When I Was Young and In My Prime (20 page)

Grandma can't feed herself anymore, and Mom and I have found that feeding her gives the visit a focus, even though it's depressing. They serve everything puréed in Extended Care. Lunch menu for today: puréed ham sandwich. Dinner: puréed roast beef with puréed Yorkshire pudding.
 

One day, I'm holding a spoonful of applesauce in the air, waiting for Grandma to finish swallowing the one before, and Mom says, “If it happens to me you have to promise you'll make sure to feed me a little of everything in each bite.”
 

We've always teased Mom about how she eats. Whatever's on her plate—roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas—she takes some of each in each bite, the mounds shrinking proportionately throughout the meal, always attentive, evening it out, taking a bit more potato with one bite if necessary, timing it so that the final bite will have a little of everything.
 

I laugh and say, “Sure Mom.” But when I look at her, she isn't laughing. She drops her eyes and, after a moment, picks up one of Grandma's hands.

“How do your fingernails get so dirty?” she coos.

Another day, we're driving home together from the nursing home. She's offered to drive me all the way back into the city, drop me off at my place. Traffic is sparse. As we near the exit she breaks the silence, says, “Well if it happens to me I just hope to God I have the courage to drive myself off a bridge.”
 

I look at her. She looks at the road. Her hands tight at ten and two on the steering wheel.
 

There was a story that fascinated me, one I latched onto from Mom's growing up. I don't remember in what context Mom told it to me; it's not really even much of a story, more an image: Grandma waiting behind the curtains for Mom to come home from her dates. She'd wait and wait and watch the chaste kiss on the front porch and then slap Mom's face when she got inside. That was it. That image explained why Mom couldn't wait to leave. Why she didn't come home for a long time after she left for university and why she began going back only gradually. Then more and more when I was born. I wonder if back then she could have imagined herself going every weekend to iron labels into the inside collar of all her mother's blouses, write her name in indelible markers on the soles of all her shoes, Mary Friesen Mary Friesen Mary Friesen, getting her ready to go to the Home.
 

I remember one of those weekends in particular. Mom ensconced herself in the bedroom sorting girdles and slips. I stayed in the living room with Grandma, who was on the couch reading aloud the same section about a bear attack over and over again from a Reader's Digest. At one point, out of the blue, she looked up, saw Mom's purse on the coffee table and said, “Whose purse is that?”

“It's my mom's purse, Grandma. Your daughter—Ruth's purse.”

“Ruth is here?”
 

“Yep, in the bedroom.”

“For a visit?”

“Yes, for a visit.”

“Isn't that lovely,” she said, struggling up from the couch, and went to the back of the house to greet her daughter.
 

A few minutes later, settled again on the couch, reading and rereading a similar paragraph from later in the same article, she looked up.

“Whose purse is that?” she said. “Is someone here?”

“Ruth is here,” I said.

“How lovely! For a visit?”
 

And again the joyous greeting in the bedroom was re-enacted. I watched Mom. It was as if by chance she'd taken a simple step aside and missed the usual landslide of bleak discomfort and undiscussed grief, was able to simply put down what she was doing and greet her mother with open, empty arms. All three of us rose, as if through a lesser gravity, to the occasion. We even laughed, playing it up a little, letting Grandma have her day in the sun, letting her lead us through the tender surprise of visitation over and over again, all through the afternoon, like a dish of candies too sweet for you to keep your hand from drifting back.

James and I watched a film last week, an arty one with a score by Philip Glass and a foreign title I can't remember but which translated as
Life Out of Balance.
I've been haunted by one of the images from it ever since: a panning aerial shot of acres and acres of abandoned apartment buildings.
 

They exist somewhere in the world, I guess, standing there empty. But it felt like watching a prophecy.
 

On the subway, afternoon rush hour. I've read all the advertisements, so I play one of my little games. Today it's guessing whether people are single or not just by the way they carry themselves, seeing if you can read the joining of lives on a body.
 

Suddenly the subway slows and stops mid-tunnel. People groan and look up from their newspapers and paperbacks, look around over each other's heads out into the blackness of the tunnel. Some people catch each other's eyes and shrug—these are the naturally gregarious ones, or the ones born elsewhere.
 

Nothing to do but wait. After a few minutes, a voice comes to us over the speaker system. Presumably, the voice is explaining the reason for the delay, but the words are scattered and flattened by the speaker system. We look around at each other again, puzzled. As far as I can tell from the body language of the others, no one was able to make out anything from the announcement beyond the weary, superior and slightly defensive tone of official apology.
 

Ten minutes pass. People gradually begin to talk with one another about connections they're going to miss, daycares that charge a dollar for every minute you're late.
 

I'm thinking it was a jumper.

After twenty minutes I turn to the woman next to me and say, “How about you?” She's older than I am, but younger than my mother. Her hair dyed blonde, but not platinum—a dirty blonde trying to match an old natural. Homemade-looking scarf, practical boots.
 

“How about me what?” she says, but in an inviting way. She has an accent. European. I like the lines around her eyes—they seem to suggest a habitual expression of tender commiseration.
 

“Are you going to be late for something?”
 

She looks at her watch as if it's just occurred to her. “Oh, maybe. But I always give myself plenty of time to get to work. Just in case.” She says this not without a note of smugness in her voice, like the ant to the grasshopper. The self-satisfied voice of the citizen who has forgone her allotment of summer fun in order to stockpile for the hardships ahead.
 

“What do you do?” I ask, grateful to have a natural opening for the question. It's the question we always want to ask. Not to place someone in the class structure anymore—which is the old and valid objection to the question—but because we're genuinely curious. I always stop myself from asking though, because what if the person is out of work or can't tell by my tone that I think all work is valuable?
 

“I'm in meat inspection,” she says. No nonsense. Matter of fact. This, I think, is a woman who faces facts. A woman who has seen people break promises and die untimely deaths, a woman who has cleaned up unspeakable messes.
 

“Ah,” I say, “meat inspection.”

“Chickens,” she says, nodding, looking at her hands. “At a kosher chicken plant in North York. It's hard on your body, standing like that all the day long. And on your hands. Hard on your hands, I mean.”
 

We sit side by side in silence for a while as I take this in.
 

“Thirty-eight a minute,” she says. And it takes me a moment to realize she's talking chickens. That this woman earns her living inspecting thirty-eight chickens a minute. All the day long.
 

“It's better than some places. I worked in one company that did eighty-six a minute. They did it electronically with x-ray cameras, one person looking at the viscera, another at the cavity and so on. Me I do it by hand now.” She gestures as if opening a book with her thumbs. “Open each one up.”

“Wow,” I say. I try to think of something else to say but am stumped. My social graces have for the moment been swept away on a wave of generalized guilt. Guilt for my eating of chickens, guilt for my comparatively cushy work. This woman has a kindness about her that makes me afraid for her.

“I'm getting older, and I'm on my own since my marriage ended and I don't know how much longer I can do it. I hate these night shifts especially. I want to try to get an office position in the company, but it's exactly how they say. I didn't believe it at first, but I know now it's true. It's who you know, you know. And people are so backbiting. It's unbelievable, but you have to believe it.”

Her accent is lovely. The way she says unbelievable is so pristine, the word sounds as if it were doing a high platform dive with a twist from her lips.
 

The subway jerks forward, the obstruction having apparently been addressed.