The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

it weren’t for you being here, I’d want to cry and go straight home. How many times did you have to put the bottom sheet on your bed? I didn’t get mine right until the tenth time.”

“I did mine satisfactorily the seventh,” June laughed. “But then I’m two years older than you are, so I can’t help being smarter.”

Bed-making was a difficult job. First you whisked the mattress⁠—away from you lest you get a germ on your clean white apron⁠—and turned it and whisked some more. Then you whisked a carbolic solution over each side of the mattress and washed the remainder of the bed till there wasn’t a speck of dust on it. You did this to six beds before you returned to the beginning of the line to make the first one.

The sheets were folded in a certain way so that they could be unfolded and spread out on the bed in a certain way. There was no flapping open as you did at home with a sheet or tablecloth to spread it smoothly. That might disturb germs that were in the air and set them in circulation.

After the sheet was smoothed out on the bed, you tucked in one side, tucking with broad sweeps from the middle. Then you went around to the other side and the sheet was so wide that when you tucked it there, you tucked that side so that it fitted into the other, as an envelop flap fits inside of an envelope. At either end what was left over of the sheet on the underside of the mattress was inserted under the sheet on the upper side of the mattress, was folded to form a flap and pinned carefully and neatly with two straight pins to the mattress. There was a certain way of putting in the pins too. You see what a difficult job it was.

And you see also what June and Adele meant when they said they had to make the bed seven and ten times before the head nurse was satisfied. It was very discouraging to put the sheet on to the best of your ability and then have the head nurse come along and point out several wrinkles. Wrinkles, it would seem, were very irritating to sick people.

When you had been told to try again, off the sheet had to come. Not quickly. You didn’t just take out the pins and pull the sheet off and begin laboriously to put it on again. No, it had to be folded as it was taken off, and unfolded again to put it on. So many times that you could never forget how hospital linen was folded.

Making a bed, June decided, was much more difficult than writing a book review, and her satisfaction when her bed had been made for the seventh time and approved was much greater than she had enjoyed when seeing a book review in print with her name signed to it.

June and Adele worked in an empty ward. A wide door opened into another ward from which every now and then came the hot, sharp cry of a patient. It was good to be working there. There was even a strange satisfaction in hearing a patient cry because when the cries were stilled you knew that something useful had been done.

Miss Kelley was the probationers’ instructor. She was a little white-faced nurse with prim firm ways. Her eyes were large and intensely serious, the color of an ocean on a dull winter day. Her hair was mouse colored. She was sweetly firm and could be very forceful. June heard her voice from behind a screen, calming an hysterical patient. “Turn right over on your side now and let the nurse attend to you! The idea of your making all this trouble!” There was quiet immediately.

There was the same insistence in the touch of her hands. She was not strong but she could move the helpless bulk of a woman who weighed three times as much as she did. Strength seemed to pour from her fingertips into a patient.

When, after several days of bed-making, June gave her first morning toilet, she felt that it was an event and an accomplishment. Before you could give a morning toilet, you had to be given a tray with many bottles and sponges and toilet articles on it. Trays were fascinating with the little jars of salve and swabs and bandages and liquid green soap and mouthwash⁠—many more things. You had to go over your tray every morning to see that the other nurses did not steal things from it.

June’s first patient was an old Canadian woman, ninety-four years old. Granny objected to being washed saying that she had been bathed the day before and that at her time of life she did not see why she had to be pestered with soap and water the way she was. Argument was useless so she began to kick and fight, clawing at June with birdlike hands.

Another nurse said, “Can’t you see, Granny, that Miss Henreddy only wants to make you comfortable? She does it because she loves you.”

“Love be damned,” said Granny, loudly, stridently. Her defiance was glorious, June thought, and she laughed joyfully as she put her hands under the armpits of the old lady and tried to persuade her to lie down. In the scuffle the bedclothes had been heaped in the middle of the bed. Granny perched there, sitting on the end of her spine, her arms clasped about her bare and scrawny knees and blazed at June with eyes as dark as those of a baby. Her cap hung over one ear, displaying a large bald spot surrounded by a queer fringe of grey hair which was matted and awry, standing up like a field of ferns. She gave way to June at last and allowed herself to be bathed, crying to herself all the while like a whimpering monkey. The ghastly youthfulness of her false teeth in her