Waiting

The western sky is a pool of orange sherbet. The setting sun lingers above the horizon. Rita Fuller hunches in her wheelchair, trembling slightly from neurological rather than environmental conditions. She has dragged herself, one faltering heel at a time, to the circle drive by the main entrance. She stops just shy of the curb. She's drawn moth-like to the light. Through thick lenses, her eyes are directed to the tops of pines at the edge of Evergreen Grove's property. Each verdant cone intermittently sways in the breeze as though entranced. A mosquito hums near her ear, but she does not bat it away. She is not concerned. She is totally withdrawn, testudinal in her seclusion. She is a perceptual repository. She is aware of the perspiration seeping from her pores, but she has no desire to blot at it. Her bladder sends a dull signal, but she will not tend to it. Mrs. Fuller only wants to be left alone to stare into the offing and replay her life's fragile reels on the broken projector of her memory.

                Of katydids and sweltering summer evenings. Of the milkman in all-white, spotted with translucent patches of sweat, bringing gallons of ice cream to their porch. Of her two brothers and two sisters gathering around with spoons in hand and herself, the eldest, with a tub condensating in her lap. The container making a darkened ring on her long skirt, her thighs burning with the intense cold. Spoons clanking against each other, protestations of unfairness. Creamy drops landing on shorts or shins, dispersing into cloth or slipping along downy-haired legs, drying in crusty amoebas or sticky trails. Giggles mingling with grunts and shoves. Rita the mediator. One at a time. Take turns. There's enough for everyone. All the children gorging but her who held the tub with numbing fingers. Rita doesn't mind. She is the helper. Her father silently overseeing the treat’s  apportionment from his rocker behind them, stripped down to his undershirt. His bangs wilted in clumps across his forehead, a hand never quite clean brushing them back. He whose chin stubble tugs at her locks during goodnight kisses. He whose strength seems boundless.

                Mrs. Fuller's fingers tingle now but without applied chill. Her hands look crudely drawn. The digits deviate at the knuckles, each failing to align. Her thumbs stick out, contorted. When they aren't tingling, they're throbbing. She has learned to ignore the pain, to let the nerves fire in vain. Like so many matters of the body, the will is impotent.

                Her manual dexterity scores have diminished since she was moved to the Grove eight years ago. She's tired of the tests and the nurses who administer them. She is weary of the staff's ceaseless commands. It's not as though she doesn't know how. Her fingers simply don't obey sometimes. She tells them to squeeze the same way she always has, but they must be hard of hearing like their commander is.

                Three years ago, Mrs. Fuller ceased replying to letters or expressing thanks for cards. Longhand is too demanding with its swirls and loops. Even dialing the phone is a challenge. Its buttons seemed to have shrunken. Then there's the problem of contact information contained in her outdated address book. She ceased blotting the deceased's numbers in black because it obscured the pages behind. Which is just as well. No one expects her to respond or do much of anything else besides cooperate. She scrawls on claims or waivers as needed. She scribbles on the sporadic release when Deborah can't be reached soon enough. The motions are familiar but the outcome is not. She can't read her marks even though her vision is fair. The script is torturous; the lines are faint and squiggly.

***

                A chickadee hops among the landscaping, pausing to eat bits of unseen food. Mrs. Fuller senses the bird out of the corner of her eye. Even its diminutive shadow is lengthy. She watches it forage, the feathered creature, the winged thing, the flying animal. Millie Granderson owned one, but it was blue and white. A terrible pet, always getting loose and chomping on picture frames. Perching on bookshelves in the den, evading capture and taunting with piercing notes from an elevated throne. He would bite your ear and mess on your shoulder. Equal parts eating and messing. Chirping incessantly, all throughout the day like a busted alarm. In the wild, though, how nice. We are happier apart. We are apart. Apart. Mrs. Fuller flits away before the bird does.

                The sun is nearly finished with Springfield. The waning light puts Mrs. Fuller's countenance in stark relief. Her skin has an etched quality as though she were one of Durer's prints. Around her thin lips is a sunburst of creases. Along these peaks and troughs are hundreds of faint hairs. The topography undergoes seismic shifts every few minutes. During the most powerful tremors, half her face snaps taught instantaneously, a flashed and incomplete smile. Others, more aftershock than quake, involve a brief pursing of the lips or partial wink. Glasses pivot on the fulcrum of her nose. The frames’ left arm is wrapped with medical tape. What originally read FULLER in permanent ink has bled beyond all recognition. Above these, her stiff hair resists tussling. It is caked with spray. The gray waves are ruins, structures once tubular but since collapsed. Her hairline is scaly. Her scalp is the same pallid pink of her gums. On her temple above her right eye is a thick scab she picks at each time she rediscovers it. The scab is black and roughly textured from provocation. Rita had struck a table's edge trying to pick up the fork she dropped before she could stab her boiled carrots. The world melted, and she toppled like a spruce at… at… at… at wintertime.

               

***

                Mrs. Fuller waits, but she waits for no one. She believes she receives no visitors; she complains she entertains no guests. Few are left to come calling. Both of her brothers and Edith died decades ago. Her youngest sister, Faye, moved elsewhere without leaving a forwarding address in the 1970s. Nieces, nephews, and cousins are scattered across the nation with lives of their own. Nurses and neighbors do darken her door daily, though these strangers count not to Rita.

                Deborah drops by every other week to debrief with a supervisor and bring Mom her Milano cookies, but she can't bear to stay for long. The journey to Room 138 is reminiscent of a scene from The Inferno. Fetid air fills the corridor's length. Huddled, moaning lumps of people are strewn about the hallway, moored where they were discarded. The cruel juxtaposition of smiley face stickers and mylar balloons against badly-stained carpet tile and oppressively loud televisions is too much to take. Mrs. Fuller's room is no oasis. The space feels cheap even though it is anything but. The furniture is hospital-grade, of a color chosen for its neutrality and a material chosen for its impermeability. Plastic wraps the bed beneath the sheets. Galvanized handles rated to hold four hundred pounds in the bathroom help hoist Mrs. Fuller's scant ninety-one. Red call buttons protrude on every wall; a pullable cord dangles by the toilet. Despite the sepia pictures and framed needlepoint, the atmosphere is transient. Residents' names are slid in and out of plaques like so many bank tellers.

                Every time Deborah enters, Mrs. Fuller is awake and in her chair. She’s rolled over by the window, gazing into the courtyard and the parking lot on the other side. Their interactions play out predictably. Deborah knocks on the door frame, crosses the threshold, says hello, and embraces her mom at an awkward angle. Her mom inertly accepts. On the rare occasions Mrs. Fuller lights up at Deborah's entrance, it indicates the happiness of being surprised—not of being surprised by her daughter. Their conversations tend to be imbalanced. On bad days, Mrs. Fuller responds with flat monosyllables. When she musters more, she trails off mid-sentence as though her teleprompter blanked. After ten minutes, Deborah leaves the bag of cookies on the laminate dresser and says she must be going now. Deborah writes notes on her mom's wall calendar chronicling past and future visits, but Rita doesn't know who wrote them or what day it is. Every time Rita sees the calendar, she thinks it’s wrong. It can't be 2015.

                Mrs. Fuller waits for a breeze, for a bug, for a cloud. She waits for a cue, a suggestive association. Rita waits for Harold, who has been dead for seventeen years, but who'll be returning any moment from the hardware store with a new knob to replace the one in the den that won't catch. What time did he leave? It couldn't have been more than an hour ago. And yet, it feels much longer. It feels like years. Then again, it feels like no time at all because she can recall his voice with a clarity not possible in archaic recordings. The feed is live. The speech is present as much as a passing car's engine. She can almost smell him. He’s borne in certain aromas. Harold resides in the fresh mulch he would spread around their sugar maples and atop their bed of jonquils—earthy, a soiled tang. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but real. He's in the wind, felt but not held. He can't grasp or be grasped, but he is here with her so long as she is here with herself. He consists of materials impervious to aging, not from solidity but friability, from being carried aloft like a word or the rhythm of his footsteps. This is the compromise with death. You can stay but not the same. You can be but as forgettable.

***

                Her body brings her back to the sidewalk. Rita's joints ache. How long has she been rooted to this spot? She finds her wrist bony and skin pebbled. How can that be? That is not her arm and yet it is. She grips and twists like a throttle where the watch ought to be. Mrs. Fuller doesn't currently know that she doesn’t wear watches anymore. Although she has acquired many timepieces over the years, she isn't afforded the luxury. They are all dead and buried in a bank whose steps she could not ascend. Her other valuables are stored there as well. The malachite brooch from her trip to Israel, the pearl necklace from Harold’s tour in Japan, Grandma Esther’s ruby hairpin, her parents’ gilded graduation gift: they all lie in a metal container, unworn and cold. The contents were slid into a wall of identical containers and locked with a key of which she has not a copy for their safe keeping. Because such items will soon be part of her estate. Because Evergreen Grove is a nice place but you never know about the staff. Because who's to say if she misplaced her wedding ring or if it was slid off of her relenting finger by a bad apple? Deborah would not allow that to happen, so Mrs. Fuller sits and rubs her bare wrist with her naked hand.

                The nakedness of her ring finger alarms her next. Her eyebrows raise. A siren sounds for the item lost to her but not to her executrix. Oh Lord. She looks in her lap and finds only a carrot-colored stain on her otherwise yellow slacks. She pulls on the rumpled fabric of her blouse, hoping to make the object tumble. The polyester blend stretches and springs back. She lifts and shakes the hem, yearning to feel the tug of two gold ounces and half carat diamond rolling free of their hiding place. But nothing new tugs at her. Oh Lord. She brushes her chest. She shifts and cranes her neck over one side of the wheelchair. Sparkleless pavement. And the other. Sparkleless pavement. Her old heart races.

                She bends to look down at her feet. Whose shoes are those, nude and velcroed, a perforated crescent over the toes? Who would ever wear such ugly things? And yet, when she thinks of twitching a foot, the shoe twitches. Oh no. A clump of brown fuzz clings to one of the straps. Mrs. Fuller reaches down to pick it loose, but meets with resistance. Her back aches and refuses to bend as far as she needs to pick at the ball. The swell of panic elevates this task into urgency. She tries to lift that shoe towards her outstretched hand but meets with resistance in another location. She can feel it creak, feel the sound's texture from within, the quick succession of snags and releases, the vibration of friction and a little sharp pain. Defeated, Rita leans back. Her head is awash in liquid, but she's not wet. She's submerged, but there's no water. Her hearing is muffled like there's batting in her ears. She closes her eyes. Not to stop seeing, but to stop being here. To stop feeling vertiginous. But her head continues sloshing. Please stop. Oh...

                Her inability to reach her foot, to be thwarted by a task so simple, and the liquefaction of earth flushes her face. Pins of dismay prick her body. She shudders and begins to sob. Sobbing gives way to wailing, and she starts to totter. The cries reverberate off of the east wing, and the chickadee takes flight. The tingle in Mrs. Fuller's abdomen subsides. Warmth blooms and spreads beneath her. All the while, she is aware. It occurs to Rita that everything is miserable. She circles around and around this fixed point of helplessness. Who is she now? How did she get here? The deep creek bed of wrinkles on her cheeks channels the tears to her slack jowls. In quieter moments, they wobble with palsy. Now, they are flushed and heaving. If she was seen, she'd look pathetic. She is not seen or so much as wondered about. This is her private suffering. The remnants of last night's sleep moisten in the corners of her eyes and become doughy. If she could see herself, there would be no recognition. She is a constant alien, a wanderer in what passes as her home.

               

***

                Mrs. Fuller intuits her incompleteness. She's never far from her boundaries. Huge swaths of inquiry are forbidden to her, yet she can approach their borders. She does so frequently. Her mind naturally meanders within the yawning chasms between meals, between naps, between pills. She retraces events, relives times, and abruptly tumbles into ignorance. It's as though she plunges into a hole. She begins along a path, foresees the shimmering end on the frontier, but is subsumed by a void along the way. The abyss is unlike unconsciousness, though. It is not experienced like slumber’s ease. While your recollection fails you, your will does not and neither does your shortest of short-term memory. For in the empty place, you remember you entered it with a purpose. You recognize that it was once full. You long to pack in its truth again. You cannot. Adrift in the abyss of forgetfulness, Rita is deprived of herself. She is a person aware of her location but blind to the landmarks. She is lost and knows it.

                Dark matter would be comprehensible to Mrs. Fuller if she had ever heard of it. She could understand the hypothesis that that which is not is the heaviest stuff. It is like nothing but not. Nothing is borderless. These cavities inside Mrs. Fuller are circumscribed. She can walk around them, survey the abutting landscape. These holes are the places where her darkness dwells. A doctor, the soft-spoken one with the nice office, Dr. B— or Dr. V—, explained that her brain was becoming porous. He spoke of her brain and not her. He circled lesions on the backlit MRI with his pen's tip. Mrs. Fuller did not grasp the terminology, but she gathered the upshot from his tone. She agreed. That's how she felt. She felt like a piece of pumice. She contains many holes. The negative space nearly outweighs the positive.

                These moments of disorientation—hundreds per day—are observable in her broadly attentive visage and eyes fixed on nothing more concrete than the distance. When she looks, Deborah can see the agony magnified behind her mother’s glassy eyes. The pain of loss concentrates Mrs. Fuller's mind to pierce through the haze, the clips of sounds, monosyllables, the incomplete sketch of a face or fact. She retracts all attention from her limbs and torso and retreats to her mind's cracked throne, peering and straining to regain bearings. She holds this defiant posture until bereavement makes her slacken. In these moments, she is alive enough to know that death is eroding her, that there are burgeoning caverns in her core, that she is a shell being siphoned of its substance.

                But then, as shoulders droop and Mrs. Fuller crumbles, the foe becomes friend. The remembrance of forgetfulness dissolves like film exposed to heat. She finds herself advanced beyond crisis by the sometimes maniacal, sometimes merciful progression of time. She rediscovers the fact that arrivals and departures are a matter of perspective, destinations are interchangeable when scrubbed of the past. She resets.

                The lives of octogenarians afford ample opportunities to learn by experience. In her years, Mrs. Fuller has been taught what to fear: the death, not the dying. The dying will happen one way or another. Dying is matter of fact. She has long known this, has seen this seven times. She watched her father abruptly expire. He was mowing the lawn, laboring up the sycamore-lined hill. He wore striped shorts and his old loafers, the tan ones tinged grass-green. How he would sweat! The scene was comical from her window's vantage. She thought he tripped. The reel mower shot out in front of him and he crumpled. The handle hit the ground after he did. Nothing else changed. The clothes still flapped on the line. Dogs kept barking. Her father laid motionless like a cartoon character who'd been bonked on the head. Silly daddy. Rita told her mother about his spill, laughing. Her mother did not laugh. She ran. She died next, some years later. Gigi and Edith, too. A car accident and a stroke. No one knew about the hole in Donald’s heart until his lips were blue for a week. He was nineteen. Cancer took its time with Edwin, worked him over like a boxer, drug it out, savored the victory. The heart monitor keeping time, counting down. That’s the way it goes, fast or slow.

                Mrs. Fuller will go when her maker calls, and she has faith she will live on. But she won’t leave this earth a moment before. Life’s a gift she’s in no hurry to return. That’d be ungrateful. That would be ceding victory to the sickness. She does not know the day of the week or what she ate for lunch, but she knows this: that sickness feeds on fear. She has watched it feed on others when given the chance; she has felt it gnaw within her. She will not allow it to be further sated. Death wants you to think it is the end, to give up or run. But it is not. This conviction is her compass by which she marches on.

***

                Under her slacks, on shins and thighs frosted with xerosis, are splotches of eggplant purple. They are the marks left by Webster's Large Print Edition. Rita had extracted it from Evergreen Grove's modest library shelf in the hopes of filling in one of the countless tip-of-the-tongue blanks that taunt her. She wanted to label her experience and place herself again in the comfort of states named. But a dictionary is a cumbersome tool in the hands of an ignorant laborer. It is the flattened haystack, every page full of wrong needles. After flipping through the Cs and Ss, the word kept floating, aloft in an updraft of frustration. Mrs. Fuller was reminded that objects require no name to make themselves known. The force of gravity and fumbling fingers seeking to replace the infernal thing from whence it came suffices.

                Skin was not broken; blood vessels and spirit were. She cried then as now. When Deborah inquired of the ghastly bruises, of which there have been many, Rita could offer no explanation. When asked if the wounds hurt, she pushed them like fleshy buttons and confirmed. When asked about the workers, if they did that to her, if they've been rough with her in any way, Rita wasn’t sure. When asked Mom, please try to keep track of your injuries, write them down—as soon as they happen—because it's serious and we can move you if need be, Rita screamed her hands are no damned good anymore. She raised the arthritic things in front of her reddened face and pleaded through viscous saliva to be left the Hell alone.

                She slumped and sobbed and when Deborah rose to leave, herself in tears, Rita asked where she was going. Deborah didn't explain. She retreated from the threshold and went to her mother, embraced the quivering husk, and reassured Rita it's going to be okay. Rita agreed and rubbed Deborah's declined back, and said of course it will be, Edith. They'll get through this together. She declared she's so blessed to have a sister who is so close, one with whom burdens are shared.

                Rita's tears transitioned from sad to happy while Deborah's remained sad. Deborah did despair, though, she lamented. She'd rather be her own aunt than a complete stranger to her mother. Because it's not a lie if you fail to set the record straight. Because Rita is more contented by this gracious error than the unforgiving truth of the situation: that Esther died fifty-five years ago, but died again three minutes ago, that Aunt Edith passed on more than twenty, and that Rita is eighty four and the final fruit of the Fuller tree.

***

                Emotions emanate from an unknown origin. Mrs. Fuller finds her cheeks damp. She rubs the moisture around and clears the corners out behind the glasses. She rolls the residue between her fingers methodically. These motions require concentration. She appreciates the sensation, so she continues until it becomes sticky. Mrs. Fuller has a propensity to see without registering. Her eyes are open. There are colors and shapes, but they have no import. She is in her fingertips. The echoes of her frustration recede into the lightly molding vinyl siding and the suburbs beyond. She has returned to where she started. Vacancy is her home.

                The golden sun is a tarnished sliver for a moment and disappears. Ochre dims to rust as the sky strains to recall the daylight. Navy steadily advances overhead, attacking from all fronts. She feels relieved of a certain pressure, but grows uncomfortable. Her seat begins to itch. Something is amiss, but something is always amiss. She only wants to be here, here with her disease and fearless, filling her holes with what life continually offers or has not taken back.

                With trips out west and Arizona’s martian terrain. With the Airstream in tow, barreling down two lane roads for days and Debbie sleeping in the bathtub to stay cool. Brisk early mornings with a tea kettle’s whistle and cookies from the filling station for dunking. Playing old maid on the fold-out table and Harold invariably losing. Connecting the dots between campgrounds. Tripping over every leg and corner in the dark to wake him up, a hefty bag of winnings from Reno thudding on the dresser. The two of them giddy, filling coin sleeves at 2:00 AM. Debbie in her nightie, hair a mess, rubbing her eyes by the bathroom door. Go back to sleep, Debbie dear. We’ll all celebrate in the morning. How do pancakes sound? With Harold embracing her from behind while she stirs noodles on the efficiency stove. Her blushed cheek on his tattooed forearm. With reunions of friends beneath the stars, the soda siphon sizzling. Kids squealing, trying not to be it. Going back a week later to where these two people carved out a little room for a third in this crazy, wounded world. Simple pleasures. Open road. Needlepoint to pass the time and jello molds to hold the dessert for when the gals get together for bridge. Those were the days. They still are the days, in a way.

                The sliding door opens unassisted behind her. It sounds like a whisper to hush, but no one is being noisy.

                "Oh there you are Miss Rita! Time to come back on inside, hun. It's going on eight. You got to take your pills, now, okay."

                Rita pretends not to hear the nurse. She would rather be dragged inside. This is her revolt. Her quiet rebellion. Mrs. Fuller's shoes scrape the sidewalk as she's retracted inside the automatic doors of the vestibule. She will not divert her gaze. The sun is nearly risen.