The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  There, sitting in a chair against the wall with her purse upright in her, lap was one of the small, frail old-lady type; his mother had been like that, and his daughter Becky would be, too, when she was old. He missed Becky. He hadn't seen her for a long time. He wondered where she was. He gave a courtly little bow to the small old lady.

  Coming down the hall was a drunk. Marshall detested all drunks. This was the happy-drunk type. Jovial, beaming like an imbecile, the guy would have been red-faced if he hadn't been a Negro. He smelled like a brewery, gladhanding you and slurring his words. Marshall knew the type and kept his face stony when the drunk approached, but the young woman on his arm - his daughter; his daughter Rebecca - stopped and was friendly. She oughtn't to do that. That wasn't the way to handle drunks. Marshall made his arm stiff and leaned away from his daughter and the drunk, hoping she'd sense and correctly interpret his disapproval. When they were out of earshot he would sit her down and give her some fatherly advice about drunks (happy drunks, fawning drunks, were the most insidious, whatever their race).

  Among the nurses and aides in white uniforms were several types. The homosexual. The nervous young girl. The brazen young girl. The middle-aged female smoker with gravelly voice, nicotine-stained fingertips exaggerated by long painted nails, and smoky breath.

  Marshall was certain he had never known the names of any of these people. Throughout his life he hadn't taken much interest in more than a few people - his wife Billie, his daughter Rebecca, co-workers as long as they were working with him. (Faye.) Childhood friends; suddenly he was wondering what Winslow Curtis was doing these days. Good old Windy. He stopped and asked of the woman beside him (he couldn't quite place her, but she was somebody close to him so it made sense to ask), 'Did you know Windy Curtis? What's become of him?'

  'No, Dad,' she said patiently. Her patience alarmed him. 'You knew Windy before I was born. He died twenty-five years ago or more, of a heart attack.'

  Shock riffled through him, along with a dismaying feeling of déjà vu, as though he'd experienced that same shock and vertigo at the news of his friend's death more than a few times before. He must have swayed a little because she put her other hand on his shoulder. 'Oh,' Marshall said, struck as if freshly by the inevitability of both death and mourning. 'Oh. That's too bad. I'll miss him.'

  'You had good times, together, didn't you?'

  How did she know that? Did she know Windy? Warily, Marshall nodded. 'We traveled across country together.' (With Faye. Both of us with Faye, although Faye and Windy had never openly admitted it.) Maybe he shouldn't have said that. Maybe he'd given away secret and potentially damaging information about himself (and about Faye, although he couldn't quite see how).

  'During the Depression, when you were just out of high school and couldn't find work.'

  Suspicion now rang in his ears. 'That's right,' he said curtly, and would say no more about Winslow Curtis, whom he would visit as soon as he could get out of this place. (Or about Faye.)

  'Look, Dad,' Rebecca urged. She was trying to distract him. Marshall recognized the ploy. She was trying to force him to turn left. He'd have had no objection to turning left, but he was not about to be forced and certainly not by his own daughter, so he resisted. The pressure on his arm and shoulder subsided. 'They're painting a mural.'

  Despite himself, he turned left, stopped, and looked. Maybe half a dozen people were painting a wall. The gladhanding drunk. A tiny, dark, intense woman of a type he had not encountered oftensome sort of foreigner. Another one of the bent old-lady type — this one frail although she wasn't especially small.

  Marshall squinted. It made him uncomfortable to see all these people painting on the wall like misbehaving children. If there was any coherence to the painting, it escaped him. Swatches and globs of random colors, and shapes that bore no resemblance to anything in the real world.

  The drunk was painting the background. 'That's Gordon,' Rebecca told her father, as if he cared what the guy's name was. 'I guess he's painted before.'

  'Sure have, Princess,' the drunk guy boomed, and Marshall, mistrusting his familiar tone, tried to put himself between Rebecca and the man and found he could not; in the attempt he nearly lost his balance and someone, the blonde young woman holding onto his arm, prevented him from doing so. He did not appreciate that. He would bide his time. The drunk, face flushed under the dark jowly skin, was still talking, too loudly, too familiarly. 'Houses, fences, one time a barn with a big high peak, none of the other fellows would go up the ladder. I know what I'm doing.'

  The north wall of the lounge was now a bright satisfying white, with smudges and streaks only here and there. 'Well,' said Rebecca wryly, 'I guess we can't change our minds now, can we?'

  A tall woman in a uniform, a stern-nurse type, shrugged and turned her attention back to the spiral notebook in her hand. 'Maybe it won't look so bad.'

  A woman with a Southern accent said comfortingly, 'At least it's a cheap way to redecorate the lounge.'

  The tiny dark foreig n woman was painting stars. She sat crosslegged in one corner, her nose inches away from Gordon's white wall, and used the brush from a child's paint-by-number so to make dozens of dots and rays. The stars were in a formation like a fan: the yellow ones at the wide end were faint and fuzzy, the middle ones were green and blue and purple and round, and at the tip was one bright red star perhaps two inches in diameter with twelve distinct points and the sugg estion of three-dimensionality.

  The woman appeared to be talking to herself. When Rebecca raised her voice slightly to say, 'Those are terrific stars, Petra,' she scooted herself around so that the stars were hidden by her small taut body from the view of Rebecca and Marshall, and Marshall heard her muttering curses no lady ought to know.

  A stocky old man in a red flannel shirt and suspenders, smelling as his type always did of sweet pipe-smoke, was making shapes. Lumps. Black hills. He chortled in curmudgeonly glee. 'I don't know what they are, little lady. Hell, I'm ninety-two years old. I don't have to know. You figure it out, you tell me.' His swelling black brush-strokes filled the bottom quadrant of the mural opposite Petra and as high as he c ould reach from his wheelchair.

  Another of the frail old ladies came down the hall, laboriously, leaning hard to the left and holding onto the handrail with both hands. Rebecca let go of her father's arm to get the old lady a chair. Marshall stood swaying in space until she came back to him, saying (he thought she was not speaking to him, but he couldn't be sure), 'Beatrice, I'm glad you decided to join us.'

  The woman apparently named Beatrice smiled pleasantly and didn't say anything.

  Completely at a loss as to what was going on, Marshall cast about for clues. Circles of light — reflections, he thought, but maybe not — were broken up in the wavy waxed white floor. Sounds were hollow and crowded, sliding into one another or separating out. 'Would you like to paint, Dad?' Marshall didn't know who was speaking, what the speaker was alluding to, whom she was addressing. Her father, presumably.

  Marshall. Honey .

  Faye. He knew who that was, but he couldn't be expected to know what she wanted. He never had known what she wanted. Heart pounding painfully, looking around for her, desperately hoping he'd find her again and desperately hoping he would not. 'Leave me alone,' he told her.

  'Okay,' Rebecca agreed. 'We'll just watch for a while.'

  A very tall wiry man walked up behind Petra, positioned his feet shoulder-width apart, and dropped his hand heavily onto her head. Still painting stars, she ignored him. He stared at the wall. 'Stupid,' he announced in a loud surly voice. 'This is fucking dumb.' Marshall winced and considered telling the guy to watch his mouth, there were ladies present, but couldn't quite put the words in the best order and then forgot.

  Someone handed the tall man a wide paintbrush. 'We need something at the top, Bob. You're the only one who can reach it.'

  Face stormy, Bob regarded the brush. At his feet Petra worked steadily, her undertone of furious Spanish rising an
d falling like an unmelodic song. 'This is fucking dumb,' he said again, but he finally took the brush.

  Quietly, Beatrice moved her chair up to the wall and picked up a brush. The old woman's strokes were firm, her face set. In bright blue paint and thin lines a cluster of faces emerged, not quite realistic but utterly believable.

  The grin of one was ragged and desperate; the eyes of another were haunted.

  When she finished the faces Beatrice cocked her head even farther to the left and regarded them critically, made a few minuscule adjustments. Then she painstakingly cleaned her brush, found a can of green paint, and proceeded to set the faces one after another on leafless stems, each of them bending sharply one way or the other.

  'You've painted before, too,' Rebecca observed.

  'When I was a girl,' Beatrice admitted, 'I used to do portraits. That was a long time ago, don't you know.'

  'I am Jesus Christ! They're crucifying me! I am Jesus Christ! They're crucifying me! Ohh! Ohh!'

  Marshall swiveled his head slowly toward the shrieking. Though this was no more peculiar or disturbing than many other things in the world, it did claim his attention for longer than most. Briefly, he thought it might be Faye (she was somewhere close by; he was afraid of her), but then he chided himself. Faye loved making a spectacle of herself, but she would never be ugly like this, scrawny legs splayed and hair unkempt as the batting from a split pillow

  But this person somehow reminded him of Faye, and he did not dare be reminded of Faye. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. But without clear external visual or auditory stimuli, his own thoughts grew alarmingly louder, brighter, and more tangled, so he took his hands away and opened his eyes wide.

  'It's okay, Dad,' Rebecca said, meaning to reassure. 'Abby, I really don't think Myra can'

  'She has a right to express herself, too,' said the young lank-haired aide pushing Myra's wheelchair. Myra's eyes were opening in slits and her voice was lowering as she saw the bold colors on the wall in front of her.

  Bob stretched as high as he could and daubed an approximate circle at the juncture of wall and ceiling. It splattered upward, leaving a trail of tiny orange flecks. Rebecca grimaced. The woman with the Southern accent chuckled softly. 'Hadn't planned on repainting the ceiling, huh, boss?'

  'There,' Bob shouted. 'There's your fucking stupid sun son-of-a-bitch,' and threw down the brush and stomped out of the building.

  'Myra,' said Abby, taking pains to enunciate. 'Here's a brush and some red paint and a big white space in front of you. Paint something. Show us what you're feeling.'

  'I am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt,' Myra said conversationally.

  'Well, here, Cleo.' Abby put the dripping brush into Myra's hand and closed her own fingers around it. 'I'll help.'

  Myra looked at her with clear, wide blue eyes. 'You just take your hand away from me, girlie. You just stand there and listen and maybe you'll learn something.' Abby hesitated, then obediently backed away, grinning. Myra leaned so far forward that her long body was bent almost double like a closed safety pin over the restraint, and made a vertical red slash on the wall. Then, her tongue protruding a little and her other hand raised in a loose fist, she made another slash horizontally across the first, forming a rough and dramatic red cross.

  She sat back, dropped the brush full of paint into her lap, and sank into her chair as if she had abruptly fallen asleep. 'My God,' breathed the woman with the Sout hern accent. 'Here comes Paul.'

  Two aides propelled a spastic young man toward the group in the lounge. His chuffing noises might have signified excitement and might have signified distress and might have signified nothing in particular. Bulging eyes fixed on the mural, he grinned and drooled.

  Rebecca stooped to ready the largest brush with yellow paint. Paul by now could hardly contain himself. He was whooping and twisting in the grasp of the aides, and one of them barely stopped him from shoving the laden brush into his mouth.

  With one loud purposeful grunt he raised his brush back and fell with it against the wall. As he sank to the floor, his arm traced a jagged arc and a yellow streak like a bolt of lightning appeared across the mural. Abby and another aide caught him on the way down and eased him to a sitting position on the paint cloth; he was laughing in his odd breathless way, obviously not hurt and holding the brush aloft.

  Many in the group applauded. To be polite, to avoid drawing attention to himself, Marshall clapped, too, although he saw nothing worth such praise. Rebecca hugged the young man. 'Perfect, Paul! That's perfect!'

  Paul might have said, 'Yeah!'

  Faye whispered to Marshall, 'We can do better than that, you and me,' and very softly blew into his ear.

  Mortified to discover himself hardening for her, and to feel the extent of his terror, he cried out (he did not mean to say her name again, but nothing else would show his desire and his fear; maybe he didn't say her name). His daughter reached to hug him, and he held on. 'It is fun, isn't it, Dad? I'm glad you're here!'

  Sometime later (or earlier, or in a different time sequence, or outside time altogether, or in memory, or in a kind of foretelling), Marshall found himself poised in front of a mostly white wall. A wide paintbrush was in his hand, dripping white paint onto the thigh of his charcoal trousers.

  Faye encircled his hand in both her small, soft, longnailed ones and laughed, in that delighted and malicious way that had always made him want to run from her at the same time that he would have done almost anything to cause her to laugh like that again, to smile at him like that, to show him he could still please her. 'Aren't we a team, Marshall, honey? Aren't we something?'

  Faye raised his arm high above his head, higher than he could reach without standing precariously on tiptoe and bracing the heel of his other hand against the wall, which was sticky. A jagged yellow streak descended into - or, depending on your perspective, rose out of - the thick waves of white paint like the branch or the root of a tree, maybe dead, being covered or marooned by the rising or falling tide. He shouldn't be doing this.

  Faye squealed, 'Ooo, this is fun !' — and shoved his arm up.

  He tried to stop, but she was quicker and much more wi l lful than he was, and the yellow zigzag disappeared under thick, rivuleted white.

  'Marshall, what in the world are you doing?' It was Billie. He knew right away that it was his wife Billie, and he was very glad she had come, but he also felt guilty, although he had forgotten what it was he had done wrong. 'Oh, for heaven's sake, look at your clothes!'

  He looked, saw his good charcoal trousers, a burgundy shirt he thought must be new, and respectable black shoes, but no socks. Why was he not wearing socks? Marshall felt himself flush with shame. No wonder Billie was embarrassed. He suspected he embarrassed her a good deal these days, but he never seemed to be aware of it until it was too late. 'I'm sorry,' he said.

  'Becky, for heaven's sake, just look at your father!'

  'Is he okay?'

  'Look at his trousers. Look at his brand-new shirt. A brand-new shirt, first time he's worn it.'

  'How did he get into the paint? I thought Lisa put it all away in the cabinets in the activity room.'

  'Why wasn't anybody watching him? That's why I had to put him here, because I couldn't watch him twenty-four hours a day, but I could watch him better than this.'

  'Dad! You painted over the mural!'

  Uncomprehending, Marshall stared. Then, to get away from all of them, Billie and Rebecca and Faye, he retreated a step. The back of his shirt and the seat of his trousers clung to the wet paint on the wall.

  Chapter 2

  As an early autumn sunset stretched and thinned the blue-gray light, Rebecca walked toward The Tides. She'd been at a meeting across town and could well have gone home afterward, but it was too early; there was nothing at home that wouldn't wait, including Kurt, and The Tides compelled her.

  She'd parked her car in a lot several blocks over, so she could approach her nursing home on foot, see what it looked lik
e from a distance, experience the feel of it as it gradually came closer, larger, more detailed. Her nursing home. Her facility. Even after three months as administrator of The Tides, she still thrilled to the phrase she finally had a right to use: my place.

  People outside the business, to most of whom nursing homes were nothing but warehouses where the elderly and sick with nobody to take care of them went to die, didn't understand that. When she'd met Kurt she'd already been hooked, a geriatric social worker with ideas about revolutionizing the field, and once she'd started studying for her administrator's exam she'd hardly been able or willing to think of anything else. She'd tried to tell him stories about the residents to make him see how fascinating they were, but all he could see were their illnesses and disabilities and losses, as if there was nothing else to them, and he'd just shudder or laugh and give some variation of the standard response: 'God, those places are depressing ! And they stink! I don't know how you can stand it.' Kurt worked with children, where he said there was hope.