by Joan Barfoot
Nor could the scapegoating parents learn to embrace their bad little boy; nor would the stupid ones ever get smart. All that could be done was to try to save children from the most extreme mutations and malformations, like birth defects, of love. What people will do to each other.
It’s no minor achievement, even in a universe of griefs, an infinite swamp of things that need fixing, to pick one single small goal to pursue. Not that a child’s life is small. But there are so many, many desperate children in the world—to save a few must be a tiny triumph, but surely it’s also enormous.
Of course most children did stay in, or return to, their homes. That was the prevailing child-care philosophy: supervise families if need be, but keep them together; a tragically pragmatic philosophy, reliant on dubious parental pledges. There was nowhere near enough money, or people, to shift kids willy-nilly into new, improved lives, but there was also this: children will love just about anyone. Or they’ll hold as hard as they can to the most vicious known against any unknown. Ruth can feel frightened arms tight around her neck, but also little hands struggling to free themselves in order to flee home again. She can find these hands and arms, surprisingly, right on the tip of her skin, any time, day or night.
It would be interesting, if not useful, to know the endings to their stories, but for the most part she doesn’t. She has come more recently, though, to understand better why those children might have clung to what was familiar.
A person can cling too long, and create terrible hardship.
Keep counting.
So far at the Idyll Inn, like consolidating many small debts into a single large one, Ruth has managed to roll many minor terrors into a big single ball of—what? A grand tension, anyway. A discernible, terminal purpose.
Such absurd dreads rose up when Bernard was gone and she was alone in their house. Something of a revelation, really, for a woman who considered herself reasonably fearless, to find that beyond grief, and much else, there was shock that some of what she’d assumed she was must have relied on knowing he was behind her, backing her up, holding her up, simply there. Where he no longer was. So that—talk about wasted time—suddenly she was fretting over upwards-sliding property tax and utility bills denting her careful budget, potentially threatening how long she could keep the house (not all that long, but for other reasons entirely); becoming alert to strange sounds, animal or human, outside in the dark (but the strangest sound her own anxious heartbeat in the silence of listening); and picturing, quite vividly, the even more far-fetched possibility that, say, a plane overhead might dip radically to slam into her street, or an electrical appliance—hair dryer? radio?—could splash into her bath (what were the odds, ever? But you never know); or in high, howling winds that a tree might crash through the roof (but the old backyard maple stood the test of time more sturdily than she has, for sure).
Whatever happened to flying high and free through the air? Still, she is starting to feel the days whirling along as fast as when she was young and lithe, with a body so light and flexible it turned and tumbled at her slightest shifting command.
Those were the days.
These are the days, too: for advancing an intimate balance, balance being a trick for which she once had a fine aptitude; for proceeding a step at a time through her many count-ups to her single countdown. Admittedly, persuading at least one of the others will be a subtler and more difficult matter than balance, or even soaring solo through air, but she has some ideas for getting her desire to add up in their minds, just as it moves toward a dark, still secret total in hers.
12
OH HA HA HA, MORE OR LESS…
Spry granny climbs Kilimanjaro.
Feisty senior beats off purse-snatcher.
ALSO, 80-year-old charged with child porn. “Good God,” says Sylvia, “you’d think it was a miracle anyone our age could do anything livelier or more complicated than wake up in the morning. Spry. Feisty. Can you imagine?”
Of course they can. Qualities of spryness and feistiness do not, in truth, abound at the Idyll Inn. Unexpectedly, after the first relief and delight, days without chores and duties—laundry, vacuuming, cooking—feel a little too free and weightless. They lack heft; which is why for an hour or so every morning Sylvia, Greta and Ruth now converge on George’s room, where, although they don’t put it this way out loud, he is a project. Greta’s idea. “George,” she’d asked, “do you have exercises from the hospital, as I have from my doctor, that you are to do here to improve?”
Yeah, there was some crap he stuck in a drawer, and no, he wasn’t doing them. “No point,” he said.
“For heaven’s sake, of course there’s a point.” Sylvia, in that snappy voice of hers. “Do you want to get better or worse?” As if those were his choices. But that’s how come Greta and Sylvia are spending time every weekday (weekends off) manoeuvring his limbs and egging him on while Ruth, who can’t really help, perches on his coffee table reading aloud stories from the national newspaper she gets and the local one Sylvia subscribes to. “A physical and mental workout rolled into one,” as Ruth says.
It’s not that every day’s stories are necessarily funny—the opposite, in fact, when Ruth does the choosing—but today, oh ha ha ha, more or less, laugh the women. What they find funny isn’t generally what George thinks of as jokes, they’re not little stories with punchlines. Aside from that he has to admit, although he would not to them, that it’s kind of pleasing to see Greta’s head, even her old, altered head, bent beside Sylvia Lodge’s, pushing his left leg, then his right, upward and back, and then to feel them close beside him, one on each side, rotating his arms, flexing his fingers, except when Sylvia stops because she says that while the exertion helps her, not just him, it gets to hurting her too.
Sylvia Lodge being in his room—not so much the others—makes him see through her eyes, or one of them, anyway, that his furniture, years old, is worn and its arrangement a bit hodgepodge. When he looks at it that way, Colette and Bill didn’t go to much trouble to make sure he’d fit in, did they? Even more uncomfortable at first, though, was having her fooling around with his feet. “Goodness, George,” Sylvia said, “think how many times you’ve had your hands on my feet. This is just turnabout.” But that was a long time ago, and except for admiring a good set of legs, it was business. This is—maybe not pleasure, but it sure isn’t business, and there’s nothing to admire about his feet now, all blue-veined as they are and half-helpless. Still, he doesn’t say no. He could tell them they can shove him around till the cows come home and he won’t be fixed, but to be honest he can feel blood moving, at least on his right side, with a vigour that is secretly, privately heartening.
Then there’s the flash now and then, looking down, seeing Greta working away; just a flash like a quick bright porch light in a storm.
She and Sylvia make him use Ruth’s walker as a brace or a weight or a pullbar for some of his exercising, which is a lot of hard work. It can also be hard work listening to Ruth read out loud from the newspapers. If they’ve heard fire trucks racing by one day, the next day she’ll try to find an item in the local paper that says where they were going and what they found when they got there. Court cases are interesting for the names of people, sometimes children and grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of those familiar to them, caught driving while drunk, breaking into variety stores—and today, the larger, interesting crime of creating counterfeit money with a fancy photocopy machine. Ruth keeps saying that none of them knows half of what goes on in this town, but even she sounds surprised by this one.
What Sylvia says is, “We should get ourselves one of those,” meaning the photocopy machine. “Nobody’d suspect a bunch of old crooks in a retirement home, would they? Even spry, feisty crooks. We could manufacture enough money to keep ourselves going forever.”
Ruth kind of spoils it when she says, “If forever could be bought,” in that down-bringing way she has sometimes. Left to her own devices, she’ll go on and on about the mo
st gruesome stuff: stonings, beheadings, starvation, disease, dead children, brutalized women—before George protested this morning, she’d already dragged them through a painstaking account of a rebel army of kidnapped teen rapist-killers and kidnapped child slaves far away, with some really nasty information thrown in about one bunch of people hacking and burning another bunch, leaving rotting bodies in dusty streets, torn into by hungry dogs, victors prancing around wearing necklaces festooned with ears and, of all things, drying fetuses carved and sliced from dead wombs.
Unbelievable except that since there it was in the news, it must be believed.
Even hearing these things felt painful. “Expendability,” Ruth said, as if that explained anything. “The value of life. Anyone’s. What’s it worth, after all? What’s so sacred about it?” Which was a plain strange thing to say, especially for somebody whose job involved saving lives. All those things Ruth tells them they don’t know the half of.
“No good!” George cried, meaning any number of things: that knowing does him no good, since these stories make his head hurt again, when he’s already here because of a stroke; that they’re in no position to do any good about distant matters; also that Ruth doesn’t read more about the good things that some humans somewhere must be doing, or else the whole world’s out of whack. Ruth claims it is out of whack, but then she found those old-people stories that made the women laugh, and then the one about the photocopy machine.
One day last week Colette phoned while they were in his room, and Ruth answered and told Colette her father was busy and would call her back. “What on earth, Dad?” Colette asked when he did.
“Exercise.”
“With a woman? In your room?”
“Three.” He couldn’t help sounding pleased. Colette should know that if she’s not going to be here, he has other options.
“Staff?”
“No.”
“Well”—how doubtful she sounded—“I guess it’s good you’re making new friends.” Yes, it is, although by the time they leave he’s pretty worn out, and has to lie down for a rest before lunch. He supposes he’s lucky compared with a whole lot of other people, but he wouldn’t say that to Colette. Or to Greta, or the other two, either. People take advantage; women always want something.
On the other hand, it wouldn’t hurt to press the point with Colette. “They really wear me out,” he told her. “I always need a good rest when they’ve gone.”
“I see. But try not to overdo it, okay?” Colette didn’t say what she imagined the “it” was that he might overdo, but he thought she sounded slightly and satisfyingly unhappy.
Just keeping her on her toes.
Today when they leave him to his pre-lunch lie-down, Sylvia stops Greta and Ruth in the corridor outside his door. “It’s a beautiful day, do you feel like sitting out on my deck for a while?” Because there are these late-June days now, when the sun shines and the river glitters and the air smells somehow bright green, when her deck is exactly as she pictured it could be when she moved in: a place to stretch out in the warm light, with a book or without, easing heat into her bones, and luxuriously remote, worlds away, from the day-to-day Idyll Inn rhythm of TV being watched, songs being sung, meals being eaten, tall tales being told, people coming and going: residents, relatives, staff, the rare but inevitable corpse, with attendants. Today, when they’ve settled and adjusted themselves, Sylvia on the chaise, Greta and Ruth in the upright deck chairs, Sylvia—just because she’s in a curious, Tell me a story frame of mind, and just because this late in the game where’s the harm, and just from a kind of languorous mischief—Sylvia turns to Greta and says, “You used to know George much better than well, didn’t you?” Greta frowns. “It seems to me you’re a lot more attentive to his well-being than if he was just any old fellow. It looks as if you touch him like an old habit, and you lean toward each other sometimes. You have ways of talking and sitting I bet you’re not even aware of.”
Sylvia would win such a bet. Greta has not realized that others might notice. She likes touching George. It is a good sensation to rest a hand on his knee, shoulder, arm. It is different skin than it once was, but so is hers, too.
Otherwise what is there to touch? The woolly materials of her knitting, the needles, metal or plastic. She would most happily embrace Emily, Sally and Patricia, but they say she can make no more long journeys to them, as she has before, because travel is too hard, even for someone strong, who has heart attacks. So they say they will continue coming to her; but they cannot very often, having already given up much time to her sickness and health. Once she is more skilled, she has in mind knitting birthday-gift scarves for them, possibly also for chilly underdressed strangers, perhaps even children who are wards of Ruth’s former agency. People say the best gifts are made by a person’s own hands. The main part, though, is sensation and touch; the understanding, too, of beginning and end. Shape and boundary. Of one stitch, one row after another: how a scarf, a life, a person proceeds.
For the time being she is still practising the arts of casting on, holding a steady tension, attempting to purl and not losing or gaining stitches row by row. She likes the need for paying attention. “Then there is how to end well,” she has mentioned. “Cast off, it is called.”
“Yes, that’s important.” This from Sylvia. “Otherwise you’d risk getting stuck on one great long scarf forever, and we’d have Isadora Duncan all over again.” Who? Sylvia says these things that are as mysterious as her foreign words.
Occasionally Greta slips into foreign words too, except they are not foreign to her, and she is nervous of them because they are slips.
Now a stitch slips as well. “George was good to give me my first job when I had to find work.” As they know, because they weeks ago told their stories of widowhood—cancer for Sylvia, another kind of cancer for Ruth. Greta told her different tale as briefly as possible, because George was present at the time and grew quickly restless. Well, he had heard it before. Perhaps he remembered. It is not always easy to know what George can remember.
He may at least recall that there could have been no question of him if there had not already been Dolph.
With whom she came here blithely—blithe: joyous—and with relief like a deep breath, and with gratitude for the small savings and large sacrifices made by their families, and for the offer of work from a distant cousin of Dolph’s father who’d come here a generation before, so that the two of them, at least, would escape from the terrible country whose war had been lost, along with much else, and whose name, easy to say these days but which she nevertheless tries not to speak around Ruth, because there were those difficulties, atrocities, even though they should not matter so much here and now; Dolph’s name also a problem perhaps, although not his fault either—Greta and Dolph came here hand in hand and thigh to thigh, willing and hopeful and strong, leaving all their people behind with the brutal ease of the young, no good looking back.
This is when she learned what she has since always tried to remember: how the young do what they do.
Dolph was beautiful. He still is beautiful. Greta is much, much older than he. Photographs of him could be of her grandson. This is a nearly indecent thing to consider.
Glad for escape from the hunger, the debris, also the retribution, and thrilled by possibilities, and entranced by desire, although, to be sure, lonely too, they rented a shabby house in this small alien city, intending to save money so that soon they could buy. Then from their busy bedroom came Sally, Emily and Patricia, all in Dolph and Greta’s first seven years in this country. They chose the strange-sounding names from a book, to be sure their children, those new citizens, would not be lonely; would be unburdened by foreignness, unlike she and Dolph, toward whom there were moments of unkindness. A passing group of boys, young, on the street: “Fucking Kraut.”
Letters came and went over the ocean with news that was more and more remote. Some of it, too, best put out of mind and forgotten. Here, Dolph and Greta were like pione
ers. They might now and then miss faraway mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, but faraway meant what it said: out of reach, grown vague and impossible to imagine.
How happy she was then! Busy, always busy: baking and cooking and washing diapers and sterilizing bottles and sewing on her second-hand treadle machine her girls’ little outfits. Dolph had work at his father’s distant cousin’s garage, where he became skilled in the repairing of cars, tractors and trucks and came home more muscled each day, scarred and blackened and smelling of metals and oils. He earned more money with odd jobs on a farm, and some nights smelled of manure and grains and the hot breath and flesh of cattle and pigs.
He brought home new words and stories, like pearls to be draped around Greta when they were alone in the night. They breathed each other’s skin. He said she smelled of laundry: clean and airy like wind. She traced his spine, those bones, long and narrow, holding them all here together. Holding the two of them, too.
They had yet no house of their own, but were still young and hard-working, stubborn and hopeful. They had still, too, the rapture—rapture: ecstatic delight, of skin. They saw no end to this; why would they?
But endings come. They come in the middle of a day, girls in school, Greta pounding with a hammer a cheap cut of beef to make it tender for supper—an ending comes with a distressed, awkward young man in uniform blue on Greta’s doorstep, clutching his uniform cap. There was an accident, he told her. He said that Dolph, no Bauer except in name, no farmer, had lost his footing while loading a silo; that he had fallen in; that he was at that very moment inside the silo, being crushed and smothered by feed corn. Much frantic digging was occurring, the man said, but the prospects were bleak, and she should not have hopes.