by Paul Zimmer
Even though I dislike being here in this crowded, odiferous place, I have taken a personal vow: I swear I will be cooperative and patient with fellow residents and show gratitude to my caregivers. Otherwise I will become a living misery.
I HAVE met a new resident—or I guess I should say an old resident—who apparently has returned to the home after what must have been a very serious episode in the hospital. He had been injured in some terrible way, perhaps not by fire—but by ice; an odd man who looks like a partially unwrapped mummy with his bandages. I feel concern for him, and he interests me because his mind is active. He asked me a strange, obscure question when he sat beside me at lunch, to which—by some wild chance—I was able to give him a full response. He was so astounded and apparently delighted by my answer to his question that he suddenly proposed marriage.
Of course, I ignored his proposal, but I must, however, advise him later to be more careful about such frivolities. Old women can be very dangerous—in ways different than younger ones.
CHAPTER 7
Cyril
Here I am—a seventy-nine-year-old mossback who’s never had a date.
There she is—a woman like no other I’ve ever seen. And she actually pays attention to me. Is she just being kind to me? Her name is Louise. I want to know her better. I am attracted to her. How the hell do I do this?
Is this the beginning of love? Is that what this feeling I am feeling is? How would I know? What do I do now? Maybe I could invite her to sneak out for a beer with me. I’ve got to do this right. If she turns me down now I may never come out of my room again.
It’s time for lunch in the dining room. I oil my boots, slather on Lilac Vegetal after cutting myself while shaving. I’ve got to remember to pull the bloody patch of toilet paper off my chin before I leave the room. I keep slicking down my few gray hairs and looking in the mirror.
What I see is not good. No, not good at all. I look like a lump of suet with Band-Aids on it. Why did I wait this long in my life to try and make a date with a woman?
I get out my best shirt, a blue and red plaid flannel that might catch her eye. If I had a car I’d invite her out to the Readstown Inn for brats and fried cheese curds. Maybe she would like that. I wonder if she likes beer? I’ve got to be careful with this kind of thing. I don’t want to put her off, or make her think I am some kind of country goof.
She said she had been born in France and her name is Louise. That’s pretty swishy, it seems to me. Don’t screw it up, Cyril! Go slow. Think what Adolphe Menjou would do. Maybe I should grow a moustache so I could twirl it. Adolphe always moved slowly and was very elegant. I remember him in The Sheik, and he was in One Hundred Men and a Girl when he played Deanna Durbin’s old man. He was cool and courtly, never pushed it.
Cyril, you don’t want to make any fast moves! Nice and easy for old folks. Don’t be talking with your mouth full—and make sure your fly is zipped. Cultivated. That’s the word. Cover your mouth when you sneeze, and don’t say “ain’t.”
She must have lived in the driftless hills to be staying in this care home, but I’ve never seen her around town. I would have noticed her. I’ll get to the dining hall early and watch to see where she sits, then slip in at her table. How should I start talking to her again? I’ve never done this before.
I’ve listened to many lines over the years in Burkhum’s Tap: “Weren’t you in my high school class?” or “Haven’t I seen you around Walmart’s?” or “Hello, sugar, would you please pass the popcorn?” I don’t think any of these would work with Louise. Adolphe Menjou would take her hand, kiss it, and say, “Madame, enchanté.” I don’t think I could pull off that sort of thing either.
I watch her come into the dining room and she picks a table where no one is sitting. I’m a little shaky, but I suck it up, go over and sit down next to her. I’m nervous as hell, start playing with the silverware, and gaze off across the room as if I’m thinking about something important.
They’re serving wieners and beans and slaw in the dining room. She nibbles at her slaw. I am trying to look cool as I cut a hotdog with my table knife, rather than use my fork. But I haven’t a clue what to say to her.
The singing woman who entertains is offering “A Tree In the Meadow” today for our lunchtime pleasure. She’s still way off-key, but I pretend to listen. Kate Smith used to sing that song. She was a big gal, from Duluth I think, and her manager was Ted something, and sometimes she would sing the national anthem before World Series games, but I’m so nervous I can’t get anything straight right now. I go on poking at my beans in silence.
Louise takes the heat off me: “They should serve wine with these meals,” she says with a chuckle. “It might make them more edible.”
I know she’s kidding, but I don’t know how to respond to this and my mouth is full of hotdog. She’s so trim and beautiful, she has that little French accent, and now she wants wine with her food. This mention of alcohol gives me, I think, a possible lead-in. My voice goes up three decibels as I ask her, “Do you like Leinenkugel?”
Damn it! Cyril, you stupid fossil, what a dumb thing to ask her! I wish I could swallow the whole sentence back like a cartoon character might swallow his balloon back. I can’t believe I said it! I’m so ashamed my whole body starts itching,
But the lady is kind; she takes it up immediately without blinking an eye. “Well, my husband used to drink a bottle of Leinenkugel when he came in from the fields. I sometimes tasted his. It’s not bad, as these things go, but I have to admit I haven’t yet learned to favor beer very much.” She even gives me a little smile. “But I could try.”
I am a gone coon. I’m gulping. I am sailing!
Finally I manage to calm myself a bit. We sit and chat, the two of us, until the servers start clearing things away. I consider giving her a few lives, but have the good sense to keep off that. I don’t want to scare her, so we talk about the home, the weather, the food and other stuff. Finally they are wiping off the table in front of us, so we have to leave. I say, “Can I walk you back to your room?”
“That would be nice,” she says. Both of us use our canes as we trundle through the halls. When we reach her door I don’t pull a Menjou enchanté act—but I at least have the presence to say, “I sure enjoyed talking to you.”
“And I, too,” she says, and smiles so sweetly again I almost fall down on the hall carpet. She goes into her room, and shuts the door. I’m ready to dance a jig on my frostbitten legs. I’m glittering—old busted, bandaged Cyril—all the way back to my room.
Was that a date? I did it okay. Cyril, you really did it. Casanova, Warren Beatty, Rudolph Valentino, Lord Byron, move over! Cyril is moving onto the scene.
When I get back in my room I step into the john to take a pee and see in the mirror that the blood-spotted patch of toilet paper is still stuck to my chin. I am going to have to work very hard to improve myself.
CHAPTER 8
Louise
The man with the bandages is recovering from nearly freezing to death—I found this out from some of the residents. Apparently he was abducted by some rogue and left for dead on a roadside in a driving blizzard. He must be very willful and strong to have endured such a crisis. He seems to enjoy talking to me. He is an odd combination of countryman and scholar, a serious collector of obscure facts about the lives of people.
I have taken several after-dinner strolls with him now and, though he is very shy, I find him to be more intriguing than other people I’ve met in the home, who seem overwhelmed by age and physical problems. But Cyril—that is his name, he told me—despite his grievous injuries, is still outgoing and ongoing, and determined to recover. He is still interested in things. I like his innocence and sanguinity. It is a rarity in this atmosphere.
And he says such odd things. The other day he told me that I looked like Thomas Hardy’s second wife, Florence. Now where in heaven’s name do you suppose he conjured that one? He says I have a round face like hers and remain essentially unsmiling,
but that I seem to be a devoted person, as Florence Hardy was—and that I have visions.
My face is not round. I might be a sleepy-looking old woman, but I have no visions. Besides, Florence Hardy was an intelligent, constant woman. Her only ambition was for Thomas and his literary career. Cyril must be thinking of W. B. Yeats’s wife, Georgie, who helped spark William’s poetry with her spirit writing. I would not want to do spirit writing. I would not favor meeting a ghost, and my hand is not driven by shades.
But how odd and interesting to encounter a man in the quiet farm countryside of Wisconsin who knows these things and tries to apply such configurations. This seems to be his art, and he appears to have practiced it all of his life. But now that he grows old, his sources seem to sometimes run together like watercolors. I wonder who he communicated with all his years in this preoccupied, insular dairy country? I suspect he’s spent a good deal of time talking to himself. I’ve never met anyone quite like him.
Yesterday he asked me if I knew who Felix “Doc” Blanchard was. Was he testing my sanity? I had no idea who Felix Blanchard was! It seems he was the star fullback for the army military academy football team in the middle 1940s. According to Cyril, he was perhaps the most powerful runner who ever played the game. Cyril knew that he had scored three touchdowns against the navy team in 1946 and had a total of nineteen for the season. His jersey number was 35, and if he ever ran into you, you would go “oof” and never forget number 35.
Cyril was quite adamant that I get all this right, as if he were filling in a great gap in my mind. And yes, I have committed it to memory—and can already feel my life . . . improving. This is far better than hearing someone complain about how their feet hurt. Cyril has an obscure brio which beguiles me.
After our walks, I am worn out by the time we reach my door. But I will take more walks with him. I must figure out a way to return the favor of his constant flow of information. Perhaps I can quiet him down long enough to read him some poetry or show him some pictures or play some music for him, perhaps put some essence behind all those facts he holds in his head about poets, artists, saints, composers, movie stars . . . and old football players, and obscure medieval women, and jazz musicians, and decadent politicians, and opera singers, and . . .
I requested that the staff of the care home help me bring more of my art books from the farm along with a small standing bookcase shelf that would accommodate them. The books make my room warmer, but also smaller.
These little rooms. We try to disguise them in our various ways with our possessions—but they are what they are—holding cells for the doomed. Sometimes we vacate them suddenly, and sometimes we linger a long while in them as we slowly, slowly empty. The staff removes hard-edged or sharp things from our rooms so that we cannot injure ourselves or worse. Things disappear from our minds into the abyss as we sit in these rooms by ourselves—textures are removed, layers are stripped away, our essences are changed and peeled off—leaving strange traces, a sort of melancholy pentimento, until we are down to our true substance, and our final mission: the movement toward the great void.
That is why I will take walks with Cyril and sit with him at meals—because I want to help him hold on to the fascinating things he has put into his head. He is unique, has spent his whole life gathering lives. So many remembered lives—so much better than one lonely death, or a million lost or vacant lives.
CHAPTER 9
Cyril
Every night before I go down to the dining hall to sit with Louise for dinner, I watch the evening news on television for an hour. Louise refers to this as my “evening waltz with death,” and I often appear in the hall for dinner looking like an undertaker. It is an old habit, I’ve done this for years: I watch the news because I’m looking for lives—but it is a kind of penance, too, and I don’t often find lives that I want to keep.
Here I am, this lucky guy who has lived in these wooded, driftless hills for many years. All I have to do is go out in the morning—winter, summer, spring or fall—and turn my head just slightly in any direction, and see something beautiful. But on the news there are helpless people all over the world stuck in scabby, blasted places, who can’t get away and are being chewed up and murdered, millions of them, year after year, their lives pulverized before they can even grow up, cheated and deluded by their leaders, governments, and neighbors, drowned, blown up, shot, raped, buried alive, robbed and forgotten by the cunning idiots they have elected to take care of them, doomed by their poorness, remoteness or religion, they’ve got no lives to do anything with except try to find ways to exist and maybe find something to eat once a day. They can’t go to school or play in their blasted streets. They’re afraid to go to the market. They can’t go to church to pray because it is forbidden. They can’t sit three at their café tables, because it is forbidden for more than two people to be conversing at one time in public.
I could tell you the lives of most of them in one long sentence: They’re born, they scramble for water and food every day, they feel more hunger; maybe they are given enough time to produce a child who will also be hungry; finally they are killed, dead and alone, by some bullet or a painful disease, or maybe an explosion vaporizes them, some few relatives mourn and cry out for them, wrap their bodies in dirty cloths, place them in ditches, shovel on dirt, and forget them in a few days. Are these potential scholars, scientists, poets, humanitarians? Lives I would want to collect? Who could say? They are gone forever.
Essentially, this is the news, and these are the lives. The only “notable” lives are bozo dictators and politicians, who dither and blow off, fill their personal coffers, and primp for the crowds. The “good” politicians are so busy hustling for votes, being on the take and staving off the opposition that they completely forget how to be constructive. These are not the kinds of lives I want to remember or keep, but sometimes they seem to be the only lives being lived.
Once or twice a month pictures are broadcast on the news program of the lost young people who’ve died in our American wars—gone before they have any light in their eyes, down they go into body bags, into the ground as if they’d never existed in this world, mourned only by some remote family and a small group of friends. Why do I watch this without expectation night after night? Perhaps I think it is my duty as an informed citizen. After watching this, it is such a relief to go sit at dinner with Louise, but sometimes I am not very good company.
Louise ignores the news and counts on it for nothing; she has other things on her mind. Louise is a quick study. Right away she sized up this care home and recognized it as nothing more than a staging area for advanced crones and codgers. You can either make the best of this when you come here, or wither away in your own elemental sadness like a stricken elm.
Louise is determined not to start sucking her thumb, and she won’t allow me to feel sad or sorry for myself either. I admire her attitude, so I am always anxious to see her when I go down for dinner after my waltz with death, and afterward, if the weather is nice, take an evening constitutional with her around the grassy islands in the parking lot.
But this night I’m a bit late as I step into the dining area and I see there is a man sitting at our table with her. They are in conversation. I back out of the room again, almost falling over someone’s wheelchair, and catch my breath.
I recognize this guy. His name is Danderman, and he’d been a couple of years ahead of me in high school all those years ago. He was one of the athletic hotdogs, quarterback on the football team, a jaunty shortstop/pitcher type; later I think he ran some insurance agency in Readstown, became a councilman and school board member. A small town civic leader whose tenth-tier life wasn’t worth keeping track of—but there he is in his old age, leaning toward my new friend, Louise, like the world’s biggest pooh-bah. And she is listening to him.
My chilblains start itching, my chopped sirloin nose is running. Is this jealousy I’m feeling? I guess so. I consider not going into the dining room. The singer is standing with her fin
gertips on the table and singing “Twilight Time.” She’s all over the place with the tune.
Finally I suck it up—Cyril, I say to myself, what kind of a chicken shit are you? Get in there! And so I step back into the dining room, tapping my canes loudly as I walk toward the table where Louise and Danderman are sitting. I would have been clicking my heels, too, but I’d forgotten to change from my slippers.
Louise looks up, happy to see me, and smiles her beautiful smile. “Good evening, Cyril,” she says, as she always does. “Have you met Mr. Danderman?”
Danderman gazes at me coldly, not acknowledging the introduction. “You look like you need to sit down,” he says to me, and gestures to the chair beside him. But I shuffle around and sit on the other side of Louise.
I don’t recall that I’ve ever exchanged a word with Danderman over the many years we both have lived in this same little area. He’s always been too important to acknowledge my existence. I remember that he would occasionally buffalo me aside in the halls of the high school, but he never deigned to speak to me, except perhaps once or twice a jaunty nod and passing “Whadayasay.” He always had a bimbo on his arm. Now he measures me carefully. Is he planning to move in on Louise?
Not by the few gray hairs of my chinny chin chin!
