Fresh Complaint. Jeffrey Eugenides
no nursing staff. It’s cheaper than assisted living and the benefits are minimal: prepared meals in the dining room, linen service once a week. That’s it.
As for Della, she appears unchanged from the last time Cathy saw her, in August. In preparation for the visit she has put on a clean denim jumper and a yellow top, and applied lipstick and makeup in the right places and amounts. The only difference is that Della uses a walker herself now. A week after she moved in, she slipped and hit her head on the pavement outside the entrance. Knocked out cold. When she came to, a big, handsome paramedic with blue eyes was staring down at her. Della gazed up at him and asked, “Did I die and go to heaven?”
At the hospital, they gave Della an MRI to check for bleeding in the brain. Then a young doctor came in to examine her for other injuries. “So there I am,” Della told Cathy over the phone. “Eighty-eight years old and this young doctor is checking over every inch of me. And I mean every inch. I told him, ‘I don’t know how much they’re paying you, but it isn’t enough.’”
These displays of humor confirm what Cathy has felt all along, that a lot of Della’s mental confusion is emotional in origin. Doctors love to hand out diagnoses and pills without paying attention to the human person right in front of them.
As for Della, she has never named her diagnosis. Instead she calls it “my malady,” or “this thing I’ve got.” One time she said, “I can never remember the name for what it is I have. It’s that thing you get when you’re old. That thing you most don’t want to have. That’s what I’ve got.”
Another time she said, “It’s not Alzheimer’s but the next one down.”
Cathy isn’t surprised that Della represses the terminology. Dementia isn’t a nice word. It sounds violent, invasive, like having a demon scooping out pieces of your brain, which, in fact, is just what it is.
Now she looks at Della’s walker in the corner, a hideous magenta contraption with a black leatherette seat. Boxes protrude from under the daybed. There are dishes piled in the sink of the tiny efficiency kitchen. Nothing drastic. But Della has always kept the tidiest of houses, and the disarray is troubling.
Cathy’s glad she brought the present.
“Aren’t you going to open it?” she asks.
Della looks down at the gift as though it has just materialized in her hands. “Oh, right.” She turns the package over. Examines its underside. Her smile is uncertain. It’s as though she knows that smiling is required at this moment but isn’t sure why.
“Look at this gift-wrapping!” she says, finally. “It’s just precious. I’m going to be careful not to tear it. Maybe I can reuse it.”
“You can tear it. I don’t mind.”
“No, no,” Della insists. “I want to save this nice paper.”
Her old spotted hands work at the wrapping paper until it comes unstuck. The book falls into her lap.
No recognition.
That doesn’t mean anything, necessarily. The publishers have put out a new edition. The original cover, with the illustration of the two women sitting cross-legged in a wigwam, has been replaced by a color photograph of snowcapped mountains, and jazzier type.
A second later, Della exclaims, “Oh, hey! Our favorite!”
“Not only that,” Cathy says, pointing at the cover. “Look. ‘Twentieth-Anniversary Edition! Two Million Sold!’ Can you believe it?”
“Well, we always knew it was a good book.”
“We sure did. People should listen to us.” In a softer voice Cathy says, “I thought it might get you back to reading, Della. Since you know it so well.”
“Hey, right. Sort of prime the pump. The last book you sent me, that Room? I’ve been reading that for two months now and haven’t gotten further than twenty pages.”
“That book’s a little intense.”
“It’s all about someone stuck in a room! Hits a little close to home.”
Cathy laughs. But Della isn’t entirely joking and this gives Cathy an opportunity. Sliding off the daybed, she gesticulates at the walls, groaning, “Couldn’t Bennett and Robbie get you a better place than this?”
“They probably could,” Della says. “But they say they can’t. Robbie’s got alimony and child support. And as far as Bennett goes, that Joanne probably doesn’t want him spending any money on me. She never liked me.”
Cathy sticks her head in the bathroom. It’s not as bad as she expects, nothing dirty or embarrassing. But the rubberized shower curtain looks like something in an asylum. That’s something they can fix right away.
“I’ve got an idea.” Cathy turns back to Della. “Did you bring your family photos?”
“I sure did. I told Bennett I wasn’t going anywhere without my photo albums. As it is, he made me leave all my good furniture behind, so the house will sell. But do you know what? So far not a single person has even come through.”
If Cathy is listening, she doesn’t show it. She goes to the window and yanks up the blinds. “We can start by brightening things up a little in here. Get some pictures on the walls. Make this place look like somewhere you live.”
“That would be good. If this place wasn’t so pitiful-looking, I think I might feel better about being here. It’s almost like being—incarcerated.” Della shakes her head. “Some of the people in this place are sort of on the edge, too.”
“They’re edgy, huh?”
“Real edgy,” Della says, laughing. “You have to be careful who you sit next to at lunch.”
After Cathy leaves, Della watches the parking lot from her chair. Clouds are massing in the distance. Cathy said the storm won’t get here until Monday, after she’s gone, but Della, feeling apprehensive, reaches for the remote.
She points it at the TV and presses the button. Nothing happens. “This new TV Bennett got me isn’t worth a toot,” she says, as though Cathy, or someone, is still there to listen. “You have to turn on the TV and then this other box underneath. But even when I manage to get the darn TV on, I can never find any of my good shows.”
She has put down the remote just as Cathy emerges from the building, on the way to her car. Della follows her progress with perplexed fascination. Part of why she discouraged Cathy from coming out now wasn’t about the weather. It’s that Della isn’t sure she’s up to this visit. Since her fall and the hospital stay, she hasn’t felt too good. Sort of punky. Going around with Cathy, getting caught up in a whirlwind of activity, might be more than she can handle.
On the other hand, it would be nice to brighten up her apartment. Looking at the drab walls, Della tries to imagine them teeming with beloved, meaningful faces.
And then a period ensues where nothing seems to happen, nothing in the present, anyway. These interludes descend on Della more and more often lately. She’ll be looking for her address book, or making herself coffee, when suddenly she’ll be yanked back into the presence of people and objects she hasn’t thought about for years. These memories unsettle her not because they bring up unpleasant things (though they often do) but because their vividness so surpasses her day-to-day life that they make it feel as faded as an old blouse put through the wash too many times. One memory that keeps coming back lately is of that coal bin she had to sleep in as a child. This was after they moved up to Detroit from Paducah, and after her father ran off. Della, her mom, and her brother were living in a boardinghouse. Her mom and Glenn got regular rooms, in the upstairs, but Della had to sleep in the basement. You couldn’t even get to her room from inside the house. You had to go out to the backyard and lift doors that led down to the cellar. The landlady had whitewashed the room and put in a bed and some pillows made from flour sacks. But that didn’t fool Della. The door was made of metal, and there weren’t