elder care the game

8/9/2019 Elder Care the Game

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Robin Black

Eldercare, The Game

It was the hottest day yet that year, and a woman named Maura Flanagan-

Jones was arguing to her two companions that when parents get to be about eighty

they should just be strapped onto their children’s backs with bungee cords. It’s that

much of a burden anyway.

“Really. I might just as well be carrying Mom. I’d actually rather that. Save

me the car rides here, for one thing.”

“It’s just five minutes for me.” Bev Clark the other woman there sounded

almost apologetic. “I really don’t mind the drives,” she said.

The sole man in the group, Judd Friedman, said nothing at all, just waited for

the next words to come out of Maura’s mouth. He’d only known her since a couple

of days after he’d first checked his father into Farmingdale about three weeks

earlier, but they had already formed the kind of misery-loves-company instant

friendship that breeds in places like nursing homes and hospital waiting rooms,

substance abuse programs too, all the ragged edged locations people find

themselves when things haven’t turned out quite as hoped. There wasn’t much to

enjoy at Farmingdale, but Judd did enjoy the way Maura always surprised him with

what she said. And he thought she liked him too. He figured she probably gave

him enormous good-guy points for being someone’s son and turning up there, day



after day, because mostly it was the daughters who appeared - and maybe the

daughters-in-law. Women anyway.

“Don't you think I’m built perfectly to carry a little thing like her?” Maura

took a step back, the better to display herself, arms extended downward, palms

open to the sky, the stump of a cigarette burning in her hand. “I could easily do it,”

she said, breaking the pose with a final drag. “No sweat.”

Judd nodded, just barely, not really wanting to contribute any agreement or

dissent and Bev Clark made a similarly noncommittal sound. Maura was a big

woman without doubt, a gym teacher in a local junior high just one suburban school

system down the road from the high school where Judd himself taught history. And

she was fat, but in just that powerful gym teacher way that made it easy enough to

imagine her blowing a whistle hard and hustling a bunch of kids to do something

they’d rather not do; or, for that matter, strapping her own aged mother to her back

and getting on with her day. Her right-from-the-bottle reddish blonde hair was cut

unflatteringly short - though it wasn’t clear to Judd that growing it long would have

been all that flattering either - and she had a round freckled face, set onto her thick,

meaty neck. Like a circle, dropped on a square. A child of four could have drawn

Maura and it would have been clear who it was. Her form was that simple.

She lit a second cigarette, inhaling with an attitude like thirst, and while she

puffed away on number two, she ground number one into the asphalt with her foot

as if she were killing it dead. The pavement all around them was littered with

stubbed out cigarettes. This circular patch of barren ground – dubbed The Garden

long before Judd’s arrival at Farmingdale - was where all the middle-aged children

went to smoke; and it was where Judd went too, though he didn't smoke. Not



anymore. But he would go to The Garden to get a break, a step outside, a breath of

non-disinfected air. And, increasingly, he would go to The Garden just to talk.

“I wish I wasn’t such a weak little thing,” Bev Clark said. She was also

smoking, also speaking between her puffs, but there her similarity to Maura began

and stopped. Bev was a woman every bit as pallid and mild as Maura was vivid and

no bullshit tough. Maura smoked Camels. Bev’s were Benson and Hedges menthol,

a brand from Judd’s own childhood - his father’s cigarettes, now held far outside his

father’s reach, materialized here, still wrapped in that mint green foil.

The three of them stood silent for a time.

“Honestly,” Maura eventually said, not about anything in particular it

seemed, but as though in the absence of conversation, in the swelter and weight of

the day, lay an obvious, unpleasant truth.

“I know exactly what you mean,” Bev said.

It had taken Judd about ten seconds after meeting Bev Clark to figure out

that she had it toughest of them all. Her mother was in the lock-up ward, the

Alzheimer rooms, where whatever alarms, whatever guards there were, a patient

would bolt and run for freedom every day or so, kicking off all constraints, all the

facts of their life as they had assembled, trying to anyway. The sirens would blare

in uneven bursts and young men and women in white would spread out across the

lawns, until one of the hunters returned, hauling in what appeared to be a quivering

child draped in an old person’s flesh and clothes.

It would have scared the hell out of Judd, given him nightmares if his father

had been in there instead of perched in his newfound placidity on his recliner in Full

Care. It gave him a couple even with that distance built in. But early on Bev she

told him that her mother would never try. “She’s a simple, accepting soul,” she said



and it had been easy enough to believe. Bev seemed like someone who had been

raised by a simple, accepting soul. Her large blue eyes seemed to hold a soft,

gentle emptiness, as though she had never been given too much complex

information to worry through. She even smoked in a passive way, simply breathing

as she always breathed, a cigarette pressed intermittently between her lips.

She’d asked him right away which ward his father was in.

“Full Care,” he’d said, adding, “We just didn’t have the space for him at

home,” - which was bullshit, and sounded like bullshit to Judd, who often wondered

if it sounded like bullshit to everyone else. We just didn’t have the space for him at

home. The fact was, under all but the most imaginative definitions of space, they

had the space. But early on in this process Polly had made it clear that taking Harry

in just wasn’t an option. For one thing, she couldn’t stand the man, and for another,

Polly’s own parents had died in a great big bang of a train crash when she was just

a kid, seven years old, and the whole subject of parents, especially ones who’d had

the chance to grow old gracelessly, was, as she herself liked to say a bit sensitive.

And Polly wasn’t a person who sought to overcome her sensitivities. Polly was a

woman perfectly willing to accept her own limitations, content that by

acknowledging them, she had done enough. So Judd hadn’t been a bit surprised

that she’d wanted nothing to do with his adventures in eldercare, nor was he

particularly surprised by her failure to come visit Harry. Maybe that wasn’t the ideal

way for her to act, but then ideal had never been the measure between them. He

took that as understood. Ideal wasn’t what either of them had ever offered or ever

asked. Judd Freidman, recovering alcoholic, recovering misanthrope, recovering

fuck-up, and Paula Louise Porter, his brittle, bitter, eternally orphaned wife.

Separately and together, they were long past ideal.



“Is he ever violent?” Bev had asked that same day and Judd had shaken his

head. No. His father had been a thunderous man in his prime, a corporate lion, if

anything a little proud of being a real son of a bitch; but as an old guy, he was a

pussycat.

“That’s good,” she said. “That’s really a blessing, you know. Some of the

people I see in the A-ward are just terrifying. And you shouldn't feel bad at all. It

isn’t your fault if you didn’t have the space.”

“That’s nice of you to say. That helps,” he said, though in fact it made him

feel worse. He looked away from her eyes, two moist circles the color as the sky.

“Because sometimes, I do,” he said. “I feel pretty bad.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. None of us should. We’re all just doing what we can.”

And that was typical Bev. She was one of nature’s born soothers. There was

absolutely none of Maura’s vigorous huffing and puffing visible in Bev. None of

Maura’s open outrage at the undeniably rotten nature of life. Just this impulse,

maybe this compulsion, to make nice, nicer, nicest.

Now, a couple of weeks later, as Maura spread her left hand open, ticking off

a list - all of the reasons this bungee cord plan made so much sense - Judd studied

the dull gold band pushing its way into her ring finger, like something placed around

a sapling that has grown to be a great oak. Though for all that her ring was

embedded in her, she’d only mentioned her husband a couple of times, her kids a

little more, usually to say she’d shoot herself dead before saddling them with her

old age, or she’d hang herself, have herself blasted into space. When he’d asked

her how many children she had, she’d said three . . .that I know of . Bev had two

kids, though it seemed impossible to Judd for her to have experienced any of the



physical extremes necessary to producing them. The question of Judd’s fatherhood

had been dismissed with a simple nope from him and just as well, from Maura.

Her hands moved close together now, and with the cigarette burning and

skittering, Judd thought she might just scorch herself. She seemed to him like a

woman just waiting to combust.

“There’s the time spent in the car. . the gas. . . The time spent listening to

Mom complain. . the time spent talking to the nurses about her complaints . . . their

gifts when her complaints piss them off . . .” He was relieved as she pulled her

right hand back to her mouth to take another drag. “You want one?” she asked.

Judd shook his head; and Maura tossed him a big, loose, compassionate kind

of smile. The subject of his struggle to stay smoke-free was a recurrent one.

“The truth is, Maura, you and I should both stop,” Bev said.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Judd wanted to answer that generous smile of Maura’s

with a little generosity of his own. “Lord knows, I could use a drink when I get

home. Plenty of days, I could use one here.”

Maura’s smile deepened, the two round hills of her ruddy cheeks rising up to

her twinkling eyes. Judd recognized the look. The fellowship of need. No one could

get through this without a crutch. No one was any better at this than anyone else.

He didn’t mention that he couldn’t have a drink when he got home, not if he wanted

a home to go to, or a wife, that drinks were verboten, more gone than cigarettes.

One thing Judd well understood is that when you’re caught up in doing something

you shouldn't do, it means everything to think someone else is also caught up in

something – anything - bad. Misery might love company, but addiction lusts after it.

Maura tossed what was left of the still burning cigarette on the ground. A few

seconds passed, then the two women both began to laugh at Judd staring at it



there. Finally, this time as a kindness, Maura Flanagan-Jones stamped the thing into

a flat, extinguished strip.

(incomplete)

elder care the game

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