By Lamb
The goal was to round the four halls of the home alone. Just once. No walker, no nurse, supported only by my will. I’d hardly made it to the kitchen when my left thumb tendon spasmed, then my whole hand, brittling in pain, and I felt myself unsteady, and I said, Help, she’s falling! And there was Geri with a chair, an almond blanket folded squarely in the seat, which she opened large and tucked behind my calves as I sat. Like Alma, the other Filipino, she is different from the others. She does her job in the style of divine employment. I’m never unsurprised by her care. She wheeled me through the hallway to my requested spot outside the room of two residents named Franklin, whose door is usually kept open for the steady flow of medications, allowing a plane of morning sun past the threshold into the hallway for a few hours. My room gets light only in the afternoon, and not without a punishing heat. Alone and warm, I closed my eyes and began to bend the real about me, to wrap myself in a more persuasive fabric. Surrendering one power, another entered, and I grew, and the goal was now to rove San Bernardino, to dance what landscapes roll beyond this place for what might make my blood run quick again. Tall, I rise, breaking through the layers overhead into the day, greedy for the freshness ushered by my giant lungs, staring at the world in miniature, looking down on the way I used to live, spitefully forgetting every odor, every slap and hurtful word. From up here, I appreciate the beauty of the facility. The flat and graveled roof, wires curling faintly on its surface, the suggestion of parched grass in the courtyard, sliding glass and patios alight and lining the perimeter, door mats made of braided rags. What does it say about a person, to imagine herself tall as a chapel? Probably nothing, I hear John say, by which he always meant, Something, probably. And leaving thoughts of John for my new form, I am tall again, vigorous and standing like a myth above the nursing home, long as to retire the horizon with one stride, strong as to go again, again, however many times I’d like. My legs are steely in this reverie, unloosed from time and swelling, their movements streaked with lusty shine from my Italian loafers, oiled and in cherry leather. I skip the cold mountain crown, swishing my skirt over suburban clumps of houses, schools and groceries. I spend a week sleeping on the shore, in the soft contour of sand, licked awake on the sabbath by the waxing tide, my skin glowing. And now I’m hungry as a child for something from a tree, and so I drag my wooden heels ten miles inland, devastating every hillside in my drowsiness until I’m back in Bonsall, and as I slip into the avocado grove behind my childhood home, I assume my normal, sorry shape, though still walking unimpaired and with an even coloring. How familiar here. I remove my loafers, my stockings. By the dizzy, melancholic smell, the way I press into the soil, I know hot rain has flooded these trees, causing roots to rot, and, yes, I see, the leaves are yellow at the tips. There is dieback in the canopies, which are thinning like bouquets at the end of honeymoon. The boughs bowing morosely with their loads. The flush has borne too much fruit too soon. And I hear them murmuring, the trees. Another season’s work to pests, they say, to pot. Our babies scabbed like stones by feeding thrips. I walk between the rows, listening. More than once I feel a fledgling branch run its fingers through my hair. And when I stop to rest, my weakness returning, I see how time would have these trees: more bugs come to feed, mother borers and their eggs, limbs weak with holes and dropping as if with stricken hearts. A young man, handsome as a Christian, buys the grove at discount, teaching himself and his sons to rouse life from the roots. He bellies all around the trunks, spreading black mulch with his hands. The boys hide from the chore behind the trees, kicking skins, throwing pits to barely miss each other’s heads. I laugh and laugh, and as I feel time pass again as minutes, I decide I’ve met the limit of my fantasy, trying to open my eyes, failing to return to the home, to my chair in my spot of light in the hallway outside the Franklin room, and I fear I will remain here alone to haunt the happy promise of this family, jealous for my own son, for myself, of all that could have been ours, and I open my eyes again and scream to no effect, and wonder if I’ve bent things far enough this time to break. And I begin to understand how joyless death would be if a forever resignation to our imagined Edens.
Lamb is an American writer.