by Bill Dodds
The bad part about having my birthday the same day as Great-grandpa’s was that I never got it to myself. The good part was a lot of relatives were usually around on that day and they felt like they had to give me at least a little something.
For the past couple of years it had been money. Nobody gave me a lot of money but a lot of people gave me a little money so it was okay.
That’s more than I can say for Fair Brook. It was a one-story brick building that had hallways spreading out every which way. Walking around inside it felt a lot like being swallowed by a spider.
“Hold your breath,” Robert whispered to me and he took a couple of deep breaths and headed for the main door. It was supposed to be a joke. Fair Brook didn’t smell really great inside.
We all had stuff to carry and we all knew where to go, inside the main reception area and down the hall and to the right. That was where the sitting room was. It was like a big recreation room. We knew that much because we had been coming here every Christmas and birthday for as far back as I could remember.
I mean every Christmas and my birthdays.
Probably about one hundred fifty people live at Fair Brook. Most of them live in a room with one other person and all of them are either so sick or so old they can’t take care of themselves too well.
“WHO’S THIS PRETTY GIRL?”
We were just in the front door when an old lady started yelling. We knew she was talking to Mom.
“HELLO, MISS CRENSHAW,” Mom yelled back and went over to her. The lady was slumped in a wheelchair over by one wall. She liked to sit by the front door and keep track of who came and who went. I don’t think she was as old as Great-grandpa but she was pretty old. She had been there a long time.
“WHO’S THIS PRETTY GIRL?” she asked again.
“MARY FARRELL,” Mom answered. “I’M CHARLES FARRELL’S GRANDDAUGHTER-IN-LAW.”
I used to think Miss Crenshaw was mad at us. I mean, she was always yelling. Mom explained to me that she just didn’t hear well and so she thought she was talking normally.
She wasn’t.
“MR. FARRELL’S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW?” Miss Crenshaw asked and Dad laughed softly.
“GRANDDAUGHTER-IN-LAW,” he said and knelt down on one knee in front of her so they were eye-to-eye. “IT’S MR. FARRELL’S BIRTHDAY,” he said. “HE TURNS ONE HUNDRED TODAY.”
“HE’S OLD,” she said and laughed at her own joke. Dad laughed, too.
“YOU COME DOWN A LITTLE LATER TO THE SITTING ROOM FOR HIS PARTY,” Dad said. “WE WOULD LOVE TO HAVE YOU.”
“HE’S OLDER THAN I AM,” she shouted, “AND I’M OLDER THAN DIRT.”
“No!” Robert muttered, pretending to sound shocked. “You don’t look a day over a thousand.”
“Yes, she does,” I muttered back and she looked up right at me. I was sure she couldn’t hear me but she looked right up at me and I felt as if I had to say something.
“Hello,” I said.
“WHAT?”
“HELLO.”
“HELLO.” She gave me a little wave and her bathrobe fell open. I could see she was wearing a hospital gown underneath. She was all skin and bones. All wrinkles and bones. Her hair was so thin she was almost bald. She had on pink knee-high socks.
“WE HAVE TO GO, MISS CRENSHAW,” Mom said. “I’LL SEND ONE OF THE BOYS DOWN A LITTLE LATER TO GET YOU WHEN THE PARTY STARTS.”
Gee, I wondered who was going to get stuck with that job.
Then we started out again and I tried not to look in people’s rooms as we walked by. A lot of people were in bed. They were in hospital beds, the kind that have a motor underneath and can have the head or the foot raised. Some of them were hooked up to medical equipment that gave them oxygen to help them breathe. Others had intravenous needles and lines in their arms to give them medicine. And some had other stuff attached up through their private parts so if they had pee they just peed and it came out a tube and collected in a plastic bag hanging on the side of the bed.
Some had all three.
There was a lot of stuff I didn’t want to see but I saw it anyway. There wasn’t a lot of privacy.
And there were a lot of TV sets going, blaring. There was one for each bed and a lot of people kept them on most of the time and a lot of people didn’t hear any better than Miss Crenshaw did.
Sometimes I would walk by a room and I would swear that the person in the bed by the door—he would be hooked up to all kinds of medical junk—I would swear he must be dead or at least almost dead and then he would open his eyes and give me a little smile.
It was all kind of spooky. It was more spooky when I was younger, when I was eleven.
That morning there were some old people and some sick people in the halls, too. Some were walking around with canes or crutches or aluminum walkers. Some were in wheelchairs. Some of the people couldn’t use their hands or arms to move their wheelchairs and so they were scooting along by pushing with their feet. They had to go backwards to get anywhere.
“Gridlock,” Robert said. “Traffic jam.”
Up ahead, where two hallways met, about a half dozen wheelchairs were stopped. Some people coming down one hallway had met some people coming down the other and now nobody was going anywhere. A nurse’s aid was trying to untangle the mess.
“RUSH HOUR,” Dad said and some of the people laughed. “EVERYONE’S TRYING TO GET TO THAT FARRELL BIRTHDAY PARTY.”
“We want to get there early so we get good seats,” one lady joked.
“We’re bringing our own seats,” a man kidded
I didn’t see how they could make jokes like that.
“You just eat a pickle?” another lady said to me. I wondered if she had some form of dementia, if she had lost her mind. Some people at Fair Brook had.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re standing there looking so solemn. Face all puckered up. Look like you just ate a sour pickle.”
“I . . . I . . .” I stammered.
“Watch out, Florence,” a man said. “Face like that he could be a funeral director.”
“Not yet!” the pickle lady squealed and a bunch of them laughed some more. I felt myself blush and I looked around quickly, trying to find some way to escape.
I didn’t have much luck. Standing in the doorway to the recreation room was my grandfather’s sister, Great-aunt Millicent. Great-aunt Millicent has the world’s biggest . . . bosom . . . and I’m sure she goes through a tube a lipstick in a single day. Great-aunt Millicent loves to give hugs and kisses.
“There’s my little birthday boy!” she sang out and spread her arms wide.
Chapter 4
Escaping the Hug of Death
It was kind of like being sucked into the valley of death. I knew I had no choice but to walk over there and get caught between those two huge mounds.
It’s hard to breathe in there.
“Come on, birthday boy,” she said and smiled, the bright red lipstick practically dripping off her lips.
I don’t know how old Great-aunt Millicent is. She’s the youngest sibling—that means brother or sister—in her family so she isn’t as old as my grandpa. Grandpa is in his mid-seventies and Great-aunt Millicent is at least ten years younger.
“Come on,” she said and I was sure everyone was watching me.
“You know he does sort of look like an undertaker,” one of the wheelchair ladies said.
“Looks like he needs one,” a man answered.
I walked around the traffic jam and stuck my right hand out. After all, I was twelve now. Wouldn’t a handshake be more appropriate? Of course it would.
“Happy birthday, little Mikey,” she said, rushing forward and ignoring my very adult gesture. I didn’t even have time to take a deep breath. I closed my eyes and felt her fat arms wrap around me. Like Santa Claus, Great-Aunt Millicent shakes like a bowl full of jelly.
“Why, just look how tall our Mikey has grown!” she said.
I opened my eyes just a slit and there was her
face, right in front of mine. We weren’t quite eyeball-to-eyeball but I wasn’t lost down in that other world either.
Why, just look how short Great-aunt Millicent has grown, I thought.
“You’re turning into quite the young man, aren’t you?” she said and I heard some of my cousins snickering behind her. I didn’t know what to say.
“When was the last time we saw you, Aunt Millicent?” Dad asked. “Must have been Christmas.”
“I didn’t make it out here at Christmas,” Great-aunt Millicent said. “I was on that Caribbean cruise.”
The image of her in a skimpy bathing suit flashed through my mind. I shuddered. She must have thought I was just returning her hug because she increased the intensity of the stranglehold she had on me.
“It has to be a year, Johnny,” she said to my dad. I figured if he could live with “Johnny,” I could put up with “Mikey.” “When Dad turned ninety-nine.”
It was hard to think of Great-grandpa as anyone’s “Dad.” It was hard to think of him as anything but a skinny lump under some white sheets. A skinny lump with a shrunken head that had no teeth.
“How much have you grown, Mikey?” she asked me. I shrugged. I tried to anyway. I couldn’t really move much. She let go of me and I inhaled deeply and almost got knocked over by Great-aunt Millicent’s perfume. She must use a quart of that a day, too. I don’t know the name of it but I bet it would clean old paint brushes.
“You used to be down here,” she said, kind of saluting herself right at her chest. “But now . . . now I can see right into those beautiful, sky-blue eyes.”
I suppose I’ve forgotten to mention I have beautiful, sky-blue eyes. That’s because most of the time, if I’m asked, I just say I have blue eyes. Great-aunt Millicent is always the one who mentions I have “beautiful, sky-blue eyes.”
“Just like Dad’s” is what she always says next.
“Just like Dad’s,” she said, to no one’s surprise.
I guess Great-grandpa and I are the only ones in the family with eyes that color. Big deal.
Other than that, I pretty much look like my brothers. Average height and weight for my age. Kind of sandy-brown, straight hair.
Speaking of hair, while Great-aunt Millicent was talking, I saw several curly mops of carrot-orange hair bobbing up and down behind her. Those were some of my cousins. Aunt Carol’s kids. Aunt Carol is my dad’s sister. She and Uncle Albert have five kids: three boys and two girls. The boys are the same ages as my brothers and me. One of the girls is the same age as my sister, Sarah.
Then they have one spare kid who’s only in first grade or so.
It’s always fun to be around them. If I could just make it past all the aunts and uncles, maybe this day was going to be all right after all. I was sure those guys were as glad to see us as we were to see them.
I have other cousins, too, of course. Tons of them. But the Jamesons—that’s their name—were our favorites. Mine anyway.
In fifth grade I had to make a “family tree”—show all my immediate relatives—for school and it looked more like a family forest. I know how to explain aunt, great-aunt and great-great-aunt but when it comes to cousins—first cousin, second cousin, third cousin, first cousin once removed, first cousin twice removed, second cousin once removed, and on and on and on—I give up.
My general rule of thumb is this: If you’re stuck seeing this person year after year whether you want to or not, it’s a relative.
“Least you didn’t almost throw up on Aunt Millicent this time, huh, Michael?” some man back in the sitting room said and everyone laughed. It was one of my uncles or great-uncles.
That was another thing about relatives. You make one little mistake about a million years ago and they never let you forget it. They never let anyone else forget it either.
I was in kindergarten—kindergarten!—when Great-aunt Millicent gave me one of her industrial-strength hugs and she squeezed a burp right out of me. Not a little “erp” burp. A big, old, raggedy “BRAP!” burp.
Now the story was slowly becoming I had thrown up on her.
I hate family stories. All these old people sitting around talking and talking and talking about what went on when they were kids, as if anyone remotely cared.
“And now when I think back on how we used to walk those two miles to school . . . .”
“And how Dad used to warn us about the Taylor boy whenever we were heading out to go swimming . . . .”
“Did you learn to drive with that old, gray Packard or did we have the blue Ford when you . . .?”
Yawn. Yawn. Yawn.
I knew if I could get by the semi-annual physical inspection (“Why you look just like . . . .”) and could make it through the “burp” kidding, and the long, boring stories about The Good Old Days, I would be home free. There would be a lot of good food, all you could eat and some of my relatives could eat a lot, and there would be envelopes for me with birthday cash. Hot diggedy dog.
So I laughed right along with my uncle or whoever had made the crack about my burping. Yes, siree, that was just about the funniest thing that ever happened in the world.
“Michael.”
I stopped laughing. That was a voice I didn’t hear directed at me very often but I recognized it immediately. It came from behind me. Everyone else stopped laughing, too.
I turned and there—on the other side of the wheelchair traffic pile-up—was Great-great-aunt Lauretta, Great-grandpa’s sister.
“He’s awake,” she said and no one had to ask who “he” was. “He wants to see you now.”
Chapter 5
Into Great-grandpa’s Room
Suddenly, it felt very warm in there. Those many, many relatives behind Great-aunt Millicent were so silent I thought I could almost hear the sweat popping out above my upper lip.
“Leave your jacket, honey,” Mom said, noticing.
“No!”
That was Great-great-aunt Lauretta. I looked over at her—down at her actually because she’s so bent over—and she sort of smiled self-consciously and said, “It’s such a pretty red one.”
That made no sense but, as far as I could tell, when you’re in your nineties, you didn’t have to make a lot of sense.
“It used to be mine. I outgrew it,” Robert said, as if that somehow mattered. It was just an ordinary nylon jacket. The kind with snaps instead of a zipper and a ribbed cloth collar and cuffs. Those were striped red and white. It was just a plain old baseball jacket.
Great-great-aunt Lauretta smiled at Robert. “It’s very nice,” she said. And then to me, “Come along now.”
A streak of lightning flashed and the thunder rumbled soon after it.
“Tell Dad we’ll be down to see him in just a bit,” my grandfather called out over Great-aunt Millicent’s shoulder. “Tell him we’re still trying to get all those birthday candles out of the boxes. Going to take us half the day just to light them all.”
Everyone laughed. Everyone except Great-great-aunt Lauretta and me.
She turned and started off and I followed, walking next to her.
“That’s a tremendous storm,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” I answered.
“How is school?”
“We’re on summer vacation now,” I said.
She nodded. “And you just finished the . . . which grade?”
“Sixth,” I said and she nodded again.
“Ready for a summer of fun and adventure?”
“I guess.”
“What?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
We walked down one hallway, back to the hub of the building and then headed down another. (Up one of the spider’s leg to its body and then down another.) I knew where we were headed. My family—my immediate family—came out here at least four times a year. Great-grandpa had had the same room the whole time.
He moved into Fair Brook when I was a little kid. I could vaguely remember him living in an apartment in a nearby town called Culv
er City. Two bedrooms. With Great-great-aunt Lauretta. Now she lived there alone.
We were passing people in the hall, old people, but I didn’t pay any attention to them. I kept wondering why Great-grandpa wanted to see me. On my other birthdays, Mom and Dad and David and Robert and Sarah and I came together to say hello if he couldn’t get out of bed.
