“Wait and see. He may become himself again tomorrow.”
“I hope so,” she sighed.
A Pension Plan
IT WAS SAID that Mr. Sheng suffered from a kind of senile dementia caused by some infarction in his brain. I was sure it was neither Parkinson’s nor Alzheimer’s, because I had learned quite a bit about both during my training to be a health aide. He wasn’t completely disabled, but he needed to be cared for during the day. I was glad to attend to him, because I’d been out of work for more than three months before this job.
Every morning I’d wash his face with a hand towel soaked with warm water, but I’d been told I mustn’t shave him, which only his family members could do. He was sixty-nine, gentle by nature and soft-spoken. He’d taught physics at a middle school back in Changchun City three decades ago, but he couldn’t read his old textbooks anymore and was unable to remember the formulas and the theorems. He still could recognize many words, though. He often had a newspaper on his lap when sitting alone. My job was to cook for him, feed him, keep him clean, and take him around. A young nurse came every other day to check his vital signs and give him an injection. The twentysomething told me that actually there was no cure for Mr. Sheng’s illness, which the doctor could only try to keep under control and slow down his deterioration. I felt lucky that my charge wasn’t violent like many victims of dementia.
Mr. Sheng’s wife had died long ago, before he came to the United States, but he believed she was still alive. Oftentimes he couldn’t remember her name, so every morning I let him look through an album that contained about two dozen photos of her and him together. In the pictures, they were young and appeared to be a happy couple. She was a pretty woman, the kind of beauty with glossy skin and a delicate figure you often find in the provinces south of the Yangtze River. Sometimes when I pointed at her face and asked him, “Who’s this?” he’d raise his eyes and look at me, his face blank.
About a month after I started, his daughter, Minna, intervened, saying the photos might upset him and I shouldn’t show them to him anymore, so I put the album away. He never complained about its absence. Minna was a little bossy, but I didn’t mind. She must have loved her dad. She called me Aunt Niu. That made me uneasy, because I had just turned forty-eight, not that old.
Part of my job was to feed Mr. Sheng. I often had to cajole him into swallowing food. Sometimes he was like a sick baby who refused to hold food in its mouth for long. I made fine meals for him — chicken porridge, fish dumplings, shrimp and taro pottage, noodles mixed with shredded shiitake mushrooms, but in spite of his full set of teeth, he seemed unable to tell any difference among most of the foods. A good part of his taste buds must have been dead. When eating, he’d jabber between mouthfuls, his words by and large incomprehensible. Yet once in a while he’d pause to ask me, “See what I mean?”
I’d keep mute. If pressed further, I’d shake my head and admit, “No, I didn’t follow you.”
“You always space out,” he’d grunt, then refuse to eat any more.
Lunch usually took more than two hours. That didn’t bother me, since in essence my job was just to help him while away time. Due to his willfulness about food, I decided to eat my own meal before feeding him.
After lunch we often went out for some fresh air, to do a little shopping and get that day’s World Journal; I pushed him in a wheelchair. Like a housewife, he was in the habit of clipping coupons. Whenever he saw something for sale, he would cut the ad out of the paper and save it for Minna. That made me feel that he must have been a considerate husband willing to share lots of things with his wife. Now, with my help, he enjoyed frequenting the stores in Flushing. For food, he claimed he liked freshwater fish, perch, carp, eel, dace, bullhead, but he wouldn’t eat seafood, or anything from the sea except for scallops. The last was recommended by the young nurse because it contained little cholesterol. She also told me to give him milk and cheese, but he disliked them.
One afternoon we went out shopping again. As we were approaching a newsstand on Main Street, Mr. Sheng cried, “Halt!”
“What?” I stopped in my tracks. People were pouring out of the subway exit.
“Wait here,” he told me.
“Why?”
“She’s coming.”
I wanted to ask him more but held back. His mind could hardly take in a regular sentence. If I asked him a question longer than ten words, he wouldn’t know how to answer.
More people were passing by, and the two of us stood in the midst of the dwindling crowd. When no passengers were coming out of the exit anymore, I asked him, “Still waiting?”
“Yeah.” He rested his hands on his legs. Beside him, a scrap of newspaper was taped to the top horizontal bar of the wheelchair.
“We must buy the fish, remember?” I pointed at the ad.
He looked vacant, his pupils roving from side to side. At this point the subway exit was again swarmed with people, and pedestrians were passing back and forth on the sidewalk. To my amazement, Mr. Sheng lifted his hand at a young lady wearing maroon pants, a pink silk shirt, and wire-rimmed glasses. She hesitated, then stopped. “What can I do for you, Uncle?” she said with a Cantonese accent.
“Seen my wife?” he asked.
“Who’s she? What’s her name?”
He remained silent and turned his worried face up to me. I stepped in and said, “Her name is Molei Wan.” Not knowing how to explain further without offending him, I just winked at the woman.
“I don’t know anyone who has that name.” She smiled and shook her dark-complected face.
“You’re lying!” he yelled.
She glared at him, her nostrils flaring. I pulled her aside and whispered, “Miss, don’t take it to heart. He has a mental disorder.”
“If he’s a sicko, don’t let him come out to make others unhappy.” She shot me a dirty look and walked away, her shoulder-length hair swaying.
Annoyed, I stepped back to his chair. “Don’t speak to a stranger again,” I said.
He didn’t seem to understand, though he looked displeased, probably because he hadn’t caught sight of his wife. I pushed him away while he muttered something I couldn’t catch.
The fish store was nearby, and we bought a large whitefish, a two-pounder. It was very fresh, with glossy eyes, full scales, and a firm belly. The young man behind the counter gutted it but left the head on, like I told him. By no means could Mr. Sheng eat the whole thing — I would cook only half of it and save the other half for the next day or later. On our way back, he insisted on holding the fish himself. I had tied the top of the plastic bag, so I didn’t intervene when he let it lie flat on his lap. Bloody liquid seeped out and soaked the front of his khaki pants, but I didn’t notice it. When we got home, I saw the wet patch and thought he had peed. Then I found that neither of his pant legs was wet. “You meant to create more work for me, eh?” I said. “Why didn’t you hold the fish right?”
He looked puzzled. Yet he must have meant to be careless with the fish, peeved that I hadn’t let him wait longer outside the subway terminal. I began undressing him for a shower, which I had planned to do that day anyway. As for his pants soiled by the fish blood, I’d wash them later. There was a washer upstairs on the first floor of the house, where his daughter lived with his two grandchildren and her husband, Harry, a pudgy salesman who traveled a lot and was not home most of the time.
I helped Mr. Sheng into the bathtub. He held on to a walker with its wheels locked while I was washing him. I first lathered him all over and then rinsed him with a nozzle. He enjoyed the shower and cooperated as usual, turning this way and that. He let out happy noises when I sprayed warm water on him. He should be pleased, because few health aides would bathe their patients as carefully as I did. I had once worked in a nursing home, where old people were undressed and strapped to chairs with holes in the seats when we gave them showers. We wheeled them into a machine one by one. Like in an auto bath, water would spurt at them from every direction. When we pulled them out, they’d hiccup and shiver like featherless turkeys. Some of the aides would let those they disliked stay there wet and naked for an hour or two.