Tender Loving Care

by Andrew Neiderman

  “Oh, the wheelchair. That was our surprise. It’s how Lillian’s going to play games with the others, remember? Remember when I told you we figured out a way?” At this point her silly girlish tone of voice was annoying.

  “No, I don’t recall,” I said walking in past her.

  “Well, I said it, Michael. I remember saying it because Mrs. Randolph and I already had discussed it. We are going to get Lillian out of that room and into the fresh air. And the stairway is not going to be a problem, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she said following me around the bedroom as I undressed and took out a pair of pajamas. “Between Mrs. Randolph and myself, we’ll be able to carry her, chair and all, downstairs whenever we want. When you’re around, you’ll help, too. Why do you look so upset?”

  “It’s not that I’m upset. I’m ... I’m surprised. It was quite a shock.”

  “I know, but I made Mrs. Randolph keep it to herself. I know how you can get sometimes, Michael; and I didn’t want any of this spoiled.” I shook my head, and she smiled and patted me on the arm. “It’ll work out, you’ll see. It’s a great idea. Why, from now on, Lillian will be with us even more. She’s very excited about it herself. We’ve already given it a test run,” she added laughing. It was insane.

  “Miriam, listen ...”

  “What?” She stopped smiling. “What, Michael? You are going to say something to spoil it, aren’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Then what, Michael?” She folded her arms across her breasts defiantly. The pressure ballooned her bosom until her nipples were almost exposed. Although I looked at her lustfully, she seemed totally unaware, like a preadolescent oblivious to the effect her nudity would have on a man. I was filled with the urge to take her in my arms and awaken the sexuality in her. But I did nothing.

  “We can’t put too much hope in anything, Miriam. That’s all I wanted to say. I don’t want you to be more disappointed than you are already.”

  “I’m not putting too much hope in it, Michael. And I wouldn’t have done it, even thought of it, if it weren’t for Mrs. Randolph. I think she would know about too much hope, don’t you? Well, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “So?”

  “It’s fine, dear. As I said, I was just surprised, that’s all.”

  “Good. When you come home from work, you can push her around outside. We’ll tie the dog to the chair and he can follow along. Won’t that be nice?”

  “Yes, dear. It will.”

  “Things are changing, Michael. I can feel them changing, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I can.”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said. “And so much of it is because of Mrs. Randolph. You ought to talk to her more. She’s a great nurse and a great person.”

  “I intend to,” I said, but Miriam was already back in bed, the cover drawn to her neck. I stood there looking at her for a moment and then went to the bathroom. There wasn’t any more to say. She had closed me out; her eyes were glassy and her face was frozen in that Mona Lisa smile.

  In the morning all the chatter around the breakfast table was about the chair, my surprise about it, and the plans they had for using it. I listened politely, but every chance I got, I let Mrs. Randolph know through my facial expression that I believed this was too much. I didn’t have much time alone with her, but when I did get a minute, I told her what I thought.

  “I know we had a good conversation and I felt I understood much of what was happening, but this is definitely unnecessary.” She didn’t appear annoyed by my criticism. She nodded as though she had expected it.

  “I realize how it looks,” she said, “but I asked you to trust me.”

  “I can trust but—”

  She reached forward and covered my left hand with hers. Her touch was soothing, warm. I hadn’t realized how much I longed for such female attention. Her eyes were calm; her face was filled with understanding. I felt myself relax.

  “How do you suppose we’ll ever get to reenact that accident if we never get Lillian out of that bed and out of that room? Don’t you see how important this is?”

  “But actually renting a wheelchair ... it’s ... it’s ...”

  “Eerie, I know; but the whole condition is.” She patted my hand and sat back. “Trust me,” she mouthed as Miriam reentered the room. Shortly afterward, I left for work.

  All the way over I thought about what Mrs. Randolph had said and how she had said it. I debated with myself as to whether I was upset with the wheelchair because it was eerie or because it might help accomplish what Mrs. Randolph wanted to accomplish—the reliving of the accident. I didn’t want to relive the accident. Who would? But if I opposed what Mrs. Randolph was doing because I was afraid or annoyed, I would be opposing it for selfish reasons. It was then that I realized I would have to be as cooperative as I could, but I would suffer almost as much as Miriam suffered in the process.

  Right from the start, it was not a good day at the bank for me. I made a tremendous error on a customer’s deposit slip, placing the decimal point in the wrong place and instead of giving him credit for a twelve thousand dollar deposit, I gave him credit for twelve hundred. He didn’t notice it until he was out of the bank and back at work. We received a phone call first and then he returned, enraged. Mr. Kasofsky handled him personally. I apologized profusely, but it didn’t do much good. After that I was as irritable as could be, and I know I annoyed a number of customers.

  But the climax of the day for me came a little more than an hour after lunch. Charley Tooey had gotten a phone call. I saw him talking on the phone and I saw him look at me. His face grew white as he continued speaking, nodding and shrugging. Instinctively, I knew he was going to say something terrible to me.

  After he hung up, he stood there for a few moments staring my way. I tried to ignore him, but as soon as he started toward me, my heart began beating faster. I didn’t have any customers so I prayed someone would come to my window to keep me from talking to him, but no one came. He stood right beside me waiting for me to look up from my counter. I had readded the same figures four times.

  “What’s up?” I said without turning.

  “That was Alice on the phone.”

  “So?”

  “She just rode by your house a little while ago.”

  I turned and looked at him. From the expression on his face, I thought I could imagine what had happened.

  “She stopped to talk to Miriam.”

  “No, she was too frightened. She just rode on by. She was all out of breath. You should have heard her on the phone. I was trying to calm her.”

  “Well, as I said, in time ...”

  “She saw Miriam,” he said quickly.

  “What do you mean? You said she didn’t stop.”

  “And her nurse. They were outside.” He swallowed and then leaned forward to whisper. “Pushing a wheelchair.”

  “Oh. You see ...” There was something in his eyes that made me stop. “What?”

  “She said there was someone in it. A child ... smaller than Lillian, but dressed in one of Lillian’s outfits.”

  8

  * * *

  THERE WERE MOMENTS DURING MY RIDE HOME WHEN I considered the possibility that I, like Miriam, had become mentally ill because of the accident. I recalled the faces of people I had met or had business with since. I tried to remember details: the tone of their voices, the way their eyes searched my face, the content of the things they said to me. Was I being humored?

  The nurse had told me I was high-strung. She had recommended meditation as a treatment. Was that her way of telling me I was sick? Perhaps Dr. Turner had discussed this with her. Perhaps he had said, “Michael Oberman is just as ill as his wife only he doesn’t realize it. Humor him for as long as you can and when you can, try to treat him.”

  How does one know who’s sane and who’s not? I remember a scene in a terror film I had gone to see when I was a teenager. I don’t remember the title of the movie or even the names
of the actors who were in it. The story is a blur. I get it confused with so many other tales. But there was this sequence on a train. A man who had escaped from a mental institution had been captured and was being brought back by this detective or something. He might have been a doctor. I can’t recall. Anyway, they were seated at a table in the dining car when all of a sudden a large fly landed on the table. The detective or doctor scooped it up in his fist. He was about to crush it when the mentally deranged man said, “Why do you have to do that?”

  The detective hesitated and thought for a moment. I can still see his smile clearly. The two men locked gazes, and then the detective simply opened his fist and let the fly go off. The mentally ill man smiled as though to say, “That’s a good boy now.”

  I laughed aloud. My friends with me in the theater didn’t see the humor I saw. In that moment, the crazy man had turned the tables. He had made the supposedly sane man look sadistic and evil. Anyone who had just come onto that scene and no other would seriously question who needed mental treatment and who didn’t.

  Why wouldn’t the same thing happen if someone just walked into my house? Look at Miriam, I thought, how gentle she was, how soft and friendly; and then look at me—I was mostly irritable, short tempered, eager to be alone and terrified of ordinary conversation. I was sure Charley Tooey wouldn’t want to vouch for my sanity. We all have our own illusions and fantasies. We all cling to them. Some cling more desperately than others. When do they become symptomatic of mental illness?

  Fantasy, illusion, and another sort of desperate need were now drawing me to Mrs. Randolph’s room. I had come to feel that it was a place of power. It was dangerous for me to go in there, but it was exciting, too. There was a part of me that wanted the danger and the mystery.

  It was the same part of me that drove me to open Lillian’s closed door to confront the darkness. It made me think of the nurse’s first night and the way I had slithered through the shadows to peer up at her uncovered window. My body tingled with the memory of her bare breasts washed in the warm light.

  I drove on like the mythical Odysseus who was warned about the power of the sirens to tempt him onto the rocks, but unlike Odysseus, I did not lash myself to the mast and stuff the ears of my men with wax. I couldn’t stop myself from knocking on her door.

  I had rushed my work so that I would get home before five. Mrs. Randolph had told me she gave Miriam a session of meditation before she went into her own. So, when I first entered the house, I thought they were both upstairs. I opened the front door quietly and moved in slowly and slyly like a thief. I wanted to come upon Mrs. Randolph and Miriam and watch them unseen.

  I hesitated in the hallway. Apparently no one had heard me enter. The dog hadn’t heard me drive up, and no one had come out to greet me. There were no sounds coming from the kitchen. Miriam wasn’t preparing supper. I looked at the stairway and then started toward it until I heard what sounded like soft sobbing. It was coming from the living room. Practically on tiptoe, I turned toward it. When I looked in, I saw Miriam sitting on the couch, looking down at a sheet of paper in her hands, and crying.

  “What is it, Miriam? What’s wrong?”

  She looked up quickly and smiled through the tears. I walked into the room and she stood up to greet me.

  “Oh, Michael,” she said, “I’m so happy.”

  “You’re crying because you’re happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s made you so happy?”

  “This,” she said and handed me the sheet of paper. There was a drawing on it, the drawing of a dog. The style of the childish artwork was quite reminiscent of Lillian’s. In fact, it was remarkably similar to the collection of pictures and drawings we kept in Lillian’s room. “It’s the first creative thing she’s done since ... since the accident,” Miriam said.

  I looked up at her with some amazement. Her very mention of it was almost as shocking as the new drawing. Right from the first day she had come home from the hospital, Miriam never used the word “accident” in reference to Lillian. Lillian was always “ill,”

  “sick,” “recuperating,” but the cause was never stated. It was as though the recognition of the reason would contradict Lillian’s imagined existence.

  After my initial surprise, my first reaction was to think Mrs. Randolph was really making progress with her. She had already gotten her to do so much and now this—an admission that the accident occurred. But rather than leave me with a feeling of joy, it simply added to my confusion. I gazed at the drawing again. Even for the sake of Miriam’s happiness, I couldn’t pretend about it,

  “Maybe this was one of her drawings we hadn’t seen before, dear. Maybe this was simply buried under the others.”

  “Oh no, Michael.” She shook her head and wiped the tears from her cheeks. “Can’t you tell? It’s a picture of the new dog. She just did it.”

  I looked at it again and nodded. It was a picture of the new dog, capturing its shape and color.

  “When did ... did she give you this?”

  “Mrs. Randolph brought it down a little while ago. She said Lillian surprised her with it. She didn’t know Lillian was working on something new either. You should have seen her; she was almost as excited about it as I was.”

  “I bet.”

  “She’s had such success with her in such a short space of time. Lillian will be up and walking again before you know it. You’ll see.” She nodded after she spoke, like a little girl pleading for confirmation.

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. In fact, nothing Mrs. Randolph does anymore would surprise me. You used the wheelchair today,” I began, handing the drawing back and keeping my tone of voice calm, “and took Lillian out?”

  “Yes, but it was hard wheeling it on the lawn so we went down the road a ways and then back.”

  “I see. Mrs. Randolph is upstairs in her room, I suppose.”

  “She told me she was going to teach you to meditate today. That’s good, Michael. You need something to calm your nerves,” she said, and she sat on the couch again.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, dear,” I said. She smiled, but when I turned to leave, she got up and took my arm. There was something in her face, some new look of strength and determination that surprised me.

  “Mrs. Randolph is a very, very special person, Michael. Be kind to her.”

  “Very well, dear. I’ll do my best,” I said. She nodded and sat down again, holding the drawing in her lap. Then she looked up at me with such joy in her face that it nearly brought me to tears.

  “It’s a gift, Michael, a gift from God. I’m so grateful and so happy. If anything destroyed that happiness now—”

  “I know, dear. Nothing will destroy it,” I said.

  “I love you, Michael,” she said. She hadn’t said that since Lillian died. “And having her come back to us like this frees me to love you even more.”

  I couldn’t speak. I felt trapped, yet pulled in different directions. In a tearful, joyful moment, Miriam had made the world fragile and thin again. I couldn’t be abrupt or loud. All my anger had to be subdued. The walls of the house had become mere membranes. Everything in it was made of thin china. There would be no slamming of doors, no heavy footsteps. There would be only softness and the gentle tinkle of Lillian’s chimes.

  I turned and walked out to climb the stairs slowly, thoughtfully. The terror that had come as a result of Alice Tooey’s tale to her husband had filled me with an insane paranoia, and now my moments with Miriam had left me with a mixture of anxiety and compassion. I was shaking, crumbling with every footstep, as though the bones in my legs were melting and being absorbed in my flesh. Before I reached the top of the stairway, I thought I would flow back down and become a puddle at the bottom.

  The image of that drawing in Miriam’s hands flashed before me. That dog was definitely the new dog, and the style of the artwork was definitely Lillian’s style. Was I still of this world or had we all died with Lillian?

  I stood befo
re the nurse’s room. She was within, waiting for me. When I raised my hand to tap on her door, I felt my heartbeat in the palm of my hand. My fingers seemed to merge with the wood. I didn’t think I had knocked, but the nurse called, “Come in,” and I entered.

  She was as I had found her before, dressed in that blue dashiki. She was seated on the bed, leaning back and bracing herself with her arms to her side, her palms down.

  “You’re early,” she said. “That’s good. Close the door.”

  I heard the door click behind me, but I didn’t feel my arm go out to close it. I was filled with a strange numbness. I knew that I had walked in further because I was closer to her, but I couldn’t feel my feet. I looked down to see if they were still there.

  “You look very upset,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “A friend of mine at the bank,” I began. I paused as though I expected she would know the rest.

  “Yes?”

  “His wife called and said she saw you and Miriam pushing the wheelchair outside.”

  “So?”

  “She said there was someone in the chair ... a little girl.”

  “Ridiculous,” the nurse said. Her eyes grew small, but nothing else changed in her face.

  “She recognized the clothing. Their daughter and Lillian were close friends. Lillian often stayed at their house. She knew Lillian’s wardrobe.”

  “Oh,” the nurse said smiling.

  “What?”

  “We had one of Lillian’s outfits in the chair. The woman probably saw the outfit and imagined she saw someone. Going by fast ... the mind plays tricks.”

  “Why did you put an outfit in the chair?”

  “Miriam had picked it out for Lillian. She wanted her to wear it when we took her outside.”

  What she said made sense, but I was disappointed. I realized with a shock that I wanted her to say, “I’ve brought your daughter back from the dead. She’s in her room now. Go see her. She’s been waiting for you to come home. Listen, Lillian’s calling.”

  I fought to control myself.