The Sixth Floor

There is a cactus on the desk that looked to me like a prickly green hand emerging from a terracotta-red cuff ― one of those cheap clay pots that break easily. The lady behind the desk is obese and has beautiful dark skin. She has soothing eyes and a warm smile. She smiles and hands me a grape sucker because she remembers me rooting through her glass jar last time for grape, or what I called purple. Purple, she said, is her favorite color. My grandma’s shoes squeak as we walk back. Her polyester pants swish and I imagine I am the only person in the world that can hear either noise. I stare at the green waves of her stride. She takes my hand, which is an odd feeling because I don’t remember touching her except for when we come here ― or when she smears my face with the lipstick of an occasional and dreaded kiss usually reserved for holidays when her breath smells like crackers, cheeseball, and peach schnapps. She smells like cigarettes and orchids in memory. She is mean and nice all at the same time and her hand is warm and calloused.

The people mingle about uniformed in light blue gowns and bright white slippers. I can see their bare backs when they turn around, boney blanched-white skin, bloated yellow pig flesh, or hairy curtains matted on raspberries. They wear paper underwear and make loud noises, or no noise at all. One tall bald man fans his arms apart and runs around like he is an airplane. His mouth sputters as though he is experiencing engine failure but at the last moment the engines recover and he soars through clouds of fluorescent light. His eyes are large and seem never to blink. His eyebrows are graying ungroomed hedgerows. He is one of the boney ones whose back ribs look like a ladder. I have seen him more than once. I know the sound of his airplane well.

Mom is sitting on the bottom of her bed watching TV and I eye her from the hallway where grandma made me wait. Nurses pass pushing carts with medication. An orderly helps a bawling young woman walk down the hallway to a room that swallows them. I hear grandma say you are lucky to have a TV in your room and The Wheel of Fortune blares ― the loud tick of the wheel. The ding, ding, ding of correctly guessed letters. The buzz of an incorrect guess makes me jump. I brought someone to see you, she says to my mom cheerily. She waves a hand to me and I waltz into the dim-lit room with my head down afraid to look at her. She isn’t herself in real life when she is here. She is cicada skin. Her skinny white legs dangle from the bleached bed, bruised and unshorn. Her feet are tucked into two puffy white bunny rabbit slippers. They aren’t real bunny rabbits and I don’t know where she got them but they stare back at me with watchful pink eyes. Mom gawps at me as though she doesn’t recognize my face. Or as though I am painting in her mind a universe of memories, of which I cannot tell are pleasant or otherwise. She looks at me like I looked at the cactus.

I would like to buy a vowel, please. An E.

Yes. There are two Es.

Vanna White was the most beautiful woman in the world to me when I was seven. I felt badly for once wishing she was my mother and my mother turned letters, only to be seen briefly when the wheel stopped ticking. My grandma doesn’t take her eyes off the television. It was a marvel to her, born when she was still a young woman fully aware of life without its placation. The Wheel was what we were watching at her house before we came. My mom smiles and hopped down on her two bunny rabbit feet. Their ears flop forward and their eyes are still affixed upon me. She slides forward as though she’s on ice and kneels down and looks at me without saying anything at all. No hello. No hug. The grape sucker is in my hand which I tuck behind my back instinctively, fearful of losing it to her. I imagine, though, my lips were a purple indictment of its presence. She smiled but still doesn’t say anything and I feel uncomfortable and weird like I want to run. Her eyes are glassy and she puts her hand on my head and rubs my hair. My grandma turned her attention to us and I can see her wrinkled face over mom’s shoulder and the glow of the wheel in her glasses. A plastic bracelet slides back on mom’s arm and she rubs my head as though she was looking for something in my hair.

You be a good boy for your grandma. There aren’t too many nights left on her davenport, she smiled assuring me. I’m going to get out soon! She whispered the last part as though it were a secret. But my grandma promised me that more than once every single day.

He’s a good boy, grandma spoke up.

I lived in fear at my grandma’s house. Of my blind grandfather who sat in a chair like a statue all day and the chime of a grandfather clock in the middle of the night when all the lights were out. Of a cement cat and pictures of dead people all over the walls and of the smell of old age and smoked cigars.

I don’t say anything. I don’t know this mom. I don’t know anyone.

There is a curtain which divides the room. I cannot see the other side but there is a man sitting there and his voice was low and muffled. He was speaking to someone in a bed I presumed to be situated before him. I can see his cowboy boots beneath the curtain and the cuffs of his gray pant legs in the agape. Whatever he said was spoken with a grave air of finality. He sounded frustrated by whoever he was talking to and he pauses as though to allow the person to speak, but they say nothing at all unless it was spoken in a whisper I could not hear.

The buzz sounds and I jump. There are no Ns.

What is it that you have that turned your lips purple? she asked.

Reluctantly, I reveal my slobbery sucker and she looks at it.

That will do it, she grins.

My grandma goes back to watching TV, no longer concerned about the two of us. An orderly in white brought a dinner tray and mom gave me a brownie which was dry and hard. I dropped my sucker on the floor and my grandma swooped in and threw it out. She promised we would get another before we left, though I didn’t fuss or even ask. The man behind the curtain in the cowboy boots stepped out. He was very tall and had gray slicked hair which he combed over with his large pink hand. He had an enormous belly and a belt buckle that seemed to keep it in place. He smiles politely at us and nods in deference, puts on a gray cowboy hat and quickly leaves the room.

This Side of Paradise, said a beautiful voice from behind the curtain.  

My mom whispered something to my grandma and grandma shook her head. I would like to buy a vowel, Pat. An O.

There is one O.

Mom sat up in bed and picked at her food. She said she never eats on Tuesdays or Thursdays because the lady who cooks on those days puts chemicals in the food to control their minds. She says she has no intention to bark like a dog or quack like a duck because someone wants her to. My grandma says horsefeathers. I can hear the man’s cowboy boots walk up the long hallway and the engine of a swooning airplane that recovers, again, at the very last minute.

The room grew dimmer. The lights ensconced in the ceiling are turned low and there is little light coming from the darkening sky outside that is the blue shade of a bruise. There is a large window I look out of which puts me unwittingly on the other side of the curtain. I stood there, awestruck by a sea of cars that are each the size of a matchbox. I tried to see my grandma’s truck but couldn't find it. The headlights from the road came and went, red and white eyes all in a row. Cape Cod-style houses lined the street and porch lights were scattered. It had rained and wet leaves fall and collect on lawns and I watched a dog romping around in a front yard with a little girl in pink. A Jack-Lantern’s face glows on a porch reminding me that tomorrow is Trick-Or-Treat. Then I look over and realize the other person in the room is there watching me, all the while, smiling. She waved. She was beautiful but her face was badly beaten and splotched the color of a grape sucker. I darted away, rather rudely in retrospect.

S.

There are three Ss. Vanna turns them.

I would like to solve the puzzle, Pat. This-Side-of-Paradise.

You got it! [Audience applause.]

We left but didn’t stop to get another sucker and the dark-skinned lady at the front desk smiled and said goodbye, sugar. I asked grandma if we could stop at Super-X to buy me a Halloween costume. I had no idea what I wanted to be. I was a ghost last year. Maybe I would be a cowboy or a bruise.