The little bottles under the Kissing Bridge, for instance. He had taken a long walk out to Bassey Park one day in July and had gone under the bridge to rest out of the afternoon sun for awhile. He had barely gotten comfortable before noticing a little pile of broken glass in the weeds by the stream that trickled beneath the bridge. He had swept at the high grass with a length of broken branch and discovered six or eight small bottles. One had some crusty white stuff in the bottom.
Ralph had picked it up, and as he turned it curiously before his eyes, he realized he was looking at the remains of a crackparty. He had dropped the bottle as if it were hot. He could still remember the numbed shock he had felt, his unsuccessful attempt to convince himself that he was nuts, that it couldn’t be what he thought it was, not in this hick town two hundred and fifty miles north of Boston. It was that emerging naif which had been shocked, of course; that part of him seemed to believe (or had until he had discovered the little bottles under the Kissing Bridge) that all those news stories about the cocaine epidemic had just been make-believe, no more real than a TV crime show or a jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
He felt a similar sensation of shock now.
“Harold said they wanted to ’run me up to Bangor’ and show me the place,” Lois was saying. “He never takes me for rides these days; he just runs me places. Like I’m an errand. They had lots of brochures, and when Harold gave Janet the nod, she whipped them Out so fast-”
“Whoa, slow down. What place? What brochures?”
“I’m sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? It’s a place in Bangor called Riverview Estates.”
Ralph knew the name; had gotten a brochure himself, as a matter of fact. One of those mass-mailing things, this one targeted at people sixty-five and over. He and McGovern had shared a laugh about it… but the laugh had been just a touch uneasy-like kids whistling past the graveyard, “Shit, Lois-that’s a retirement home, isn’t it?”
“No, sir!” she said, widening her eyes innocently. “That’s what I said, but Harold and Janet set me straight. No, Ralph, Riverview Estates is a condominium development site for community-oriented senior citizens.” When Harold said that I said, ’Is that so? Well, let me tell you both something-you can put a fruit pie from McDonald’s in a sterling-silver chafing dish and call it a French tart, but it’s still just a fruit pie from McDonald’s, as far as I am concerned.”
“When I said that, Harold started to sputter and get red in the face, but Jan just gave me that sweet little smile of hers, the one she saves up for special occasions because she knows it drives me crazy.
She says, Well, why don’t we look at the brochures anyway, Mother Lois? You’ll do that much, won’t you, after we both took Personal Days from work and drove all the way down here to see you?”
“Like Derry was in the heart of Africa,” Ralph muttered.
Lois took his hand and said something that made him laugh. “Oh, to her it is!”
“Was this before or after you found out Litchfield had tattled?”
Ralph asked. He used the same word Lois had on purpose; it seemed to fit this situation better than a fancier word or phrase would have done.
“Committed a breach of confidentiality” was far too dignified for this nasty bit of work. Litchfield had run and tattled, simple as that.
“Before. I thought I might as well look at the brochures; after all, they’d come forty miles, and it wouldn’t exactly kill me. So I looked while they ate the food I’d fixed-there wasn’t any that had to be scraped into the swill later on, either-and drank coffee.
“That’s quite a place, that Riverview. They have their own medical staff on duty twenty-four hours a day, and their own kitchen.
When you move in they give you a complete physical and decide what you can have to eat. There’s a Red Diet Plan, a Blue Diet Plan, a Green Diet Plan, and a Yellow Diet Plan. There were three or four other colors as well. I can’t remember what all of them were, but Yellow is for diabetics and Blue is for fatties.”
Ralph thought of eating three scientifically balanced meals a day for the rest of his life-no more sausage pizzas from Gambino’s, no more Coffee Pot sandwiches, no more chiliburgers from Mexico Milt’s-and found the prospect almost unbearably grim.
“Also,” Lois said brightly, “they have a pneumatic-tube system that delivers your daily pills right to your kitchen. Isn’t that a marvelous idea, Ralph?”
“I guess so,” Ralph said.
“Oh, yes, it is. It’s marvelous, the wave of the future.
There’s a computer to oversee everything, and I bet it never has a decline in cognition. There’s a special bus that takes the Riverview people to places of scenic or cultural interest twice a week, and it also takes them shopping. You have to take the bus, because Riverview people aren’t allowed to have cars.”
“Good idea,” he said, giving her hand a little squeeze. “What are a few drunks on Saturday night compared to an old fogey with a slippery cognition on the loose in a Buick sedan?”
She didn’t smile, as he had hoped she would. “The pictures in those brochures turned my blood. Old ladies playing canasta. Old men throwing horseshoes. Both flavors together in this big pinepanelled room they call the River Hall, square-dancing. Although that is sort of a nice name, don’t you think? %ver Hall?”
“I guess it’s okay.”
“I think it sounds like the kind of room you’d find in an enchanted castle. But I’ve visited quite a few old friends in Strawberry Fieldsthat’s the geriatrics’ home in Skowhegan-and I know an old folks’ rec room when I see one. It doesn’t matter how pretty a name you give it, there’s still a cabinet full of board games in the corner and ix pieces missing from each one and the jigsaw puzzles with five or s’ TV’s always tuned to something like Family Feud and never to the kind of movies where good-looking young people take off their clothes and roll around on the floor together in front of the fireplace.
Those rooms always smell of paste… and piss… and the fiveand-dime watercolors that come in a long tin box… and despair.”
Lois looked at him with her dark eyes.
“I’m only sixty-eight, Ralph. I know that sixty-eight doesn’t seem like only anything to Dr. Fountain of Youth, but it does to me, because my mother was ninety-two when she died last year and my dad lived to be eighty-six. In my family, dying at eighty is dying young… and if I had to spend twelve years living in a place where they announce dinner over the loudspeaker, I’d go crazy.”
“I would, too.”
“I looked, though. I wanted to be polite. When I was finished, I made a neat little pile of them and handed them back to Jan. I said they were very interesting and thanked her. She nodded and smiled and put them back in her purse. I thought that was going to be the end of it and good riddance, but then Harold said, ’Put your coat on, Ma.”
“For a second I was so scared I couldn’t breathe. I thought they’d already signed me up! And I had an idea that if I said I wasn’t going, Harold would open the door and there would be two or three men in white coats outside, and one of them would smile and say, ’don’t worry, Mrs. Chasse; once you get that first handful of pills delivered direct to your kitchen, you’ll never want to live anywhere else.”
“I don’t tvant to put my coat on,” I told Harold, and I tried to sound the way I used to when he was only ten and always tracking mud into the kitchen, but my heart was beating so hard I could hear it tapping in my voice.
“I’ve changed my mind about going out. I forgot how much I had to do today.” And then Ian gave the laugh “Why, Mother I hate even more than her syrupy little smile and said, Lois, what would you have to do that’s so important you can’t go up to Bangor with us after we’ve taken time off to come down to Derry and see you?”