Suddenly her body is all that matters. How it’s let her down.
And how fundamentally lonely it is to live inside a body year after year and carry it always in a forward direction, and how there is never any relief from the weight of it, even when sleeping, even when joined, briefly, to the body of another. An x-ray of her left knee reminds her just how insubstantial she is, has always been — an envelope of flesh, glassine. She lives now in the wide-open arena of pain, surrounded by row on row of spectators. The nights are endless, the morning sun a severity. Those hospital mornings!
A thermometer planted between her lips, her blood pressure roughly taken, and a cardiac monitor rolled into her room, heavy, masculine, with dials like a human face, ready to condemn her vascular weakness. Her ancient feet poking out at the side of the sheet have an oyster-like translucence and are always cold, though, oddly, no one notices this, no one says, “Why is it your feet are so cold, Mrs. Flett?” Urine passes from her body through a catheter stuck between her legs and disappears along with other cloudy fluids into the unknown. Into the universe. She spits into a basin, makes obscene gurgling sounds when brushing her strong old teeth, trying to remember a time when her body had been sealed and private.
After a few days the drainage tube is removed from her nose and the intravenous needle from her arm, and she is told — with a congratulatory salute — that she has earned the right once again to partake of food and liquids. “Some lemonade’ll do you good, sweetie-pie,” the juice girl yells into her ear. “A person can never, never get enough fluids.” This girl with her rolling cart of apple juice, milk, iced tea, and lukewarm cocoa is eighteen years old, black-faced, purple-lipped, with a high, tight, one-note laugh: oppressive.
In the early morning hours Mrs. Flett experiences nightmares that are uniquely invasive, reaching all the way to her heart’s core, and their subject, which she can never recollect afterward, is violent. “It’s just the drugs,” her doctors tell her, “a common complaint.”
In her much milder daytime dreams she drifts through scenes shabby like old backyards, dusty, with strewn trash in the flowerbeds and under piles of dead shrubbery, past streets where white-faced men and women are watering lawns choked with plantain, dandelions, and creeping charlie, lawns that because of ignorance and insufficient money are doomed never to flourish.
In the pleat of consciousness that falls between sleeping and waking she is capable of marching straight into the machinery of invention. Sketching vivid scenery. Laying out conversations, arguments. Certain phrases, remembered and invented, rattle in her afflicted head, taunting her with their rhythms and abraded meaning.
“The chaplain’s here to see you, sweetie-pie.”
“What?” Out of a spiral of thin-colored sleep.
“The chaplain, Mrs. Flett. Y’all feel like talking to the chaplain?”
“Who?”
Louder this time. “The chaplain. Reverend Rick. You remember Reverend Rick.”
“No.”
“Hey, you do so. You had yourself a real nice prayer together just yesterday. And some Bible verses.”
“No.”
“Hey, Mrs. Flett, don’t give me that stuff — you remember the chaplain, sure you do.”
“No.”
“No what?”
“No, I don’t want to see him. Not today.”
She has a private room at the end of the hall with a wide uncurtained window. In the days following her surgery she lies, wretchedly, in bed and during her brief waking moments stares out at the pale concrete Florida architecture, pink, green, lavender, like frosted petits fours shaped by a doughy hand and set out to stiffen and dry. The sun shines down on dented station wagons, glints on the heads of young mothers cooing at their children and banging car doors, and boils into whiteness the cracked cement fence that surrounds the parking lot. Doctors park their Mercedes and Lincolns in a reserved section close to the hospital doors, and the tops of these cars gleam with the hard brilliance of cheap candy, a rainbow of hues.
“No, I won’t see the chaplain today,” she says with dignity, with what she believes is dignity.
“If that’s what you want, so okay.” Shrugging.
“That’s what I want.”
“It’s up to you.”
“I know.”
“It does a world of good, though, the words of Jesus, the sweetest words there are in this crazy mixed-up world of ours.”
“I’m too tired today.”
“It’d perk you up. Hey, I see it happen every day, that’s the honest truth. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ The best medicine there is and it’s free for the taking.”
“No, really, I don’t think—”
“Whad’ya know, here’s Reverend Rick now. How ya doin’, Reverend? Why don’ya come on in for a minute or two. Cheer up our patient here, who’s all down in the dumps.”
“Please, I’m—”
“So — feeling up to a little chat, Mrs. Flett?”
“Well, I—”
“I could always come back tomorrow.”
“Well—”
“I’ll just stay a minute. Sure wouldn’t want to tire you out.”
“Oh, no.”
“Pardon? What’s that you say, Mrs. Flett?”
“Please sit down. Make yourself—”
“Afraid I didn’t quite hear—”
“Make yourself, make yourself”—here Grandma Flett comes to a halt, pushes her tongue across the ridge of her lower teeth, panics briefly, and then, thank goodness, finds the right word—”comfortable.”
“I’ll just pull up a chair, Mrs. Flett, if that’s okay with you.”
“So good of you to come.”
God, the Son and the Holy Ghost; suddenly they’re here in Grandma Flett’s hospital room, ranged along the wall, a trio of paintings on velvet, dark, gilt-edged, their tender mouths unsmiling, but ready to speak of abiding love. Not a sparrow shall fall but they — what is it they do, these three? What do they actually do? I used to know, but now at the age of eighty I’ve forgotten. It seems too late, somehow, to ask, and it doesn’t seem likely that young Reverend Rick will put forth an explanation. The cleansing of sins, redemption. And somewhere, a long way back, the blood of a lamb.
Something barbarous. A wooded hillside. Spoiled.
“Afraid I didn’t quite catch what you said, Mrs. Flett.”
“I said, it’s so good of you to come.”
Is Mrs. Flett shouting?
No, it only seems that way; she’s really whispering, poor thing.
From her trough of sheets. From her pain and bewilderment. Her tubes and wires. Her constricted eighty-year-old throat. The drugs. The dreams. Her feet, so chilly and damp, so exposed, ignored, and doomed. The pastel scenery outside her expensive window, the car doors slamming in the parking lot, Jesus and God and the Holy Ghost peering down on her in their clubby, mannish way, knowing everything, seeing all, but not caring one way or the other, when you come right down to it, about the hurts and alarms of her body — at this time in her life. Now. This minute. Go away, please just go away.
“It’s so good of you to come.”
Did you hear that, the exquisite manners this elderly person possesses? You don’t encounter that kind of old-fashioned courtesy often these days. And when you think it’s only two weeks since her bypass, six days since a kidney was seized from her body. And her knees, her poor smashed knees. Amazing, considering all this, that she can remember the appropriate phrase, amazing and also chilling, the persevering strictures of social discourse.