You're Not You (7 page)

Evan applauded. “I know it’s a lot harder than it looks,” he said. “You’ll be good at this, though; I can tell. I bet you’ll be better than me.”

He was only being nice. I knew I’d botched the very first thing I’d done for her, and I didn’t ever want to try it again. I made some sort of grimace that was meant to evoke a smile, and preceded Kate to the bathroom.

She asked me to start by brushing her teeth. With her head tipped back, her mouth open, I set to work with an electric toothbrush, concentrating on not touching her gums with the whirring bristles. Her teeth were very straight on top, the middle bottom teeth overlapping, and the glistening peaks of her molars stippled with dark pools of fillings. I counted six. Her head trembled a little with the movement of the brush, and I put a hand at the back of her skull to steady it. Her hair was warm and a little tangled from being slept on. I watched her tongue move from side to side away from the brush and the toothpaste foam, and finally she let it lie in the center of her mouth so I could run the brush over it. I had to be careful not to use too much water or she could choke on it—Evan had told me that her throat no longer closed off efficiently.

The dental part went well, at least. I tried to make it last a little, just as a respite from the chair and the shower that was coming, but you can only brush someone’s teeth for so long. Finally I gave up and rinsed the brush. I wiped her mouth off with my hand, but even as I did it I knew that was wrong. Of course I should have used a washcloth. I froze for a moment, and I could see in her face that she had decided to let it slide. Instead she said something else, but I didn’t get what it was—something
about the shower. I nodded and smiled, but I was looking at the huge walk-in shower with its sliding door and trying rather desperately to remember what Evan had told me the day before. Fine, I thought, it’s common sense. I turned on the water, the handheld attachment spraying away toward the wall, and started to put her into the plastic chair inside the shower. She looked pointedly at my leather sandals and said, moving her lips carefully for me, “You’ll want them off.” I kicked off the shoes.

“So, remind me: I lift you to a standing position, take off your nightgown, and then move you? Or put you in the shower chair and take it from there?”

“The chair is more stable,” she said. I repeated it after her and she nodded, so I put her into position in the white plastic lawn chair, which had suction cups attached to the feet, and then I lifted her nightgown up. I lifted each leg to free it and then pulled the back of the gown up from beneath her buttocks. Then I lifted one arm at a time and took the whole thing off over her head, her hair catching for a moment in the straps before falling again, and I slung the gown over to the counter.

I looked around for a sponge or brush, and found an oversize one dangling on a hook. Thank God, I thought. Even with babies I felt like a pervert washing them with my bare hands. I wanted a nice huge sponge with lots of surface area. If they’d had shower gloves I might have liked those too.

I reached for the showerhead and turned back to her. Her head was down, her arms set on each arm of the chair where I’d placed them, her feet straight in front of her. The ridges of her ribs were faintly visible. Her breasts were small and set far apart, the peach-colored nipples contracted. Her thighs spread slightly against the chair seat, the triangle of pubic hair darkening against the spray of water as I washed it over her shoulders and chest and legs. I leaned her forward slightly and sent the water down the string of vertebrae. Her hair grew dark at the ends, and when she laid her head back for me to wet it I saw that her cheeks had flushed slightly from the heat of the water.

I turned away as I squeezed soap on the sponge. I didn’t want to see her just then, the naked wings of her collarbone and her small puckered
nipples and blush spreading up her chest. As I lathered up the sponge I thought about her saying when I interviewed that she’d had ALS for two years. It wasn’t that long. Who knew how long it had taken her to get used to being bathed by other people? At least a few months.

She hadn’t said a word since we got in the shower, and her eyes were still shut, her brows slightly knit against the spray. I sudsed her shoulders and the thin columns of her neck and arms, keeping my fingertips behind the sponge and away from her wet skin. The warm water sprayed my clothes and my legs, and once you got in there and started washing her, the shower was not as big as it had seemed. Still, I was doing okay. I almost started to believe in my own skills. This was just something we caregivers did.

I lifted her arms to wash her armpits, which bore a little patch of dark stubble. I saw a razor on the shelf but decided not to do anything unless she asked. I had washed her limbs and her torso, letting the sponge glance over her breasts as though they were no more private than elbows. Now, I realized, I would have to run it between her legs. People did that in the shower.

It was a strange time to think about my mother. But as I drew the sponge between Kate’s thighs and then washed her back all the way down to the cleft of her buttocks, I was recalling washing with my mom. I suppose when I was very young it was easier than bathing me separately. But it had always seemed an arbitrary and bold thing for her to do, and I still remembered standing in the shower, looking up the landscape of her body, its wide hips and the sturdy muscle at the front of her thighs and the moon-colored curve of the bottoms of her breasts, the brisk slapping sound of her cupped hand—my mother did not believe in washcloths—mittened in lather as she rubbed at the gray-shadowed skin of her armpits and the flat curls of pubic hair. Her breasts and the flesh of her upper arms trembled as she reached, businesslike, into the dark hollow between her legs, and I had watched her and thought,
Oh, I’d better do that too
. It embarrassed me to wash myself in front of my mother, so I’d turned silently away toward the green-tiled corner of the shower and done it, one fast scrub as though I were brushing something away. I didn’t look at my mother’s face when I turned back. I looked at the crease across her belly instead.

I did the same thing with Kate now, a brief wipe with the sponge and then a rinse. I hung the sponge up on its hook, turned off the water, and turned back to her. Without the hot spray it felt chilly in the shower, but her cheeks were flushed even more deeply than they had been before, her neck blotched red. She had said nothing, not even a directive, since we had gotten in the shower. She dropped her chin a little farther and looked away, toward an empty corner of the shower.

I wanted to make a little comment about something inane and conversational, something to open the way for her to reassure me I had done an okay job of it. I was about to do this, had actually taken the breath to speak, when I understood that blotchy flush over her skin, her uncharacteristic gaze at the wall.

She wasn’t used to this at all. She was as embarrassed as I was, maybe more so. The thought was so distressing that I stopped what I was doing for a moment, one arm reaching for the towel rack, and considered what it was like to open yourself up in this way, to whoever came along and was halfway decent enough to hire. It wasn’t like sex, where you could simply refuse and put off intimacy and nakedness until someone more intriguing came along. (Unbidden, I pictured Liam auditioning a series of women in the same café we’d sat in, and I pushed the image aside.) Kate just had to let herself be handled and undressed even if it was by someone as unsure and clumsy as I was.

But why put herself through it? She was married; Evan could do it. If he had to leave town she could skip a bath for a day and avoid having a stranger do it. I could have figured this out if it were ever necessary, but I didn’t see why we’d needed to do it on my second day. Why would you choose the caregiver to bathe you instead of your husband? Maybe it was only to get to the inevitable and face the prospect head-on.

Had I done anything well yet, even one thing? I wondered whether they’d pay me for the days I’d already worked if I quit the next day. She’d be all right if I did. She had Evan. I draped the towel over her breasts and belly, hoping it wouldn’t offend her if I were too uncomfortable. I grabbed a second one to dry the rest of her. She glanced down at herself while I toweled her arms, and then up at me. I waited for her to say something rather arch, or amused, but instead she said, almost clearly, “Thank you.”

EVAN LEFT BEFORE NOON
and already I was exhausted. It was more mental than physical, from all the scenarios in my head: Kate falling, me dropping her, me mortifying her in some original way. I kept stretching my neck and massaging my face, which was stiff from smiling expectantly.

All jobs were stressful at first. All the social awkwardness, my own relentless display of ignorance. This nervousness would go away, I hoped. I didn’t want to dread going to work, but if I didn’t get better at it, I might have a nerve-wracking summer ahead. I couldn’t leave this job too soon; the setup was too personal. I couldn’t walk out after seeing her naked, like some one-night stand. I hated this about myself, my tendency to try something new and, as soon as I had begun, to wonder how to get out of it. The fact that yesterday I had been so chirpy and optimistic only made it worse. They had tried to give me some sense of what it would be like, but I’d been too dumb to recognize a grace period when they gave me one.

Even doing her makeup was harder than it seemed. After a few tries at the eye makeup, she had faked a smile of satisfaction and we decided it was done. But the eyeliner was too thick—it seemed to thicken of its own accord every time I looked at it—and I had accidentally added a tiny elongated line at the outer corner of one eye but not the other. This bothered me even more than the difficulty of getting her out of bed and more even than the shower. It made her look a little foolish and undignified, the very opposite of what I was supposed to be helping her achieve. It seemed that for her to look perfect was the very least I could do.

Around the time Kate had suggested we have lunch, Evan appeared at the door of the kitchen, briefcase in hand, and said, “Bec, you don’t need me today.”

I fought the urge to say that I did indeed need him, that yesterday’s confidence had proved so misguided it was almost funny, would be funny if it weren’t for the fact that he seemed to have believed it and was now leaving his wife at my mercy. I had been staying a few feet away from her whenever I could, nervous about touching her unnecessarily. Her kneecaps and elbows seemed brittle and easily bruised. Instead I
hovered nearby, keeping a loose orbit around her, just close enough that I could smell the cream in her hair.

“You’re doing fine,” he continued. “I’m just running to the office to catch up a little.”

“Okay,” I said. I had no choice. I smiled brightly and falsely at them and turned back to the sandwich I was making. Behind me I heard the sound of a kiss and Kate’s faint, warm murmur.

It seemed to me I spent a fair amount of time glancing in the other direction so he could kiss her. After he left we sat quietly together in the kitchen, the house seeming very empty. Had I paid as little attention to her directly as it suddenly seemed, now that there was no third party to focus on?

Now she and I were in the study, organizing various papers, insurance, financial stuff. I wasn’t exactly privy to any major information, but I had figured out where the money came from. I saw from a photo that Kate’s family had a huge house near Chicago—it made this house look almost as small as the one I grew up in—thanks to her grandfather’s early patents on a chemical compound that had something to do with oranges. I hadn’t quite gotten it straight, but suffice it to say her family was deep in trust-fund territory. I’d never met anyone who actually came from money. It wasn’t very common in Wisconsin.

I thought I’d like this part of the job, the neat piles of triplicate copies and rational system of filing. She even had her own copy machine. It was efficient and absorbing, easily accomplished. Too bad it wasn’t all like this.

“He’s a grad assistant. And a writer,” I was telling her. “He used to have a music column.” This was also how he’d met his wife, who’d been a friend of the editor’s.

Kate grinned and looked away toward the wall for a moment while she took a swallow. She had a way of shifting her gaze while she prepared to speak, and I’d learned to give her a moment, not to follow her every glance around. I wondered what she would say if I went ahead and told her the rest of it.

“Sounds like a keeper,” she said. I understood her a little better now. I was forced to, like an immersion program. You had to watch her lips; half the cues lay in the familiar shapes you saw people form
every day but never noticed. The sound she made was almost less important than the way she shaped the air.

She said, “You should bring him by sometime.”

“Soon,” I said vaguely. I wanted her to meet him. Or, more accurately, I wanted him to meet someone, to be able to introduce him for once, like a regular boyfriend. But you couldn’t be sure who knew whom. The only reason I had indulged myself by talking about him was that I thought she was safely distant from my life and his, so completely secure and contentedly married. But I regretted it now—it only reminded me how sleazy it would have felt, bringing my adulterous boyfriend over for coffee, wedding ring stashed in his pocket. I tried to change the subject. “Anyway, you probably could care less about boyfriends and stuff. It must be nice to be done with all that.”