Varieties of Disturbance (13 page)

Both Vi and Helen have mottoes on the walls of the kitchen, but Vi's tend to be purely humorous while Helen's—in Swedish, English, or both—are either religious (“God Bless This House”) or sentimental (“Home Sweet Home” and
“Hem kara hem”
) or moralistic (
“Den som vinner tid, vinner allt”
) or humorous with a moral message (“The hurrieder I go, the behinder I get”) or simply friendly (
“Villkomen”
). Also hanging in Helen's kitchen are several pictures intended to charm or entertain, such as a photograph of a frightened kitten clinging by its front paws to a thin branch.

Though she goes back to visit her house from time to time, Helen now lives in a shared room in a pleasant nursing home. Her half of the room is on the hall side rather than the window side, and is therefore darker, but she prefers not to be moved. She has had two roommates so far. The first was bedridden and mentally incompetent, emitting only groans and shouts except for the one intermittent phrase “Oh boy oh boy.” This woman died after a year, and the space is now occupied by an active woman in her forties with chronic progressive dementia. She is in the early stages of the disease and currently functions very well, caring for the cats and birds that live in the nursing home and giving Helen whatever help she can, as with the telephone, with selecting food choices from the daily menu offerings, and with many other necessary tasks. Helen and she have become fond of each other, and Helen's only difficulty with her is that the roommate, whether because of her disease or her medication, talks perhaps twice as fast as the average person, so that Helen, with her impaired hearing, cannot always understand her.

Because the nursing home is located in the town in which Helen has lived all her life, she regularly discovers, among the other residents, old friends or acquaintances who are in the home either for a short rehabilitation or, more usually, for permanent care. She had not been living there long, for instance, when one of her sons read off to her the names of the two women who lived directly across the hall. To her astonishment, one was Ruth, a close friend from her childhood with whom she had lost touch. Helen immediately went across the hall to visit her friend. The woman, however, was mentally incapacitated and, though Helen spent some time talking to her and recalling events from their youth, did not recognize her. Later, Helen showed her son a photograph in which she, in the front row, and Ruth, in the second, stood among ten or twelve other girls in their white confirmation dresses and curled hair, holding flowers.

Recreation

Although Vi sings in church, she does not sing while she works, or at other times.

Helen sang in church regularly as part of the congregation. She also sang Swedish songs with her family when she was growing up. When she still lived at home, she would sometimes hum softly along with the hymns that were chimed by a nearby church every evening at six o'clock. In the nursing home, she has occasionally been induced to sing a few carols with the other residents during a Christmas sing-along. She sings tremulously and so faintly as to be almost inaudible, her expression vacant and her eyes, behind their wide bifocal lenses, directed into the vague distance.

Every evening before bedtime, however, she goes across the hall to sing a Swedish children's prayer to her old friend Ruth.

When Vi's granddaughters lived with her, she used to come home in the evening exhausted after working sometimes not just one but two jobs, and the little girls would want to teach her a new dance. “Come on, Gramma,” they would say, “come on, dance with us.” She would say, “No, I'm tired, I'm too tired.” They would say, “Come on, Gramma, come on, dance with us—it's good exercise!” and she would give in and dance with them before she went to lie down.

Helen danced as a teenager, as often as once a week. Later, she would go to the dances where her husband was playing in the band, and still later, she and her husband would go out dancing together. When she still lived at home and her balance was good, she would occasionally catch hold of a grandchild's hands and dance with him for a moment by the kitchen door, singing a little tune to go along with the dance.

Activities with other people have been both Vi's and Helen's main forms of recreation all their lives. For Vi, most recently, these have taken the form of church activities, dinners with family or friends in her home, and travel. For Helen, they have been mostly confined to visits from family and friends and occasional scheduled events in the nursing home. Earlier in her married life, besides dancing with her husband, Helen liked to give card parties at home. She also put on regular dinners with friends and family, often including such characteristically Swedish dishes as pickled herring, pickled beets, meatballs, and limpa.

Reading was a form of recreation for Helen before her eyes went, but not for Vi. When Vi reads, it is the Bible. Helen used to read the Bible and other Christian books, such as
The Good Christian Wife
, but also magazines and the romantic novels of popular women authors like Judith Krantz.

Vi watches some television, but not much. She has a set in her kitchen that is on most of the time, especially when her daughter is visiting, but she is often busy cooking, talking on the telephone, or visiting with friends, and only intermittently pays attention to it. She is shocked by the low level of many of the programs.

At home, Helen had a console television set in the corner of her living room and used to watch game shows and one soap opera in particular,
As the World Turns
. After her eyesight became so poor, she would still listen to the programs, but then she abandoned television altogether. She also listened to the radio that she kept in the kitchen on a shelf over the sink, not only the Sunday sermons and inspirational talks, but also the women's basketball games, which she followed with some ardor: a tense moment in a game was one of the rare occasions when she was, in her own gentle way, assertive with another person, asking by the most delicate of gestures—an upraised hand and a tilt of the head—for a pause in the conversation so that she could hear the outcome of the play. She is still a fan of the UConn team. Vi does not seem to follow sports at all.

Neither Vi nor Helen is very interested in world or national news in areas such as economics, politics, literature, or art. They are both keenly interested in news of disasters and in human interest stories involving a universal theme in a particularly dramatic form—love, loss, betrayal, perversion, gross injury or disability, death. They may also, exceptionally, comment on some recent legislation that will affect them directly. But the news that engages them most is strictly local, concerning those close to them—and this includes not only their immediate friends and family but also their friends' extended family; in these areas they are quite up-to-date on the latest information, most often remembering all names and ages and relationships of those involved.

Now that Helen spends so many hours sitting in her chair by her bed, unable to read or watch television, she confides that her main leisure activity, when she is alone, is to remember and relive incidents and episodes from her past life.

Travel

Vi learned to drive at the age of sixty. Her last surviving cousin never drove a car, and it didn't do her any good, Vi says, always to be standing on street corners in all types of weather waiting for a bus or a taxi. Certain friends of Vi's will drive around town but will not drive to any other town, but Vi is not afraid to drive a fair distance.

She drives a large car that was her second husband's particular pride: he always kept it perfectly cleaned and shined. She says he would be so ashamed to see how she takes care of it, although it looks fairly clean and tidy to anyone else. True, she does allow dust to gather on the dashboard and tiny scraps of litter on the floor.

The fact that Helen never drove a car meant that in later life she and two of her friends shared their weekly trip out for groceries; thus, the necessary chore became a pleasant social occasion.

Vi travels regularly within the country and occasionally out of the country, whereas Helen no longer travels and rarely did.

Vi goes to Washington to visit her granddaughter, and sometimes farther south to attend a wedding or funeral. She either drives with her daughter or takes the bus with a friend. Other, local trips are either by car, when she drives herself, or in the church van, when the choir is going off somewhere to sing.

Helen has traveled very little in her life, though members of her extended family have gone to Sweden to visit historical family sites. She took several vacations in New England with her husband and sons and, after she was widowed, two trips to Florida with her
brother. In all of her life, she has lived away from her hometown only once: after she graduated from high school, her brother drove her down to New York City, where she settled in Brooklyn and studied dressmaking for one year at the Pratt Institute. After she was married and raising her two sons, she rarely went farther from home than to Hartford by train.

For many years now, travel for Helen has been limited to drives around town and into the countryside as a passenger. She looks out the window, and despite her near-blindness manages to identify old landmarks from her younger years: a friend's farm, the group home where her friend Robert lives with his large collection of first-edition books, the house where she once worked as a maid, her friends' florist shop, the house on Oak Street where her family first lived after they left the farm, and the house in back of it that her father built.

Pets and Other Animals

Both Helen and Vi are very fond of animals and have had pets and domestic animals in their lives from early childhood.

Vi is more partial to dogs; she has more stories about them, and photographs of them. But she is also amused by cats, especially one small black cat that tries to grab the dust cloth out of her hand where she works—helping her to clean, she says. Her backyard is full of strays and neighborhood cats, though she does not feed them. The old woman next door feeds them, she says, and although some of the other neighbors object, Vi sees no harm in it, since this is one of the old woman's few pleasures and she will be gone from this world soon enough. When Vi talks about this old woman, she seems to forget that she herself, being eighty-five, is also an old woman.

In Helen's early life, there were the two horses, as well as the cows, calves, cats and kittens, and a large flock of chickens. In her adult life, she has almost always had a cat as a pet. She used to feed strays at her back door, and one winter arranged a cardboard box shelter for one of them under the outside staircase. She would walk out over the ice with small, careful steps just before dark to set his evening meal down in the snow. There are cats in the nursing home, and one in particular, a large Persian, will occasionally wander in to visit her. She speaks to him, smiles, and reaches her hand down to him, though in her eyes he is only an orange blur.

Hope kept an overweight female cat throughout her later years, with sometimes harmony between them and sometimes ill will. She was sure the cat harbored resentments and indulged in some calculated bad behavior. When, eventually, she was advised by a home health expert that the cat posed a certain hazard to her by crouching in dark corners, getting underfoot, and occasionally attacking her ankles, she immediately arranged for it to be put down by the local vet before her family could intervene.

Although Helen, when she lived at home, kept a bird feeder well supplied outside the kitchen window where she could watch it over her morning coffee, she had no great love of, or interest in, other sorts of wild creatures.

Vi, the same in this respect, particularly dislikes snakes and often repeats a long story about finding one in her yard and going after it with a shovel. When she was a child in Virginia, the windows were kept open in the summertime and lizards would climb up to sun themselves on the windowsills. The children were scared of the lizards and wanted to kill them. But Vi's grandmother told them the lizards would not hurt them, to let the lizards stay there and enjoy the sun, and they would go away when they were ready.

Neither Helen nor Vi is particularly interested in the natural world beyond the confines of the garden. Nature for Helen, when she still lived at home, manifested itself either as a practical problem—trees shading the house, the lawn that did not grow well, the hedge that needed clipping, acorns in the driveway—or a domesticated thing of beauty like her favorite, the azalea shrub, or the dogwood in blossom. Her work in the yard was caretaking work rather than designing and planting, with the exception of the geraniums, which she liked to see set out in the spring in a row by the front porch. Every spring, too, she looked for the first blooms of the flowering bulbs.

She also enjoyed nature in the form of the landscape as seen from the car window on a Sunday drive.

Religion

Both Helen and Vi have maintained close involvement with their churches all their lives, although the church has loomed larger in Vi's life than in Helen's. Their churches have constituted their most important larger community, both social and spiritual.

In youth and middle age, Helen participated in the church's ladies' auxiliary group and helped out with such projects as bake sales for fund-raising. Every summer her family attended the church picnics. She said grace before every meal while she still lived at home. It is important to her that every family member be baptized, although her gentle insistence about this has sometimes had no effect. Her religious beliefs do not explicitly enter or color her conversation. She now rarely goes to a church service because the chapel in her nursing home is Catholic.

Vi's strong faith occasionally enters her conversation, when she refers to “God's will” or, more jocularly, describes what God might have in mind for her future. When she used to visit the local prison, she would incorporate some Christian teaching in her conversations with the prisoners. She likes to spend time at Bible study with her best friend on a warm Saturday evening in summer. They take chairs out into the backyard, and as it grows dark they read aloud to each other from Scripture, discussing each passage in preparation for the following day's Bible class.