PART TWO
All Fall Down
SEVEN
“Welcome to Eastwood.” The woman who met me on the front lawn of the Eastwood Assisted Living Facility had her silver-gray hair in a neat bob, a high, sweet voice, and a cool, brisk handshake. She wore khakis, a sweater, and a nametag with KATHLEEN YOUNG written on it, and she led me through the doors with a bounce in her step, like a former high-school jock who’d stayed on campus to teach phys ed. “Let me show you around!”
Her bubbly, energetic manner only made the handful of residents—a man in a wheelchair by the door, hands shaking as he held up the Examiner; a woman in a pink-and-white bathrobe, using a walker to make her slow way toward the art room—look even older and sadder. I tried to picture my father here, my smart, strong, competent father in a bathrobe, requiring the kind of care a place like this could give him. It hurt, but it was a distant kind of pain. The pills let me consider his future without feeling it too deeply. It was almost like watching a movie about someone else’s sorrows—now her father can’t remember his granddaughter’s name; now he’s having temper tantrums; now he’s having accidents, and wandering away from home, and crying—and knowing they were painful without feeling them acutely. Narcotics were like a warm, fuzzy comforter, a layer of defense between me and the world.
“Follow me, please,” said Kathleen, bounding down the hallway on the balls of her feet. I grappled with a brief but fierce desire to go sprinting back to my car, to burn rubber out of the parking lot and never see this place again . . . only what good would that do? My mother was unlikely to take this on. Someone had to step up and do what was required.
In the foyer I braced myself for the smell of urine, of industrial cleansers and canned chicken soup that I remembered from my dad’s last hospital stay, but Eastwood’s green-carpeted corridors smelled pleasantly of cedar and spice. There was a basket of scented pinecones on top of the front desk, behind which two women in headsets were busy typing. Behind them was an oversized whiteboard, the kind I remembered from Ellie’s preschool, with sentences left open-ended, so the kids and teachers could fill in the blanks. Today is MONDAY, read the top line. It is APRIL 7th. The weather is . . .. Instead of the word “sunny,” someone had affixed a decal of an affably beaming sun. Our SPECIAL ACTIVITIES are BINGO in the Recreation Parlor, and a TRIP TO THE CAMDEN AQUARIUM. I felt a tug at my sleeve, and heard a whispered “Help me.” I looked down. While Kathleen was deep in conversation with one of the head-setted ladies behind the desk, a tiny, curled shrimp of a woman had wheeled up beside me and grabbed my sleeve.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
The woman gave a very teenager-y eye roll. Fine white hair floated around her pink scalp in an Einsteinian nimbus. Her frail torso was wrapped in an oversized pink cardigan, and she wore pink velour pants and a pair of white knitted slippers beneath it. Her veined hand trembled, but her eyes, behind enormous glasses, were sharp, and I was relieved to see a full set of teeth (or realistic-looking dentures) when she started talking.
“This place is what’s wrong,” she murmured, speaking out of the side of her mouth, like a prisoner in the yard who didn’t want the guards to overhear. “The steak is tough. The pudding’s bland. They’ve been promising me for weeks to order my gluten-free crumpets, and . . .” She lifted her hands in the air, palms up, a mute appeal to the God of gluten-free crumpets. “Also, my kids never visit.”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered, then squatted, my face close to hers. She extended one of her gnarled paws toward me.
“Lois Lefkowitz. Formerly of sunny Florida, until I broke my hip and my kids moved me back here.”
I shook her hand gently. “I’m Allison Weiss.” I shot a glance at the counter, making sure the brisk Ms. Young was still occupied, before I whispered, “Is it really that bad here?”
She patted my hand and shook her head.
“What’s not to like?” she asked. “I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to clean, I don’t have to shop, and I don’t have to listen to Murray go on about his fantasy football team. I read . . .” She tapped the e-reader in her lap. “With this thing, every book is a large-print book. I go to the museum, I go to the symphony, and the beauty shop’s open once a week for a wash and set.” She patted her wisps of white hair, then put one gnarled paw on my shoulder. “Mother or father?”
“My dad.”
“Memory loss or just can’t get around?”
“He’s got Alzheimer’s.”
“Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry.” Pat, pat, pat went the wrinkled little hand. It felt surprisingly nice. Both of my grandmothers were long gone—my mother’s mother had died of breast cancer before I was born, and my father’s mother, Grandma Sadie, had gone to Heaven’s screened-in porch when I was in college. I liked to imagine her sometimes, sitting in a rocking chair, listening to the Sox and yelling at my grandfather. “They’ll take good care of him here.”
My throat felt thick as I swallowed. “You think so?”
“I see things. I watch. They’ll make sure he’s safe. Do you have children?”
“A little girl.”
“Pictures?”
I pulled my phone out of my purse. Ellie, in her favorite maxidress, was my wallpaper. In the picture, she stood on the beach in a broad-brimmed sun hat, with waves foaming at her feet. My new friend peered at the screen, then sighed. “It goes so fast,” she told me. “One minute you’re putting diaper cream on their tushies, the next thing you know, you’re walking them down the aisle. Then they’re putting you in a place like this.” She sighed again, and I thought I saw the glimmer of moisture on one seamed cheek. “And you sit here and wonder where the time went, and how you never wanted to live long enough that someone should be changing your diapers.” Another sigh. “Still. I wouldn’t have missed a day of it.” She poked at my phone. “You got Candy Crush on here?”
“Oh. No. Sorry.”
Kathleen Young was heading toward us, her pleasant smile still in place, but I noticed the creases around her eyes had deepened.
“Mrs. Lefkowitz, you’re not scaring away prospectives, are you?”
My new friend gave Ms. Young a sunny smile. “You mean I shouldn’t tell them about the rats in the showers?”
“She’s kidding,” said Ms. Young. Mrs. Lefkowitz gave me another smile of surpassing sweetness.
“I hope I’ll see you again,” she said. “And that pretty little girl!”
“Nice to meet you,” I said, and gave her little paw another squeeze.
“Right this way,” said Kathleen Young. “This is the Manor,” she said, walking at a swift clip past opened doors with nameplates on them. “Our residents who require the most care stay here. This,” she said, opening a door, “is a typical double room.”
I stepped inside. The room wasn’t large, with most of the space taken up by adjustable hospital beds with side rails that could be raised or dropped. There were two oak dressers; two bookcases; two armchairs, one on each side of the room, each upholstered in blue plastic, dyed and patterned to make it look like cloth. The bathroom had all of the stainless steel rails you’d expect, with a metal-and-plastic chair in the oversized walk-in shower cubicle, and grippy mats on the floor. Back in the room, I let my fingertips drift along the armrest of one chair and tried not to wince at the feeling of plastic. Would my dad see the difference between the furniture in his house and this stuff? How could he not? Noticing my expression, Kathleen said, “Of course, our residents are welcome to bring their own furniture. Most do. We find it helps with their sense of dislocation.” I nodded, mentally erasing the hospital bed, the cheap bureau and bookcase, and the plasticized armchair, and replacing them with things from my parents’ home. Better.
“Are there single rooms available?”
“Of course. They’re significantly more expensive . . .”
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, and watched Kathleen’s pupils expand. Years ago my father, in a tacit admission that my mother was equipped to handle precisely nothing that his golden years might entail, had bought himself a life-insurance policy and all kinds of disability and extended-care policies, too. There was money to pay for everything he’d need, and to pay for the help my mother might eventually require, now that my father was unable to arrange her days. “Tell me about the, uh, level of care.” I’d done all kinds of research about the questions I was supposed to ask, even if the answers were all on the website. As Kathleen recited statistics about physician’s assistants, physicians on call, and nurse-practitioners, LPNs, and nurse’s aides, and how it was a goal at Eastwood to encourage as much independence as was feasible and safe, I thought of when I was twelve, and my father had taken me to New York City.
The whole thing was an accident. He’d gotten the tickets for South Pacific as my mother’s birthday present. For weeks, she’d gone around playing the cast recording, singing “Younger than Springtime,” making appointments for a haircut and color, trying on and returning different dresses. I had come home on the Friday afternoon of their proposed trip and found her sick in bed. Some kind of twenty-four-hour bug, I’d thought, remembering the sounds of retching, murmuring behind closed doors, my dad asking if she wanted a doctor and my mother, shrill and weepy, saying she’d be fine, just fine, she just needed to sleep. My father had emerged tight-lipped, visibly unhappy. He’d already paid for the tickets, made plans for dinner, reserved the hotel room. If there’d been time he would have found a way to cancel the whole thing. Instead, he’d mustered up a smile and said, “How’d you like to go to the Big Apple with your dear old dad?”
At twelve, I was not looking good. My breasts and my nose had both sprouted to what would become their adult dimensions, with the rest of my body and my face lagging behind. I had braces, with rubber bands to pull my upper jaw back into alignment with my lower jaw, and my oily skin, in spite of all the Clearasil and the benzoyl-peroxide-soaked scrubbie pads, was routinely spattered with pimples. I was wearing my hair with bangs, figuring the more of my troubled complexion I could hide, the better, and my oversized button-down shirts, paired with pants pegged at the ankles and flowy everywhere else, did nothing to minimize my size. But on that night, due to some miracle of luck and timing, my skin was clear, my hair was behaving, and I looked like a girl any father would be happy to escort to a show.
“Try my silver dress,” my mother had croaked from her bed. It was meant to be knee-length. On me, it was a hip-skimming tunic. Paired with plain black leggings and my mom’s black leather boots, it made me look almost like a grown-up, sophisticated and smart. She swept my bangs back with one of the wide cotton bands she wore to yoga, then blow-dried and straightened my hair and let me wear a little lipstick, red, which made my skin look olive instead of sallow. “Nice,” she whispered with a smile, before turning on her side and falling noisily asleep. My father had been dressed in his newest suit and the tie my mom had gotten him for his birthday. His eyes widened in appreciation as I came down the stairs, with my mother’s good black winter coat draped over one arm. “Those boys don’t know what they’re missing,” he’d blurted, and then instantly looked ashamed, but I carried that compliment close, like a jeweled locket, something wonderful and rare. He had held the car door open for me, regaled me with stories of the brain-dead interns from Penn’s and Temple’s graduate schools who descended on his office every summer, and how one of them had gotten so drunk at the managing partner’s Fourth of July party that he’d vomited in the hot tub. Exiting the car, paying the parking-lot attendant, holding his arm out to hail a taxi, or holding a door open and saying “After you,” he’d looked so handsome, tall and assured in his camel-hair topcoat, his shoes polished to a high gloss, the Rolex my mother had bought him for his fiftieth birthday gleaming on his wrist. In the theater, he kept one hand lightly between my shoulder blades as he steered us toward our seats, and in the restaurant, the pride in his tone was unmistakable as he introduced me to the ma?tre d’ and the waiter, who both seemed to know him, as “my daughter, Allison.”
I could remember everything from that night—the look of the theater, lit like a temple in the frosty Manhattan night, the smell of perfume and silk and fur in the air, the rustle of programs as the audience settled into the seats, the plaintive voice of the lead actor, lamenting about how paradise had once nearly been his. I remembered how women’s eyes had turned toward my father, the approving looks they gave him, how I’d felt about the way he belonged in their company, tall and smart and successful. I could name everything we’d eaten at the little French bistro on Fifty-Sixth Street, and could conjure up the taste of lobster bisque laced with sherry, profiteroles drizzled in dark chocolate, the single sip each of white wine and red wine and after-dinner port he’d let me have. Half-asleep in the taxi’s backseat as it cut through the traffic, humming the overture to myself, I had thought that I would never feel more content, more beloved, more beautiful.
Today is MONDAY, read the sign in the dining room, where tables for four were draped in pink cloths and set at wide intervals, the better to steer wheelchairs around them. On a shelf were dozens of paperbacks by Lee Child, Vince Flynn, Brad Thor. Was there some kind of law that men who wrote military thrillers had to have two-syllable names where the first and the last sounded interchangeable? There were romances for the ladies—your Nora Roberts, your Danielle Steel—and board games in worn boxes, some with their sagging edges reinforced with duct tape, the same games I played with Ellie: Sorry! and Parcheesi and Monopoly and Battleship. Our next meal will be DINNER, read the whiteboard at the front of the room. Tonight we are having CREAM OF MUSHROOM SOUP, LONDON BROIL, MASHED POTATOES, and GREEN BEANS. Oh, Dad, I mourned, and wondered how my mother would survive, seeing her beloved husband in a place like this.
Kathleen interrupted my reverie, giving me a glossy “Welcome to Eastwood” folder and a big smile. “If you’re ready, we can go back to my office. There’s some preliminary paperwork you can fill out, and then, once our finance department has had a look, they’ll be in touch. Did you bring your father’s tax returns?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The insides of my eyelids were stinging, and I was already blinking back tears. “I think I’m going to have to take care of that another time.”
“Are you all right?” Kathleen’s tone was not unsympathetic. She must have seen this dozens, if not hundreds of times—spouses and children who thought they were ready flipping out and running when it came time to sign the forms, to write the checks, to make it real. I managed a nod, and then hurried past the front desk, through the doors, out to the parking lot, and into my car. One dream in my heart, I heard in my head, and brushed my sleeve against my cheeks to wipe away the tears. One love to be living for . . .. One love to be living for . . .. This nearly was mine.