Authors: Ronald Malfi
“Yes,” she repeated. “Working too hard.”
Her stomach felt queasy and she took three deep breaths before exiting the bathroom.
Outside the café, Josh stood on the curb holding Kelly’s coffee in one gloved hand, shivering against the wind. It was only mid-November and already the temperature was teetering on freezing. It was going to be one hell of a cold winter. “I was starting to get worried about you,” Josh said, handing over her coffee.
She tried to sound composed. “Thought I fell in, did you?”
“Just some strange folks in this city, gotta be careful,” he told her. “Last time I used the bathroom here I was almost mugged. And what’s with those guys who stand in front of the urinals with their hands on their hips? Whack-jobs. I mean, it’s like watching fucking Superman take a piss. I don’t get it.”
She laughed and a billow of vapor blew from her mouth. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.”
“No,” Josh said, absently considering, “I guess you haven’t.”
Nellie Worthridge was eighty-seven years old and had no legs. When she was twenty, she lost them in an automobile accident—along with her father. Now, she was a withered old thing with a surprisingly pleasant disposition and an animated face that lit up whenever Kelly and Josh turned up outside her tiny West Side apartment. Nellie Worthridge was Subject Number Four of the project, a woman Kelly had read about several months ago in
People
Magazine, back when the project was still in its infancy. For most of her life, Nellie relied on her motorized wheelchair to get her from place to place and, when in the comfort of her cramped but immaculate one-bedroom apartment (which she hardly left, except to shop for groceries and to play Wednesday night bridge), she frequently ditched the chair and moved about on the palms of her hands. It was sad, but Kelly’s first impression upon seeing such an acrobatic maneuver was that the old woman looked a bit like some withered old wind-up toy. After their first meeting with the woman, as she and Josh took a cab back to the Village, Josh had commented on how much Nellie Worthridge reminded him of his own grandmother.
“Just something about her, I guess,” Josh had said. “In the way she talks, or in her mannerisms or something. I don’t know. I guess deep down, all old ladies are the same animal.”
That was back when Kelly thought she might actually want to sleep with Joshua Cavey, that she might actually be attracted to him. Not because of the grandmother comment, but because of Josh’s line of thinking, and the countless other expressive comments he made, and also in the divine things he saw in ordinary life. He was, in a word,
refreshing.
But even then, despite her attraction, she realized that a relationship was the last thing she was looking for. In the Big Apple, even refreshing things went stale rather quick.
Like most elderly people (although this was just an assumption on Kelly’s part—she had never really been close to anyone considered “elderly”), Nellie Worthridge awoke at the crack of dawn and was already brewing coffee when Kelly and Josh arrived at her West Side apartment.
“It’s a cold one out there this morning,” Nellie said from the kitchen vestibule. “It’s going to be an angry winter, you mind me.”
“I believe it,” Josh said, dropping to one knee and unpacking his recording equipment.
Flipping through the notes in her notebook, Kelly backed against the wall between a picture of Jesus and a crocheted tapestry of a rainbow. Nellie’s apartment always smelled like a fusion of body odor, lemon Pledge, and camphor—the same smells she subconsciously associated with a high school gymnasium. Despite her handicap, Nellie was a fastidious woman who kept her apartment so ridiculously spotless, one would guess the apartment’s owner had died some time ago and no one had been inside the place to make a mess in a matter of months.
Kelly heard Josh mutter something to himself while searching through his labeled videocassettes. From the kitchen vestibule, she could hear the motorized whine of Nellie Worthridge’s wheelchair as the old woman urged it forward along the floor.
“Coffee, dear?” the old woman offered, easing her chair to a stop in front of Kelly.
“No thank you, Nellie.”
“It’ll warm you.”
“I’m warm.”
“Are you all right?”
Smiling, Kelly looked up from her notebook. “I’m fine.” And thought:
Do I really look that bad today?
“How are you feeling, Nellie?”
“Oh,” said the woman, “I’m getting by. These winters now…make my bones ache. And I’ve been having these headaches, just these really bad ones. They come and go.”
“Has Doctor Jennasyn been to see you lately?”
“He was here not two weeks ago,” Nellie said. She was trying to crane her neck around to watch Josh set up the camcorder on its tripod. “Gave me some pills for my arthritis.”
“And the headaches?”
“Wasn’t having the headaches then,” Nellie said. “Just started up past couple days. They’ll pass eventually. Everything does, after a while.”
Josh straightened up, slipped off his leather coat, and said, “I’m all set, Kell. Where do you want me set up?”
“We’ll start with some kitchen shots,” Kelly told him. “Is that all right with you, Nellie?”
“Fine, fine,” the woman said, waving a hand. “Should have come sooner, filmed me making the coffee. I can put on some English muffins, if you two’ll eat them. I don’t mind making food long as it’s not wasted.” She managed to bring the wheelchair around and directed it toward the kitchen. The motorization made her entire body vibrate and she looked like a wooden puppet from the back.
“I’m staying out of the shots today, Nellie,” Kelly told the woman. “I’m going to be with Josh behind the camera. I’ve written some narration in this notebook. I’m just going to recite it to myself while Josh films, make sure we’ve got enough useable footage.”
“That’s fine, dear.”
“English muffins would be great, Nellie,” Josh said, rubbing the palms of his hands together. He lifted the tripod and camera and set them directly across from the kitchen vestibule, peered through the lens, and panned back until he was able to see most of the kitchen through the blue-tinted viewfinder.
“We got enough tape?” Kelly asked him.
“Quit worrying about my job,” he barked with some humor, not taking his eye from the eyepiece. “Do me a favor, Kell, and go stand in front of the camera for a sec. I want to get a height ratio here…”
“You nearly ran out of film last time,” she told him, moving into the kitchen and standing in front of the camera. Her eyes were down, still scrutinizing her notes. “Someone needs to keep an eye on you.”
“Worry-worry-worry,” Josh snickered. “Nellie, you think our girl Kelly here is going to worry herself to an early death?”
“Worries
me,”
Nellie said, unwrapping the English muffins. Then to Kelly: “You don’t look so good, dear.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted, looking up. “I don’t understand why everyone keeps interfering with—”
She froze, staring straight ahead at the eye of the camera…staring at the blinking red RECORD light just above the lens. Too occupied with her muffins, Nellie did not notice the frozen expression on Kelly’s face. Josh, still standing behind the camera and peering through the lens, did.
“Kell? Kelly? Command Center to Agent Kelly Rich…”
She snapped her head away from the blinking red light. “What?” she blurted, temporarily disoriented. “What is it?”
“You’re phasing out on me, kid,” Josh said, peeking at her from around the side of the camera. “A bit camera shy? You did fine the other day.”
“No, I’m just…” She brought a hand up to her forehead, rubbed her brow. “I guess I didn’t get enough sleep last night.”
“You up for this?”
“Yeah, I’ll be okay.”
“You’re the boss,” he said, and stepped back behind the camera. “Now get your mug out of the frame, country girl.”
Kelly sidestepped the tripod and moved into the hallway. She cleared some books off a small wooden chair and sat down, her mind still reeling. Looking down, she saw the knees of her jeans were damp from where she’d rested her hands. Her palms were moist with sweat and she rubbed them together like an Eskimo trying to keep warm.
I don’t know what a nervous breakdown feels like,
she thought,
but if I had to guess, I’d say it feels very much like this.
The last time she’d felt this way was years ago, back with Collin in the months before their separation. They’d taken turns, it seemed then, struggling with the reality of their incompatibility…with Collin’s infidelity and her neuroses…until the foundation of their impromptu marriage could do nothing but give in and fall away beneath them. And before Collin, the last time she’d felt this unstable and paralyzed had been…Christ, it had been such a goddamn long time ago she couldn’t even remember…
Maybe I should have just taken the day off after all,
she thought.
This wasn’t such a good idea. I feel lousy. I feel like I’m psychic, and I know I’m going to get creamed by a taxi on my way home tonight.
That wasn’t good. Recently, the project seemed like it was on a perpetual downslope, and for the past week or so she had begun doubting herself. And that just wasn’t good, wasn’t good at all. The onslaught of doubt, she understood, signified the eventual renouncing of the whole project altogether. And early on, she had been so excited about the project’s potential. As most great ideas do, the initial concept of the project dawned on her before she even realized she had been looking for it. It was simple: a series of videotaped biographies, only not about actors or musicians or politicians or war heroes, but about average people who have overcome tremendous adversities in their lives. She’d call it
We the People,
and would present a new individual with each installment, show how they lived, how they got by day-to-day, and what their specific adversities were. The concept had struck her like a thunderbolt, nearly rattling her brain, and on the heels of the concept she’d thought:
Yes, this is it, you are it, you are the art I’ve been searching for all along and I didn’t even know it.
How many potential subjects lived in all of Manhattan? Hell, how many potential subjects lived on her very own
street?
Sure, there would be research and lots of work and she’d probably need to go to the University to gather some help…but this idea…this idea was a
good
idea, and it would certainly
work.
She’d met some amazing people, and interviewed and photographed them all. Belinda Charles, the seven-hundred-pound woman sentenced to live out the remainder of what promised to be a cruelly short life atop her filthy mattress. Jackson Tanner, the teenage boy who’d bitten down on the business end of a handgun, pulled the trigger and blew the bottom half of his face apart…only to survive. So many unbelievable people living so many unbelievable lives. And, of course, old Nellie Worthridge, absent of both her legs since the age of twenty and looking like a wrinkled old wind-up toy.
“On your orders, my lady,” Josh said from behind the camera, snapping Kelly from her daze.
“We ready, Nellie?” she called into the kitchen, not looking up from her notebook.
“I’m just doing what I do, dear,” Nellie called back.
“All right,” Kelly said, trying not to think about that red blinking light. “Roll camera, Josh.”
Chapter Two
It was raining and near dark once Kelly and Josh finally wrapped up the shoot. It had gone smoothly, and both Kelly and Josh were pleased with the footage. Sometime around noon, Nellie’s headaches returned (Kelly insisted Josh keep the camera rolling, even though the headaches really had no bearing on the project itself) and the woman began quietly moaning to herself. She maneuvered her motorized wheelchair over to the sofa in her tiny parlor and, without any assistance, lifted herself up onto the sofa and eased back against one of the arm rests. Josh offered to get the woman a glass of water and some Advil, but Kelly shook her head, insistent upon their complete and total lack of interference. Soon, Nellie’s headache subsided enough for her to crawl back into her chair and fix herself something to eat.
“Could just be a hunger headache,” the old woman told them as she fixed herself some whole-wheat toast and jam. “Ain’t seen food since supper last night. Get too sick eating breakfast nowadays.”
Outside, the sky looked the color of fading iron. It had gotten colder, the wind picking up, and the collection of yellow cabs cluttering the streets already had their headlights on.
“You feel like catching some eats?” Josh asked her.
“Not up to it,” she said. “Think I’ll just head home, get some sleep.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Think maybe I’ll go home and go over the dailies.”
“Dedication,” she said, half-smiling. “I like that in a scrub.”
“You know me,” he said, hailing a cab. “Fingers to the bone, right? Share a cab with me?”
She rode with him back to the Village, thanked him for all his hard work (this was a habit; it was the least she could do, given the fact that Josh Cavey worked for free), and crept up the steps to her third-floor apartment like a dejected mutt. Her apartment was small and gloomy, with only two narrow windows facing Washington Square in the main room. It was very obviously the home of someone subsisting on city grants and the emolument for her former duties as a wife and homemaker. The walls boasted a dreary collection of monochromatic Gothic prints, mostly from local artists, and a collection of abstract sculptures could be found resting on nearly every applicable surface:
“pene di partecipazione azionaria di uomo,”
and
“donna senza mammelle”
and
“masturbazione.”
Bookshelves groaning from the weight of thick, leather-bound volumes…a vase of wilted peonies…some week-old Chinese take-out growing fungus on the kitchen counter…a lamp in the shape of a turtle, its shell a patchwork of colored glass rectangles…