THE VACUUM by Jackie Bang
The woman is sitting on top of a violently colored afghan thrown over a broad green chair. She is a large woman and fills the chair completely. There is an iridescent snake of oxygen tubing running down the front of her rose-colored dress. The dress is new. There were times in the past she was so depressed she wore only King-Sized bed sheets in which she’d cut a hole for her head. These days, though, she was feeling better and had recently sewn three new dresses, and among them this rose-colored one. The woman brings her finger to the hole in the plastic necklace around her throat all the while never taking her eyes off the child. There is the rasp of the fabric as the woman’s arm drags across the front of the dress, the rasp of the woman’s labored breathing, the persistent hum of distilled water percolating into usable oxygen. “You have to vacuum first,” the woman says covering the hole in her throat. The child is ten and she crosses her arms over her chest, her ponytail flopping side to side.
“You said pick up the living room and then I could go. I picked up. You didn’t say anything about sweeping the carpet,” she says, letting her eyes trail over the green sculpted carpeting, the food crumbs, shreds of paper, other unidentifiable particles of trash. There are two other children, toddlers really, a little boy and girl, sitting on the pea green carpet watching the Cartoon Network, also an infant in a playpen slobbering over a set of brightly colored, oversized keys. She entertains the idea of just doing it, giving in and sweeping. She knows it will take an hour to do it right, that to do it otherwise, well there’s really no reason to do it otherwise. She understands the Sisyphean nature of the task, though she does not yet know the story of Sisyphus. She knows by the time she is done her palms will be sore. That the whole time she is sweeping she will need to watch for the bristles that will inevitably break off, littering the floor with large and miniscule pieces of chaff. That no matter how extra diligent she is, the carpet will never, in fact, be clean. That she will have to sweep again in a few days. There is no sense to it, no one else to do it. The woman is bound for the most part to her chair except for the little bit she is able to walk with the aid of a walker. The toddler-aged children and the infant lack the necessary motor control, and the woman’s husband – well, the woman’s husband is his own story really. The child reflects a moment on the time she’s already spent picking up all the toys and shoes and clothes, the books and dirty plates and glasses, the feeding and dressing of the smaller children. Her eye lands on the faded yellow wood handle of the broom where it leans in the corner between the exercise bike and the vacuum. She flushes with a swell of indignation. “You said pick up. You didn’t say anything about sweeping the carpet.” The woman eyes the child with a wry smile. She raises her finger back to the edge of the plastic hole.
“I’m saying it now,” she says, her voice controlled, nearly musical against the grating rush of air. “Anyways, pick-up means vacuuming,” she says, and hers is the voice of reason.
The child momentarily drops the woman’s gaze, her eye seeking out the far corner of the room where the vacuum cleaner sits between the stationary exercise bicycle and the black metal of the wood stove. The sun blares through the panes of the sliding glass door and the three floor-to-ceiling picture windows show the stove, the bike, the vacuum, all three outlines under a thick grey covering of dust. The broom alone appears to have been recently moved. The vacuum is broken, has been broken for going on six months. The woman knows this. Still when she wants the child to sweep the carpet she uses the word “vacuum.” This drives the child mad.
“You said pick up. You didn’t say anything about vacuuming. We don’t even have a vacuum.”
“You know what I mean,” the woman says, smiling, covering the hole. The child flashes her a look of disgust and starts to leave the room. The woman’s voice stops her. The voice is calm, melodic. “You can’t go until you vacuum,” she says simply. The child turns, almost involuntarily, emitting a small grunt-like howl, she stamps her foot down hard against the carpet.
“There is no vacuum!”
“You know what I mean,” the woman sings with a smile, always with a smile. The child’s eyes are slits.
“I picked up. I’m leaving,” she says. The woman brings her finger back up to the hole in her throat.
“You are not,” she says sweetly and the child’s laughter is quick and sharp.
“Who’s going to stop me? Just watch me,” she says and heads into the kitchen and down the stairs to her room. As she climbs back up, the woman’s labored breathing greets her before she even hits the top step. Grows louder through the kitchen. The woman has taken off the necklace and the oxygen tubing extends from the machine near her where she has flung it and it’s landed in several luminous coils. Her throat looks naked without the necklace, obscene, the edges of the incision vulnerable and irritated. The necklace is lying next to her on top of a paper towel atop a metal tv dinner tray that is painted black and holds any number of medical devices. The towel and the devices cover up a painted woodland scene, which reminds the child of her friend’s pasture, which is where she wants to go now.
The woman’s breath is coming in great gulps. The edges of the incision flutter like the wings of a large moth. The child wonders meanly if this is as good for her as riding the exercise bike is supposed to be. On the rare occasion that the woman mounts the bike, the sound is similar. The woman can’t see the child, not really. The child is a silhouette against the white light of the picture windows. Her face is unreadable. “Put it back,” the child says firmly.
The woman shakes her head, mouthing the word, “vacuum.” Attached to the soundless word is a tiny globular little voice that squeaks and rasps the last syllable.
“You put it back. You put it back in,” the child says slowly, as though the woman may otherwise confuse the meaning. “You put it back in right now,” this last seems to contain some sort of threat.
“You vacuum” the woman mouths in exclamation. The only sounds are the Cartoon Network and the gurgle of her breathing.
“No,” the child replies soundlessly. The woman glares, her eyes long past sapphire. The child moves toward the front door. The woman’s already raspy breath becomes grating with the child’s movement. The toddlers and the infant begin to cry, a great swelling void of hopelessness, the infants unfocused howl made even more affecting by the two sets of stricken toddler’s eyes. The toddlers have risen to their feet and the child stops just before the door where a ledge of countertop separates the entryway from the kitchen. She reaches up and raises the heavy receiver to her ear. The dial tone is a heartbeat. She digs her finger into the sheer plastic cover of the dial and listens to the click, click, click as it turns. She fights a brief surge of fear when it begins to ring.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice answers brightly. “Home Hospice Emergency Care.” The child says nothing. “Hello?” the woman says again, tentatively. This time the words rush out of the child’s mouth like a bad secret.
“My Mom’s taken out her oxygen and is refusing to put it back in,” the child says growing more and more smug with each word. Though her voice is perfectly tunneled into the sound of hysteria, though she feels this sound deep in her ten-year-old guts, she is all the while smiling pleasantly across the room at the woman with the hole in her throat, who, in turn, is smiling back. The woman on the phone takes her address and name, the name of her mother and tells her to stay on the phone. The child hangs up. She walks over to the long shabby couch in front of the three picture windows and sits down to wait. She sits with her back straight and crosses her legs and arms and grins across the room. The woman smiles back, and reaches down near her swollen ankles to where the shimmer of the cord runs by. She uses this bit to draw the rest of it back toward her.
The Emergency Medical Team arrives in minutes, but by then the woman has reattached the necklace, she has maneuvered the tube back down through the hole into her trachea. She has reattached the luminous coil. She has done all this, her eyes never leaving the child.
By the time the EMTs arrive her breathing has returned to normal, or at least what passes for normal. When the EMTs ask her what the problem is the woman tells them that the trache was bothering her and she took it out just for a moment to get some relief. She says she tried to explain this to the girl there, but the child grew hysterical and called the Hospice number. The EMTs are attentive, sympathetic. They offer various suggestions for dealing with the irritation. They smile indulgently at the children. One of them is the nurse from the child’s school. It is summer now so the nurse seems doubly out of place to the child. The nurse is the only one of the EMTs that the child knows. The child has been watching their nice shoes tread over the crumby carpet and is now wishing she hadn’t called. The nurse eyes the child carefully and as she leaves, leans near her and whispers not to be afraid to call if it happens again. The child nods obediently, doing her best Orphan Annie. She keeps that look pasted on the whole while the EMTs shuffle out. When everyone is gone the child collapses on the couch with a sigh. She glances over at the woman with self-satisfied and gaping grin. The woman’s eyes are smoldering. Her smile is vicious. As she raises her finger to her throat the child can see that her hand is trembling. “You’ll wish you hadn’t done that,” she rasps. The child looks away, lays still for a minute listening to the sound of the machine, staring at the ceiling. She then rises slowly, walks to the corner and pulls the broom out from behind the exercise bicycle.
“Vacuum” is Jackie Bang’s first publication in a national literary magazine.