“Well, I don’t know. They connect it to something.”
“I know that. The question is, what do they connect it to?”
“I’m not a doctor. I don’t know,” says Mrs. Lowe.
Maybe there’s a song in here somewhere, thinks Carl, but . . . maybe not.
“Looks like she’d just get a patch.”
“Then she could get rid of the eye. You don’t see people with glass eyes under their patches.”
“Who can know?” says Mrs. Satterwhite. “I guess we’ll have to go look it up in the encyclopedia. That’s what they tell you to do in school. I remember doing a report on the presidents, and I found everything I needed in the encyclopedia. They have every one of them in there at one place or another.”
“Probably under the letter their last name starts with.”
They are silent. Then, “That’s a funny word, encyclopedia,” says Mrs. Satterwhite. “Gymnasium is a funny word too. There are lots of funny words, if you just think about it. . . . La-boon is a funny word and it’s not even a word.”
Mr. Flowers says he has to go inside and starts to move away.
“Mr. Flowers,” says Mrs. Satterwhite. “Do you know anything about glass eyes?”
He rolls to a stop. “Glass eyes? Let’s see. No, I can’t say as I do.”
“I wouldn’t get Mr. Flowers involved in that,” murmurs Mrs. Lowe.
Mrs. Talbert checks on the preacher man’s shoes. Bedroom shoe on his outstretched foot is okay, but on his other foot is a tennis shoe, of all things. Men are wearing tennis shoes all over the place. A tennis shoe in a house of worship is worse than a worm in pudding. Or is this a funeral home? It’s a nursing home. She knows that. She’s not even supposed to be here.
“We can’t figure out how you hook up a glass eye to the nerve endings,” says Mrs. Satterwhite to L. Ray. “Do you know anything about that?”
Carl decides he has to go—at least stand up to go.
“But you can’t see through a glass eye,” says Mr. Flowers, smiling.
“I know that. But somebody said you could see through a glass eye darkly, didn’t they? And besides that, I don’t think the nerves will actually be wha—”
“The muscles, you mean,” says Mrs. Lowe. “Something to move it. But how can you hook up something to a smooth, round ball, like a marble, that can move it around?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question,” says Mrs. Satterwhite.
Carl looks at Mr. Flowers. Mr. Flowers is looking back at him with a gleam in his eye.
UNDER THE MIMOSA TREE, behind the fence, Carrie, the aide, sitting at the picnic table, smoking, says to Latricia Willis, another aide who’s just come out and asked for a cigarette, “Did you hear what they talking about out there?” She reaches toward Latricia, holding out the cigarette pack, a cigarette shook up. She is tired.
“No.” Latricia leans her back against the mimosa, one foot up under her against the tree trunk.
Carrie notices how slim and muscular Latricia is. “Mrs. Cochran’s glass eye—they wondering what she connects it to.”
Latricia lights the cigarette with a Bic lighter, her dark blue, white-striped fingernails almost as long as the lighter, takes a long draw, and blows smoke straight up. “What you mean? When she take it out? Put it on the table?”
“No. In her eye. In her eye socket.”
“I thought you meant so it don’t roll off the table,” says Latricia. “What does it connect to?”
“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it. Ask Sabrina. She just got her medication certificate.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yes. She think she something now.”
“I wouldn’t hand out pills for nothing.”
Carrie looks at her watch. “Well, I got to get back in there, change Mr. Anderson’s dressing. That thing ain’t ever going to heal.”
“You can say that again. They’ll be taking him off skilled care. There goes Medicare; here come Shady Rest.”
“He’ll be gone in less than two weeks, I bet.”
The Kirby
CARL OPENS AUNT LIL’S apartment mailbox, under the outside stairway. She stands behind him in her walker. The box is stuffed with junk mail, three bunches wrapped with rubber bands—several “Have You Seen Me?” flyers, Citibank and other MasterCard and Visa inquiries, Home Depot sale notices. He sifts through the mail quickly to see if there are any get-well cards, although they pretty much stopped coming a while back.
“Don’t you want to take the elevator?” Carl asks.
“No. I don’t aim to start now. What have you got there?” Aunt Lil wears her green striped jacket over her blue sweat suit, a yellow scarf, and full makeup—all for this little visit to her apartment. She needs to clean some, she said.
“Mostly junk mail. You can look through it when we get upstairs.”
“Lord, lord, all these card companies. What do they do with their time?”
“What do you mean?”
“Who sends all these things out? They won’t allow the street panhandlers to beg, but the . . . damn banks can, through the mail.”
He follows two steps below her, bringing up her walker. She stops on each step, holds to the rail. “See, I can do this all right,” she says. Before she fell, she never stopped when she was going up or down, never put both feet on the same step.
Up top, he puts her walker in front of her, gets out her keys.
At the door she asks, “Is that the right key?”
“No, it’s the wrong key. I thought I’d try a few wrong ones first.”
She looks up at him, then smiles. One of her eyebrows is painted on higher than the other.
He follows her in through the door and turns on the air conditioner. He smells a tinge of cigarette smoke covered by the lemon freshener she’s always used. She moved here after Uncle Tad died. It’s a relatively old apartment building. In the living area of the large room sit her soft couch with the wooden arms, a wood coffee table, a big chair, a small chest of drawers with a writing desk built into the top, a TV, and another big chair with three welcome-mat-size squares of cut carpet on the rug to catch dropped ashes. A picture of red cherries in a bowl hangs over on the dining-area wall beside a certificate that reads “Lillian W. Taylor, Simmons Business School.” Beneath the cherries and the certificate, a table holds family photographs.
He drops the mail on the round dining room table, sits on the couch, looks around. He doesn’t have a lot of time today.
She stands in her walker. “I can get around without this walker in here. Don’t you think so?”
“I think that will work all right. Keep a hand on something.”
“I just want to look around before I do a little cleaning.”
“You know, I can hire somebody to come in here and clean.”
She touches the back of a living room chair, holds to it, moves and reaches to her TV chair, then to the back of a dining room chair. She slowly and carefully sits at the dining room table. “I know that. But I’m able to do a little cleaning.”
Carl watches her as she picks up one of her cigarette lighters and looks at it, puts it back down, picks up another one. She looks all around, picks up her Washington, D.C., pepper shaker. He bought it for her on a Boy Scout trip twenty-five or thirty years ago. He bought two, broke one, and gave the good one to Aunt Lil instead of his mother.
“Cigarette lighters,” she says. “That picture of those cherries.”
This is where I need to be, she thinks. And Carl needs to understand that.
“You said something about some more shoes,” says Carl. “Do you want to check and see if there are some more shoes you want to take in?”
“Oh, yes. Shoes. I want to see if I’ve still got those bedroom shoes with the hard rubber bottoms. Something that won’t be so slick.”
She stands, steps into the kitchen. The pantry door is open: there are her canned string beans, pintos, corn, and plenty of other canned goods, a sta
ck of paper bags, the broom she kept planning to replace, a dustpan. “I don’t see why I can’t move on back here. Do you?”
He was afraid she was going to ask that. “Well, I . . . no. We just need to try it a little longer at Rosehaven. You know what the doctor said.” He steps into the kitchen with her.
“I don’t like him. Do you?”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s hard to find a good one nowadays.”
He looks inside the pantry, wonders what will become of all those canned goods—should he take them home? Not yet. The doctor has said that only with full-time supervision should she live at home.
He shuts the pantry door, finds her in the hall, where her waist-high bookcase holds her three dictionaries, a history of Hansen County, a typing manual, a biography of Ronald Reagan, a book about Al Capone, three small bowls, and a copy of Out of Africa, the book with a cutout space inside—about the size and shape of a pack of cigarettes—where his uncle Tad used to keep cash.
She stands at the door to the extra bedroom. “You go up to the doctor’s office, and you don’t know which doctor you’re going to see. . . . Let’s check on them shoes. And I want to get my Kirby out. It’s still in here, idn’t it?”
“Yes. But that thing’s too heavy for you to do anything with, Aunt Lil. Let’s get your walker. We can’t be too careful. Aunt Lil, wait a minute.”
“Why?”
“I need to get your walker.”
Bringing the walker from the living area, he looks down the short hall, straight over her head. He remembers getting around behind her as a boy—at the sawmill where they’d go to get mulch—reaching up, grabbing her shoulders, holding on, riding her down to the soft sawdust. “Remember when we used to wrestle at the saw-mill?” And in a flash, all that—the smell of sawdust, the morning coolness of it under his feet, the view down through the pines, his mother and Aunt Sarah laughing—all that comes back. He thinks about this apartment being empty of all the furniture, pictures. Maybe that time is near. Maybe after she dies . . .
“Oh, yes,” she says. “Lord have mercy. The old sawmill—all the animals we buried there over the years. And I could beat your hind end until you got so gangly.”
. . . he can start his own business or something. At least a new truck. But he isn’t altogether sure how much money she has, and he shouldn’t be thinking about that now. It’s her money, and if all of it is needed to keep her at Rosehaven, that’s how it will be spent.
In this mostly empty extra bedroom, in the corner, stands the shiny, mighty 1963 Kirby vacuum cleaner, famous because Aunt Lil traded it in for a new one twice but each time took the new one back and repossessed the ’63. A table lamp sits on the floor, a big, rolled-up rug beside it.
Aunt Lil takes a few steps toward the closet, points. “See if the Kirby implements are in there.”
He opens the closet door. On the closet shelf sit ten to fifteen rolls of toilet paper, three rolls of paper towels, Fantastik, cans of Comet, jars of Pond’s cold cream, and all her vacuum cleaner implements.
She’s over by the Kirby. “I’ll roll it on out into the living room,” she says.
“Let’s go ahead and check for your shoes, and then I’ll vacuum the living room.”
“I need to do it.”
“Hang on until we get your shoes. Come on, let’s just check on your shoes.”
“Okay. But I need to do a little cleaning. That’s why I came over here.”
“I know. We’ll do a little cleaning.”
In the hallway bathroom—on the right—is the tub where she fell, got up, fell again.
In the big bedroom, many pairs of shoes are lined up on the floor over by her dresser. Her walk-in closet door is open: clothes hanging, metal file box on the floor.
On the wall in the bedroom is a photograph of Aunt Lil and three girls from her business school, all dressed up, standing on the courthouse steps, smiling, waving. The last time Carl and Aunt Lil were in her bedroom, she pointed to each girl in turn, named her, told a story or two about her, laughed, told about how the four of them had reunions every few years for a while after they graduated, and then they lost touch—except for Emma Brown, who runs A-I Hair. Emma cut and styled Aunt Lil’s hair until Aunt Lil went to Atlanta with a neighbor and bought two identical wigs. By then she was practically bald on top. Now both wigs look like their best days are gone.
She sits on the side of the bed. “I don’t see any reason at all I shouldn’t move on back home. They have those meals on wheels.”
“Well, yeah, but what about your medicine? You know we talked about that, and you remember how all that worked with Mother. It didn’t go very well.” Carl again visualizes this apartment empty, him sitting on the floor with his back against a bare wall. He feels almost overcome with some kind of blankness. He checks his watch. “I probably need to be getting on pretty soon.”
“My file box is in that closet, idn’t it?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“I need to just check something out here for a minute or two.” She stands, starts for the box.
“I’ll get it.”
“Okay. Suit yourself.”
He senses that she wants to be alone with the box. “I’ll put it right beside you, and I’m going to the kitchen to check out the pantry.”
“Just give me a minute or two to see what all is in here.”
At the dining room table, Carl looks through the mail again. The apartment is beginning to get cool from the air-conditioning. He clicks on the TV with the remote. Man, it took hours to teach her to use that thing. He’d have to get rid of captioning, or show her she was holding it upside down. Somebody will make a million dollars with the first TV remote for old people. Now they look like airplane instrument panels.
“Carl? Come here a minute.”
He clicks off the TV. In the bedroom, on the bed beside Aunt Lil, are a pile of war bonds, a coat, and a pair of scissors. “Great day. Were they all in your file box?”
“A few were, but the rest were in the lining of that coat. That’s where Tad sewed them. He refused to spend money. Now, when I kick the bucket, you need to be able to put your hands on them.”
“You got a while. You know that.”
She picks up a bond and looks at it. Her hand shakes worse than he remembers.
“We shouldn’t leave them in the file box, should we?” she says.
“I don’t guess so.”
“How about a safe-deposit box at the bank?”
“That will work.”
“Count them, will you?”
He counts. It takes a while. “I get ten thousand three hundred dollars, and with the dates and percentages that comes to, let’s see, around . . . well, it must be . . . I’ll figure it later. It’s right much. These are all from the early fifties.”
“Tad wouldn’t use the bank. Course, we never had a lot of money, but we did have these—and he kept buying them every once in a while. He didn’t trust banks. Can you take care of this?”
“Sure.”
“Put your name on the deposit box too. I remember Margaret and Sarah both had one. If we need the money for some reason, we’ll cash them in. There’s a paper bag in the pantry. Now, I need to vacuum.”
“Everything’s pretty clean inside, but there’s some dust or old pollen and stuff out on the porch. I’ll put the hose on the vacuum cleaner, and how about you do a little cleaning on the porch?”
“Well . . . okay. I can . . . I can do the rug later.”
Carl puts the bonds in a paper bag, then goes back into the extra bedroom, disconnects the heavy floor attachment from the Kirby and puts it out of sight, finds the straight plastic hose with the brush on the end, and rolls the cleaner out into the living area. “Okay. Get your walker there, and follow me on out on the porch here and we’ll . . .”
He unlocks and slides open the balcony door and heaves the Kirby over the bump. Heat engulfs him. The porch holds a small black metal couch and table and matching chairs; all
are very dusty. He’s going to have to tell Anna about this.
Aunt Lil follows him out, bumping her walker along.
He looks around. “Is there an outlet?”
“Right over there.”
He plugs in the cord, hands her the hose, stands behind her and beside the Kirby. He presses the start button with his foot. It roars.
She reaches the brush attachment over her walker toward a chair and starts dusting and vacuuming. She turns, frowns at Carl, and points at the Kirby.
He cuts it off.
“This walker’s in the way.”
“Well, I don’t know what to do about that.”
“You can put it in the house.”
“You need to keep your walker.”
“Why?”
“Because you might fall.”
“I’ll be holding on to the hose.”
“That won’t keep you from falling, Aunt Lil.”
“Well, how am I going to clean the porch?”
“I can clean the porch.”
“This is my job.”
“Okay, look. I’ll put the walker inside, and then hold . . . hold to you while you vacuum.” This is what a niece is supposed to be doing, he thinks. He opens the sliding door, sets the walker just inside.
He stands behind her, beside the Kirby. She holds the hose. He presses the start button with his foot, then holds on to a fistful of blue sweatshirt, pants, and diaper at her waist in back. She keeps her feet planted, sways slowly to the left and then over to the right, reaching with the hose, sucking up pollen. Then they move to a new spot.
After they finish, he stores the Kirby.
In the living area he checks his watch, then remembers. “What about your shoes? We forgot them.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“I’ll get you a pair.”
“I want to pick them.”
In the bedroom, she picks a pair of bedroom shoes, a pair of dress shoes, and a dress and then asks Carl to take down her business-school picture. She’ll hang it at Rosehaven.
GOING DOWN THE outside stairs, Carl leads the way, carrying her walker, the paper bag of war bonds, and the photo. He stops, turns, and looks up at her. She is stooped, holding to the railing, a sliver of diaper showing at her waist.
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 3
