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Marianne and Raymond
When I arrived to live here at the Institution, Marianne had already been here for several years as a resident -- something I found out, not by word of mouth, but rather because she occupied a single room; and here such choice things are dispensed through seniority.
Marianne, like the vast majority of residents here (including myself), suffers from the effects of the disease MS. This can affect any part of the brain and/or spinal cord; and the results can range from obvious physical disabilities to changes in personality. Poor Marianne was dealt both kinds of changes: physical (her walking: she has been confined to a wheelchair for two decades or more) and psychological (her personality: she became very claustrophobic.)
"Claustrophobic"? Yes. But it took a particular misanthropic turn: she could not stand another person in a wheelchair being anywhere near her, out of fear of being hit. (I think this is part of a more general condition called "hapnophobia": fear of being touched by someone else.)
This phobia could arise anywhere -- even when she would be in the open space by the nurses' station and residents would be trying to get around her. But the most claustrophobic situation of all to Marianne was, as you might expect, the elevators.
For example, if she got into an elevator, and then another resident tried to enter behind her, she began to yell and cry bloody murder:
"Who is that?! Is there somebody behind me? Stay away from me! Please! Stop, you're going to hit me! Get away from me this minute! Please! Help! Stop!"
And at that moment the other person would be at least three feet away from her.
(I find it amusing that she thought fit, perhaps out of an instilled sense of propriety, to sprinkle a couple of "pleases" into her psychological meltdown. I also found it ironic that she is completely articulate; while many of the other residents here, who have lost some or all the uses of their voices due to the disease, have no paranoia to trumpet forth.)
(Actually, in fairness to Marianne, I'd just like to add here that probably most of us feel a bit of claustrophobia inside an elevator. After all, there is a limited amount of space to turn around in -- if in fact you feel the need to turn, as I do. [But admit another wheelchair into that elevator with you and all bets are off: no turning is possible in that case.] Then too, you only have a certain amount of time to turn before those elevator doors open again: at that point you have exactly 12 seconds to exit through those doors before they close and leave you trapped in an elevator that is going nowhere [because you are unable to press a button.]
So many of us have paranoia in the elevators -- it's just nowhere near as extreme as Marianne's is. I am half-tempted [the humorous half] to make a suggestion to the maintenance staff here, namely: to put pads on ("padify"?) the walls of the elevators -- just in case anyone were to go completely cuckoo while inside one.
At first, I found this sort of behavior on her part to be a bit irksome. What kind of driver does she think I am anyway? Is she accusing me of potential carelessness, even recklessness -- or worse, incompetence? I think most of us have a pretty thin skin when it comes to her outbursts.
But over time I have adopted a live-and-let-live policy toward Marianne, as follows: if she is on the elevator first, I do everything to assuage and reassure her that I will not try to get on with her. Once I did that by concocting an entertaining little 12-second playlet:
"Don't worry Marianne, I won't try to get on with you! Listen to my wheelchair complain." (in a machine-like grunt): "I want to run into Marianne really hard!" (In my own normal voice): "Now wheelchair, I told you before how much it upsets Marianne, and..."
The theater curtains -- sorry, elevator doors -- closed before I could finish my little act for Marianne. But I seemed to have been successful: I did not even once hear her yell out. Is it possible that she was actually entertained by my pitiful playacting? I doubt it; I think it much more likely that she heard my first eleven words (which placated her) and that was that.
Ah, but what if I am on the elevator first? You might think that I would choose to be magnanimous and, while I was still facing the rear, invite her to join me. And so I did -- once and only once. She was silent until we reached the floor we were both headed for, at which point she issued me a warning in a voice already containing more than a hint of panic: "Don't move! I'll get out first! Please! Don't run into me!" The doors began to open. At that precise moment my hand touched the joystick once. This did not move the chair one iota, but it caused a resounding "click!" to echo in magnified form around the inside of the elevator. And that sent Marianne into a paroxysm of paranoia:
"Stop! Don't move your chair! I told you not to go! Please! Stop!" Etc. (Unlike Reader's Digest, this text was probably improved by abridging it.)
(Note to maintenance department: another use of padding in the elevator: to dampen the acoustics, thereby deadening all the "clicks" [as well as all the cries of "Help!”?].)
(Did Marianne suffer from "Joystick Envy" -- or at least "Joystick CLICK Envy"?)
Why did I click my chair like that? Was it an accident? I have a sneaking suspicion that it wasn't, that I deliberately did it to get her goat, to get under her decidedly thin skin. Why? Perhaps to give her a bit of payback for all of her obnoxious admonitions. So I set her off at my own will -- even though I knew that, because she could not help the way she behaved while I could most definitely help the way I did, this made me the reprehensible one.
After that little incident, I did not let her get on the elevator with me again.
And so it went with me and Marianne. I would try to steer clear of her as much as I could. But inevitably, when for example she would be occupying the middle of a hallway, forcing me to negotiate a slim space between her and the wall, I would receive my share of quasi-hysterical admonishments (which only served to make me more nervous) as I passed her by.
But something else that made me nervous was the fact that I was losing the use of both my hands. A lot of adjustments had to be made in my daily habits; one of these had to do with how I drive my wheelchair. Apparently the joystick would have to go.
It was decided that I should try the so-called "sip-n-puff" system of driving. In this, I would control all directions and other changes with my mouth alone. This was a system which required some finesse and sensitivity on the part of the driver, since the difference between, say, a soft sip and a hard sip (denoting, respectively, left turn and right turn) could be subtle.
But the command which gave me the most trouble (and therefore the most worry, for obvious reasons) was the one for stopping. Part of the reason for this trouble had to do with the fact that, with this particular drive system, once you started the chair going forward, it would continue to move until you gave it a command to stop. There was no taking your foot off the gas, because there was no acceleration or de-acceleration, no gradual braking. There was only either going or not-going, on or off, and nothing in between. The speed of the chair was not fast; but it was inexorable.
The command for starting the chair was a hard puff; that for stopping it was a soft puff. See what I mean? Where is the line between the soft and hard puffs? Suppose the chair is moving and you want to stop it. Puff a bit too softly and you get nothing; but puff a little too hard and you get no change as well. In each case the wheelchair continues to move relentlessly forward.
Here's a further problem: what do you think a person tends to do if he gives one soft puff and nothing happens? (Remember: the wheelchair is 500 pounds of steel and flesh [that includes the operator] hurtling through space.) In my case I begin to panic, of course! I tend to puff harder than ever, thus maintaining the status quo.
In short, I had a few accidents while learning to use the "sip-n-puff" method of driving. I plowed into a few walls as well as a couple of nursing carts; I also ran into a handful of residents, who were fortunately protected by their tank-like machines. (One of those who was always laughing, a wonderful little fellow who was the last person I ever wanted to hit, laughed at that too.)
But I capped this record of violence and mayhem by smashing directly and unabashedly into the fattest target of them all, the Big Enchilada. (The best part: it was, to the best of my knowledge [but who can know their own subconscious?], unintentional.) She was sitting there innocently (indeed, I never saw her run into another resident) near the entrance to her and my corridor. I did a quick eye estimate of the distance from her chair to the wall: I judged it to be "a bit of a challenge, but ultimately negotiable with a little care.")
Now I did have a "relationship" with Marianne which transcended her yelling out warnings to me, but it was a very modest one: we greeted one another in the halls. I liked to greet her because my calling out her name caused her whole face to brighten (normally she would sit with a decidedly drear expression), in which state of luminescence she became actually beautiful. We addressed one another by name -- something I did not do with a lot of the residents.
(I will admit to an ulterior motive in greeting Marianne whenever we "ran into" one another -- namely, to deflect her mind from the worry and paranoia which tormented her all day long. And, in doing that, to relieve myself in particular from the receiving end of such outbursts (for she would not hurl her admonitions at me while we were greeting one another.) In other words, in such situations half of my reasons were altruistic; while the other half were decidedly self-serving.)
And so today we greeted one another, Marianne and I, and I was glad to see her brighten up. And doubly glad not to be admonished by her. Unfortunately for me, such greetings necessitated that I take my eye off the ball, so to speak -- in this case, they deflected my attention from the narrow opening between Marianne and the wall to her left. When I focused back on this, I noticed that I was closing fast on her wheelchair. So I gave what I thought was a continuous soft sip to deflect the chair away from Marianne and toward the wall. Unfortunately, I must have already been in a semi-panic mode, for the chair veered not away from Marianne but toward her, thus showing that my sip had been too hard. At that point I only had time for one more command, but it had to be a decisive one. So I gave it a good hard puff in order to stop my chair cold.
"... a good hard puff..."??
I ran into her, of course (or rather, I ran into her wheelchair.) And as I did that, I thought of the old Jewish expression which says in essence, "Try not to violate the Sabbath; but if you must, do it in grand style!" In other words, don't hold back (eat as much of the best pork that you can find, etc.)
So no, I didn't just graze her chair, or scratch it a bit, or hit against a footrest in a perfunctory fashion. Rather, I smashed into the side of her chair fully and directly and unabashedly; I plowed -- no, ploughed (the British spelling seems much more formidable, doesn't it!) into her broad side, and broadsided her in the bargain; I decimated (does this word mean that I broke her chair up into ten little pieces?) her wheelchair.
(One thing this little accident told me was that Marianne had good reason to fear me getting near her chair: it was a realistic assessment!)
And what kind of bloody murder, you ask, did she scream as a result of that little fiasco? It must have been beyond anything I had ever heard from her!
Actually she was eerily quiet. I think she found herself in a situation between complete surprise and acute shock, a state of psychological paralysis. After all, we had just greeted one another in the most friendly fashion! So she was helpless to register even the least anemic complaint, never mind the most vehement protest.
But that made me want to stop running into residents and their wheelchairs. I soon found out that there was another way to stop my chair using the "sip-n-puff" type of drive system -- and that was to hit the chin switch (which I used to choose the drive mode) right under my chin. That almost cured me of any more accidents. (I say "almost" because, I must admit, I have since created a couple of "situations" wherein each time I have inadvertently pushed a huge table across a crowded dining room as a type of "battering ram", bashing into helpless screaming residents in their wheelchairs and sweeping them all before me. That was exhilarating -- but I had to hang my head each time and feign contriteness.)
This completes my introduction of Marianne to the reader. As you can see, there are some interesting things about her. But the title of this memoir is "Odd Couples" and so we expect to meet another person who will complement (compliment?) her. And so we shall -- in a second. First, though, I would like to ask a further intriguing question about Marianne:
How do you think she would behave in the presence of a potential suitor? In particular, what would she do if some ardent swain were to reach out with the intention of (gulp!) touching her? You know, the laying on of hands -- something that people tend to do in a relationship. After all, she suffered from hapnophobia. Would she cry bloody murder (or rape)? Freeze up completely? Or purr like a kitten? Or something else I can't think of?
But let us at long last meet the other half.
A couple of months ago, one of our male residents left here -- for happy reasons, I should add. (Mostly everyone who leaves here does so in the horizontal position, so to speak. But this fellow actually got better, and so went to an assisted living facility to live on his own.) He was replaced by a man named Raymond.
Raymond was a thin slightly-balding fellow whose age was almost the same as Marianne's (they were both in their mid-40s.) I thought that he had the wise look of an intellectual in his eyes, especially as he resembled the early 20th century Austrian composer Arnold Schonberg -- a hyper-intellectual if there ever was one. But I really did not get to know him for quite a while, since I had no interactions with him at all -- especially not of the sort I'd had with Marianne.
One day I was riding down the hall when I noticed Raymond and Marianne sitting next to one another in the open space near the nurses' station -- that is, the nearest thing our floor has to a public forum. They were both reclined back in their wheelchairs and resting with their eyes closed. And their hands were joined together.
Naturally this sight made me very happy. I thought, "a romantic relationship? Of course! The very thing to cure her of her phobias about being touched!" Indeed, after that public display she began to tell everyone, "I have a boyfriend!"
Naturally I immediately began to wonder how long it took poor Raymond to overcome her elaborate defenses against being touched? Being wise, he was probably eloquent as well [this was my assumption -- I had never heard him speak.] So no doubt he spoke to her softly and gently over a number of days -- until on one crucial day he ventured forth his hand in a kindly gesture of friendship. (Or to put it in a more historic -- and dramatic -- perspective: as the medieval knights had to storm the walls of a castle or slay a fire-breathing dragon in order to rescue the beautiful maiden, so did Raymond have to "cut through" her stream of protestations with the "sword" of his wit and the "lance" of his high good humor.)
So I had the highest respect for Raymond, and this feeling lasted for a week or more. But then I began to hear some very strange things associated with him. I was a witness to at least two incidents that I would call bizarre, to say the least.
Late one afternoon I was sitting with Sibyl (the sweetest little resident at the Institution) down in the Garden Room waiting for supper, when Raymond appeared. He had a weird little smile on his face (no, it was not the "wise" look I thought I had seen before), as if he thought that he was about to say something really clever. He made a point of approaching Sibyl while ignoring me. And then he said:
"Is anyone here interested in playing 'Doctor'?"
That did not sound like Arnold Schonberg to me! As for Sibyl, she did not respond and looked away. But she later told me that she was shocked and offended by his "creepy" (that seemed like the word that she and I both chose independently of one another) behavior. (Later, she would more simply describe him as "very odd".) As for myself, I realized sadly that I had (to parody a former president) slightly "misoverestimated" Raymond.
I was secretly glad that he was only interested in the opposite sex; thus was I spared an unwanted verbal intrusion. Unfortunately, I did not pick up on the irrational broadness of his interest.
One day just before lunch, I was sitting at my table with the old cantankerous Irishwoman Bridget, when I suddenly realized that Raymond had pulled up to the table right between us. I was wondering why he was there, since each resident was assigned to a particular table, and he had his own table nearby.
Then he spoke in Bridget's general direction: "May I sit here?" Bridget gave an antisocial grunt of some sort. As the question still hung in the air (as well as the fact that, in a few minutes, our table would fill up with the other two assigned members -- one of whom was Sibyl), I thought it best to nip this in the bud: "I don't think that there is room for you here." And I said this fully conscious of its double meaning: that we had no room for him personally as well as physically.
Raymond turned his head toward me and said with quiet vehemence:
"Look, you little shit, I wasn't talking to you!"
Wow! I hadn't been called that quaint little expression since high school fifty years ago. I should've been grateful for that burst of nostalgia!
Not surprisingly, I wasn't. The only thing that I received from that encounter was a firmer and bitterer contempt for Mister Raymond, not least because he seemed to be coming on to every woman in the Institution, and in bizarre creepy ways (while treating everyone else with contempt.)
I began to wonder how long it would take Marianne to see through him. Actually, I did not have that long to wait in order to find out. A few days later I thought I saw them sitting together once again at the nurses' station. But on closer inspection, they were not strictly together; rather, he was a little bit behind her. Evidently he had just approached her from the back. I saw him put his hand on her shoulder -- which initiated the following instantaneous response from her:
"Who is that? Get your hands off me! I don't want you touching me -- get away from me! It's all over! Leave! Go away!"
That's not a phobia; it's good old garden-variety self-defense!
And my heart went out to Marianne.
(25 July 2009)
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