The Transfer — Summary

The basin is blue plastic, bought at the drugstore on Maple for four dollars, and it lives on the dresser next to equipment worth more than the car.

It is a Thursday in March, a year and some past the Saturday of the long table. Eileen Kovar is seventy-eight and the bed is downstairs now, in the front room, where the light is, which was Joanie’s argument. Marcia comes Tuesdays and Thursdays, one to five. She is fifty-eight, has done this work for thirty years around Muskingum County, and drives a Corolla with 240,000 miles on it.

The transfer is first, bed to chair. The lift does it, in forty seconds, taking Eileen up off the bed in its sling the way weather takes up water, no strain anywhere in it, and settling her at a speed no person’s arms could hold steady, slower than gentle. Thirty years of other people’s bodies are in Marcia’s shoulders, and she stands through the forty seconds with her hands out, spotting a machine that does not miss, because her hands will not stay down and she has stopped instructing them to.

What the lift does not do is the part before and the part after. Some Thursdays the sling is a thing being put on her and Eileen’s arms say no to it, and the lift cannot meet the no; it can only wait, patient as a hallway. Today Marcia meets it with the fair-pig story, and the arms come through the sling on the pig’s name. And a body set down is not a body arranged: Marcia’s hands do the arranging, a dozen small motions with no names, knowing things about this body she could not put in a report if the report had a field for them, which it does not.

The wound schedule says the heel at two, and the house keeps it totally: dressing lot numbers, counted gauze, a chart of this heel across six weeks finer grained than anything a hospital floor kept for anybody in the century Marcia trained in. The heel itself is Marcia’s. She does it talking, the talk over the procedure like a cloth over a lamp, her hands quick and completely serious underneath. Between one and five on Tuesdays and Thursdays the house goes quiet in a particular way, as a good charge nurse goes quiet around a better hand.

The bath is a bed bath in the chair, and no machine anywhere in the room moves. There is a bathing appliance for sale that does this; the pamphlet is in the accordion file under the rubber band, and that is where it lives. The lifting went to the machine the day the machine could lift. The washing had somewhere else to go and did not go. Nobody decided that with a sentence; it got decided as a grease line on a shop floor gets decided, by everyone, with no meeting. Denise does her mother’s hair with the water cup, slow, over the towel, as it was once done to her over the kitchen sink, and for the eight minutes of it the room contains nothing that needs a lot number.

Halfway through, Eileen says, clearly, to Marcia: you have good hands. The sentences come rarely now and land where they land. Marcia says I know it, which is the right answer, and the only person in the room who could not have produced it is the one taking the water temperature.

The good sentence goes in the chart, the house writing down what the disease unwrites. Denise rinses the basin and sets it back on the dresser. It will be used again Saturday, by her, alone, the water at whatever her wrist says, and the house will not correct it, having learned, somewhere in these two years, which temperatures in this room are its to take.