Leisureville

by Andrew D. Blechman

  “My heart is still in Boston,” she tells me, stating the obvious. “I miss my family. I miss the four seasons. And I miss riding the T into town and walking around.” Carol moved to The Villages with her far more enthusiastic husband about three months ago.

  “I was in the navy for a lot of years,” her husband, Jim, says. “I’m used to moving around.” Carol looks down at the table. “I’ve been looking for a nice place to retire for seven years. Here I can play golf every day. And if something happens to one of us, there are people for us to lean on.”

  “I miss the snow, the flakes falling down,” Carol says.

  “Yeah, but she forgets all the slush and shoveling,” Jim counters.

  “I miss the rain,” Carol says. “I’m tired of all this sun, day after day. Everything is the same here. There’s nowhere to go. We’re in the middle of nowhere. Where’s the art museum? Where’s the library in Copley Square? Where’s the Boston Pops, or the fall foliage? I miss the mix. I miss not seeing any children around. But what I really miss is my family. I miss them terribly.”

  Jim is quiet. He takes no pleasure in his wife’s discomfort. “Look,” he says finally. “Let’s just give it a while. Try it on for size. You might just end up liking it here. We can fly home as often as you like.”

  “You promised we could always move back,” Carol counters.

  “We can buy as many plane tickets as you’d like,” Jim responds.

  “That wasn’t the promise.”

  “You’re right. We can always move back, I suppose.”

  Carol looks pale. She and Jim excuse themselves.

  The other women at my table are a feisty bunch—hard-core Yanks from Boston—with thick accents. Their comments are full of sharp barbs. “You find that a lot of people miss their families,” a woman named Ellen tells me. Her short hair is smartly styled, and she wears a touch of lipstick. “It’s the husbands. They drag their wives down here for the golf. But the women miss their families. The men—it’s like they don’t care as much. They’d rather visit them. That’s the generation you’ve got here: the men make the decisions and the women follow them. I run across it all the time. Ninety percent of the men love it here, as if they’ve died and gone to heaven. But the women—that’s another matter. I’m single. I’m a free woman. I make my own decisions.”

  A woman named Paula cuts in. “You make lots of acquaintances here, but not a lot of close friends. Everybody’s too busy running around the golf courses. Me? I love my house. When we took the trolley tour, the woman said, ‘We don’t sell houses; we sell a lifestyle.’ Well, I wanted a new house, not a lifestyle. I never had a new house. I like to cook, to clean. People think I’m crazy because I like ironing. Nobody around here even cooks. When you talk to someone about meeting for dinner, the first question they ask is, ‘Which restaurant?’ I guess it all depends on where you’re from and what you’re used to. Everybody here is from somewhere else. Florida is such a transient state.”

  “This is an excellent place for singles,” Ellen says. “I don’t care if I never go back north again. There’s an excellent support system for single women here.”

  In addition to belonging to the Massachusetts Club, the Irish-American Club, and the Explorers’ Club and volunteering as a docent at a regional museum, Ellen is a founding member of the Sociable Singles Club. But the purpose of this club is not to meet men; it’s to provide a venue for single women to meet and make friends.

  “Men?” Ellen asks. “I’ve already been married once. And that was enough. The men here are all letches anyway.” Divorced after twenty-seven years of marriage, Ellen now lives with her brother, a Korean War veteran diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder who rarely leaves the house. “It’s only men that truly retire,” she says. “I took care of my husband, I took care of my kids, I took care of my mother when she got sick, and now I take care of my brother. It’s time I took care of myself.”

  Ellen’s cousin Pat introduces herself. She’s a petite woman who never married. She has lived all her life with one of her sisters, and still does: they share a home in The Villages. “As a single woman, I feel safe and secure here,” Pat says. “I don’t feel threatened like I did back in Boston. Back home, I’d be stuck in the house, scared. Here I can go down to the square by myself, listen to the music, see people dancing, go home, and I feel like I did something—and it didn’t cost me a dime.”

  “Living down here is affordable,” another woman—Debbie— says. “Up north, I couldn’t afford to go out. I’d probably be living in an insulated garage or something, counting pennies. Here I can have my own apartment. It’s tiny, but it’s a home.”

  Like most northeastern “blue staters,” these women are solid Democrats, although they now live in a community where Republicans outnumber them two to one. They have few kind words for Gary Morse and his staunchly conservative politics. “This place lost a lot of its charm when Harold died,” Paula says. “It’s kind of like when Walt Disney died and Eisner took over. Morse is too greedy. He cares more about money than people. You read his newspaper and you’d think everything is hunky-dory in Iraq and Bush is a genius.”

  “This place is a dictatorship,” Debbie says. “But you know what? If I won the lottery, I’d still live here. I’d just travel more and maybe buy a house on the Cape.”

  I ask the women for their views on age segregation. “I like kids,” Debbie says. “But I don’t want to live with them. After four hours with them in the pool, crying, yelling, throwing tantrums—well, it’s nice to know that I can relax without them.”

  “Children don’t fit the lifestyle we’ve got in The Villages,” Pat says. “You can’t mix the two. It’s either one or the other, but not both. If this place was multigenerational, there’d be a lot more crime. We’d have drug busts, wild parties, loud stereos, auto accidents. It wouldn’t be the same. We’d be shoved to the side. And afraid.”

  Although the night is still young, the women all drive home. I head to Katie Belle’s. There’s a short line outside; an elderly bouncer slowly checks for resident IDs and guest passes with a flashlight and magnifying glass. Three seniors from out of town wait in front of me. The first in line has an awkward comb-over and wears heavy gold chains around his neck and wrists. The next one has a mop of white hair and an unusually prominent Adam’s apple and wears a Jimmy Buffet T-shirt. He rocks back and forth impatiently in his shorts and two-toned loafers. The third guy wears a Hawaiian shirt tucked into a pair of jeans pulled up over his belly button. They’re agitated at the bouncer’s delay and say as much, as if they’re spoiling for a fight. By now, most of the bouncers know me, so I just wave and walk right in.

  Inside, Mr. Midnight’s holding court at the bar, telling friends about his day trip to the beach to meet an Internet friend. “It was a great day,” he says. “We swam, ate lunch, smoked some marijuana, and then jumped in bed. She had new tits. Just bought ’em, and they were beautiful. Top-notch. You know what else? She’s pierced down there. I’d never seen that before. Right there, under the hood.” He pauses to order another low-carb beer. “It’s nice to get off campus once in a while.”

  I grab a drink and listen to the band play Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow” and another perennial favorite in The Village, “Mustang Sally.” About 100 residents linedance in unison, and the balconies are packed with spectators cheering them on. I watch in amusement as a few younger people struggle to keep in rhythm with the quick-dancing seniors. A woman who seems to be in her late seventies leaves the dance floor swinging her hips and pumping the air with her fist. The contrast with my hometown’s senior center couldn’t be any starker.

  Suddenly, somebody grabs my notebook out of my hands. “What are you writing about, cutie?” asks an attractive middle-aged woman in jeans and a silky red blouse. “What do I get if I give you your notebook back, hmmm?” She grabs me by the arm, pulls me closer, and then reaches down and gives me a soft playful slap on the butt. Her hand lin
gers at the base of my thigh. “I need another drink,” she announces. “How about you?”

  I have difficultly responding. Feeling like a prude is a new experience for me, and her seizure of my notebook does not amuse me. I know she’s only playing, but the notes inside cannot be replaced. Nevertheless, I walk to the bar and return with two margaritas. She looks me in the eyes and asks what brings me to The Villages. “Research,” I answer.

  She pauses and then starts to tell me her story. Her name is Jean, and she moved to The Villages six years ago from Wisconsin, where she worked as telephone operator. She looks as if she is in her late fifties and is actually quite pretty. She then returns to the business at hand. “I’m so horny,” she says, drawing even closer. She rests an elbow on my shoulder and gently tousles my hair. “I gotta use it before I lose it!”

  Jean senses my bewilderment and awkwardly pulls back several inches from my groin. “I just hope I meet a guy, somebody to be with,” she says soberly. “But maybe it’s just not meant to be.” She quietly hands me my notebook.

  Back at the Andersons’ house, Dave is in the lanai, smoking a pipe and working on a large-print crossword puzzle. He puts down his pencil and invites me to join him for a friendly chat, which is something I’m finding myself increasingly looking forward to. He loves to hear about my day, and I enjoy listening to his thoughtful insights. I make myself a sandwich and pop down on a chair across from him.

  “People were searching for a place where they could feel comfortable with peers their own age,” he tells me. “This place prospers because it provides that. When everyone is retired, boundaries fall away and guys from the assembly line find themselves hanging out with executives. Everybody here is from someplace else; it’s what you have in common that brought you here in the first place. All these people were searching for community. And now they’ve found it.

  “A lot of our friends here find their kids don’t call them, let alone visit. At some point in life, you become independent of family, or family becomes independent of you. Your friends become your chosen family.

  “To my mother’s generation, it was very important to leave money to your children, even if that meant doing without. But this generation doesn’t have the same closeness to their children. It’s a social revolution: we’re no longer dependent on them to take care of us. We can take care of ourselves, and have fun doing it.

  “Besides, what’s the alternative? Moving to be near your kids? What happens when your son-in-law gets a promotion and that means yet another move? Do you really think they’re going to stay behind and say no to the promotion?”

  The following week, Ellen calls and invites me to play cards with her women friends that evening. I accept, and then ask what she’s been up to. She excitedly tells me about a night out she had at the Savannah Center for twelve dollars, listening to a medley of show tunes. “I go to that show every year,” she says. “Everybody raves about it. It’s like seeing a real Broadway show, but cheaper.”

  I ask her how her friends from the Massachusetts Club are doing. “We get together a lot,” she says. “We’re always doing something. Just the other night we got together for spaghetti and eggplant Parmesan, and we had strawberry pie for desert. It was a very nice evening. And on Monday, we went to hear a polka band. That was fun, too.”

  I’m looking forward to my own fun today. I’ve decided to forgo a gathering of golf cart hot rodders and play bingo for the first time since elementary school. Silly as it may sound, I’m really looking forward to it, and have planned my day around it. I cheerfully drive into Spanish Springs for a quick lunch before game time.

  As I sit eating a sandwich at an outdoor table, I notice a woman on the sidewalk staring at me. She’s wearing jeans, a pink T-shirt, sneakers with sequins, and a snazzy purple cap resting at an angle over her white hair. “Hey, Andrew!” she says, waving her hand excitedly. “I betcha you don’t recognize me without my makeup!” She’s right, and it takes me a moment before I realize it’s Sassy without her clown getup. I’m happy to see her, and invite her to join me for a cup of coffee. She says she wants to tell me her story. I’ve been bombarded with unsolicited biographies, but I really like Sassy and I’m curious about her tale.

  “I’ve been widowed for five years,” Sassy informs me. “I don’t want somebody else. I haven’t dated since I was seventeen, and I’m not about to start. I was raised Catholic and that don’t go away easy.

  “After my husband died, I was desperate to share things, even little things. I’d call a friend just to say that I found my keys or paid such and such a bill. But I’d rather bite a cyanide pill than live with any of my kids, God bless them all.

  “Being single was really, really hard at first. After forty-five years of doing everything together, I was suddenly cast off. I feel gypped that we can’t share these years. He missed the birth of our first great-grandchild, and he loved kids.

  “We were best friends. He always said that he should be the first to go because he couldn’t live without me. Well, he got his wish. He thought I could cope better with being alone. I hate to say it, but he was probably right. But I’m angry. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. He wasn’t supposed to die of cancer.” Sassy shows me her necklace: hanging from a gold chain is her wedding ring wrapped around her husband’s. Her misfortune, though a common occurrence at a place like The Villages, is nevertheless starting to make me weepy. I look at the simple yet poignant necklace and my eyes moisten. She looks at me with sad resignation and continues her narrative.

  “I’d take my husband back in a heartbeat. The men around here are so different than he was. I always have to tell them to keep their hands to themselves. They’re always trying to touch something, cop a feel. I’m a nurse, and I can tell you, that that’s the last thing to go. I have a ninety-year-old patient and I can’t shower him without somebody accompanying me. Can you imagine?

  “Finding love again at my age would just complicate things,” Sassy continues. “I’ve led a full life. I don’t feel I need to ask for more. I don’t want to be greedy. It takes years to build a good relationship and I only have so many left. Who would want me, anyway?”

  Sassy and I finish our coffee and walk slowly down the sidewalk, pausing to look at window displays. “There’s a lot of sadness here,” she says, placing a palm over her heart. “But I’m not going to let it take over. I’m going to fill up my time until it’s my time. That’s why I like clowning. It beats sitting at home and crying.

  “My husband wasn’t the only one to go. I’ve buried so many of my friends that I need to make new ones on a regular basis. I just buried my best friend who I’d known since 1959. I’m getting really good at saying good-bye.”

  After this story, I feel sheepish informing Sassy that I need to go because I’m late for bingo. But she just smiles and walks me to my car, where she gives me a big hug. “Thank you for taking the time to listen to an old lady’s story,” she says.

  The bingo game is held in one of the larger rooms at the recreation center. The parking lot is filled with cars and golf carts. Inside, nobody shows the slightest interest in helping me find a seat. Bingo, I learn, attracts a tough crowd. Social niceties quickly give way to acerbic moodiness as soon as the bingo balls start bouncing. The vast majority of participants are female, but they are not about to coddle me like grandmothers.

  I evenually find a seat beside a hunched-over woman with cat’s-eye glasses studded with rhinestones. She wears a sweater to ward off the air-conditioning, which whips around the room like a nor’easter. Her name is Dotty, and she introduces herself without looking up. “Bingo’s about the only thing left that I can still do,” she says when I sit down. “I’m too old to do anything else fun.”

  A bingo lieutenant walks over and sells me a pile of bingo sheets for five dollars. He asks me if I need a magic marker for dabbing. Dotty flicks one down the table at me like an old penny. “Save your money,” she advises, adding tersely, “You owe me one.”

/>   A woman at a table next to ours shouts, “Bingo!” She wins fifteen dollars. Everyone at the table is encouraged to touch her winnings. “That’s lucky money,” Dotty tells me, then kisses her talisman, a little porcelain puppy. The first winner of the game is also presented with a paper crown, and is referred to as the “bingo queen.”

  The man on the stage calls out a new game. It’s hard to imagine that a game as seemingly simple as bingo could be challenging, but I find decoding the announcer’s jargon beyond my ability. A slew of numbers are called. I dab as quickly as I can but I can’t seem to get the hang of all the variations of the game, each with its own different pattern on the bingo sheets. I have no idea what Lazy L, the Chair, or the particularly enigmatic Doo-dad means. Why can’t I just dab at all my numbers?

  A woman across the table offers to be my Rosetta stone. Her name is Marianne. She lives in an age-segregated community in Arizona, but she’s here visiting her ailing mother. “Am I winning yet?” I ask. She points out that one measly G-50 stands between me and a crisp Ben Franklin. Another number is called and a woman across the room yells out, “Bingo!” loudly enough to make me jump.

  “My mother had a lot of friends here, but at some point after her stroke, she just gave up,” Marianne tells me. “Friends can only help out so much. Then it’s time for family. Who else is going to talk with her doctor and make sure she’s getting the right treatment?”

  The announcer calls out I-17, and we hastily scan our cards.

  “My husband and I like living in our gated community,” Marianne continues. “We’re proud of it. We’ve finally made it.”

  “N-34.”

  Dotty curses, scrunches her face, and clears the phlegm in her throat. She turns toward me and finally looks me in the eye. She’s pissed. “Are you here to talk or to play?” She looks at my bingo card. “C’mon, that’s the wrong pattern. Fix it!”