Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  “It’s pigs. De social life of pigs. It sho’ am a swill book.”

  One of the residents in the audience said to another, “Well, at least they have a sense of humor.” Behind them, though, the younger contingent laughed and laughed. As the show went on, the female residents at one table in the audience discussed the finger foods. Why did the kitchen serve them food you needed teeth to eat? And where were the napkins? But the rest of the audience drowned out most of that conversation. The audience laughed at all the right moments and applauded at the end of every song, dialogue, and skit.

  Joe, playing Simon Legree in Eleanor’s father’s egregious “Uncle Tom’s Nabin,” fumbled his lines, trying to read his script. Eleanor prompted him, hissing from stage left, and Joe found his voice. “I’ll have his blood!” Joe roared, flicking a riding crop over Uncle Tom, Linda Manor’s chief of maintenance, who lay snoring on the floor. The third actor in this bit, a retired school principal in a wheelchair with a painful-looking hump, declared, her mordant voice improving the line: “You can’t. He’s anemic.”

  Eleanor donned a bonnet, tied its strings under her chin, and remained seated beside the drummer for her solo. “My mother sang this song in my father’s revue when I was two and a half years old, but I’m no singer, so I will speak it,” she told the audience, and then slipped into character, hunching her shoulders, clasping her hands together, pulling them to her chest, and saying, “I’m an old maid, an old maid. That’s what the people say. Although…” She paused, her hands coming forward, palms facing up. “Although I’m very fond of men, they never come my way…”

  Eleanor was the smoothest of the performers, clearly a trained actress acting. But Winifred, in the role of a nagging, weeping wife to a bankrupt ne’er-do-well, was utterly convincing, a natural talent now exposed. Everyone knew Winifred, and she got a big hand when her able-bodied partner in the skit wheeled her out before the audience. Winifred wore a bouffant, curly brown wig, like a headdress, and a satin print dress with perhaps two pounds of costume jewelry around her neck. Her wheelchair had leg extenders on which her swollen feet and legs rested, pointing straight out at the audience. Winifred was huge all over and in outline nearly shapeless, but for all of that she looked regal, like a queen in a peculiar dream. Her voice was very strong. It seemed a pity that she didn’t have more lines.

  Lou came on near the end of the show, rising and walking slowly on his cane to center stage. Lou didn’t use any of Eleanor’s father’s material. He did three old vaudeville turns remembered from his youth. They were two-man acts. Lou did both voices. “On the way out I met an old friend of mine who just came back from a course in school where he learned all about nature. I said, ‘You did? What is nature?’ ‘Well, I’ll tell ya. You plant a sweet potato and it grows, that’s nature.’ ‘Oh, nature is a sweet potato? Ah, you didn’t learn nothin’. Tell the people everything you learned.’ ‘I’ll tell them everything we both learned. It won’t take any longer.’”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Lou said at last, “we’ll be here tonight, tomorrow night, and probably Saturday night. Provided police and weather conditions permit.” The audience laughed uncertainly. “That’s all, folks,” Lou added, and everybody cheered.

  Soon Mr. Interlocutor was saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, the finale by the entire company,” and, led by the nursing supervisor’s fine, strong soprano, they began, “Ta ta ta tum, on they come…” The front row of actors was supposed to stand to sing.

  Lou stood up. Beside him, Joe inched himself to the edge of his low metal chair, planted his cane, and started to rise. Many days had passed since he had gone to M&M’s or ridden the bike, because of his blister. Joe’s arm trembled. He rose a little, and then settled back. He tried again. His arm shook as it tried to push him up.

  Lou turned and reached down to help, but by then the song was almost over, and Joe waved him away.

  7

  Christmas carolers were abroad, and they were drawn to nursing homes like missionaries to the South Seas. Some groups gave semiformal concerts in the activity room. Many residents attended. They enjoyed the singing, especially when they were asked to sing along and when children came. The sight of children brought sudden infusions of color into the faces of almost every resident. The hearts of even the listlessly demented seemed to pump harder. But residents sometimes had no choice except to listen, since some groups serenaded in the corridors of the nursing units. All things grow oppressive if repeated enough. It seemed as if every religious and civic group had to come in and sing carols. Some residents, Eleanor particularly, began groaning at the news of yet another group’s coming. But the carolers meant well, and it was Christmas season.

  A nursing home proceeds to many different clocks. Illnesses and injuries hold people to different schedules from the world outside them. Time in Lou and Joe’s room became the time of the blister on Joe’s toe. It was marked by the judicious looks and noncommittal words of the nurses, and by Joe’s growing weariness with the question, “How’s the blister, Joe?” “It’s, uh… Oh, the hell with it,” he said, waving the question away.

  Joe still could not return to M&M’s or ride the exercise bike. But he couldn’t resist weighing himself each morning. “Good God, I gained a pound,” Joe said, lying on his back on his bed. “I think it was the Jell-O last night.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lou said from his chair by the window. He added, “When you were bicycling like mad, you weren’t losing weight.”

  “I wasn’t bicycling like mad,” Joe said. But his voice wasn’t vehement. He didn’t even sit up in bed to argue this point anymore. What was the sense of arguing? Lou was right, and Joe might as well admit it.

  “Yes, you were,” said Lou. “I told you you were going at it too hard. Like do or die.”

  Joe gazed up at the ceiling. “That’s right. Eingeshpart. Well, I paid for it. Two weeks and it won’t heal.”

  Joe missed the bike. “It made my leg feel strong, you know.” But everyone here had problems of one sort or another, most much worse than this. The blister would pass, Joe told himself. Days ran into each other. Life in the room wasn’t all that different, really. To be at Linda Manor at all was to be laid up. Joe was just a little more laid up for now.

  He and Lou could not control most of the substance of their life in here, but they had imposed a style on it. The way, for instance, that he and Lou had come, in the past months, to deal with matters of the bathroom. Joe had to go there what seemed to him like a ridiculous number of times each day and night. He and Lou referred to the bathroom as “the library.” The mock gentility of the term amused Joe. The point was to make a joke out of anything you could around here, whether it was weakened bowels or Bob’s antics. Up in the room after breakfast, Joe would say to Lou, “I gotta go to the library. I have to do my, uh, uh, prune evacuation.”

  This room was now their home. As in any household, people entering were expected to follow local rules. The nursing staff was overwhelmingly female. Lou and Joe referred to all of them as girls, and indeed, next to them, even the middle-aged did look like girls. The staff had all, of course, been quite willing to talk frankly about matters of Lou’s and Joe’s biology. Too frankly for Lou. Too frankly for Joe, once Lou had made the point. The aides, “the girls,” used to come to the doorway cradling open in their arms the large, ledger-like Forest View “BM Book,” and they’d call loudly in, “Did either of you gentlemen have a bowel movement today?” It was Lou, some months ago now, who responded to this question by inviting in the girls who asked it, and then telling them gently, “All you have to say is, ‘Did you or didn’t you?’” The way Lou did that job impressed Joe. Lou did it so diplomatically, so much more diplomatically than Joe would have. Lou, as he liked to say, had trained all the girls by now. Joe took care of reinforcement.

  It was a morning in December, in the third week of Joe’s blister. Joe had the television news on. He and Lou were listening to the dispatches from the Middle East. It looke
d increasingly as though there would be war in Iraq. Joe watched intently, fuming now and then about the stupidity of war. He wasn’t waiting for the aide with the BM Book, but he had a question ready for her. When the aide came to the door, she asked, “For my book. Did you?”

  “Yes.” Joe tilted his head toward Lou. “And so did he.” Then, a little smile blossoming, Joe looked at the aide and asked, “And what about you?”

  “None of your business!” The aide looked embarrassed. She laughed.

  “Well, you ask me,” Joe said.

  “But I get paid for it.”

  “Good bye,” Joe said pleasantly, and went back to watching the news.

  Across the room, Lou was bending over in his chair, getting out his shot glass and bottle from his bedside dresser. Joe sat up in bed to watch. “Good God. That isn’t drinking. One shot glass. Tee-hee.”

  Lou raised the glass. “L’chaim. Cheers, Joe.” The room filled with the sweet smell of cheap brandy. The war news had concluded. Joe shut off the television and lay back on his bed. Now they’d talk. Lou was always ready to talk, and never at a loss for subjects.

  Did they offer service-connected life insurance in World War II, as they had in World War I? Lou wondered. He wished he’d bought that insurance back in 1917.

  “Mine’ll bury me,” Joe said. “It costs you pennies a month, for God’s sake.”

  “When I was first married, my wife didn’t believe in insurance. She was afraid if you got it, you’d die.” Lou shifted in his chair. He said, “One thing my wife and I discussed when she was still in her right senses, we didn’t want to be a burden on our children. In fact, before we came here we purchased a burial plot.” Joe heard Lou’s voice turn thin. He glanced at Lou. Lou’s chin was raised, his head back, his eyes closed. “She didn’t want to be a burden on the family, and it’s turned out that way.” Lou sniffled, just once. He rolled his shoulders slightly, readjusting himself in his chair, his face recomposing itself.

  Joe stared at the ceiling. He didn’t speak. What could he say? He ran his good hand downward over his face and, his face thus cleared, made a chewing motion.

  “Well,” Joe said, “I’m gonna be cremated. Take up less space. Christ almighty. When the spirit leaves you…” Joe threw his left arm high in the air and said, “Whoop!” His spirit dispatched, Joe went on, “And I’m going to heaven, and it’s going to be run by a woman.”

  Lou still had his eyes closed, but Joe had him smiling now. “Your vision.”

  “Yes, my vision,” Joe said. “Through that window. God came down and said, ‘I’m a woman,’ and I said, ‘Good!’”

  “Dan,” Lou said. “Dan sees little green men out his window.” Their fellow Forest View resident Dan was very garrulous. He once told Lou and Joe that he thought he’d seen a UFO outside his window.

  Outside, a story below their east-facing window, a grassy hillside led upward to an evergreen and hardwood forest. Some residents insisted that they once saw a bear crossing the field. Joe hadn’t seen it. He didn’t spend a lot of time gazing out. It looked cold outside, the grass brown, the oaks and maples and birches bare. It was very warm in the room. Joe raised his left arm, like a maestro conducting from bed, and he declared that he hoped his house back in Pittsfield was still in the family when he died. He hoped there would be an ice storm that day. “I want my ashes spread on the sidewalk. So nobody will slip.”

  “What if it’s summer?” Lou said.

  “Then I’ll have them put on the garden. Sure. For God’s sake.”

  Lou mentioned the story they heard on TV, of the funeral director who cut his expenses by cremating several people at once.

  “What the hell difference does it make?” Joe said.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” Lou said. “But if you want the remains of your loved one, you don’t want six or seven other people mixed in.”

  Joe laughed. He glanced at Lou, who lifted a hand from the arm of his chair and made a gun with the forefinger, saying, “Talking about ashes and stuff.”

  Joe knew what was coming, in a general way. “Yup,” Joe murmured toward the ceiling. He gazed up, his bared toe aloft on its pillow. He let himself relax into his bed. He wondered which story Lou would tell now, and if it was one already told. Sometimes Lou told new ones, or added new elements to old ones.

  “Speaking of ashes and stuff,” Lou said. “As a youngster in Philadelphia, we had quite a few oyster saloons, they used to call them. They were only open in the r months. The shells were ground up and sold to chicken farms. Then they started using them on the roads.” And there were the arcades, theaters, and vaudeville and burlesque houses on 8th Street: the Gayety, Forepaugh’s, Lubin’s Nickelodeon, the Bijou where Lou saw the first talking pictures, and the nearby sporting houses where Lou never went, though he sometimes earned a nickel by giving sailors the directions. A hawker used to set an open suitcase on a tripod on Summer Street, between Vine and Race, and pull out a postcard of a half-naked woman, moving it from side to side in front of Lou and his two schoolboy friends. All three boys wore knickers and snap-brim caps. The hawker practiced his pitch on them, and when adults appeared he would say, not unkindly, “Beat it, kids.” As Lou and his pals walked away, they’d hear the hawker saying to his customers in a singsong voice, “I’ll be here tonight, tomorrow night, and probably Saturday night. Provided police and weather conditions permit.”

  Lou’s tongue did not quite form th, so “these” came out as “dese,” but with a much softer d than in Brooklyn. His gravelly voice, not a basso profundo but from a deep place, rolled smoothly on, like the sound of a lone propeller plane in a quiet country sky. Joe could drift away on it. Lou’s voice carried on for what seemed like both a long time and no time at all. “Yup,” Joe said occasionally.

  “Ahh, dear,” Lou sighed. “The things you remember. What time is it?” He peered at his wristwatch, holding it up to within about an inch of his right eye, like a jeweler examining a precious stone. “Time to go down for lunch, Joe.”

  Months ago now, Lou had affixed, to the upper-right-hand casing of their doorway, a tiny mezuzah—the talisman found in many observant Jewish homes, to remind the inhabitants to walk in the ways of God. On his way out of the room for lunch, Lou paused in the doorway, reached up, and touched the little mezuzah. Then, after he crossed the threshold, Lou called back, “Joe, close the door.”

  Lou feared that if they left their door ajar when they went out, one of Forest View’s demented residents might ransack their room. That made sense to Joe, but Lou seemed to think he had to remind Joe to close the door every time they went out. Every time.

  “Jesus Christ,” Joe muttered to himself, “if I don’t close it, he’ll kill me.”

  Joe followed Lou toward the door. Lou always touched his mezuzah. “Lou figures that the Tribe will go to heaven,” Joe thought. “Well, for Christ’s sakes, they got no more chance than anybody. The Chinese die, they’re going to heaven?” Lou and the door. Lou and his mezuzah. But you never can tell. At the threshold, Joe reached up and touched the mezuzah, too. Then he closed the door.

  ***

  Joe’s doctor changed Joe’s antibiotic. Probably that did the trick, or maybe time deserved the credit. In any case, Joe awoke one morning near the end of December and for a moment he couldn’t even see the blister. So Joe was cleared for a return to M&M’s and stationary biking. But when Lou asked, “You coming down to M&M’s?” Joe said he didn’t feel like it today.

  With Joe it was all or nothing, Lou thought. “He’s his own worst enemy.” In the afternoon, contemplating the shape of Joe, lying over there, Lou had an idea. He got up and fetched his cane. “Joe, I’m going out for a walk.” But that didn’t work. Either Joe didn’t get the hint or he chose not to.

  Lou understood the problem. You get old and you get rusty. You go without exercise for a while, and you don’t feel like exercising anymore. But persistence had worked on Joe before. He’d just keep asking the question until Joe go
t sick of it. “Joe, why don’t you come down to M&M’s with me tomorrow?”

  “All right,” Joe said finally. He didn’t sound too happy about it, but he would be, Lou thought.

  A little later, Lou went off alone downstairs. Just to take a walk, he told Joe. Actually, Lou went to the physical therapy room, searching for the voice of Carol, the physical therapy aide who ran M&M’s and supervised Joe’s biking.

  The next morning all was just as it had been before Joe’s blister. Joe limped into the physical therapy room and took his usual seat, an armchair next to Lou’s. Carol welcomed Joe back. She told him she had attached some foam rubber pads to the pedals of the bike. That way Joe could ride it in his stocking feet, lessening the chance of another blister.

  “It was an extra thing for you to do,” Joe said to Carol. “Thank you.”

  “Well, I just wanted you to be able to use the bike again,” Carol said. She paused, then added, “But maybe not quite so violently.”

  As she said these words, Carol glanced at Lou.

  Joe’s eyes followed Carol’s to Lou. Lou was making an effort to look completely nonchalant. It showed. Joe smiled.

  Lou could sense Joe’s eyes on him. Lou rolled his shoulders, as if getting ready for the workout. Beside him, he heard Joe’s voice, directed his way. “I’m not eingeshpart!”

  8

  The New Year’s Eve celebration started at 2 P.M., in order to accommodate the nursing home’s routines and the residents’ bedtimes. A four-man combo, with drums, saxophone, accordion, and bass guitar, set up their music stands in the wide doorway to the dining room. Crepe paper streamers stretched in webs among the chandeliers, and party favors lay with every table setting. At Linda Manor’s parties, there was always the appearance of a broad dichotomy between bustle and passivity—aides and managers dressed in party hats waiting on the tables, blowing party horns and clacking party noisemakers, singing brassily along to the music, while many residents sat quietly with open mouths, or smiling, or looking grumpy. Now and then a nurse slipped in among the crowd, with pill cup in one hand and water cup in the other, and knelt down before a resident.