Long Hallways
You could say the biggest thing we all have in common is that we can afford to be here. Our grandkids like to remind us how no future generation will ever again live in a place like the Evening Star Retirement Village, where we’re all paying $6,000 a month to wither in untroubled, dignified luxury.
Residents leave or die, and new ones move in. Everyone has one story they tell by way of introduction. Mine goes: on our second date I kissed my future wife goodnight and then tripped over a garden fence, climbing dew-wet and beet-red from the shrubs. She laughed so hard she slumped to her knees in the doorway, and I saw my future with her rolled out like a map. Jeanie was a teacher and once met Johnny Cash. Barbara was a nurse who patched the war-wounded, and married one of the ones that didn’t die. Gerald is only 60 and wears his dead son’s football jersey and cries all the time.
Don’t ask the new ones how they’re doing—the hallways are long, and you’ll hear about joint pain and early-stage cancers, and who has time anymore? Say something polite and keep moving. Mary answers by saying that she’s “still fat and sassy.” One of the wheels on her walker is wonky and she veers to the right and has to correct. Edgar salutes with his prosthetic arm and says, “Just fine, just fine.” Sue nods and says nothing because every breath is a miracle at 104, and she’s not wasting a single one of them having another boring conversation.
Or you could say the biggest thing we all have in common is that, really, we’re on our own. I found my wife at the bottom of the stairs in a posture I can’t unsee. Every woman here’s a widow. Talking to your kids and grandkids is like turning back to holler across the years—there are things they won’t be made to understand until it’s too late for them, too.
Howard won’t say it because he’s embarrassed, but he owns a ranch the size of a European country and has no heirs over whom to dangle it. On his lucid days he imagines selling for the vast sums he’s been offered and giving it all to the impoverished, with a press conference and big showy checks—make a real bid for sainthood. Other days he finds himself in one of the plush hallway chairs at 2 a.m., his pupils shrunk to the size of punctuation and his face overcome by an utter blankness—able only to remember how he used to fall asleep in the saddle, how his horse would turn and, gentle as a mother, take him home.
