The Birthday Wish was originally appeared in the Federation of BC Writer’s Anthology, 2003. _________________________________________________________________________
The Birthday Wish
Patrick Joseph King
I never paid much attention to the old. They were nothing more than a race of aliens cohabiting my young world. So far distanced from me that I relegated them to the sidelines, worthy only of a curious glance. Tomorrow, I will be a hundred. It is the young who are the aliens now, and they are all I think about.
Youth is a skin shed, a cocoon, a past life. My paradise lost.
There are times I believe this is all a dream, and I’ll wake up the 25 year old girl I am. But morning arrives and I am still in the nightmare. The aches have not thawed from my bones. My veins like swollen purple rivers continue to course through my hands. More liver spots, the brown crop circles that they are, have appeared.
I stopped looking at my reflection and having my picture taken when I turned seventy. Why would I want to discover another wrinkle amongst the thousand already creasing my face, to see my chin sag another inch? Mirrors and cameras, like everything else today, are for the young.
The staff at the nursing home here tell me God has blessed me with long life. I shrug. Laugh. He has cursed me, and will them too, eventually. Life is not sweet for a hundred year old woman. Mine revolves around strangers who take care of me. I have buried a husband and three children. All my friends are dead except Emily Martin who suffers from Alzheimer’s in a nursing home somewhere in New Brunswick. I do not have control over my bowels. My breasts are deflated balloons. I have a plastic hip and am forced to use a walker. I cannot bathe myself. I share a room with another old woman whom because of a stroke has her mouth paralyzed open and cannot speak.
I am a relic. An unwilling artifact. I carry around memories like overstuffed suitcases.
My doctor, fool that he is, trumpets me as proof that a life span of a hundred years is an achievement to be proud of. Mrs. St. Claire, director of the Golden Oaks Home and an imbecile, has hovered around my bedside for the last two weeks. “You will be the first person to reach a century at the home,” she tells me with each visit. She gloats like it will be her accomplishment.
She has ordered around-the-clock care for me. Not for my sake but hers. I am the feather in her cap: the golden goose who will lay the 100 pound egg. Tonight, Nurse Flight is on shift. She sleeps in the chair in the corner with an empty box of chocolates on her lap. Of all the nurses at the home, I like her the least. She prefers stuffing her mouth with sweets than tending to the needs of an elderly woman. She never runs the water past lukewarm when it is her turn to bathe me. Her rough hands never dry me off completely. Her cold blue eyes do not hide the repulsion at having to clean me after I have soiled myself.
I listen to her snore and pray to God to take me tonight. Let Nurse Flight explain to Mrs. St. Claire how I died on her watch.
***
I open my eyes and see Nurse Flight peering down at me. She grunts, nods. I do not merit a ‘Good morning’ or a ‘Happy Birthday.’ She snatches her sweater from the chair, inspects the empty box of chocolates, and tosses it in the garbage before leaving. God, as usual, has not answered my prayer. I live another day. I have reached the age most of society aspires to but few attain.
Nurse Carim bounces into the room.
“Happy Birthday,” she says. She never treats me like a child or a vegetable. I envy her fresh flesh and enthusiasm. She reminds me of what I once was and never can be again.
She hands me a box wrapped in pink paper tied with gold ribbons. It is either soap or talcum powder, the perennial gifts for the old. I thank her and try to appear appreciative. Her quick skillful fingers help my arthritic ones unwrap her gift.
It is a bottle of gin. Liquor is outlawed here. I am touched that she has put - at the very least - being disciplined, or at the most, losing her job over me.
“I figured that if you make it to a hundred, you’re entitled to a drink or two,” she says.
Mrs. St. Claire flutters in like a deranged moth. Nurse Carim shoves the bottle under my blankets and winks.
“Good morning, birthday girl,” Mrs. St. Claire announces and hands me a card. It has a picture of a tree in full autumn bloom and a bible carved in its trunk. May God Bless You on Your 100th Year is scripted at the base. The inside reads like a prayer, not a birthday verse. God would have blessed me by letting me go at ninety-nine.
Like a magician, she pulls a manilla envelope out from behind her back. She sits on my bed, dangerously close to the gin bottle.
“Inside this,” she says, “are birthday wishes from King Charles.” She waves the envelope in front of me. Pulls out a sheet of paper from inside and holds it under my nose like a bone to a dog, but does not release it. She pats my head, clears her throat, and reads aloud.
Did King Charles spout such drivel when his grandmother hit a hundred, I wonder? Would he have if his own mother, Queen Elizabeth, had reached it?
“I’m going have it framed and hung up in the Front Office,” she says and slides it back into the envelope. “We have a big celebration planned for you this evening. Isn’t that right, Nurse Carim?”
Nurse Carim nods, looks at me despairingly.
“We’re going to have a big birthday dinner. A cake, and then bingo after for entertainment. I’ve made it mandatory for all staff and residents to attend. Four of our Board members will also be there. Isn’t that exciting? And, as a special treat, I’ve asked The Gazette to come and take your picture, and they’ve agreed. We’ll put it on our website too.”
Worse than turning a hundred is having strangers gawk at my photograph in tomorrow’s paper and on a website.
“I don’t want my picture taken, and I don’t want a party.”
Mrs. St. Claire smiles and shakes her head. “Now, now. Don’t be cranky on your birthday.” She recites the line from that 70’s poster about today being the first day of the rest of my life.
What bullshit. Whoever wrote that should have been shot, or at the very least be 110 now and confined to an oxygen tent in a ten by twelve room with no windows.
“Maybe we shouldn’t, if Mrs. Roberts doesn’t want it,” Nurse Carim says.
“Nonsense. Of course she wants it. Anyway, it’s too late now. It’s all been arranged.”
Freedom to make one’s own decisions does not exist with the agéd.
***
Nurse Flight stands beside my bed with a walker. “It’s time for your birthday dinner. Everybody’s gone to a lot of work for you, now get up.”
I refuse.
She pulls me out of the bed and pushes the steel contraption into my hands. I have drunk half the bottle of gin and stumble. Nurse Flight catches me before I fall. She sniffs around me.
“You’ve been drinking!”
She flips my pillows over and rips the blankets from the bed while still holding on to me. She finds the bottle.
“Who gave you this?”
“The tooth fairy.”
One of the male nurses pokes his head into the room.
“Everybody’s waiting. Mrs. St. Claire wants her out there pronto!” he says and ducks back out.
“I don’t have time to deal with this or you right now,” Nurse Flight says. “But you can be damn sure I will after dinner.”
“I’m not going out there.”
“Oh, yes you are.”
She throws me on the bed, dresses me hurriedly, painfully, then rushes out and returns with a wheelchair. She plops me into it, shoves a mint into my mouth which I spit out, and pushes me down the hall and into the dining room. It is decorated like a child’s birthday party at McDonald’s. I am wheeled up to the head table and placed beside Mrs. St. Claire. Nurse Flight sits herself on my left. I spot at the table slightly off to the right what I assume are the four Board members. I stare out at the yellow withered faces at the other tables. Most of them are senile, and those who are not, do not know who I am. I spot my room mate, propped up in the back like a wilting sunflower.
Mrs. St. Claire rises like the matriarch of a dynasty. She introduces the four Board members. They stand and bow like half-assed actors giving a curtain call after an abysmal play. No one claps except Mrs. St. Claire and Nurse Flight. I’d give my eye teeth, if I had any, for a bag of tomatoes. Mrs. St. Claire moves directly behind me and rests her hands on my shoulders. The pressure hurts. The gin rumbles in my stomach. I feel my eyelids flutter. My head spins.
“I present Mrs. Doreen Roberts, Golden Oaks first centenarian,” she announces. “Isn’t she a sight to behold.” Nothing can save me from this indignity, and I am resigned to sit here like a decrepit puppet.
Mrs. St. Claire speaks more gibberish. She talks more about me than to me. She rereads the letter from King Charles which she has since framed. Then the meal is served. Tough roast beef, dry mashed potatoes, bland carrots and warm cranberry juice. I eat little of it.
After dinner, Mrs. St. Claire clinks her glass of cranberry juice with a fork and toasts me. She rises and beckons the pasty middle-age man with a camera at one of the tables on the left to come forward.
“This is Mr. Peevers from The Gazette,” she says. “He’s going to take your picture and make you famous. Won’t that be nice?”
Mr. Peevers extends his hand but I do not take it. He looks like he’d rather be aiming his camera up under young girls’ skirts rather than at an old woman’s jowls.
“Mrs. Roberts, tell us the secret to long life?” he asks with a smile.
I am drunk. I am a hundred years old. I do not have to watch my P’s and Q’s. That is for the young.
“A good fuck,” I say.
Mrs. St. Claire gasps.
“How disgusting,” Nurse Flight says out loud. I have committed the unforgivable. I have mentioned the subject the young think taboo for the old. Nurse Carim winks over at me from her table. I wink back.
Mrs. St. Claire addresses the Board members. “Entering her second childhood, probably,” she chuckles. “At that age what can you expect?”
I have attracted Mr. Peevers interest, and he moves closer to frame his picture. The cake is wheeled in, aflame with a forest of candles.
“Take the picture when she blows them out,” Mrs. St. Claire instructs. Mr. Peevers nods.
“Don’t forget to make a wish,” Mrs. St. Claire giggles. “And don’t tell us what it is or it won’t come true.”
What is a woman my age going to wish for? Another year? To have regular bowel movements? To feel soft green grass under my feet not the hard linoleum of this prison? To be young again?
I wish for the evening to be as disastrous for Mrs. St. Claire as it is for me.
A stream of diarrhea soils my underwear. The stink infiltrates the room quickly. Mrs. St. Claire flinches and steps back. The cake is positioned before me. The writing on the icing is blurry.
“Blow,” Mrs. St. Claire says and nudges me in the shoulder.
The gin gurgles up my throat.
Flash!
My head falls forward and Mrs. St. Claire pulls it back before it hits the cake.
I vomit. All over her.
There is commotion around me. A lot of flashes.
I’m going to enjoy the photographs in The Gazette tomorrow.
And with that thought in mind, I turn to my left and throw up over Nurse Flight.
copyright 2003