by Emma Straub
“Thank you for this,” Bob said. He took the food into the kitchen, leaving Astrid alone in the living room. She stood silent, holding her hands in front of her body like a choir girl. Bob hurried back, patting his hands against his thighs. “Barb’s sister is planning the service, she got here yesterday.”
“I didn’t know that Barbara had a sister; that must be a big help,” Astrid said. She herself was an only child, and she found old people with siblings somewhat ridiculous, as if they were eighty-year-olds who still wore water wings in swimming pools. Siblings were for the very young and needy. She had given her children siblings to occupy each other in childhood.
“Carol drove down from Vermont. Her kids are grown, and her husband is retired, so he can mind the dogs. She’s a breeder. Havanese. They love animals, the whole family.” Bob’s eyes went twinkly with moisture.
“How lovely,” Astrid said, and nodded solemnly. She looked at the unvacuumed floor, at the basket of knitting needles, at the half-empty drinking glasses on the cluttered coffee table. Bob blew his nose.
“The cats don’t know what to do,” he said. “When she left for Heron Meadows, Barb would still come back every day to visit, but now they’re just climbing the walls. They know she’s gone.”
“Creatures are such a comfort in times of need,” Astrid said, though she believed pets were useful only in teaching small children about death. She knew this was an unpopular opinion. For the first years of their relationship, Birdie had had an ancient, lumbering dog, a big galumph who slept at her feet, and Astrid thought that her sensitivity to Birdie following the dog’s eventual, gradual, endless passing showed that she’d made great strides as a person. If she’d bought dogs for her children, she might have been a better mother, though that was what the siblings had been for. “Well, to your health, Bob.”
Bob nodded. “Thanks again.” The ceiling was low, and the room was crowded with too much furniture by half. There were woven rag rugs everywhere, no doubt to keep Barbara’s feet warm as she walked from cat to cat, mewing motherly encouragement. Astrid didn’t want to hug him, so she didn’t, and she hurried out quickly before Bob started to cry in earnest.
* * *
—
Heron Meadows was set back from the road, with a large wooden fence and a tiny gatehouse for the security guard, whose job it was to make sure that no one’s granny escaped in a nightie and bare feet. Astrid parked in the lot and walked in, greeting everyone she passed. Russell’s mother had lived at Heron Meadows for the last ten years of her life, and Astrid knew the halls well. No one wanted to outlive their children, and so after Russell died, Astrid made an extra effort to bring the children to visit. It was the least she could do, nearly, just after not bringing them at all.
Like most dedicated residences for old people, Heron Meadows had a vague odor of bleach and urine, and framed reproductions of famous paintings (Monet’s Water Lilies, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, no Picasso or Caravaggio) hung on the walls. Fake plants were here and there in large terra-cotta pots, evergreen. Astrid asked at the desk where Birdie was cutting hair and wandered off to find her.
The Meadows was shaped like a tarantula, with a fat middle and long legs extending outward, each hall occupied by residents’ rooms. In the middle section, past the desk, were an exercise room and a physical therapy room, a television room, and a bingo room. Birdie’s setup at Heron Meadows was in the bingo room, which was otherwise used for bridge games and singletons doing word search puzzles in cheap newsprint books. Astrid peeked through the open doorway (doorways needed to be wide, to allow for wheelchairs) and observed Birdie in action.
There was a woman in the chair, with her back to the door. Her white hair was damp, and Birdie was running a comb through it, catching strays. There was a large plastic mat on the floor, to help with cleanup. Her various instruments waited on a round wooden table nearby: two hand mirrors, a spray bottle of detangler, a spray bottle of water, a hair-dryer, combs, brushes, clips, and three different pairs of scissors. The residents could sign up in advance, or they could just show up and wait. No one was in a rush. By the end of the day, the room would be full of men and women just waiting patiently, as if for an airplane flight home after Thanksgiving, full of pie and tryptophan. Birdie was quick and efficient and, like all hairdressers, adept at the kind of small talk that young people hated but old people loved. Astrid watched Birdie work, her back hunched over in a tight curve, her knees bending slightly. She moved like a boxer.
“Coo coo,” Astrid called. “Little Bird.”
Birdie looked up, her glasses wedged halfway up her forehead. She waved with a pair of scissors. “Almost done with Doris,” she said. “Right, Doris? Almost done?” Doris offered a beatific smile with pink gums and no teeth.
“I’ll do a lap,” Astrid said. Barbara’s mother, Mary Budge, was around Heron Meadows somewhere, and Astrid was going to find her. She went back to the front desk and asked for directions to Mary Budge’s room and then walked her tote bag full of food down the wide hallways until she found it.
The doors were never locked at Heron Meadows—that was a safety precaution. And since so many residents were hearing impaired, each room had a doorbell that, in addition to making a small tinkling noise, illuminated a flashing light inside, like a buoy in the ocean. Astrid rang the bell and waited. After a few minutes, the door swung open, and there was Mary Budge. She looked exactly like Barbara, only shrunken 15 percent in a xerox machine. Her shoulders, round as truck wheels, pitched forward, as if she was always halfway through an attempt to touch her toes.
“Hi, Mrs. Budge, I’m Astrid,” Astrid said, patting herself on the chest. “Might I visit with you for a few minutes? I knew your daughter, Barbara.”
Mary nodded and closed her eyes. She opened the door wide and gestured for Astrid to come in.
The room was identical to all the other rooms at Heron Meadows, some of them mirror images instead of exact replications. Mary’s room was the same model as Russell’s mother’s room had been, L-shaped and tidy, with each dusted knickknack in its place of pride. Barbara’s hoarding had not been born from nothing, Astrid saw.
Mary shuffled back toward her recliner and then sat down with a soft squish, covering her knees with a crocheted blanket. Astrid thought to herself, I will never be that old, even though that was one of the basic tenets of human existence: stay alive as long as you can. Heron Meadows wasn’t the only place for old people in or near Clapham—there was a residence facility near the hospital, for those needing more constant medical attention, and there were a few of what Astrid thought of as boardinghouses for old broads. The men died first, of course, in Clapham and everywhere else. When the apocalypse came, there would be only old women left, with hard candy and clementines in their bags. Some of her older friends (everything was relative, even age, even now) had started to fail, to crumble; some had died. She was still young enough (again, relative) that every death felt like a wrong, cruel blow, and not yet like the eventual and unavoidable mercy that would come for everyone. Mercy! Astrid was not anywhere near mercy. Women her age were still working, even if she wasn’t. Astrid had worked at the Clapham Local Bank after Russell died, first as a teller and then as a financial adviser, because she loved telling people what to do with their money. She’d retired at sixty-five, because there were younger bankers, and she wanted to spend more time in the garden. But look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Astrid had decades, she hoped.
Mary Budge sat quietly, her hands cupped on the crocheted hills of her knees. Astrid sat across from her on the daybed, which, she realized just after sitting down, must have been where Barbara had been sleeping.
“I brought some things to eat,” Astrid said, and took some things out of the bag and waved them around.
“Sandwiches,” Mary said, though they weren’t, and smiled.
“I’ll leave everything by your kitchen,” Astrid said, putting the tinfoiled l
oaf back into the bag. “I’m sorry about Barbara.”
“Yes, Barb,” Mary said.
Astrid’s mother had died thirty years ago, before Russell, before Russell’s parents, before anyone else who mattered to her. It had been sickening, the very worst kind of surprise, one that proved instantly the cruel randomness of the world, as if famine and genocide and car accidents hadn’t already. Her mother had always seemed older than she was, but she’d never actually been old. Astrid wondered what her mother would have thought about Porter’s baby, about Birdie, about the way she’d renovated the kitchen cabinets, about each summer’s crop of flowers, which had survived, which had grown. Her mother and Russell now lived in the same neighborhood of her mind, which felt like a remote Norwegian fjord, or Fiji, a place that it would take so long to travel to that she would never go in person, and so hard to imagine the time difference that it was never convenient to telephone. They were both there, still, inside her brain, and sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and think, Now, now, if I could just pick up the phone right now, maybe I could catch them.
“I’m in love,” Astrid said.
Mary nodded, smiling.
“With a woman.”
Mary nodded again. There were only a dozen men in the building at any moment, Astrid guessed, most of them on staff. Maybe all Mary’s friends had gone lez in their widow queendom. Most women over the age of forty were misandrists when you got right down to it. They wanted their husbands around for manual labor, but what else? And of course, once husbands started dying off, it was all women anyway, and who cared who slept with whom, who cuddled close or shared a precoffee kiss? Nobody. Astrid felt emboldened and kept talking.
“My daughter’s having a baby with a ghost,” Astrid said. “Not an actual ghost, but with a negative space, with no person.”
Mary nodded. “Mm-hmm,” she said.
How long had it been since Mary Budge had held a baby? Human lives were so long, it was hard to stretch a net wide enough to hold all of a person’s experiences. What did Mary remember? Did she remember her wedding? Being a teenager? Did she remember Barbara losing a tooth for the first time, and how she’d tucked a crisp $2 bill under her pillow, fresh from the bank?
“Your daughter and I didn’t always get along,” Astrid said. “But we knew each other for a very long time.” Astrid hadn’t thought about what she was going to say, but now that she was talking, she knew what she wanted Mary to know, or at least what she wanted Mary to hear. “I didn’t always like her, but she was a good person. You did a beautiful job.” There was nothing else that mattered, was there? Whatever other accomplishments she’d ever had, Astrid had foisted three human beings on the planet. Had they made it better? Had she? Barbara had tried, in her nosy, nudgey, self-righteous way. Was this what getting old meant, realizing that the people she had always judged for being too much had been in the right, and she had always done too little?
“Barb, yes,” Mary said. Her eyelids looked heavy, as if she might fall asleep. There was a light knock at the door, and then a nurse came in with a tray of pills.
“Mary, I see you’ve got a visitor,” the nurse said, kindly. She patted Astrid on the shoulder. “Mary usually naps around now, I wouldn’t take it personally.”
“I’ll go,” Astrid said. She stood up and touched Mary on the hand. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “For Barbara.”
The nurse held Astrid’s elbow and walked her to the door. Her grip was firm. “We’re not sure how much Mary understands about her daughter,” she said.
“I see,” Astrid said. How stupid—of course, she should have checked. She should have thought about what Mary knew, if she would be upset or confused. The nurse was still holding Astrid’s elbow, which felt both generous and serious; this was a woman who was used to holding people who were shaky on their feet, used to helping people who wouldn’t or couldn’t ask. Astrid half wanted her legs to give out, to fall in order to be saved, but she stayed upright. “I left her some things,” she said.
“Mary says thank you,” the nurse said, and opened the door for Astrid to leave.
Freezing cold air blew from the air-conditioning vents in the hallway ceiling. A woman in a wheelchair sat outside a room down the hall, and Astrid waved. The old ladies all looked alike, like babies all look alike through a glass window, lined up in bassinet after bassinet. If Barbara Baker were still alive, and she turned the corner to go visit her mother, and Astrid had been standing right there, what would she have done? The truth was that Astrid thought about Barbara all the time—it wasn’t just her death, not at all. Barbara’s death was the splash in the water, but for the last twenty years, Astrid had been watching her bounce on the diving board.
People talked about coming out like it was one thing that happened, like it had to do with who you wanted to have sex with, full stop, the end. But there were other things, too, that one needed to say. Fear controlled so many things. Astrid put out her hand and rested it against the cool wall, a ballast.
* * *
—
Elliot had been fourteen, and small for his age. He was in the ninth grade, on the basketball team, getting good grades, and popular enough, as far as Astrid could tell. No trouble. Not like Nicky, who fell asleep at the wheel of her car coming home drunk from a party and nearly killed himself. Even Porter had had her troubles, of the dramatic teenage girl variety, but Elliot was on the honor roll, the class treasurer. So Astrid had been surprised when Barbara Baker called her.
Barbara was a crossing guard then, not at the corner by the elementary school, but two blocks over, in a mostly dead zone beside the river and the train tracks. It wasn’t a busy spot, and why they put her down there, Astrid had never understood. But Barbara was calling to say that she had seen Elliot and his friend Jack—a beautiful boy with sandy hair, a soccer player, the son of academics who threw dinner parties and listened to Miles Davis on vinyl—playing on the rocks by the river. It’s so dangerous, you know, down there, that’s what Barbara had said. It looks still, but the current is strong. She was thinking of their safety. When Barbara was halfway to where the boys were, they hadn’t seen her yet. The river was noisy that day, and so were the trains, and they were teenage boys who thought they were alone in the world. Barbara was young then, god—if Elliot was fourteen, she must have been in her forties, like Astrid was, and there was no reason on earth two teenage boys would notice a woman like that. They wouldn’t, and they didn’t. So she got closer, finally close enough to tell them to quit horsing around, and then she saw. They were kissing.
* * *
—
A male nurse wielding a large garbage can on wheels came down the hall and greeted Astrid. She moved out of his way and hurried down the hall to the front door, which was heavy and solid, designed to keep people in. Astrid pushed and stumbled out into the bright sunshine. She’d forgotten how hot it was outside, but it was too late, she was already there, and couldn’t actually make her legs take her anywhere else. She sat down on the nearest bench, next to a woman with a portable oxygen tank.
* * *
—
Barbara had waited, politely, for Astrid to respond. Nicky had always piled on top of his friends like they were all puppy dogs, but Elliot never had. She—Astrid, his mother—had never noticed anything like what Barbara was describing. He was her eldest—she had spent the last fourteen years paying more attention to him than his two siblings. She could name every teacher he’d ever had, every friend he’d ever made. But this—she hadn’t seen this.
There wasn’t a moment of conscious decision making. There was just a wall, erected in an instant, that hadn’t been there before. That was the truth about parenting, at least as Astrid had done it—most decisions weren’t plans, they were tourniquets, immediate responses to whatever problem was at hand. Astrid said—she had said this—No, Barbara, you are mistaken. Thank you. And then Astrid had hu
ng up the phone. It was the second most shameful moment of her life. She didn’t tell anyone—not Russell, not Porter or Nicky, nobody. And when Elliot came home from school that day, Astrid told him that she’d had a phone call, without saying who from, but that someone had seen him, and that he needed to be careful. Did she say careful? She told him not to. She told him not to do it in public. It, she’d said. She told him that she was embarrassed. And that was the most shameful moment of her life. At the end of the year, Jack’s mother got a teaching job in Berkeley and they moved to the West Coast, and then he was just gone, and you know how it is, when you’re a kid. Especially boys. She didn’t think Elliot even tried to keep in touch—and why would he have? And so then Jack was just gone, and Astrid was relieved. She’d thought about that call from Barbara every time she’d seen Barbara since. Sometimes she was angry at herself, sometimes she was angry at Barbara—what a cow! Who did that? Who tattled on a teenage boy who wasn’t hurting anyone? But they were both cows, of course, she and Barbara: Astrid could try to blame it on her generation, but that didn’t hold much water. There was no excuse, except for the excuse that perfection was impossible, and failure inevitable.