April Journal

BINGO LOVE

April 29, 2006 - Saturday

  Well, I accidentally got Myrtle back for the flimsy nightgown incident. I was on the phone with my good friend Liz this morning, having finally gotten my own phone a few weeks ago. There was a knock on my door. A hard knock, not the soft old lady kind I’ve become accustomed to. I asked her to hang on while I wrapped my blanket around me. In that split second before I opened the door, I knew there was trouble brewing outside: there were voices. Not just old lady voices, but a man voice as well. My brain couldn’t compute that quickly. My brain didn’t have the sense to say, “Self, don’t open this door. You are wearing nothing but a blanket, your breath could gag maggots and your hair is in eighteen different directions.” I opened the door anyway.

   Outside in the hallway was my worst nightmare (considering my bodily state of affairs). There were my two favorite neighbors, Myrtle and Mary Sue, of the sweet old lady variety that probably wouldn’t approve of my tattoos and hellaciously messy apartment, and Hottie Doctor, the resident doctor here who, in addition to me, makes up the whole of the young people population in this building.

  “Nice hair,” said he.

  “Thanks,” I said, blowing my dragon breath at him, wearing my blanket.

  It was all very awkward.

  I invited him in, of course, not because I wanted him in my wreck of an apartment, but because I had to escape the stares of my neighbors. This probably forced their good opinion of me to plummet even further but Brain was not thinking about that at the time. Brain was thinking, “Must retreat from stares of old ladies. Must comb hair and brush teeth so as to have fruitful conversation with Hot Doctor. Never mind the blanket.”

  A while later after Hot Doctor left with instructions for me to visit his apartment later in the afternoon, I closed my door. I was standing there thinking how hot he was when I heard a metallic sounding noise calling my name.

  “Sue? Susan? SUE!”

  I picked up my phone. “Oh shit! Liz, I thought we hung up!” She laughed in her evil little way. “Haha, God you are such a flirt! You are shameless… good to have you back,” she added.

  One observation I made about old people was that, nice as they are, they are a suspicious bunch. They get set in their ways and routines and when something out of the ordinary happens –such as a young person moving into their old people building- they simply observe, a bit like predators, before they will investigate the scene.

   It was nearing the end of February when we had a fire drill. I was sitting in my apartment playing Catch the Finger Under the Covers with my cats. Suddenly a noise loud enough to wake the dead (and loud enough to wake old people) blared through the building. The cats ran into the bathroom cabinets and my heart did a back flip. As soon as I got up to go investigate, my neighbor Myrtle opened my front door. At that point I had only spoken to her briefly in the hallway once or twice, so her opening my door was a bit of an invasion, by my standards. “Susie?” What is it with old people calling me Susie? My grandma always did that. “We have to get out into the hallway! It’s a fire drill! Put some clothes on!”

  There was an elderly ruckus in the hall. Everyone was milling around. There was a jumbled mass of canes and walkers and confusion. I was the only one holding my ears. After a few moments the noise stopped and the jumbled confusion drifted away from the fire drill and onto the new resident. I stood out, like in one of those games on the back of a kids’ cereal box where it asks you to find what’s wrong with this picture.

  Someone from the staff came by and said it wasn’t a real fire drill and that we had done a good job getting out as quickly as possible and now we could go back to our rooms. “You mean I came out here for nothin’?” one of the old men asked. “Dern it! And I was sleepin’ good, too.” There was a murmur of agreement.

  “You mean we have to go back in now? We’re done?” another man asked. “Well, as long as we made the trip out here, we might as well socialize a little,” as if the journey from their recliners to the hallway was so arduous they had to rest. “Excuse me, do you live here?” a lady asked me. I already knew her name. She was Mabel from 210. I had seen her go into her apartment one day when I was taking my trash to the garbage room. I nodded. “Well, we’ve been hearing there was a little girl living here, but we didn’t believe it!” someone else said. Suddenly I was bombarded with old people questions. Why are you here? How’d they let you in? Do you pay the same as us? What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you want to live with your parents? Do you play bridge? “Get out of the way,” Mabel snapped at George, who lived across the hall from her. “Quit bugging her. Dear,” she said to me in a completely different tone, “do you like cookies?” Does a fox like chickens? “Yes ma’am.”

  “Come inside, dear, I’d like to share something with you.” The other old people looked a bit disappointed, as if Mabel had won the prize and the game was over. I entered #210 and was overwhelmed with a burning smell. Was this why we were having a fire drill? “They’re nice and done,” Mabel said, pulling them out of the oven. I watched as she scraped them off the pan, torn between the delicious smell of chocolate chip and the burning aroma of cancer-causing agents. “You can just scrape the black stuff off, dear.”

  After that day, I was no longer the mysterious spectacle. The residents on my hall spoke to me every chance they got and most forced food on me as if I were an orphan. Now that I think about it, I was very much like an orphan. I had few visitors who weren’t residents (I didn’t want visitors those first few months) and all the old folks knew I was having trouble making ends meet. It was like having thirty sets of grandparents, all within a stone’s throw.

May 5, 2006 - Friday

  It seems like just yesterday I was getting hammered at the Mardi Gras party. I had such an unprecedented hangover that I swore I’d never drink with old people again. Unfortunately, I am a sucker for a ninety-year-old man. I swear, if Morris and Earl would stop sleeping so much they could have their own comedy act in Vegas. They knocked on my door at 3pm and literally dragged me down to the parlor. I knew there was a Cinqo de Mayo party but I was napping myself (ok, so I’m a hypocrite) and couldn’t be bothered to get up in time. This one was more low-key than Mardi Gras, but there were still fifty or more old folks down there who all clapped when the three of us came in. Earl said they were clapping because I showed up, but I think they were clapping because Morris and Earl were actually awake and semi-lucid. That is a rare event.

  After two margaritas the three of us fell asleep on the couch, Earl on one side, Morris on the other, and me in the middle.I told my friend Kristen this story and she just tut-tutted in her little way. She said, “Sue, you have officially become one of them.”

  That was the greatest compliment I’d gotten in a long time.

  I was hanging out in the ice cream parlor next to the main lobby one day in February. Shirley, our receptionist, came in to get some coffee. I liked Shirley from the start. She never said anything when she saw me take a cookie from the visitor’s cookie tray by her desk, even when she saw me tuck a couple into my pocket. A man whizzed by her in his wheelchair, and Shirley quickly snapped around. “Hi Bert,” she said.

  “Hey darlin’,” he said, winking at the both of us on his way out.

  “You gotta watch that one,” she said to me, “he’s a pincher.”

  “Good to know.”

  Morris wheeled in right about that time, and had that look on his face like he was on a mission. Bingo. He roped me into it. “You’re smart, you’ll be good at bingo,” he said, as if counting to five in a row were some academic feat. “Plus there’s some old hens I want you to beat. They win every time and then if you win they want your damn door prize in trade. Like they’s God’s gift to bingo.”

  “I just moved here. I don’t want any trouble,” I said. The last thing I needed was some old lady who had it in for me because I whooped her at bingo. My mom is pushing eighty. I know what old ladies are capable of. It isn’t pretty.

  “Aw, Edna ain’t nothin’. It’s Annie you got to worry about, but she’s getting transferred to the Alzheimer’s unit next week so she won’t be able to get you back.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  An hour later I was sitting next to Morris in the main parlor. “Twenty-nine!” Gladys called. Gladys lived on my floor. She always presided over bingo events because she was one of those few people who could see and hear well enough to screen the cheaters. Nobody could get away with anything with Gladys around. Another observation I’d made about old people: they aren’t the sweet and innocent folk I’d always imagined them to be. They cheat. Especially at bingo.

  “Susie! You got twenty-nine! Put your chit on it!” Morris said. I thought he was cussing at me until I realized that I really did have twenty-nine, right in the top left corner of my bingo card. One more and I had bingo. “You gotta stay sharp, Susie,” Morris said, pulling his wheelchair back a little from the table so he could scratch himself. “Annie and Edna are eyeing your card. We can’t let them win!”

  “Okay. I’ll try harder,” I said.

“Forty-seven!” Gladys called. Morris let out a little gasp as he saw Annie put one more chit on her card. She was smiling at us. An evil smile. Someone sitting at the table behind me farted. I got distracted. I was in the middle of turning around to see who it was when Gladys called “Eighteen!” and I thought Morris would have an aneurism. “Susie! Pay attention! You got it! You got bingo! SUSIE GOT BINGO!” he said to Gladys at the front of the room. He put the chit on number eighteen for me.

   “Read ‘em out,” she said, “real loud so everyone can hear.”

   I opened my mouth but Morris’s impatience got the better of him. “You better let me do this,” he said. I relented. I didn’t much feel like yelling out anything, and I sure didn’t want to take away an old man’s pleasure. “Twenty-nine! Forty! Eighteen! Fifty-five! Thirty-one! That makes bingo! That makes bingo!” he yelled. “It sure does,” Gladys said, “and Susie gets a door prize!” He whispered to me, “Ooh, that Annie is pissed now. Look at her.” I looked past Morris’s grin to see Annie’s puckered lips, a sign that either she was angry or her dentures were coming loose.

   They used to let everyone come up to the front table to choose their door prize, but it caused too much dissension and bickering so they started using a number system to determine who was getting what. Gladys pulled a slip of paper from a fishbowl, grabbed something off the table, and brought it to me.

  It was a plant.

   “Hey, that’s purr-ty,” Morris said, “like you.” I didn’t really want another plant. I was thinking I could trade with Annie or Edna if they won. When I realized it was plastic, though, I decided to keep it. It would go nicely in my apartment. It would never die. Annie won the very last game of bingo and tried to trade me her pack of crackers for my plastic plant. I told her to forget it. I said I’d already named my plant, and its name was Morris. Morris smiled and touched my arm. “You know somethin’? I love you.”

  It was mid-January, right around the time I moved in to the retirement home, when I started getting up before dawn. I had never been a morning person, but I was in a new phase of life now and had to make so many transitions that this came naturally for some reason. I didn’t even need an alarm clock. I simply got up, took my medicine, threw on a coat and made my way outside to patrol the grounds.

  Although February was an exceptionally warm month this year, there was one spell when we had a few ice patches on the ground. I probably should’ve known better than to attempt patrol of the parking lot, but it was my usual pre-dawn route so I didn’t give it a second thought. I was looking up at the moon when I fell. My face hit the pavement, as I was not able to catch myself in time, and my lip was fat and bloody. My ass hurt too. It was not a graceful fall. The worse part of it was that it was 5am and not a soul was around to lend me a hand. (Of course, no one was around to see me bust my ass, either, so that was good.) When I finally got back up to my apartment, the sun was coming up.

  I sat on my couch, cats on either side of me, and stared despondently at my bare apartment. It was one of those moments when you wonder if anything in your life will ever go your way, or if you are destined to live the rest of your days paying for the mistakes of a really bad past life. I used to ask myself, How does one start over? I moved to Japan a few years ago and thought I’d answered that question. I asked myself again, How does one start over again? I loved back to Japan last year and thought I’d answered it a second time. But now I ask myself, How does one start over again?

  And again?

  And again?

  And again?

  Sitting on a scratchy couch in a retirement home at thirty-two years old with a fat and bloody lip, these are the questions that cross your mind. I imagined it was one question old people probably didn’t have to ask themselves.

  I was coming back from my walk one evening when I opened my door to find a note. It had been shoved under the door and my cat had been lying on it. The note said, “Susie, me and Earl are hanging out at my place watching movies. Earl got a bottle of wine for his 85th birthday. Come on over. Signed, Morris.” It was written on the back of a bingo card. It was a Friday night. I had no plans. In late February I still had no phone so my friends couldn’t call me. It was past 7pm so the lobby doors were locked, which meant I would not be receiving any more unexpected company from my group of normal young friends. Another exciting Friday night in the retirement home, all to myself.

  I shuffled on down to Morris’s pad on the opposite hall. Rounding the corner, I could already hear the blast of his TV, a familiar sound in these parts. I opened his door. “Hello? Morris? Earl?” Mr. Holland’s Opus was blaring on the TV. A lamp was on and the place smelled of popcorn and Old Spice. I walked in, turned the corner by the kitchen and saw them. Two old men, snoring on opposite ends of the couch, a half-eaten bowl of popcorn between them, and a half-drunk bottle of wine on the coffee table.

  I poured myself a glass of Earl’s birthday wine, grabbed some popcorn and sat in Morris’s recliner to watch the rest of Mr. Holland’s Opus. Morris and Earl continued to snore. If anyone is truly curious what life is like as a young person living in a retirement home, well, this is a pretty good example. It is a bit like my college dorm. Lots of single people, alcohol and pill-popping, slacking off, and socializing. There is less venereal disease and everyone falls asleep at 7:15pm after a glass of wine, but otherwise it isn’t so different than my days at Appalachian State. Now I take routine blood tests rather than exams, and instead of football games I go to shuffleboard matches.

  And instead of cute little notes from my college boyfriend, now I get notes from a ninety-year-old written on the back of a bingo card.