by Bob Tarte
“Good!” I told her, then hastily recapped the story for Linda. “So did that do the trick?”
“After looking me right in the eye and saying, ‘I have a broken elbow, and I am in the hospital,’ she proceeded to ask if we had sold the raffle tickets, and could we go home?”
LINDA AND I caught up with Joan, Bett, and my mom at an assisted-care facility with the vaguely biblical, remotely Mediterranean name of Testament Terrace. Using telephone skills that rivaled Linda’s, Bett had discovered via long distance from Fort Wayne that the Terrace made a few apartments available on a short-term basis for respite care. Acting with her usual superhuman efficiency, she had breezed into town from Indiana and immediately installed our mom in a spacious three-room unit with walk-in closet and a bathroom the size of a small Aegean isle.
“Why do I have to stay here?” Mom asked as we sat sipping tea in front of her picture window.
“Remember how you’ve been saying you wonder if you’d like living in an apartment? Well, this gives you the opportunity to find out,” Bett said.
“Why can’t I just go home?”
“Because of your arm.”
“What’s wrong with my arm?”
“You broke your elbow.”
“I can still take care of myself.”
Joan and I exchanged the look. During the week that she had stayed with Mom, Joan had told me, Mom had tried to walk downstairs one morning with her left arm immobilized in a cast, her right hand clutching a cup of coffee, and her entire body wobbling with every step she took, like a bowling pin that had just been clipped by the ball. “I made her sit and go down the stairs the rest of the way on her butt,” Joan had said.
“You might like some of the other ladies who live here,” Linda suggested as she stood up to peer at a squirrel in the courtyard. The rest of us had gotten used to her hopping to her feet at frequent intervals due to her sore back, but Mom shot her a quizzical glance.
“What other ladies?” she wondered as Linda headed into the kitchen to heat her odorless gel pack in the microwave.
“The ladies who live on either side of your apartment,” said Bett. “You met Bernice.”
“What happened to Ted and Lesley?”
“Ted and Lesley are in their house, and you’re in Testament Terrace. Did you want them to move into an apartment here, too?” she teased, coaxing a grin from Mom.
Over the last few months, my mother’s sense of place had begun disintegrating. The previous April, Bett and I had taken Mom on a trip to Albuquerque, since she had mentioned missing the vacations she used to go on with my dad. One afternoon as we had returned from gawking at petroglyphs and headed back toward our hotel, Bett had pointed out the rosy shadows dappling the Sandia Mountains in the distance. This had prompted a surprising comment from Mom: “Fort Wayne sure has a lot to offer.”
“Bob and Joan will take you to your physical therapy sessions,” Bett continued. “Once your elbow is back to normal, you can go home. Unless you decide they pamper you so much here, you don’t want to leave.”
Bett enjoyed an amazing rapport with Mom. She could easily slide across suggestions that would have met with stony silence had Joan or I delivered them. I doubted that we could have convinced her to try out an assisted-living situation at all. While Mom wasn’t exactly thrilled about her separation from home, Bett had engineered events to make it seem as if moving to Testament Terrace had been her decision as much as Bett’s. But beyond Mom’s mere disgruntlement over her new accommodations lurked something far more serious. The shock of falling and breaking her elbow, along with the resulting disorientation of moving to unfamiliar quarters, had deepened the hold of the Alzheimer’s disease. It wasn’t just that her memory had slipped. The present moment retreated from her, too.
“What time is it?” she asked Bett.
“What does the clock say?”
“What clock?”
“The clock on the wall.”
“What wall?” she asked without sarcasm or irony. Bett pointed. “Oh, that wall.”
Changing the subject, Bett joked about Mom’s neighbor Bernice, who enjoyed playing cribbage. “I’d better warn her that there’s a cardsharp on the premises,” Bett joked, informing the rest of us, “Mom beat me at three games of cribbage in a row last night.”
As we were chuckling over this, a confused expression crossed Mom’s face. “I know this is an awful thing to ask,” she said. “But did Dad die?”
WHEN I CAME HOME from work, I stuck my head inside the mailbox, grabbed the mail between my jaws, and raced inside the house on all fours. Or at least the end result was the same as I plopped down on the couch with a fistful of envelopes, which I sorted into four piles: Bob’s mail, Linda’s mail, junk mail, and mail from worthy causes that might contain self-adhesive return-address stickers that could find their way into the top drawer of my dresser.
Among the mail for me was an envelope from Eileen Kucek, betrayed by a return-address sticker from a charity she had probably never contributed to. My intentions were always good regarding the stickers in my dresser drawer, even if I hadn’t yet gotten around to making a donation to the Save the Dodo Fund. But I still had plenty of time. I carefully worked my finger underneath the envelope flap and with a single deft movement managed to tear the entire envelope in half while preserving the integrity of the letter. It took some work to decipher the florid handwriting, which deviated significantly from the Palmer method penmanship we had learned at Blessed Sacrament Elementary School.
“I cannot continue the friendship due to your inhumane mistreatment of companion animals,” Eileen wrote on creamy yellow notepaper with a pink-and-violet floral border. “Your negligent abuse of my two geese while you were on vacation was unconscionable. I would prosecute you if I could. I don’t know what you think you’re doing. It’s obvious you learned nothing about God’s creatures from your Catholic education.”
I certainly couldn’t argue with that last statement, since concern for ducks, geese, hens, parrots, doves, cats, rabbits, European starlings, and Baltimore orioles had never breached the Baltimore catechism of my youth. Nevertheless, the letter enraged me, even though it spelled the end of the annoyance named Eileen. When a person who hadn’t taken leave of his or senses criticized me on some trumped-up charge—say, that I was meek and cowardly—at least I could argue my position if I wanted to, though I didn’t want to, because arguing made me cry. Being criticized by Eileen was an entirely different story. That woman had gone so far around the bend she could see her own rear end ahead of her, and disputing her surreal outlook would be a waste of breath.
Part impressionable sponge, part protean masochistic stick, I stuck to the couch, reading her letter over and over again, reluctant to resist her baseless accusations. The inevitable ring of the telephone interrupted my wallow in pain.
“Hi, it’s me,” Mom told me. “I’ve done a stupid thing.”
“What’s that?” I croaked.
“I went to the hospital guild luncheon, and another of the gals must have driven. I’m here at the restaurant without my car, and I need a ride back home.”
“You’re not at the restaurant,” I said. “Remember? You’re staying at Testament Terrace until your elbow gets better.”
“Oh, that’s right,” she said. “No wonder it looks like somebody’s apartment.”
“It’s just for a few weeks,” I told her. “You’ll be back in your house in no time.”
“Thanks, honey,” she said. “You always make me feel better.”
Within the hour, the phone rang again. “Bob, I’m downtown in Dad’s office, and I need a ride home.” I explained the situation to her one more time and braced myself for the calls still to come that day. It could be worse, I told myself. She could be blaming me for the loss of her electric trimmer or the package of something that somebody left for her somewhere. But from the severity of her confusion, it was beginning to look as if Mom’s stay at the assisted-living facility might turn ou
t to be more permanent than any of us had intended.
WALTER’S LUMBERING SPIRIT trapped us. Each time one of our rabbits had died over the years, I had tried to view the situation as an opportunity for phasing out of keeping these charming but short-lived home-demolition experts. The surviving rabbit of the pair always had another idea, though. Rudy’s apparent ambivalence toward Walter during their months together—in separate cages, of course—plus his vivid independent spark made me hope that he wouldn’t suffer from the loss of his big buddy. But Rudy showed signs of neediness right away. Linda got little peace on her faux-sheepskin rug whenever the little brown bunny roamed loose. He would butt her with his head, scuff her legs with his forepaws, and treat her supine body as a steeplechase jump—on one occasion scratching her cheek with his claws in the course of a low-altitude leap—all in an uncharacteristic quest for attention.
Not simply to placate Rudy but also to preserve her own well-being, Linda decided that we needed to find Rudy a companion. This time she made up her mind to choose a rabbit that could actually be with Rudy in the same room at the same time without a wire barrier between them.
“Impossible,” I insisted.
“Other people have rabbits that get along.”
“Other people lead normal lives.”
“We’ll take Rudy with us and let him pick out a friend.”
Instead of buying a rabbit from a breeder, Linda wanted us to adopt a homeless bunny, so she phoned our wildlife rehabber friend Marge Chedrick, who said, “You’re not interested in a duck that will play catch, are you?”
“A duck that plays catch?”
“She’s a spoiled white Pekin that had been attacked by a dog. While she was at Dr. Hedley’s office after her surgery, the staff taught her to roll a ball back that they rolled to her. But she isn’t very good with other ducks.” Marge told Linda that she didn’t have any orphan domesticated rabbits at the moment, because she had just given a batch to her helper, Chris. “But she’d be happy to see one of them get a good home.”
Chris’s setup was about as good as it got for a bunny. Inside her spotless house a huge shaggy Angora rabbit had wrapped the young woman and her diesel mechanic husband around her little toe. In the backyard, a group of rabbits coexisted harmoniously in a heated shed with an attached exercise pen.
“I want him,” said Chris, when she laid eyes on Rudy. “Are you sure he isn’t a wild rabbit?”
“He’s part Netherland Dwarf, part Polish,” Linda told her.
“Polish people are pretty wild,” I commented, and my comment justifiably hung in the breeze.
In order to find a suitable pal for Rudy, Linda first placed him inside the rabbit shed. Within seconds, a grey-and-white female twice his size vigorously chased him out to the pen, where a second bunny took up the pursuit and drove him back inside to face the intolerant female again. After the pair of rabbits had sent him scurrying in and out of the shed a few hundred times, Chris managed to grab him and return him to Linda’s arms.
“Figures,” I said.
“These are pretty territorial,” Chris told us. “I’ve got a couple of newcomers in that hutch over there. He may do better with one of them.”
Linda picked out a large, silly-looking New Zealand White that she described as resembling “the Cadbury rabbit,” after a television commercial for chocolate eggs that ran around Easter. She set the bunny on the trampoline that dominated the backyard, scooped up Rudy, and placed him next to the New Zealand female.
“Who’s going to spot for them?” I asked nobody in particular.
The two rabbits began nuzzling and continued to nuzzle in their carrier throughout the ride back to our house. They were lovey-dovey best buddies until Linda turned them loose in our dining room. Taking her cue from the rabbit in Chris’s shed, the newly named Frieda hectored Rudy beneath the table, harassed him under the bird cages, and goaded him into leaping over the plywood board barrier and skedaddling into a far corner of the living room.
“Here we go again,” I said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Chris told Linda over the phone. “She’ll settle down once she’s comfortable in your house.”
Comfortable wasn’t the word. Frieda was elated. True to Chris’s prediction, within a day she had made up with Rudy, the better to direct her energy toward exploring every nook and cranny of the downstairs. Having spent her first months of existence inside a hutch, Frieda luxuriated in the vast open prairie of our living room. Her blobby method of uncontrolled bursts of high-speed hopping promised to surpass Walter in the ridiculousness department. And in contrast to our late, great Checker Giant, she showed instant affection for her people.
On Frieda’s second evening with us, I was sitting on the floor with Linda watching, quite appropriately, Monster House on TV, when Frieda galloped out from behind the recliner, crashed into my leg at full throttle, and instantly stretched out on the rug as if a lie-down had been her intention all along. When I reached out to pet her, she lovingly licked my hand.
“Did we get a dog by mistake?” I asked Linda.
Petting our new bunny and watching her romp and play with Rudy delighted me so much, I kept an ear cocked toward the phone, certain that a call from my mom or a verbal footnote from Eileen would spoil the idyll. But any invasions had apparently been postponed until another day.
CHAPTER 13
Aquarium
I should have known that something bad was coming when the K-A-U-F-M-A-N coincidence struck. If that didn’t do it, then the two sightings of a ghost cat in the basement should have tipped me off.
The miserable post-Thanksgiving wintry weather had arrived, and the grey icicle of another birthday hung over my head. After what we’d been through the past twelve months with my mom—along with the long weeks tending Walter—adding another candle to my cake didn’t seem like much of an achievement. In a more celebratory mood, Linda asked if I wanted any particular book as a birthday present.
“Another bird field guide wouldn’t hurt,” I answered, since I owned less than a dozen. I lived in hopes that the more field guides I accumulated, the greater would be my chances of merely glancing out the window and spotting a rarity like an ivory-billed woodpecker. “There’s a series of books called Kaufman Focus Guides,” I told her, referring to a memo to myself that I’d written on a sticky-note before folding it and tucking it inside my wallet. Unwrapping the gluey wedge and interpreting the smeared pencil scrawls tested my manual dexterity and ocular perspicacity. “The title is Birds of North America, which isn’t a lot of help.” A snappier name, such as, Enslaved by Birds, would have made the book easier to remember. “Just remember the name Kaufman Focus Guides.”
Bounding upstairs, I returned with another field guide. “Here’s Butterflies of North America. It’s one of the Kaufman Focus Guides,” I told her. “The book I want will look a lot like this, but it’s a field guide to birds, and the author’s name is Kenn Kaufman.”
“Let me write that name down.”
“Kenn—with two n’s—Kaufman. And don’t use a sticky-note,” I suggested.
When the magical natal day finally rolled around and threatened to flatten me, I stopped moaning over the toll of years long enough to open a few packages. After thanking Linda for three pairs of socks and a pound of Kenyan coffee, I tore apart the balloon-themed wrapping paper to reveal a coffee-table tome entitled Lives of North American Birds by Kenn Kaufman, in place of the tote-friendly field guide. “Oh, this looks nice,” I remarked with a lack of enthusiasm.
“Isn’t that the book you wanted? I asked the little guy at the bookstore for a bird book by Kenn Kaufman, and this is what he gave me.”
I muttered something unintelligible then assured her that it would be fine.
As an added birthday perk, Linda announced she was treating me to the $4.99 buffet at the Peking Happiness restaurant in Ionia. I drove while Linda lay in the back seat with her pillow and gel pack. As I followed a dump truck hauling a load of gravel u
p and down the winding, hilly two-lane road and ran the wipers to keep the windshield more or less free of pebbles, I sunk into a deeper than usual mire of self-pity. I only asked for one present, I whined to myself. You’d think she could have gotten it right.
At the restaurant, as I picked at my dill-pickle sushi roll, Linda went back to the buffet to heap another plate with such Cantonese delights as squash, corn on the cob, and macaroni and cheese. I was silently lamenting the demise of the Weigh and Pay, which had gone bust within a month of my meal with Bill Holm the previous winter, when a man at the table directly behind Linda’s empty chair caught my attention.
“It’s Kaufman,” he told the frowning boy sitting next to him. “Kaufman, spelled K-A-U-F-M-A-N.”
I had no idea what the two were talking about. I suspected that Bobo the cosmic clown had decided to make me feel foolish about sulking over a birthday gift from Linda.
WHISKERS CURLED UP on the basement rug, then flopped around as I petted him. The shyer cat named Baby watched the scene with skepticism before finally deciding that her back required stroking, too. The two cats belonged to Linda’s housecleaning client, Nancy Ann, a strong-willed young woman with cerebral palsy. Upon moving from a relative’s house to a group home for the disabled, she had discovered that she needed to petition a board of directors to allow her cats to stay with her. In the meantime, the pair had nowhere to go, and we’d ended up boarding them.
Normally we wouldn’t confine cats to our basement. But with a room full of birds just upstairs plus a trio of cat-intolerant cats of our own, we didn’t have a lot of choice. Happily, Whiskers and Baby loved it down there. While Whiskers hunted for the hordes of mice that streamed inside each day—we had installed a tiny service door for their convenience—Baby would spend hours stretched out on the windowsill regarding the barren winter wastes. Chickadees flitting around the leafless spirea bush hypnotized her with their activity, and as an added perk, indoor-outdoor explorer Agnes occasionally hissed her disapproval from the opposite side of the glass.
