Read Online Ordinary Life by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online

watchbands were white. They were always busy, but they were remarkably cheerful. I admired them: their understated makeup, their calmness in the face of ever-impending disaster, their absolute willingness to help. I had gone to school intending to become a teacher, but after watching the nurses for a few weeks, I decided to change my major. “I’m going to go to nursing school,” I told one of the nurses, and she said, “Good. We need you.”
    After I graduated, I got my own white cap with a navy blue stripe. I thought it looked great. I used white bobby pins to anchor it and I wore white pearl studs. I was cheerful, like my mentors. And I worked happily in hospitals until the time my husband picked me up after work one night and complained, again, that I hadn’t come out on time. “I was pushing on someone’s chest,” I said. “I was making his heart pump so he wouldn’t die. It didn’t particularly matter that my shift had ended.”
    My husband stared straight ahead, shifted the car too precisely.
    By the time we could afford two cars, I’d had children and needed to be home more often. So I started working part-time, visiting patients in their homes. As it happened, I liked doing that even more than working in hospitals. Because I saw all of those patients. They weren’t stripped of themselves, sitting alone in a hospital bed with a wrinkled patient gown tied on them. Now they wore their own clothes and sat in their own chairs, surrounded by the things that made them themselves: their newspapersand coffee mugs, their exuberant dogs and various family members, their pictures on the walls. I liked that I could check their temperature while I smelled their dinner cooking, that I heard their phones ringing, saw their gardens blooming. I liked being closer to them. That’s what is best about nursing: you get close to patients, because when people are sick, they don’t bullshit. They are real, and you can be real back. What I understood about myself the day I decided to become a nurse is that there’s nothing I prize more than looking into someone’s eyes and seeing them true. I thought if I were a nurse, I could do that over and over again.
    Richard lived in a brick building with six apartments. It was an old place in fairly good shape, with high, interesting windows and gigantic screened-in porches. I stood outside looking at the place, wondering what he’d thought when he first saw it. Probably he didn’t think,
So this is where I’ll die
. Probably he thought,
This will do for now
.
    I rang number five and was surprised to be immediately buzzed in. I was afraid I’d have to get the super, that Richard might refuse to admit me, but when I reached his door, I saw why I’d been let in so promptly—someone else had done it. A red-haired woman, pale and beautiful and wary looking, held out her hand. “I’m Richard’s girlfriend,” she said. “Laura.”
    I shook her hand, told her my name. “Is he up?” I asked.
    She motioned me inside the living room. “Yes, he’s in the bedroom. He’s lying down. You’re going to do his dressing, right?” I nodded. She sat down on the sofa, lit a cigarette. “I was taught how, you know, but he doesn’t like for me to do it.” She exhaled in a straight line, up into the air over her head. There was someanger in it. Then she looked levelly at me. “I thought I’d watch, though, if you don’t mind.”
    “I don’t mind at all,” I said. “You can help me if you want.”
    “No,” she said. “Richard wouldn’t like it.”
    “I need to do an interview first,” I said. “First-visit stuff—just some routine questions.”
    “He won’t tell you anything.”
    I hesitated, then said, “Well, maybe I’ll just try.”
    She shrugged. “Call me when you’re ready for me.”
    She was wearing a pair of tight blue jeans and a white blouse, knotted at the waist. Her feet were bare, her toenails painted a deep red. She wore large gold hoop earrings and her