Pretty soon Macky and Norma started sending off for brochures of retirement communities. From the pictures of the good-looking silver-haired men and women standing around having cocktails, playing golf, tennis, and swimming, it looked like fun. “Your home away from home, only better,” they said.
As it turned out, the decision was made in less than forty-eight hours and it had nothing to do with anything that was planned. Verbena and Merle called in a fit. They had a nephew who was living in a gated community in Vero Beach and he had just found out that a house was coming up on the market in a few days and he’d called to see if they were interested. He said that it was one of the best retirement complexes down there and if somebody moved fast, before the Realtors found out about it, they could buy it from the owner, a friend of his, and not have to pay the commission.
After Macky got off the phone he told Norma all about it. “But the bad news,” he said, “is we have to make up our minds right away. Merle said there are people waiting in line to buy it if we don’t.”
Norma panicked. “Oh my God . . . do we have time to call Linda?”
“Yes, honey, go on.”
After ten minutes Norma handed the phone to Macky.
“Daddy, what do you think?”
“It’s up to your mother, whatever she thinks.”
Norma threw up her hands. “You always do this.”
“Well, Daddy, it sounds like a good deal to me. If you get there and don’t like it, you can always turn around and sell it but it sounds like you have a chance to get a nice place at a good price. I think you would always be sorry if you didn’t take advantage of it. Do you know anybody other than Verbena’s nephew who lives in Vero Beach? Anybody you could ask?”
“No.”
“Let me call around and I’ll try and find out something.” Twenty minutes later she called back. “Daddy, listen to this: Vero Beach, Florida, Indian River country home, home of famous Dodgertown, USA.”
“What’s that?”
“Daddy, it’s where the L.A. Dodgers have their spring training. You and Mother can go and watch the Dodgers play.”
The next afternoon Norma called Linda. “Well, honey, we did it. Your daddy and I have just bought a pig in a poke. He’s told the man yes. I just hope to God we don’t get down there and find out we’re in the middle of a swamp.”
“Great! Aren’t you excited?”
“I don’t know what to think, it all happened so fast. I just hope your daddy made the right decision.”
After they packed up and sold everything, it was time, as Merle had said, to shake the dust off and see some new scenery. When Merle and Verbena had moved to Florida they had flown, but Macky decided to buy a Minnie Winnie and see the country on the way down. He bought a captain’s hat and hung a sign on the back that said THE CHUCKLEHEADS and the next day he put Norma, Aunt Elner, and Sonny Number Four in the back and took off. Macky was excited. He had remembered all the little charming, out-of-the-way cafés his family had stopped at the last time he went to Florida, in 1939. But as he soon found out, things had changed. For days all they saw were Burger Kings, Taco Bells, McDonald’s, Jack in the Boxes, and Cracker Barrels. Norma said, “Macky, there are no more little places and Aunt Elner and I don’t want to get ptomaine poisoning just so you can take a trip down Memory Lane.” The one place he did find, Norma refused to go in. “Let’s just go to the Cracker Barrel, where we know it’s clean and the food is good.” The road was not as he remembered either. It was nothing but a blur of huge trucks. There were almost no cars anymore. It seemed like the entire country was nothing but trucks following other trucks. Every town looked exactly like the last. Every gas station had the same mini-mart inside. It was hard to tell one state from another.
In Vero Beach, the man had said to look for a shopping center with a big Publix drugstore, but every shopping center they passed had a big Publix drugstore and Macky finally had to stop and ask directions. A man poked his head in and said, “Sure, go about five miles up past the Winn-Dixie and take a sharp left, right into Leisureville.”
They found the sign with the arrow that said WELCOME TO LEISUREVILLE CENTRAL, FLORIDA’S FINEST GATED COMMUNITY but as they drove in they saw row after row of little mint-green, oleander-pink, or lavender stucco houses that, Aunt Elner noted, were the same color as those candy mints that Miss Alma used to keep in a glass bowl by the cashier.
As they drove in they did not see any vital, silver-haired, good-looking couples, as were shown on the brochure, standing around the pool, cocktail in hand, laughing and chatting with others of the same age with the look of “I’ve got the world by the tail.” All they saw was a bunch of people who looked old to them but looked young to Aunt Elner.
They soon discovered that what had been advertised as Citrus View Patio Homes meant there was an orange grove across the street and a slab of concrete in the postage-stamp backyard. When they walked into their new home Norma was silent. The cottage-cheese ceilings were lower than expected and there were stains all over the mustard-gold shag rug, which did nothing to enhance the olive-green stove and refrigerator. The fact that the house had been closed up for three months and smelled like mildew did not help ease the initial shock. The walls were a dingy color described as champagne beige, popular in the fifties, as were the cheap aluminum sliding doors and windows throughout the house. Macky was already wondering how hard it would be to sell it when Norma surprised him, as she still could, by saying, “Oh, Macky, it’s not so bad. I can whip this place into shape in no time.” Sonny had no qualms about the shag rug and happily scratched away at it after depositing a welcome-to-your-new-home gift. They stayed in a motel until Macky could get the rug pulled up and have the walls repainted. Norma went to Sears and bought a new white refrigerator and stove and had Goodwill come and pick up the old green ones. Macky laid a new sheet of white linoleum on the floor in the kitchen and in the bathrooms. A week later, when the van carrying their furniture arrived from Missouri and everything was put in its place and the stucco house looked at least a little familiar, Macky sat down on his old chair from home and flipped up the leg rest and thought to himself, “Now what?”
The next week a new magazine came and he stared at it and asked Norma, “What the hell is AARP? It sounds like a dog throwing up.”
Norma said, “It’s a magazine from the American Association of Retired Persons. Everybody gets it after they hit fifty. It tells all about your senior citizen discounts.”
Macky mumbled and went out to take a walk. What was going on? He was not ready to be a senior citizen—there seemed to be a national conspiracy to label anybody over the age of fifty-five a “senior” and move them on out of the mainstream. That’s not how he remembered it when he was young; an old man was not old until at least seventy-five or eighty and even Old Man Henderson had still been doing his yard at ninety-three, for God’s sake. Macky was still young; he had years left before he was old. Rest up for what, he wondered, to get ready to die? Take a short rest before you take the long one? Norma was sailing into the bay of senior citizenship with the wind to her back and with a smile on her face. But not him.