The Old Ballerina
Excerpt

My life as a health care aide imposter began accidentally on a clear bright morning in April, at the Nashway Valley Home Health Care Associates on lower Main Street, in a gray and derelict part of town.

The woman who cleaned the Nashway was my neighbor: she lived in my building, across the hall. She was seventy or seventy-five, and her ankles were always swollen, the skin spilling over the sides of her dirty white sneakers, which never had laces in the eyelets. She was older than me by twenty years but I preferred to think of it as two hundred. She looked like an old-fashioned gypsy fortune-teller, in fact, she was Greek, from a family that used to run a pizza shop downtown, which had closed many years ago, when Papa Gino’s moved into the mall. Her name was Panadopolous, Mrs. Dee Panadopolous. The Dee was a shortening of an unpronounceable name with many vowels. It did not seem right to me that she should be cleaning an office building at her age, with those feet.

And she had hairs on her chin, gray hairs. An old woman’s dark moustache ran the length of her upper lip, without touching the lip itself, as if she’d been drinking a chocolate frappe.

"I have used up my sick days. My stomach and heart are not well. Will you go in my place tomorrow morning to the office I clean?"

I’d never done cleaning before on a professional level, but what was to learn? Grime was grime. You rolled up your sleeves and got rid of it.

We had talked at the door of my apartment. My neighbor felt too weak to do anything more than trudge across our hallway to ask her question, press a key in my hand, and say, "Be sure to go early in the morning. When I get my next paycheck I will give you twenty dollars."

I’d been laid off my job in the shipping department of the plastics factory by the river, where I worked for eighteen years. In the last four months, I could find no work at all, not even a few odd hours here and there of baby-sitting, or one tiny glimmer of hope from the forms I filled out every week downtown at the unemployment office, or the applications I kept pressing, without despair, into the hands of clerks in personnel offices at our town’s three other factories. The shipping operations in these places were done by computer. All the people being hired to work at the computers were young.

It was the pinching of pennies that bothered and hurt me the most. I felt pinched, like a foot being squeezed into a shoe that was three or four sizes too small.

When I walk into the Nashway office, a phone is ringing, but it’s answered by machine, with the sound off.

I sit down at a desk. I look at a few brochures describing Nashway services. I light a cigarette, smoke it. There are ashtrays, which you would not expect to find in the office of health care people. I wave at the air where the smoke curls thickly in streamers of sunlight. I feel like Goldilocks. I spit on a piece of kleenex and put the used-up cigarette into it, and the ashes, too. With another bit of tissue I wipe the ashtray clean.

"Today I’m the cleaning lady," I say to the desks and the chairs.

After several minutes of looking through drawers, I begin to feel at home. I would have set about at once with the business of cleaning, but I hadn’t discovered a storage area for buckets, rags, ammonia, scouring powder, Windex, brooms, mops, a vacuum cleaner, rubber gloves. It was possible that Mrs. Panadopolous brought these things herself, and had forgotten to mention this part of it. I can’t recall a single time I noticed my old neighbor going out from the building at all, never mind carrying objects, although of course she must have done so.

I’m just about ready to call up my neighbor on the phone and ask her what to do, when a little red sportscar comes into the yard. It enters through the old front gates. If small foreign sportscars can have feelings, this one looked nervous, and no wonder. It’s strange and unbelievable that a company of health care professionals had chosen this kind of place for their office.

The Nashway building used to be the headquarters of a school transportation company called Haemer’s Orange Coaches: seven or eight years ago, it went bankrupt. Before that, it was the showroom of a car dealership, which had under-gone the same fate. There is a large, cluttered room inside, surrounded by plate glass windows. Perhaps the people from Haemer’s intended to return some day and collect the remains of their fleet, if "fleet" was what they called it.

It looked as if they’d left in a hurry. Dark orange buses, station wagons, and vans stand every which way, at strange angles, slowly being eaten by rust. New spring grasses poke up around their axles. Steering wheels are missing. Doors are off hinges. Places where seats had been removed look like missing teeth in an open, grinning mouth. Some of the vehicles are up on cinder blocks, and some are up on jacks. A few are tipped over on their sides, as if the hand of a giant had pushed them. A few are intact, and look dignified and solemn, like worn-out creatures who stopped in their tracks a long time ago, and made up their minds to be fossils.

The sunlight on that rust is the color of mustard mixed with honey. Here and there, in brief, silver sparks, the early morning light shines like crazy off engine parts and loose bits of chrome. Rearview mirrors that had fallen face-up in the dirt are as shiny and loose in this light as puddles of mercury. Mrs. Panadopolous must have cared about the windows of the office: they are spotless, as if the glass were empty air. The windows are the only things here that are clean, in a way that you would notice.

I look out the big windows and do not feel alarmed, although I probably should have.

Getting out of the car is an odd-looking man in a wrinkled but expensive tan raincoat, buttoned all the way up, as if protecting his throat from a chill. The man is heavy-boned and tall in a startling way, not bulky or awkward, just large.

The odd-looking man looks slowly and calmly around the yard, taking everything in without being alarmed, without judgement. It’s obvious that he’s never been here before.

He appears at my side so quickly, I jump a little, I have the sense he must have entered the office in one step, quick and silent like a ghost, as if straight through the door, without opening it.

In spite of his size he walks lightly. If he carried a large bowl of water, filled to the brim, not a drop of it would have spilled; it would not have even rippled. But he doesn’t seem rich. "Rich" is not what I think of. He looks at me directly when he speaks to me, and he doesn’t seem false and affectedted, or smooth on the outside but brittle underneath, as you expect in someone wealthy, like a seashell lacquered over with varnish.

He tells me his name immediately. "I am so-and-so," he says. It sounds like "brrr," as if he is trying to tell me that in spite of the beautiful day, he is freezing; and his voice is low and mumbly, so I wonder if he suffers from a toothache. I act as if I’d heard him perfectly well. Mr. Brrr.

Mr. Brrr is almost totally bald. His big head is so exposed, like the skin on top of a mushroom, I want to say to him, "Put a hat on." It’s uncomfortable to be seeing someone’s skull like this, as if you stumbled on a secret that maybe you shouldn’t have looked at, but then you can’t look anywhere else.

He has a stoop in his shoulders. Oh, he’s a hunchback, you’d think, except that the hunching is evenly distributed.

His face is pale, like a man who rarely sees sunlight. I guess his age to be close to my own, but he could have been many years older. His eyes are dark, and deeply set in. His cheekbones are very large and the top of his face protrudes outward, in a jutting, angular way, like a Neanderthal in a history book. But it seems that this is something Mr. Brrr must have known about himself. The element of fright, upon meeting him, only lasts for a couple of seconds.

"Mrs. Eberhart?"

I know from the brochures that Evelyn Eberhart is the name of the manager of the Nashway. I answer without lying. "Oh, she’ll be sorry when she finds out she missed you."

"I have so little time. I’m afraid I hadn’t left her with a way to contact me. I should have been here yesterday. You are, perhaps, the available aide, whom she had mentioned to me on the phone?"

Mr. Brrr takes an envelope from a pocket of the raincoat. Tilting my head forward, just a little, I give the impression that I am nodding.

"I apologize for asking you to handle this account. I didn’t mean to be unorthodox, when Mrs. Eberhart had made it clear to me that arrangements must be made through only her. I was worried I might have bungled all this, when I had thought it would be so simple. I’d tried three other agencies already, without success."

"You’ve hit it on the head just fine right now, I would say."

He waves the envelope in the air. "Mrs. Eberhart had mentioned a form I’d fill out, but I’m hoping you’ll take care of that end. The information you’ll need is in here. The suggested amount of time you’ll be employed is two months. I expect, though, that two months may not be enough, in which case, I’m quite certain, I’ll be notified. But let’s say for now that we’ll cross that particular bridge when someone builds it."

"You’re not the patient?"

"No, I am not, but I can see where you would think so. I am a teacher in the high school. I believe I had made it clear to Mrs. Eberhart that my friend is a woman."

"This information, it’s the only copy?"

"Oh, yes. The woman whose account I’m setting up, I must tell you, although I clearly made this point to Mrs. Eberhart, is very private, and to tell you the truth, I don’t blame her."

"You don’t look like a teacher, if you don’t mind my saying so," I tell him, because I’d had the impression that this fact about himself was something he had invented, spontaneously, for some reason. He nods his head and says, in a gentle voice, "Thank you for the compliment. My friend says I look like Aeneas of Troy, that is, the Aeneas of after the war, before he founded Rome."

"I was never that good in school."

"Aeneas had a hard time of it," he says, and I ask him, "How sick is your friend?"

"She’s had a hip operation," he says. "I believe I pointed that out to Mrs. Eberhart."

"Oh, she was vague when it came to particulars."

"I wonder, would it be out of the question to ask you to go and meet my friend quite soon? She’s not well, you see."

"I can go today. This woman, she’s not your wife?"

Mr. Brrr isn’t wearing a wedding ring, but I felt like asking anyway.

His eyes open wide. "My wife? Oh, my. Oh, no. Oh, my goodness."

"Hey. I only mentioned it because, I needed to know."

My voice sounds rougher, my whole manner is rougher, than I intended. But anyone else who has ever had a stroke of good luck for a change, just suddenly out of nowhere one day, would understand how I felt at this moment. If a feather had touched my cheek, I would gear myself up for the brick that would come the next moment, having loosened itself from a wall somewhere: it would fall on top of my head.

But Mr. Brrr sees nothing of my distress. He says, "Marriage is something which my friend had thought of trying several times, without ever quite managing to make a go of it."

"Then I guess we’ll have something in common," I tell him, and he smiles at me sadly, like a softening in his mask of formality. "Don’t tell me anything personal, because, even if I had the time to stand here and talk with you more, I wouldn’t be able to bear it," is what he really seems to be saying.

My pleasure in his company is brief, and disappears as quickly as that soft, sad smile of his.

He holds out the envelope and I accept it. He hurries away, and my fears intensify. If he comes back in, saying, "I’ve changed my mind," or, "There’s been a terrible mistake," what could I do? He would reach for the envelope. He would try to grab it away from me. Would we tear it in half? No, wait, the bottoms of his shoes would be caked with dirt from the yard. He might have slipped. If he fell to the floor, his huge head would strike a desk leg; he’d be concussed. Lying there bleeding, he would expect me to know, and to offer him, the appropriate type of first aid.

But the red car pulls away, looking shiny and vigorous. It never before in its life felt as relieved as it did then, to get away from the hulks of the buses. It slides into the street, turns the corner by two old warehouses, and vanishes. I open the envelope. There’s a single page of notepaper inside, as thin and crisp as a paint chip.

"My name is Irene Kamsky," it says.

The style of the writing is narrow and spikey. Mrs. Kamsky had formed letters that looked a little bit taller than they needed to be; all the words were spaced a little too widely apart. It looks as if Mrs. Kamsky had written with a needle dipped in ink. When I turn the paper over, the ink does not show through, not at all.

Mrs. Irene Kamsky is fifty-eight years old. She lives alone in a suburb north of town. She suffers from a debilitative form of arthritis, and recently had surgery for a hip replacement.

I know of the suburb although I’d never been there. "Well-off" is how I’ve always heard it described.

The note says, "As my friend must have made you aware, I wish to have a health care aide, or personal attendant, as you are sometimes also called, of experience, who is quiet and discreet, who respects a person’s privacy, and who is tolerant of demands put upon you that may be slightly different from demands put upon you in the past. Willingness to act as driver to me on occasions when I am unable to do so will be welcomed. Having your own car is not necessary. I will pay you in cash, on a regular monthly schedule."

It’s been a while since I had a valid driver’s license. When you’re unemployed you tend to let things lapse. But I say to myself, "Margaret, don’t be picky."