you can change anything at any time. When you’re young, you think you’ve got all these choices. Well, you don’t. My daddy used to say that you don’t have to worry about falling into a rut—because the rut’s out there looking for you already and it’ll get here real soon. No escape. You’re stuck before you know it.” Arlene said these things with a certain gallant cheerfulness, and not the lugubrious self-pity that such sentiments might inspire.
Before Carla could ask the next question, there was a commotion at the checkerboard table. The daughter was jabbing a finger at the old man. She was not shouting, but her voice had the menacing, escalating edge that was well on its way to a shout: “You fucker. I know you fucking remember. I know it.”
The aide tapped the woman’s shoulder. Time to settle down. But the woman shook her off and continued to heckle the old guy: “What about me? What about Nelson, wherever he is? What are we supposed to do, huh? With the rest of our lives? After what you did to us?”
The woman abruptly broke off her rant, lowered her head, and thrust it in her hands. She was not crying; her grief struck Carla as something that had ranged beyond the ability to be expressed in mere sobs a long time ago. It was part of her being now, fossilized inside the larger universe of everything she did and said and was. In the meantime, the old man gazed serenely across the table. He smiled a tiny little smile.
Arlene turned back around to Carla. She had been watching the drama with a relish that made Carla want to offer to go fetch popcorn. “We get that all the time,” Arlene muttered. With a naughty grin, she added, “Usually, though, it’s the patients who act up—not the visitors.” She squared herself in her chair, ready to get back to it. “Fire away.”
“What’s your favorite childhood memory?” Carla asked.
Arlene pondered the question for a very long time. “I don’t remember very much about my childhood. I used to—but I don’t anymore.”
Carla looked concerned. Her face made Arlene snicker and sweep a pudgy hand around the lounge, where three more patients had wandered in, shuffling along like lost zombies. They stood in a row by the wall, waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
“Oh, honey—not like those poor folks,” Arlene exclaimed. “Not that kind of ‘I can’t remember.’ What I mean is that I don’t want to remember it, so I just don’t. I keep it off to the side of my brain. See, we were pretty poor, and my parents went hungry a lot of times themselves so that us kids could eat. I don’t really like remembering how my mother would stand by the table, thin as a corpse although not quite as talkative, and spoon another helping of oatmeal into my brother Leroy’s bowl. Leroy would eat it right up. He was too young to realize that my mother was giving him her helping.” Arlene shook her head. Carla started to point out that she had just recounted a scene from a childhood she claimed she did not remember, but held back. Arlene was an intelligent woman. If there was irony in the vicinity, she would know it. She didn’t need Carla to circle it with a Sharpie.
“Memory’s a tricky thing,” Arlene said.
“What do you mean?”
“Well, take that lady who was sitting at the table over there with Bill Ferris.”
Carla looked. The table was now vacant. Both Scowler and Driving Cap were gone. Only the aide remained, still picking at the spot on her smock, digging in.
“That lady,” Arlene continued, “comes here all the time. Lives pretty far away, but makes the drive, no problem. And it’s like she’s trying to get old Bill to remember something. But he won’t. Like you saw, she gets real mad at him. Got so mad once she went a little crazy. It was way worse than today. We had to pull her off of him. Me and Lester, another aide who works the same shift as I do.
“It’s gotten so bad with Bill’s daughter now, you know, that Ms. Layman said she can’t be left alone with him. Has to have an escort. That’s why Peggy’s over there. Today was her turn to make sure that crazy lady didn’t take a swing at her own flesh and blood.”
“If she hates him that much, then why does she have him in