Exit Lines Page 2

It’s the little things, isn’t it?

  While other little things can turn at the flip of an ankle into quite large things.

  To the left, opposite the bathroom, is a cupboard unit with drawers for sweaters, underwear, nightgowns and scarves, and an open space below into which her tiny new fridge will fit nicely. Then comes the closet, with its two doors that do not open outwards but run side to side. It’s nothing like her walk-in at home, but it will contain, she supposes, what she has reduced herself to.

  She must learn not to think home of the place she has left, even if she lived there for half a century and has been here for maybe ten minutes. So much will need swift redefining; for instance, what’s referred to here as the living room, with its sturdy bluey-grey spillproof carpeting and pale yellow blank walls, where she will shortly distribute the loveseat, easy chairs, recliner, little tables and TV and bookshelves and pictures that are on their way—it will be her sitting room. That being, she expects, her main activity in it.

  It’s the picture window and what lies beyond that clinched the deal. The window is separated from the river by a slow slope and a few metres of cattails and other marsh grasses. Anglers will float by in their boats. In winter—she’s not sure about this—there will perhaps be skaters and cross-country skiers. In any event, for the most part the effect should be pastoral.

  Beside the window with the clinically white vertical blinds she intends to replace is a second door, this one to the outdoors and her own private deck, where in good-weather seasons she will arrange her own private lawn furniture: a chaise, two cushioned upright folding chairs, a white metal table with legs weighted against winds springing up, and an adjustable yellow umbrella. She sees herself out there in loose trousers and shirt, a book and binoculars, the world of the sitting room left well behind.

  It was irritating having to put up an argument for a main-floor, riverside suite with a deck. Annabel Walker—she must remember Sylvia, although they carefully did not touch on histories and old times—Annabel tried hard on their tour to persuade Sylvia to live on the second floor, where the most lucid and able are supposed to gather in merry segregation. “We’d prefer,” Annabel said, “to keep our main-floor spots as much as possible for residents who need a little more help—maybe some supervision with the shower and toilet—or those who can’t move so independently.” Those would be the residents who, Annabel clearly meant, would be tottering about behind walkers, or bit by bit losing their marbles, little coloured glass balls rolling out of their brains, tripping them up.

  Who would therefore keep staff on the hop, and so were best kept handy, saving distance and trouble. “I think not,” Sylvia said. “Having a deck suits me best. Have you considered that your plan is entirely backwards? Of course that’s up to you. And your other residents. But as for me, this is my choice.”

  Annabel sighed, an aggrieved, unpromising sound. “Well, as long as you realize that all your neighbours may not be as congenial to you as the people upstairs.” It’s a shame that Annabel looks like her mother: pudgy and pudding-skinned and, given that she’s managing a fair-sized establishment, distinctly unauthoritative. She’d have a better shot at being more, oh, electric, if she resembled her father. It was once a mystery to Sylvia how Peter came to be married to a woman like Annabel’s mother. Men marry down, that must be it. They may occasionally mistress up, but they do tend, poor short-sighted things, to wife down.

  Not that that matters. Sylvia will now be in a world consisting mostly of long-lived women, men who would be her contemporaries being for the most part, like her own husband, Jackson, not to mention Annabel’s father, Peter, already dead.

  This is also a place where, if she’s not careful, people will take to diminishments like sweetheart and dear, which will not do.

  And meals will not sufficiently cater to whims, which is why she bought the little snack-and-wine-sized refrigerator. Whatever happens to major ones, she has no intention of being deprived of minor desires.

  Staff will generally be underskilled and ill paid. Some will be kind, some cruel, which she can hope will cause them to be fired, but they’re unlikely on the whole to be very bright. Annabel sounded proud of a staff-to-resident ratio that is in fact not awfully remarkable once broken down by simple arithmetic into round-the-clock shifts every day of the week. “A nutritionist plans the meals,” Annabel said, “and as well there will always be fresh homemade snacks in the lounge, and free tea and coffee. We’re hoping people will gather in the lounge, get to know each other, enjoy the entertainments. And we’d like to build up the library with people’s own books.” Presumably the mobile and lucid will be able to figure out how to use the elevator to get from their second-floor perches to these assets of the main floor. Sylvia forbore making this remark to Annabel.

  “Of course we have an activities coordinator.” Of course they do. This will be the person urging Sylvia to make fiddle-fingered crafts, or play word games, or sing along to heartfelt old songs. “And naturally we want everyone to keep up with their own interests.” That will rather depend on their interests, won’t it? Sylvia didn’t say that, either.

  The larger point is that staff, however ill paid or unskilled, will arrive when she presses the unattractive button she will wear like a necklace on a cord around her neck. They will help her get dressed and do other personal tasks that require deft fingers. She used to have very deft fingers. “Your father could tell you,” she might advise Annabel. Now her clumsy, painful, swollen-knuckled hands look to her like someone else’s entirely, which is eerie and jarring.

  If she falls in another of those terrifying, bone-defying topplings, no doubt she will still experience the startling sensation of genuine fear as she watches the floor and her body merge in slow motion, but now there won’t be the panic about what happens next: someone will come pick her up. These are the trade-offs of moving to a place like this. The trick is never to trade too much, or too swiftly. Not for her the quick, naive, goggle-eyed Look! Beads! Here, take all of Manhattan!

  Where the hell are her things?

  Here they come now, with shufflings and bumpings and young men’s voices out in the corridor. This will be fine. Fine enough. It only takes getting used to, and a little time to get settled. It’ll remain a shock for a while, being incarcerated even in this genteel, open-doored prison. Not that she intends to be excessively jailed, and sorting out who and what still interest her from who and what no longer do is going to be interesting. As will be the fresh challenge of acquainting herself with people she might not otherwise know; a potentially stimulating project, a means of taking advantage of opportunity, taking charge of a new environment, making the most of necessity.

  The most positive possible spin.

  Besides, as Jackson used to say about handling the more peculiar legal affairs of so many town residents, “Some shit always happens.” It wasn’t always funny then, but it is now, and she is laughing when the young men arrive bearing her loveseat between them. Perhaps she sounds mad, laughing all by herself and at nothing; or maybe she just looks typically addled and old. Which makes her laugh again, at the useful camouflagings of age and its occasionally happy invisibilities, which is how it can keep secrets, and even some kinds of freedom.

  4

  NOT ALL THE OLD MEN…

  AH, BUT NOT ALL THE OLD MEN ARE DEAD. Canting slightly sideways, with a middle-aged man in a dark grey suit at his left, a middle-aged woman in a daffodil track suit pushing his wheelchair, George Hammond is about to take up residence in a room across and down the hall from Sylvia Lodge. He doesn’t see Sylvia in her doorway because his leftward vision is blocked not only by the man in the suit, but by the infuriating residues of a stroke.

  How well George Hammond has done to be up and about in this surely glorious universe; how gritty and determined a man he must be to have come so far: from his kitchen floor to this spiffy, optimistic new building. He should be pleased with himself, he ought to feel proud and happy and safe.

 
He does not.

  If he can’t see Sylvia, she can see him, there’s nothing wrong with either her eyes or her memory. Of course she recognizes George Hammond, who ran a shoe store for years. His surprisingly delicate hands have clasped Sylvia’s ankles and cupped the soles of her feet, they have pinched at her toes to demonstrate the roominess of loafers and high heels and golf shoes, although they haven’t done so for quite a while now, since he went out of business. The woman with him is likely his daughter. She’s of an age to have gone to school, more or less, with Sylvia’s Nancy. Perhaps the man is her husband. If so, they live someplace fairly distant—out west, maybe? Sylvia has heard something but doesn’t remember exactly, why would she?

  He had the beguiling smile of the natural salesman. “Good fit, I’d say,” beaming upwards from the stool at her feet. “And they show off your legs.” Sylvia had sleek, shapely legs, it was true that a nice pair of high heels set them off. Compliments were pleasing, even from a merchant who, one might assume, only really paid attention to people from the knees down.

  He is not smiling now. His face looks dragged down, by stroke or gravity, who can tell? It is enlivened, however, by temper.

  Good for him. Young people should not get off lightly when they do these things to the old. Sylvia has avoided the problem by keeping herself out of anyone’s hands, even benign ones, or Nancy’s. Today’s move is in the nature of a coup in that sense. A triumphant fait accompli. And isn’t the French language useful.

  Also, sauve qui peut. “No, no,” she tells the two hired young strangers carelessly distributing her possessions, “that chair goes by the window. Put the loveseat across from the TV, between the end tables.” George must be what Annabel meant by the decrepit coming to roost on the main floor. Depressing, really, and this isn’t even a nursing home, the next step downwards en route to incapacity’s basement. Unlike nursing homes, with their particular standards for the amount of actual medical care required in the course of a day, not to mention a considerably less elegant ambience, this is a retirement lodge, the Idyll Inn—hard to imagine who dreamed that name up. “Sounds like one of those twee cottage names,” Sylvia told her friend Mabel when she was deciding to move here. “Dun Roamin’. Bide-a-Wee. You know? The Idyll Inn, my rear end. The Belly-Up is more like it.”

  And Mabel said, as intended, “Oh, Sylvia, you are bad,” and giggled. The trick is not to let people know how much certain things matter. Sympathy is bad enough, pity utterly deplorable.

  In which case, Sylvia must deplore her brief pity for George Hammond. For all she knows, he’s like her: weighing choices and odds, making his decisions himself. She would certainly resent being used as an example against him, but that’s what is happening inside his room as Colette MacPherson, voice pitched high with strain, says, “You have a good-looking neighbour, Dad, did you notice? And she sure doesn’t look unhappy, she looks like somebody who figures this place’ll suit her just fine.”

  “Blah blah blah,” says George Hammond as clearly as he can manage. “Blah blah blah.”

  She sighs. “Look, Dad, all your own things are here, isn’t that nice? Not just your clothes but furniture and even the photographs—it’s the same as your living room at home, and just as big. The only difference is that you won’t be alone, and you’ll have help if you need it. We’re lucky you don’t need real nursing care, so we could get you in here. Lots of people want to live in a bright new place—did you notice there’s even flowers on the tables out in the dining room?—and for sure I’ll feel better, knowing you’re safe.”

  “Blah blah blah,” says her father.

  “Window,” he adds. Because against his better judgment that big span of glass, even though it overlooks mud at the moment, does have its appeals. And according to Colette there’s a nice-looking woman right down the hall—who would that be, someone he knows? He used to know practically everybody in town, although he no longer remembers them all and can put names to even fewer. Still, words return one by one, sometimes creeping the entire way to whole and mainly ungarbled sentences. It’s like magic when that happens. Like a starburst in his head, something as ordinary as knowing words, making a sentence.

  He could just as well say, however awkwardly, “Push me to the window, please,” instead of “Window,” but it feels useful to emphasize disabilities. Maybe it’s pitiful when weakness is a man’s best weapon—his only one—but at least it’s only an exaggeration, not a lie.

  Why is she doing this to him? “Why?” he asks jaggedly. “To me?” It’s irritating that Bill, the insurance fellow who years ago took Colette half across the country and still keeps her there, puts a tailored arm around her when she cries. It makes George look like the one in the wrong.

  It’s also annoying that it’s Bill who says, “We’ve been over this, George. We’re not doing something to you, we’re doing our very best for you. Look at this place—I’d live here myself if I needed a little help getting along, and let’s face it, you do. We’re too far away to give you that, and anyway we wouldn’t always know how, and besides, we both work all the time. Here, they know what to do so you’re safe and well cared for. And like Colette says, you’ve got your own things, and you’ll have friends here, you know. Now,” his tone firming, “we had to guess how you’d want things arranged, but if you tell me what you’d like changed, I’ll move it around now, no problem.”

  “Blah blah blah.” No problem, says the smartass, but where’s the insurance against a perfectly good life turning upside down in a kitchen? What would the premiums on a policy like that amount to, Mr. Insurance Executive? “Why” and “to me” isn’t even what George means, really. What he means is, “How does this happen?”

  This is how:

  An eighty-year-old man gets up in the night because he has a bad headache that requires an Aspirin. He makes his way to the bathroom cupboard in darkness, because after years and years in a house, who needs lights? Then he’s off to the kitchen for a glass of water, and next thing he’s waking up on the floor in the dawn light with the strangest dead-fish quality to at least half his limbs and an inability to picture just what a fish would be, much less say the word. He lies waiting for answers, and learns that getting up, or unscrambling the sense of things, is not going to come naturally.

  He’s no quitter, George Hammond. He’s a man who, if he can’t get what he wants one way, will—except for the store, he finally couldn’t save it; or Alice, he couldn’t fix her, either—invent another route to his goal and desire. He has a creative nature that way. So he lies on the kitchen floor waiting for capacities to return. He tests this and that and finally gets his right leg to obey him, however reluctantly, but not his left leg. He can only move his left arm by gripping and hauling it with his right hand. He tries saying help, experimentally, and hears fmphf. There is no one to help. What’s her-name is in a place. Something. Never mind. He’s alone.

  He wets himself, because he doesn’t have a choice in the matter. The prospect of shitting himself is more dire. It would be nice if what’s-her-name, Alice, was here so he could close his eyes and be taken care of, but as it is, he has to take care of himself, so he bends his right leg and pushes and slides back slightly on the wet linoleum, and repeats the motion until overhead he can see the grey cord of the telephone reaching down to its plug, and rolling slightly he grasps the cord with his right hand and pulls, pulls again, until the phone teeters on the edge of the kitchen table and he closes his eyes because when it comes down it will hit him, which it does, glancingly, on the forehead.

  The light in the kitchen is no longer dawn but full, bright day. Somewhere along the inch-by-inch length of his journey, he has lost time. He has also left his pyjama bottoms behind.

  His fingers pursue the phone fallen beside him, but what next? There are numbers for help, but they’re gone from his mind. There’s a single programmed one on the top row, though, if he can find it. He tries once, shifts his blind fingers, tries again and when he hears the voice of rescu
e, oh, what triumph!

  “Please state your emergency,” he hears, and his heart sinks. “Mmph,” he says, which is still not close to “help.” “Mphlmph,” he tries, and then, reshaping his lips around an unwieldy tongue, whispers, “Aylay.”

  The woman’s voice is calm and, to his ears, tender in a new and strange way. “I understand,” she says. How could she? But how grateful he is that she understands and is kind. “You just stay on the line. Don’t hang up”—as if he could—“I’m tracing your address, and we’ll have help on your doorstep as quick as we can. When you hear the siren you’ll know we’re just about there,” and when she rattles off his street name and number he sighs a yes down the line, “so you stay with me here and I’ll stay with you, and even if I have to put you on hold for a minute or two, you hang on,” and she talks him to sleep, content as a baby, slumbering in her arms, sucking her tit. Which wakes him up with a start. Either that or his name. “Are you George Hammond?” she’s asking. “That’s the name that comes up on my screen—is that you?”

  “Ahh,” he says. He hears sirens down the block. Now crunching wheels in his driveway. Now fists on his door—as if he could rise up and open it.

  “Don’t you worry,” the tender voice says, “they’ll find their way in. Just relax. I’ll stay on till they get to you.”

  “Stay with me forever,” he would like to say. “Don’t ever leave.”

  What a crowd in his kitchen! A police officer, two ambulance people—the street must be whirling with lights, what will the neighbours be thinking? He doesn’t want to let go of the phone, but is no match for the fingers peeling his from the receiver. He hears a man’s voice say, “Stroke,” and “Yeah, thanks, we’re okay here now,” and there’s a rumbling of voices before he’s rolled one way, and when he rolls back he’s on something being raised and clicked into place like an ironing board only on wheels. He tries lifting his right hand in some kind of gesture, but it turns out he’s strapped down, all limbs confined. There’s a bump and a jolt, and doors slam and they’re off, the siren making its rising and descending whoo-whoo and a woman in blue fussing above him with one thing and another.