She didn't smile, as he had hoped she would. "The pictures in those brochures turned my blood. Old ladies playing canasta. Old men throwing horseshoes. Both flavors together in this big pinepanelled room they call the River Hall, square-dancing. Although that is sort of a nice name, don't you think? %ver Hall?"
"I guess it's okay."
"I think it sounds like the kind of room you'd find in an enchanted castle. But I've visited quite a few old friends in Strawberry Fieldsthat's the geriatrics' home in Skowhegan-and I know an old folks' rec room when I see one. It doesn't matter how pretty a name you give it, there's still a cabinet full of board games in the corner and ix pieces missing from each one and the jigsaw puzzles with five or s' TV's always tuned to something like Family Feud and never to the kind of movies where good-looking young people take off their clothes and roll around on the floor together in front of the fireplace.
Those rooms always smell of paste... and piss... and the fiveand-dime watercolors that come in a long tin box... and despair."
Lois looked at him with her dark eyes.
"I'm only sixty-eight, Ralph. I know that sixty-eight doesn't seem like only anything to Dr. Fountain of Youth, but it does to me, because my mother was ninety-two when she died last year and my dad lived to be eighty-six. In my family, dying at eighty is dying young... and if I had to spend twelve years living in a place where they announce dinner over the loudspeaker, I'd go crazy."
"I would, too."
"I looked, though. I wanted to be polite. When I was finished, I made a neat little pile of them and handed them back to Jan. I said they were very interesting and thanked her. She nodded and smiled and put them back in her purse. I thought that was going to be the end of it and good riddance, but then Harold said, 'Put your coat on, Ma."
"For a second I was so scared I couldn't breathe. I thought they'd already signed me up! And I had an idea that if I said I wasn't going, Harold would open the door and there would be two or three men in white coats outside, and one of them would smile and say, 'don't worry, Mrs. Chasse; once you get that first handful of pills delivered direct to your kitchen, you'll never want to live anywhere else."
"I don't tvant to put my coat on," I told Harold, and I tried to sound the way I used to when he was only ten and always tracking mud into the kitchen, but my heart was beating so hard I could hear it tapping in my voice.
"I've changed my mind about going out. I forgot how much I had to do today." And then Ian gave the laugh "Why, Mother I hate even more than her syrupy little smile and said, Lois, what would you have to do that's so important you can't go up to Bangor with us after we've taken time off to come down to Derry and see you?"
"That woman always gets my back hair up, and I guess I do the same to her. I must, because I've never in my life known one woman to smile that much at another without hating her guts. Anyway, I told her I had to wash the kitchen floor, to start with. 'Just look at it," I said.
"dirty as the devil."
"'Huh!" Harold says. 'I can't believe you're going to send us back to the city empty-handed after we came all the way down here, Ma Well I'm not moving into that place no matter how far you came," I said back, 'so you can get that idea right out of your head.
I've been living in Derry for thirty-five years, half my life.
All my friends are here, and I'm not moving."
"They looked at each other the way parents do when they've got a kid who's stopped being cute and started being a pain in the tail.
Janet patted my shoulder and said, 'Now don't get all upset, Mother Lois-we only want you to come and look." Like it was the brochures again, and all I had to do was be polite. just the same, her saying it was just to set my mind at ease a little. I should have known they couldn't make me live there, or even afford it on their own.