SSDD
SSDD
As was often the case, Dorothy’s first thought
when she woke up was, “Nothing new under the sun.” She’d had the thought a few
times already today, and this time when she opened her eyes
and the baskets of plastic geraniums on the windowsills. There was
a soggy grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of soup in front of her.
Must be lunch time.
“Hey Dottie!” It was that damned Fred. She
rolled her eyes, but it was pointless. Her once-bright eyes – they had been
bright, hadn’t they? She couldn’t remember – were surrounded by creases and
folds, like cloudy marbles buried in a pile of old leaves. Dottie was not her
name and never had been; there was nothing dotty about her. She was not flighty
or eccentric, nor was she small and round like a cute little polkadot. She
shook her head. She didn’t give a damn what he called her.
But there was a new woman at the table, and
Fred’s attention was already on her. Younger, looked like. Dorothy adjusted her
glasses. From the cords on the woman’s skinny neck, she guessed eighty. You
could fool people with your smooth cheeks or botoxed forehead, but your neck will
always betray you.
“Gotta be careful here, you know.” Fred was grinning like an idiot.
“The first day I got here I leaned to the right and the nurse straightened me
back up.” Lupe, the girl serving the lunches, shook her head, and the aide who
was feeding Mrs. Grealy
giggled. “Then I listed to the left, and she straightened me up again.” With the window behind her, Dorothy couldn’t see
the face of the new woman, but she was hunched around as if the information
Fred was about to impart would be the key to surviving in this place, where, if
she hadn’t noticed it yet, people rested on hammocks strung between life and
death.
Fred widened his eyes. “Finally I said,
what’s up, honey? You keep straightening me up! It isn’t a man allowed to fart
around here?”
Dorothy couldn’t count how many times
she’d heard Fred tell that joke. Lost track the third day she got here, and
that was nine years ago. The new woman, though, gasped in feigned shock, and
giggled like a sixteen-year-old, just like the teenaged aide feeding Mrs. Grealy,
in fact.
“Welcome to Restful Oaks Junior High,”
Dorothy said to the woman. Her voice came out croaky-like, so the woman probably
didn’t get the full benefit of her witticism. But, then, few did. She lost her
most appreciative audience the day her husband Lloyd died, sixteen years ago, so
she wasn’t sure why she even tried. For her own amusement, such as it was, she
supposed.
She ate a few more bites of lunch and
closed her eyes. She was awakened by a jostling of her wheelchair. “It’s social
time,” Lupe sang. Nothing new under the sun. The days of making decisions about
how she spent her time were many years behind her, and what would she do
differently, anyway?
“Social time” was code for sitting in
the day room with a television so loud she was surprised the neighbors didn’t
complain, surrounded by old people in vinyl-covered chairs snoring with their
mouths open. Of course, Fred was awake, recounting the old tales of his youth
to the new woman. He turned to Dorothy and asked, “What’s up, Dot?”
“Same shit, different day,” she responded.
The new woman raised her eyebrows. Dorothy had learned this phrase from one of
the aides, who apologized to her after letting it slip, as if a 100-year-old
woman hadn’t heard every swear word imaginable.
There was quite a fuss on the
television. People were marching, protesting. Just like the newspaper pictures back
in the '30s. Hunger marches, back in the Depression days, when people really
knew hardship. In Dorothy’s lifetime, people had marched for civil rights and gay
pride, and against war after war, and where had it gotten them? Now it was
about police brutality, again. Another black man senselessly killed. SSDD. A
little black girl flashed onto the screen. His daughter, they said. She was
riding on a man’s shoulders shouting, “My daddy changed the world! My daddy
changed the world!” Fat chance.
A memory hit her like the snap of a
flashbulb. Ella, six years old, running to Lloyd, making him carry her on his
shoulders, even though she was too big. The little girl they adopted after all
their friends had children and they still had none. Ella lit up their lives
with her dazzling smile, her sparkling laugh, and a red-hot temper. Dorothy and
Lloyd had loved her beyond words, a love so deep it left them as vulnerable as
daisies in a snowstorm when people asked, “Why on earth did you adopt a colored
child?” or wouldn’t let their children play with Ella. They were encouraged to
send her to “a different school,” a school “where she’d feel more
comfortable.” Dorothy refused. Then came high school, Black Power, and Liberation.
“Why did you adopt me?” Ella threw the words at them. “Why did you take
me away from my people?”
Dorothy had cried herself dry then, only
to find that the well of tears would fill up again. But that was a long time
ago. She’d lived through the estrangement, their delicate detente, and her
longing for the three grandchildren when Ella moved them all to Texas in search
of her biological family. She lived through Ella’s death from sickle-cell when
she was only forty-two, leaving behind three children Dorothy no longer knew.
Maybe she and Lloyd had done the wrong
thing adopting Ella. But twenty-some years ago, when she thought she could see
the end of her life on the horizon, Dorothy had forgiven herself, for that and
everything else. She’d done her best. She and Lloyd had a ball in the nineteen
years between his retirement and death. After he was gone, she gathered up her
gratitude for those years, wrapped it around her grief, and took advantage of the
lowered expectations that came with age to draw a curtain around herself. The
days of goals and regrets were past; now she was resting in the hammock,
soothed by its swaying.
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