But I said, “Never mind,” because I figured things would get all the wetter while we waited. Besides, Maud May wasn’t the fussy type.
She’d changed, though. I should have known. I’d certainly seen enough signs of it, over the months I’d been visiting. First off, as Bentham was wheeling her through the door, she barely acknowledged the staff’s goodbyes. “You’re leaving us?” they asked her. “Well, you take care, now, hear?” Granted, they were most of them using a honeyed, high, thin, baby-talk voice that probably drove her nuts, but still, she could have said, “Thanks.” She didn’t. She gave an indifferent wave, not troubling to look back.
Then, outside, she cried, “What!” so sharply that Bentham stopped pushing her. “I’m going home in a truck?” she asked me.
“It’s just a short ride, Ms. May,” I said.
“What happened to your darlin’ little sports car?”
“Well, I sold it.”
“Good Gawd, Barnaby, you’re an idiot,” she said.
But already beads of rain were shining on the top of her head, and she didn’t protest when Bentham started wheeling her again.
Helping her into the truck’s cab caused another hitch. “Damn thing is too far off the ground,” she told me. And, “Jesus! My luggage is sopping!” as she happened to glance toward the rear. Bentham tsked and hoisted her up by one elbow. I said, “At least your plants’ll be watered, Ms. May” She didn’t smile. After I shut her in, she sat staring straight ahead, dead-faced, and she failed to lean over and unlock the driver’s-side door when I came around. I had to use my key. You see a lot of that with invalids. They start out vowing they won’t depend, but then they seem to get into it. They turn all passive. Still, I hadn’t expected it of Maud May
“You be good, Ms. May!” Bentham called as we rolled off.
Ms. May just said, “What choice do I have?”
We didn’t need our wipers at first, with the rain so light and fine, but gradually the windshield grew harder to see through. I was kind of waiting for Ms. May to mention it. I thought she would order me around in that tough-talking way she used to have. But she kept quiet, staring straight in front of her. Finally I flicked on my wipers unbidden. I said, “So! How does it feel, getting sprung?”
“Oh …,” she said. And then nothing more.
We reached her house, and I parked at the curb. Maud May didn’t even glance toward her front door. Luckily, the rain had stopped by then. I say “Luckily” because once I’d helped her down from the truck, it took her forever to inch up the walk in her walker. Step, rest, step, rest, she went, and several times she pointedly lifted one hand or the other and wiped it on the front of her coat, although I had dried the walker off after I unloaded it. Halfway along, a neighbor came out — a pudgy-faced woman with gray hair — and she took charge of Ms. May while I brought in the luggage. “Why, Maud, you’re doing wonderfully. Just wonderfully,” she said, but all Ms. May would answer back was, “Huh.” I kept passing them, traveling between the truck and the house, and every time, Ms. May had her head down, her eyes on her feet as they shuffled behind her walker. “Sturds,” she said at one point, and the neighbor said, “What’s that, dear?”
“Sturds: those klutzy, thick brown oxfords they used to make us wear at Roland Park Country Day School.”
Actually, her shoes were black, not brown, but I caught her drift. Till now, she’d always worn vampish heels with sling backs and open toes. Also, she used to claim she would never be seen publicly in pants, but this morning she had on not just pants but sweatpants, elastic-waisted, cuffed bunchily at the ankles.
They’d delivered a hospital bed the day before, and it was set up in the sunporch so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. I arranged her belongings nearby where she could reach them. Then I steered her up the front steps, while the neighbor followed, hands cupped to catch her if she stumbled. “Smells musty,” Ms. May said as she entered.
“We’ll air it out,” the neighbor assured her. “Throw open all the windows and just chase those cobwebs right out of here!”
“Well, Elaine,” Ms. May said abruptly, “perhaps we’ll meet again sometime. Goodbye, now.”
The neighbor took on a stunned look, but she was still smiling steadily, her face very bright and determined, when she turned to leave. I told her, “Thanks a lot!” to make up for Ms. May’s bad manners. “She was only trying to help,” I said, once the door was shut.
“Get me onto that couch,” Maud May told me, “and then go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“This is the first time in seven months that some jackass fellow human won’t be sharing my breathing space.”
“Hey. I can dig it,” I said. I felt a tad bit better, because she was starting to sound like herself.
Even so, that experience put a damper on my day. I’m telling you: don’t ever get old! Before I started at Rent-a-Back, I thought a guy could just make up his mind to have a decent old age. Now I know that there’s no such thing — or if once in a blue moon there is, it’s a matter of pure blind luck. I must have seen a hundred of those sunporch sickrooms, stuffed wall-to-wall with hospital beds and IV poles and potty chairs. I’ve seen those sad, quiet widow women trudging off alone to their deaths, no one to ease them through the way they’d eased their husbands through years and years before. And if by chance the husband’s the one who’s survived, it’s even worse, because men are not as good at managing on their own, I’ve come to think. They get clingy, like Mr. Shank. They tend to lack that inner gauge that tells them when they’re talking too much; they’re always trying to buttonhole the nearest passerby Ask them the most offhand question; they lean back expansively and begin, “Well, now, there’s a funny little story about that that I think may interest you.” And, “To make a long story short,” they’ll say, when already they’ve gone on longer than God himself would have patience for. They pull this trick where they change the subject without a pause for breath — come to the end of one subject and you’re thinking at last you can leave, but then they start in on the next subject; not so much as a nanosecond where you can say, “Guess I’ll be going.”
And those retirement watches old people consult a hundred times a day, counting off minute by minute! Those kitchen windowsills lined with medicine bottles! Those miniature servings of food, a third of a banana rewrapped in a speckly black peel and sitting in the fridge! Their aging pets: the half-bald cat, the arthritic dog creeping down the sidewalk next to his creeping owner. The reminder notes Scotch-taped all over the house: Lawn-mowing boy is named RICHARD. Take afternoon pill with FULL GLASS OF WATER. The sudden downward plunges they make: snappy speech one day and faltering for words not two weeks later; handsome, dignified faces all at once in particles, uneven, collapsing, dissolving.
The jar lids they can’t unscrew, the needles they can’t thread, the large print that’s not quite large enough, even with a magnifying glass. The specter of the nursing home lurking constantly in the background, so it’s, “Please don’t tell my children I asked for help with this, will you?” and, “When the social worker comes, make like you’re my son, so she won’t think I live alone.” The peculiar misunderstandings, part deafness and part out-of-syncness — insisting that someone named “Sheetrock Mom” bombed the World Trade Center, declining a visit to a tapas bar in the belief that it’s a topless bar, calling free-range poultry “born-again chicken,” and asking if the postpartum is blooming when what they mean is impatiens. “Don’t you look youthful!” a physical therapist said once to Mrs. Alford, and she said, “Me? Useful?” and the thing that killed me was not her mishearing but the pleasure and astonishment that came over her face.