Princess

“You do it. You do it.” She shoves the bedpan in my face.

“Okay,” I say, “but how?” I have no idea. I’ve never put a bedpan under a butt before. I can’t imagine lifting up anybody’s middle and squeezing this little metal pan underneath. I know I won’t get it right, and there’ll be some cleaning up to do. I don’t know anything about nursing. The possible picture of rich red blood busting from veins and arteries makes me gasp for air.

I’m only a volunteer here. What I usually do is sell. I can sell anything; I’ve worked at Herberger’s in Intimate Apparel, Walgreens in Pharmacy, and Fleet Farm in Hardware. The reason I’m here at this nursing home is because I follow my husband around. The construction company he works for is putting up that new strip mall in town. They’re going to call it the Castle. They’re working on the inside of the main building right now, the one with the keep—I think it’s supposed to be a restaurant. For looks, they’re going to put two armored guards in front of the entrance doors.

Art and I’ve been jostling around since we got married a year ago. He wanted to leave Green Valley, Minnesota, even though I had a good job at a cute gift shop. He kept complaining, “I can’t stand it here any longer. I can’t take this white place—this nondescript, pale place. It makes me sick to death.”

He wanted to see what the South was like, so he took off on his cycle and I moved our stuff in a U Haul. My mom came along to help me drive, but she didn’t stay long after we got to Biloxi. She flew back home after only a few days because Art shouted at me, saying he didn’t like how the gas station guys looked at me. He yelled at Mom after she said, “Are you crazy? She didn’t do anything.”

We rented this motel room in a poor, scary part of town with abandoned buildings and warehouses with broken windows and chain-link fencing. The Sleep Tight Motel was right beside a Pump and Sip. Our room had a bed and a hotplate and a tiny fridge that shared top dresser space with a TV with ears but no reception.

Art couldn’t get a job in Biloxi, but I worked a day and a night job at the fish market and fun factory. Art hung out at bars. When I occasionally joined him between jobs, he’d be announcing to anybody who’d listen, “I’m a culture hound, needing to sniff out people in their kennel lairs. Talk to me, people.”

Then he needed to bust out, because he “couldn’t stand the liquid sounds, the dark kudzu,” and we bounded for Calgary, Canada. I hauled our stuff up there. Mom didn’t help me this time. Calgary was a cold cowboy town, and I liked it, and found a job at the tourist center, Heart of the New West, but Art insisted a buddy of his in Wisconsin needed help with this shopping mall.

So we hightailed it here to Springvale in the middle of winter. We rented a cottage in a resort about fifteen miles north of town, in the woods, from this nice older couple, Mr. and Mrs. Bronski. Art didn’t want me to work—he said he could support a wife—so I stayed out at the cottage. Mr. Bronski came over every morning, knocked at my door, and invited me for coffee in their place, the main lodge. I’d put down my cross-stitching—I’m not kidding, that’s what I was doing—watching the soaps, and sewing this panel, Kwitcherbellyaking. I walked over behind poor old bent-over Mr. Bronski shuffling along with his big old buckle boots, and took my place on the end of his long oak trestle table. Over a steaming cup of coffee, I’d listen to the couple talk about their children, fish, deer, rain, snow. Then I’d trudge back over to my cottage, pick up my Kwitcherbellyaking and turn on The Guiding Light.

Art came home later and later, more drunk all the time—and God did that worry me, because he was driving on icy roads by himself and had to enter Enchanted Woods on a very narrow, circular road because Mr. Bronski shoveled out only a plow’s width path of the resort. Art had already nosed into snow piled sky high. I was beginning to wonder why I was married to Art, but religion was a big thing in my life; I had taken vows for better or worse, and I wasn’t a quitter. But, still, I felt I was going to lose my mind.

One morning I drive into town with Art and see this place, the biggest building in town, and it hits me—I can do something; I can help out at the Avalon Nursing Home. You know they’ve never ever seen a volunteer at Avalon. The people on the bottom rung of the employment ladder are people with disabilities and they’re so happy to have me under them. They assign me chores, like bedpans.