by Sigrid Nunez
Now that’s my mother’s biggest fear, the man said. All I have to do is say the words assisted living and she threatens to disown me. And really, for her age, she’s doing pretty well on her own.
This conversation—our first—took place a couple of years ago, on a bench in the building courtyard. It’s something I never do, sit in the courtyard, but I’d accidentally let something burn in the oven and was waiting for my apartment to air out. He was visiting his mother and had stepped out for a smoke. It was a warm dry summer day, there was deep shade from the courtyard trees, the rose trellis was in bloom, and the air was as sweet as city air can get. I hadn’t been near a person smoking in a long time, and rather than being unpleasant the smell filled me with nostalgia. Cars packed with teens, college all-nighters, drugs, rock, cocktails, sex. I wouldn’t have minded if he’d blown the smoke right in my face rather than deliberately over his shoulder.
His mother’s day was a barrage of interruptions, he said. Congratulations, she just won a sweepstakes. She recently stayed at a certain hotel (as a matter of fact, she has stayed in a hotel exactly once in her life, on her honeymoon, more than six decades ago) and is now eligible to receive a reward. The thank-you gift from an anonymous friend is waiting for her. The special life-saving device she ordered is ready to be shipped. She is eligible for a free trip, a new credit card, a preapproved loan, a personalized wellness package, a free home security system. To protect her bank account, she must verify her personal information. A grandchild needs money to get out of jail; another grandchild has been kidnapped and is being held for ransom.
What about the Do Not Call Registry, I asked, and the man shrugged. He’d registered his mother’s number but the volume of calls stayed about the same. When I asked why his mother didn’t use caller ID, he smiled. She has caller ID, he said. But it’s like she can’t resist. The phone rings, Mom’s got to answer. She wants to know who it is! Also, it’s not rational, but she’s damned if she’s going to let bad people force her to hide from her own phone. And when it’s not a robocall but an actual person, though I’ve warned her never to talk to them, she sometimes does. She starts interrogating them. How do they know her name? How did they get her number? Or she’ll play along for a bit, you know, playing the sweet gaga old lady. Then they ask for her social security number and she says, Sure, honey, got a pen? It’s one two three, four five, six seven eight nine. When someone told her they had one of her grandkids, she said, That’s okay, I got more, and I never liked that one anyway.
Hearing this, it crossed my mind that the woman, all alone all day in her apartment, might actually enjoy these phone calls, that they might be as much a meager kind of entertainment as a nuisance to her. I was reminded of another neighbor I once had, another elderly widow living alone, who used to knock on my door regularly to complain about the noise—baffling me, because I hadn’t been making any noise—until I realized that it was something else. A terrible thing was happening to her. Attention must be paid.
Sometimes she tries to reform them, the man said. I’ve listened to her do this. She starts lecturing them, asking why would they want to hurt innocent people, why didn’t they go out and get themselves an honest job. She’s even convinced herself that she’s had some success. Last month she told me about a guy who told her he was truly sorry for what he’d done and promised never to do it again.
The man laughed, and I laughed with him. He had finished his cigarette, but instead of going back to his mother he kept sitting there on the bench, talking. It occurred to me that she must wonder what was taking him so long, but he didn’t seem concerned. I wasn’t entirely surprised when he shook another cigarette from his pack and lit up again.
I do worry about her becoming more vulnerable, he said. The older she gets, the more forgetful she is, and things happen. Her toothbrush ends up in the fridge, she has trouble keeping the grandkids straight. And after all, people a lot younger and sharper than her get scammed every day.
I thought about a friend of mine whose mother is in a nursing home. Every time I visit her, he told me, she says something about how maybe now I’ll find a nice girl to settle down with. And every time she says this I say to her, No, Mother, I’m gay, remember? This has been going on for years. Every time my friend sees his mother he has to come out all over again.
It’s so depressing, the man in the courtyard went on. Like old people don’t have enough bad things happening to them. What a toxic society we live in. And it’s not just one or two bad apples. Seems like hordes of people are out there ready to prey on the weakest. I don’t get it. How do these crooks feel when they’ve ruined some poor person’s life? How can they enjoy whatever it is they spend that victim’s money on? Feasting on someone else’s misery—how can these people look in the mirror? What do they tell themselves?
I said I thought these people would say that it was only money, that they weren’t really hurting anyone, they weren’t really evil like killers or rapists or child molesters. I said probably every one of them could point to a time when they themselves had been victims, when some kind of damage had been done to them—especially when they were too young to defend themselves. And who had cared then? Who had been there to look out for them? I said they could probably all name a dozen ways in which they’d been cheated out of something they thought they should have. It was a dog-eat-dog world. It was a jungle out there. It was every man for himself. Deal with it.
Is what I said I thought such people told themselves.
The man gave me a sideways glance. That’s deep, he said with just a hint of mockery. You a psychologist?
I told him I was a writer.
Interesting, he murmured, his gaze absently tracing the path of his cigarette smoke.
I thought of the Hitchcock movie about a man known as the Merry Widow Murderer. Uncle Charlie, fulminating against rich old widows—“fat, wheezing animals,” who, according to him, had no right to all their money. “What happens to animals when they get too fat and too old?” To him, his victims deserved to be slaughtered.
Since his mother had stopped going out, the man had arranged for regular deliveries of groceries and other necessities to her door and for someone from a housekeeping service to come in and clean once a week. Certain things, however, had not been cleaned in a long time. Windows, for example. This I would discover when I began visiting the woman, which would never have happened had I not got into a conversation with her son in the courtyard that day.
After Hurricane Sandy, when our building lost power for several days, he’d been beside himself thinking about her all alone in the cold and dark. At least landlines had been working. But, he said, in the next emergency—and there would always be a next—who knew what might happen. For years he’d been trying to get her to move upstate, but she wouldn’t budge.
Mom was always a bit on the stubborn side, he said. But now, forget about it. Be like moving the Rock of Gibraltar.
I should say that this was at a low point in my life, when the balance of things to be unhappy about seemed weightier than things to be grateful for (having heard how helpful to a person’s emotional well-being it could be, I’d started keeping a gratitude list). They say one way to lift yourself up when you’re down is to do something for somebody else. We weren’t entirely strangers to each other, my neighbor and I. I too have lived in the building for many years, and she hasn’t always been a recluse. There was a time when, meeting in the lobby or in the mailroom, we’d exchange a few words. I agreed to visit this man’s mother now and then and to check on her in case of emergency. I didn’t think it was asking much. I’d done the same when I lived in another building, for a neighbor who, though still young, had a disability that kept her mostly housebound. Also, if the truth be told, I was hoping that, though it had yet to be put into action, my good deed might help me get through the rest of the day with more success than I’d had so far in the kitchen, maybe even help me get some work
done, a main reason for my current funk being that I hadn’t got any work done in some time.
After we’d exchanged contact information and the man had thanked me many times over, he politely assumed an interest in me. What kind of writing did I do? Let him guess: romance.
Just then, from overhead, through the open window of one of the second-floor apartments, came a noise. A cry. A female cry. We sat there, momentarily silenced, as the cry glided into a moan.
The bed must have been right under the window. And, given how any sound made in that brick canyon was much magnified (the cause of frequent tenant complaint), it might as well have been miked.
Together, without a word, and avoiding each other’s gaze, we stood up from the bench and headed for the door leading into the building. I kept slightly ahead of him, trying not to run, as the moans pursued us, without pause, rising, rhythmic, weirdly interrogative: Is it? Is it? Is it is it is it? Then, just as we made it to the door: Stop! we heard the woman shout. No! No! Stop!
Did we say goodbye? All I remember now is the man hanging back while I fled upstairs to my apartment, where I slammed the door behind me and leaned against it, tears in my eyes, heart pounding.
* * *
—
I figured it would be an easy obligation to fulfill. I figured she’d want to talk, as people so often do, especially lonesome people, who often talk volubly even to complete strangers about things that have nothing to do with the listener. I expected she’d probably talk about herself, about her long life, her memories of the past, and I wouldn’t have to fake attention, because other people’s lives, and specifically their remembrance of things past, are a source of genuine interest to me. I think it’s largely true, what I once heard a famous playwright say, that there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you’d discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people. But sometimes you had to be willing to sit for a very long time. It always amazes me now to think back to when I was an adolescent, and to remember how little attention my friends and I paid to one another’s parents and grandparents. What could they possibly have to say, these ordinary people, most of whom, if they weren’t housewives or retirees, went to work every day at jobs we couldn’t imagine being the least bit interesting. It was only later that it occurred to me that these were people who’d lived through some of the most dramatic events of the century. They themselves had come of age during periods of upheaval, had endured all types of hardship, had escaped harrowing conditions in foreign countries, or in the Deep South, become homeless during the Depression, fought in world wars, been held captive in prisons, survived death camps. They had been through some of the most extreme things life can throw at a person, like characters in the movies we saw, but although we might have had some vague idea of this, from those movies, say, compared to what kind of clothes or makeup your girlfriends were wearing, it could not provoke the slightest curiosity. My friends and I hung on one another’s every word, we were transfixed by the minutiae of our BF’s experiences, no matter that they were all but identical to our own. I had a classmate whose father had worked for J. Edgar Hoover, another whose mother was an ER nurse. These people had stories—the same kind of stories that had us rapt in front of the TV night after night. But we wouldn’t have dreamed of engaging them in conversation, and if they’d ever started talking openly about themselves we would have died.
Later still, though, I realized that, even among themselves, with other grown-ups, including those closest to them, most of these people were not at all eager to talk about the past, especially the traumatic parts. Who wanted to remember? Who wanted to hear? Only those who are writers, it seems, get to say what happened.
Untold is a good word. Meaning, of course, not recounted or narrated. But also, too much or too many to say. The untold story of his youth. Untold suffering.
The air in the homes of old people, have you noticed, is always stale. Even when the windows were open I felt stifled. Usually when I dropped by, in the afternoon, she had the blinds closed and the only light in the room came from the television, which seemed to be always on. I didn’t want her to go through any trouble so I always came with coffee and muffins that I’d bought at the corner coffee bar. This she clearly appreciated, and I was grateful for the way it gave some structure to these visits, something for us to do, something to share, and, once the coffee and muffins were finished, it was not too awkward to use this as a sign that it was time for me to go.
She was a big complainer. Mostly she complained about our building: the garbage piling up in the basement, the super who took too long to fix things and whose English she had so much trouble understanding, the high-heeled clacking of her neighbor upstairs (“in her Jimmy Choo-choos”), children throwing balls in the courtyard. She was particularly irritated that the smell from the litter box of someone’s cat occasionally drifted through the vents into her own bathroom. (This happened once when I was there; in fact it was the smell of someone smoking weed, but I didn’t say this.) She batted away questions about her early life. She didn’t like to remember being young, she said. It just made her feel old. About my own life she had no curiosity. I was single, I was childless: What life? Once she’d finished complaining about the building she moved on to the world at large, her feelings about which could be summed up in four words: hell in a handbasket.
It was summer again and I went away, I had some traveling to do, and when I returned six weeks later I learned that while I was gone she had been briefly hospitalized for what her son described only as a coronary event. She didn’t seem to me much changed at first: same old litany, more or less, but the countdown to the presidential election had begun, and she was becoming increasingly agitated. Was it really possible that Americans would elect to the highest office in the land, to the most powerful position on earth, a person so manifestly unfit, so brazenly immoral and corrupt, a person who lied with every breath and was a complete incompetent to boot?
Never had my neighbor’s faith in humanity been so shaken.
That woman is as crooked as a barrel of fishhooks, she said. Worse even than the great Obamination. The woman had blood on her hands, she was a treasonous traitor, she deserved to be shot, my neighbor said. How could she ever have got this far? Of course it was some kind of conspiracy.
I myself have never had that much interest in politics, her son said to me. Right now I don’t like what I’m seeing on either side, so I may just sit this one out. But the thing is, Mom was never like this before. I mean, she never got worked up over an election, and when I was growing up she and Dad usually voted Democrat. And Mom even used to be a feminist. I don’t mean in any active political way, but I remember her reading that book (The Feminist Mystic, he called it), and I remember her talking about women’s liberation and what a great thing it was and what a bad thing it was that more women weren’t in office.
Not to sound crazy myself, he said, but when I listen to her now it’s like while she was in the hospital someone planted a chip in her brain. She thinks Christians are under attack, she thinks Hillary Clinton is some kind of—I don’t really know what, but I’ve heard her say Hillary Clinton answers to Satan. But the thing is, Mom’s not religious, she never has been, and I never knew her to believe in Satan. So where did this come from? And how is it that, no matter what it’s about, if it’s between what Sean Hannity says or what her own son says, she trusts Hannity.
I’m sorry, he said, I know you’ve been getting an earful, but I think after the election she’ll calm down.
But after the election she did not calm down. She remained just as paranoid, just as enraged at the enemies of Christianity and of real, patriotic Americans. She took it ill when I happened to remark that Sean Hannity reminded me of Lou Costello, as if I’d said it to slander him.
But in fact, one of the strangest things about her behavior was that she didn’t really care what I said. She never paused during
one of her rants to ask whether I agreed or disagreed with her, never asked what my own views of the two candidates were, and when I volunteered such information she received it with a shrug, she never made the least effort to convert me. I could watch Fox News for myself if I wanted the truth, and if I didn’t, to hell with me.
For the most part, though, it was as if I weren’t even there. Never have I felt more superfluous. The coffee and muffins might as well have been left there by elves. I began to wonder what my visits could really have meant to her. I supposed I functioned successfully as some kind of ear, but there didn’t seem to be any real human connection. I had started visiting her out of the desire to do a good thing, something that would benefit another person—two persons, if you counted her son. But could it still be called good if I’d begun to hate every minute of it, to regret that I’d ever agreed to it in the first place, that I’d ever laid eyes on either of them, that the woman had ever been born? Wasn’t this really rather what you’d call a sick situation? Aside from the anxiety that built up for days before I could bring myself to ring her bell again, there were moments when I found myself actually afraid of her, when her voice was raised in anger and she glowered from her humpbacked position out of bloodshot rolled-back eyes and I feared she really was going to headbutt me across the coffee table.
On the other hand, I didn’t know how to get out of these visits now, what I would tell her son (the truth, or some excuse?), or the woman herself (but would she even care?), and I felt increasingly stuck in a position that seemed both perverse and ridiculous.
It’s so sad was one of the last things her son ever said to me. If she never watched TV, he said, I know she wouldn’t be this way. And it makes me so mad. She could be spending her last years in relative comfort and peace, grateful for what she has. Instead she’s in a constant state of bitterness and resentment toward all the enemies she’s been scared into thinking are out to get her. It’s so sad, what happens to old people. I keep telling myself it’s not her fault, same thing could happen to me. But I know I’d rather die before my time than have it ever happen to me.