Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Nancy

Nancy stands up from the table to get the sugar from the kitchen. The chair scrapes across the floor as a giant hiney rises in the east. Her gray sweatpants are hiked, ambitiously, halfway up her spine -- but never higher than the waistband of the Depends that peek out on top.

My coworker, the staff member in charge of neighborhood associations, has banned Nancy from running for office. “She can come to all the meetings she wants,” she told me once in private, “but I refuse to have a president who tucks her shirt into her Depends.”

Nancy is an ungainly, looming woman with short, slicked-back gray hair, flattened ears, and googly eyes made googlier by thick glasses. She steadfastly pairs her gray sweatpants with a rotation of XXXL tee-shirts featuring cartoon animals, crude phrases, or both. Nancy has a sputtering Sylvester-the-cat lisp and the loudest damn voice I have ever heard in my life.

Someone once told me that Nancy had had a stroke somewhere along the line, contributing to her bizarre speech patterns. Sometimes her pregnant pauses are so long and so painful that you can almost hear the words building up inside of her, finally escaping in an impossibly loud grunt of a word. “UM!” she will shout, finally, breaking the silence. “WELL!”

Nancy arrives at 9:30 every Wednesday morning to make coffee for the 10:00 counseling session. “Good morning!” she squawks, making her way toward the kitchen. Once the coffee is brewing, she sits down at the table to chat with her best friend and neighbor, Donna.

Donna’s low, androgynous voice and Nancy’s screech clatter about like a Jerry Springer soundtrack. They talk about Nancy’s cats, about other neighbors, about the pile of leaves amassing in Donna’s yard that Maintenance refuses to take care of. They talk about former lovers, estranged children, and wild days of yore. Donna does not mind much when Nancy gets stuck on a word. She usually just finishes the sentence for her.



It is almost four months before I notice Nancy’s hands. The discussion topic for the day is the importance of having a support system—family, friends, neighbors, someone, anyone. As sometimes happens, however, conversation has gotten off track. One resident is in tears in the corner. Donna, already on pancakes number five and six, is eating her feelings. And Nancy, having momentarily overcome her speech impediment, is delivering a hair-raising diatribe about her traumatic childhood. She cannot seem to stop. Her wild-eyed description of her negligent mother is equal parts horrifying and histrionic. But somehow, it is her hands that catch my attention as she waves her fork about, spraying half-chewed pancake into the air, and condemns her mother’s soul to hell.

The rest of Nancy’s body shows seven decades of poverty and misuse: slabs of extra flesh and fat, missing and gray teeth, sunken eyes, a stiff shuffle. But the backs of her hands are as smooth as wax. She has long, tapered fingers with delicate fingernails; every morning she slips on a still-shiny gold band. Even though she is nearing seventy, there are no liver spots, no swollen veins, no yellowed nails or bony knuckles.

Towards the end of the meal, Nancy has made real progress with the counselor. Things have quieted down significantly. I take the quiet moment to compliment her on her hands. She blinks her googly eyes open and shut rapidly as her mouth tries to catch up to her brain. Seconds pass; Donna drowns her seventh and eighth pancakes in syrup. Finally Nancy’s words come to a head. “WELL!” she hollers, scooting back her chair to put the coffeepot in the sink. “Thank you! My mother did always have nice hands.”