Old Friends

by Tracy Kidder

  It seemed that most of the staff would just as soon yield on this point and get the meeting over with. Only Lou now stood in the way. “Mr. Freed,” said one of the Linda Manor nurses, “there’s a list of DNRs at every nurses’ station.”

  Lou pursed his lips. The surveyor said again that the problem of per diem staff was separate. They should be trained in the procedures—“in-serviced.” The issue of not resuscitating certain residents should be discussed with the per diem staff.

  “It should be discussed with a resident’s family,” said Lou.

  He’d gotten a little confused, obviously. He must have thought they’d turned to the subject of how Do Not Resuscitate orders get made, not the dots on the doors. The surveyor looked across the circle at Lou. She paused. Was she considering helping him get back on track? If so, she thought better of it. Yes, she said, a DNR was something that should be discussed among families.

  The whole argument had been pointless anyway. She won it before it began. She was going to protect residents from the indignity of those dots whether the residents liked it or not.

  “It’s been a learning experience,” the administrator said to the surveyor.

  The surveyor smiled. “Yes, it has.”

  As the meeting disbanded, Lou moved to the chief surveyor’s side. He said, “This is where the Nudniks sit.” He gestured at Bob’s row of five chairs, neatly arranged near the dining room door.

  The surveyor was a little taller than Lou. She smiled down at him. “What’s a nudnik?”

  “A pest,” Lou said. He smiled toward her voice and hazy shape. “You’re a nudnik.”

  ***

  It is often said that the old resemble little children. This is true in only one sense: they are often treated similarly. Many people would no more take advice from a ninety-two-year-old than a six-year-old. But many of the staff of Linda Manor had one by one found their way into Lou and Joe’s room for just that purpose. Not all the advice that Joe gave was solicited or followed, vasectomy being his main solution to many family problems. But Joe had several regular clients now, invited in for consultations about alimony. Many came to see both men, to talk about their troubles and to receive Lou’s calm suggestions and Joe’s peremptory ones, often less like suggestions than commands. Their favorite day-shift aide used their room as a sanctuary. When events in other rooms that morning or her sons’ behavior last night upset or saddened her, she’d come in and talk awhile just to get cheered up. On especially harried evenings, the 3-to-11 charge nurse would spend her coffee break sitting in a chair across from the two men’s beds, telling them her troubles. “They have a tendency to calm me down,” she said.

  On a summer evening Lou and Joe walked together to the nurses’ station for their evening pills. They looked like two retired vaudevillians, walking side by side on canes. The nurse on duty, standing behind her pill cart, said she didn’t like to see nighttime come. “I like it,” Joe said, “because I shack up with nurse’s aides.”

  “What?” said the nurse. She looked confused.

  “He’s having an hallucination,” Lou said.

  Then the nurse got it. She smiled. “In your dreams,” she said to Joe, handing him his pills.

  Joe left chuckling, saying, “In my dreams.”

  A little later Lou returned to the nurses’ station and flicked on the night lights. And then April came in to put lotion on Joe’s feet. The other day April brought in her new boyfriend for the two men to examine. Joe had told her he approved of the boy. Now, as she rubbed the lotion onto Joe’s right foot, she remarked that she was moving into an apartment.

  “How much it cost you?” Joe asked.

  “Five hundred, plus phone and utilities.”

  “You don’t make that much,” Joe said.

  “I take home almost three hundred a week,” she said. Then she broke the real news. “I’m moving in with Eric.”

  “Get married,” Joe said.

  “I’m waiting for him to ask me.”

  “You girls—” Joe began.

  “Careful,” April said. “I’ve got your foot.” She held the foot slightly aloft, the one with the big toe missing.

  “No,” said Joe. “You girls take too many chances. There’s a girl here I won’t mention went with a guy and now he’s got another girlfriend.”

  “Do I look worried? I’m not worried at all.”

  “That’s why I don’t like the men,” Joe said as April pulled off her rubber gloves and tossed them in the trash can. “Eric’ll quit you and leave you with the apartment.”

  “Gosh. Have a little faith.”

  “I’ll have faith when you get married!”

  “Don’t get snippy with me.” April put her hands on her hips.

  “I’m not snippy with you,” Joe said. “I’m snippy with Eric.”

  “I’m waiting patiently for him to ask me.” April started out of the room. She stopped at the door. “Just because we’re living together doesn’t mean we’re gonna have a sexual relationship.”

  Joe laughed. “Goodbye,” he called.

  “It may be so, but I don’t know,” sang Lou from his bed, the covers up to his chin.

  4

  It was either 1915 or 1916. Outside the gate of the factory that had begun to make the first all-steel car bodies stood a long line of men. An old gentleman with a white goatee, wearing a Panama hat—he looked like an old southern colonel to Lou—was walking down the line, conducting job interviews. “What can you do, son?” he asked the man in front of Lou.

  “I can do anything, sir.”

  “Sorry, can’t use you,” said the colonel, and he moved on to Lou, who now knew what he shouldn’t say.

  “What can you do?” he asked Lou.

  “Well, I’m willing to do anything, sir. But I’d like a job in the electrical plant.”

  “There’s no job in that department,” the Colonel said. “But I’ll get you another.”

  Seated by the window, Lou said, “I started in the door department. Twenty-seven cents an hour, ten hours a day, and six hours Saturday. And no coffee break. It hadn’t been invented then.”

  Lou hadn’t worked long in that factory before he noticed that the procedure for drilling holes in the car doors could be improved. The men who did that work drilled the holes and then they tapped the threads. Lou went to the foreman and said, “Why can’t they put that hole in there and tap it at the same time?”

  The boss brushed his suggestion aside. “Oh, that won’t work.”

  “Okay,” said Lou from his seat by the window. “I was just a kid. But six months later, when I started working in the electrical department, they were doing it.”

  Lou still got results. These many months ago, he’d gotten Joe into attending M&M’s and into eating prunes, and, more recently, into telling his wife he loved her over the phone, at least once in a while, and maybe Joe was swearing less, but maybe not just now, since this was baseball season. He had gotten results when he’d explained to Dave, the boss of the kitchen, that cabbage should be cut across the grain. And the Forest View night lights always went on at the proper time now.

  But Lou didn’t know how many times he’d told Bruce, the director of maintenance, that the elevators needed attention, and so did the air-conditioning system, only to hear Bruce politely reassure him that everything was fine. And this business of having residents wait uncomfortably outside the dining room until a nurse’s aide arrived—Lou had harped on that at many Resident Council meetings. State law, he was told, required that a nurse’s aide be present to supervise before residents entered the dining room. What was the reason? Because, he was told, some residents might choke on their food, and nurse’s aides were trained in the Heimlich maneuver. Well, Lou wanted to know, why not train the dietary aides? They were trained, he was told. Well, then, why not let the residents sit down at their tables before the nurse’s aide arrived? Because regulations required that a nurse’s aide be on hand.

  “Meshugge,” Lou said
upon reaching this dead end.

  The other day, during this summer’s first heat wave, a fire started in one of the motors of the air-conditioning system. All the residents had to eat inside their rooms until the thing was fixed. Lou sought out a supervisor. If the authorities were so afraid of people choking on their food, Lou asked her, then how could they let people eat unsupervised inside their rooms? The supervisor said the aides were on lookout in the halls. “Meshugge,” Lou said afterward. He sighed.

  “I’m a whistle blower,” Lou said. He spoke without obvious pride in the fact, as if it were just a condition that he’d have to put up with. He’d saved up a number of items to talk to Bruce about, so as not to be pestering him constantly. Now Lou went off on his cane, searching the building for Bruce’s voice. He heard Bruce talking in a corridor downstairs, and made for him. “Bruce?” said Lou. “Bruce, I don’t want to be a troublemaker, but who’s supposed to clean the showers?”

  “Housekeeping,” Bruce said.

  “When?”

  “When they can get in,” Bruce said.

  Lou said he felt the showers should be mopped and sprayed with disinfectant after every use. Bruce said the nurse’s aides were supposed to do that.

  “Because you hear so much about athlete’s foot,” Lou went on.

  “Okay, Louie. We’ll look into it. I’m sure it’s supposed to be mopped up every day.”

  “I’ve never seen anyone mopping it. And the other thing I talked to you about the other day.”

  “The handrails,” Bruce said.

  In various parts of the building Lou found some handrails, which he relied on, sticky. Bruce said he was taking care of that.

  Lou went on with his list. Bruce always had time for Lou. Working here with only one helper, he didn’t always have time to follow up on Lou’s suggestions. Lou said he’d noticed that the non-slip strips on the floors of the showers were gone. Bruce said he was working on that. The last strips he used hadn’t stuck.

  “Who’d ya buy from?”

  “Brigham’s.”

  “Why don’t you go right to the source? And by that I mean 3M.”

  Bruce had gone to them, he said, but their stuff was too expensive.

  “That reminds me,” Lou said. “I still need a little piece of double-faced tape.”

  “For your soldiers.”

  They talked a while longer. Bruce and his assistant had erected a couple of forest green, fringed canopies on the grounds outside. Lou had heard about the canopies. He hadn’t inspected them, but he had some advice to lend. Bruce might want to consider anchoring the canopies with concrete blocks, just as Lou himself did, a few years back, when he erected a children’s swing set for a friend of Ruth’s. “The thing held up pretty good,” said Lou, hanging his cane on a handrail so he could depict what he had done. “Four concrete blocks.”

  “Anchored it down,” Bruce said. “Well, we’ll look into it, Louie.” But Bruce was just humoring Lou this time. Bruce had already put up the canopies and he thought them sturdy enough.

  Lou headed back upstairs. “I wonder if I should keep stirring the pot. See, when I was working in Burlington, safety was part of my job.” Lou nodded to himself. “It’s a little late in the game for me to change my ways.”

  ***

  Lou knew Joe’s pneumonia hadn’t altogether left. Joe still hadn’t gone back to the exercise bike. He still felt too short of breath, but hadn’t said much about the problem, to Lou or to the staff. Lou wished that Joe would sit up more often, but he didn’t feel that he could chide him about that anymore. He listened in silence to Joe cough at night, and he worried. “It scares the hell out of me—pardon my French,” he said to their favorite aide when Joe was out of the room.

  Lou’s own health seemed stable, and then one day it didn’t. The trouble started over a dinner of beef stew. “I’ve yet to have a piece of stew meat around here I could chew,” Lou explained to the dietary aide. But Lou didn’t eat shellfish, so he didn’t want the alternate, which was seafood salad. So Lou asked, as had been his custom at these times for more than a year, to be given a plain cheese sandwich. But the waitress returned to say that Dave had left orders not to slice any cheese. Lou ended up with a meager supper—“four crumbly little pieces of toast with a little cream cheese on them”—and he was furious.

  Joe told Lou to calm down. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Lou get this riled up. It couldn’t be good for a man Lou’s age to get so angry, Joe thought. Damn that kitchen. If he had two working hands, he’d have gone in there and pushed the cook aside and made the cheese sandwich himself. Even he could make a plain cheese sandwich. It wouldn’t cost anyone much to give Lou a plain cheese sandwich.

  It might have been coincidence, but all that night Lou’s left side ached, and then around midnight he awakened with a pain on the left side of his chest. He recognized it. He’d had severe angina a couple of times, but not since coming to Linda Manor. This felt different, a fluttering feeling and what he thought of as “a little knip,” like a hand in his chest grasping his heart and giving it a twist. The sensations frightened Lou. They always did. The world shrinks at such moments. It becomes not much larger than one’s chest. But the pain wasn’t strong enough to justify his calling the nurse. If he called the nurse, he’d wake up Joe, and the nurse wouldn’t do anything that Lou couldn’t do for himself. He leaned out from his bed, pulled open the dresser drawer, and his hand found the special compartment that held his pills of nitroglycerine. Lou put a pill under his tongue. As it dissolved, so did the pain. He lay awake for a few minutes, to be sure it wasn’t coming back, then drifted off to sleep.

  Lou reported all this to the nurse the next morning. He figured it was his own fault. He’d gotten too angry over that business with the cheese sandwich. He said to Joe, “I’m foolish for letting myself get so upset. But I just can’t help it.”

  “Well, don’t get upset, that’s all!” Joe said.

  “I can’t control myself. When I know I’m right on something, I get upset.”

  That afternoon while Lou rested upstairs, Joe went to the lobby and, in between his coughing fits, fumed to Art and Bob. “It doesn’t do Lou any good,” Joe said. And then, as if he’d just realized it, Joe exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, you know that could kill him!” His face was suddenly gnarled, as when he was imagining his granddaughter dead from earache. Mouth open, he gave his brief, dry-heaving sob. “Goddamn fools,” Joe said. “A cheese sandwich.”

  That night Lou had another attack. This was unusual. Again, he kept the news from the staff and Joe until morning. Lou took another nitro pill and went back to sleep. But he didn’t feel right when he awoke. The pain in his chest wasn’t strong—just a pin, not a knitting needle, like something hovering. Lou took yet another nitro pill.

  Was he all right? Joe wanted to know. Maybe Lou shouldn’t go down to breakfast.

  Lou said he felt well enough to make the trip, but afterward, back in the room, Lou sat in his chair with an uncommon stillness, as if listening to distant sounds. He squeezed his eyes shut. Once in a while he seemed to wince. Joe was staring at Lou.

  “It still keeps coming and going,” Lou said. “It’s not what they call a chest pain, just a sticking in one point. It just gets me a little bit scared.”

  A nurse came in. “How you feeling now, Lou?”

  “On and off,” Lou said. “This pain keeps coming and going. It’s not severe or unbearable.”

  “Mmmm,” said the nurse.

  Joe stared on at Lou.

  “Are you going to check my vitals?” Lou asked.

  “Soon,” said the nurse.

  “I wonder if Tylenol would do some good,” Lou said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt,” said the nurse. She left the room.

  Joe lay back and stared at the ceiling. Lou had these spells every so often. Sometimes they would coincide with something that upset Lou, like the time when he dreamed about giving away his woodworking tools and woke up with chest pains. Some
times the spells seemed to come all on their own. Usually they went away fairly quickly once Lou took his nitro pill. Joe had gotten used to this, in the way soldiers get used to bombardment in their bunkers. He just had to lie here and wait it out. What did the nitroglycerine actually do? Joe wondered. Why hadn’t it worked yet? Where was the nurse with that Tylenol? Joe looked across the room. Lou sat very stiffly in his chair. Joe couldn’t just lie here. He rose. “I’m gonna go find out about, uh, Tylenol, Lou.”

  At around ten, Joe’s daughter arrived for a visit. She was striking looking, in her thirties. She had dark, curly hair and was about as tall as Joe. Today she wore a gray dress. She came at least once a week to visit. She stopped as usual to kiss Joe, who, as she approached him, seemed at once to put on extra years. Beside his lovely daughter, he looked like an old pensioner.

  Then she crossed the room, leaned down, and kissed Lou on the top of his head.

  Lou smiled for Joe’s daughter, but he continued to sit in that stiff, still way.

  “How are you, Lou?” Joe’s daughter asked.

  This was a dangerous question at Linda Manor. Ask the wrong person and you might get a real answer. But never from Lou. In the time Joe had known him, Lou had always said “fine,” even when he wasn’t.

  “Lousy,” Lou replied.

  Joe sat up and stared at Lou.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Joe’s daughter.

  “Out of breath,” Lou said.

  “What is it?” Joe demanded.

  Lou shrugged.

  Joe’s face contorted, his mouth open. He looked at his daughter and said, “That’s the first time I ever heard him say ‘lousy.’”

  “I must be getting old.” Lou smiled. “Phil said he was watching a cooking show. They put pansies in the salad. I figure I’ll go tell Dave.”

  Lou never said “lousy.” Now he was trying to cover up his indiscretion, to put Joe and his daughter at ease. By Jesus, he was tough, Joe thought.