Before I get to discover there are no eggs or anything else solid in the house, the phone rings. I am accustomed to the answering machines of friends at school, the screens. We don’t have a screening machine down here at the beach. I pick it up.
“I thought you’d be there,” my mother says.
“I am.”
“I can tell.”
What? She’s a drinker, not a drunk.
“Your father,” she intones, “wants to go up for your commencement.”
“Tell him I have commenced.”
“He won’t have it.”
“Sure he will. Tell him to come down here and plan my future. That’s what he really wants to do. Tell him I have commenced the planning.”
She laughs — much more herself.
“I plan to scramble some eggs. I plan to have you all restock the liquor larder. I plan to wear a pink dress when he gets here. I plan hallucinations. Seriously, there’s no real booze here. Why don’t you come down?”
“Athenia had a stroke.”
“What?”
“Athenia had a major stroke. They say she’ll never move her left side again. I don’t know how they know that.”
“I thought you didn’t know where she was.”
“I didn’t. They surface.”
“Seems they do.”
The hangover I did not have when squeaking clean ocean sand I suddenly have listening to details of the incarceration of the invalid poor. The state has named a holding facility for the invalid poor Turtle Creek. I will be going, imprudently, but as certainly as I stand with a phone in one hand trying to massage both temples with the other, to this Turtle Creek. As carefree as a white rabbit, I will be going to Turtle Creek to see some hopelessness, some urine where you wouldn’t think it fair.
“Mom”—she’s talking about something—“Mother, that fellow who served paper down here? Involved with Theenie leaving, it seemed? Her daughter, or something—”
She says something that again makes me wonder if Thompson Time is all the time: “Blue suede shoes. Don’t judge me.”
“What?”
“I wouldn’t go.”
“Go where?”
“To see Athenia.”
“I know you wouldn’t. But you’re telling me so I can go. I am the naïf. That’s my job in this outfit, is it not?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was wondering what happened to that guy—”
“I don’t know what happened to that guy.”
She’s very deliberate, careful, betraying herself in the repetition. She’s sensitive about this old lover. I was right all along. She might as well be a schoolgirl trying to conceal a crush. I could ask her point-blank about others and get a straight answer, I think. I think to try her.
“Hey!”
“What!”
“Where is Jules Windham these days?”
“Selling funerals for Bilo Windham, as always.”
Yes.
“Do you want to hear about Turtle Creek if I go?”
“No.”
“Don’t let anyone know I’m here. Tell him I’m in Atlanta looking for a job. I will be there looking for a job until further notice.”
“Where will you be?”
“Right here. Looking for a job.”
“Good.”
The Doctor hangs up. She likes the idea of that son of hers holed up in an empty house. I don’t mind it myself. There are lots of jobs here — small ones that contribute directly to human comfort, such as removing the snowdrifts of sand and locating fresh eggs and fresh liquor, and large, cerebral ones that contribute directly to discomfort. I shall do a bunch of the small and a few of the large. Blue suede shoes, indeed. Do not step, I inform the Atlantic Ocean, on my blue suede shoes.
5
IT DOES NOT MATTER that I have not seen Theenie in some fifteen years, but I think it will matter when I wade into the halls of misery at Turtle Creek. Important, important to spot her in her wheelchair from twenty yards and smoothly, directly, confidently approach her, with a smug I-knew-you’d-be-parked-right-here look and an athletic grade into squatting during the final approach so that you land at her level, a hand on her arm to prevent more awkward intimacies or awkward lack of other intimacies. This business — intimacy warding off — you see the importance of when you walk in and a woman in a wet nightgown, backlit so you see her skeleton through it, declares, “Help me! What took you so long!” and approaches with her arms outstretched and with the determination of a living-dead zombie, and you look to the attendant escorting you to dissuade the woman, and the attendant politely steps back to let the woman have at you. You politely ease behind the attendant, who says, “What the matter with you?”
“I don’t know that woman.”
“They change in here, child.”
“I’m looking for a black woman. They change that much?”
The attendant chuckles and abruptly leaves, and you, a step later, follow, the begging woman not two feet away with her outstretched arms. Every patient — you’ve already been told they are not to be called inmates — who can recognize anything recognizes you as someone dear to her, all the way down the halls and through the big rec rooms.
I mistook two or three patients to be Theenie because I did not want to disappoint her by not recognizing her. Picturing her heavier or lighter, her hair perhaps thinner, bluer, her teeth perhaps gone — it was easy to see her in three or four other failing black women in wheelchairs. On the basis of one visit I will hazard a racial generalization: Incapacitated white women are indignant, certain of rescue, depressed, and angry; the black women beside them are at peace, not anticipating rescue, and not angry. They are not saying, in their postures and grasping and yelling, If we’d known it would come to this. … They are saying, We knew it would come to this. Somebody help them white bitches. Make ’em shut up.
So there I am.
“Which?” the attendant is saying.
“None which in here,” I say. I’m tired of this woman laughing at me, and I’m going to use a little language to fend her off.
“What her name again?”
“Athenia Small.”
“Small. Small.”
“Small.”
“She new?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on.”
I seem to have gained a measure of respect, or credibility, I can’t tell. There are things going on here I can’t even apprehend, let alone comprehend, I’m sure — I’m likely to start crying, for one thing. There is something profoundly wrong with acres of women weeping and fouling themselves and recognizing salvation in strangers. I get the feeling there is something unusual in visiting itself, but beyond that that there are not too many white boys coming to see a black woman, unless it’s some kind of odious, sentimental thing just like my visit is. This boy she raised come in once, they will say. “They” are the black women at the desk. Behind them, hidden, somewhere, are the white men in charge. I am one of them, in the final scheme of things. I know this, but in an atmosphere of confusion — a woman on the floor here, one weeping into drapes here, one addressing invisible kitties here, and all through all of it the urine smell — in this atmosphere I don’t feel like acknowledging any racial deferences or subtleties. I am in a place where survival is the issue, and everyone but me and my bossy, chuckling escort has missed the boat, and I am worried not about the delicate social minuet between me and her but about me getting out intact.