Simone’s father was crazy, and everyone knew it. He’d once choked Ms. Simone until she passed out, had set their basement on fire with some chemistry experiment gone wrong, had cursed out the mailman when he’d put someone else’s mail in his box. I reminded Simone of all this.
“My mother was worried about you. Your mother wasn’t attentive. You know that’s all it was,” I said.
“You remember what you used to call your mother? S-O-S?” she said. “Selfish ole Sally. She was not concerned about my welfare.”
I had worked decades as a litigation paralegal. I knew how to think on my feet. Yet I heard myself quiet, for inside I was roiling, humiliated. What had my mother been doing at the front of their house? I tried to think of all the nights Simone had slept over, the time my mother helped Simone insert her first tampon so we could swim at the water park. Had my mother always been thinking of Little Simone in that way?
That night when my mother fought the nurse at bath time, she called out for me. I let the nurse put her to bed. The sound of the cotton socks encasing her cracked feet made me feel guilty. I should have lotioned her heels, painted her toenails in the purple she once favored. But I needed time to put the armor back on so that I could secure my mother’s name in my own head. She had warned me many years earlier that I would need to protect my mind. I didn’t think I’d have to protect it from her.
That night I realized I hadn’t hugged my mother in something like four years. Hadn’t kissed her in close to three. I wondered how long it’d been since she’d kissed me, hugged me. The answer seemed irrelevant. Everything about how I felt seemed irrelevant.
I called Simone again. “There’s something you’re not saying.”
I had pulled Simone’s first tooth, we’d won our neighborhood jacks tournament three summers in a row, had gotten lost on our Big Wheels in the woods and hugged each other the whole night hoping they’d come looking for us. But our parents didn’t know we were missing.
“Sometimes at nights, your mother would come over.” She said this as if she knew she’d have to one day say it.
“Ma came over to your house?”
“My mother told me if I ever told my dad that your Ma was there, she’d give into my father’s demands to put me in public school.”
“Wait. Your mother was home but not your father? What was my mother doing there?”
Charles moved about the kitchen, pretending he wasn’t listening.
“Your mother would sit across from mine at the dining room table and when they thought I was asleep on the sofa, they’d go up into my parents’ bedroom.” Simone paused and I found myself unwilling to fill in the blank. “My mother sprayed Chanel No. 5 after your mother left.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
I put Simone on hold and instructed Charles to check on Ma. She was knocking her fists on the tub again. The nurse had raised her voice. After I heard him walking up the stairs, I held the phone to my chest and wondered if my mother had allowed Ms. Simone to lie to her husband about why she had been watching their house?
“Before she got sick, your Ma would drive to Pennsylvania every Friday night and my mother would follow her in her car, down the I-70 on Sundays, and stay with her until Tuesday,” Simone continued.
Ma had often told me that she was too tired to drive the forty-five minutes for Charles’s Sunday soccer matches, that there was too much arthritis in her knees to sit on bleachers during his Saturday basketball games.
“Four nights, every week?”
I remembered little of Ma’s early retirement years except thinking I didn’t wish to be a lonely old Black woman like her. That I hated how her breasts sagged, how her skin soured more quickly when she perspired. Who would love her now, I remembered thinking? That’s when I first searched for Charles’s father on Facebook. He was married to a woman who could have been my sister. Same complexion, same wide face, same flat chest. His wife was a gynecologist. He was a consultant at Goldman Sachs. They lived on the Upper East Side in an apartment overlooking the park I’d once dreamt of rollerblading through. They had two girls. Both with bad teeth that I knew would be straightened in the same number of years it took their beautiful father to follow me back on Twitter, to ask why I’d dropped out of school. “My mother was sick,” I’d lied.
“My mother and your mother, they love each other,” Simone said.
Simone said “love” like this was a thing I understood. Like this was a thing Ma remembered and wanted, like this was a thing that held the power to make Ma new, to make my life new. I thought of all Ma’s regrets, all mine, culminating into that one horrific moment on the phone with Simone where I denied knowing that Ma’s life was never as she wanted, where I denied knowing that this was true for me too. I heard Simone smile, like she was happy for my mother, sad for hers, like she thought that me knowing of this love between them offered me relief as I cared for a woman who’d always done her duty. And I convinced myself that God would be more merciful to me.
CASTING STONES
JULIA TAGLIERE
CHECK-IN
Ginger, all blond wig and movie-star sunglasses, thirty-year-old implants hanging on for dear life to a scrawny eighty-five-year-old chest, is not my new roommate’s real name. She flirts with Matt the Certified Nursing Assistant (Our Cruise Director) during her daily sponge baths and bursts into Hollywood show tunes at odd hours. She claims to be a former Rockette, now wheelchair-bound, but her pink-chenille-slippered toes tap constantly, begging for dance partners. Sometimes I think putting vivacious Ginger in with me is my extra punishment for slipping up, for letting myself blink when I woke up and saw Matt raping my former roommate, Mrs. Margaret O’Brien (her real name) the last time. Maybe it was coincidence, but the next morning, Margaret was gone.
I’m sure you’re thinking I should’ve said something the first time—is it really two years ago now? Well, I did say something. But if Charles, my own son, didn’t believe me, why would anyone else? It took seven calls for him even to return my message.
“Listen, Mother,” he’d said, sighing. “First it was having to share a room, then the cheap bedding, then the bad food, and now this? I mean, why would anybody—are you sure you’re not just making up stories to get me to pull you out of there?”
I tried to slam the phone down but it slipped from my fingers. Charles’s voice drifted up from the receiver on the floor; he didn’t even realize I was no longer there.
“I’ve told you, Mother,” he said, “I can’t take care of you myself. This is the only place you can afford, so you’re going to have to get used to it.”
I tried clenching my hands into fists but gave up at pathetic little Cs. Whose fault was it I couldn’t afford better?
The first time Matt “visited” Margaret, I’d pretended to be asleep. But, leaving her a still-none-the-wiser de facto turnip, he’d crept into bed with me after, smelling of beer and sweat. Too shocked even to scream, I shook so violently I wet my diaper. When it leaked, he rolled right off me; I made a mental note for future reference.
“Jesus Christ, you’re disgusting,” he said, slurring his words. He grabbed a corner of my blanket and began rubbing at his crotch. I fumbled for the call button, pressing it over and over, but no one came. I found out later he’d unplugged it.
Matt grunted and lay still beside me. Then he climbed out of my bed and pulled up his scrubs. He went to our bathroom; I heard water running. He returned with a washcloth and swiped at my blanket.
When Matt pulled the call button from my grasp, I opened my mouth to scream. He covered my face with one of his big hands; it smelled of antiseptic soap and lighter fluid. He whispered in my ear.
“You say anything, and you’re next.”
I called Charles again the next morning, and the next. On the seventh day, I stopped trying. That was the day I turned to stone.
DINNER AND A SHOW
Today must be Thursday, because Ted the Piano Man, he of the musical-note-dotted red bowtie
, is here, bludgeoning the keys of the scarred old baby grand in our snot-yellow-hued lobby (the Sunflower Room).
When Charles still visited me every week, I almost looked forward to Thursdays. For that single hour each week, we could approximate a normal mother-son relationship. But before the end of the first year, not even a full one since his father’s death, Charles had emptied our home, sold the contents (“I told you, Mother, the money can’t be in your name, it’ll screw up Medicare and Medicaid”), and moved out of state.
Now I hate Thursdays more than any other day of the week.
Ginger—Nadine told me the woman’s real name again this morning, but it doesn’t suit her half as well—asks Matt to push her chair right up next to the piano. Closer, closer, she trills. Tap, tap, tap, go those slippers, keeping perfect time with “Hello, My Baby.”
Good-bye, my sanity.
Matt’s eyes dart over to me; I let the drool I’d been saving for later dribble from my mouth. Ginger wipes my lips with the corner of her pink satin sleeve. The embroidery scratches my cheek, but I don’t flinch.
Ted the Piano Man cracks his knuckles. He plays a brief flourish then takes us all down a notch. His next song will be “My Wild Irish Rose,” and Ginger will eat it up.
CHECKOUT
Nadine is late today. I almost wonder why, but as she wheels me down the hall, past the rheumy gazes and limp finger waves of other Guests en route to the cafeteria (the Walnut Room), I spot the hearse (God’s Special Chariot) parked outside the front doors, and I know.
I ponder the possible identity of the Passenger therein, and by the time Nadine sets the brakes on my chair, I have narrowed the list (based on the crowd of vultures sniffling by their rooms) to two: Big Mickey in 1C—the staff’s nickname for him—and Judy Moody, across the hall in 1B.
I hope it wasn’t her; she was the best show in the house. You can always tell when someone takes up cursing late in life: like someone learning a foreign language, they never quite get the hang of the rhythm.
Nadine settles in across from me and ties the bib around my neck. She works her spoon in my applesauce like an artist at a palette. I let her scoop, push, scrape, and wipe (Meal Assistance) until the tray is empty, never moving my eyes from her belt buckle to avoid accidental eye contact. I wonder if she knows the bottom button of her shirt is missing.
Later, as Nadine and I approach my room, I hear Ginger, whooping and laughing with her son and his family. Listening to the other residents’ visitors here is like lying in a crowded maternity ward after you’ve just miscarried.
After Ginger’s family (Our Special Guests) leave, the painfully yellow roses they have brought her will make me sneeze. I will let the snot drip down my nose until someone comes to wipe it away.
ROOM SERVICE
Ginger has insomnia. I know this because she told Nadine all about the “happy pills” that make her sleep. She takes them every night, and every night she snores and mumbles, cries and farts and hums loudly enough to wake the dead—except, sadly, for Judy Moody. Lucky Judy; the poster child for futile resistance has escaped at last.
Tonight, however, Ginger is quiet, but her mattress is squeaking, and that is what awakens me. I peek through the three or four eyelashes I have left and see Matt, bouncing up and down on top of Ginger.
His scrubs are down and her pink nightgown is up, and I know Ginger is too Ambien-scrambled to resist—or, likely, to remember. Oh, God.
I close my eyes, millimeter by millimeter, hoping my eyelids don’t creak. I hold my breath and try to stop shaking. Nadine helped me use the bedpan before turning out the light, so I am utterly defenseless.
Matt grunts. After a bit of rustling, I feel his hot, beery breath over my face. Desperate, I form a bubble of sour, foamy saliva on my lips. He snorts and leaves.
SPA DAY
At breakfast, though Nadine straps my head up to prevent choking, when she asks me and Ginger how we are this beautiful morning, I choke on my oatmeal, spraying her. Nadine never gets angry when things like that happen, just gently wipes my face and her shirt. Her constant kindnesses to me almost make me feel I could tell her about what Matt is doing. But when she spins my chair around to face the TV and tells us Miss Carmen will be in soon to “make us pretty for Movie Night,” instead of telling, I remember I can’t count on anyone in here, and I belch instead.
Movie Night is a misnomer, since it takes place right before lunch, to give the sundowners among us a fighting shot at making it to THE END (of the movie). The staff wheels all the Guests into the Walnut Room Theatre—which they magically transform into a Graumanesque cinema palace by adding an oversized white screen and an Old Timey Popcorn Machine!—and lacerate us via a DVD from their rotating archive of Crap Designed to Make Old People Cry. It’s quite the collection: On Golden Pond, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy are usually in heavy rotation. I last tasted popcorn several years ago, when a stray hull lodged under my dentures and caused an abscess. After that, they took my dentures away.
“Good morning, ladies. How are you?” Miss Carmen (Physical Therapist/Beautician) waddles behind her salon trolley into our suite.
“We’re lovely, Carmen, how are you? What a beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Ginger asks.
“Not as beautiful as you, gorgeous,” Carmen says.
And so it begins—the relentless onslaught of silliness and tittering I will endure for the next hour while Carmen sets and teases Ginger’s wig, trims and buffs Ginger’s nails to a shine, and throws in some token range-of-motion exercises for Ginger’s bursitic shoulder.
When she is finished with Ginger, Carmen turns on me, flourishing her gleaming scissors a couple of times over my scabby scalp for show.
“You know, I have so many wigs in storage at my son’s house,” Ginger says. “I could ask him to bring one.”
I tongue the last slobber of oatmeal out the side of my mouth and pray, if not for Death, at least sudden-onset deafness, but as usual, both continue to ignore me.
Carmen wipes my face with a towel and continues our charade. “Aw, she’s got a few curls left,” she says. “No one sees her but us, anyway. There, all done, beautiful.” She plants her customary sticky kiss on my cheek and drops her scissors as always. “I ought to put a bungee cord on these things.” She grunts when she picks them up.
“Doesn’t she have any family?” Ginger asks Carmen.
“She’s got a son in California. He moved back out there a few years ago, as soon as he saw she was settled. Doesn’t visit her but once a year now, if that,” Carmen says, tucking her scissors back into her smock pocket.
“Oh, that’s so sad,” Ginger says.
“Disgraceful, is what it is,” Carmen says. “But what can you do? Some families are just like that.” She wheels her trolley to the door. “You ladies have a great day now,” she says. The door hits her ample behind on the way out; I hear her muffled curse when the scissors clatter to the floor again.
Yes, Charles is “just like that” now.
At least he waited to show his true colors until after George died. I’m glad he’s gone; seeing what our son has become would’ve killed him. I wish it could kill me.
DRIVE-IN
At ten o’clock, Renaldo (might well be his real name, though I’m not sure) parks the last body (Permanent Guest, head strapped up like mine) in front of the screen.
“Great, thanks, Renaldo,” Matt says. “Hey, everyone, we have a big treat for you today, a new movie.” Matt sweeps his girlishly long bangs back with his hand and holds up a case featuring the omnipresent image of Some Plucky Old Person(s) on the front. “Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon, plus for you gents, Ann Margret. They don’t come any hotter than her—except for my best girl over there.”
“Come sit by me, Matt,” Ginger calls out.
“It’s a date,” he says, flashing his pearly canines. He drags a chair over next to Ginger’s wheelchair and drapes his arm across her shoulders. She sighs and snuggles her head against his arm. I want to screa
m at her. From somewhere deep inside me a feral, primitive urge starts my lips curling back from my empty gums. Nadine strokes me lightly on the shoulder.
“Shh, it’s just a movie,” she says. She’s using exactly the type of soothing whisper I used to use with Charles, when he’d wake from his boyish nightmares.
Trying to cover for my loss of control, I force a loud gurgle from my throat. Matt turns his head and looks right at me.
I will have to be more careful.
BIRTHDAY SUIT
Carmen goes all out for my ninety-fifth birthday (Ten More Than Expected or Needed). At Ginger’s urging, she buffs my nails, and bathes and lotions each accordioned inch of my body. To add insult to injury, she rakes the last of my curls together into a ridiculous pigtail on the top of my head.
“Look what I found for her,” Carmen says to Ginger. “Isn’t it sweet? They make these for little baby girls now. It’s Velcro, so even if they don’t have much hair, they can still have a pretty little bow.”
She spins my chair around, and I glimpse in the bureau mirror a shriveled Kewpie doll, its head strapped to the back of its padded chair.
“Oh, that’s just darling,” Ginger says.
I’ve been pushing a slug of slimy mucus around the inside of my cheek with my tongue, and I wonder what would happen if I just spewed it at her, but Matt opens the door and again seems to look right at me. I gag on the gob as I choke it back down, and Ginger claps her hands.
“She likes it,” she says.
Nadine wheels me into the Sunflower Room, where the staff has gathered all of the other Guests. Matt leads them in a stirring dirge of “Happy Birthday,” and Ginger sings harmony.
When they did this to Judy Moody for her last birthday, she clawed the paper hat off her head and screamed, “Fuck off, you shit-fucking fuckers” to everyone, until they wheeled her, screaming, all the way down the hall to her room. I miss Judy Moody.
Nadine told Ginger Judy’s son didn’t even claim her ashes in person, just asked the director to ship them. I imagine Judy’s vitriol-filled urn blowing the roof off the Fed Ex truck, and I almost crack a smile. At least I can count on my son to show up in person, as long as there’s something to claim—car keys, bank books, family silver, wedding bands, ashes.
Us Against Alzheimer's Page 26