Stephanie was busy, and couldn’t stop to solve that conundrum, willing to wait for the exam. Maureen was less easily satisfied.
“You may not have had a secret surgery, but you do have a secret, I’m bettin’.” Maureen was looking at her with that same off-centered stare as the new receptionist.
Gladys just grinned. Even as she did that she thought of Jesus and his knowing grins. And, for the first time since sending him away, she inhaled the truth, that she was missing him. Holding a magazine in her hand for a full minute without opening it, Gladys let her mind wander to the big question, whether she had offended Jesus, and made it impossible to expect ever to see and hear him again.
She startled from her rumination, however, when Stephanie opened the exam area door and called her name. “Come on back and get ready for the doctor to take a look at you.”
Again, the two women at the front desk took the opportunity to evaluate Gladys’s gate. And again, Gladys had to resist the temptation to show off in front of them. She wasn’t going to give in to that pull just now, muted by her fears about what she had done to her relationship with Jesus.
Through the odors of alcohol and a hundred kinds of plastic, Gladys strode confidently to exam room number three. For the last five years, all of her visits had been filled with dread. She had waited all those years for the bad news, that it was time for surgery. Few people feared hospitals and surgery more than Gladys. She had to club and gag a dozen noisy little terrors just to go and visit someone in the hospital. For this reason, it was somewhat merciful that Harry’s heart attack took him quickly. He didn’t linger in the hospital for more than a few hours before passing.
Stephanie stood looking down at Gladys’s legs, when they reached the scale outside the exam room. She was about the same height as Gladys, and about half her age. “Well, go ahead and hop up there you young thing,” Stephanie said, a slightly hollow sound resonating from her tease, as she tried to imagine what could account for the improvement. She tried a guess. “Did you switch to that all-juice diet?” That Stephanie made this illogical speculation bespoke her complete consternation at the improvement. She too was aware that surgery had been waiting just around the corner for Gladys.
“No, nothing like that. I just have my juice and toast in the morning like always,” Gladys said, from up on the scale.
Stephanie adjusted the height scale, wrote down the number and then fiddled with the weight. “Five-foot-four,” she said absently.
“Really?” said Gladys with a chuckle.
“Yeah, why?” Stephanie said, as she wrote down the weight.
“Well, I was barely five-three when I was in here last.”
“A growing girl,” Stephanie said, without thinking about the implications. She just assumed she had made a mistake one of those two times she measured.
Gladys wasn’t one to drive home a point. She just laughed a little more and stepped into the exam room.
“Okay, well get into the gown as usual. I’ll check in on you in a couple o’ minutes.”
As doctors’ visits go, Gladys didn’t have to wait long until Dr. Hansen knocked on the door and then let himself in. Gladys sat on the table, having climbed up there much more easily than last time. She had decided against hopping up there like she did when she was a teen. She was beginning to feel giddy with her renewed youth, but that feeling hadn’t pushed all of her common sense aside.
“How are we today?” the doctor said, looking at her file, and then looking up to remind himself exactly who “we” designated. Dr. Hansen was only a few years younger than Gladys. He had been the family physician for all twenty years that she and Harry lived in Wisconsin.
“We are quite well,” Gladys said, with a subtle jibe at his odd habit of addressing her as if she were the Queen of England.
The doctor looked through his glasses, which had slid half-way down his nose. “Your hips bothering you? Mine sure are, in this cold, damp weather.”
“No, actually that’s why I came in. My hips are feeling so good now that I wanted to check how fit I am to do some exercise—you know heart and lungs and all that.”
“What?” he said, fairly barking. “You say you feel better? What did you do?”
Here is where Gladys lost her nerve. The doctor’s intimidating gruffness set her back from her playful agenda, back toward a need for defensive cover.
“Well, they just feel lots better and I’d like to do some walking, or something, to get my blood pressure down and lose some weight.” She decided she would have to stick with the medical reason for the visit and abandon the glorious surprise she had anticipated.
Stephanie knocked on the door and let herself in, as the doctor stared at Gladys.
“Here are her x-rays, Doctor,” Stephanie said. She stood smiling at Gladys as the doctor took the envelope and pulled out four shiny dark films.
He flipped on the light and stuffed all four images into the clips at the top of the viewer. He tipped his head back and looked at each view of Gladys’s hips, front, back and both sides. “What did they send me this time?” he said, bellowing. “Those clowns sent me the wrong x-rays again. We gotta have a talk with them. They’re getting sloppier all the time.”
Stephanie gently cleared her throat. “The films all have Gladys’s name on them, including her social security number. It’s not like last time when they had the wrong name and all.”
“Yeah, well, that just means they screwed up a different part of the process. There’s probably a fifty-year-old woman somewhere trying to overcome the shock that she needs hip surgery.”
“How do you know these are not my hips?” Gladys said, pointing at the x-rays. “I told you I was feeling much better.”
“Ha,” the doctor said. “No one feels this much better.” He leaned in closer to see the detail of one of the images. “There’s no significant cartilage deterioration at all on these hips. These are from a much younger woman.” He looked at Stephanie. “They’re more likely yours than hers.” His voice had slotted into a low growl.
The storm of the doctor’s anger, directed at the convenient care facility, had spread so wide that neither Stephanie nor Gladys felt safe in mentioning the other evidence present in the room. But they didn’t have to turn the doctor’s attention in that direction, he steamed past the x-ray disaster and proceeded to the exam.
As he checked Gladys’s reflexes and her range of motion, he kept moving her knees and then her hips higher and higher, where she lay now on her back on the table. He huffed and harrumphed a few times and then tried the other leg. Still finding no wincing or resistance from Gladys.
“Are you telling me that this doesn’t hurt?” he said, when he had pressed her right leg higher than a sitting position with the knee bent.
“The muscles are a little tight up the back there,” Gladys said calmly. “That’s part of my question about exercising, ya see.”
Stephanie was watching with her hand over her mouth. She had already accepted that something unusual had happened to Gladys and was trying to figure out how to get the doctor to open his eyes and see it. But Stephanie had no idea just what that something was, which left her uncertain what to do.
“I don’t understand this. How could you be feeling better?”
Gladys gathered her courage and offered her opinion. “I think it’s a miracle. That’s how. It’s just a miracle.”
“Hmmm. Miracle,” he muttered. A long-time member of the old conservative Baptist church in town, he hadn’t ever seen a miracle and didn’t believe anyone else who claimed they did. “People use that word too freely, in my opinion,” he said. But a slight slack in his intensity, a bit of a squeak to his voice, and a refusal to make eye-contact, hinted that he was fumbling some of his bluster.
Gladys sat up and looked at the tall, hunched man who had been her doctor for two decades. She knew now that she had to find another primary physician. This one was too old.
“Well, my x-rays and I are feeling much younger
these days, whether you believe that or not,” she said.
“Those are not your . . .” he said, and then gave up. “Well, Stephanie will talk to you about exercise.” And he exited the room.
Both women watched the door close behind him. “You picked a bad day,” Stephanie said. “I think his own hips are hurting pretty bad today.”
Gladys nodded. “He’s not as young as he was when we first came here,” she said. That obvious statement carried plenty of unspoken meaning between them.
“So, what really happened?” Stephanie said, her tone confidential and eager.
“Well, a neighbor prayed for my knees and hips to get well, and I believe it was Jesus that healed them completely.” Gladys decided to leave out the details, not wanting to dredge up the mess around Andy’s involvement.
“Really?” Stephanie cocked her head back and then turned to the x-rays. “You mean prayer gave you hips like a fifty-year-old.”
“Apparently so,” Gladys said, smiling more broadly than she had since before Harry died.
Stephanie laughed lightly at the look on Gladys’s face. Then she clouded up. “I wonder if Doctor is really gonna make a stink with the convenient care people about this.”
Gladys climbed down from the table, intent on getting dressed while Stephanie advised her on exercise. But, first, a thought occurred to her. “I hope not. It would be a pity to blame another person, for his own mistake.”
Then she paused to wonder if she had recently blamed someone for her own mistake.
Chapter 11
FATHER
Gladys had left a message at the retreat center after returning home from her X-rays on Tuesday. Father Bob wasn’t available, and he didn’t call back that night. Sitting on the couch, Wednesday evening, watching one of her favorite programs, Gladys drifted away from the storyline on the TV and pondered something Jesus said to her early in their encounter. When she was trying to figure out what he was doing in her house, he had said something about being inside of her all along and just coming out to show himself for a while, or some explanation along those lines.
She noticed that Jesus spoke carefully in terms of going invisible, not going away, when the subject arose. This fit with what they told her at church, that Jesus lived inside her heart, and would never leave her or forsake her. She stopped to wonder what “forsake” really means, but thought it was probably just the same as “leave.” A humorous commercial attracted Gladys’s attention back to the TV and the program managed to hold that attention until bedtime.
Her flannel nightgown on, the sheets just beginning to warm with her body heat, Gladys lay in the dark and returned to that idea of Jesus inside her. He made it seem as if the only difference with him standing there in her living room, as opposed to his usual mode of operation, was a matter of sight and sound, not of location. Given her life-long experience of internal silence, apart from her own busy tangled thoughts, Gladys doubted that Jesus was telling her the truth, or at least that she had access to what he was describing.
With that thought balancing on the edge of her conscious mind, Gladys fell asleep.
Thursday morning started soggy and cold, the sort of spring day that calls into question all those winter daydreams of a new season, a season that turns out to be a different kind of miserable, especially if you’re a kid hoping to get outside and frolic. Gladys hadn’t been tempted to frolic for half a century or more. Having children banished the last of those desires. But that was before the miracle entered her house and then entered her legs, a miracle that awoke a bit of that urge to run and play. It was just an urge, of course. Gladys was still seventy-eight years old, and it wasn’t just her hips and knees that had known it.
Stephanie had given her photocopies of instructions for several muscle-toning and aerobic exercises. After breakfast, five minutes on the floor in the living room was enough to give her a taste of what it would mean to pursue that more practical urge. The taste wasn’t so good, but Gladys would have to rely on promise, instead of experience, to motivate any future efforts at getting in shape, just like everyone else.
Women’s Bible study was uneventful that morning. Strangely, no one noticed her easy gait with her new hips. This discouraged her, given their earlier prayers for her healing. That she was wedged between the difficulty of convincing people of her experience with Jesus and her guilt at banishing him, kept her from raising the topic as a praise during prayer request time. And a couple of her best friends weren’t at the meeting, which helped her justify the lack of celebration at her painless, and cane-less, walk.
Since her guilt at turning against Jesus flowed with Gladys wherever she went, the Bible study dispersed in her memory, as if it hadn’t even happened. Afterward, she was actually glad to be back home, cleaning.
Cleaning the basement, where water had leaked into one of the corners of the gray concrete utility room, kept her busy and exercised for the rest of the morning. The ease with which she could now squat and kneel inspired her to sing hymns as she scrubbed. Gladys sang hymns, not so much out of religious gratitude for her miracle, but because those were the only songs she knew well enough to sing. She soloed through more verses of Holy, Holy, Holy, than most people know exist.
When, finally, she stood with her hands on her hips surveying her work, she said aloud, “That’s a good job well done, I’d say.” Then she ventured to address her invisible audience. “Wouldn’t you say?”
Before she turned to head for the stairs up to the kitchen, Gladys felt a sort of lift, as if she had rolled up over a speed bump. But she knew that was no rise of tires and suspension, and she thought she might know who had responded this way to her anonymous question. She wasn’t ready, however, to take another step and follow that response with a further overture. Such a conversation had not yet even introduced itself to her imagination.
Gladys had grown up saying her prayers before bed, and waiting patiently for food, while some adult gave thanks first. She had prayed for Harry or the kids, when they were taken away by ambulances—all five times. But prayer remained confined in little slots slimmer than the one for mail in the front door of her old house back in Skokie.
During her lunch, the phone rang. The voice on the other end reminded her immediately of that man on public television that the kids used to watch, when they were little. But it wasn’t Mr. Rogers calling, it was Father Robert Montgomery, from the retreat center.
“Hello, Gladys,” he said when she answered. “I received your request to meet with me yesterday.” He paused here and Gladys felt as if she should say something, but it wasn’t obvious what. Then he started up again, no hint in his voice that she had dropped her end of the conversation. “I have had an appointment cancelled for later this afternoon. Would you be interested in coming in at four?”
“Oh, yes. That would be nice,” Gladys said.
“Very well. I will see you then. Do you have directions?”
“Yes, the secretary at church gave me one of your brochures, and it has the little map in there.”
“That’s fine. I look forward to speaking with you.”
“Thank you,” said Gladys, a small hesitation where she might have inserted “Father.”
“Goodbye,” he said.
His ending to the call excused Gladys from having to cover the question of what to call him just yet. She said her goodbye and hung up.
Exactly what she feared would happen at that meeting, Gladys could not have told you, even under torture. But torturous was her afternoon, waiting for her first appointment with a priest, Catholic or otherwise. Like her prayers, all of the clergy in her life had fit within a narrow slot. The irony, and the only reason she didn’t call back and cancel, was that her first appointment with a priest was suggested by her pastor. He was young and progressive, as Bible church pastors go in rural Wisconsin. He allowed electric instruments, and even an occasional drummer on the stage at church, something the old pastor never would have tolerated. But Gladys knew that it was a
lso out of a feeling of being ill-equipped that her young pastor had pointed her toward a priest at a retreat center. Gladys didn’t even have a broad expectation for what one does at a retreat center. For now, she just assumed it was a place where people go after Jesus shows up in their house and gets them in trouble with the neighbors.
As she paced around the house that afternoon, Gladys noticed Andy outside on his bicycle, as usual. He seemed to be making an extra effort to avoid touching even the bottom of her driveway now; at least, that’s how it appeared to Gladys. She breathed a large sigh and shook her head at the implications of the misunderstanding which she blamed on Jesus. That’s how the events had evolved in her head, during the repeated recaps and reconsiderations of her story.
She knew she was desperate that afternoon when she sat down and turned on the TV. To Gladys, daytime television was depressing. Perhaps it was its connection with being sick at home with nothing better to do. But she overcame that feeling in order to get her mind off the toxic anticipation of her four o’clock meeting.
At three-thirty, she was out the door for the fifteen-minute drive to the retreat center, making another attempt to end the suspense. From Union City to the rural route address of the center, there was no chance of a Chicago-like traffic jam, maybe a tractor laboriously pulling a plow, but not a delay to justify her fifteen-minute buffer.
Dressed in her spring weight coat, a rain scarf over her head, and wearing her old blue slacks and sensible shoes, it hadn’t occurred to Gladys that she might dress up for this meeting. The first realization came when she sat in the parking lot looking up at the welcome center built in the 1970s, with its high A-frame roof. For a brief second, she considered whether she had time to go home, change and come back—an idea born of desperate thinking.
At three-fifty, she stood in front the reception desk, slouching as she waited for someone to answer the little store-keeper’s bell she had just tapped, where it greeted visitors on the edge of that desk. That greeting came in the form of a neatly printed page that said, “Welcome. Please ring me.” Gladys was happy to grant the little bell’s request.
Hearing Jesus (Seeing Jesus Book 2) Page 9
