Jennifer Weiner - All Fall Down: A Novel

What are you doing? a part of my brain cried as I crunched three of the pills, then bent down to gather the dirty towels, pick up the soap off the shower floor, pull a wad of hair out of the drain, and sweep discarded Q-tips and Kleenexes into the wastebasket. You’re stealing medicine from your father, your sick father. Have you really sunk so low?

It appeared that I had. I need this, I told myself as I moved through the bedroom, gathering armloads of clothing and piling them into garbage bags, and then loading the bags into the trunk of my car to take home to wash and fold. I need this.

“Welcome to Eastwood.” The woman who met me on the front lawn of the Eastwood Assisted Living Facility had her silver-gray hair in a neat bob, a high, sweet voice, and a cool, brisk handshake. She wore khakis, a sweater, and a nametag with KATHLEEN YOUNG written on it, and she led me through the doors with a bounce in her step, like a former high-school jock who’d stayed on campus to teach phys ed. “Let me show you around!”

Her bubbly, energetic manner only made the handful of residents—a man in a wheelchair by the door, hands shaking as he held up the Examiner; a woman in a pink-and-white bathrobe, using a walker to make her slow way toward the art room—look even older and sadder. I tried to picture my father here, my smart, strong, competent father in a bathrobe, requiring the kind of care a place like this could give him. It hurt, but it was a distant kind of pain. The pills let me consider his future without feeling it too deeply. It was almost like watching a movie about someone else’s sorrows—now her father can’t remember his granddaughter’s name; now he’s having temper tantrums; now he’s having accidents, and wandering away from home, and crying—and knowing they were painful without feeling them acutely. Narcotics were like a warm, fuzzy comforter, a layer of defense between me and the world.

“Follow me, please,” said Kathleen, bounding down the hallway on the balls of her feet. I grappled with a brief but fierce desire to go sprinting back to my car, to burn rubber out of the parking lot and never see this place again . . . only what good would that do? My mother was unlikely to take this on. Someone had to step up and do what was required.

In the foyer I braced myself for the smell of urine, of industrial cleansers and canned chicken soup that I remembered from my dad’s last hospital stay, but Eastwood’s green-carpeted corridors smelled pleasantly of cedar and spice. There was a basket of scented pinecones on top of the front desk, behind which two women in headsets were busy typing. Behind them was an oversized whiteboard, the kind I remembered from Ellie’s preschool, with sentences left open-ended, so the kids and teachers could fill in the blanks. Today is MONDAY, read the top line. It is APRIL 7th. The weather is . . .. Instead of the word “sunny,” someone had affixed a decal of an affably beaming sun. Our SPECIAL ACTIVITIES are BINGO in the Recreation Parlor, and a TRIP TO THE CAMDEN AQUARIUM. I felt a tug at my sleeve, and heard a whispered “Help me.” I looked down. While Kathleen was deep in conversation with one of the head-setted ladies behind the desk, a tiny, curled shrimp of a woman had wheeled up beside me and grabbed my sleeve.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

The woman gave a very teenager-y eye roll. Fine white hair floated around her pink scalp in an Einsteinian nimbus. Her frail torso was wrapped in an oversized pink cardigan, and she wore pink velour pants and a pair of white knitted slippers beneath it. Her veined hand trembled, but her eyes, behind enormous glasses, were sharp, and I was relieved to see a full set of teeth (or realistic-looking dentures) when she started talking.

“This place is what’s wrong,” she murmured, speaking out of the side of her mouth, like a prisoner in the yard who didn’t want the guards to overhear. “The steak is tough. The pudding’s bland. They’ve been promising me for weeks to order my gluten-free crumpets, and . . .” She lifted her hands in the air, palms up, a mute appeal to the God of gluten-free crumpets. “Also, my kids never visit.”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, then squatted, my face close to hers. She extended one of her gnarled paws toward me.

“Lois Lefkowitz. Formerly of sunny Florida, until I broke my hip and my kids moved me back here.”

I shook her hand gently. “I’m Allison Weiss.” I shot a glance at the counter, making sure the brisk Ms. Young was still occupied, before I whispered, “Is it really that bad here?”

She patted my hand and shook her head.

“What’s not to like?” she asked. “I don’t have to cook, I don’t have to clean, I don’t have to shop, and I don’t have to listen to Murray go on about his fantasy football team. I read . . .” She tapped the e-reader in her lap. “With this thing, every book is a large-print book. I go to the museum, I go to the symphony, and the beauty shop’s open once a week for a wash and set.” She patted her wisps of white hair, then put one gnarled paw on my shoulder. “Mother or father?”

“My dad.”

“Memory loss or just can’t get around?”

“He’s got Alzheimer’s.”

“Oh, sweetie. I’m sorry.” Pat, pat, pat went the wrinkled little hand. It felt surprisingly nice. Both of my grandmothers were long gone—my mother’s mother had died of breast cancer before I was born, and my father’s mother, Grandma Sadie, had gone to Heaven’s screened-in porch when I was in college. I liked to imagine her sometimes, sitting in a rocking chair, listening to the Sox and yelling at my grandfather. “They’ll take good care of him here.”

My throat felt thick as I swallowed. “You think so?”

“I see things. I watch. They’ll make sure he’s safe. Do you have children?”

“A little girl.”

“Pictures?”

I pulled my phone out of my purse. Ellie, in her favorite maxidress, was my wallpaper. In the picture, she stood on the beach in a broad-brimmed sun hat, with waves foaming at her feet. My new friend peered at the screen, then sighed. “It goes so fast,” she told me. “One minute you’re putting diaper cream on their tushies, the next thing you know, you’re walking them down the aisle. Then they’re putting you in a place like this.” She sighed again, and I thought I saw the glimmer of moisture on one seamed cheek. “And you sit here and wonder where the time went, and how you never wanted to live long enough that someone should be changing your diapers.” Another sigh. “Still. I wouldn’t have missed a day of it.” She poked at my phone. “You got Candy Crush on here?”

“Oh. No. Sorry.”

Kathleen Young was heading toward us, her pleasant smile still in place, but I noticed the creases around her eyes had deepened.

“Mrs. Lefkowitz, you’re not scaring away prospectives, are you?”

My new friend gave Ms. Young a sunny smile. “You mean I shouldn’t tell them about the rats in the showers?”

“She’s kidding,” said Ms. Young. Mrs. Lefkowitz gave me another smile of surpassing sweetness.

“I hope I’ll see you again,” she said. “And that pretty little girl!”

“Nice to meet you,” I said, and gave her little paw another squeeze.

“Right this way,” said Kathleen Young. “This is the Manor,” she said, walking at a swift clip past opened doors with nameplates on them. “Our residents who require the most care stay here. This,” she said, opening a door, “is a typical double room.”

I stepped inside. The room wasn’t large, with most of the space taken up by adjustable hospital beds with side rails that could be raised or dropped. There were two oak dressers; two bookcases; two armchairs, one on each side of the room, each upholstered in blue plastic, dyed and patterned to make it look like cloth. The bathroom had all of the stainless steel rails you’d expect, with a metal-and-plastic chair in the oversized walk-in shower cubicle, and grippy mats on the floor. Back in the room, I let my fingertips drift along the armrest of one chair and tried not to wince at the feeling of plastic. Would my dad see the difference between the furniture in his house and this stuff? How could he not? Noticing my expression, Kathleen said, “Of course, our residents are welcome to bring their own furniture. Most do. We find it helps with their sense of dislocation.” I nodded, mentally erasing the hospital bed, the cheap bureau and bookcase, and the plasticized armchair, and replacing them with things from my parents’ home. Better.

“Are there single rooms available?”

“Of course. They’re significantly more expensive . . .”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” I said, and watched Kathleen’s pupils expand. Years ago my father, in a tacit admission that my mother was equipped to handle precisely nothing that his golden years might entail, had bought himself a life-insurance policy and all kinds of disability and extended-care policies, too. There was money to pay for everything he’d need, and to pay for the help my mother might eventually require, now that my father was unable to arrange her days. “Tell me about the, uh, level of care.” I’d done all kinds of research about the questions I was supposed to ask, even if the answers were all on the website. As Kathleen recited statistics about physician’s assistants, physicians on call, and nurse-practitioners, LPNs, and nurse’s aides, and how it was a goal at Eastwood to encourage as much independence as was feasible and safe, I thought of when I was twelve, and my father had taken me to New York City.