Light Lifting Page 14

  I tried to keep everything as light as possible and move as fast as I could, but there were a couple of times when I was stuck right in the middle of it – standing up on a chair in the hall to screw in a new light bulb, or maybe stuffing a pile of leaves into a garbage bag – and I would have to stop for a second and slow everything down. It would just take a second, but I’d have to take a breath and maybe reach out a hand to steady myself on the back of the chair or look away from the leaves and up to the white sky to get my bearings. I needed to get solid again and anchor myself against the bad, dizzy feeling that used to wash up over me every once in a while. It was one of those sick-to-your-stomach sensations, the kind that hit you after a turn on the Tilt-a-Whirl, where even though you’re stopped and it’s over and you’re back on the steady earth again, you still feel like your body is going on without you and getting tossed around at some crazy angle.

  It seemed, sometimes, like I knew too much about things I wasn’t really supposed to know at all. Like the first time your eyes touch on a bad case of bedsores – the kind that can eat big, fist-sized holes right through your flesh just from laying down in one spot for too long. The first time you see that, you can’t look at anything the same way anymore. The Musgrave job was full of stuff like that. There was an old man who asked me to help rub in the eczema cream for his legs and when I kneeled down to touch him, even as softly as I could, large flakes of his skin came off in my hands like red fish scales. And there was another lady on McEwan who needed me to read her the fine-print directions on a package of glycerine suppositories.

  “I don’t know why in the hell they write everything so small,” she complained to me while I waited outside the bathroom door. “Just tell me what it says. Are you supposed to run them under the water before they go in?”

  I was like one of those guys in the audience who doesn’t really want to be invited back stage, but then they shine the light on him and everybody claps and he has no choice but to get up and move behind the scenes, to the other side of that thick velvet curtain that normally hides all the secrets and keeps the magic going for everybody else. There was some knowledge you couldn’t escape from. It came down on you like white water, flowing in only one direction, and once it got hold of you, there was no way to turn back and swim against the current. Even though I felt perfectly fine and my healthy twelve-year-old body kept pedalling hard between the stops, there were moments now when some image I didn’t want would blow into my head and I’d think about the fact, the real fact, that there might be a day when I would not be able to stand up and close the drapes for myself. There might be a day when I wouldn’t have the strength to walk across my own kitchen, and open the fridge and pick up the milk pitcher with one hand and fill up a glass I was holding in the other.

  The old ladies could teach you all about that stuff. They heard the way their kids whispered about what to do with mom, but the best of them stood up and just refused, just flat-out refused, to give up on their own places. From April to September, they’d be outside, digging through their gardens on their hands and knees and waving away the mosquitoes. And they still carved a pumpkin and had the candy ready for the trick-or-treaters, and lots of them even shovelled their own snow. It seemed like no blackness, no dirt or dust was ever allowed into their houses, that no rot or decay could even get a toehold.

  Eighty-nine-year-old Mrs. Hume, my number-one favourite, used to come to the door, clear-eyed and busy and always a little annoyed by whatever it was that might pull her away from her work.

  “What, what, what?” she’d say as she opened up.

  I’d hold up the bag containing a refill of her blood thinners and she’d smile and say something like, “Oh, it’s you again, is it? Well then, come in.”

  She’d be wearing one of her husband’s old work shirts with a dish towel slung over her shoulder and some stiff wire brush in her hand and she was always in the middle of refinishing another piece of furniture. Her house was overstuffed with dressers and buffets and china cabinets that she’d rescued with her heat gun and her varsol and her twelve grades of sandpaper. I used to help her move them around, rearranging the rooms every couple of months, as though nothing could be allowed to settle into one spot for too long. We carried things evenly, with me taking only my half of the weight in the dresser. We’d both tuck our fingertips under the edge at the top and our shins would bang along at the bottom with every step we took, but we’d just inch our way along, taking little breaks whenever we needed to.

  “Which one of these do you want?” she asked me once after we’d finally wiggled the sideboard into its new location. She waved her hand around in a semicircle and looked me straight in the eye without smiling. I could tell she wasn’t joking, but at that stage in my life I don’t think she knew there was nothing I needed less than a china cabinet.

  “Which one?” she said again. “Just choose and I’ll leave it to you in my will. I mean it. We’ll write your name on a piece of paper right now and stick it in a drawer.”

  Once, when she was showing me one of her best little coffee tables, she explained it all to me.

  “People are idiots, plain and simple,” she said.

  “I picked this guy right out of the garbage, for God’s sake. I didn’t even touch him after that. Just plunked him off the street and brought him right in. Just think about that for a second. They must be made of money. Idiots, I’m telling you. All of them.”

  But not everybody could keep it together like Mrs. Hume. I made lots of deliveries to elderly people who lived locked away from the world, up on the climate-controlled top floors of the assisted-living building for seniors on Riverside Drive. The staff tried to keep that place as cheery as they could. They had a bulletin board in the elevator that was full of photocopied notices telling everybody to come to Edith’s big 95th birthday party – “No presents, just presence!” And there was stuff about the weekly card game every Wednesday in the common room and the movie nights and the special van that went on Sunday and made its own loop around to all the churches. You could get a regular ride to visit your friends in the hospital and, as long as the weather was okay, the van would go out to the cemetery every other week if you wanted it to.

  But it always seemed like a dry place to me. Something about how they recycled the air made it feel like there was never enough oxygen in there. I couldn’t breathe right and when I buzzed through the lobby and made my run through the building, I felt like I carried the weather with me, like I brought in the snow and the rain and the windy cold and they kept swirling around my body as I tracked wet footprints across the industrial carpets and down the corridors. Weather was the only subject all the residents cared about and I’d have the same conversation ten times in half-an-hour.

  “And what’s it doing out there today?” someone would ask as I handed over the calcium supplements. We’d be standing in the little living area that each of them had between the kitchenette and the bedroom, and maybe we’d both stare outside for a second, looking out through the thick glass of those unopenable windows. Down below, I could see where I’d locked my bike against a tree, but the street and everything that went on there seemed so far away that it was almost like we were stuck in a submarine or up in the space shuttle, and the world we were looking at had a whole different kind of atmosphere where we could never survive.

  “Oh well,” I’d say. Everything I ever said in the assisted living building started like that, as if the “oh well” was required.

  “Oh well. The snow’s starting now.”

  “It’s cold then?” she might offer. “Getting very cold now? Making the turn into the real winter? You know, I haven’t been out in a while.”

  “No,” I’d say, trying to keep it as accurate as possible. Accuracy was what they wanted more than anything.

  “No. Not too bad yet. Still have a few weeks before it really hits us. It’s just a bit slippery now with the ice on the side of the road. Just slippery.”

  “Yes,” she m
ight say. “Slippery, yes.”

  Then there’d be a little cluck of recognition and you could almost see her thinking about it, about the word – slippery – and remembering the excitement and the danger that could be left over in a word like that, even in just the idea of it. Their apartments had all kinds of extra railings and there were suction cup bath mats and this special black tape they wound around door handles and banisters. Slippery wasn’t allowed in the assisted living building.

  The people in those apartments all had their little idiosyncrasies. I remember the first time I realized it, the first time I really understood that, just like being young, there were lots of different ways a person could be old. Chatty or shy, outgoing or held-back, risky or safe: everybody made their decision and stuck with it right through to the end. There was a woman on the sixteenth floor who never unfastened the inside chain of her door. I probably delivered fifty packages to Mrs. Elson, but I never saw her entire face. When I came by, she’d give me only the smallest crack between the frame and her door and I’d have to squish the bag through to her. Then her thin hand would reach out with the money and I’d pass back the change. During the whole thing, I might catch only the quickest glimpse at the side of her head, just one un-pierced ear maybe, or that one eye staring out at me through the gap.

  The half-blind woman on McKay could smell you coming. Or maybe it was the sound of the tire scraping the side walk. Before you could even set foot on the bottom stair of her porch, she’d start calling from deep inside the house.

  “Door’s open,” she’d holler. “Just bring it right to me, dear. I’m in the back room. Last room at the back. Door’s open. Just bring it to me.”

  Her voice was thin and kind of scratchy and it tugged me forward like one of those sticky threads that lead to the centre of a web. To get to her, I had to go down this long hallway, past the abandoned dining room on the left and the almost abandoned kitchen on the right. Her place was mostly dark and mostly empty and you couldn’t block out the sound of her too-loud television and the smell of stale urine that had sunk down into the carpets and the cushions and mattresses. Her voice kept going all the time, like a homing beacon or a looping SOS that sends out the same message until somebody talks back.

  “I’m right here, dear. All the way to the back. Just keep coming. Back, back, back. You can’t miss me.”

  The sicker a person gets, the less of their house they use. It’s usually the upstairs floors that go first, especially if the stairs are too steep and the railing isn’t any good. Then it’s the basement and then the back and front yards and then the whole outside just disappears. Some people used to ask me to look out the back window and tell them if the trees were still in the same places and if the tulips were coming up at the right time.

  Eventually people like that spider lady on McKay got whittled down to one last room. It was usually a remodelled area near the back of the ground floor, a place big enough to double as both a bedroom and living room at the same time. There might be a new bathroom too, something roughed in by a caring grandson or a reliable nephew. I saw lots of places like that where a new toilet and a new vanity and a new low-rise shower sprung right out of the carpet like they’d been planted in the middle of the old den.

  That woman on McKay ruled over her world in an automated La-Z-Boy throne. The chair could motor itself up and down and it was surrounded by four or five little tray tables that held everything she needed. There was a system to it, a spot for the remote controls and the telephone, and an area for lots of different boxes of Kleenex and a special corner for her purse and for those flip-top plastic tubes that keep all the pills for the week in separate little SUN, MON and TUE boxes. She had a place for her knitting stuff and one for the address books and the crossword puzzles and the Bible and another one for photographs. Even though she had cataracts and her sight was clouding over and her glasses were just for show, there was nothing she couldn’t find. She kept her hair pulled back in a tight bun and though she never went outside, she wore real shoes instead of socks or slippers.

  “I wonder could you do something for me?”

  She asked me this once, during one of those 38 degree summer days where everything gets heavier than it should be. I was sweating from the bike and my shirt was damp and sticking to me. The smell in the room was thicker than normal. You could almost see it.

  “Yeah,” I said automatically. “No problem. What do you need?”

  I pictured something like a bag of groceries that needed to be unloaded or a letter she wanted me to drop in the box.

  “Will you look at this?” she said. “And tell me what you think I should do?”

  Before I could get a hold on what was happening, she started to unbutton her blouse and to wriggle out of her sleeve and slide away the sturdy beige strap of her bra.

  “Oh, no,” I said, “Don’t do that.”

  I turned in the opposite direction, toward the TV, but it didn’t change anything.

  “This isn’t right at all,” she repeated, “not at all.”

  It was like I was barely there and she was just looking herself over and privately keeping track of the changes in her body.

  “You see how it’s getting worse, don’t you?” she said. “What do you think I should do? You work for the doctor’s, don’t you? What do you think?”

  She’d pulled back her shirt far enough that I could see nearly her entire breast. It was a thin, used-up looking thing and almost the same white colour you’d link up with one of those ugly fish that live in some deep trench at the bottom of the ocean and have never seen light. The skin was crisscrossed with a purplish-blue network of veins and there were long, very long, black bristles growing around the nipple. Just below, you could see the problem – a big yellowish cyst, like the biggest pimple you can imagine, but circled in a dark red sore colour. It looked very bad, almost ready to burst and there was a shiny liquid film oozing out of it. The woman looped her index finger around the red circle and grazed over the surface in a tentative, worried kind of way.

  “It hurts every time I move,” she said. “Even when I’m just sitting in my chair. I thought it was nothing at first, but it’s getting bigger every day and I can hardly stand it now.”

  It was the first time I’d ever seen one of those hidden parts of a woman’s body – Barney’s pictures didn’t count for anything – and I didn’t know what to do. I felt kind of dull and numb, like this was something I should have seen coming, but still couldn’t prepare for. It was like when you get called up to the front of the class and they ask you to stare down the jumble of numbers and letters in a difficult math problem, but even before you stand up to go to the blackboard, you already know you can’t do it, that this question is out there, beyond where you can go, and it’s going to have to stay unsolved.

  “I don’t know,” I said to her. “You need to see a real doctor. You need to get somebody to take you to the hospital and get looked at by somebody who knows what they’re doing.”

  I told her I was sorry, and that all I could do was maybe check-in with the pharmacist when I got back to the store and that maybe if I described it to Musgrave and told him what it looked like, he might know what to do and maybe he would call her later on.

  “Well that would be just great,” she said, happier than she should have been.

  “That would be wonderful, thanks so much.”

  “But it’s the doctor you really need to see,” I said. “You can’t forget about that. You need somebody to take you to the doctor, right, as soon as you can?”

  “Oh yes, yes, dear,” she said. “I’m sure somebody will come along. No problem at all. Your Mr. Musgrave is going to call. He’ll call and tell us what to do next.”

  Then she pulled her shirt closed and straightened herself up and slipped the buttons back together. It was all very matter of fact. A second later, she was thanking me again for all my help and telling me to grab a few cookies out of the cupboard on the way out.

  “Ther
e might be a cold pop in the fridge,” she said in a mischievous funny kind of way and that was that. One thing gave way to the next.

  I worked my last day for Musgrave near the end of October, just after they turned the clocks back and everybody was still trying to adjust to the full dark coming down on them by five in the afternoon. The temperature dropped fifteen degrees in one night and there was a minefield of black ice on the side of the road. I zig-zagged across the city trying to avoid it and my eyes never moved from that spot a couple feet in front of the wheel. I’d been making my preparations for winter for the last few weeks and the fingertips were already cut out of my gloves and I was dressed in layers. All through September, it had been wet and rainy and my back tire had been kicking up a brown line of spray. Every coat I owned had this skunk-stripe of filth running down from my neck to the base of my spine.

  When I made the turn to Barney’s, the sky was still a little bit grey with leftover light. He was getting his standard package of canned goods and insulin and the little strips he used to test his sugar levels. There was a refill for his blood pressure medication and a roll of paper towels and a package of disposable razors. He’d already made his move off the porch and into the TV room where he normally sat with the remote in his hand and his legs spread wide over the velour cushions. I went up the stairs and knocked on the door and I called out to him, telling him that his stuff was here and that he better come and get it.

  There was no sound from inside and I think that was the first sign I had that things were going to change. Barney was never not at home. I rang again and I rattled the front door a bit and I told him I’d just leave the package on the porch if he didn’t want to pick it up. His inside door, the real wooden door, was wide open and there was nothing to keep me from just poking my head in and looking around, but I had those lines in my head and I stuck to the rules. I went over to the big front window and cupped my hands up against the side of my head and stared through the glass like a kid at an aquarium.