Golden Horizons Retirement Center
Tucson, Arizona
Present Day
Honey, your bosom is very nice. You shouldn’t wear such a terrible trench coat. You’ll never find a man that way…or a man will never find you…under all that.” Mrs. Sally Jenkins adjusts her wig in the mirror; I straighten her collar from behind her wheelchair.
“As you well know, Sally, this is not a trench coat. It is the official uniform for Golden Horizons Retirement Center, and I think it is quite stylish.” I strike a pose that she ignores because she is putting large butterfly-shaped earrings onto her drooping lobes.
“You could try to be a bit more…available, you know.” She points a press-on nail in my general direction. I duck in time to save an eye.
I believe God is fond of irony and humor. I believe he listens to the vow of a third grader and sets it aside for future material. He does not need to close his eyes and count because he is a God of abundant patience. He merely waited for the perfect rebuttal to my youthful self-promise and placed me here, in Tucson, as the activities director who serves not two, but two hundred controlling, opinionated surrogate parents among oatmeal-colored walls.
“Start getting out more, that’s all I’m saying. I date more than you do.” Sally tries to roll her eyes, but her mascara has just about welded the upper and lower lids together. She rotates her face and contorts her expression to test the elasticity of today’s mask.
“I am not looking for a man,” I say defensively.
Sally adjusts her hair one more time and tries to peak it to a mountainous crest and is displeased. “You sure don’t do hair like Beau. Have I ever told you about…”
“Yes. Yes. The amazing chignon of 1998. Sally, if I have to hear about Beau the beautician one more time, I will never shave the back of your neck again.”
Beau…my activities director predecessor and apparently a man who could do anything except fail. Even the most disgruntled residents reminisce about the days of Beau. I cannot stand the guy. We’ve never met. But I think that if I ran into a guy named Beau in a dark alley, I could take him at any challenge…chignons, sponge cake, karaoke, you name it. In fact, I look forward to the day I run across the boy named Beau.
My somewhat idle threat has worked for now. Sally returns to her original complaint. “If you take your own sweet time, you will run out of it. Don’t wait until you are eighty. It’s slim pickins at this age.” She pauses only long enough to check her profile in the mirror. The orange foundation line across her chin does not faze her. Beneath wands of lashes, her eyes brighten with discovery. “Hey, where’s the goat?”
“Excuse me?” I gather the makeup brushes and shove them back into plastic stackable cubbyholes, the kind used to store socks and underwear in dorm rooms.
“The painting…with the goat?” Her mass of orchestrated tangles leans toward the wall opposite the vanity.
“It’s a Chagall print,” I say without looking. I know its every brilliant hue and offbeat shape by heart. “It is one of my favorites. Though I really love his series housed at the Museum of the Biblical Message in Nice. I’ve only seen it in books, of course, but he painted scenes from—”
“Okay, show-off. Whatever it is, it is missing. Don’t make me late for the reading group.” Sally has little tolerance for new knowledge that does not relate to hair, George Clooney, or dating. As if on cue, she returns to this latter topic. “You know, my nephew Roger owns a much more respectable print of a Monet. Do you know the one that has the bridge and the faded flowers?” She unnecessarily describes the most overly reproduced art image in the history of museum gift shops. “My Roger is a catch by any standards. You two should—”
I pop a wheelie to throw Sally’s last words back down her throat and to stop the image of Roger sitting on a pleather couch, offering me tap water from an emerald green Perrier bottle and fancy French cookies bought in bulk at the local supermarket while discussing the benefits of “art” collecting ad nauseum.
Only recently did I find out that my love life was fodder for more than Parcheesi gossip. My romantic endeavors, or lack of them, was the subject of the longest running bet ever to exist in the hallowed halls of Golden Horizons. Running so long, in fact, that seven residents had their bets redistributed after they…moved on.
The path from the salon to the commons room is scattered with other residents who are heading our way. They file in to the large multipurpose room and look for places to sit in the semicircle of metal chairs. I survey the octogenarian crowd waiting to discuss chapter 2 of Nicholas Sparks’ The Notebook and am most certain that my Mr. Right will not be found among their spawn. God willing.
The gray-and-blue tiled area looks like a showroom for Deluxe Wheels and Regal-Rotary wheelchair models with an entire back section of reading group participants parked in orderly rows. They WD-40’d their wheels days in advance.
This latest book evokes very tender memories. While Stan Sherman discusses how his wife died of cancer ten years ago, I wipe away a few tears. His frayed baseball cap and oversized Yankees sweatshirt are endearing. I want to take him home. This, my friend Angelica would say, is one of my issues.
I believe I have many.
For example, on my way to becoming that independent adult I vowed at age nine to become, I have bypassed the joy of being my age. Here I am approaching thirty—my absolute goal for success and happiness—and I have let the demographic of my eight to five crowd start to crowd out my youth.
Exaggeration?
I receive the AARP newsletter instead of Vogue.
I call out bingo numbers instead of giving out my number to eligible men.
While people my age are investigating safe tanning methods, I have a file filled with the latest research on hip replacement surgery.
Lord, help me.
I have started to wonder if that overused prayer has become a useless, mute plea to God. Because he certainly doesn’t seem to listen, and his response time doesn’t take into account the “window for success” that a career demands. For the past five years I have prayed for a way out of this job, but student loans, the economy, and two crashed hard drives possessing my recent résumé derail good intentions. I cannot see my way out of this current life. The thought gives me goose bumps. The fear kind, not the inspired kind.
Then again, could be the flu. Even my health cycles are that of the over-seventy-five crowd.
Spending too much time with these folks is a bit like being trapped at a baby shower. You inevitably hear terror stories of physical anguish and are offered advice against your persistent yet polite wishes that they really not go there. Oh, I never thought I would have problems with [insert any private body function] either. Learn from me, deary. Eat your [insert remedy…soy, yogurt, iron supplements, etc.] now. To which you cringe and inevitably turn to the person on the other side of you, who initially looks normal, until her mouth opens and she says, Learn from me, deary. Don’t ever eat soy or yogurt or take iron supplements, etc. It is a wash every time.
After a while these crazy personal horror stories start to sink in. I imagine chills, sniffles, and aches where there is nothing more than typical working girl fatigue. But just in case I am ever on the verge of faulty [insert private body function], I had my friend Sadie come over and help me install a lazy Susan in my kitchen cupboard so I would have easy access to the latest multi-herbal-combo-infused-coated supplements. To alphabetize said medicines was completely Sadie’s doing. I am not obsessive.
But I am regular.
“Mari, you have a visitor. Front lounge area.” The loudspeaker bellows this just above reading group leader Kay William’s purple-and-yellow striped hat—a carryover from her days as an elementary school librarian. She starts with a bolt of nerves, her large hands losing their place in the book. She licks her fingers and smears coral lipstick onto the white pages to regain her spot, and the other residents give me dirty looks.
“Sorry,” I whisper under my breath and sneak out to the hallway. I am thankful to leave. Why can’t Mad Hatter choose something peppier? There are so many happy books.
I trundle down the hall listing off optimistic stories. “Wind in the Willows. Anne of Green Gables. All Creatures Great and Small. Huckleberry Finn—”
“I shot Kennedy.” Fran, a woman who laps the facility in Mickey Mouse slippers and fabricates a new history of her life daily, whispers into my ear. The smell of the peppermints she steals from my supervisor’s office wafts toward my nose.
“Just as I suspected.” I nod at her and keep walking. I turn back and see her talking into a pretend phone. She’s probably discussing her legal strategy now that her secret is known by the woman who leaves these corridors and surely tells the FBI or at least NPR about such confessions.
My smock stretches tight across my back when I reach for colorful streamers and balloons as I walk the corridor. This action allows me to cross the masquerade ball off my long list of annual activities. “I am Julie, your cruise activities director,” I say, mimicing reruns of the Love Boat to nobody. As freeing as it is to speak nonsensical, fantastical thoughts out loud, I’m still stuck on a boat that never docks in exotic ports promising parasailing, genuine handcrafted baskets, and that most requested excursion of all…love.
My sights are set on a horizon more golden than this one, indeed. I am determined to have the life I want by the time I am thirty. However, I just turned twenty-nine a month ago, and I have no plan in motion to exchange this charity job for a glamorous resort recreation director position or for attaining an enviable love life…and all the other imagined trappings of a perfect existence.
“Hey there.” I say before the person in the waiting room stands up and turns around to greet me. Answering the phone or greeting a guest does not allow for surprise. My life consists of three people with a few minor characters thrown in here and there.
“Thank goodness they found you. It takes them forever. Forever.”
A deep and full-bodied voice that should belong to a jazz singer belongs to my friend, who is five foot two and tiny and cannot carry a tune. I expected her to squeak like a mouse the first time I met her.
“You’d think they could locate an employee—” She stomps her foot without effect because she is wearing fuzzy slippers.
“Hey. Caitlin. What brings you here?” I say, encouraging her along. She goes through this spiel every time.
“I was just over at the resale shop on Seventh and, of course, thought of you. Can you believe it has been three years since we met that day you went in to look for those pants? Corduroy, were they?”
“Yes. Good memory. A resident had left his only photos of his wife in the pocket. We looked for nearly two hours that night. I still cannot believe you helped me.”
She smiles, remembering our beginnings. “Well, when I overheard your reason and the manager’s lack of compassion, I just had to. And we found them! And each other.”
“Ahhhh.” We croon this simultaneously.
I check the clock on the wall over Caitlin’s shoulder. “I’m off pretty soon; I just need to lock all the outside doors. Want to come with me?”
Always agreeable, Caitlin salutes me and then says, “I brought you a vanilla latte.”
“Mmm. You, Caitlin Ramirez, are my best friend.” My mood is altered just in the anticipation of something warm and sweet.
“I spoke to your other best friends. We have decided on Freddie’s for breakfast tomorrow. Are you on?” She drains her latte, tosses it, and pulls a file from her leopard-print purse to work on her long, bright pink nails.
“Sure, I’m on. But you mean Bible study.”
“Yeah, Bible study.” She looks up from a hangnail. “You seem down. Are you down?”
“No, not really.”
“Not really?” She hiccups as she often does when doing two things at once.
“No, just tired.” I notice Caitlin’s short, black hair is sprinkled with pink glitter.
“Just tired?”
“Could be a cold.” Why am I extending this dialogue?
“A cold?”
A conversation with Caitlin is like a monologue in the Grand Canyon.
“No. I’m fine. Glad the weekend is here.” I don’t lament out loud that my only planned activity is our breakfast gathering. Surely if I am tired of my state of being, so is my wide circle of three. Once a month we meet for what started as a Bible study. Lately we have done less delving into spiritual matters and more dissecting of life moments. I figure life moments are what lead us back to spiritual matters, so in our self-absorbed way, we are right on track.
“Yes…the weekend. I think Sadie has big news,” Caitlin offers.
“Really? What?”
“You know Sadie. Lock-lipped. Lip-locked? No, that would be kissing. Well, you know…she won’t talk. But she did allude to some guy. Which could be lip-locked, I guess.” She laughs at her joke and then sighs. “Sadie is so deserving.” Jealousy taints how much she means this. “At least we will have something to discuss this week.”
“In addition to…”
“In addition to…?”
“We will have something to discuss in addition to the book of Matthew.”
“Matthew?” She pauses, and I assume she is recalling a boyfriend from college. I can almost hear her flipping pages of her diary. She sighs ever so audibly between hiccups.
The grandfather clock next to me begins to announce quittin’ time. I was not about to stay a moment later. It is dangerous to get stuck in these hallways at night; one is likely to get talked into a round of dinnertime dominos. I made that mistake once. Okay, five times.
“Do you want to come over and heat up a pizza?”
“I have to head on to Fab to hang up some inventory, but thanks. I just wanted to honor the day we met while I was thinking about it.” She reaches around my paper cup to give me a quick hug.
“Thanks, Caitlin. This made my day. See you tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
As I lock the door behind her, I think about Sadie. No, I think about levelheaded, act-together Sadie and a guy. Has she found someone?
I am probably the only one of us who could say “congratulations, it’s a boy” without a hint of envy. Four years ago I decided I would wait until just before my thirties to date seriously. I wanted all the other things by thirty, so it would follow that a serious somebody would appear immediately after. So far, nobody has attempted to interfere with that declaration. Perhaps if I approach the “new job, new life before I am thirty” conviction with similar resolve, it will also come true.
I don’t dwell on the fact that the first commitment has been easy to fulfill because nobody asked.