Range of Motion

by Elizabeth Berg

  “We can talk later,” the doctor says, putting her ophthalmoscope into her pocket. “Why don’t you just take a little time, now?”

  “Yes,” Jay says, and the sound of his voice makes my hand go up to my mouth. “Lainey?” he says then, and though I didn’t want him to see me crying, that is all I can do. I go over and hold him against me, and I weep so loudly I think I might crack the walls. I don’t know the words for this. I only know the feeling. It is over me like a blanket, in me like blood.

  EPILOGUE

  It is fall, and I’m working a lot of hours at Beverage World. Business has picked up; Frank may have to hire another person. Dolly has insisted that this time she does all the interviewing, and he has agreed. Although we usually eat at our desks, I had lunch out with Dolly last week, and she told me about her new boyfriend. “He’s nothing like Frank,” she said, “but he’s a real nice man. We have a good time together.” She was looking out the window when she told me that, and I saw reflected in her bifocals a couple walking down the street, arms around each other. “Well,” she said, looking back at me. “You know, at some point, you just have to move on.” I smiled, nodded. I felt so badly for her, sitting there in her powder-blue cardigan and smelling only slightly of a safe perfume. But she does not seem unhappy; she continues to enjoy the little relationship she has with Frank, and I have come to see that in the way they are able, they love each other. He notices anything new she comes in with, from a piece of jewelry to shoes to a slightly runny nose; she continues to carry his coffee in to him and I am careful to never put phone calls through at that time. There was a Friday when she was in there a good twenty minutes, and she came out with a color in her face that I thought made her beautiful.

  Jay is back to work almost full-time. He lost quite a bit of function in one arm and he goes for therapy at the hospital every afternoon. They say in a week or two he’ll be all done, good as new.

  It was a funny thing when he came home. Amy was afraid of him for a long time, weeks. I think she saw him as risen from the dead. Well, so did I, I guess. I was afraid he’d fall back into a coma; for a long time, I’d wake up several times a night and make him wake up, too. Finally we were both exhausted, and Jay asked me, in the gentlest of ways, to cut it out. He doesn’t recall anything specifically from when he was in a coma: for him, it was a long, strange nap. “Cinnamon?” I’ll say. “Do you remember smelling cinnamon?”, and he’ll say, “… No. Was there cinnamon there?” He does occasionally have a shiver of something, though, a gloved tap. He says it’s a feeling of nearly remembering something, then not. Losing it. He describes it as the way that none of us can remember being born, and yet we do seem to remember anyway, in that nearly all of us have a vague longing to go back somewhere. Jay says what else can it be but the womb, where all our needs were met before we knew we had them? I suppose that might be true, although my fantasy as a child was that I was from a superior planet whose most important members would soon come to reclaim me, hopefully when I was in Mrs. Menafee’s geometry class where, due to certain mathematical failings, I functioned as inadvertent class clown. I waited every day for people dressed in silver to walk into the classroom and astonish her—and save me. I intended to ask what took them so long.

  I told Jay all that I remembered about him being in the hospital, then in the nursing home. I had that turkey dinner for all the people who took care of him at the nursing home, too. I had to have it at the home, in the rec room, because otherwise a lot of people would have been working and wouldn’t have been able to come to our house. Gloria and Wanda and Pat, all Jay’s nurses came up and told him they were the ones who did this and that, and Jay listened in a kind of polite wonder. Flozell smacked him on the back and sat beside him the whole time; it was like they were war buddies. Jay goes to visit Flozell at least once a week or so now, and Amy goes along most of the time.

  It took me a while to tell Jay about seeing Evie. It was a Sunday night; we’d had Chinese food just like we always used to. The kids were in bed, and the little white boxes were all over the family room, sauces thickening at the bottoms. Jay started to clean up and I told him no, just to wait a minute, I wanted to sit there with him for a while and think about how happy I was that we were doing this again. He put his arm around me and we had our stocking feet up on the coffee table and I said, “You know, when you were gone, I had regular hallucinations. I saw a ghost, a ghost woman.” He pulled away, looked down into my face, concerned. “No,” I said, “it wasn’t a bad thing. She actually helped. She talked to me, made me feel better.” He wanted to know what she said, and I told him mostly just things that happened in this house, in this neighborhood. “Like what?” he’d said, and I told him about how there was a war bride from Japan a few doors down who’d renamed herself Shirley and who kept trying to whip cream with chopsticks, so the women in the neighborhood chipped in and got her a mixer. I told him about how Walter once came downstairs after he’d put the kids to bed, changed into his best suit, slicked his hair back. Evie was in the kitchen, finishing the dishes. He’d called her into the living room, turned on the radio, low, then bowed and asked her to dance. She’d felt a little embarrassed, but then she’d taken off her apron and her glasses, slid out of her shoes, turned off most of the lights, and stepped into Walter’s arms for Harry James and “I’ll Get By.” “Huh,” Jay had said. “That’s nice.” He’d looked at me for a long time after that, checking to see if I was all right, I guess.

  It was about a month after he was home that we finally had a fight, Jay and I. I have to say it was what let me know he was really back, that I could relax. I slammed the door and went over to Alice’s house and told her Jay was an asshole. She poured us glasses of wine and toasted me. She’s doing so well, Alice. I’ve met Ed’s lover, Sloan, and I like him. I asked Alice if Sloan was his real name or if it used to be Elmer and she said who knew. I know it’s an awful cliché, but Ed seems to have blossomed, really, to have opened up into himself, and he’s so much easier to be with. I’m not sure what the kids really think; I know they talk about it, but not around me. I tried to eavesdrop once, and they caught me, which is pretty embarrassing.

  Alice is dating a gorgeous-looking Chinese man who teaches astrophysics over at the university. Their favorite thing to do is go roller-skating at the big wooden rink a few blocks away. I don’t know. You tell me. He appreciates her; it’s a pleasure to see the way he watches her talking, the careful way he takes her hand. And she tells me he is the most fantastic lover. She won’t give me too many details, which I think might be the sign of something really special. Still, I keep after her. I’m dying to know.

  Sometimes when I’m alone in the house I kind of ask for Evie to come back, but she never does. I wish she would. I want to tell her something. I want to tell her about the day Jay came home, what it was like when he opened the door to his house and walked back in. How he stood for a long moment in the hall, and didn’t say anything. There were, of course, no words. There was just the slow lifting of his hand to the familiar banister at the foot of the stairs, the glint of the wedding ring that has never left his finger since the day I put it there. I want to say that I understood something at that moment, which was this: the gift is not that I got to bring Jay back. The gift is that I know what I brought him back to; and so does he. I suppose Evie knew that, though. I think that was all she was ever really saying.

  And so I am out here on the wooden stoop in my sweater worn thin at the elbows, and it is early morning, and I am looking out at my own backyard and at the trees beyond that and at the sky beyond that and I am thinking this:

  I am living on a planet where the silk dresses of Renaissance women rustled, where people died in plagues, where Mozart sat to play, where sap runs in the spring, where children are caught in crossfire, where gold glints from rock, where religion shines its light only to lose its way, where people stop to reach a hand to help each other to cross, where much is known about the life of the ant, where the gift of gett
ing my husband back was as accidental as my almost losing him, where the star called sun shows itself differently at every hour, where people get so bruised and confused they kill each other, where baobabs grow into impossible shapes with trunks that tell stories to hands, where rivers wind wide and green with terrible hidden currents, where you rise in the morning and feel your own arms with your own hands, checking yourself, where lovers’ hearts swell with the certain knowledge that only they are the ones, where viruses are seen under the insistent eye of the microscope and the birth of stars is witnessed through the lens of the telescope, where caterpillars crawl and skyscrapers are erected because of the blue line on the blueprint—I am living here on this planet, it is my time to have my legs walk the earth, and I am turning around to tell Jay once again, “Yes, here.” I am saying that all of this, all of this, all of these things are the telling songs of the wider life, and I am listening with gratitude, and I am listening for as long as I can, and I am listening with all of my might.

  ELIZABETH BERG

  ON

  Range of Motion

  For ten years before I began writing for a living, I worked as a registered nurse. Never mind that the work was hard—more than once, I literally had not time for even a bathroom break. (My husband never believed me about this, but it was true.) Never mind that I had to work on holidays and every other weekend and on people’s birthdays, my own included; I loved the job.

  There were many reasons for that. The biggest one was that it’s incredibly rewarding to offer care and comfort to someone in distress. I became a nurse because I wanted not to feel helpless in the face of severe illness; I wanted to get in there and make things better. And as a nurse, you get to work with such lovely people: compassionate, intelligent, dedicated people in the habit of putting others first, people who aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty and their hearts a little broken by becoming deeply involved with patients they can end up losing.

  I learned a lot about medicine in those years, but I learned more about human nature. I learned about bravery and resilience, about the many forms of grief, and especially about the importance of the little things in one’s life. I’ve said many times that nursing taught me the value of the “little” things that individuate and define our lives—the things that ultimately make it worth living. When you are really sick, what do you want? Honor and prestige? A big salary and a corner office with a spectacular view? Fame and fortune? No. What you want is your yellow mug that you drink coffee from every morning. You want the familiar landscape of your own home, the feel of your own bed beneath you. You want your friends and family, you want to appreciate a sunset from your front porch, a snowfall from your kitchen window, a Christmas pageant offered by five-year-olds. You want your own kind of cooking, your dog. All these small things are the glue that keeps you bound to your own life. They are the things that make you you. And in that respect, they are not little at all. They are huge. They are grand.

  As a nurse, I cared for a number of people who were in comas. And whenever I did, I was struck by an eerie sense of that person being there, unresponsive though they were. It was as if you could feel a presence hovering, a spirit not obtunded at all, but ever vigilant and available. In nursing school, we were taught that hearing was the last sense to go, and so we were meant to talk to our patients who were in comas, to assume that they could hear us, even if they couldn’t respond. I always felt that it was more than hearing that people in comas were capable of, but I was hard-pressed to say what exactly it was.

  One day I was working on my medical-surgical floor when someone I’ll call Helen Larson was admitted. She was a Liz Taylor look-alike, a stunningly beautiful woman with jet-black hair and pale blue eyes. She had complained to her husband of a terrible headache, and then suffered a bleed in her brain that rendered her unconscious. The prognosis was not good.

  Day after day, her husband sat at her side, holding her hand, talking to her, running the backs of his fingers down the side of her face. He refused to believe that his beloved would not recover. He put his faith in his wife’s doctors, in us nurses, in the science and art of medicine. But mostly he put his faith in a handkerchief. It was a small white one that he taped above Helen’s bed, right over her head. It was her lucky handkerchief, he said. It would help her get better. I don’t know how many people believed that, but I did. And after many long months, Helen woke up. By then, she had been transferred to a long-term care unit. When we heard the news that Helen Larson had awakened, a few of us nurses who had cared for her went to see her. She was still far from complete recovery; she sat in her wheelchair in a way that looked like she was half folded up. She did not speak, and her gaze was not particularly steady. But when it was my turn to squat down and look into her eyes, I felt she recognized me. Not by sight, but by something deeper.

  On the way back to our unit, one of the nurses said, “She didn’t know us.” But I wasn’t so sure about that. I think Helen knew a lot of things that she might never be able to articulate—not because of her condition, but because those things were more of the spirit world than of the physical one. Crouching there before her, I thought I’d felt that knowledge. It was like an old, archaic language that you hear and don’t understand at all but understand anyway. It was like a low whistle of wind in a cave, or a sudden shadow passing over you that makes for a shiver of recognition.

  Of such things are novels made, I suppose, or at least they are for me. Years later, I began Range of Motion with one goal in mind: I wanted to get inside the head of a person in a coma. So I had my character Jay walk under a huge icicle and get hit by it and rendered unconscious; and I had his wife, Lainey, attend to him with every handkerchief in her arsenal, so to speak. Like Helen’s husband, Lainey refused to believe her spouse would not overcome his circumstances. Despite bouts of despair, she held on to that belief; she was determined to will him back into existence. One of the ways she held on was to continue a silly practice she and her husband had indulged in, one of those things that a couple would be embarrassed to admit to anyone else, but that between them was secretly prized. Every night in bed, Lainey and Jay sang to each other in a made-up tune about what they had done that day. They called it “Telling Songs,” and it was one of those “little things.”

  In the end, the Telling Songs, the apple crisp, the children’s drawings, the soft work shirts, all the myriad things that Lainey brings to her husband’s bedside are what she hopes will make him recover. Let others bring knowledge of anatomy and physiology, of pharmacology and statistics. What Lainey brings to her husband is faith. Hope. And an abiding love.

  I wanted to title this book Telling Songs. When I shared that idea with a friend, she said, “Oh, you have to call it that! Because the Aborigines believe that they sing things into being.” And that is just what Lainey does, in the end, by holding on to their Telling Songs—she hopes the private, everyday ritual will reach Jay, and will help bring him back into being.

  I didn’t listen to my friend—or myself. I listened to someone else who told me to title it Range of Motion, but I wish I hadn’t. Because this book, like the lessons I believe can be learned when one is unconscious, is more of the spirit world than the physical one, and its title should reflect that. I hope that readers of this book will give themselves over to that world, and let themselves be transported, at least a little, to that luminously strange and mysterious place.

  QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  1. What did the epigraphs mean to you before you read the book? Did they seem to hint at any major themes in Range of Motion? How did the meaning of the epigraphs change for you, after you finished the book?

  2. In the Prologue, Lainey says that “sometimes lessons take the crooked path” (this page). She says that Jay’s accident was her way of reflecting all of her parts back to her, both “visible and unseen.” What lessons did Lainey take from this “reflection” of all of her parts? What things were revealed to her—about herself, and about her relations
hips—because of the accident?

  3. Humor plays an important role throughout Range of Motion. Despite the deep sadness of Jay’s coma, characters like Alice and Evie, the ghost woman, provide comic relief. Lainey even describes the accident as “Chaplinesque,” and it seems “kind of funny” on first telling. How did you react to the intermingling of sadness and humor throughout the story? What does it say about the way that Lainey, and perhaps everyone else, deals with the tragedies that interrupt normal, everyday life?

  4. Jays receives “range of motion” every day, so that his body doesn’t “forget” all of the movements it’s capable of. “Remember all that is here for you to use,” Lainey imagines the therapist’s hand telling Jay’s body (this page). How is Lainey’s offering of small reminders to Jay (his wallet, the kitchen spices, his soft work shirt) another version of range of motion? To what extent is Lainey giving herself range of motion in the way she goes about her day-to-day activities, while occasionally feeling distant and apart from it all?

  5. The small things that Lainey brings to Jay’s bedside have very tactile qualities: their scents or textures are all unique and powerful. Lainey’s imaginings of Evie have a similarly tactile quality: Lainey vividly conjures up Evie’s clothing, her cooking, her old-fashioned kitchen. What does the specificity of these sights, sounds, smells, and textures say about the power these goods have over us? About the important role they play in our imaginations and memories?