It was probably fitting that during the last month of Gee Degraw’s life he became preoccupied with his genitals. He seemed enamored with them, delighted by them, as though he’d discovered something new and exciting about his degenerated body. He played with himself underneath his hospital gown and grinned at us. Sometimes he showed us. He would kick his covers off and point.
The doctor assured us that his dementia had dissolved considerable aspects of his personality. “He isn’t the man you knew,” the doctor would say.
This didn’t seem to convince my mother. She fought with Gee when he tried to lift his gown, angrily brushed his hands away from himself. His masturbatory impulses upset her. I brought her coffee and she paced the room until the nurse brought his sedatives. “I‘m sorry, Gretchen,” she’d say.
But it never bothered me. I thought it was remarkable that an eighty-six-year old man with emphysema still found his penis amusing. It was oddly shaped, I noted. I told Toby this the last time we visited Gee in the hospital, and asked him if he’d like to have a look. It turned out that he, much like my exasperated mother, did not.
“He’s really holding on.” She sighed one morning. We were sharing a donut and a cup of stale coffee. The waxy glaze kept crumbling on his bed sheets.
“Maybe he’s waiting for something,” I suggested through a mouthful of dough, “maybe he wants one last sexual favor.” I laughed, thinking this was funny. But she gasped painfully as though pricked by something sharp. A piece of donut stuck at the back of my throat.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
My mother’s sense of humor was often unreliable.
The hospital was a maze of entertainment for the idle and restless. You could get lost in the halls just looking for the bathroom. You could disappear for hours following the infinitely squared linoleum floors, trying to step inside the gleaming globes of white reflecting the bulbs overhead. You could open an unmarked door and find the janitor’s closet, step inside for a moment and close it behind you — just to see how long you could stand the dark and the smell of cleanser before you got nervous. Or you could peek into all the open rooms and look at the sick people, white-haired and open-mouthed, feeling guilty when they caught you careening by, as though your youth leaked from your body and left a mocking mist floating in your wake. With every step I seemed to swing. It was offensive.
Marjorie was the woman with balloons tied to the back of her wheelchair who sat in the hall and reached for people as they passed by. I tried to avoid her. I quickened my pace as I approached her backside, hoping to step lightly beside her and remain unnoticed. And really I could have kept going.
“Help me!”
She yelled this constantly. Nurses and hospital staff had learned to ignore it, to allow it to blend in with the buzzing intercom, the beeping heart monitors, the pinging elevator. “Help!” Her cries bled into the scarlet vines that crept along the wallpaper. .
“Take me to the bathroom, they won’t let me go!” She grabbed my wrist with both hands. “I have to go!” Her grip belied her appearance. She was strong for an old person in a festive wheelchair.
I bit my lip and searched the room for help. She seemed desperate. Even the tuft of silver at the top of her scalp flashed with urgency. I couldn’t leave her. Even though I wanted to. Even though I wanted to run desperately in the other direction and pretend we’d never encountered each other. I wanted suddenly to become the expressionless nurse at the station a few yards away. She shuffled papers like a large deck of cards.
“Hey!” I yelled at a passing orderly from my crouched position on the floor. This is how I met Toby. “She has to go.” I gestured to Marjorie. “Really bad.” In case he didn’t understand the urgency of the situation.
“Help me!” She cried again. Couldn’t she see I’d found help?
The orderly looked queerly at me, as though my presence in the building confused him. I stared back, consciously pinching the muscles around my eyes to mimic suspicion. The strawberry blond of his hair seemed to mock the stiff black plastic of his nametag. As if to repair this absurdity, a small yellow smiley face covered the “o” in “Toby.”
“Colon cancer.” He said, pointing to Marjorie’s colostomy bag. “All sewn up, you know.” He looked me over again and patted my arm before trotting off. I shrugged at Marjorie, and listened to the sound of Toby’s sneakers squeaking cheerfully down the hall.
“Help!”
I winced as she called after me, the arc of her cry flinging arrows between my shoulder blades. In the bathroom I stared at myself in the mirror, pants around my ankles, fingering the elastic band of underwear snug against my hip. I imagined my future self wrapped in a diaper, or attached to a clear plastic bag showcasing my waste fluids, waiting in shame for someone to come and remove them. That was Toby’s job. Toby removed and emptied bags of human waste.
“Why do you work here?” I started following him a few days later, looking for him in the nurses’ station, or in the lounge. I caught him pushing a meal cart down the hall and ran after him. He kept going.
“Why this? Why are you doing this?”
Toby was only a few years older than me. He could be anything. He could be an astronaut. Or a lifeguard. He looked like a lifeguard who worked at the Y and had never once saved anyone.
“I’m training to be a nurse.” He pushed the cart into the dining lounge and air swam thick and warm into our faces. The aged and infirmed sat at every table, waiting to be fed. A large television gleamed importantly from the front of the room. It flashed spectacular images of the entertainment channel. A golden-skinned movie star escorted a camera crew around her home. She removed her shorts and dove headfirst into her pool, crystalline waters swallowing her calves. I looked away. Toby was feeding creamed corn to a large, overweight man.
I told Toby something I’d wanted to tell someone for a while, that I’d been having dreams about an unavoidable car crash.
“I’m dodging through traffic, missing every obstacle, passing every slow poke, just flying along. And then, bam!” I slapped the table. “A giant truck stops right in front of me.”
“Just like that, huh?” He smirked, clearly misunderstanding the significance of my confession.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, just like that.”
For the first time I began to wish that Gee would live, just a little longer. Even though his eyes had sunk and almost disappeared behind two sagging eyelids and he shook and moaned between shallow, wet gasps. He seemed to be drowning. He struggled to become comfortable in his bed, the temperature of his lithe frame fluctuating constantly. First he curled defensively beneath his blanket, then he’d wriggle his legs free and lay there, suddenly calm, his lower half again exposed. My mother fussed and frantically tried to cover him.
“The doctors think he could go any day now.” She sighed into the receiver, pacing back and forth in front of Gee’s bed. “I don’t know exactly.” She paused and tapped her foot impatiently. “Well, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.” Tugging on her hair, she rolled her eyes at me.
Aunt Jean had been my mother’s sister for 53 years but had been virtually absent for the last 26. I had seen her twice in my lifetime, both occasions at funerals in honor of strange, painted bodies I didn’t recognize and never cared to know. Death seemed to have a shameful, unifying quality, which people were always apologizing for. “So good to see you, though I’m sorry it’s under such circumstances…” My memories of Aunt Jean were fond in that she had been the only human in the room I could sit beside in the comfortable silence of apathy.
She had brought a bag of tortilla chips with her. Odd, when compared to the cakes, cookies, and nut-filled breads that had passed quickly through Gee’s hospital room. But these chips were not for us. She carried a plastic Tupperware container filled with salsa in her purse and made herself a picnic on the television tray beside Gee’s bed. I decided that even though we’d only ever exchanged a handful of polite phrases to each other, I could easily love this woman.
“He looks like shit” she said, raising a dripping corn chip to her mouth. I suddenly noticed the way her chin seemed to sag slightly into her neck and the way her bloated fingers resembled cooked and swollen sausages. I realized that underneath her large overcoat designed for chilly Boston weather, Aunt Jean had gained a considerable amount of weight.
“Well, he’s dying, Jean.” My mother hypocritically defended him. Just an hour before she had made similar observations. As usual, her sister’s dry humor and fresh sense of sarcasm irritated her.
“Ok, when?” Jean demanded.
“The doctors say soon.” My mother stiffly adjusted his bed sheets, carefully avoiding the hand that lay on top.
“Well he sure is holding on,” Jean scoffed.
“Sure is,” Mom said.
Dinnertime in the lounge was a surreal affair. A television blared, but no one watched it. Not even the nurses, some of them chattering across the room in Spanish as they distractedly fed the elderly people slumped over in their chairs. The cadence in their voices suggested excitement, though my freshman and sophomore years of foreign language had sifted through the gutter of my memory and left me with useless greetings and the names for certain foods. I was dying to know what they were talking about. I strained to catch notes that flew from their lyrical dialogue.
“Pobrecito,” one of them cooed, as she spooned a thimble of corn cake into an open mouth.
Toby and I sat with Harold who was a WWII veteran with a scar over his left eyelid and a nervous, sweaty upper lip. He never spoke to anyone.
“He can‘t eat anything solid,” Toby informed me as he pressed a fork into a slab of meatloaf and began mashing it into a meat-soup. I tried smiling at Harold. I winked. I laughed inappropriately as though he’d said something funny. He just stared, his lip twitching slightly.
“Want some potatoes?” I asked casually, pointing to the plate.
Harold looked at the runny mess.
“Yeah.” I stirred it with my fork. “I wouldn’t eat that shit either.”
One of the older nurses glared at me from a distant table. Toby laughed. Harold blinked faintly.
There were other patients on the long-term care floor who would have enjoyed the company of two young people eating at their table. But Toby had a special preference for Harold, a special eagerness and anticipation for him as if at any moment he expected Harold to exhale and unload barrels of fascinating stories about the war, the forties, and the life lessons he‘d gathered traveling Europe and beyond. Toby hoped that with enough patience and care, the spell would be lifted and Harold would bubble over into a fountain of sagacious truth.
“So, how are you doing?” Toby asked me, leaning the weight of his question on that word, doing, but offering it with the same delicate softness he reserved for the patients he visited. His chin rested in his palms, his attention focused entirely on me. I smiled back, but found it difficult to maneuver the right measure of cheerfulness, as I wasn’t quite listening. I felt fairly certain that the nurse with the long braids over by the window had just confessed to sleeping with her sister’s boyfriend.
“Gretchen?” Toby called to me again. “Are you OK?”
I cursed Mr. Alaback for being such an unmotivating Spanish teacher. I’d earned A’s in both of his classes. I should have kept going with it. I should have moved to Barcelona.
“Hey!” Toby snapped his fingers rather rudely in my face. I’d heard him.
“Yes, I’m fine.” I replied, finally deciding that if nurse-long-braids wanted to wrap a tourniquet around her bloodline it was her choice.
“Really?” Toby pressed.
“Well, actually,” I admitted, “I have a kink in my shoulder that’s killing me.” I unzipped my jacket and stretched the neck of my t-shirt to show him, forgetting of course that the internal pain resulted from an invisible source beneath my skin. There was nothing for him to see. “I guess you’d have to feel it yourself.” I shrugged, rearranging my clothes and flushing with embarrassment. Toby seemed to blush as well, probably just as embarrassed for my mistake.
“That isn’t what I meant,” Toby began.
But a sudden realization inspired me to cut him off. “It’s because I slept on that bed next to Gee’s room!” I announced.
Discovering the birthplace of the resilient little knot in my shoulder that for days had sent sporadic bursts of pain into my neck and back, relieved me. It somehow relieved any shadow of discomfort I may have felt even moments before and this became obvious as I raised my arms to the sky. Toby’s face suddenly recalled that queer look that reminded me of the first time we met. Harold blinked rapidly as though he wanted very much to say something.
“See, I’ll show you.” And I led Toby by the hand to the empty hospital room one door down from Gee. Room 223, the door announced as we paused to glance up the hall. Room 224 was open and bustling from the look of the jackets and bags that had been thrown haphazardly by the entrance. People and nurses seemed to be filing in and out and I could hear my mother arguing loudly from inside. No doubt it was Aunt Jean standing on the other end of the disagreement, but suffering proudly with a smirk on her silent face. Toby seemed to pause longer by the entrance, leaning a little and straining to hear snatches of conversation. But I was already inside, checking to see if any person might have passed in the few days since I’d taken the fatal nap that had ruined my perfect health. There were no personal items anywhere. The bed sheets looked as smooth and sterile as the day I’d laid on top of them.
“I slept like this, see?” I hooked my arm up under my head and laid on my side as though posing for a photograph, but I wasn’t being completely honest. I had faced the window that day, and it was my left arm I’d crammed so awkwardly beneath me. But with Toby in the room, closing the door with excruciating caution as though it were made of glass, I felt I should face him on my right. He looked especially youthful and awkward just then. He fumbled with his cerulean blue shirt and surveyed the contents of the hospital room as though he’d never actually been in one before.
“Come here,” I said.
Toby bounced a little first, like a diver about to spring from a board. He’d gathered his strength. He felt good. He looked good. And when he finally began to walk toward me he tripped on the jutting wheel of a night table. He stumbled and flew face-first into my torso, jamming his own shoulder into the edge of the bed. I couldn’t help but notice the chivalrous nature of his accident, an almost unconscious attempt to ‘feel my pain.’
“Sorry,” he mumbled, rubbing his shoulders as he sat Indian style on the floor. In my mind, I spoke to him. I said something like, “don’t be,” or “that’s Ok.” But from my throat, nothing registered. I kissed him instead.
Toby’s lips tasted like artificially flavored gelatin. I couldn’t tell which flavor. His teeth knocked against my own, and the fabric of his nurse’s uniform scratched the skin of my chest. Somehow we’d ended up in the hospital bed together, the sheets becoming tangled and decidedly less sterile as the seconds passed. I couldn’t stop myself from giggling at the thought that this bed, this mattress smelling of bleach and antibacterial soap, would never again see this much action. I pictured the gray unblinking faces that would lie there, knowing nothing of our indiscretion. It was fitting that I’d been thinking about that right then, right when Toby had started on my neck with his tongue. I’d closed my eyes. And I’d seen those gray faces. And then a mouth smelling of salsa and Jose Cuervo whispered gently into my ear.
“Gee’s dead.”
We hadn’t heard her come in. And we froze together, Toby’s mouth still pressed to my neck. Aunt Jean smacked her lips with all the delicacy of a horse standing in a stall. She looked Toby up and down, carefully assessing him. “Nice to meet you,” she said.
As we sat in Gee’s empty hospital room, tidy and clean after the brisk business of removing his body, I suspected that I had swallowed something large and indigestible. Tennis-ball sized, it seemed to lie at the bottom of my stomach, pulling my chest to my knees. And then I knew, holding Toby’s hand and staring numbly at the tightly tucked sheets that Gee had spent such an effort disrupting, that the feeling I had swallowed was regret.
I’d never seen anyone die before. In movies and Lifetime television dramas, yes. But I’d never been witness to that moment in reality, that moment when a person ceases to be, when he takes his last breath, enjoys his last coherent thought. I had wanted to see if all the signals shut down individually. I’d wanted to see if he would really utter any “last words.”
“He didn’t even know we where there,” Jean offered, sensing my glum curiosity. Toby squeezed my hand harder in his palm, sympathizing with my loss. I appreciated it. I had suffered a loss. I had lost my chance for morbid voyeurism because of my indulgence in pleasures of the flesh. My disappointment shamed me. With unbrushed tangles of hair hanging in my face, my feet kicking beneath me like a small child in a big chair, I must have looked very much the martyr. This may have been the reason my mother turned so sharply and said to me, “Gretchen will be the one to speak at his funeral.”
If I hadn’t been so embarrassed by the activities taken place in Room 223, the room right next door to the room in which Gee died, the time of his death coordinating exactly with the moment I’d pulled Toby’s face to my lips, I’d have argued.
I began to search for reasons why my mother wouldn’t want her daughter to handle this important responsibility, but stopped when I caught that look on her face, that hurt, humiliated, angry look that wouldn’t pause for reconsideration. She wouldn’t speak to me. But her face told me how disappointed she felt, how badly I’d behaved, how deeply I had split a rent in her heart. “Yeah, sure.” I agreed. I had the decency not to meet her disapproving stare.
“It’ll blow over,” Aunt Jean said to me later, when my mother left to meet with personnel at the funeral home and cemetery in which Gee would be buried. “It’ll all become some funny story you tell someday.”
I laughed, but didn’t believe this was true. I imagined my mother standing beside Gee’s bed, feeling overwhelmed by her burden of being the “responsible one,” by the effort it must have taken to hold his hand when everyone expected her to. She’d needed me to crack jokes and make faces. I’d abandoned her on stage, during her last and most important performance.
“What are you gonna say?” Jean asked.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. I couldn’t remember having one fond memory of Gee, not one holiday surprise, not one family trip, certainly not one heart to heart over Folgers in the kitchen. Gee had always been there. But we’d had nothing to do with one another. I doubted anyone would want to hear my musings about the shape of his penis. “What would you say?” I asked impulsively. But when Aunt Jean paused and searched the ground to sort her many versions of truth, I realized her answer might be too involved for the brevity of the question. I tried to change the subject. “What will they dress him in?” I asked, knowing it wouldn’t matter to anyone if they threw him in his coffin wearing boxer shorts and a sunhat.
“I’d say he had a great right hook,” Aunt Jean said suddenly, chuckling softly to herself. Then she began to laugh louder and harder. She simply shook with great, bellyaching laughter that tumbled and echoed all throughout the first-floor cafeteria, her sausage fingers trembling, her bloated face a red split watermelon. I felt about as prepared to handle this emotional rupture as I would if she’d burst into tears. Suddenly I feared the approaching funeral, imagining crazy, hysterical Aunt Jean, slapping my knees and elbowing me in the ribs during the service.
“I’d say,” she went on, “here lies a car mechanic who should have been a prize fighter.” She giggled. “I mean, he always acted like he’d taken a few blows to the head, didn’t he?” She nodded vigorously at me, as though I must’ve known exactly what she was talking about. Somehow I felt that I did.
“I’d tell everyone,” she went on, “here lies a dumbshit who couldn’t tie a knot in a shoelace, but he could spot the branch he was going to whip you with from twenty yards away.” She whistled. “They were just the right branches too, the long snappy ones, the ones that never broke when you struck,” Aunt Jean paused for a moment, searching, “when you whipped the skin of a bare behind. Sometimes they were damp, that helped.” Her voice softened and she gripped the table for support. I focused my attention on her knuckles, feeling suddenly that something very dangerous swam behind Aunt Jean's eyes and threatened to spill at the slightest distraction. “I’d say that Gee Degraw was a man who knew his drink but not his limit. I’d say he was very talented,” she shook again, though not to laugh this time I felt sure, “he could hold a girl down with one arm and remove his belt with the other.” When she said this, her chin drooped. The words fell from her mouth as though they’d turned to hot sand. I didn’t say anything. Something about the way she’d spoken to the floor, as though the rest of the story couldn’t be described. I shuddered. Aunt Jean had never seemed ashamed about anything. We sat in silence while three doctors were paged, two to maternity, and one to the phone.
“Well,” I sighed deeply, allowing the moment to absolve itself, knowing I had to say something. “It’s a good thing Mom didn’t ask you.”
And Aunt Jean laughed, truly this time, relieved by my inappropriate joke. Her breathing slowed as she relaxed and looked about the room. She opened her bag of chips and began to eat. Then she pointed out a man limping by with his hospital gown left open in the back. The man’s pale rear end and the back of his skinny thighs were exposed to the cafeteria; he ambled between the tables as though he knew and didn’t really care.
Aunt Jean made a joke about pizza pie. We both laughed. Nothing had happened, we silently agreed, nodding and saying that, yes, the man did have an acne problem in places other than his face. She hadn’t told me anything.
Digesting a cup of lime Jell-O, I imaged what I would say at Gee’s funeral. I could almost smell the fresh flowers that would drape his coffin, the expensively arranged sprays of iris and lily my mother would insist upon. The lurid colors would clash against his powder-caked face as it poked out of the top. He would probably wear a new suit. It would be fitting if they’d removed his pants. I would see Aunt Jean sitting in a pew, pretending she felt nothing. And my mother, of course, would sit beside her, pretending to cry. I would clear my throat first, command the attention of the audience, shifting and whispering under the arched church ceiling.
“Good morning, friends and family members,” I would begin. Then I would address the much larger group of people attending Gee‘s funeral, the people who often attend funerals, look forward to them, and yet, are sadly disregarded. “Good morning acquaintances,” I’d say, “good morning looky-loos, good morning funeral home staff, good morning church members, good morning to those of you who’ve never met Gee, and good morning to those of you who came for the food.” They would titter. “It’s by the door.” They would laugh. “First come first serve.” Aunt Jean would be rolling. “I would just like to say,” I would pause here for effect. Silence would cloak the room like a curtain. Aunt Jean would collect herself and stare at me with reverence and admiration. I‘d lean gently into the microphone. “That if it weren’t for my Grandpa Gee,” I would probably stutter a bit, as I’d never called him that before. It really was a nice touch. “If it weren’t for Grandpa Gee,” I’d say, “I’d have never gotten to do it with a nurse in a hospital bed.” Then I’d curtsey and leave the stage. It was a good joke, I decided. Gee would’ve liked it, even if it wasn’t really true. I would tell my mother this later.
Then I’d probably walk outside, into the cemetery. You can always tell where the new grave is, because the earth is piled beside it, on great green tarps. I would wait there until everything was finished. Toby would wait beside me, with all of his patience focused into a squeeze of my hand. Because it would be boring, waiting all that time. It wouldn’t be any fun. But I’d missed his death. And I’d be damned if I was going to miss his burial.