As was often the case, Dorothy’s first thought when she woke up was, “Nothing new under the sun.” She’d had the thought a few times already today, and this time when
she opened her eyes she was in the dining room, with its familiar linoleum-tiled floor and the baskets of plastic geraniums on the windowsills. There was a soggy grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of soup in front of her. Must be lunch time.
“Hey Dottie!” It was that damned Fred. She rolled her eyes, but it was pointless. Her once-bright eyes – they had been bright, hadn’t they? She couldn’t remember – were surrounded by creases and folds, like cloudy marbles buried in a pile of old leaves. Dottie was not her name and never had been; there was nothing dotty about her. She was not flighty or eccentric, nor was she small and round like a cute little polkadot. She shook her head. She didn’t give a damn what he called her.
But there was a new woman at the table, and Fred’s attention was already on her. Younger, looked like. Dorothy adjusted her glasses. From the cords on the woman’s skinny neck, she guessed eighty. You could fool people with your smooth cheeks or botoxed forehead, but your neck will always betray you.
“Gotta be careful here, you know.” Fred was grinning like an idiot. “The first day I got here I leaned to the right and the nurse straightened me back up.” Lupe, the girl serving the lunches, shook her head, and the aide who was feeding Mrs. Grealy giggled. “Then I listed to the left, and she straightened me up again.” With the window behind her, Dorothy couldn’t see the face of the new woman, but she was hunched around as if the information Fred was about to impart would be the key to surviving in this place, where, if she hadn’t noticed it yet, people rested on hammocks strung between life and death.
Fred widened his eyes. “Finally I said, what’s up, honey? You keep straightening me up. It isn’t a man allowed to fart around here?”
Dorothy couldn’t count how many times she’d heard Fred tell that joke. Lost track the third day she got here, and that was nine years ago. The new woman, though, gasped in feigned shock, and giggled like a sixteen-year-old, just like the teenage aide feeding Mrs. Grealy, in fact.
“Welcome to Restful Oaks Junior High,” Dorothy said to the woman. Her voice came out croaky-like, so the woman probably didn’t get the full benefit of her witticism. But, then, few did. She lost her most appreciative audience the day her husband Lloyd died, sixteen years ago, so she wasn’t sure why she even tried. For her own amusement, such as it was, she supposed.
She ate a few more bites of lunch and closed her eyes. A jostling of her wheelchair awakened her. “It’s social time,” Lupe sang. Nothing new under the sun. The days of making decisions about how she spent her time were many years behind her, and what would she do differently, anyway?
“Social time” was code for sitting in the day room with a television so loud she was
surprised the neighbors didn’t complain, surrounded by old people in vinyl-covered chairs snoring with their mouths open. Of course Fred was awake, recounting the old tales of his youth to the new woman. He turned to Dorothy and asked, “What’s up, Dot?”
“SSDD” she said. The new woman raised her eyebrows.
"Same shit, different day," Fred translated, causing New Woman's eyebrows to drop back down, already disappointed in her new acquaintance. Dorothy had learned this phrase from one of the aides, who apologized to her after letting it slip, as if a 100-year-old woman hadn’t heard every swear word imaginable.
There was quite a fuss on the television. People were marching, protesting. Just like the newspaper pictures she'd seen back when she was a kid in the ‘30s. Hunger marches, back in the Depression days, when people really knew hardship. In Dorothy’s lifetime, people had marched for civil rights and gay pride, and against war after war, and where had it gotten them? A little more respect, that was about it. Now the problem was police brutality, again. Another black man senselessly killed. SSDD. A little black girl flashed onto the screen. His daughter, they said. She was riding on a man’s shoulders shouting, “My daddy changed the world! My daddy changed the world!”
A memory hit her like the snap of a flashbulb. Ella, six years old, running to Lloyd, making him carry her on his shoulders, even though she was too big. The little girl they adopted after all their friends had children and they still had none. Ella lit up their lives with her dazzling smile, her sparkling laugh, and a red-hot temper. Dorothy and Lloyd had loved her beyond words, a love so deep it left them as vulnerable as daisies in a snowstorm when people asked, “Why on earth did you adopt a colored child?” or wouldn’t let their children play with Ella. They were encouraged to send Ella to “a different school,” a school “where she’d feel more comfortable.” Dorothy refused. Then came high school, Black Power, and Liberation. “Why did you adopt me?” Ella threw the words at them. “Why did you take me away from my people?”
Dorothy had cried herself dry then, only to find that the well of tears would fill up again. But that was a long time ago. She’d lived through the estrangement, their delicate detente, and her longing for the three grandchildren when Ella moved them all, along with her husband, to Texas in search of her biological family. She lived through Ella’s death from sickle-cell when she was only forty-two, leaving behind three children Dorothy no longer knew.
Maybe she and Lloyd had done the wrong thing adopting Ella. But twenty-some years ago, when she thought she could see the end of her life on the horizon, Dorothy had forgiven herself, for that and everything else. She’d done her best. She and Lloyd had a ball in the nineteen years between his retirement and death. After he was gone, she gathered up her gratitude for those years, wrapped it around her grief, and took advantage of the lowered expectations that came with age to draw a curtain around herself. The days of goals and regrets were past; now she was resting in the hammock, soothed by its swaying.
When she opened her eyes, there was nothing new under the sun. Just that same little black girl on the TV screen again, shouting the same boisterous words.
Dorothy looked at the child, her bright little face, and for the first time in sixteen years, a tear rolled down her wrinkled cheek. SSDD.
Writing prompt: tell a story about a bored 100-year-old.