Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  Ted’s wife died here last summer. During parties and events like bingo Ted often stands outside the activity room, looking as if he’d like to enter, but he doesn’t. “That’s the way I like it,” he has said. “I just want to sit by myself and think about my wife. I do like pushing somebody down to a meal in a wheelchair. Physically I feel fine. Well, I thank God for that. But there’s nothing else I can do.”

  In old age, memory often fades in the absence of apparent disease, through a process for which science has no real explanation but does have a name: benign senescent forgetfulness. A basic principle of neurology, promulgated in the nineteenth century, holds that failures in memory tend to proceed inversely with time. As memory fades, the past comes nearer. No doubt there’s a biological cause, but the psychological result has a logic of its own. In old age, many people seem to remember best what has mattered most to them, and often it is work Ted sits alone here in the lobby recalling his days on the railroad. He was a telegrapher, manning the key in switching towers in the remotest sections of the Berkshires, all alone in his high perch except for the occasional hobos who would come by and ask for a place to sleep. Ted would accommodate the hobos. They were, after all, just workingmen down on their luck. Ted can still see those towers in his mind, and though he often can’t remember if any of his family has promised to visit on a given day, he can name all of the stations he worked at. “I can tell you every station, from the East Deerfield station to the Rotterdam station. Thank God I’ve got a good memory,” he says. “I can still remember every letter of the Morse code today.” Now and then, while sitting here in the lobby, or upstairs in his electric recliner, Ted drops his right hand to his thigh and taps out his thoughts in Morse code on his trousers.

  ***

  A new summer decorates the windows, and the rooms are full of yearning. One woman has imagined she is having an affair with a demented fellow resident. She doesn’t care who knows. “He makes my ovaries ache,” she says to a nurse. The nurse returns to the privacy of the medication room to laugh. “That’s a new one on me,” the nurse says. “I must be missing something.”

  Through the squawk boxes in the ceilings—the in-house paging system is used only occasionally—a supervisor’s voice calls out, “Attention staff. Attention staff. Norman has found his room.” Norman is presumed to have Alzheimer’s. The drugs he is given are supposed to curb his restlessness. They don’t always. The evening charge nurse tells this story: On an evening last summer she took him out for a walk, and suddenly he asked her if she owned a car. Then he said to her, “Let’s get out of here.” The nurse told him her car keys were upstairs. In his low whisper, but quite distinctly, Norman said, “I can hotwire it.” The nurse coaxed him back to Forest View, and by the time they got there, he’d forgotten that plan of escape. Norman still walks the halls of Forest View, pausing at doorways, rubbing his forehead worriedly, looking for his wife as well as for an exit, which he still finds sometimes.

  Upstairs in the Forest View living room, the staff clears away the remnants of breakfast, the breakfast of those residents too demented for the dining room. It isn’t summer in this room. It is, as always, a season of memories all mixed together, and there is no season here. Norman, in his porkpie hat, his escape aborted, now dozes in a chair in a corner. Phil, who has not set foot outside for over a year, has come up from the dining room and sits in his wheelchair in front of the TV, watching The Regis Philbin Show. Today Regis and his sidekick Kathie Lee preside over a men’s underwear fashion show. A succession of mostly potbellied men model jockey shorts, and the studio audience howls at the spectacle while Phil, his head cocked to one side, smiles as if mesmerized at the screen. In the room, there is the usual hustle and bustle of aides and nurses, taking away breakfast trays, readying medications. In the hall just outside, Fleur says in a chirpy voice to a nurse, “I don’t know where I am.”

  “You’re in Linda Manor and your apartment is right down there.”

  “Oh, I still don’t know where I am!”

  “You look lovely in white,” the nurse says.

  Fleur looks down at her white cardigan sweater. “I wish it was mine.”

  Behind Phil, at one of the church-social-type tables, Zita sits facing two white-haired women. They do not seem to notice the hubbub around them. They seem to be having a post-breakfast chat. “He wouldn’t be, wouldn’t be. Nine billion!” says one of the women seated across from Zita.

  Zita looks at her but says nothing. Zita’s eyes look sleepy.

  “I told you once, I don’t want you back here,” says one of Zita’s tablemates.

  “That’s all right,” the other says. “The one little thing. That’s what you’ve got to have.” The woman looks across the table at Zita and adds, “You’ve got a dead stump and it isn’t worth anything. That’s what you’ve got and you haven’t got any.”

  The studio audience is howling on the other side of the living room.

  Zita nods. She speaks very softly. “If she wants.”

  “Throw it in,” says one of the women across from her.

  “Just let ’em sit,” the other says.

  “He is the best I’ve known,” says the first.

  “Cage to them,” Zita murmurs.

  One of the other women coughs. “Goodness crispies,” Zita says. She smiles. “Now I know he’s a snot.”

  Gradually, those voices cease. Soon, for no apparent reason, but as if sleepwalking, Zita rises and exits the living room.

  Just a few years ago, when she was in her mid-sixties, Zita was holding down a job as a machine operator. Then people from the factory began calling her daughters to say, “Something’s wrong with your mother. She’s getting lost on the way in from the parking lot.”

  Zita’s parents came from Poland. She was born and raised on a farm in the Connecticut River Valley. Zita worked all her life, in fields and her own household and factories. She was a gentle and undemonstrative mother. If two of her children fought, she’d make them sit on the sofa and hold hands. She was fond of practical jokes: once she dressed herself up as a boy at Halloween and went trick-or-treating at a daughter’s house. Zita’s descent took a path often described in the burgeoning annals of Alzheimer’s disease. Her children and husband first assuring one another that everyone forgets things. Then the slow realization of a general decline in Zita’s abilities, especially her once impeccable housekeeping—and her daughter’s discovering in Zita’s refrigerator a jar of cold cream with a light bulb stuck in it. And finally the first of many grim family scenes. Zita didn’t recognize her own house. She said of her husband, “A strange man is following me.” She sat on her daughter’s couch and wept while her husband paced the floor in great, understandable fury.

  Her children had never before seen her weep. That was the worst stage, for her family and Zita, when her mind still clearly grasped its own trouble and she would say, “Something’s wrong with my brain.”

  A year’s worth of tests confirmed the worst. Zita almost certainly has Alzheimer’s. But at least she no longer seems to realize it. There is no telling where she lives now in what remains of her mind. Today, an average day for her, she will walk about two and a half miles indoors, up and down the corridors of Forest View, only stopping now and then to pluck at flowers in the carpet.

  ***

  In the afternoon, at Eleanor’s request, one of the staff places a wicker armchair at the west end of Forest View’s longer corridor. Eleanor calls this spot “my little pretend porch.” She would like to sit outside in the new summer air, but the door to the real porch behind her is locked, because it has no screening. Seated here, Eleanor tries to read a little, but puts down her book to watch Zita pace up and down the hall in front of her.

  A while back Eleanor thought that she might write a play about the denizens of Linda Manor. All Set? All Set! was to be the ironic title—“All set?” being what every nurse and aide and doctor asks a resident, and “All set!” the response that they expect. For a time, f
rom her lookout posts in the corridors, Eleanor kept a keen eye on all of her potential characters, especially her demented fellow residents. But Eleanor’s interest in writing the play has flagged. And none of the demented amuse or interest her anymore. Except for Zita. To Eleanor, she appears to be the quietest and most inoffensive of all of Forest View’s demented, more attractive to her indeed than most of Forest View’s nondemented residents. Eleanor wonders if at bottom she and Zita aren’t a little bit alike, both as restless in their own ways.

  Though always an actress, Eleanor also worked as an English teacher and speech therapist. She has the teacher’s knack for reaching the hard to reach. Some months ago Eleanor set out to make contact with Zita. Whenever she paced by, Eleanor would speak to her. “Hi, Zita. What you up to?” Small questions like that. For the longest time, Zita didn’t answer. But Eleanor felt encouraged, because sometimes when she spoke to her, Zita would stop nearby and speak herself, in disconnected phrases, saying incoherent things usually, and sometimes uttering amazing phrases that made Eleanor wonder if she had heard her right: “Way, way, and you could hear the wind blowing. The way of the god was a white crow. It’d wake me up.”

  Eleanor would reply as if Zita had been speaking to her. Eleanor would try to imitate the inflections of Zita’s voice. Then, a month or two ago, when Eleanor was sitting in her wicker armchair on her pretend porch, Zita stopped in front of her and said, “I came over to your house and you weren’t there, and I missed you.”

  Maybe she mistakes Eleanor for someone in the past. It is clear in any case that Eleanor has now become a distinct personage to Zita. Sometimes she stops and takes Eleanor’s hand, rocking back and forth and speaking incomprehensibly. Once, Eleanor had her feet on a stool, and Zita walked up and said in a sympathetic-sounding voice, “Didn’t you sleep well last night?” Just the other day, Zita bent down and planted a kiss on Eleanor’s cheek. Eleanor was delighted. “When you’ve been treated like someone out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest… Well, I think Zita’s much better since I’ve been talking to her.”

  Better perhaps, but not miraculously restored. As Zita approaches, Eleanor waylays her, saying, “Hi, Zeet. What you up to?”

  Zita stops in front of Eleanor, looking over her head toward the windows.

  Seated in her wicker chair, Eleanor studies Zita’s face. “My, it’s nice outside,” says Eleanor.

  “It’s about time,” says Zita.

  Eleanor beams, but then a mask seems to descend over Zita’s face, and she turns and walks away. It is as if one’s car radio had caught with perfect clarity a station a thousand miles away, only to lose it in static moments later. Eleanor expects this, but it’s a daily disappointment that mirrors larger ones—to succeed at making contact and then to have it break.

  Eleanor has changed rooms and roommates. She finally had it out with Elgie. Elgie is ninety-four, but Eleanor could not abide the way that woman seemed to like to lie in bed—“I hate bed,” Eleanor says. She had several noisy rows with Elgie. Eleanor made all of the noise. Now she lives in a room on the eastern half of Forest View’s longer corridor. She has reasons to regret the change. She doesn’t see Art as often now that she lives half a hallway farther from his room. He is still a bon vivant as far as she’s concerned. But it seems as if it’s always she who must search out Art, never the other way around. And the morning coffee klatch has all but died. Eleanor used to be awakened by the sound of Bob’s shoes squeaking as he passed by her room at around 5:30 every morning. She stays in bed later now. But even when she does get up in time for the klatch, it just isn’t the same. She can’t say why. She’s sick of Bob and Phil anyway, she tells herself, and yet, she must admit, she misses those morning get-togethers.

  For company, Eleanor still has her confidantes on the staff. But they are all too busy to talk long, and they are limited in other ways. Striking up a chat with one of the passing aides, Eleanor mentions Maria Ouspenskaya.

  “Who?”

  “The Russian actress.”

  “I don’t know her,” says the aide.

  “You’re too young,” Eleanor says. “I get so sick of you young people.”

  The cabaret is long since over, so are the invigorating little dramas of her cataract operation and her fight with Elgie, her new play is merely in rehearsal, she can’t seem to get interested in reading anymore, the coffee klatch is moribund, she doesn’t see Art much. Eleanor feels bored, estranged from the younger generation by their ignorance and from her own by geography, illness, and eternity—bored with all the routines, sick of almost everyone around here, and lonely. Her new roommate is no help. Eleanor has one of the presumed victims of Alzheimer’s for a roommate now, and Eleanor can’t even complain about it, because she was the one who chose her. She thought the woman would resemble Zita, but Eleanor has found her quite annoying.

  It is evening, a green and golden evening, outside the window of Eleanor’s new room. Eleanor sits by the window and stares at her roommate. The woman is short and stout with gray hair cut very short. She sits in a chair chewing gum—the same piece of gum she stuck in her mouth this morning—and knitting. She has been sitting there knitting for hours, her television alight in front of her. “She says her prayers right through the mud wrestling,” says Eleanor. The woman never watches her television, and she almost never says anything to Eleanor, unless Eleanor tries to turn it off. Then the woman says, “Oh, please, please, I want to watch this.” Eleanor now has a method. She makes several trips to the bathroom, and each time she passes the television, she turns the volume down a little. The volume is all the way down now. The TV is on but soundless, and her roommate doesn’t seem to notice.

  Looking toward her roommate, Eleanor sees Zita go pacing past the open doorway. “I wonder if Zita dreams,” Eleanor says. “I wonder why she paces like that. I think she’s trying to get away from something. There’s a lot of loneliness here. I wonder if loneliness has something to do with Alzheimer’s. Loneliness in disguise.” Or maybe, Eleanor thinks, it isn’t a matter of disguise but of depiction, Zita depicting the loneliness that hangs in every corner of this place.

  That is the most discouraging fact of this life to Eleanor—not all the illnesses in the building or that she has to live in a little corner of a little room, but the separateness of all these lives around her. This community hardly deserves the name. It takes too great an effort of will and too much energy for most people here to say, “All right, this is part of my life, too. I have to live in these moments.” Too many people have too many overwhelming problems of their own and can’t or won’t get out of them. The physical distances inside are vast, given the difficulty many have in crossing them, just to visit someone in another room. Too many people around Eleanor seem to be giving up. Eleanor has tried. God knows, she’s tried. She thinks again about her cabaret. How she got a little adrenaline flowing in some of her fellow residents. But it didn’t last. She’ll put on another play in a month or so, but she knows that she’ll spend most of summer sitting on her pretend porch, watching the world pass by out there on Route 9.

  Eleanor sits beside her bed in her fine old Windsor chair and gazes out her window. “It isn’t fun. Nothing I do is fun. I don’t suppose you’re supposed to have fun, but we don’t laugh the way we used to. To get out of this whole environment. I wish I could.” In the dusk, Eleanor’s window has begun to catch the reflection of her roommate’s silenced TV and her roommate’s stocky figure. Eleanor looks out through the watery image of her roommate—knitting and chewing behind her, knitting and chewing. Through her window Eleanor can see the windows of the north wing, rectangles of glass within brick walls. She looks at Lou and Joe’s window across the way. She imagines they are having a wonderful conversation. She remembers other rooms, the salons of Amherst. She can almost hear the witty talk in them. “I may leave,” she says. She can see the back of Lou’s head behind the glass, his white hair glowing in the dusk.

  Lou and Joe

  1


  Joe had made himself quite fit, fitter perhaps than ever before in all the years since his stroke. He rode the exercise bike five and a half miles, then six miles, then seven. After riding the seven, Joe declared, “I could have ridden ten.” He mounted the scale and found he’d lost two pounds. “I think I’ll have ice cream tonight.”

  But then arthritis flared up in his bad arm, and it no sooner left there than it turned up in his good knee. “Where does it hurt, Joe?” asked Lou, lifting his cane as if to smack Joe’s knee, and Joe laughed. But walking toward the bathroom, Joe winced, and he muttered, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” For a while, he couldn’t even manage M&M’s, let alone the bike. Coming downstairs to dinner, he saw on the activities bulletin board a notice for Catholic services at which the Sacrament of the Sick would be administered. “Christ, I should go in there.” Then Lou caught a cold and had just recovered from it when Joe, often in bed now with his aching leg, began suffering deep, long coughing fits, which Lou, on the sly, reported to the staff. A chest x-ray was ordered. “I got walking pneumonia?” Joe said that evening. “That’s what the girl told me. Cripes sake, I haven’t got walking pneumonia. Because I have a good appetite.”

  The x-ray confirmed the fact, however. Joe’s doctor prescribed antibiotics and oxygen.

  Joe’s face flushed, he thundered curses, and his blood pressure, measured afterward, had shot up when one of the nurses first tried to loop the thin blue catheter over Joe’s ears and across his upper lip. Joe lay on his bed with the outlet of the tube stuck in his nostrils, the tube snaking across his cheeks and pillow to the oxygen concentrator that stood beside his bed. It looked as though he was attached to an industrial vacuum cleaner. He looked trussed up and, at times, small and forlorn, but then again, nothing dwarfs a person like medical machinery.