M. G. Stephens 

     Erased

            "What was that unforgettable line?”

               —Samuel Beckett

"Erased"

She is not gone. Not yet. But she is slowly disappearing. Some days a friendship gets erased. Another day 1975 is erased, every news item, every moment of love and family, cousins running around the room at Christmas, cousins sliding down the banister until their grandmother tells them to skedaddle. She is not going to be so kind about it if one of the children gets hurt. But no matter: it is gone. Her name is Susanah Wolanski, and I lived with her. (The other day a fellow patient said hello to Susannah, but SEW did not answer. “Mary,” the patient said. But the name did not register with Susanah. Instead she declared: “I can’t even remember my own name, much less yours.”) We had been together a long time—twenty-nine years at this writing. We had lived in Boston, upstate New York, and then we moved abroad. We lived in London for fifteen years. It was, in many respects, a wonderful life, even though at times it was harsh and unbending, and we were foreigners, her with a visa to work in the UK, but eventually she lost that. She worked off the books from that point onward. I had my Irish passport, which came in handy for work, though the minute the work stopped, the Brits were reluctant to agree to my being an Irish national, and therefore an EU national, which had many perqs, the number one reason being that I was allowed to work in the UK. Secondarily, I was entitled to the dole as I looked for new work. But the UK were reluctant to give me anything, other than taking taxes from my wages, because of my accent and my last name: Froidveau. My first name was Dermot, still is, I am Dermot Froidveau, hardly an Irish name, but there you are. I am Irish and my name is Froidveau. Cold veal. Or cold valley, which is even more likely the origin, not the cold veal. Which is how the name translates, a good Swiss name, that part of the family from Bern. Interesting that in all the years I lived and worked in the UK, I never flew to Bern. I had an uncle in Brooklyn who had visited that Swiss city when he was stationed in Germany during his two years in the military. He brought home a chartreuse bear, some kind of symbol of that part of Switzerland. But he became a missionary priest, and would spend the next twenty years in Japan, learning a dialect indigenous to Okinawa. I am banging on about lineage and family ties, while my true love languishes on a urine-sprinkled hospital bed, waiting to get cleaned up and her wet clothes changed, not remembering who she was or how she wound up in this godforsaken place.

“Who are you?” she asks me.

Dermot,” I say.

“Dermot who?”

“Your true love,” I tell her.

“That’s Frankie down the hall in room 320.”

“Oh, since when?”

“Since forever.”

I tell her: “I made your favorite pasta. Mangia, mangia.”

She sits and devours the food, her hair a bird’s nest of tangles and curls nearly falling into the sauce.

Head down, she eats heartily. Though she keeps losing weight, her appetite is enormous, is always surprising to the nurses and the CNA’s.

“Where’s Frankie?” she asks.

   "The Door"

Susanah stands in front of the door to the apartment where we live. She no longer understands what it is for. Does it keep people and things out or does it keep them in? She grins, but there is no connection between her grin and the circumstance, the brilliant light out the window or the fading light of morning inhabiting the day. The concept of the “door,” its doorness and its stature at the threshold of their apartment, it all confuses her.

I attempt to practice patience.

I take a deep breath, I let it out slowly.

I sigh. I am a poor study for the concept that patience is. Nonetheless I act “as if.” I act the part of the patient partner, the caregiver.

It is not the role which easily drapes over me and which I wear as a loose garment.

I ask her to close the door.

She looks at me as if I had just been speaking a foreign language, a foreign language which she does not know.

What is he going on about the door? What does he mean about this thing called “the door?”

What is a door?

But my hands are full—they are filled with groceries—and I would like for her to shut the door. I point. I gesture. I nod towards the door, as if to say—that thing which lets us go in and out of the apartment. But she cannot appreciate or understand what it is I am saying. What is a door? she seems to ask herself. What purpose does it have in the scheme of things?

We live on the seventh floor; it is an old 1940’s building, similar to projects in New York City, such as Stuyvesant Town, postwar housing. Our apartment is a coop. In theory we all work together—the various tenants—the various people who form the coop. We are all in theory working for the greater good. But most people in the coop operate in ways that are transactional, and in their own interests. There are a some exceptions; they are few and far between. “The common good” is not something that gets bandied around at the trustee meetings.

Susanah looks at me wonderingly.

“Who are you?” she asks.

“Dermot,” I say.

   "Open"

I have lost my patience. The door is still open. I ask her to come into the apartment or go out into the hall, not stay there in the doorway, neither moving nor helping, just blocking my ingress. The door bangs shut. He apologizes to her. She looks scared but otherwise there is no real response to the door flying shut, even if almost knicked the tip of her nose in the process of the door slamming.

I want to be loving and kind, yet caregiving is thankless, exhausting, and all consuming. I wish it were otherwise, but it is not.

She no longer rides the elevators. It is a primitive fear that he respects until he realizes that elevators are 20th century things, not from some ancient order. It is not the elevators which are the anachronisms but rather her fear in response to the elevators which are the ancient order, straight out of the limbic system. Usually he takes the elevator down to the ground floor and when he exits the elevator, she is already waiting there for him.

“What took you so long?” she asks.

“I was just a minute,” I answer.

“It seemed like forever.”

“It was only a minute.”

They exit the lobby and step out in the courtyard of the coop.

She is always in the lobby waiting for him, and yet this time she is not there. Where is she, where did she go? I call her name. “Susanah, where are you, my love?”

I look beyond the lobby door and then the foyer door and I see her standing outside. I go out to meet her.

“What are you doing?” I ask her.

“What?” she asks me.

“What are you doing outside?”

“Waiting for you,” she says.