Eastern Elbow Time

Ken’s job was to sit by Lydia’s side while his wife and her mother, Lydia’s partner, went out for groceries, in a busy neighborhood of Miami. He had known Lydia, a tennis pro, for many years, and they had gotten along well, although now dementia had set in, Lydia was near death, and it wasn’t as fun as it used to be to talk to her. Every few minutes, she’d ask what time it was. Ken would say, patiently, 10:15, or whatever, but he had to bite his tongue to prevent giving him the wise-guy answer from his youth, “Two freckles past a hair – eastern elbow time!”

As a child, growing up in a boisterous family outside Pittsburgh, this answer was almost a matter of pride – that one didn’t wear a watch, and didn’t care, and you could get more precise on how little one cared, but still, anybody who actually wants the time in a place where kids are playing hard, well, they’re pretty much on their own. His siblings and their friends lived a kind of boisterous, outdoor life, and very rarely were focused on the demands of the civilized world. When his little brother would say “Leave me alone!” he would frequently say, “How much, a thousand, two thousand?” with the same kind of torturous reference to a real world he neither cared for nor had any solid connection to.

But now, fifty years later, he sat at the tennis pro’s bedside, and was concerned that a reference to “elbow” might stir unpleasant memories, or at the very least confuse her, at a time when she needed reassurance. He liked Lydia, and cared for her a lot, though these times, when he was in charge of her, were difficult for him. In the past they had shared a lot of stories, and they shared a kind of ruthless competitiveness that probably was hard on both his wife Ann, and her mother, Jane. Ken could tell, sometimes, as Ann and Jane slipped out the door, that they relished their time away from their partners, though it could just be, in Jane’s case, that Lydia had become very difficult to care for. Her decline was rapid, her dementia more serious every day, and, though they had chosen to keep her out of a hospice facility, they were pretty sure her time was limited.

One time, Lydia had come back from a tennis tournament, beaten by a woman whose primary trick was throwing off the timing of the opponent. She’d built in a kind of fake start, and was just unpredictable enough with it so that she’d only serve when she was pretty sure the opponent was off-balance. It worked. She wasn’t a great server or even a great tennis player, but she’d throw off her opponents often enough, that she’d pick up enough points for a win. And she’d beaten Lydia that way.

Ken’s own story had to do with dynamite, though now, he couldn’t remember how he’d related the two stories. A good fifteen years of his life involved dynamite and blowing things up, often in remote places that involved extended concentration over days or even weeks, to get back to whatever bridge, road or building was going to fall. Part of blowing things up was superimposing a countdown on a real world clock and counting back from that zero hour to plan everything else out. At Jane and Lydia’s, he’d tell the stories of blowing things up. Once, though, Ann pointed out that the professional cook had the same situation, counting down with every course of a meal, so that it would all be hot and ready and beautiful at that last zero-minute, all at once. And this had stung him deeply, because the implication was that the cook spent his life feeding people and making them happy, whereas he’d spent his life destroying things. It was as a result of that comment that he changed his career, and became a professional cook. It wasn’t as dramatic a change as you would suspect, and Ken was able to pull it off pretty well; he was a good cook, and even now, was satisfied with his life and where it had gone. Sometimes Ann complained that his competitive nature robbed her of the joy of cooking, but there was no question they ate pretty well as a couple, and were able to feed their friends and relatives pretty well, too. Just last night he had cooked Jane a fancy dinner, and they sat and talked about old times, better times, for a long time into the evening.

Another time when they had been visiting, he had asked Lydia why, in tennis, one would have “love” when one had nothing. At least once every game, he said, one person would have “love,” and that would mean he had nothing. Of course, said Lydia, because the game comes from the French, “love” is actually “l’oeuf” or “the egg.” Actually that player has the egg, which is not really nothing, but kind of looks like a zero. But this answer didn’t satisfy Ken either; it was almost like the explanation was more confusing than the problem itself. And he went back and forth with Lydia; she would ask him why he was in the dynamite trade, for example, or ask him why it was that old man Nobel felt so guilty about blowing things up that he’d gone and started the Peace Prize. Their relationship was refreshingly honest, in a family in which many things went unspoken. She told him bluntly about fallings out in her own family, particularly about her being with Jane, but the same conversations never took place in the rest of Jane and Ann’s family. Lydia and Ken told the truth to each other, almost always, and that made their relationship unusual.

Ken slowly became aware that Ann and Jane would probably be late again. There was no question Miami’s traffic was horrible. And sure, they needed to get away; sure, they’d get a coffee, and perhaps talk, at the grocery store. They’d say things they couldn’t say around Ken or Lydia, and maybe they’d lose track of the time. But on his end, each minute seemed to last forever. Lydia was quiet most of the time, so he listened for every noise in the driveway.

But then, Lydia woke up suddenly, asked for some water, and began to talk to Ken with unusual lucidity, after asking for the time, of course. It was now about 10:28, and he told her so, biting his tongue again to prevent being a wise-guy; he expected Ann and Jane to be back at about 10:50, allowing for Miami’s traffic. She told him, more or less out of the blue, that she had always enjoyed talking to him, and that she had no regrets about her life. She said that she felt they shared that certain feeling that you get in a tennis match, of wanting everything to go right, and turn out well, to do the best you possibly can. He looked at her in the morning light, which came through the bedroom window; she was unusually beautiful, even though death was almost entirely taking over. And she seemed to be carefully telling him everything she wanted him to know, possibly knowing she wouldn’t have another chance. He stopped, almost breathless himself, and simply listened.

He had heard stories of people dying, and in fact had been by his own mother’s bedside just a couple of years ago, as she had died. Sometimes dying people see people who have gone before them, and even talk to them. Sometimes they are sure that a car is waiting for them, or that they are about to meet someone. And he knew that it could be that dying people know more than we do, and see more, and it’s not just the delusions of people who are beginning to lose their handle on reality. With Lydia, it didn’t seem like any of this was happening, but there was no doubt that the time was close. Having said what she wanted to, she fell back into a deep, restless sleep, and he simply sat by her side and watched her. At one point she woke up again, and once more she asked him the time. It was now 10:50, and he told her, once again hearing “two freckles past a hair” clearly in his mind, a clarion call from his own past, wandering around in the woods. Again she fell back asleep. Jane and Ann were expected any minute; undoubtedly Miami traffic was worse than they’d thought.

For a while Ken drifted off into daydreaming; he thought again of times in his childhood when most of what he said was things like “two freckles past a hair,” and “How much, a thousand? Two thousand?” The first, he actually liked, because it represented a simpler time, when one didn’t carry cell phones, and have that electronic fact burned into your home screen; it was a reminder that you could be disconnected, or oriented toward more physical things. The second, though, had an edge to it, and ignored the speaker’s need to be left alone. This was the problem, he thought, with big families, and probably one of the main reasons he never had kids. You were never left alone. No matter how obnoxious your siblings were, you were stuck with them and their big mouths, every minute.

He snapped out of his daydream when Lydia stirred, and something seemed to change. Suddenly, in her sleep, she began to lose her spirit altogether, and she stopped breathing, right in front of him. At the same time he knew it was bound to happen at some time, he was totally unprepared for it, when it did happen; he didn’t cry, or shake her, or try to talk her back to life; he simply watched, surprised. It was not that she hadn’t been able to say good-bye to Jane or Ann, it was more that it seemed, that, if there were no accidents, she had chosen to die in a room alone with him, at that moment. Was that possible? He was shocked, and didn’t know what to make of it. The moment stayed with him, even as he watched the color leave her face; she had clearly died.

When Jane and Ann came home, only ten or fifteen minutes later, they too were shocked, but immediately went into arrangements mode – they called the funeral home; they began to do things that they’d been planning to do anyway – call the family, distribute her belongings. Ken was in a daze for a few days, basically remembering the two images: Lydia, beautiful, by the window, the morning light on her, and Lydia, dying suddenly, slipping away, without warning Ann or Jane. And even though the funeral and beyond, it wasn’t discussed – they simply didn’t talk about such things.

(9-16)