Red Girl Rat Boy Part 9

"b.i.t.c.h," echoed Annabel.

Everyone smiled as the Wanderer handed over Lorraine's phone.

DOING MORE TIME.

At Tuesday's News & Views, Annabel reported, people talked about Big Man biting an orderly. "We didn't even open the Province."

A doctor visited Lorraine.

After supper a bat landed on 17-A's windowsill. Flapping towels, Annabel and Angelique rushed about till the creature swooped away.

"Close window."

"Stupid!" Sally cried. "By morning there's no air left."

"No oxygen," said Annabel.

"You studied chemistry?"

Angelique rolled her eyes.

Drinking water, Lorraine felt dry as drought.

Josie came by. "Little treat, girls!" Twinkies.

Sally ate them all, left the wrappers on her table and limped to the sink to splash hands and hot face.

"You've spilled, I'll skid!"

"Then skedaddle to your d.a.m.n friends, Annabel." Sally grabbed paper towels.

"At least I have friends. And family, Mrs. Knox."

"Eric is a r.e.t.a.r.d, Eric is a r.e.t.a.r.d!"

"Fatty fatty two-by-four!"

Wads of wet towel flew, Lorraine sobbed, the Boss Lady entered.

"Quiet time, ladies?" She scanned the room. "Mrs. Knox, obesity shortens lives. Try to control yourself. That cellphone's back? No one told me."

After she left, a whiff of skunk remained in the air of 17-A.

WEDNESDAY.

Midnight showers had suppressed the dumpsters' fermenting odour, but it rose again with the sun. The crows didn't attend Crafts to explore playdough's tactile pleasures, nor squeeze remotes with bleeding claws. They strutted about squawking while the rats and their babies snoozed in the warm dark rimmed with gold. Yearling gulls chased an eagle until, bored, it soared so its pursuers heeled away down the air.

Sally grumped, "Can't the b.l.o.o.d.y Wanderer get on with it?"

In the elevator, the Boss Lady lectured Annabel. The resident crossed her eyes.

Lorraine received from the Wanderer an Ambrosia apple and a photo of a willow-edged river curving away. At bedtime, a nurse checked her vitals. Her roommates didn't let their eyes meet.

THURSDAY, FLOWER-ARRANGING.

Muggy. Rain forecast.

Lorraine lay on a gurney by 17-A's door, helpless before a doctor's order for a bedsore treatment over in the hospital.

Annabel stroked her roommate's hand.

Sally adjusted her walker. Too high. Too low.

"f.u.c.k!" she shouted.

As if signalled, the TV in 17-B burst out In the criminal justice system, the volume rising to a bellow for police, who investigate crime. The Wanderer exited, holding a flag. Snapping it downward, she raced for the nurses' station.

Lily ran towards the roaring These are their stories, but Lorraine extended one arm off the gurney. She got the aide across the diaphragm.

Winded, Lily fell.

Sally threw herself upon her walker so it and she collapsed, then screamed.

Officer down! Teevee-gal laughed. Her rictus turned to hiccups as she handed the remote to Annabel. Bang bang, gunshots. Two dead here.

Annabel scooted to the linens while aides, LPNs, even a nurse responded to Sally's cries.

Lorraine sobbed. Her arm drooped from the gurney.

Just a kid, roared Jerry Orbach.

A black kid way out of his neighbourhood, Chris Noth sneered. Of course he had to die.

To the staff crowded into 17-B, Orbach blared Where's justice?

"Look, Teevee-gal's laughing!"

"Who knew she could?"

A shout, "You won't tell where it is, will you? You bad girl," laughing.

"Very bad!" Pats on the tattered fingertips.

In the hall, an LPN bent to Lorraine. The Boss Lady glanced their way but stalked on into 17-B, grasped the TV's cord, traced it to the outlet, pulled.

Silence.

"No one thought of that?"

Hiccups racked Teevee-gal.

"Or noticed this? You, attend to her. You, get rid of that TV. Shove it out the window for all I care. I'll page a doctor," gesturing at Lorraine. "The rest of you, back to work! No one's at the nurses' station."

Lily got to her feet.

There came the noise of a truck grinding into gear.

"f.u.c.king great!" Sally shouted from across the hall.

"Did you hear me?"

Obedience cleared the room.

Lorraine almost welcomed her pain, as suggesting a correctable mechanical wrong, and waited calmly for the a.n.a.lgesics to kick in, while hearing Sally's tale. Scrambled, yes-yet she and Annabel saw just how staff had huddled by jumbled human and metal limbs while the unseen Wanderer reached the window, her whir-whir inaudible under Law and Order.

Out flew the blue files, three, four, twelve, b.u.t.terflies shedding hundreds of white inner wings as they tumbled. Twinkling paperclips, staples. Screech of plunging gulls. The truck heaved up the dumpster so its maw could vomit out all waste, everyone-but the Wanderer didn't stay to see that.

Sally finished telling just as the nurses' station broke into uproar.

"Score!" cried Annabel.

FRIDAY, BAKING.

Overnight, the skunky vehicle stayed in the parking lot as the soft persistent summer rain of the West Coast began to fall. At dawn, animals drank. Birds stepped through puddles, shook rainbows off their wings.

With her trolley, Lily entered the watery light of 17-A. One woman had a bandaged ankle, one lay still, one clutched a jar of Sicilian olives.

The Boss Lady, clacking along, met and re-met Mr. Chang several times before she observed him waving at her.

"You want what?"

He asked again.

"A dog? To live here? D'you think I'm running a kennel?"

Such Language f.u.c.k YOU, THE MESSAGE TAPE SAID ONE OCTOBER DAY.

I pressed Replay. Yes, f.u.c.k you, bracketed by mmm sounds. A high voice. Strained. Inside the mmm, were there words? Was the last one Lauren? After several replays I thought the terminal consonant wasn't n.

Today, if Henry and Jake and I were together as a family we'd all have cellphones. Even on a landline we'd each have a message box to accommodate a caller desiring to say to me, specifically, f.u.c.k you. In 1985, however, I was living with an answering machine and an eleven-year-old son and a forty-three-year-old husband. I pressed Erase. At once this seemed a mistake, but then Henry and Jake arrived home from soccer, so it didn't.

Their news: a team would be chosen for league play. Our boy was hopeful. So was Curtis, his friend. After practice, as usual, they'd all gone to Tom & Jerry's, with Curtis's mum Melanie, for celebratory hot chocolate.

"The new TV there is huge," Henry reported.

"Don't get addicted to the screen, son," said Jake.

The answering machine's message indicator still showed a luminous red 3. Before I could stop him, Henry listened. "Hang-ups. They're all grand-mere."

"My mother?"

"Madame?" Jake made the formal term affectionate.

"She puts the phone down hard. I can tell it's her."

Listening to the bangs, I saw my widowed mother at her desk. My father had built in a drawer for the phone directory, a well for pencils, and a bookshelf holding Churchill on WWII (six vols) and de Gaulle's Memoires de guerre (three). The pages were soft-edged.

When Jake met my parents, he'd admired that desk. "Distinctive. A craftsman's work."

"Just a village carpenter." My self-deprecating father, very pleased.

Jake's praise also won over my mother, till then disconcerted by my choice. "Lauren, I expected you to marry an intellectual."

Now we said, "You're right, Henry."

How could we tell? Still I don't know.

Getting the machine was my idea, of course. Play, Replay, Erase, Rewind, Stop. Under the translucent cover, the brown plastic ribbon swelled and shrank in its...o...b..ts.

My mother asked Henry, "What is Lauren's new nonsense?"

They were piling her winter clothes into her freezer, because his science teacher said this would kill moths.

"It's me saying the greeting, grand-mere!"

She did "her wave thing," a backhand sweep to fend off unwanted data. "A telephone is not to prevent people from talking."

"Grand-mere, you can say whatever you like!"

"I am not a machine."

Then they went out to check the seedlings in her cold-frame, and, in the five months since, grand-mere had never left a message.

I began thawing dinner. "Don't turn it off, Henry."

"Let me guess, Lauren," said Jake. "You just want peace and quiet?"

I kissed him. We both hugged Henry.

Truth be told, we'd been grateful for the machine. Too often my mother phoned as we got home, or were eating, and she rarely began by asking about Henry's game, Jake's sweet peas. Never about my day at the library.

"Lauren, I have bought Seville oranges. It is the marmalade time."

"Lauren, the Globe is like you. It thinks the UN can save the world. Or have you still not read today's editorial?" (Her one-two punch.) "The language I hear on the bus! That young people should speak so. Brutal, ugly. Such words my grandson must never say."

"North Americans are ignorant. They do not understand war." My mother grew up in Lyon, France. Twenty-nine in 1945 when history wrote That's all folks, she'd spent the war by her own mother's bed, a witness to one slow, agonizing death.

"Jake, what about my dimmer switch? And that play you did the sets for, the Courier review is not favourable."