Scary Old Sex

by Arlene Heyman

  Gussie, at ninety-nine, is one of the oldest residents at the northern New Jersey facility, although she tells no one her age, and she insists that Marilyn keep it secret as well. Gussie doesn’t permit Marilyn to tell her own age, either, because people who know Marilyn’s age may be able to figure out Gussie’s.

  Marilyn is sixty-eight. Her hair is dyed two tones—a double process, they call it at her expensive Manhattan hair salon: dark blonde, with light-blonde highlights. Otherwise, she doesn’t take any special care of herself—sometimes she remembers to use moisturizer on her face. But she is a pleasant-looking woman, fair skinned with a straight nose and her mother’s large hazel eyes. A little overweight, she tends to wear black often, including today, with the idea that black is slimming.

  In the dining room Gussie points—“I want to sit there”—and Marilyn moves a chair away from a table for four and rolls Gussie into its place. There are perhaps fifteen other tables of various sizes. At the center of each table are purple anemones and pale-yellow Gerber daisies—fake flowers, but good fakes. Marilyn once had to feel the petals to make sure they weren’t real; the flowers sit in clear vases, with fake water levels.

  On this Saturday afternoon the house is moderately full; while some residents are out with family, others have visitors. Most of the diners are elderly women, but here and there a few men are sprinkled around like pepper on a salad. In their noses several people wear plastic tubing attached to gray metal oxygen tanks set up beside them.

  “Hellooo,” Gussie calls to a heavy black waitress who is taking orders at another table. (The residents are mostly white, the kitchen staff exclusively black.) “My daughter’s here. She’s come all the way from New York. She’s a medical doctor. Bring us some menus.”

  Although Gussie has publicly announced her daughter’s profession again and again during the years she has lived at the Happy Isles, Marilyn still feels embarrassed. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head and aims her words at no one in particular: “Who cares if I’m a doctor!”

  Gussie wears two hearing aids but does not seem to hear what her daughter is saying.

  Eight years earlier, when she began having trouble carrying her groceries up the outdoor brick steps to her duplex apartment, Gussie insisted that her daughter help her move to the assisted-living home in West Orange, New Jersey, where Gussie had brought up her children and worked as a fifth-grade public school teacher and head of the glee club. She chose the Happy Isles because three former female colleagues lived there. In the beginning, Gussie kept her car and drove it over the familiar roads to buy stamps at the Main Street post office, shop for small items at the Essex Green mall, or take “the girls” to faux-rustic Pal’s Cabin for a hamburger and an ice cream sundae on a summer evening. Sometimes at one of these destinations, a former student, often with children or grandchildren in tow, would recognize Gussie—“Aren’t you Mrs. Fernmann?” or “Aren’t you Mrs. Klein?”—and make a fuss over her, which Gussie would relate to Marilyn with delight. But as her vision and hearing began to fail, she had to give up the car. Two of her teacher friends died, and the third moved to Florida. Now Gussie keeps to herself and seems to know the name of only one other resident, Betty Berle, whose son is an orthopedic surgeon. (Gussie needs a hip replacement, but at her age major surgery is not an option.) Occasionally Gussie will say, “See that woman over there? She’s a Christian lady.” Or “See that woman walking by? She’s cuckoo.” Gussie circles one finger in the air beside her ear.

  “What have you been doing lately?” Gussie now asks Marilyn, who reaches over and takes her mother’s gnarled hand. Gussie’s fingernails are silver polished, but some of the silver has worn off. She wears a wide gold wedding ring with tiny, multicolored stones.

  “Well, I’ve seen a few good movies.”

  “Big deal. Hellooo!” Gussie calls again at the waitress, who is still taking orders at the other table. There are eight people sitting there, several of whom have had strokes and cannot speak clearly. “Wait on us, miss,” Gussie yells. Her voice starts to crack as if she will cry. “Give us a couple of menus. For God’s sake, help us out!”

  Several residents turn to see who is making the commotion. Marilyn takes her hand away from her mother’s. The waitress hurriedly brings over two menus, and Marilyn thanks her. “Mom,” Marilyn says. “What about puh-lease! And thank you?!” But the waitress has already returned to the other table.

  “Order whatever you want,” Gussie tells her daughter. “It costs me the same if you order one dish or five dishes. Take the soup or juice to start. Which are you having? Get the soup. People rave about the soup.”

  The manager stops by to ask if he can place another resident at the table. For this particular meal, the resident has no one to sit with, he explains; two of her friends are in the hospital, another is at a granddaughter’s wedding.

  “No way!” Gussie says, grimacing and turning her head side to side vigorously. “No how! I’m with my daughter who drove here an hour from New York City. She’s a medical doctor.”

  Marilyn winces but remains silent.

  The waitress shambles over in the director’s wake. Marilyn orders decaf coffee and a cheese omelet. Gussie says to the waitress, “Bring us two vegetable soups.”

  “I don’t want soup.”

  “You’ll see it, you’ll want it.”

  “I’ll blind myself.” Marilyn smiles.

  When the soup arrives—the waitress brings two—Gussie says, “Look at all the vegetables in it.”

  Marilyn keeps her hands in her lap and looks determinedly away.

  Gussie blows on a spoonful of soup. In bringing the spoonful to her mouth (Marilyn worries for a moment that Gussie will bring the spoon to Marilyn’s mouth), Gussie loses her grip and the hot soup ends up in her lap. “Damn it to hell!” Gussie yells out. “You bumped the table!”

  “Shhh, Mom. I didn’t do anything.”

  “You most certainly did.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  Marilyn leans over and cleans the soup off her mother’s pants with a napkin. For a moment, she imagines she detects some unpleasant smell, some foul odor drifting near her mother. Has the woman farted? Perhaps it is only the odor of her hair permanent. Marilyn sniffs discreetly near her mother’s hair—nothing—then tries to put whatever it is out of mind as she dips her mother’s napkin into her glass of water and rubs at the stain that is left. Marilyn wonders if she did bump the table.

  Suddenly three emergency medical technicians, two young men and a woman, enter and stride to the far end of the dining room where a man sits limply in his chair. Their youth and quick gait make them particularly smart among the faded flowers of the residence. Marilyn would like to go over to see if she can help. It would make her feel more like herself—she heads an emergency room at a large Bronx hospital. But she is not at her hospital and she doesn’t want to interfere with their work. Also, her mother might resent her getting up and going to the rescue, so to speak—would she look on it as an abandonment? Or would Gussie be proud of her? She still cares what her mother thinks, Marilyn notes ruefully. She continues eating her omelet as the medics take the resident out on a stretcher.

  Her mother says, “They come for that old coot every week. He’s wheezing or gasping—always something with his breathing. Calls attention to himself, if you ask me. How’re your eggs?”

  By saying they are good, Marilyn feels she is making some admission or doing some obeisance, but they are good and she says so.

  At this point, Marilyn takes out a little “airplane bottle” of wine from her pocketbook. (Two days earlier she was flown to Atlanta to give grand rounds on the initial management of head trauma in the emergency room. She couldn’t resist pocketing the wine, a business-class freebie.) Marilyn unscrews the cap, pours herself a little and tastes it. Potable.

  “What are you doing? Is that wine you’re drinking?”

  Marilyn considers claiming it is grape juice
, but telling a lie seems cowardly. “Yes, Mother, would you like some? I’ll split it with you.”

  Her mother waves her hand in a dismissive gesture. “You need that? You need to drink in the middle of the day?”

  “Mom, it’s a single glass of wine. And I’m happy to give you half of it.”

  “And you a doctor! You should know better! What kind of example are you setting?”

  “Mom, it’s red wine. The latest medical opinion is that red wine is good for you.”

  “I watch TV. You need to drink a thousand bottles of red wine for it to be good for you.”

  Her mother is right. Marilyn sips a little more. “Look, Mom, we discussed this already. Remember the fight we had last Christmas? I had one glass of wine! You said you wouldn’t make a stink about it ever again.” Marilyn, who drinks maybe a glass of wine a week, is beginning to feel like an alcoholic.

  “I don’t remember anything about Christmas. It’s a goyish holiday.”

  “Mom! We’ve been celebrating Christmas every year since I was born!”

  “Well, it’s enough already! Are you ashamed of Hanukah? And why do you have to drink with me? When you know it annoys me!”

  An occasional drink with her mother might make their meals more festive, Marilyn had thought—the food here is generally not flavorful—but perhaps the drink also serves to calm her down. Should Marilyn really need calming down after so many years? And if she does still need it, why not just take a tranquilizer? She is sure she has some old ones in her apartment. Or she can get a colleague to write her a prescription.

  Suddenly it occurs to Marilyn that, more than the need to soothe herself, the glass of wine smacks of defiance! After all, what has she had, three glasses of wine with her mother in the past year? And a fight over every one. But isn’t it unworthy of Marilyn to drink merely to show her mother that she, Marilyn, can do what she damn pleases, despite her mother’s disapproval? At age sixty-eight, shouldn’t she already know she can do what she damn pleases? Marilyn hears herself say, “All right, Mother, since it bothers you so much, I’ll drink only half a glass.”

  “Why drink any, why drink even half a glass since it bothers me so much?”

  It is a point. Hardly magnanimous, but a point. Marilyn looks longingly at the wine. Then she asks herself, what is she doing carrying on a battle with a ninety-nine-year-old woman? “Mom,” she says. “I’m here to visit you. I’ll do whatever makes you comfortable.”

  Her mother gets a glint in her eye as she shifts her focus to Marilyn’s omelet. “They say eggs aren’t so good for you either, but what the hell. Do you know one of my husbands used to serve me breakfast in bed, often an omelet? I forget which husband. I had three wonderful husbands. I only tell people here about two.” Gussie lowers her voice. “If they knew I had three, they’d be mad with jealousy. No one had better husbands. Even their mothers all loved me.”

  Marilyn has heard many times about her mother’s three husbands—the second was Marilyn’s father, a good-hearted, boyish traveling salesman who used to sell men’s ties for a company called Beau Brummel. The third, her stepfather, was a quiet, self-effacing owner of a small business that made automobile seat covers; although Marilyn never warmed up to him, he paid for her college and medical school without a murmur.

  Gussie rarely discusses her first husband, whom she’d known since grade school, an accountant who died of cancer at the age of twenty-five. Marilyn has never asked her mother how she felt about his death. In those days you didn’t question your mother, or you didn’t question that mother. Gussie had been a no-nonsense, sure-of-herself person. As a little girl, Marilyn had thought that she couldn’t die if her mother was in the room. Marilyn had also believed that her mother would never die—and it was turning out to be the case.

  With her crooked fingers, Gussie picks the white meat out of her sweet-and-sour chicken. “Did I ever tell you how after my first husband died, his mother got sick and she would only let me give her her medicine? She felt everyone else was trying to poison her.” Gussie smiles.

  “Yes, Mom, you’ve told me that many times.” Then Marilyn adds, “But I don’t mind hearing it again.”

  “What? What did you say?”

  “It’s lovely his mother loved you so much.”

  “My grandmother lived with us when I was growing up. Did you know that?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “And she didn’t let me go to kindergarten. She wanted me with her. So I missed kindergarten. Did you ever hear of anything like that?”

  “She certainly loved you, too.”

  “Yoo-hoo,” Gussie calls to the waitress. Gussie makes a large arm gesture beckoning her over. “Order the ice cream,” she tells her daughter. “They have terrific peach ice cream.”

  “It’s fattening, Mom. I shouldn’t have it.”

  “You could stand to lose some weight. You have a fat tuchus. Do you use any wrinkle cream on your face at night? You have more wrinkles than I do.”

  Marilyn smiles sadly.

  “Well, get the sugarless ice cream. It’s also very good.”

  “It’s still fattening.”

  “Start a diet tomorrow. Why are you always on a diet? You never lose any weight. Do you have apple pie?” Gussie asks the waitress. “I’ll have apple pie with some peach ice cream on top. What’ll you have, Marilyn?”

  “I’ll have decaf coffee.”

  “That’s all? Bring her some sugarless ice cream. Bring her chocolate.”

  “Mom, chocolate makes my face break out. You know that.”

  “Still? At your age, your face still breaks out?”

  After lunch, Marilyn pushes her mother to the elevator. Marilyn’s arms and back ache, and her neck is sore.

  “Hit two,” her mother says in the elevator. “Come on, goddamn it, I’m on two!”

  Marilyn is suddenly, unexpectedly, screaming. “You’ve been on two for eight years! And I pushed the button before you opened your mouth!” Marilyn closes her eyes for a moment, upset with herself. In the ER she will yell at a nurse or doctor who endangers a patient, and she is not above yelling at an adult friend who gets on her wrong side, but she tries never, anywhere, to yell at children or at the aged. Oddly, she seems to have trouble regarding her mother as aged.

  “It’s good when you talk loud. I can really hear you,” Gussie says.

  In the apartment Marilyn gently helps her mother out of the wheelchair to sit on the couch. She has a small two-room apartment with good light, but the overstuffed, heavy wooden furniture her mother bought for the Victorian house Marilyn grew up in is out of place here. Even back then, Marilyn felt overwhelmed by the furniture, dreamed once as a child that she lived in a dark forest inhabited by a witch. Her father, whom she’d adored but considers lightweight in retrospect, had sometimes teased her mother by carrying a flashlight around the house; yet he let her choose everything, including the color of Marilyn’s room—dark green, which she hated. Gussie directed him all the time, even when he drove to his own mother’s house. Often he’d quipped, “I want to go my way, the wrong way,” and he occasionally called her “sergeant” or “captain.” But Marilyn cannot remember her father ever making a real ruckus about Gussie’s domineering ways. Maybe he socked it to her in private? (Marilyn hopes.) As for the furniture, she has offered to buy her mother a new, more diminutive couch and chairs, but her mother thinks it would be a waste of money.

  In the living room there are a few photos of Gussie as a young woman, with dark, dramatic hair and glowing eyes. There are also photos of Marilyn’s father—she still finds him handsome, with his fair skin and blue eyes—and a few of Gussie’s last husband, Jack Klein. From Jack, Marilyn has a twelve-years-younger half brother, an obstetrician, who is married with three grown children. That whole side of the family lives near Chicago.

  So the care of Gussie falls on Marilyn, Marilyn who never married. For ten years, she had loved Huang deeply, a tall, handsome Chinese American neurologist who had been a te
acher of hers. His wife, from a village on the Yangtze River, had a terrible case of multiple sclerosis; and Marilyn and Huang, who was patient and highly ethical, planned to marry as soon as the wife died. But she stayed alive—she was alive still, institutionalized—and he died after an auto accident. Marilyn was at his bedside. He died apologizing to her.

  If she’d only had the nerve to become pregnant by him! Years later, she adopted—a Chinese infant who is now twenty, a student at UC Berkeley. Mi-yay studies Chinese and has spent the last two summers in Xian with her birth mother. Marilyn believes this is a good thing, but she also feels abandoned and jealous, although she disapproves of these emotions.

  “Did I ever tell you how your stepfather asked me to marry him?”

  “Yes, Mom, you have.”

  Gussie leans across the couch toward Marilyn in a confidential way. “Well, Jack and I were in the kitchen drinking coffee and he says, ‘Gussie, I want to have sex with you.’”

  Gussie’s hearing aid begins to whine. The sound is high pitched, grows louder. Scowling, her mother turns and twists the device a few times in her ear.

  Marilyn, pleased to have the story interrupted—perhaps Gussie will forget about it altogether—says, “Let me take a look at that, Mom.” Her fingers itch to do something, even if it is only to get her thumbnail under the latch that opens the plastic door so she can check the battery.

  Her mother takes the hearing aid out of her ear and, holding it in one hand, slaps at it with the other.

  “Mom!”

  “You keep out of it!”

  After a few more slaps, the pink fetal thing stops squealing. Gussie puts it back in her ear and smiles. Marilyn is astonished.

  “So like I said, Jack and I were cozying up to each other in the living room, on this very couch”—she touches the velvet material, which is midnight blue; Marilyn has at least managed to get the worn slipcovers replaced—“and he says to me, ‘Gussie, I have to have sex with you.’ And I say straight-out, ‘Sorry, I only have sex with men I’m married to.’