Exit Lines

by Joan Barfoot

  “Good night, Ruth,” Sylvia says, wheeling Greta in George’s chair toward the corridor along which, just a couple of hours ago, they made their way in this direction all unknowing; unknowingness now having shown itself, once again, to be what it is. “We’ll see you later, I guess.”

  “Yes, I guess you will. Take care out there.” Don’t get caught, Ruth means. “And you take care too, Greta. If there’s even the smallest sign of things going wrong, you buzz for help right away, do you promise? Don’t take chances.”

  “I promise. And Ruth? After all, I am very pleased we are both alive.”

  “Yes.” Yes, no doubt they are both alive. Pleased, despairing—those remain up in the air, but apparently Ruth has time now to ponder opportunities taken and missed. To regret or not to regret.

  She will have to take this into consideration, too: whether, if life hasn’t seemed so important, the absence of death, a somewhat different matter, might equally be not so important.

  Oh, she is tired. The little death of sleep is alluring. Seductive.

  In Greta’s bedroom, Sylvia sits for a few moments in George’s wheelchair, watching Greta curl herself into bed, and catching her own breath. How she aches! How every muscle and joint makes itself felt. And still she has a task or two before she too can rest.

  Here’s Greta, though, doing well enough and safely back, thanks to Sylvia’s quick action. There’s Ruth, having put them all through this, nevertheless safe and sound in her room. And George in his. Really, these are all things to be proud of: that Sylvia is still good at figuring out fast what’s to be done, and then getting it done. And all undetected. Not a bad night, in that regard.

  But such a long night. It used to be, years ago, that she could dance, drink and laugh till the cows came home. Certainly until this pre-dawn kind of hour. Those days are long gone. This night is going to take a while to recover from. It won’t be like waiting for a small hangover to pass.

  Greta is already snoring. A good sign of recovery, if an unpleasant sound.

  Up and at ’em.

  Surprisingly, George is still awake when Sylvia returns his chair to his room. “Were you afraid I wouldn’t bring it back?” she asks, although there’s never much sense joking with George.

  Predictably, he frowns in his uncomprehending way. But then he surprises her by asking, “Greta. Is she all right?”

  Isn’t that sweet? Or something. “Seems to be. Last I saw her, a couple of minutes ago, she was sound asleep and snoring. Did you know that she snores?”

  There’s a pause before he says, “Good thing,” and Sylvia doesn’t feel like bothering to decipher what, exactly, he thinks is a good thing. Presumably that Greta is well, not that she snores; but possibly that the whole night has been a good thing.

  “Get some sleep, George,” she tells him; and now finally, finally, she can check the corridor one more time before scuttling home to her own suite. Where, thank God, she can close the door on these harsh, busy hours.

  If she previously pictured herself ending the night sitting with her comforting, calming glass of wine, staring out into the darkness and considering whatever had happened and not happened—whatever she’d done or not done—the time for that has come and gone in an entirely different kind of upset and flurry. She hurts more than she can recall hurting for a very long time, but even so, she thinks she could fall asleep in a blink.

  As she pulls off her robe, two carefully folded plastic dry-cleaner bags fall to the floor. They’ll look strange to whoever comes to rouse her first thing in the morning, but her body has gone beyond bending to retrieve them.

  It doesn’t matter. They’re just dry-cleaner bags: a minor mystery.

  There is, she thinks, as she very cautiously lowers herself into bed, much to be said for the merely minor mystery.

  These have been interesting months, and perhaps they won’t have such interesting ones again at the Idyll Inn. Or maybe they will. At the moment, although exhausted in every possible way, Sylvia finds that as her eyes close, she is smiling.

  For one thing, it’s been an absolutely ridiculous night. Ridiculous, as Greta would probably note: unreasonable, absurd.

  More, though, she is smiling because even in the midst of this bone-deep weariness and pride and, frankly, distinct anticlimax, there is, it turns out, a surprising, lilting, unfamiliar upsurging of what appears to be, almost certainly is, at very least definitely passes for, the pleasant and gratifying sensation of—what’s it called?—joy.

  29

  AND THEN…

  A MONSTER BANANA CAKE WITH WHITE ICING it is, then—not a bad effort, really, from the Idyll Inn kitchen, and a treat for everyone but the diabetics, who get their own smaller, sadly sugar-deprived version. The quavering round of “Happy Birthday” is less sweet than the cake, but well-meant, and endurable.

  Endurance being, as Sylvia has already noted, “rather the theme du jour, one way and another.”

  The single candle usual for these occasions is within the abilities of most residents to blow out. “Make a wish,” Annabel Walker tells Ruth, and poof, out goes the flame. Nobody asks; everyone knows speaking a wish aloud is bad luck.

  Annabel leads the “Happy Birthday” chorus. A birthday that falls plunk in the midst of holiday preparations is inconvenient, but anything that makes residents celebratory or even just placid is worth the effort. Old people can be extremely difficult; so can the distant doctor and dentist investors in the numbered company to which, ultimately, she reports. There’s no keeping everyone happy, but she goes the limit, she does her best.

  Ruth Friedman’s little coterie has already caused some alarm and disruption today, but at the moment, in the dulled winter-afternoon lighting of the lounge, all looks reasonably calm and benign. Ruth herself is rather glamorous in a tiny-old-woman way, in a swishy silvery grey silky dress that flares out at the knees.

  Something more worrisome was afoot this morning, when not one of Ruth, Sylvia Lodge, Greta Bauer or George Hammond would get up for breakfast. They weren’t exactly pleased about getting to lunch, either. Annabel heard from Adele, one of the morning-shift aides, that Ruth told her, “No, please just let me sleep,” Greta said, “I will stay in bed longer, thank you,” Sylvia said, “Bloody hell, go away,” and George said something like “Dutdutdut.” “I don’t know if you want to check on them yourself,” Adele told Annabel. “But it’s weird, all four of them still in bed.”

  “Are they sick?” Perhaps something only they ate or drank. That would teach them a good lesson about self-indulgence; although not if they had actual food poisoning, which can kill weakened old people low in bounce-back abilities.

  “Not throwing-up sick.”

  Annabel sighed. Yes, just in case, she would have to look for herself; but when she arrived at Ruth’s bedside, Ruth insisted, “It’s my birthday and I’m sleeping in,” and closed her eyes again. Next up Greta, who, when Annabel shook her shoulder, stirred only long enough to say, “I was awake late to say to Ruth happy birthday.” Of course, like it or not, George had to be roused, because he had to be helped to the bathroom and stepped by an aide through his toiletries before it was too late. “Dutdutdut,” he told Annabel, too, but often enough people who’ve had strokes need time each day to pull together whatever they’re capable of pulling together.

  That left Sylvia Lodge, although Annabel would just as soon have as little to do with her as she can. It’s difficult to have authority over someone who was friends with Annabel’s parents, whose husband worked with Annabel’s father, who knew Annabel as infant and girl and who, Annabel’s mother used to say, “is a real pill. Poor Nancy, Sylvia must be the most unaffectionate woman on earth.” Later there was some mishmash of adult tensions, maybe the strains of a law practice, who knows, and Annabel’s parents and the Lodges didn’t hang out together so much, and the women, as Annabel recalls, rarely spoke. At this end of time, anyway, it’s tricky dealing with Mrs. Lodge, complicated in a former-little-kid way. Still, if so
mebody can afford the rent and isn’t too sick with one thing or another, it’s hard to say they’re not allowed to move in.

  This morning’s encounter could have been worse—Mrs. Lodge just said, “I’m perfectly fine. Don’t bother me. I’ll get there when I get there.” As she did, barely, in time for lunch. And now they’re all here in the lounge for Ruth Friedman’s seventy-fifth birthday party, so whatever kept them late in bed must have been a false alarm. Irritating in itself.

  Sleeping late has left them relatively clear-eyed, except maybe for George Hammond. Hard to tell if he’s getting better or worse, but he’s one of those Annabel keeps a particular eye on in case his situation takes a dive and she has to shuffle him off to, say, his wife’s nursing home. He’s remarkably uncaring in that regard; hasn’t in all his time here even taken the small trouble to visit his wife. Then again, he’s a man, and in Annabel Walker’s experience men are careless creatures. Spoiled and selfish and vastly unreliable.

  This afternoon Annabel’s job is to preside over the aides cutting and distributing cake, and to lead the “Happy Birthday” singalong so she can get back to holiday planning at the first possible moment. The trouble is families, mainly. They have all sorts of requests and even demands, and then, come the time, will get in the way. Plus residents, with or without families coming, will have any number of ways of kicking up fusses—all in all, far too much emotion zigzagging through the Idyll Inn over far too many days. However, juggling and managing is her job. The satisfaction, not inconsiderable, is in doing it well, and so when she smiles and says, “I hope you’re enjoying this,” and Ruth smiles back and replies, “Oh yes, I am indeed,” well, that is fairly gratifying.

  Who says happy birthday to Annabel Walker these days? Nobody, really. Or if they do, it’s not often with a genuine heart. Or maybe that’s only her. It gets harder and harder to have a genuine heart. Come the time, she herself will be a less than cheery resident of some Idyll Inn equivalent; although it’s true that this job offers quite a few examples of what a person should make an effort not to become—cantankerous, self-centred, ungracious—along with a few models of kindness and courage.

  Ruth is surprised by the number of people, however lame, deaf, frail or slightly confused, who come by the table to offer their greetings. Maybe they’re mostly grateful for cake, but it’s nice of them anyway. In her months here she hasn’t particularly cultivated anyone besides Sylvia and Greta and in a way George—not much point, with no intention of sticking around, and with her carefully laid trail of gloom doing its persuasive work on them. But now here she is when she ought to be not here—this casts a new light on some of the powdery people wishing her well.

  This new light has to do also with the ludicrous, grandiose scheme Sylvia proposed here in the lounge an hour ago. “I’ve been thinking some more,” she said, “about how to keep us stimulated after last night—for one thing, how to reward you for staying alive, Ruth, and how to sufficiently entertain you to keep you that way. It’s a hard one to top, but it seems to me, just think about it, that we have the tools and we’ve done the thinking-through part, so we’d only need the circumstance and the request. And of course the guts. Which admittedly we still haven’t put to the test.”

  What?

  “I mean, you made your case for, oh, relatively easeful death, I suppose we could call it. Granted any of us could go any minute, just naturally, as they say. I’m sure we’re all aware that we don’t have any idea what bullets are lurking inside, waiting for the moment to shoot us down. But if it doesn’t happen that fast, that’s where your idea would come in handy. So my theory is, we’d agree that if any of us gets in a longer-term kind of trouble and wants out, the others will help her. Or him. If Greta had another real heart attack and couldn’t bounce back, or if my mind wandered off into the wilderness. That kind of thing. We’d have a choice. Same as you might have had.”

  If Ruth had said, Now, and if Greta hadn’t taken that turn, and if they’d been able to bring themselves to act, in the end.

  “And then,” Sylvia was continuing, “since we’d be into the law of diminishing returns if we started knocking each other off, and nobody’d want to be left last person standing—or sitting, whatever—anyway, we could keep our eyes peeled for recruits. Carefully, of course. Very subtly.”

  Ruth wondered if Sylvia’s cherished mind might already have gone wandering into a wilderness thicket. Surely she could not be serious.

  Typical of Sylvia, though, to turn death into a project. And to elect herself chair. And then to sit back and smile as if at a clever bit of insanely ambitious mischief; although it wasn’t an especially benign smile. Nor a particularly insane one, either.

  A woman who will not give up ought to have been the first to protest what Sylvia was talking about, but Greta said instead, “I was frightened in the night, and I remembered how my heart has been before, too, and being so frightened. When Sylvia first spoke this before you came to the table today, Ruth, I thought of course, no, but then I think of how I do not want to be helpless, or to be a burden to my girls, and I see that perhaps this could be a strong thing, although I did not dream of it before.” She smiled, although not with Sylvia’s edge. “This is something more I have learned from you, Ruth. You see again how we keep learning?”

  At least one of Sylvia’s goals is already achieved: serious or not, mad or otherwise, her suggestion, her project, her plan, means Ruth is now intrigued by a new, interesting arithmetic among these happy-birthday faces collecting their slices of cake: who are these people, and how far might they go—in what state are their minds, and where may their hearts lie? And how about George? It’s hard to imagine that he signed on. More likely that when Sylvia asked, he agreeably cried, Yes.

  Today, at any rate, it’s nothing that requires action or even much contemplation. Today is Ruth’s birthday: an unanticipated addendum to what was to have been the whole of her life.

  The existence of time—that itself, hours into the day, remains disorienting. Fall-down dizzying, almost. If she’d thought of this day coming about, Ruth would have expected it to carry only the sad weight of flat, even foolish anticlimax. Entering the lounge this afternoon, seeing Sylvia, Greta and George at their usual table, was almost embarrassing. “Oh dear,” Ruth said. “All that effort and struggle we went through, and here I still am.”

  “Well,” said Sylvia, glancing at Greta, “not entirely through your own choice. And I don’t know about you, but I can hardly believe in daylight what seemed sensible enough in the night. That we just gave you your medication and left you, Greta—given that you weren’t actually someone who wanted to die, that’s pretty unforgivable.”

  Which was when she described her bright new idea, and the awkward moment—at least that awkward moment—was hurdled right over.

  Ruth might have expected Greta to express some regret for the night, if not an apology. She has not done so; but now, with their slices of banana birthday cake on the table before them, she asks, “Are you glad, Ruth?” To be alive, she must mean. It has been snowing lightly for some hours now, so that under a gunmetal sky the Idyll Inn grounds are the flat white of dull paint: clean, but not optimistic. What is optimistic in a temporary, seasonal way are the red, green, blue and white little bulbs strung around windows, the wreaths of fake pine boughs and silver bells and wide red ribbons in bows hung carefully high on the walls here and there, and even the plastic mistletoe sprigs. Glad is not quite the right word—perhaps Greta could consult her dictionary and find a more lavish one.

  Ruth’s first surprise of the day when she finally woke up, just before lunchtime, and after failed efforts by both Adele and Annabel Walker to rouse her—her first surprise, having forgotten in sleep, was remembering.

  And she looked around and thought, just, Oh.

  The beauty of her chest rising and falling, breath in and out. The amazement of light.

  Funny how, in all her calculations, she had somehow left out the amazement and beauty
.

  Bewildering, too, the business of light when there was not supposed to be light, sounds when there should have been silence.

  An interesting sort of elation nestling in the chasm between her intentions and the ordinariness of that light and those sounds.

  She thought, Bernard. The final impression—it’s been hard to see past her small hands and a pillow descending, to the grand sweep of her history, and so many faces. Today, with the opening of her eyes it was still hard, of course, but no longer so blinding.

  What did she do to Bernard?

  She performed a good act as lovingly—as mercifully—as she could. She mustn’t forget that.

  How her bones ache, especially with the first movements each day. Finally rising slowly and cautiously from her bed, too late in the day to have help from busy Adele—once on her feet she felt also, besides the familiar pain top to bottom, a ballooning in her throat, new and not painful, of something round and brilliantly red. A constricting, monstrous uplift of…gratitude, maybe. Some of that for Bernard.

  The grace of shapes: the pewtery late-morning light touching the yellow shade of the ancient floor lamp that used to stand at his end of the sofa, and glancing off the walnut cabinet that holds her and Bernard’s old TV set, and swooping down to the buttery-maple coffee table with its magazines and their worn remote. The light disappearing, absorbed into the dull nut-brown softness of their high-backed, wide-armed sofa and matching wing chair. Bernard’s round, freckled face, all of his faces through the decades, in every possession.

  All those possessions that she tenderly and firmly said goodbye to yesterday, she has had to tenderly and firmly say hello to today. New eyes from old.

  Up on the far hills, through the light snowfall, the bare trees reached upwards, distinct and bony, with their tap-tapping limbs. Out on the riverbank, a well-bundled young couple walking a snow-dappled dog looked up to see Ruth in her window, and waved: Hellooo, hellooo.