He hadn’t seemed overly concerned with my lack of prior experience, which was a plus. I was so unfamiliar with the details of the disease that I wasn’t even certain who Lou Gehrig was—a baseball player, I eventually recalled, and I pictured a woman slowly transformed into a thick mannish figure, growing daily more meaty and sad, until I realized I was thinking of Babe Ruth.
Instead I found a slim woman with dark gold hair that fell past her shoulders and bright amber eyes. When I arrived for the interview the French doors had swung open of their own accord as soon as I rang the bell, revealing a woman in a wheelchair, her hands folded in her lap, and a man standing behind her. His hand was resting on her shoulder. The two of them were positioned a few feet back from the front doors. They were the very first thing I saw when I entered the house.
She smiled at me. Between her shining hair and her dangling gold earrings,
she looked even younger than I had expected. Her prettiness and her berry-red dress were a relief and a surprise to me, so much so that I had to admit I must have been steeling myself for this moment. Even as I was pleased to see what she looked like, I was ashamed to think how I might have responded if she had been homely and lumpy, in a pilled but comfortable polyester jumpsuit. I’d been picturing an older couple, a smaller house.
Kate mouthed hello. She shifted her knee slightly to one side, so that it pressed something, a switch or a button of some kind, on the chair. The big French doors swung shut behind me.
“Hi there,” I said. I nodded to both of them. I wanted to address Kate, even though it was tempting to go toward Evan, since I had already talked to him. He’d turned out to be tall, maybe a bit gangly, with thinning blond hair and a handsome, lean face, long-nosed and etched with lines around the lips and eyes. He wore round wire glasses and rubbed at the back of his neck in the manner of someone who recently cut his hair shorter than he’d meant to.
“Becky, right?” Evan said. There was something bookish and friendly about him.
“Everyone just calls me Bec, actually,” I said. “Don’t ask me why.”
I took a step toward them, wondering how to greet her. The movement of her leg had thrown me off. Evan had told me she was almost totally paralyzed, but clearly she could do some things, so I held out my hand for her to shake. Her glance alighted on my outstretched hand and then on her own hands, thin and attenuated with oval unpolished nails. The hands lay in her lap, motionless. She gave me a little shrug and a smile. Suddenly I was sure I’d made a terrible decision coming here—what did I know about this job besides the money they offered? I hadn’t thought this through at all.
“I’m kind of an idiot,” I said.
She spoke, glancing toward Evan and grinning, and I took another step forward, straining to hear her. Had he mentioned this part, that I would not understand a word this woman said? Unsure if I was supposed to be answering, I watched Evan watch her and then say to me, smiling rather kindly, quoting his wife, “The important thing is that you feel at home enough to say so.”
Evan set Kate’s hand on the armrest, her fingers placed over the wheelchair buttons, and they led me through the living room toward the kitchen. The living room was cool and pearl gray, the sort of place that looks as if no one ever sits down. On a table by the wall near the kitchen door was a statue of a girl, and as we walked past it—Evan first, then me, then Kate, the chair’s gears whirring softly—I slowed to look at it. One arm hung at her side and the other curled over her head. Her stomach muscles were molded clearly, and so was the muscle at the top of one thigh as she stepped forward. The breasts curved out from her rib cage and came to a smooth undifferentiated point at the tips. Someone had hung a spider plant too close to her, so she had a mermaidish mop of green hair.
Kate saw me looking at the statue and rolled her eyes. With a tolerant smile, she tipped her head toward the kitchen, where Evan was waiting for us. I took it to mean the statue was his taste and not hers.
In the kitchen she stopped her chair at the table and Evan gestured for me to sit down as well. He stood, leaning against a butcher-block island in the center of the room. Behind him half a dozen battered copper pans hung from hooks in the ceiling. A row of cookbooks slanted against the refrigerator. If I’d had a kitchen this beautiful, I thought, I’d know how to cook by now. As it was, I mostly microwaved butter and poured it on things.
Sitting across from Kate gave me a chance to get a better look at her. The back of her head was cradled in the padded half-moon attached to the back of the wheelchair. When she brought her head forward, to swallow or take a breath, it fell a little too far, so that I could see her pale side part. She had the kind of hair, straight and heavy, that I’d always coveted. I was very aware that my own hair was a dark frizz around my face and stuck to the back of my neck. I set my forearms on the table and realized my button-down shirt had a tiny stain on the cuff. I felt incredibly out of place: fuzzy, damp, badly dressed. You think you’re showing up to help people out, but there they were, cool and sleek and regarding me with an air of friendly curiosity, as though I were a Girl Scout or a Mormon.
If I got through this without embarrassing myself, I decided, I’d go home and call Liam. Let that be my little carrot to draw me through. I
hadn’t seen him in days, which was typical, if unpleasant. Sometimes I wandered aimlessly around his part of campus just to glimpse him, though we were smart enough not to be seen strolling the lawns together. When he did see me, sitting in the Rathskeller on rainy days, a book and beer on the table before me, or when we passed one another trudging up the steep sidewalk of Bascom Hill, we nodded and smiled pleasantly, leaving our sunglasses on. Sometimes we stopped and spoke—no lingering, no idle touches—just long enough to plan a meeting at my house.
I made an effort to apply myself and listen as Kate started to talk about what she needed. Her voice was soft, the sound coming from low in her throat. I had to watch her mouth carefully. Kate would speak, and then pause, and then Evan repeated what she’d said. Evan seemed to understand her, though sometimes he had to double-check a word or two.
She was almost impossible for me to comprehend without his translation. I was becoming very worried. Would he be here all the time? Because I didn’t see how I would ever understand her. I darted back and forth between looking at her and then at him. It seemed very important to pay attention to Kate, even when Evan was the one speaking. After all, I reasoned, they were her words. So I watched Kate as Evan said he would generally get Kate up and dressed, and usually help her to bed as well. Without seeming to realize it, Evan sometimes referred to himself in the third person when he quoted her.
She had pockets of movement left, he explained—she could muster some strength in her legs, enough to press a button on her motorized wheelchair with one side of her knee to open and close the front door, or to kick if she were in a swimming pool. Her fingers were strong enough to manipulate a remote control or a simple switch if it was placed beneath her hand. She could hold her head up and turn her neck, but when the muscles grew tired she often let the back of her skull rest in the padded cushion on her chair.
“We’re not talking about something excessively clinical,” Evan had said. “Obviously you’re not monitoring her heart rate or giving her injections or something. More the general business of keeping her mobile and communicative. But I don’t want to misrepresent it—she
does need help bathing, for example, and using the bathroom, and as long as you’re here we’d expect that to be part of it.” Evan paused and looked toward his wife. “So if you’re really uncomfortable with that, say so now.”
“I don’t think I am,” I said. “But I don’t know for sure till I try.”
“That’s honest,” he said approvingly. “I take it you haven’t done anything like this before? Or maybe you knew someone who did?”
“Not me, no. My roommate’s grandmother needed a caregiver for a while before she died, but I think her mom did most of that.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, sounding as though he was waiting for more.
“I guess it made an impression on me,” I said. Had it? I remembered it still, years later, so perhaps it had. Certainly it had made an impression on Jill, who was very vocal about her plans to die in some strategically timed manner. “How much they could have used some help.”
In fact, there had been a home health care nurse who was supposed to be doing the heavy lifting, as it were, but Jill’s grandmother had insisted her mother and Jill help her instead. “But no, I personally don’t have a lot of experience.” I paused. “May I ask why you aren’t going through an agency?”
Kate spoke first. Then Evan nodded and said, “We have before. They’re fine, but they seem to deal with Kate as sort of a generalized patient instead of as an individual.” He cleared his throat. “They were never that willing to do things her way instead of what they’d always done. So we train each person ourselves. Fewer channels for things to get lost in.
“We’ve been using friends of friends, and now, of course, an ad, just to see who turns up,” Evan was saying. “We had two, Hillary and Anna, but Anna left for graduate school in New Haven. So Kate wants to choose her own and make sure it’s someone she has fun with.”
“Well,” I said to Kate, “that makes sense.”
It was awkward, staring at this person who simply looked back at me. I nodded a lot. Sometimes she gave me a quick, understanding smile, the lines around her eyes deepening for a moment, and other times she only sat quietly and let me watch her. She was so small: her neck only a stem, her shoulders narrow and bony beneath the fabric of her
dress. I tried to picture Evan dressing her. It must be such a delicate operation. On her wrists a prominent knob of bone bore outward, pressing white against the skin. If someone wasn’t careful they’d bruise her against the hard metal of the wheelchair, or the walls of their widened doorways.
“I think I mentioned references on the phone, right?” Evan said, startling me out of my thoughts.
References? He hadn’t mentioned references. I didn’t think so, anyway, and in the absence of a job application asking for them, I hadn’t even thought about it. The setup had seemed so casual on the phone.
“I’m sure you did,” I lied. “I can write them down for you now, if you want.” He handed me a notebook and pen that had been sitting on the table. I stared hard at the empty paper, then wrote down my boss at the steak house where I waitressed, as well as my boss from last summer, when I’d worked at a temp agency. Maybe I should have written down a professor or someone who could attest to my intellect, but I didn’t know my professors very well. Liam was faculty, but I hadn’t exactly taken a class with him—he’d taught Jill’s class.
I pushed the notebook back toward Evan, who set it aside without looking at it. Maybe it was just a formality. No—they were looking for someone to come in and have the run of their house and be responsible for Kate. They’d call, and my steak house boss would know I was looking. I’d just have to tell her I needed daytime work. Which I did—my parents paid my tuition, but I had next year’s living expenses to think about.
References dispatched, we returned to discussing what they needed.
As we got up to tour the rest of the house, I wondered how much of this they’d done before. Evan hadn’t said how long she had been ill, but they seemed comfortable enough, their explanations practiced enough, that I thought it must have been some time. Five years, ten years? I was struck by the feeling—both pleasing and ominous—that they were wooing me a little, showing me how normal and easy it all was.
They led me down the hall, gesturing as we passed the den, the family room, the dining room, the sunroom. That cool living room at the front seemed strange now that I had seen the rest of the house, which
was comfortable and bright. The kitchen walls were the color of buttercups, and in the other rooms there were vases of tulips and bowls of pears, big comfy chairs and end tables piled with books. As they showed me around I took in the miscellaneous details of a stranger’s home: an old-fashioned shaving brush in the bathroom, a pair of dumbbells on a chair in the den. After ten minutes I knew more of their home than Liam’s, though I had been seeing him for almost five months. I knew he lived in a small yellow house walking distance from campus, in a neighborhood known as a good place for big dogs and small children. Once I had made Jill drive me past the house late at night, but I had definitely never been inside. Were there bowls of fruit on the tables and vacuum tracks on the rugs? Or was it messier, with half-empty coffee cups in the living room, damp panty hose draped over the towel rack?
“I love your house,” I called out, from behind them. Kate turned her head as far as she could toward me. I saw her lips move and decided she was saying thank you.
“You’re welcome,” I hazarded.
“Kate should have been a decorator,” Evan said, as we turned left at the end of the hall. “She chose almost everything here. I helped on a couple rooms, too, but mainly it’s all her.”
It made sense: Her clothes were a similar palette of bright colors. Only her black wheelchair seemed out of place. I wondered if they made wheelchairs in other colors or out of other metals. She would have looked very nice in copper.
“What were you?” I asked gracelessly. The past tense sounded worse than I’d meant it to, but Kate either didn’t notice or chose to ignore it. She answered, glancing at me and then at Evan, who said, “She was in advertising, too. That’s how we met.”
“Really?” I said. “That’s my major. When I talked to you yesterday I was on my way to my final in ‘Stoking Desire: Consumer Trends 341.’ “
Kate smiled. “Is that what they call it these days?” Evan said, sounding faintly appalled. “We should talk about that too, maybe. What are you hoping to do after college?”
I froze. I had only mentioned it to establish a little rapport. Quite
frankly I thought I’d gotten a C on the final. My choice of major was mainly borne of panic and an unproven suspicion that I might have a flair for writing catchy slogans. If pressed, I would be forced to admit I found the whole thing rather shady and manipulative. Yet these two seemed fairly straightforward, and suddenly I was unwilling to make up something interview-y.