Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

“I think you’re on a restricted diet. Because of the surgery.”

Marie sat up. “I’m having surgery? No one said I was having surgery. What? Oh my God.”

And with that, she tried to swing her legs over the edge of the bed, never mind the stent or that her hip was fractured in two places.

Anne-Janet dove at her mother. Yelled at her. “ Get back in bed. You want to die? You could die. Just get back in bed.”

She rang for the nurse while struggling with Marie, afraid the struggle would make things worse and eyeing the heart monitor as if she knew what all the numbers meant but certain a spike in any direction was bad.

“Let go of me!” Marie yelled. “I can’t stay here. You can’t put me under!”

“Mom, don’t be like this.” But her mother pushed her away with a strength she’d obviously had on reserve. “Mom, you are scaring me. I can’t help you if you are doing this.”

“Get off me, AJ!”

“Don’t call me that!”

And they struggled still. Anne-Janet depressed the emergency button. She could hear it ringing down the hall. But no one came. She looked to the roommate, who’d been shot in the gut by a bullet strayed from gang violence, but she just shook her head. No one had come to visit her, she had no advocates on the outside, she had to protect her standing in this hospital no matter what. Would she ring for the nurse? No.

Finally, Lynne of the jumbo duds stormed in with a syringe poised above her head. It was one of the scariest things Anne-Janet had ever seen, this stout little woman who wore her hair like a baseball mitt, coming at her mother like a slasher — practiced but lusty. She stabbed Marie in the thigh.

Marie went slack with the sense of being outnumbered. “You are psychotic,” she mumbled, and she let herself be helped back into bed.

Anne-Janet glanced at the heart monitor. The numbers were blinking. She looked at Lynne.

“Don’t ask her,” said Marie. “She is the stupidest nurse ever.” And then, turning to Lynne, “It is strange, the way you know nothing.”

She settled into the mattress. The numbers stopped blinking. “I’m going to sleep now,” she said. “You look like you want to go home anyway.”

Lynne said she had other places to be but that she’d come back later. Anne-Janet wet a towel in the bathroom. Wet and wrung and tried to return her thoughts to something safe, though instead they alighted on the whys of her being here in the hospital alone, the whys of having to shoulder her mother alone, the mistakes she’d made, the chances she’d never even had.

She passed the towel across her mother’s face and hands. “There,” she said. “Good as new. You’re going to feel much better in a second.” She swiped the cloth behind her ears and along the folds of her neck, and the room said: Washing your mother when she is incapacitated looks like love.

As soon as Marie fell asleep, Anne-Janet slunk out. The sedative would probably give her a few hours’ reprieve. Time enough to go speed dating without thought of her mother calling out her name in vain.

She headed for the bar, just a couple of Metro stops away. Options to drink in this neighborhood were limited to the New Wave — an all-night karaoke bar for British punk — or Nixon’s, whose three rooms could accommodate multiple events at the same time. A favorite among government staff, who came for the beer as much as the decor: renderings of the presidents no one cared about or even recalled. Zachary Taylor, who died of fruit and never brushed his teeth. Chester Arthur, of the morbid kidneys and rowdy facial hair. Warren Harding, whose reputation would have fared better if his wife really had poisoned him, and, next to him, a vacancy where once was the sober likeness of Rutherford Hayes, whose contentious election was, these days, just too much grist for argument. In point: good-bye, Hayes; hello, Reagan of the unifying landslide, whose triptych depicted the president with dog, horse, and gun, respectively.

The bar was packed. Half the place was given over to a birthday party, the other half consigned to the Helix, whose logo was postered all over the walls and spiraled from the ceiling in rainbow pipe cleaners.

Anne-Janet looked around. Speed dating had already begun, which gave her full view of the roulette being played among these single men and women with nothing happier to do. Was it too late to leave? This night was going to be a bust, she knew it. She searched for the coat-check ticket in her purse, the plan to about-face, go home, and do nothing.

Eh, enough; stay focused. She’d heard the testimonials, same as everyone else. Helix Heads. Members who’d directed their goals, resources, and beliefs to practice empathy, no matter how hard. Members who were happier for it. They were together, she was not, so just shut up, Anne-Janet, and date.

Besides, she wouldn’t go home. She’d go back to the hospital and watch the State of the Union with her mother, which was worse. Our generation has been blessed. The speech bawled from speakers in the next room and careened off the windows and wood floor of cappuccino tint.

She signed in and collected her date cards. At orientation for the Department of the Interior, she’d been told that new hires who wanted to thrive did well to go to Nixon’s, and so she was not surprised to see Ned Hammerstein in a corner with a woman fifty times prettier than she — the woman sporting a red baize spencer and suede skirt with edelweiss buttons. Throwback Bavarian, repressed but hot.

Anne-Janet hadn’t actually met Ned at work, but she’d been eyeing him from day one. She chose a table across the room from his. And started her night. On your marks, get set, talk.

“Hi,” she said, and looked at her date. His stats were: Gandhi glasses; facial hair goateed but unkempt; skin pallid, eyes pallid.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi back.”

A minute spent. There were prompts on the list; she chose one. “My worst high school moment? This girl Dawn on my gymnastics team tried to switch the talc in my bucket with boric acid because my Yurchenko double-twist vault was better than hers, except a rat got in the bucket and died, and Dawn went to juvie, but the rest of the team blamed me. So, yeah, that was it for friendships meant to last forever.”

“You know,” he said, “you have an asymmetric mouth. I find that very attractive. I think we as humans like symmetry but that we also like to see a pattern, and then to see some slight variation. Music is a great example of that. Establish a pattern and then throw in variations. I guess what I’m saying is, your face is like a song. Like ‘Take Five.’”

Speaking of which: ding.

Ned stared at his drink. There were cherries in his highball glass; he stabbed one with a cocktail pick. Tried to stab for emphasis. Get it? I hate that my life has brought me to this.

His date scanned a list of questions. “You got any hobbies?”

“I do,” he said. And he looked her over. Her smile was big, and he could see that her front teeth were canted in the direction of her throat and that her lips were tight against her gums, all things moving one way, which boded well if you were a guy with a libido, which Ned was and was not. Not for weeks, but here trying.

“I study the weather. Weather as warfare. Technically, there isn’t much use for the skill because of the UN’s 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. But the fact is, no one cares. I mean, really: if you can roll in a float of clouds just when the enemy needs a sight line, you’re saving lives.”

“Are you a lifesaver?”

“No.”

“Is this your first time doing this?”