This Is Running for Your Life

by Michelle Orange

  “Ohhh,” she says, a light, wobbly sound of agreement. Rita repaints her new favorite word every time, not with new colors but a whole new palette. She watches with interest as I hump my luggage through the door. “Hello.”

  Even more frail than I remember, Rita’s body is reduced to the joints beneath her black slacks and gray cotton top. Only the toes of her purple, embroidered velvet slippers touch the ground, a dainty effect that reminds me of the pride she was known to take in her appearance. Raised up tough and superthrifty in every other respect, Rita has no memory of ever washing her own hair; after her mother stopped doing it, she began a lifetime routine of weekly visits to the salon. French to her core, she ate and dressed simply but very, very well. An accomplished chef whose kitchen turned out well-distributed pots of soup and pans of muffins, her modest parcel of extra weight in later years was a constant source of resolve.

  I used to puzzle over her letters, typically a newsy log of minor complaints and small but potent comforts. She would spend a paragraph describing the baking and eating of a single pineapple-coconut muffin, split and topped with cut strawberries ($1.47 a pound at Price Chopper) and cream whipped by hand, then savored with a cup of peppermint tea as rain sluiced down her balcony doors after her return from a matinee. Though I was often warmed by these private contentments, the greener, more impatient part of me—the part that was more confused all the time about how to please myself—would think, Why is she telling me this?

  Hailing the arrival of Vidalia onions from the south in a 2004 letter, she laid out her dinner plans—calf’s liver with piles of fried Vidalias and finger slices of green pepper. “It doesn’t take much to please me these days,” she wrote. “And I take great pleasure in all the good produce we are able to get from all over in the winter.” How strange that these kitchen dispatches should read as almost radical to me now.

  Today her uneaten lunch is draped with a napkin on the kitchen table. Days of upright dozing in the copper-colored chair have pressed her white-blond hair into a tufted corona. The rain is marine, soaping the windows in tidal, car-washing whorls. I first saw her like this in early 2007, during a trip to London to help clean out her apartment. I remember her drifting through the rooms, already twenty pounds lighter in her cotton nightie, as we apportioned her life’s belongings. I can see Rita hovering in the kitchen doorway as my mother succumbed to the desperate mood and began shouting about uneaten pizza in the fridge, a misunderstanding that left us all spent. Beyond the shock and heartbreak of that day, what I have felt in the face of my grandmother’s suffering is humility. Only a fearsome and disarming force could account for that kind of transformation, and perhaps as often as I begged it to leave her be, I prayed that it would spare me on its way.

  I fill the candy dish and place it by her with a fresh glass of water. Rita leans over, ever cordial, and lifts a single chocolate-covered raisin to her mouth. I take a seat across from her, on the hard-cushioned couch she’d had re-covered in royal-purple twill a few years back, and watch her chew. We haven’t really been alone since her move to Halifax. My letters are neatly filed on a nearby shelf, their envelope tops lightly frayed in the old style, back when correspondence was an art with its own set of tools. Her expression remains dazed but attentive, and I realize I had hoped for too much.

  I had told myself I’d be happy just talking about the movies and would settle for the weather. But the hope that Rita would relent—the belief that she could relent—lingered. Part of me still believed I could make her feel the play of time working against us—that it would become unavoidable, and it was a kind of sin not to acknowledge it. It’s a weakness of mine, and not only with ailing ninety-five-year-olds.

  When I was twelve years old, while saying goodbye to my perfectly lively paternal grandmother under perfectly normal circumstances, I became certain, in a ghastly instant, that I would never see her again. The scene has slow-motion clarity: my dad behind the wheel, Margaret riding shotgun, and me in the back. She was heading to the train station after my drop-off at school. I thought I might draw one last hug, but Margaret remained in her seat, twisting over her left shoulder as we idled in the staff parking lot. I never lost the toddler’s impulse to plank out with grief when a loved one leaves the room, or the city; like most of us I just learned to hide it better. But the awful twinge bracketing the bright, brow-lifting smile and Goodbye, dear she gave me—the shutter release of memory quietly engaging—was different. Six weeks later, Margaret succumbed to the gallbladder cancer that was at its steady work that morning, and throughout the days she had spent babysitting my brother and me.

  That week I had taken to recording her secretly, with the Dictaphone I had requested, after coveting the one in my mother’s briefcase, as a Christmas present. It felt a little sordid, but I couldn’t seem to stop. During our early breakfasts, before my brother woke up, I would slip it out of my housecoat pocket—one always dressed for toast with Margaret—under the kitchen table, easing down the record button as she launched into one of her soothingly discursive stories. I didn’t mention these recordings until after she had died, when everyone was too distracted to think much of it.

  From then on, interrogating parting moments for signs of the inevitable became a kind of personal safety issue, like buckling up or checking the stove before you leave the house. I was always turning back to rinse a last glimpse of a loved (or, frankly, barely liked) one in developing fluid—just in case. I wanted to be on top of every story, a step ahead, and fancied I had the gift. I have a digital voice recorder now, my job requires it, and I brought it with me to Halifax.

  * * *

  Life at Melville is meal oriented. Once a week, a sheet of printed foolscap is slipped under each resident’s door: seven days, seven dinners, five components (appetizer, entrée, starch, vegetable, dessert) per dinner, at least three options per component. A morning could be parceled to settling the forthcoming week’s menu. The idea that we revert to a childlike state in old age feels condescending, too simple to be human. Illness and infirmity are unwilled dependencies, after all, and even infants, I reminded my mother when she characterized Rita’s latest decline as a regression, will cry when their diaper is full.

  Yet structure—particularly feeding structure—takes on a devotional strictness in the elderly that most plainly suggests the cherished routines of childhood. If life is bookended at all, it may be by the assertions of the body, and the demands that we push into dormancy as adults, believing they can be mastered, subjugated, or separated from a nimble, developed psychology. Even in depression, even when she refused much of what was on her plate, mealtime called to something basic in Rita. A two-inch stack of menus from weeks past sits on her ottoman. Unwilling to throw them out, she turns to the pile often, as if for comfort. That page of foolscap is the last evidence of preference or appetite in Rita’s life; her visitors tend to examine it like an illuminated text. I was to join her that night in the dining room, a culinary battleground I had visited before. If I had any remaining innocence I left it there: it’s been fifteen months since my last Melville meal, and the words vegetable medley still make me flinch.

  Rita’s stunned but pleasant look has been turned my way for fifteen minutes when she asks about my flight. I make it brief; it seems perverse to bring news of worldly monotonies into that room. This is my first mistake. A disappointed flicker in her expression confirms that a solid air-travel epic calls to that same something basic in even the semicatatonic among us. I think it’s because these stories reinforce a common and yet still mildly exotic experience, making folklore of a particularly Western concern: this is what happens when you relinquish control.

  During our vigil at the gate, my standby comrade had turned to me as soon as his phone call ended and repeated, in perfected narrative form, what I had just heard. This is standard introductory behavior in airports, and elsewhere, should the topic arise. Language is no barrier: the story of stranded passengers, refused vouchers, and fat-ass seatmates will be
pantomimed, if it must be. Witnesses to these oaths repair to a boredom-proofed place inside themselves, politely waiting out each unexpurgated detail, then seizing the moment to reciprocate with a butt-numbing misadventure of their own.

  So I go back to the beginning and give it to Rita in chapters, with character arcs and a strong moral finish. Her thin, chugging coughs signal appreciation along the way. Then the quiet returns. It’s the dead air I find toughest, despite being a longtime proponent and regular practitioner of comfortable silences. Rita, on the other hand, was the most Italian French Canadian I had ever known: for her silence was death. If something about her smoke-bombing monologues was disconcerting, beyond the lack of interest in or mercy for the person trapped in their blast radius, it was the sense that they formed an offensive line against some unseen pursuant. To see Rita mute was like looking at a woman just robbed and still standing in the street, stripped of everything that identified her as an actor in the world.

  My last trip to Halifax was a heartbreaker, a winter voyage marked by every available impediment, yielding only a sense of its own uselessness. Rita’s surpassing indifference had been painful—usually she rallied a little—but the larger frustration was more abstract. Her company did have a new, childlike quality, but she was not the source of it. The point at which the elderly and the infirm slip from protagonists in their own story to players—or even pawns—in the stories of others had arrived. There but not there, she was cognizant but more withdrawn than ever. It seemed we had only our bodies and their proximity to offer, yet I felt myself malignant somehow, as though every syllable of the talk that went on without her endorsed her living disappearance. My mother had come to think of the trips as support for my aunt—there was no return on any other kind of investment—and suggested I do the same. But who was this phantom sitting among us as we chattered with forcible gaiety, supporting each other until our gums ached?

  I was defeated by that trip. Though I kept up the occasional letter and phone call, when the next year’s visit came around, I passed.

  With two and a half hours to go to dinner service—garden salad, roasted chicken with rice and broccoli, and lemon meringue pie—I begin recording. After twenty minutes of silence and the production of a sour feeling—the deceit of experiencing a personal moment with one eye on posterity—I press stop. The rain is a CGI sea creature thrashing against the apartment’s picture windows. I owe the rain money and slept with its best friend. The wind, a wingman, judders the glass in its frame. There’s an electric-blue bunny in my lap, a stuffed animal mistaken for an infant by the nurse who sweeps in with the afternoon’s dosage of I don’t know what.

  Shortly before the nurse’s appearance Rita had made the effortful series of facial expressions that signal she is about to speak. We had been contemplating each other openly for a stretched-out moment. “You look like the Madonna, sitting there,” she said.

  * * *

  A few weeks into my first semester at NYU, in the fall of 2003, a letter arrived with a trio of ticket stubs enclosed. Rita had been saving them from her weekly matinees and filling each one out with longhand impressions of the according film. They ranged from a few salient words to a sentence or three, with circling, capitalization, and underlines used for emphasis, a schema that took on a precise and—to me—thrilling grammar over what turned out to be a two-and-a-half-year project.

  The saving of ticket stubs like memory chips in an external drive I understood and endorsed—as a teenager, I began tucking every one of mine into a wooden box I had painted for that purpose—but the reviews struck me as inspired. I saved her stubs together with mine and asked for more. Soon I was receiving regular shipments, telegraphic bulletins from the Rainbow Cinemas—the only functioning business left in London’s failing downtown Galleria—where she could catch a show for $2.50 just as she pleased. Two-fifty is what I remember movies costing when I first ventured to the same Galleria as a kid. She didn’t mind going alone anymore. When she mentioned a companion on the stub, it was usually to note how gravely the dead weight or drippy attitude next door had compromised her viewing experience.

  That fall I watched films all day as part of an academic regimen, with no tickets to show for them. At night I went to the movies with a man I was seeing, and indeed it was mostly him I saw. My moviegoing equilibrium was off, and the ticket stubs were a reminder of the basic mechanism of pleasure and response—movies as they are ideally watched.

  The format did not confine Rita’s multitudes. Her take on Brokeback Mountain—“Excellent portrayal of Homosexuality in the 60’s. Now let the Gays + L. live in peace (over) + marry each other + not spoil other lives. Great scenery”—was the first I knew of her thoughts on the subject. She saw everything—more than me, in those days—and as often as she applauded stories of gay liberation (A Touch of Pink: “Amusing. My companion didn’t laugh”), the afternoon’s selection ran afoul of her conservative streak. “Didn’t know they were Divorce Lawyers + I am not comfortable with that Subject,” she wrote about Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore on the ticket stub for Laws of Attraction. “Worth $3 though.” Just six months earlier, however, in November 2003, she had been delighted by Intolerable Cruelty, the Coen brothers farce: “Fun picture about Divorce + Pre-Nuptual Agreements. Good.” (The $2.50 ticket price is circled.) She was similarly ambivalent about representations of violence and shady behavior. Though she was plain about the former on her Million Dollar Baby ticket stub (“Good Movie. I don’t like Boxing or any Violence”), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang found her in a more suggestible mood (“Black Comedy—hard for a 90 yr old to follow but interesting. I liked it”).

  Rita on Once Upon a Time in Mexico: “Love Johnny Depp. 1/3 Good, 2/3 Guns Guns Guns.” She added my favorite aside of the bunch in the left corner of the stub: “?Comedy?” She radiated contempt for Match Point, which she found “Dreadful. Bad Person in this Woody Allen Movie—I left before the ending. British,” and seemed wearied by Closer, “A tale of unfaithfulness (Don’t go!) + hurting each other.”

  But here she is on The Woodsman, a film I found bleak to the point of being unbearable: “Excellent. Study of Pedophilia.” And then at the bottom: “In good taste.” Sometimes sex is all in good fun: “Made a special trip alone to see this,” she wrote on her Sideways stub, “Hilarious sex scenes”; “Good Research,” she wrote about Kinsey, “Enjoyed it!”; “Plenty of sex,” she advised, writing about The Door in the Floor. And sometimes, as with an ill-fated trip to Where the Truth Lies on a restless afternoon, it’s horrifying: “I was appalled at the (over) amount of raw SEX in the movie, every which way—ménage à trois—etc—everybody left in a hurry when it was over. Don’t go.”

  I didn’t go. But I did wonder how the movies help us know one another. We didn’t talk much about them in person (in person there were always matinees to see), and she seemed more prepared to send the ticket stubs than discuss them. I was aware that a minor treasure was forming, one whose value would only accrue with time. During my second year at NYU I was accepted into a film-criticism seminar with Jim Hoberman, then the presiding eminence at The Village Voice. He challenged us to bring imagination, critical fortitude, and good writing into a fairly strict format. I made copies of a Rita Boyle ticket-stub collage one week and passed them out in class.

  They were a marvel of critical economy to me then. As I lay them out now—seventy-nine in all, the last one received in April 2006—I see a puzzle made of puzzles. In trying to unlock it I have arranged and rearranged them according to chronology, enjoyment level, genre. I saw many of the films alongside her; some, such as My Summer of Love (“No one told me it was about two girls pushing the envelope—experimenting (over) drinking etc. I think you would enjoy it”), I still haven’t seen. I wonder if she thought of me while she watched Garden State (“Good re: 30 year olds”) and try to accept that she probably did. Movies are where the less overtly emotional among us spend a fair amount of time trying to figure other people out, and it’s not mine to say what
ever conclusions she came to about me vis à vis Zach Braff are wrong. I contemplate the times she cried watching a film I found banal (House of Sand and Fog), her knowing enthusiasm for unmitigated fluff (Under the Tuscan Sun), her openness to the “weird but clever” (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the movies that slid through her mind pleasantly but without making a single impression (Prime), the memories stirred by stories involving what she called “my era,” like Ray (“Best Picture of 2004 for me,” she wrote, and I smile now at the authority and humility combined in those last two words, the mark of a natural critic), Vera Drake, and Good Night, and Good Luck. The shrugging off she gives to Hollywood blockbusters is hard for someone who watches them for a living to resist: The Longest Yard? “The longest football game—boring.” Spider-Man 2 had a good story line but a “Weird Opponent. Saw it by mistake but glad I did.” Though she enjoyed the special effects in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, it was “Too long. Who was the Dozed off for 2 seconds.” And the behemoth Lord of the Rings elicited her shortest shrift: “1 hour too long.” Ninety-year-olds have even less time to waste on computer-bay bombast than the rest of us.

  The ticket that keeps filtering to the top is for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which she found terrifically whimsical, another winner for her beloved “J. Depp.” Beyond testifying to that love (which surmounted any sin, by the way, including The Libertine), the tickets are most simply and consistently a record of hours spent and things felt. Together they form an impenetrable mosaic of life lived in real time; individually their concision forms a portal onto the figure of a woman alone in the dark, gazing up at the big screen’s moving bodies with their illuminated skin, communing with a story to create something separate and new. An afterthought floats at the bottom of the ticket: “Wish I had a 7 yr old along.”