FICTION

Real Simple

By Rachel Talbot     VOLUME 59 No. 3

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Marlie was working from home when Cathy called to ask if Marlie could babysit her mother. Babysit was Marlie’s word, but what else to call staying with the lady while the home health aide took Cathy’s father to the doctor? Cathy said she was sorry to ask, but she’d run out of options and her mother couldn’t be alone right now. Cathy had a good excuse. She lived a million miles away from their hometown, in Europe—a fact Marlie first learned from the class notes in their high school’s alumni magazine. (RAISING KIDS IN SPAIN MEANS LEARNING TO LOVE SIESTAS!) After Marlie first landed her current job at the engineering firm five years ago, she had sent an update to the magazine. But not since then.

Marlie gnawed on her fingernails. She had to finish reviewing a structural analysis of a series of arch bridges by the end of the day. The deadline was artificially imposed—in Marlie’s opinion—by her supervisor, Jocelyn, whom Marlie knew to be less qualified than she was, and who lauded over her fiefdom like a petty vassal. Marlie worked from home whenever she could.

I can’t stay long, she had told Cathy, who gushed her appreciation, insisting they should catch up some time soon, even as they both knew that wasn’t going to happen.



While Marlie was in her bathroom getting ready, Cathy’s dad left a phone message asking when she would arrive. Hadn’t Cathy told him? When Marlie returned the call, a voice, seemingly far from the receiver, answered: “Is it the phone or the door?”

“Hello?” Marlie said.

“The phone. You’re holding the phone.” This was another voice, loud and forthright.

“Hello? It’s Marlie Stein. I spoke to your daughter? I’ll be there in half an hour.”

The distant voice said, “I think it’s the door.”

The loud voice responded, “You’re holding the phone!”

It was a regular Abbott and Costello routine over there.

Marlie cleared her desktop, putting loose pens and papers into the beige, basketweave storage stool which fit securely under her desk. She considered telling Jocelyn her report would be late and she’d just have to deal with it. But who was she kidding? She’d be up all night rather than stand up to Jocelyn. With her laptop and a magazine in her tote bag, Marlie left to mind Cathy’s mom.



The health aide greeted Marlie at the door, clearly the owner of the loud voice Marlie had heard on the phone. She wore a pink V-neck and a necklace with a word written in indecipherable script, nestled in her considerable chest. The narrow entryway forced them into an awkward shuffle before the aide led the way down a murky hallway. The floorboards muttered under Marlie’s feet. The ceilings were high, and the moldings were thick and undefined with decades of paint and a fuzz of dust. It was like entering a cave.

The hallway opened into a cramped kitchen where an old woman sat in a motorized wheelchair at an off-white Formica table. She had only strips of pale hair combed back over her scalp, which reflected the light from a yellowing ceiling fixture. A folded white towel was draped over her lap. How could this ancient woman be Cathy’s mother? Marlie’s own mother had an active life and regular appointments with her hairdresser. In fact, her mom’s days were plastered with appointments. She was the busiest person Marlie knew without a job.

“Hello Mrs. Fornay. I’m Marlie.” She didn’t expect Cathy’s parents to remember their daughter’s nondescript high school friend.

Cathy’s mother looked up at her with blue, startled eyes. “Greta. Call me Greta.”

The aide was at the sink, rinsing something. “She should only have bland foods.”

Did the aide think Marlie was a professional caregiver?

Greta’s arms were braided with veins that ended in two knobbed hands. Marlie watched uneasily as she reached out and hooked a hand onto a wide-mouthed glazed mug in front of her on the table. Her fingers looked fashioned from screws and nuts assembled in haste by a wicked scientist. Greta brought the mug, quavering, to her pale lips: a high-wire act. That the contents didn’t spill into her lap seemed a small miracle.

“Bouillon,” Greta said, presumably referring to the drink. “It reminds me of childhood. Did you have bouillon as a child?” She looked up at Marlie, a dash of a smile across her lips. The mug was now suspended between the table and Greta’s mouth until she extended her arm, successfully landing the mug on the table. Marlie sighed audibly.

Cathy’s father entered the room bent over a walker, looking only barely heartier than Greta.

“She’s all clean,” the nurse said, and Mr. Fornay’s eyes shifted quickly away from Marlie’s.

“She needs to stay in the chair,” continued the aide, looking at her phone. “Where’s the car? I called the car ten minutes ago.” Her booming voice cut through the decrepit hush of the kitchen. “Type your number in.” She held her phone out to Marlie and scribbled her own number on the bottom of a legal pad lying on the kitchen table.

As Marlie typed, the phone made a noise.

“Okay, time to go,” declared the aide. Cathy’s dad rolled his squeaky walker toward the front door. If he moved this slowly, they might not be back until nightfall, Marlie thought. If she was lucky.

“Don’t let her out of the chair! She must stay in the chair!” the aide’s voice sliced through the apartment once more. The front door closed. Now, it was just the two of them.



Greta was looking at Marlie. It would be something, wouldn’t it? To look at youth when you were that old. Marlie gave Greta a pleasant smile.

“I’m trying to see you,” Greta said. Marlie’s face relaxed into a frown. “Part of this whole condition is that my eyes aren’t working that well anymore. I can no longer read.”

Marlie hadn’t read much herself since college. After a day of work, she didn’t have the energy or patience for thick, unwieldy novels and didn’t see the point. Instead, her coffee table was stacked with magazine towers—months of breezy, useful articles.

“What about audiobooks?” Marlie suggested.

“I’ve tried some of those,” Greta said without enthusiasm. “Last week, I could read headlines using a magnifier. Now, less so.” Her expression was not self-pitying, Marlie noticed. She was just conveying information.

The mug wobbled its stormy way to Greta’s lips once more.

“Do you want any?”

A fruit bowl with a bunch of aging bananas sat on the counter. It didn’t look as if anything had been updated since she was here last, some two decades earlier. Marlie was strikingly aware of the air that entered her nostrils, as if this ancient world were contagious.

Marlie’s childhood home was sold long ago. Her parents separated before Marlie entered high school. Her dad married a younger woman and promptly had twin boys. Her mom moved into a sleek condo. She bought premade lasagnas and salads and half melons wrapped in cellophane. Everything was wrapped in cellophane. Marlie’s mother had thrown away, donated, and unloaded much of the evidence of her marriage and Marlie’s childhood. Toys, books, clothes, photos. The new place was a clean slate. At her dad’s, Marlie slept in the living room on a pull-out couch, falling asleep to the bubble and hum of a tropical fish tank and the cries and gurgles of her baby brothers.

“Oh, no thank you. I’m fine,” Marlie said.

Marlie eyed the legal pad on which the aide had written her number. Above the number was a handwritten list and the date:

JUNE 10
4:05 a.m. - OXY
6:10 a.m. - TYLENOL
8 a.m. - OXY
11:15 a.m. - TYLENOL

While Marlie had eaten a low-fat sugar-free yogurt and coffee with skim milk and Sweet’N Low, Cathy’s mother had swallowed a pharmacy.

Through the kitchen doorway, Marlie glimpsed another room that looked brighter and flecked with daylight.

“Go ahead,” Greta said, following Marlie’s gaze. The motorized chair murmured behind Marlie as she walked into the other room.

All of the wall space in this new room was covered with photographs, framed art, or shelves sagging under the weight of books. None of the three armchairs or the sofa matched. Even though it was summer, a garden of Christmas cards wilted on the mantelpiece.

Turning to look at Greta, Marlie was shocked to realize that she was wearing only a diaper. No pants, just a diaper, hidden before by the towel on her lap, which must have slipped off on the way from the kitchen. Greta’s long, pale legs led to long feet knobbed like her hands and tucked under the seat of the wheelchair. Marlie looked away quickly. She thought of Mr. Fornay’s expression when the aide said Greta was “clean.” Marlie’s cheeks flushed. She felt horrified for everyone.

I’m saving up my pills. When I can’t wipe my own ass, it’s time to say good-bye, Marlie’s mother declared one Thanksgiving as she peeled back the aluminum foil on the store-bought tray of green beans almondine. I can’t bear the thought of you having to take care of me like that. But Marlie wasn’t convinced her mother’s motives were entirely altruistic. She knew she didn’t want to be seen as anything less than well-coiffed.



A lamp with visible wiring dangled over a dining room table strewn with papers, envelopes, and more books. Greta had parked herself near a bookcase. Marlie stepped closer to a cluster of framed photographs on the wall: jolly people posing at a wedding; a young couple standing arm in arm on the street of a foreign city; people seated around a long table covered with a bacchanalia level of platters, half-drunk wine bottles, fruit peels, hunks of bread.

Marlie lowered herself onto the couch’s age-flattened cushions. “Do you mind if I do a bit of work?”

“Make yourself at home.” Greta smiled.

Marlie intended to take out her laptop but instead extracted the most recent issue of Real Simple. Each month, she looked forward to sitting with a Diet Coke, a bag of Twizzlers, and her new Real Simple. The glossy, clean scenes of perfect, muted, oatmeal-colored bedrooms and kitchens organized with clear containers for everything from cereal to chocolate-covered pretzels. It might be the best hour of her whole month.

Paging through the magazine, Marlie felt Greta looking at her from her spot against the columns and entablatures of books. Had she been a college professor? Or some sort of scientist? There had always been a lot of books here, Marlie recalled. Then, she noticed Greta leaning forward, stretching toward a book on a shelf just above her head. Marlie leaped to her side.

“Can I get something for you?” Marlie kept her eyes on Greta’s face. Before Greta could respond, a buzzer sounded.

“Is that the phone?” Greta asked brightly.

“I think it’s the door. Were you expecting someone?” After she said it, she felt foolish. Who would this diaper-clad woman have invited over?

Greta was thoughtful. “I don’t think so.”

At the front door, a delivery man handed Marlie a small pharmacy bag.



Walking back down the hallway with the prescription, Marlie scanned the framed pictures surrounding her on the walls. There were more family photos, many of them. It seemed that every moment of the family’s life had been captured. Clearly a young Greta, looking proud, wearing a mortarboard. Young Greta speaking animatedly to a classroom of dark-haired, barefoot kindergartners in an unadorned classroom with windows that folded up and let in a flood of bright light; Cathy and her family in swimsuits, then snow jackets against a dramatic mountain peak, then in short-sleeved shirts, hammering nails into what looked like the beginnings of a wood structure with blooming, tropical trees overhead; Cathy and Greta, their arms entwined, Cathy’s head on her mother’s shoulder. It was the sort of pose Marlie couldn’t imagine she and her mother inhabiting. They’d never been touchy-feely.

Farther down the hall, there were framed pencil sketches, swipes of dramatic color on canvases, and more black-and-white photographs. None of the frames aligned.

Marlie had researched how to create an appealing photo gallery. She was good at the measuring and precision. She hung bright, graphic prints from Pottery Barn and West Elm above her couch. She didn’t blame her mother for downsizing and getting rid of so many of their old photos. She wouldn’t have wanted to look at them anyway.

“Did you see this one?” Greta pointed to a black-and-white photograph of a smiling, buxom woman leaning against a wall. Next to her was a ruggedly handsome man wearing a cowboy hat.

“Relatives?”

Greta angled her chair so she could see Marlie’s face. “No!” She laughed. “I bought that ages ago. What I love is how this woman loves her man so much that she will do anything for him, even let him practice throwing knives at her!”

Marlie leaned closer and saw that the man held a bunch of long knives in one hand. And the wall that the woman was leaning against was actually a slab of wood pocked with knife cuts. Not long before the photo was taken, the woman must have been leaning against that slab, arms akimbo, while the man outlined her shapely body with knives that etched the air, released from his weathered hand. Marlie had never seen anything like it before.

“Wow. What are they doing?”

“I think it’s the circus,” Greta said.

To Marlie, the woman in the photograph radiated a type of old­fashioned health, as if raised on beef and milk from her own cows and bread made from the wheat in her fields. She didn’t seem to care that she was soft and rounded. It was curious, though, owning and displaying photographs of people you didn’t even know.

Greta extended a knobby finger toward a sketch of a nude and what resembled a coffee spill creeping up the lower right corner.

“Cathy made that in college. She thought it was ruined, but I like it that way. Adds some interest.” What remained of Greta’s eyebrows rippled briefly. Marlie couldn’t see beyond the stain.

Marlie stopped before a canvas featuring a painted woman with long hair, rowing in a painted boat. She glided on glassy waters made of torn, overlapping blue papers adhered to the canvas. The water was skirted by emerald pine trees. Light dappled the water’s surface, not a creature in sight. Like the water, the forest was made of torn papers in all shades of green.

“Do you like that one?” Greta asked. She was looking at Marlie.

“Yes, I do.”

“Why do you think you like it?”

Marlie looked down at Greta, surprised by the sincerity in her voice. She looked back at the art. It was as mysterious as it was marvelous. Marlie couldn’t remember the last time someone had sought her opinion.

“I guess, I mean, the colors are pretty. I love blue.” Marlie wondered if she had disappointed Greta with such a bland response.

Marlie was all too familiar with Jocelyn’s frequent grunts of dissatisfaction when she thought Marlie had not considered a key parameter in a structure’s performance or when Jocelyn questioned her about a filing she had done. The fact that Marlie could prove Jocelyn was mistaken and that Marlie was right didn’t stem the tide of her boss’s critiques or prevent Marlie from continuing to seek her approval.

“What do you like?” Marlie asked.

“I love the textures and the colors, like you. It’s multimedia with the paint and the collage elements,” Greta replied. “So much drama. This bold woman out for adventure.” Greta’s chair headed toward the kitchen. “And a friend of mine made it, so, another reason.”

Marlie got closer to the painted woman’s face. A few simple lines of a paintbrush had somehow captured a whole, courageous person.



Marlie’s phone rang. “Hospice might come. The hospice lady has to do an assessment.” It was the aide’s baritone voice.

“Hospice?”

“She won’t take long,” the aide said.

Through the phone, Marlie could hear the echoey hollowness of a hospital corridor.

“Don’t leave until I come back.” The aide hung up before Marlie could say anything. Greta was old, but Marlie had never considered that she could be so close to death.

“The phone?” Greta asked, her expression bright and inquisitive.

Marlie swallowed. “Yes, the phone.” She held up the evidence before sliding it into her back pocket.

“I think I’d like some mango sorbet,” Greta declared.

Was sorbet a bland food?

Buried in the freezer, between a loaf of frost-covered sliced bread and an ice pack, was a partly crushed container of sorbet. Marlie scooped out a small amount and carefully handed the bowl to Greta, who immediately took a spoonful. But she didn’t seem to swallow it; rather, she held the cold sorbet in her mouth, savoring it as it melted.

“I adore mango sorbet,” Greta said.

It surprised Marlie, that someone who was dying could feel pleasure.

“Do you adore mango sorbet?” Greta continued.

Marlie’s taste buds watered at the thought of the tart sweet. Her mind was blank; she suddenly felt profoundly unsure of what she liked, let alone adored. Before she could reply, Greta’s chair rolled out of the kitchen.

“I think I’m going to lie down,” she said.

In the bedroom, there was a queen-size bed, a square blue pad visible under the tussled sheets. Greta parked herself next to the bed, and she began pushing on the armrests with both hands, leaning forward.

“Wait.” Marlie put a hand on Greta’s shoulder, which felt like nothing more than a bone, stripped of flesh and diminishing life. “Remember what the aide said? You’re not supposed to get out of the chair?”

“I’d really like to just lie down now.” Greta looked longingly at the empty bed and her deflated pillow.

“I think we have to wait. Just until the aide gets back.”

Greta’s eyes remained on the bed.

“You really have a great collection of art,” Marlie said, stalling.

“My eyesight is getting so bad. The pictures on the walls are blurry.”

What would it be like to have your world slowly erased? One day, the signs on billboards, then the label on the milk carton, and the outline of your own body in a mirror’s reflection.

“I’m not sure why I liked that picture, the one with the lake,” Marlie said. “Just looking at it . . . was nice.” She knew her words were inadequate. She was stumbling inside a befogged paper and paint landscape, ill-equipped.

“Sometimes we don’t know exactly what it is we’re responding to. It’s something deep inside. Love at first sight has no more logic,” Greta said.

An unframed canvas hung near the bedroom’s doorway—a portrait of a man, tranquil and seated, a gray dog with wrinkled skin collapsed at his feet.

“Are you looking at the one straight ahead? I painted that one,” Greta said. “It’s Louis.”

“You did?” Marlie approached the painting. Close up, she could see that Louis’s face was formed not by one color, as it had appeared from afar, but strokes of peaches and beiges, even a mossy, improbable green. His eyes rested in the near distance, most likely on the painter, his wife.

“He was very patient and sat for hours. It was back before we were married. Before Cathy.”

“You were really talented. Are talented,” Marlie added quickly. “I could never do that.”

“You could. It’s about really letting yourself see. Trusting what you see. You probably have other ways of expressing yourself.”

There was a box of mostly untouched coloring books in Marlie’s apartment. All those tiny, blank spaces were supposed to be so soothing and pleasurable to fill with a rainbow of thin-tipped markers. But Marlie found it hard to start, fearing that she would choose the wrong color or ruin the symmetry of the designs. She could almost hear her mother saying to her younger self, Don’t color outside the lines!

Greta was still looking at the bed. “I really just want to lie down.”

Nothing Marlie had learned had prepared her. The moment felt like a cruel test she was going to fail. There were no numbered lists for how to deny a dying person a wish when they had so little time left to be granted wishes at all. Giving her a couple spoonfuls of sorbet was one thing but moving her after being told not to seemed more problematic. Dangerous even.

Marlie took a deep breath. Maybe, once she got Greta onto the bed, the supine position would be innocuous, ameliorative even.

“Let me just straighten this.” She repositioned the blue incontinence pad and picked up the pillow in its pale pink case, tossing it against her body to fluff it. In her fingers, the pillowcase was as soft as anything she had ever touched. Once back on the bed, the pillow resumed its flatness.

Marlie stood in front of Greta and bent her knees. She closed her arms around Greta’s delicate torso, as fragile as the shell of a crab. Greta smelled of ginger ale and the warm, old smell of sleep. She looked in Greta’s eyes. “Ready?” Even though the question was more to herself. “I’ll count to three. One, two . . .  ” She lifted. The thing was, Marlie could feel Greta straining, making an effort to put herself into Marlie’s arms. With as little strength as she had, she was trying.

Marlie pivoted and then lowered Greta onto the bed. Pulling away, she realized that Greta’s legs were awkwardly twisted, and she felt a wave of panic. She slipped her hands under Greta’s calves and slowly began to straighten them. Greta whimpered.

Marlie stopped, the weight of Greta’s dry, precious calves in her hands. “I’m so sorry. I’m not sure what to do.” Moving in either direction felt merciless. Greta’s pewter blue eyes conveyed a garbled message Marlie couldn’t interpret. It was a mistake. She should have insisted she stay in the chair. It was this lack of grit that Marlie hated in herself.

Lifting points, weight distribution. When she thought about it for a moment, it made sense. She’d have to put one hand underneath Greta’s thigh, and one under the calf of the same leg and lift each leg individually. Greta’s eyes were now closed. Her face was pinched from the strain of her tangled limbs. Marlie almost bit through her lip she was focusing so hard. A film of anxious sweat formed on her brow and under her arms before she slid one flat hand underneath Greta’s right thigh. The skin was as dry as her calves and as soft as the pillowcase. Marlie detected a faint, acrid smell and baby powder. She continued, carefully raising and then lowering Greta’s right leg so it lay straight. Greta did not protest, and so Marlie did the same with the left.

Both of Greta’s elegant legs lay straight out on the bed as if ready to receive the warmth of the sun on the bank of a pine-circled lake. Greta smiled up at Marlie. A raised mole nestled in a crease of delicate skin under Greta’s eye.

“We did it,” Greta said. Her faint eyebrows rose in a small wave. Marlie felt such a tenderness inside, as if Greta had said she loved her.

She lifted the bedsheet and let it parachute gently over Greta’s body. Seeing no other option, Marlie sat in Greta’s motorized chair; the seat was puffy and cushioned and still warm.

The bedroom had one large window, and the sun had intensified, casting a bright glow on the caramel brown floorboards. The second hand of a bedside clock advanced decisively with little clicks. Marlie wondered if Greta was once as enamored of Louis as the farm-raised young woman was of her knife-throwing, circus-performing boyfriend.

“So much better lying down,” Greta said. The outline of her upper lip made a lopsided V under her nose. In her skin, Marlie could see cream the color of French vanilla ice cream, the gray of an unearthed pebble, and a faint purple-blue just under the surface, like an intricate, faded blueprint. An improbable breeze, like the breeze spreading over water, lifted the small hairs framing Marlie’s face.

Who would she be, if she had had a mother like Greta? The woman lying before Marlie couldn’t be the same as the one that Cathy saw. She couldn’t possibly see the subtle shades and variations that Marlie could see. If she did, Marlie felt sure Cathy would be here now, seated at her mother’s side.

What had it been that she had liked about that print made with paint and paper? Thinking on it, Marlie could hear the stuttering of a loon filtered through the pines along the lake. She could smell the deep greenness of the trees and the minerally cool water and see the brushes of color forming the determined eyes and wind-tossled hair of the lake-faring woman. It felt more real that her own dimpled hand resting on Greta’s bedsheet and more vivid than the whole blurry, achromatic tunnel of her past.

She closed her eyes and saw it clearly. The woman in the boat would dip one hand into the gentle lake, forming—briefly—a trail with her opened fingers. Once her boat reached the shore, she would stand up, not teetering at all—her linen dress gently wrinkled and flowing. She would keep her feet bare so that she could feel the smooth, yielding sand as well as the pricks from the jumble of fallen pine needles on the forest bed. To make a path for herself, she would begin to peel the layers of green paper that formed the trees and branches and leaves. Her fingers would feel for the edges. Her nails would scratch to lift each piece. She would pull and tear, yank and claw, discarding the paper scraps, coiled and knotty, on the ground, to make her own way forward.

•     •     •


TO READ MORE FICTION, PICK UP A COPY OF VOL 59 No. 3




RACHEL TALBOT’s fiction has appeared in Ponder Review, Action, Spectacle, and Cleaver. Her stories have been nominated for a PEN / Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and a Pushcart Prize. Her nonfiction has appeared in Parents.com and NextTribe. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Stony Brook University. She is thrilled that this is her second story to be published in Southern Humanities Review.


VOLUME 59 No. 3