Old Friends

  As a result, Bob’s Stupidvising chairs were sacrificed. A dining table replaced them in the doorway. Bob scowled. Joe felt a little disappointed, but philosophical. “Oh, well.” He assumed this was the end of Stupidvising. But he underestimated Bob.

  A week went by without Stupidvising. Then on a winter morning just before lunch, Joe limped into the activity room and found five chairs arranged, once again, in the wide doorway to the dining room. Bob sat in one of the chairs. He was grinning at Joe. The chairs were all in one row now, instead of two, and they didn’t face in on the dining room. They stretched perpendicularly back from the doorway. Bob had left just enough room between the table in the doorway and the new row of Stupidvising chairs for others to pass through. Bob jabbed his cane at the chair to his left for Joe, at the chair to his right for Lou, at the other two chairs for Art and Ted, and when everyone was seated, Bob said, “Excellent! Beautiful!” Stretched out in a line this way, the five men couldn’t talk among themselves as easily as before or look directly into the dining room. But by bending forward and turning his head to the right, Joe could still see the dietary aides as they emerged from the kitchen.

  “Lou-weese!” Joe called in his falsetto as the dietary aide by that name appeared.

  Suddenly Art, in the chair to Joe’s left, began to sing, with brio, in his ringing baritone. “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise.” Joe joined in, then Bob. And Lou, who never could carry a tune, chuckled, squeezing his eyes shut.

  “Suuuu-zeee!” Joe called.

  “If you knew Sue-zee like I know Sue-zee,” Art sang.

  “Excellent! Excellent!”

  They used to sing only before Wednesday’s lunch, when a piano player from outside would play songs on the upright. Now they began to serenade the dietary aides before almost every meal, and when the nurse’s aide called out “Okay!” and the men rose and began to file in toward their table, Art would begin right on tune, “Glory, glory halle-lu-jah.” Bob and Joe and sometimes Ted and sometimes even Lou would pick it up, the five men in their line, each leaning on a cane, proceeding through the dining room in slow rhythm to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

  Joe took up the rear. As the men trooped in, single file and singing, Joe suddenly felt as if he saw his companions and himself in a mirror from above, five doddering old men on canes, earnestly and carefully limping in their line toward food. Joe stopped. He leaned on his cane, threw his head back, and started laughing.

  “It’s nice, you know,” Joe said. “Art laughs, Bob laughs. Lou. Ted. I laugh. It’s nice. Jesus Christ.”

  8

  Lou had been the first resident to tie a yellow ribbon to his cane. Now yellow ribbons flourished everywhere—yellow ribbons tied to all the walkers, canes, and wheelchairs, yellow ribbons designed for packages fastened to all the doors inside, yellow ribbons looped around the columns of the portico. Meanwhile, at the direction of the activities department, residents were making valentines to send to the troops in the Persian Gulf.

  Several Linda Manor residents claimed to have seen combat in their generation’s wars, though their accounts lacked realism. Joe, by contrast, refused to say much about what he’d seen in the Pacific, besides the fact that he’d been at Leyte Gulf, the first battle of the Philippines campaign, where the first kamikazes struck. “Young people want to fight because they don’t know war. Old people make up their minds, and young people fight, that’s all,” Joe said to Lou while watching the war in Iraq on TV.

  Joe declined without comment to make valentines. But the old combination of Cupid and Mars proved very popular. Day after day dozens of residents, more even than turned out for bingo, sat at the long folding tables in the activity room and worked with paste and pens and construction paper. Even Phil joined in, parked at a table in his wheelchair, his head cocked to one side. He worked all alone, by choice it seemed, quickly turning out his messages to the troops, the same message on every construction-paper card:

  Have a nice day.

  Phil

  “Some of the people are writing whole diaries, for cripe sake,” Phil muttered, glancing at the women at the other tables.

  At the end of January the activities department decorated the dining room with red streamers and rounded up a class of elementary schoolchildren. Two residents and two children sat together at each table. There at a table by the windows sat Lou and Bob and two young boys. Bob fidgeted and chewed at his mustache. The boys were asking questions. “I can’t talk,” Bob told them. Lou was smiling beneficently. “I can talk but I can’t see,” he was saying. In a moment Lou was cane-walking rather quickly from the room. A couple of the teachers who accompanied the children had approached Lou and said that they were friends of Ruth’s. Lou was hurrying back to his room in order to phone Ruth before he forgot the teachers’ names.

  At a table near the center of the room sat Winifred—in her wheelchair, in one of her gowns and lots of costume jewelry, a boy on one side of her and a little girl on the other, all of them busily cutting big hearts out of paper plates, Winifred chatting away as she worked her scissors. “I’ve got my tongue hanging out,” she declared, “so I’m happy.”

  Eleanor, well rouged and neatly coiffed as always, sat over near the coffee machine, her chair half turned to face a handsome little boy. Eleanor looked radiant. She wasn’t making valentines, she was recruiting talent. The little boy was telling her that he’d played Cobweb in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He came right out and said that he was a great actor. “I like him,” Eleanor said later. “He’s very conceited and he loves to act. I’m going to try and put him in my next play. I’d love to get back into children’s theater.”

  Rosa was at a table over by the dining room’s mirrored wall. She had two schoolgirls to herself, pink-cheeked sixth graders with silky hair and dainty wrists. Rosa had dressed up. She wore a string of pearls and a pink sweatshirt with the legend “Spoiled Brat” on the front. Rosa leaned toward the girls with her elbows on the table—she was so short that this put her elbows almost at shoulder height. Rosa, the poet of Forest View, the maker of salty limericks, had her hands clasped before her on the table. She looked as if she meant to be on her best behavior. One of the staff stopped at Rosa’s side. She wasn’t helping the children write any poems, was she? “Nah,” said Rosa. She smiled from the side of her mouth.

  From the Stupidvising doorway, the activities director called, “Thanks again for all your help in this wonderful project for helping our troops.” She asked that all those with relatives “over there” raise their hands.

  At Rosa’s table, meanwhile, one of the girls asked Rosa, “Do you want to write something here?” The child had a card prepared and was offering it to Rosa.

  “Nah,” Rosa said. “I don’t write very good.” Then a sneaky little smile came over her face. “Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m in love but not with you,” Rosa said. She grinned, looking at the girls.

  The schoolgirls looked back at Rosa with widened eyes. One of them said, “Want to put, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you’?”

  “Yeah,” Rosa said.

  The girls got busy concocting a card on pink construction paper, pasting paper hearts all around the poem. Rosa cocked her head, leaned over, and watched.

  “There. How’s that?” said one of the girls.

  “Ohhh,” Rosa said. “Good. That’s nice writing there.”

  “Thank you,” said the girl, dropping her eyes modestly.

  “What do you want to put on the front?” the other girl asked Rosa.

  “‘I’ll see ya when you come back,’ huh?” Rosa said. She frowned. “Well, we don’t know when they’re comin’ back, do we?”

  Outside the activity room the corridors were all but empty. Faint sounds of merriment reached no farther than the Sunrise nurses’ station. Down at the end of the west corridor, Earl’s door was open. He lay on the covers of his bed in street clothes, fast asleep.

  By
the time Earl awoke that afternoon, the party was over. He regretted missing it. He wanted to do his part.

  ***

  Valentine making in the activity room continued daily. Several days later, Earl and Jean sat together at one end of a table, Earl in his wheelchair, and worked on valentines. Winifred and several other female residents sat at the next table.

  Jean, recalling her own Army days, told Earl, “No one ever sent me a valentine when I was in the service.”

  “No,” Earl said. He looked at Jean and winked. “But they have ever since.” Earl came of age between the wars and never served in the military. He leaned over to see what Jean had written on her card. “Don’t write a book on it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Okay.” He smiled.

  Earl fingered the cup of paste before him. “This looks like milk of magnesia,” he muttered to himself. He got to work designing his own card. He looked like an executive at his desk now, in spite of his thinness, his wheelchair, his oxygen tube.

  “You’re going too fast,” said Jean, leaning over to look at Earl’s work. “Why don’t you make a little cherub or something?”

  “Me? Oh, come on.”

  “Think of a few messages, dear.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “If you were a soldier out in the desert, what would you want to hear?” she asked.

  Earl looked at his card and said—there was great conviction in his voice—“I’d just want to hear from someone.” Perhaps he was thinking of the many friends who hadn’t yet visited him here.

  Jean went back to work, and Earl started to do likewise. He meant to pick up his pen, but he took the paste brush instead and made as if to write with it. It was only a moment before he realized the mistake. He put the paste brush back. His hands were suddenly fumbling.

  Winifred now raised her voice, addressing the whole room.

  “I put on all of mine, ‘Our minds are on you, our hearts are with you, our love is for you.’ And then I said, ‘Thank you and God bless.’”

  Jean turned around in her chair. “That’s very nice,” she said to Winifred.

  Winifred looked, in her wheelchair, like a person immobilized in traction, sprawled out, feet up, and yet she was managing to turn out valentines at a staggering rate.

  “On some of them I said, ‘God loves you and so do I,’” Winifred went on.

  “That’s nice,” Jean said more softly.

  “And on some of them I wrote, ‘We support you and will work to bring you home safely and soon.’”

  Earl didn’t seem to hear any of this. He had dropped his pen. He was staring at nothing, wearing the sort of look a night watchman might wear who has heard a suspicious noise behind him.

  Jean turned back to Earl. “I didn’t know you got involved in this sort of thing.”

  Earl was breathing more rapidly now. “I get involved whenever I can help,” he said, staring at the table.

  Winifred was telling the room, “I’ve got a friend with two daughters, and…”

  Earl stared fixedly in the general direction of his card. The color in his face had all drained away. “I’m going to have to go,” he said to Jean. “Can you finish this?”

  “You’re getting tired?”

  “Yes.”

  9

  Slow, tenacious traffic moved up and down the first floor’s central corridor. A resident out for exercise bent unsteadily over her walker. A white-coated physical therapist followed close behind, towing an empty wheelchair with which to catch her if she should lose her contest with gravity today. A few aged figures limped by on canes and caterpillar-walked in wheelchairs, pushing with their hands and padding with their feet, their eyes fixed on distant goals—the beauty shop, the dining room, the library, the elevators halfway down Sunrise’s northern corridor.

  Lou and Joe joined the northbound traffic. Lou got a little ways ahead. He probably didn’t realize it. He was concentrating on the perils in his way.

  It had surprised Joe when he’d found out that Lou could walk faster than he. It had surprised him more when Lou had told him that he had almost all his teeth. Ninety-one years old and Lou still had his teeth. Good God. Dragging his right leg along down the corridor, Joe grinned. He called out loudly toward Lou’s back, “He didn’t drink. He didn’t smoke. He didn’t chase women. He’s dead, for Christ’s sake!”

  A woman in a wheelchair heading the other way smiled up at Joe. He smiled back.

  Lou turned in at the door to the left, labeled “Physical Therapy.” Joe paused at the door. Across the hall, in the activity room, Bible Study was in progress. The minister was talking about the immortal soul. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Goddamn fool,” Joe muttered.

  Anyway, this was M&M’s time, the body’s hour. Joe looked forward to it. M&M’s was better than bingo. More constructive.

  Joe limped into the M&M’s room. Daylight from the small adjoining greenhouse and overhead fluorescent lights gleamed brightly on the floor. The clean, bitter smell of geraniums filled the room. Lou was already seated in a straight-backed armchair, his eyes squinted shut against the brightness. A couple of the other M&Ms regulars were already there, too: Carol, the instructor, seated beside a small tape recorder, and Lou and Joe’s next-door neighbor Mary, in her wheelchair. Mary was only in her sixties, but a brain tumor had twisted her face out of symmetry. The left side drooped; it looked the way one’s face feels when numbed on one side with Novocain. Mary spoke out of the right side of her mouth, rolling her head to that side. Her speech sounded garbled but she spoke slowly and distinctly enough. “Go’ morning, Joe.”

  Good-mornings were passed all around. Joe sat down beside Lou. “Mary, I’m going to take off my shoes.”

  “All right, Joe. I know you just took a shower.”

  From the hallway a rhythmic sound of creaking metal approached. “Here she comes,” Mary said. “Miss ’merica.”

  Dora came in on her walker. Joe watched her enter, and a little smile blossomed on his face.

  Though he liked Dora, Lou was weary of her predictable discourse. Back up in the room, he had said to Joe, “Don’t get Dora started.” But the sight of Dora put Joe in a sportive mood. Knowing her answers as well as he did, Joe could not resist. “How are ya, Dora?” Joe asked.

  Dora stopped halfway into the room, standing behind her walker, gripping its front rung as if at a balcony railing, and she declared, “I was never better. I was never better than I am this minute.”

  Dora’s t’s were very crisp, like several other female residents’. Did schoolteachers early in the century insist on the emphatic t, along with good penmanship and right-handedness? And was it the girls, back then as now, who paid attention?

  Dora continued: “I went to bed at a quarter past eight and I never got up until quarter past seven. That’s what I call a good night’s sleep. Can anyone beat that?”

  Joe leaned forward, bowing his head, so that his face was hidden from Dora. He laughed silently.

  “I slept eight hours without interruptions,” Dora went on. “My next-door neighbor’s snoring didn’t bother me a bit.”

  Joe, his grin under wraps, looked up at Dora. “You told me how old you are.”

  “Nine-tee-four,” Dora said. “I’m going to be nine-tee-five next month. I’m in no pains. I eat everything put in front of me. I’m in good health. My doctor says, ‘Dora, I’ve got some good news for you. As of today, you’re one hundred percent well.’ I told him the other doctors say, ‘Get out of here, Dora, you’re gonna live to a hundred.’”

  “You dream when you sleep?” asked Joe.

  “Yes, I dream every night,” said Dora, who still hadn’t moved to a seat. “I have good dreams. I dream that my folks are still alive. But they’ve all passed away. They’re all in the Colrain cemetery.”

  “You’re an inspiration, Dora,” said Carol.

  Joe’s face turned serious. He looked Dora in the eyes. “Yes, you are,” he said. Then, smiling again, Joe asked, “Do you feel like
you’re twenty?”

  “Just her mind,” Mary said in her garbly voice.

  “You think like a twenty-year-old,” Joe said.

  “Yes, I do,” Dora said. She recited exactly what she’d had for breakfast.

  “I feel like a seventy-two-year-old man, that’s all,” Joe said.

  “You’re not. Are you?” Mary said to Joe. “You don’t look like a seventy-two-year-old.”

  Suddenly Joe was frowning. “Bullshit I don’t.”

  Carol began to say, “It’s all in your—”

  “No,” Joe said, and, evidently hearing the warning in his voice, Carol abandoned the sentence. The scowl left Joe’s face as suddenly as it had appeared.

  Lou, in the meantime, was starting to look restive. “Dora, you better sit down before someone steals your chair,” he said.

  “All right,” said Carol. “Everybody ready? Deep breath. In. And. Out.” And to the strains of Mitch Miller and his band singing “I’ll Have You to Remember” on the tape recorder, Music and Motion began.

  They exercised sitting down for about half an hour. The routine, which Carol had invented and kept tailoring to fit her ever-changing clientele, demanded gentle exercise of all movable parts from head to feet. Joe sang along to the taped music now and then, in a tenor much more fluid and mellifluous than his speaking voice—to old favorites, Lawrence Welk taking up when Mitch Miller finished, slow music for the slow stretching. Joe grunted sometimes, especially when he had to lift both arms over his head. He grasped the right one and pulled it up with his left, and the right arm shook. Carol called out instructions. “Now chin up and head back. Nice and slow. Now gently to the side.”

  “Your neck creak, Lou?” Joe asked over the music.

  “Yeah. I should keep a little can of oil.”

  “Now reach to the side. Very carefully. Pick up those hundred-dollar bills off the floor.”