by Homes, A. M.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss the patients—in fact, perhaps I’ve said too much already. It’s a little of this, a little of that—there are advances being made every day. It’s a lot about movement—getting them up and out. Short of true paralysis, there’s no reason a person should be in bed or sitting down all day…and for those who are too weak, we start them off just hanging up.” She leads me down the hall to a room and opens the door. Dozens of long springs hang from the ceiling, and each pair of springs is attached to a modified straitjacket/canvas lace-up vest, and laced into the vests are old people. They hang like limp puppets, half standing, half bouncing, half dancing to music, as physical therapists make their way from person to person. “They seem to like it,” the woman says. “We invented the units here—weighted standing-assist devices. It cuts down on the respiratory illnesses—better lung function.”
“They seem pleased,” I say, unable to get over the sight of a roomful of “suspended” elderly.
“Enough show-and-tell for one day,” the woman says, closing the door. “Are you going to go down to the YMCA and look for your mother? They just left, so you should be able to catch them.”
I have to pay fifteen dollars and fill out a liability waiver before I can enter the pool area of the YMCA, and the fact that I am not going swimming seems irrelevant to the person at the desk.
I enter through the men’s locker room, an unappealing old green tile space dotted with male flesh and the smell of sneakers.
As soon as I enter the pool area, I am sent back—told that I must take off my shoes and socks and wash my feet in the shower before entering.
“Hi, Mom,” I call out when I get into the pool area, my voice echoing off the tile walls and then absorbed into the chloramide fumes rising off the pool’s surface. “Hi, Mom,” I repeat.
The entire class turns to face me. “Hi,” all the ladies in the pool answer.
My mother is wearing a latex cap, the same kind she used to wear thirty years ago—white with large rubbery flowers in full bloom bursting off the top. Could it be the same bathing cap she’s had all along? She swims towards me and, considering that not so long ago she was bedridden, it’s disorienting to watch her kicking, swinging her arms through the water’s surface. She breaststrokes to the edge of the pool, where I find myself staring down into an oddly open face—framed by the latex flowers—and a deep, wrinkled cleavage.
“You look great,” I say. “How are you?”
“Fantastic,” she says.
A barrel-chested man swims to her side.
“Hello, son,” he says.
“Hello,” I say.
“Good to see you,” he says.
“You too,” I say, going along with it.
“How’s your sister?” he asks.
“Good,” I say, even though I have no sister.
“I’m very worried about your mother,” he says. “I can’t find her anywhere.” He speaks in a booming voice, like a former radio announcer.
“You can’t find her because she’s gone,” my mother reminds him. “But you’ve got me now.”
“You have each other?” I ask.
“Yes,” they say.
“And what about Dad?” I am confused, suddenly a child again.
“Your father’s been dead for years—I’m entitled to have a life,” my mother says.
“Would you two like to come back to class?” the instructor asks, and they turn around and swim back to class, their diapers poking out from under their suits.
On the way home, I stop at the A&P. It’s not my regular store, I just happened to go there. A woman seems to be following me through the store, everywhere I go.
“Are you following me?”
“Am I?”
“Are you?”
“Hard to know,” she says. “Most people go up and down the aisles,” she says, “they go row by row; unless you have a system of your own, you’re bound to see the same people twice.”
“Sorry,” I say. “Have we met before?”
She shrugs, as though it’s irrelevant. “What kind of cake do you like?” she asks. We’re in the frozen-foods section, stopped by the desserts. “Plain pound cake, or something with frosting?”
“I’ve never bought cake,” I say, and it’s true. “If I wanted cake, I think I’d go to a bakery, but I’m not really a cake person.”
“I think young people like frosting, old people like plain,” she says, putting a plain Sara Lee pound cake into her cart.
“You don’t look old,” I say.
“I am, inside,” she says.
“So how old are you?” I notice that her body is thin, sinewy, more like that of a child than a grown woman. Her hair is long, thin, almost stringy—dirty blond.
“Guess,” she says.
“Twenty-seven,” I say.
“I’m thirty-one,” she says. “You have a lousy sense of what’s what.”
I push my cart onward—perhaps I should be grateful for her attention, but at the moment I’m not, I’m distracted—dog biscuits, cat litter…
She intercepts me again: “You’re an animal lover?”
“The cat had kittens,” I say.
“I always wanted pets,” she says, “but my parents hated the idea: ‘They track in dirt,’ my father would say. ‘It’s all I can do to manage you and your sister,’ my mother would say.”
“Well, you’re thirty-one now,” I say, “so I guess it’s up to you.”
“I recently had a cat,” she says. And then pauses. “Can I meet your kittens? Can I? How about I come to your place for hors d’oeuvres?” She throws some frozen cheese puffs into her cart.
I don’t really know what to say—or, more precisely, I don’t know how to say no.
And so, when I pull out of the A&P parking lot, she is behind me, following me—almost bumper to bumper. Her car is as nondescript as her person—a white compact of indeterminate age—one of a million. As I’m driving, I’m realizing that I didn’t pick her up, she picked me up, and it makes me nervous. Why is she following me? There’s a reason people used to be “introduced,” a reason why polite society is called polite and why it evolved the way it did—with great castle balls and formal letters of introduction.
She parks behind me in the driveway and comes in carrying a bag of her frozen things, asking if she can put it in the freezer for the moment, and suddenly it’s entirely awkward. It’s not like she’s stopping by to borrow a roasting pan, or so I can show her how to make tarte tatin.
Tessie barks.
“Who is this big bad doggy?” she asks, in a babyish voice.
“It’s okay, Tessie, it’s a woman from the produce section who wanted to come home with me,” I say.
“You invited me over,” she says, still bent and talking to Tessie. “He said, ‘Do you want to come to my house and play with the pussy cats?’”
“I don’t think so.”
“Um-hummm,” she says to the dog, who wags her tail, grateful for attention.
I put away my groceries and ask if she’d like some coffee or tea.
“How about a glass of wine?” she says.
“Sure.” I go into George’s wine closet, feeling like I’m raiding the supply chest; I go in hoping to find something unremarkable—i.e., cheap. “You know,” I say as I’m digging around, “it’s not really my house.”
“Oh,” she says. “You seem to know where everything is.”
“It’s my brother’s; I’m long-term house-sitting.” I find a Long Island Chardonnay that looks like a gift someone brought to a cookout rather than something George got from his “wine dealer.” “So do you do things like this frequently?” I ask.
“Like what?”
“Meet men in the grocery store and follow them home?”
“No,” she says. “I’m just killing time.”
“Until what—the five o’clock movie at the Yonkers cinema?”
“Where are the kittens?” she asks.
“U
pstairs,” I say, taking her to the master bedroom, which has been not so much converted as taken over as the cat nursery.
“Oh my God,” she says, getting down on her hands and knees and crawling towards the kitten pen. “They’re adorable.” The kittens are in fact adorable; they’re now walking around a bit and playing, and the queen seems willing to allow me to play with them…. I change the towels in their box.
“Lots of laundry,” I say.
She picks one up and rubs it against her face—the queen mother seems unhappy.
“Best not to pick them up,” I say.
“Sorry.”
I am watching her down on her hands and knees in the rather smelly “cat room.”
“Do you have a husband?”
She shakes her head no.
“A boyfriend?”
“Former, not current,” she says.
We play with the kittens for a few minutes and then go back downstairs. Reflexively, I turn the television on. It’s as though I need backup, more voices, the simulation of a cocktail party. A soon as I push the button, I think of George, who always had the television on.
I look at the woman. “There’s a reason your mother said not to talk to strangers,” I say.
“Can we change the channel?” she asks.
I’m thinking she means change the subject. “Sure,” I say, pretending to push a button on my stomach—bing, channel changed. “Are you hungry?”
“No, I mean really, can we change the channel? I need to, like, clear my head. Can we put on something different, like not Headline News but a real show, you know, like Two and a Half Men? You know—cheerful?”
The show that starred a cokehead hooker-abuser—cheerful? I think, but say nothing. “Yeah, sure.” And I change the channel. “You know it’s not real people laughing,” I say.
“It was once,” she says, and there’s nothing more to say. “It’s kind of cold in here.”
“Would you like a sweater?” In the front hall closet there are still some of Jane’s things—I give the girl a soft magenta sweater.
“So you’re married,” she says.
“My brother’s wife’s. She passed away—keep it.”
“It’s cashmere,” she says, as though obligated to disclose the value of what I’m giving away.
When she puts it on, I remember Jane wearing it, and I remember noticing the curve of her breast and feeling compelled to touch it, wondering if it felt as good as it looked, delicate, sexy. Now, on this other girl, the look is different, but it still has a special effect.
“Hors d’oeuvres?” she asks.
“You want me to make your cheese puffs?”
“What else have you got?” she asks in a way that makes me wonder what she bought the cheese puffs for—like she’s saving them for something better.
I dig around in the freezer and find some old pigs-in-blankets and pop them into the toaster oven.
“Piping hot,” I announce when I bring them out eleven minutes later—at the third commercial break.
“I didn’t know they made these for home use,” she says.
“Sorry,” I say, not understanding her point.
“I thought pigs-in-blankets was, like, something only a caterer could get.”
She dips the hot dog into the Dijon mustard and pops it in her mouth. “Wow, I like it. Quite a kick. What is that?”
“Dijon mustard?” And all I’m thinking is, how can you never have tasted Dijon mustard?
When the snacks are gone, we watch a little more TV, and then she declares she’s still hungry. “Who delivers around here?”
“No idea,” I say.
“I know there’s pizza,” she says.
“Had it for lunch,” I say. “Chinese?”
“Do they deliver?”
I call my usual place. “It’s me,” I say, “Mr. Half Hot and Sour/Half Egg Drop. Do you by any chance deliver?”
“You sick, you can’t come in?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, so what you want?”
I look at the woman. “A double order of my usual soup, a couple of egg rolls, an order of moo-shu pork, and sweet-and-sour shrimp. Anything else?” I ask the woman.
“Extra fortune cookies,” she says, loud enough for the man taking the order to hear.
“How many you want?”
“Six,” she says.
I give them the address and phone number and turn on the outside light. And then, a few minutes later, out of small talk and worried they won’t find the house, I suggest we wait outside. We sit on the front stoop. There’s something wonderfully melancholic about being outside on a spring evening watching the vanishing sunset against the deepening blue; the outlines of the old thick trees, full with bright fresh leaves, the surprising, gentle tickle of a breeze, and it somehow feels so good to be alive.
I breathe deeply.
“It’s like when we were kids,” she says. “We’d eat dinner early, before Dad came home, and then sit outside and wait for the Good Humor truck—my favorites were Strawberry Shortcake or Chocolate Éclair.”
“We weren’t allowed ice cream from the truck,” I say, suddenly remembering. “My mother thought that was how children got polio.”
Tessie is working the yard, sniffing everything, bushes, the daffodils, lilies that are pushing up through the dirt; she pees a little here and a little there.
“She’s really well trained,” the woman says. “She doesn’t seem the least bit interested in going in the street.”
“She hates the street.”
Mr. Gao, the owner of the Chinese restaurant, pulls up to the curb in a Honda SUV with the name of the restaurant on the side.
I go down to the car. Mr. Gao is at the wheel, and his wife sits beside him, holding the heavy brown paper bag filled with dinner—the inside of the car smells delicious.
Even though she could easily hand me the bag through the window, the wife gets out of the car. She is wearing her Chinese hostess dress. “Ding-dong, delivery,” she says, pretending to ring an invisible doorbell.
“How have you been?” I ask.
“Good,” she says. “We no see you in long time.”
“I’ve been busy. Who is minding the store?”
“Mr. Foo, the headwaiter. He has been with us a long time.” She glances up at the house. “Nice place.”
“Thank you,” I say, as I take money out of my wallet.
I pay her, and she hands me the bag and then dips both hands in her side pockets and pulls them out, fists clenched.
“Pick a hand,” she says.
I tap her right hand; she turns it over and opens. Her palm is filled with the white mints with the jelly center that they have at the cash register. “Trick-or-treat for you,” she says.
“Thanks,” I say, popping one in my mouth. She pours the rest into my hand—they are kind of sweaty-sticky.
The woman is hanging back, high up on the lawn, near the door, as though she doesn’t want to be seen.
“Come visit soon,” the woman from the restaurant says.
“I will, and thank you.”
I watch as they drive off, and then turn back towards the house. The woman has already gone inside and is in the kitchen, looking for plates and silverware.
While we’re eating, she asks if I’ve ever stolen anything.
“Like what?”
“Like anything?”
“No, but it sounds as though perhaps you have.”
She nods.
“Okay, so what’s the biggest thing you’ve ever stolen?”
She stops to think for a moment and takes a bite of her moo-shu roll-up; cabbage and soy sauce squirt out. “A thirty-seven-inch plasma TV,” she says, still chewing.
“Under your coat?”
“No, in a rented car; I had to have it; I’d lived with a thirteen-inch for so long—no remote. It was time to get with the program.”
“Do I need to worry that the real reason you came here is becaus
e you’re casing the joint and you and your boyfriend are going to come back later with a U-Haul and clean me out?”
She looks up. “Oh no, I don’t steal from people, only stores. I would never take something from someone I know.”
“Do you know me?”
“You know what I mean, an individual as opposed to a corporation.”
We finish eating, and then she neatly packs up the leftovers, puts them back in the brown bag, and tucks it into the fridge.
“Time for cookies,” she says.
“Would you like some tea?” I ask.
“More wine,” she says, cracking a fortune cookie. She opens one and then another and another, each time apparently not pleased with the result, until, finally, the fourth fortune reads, “Your Good Fortune Starts Now.”
She feeds cookie bits to Tessie until I say no more: otherwise she’ll get a tummy ache.
We retreat back to the sofa and watch more television, and I find myself thinking that I now understand what the perfect use for TV is—it gives people who have nothing in common something they can do together and talk about: it gives us familiar territory. I have a new respect for what George used to do, how television binds us as Americans—we are what we watch.
“Soon I have to go,” she says.
I nod. I’m not thinking about sex, but apparently that’s part of the deal—on the menu, right after orange sections and fortune cookies. Without warning, she dive-bombs me on the sofa with heavy wet kisses, her mouth open and oddly gifted: I can’t help but respond. She’s thrusting her tongue into me and then pulls back for a moment, lifts her shirt over her head—and essentially gifts me with herself. Her breasts are bigger, fuller than I would have expected—she wears a bra that is dark blue and lacy, which sets off her pale skin. Rather deftly she’s down on me, wrestling my stiffening situation from its hiding place, but when I reach for the button of her jeans—she shakes her head no. I obey. The rest is frenetic, urgent, with a lot of grappling and sliding off the leather cushions and onto the floor. And then I come and it’s over. I am left, spilled, my dick shrinking back in my lap like messy melted ice cream, and she is up, putting her shirt back on like this is just the way it goes. She walks into the kitchen, collects her frozen stuff from the freezer, and pops back into the living room, where I’m still on the floor. “See ya,” she says, like it’s all so easy.