I entered the lobby, a grand oak-paneled room with a sweeping wooden staircase and two giant, intricately carved fireplaces you could walk into if you got the urge to self-immolate.
Yvonne, the sunny, buxom Jamaican receptionist fond of hair accessories, waved from the front desk. Shiny orange and yellow beads bounced at the ends of her dreadlocks as she moved her head. A carved wooden turkey wearing a pilgrim’s hat stood on the counter next to her. NO FOWL LANGUAGE read the sign that hung around its intact neck. I wondered if Yvonne had caught me on the news and how she’d react.
“Ah, Nora, dare ya are.”
“Hi, Yvonne. How’ve you been?”
“The lord shinin’ his love on me. Giving me extra shifts. Yourself?”
Yvonne seemed unaware of my drama. She was probably much too busy to watch television with all the hours she worked.
“Good. I’m good. How is my aunt?”
“She’s been missing ya. Acting a bit spacey. Mostly she go to a happy place, but sometime she go paranoid. She call security yesterday evening. Say someone stole her can opener. Turns out she put it in her refrigerator.”
It was always a blame game with Lada lately. Always a mysterious “someone” responsible for petty crimes against her. But there’d been nothing really alarming yet.
“Here you go, child. Sign on the line,” Yvonne said, pushing the registration book toward me before she buzzed Lada’s apartment.
I be no child, I thought, tracking the brown spot on my hand as I wrote my name. Was that a freckle or a liver spot? Whenever I came to The Cedars, my fears of aging bubbled up.
“Nobody home. Try de Panic Room,” Yvonne said, hanging up the in-house phone.
That was what residents had dubbed their lounge area, the place they went when they couldn’t bear spending any more time alone in their apartments but didn’t have the energy to entertain.
“If I invite people over, I’ve got to serve coffee and a nosh, at least. Then I have to clean up after them,” Lada told me. “Old age takes it out of you, Nora. Syakomu ovoshchu svoyo vremya. Every vegetable has its time. Mine is over. I’m rotting in the bin.”
My heart broke when I heard her talk like that. I wished I had something to say to make her feel better—some sage advice, some really useful tips for living. But Mad as Hell was right. I was glib. If Ben had published the letter and I had the guts to be totally honest, I would have written this response:
Dear Mad as Hell,
Here’s why I write the column in the way that I do: I’m covering up for the fact that I have no idea how to deal with the reality of people’s pain and fragility. I don’t have a fucking clue how to help with my own, let alone theirs.
Nora Glasser, alias Total Fraud.
I thanked Yvonne and took the elevator to the second floor, where I walked down a corridor whose walls featured decorative paper cutouts of smiling Native Americans in headdresses, pilgrims and cornucopias. The Cedars wasn’t exactly politically correct. My spirits lifted as they always did as soon as I entered the Panic Room. It reminded me of New York’s Algonquin Hotel—the dark wooden paneling, clusters of high-backed Edwardian chairs, antique tea tables and velvet couches. Back when I lived in the city, I used to hang out in the lobby of the famous old hotel for inspiration. I’d imagine Dorothy Parker and her New Yorker friends trading witty stories at their Round Table luncheons there.
The Panic Room was full of character, but it was also redolent with the stink of mothballs—all those wool sweaters and shawls that residents had pulled out of storage with the arrival of the cold weather. Surprisingly, the cedar-obsessed owners hadn’t installed cedar closets when they renovated. My nose started running from the sickly sweet odor of naphthalene.
Aunt Lada and another white-haired woman were playing cards near the window. Even from across the room, I could see that Lada had a “tell.” She looked so much like my mother in that moment that I had to stop and catch my breath. It wasn’t just that Lada and Sally Levervitch had prominent Russian foreheads, feline eyes and similar wavy hair (though my mother dyed hers strawberry blonde to hide her ethnicity, while Lada had lived to see her brown hair go completely gray), it was the astonishing height to which Lada’s left eyebrow could arch when she disapproved of something. My mother had the same ability. Lada’s eyebrow was aimed at her cards, and it said, “I don’t like the hand I’ve been dealt.”
“Nora!” Lada exclaimed, lighting up when she saw me. “I told you she’d come,” she said to her card-holding friend.
I didn’t recognize Lada’s companion—a handsome Asian woman with unusual ethnic bracelets and earrings that complemented long silver hair she wore twisted into a bun. She must be a new resident, I surmised.
“Nora, this is Ann Kogarashi. She took a one-bedroom on the third floor. She’s an anthropologist.”
Ann looked me over and smiled.
“Anthropologist, long retired. Lovely to meet you. Your aunt raves about you,” she said. There was no hint of her having seen me on the news, either. Was she just being discreet out of respect for my aunt?
A whirring sound came from behind as Mort pulled up. Mort, who was eighty-nine, had a tube running from his nose to an oxygen tank strapped to the back of his wheelchair.
“How are you, Mort?”
“Woke up on the right side of the dirt, so I can’t complain,” he answered, smiling.
Mort used to be a Madison Avenue ad man. He was still mentally sharp and plugged in to current events.
“Sorry to hear about your troubles with the law, Nora,” he said softly. “You doing all right?”
I glanced over at Lada, certain that this would start a conversation about the murders, but she was smiling, oblivious. Ann just looked at me with concern. I nodded at Mort.
“Maybe you’ll come with us to the film today? Take your mind off things,” he said. “They’re showing Hairspray. John Travolta plays a woman. Wears a fat suit.”
I’d gone to see No Country for Old Men with Lada and Mort a few weeks back; The Cedars screened movies in the downstairs lounge. The two of them fell asleep about twenty minutes into the film. Holding hands.
“Sorry, Mort. I’ve got to work after lunch.” I gave my arm to Lada. “I have to steal my aunt away for a little bit. Nice to meet you, Ann. See you soon, Mort.”
I fully expected Lada to bring up the murders as soon as we were out of earshot, but she didn’t. She really seemed to be off in another world.