The Dream Life of Astronauts (24 page)

“C
ome find me,” she would sometimes tell her son over the phone, in advance of one of his weekly visits. “I might be anywhere.” But Serenity Palms, by design, was not a sprawling place, and Ellie was ninety-two years old. Finding her was not a challenge. She would be in the community room, or in the activities room, or in the nondenominational chapel, or—more often than not—in her own room, sitting awake or asleep in the Arcadia recliner Martin had bought for her. The recliner swiveled and was throne-like, with its high back and wide arms, and if Ellie had preferred to keep her feet on the floor she might have looked like a wizened, B-movie empress when she turned away from the television or the window to greet him. Instead, she kept her feet up, used her cane to rotate the chair, and looked like a castaway rowing a life raft.

Her olfactory receptors had become so sensitive that Martin could no longer bring her flowers. The smell of flowers made her queasy, as did the smell of so many other things: candles, nail polish, aftershave, the stucco and terra-cotta exterior of the building, almost any kind of food. She liked both the smell and taste of Weetabix, and she tolerated Ensure—which was fortunate, the on-staff doctor had told Martin, because if she got much lighter, they would have to consider intravenous feeding, and Ellie wasn't amenable to needles. In fact, Ellie wasn't amenable to much of anything, and Martin, who'd recently turned seventy and felt every year of his age in nearly every movement he made, couldn't blame her.

When he arrived that Saturday, she was in the recliner and had it faced away from the door, toward the picture window and its view of A1A, the distant sliver of beach, and the ocean beyond. Her roommate—Martin had yet to learn this one's name—was sitting up in bed, working a pair of rounded scissors over the pages of a magazine. Over the past two years, Ellie had gone through four roommates, none of whom had passed away and all of whom had requested to be moved rather than suffer her complaints, her ramblings, and her observations about race that could only come across as insults.

As a rule, Martin tried not to startle his mother. Her hearing was as sharp as it had ever been, but she was easily alarmed and occasionally had to orient herself. Her eyes were closed, he saw as he drew near. Her cane was leaning against one of the recliner's padded arms. He set his windbreaker on the back of the plastic chair nearby, dragged the chair partway between her and the window, and eased himself down. When he cleared his throat, her eyes fluttered open and she stared forward in the general direction of both him and the window. “This again,” she said.

“Hello, Mom.”

She gasped. “Jesus, you scared me half to death!”

“I thought you knew I was here.”

“How would I know that? You're like a cat.”

Martin forced a smile. “You said, ‘This again.' I thought you meant me.”

“Not you.
This,
” Ellie said, lifting a hand and motioning toward the window. She had been dreaming about Clermont, about the classrooms of children, about trying to teach the younger ones what an octave was. She could stand at the piano and strike the eight notes of an octave one at a time, low C to high, and get every child in the room to say
Yes
when she asked if they heard the difference. But when she struck the low and high C simultaneously, they heard only one note. “Listen carefully,” she said. “It's this note.”
Plunk.
“And this one.”
Plunk.
“Low and high at the same time.” And then struck the two notes together. “Hear them?” The seven- and eight-year-olds could distinguish between the two notes, but the six-year-olds couldn't. It was fascinating. Either their hearing hadn't yet developed beyond the monophonic, or their brains were capable of registering only one piece of stimulus at a time. If she were a scientist rather than a music teacher, she might conduct a study. But then she had opened her eyes and seen the palm scrub, and the beach, and the tiny man with the parachute going up and down over the water, and she had thought—apparently had said aloud—
This again.

“Anyway, I'm here,” Martin said.

“I was back in Clermont,” Ellie said. “I was trying to drill some sense into those kids.”

“But you're here now. Cocoa Beach. It's Saturday—you know that, right?”

“For godsake, I was having a
memory.
” She blinked at him, then narrowed her gaze. “Do you have a tardy slip?”

“Mom—”

“It's a simple question. Either you do or you don't. If you don't, I'm going to have to ask you to take a walk down to the principal's office.”

This was what the on-staff doctor called “mental jurisdiction.” Ninety-two-year-old Ellie was entitled to her own mental jurisdiction, just like seventy-year-old Martin was entitled to his. It was okay—even healthy, the doctor had said—to indulge her a little. And so Martin found his wallet, pulled out an ATM receipt, and presented it to her.

“Ha!” she said, ignoring the receipt and taking hold of her cane instead. She brought the rubber-tipped end of it down to the floor and gave a push, so that the recliner turned away from him. “You fall for that every time!”

Martin nodded and tucked the receipt back into his wallet. She was moving the recliner full circle—slowly, but she was getting there—and as he was putting his wallet away he had to stand a little and push the plastic chair back to make room for her elevated feet.

“That was a bad idea,” she said, coming to a stop. “Now I smell something.”

How a minute could feel like an hour in this place. How an hour could feel like a week. Martin had news for his mother, but the ideal moment for telling her wasn't going to present itself. The ideal moment didn't exist. He glanced at the roommate, who was watching the two of them as if they were on television, and then pivoted his head, listening to his neck crackle. “What do you smell?”

“I should never go all the way around. Partway around and back is okay, but all the way around stirs something up. Is it floor wax?”

“Is it floor wax?” the roommate suddenly piped up from across the room. “Is it floor wax?”

“Oh!” Ellie said. “I'm smelling a parrot! Have you met my parrot, Martin? Her name's Pauline, and she loves to imitate, loves to sharpen her beak on things.”

“Squawk, squawk,” the roommate said. “Go choke, you old bag.”

Martin opened his mouth to say—something—but his mother and her roommate kept talking.

“She sheds, is part of the problem,” Ellie said. “She
molts.
And, I swear, when she doesn't get enough attention, she picks up her poo with her feet and flings it across the room!”

“Gas bag!” the roommate said. “Gas bag from hell!”

Should he tell them to stop, call for assistance? Was there protocol for such a thing in an assisted-living home? A semi-emergency cord to pull alongside the regular emergency cords that were hanging next to each bed and in the bathroom?

“Do you hear the filth that comes out of the parrot's mouth?” Ellie asked him. “It's like a toilet flushing in reverse.”

“Look who's talking,” the roommate said. “Everyone—I mean,
everyone
—on this floor is sick of you.”

“Ask her what she's up to over there, Martin,” Ellie said calmly. “Go ahead, ask her what she's working on.”

Martin didn't want to ask either one of them anything. He wanted to leave, but they'd come to a lull in their volley, and they were both looking at him. “What are you working on, Pauline?” he asked, then felt his forehead tighten, realizing her name might not be Pauline, that “Pauline” might only be Ellie's parroty nickname for her.

But the roommate seemed unfazed. Her scissors were still moving. On the nightstand beside her bed, Martin noticed, were cutout circles stacked according to size—some as small as quarters, some as big as coasters. “A collage.”

“Ask her what kind of magazines those are,” Ellie said.

“What kind—”

“They're pornos,” Ellie said. “Ask her where she got them.”

“Where did you—”

“She stole them,” Ellie said.

“I did
not
steal them,” the roommate told Martin. “And they're not pornos. They're
Playboy
s. The home fired Mr. Strickland, the head custodian, and they had to clean out his office before the new custodian got here. I walked by, and these magazines were stacked on top of the things waiting to be thrown out. No one else wanted them.”

“She picks through trash,” Ellie said.

“Liar,” the roommate said.

“She
collects
them. Not the magazines. She collects the breasts and the lower-downs. She's got hundreds of them in a shoe box under her bed.”

“So what if I do?” the roommate asked. “And how would you know, unless you went snooping?”

“Mom,” Martin said, “can we go somewhere and talk? Somewhere private?”

“This is my room,” Ellie said. “We can talk here.”

“But it's not private.”

“It's not private because of her. That's not my fault.”

“I'm not blaming you for anything. But come on,” he said, getting to his feet. “Let's get out of here for a little bit.”

Her wheelchair was folded up and standing beside the dresser. Martin opened it and wheeled it over to the recliner. It was slow business getting himself around these days, but it was
very
slow business getting Ellie from one chair to the other. Her legs weren't much wider than his wrists, her wrists not much bigger around than his thumbs. Her skin was cool to the touch, and it bruised with the slightest contact, but she didn't seem to mind. She had dry mouth but it didn't affect her teeth, which had been swapped out for dentures two decades ago. She suffered from macular degeneration and mild glaucoma but managed, so long as her drops and her magnifying glass were nearby. She was unhappy with her bowels. Unhappy with the constant swelling in her feet. Unhappy with her hair, which was white and wispy and untamable, as soft and volatile as dandelion seeds. But she was still here and, for the most part, still operating under her own steam. Had she ever actually been sick? Martin had made a point of asking her that recently, and she had told him, emphatically,
yes:
she'd been as sick as a dog in 1943, on her honeymoon, and sick again right after Martin was born. She'd been on-and-off sick during all her years of teaching public school. And she hadn't exactly felt well since he'd moved her into Serenity Palms, if he wanted the truth. But she was holding on for a little while longer, thank you very much.

He held both her hands as he helped her into the wheelchair and noticed the absence of her wedding band.

“Did you lose your ring?” he asked. They'd already had it resized once to accommodate her weight loss.

“I traded it,” she said.

“To who? For what?”

“To Mr. Hollingsworth. For Weetabix. The British Weetabix you can't get in the States. His niece sent a box over in a care package.”

“Mom, for Pete's sake, you can't—”

“Take as long as you want,” the roommate all but sang. “Take her to China, for all I care!”

“Enjoy your smut,” Ellie said as Martin wheeled her past the foot of the roommate's bed.

“I will. I might even glue these to the wall over your bed.”

“I think that's
wonderful,
” Ellie said. “I really do.” She reached over her shoulder and tapped one of Martin's hands. “Tutti-frutti, that one.”

P
oor Martin. When was he
not
in a rut? He had grown up to look just like a character in one of the comic books he used to read. Private Punky? Sargent Schlep? Ellie couldn't remember the name. Despite years of correcting him, he had the poorest posture she'd ever seen in a young man. “Tab neck,” she used to call it in her students, and she would warn them that if they didn't straighten up, they were going to turn into bass clefs. Well, here was her own son: a bass clef. And getting a little soft in the stomach because of it, all that middle body pushing forward. It was sad, really, because with posture like that, how was he ever going to land a nice girl? Or a wife, for that matter? But that was wrong, she realized. Martin had a wife—had
had
a wife, and she'd died. That was a perfect example of a fact Ellie had to keep track of, because when you got something like that wrong—something big, like a death in the family—the doctors and the neighbors and even your children wrote you off as senile. Mr. Griffin, who used to live across the hall, got it into his head that he'd been hired by the mafia to shoot Lee Harvey Oswald but that Jack Ruby had gotten there first. So where did that leave Mr. Griffin, who'd never been reimbursed for his plane ticket to Dallas or for the gun he'd bought? One day, tired of waiting for answers, he climbed up onto a sofa in the dayroom and started demanding to know who was mafia around here? Who was going to get him his damn money? Well.
No one
took him seriously again after that, least of all Ellie. She pitied him, but she never again took him seriously. And so, certain facts had to be kept straight.