Then Again - Diane Keaton [89]
Grammy didn’t say much when George got skinny. The morning he keeled over and died, Grammy didn’t cry. “He never gave me a dime. Not one dime.” That’s all she said. I thought of the money-tree cards. I wished I hadn’t spent all those dimes. I would have given them to Grammy so she wouldn’t be so angry about George. After all, he died. I was sure George meant for her to have as many dimes as she wanted. And even if he didn’t, he always tried to pay his rent on time. Grammy’s response was hard for me to decipher. Why wasn’t she sad? It wasn’t nice. What it was was cold and unattended, like her duplex on Range View Avenue.
Then Sadie
“Ninety-three years is no small eggs, but what does it matter now that Sadie’s gone?” Grammy Hall paused. “There ain’t much left in a way. I’ll tell you one thing. There’s no sense in worrying about dying. A lot of people ain’t got very good minds on the subject. I say don’t be overactive in thinking, Diane, because you can think so much your mind goes haywire. I can’t get Sadie’s pacemaker out of my mind. It wasn’t pulling its weight. She had a little button for the damn thing. She was always fiddling with that button, you know. Rolling it around and around. Then she started acting stupid for about a week. I never thought much about it. I went to the store, and when I came back she was dead. She had on a pink dress. I think she put on that dress ’cause she knew her time was up. I hate to say it, but the truth is, Sadie got taken up in the whodunit of an all too predictable death.”
Even Dr. Landau Too
Dr. Landau was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. She told me she was retiring but she would still like to see me in her apartment at 96th Street and Madison. On our last visit, she was telling me the story of how she and her husband, Marvin, had escaped Poland on the eve of Hitler’s invasion, when out of the blue she began speaking in a language I couldn’t identify. I pretended to understand what she was saying by nodding my head and smiling in what I thought was a soothing manner. Even with Alzheimer’s, Dr. Landau didn’t suffer fools. She glared at me as if I was deliberately putting her on. She wasn’t wrong, but what the heck was she saying? No matter how much I tried to placate her, she got more unnerved, so much so that she started to point her finger at me and scream as if I’d betrayed her. A nurse appeared and took her away. Dr. Landau, like Mary Hall, did not look back. We didn’t say goodbye, and I never saw her again.
In better days, Dr. Landau explained there was no such thing as fair. I didn’t agree. Life had to have its reasons. It couldn’t be a lawless jumble of contradictions. As I watched her shuffle out of her living room, holding on to her caregiver’s arm amid the orange and black furniture she’d spent years collecting, I couldn’t believe the woman who’d spent her entire adult life helping people battle the insistent demons playing havoc with their minds had been struck down by Alzheimer’s. It would take twenty years before Mother would be joining her in the fluster and distress of a shrinking brain. Felicia Lydia Landau was right; life is not fair.
One Phone Call, Two Messages, September 8, 2008
On the seventh day of our encampment on Cove Street, I went to pick up some lunch from Baja Fresh while Suzy sprayed Mother’s hair with dry shampoo and freshened her braid. The signs couldn’t be clearer. Low blood pressure. Low pulse rate. A waxy surface spreading across her face. Poor circulation. Dehydration. Every hour, on the hour, as if there was some reasonable order to the process, Dorothy’s gurgling sound got louder.
When I got back, there