Assisted Living

Annie May dropped her bombshell in the middle of the evening news. Besides me and Baby Desiree, the only person who heard it was Mary Katherine, and she won’t talk about it, just gives you a dirty look when you bring it up.

Desi had been born in June, and my cousin was still busily making the introductory rounds. Mary Katherine had been a Tri-Delt in college, and Baby Desiree was her first kid - of course, she couldn’t be expected to lug bag and baggage all over the state by her lonesome, so I was volunteered. Since I was out of school for the summer and unemployed, the family decided I had nothing better to do than tag along to play valet.

It could have been worse, I guess. Desiree was a good baby, and at least Mary Katherine didn’t give me crap about smoking, my lack of a boyfriend, or my grades; she was more concerned with my fashion sense, or rather lack thereof. We spent the summer flying down dirt roads and gravel roads, through cane fields and stands of cypress, with Mary Katherine going a mile a minute about skin-care products while I sat in the back making faces at Desi.

Annie May lived in the middle of a hundred acres of soybean fields. She was a great-aunt on one side and some kind of cousin on the other, plus she was my step-grandma’s mother. She was a distant enough relative, blood-wise and geographically, that a visit wasn’t really obligatory. But Mary Katherine was a show-off when it came to Desi, and besides, we were on our way home from another visit to a cousin closer on the family tree but farther up the road. And Annie May was old; we glanced at each other with the unspoken acknowledgement that this might be our last chance, and guiltily decided to make the detour.

Mary Katherine’s Hyundai bounced up the washboard road to Annie May’s house in a cloud of dust which took nearly five minutes to settle. We sat in the car until it subsided so the baby wouldn’t choke, and so Mary Katherine could finish her lecture on hair coloring. As soon as she shut up, I bolted out of the car and lit a cigarette, trying to get a few drags in before going up to the house. My cousin snorted at me and started loading me down with the diaper bag, a cooler, her purse, and a backpack full of toys, then picked up Desi and marched up the cracked path to the front door.

Mary Katherine is not a patient person – she rang the doorbell four times in the space of a minute, knocked for another few seconds, and was striding around to the back of the house in a huff by the time Annie May opened the door. I hadn’t budged; all that baby junk was heavy. I’d also seen Annie May since Mary Katherine had, and had a better idea of how much she was slowing down. Once a person reaches a certain age, you’ve got to make some allowances.

Annie May was ninety-seven, and still lived by herself. The family had talked from the time I was little about putting her in a home, but someone always pointed out that she was doing just fine. She got around great, gardened on five acres without so much as a tiller – hell, she still butchered her own hogs. She had electricity and gas, and Uncle Ralph (who wasn’t really an uncle) lived only a mile away, Just In Case. In defiance of the fluttering of some of the control-freaks in the family, like Mary Katherine’s mom, Annie May remained in the house where she had spent her entire adult life.

She had apparently just finished canning when we got there. Her face was still pink from the steam and her white hair stuck up in spikes, giving her an oddly punk-rock look. The shotgun in her hand swung past me to Mary Katherine, who goggled, before she nodded briskly and stuck it back in the umbrella stand just inside the front door, and then she stepped forward and hugged me. Mary Katherine was furious.

“Aunt Annie May, you can’t go pointing guns at people! Is that thing loaded?” Mary Katherine stepped up for a perfunctory kiss and held the baby up for inspection.

“Of course it is, and I can do what I want on my own property. It’s for protection. You know that colored boy came around here again?”

“Annie May, that was Mr. Young from the church. You know Uncle Ralph said they thought you could do with the company,” I explained.

“Well, they know better now, don’t they?” she retorted. “You come in and set those things down so you can help me put these pickles away. I’ve got coffee on.”

The visit was a huge waste of time, as far as Mary Katherine was concerned. Annie May was singularly uninterested in babies and had no interest in amusing anecdotes about motherhood. She didn’t talk about the church and genealogy, like the polite old folks in the family, or, like the less socially aware ones, about her spleen and bowel problems. Instead she asked uncomfortable questions about what you were doing, why you were doing it, and whether it made you happy. During this inquisition Mary Katherine kept glancing pointedly at Desiree, baffled that Annie May couldn’t see the self-evident answers to her enquiries.

We watched the news because Annie May was interested in politics. She wanted to know what was going on in the world, but complained that she couldn’t understand what was happening – her hearing wasn’t so great and she couldn’t read well enough for closed captions to do her any good. Whenever someone came over, they had to stay for the news, to explain what was going on in the mythical rest-of-the-world to Annie May in her squat brick house in the soybeans. She had never been outside the parish, as far as I know, but she by-God wanted to know what was happening in Hollywood and D.C. and Zimbabwe.

I cleaned the living room while Mary Katherine, in her element now that she could run her head again, gave Annie May a running commentary on the news. Annie May held the sleeping baby with the understanding that as soon as it woke up, somebody else was taking it. During the commercials, I asked Annie May about the dust-covered pictures and curios that lined her walls and populated the mantle.

Her living room didn’t match the Victorian excess of some old people, but she still had plenty of knick-knacketty garbage and pictures of people I doubted she remembered. I asked her about these, half out of interest, and half with the guilty feeling that I was testing her to see how senile she was – Mary Katherine’s mom would have been proud. Annie May had no problems in the memory department, though – or if she did, she was a good bluffer. She rattled off names and kinship ties as briskly as she did everything else.

She had an easier time of it since the pictures were mostly of the same people. There were a couple of photos of her kids from their long-ago school days, but no grandchildren or great-grands graced the walls, no nieces or nephews or cousins had a spot. There was one grainy portrait from the forties of a mournful looking dog – Annie May claimed with a straight face that he had answered to Dammit. A family grouping of Annie May and her brothers was flanked by her sepia-toned parents, and a smaller portrait of her stepmother hung a short distance away. Her brothers, singly and in groups, aged in stages all over the room.

The large tinted wedding portrait hanging behind the television was the only image in the house of Annie May’s late husband. Jarring smudges of pink showed that Fitz had worn a red tie to match his bride’s roses. His blue eyes looked faded even against the grey of his lantern-jawed face. He gazed solemnly at the camera while a much younger Annie May looked to the left, a secret, tiny smile on her lips.

A woman’s hand was visible on that side. When I asked about it, Annie May said that it belonged to her bridesmaid, her sister-in-law Verdis. Pictures of Verdis graced the walls, the mantle, even the kitchen counter – she had moved in with her brother and his new bride after their marriage, helping them build this house. She stayed on after Fitz died, until her own death many years later. With a face like her brother’s and a lazy eye, she was far from attractive, and our family had always viewed her as something of a charity case. Verdis and Annie May were best friends for nearly three quarters of a century, and Annie May was never closer to the nursing home than she was when Verdis died.

The largest picture in the house, with pride of place over the mantle, was a professional portrait of both ladies taken just before Verdis’ death, the year I was born. It showed two old biddies in plaid shirts with their arms linked, schoolgirl-style. They both grinned hugely, showing off their new Roebuckers. I gave the picture a swipe with my rag as the news came back on.

The theme music woke Desiree, and Annie May almost threw her at Mary Katherine. The new mother had trouble suppressing her irritation at this maltreatment, and it took a while to calm the baby. Annie May peered at the TV in a fit of contrition, chin jutting in a manner strangely evocative of her late husband and sister-in-law as she tried to decipher the news. She was as impatient as Mary Katherine, though, and as soon as the baby quieted she was asking questions, demanding that someone tell her what she was missing.

“What’s he on about, then?”

It’s odd – I remember everything up to that point, but I can’t recall what sparked that conversation. Something on the news, I know, but whether it was political or just some gossipy tidbit about a celebrity, I couldn’t tell you now. I know Mary Katherine glanced at the TV, still annoyed, and curtly responded to Annie May’s question with an answer that didn’t seem to explain anything.

“They’re gay.”

“Oh.” Annie May cocked her head to one side and stared at the set for a moment, bemused. “They don’t look very happy to me.”

I laughed. I couldn’t see the television from where I stood, but I could tell from the look on my cousin’s face that that wasn’t what she meant.

“Not gay like happy, Annie May,” Mary Katherine explained, exasperated. “Gay like homosexual.”

Annie May was clearly still confused. I saw her shift in her chair, and knew she was heading for her ancient Britannicas. No sense continuing to ask questions if the answers were going to be deliberately opaque. I interjected to save her the effort.

“She means they like the same sex.” Annie May was still moving laboriously forward. “Boys that like boys instead of girls. Girls that like women better than men. That style of thing.”

“Ohhh.” Annie May settled back. “I’m ‘gay,’ then. Nothing wrong with that. You said it like it was a bad thing.”

Mary Katherine rolled her eyes. I looked at the picture of Annie May and Verdis.

“You’re not gay, Annie May.” My protest was tinged with guilt at having to correct a person I had been brought up to respect.

“Sure am. My husband was scum, like most of ‘em are, and who was my best friend my whole life? Most people are prob’ly ‘gay,’ they just don’t know it. You learn something new every day. Every day of your life.” This last was detached, as if spoken primarily to herself.

Mary Katherine rolled her eyes again. Another commercial came on, and Annie May went to the bathroom. Mary Katherine noticed my enquiring eyebrow.

“She’s not gay, you know. She’s senile, is what she is. We should think about assisted living.”

After she finished feeding and changing Desi, we took our leave – the news was over, and it was getting late. We still had a long drive.