It was the witching hour at The Willows, the hour when the lights went down and voices settled into whispers before stopping entirely. A handful of the devout sat in the library, all looking toward a bookshelf, which was covered by a faded white sheet, a makeshift screen, as they waited for the glow to appear. Those, who could, leaned forward as the glow became an image, an unfocused scene of space and stars. In one corner stood a man, his demeanor sincere, his eyes intense. He spoke familiar words, words they’d heard for so many years. They still paid close attention as if the words might change though they were able to recite them with his same cadence, with his same tone. Some nodded their heads silently, mouthing the refrain. Others sat, eyes closed, heads resting on their shoulders, grunting as if lost in a dream.
A thin plume of smoke rose from a cigarette the man was holding at his side. The stance, the cigarette, were part of the ritual, so much so that the watchers paid no heed to the cigarette, dangerous though it was in this time. None of them smoked, not any longer. Even if they wanted to, they wouldn’t. They couldn’t. “No Smoking” was the rule in every nursing home across the country; the Willows was no exception. Octogenarians, nonagenarians, and the occasional centenarian dragging oxygen tanks daren’t so much as light a Sabbath candle. They learned that lesson the hard way on Mrs. Gittleman’s 100th birthday.
But smoking? Most had given it up by the time their kids were born, and their kids were easily in their 50s and 60s. That monochromatic man before them, the man on the screen, died young from his smoking habit. That wisp of smoke disappearing into space was as fine a Twilight Zone allegory as there ever was. Alas, for the man on the screen, Rod Serling, that particular allegory was as unintentional as it was prophetic.
Thursday night at 9:30 was Twilight Zone night for the handful of diehards who managed to stay up until lights out at 10:15. In the library, the final image would go gray when the aide turned off the DVD player, the lights would come on, and those who’d fallen asleep were tapped awake by hovering aides and quietly wheeled back to their rooms.
The tap on Peter Siegel’s head came from the rubber capped end of a wooden cane wielded by Ed Mulcahy.
“What the heck? I’m watching the show.”
Mulcahy leaned into Siegel’s face to tell him he was snoring by the time Serling finished the introduction. Siegel insisted he’d watched the entire thing and recited, verbatim, Serling’s introduction: “Sunnyvale Rest, a home for the aged, a dying place and a common children’s game called kick-the-can, that will shortly become a refuge for a man who knows he will die in this world if he doesn’t escape into…The Twilight Zone.”
“Get that? They seek out the Fountain of Youth, Mulcahy. And find it. All except for one dirty old curmudgeon who I bet was stuck in his room reading old copies of Playboy. Reminds me of someone.”
Siegel might very well have been awake; It’s true. But then he’d seen episode 21 of season 3, “Kick the Can,” no fewer than a dozen times since the show first aired in 1962, plus an additional six times while at The Willows because it was one of the less scratched DVDs in the facility’s sparse collection. Only the Golden Girls DVDs were more worn. At his age, at all their ages, long-term memories were stronger than their short-term ones.
They were two lonely old men who had become best friends.
Siegel met Mulcahy when he first arrived. He was walking, by himself, a badge of pride for the residents, past Mulcahy in the interior garden, or the “atrium” as they called it. Siegel was wearing a faded sky-blue cap with “Tufts 1955” embroidered in an ugly brown over the brim Mulcahy stood up, only two inches shy of the 6’3 frame he had in college, blocking Siegel’s progress with that cane of his. “Go Jumbos. Here for the class reunion?”
Friendships are a good thing at any age. But to the residents of The Willows, especially those who retained their marbles, new friendships went all too quickly with the body and mind both on borrowed time. When friendships came, they came with the intensity of a burning fuse. Mulcahy would say the basis for their friendship was that 1) they could hear each other, 2) they could remember each other’s name, and 3) had something to say other than “Huh, what was that?”
Siegel would joke they’d been making hay while the sun set, “It wasn’t a match made in Heaven by any means. But it was a match made on the way.”
They hadn’t known each other at college and neither one had a yearbook to jog memories of what they looked like way back when. It didn’t matter. They talked about their lives after Tufts, their careers and families, and played what Siegel called “Jewish Geography” to see if they knew anyone in common. The game went something like, “You’re from X, do you know Y?” They came up empty. Mulcahy was from a Boston Irish family and in the Boston Irish frat, a dilapidated brick house with green shamrocks on the shutters and beer bottles on the lawn. Siegel was from the Upper West Side, a dermatologist’s son, and in the Jewish frat, the one with full bookshelves and a lights-on-all-night study room.
It was an awkward reminiscence at first, a strained attempt to find common ground until Francesca Vavavavoom oscillated by. Francesca was a curvaceous nurse leaning into a cart laden with pills and catheters for inmates in the memory ward. A stale egg-salad sandwich dropped on the walkway jostled the cart and Francesca, and several boxes of men’s incontinence underwear fell off. Siegel and Mulcahy watched carefully as Francesca bent over to pick up the spilled contents. “There is a God,” said Mulcahy. Siegel nodded his head slowly in ready agreement as their eyes followed the nurse’s sway down the path.
“I forgot what I wanted to say,” said Siegel.
“Maybe you should head over to the memory ward.”
“You think so?”
“Depends.”
“Yes, Depends. Amen to that.”
Common ground was found. They also found a common room in an unused coffee lounge.
The lounge was always empty except for them. It was the last spot at The Willows that hadn’t met ADA rules, meaning no wheelchair ramp at the entrance, scattered rugs that snagged tennis balls clinging to the bottom of walkers, and unsupervised. The exit door had a faulty alarm, and the room’s heating system was in competition with massive picture windows that leaked cold like a sieve. If there was a drawback to the room it was that they had to bundle up in winter clothes to contend with room’s inadequate temperature, the same temperature, though, that kept everyone else away.
But it wasn’t, yet, off limits to the residents, and Siegel and Mulcahy coveted their limited independence. For the mobile duo it had a view, privacy, and a K-cup machine, even if the only coffee available was Green Mountain Light Roast and a vile blueberry decaf with an expiration date so far back in the past that it had faded off the cover from the room’s abundant sunlight. Siegel was there one wintry day, dusting a powdered cream substitute into his watered-down coffee. Oh, how he missed his Starbucks ventes and damned the doctor who warned him off too much caffeine.
Mulcahy came down the steps that should have been a ramp juggling a tray of Old London Melba Toasts and cottage cheese bowls, standard snack fare from the dining hall, and another tray with a paper towel hiding two deliciously greasy glazed chocolate donuts. He’d bought those from Desmond McCauley, the empathetic Jamaican janitor who was raising two children on his own and ran a geriatric black market. He smuggled in those donuts for $4 a pop and an herbal brownie every so often at $10. Donuts, and definitely herbal brownies, were not part of the regimented diet where dessert was generally limited to lime-green Jell-O cubes and gelatinous butterscotch-flavored pudding cups.
Siegel and Mulcahy picked carefully away at their donuts to draw out the experience. They concluded by wetting their fingerstips to dab the last crumbs from the plate. Siegel pushed the tray away with his foot, spilling the Melba Toasts and cottage cheese onto the floor. “I’ll be Goddamned,” he said. “At least it wasn’t the donuts.” He put the tray on the floor while he cleaned up the mess.
“Trays,” said Mulcahy. He got up and walked to the coffee machine and picked up a tray and tossed one to Siegel. Then another. Then another.
“What the hell are you doing?” said Siegel batting them away as they flew at him.
“Trays,” repeated Mulcahy. He held one to his chest like it was a life preserver.
Mulcahy pointed with his sharp chin out the bay window. Beyond was a wooded hill, part of the conservation land at the rear of The Willows. It was snowing hard, adding powdery inches to the heavy accumulation of that winter.
In the infinitesimal intersection of their college days a Venn diagram might show, trays would stand out.
Their college was on the high mound of earth rising on the border between Somerville and Medford, Massachusetts and affectionately called The Hill. It was a term coined by graduates who had made careers in advertising and utilized it to headline fundraising efforts ahead of class reunions as in, “Let’s meet back on The Hill!”
No student referred to the school as “The Hill,” not when they were there. But all students were keenly aware of the topography, especially after a snowstorm, when vast numbers of cafeteria trays disappeared under winter coats. From the top of the hill students would sled past professors angry that students were wasting time when they should’ve been studying, and envious of their freedom. They sped past townies looking forward to pounding the spoiled kids some night. They zipped past screaming lunch-line ladies demanding the return of the plastic trays that would inevitably crack apart after runs.
And though they didn’t realize it, there was one time when Ed Mulcahy and Peter Siegel almost crashed into each if not for Mulcahy swerving at the last minute to grab the edge of a tray beneath a girl he wanted to meet.
“Cans,” said Mulcahy. “They’re our cans.”
“Huh? What are you talking about? Or is this your effort to get a sponge down from the lovely Ms. Vavavavoom?”
“The trays. They’re our cans. Don’t you get it?”
Siegel looked out to the snow-covered hill. He couldn’t help but smile.
An aide felt the cold breeze as he walked past the lounge. The outside door was wide open. He went to close it, but not before following a pair of footprints in the snow leading up the hill. The prints were jumbled on top of each other like one person was helping another along, or maybe it was a couple of kids pushing each other into the snow. Through the trees and blizzard, the storm had grown harder, he was almost sure he heard two kids screaming “Gangway!” as they sped down the slope.