Range of Motion

by Elizabeth Berg

  I go upstairs, turn on the tap, lay out a towel. I think the kids have some bubble bath in the linen closet, I’ll use that, even though the scent is grape gum. When the tub has begun its slow fill—the water pressure in the bathroom is ridiculous, we never did find out why, or fix it—I go into the basement, sort some laundry. After my bath, I’ll put a load of underwear in, make sure the girls are set with clothes for school on Monday. I upend the basket of dirty clothes, start pulling out what I want to wash.

  “Can’t get ahead for being behind,” I hear. “Isn’t it the truth?”

  I drop what’s in my hand, turn around. No one. Then, when I start sorting again, I see the ghost woman standing by the wringer, doing her own laundry. She is wearing a blue-and-white print dress, a floral apron over it. “You don’t have to worry about those stains on your husband’s shirt,” she says. “You just soak them in a little white vinegar and water first, the stain will come out fine.”

  “My God, I am exhausted,” I say, to her, to my own unraveling self.

  “Take a nap,” she says, straightening suddenly, as though she has a kink in her back. “Twenty minutes, do you a world of good. I used to do that when the kids were little, take a nap right with them. It was awfully nice to pull down the shades in the middle of the day, slip off my shoes and lie on top of the spread. I’d wake up before the kids, go down into the kitchen and do a little for dinner, maybe peel the potatoes, or try a new dessert. I’d have the radio on low, I liked to listen to the afternoon shows. It always refreshed me so, to take a nap. Then when the kids got up, why, I was happy to see them again.” She hikes her basket up on her hip, juts her chin at me. “Go ahead, take your bath and lie down.”

  I see her so clearly, her left arm across her waist, helping to hold the basket. The tiny diamond on her wedding ring has turned to the side; the ring has gotten too big. I swear I can see her beating heart in her throat. And I know about her. She uses dark-blue ink in her fountain pen, signs her letters, “As always.” She takes her slippers off at her side of the bed at night, leaves them lined up and ready for when the morning sun pushes into her bedroom. She drinks from jelly glasses washed in the metal dishpan, rinsed in water that reddens her hands, then dried with a dishcloth embroidered with pastel daisies. She feeds her children lunch at a table covered with decorated oilcloth: sandwiches cut on the diagonal, milk; and on Friday, a Baby Ruth for dessert. She uses cold cream from the five-and-dime that comes in a white jar with a pink top. She prays on her knees at night, her head bowed, her faith steadfast and unquestioned. She has never looked at herself naked. Her back bothers her frequently, but she doesn’t mention it.

  I mean, I could just go on and on. It’s like idly looking down into a well you thought was dry and seeing the black face of water so obviously deep you feel fear in the pit of your stomach like a fist.

  It is worrisome, what is happening to me. As though there weren’t enough going on. I’m just tired. I’m just too tired. I do need a nap. My subconscious has had to grow big, has had to play tricks to get me to pay attention to my most basic needs. I turn out the basement light, then turn it back on, head upstairs on legs that feel like they have the flu.

  I sleep awhile, a good half hour, and then wake up with a fuzzy-brain feeling. I go to the bathroom and splash my face with cold water, then go across the hall to Sarah’s room, sit on her bed, think about what we should do for dinner tonight. We always used to order out Chinese on Sunday night—shrimp with lobster sauce, he got that every time—then eat in front of a rented movie. I haven’t done it since the accident. I wanted to wait for him to be back. But maybe we should just start doing things again, without him.

  I lean back on my elbows, feel a lump on the bed, turn and reach under the covers to take it out. It could be anything: a shoe, her lunchbox, a book she is reading. It is a book, her diary, a white leather thing, gold trim, unlocked. I know I shouldn’t, but I open it and read the last entry.

  I think my Dad is dead. I told Lindsey, but that’s all.

  Oh, Sarah, I think. Do you really believe I wouldn’t tell you? But the truth is, I keep so much from her. Surely she knows that; kids are all the time being smart in ways you wish they wouldn’t be. Just learn your math, we think; never mind the secret places in your parents’ hearts. But they know when you’re hiding something. Why should she not think I’m hiding the fact that he’s dead? Why should she believe he’s alive when he lies unresponsive to her every word, when he no longer rolls up his sleeves to help her make Lego cities, when he no longer checks her homework and tells her she’s a genius, or lies on her bedroom floor with his hands behind his head, his ankles crossed, listening to all she wants to say before she goes to sleep?

  I put the diary back under her covers. Then I go into my bedroom, stare at his side of the bed. There’s a wrinkle there. I go over to straighten it out, but I don’t just give a little tug. I pull a bunch of fabric into my fists, and then I start shaking it. “You’re so stupid,” I say. “Walking under ice. What’s the matter with you?” I pull the spread off the bed, throw it onto the floor. Then I pull off the sheets and I hear myself making the growling noises I used to make when I played monster with the kids. “Stupid!” I say. “You never think of anyone but yourself!” I stomp all over the sheets, try to rip them, fail, try again, succeed. I tear both sheets into long shreds. Then I walk over to the dresser and upend his top drawer, watch the rain of boxers and T-shirts and folded socks. “Now what do I do?” I ask them. “Huh? Now what do I do? You tell me! You tell me!” And then, of course, I start sobbing. I sit down on the floor, hold one of his T-shirts against me and ask him to forgive me. I say I am just so scared.

  I cry until my stomach aches, until my throat is sore. And then I get up and put Jay’s things away, put fresh sheets on the bed, carry the torn ones out to the trash.

  Tonight I will try once again to teach Sarah how to use chopsticks. And then I will start being honest. “Sarah,” I will say, looking her right in the eye, my insides true and calm as a ticking clock. “Daddy is in a coma, and I still hope he will wake up. I still believe he will wake up. I know you said you don’t want to see him anymore, but I think we should all go together next time.” And then I will take her to see him, which frightens her, I know, Amy too; but I will take them to see him and I will say, “Talk. He can hear you. That I know. I really do know that.”

  And if I need to cry, I will cry. “I’m just feeling sad right now,” I’ll say. “I just need to cry to feel better. Maybe you need to, too. It’s all right.” What would be wrong with that? What would be wrong with the three of us sitting on the sofa in the living room, crying together? The three of us asking together in silence for something we want too much to say out loud. There is nothing wrong with that. It’s probably only real prayer.

  I want to get up. This long, bright field of things waving, you are all on the other side. The field is so bright, yellow sun, and then a rush of birds rising up, their calls, their calls to me, three birds. They rush toward my face and then they are gone, black dots high up in the sky, shimmering pepper.

  I work at a beverage distribution center. Beverage World, it’s called. I can walk to it. There’s a globe on a pole outside the small brick building. It used to spin on its metal axis. Now it stays still, rusting a little more each day. There’s a big office with two desks in the front; a smaller room in the back where the boss, Frank, sits. He’s one of the most elegant-looking men I ever saw: tall and slender; neat mustache; thick, gorgeous gray hair; looks like he ought to rule a country or at least conduct symphonies. He loves sailing, has little toy boats all over his office, and one of those wave-in-glass things that offer an approximation of the continuous comfort of the ocean. He has a terrible stutter. You just don’t know what to do, sometimes, when he gets going. You just stand there, thinking really hard it’s all right, you just take your time, I’m not mad, don’t worry but of course he does worry, he feels really badly that he just can’t spit it out. He’
s a nice man, he lets me come and go, work around the kids’ schedules, leave early if I need to, come in on Saturday if I want to. The woman I work with in the front, Dolly, is in love with him. She’s full-time, she’s worked with Frank for twenty-three years, and I don’t think he knows how she feels. He’s married, happily; Dolly’s shy and careful. She wears, with no sense of irony, pearl-decorated glasses chains and cardigan sweaters buttoned at the top. She’s so happy when Frank’s on the phone and can’t get his own coffee. She carries it in to him as though it’s her heart on a silver platter, which of course it is.

  It’s not a glamorous job, by any means, but it’s a break from the house and a little extra income that I’ve been saving for the kids’ college tuition. I’m the girl Friday: I do a little filing, a little phone-answering, even a little bookkeeping, though that terrifies me. I get to pay bills sometimes; I really like, for some reason, paying the trucking companies. They have solid, reliable-sounding names—Indianhead, TransAmerica—and I like the associated images I always get: fat guys climbing out of big black trucks named Rita and going in for a plate of meat loaf and mashed potatoes and green beans, leaning back and picking their teeth afterward, satisfied as Romans after a banquet. Or young, slim guys with Elvis sideburns and cowboy boots drinking coffee straight from the thermos and driving far into the night, the only vehicle on the road. I see them cranking up the country-and-western, singing along a little, looking for company on the CB, watching the night-softened horizon out the left-hand window like a miles-long floor show. I understand there’s a fair number of female truckers now, and sometimes I get a notion that in another life, that would have been the job for me. Just keep moving, you know. Socialization at the counters of the restaurants. “Okay, June, how about some of those blueberry cakes?” I’d ask the waitress I knew pretty well just outside Toledo. Her with her forty-year-old ponytail, her fading sexiness, nice mole above her upper lip. “How’s the ride today, Lainey?” she’d ask, wiping down the counter beside me after she delivered my order. “Hear you just come out of some heavy rain.”

  “Yeah, it was going pretty good there for a while,” I’d say. My king-sized windshield wipers would have been thunking out a heavy rhythm that was still in my brain. June would tell me about the P.I.E. guy she had a one-nighter with and I’d say, Now June that’s dangerous for your body and your spirit and she’d say, Oh, she knew that, but what the hell, he untied her apron when she poured his coffee and smiled up at her with those dimples—Lord! What was she supposed to do? Sit home alone in her bathrobe looking at reruns? Not this girl. She wasn’t the stay-at-home type, not yet. She’d make a giddy-up sound, wink at me, then go to pick up the order for chicken-fried steak the cook in the back was yelling about. “Aw, hold your horses, Mikey,” she’d say. “Settle down back there, you’re gonna blow a gasket.”

  I called work a few days ago to say I still couldn’t come in and Frank said that was perfectly all right, not to worry; he said they had a temporary worker, driving Dolly nuts with her gum-chewing, but otherwise doing just fine. I should take my time, come back whenever I was ready. And … how was he?

  “Oh,” I’d said. “No change.”

  “I’m so s-s-s-s-s-s-s … regretful,” Frank said.

  “Thank you,” I said. The sound of his voice made me wish so hard to be sitting there at my desk, making out the grocery list before I left for home and a normal evening, like I used to.

  Monday evening, the setting sun coloring the clouds pink as cotton candy. The kids and I are on the way to see him. We’ve brought offerings: from Amy, a drawing of stick-fingered, smiling people, a family lined up outside a house with heart-shaped window boxes. The woman wears a blue triangular skirt, the man rectangular brown pants. There are two little children, a boy and a girl, dressed identically to their parents. Sarah has made a tape of herself reading some of The Secret Garden, her current favorite. I have brought an embroidered pillowcase that my grandmother did years ago, and Jay’s Weejuns, and some apple crisp which I know he can’t eat but which I want to heat up in the microwave and put under his nose. I’m a little nervous. I’ve prepared the girls for the patients in the nursing home, but they still might stand stock-still when we walk in, stare at one of the residents, feel fear knocking about inside them. Maybe they’ll sit down on the floor and say, “No!” like when they were toddlers and didn’t want to put their jackets on.

  “He has his own room,” I say now, looking in the rearview mirror at the two of them sitting together in the back seat. Usually they fight over the front seat, but tonight they both wanted to sit back there.

  “You already said,” Sarah says.

  “Oh. Yes. I did. Right.”

  “Look!” Amy says, pointing out the window. “Dairy Queen! Can we bring him some ice cream?”

  “He can’t eat it, honey.”

  “Well, you’re bringing him apple crisp.”

  “Yes, but for the smell.”

  “Ice cream has a smell. He likes Dairy Queen the best. Butterscotch sundae. That has a smell.”

  I turn on the blinker. Fine. I’ll go back, get him a sundae. We can put it on top of the apple crisp. It’s sort of crazy, but I’m starting to get excited. “Ice cream woke him up?” Alice will say. “Yes!” I’ll answer. “And you know, it was Amy who suggested it, and I almost didn’t stop!”

  There is no one in the hall when we go into the nursing home. It is eerily quiet. “Is anyone here?” Sarah asks. “Is this the right place?”

  And then, as though on cue, we hear the thin, high sound of an old woman’s voice. I believe she is crying, but it is the thin, wailing variety, sorrow that expects no answer to its request, no relief.

  “What’s that?” Amy asks, stopping in her tracks. This is what I was afraid of. They will see all the human misery and it will kill them that their father is here.

  “It’s just one of the patients,” I say. Actually I’m pretty sure I know who it is. “That’s Mrs. Eliot. She’s really, really old and sometimes she gets upset and cries but then the nurses go in and she stops right away.” Not quite true, but a necessary lie at this time.

  “Oh.” Amy starts walking again. “I thought it was a ghost.”

  “There are no ghosts,” I say. “You know that.”

  “Well, my word,” she says in my head. “Deny me twice more, why don’t you?”

  “Here’s his room,” I say, outside Jay’s door. “Are you ready?”

  They nod, together.

  I push open the door. He is on his side, pillows at his back to hold him over. He is turned away from us. “It’s me, Jay,” I call out. “And Amy and Sarah are here, too.” I have the absurdly hopeful thought that he will say, “Oh, well in that case!” and sit up, fling the pillows aside, ask for a drink of water, and then, a little embarrassed, push at the pieces of hair that stick out from the side of his head. He will feel something weird, lift up the sheet a little, look down at the catheter in his penis and say, “What the hell is this, Lainey? Go see if you can get someone to get this thing off me.” And I will say, “You girls stay here with Dad. I’m going to go tell them he’s awake.” And then, “See?” I will say. “You see?”

  Of course Jay doesn’t do that. His door swings closed behind us, and we walk slowly around to the other side of the bed, stare at him. His eyelashes are so long and beautiful. The kids got them. Sarah is hanging back against the wall, but Amy goes up to Jay, touches his hand, says softly in her breathy child’s voice, “Hi, Daddy.”

  Then, looking up at me, “Can he really hear me?”

  I nod.

  “Hi, Daddy,” she says again, a little louder. “I brought you a drawing. Of a family.”

  “Is he cold?” Sarah asks.

  “No, I’m sure he’s fine,” I say. “He has a blanket on, see?”

  “No, I mean, his hand. Is his hand cold?”

  “No,” Amy says. “Here. Feel it.” She steps aside and Sarah comes forward, reaches her small hand through the bars. At fi
rst, it lies across his; then she slides her fingers into the familiar pocket of his palm. She takes a big breath in, sighs out. Then, “Mom? Can we be with him by ourselves?”

  “You mean … you want to be alone with him?”

  “Yeah. Right, Amy?”

  “Yeah!” she says. And then, “… I guess so.”

  “All right,” I say, and I have to think very hard about whether or not to add, “Don’t hurt him.” I decide not to. I decide to just stay close. Who knows what made Sarah ask for this? It is so mysterious, I feel I ought to honor it. I get the apple crisp and the ice cream to take with me. The room with the microwave is right next door. I’ll be able to hear if anything goes wrong.

  I put a paper towel on the bottom of the microwave, really, the thing is filthy, they should clean it. Maybe I’ll clean it. I set the timer for a minute and a half, lean against the counter far away from the thing so I’m safe from whatever a microwave does to you, I forget exactly what it is. Who can keep up with what we’ve done to ourselves, the invisible dangers in a normal day wrought by overactive technology, fueled by greed. Soon we’ll have a whole world meeting for the purpose of saying, “Oops. What should we do?”

  Just as the timer rings, a man comes into the kitchen. We startle each other, my hand goes flying up to my throat. This is something I’ve done involuntarily since I was a little girl: I get scared, my hand goes to my throat and I squeeze it a little. The more frightened I am, the harder I squeeze. One of these days I’m going to strangle myself.

  “I’m sorry,” the man says. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.” He’s very handsome, dark hair and eyes, tall; vaguely reminiscent of someone famous, though I can’t think who. He’s wearing a beautiful sweater. Expensive, you can tell.