They May Not Mean To, But They Do

35

The thought of an outing excited Joy. The brick buildings glowed, genial and rosy in the sun. What a beautiful day and she’d woken up feeling strong. Oh, this was very nice! She began the search for her wallet, her bags, her sunglasses, her gloves.

She bought a tuna-fish sandwich and a ginger ale at the little deli on the corner and watched the man behind the counter wrap the sandwich in white paper, then cut it diagonally. That was nice, too. She liked her sandwiches cut diagonally. This is what she would do when she retired. Go on outings with tuna-fish sandwiches cut on the bias. You couldn’t do that in an assisted-living facility, not like this, spontaneously. You probably had to check out at the desk, sign an attendance sheet, get permission, like the loony bin.

She didn’t have to ask anyone for anything.

She carried her brown bag out to the street and the wind nearly knocked her down. It was chillier than she’d thought. The tulips planted on the meridian of Park Avenue were bright orange this year. The cherry trees above them were in full pink bloom. The wind would take care of that, soon enough, she supposed. The petals would blow around like bright pink snow, then settle into colorful drifts, then turn brown and rot like all flesh, even flowered flesh. But for now, they danced gaily against the blue sky.

She turned into Aaron’s little park and sat on a bench. The sun was glaring. The bread of her sandwich was dry. The wind was cold. This was a mistake. She was not ready. She felt her heart beat unevenly. Atrial fibrillation. Right now, the blood could be languishing, clotting during a skipped beat, and then, wham, a clot could be thrown up to her brain and she would be dead. Or worse.

Karl came into the park just as she was balling up the wrapper from her sandwich.

“Joy!” He pushed his red wheeled walker aside and sat next to her on the bench. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”

“You want coffee?” said his attendant, Wanda’s friend Marta.

Karl shook his head. “Go, go,” he said. “Enjoy.”

Joy and Karl sat silently awhile. Joy pulled her hood up. She stood to dump the remains of the sandwich in the trash can, but Karl took it from her and tossed it like a basketball.

“You have good aim,” Joy said. “We never went to a basketball game, did we, you and I?”

“Baseball. You’re a dirty rotten Yankees fan. I remember.”

Did he remember the ride home on the subway, hand in hand?

“Are you still a dirty rotten Yankees fan?” he asked.

She laughed. “I don’t pay much attention to sports.”

“My wife was a dirty rotten Yankees fan. She died two years ago. It’s terrible, Joy. I know it’s terrible.”

They looked at each other. Why, his eyes were the same, the same eyes they had been when they were young, hazel eyes specked with green. There were tears in them.

“It’s so windy,” she said.

“My children want me to move.”

“Oh, that,” Joy said. “Pay no attention.”

But sometimes she did worry about her own situation. She did not want her children to send her away to a home. If she became weak enough … well, stranger things had happened. They watched her like hawks to make sure she was okay, and like a field mouse she scuttled and hid. Yes, I’m doing quite well, she would say. Nothing to report. They seemed to believe her. They wanted to believe her. They told her she was a good sport.

But the illusion of good sportsmanship was becoming more and more difficult for her to pull off. She did not want to burden them with her problems. That might push them over the edge. She didn’t want assisted living; just, sometimes, a little assistance.

“There’s so much paperwork,” she said to Karl. “In life.”

He nodded sympathetically, but he continued to talk about his son who wanted him to move to Rhode Island and his other son who wanted him to move to Denver. “I can’t move. I mean, look at me. I, literally, can’t move.”

The papers accumulating on Joy’s dining-room table had begun to haunt her, zombies from another life, infinite and unfinished though Aaron was finite and gone, as if the magazine subscriptions addressed to him were more important, more vital than he had ever been. He lived only in the gruesome form of debts and appointments, doctors’ bills.

“I have enough money, I have a nice apartment, I have Marta, who’s a godsend. Why don’t they leave me alone?”

“Who would want to live in someone else’s city?” Joy said. But she was thinking about the piles of papers waiting for her. The papers oozed across the table, an accusing slop of obligation, neglect, pressure, the pressure of a hostile world to pay attention and to pay, pay, pay. She was old and she was alone, and the papers took no pity.

“They mean well,” Karl said.

The papers had begun to take on a mythical quality. They were an angry god of chaos who never stopped reproducing himself, growing bigger and stronger, tentacled, menacing, choking her to death.

“I don’t understand how they pile up so fast, the papers,” she said.

“Maybe it would be nice to move away, just leave all the mess behind. I never thought of it like that.”

“Absolutely not,” Joy said. “That mess is your life. Don’t ever let ’em tell you any different.”

Then she hobbled back to her apartment. There it all was, her mess, waiting, turrets and towers of files and mail, its banners of Post-its and crumpled tissues. It was an eclectic collection. Everything had been or was to be filed, but the names on the files had little to do with their contents and few hints for what should be added. There were multiple files labeled, for example, Urgent!!, though some were labeled URGENT, all caps, and a few Urgent! with just the one exclamation point. There was a Pay Today file and a Pay Immediately file, a Miscellaneous file and a Miscellany file. There were Medical, Medicine, Health, Health Care, Health Insurance, Doctors, Doctor Bills, Medicare, and there were files by illness as well: Diabetes, Cancer/Joy, and Cancer/Aaron. Inside were flyers for Roundabout Theater and YIVO, Time Warner, DirecTV, AT&T, Verizon, and free shingles shots from CVS. There were unopened envelopes with requests for money from starving children, dogs, cats, and abandoned farm animals; newsletters from Israel and Trader Joe’s; literature from city council candidates, mayoral candidates, cemeteries, the Neptune Society, and juice fasts. Bills and tax returns, X-rays and lab reports showed up, too, here and there, as well as clippings of art reviews by Adam Gopnik from the 1980s.

She adjusted a stack of unopened envelopes, tilting her head at them, like a curious dog. She opened one envelope and carefully read the marketing materials for a service she would never need or want. She put the torn envelope on the table, placed the glossy marketing pamphlet beside it. She shuffled through the stack of unopened envelopes again. She spread them out like a deck of cards on the table. She touched them, moved them slightly, piled them up again. She sighed. She began to read yesterday’s paper, which was on the chair next to her. She reached for her scissors. She intently cut out an article and laid it on the table. A crumpled tissue fell from her sleeve. She carefully removed the cellophane from a lemon drop, which she then popped in her mouth, placing the sticky cellophane between the torn envelope and the tissue. She spread the pile of unopened envelopes out like a deck of cards on the table again.

She finally broke down and called Danny. “I think someone has to help me. But no one can help me. What should I do?”

“Close the door,” Danny told her. “And never go in again.”

When she called Molly, in tears, Molly said, “That’s all? God, you scared me.”

To them, it was a pile.

To Joy, it was the past and the future jumbled together.

Someday they would understand. They would feel sad the way she felt sad about her own mother, about all the ways she had not been able to understand until she, too, was old. If only everyone could be old together.

“Natalie!” She called her friend immediately. “I just had the most ghastly thought…”

* * *

Joy ran into Karl at the coffee shop regularly now. As soon as Marta saw her, she hauled herself up, said, “Errands,” and lumbered out of the restaurant. It was pleasant for Joy, having someone to sit with, to confide in, someone her own age. And, she admitted this to herself, it was pleasant to spend time with a man.

She ordered her soup and listened to Karl tell one of his stories. She occasionally had to hold her hand up. “Karl,” she would say, “my turn to speak.”

“He has so many stories,” she told Danny that night on the phone. “Very entertaining.”

“You knew him in college? How come I never heard anything about him?”

“Oh, we lost track when I got married. You know how it is.”

Molly called Daniel every Wednesday after his weekly dinner with their mother. She told Freddie she wanted to be supportive, but Freddie suggested she was just trying to cling to Daniel’s devoted-child shirttails.

“Did you have a good time with Mom tonight?” Molly asked her brother. “Did you have a nice dinner?”

“I didn’t go. She said she was too tired.”

“She told you not to come? That doesn’t sound good. Is she sick?”

“No. She said she had lunch with a friend and they walked in the park and she got tired.”

“Yeah? Natalie?”

“No.”

“Well, who, Daniel? You’re being weird and mysterious.”

“That guy. That Karl guy.”