“That’s your room to the left.” Tim pointed down the hallway and scooped up his backpack. “Got to run. My macro professor actually takes attendance. Help yourself to food—there’s cereal, milk, potato chips, maybe some peanut butter. Take-out menus on the TV. Or you can wait for me to get home and we’ll go out.”
Tim hesitated in the doorway. Jeremy looked shell-shocked, still hugging his duffle like a drunken girlfriend who couldn’t stand up on her own. Tim wondered if Jeremy had ever had a girlfriend, or if he just loved the female parts of flowers. The pistil, wasn’t it? Or the stigma? He blanked on the textbook diagram in his required freshman biology course.
He pointed to Jeremy’s duffle. “You can put that thing down. Unpack. Or just sleep. Or go out. Make yourself at home.” He tossed the extra set of keys at Jeremy. “Nice catch, bro,” Tim said, turning away.
He was late, and he had to get away from Jeremy’s dead face. He pulled the apartment door closed behind him with a heavy clunk. He took the stairs two at a time and jogged to the subway. He loved his brother, and there was the pledge and all, but still. What the fuck had he gotten himself into?
Once he was alone, Jeremy let his duffle thud onto the oak floor and looked around. The apartment was small, but it was neater than he would have expected of Tim. No crushed beer cans or empty pizza boxes like the few off-campus apartments he’d visited at UMass. And it was quiet, no music seeping through thin dorm walls or the thumping of footsteps down the hallway. He missed all that. He wished he were back in his dorm. Or even sitting with Patty and her mustard sweater in the exam room. He dug in his pocket for the business card she’d given him. Maybe he could call. Because, really, what difference did a change of place make? Why should being in Brooklyn slow down the parade of ecological horribles marching across his brain? Why should a different city banish the funeral march of dead plants?
Jeremy knew what his twin was thinking. He could read in the set of Tim’s jaw that he was already regretting his invitation. He bet that Tim was thinking about their father, worrying that Jeremy would go all soft too. Tian still looked dangerous, with his grim expression and prison tats, but inside he was boneless, diminished. Jeremy wished he could have inherited his dad’s tough looks and his mom’s tough insides, but he got only Francie’s blond genes and Tian’s mush.
Chapter Four
At the toot of the car horn, Flo buttoned her jacket and gathered her pocketbook and cane. She checked the list taped to the apartment door—coffeepot unplugged, cat fed, stove burners off, keys in hand—and let herself out. Damn good thing Mimi still had fully functional gray matter and a driver’s license, Flo thought as she maneuvered into the passenger seat, because their Thursday morning group was a lifesaver.
“Quite a brouhaha at Food Castle yesterday,” she announced to Mimi.
Flo couldn’t wait to tell her friend about the adventure, except that the story kept floating out of reach, like those gently drifting black spots hovering behind her eyeballs. Something about Zoe. There was an onion, and comic books.
“Wait and tell us all at once?” Mimi asked, turning onto Route 5. It was a little longer to the mall this way, but she refused to drive on the highway.
The three other women had claimed their regular places on the blue Coffee Hut sofas, facing each other across a fake-spool coffee table. Fanny and Marlene had their skinny decaf lattés and Claire was sipping her green tea.
“We have to talk about the name of our group,” Fanny announced, as she did every week.
“I like the Old Hags’ Club,” Mimi teased. Flo grinned.
“You ladies may be hags, but I’m not,” Claire said.
“We need our drinks before you start,” Mimi said. “The regular, Flo?”
Flo nodded and sat down across from Marlene. These women were her best friends in the world. Seven of them met in a consciousness-raising group in 1970. She had just moved to Springfield and was pregnant with Sam. Together they counseled rape victims, protested wars and male privilege, and raised their children—except for Fanny who called herself child-free. They met every Sunday night.
Now in their seventies, after losing two members of their group and several partners, they organized food brigades after a hospital discharge as efficiently as they once planned sit-ins. Their meeting changed to Thursday mornings when several members admitted that they didn’t see so well at night. Recently, several of them had lost the leadership of organizations they created. Just last month they listened to Mimi describe how the Board of Directors of the food pantry that she started in her living room four decades earlier had maneuvered her out of her job.
“That’s exactly what the women’s shelter trustees did to me,” Marlene had sloshed her latte with the force of her response. “Can you believe it? After I created the project out of my own broken ribs. Look around the room. We’ve all been deposed from positions of power in organizations we started.”
“Not me,” Flo had said.
Mimi leaned over and whispered. “You were kicked out of the Party, remember?”
“That’s different,” Flo had said.
“Yeah, you didn’t start the CP.”
Now, Mimi handed Flo her Mocha Delight and sat next to her. “Flo has a story to share,” she prompted. “About something funny that happened yesterday.”
“What about our name?” Fanny said.
Mimi rolled her eyes.
Flo rubbed her chin. Touching a stiff hair, her fingers flew back in time to remember the feel of a stubbly cheek, black hairs that scratched her skin raw. Another lifetime.
Mimi touched her arm. “Flo? About Food Castle?”
Flo shook her head slowly, trying to remember. Did she go to Food Castle? She had to shave those few bristly hairs. Maybe she should add “Shave chin” to the list on her front door, except she would hate for Sam or Zoe to see it.
“Really, we need a name for our group,” Fanny insisted. “Something that expresses how much we love each other. You know, and how long we’ve been together.”
“Longer than most marriages,” Marlene said.
“It’s not only that. It’s all we’ve been through, the losses we’ve suffered. Our dear husbands.” Fanny glanced at Mimi. “Partners, I mean.”
Mimi’s beloved Joanna had been the most recent death.
“Claire probably wants to call us the Deposed Despots Club.” Fanny’s voice dripped sarcasm. She still hadn’t forgiven Claire’s unkind comment about her management style, made just one week after Fanny’s previously beloved nephews wrested control of the family law firm.
“Hey,” Claire said. “Some of us still work for a living?” Claire worked weekends supervising night shift nurses at a community hospital. She hadn’t shared with her friends that the administration had pretty much demolished her benefits when they decreased her hours the year before. “And not all of us are tyrants on the job?”
Flo looked down at her lap. She knew these women so well—how Fanny could be harsh, how Claire’s voice climbed into a question at the end of every sentence, making Flo long to chop off the final clause—but in the last few months, Flo often had no clue what they were talking about. That’s what she should add to her list: pay closer attention.
“Earth to Flo,” Marlene said.
“Never mind,” Mimi said. “You can tell us about Food Castle later. You know what I was thinking about last night, when I couldn’t sleep?”
“Hey. I saw you on Facebook at 3:24 a.m.,” Fanny said.
Mimi ignored the interruption. “How about we organize a rally for International Women’s Day next month? Talk about the war and feminism. Like we did two, three, years ago.”
“More like ten years ago?” Claire said.
“Whatever.” Mimi shrugged. “There’s still a war and still plenty of male chauvinism, right? I was thinking about the speech you gave in Yellow Springs, Flo, about child care and the feminist movement. Remember that?”
“Yellow Springs?” Fanny asked.
Mimi laughed. “Do I ever. You got up on stage shirtless, Sammy hanging on your tit, and let them have it about the rights of women to have kids if they wanted to. How children had to be part of our revolution.”
“Even the boys.” Flo laughed. “What a hoot that was.”
That was just one of the reasons Flo loved Mimi so much. Nobody else, not even Sam or Zoe, could remind Flo who she was, beyond the memory lapses and chin hairs. No one else remembered all the demonstrations, all the political meetings, the endless arguments about the primary contradiction and was feminism a bourgeois sidetrack. Being known like that was priceless, like they said on TV. Flo might not remember much these days, but she knew that.
“That’s exactly my point.” Fanny smacked her hand against the coffee table. “We need a new name for our group, to reflect who we really are.”
Who exactly were they? Flo wondered. Who was she?
Chapter Five
Spring came early that year.
Not isn’t-this-wonderful early. More like this-isn’t-right early. By the spring equinox, the daffodils and hyacinths were in full bloom and the forsythia was almost there. Weather pundits nattered away about the surreal string of ninety-degree days in the Midwest, early mosquito swarms bringing bizarre tropical diseases and invasive crop-destroying insects in the South, and sky-high levels of yellow pine pollen coating cities and lungs nationwide. It was the warmest winter ever recorded, beating every record by several degrees. Researchers blamed solar flares or La Niña.
Zoe loved the unnatural warmth and she didn’t care about the cause. Spring liberated her from snow piles blocking curb cuts and icy sidewalks and bulky coats. Maneuvering her wheelchair with ease over the minimal threshold of the diner, she was as mobile as a normal teenager. Not that her life mirrored her friends’ that much, especially since she took the Monday-Wednesday-Friday job helping her grandmother. At least there’d been no further episodes of target practice with onions at the new store.
Every Friday Zoe met her father and grandmother at the diner on the corner for an early dinner. This week, Flo and Sam were already seated side by side at the half-booth, half-table in the back of the diner, under a poster of giant ice cream cones masquerading as a mountain range with peaks of pistachio and blackberry and double chocolate. Negotiating the narrow path between tables, Zoe marveled at the bizarre permutations of genetics, more interesting when it was attached to people than in diagrams in her biology textbook. Flo was pale with wild, steel-gray hair. Sam’s springy curls were sandy-brown and his skin was the color of the half-milk coffee Zoe’s mom used to make on special occasions. Zoe looked down at her own hands, already deeply tanned in early spring.
“Zoe,” Sam called out. “Prow was hactice?”
Her father’s spoonerisms got old years ago, but Zoe didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He seemed to get such a kick from the stupid sounds. But she didn’t want to encourage him either.
“Wet,” she answered, parking her chair in the empty space across from them. She missed sitting on the cracked leather seat. Sam offered to fold the chair and stow it out of the way in the back hallway so they could take a regular booth. It wasn’t worth the effort but it still made her sad. So let’s go someplace else, he suggested, but she didn’t want that either. She’d grown up eating at this place, even though the vegetarian options were limited. When she was little and mourning that she wasn’t allowed to be near balloons because of her latex allergy, the owners Madge and Owen promised their diner would always be a balloon-free zone. They’d kept that promise and she was loyal too.
Madge called from the kitchen through-window. “What’ll you have?”
“The usual,” Flo said.
Zoe rolled her eyes. Her grandmother, so fanatic about healthy food on their weekly grocery shopping, always ordered a medium-rare burger, extra pickles, and onion rings on Fridays. “How could she be so phony?” Zoe ranted at her dad. “Consistency is for small minds,” Sam liked to quote in response.
“Southwestern tofu wrap for me, please,” Zoe said.
“Make that two,” Sam added. “And a coffee.”
Sam placed his silverware packet, tightly wrapped in a napkin with a green band, perfectly perpendicular to the table edge. “Listen,” he said. “I’ve got something important to discuss with you two.”
Uh-oh, Zoe thought. In her experience, important equaled bad news.
Sam tended to procrastinate making big decisions, but by the first Friday of spring, he knew that Flo had to move into Assisted Living or a Memory Unit, or whatever other euphemistic names they came up with. He had researched every facility within a twenty-five mile radius—deeply researched, hacking into password-protected accreditation association chat rooms and archives. He read ten years worth of consumer complaints, health and safety regulation violations, and employee grievance records. In the six years since he transformed his not-quite-kosher online inquiry business into website design, Sam hadn’t lost his investigative touch. Of all the potential new homes for Flo, only one seemed worth a visit.
Madge brought three glasses of ice water and Sam’s coffee. “You guys doing okay?” When they all nodded and smiled, she squeezed Zoe’s shoulder before leaving. Sam sipped his coffee, wondering if Zoe liked the touch, or it made her feel like a little kid. It was hard to know what a teenager wanted.
When he was Zoe’s age, he played ball in Forest Park every warm evening until the game disappeared into dusk. His strongest memory was that his mother—who hated organized sports—watched every game and his dad never came. Baseball won’t get you into college. Baseball won’t get you a job. Dad had a hoarse voice, thick with smoke. “Lung cancer will get you,” Flo used to warn him. But she was wrong. His heart gave out when Sam was in eighth grade. Sam’s most profound connection with his dad had been listening to the Grateful Dead while they washed dishes every evening after dinner. Sam couldn’t listen to the Dead after his father died. Until freshman year in college when he walked by Anna, sitting alone on the grass outside the library listening to the lyrics about the highway between dawn and the dark of night. The song gave him courage to talk to her. And now they were all gone: his dad was long dead, Anna didn’t love him any more, and his mother was losing her marbles.
“So, Ma. Zoe.” He made himself look at them both. “I’m not sure how to say this, because it’s not an easy situation.” He hesitated, took another sip of coffee. Zoe twirled her silverware packet through her fingers like a mini-baton.
“Spit it out, Sam,” Flo said. “You want to dump me in a nursing home, don’t you?”
Zoe’s utensil baton clattered onto the table. Sam choked on his half-swallowed mouthful.
“Dad?” Zoe said. “Is that true?”
“Not a nursing home. Assisted Living, probably a Memory Unit. There’s a big difference.”
There was a big difference. Sam had been charmed by the small non-profit facility halfway up the mountain in Holyoke. He wasn’t crazy about the symbolism of the location, with the affiliated nursing home and hospice center at the top of the hill. “Closer to heaven,” the director said with a practiced laugh.
Sam reached across the table and took Flo’s hand. “I think it’s time for you to live someplace where you can get some help.”
“I don’t need help,” Flo said.
“You’ll like this place,” Sam said. “It’s convenient—fifteen minutes from Zoe and me. Closer to the mall.”
“So you won’t have to miss your Thursday morning meetings,” Zoe said.
Flo flashed her a look. Whose side are you on?
“There’ll be people there to make sure you don’t hurt yourself,” Sam said. “Or anyone else.”
“I’m fine,” Flo said.
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“You’ll love it,” Sam insisted. “When I visited, there were these two women sitting side by side on the piano bench playing Mozart. They were good and I stopped to listen. I noticed each woman played with one hand. The director told me that one woman had been a concert pianist until her stroke and then she couldn’t use her right hand. The other musician had bad arthritis in her left hand. Together they sounded great.”
“Heartwarming,” Flo said.
Okay, so maybe that was a bizarre reason to choose a facility, but it made sense to Sam. Hillside Village seemed like an accepting sort of place and Flo’s outspoken opinions would challenge most institutions. Over the years, his teachers had rolled their eyes more than once at her contributions to Parents’ Night and Sam learned to balance his pride and his embarrassment. In grade school he hated that Flo never took his dad’s name. Anna never took his name either, but by then it was pretty common. Besides, maybe she already knew something he didn’t, back then when they got married.
“It was heartwarming,” Sam said. “It’s a good place.”
“Maybe it is but I’m fine. If I go to some old people’s prison, how can I continue my work, my organizing? I can’t, that’s how!”
“Come on, Ma. You haven’t been active in politics for years.”
“Of course I have,” Flo shouted. “What do you know? I go to meetings and I leaflet and talk to people about important issues like workers’ rights.”
“Like at Food Castle?” he said, under his breath.
“I heard that,” Flo said, slapping his hand. “Besides, those places cost a mint. I don’t have that kind of money.”
Sam swabbed the last drips of salsa from his plate with his finger. He couldn’t look at Flo. She would hate this. “They’ll help with the Medicaid application. You’ll qualify, no problem.”
His mother seemed to deflate, like the energy whooshed out of her body. “If I go there,” she said, “it’s like giving up. Who will I be if I stop fighting?”
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