by Joan Barfoot
Women and their preaching, lecturing, demanding. As if he could be content at the snap of their witchy fingers, as if he couldn’t burst with Colette flying off again today with an easy “Try to be happy here, Dad. Do your best. I know you can.” She kissed his forehead the way she does, and danced away before he could hold her. Maybe she forgot that he can’t move the way he once did, that he’s not the same father who could give her a swift hug before leaving to, he’d say, meet a salesman passing through town, or refresh his inventory—anything that explained getting out and heading to the interesting and sometimes even thrilling parts of his life.
She said, too, “If you keep behaving badly, Dad, they’ll throw you out. And another place…well, it might not be so nice. You really do need to think about that.” She meant a nursing home. She spent time visiting Alice, who doesn’t even know if Colette’s coming or going, and was shocked he wouldn’t go with her. Shocked too when he said, “Waste.”
Any day he wants, he could call a cab or be hoisted into the Idyll Inn van to go and see Alice. Does she ever wonder where her husband has disappeared to? Does his face ever rise up in what remains of her mind? She has no way of remembering that he’s been ill, has been in hospital, is now here. Maybe in Alice’s world it’s easy come, easy go; now you see him, now you don’t. Time can have no meaning for her. She used to say, “I hate when you’re out in the evenings, the time drags so.” Not for him.
If he could, he would throw himself to the floor and howl and batter his fists like a two-year-old.
If he could do those things, he would not want to do them.
If he could be gathered up into somebody’s arms; if he could be consoled, and other unspeakable words; if he could be restored to his feet—then wouldn’t he run and run! Home, if he knew what house number, which street, how the rooms fit together. If he could be himself there again, whole and free, not like this. “Room,” he commands more loudly. Why is Greta looking at him like that, why is her big warm hand not at his knee any more? Sometimes she wheels him around, it’s not as if what he asks is impossible or surprising.
“No, George, if you want to, you can work the wheelchair yourself, or you could call for an aide. Or you could change your mind and stay here with us. We shall have wine and not be sad in our rooms.” Perhaps it’s a collapse of will, or of temper, perhaps it’s a loss of some kind but—all right. “Good,” says Greta, “good for you.”
He hears Sylvia say to her, “Good for you.”
Their voices resume rising and falling around him. Who the hell knows what they talk about all the time? Sylvia said one day, “At least at our ages there won’t likely be time to get fed up with each other,” and Ruth drew a sharp breath and then laughed and said, “Too true, there’s no time to get bored.” He guesses they talk about women’s stuff, little things, but it can be kind of like music, their voices, and maybe he’s been too meek but Greta’s right, this beats being alone. Her living here is funny, in a strange way, not ha-ha, even if she’s not as agreeable as she once was, except when she is. Here’s time making a man dizzy with words and the round-and-round voices of women, and with wine, too.
“We can’t go on drinking your wine, Sylvia,” Ruth is saying, “just because you were clever enough to bring your own fridge. Did anyone mind?”
“I didn’t ask. They’d object to a microwave, but a little fridge won’t burn the place down. I don’t find the meals quite as advertised, so I like having my own treats on hand.”
“I guess the food’s bland so it doesn’t upset anybody.”
“Well, but what about people who find bland upsetting? There seems barely any point to having taste buds and teeth, does there, for the meals they’ve been serving so far?”
Ruth giggles. “You’re right, and if we don’t get what we want now, when will we?” Another remark that creates a pause. “We could ask, I suppose.”
“You could,” Sylvia says. “Or Greta. I have such an awful time dealing with authority, I’m usually just inclined to demand, and you’re more diplomatic.”
What an odd point of view. From Ruth’s and Greta’s perspectives, Sylvia carries authority around in her slacks, blouses and bracelets, in her voice, in her very bearing.
Greta’s needles go click, click, click through their conversations now, with the first knitting classes under her belt. It is hard to talk and knit at the same time, however, even plain practice squares. “That Annabel Walker, she said she wishes to please”—a moment to frown over a loose stitch—“so would it be fair to let her know ways she can do that?”
Fair—something to know about Greta. “All right. Then carpe diem, don’t you think?”
Greta hopes the talk will not reduce to carping, if that is what Sylvia means. Complaints risk retribution—retribution: the dispensing of punishment. But she will not say so to Sylvia in case it would sound like criticism. She would not care to criticize Sylvia.
“Maybe we could get somebody to shop for treats for us all, to keep in my fridge,” Sylvia suggests. “So we wouldn’t have to bother with Annabel, but nobody’d have to rely entirely on the kitchen, either.” There. How gracious and redemptive is that? Not that she’s keen to turn her suite into an open house of people wandering in and out, rooting around.
“As long as we were careful not to intrude on your privacy,” says Ruth, “it would be nice to have some things of our own. It’s very pleasant having an afternoon sip like this.”
“It is, isn’t it? And not to be sniffed at in the middle of the night, either. Those times, you know, when you wake up and can’t get back to sleep, and you sit in the dark and look out the window and have a little drink.” Did that sound peculiar? It’s been Sylvia’s cosy custom for decades, the waking up into darkness, the slippering off to a soft chair with a glass of wine in the silence of night.
Then back, more calmly, to bed and to sleep.
“Drunks,” George bursts out—so he’s been listening after all, and now half his mouth is upturned, and his eyes, even the left one, look unexpectedly merry.
After a startled moment Sylvia says, “We could ask an aide, in return for a little spare cash. The poor things probably don’t make much more than minimum wage.” The poor things. Ruth frowns. “But it should be one of you. My name is already mud with some staff, there’s a certain froideur in some quarters.”
On Sylvia’s very first night here, the evening-shift aide assigned to the main floor barged into her suite without knocking. “Hi hon, I’m Diane, I’m here to help you get ready for bed and give out your medications and night-time snack. Okay with you, sweetie?”
Did no one train these people? If they lacked the wits themselves, did someone not suggest that residents might be lonesome or homesick or just plain sad, or be lost in their own thoughts and adjustments, and shouldn’t be startled by some perky thing bouncing into their private space all unannounced, as if that were normal at the door of a stranger? There was so much wrong, Sylvia hardly knew where to begin. She raised herself from her loveseat, then paused to make sure her voice wouldn’t for one reason or another carry a tremor. Ditto her legs, and her hands. “How do you do. I am Mrs. Lodge, and I am by no means your hon, or your sweetie. In future, too, I would like you to knock, as you would at any home. Also”—she peered at her watch—“it’s only seven-thirty. If you come back at ten, we’ll discuss what you might do for me then.”
Hard to tell young people’s ages. This Diane looked more than twenty, maybe even thirty—old enough, anyway, to be less intimidated than Sylvia intended. “Fine,” and she slapped a plastic glass of orange juice and a tiny paper container of Sylvia’s two powerful nighttime anti-inflammatories on the end table. She was cool later when she returned to help Sylvia into her nightgown. By the end of the day, as at its start, Sylvia’s joints are exceptionally painful and stiff, although in a pinch she can usually manage to change her own clothes. One purpose of the Idyll Inn is to eliminate such pinches.
George is frowning. “Nic
e girl. Strong.” What was wrong, anyway, with being called hon or, as he was, sweetheart?
When the girl came to his room his first night here, Colette was still visiting, but she jumped right up. “Did you need my dad, am I in the way?” It could not have been clearer that she’d spotted a means of escape. A stroke is scarcely more hurtful.
“It’s okay, I can come back. I’m just making the rounds, helping people get toileted and ready for bed, and there’s cookies and juice and Mr. Hammond’s pills, but I can go do somebody else first.”
“No, I should leave anyway. I’m going back to the house now, Dad,” Colette said more loudly—did she think he’d gone deaf? “I’ll see you in the morning after I pick up the things on our list”—the massive supplies of toothpaste, soaps, aftershaves and tissues she stacked in the cupboards, intended to last him for months. It costs a shocking amount to live here, but even so, these modest items, like racing stripes on a car, count as extras. “I’ll pick you up a couple more pairs of pyjamas, too. There’s no such thing as too many pyjamas, is there?”
Not if he was supposed to go to bed at eight o’clock. That used to be right about when he was leaving the house, excusing himself to Alice and Colette, creating shoe-related reasons for absence.
When Colette was gone, the girl said, “My name’s Diane, I work evenings so you’ll see a lot of me at bedtimes. Want to start with a trip to the bathroom?” She looked friendly and strong, and he didn’t too much mind having her arms locked around him as they located his place on the toilet, although he did mind that first she had to tug down his pants, and then he had to sit with his shanks showing, and under some pressure. But there too she was kind, because she said, “Are you okay here for a few minutes on your own? I can deke out and check on one or two of your neighbours while you have your privacy, okay, sweetheart?
“Good.”
Except immediately she left, he began worrying about how soon she’d be back. Because what if she forgot? He remembered the button hanging from the cord at his neck: the way to remind her. He shifted more comfortably, nicely protected by the frame surrounding the toilet. All in all, safe as a chair. She was gone quite a while though, and was a bit rougher when she came back. By then he’d risked twisting his right arm back to the flushing lever, which required him to lean forward, so that he might, if the manoeuvre had gone badly, have toppled headfirst off the toilet. “Oh,” she said, “you shouldn’t have done that.” Maybe that’s what made her rougher: alarm.
She’d be a good one to get to pick up food and booze for them, right?
“It’s still early days,” Ruth is saying. “I don’t think most of the staff have much experience, so we’re learning together, them and us both. It’s not their fault we don’t always enjoy being their jobs.”
“Ruth Friedman, what an annoyingly good person you are. You put us to shame.”
“Oh no,” Ruth starts to say, before she realizes that Sylvia’s teasing; and also that a real remark is buried inside the joke. Ruth doesn’t mean to put people to shame. It’s only a side effect, sometimes, of wishing people were kinder. And what does any of them know of Diane?
“You just tell me what you need, hon, and how we should do it,” she said on Ruth’s own first night here. “I don’t want to cause you any discomfort.” Someone, Ruth imagined, had taught staff to say discomfort rather than pain. She took no great offence to the hon.
“Well, dear, I’ll hurt whatever we do, so it’s just a matter of managing in ways that hurt least. I’m sorry if I slow you down, you must be very busy trying to take care of so many people.”
“Yeah, and in a new place it’s hard on everybody. It’ll get easier as we go along, I guess.”
“Is this your first job in a retirement home?”
“It’s sort of my first job altogether since I graduated.”
“From?”
“I did a nursing aide program. I didn’t like school so I quit and worked in, like, a variety store, but then my grandmother died and left me some money, but only if I went back to school. My grandma was kind of bossy sometimes.”
“Good for you. And good for your grandmother. Did you mind?”
“Not really. Working in the store got boring real fast, and the pay was bad.”
“Not great here, either, I imagine.”
Diane shrugged. “I don’t mind helping people, and that’s all it is. Everybody’s different so far, but I guess I’ll manage.”
“I’m sure you will. You’re doing just fine.” So she was. Her arm was strong to lean against, her fingers quick and gentle getting Ruth’s arms into her bright zip-up nightgown and its matching red robe. It was nice seeing her eyes light up at just a morsel of praise. “I used to be a social worker, so I tried to help people too. Although,” and Ruth smiled at Diane, “you’ll have more certain results. We’ll be grateful, and then we’ll die, so you won’t have to worry about whether you’ve set someone on a good road to the future or not.” Diane looked shocked. “Oh my dear, you’d better get used to it, don’t you think? Death, I mean. It’s bound to come up.” She patted Diane’s hand. “Never mind, I shouldn’t have mentioned it. You’ll do fine with whatever happens.”
“Thanks, yeah, probably,” but now she looked anxious.
Okay, if the girl didn’t entirely realize that Idyll Inn residents weren’t children or pets, well, she wasn’t alone in that, was she? The old, as they might remember from their own youth, are like a separate species: more or less useless, even repellent, and certainly irrelevant. It may even be, Ruth supposes, that they are all those things, and that’s just one way the world propels itself onward, and the best trick the old can perform involves acquiescing to the harsh rule of becoming unseen.
While continuing to go, as she must, about their own urgent business.
“The plump girl with short brown hair?” she asks. “I don’t mind asking if she’d run errands for us now and again. I find her an agreeable girl.” Sylvia needn’t think Ruth’s a pushover. While Sylvia swanned around serving on boards and playing golf and bridge and throwing parties, Ruth was being honed by genuine danger: from raging men, rapier-fingernailed mothers, sullen and dangerously unpredictable adolescents, and youngsters in awful distress. As a small person, she made herself large with straight back and head always held high—possibly amusing, given the present shape and state of her bones.
But she has never been defenceless. And she is surprised to find that at this late date she can still be angry at women like Sylvia Lodge, with their easy, casual lives.
Even though it’s better to be on Sylvia’s good side than her bad; and it’s somewhat flattering to be on her good side.
They’ve finished the Riesling, and gone to work on the Chardonnay. “Then that’s settled,” Sylvia says. “Now, I don’t mean to harp but what else could we be doing, do you think? Besides drinking the days away.”
“Well, nothing very active in the way of activities works for me, I’m afraid,” Ruth says.
“No aerobics, then.”
“Or dancing.”
“Or yoga or jogging or shotput or three-hundred-metre dashes.”
“Or three-metre dashes.” Ruth again.
They are giggling now, Greta too, like six-year-olds at a birthday party. “Oh, I hurt,” Ruth gasps.
“So laughing’s out, too?” Causing more laughter; how unseemly. Or perhaps they look senile. A passing aide smiles but then frowns. That’s funny too.
Annabel Walker drifts into the lounge. “Hello, ladies. And gentleman. Nice to see you all enjoying yourselves, is there a joke you could share?”
Why, does she have a sense of humour? One hasn’t been discernible in this first month. And if she does, from whom might she have inherited it? “Probably not. You had to be there,” Sylvia tells Annabel. Who holds her tight smile as she sighs. Naturally.
“All right. Only, this looks like a good time to mention that I’ve been a little concerned you may have been drinking a bit on occasion.”
“There’s no may about it. We have.”
“Well, it’s not a good habit to get into, especially since we serve a glass of wine at supper, which is already more than some residences permit.”
Permit? “Would you care for some?” Ruth asks, so innocently that Sylvia thinks, What the hell is she doing, offering my wine around?
“Me? Heavens no. It’s the middle of the afternoon, and I’m working.”
“Then I too don’t understand your interest.”
Good for Ruth.
Annabel now looks, Sylvia thinks, even more like her mother in middle age: cross and disapproving and plain. That can happen when people are disappointed again and again—it starts to show up in expressions and postures, even their features grow heavy or pinched. One may feel sorry for people who’ve been deprived of their hopes, but one does not especially care for them. “What I mean is, drinking is dangerous just for getting around, never mind for mixing with different medications.” They might sympathize with this point of view if Annabel didn’t go on to say, “It’s for your own good.”
What an intimidating little thing Ruth can be; she has Sylvia’s and Greta’s attention, and even George watches as, best she can, she draws herself up and together—here’s a view of how she must have operated out in her tragically dangerous world. “Oh, I don’t think we care for that, I don’t believe we’re paying to be deprived of our pleasures because of what someone else thinks might be for our own good. I don’t think that’s what we’ve signed up for.”
“But,” Annabel leaps on the word, “you did sign our contract.”
“It says nothing on this subject,” Sylvia says, “not even in the small print, and believe me, the wife of a lawyer learns to read carefully.” She says this deliberately, poking at the past to see if anything stirs. And something does. Annabel’s eyes harden.
“So does the daughter of a lawyer, Mrs. Lodge. Which I am, as you know. And I’m sure you remember that the contract says if management decides a resident is not best served by this kind of accommodation, the tenancy may be terminated. Including on medical grounds, and drinking can certainly be medically inappropriate, I don’t think there’s much doubt about that.” Hardball, and more impressive than Sylvia expected. Also unhappily similar to dealing with Nancy. It doesn’t do to retreat, but she rather wishes she hadn’t taken that poke.