An Atomic Romance (7 page)

11

Reed peeked into two nursing homes but didn’t wait for the guided tour at either place. Quick glimpses sufficed: cramped rooms; metal wardrobes like school lockers; gnarled, half-dead creatures lying in narrow beds, with their oxygen tanks tethered like pets. He vowed to ride his bike off a cliff before he got old.

He wandered through another place that he had been urged to visit. It was different. Reed had heard someone remark that Green Haven was so classy it should be featured in
House and Garden.
This high-tech home was long and low, with several wings radiating from the center. Reed glided down a brightly lighted corridor lined with metal handrails on glaring white walls. He passed X-ray rooms, rehab rooms, offices, sitting areas with floral-patterned upholstery, birdcages, and hanging plants. He paused at the open door of a room labeled AQUATIC REHABILITATION. It was empty, but he could see a whirlpool bath, which had a lift harness like those used for horses. He imagined his mother’s roommate at the hospital—a naked old bag of bones being lowered into the whirlpool.
Now sweetheart, let’s dunk you in this tub. It’ll be good for you.

As he waited at a nurse’s station for a guide, he tried to imagine his mother here. She would find the lights too bright. She always closed the shades in summer to keep the house cool. He remembered playing gin rummy with her in a darkened room on hot summer afternoons. He did not know if she would be able to play cards again.

An aged woman tottered toward him, waving a piece of paper at him.

“I need you to explain this,” she said. She was trim and thin, with a white shock of thick hair.

The paper was a flyer—CAR WASH SPECIAL. Reed remembered that his truck was dusty.

“It’s about a car wash, ma’am,” he said. “Does your car need washing?”

“We’re studying it,” she said.

“I’m afraid I’m not the expert,” he said. “I’ll get somebody.”

The woman snatched the paper. Then she seemed to be running backwards—taking small, mincing steps, then two fast ones, then two faster ones. Reed’s impression was that she was entertaining herself, as a child might do. Suddenly, with seeming deliberation, she threw herself onto the floor, falling flat on her back. An aide and a nurse rushed forward.

“Miss Kitty!” they cried, squatting around the woman, who appeared to be conscious.

“What happened, Miss Kitty? Can you raise your leg?”

Reed hadn’t been close enough to catch her. He stood by, useless.

“Did you trip, Miss Kitty? Do you hurt?” the aide asked as she massaged the woman’s legs.

Miss Kitty managed to lift her legs, one at a time. The women helped her into a wheelchair, and the aide wheeled her away, saying, “Now, Miss Kitty, you were having a pity party, weren’t you? And something got into you—you had a wild hair, didn’t you?”

“I’m so sorry!” the nurse said to Reed. “Welcome to Green Haven!”

“I see you offer gymnastics,” he said.

The nurse let out a string of bubbly laughs, and her name tag bobbed alongside her cleavage: LINDA. Linda’s uniform fit tight all over. Reed hadn’t really meant to be funny, but as he explained his impression that the woman had deliberately thrown herself down, he quickly imagined a convenient dalliance with Nurse Linda while visiting his mom here.

“If I’d realized she was going to try out for the circus, I would have tried to stop her,” he said. “I hope she didn’t hurt herself.” In his confusion, he found himself trying to be charming.

“She has spells,” Linda said, waving his concern away. Linda wore a nursing cap like wings of a bird alighting on her crown. Reed liked this old-fashioned touch.

Nurse Linda said, “Follow me and I’ll show you the bed we have available.”

“I’m ready for anything,” Reed said, smiling.

He followed Linda through a large lounge. An orange-and-white round-faced cat feeding from a blue bowl glanced up. The cat appeared to raise an eyebrow at the sight of Reed.

“We have several animals on the premises,” Linda said, as she turned down a corridor. “Our guests seem to appreciate their furry friends.” She paused at Room 121. “This is a semiprivate,” she said to Reed as she knocked on the open door. “Miss Minnie? Sweetheart, are you decent? This gentleman is here to see about letting his mother share your room. Won’t that be nice?”

The room was bright, with pink rose-patterned drapes and white metal furniture. A crone curled in a bed by the window slowly rotated toward them. In a wavering voice, she said, “I’m keeping that other bed empty. I’m expecting my husband.”

“We know, darling. But this new lady won’t be in his way.”

“What about when he comes back?”

“I tell you what, Miss Minnie. When he comes, then we’ll let him have the bed. We’ll just tell the new lady that your husband is here, and she’ll have to go to another room.”

“Well.” The woman turned away from them and pulled the covers over her head.

As they left, Linda whispered, “She thinks her husband is Don Ho, and she says he’s off on a musical tour.”

Nurse Linda was still talking as Reed hurried down the incandescent corridor in a state of abstract inanity.

At the smoking station outside the hospital, a middle-aged man in a hospital gown was puffing a cigarette. He held his I.V. drip like a ski pole.

“Out for some fresh air?” Reed said to the guy.

“It’s healthier out here than it is in there,” the guy said, blowing smoke.

Reed’s mother was asleep. He sat in the recliner beside her tray table, then noticed a note with his name on it propped against the water pitcher. He unfolded it.

“Hi, Reed,” the note said. “I stopped by this afternoon. Your mom and I had a lovely little visit. Sorry to miss you. Julia.” Reed bolted out to the hall and strode up and down, carrying the note, wondering what to do. She was
sorry
she missed him! He would apologize to her in a thousand ways, he decided. He would promise her anything.
Lovely.
Only Julia would say that. It sounded so sophisticated. He would assure her that the atomic plant had helped to protect America just as he would protect her. But she would shoot some little atomic barb at him
—Technetium!—
and he would have to justify atomic weapons to her once more.
There you go again,
she would say.

Reed’s mother grinned when she awoke and saw him standing by her bed.

“There’s my baby,” she said sleepily. “Come here and let me love on you.”

“I’m just a big old baby,” he said, clumsily trying to embrace her along with her I.V. tube.

“I was asleep in a cabbage cluster,” she said, a blissful expression crossing her face.

“In a what?”

“A cabbage cluster,” she said. She moved her mouth, as if searching for some alternate words caught between her molars. “I was sleeping in a cabbage cluster!” She sighed.

“I need to do a word search on my computer for you, Mom,” Reed said.

“What I mean is—” She groped again for words. “A cabbage cluster.”

“Do you mean a garden?”

“I’ll be all right when I get home,” she said. “I want to plant the garden.”

He started to say that she didn’t have a garden at Sunnybank, and that she must be recalling a scene from childhood, but he caught himself. He realized argument might not be relevant. He and his mother were entering a new configuration. In time to come, Reed imagined, she might enter yet another phase, where she was the child and he was the adult; the normal paths of recognition were being swept clean.

Sipping a cup of coffee filched from the nurse’s station, he sat with his mother for a while. He tried to read a science book he had brought—Julia might quiz him on string theory!—but he couldn’t concentrate on his reading. Some of Julia’s stray molecules probably lingered in the air. He inhaled deeply. He longed to ask her what he should do about his mother. He could not consign his mother to any of those places he had seen. She needed her family to care for her, not Nurse Linda.

His mother was growing wakeful. Squeezing Reed’s hand, she tilted her head to the voices behind the curtain separating the two beds. The scarecrow’s son was talking on the telephone. “They tell me Mama ate a hundred percent of her dinner. She eats for Donny, but she wouldn’t eat for me. She wouldn’t eat till he got here from Denver.”

Cooking. He hadn’t thought of that. He couldn’t cook those complex casseroles and fancy ladies’ luncheon salads she liked. But he’d think of something. He could envision the scene—his mother in his house, banging around with a walker, while he concocted some pathetic dinner to please her. He wondered how she would like spaghetti carbonara from Mr. Como’s. Frozen dinners were the answer. But Julia would help him, he thought.

His mother scrunched her shoulders against her pillow and reached for her water. He guided the straw to her mouth.

“You’re going to be all right, Mom.” He realized that Julia must have helped her with her hair, and even some makeup.

“Was Julia here, Mom?” he asked.

“Your lady was here.”

“Was it Julia?”

“She didn’t stay long. She had a—I can’t think of the word.”

“Lip gloss?”

His mother lay back on her pillow and smiled. “When I get back home it might take me a little while, but you just wait. I’ll be pegging daisies again before you know it. I don’t want you to have to do it.”

“You won’t catch me pegging daisies, Mom,” he said. “Whatever you mean by that.”

When he last lived with his mother, she was caring for his stepfather, Mort. Reed stayed away as much as he could during Mort’s last days. But he remembered times when she cleaned up vomit and driblets of shit from her shag rugs, without complaint—the same as she had done when Reed was a baby. A shudder rolled through him.

Later, in the telephone booth downstairs, he told Shirley about the nursing homes. She was enthusiastic, as he expected.

“How can we do that to Mom?” he asked.

“But they can give her rehab,” said Shirley.

“She’ll be so bewildered there. She’ll hate it.”

Reed shifted his weight in the telephone alcove. Was it his imagination, or did he suddenly have arthritis in his knee?

He said to Shirley, “She always said the very thought of nursing homes gave her the fantods.”

“Well, what else can you do?”

“They can do the therapy at the hospital, but they don’t have a bed available, so they want to ship her out.” He paused. He shook his knee. “I could take her home with me until they have room at the hospital.”

“How would you give her a bath?”

“I’ll get help. There are people who do that for a living.”

“It’ll cost a fortune.”

Reed went on, “She’s a little confused in the head, but wouldn’t you be nuts too if they gave you Xanax and then tried to carry on a conversation with you at five-thirty in the morning? Her speech isn’t so bad. Her hand is a lot better. She just needs therapy on her leg. She’s dragging one.”

“Slow down, Reed. You can’t be serious. For one thing, you’d have to kiss your social life good-bye.”

“I’m working twelve-hour shifts, so I’m home a lot of days—sometimes three or four days in a row, if I don’t work overtime. A therapist can do home visits.”

Reed sensed the easing effect of distance. From California Shirley must see the situation as not quite real—vague scenes without the particulars colored in. The bladder scanner, the scarecrow, the whirlpool with the horse harness.

Reed said, “Right now, I think she’d be better off in the back end of my truck than she would at a nursing home.” His knee still hurt. He wondered if he needed a knee brace.

As he cruised upward in the elevator, he realized that Shirley still had not inquired about the plant. It had made the national news, but apparently she hadn’t noticed. She had California on her mind, he thought.

In the hallway, he ran into the clipboard twins. He caught the two women off guard—in casual conversation, as if they had been discussing some new exercise for their abs. They said they had been looking for him.

“I went to Green Haven,” he told them. “Man, it’s state of the art.”

They beamed at him. Sunflowers orienting themselves.

“It’s got the equipment, the medical support,” he went on. “It’s five-star accommodations! It’s got all the toys, the stuff. And it smelled good. They must have a pee neutralizer that NASA developed for the space shuttle. They should sell it for cat litter boxes. You name it, they’ve got it.” He babbled on for a moment, watching their rapt faces. Then he paused for effect, enjoying his power over their attention. He said, “It also reminded me distinctly of the Chicago airport.”

He liked the question marks on their faces.

“What do you mean?” the blonde said, lowering her clipboard.

He imprinted their dumbfounded expressions onto his mind like a photograph, one of those prize-winning battle photographs that captures a revealing moment in the conflict.

“A terminal,” he said. “Busy, busy, busy. Big and impersonal and bewildering. People rushing every which way.”

The pretty blonde gestured with her clipboard—almost a bow—as she wiggled toward the elevator. His knee felt a little better. He needed to go dancing, stay limber. His mother would want him to get out there on the dance floor. She used to love to dance so much she would jitterbug by herself in the kitchen while Mort watched wrestling on TV in the den and drank himself into a stupor.

Reed tried to imagine Miss Blond Clipboard boogying at the Boots and Saddle dance club he liked to go to. She had an appealing curve to her bangs that paralleled her breast bulges. The clipboard could be a prop, something a stripper would use.
The Dance of the
Seven Clipboards.
If his mother could see him dancing with Miss Clipboard—he in his cowboy boots, with knee braces beneath his jeans—how she would jump and clap! She would applaud his foibles away.

He really was an idiot.

But it was Julia he wanted to dance with. He tried to conjure up her slim, white legs.

12

Reed, sinking into sleep, screamed silently, Oh, no! as if he harbored a monster that came alive in the dark. He tried to name the fear as he surfaced into consciousness, still fighting the hollow dread. He awoke, the phrase black hole humming in his mind.

Potty chair. She’d need one—sooner or later—if she came to live with him. He had not prepared a room for her in his house. The spare bedroom was full of exercise equipment and piles of magazines and storm windows. An air compressor and the works of a vacuum cleaner occupied the bed.

Julia would know what to do. But even though she had left him the sweet note on his mother’s tray, she still wasn’t answering his calls. Earlier in the evening, he sat poised by the telephone, about to ring her and ask her for an old-fashioned date, with wine and a corsage. But he knew she would be suspicious when she learned that he needed help caring for his mother.

Now wide awake, he switched on the gooseneck lamp and tried to read about superstrings, the Theory of Everything—T.O.E. Superstrings might have p-branes that flipped into ten or eleven dimensions, all wound up tight. The book said all p-branes were created equal.

Hallelujah,
Reed thought, closing the book. He pulled on a pair of sweatpants and flip-flopped into the den, where his Hubble show was blithely sailing around the computer screen. He sat down to peer a dozen billion light-years into the past through the Hubble telescope, a time machine of sorts.
In times of trouble, I turn to Hubble,
he said to himself.

Centaurus A—a collision of galaxies—floated forth, gushing fire, with murky gases hiding its central black hole. The Cartwheel Galaxy was next, another galactic collision. He liked the purple color, the red star aiming at its center. It was more peaceful than Centaurus A. The Cat’s Eye Nebula was beautiful—symmetrical and charged with hot color.

For Julia, an equally fantastic journey lurked in microbes and even farther down in the subatomic. Was there a limit in either direction? Or was there infinite regress in both directions? Was one the mirror of the other? He entertained himself with thoughts like these, thoughts that made him spin with wonder until he could feel himself beating against the bars of his cage. He didn’t have the focus needed to study astronomy seriously, but Julia had told him he could crack that field with one hand. It was never too late, she insisted. Diseases, of course, were far more urgent. She said, “What if the plague suddenly shows up? We’re not ready. We barely had enough flu vaccine this year. How could we halt smallpox?” Evidently she expected someone to drop a suitcase of germs in a town square. At any moment she might recite a paragraph of information on emerging viruses and other deadly diseases. She pronounced their names almost lovingly: cholera, Ebola, hanta, Puumala. She was especially big on hemorraghic fevers.

A spiral galaxy was cruising by. With a touch of one key, the up arrow, the cosmos disappeared, and he checked his e-mail. Hot Mama! She had written, “I totally understand and respect your line, sex not a requirement, because I totally know if we met each other and either one of us was turned off, it’s good to have that shield between us, so we don’t
have
to do anything. That is
cool
with me, and who knows, we might hit it off. I have twelve years’ experience dealing with the public—as a waitress and therapist. I like to fish. I cure my own hams (and double-smoke them). I love Beethoven. I like to sit on the porch in the rain and just enjoy the freshness of the air. I love collecting. I own a complete set of Blue Ridge pottery, which I’ve chased down at every flea market and antique store in this part of the world.”

Reed, in his fancy, flitted through a lengthy meeting with the mystery woman, in which they screwed five times and gorged on double-smoked ham, and he was about to reply in the affirmative, but he read her message again. She was becoming more intriguing. But no, it was too complicated. This woman wanted a relationship. The Blue Ridge pottery gave her away.

He stared at the e-mail until the screen went dark and his Hubbles appeared. He could always count on the Andromeda galaxy.

He had to sleep. He adjusted the curtain to shut out the daylight, then got in bed and read about dark matter.
Dark Matter in the Afternoon,
he thought, as if he were doing something illicit. Dark matter and dark energy involved MACHOs and WIMPs. MACHOs could be black holes. WIMPs could be neutrinos. Nothing was for sure.