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Order this writing in the collection book Revealing All Your Dirty Little Secrets available for only $1995 |
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This appears in a pre-2010 issue
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Good Day
Pat Dixon
As Lorna Chalker begins to thumb through Kate Shaughnessy’s file folder, a crisp rapping on the frame of her open door makes her glance up.
“Busy, Lorna? Becky started my training a couple minutes early today, which means, logically, that Becky ended our session a couple minutes early.”
“Hi, Kate. Come in. So—how did it go today?”
“Pretty well.” Kate wipes her face on a small towel she is carrying and hands Lorna her food diary for the previous week. “No new personal bests with any of your Nautilus machines, but no backsliding either. It was a good workout—plus I think I got something very, very useful out of it, too.”
“That’s the way it should be when you come here. Want to jump up on the scales first?”
“No—but I will. I already know I’m going to be about two more pounds heavier this week, but I know what I need to do about it.”
Kate closes the door and tosses her towel on the floor between the “client chair” and Lorna’s desk. Then she slides the two weights along the top of the medical scale to register 142 pounds and steps onto the square platform at its base. She taps the smaller weight a tiny bit to the left, waits for the balance to settle, and steps off.
“Yup—141 and three-fourths libs. That’d be just about 137 libs without these heavy sneaks and all these heavy, sweaty gym clothes—and my heavy watch and keys.”
Lorna carefully records the weight information on Kate’s food diary and looks up.
“Want to be measured and calipered and have your Body Fat Index graphed?”
“Nope—definitely not this time. I’m fat, fat, fat, Lorna, and I don’t even want you touching my fat fat—or even looking at my fat fat. Maybe next week—or the next—or the one after that. And, by the way, thank you for never being pushy about my weight—or judgmental about how I look—whatever you privately think. Not everyone is so tactful.”
Lorna blinks and frowns slightly: “Like who?”
“Like my friggin’ doctor is who. Yesterday I had my annual physical, an’ when we’re looking over my chest X-rays, he points and gratuitously says, ‘ Hmm—your left boob is lower than your right one.’”
“He said that—and pointed right at you?!”
“Well, actually he said ‘breast’ and was pointing at the front-view X-ray, but he majorly pissed me off. For one thing, it’s a normal womanly fact—and for another, I’ve been self-conscious about it for the past twenty years.”
“What did you say?”
“I couldn’t think of a thing. I was too friggin’ mad at him. Normally I have snappy comebacks without end, but not yesterday.”
“Well—you could have said, ‘Hmm—your left ball is lower than your right ball—Doctor.’ And you could be looking right at his crotch while you said it.”
“Ha! That’s great, Lorna! Really great. Did you just make that up?”
“Well, not really. My Aunt Janine said that once to her doctor about—oh—thirty or forty years ago—way before I was born. I’ve heard her tell it maybe fifty, sixty times. My mom and her—and even my dad and Uncle Harley—they none of ’em ever get tired of hearing Aunt Janine telling it over again every time there’s any sort of a get-together.”
“Well—that’s a really great line—and I will plagiarize it someday—one way or another.”
Lorna smiles and glances at Kate’s latest food diary for half a minute.
“I see here, Kate, you’re chowing down an awful lot of oatmeal cookies in your afternoon snacks on—um—four of the last seven days. That’s 600 to 800 extra calories each afternoon, which is more than you’re going to burn up by grading and teaching or climbing stairs—or even working out here twice a week.”
“Self-medication. Not a good thing, but much better than two or three Tom Collinses, especially when I have to drive thirty miles to get home afterwards. The traffic is wild enough to kill me every time I make the trip—without me being loopy and impaired and a menace to others.”
“How is you mom?”
“Declining—failing—slipping—sliding. Chiefly mentally, but physically, too.”
“So, it’s putting stress on you, and you react by eating too much when you’re there? How ’bout, instead of having cookies with refined sugar in them, you take a little bag of Granny Smith apples to eat while you visit her? They’re only about eighty calories each, and three of those would be way better for you than six or eight cookies, right? You can cut them up into little pieces to munch on. Or, for variety, you could take a little bag of rice cakes, like these here on my display table. They only have forty-five calories each.”
“Apples—even green tarty tartlette apples—sound okay, but, at least for me, the rice cakes would taste too much like friggin’ cardboard.”
“Well, they also come in flavors—apple-cinnamon rice cakes only have five more calories each than the plain ones. That’s still just half what one oatmeal cookie has.”
“Okay, those sound like good suggestions. I guess I can take my own little goody bag of low-cal oral gratification with me next time I drive down to New Haven to see her.”
Kate frowns for five seconds, then deliberately relaxes her face and glances around the edges of the ceiling of Lorna’s small office. Looking into Lorna’s face, she continues.
“I love that woman, of course, but she and her apartment drive me, well, fifty-seven varieties of bat-shit after just five minutes. I think I’ve mentioned that she usually sets her heat up way too high—on 85 or worse—and forgets to rehydrate—or else she chooses not to drink anything ’cause it’ll make her pee more, and she’s been soaking her sofa a lot in spite of double-diapering. I’ve been going over there more and more lately, and I’m afraid I may have to stay overnight with her two or three times a week pretty soon.”
“What about home health aides? Have you tried looking into that?”
“Of course. I’ve got something called ‘cluster care’ set up for her, where somebody pokes a head in to check on her every few hours, day and night, but it won’t be enough for much longer. But the good news is my mom still knows who I am—most of the time. And I’ve been getting a lot of—mmm—handy material from this experience.”
“Handy—material?”
“Details and stuff I can write about in some way—partly as a way to digest—and absorb—and excrete—that part of my life—and partly to do what I do well: make up short stories.”
“Hmm. Like what kind? I didn’t know you’re writer. I thought you just taught.”
“Oh—I’ve written all different kinds: murder mysteries, sci-fi stories, war stories, ‘realistic daily life’ tales, even a couple romance fantasies. Lately, a high percentage of ’em have dealt with—or been ‘inspired’ by—elder care problems. Basically I do all different sorts.”
“Hmm—very interesting. Have any ever been—like—published?”
“Mmm—several dozen, but just in places where only a chosen few will ever read them, including some of the other authors—about ten in college or university magazines—and about forty in so-called ‘little magazines’—mostly in low circulation places—some as low as a hundred copies. Nearly all are mags that seldom pay a cent—or a nickel, let alone a dime.”
“No? Why do you do—it—like that, then?”
“Well—partly for me: I enjoy writing—and like what I write—and want to share what I’ve written with one or two other folks who might also enjoy it—or get something out of it—even if they’re strangers, and I never even know a thing about them. And—partly because I’m pretending that someday I’ll get recognized by some of the big-paying mags—and then eventually I’ll write a best-selling book or two—or thirty. Also, professionally, each time I write anything that’s accepted, it’s ‘one more line on my résumé,’ as we say in the college teaching game.”
She pauses to make a wry face and wrinkle her nose, then continues.
“At good ol’ Witherspoon Academy, we’re expected to be ‘professionally productive outside of the classroom,’ which basically means getting some things published that are scholarly and/or creative—which leads to greater job security and sometimes to promotions and pay increases in these dicy-icy times. But don’t get me started—because the game ain’t often an honest one—any more than pouring our money into lottery tickets or the slots in Atlantic City is going to work for most of us.”
Lorna frowns slightly.
“People shouldn’t gamble—unless they can afford to do it for fun. My boyfriend and I drive down to A.C. in Jersey maybe twice a year and set ourselves a limit on what we can afford to lose—and never go beyond it—never.”
“I guess I made a bad analogy. I was thinking of our whole lives being like an array of gambles—taking jobs that we don’t know will pan out—or that have downsides we never thought about in advance—or—well, a ton of other things. Anyway, shifting gears an’ driving back over to the sunny side of life: today, during my workout, I got lucky and thought up a nutty idea for a whole new story I can write when I get back home to my ’puter—and it has nothing whatsoever to do with a single aspect of elder care, which is sort of a majorly huge plus for me this week.”
“A story about a woman having a gym workout? Cool.”
“Well, actually I thought up two kinds of stories, and one of them is about a person—a woman—at a gym. She’s a writer, and she comes up with an idea for a story during my story about her—while she’s working out. Of course, when I write it, I might just give her a sex change an’ make her a man so nobody will think it’s autobiographical or anything. But the other story is one I’m thinking I’ll combine with this one—a story inside another story, so to speak.”
She smiled and drew a line in the air with both index fingers and then cupped her hands at either end of it like a set of parentheses.
“It’ll be the idea that she, the writer, will come up with—and she’ll work it out in her mind— during her—workout. And that was the first story I thought up today—sort of a science-fiction thing with a goofy premise that’s kept hidden until the very end. It came to me while I was doing my leg presses and overheard ol’ Professor Swingle telling his trainer, Hunky Larry, that he happened to see himself in the mirror yesterday morning, while he was getting dressed, and suddenly he noticed how thin his legs are now that he’s seventy-one. He was working on the leg-lift machine and told Hunky that his legs are stronger now than when he was sixty or even fifty, despite them being a hell of a lot skinnier, and he couldn’t figure out why. So I’m sitting there doing my presses, with Becky keeping count for me, and I start thinking about legs being different thicknesses at different ages—and the nutty idea for my story comes to me almost out of nowhere. It’s about a planet in, maybe, another galaxy where nearly everyone has had both their legs amputated. I thought of the reason for it first, and then I started thinking about ways to keep readers in the dark about that reason until the very ending—sort of like a Twilight Zone type of story, if you know what I mean. And I decided to make all the amputees descendants of a ship full of French astronauts that crash-landed there—oh—several generations ago.”
“Sounds pretty unpleasant to me,” says Lorna. “I never like hearing about stuff like injuries that are permanent—or even temporary—though sometimes I’ve got to deal with people here who are rehabbing, you know, from injuries—or they’ve had strokes and stuff.”
Kate looks at Lorna in silence for eight seconds.
“I guess I can respect your feelings about that. I’m a bit sensitive, too, and even get squeamish when I hear about people having paper cuts—especially on the tips of their tongues—from licking an envelope, say. Let me change the subject again, to something sunnier. Some of my stories are, well, happy-ending stories where people are able to overcome some major problem—like having a victory over a person who is hassling them or bullying them. Would you like me to print off a copy of one of those and bring it to you next week? One of my latest sci-fi stories ends happily that way. Definitely, not every kind of story appeals to every kind of person—as I know very well from my daily experience.”
“Well—I guess you could—though I can’t promise I’ll get to reading it right away. I’m not much of a fiction reader. I—you could say I’m more of an article reader—like health and diet stuff mainly. My boyfriend, though—he reads sci-fi sometimes—and watches a lot of it on TV. I could see if maybe he’d like to read it—even if I don’t get to it, myself, like right away.”
Kate looks at Lorna in silence for another seven seconds. Lorna puts Kate’s latest food diary into her file folder and opens the file drawer of her metal desk. Taking this as a hint that her time is up, Kate makes a tiny shrug and directs a brief, mirthless smile toward the large round clock between the door and the scales. She reaches for her towel, then stands.
“Okay, then. Sounds like a plan, then. I’ll try to remember to copy or print some upbeat story and bring it in—and if I forget next week, then please just keep after me till I do it. As I said, I’m at my mom’s place a gawd-awful lot these days, and—well, you remember I said it’s getting to me. It ties me in knots sometimes—and can sometimes make me forget some things I mean to do. I could even forget my two story ideas I had—and your aunt’s great—great rejoinder. And just those three things have made this into one of my ‘good days.’”
“Yeah—getting old—like your mom—that’s a thing that sort of creeps me out, too—just a little bit—but I always try and think about happier things.”
Kate tilts her head slightly and takes a deep breath, slowly exhaling before speaking again.
“Oh—before I take off, Lorna: have you done anything yet with my idea—suggesting to the gym’s big management how it would be a smart, good, and useful thing to enter your clients’ data into computers—and then prepare individual charts or graphs showing each person’s weight and strength progress over a period of time? It could be for three months or six months—or a year—or all sorts of time periods. And I bet you a shiny penny that your clients here would grub up that sort of thing—and management might give you some kind of a bonus just for suggesting it—even if nobody ever follows through and actually does it.”
“I—I haven’t gotten to that yet. It’s a really good idea, probably, Kate, but I’ve just been so busy here lately. I just haven’t gotten to it yet—but I will. Well, then—I’ll—see you next Saturday—same time, then.”
“Maybe—if I survive three or four more visits to my mom’s—plus the drives there and back.”
“You will. Just remember: take those goody bags with you—with some nice Granny Smith apples—and rice cakes!”
