The Possible World

by Liese O'Halloran Schwarz

  I sit waiting, listening to their declamations. I have little to prepare once I am dressed; I am bringing nothing with me. Mandy runs from room to room, zipping here, knotting a shoelace there, dispensing reassurance: Fine, fine, you look fine, and Here it is, right here.

  Finally, a whisker before eight thirty, we are all at the front of Oak Haven, waiting for the transport van. There are six of us: Mrs. Donovan, Mrs. Bentley and Mrs. O’Meara, Mr. Simonetti and Mr. Tuttle, and me. As we are loading the van, Gloria Pereira appears in her wheelchair in a steady, motorized version of bursting onto the scene.

  “I changed my mind,” she says. “May I come?”

  “The more the merrier,” cries Mandy.

  The mall opens early for mall walking twice a week; after the short ride across town, our van joins a stream of similar vehicles from the various senior facilities in the area. We travel in a kind of convoy, collapsing into single file for the last mile or so, then snaking up into the parking structure, inching along to the double doors where one by one each van disgorges its occupants, the skylighted middle level of the structure filling with a palsied throng. Walkers, canes, wheelchairs. It looks like a march to Lourdes.

  The section Mandy has chosen for us is no more than a quarter mile of smooth indoor boulevard, with benches at intervals. There isn’t a lot of conversation as we move ourselves bench to bench, each of us going at a different pace, Mandy loping among us like a border collie, her voice encouraging and soothing by turns.

  “You’re doing great, Clare,” says Mandy, dashing by as I am approaching the next bench, only three more to go. “I hope I’m half as fit at your age,” she says. “You have to tell me your secret. I’ll bet you were a dancer.”

  She dashes off again without waiting for a reply.

  I lower myself to the bench and lean my cane against my legs. It’s been a while since I’ve walked so far, or been able to look up and see sky. Although the sun is shining down through a glass barrier high above our heads, I fancy that I can feel its warmth. There’s a potted plant beside me, a welcome spray of green. I rub a thumb and index finger over a leaf: plastic. I get up and move to the next bench at a tortoise pace, feeling the pleasant pull in my muscles. I’m not sure which is more incredible, the memory of the physical labor in my past, or the fact that nowadays creeping twenty feet under my own steam before resting is an accomplishment.

  The stores are blinking their lights on and unlocking their doors. Across from where I sit, a smartly dressed woman fills the jeweler’s window with sparkling trays; on the corner of the row is a very large store apparently devoted solely to the sale of brassieres. That storefront display would have been considered pornography not so long ago. A smell of cinnamon sneaks into the air. Customers begin to appear, some of them solo, fast and purposeful, but also slower-moving pairs and trios, sipping coffee from white paper cups, chatting and laughing and sometimes stopping to look at items in the windows. There’s something bright and colorful and inexplicable almost everywhere I look.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here, observing the customers drifting in and out of shops, trying to puzzle out what a store called LIDS might sell—I’m too far away to see more than the neon sign—before I see Gloria exiting a shop just a few feet away. She’s putting a white paper bundle into the huge handbag on her lap when she looks up and sees me. I sigh as she chrrrs over.

  “Look what I got.”

  She opens her handbag and angles its maw toward me. It gapes a crush of tissues, eyeglass cases, paperback books, pens, and I don’t know what all.

  “Heavens,” I say. “You carry all that around with you?”

  She holds it up closer to my face.

  “Close your eyes,” she commands. “Take a deep breath. Can’t you smell it?”

  I close my eyes and inhale. First just more of the same: a cool wash of chemical interior air, polluted by a blend of cinnamon and artificial florals. And then something else. The water rushes into my mouth, surprising me. I haven’t had much appetite for a while; lately everything’s been tasting of the same dull flat nothing. I figured it was my taste buds failing, another county heard from in the relentless progressive decrepitude of age.

  “Sausage?” I say. It’s all I can manage. I am fairly drooling.

  “Not just any sausage.” Her face seems lit from within. “Hand-cured linguica.” She brings the handbag under her own chin and breathes deeply. “Just like that, I’m back in my grandmother’s kitchen.”

  “I’m just guessing,” thinking of the three water pills. “Against doctor’s orders?”

  “Ab-so-lutely.” She’s grinning. She snaps the clasp of the purse and wedges the bulky thing beside her in the chair. “What’s your madeleine?”

  “What do you mean?”

  She knows I know what she means; she blinks once, slowly, as she explains. “Is there a particular smell that brings back your childhood?”

  So many things come to mind, tumbling over themselves, pushing to be first: choose me, no me.

  “I don’t dwell in the past,” I say. I don’t think I have ever told a bigger lie. I almost expect the God I turned away from eighty years ago to reach down and rap me on the forehead, knock me dead where I sit.

  “Nonsense,” she says. “We’re all of us obsessed with our own story. Especially those of us near the end of it. We go over it and over it. But guess what, Clare.” She leans forward, mock whispers at me. “We’re still writing it.”

  She is addled. She’s the one who needs a nerve pill.

  “Are you ready?” she says, hand on the knob that controls her wheelchair, and I realize she means for us to proceed together.

  My little shadow again. How did this start? How can I end it?

  “I’m fine. You go ahead.”

  “I don’t mind waiting,” she says. “You can give me the lowdown on our fellow citizens. What’s up with Mrs. Donovan? Is she demented or just deaf?”

  Both.

  “You’re not still mad about the other day?” she asks. “I thought we sorted that out.” When I don’t answer she rolls her eyes, magnified to the size of hard-boiled eggs by her glasses. The effect is impressive. “I don’t understand you,” she says. “You’re alive. You’re walking.”

  The words rise up in me and dam at my lips, pressing there for a moment before ebbing back down my throat.

  “You know nothing about me,” I manage to say.

  “No one does,” she says bluntly. “I see you sitting alone, day after day. There are some very nice people at Oak Haven, Clare, and not one of them knows anything about you.”

  “You’ve been asking people about me?” How intrusive.

  In the distance, I can see Mandy coming toward us. She must be collecting the stragglers.

  “For goodness’ sakes,” says Gloria. “I’m trying to be friends. Who doesn’t want a friend?”

  “We have nothing in common.” It’s a flat statement of fact, empty of invitation, but apparently she hears a challenge in it.

  “We’re both readers,” she says. “That’s something in common. We both seem to have most of our marbles. That’s a pretty significant thing to have in common, considering.”

  “How are you ladies doing?” Mandy cries, reaching us.

  Gloria gives me a look. “Your loss.” She turns her head away from me and smiles at Mandy. “Coming.” She juts out an elbow, uses it to tuck her bag up against herself like a mama hen gathering a chick, and then jams the wheelchair controller knob forward.

  We proceed, Mandy chattering and Gloria and I silent, through the thickening mall crowd, to the large glass double doors at the exit. When the van comes, Gloria is loaded last, and though her wheelchair ends up locked in beside my seat, she doesn’t say a word to me. No one talks on the ride home except Mrs. Donovan, who reports on everything we pass. There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts, mmm, I’d love a chocolate glazed, and There’s the Big Blue Bug, he’s got Easter Bunny ears on, is it Easter again already? and Loo
k, another Dunkin’s.

  By eleven we are back. We disband exhaustedly into our rooms to rest before lunch. The midday meal marks the beginning of every day’s slowdown; afterward, there’s an hour to digest before an onslaught of personnel: for some, the physical or occupational therapists, for others the nursing assistants who prick fingers for sugar levels and administer snacks or insulin as necessary. The afternoon passes with books or television or card games or knitting or napping, and before long it’s dinnertime.

  I delay my entrance to the dining room, giving everyone else a chance to get there before me. No, not everyone—Gloria. I want Gloria to commit to her seat. She’s been sitting at my usual table, and tonight I will sit somewhere else.

  But when I finally enter the dining room, Gloria is not at my table. Scanning the room, I see her seated near the window, with some of the group from our outing, engaged in an animated conversation. The new clique has caused a shakeup in habitual seating, and my regular table is filled with knitters, who take me in and dismiss me with a glance. They’re correct to do so—I can knit, but only in a lumpy, serviceable way, and I never did it for enjoyment. While they discuss the best way to set a raglan sleeve, I watch Gloria shout-chat with Mr. Simonetti and Mrs. Donovan. I suppose that’s a match made in Heaven: those two can’t hear well enough to be bothered by her nonsense.

  The tossed green salad from the menu is disappointing—flaccid cucumber slices and hard pale wedges of tomato scattered over chopped iceberg that was kept in a too-cold refrigerator, so that its cells are packed with grainy ice.

  Were vegetables really as I remember them, each speaking individually and boldly on the palate, tomato and cucumber fully distinguishable from each other? They differ solely by texture now. I have read that the soil of those big farms is drenched in chemicals. Maybe that’s the difference. I never ate anything but homegrown in my life before coming here.

  “This whole meal is unnatural,” I say. “I bet these bacon bits never saw a pig.”

  The knitters stop talking, but none of them responds. Am I speaking too softly?

  “These tomatoes are terrible,” I say, a bit more loudly.

  “We used to grow tomatoes in the summer. In the backyard,” says one of the knitters.

  “That’s right,” I say. “In summer. Tomatoes in spring are a perversion of nature. Not that seasons matter anymore.” In every one of my memories, the weather is predominant, like an extra sense or dimension. Nowadays, living in climate control, the present is a rhythmless slush, and I’m hard-pressed to know the month without looking at the calendar. “They could be feeding us anything.” I point my fork at my plate. “Maybe this isn’t cod. It could be an amazing simulation.”

  “Mine’s cod,” says the knitter, touching her fork to the flaky half-eaten square on her plate.

  “I meant—” I begin, but her blank expression stops me.

  There are a few moments of silence as if to honor the death of that conversation, and then the knitting discussion starts up again.

  There are peas, frozen of course and overcooked to a khaki mush. I eat some in silence and then go to my room. Doze for a while and dream of peas thumbed raw from the pod, crunchy and sweet. After a while I hear Gloria’s door open and the noise of her chair, then some drawers opening and shutting. At least she’s not a television watcher. Some earlier occupants of that room had the thing going night and day.

  I should apologize. Belinda’s right, I shouldn’t be so rude. And Gloria and I really may be the only ones here with all of our marbles. I acknowledge now the humor in that turn of phrase, picturing Mrs. Donovan with one lonely marble skittering around inside her skull. I lift my hand to knock on the wall, but as if she’s heard my thoughts, Gloria’s television goes on.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  * * *

  Leo

  THERE ARE A BUNCH OF kids here, but no one my age. A little girl with tangled hair who smells of pee and doesn’t talk, and a very thin teenager who sucks her thumb. A pair of ten- or eleven-year-old girls who wear matching T-shirts they made with puffy paint in OT and are always whispering in each other’s ears. The only other boy here is much bigger than I am. He looks like that boy who used to sit behind me in chapel and spit into the space where my collar gapped away from my neck. A name floats up to me: Bedrick. I haven’t seen this kid spit on anybody, but he has the same hoarse voice and barrel-bellied walk and I stay away from him. He’s easy to avoid: he spends most of his time in his room, playing a game on something called a Nintendo, which is a television set on a rolling cart. I’m intrigued by it, but it stays in the big kid’s room and it never seems to be anyone else’s turn.

  After breakfast I am expected to wash and dress as if I am going to a classroom, even though I just sit at the desk in my room and do worksheets. I copy the alphabet and color in pictures of the American Revolution and do easy math problems: one orange plus two oranges equals three oranges. Each day has a workbook section, and when it’s filled in, school is over. Sometimes I do everything slowly and carefully, keep the color inside the lines and make my letters perfect; sometimes I draw faces on the fruit outlines, or doodle designs in the empty spaces around the pictures of patriots. It doesn’t seem to matter what I do; as far as I can tell, no one checks my work.

  The tangle-haired girl is named Missy, and she’s too young for school. Sometimes she brings her tablets and coloring books into my room and draws pictures silently while I do school. Her drawings are mostly flowers and houses, but the ones with people have black cross marks across the faces. She’ll draw three people next to a house under a sun, and put in all the grass and the flowers, and then just when you think she’s finished with the drawing, she puts big Xs over the heads. When I close my workbook, she jumps down from her chair and we go together down the hall to the playroom and look out the big window at the buildings below and the people walking. We’re in the tallest building so there are a lot of roofs. There’s a store across the street, Garibaldi’s, that has a sign for frozen lemonade in a green-and-white-striped cup. Missy puts her tongue against the glass and licks it like ice cream.

  At first the police came every day, but then that stopped. Maybe they finally believed that I didn’t recognize the photo faces, and couldn’t tell them more about Clyde or Mama or the day I came here. No one has told me what’s wrong with me, but it must have something to do with the emptiness in my memory. I know that it should be different, that there should be a long story like a book I’m in the middle of, with pictures and words filling the pages. When they ask me to open the book of my story, every page is blank. But then when I’m not trying to remember, things swim up in the corners of my mind, like bright fish that dart out of view when I look.

  Miss Meredith is the name of the fluffy-sweater lady. She calls me Ben; they all do. She comes to get me today as usual, and when I go down the hall toward the room where we always go from eleven to noon, she steers me past it, toward a different door.

  “Let’s talk in here today,” she says, and pushes the door open.

  It’s a bigger room than the one we’ve been using; it has a big mirror on one wall and smiling brown monkeys hold hands in a chain just under the ceiling, all the way around. There is a bookshelf with some books on it and a dollhouse and large toy box in the corner, and in the center of the room there’s a round table surrounded by plastic chairs. Miss Meredith sits down in one of them.

  “You can play with anything in here,” she says. “You choose.”

  I stand next to the toy box and look down into the jumble. Rubber snake, dolls, metal cars, airplanes, army men.

  “Anything you like,” she says.

  I pull out the snake, wiggle it. It’s got rings of color around it. A coral snake, you can tell from the colors. Red touching yellow, kill a fellow.

  “Ooh, you’re brave. I hate snakes.”

  Silly: a rubber snake doesn’t require courage. I drop the snake back into the bin and take up a soldier. His plastic feet are froze
n to a plastic disk, in a half lunge forward with his gun aimed. I drop that back into the toy box too.

  “Let’s draw,” she says, as though it’s a new idea. She asks me to draw every day.

  I climb onto the chair across from her, although I don’t feel like drawing. There are tablets of off-white paper, one in front of each of us, and a box blooms crayons in the middle of the table. It’s a sixty-four box, with the gold and the silver and the sharpener in the middle, and it must have just been opened, all the crayons pointy. She hovers her hand over the box, finally choosing brown, and starts drawing.

  I pull two crayons from the box.

  “This is magenta,” I say. “Not”—I read from the paper covering—“Jazzberry Jam.” Her head snaps up, but when she speaks her voice is casual.

  “You read very well.” She chooses a light green and makes some grass.

  The air in here is dry. My eyes make little sounds when I blink.

  “I’m drawing a park,” Miss Meredith says, making blue waves, a pine tree, some things that could be ducks. “It’s my favorite place. My family goes on picnics there.” She puts another pine tree in, jagging the edges.

  I reach across to the crayon box. I touch a fingertip to an orange crayon, rocking it back and forth; a cat arches and stretches in my mind.

  “Can you draw your favorite place for me?” She is coloring a yellow sun.

  I pull out the dark green and the orange and the gray.

  “What are those things?” says Miss Meredith after a few minutes. “They look like—wheels?”

  I look up; her eyes are on my paper. She blinks and I see Brother Timothy blinking, fluttering his short lashes and wrinkling up the skin around his nose like a rat. I blink too, and chase that image away.

  “They’re headstones,” I say.

  “Head . . . stones.” She pulls up the chain around her neck; there are the half glasses. She unfolds them and puts them on. “Headstones?”