When I Was Young and In My Prime

by Alayna Munce

  I phoned Mother one Sunday

  she phoned me the next

  I phoned her one Sunday

  she phoned me the next

  I phoned her one Sunday

  she phoned me the next

  I’m not sure if it was Grandpa or Mom and Uncle Nick who made the decision. Whatever the case, it certainly wasn’t Grandma.

  There isn’t much to move really. Or much to say. It’s a hot, awkward afternoon. Mom takes charge, arranging the bright track suits in the little closet beside the bed, pointing things out to the nurse on duty, asking questions about meal times and laundry routines.

  Uncle Nick volunteers to walk the block and a half back to the house to fetch a hammer and nail so we can hang the family picture above the narrow bed. I envy him: twenty minutes in the place and I’m craving fresh air. The “Retirement Home” I work at, with its private rooms and ploys at homeyness, is much less depressing than the Extended Care section of this nursing home—the residents here much further along in the continuum of decline. Part of me is wishing one of my cousins had come so we could sneak out together for a cigarette, though part of me is also feeling a little smug being the only one of my generation to have shown up.

  Grandpa speaks only to Grandma, and only in short commands. “Stop that,” he barks when she begins to chew loudly on nothing. When she wanders over to the other side of the room and starts to make one of the other ladies’ beds, he lets out a sharp, “Leave it.” After that he steers her to the vinyl bench by the window and sits there beside her, keeping a tight grip on her hand.

  Mom’s big discovery of the afternoon is that they still have a piano in the lounge. She brightens. “Look Dad, she’ll be able to practise. We’ll have to bring her sheet music over. I wonder how we can keep it from getting lost.” Already fishing through her purse for her notepad so she can add sheet music for Mom to her list.

  When it comes time to go Mom put her hands on her knees with a slap and stands up. We all take the cue. “Well,” she says, “I guess we’d better get going.” She pauses. “You’re going to stay here Mum. Remember how we talked about this?”

  Grandma is on her feet, having risen with the rest of us at the signal to leave. Now Grandpa walks over to her side, takes her elbow and guides her to sit down on the bed. “This is where you’ll sleep now, Mary.”

  Grandma looks at each of us in turn, her mouth slightly open. She settles on Grandpa. “But I want to go with you,” she says.

  Mom sits down on her other side and points to the family picture that Uncle Nick has hung. “See Mum, there’s the family and—”

  “I want to go with you,” she says to Grandpa, her voice rising.

  Grandpa takes her hand and looks at the ceiling for a moment before looking at her. When he speaks his voice is firm, almost harsh. “You have to stay here Mary,” he says, “and we have to go.”

  Then I witness a barely perceptible shift in her face. Her chin lifts. Her breathing slows. It’s as if she’s found reins. I don’t think it’s that she’s understood. I think it’s something subtler than that, something to do with the long practice of rising to the occasion. It’s as if she’s felt a familiar tug—the imperative of not making a scene in public perhaps, or maybe just the sheer habit of doing what needs to be done. She pulls herself together.

  After all, who’s going to do it if she doesn’t?

  That sound—the creak of the line through the pulley when I’m hanging out the wash—always puts me in mind of the farm. Peter had strung up a clothesline between the house and the oak tree in the side yard. My favourite chore was hanging out the laundry in the morning there under that tree. Time by myself, thinking about what needed doing and what was already done. What needed doing and what was already done. Shirts and pants and sheets and aprons. Half of them hung out to dry—stretching their arms and legs in the wind, I liked to think—and half of them bunched in the basket, waiting to be hung. The creak of the line through the pulley. What needed doing and what was already done and then later that afternoon pulling the line back in the other direction, the clothes stiff and dry and good-smelling. Filling the hamper. Ironing next. The line between what needed doing and what was already done going back and forth all the time, things building up on one side then the other like a see-saw. It takes a steady woman to keep up with it on a farm, all that back and forth. Let me tell you.

  things that have left her:

  1 first, her ability to remember

  (then to wonder) whether she already asked

  you the question she’s been meaning

  to ask you

  2 pride

  about her false teeth

  3 bladder control

  4 her tendency to comment on stains

  and fallen hems and showing slips and

  holes in socks

  5 her ability to knit

  and crochet and embroider and

  mend

  6 her disdain for beer

  Grandpa feeds it to her often now, and I can’t decide

  whether it’s revenge or a sort of tenderness,

  making up for lost

  time

  7 names

  in this order: the names

  of her acquaintances and of her neighbours; the names

  of her curling friends, choir friends, old teaching friends; the name

  of the United Church minister and of the little boy

  with Down’s syndrome who came every week to swim in the pool; the names

  of her grandchildren her husband her children and lately her own names both married and

  maiden

  Lois King, interim treasurer, United Church Women (UCW), Branch 186, St. James United Church, Paris, Ontario

  Oh, Mary was always showing the rest of us up. I’ll admit I even felt a little peeved at her from time to time. Seems so silly now, what with... well, you know. Oh but then. If it was a beautiful spring day and you said to yourself what the heck and wore your new white shoes to church even a day before the 24th of May, well. You could tell she noticed. Not that she would say anything of course, but her eyes would go straight to your shoes and then she’d shake your husband’s hand but wouldn’t stay to chat. Lois, John always used to say to me, Lois, if you didn’t have anything to worry about you’d have to invent something. It’s just your imagination, he’d say. Aren’t you the one always saying she’s your best friend? he’d say. Yes yes, I’d say, but that doesn’t mean she can’t be a pain in the neck sometimes. There were her thank-you notes for instance. She was positively renowned for her thank-you notes. She had a system, and she didn’t mind telling you about it either. Whenever she was invited to a dinner or a tea or a luncheon or a shower or any kind of party or gathering, she’d make out the envelope beforehand, address it and stamp it, get it all ready to go. Then the moment she got home from the outing she’d write the thank-you note easy as pie from some formula Lord knows she must have carried around in her very bones, and then she’d seal it and stick it in the mailbox that very evening, neat as can be. Beyond reproach. Couldn’t touch her. Not Mary.

  No, I don’t think I was imagining anything. Though that doesn’t mean I don’t miss her like the dickens. Things aren’t the same in the UCW, that much is for sure. You could always count on Mary.

  When she’d start in on one of her stories all of us kids—the cousins and I—we’d drop our forks, roll our eyes and kick each other under the table.

  Her favourite was the one about the fiancée of their best farmhand. Grandma would tell this story whenever our table manners slipped, whenever we bent our bodies the least bit toward our forks instead of bringing our forks—properly—to our mouths.

  In the old days on the farm during harvest, they all ate at the same table with the crew. And this woman, the farmhand’s fiancée—she must have been working in the curing house—would roll up her sleeves, push her chair back, and bend over so low that she could get the food into her mouth without lifting her arm. Apparently she hel
d her fork wrong too, held it straight out in her fist—Like a savage, Grandma said. Or sometimes, her voice rich with disbelief, she’d exclaim, Just like a baby!

  The funniest part of her telling this story, though, and the reason why we eventually began to goad her into it, was that she would demonstrate. She’d get this slack look on her face, push back her chair, bend right over so that her chin was almost touching her plate and shovel mashed potatoes into her mouth, just like the woman. To show us how ugly it looked, she said. If we weren’t careful we’d end up that way, she said.

  Again and again some elusive ballast in the telling of that story kept her coming back to it, kept us slipping in our table manners so she’d tell it one more time, so she’d take us one more time to the edge of the place where you aren’t quite sure anymore who is who. Then we’d roll our eyes to quell the gap there and ask, each in our turn, to be excused.

  We moved her to the same place she used to volunteer at. Played piano for the old folks every Sunday afternoon. The place just around the corner, block and a half away. I looked after her a long time, though, before we finally moved her to the Home. After all, I’ve got the nurse’s training. By the end I had to do it all, and not just the cooking and cleaning. I took her to the bathroom, cleaned her up when she made a mess. Things a man shouldn’t have to do for his wife. Though she always did love it when I’d wash her hair. Like they say, in sickness and in health.

  Had to watch her like a hawk there at the end. She’d put the coffee on with no pot under it and the coffee’d go spurting all over the kitchen. She’d put the milk back in the cupboard under the sink beside the compost bucket and I’d come across it two days later, sour. I remember one day she came out of her bedroom in the morning wearing pantyhose with two bathing suits over them and a dress-shirt of mine over that. She was waving her arms down around her legs saying, I don’t like it so bare down here. Funny what occurs to you at times like that. Dressing for all her different lives, I thought—pantyhose of a schoolteacher, bathing suits of a lady with a pool in her backyard where all the neighbourhood kids come to swim, borrowed dress shirt of a woman who’s just plain confused.

  I don’t know quite why, but that day was the straw that broke my back. I recall steering her to the piano—she could still play with both hands then, and it was the only thing that gave me a break. I pulled out the stool, set the sheet music in front of her, put her hands on the keys at middle C and left her playing so I could rest my head in my hands in the kitchen.

  I phoned her one Sunday

  she phoned me the next

  I phoned her one Sunday

  she phoned me the next

  I volunteer once or twice a week at the Brant County Crisis Line. When I started Peter said, Mary, you’ll just never learn to say no, will you? But they’d put a notice in the church bulletin saying they were in need of volunteers, and I thought I should give it a go. It’s all confidential of course, I’m not even supposed to tell Peter, but what I can tell you is that there are an awful lot of lonely souls out there. Some of the other volunteers seem to be able to tell right away if a caller is high on drugs, but I must say I have a hard time telling the difference between the drug addicts and the callers who are just plain strange. I always take an egg salad sandwich or a ham and cheese, cut in quarters for a four-hour shift. It helps to pass the time. Some days hardly anyone calls at all.

  In any case, plenty of the people who call the crisis line aren’t really suicidal. Some of them are just simply in over their heads. Sometimes a single mother will call at her wits’ end saying that she saw the crisis line number in the lineup at the food bank, and you can hear the baby crying in the background and you can tell from her grammar and her diction what kind of family she comes from, if you take my meaning. Sometimes I positively long to interrupt and say, We were, dear, not we was.

  And some of the callers are just old. Those are the calls I do best with—I like to think of them as my specialty in a way, although it doesn’t work that way of course. There’s one old lady who calls every once in a while rather confused—can’t remember when garbage day is and can’t for the life of her figure out how to find out. Or sometimes she’ll call us to find out what day of the week it is. Once she called while I was on shift and she was crying, saying, I just dropped a vase full of freesia on the kitchen floor. What should I do? she kept saying, Help me Martha, I don’t know what to do. She sometimes calls us Martha, so that’s what they’ve christened her in the logbook, Martha, though I pointed out in one of my logbook entries that her name isn’t Martha—that’s obviously the name of somebody else in her life, so it doesn’t really fit to call her Martha, if you see what I mean. Well in any case, technically we’re not supposed to encourage this kind of call, and some of the other volunteers have tried to make referrals—set her up with local homecare you know—but I don’t mind talking to her when she calls. It’s nice and satisfying to have some concrete way to be of help sometimes. I always picture her in a kitchen rather like my own, only with a crucifix where our clock is. She must be Catholic. Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, she’s always saying. Lord have mercy, between every sentence.

  Of course, there are the times when we get a call from somebody who’s actually suicidal. If there’s somebody else on shift I’ll pass it on to them. They try to always pair up a less experienced volunteer with one who has more experience. Once, though, Marie-Lou Cromwell, who’s actually a therapist in real life, called in sick at the last moment and there was no one to replace her, so I was on shift all by myself. I usually take afternoon shifts since I’m retired, and from reading the logbook you get the idea that most of the suicide calls are night shift ones. In any case, this one day when I was all alone, wouldn’t you know it, I got a real suicide call. I could tell right away it was serious because the young man’s voice was so distant and his silences were so... well, so silent. And long. Oh I can still remember those silences. Gives me a shiver thinking of them. I was trying to juggle so many things at once—trying to remember everything I’d learned in the training about techniques for drawing a person out—what to say, what not to say, and at the same time trying not to remember how in the training my instinct was always to say the exact thing you’re not supposed to say, and then trying to remember all the business about making a contract, getting the caller to make you a promise, and at the same time trying to find out where they are so you can send the police, and all the while trying to give them a sense that there’s something to live for. Well, for pity’s sake. All that and at the same time making sure they know you’re really listening because they can tell, you know, and sometimes they’ll just hang up on you if your mind is wandering. But then on the other hand trying not to be pushy or say too much because they’ll hang up then, too. All that whirling around my head like a blizzard in those silences of his.

  Well finally, after about four or five silences when I kept thinking he was completely gone and then I’d just manage to fish him back in, he was off again, and, well, I couldn’t help myself; I just reached the end of my rope. I sat up straight and said, Open your curtains. Just like that. What? he said from far away. Open your curtains. You’re in the dark, aren’t you? I said. How did you know? he said, closer now. Just a guess, I said. Now what do you say you go and open your curtains and let in a little light. It’s a beautiful day out, and we’re getting nowhere in the dark, I told him, and he said, I’m in a basement apartment, lady. Just like that. Well, for Pete’s sake there still must be windows, I said, and he said, Yeah but they’re all dirty. Just like a child. Well there’s got to be a way to get some light in there, I said, and he said, I guess if I open the door to the outside it would give me some light. And I said, You go and do that now, but don’t hang up. Come back and talk to me again as soon as you’re done. Okay, he said, and I’ll tell you I held my breath the whole time he was gone. Finally he came back and picked up the phone and I let out my breath and I could hear him breathing too. After a while I said, Hi. Hi, he
said, and he started to weep. There, there, I kept saying. There, there.

  Well, in any case, apart from a few exceptions I’d say a good number of the callers are just plain lonely, and I don’t mind chatting with them, or rather, letting them chat to me. I’ve occasionally even caught myself thinking wouldn’t it be nice to have someone I could call—anonymously, you know—and never have to face the person and just be able to pour my heart out. Though I certainly don’t let myself indulge that thought for very long. I’m not that sort of person and when you get right down to it, if you ask me, you take a risk letting yourself go like that—there’s no telling whether you’re going to be able to get yourself back. It’s a slippery slope, as they say. Not that I blame the callers exactly. They’re mostly all a little touched. But I do find myself impatient from time to time as a woman goes on and on about her problems and I get an urge to just interrupt, you know, just put an end to her nonsense. Tell her to just buck up. Just dig deep dear, I’d like to say. You just need to decide. Your baby is crying, I can hear it. Stop talking about yourself, hang up the phone and go to your child. Just remember there’s always somebody worse off than you are, that’s what I say. Or, at least, that’s what I’d like to say, sometimes.