All Fall Down(45)
Author: Jennifer Weiner

What are you doing? a part of my brain cried as I crunched three of the pills, then bent down to gather the dirty towels, pick up the soap off the shower floor, pull a wad of hair out of the drain, and sweep discarded Q-tips and Kleenexes into the wastebasket. You’re stealing medicine from your father, your sick father. Have you really sunk so low?

It appeared that I had. I need this, I told myself as I moved through the bedroom, gathering armloads of clothing and piling them into garbage bags, and then loading the bags into the trunk of my car to take home to wash and fold. I need this.

PART TWO

All Fall Down

SEVEN

“Welcome to Eastwood.” The woman who met me on the front lawn of the Eastwood Assisted Living Facility had her silver-gray hair in a neat bob, a high, sweet voice, and a cool, brisk handshake. She wore khakis, a sweater, and a nametag with KATHLEEN YOUNG written on it, and she led me through the doors with a bounce in her step, like a former high-school jock who’d stayed on campus to teach phys ed. “Let me show you around!”

Her bubbly, energetic manner only made the handful of residents—a man in a wheelchair by the door, hands shaking as he held up the Examiner; a woman in a pink-and-white bathrobe, using a walker to make her slow way toward the art room—look even older and sadder. I tried to picture my father here, my smart, strong, competent father in a bathrobe, requiring the kind of care a place like this could give him. It hurt, but it was a distant kind of pain. The pills let me consider his future without feeling it too deeply. It was almost like watching a movie about someone else’s sorrows—now her father can’t remember his granddaughter’s name; now he’s having temper tantrums; now he’s having accidents, and wandering away from home, and crying—and knowing they were painful without feeling them acutely. Narcotics were like a warm, fuzzy comforter, a layer of defense between me and the world.

“Follow me, please,” said Kathleen, bounding down the hallway on the balls of her feet. I grappled with a brief but fierce desire to go sprinting back to my car, to burn rubber out of the parking lot and never see this place again . . . only what good would that do? My mother was unlikely to take this on. Someone had to step up and do what was required.

In the foyer I braced myself for the smell of urine, of industrial cleansers and canned chicken soup that I remembered from my dad’s last hospital stay, but Eastwood’s green-carpeted corridors smelled pleasantly of cedar and spice. There was a basket of scented pinecones on top of the front desk, behind which two women in headsets were busy typing. Behind them was an oversized whiteboard, the kind I remembered from Ellie’s preschool, with sentences left open-ended, so the kids and teachers could fill in the blanks. Today is MONDAY, read the top line. It is APRIL 7th. The weather is . . .. Instead of the word “sunny,” someone had affixed a decal of an affably beaming sun. Our SPECIAL ACTIVITIES are BINGO in the Recreation Parlor, and a TRIP TO THE CAMDEN AQUARIUM. I felt a tug at my sleeve, and heard a whispered “Help me.” I looked down. While Kathleen was deep in conversation with one of the head-setted ladies behind the desk, a tiny, curled shrimp of a woman had wheeled up beside me and grabbed my sleeve.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The woman gave a very teenager-y eye roll. Fine white hair floated around her pink scalp in an Einsteinian nimbus. Her frail torso was wrapped in an oversized pink cardigan, and she wore pink velour pants and a pair of white knitted slippers beneath it. Her veined hand trembled, but her eyes, behind enormous glasses, were sharp, and I was relieved to see a full set of teeth (or realistic-looking dentures) when she started talking.

“This place is what’s wrong,” she murmured, speaking out of the side of her mouth, like a prisoner in the yard who didn’t want the guards to overhear. “The steak is tough. The pudding’s bland. They’ve been promising me for weeks to order my gluten-free crumpets, and . . .” She lifted her hands in the air, palms up, a mute appeal to the God of gluten-free crumpets. “Also, my kids never visit.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, then squatted, my face close to hers. She extended one of her gnarled paws toward me.

“Lois Lefkowitz. Formerly of sunny Florida, until I broke my hip and my kids moved me back here.”

I shook her hand gently. “I’m Allison Weiss.” I shot a glance at the counter, making sure the brisk Ms. Young was still occupied, before I whispered, “Is it really that bad here?”

She patted my hand and shook her head.

“What’s not to like?” she asked. “I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to clean, I don’t have to shop, and I don’t have to listen to Murray go on about his fantasy football team. I read . . .” She tapped the e-reader in her lap. “With this thing, every book is a large-print book. I go to the museum, I go to the symphony, and the beauty shop’s open once a week for a wash and set.” She patted her wisps of white hair, then put one gnarled paw on my shoulder. “Mother or father?”