Chapter Eight
I felt a little off.
That’s where it all started.
Maybe I felt more than a little off, but honestly, who could tell?
One of the unfortunate things about getting old is you almost always feel at least a little off.
But one of the fortunate things is it bothers you less.
I was dizzy and lightheaded, nauseated and generally muddled, but I wasn’t alarmed.
That’s just the way it is when you’re old (and/or eating in the dining room of a retirement community.
Now that it was October, never mind it was still ninety degrees out, the menu had shifted to lots of squashes stuffed with apples or apples stuffed with squashes, and everything was mushy and stringy and orange).
“The worst part isn’t feeling like shit,” Maisie concurred.
I felt lucky to have met another woman my age who was unruffled by that Brooklyn vocabulary.
People like their old ladies polite and demure, but as one ages, things get more fucked-up, not less, and it seems important to say so.
“The worst part is you might not get better. Maybe you feel like shit because you’re slightly indisposed, or maybe you’re about to be dead. ”
Dot nodded sagely. “Bernice Herman.”
“She lived in your apartment two people before you,” Maisie said.
“Three,” said Dot.
“Three people before you. She had a headache one Monday morning that turned into a coma by Tuesday afternoon.”
“Ida Bowman,” said Dot.
“Good one,” said Maisie. “She tripped over a planter in the parking lot and broke her kneecap. They had to remove it.”
“Her knee?” I was aghast.
“No, the planter. But you see my point.”
I wasn’t sure I did, but only one month into my time at Vista View, I appreciated having already made friends who treated the news that I wasn’t feeling great with equanimity: Everyone feels a little off a lot of the time, so no need to make a fuss, but on the other hand, it might be the end, so no need to make a fuss.
My children, however, disagreed.
“You sound funny,” Darcy said on the phone. “Do you feel okay? Are you eating enough? Should I make you a doctor’s appointment?”
I changed the subject. “Lola thinks you like Sari better.”
“She’s right. I do.”
“Darcy Elizabeth!”
“Sari does activities after school. At school. Lola makes out with Lucas after school. At my house.”
“Don’t you trust her?”
“Absolutely not. Are you having a stroke?”
“I used to have teenagers myself, you know.”
“We were more trustworthy than mine are,” Darcy said.
I laughed and laughed.
“It’s different now,” she insisted.
“It’s always different now.” (Irony.)
“Wait,” she said. “Go back. I asked if you were eating enough and should I make a doctor’s appointment, and you changed the subject.”
It is hard to sneak things past your children, because you raised them, so they know all your tricks.
“Just, you know, a little under the weather at the moment. A little woolly-headed maybe. But otherwise I’m fine.
” Otherwise, I was fine. This is another feature of old age.
When I was young and didn’t feel good, nothing was fine.
Everything was wrong. Now I felt queasy and breathless.
And tired. And kind of hazy. But I was settling into Vista View.
I was making friends. I had—somehow I had—Moth.
So actually “fine” was something of an understatement.
Besides, if I waited to be fine until nothing ached or malfunctioned, I’d never be fine again.
“Under the weather?” Darcy snapped to attention at once. “Under the weather how?”
“I don’t know. I’m winded. I can’t catch my breath. My tummy’s a little funny.”
“I’ll make an appointment with Dr. Kim.”
“Don’t make an appointment with Dr. Kim.” It is exasperating to be parented by your children. “I’ll take a nap and be fine.”
“Not all problems can be solved with a nap, you know.” Darcy still bore a grudge about the ones I’d forced her to take in kindergarten.
“Not all problems need to be solved,” I said. “Not all problems are problems, in fact.”
“That makes no sense, Mother.”
“I’m fine, Daughter. Getting up on the wrong side of the bed does not require medical intervention.”
Lola texted a few hours later: Here ur sick
I replied: You hear I’m sick!
Lola: [Sad face emoji]
Me: Not here. Hear. Unless you mean that I am sick there, which I am not. I am here.
Lola: [Barfing emoji, chicken emoji, star emoji, soup emoji]
The barfing emoji made me kind of queasy. The chicken emoji too, actually.
Me: Is the chicken sick?
Lola: Jewish
Me:
Lola: No matzo ball emoji
Lola: Very heeling
Me: Healing!
Lola: [emoji of a foot, emoji of a dog]
The foot made me kind of queasy.
At dinner that evening, I still felt like crap.
The reason, however, was probably dinner itself.
Vista View called it Sweet and Sour Chicken and served it alongside fortune cookies and only partially unfrozen egg rolls.
The chicken was definitely gross and possibly racist. The egg rolls lay limply on plates around the dining room like cocoons in which the caterpillar had died before hatching.
And fortune cookies in a senior center are just mean.
Mine said, “One day you will make a great work.” When?
Moth moved his food around his plate sadly, but Dot and Maisie were both eating enthusiastically.
Enthusiastically and not unimpressively.
Maisie weighed maybe eighty pounds, so where did she even put it?
Dot came down to dinner most nights dressed, in her parlance, “to the nines,” a phrase so old even I didn’t know where it came from, but pearl earrings and silk blouses were no match for Vista View’s menu.
“Are you going to finish that?” Maisie eyed my plate with an expression somewhere between concern that I wasn’t eating and eagerness to stake her claim before Dot did. I pushed my plate over.
“You’re not hungry?” Moth’s wrinkled forehead wrinkled further.
“No, I am hungry.” I was. Sort of. “But this is too gross to eat.”
“It tastes like it always tastes,” Dot said cheerfully. “It’s Thursday. Sweet and Sour Chicken.”
“It is tragic that this meal occurs weekly.” I made a face. I couldn’t stop making a face. “What if this is someone’s last supper?”
“Do you feel like you might be dying?” Dot asked.
I understood that this question was sincere but only mildly offensive, like when someone said you looked tired, but I was annoyed anyway. “You might be dying. Eating this and thinking it’s good might be a sign your taste buds are dead and the rest of you is soon to follow.”
“Don’t be touchy,” Maisie said. “You brought it up.”
Had I? I couldn’t remember. I felt hungry but queasy but sweaty but cold.
“Since you’re not dying”—Moth took the opportunity to segue—“backgammon later?”
I felt my cheeks flush on top of everything else, but this time it wasn’t the chicken.
We told people, we told ourselves, that we were getting together most evenings for game nights.
But really, having resolved to waste no more time, having rediscovered what I’d been living far too long without, having determined that being coy was a young person’s game, ever since that first time we’d been going more or less straight to bed.
Maisie and Dot were keeping their eyes on their plates and swallowing smiles, so apparently we weren’t fooling anyone.
“I hear you’re sick.”
I looked up. Roger.
“I’m fine.”
“Alice said to check on you.”
“I’m. Fine.”
“Lola sent a cryptic text. I think she wants me to sacrifice a chicken on your behalf.”
“She wants you to bring me matzo ball soup,” I said.
“She might be warning me that you’re a witch,” said my ex-husband.
“If I were a witch, Roger”—I pushed myself up by the arms of the chair and breathed through the head rush—“you’d be a frog by now. If you’ll excuse me, I have game night.”