All Adults Here(26)
The Meadows was shaped like a tarantula, with a fat middle and long legs extending outward, each hall occupied by residents’ rooms. In the middle section, past the desk, were an exercise room and a physical therapy room, a television room, and a bingo room. Birdie’s setup at Heron Meadows was in the bingo room, which was otherwise used for bridge games and singletons doing word search puzzles in cheap newsprint books. Astrid peeked through the open doorway (doorways needed to be wide, to allow for wheelchairs) and observed Birdie in action.
There was a woman in the chair, with her back to the door. Her white hair was damp, and Birdie was running a comb through it, catching strays. There was a large plastic mat on the floor, to help with cleanup. Her various instruments waited on a round wooden table nearby: two hand mirrors, a spray bottle of detangler, a spray bottle of water, a hair-dryer, combs, brushes, clips, and three different pairs of scissors. The residents could sign up in advance, or they could just show up and wait. No one was in a rush. By the end of the day, the room would be full of men and women just waiting patiently, as if for an airplane flight home after Thanksgiving, full of pie and tryptophan. Birdie was quick and efficient and, like all hairdressers, adept at the kind of small talk that young people hated but old people loved. Astrid watched Birdie work, her back hunched over in a tight curve, her knees bending slightly. She moved like a boxer.
“Coo coo,” Astrid called. “Little Bird.”
Birdie looked up, her glasses wedged halfway up her forehead. She waved with a pair of scissors. “Almost done with Doris,” she said. “Right, Doris? Almost done?” Doris offered a beatific smile with pink gums and no teeth.
“I’ll do a lap,” Astrid said. Barbara’s mother, Mary Budge, was around Heron Meadows somewhere, and Astrid was going to find her. She went back to the front desk and asked for directions to Mary Budge’s room and then walked her tote bag full of food down the wide hallways until she found it.
The doors were never locked at Heron Meadows—that was a safety precaution. And since so many residents were hearing impaired, each room had a doorbell that, in addition to making a small tinkling noise, illuminated a flashing light inside, like a buoy in the ocean. Astrid rang the bell and waited. After a few minutes, the door swung open, and there was Mary Budge. She looked exactly like Barbara, only shrunken 15 percent in a xerox machine. Her shoulders, round as truck wheels, pitched forward, as if she was always halfway through an attempt to touch her toes.
“Hi, Mrs. Budge, I’m Astrid,” Astrid said, patting herself on the chest. “Might I visit with you for a few minutes? I knew your daughter, Barbara.”
Mary nodded and closed her eyes. She opened the door wide and gestured for Astrid to come in.
The room was identical to all the other rooms at Heron Meadows, some of them mirror images instead of exact replications. Mary’s room was the same model as Russell’s mother’s room had been, L-shaped and tidy, with each dusted knickknack in its place of pride. Barbara’s hoarding had not been born from nothing, Astrid saw.
Mary shuffled back toward her recliner and then sat down with a soft squish, covering her knees with a crocheted blanket. Astrid thought to herself, I will never be that old, even though that was one of the basic tenets of human existence: stay alive as long as you can. Heron Meadows wasn’t the only place for old people in or near Clapham—there was a residence facility near the hospital, for those needing more constant medical attention, and there were a few of what Astrid thought of as boardinghouses for old broads. The men died first, of course, in Clapham and everywhere else. When the apocalypse came, there would be only old women left, with hard candy and clementines in their bags. Some of her older friends (everything was relative, even age, even now) had started to fail, to crumble; some had died. She was still young enough (again, relative) that every death felt like a wrong, cruel blow, and not yet like the eventual and unavoidable mercy that would come for everyone. Mercy! Astrid was not anywhere near mercy. Women her age were still working, even if she wasn’t. Astrid had worked at the Clapham Local Bank after Russell died, first as a teller and then as a financial adviser, because she loved telling people what to do with their money. She’d retired at sixty-five, because there were younger bankers, and she wanted to spend more time in the garden. But look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg! Astrid had decades, she hoped.
Mary Budge sat quietly, her hands cupped on the crocheted hills of her knees. Astrid sat across from her on the daybed, which, she realized just after sitting down, must have been where Barbara had been sleeping.
“I brought some things to eat,” Astrid said, and took some things out of the bag and waved them around.
“Sandwiches,” Mary said, though they weren’t, and smiled.
“I’ll leave everything by your kitchen,” Astrid said, putting the tinfoiled loaf back into the bag. “I’m sorry about Barbara.”
“Yes, Barb,” Mary said.
Astrid’s mother had died thirty years ago, before Russell, before Russell’s parents, before anyone else who mattered to her. It had been sickening, the very worst kind of surprise, one that proved instantly the cruel randomness of the world, as if famine and genocide and car accidents hadn’t already. Her mother had always seemed older than she was, but she’d never actually been old. Astrid wondered what her mother would have thought about Porter’s baby, about Birdie, about the way she’d renovated the kitchen cabinets, about each summer’s crop of flowers, which had survived, which had grown. Her mother and Russell now lived in the same neighborhood of her mind, which felt like a remote Norwegian fjord, or Fiji, a place that it would take so long to travel to that she would never go in person, and so hard to imagine the time difference that it was never convenient to telephone. They were both there, still, inside her brain, and sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and think, Now, now, if I could just pick up the phone right now, maybe I could catch them.