She

by Shireen Jeejeebhoy

chapter fifteen

  MISERABLE COMFORTERS

  ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER medical appointment. One of the men waiting next to her to see her GP Dr. Basset said being ill is like a full-time job, with all the doctors and therapists he has to see. He’s so right. Dr. Basset doesn’t make her wait too long this March Friday, which she’s grateful for. She had to skip TARC in order to see him even though the appointment is well before her regular TARC time. But she can’t do both in one day, and she’d cancelled her homemaker too as she’d needed a break from imposed order. By 11:00 a.m., she’s free and on her way home to an entire almost-uninterrupted day. Bliss. She dreams of being able to wake up, knowing she doesn’t have some chore to do, like TARC or acupuncture or shopping, of being able to go out and have coffee with Nance like of old. That other life though is growing faint in her memory, that life of weekly coffee dates with Nance at the Starbucks on Yonge, season’s tickets with Charlie to the Factory Theatre, nightclubbing with Belinda. Perhaps this failure of memory is what acceptance is. Sucks.

  The TTC at 11:00 a.m. is not so bad. It isn’t as infrequent and packed as right after rush hour; she actually finds a seat on the Woodbine North bus and even on the Bloor-Danforth subway. Unfortunately, some blonde-haired cutie has her music pulsing through her earbuds. Irritation floods her.

  Music.

  Oh, of course, she has her own. She pushes her own earbuds in, plugs them into her iPod Mini, and searches for music. Lenny Kravitz is sufficiently loud enough. She sits back on the flattened maroon fabric seat that’s not wide enough for her butt and shoulders and listens to American Woman. Her shoulder is pressed into the glass door partition, and the pain starts to seep through. She scootches over and sits partially on the steel seat dividers, like everyone else. The subway lurches to a stop, opening her eyes to the sight of one black-dressed young man sitting sideways on the forward facing twosome seat, back to the wall, his dusty shoes planted firmly on the aisle seat. Gross. Anger burns her chest. She looks away and down and sees used Kleenex, a paper coffee cup, and a couple of wrappers floating around underneath the three-seater opposite. Anger morphs to a storm that pushes against her lips, willing them to open and bark reprimands to that inconsiderate piece of —

  She presses her lips together, tighter and tighter. Stupid asshole, didn’t his mother teach him manners; thinks he’s entitled to shit all over communal property that her taxes pay for; what a useless f —

  Her lips try to part.

  And that blonde — she thinks she’s the princess of Sheba, entitled to fill the train with her crappy, bad thump thump thump. Wouldn’t know good music if she heard it, the f —

  Suddenly she scrabbles round in her waist purse for her sunglasses. She shoves them on, cranks up the volume, pulls her hat down, and crosses her arms. American Woman has gone on to Black Velveteen. The furious storm settles back into its pit.

  With relief, she steps off the last of the TTC vehicles she’s forced to take and hoofs it up her street, past the school with kids bursting out its doors, herself passed by cars driving north, until at last she sees her home. Blessed quiet envelopes her as she closes her door against the chaos outside and hangs up her jacket and hat. Smokey thumps down the stairs and leaps onto that dining room chair. Her cat had liked doing that so much, she had decided to leave it in the living room. Plus it was too much work dragging it back to the table.

  The chair comes to rest at precisely the right distance for her to stroke her cat. The tension leaves her as the soft fur tickles her hand and Smokey raises a purr to being obeyed. A song tugs at her mind, words are knocking at her consciousness, notes hovering just out of reach. Her hand stills on Smokey’s back, and then she suddenly trots upstairs. The keyboard cover resists being pulled off and with an irritated grunt, she yanks it up and to the side, dropping it on the floor. Pulling out the stool, she sits down, flexes her fingers, and looks at the keys. “Where is middle C?” she wonders. It’s so elusive. How can she play what’s nudging her mind if she doesn’t know where that damn key is? She sees it. It’s like a scene coming into focus in a pair of binoculars. She plays a few notes with her right hand, but they sound awfully low, and her arm doesn’t look quite right. She stops. Looks at the keyboard again, counts the keys, and realizes that what she’d thought was middle C was actually one octave down from the real middle C. Frustration flashes up. She raises her fists over the keys and freezes. The urge is so strong to slam them down, like she’s being egged on. She stands up, pushing the bench over, and steps to the desk in front of the window. Her hands refuse to unclutch; she breathes in deep the scene outside, of bare branches criss-crossing the air, up and up and up. She exhales slowly and lowers her head briefly to see last summer’s weeds stretching and waving to the sky. Clouds flit across her vision, cloaking the blue sky in grey. She slumps and lets go her fists. The greyness outside melts into the white IKEA gauze curtains on either side of the window. The black rod holding them up a sharp exclamation to the white walls. She’d liked the white and black combination when they’d decorated her music room, but today the starkness is like a sharp point of lost competence stabbing her over and over and over.

  Maybe she can’t play the keyboard, but she can write, the thought emerges. Rona has been pleased with her progress, said that she’s way ahead of the normal client. The idea that the normal client isn’t usually a writer punctures her burst of resilience. But head drooped, she still sits down in front of her tempered glass desk, on the plain wood chair, and notices her feet underneath. She wiggles her toes and watches the top of her soft slippers move like an undulating pink wave.

  Time moves, and her alarm to go eat lunch startles her. She fishes around in her pockets until she finds her Palm. She turns off the alarm, pulls a pad of lined paper toward her, and tries to write. She can feel the rough smoothness of the paper at the tip of her pen, smell the ink waiting to be released, but words elude her mind. Write, she admonishes herself. She pushes the pen hard into the paper, creating an indentation, and then stops. No letters, no words form under her hand. Her stomach hollows out; hunger calls her attention. She drops the pen, immediately forgetting she has a song to write.

  Smokey is crunching her kibble into dust as she slouches by. The fridge reveals not much for her. Grandmother had been distracted and had whipped through the store on Wednesday. And she’s eating more than usual this week. She’s so hungry. She grabs the last two slices of bread in their bag, a slice of pre-sliced cheese out of its plastic package, and the mayo jar. She slaps some mayo on the bread, forgetting the jar on the counter, places the cheese on one slice of bread, puts the second slice on top and pauses. There’s a tomato sitting on the counter, all ripe and good looking. But it would take time and energy to slice it. Eat! That’s all that’s in her head.

  And so she does.

  Charlie should be on lunch break about now. The cordless phone is lying on the table where she’d been using it that morning to monitor the call display as the usual raft of telemarketers rang and rang. She keys through its phone book to find Charlie’s number and dials.

  “You got Charlie.”

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Oh hey. “

  “Hi. Um, I just called to say hello.”

  “‘K.”

  “Um, hello. How’s it, how’s it going?”

  “Hang on, I got another call,” click. She waits, listening to the nothing sound of call waiting, sliding down in her chair.

  “So yeah, what’s up?”

  “I just got back from Dr. Basset’s. Thought I’d call, call you.”

  “Uh-huh.” She hears him scribbling. She struggles to think of something to say, knowing that a life full of medical appointments is not the most scintillating thing to talk about, but what else is there to say?

  “How’d it go?” Charlie asks into the silence.

  “It went well. He’s liking my progress. Thinks I’m doing well.” She relaxes into her chair, “He said my heart rate is still f-f-f-fast, but my
blood pressure is okay. No blood tests this visit.”

  “That’s great. Wait a sec, gotta get this.” Click. More dead air.

  “So when are you getting better?”

  “Huh?” she answers, perplexed.

  “You know, I mean out of this phase you got going on.”

  “Phase?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Um, no.”

  “Okay, look, I’ve never heard of Akaesman before. Okay, maybe I have heard of him. But I haven’t heard of him doing this kind of thing, and none of my other friends have either, you know. We all think you’ve been taken for a ride, and you gotta move on with your life.”

  “I haven’t been taken for a ride,” she says in a dead voice.

  “Yeah, you have. We’ve all heard stories of doctors creating work for themselves, therapists too. Gotta get this.” Click. She struggles to comprehend the hostility oozing out of the phone.

  Click. “Yeah, look, I’m busy here. I think you need to see a real doctor, one whom we can trust, a professional. We’re worried about you.”

  “You don’t need to be. I’m doing fine.”

  “Uh-uh. I’ll get back to you with a name. It’s time you made some changes. ‘K?” Click. This time he hangs up the phone for good in her ear.

  Changes? What is he talking about? All she does these days is change. Anger erupts; then it vanishes. She read one page, then two, and now she reads three in one day. She’s progressed to writing a whole page from a paragraph. She’s even remembering to feed and water Smokey every single day. Sure, she has that programmed into her Palm with an alarm, but that’s progress over before when she didn’t remember on her own.

  She leans back in her chair and faces the blood-red wall. The colour was so vibrant and rich when it went on the new drywall, it made them feel alive. She hates it.

  Energy seeps out of her. Using her knuckles to push herself up, one hand still holding the phone, she moves away from the table and stands up. The couch seems kilometres away, but she makes it and sighs as the cushions rise up to meet her. She slumps down and raises the phone to her eye level to stare at the display. It rings in her hand, startling her. It’s Bell, trying to reach her for the sixth time today, or so the Call Display says. She hates Bell. She already has her phone service with them. Why do they have to ring her too? Go to hell, she mouths at the phone. Stupid telephone company. She waits until the ringing stops, and then presses Talk. She’s too tired to call Nance, but if she doesn’t do it now, she won’t get her in the afternoon, or in the evenings, a time they used to chat regularly, catching up on the day. For the last few weeks, either Nance is not in or she’s in bed already. And she never gets her messages apparently. She was starting to get mighty pissed at her new boyfriend — what’s his name? — but Nance let it slip one time that he has a message pad he keeps by the phone to write down all the calls that come in, he’s that organized. She continues to stare at the phone, torn between her need to speak to an old friend, to connect with a fellow human being, and feeling like all she is, is a pest. Quickly, she punches the number in.

  “Hi, how are you?”

  “Hi Nance. Just calling to, to see how you are. You got a minute?”

  “I’m eating lunch.”

  “Oh, I can call back later. If you want.”

  “No, don’t,” she chews, swallows. “It’s best to talk now.”

  “Okay. How’s work?”

  “The usual. You wouldn’t believe what my boss did,” she crunches on something, “today. She complained to our big boss that I was late. I tell her that I take the same train I do every day to work, but it was delayed again. I couldn’t tell her why because they never tell you why. My cell doesn’t work down there, and I think I forgot to charge it anyway. I thought if I went upstairs to look for a pay phone, the train would take off without me — you know how that always works — and I’d be even more late for work. For Chrissake I was only five minutes late anyway. She says I’m always late. But I’m not. It’s not my fault the TTC has become more unreliable. I’ve been coming in on time, even early, for years, and suddenly I’m unreliable because the last couple of weeks, the TTC is always delayed and we’re stuck in a tunnel, and I can’t do anything to get there faster?” She sucks on a straw, the drink gurgling.

  “That’s awful. Why doesn’t she understand? Don’t they know when the trains get delayed?”

  “You’d think, eh? But no.” She bangs a can down on a table and continues her saga. She finishes about the same time she stops chewing.

  “What a day you’ve had. S-s-sounds rough.”

  “How’s it going for you?”

  “I went to see Dr. Basset again.”

  “How’d that go? The last time you went, you weren’t doing well, you had flu or something and got worse. Did he say how long you were going to take to get better?”

  “It took me a while to get over that. But I’m okay now. He s-s-said it wasn’t a cold, but traumatic rhi-rhinitis.”

  “Traumatic what?”

  “Rhinitis. A stuffy nose. He gave me a s-s-spray I have to use every day. It took a while to work. But I feel better now,” she says as if reciting racing scores.

  “Oh,” computer keys start clicking.

  “So anyway, um, he’s happy, uh, with my progress.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “S-s-says I’m doing well, um liked my blood pressure,” she pauses. “Thinks my heart rate is a bit high …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t know what he’s going to do.”

  “That’s the problem isn’t it? They don’t know much. It’s like you’re on this big downhill train to bad health, and they’re all screwing around. Charlie says he knows someone, a real doctor. We think you should see him.”

  “I am seeing a real doctor,” she says with a spurt of irritation.

  “Dr. Basset is a GP, what does he know? He has to go by what the specialists say.”

  “Not really,” she says to herself. “He’s got his own mind. He can read. He can think.”

  “These therapists are making you worse. They’re enabling you. You used to have a great memory. Now with having you use this Palm and writing Post-its everywhere, your memory is bad. We notice you forget things, yet you know what’s going on in the world. What’s up with that? You say you can’t read, but you read the papers more than we do.”

  “Yeah, the headlines,” she grimaces silently. “I can really fool people just by quoting headlines.”

  “So there’s nothing wrong with your memory. And then there’s your depression.”

  “My what?” she exclaims. Fury licks at her neutral mood.

  “You’re depressed. Anyone can see that.”

  “I am not!”

  “You don’t need to get angry. You’re taking it the wrong way. We love you. Depression is nothing to be ashamed of, but you’re not dealing with it. It’s time for you to change.”

  There’s that change thing again.

  “You’ve always been a reader, you’ve always written these amazing songs. When was the last time you wrote a song? These so-called professionals have killed that in you, not this Akaesman no one’s heard of. That’s just an excuse to blow up your problems worse than they are. All you need is to take medication. That’s nothing to be ashamed about.”

  Right.

  “Prozac is great stuff. It’ll make you so much better. You’ll want to read and write again. You’ll see. You should talk to Dr. Basset about putting you on it. But you need to see this doctor. He’ll know what to do.”

  Like the people I see don’t?

  “Okay? You know what, I’m having a small party. Only twenty people or so. I think you should come. It’ll be good for you to get out. I know you say crowds make you feel claustrophobic, but it’s your moping around the house that’s making you claustrophobic and depressed. You have to get out more, out of the quiet, become used to dealing with crowds.”

  As if I wasn’t used to deali
ng with them before, as if I didn’t love parties before, as if I wanted to start hating them. Not.

  “It has nothing to do with Akaesman. Besides I want to talk to you, but I don’t have time for our phone calls. They’re so long.”

  Maybe ‘cause you don’t answer them for days on end.

  “A party will be a great way to catch up. How about it? It’s this Saturday. Nothing fancy, just some cookies and wine. It’ll be after dinner. I know you have some funny diet going on, but it won’t hurt you to drink a little bit, have some cookies. You can’t expect us to accommodate your every need. You have to be flexible. It’ll be good for you to let loose for a change. Okay?” She suddenly hisses, “My boss is coming. Bye.”

  She jabs the End button. Why did she call? Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  You’re not stupid.

  Claustrophobic. Well, that’s one way of putting it. More like groups overwhelm her, blanking her mind, tensing her muscles, scratching at her amplified senses; crowds make her want to run screaming for the closest private bathroom where she can lean over the sink until her nerves calm down. It’s hard to talk one-on-one in groups with all the competing calls on her attention, the many voices, the diversity of clothing and colours, the overflowing buffets with their competing smells of sweet and drink, the odd perfume or cologne punishing her nose, the brushing of auras against her skin, the cacophony. She shudders at the nightmare.

  The phone rings. She lifts it to her eyes. It’s Bell again. They’re so faithful. They’ll keep calling her until she finally answers. Only they keep calling her. Only they want to connect with her.

  Smokey jumps up beside her. Absentmindedly, she strokes her cat’s tiny, soft head, her own head being supported by the couch back, her spine curved across the seat, her legs sprawled out from the seat. Smokey pushes her hand hard up and stomps onto her lap, forcing her to sit up with a grumbled ouch. Smokey kneads her paws into her jean-clad legs, turns a few times, and then snuggles down.

  ~~~*~~~