Fresh Complaint Page 3

  Once, years ago, when Della and Dick had the sailboat, Della almost drowned. The boat was moored at the time and Della slipped trying to climb aboard, sinking down into the murky green water of the marina. “I never learned to swim, you know,” she told Cathy. “But I wasn’t scared. It was sort of peaceful down there. Somehow I managed to claw my way to the surface. Dick was hollering for the dock boy and finally he came and grabbed hold of me.”

  Della’s face looks the way Cathy imagined it then, under the water. Mildly astonished. Serene. As though forces beyond her control have taken charge and there’s no sense resisting.

  This time, wonderment fails to save her. Della falls sideways, into the shelving. The metal edge shaves the skin off her arm with a rasping sound like a meat slicer. Della’s temple strikes the shelf next. Cathy shouts. Glass shatters.

  * * *

  They keep Della at the hospital overnight. Perform an MRI to check for bleeding in the brain, X-ray her hip, apply a damp chamois bandage over her abraded arm, which will have to stay on for a week before they remove it to see if the skin will heal or not. At her age, it’s fifty-fifty.

  All this is related to them by a Dr. Mehta, a young woman of such absurd glamour that she might play a doctor in a medical drama on TV. Two strands of pearls twine around her fluted throat. Her gray knit dress falls loosely over a curvaceous figure. Her only defect is her spindly calves, but she camouflages these with a pair of daring diamond-patterned stockings, and gray high heels that match her dress exactly. Dr. Mehta represents something Cathy isn’t quite prepared for, a younger generation of women surpassing her own not only in professional achievement but in the formerly retrograde department of self-beautification. Dr. Mehta has an engagement ring, too, with a sizeable diamond. Marrying some other doctor, probably, combining fat salaries.

  “What if the skin doesn’t heal?” Cathy asks.

  “Then she’ll have to keep the bandage on.”

  “Forever?”

  “Let’s just wait and see how it looks in a week,” Dr. Mehta says.

  All this has taken hours. It’s seven in the evening. Aside from the arm bandage, Della has the beginning of a black eye.

  At eight thirty, the decision is made to keep Della overnight for observation.

  “You mean I can’t go home?” Della asks Dr. Mehta. She sounds forlorn.

  “Not yet. We need to keep an eye on you.”

  Cathy elects to stay in the room with Della through the night. The lime-green couch converts into a bed. The nurse promises to bring her a sheet and blanket.

  * * *

  Cathy is in the cafeteria, soothing herself with chocolate pudding, when Della’s sons appear.

  Years ago, her son Mike got Cathy to watch a sci-fi movie about assassins who return to Earth from the future. It was the usual mayhem and preposterousness, but Mike, who was in college at the time, claimed that the movie’s acrobatic fight scenes were infused with profound philosophical meaning. Cartesian was the word he used.

  Cathy didn’t get it. Nevertheless, it’s of that movie she thinks, now, as Bennett and Robbie enter the room. Their pale, unsmiling faces and dark suits make them look inconspicuous and ominous at once, like agents of a universal conspiracy.

  Targeting her.

  “It was all my fault,” Cathy says as they reach her table. “I wasn’t watching her.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Bennett says.

  This seems a mark of kindness, until he adds, “She’s old. She falls. It’s just part of the whole deal.”

  “It’s a result of the ataxia,” Robbie says.

  Cathy isn’t interested in what ataxia means. Another diagnosis. “She was doing fine right up until she fell,” she says. “We were having a good time. Then I turned my back for a second and—wham.”

  “That’s all it takes,” Bennett said. “It’s impossible to prevent it.”

  “The medicine she’s taking, the Aricept?” Robbie says. “It’s not much more than a palliative treatment. The benefits, if any, taper off after a year or two.”

  “Your mom’s eighty-eight. Two years might be enough.”

  The implication of this hangs in the air until Bennett says, “Except she keeps falling. And ending up in the hospital.”

  “We’re going to have to move her,” Robbie says in a slightly louder, strained tone. “Wyndham’s not safe for her. She needs more supervision.”

  Robbie and Bennett are not Cathy’s children. They’re older, and not as attractive. She feels no connection to them, no maternal warmth or love. And yet they remind her of her sons in ways she’d rather not think about.

  Neither of them has offered to have Della come live with him. Robbie travels too much, he says. Bennett’s house has too many stairs. But it isn’t their selfishness that bothers Cathy the most. It’s how they stand before her now, infused—bloated—with rationality. They want to get this problem solved quickly and decisively, with minimum effort. By taking emotion out of the equation they’ve convinced themselves that they’re acting prudently, even though their wish to settle the situation arises from nothing but emotions—fear, mainly, but also guilt, and irritation.

  And who is Cathy to them? Their mom’s old friend. The one who worked in the bookstore. The one who got her stoned.

  Cathy turns away to look across the cafeteria, filling up now with medical staff coming in on their dinner break. She feels tired.

  “OK,” she says. “But don’t tell her now. Let’s wait.”

  * * *

  The machines click and whir through the night. Every so often an alarm sounds on the monitors, waking Cathy up. Each time a nurse appears, never the same one, and presses a button to silence it. The alarm means nothing, apparently.

  It’s freezing in the room. The ventilation system blows straight down on her. The blanket she’s been given is as thin as paper toweling.

  A friend of Cathy’s in Detroit, a woman who has seen a therapist regularly for the past thirty years, recently passed on advice the therapist had given her. Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

  Cathy reminds herself of this as she lies sleepless on the slab of mattress. Her impotence in helping Della has filled her mind with nihilistic thoughts. Cold, clear recognitions, lacerating in their strictness. She has never known who Clark is. Theirs is a marriage devoid of intimacy. If Mike, John, Chris, and Palmer weren’t her children, they would be people of whom she disapproves. She has spent her life catering to people who disappear, like the bookstore she used to work in.

  Sleep finally comes. When Cathy wakes the next morning, feeling stiff, she is relieved to see that the therapist was right. The sun is up and the universe isn’t so bleak. Yet some darkness must remain. Because she’s made her decision. The idea of it burns inside her. It’s neither nice nor kind. Such a novel feeling that she doesn’t know what to call it.

  Cathy is sitting next to Della’s bed when Della opens her eyes. She doesn’t tell her about the nursing home. She only says, “Good morning, Della. Hey, guess what time it is?”

  Della blinks, still groggy from sleep. And Cathy answers, “It’s hatchet time.”

  * * *

  It begins snowing as they cross the Massachusetts state line. They’re about two hours from Contoocook, the GPS a beacon in the sudden loss of visibility.

  Clark will see this on the Weather Channel. He’ll call or text her, concerned about her flight being canceled.

  Poor guy has no idea.

  Now that they’re in the car, with the wipers and the defroster going, it appears that Della doesn’t quite grasp the situation. She keeps asking Cathy the same questions.

  “So how will we get in the house?”

  “You said Gertie has a key.”

  “Oh, right. I forgot. So we can get the key from Gertie and get into the
house. It’ll be cold as the dickens in there. We were keeping it at about fifty to save on oil. Just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing.”

  “We’ll warm it up when we get there.”

  “And then I’m going to stay there?”

  “We both will. Until we get things sorted out. We can get one of those home health aides. And Meals on Wheels.”

  “That sounds expensive.”

  “Not always. We’ll look into it.”

  Repeating this information helps Cathy to believe in it. Tomorrow, she’ll call Clark and tell him that she’s going to stay with Della for a month, maybe more, maybe less. He won’t like it, but he’ll cope. She’ll make it up to him somehow.

  Bennett and Robbie present a greater problem. Already she has three messages from Bennett and one from Robbie on her phone, plus voice mails asking where she and Della are.

  It was easier than Cathy expected to sneak Della out of the hospital. Her IV had been taken out, luckily. Cathy just walked her down the hall, as though for exercise, then headed for the elevator. All the way to the car she kept expecting an alarm to sound, security guards to come running. But nothing happened.

  The snow is sticking to trees but not the highway yet. Cathy exits the slow lane when traffic gets light. She exceeds the speed limit, eager to get where they’re going before nightfall.

  “Bennett and Robbie aren’t going to like this,” Della says, looking out at the churning snow. “They think I’m too stupid to live on my own now. Which I probably am.”

  “You won’t be alone,” Cathy says. “I’ll stay with you until we get things sorted out.”

  “I don’t know if dementia is the kind of thing you can sort out.”

  Just like that: the malady named and identified. Cathy looks at Della to see if she’s aware of this change, but her expression is merely resigned.

  By the time they reach Contoocook, the snow is deep enough that they fear they won’t make it up the drive. Cathy takes the slope at a good speed and, after a slight skid, powers to the top. Della cheers. Their return has begun on a note of triumph.

  “We’ll have to get groceries in the morning,” Cathy says. “It’s snowing too hard to go now.”

  The following morning, however, snow is still coming down. It continues throughout the day, while Cathy’s voice mail fills with more calls from Robbie and Bennett. She doesn’t dare answer them.

  Once, early in her friendship with Della, Cathy forgot to leave dinner in the fridge for Clark to heat up. When she came home later that night, he got on her right away. “What is it with the two of you?” Clark said. “Christ. Like a couple of lezzies.”

  It wasn’t that. Not an overflow of forbidden desire. Just a way of compensating for areas of life that produced less contentment than advertised. Marriage, certainly. Motherhood more often than they liked to admit.

  There’s a ladies’ group Cathy has read about in the newspapers, a kind of late-life women’s movement. The members, middle-aged and older, dress up to the nines and wear elaborate, brightly colored hats—pink or purple, she can’t remember which. The group is known for these hats, in which its members swoop down on restaurants and fill entire sections. No men allowed. The women dress up for one another, to hell with everyone else. Cathy thinks this sounds like fun. When she’s asked Della about it, Della says, “I’m not dressing up and putting on some stupid hat just to have dinner with a bunch of people I probably don’t even want to talk to. Besides, I don’t have any good clothes anymore.”

  Cathy might do it alone. After she gets Della settled. When she’s back in Detroit.

  In the freezer, Cathy finds some bagels, which she defrosts in the microwave. There are also frozen dinners, and coffee. They can drink it black.

  * * *

  Her face is still pretty banged up but otherwise Della feels fine. She is happy to be out of the hospital. It was impossible to sleep in that place, with all the noise and commotion, people coming in to check on you all the time or to wheel you down for some test.

  Either that or no one came to help you at all, even if you buzzed and buzzed.

  Heading off into a snowstorm seemed crazy, but it was lucky they left when they did. If they’d waited another day, they would never have made it to Contoocook. Her hill was slippery by the time they arrived. Snow covered the walk and back steps. But then they were inside the house and the heat was on and it felt cozy with the snow falling at every window, like confetti.

  On TV the weather people are in a state, reporting on the blizzard. Boston and Providence are shut down. Sea waves have swept ashore and frozen solid, encasing houses in ice.

  They are snowed in for a week. The drifts rise halfway up the back door. Even if they could get to the car, there’s no way to get down the drive. Cathy has had to call the rental agency and extend her lease, which Della feels bad about. She has offered to pay but Cathy won’t let her.

  On their third day as shut-ins, Cathy jumps up from the couch and says, “The tequila! Don’t we still have some of that?” In the cupboard above the stove she finds a bottle of tequila and another, half full, of margarita mix.

  “Now we can survive for sure,” Cathy says, brandishing the bottle. They both laugh.

  Every evening around six, just before they turn on Brian Williams, they make frozen margaritas in the blender. Della wonders if drinking alcohol is a good idea with her malady. On the other hand, who’s going to tell on her?

  “Not me,” Cathy says. “I’m your enabler.”

  Some days it snows again, which makes Della jumble up the time. She’ll think that the blizzard is still going on and that she’s just returned from the hospital.

  One day she looks at her calendar and sees it is February. A month has gone by. In the bathroom mirror her black eye is gone, just a smear of yellow at the corner remains.

  Every day Della reads a little of her book. It seems to her that she is performing this task more or less competently. Her eyes move over the words, which in turn sound in her head, and give rise to pictures. The story is as engrossing and swift as she remembers. Sometimes she can’t tell if she is rereading the book or just remembering passages from having read them so often. But she decides the difference doesn’t matter much.

  “Now we really are like those two old women,” Della says one day to Cathy.

  “I’m still the younger one, though. Don’t forget that.”

  “Right. You’re young old and I’m just plain old old.”

  They don’t need to hunt or forage for food. Della’s neighbor Gertie, who was a minister’s wife, treks up from her house to bring them bread, milk, and eggs from the Market Basket. Lyle, who lives behind Della, crosses the snowy yard to bring other supplies. The power stays on. That’s the main thing.

  At some point Lyle, who has a side job plowing people out during the winter, gets around to plowing Della’s drive, and after that Cathy takes the rental car to get groceries.

  People start coming to the house. A male physical therapist who makes Della do balance exercises and is very strict with her. A visiting nurse who takes her vitals. A girl from the area who cooks simple meals on nights when Della doesn’t use the microwave.

  Cathy is gone by that point. Bennett is there instead. He comes up on the weekends and stays through Sunday night, getting up early to drive to work on Monday morning. A few months later, when Della gets bronchitis and wakes up unable to breathe, and is again taken to the hospital by EMS, it is Robbie who comes up, from New York, to stay for a week until she’s feeling better.

  Sometimes Robbie brings his girlfriend, a Canadian gal from Montreal who breeds dogs for a living. Della doesn’t ask much about this woman, though she is friendly to her face. Robbie’s private life isn’t her concern anymore. She won’t be around long enough for it to matter.

  She picks up Two Old Women from time to time to read a little more, but she never seems to get through the whole thing. That doesn’t matter either. She knows how the book ends. The two old
women survive through the harsh winter, and when their tribe comes back, still all starving, the two women teach them what they’ve learned. And from that time on those particular Indians never leave their old people behind anymore.

  A lot of the time Della is alone in the house. The people who come to help her have left for the day, or it’s their day off, and Bennett is busy. It’s winter again. Two years have passed. She’s almost ninety. She doesn’t seem to be getting any stupider, or only a little bit. Not enough to notice.

  One day, it snows again. Stopping at the window, Della is possessed by an urge to go outside and move into it. As far as her old feet will take her. She wouldn’t even need her walker. Wouldn’t need anything. Looking at the snow, blowing around beyond the window glass, Della has the feeling that she’s peering into her own brain. Her thoughts are like that now, constantly circulating, moving from one place to another, just a whole big whiteout inside her head. Going out in the snow, disappearing into it, wouldn’t be anything new to her. It would be like the outside meeting the inside. The two of them merging. Everything white. Just walk on out. Keep going. Maybe she’d meet someone out there, maybe she wouldn’t. A friend.

  2017

  AIR MAIL

  Through the bamboo Mitchell watched the German woman, his fellow invalid, making another trip to the outhouse. She came out onto the porch of her hut, holding a hand over her eyes—it was murderously sunny out—while her other, somnambulistic hand searched for the beach towel hanging over the railing. Finding it, she draped the towel loosely, only just extenuatingly, over her otherwise unclothed body, and staggered out into the sun. She came right by Mitchell’s hut. Through the slats her skin looked a sickly, chicken-soup color. She was wearing only one flip-flop. Every few steps she had to stop and lift her bare foot out of the blazing sand. Then she rested, flamingo style, breathing hard. She looked as if she might collapse. But she didn’t. She made it across the sand to the edge of the scrubby jungle. When she reached the outhouse, she opened the door and peered into the darkness. Then she consigned herself to it.