Fresh Complaint

Della started telling Cathy how strangely her husband had been acting. She said she didn’t know what had got into him. “For instance, a few weeks ago, Dick gets out of bed in the middle of the night. Next thing I know, I heard his car backing down the drive. I thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe this is it. Maybe he’s had enough and that’s the last I’ll see of him.’”

“But he came back,” Cathy said, placing a book on a shelf.

“Yeah. About an hour later. I came downstairs and there he was. He was down on his knees, on the carpet, and he’s got all these road maps spread out all over.”

When Della asked her husband what on earth he was doing, Dick said that he was scouting for investment opportunities in Florida. Beachfront properties in undervalued areas that were reachable by direct flights from major cities. “I told him, ‘We’ve got enough money already. You can just retire and we’ll be fine. Why do you want to go and take a risk like that now?’ And do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Retirement isn’t in my vocabulary.’”

Cathy disappeared into the self-help section. Della was too engrossed in telling her story to get up and follow. She hung her head dejectedly, staring at the floor. Her tone was full of wonder and outrage at the ideas men latched on to, especially as they got older. They were like fits of insanity, except that the husbands experienced these derangements as bolts of insight. “I just had an idea!” Dick was always saying. They could be doing anything, having dinner, going to a movie, when inspiration struck and he stopped dead in his tracks to announce, “Hey, I just had a thought.” Then he stood motionless, a finger to his chin, calculating, scheming.

His latest idea involved a resort near the Everglades. In the Polaroid he showed Della, the resort appeared as a charming but dilapidated hunting lodge surrounded by live oaks. What was different this time was that Dick had already acted on his idea. Without telling Della, he’d taken a mortgage on the place and used a chunk of their retirement savings as a down payment.

“We are now the proud owners of our own resort in the Florida Everglades!” he announced.

As much as it pained Della to tell Cathy this, it gave her pleasure as well. She held her beer bottle in both hands. The bookstore was quiet, the sky dark outside, the surrounding shops all closed for the night. It felt like they owned the place.

“So now we’re stuck with this doggone old resort,” Della said. “Dick wants to convert it into condos. To do that, he says he has to move down to Florida. And as usual he wants to drag me with him.”

Cathy re-emerged with the cart. Della expected to find a look of sympathy on her face but instead Cathy’s mouth was tight.

“So you’re moving?” she said coldly.

“I have to. He’s making me.”

“Nobody’s making you.”

This was spoken in Cathy’s recently acquired know-it-all tone. As if she’d read the entire self-help section and could now dispense psychological insight and marital advice.

“What do you mean, no one’s making me? Dick is.”

“What about your job?”

“I’ll have to quit. I don’t want to, I like working. But—”

“But you’ll give in as usual.”

This remark seemed not just unkind but unjust. What did Cathy expect Della to do? Divorce her husband after forty years of marriage? Get her own apartment and start dating strange men, the way Cathy was doing when they first met?

“You want to quit your job and go off to Florida, fine,” Cathy said. “But I have a job. And if you don’t mind, I’ve got some things to do before closing up.”

They had never had a fight before. In the following weeks, every time Della considered calling Cathy she found that she was too angry to do so. Who was Cathy to tell her how to run her marriage? She and Clark were at each other’s throats half the time.

A month later, just as Della was packing up the last boxes for the movers, Cathy appeared at her house.

“Are you mad at me?” Cathy said when Della opened the door.

“Well, you do sometimes think you know everything.”

That was maybe too mean, because Cathy burst out crying. She hunched forward and wailed in a pitiful voice, “I’m going to miss you, Della!”

Tears were streaming down her face. She opened her arms as if for a hug. Della didn’t approve of the first of these responses and she was hesitant about the second. “Now quit that,” she said. “You’re liable to start me crying, too.”

Cathy’s blubbering only got worse.

Alarmed, Della said, “We can still talk on the phone, Cathy. And write letters. And visit. You can come stay in our ‘resort.’ It’s probably full of snakes and alligators but you’re welcome.”

Cathy didn’t laugh. Through her tears, she said, “Dick won’t want me to visit. He hates me.”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

“Well, I hate him! He treats you like crap, Della. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. And now he’s making you quit your job and go down to Florida? To do what?”

“That’s enough of that,” Della said.

“OK! OK! I’m just so frustrated!”

Nevertheless, Cathy was calming down. After a moment, she said, “I brought you something.” She opened her purse. “This came into the store the other day. From a little publisher out in Alaska. We didn’t order it but I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down. I don’t want to give the story away, but, well—it just seems really appropriate! You’ll see when you read it.” She was looking into Della’s eyes. “Sometimes books come into your life for a reason, Della. It’s really strange.”

Della never knew what to do when Cathy got mystical on her. She sometimes claimed the moon affected her moods, and she invested coincidences with special meanings. On that day, Della thanked Cathy for the book and managed not to cry when they finally did hug goodbye.

The book had a drawing on the cover. Two Indians sitting in a tepee. Cathy was into all that kind of stuff, too, lately, stories about Native Americans or slave uprisings in Haiti, stories with ghosts or magical occurrences. Della liked some better than others.

She packed the book in a box of odds and ends that hadn’t been taped shut yet.

And then what happened to it? She shipped the box down to Florida with all the others. It turned out there wasn’t room for all their belongings in their one-bedroom at the hunting lodge, so they had to put them in storage. The resort went bust a year later. Soon Dick made Della move to Miami, and then to Daytona, and finally up to Hilton Head as he tried to make a go of other ventures. Only after he died, while Della was going through the bankruptcy, was she forced to open up the storage facility and sell off their furniture. Going through the boxes she’d shipped to Florida almost a decade before, she cut open the box of odds and ends and Two Old Women fell out.

The book is a retelling of an old Athabascan legend, which the author, Velma Wallis, heard growing up as a child. A legend handed down “from mothers to daughters” that told the story of the two old women of the title, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’, who are left behind by their tribe during a time of famine.

Left behind to die, in other words. As was the custom.

Except the two old women don’t die. Out in the woods, they get to talking. Didn’t they used to know how to hunt and fish and forage for food? Couldn’t they do that again? And so that’s what they do, they relearn everything they knew as younger people, they hunt for prey and they go ice-fishing, and at one point they hide out from cannibals who pass through the territory. All kinds of stuff.

One drawing in the book showed the two women trekking across the Alaskan tundra. In hooded parkas and sealskin boots, they drag sleds behind them, the woman in front slightly less stooped than the other. The caption read: Our tribes have gone in search of food, in the land our grandfathers told us about, far over the mountains. But we have been judged unfit to follow them, because we walk with sticks, and are slow.

Certain passages stood out, like one with Ch’idzigyaak speaking:

“I know that you are sure of our survival. You are younger.” She could not help but smile bitterly at her remark, for just yesterday they both had been judged too old to live with the young.

“It’s just like the two of us,” Della said, when she finally read the book and called Cathy. “One’s younger than the other, but they’re both in the same fix.”

It started out as a joke. It was amusing to compare their own situations, in suburban Detroit and rural New Hampshire, with the existential plight of the old Inuit women. But the correspondences felt real, too. Della moved to Contoocook to be closer to Robbie but, two years later, Robbie moved to New York, leaving her stranded in the woods. Cathy’s bookstore closed. She started a pie-baking business out of her home. Clark retired and spent all day in front of the TV, entranced by pretty weather ladies on the news. Buxom, in snug, brightly colored dresses, they undulated before the weather maps, as though mimicking the storm fronts. All four of Cathy’s sons had left Detroit. They lived far away, on the other side of the mountains.

There was one illustration in the book that Della and Cathy particularly liked. It showed Ch’idzigyaak in the act of throwing a hatchet, while Sa’ looked on. The caption read, Perhaps if we see a squirrel, we can kill it with our hatchets, as we did when we were young.

That became their motto. Whenever one of them was feeling downhearted, or needed to deal with a problem, the other would call and say, “It’s hatchet time.”

Take charge, they meant. Don’t mope.

That was another quality they shared with the Inuit women. The tribe didn’t leave Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’ behind only because they were old. It was also because they were complainers. Always moaning about their aches and pains.

Husbands were often of the opinion that wives complained too much. But that was a complaint in itself. A way men had of shutting women up. Still, Della and Cathy knew that some of their unhappiness was their own fault. They let things fester, got into black moods, sulked. Even if their husbands asked what was wrong, they wouldn’t say. Their victimization felt too pleasurable. Relief would require no longer being themselves.

What was it about complaining that felt so good? You and your fellow sufferer emerging from a thorough session as if from a spa bath, refreshed and tingling?

Over the years Della and Cathy have forgotten about Two Old Women for long stretches. Then one of them will reread it, regain her enthusiasm, and get the other to reread it, too. The book isn’t in the same category as the detective stories and mysteries they consume. It’s closer to a manual for living. The book inspires them. They won’t stand to hear it maligned by their snobby sons. But now there’s no need to defend it. Two million copies sold! Anniversary editions! Proof enough of their sound judgment.

When Cathy arrives at Wyndham Falls the next morning, she can feel snow in the air. The temperature has dropped and there’s that stillness, no wind, all the birds in hiding.

She used to love such ominous quiet, as a girl, in Michigan. It promised school cancellations, time at home with her mother, the building of snow forts on the lawn. Even now, at seventy, big storms excite her. But her expectation now has a dark wish at its center, a desire for self-annihilation, almost, or cleansing. Sometimes, thinking about climate change, the world ending in cataclysms, Cathy says to herself, “Oh, just get it over with. We deserve it. Wipe the slate clean and start over.”

Della is dressed and ready to go. Cathy tells her she looks nice but can’t refrain from adding, “You have to tell the hairdresser not to use crème rinse, Della. Your hair’s too fine. Crème rinse flattens it down.”

“You try telling that lady anything,” Della says, as she pushes her walker down the hall. “She doesn’t listen.”

“Then get Bennett to take you to a salon.”

“Oh, sure. Fat chance.”

As they come outside, Cathy makes a note to e-mail Bennett. He might not understand how a little thing like that—getting her hair done—can lift a woman’s spirits.

It’s slow going with Della’s walker. She has to navigate along the sidewalk and down the curb to the parking lot. At the car, Cathy helps her into the passenger seat and then takes the walker around to put it in the trunk. It takes a while to figure out how to collapse it and flip up the seat.

A minute later, they’re on their way. Della leans forward in her seat, alertly scanning the road and giving Cathy directions.

“You know your way around already,” Cathy says approvingly.

“Yeah,” Della says. “Maybe those pills are working.”

Cathy would prefer to get the frames somewhere nice, a Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, but Della directs her to a Goodwill in a nearby strip mall. In the parking lot, Cathy performs the same operation in reverse, unfolding the walker and bringing it around so that Della can hoist herself to her feet. Once she gets going, she moves at a good clip.

By the time they get inside the store, it’s like old times. They move through the shiny-floored, fluorescently lit space as eagle-eyed as if on a scavenger hunt. Seeing a section of glassware, Della says, “Hey, I need some good new drinking glasses,” and they divert their operation.

The picture frames are way in the back of the store. Halfway there, the linoleum gives way to bare concrete. “I have to be careful about the floor in here,” Della says. “It’s sort of lippity.”

Cathy takes her arm. When they reach the aisle, she says, “Just stay here, Della. Let me look.”

As usual with secondhand merchandise, the problem is finding a matching set.

Nothing’s organized. Cathy flips through frame after frame, all of different sizes and styles. After a minute, she finds a set of matching simple black wooden frames. She’s pulling them out when she hears a sound behind her. Not a cry, exactly. Just an intake of breath. She turns to see Della with a look of surprise on her face. She has reached out to take a look at something—Cathy doesn’t know what—and let her hand slip off the handle of her walker.

Once, years ago, when Della and Dick had the sailboat, Della almost drowned. The boat was moored at the time and Della slipped trying to climb aboard, sinking down into the murky green water of the marina. “I never learned to swim, you know,” she told Cathy. “But I wasn’t scared. It was sort of peaceful down there. Somehow I managed to claw my way to the surface. Dick was hollering for the dock boy and finally he came and grabbed hold of me.”

Della’s face looks the way Cathy imagined it then, under the water. Mildly astonished. Serene. As though forces beyond her control have taken charge and there’s no sense resisting.

This time, wonderment fails to save her. Della falls sideways, into the shelving. The metal edge shaves the skin off her arm with a rasping sound like a meat slicer. Della’s temple strikes the shelf next. Cathy shouts. Glass shatters.

They keep Della at the hospital overnight. Perform an MRI to check for bleeding in the brain, X-ray her hip, apply a damp chamois bandage over her abraded arm, which will have to stay on for a week before they remove it to see if the skin will heal or not. At her age, it’s fifty-fifty.

All this is related to them by a Dr. Mehta, a young woman of such absurd glamour that she might play a doctor in a medical drama on TV. Two strands of pearls twine around her fluted throat. Her gray knit dress falls loosely over a curvaceous figure. Her only defect is her spindly calves, but she camouflages these with a pair of daring diamond-patterned stockings, and gray high heels that match her dress exactly. Dr. Mehta represents something Cathy isn’t quite prepared for, a younger generation of women surpassing her own not only in professional achievement but in the formerly retrograde department of self-beautification. Dr. Mehta has an engagement ring, too, with a sizeable diamond. Marrying some other doctor, probably, combining fat salaries.

“What if the skin doesn’t heal?” Cathy asks.

“Then she’ll have to keep the bandage on.”

“Forever?”

“Let’s just wait and see how it looks in a week,” Dr. Mehta says.

All this has taken hours. It’s seven in the evening. Aside from the arm bandage, Della has the beginning of a black eye.

At eight thirty, the decision is made to keep Della overnight for observation.

“You mean I can’t go home?” Della asks Dr. Mehta. She sounds forlorn.

“Not yet. We need to keep an eye on you.”

Cathy elects to stay in the room with Della through the night. The lime-green couch converts into a bed. The nurse promises to bring her a sheet and blanket.

Cathy is in the cafeteria, soothing herself with chocolate pudding, when Della’s sons appear.

Years ago, her son Mike got Cathy to watch a sci-fi movie about assassins who return to Earth from the future. It was the usual mayhem and preposterousness, but Mike, who was in college at the time, claimed that the movie’s acrobatic fight scenes were infused with profound philosophical meaning. Cartesian was the word he used.

Cathy didn’t get it. Nevertheless, it’s of that movie she thinks, now, as Bennett and Robbie enter the room. Their pale, unsmiling faces and dark suits make them look inconspicuous and ominous at once, like agents of a universal conspiracy.

Targeting her.

“It was all my fault,” Cathy says as they reach her table. “I wasn’t watching her.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Bennett says.

This seems a mark of kindness, until he adds, “She’s old. She falls. It’s just part of the whole deal.”

“It’s a result of the ataxia,” Robbie says.

Cathy isn’t interested in what ataxia means. Another diagnosis. “She was doing fine right up until she fell,” she says. “We were having a good time. Then I turned my back for a second and—wham.”

“That’s all it takes,” Bennett said. “It’s impossible to prevent it.”

“The medicine she’s taking, the Aricept?” Robbie says. “It’s not much more than a palliative treatment. The benefits, if any, taper off after a year or two.”

“Your mom’s eighty-eight. Two years might be enough.”

The implication of this hangs in the air until Bennett says, “Except she keeps falling. And ending up in the hospital.”

“We’re going to have to move her,” Robbie says in a slightly louder, strained tone. “Wyndham’s not safe for her. She needs more supervision.”

Robbie and Bennett are not Cathy’s children. They’re older, and not as attractive. She feels no connection to them, no maternal warmth or love. And yet they remind her of her sons in ways she’d rather not think about.

Neither of them has offered to have Della come live with him. Robbie travels too much, he says. Bennett’s house has too many stairs. But it isn’t their selfishness that bothers Cathy the most. It’s how they stand before her now, infused—bloated—with rationality. They want to get this problem solved quickly and decisively, with minimum effort. By taking emotion out of the equation they’ve convinced themselves that they’re acting prudently, even though their wish to settle the situation arises from nothing but emotions—fear, mainly, but also guilt, and irritation.

And who is Cathy to them? Their mom’s old friend. The one who worked in the bookstore. The one who got her stoned.

Cathy turns away to look across the cafeteria, filling up now with medical staff coming in on their dinner break. She feels tired.

“OK,” she says. “But don’t tell her now. Let’s wait.”

The machines click and whir through the night. Every so often an alarm sounds on the monitors, waking Cathy up. Each time a nurse appears, never the same one, and presses a button to silence it. The alarm means nothing, apparently.

It’s freezing in the room. The ventilation system blows straight down on her. The blanket she’s been given is as thin as paper toweling.

A friend of Cathy’s in Detroit, a woman who has seen a therapist regularly for the past thirty years, recently passed on advice the therapist had given her. Pay no attention to the terrors that visit you in the night. The psyche is at its lowest ebb then, unable to defend itself. The desolation that envelops you feels like truth, but isn’t. It’s just mental fatigue masquerading as insight.

Cathy reminds herself of this as she lies sleepless on the slab of mattress. Her impotence in helping Della has filled her mind with nihilistic thoughts. Cold, clear recognitions, lacerating in their strictness. She has never known who Clark is. Theirs is a marriage devoid of intimacy. If Mike, John, Chris, and Palmer weren’t her children, they would be people of whom she disapproves. She has spent her life catering to people who disappear, like the bookstore she used to work in.

Sleep finally comes. When Cathy wakes the next morning, feeling stiff, she is relieved to see that the therapist was right. The sun is up and the universe isn’t so bleak. Yet some darkness must remain. Because she’s made her decision. The idea of it burns inside her. It’s neither nice nor kind. Such a novel feeling that she doesn’t know what to call it.

Cathy is sitting next to Della’s bed when Della opens her eyes. She doesn’t tell her about the nursing home. She only says, “Good morning, Della. Hey, guess what time it is?”

Della blinks, still groggy from sleep. And Cathy answers, “It’s hatchet time.”

It begins snowing as they cross the Massachusetts state line. They’re about two hours from Contoocook, the GPS a beacon in the sudden loss of visibility.

Clark will see this on the Weather Channel. He’ll call or text her, concerned about her flight being canceled.

Poor guy has no idea.

Now that they’re in the car, with the wipers and the defroster going, it appears that Della doesn’t quite grasp the situation. She keeps asking Cathy the same questions.

“So how will we get in the house?”

“You said Gertie has a key.”

“Oh, right. I forgot. So we can get the key from Gertie and get into the house. It’ll be cold as the dickens in there. We were keeping it at about fifty to save on oil. Just warm enough to keep the pipes from freezing.”

“We’ll warm it up when we get there.”

“And then I’m going to stay there?”

“We both will. Until we get things sorted out. We can get one of those home health aides. And Meals on Wheels.”

“That sounds expensive.”

“Not always. We’ll look into it.”

Repeating this information helps Cathy to believe in it. Tomorrow, she’ll call Clark and tell him that she’s going to stay with Della for a month, maybe more, maybe less. He won’t like it, but he’ll cope. She’ll make it up to him somehow.

Bennett and Robbie present a greater problem. Already she has three messages from Bennett and one from Robbie on her phone, plus voice mails asking where she and Della are.

It was easier than Cathy expected to sneak Della out of the hospital. Her IV had been taken out, luckily. Cathy just walked her down the hall, as though for exercise, then headed for the elevator. All the way to the car she kept expecting an alarm to sound, security guards to come running. But nothing happened.

The snow is sticking to trees but not the highway yet. Cathy exits the slow lane when traffic gets light. She exceeds the speed limit, eager to get where they’re going before nightfall.

“Bennett and Robbie aren’t going to like this,” Della says, looking out at the churning snow. “They think I’m too stupid to live on my own now. Which I probably am.”

“You won’t be alone,” Cathy says. “I’ll stay with you until we get things sorted out.”

“I don’t know if dementia is the kind of thing you can sort out.”

Just like that: the malady named and identified. Cathy looks at Della to see if she’s aware of this change, but her expression is merely resigned.