Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  The couple moved on. The man, gray-haired and stooped, smiled at Joe as he passed. Joe turned and watched him walk away. That guy was old. “I know I look that old and gray and everything,” said Joe, “but I don’t feel that old.”

  He smiled at himself again. While sitting here, Joe often found his mind making loops in time. The other day, deep in thought, he glanced up and saw the back of a gray-haired woman passing by, and he was on the verge of calling out, “Hey, Ma!” before he caught himself.

  Joe gazed out the bay window, looking for birds. There were none in sight. He had a view of brown grass and parking lot. Out there the state flag on the tall flagpole flapped in the wind. The door opened again, and a young woman in a parka came in. She was a nurse who sometimes worked on Forest View. Her son had cerebral palsy. Little by little she’d told Joe all about her boy and her problems in getting help for him. Joe had told her to bring her boy in, and she had done so on one of her days off. Joe had sat on his bed chatting with the boy, and then pulled up his trouser leg and showed the boy his brace. “He has a helper, too,” the child had said to his mother the nurse. The boy’s face had lit up. “He has a helper, too.”

  “Hi, Joe,” said the young nurse.

  “How are ya?” asked Joe.

  She stopped, but didn’t seem to want to. “Don’t ask, Joe,” she said.

  “Come on. How’s your kid?”

  “He’s all right.” She seemed on the verge of tears or fury. She clearly didn’t want to chat now.

  “I’ll talk to you upstairs,” Joe said, and she nodded and passed inward.

  The lobby was quiet. Joe looked out the windows. “These nurses and aides, they all have troubles. That’s why they’re so nice.”

  ***

  In a moment, Art shuffled in and sat down on the sofa next to Joe. Art had recently started traveling by cane. His was made of metal but had a shepherd’s crook handle like Joe’s. Once seated, Art hooked the handle around his neck and pulled gently down on the shaft of his cane. He did this to relieve the stiffness in his neck.

  “Did you tell your doctor you only walk a little way and you get tired?” Joe asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s because you’re not walking enough!” said Joe.

  The other day, down here in the lobby, Joe said something in which Art misheard an insult. Art stood up, his hands shaking with anger. Joe was surprised, but at once he started speaking to Art in a soothing voice, excusing himself finally by saying, “I have half a brain, you know.” Which made Art laugh.

  Joe liked Art. Art usually said something that amused Joe during these lobby sittings—the time, for instance, when a youngish visitor asked Art how old he was and Art said, “Eighty-four,” and the young visitor said, “Eighty-four isn’t really old,” and Art replied, “It is if you’re eighty-four.” Art still ranked high on Joe’s list of local stoics. “By Jesus, he’s tough,” Joe would say. Art was quiet, private, and undemonstrative around most people here. When he couldn’t manage to be all those things, he tended to seek out Joe. That had happened just recently. Art had sat down next to Joe and told him this story:

  Up in his room Art had spoken to his wife’s photograph, a custom of his. “How you doin’ today? Are you up and around? When you were living, you’d say I’d never tell you I loved you. That’s true. You had to goad me.” Then Art lay down on his bed for a nap and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he saw his wife, restored to the world, sitting in his recliner at the foot of his bed. She was trying to tell him something, he thought. Art closed his eyes and opened them again, and she was gone. Had she been trying to tell him what death was like? Where had she gone? He told himself, “It can’t have been to a very bad place if she was up and around like that.”

  Tears had streaked Art’s cheeks as he’d told all this to Joe. He apologized to Joe for being “a crybaby.” But Art had wanted to know what Joe thought. Could Art really have seen his wife?

  It was a tough question for an agnostic leaning toward atheism. “If you believe it,” Joe said finally, “it’s probably true.” That had seemed to cheer Art up.

  Joe’s shoes lay in a heap by his stockinged feet. Art was looking into the middle distance, his cane hooked around his neck. Joe was practicing the word “podiatrist.” “Po-die-uh… Po-die-uh-trist,” Joe murmured to himself. He almost had it down. He still couldn’t find the word “diabetes” half the time. He’d end up having to ask Lou for help. “Lou, what do I have starts with d?” Lou would tell him. Joe would repeat it: “Diah-beetiss.” Why was it he couldn’t say “diabetes”? Joe wondered. Because he didn’t want to admit that he had it?

  “Po-die-trist. Po-die-uh-trist,” Joe was murmuring, when from the direction of the administrative corridor came the familiar call: “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!”

  Bob stumped rapidly across the carpet, saying, “Hello, hello, hello to you, hello. Hello to you. Howdee! Howdee! Howdee! No way, no way.”

  Joe turned to Art and said, “He’s cuckoo.”

  “He’s cuckoo all right,” Art said.

  Bob limped up. “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!”

  “Howdee! Howdee! Howdee!” answered Joe, outdoing Bob in volume, then in a softer voice, “How are ya?”

  “Excellent. Thank you kindly.” Then Bob realized that Joe was in his sentry chair. Bob eyed Joe and scowled. This was sport. One time Bob found Joe in his chair and, in high dudgeon, shook his cane right under Joe’s chin, while Joe tried in vain to keep from laughing. When the positions were reversed and Joe found Bob in the sentry chair, Joe would smile and say to Bob, “Why don’t you go to the bathroom?”

  “No way, no way.”

  “I’m going to wait for your bladder to fill up,” Joe would say, and Bob would start looking agitated, partly from amusement maybe and partly, it seemed, out of a real worry that Joe would get the chair somehow. Today, though, Bob made no complaint. He just pulled another chair out from the wall and sat down facing Joe, who said, “I still have my hair.” Joe sprinkled hair over his bald dome with his fingers, then bent over so that Bob could examine the top of his head.

  Bob reached out and tapped Joe’s head. Joe sat back and laughed.

  “You hot shit,” Bob said.

  “Hot stuff,” Joe said.

  “Long time ago, boy,” said Bob.

  Lou arrived and sat down on the sofa next to Art. The four men watched the traffic and chatted. And then a very thin man, who was not a resident, wheeled his wife out to the lobby. The couple sat down on the other side of the piano, near the old schoolteacher, who shook herself awake from her nap. This happened every afternoon. The couple would sit over there. Sometimes they’d argue a little with each other. Then, when he got ready to leave, the husband would wheel his wife to the north-facing bay window, and she’d sit there and watch his car drive away, waving and weeping. The scene had saddened Joe once, but no longer. It was the same scene every day, and he’d realized that the weeping woman was probably deranged and also quite wily. Her husband was a quiet man. She was loud and full of recriminations. “I don’t think there’s anything so wrong with my brain,” she’d shouted at him one time in here. “I went to a doctor and had my brain tested and I came out higher than anyone has since 1818. So don’t tell me my brain has been damaged.” Sometimes she’d start in on her husband as soon as they arrived in the lobby.

  “You didn’t even wave to me yesterday.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  The ninety-five-year-old schoolteacher, fully awakened, spoke up. “Yes, he did.”

  Over on the other side of the lobby, Lou said to Joe and the others, “She’s something.”

  “She’s not something,” Joe said. “She’s a pain in the ass.”

  Across the lobby, the husband was trying to leave. He told his wife he’d see her tomorrow. The woman started crying. “Well I hope you stay longer than you’re staying today,” she wailed. The man settled back in his seat. He was going to stay a while longer, evident
ly.

  Over on their side of the piano, Joe smiled and Bob grinned at Joe. Bob usually listened in intently on the couple’s daily lobby drama. “Oh, Jesus,” said Bob, grinning with a furtive quiver of pleasure. And Lou said, “It’s a shame.”

  There was a fair amount of traffic today. A young-looking man, carrying a small black bag and dressed in a suit, came in the front door. Joe watched the man as he passed quickly by. Joe figured him for a doctor. He had the doctor look. “Intense. They go to their patient. Intense. Goddamn fool.”

  Then Martha appeared, a spry woman with sparse gray hair. When Joe first encountered Martha months ago, he placed her in the has-all-her-buttons category. Martha had come here with her husband. Joe used to see her pushing her husband around in his wheelchair, Martha calling cheery greetings to everyone, as sane as anyone in here as far as Joe could see. But in fact Martha suffered from one of the irreversible diseases that cause dementia—probably Alzheimer’s, the doctors said. And after her husband’s death, she began to make frequent departures, pausing in the lobby to tell Joe or Bob that she was going home. Sometimes Martha would say that her husband was coming to pick her up, and sometimes that she planned to walk home. Once in a while she’d ask if anyone knew the directions. “It isn’t far, is it?” Martha would go out, walk around the building, and come back in on her own. Sometimes, though, she walked into the woods and got some distance down an old logging road before a nurse or an aide caught up with her. Sometimes she headed right down the long driveway toward Route 9. On those occasions, Bob, in his capacity as doorkeeper, would get up and limp to the receptionist’s window, informing the receptionist with elaborate gestures of his cane that Martha was heading for danger.

  Today, Martha wore her cloth winter coat. She had her pocketbook slung over one arm. She stopped in front of the men and said, “I’m going home. Maybe I won’t come back, seeing you don’t love me anymore.” She laughed gaily. “Bye-bye,” she sang.

  “Bye,” Joe said.

  “Bye-bye now,” Bob said. As she went out, Bob turned and watched through the window, as vigilant as a blue heron. But this time Martha merely circled the building and returned a few minutes later. “My husband is living,” she said to the men. She seemed to study their faces with nervous eyes. Soon Martha headed back inside.

  Over on the other side of the lobby the weeping woman’s husband had wheeled her to the bay window. This time he really was leaving. “That’s my car,” he told her, pointing out.

  “Now she’ll cry,” Joe murmured.

  Joe was right.

  “I never get a chance to go out with you anymore,” she wailed to her husband.

  “Yes, you did,” he replied. “I took you out to lunch Sunday.” He started for the door.

  “It was a lousy lunch!” she yelled after him. Then, weeping quietly, she turned back to the window and began to wave.

  That scene had by now the quality of ceremony. It signified that another afternoon neared an end. Lou said, well, he guessed it was time to go upstairs and get some pre-dinner pills. Joe told Lou he’d see him upstairs. Joe would sit here a little longer and chat with Art, while Bob listened in. In the lobby, shadows lengthened. Joe talked baseball for a while. Baseball talk warmed up the landscape for Joe.

  Art said he agreed with Joe, that Ted Williams had been a greater player than DiMaggio. Art liked Pepper Martin, too. “You should’ve seen that guy. I saw Dizzy Dean pitch. I liked to hear him announce, too. ‘And he slud into third.’”

  “I remember when he hurt his toe,” Joe said.

  “His best performance was 1934,” Art said. “He won thirty games and lost four. But Pepper Martin, he was a live wire, boy. He put everything into it. Gotta give him that. Well, that was Pepper Martin.”

  Though Art did not complain of pain, it was a rare afternoon in the lobby when he did not speak of boredom. “It’s very boring, this kind of life. If I didn’t have that bingo on Tuesday nights, I’d go nuts.” Art played bingo every Tuesday evening at a local Catholic church.

  “Oh, hell,” said Joe, “I watch TV.”

  “I can’t very well,” Art said. “Ted watches those darn soap operas and I can’t watch that stuff.”

  Joe looked to the right. Two women had come out and now stood near the front door. They buttoned up their winter coats. They were rather young by the standards of this place, and late-middle-aged by those of the wider world. Occasional or first-time visitors, Joe thought.

  “Oooooh, look at the wind out there,” said one of these women, looking over and down at Joe and Art and Bob. “You guys are lucky to be in a nice warm place like this.”

  Art was gazing out the windows. Joe stared at the women. They shivered in anticipation, for the old men’s benefit. Then they went out the door.

  “Never a lack of people to tell you how good you have it in here,” Joe said to Art as the door closed.

  “I’m in the dark a little bit,” Art said.

  “Everybody who comes in and goes out tells you how good you have it in here,” Joe repeated.

  “I’ll tell the next one, ‘You can swap places with me anytime you want,’” Art said. He smiled.

  “Well,” Joe said, “make the best of it.” Leaning down, Joe strapped on his shoes. He rose in his laborious way, inching himself to the edge of his chair, planting his cane, then lifting himself, his good arm trembling all over as it caught the weight of his body through the cane.

  “Laugh instead of cry, that’s all,” Joe said to Art. Joe chuckled, his shoulders bouncing, as if to demonstrate. “I mean it!” He laughed again.

  Bob got up quickly and stumped over to the chair that Joe had vacated at last. “Excellent,” said Bob, settling himself and peering toward the windows. “Beautiful.”

  “Good bye,” Joe said in that tone of voice he often affected, a tone full of self-mockery.

  4

  Sunlight stretched across the gray linoleum floor of Earl’s room. Earl lay on his bedspread in clothes he could have played golf in, except for the slippers he wore and the oxygen catheter. His slippers were made of brown leather, appropriate to a banker in his boudoir. Jean sat beside him, a handsome, stocky woman in her sixties with broad red cheeks, dressed in tweeds. Earl’s clothes hung loosely around him. But his voice had a quick, bird-like energy. “If I’m gonna die, I want to die at home or in a hospital. Not here.”

  Jean rose from her chair and straightened the collar of Earl’s turtleneck. He submitted without protest as she smoothed down his gray hair, which had been sticking up in back. “Like a rooster’s,” she said.

  “I don’t want to kick the bucket here,” Earl went on, looking up at her.

  “I don’t want you to kick the bucket there either.”

  “The doctor said one week to six months,” Earl said.

  “But you’re a tough old cookie.”

  “I’ve escaped five other times.” Earl stared at the wall across from his bed.

  “It’s a dirty trick.”

  “Boy, it is. Here I was seventy-eight and feeling like a fifty-year-old.”

  “And then, kafooey, you lose all this stuff overnight, practically. You think if you live a good life, keep active and healthy…”

  Earl smiled at her. “We traveled all over the place.”

  She smiled back from her chair beside him. “But you’re a spark plug. I have plenty of good ideas, but you move on them. We did more stuff because of that.”

  “I’d like to get home.” Earl looked away, then back at her, and the matter-of-fact, manly quality he put in his voice did not entirely conceal the plaintiveness implied as he said, “I hope it’s gonna be this weekend.”

  “Well, don’t push it, honey.” Jean looked down at her lap. “Please don’t push it. I’d like to have just a calm weekend before you come home.”

  “Well, okay,” Earl said briskly. His voice quickened. “Then let’s make it Monday. If it’ll help you.”

  “That would be much better.”

&n
bsp; Earl’s roommate often sat on the other side of the room in his wheelchair facing the TV, which belonged to him. He didn’t seem to listen in on Jean and Earl’s conversation, but now and then he broke into it. He seemed to be talking to them. “Those boys they put in the CCC camps during the Depression got thirty a month and we got fifteen. That caused a lot of resentment,” said Earl’s roommate. “And there was this colored girl had a baby right on the trail.”

  “Goodness,” Jean said. She turned back to Earl.

  “Those garbage-disposal units, they all have a reset on them,” Earl’s roommate said.

  “You want your TV on?” Earl called from his bed.

  “I don’t care,” said his roommate from his wheelchair.

  Earl picked up the remote control. His roommate sometimes had trouble operating the thing. Earl flicked on the TV. “He likes soap operas,” Earl explained to Jean as voices full of intrigue and passion, from Days of Our Lives, filled the room.

  The TV seemed a comforting presence at this moment. It made a barrier around Jean and Earl in their corner of the room. They talked about the trip to Florida that they had planned for March. “I was hoping we’d go, but it doesn’t look like it,” Earl said. “I just want to get home. The doctor gave me a week to six months.”

  “But you mustn’t think of that as a sentence,” Jean said. “That’s just a guess. I wish he hadn’t said anything.”

  “I did say, ‘Now, lookit, Doctor, I’m not a kid anymore.’ And he said, ‘A week or six months.’” Earl looked pensive. He pursed his lips. “If I’m gonna go, I’d just as soon go fast and not suffer through another heart attack.” Then he looked at Jean again, as if trying to read her face, and said, “But I want to die at home. The point is, the atmosphere here isn’t helping.”

  “I don’t think it’s the atmosphere.” Jean leaned close to him. She touched his leg. “It’s what’s happening to you. You have a nice room and services at your fingertips that you wouldn’t have at home. You’ve got to be creative about it. You know that little poem about God give me the ability to change what I can change?”