When I Was Young and In My Prime (11 page)

Uncle Nick volunteers to walk the block and a half back to the house to fetch a hammer and nail so we can hang the family picture above the narrow bed. I envy him: twenty minutes in the place and I'm craving fresh air. The “Retirement Home” I work at, with its private rooms and ploys at homeyness, is much less depressing than the Extended Care section of this nursing home—the residents here much further along in the continuum of decline. Part of me is wishing one of my cousins had come so we could sneak out together for a cigarette, though part of me is also feeling a little smug being the only one of my generation to have shown up.
 

Grandpa speaks only to Grandma, and only in short commands. “Stop that,” he barks when she begins to chew loudly on nothing. When she wanders over to the other side of the room and starts to make one of the other ladies' beds, he lets out a sharp, “Leave it.” After that he steers her to the vinyl bench by the window and sits there beside her, keeping a tight grip on her hand.
   

Mom's big discovery of the afternoon is that they still have a piano in the lounge. She brightens. “Look Dad, she'll be able to practise. We'll have to bring her sheet music over. I wonder how we can keep it from getting lost.” Already fishing through her purse for her notepad so she can add sheet music
for Mom
to her list.
 

When it comes time to go Mom put her hands on her knees with a slap and stands up. We all take the cue. “Well,” she says, “I guess we'd better get going.” She pauses. “You're going to stay here Mum. Remember how we talked about this?”

Grandma is on her feet, having risen with the rest of us at the signal to leave. Now Grandpa walks over to her side, takes her elbow and guides her to sit down on the bed. “This is where you'll sleep now, Mary.”
 

Grandma looks at each of us in turn, her mouth slightly open. She settles on Grandpa. “But I want to go with you,” she says.

Mom sits down on her other side and points to the family picture that Uncle Nick has hung. “See Mum, there's the family and—”

“I want to go with you,” she says to Grandpa, her voice rising.

Grandpa takes her hand and looks at the ceiling for a moment before looking at her. When he speaks his voice is firm, almost harsh. “You have to stay here Mary,” he says, “and we have to go.”
 

Then I witness a barely perceptible shift in her face. Her chin lifts. Her breathing slows. It's as if she's found reins. I don't think it's that she's understood. I think it's something subtler than that, something to do with the long practice of rising to the occasion. It's as if she's felt a familiar tug—the imperative of not making a scene in public perhaps, or maybe just the sheer habit of doing what needs to be done. She pulls herself together.

After all, who's going to do it if she doesn't?

That sound—the creak of the line through the pulley when I'm hanging out the wash—always puts me in mind of the farm. Peter had strung up a clothesline between the house and the oak tree in the side yard. My favourite chore was hanging out the laundry in the morning there under that tree. Time by myself, thinking about what needed doing and what was already done. What needed doing and what was already done. Shirts and pants and sheets and aprons. Half of them hung out to dry—stretching their arms and legs in the wind, I liked to think—and half of them bunched in the basket, waiting to be hung. The creak of the line through the pulley. What needed doing and what was already done and then later that afternoon pulling the line back in the other direction, the clothes stiff and dry and good-smelling. Filling the hamper. Ironing next. The line between what needed doing and what was already done going back and forth all the time, things building up on one side then the other like a see-saw. It takes a steady woman to keep up with it on a farm, all that back and forth. Let me tell you.

things that have left her:

1 first, her ability to remember
 

(then to wonder) whether she already asked
 

you the question she's been meaning
 

to ask you

2 pride
 

about her false teeth

3 bladder control

4 her tendency to comment on stains
 

and fallen hems and showing slips and
 

holes in socks

5 her ability to knit

and crochet and embroider and
 

mend

6 her disdain for beer
 

Grandpa feeds it to her often now, and I can't decide

whether it's revenge or a sort of tenderness,

making up for lost

time

7 names
 

in this order: the names
 

of her acquaintances and of her neighbours; the names
 

of her curling friends, choir friends, old teaching friends; the name
 

of the United Church minister and of the little boy
 

with Down's syndrome who came every week to swim in the pool; the names
 

of her grandchildren her husband her children and lately her own names both married and
 

maiden

Lois King, interim treasurer, United Church Women (UCW), Branch 186, St. James United Church, Paris, Ontario

Oh, Mary was always showing the rest of us up. I'll admit I even felt a little peeved at her from time to time. Seems so silly now, what with... well, you know. Oh but then. If it was a beautiful spring day and you said to yourself what the heck and wore your new white shoes to church even a day before the 24th of May, well. You could tell she noticed. Not that she would say anything of course, but her eyes would go straight to your shoes and then she'd shake your husband's hand but wouldn't stay to chat.
Lois
, John always used to say to me,
Lois, if you didn't have anything to worry about you'd have to invent something. It's just your imagination,
he'd say.
Aren't you the one always saying she's your best friend?
he'd say.
Yes yes,
I'd say,
but that doesn't mean she can't be a pain in the neck sometimes.
There were her thank-you notes for instance. She was positively
renowned
for her thank-you notes. She had a system, and she didn't mind telling you about it either. Whenever she was invited to a dinner or a tea or a luncheon or a shower or any kind of party or gathering, she'd make out the envelope beforehand, address it and stamp it, get it all ready to go. Then the moment she got home from the outing she'd write the thank-you note easy as pie from some formula Lord knows she must have carried around in her very
bones
, and then she'd seal it and stick it in the mailbox that very evening, neat as can be. Beyond reproach. Couldn't touch her. Not Mary.
 

No, I don't think I was imagining anything. Though that doesn't mean I don't miss her like the dickens. Things aren't the same in the UCW, that much is for sure. You could always count on Mary.

When she'd start in on one of her stories all of us kids—the cousins and I—we'd drop our forks, roll our eyes and kick each other under the table.
 

Her favourite was the one about the fiancée of their best farmhand. Grandma would tell this story whenever our table manners slipped, whenever we bent our bodies the least bit toward our forks instead of bringing our forks—properly—to our mouths.
 

In the old days on the farm during harvest, they all ate at the same table with the crew. And this woman, the farmhand's fiancée—she must have been working in the curing house—would roll up her sleeves, push her chair back, and bend over so low that she could get the food into her mouth without lifting her arm. Apparently she held her fork wrong too, held it straight out in her fist—
Like a savage,
Grandma said. Or sometimes, her voice rich with disbelief, she'd exclaim,
Just like a baby!
 

The funniest part of her telling this story, though, and the reason why we eventually began to goad her into it, was that she would demonstrate. She'd get this slack look on her face, push back her chair, bend right over so that her chin was almost touching her plate and shovel mashed potatoes into her mouth, just like the woman. To show us how ugly it looked, she said. If we weren't careful we'd end up that way, she said.
 

Again and again some elusive ballast in the telling of that story kept her coming back to it, kept us slipping in our table manners so she'd tell it one more time, so she'd take us one more time to the edge of the place where you aren't quite sure anymore who is who. Then we'd roll our eyes to quell the gap there and ask, each in our turn, to be excused.

We moved her to the same place she used to volunteer at. Played piano for the old folks every Sunday afternoon. The place just around the corner, block and a half away. I looked after her a long time, though, before we finally moved her to the Home. After all, I've got the nurse's training. By the end I had to do it all, and not just the cooking and cleaning. I took her to the bathroom, cleaned her up when she made a mess. Things a man shouldn't have to do for his wife. Though she always did love it when I'd wash her hair. Like they say, in sickness and in health.