Dance Lessons
Clarice had fallen and broken her hip last winter. She was lucky, her daughter Lucy said, that it was the cleaning lady's day or she might have lain undiscovered. Clarice's only memory of the fall was fear and pain, her only recollection of the hospital was ringing for pain medicine and waiting. The sharp pain was gone now, replaced by the dull ache of boredom. According to Lucy, the doctors had insisted she could not live alone, she needed care and rehabilitation and to be near family.
"And you must be careful, you have osteoporosis, bones like graham crackers, the doctors said," Lucy told her.
Her son-in-law, a lawyer, said she could not afford to keep her apartment in
"Rest Home is a ridiculous euphemism," she told her daughter. "Are we resting from Life? Resting up for Death?"
"Don't be dramatic, Mother," said Lucy.
Clarice awoke in the middle of every long night, needing the bathroom, forgetting where she was until - struggling to get up - she encountered the bedside railing.
"I don't appreciate being a prisoner here," she told her daughter who stopped in every day on her way home from work at the library.
"Oh, hush," Lucy said. "Look how pretty your room is, with your pictures on the wall, the plants on the window sill."
The Rest Home, like its residents and like the town, had seen better, livelier days. Tourists used to be drawn to the area by mineral springs. Years ago, Clarice and her second husband had attended conventions at The Springs, the big resort hotel just outside of town. It had been pleasant, dancing, golfing, soaking in the baths. Lucy had recently taken her to lunch at The Springs. It was shabby and rundown now. The more modest hotels in town had closed altogether or, like this one, been converted to other use.
Her room looked like what it was, a drab hotel room hybridized into a hospital cell. The plants and pictures were only window dressing. The aluminum contraption she had used to learn to walk again leaned in one comer. Clarice had "graduated" to a four-pronged cane but refused to use it. She detested the practical sneakers with Velcro closures they made her wear - "running shoes" and she could barely walk. Her room was on the fourth floor and looked out over the little river that ran through town. She could open the window and hurl herself out, if she had the strength, if she did not want the shame of her obituary reading that she had died here. W.C. Fields would say it was redundant, to die in this town.
"Up and at 'em, Clarice, it's bingo time," said the plump woman, bursting into the room without knocking. Activities Director said her name tag, as though this were some pleasure cruise.
"Not today."
"We'll miss you. Your boyfriends will be asking for you!"
Clarice thought that unlikely. The few men here barely spoke.
"Well, don't mope in the dark," the woman said, whipping up the Venetian blinds and snapping on the fluorescent light.
"Turn that off."
"Just trying to brighten up your day."
She bustled out. Clarice knew she had hurt her feelings. Lucy warned her about "alienating the staff and wooed them with offerings of candy and flowers. Clarice had never been good with women; they bored her. When she was young, before she married, she enjoyed her job as a bank teller. She dressed in tight straight skirts, silky blouses, high heels. A line of men waited at her window, even when there was no queue for other tellers. She cashed their checks and dispensed crisp bills like manna from her manicured fingers. Lunch hours she took dancing classes and spun through the studio in the teacher's arms, charmed, enchanted by her own reflection in the mirrored walls. She waltzed back to the bank with the music in her ears.
She should have asked that silly woman to turn on the music. She could not seem to learn, or remember, how to operate the machine Lucy had brought when Clarice complained that there was no classical music on the radio here. She was probably the only person in this place who had ever been to an opera. Now she had a mute pile of silvery disks and a mysterious machine….
Published in The Broome Review: Spring 2008, Issue I
