Infection Control
Bethanne loved that brief moment just after she sprayed when the particles of cleanser hung suspended in the air like hundreds of tiny suns. Here, then gone.
The citrus scent hit her nostrils, the smell of long ago summer days while polishing the big cherry dining table to the sound of Little Beth and her friends chattering outside while they played four square on the driveway. She would look out to see her daughter beaming as she bounced a ball with her friends.
Little Beth was her everything. She loved reading to her at night, but she especially loved bath time. Little Beth in a fresh nightgown as she combed her hair. How sweet she looked snuggled in her bed. How safe Bethanne felt reading the evening paper with Harvey, Little Beth asleep upstairs, the sound of the dishwasher purring in the background.
Those were special days, unmarred by age or illness. The greatest challenge was deciding between meatloaf or chicken for when Harvey got home.
Harvey was gone, ten years now. And she was consigned to a retirement “home” after one too many falls. She thought that her daughter might take her in, but it had never been mentioned, Now, Bethanne’s job was to make sure her daughter came to her.
Wipe, wipe, wipe. Small circles were best, though there was no way she was going to brighten up the faux wood finish of her nightstand at Chancellor Home. Bethanne was haunted, not by the room’s last inhabitant, but by the coffee rings they left on the bedside table.
Clean equals safe. Clean equals healthy. Clean equals happy. Her mother, a nurse, had told Bethanne she would make an excellent infection control nurse. She took it as a compliment, in spite of her mother’s snarky tone.
Infection control was a valuable skill these days. There were rumors of a virus that stole people’s breath, especially old people. One that required everyone to wipe down their groceries. Bethanne imagined the virus like the smoke that poured in under the doorways in that movie with Charlton Heston. His deep voice used to send a shiver of lust up her spine. What was the title? The Eight Commandments? Twelve?
The virus replaced the rote conversations about food and the weather. It even eclipsed the daily scandals coming out of Washington. Bethanne didn’t want to believe the virus was anything to worry about. She’d heard the bloated, overconfident president say it would disappear. As much as she hated him, she wanted to believe what he said was true. But he was a liar. Anyone with any sense knew that.
Then the nurses started wearing face masks. Some were regular surgical masks, but others tried to get cutesy with little rabbit prints, messages like “Be Kind” and disorientating patterns that looked like the mouths of animals. It had been three months and the sight of the animal masks still gave Bethanne a start.
Little Beth blamed the virus for why she had stopped visiting in person. “They won’t let me in, Mom. They won’t let anyone in.” She believed her, but couldn’t help thinking her daughter was glad to be relieved of the burden of spending a few hours with her old mother.
She had been a regular visitor, though sometimes Beth looked at her phone more than she looked at her own mother. Bethanne got tired of seeing the top of her head, even with all her beautiful auburn hair, as Beth stared at her phone. It wasn’t like she was a brain surgeon who needed to be on call. She worked in a logistics office, for God Sakes.
“What are you seeing on there?” asked Bethanne. “It’s like you’re at some big party and I wasn’t invited.”
Little Beth, a name which Beth asked her to quit using when she reached high school, had always been a bit flighty. When Bethanne sent her to her room with a dust rag, she would find her thirty minutes later tracing pictures of women in ball gowns in the spray with her finger. It didn’t matter really. It wasn’t like there was any dust to be found anyway.
Eventually, Beth would hit like, put the phone in a pocket, and look up at her.
“How was lunch?”
“Fine, just fine.” Bethanne had no trouble lying if it would keep the peace.
“What did you have?”
“A small salad, tuna noodle casserole, some kind of a muffin.”
“Sounds good.”
“Mhhm.”
Bethanne could still taste the salt from the casserole on her tongue. She had spent a good fifteen minutes that afternoon talking with Alice and Faye about what the muffin was made of. One of them thought she saw carrot in there, but it tasted vaguely, chemically of orange. She didn’t even allow herself to envision the food prep, done by big ladies who reminded her of the sloppily attired lunch ladies from the school where she had worked.
Beth had her own life now and her mother was a small part of it. Sundays from 2 to 4. It wasn’t fair. Alice lived across the hall and had a son who came every day and read to her and all Bethanne had was a daughter who showed up looking like she had just reported for jury duty.
There was one upside though, Beth supplied her with the lemon scented cleanser so that she could clean her own room. It puzzled the nurses, who never bothered to check the ledge behind the toilet tank where Bethanne hid the cleanser and a small picture of herself as a girl standing up proudly in front of a neat row of her stuffed animals behind her. Bethanne had spent hours as a girl brushing the animals’ fur with her hairbrush. She believed displaying pictures of yourself was vain, no matter how adorable you were in the picture. Still, she couldn’t bear to part with the photo.
When she complained to Beth about the food or the lack of cleanliness, Beth said, “This is your home now, Mother.” It was all Bethanne could do not to chuck the cheesy mother and child figurines Beth gave her each Christmas at her beloved daughter’s head.
She had been a teacher for thirty years and had students who had given her more personal gifts, like perfume in her favorite violet scent and stationary with butterflies. It stung to get a present that seem to come from the “old mom who needs nothing” section of the store.
She’d quell her anger by asking Beth for a hug, inhaling the scent of Beth’s shampoo. Still her little girl.
Beth had called this place a home, but there was nothing homey about it. It was little better than a hospital, with its linoleum floors and cleanser smells. Bethanne had only been in the hospital twice, when she gave birth to little Beth and when she had a hysterectomy. The best and worst experiences of her life. Whenever she thought of the hospital it left her confused, a feeling of emptiness and fullness all at the same time.
She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be doing here. Replaying old memories in her head of her very ordinary life? Making new friends among a group of old women who had trouble seeing and hearing? Filling time with puzzles and crosswords while outside the world passed her by? These days Chancellor Home was the place where she hid out from the virus, a sitting duck surrounded by the vulnerable, and looked after by a staff that she was sure was too dumb or careless to wear their masks into the grocery store.
Her “home” was more like a jail now. No trips to the ice cream shop or drugstore. No movie outings or in person visits. Now Beth would stand on the lawn outside Bethanne’s window talking with her on the phone. At least it kept Beth from looking at her screen. But her visit were shorter, sometimes only fifteen minutes.
The whole thing reminded Bethanne of those seventies cop shows where people in prison talked to visitors through the glass. She guessed it was better than nothing, she thought. Still she missed hugging Beth at the end of every visit, the way that Beth would squeeze her arms before letting go, the warm feeling that lingered the rest of the afternoon.
Her visits with Alice and Faye were reduced to shouting through their masks from their doorways until one of the nurses showed up and shoed them back into their rooms.
She had never imagined she would find herself in this place, obsolete, marking time. She needed a purpose, something more than a hobby.
It was a Saturday afternoon, right around shift change, when she noticed keys hanging from the door of the supply closet. She turned the keys and looked inside. There were huge jugs of bleach, an army of mops, and rows and rows of furniture polish. For the first time since she got to Chancellor Home she felt totally at home.
She pocketed the keys and hiked up her support hose. She tucked a few bottles of the spray polish under her arms and tied the belt of her house coat around the handle of the bleach. She checked the hallway, it was empty. She made her way to her room dragging the bleach and closed the door behind her.
There were all sorts of weird theories about how to get rid of the virus, eating garlic, drinking coconut oil or cow’s urine, even injecting bleach. She shivered at the thought. Drinking bleach would kill you, but cleaning with it was another story.
There had to be a culprit. Her own room was spotless thanks to her tireless efforts, but they still wouldn’t let Beth in. No one gathered in the dining room. She couldn’t access the kitchen. She peeked out the door at the hallway. There was a crumpled paper mask halfway down the hall. There were footprints all the way down. Some dummy had mopped and then walked right through their own work leaving a trail.
Maybe if the floor was clean enough the virus would be kept in check and visits could resume?
She hauled the bleach to her doorway and struggled to remove the cap. Bethanne went into the hallway, dragging the bleach and used her last bit of strength to topple it. She watched as the clear liquid flowed down the hallway killing the germs. The sharp scent burned her nose but she didn’t care, soon she would be smelling Beth’s shampoo, feeling her arms around her. All would be well.