A Patchwork Planet

12

MAUD MAY had been in the nursing home for over seven months now. First it was one thing and then another. I’d begun to think she was one of those clients who go in and never come out again. Her house had taken on the faded, seedy look of a place that’s been abandoned, and it gave a start and shrank back on itself whenever I walked in. The spider plant I’d been watering all this time had grown so many baby plants that some of them trailed to the floor.

But then at the end of October — Halloween, in fact — they said she was well enough to leave. I remember it was Halloween because she asked me to pick up some trick-or-treat candy before I came to collect her. “I don’t want any neighbor brats soaping my windows in spite,” she told me. Though how she expected to answer the door when they rang, I couldn’t say. She was still exceedingly lame.

So I dropped Martine at Mrs. Cartwright’s, where the two of us were scheduled to clear out the guest room, and then I went to the supermarket. Halloween this year wasn’t likely to amount to much. A thunderstorm had been threatening since early morning. But I bought three sacks of fun-size Almond Joys, along with the other items on Maud May’s shopping list — the prunes and the all-bran cereal, a single grapefruit, a skinny one-quart carton of skim milk. Anyone could have told at a glance that these were an old person’s groceries.

When I let myself into her house, I tried to view it through her eyes. Should that spider plant be so brownish at the tips? And how about the drawers in the sideboard: did they look snooped into, somehow? I hadn’t snooped; I swear I hadn’t; but you never know what people will imagine.

At the Silver Threads Nursing Home, Maud May was ready and waiting. She sat beside the reception desk in the wheelchair they always force departing patients to ride in. A jumble of belongings crowded the floor all around her. “At last!” she snapped when she saw me. “Bentham, we can go now.”

Bentham was the orderly who was joking with the switchboard girl — a young black guy about seven feet tall, with a wedge-shaped hairdo. He threw one last remark over his shoulder and came to help me carry the luggage out. Suitcases, hatboxes, potted plants, a folded aluminum walker … We loaded them all in the back of the truck, A misty rain had started falling, and Bentham said, “Ms. May not going to be too happy about this”—meaning the fact of the open truck bed. “You want I should hunt up a tarp?” he asked.

But I said, “Never mind,” because I figured things would get all the wetter while we waited. Besides, Maud May wasn’t the fussy type.

She’d changed, though. I should have known. I’d certainly seen enough signs of it, over the months I’d been visiting. First off, as Bentham was wheeling her through the door, she barely acknowledged the staff’s goodbyes. “You’re leaving us?” they asked her. “Well, you take care, now, hear?” Granted, they were most of them using a honeyed, high, thin, baby-talk voice that probably drove her nuts, but still, she could have said, “Thanks.” She didn’t. She gave an indifferent wave, not troubling to look back.

Then, outside, she cried, “What!” so sharply that Bentham stopped pushing her. “I’m going home in a truck?” she asked me.

“It’s just a short ride, Ms. May,” I said.

“What happened to your darlin’ little sports car?”

“Well, I sold it.”

“Good Gawd, Barnaby, you’re an idiot,” she said.

But already beads of rain were shining on the top of her head, and she didn’t protest when Bentham started wheeling her again.

Helping her into the truck’s cab caused another hitch. “Damn thing is too far off the ground,” she told me. And, “Jesus! My luggage is sopping!” as she happened to glance toward the rear. Bentham tsked and hoisted her up by one elbow. I said, “At least your plants’ll be watered, Ms. May” She didn’t smile. After I shut her in, she sat staring straight ahead, dead-faced, and she failed to lean over and unlock the driver’s-side door when I came around. I had to use my key. You see a lot of that with invalids. They start out vowing they won’t depend, but then they seem to get into it. They turn all passive. Still, I hadn’t expected it of Maud May

“You be good, Ms. May!” Bentham called as we rolled off.

Ms. May just said, “What choice do I have?”

We didn’t need our wipers at first, with the rain so light and fine, but gradually the windshield grew harder to see through. I was kind of waiting for Ms. May to mention it. I thought she would order me around in that tough-talking way she used to have. But she kept quiet, staring straight in front of her. Finally I flicked on my wipers unbidden. I said, “So! How does it feel, getting sprung?”

“Oh …,” she said. And then nothing more.

We reached her house, and I parked at the curb. Maud May didn’t even glance toward her front door. Luckily, the rain had stopped by then. I say “Luckily” because once I’d helped her down from the truck, it took her forever to inch up the walk in her walker. Step, rest, step, rest, she went, and several times she pointedly lifted one hand or the other and wiped it on the front of her coat, although I had dried the walker off after I unloaded it. Halfway along, a neighbor came out — a pudgy-faced woman with gray hair — and she took charge of Ms. May while I brought in the luggage. “Why, Maud, you’re doing wonderfully. Just wonderfully,” she said, but all Ms. May would answer back was, “Huh.” I kept passing them, traveling between the truck and the house, and every time, Ms. May had her head down, her eyes on her feet as they shuffled behind her walker. “Sturds,” she said at one point, and the neighbor said, “What’s that, dear?”

“Sturds: those klutzy, thick brown oxfords they used to make us wear at Roland Park Country Day School.”

Actually, her shoes were black, not brown, but I caught her drift. Till now, she’d always worn vampish heels with sling backs and open toes. Also, she used to claim she would never be seen publicly in pants, but this morning she had on not just pants but sweatpants, elastic-waisted, cuffed bunchily at the ankles.

They’d delivered a hospital bed the day before, and it was set up in the sunporch so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. I arranged her belongings nearby where she could reach them. Then I steered her up the front steps, while the neighbor followed, hands cupped to catch her if she stumbled. “Smells musty,” Ms. May said as she entered.

“We’ll air it out,” the neighbor assured her. “Throw open all the windows and just chase those cobwebs right out of here!”

“Well, Elaine,” Ms. May said abruptly, “perhaps we’ll meet again sometime. Goodbye, now.”

The neighbor took on a stunned look, but she was still smiling steadily, her face very bright and determined, when she turned to leave. I told her, “Thanks a lot!” to make up for Ms. May’s bad manners. “She was only trying to help,” I said, once the door was shut.

“Get me onto that couch,” Maud May told me, “and then go.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“This is the first time in seven months that some jackass fellow human won’t be sharing my breathing space.”

“Hey. I can dig it,” I said. I felt a tad bit better, because she was starting to sound like herself.

Even so, that experience put a damper on my day. I’m telling you: don’t ever get old! Before I started at Rent-a-Back, I thought a guy could just make up his mind to have a decent old age. Now I know that there’s no such thing — or if once in a blue moon there is, it’s a matter of pure blind luck. I must have seen a hundred of those sunporch sickrooms, stuffed wall-to-wall with hospital beds and IV poles and potty chairs. I’ve seen those sad, quiet widow women trudging off alone to their deaths, no one to ease them through the way they’d eased their husbands through years and years before. And if by chance the husband’s the one who’s survived, it’s even worse, because men are not as good at managing on their own, I’ve come to think. They get clingy, like Mr. Shank. They tend to lack that inner gauge that tells them when they’re talking too much; they’re always trying to buttonhole the nearest passerby Ask them the most offhand question; they lean back expansively and begin, “Well, now, there’s a funny little story about that that I think may interest you.” And, “To make a long story short,” they’ll say, when already they’ve gone on longer than God himself would have patience for. They pull this trick where they change the subject without a pause for breath — come to the end of one subject and you’re thinking at last you can leave, but then they start in on the next subject; not so much as a nanosecond where you can say, “Guess I’ll be going.”

And those retirement watches old people consult a hundred times a day, counting off minute by minute! Those kitchen windowsills lined with medicine bottles! Those miniature servings of food, a third of a banana rewrapped in a speckly black peel and sitting in the fridge! Their aging pets: the half-bald cat, the arthritic dog creeping down the sidewalk next to his creeping owner. The reminder notes Scotch-taped all over the house: Lawn-mowing boy is named RICHARD. Take afternoon pill with FULL GLASS OF WATER. The sudden downward plunges they make: snappy speech one day and faltering for words not two weeks later; handsome, dignified faces all at once in particles, uneven, collapsing, dissolving.

The jar lids they can’t unscrew, the needles they can’t thread, the large print that’s not quite large enough, even with a magnifying glass. The specter of the nursing home lurking constantly in the background, so it’s, “Please don’t tell my children I asked for help with this, will you?” and, “When the social worker comes, make like you’re my son, so she won’t think I live alone.” The peculiar misunderstandings, part deafness and part out-of-syncness — insisting that someone named “Sheetrock Mom” bombed the World Trade Center, declining a visit to a tapas bar in the belief that it’s a topless bar, calling free-range poultry “born-again chicken,” and asking if the postpartum is blooming when what they mean is impatiens. “Don’t you look youthful!” a physical therapist said once to Mrs. Alford, and she said, “Me? Useful?” and the thing that killed me was not her mishearing but the pleasure and astonishment that came over her face.

They walk down the street, and everyone looks away from them. People hate to see what the human body comes to — the sags and droops, splotches, humps, bulging stomachs, knobby fingers, thinning hair, freckled scalps. You’re supposed to say old age is beautiful; that’s one of those lines intended to shame whoever disagrees. But every one of my clients disagrees, I’m sure of it. You catch them sometimes watching children, maybe studying a toddler’s face or his little hands, and you know they’re marveling: so flawless! poreless! skin like satin! I doubt they want to be young again (“Youth is too fraught,” was how Maud May always put it), but I’m positive not a one would turn down the chance to be, say, middle-aged.

“Fifty was nice,” Mr. Shank told me once. “Fifty was great! Sixty was too. And sixty-five; I was doing good at sixty-five. But then somewhere along there … I don’t know … I said to my wife, Junie — this was when Junie was still living—‘Junie,’ I said, ‘you know? Some days I’m afraid I might commit suicide.’ And Junie, she just looked at me — she was one of those zestful people; energetic, zestful people — and she said, ‘Well, Fred, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I’m afraid I might commit suicide myself.’ She didn’t, of course. She passed away in her sleep, God rest her. One morning I woke up and I knew without even looking; it felt like our bedroom was quieter than it ever was before. But, now, what was I saying? What point was I trying to make? Oh. If Junie could feel that way, such a zestful person as Junie, then I don’t see as there’s any hope whatsoever for the rest of us.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, like someone delivering a weather report. And then turned in his chair and looked out the window, absently smoothing his kneecaps with both hands, the way he always did when he sat idle.

And Mrs. Cartwright: now, this was just the kind of thing I was referring to. The reason she wanted her guest room cleared out was, she had arranged for a live-in companion. Some woman from a classified ad. Companions generally mean a lot fewer hours for Rent-a-Back, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s that once they’ve moved in, they tend to take over. They leave their magazines lying around, and switch channels on the TV without asking, and throw out perfectly edible food, and smell up the air with strong perfume. I’ve heard it all! Still, it’s not our place to argue. Mrs. Cartwright said she had to face the fact that she hadn’t had a good night’s rest since her husband died. Every little creak sounded like a footstep, she said. So we’d been called in to clear thirty years of clutter from the guest room, and the following week a total stranger was coming to keep her company.

By the time I got there, Martine had emptied the bureau and started on the closet — knitting supplies and sewing remnants and half-finished squares of needlepoint. “How was Maud May?” she asked, and I said, “Old,” which made her pull her head out of the closet and give me a look. But instead of speaking, she tossed a ball of yarn at me. I dodged, and it landed squarely in the garbage can she’d set in the center of the room. “Ta-dah!” she said.

“Sure, at that distance,” I told her. I moved the garbage can farther away and reached past her for another ball of yarn. It always soothes my mind if I can get some kind of rumpus going. And Martine was good at that; she was kind of rowdy herself. We started slam-dunking every dispensable item we came across, and maybe a few that weren’t. A jar of buttons, for instance, which burst when it landed with a gratifying, hailstone sound that made me feel a whole lot better.

But then Mrs. Cartwright called out, “Children? What was that? Is everything all right?”

We grew very still. “Yes, ma’am,” I called. “Just neatening up.”

After that, I sank into a mood again.

We were dragging an unbelievably heavy footlocker out to the hall when I asked Martine, “Have you ever thought of changing jobs?”

“Why? Am I doing something wrong?”

“I mean, doesn’t this job get you down? Don’t you think it’s kind of a sad job?”

She straightened up from the footlocker to consider. “Well,” she said, “I know once when I was taking Mrs. Gordoni to visit her father … Did you ever meet her father? He’d been in some kind of accident years before and ended up with this peculiar condition where he didn’t have any short-term memory. Not a bit. He forgot everything that happened from one minute to the next.”

I said, “Oh, Lord.”

“So he was living in this special-care facility, and I had to drive Mrs. Gordoni there once when her car broke down. And her father gave her a big hello, but then when Mrs. Gordoni stepped out to speak to the nurse, he asked me, ‘Do you happen to be acquainted with my daughter? She never visits! I can’t think what’s become of her!’ ”

“See what I mean?” I said.

“That kind of got me down.”

“Right.”

“But then you have to look on the other side of it,” Martine said.

“What other side, for God’s sake?”

“Well, it’s kind of encouraging that Mrs. Gordoni still came, don’t you think? She certainly didn’t get credit for coming, beyond the very moment she was standing in her father’s view. Just for that moment, her father was happy. Not one instant longer. But Mrs. Gordoni went even so, every day of the week.”

“Well,” I said. Then I said, “Yeah, okay.”

Martine wiped her face on the shoulder of her shirt. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, and her house key swung from the wide leather band that circled her wrist. It wasn’t designed to circle her wrist. It should have been hooked to a belt loop, but since she didn’t have a belt loop, she wore it like an oversized bracelet instead; and all at once I was fascinated by how she’d come up with this arrangement. The workings of her mind suddenly seemed so intricate — the wheels and gears spinning inside her compact little head.

But when she said, “What,” I said, “What what,” and bent to lift the lid of the footlocker.

Just as I had suspected, I found stacks of moldering books cramming every inch. Nothing’s heavier than books. These had bleached-looking covers in shades of pink and turquoise that don’t even seem to exist anymore. Lets Bake! Fun with String. Witty Sayings of Our Presidents. The Confident Public Speaker.

“Mrs. Cartwright?” I called. “Are you around?”

Of course she was around. She was wringing her hands at the bottom of the stairs, probably longing to come supervise if only her heart had allowed. “Yes?” she said, craning up at me.

“How about those old books in the footlocker? Shall we toss them?”

“Oh, no. My son might want them. Just put them in the basement.”

Yes, and that’s another thing: the possessions choking the basements and clogging the attics, lovingly squirreled away for grown children. The children say, “We don’t have room. We’ll never have room!” But the parents refuse to believe that the trappings of a lifetime could have so little value.

We put the footlocker on a scatter rug and slid it — a trick I’d learned my first day of employment. Martine backed down the stairs ahead of me. Mrs. Cartwright stayed planted in the foyer, tugging fretfully at her fingers as if she were pulling off gloves.

When we got back to the guest room, Martine grabbed a broom while I consulted Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “ ‘Move night-stand in from room across hall,’ ” I read aloud.

“I already did that.”

I stepped aside to let Martine sweep where I’d been standing. She was raising a little dust cloud — too enthusiastic with her broom. Wiry tendons flickered beneath the skin of her forearms. Really her skin was more olive-colored than yellow; or maybe that was a trick of the light. I glanced back down at Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “Did you turn the mattress too?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said, “because I wasn’t sure what that meant. Turn it? Turn it how?”

“Flip it to its other side,” I told her. “Haven’t you ever done that? It’s usually part of spring cleaning.”

“It isn’t part of my spring cleaning. I’ve never turned a mattress in my life. Do you turn yours?”

“No, but I’ve done it lots of times for clients,” I said.

Then — I don’t know why — I started feeling embarrassed. It was something about the word “mattress.” I almost wondered, for a second, if that was one of those words you shouldn’t say in mixed company. (These notions hit me every so often.) I hurried on. I said, “Especially back when Mrs. Beeton was alive. About once a month, I swear, her kids would be phoning up: ‘Help! Get on over to Mama’s! Mama’s talking again about turning her …”’

Maybe I should call it a pallet. Was that too much of a euphemism? Fortunately, Martine didn’t seem to be listening. She had propped her broom in a corner, and she was moving toward the other side of the bed. “In fact,” I told her, “that happens to be how Rent-a-Back began. I bet you didn’t know that. Mrs. Dibble’s mother was turning hers one day, and it got away from her. When Mrs. Dibble came to check on her that evening, she found her flat as a pancake underneath it.”

Martine’s eyes widened. “Dead?” she asked.

“No, no; just mad. Mrs. Dibble said, ‘You should have hired a man to do that,’ and her mother said, ‘I can’t hire a man just to turn one … mattress!’ and Mrs. Dibble said, ‘Well, I fail to see why not.’ And she went home and dreamed up Rent-a-Back.”

“Grab an edge, will you?” Martine asked me.

I did, finally I heaved my side of the mattress upward and came over to the other side to help Martine support it. We were standing so close that I could hear the clink of one overall clasp when she drew in her breath. I could feel that concentrated, fierce heat she always gave off; I could smell her smell of clean sweat.

She said, “How do you get your mouth to curl up at the corners that way?”

“Practice,” I said. And then, “Whoa! Look at the time.” (Although there wasn’t a clock to be seen.) “I promised to meet Sophia for lunch,” I said. “We’d better hustle.”

Martine let her end of the mattress drop. For a moment I had all the weight of it before I let mine drop too.

In the truck, she started a fight. It wasn’t me who started it. She claimed that I had promised to drive her to her brother’s. Her brother’s wife had had a new baby. But I had promised no such thing; this was the first I’d heard of it. “How could she have a new baby?” I asked. “I seem to recollect she was pregnant just a while ago.”

“She was pregnant just a while ago. And now she’s had her baby.”

“See?” I said. “This is why I should have got a car of my own. Something used, I could have bought, with the rest of my Sting Ray money. Instead I’m having to split this dratted truck.”

“My heart bleeds for you,” Martine said.

“Besides, a truck’s a problem for old folks to climb into. It’s not appropriate! That high-up seat, and Everett’s silly fur dice—”

All at once, Martine reached over and swiped the dice off the mirror in one quick motion. Just snapped the string that held them, tossed the dice in the air, caught the two of them one-handed, and stuffed them into her jacket pocket.

“Satisfied?” she asked me.

“Well, hey,” I said.

“You think it’s easy for me, letting you keep the truck at your place? Begging you for a ride anytime I need to go somewhere? But I don’t have any choice! I don’t come from a fat-cat family! I can’t just waltz out and buy myself a car if I decide a truck’s not ‘appropriate’!”

“You don’t need to bite my head off,” I said.

We had reached her house by now, and I pulled over to the curb. But Martine stayed where she was, poking her sharp yellow face into mine. “I don’t know why I bother hanging out with you,” she said. “You’re sarcastic and moody and negative. You think just because you’re good-looking you can take up with any woman you want. You think you’re so understanding and sweet with those poor old-lady clients, but really you just … hit and run! You have no staying power! You couldn’t stick around even if you tried!”

I was astounded. I said, “Huh?” I said, “Where did all this come from?” And when she didn’t answer, I said, “You’re the one who fixed it so you’d have to rely on me for your rides.”

“Now, that is just exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. Making no sense whatsoever.

Then she jumped out of the truck and slammed the door hard behind her.

I took off, with a screech of my tires. I went on fuming aloud as if she were still there. “Maniac,” I said. “Lunatic.” I asked, “Didn’t I say all along this truck scheme would be a pain?”

Anyone who heard me would have thought I was demented.