by Paul Zimmer
My room is like an overgrown child’s room; it smells of long inhabitance, of diapers and age-old sweat. There is a small desk—maybe suitable for doing high school homework—a hard wooden chair, an alcove with a toaster, electric water heater, microwave oven, and some odd pieces of crockery on a shelf. Thank heaven there is a small section of bookshelves built into a wall, and in the divider between the kitchen and living area. The shelves are shallow, intended for knickknacks, but I lay my books in sideways and jam most of them in. The rest I line up between bookends on the dresser and a small table.
When they checked me into my room, a small television was already tuned to General Hospital for me. I switched it off. The little bathroom seems clean and there are many handles and grab bars around the shower and tub to hold onto. There is the bed, a long couch, a severe looking easy chair, and a rack by the door where I can keep my cane, umbrella, and walker, and hang my few hats.
My window looks out on a large parking lot, with a few small patches of trees clustered here and there on islands in the asphalt. I was introduced to some of my fellow residents as I was wheeled in. They seemed dear people in various stages of separation. The lobby and sitting room are already decorated for Christmas with a brightly bedecked tree, an illuminated Santa Claus who winks and blinks a red nose, a crèche with kneeling idolaters and a bouncing baby Jesus.
Left alone in my room at last, after signing more papers and receiving more instructions, I sit down in the plain chair and consider suicide, which is what I imagine most people do at this point of their arrival. But like most people, I haven’t the courage or the means to do the deed properly. I have only this sinking feeling.
I am quiet for a long, long time in the chair, my eyes open but seeing nothing—then finally I stir to regard the bed. I am drifting dismally. It is time for a nap, the staple of my life, and so I make my way over and lie down on the tufted spread, pulling up a light blanket, allowing unconsciousness to sustain me for a while.
But when I awaken after harsh dreams I am disoriented and irritable. What have I done to myself? The red light dot of the fire alarm blinks occasionally high over the entry door. I try to time its signal, but soon lose interest. The electric heater turns on low and clicks as evening light fades from the window.
I rise and shuffle to the chair again and put on a tape of a Vivaldi concerto, but it does not occupy me at this time. I go to the desk, take some of the care home stationery and begin a letter to my cousin in France. What can I say to him? Dear André, I have institutionalized myself—please come and save me? Then I remember that André died two years ago. I had been devastated because I was unable to travel to his funeral in France. He was the last of my relatives. I weep quietly as I remember this.
Someone is calling out feebly in the hallway—someone fallen—and I hear hurried steps and professionally comforting voices. The sound of some visitor’s motorcycle roaring into the parking lot is like the charge of some great animal.
There is a knock on the door. “Louise,” a voice calls, and the knob shakes—but I have turned the key in the lock. “It’s time to come for dinner, Louise. Do you need help?”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll be along,” I say.
I rise and go to the bathroom, splash water on my face, run a comb through my gray hair.
I will not weep beyond this room. My tears are mine, not to be shown to others.
The dining room is large, and there is only hushed conversation, except for one woman standing, leaning on her hands spread before her on her table. Apparently she believes it is her job to sing and entertain the others during meals. Or at least this is what she believes—I’m not sure if she has officially been assigned this duty, but she sings, slightly off key and full-throated, an old song I remember hearing on the radio in the late forties and early fifties, quite popular then when Heath and I first came to live on our farm in Wisconsin. “Together,” it is called:
We strolled the lane together
Laughed at the rain together . . .
No one pays any attention to the woman, but I realize that this is her work and she is going to help us all with her song, providing us with dinner music.
I sit down at an empty table with my eyes lowered, but am soon joined by several others as the food carts are rolled between the tables, and trays distributed. I nod a greeting to my tablemates, but they do not notice. One woman, even older than I, hugs a Raggedy Ann doll, and places it beside her on the chair as she eats, occasionally offering the doll a morsel. “She just doesn’t get enough to eat!” she declares with some concern to others at the table.
Chicken breasts, peas, french fries, a flaccid salad. An ancient man at our table, his head bent inches over his plate, eats the peas with his fingers one at a time. “You’re new,” the woman next to me says. “The chicken’s always just half done,” she warns me. “Salmonella,” she whispers conspiratorially. The singer has her head raised:
You’re gone from me
But in my memory,
We always will be together.
She concludes her song. It is such a silly, sentimental old song, sung so shakily, but I applaud her. The others around the room look at me as if I am insane. The singer is surprised, but smiles graciously in my direction, as an old entertainer might do. I go to my ill-cooked chicken, and she begins another song. There is some talk at our table, but it is lightly passed—weather, the Green Bay Packers, the ghastly food, a recent death amongst the residents. As a newcomer I am not expected to participate. I eat a few spoonfuls of the tapioca dessert, and return to my room.
I miss Heath, I miss our trees, I miss the birds and fields, the comfort of my long shelves of books, the sun and rain through changing seasons; I miss France all those years ago—when peace had come and freedom, the release from threat, the future extending with a fresh glow into my youth.
There is a knock at my door. I rise to turn the key. My medications have arrived from the pharmacy. Would I need assistance in arranging my pillbox?
Not today, thank you.
No. Do I have enough blankets?
Yes, it would seem so.
The door closes. The red dot of the fire alarm blinks exactly every two minutes over the door. I have been able to figure this out. Thirty of these blinks and an hour has passed.
I begin a rereading of Eugénie Grandet, until I feel too sleepy to read and lie down fully clothed, pulling a blanket up over me from the foot of the bed. Perhaps I will change to my pajamas later.
CHAPTER 5
Cyril
I am a different person in my room now that I’ve come back from the hospital. I stumble and thump things; it is an adventure to get up, sit down, go to the can, lie down, sit in a chair, or even scratch what’s left of my nose. That son of a bitch, Balaclava, really set me back. So I try to stay still, hoping that my faithful body cells are laboring in there to pull things back together for me; but I find it difficult to even wrap my mind lightly around a life or two. Things have gotten a little mixed up—and this makes me nervous.
Sitting up makes my back hurt. Mostly I stay in bed—like Proust, Oblomov, Don Juan, and Casanova, I spend a lot of time in the sack. But what bothers me most is that my mind seems buggered, too, so I fight hard to keep things straight. I can’t let things start to slip. I figure if I lose control of the lives, they might start running together, sliding over into each other, and I’ll be deep in the wallow.
What will happen to me then? I’ll become a black hole. I try to think good thoughts. Maybe if all the lives come washing and mixing together they’ll become one perfect life—or maybe even one very bad life? How would things stack up? This is too serious for me to think about in my weakened state.
Cyril, get your ass in gear! Shake it out! Hang on to what you’ve got.
Three times a week they haul me off with a bunch of lurching elder residents to a physical therapy class in the medical center. Each of us is given a special exercise assignment. It’s all figured out by computers
as near as I can tell. Many of the other patients have wracked up their backs or legs in farm accidents. Others are cursed with arthritis or gout. Everyone does a separate task. I’m the only iceman in the class.
The exercise attendants are all staring into computers behind the counter when our group arrives. There are a half dozen of them. The screens somehow tell these folks what exercise programs to assign to each of us. The attendants rarely look up, and the lights from their computer screens give their faces a sinister glow. “Cyril,” one of them says without looking up. “You start with five minutes on limbering machine number two, then move to rolling track number five and do ten minutes at .05 speed.”
“Point zero five!” I say to him, acting like I’m in shock, trying to liven this joint up a bit. “Who do you think I am—Paavo Nurmi?”
“Who’s Paavo Nurmi?” one of them asks. Oh-oh—I can see it on all their faces—their sudden realization that they’ve accidentally tripped my mechanism again.
I lean forward on the administration desk. They lower their heads and descend more deeply into their computer screens. “Paavo Nurmi. It’s amazing how a guy that great can be forgotten. In 1924 he won five gold medals in the Paris Olympics. Five! The Flying Finn, they called him. The French went nuts over him. Everybody did. He’d run with a stopwatch in his hand to pace himself. Once on the same day he won the 1,500- and 5,000-meter races. Same day! That was in the time before antiaging foods and drinks and performance enhancement drugs. In those days you had to pull a race on just your own breakfast eggs.
“Nobody’d ever seen anyone like Paavo Nurmi. He had wheels! In 1928 when he was thirty-one he came back to the Olympics in Amsterdam and won the 10,000-meter race and pulled second in the 5,000 and the 3,000-meter steeplechase.
“At one point he held the world records for 1,500, 5,000, and 10,000 meters and one, three, six, and ten miles—all at one time. That is chugging, brother! That’s like Sugar Ray Robinson winning the middleweight title five times after he’d held the welterweight title for years. Do you know who Sugar Ray Robinson was?” I figure all these physical therapists might know some lives of athletes.
But, “Naw, Cyril,” one of them says abruptly without looking up from his screen. “You’ve got to get chugging though. Get yourself up on that machine.” All of them are totally unimpressed that I am able to hold this stuff in my mind. They just want me to do painful exercises.
I heard one of them mutter an aside to another when I was in the gym last time. “Watch out, here comes the Google Man.”
Google Man! It’s true, they really don’t need to have me blathering at them. Anything I hold in my head could be brought up by a couple of clicks on their keyboards. Their faces are lined up and staring at the screens like a crate of blighted lemons in their mysterious light.
So I go off to ease my suffering butt onto the seat of the limbering machine, which is like an upside-down spider. You pull on its legs with your hands and push down on its palps with your feet, and it runs poison up your ass as you pump. A man can’t think straight when he’s using all his energy like this.
All you can do is gaze up at the soaps on the TV screens, and hope for the best. There’s no sound coming from the TV, but there is always some very tense situation going on with those young actors in the dramas. They all look like they need a laxative.
By the time I’ve shagged my ass at .05 for ten minutes on number five machine, it’s time for all of us to crawl back to the minibus and be driven back to the home for lunch. I can’t talk because my tongue’s hanging out, and the rest of my fellow exercisers don’t look to be in much better shape. But we have done our duties.
For lunch it is mac and cheese, green beans and a salad. There’s a new tenant sitting in the chair next to me. She looks mighty woeful and she doesn’t speak to anyone as she eats.
This care home is not exactly Romper Room—everyone is generally in a sky blue funk when they’re first rolled in here. As I shovel in my mac and cheese I’m trying to think of something nice to say to my neighbor that might give her some cheer. She’s a real pretty woman with her short white hair and slender hands.
I’ve never known how to talk much to women, but this is one I’d really like to talk to. Cyril, I say to myself, you dope, don’t get nervous and start blathering—just say something cool to her! Look at her—she’s elegant. Don’t just spout some empty-headed crap. Maybe you could give her an interesting life to think about.
I’m not good at this sort of thing, never learned how to be smooth, but I try to display a little class when I speak to her. “My name is Cyril,” I say. “Are you familiar with Christine de Pisan? You remind me of her.”
She blinks only once. I can see she’s surprised by my question—but she is thinking. I’m not used to people mulling over what I say to them! Then she starts talking: “Christine de Pisan was a medieval woman, the daughter of a Bolognese astrologer, very beautiful and witty, wrote poems and even a chronicle of Charles V.
“I was born in France, and where I’m from it is part of our history that Christine came to visit her daughter in the priory at Poissy near where my family home was. She wrote poems about her visit and left important details of how young, cloistered women lived.”
I almost fall out of my chair. My mouth is open, my sore eyes are wide. I am numbed, unable to respond. No one has ever answered one of my questions and given a life back to me.
I struggle for breath, so surprised that I am speechless. A moment of moments. If I could get down on my dubious knees I would kneel before her.
Finally . . . finally I manage to utter, “Will you marry me?”
CHAPTER 6
Louise
I read as much as my challenged eyes will permit, I spend many hours listening to music, but I want to do this selectively, not merely perform these things as rote activities. I want to really listen, so I parcel out my limited energy. At times I sit in my stern chair and look at my framed reproduction of “Mme Manet on a Blue Couch” which I had hung on the wall. I cherish the cobalt color of her settee, and the way Mme looks so knowingly, almost impatiently, at the painter. Hurry up! she seems to say.
Sometimes I lie on the bed and dredge through remembered pieces of my life hour after hour. There’s no order to my rambling—a memory of a small event comes into my mind for no particular reason, or something reminds me of something else. My eyes might be open, but I am taking a nap, a sort of open-eyed coma, and my dreams wash together with bits of reality; my unconsciousness is always odd and unrelated until it startles me back into cognizance. There is the good—and the bad—the frightening connections and the warm fancies.
I don’t have to plan things anymore—or concern myself with what needs to be done. Nothing needs to be done—except that I must be cautious so as not to fall down, take my medicine on time, go to the bathroom regularly, and appear in the dining hall at meal times.
I don’t wish to descend permanently into the television screen all my waking hours as so many of my coresidents do. So far I have been able to resist this.
I know what lies ahead—an event not to be overly pondered. So I strike sparks off my past, wondering why I did this thing or that thing. I think of a particular event and wonder what it really meant when it happened. Now that I have time to think about them, I recall places in my life where I turned a corner when I did not even realize I had done so, or how I could have saved myself great trouble if only I had only done a certain thing. There are the lovely memories, too, of young infatuation, a good bottle of wine, many moments and realizations in art, an éclat amongst the trees in our woods, a fine book, a walk with Heath, a moment of lovemaking, a vegetable triumph in the garden, a picture, a poem, a dance, some music that illuminated and sustained my life.
At last I have lived enough of my life so that I have some wisdom to rely on, knowledge I have accumulated to influence my decisions, some things that could possibly be useful to others, too. But no one really cares or consults with me abou
t anything, and I am given no real decisions to make. It seems that things have already been decided for me. No wisdom is required in the face of this reality—nor, it seems to me, is wisdom much valued.
No one comes to see me in the home. Heath and I had been a hermitic twosome over our decades together, had only a few friends, and mostly these are all dead or doomed now. We had a few good neighbors who occasionally looked in on us, but basically we were by ourselves. I have no relatives with whom I am in touch; they all eventually disappeared into my vaporous memories of France across the sea when I was a girl. Heath’s parents had both died suddenly when he was twelve and his only brother passed away a decade ago. Heath and I had our fields, our woods, our work, our house, and each other.
We belonged to no groups or clubs, went to no meetings, rarely dined in the local bars and grills. We did not hunt our land, nor did we permit others to hunt it—and this, too, set us apart from our neighbors.
In late autumn the guns come out in the driftless hills, and the war with animals commences in full. I would begin to hear gunfire and it always conjured up terrifying memories of the war combat in France when I was a child. Heath would be off doing his chores, and I would be frightened that some stray shot might take him down. I was unable to walk in our woods when this bellicose activity was commencing. When we went to town for our groceries there were deer strung up like lynch victims from trees around the houses, and pickups with bloodied animals’ corpses slung onto their beds as if they were firewood. This, too, stirred terrible memories for me and had its deep effect on me particularly, reinforcing our solitude.
Dearest Heath, this was his childhood home and these things had been part of his growing up, but he changed his customs for me as an act of love, knowing that hunting bewildered and appalled me. If he saw hunters straying onto our land he would emphatically order them to leave.
The caregivers in this home are professional and dedicated, but they are challenged and sometimes annoyed with their work. Like most people who labor in institutions that serve particular types of human beings—teachers, prison guards, ward nurses, military officers—they sometimes become impatient, especially when residents become querulous. Elders might be quiet people, but we are diverse; our one common denominator is that we are all moving now with varying speeds toward an inevitable conclusion, and our attitudes about this vary as we wobble toward our respective ends. At times we become overdemanding of our caregivers and impatient with each other, creating situations that are not productive.
