Dovetailing

By Becca Ironside

June is having a vocational crisis. She takes a job at a nursing home and finds herself drawn to a man twice her age. Wally is confined to a wheelchair and shows every sign that he is a terrible match for his younger caregiver. But he is so damned charming, and charm is a lost art these days.

June finds herself at this unusual crossroads, and she meets other patients at her job who intrigue her. Concetta is a retired leg model from the 1950s, who once worked in the Waldorf Astoria and still wears hot pants and heels. Doctor Melvin Stein was once the most prominent plastic surgeon in Manhattan, though his hands are now clumsy from arthritis. A young horse jockey has landed in this same facility, because of his diagnosis of schizophrenia and penchant for glue huffing.

Junes colleagues are women of her own age, struggling with the complexity of dating, the mundanity of marriage, and the impossible risk of having children in todays world. These women share a boss of Orthodox Jewish faith; he is both mystified and terrified by the women he manages.

As June is confronted with the deaths of the elderly people she adores, she is also faced with a decision about her emotional affair with Wally. Will she remain in her illusion of the past or will she accept the modern world into which she was born?

A book that gives us food for thought on what needs fixing in American Healthcare. These short vignettes are honest, charming and gritty. We meet these characters...some are broken and need healing, others are whole and cant heal. Ironside has captured the regional essence of the Tri-State area with compassion and love... - Francis Rella, Author of Lullaby of Broadway

Ironsides gentle hand is the quintessential companion through the most challenging chapter of our lives... - Michael DAmato, Author of The Dominican Experiment

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781532018817

Becca Ironside

Becca lives in New Jersey with her King Charles caveliers. She takes her role as a USO girl for World War II veterans very seriously.

Book preview

Copyright © 2017 Becca Ironside.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-1700-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-1881-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017903477

iUniverse rev. date: 03/08/2017

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

Chapter Fifty-Four

Chapter Fifty-Five

Chapter Fifty-Six

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Chapter Fifty-Eight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

Chapter Sixty

Chapter Sixty-One

Chapter Sixty-Two

Dovetail

Definition: noun: something resembling a dove’s tail; a flaring tenon and a mortise into which it fits tightly making an interlocking joint between two pieces (of wood) verb: to fit together into a whole

For my Dad, who taught me how to write

"Younger than springtime are you

Softer than starlight are you

Warmer than the winds of June

Are the gentle lips you gave me

Angel and lover, heaven and earth

Are you to me."

Rodgers and Hammerstein, South Pacific

Chapter One

T he people of Sierra Leone were going about their business. On the coast of West Africa with the deep blue sea tossing about behind them, they cooked fish on an open aired grill and sipped lemonade. Their children giggled in the waves as the sun began her slide towards the edge of the water which would mark the beginning of the night.

Tomorrow would be a different kind of day. A large American health care corporation was traveling to town. It was rumored that there were jobs to be offered, jobs with high wages and work visas to the United States. Health care jobs, even! Though this country in Africa had known little more than civil warfare, tribal violence, low literacy rates and poverty, the people were aware of the money-making potential and security that American health care jobs afforded. They knew that a two to three year stay in America while scrimping and making every penny count would offer a new kind of life for generations to come.

Mothers beamed from ear-to-ear and braced themselves to live without their children for a few short years. Fathers felt their chests open and burst with pride as they envisioned handsome paychecks from professional work in America. Young adults felt a particular fire behind their eyes as they imagined being United States citizens one day, living in Center Hall colonials with central air conditioning, driving gleaming chrome pickup trucks, and wearing hip clothing from Bebe and Abercrombie and Fitch.

Tomorrow would be a happy day, indeed, as half of the town residents signed contracts and shucked off their own shirts to don pristine white ones with their new company’s logo. Their forearms were pricked for PPD testing. They devoured the benefit package which was presented on Power Point. It included health benefits, free airfare, relocation money for moving expenses, and even tuition reimbursement for college. The starting hourly rate for these new employees was listed at eight dollars per hour! This was more than many of them were able to make in one day in Africa. They ate premade ham and cheese sandwiches on white bread with Hellman’s mayonnaise from the free lunch hosted by the healthcare company, and wiped the corners of their mouths with glee.

The day of departure was merely thirty days away. Dinah Turay packed her favorite clothing, family photos and the Holy Bible she had been given in her childhood as slowly as she could. The thought of abandoning her mother, practically blind and with wounds on her feet from the plight of diabetes, left her feeling guilty and ashamed. Through her cloudy eyes, however, Dinah’s mother saw her daughter’s fear. You cannot stay in Africa for me, my dear girl! You must think of yourself and our boy Kabba.

Through a haze of tears, Dinah held the hand of her six-year old son as they boarded a plane for the very first time. She gave him the window seat and Kabba pushed himself upright in the seat to peer into the sun. He kicked his feet in wild anticipation, and Dinah needed only to frown in his direction to make him stop. Together, they felt their stomachs sink and then flip, as a Boeing 747 rose aloft in the sky.

Chapter Two

I would come to meet many Dinahs in my line of work through the years. They are the backbone of the healthcare industry, underpaid and undervalued. The only difference between me and all of the Dinahs was that I had been born the daughter of an American woman during the height of the Women’s Lib Movement in the early 1970’s. Attendance to a university was an expectation for me from the time I was a toddler. While my parents were not wealthy, student loans were easily attainable and I got into my first pick of colleges. I had earned my Master’s Degree in Physical Therapy by the time I was 22 years old. I kept my diploma rolled up in a cardboard tube, and only occasionally would I pull it out to trace the lettering which read of my supposed success: To the one referred to as June Michalowski, granted on the fifth day of May in the year of human salvation 1998, and in the 222 nd year of sovereign power of the United States . It was a most elaborate diploma, but I never had it framed nor mounted on the wall. I had attained this success largely because of my mother’s prompting, just as Dinah’s journey to America had been facilitated by her own mother. Nobody knows us like our mothers do.

My graduation day now seems so very long ago. These days, I struggled mightily with my choice of career. Having been trained in my craft over fourteen years ago, I had tried every variety of physical therapy job. There had been the years in Brooklyn, of working in a community hospital where patients with tuberculosis needed their chests tapped upon to drain their lungs. These patients were then asked to cough into a sterilized cup, their sputum sent to a laboratory, all of this performed by a 23-year-old woman, who wondered how such tasks fell into the realm of Physical Therapy. A few years later came a homecare position for infants with disabilities. Babies born prematurely or with the early signs of a congenital disorder required Physical Therapy, to learn to sit upright on the floor, crawl or take their first steps. It was in an edgy neighborhood of Elizabeth, New Jersey, down near the port, that I found myself walking along urban streets, hand in hand with a toddler, avoiding syringes which littered the sidewalks. The local drug dealers assumed I was a visiting nurse of sorts and usually made polite conversation with me and the young child. The toddler and I preferred ambling in the cold wintry air to sitting on the floor of his tiny apartment while German cockroaches skittered between us (or at least I preferred it. I should not speak for the toddler).

The most satisfying years had been the ones performing outpatient, manual therapy on people with torn rotator cuffs and injured spines. Yes, there was an element of problem-solving in this line of work which had provided excitement for close to a decade. (Why did Frances Jones have tingling and numbness in her ring and pinky fingers when she turned her head to the left to glance at her computer screen? Was a vertebral disc in her cervical spine pinching on a nerve root? Was her first rib elevated, from carrying her knock-off Louis Vuitton handbag, which weighed over 26 pounds? Or did her mammoth breasts pull on her pectoralis minor, and compress the delicate nerve bundle as it crossed the front of her ribcage, before winding down her arm to control her fingers?) The human body is a wondrous machine, one I adored touching, examining and fixing with my hands. But, as with all things, the cache had worn off and the job had become merely a job.

In sum, I had given up on any sense of thrill when it came to my career. I tolerated these jobs of physical rehabilitation, stalwartly reminding myself that I was lucky to have employment at all during a recession. (I was also a professional, largely due to my fortuitous life beginnings. It was happenstance, I figured, that I had been born when and where I was. I had played no hand in being born an American citizen. There was simply a lucky star twinkling in the sky above the midwife’s hands who delivered me).

It was at this precipice of job dissatisfaction that I accepted a position in a nursing home. After all, how hard could it be to give physical therapy to those who were at the end of their lives anyway? I would get on this carousel and ride it, while patiently tucking money away for retirement. There are far worse things in life than boredom.

Most people who work in nursing homes make more money, hour for hour, than those in other healthcare arenas. Why? No one likes to be in nursing homes. Whether they are patients or family members visiting, doctors or nurses, very few of us would choose to darken the doors of such a place without a mighty strong incentive. The monetary remuneration and the daytime hours were what appealed to me the most. Unlike outpatient therapy, where patients came and went from the clinic based on their appointment times, the residents of a nursing home were pretty much a captive audience. I would no longer have to work in the evenings. (I would later learn that most nursing home residents eat dinner at 5 pm and are put to bed exactly one hour later).

And much like the people of West Africa, Jamaica, Haiti and the West Indies, I had also been lured in by a very lengthy and detailed benefit package from this particular health care corporation. While I did not have children to insure on my health benefits, nor was I a candidate to receive money for relocation expenses, the full offer presented by the natty Director of Human Resources read as convincingly about job satisfaction as a Tolstoy novel reads about tragedy and despair in the human condition. I was sold almost instantly and was excited to be part of such a giant on the healthcare scene, wherein I would be eligible for stock options one day.

Chapter Three

O ld Bridge, New Jersey, is a sleepy little town located in the center of the state in Middlesex County. When driving southbound on Route 9, the northern towns of Woodbridge and Sayreville are as congested and built-up as one might expect of the Garden State. But as the road splits off towards Route 34, a quiet and magically bucolic curtain parts when one enters Old Bridge. The town had once been a farming community years ago, and there are still roadside stands which sell fresh eggs, tomatoes, sweet corn and firewood. The old houses sit on grand plots of land with mature trees. There are the beginnings of housing developments and a few strip malls in Old Bridge; but on the back roads, these modern buildings are disguised by a mysterious time capsule which surrounds the township. If you allowed yourself, you could believe there were farmers in those fields off Route 34, leading horses to till the earth for crops to put on their planked wooden tables in the early 1900’s.

The nursing home wherein I would begin working was nestled smack in the middle of this landscape. Even though the edifice had clearly been built in the 1970’s, with post-modern lines and diamond shaped windows in the Dining Hall, it was set back from the road by a long and curved driveway. Small bunnies scampered between the cars in the parking lot, the occasional deer nibbled on the grass along the perimeter of the property and cardinals and robins sang relentlessly through the large oak trees. I had been transported to a natural wonderland of another lifetime, I thought, as I walked towards the entrance.

My first day of employment was on a sweltering Monday in late August. Automatic doors opened into a foyer. There was a mock coffee bar and sofas for visitors which were stained with fluids. The clatter of dishes was heard from the Dining Hall located just beyond the entrance. Patients were seen traveling to and from their breakfasts. Some were walking with walkers, but most were propelling themselves in their wheelchairs with their hands or feet. Some patients were dressed and clean for their morning meal. Others were missing pants, wore Johnny coats haphazardly tied around their necks or had food stuck on their faces or in their hair.

A tall man with jet black hair, slicked back in a wind-tunnel fashion, shuffled towards me. While he did not look young, he did not appear anywhere near old enough to be living in a nursing home. This man walked as through he was tipsy, with one eyebrow raised as he swayed on his wobbly feet. When he began to mumble, I noticed that he had no teeth to speak of. I leaned forward to hear him whisper. "Follow the Yellowbrick Road," he said.

Chaz! You leave that woman be! A receptionist hollered, as she lunged towards this man and pulled him by his shirt sleeve back into the bowels of the building.

The receptionist returned momentarily. Flustered and annoyed. My apologies, she said. She had long nylon tipped nails with miniature American flags applied to them. Her hair was one shade away from Ronald McDonald red, with a dash of brown to soften the look. Chaz is known to misbehave. It is best not to talk to him until you know what mood he is in. My name is Betty. How may I help you?

Betty paged the Director of Rehab to come greet me. Twenty minutes ticked by. I sat on the one sofa with the least amount of liquid stainage. An elderly woman sat down on the couch across from me. She was pushing a rollator. Upon the seat of it was placed several items: a stuffed animal with bright yellow fur, a box of tissues, an extra diaper and a framed 8 by 10 photo of a handsome man in uniform. A plaque on the bottom of the picture read the name Jack.

Who’s Jack? I asked her.

My late husband, the woman replied. We served in WWII together in the Navy. I was a nurse and he was a gunner. He was awfully handsome, she remarked, wistfully.

Yes, he was, I replied. How did you meet him? I asked her.

It was at a dance. He walked right up to me and told me a joke. ‘What do you call sex on the rocks?’ It took a few seconds for me to understand that she was telling me this joke, because the man Chaz from earlier this morning was now strapped onto a gurney and being wheeled through the front doors by a couple of transporters. He waved goodbye to me and Betty at the front desk. She was rubbing cream on her cuticles and did not look up as he left.

I am sorry, I said, turning back to the elderly woman. What DO you call sex on the rocks?

Uncomfortable, the woman replied.

The work day began with a list of patients that I had to secure myself. Due to recent cutbacks in healthcare, there were no porters or technicians to collect patients and bring them to the rehab gym. This facility was a very large building which held over180 beds in four separate wings. Walking around these wings led to a daily mileage tally of over seven miles, I would discover. Not to mention the heavy lifting involved in hauling obese people out of their beds. This was going to be a laborious job. Yet having been born of Polish lineage, I had no fear of hard labor.

The first work day went by in a split second. As I learned how to navigate around the place, began to understand the computerized billing system, and met the staff, my head reeled with the new sights, smells and auras of so many people. I had thought this was supposed to be easy. Here, in the nursing home, I was only expected to treat roughly eight patients per day, a great deal less than the thirty-plus people I was accustomed to working upon. There were fewer people to touch, I reasoned, and therefore, fewer energies of others that my body would take on.

I had been quite wrong in this assumption. As I collapsed upon the couch later that evening, my fatigued muscles were screaming for mercy. But the more salient sensation was sorrow. The sadness of the place, the hopelessness of it all, had seeped into my skin.

Chapter Four

G eorgianna was the unofficial head of the rehabilitation department. This nursing home had been through six managers in the last eighteen months. The lead position offered no more than a two percent salary raise from a subordinate physical therapist position. Along with the enormous responsibility of calculating the length of rehab stays, meetings which promised nothing more than unpaid overtime, and the underrated power of hiring and firing employees, there were few people who wanted any part of this position.

Georgianna had been working in this nursing home for several years and had been offered this promotion. She had wisely declined it and had become the manager by default. In short, Georgianna was able to make sure she got her own vacation time and was paid correctly, without the hassle of being a manager. Even better still, there was no clashing of temperaments as there had been with a few of the previous supervisors, many of them with commanding Gym Teacher personalities. Not only was Georgie rarely fond of other physical therapists, but she particularly disliked being managed by one. It was hard for Georgie to decide what she disliked more: peppy females who ended staff meetings with Let’s Go Team! or serious men who micromanaged every billing mistake, with no flair for managing other humans.

She preferred to go by Georgie. A sassy name, if you ask me. At six feet tall and with light auburn hair, this woman ran the entire rehab department, without the title and marginal two-percent raise from the company. Georgie led me into the facility and introduced me to the staff. Occupational, speech and physical therapists bustled in and out of the gym. Some were there because they had been with the company so long that they valued their five weeks of paid vacation per year, and weren’t going to change jobs to start back at the bottom of the heap of having two weeks annually elsewhere. Some were contract therapists, who came and went every thirteen weeks, vying for new positions and hearty pay. (Flexibility is valued in the rehab world. Traveling professionals can make a bundle of money, have most of their moving and living expenses paid for by their agencies and have the unique ability to acclimate to new environments with ease. Some of the smartest of these rehab therapists also know that the dirty little secret to having a long career is to avoid burnout by not staying in one depressing job for too long).

Georgie was unique for a physical therapist. Especially for a makeshift manager. Most rehab specialists are defined by their belief that therapy cures all. Isn’t exercise the cornerstone of staying healthy for as long as possible? Shouldn’t patients get out of bed every day and participate in activities which allow them to maintain their independence, even if they may die within one week? Georgie was different. While she wanted to maximize profitability for this particular place, she was a realist. As such, she did not push over-delivering care in her center. If a patient was dying and placed on the rehab schedule, Georgie fought with the building’s administrator to remove them from rehab care, allowing them to die in peace.

I met this towering woman, and I was confused. Her countenance was strong, yet withheld from the job. Georgie was aloof. This is not to say that she was cold. No, this woman had a blended family of six kids with a live-in boyfriend. She had friends and enjoyed book clubs and music concerts. Georgie loved the ocean and vacationing, as was evidenced by her tan and a thin, gold necklace threaded through a small sea shell.

Still, Georgie was complex. Upon my first week of meeting her, two of her patients died. Georgie carried on with her schedule and continued to treat her other patients. At the weekly staff meeting, she reported on the expiration of the deceased with utter detachment. As I watched her, with a face which barely required any makeup thanks to her ancestors who also bore perfect skin, I marveled at this ability to stare death in the face. Who was this woman who had mastered the art of letting go of the living? How can a person work within such a place and sustain this particular brand of loss, every single day? What kind of armor was Georgie wearing underneath those loose rehab scrubs?

As for the rest of us, where can we find such armor, for the losses and the hard winds that will always find us?

Chapter Five

W hy are there certain people, who seem so familiar to us upon meeting? Is it their pheromones? The twitching of the tiny muscles in their faces? The slight bounce to their gait that reminds us of someone we may have known? Chances are, we have never met the person whom we ask, Do I know you from someplace else? You look very familiar to me.

It was this way with a particular man in the nursing home. On the third day of my employment there, I saw him in his wheelchair, arranged in a circle for group arm strengthening in Occupational Therapy. He was a tall man and quite slender. He had not lost his full, white hair, which was cut in a tight buzz. He wore thick, Coke bottle glasses, in a style reminiscent of the 1970’s.

As I approached the group, I cocked my head and asked myself how I might know this person. Let’s see: he was the kind of guy that had probably been married, but had a steady girlfriend on the side. Friday nights were for the girlfriend, Saturday nights for the wife. It was the done thing in Brooklyn, as natural and commonplace as eating a bagel over a morning copy of The New York Post. This guy preferred hard liquor over beer. Definitely not a wine drinker. He had never bought a Japanese car in his life. American made all the way! He likely took his Friday night girlfriend to that run-down place in Sheepshead Bay, the Golden Gate Motel. They ate prime rib together in the restaurant downstairs before heading up to the old, polyester bedspread in a room that reeked of cigarettes.

Are you from Brooklyn? I asked him. While I had lived in Brooklyn for a short while years back, I knew that I didn’t recognize this older man from that time. Rather, I asked him this because everything about him oozed of it. Was it the whiff of a guy who enjoys a covert operation that reminded me of this particular borough of New York City? Was it those ridiculous looking eye glasses? Perhaps it was the blue jacket that he wore in support of the New York Yankees.

"Yes, my dear. I am from