by Joan Barfoot
There’s the lesson: don’t falter, because action will be brutal and swift against any residents who let down their guard. Evidently Art Fletcher has not taken this lesson to heart. Perhaps he hasn’t been here long enough to have absorbed it, as a relative newcomer, a replacement for one of the dead, and not a happy one. Even George has been less morose—indeed George took the trouble to wheel up to greet him, in faint hopes of a little male companionship, but Art just glared mutely and gave him the finger. His manners have clearly slipped since their nattier days, when George was a customer of Fletcher’s Menswear and Tailoring, and Art would tell him he was perfectly built, from shoulders to hips to the long thighs Greta also admired, for the suits Art fit around him. Art was—is? Do these inclinations dissipate with age?—homosexual, which, although everyone knew, most people did not much care about, or understand, or discuss. Whatever he did, he didn’t very obviously do it around town, but George expected that it gave Art a sharp eye for who looked good in a suit, even though it took getting used to, being assessed by another man in that way.
Now for ease and convenience George wears loose zip-up shirts, and pants with stretchy waistbands, and he wonders if being homosexual has somehow led Art Fletcher to knives.
Probably not. Why would it?
Something has, though; some kind of rage.
What happens is, between courses, while staff are out in the dining room clearing plates to make space for apple cobbler dessert, Art rises from his table and hikes pretty fast into the kitchen. Where he picks up two fair-sized chopping knives and starts to wave them around, surprisingly vigorously. When a couple of staff take ill-considered steps toward him, he shouts, “Fuck you,” and “Back off, bitches,” and “I’ll kill you if you take one more step.” It looks as if he would, too. Even if not on purpose, although he does appear to have purpose, just from the flailing knives he could really hurt someone.
Annabel Walker comes out of her office. “Everybody stay where you are,” she says, in calm if quivery tone. “Everything’s fine. Now, Mr. Fletcher, I know you don’t want to be so upset. Just put down the knives and we’ll talk over what’s troubling you, all right? We can fix whatever it is, so just put them down and come out of the kitchen and we’ll go into my office and have a nice chat. All right? Will you do that for me now?”
No, he won’t. His lips curl back. He looks like a wolf. “Bitch,” he says. “Back fucking off.”
Nobody gets paid enough to deal with a situation like this, certainly nobody at the Idyll Inn, including Annabel Walker. She leans to an aide. “Go to my office and call the police,” she whispers. “Don’t run, just slip away.” She herself continues talking to Art. “Can you tell me what’s wrong, Mr. Fletcher? Can I get something for you? Call someone you’d like to talk to? Please tell me so I can help. We all want to help, we just need to know what we can do.” And so on and so forth, to no effect except for Art starting to sway on his feet.
There are no sirens, and when two police officers come through the doors it’s at a leisurely, ambling pace—who expects urgency at a retirement home? This changes when they see the knives, and behind the knives, even if an old man, also a furious one. “Drop it,” one calls out, unbuttoning his holster as if he thinks he’s in a shoot-’em-up movie, while the second pulls free his baton. Will there be gunplay? Head-cracking? Pepper spray? Do the cops’ pockets or belts hold one of those electrical gadgets that knock grown men to the ground? How exciting. Everybody is watching, some leaning forward or, at the back, standing up as best they can for a better view of the action. What do they hope for? Not harm, surely, just…something. Better than TV or any weekend-night movie, but laced with a kind of horrified pity for one of the many ways a life can go sour.
It looks as if it’s the uniforms, not the shout or the weaponry, that cause Art Fletcher’s eyes to shift as if a channel’s been changed, so that he regards the knives as if he has no idea what they’re doing there in his hands. He lets them fall clattering to the floor, and his head drops, his shoulders slump—a defeated man. There are sighs here and there in the room.
And that, as he’s hustled out the doors, a cop on each side, is the last they will see of Art Fletcher. A rather more vivid departure than Amy Perry’s, or any of the dead bodies that have rolled out these doors, but just as final. Poor Art. Or as Sylvia says afterwards, back in the lounge, “Do you suppose he was having hallucinations? Please, promise to put me out of my misery if I ever start doing things like swinging imaginary golf clubs. I swear I can put up with swollen ankles and wrecked knees and these horrible hands as long as I don’t lose my marbles. If that happens, shoot me.”
“With an imaginary gun, I presume,” Ruth suggests.
It’s interesting to Ruth, hearing the thumbs-up, thumbs-down weight Sylvia gives to her mind. Even joking, she’s serious. But come the crunch, like most people, including the old facing more or less imminent encounters with death, she would probably turn out not to mean it at all. “Just kidding,” she’d say, “for God’s sake, don’t shoot.”
Whereas Ruth hopes she herself would command, “Fire away.”
Later in the afternoon George, wheeled back to his room by an aide, thinks Colette would be interested in what happened at lunch. She might remember Art Fletcher, and since there’s hardly ever much new to tell her, this makes a change. Colette claims she calls George every couple of days before she goes to work, or even sometimes from her office, but he swears that’s not true. It’s his impression that they would never talk if he didn’t phone her, which he doesn’t do all that often. Even so, this afternoon she says, “What’s up, Dad? Did you know you already rang today? Think of your phone bills!”
Mustn’t complain. Complaints roll out anyway. “Did not. Where are you?”
By which he means, “Why aren’t you here where you should be?” but she sighs and says, “You know where I am, Dad, I’m at home. It’s the weekend, it’s Saturday, and I’m at home.” Up the street and across town? “No, not your home, my own.”
All thought of Art Fletcher has vanished. “When are you coming?”
“Pretty soon. In a few months. I was there not that long ago, remember?” Not really. And soon and months are totally different. She doesn’t have a clue about time, no wonder she can’t keep track of telephone calls. Still, her words and his, and their tones, ring a bell. Maybe she’s right, maybe they have already spoken today. It’s easy to pick up the phone on the little table by his right hand and press the single number programmed to magically dial Colette in her faraway household, or the next one, which rings her direct line at the bank, although there she’s apt to sound busy and quick. There’s something else about time: that hers is different from his. Once she answered as if he’d wakened her up, even though it was way past breakfast here. Now she says, “Listen, Dad, I’m sorry but we’ve got company coming later on for Bill’s birthday, and I’ve got a cake ready to come out of the oven, so I can’t really talk now, okay? Anyway, you’ll be eating soon, won’t you? It’ll be your suppertime in a few hours. I wonder what you’ll be having tonight?”
“Some crap. Never mind. Sorry I bothered you.” He tries to slam down the receiver but misses on his first try—damn it, a man should be able to do something that simple the way he means to.
Bill gets a birthday party, that figures. How does she carry on with parties and cakes as if nothing is wrong, or if anything is wrong it has nothing to do with her? What did he do to deserve this?
Oh. These thoughts, like the telephone calls, come new to his mind but then are immediately and completely familiar. Even back in the ambulance, and in the hospital, he surely thought, What did I do to deserve this? His sins from decades past catching up finally? But he has never murdered or even stolen, unless a person counts time. He has never caused mayhem. All he ever wanted was more, and doesn’t everyone, and is that so terrible? His sins, if that’s what they’re called, amount to mere promise-breaking, and is it so bad to hanker for passion, as well
as affection?
That’s a word that hasn’t come to him for a long time: hanker. But there it is, another one gained, although perhaps to be lost again, whoever knows?
Greta once told him, now tells everyone, that after her husband died, her daughters took over teaching her language. Lucky Greta, to have daughters who would patiently, even as she tells it cheerfully, put word after word into her head.
George does not have such a daughter.
He never met Greta’s girls—well, he did when she was buying them shoes or they turned up in the store to ask her for permission or money or whatever girls ask for from their mothers—he guesses he means he never knew them. Greta was careful—he was too—about keeping family separated from pleasure. What a pleasure she was, he thinks he recalls: big and strong, golden and tall, kind and willing—all of which qualities together meant he didn’t need to worry about injury or breakage in any way. How free he could be with her! Although in the end it doesn’t make much difference, does it? Now Greta is big but not so strong, tall but more pasty than golden, more or less kind and even sometimes willing, but not always thoughtful; that is, not always thoughtful of him.
And there’s Colette, in a whole different time, busy getting ready for somebody’s birthday. And there’s her mother, in another place, lost completely for memory and words.
How long has he been harping on this way? There’s another word—harping—popping back unexpectedly for a visit, just like hanker did moments, or it might be hours, ago.
Perhaps this is an H day. Help me, he thinks, or possibly says.
Colette isn’t here to help, and she’s not going to be. Maybe nobody really helps anyone else. There was Alice, her defiant little voice saying some helpful person at church had pulled her aside to remark on George’s car being regularly parked where it had no good reason to be—and then there were choices to make, no help for it.
What would Alice have been like if she’d had a job besides being married to him and raising Colette? It’s strange now to think of a person not going to work, although that didn’t occur to him at the time, and if it occurred to Alice, he’s pretty sure she never said so. Anyway, what could she have done?
She could have got off her ass, the way Greta had to, and made a life, and a living.
Greta once called him hard, and not in the good way she sometimes meant. Come to think of it, Alice too called him hard. Or as she put it, hard-hearted. He feels soft now, that’s for sure. Malleable and helpless, most often.
The aide who wheeled him back here from the lounge this afternoon helped him from the wheelchair into his easy chair, saying, “There, that’s more comfortable for a while, don’t you think?” At the time, yes, he did. Now, no. He is trapped, helpless as a turtle turned on its back.
Colette and Bill and Greta and that Lodge woman and the little one, Ruth, still go on about making the best of things, or the most, and it still sounds like the sort of stupid thing rosy-tinted people can say, blah, blah, blah. But look what he can do now that he really is stronger, perhaps due to time passing, perhaps thanks to the women. He can rise up slightly using his right arm, then lock the elbow for bracing. This way he can, elbow locked, hover—another H word!—just off the easy chair’s seat while he leans forward and gets a good grip on the floor with his right foot so he can propel himself forward and upward and over and down into the wheelchair—so pleasing, a move-by-move plan that will have liberating results.
Moderately liberating.
So it’s an unhappy surprise when he succeeds in locking the elbow and hovering, and leaning forward and planting his right foot firmly, and as he is preparing to rise further upward and forward and over and then safely down, that his arm starts to tremble and the locked elbow collapses and his right leg shifts to recapture his weight, and he finds himself falling leftward, just missing cracking his head on a wheelchair footrest, and then there he is, landing with a thump, sprawled on the floor.
Staring down into carpet instead of up into light, but otherwise much as before.
Useless old man.
He is winded, and very frightened. The carpet is a mass of bluey-grey fibres that look plastic up close. Is anything broken? Busted hips can be killers. He didn’t hear anything snap, but he also can’t feel half his body. Give him a second and he’ll figure out what to do, though, same as when he was alone in the night and the day of his kitchen floor.
One way is simple. If he presses the button at his throat, someone will come and raise him up, check for bruises and broken bones, rescue him. But he can hear Annabel Walker saying sternly, “I’m sorry, but we can’t be responsible for such dangerous, careless behaviour,” and off he would have to go. He might, after all, wind up living with Alice again—there’d be another cruel twist. No wonder that for as long as she could, she begged to get out, even though as nursing homes go it’s a decent one. Of course he wouldn’t have put her in a bad place; but people arriving there seem to observe their dazed new companions, sniff at air that always smells slightly fetid, and start their swift journeys to happier, or at least more useful, pasts. Within weeks he might be a lost, loony man cupping people’s feet in his hands, measuring their toes and assessing their arches, probably getting in trouble for touching.
As bad a fate as whatever Art Fletcher’s will be.
The point is, pressing his buzzer would lead to nothing good, except for being raised off this damned floor. “Help me,” he says aloud, nevertheless. “Help me.” It must be good news that he can say those words almost clearly.
“George?” he hears from the doorway. “Is that you? Is something the matter?”
“Umph,” and he’s facing a pair of fat wheels and some chrome, and two flat brown shoes—mass-made, imported from some cheap-labour country where individual stitchery is not a concern or an art—and thin ankles.
“Oh my goodness,” says the voice of what’s-her-name, Ruth, “are you hurt, can you get up?” Of course he can’t. If he could, he’d be up, wouldn’t he? “Would you like me to press your buzzer for help?”
“No!” That comes out loud and clear, which is good, although it causes the wheels to roll slightly back and the plain brown shoes to do a small shuffle.
“Oh. Yes, I see.” Does she? “Do you think anything’s broken?”
“No.”
“Is it another stroke, or a heart attack?”
“No. Fell.”
“Does anything hurt?”
“No.” Just what he can feel of his pounded, bruised body, and his pride. “Get me up.”
“Well, you know, I can’t do that myself, but let me go and see what I can do without bringing staff. You just gather your strength for a few minutes so you can help get yourself back on your feet, or your rear end, or whatever you want to be back on.”
Is she making fun of him? “Thank you,” he says, however, and the wheels and shoes disappear. She is like Lassie, gone looking for help. He and Colette used to watch Lassie reruns. Colette begged for a dog, but Alice opposed it. “The trouble is, honey,” he said, “you’re at school every day and I’m at work, so your mother would have to look after it most of the time, and that wouldn’t be fair, would it?”
“You could take it to work with you, it’s your store. I’d feed it and take it for walks after school every day. Mum wouldn’t have to do anything, honest.” The fact is, customers might not have minded a store-dog at all. Does Colette have a dog now, or a cat, or a bird, or a goldfish? It’s the sort of thing you’d think a person would mention, but he doesn’t think she has, although he cannot be sure.
Look, here are different shoes at his nose, and thicker ankles: Greta’s white sneakers, nasty things. Also a pair of expansive sure-soled yellow slippers belonging to Sylvia Lodge, whose enlarged, knobby foot-bones and ropy ankles he recognizes; and the wheels and little feet again—what a crew. He hopes he doesn’t look too revealed and pathetic, but expects he probably does.
“Oh dear,” Sylvia’s voice says. “This’ll be tr
icky. Should we block the door shut with the doorstop, Greta, while we try to figure this out? We don’t want anyone blundering in.”
The sneakers go away, then return.
“I can’t lift,” Ruth says, “but my walker might be useful. Maybe George could pull himself partway up it. Then if we got him standing and braced, we could use it to nudge him back into his chair.”
“Like a snowplow?” says Sylvia.
“Something like that.”
They sound to his ears interested mainly in solving a puzzle. Also pretty cheerful about having a problem to solve. Beggars can’t be choosers—there’s an old expression zipping back. He rolls slightly leftward, raises his right hand and digs his right foot into the carpeting to show the contribution he can make to the effort.
“Good,” Sylvia says. “All right. We’ll only get one chance, so what do you think of this? Greta, if he can reach up the walker and grab onto that bar while you get under his shoulders, so you’re raising him up but not holding his whole weight, and I come in from behind and push best I can to help get his knees under him, and he hauls himself upright with you helping him from beneath and then me coming in on his left side—could that work?”
“I guess,” Greta says dubiously. “It sounds complicated and we do not want to put strain on you or on my heart, but I do not see a better way. Can you help so much, George?”
He’d better, hadn’t he? One chance, as they say.
“Just think,” Ruth sings out, “how many men would give their eye teeth to be in the hands of so many women.” Does she think that’s funny? Apparently so. The helpful women laugh; even Greta.
Women are cold. But still, here they are.
Now he can feel Sylvia behind him, and here’s Greta’s face—how loose-skinned and large-pored it has become!—coming down close to his. “All right, George, remember, right arm up to the bar, and right leg forward for the push onto your knees.”