw where rich people sent their kids to school and was resourceful, advocating for Nemi with a Board of Ed secretary who thought it acceptable to wear curlers and slippers to work, so that her daughter got to attend school with those so privileged they had no clue about earning it.
And then one day a magic gift from God fell into V’s lap, quite literally, on a crowded bus, a gem of a man with a soft voice and round face, a man from a higher class given his embarrassment in rising from her lap, all of which she found touching, a man who turned out to have riskier immigration status. Though she introduced him to her employers as her cousin, it soon became clear that Harold was her new beau, that one day they would marry and change his green-card status, and that he even liked playing father to Nemi, as he had lost his own son to palsy years ago: he was a good man, unafraid to plead with her when she turned cold, a man who appreciated that, in contrast to the lagabouts for whom he had fallen before, V worked. When Harold wasn’t washing high-rise windows, he loved paging through self-help books: their favorite postcoital moments involved his coaching V about the direct way to achieve their dreams.
While the actual act V. loved almost more than any other material thing was arranging items of different sizes on a shelf, an act which gave her a control elusive in the general business of life. Tirelessly she arranged the Hummingbird’s house, just as determined in trying to keep Nemesis safe during work hours from the roaming hands of her half-brothers. To the houses Nemi came, watched television, played with dolls, or just watched her mother’s efforts with a blankness good at barring most inroads.
And the wife appreciated V’s instincts, so that both women, going up and down stairs, had, on good days, a sense of lubricating a vast machine, sharing the workings of the house. Perfume bottles in a row, dishes stacked neatly, books arranged by height, satisfying to keen eyes. The nursing home employees later on were not the first to call the wife a bird. In high school, the wife had been known as a triller, and this avian spirit came over her often, humming tragic songs to herself, thinking of herself as a sparrowlike Piaf: as the wife and V worked together, she had the sense the two flew together within the world’s economy of heartbreak, though she also chose not to know too much the details of V’s past or prospects.
And because V was already with them for years when the husband started slipping, losing the ability to walk and then the ability to use the bathroom alone, right as his grandchildren were learning to walk and go potty, his throat thickening, soon to strip him of the ability to speak, long before he ended up in the nursing home, it proved easier for the wife to entrust the care of that slipping body to V., his body no longer one the wife wished to recognize.
And because there were also unmentionable, dearly held wrongs this same body had committed, V was a good stopgap measure, despite her lack of training as a caregiver, being strong and voluptuous, able to grip the husband as he started to forget how to walk the seventy steps to their house, perched on a dreamy hill facing the boats of the great river that led down to the greater city where V had first crossed the border.
It soon became logical that V and her man-friend Harold—whom she would marry as soon as they could execute a real wedding—took up residence in the basement, available now that the kids were gone. The pair stayed on call day and night for the husband, at a more than reasonable salary, because V knew the power of negotiation and also that the wife had the rich-person habit of having money pocketed away here and there. Taking over the husband’s leaky bodily functions meant something magnificent needed to hemorrhage her way as well, a prize for her own future in which she was destined for more than the mere watching of telenovelas: she was meant for the life of the gilded neighbor with the curved banister.
As such, she and the bird entered a course of détente in which V brought her coffee each morning, one packet of artificial sugar with one sloop of skim milk. Good at keeping the house going while mostly ignoring the Post-it notes left her in big scrawled loopy script—V, PLEASE MAKE SALAD FOR LUNCH, THANKS—V showed brilliance in keeping the bird satisfied, and, when alone with the husband, V was not above holding his black-socked foot with affection, or, when toweling him off after his bath, slicking his hair back so he became a giant pink baby. In moments of fondness, she liked calling him her big pink doll. Be that as it may, he sobbed, thank you.
What V abhorred, however, was incontinence in the bed, and, given her lack of training, she kept her dislike overt. Every morning she found it fair to castigate her patient for his soile
d sheets, every night chastising him as she placed his frail hips into a double diaper. All the other parts of the job she could handle with competence, smirking but her heart softening so that when he cried like a baby, she would say, Don’t worry, señor, and even made a big poster her patient could look at, saying IF YOU NEED SOMETHING, CALL V, as reassuring to him as a map of Greenland would be to an armchair explorer.
Until the early dawn when her patient, in a fit of paranoid dementia, not in his clean pink-baby state but in his soiled dawn, at his most anxious and self-pitying, confused about which house he was in, propositioned her, saying point-blank that if V refused to make love with him, he would fire her. He took on the air of the boss he must have once been, especially since it probably had been years since he’d had congress with anyone.
Make love, he shouted before whimpering: Make love.
She ran downstairs crying, every detail shared with her smart boyfriend if just a bit burnished with a few details from the last soap opera.
Later V’s calm, in explaining that unless her salary was upped by eighty percent she would not continue, inspired awe, stealing the wife’s breath, making her heart gag her with a hellfire beat.
Once V finished her tale, the wife knew it was over: she could no longer keep the body and wandering spirit of this husband in a house she’d started to think of as solely hers. After all, who was responsible for its operations, its lights during the day and heat at night, the way it breathed, what it needed, its bill-paying and hedge-cutting, the minutest adjustments to keep up the home of their early marriage? Their home could not be squandered to this loss of dignity, strangulated calls in the early morning booming on the baby monitor next to where V slept in the apartment, the mentholated scent wafting through the house with its sick-joke potpourri, the ammonia bottles stacked ready in the closet, the poop stains on the Persian carpets, the shards of the husband all around while he himself made up a central gaping hole. All the wife could do to address that hole was call the children to her house. This time, unlike her earlier attempts to excise him from her heart, she would succeed. This would be no failed rocket launch à la 1960 in Cape Canaveral, a rocket combusting in midair before leaving the earth’s atmosphere, this would form total eject.
Someone had told the wife, back in the early days of marriage, right after she had met her disapproving in-laws, that eccentricities get more pronounced as people age. She had used this maxim often, if unsuccessfully, to try forgiving certain people, but in the hours that stretched between V’s story of the proposition and her announcing the husband’s ejection to the children, she could not. She knew his to be no senior dementia: he suffered the natural consequence of a mind and hands that wandered all too much during the years of their marriage.
Maybe, the wife considered, the best proof for an afterlife exists in the brilliance and specificity a person shows in creating a living hell.
On entering the home, the husband did his best to charm all the nurses, successful with everyone but old Berta, canny at recognizing the loose-fingered ones. He’ll put hands on you, Berta said right off, and since she had close to a 100 percent record in her initial assessments, most nurses did what they could to avoid being assigned his room.
Still, when they saw the new nurse, Letty, who’d gotten stuck with the assignment but who then came, afterward, literally flying down the hall, a movement in reverse started: everyone wanted his chart. He ask me lean close, then he kiss and grab, said Letty. I get quick out of room. Only then I fly, you say float.
No one could deny Letty’s rapture, who then went down the hall to peek at the Groper sleeping, coming back calm and confirmed, speaking as if from a dream:
As small girl, I say one day I fly. You think he give other wishes, I let him do anything!
You sure his kiss was what made you fly? Berta asked, feeling the knot of cause versus correlation in her gut, hooking pointer fingers together to show her meaning, not ready to let the new girl get one over them so quickly.
Trust me, said Letty. Most of them wanted to, but then she also had the deep throatiness of someone who’d once had the virgin wink back at her from a cloth diaper.
Though few waited to hear what she had to say next. Skeptics disbelieved but already the quarreling was on. Letty could be bumped and so who would get to serve the Groper next?
Don’t tell the doctors, they agreed, at least, we’ll keep it among us. Because the husband couldn’t have ten nurses tending to him, they took turns; and because he was unable to keep up with the rotating parade of faces popping in to change his diaper or guide him to the toilet or roll him back and forth to prevent bedsores, unaware of the havoc his ministry had caused on the floor, he just started calling all of his attendants Nurse, as in Nurse, may I please have, or Nurse, could you please—and would welcome whatever new face showed up to diagnose, soothe, or attend to the demands of his fallen body.
Over that first month, Berta’s back pain healed, Mindy was overjoyed to have her husband give up the drink and check in, finally, to rehab while Sherrie was happy to lose her clumsiness. Inez lost her limp, Gloria had her workmen’s comp claim go through, and Rosa’s son paid a visit with her new grandson. At this point, some of the more mercenary on the staff were tempted to sell outsiders a grope with the geezer—imagine how it would look on the web! A subscription service!—but calmer voices prevailed, especially since some of the nurses had risen from their own versions of shady-lady pasts and knew a secret kept in the ranks was worth two hundred plus tax out in the world.
Still, nurses from other floors, getting wind, asked to sub at night just so they could serve the Groper, the secret healer of Ward 77 in the skilled nursing facility, because, even if there were no science to it, even if it seemed to work like astrology or aromatherapy, since you could not predict, fully, how or if or when it would work, they wanted to believe and all it really seemed to take was just letting yourself lean close.
They did find that whoever was on call following one of the Hummingbird’s visits would not have her wish fulfilled, or if it was, the wish would be fulfilled in a tweaked way.
Applying scientific method, the frustrated ones started keeping a logbook so as to better study the pattern, and it became clear that it was wisest to avoid a grope post-Hummingbird: you just had to peek at the obvious links. Elsa’s daughter announced, the day after the Hummingbird’s visit, that, not content with just graduating school, she wanted to move away. When Joanne’s new car came, it was a lemon that left her stranded by a depressing watering-hole on the interstate. Susie from two hours away had her bank account filled, by mistake, with someone else’s massive deposit, equal to an entire year’s salary, and after she bought them all burgers that day and said she would leave to study tango in Buenos Aires, the bank fees the following week left her poorer than before, though she didn’t let it faze her, back to her usual resourceful self, heels clicking down the hall.
Of course, they kept the Groper’s skills a secret from the Hummingbird. Yet on overhearing his new moniker, however affectionate the lilt, the Hummingbird misunderstood it, unable to keep herself from gloating: a sting of happiness to the idea that her husband was, fulfilling her worst prediction, corroding in a hell of his own devising. After all the Hummingbird had endured—the joke! Being called the Groper! He had basically lost his male organ and was now married to a catheter. You could not dream of greater recompense.
Despite the new age ideas she had long entertained about people creating their own sickness, she did not think to ask what might be her hell: she would eye a gossiping friend and fear the friend might lose her vocal cords. Or would watch her worrywart son and fear he would sprout brain tumors.
She decided to confide this idea that her husband had created his own hell with ingenuous specificity to her neighbor Donna, a hearty platinum-haired Italian married to her high school sweetheart, a person who used to let neighborhood kids run amok in her house.
New age hogwash, Donna said, just as the H
ummingbird had feared: she already wanted to back away from the fence between their driveways. Donna kept on: Don’t believe in some higher power, fine, but you think everyone creates their own realities? What about tsunami victims? War refugees? There’s so much beyond our control.
I wasn’t raised Catholic, said the Hummingbird.
You don’t need to be Catholic. Trust me, if we could control our hells, we’d all be better people, she said, not making sense but pressing a sack of ginger cookies into the Hummingbird’s hand before returning to what she loved, the great libidinal satisfaction of amassing supplies for her own beloved: scrapbook-making.
The first time the Hummingbird’s husband had invaded her idea of loyalty, the wife had lectured him that all relationships are built from memory.
Now that on each visit he had less and less, she was proven bitterly right.
How are you? she always asked, giving him a quick peck while trying to avoid inhaling his mold and menthol.
She saw herself in his bifocals, swimming into a kind of focus. I have important theories on the flagellation of Christ, he might say. In my spare time, I’m redesigning the early aqueduct system of Budapest. A few times he was especially jolly: Goodbye, Nurse! he saluted her brightly, as if he expected her to fly off happy to be misrecognized.
Every week, nonetheless, the wife visited at least twice. As she rose in the elevator with other visitors, each coming out of love, curiosity, duty, or bearing an invisible flag of self-nobility, she would consider the place her man had ended up in, stuck in bed, laughed at by nurses. The Groper!
