Maple Grove

  

There was that sickly moment I’d always remember, though I cursed myself for it being so cliché. In the passenger’s seat of the car, I watched as my home got smaller and smaller in the side-view mirror. Jonathan, my son, was the one driving. It was a nice car, much nicer than the first one he had back when he was still learning to drive. Of course, it had been the family station wagon, when Irving had finally decided to buy a new one and give that one to our son. This car was all sleek lines and an interior that squeaked unpleasantly. I had let out a tiny “ohh” when I sat down, causing the sound. My son had laughed.  

The trees of the neighborhood whizzed by as I took it all in. It wasn’t as if I could never leave the nursing home I was moving into. It was just important for me to remember details. It was seventeen oak trees down from my house to my best friend Betty’s house. She’d passed away quite a few years before. Her house was bought by a couple and their young boy who liked to run along the side of their house with a toy plane. They were pleasant enough, but I hated the color they painted the house. Betty’s birthday was November 4, 1932. She almost made it to eighty-one.  

Another three streets over was the school I had gone to. They tore it down and built a convenience store there. Five more streets was where Irving had lived when we first met. It was always such a lovely house, with brightly painted shutters and an intricately carved door-knocker shaped like a lion. His father would often tell me and the other kids stories about how the lion would come to life at night and scare away any burglars, and of course, we all believed it. The last owners of the house lost it to foreclosure. No one lived there anymore. Irving’s birthday was April 29, 1933. He didn’t make it to eighty.  

Down the highway and seven streets down was where the nursing home was. Maple Grove Retirement Village was the name. There weren’t even any maple trees around. It wasn’t a village. The building was three stories tall and in the shape of a squared-off U. There was a courtyard enveloped by the building with some shrubbery and benches. None of those plants were indigenous to the area, I had noted.  

“Looks just as nice as the pamphlets I showed you,” Jonathan said, pulling the car into a space with swift arm jolts, locking it in dead between the lines.  

“At least you learned how to park properly,” I mumbled. I was reminded of the jagged scrape the old station wagon endured along the side, thanks to his attempts at parking while learning. We never got it fixed, kind of as punishment. Look here, now the car can have a crooked little smirk like you, son.  

“Hey now, don’t change the subject,” he droned, switching off the car and swiping the key from the ignition in one fluid motion. “This would’ve been a lot easier if you had just come with us to check this place out when me and Sal came.”  

“Right. Sorry,” I said.  

He sighed, heavy enough to cause his college graduation tassels hung from the rearview mirror to flutter, with a wheeze at the end like an old cassette tape giving out. The car door swung open with a bit more force than before, shutting the same. I remained a moment, staring at the front doors of this building. They were red. Homes usually painted their doors red. It’s said to make the home more inviting. On a home, the red would have radiated like a rose, beautiful and soft. Here, it felt like a stop sign.  

Just as I was locking my knuckles around my well-used handbag, my car door flew open.  

“Seriously, Trudy! You can’t stay in the car forever!” He barked at me, a brash sound like clock tower bells, something you were prepared for every hour, on the hour, but still catches you off guard.  

Without a word, I rose from my seat, the creaking of my bones doing all the talking. I compared myself to an old house these days. I creaked, bits of me weren’t working as well as they used to, yet I stood tall as people frequently came and left me for warmer places.   

People were never meant to be homes, after all. A home is a stable, static place, but they take so long to build. People are just there, promising all those things and, because they already exist, it’s so tempting. It’s so close. Window eyes and door mouths, but you can’t control the curtains or the lock. People aren’t static, no matter how hard you try. They change their wallpaper, and you convince yourself it looks better with the carpet. And they tinker with the plumbing; you always wanted an indoor swimming pool, right? The home becomes too familiar, and you can’t just give it up. Plus, you’re bad with real estate. Eventually, you don’t leave. You never leave, until they do. Houses can’t leave, but people will just make you homeless.  

This three-sided square had to be my home now. This was what happened when you became a widow, I supposed. Or at least when your children no longer thought you important enough to care for. Or at least when you had no more money to give your children. We walked up a path made of square blocks in the ground. There were thirty, I counted. I didn’t know why I noted it, as I wouldn’t be leaving this place too often. Notation of surroundings had become so inherent in me that I began tallying them up without much thought as we approached the red door.  

The interior reeked of sterility. The tiles that made up the floor were shiny, pearlescent, making a muffled thwack upon each footfall. They were all white, except for every fifth one in the row and column, which was the accented navy blue tile. Even the walls had that scrubbed-clean look about them.  

To say that this lobby area was scattered with furniture would be incorrect. Scattering would imply random chance or imprecision. They were placed with a strict grid. The chairs and loveseats were streamlined in style, with no frills or patterns, just blocks of cushion and steel bars. Some of my fellow residents were out and about, sitting, reading, and talking, scribbled lines juxtaposed with perfect geometry. They seemed… content, I supposed.  

A head bobbing on the shoulders of a young woman behind a desk bolted up upon their entrance. She was wide-eyed like a doe in the headlights of an ambulance. Her mane was chestnut brown, ironed straight, never giving a hint that she might have curls or pointy, twitching ears. She wore all white with a little red cross over her heart; whether it represented nurse status or target practice remained a mystery.  

“Hi there!” the girl behind the desk piped, flashing a smile. There were small dimples on her teeth where braces must have recently been. “How can I help you today?”  

“We’re here to check my mom in,” Jonathon started, pulling some forms out of his pocket while simultaneously indicating to me standing next to him. “She’s supposed to move into room… 311?”  

“Name please?” the girl asked, swiveling over to her computer and getting her slender fingers ready to type.  

“Gertrude Ainsworth,” he stated as if I couldn’t speak for myself. I was fine with that; I felt too bitter to really converse. The girl went clicking away at the keyboard with the greatest of ease. I once had secretarial work, so I learned to use a typewriter. The sounds of the metal keys were somehow more pleasant than the plastic ones, to my ears at least, but always just reminded me of the mice in my attic as a child. We had found forty-four up there over the course of my life.  

“Ahh… yup, here she is,” said the girl, “Gertrude in 311. It’ll be up on the third floor of course. We have stairs and elevators, but if the trip up ever becomes difficult, just let us know!” She again bared her teeth at us. I could only imagine her face splitting at the seams from doing that so often. The girl then opened a drawer, rummaged a bit, and produced an envelope. “We’ve got your keys and introduction papers right in here. I’ll get someone over here to bring you up to your room and show you around.” She pushed a button on an office phone, and I counted 47 seconds before a young man came strolling towards us, wearing a similarly bleach-white uniform, only the symbol on his chest was a blue heart.  

“Is this Gertrude then?” rang his voice and, not surprisingly, a full set of ivories on display. I was already going to start calling this the Maple Grove Smile™, a consistent part of their marketing plan, evidently. “Hi there, folks, my name is Mark, and I’ll be showing you around your new home.”  

Jonathon instinctively shot his hand out to shake the young man’s, who immediately obliged. “Jon. Nice to meet you, Mark. This is my mom, Trudy.” He gave a brisk shake with unwavering eye contact, something he had learned in business school. Mark smiled and nodded to me, I nodded back, forcing one corner of my mouth to jerk up. “Well folks, if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you some of the important areas in Maple Grove, then up to your room... Sound good?”  

  

Regardless of my personal opinion on how it sounded, our trio started the tour of the right side of the building. It was fifty feet from the lobby desk, past the arranged furniture area, to the corner of the building where there were the elevators and a door for the stairs. As we made the turn, I heard the ding of the elevator behind us. It reminded me of the sound of the one metal tube on my old wind chime that was dented and thus twinkled off key, and the swish of the doors sliding open was a lot like my feet wiping against my welcome mat.  

The long hallway had apartments on both sides, three on each side. The first apartment’s door was red, the next one yellow, and the last one blue. Taking into consideration their apparent color scheme and who I had seen so far, I began wondering who wore a yellow symbol on their uniform. The hall was a hundred feet long, I figured, keeping track of the tiles on the floor, now that I had calculated each to be about a foot long. At the end of the hallway was a set of double doors that led, as Mark explained in a sweeping, tour guide voice, to the first-floor café. He said how each floor had its own café in this area. We looked inside to see some other residents inside, eating at shiny metal tables.  

The second floor mimicked the first, save for the lobby area, which was just one big living area here with other apartments, and the left-hallway community room was a library.  

“Do you like to read much, Trudy?” Mark asked quietly, since it was, in fact, a library.  

“Sometimes,” I mumbled, looking around.  

While there were rows and rows of books to choose from, all nice, new, and hardcover, big, overstuffed chairs to plop yourself down on and cubicles with some sleek-looking computers, it was not the type of library I would like. In my youth, the local library was seven streets down and three streets left from my home, and it was a magnificent building like a stunted Gothic cathedral. The inside was dark but not gloomy. There was warmth in this darkness from the interior slatted with bog oak, walnut, and mahogany, with bookshelves that towered taller than your imagination could take you. I had this one chair I always sought out, next to the fireplace that would be lit in the cooler months, an ornate chair whose sharp flourishes and frivolous ornamentation were contrasted by the soft, velvet cushion I would sink into with a rectangular portal to another world. The darkness held me close there, where I could let life blur out at the edges.  

The Maple Grove library was just like the rest of the building, bright and white, clinical and cynical. Sufficient light to read but a painful lack of personality. I did love to read though, and since most of my books had to be left behind with my smaller living arrangements, I would probably just make do with what they had here.  

Finally, the final floor, the one that I would reside on. As expected, the layout was the same. The community room on the third floor, however, was a greenhouse garden. Mark had noticed my eyes excitedly moving about the humid glass room, from the simple potted flowers to the vines spilling to the floor to the ripening vegetables. I noted ten distinct plots, each one with a small card sticking in the soil with a name on it. “Gardening of interest to you?” he asked. “There isn’t enough room for every tenant, usually not everyone wants to garden, but in case there isn’t room, the plots are done in shifts.”  

“That does sound nice,” I said, wandering forth a bit to gaze at the flora. I heard my son let out a sigh of relief behind me. Most of the plants looked in good shape, vibrant and fragrant, except for one plot near the back (third row, second to last) in which the plants had gone all brown and decayed.  

“Oh goodness, forgot that Morana had left us about a month ago,” Mark sighed sadly. But we forgot to clear out her plants. Well… I suppose that means you’d be more than welcome to it.”  

  

“Well, I think it’s about time we got to your new room then!” chimed Mark, as they reached my room of 311. I stared at the numbers, and they stared right back. Their sleek modernist forms were blocked out of my jaundice yellow door. My apartment was on the left side of the building. At least I’d be close to the garden. My fingers gripped tighter around my pocketbook, feeling the leather strain and whine with tension, as if bracing to somehow defend myself. But I was fairly certain I knew what the inside was going to look like: just like everything else.  

Stark. Modular. Devoid of distinctiveness. The layout mimicked the shape of the building, the squared-off U. I walked slowly into the U’s opening. To the left was a kitchenette, all shining tiles, floor, and walls. To the left was a wall, inside of it I would discover to be the bedroom and bathroom. In front lay three windows, a red table, a yellow couch, and a blue table, all along the grid. Everything else was white. It was too blank. It was a void. My son and my tour guide were having a conversation behind me; I heard the words but didn’t listen. The bright white around me seemed to conjure up a deafening silence that engulfed me, squeezing the air out of me. First chance I get, I need to take a walk, find a tree, count exactly how many leaves there were… anything but this nothingness.  

“So, would you like to walk down with your son on his way out?” Mark asked in my direction, startling me out of my haze.  

I turned to look at the pearly teeth with a body and then to my son, who was making eye contact with his phone, held at chest level, a double chin even forming on his slender neck. His expression remained blank as he forced his eyes upward with a quick glance at Mark, then to me. He suppressed his need to roll them.  

“No, I think we’ll be fine,” I muttered to the carpet.  

  

Isolation was a gradual thing in my life, coming and going in waves. Being alone wasn’t an option when you were young. Hold my hand. Don’t cross the street by yourself. Stay close. Then there’s a period of time in adolescence where you can be surrounded by as many people as you can be but still be alone. Then you get married, have kids, and people are always around. The kids move away, you become a widow, and now you’re truly alone. I didn’t even have my wedding ring anymore to remind myself that I once shared my life. It had been my suggestion that Irving sell our rings when the price of gold skyrocketed. I never told him he should waste the money on a shotgun though. “Think of it. Two barrels next to each other for all time. Ain’t nothing more romantic than that.” He hunted nine deer with it, only one of them a buck.  

I didn’t leave the room for the rest of the night; I wanted to cannonball into the loneliness rather than toeing myself into it with painful slowness. I wanted to see how dark that white could get in the middle of the night. In my simple, single bed, I had laid down and stared at the ceiling. Not a single pore or crevice found to count myself to sleep.  Occasionally, I heard shuffling of people below me. A squeaky wheel on a cart of some kind went back and forth three times in the hallway. Janitor, probably. I finally slept with vivid dreams. It was a nightmare but almost welcoming with my blank exterior surroundings. At least it was in color. I still sometimes dreamt in black and white. In the dream, I was driving along the highway at night. The trees that hugged each side of the road were black masses of wispy shapes as if the dark clouds above had invaded the ground. There were no other cars around, just mine, being strung along the asphalt endlessly, the yellow dashed lines bulleting past the only thing giving a sense of advancement. That was the extent of the dream, an endless drive in the dark with an unknown destination. It still somehow left me feeling uneasy when I woke up.  

  

I awoke with a taste like death in my mouth, the kind of morning breath that could travel throughout your core, like an echo in the cavern I humbly called a body. The metal taste lingered on my white, bacterial-bloomed tongue, sour against forming cavities, and I idly probed those hunks of bone that jut from my gums. With each wet flick, I counted the number of days it had been since I had seen a dentist. I felt much like a cave in other ways, round on the outside but hollow within, where people rarely venture, except for shelter during trying times.    

A slew of smiles engulfed me as I made my way out of my room that morning. All the Maple Grove drones would have been alerted to this newcomer, arriving in droves to greet this new Trudy. It was a peppy, babble of I’m so glad that you’ve chosen us as your new home and I hope you’re settling just fine and If you need anything at all don’t hesitate. I imagined cue cards off in the distance with those words. I grunted a pleasantry with a nod as I made my way down to the common area. Each flight of stairs had fifteen steps. I was hoping to find some company that wasn’t on their payroll, though I wasn’t interested in making friends. Just some people to talk to.  

The common area on the first floor had three other people seated around a coffee table, all talking with each other, while two individuals were off by themselves, faces in books. I felt my legs hesitate to move forward and tightness in my chest. Meeting new people was a pain for me. I had faint memories of elementary school and trying to make friends. Even back then, I wasn’t sure I wanted friends but assumed I had to have some. I had even pretended to have an imaginary friend because I thought I was supposed to. The other kids would give me strange sideways glances as I would say to one of them they have two hundred and seventeen freckles on their faces and seven buttons on their shirts. I once mentioned to a boy that three of his front teeth were crooked and got pushed to the ground for it. I tried to keep these things to myself after that.  

After two breaths in and out, I walked over to the group, their attention turning to me as they saw me approaching.  

“You must be the new gal, right?” asked one of them, a man with thick-rimmed glasses perched at the end of his bulbous nose. “Heard we were getting someone new. Sit with us, we’ll spill all the secrets,” he said with a small laugh, motioning for me to sit in the available chair. The other members of the group were a woman with dark skin and steel gray hair twisted into a braid and a man with a priest collar. When the priest looked up, his eyes widened.  

“Trudy?” he exclaimed, leaning forward with excitement, “Trudy Ainsworth! I knew that name sounded familiar!” His arm shot out and took mine, shaking it earnestly as I began to recognize him too.  

 “Clark Brogan,” I said, trying to sound sincerely kind. “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”  

“The class of ’57 we were,” he said to his friends. “University work isn’t the same, that’s for sure.” I had gone to college when my only options were secretarial or nursing-type majors, but my mother had said if I wasn’t getting married yet I was at least going to school. Clark had been one of my future husband’s friends, always a loudmouth and an instigator. I chuckled looking at him. This had been the man that would attach mirrors to the tips of his shoes so he could look up girls’ skirts. Of course, he had become a pastor.

“So these are my cohorts,” he continued, arm motioning towards the other gentleman, “Harry Ellis,” and to the woman, “and Virginia Harper.” I nodded at them, as they began the usual Q&A, about my life, my family, and how I ended up here.  

“They were tired of taking care of me,” I said plainly, looking at the covers of the magazines rather than their faces.  

“Really?” said Virginia, her voice cracking with sadness, “That’s awful. That’s really awful.”  

“Well…” I said, with a shrug, seeing that Good Housekeeping recommends a hundred and two creative birthday presents and six foods that help stop stress, rather than looking at the pained expression of Virginia.  

“Kids think they’re entitled to a lot,” said Harry, leaning back and crossing his arms. “I see it all the time with my grandkids. So last week…”  

The conversation continued, and I studied everything other than the spoken words. Harry had two mismatched buttons on his shirt and seven blades of grass stuck jutting out under his shoes. He had fourteen liver spots on his face and hands that I could see. Virginia’s braid crossed hairs eight times, and her polka-dotted shirt had a hundred and sixty-seven dots within view. And Clark, he had two false teeth in the front and a scar under his chin that required eight stitches, both of those things a result of a fight in our sophomore year. If I could get closer to them, I could count all the wrinkles on their skin. This was all I needed, just something to look at, something complex and authentic.  

  

Later that night, I couldn’t sleep. The emptiness had gotten to me again. Hours went by (four hours and thirty-eight minutes), I tried sleeping on both sides seven times and on my back three, I fluffed my pillows twice, but there was no use. With some strain, I swung my legs over the edge of the mattress, securing myself with my palms on either side of me. I looked down at my feet which just barely touched the floor. I wondered if I’d be able to get into the library at this hour, though a faint voice rang in my head. My tour guide had rattled off some regulations about living here, one of them being residents were not to leave their rooms after 10 pm because the custodial staff cleaned the floors, leaving them slippery. Pffft. They treated us like children, unable to maneuver a wet floor, eh? All the modules and blankness left me feeling rebellious. I chuckled as I got to my feet, thinking how silly it sounded that sneaking into the library in my retirement home would be considered rebellious. Some written words could ease me to sleep, I figured. I grabbed hold of my cotton robe to keep me warm and some flimsy excuses should I get caught. Sleepwalking? Dementia? Restless leg syndrome?  

I opened my front door and was tangled in darkness. Not a single light cut through it, not from a window nor a crack under the door. The only thing thicker was the pang of disinfectant in the atmosphere. I stepped a foot out. I could sense that the floor was damp but not overly, something I could manage, but in this darkness? Was this their deterrent to keep us from getting out of bed? Perhaps for the feeble of mind. I knew exactly how many steps it was from my apartment to the stairs, then exactly how many stairs down it was to the second floor. My slippers made a soft padding noise and I lifted foot after foot, marveling at my ability to be so sneaky. An old lady ninja. The stairs were a little troublesome, but I knew the elevator would be too suspicious. I was extra careful. No matter how certain I was of the number of stairs, there was still a palpable dread I felt upon each footfall with each step. The feeling of a foot falling through an imagined stair in the blackness was a surprising thing.  

Without fault, I reached the landing. I placed my ear to the door of the stairwell, just to be sure I didn’t have any company. Counting my steps carefully, I made my way down the empty hallway. Not even the sound of a snoring tenant. My thick fingers tickled the darkness until they sensed the metal handle of the library door. But a quick pull told me it was locked tight. I tutted myself almost out loud. Of course, it was. Mission kaput.  

I stood there a moment and let the darkness grip me. My thoughts panned over what it had been like there at Maple Grove so far, how I desperately needed to find people just to tally the stuff about them, and how I felt like wandering in the dark to the library was a grand adventure. This would be the extent of the rest of my life, where the most interesting thing to count would be the number of days I guessed I had left.  

Something in my stomach jumped. A muscle in my brain flexed.  

I had to leave.  

There were no other options. I would leave everything I brought here and just walk home.  

Down the stairs, I went, down to the first floor, eager in my movements but never missing a step or making a sound. I went as quickly as my creaking legs could take me, an unpleasant popping of my old ligaments rattling me.   

I crossed the main lobby area and turned to the front entrance. My hands flattened against the door handle and pushed. An alarm sounded. It squealed at two-second intervals, and as I opened up the door wider, it spilled into the night air. My body froze for a moment, as I realized I had to make a decision. I knew if I stayed there and allowed the reprimands from my caretakers for breaking the rules, I would be watched closely, never getting a chance like this again. And I knew exactly how to get home.  

Up the highway, seven streets up. That’s all I had to manage. My soft slippers flopped against the sidewalks, damp from a light misting that had just passed, a muffled slap of each foot. At first, I was worried I would call attention to myself, an old woman trudging the highway in the middle of the night. I passed six homeless people on the highway, two with just carts, one with a peg leg, one talking to a cat, one dressed like he was from the 70s, fake afro and all, and one I assumed was a prostitute. No one would pay me any mind.  

After I got off the highway, my legs began to strain and I slowed my pace. I hadn’t heard anyone following me, so I hoped I’d be okay. Just seven streets. I counted each block of sidewalk I walked over and the number of cars I saw parked in the street. The first street had four cars. The second street had nine. I started to lose feeling in my legs by the fourth street and started to have trouble breathing by the fifth. Just two more, I told myself, as I clutched at my cramping side.  

While I had all these streets memorized, I felt relief recognizing my own street, the seven houses that had mailboxes near the street and the three that had them at their door, the three that had shutters on their windows, and the two that had a flagpole. Ten houses I knew, mine the best, with its four windows that faced the road, the six rose bushes that traced the walkway to the front door, the forty-five blocks in the walkway, the four hundred and sixty-eight red shingles on her roof.   

I fetched the hidden spare key from a loose board in the doorframe and went inside.  

My family, it seemed, had already started clearing much of the stuff out of my home. I looked at the bare floors, small indentations on the carpets where furniture once stood. They had left my rocking chair, at least, where I immediately plopped myself down.  

Yes, of course, I thought, I am an old lady who likes rocking chairs. Of course. Another moment, so cliché. I rocked and started to massage the kinks out of my legs, counting as I went.  

It was three hundred and eighty-seven rocks before I saw the flashing police lights outside.  

It was a shame they had to see this old house so empty.