Brizzles Basket

I’m in front of the TV helping my sister Marsha punch out paper doll clothes when I hear my Mom scream, “Oh my fucking God!” I look up.

Holding Margie, her youngest child just three years old, against her chest, Mom runs full-throttle down the hall, through the living room and out our front door. My oldest brother Howard jumps up, bangs out behind her, and a second later I shoot out behind him — already Mom’s at the end of our building. Clearly something bad is wrong.

Howard shifts gears, gaining on her. Without first checking in either direction Mom runs across Bicknell Avenue and starts up Hazelwood. Howard catches Mom just past Fox’s Neighborhood Grocery, yelling at Mom, “What the fuck’s . . .”

“I need to get his baby to the hospital!” Mom pants.

“Why? What’s . . . ”

“She drank a whole glass of nail polish remover!”

Howard says, “Fuck!” Says, “Give her to me!”

Mom nods and Howard lifts Margie from her. He runs ahead of Mom who runs ahead of me.

It’s early evening, August, and so hot you want to take off your skin and sit around in your bones. On the right side of the street neat, white, close-together houses sit like the teeth in a comb, but hardly no one’s out.

Mom wears blue jeans rolled up mid-calf, a sleeveless red- and white-striped, like a barber pole, pull-over top and black shoes not all that good for running. She speeds up until she’s running alongside my brother, who’s also wearing jeans and a pull over shirt. “What was she doing, Mom?” he asks Mom. “How’d she get a hold of . . .”

“Brenda left a glass full of polish remover unattended,” Mom explains, “on the little table beside the bed. I think she just went to the bathroom. The shit in the glass was a red color. Margie thought it was a sweet drink.” Brenda is my next-to-the-oldest brother Larry’s wife. She paints her nails with real artist brushes that she lets soak in a foul-smelling solution when she’s finished.

Running past my elementary school — where I’m in Mrs. Lawless’s fifth grade class — we scare up a half-dozen birds like a handful of buttons tossed in the air and I get close enough to Mom and Howard to see Margie is a bluish color and she’s making scary, I-can’t-catch-my-breath sounds.

Howard’s sweating, running hard and showing all of his teeth. The veins on his neck are popped out and Mom asks him, “Do you need me to take her?”

He shakes his head. “No. I got her.” Unable to keep up with Howard, Mom falls back. As we approach Alma Avenue, my 21-year-old brother completely stops. Breathing hard and sweat-drenched he bends forward. Mom quickly reaches him. “Give her to me!” she demands. Howard nods and hands Margie, a baton in a life-and-death relay race, off to my mother. She accelerates.

Howard held Margie honeymoon-style — his arms under her neck and knees, like husbands carrying new brides over thresholds do. But Mom holds Margie in a wrapped-around-her, monkey-style way, like Tarzan carries Cheetah when the two of them are swinging through the jungle.

Howard jogs slowly now, so slowly, I overtake him and run just a few steps behind Mom. I get a bit distraught when someone’s yellow dog bounding from out of nowhere runs up to me. I’m scared of dogs, but I can see pretty quick this one’s okay. He just thinks running with a maybe-dying little kid is a fun game. One of Mom’s black shoes flies off, arcing over my head it lands with a wet-plop sound on the walk behind me. I fall back to retrieve it but already kicking out of her other shoe Mom says, “Leave it!” The yellow dog leaps onto the shoe Mom tossed on purpose like he can’t believe his luck and heads for the hills with it.

After another minute, it’s Mom who slows, almost-but-not-quite stopping to work on her breathing. Howard swoops in, grabs Margie up and then, after turning right onto Bluegrass Avenue, runs faster than ever.

Barefoot now, Mom runs at a trot beside me before revving to all-out, full-steam,  maximum-speed in front of me.

Up ahead to our left the hospital complex comes into view. Mom catches Howard, again there’s a child hand-off and the closer my mom gets to the hospital with Margie the faster she runs. As she darts into the hospital’s parking lot, plowing straight toward the emergency entrance, Howard and I are right on her heels.

Sts. Mary and Elizabeth Hospital at 1850 Bluegrass is six-tenths of a mile from 1475 Bicknell, the address of our housing project apartment and though it feels like we ran for hours, it’s only taken us seven or eight minutes to get to it.

The hospital’s emergency room doors whoosh open, Mom runs through them, past the eight or nine people waiting, lickety-split up to a desk. Mom yells, “She’s swallowed a glass of nail polish remover!” Her voice is so loud and hysterical and scared I want to bust out crying.

A skinny guy in white scrubs blasts through a set of double doors with round windows like on a cruise ship then two seconds later explodes back through them pushing a gurney. He turns the little bed on wheels sideways in front of my mom and a happily plump nurse with piles of red hair helps Mom lower a limp and eerily quiet Margie onto it. The skinny guy and nurse push Margie past the desk and disappear behind some curtains. Mom’s right on their tail.

I grab the back of her shirt. She tries to shake me loose. “Wait!” I yell at her.

Mom stops. “What is it, Billy?”

“Tell ‘em to look at your feet,” I say.

Mom’s eyes look at me and then to Howard before taking in the bloody footprints she’s left on the lobby’s white tile floor. She lifts one of her feet, sees it’s blistered and cracked, oozing blood. “Well, Lord. I can’t feel a thing,” she says. She turns and disappears behind the same curtains the skinny guy in white pushing Margie and red-headed nurse went behind.

Howard turns and walks away. I walk over to the waiting area and situate myself against a wall in such a way that I can see the double doors and everything behind the desk.

My heart leaps when the curtains part and the red-headed nurse steps through. Walking briskly, she moves around to and then behind the ER desk. Her uniform is way too tight. Her breasts and belly strain against the mint-colored fabric and the sleeves cut into her arms. She picks up a phone and punches buttons.

I can feel the eyes of a beefy man, shirtless, in bib overalls and holding a bloody dishtowel to his forehead on me. He glowers like it was me who caused the damage under the rag. Like I threw the paperweight at him, ran into him with something sharp.

I look around for Howard. He’s fifty feet away, studying a painted, near life-size statue of the Virgin Mary. The red-headed nurse in the too-small clothes stands up. “David Wheeler,” she calls. The beefy man with the forehead wound stretches his neck to look at her. “You want to come on back?” she asks/tells him.

The hospital has a flat, antiseptic smell and it’s cooler than outside, but only by a few degrees. The skinny guy in white who got the gurney for Margie so quick steps from behind the curtains. He has a dark, neatly-trimmed goatee — my brother Larry would call it a face pussy — soft, friendly brown eyes as he walks past me to step through the automatic door.  I look at a clock. It’s 7:10 in the evening.

At 7:55 p.m., Constance Simms, a bespectacled girl, 15 or so years old with a croupy, window-rattling cough she never bothers to cover with her hand is called back. Howard’s still checking out the statue of Mary, looking her over like a guy thinking to buy a car. The curtains behind the desk part and I see a flash of red and white. Mom steps out. A black nurse about Mom’s same age with hair plastered so flat against her head I think it’s painted on steps out with Mom and walks beside her, then Mom veers toward the waiting area and the nurse goes the other way toward the desk. Howard hurries up to Mom. “How is she?” he asks her.

“She’s going to be okay,” Mom says.

I sneak around my mother and brother and sit in one of the hospital’s chrome and orange vinyl waiting room chairs. Mom eases down in the chair beside me and  looks up at Howard. “They pumped her stomach and they’re keeping her overnight, but she’s alright. I’m gonna stay with her, carry her home in the morning. She may be able to walk some by then, so I’ll be fine,” Mom says. “We’ll be fine,” she says.

Howard nods. Mom tells him, “Go on home, hon, and let everybody know Margie’s okay. Especially tell Brenda. I know she must feel awful. Billy, you go on home with your brother.” I sit back in my chair and shake my head. An army of ghosts and vampires couldn’t make me leave my mom alone here.

Howard reaches into his back pocket, pulls out and opens a beat-up looking wallet. He takes money out. “I’ve got four dollars, Mom. You’re welcome to it.”

Mom gently pushes at his hand. “No, I’m all right.” She looks at me. “Billy can stay with me. You go on home, Howard, tell Estin what’s going on. Tell him he’ll need to do both Mark watches tonight.” What my mom means is my stepdad will have to sit up all night watching to make sure my little brother Mark, who’s mentally retarded, doesn’t set anything in our house on fire. Normally, Dad just sits up between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. and then after only a few hours of sleep Mom will get up to keep watch the rest of the night.

“I’ll take your shift,” Howard tells Mom, “I don’t have to work tomorrow.”

“Thank you, hon.”

“Take this money, Mom.”

“No.”

Howard reaches into his shirt pocket and takes out an almost-full pack of Pall Mall cigarettes and five or six kitchen matches and hands them to Mom. “Here,” he says, “I got more at home.”

Mom takes the cigarettes. “Thank you again, Howard. I don’t know if I’d have got that baby here without you.”

Howard leans over me and shoves the four dollar bills into the pocket of my shorts. He turns and walks across the lobby. The hospital doors blow open to let him out and sigh closed once he is.

Mom moves to a chrome and orange vinyl chair closer to an ashtray and I move closer to her. She shakes a cigarette out the pack Howard gave her and puts it in her mouth. I watch as she opens the fly of her jeans and strikes a wooden match the way a man might, against her zipper.

An hour later I enter an elevator with my mom. We ride up, get off and walk to a room where Margie lays wide awake, normal and pink-looking on a bed. The room has a large window and two chairs. Tan vinyl and wood this time. Mom sits on Margie’s bed and gathers her up in her arms. I park myself in one of the chairs.

Margie smiles, gets this kind of embarrassed little girl look on her face and says against Mom’s neck, “I thought it was Kool-Aid.”

Mom says, “Of course you did,” all warm and mom-like and her eyes fill up with tears. “If I saw a tall glass of red stuff I’d think the same thing.”

A couple hours later Margie’s asleep. I feel wired and hungry, but I don’t say anything about it to Mom. In the room’s other chair Mom smiles at me. “I say we go downstairs and hunt up a cup of coffee and a cold drink, maybe a candy bar,” she says to me. I scoot forward faster than I intended to, in my chair.

“You think it’s okay to leave her?” I ask Mom.

Mom nods. “For five or ten minutes.” I stand up when Mom does and follow her out of the room and down the hall to the elevator. I push the down button and we wait.

“How’s your feet?’ I ask my mom.

She shrugs, “Okay. Not near as bad as they looked.”

I nod. There’s a ding and the elevator door slides open. We get in, the door closes and after a little lurch we start down. Mom puts her fingers in my hair. “You know, Billy, every cloud’s got a silver lining.”

I look up at her. “What silver lining does this one have?”

“Well, we get to spend some time together, just you and me. That don’t happen often.”

“I’m glad you didn’t make me go home,” I tell my mom.

“I’m glad I didn’t too, Billy Boy. I’m glad I didn’t, too.”

This entry was posted on Monday, November 7th, 2011 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Rock Me, Momma. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.