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ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

Chapter 17

ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME

©Jo Dereske 2014

Chapter 17




The New Doctor


Convincing Louise to keep a doctor’s appointment was always a struggle and I dreaded this one because the woman doctor she’d liked and trusted had moved out of the area, and this would be her first consultation with the new doctor, a man, Dr. Hoffer.

“Call and cancel,” she ordered me. “I’m too unsteady on my feet to go.”

“We may as well go and get it behind us,” I told her. “Besides, it’s a nice day.”

“I’m not going.”

“All right,” I affably agreed. “You’ll lose the money, though.”

“What?”

I shamelessly lied. “The appointment’s already paid for. If you don’t go, the doctor will be paid for nothing.”

Wasting money was too painful a prospect for her and within the hour she was dressed and reluctantly waiting for me to help her into her car.

In Dr. Hoffer’s office, Louise told the brusque receptionist, “My, but you’re a pretty girl,” and received a blushing thank you and an arm to hold on the way to the examining room. Louise couldn’t hide the satisfied smile on her face.

We helped her sit on a low examining table and I took the chair beside it.

“Hello, Louise,” Dr. Hoffer said when he stepped into the examination room, reading her chart at the same time he spoke and not looking at her. He was young and brisk and moved like a man who’d conducted too many routine appointments. Louise considered him skeptically, not answering. Her chin rose and I held my breath. I knew she regarded him as rude to have greeted her without making eye contact. He took her non-response as a condition of her illness, not as the rebuke she intended.

"Do you know who I am?" he asked her, raising his voice as he sat on a rolling stool and wheeled close to her

"Well, you're the doctor," Louise answered, as if he weren’t very bright. She moved her foot and held it firmly against the wheel of his stool so he couldn’t roll any closer.

"Do you know why you're here?" he continued, now finally gazing at her closely, even curiously.

"Because I have an appointment."

A smile played at his lips while he asked her the day, the year, the president – and although she couldn't answer a single one of his questions correctly, she gave him a piercing glance and asked, "What's wrong? Do you think I'm senile?"

“Less and less,” Dr. Hoffer said. They chatted for a few minutes, his tone friendlier, actually interested now.

When Dr. Hoffer turned to me and began to ask questions as if Louise weren’t in the room, I looked to her to see if she could answer first. If she couldn’t I prefaced each answer with, “Louise can tell you better than I can…” or “Do you think that’s right, Aunt Louise?”

He updated her medicines and squeezed her hand when he left, calling her by name, adding, "It's been a pleasure."

All in all it was a successful doctor’s appointment and to celebrate we drove to the beach on Lake Michigan where I bought us ice cream cones. Louise refused to get out of the car. “I might get sand in my underwear,” but she had an abiding interest in the bathing suits and the people in them, both men and women, especially the men.

“There’s a nice one,” she commented. I couldn’t tell who she was referring to but I noncommittally agreed. “A woman has to keep her eyes open,” she said huffily, sounding as defensive as if I’d tsk-tsked.

So we sat in the car eating our ice cream, people-watching, the windows open, a view of the wide sandy beach spread with blankets and umbrellas, the bathers, and the lighthouse. Farther out in the Lake, a tanker passed sedately against the backdrop of distant haze. The warm air smelled of sunshine and wafted with coconut oil.

“I wish we’d had bathing suits like that,” she murmured as she watched a mixed group of lithe young people play volleyball in the sand.

When we returned home Mike was in the garden with Kipling, pulling weeds. He wore clean clothes and his face was freshly shaved. I surmised that while I’d been with Louise at the doctor’s, Kipling had experienced a few struggles of his own.

"Here we were out having a good time and you were at home working," Louise told Mike, shaking her head.

"I don't know if you were having a good time or not," Mike said. He picked up a pan of strawberries from beside the garden to offer her.

Strawberries were in full swing, both domestic and wild. The domestic were succulent and sweet, and the wild along my trail through the “prairies” were tiny but zinged with a burst of tart wild strawberry flavor. Both, though, when picked in the sun, tasted of summer. Why did I ever buy strawberries in the dead of winter? They were sawdust compared to these.

Again, conscious to the rhythm of the season, several times a day Mike carried a small saucepan out to the strawberry patch and filled it with the ripest fruit, carrying it eagerly back to Louise, and then they’d share the pan between them on the patio until they’d eaten every single berry.

“Come on,” Louise said to me, taking my arm. “Let’s pick more and go eat them while they’re still wiggling.”

We sat on the patio in the metal lawn chairs and ate the strawberries one by one. Mike and Kipling went back to weeding the garden. It was such a life-long habit of Mike’s that he was completely confident and efficient, pulling weeds without hesitation, gently working around each vegetable plant in rhythmic peace.

Mike had finally returned to the garden due to a mistake of Kipling’s. He’d planted the corn too close together and bought too many tomato plants. I’d raised gardens, but this one I’d withdrawn from, bowing to Kipling’s excitement, biting my tongue at the exotic plants he’d ordered from the catalogs: peanuts, okra, purple beans, English cucumbers. Peanuts?

The corn had emerged crowded and stunted, and early one morning he’d stepped out the door to discover Mike busy in the garden, thinning corn with a hoe and staking tomatoes on stakes from the garden shed. From then on, the garden had formed a focal point for Mike, and we were grateful. Here, he was a semblance of the old Mike, sure of himself and relaxed.

Louise and I held a long and easy conversation as we ate our strawberries and the men gardened. Louise’s thoughts were so clear that I recorded our chat when I returned to the little house, wanting to remind myself of the grace of these rarer and rarer moments.

"I'm lucky to have Mike," she said as she watched him pull a weed from a row of beans. "He's never beat me although he's had plenty of reason.”

"Why?" I asked.

"Because I aggravate him so much."

"Why do you do that?"

Louise shrugged. "Because it's in me to aggravate. Some people are just like that."

A strawberry fell from her hand and rolled across the patio. I picked it up and tossed it into the dirt near the astilbe plants.

“I’m clumsy,” Aunt Louise said, holding up her stiff right hand. "I think God is punishing me."

"Maybe he's telling you to slow down," I suggested.

"Then why doesn’t he just tap me on the shoulder and say, 'slow down, old lady,'?"

"Because you wouldn't listen."

Louise nodded gravely. "You're right. If I’m being punished for all my sins, I’m in for a long siege. Is anyone coming to visit me today?"

I could tell by the way she asked that she’d already forgotten we’d just returned from the doctor and the beach. Moments, Susan had said, not memories.

"Not that I know of,” I told her. “But I can take you visiting."

"Oh no, I'm not in the mood to visit with anyone.” Then she hastily added, “except you,"

"People wear you out sometimes, don’t they?" It could be dangerous to ask her such a question because she was likely to point to me as the one who wore her out the most.

"Some people are so boring they make me fall asleep with my eyes open,” she confessed, picking the last strawberry from the pan. Her fingers were stained red with strawberry juice. “They talk and talk and say nothing. I'm not so boring that I can't entertain myself."

It was Kipling’s turn to bring them dinner that evening. Because of the hot day, I’d made a light vegetable soup and turkey sandwiches. When he returned with the basket of dirty dishes, he said, “That was like Alice’s tea party.”

Mike poured his milk into his soup bowl and when he discovered what he’d done, tried to pour it from his soup bowl into his cup.

“Don’t pour your soup into your cup,” Louise admonished.

Then Mike ate his sandwich with a spoon and Louise said, “It certainly seems strange to be eating soup for breakfast.”


1931 Went to mass at St. Theresa – I’m trying to be a good Catholic – then to a movie to see Joan Crawford in “Dance Fools Dance.” Gilda Gray was there in person. I’m so very very happy to be back in the city and back with Billy. Al and Sylvia came over after the movie to play cards and stayed all night. We slept crosswise on the bed – all four of us!


I was in a hurry, driving to town to pick up a prescription for Louise that I’d forgotten to fill, and she’d run out of. When I’d left, Kipling was trying to engage Mike in using a rake to smooth ruts in the driveway but he stood by, awkwardly holding his rake and watching Kipling, his face blank. Louise sat on the patio. “Come with me,” I’d encouraged her.

“I want to watch the birds,” she’d claimed, then laughed, acknowledging how lame her excuse was. I let her get away with it.

Almost to town, I spotted a dark shape in the road and swerved just in time to avoid a large dead raccoon that had likely been hit by a car. I was just catching my breath from that surprise when I steered around a second, smaller raccoon lying dead on the road, and before I could straighten the wheel, saw three more young raccoons dead on the pavement and another large raccoon corpse beside the road. Six dead raccoons. Two adults, four young ones. I’d never seen such a sight and continued my drive, keeping a wary eye on the pavement ahead of me, my thoughts on the familial tragedy behind me.

I thought of the mother raccoon and five babies we’d released into the National Forest. That had been miles away in the opposite direction. Intellectually I knew it couldn’t be the same family, but a surge of guilt passed over me, nonetheless.

In the drugstore, while I waited for Louise’s prescription, I saw Roger, who lived between Louise’s and the site of the raccoons. He was in his seventies, a second generation farmer raising green beans for Stokley’s on acreage where his father had once pastured dairy cows. The cow barn now leaned inward, empty.

“I saw the strangest sight along the road just now,” I began after we’d said our hellos.

“You mean the raccoons?”

“Yes, did you see them? There were six of them.”

‘That happens sometimes. Raccoons can be funny creatures. One of the pair gets hit and the other one hangs around until it gets hit, too. That’s the first time I’ve seen so many, though.”

“I saw them on my way to work,” the woman restocking the shampoo aisle near us joined in. “It must have happened in the middle of last night.”

And we three lapsed into silence, all of us contemplating the small tragedy.

“How’s Louise?” Roger asked.

“Fine. Stop by and say hello,” I invited.

“I’ll try to. I’ve known that family a long time. I went to school with Stella.” He shook his head, smiling. “Tofelia was the beautiful one, though.”

It took me a second to realize he meant my Aunt Phyllis. Tofelia had been her Lithuanian name.

A recollection of Phyllis draped in furs and jewelry and rhinestone glasses, and who, we were led to believe, had chewed through a string of husbands. Her final husband – the one we nieces and nephews knew – had been a lounge singer and car salesman who sported an unnaturally bright golden toupee, and, we had gigglingly realized, make-up.

I’d often been aware of snappish arguments and long grudging silences between Louise and Phyllis. They’d been “at odds” when Phyllis died late one autumn in California and her husband didn’t inform the family for weeks, slipping the news into his Christmas card.

I left the drug store and considered taking a longer route home that would detour past the family of dead raccoons but finally I chastised myself to toughen up.

Almost to the death site, a yellow pickup had pulled onto the shoulder of the road and another stopped behind it. The car in front of me slowed to a crawl.

A woman about my age in shorts and a T-shirt hopped out of the cab and pulled a shovel from the truck bed. She scooped up a small raccoon body, then carried it to the side of the road and nudged it into the grass. The man who’d pulled in behind her directed traffic around her as she removed one raccoon after another. When I passed her, her head was down, her face invisible.

At home, Kipling, Mike and Louise sat together on the patio. I climbed out of the car with Louise’s prescription and a bag of potato chips to share. I also shared the drama I’d seen: the family of dead raccoons, the woman removing their bodies.

Kipling’s eyes were distant as he relived the situation through my eyes. Louise shook her head. “Oh, those poor, poor babies,” she bemoaned. “More devotion than some families I’ve met. And they’re just raccoons.”

“Sonsabitches,” Mike commented, scooping up a handful of potato chips.


1931 Bill goes to “meetings” almost every night. No work no money.
Mrs. B. hired me for a few days. I made a cake for her ladies’ luncheon but it fell flat. I cut it into thin slices and rolled it in powdered sugar and was asked if I’d share the recipe!
I’m so tired.



Evelyn, the woman who'd once monopolized the Alzheimer's Support group, was subdued and thoughtful at our meeting. She soon divulged that her husband had become violent with her.

"He’s never raised his voice to me in forty years," she said, “Not once.” He’d hit her when she came upon him standing over an upholstered chair in the living room, peeing into it. She couldn't turn her back on him or leave him alone because he wandered indiscriminately, sometimes for miles before she tracked him down and brought him home. He was suspicious of her, and had once threatened to kill her. “He didn’t recognize me.” She was exhausted and shaking.

"If only I could get a full night's sleep I think I'd be all right." Her tone wasn’t plaintive or near tears, only resigned. There was no one in the area to help; friends and relatives were beginning to avoid her. Susan was planning a county adult day care program, but its inception was months away.

"That will be too late for me," Evelyn said sadly.

I thought of what Susan had told me on the phone, that when it’s time to change the situation, you’ll know. From the sadness on her face, it was apparent that Evelyn was ready, that she no longer believed she had a choice.

1931 John and Joe came over. John wants Bill to drive . I don’t want him to. Joe’s always fussing over John. We went to 79th Street together.
I told a joke that caused an awful quarrel between Bill and a little rat who I thought insulted me (and he did). Tony told us to leave. I’m not so nervous and touchy if Bill’s working at a real job. We’re broke.





Next Tuesday, Chapter 18: Questionable Bounty
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