A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (11 page)

“Oh no, you don’t spend time with terminally ill children. Our volunteers visit with the children recovering from surgery, getting fitted for prostheses, things like that. Not terminal cases.”

I can see her thoughts through a suddenly opened window in her forehead. Jesus, she’s thinking, this woman is clearly not suitable for any kind of program, how do I leave without upsetting her? The transparent patch in Jessica’s forehead is a product of sleep deprivation, as Mary Lou has already explained to Marc and me. The moments when
Saul, at various ages, comes to me and weeps in my arms, the tendency to see people’s words as they say them and sometimes when they don’t, the sensation that objects are only two-dimensional—these are typical symptoms of sleep deprivation. Not to worry.

“I’ll think about it. Why don’t you leave your card. Thanks for coming. Good-bye.” I think this comes out pretty well, but I can see from her face that I have left out something key, like inflection. Too bad. If she wants affect, she can talk to Marc. I go upstairs and lie down with my shoes on (but my soles don’t touch the bedspread—I’m not that far gone) until I hear the front door close.

Another agonizing evening with the O’Connor-Schwartzes begins. Marc is solicitous, then hurt, then apologetic, then furious, then guilty, then back to the beginning, then exhausted. He usually falls asleep between guilt and the third bottle of wine.

I cannot kill myself—we do not commit that sin, it is
such
bad form—but I find myself teetering at the stair landings, walking quickly on the narrow, slick marble steps of the library, seeing how long I can keep my hands off the steering wheel. Come and get me.

T
his is not a hospital ward, it is the Hieronymus Bosch Pediatric Purgatory. I have been told to wait with the other child lovers shuffling along in pastel sweatsuits and massive sneakers or two-hundred-dollar cardigans thrown
over jeans and posy-covered turtlenecks. Apparently, only women are in need of this kind of entertainment. As we go through the halls of gasping infants, and toddlers with metal shunts sticking out of their heads, and older children playing tag with their IVs, I notice that my little group is more varied than I thought. Two of the six look late-middle-aged, and their expressions are of pleasant concern and universal affection. Two others are quite young, very Junior League, and if they have lost babies they’ve been spending quite a bit of time in the gym ever since. The woman right next to me is black, meaning the color of strong coffee, and
her
expression, at least, is familiar to me. She looks enraged and terrified, and when she sees a nurse her lips curl up and back, revealing wonderfully pointed incisors. When we are seated for orientation, in a window-less room with firmly cushioned chairs and love seats, I perch on the edge of a table, and the little nurse leading the group knows enough not to encourage me to join the circle. She asks what each of us hopes to get out of this program, and the others say whatever they say, and the black woman and I snarl and look away. Even I, with my impaired judgment, cannot believe that they’re going to let people like us have contact with helpless children. Then she asks if we have preferences about the kids we spend time with. The others say prettily that it really doesn’t matter. The she-wolf says, “Not a black child,” and I say nothing at all.

I ask for a little time to get acclimated, and the nurse lets me trespass quietly, unsupervised. All the children I
see are engaged. They are being fed and held, or being sung to as their dressings are changed. They cry out briefly as their scarlet stumpy parts are washed and rewrapped. When the nurses and aides see me watching, they scowl or smile quickly; visitors are not much help. Some of the rooms are overflowing with Mylar balloons, photo-filled bulletin boards, parents, toys, comic books. I am looking for a room with nothing but a kid and a cot.

He is there, at the end of the hall. He comes out of his room to greet me in a state-of-the-art wheelchair, its front built up like a combination keyboard and portable desk. He holds a silver stick in his mouth and presses the keys on the console with it. We watch each other. He is ugly, not at all what Saul would have been. Sallow, greasy little rat face, buzz-cut black hair, stick-out ears. As he bends over the console, I see the back of his thin, hairy neck.

“Hey,” he says, letting go of the stick. I thought he couldn’t be more than three, but no toddler could speak like that—as if he’d been living on the streets for fifteen years and this hospital was just one more dead-end job.

“Hey, yourself.” I’m blushing.

“Could you move?”

I flatten myself against the wall and he rolls past, stick pressed hard to the flat orange disk in a row of concave blue buttons. The wheelchair has tires fit for a pickup truck, and the sides go up to his neck like a black box. I look down as the whole thing lumbers past. Under his little T-shirt he has no arms.

“Bye,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I cannot befriend the nurse at the front desk, but I do persuade her to tell me about him. Jorge. His story is horror upon unending horror—proof, not that I needed it, that the thought of a God is even more frightening than a world without one. Nobody is coming to take him home. He is not considered lovable, and the occasional saints—the foster parents who take in the AIDS babies and the cancer-ridden children—don’t want him. What does he like? I ask the nurse. Nothing, she says. Whatever he likes, he’s been keeping it to himself.

I wait by his room. He will not show his pleasure, but he will be reluctantly, helplessly pleased. Who has ever come back for a second, nonclinical look?

“Gum?”

“What kind?”

“Bubble Yum. Mint or grape.” It
is
what I chew.

“Grape.” He opens his mouth, and I unwrap the gum and place it on his white-coated tongue. He chews away, and then purses his lips around his joystick and moves off. At the end of the hall, he sits up and looks over his shoulder at me. He tongues the stick aside, keeping the blue gum in.

I wave. “See you tomorrow, Jorge.”

A
t home, I prepare for diplomacy and war. I shower, even using the marjoram gel. My spirits
are
lifted. I make Julia Child brisket and arrange a pretty salad. I open a bottle of
Stag’s Leap and use the big-bowled wineglasses, the ones I have to wash by hand.

I tell Marc about him, lying. I make him sound sweet, responsive, appreciative. I don’t tell the story the nurse told me: how he spat in the face of an aide, saving up a mouthful of penicillin to do so. I don’t mention his all-over ugliness, the gooey squint in his right eye, the slight fecal odor surrounding him. I might as well have told Marc the truth. No, he says, we cannot take a disabled child right now.

We? I have to laugh. That old joke: What do you mean “we,” white man? I pick over the words in my mind, to get him to say yes, and then I don’t care.

“I’m bringing him home if they let me. He doesn’t have to be in the hospital, but his family can’t care for him, and his needs are too much for a residential place.” Of course they’ll let me. It must cost a fortune to keep him. And he’s so ugly.

“If you bring him home, I don’t know … I don’t think I can stay. Please don’t do this to us.”

A
n aide brings Jorge off the elevator, and they both stare at me in surprise. I open my briefcase slowly, making a show of the tight buckles as Jorge approaches. I can hear the warm, sticky roll of the tires on the linoleum floor. We’ll have to pull up the guest room carpeting.

“Gum?” he says.

I unwrap the gum and put it in his mouth, telling him my name so that the grape sugar on his tongue will become his thought of me.

He nods and chews. I sneak my hand to the vinyl headrest, almost skin temperature, and smoothed by his neck and hair.

“Let’s go find the unit chief,” I say, and Jorge follows, the heavy movement of the chair shaking the floor beneath us.

I
get into bed with the phone book and my list: medical equipment, pharmacy (delivery service?), furniture, foreign-language tapes (in case his Spanish is better than his English), carpenter (ramp). I underline “carpenter” twice and call three names, leaving messages on their machines. It can’t take more than a week to put a ramp where the kitchen steps are now. In my mind I move the living room furniture around and get rid of the glass coffee table. When Marc falls asleep, dried red wine sitting in the corners of his mouth, I get up and move the actual pieces, shoving the coffee table into Marc’s study for now. My body hums. I hang up my clothes, wipe Marc’s damp mouth with my fingers, and pull the blanket up around him. I fall asleep easily, dreaming of Jorge, my little egg, rolling around on our queen-size bed, the silk spread smooth beneath his skin.

M
y senior year in high school, I was in two car accidents, neither of them my fault, and I was arrested twice, also not my fault. I couldn’t keep my hands on the wheel, and the guardrails flew right at me.

I found myself on emergency room examining tables, looking into slow-moving penlights, counting backward from forty to demonstrate consciousness, and calling my mother terrible names. I hate hospitals. The smell makes me sick, and the slick floors trip me up. When I visited my four dying grandparents, who dropped like dominoes the winter I was ten, I had to leave their rooms and go throw up. By February I had a favorite stall. With my mother, I could never get that far; before I even saw her I’d throw up from the thick green smell laid over the pain and stink and helplessness. When there was no reason to keep her, they let her come home.

My mother painted about forty pictures every year, and her hands smelled of turpentine, even when she just got out of the shower. This past year she started five or six paintings but only finished one. She couldn’t do the big canvases anymore, couldn’t hang off her stepladder to reach the upper corners, and that last one was small enough to sit on a little easel near her bed so she could work on it when she had the strength. After December she didn’t leave the bed. My mother, who could stand for hours in her cool white studio, shifting her weight from foot to foot, moving in on the canvas and backing off again, like a smart boxer waiting for the perfect opening. And then, in two months, she shrank down to an ancient little girl, loose skin and bones so light they seemed hollow. A friend suggested scarves for her bald head, but they always slipped down, half covering her eyes and ears, making her look more like a bag lady than a soap opera star. For a while she wore a white fisherman’s hat with a button that said “Don’t Get Me Mad,” and then she just gave up. I got used to the baldness and to the shadowy fuzz that grew back, but the puffiness in her face drove me crazy. Her true face, with cheekbones so high and sharp people didn’t think she spoke English, was hidden from me, kidnapped.

When I got too angry at her, I’d leave the house and throw rocks against the neighbors’ fences, hoping to hit someone’s healthy mother not as smart or as beautiful or as talented as mine. My friends bickered with their mothers over clothes or the phone or Nathan Zigler’s parties, and I
wanted to stab them to death. I didn’t return calls and they all stopped trying, except for Kay who left a jar of hollyhocks or snapdragons on the front porch every few weeks. When I can talk again, I’ll talk to her.

I could hardly see the painting my mother was still working on, since I went blind and deaf as soon as I touched the doorknob. I stared at the dust motes until my vision blurred and I could look toward the bed. My mother held my hand and sighed, and her weakness made me so angry and sick that I’d leave the room, pretending I had homework. And she knew everything, and I couldn’t, and cannot, forgive myself for letting her know.

It was June, and everything outside was bright green and pale pink, and our house was dark and thick with dust. My mother used to say that we were messy but clean, and that used to be true. My father hid out in his study, emerging to entertain my mother and then lumbering back to his den. He’d come out, blink in the light, and feel his way to the kitchen, as if he’d never been in our front hall before. We avoided dinner conversation by investing heavily in frozen foods. He’d stay with my mother from five to six, reading to her from the
National Enquirer,
all the Liz Taylor stories, and then I’d take over the chitchat brigade while he drank bourbon and soda and nuked a Healthy Choice. The nurse’s aide went home at five, and my father and I agreed we could save money by not getting another aide until the late shift. Six terrifying hours every night. While my mother rested a little, if the pain wasn’t too bad,
I’d go down to the empty kitchen and toast a couple of apple-cinnamon Pop-Tarts. Sometimes I’d smoke a joint and eat the whole box. If my father’s door was open, I’d sit in the hall outside and wait until the sharp, woody smell brought him out shaking his head like a bloodied stag; we didn’t have the energy to really fight. More often than not, we’d end up back in the brown fog of his study, me taking a few last puffs with my legs thrown over his big leather armchair, my father sipping his bourbon and staring out at the backyard. I ate Cheez Doodles most of the night, leaving oval orange prints all over the house. We took turns sitting with my mother until eleven. I watched the clock. One night I woke up on the floor of my mother’s room, my feet tangled in the dust ruffle. I could see my father’s black shoes sticking out on the other side of the bed, gleaming in the moonlight. He’d fallen asleep on the floor too, his arms wrapped around my mother’s cross-stitch pillow, the one that said “If you can’t say anything nice, come sit by me.” I don’t know what happened to the aide that night. By morning I was under my father’s old wool bathrobe and he was gone.

On her last good days, in March and April, I helped my mother paint a little. She always said I had a great eye but no hand. But my hands were all she had then, and she guided me for the bigger strokes. It was like being a kid again, sitting down at our dining room table covered over with a dozen sheets of slippery tan drawing paper.