Passings ~C.B.

“And that’s why I don’t think that it’s relevant. You know, it shifts, and that’s why it doesn’t matter what’s going on right then. I don’t think that it’s a philosophical point…just the way it is.” Max shifted her weight. She stared at the side of Annie’s lovely face as Annie artistically lined her lips with a brown eyebrow pencil. “Do you understand what I’m talking about now?” She asked and then smiled as she picked up the comb off of the side of the counter. “Are you pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down?”
“I guess…no, I guess it just doesn’t make sense. Maybe what I should say is that what you’re puttin’ down is way too heavy for me to pick up,” Annie laughed as she strained to lean closer to the mirror. She carefully inspected her eyebrows, looking ever so closely to make sure that there wasn’t even one eyebrow that might be verging away from her perfectly sculpted arch. As usual, unsatisfied, she rubbed the top of her nose roughly and then with a loud ‘shit,’ started searching through a basket, overflowing with junk, and spilling all over the countertop. After a couple of minutes of searching, she became noticeably impatient and aggressively spilled the contents from one end of the countertop to the other. She tossed aside; hair ties, brushes, half-used containers of base, free samples of expensive hair products, bottles of unknown medicines, fingernail clippers, and numerous other things that looked more like garbage than necessity.

“Hell yah!” Annie gasped as she grabbed a pair of tweezers and held them up in the air for Max to see, “I was afraid I was gonna have to go lookin’ for ‘em.”
Max threw the comb into Annie’s enormous mess and looked up at the framed photograph of trees in the snow that was hanging high on the wall in front of her. Then she lowered her gaze to stare at the bare, white wall across from where she was sitting. This was easier because she didn’t have to strain her neck. There was sunlight coming in through the vertical blinds, creating a grey, and dark white pattern of shadows that danced softly on the plaster. While she stared at the movement, Max thought about the ways that the shadow was alive. Blinks and flutters created from the hide and seek game of the distant January sun gave the impression that the shadow was breathing and moving with a strange and exotic life form.
Max could hear the dogs moving around in the living room. Outside, she could hear a neighbor, (maybe the one across the street), closing a car door and then the slow, painful, lurching of a car engine that didn’t want to start because of the cold. The world was moving, and almost without notice, it was walking away.
Max leaned down, put her elbows on her knees, and then rested her head in her hands.
“Wow…I see you’re gettin’ comfortable,” Annie removed a tiny, discreet hair, threw the tweezers in the middle of her huge pile of junk, and walked out of the room. She came back momentarily, and set down an old, black and pink, flowered, dirty, base and powder covered, bathroom bag right in the middle of her pile, opened it, and started digging deeply into it.

“Like it matters,” Max replied with boredom, “from the look of your mess, you’re gonna be here awhile.”
“Yeah, and lucky for you,” She pulled out her hand to reveal a tube of mascara, opened it, and moved the brush quickly in and out. Then, she closed the bottle, threw it back in the bag and asked, “Do you know where the new bottle of brown mascara is?”
“Jesus Christ Annie! How should I know? Why don’t you look in my makeup bag? Or, better yet, why don’t you look through that huge pile of junk that’s all over the counter.”
Annie opened the cupboard and pulled out Max’s tiny, clean, coffee colored, travel bag, opened it up, moved her hand around, and quickly produced a tube of mascara. Without closing the bag again, she blindly tossed it back into the cupboard.
“O.k.,” max said as she stared with horror at the ever-increasing mess. “Maybe this story will help you understand what I’m trying to tell you…when I worked at the nursing home… when I was twenty… there was this lady.”
“Yeah,” Annie turned away from the mirror and looked at Max with and eyelash curler covering her right eye.
“Yeah well I think that this lady’s name was Mary….I think… anyway… I really dug her you know. Anyway, when Mary was young, she was incredibly beautiful. There was this huge, gold-framed picture of her above her bed that was probably taken in the twenties or so. She looked like a real movie star. For real…she looked more like a movie star than anyone that I’ve ever seen in real life. I used to go

into her room and stare at that picture all of the time. It was really something. Plus, this lady had money. Her family was really rich. They were one of those families that are always there; being mean and bossing all of the staff at the nursing home around about Mother. The staff fucking hated them, and that made everyone act a little bit distant with the old lady.” Max sat up straight, crossed her leg over her lap, and turned to watch Annie squeeze blackheads out of her chin.
“Anyway, this old lady… she acted crazy. She didn’t talk, and she slumped in her wheelchair. She slobbered, and sometimes she’d finger-paint the walls with her shit. You know…the kind of resident that can be a real pain in the ass. But even though she acted like a billion other residents, there was definitely something different about her. You know what I mean?”
“Not really, sounds like most of ‘em at the nursing home that I used to work at,” Annie, finished with blackheads, sat down on the floor to dig through the cupboard. After pulling everything out onto the floor; she found both the curling iron and hair dryer, stood back up, and without putting anything back in the cupboard plugged them both into the socket. Max had to raise her voice to talk over the roar of the cheap, five-year-old, dryer.
“Yeah, it does sound like a lot of ‘em. But, this old lady had a twinkle. I can remember her sitting there with her wrinkled fingers in her bowl of mashed potatoes. She was smiling, and she had food running down her shirt, and slobber coming out of her mouth. You know, her lips were still beautiful, even with wrinkles. Plus, she still had all of her perfectly straight teeth, even though they had turned dark yellow.
Annie shut off the blow dryer. She brushed her long-beautiful hair, sprayed hair spray on it, and then wrapped a long chunk of hair around the sizzling curling iron.
“Wow,” she said, “still had all of her own teeth huh?” Ann smiled in the mirror to look at her own beautiful, white, perfectly straight teeth, “That’s really something. Not many people keep their teeth in good condition.” She pressed the button on the handle of the curling iron and released a beautiful blond curl, hanging like a spring delicately over her right eye.
“Yeah… huh?” Max said as she picked up a crisp, new, magazine out of the basket sitting beside her and began to flip through the pages. She stopped occasionally to glance at a picture of some beautiful, young, rich, movie star as she talked. “But… it was her eyes that got me. I’d be sitting there feeding her, and she’d be staring at me, and I was sure that I could see a smile in them. Those beautiful blue eyes were hidden behind all of those wrinkles but they were still full of life. They weren’t dull and faded like eyes usually get when people are senile….Anyway… I started talking to her all of the time. I’d go and sit with her and talk to her and she’d just sit there and stare at me.”
Max got bored with her magazine, discarded it, and grabbed a crumpled, dusty Smithsonian from below all of the brand new issues of US and People.
“That’s something I don’t get about you,” Annie said looking at herself in the mirror, a piece of hair from the back of her head wrapped in the curling iron, “You wouldn’t see me spending all of my breaks and free time sitting around talking to some old lady that wouldn’t even talk back to me.”
“Yeah… but, that’s just it. She did talk to me eventually, and when she did, it made complete sense.” She held the magazine wide-open at arms length to look at a picture of a painting by Frida Kahlo. “Anyway, back to my story, I talked to Mary all of the time. Then one day, I decided to start going in before the start of my shift so that I could put makeup on her. Nobody worried about her makeup anymore. I was sure that I could see her perk up a little bit when she’d get some makeup on. You know what I mean?”
“Sure,” Annie said, “everybody feels better with a little makeup. You should try it yourself.”
“Whatever…” Max sighed, “…Anyway, this one day, I think I went outside to smoke during break. When I came back in, this other aide, that was a friend of mine, was in the hall all pissed off. She said that Mary’d made a huge mess by getting shit all over herself, the floor, and the walls. She said that because she had to clean up the room, and Mary, she wouldn’t be able to get all of her people up before they had to go to dinner.”
“Oh I fucking hate that!” Annie created a cloud in the tiny room as she sprayed more hairspray on the back of her hair.
Max lay down the magazine and grabbed a fingernail file that was lying in Annie’s huge pile of junk on the cupboard.
“Yeah I hate it too. So, I told the aide that I’d help her clean up the mess. Anyway, when we went in the room, my friend said that she needed to try to find someone from the maintenance department so that she could find out if she could get a new privacy curtain since Mary’s was all dirty. I was a little irritated because I figured that meant that she was going to stick me with cleaning Mary up by myself.
Annie put another chunk of hair in the curling iron, “yep, that’s usually what that means.”
“Anyway, I put Mary in her wheelchair and started to wash her up so that I could take her to the lobby and go back to finish my people. I was washing her arms and I said, ‘God Mary. Why in the heck did you make such a big mess?’ She sat up straight in her wheelchair and looked right at me. Clear as day, she said, ‘Does it matter? It isn’t your mess is it? Beside that… I wanted to see if I could.” For a minute I thought that I had gone crazy. I must have looked at her really strangely because I had never heard her sound so with it. You know? And then, she smiled at me. There was that twinkle in her eye and then I knew that it was real. She wasn’t crazy….she was just acting like she was.”
“Man,” Annie was rolling her last curl into the curling iron, “that’d piss me off. Jesus Christ. She just made that huge mess because she thought it was fun. That’s fucked up.”
“Yeah, but that’s not it though. The point was that she was there. I didn’t know why she was lying but that didn’t matter. I thought it was pretty impressive that she had made everyone, including her family, believe that she was completely senile.” Max watched Annie fluff her hair with her fingers. “Anyway I started to go in and talk to her even more than I had. I’d go in and tell her stories every day; just stupid, little stories…sometimes about things that were happening to me, and sometimes about things that I’d made up. But, she didn’t talk to me like she had that day. She just looked at her hands and kind of smiled while I talked.”
“Is this story going anywhere? Because… it stinks,” Annie began to pick stuff up off of the counter and throw it chaotically back into the basket.
“Yeah, this is the part that I am trying to get to. One day… I went in and told Mary a story…I don’t remember what it was about. When I finished, she smiled lightly, and slowly raised one of her wrinkled fingers up to her lips. Then, with a voice that was crackly from not being used, she said;
‘Now I’m going to tell you a story…Once upon a time….there was this man…..everyone in his town told him not to say devil three times…they said… no matter what you do… don’t ever say devil three times…and then one day…he said devil three times.’ I stared at her, ‘what happened then?’ I asked. She raised her head, looked right into my eyes, and then very seriously, she said, ‘Nothing…that’s all that you need to have in a story…that and nothing else.’
“O.k. Was this story supposed to have anything to do with time at all?” Annie stopped what she was doing and stared at max. “Because, if it was, then I don’t think that I’m getting it. Was she trying to tell you that you talk too much? Cus, it’s pretty fucking funny if you talked so much that you brought a poor little old lady out of dementia just to tell you that you’re too wordy.”
“No,” Max handed Annie the fingernail file that she had been fiddling with, “but that’s pretty goddamned funny Ann. What I mean is that Mary’s been dead for like eight years. But, that day still sticks in my head like it just happened. That’s what I’m trying to say about time. It just goes away. It’s kind of like when I had the baby. I just kept telling myself that it was all relevant. The pain wouldn’t even be a real memory in a month, a week, or a year. It’s like my grandma. Remember how she used to look at her hands all of the time in her last years. She’d just sit and stare at her hands for the longest time. One time, she held her hands up and said, ‘I don’t know what happened. My hands used to be so pretty and strong. And then… one day…I just noticed that they were as thin as tissue paper and had these god-awful brown spots all over them.’
That’s what I mean about time. Haven’t you ever listened to a tape of somebody that’s died? Try it. Use the Carpenters, they work really well. Listen real closely to it when you’re all alone. In between the words you can hear her breathe. That was just like yesterday where time is concerned. But it’s nothing now. It’s not even important. Something as important as breathing, and it’s nothing. Do you see what I mean?”
“Wow, that’s a happy thought. Thanks for that. You’re so weird Maxy. Oh well. How do I look?” She turned toward Max and struck a vogue pose just like Madonna, with her hands moving up and down to make a picture box around her face.
“You look absolutely beautiful,” Max said truthfully.
“Good… Are you finally finished?” Annie asked as she put her hand on the doorknob.
“Sure…as soon as you get me another roll of toilet paper.”
Annie left, and then quickly came back into the bathroom. She threw the roll of toilet paper in Max’s lap. “But you better spray…I can’t believe, that after almost twenty years, I still have to sit in the bathroom with you while you shit.”
Max laughed and threw a ball of clean toilet paper trying to hit Annie before she shut the bathroom door.