Wanda
I drive days.
I’ve reached a point in life where I’m just too old and cranky to deal with the denizens of dusk and the hours beyond… so my taxicab stories are seldom dramatic.
No matter. I’ll tell some anyhow.
Shortly after I began driving a cab, I met Wanda. Wanda was then in her early 80s, living with her older brother in a crackerbox house in Fairview Park, a ‘burb just west of Cleveland. She was a tiny, hunchbacked woman, utterly nondescript, always dressed in dark slacks and a baggy blouse, with a $19.95 wig on her head. Her sole sartorial indulgence was her footwear… Nikes… always like new, never a spot or a scuff… perfect, perfect white.
Wanda would call a cab once a week to go shopping, always at her favorite Discount Drug Mart. Never to a grocery store. Never to a bookstore or Wal-Mart or even a bagel shop. If it couldn’t be had at Discount Drug Mart, I guess it wasn’t worth having… sometimes I was sent on her order, more often not, but I did drive her enough to recognize her and anticipate her singular destination. One more old person in a region overflowing with them.
She had a gravelly voice, though she didn’t say much… just content to keep her own counsel, I suppose, and that was fine with me… I’m a quiet sort, too.
After a while, there were no more orders from Wanda’s address, though I only realized that in retrospect. Customers come and go and come and go, and come and go some more, for myriad reasons, and you just accept that as a given, yes? I do.
Several months passed before I saw Wanda again. Early one morning, a nasty, iced-up, road-salt-tinging-everything-in-the-world kind of morning, I had a pick-up at a Cleveland nursing home… as I slide my cab up to the front door, a familiar face is peering out from the frosted glass of the lobby doors… yup, it’s her. We get her in the cab, and she seems no less able than when I saw her last…
“What are you doing here?” “eh, my brother got too fucking old, I can’t take care of him by myself anymore…”
heh… I’d never heard her cuss before. I would come to learn that she could cuss with the best of them…
“You going to Drug Mart?” “…no, to my house…” “You still have the house?” “yeah, I hate it here… the nursing home is for my brother, I’m only here to keep him company… I’m gonna start going back home during the day”
So I drove her home.
“Can you come back and get me later?” “Sure.” …and I did…
“Can you come back and get me tomorrow?” “Sure.” …and I did… and by doing so, began two years of shuttling Wanda between the nursing home and her real home and, once each week, Discount Drug Mart and her bank.
She grossly overpaid me for this, and I told her several times to stop, but she insisted and said, finally, “I can depend on you, and it’s worth it to me… if you won’t take the money, I’ll find someone else who will…”… so I shut up about it, and kept driving her back and forth six days each week, and sometimes seven. Most of the time, when I dropped her off on Saturday afternoon, she’d say “we’ll take tomorrow off.” Sometimes she didn’t say that.
As I mentioned, Wanda didn’t say a whole lot… even so, when you’re driving someone around six days a week, and sometimes seven, you get to know a little bit about them:
She was a lifelong Clevelander, born to Polish immigrants, and raised in Slavic Village on the city’s east side.
She never married; she was engaged once, but her fiance showed up the night before the wedding and wanted her to elope. She refused, not wanting to leave however many guests and family members in a lurch the next day, so he left. And didn’t show for the wedding… she never saw him again.
She and her brother bought the little crackerbox shortly after that, and proceeded to spend their lives there. I never did discover what he did for a living; Wanda, for her part, made a career of working in a drug store warehouse… must’ve made for a decent pension, if nothing else, and it obviously had considerable influence on her late-in-life shopping patterns.
The nursing home decided that Wanda and her brother were “Residents of the Month” one time, so she had to find memorabilia that could be used for a story in the house newsletter… she came up with a few odds and ends that included a photo of her when she was in her 20s; she was a seriously beautiful young woman, looked a lot like a young Liz Taylor, in fact… as I was looking at her picture, I guess she anticipated me doing a then-and-now thing in my head because she said “I spent years and years drinking, and drinking a lot… it made me old and hunched my back.” She said it so matter-of-factly that I had no response… what could I say?
I picked Wanda up at the nursing home early on a Memorial Day Saturday a few years back and drove her to her house… dropped her off and went about my day, grocery runs and airport runs and folks going downtown for the rib cook-off, with a few Lakewood drunks wandering between bars thrown in for good measure… the day went by and then some, and Wanda’s phone call telling me she was ready to go back hadn’t come. I waited ’til she was an hour or so past her latest-ever call, and then I called her… no answer… called again, no answer… one more try, no answer. Shit. So I drove out to the little crackerbox house…
She must’ve heard me pulling into the driveway, because as I was walking to the door I heard her yelling that she fell… can’t get up… the doors were locked, of course…
“Help me!” “Wanda, I can’t get in!” “I can’t move!” “I’ll call the police!” “NOOOO-OOO-OOO! They’ll break my door!” “Wanda, I HAVE to call the police!” “NOOOO-OOOO-OOO!” :: she’s crying ::
I called the police; they were quick in arriving, along with an ambulance and EMT crew. They talked to her through the door and she was raising holy hell about not breaking anything… the poor guys had no choice… they used one of those small battering ram things to get the back door opened, and sure enough, she’d fallen and broken a leg. I never did figure out how long she was lying there on the floor that day.
Two things happened when the EMT guys lifted her:
Her dollar-store wig fell off. You know what? Her real hair was perfectly fine… a lovely silver, not at all thin. I’ll never know why she wore the wig… and;
Her baggy blouse rode up to her armpits… she wasn’t wearing a bra… she had a 20-year-old’s boobs and a witch’s hump on her back. Nothing has ever struck me as being more incongruous.
Wanda was in the hospital for five days after that, giving the staff a seriously hard way to go… I saw her three times in those five days and she was out of it for the most part, heavily drugged. The fourth time I went to see her, the nurse on duty told me she’d been sent to the nursing home for recovery… where, within a week, she had a heart attack, and died.
I suppose I was the closest thing Wanda had to a friend in her last couple of years, although I don’t think either of us would have called it a friendship, exactly… for me it was business mostly, plus a feeling of responsibility for her that kinda grew over time, and some degree of amusement. For her? I don’t know. I can only guess that I made one facet of life a little less worrisome for her… beyond that, what she might have felt about me is anyone’s guess.
Wanda didn’t talk all that much.
