Monica has long curly hair, which always looks wet, and she is wearing a shirt that says: STOP . . . pretending you don’t want me.
She arches her thinly plucked eyebrows. “Guess who won’t stop asking for her cigarette?” she asks. She turns and takes her time card from its slot, and punches it in the paintchipped metal machine.
“I’d better go and give it to her,” you say, reaching up to tighten your ponytail. But your ponytail isn’t there, because you cut off all your hair with a pair of baby-blue plastic safety scissors last Tuesday, when your car was parked in the strawberry field by the creek. At first you thought: I’ll stuff it all in an envelope and mail it to Dad, as a joke. But then you looked at the lilies cropping up from the thick ragged vines by the creek and you wanted to go pick them, so you thought: I’ll toss it all in the creek, and the rushing brown water will carry it downstream. So you got out of the car with your hair in handfuls, and it stuck to your arms because of static, and you left the car door open and you slogged through the thick ivy vines to the soft sandy creek bank, and then you remembered that it was summer. Instead of rushing brown water, there were just puddles in the creek. So you gently arranged all of your hair in a puddle, let it float there on the scummy water, and you thought: if some owls dive down and take my cut-up hair for a nest, I’ll have done at least one useful thing in my life.
“Janice?” Monica is standing in front of your face. She is drawing you back to the creamy yellow walls and clucking time clock of the Setting Sun Nursing Home staff lounge.
“Oh,” you say. “Right. Shirley, cigarette.” You edge around Monica, and swing the white door open and burst into the hallway.
The old people, you think to yourself. They will not bring me down.
You discover Shirley sitting on the leather couch by the doorway, next to the nurse’s station.
“Shirley!” you cry. “My poppet! My princess!” You throw open your arms and stride toward her. Shirley’s brain is fried from Alzheimer’s. She pops up, propping herself with her rolling rocker.
“Do you have my cigarette?” she asks, animated in her powderblue leisure suit.
You tear around in a drawer in the nurse’s station until you find Shirley’s cigarettes and a hot pink lighter. “I do have your cigarette,” you say. “Let’s go outside and smoke it.”
Shirley wheels her walker onto the sunny, splintery porch and sits in a plastic deck chair. You plop down next to her and shake a cigarette out of the package. You hold the lighter to it while she inhales, widening her eyes cartoonishly. “Thanks, babe,” she says when she’s got it lit. She stares down at the cracks in the porch.
Then you light one for yourself, because the manager’s not here, and even if the cook looks out the window and rats on you, you’ll be glad, because if you get fired, you won’t have to work here anymore.
Ruth, brooding, limps onto the porch in her pink nightgown, plops down into a deck chair, and stares at her feet. She is in this rest home at 50 for being depressed and getting too fat and not taking her medication. All the skin on her body droops and hangs, wads of fat sucked away by a staff-enforced diet. Her jowly face is gray around the corners of her lips. She looks at Shirley, frowning.
“If I ever get like that,” she mutters, “shoot me dead.” You look at Shirley, who is staring out at the parking lot like a perky bird. “She doesn’t even know who she is.” Ruth thickens her eyebrows. “It’s disgusting.”
You remember when the mental home across the street came over for bingo, wearing their seizure helmets, watching you with their squinty gentle eyes. Ruth got in a fight with one of them. The retard called her out on stuffing lucky bingo boards in her sweat pants, dishonorably winning rows of Sara Lee nut brownies. You didn’t care, because you had the keys to the prize box. You ate all the brownies you wanted, secretly unwrapping them under the table, covering the crinkle noise by cranking the bingo wheel, sneaking bites between calling out numbers.
“The nuns at my high school told us not to kill ourselves,” you say, leaning back in the plastic deck chair, crossing your legs.
“Lots of people do,” Ruth says, widening her eyes, convicted. “When someone wants to, you can’t stop them.”
“You’re a pretty lousy friend if you don’t try,” you say, crushing your cigarette out in the cement ashtray, smearing black ash into brown sand.
Ruth shakes her head, draws her mouth open. “I was on the boardwalk,” she says. “In San Diego, when I lived down there. I was walking on the beach at night, and a girl came up to me. She was crying, and she told me that her beau had made her pregnant, and wasn’t going to help her out.”
“I know the type,” you say. For instance: Jason, your ex-boyfriend.
“And she said that her parents would throw her out if she told them.” Ruth goes on, shaking her head. “There wasn’t anything she could do. She told me she was going to drown herself.”
“And you saved her, Ruth. You stopped her,” you say, like a calm psychologist. You know how psychologists talk, you have seen the compelling specials on Lifetime, network for women.
“I couldn’t.” Ruth wrinkles her face, wincing. She flicks her cigarette and stares at the shadows made by deck chairs. “She just walked into the ocean.” Ruth stands up. She leans heavily forward on her cane, her dingy pink nightgown swinging, and plods off the deck.
Shirley sits up alertly. “Can I have my cigarette?” she asks, chirpy.
“Sorry,” you say. “We only have candy cigarettes.”
“Dammit!” Shirley squawks, pounding her fist on her powderblue knee. “I want my cigarette!”
“Hey,” you say. “It’s dinnertime now.”
“Am I cooking?” Shirley asks.
“Yes,” you say. “We’re having 40 people. It’s Thanksgiving.”
“Shit,” Shirley mutters, lifting her walker up slightly and clanging it down on the porch. “Shit.” She surveys the deck, conspiring escape.
“Let’s go to the store to buy the turkeys,” you say. She raises her head, yellow eyes brightening.
“Okay!” she says, leaning up, turning her walker toward the ramp. You jump from your chair and feel for change in the soda machine on the deck. You bound over to the doorway, and in. Monica is sitting with her feet up on the desk, phone cradled against her ear, laughing.
“I’m taking Shirley for exercise,” you whisper, delicately edging the cigarettes and lighter onto the desk. Then you chase down Shirley, who is on the edge of the nearly-empty parking lot when you catch up.
“Shirley-babe,” you say. “Shirley-my-man.”
“Where are we?” she demands, confidentially irritated.
“We’re going for a stroll,” you say. You lead Shirley out of the parking lot. You jive with her through the neighborhood with gravel streets and plastic toys on yellow grass, corn growing over fences in back yards, screaming Mexican kids.
“Let’s talk about our lives, babe,” you say to Shirley, strolling over broken glass. “What’s new with you?”
“I don’t know,” Shirley says, frowning and dismissive, shoving her walker over a weedy sidewalk crack.
“Personally,” you say, surveying telephone lines and an armless doll lying on a roof, “Personally, I say we go to the park.” So you walk Shirley to the park, where some young fat Mexican grandma in a black and brown flowered dress is sitting on a metal bench. She has the arm-folded resignation of someone in a knitted black shawl in the sun, someone who knows she will always be getting the crumbs of the world’s bread. She watches her grandkids or her daycare run around the grass.
You leave Shirley’s walker outside the short wooden wall of the sandbox, help her step up over its dusty top, holding her thin-skinned hand. You walk with her across little dunes and mountains to the swing set, where you turn Shirley around and push her down in a swing.
“Okay,” you say to her. “Let’s swing.” You lean back and kick your legs forward, pressing them together. “It’s like we’re kids again,” you say to her, swinging by on a short pendulum of wind, but she is just sitting there gripping the iron links, looking at the sand, skeptical. You swing up, higher, swinging out of this park, out of this town. You are swinging away, swinging someplace where things move fast and people talk back to you.
You dig your feet into the sand and rock forward and back, digging trenches as you slow to a stop. Shirley is still staring around the playground, not quite approving. She turns to you, agitated.
“I forgot to pick up the kids,” she whispers, face crosshatched with guilt.
“I picked them up already,” you say. “I got them.” Then you look at her and think—what if she slips off the swing and breaks her face? You’d have to explain it to Bill, your manager, who has puffy red skin and a brown beard and brings six Diet Shastas to work each day, in an ice cooler.
“C’mon,” you say to Shirley, and stand up and pull her up off of the swing, and you walk back across the hills and gulleys of sand, over the wooden wall, across the ratty grass to a metal bench. You sit her down and lie on your back on the bench next to her, squinting your eyes in the sun.
“So tell me about your life, Shirley,” you say, letting the tips of your fingernails graze the pavement below you. “You got a husband?”
“Yes,” Shirley says pertly. “You?”
“I’m married to the king of Siam.”
“Oh, no, you’re not.”
“Okay,” you say. “You got me.” You sit back up.
“I’m not married.” You fold your hands together, cracking back your knuckles. “I have plans.” You run your hands along the ridges of the platinum-colored metal bench. Your red fingernail polish is chipping away. You are wild, and ravenous. “I’m going to go to college,” you say.
Sister Gloria said you could have gotten in, if you had not spent your afternoons watching television and writing violent stories on binder paper in purple ink and smoking pot with Jason in his truck by the lake. And making out with Jason and getting pregnant and stopping eating to make the problem go away, which it did, eventually, but you had to miss school because you got sick, and you didn’t graduate with the other girls in their white gowns clutching red flowers with matching white heels and hair slicked back. It was a cheesy ceremony, anyway. It looked like a virgin sacrifice—all those girls in white. You didn’t fit in with that, either.
You pound the table lightly with your fist, and an echoing noise reverberates through the bench. You’ve got your GED. You can go to college. You just need to save up a little bit. And you’re not going to go to some crummy community college either. You are leaving home. You are history. Goodbye, Janice Gibbs. Janice Gibbs has left the county.
The young fat Mexican grandma at the next table is giving out purple grapes to her kids. They are scrambling around the aluminum table like vultures or ants, crawling on top of it, then one of them shouts something and they run off for the field. They shouldn’t run with grapes in their mouth, they could maybe choke. You know this, you babysat when you were 13 and keeping it together, putting away dollar bills and dimes you picked up from the pavement in a sock under your pillow.
Sister Gloria knew how bad you wanted to get away, and she took you aside after catechism, and said they would give you a scholarship to the girls’ school. But that was when you were holding things together, before you decided to drop open your hand, and let things fall. You like letting things fall, seeing things splatter, walking away, leaving places, burning bridges.
Sister Gloria sends you letters now, and you burn them with your lighter, holding your hands and the flaming letter outside the window of your car while you kneel on your seat playing mix tapes Jason made you. It’s not like you don’t like her, she did good things for you. The letters are even signed “affectionately,” and Sister Gloria is not affectionate by nature, not by a long shot. She’s one of those frozen people who coldly does good things, calculated frozen charity, ice cubes of love. She liked you, though, you made her laugh in Sunday school.
You look over at the Mexican grandma, who still has a pile of grapes on the Saran Wrap on the picnic table in front of her, grapes resting in a pool of water on the plastic. She looks up at you, and you nod your head, because you are both babysitting here, daydreaming while keeping others from killing or hurting themselves, lives on hold. She stands up, calling her kids back in, to go home and take naps, or watch tv maybe. She looks at you, and plucks up a bunch of grapes by the stem.
“Uvas?” She dangles them questioningly.
“Sure,” you say, reaching out, and she drops the cold dusty blue grapes into your palm.
“Thanks.” She smiles at you, showing front teeth framed by metal dental work. Her kids swarm up to her, and they leave the field for someplace cool and shady. You hold out a ripe-split grape for Shirley, and as she reaches to take it, you catch sight of a silver charmchain on her skinny wrist. “That’s a pretty bracelet,” you say.
Shirley looks down at the chain, and you realize: it is a medical bracelet. Like the kind that warns if someone is allergic to penicillin.
“Oh, this?” she says, dismissive. “I don’t know where this came from.” Frustrated, she fumbles at it with her thumb and forefinger.
“What does it say?” you ask. You squint down at the line of script carved into the metal.
Engraved are the words, “Do not resuscitate.”
Shirley squints. “I can’t read it,” she mutters.
You pluck a grape, and place it in her palm.
“It just says your name,” you say. “It just says, ‘Shirley.’”
KATHLEEN FOUNDS, ’04, works with students at the writing center of the University of Texas-Pan American.
