The Adjustment League (6 page)

§

1:00. Small as the room is, we're going to have to pick up the pace to be ready for Strongbacks in an hour. I decide to break down the bed to give us more room. I look around for Judy, thinking this part might be difficult for her to watch, but she's gone.

Bathroom break? She always seemed to recall the needs of her body suddenly, as if it were a mostly silent companion who sometimes tapped her on the shoulder to make a request. There's no telling. She's always taken powders. Ghosting in and out of rooms and scenes.
Not her rooms, not her scenes.
Drug itch? Drug bladder? Beyond those, just an inability to situate herself anywhere for very long. A psychic vagrant. Long before she was a physical one.

Strange, how work goes faster when the one not working leaves. Non-help not just failing to add but subtracting from what's there. Sinkhole of inaction…

Five minutes and the bed's apart and leaning against the wall. Bedclothes folded, box spring, mattress. Scarred and sticky wooden frame unscrewed and wrenched free—headboard, foot, metal side slats. Scrubbed-at rust and ochre stains splotching the mattress, both sides. Faint in places—caregivers and cleaners doing their best, plus the rubber sheets and incontinence pads shelved in the closet—but multiple and dark in the central combat zones, rising to the eyes like aerial views of an ancient battlefield, nightly skirmishes with Bladder and Bowel spilling ineradicably into the ground.

A heavy black woman, Jade on her name tag, comes in with garbage bags. Puts them in places around the room. “Things too old, no good anymore, or broken maybe”—she leans close and says in a low voice, Maude nearby but still hard of hearing—“or things that are too dirty, who can wear them now? Just throw them quietly”—with a downward pushing of her big hands to show me. “It's not disrespect. Is what she wants.”

My head is woozy, soaked in sense. It's late in the window to be sorting so much.

Her garbage bags around, and a few items swept into them to get me started, Jade plants herself in front of me and speaks with deep feeling, with expansive hand gestures and without expectation of reply.

“Oh, oh, oh, I'm missing this gal. Lovely lady. Always such a big, bright smile. Never temper. Almost never. Oh, she can fool me. Fool me! The tricks she can play sometimes! She makes me think, Why are you here? I'm so tired, I should be here, you go home, Mama, and take care of my own kids. Nice voice, she has. Singalong, we always get her first. ‘Where's Maude?' Anyone will say that. Baking activity. Movie night. ‘Maude, c'mon girl, this is not your nap time. Sleep later. We
need
you!' And she'll be feisty too. Some lady she doesn't like, make her fist up at her. I love her, this lady. How is her daughter?”

It takes me a second to realize I've been asked a question, and I have to backtrack to find the four words. When I do, the lack of a first name, even if she simply doesn't know it, seems strangely respectful. I raise my palms.
How is Judy?

Jade nods, tight-lipped. “Not easy for that girl, wake up like that. But I'm happy for Maude. Not to be alone when her time is come. When the Lord calls her home.”

“She wasn't alone?”

Jade rears back, wide-eyed. Speaks to the room at large. Half-deaf or not, Maude needs to hear this. “Sometimes she likes to, we call her landlady. Against the rules, but on weekends sometimes I allow. Sleep with Mama, why not? What harm? Good for Mama, good for daughter too.”

Which explains how Judy beat me up here yesterday, though I hadn't wondered, assuming GO started running early even on weekends. But another unasked question tugs at me now, distantly, I can't place it or slow it down to look at it. It wings past in a blur. Last night's sleep no worse than the others lately, a patchy four hours, but the accumulation of them beginning to take its toll. I ask instead about Maude's recent health.

“Pretty good on her last review. August, I think. Summer sometime. Physical, not bad. Little heart problem, but with her pill and puffer, she's okay. But her brain”—she puts her hands up beside her own head and mimes a falling motion, little waterfalls out both ears. “She has it many years, the Lord gives her a long trial.” Good-natured scowl at the ceiling. “But these old ones—they go when they have to. They know best.”

She steps away from me, turns her back, and makes what seems a ceremonial facing of the window, the wall with the call string dangling, the short wall the headboard abutted.

“Ohhhh,” she says, a deep groan, and strides out the door.

Silence. Deeper without Jade, as if she took something with her.

For an absurd moment—if it is absurd—I want to move into Vivera. Right now. Drive home and get my things. Have Jade and Amrita and Meru look in on me. Remind me of mealtimes and activities. Help me dress on the worst days. I can't see the punishment I've taken letting me reach that stage, but who knows? Sometimes it's the most spindly, grub-hollowed tree that hangs on through the storm, bushy-leaved saplings blown down around it…

Wishing Judy would come back, I get busy on the bureau to liven up the room. Jade's advice helps. Old cards and torn-off calendar pages, balled-up single socks, the detached blades of a pair of scissors, sweets wrappers of all kinds—gums, chocolates, mints, caramels, half a rock-hard cookie, papers torn from notepads, many with cross-outs or illegible scrawls. Playing cards, some with a third ripped away, a half.

And a scrap that stops me cold. On a square of white paper, a series of lines that look like the birth of language. Squiggles at the top, a bumpy graph from some primeval experiment. Which separates in the next line into four bumpy strands, like cells dividing. Loops protruding above and below, scrawny, crabbed—trying to become limbs. Then a couple of cross-outs, aborted words.
Feel
, clearly—but a heavy stroke through it. Then a small word with a tail—
mud? rod?
And then, after a space, the tiny, wobbling sentence, terrible and achieved:

I am feeling sad.

Everything I know about Alzheimer's, which is not much, upended by this. People speaking of it with a terror almost fond, the loss of memory, of self—but peaceful, like a cloud dissolving, a slate wiping itself clean. Which is nothing like what I'm seeing here, nothing at all. Everything ripped, broken. All this evidence of a pitched battle filled with violence and pain. Chaos, yes—but not raw chaos, pure. Dirty, sorrowful chaos.
A person steering through it
.

It stokes me with a cold fury, puts me on notice that there may not be any choice about an adjustment. Maybe there never is.

Which only intensifies drawer by drawer.

Judy come back. The bureau is a pure bitch.

Pictures in a jumble in the third drawer. Eras mixed and overlapping, snaps taken from many albums. Many folded, torn at the corners. Pieces of photos, torn to bits. But plenty to see Jade's lovely lady—smiling, smiling under a changing hairstyle. Pictures of friends, classmates. Husband and children through decades. Parents—sun-dark couple in a field. Others who might be siblings, nieces, nephews.
So where are they? Why are you alone in the room with me?

Some pictures with notations beside the faces, or above or below them. Names legible in a couple of cases. But usually the ink blurry, flaking off, registering poorly on the photo plastic despite repeated shaky over-pressings.

One photo, though. A class reunion, looks like. Late-middle-aged ladies, arranged in rows. X's through some of the faces, check marks over the rest.
The living and the dead.
X means
dead
. X means
gone
. Her own face—middle row, left of center—the only one without a sign.

Cards scattered throughout the drawers. Christmas, Valentine's Day, Easter, Mother's Day, Birthday. The message half torn off many of them, leaving just pictures: a wagon approaching a log cabin on a frosty night, a basket of coloured eggs tied with a pink ribbon, a Beatrix Potter rabbit wiping her baby's muzzle with a cloth—a lot of flowers. Here and there, a card left whole—from Sandor, from Max, even a couple from Judy. From others too, notes from friends, though none more recent than two years back, when Judy said she'd moved to Vivera.

One in the bottom drawer still in its envelope. A Mother's Day card with embossed roses, rhyming sentiments inside.
Love, Max
in a quick hand. But a different hand, a woman's, entering the name and address on the envelope. In the top left corner, a tony address sticker, black italics on gold:
Dr. Max Wyvern
, with an address at Yonge and Eglinton. Franked stamp on the right.

A story in a card.
Mother's Day, but he mails it from the same city. Gets his secretary to fill it out, present it to him for signing. She would have bought it too, hitting the lobby pharmacy on her way back from lunch.
The doctor my son.

A keeper. I put it in a coat pocket.

Another keeper a photo of mother and father and sons. The family minus Judy. Maybe ten years old, but the most recent group shot I can find. In the white border under each person, an identification in the shaky blue over-pressings.
My husband me (Maude) son Max son)Sandor
The
dead
-X firmly through the husband's face.

There's one more object that, on instinct, I pocket. A little box of unfinished wood, maybe two inches by three, with a plastic top window and a cheap clasp, I've seen them in Dollarama. “Precious Things” printed neatly in blue ink above the window—not in Maude's hand anytime lately, and probably not ever. Something mannish, almost Roman, in the firm strokes.
Though the quote marks an odd touch.
Whimsical? A bit fey?

Inside the box, a balled-up nylon whose cheesy smell wafts out when I open it. It's stuffed in, almost filling the small box. Uncoil it, though, a limp snakeskin, and underneath are a pair of nail clippers, two bobby pins, and a USB stick with a self-adhesive label cut to fit on the side, titled “Christmas Music.” Same quote marks and neat blue letters, though perhaps a different hand. It can be hard to tell with printing.

With a silent apology to Maude, I stow her “Precious Things” in a pocket too.

Standing in the stripped room, boxes around me. Bureau, bed, chairs. A couple of small tables. Feeling tired by it. And feeling the other presence fainter now. The parts left in her things detaching, beginning to float free.

What did you do to earn this neglect?
The answer not far to find. Staring anyone who looks in the face.
You got sick
.

§

The Strongbacks men waiting by their truck, outside. Why, I have no idea. Do they need our permission to do their job? Judy with them. The square-bodied young guy leaning against the passenger door, smoking. The seedy older guy chatting Judy up, smiles and gestures. Judy nodding. Flirting? Nothing's impossible—she must cycle through every drama eventually—though it's a vice with men to mistake vacant for coy.

Are they wrong? She can't object if she's left the premises.

After we're loaded up, I tell them I need to go back for a minute, one last thing I need to take care of. The young guy has his pack out before I've turned.

§

1111.

A skeleton confronts me a few steps from the elevator. Socket eyes, lips skinned back from yellow teeth, a thin glaze of skin over planes and scarps of bone. The instant I return his gaze, he drops his eyes, fusses with the ties of his housecoat. Turns away.

Some kind of baking activity at a long table in the kitchen. A staffer passing the mixing bowl to a resident, lifting his fingers to the handle of the wooden spoon. A bridal dress, even earlier, it seems to come from Depression films, hanging on the wall in another alcove. A WWI soldier's uniform.
Fathers, uncles could be that old.
More photographs, war medals. A tuxedo and an emerald dress on adjacent dressmakers' dummies. Like stiffened ghost dancers. While I stand there, waiting for I don't know what, two residents shuffle over and touch the fabrics. The bubble lady stands by a window near the uniform, blowing her slow soundless pops. With each generation, they'll have to update the memory aids. Twenty years from now, it'll be jeans and peasant blouses and an Abbey Road poster. Then what? An iPhone and a Gap T-shirt? Time not only moving more swiftly, but also becoming more insubstantial. Leaving flimsier traces. For those losing their minds in the Information Age, there'll be few spars to cling to. You'll just eddy in the data, dissolving in bits.

In the middle of the torn-down room, head cocked. On alert. Hungry for orientation, scoping the human terrain.
Are you on an adjustment?
Tinglings of a familiar space opening up between my brain and the top of my head, a fizzing lightness that in time will turn murky, as if a swamp is releasing bubbles of gas that have nowhere to go and so build up in pressure. And the sense, basic—
something wrong here
.
Something not right.
Itchy, pre-twitch crawlings between my shoulder blades, the muscles there preparing to announce their need to lash out and hit something, grab it and shake hard. Rage heralds.

Which yield to, or become, a feeling of utter peace. Cool fingers cupping my skull. Hand cap of calm.

At moments it makes me wonder about myself, this peace I feel with the dead, with empty rooms. It isn't morbidity, or not just, because at moments I'll find it with the living and with fully furnished spaces as well. That's rarer, though, more elusive. Usually the living are like the mall seething around Judy and me yesterday—an insane noise and welter of aimless movement, a ceaseless surf of scams, fool's errands, and skulduggery.

Opening the sheers, I stand with Maude at my side—her head coming to just below my shoulder—staring a last time at the trees rising from the swamp, half bare, stretches of dark bark between their coloured flags.