‘It was not a nice day when we went to look at Rivertree, you have to remember that,’ she said. I grunted, kept driving, refused to look at her. I knew she was peering at me with that intent look, the one that insisted I agree with her no matter what she said.
‘That makes such a difference in the impression you get,’ she went on. ‘Remember how, when we took Tommy to look at colleges, and the weather was bad, he hated those.’
I kept looking at the road. ‘And he went to Brunswick on a sunny day and decided to go there and hated it,’ I said. ‘So what’s your point?’
‘Well, I just mean, you have to give a place more than one chance. In all fairness, you—’
‘Look Sally, I said I’d go look at one just to get you off my back. So I did. End of story.’
‘But you can’t give up at just one. You haven’t got the whole picture.’
‘I think I do.’
‘This time it would be visiting somebody we know, somebody who can give us some real perspective on living there.’
‘Somebody you know,’ I said.
‘You know them, Tom. They came to visit right after we moved here. She was the one whose hobby was making those darling Nantucket baskets, the ones that cost a fortune in the shops.’
‘That has to be forty-five years ago. I have no clue what they look like, either one. You don’t either.’
‘I certainly do! They’ve sent us a Christmas card every single year, with family pictures and everything. I’d recognize them in a minute.’
‘It’s just really fishy; all of a sudden they want us to visit them, be pals, get a tour of this place they’re ga-ga about. It’s like they’re working as sales reps for it or something.’
‘Tom, you are so cynical! I think they’re just so happy they made such a good choice, they want to share the good news with people.’
‘But why us?’
‘Look, honey, just think about it. They’ve invited us for lunch, it’s a free lunch, and it’s not as if we’re booked solid for the next month.’
‘I have plenty to do. And there are no free lunches. You know that, Sally. Everybody knows that.’
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It was not too good a day when we went to Sunrise Ridge, either. It started out pretty badly; I am good with directions, but Sally was reading them to me and she got me going east on Route 183 when we should have gone west. It embarrasses the hell out of me to be late, especially when the Crawfords had said lunch was only served until one and we were cutting it really close.
‘You can’t miss it; it’s the biggest building in Connecticut,’ Henry Crawford had said. Right there I should have known it would be a waste of time. And we couldn’t miss the entrance, he said, it’s so obvious. We drove down this long, winding entrance driveway to a gray-shingled building that went on and on. There were quite a few places that looked like entrances, but I found one that had a flagpole out front, with an American flag hanging in the rain, and I decided that had to be it.
Sally went in and came out with this woman who might have looked vaguely familiar, except she was a few pounds—quite a few, actually—heavier than anybody we’ve ever been friends with. Except we were never friends with these people, so far as I can remember.
Henry came out, he was just as tubby as she was, and showed me where to park the car. He jabbered the whole time. ‘You can get a carport for an extra fee, but we didn’t see any need,’ he said. ‘When it snows they come out and brush off your car, and they have your keys and move it and plow all the spaces and put it back, so you can just come out and start ‘er up and you’re on your way. Not that we drive that much anymore. The van takes us to all kinds of events and activities, and I can tell you, it’s a relief not to have to deal with the kinds of people on the road these days.’
We went into the dining room with the girls. I have to say, it was impressive. Not exactly institutional. Like some kind of resort lodge. Fieldstone fireplaces with real wood fires burning. Laminated-beam arches overhead. Plate glass overlooking the woods. Tables for four with real tablecloths and napkins, something we never have at home unless we have company. Menus. Waitresses.
Henry and Janice knew the waitresses. ‘This is our friend Tanya, hi Tanya,’ they said. ‘These are our friends from Massachusetts, out slumming.’ Tanya laughed and took our orders. She invited us to go to the salad bar and help ourselves.
I never eat a big lunch, a sandwich maybe, but everybody was ordering major entrees, so I did. ‘Do you eat like this all the time?’ I said. ‘Sure,’ said Henry, pushing back his chair a little.
‘What do you do for exercise?’ I said.
Janice leaned forward earnestly. She wore her hair in a way I thought strange for a woman her age, the front part pulled back into a clip or something and the sides hanging straight down. It must have been how she wore it as a kid, only it was gray. ‘We walk. We have several miles of beautiful walking trails, down to the river and across the road to the new campus. We walk up there pretty often.’
‘What’s the new campus?’
‘Oh, didn’t we say? Sunrise Ridge has been so successful that they’ve expanded, sixty-five new units right across the road. Sunrise Woods. They’ve just started offering them. So you could get in right away if you wanted to.’
I grunted and attended to my filet of sole, which I have to admit was pretty tasty. Tanya came back with dessert menus, and the Crawfords ordered apple crisp and profiterole. Sally had key lime pie. I said black coffee. Everybody looked at me like I had committed some terrible faux pas. ‘The desserts here are outstanding,’ Janice said. ‘You really should try one.’ I said, ‘I try to watch my weight.’ Sally frowned at me.
Janice and Henry insisted I taste their desserts. I hate eating off of other people’s plates, but I knew Sally was already storing up a lecture about how rude I was, so I had a forkful of each. They were way too sweet. After everybody cleaned up their desserts, Janice stood up and threw her napkin on her plate. ‘This is the best part. Somebody else cooks, and then you can just get up and leave the dirty dishes.’ ‘Darn right,’ Henry said. ‘Spoken like a man who does dishes,’ Sally said, smiling. ‘Used to,’ Henry agreed. ‘Used to.’
‘So first, let us show you the other dining rooms,’ he said. We went to the other side of the big fireplace and saw a smaller plate-glass room with something like a big boardroom table in the middle. ‘This is if you have family visiting and want to eat in private,’ Janice said. Then we crossed the big dining room into a place that looked a little like a café, red-checked tablecloths and stuff. ‘You can get sandwiches and soups here any time, or something to-go if you want.’
To-go? Where the hell, I thought, would they go? Janice must have read my mind and said sometimes they just wanted to eat in front of the TV without a lot of fuss. They had the plan that provided one meal a day, and they didn’t dress up for dinner, nobody did, but sometimes they didn’t even want to go down for that. I could understand that. You’d still have to meet and greet, and try to avoid the neighbor who was a pain in the ass, and maybe spend a lot of time talking to the one you kind of liked, if there was one.
‘Do you want to take the elevator, or walk up?’ Henry was talking to me. ‘Walk,’ I said. Janice said, ‘I think I’ll ride. We’ll meet you boys up there.’ On the way up Henry started explaining the layout of the place, how every wing had its own name and color-coded carpet to help you know where you were, but after the first eight steps, he was too winded to talk. At the top we went through the fire door where he stopped to wheeze and pointed to the rug. ‘We’re in Skowhegan here; see, the color is green with these pine treesy patterns; get it, Pine Tree State?’
He led me down the corridor where the girls were waiting. There were pictures on the wall, some like dime-store prints of famous works and some paintings that must have been done by the people living there. There were also directional signs, Lobby and Dining, Skowhegan, Nantucket, New York and what-all. Like they were sure you were so out of it you couldn’t find your way home.
I visualized everybody inside doling out their pills into those little blue boxes with compartments for every day or, I hate the thought, three times a day—a blue row for morning, yellow for noon, and purple for night. It’s bad enough I have to pull out a Medicare card now instead of an honest workingman’s Blue Cross. Sally has no problem marching up to the ticket counter and asking for senior discounts. I won’t do it. I hate the whole nomenclature, Senior Citizen, for God’s sake, when they really mean old fogey. Old is all in your mind, anyway. It’s just numbers. I’m not old. These people here, they’re old.
What struck me as we walked along were the different ways people dressed up their front doors, like they needed to confirm some identity. One had an autumn wreath made out of bittersweet and stuff, pretty tasteful. The one I liked best had half a model ship, the hull cut stem to stern, glued to the door. Some were really tacky, artificial flowers or rag dolls or little shelves with those porcelain figures of shepherd girls and boys in lederhosen. We passed a birdcage that had a carved canary in it; Henry stopped and shook it, and one of those bird-call boxes flipped over and went tweet-tweet. Sally exclaimed how cute it was. One place had a bulletin board with family photos tacked up. Another one had a carved plaque with Westies on it. ‘You can have dogs?’ I asked. ‘Oh yeah, sure can, little ones’, Henry said. Sally looked at me funny. ‘We don’t have a dog,’ she said. Like I didn’t know that.
‘Now we’re in Nantucket; see, the carpet is blue,’ Janice said. It had what looked like thousands of little lighthouses on it. ‘We live in Nantucket; isn’t that a great coincidence, with my baskets and all? I mean, it was just an accident, but we decided it must have been fate.’ At a door with a little Nantucket basket tacked in the middle, she unlimbered a set of keys. I was surprised. I thought this would be a place you wouldn’t have to worry much about crime, but I guess I was wrong.
I got claustrophobic right away. There was a little hall about one stride long with coat hooks on the wall, then a kitchen just big enough for a sink and a microwave, then the living room with a couch and TV. What saved the place was a kind of bay window with a round table to eat breakfast on. They showed us the other rooms, a bedroom and a bathroom and a den they both used. That’s out, I said to myself.
The magazines on the table were Retirement Living and the AARP monthly that Sally gets. I refuse to read it. All it has is dumbed-down diet and exercise advice, pep talks about staying active, and drug ads. Sally has talked herself into being old. It’s a bad idea. You’re as old as you think you are. I’m convinced I’m still thirty-five. Maybe forty. Living here would make me ninety, real quick.
‘It’s small but it’s all we need,’ said Janice, reading my mind again. ‘We have so many other activities, we’re not here very much.’ Henry pulled out a thick folder and said, ‘Here, here’s what you might want to know about the place.’ There were floor plans, four-color pictures, a reprint of a feature story about the founders of Sunrise Ridge who saw the need long before anybody else thought of it. I didn’t see any prices, but then, I wasn’t buying. I leafed through it just enough to be polite. I can skim pretty fast, and I saw the fine print where it said residents who recommended a new purchaser got a thousand dollars.
‘Well, it sure has been nice seeing you guys and seeing the place,’ I said. Henry laughed. ‘We’re not done! You still have to see the activity rooms.’ We went out again, through Nantucket, through Skowhegan, through Lenox (gold, with little French horns on the rug). The halls were pretty empty. Now and then we’d meet a bent-over old lady, blue hair and cane and all, and she’d smile like she really wanted to stop and talk. Janice and Henry would say hi but wouldn’t stop, maybe knowing how long it would take. Once a man shuffled by pushing a three-wheeled kind of thing, painted blue, with fat gray rubber tires. We nodded at each other, but there was a sharp look in his eyes that said, okay, feel sorry for me, you’re not so far from this even if you don’t think so. I looked away fast.
‘Here’s the workshop,’ Henry said. ‘Just about all the tools you could ever need.’ So we saw the workshop, where two old geezers were puttering at the tool bench, and the crafts room where Janice gives classes in basket-making, and a greenhouse where three women were snipping dead leaves off plants in flowerpots. And the painting studio. I looked at the stuff on the easels. I’m no artist, but I have been to the Museum of Bad Art, and I think these were candidates. One was a big blowup of those gaudy Hawaiian flowers, red with yellow spikes poking out of the middle in an obscene way. The other was a copy of a clipping the guy had tacked to the wall, a red lobster shack on a wharf with lots of dories along the pier. Sally made a point of talking to the men and telling them how much talent they had and how she hoped this would be ready for the all-resident show next month. George nodded and mumbled a little.
‘If you go away,’ Janice said, ‘you can bring your plants to the greenhouse and the plants committee will take care of them for you.’ ‘What other committees are there?’ Sally asked. ‘Oh, there are so many! Activities committee, excursions committee, decorating committee, complaints committee, dining committee. Whatever your interest, you can get involved.’
Henry showed us the computer room, ‘Just in case you don’t have your own, but there are connections in every apartment anyway, and if something goes wrong, well, there’s always somebody around who can help you out.’ ‘Now that’s appealing,’ Sally said. I said nothing.
‘And did we tell you about the courses?’ Janet gushed. ‘You can go to Compton Community College—the Sunrise van takes you—and take their Lifelong Learning courses. Everything you can think of! Play-reading, art appreciation, basic Spanish. And we have bridge lessons here, once a week, and duplicate bridge twice a week.’
In every other corner of the corridor was a card room or a mini-library or an activities nook with jigsaw puzzles all completed, standing proudly on tables. I wondered if they were a topic of conversation in the dining room. Jack! I see the two-thousand-piece Vermont scenic is finished! Wasn’t that the one you were working on? Congratulations, old boy!
There was never actually anybody playing cards or working on jigsaws, though. These places reminded me of those store-bought play sets in a million suburban back yards, tree houses and slides and swings and forts, all set up, where you never saw any kids playing. I used to give the kids hammers and nails and a few boards and let them make their own.
We went through swinging doors and found ourselves in New York, red carpet with skyscrapers on it. The place looked different but familiar, and with a jolt I realized what it was. A young woman in a nurse’s uniform came out of a door. Henry said, ‘The beauty of it is, if you have to come here, it doesn’t cost you any more than you were paying before. And the care is first-rate. First-rate.’ The doors to the rooms were open, like hospital rooms, which I guess they were. I didn’t want to look in, like maybe I thought I might get infected with old age.
They insisted on driving us over to the new part. Sally knew I was ready to go and then some, but we went with them. ‘This campus has some free-standing units,’ Janice said. ‘They even have garages.’ Sally tried to dig me out of my silence: ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Tom?’ ‘The drawback,’ said Henry, ‘is if you live in these, you have to go outdoors. You want to go to dinner and it’s snowing and you have to put on all your boots and stuff. Whereas if you live in one of the apartments, why, everything’s connected. You don’t care what the weather is.’
☽☾ ☽☾ ☽☾
It was a couple of days before Sally brought it up again. I was trying to read the paper; I could tell it was coming. She leaned over the breakfast table, kind of flushed and that bright look in her eye.
‘Sally,’ I said, ‘it’s just like a goddam cruise ship, only everybody’s old. You haven’t got anything useful to do, so you invent all these hobbies and pastimes, for what? Just so you can finish a bunch of jigsaw puzzles before you peg out? I’m not leaving here except in a pine box.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, Tom. You’re not cooking and cleaning every day of your life. I’d like a little time of my own before I peg out!’ She sniffed a little and got teary. I hate that. ‘Chrissake, Sally, I’ve said I’ll pay for a cleaning woman if you want. I’ve said you can get takeout any time you want, I won’t complain. I thought you liked to cook, I thought you thought it was creative.’
‘I could be so much more creative doing something else,’ she said. ‘Like what? I should have let it lie, shouldn’t have said anything else, but I went on. ‘Like writing the great American novel? Like composing the great American anthem? I mean, I’m happy just doing useful everyday stuff…’ But she got up and left the room, closing the door ungently.
I sighed. I put on my denim jacket, got my gloves and bow saw and my maul and splitter. One of the things about having our own place is, I can go out and cut wood and split it and reward myself by putting my feet up by the fire with a drink afterward. It’s having little goals like this in life, and putting your feet up only when you know you’ve earned it.
Thing is, you can’t have any big goals anymore. I know I’m never going to have my face on a postage stamp, I’m never going to win a MacArthur genius grant, never even going to hike the Appalachian Trail, which I used to think I would. It struck me like a ton of bricks, after my parents died, hey, I’m the older generation. I’m the sage, the patriarch, the Old Man. And I don’t have all that much time. Funny, when I think of things that happened thirty years ago, say when Suz got married, it seems like yesterday. But thirty years from now…I don’t have another thirty years. Twenty-five, maybe. I’m even a little superstitious about laying down a bottle of wine that needs to age for five or six years. I have to settle for little goals.
We only have an acre, but I’ve left enough of it as woods that it kind of rains firewood. Dead wood is always falling down, and when it isn’t, I can usually find a little tree that won’t be missed and cut it; you need a green log to keep the fire going, anyway.
Sally doesn’t like it, wants it all to look like Versailles, so I let her grow flowers and manicure the front yard, and I keep the back like I want it. It’s so unkempt that I can get away with dumping stuff I don’t want, back there where nobody can see it, Christmas trees and fence posts and the occasional old tire. It’s kind of a scrapbook of my years here. Here’s the first mailbox the local kids bashed in playing mailbox baseball. There’s a stack of fence sections we took out after the dog died, and I kept because I thought we might put them back, or if not, they would make good firewood. But I haven’t taken them apart because the minute I do, I have no doubt Sally will suddenly want a fence somewhere again.
I keep stubbing my toe on this chunk of asphalt with a round hole in the middle, obviously the base of something, but I don’t remember what. There’s the first basketball hoop pole, the one Tommy’s friend’s mother backed into with her SUV and bent in half. She paid for a new one and pretended to have no hard feelings about it, but she was never too friendly after that. Nobody can see this stuff; it’s pretty much covered up with weeds and ground cover, but just to make sure, I build my compost pile against the back line. It screens everything from the neighbors. Nobody can complain about compost, it’s environmental and the sign of a good, responsible citizen. Sally is always after me to clean out this spot and take the junk to the dump. She has no idea what they charge you to dump stuff like this.
When we bought this place I thought it would be temporary until we found what we really wanted, a house with a little bit of jazz and personality. Then all the kids came along and we got too busy to look. It was pretty crowded when they were teenagers, but I kept telling Sally it was good for them, to learn how to live with other people, share the bathroom, not swipe other people’s food out of the refrigerator. And now they’re gone and there’s no point. Like I say, the place wasn’t perfect for a long time, but now it is.
It was a good day to be outside. The leaves were just beginning to go rusty, mostly green with a red or yellow flag here and there. I pay attention to those because they tell me which trees are in trouble. I knew there was a major branch that had come down with the windstorm a few days before, just the kind of thing I like. I started lopping off the really small branches, the ones not worth taking in. Then I sawed the ones as big as my arm into eight- or ten-foot pieces so I could drag them back to my sawbuck and cut them to a proper length in comfort. After that, I planned to go to work on the big piece, getting chunks I’d have to split.
I started dragging two long limbs under each arm until a stab in my back told me it was a bad idea. That’s the thing that galls me most, that I can’t push the envelope anymore. I used to be a workhorse. As a kid I was always the one who’d run the extra lap, stay in the weight room until they closed it down. Coaches loved me. There was a time I could have wrestled that firewood to where I wanted it and just gotten stronger in the process. Now if I push it, I pay a price—a pulled muscle, a gimpy knee, a sore back, an X-ray session that has doctors muttering about joint replacements. Sometimes I’m so stiff when I get out of bed in the morning I move like an old man. I don’t let Sally see that, there’d be more carping about how we can’t cut it here.
I put three of the branches down and started pulling them one by one back toward the house. I glanced up and noticed the gutter sagging at the right end. Damn, another chore. I said damn, but the fact is I don’t mind. Like I say, I enjoy meeting these little challenges. It was just a matter of re-setting the bracket.
The ground slopes down a little at the back of the house, so I needed to get the thirty-foot ladder. It’s tricky to set up on the hill, but I’ve done it a hundred times. I clean the gutters myself, fall and spring. Sally always frets about it, and this time was no different. She popped out of the back door. ‘Tom, you shouldn’t be doing this, you wouldn’t have to do it at Sunrise…’
‘I like doing this, Sally! Get off my back!’ And I jammed the bottom end of the ladder in the grass and started walking it up, rung by rung, and let it fall against the house, like I always did. It was a little close to the house, had to be, because of the slope there, and I knew it and was always careful. Maybe having her nagging me distracted me from the process, but I can’t blame her, it was my own damn fault.
She shut the door and I took my screwdriver and went up. The bracket was not loose so much as bent, maybe from the ice, and I saw I’d have to get it off completely and hammer it back into shape. The screws were painted over and I had to scrape to find the slot and work them out. Then the bracket was more or less welded in place by successive coats of paint, so I started to pry it off. I kept my left hand on the gutter for balance and worked the screwdriver in under the metal strip. All of a sudden the bracket came loose and a length of gutter with it, the piece I was holding onto. My weight lurched back and the ladder came away from the house. I dropped the gutter and scrabbled for a handhold, getting nothing but roof grit and bloody fingers. I was going down, thirty pounds of ladder and me, backwards.
At the apex of the ladder’s arc, balanced between heaven and earth, I saw how it was going to be. I hope to hell I die instead, I thought. Then the ladder and I crashed into the bushes.