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Finding My Smile

By Janice Kaye Davis

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Nurse Tetchy bellowed, filling the doorway, fists crammed into her hips.
“What...now?!” I emphasized the pause between words, staring right through her stone-cold glare and heavy frame dripping in untapered gray cotton. Her greasy gray hair was pulled up high in a tight bun, causing her mouth to stretch upward in a perpetual smile. Except she wasn’t smiling. She never smiled. She was her name personified.
Nurse Tetchy brought out the worst in me. I often blamed her for my willful attitude. But, the truth was, my typical demeanor was dreadful with or without her influence. Being forced into community service 20 hours a week, for nine months, in the Warrenton Alzheimer’s Nursing Home would probably make anyone belligerent. In my case, though, the belligerence preceded the sentence, the sentence exacerbated the aggression, and Nurse T fueled the fire that raged within my core.
“When you’re finished changing Miss Lottie’s linens—” she smirked (not a smile)—“I expect you in the cafeteria to help feed Mr. Kinnerly his dinner.” Thankfully Miss Lottie’s bed was right in front of her wall mirror. My foster mom told me to look in a mirror and smile at myself when I was really angry. She said it’s hard to stay mad if you see yourself smiling. “It might help you stay out of trouble with your mouth,” she’d noted.
I stared in the mirror and smiled brightly through gritted teeth. “Yes, ma’am, Nurse T.”
She pursed her heavily painted Paradise Pink #13 lips, then turned and stomped down the hall. Her fists, still crammed into her bulging hips, rose and fell with each step. Researchers said there hadn’t been a major earthquake in Wisconsin for 30 years, but I believed people within a 10-mile radius of Warrenton felt the earth tremble whenever Nurse T lumbered down the hall...usually after visiting with me.
She was always trying to provoke me. But I was determined to prevail. If she won, then she would happily turn me in for insubordination, and I would
“A
be sentenced to six additional months in either that prison or the one four miles down the country road—the one with real bars on the windows and locks on the outside of the doors.
I didn’t realize then that I had actually erected and moved right into my own prison, a horrible place secured with bars of hatred, dishonesty, and self-loathing. The Key was always right there within my reach. Sometimes I desperately wanted to reach out and grab the Key, unlock my chains, and embrace a precious freedom from my pain. But fear convinced me that this freedom was elusive, so I always forced those brief moments away as quickly as possible. I chose to remain inside my self-imposed jail, believing the lie that it was better to hold tight and control my own anguish in life rather than risk letting someone else help. Other people could not be counted on, and they would only make things a thousand times worse.
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Warrenton is nestled between Squaw and Hills Lakes with a huge pine wood forest just south of the medium-sized Wisconsin town of 40,000 people. The nursing home is still there, located at the south edge of town, perfectly situated with a view of Squaw Lake on one side and the towering evergreens bordering the edge of the forest on the other. Six shining white pillars adorn the front entrance, making it look more like a castle for royalty than a home for Alzheimer’s patients.
The foyer continues the façade of luxury with a floor-to-ceiling white pine fireplace and gray marbled hearth. The opposite wall displays a six-foot mirror framed in an intricately beveled redwood casing. To the left of the foyer entrance is a large, open study surrounded with built-in shelves filled with books, puzzles, and games. A grand piano, three tables, and several oversized chairs welcome visitors and their estranged loved ones to a quiet read or simple game. Down the hall from the foyer, a short distance to the left is the recreation room, again filled with books, games, and puzzles. Several portable card tables line the perimeter of the room with portable chairs strewn wherever they were last used. An exercise bike, large-screen TV, Wii game center, and bathroom dot the far wall. It is the perfect location for large family gatherings, nursing-home extravaganzas, or an afternoon in one of the classes designed to stimulate the residents’ brains.
Extending at a right angle from the rec room is Ward A—the ward reserved for patients who are in the early to middle stages of Alzheimer’s and only in need of assisted living conditions. Off the other side of the front lobby and a little down the hall to the right is the dining room. Looking inside, it
resembles a family-style restaurant with fancy green drapes and matching tablecloths. Every table has fresh-flower centerpieces and cushiony chairs, not the hard benches like my school cafeteria. Around the corner of the main entrance to the dining hall, parallel to Ward A, is Ward B. That wing is reserved for the advanced Alzheimer’s patients, those who needed help with everything from getting out of bed, to dressing themselves, to eating, to using the bathroom (assuming they are not already wearing Depends). Most of those patients cannot speak clearly, if at all.
Straight out the middle of a window wall at the back of the foyer, between the two wings, is the massive two-acre courtyard and gardens. A visit to the gardens is often the “selling point” for family members of potential residents. The smooth, black-topped pathway was designed specifically for the many wheelchair-bound patients so they could “stroll” through the gardens while enjoying wild irises, hundreds of brightly colored rose bushes, large daffodils, blooming azaleas, and 24 different species of coniferous shrubs and trees planted to maintain lush green foliage during the harsh Wisconsin winter weather.
At the far end of the garden, connected to the corners of each of the wings, is a 15-foot brick wall. The wall encloses the far end of the gardens, restricting the residents to enjoy the scenery outside their confines only through four large, six-inch glass windows centered in the bricks. Most of the patients stare blindly through the windows, though, rarely noticing the detailed beauty of the snow-laden evergreens in the winter or the prancing deer and budding wild flowers in spring. Only the litter of cats that roam the property ever actually seem interested in what lies beyond the wall at the edge of the gardens. It always seemed ironic to me that such extravagance was carefully crafted into a place filled with such affliction.
The Wisconsin Correction Division must have found it humorous in remanding me to community service in the nursing home. The residents were prisoners like me, but they weren’t confined because they’d been convicted of a felony crime. No, they were prisoners because their brains turned them into delinquents who posed a physical threat to themselves and others. They could not leave without someone escorting them safely around, or from, the premises. While the warmth of a roaring fire, a soothing melody wafting from the piano, or the airy scent of the century-old books were meant to relieve stress, the large mirror always reflected the tension family members struggled to overcome as they embraced a loved one who greeted them like a stranger. Worse, though, they could not escape the internal infirmary of their disease—a life void of logical thought, independence, and precious memories.

As Nurse T trundled down the hall, I looked back in Miss Lottie’s little dressing mirror. That time I did not smile. My beautiful, shoulder-length auburn hair was a mess, pulled up in a ponytail with half of the ends split and splaying out of the rubber band. A day of hard labor makes even the most perfect hair scraggly, I grumbled to myself.
I looked at my reflection once more, noticing how difficult it was to find any trace of happiness in the narrow brown eyes looking back at me. All my perfectly painted makeup sweated off within the first hour of work. Too many hours of scrubbing toilets, changing urine-stained bed linens, washing dishes, and feeding people who drooled out most of their dinner. That girl in the mirror was not who I wanted to be, but she was who I was most comfortable with in life. When I smiled, all I saw was a stranger mocking me from outside my prison bars.
Just as I was wallowing in my little pity-party, Miss Lottie hobbled in, her walker a few feet in front with every step. “Oh, hi there, sweetie.” She smiled without any help from the mirror. I tried to imagine her smile years ago when her teeth were all there, and white. When her eyes would open fully and both sides of her smile would turn upward instead of only on the right. But, looking at her now, it was hard to see past the wrinkles, sagging arm folds, and the soiled sheets I had to change each day.
“Hi, Miss Lottie,” I replied, followed by faked interest. “How are you feeling today?” I noticed that her ashen hair tumbled over her shoulders and halfway down her back. Usually she had it pulled in a bun, but much looser than Nurse Tetchy. Probably because Miss Lottie could smile without pulling her hair taut.
“Why, I’m pretty good today...umm...oh, honey, I’m so sorry. What is your name?” It was usually that way. She would return from a knitting class several minutes before I finished cleaning her room. The pleasantries would begin, and then she would often ask for my name. I wondered if she had to be reminded of her own last name, Voslokus. Even fully functioning people would try to forget that one! I’d mused when we first met.
“I’m Alayna. Remember, I clean your room for you every day while you’re at knitting class?” For the fiftieth time! I thought in forced patience.
“Oh, of course! How silly of me to forget.” Then we would exchange a couple more insignificant comments, none of which ever meant anything to me other than passing time. Always, though, she would end up nestled in the electric recliner, squinting at her tiny 15-inch television, watching old reruns
on cable. Sometimes she simply forgot I was even in the room. It was sad, really. I knew all the patients had Alzheimer’s, but all I really cared to know beyond that was whether they were still continent or not.
“Bye Miss Lottie,” I mumbled as I threw the soiled linens in my wheelie basket and rolled out of her room. She didn’t flinch. Her world was often far away from the real world. What I refused to admit was that same thing was true about me.
But, very soon, an 84-year-old Alzheimer’s patient would inspire me to reach for the real world, even though she couldn’t always find it herself.

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