Nursing Home

            A little girl sits alone in a waiting room, a lounge, a reception area. “Little” because she is small and thin, whatever her age. All we know is that she is too young to enter the patients’ rooms at the nursing home. It is somewhere between 1969 and 1972 and at this point in history they still call the inhabitants of the nursing home patients. She has just learned the word “denizens” but is unsure how to use it. She is reading a big book—Anna Karenina, perhaps, or War and Peace, or Middlemarch, depending on the month and the year. She has chosen the longest books she can find because she knows she will be spending a long time in waiting rooms, this one and several others, as her mother makes the round of the previous generation. Although the book she is reading is likely a paperback, it is heavy. It makes her back ache because, as she has learned from her mother and a doctor she disliked intently, her posture is not good. She remembers the doctor’s words: “You would be such a pretty girl if you stood up straight.” As she withdraws into Anna Karenina, or War and Peace, or Middlemarch, the doctor’s voice recedes but not entirely. 

            Inside the nursing home, beyond the door to her right or to her left, she knows there is a corridor that leads to her grandmother’s room, or maybe to her great uncle Frank’s, or to his brother Willie’s, or to another great uncle’s. They are all in different nursing homes across upper Manhattan, West side or East, but never below 57th street or above 96th. Wherever it is, wherever she is, her mother is beyond the door with her own mother or one of her uncles. If the girl is reading Middlemarch, she will have noticed and perhaps read quickly over a boring subplot, where the doctor-protagonist, Lydgate, is being pressured to vote for a particular chaplain for an infirmary. She is not at all invested in the plot about institutions, especially the infirmary. What she likes about the novel, what keeps her turning the pages in the waiting room are the love plots. Since old people in institutional settings cannot love, she cannot really love or care about them, at least not in books.  She ignores the fact that the narrator makes fun of love plots, in part because she doesn’t understand the references to troubadours and she never reads the footnotes, or perhaps there are none in the edition she is reading.  In this opinion she is very much like her future students, who, in 20 years or so, will also be impatient about the infirmary, the fever hospital, and Dorothea (the heroine’s)plans for the renovation of poor people’s cottages. She and the ghosts of her future students that read over her shoulder in the waiting room all agree that Lydgate and Dorothea should marry and let the rest of the world take care of itself.

            The girl would like to see her grandmother, but not her great uncles who bore her. She has learned to tell her grandmother’s brothers apart, but when she sees them, between their time in nursing homes in her grandmother’s apartment, they only talk to each other, and their stories are about the past. They also spend a lot of time eating—and rejecting—foods her grandmother makes for them. She did not notice this second pattern herself, but her mother pointed it out, and now she is angry on her grandmother’s behalf. If it is after 1970, she, the girl, has begun to think about what she (and everyone else) calls “women’s lib.” She and two of her female friends have done a project in which they interviewed women on the streets about whether they support it.  Mostly the answer is “no.” Mostly the answers include a reference to burning bras which a few women seem to have done. “I think women should make as much money as men,” one interviewee told her, “but I would never burn my bra.” This makes sense as a middle way to the girl, who will decide in a few short years that she is a woman and a feminist.  She will distain the word “woman’s lib.” In the waiting room, and for more years afterwards than you might expect, she will overlook the fact that it is her mother and not her mother’s brothers who visit the nursing homes every day. She will keep the “woman’s lib tape,” unplayable for decades, well into the 21st century when it will disappear in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey.

            In 1973 she becomes old enough to visit her grandmother (and surviving great-uncles) in their rooms. Rosie’s bedside table has a plastic pitcher for water on it, but is otherwise covered in pictures of her only granddaughter. One nurse disapproves, not of the pictures, but of the silver frames which she worries that someone might steal. In all of the pictures of her, the girl detects a slight slouch. She promises to bring her grandmother a closeup photo so that she, th girl, will not have to be reminded of her bad posture. Grandma Rosie has made no concessions to settling in other than the pictures and their frames. She insists on wearing a coat over her nightgown in anticipation of her discharge, which may be weeks away. Rosie has, as the girl’s father often says, “all her marbles.” She knows exactly where she is and she does not want to be there. Rosie tells her daughter that she has betrayed a promise. “You told me you would never put me in a nursing home,” she says, perhaps between clenched teeth, but more likely without the dentures that have become uncomfortable now that she has lost weight by refusing to eat nursing home food. She has never been to the cafeteria and will only eat jello and crackers from the tray that appears three times a day even though she has never filled out a “menu.”  

Her daughter has made no promises, but tries to change the terms of the debate by assuring her mother that she is not in fact in  a nursing home, but a rehab facility, more like a  hospital. No one expects this renaming to work. Twenty years later, the girl’s mother will try to extract the same promise from her. “No nursing home.” It is likely that at some point the girl, now definitely a woman and somewhat conflict averse, would have given in and promised what she could not guarantee.  In any case, the promise turned out to be irrelevant. Her mother slipped from a hospital to a hospice, which, like Rosie’s nursing homes, promised a homelike environment. Another home that is not one, another set of cozy armchairs and women’s magazines, this time in what is called not a waiting but a “living” room.

            The girl, now in (very) late middle age, no longer has to worry about a previous generation. If her grandmother’s siblings vanished through the doors of nursing homes, her own father, mother, uncles and aunt through got their wish and avoided them entirely. She is not sure this made anything easier for them, but she is grateful that she herself has been spared the false coziness, the euphemisms and outright lies, the homes that are not homes. She makes the same half-jokes to her children that her mother made to her: the ones that begin “when you put me away in a home,” or “when you come to visit the nursing home.” No one, she least of all, thinks the jokes are funny, but they evade her control, the parental curb on the tongue that makes things right between generations. She thinks she has a few years before the jokes get even less funny and she will have to stop making them entirely. She thinks of Rosie’s two sons who loved her very much but visited relatively little—and to great fanfare—and of how Rosie kept a small stash of real jewelry to bribe nurses and entice (hypothetical) daughters-in-law to bring their husbands to visit their mother. She has no daughters-in-law at this point, but she has inherited the jewelery.

            Now it is her mother-in-law who is in a nursing home, who is living—or more properly, surviving—in one during COVID. It is her mother-in-law’s  grown children who chose the facility, who looked at layouts, furniture, and bathroom fixtures and assessed their hominess. It is they who have to listen to their mother’s pleas to be taken “home” to a house that is already sold— 

as houses have to be to pay for “homes” of other kinds. And now, COVID offers a brutal twist; another door closes and the home that was never a home is now a prison without visitors. Family members of all ages are essentially stuck in a perpetual waiting room, unabe to enter, to talk, to comfort.

            The woman thinks to herself of her grandmother, coated, veiled and ready to leave to return to her apartment; of her own mother flown within a week of her death to a city she barely knew with, what turned out to be, a fantasy of living with her daughter; of her mother-in-law alone and afraid in her lovingly chosen room, locked into her own nightmares. In this time of COVID homing is nothing short of gothic. The nursing home reveals itself in its unhomliness, the funeral home becomes an assembly line. The private home may also not be a place for old people; the pandemic feeds on multigenerational households, on those that have resisted institutionalization. There is no good place for the old, no matter how many times and in how many different ways we invoke homing, or use the word “home.”