What Happens When You Don't Play Ball

What Happens When You Don't Play Ball

  by Janice Daugharty

  Copyright Janice Daugharty 2010

  The wheel chairs shape out a bad circle. Like children playing Ring Around the Roses or Drop the Handkerchief. Except that the chairs are manned by old, old ladies. A yellow ball, plump as a new moon, bounces and woggles within the ring. A rouged-up lady cased in white knit pants catches it in both hands and bounces it hard toward the center—no aim—to show that she is really into it, this rehab therapy or exercise or whatever the hell it is. The ball spins up before a long-bodied, long-faced woman with insect eyes. She doesn’t even look at it.

  A black woman in a green attendant’s uniform squeals, “Catch it, Miss Faye! Catch it!” She gets paid for saying that.

  Miss Faye doesn’t even look at her.

  The ball bounces into the bull’s eye of the circle again and another lady catches it on the rebound. She cackles and pitches it willy-nilly and it rolls between the wheels of two chairs and across the waxed tile floor of the huge glassed-in therapy room, all chrome and white with a few no-name children’s pictures to make the place look homey and justified. Murmur of voices from the flat black vinyl beds along the walls where other green uniformed therapists are working over kinked legs and bodies of the should-be dead.

  The room reeks of antiseptic and old flesh.

  Miss Faye suffers the ball another frolic in her direction, then backs her chair from the circle, turns and guides it toward the open double doors.

  “You going back to your room now, Miss Faye?” asks the black woman attendant.

  “I am,” says Miss Faye with surprising volume and sass. She is 95 now, will be 96 come May, Lord willing. It is March now.

  “Just see you stay there.” The attendant switches to baby-talk. “It’s a little after ten now and you got that walking session at the bar at eleven.”

  Miss Faye wheels through the double doors, then left down the puke green corridor rather than right and right again along the hall that would take her to her room and the narrow bed that makes her feel at final rest like in a casket. She is wearing the new navy sweat pants and shirt her granddaughter brought to the hospital after she broke her hip four weeks ago.

  Her short cute therapist, in khaki pants, green shirt and penny loafers, walks friskily along the hall toward the therapy room. When she gets to Miss Faye's chair, she says, “Good, Miss Faye, good for your arms,” and keeps walking.

  Miss Faye hadn’t realized how fast she was turning the wheels of her chair. Slows down and keeps her eyes on the orange exit sign pointing left.

  At the elevator, she stops before pressing the disk with the down arrow. What will happen when they find she is not in her room? What about her purse with its family pictures and Kleenex? Where is she going? What if she doesn’t show up for therapy?

  With one hand, like a gardener’s rake, she reaches for the button, presses it, and has plenty of time to change her mind, to turn around and go to her room before the elevator rumbles up the shaft and the door opens. But she is inside, facing the beige grass-cloth wall and the doors are closing at her back, moving with a singular lurch of the wheelchair, hearing the doors opening again. She backs the chair out, bypassing a woman with a red scrubbed face and a bald fat man stepping into the elevator as she gets off.

  In the main lobby, ground floor, people are grouped on sofas and chairs along each wall. Carpeted blocks of furniture, like displays of living room suites in a show room. Strong smell of cafeteria stew, turnips and poached fish, coffee and plastic. What a place!

  For a few minutes, she just sits, staring out the west span of windows at the morning sun spiking off cars in the parking lot. Wind is rocking the pines, unheard, bordering the black asphalt square.

  Surely she has broken some rule and there will be a price to pay—she has never been much of a rule-breaker—but she cannot imagine that the price will be much. Well, she supposes the cute therapist, or the black attendant, or the doctor, or the hospital administrators, could throw her out. And for a fact, her hip needs to mend for a couple more weeks before she can go back to the Sunrise Center for Seniors.

  She wheels her chair along the white tile aisle toward the double glass doors at the entrance, watching them slide apart and people passing in and out. There is a collective soft babbling from the separate groups as she rolls past, then a baby crying, but she can’t locate the baby and really it’s okay because it’s not her baby, not her problem; she’s had two and raised three grandchildren. Enough. She will turn around when she gets to the doors and go to her room where it is quiet and nothing much is expected of her—till therapy session. But the automatic doors slide aside with such a satisfying whoosh when she gets there that she automatically wheels out, facing the parking lot.

  The warm, windy air is loaded with traffic sounds and smells of motor oil and asphalt.

  She is sitting, watching cars line up in the parking lot, minding her own business, when a yellow cab pulls through the crescent concrete drive and stops in front of her and the driver taps his horn.

  She looks behind, all around, then back at the cab. The man is motioning to her.

  Me? she motions back, touching her bony chest with one fist.

  He gets out, leaving the cab idling, and calls across the roof. “Grannie, you the one called for Stinker?”

  “Stinker?” she says.

  He steps around the front of the old square car and up on the curb. He has on a tan shirt, green pants, and a green cap. His eyes are squinty and his skin looks smoked. “You need a little help there, don’t you, Grannie?”

  At her back in a flash, he pushes her down the wheelchair ramp and on to the rear right door of the cab.

  “I’m about late for lunch, I imagine,” she says and holds up one hand for him to stop.

  “I’ll get you there, Grannie,” he says and flips the brakes on her chair with his blocky head almost in her lap. His hair is brown and shaggy and not all that clean.

  Her knees turn in when she stands and she has to hold to the door to shift from the chair seat to the car seat. He closes the door just as her gold mules and red socks lift from the pavement, inside. Then he folds the wheelchair and places it in the trunk. All done and said with a peculiar jerky rhythm to the ticking of the meter on the dash.

  Inside the cab smells stale, of old car seats and of all things, strawberries. Fake, but you can’t be too picky at 95 and on the run.

  “Bunch of foolishness,” she says, but she is thinking about the yellow ball she was supposed to catch, about the rag of roast beef she would be having for lunch. About her granddaughter who will think she’s been kidnapped.

  Static and talk rattle from the radio on the dash.

  The driver gets in, closes the door, says, “Okay, Grannie, you name it.” His head jerks side to side with eagerness, then he frames her in the mirror.

  She had sold her house before moving into the Sunrise, but the address pops into her mind. “219 West Adair,” she says, because behind them another car is honking at the cab.

  “219 West Adair.” He heads the cab out along the crescent drive, stopping at the side street and looking both ways, waits for a city bus to pass and tools out. “You been there awhile, Grannie?” he asks.

  “Most of my life,” she says.

  “No ma’am, I meant in the hospital.”

  “Oh, that.” She is watching the tower clock of the north campus of Valdosta State University. Then the fine colonial houses along Patterson Street. The funeral home at the crossing of Park and Patterson, the red brick square house on the corner turning onto Adair, and then her own neat yard with its wintering grass and crop
ping up tubers of jonquils soon to bloom. There is a red tricycle in the front yard and a fake magnolia wreath on the front door of the long white house with green trim.

  “This it, Grannie?” the driver says, stopping and tinkering with the meter.

  “I tell you what,” she says, “long as I’m already out, how about driving me out to Fargo.”

  A woman is talking on the radio through the static.

  “Ma’am?” he says.

  “Fargo, Fargo, Georgia,” she says. It sounds so familiar to her ears suddenly, more familiar than 215 West Adair.

  He turns with one dingy arm on the seat. “Grannie, if that’s the Fargo I’m thinking about, it’s a good forty-five miles from here.”

  “Have you ever been to The Swamp?”

  “You mean the Okefenoak?”

  It’s been a long time since she’s heard the Okefenokee pronounced that way. She laughs. “One and the same,” she says.

  “You want me to go up there and tell your folks…?”

  “No sir, I don’t,” she says. “I’m 95, going on 96, and I don’t reckon I need to report in.”

  He shrugs, moves his arm from the seat and tips the bill of his green cap up, then reports in on the radio: a fare to Fargo.

  She leans toward the front seat. “And listen, if you’re worried about the money, I’ve got money.” She doesn’t have a dime on her, but she has plenty in the bank. So they tell her. When you get old, they don’t let you keep up with your money.

  He U-turns on West Adair, cutting the cab close to the trimmed curb of Miss Faye’s old neighbor Wade Turner. So close she can see through the picture window—blank now without the sheer crisscross curtains and lamp.

  “I got me a old grannie, going on a hunderd,” he says, driving, hawing. “She tells me to fly to the moon, I do it. One time she got so mad, she tried to shoot me out of a tree.” He is cranking his smoked neck side to side.

  For a little bit, he could get on her nerves.

  “Reckon I oughta stop up here and get you a Big Mac?”

  “No, thank you.”

  His bright eyes show in the rearview mirror. “I mean, it’s a ways out there to Fargo, and ain’t no eating places as I know of.”

  He talks so fast she can hardly make out what he is saying. Sounds like “anoetgplasaziknowuv,” one long word.