She says, Well, why don’t we look at the brochures anyway, Mother Lois? You’ll do that much, won’t you, after we both took Personal Days from work and drove all the way down here to see you?”
“Like Derry was in the heart of Africa,” Ralph muttered.
Lois took his hand and said something that made him laugh. “Oh, to her it is!”
“Was this before or after you found out Litchfield had tattled?”
Ralph asked. He used the same word Lois had on purpose; it seemed to fit this situation better than a fancier word or phrase would have done.
“Committed a breach of confidentiality” was far too dignified for this nasty bit of work. Litchfield had run and tattled, simple as that.
“Before. I thought I might as well look at the brochures; after all, they’d come forty miles, and it wouldn’t exactly kill me. So I looked while they ate the food I’d fixed-there wasn’t any that had to be scraped into the swill later on, either-and drank coffee.
“That’s quite a place, that Riverview. They have their own medical staff on duty twenty-four hours a day, and their own kitchen.
When you move in they give you a complete physical and decide what you can have to eat. There’s a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan. There were three or four other colors as well. I can’t remember what all of them were, but Yellow is for diabetics and Blue is for fatties.”
Ralph thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life-no more sausage pizzas from Gambino’s, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Milt’s-and found the prospect almost unbearably grim.
“Also,” Lois said brightly, “they have a pneumatic-tube system that delivers your daily pills right to your kitchen. Isn’t that a marvelous idea, Ralph?”
“I guess so,” Ralph said.
“Oh, yes, it is. It’s marvelous, the wave of the future.
There’s a computer to oversee everything, and I bet it never has a decline in cognition. There’s a special bus that takes the Riverview people to places of scenic or cultural interest twice a week, and it also takes them shopping. You have to take the bus, because Riverview people aren’t allowed to have cars.”
“Good idea,” he said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “What are a few drunks on Saturday night compared to an old fogey with a slippery cognition on the loose in a Buick sedan?”
She didn’t smile, as he had hoped she would. “The pictures in those brochures turned my blood. Old ladies playing canasta. Old men throwing horseshoes. Both flavors together in this big pinepanelled room they call the River Hall, square-dancing. Although that is sort of a nice name, don’t you think? %ver Hall?”
“I guess it’s okay.”
“I think it sounds like the kind of room you’d find in an enchanted castle. But I’ve visited quite a few old friends in Strawberry Fieldsthat’s the geriatrics’ home in Skowhegan-and I know an old folks’ rec room when I see one. It doesn’t matter how pretty a name you give it, there’s still a cabinet full of board games in the corner and ix pieces missing from each one and the jigsaw puzzles with five or s’ TV’s always tuned to something like Family Feud and never to the kind of movies where good-looking young people take off their clothes and roll around on the floor together in front of the fireplace.
Those rooms always smell of paste… and piss… and the fiveand-dime watercolors that come in a long tin box… and despair.”
Lois looked at him with her dark eyes.
“I’m only sixty-eight, Ralph. I know that sixty-eight doesn’t seem like only anything to Dr. Fountain of Youth, but it does to me, because my mother was ninety-two when she died last year and my dad lived to be eighty-six. In my family, dying at eighty is dying young… and if I had to spend twelve years living in a place where they announce dinner over the loudspeaker, I’d go crazy.”
“I would, too.”
“I looked, though. I wanted to be polite. When I was finished, I made a neat little pile of them and handed them back to Jan. I said they were very interesting and thanked her. She nodded and smiled and put them back in her purse. I thought that was going to be the end of it and good riddance, but then Harold said, ’Put your coat on, Ma.”
“For a second I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. I thought they’d already signed me up! And I had an idea that if I said I wasn’t going, Harold would open the door and there would be two or three men in white coats outside, and one of them would smile and say, ’don’t worry, Mrs. Chasse; once you get that first handful of pills delivered direct to your kitchen, you’ll never want to live anywhere else.”
“I don’t tvant to put my coat on,” I told Harold, and I tried to sound the way I used to when he was only ten and always tracking mud into the kitchen, but my heart was beating so hard I could hear it tapping in my voice.
“I’ve changed my mind about going out. I forgot how much I had to do today.” And then Ian gave the laugh “Why, Mother I hate even more than her syrupy little smile and said, Lois, what would you have to do that’s so important you can’t go up to Bangor with us after we’ve taken time off to come down to Derry and see you?”
“That woman always gets my back hair up, and I guess I do the same to her. I must, because I’ve never in my life known one woman to smile that much at another without hating her guts. Anyway, I told her I had to wash the kitchen floor, to start with. ’Just look at it,” I said.
“dirty as the devil.”
“’Huh!” Harold says. ’I can’t believe you’re going to send us back to the city empty-handed after we came all the way down here, Ma Well I’m not moving into that place no matter how far you came,” I said back, ’so you can get that idea right out of your head.
I’ve been living in Derry for thirty-five years, half my life.
All my friends are here, and I’m not moving.”
“They looked at each other the way parents do when they’ve got a kid who’s stopped being cute and started being a pain in the tail.
Janet patted my shoulder and said, ’Now don’t get all upset, Mother Lois-we only want you to come and look.” Like it was the brochures again, and all I had to do was be polite. just the same, her saying it was just to set my mind at ease a little. I should have known they couldn’t make me live there, or even afford it on their own.
It’s Mr. Chasse’s money they’re counting on to swing it-his pension and the railroad insurance I got because he died on the job.
“It turned out they had an appointment all made for eleven o’clock, and a man lined up to show me around and give me the whole pitch. I was mostly over being scared by the time I got all that straight in my mind, but I was hurt by the high-handed way they were treating me, and mad at how every other thing out of Janet’s mouth was Personal Days this and Personal Days that. it was pretty clear that she could think of a lot better ways to spend a day off than coming to Derry to see her fat old bag of a mother-in-law.
“’stop fluttering and come on, Mother,” she says after a little more back-and-forth, like I was so pleased with the whole idea I couldn’t even decide which hat to wear. ’Hop into your coat. I’ll help you clean up the breakfast things when we get back.”
“’You didn’t hear me,” I said. ’I’m not going anywhere. Why waste a beautiful fall day like this touring a place I’ll never live in?
And what gives you the right to drive down here and give me this kind of bum’s rush in the first place? Why didn’t one of you at least call and say, “We have an idea, Mom, want to hear it?” Isn’t that how you would have treated one of your friends?”
“And when I said that, they traded another glance.
Lois sighed, wiped her eyes a final time, and gave back Ralph’s handkerchief, damper but otherwise none the worse for wear.