Anna in Chains (15 page)

The men stepped into the hall to hold a feverish consultation. They argued in great agitation as if over a point of law in the Torah—this pettiness was in their genes. Also, they had seen Anna carry on and knew she wasn't bluffing.

The solution they reached was a device now in place between her legs—some kind of thick rag (supplied by the nursing home) which, at intervals, was pulled out by an aide and replaced with a new one.

No, there were tortures in this existence her daughters had not yet begun to imagine: the bowel impactions, for example, which had happened to Anna several times due to her inactivity and her lack of solid food. When this occurred, when the aides noted that a week had passed without results, they set upon her some young Mexican aide (sometimes a young fellow just over the border and working cheap) who was given license by the nurses (who hated to do it themselves) to thrust his gloved fingers into Anna's private recesses to unstick the stalled products of digested “Gevity.” She had to submit. She had no choice. She sometimes screamed in pain during the procedure. And in recent weeks she imagined the worst, that maybe one certain aide enjoyed doing it to her, came in during the dark hours after midnight and turned her on her side, did things to her behind her back, said it was orders on her chart from the doctor. He took a long time doing it, with her turned on her side, away from him. She couldn't see his face or tell exactly what he was doing (and maybe not doing things only to her). She didn't know his name. She didn't even know if he worked here. Who would believe her if she told anyone her fears? And if she reported him and he was fired, who knew what he would do, come back with a gun and kill her? Kill her children! Never mind. What did it matter? She wasn't a woman. She was no longer human, no longer a sexual being.

When her turn came to be showered here, by male aides or female aides, it was all the same, they sat her naked on a chair with a hole in it, wheeled her under the cascading blasts of water—first too cold, then too hot. They used a washcloth first on her body, her private parts, and then, last of all…on her face. She was outraged; she sat there, freezing, burning, singing her tune, “I wish I were dead,” saying it out loud and to herself, shouting it, like a Hallelujah chorus, filling her mouth with water and spitting out the words.

So how did her daughter have the nerve to tell her she should have a better attitude?

Her attitude had worsened after she had learned the cost of her hospital bill from her hip surgery. She still couldn't believe it.
Eighty-seven thousand dollars!
For consultations and tests and machines and technicians and therapists and surgeons and heart specialists and lung specialists and blood specialists and brain specialists and stomach specialists and several psychiatrists to find out why she wanted to die. (Their brilliant diagnosis was: “Depression possibly related to recent health setbacks.”) All this knowledge for Anna's benefit, all these geniuses gathered around her singing gibberish:

No wonder Medicare had no money left for her diapers. But what bothered her was the stupidity of it. Eighty-seven thousand dollars? Anna had never seen that much money in her life, not at one time, not in one place. But to think what money like that would have bought her at another time of her life, another place. An education! Music lessons with a master teacher. A house for herself and her husband and children. Freedom, space, the ocean, the mountains, rivers, eagles flying overhead. Maybe even vacations (which she and Abram could never afford to take), a night in a hotel, good meals in restaurants, a car that wasn't fifteen years old. She couldn't bear to think about this; the tube in her stomach, the machine pumping in the “Gevity”—this alone cost eight hundred dollars a month, more than Anna had ever paid for rent, ever, anywhere, in all the places she had lived in her life. For the conveniences she had now, a narrow bed, a five-inch TV, and all the complimentary tortures of this existence, someone was writing a check for thousands of dollars every month to the Orthodox Jew with his beard and his matzo crumbs.

“How can I get in touch with Dr. Death?” Anna asked her daughter. “This Kevorkian doctor. I want to speak to him.”

“He would never consider you, Ma,” her daughter said. “You're not terminally ill. You're not even dying.” “What would you call this?” Anna asked.

“That's not the point. You don't have a fatal condition.”

“I have the human condition.”

“Yes, but you're not
dying
.
Not right now
.”

“Excuse me,” Anna said. “Are you suggesting I'm dancing the night away?”

“You make it hard for me, Ma. I don't know what to say. If I could fix you, I would. I'd do anything if I could. But I'm only human, too.” Her daughter looked over toward The Crab's side of the room; Anna knew what she was thinking. When The Crab's daughter visited, the two of them chatted briefly, played three hands of gin rummy, prayed to Jesus, watched TV, and then said a brisk goodbye. No operatic crescendos, no Sarah Bernhardt pronouncements, no farewell deathbed scenes. But The Crab didn't have Anna's grasp of the nature of existence. She didn't see the long view and therefore couldn't make judgments. She didn't excoriate the universe; she simply didn't have the brains for it.

“Janet, have a little human sympathy for me.” (She knew she should leave it alone, but she couldn't.) “I have nothing to do here all day but think of how I'm in pain, how I'm suffering. How they turn me over every two hours. How I have a bed sore at the base of my spine. How my right arm is swollen and paralyzed. How my heels hurt. How I have a pain in my chest all the time.”

“Ma, maybe if you thought of something else besides yourself. I always offer to bring you books on tape and a cassette player. You could listen to all the great books you never read. You could finally get your education!”

“I'm not interested. What do I need an education for now? To help me in my future career?”

“To enlarge your horizons. You could listen to tapes of all the music you love. For pleasure. Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart. “

“Just thinking of a piano makes my heart break. Hearing one would kill me.”

“So it would kill you. I thought that's what you want, anyway,” Janet said. “Look, I'm sorry, Ma. I didn't mean that. But what is, is. This is where you are. This is your fate now. You have to make the best of it.”

“Give me liberty or give me death,” Anna said.

“If I actually handed you a poison pill, would you take it right now?” her daughter demanded. For an instant, Anna thought her daughter was going to produce one from her pocket.

“You know I can't swallow anything by mouth,” Anna said in self-defense. “I'm on a feeding tube.”

Anna checked the large-print schedule taped to the wall and saw that there was an “activity” taking place in Unit Nine. She was getting bored by her own histrionics.

“You'll wheel me over, I'll enlarge my horizons,” she told her daughter. “They drag in all these unconscious souls who sleep and drool the whole time, while some poor girl from Mexico, who can hardly speak English, asks us if anyone knows how much two-plus-two is, and then she reads us recipes from the paper for chili beans. Tell me, Janet, are any of us going to be cooking chili beans in the near future?” Anna motioned with her movable fingers to her daughter. “Go get the nurse now and tell her to unhook me from the feeding tube. It's pumping me so full that I'm gaining five pounds a week. I never weighed more than 105 in my life and now I'm 133 pounds. Tell the nurse I want to be put into the wheelchair.”

Anna braced herself for the ordeal. Two male aides came in and, chattering to each other in Spanish as if Anna were not there at all, they rolled and jerked her around on her bed. First they needed to put on Anna's cotton robe. They needed to change the wet diaper-rag. They needed to undo the feeding tube from its socket and insert the sealer plug. Anna's daughter waited discreetly in the hall while they got her dressed and lifted her into the padded wheelchair. Anna screamed repeatedly as they pinched her skin, hoisted her roughly, dropped her down too hard, nearly broke her ribs as they let go of her. When her daughter finally wheeled her down the corridor past the reflecting window of the beauty parlor, Anna turned away her head. “I haven't looked at myself in a mirror since I've been here. Why would I want to look at a corpse?”

“Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

The song coming from the activity room hit Anna like a hot wind. “I forgot. Bible Study is on Thursday,” she told Janet. “Turn me around.” They were in the breezeway between units; the goldfish fountain gurgled and sloshed gum wrappers among the mottled, bloated-looking fish. White-coated aides, the beautiful dark-haired young men and women on their breaks, sat on the hard metal chairs and flirted, teased, laughed, as if this place they worked in were a carnival, a celebration on the outskirts of town where the freaks were incidental, where the true purpose of their work was pleasure, laughter, and seduction. They had shining skin, ebony hair, brilliant smiles; they were aching to start making their thousands of babies together, Anna could feel the urgency in their voices.

Janet had stalled the wheelchair; Anna didn't really want to go back to her room and stare at The Crab, not after all her arduous preparations, repositionings, and mechanical adjustments, nor did she especially want to hear that Jesus loved her. Clapping could be heard from the activity room; a man's deep voice exhorted everyone to join in.

“Oh, wheel me in, anyway,” Anna conceded. “What can we lose?” Janet turned her in a circle and pushed on. Inside it looked like a train station full of the lame and the halt waiting for passage to Lourdes. Anna wondered how it would be now if she'd been raised a believer. Jesus up on a cloud, arms extended, to welcome her into heavenly bliss, Jesus to forgive her meanness and sarcasm, Jesus happy to bathe her brow in the waters of peace. Jesus her handsome lover there to soothe her pains, console her for her losses, cherish her tenderly for eternity.

Instead, what legacy did she have from her own pale religious beginnings? Nothing but the memory of a father who forbade her to sing the name of Jesus in Christmas carols at the public school. And now what did she have? An Orthodox Jew-businessman with a long beard waving matzos at her.

Janet bumped her over the threshold and found a place for Anna under a vent that already was blowing cold air on her neck and would probably give her pneumonia that wouldn't kill her. Janet herself took a seat on a torn plastic couch beside a Down's Syndrome woman (she could have been fifteen years old or thirty) wearing a pink apron with bunnies on it.

Anna scrutinized the crowd; she didn't recognize a single person. These inmates were
young
—they had to be from some other circle of hell, not the toothless wing or the Alzheimer's wing. The young man conducting Bible Study, the one with the deep voice, was very tall, very handsome. He wore tight blue jeans with a silver belt buckle, and a plaid shirt open at the neck with a bolo tie hanging loose on his hairy chest. He was talking now in deep, low tones that resonated right up through the wheels of Anna's chair and shivered into her lacelike, filigreed bones.

“Are you impatient?” he asked. “Are you tired of waiting for the miracle? Do you think it will never come?” Anna looked her daughter's way and rolled her eyes. Janet seemed to be listening attentively, without hostility. “Do you wake up every day and think, ‘Today I'll be saved? Today I'll be released and go home to my Heavenly Father?' “

There was a murmur of agreement in the room. Anna glanced around again, looking to see if any of the usual senile vegetables, the living dead, the comatose catatonics, had been wheeled in. But around her were only the hollow-eyed young, the MS victims, the severely retarded, the quadriplegics, the Lou Gehrigs, the anorexics past the point of no return. Her heart skipped a beat then landed in her gut like an anchor thrown from a ship. (Was this going to be her fatal heart attack? Here, now, with Jesus flapping his wings overhead?)

“My wife left me years ago,” the handsome man said, “and every year, on our anniversary, I ask myself, ‘Is this the year she'll return to me?' I always set out some flowers on the hall table, and I look out the window for her, hoping to see her, with her beautiful gold hair, coming up the walk. Like all of you, I'm tired of waiting. I'm full of despair. But then one day it occurred to me: the longer I've waited, the closer I am to the day it will happen! So you see?
We're all closer! Every one of us. We're almost there!
Don't you just feel it? If the miracle wasn't yesterday, isn't today it may be…tomorrow! Even tonight! Because it's coming, we all know that, don't we?”

A shimmer of assent, like the whirr of hummingbirds' wings, fluttered across the room. Anna felt the breeze of it lift the hair on her neck (unless what she felt was the air vent). Just in front of her was a tiny girl-like woman on a downy fluff of deep padding, in a wheelchair designed like a reclining couch. The girl was emaciated, weighed less than a bird, couldn't have been more than twenty. Her short fine hair was cut like a boy's. She was watching the handsome man with her huge, dark eyes, beautiful eyes, she was following his every movement, taking in his power, his sweetness. Anna had an impulse to call out to him, “Never mind about your wife, come and take care of this girl, she's lonely, she needs you. Put your arms around her. Kiss her with your lips. Give her a taste of love before it's all over.”

Now Anna noticed a young man strapped upright into a wheelchair, his face newly shaven (she saw a spot of blood on his cheek, the aide must have nicked him), but he had red lips, blue eyes, he was beautiful. He, too, was listening to the handsome man who promised the coming miracle. Next to him was a wasted young man, displaying the angles of his skeleton. He looked like the AIDS victims Anna had seen on television. Perhaps he had tasted too much love and was dying of it. She saw spastics and cripples and mutes—with their faces radiant and lit from above.