Girls of a Certain Age

by Maria Adelmann

  I shrugged. “Just decided to be. That’s all.”

  On Friday, I was shoving plastic gloves into glove boxes on 2C when I saw a priest walk onto the floor. I followed him because I thought he might be there to say prayers before a death, and maybe I’d get to see a body rolled out. When I walked into the room he’d gone into, the priest turned to me. He looked at my ugly, bright red Junior Volunteer vest, at the giant VOLUNTEER pin stuck to it, and then said with a smile, “There are a lot of good teenagers out there today.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I hated the word “teenager.” It made me think of pimples and after-school specials about periods and peer pressure. I asked the lady—middle-aged, rosy cheeks—if she wanted me to refill her water.

  “Could you bring me some applesauce?” she asked, very chipper. “And ginger ale? If you wouldn’t mind?” These were not, I knew, dying wishes.

  When I was on my way back from delivering the lady her afternoon snack, one of the nurses asked if I could feed Jell-O to the man in room 257. “He’s going to hit on you,” she said, “but don’t worry, his hands are tied down.”

  The man in room 257 was ancient, with dry, cracked lips and concave cheeks that gave him a shrunken-head look. Tufts of gray hair sprouted from his ears like grass from a potted plant. His wrists were braceleted in leathery brown cuffs with silver buckles, which wrapped around him almost twice because his wrists were so thin. His heavy breathing sounded like snoring. I couldn’t believe my luck. He wasn’t even in the mental health wing, but I felt as if a real-life file from the Lunatic Report had opened before me.

  “They’ve got me tied up in this shit,” he said in a hoarse voice, raising one arm an inch off the bed and then plopping it back down again. “No wonder I can’t feed myself!”

  I just stood there, forgetting to speak.

  The man sighed loudly. “You just gonna stand there or what?”

  “Oh,” I said, remembering myself. “I’ve got some Jell-O. Strawberry.”

  “Strawberry my ass,” he said. “That shit tastes like cough syrup.”

  “You don’t have to eat it.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen,” I said, pulling the Saran Wrap off the little pink bowl.

  “You’re pretty,” he said. “You’re very beautiful. I mean that.”

  “Thanks. Do you want some Jell-O or not?”

  He shrugged, and I pressed the button on the side of his bed, whirring him slowly to a sitting position. I started spooning Jell-O into his mouth, slowly, bite by bite, except there was no actual biting, since he didn’t have any teeth.

  He stretched out his pinky as far as he could to graze my thigh. “You are very pretty.”

  I stepped back but kept feeding him, leaning over him awkwardly. I was trying to take note of some things about him for another story, the kind of details you just can’t get from a Lunatic Report, like the Pine-Sol smell of the room mixed with his BO, and the way his saggy arm skin looked like a costume for his bones.

  “What? Give an old guy some pleasure,” the man said. “Goddamn, you nurses are all such prudes.”

  “It’s just that I have a boyfriend,” I found myself saying, even though I’d never even kissed a boy. “John Pine,” I added for verisimilitude, which was something we were learning about in English class. “Plus, I’m saving myself for marriage.”

  “Saving yourself for marriage?” he said, shaking his head. “Might as well save your money for the apocalypse.”

  He closed his eyes as he sucked on his Jell-O. I waited for some sign that I should feed him more. When none came, I put another spoonful in his mouth, though half-mashed pieces from the last bite were still waiting there.

  “Sir? Mr.”—I glanced at the whiteboard above his head—“Mr. Adams? You have to swallow, or you could choke.”

  He started snoring loudly. I watched the Jell-O quiver in the darkness of his half-open mouth. I stood there for a minute, and then I spooned the Jell-O from his mouth back into the bowl.

  I put off writing my second story, once again, until the evening before it was due. My mother appeared in my doorway, arms crossed. She was dressed in khakis and a white polo, an ensemble required for her shitty, part-time night job, the one she’d tacked on to her schedule after my dad had been laid off. She looked exhausted, her face a little droopy, as if gravity had captured another centimeter of skin.

  She pointed at my math book, which was open next to me, asking me why I hadn’t started earlier. “Because it’s math,” I said. She gave me the mom look indicating that I had provided the wrong answer. I hadn’t even told her about the Write Stuff—as far as she knew, I was still on the crew for the school play.

  “Sorry,” I said. “But I’m done now! I just finished!” I slammed my math book shut and started getting into my pajamas, which were hanging off the back of my chair.

  “Come here,” she said softly, and I went to her.

  She kissed me on the forehead, her arms still crossed. “Good night,” she said, and then she left the room, closing the door behind her.

  I heard her walk to the guest room, as she did every night. I pictured her standing in the doorway, arms crossed, the same way she stood in mine. Tonight, instead of just saying good night, I heard her scold my father. “Get out of this bed, and do something—anything,” she said. I couldn’t hear my dad. Maybe he didn’t say anything. “I mean it,” she said. “If I don’t see you up tomorrow, I’m dragging you out of this house myself.” Then she made a show of clomping down the stairs in her sneakers.

  I settled back in my seat. I decided that the man in my story was a narcoleptic with saggy costume-like skin who was so intolerable that his wife tried to poison his soup one night. When he passed out, his frightened daughter called the hospital, though she didn’t mention the poison. At the hospital, the narcoleptic suddenly shot up from his gurney and, with a twisted smile, said, “Great! I needed a vacation from my nagging wife!”

  I stepped off the bus the next day and saw that my father was outside. It was a biting, windy fall day that had whipped some of the leaves off their branches. As I walked closer, I realized my father had pulled a big square of blue siding off the house and was now pulling off more. The power tools were strewn across the yellowish lawn, and he was covered in dust. He kept stopping to rub his eyes, though his hands were covered in dust too.

  I stood behind him, watching him try to rip a nail out of a piece of siding with the claw of a hammer. “Hey,” I said. “I guess your headache is gone.”

  He turned around, leaving the hammer hanging from the nail. His skin was chapped red, and his eyes were wet from the wind.

  He rubbed at his eyes again with his dusty hand. “You should go in the house,” he said finally. “There’s asbestos out here.”

  “Asbestos? Doesn’t that cause cancer?” I asked. “Shouldn’t you be wearing, like, a face mask?”

  “It’s fine. They just have these precautions so they don’t get sued.”

  “Then why can’t I stand here? And what are you doing?”

  “Just fixing some things,” he said. He was back at the nail again.

  “So, your headache’s gone?”

  He turned back toward me. “Go inside,” he said again, dust falling from his eyelashes. “I don’t want you to get this in your face.”

  That night, the three of us sat at the dinner table together eating a hamburger macaroni dish we called Tuesday special. My dad pushed his food around, dust falling into his noodles.

  “So, I see you’ve decided to tear the house apart,” said my mother. She hadn’t said anything about it until then. She’d just walked past him without a word, entered the house, and started making dinner.

  But I had noticed, recently, that the space beneath her eyes was growing darker, grayish, like the shadows under the eyes of the troglodytes in corridor D.

  “Well, you said—” my father began.

  “Getting outside was a good idea,” I interrupted, “but
maybe you shouldn’t be getting into the asbestos.”

  “Asbestos?” said my mom.

  “Just kidding,” I said. “I made that up.”

  “I think I need a nap,” said my dad. He left his plate full of food on the table and walked back upstairs.

  I ran through the downpour and into the hospital, soaked by the time I got inside. The rain started needling sideways in a way that was kind of exciting, striking the windows so hard and fast that it sounded like an arena broken out in applause.

  I tried to dry off in the bathroom under the hand dryer, which didn’t really work. The red vest was still sopping, so I stuffed it in one of the volunteer lockers and pinned the VOLUNTEER badge to my slightly less wet shirt. My plan was to head down to medical records for another story idea, but as I turned the corner near mental health, a nurse said, “We could use you in here,” motioning toward the forbidden wing.

  I hesitated. “Come on,” she said, pulling me along.

  I’m not sure what I’d expected—maybe I thought some lunatics would be walking around wearing underwear as hats—but the floor didn’t look all that different from the others in the hospital. We passed a patient power walking the hall. “This is worse than being a mall walker, isn’t it?” he said.

  There was, at least, an old, hunchbacked woman slumped in a wheelchair near the nurses’ station shouting “I love you!” to everyone who passed, as if her voice were motion activated.

  The nurse was rattling off information and looking into rooms as she walked. “It’s all hands on deck for a bus accident coming into emergency, so we’re pretty short-staffed here,” she said. I was sure someone would kick me out, but not a single nurse or doctor even glanced in my direction. “There’s a woman in one forty that gets a little hysterical from time to time, but we don’t really want to restrain her. Whenever it rains, she thinks the sky is falling.”

  The nurse stopped suddenly, and I almost ran into her. “Belinda!” she shouted, waving down a nurse across the hall. “Just keep her company, would you?” she said to me, already walking away.

  I was overwhelmed by my good fortune.

  I peeked into 140 before I entered. The lights were off, and the woman was facing away from me, looking out the window where rain was pounding hard in the parking lot, the trees along the edge twisting back and forth as if they were being tortured for information they didn’t have.

  “Some weather,” I said. I sat on the salmon-colored pleather chair near the bed, the kind of chair all the rooms had.

  The woman turned toward me as if in slow motion. Only then did I realize she was crying. She was middle-aged, maybe a few years older than my parents, maybe a decade older. Her off-white nightgown was oversized and pilly. Thick strands of hair were stuck to the sides of her face with sweat or tears or both.

  “The rain!” she said, her eyebrows wrinkled in grave concern.

  “It’s supposed to stop soon,” I said, though I hadn’t seen a weather report.

  “It’s pieces of the sky falling down.”

  “No,” I said, and tried to think of some way to prove this while she stared at the ceiling.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “I thought I’d keep you company.”

  “They sent you in here, those nurses. To watch me.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t have anything else to do, so I thought I’d sit here.”

  “You’re lying.” She turned her body away from me. “They send a kid!” she added, and then went silent.

  I sat in the chair, trying to think of something to say. “Mrs. Peg Michaels” the whiteboard above the bed said with a smiley face next to it. The rain was torrential now, the parking lot just a gray blur outside the window. But the noise was rhythmic, like a meditation soundtrack, and I started to feel peaceful and a little drowsy.

  Peg turned toward me so suddenly that I almost jumped. “Listen,” she said. “Can you listen to a lady like me?”

  “Yes,” I said, leaning toward her.

  “They won’t let me talk to my husband. You have to help me. I just want him to know where I am, so he doesn’t worry.”

  “You aren’t allowed to call him?” I asked.

  “Do you have a piece of paper? Write this down.” I found a little pad and pen in the drawer of the nightstand, and then stood in front of the tray table and began writing down the husband’s information, including his address in North Carolina and his phone number. “Will you call him? Please?”

  I went straight to the nurses’ station, almost running into an orderly on the way, trying to look like I had urgent information while I waited for someone to notice me. The hunchbacked wheelchair lady was still there, and she kept telling me she loved me in a voice so desperate I finally whispered back, “I love you too.”

  Belinda appeared at the computer and started ticking away at the keys with the tips of her bright pink fingernails, not acknowledging me until she finally said “Yes? Was there something you wanted?” without looking up.

  “I was in room one forty—” I began.

  “Does she need to be restrained?”

  “What? No. It’s just, her husband. He doesn’t know she’s here and—”

  “That’s because he’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “He died seventeen years ago.”

  “But—”

  Belinda looked up from the computer with a face that said I was an idiot. “Did she tell you the sky is falling? Did you believe that?”

  “But what should I tell her?” I asked.

  “I love you!” the woman in the wheelchair suggested.

  “Change the subject,” said Belinda. “She likes the beach. Her favorite color’s red.”

  Her favorite color—was this lady kidding me? I must have looked annoyed, because Belinda threw one hand in the air as she continued key-pecking with the other. “I don’t know,” she said. “Tell her that her husband’s dead, if you want, but she’ll probably take the news as if she’s hearing it for the first time.”

  I walked slowly back to 140, trying to think if I knew anything interesting about beaches.

  When I returned, Peg was looking out the window again. Her fingers were white from gripping the metal side rails, as if she were on some horrific amusement park ride. I could see the thick stitches running like train tracks up and down one of her wrists.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, sinking back into the chair, “that it took so long.”

  She turned to me, expectant.

  “It took a minute, but I got in contact with him. With your husband.”

  “You’re lying!”

  “Why would I lie?” I said, feeling strangely confident. “I don’t know you. I called him myself. Obviously the nurses were against it, so I wouldn’t tell them if I were you.”

  “What did he say?” she asked, half skeptical, half curious.

  “That he misses you very much, that he had wondered where you were and why you hadn’t called. I told him you’d been trying. He said that it was okay, as long as you were safe.”

  “Sure,” said Peg, nodding. “He would say that.”

  “He said he loves you, that North Carolina is warm…but not nearly warm enough without you. He’s doing well—he told me to say that. He is really going to be okay, and if you are doing okay or not okay, he still loves you.” Peg was smiling now, staring at the ceiling, her grip loosening on the rails. “Can you hear me?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

  “He asked that you remember the Carolina sunsets, how beautiful they were, the nights you spent on the beach together, where you shared a red knit cardigan, an arm for each of you. You two stretched the back so thin that after that, it was too big for one person. He still has the cardigan. He keeps it in the drawer where he keeps his pajamas. At night sometimes, when he can’t sleep, he takes it out and smells it and thinks of you.

  “He has so many memories of you, good ones,” I said. “Even the times you were so sad you just lay in bed a
ll day and he didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to make you happy, even then he loved you. Even when he told you that you had to change, had to get better, he still loved you, even then. Even when you wouldn’t go to work, wouldn’t do the chores, he would still take out that cardigan and think of you, of that time on the beach when you were both so happy. Because you were happy, once. He couldn’t forget that other version of you. He never lost hope.”

  My eyes felt weighted in their sockets, the way I felt before I might cry. Maybe this woman would never get better. Maybe she would lie around in bed for the rest of her life. Maybe she would never be what her husband wanted her to be.

  But of course—I’d already forgotten—her husband was dead.

  I blinked myself back to reality, letting Peg come into focus.

  She was looking right at me, maybe even through me, to the center of my brain. Her eyes were narrowed and full of hate. “You little bitch,” she hissed. I felt my jaw go slack.

  She let go of my gaze very slowly, as if to be sure I had understood her, and then turned back toward the window. Outside, the storm was dying down. Light rain pattered in the parking lot over a mosaic of wind-torn leaves. A man in a trench coat jogged toward the hospital with a newspaper splayed over his head. A black umbrella bobbed gently among the parked cars. Beads of rain rolled down the window in thin, glistening tracks.

  First Aid

  Color

  My blood comes out a different color every time I slit a new gill. I call them gills because they help me breathe. Every feeling has its own color, and that’s the way to know what I’m feeling, cut myself open and see: red, angry; blue, sad; et cetera. Yellow is happiness and it’s a great sign when I cut myself open and realize it’s been happiness I’ve been feeling all along.

  Example

  See these here, on the underside of my forearm? It’s okay, don’t look away, they aren’t fresh, they’re almost nothing now, just twenty or so raised lines—swoosh, swoosh, swoosh—running parallel to the wrist, my vein a green river running through them. The newer lines are still pink and hopeful, but the old ones are white as ivory, dead as ghosts.