rosie getting closer
I’ve been left in the white lobby of the home with the rest of the residents that are confined to chairs. The ones who can walk are clucking out on the patio, waiting for the vans that take us to the YMCA. I can see them through the sliding glass doors. Around me are the four others in chairs. Two of them have their heads tucked into their shoulders, fast asleep. One of them is staring through the glass at a newer female resident, delicately smoking and slowly nodding to a wildly gesturing RN. The other is muttering through her gums, flecking spittle into her pink hyacinth-print gown.
Every moment I gumble under my breath or complain loudly to Dora I am reminded to watch myself lest I look like this woman. Her name is Alice Coates and I have been watching her since her arrival four years ago. She came in screaming and she hasn’t shut up since. Her French accent rises and falls throughout the halls, shouting as she’s being wheeled up to the dinner table, falling quieter as she’s being fed but always keeping up her monologue, slipping in and out of her mother tongue, back into English or German. Mostly, she just complains in a tone that I imagine she is unaware others can hear. Every time Ephram, the Resident Director, walks by her chair she wonders out loud if the colored boy’s been the one sneaking into her room in her sleep, fingering her jewelry. She spits at a group of younger residents when they pass her on their way out to church, donned in their skirts, furs and stockings. She calls them the Rotting Whore-Daughters of Christ.
She may be a rotten bitch but that accent of hers is blood-red fire to my ears. Her tongue coupled with her irritability make her one more in a long line women who’ve set my head and my thighs aflame with blinding adoration and burning lust. She’s never acknowledged me and that suits me just fine. I can only imagine the burning wrath that would ensue if she ever caught me watching her the way that I do, or the scripture she’d invoke if she could see the things I wanted from her.