But the patients noticed. As if magnetized, they swarmed toward Sharon, began flocking around her, wheeling and hobbling. Soon we were surrounded. The attendants didn’t budge.
She reached into her purse, took out a box of gumdrops, and began distributing candy. One box emptied, another appeared. Then another.
She dispensed another kind of sweetness, too, kissing misshapen heads, hugging stunted bodies. Calling patients by name, telling them how good they looked. They competed for her favors, begged for gumdrops, cried out in ecstasy, touched her as if she were magic.
She looked happier than I’d ever seen her- complete. A storybook princess reigning over a kingdom of the misshapen.
Finally, gumdrops depleted, she said, “That’s all, people. Gotta go.”
Grumbles, whines, a few more minutes of pats and squeezes. A couple of the attendants came forward and began corralling the patients. Finally we managed to pull away. Resumption of chaos.
Elmo said, “They sure love you.” Sharon didn’t seem to hear.
The three of us walked to the end of the big room, up to a door marked INPATIENT UNIT and shielded by an iron accordion grille, which Elmo unlocked. Another key twist, the door opened and closed behind us, and all was quiet.
We walked through a corridor covered in the same lurid green vinyl, passed a couple of empty wards reeking of illness and despair, a door with a mesh glass window that afforded a view of several stout Mexican women laboring in a steamy industrial kitchen, another green hallway, and finally a steel slab marked PRIVATE.
On the other side a new ambience: plush carpeting, soft lighting, papered walls, perfumed air, and music- the Beatles, as interpreted by a somnolent string orchestra.
Four rooms marked PRIVATE. Four oak doors, fitted with brass peepholes. Elmo unlocked one and said, “Okay.”
The room was beige and hung with French Impressionist lithos. More plush carpeting and soft lighting. Oak wainscotting and oak crown molding rimmed the ceiling. Good furniture: an antique chiffonier, a pair of sturdy oak chairs. Two generous, arched windows, barred and filled with opaque glass block, but curtained with chintz pull-backs and lace. Vases of fresh-cut flowers strategically placed. The place smelled like a meadow. But I wasn’t paying attention to decorator touches.
In the center of the room was a hospital bed covered by a pearly pink quilt, which had been pulled to the neck of a dark-haired woman.
Her skin was gray-white, her eyes huge and deep-blue- the same color as Sharon’s, but filmed and immobile, aimed straight up at the ceiling. Her hair was black and thick, spread over a plump, lace-trimmed pillow. The face it framed was emaciated, dust-dry, still as a plaster cast. Her mouth gaped- a black hole studded with peg teeth.
Faint movement nudged the quilt. Shallow breathing, then nothing, then re-ignition heralded by a squeeze-toy squeak.
I studied her face. Less a face than a sketch of one- anatomic scaffolding, stripped of the adornment of flesh.
And somewhere amid the ruins, resemblance. A hint of Sharon.
Sharon was holding her, cradling her, kissing her face.
Squeak.
A swivel table next to the bed held a pitcher and glasses, a tortoise-shell comb and brush set with matching manicure tools. Lipstick, tissues, makeup, nail polish.
Sharon pointed to the pitcher. Elmo filled the glass with water and handed it to her, then left.
Sharon tipped the rim of the glass to the woman’s mouth. Some of the water dribbled down. Sharon wiped the pale flesh, kissed it.
“It’s so good to see you, darling,” she said. “Elmo says you’re doing just fine.”
The woman remained blank as eggshell. Sharon cooed to her and rocked her. The covers slipped down, revealing a limp wisp of a body wrapped in a pink flannel night-gown, contracted, pathetic- too fragile to be viable. But the breathing continued…
“Shirlee, we have a visitor. His name is Dr. Alex Delaware. He’s a nice man. Alex, meet Miss Shirlee Ransom. My sister. My twin. My silent partner.”
I just stood there.
She stroked the woman’s hair. “Clinically, she’s deaf and blind- minimal cortical functioning. But I know she senses people, has some subliminal awareness of her surroundings. I can
She took my hand, put it on a cold, dry brow.
Turning to Shirlee: “Isn’t that true, darling? You
“Say something to her, Alex.”
“Hello, Shirlee.”
Nothing.
“There,” said Sharon. “She’s humming.”
She hadn’t stopped smiling, but there were tears in her eyes. She let go of my hand, spoke to her sister: “Alex
I waited as she talked to a woman who couldn’t hear. Sang, prattled on about fashion, music, recipes, current events.
Then she folded back the covers, rolled up the pink nightgown, exposing chicken-carcass ribs, stick legs, spiky knees, loose, putty-gray skin- the remnants of a female form so pathetically wasted I had to look away.
Sharon turned her sister gently, searching for bed sores. Kneading and stroking and massaging, flexing and unflexing arms and legs, rotating the jaw, examining behind the ears before covering her up again.
After tucking her back under the quilt and propping the pillow, she gave Shirlee’s hair a hundred strokes with the tortoise-shell brush, wiped her face with a damp washcloth, dusted the collapsed cheeks with makeup and blush.
“I want her to be as ladylike as possible. For her morale. Her feminine self-image.”
She lifted one limp hand, inspected nails that were surprisingly long and healthy. “These are looking beautiful, Shirl.” Turning to me: “Hers are so healthy! They grow faster than mine do, Alex. Isn’t that funny?”
Later, we sat in the Alfa and Sharon cried for a while. Then she started to speak, in those same flat tones she’d used years ago, to tell me about her parents’ deaths:
“We were born absolutely identical. Carbon copies of each other- I mean, no one could tell us apart.” She laughed. “Sometimes we couldn’t tell ourselves apart.”
Remembering the photograph of the two little girls, I said, “One difference: mirror-image identical.”
That seemed to jolt her. “Yes. That- she’s a lefty; I’m a righty. And our hair whirls go in opposite directions.”
She looked away from me, tapped the Alfa’s wooden steering wheel. “Strange phenomenon, mirror-image monozygotes- from a scientific point of view. Biochemically, it makes no sense at all. Given an identical genetic structure in two individuals, there should be no differences at all, right? Let alone reversal of the cerebral hemispheres.”
She got a dreamy look in her eyes and closed them.
