The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (14 page)

It’s Birdie’s chronic lymphatic leukemia that has her in the hospital again. She’s done well for a long time, but now things are starting to act up. She’s getting some kind of ex-perimental immune system therapy. If it works, she’ll get another reprieve. If it doesn’t, well, it doesn’t. Birdie tightened her mouth when she told Ethel that last part, then took in a breath and looked pointedly away. She had the air of someone who had just been grossly insulted, and Ethel supposed she had been.

Ethel takes her curtains down and shakes them out.

Maybe they’re not that bad; when she looks at them now, they don’t seem that bad. She hangs them back up and fluffs them out a little. There. Better, if only by virtue of having had someone notice them. “Things have feelings, too!” Ethel used to say, as a little girl; and she still believes it, actually. Why not. Stranger things have been discovered. Plants and
their
feelings. Dogs and their emotions.

The health benefits of dark chocolate—that was a
good
one. As opposed to Pluto being stripped of its planetary status, that was deeply disturbing. Though not of course to Pluto, which simply continued to orbit, oblivious of its status, out there until it wasn’t. Simple.

Ethel checks her watch. She’ll go and run some errands: the bank, the drugstore, a turkey sandwich at Sub-

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way, and then she’ll go to the hospital. Nothing like having a friend immobilized to make you appreciate your own freedom. She has time to go to the library, too, and she has to quash the immediate impulse to find something for Birdie there, surely her friend couldn’t refuse a library book—it was free, it was returnable. But Birdie would refuse it. She would say thank you but she really didn’t feel like reading. And anyway, maybe a library book didn’t belong in a hospital, where it could get all full of germs. It wouldn’t be polite to bring a library book there. Think of the next person who checked it out, catching something terrible.

Ethel wipes off her kitchen counter, straightens the rag rug in front of the sink, centers the fruit bowl on the little round table. “See you later,” she tells her kitchen.

Ethel bought her house ten years ago, six months after her husband died. It’s on a block lined by tall trees, whose tops meet in the middle of the street like crossed swords at a military wedding. Her place is a little bungalow, Chicago yellow brick, the smallest property on the block, but truly the loveliest, Ethel thinks. She got it for a song, because it had the original bathroom and kitchen, which Ethel preferred. It has a sweet front porch outfitted with a swing, a mature garden out back, small but lush, and art glass high at the tops of the windows that makes for churchlike spills of color on her oak floors in the late afternoon. The closets are small, but what does she need with huge closets? And the closets have glass doorknobs, which she loves. As a girl, she used to pretend the glass doorknobs in her parents’

house were diamonds, and they all belonged to her. Her kitchen sink, too, is similar to the one she grew up with, and she likes to wash her dishes there, all her flowered china that she now uses instead of saving. She splurges on 108

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Williams-Sonoma dishwashing soap for her dishes. Birdie does, too. Birdie said once she felt so thrilled and guilty when she got that dish soap, it was like buying marijuana.

“Have you had marijuana?” Ethel asked, astonished, and Birdie said no, not yet. But she
would
have it. She didn’t think she would like to smoke it, she had never liked smoking; instead, she would have it in those brownies. She said it would probably help her glaucoma. She’d get hold of some, she said, and she and Ethel would stay in and watch Cary Grant movies and order out for Chinese, wouldn’t that be something? They would have to draw straws for who would answer the door in their condition.

“But where do you get it?” Ethel asked, and Birdie said she had no idea and that was that, they had never spoken of it again.

Birdie lives in a high-rise with other older people, and she hates it. She calls it a prison with wall-to-wall carpeting. When her daughter moved to Los Angeles last year, she talked Birdie into moving from her house into the high-rise so she wouldn’t have to worry about her, and Birdie is plenty mad at her daughter now. Getting madder every day, too. Her daughter had wanted Birdie to move to L.A. with her, but Birdie had refused. And Ethel had seconded the motion. What would Birdie do in L.A.? Well, what would Ethel do without Birdie, that was the question.

On the bus, Ethel sits on a seat for the handicapped. She doesn’t need it, but no one else knows that—wear a hat and some old lady shoes, and you can do whatever you want. She stares out the window at all the different kinds of people walking down the sidewalk: men with briefcases talking on cell phones, kids with backpacks talking on cell phones, mothers pushing strollers that look like lunar
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landing devices and talking on cell phones. Ethel likes to watch the children best. She was never able to have any, and Ed wouldn’t adopt, kept holding out hope that Ethel would get pregnant. Finally, it was too late, they were in their forties, and they made their dog their child. Though not like today! No, no dog bakeries or miniature Harley-Davidson jackets or playdates for their Archie. He just got to sleep on the bed, and on his birthday he got a hot dog.

The hospital lobby is crowded today, a woman dressed in an elegant black pantsuit and quietly weeping, holding on to her husband’s hand. A couple of young women laughing about something that’s in one of their purses.

There is also a group of about ten people all of whom seem to be together, and they look positively giddy—Ethel guesses they’re taking turns visiting someone up in Mater-nity.

Sometimes Ethel thinks everyone should come and hang around in a hospital for a few minutes every day. The things that go on here! The births and the deaths, the miracles and the failures. The anxious questions, the careful answers. The sad conversations about what to do next, the joyful ones addressing the very same question.

Ethel sees the doors of one of the elevators opening, and she walks quickly toward it—sometimes the elevators here can take a long time, and nothing makes her more impatient than a slow elevator. She’s one of those who will punch the Up button again and again, though she knows it doesn’t help. Well, it helps her.

Inside the elevator, there’s an orderly standing beside a gurney on which a patient is sleeping. “Going up?” the orderly asks. He’s come from the basement, where the cafeteria is, but Ethel doesn’t think he’s coming from the cafeteria.

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“Yes, thanks,” she says and looks quickly over at the patient. He’s an old man, his arms full of purplish bruises.

Ethel winces and looks away. She wonders if the man is sleeping after all—she hears no sound of him breathing.

And that orderly was overly cheerful. She sneaks another look at the patient and sees his chest rise. There. Thank goodness! Well, silly of her to suppose they transport dead bodies on the elevator mixed in with everyone else.

Though maybe they should. Really. Because if there’s one thing you’re aware of in a hospital, it’s that people die.

They die and probably get sent to the morgue in those terrible body bags with handles that allow you to carry a person like a duffel bag. But maybe they just use sheets, that would be nice. Ethel hopes when she dies she gets wrapped up in a sheet with a decent thread count.

The elevator door opens, and the orderly pushes the gurney out ahead of Ethel, the patient still sound asleep on it, or pretending to be, Ethel supposes he might be pretending in order to spare himself the stares of the other passengers. And wasn’t she one of them, someone standing there stealing looks at the poor man: his knobby collar-bones, the tiny constellation of moles at his temple, the wedding ring worn thin on his finger.

Ethel walks the short distance down the hall to the station where Birdie is. She smiles at the nurses as she goes past the desk. So young, so pretty, and many of them are really very nice, though they certainly don’t spend much time with their patients, not like they used to. And they don’t wear white uniforms and caps anymore, either. Why not? What was wrong with those caps? They were badges of honor! And they let people know who was in their hospital rooms. Now everyone wears scrubs, and you can’t tell the IV therapist from the psychiatrist from the cleaning
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staff. Birdie only yesterday asked a woman she thought was a nurse for a pain pill and the woman said in broken English she was just there to “take out it the trashes.”

Nurses don’t have time for anything anymore. Back rubs? Ha! But they used to do back rubs at least twice a day.

Ethel had a friend named Vicky who’d been a nurse years ago, and she told a story about once giving a back rub to a young man as part of his “HS” care, “hour of sleep” that stood for. You changed the draw sheet, helped the patient wash his face and brush his teeth, and finally used the thick, unscented hospital lotion to give him a back rub.

After Vicky had finished the man’s back rub, she’d asked if there was anything else he needed. “Well,” he’d said, “my testicles have been feeling
really dry. . . .
” Ethel shrieked and covered her mouth when she heard that story, then asked from behind her hand, “So what did you
do
?”

“I handed him the bottle of lotion,” Vicky said. “I told him, ‘Here you go, try this.’ And then I walked out of his room.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Ethel said, shaking her head. To have a young man so boldly ask you for . . . Well. Those nurses. They saw everything.

When Ethel comes into Birdie’s room, she sees that her friend is asleep. The head of the bed has been raised, and Birdie is bent far over to one side. Her meal tray is still before her, mostly untouched. She has gotten a roommate, Ethel sees, and she smiles and waves to a woman who appears to be somewhere in her thirties. The woman is pale, with dirty blond hair and dark circles under her eyes, but she is cheerful, and attractive, too, in a country-and-western kind of way; she smiles and waves back, then says,

“I think she’s asleep.”

Ethel looks at Birdie. “Yes. She is.”

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“Not for long, I’m afraid,” the woman says. “My family is on the way up, and my kids are
loud
.”

“That’s okay,” Ethel says and goes to sit down beside Birdie. She’s going to wake up with a neck ache, positioned that way. Ethel pushes the button to lower her friend’s head, and it wakes her up.

Birdie’s blue eyes, still beautiful after all these years, open round and startled, but when she sees Ethel, she re-laxes. “Oh,” she says. “Hi, you.”

“Hi, darling.”

“What’s it like outside?”

“Warm! You’d think it was the middle of summer.”

Birdie’s face clouds. “What’s . . . What day is it?”

“Friday.”

Birdie nods. “And the month?”

A flash of cold down Ethel’s spine, but she answers normally. “May.”

“The twelfth,” Birdie says, then rushes to add, “Two thousand and eight. Bush is president. Fifteen, twelve, nine, six, three. You’re holding up zero fingers.”

“You didn’t eat nearly enough,” Ethel says, and Birdie says, “Did you meet my roommate? I got a roommate last night.”

“Kind of,” Ethel says, then calls over to the woman,

“I’m Ethel Menafee. Birdie and I have been friends for over fifty years.”

“Oh,
wow
!” the woman says.

Ethel shrugs.

“I’m Angie Larson,” the woman says. “I’m going home tomorrow.”

Well, la-di-da,
Ethel thinks but she says only, “Nice to meet you.”

“Uh-huh.” Angie flips on the TV.

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Birdie turns to Ethel and rolls her eyes. She hates television, won’t have one in her house. But what can you do.

They’re starting to put TVs on buses, now.

“You know, there’s a McDonald’s right next to the hospital,” Ethel tells Birdie.

“There’s a McDonald’s right next to everything.”

“What I mean is, I could bring you a Happy Meal. It would stay hot. It would be better than—”

“No,” Birdie says. “Thanks.”

Ethel settles back in the hard chair and looks over Birdie’s IV and the clear green tubing that delivers the oxygen into her nose. As if she knows anything about it. As if she’s in charge. Still, it seems one must acknowledge the equipment. Let it know that someone’s keeping an eye on it. “So,” Ethel says. “Any news?”

“I got a roommate.”

From the corner of her eye, Ethel sees the roommate give a little absentminded wave.

Ethel lowers her voice. “You said.”

“I
know.
But that’s the news. The only news.”

There is a great hubbub at the door, and then two little dark-haired girls come running in the room, yelling,