The Moons of Jupiter - Alice Munro [84]
Mrs. Cross has been in Hilltop Home three years and two months, Mrs. Kidd three years less a month. They both have bad hearts and ride around in wheelchairs to save their energy. During their first conversation, Mrs. Kidd said, “I don’t notice any hilltop.”
“You can see the highway,” said Mrs. Cross. “I guess that’s what they mean. Where did they put you?” she asked.
“I hardly know if I can find my way back. It’s a nice room, though. It’s a single.”
“Mine is too, I have a single. Is it the other side of the dining-room or this?”
“Oh. The other side.”
“That’s good. That’s the best part. Everybody’s in fairly good shape down there. It costs more, though. The better you are, the more it costs. The other side of the dining-room is out of their head.”
“Senile?”
“Senile. This side is the younger ones that have something like that the matter with them. For instance.” She nodded at a Mongoloid man of about fifty, who was trying to play the mouth organ. “Down in our part there’s also younger ones, but nothing the matter up here,” she tapped her head. “Just some disease. When it gets to the point they can’t look after themselves—upstairs. That’s where you get the far-gone ones. Then the crazies is another story. Locked up in the back wing. That’s the real crazies. Also, I think there is some place they have the ones that walk around but soil all the time.”
“Well, we are the top drawer,” said Mrs. Kidd with a tight smile. “I knew there would be plenty of senile ones, but I wasn’t prepared for the others. Such as.” She nodded discreetly at the Mongoloid who was doing a step-dance in front of the window.
Unlike most Mongoloids, he was thin and agile, though very pale and brittle-looking.
“Happier than most,” said Mrs. Cross, observing him. “This is the only place in the county, everything gets dumped here. After a while it doesn’t bother you.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
MRS. KIDD’S ROOM is full of rocks and shells, in boxes and in bottles. She has a case of brittle butterflies and a case of stuffed song-birds. Her bookshelves contain Ferns and Mosses of North America, Peterson’s Guide to the Birds of Eastern North America, How to Know the Rocks and Minerals, and a book of Star Maps. The case of butterflies and the songbirds once hung in the classroom of her husband, the science teacher. He bought the songbirds, but he and Mrs. Kidd collected the butterflies themselves. Mrs. Kidd was a good student of botany and zoology. If she had not had what was perceived at the time as delicate health, she would have gone on and studied botany at a university, though few girls did such a thing then. Her children, who all live at a distance, send her beautiful books on subjects they are sure will interest her, but for the most part these books are large and heavy and she can’t find a way to look at them comfortably, so she soon relegates them to her bottom shelf. She would not admit it to her children, but her interest has waned, it has waned considerably. They say in their letters that they remember how she taught them about mushrooms; do you remember when we saw the destroying angel in Petrie’s Bush when we were living in Logan? Their letters are full of remembering. They want her fixed where she was forty or fifty years ago, these children who are ageing themselves. They have a notion of her that is as fond and necessary as any notion a parent ever had of a child. They celebrate what would in a child be called precocity: her brightness, her fund of knowledge, her atheism (a secret all those years her husband was in charge of the minds of the young), all the ways in which she differs from the average, or expected, old lady. She feels it a duty to hide from them