What Bea sees in him I'm not exactly sure, but maybe at this stage and locale it's enough for a man to have any bit of spirit left, any whiff of piss and vinegar, to make the ladies swoon.
There is, as Pop purports, more action going on around here than anyone cares to imagine, and it's not what we'd like to think is just some smoothy doe-eyed cuddling in the dayroom.
Bea isn't looking terribly right this evening (or afternoon, as 4:45 is the first dinner seating), for she's also wearing her bathrobe and slippers, and her shoulder-length hair, which I recall being thoroughly warmly blond, is now white for an inch at the roots (has it been that long since I last visited?), and not brushed. With no makeup on her face I can hardly recognize her, her eyes seeming that much sleepier, sunken, the unrouged skin of her cheeks so sheer as to seem transparent, her faintly purplish lips dried and cracked. Maybe I'm old-fashioned and don't mind being duped by a deft hand with the Maybelline, but I don't think I'm overstating things when I say that if she weren't otherwise eating with some gusto and sitting upright I might say poor Bea was about to kick the bucket.
"Jerry, are you Hank's brother or son?" Bea asks me, like she's asking for the very first time.
"He's my son, sweetheart," Pop tells her. "He's the one who put me in here."
"Then I should thank you," she says, "for sending me my sexy companion."
"Please don't use that word," Pop says.
"Sexy?"
"Companion."
"Why not?"
"It sounds fruity."
"So? You are fruity. Fruity with me."
"Yeah, but I don't want my son to know."
Bea grins at me, with her perfect set of porcelain choppers, a speck of green bean clinging to her incisor.
The nursing-aide-posing-as-waiter approaches and tells us what's on the dinner menu, which is just what Bea is working through, save the option of fish instead of the turkey. Pop asks what kind of fish it is and the fellow says a whitiskfish, of course meaning he doesn't know or care. Pop says we'll both have that, and I don't fight it. He's always ordered for everyone, even the guys on the crews when the lunch truck came by (he made a point of buying lunch whenever he was around), because he's proud and he's a bully, and he'll be buying dinner for as long as his triple-tax-free munis hold out. The other folks at the table, two men and a woman, appropriately clad, all order the turkey, and while we wait for our plates to be delivered I check out the rest of the room, now nearly filled up with most of the residents of Ivy Acres, whose mission is to serve those, according to its glossy brochure, "moving between self-sufficiency and a more needs-intensive lifestyle," meaning of course the heading-downhill-fast crowd. What strikes me is that there's never as much conversation as I think there will be, there's just this se-date bass-line murmur to accompany the piped-in easy-listening format, because as much as I'd like to believe that these old-timers can hardly contain their accrued store of tales and opinions and observations, the truth of the matter is they would rather talk to anybody else but their Ivy Acres brethren, wishing to be a part of the chance daily flow again, the messy unknown arrays of people and situations that you and I might consider bothersome or peculiar or annoying but to the institu-tionally captive are serendipitous events, like finding a ten-dollar bill in the street. So I feel it's part of my duty whenever I visit to eat with Pop and listen to whatever his tablemates have to say about their neglectful families or their lumbago, and nod agreeably to their shock at the price of a gallon of gasoline or a three-bedroom house in Centerport, and patiently discuss their views on abortion and the right to bear arms. Bea usually tells me about her divorced eldest daughter, the one who has a son who is a junkie and a daughter who is already a lesbian ("at the age of thirteen!") and who asks her for monthly counseling money for all three, which Bea knows she uses instead toward a lease on a new Infiniti sedan.
Across from us sit Daniel and his fraternal twin Dennis, who ran a family bakery in Deer Park, and are decent enough fellows, though one of them is hard of hearing and so they both talk way too loudly, and both spit a bit doing it. They like to argue with each other about the Middle East crisis, one of them approvingly Zionist in the conservative American Gentile tradition and the other something of an anti-Semite, inevitably bringing up the idea of Jewish conspiratorial influence in Washington and Hollywood and on Wall Street. They can sometimes get quite angry at each other — one of them might even slap the table with a big loafy hand and leave red-faced—
but Pop assures me that they hardly speak when visitors aren't around, and just get up together at 3 A.M. out of lifelong habit and play Hearts to kill time until coffee is served in the Sunrise Room.
There are, of course, a number of residents that you never see, who are housed in a special wing of the complex called
"Transitions" (though informally known as "The Morgue," as it is situated, in a somewhat unfortunate attempt at an expensive contemporary look, behind a massive pair of polished stainless steel sliding doors). This is the unit where the living isn't so much assisted as it is sustained, and while I've been invited multiple times of late by the executive administrator to take a tour of its specialized facilities and meet its staff I've not yet done so, the reason, I think, being not exactly denial of the coming reality but my feeling that I'd rather be cathartically jolted by shock and dismay and surprise by what Pop requires than have to ru-minate too much now on all the grim complications and possibilities. Maybe that's a sneaky form of denial, too, but it's what I can do.
Our dinners are brought to us and it's no stretch to say that Pop gravely misordered. The fish on our plates is an unnaturally rectangular fillet of meat, grayish and bluish and not nearly whitish enough, with veiny streaks of brown running through the engineered block. A glum slice of lemon is steamadhered on top. The fish has been poached in its own past-due juices, which are now infiltrating the green beans and mashed potatoes and the overfancy garnishes of carrot flowers and parsley. I can hardly stick my face over the plate, but Pop is digging right in, and nobody else at the table seems to notice, or cares if they do. I'll remind you that Ivy Acres is an upscale nursing facility, and it's amazing to think what they might be serving at some of the other homes I looked at, which were but half the price. What would it take to slap a decent piece of sirloin on the griddle and Iet it sear to medium-rare, and serve it the way Rita does with a pat of sweet herbed butter and maybe even a half glass of dry red wine? I've always thought that Ivy Acres spent too much dough on the glossy brochures and advertisements and then on landscaping the grounds, which I can say from my former professional point of view is clearly top-shelf, with the pea-stone pathways and English garden perennials and a high-end playground set for the visiting grandkids (who don't go outside but just sit in the dayroom watching whatever the residents are watching). In fact I've never seen any of the residents hanging out outside except when their families insist on "getting some air." Like everything else here the money is spent by management for the sake of us visitors, the same way pet food is designed to please the owners, to assure us in our wishful thinking that our folks are already, as it were, in a better place.