Exit Lines

by Joan Barfoot

  But Ruth is surely singular here.

  “I did not have a house,” Greta tells her. “Our home was the apartment in the upstairs of a house. Only because of my girls can I be here.” Yes, yes, as she keeps mentioning. “So I have wondered about fitting in.”

  “Me too, I suppose, although I bet we can both hold our own.”

  That is kind of Ruth to say. “There is also being used to living alone, and now being with so many people, do you think about that?”

  Of course Ruth has considered that; for her own, still very personal reasons, not just because everyone here must have had to contemplate in advance these new, quite different circumstances. “But there’s nothing wrong with spending whatever time we need in our own suites. In a way it’ll be interesting, figuring out our preferences from scratch, as we go along.”

  What is from scratch? “I have thought also I shall miss watching the children going to school past my apartment—all the sounds of the young.”

  Good heavens, what isn’t Greta fretting about? But “I expect there’ll be lots of young visitors,” is all Ruth says.

  “And don’t forget,” comes a dry voice from behind, causing Ruth to jolt her head automatically leftward, causing in turn a great cascading of pain across her shoulders and right down her spine, “don’t forget the schoolchildren who I gather will be turning up to amuse us. Keep us soft-hearted. Or soft-headed. Have you seen this thing?” The voice belongs to a narrow woman in pale linen trousers, white blouse, and two slim coppery bracelets, waving the same sheet of paper that was waiting in everyone’s suites when they moved in. “How do you do, I’m Sylvia Lodge. May I join you?”

  “Yes, of course, please. I am Greta Bauer.”

  “Ruth Friedman.” Ruth notes arthritis that looks rheumatoid, the cumbersome, misshapen joints in a different category from her own osteo. She knows Sylvia Lodge, as a matter of fact, or used to when Sylvia, as Ruth moments ago predicted, was on her agency’s board and Ruth was occasionally called on to flesh out, as it were, the blood and guts behind the agency’s numbers: this many homes investigated, these charges laid, those families under close supervision and counselling, these children seized, injured, once or twice dead.

  So: this Sylvia Lodge a board-joining Lady Bountiful. Who looks puzzled, as if realizing she should recognize Ruth; maybe Greta too, for all Ruth knows. Sylvia waves her piece of paper again. “Have you taken a look at this so-called activities schedule?”

  “Yes,” Greta says, “I thought to learn knitting, or to crochet. I have not ever made anything except for my girls’ clothes when they were small, and I might like to.”

  Each day of the month is blocked out in a large square, and each square tells what’s organized for that day. “Knitting group”—Greta’s choice, evidently—“10, crafts room!” Or “Word games, 2, lounge!” or “Music by The Golden Cowboys, 2, dining room!” Wednesday afternoons there’s to be “Bingo, 1:30, dining room!” and on Friday and Saturday nights “Movies, 7:30, library!” Plus there are “Mall outing, 10!” or “Spring countryside tour, 2!” Next Tuesday, “Sylvester School Grade 6 Choir, 10, lounge!” “All those exclamation marks!” Sylvia says. “As if punctuation will make any damn thing interesting. Sorry, Mrs. Bauer, I didn’t mean to insult knitting. But really, if a person were depending on that girl for entertainment, the days would be long and uninspiring, don’t you think?” That girl is the recreation director, Linda Swain, a muscular, peppy blonde who could be somebody’s granddaughter. Great-granddaughter. An optimist, it appears. “Honest to God, we’re just old, we’re not morons.”

  “Call me Greta, please.”

  “I expect,” Ruth says, “it’s hard to program for so many different kinds of people. I mean, of just the three of us, only Greta’s fingers look as if they can manage knitting. Maybe the activities are for people in the middle.”

  “Or the lowest common denominator. Although I do understand the desire for productive new skills—perhaps you’ll have knitted up new sweaters for us all by Christmas, Greta?”

  Sylvia Lodge seems to have a strange sense of humour. “Or if I am not so clever, perhaps a plain scarf?”

  “Anyway, nothing’s mandatory,” Ruth says. “Maybe the schedule’s just a fallback, and they figure most people will have in mind using their time in their own ways.”

  “Such as?” Sylvia asks.

  “I don’t know. Keeping up with what they’re already interested in. And thinking, I suppose. Preparing. Focusing forward.” A curious remark. Sylvia frowns. “How did you decide to move here?” Ruth asks, leaving unsaid but perhaps not unheard, if you’re going to be critical right off the bat?

  “A pre-emptive strike. I thought I should take matters into my own hands before anybody had a chance to do it for me. Or to me. I’ve taken a couple of spills, and as you can see I have awful arthritis, so I foresaw more and more trouble getting around without breaking bones.” Sylvia leaves unsaid, but not unheard, although not as much difficulty as you, you poor crippled thing.

  Nevertheless Ruth notes Sylvia Lodge’s inclination toward pre-emptive strikes.

  “Me also,” says Greta, “I am here to be safe. I have had two heart attacks, and to think of another and not being found, it frightened me, and my girls, too. Do you have children?”

  “A daughter. I guess I should call, let her know where I am.”

  “She does not know?” Greta is startled; Ruth, too. This sounds like yet another way to abuse a child, even though any daughter of Sylvia Lodge’s will be a long way from childhood.

  “Not yet. I didn’t feel it was a matter for debate. Now it’s done, I’m hoping she’ll be grateful to be spared all the trouble.”

  “Goodness, my daughters would not have liked that. They have been a great help.”

  Ruth moved unaided. It’s not an impossible thing to do. Her sympathies slide back toward Sylvia; Greta may be one of those women who lean on their children for every damned thing. Then again, obligation is different from love. Maybe Greta’s daughters, as she suggests, just love her to death. Maybe Sylvia is simply cold. Ruth shivers. “Are you chilly?” Greta asks. “I could get you a sweater.”

  “Thanks, but I’m fine.” It’s hard not to be warm in a track suit, and track suits are pretty much Ruth’s uniform these days, if only because most of the time she can get in and out of them on her own. Today’s is a bright and misleadingly athletic red. She also owns a purple one, and another in a rather unpleasant green shade verging on lime. Her theory is, now that she’s gotten so stooped, people could easily trip over her like a crack in a sidewalk. As Greta nearly did anyway.

  “Scheisse,” Greta whispers.

  “What?”

  “Pardon me. Someone coming into the lounge.”

  “You know him?”

  “I did once.”

  The man slouched in the wheelchair looks as sullen as one of Ruth’s unhappy adolescents. A younger fellow, middle-aged and dressed in a dark suit, is pushing him, pausing, eyes landing on Sylvia, Greta and Ruth. Perhaps they look welcoming.

  The man in the suit—a son?—leans over and points. “How be I wheel you over there where there’s people to talk to? You can start getting acquainted with the place while Colette drives me to the airport shuttle, okay?” His voice carries. To Greta he sounds cajoling—cajole: to deceive with soothing words or false promises; to Ruth he sounds patronizing; to Sylvia, inconsequential. The old man’s right hand waves vaguely, as if his sentiments are more or less Sylvia’s.

  “Look, George,” the man continues; not a son, then, unless it’s one of those progressive families in which everyone uses first names. “Look, when Colette gets back, go easy, okay? I know you don’t want to make her feel bad. If you try to make the best of being here, that’ll be a kindness to her, and it’ll help you as well. Go into this with a positive outlook and good things will happen. Shall we start by joining the ladies?”

  The old man flings his right arm out, brings it down hard on the arm of
his wheelchair. The man in the suit says, “Good. Here we go, then.”

  “I know you,” Sylvia says as the wheelchair reaches them. “You’re George Hammond. You ran a shoe store on the main street.”

  As if he doesn’t bloody know who he is. “Mmmph.” George’s head bobs up and down, back and forth.

  “Yes, he did,” says the suited man. “See, George, we told you you’d know people here.”

  Greta takes a deep breath everyone can hear and leans forward. “George,” she says. One more time to take a first step. She looks at his hair, which is still lavish; at the off-kilter shape of his lips, into his alarmed eyes. Her gaze travels across his arms and down his body, fixes briefly on his slippered feet propped on the wheelchair’s footrests. Abruptly she leans back, raising her coffee cup as in a toast. “George,” she repeats. “We meet again.” From a spy movie she saw long ago.

  “Right, then,” says the middle-aged man, “looks like you’re all set with old friends for a while, so I’ll be off. Colette expects to drop back in after your dinner to make sure you’re doing okay. You can get back to your room when you need to, right?”

  “Rummph.”

  “That’s great. You guys have fun now,” and he’s off, his step light and eager, his relief so evident that all three women at the table feel the insult. The young who don’t want to be bothered. The young who fail to see life in the old fellow yet. Any old fellows. Including the women.

  Did that suited man not feel, coming through the automatic doors earlier, the breeze of his own future entrance?

  The tangles and complications of families—here’s another one, as Annabel Walker comes into the lounge, clapping her hands like a cheerleader. “Isn’t this lovely, you’re already getting together, just what I hoped for, what good examples you are! Don’t forget to ask for whatever you need—cards, cribbage boards, anything.”

  Good God. Cribbage. Good examples. When Annabel turns away, Sylvia’s narrowed eyes remain on her back. Peter’s genes, all in all, were pitifully weak. Never mind. “We were discussing this activities schedule before you arrived, Mr. Hammond. What do you think of it?”

  George took one blurred look at the damned thing this morning and threw it into the trash. What does he care for stupid things to do? “Be pleasant, Dad,” Colette keeps telling him, “and people will be pleasant to you,” but who gives a bugger about pleasant? He’s a man who could rely not only on knowledge of footwear but on charm for his living, and now he’s just supposed to be pleasant? Hell, he can consider himself brave when he musters a smile, half a smile; stoic when he isn’t in tears. “Useless,” he blurts finally, and the women look startled.

  “Exactly,” Sylvia says after a moment. “We’ll have to come up with our own entertainments if we want any stimulation at all.”

  Ruth thinks: a natural board chair, setting agendas, organizing, moving events right along. A thin line between that and bullying. But a leader of sorts, not to be sniffed at.

  Frankly, Ruth is a little shocked by the age of the people she’s seen here so far. At seventy-four, she looks to be the baby of the place—this bunch must be hovering around the eighty mark. And all these people have simply kept going, no matter what. Does that make her a coward?

  No.

  But it is true that she has come here to die.

  She does not mean this in the shadowy fashion that applies to every Idyll Inn resident—every human on earth—but as a resolution packed along with her cosmetics and painkillers and photographs and nightgowns and best bits of furniture.

  She has taken a large, hard lesson to heart: if in Bernard’s democratic dying there were two votes, his and cancer’s, in the dictatorship of Ruth there’s to be only one.

  Like any prudent dictator, she has made certain plans, devised certain strategies. What she needs now is a dictator’s military support. The Idyll Inn may not look like a barracks where good soldiers reside, but if she can find one ally, one friend, that’s all she should need. Two would be better; more most unlikely.

  Still, she has some faith that while they are often enough properly nervous—about tripping, about falling and breaking, about being abruptly struck down whether by heart or by stray, running youth—the old are not easily bone-deep frightened. Having, like her, survived decades of large and small ups and downs, and being well aware of what is capable of being endured and performed, they surely can’t find much truly terrifying still; really, just one or two things.

  7

  AT THREE IN THE MORNING…

  PINKISH, TRANSLUCENT, RIDGED AND UPTILTED wall sconces light the after-dark corridors of every Idyll Inn, including this one. From a distance they resemble valuable old glass, but in fact they are made from recycled plastics and are pleasantly inexpensive when bought in Idyll Inn quantities. And who can tell the difference? They’re set high enough that even the most skeptical residents won’t be leaping up to examine them closely.

  There is a density to the dim radiance, too, that creates its own silence. The first person to set out on the night’s journey at the appointed hour feels wary and out of place, even though this is the same smooth, handrailed, plain-sailing corridor regularly travelled in daylight.

  The sole overnight-shift staff member gloomily or sleepily or irritably responsible for covering the main floor made her last rounds an hour ago, and now, barring some kind of alarm, she will be settled in the office down the hall, around a corner, past the dining room, well out of sight and sound of a shady first-floor corridor, till the kitchen staff start arriving to set up for breakfast. This is a well-scouted, predictable pattern—who expects aged residents to be skulking around at this hour, when they’re supposed to be tucked up in their beds?

  Still, care is required.

  The tall, narrow figure taps on a door, steps inside. In foxholes, the bullying old saying goes, there are no atheists; which is a lie, she believes. Hoping for mercy and grace under fire isn’t at all the same thing as belief.

  Because what sort of god would put people in foxholes to start with?

  “You’re ready?” she whispers to the waiting figure, a bulky silhouette against moonlight. Then, “Courage.” Which is not to be mistaken for a prayer; more a battlefield exhortation.

  8

  A COSY FEET-UP VISIT…

  ON THE SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN LATE MAY that ends the Idyll Inn’s first full month in operation, the taxi bringing Sylvia’s daughter Nancy for her first visit arrives just in time to take George’s daughter Colette away after her second. From this flying trip Colette will again catch an airport shuttle to the city, and then her long flight home to Bill and her much-interrupted career. “Jesus Christ, what were you thinking?” are among Nancy’s first words to her mother when she reaches Sylvia’s suite. “There’s a guy at the front door in a wheelchair making weird noises and crying. You don’t belong with people like that.”

  How flattering. Really. “I’m sure that’s meant as a compliment, thank you. But I am living here, so why don’t you sit down, relax, and when you’re ready, I’ll show you around. If you’d like to stay for dinner, we’ll let the kitchen know—they’re happy to serve guests, but they need some notice and the dinners are early.”

  Here the meal is called supper, and it’s appallingly early. By five-fifteen, which is about the time Sylvia in her previous life, last month, would have been choosing among pre-dinner wines, everyone is gathered at their place settings. By six-thirty, a good half-hour before Sylvia would have even been starting her meal, everyone is gone from the dining room as if, like messy plates and used cutlery, residents are to be cleaned away as smartly as possible. It’s early days for a campaign of civil disobedience, but Sylvia has been considering an obdurate, chair-gripping refusal to move. A group sit-in would be wonderfully literal, and bound to be more effective than George’s periodic tantrums; the ones that caused Annabel Walker or one of her minions to call Colette to fly here again to get him calmed down because otherwise, despite previous promises, “
we might not be able to keep him here after all.”

  He’s been pushing the envelope, that’s for sure: gritting his teeth against taking his meds, specifically the prescribed antidepressants, which personally Sylvia thinks he should be taking as many of as he can get; refusing to propel himself in his wheelchair, demanding the services of an aide instead, if good-hearted or too amenable Greta isn’t around; plus the last straw, when he deliberately tossed, as opposed to dropped, his lemon cake and custard dessert on the dining-room floor, loudly pronouncing one of the words he can actually say clearly, which is “crap.”

  His methods may be unfortunate, but Sylvia is basically sympathetic to his aims. It’s a matter of power, and trying to exert some control—aside from going about it foolishly, he’s putting up a pretty ordinary and admirable struggle. Nancy’s right if she’s implying that most Idyll Inn residents are not what one would call sprightly, but mistaken if she thinks nothing is happening. Which would hardly make Nancy unique when it comes to assumptions the not-old make about the old, but it’s annoying. It shouldn’t be so hard to realize that there are some strenuous wrestling matches going invisibly on. Or visibly—look at George.

  “Before you sit, Nancy, why don’t you fetch us some wine from my little fridge—it’s beneath the counter by the door, and there’s a corkscrew and glasses on the shelf overhead, if you’d do the honours.” Sylvia’s hands can barely perform that trick any more. One virtue of the Idyll Inn is that there’s always somebody to corral into opening a bottle, even if she has to wait awhile sometimes.

  “Should you be drinking, Mother?”

  “Should I not be?”

  So swiftly they leap to belligerent tones. The trouble with families: there you are, locked to people you’d never even meet otherwise. If Nancy were not her daughter, how would Sylvia ever encounter a personal trainer for the reasonably wealthy and terrifically self-indulgent in a city a couple of hundred kilometres away? Personal trainer! And an aging one, at that. Perhaps Nancy’s concern here is for her inheritance, despite doing well enough for herself with the inheritance she has already received: Sylvia’s bones, Sylvia’s long, lean, previously flexible body.