Fiction: Memory Care by Ian Woollen

By Ian Woollen

Gail’s new phone rang in the check-out line at Hannaford, and she wasn’t sure what to do. Or even how to answer it. Oh, golly. She’d owned this mysterious gadget for only a few days. Her daughter, Rose, and the visiting nurse had forced her to get one and made her promise to carry it in her purse. Something about safety and knowing her location if she got lost again.         ​

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The old woman dug around in her enormous leather purse and found the phone. She stepped away from the check-out line of her favorite cashier, signaling that she’d be back momentarily. Gail had been raised to be a polite person and polite people answered the phone. If she could figure out which button to push.

“Hello, hello? This is Gail.”

“Great, finally. You’re hard to reach, like the pickle at the bottom of the jar,” said the faint voice at the other end. It was a man’s voice.

“I’m at the grocery store.”

“There’s no such thing anymore.”

“What?”

“Supermarkets. They’re called ‘supermarkets.’”

“Excuse me, what?”

“Do you remember the IGA out by the lake?”

“Talk louder, please. It’s difficult to hear.”

“No kidding. Everything is getting so difficult.”

“Who is this?”

“Reggie, your long lost step-brother.”

Gail yanked the phone away from her ear and squinted, as if trying to assess the freshness of a piece of fruit and finally deciding it was bad. She stuffed the phone down into the bottom of her purse. Perhaps it was a wrong number. She adjusted her hair clasp, pulling silver bangs off her forehead, and stepped back into the line.

The cashier’s arms were covered with bird tattoos. Gail secretly admired those tattoos and decided to tell her so today. Having been distracted by the phone call, oh, golly, she forgot to place a divider bar between her items and the customer’s stuff behind her and it all got mixed up and Gail felt embarrassed and stammered an apology. “I’m sorry. Forgive me.”

The cashier said, “Don’t worry. It can happen to anyone.”

“Phone calls from dead relatives?” Gail said.

“I meant your purchases. Would you like paper or plastic? ”

“I brought my own bag,” Gail said.

“Yes, you always bring your own bag. You’re very conscientious.”

“Oh, and I like your tattoos.”

“Thank you, dearie.”

Gail said, “I shouldn’t have answered the phone. My daughter made me get one and I don’t really know how to use it.”

The cashier said, “Tell your daughter that, once upon a time, the world worked perfectly well without smart phones.”

Gail sighed and said, “I’m not so sure about that.” She hoisted her bag, which included 10 pounds of sunflower seeds, up onto a thin shoulder. “I’ve been around a while and the world has never worked very well, as far as I can see.”

​Later, she regretted that comment. It was not polite. Rose had warned her about getting a reputation as an ornery shrew. “You don’t want to be a Loretta.” Referring to Gail’s mother, a famously ornery shrew. Loretta had a mouth like a stevedore. She could turn the word shit into a seven syllable imprecation. Foul-mouthed stevedores on both sides as far back as it goes, despite being devout church-goers.

Outside, at the crowded bus stop, Gail listened in on a young couple debating something about “density,” a proposal before the city council to tear down houses in the core neighborhoods and replace them with duplexes and triplexes. Gail knew nothing about the topic, but she liked the sound of their talk. Two people just plain discussing something. Like the conversations Gail used to have with her dogs.

“What do you think, ma’am?” the young man asked.

​“About density? I don’t know. My daughter accuses me of being dense.”

“No, no,” the woman laughed, “Do you want to see more young people living downtown?”

“Sure, yes, Rose, my daughter.”

“Where does she live now?” the man asked.

“Downtown, but it’s a different downtown.”

“What do you mean?”

“She moved. And I miss her.”

“Where did she move to?”

“I…don’t…remember,” Gail said.

“Are you okay, ma’am?”

​No. It was another one of her spells. The world gone all fuzzy. Like when the TV set needed a good whack. Gail rubbed her forehead and stared down at the ground. She gripped the bus fare in her fist. Fortunately, a #12 arrived, a kneeling bus that appeared to be kneeling just for her. Gail climbed aboard and found her way to a seat at the back. Things settled a bit when she remembered, no, it was not her daughter who had moved. Gail herself had moved, on the recommendation of the bald psychiatrist, Dr. Shinytop. The dementia doctor. He believed it would be better for Gail to be living in a familiar town, a place that she knew like the back of her hand. That’s how he put it. So abracadabra, here she was back in Maine, gazing at the mottled, blue-veined backs of her hands as if they could offer directions. And the word must be out on the street, which would explain the phone call from Reggie.

​What could that sad sack possibly want from her? More money? Poor Reggie and his ratty watch caps. From the beginning, he was known as ‘bad luck.’ He countered by claiming that his presence with Gail in the gas station on the night she bought the winning ticket was proof that he was in fact ‘good luck’ and that he deserved a cut. Whether Gail’s surprise lottery windfall had been good or bad was a matter of ongoing debate. Previous to the bonanza, innocent Gail, barely into her twenties, had never made a major decision, and suddenly she was making fifteen a day. Should she buy a house down in Worcester, near her high school friend, Rose (namesake and godmother of her daughter), or a condo in Providence, near where her grandparents had moved for the mill jobs? Whatever, the money was gone. Along with two moocher husbands and three Irish setters and a roomful of Corning glass that sparkled in the morning sun. Gail thought Reggie was long gone too, in a boating accident on the lake, but maybe that was his twin brother, Leroy. The one with the eye patch. An interesting fellow, but not as interesting as he thought he was.

“Hello again.”

“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” Gail said.

The young woman across the aisle smiled and said, “We just want to make sure you’re okay, before we got off.”

It was the talkative couple, who apparently also rode the #12 bus.

“According to the visiting nurse, my blood pressure this morning was good enough,” Gail said.

“Okay,” the guy said, “Do you know where you’re going?”

“The Retired Dock Worker’s Home, down on Commercial Street.”

“Are you a retired dock worker?”

“My daddy and uncles were, so they let me in,” Gail said, “It’s just a few more stops.”

“Would you like us to walk you there?”

“Thank you, no. I’ll be fine,” Gail said.

“Take good care,” the woman said, as she pulled the cord for the next stop.

​Gail watched the couple get off. She smiled and waved goodbye and shivered through a smug thrill about how easily she’d convinced them of her route and destination. A kernel of truth in it. She’d taken the #12 many times to visit her bedridden father in the smelly nursing home that overlooked the wharf. That was in a previous century, before cell phones. Oh, how her father would have scoffed at cell phones.

“What’s new with you this fine morning, daddy?”

“Low tide on the mudflats, Gail.”

“Lower than yesterday?”

“It’s a very low tide.”

He always remembered her name. Gail sat up and shifted her bag to the other shoulder. Momentarily blanking on her own daughter’s name, she recalled her snippy instructions to leave the phone turned on so that the location device function thing could work.

“Wait, nope, sorry,” Gail decided, “can’t risk another call from Reggie.” She examined the liver-spotted backs of her hands. They were trembling, more than usual. She could smell the rank stillness in her daddy’s room at the nursing home that he shared with two other immobilized teamsters. His desperate longing to swing his legs free and slide them down into the tall, black clam boots that waited in vain beside his narrow, iron-frame bed.

Daddy would have known exactly what to tell her right now. As a fisherman, he had a reputation for getting lost in the fog. Mostly because he refused to install any of that fancy, electronic gear. He claimed to possess an “innerds radar,” which was somehow connected to the tattoo of a blue heron that extended along his left forearm.

“Listen for the rocks and don’t panic.”

“I’m scared that I’ve forgotten the way home again, and that Rose will put me in the memory care unit.”

“In the fog, the ocean is usually calm.”

“I don’t feel calm.”

“Turn on your innerds radar.”

Gail attempted to do so. Her wrinkled face brushed up against the window as the #12 hung a wide left around the square and the post office and passed a brick school with a noisy playground. The bus turned onto a street lined with new ranch houses, all shades of vinyl brown. One problem for Gail was that every town in New England looked the same to her anymore. This could be Worcester or Portsmouth or Providence.

She became aware that someone was sitting beside her. A child in a school uniform, with a large backpack in her lap. A bevy of kids had boarded the bus a few minutes ago. This was familiar. This had happened before. It meant that Gail had not missed her stop. She reached into her purse and dug around for her keychain, a clunky, carved buoy toggle that read: Harbor View Senior Living.

The freckled schoolgirl said, “Hello, can I ask you a few questions? We’re doing a project for our school newspaper.”

Gail, a bit disoriented, verging on ornery, replied, “Didn’t your parents ever tell you not to speak to strangers?”

“But you’re not a stranger,” the schoolgirl said.

“I’m not?”

“You’re the lady in the red coat on the park bench who feeds the birds.”

“Well, so I am,” Gail said, delighted to have received this gift of restored identity and perspective. Whew, yes, she could see herself on that bench, wearing an ex-husband’s hunting jacket, eating the sandwich that she made every morning. And she knew the bench wasn’t far away, and she knew that her room in the Senior Living Center was not far from the bench and that someone, maybe one of the attendants or her daughter would probably find her there.

“I have a fresh batch of birdseed right here in my sack,” Gail said.

“Can I ask a couple questions? It’s supposed to be a man-on-the-street interview.”

“How about woman-on-the-street?” Gail said.

“That’s fine, too.”     

“Fire away,” Gail said.

The schoolgirl opened her notebook. The interview focused on Gail’s opinions about holiday traditions. Decorations and recipes and other Christmas rituals. Gail managed to take it in stride. She described studding apples with cloves and making garlands to wrap around the porch. Citing Loretta (but not swearing), she spoke at length about the correct way to prepare chestnuts for roasting, the importance of boiling the nuts for five minutes to soften the skin, first cutting an X in the back to make the peeling easier.

“This is great,” the girl said, scribbling notes.

“Now can I ask you a question?” Gail said.

“Sure.”

“Are we getting near the park?”

“Just up ahead.”

“Could you take me to my bench?”

“If we get off right here,” the girl said, and she jumped up to pull the cord.

The bus kneeled for them to exit. Gail handed her bag down to the girl. Back on solid ground. They waited for the bus to pull away. Gail paused to make sure she had not forgotten anything. She recited her father’s standard check-list, “Spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch.”

 “What’s that again?” the girl asked.

“An old saying,” Gail explained.

The schoolgirl led Gail across the street. They cut through the Exxon lot on the corner and entered the park at the mid-block gate and proceeded over to the memorial fountain. Covered with a blue plastic tarp for the winter, it was encircled by wooden benches, a couple of them occupied by homeless sleepers curled up tight. The girl led Gail to a bench at the far side of the brick plaza beside the angel statue. For several perplexing moments, Gail wondered if the girl herself was an angel, or some manifestation of what Dr. Shinytop referred to as a “second childhood”.

Little Freckles reached down and helped to lift out the birdseed package from Gail’s bag. They opened it together, without spilling, and tossed a few handfuls on the ground. Their bench was quickly surrounded by mourning doves and chickadees and pigeons. Some of whom Gail claimed to know personally. She had pet names for them.

“That’s Perky and Jezebel and that’s Bud.”

“How do you tell them apart?” the girl asked.

“It takes a while.”

“You live nearby?”

“Pretty close, at the Harbor View place. My daughter will come and fetch me soon, and will probably be mad. She will lecture me about getting lost. She thinks that I’m willful. She tells me, ‘It may feel exciting to get lost, but it feels really terrible to never be found.’”

“I disagree,” the freckled girl said, “Playing hide and seek, I love it when nobody can find me.”

Gail felt a chill slowly sneaking up her legs. She watched the sagging, red sun touch the hilltop behind the ferry slip. The schoolgirl was gone and so was the afternoon. The first dinner seating was probably over too. It had been easy to pass the time, thinking about hiding places (one favorite was inside her uncle’s cement mixer) and remembering the long waits after choir practice outside the church, St. Brendan the Navigator, when Loretta would forget to pick her up. That was the beginning of Gail’s involvement with birds, whistling and naming them. It felt similar right now, her annoyance at Loretta becoming a sharp fear of abandonment, as the gloaming deepened. In this moment, abandonment by her daughter. Where was smarty-pants Rose? Why wasn’t she here yet? Dr. Shinytop had once insinuated that Gail purposely got herself lost so that she could experience being found by her daughter. A form of compensation. Stupid old goat. Why would anyone still care about that? Especially when so much worse had happened.

Gail prayed, “God, please bring Rose to the park soon.” The phone again. Oh, golly. She needed to turn on her phone, but didn’t want to disturb the birds. She waited until dark, until the streetlamps came on. The device glowed in the palm of her hand. After a minute or two, the ring tone sounded.

It was Rose, all huffy as usual. Maybe more than usual.

“Hello, this is Gail speaking.”

“Where the heck are you?” Rose said.

“I am just really wondering.”

“Wondering what, Mother?”

“Where this all ends.”

“How about you tell me where you are exactly,” Rose said.

“In the park, on the bench beside the angel.”
 
“Should have known. I’ll be right there. First, I went to Hannaford and then to the wharf.”

Gail stood up and stretched and decided on a plan of action to redeem herself. To appease her daughter’s anger. To make everything new again. She hoisted her bag and walked around the covered fountain and over to the Exxon station on the corner. She hesitated before opening the door. It occurred to her that if Rose arrived at the bench and did not find Gail there…that would only make matters worse.

Better do this fast, old girl.

A buzzer sounded inside the bright gas station. A friendly man looked up from his newspaper. “May I help you, Gail?”

“You know my name?”

“Of course, you come in to use the restroom and then buy a ginger ale.”

“Today I’d like to buy some lottery tickets.”

“You’re feeling lucky?”

“No, I’m feeling like the pickle at the bottom of the jar.”

​Later, she remembered that the man gave her a fountain drink for free, in addition to the lottery tickets. He read aloud to her from the newspaper, a story about the color of wooly worms predicting the winter weather, while they watched for her daughter’s car. Or truck. Rose drove a white pick-up truck. The man recognized it and went out and waved his arms. He helped Gail step up onto the running board and gave her a boost up into the warm cab. It was a good memory. One she would cherish.