Insomnia

  'Ralph? Are you there?'

  'Yeah - just thinking about Litchfield. Wondering why I cancelled that appointment.'

  She patted his hand. 'Just be glad you did. I kept mine.'

  'Tell me.'

  Lois shrugged. 'When it got so bad I felt I couldn't stand it anymore, I went to him and told him everything. I thought he'd give me a prescription for sleeping pills, but he said he couldn't even do that - I sometimes have an irregular heartbeat, and sleeping pills can make that worse.'

  'When did you see him?'

  'Early last week. Then, yesterday, my son Harold called me out of a clear blue sky and said he and Janet wanted to take me out to breakfast. Nonsense, I said. I can still get around the kitchen. If you're coming all the way down from Bangor, I said, I'll get up a nice little feed for you, and that's the end of it. Then, after, if you want to take me out - I was thinking of the mall, because I always like to go out there - why, that would be fine. That's just what I said.'

  She turned to Ralph with a smile that was small and bitter and fierce.

  'It never occurred to me to wonder why both of them were coming to see me on a weekday, when both of them have jobs - and they must really love those jobs, because they're about all they ever talk about. I just thought how sweet of them it was . . . how thoughtful . . . and I put out a special effort to look nice and do everything right so Janet wouldn't suspect I was having a problem. I think that rankles most of all. Silly old Lois, "Our Lois", as Bill always says . . . don't look so surprised, Ralph! Of course I knew about that; did you think I fell off a stump just yesterday? And he's right. I am foolish, I am silly, but that doesn't mean I don't hurt just like anyone else when I'm taken advantage of . . .' She was beginning to cry again.

  'Of course it doesn't,' Ralph said, and patted her hand.

  'You would have laughed if you'd seen me,' she said, 'baking fresh squash muffins at four o'clock in the morning and slicing mushrooms for an Italian omelette at four-fifteen and starting in with the makeup at four-thirty just to be sure, absolutely sure that Jan wouldn't get going with that "Are you sure you feel all right, Mother Lois?" stuff. I hate it when she starts in with that crap. And do you know what, Ralph? She knew what was wrong with me all the time. They both did. So I guess the laugh was on me, wasn't it?'

  Ralph thought he had been following closely, but apparently he had lost her on one of the turns. 'Knew? How could they know?'

  'Because Litchfield told them!' she shouted. Her face twisted again, but this time it was not hurt or sorrow Ralph saw there but a terrible rueful rage. 'That tattling son of a bitch called my son on the telephone and TOLD HIM EVERYTHING!'

  Ralph was dumbfounded.

  'Lois, they can't do that,' he said when he finally found his voice again. 'The doctor-patient relationship is . . . well, it's privileged. Your son would know all about it, because he's a lawyer, and the same thing applies to them. Doctors can't tell anyone what their patients tell them unless the patient--'

  'Oh Jesus,' Lois said, rolling her eyes. 'Crippled wheelchair Jesus. What world are you living in, Ralph? Fellows like Litchfield do whatever they think is right. I guess I knew that all along, which makes me double-stupid for going to him at all. Carl Litchfield is a vain, arrogant man who cares more about how he looks in his suspenders and designer shirts than he does about his patients.'

  'That's awfully cynical.'

  'And awfully true, that's the sad part. You know what? He's thirty-five or thirty-six, and he's somehow gotten the idea that when he hits forty, he's just going to . . . stop. Stay forty for as long as he wants to. He's got an idea that people are old once they get to be sixty, and that even the best of them are pretty much in their dotage by the age of sixty-eight or so, and that once you're past eighty, it'd be a mercy if your relatives would turn you over to that Dr Kevorkian. Children don't have any rights of confidentiality from their parents, and as far as Litchfield is concerned, old poops like us don't have any rights of confidentiality from our kids. It wouldn't be in our best interests, you see.

  'What Carl Litchfield did practically the minute I was out of his examining room was to phone Harold in Bangor. He said I wasn't sleeping, that I was suffering from depression, and that I was having the sort of sensory problems that accompany a premature decline in cognition. And then he said,"You have to remember that your mother is getting on in years, Mr Chasse, and if I were you I'd think very seriously about her situation down here in Derry."'

  'He didn't!' Ralph cried, amazed and horrified. 'I mean . . . did he?'

  Lois was nodding grimly. 'He said it to Harold and Harold said it to me and now I'm saying it to you. Silly old me, I didn't even know what "a premature decline in cognition" meant, and neither of them wanted to tell me. I looked up "cognition" in the dictionary, and do you know what it means?'

  'Thinking,' Ralph said. 'Cognition is thinking.'

  'Right. My doctor called my son to tell him I was going senile!' Lois laughed angrily and used Ralph's handkerchief to wipe fresh tears off her cheeks.

  'I can't believe it,' Ralph said, but the hell of it was he could. Ever since Carolyn's death he had been aware that the naivete with which he had regarded the world up until the age of eighteen or so had apparently not departed forever when he crossed the threshold between childhood and manhood; that peculiar innocence seemed to be returning as he stepped over the threshold between manhood and old manhood. Things kept surprising him . . . except surprise was really too mild a word. What a lot of them did was knock him ass over teakettle.

  The little bottles under the Kissing Bridge, for instance. He had taken a long walk out to Bassey Park one day in July and had gone under the bridge to rest out of the afternoon sun for awhile. He had barely gotten comfortable before noticing a little pile of broken glass in the weeds by the stream that trickled beneath the bridge. He had swept at the high grass with a length of broken branch and discovered six or eight small bottles. One had some crusty white stuff in the bottom. Ralph had picked it up, and as he turned it curiously before his eyes, he realized he was looking at the remains of a crack-party. He had dropped the bottle as if it were hot. He could still remember the numbed shock he had felt, his unsuccessful attempt to convince himself that he was nuts, that it couldn't be what he thought it was, not in this hick town two hundred and fifty miles north of Boston. It was that emerging naif which had been shocked, of course; that part of him seemed to believe (or had until he had discovered the little bottles under the Kissing Bridge) that all those news stories about the cocaine epidemic had just been make-believe, no more real than a TV crime show or a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.

  He felt a similar sensation of shock now.

  'Harold said they wanted to "run me up to Bangor" and show me the place,' Lois was saying. 'He never takes me for rides these days; he just runs me places. Like I'm an errand. They had lots of brochures, and when Harold gave Janet the nod, she whipped them out so fast--'

  'Whoa, slow down. What place? What brochures?'

  'I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself, aren't I? It's a place in Bangor called Riverview Estates.'

  Ralph knew the name; had gotten a brochure himself, as a matter of fact. One of those mass mailing things, this one targeted at people sixty-five and over. He and McGovern had shared a laugh about it . . . but the laugh had been just a touch uneasy - like kids whistling past the graveyard.

  'Shit, Lois - that's a retirement home, isn't it?'

  'No, sir!' she said, widening her eyes innocently. 'That's what I said, but Harold and Janet set me straight. No, Ralph, Riverview Estates is a condominium development site for community-oriented senior citizens! When Harold said that I said, "Is that so? Well, let me tell you both something - you can put a fruit pie from McDonald's in a sterling-silver chafing dish and call it a French tart, but it's still just a fruit pie from McDonald's, as far as I am concerned."

  'When I said that, Harold started to sputter and get red in the face, but Jan just gave me that sweet lit
tle smile of hers, the one she saves up for special occasions because she knows it drives me crazy. She says, "Well, why don't we look at the brochures anyway. Mother Lois? You'll do that much, won't you, after we both took Personal Days from work and drove all the way down here to see you?"'

  'Like Derry was in the heart of Africa,' Ralph muttered.

  Lois took his hand and said something that made him laugh. 'Oh, to her it is!'

  'Was this before or after you found out Litchfield had tattled?' Ralph asked. He used the same word Lois had on purpose; it seemed to fit this situation better than a fancier word or phrase would have done. 'Committed a breach of confidentiality' was far too dignified for this nasty bit of work. Litchfield had run and tattled, simple as that.

  'Before. I thought I might as well look at the brochures; after all, they'd come forty miles, and it wouldn't exactly kill me. So I looked while they ate the food I'd fixed - there wasn't any that had to be scraped into the swill later on, either - and drank coffee.

  'That's quite a place, that Riverview. They have their own medical staff on duty twenty-four hours a day, and their own kitchen. When you move in they give you a complete physical and decide what you can have to eat. There's a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan. There were three or four other colors as well. I can't remember what all of them were, but Yellow is for diabetics and Blue is for fatties.'

  Ralph thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life - no more sausage pizzas from Gambino's, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Milt's - and found the prospect almost unbearably grim.

  'Also,' Lois said brightly, 'they have a pneumatic-tube system that delivers your daily pills right to your kitchen. Isn't that a marvellous idea, Ralph?'

  'I guess so,' Ralph said.

  'Oh, yes, it is. It's marvellous, the wave of the future. There's a computer to oversee everything, and I bet it never has a decline in cognition. There's a special bus that takes the Riverview people to places of scenic or cultural interest twice a week, and it also takes them shopping. You have to take the bus, because Riverview people aren't allowed to have cars.'

  'Good idea,' he said, giving her hand a little squeeze. 'What are a few drunks on Saturday night compared to an old fogey with a slippery cognition on the loose in a Buick sedan?'

  She didn't smile, as he had hoped she would. 'The pictures in those brochures turned my blood. Old ladies playing canasta. Old men throwing horseshoes. Both flavors together in this big pine-panelled room they call the River Hall, square-dancing. Although that is sort of a nice name, don't you think? River Hall?'

  'I guess it's okay.'

  'I think it sounds like the kind of room you'd find in an enchanted castle. But I've visited quite a few old friends in Strawberry Fields - that's the geriatrics' home in Skowhegan - and I know an old folks' rec room when I see one. It doesn't matter how pretty a name you give it, there's still a cabinet full of board games in the corner and jigsaw puzzles with five or six pieces missing from each one and the TV's always tuned to something like Family Feud and never to the kind of movies where good-looking young people take off their clothes and roll around on the floor together in front of the fireplace. Those rooms always smell of paste . . . and piss . . . and the five-and-dime watercolors that come in a long tin box . . . and despair.'

  Lois looked at him with her dark eyes.

  'I'm only sixty-eight, Ralph. I know that sixty-eight doesn't seem like only anything to Dr Fountain of Youth, but it does to me, because my mother was ninety-two when she died last year and my dad lived to be eighty-six. In my family, dying at eighty is dying young . . . and if I had to spend twelve years living in a place where they announce dinner over the loudspeaker, I'd go crazy.'

  'I would, too.'

  'I looked, though. I wanted to be polite. When I was finished, I made a neat little pile of them and handed them back to Jan. I said they were very interesting and thanked her. She nodded and smiled and put them back in her purse. I thought that was going to be the end of it and good riddance, but then Harold said, "Put your coat on, Ma."

  'For a second I was so scared I couldn't breathe. I thought they'd already signed me up! And I had an idea that if I said I wasn't going, Harold would open the door and there would be two or three men in white coats outside, and one of them would smile and say, "Don't worry, Mrs Chasse; once you get that first handful of pills delivered direct to your kitchen, you'll never want to live anywhere else."

  '"I don't want to put my coat on," I told Harold, and I tried to sound the way I used to when he was only ten and always tracking mud into the kitchen, but my heart was beating so hard I could hear it tapping in my voice. "I've changed my mind about going out. I forgot how much I had to do today." And then Jan gave the laugh I hate even more than her syrupy little smile and said,"Why, Mother Lois, what would you have to do that's so important you can't go up to Bangor with us after we've taken time off to come down to Derry and see you?"

  'That woman always gets my back hair up, and I guess I do the same to her. I must, because I've never in my life known one woman to smile that much at another without hating her guts. Anyway, I told her I had to wash the kitchen floor, to start with. "Just look at it," I said. "Dirty as the devil."

  '"Huh!" Harold says. "I can't believe you're going to send us back to the city empty-handed after we came all the way down here, Ma."

  '"Well I'm not moving into that place no matter how far you came," I said back, "so you can get that idea right out of your head. I've been living in Derry for thirty-five years, half my life. All my friends are here, and I'm not moving."

  'They looked at each other the way parents do when they've got a kid who's stopped being cute and started being a pain in the tail. Janet patted my shoulder and said, "Now don't get all upset, Mother Lois - we only want you to come and look." Like it was the brochures again, and all I had to do was be polite. Just the same, her saying it was just to look set my mind at ease a little. I should have known they couldn't make me live there, or even afford it on their own. It's Mr Chasse's money they're counting on to swing it - his pension and the railroad insurance I got because he died on the job.

  'It turned out they had an appointment all made for eleven o'clock, and a man lined up to show me around and give me the whole pitch. I was mostly over being scared by the time I got all that straight in my mind, but I was hurt by the high-handed way they were treating me, and mad at how every other thing out of Janet's mouth was Personal Days this and Personal Days that. It was pretty clear that she could think of a lot better ways to spend a day off than coming to Derry to see her fat old bag of a mother-in-law.

  '"Stop fluttering and come on, Mother," she says after a little more back-and-forth, like I was so pleased with the whole idea I couldn't even decide which hat to wear. "Hop into your coat. I'll help you clean up the breakfast things when we get back."

  '"You didn't hear me," I said. "I'm not going anywhere. Why waste a beautiful fall day like this touring a place I'll never live in? And what gives you the right to drive down here and give me this kind of bum's rush in the first place? Why didn't one of you at least call and say, 'We have an idea, Mom, want to hear it?' Isn't that how you would have treated one of your friends?"

  'And when I said that, they traded another glance . . .'

  Lois sighed, wiped her eyes a final time, and gave back Ralph's handkerchief, damper but otherwise none the worse for wear.

  'Well, I knew from that look that we hadn't reached bottom yet. Mostly it was the way Harold looked - like he did when he'd just hooked a handful of chocolate bits out of the bag in the pantry. And Janet . . . she gave him back the expression I dislike most of all. Her bulldozer look, I call it. And then she asked him if he wanted to tell me what the doctor had said, or if she should do it.

  'In the end they both told it, and by the time they were done I was so mad and scared that I felt like yanking my hair out by the roo
ts. The thing I just couldn't seem to get over no matter how hard I tried was the thought of Carl Litchfield telling Harold all the things I thought were private. Just calling him up and telling him, like there was nothing in the world wrong with it.

  '"So you think I'm senile?" I asked Harold. "Is that what it comes down to? You and Jan think I've gone soft in the attic at the advanced age of sixty-eight?"

  'Harold got red in the face and started shuffling his feet under his chair and muttering under his breath. Something about how he didn't think any such thing, but he had to consider my safety, just like I'd always considered his when he was growing up. And all the time Janet was sitting at the counter, nibbling a muffin and giving him a look I could have killed her for - as if she thought he was just a cockroach that had learned to talk like a lawyer. Then she got up and asked if she could "use the facility". I told her to go ahead, and managed to keep from saying it would be a relief to have her out of the room for two minutes.

  '"Thanks, Mother Lois," she says. "I won't be long. Harry and I have to leave soon. If you feel you can't come with us and keep your appointment, then I guess there's nothing more to say."'

  'What a peach,' Ralph said.

  'Well, that was the end of it for me; I'd had enough. "I keep my appointments, Janet Chasse," I said, "but only the ones I make for myself. I don't give a fart in a high wind for the ones other people make for me."

  'She tossed up her hands like I was the most unreasonable woman who ever walked the face of the earth, and left me with Harold. He was looking at me with those big brown eyes of his, like he expected me to apologize. I almost felt like I should apologize, too, if only to get that cocker spaniel look off his face, but I didn't. I wouldn't. I just looked back at him, and after awhile he couldn't stand it anymore and told me I ought to stop being mad. He said he was just worried about me down here all by myself, that he was only trying to be a good son and Janet was only trying to be a good daughter.