She begins her hourly dance. It takes her ten steps until she can fully straighten her legs. She over-balances forward and threatens to fall into his arms. He slows the pace of his retreat as she finds her center and in a minute they have completed their circuit of the carpeted expanse. Daniel gently lowers Faith into the chair where she began. He puts the finishing touch to her blanketed lap with a gentle tuck and hands her a floppy stuffed cat. A sideways shuffle left brings Daniel before his next partner. With a soft Romanian-accented invitation, “Come on, Iris. Let’s dance.” Daniel smiles and takes Iris by both her knobbed and stiffened hands and pulls her from her chair…
At 11:30am sharp, we pulled up to the foster home. It was the appointed time to pick up Mom for her weekly Wednesday trip to see Linda at Riley’s Beauty Parlor. It was also the last. For sixty years, you could know when Riley’s was open for business by the giant ring of Phyllis’ keys hanging from the door lock, where they would dangle until she closed and locked the door at five. After this Wednesday, it was a door that would open no more. Ladies with a taste for tight curls, sculpted and hair-sprayed into a helmet that would weather the rigors of cooking and housework for a full week between appointments, have become few and far between. Beauty operators with the chops to effectuate these industrial-duty friseurs are fewer still. Sometimes doors close the last time and forever.
As we lightly knock and step into the foster home, we can see that Faith is home today. (She is always there, but not always home.) Today her eyes follow us into the room. There is a ghost of a smile as her hands reach out for a double-fisted grip of silent welcome. Her beautiful eyes say it all. They must. Her lips, her tongue, her throat lack the flow of words to fuel them. On the days when Faith is not at home, she sits and stares at her hands in her lap, ignoring her floppy cat. Or, more correctly, the eyes point at the hands in the lap. The use of the personal pronoun implies a person in attendance. Some days Faith is not home. But today is a good day. Faith is home today.
Mom sits in the fourth recliner. She’s the bossy one. The princess. And, according to her, the saint.
Iris is a singer. All the verses of every hymn rise up from a throat unused to the mundanities of secular speech. Start a song, she is suddenly awake, upright and singing. Her vocal coach, is rumored, was a fallow pasture’s rusty gate: too few visitors to give the moving parts exercise. The song creaks to a close as she settles back silent again into her chair.
Esther runs hot and cold. Cold, she sighs and stares into a melancholic present. Hot, she’s ready to dance. Esther does not need to be lead in the dance. She dances all on her own. Eyes aflirt, her speech a rapid-fire torrent of verbs and indeterminate pronouns punctuated by the soft susurrus of laughter. “…once he told me to do that. In them days it was all like that, you know. ‘Course, you might not remember. It wasn’t long before she came in with a whole stack them things to be dealt with, and none of us knowin’ where to begin. It’s hard sometimes…”
Rachel is the newest member of the circle, having joined the household just a week before. She is already showing remarkable improvement, having progressed from incessant plaintive wailing and occasional violent outbursts. She now sits quiet and content, completing crossword after crossword with random letters and symbols of her own devising. Daniel asks, “What’s my name?” between his dances with the other women. “My name is Daniel”, he explains for the millionth time. Clare and Daniel have a real gift for rescuing these drowning souls, for bringing them smiling back to the surface and keeping them afloat for whatever brief time is left
Mom sits in the fourth recliner. She’s the bossy one. The princess. And, according to her, the saint. I first met Mom (more precisely my mother-in-law) when I was 15 years old. I had come to pick up her daughter for our first date. She watched me through the living room curtains and decided I was acceptable because of the way I folded my fringed leather vest and hung it over my arm before coming to the door.
When Liz and I had been married for thirty years, Mom and Dad moved into a little apartment we built for them attached to our house. In four short months, Dad was dead (brain cancer), and Mom spent the next ten years of her life with us, in and out of grief, as her mind slowly melted away.
Some days she forgets her husband. Some days have no words, only constant searching, straining, compelled to give voice to a thought or feeling only to have that feeling swallowed by the overwhelming frustration of lost language. Some days it’s all German.
Hi Peter…Kathy W here. Boy did that ‘story’ sound familiar, as I spent the last several years wending down similar lanes with my dad. He passed away this last September. You put a more entertaining spin on it, tho! Always great to read your writing!
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