Always

Amy races through the double doors, panting, fumbling into her white jacket, cursing Alan for making her late again. She sets a leaking paper bag on Aisha’s desk. “Light, no sugar.”

“Forget that, where’s my ear plugs?” the security guard says.

“Oh, crap.” The whine of the cheap electronic keyboard is unmistakable now.  The Diva’s quavery tones waft down the hall: Now it looks as though they’re here to staaay....

“That time of the month,” Aisha agrees. “I forgot too. But she never does.”

“So glad I rushed back,” Amy says.

“She’ll be going at it another hour, at least. That your sweetie came by for you?”

Amy works to keep her face blank. “A friend.”

“Mm-hmm. Friend with his hand on your ass.”

“Soon to be ex-friend.”

“He steal your coat?”

“Oh, my god.” Is her coat in Alan’s office? The cab?

“Better get it back, honey, it’s about to snow.”

“It can’t snow. I have to get out to Long Island tonight.”

Amy pauses at the entrance to the day room. The residents slump in makeshift rows, folding chairs in front, wheelchairs behind. A few clap and sway. A wizened, heavily made-up hag with a platinum beehive preens before them. “Thank you, dear friends,” she whispers into the mike. Her monkey of an accompanist, sweating in a dinner jacket, bangs out the closing chords.

“Can you sing ‘Always’?” Mrs. Mancini calls out. Several of the residents groan. Mr. Castleton slaps his head and yells, “Not again!” and the nurses lined up against the back wall snort. But the Diva, gracious as always, gestures toward the keyboard, and the lead-in begins.

I’ll be loving you always,

With a love that’s true, always.

Amy has been working at the Harriman Home for nearly a year now, and like a curse, on the last Friday of every month, the Diva and the monkey (Mirielle LeGrand, Toast of the Ballroom, and her accompanist Paul Marcus, according to the ancient sandwich board she never fails to drag along with her) take over the dayroom, monopolizing the patients Amy needs to see and polluting the hallways with her off-key rantings. And every time, Mrs. Mancini makes her request.

“It was my wedding waltz,” she explained to Amy the first time the two spoke. “We danced to it every June third for forty-nine years.” Amy looked at her hard then, searching for the hopeful young bride, the romantic matron.  She imagined Mrs. Mancini’s sparse, greasy locks done up in a stylish chignon, her withered lips full and pouting. Retrospective makeovers, she has come to call them, these efforts to visualize the “before.”

“You must have been beautiful,” she said. Mrs. Mancini grinned and, for a moment, Amy saw it.

Not for just an hour,

Not for just a day….

She starts up the stairs, then decides to go to the bathroom one more time. In the stall, she checks her underpants. Nothing. She twists a length of toilet paper into a stiff column and forces it into her vaginal orifice. It comes out clean. She decides not to worry about it.

When Amy arrives at the second floor nurses’ station, Hutchinson is leaning on the counter, talking to McNeill and Scipio. “So I said to him, ‘Which portion of till death do us part didn’t you understand?’”

As always, they stop talking as Amy approaches. It’s too bad the second-floor nurses all hate her, because Amy could have added a lot to this discussion: how Brendan ignored her while they were married, and now that he’s decided to grow up and settle down (read: now that women aren’t falling into his lap anymore) he’s shocked and offended at Amy’s resistance to his reconciliatory overtures. How Alan blames Amy for his adulterous guilt; their stolen lunch hours consist more and more of sulks, recriminations, and frantic lovemaking that Amy feels have less and less to do with her. How she has run to the bathroom to check her underpants every few hours since last Thursday; how she feels vaguely nauseated all the time but is not in the least tempted to discuss the matter with Alan.

“Your boyfriend’s asking for you,” Hutchinson says, gesturing toward the Frat Boys’ room.

The animosity is not solely color based. All of the nurses resent the physicians, administrators, and psychologists (of which Amy is one) on principle, because they perceive, correctly, that the nurses work harder and are compensated with less money and respect. But the hatred of the second-floor nurses is personal, and racial. The Frat Boys, Mr. Grady and Mr. Russo, abuse the nurses. They call them “Toots” and “Babe,” grab their breasts and butts as the nurses try to take their blood pressure, and speculate about their love lives and their less visible anatomy. With Amy they are playful and avuncular. There is no doubt that this is because Amy is white. What pisses the nurses off is that Amy falls for their schtick. She kids around with the Frat Boys, as she does with all of her patients, tells them jokes, brings them books she thinks they’ll enjoy. The nurses experience this as betrayal, and Amy supposes it is, but, as with the wage/work/status disparity, she is not clear what she can do about it, and feels too awkward to address it with the nursing staff. Mr. Grady, the chief perpetrator, is ninety-one. Mr. Russo, the Greek chorus/egger-on, is eighty-eight and in the early stages of dementia. Amy is not going to change their attitudes at this point, not that they want to change. Harassment forms the highlight of their day. And it’s not as though Amy hasn’t been called a “white devil” and thrown out of Mr. Polite’s room. Of course, Amy has the advantage, due to the same differential, of being able to write “Resident declined psychotherapy” in the chart and move on, forget about it. The nurses have to keep coming in, several times a day, and not exploding or they’ll get written up. So, okay, it’s not the same thing at all. It is completely unfair.

The truth is, Amy is a sucker for Mr. Grady. On his good behavior he reminds her of her grandfather, if her grandfather had been a letch from Brooklyn. She loves his smell, of soap and Old Spice, and his soft sweaters. A grandpaternal countertransference, if you will. So she tries to soften their behavior; devises rewards for politeness to the staff; makes up excuses. He’s an old man. He’s had two heart attacks. He probably didn’t behave this way before. In short, she coasts on race and class privilege to indulge her nostalgia.

As she enters, Mr. Grady calls out, “Well, look who’s here! Sunshine!”

“Hey, Doc,” Mr. Russo says. “Have you got a TV Guide?”

“Again with the TV guide,” Mr. Grady says. “Nobody here has a TV Guide. I gave you the TV section of the paper.”

“It’s not there.”

“It’s not there because it didn’t happen. You dreamed the whole thing.”

“Dreamed what?” Amy says.

“Some religious movie starring Gig Young,” Mr. Russo mutters.

Amy swallows a laugh. “Gig Young?”

“I told him he dreamed it. Gig Young was a whaddayacallem, a roué.”

“I know that. That’s what the movie was about. A cad who gets religion. Then he went on Jay Leno afterward and talked about how the movie changed his life.”

“Wait,” Amy says. “Was this still part of the movie?”

“No, it was Jay Leno.”

“See? It couldn’t be real. He’s been dead twenty years.”

“You’re crazy. He runs the Tonight Show.”

Mr. Grady thumps the mattress. “Not Jay Leno, you idiot, Gig Young. Tell her about the name.”

“Okay, that part I dreamed.”

“That’s not what you said this morning. Tell her what he was going to call himself.”

Mr. Russo sighs. “Gigham.”

“Gigham Young?”

“It was his new name, his religious name. Okay, it’s dumb, I dreamed it. He’s really dead?”

“It was a big deal,” Mr. Grady says. “Murder-suicide. Not what you’d call a religious end.”

Mr. Russo shakes his head. “Damndest thing. You see somebody on TV, and they’ve been dead for twenty years, but they look as alive as you and me.”

“You didn't see him,” Mr. Grady says. “There was no Gig Young movie last night. You dreamed it.”

“But I mean, generally. All these old stars. They look better than we do, even though they’re dead.”

Mr. Grady sighs and rolls over, away from Mr. Russo. “Don’t waste your time with him, sweetie. Come over here and talk to me.”

“Uh-uh,” Amy says. “You know the deal. This is once weekly group therapy to address behavioral issues.” She hears the mocking tone in her voice and cringes. She deserves the hatred. She assumes a sterner tone. “It says in the chart that you touched Ms. Boswell’s breast yesterday while she was making your bed.”

“Boswell? She’s a cow. I’d never touch a cow like that.”

“Moo,” Mr. Russo says.

“Ms. Boswell is a professional, she has a job to do. She doesn’t need you making it harder.”

When I remember every little thing you used to do, I grow loooonely….

“Speaking of cows,” Mr. Grady says, pointing toward the open stairwell door.

“You know, if you guys participated more, maybe you wouldn’t be in trouble all the time.” Though she would hate to think of them downstairs wreaking chaos on the Toast of the Ballroom.

“Can’t do it, sweetheart,” Mr. Russo says. “It would break my heart.” He looks serious.

“Break your heart?”

“To see her like that. Bad enough to hear her, what she’s become.”

“What was she before?”

“A star,” Mr. Russo says. “Me and Francie used to go all the way into the city, into the jazz clubs in the Village, just to hear her. Francie had all her records. Mirielle Le Grand. She was some looker, too.”

Mr. Grady slams his mattress, hard. Mr. Russo turns to argue with him, then freezes. “Kev?”

Amy wheels around. Mr. Grady is hunched forward, eyes bulging, his blue lips in frantic, silent motion.

“Oh, my God.” Amy jabs the call button on his headboard.

“You have to go out there, sweetheart. The nurses won’t come in for him.”

Amy runs out into the hall. Hutchinson is still behind the desk. “Mr. Grady,” she says. She sees Hutchinson’s face go blank. “Really. I think he’s having a heart attack.”

Hutchinson is all business. She bustles into the room, checks Mr. Grady’s pulse and breathing, then calls out to McNeill, “Code blue, 26A.”

“Is he DNR?” McNeill calls back.

Mr. Grady, speechless until this moment, bellows, “Hell, no!”

McNeill gets on the intercom and soon the room is full of people and equipment. Amy, who has been hovering by the doorway, turns to leave.

“Doc!” Mr. Grady yells. “Come back here!”

Amy looks at Hutchinson, who nods, briefly. She makes her way back into the room as McNeill draws the curtain separating Mr. Grady’s bed from Mr. Russo’s. Mr. Grady grabs her hand. “Don’t leave me,” he says.

“I won’t,” she promises. “I’ll stay until EMS gets here.” She wonders how Mr. Russo, silent on the other side, is handling all this.

“Don’t leave me,” he insists. “Never.”

The thought, the wild hope, enters Amy’s head that this is all an elaborate joke, that Mr. Grady is going to pop up at any moment, grab Hutchinson’s butt, and yell, “Gotcha!” She looks at his white knuckles, his frightened eyes.

“Promise me.”

Hutchinson lays a gentle hand on Amy’s shoulder. “Might as well promise, honey. He won’t collect on this one.”

“Okay,” Amy says.

The EMS technicians arrive. “We’re getting married,” Mr. Grady tells them. Amy squeezes his hand and disengages hers.

“Aren’t you coming with me?” he says.

“She’ll be downstairs by the front desk,” Hutchinson tells him. “She’ll say goodbye to you there.”

Amy and Aisha watch the procession out the door. The Diva is wrapping up with her usual closing number: It's still the same old story, a fight for love and glory, a case of do or die…. Mr. Grady, docile now, waves to her as he passes by on his stretcher. I will remember this, Amy thinks. Outside, it has started to snow, signaling, she supposes, the earth’s intention to continue on its queer trajectory regardless of Amy’s plans.