For Mathylde, a weekend shift at the Ocean View nursing home was not the best time to celebrate her last day of work. It was the time when families came to visit. Saturdays and Sundays were also intake days, when cold shock crept over faces as loved ones admitted loved ones for permanent residency. The inside faces, as she'd come to call them, they still bothered her, even after thirty years as a nurse in elder care.
The staff were planning something for her, some kind of surprise. She could tell from the way they smiled at her knowingly when she set her purse down behind the front desk and picked the topmost chart from the work-stack.
"Last day and they give you new ones," Keekah said, helping a small man push a walker from the bathroom. His stained trousers sat high on his torso and he had pink papilloma around his eyes.
"No, it's Ms. Alexandra," Mathylde smiled at the mental status sheet with recognition. "Almost a month now."
"Your specialty," Keekah said, meaning that after so many years at Ocean View, Mathylde managed to pick up a little Russian. Some she learned from other nurses, like Larisa, the rest from the old ones themselves, enough to say it was time to eat, take medication, or ask if they had trouble going to the bathroom. The basic biology of things, most of it Latin in origin, didn't seem all that different in Russian than it was in her native Creole or French. It helped because Ocean View Avenue, for which the nursing home was named, was in the Russian-speaking part of Brooklyn called Brighton Beach. Years ago, when Mathylde first started working there, prostitutes, high-pumped and miniskirted, still openly roamed it for Johns. Now it was a quiet stretch of newly built condos with trees and balconies and pretty lights.
"Her son, a nice Jewish boy," Keekah winked at Larisa, who stood next to Mathylde behind the front desk. "Coming this afternoon and I hear he just got divorced."
Somehow, Keekah always knew such things.
"I am married," Larisa smiled and went back to counting pills.
"You hear that, Mathylde? She is married."
Mathylde smiled uneasily. That type of loose talk, another thing she wasn't going to miss. But she went along with it – not because she felt the need to play nice with the Keekah types, but because it was a respite from the work itself, no different from the way policemen would pass jokes around a dead body.
A woman's shriek broke from the dining area, something in English trailing off into Italian.
Keekah laughed heartily, "the mafia wife is calling."
Mathylde turned and slowly walked over to a frail dark-haired woman who was shaking over soupy squares of mashed potatoes, chicken, and peas.
"Mulignana!" the woman trembled. "I can have you fired, you sneaky zacolla, you!"
"I know, Mrs. Corallo, I know," Mathylde put her arm on the woman's shoulder. "Would you like some stir fry instead?"
The woman nodded and began to cry.
"There, there, love," Mathylde cooed. "I'll bring it to you just now, I promise."
Keekah laughed and nudged her old man. "Come, Grisha, let's go," she said to him. "At this rate I soon be as old as you."
Her scrubs were purple and Mathylde's blue, which meant that as a registered nurse Mathylde made quite a bit more money than Keekah, who was much younger and a technician. Still, neither Keekah nor any other staff on their floor would trade places with Mathylde, even for a raise in salary, because Mathylde worked mostly with dementia patients. And the trouble with them was that they weren't bed-ridden or crippled. They moved about on their own, often without walkers or wheel chairs. Snug in their moth-eaten handmedowns, they sat quietly in the back yard reading or listening to the radio. And if you paid no mind to the one-way security door and high walls, it was almost idyllic: the salty wind flapping the edges of their newspapers, a lukewarm catcall from some old man swatted laughingly by the new girls. Their ways were comfortably dimmed and they seemed to require little looking after. But given a choice, most medical staff still preferred those who were moaning and writhing in pain or could no longer digest their own food – like Valentin Stepanovich, who Mathylde called Mr. Valentine, a late-stage cancer case recently transferred to the hospice upstairs. Because sooner or later everyone learned that dementia was the real monster that squatted inside these dying souls – the one that knew your secrets. It sat there, sucking its fangs, and it waited. And once you glimpsed its awful leer, you'd sooner wipe vomit from shirtfronts and change colostomy bags, because it made each moment with Mrs. Corallo or Ms. Alexandra a countdown to some catastrophic change.
Before seeing Ms. Alexandra, Mathylde was supposed to meet with Vadim, Ocean View's psychologist. It was just a formality, a New York Department of Health requirement, Mathylde suspected, but one that the management insisted on for all medical staff planning to retire. They must've figured a big change like this always tickled the nerves. And at Ocean View, did it ever. Not the R-word! Keekah and Larisa cupped their gasps when they learned that Mathylde put in her papers. Its sound was like the foretaste of dying, as if saying it out-loud would summon something about their own age or appearance that everyone else at Ocean View didn't already know. Mathylde knew Vadim well, bringing residents into his small office on the seventh floor for treatment at least several times a week. Except they've always spoken to each other through these old men and women, buffered by age and collegiality. "Are you ready to see Doctor Vadim, darling?" she would ask. "I think she is," Vadim would beam back at the old woman like she was a pet puppy, "aren't you, Ms. Rabinowitz?" But now this polite, neatly khakied man with thin eyebrows and a nodding manner sat directly across from Mathylde, saying to her with a Russian accent words like "transition" and "next life stage." She listened and nodded back as he cautioned against bringing work home and recommended, at least in the beginning, replacing her shift schedule with a similarly rigorous routine. Regularity, staying busy, he said, would stave off fears of aging and uselessness. "And remember, you can come back any time you like," he assured her. Mathylde listened to the man agreeably and wondered: after years of feeding and bathing people who could no longer do it themselves, of wiping them after they did their business, why would anyone in their right mind want to come back to this place if they didn't have to? She smoothed the front of her scrubs, got up, and thanked him for his concern.
Then again, Mathylde perfectly understood the need for such talks. That for people who didn't work in elder care to experience human time, even their own, was like standing at the bank of a river. All they saw was a steady flow. But inside these walls life followed a different beat – delivered, time and again, into her world already lived and exhausted and taken out three-to-four years later through the Ocean View morgue.
Maybe that's why for Mathylde retirement was a welcome occasion. She was looking forward to seeing more of her son Pierre, who was grown up now and married to Angie. Sure, being a doorman was nothing like his old job in a big bank on Wall Street. But it pleased her to know that he still got to wear a suit to work and that his pay was good enough to provide. Who knows, Mathylde smiled, she might even live to see grandchildren. Besides, she had long given up on fancy notions about people based on the jobs they did. Even when Pierre was still a child, she never quite accepted the way other Haitian mothers, young ones like Keekah, would shame children into living their parents' dreams. A doctor, a lawyer, a Wall Street bankerman: become one or marry one, if nothing else. Such foolishness, she always thought, but played along anyway. Because when she and Roger first came to this country, Pierre still baby-swaddled, the first thing she learned about becoming American was that you must never wear your secrets inside out; that somehow, in this raving city, bragging and smiling for no good reason would save them from their foreign lives.
Taking the elevator back to her floor she smiled thinking about how much she looked forward to being with Roger. He had been acting a little funny lately, but hasn't taken a drink in almost four years. When Pierre was still a little one and Roger belted him for misbehaving, Mathylde thought it was good for the boy's discipline. But soon the belt was replaced with an extension cord, and then a curtain rod, and a later an electric iron. And when at 14 – by then a strong healthy boy, God bless him – Pierre smashed his father back in the face with his own chess board, pawns, knights, and queens flying apart like shards, she knew it was time for Roger to quit the drink. No, she didn't threaten to leave her husband – a dollar van driver who went for months too sick with liquor to work – her nursing job paid well enough to do the bread winning. Not until on one of his bad days Roger cried out that after all these years with her, dark-skin daughter of a poor cocoa farmer, he'd grown sick of the smell of chocolate. It took time alright, but after that Roger has stayed as dry as drywall. He promised and he did as he said.
She smiled secretly inside the whir of the elevator, but swallowed her happiness, determined to keep it down until the end of her shift. No, she wasn't afraid of the R-word. It just wasn't quite right, she thought, to flaunt hope around the old and the dying.
Once back on her floor, Mathylde recognized a lanky young man pacing in front of Ms Alexandra's room. From across the hall, wearing a striped polo shirt and pants with cargo pockets, he looked like a college student. But when he smiled at her desperately, showing pleated skin at eye corners and silver temple whiskers, she figured he could be as old as forty.
"Hi Stanly," she said. "How is your mamochka?"
"I don't know," he looked panicked. "Something is wrong."
Mathylde walked into the room. Stanly followed behind her. Ms. Alexandra was sitting on her bed, wearing a night dress dotted with bleach-faded flowers. When she saw Mathylde, she lowered her feet into her slippers and stood up.
"Suka!" she shouted. "Antisemitka!"
When Ms. Alexandra – a slight woman barely five feet tall with a smooth face and small shoulders – was first brought into Ocean View, Mathylde thought she looked too young to be in a nursing home. Now Ms. Alexandra’s hair was unkempt and wiry, like a corpse's, and there were brown blotches under her eyes. Her body seemed to sag under its own weight.
"Mama, please," Stanly begged. "Mathylde is here to help."
Ms. Alexandra looked at him, then lifted her night dress and pulled it over her face. With the dress up, she began to hum a song in Russian and waltz around the room. She wore nothing underneath.
Ms. Alexandra's roommate, a husky woman with short white hair who until that moment laid quietly in bed watching TV, turned over and began to laugh.
Mathylde rushed to cover Ms. Alexandra with a blanket and helped her back to her bed. When she turned around, she saw that Stanly was gone. She found him in the hallway several doors away from his mother's room. His face turned to ash, his mouth agape like he wasn't breathing. Mathylde thought he looked like his own ghost.
"Stanly," she reached out and touched his arm. His eyes rolled in his skull. He reeled sideways and almost fell.
"What was she telling you?" she said, knowing full well that it hardly mattered, but that maybe the sound of her voice would seem real enough to draw him back.
He swallowed and gagged slightly, "She cursed me for leaving her here."
"I know," Mathylde gently stroked his shirtsleeve.
"She told me about some KGB man upstairs," he stuttered in quick breaths. "That he is out to get her."
"Mister Valentine?" Mathylde couldn't help it and smiled. "He is dying. Can't even breathe on his own anymore."
"She talks about the Nazis and Soviet spies coming for the Jews, nuclear bombs exploding..."
"It's not real you know," she kept stroking his arm.
"Real?" Stanly suddenly raised his voice. "They sent my father to Chernobyl when I was nine. He died from radiation. And my grandparents? I didn’t even know them. Executed, exiled, who knows! So you tell me what’s real, because I don’t even know who I am!"
Mathylde found him staring at her angrily. Good, she thought, he is back. The last thing she needed on her last day at Ocean View was a family member going into shock and fainting in the hallway.
"I am sorry," he steadied himself. "Can't you give her something? To clear her up, unclog her head?"
"Dementia is one way, sweetheart, like this place," she touched his arm again. "She'll never go back to her old self. But she is still your mama, no getting away from that."
Stanly closed his eyes. Everything about him seemed to fizzle out and for a moment Mathylde felt like she was guilting him even more. After all, she knew how it began. While other residents collapsed into pain or loneliness or settled into a soft drug-bed of indifference, those with dementia would start to show changes in memory and mood, sudden caprices. Then a long convalescence would follow, making the whole thing seem reasonable and expected – it's what they do, grandmas and grandpas, they grow fussy, cranky, and forgetful. Until another change that is, this time in language, a swift tourettic riptide of panic and paranoia, carrying them out to a place where they could no longer control their sudden dreams. Where does it come from? What is it? Not even the doctors could tell. Ms. Alexandra knew who she was; that Stanly was her son, Mathylde her nurse. She knew where she came from. She could point things out and name them. Dementia was like a thick fog gathering over the timescape of her sanity; as if the soul itself stayed put, but all that was kin to it – recall, clarity, will, restraint – just up and left in search of a younger, healthier body.
"Maybe it will help to read her chart," Mathylde offered. "Maybe seeing these things written on paper first..."
"Is that allowed?" Stanly asked.
"It's my last day," she smiled. "I'll go get it for you."
Mathylde picked up the pages of Ms. Alexandra's mental evaluation sheet from her room and left to make copies for Stanly. But when she got to the front desk, she was greeted by Keekah, Larisa, and Vadim, along with two elderly women in wheelchairs, all bunched under a bright party banner stretched across the top of the booth. Fixed with clear tape, it read "Happy Retirement!" As soon they saw her, they began to clap and cheer. Mathylde clasped her hands and pressed them to her chest. "What a nice surprise," she delighted and dabbed the corners of her eyes. Everyone exchanged hugs. "Have some cake," Larisa smiled and pointed to a lush round block of rich frosting cut into several tall pieces. It came from the Kiev Bakery in Brooklyn, much too creamy and sugary, made by the people who, just like Mathylde, were deprived of such things in their past lives. One of the wheelchaired women held a small stereo on her lap. It played some Soviet wartime waltz. Grisha, the old man with a walker and dotted eye rims, tried dancing with Keekah, who shimmied and gyrated around him clapping her hands. Mathylde took a bite of the cake. There would be no more rounds to make or patients to see. She was grateful and happy. She was going to miss them.
Then suddenly she remembered that Stanly must still be waiting for her. So she thanked everyone, took Ms. Alexandra's chart, and excused herself. Walking down the hallway, she passed the room where Mr. Valentine used to be. Mathylde looked inside and saw a young woman in purple scrubs folding Mr. Valentine's bed sheets. She was beautiful, with a long forehead, deep plum skin and a small plastic flower woven into her braids.
"How's is Mr. Valentine?" Mathylde asked.
"Who?"
"The man who lives here."
"Oh," the girl said blankly. "He died."
"When?"
"This morning, I think."
"Thank you," Mathylde said. "Are you new?"
"Oh," the girl smiled. "Yeah."
Mathylde smiled back and rushed off to Ms. Alexandra's room, which was just down the hall, to give Stanly his mother's papers. But when she got there, he was already gone. She walked in and found Ms. Alexandra sitting alone on her bed and looking out the window.
"Isn't that nice?" Mathylde said carefully. "You can see the Ocean from here."
Ms. Alexandra didn't respond. She just sat there, hugging herself and swaying back and forth like candlelight, watching the black, restless patch of water. Tears were rolling down her eyes.
Mathylde went back to the front desk, said goodbye to everyone, and packed her things. On her way out, she passed the Ocean View reception area. She thought Stanly might be there, but he wasn't. As usual, there were refrigerator magnets and ball point pens with Ocean View logos and emergency phone numbers, eventually inherited by the children and spouses who survive the Ocean View deceased. Mathylde used one of them to fill out her final time sheet.
On the bus back home to Rockaway she kept thinking about Stanly. After seeing his mother like that, the thought of him waking up, eating, going to work, of doing whatever it was men were expected to do, was too grim to suppress. She imagined her own son Pierre seeing her like that and it dried her breath. After working at Ocean View for so long, her shock at human decline had long turned to practical understanding. But every man is also his mother’s child, watching her tumble back toward earth like a stray meteorite, the air around it growing thicker, hotter, more resistant, a sun-ball of plasma, blasting away the icy exterior until all that's left is the naked core. Rock against air. A streak of light. A shooting star: Please, Mama. Please don't go. Who will take care of me now?
Walking home from the bus stop across the Redfern Playground, Mathylde brushed these thoughts away. She was bringing home leftovers of the cake so that she could share it with Roger, as well as with Pierre and Angie, who were coming to visit later that evening. She looked forward to seeing her family gather to celebrate her retirement and smiled with anticipation. When she opened the door into her apartment, she could tell that Roger was already home. Without taking her coat off, she hurried to the living room. Her husband sat in his loveseat watching television.
"Roger," she was out of breath.
Motionless in front of the screen, he paid no attention.
"Roger?"
"Whore," he mumbled.
Mathylde froze and stared at her husband. Assuming the worst, she scanned the room for rum and beer, but couldn't find any. Roger was sober. She could tell that he hasn't bathed.
"I brought cake," she said.
"What?" her husband looked up suddenly as if seeing her for the first time.
Mathylde reached into her bag and instead recognized Ms. Alexandra's mental evaluation chart. She must've forgotten to take it out before leaving work. She glanced the pages:
Mood and Affect: agitated, exhibitionistic, frightened.
Language: expressive/prophane.
Recall and Memory: personal history lapsed.
She looked at the TV and realized that Roger had been flicking through channels with the sound off: The Real Housewives; explosions in Baghdad; a Zoloft commercial listing all the side effects; a hurricane headed for the city.
"Roger," she called, but he already turned away to face the blinking silence.
