Light Lifting (20 page)

It seemed, sometimes, like I knew too much about things I wasn't really supposed to know at all. Like the first time your eyes touch on a bad case of bedsores – the kind that can eat big, fist-sized holes right through your flesh just from laying down in one spot for too long. The first time you see that, you can't look at anything the same way anymore. The Musgrave job was full of stuff like that. There was an old man who asked me to help rub in the eczema cream for his legs and when I kneeled down to touch him, even as softly as I could, large flakes of his skin came off in my hands like red fish scales. And there was another lady on McEwan who needed me to read her the fine-print directions on a package of glycerine suppositories.

“I don't know why in the hell they write everything so small,” she complained to me while I waited outside the bathroom door. “Just tell me what it says. Are you supposed to run them under the water before they go in?”

I was like one of those guys in the audience who doesn't really want to be invited back stage, but then they shine the light on him and everybody claps and he has no choice but to get up and move behind the scenes, to the other side of that thick velvet curtain that normally hides all the secrets and keeps the magic going for everybody else. There was some knowledge you couldn't escape from. It came down on you like white water, flowing in only one direction, and once it got hold of you, there was no way to turn back and swim against the current. Even though I felt perfectly fine and my healthy twelve-year-old body kept pedalling hard between the stops, there were moments now when some image I didn't want would blow into my head and I'd think about the fact, the real fact, that there might be a day when I would not be able to stand up and close the drapes for myself. There might be a day when I wouldn't have the strength to walk across my own kitchen, and open the fridge and pick up the milk pitcher with one hand and fill up a glass I was holding in the other.

The old ladies could teach you all about that stuff. They heard the way their kids whispered about what to do with mom, but the best of them stood up and just refused, just flat-out refused, to give up on their own places. From April to September, they'd be outside, digging through their gardens on their hands and knees and waving away the mosquitoes. And they still carved a pumpkin and had the candy ready for the trick-or-treaters, and lots of them even shovelled their own snow. It seemed like no blackness, no dirt or dust was ever allowed into their houses, that no rot or decay could even get a toehold.

Eighty-nine-year-old Mrs. Hume, my number-one favourite, used to come to the door, clear-eyed and busy and always a little annoyed by whatever it was that might pull her away from her work.

“What, what, what?” she'd say as she opened up.

I'd hold up the bag containing a refill of her blood thinners and she'd smile and say something like, “Oh, it's you again, is it? Well then, come in.”

She'd be wearing one of her husband's old work shirts with a dish towel slung over her shoulder and some stiff wire brush in her hand and she was always in the middle of refinishing another piece of furniture. Her house was overstuffed with dressers and buffets and china cabinets that she'd rescued with her heat gun and her varsol and her twelve grades of sandpaper. I used to help her move them around, rearranging the rooms every couple of months, as though nothing could be allowed to settle into one spot for too long. We carried things evenly, with me taking only my half of the weight in the dresser. We'd both tuck our fingertips under the edge at the top and our shins would bang along at the bottom with every step we took, but we'd just inch our way along, taking little breaks whenever we needed to.

“Which one of these do you want?” she asked me once after we'd finally wiggled the sideboard into its new location. She waved her hand around in a semicircle and looked me straight in the eye without smiling. I could tell she wasn't joking, but at that stage in my life I don't think she knew there was nothing I needed less than a china cabinet.

“Which one?” she said again. “Just choose and I'll leave it to you in my will. I mean it. We'll write your name on a piece of paper right now and stick it in a drawer.”

Once, when she was showing me one of her best little coffee tables, she explained it all to me.

“People are idiots, plain and simple,” she said.

“I picked this guy right out of the garbage, for God's sake. I didn't even touch him after that. Just plunked him off the street and brought him right in. Just think about that for a second. They must be made of money. Idiots, I'm telling you. All of them.”

But not everybody could keep it together like Mrs. Hume. I made lots of deliveries to elderly people who lived locked away from the world, up on the climate-controlled top floors of the assisted-living building for seniors on Riverside Drive. The staff tried to keep that place as cheery as they could. They had a bulletin board in the elevator that was full of photocopied notices telling everybody to come to Edith's big 95th birthday party – “No presents, just presence!” And there was stuff about the weekly card game every Wednesday in the common room and the movie nights and the special van that went on Sunday and made its own loop around to all the churches. You could get a regular ride to visit your friends in the hospital and, as long as the weather was okay, the van would go out to the cemetery every other week if you wanted it to.

But it always seemed like a dry place to me. Something about how they recycled the air made it feel like there was never enough oxygen in there. I couldn't breathe right and when I buzzed through the lobby and made my run through the building, I felt like I carried the weather with me, like I brought in the snow and the rain and the windy cold and they kept swirling around my body as I tracked wet footprints across the industrial carpets and down the corridors. Weather was the only subject all the residents cared about and I'd have the same conversation ten times in half-an-hour.

“And what's it doing out there today?” someone would ask as I handed over the calcium supplements. We'd be standing in the little living area that each of them had between the kitchenette and the bedroom, and maybe we'd both stare outside for a second, looking out through the thick glass of those unopenable windows. Down below, I could see where I'd locked my bike against a tree, but the street and everything that went on there seemed so far away that it was almost like we were stuck in a submarine or up in the space shuttle, and the world we were looking at had a whole different kind of atmosphere where we could never survive.

“Oh well,” I'd say. Everything I ever said in the assisted living building started like that, as if the “oh well” was required.

“Oh well. The snow's starting now.”

“It's cold then?” she might offer. “Getting very cold now? Making the turn into the real winter? You know, I haven't been out in a while.”

“No,” I'd say, trying to keep it as accurate as possible. Accuracy was what they wanted more than anything.

“No. Not too bad yet. Still have a few weeks before it really hits us. It's just a bit slippery now with the ice on the side of the road. Just slippery.”

“Yes,” she might say. “Slippery, yes.”

Then there'd be a little cluck of recognition and you could almost see her thinking about it, about the word – slippery – and remembering the excitement and the danger that could be left over in a word like that, even in just the idea of it. Their apartments had all kinds of extra railings and there were suction cup bath mats and this special black tape they wound around door handles and banisters. Slippery wasn't allowed in the assisted living building.

The people in those apartments all had their little idiosyncrasies. I remember the first time I realized it, the first time I really understood that, just like being young, there were lots of different ways a person could be old. Chatty or shy, outgoing or held-back, risky or safe: everybody made their decision and stuck with it right through to the end. There was a woman on the sixteenth floor who never unfastened the inside chain of her door. I probably delivered fifty packages to Mrs. Elson, but I never saw her entire face. When I came by, she'd give me only the smallest crack between the frame and her door and I'd have to squish the bag through to her. Then her thin hand would reach out with the money and I'd pass back the change. During the whole thing, I might catch only the quickest glimpse at the side of her head, just one un-pierced ear maybe, or that one eye staring out at me through the gap.

The half-blind woman on McKay could smell you coming. Or maybe it was the sound of the tire scraping the side walk. Before you could even set foot on the bottom stair of her porch, she'd start calling from deep inside the house.

“Door's open,” she'd holler. “Just bring it right to me, dear. I'm in the back room. Last room at the back. Door's open. Just bring it to me.”

Her voice was thin and kind of scratchy and it tugged me forward like one of those sticky threads that lead to the centre of a web. To get to her, I had to go down this long hallway, past the abandoned dining room on the left and the almost abandoned kitchen on the right. Her place was mostly dark and mostly empty and you couldn't block out the sound of her too-loud television and the smell of stale urine that had sunk down into the carpets and the cushions and mattresses. Her voice kept going all the time, like a homing beacon or a looping SOS that sends out the same message until somebody talks back.

“I'm right here, dear. All the way to the back. Just keep coming. Back, back, back. You can't miss me.”

The sicker a person gets, the less of their house they use. It's usually the upstairs floors that go first, especially if the stairs are too steep and the railing isn't any good. Then it's the basement and then the back and front yards and then the whole outside just disappears. Some people used to ask me to look out the back window and tell them if the trees were still in the same places and if the tulips were coming up at the right time.

Eventually people like that spider lady on McKay got whittled down to one last room. It was usually a remodelled area near the back of the ground floor, a place big enough to double as both a bedroom and living room at the same time. There might be a new bathroom too, something roughed in by a caring grandson or a reliable nephew. I saw lots of places like that where a new toilet and a new vanity and a new low-rise shower sprung right out of the carpet like they'd been planted in the middle of the old den.

That woman on McKay ruled over her world in an automated La-Z-Boy throne. The chair could motor itself up and down and it was surrounded by four or five little tray tables that held everything she needed. There was a system to it, a spot for the remote controls and the telephone, and an area for lots of different boxes of Kleenex and a special corner for her purse and for those flip-top plastic tubes that keep all the pills for the week in separate little SUN, MON and TUE boxes. She had a place for her knitting stuff and one for the address books and the crossword puzzles and the Bible and another one for photographs. Even though she had cataracts and her sight was clouding over and her glasses were just for show, there was nothing she couldn't find. She kept her hair pulled back in a tight bun and though she never went outside, she wore real shoes instead of socks or slippers.