Alice in Bed by Cathleen Schine

Author:Cathleen Schine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

II

The cold air made her eyes water. Sirens wobbled hysterically and red lights flipped across the waiting white ambulance.

I’m outside, she told herself. But it seemed more likely that she was in a World’s Fair exhibit attempting to simulate different environments. This would be called “City Emergency” and now she would go on the Ambulance Ride.

The ambulance was the same size as the one in which she had motored to the hospital. She pushed aside the white curtain and stared at the traffic. A Chevrolet in the next lane was long and dented, filled with children who stared at her. When she waved, they ducked.

They drove down Park Avenue, past islands of dying flowers.

* * *

The room was as white as a new sneaker, the bed narrow and high as a tree house. Across the street was a billboard—Santa Claus with a shining red face drank a bottle of Coca-Cola while cans floated aimlessly in the upper right-hand corner. The billboard had been changed last night, or perhaps very early this morning. It was only seven now. Yesterday the billboard was a mass of autumn leaves cradling the bottles and cans of Coke. Yesterday had been Halloween. Moved into the little room, Alice had stared at the billboard until it was too dark to see, and then had turned on the TV. Stretched out in the little bed, she watched the local news. Small deformed children waddled, wheeled, and thumped through the halls of a hospital. Some were lying face down on stretchers, turning the wheels with their limp hands. They were trick-or-treating. They were, Alice realized as she stared unhappily at the television screen, downstairs.

* * *

She looked around the narrow little room. Someone had already come around to straighten up. Her hairbrush had been put neatly in her empty water glass. She could see the bristles and hairs pressed against the glass like little faces against a window. Her radio had been moved out of reach. Her view comprised the Coke billboard, a great expanse of muddy sky, and then suddenly, the startling Chrysler building.

“I’m tired of looking up to the Chrysler building. Let’s fly away…” She stopped singing when a nurse came in. The nurse pushed a vehicle that vaguely resembled a chair. It had a hole in what appeared to be the seat, like an elaborate rolling toilet.

“Good morning,” said the nurse. “Did you sleep? I’ve come to take you to the showers.”

The showers? Showers? Plural? The kind with other Jews, or the kind with other girls—nasty buxom girls imported from the local high school?

“Listen, I have a private nurse, so, you know, I don’t want to keep you from your other patients,” Alice said. Go away, she thought. Your very odd chair frightens me. “And, um, I’m not sure I’m supposed to go to the showers just yet. Listen, I can hardly sit up, so I’ll just have a sponge bath when my private-duty nurse gets here, which should be any minute, it’s almost eight now.

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