More and more often in her loneliness, thoughts would come to her as they had never come before, not even in her youth. They were thoughts more complex than “insanity,” and she would hear the words mounting in turmoil within her. But when her children came at the weekend to sit with her for an hour or two, it was hard to find the right moment to begin speaking of all she had thought, and if the moment came, when their restless chatter stopped and their eyes fell on her old pitted face, then she could rarely summon the words that had flown hither and thither in her head all week. And if she managed to summon the words to her mind, then she could never, never break through the last barrier and free herself from the constriction of her speechlessness.
At last she stopped trying, and when her children came they saw an expression on her face that had not been there before — a stiff, dead look, a look of blankness and defeat that reflected her hopelessness. They immediately seized upon this expression as evidence of senility. She was astonished and hurt by their reaction. If they had been more patient with her, if they had stayed with her for longer periods of time, they would have seen something in her that was not senility. Yet they clung to the idea of senility and registered her name in a nursing home.
At first she was horrified, and everything in her cried out against the coming change. With renewed vigor she frowned at them and sent them a look that her husband had well understood. But they were not moved. In their eyes, her every gesture could now be called senile. Even quite normal behavior seemed mad to them, and nothing she did could reach them.
But once she was actually living in the nursing home, she made peace with her surroundings. During the day she sat in the library reading and thinking. She read very slowly and spent many more hours staring at the wall than at the book. She tested her mind against what she read and it grew stronger. Only the nurses were not quite real to her and puzzled her: she thought their brittle good humor was not honest. They did not like her, because her lucid eye made them uneasy. But she moved comfortably among her bloodless, wrinkled companions, more comfortably than she had ever moved among the vigorous people of her former life. She found the silence in the crowded dining room appropriate. She understood very well the morose men and women who struggled along the garden paths in the afternoon or sat staring through the porch railings at the street during the long summer twilight. Tentatively at first, and with growing wonder, she realized that she had been nearly dead among the living. Among the nearly dead, she was at last beginning to live.
Almost Over: Separate Bedrooms
They have moved into separate bedrooms now.
That night she dreams she is holding him in her arms. He dreams he is having dinner with Ben Jonson.
Money
I don’t want any more gifts, cards, phone calls, prizes, clothes, friends, letters, books, souvenirs, pets, magazines, land, machines, houses, entertainments, honors, good news, dinners, jewels, vacations, flowers, or telegrams. I just want money.