Nancy Dugan
When the Urgent Care doctor told Chuck to take it easy for the rest of the day, he asked for clarification.
“I can clean the house, right?” It was Chuck’s self-imposed, allotted day to clean his apartment, now that he and his longtime cleaning lady had mutually agreed it was too risky for her to work during the shutdown. He paid her anyway.
“No. Nothing physical, no lifting. Absolutely no bending. You need to take it easy for the next twenty-four hours.” The conscientious young doctor was from a generation of men who didn’t wear shirts with buttons. His capable “intake” assistant stared at Chuck from under her heavily painted-on eyebrows.
Walking home, Chuck carried the five-page neurological report in his hand and noticed, as he always did, especially after a head injury, the people walking with free hands versus those who carried stuff or clutched a phone. The free-handers, a small portion of the population, always broke Chuck’s heart as they tried to appear carefree or even jaunty. Chuck found their loose-armed strut self-conscious, somehow forced or even forlorn. He wondered if gait-recognition technology included the particular way free hands flopped while walking. Maybe it would become yet another distinguishable trait for surveillance.
As the free-handers walked in front of him, their hands dangled ape-like, no matter the walker’s size or gender, their energy, sophistication, or manicures. The inside of their aimless hands looked like a less leathery baseball glove, the chubby padding clumped and forsaken. Chuck steered clear of the Rat Poison warnings posted by the outdoor dining sheds, as well as a rolling platform cart traveling hurriedly by him near the curb. He initially thought it was transporting a giant pineapple with a spiky green crown peeking out of biscotti-colored wrapping paper. But it was just some kind of tall greenery, maybe a palm tree.
A taxi’s radio blared, “Everybody’s doing a brand new dance now, come on, baby, do the Loco-Motion.” For the first time in his life, Chuck found the song captivating. What if, after a head injury, you had an entirely different taste in music?
The sun was at Chuck’s back, creating a tall, monstery shadow of himself on the cracked sidewalks as he gingerly walked home. The short, adjustable ends of one of his three face masks cinematically protruded, almost airborne, at an angle out of the sides of his sore head, appearing in the sunlight’s shadow like slender, droopy dog ears or perhaps grasshopper wings. Did grasshoppers have wings?
When he got home Chuck googled “Take it Easy”. The old Eagles song was the only thing that came up. It wasn’t helpful.
He drank some water and thoroughly read the five-page report. It said, among other things, that his BMI was a little on the low side, yet it also said he appeared well-nourished. He got a kick out of seeing the word “Normal” in the Psychiatric Evaluation section. Maybe he would have that framed or added to his business card.
“Well, it was only Urgent Care,” said his old friend Alice. “We can’t go by that!” They had a good laugh about it over the phone. “I’ll call you later to check you’re still alive.”
Chuck wanted to rest but was afraid to nap or take it too easy. Would he plunge into unconsciousness? As he puttered in his apartment, he found himself unintentionally bending—who knew his life contained so many bends? To move his shoes back into the closet. To pick up a dropped sponge on the kitchen floor. It was bending in the middle of the night, in the dark, and coming up entirely too fast in his tiny bathroom, clunking his head on the bottom of the sharp, metal door of his open medicine cabinet, that caused his head bump. Entirely. His grandmother once used that word, yelling at him from the beige wall-to-wall carpeted, midwestern hallway as he stood at the bathroom sink with the door open. “You’re using entirely too much Drano!” she sharply condemned him.
He commanded himself to remain entirely awake for the rest of the day.
Outside in his apartment’s hallway, maskless construction workers continued their two-year renovation. All through the pandemic, while stuck in their tiny apartments, tenants were treated to nonstop sledgehammering, drilling, and screeching assaults that shook the walls and their nervous systems, all thanks to new owners that included a former scandal-prone athletic star. It was their building’s special misery, on top of all the others.
During the surge days, when going outside was forbidden, Chuck got in the habit of hanging out his sliding bedroom window every morning like a perched Italian woman gazing down at a piazza. But it was tricky, due to his vertigo and the broken pull-up cord on the ancient, slatted venetian blinds. He’d use one hand to lift the crooked blinds above his head, the other to slide open the sticky window with grunting effort, and then jut his head and narrow shoulders through the sliver of an opening and gasp some air. It reminded him of the milk-bottle chutes at his grandmother’s house in the previous century: bigger than the mail slot where bills and letters spilled through the door onto the floor, the milk chute prevented the glass bottles from freezing and cracking out on the stoop in the subzero temperatures. The morning newspaper, with its singular thud against the front door, had no such issue, bouncing either onto the stoop or somewhere on the frozen lawn.
Packaging, Chuck thought with his sore head, was the secret to everything. Though now, with social media, he supposed it was all about branding, another form of packaging.
He’d once worked in packaging, overseeing plants that packaged every possible item on earth. He was grateful during the pandemic to have his environmentally friendly packaged almond milk (though almond production posed its own environmental burden) now delivered to his lobby, chute-less but appreciated, along with his other Fresh Direct groceries.
Sometimes during Chuck’s daily hang out the window, he’d spot one of the street’s doormen below and call out good morning. They’d wave back and it was his socially distant interaction for the day.
Today, Chuck reasoned, he’d already gotten air and social (medical) interaction and could avoid tangling with the window entirely.
What to do? He was a strong believer in not watching TV or anything narrative on a screen during daylight hours, though he had been riveted to the Cuomo daily briefings in the early months of the shutdown.
His head was very sore. He wondered if the ice pack he’d used prior to the Urgent Care facility’s opening at 8 a.m. would help or hinder him now. He should have asked. He refrained from taking pain meds, thinking he should tough it out rather than risk any pills mixing with those he regularly took.
He went to the freezer, plopped the pack on his head, and paced slowly back and forth down his narrow entry foyer, the hallway walls shuddering from the construction work beyond the front door.
A skinny, standup vacuum he kept stashed between the front door and the foyer’s low-level bookcase had lately been tumbling awkwardly to the floor whenever he exited. He juggled the Dirt Devil to see what the issue was and noticed a dusty bag of coins and several containers awkwardly positioned against the side of the Scandinavian teak bookcase.
Years ago, when coins were required for daily activities, he’d tossed so many of them on a nightly basis out of his pants pockets after work that they overtook the top of the bookcase. He’d eventually stashed the coins on the floor, primarily in recycled Talenti circular ice cream containers (excellent packaging, with a tight twist-on top).
Not bending exactly, just folding his long legs into a cross-legged, uncomfortable position, Chuck decided to sit on the floor to examine the situation more closely.
Was leg-crossing befitting for grown men? One of his newer neighbors commandeered their floor’s long hallway at night, sitting cross-legged at one end and tossing a thundering tennis ball down the corridor for his fluffy, fiercely barking dog to race after and return. Over and over again. When Chuck masked up to toss his nightly garbage down the hallway chute, the unmasked neighbor smiled and waved as if crossing this obstacle course—dodging the aerosols, the ball, and the dog—was a delight for Chuck. The little dog always raced to sniff Chuck’s ankles through their Woolite-fumed compression socks.
Wedged between the coin containers and the bookcase he found a pile of colorfully striped, paper coin wrappers: muted orange stripes (for quarters); red (pennies); deep forest green (dimes); and a vigorous berry blue (nickels).
At some point in his past, he’d optimistically believed he’d have the time and manual dexterity to roll the endless community of coins and take them to a bank. Well, now he had the time, though he wasn’t sure how dexterous his long, aching, and stiff fingers would be in this packaging process. The other day he’d used a dime to scratch off a gift card code, and it had been a challenge.
He’d recently noticed signs in local banks and drugstores encouraging customers to bring in coins. There was a shortage. He’d be providing a civic service if he could manage it.
The coins were grungy. He stretched his arm to the top of the bookcase, where he kept a box of latex-free gloves required in the early days of the pandemic. They made his hands sweat and were a challenge to pull on but seemed perfect for the job.
How to proceed? He’d call on his project management consulting skills, underused during his semi-retirement and gone dormant during COVID.
First step: Empty the coins out of one of the Talenti containers. Balance the damp ice pack on the empty container so it won’t damage the wood floor.
Step two: Sort and pile all the coins by value. But he quickly realized the currency would then cover most of the foyer, endangering his footing should he need to unfold his legs for any reason before finishing the task.
This part of the process was a mess. The pennies and dimes multiplied and scattered like roaches, while the nickels maintained a quiet dignity.
The wrappers were cruel. It took patience and cunning and several attempts to balance the tinny-smelling, whimsically tilting coins in a straight pile within the tight-columned confines of the paper.
After a while, with his back leaning against old photo albums and yearbooks in the bookcase, he got a rhythm. He’d determined he should start with the valuable quarters to get the highest rate of return, the biggest bang for his coins. The quarters were also somewhat easier for his clumsy hands to maneuver into the wrappers.
When he first moved to the city, his grandmother had religiously saved up quarters for him to use in the city laundry machines. Now the machines in his building were “smart” and apparently Chuck wasn’t (since he couldn’t figure out how to use them with his smart phone). He now gave his dirty laundry to the nice lady at the corner laundromat and paid cash; it cost less than the machines and was delivered cleaner and better folded than Chuck ever managed. And it pleased him that Apple and his credit card company remained unaware of his underwear-washing schedule.
After completing a few rolls of coins, he recognized the soothing quality mindless work that kept your hands busy could bring. Wasn’t this a Biblical proverb? Suddenly he envied and understood friends who relished such pastimes, though he himself had never pursued or benefitted from such things.
His grandmother had loved to embroider tablecloths, one of which still hung (next to a leather coat he last wore in the 1990s) in the hall closet his foot was currently jammed up against. Alice loved to sew and was all charged up about a new sewing machine she had ordered. Those activities were undoubtedly more creative than what he was doing now, but as his legs grew numb and his back ached, he was surprisingly content and peaceful. Maybe it was the head injury making him passive enough to while away the day on the floor surrounded by unimpressive currency. Maybe it was also due in part to the construction workers taking a long lunch break. He started to feel sleepy.
The other night he’d had trouble sleeping. He awakened from a dream where he was sitting cross-legged, as he was now, but on a white shag rug rather than a hardwood floor. Something glass related (a light bulb?) had shattered, leaving shards within the white shag rug. He didn’t know at first if he or his crossed legs had been cut. But he vaguely recalled being alert in the dream, having instructions he wanted to convey to someone else, mentally listing steps he needed to take, including using his cell phone (but that was puzzling since the dream seemed to occur in the distant past, not when cell phones were handy) to call someone else in the house to put on shoes and come to his room with a Dustbuster. Did the appliance even exist when shag rugs were the norm? He was unable to sort it out before he woke up. Who was he going to call?
He inserted more coins and twisted the ends of the wrappers. He wondered how sore his head would be if he took a shower and washed his hair once he was finished. When he was a greasy-haired teenager, he remembered his grandmother grabbing him and dunking his head into the kitchen sink. She roughly shampooed his head, frustrated with his lack of cleanliness. When she was done rinsing his hair, she wrapped it in a clean dishtowel and sent him off to do his math homework. Sitting on the floor surrounded by coins, Chuck laughed at the memory and also shivered a bit at the thought of her fingernails scrubbing his current sore head.
Once, when he was a younger boy sick with fever and a stomach virus, his grandmother had surrounded his bed with opened pages from the newspaper, meticulously placed with no open spaces, to protect the carpet in case he didn’t make it to the lone bathroom at the other end of the house. While they waited for the town doctor to make a house call, she instructed Chuck to behave himself in front of the doctor and not to cry if he got a shot. He was little and he was sick, but he knew damn well he would not put up with a shot. When the doctor held the shot up at his bedside, dripping with some liquid pouring out of it, Chuck made a run for it. The doctor chased him around the bed, crumpling the newspaper under his big shoes while Chuck screamed and scampered barefoot all over the news. At the bedroom doorway, his grandmother blocked him from racing out into the hall. When it was over, she yelled at him for having newsprint all over the bottom of his filthy feet.
The fully packed, circular wrappers were surprisingly heavy. Chuck worried about lifting anything per the doctor’s instructions. Still seated, he tidied up the mess as best he could from the awkward angle in the limited space. He arranged the wrappers neatly on the floor in a slender row alongside the bookcase. He snapped off the sweaty gloves and noticed their reassuring, cheerful shade of blue resembled the stripes on the nickel wrappers.
How to get up off the floor? How did the hallway dog-owner do it? He turned himself so that his knees and hands were on the floor. Was this technically bending? He paused a moment and thought about praying. Instead, he looked into the living room. He’d been so engrossed he hadn’t noticed the sun had gone down.
He came up off the floor slowly, hearing his knees creak and wondering how sore his back would be tomorrow. Tomorrow, when he would package his face in multiple masks and package the stuffed wrappers in a sturdy canvas bag. He’d carry the bag down to the corner CVS drugstore on Second Avenue and thrill the store manager with an abundance of coins.
He would be a hero. Entirely. A hero with a sore head and a pocketful of bills in exchange for the dirty, distracting coins.
And his hands would be free all the way home.
Nancy Dugan’s work has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in over 45 publications, including The Diverse Arts Project, Cimarron Review, Epiphany, Passages North, The Healing Muse, The Minnesota Review, Blue Lake Review, The MacGuffin, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Dream Catcher Literary Magazine (UK), Superstition Review, Glint Literary Journal, Green Hills Literary Lantern, After Happy Hour Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, Nonconformist Magazine, Paragon Journal, Penmen Review, Slippery Elm, and Tin House’s Open Bar.