Strange Arrangement

Things heat up at Meadowbrook Grove as the sun goes down. Couples stroll languidly and hold hands, looping around the Norwegian Wood cul de sac where the sky smudges violet on the horizon. As if at twilight, life imitates art, everything a glossy advertisement for the tranquil retirement community.

My mother felt well enough one evening for a walk around the block. At the corner we fell in step with Gary and Carol Ann. They were strolling arm in arm. The sweetness of their gesture made me want to fall back, to allow them their moment. But Carol Ann was pleased to see us, though I hadn’t yet met her. She dropped Gary’s arm and bee-lined over.

“Have you heard about our strange arrangement?” she asked me, a mischievous glint in her eye. She linked her arm with mine.

It was September. I’d been home from Spain for a month and had been keeping a low profile in my mother’s new community. I hadn’t heard about any arrangement. I slowed my stride to match Carol Ann’s, my mother and Gary taking up a conversation of their own.

“Gary and I first met in college. Siena College, have you heard of it? Small Christian school upstate. He will tell you that we went on at least one date, though I don’t really recall it, but it didn’t get much further than that, because I was busy studying while he was busy partying. Well, he went off to join the service in Japan and ended up marrying a woman over there. I moved down south to teach, and met my husband, Carl.”

One thing was clear: Carol Ann was a force to be reckoned with.

“Well, I must have made quite an impression on Gary,” she continued. “When his wife Hoshiyo was in decline, forty years later, he goes looking for me on Facebook!” she paused for effect, or perhaps to take a breath. “He finds me, and we get to talking. It turned out that my husband, Carl, was also in decline.”

I was accustomed to using the word ‘decline’ in the context of species or epidemics, but this was the first time I’d been in conversation with someone who used it to describe a person.

“He has Alzheimers,” she concluded, matter-of-factly.

“So eventually,” Carol Ann continued, “Gary and I joined forces and moved in together here, with our other halves.” She fist-bumped the air to punctuate their solidarity. “We are partners, and together we care for our spouses so they don’t have to go in a home. I like to call it a commune!” She smiled cheerfully, giving my arm a squeeze.

I looked down the road to where my mother and Gary were walking with Cho Cho the papillon, its tail more like the plumage of an exotic bird than anything that should adorn a dog’s ass. They were undoubtedly talking about their shared appreciation of the Meadowbrook septic system or the efficiency of their boilers. I quickened my pace in hopes of catching up to them.

…..

Several months after that evening, I rang Carol Ann’s doorbell to return the cookie press she’d forced upon me for her smorgasbord. Her husband, Carl, sat in his wheelchair in the far corner of the living room, a tv tray table before him. It was the same spot I’d seen him in each time I’d been at Carol Ann’s. Hoshiyo, Gary’s wife, was on the couch beside Carl. She was asleep sitting up.

“Hoshiyo hasn’t figured out yet that her legs don’t work,” Carol Ann informed me in a twangy sotto voce. She stood at her kitchen island, holding court in a striped apron. “The other day I found her crawling across the floor towards her bedroom.” She announced this matter-of-factly, the same way she might have stated a preference for salami on a sandwich.

She asked me if I could stay for an hour while she and Gary went to the store. Their regular caregiver had called in sick.

“It’s our only free time together,” she explained. “And ShopRite is having its Can Can Sale!”

…..

I sat on the couch beside Carl’s wheelchair as he ate a piece of custard pie. On my opposite side, Hoshiyo was half-conscious and slumped, dwarfed by the two blankets covering her from neck to toe. A quick glance to the couch and you wouldn’t know a person was there at all.

Cho cho perched on the cushion above us, licking my nose each time I leaned over to check on Hoshiyo. I was supposed to feed her a bowl of applesauce.

“Hoshiyo,” I offered, my voice hushed. She stirred at the sound of her name but looked nowhere.

I gingerly spooned applesauce into her mouth. She swallowed, shuddering from the coldness of it. I paused between each spoonful, waiting for her to signal she was ready for another. There was only her cataract stare.

“Do you want more?” I asked. The sound of my voice startled her.

“E-ah,” she affirmed, her unexpected staccato surprising me with its force. She parted her lips and I lifted the spoon to her mouth.

The tv was on, as it always was, a local primetime news program on the air. New York City and the outlying suburbs the domain. The news anchors laughed with each other, their teeth preternaturally white, their hair perfectly coiffed. The colors of their outfits and the newsroom scenery were Hollywood vivid. Their report of a three alarm fire and possible overnight precipitation were existentially reassuring.

I felt awkward sitting between two adults yet not speaking a word. I knew a conversation with Hoshiyo was out of the question, but beyond polite introductions I’d not yet had an opportunity to speak with Carl. I knew from Carol Ann only two things about him; that he’d been a civil rights lawyer and that he had Alzheimers. I wasn’t sure what to expect.

“How was the pie?”

“Good, good,” he offered, his voice a gentle rasp.

“Would you like some more?”

“No, that’s fine.” He gestured to the empty plate. I cleared it and wiped his tray table.

“Carol Ann tells me you like to look out the window here at the birds,” I said.

Behind the circle of houses on Yesterday Drive was a marshy area that filled with runoff from the storm drains after a rain or thaw. Cattails and coneflower grew rampant along the edges, and an occasional red cardinal flower dotted the bank. At several corners, large pvc pipes snaked out from rock piles. I admired the marsh for its unruliness amidst the hermetically sealed mini-mansions of Meadowbrook Grove. Whether by design or by flaw, the marsh had become popular for all manner of bird. Carol Ann had joked that she wanted to fill it with fake pink flamingos come spring, but I was content watching the songbirds and finches dart and careen about in their dominion.

“I like birds,” Carl answered. “Do you like birds?” he asked. I found myself spontaneously recounting the birds I’d seen with my father, in Florida. Cormorants, frigatebirds, spoonbills. Herons, egrets, storks.

“There was a reserve near my father’s house, we’d go to.” As I mentioned it, the memory of wide sky and salt air filled my mind, the lilt of my father’s voice in my ears. I thought of the small flocks of brown pelicans that flew low along the coastline, how they seemed to command a certain taciturn authority that was out of place in the Florida garishness.

“You’re lucky,” Carl said, and I nodded my head in agreement. “You’re privileged,” he said.

A commercial played on the tv and I hummed along. “Do you like music?” I asked.

“Yes.” Carl’s eyes searched the distance. “My sister, she played piano…was beautiful.” His voice scratched at his throat, wanting to be louder than it was. Tears were in his eyes.

“And the Detroit Symphony Orchestra,” he paused, searching for words, “was beautiful. Beautiful.”

“You grew up in Detroit,” I offered.

“Had a paper route,” he said, laboring a bit. “I can remember that route…like it was yesterday…but I can’t… think of…the word for…” his voice trailed off.

He looked at me and began to cry. I said nothing, only met his eyes and held his gaze. I wasn’t going to talk him out of his tears. We all had a right to them, and god knows he’d earned his. I brought him a tissue from the far side of the room.

“You’re lucky,” he repeated. “You’re privileged.”

…..

My mother was in the den watching a World War II documentary when I got home. It wasn’t unusual to find her doing that anytime, day or night. Wrapped in her flannel blanket, din of artillery fire coming from the television. The dog napping in a fetal position by her chair.

Seeing the grainy black and white footage of Nazi troops or the South Pacific stirred in me a softness for her. Her father, my grandfather, had been the chief medical officer on Guam. He survived the war and resumed life with his young bride, going on to father two girls and run a successful dentistry practice. But he never set foot on a boat or plane again. Anywhere worth going could be gotten to in his Buick.

In my life, I saw my grandfather only sparingly. I knew him to be a humorless man who favored plaid pants and the occasional cigar. It had only been since I’d come home from Spain that my mother offered small insights. “Your grandma says the war changed him,” she had mentioned to me recently. I knew those documentaries were my mother’s way of bearing witness, of keeping him close.

“How was it?” my mother inquired about my time at Carol Ann’s.

“I made twenty bucks,” I said.

…..

I think about the many arrangements I‘ve had, riddled with imperfections and rife with good company. My upstairs neighbor in Maine with her menagerie of pets and the child-sized hole in her kitchen ceiling that the landlord was too senile to repair, our condemned apartment building a pseudo co-op of kindred spirits. I think of Pepa, the donkey in my dooryard in Spain, how she brayed hello to me each morning.

I remember the look of concern on my students’ faces when they’d ask me where my family was, why I was so far from home. Donde es tu madre? came the accusatory question, time and again.

There are more places on the map where all kinds of relations live together under one roof. Through blood or love or plain old human circumstance, we belong to each other. I don’t think there’s anything strange about that arrangement.

“You’re lucky,” I think to myself. “You’re privileged.”