On our last day together, I made my move. Feigning the need to find a UPS store for “urgent business,” I charged my son with keeping my parents entertained while I excused myself, jumping into the car in search of a police station. I called my sister.
“I’ve got the gun! There’s a holiday amnesty program, or when I get pulled over for speeding, I’ll just hand it over to a cop,” I said, flooring my father’s Honda Accord.
“You’re stealing his gun?”
“He’s got a leg holster—he’s going to bend over and shoot his foot off. Someone could take it from him at the casino and kill him. What if Mom tells him he needs to build his upper-body strength one too many times? He might shoot her.”
“You’re not allowed to do that,” she said in the same authoritative tone The Little Man had used to get me to eat lima beans when I was five years old.
I reluctantly returned to the house, took my dad aside and opened my jacket. The gun was tucked into my pants. He told me in his best Big Daddy drawl that if I didn’t give it back to him, he’d leave Ezra and me in Fort Lauderdale. I caved, but convinced him to let me put the .357 Magnum in the trunk. We drove back to the Gardens. Ezra didn’t know, but he had their portable toilet seat on his lap (in a carrying case). My mother clutched her box of wine as my dad and I stewed in silence. That was the last road trip for the Gurwitches. Only later did I learn the gun was loaded.
I arrived at eight p.m. the night before my shopping safari. Dinner is served from four to six p.m. and I’ve gotten used to the hush that falls over the campus after sundown. Because there is a surfeit of empty apartments, I’m able to stay in the unit next door to my folks. One of the front-desk attendants said she thinks of my sister and me as part-time residents. I smiled when she said this, although the reality that independent-living unit #609 is the closest I have come to a vacation time-share is something I try not to think about.
One of those ubiquitous violin-playing-goat Chagall prints hangs on the wall of my place and it seems likely that the furnishings came from previous tenants, but I try not to think about that either. On my first visit, the bathroom, with its metal railings and emergency pull cord, depressed me so much that I didn’t shower for my entire four-day stay, but now I find the “daily living aids” a delightful reminder that I am still young enough to use the loo without needing assistance, making each trip to the bathroom a cause for celebration.
Any adjustments I make are insignificant compared to my parents’ acclimation. The Gardens renovated their apartment, updating the kitchen with a granite finish and replacing the carpet with bamboo flooring, but my mother still finds it wanting. My mom has started documenting a compendium of complaints in a notebook that I’ve named Shirley’s Little Book of Big Indignities. They range from “At dinner, they gave me fruit but not a cookie and I’m supposed to get a cookie too” (which is true), to a suspicion that the cleaning service is siphoning off cups of her laundry detergent (which seems doubtful). This is not unexpected; entering a retirement home is difficult for everyone.
Lisa witnessed the initial move-in meltdown. She called to report on our parents’ nonstop bickering and how Mom went into a rage, convinced the bargain-basement-priced movers were overcharging her.
“But Lisa, it sounds quiet right now.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Where are you?”
“I locked myself in the bathroom and I’m eating a salad in the bathtub.”
Even the smallest details, like sounds and ambient light, take getting used to. Their place faces the exterior of the campus, a brightly lit boulevard. The amount of traffic whizzing by each week is greater than the number of cars that went past their Sunset Islands home during the entire forty years they lived there. As a constant reminder of their perch in the unfamiliar neighborhood of Little Haiti, their apartment looks out onto the Dark and Lovely Beauty Supply.
As expected, the Gardens’ dining room and classes provide more interactions with other humans, but there have been unanticipated opportunities for community building as well. A few days after their arrival, my father was interrupted during his morning toilette by an insistent knock on the apartment door. When the knocking persisted, he answered the door and one of the oldest but admirably ambulatory neighbors burst into the apartment demanding to know why a nude man was in her dentist’s office. She drops in once a month, and on the days when my father is clothed and able to convince her that the apartment is not the waiting room of Dr. Blaustein, DDS, she’ll ask if he can stand with her until the elevator comes.
I can’t say it seems like an unreasonable request, as each episode is much like Waiting for Godot. The elevators operate with an indifference to logic or reliability. Let’s say an elevator arrives. The doors open, you enter, the doors close, and just when you think you’re about to go somewhere, they’ll open again. Repeat. I’ve been unsuccessful in finding a pattern, which means that the already slow pace of life at the Gardens requires even more patience and resignation to things being out of your control than you think you can muster. There is an old saying, “Florida is God’s waiting room,” and I now know that room is an elevator.
Out of all of Mom’s well-documented observations, it is an unimpeachable fact that the Gardens is having trouble attracting younger folks like my parents, aside from the seriously broken, of body or brain. My mother’s been tallying the diminishing number of residents. “We’re down to seventy-eight in our building,” she told me, which does seem to be worrisome, though I have no clue as to the accuracy or the method of her census keeping.*
There is a somewhat related culture clash, a palpable low-level hum of insurrection brewing at the home. Earlier generations were more religious than the newest crop of seniors, who aren’t all on board with the strict kosher kitchen. As a part-time resident, I don’t feel I should weigh in, but it does seem a bit much that even if you supply your own set of glasses, you can’t bring a bottle of non-kosher wine into the dining room. My father has been caught smuggling bacon into the cafeteria in his trousers. We’ve tried to convince him to enjoy his pork in the privacy of his apartment, but he won’t do it.
Still, there are thoughtful therapeutic touches. Each floor has its own motif of framed photographs that serve as visual mnemonics. Some floors have birds, while others have flowers. The only problem is they are a tad similar to my eye. My parents’ floor has pelicans, while one floor up is whooping cranes. You’d have to be an ornithologist to tell the difference.
And there are highlights. My mother takes advantage of the “out trips”* to concerts and we are regulars at the chair exercise class. Her mother went to the gym several times a week up until the day she died, so my mother’s new dedication may be another one of the habits she has adopted in Frances’s honor.* Our instructor is tirelessly encouraging, although I found it troubling that her playlist for our group, which includes stroke victims in wheelchairs, opens with Mel Tormé singing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” It seemed particularly a punishment to residents with more eclectic tastes, like my mother’s new dining room buddy, Inez, a record producer whose music label included KC and the Sunshine Band. If I accomplish nothing else in my tenure at Tel Aviv, my legacy will be to have successfully lobbied for the residents to shake-shake-shake, shake-shake-shake, shake their booty from 11:23 to 11:27 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday.
After his initial resistance, Dad has made an easier transition, or is at least making a good show of it. As there are fewer men at the Gardens, my father, who stands now at six feet, having lost a few inches, cuts a memorable swath and has gotten the nickname “Handsome Harry” around the campus. The front-desk staff seem to get a kick out of his feistiness and never tire of repeating that Dad told them in no uncertain terms, “Don’t fuck with me in the morning.” He announced that he was hanging up his pots and pans when they first moved in, but since he discovered the Seven Seas seafood store, located next to Dark and Lovel
y, he’s come out of retirement.* When Lisa and I or his grandsons visit, he makes his gumbo, though his measurement skills have gone a bit wonky. On this trip, we will spend an hour spooning gumbo into a dozen containers to freeze and give as gifts to the downstairs staff. I presented him with a taller garbage can and he purchased a gadget called a Folding Helping Hand Long-Reach Pick-Up Gripper™. I have seen it in action. My mother spots a speck of dust on the floor and tells him to bend over and pick it up. Dad retrieves the FHHLR Pick-Up Gripper, extends the mechanical arm, probes the area for the particle, grasps it in the tongs, and deposits it in the foot-pedal-operated trash bin. The process only takes up most of an afternoon.
You will find no highlights, however, at the hair salon. Literally. They only do frosting, so don’t even ask. In an attempt to go full-on Garden fashionista, I’ve had my hair done there. The stylist, who has not one but three signs that read I’m a Beautician, Not a Magician, gave me tight pin curls, though I requested a blowout, transforming my hair into an exact copy of my grandmother Frances’s wig. To be fair, I was the only client who wasn’t sleeping during their appointment, so I may have distracted her. The ladies of the Gardens complimented me, because I was twinning their preferred hairstyle, so it was worth it.
My mother is a poetry class regular, although she is not a fan of the modern poets featured in the Sewanee Review, which the thoughtful teacher, Kaye, a writer herself, tries to nudge the class toward.
“What does this mean? It’s meaningless: ‘Time is a graceless enemy’?” Mom complained after one class, quoting from a Charles Wright poem. “I love the Russian tenement poets, their poems about life on the Lower East Side in New York and working in factories in the garment district, don’t you?”
“Mom, you never lived in New York, nor in a tenement, or worked in the garment industry. You do know something about the march of time, but I’m so glad you are enjoying immersing yourself in turn-of-the-century squalor.”
Regulars include Ilene, formerly a college professor, who still does some part-time tutoring, and Marvin, a libertarian Zionist who Xeroxes articles from Judicial Watch, which he leaves by the mailboxes with handwritten scribbled notes: Israel, love it or LOSE IT, people!!! At the class I attended, Ilene brought in something by Kipling, Marv recited Shakespeare from memory, and because I’m an asshole, I brought in obtuse musings by Gertrude Stein and got into an argument over interpretation with Marv.
“You’re just like your mother,” he said on our way out of class, a comment that sounded like a reference to both my appearance and my temperament.
“Thanks, I have to jump off the roof now, Marv.”
My mother’s sense of humor is still intact. “Me first,” she added. “But let’s make sure we do it from a high enough floor that we don’t just break a leg.”*
I started the day, as usual, by greeting the Yettas, the Shirleys, and the Lillians at breakfast. There are three distinct groups among the women at the Gardens. Some of the Yettas, the oldest of the residents, are Holocaust survivors. The most religious of the bunch, they wear head coverings while napping in the lawn chairs outside our building. In general, the Lillians are active in the Jewish community and are older and less mobile than the Shirleys, who still drive, leave the home on a regular basis, and are less religious. I kiss and greet them all.
“Lil, I love your blouse, it looks Navajo. What’s your book club reading?” I say to the president of the building association and the oldest person in unassisted living, whose name is Lillian, though her mobility makes her more of a Shirley.
“Hello, darling, you look so glamorous today. You used to make your own jewelry, I know, that’s clearly why you are stylish,” I tell Esther, who, because she is losing her sight, is a Lillian. She moved in only a few weeks after my parents and often sits in the lobby and cries, so I always try to compliment her.
“How are your new students?” I ask Ilene from poetry class, a Shirley.
“Shirley,” I say to one of the Shirleys, whose name is Shirley, “if you go to exercise class today, please do a Rockettes kick for me and my mother.” Being the most mobile, there are usually three Shirleys, including my mom and this Shirley, in class. Rhoda invites me to stand in for my mother at Friday night services. Until recently, Rhoda was a Shirley, but an escalating short-term memory loss has sent her into Lillianville.
There’s some competition among the residents about whose kids visit more often. It’s not unlike how kids at summer camp know whose parents sent care packages and whose didn’t. Some of them have the advantage of having kids who live nearby and I don’t want my parents to fall too far behind, so I try to make sure everyone sees me.
We catch up on Gardens gossip. Bruce, the Gardens’ architect with Parkinson’s, has died.
“Oh, no, what happened?”
“It was sudden, in his sleep,” Lillian tells me. We nod and make the little clucking noises customary upon learning of a sad inevitability. Still, the news is shocking. There is also a budding romance on campus, which is causing a big rift in the population. Two residents have fallen in love. The Yettas aren’t pleased and don’t approve. One stood up at bingo night and admonished the woman, “You should be taking care of your husband,” because the woman’s husband is a memory care patient.
“How do you feel about it?” I ask.
“Love wins,” one says, and I’m not sure if she knows she’s just summed up the gay movement in 2016 America, but it’s a sentiment shared by the majority of the Shirleys and Lillians. One of the things you notice when you spend time here is that even an insignificant chat is charged with an unfamiliar intensity. No one is checking their phone, updating their Facebook, or posting to Instagram, making interactions that would once have been considered normal human exchanges seem deeply intimate. And in what has become the most dubious of achievements, I have finally beat my sister at something. Lisa is often busy handling my parents’ finances, which leaves me time to socialize. Since I’ve endeared myself to the gals, Lisa is referred to as “the other sister.” I am number one sister with the coffee klatch at Tel Aviv Gardens.
My mother has requested not to have visitors because she doesn’t want to be seen when she’s not at her best, but all the residents are following her recovery. Prior to her hospitalization, there were some incidents that I’m not able to confirm but might have occurred. The dining room, like the dress code, operates a lot like middle school. Everyone wants to be invited to sit with the cool kids, which in this case refers to the table where the majority have enough short-term memory left to gossip about those seated at other tables.
According to Mom, you have to be invited to sit at the table, and someone made it known that she was talking too much or talking too loudly or complaining too much. I’ve tried not to follow the drama too closely. When my son was four, at our local park, a kid with a crew cut and a runny nose, always a bad sign, informed my son that he couldn’t play in the sandbox. I wanted to punch the little punk. Needless to say, we just went to another part of the park, but I’ve asked my mother not to tell me which of the women said she couldn’t sit at their table, because there is no other sandbox, and someone’s walker might suddenly have a loose screw, which could be very dangerous.
Luckily, the dining room incident is behind us. It might have been like prison hazing, where you have to prove how tough you are, because when the Shirleys and Lillians heard that Mom has stage-four cancer, everything made sense to them—why my parents, who are younger than the majority of the residents, had moved in, something they were all wondering about—and the gals were impressed by Mom’s fortitude. If she can just recover, perhaps they will give her a hero’s welcome, like that scene in the prison classic Billy Jack. I picture the residents of Tel Aviv Gardens lined up along the driveway, some of them propped up with their walkers, doing the slow clap as she hobbles inside.
After catching up with the gals, I see my dad up to his ap
artment, stopping in to slip a palm-sized dusty rose–colored lychee, my favorite of Mom’s Chinese porcelain altar fruit collection, into my purse. Hopefully, she’ll make enough of a recovery that she’ll be able to notice that Sticky Fingers has pocketed something. Dad and I planned to go to the recovery center together, but first I jog around the campus, jump in the shower, and walk the few yards to the center, which takes the same amount of time for my father to use the restroom and drive his car over. We creep, which is the only word I can use to describe my father’s form of locomotion, into the center together.
The lobby of the center has the same grand piano and bright artwork as the apartment building, but once you get into the wards upstairs, there are hospital-style rooms connected by nurses’ stations and patients in wheelchairs lined up along the hallways. We pass the shape of a man in a chair with a sheet over his head, Scooby-Doo cartoon ghost style. He is doing something underneath the sheet that I am so thankful we can’t see. Some of the patients are sleeping, but unlike the nappers in front of the apartment building, they are only partially dressed. If they had trousers on, they have a hospital-gown top; if the top half was street wear, then the bottoms are pajamas. A Yetta with a kerchief on her head, face like a potato, sits upright with perfect posture, but she is completely still, eyes wide open.
No one is parked in the hallway of the wing in which my mother is recovering, but there is a man moaning for help from an adjacent room. There is never a time during my visit when he isn’t moaning, except for a brief interlude in which a nurse wheels him down the hall and parks his wheelchair behind the desk next to the staff.
Is this kind of thing unique to this facility or to Miami? I don’t know. It’s not the first time we’ve been treated to a front-row seat for the health care industry in Florida. A few years ago, my mother had a brain tumor removed at Jackson Memorial Hospital, a facility that specializes in bullet wounds to the head. Given Florida’s heat and humidity and history of racial tension, combined with an open-carry law and castle doctrine (the so-called stand your ground law), is it any wonder that my mother was the only patient in the ward who wasn’t handcuffed to her bed and accompanied by a police escort?
Wherever You Go, There They Are Page 22