Range of Motion

by Elizabeth Berg

  I head for the stairs. Alice turns to the front page. She’ll read whole articles. It always seems like such a hard job to me to have to dig for the rest of the story on another page. I’ll read the front page sometimes, but then I’ll not bother to finish the story if I have to turn to another page. It’s not always laziness. Oftentimes, it’s fear. Oftentimes, in fact, I don’t even get through the part on the front page. I get astounded. I get sad. I turn to the recipes for relief. Once, when I found something good I wanted to make and started to write down what I’d need to buy at the store I saw that my hand was shaking. And this was long before Jay got hurt. Small wonder, now that disaster has moved off the newspaper page and into my kitchen, that I have had to create Evie to tell me soothing stories. Domestic lullabies. Really, I should cancel the paper.

  Wanda has Jay today. She is filling up the basin for a bed bath when I come in the room. I hold out my hand, introduce myself.

  “Yes, I know your name,” she says. “We talk about you sometimes.” Then, hastily, “Nicely.”

  I wonder what that means.

  “I can bathe him if you’re busy,” I tell her.

  She puts the basin on the bedside stand, pours some oil in it. “That’s okay. We have a lot of help today. I’ve only got five others. They’re done already.”

  I look at my watch. Nine-thirty.

  Wanda lowers the head of Jay’s bed, begins to wash his face. She is tender, thorough. She makes a little mitt of the washcloth so water doesn’t drip off the ends. You don’t always see that. Most times Jay’s face gets scrubbed like a kitchen floor. But Wanda is the kind of nurse who takes her training seriously, the kind who won’t hold dirty linen against her uniform, the kind you see washing her hands in the little sink out in the hall many times a day. I sit down in the chair, watch her. She’s a very pretty girl, honey-blond hair pulled back into a braid, clear blue eyes, cheeks a nice pink color without the assistance of makeup. She wears tiny gold hoops in her ears. Her uniforms have flowers embroidered here and there—you have to look closely, because it’s white on white. I wonder if she does it herself.

  “You’re new, huh?” I say.

  “I’ve been here about three weeks now. I used to work at St. Mary’s. In the oncology unit.”

  “You didn’t like that?”

  She turns around. “Oh, no. I loved it. They had a problem with my … Well, the truth is I got fired.”

  I stifle an impulse to leap up and grab the washcloth away from her. Instead, I begin watching her more carefully.

  “I’ll tell you about it,” she says. “It wasn’t for incompetence or anything. But for now, just let me … I’d like to just pay attention to him.”

  “Of course.”

  She turns back to Jay, starts talking to him in a low, friendly voice. Her new car, she’s talking about. Five speed. Moves out. Smells like leather, though there’s none in the car. Paid sticker price, couldn’t help it. And then how her garden has been planned, what vegetables she and her husband will harvest in the summer. “You’ll be out of here by then, of course,” she tells him. “I’ll bring some tomatoes over to your house; you can make your kids some BLTs. Your daughters are beautiful, Jay.” I lean back in my chair, and one-twentieth of my brain says wearily, “Say thank you, Jay.”

  When she gets to his hand, Wanda exercises each finger independently, then moves all of them together. Yes, that’s right. She’s doing it right. I’ll go get a cup of coffee.

  In the day room, I see Flozell sitting by the window with Johnny. And then see that a baby is lying in his lap. I stop, stare, then go up to him. When he sees me coming, he pulls the blanket down from a tiny, sleeping face. The baby is beautiful, curly eyelashes, a dimpled chin, hands resting across a chest not much bigger than a silver dollar. “Who’s this?” I whisper.

  “My daughter!” he says. Not in a whisper. The baby startles, then stills. “Premature, but she out the hospital now. She fine.”

  “What’s her name?” I ask.

  “Tanesha,” Johnny says, at the same time that Flozell says, “Name is Jacqueline, after you know who.”

  “My ass,” Johnny says, with what I can only describe as a kind of misplaced elegance. She speaks quietly, down her nose, as though she is saying, “Indeed.” She is quite beautiful, really; and so petite, she can’t be over 5′1″. I wonder how she created this baby with Flozell. Surely he didn’t lie on top of her. He’d kill her. She is dressed in a floral print polyester dress, ruffles along the bottom and the top. A black leather jacket rests on her lap. Beside her, a huge black purse gapes open, revealing a pack of cigarettes, a gold cosmetics bag, a key ring with a rose captured in a plastic heart. “I’m the one had this baby and I’m the one named her. It’s on her birth certificate. I called her ‘Tanesha.’ Ain’t nothing he can do about it.”

  “ ’Cept call her Jacqueline,” he says. “That’s just what I intend to do, call her Jac-que-line.”

  Johnny chews her gum for a while, swinging her crossed leg and watching him with slit-eyed affection. Then, “You call her that, she stare right into space. She ignore you. You ain’t around enough to have no influence on her.”

  Flozell looks down at the sleeping face. His lower lip is pushed out. He is pouting magnificently.

  “How’s your husband?” Johnny asks me.

  “He’s being bathed,” I say, as though that answers the question. Johnny nods, looks down at her purse, sad for me. The first time I met her, she asked, “What’s wrong wid your man?” She was wearing large hoop earrings and I remember staring at one of them when I told her. She blinked, then said, “Whew, Lord!” She reached out for my arm, squeezed it.

  “I just came in here for coffee,” I tell her. “Can I get you some?”

  “No thanks,” she says, and then, to Flozell, “Give me that baby back now.”

  “Not yet,” he says. “No.”

  “Sheeeit.” Johnny resettles herself in her chair, smiling so widely I can see the gold repair on one of her back molars.

  I fill a plastic cup half full of the day room’s awful coffee, carry it back to Jay’s room. Wanda is pulling his covers over him. “All done,” she says. The odor of ironed sheets is in the air. Everything in his room has been straightened, cleaned. The bottles on top of his nightstand are lined up, the telephone dusted.

  I walk over, kiss his cheek, put my hand on the top of his head, look closely into his face. “Jay,” I say. “I’m here.”

  I wait a moment, then straighten, look over at Wanda. She is standing by the door, watching me.

  “So what do you think?” I say.

  “I think all things are possible,” she says. “I think what we don’t know about medicine is as vast as outer space. Is that what you meant?”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  She opens the door. “I’ll be right back. I need to hang his feeding.”

  I sit on the bed, take Jay’s hand. “Breakfast time, Jay. What do you want?”

  As if I didn’t know. Regular coffee in his regular cup at his regular table. He has a cup that has a Corvette on it. The picture of the white ’56 has nearly faded away. We went to look at Corvettes once. Jay sat behind the wheel, and I watched him from the front of the car. It was a new one. I told him I didn’t like it, that it looked like a Dustbuster, but I did like it, mostly for the way Jay’s face looked when he turned on the headlights and they came flipping up out of the body of the car. I thought, when those kids are done with college, we’re taking out a loan and buying one of these. Even if we have bifocals.

  “I just saw Flozell’s baby,” I tell Jay. “He has a baby! And she’s so beautiful. You remember when Sarah was born and the doctor told you to tell me what sex she was? And you weren’t quite sure, because the umbilical cord confused you?” I smile down at him. If I try, I can imagine that his eyes are only closed to hear me better. “We were supposed to have a fancy dinner, but it was too late at night,” I say. “So they brought us all the stuff they could find fro
m the little kitchen there, remember? We got toast and jelly … Jell-O, graham crackers … what else? I don’t know, it didn’t matter, everything tasted wonderful. And I remember you had some apple juice and you started to toast Sarah, you held this little flowered paper cup up to her and started to say something and then you just started crying and then I started crying. Everybody cries about babies, huh, Jay? Maybe we should have another one.” I say things like that sometimes, and then immediately feel as though some bottom has dropped out, as though I’m driving along and the road suddenly disappears. And I am sitting there, suspended in black space, my hands fiercely clenching the steering wheel as though I still had some control. I shouldn’t say things like that.

  Wanda comes in carrying Jay’s feeding and I get out of the way, go to sit in the corner. After the stuff starts dripping in, she pulls an extra chair up to sit beside me. “I’d like to tell you what happened, why I got fired.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I want to.”

  “All right.” Actually, I do want to know.

  “I was working nights,” she says. “There was a woman who was dying, Irene was her name, sweet woman, and she had these sandals she kept at the side of the bed. They were so small. She never used them, she was too weak to get up, she just wanted them there. I think she thought maybe if she kept them there, she’d get to use them again. And I also think it was a way for us to know her—you know, a way of her saying, ‘Look, I wasn’t always a patient lying here in this bed. I went shopping. These are the shoes I picked out.’ ”

  She looks at me, and I nod.

  “Anyway,” Wanda says, “she was in a lot of pain. I’d been taking care of her for a long time, a few weeks; every time I was on, I had her. I knew this was going to be the night that she died. After a while, you can just tell.

  “It was really busy when you worked nights, you had at least eleven patients, you didn’t ever have time to sit with any of them. I went in to see her as often as I could, I increased her morphine drip, I turned her and rubbed her back, but it wasn’t enough. She was really restless. She asked me to put her on the floor. I said I couldn’t do that. She said, Why not, she wanted to be on the floor, she was so sick of the bed, it was making her feel crazy to be in that bed. She wanted to be on the floor where there was more room. So I said, Fine, and I put a bunch of blankets down and got an aide to help me and we put her on the floor. And she smiled at me and said thank you. And the next time I came in she had died. I called the resident to pronounce her, and he said, What the hell was she doing on the floor? And I told him. He told someone else, and the next time I came to work they told me to punch out, I was fired.”

  She smiles ruefully at me, shrugs. “And that was it. They were not interested in any explanations. They didn’t care that the other nurses all tried to defend me. They didn’t care that all my evaluations had been excellent.”

  I don’t know what to think about what she has told me. I don’t think what she did was wrong, yet it doesn’t seem quite right, either. Suppose Jay woke up and asked her to put him on the floor. Suppose I walked in and found him there, wouldn’t I be angry? But he would say, “No, Lainey, I asked for this.” Unless he was dead. Suppose I came in and he was dead on the floor. Wouldn’t I be angry? Even if I knew he’d asked to be put there? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.

  “What made you become a nurse?” I ask Wanda.

  “Oh well, I wanted … I had a need to express my compassion. I wanted to help.” She looks carefully at my face. “I care for people. They don’t always let you show that.”

  “No.”

  She leans back, sighs. “I’ll tell you, nursing school was murder. Once we were learning about hearts, and the instructor held up a beef heart—that’s what we had to study, a heart from a cow, only the medical students got to look at a human heart. But anyway, he stuck his finger through a valve to show us the connection between the atrium and the ventricle, then wiggled it a little like he was playing a game, and I passed out. Not because it was gross. Because it was unholy. I understood we needed to learn. But I thought we should learn with reverence. I mean, there was a cow, born to a mother cow, living on the earth, and now here was that cow’s heart in the hand of a human who was making fun of it.”

  “Yes,” I say, as though I know exactly what she is talking about. And I sort of do.

  “From the time I first started nursing,” she says, “patients would do things for me they wouldn’t do for other nurses.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, once I took care of this woman psychiatrist who’d been horrible to all the other nurses, she was really hard to get along with. She wouldn’t let anyone bathe her, and she was bedridden, believe me, she needed to get bathed. By the end of the day, I’d washed her. Turned out she was embarrassed to have anyone see her feet. Isn’t that amazing? I mean, the tenderness of that?”

  I smile.

  “And then when I was just an aide, a woman who’d had a colostomy picked me to be the one to ask about sex. She told me to close the door and then she said, ‘What about my husband? How does one have sex with this thing?’ She was quite formal, you know, a very rich woman, lying in bed in her turquoise negligee, her face all made up. ‘How does one have sex?’ I was sort of scared, but I knew she needed me to tell her something. I knew she wouldn’t ask anyone else. So I said, ‘Well, you just take off the bag and tape a little cotton square over the stoma. And then you forget about it. Because that’s not what he’s making love to.’ And then I asked her what was so attractive about the original exit, anyway. You know. A stoma is no worse than an asshole, was my opinion.”

  She leans forward again, speaks softly. “I’m just trying to tell you I know what you’re doing with all these things around your husband—his clothes, the kids’ drawings, all the things you bring in from home. And the way you talk to him, read to him. I support you one hundred percent. I think it really helps.”

  I look back at her, and my heart feels like a full bucket, hanging heavy in my chest. “Do you really?”

  “Yes.”

  “The kids have started doing it too,” I tell her. “They tell him little stories. Well, the younger one, Amy, does. Sarah’s still not sure. But she’s starting to come around. Last time we visited she told him she’d gotten an A on a test just before we left. She sort of yelled it from the middle of the room. I hope it’s okay. I hope it’s not … I don’t know, damaging or anything for them.”

  “I think it’s fine. I think it’s a good way for them to feel like they’re doing something too. And may I tell you something? I also think you should take care of yourself. You can crack up a little when these things go on for so long. You’ve got to bring a healthy self in here. That will help him most. He needs to feel your strength. And you need to do what you have to to keep it.”

  “Well, yes, I know. I know that. In fact, I just wanted to see him this morning, and then I’m going away all day. To a farm, with my neighbor and our children. To relax.”

  “Good.”

  I pick up my purse, pull it tight against my belly. “So, do you … honestly now, do you really think there’s a chance he’ll come home?”

  “I absolutely do.”

  “Yes. Well, I believe it too. I don’t know that anyone else does, though.”

  “You’d be surprised. When I told you we talk about you, that’s because we admire you.”

  I put my hands over my face, start to cry. Wanda puts her hand on my shoulder, speaks softly. “We’re going to get him back to you, Mrs. Berman.”

  I nod, sniff loudly. “Please call me ‘Lainey.’ ”

  “Okay. You know what the nurses where I used to work called me?”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Wonder.’ ”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “Yes, I thought so, too.” She stands up. “Go out to the country. Have a good time. And don’t worry, we’ll take care of him.”

&
nbsp; I come out into the hall, close the door quietly. I’m a little nervous. I wonder if I’ve said too much. I feel as though I’ve unzipped myself and handed my shy insides to a nurse named Wonder. If that was a mistake, it’s too late now.

  Alice and I are sitting at the edge of the brook, making circles in the water with our winter-white feet. The water is so clear it’s nearly invisible, so cold it feels like it’s biting. Still, when winter is newly gone and you can sit on the grass, it’s hard to pass up a stream running at your feet. We dangle past the point of ache and into numbness, then pull our feet out for a while, hold them in our hands to warm them. The kids are letting caterpillars crawl up the inside of their arms for the sticky tickle, shrieking out their pleasure. I have an image of the caterpillars rolling their eyes.

  “I wish I could live here.” Alice sighs, reaching out to stroke the low-hanging leaves of the tree beside her.

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Oh, you know. Jobs. Schools. Plus once I got here I probably wouldn’t like it anymore. I’d miss having things close by: movies, the dry cleaners. Broccoli. You know.”

  “Yeah. And me. You’d miss me, right?”

  She smiles, dips her fingers into the brook, flips water at me. Confirmation. Then, leaning back on her elbows, she says, “Isn’t it lucky that we live next door to each other? I never liked my neighbors before. Well, I liked them, but I couldn’t really be friends with them. Not like with you and Jay.”

  Jay. I realize I have actually had a moment of not thinking of him. But now his spirit wedges itself between the two of us. If he were here, he’d put his feet in the water too, maybe stand up and walk down the stream a ways. And then he’d turn back, look toward me, hold out a hand. We shared. Whenever possible, that’s what we did. Fudgsicles. Quilts. The pleasant burden of raising children. Money, and the lack of it. Once, when it was a week until payday and we had only a five-dollar bill left, we started fighting about what to do with it. Finally, Jay lit a burner on the stove and stuck the money in the flame, burned it right up. I couldn’t believe it. I stood there crying, saying, “Jesus, Jay, we could have gotten groceries. Why did you do that?” And he said it was because we weren’t ever going to do that again, fight about money. That we would never allow it to become that important in our lives. And we haven’t. It’s funny; I came from a family that was very, very “comfortable” financially, but I feel more comfortable now.