Loretta

By Todd Kimm

I have this scenario where I knock on her door one Friday afternoon and she doesn’t answer. I come through the unlocked door and hear the TV blaring, as usual. (I never pay attention to what’s on because everything in the afternoon is exactly the same.) I walk into the parlor and she’s lying there dead, her mouth hanging open.

This scene rolls through my head each Friday as I approach the house to pick up the news Loretta has collected of her friends and relatives’ comings and goings. Who visited whom. If they played cards. Who won the door prize. It’s a tradition the small community newspaper I work for has kept up. Loretta composes her news in longhand in a tattered spiral notebook and then types it out painstakingly on an old manual.

Now I stand on the threshold of her front room, the scenario having played out to a T, to find her sprawled on the couch. Panicked, I work to separate her from the let-go room. My eyes fumble for her stomach in the rash of flowers, flowers in the print of her dress and in the fabric of the couch. Finally I see her stomach swell and empty. I say her name a few times, each louder than the last. I think that maybe she’s had a stroke and fallen into a coma. I consider phoning one of the burly grandsons that live a mile away in each direction, waiting for something like this to happen. I say her name really loud and she jerks awake. She looks around startled, toward the TV, saying, “What, what?” I say it’s me, Todd, the paper man.

We fall into our usual routine. She complains about the pain in her foot. She wants a copy of last week’s paper. I race to my car to get one before I have to watch her struggle for the kitchen to find the type-written pages. I have already seen her dead sleeping and helpless waking; I don’t want to see her straining for the kitchen in deep burning pain for a handful of visits almost no one will read.

I return with the paper and she’s sitting in the kitchen chair out of breath. I sit in my usual chair and she asks me if I’ll pull off one of her stockings. This is new. Flesh colored and made out of the toughest wool, it must encomb her inflamed leg or do some good for her ulcerated foot. She wobbles her leg in front of me and I try to grasp the lip of the stocking. I brace myself for some awful smell or sight. The sock peels off coolly. Her leg is bony but not terrible. It could be a younger woman’s. She thanks me profusely. Says her grandson was there this morning and made her put it on, doctor’s orders. Getting it off is such a relief, she says. It just holds everything in and it all goes inside. Now it is let out. I notice her neck. The skin is almost pink. Her little grey curls are wet against her neck. “It’s a bone that sticks out on my toe,” she says. “I’m going to have to have an operation. I told Flora I just wanted to cut it off, but then that would hurt too.”

Loretta says her shoulder is bothering her too. She calls herself stupid for farming for so many years. Filling barns with hay each year. “I was just stupid,” she says. “The smart people are dead.”

I ask her if she is taking anything for the pain. She reels off three or four things she takes and even thrusts a dark brown bottle at me. She says she doesn’t like to take the pills. “It’s hell to get old,” she says. “You have to take a carload of pills.”

I can see Loretta was getting uncomfortable. The novelty of having been released from the stocking is wearing off. She needs to be released from something else. Maybe me. Usually a visitor in Loretta’s home feels a need to break off conversation and escape into the world through the kitchen door, but today it feels as if she is trying to break me off. It’s a hot day. Maybe she wants to be alone so she can take off her dress; deeply stained with suppers and blued with wear, it must be oppressive. If I were her grandson, I would offer to take it off over her head. It would be a pleasure to see her grateful relief.

Before I left that day, Loretta told me a story she’d heard or read about two boys who were swimming in a zoo after the zoo had closed. The pool was located in a containment for bears. “They just tormented and tormented those beautiful bears until one of them started to bite,” she explained. The boy being bit screamed and screamed, but that just made the bear bite harder. She ended the story with the image of the boy’s legs lying there untouched. I reasoned that the bear had either reached his fill or deemed the legs unfit.

“Those youngsters are just into too much trouble,” Loretta said. “The other one went home and never told no one.” I related my horror and disapproval at the boys’ behavior and prepared to leave. She blessed me as I left, made me promise to pray to St. Anthony for her.

And I think after I leave, all day this woman will dream of being eaten by a huge cool bear, and it will not leave her legs.