Fresh Complaint

One afternoon last August, during Cathy’s yearly visit to Contoocook, where Della was still living at the time, Della mentioned that her doctor had been sending her for tests. It was just after five, the sun falling behind the pine trees. To get away from the paint fumes they were having their margaritas on the screened-in porch.

“What kind of tests?”

“All kinds of stupid tests,” Della said, making a face. “For instance, this therapist she’s been sending me to—she calls herself a therapist but she doesn’t look more than twenty-five—she’ll make me draw hands on clocks. Like I’m back in kindergarten. Or she’ll show me a bunch of pictures and tell me to remember them. But then she’ll start talking about other things, see. Trying to distract me. Then later on she’ll ask what was in the pictures.”

Cathy looked at Della’s face in the shadowy light. At eighty-eight Della is still a lively, pretty woman, her white hair cut in a simple style that reminds Cathy of a powdered wig. She talks to herself sometimes, or stares into space, but no more than anyone who spends so much time alone.

“How did you do?”

“Not too swell.”

The day before, driving back from the hardware store, in nearby Concord, Della had fretted about the shade of paint they chose. Was it bright enough? Maybe they should take it back. It didn’t look as cheerful as it had on the paint sample in the store. Oh, what a waste of money! Finally, Cathy said, “Della, you’re getting anxious again.”

That was all it took. Della’s expression eased as if sprinkled with fairy dust. “I know I am,” she said. “You have to tell me when I get like that.”

On the porch, Cathy sipped her drink and said, “I wouldn’t worry about it, Della. Tests like that would make anybody nervous.”

A few days later Cathy went back to Detroit. She didn’t hear any more about the tests. Then, in September, Della called to say that Dr. Sutton had arranged a house call and had asked Bennett, Della’s oldest son, to be in attendance. “If she wants Bennett to drive on up here,” Della said, “it’s probably bad news.”

The day of the meeting—a Monday—Cathy waited for Della to call. When she finally did, her voice sounded excited, almost giddy. Cathy assumed the doctor had granted her a clean bill of health. But Della didn’t mention the test results. Instead, in a mood of almost delirious happiness, she said, “Dr. Sutton couldn’t get over how cute we’ve got my house looking! I told her what a wreck it was when I moved in, and how you and I have a project every time you visit, and she couldn’t believe it. She thought it was just darling!”

Maybe Della couldn’t face the news, or had already forgotten it. Either way, Cathy felt afraid for her.

It was left for Bennett to get on and tell her the medical details. These he delivered in a dry, matter-of-fact tone. Bennett works for an insurance company, in Hartford, calculating the probabilities of illness and death on a daily basis, and this was maybe the reason. “The doctor says my mom can’t drive anymore. Or use the stove. She’s going to put her on some medicine, supposed to stabilize her. For a while. But, basically, the upshot is she can’t live on her own.”

“I was just out there last month and your mom seemed fine,” Cathy said. “She just gets anxious, that’s all.”

There was a pause before Bennett said, “Yeah, well. Anxiety’s part of the whole deal.”

What could Cathy do from her position? She was not only out in the Midwest but a kind of oddity or interloper in Della’s life. Cathy and Della have known each other for forty years. They met when they both worked at the College of Nursing. Cathy was thirty at the time, recently divorced. She’d moved back in with her parents so that her mother could look after Mike and John while she was at work. Della was in her fifties, a suburban mother who lived in a fancy house near the lake. She’d gone back to work not because she was desperate for money—like Cathy—but because she had nothing to do. Her two oldest boys had already left home. The youngest, Robbie, was in high school.

Normally they wouldn’t have come in contact at the college. Cathy worked downstairs, in the bursar’s office, while Della was the executive secretary to the dean. But one day in the cafeteria Cathy overheard Della talking about Weight Watchers, raving about how easy the program was to stick to, how you didn’t have to starve.

Cathy had just begun to date again. Another way of putting it was she was sleeping around. In the wake of her divorce she’d been seized by a desperation to make up for lost time. She was as reckless as a teenager, doing it with men she barely knew, in the backseats of cars, or on the floors of carpeted vans, while parked on city streets outside houses where good Christian families lay peacefully sleeping. In addition to the sporadic pleasures she took from these men, Cathy was seeking some kind of self-correction, as if the men’s butting and thrusting might knock some sense into her, enough to keep her from marrying anyone like her ex-husband ever again.

Coming home after midnight from one of these encounters, Cathy took a shower. After getting out, she stood before the bathroom mirror, appraising herself with the same objective eye she later brought to renovating houses. What could be fixed? What camouflaged? What did you have to live with and ignore?

She started going to Weight Watchers. Della drove her to the meetings. Small and pert, with frosted hair, large glasses with translucent pinkish frames, and a shiny rayon blouse, Della sat on a pillow to see over the wheel of her Cadillac. She wore corny pins in the shape of bumblebees or dachshunds, and drenched herself in perfume. It was some department-store brand, floral and cloying, engineered to mask a woman’s natural smell rather than accentuate it like the body oils Cathy dabbed on her pressure points. She pictured Della spritzing perfume from an atomizer and then prancing around in the mist.

After they’d both lost a few pounds, they splurged, once a week, on drinks and dinner. Della brought her calorie counter in her purse to make sure they didn’t go too wild. That was how they discovered margaritas. “Hey, you know what’s lo-cal?” Della said. “Tequila. Only eighty-five calories an ounce.” They tried not to think about the sugar in the mix.

Della was only five years younger than Cathy’s mom. They shared many opinions about sex and marriage, but it was easier to listen to these outdated edicts coming from the mouth of someone who didn’t presume ownership over your body. Also, the ways Della differed from Cathy’s mother made it clear that her mom wasn’t the moral arbiter she’d always been in Cathy’s head, but just a personality.

It turned out that Cathy and Della had a lot in common. They both liked crafts: decoupage, basket weaving, antiquing—whatever. And they loved to read. They lent library books to each other and after a while took out the same books so they could read and discuss them simultaneously. They didn’t consider themselves intellectuals but they knew good writing from bad. Most of all, they liked a good story. They remembered the plots of books more often than their titles or authors.

Cathy avoided going to Della’s house, in Grosse Pointe. She didn’t want to subject herself to the shag carpeting or pastel drapes, or run into Della’s Republican husband. She never invited Della over to her parents’ house, either. It was better if they met on neutral ground, where no one could remind them of their incongruity.

One night, two years after they met, Cathy took Della to a party some women friends were having. One of them had attended a talk by Krishnamurti, and everyone sat on the floor, on throw pillows, listening to her report. A joint started going around.

Uh-oh, Cathy thought, when it reached Della. But to her surprise Della inhaled, and passed the joint on.

“Well, if that doesn’t beat all,” Della said, afterward. “Now you got me smoking pot.”

“Sorry,” Cathy said, laughing. “But—did you get a buzz?”

“No, I did not. And I’m glad I didn’t. If Dick knew I was smoking marijuana, he’d hit the roof.”

She was smiling, though. Happy to have a secret.

They had others. A few years after Cathy married Clark, she got fed up and moved out. Checked into a motel, on Eight Mile. “If Clark calls, don’t tell him where I am,” she told Della. And Della didn’t. She just brought Cathy food every night for a week and listened to her rail until she got it out of her system. Enough, at least, to reconcile.

“A present? For me?”

Della, still full of girlish excitement, gazes wide-eyed at the package Cathy holds out to her. She is sitting in a blue armchair by the window, the only chair, in fact, in the small, cluttered studio apartment. Cathy is perched awkwardly on the nearby daybed. The room is dim because the venetian blinds are down.

“It’s a surprise,” Cathy says, forcing a smile.

She’d been under the impression, from Bennett, that Wyndham Falls was an assisted-living facility. The website makes mention of “emergency services” and “visiting angels.” But from the brochure Cathy picked up in the lobby, on her way in, she sees that Wyndham advertises itself as a “55+ retirement community.” In addition to the many elderly tenants who negotiate the corridors behind aluminum walkers, there are younger war veterans, with beards, vests, and caps, scooting around in electric wheelchairs. There’s no nursing staff. It’s cheaper than assisted living and the benefits are minimal: prepared meals in the dining room, linen service once a week. That’s it.

As for Della, she appears unchanged from the last time Cathy saw her, in August. In preparation for the visit she has put on a clean denim jumper and a yellow top, and applied lipstick and makeup in the right places and amounts. The only difference is that Della uses a walker herself now. A week after she moved in, she slipped and hit her head on the pavement outside the entrance. Knocked out cold. When she came to, a big, handsome paramedic with blue eyes was staring down at her. Della gazed up at him and asked, “Did I die and go to heaven?”

At the hospital, they gave Della an MRI to check for bleeding in the brain. Then a young doctor came in to examine her for other injuries. “So there I am,” Della told Cathy over the phone. “Eighty-eight years old and this young doctor is checking over every inch of me. And I mean every inch. I told him, ‘I don’t know how much they’re paying you, but it isn’t enough.’”

These displays of humor confirm what Cathy has felt all along, that a lot of Della’s mental confusion is emotional in origin. Doctors love to hand out diagnoses and pills without paying attention to the human person right in front of them.

As for Della, she has never named her diagnosis. Instead she calls it “my malady,” or “this thing I’ve got.” One time she said, “I can never remember the name for what it is I have. It’s that thing you get when you’re old. That thing you most don’t want to have. That’s what I’ve got.”

Another time she said, “It’s not Alzheimer’s but the next one down.”

Cathy isn’t surprised that Della represses the terminology. Dementia isn’t a nice word. It sounds violent, invasive, like having a demon scooping out pieces of your brain, which, in fact, is just what it is.

Now she looks at Della’s walker in the corner, a hideous magenta contraption with a black leatherette seat. Boxes protrude from under the daybed. There are dishes piled in the sink of the tiny efficiency kitchen. Nothing drastic. But Della has always kept the tidiest of houses, and the disarray is troubling.

Cathy’s glad she brought the present.

“Aren’t you going to open it?” she asks.

Della looks down at the gift as though it has just materialized in her hands. “Oh, right.” She turns the package over. Examines its underside. Her smile is uncertain. It’s as though she knows that smiling is required at this moment but isn’t sure why.

“Look at this gift-wrapping!” she says, finally. “It’s just precious. I’m going to be careful not to tear it. Maybe I can reuse it.”

“You can tear it. I don’t mind.”

“No, no,” Della insists. “I want to save this nice paper.”

Her old spotted hands work at the wrapping paper until it comes unstuck. The book falls into her lap.

No recognition.