A Patchwork Planet (22 page)

So many things, it seemed, my body went ahead and did without me.

Well, that stage passed, by and by. I moved out of the apartment, developed a new routine, forgot about Natalie altogether. I’d see her when I collected Opal and when I brought Opal back, but she was never really present in my mind. Not that I was aware of, at least. Not consciously.

Here I had been thinking that the train trip where I’d first glimpsed Sophia had changed my whole existence; and in fact it had, but it was Natalie who had set that in motion. I saw that now. It was Natalie in her kitchen, her face as sealed and peaceful as the day she had offered me lemonade.
Could I interest you?
It was the cookie jar on her windowsill—that humble, chipped birdcage jar we used to be so proud of when we were kids together. Oh, once upon a time I’d had all I could ask for: a home, a loving wife, a little family of my own. A
place
in the world. How could I have thrown that away?

At Rent-a-Back, I knew couples who’d been married almost forever—forty, fifty, sixty years. Seventy-two, in one case. They’d be tending each other’s illnesses, filling in each other’s faulty memories, dealing with the money troubles or the daughter’s suicide or the grandson’s drug addiction. And I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s
become
the right person. Or the only person, might be more to the point. I wish someone had told me that earlier. I’d have hung on then; I swear I would. I never would have driven Natalie to leave me.

Sophia looked so light-colored, when she arrived to pick me up. I felt a little shocked, as if I had forgotten which woman I was linked with nowadays. But also I was relieved. “Sophia!” I said. “Sweetheart!” And when she stepped out to let me slide into the driver’s seat, I hugged her so hard that she laughed at me.

I told her Opal had liked the hedgehog. I didn’t go into the rest of it. I certainly didn’t admit that I had spent the last couple of hours sitting alone on a bench. Sophia said, “Oh, good,” and pursued it no further. One of the qualities I loved in her was her willingness to accept the surface version of things. I reached over to squeeze her knee—a bounteous, soft handful encased in slippery nylon.

Then, after we reached the highway, she sailed into this saga about shopping with her mother. “She told me she needed new bras,” she said. “The only thing she won’t buy through the mail. So we got into my car—never mind that she lives in the middle of downtown; she has to drive out to the suburbs—and right away it was, ‘Oh, don’t take this road; take that road,’ and, ‘Don’t turn here; keep straight.’ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘I promise I will get you there. Show some faith,’ I said, but would she listen? ‘That road is under repair now,’ she said. ‘Take the road I tell you.’ I said, I’m sure they’ll give us a detour route,’ but she said, ‘I don’t want a detour route!’ Then, when I turned anyhow, she fell into a pout. She sat there moving her lips for the rest of the ride—which was easy, incidentally. Nothing but a few traffic cones. But coming back, what did she do? Started the whole business over again. ‘Don’t take this road! Take that road!’”

It seemed to have escaped Sophia’s notice that she could simply have followed her mother’s instructions. What difference would it have made? But I didn’t point that out. In this new, contented frame of mind, I just smiled to myself.

“Mother inquired after you, by the way,” Sophia said.

“Hmm?”

“She said, ‘How is that young man you’ve been seeing?’ Then later she asked if I would be up for Thanksgiving, and when I said I didn’t know yet, she said, ‘You’re welcome to bring your friend.’ ”

“Oh,” I said. “Well. I guess I could come, if you want me to.”

“I told her no,” Sophia said.

This was fine with me. I said, “Whatever you decide.”

“She’d be needling us every minute. Believe me.”

“It sounds like our mothers have a lot in common,” I said.

Which I used as yet another excuse to squeeze that handful of knee. I was thinking I’d like to get her into bed once we reached Baltimore, but Saturday afternoons could pose a problem. At my place, the Hardestys would be everywhere—kids squabbling on the patio right outside my door, Joe hammering away at some little task from his Job Jar. And Sophia’s roommate had an annoying habit of cleaning house on Saturdays.

“She’d be sure to make all these not-so-subtle references to my weight,” Sophia said, evidently still talking about her mother. “ ‘More turkey, Barnaby? I won’t offer
you
any, Sophia. I know you wouldn’t want the extra calories.’ ”

“Don’t you dare lose an ounce,” I told her.

There was a luscious little pouch of flesh on her inner thigh just above where her knee bent. It sprang back beneath my fingers like a ripe plum.

“With you, it would be your career,” she said. “Mother’s asked me three times now whether you’ve ever thought of other employment.”

“She really
does
have a lot in common with Mom,” I said.

“I tell her, ‘Mother, drop it. Barnaby’s very happy doing what he’s doing,’ I say, and she always says, ‘Yes, but would his salary feed a family?’ ”

“It could,” I said.

“It could?”

“It could if it weren’t a very
hungry
family.”

Sophia made a face at me.

I knew what we were creeping up on here—what we were skating around the border of. We had never, in so many words, discussed getting married; but I think lately it had been on both our minds. I said, “The way I see it, everyone has a choice: living rich and working hard to pay for it, or living a plain, uncomplicated life and taking it easy.”

“Well,
you
work hard, Barnaby. You’re practically a slave! Wakened up anytime Mr. Shank gets lonely, setting your alarm for crack of dawn on garbage days …”

“Yes, but it’s the kind of work I enjoy,” I said. “And at least it’s not nine to five.”

“Six to midnight is more like it!”

“Hey,” I said, and I eased my foot on the accelerator. “Do
you
think I ought to change jobs?”

“No, no,” she said.

“It sure sounds as if you do.”

“I just hate to see you work such long hours,” she said, “and not get better paid for it.”

“I’m paid enough to live on,” I said. Then I got bolder. “Maybe enough for a wife besides, if the wife was frugal.”

The word “wife” hung in the air between us. It didn’t really sound all that bad, after my meditations in the park.

“And face it,” I said, hurrying on. (At heart, I was a coward.) “What other work could I do? I don’t have any useful skills. My education’s been a farce. All I’ve learned is trivia.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” Sophia said. “Of course you have useful skills! There’s no such thing as trivia.”

“There isn’t?”

I had never heard that before. It struck me as so erroneous that I couldn’t decide where to start attacking it. In the end, I said, “Well, here: During the Second World War, when butter was scarce in Germany, the Germans started eating their toast with the buttered side down. That way, they could use less butter and still taste it.”

“Pardon?”

“But what’s surprising is, when the war was over, they went back to buttered side up. You’d think they would have formed a new habit; but no, they reverted to buttered side up the very first chance they got. That’s the kind of trivia I mean.”

Sophia was silent. A truckful of chickens passed us—stacks and stacks of crates, strewing feathers.

“Well, anyhow,” she said, finally. “One option I might suggest is, finish up your degree and then apply at my bank.”

“Your bank!”

“They offer an excellent training program, with full fringe benefits while you’re learning.”

“I’d rather die than work in a bank,” I said.

I felt Sophia’s face whip toward me. I glanced over and saw how pink her cheeks were. “Well. Sorry,” I said, “but—”

“It’s all right for
me
to work in a bank, but you’re above such things. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Now, hold on, Sofe—”

“
I
can work nine to five, and scrimp and save up my earnings, which, by the way, I have lost every bit of, my entire savings account wiped out, and thirty dollars in my checking account to last till the end of the month;
I
can pay for the—”

“Wait,” I said. “Surely you’re not holding me to blame for that fool stunt you did with your money.”

“Fool stunt? I did it to save you! I thought I was protecting you! I thought you would be grateful!”

“Why should I be grateful? I never robbed your aunt. And I certainly never asked you to cover for me.”

“No,” she said. And more quietly, she said, “No, you didn’t. I realize that. It was my mistake. You had nothing to do with it. But I just feel, I don’t know, frustrated when you talk about your plain, uncomplicated life and simple tastes, and I meanwhile am wishing for … oh, nothing fancy! Just to eat out a little more often, go to a play or a concert every now and then. Take a couple of trips together. But we can’t! You don’t make enough money, and mine is at the bottom of Aunt Grace’s flour bin!”

This last sentence ended in kind of a wail. I put my arm around her, although I had to keep an eye on the road. “Hon,” I said. “Look. First of all, I don’t understand why that money is still at your aunt’s.”

“Well, I told you I haven’t been back there. I’m very cross with Aunt Grace, and she knows it. I think she wasn’t nearly as apologetic as she ought to have been.”

“So? You have a key to her house. Slip in sometime when she’s out. Slip in on her podiatrist day, or her beauty parlor day. Steal your money back again.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” Sophia said.

“Why not?”

“I’m worried she might catch me.”

“You didn’t let that stop you when you put it there in the first place.”

“But it’s different, getting caught
taking
money,” she told me.

“Lord God, Sophia! Not if the money’s your own!”

“There’s no need to shout at me,” she said gently.

Then she drew away, sliding out from under my arm.

I didn’t talk anymore after that, and I barely grunted when she made some comment on the scenery. “Isn’t that tree a pretty shade of yellow!” Grunt. It seemed I was my difficult, unappreciative self again. For all the good it did, I might as well not have bothered with my epiphany in the park.

These little glints of wisdom never last as long as you would expect.

M
AUD
M
AY
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.