“Well, it’s Saturday night,” Alice told me on the phone last night, “so to celebrate I drank a bottle of Gatorade I found in the back of the refrigerator. It didn’t do much for me.”
She remembered that on one wintry Saturday evening she had jokingly asked Mr. Fickle, The Place’s resident Lothario, what he was going to do to for excitement. He thought for a minute and then said, “Wait for Sunday.”
This dull response deeply disappointed Alice. She’d considered Mr. Fickle to be her main chance at a romance ever since his kiss on her cheek on New Year’s Day. Despite his waiting-for-Sunday comment, she’d continued to keep the door open.
But now she was having doubts, she said, because she’d gotten a good look at his teeth.
“They’re old and large and yellow.” She paused. “Of course they’re old. That goes without saying. But the rest…I think I could abide them large, but not yellow. Now ask me how I found this out.”
Without waiting for me to ask, she continued, “I came back from a walk and had to go through the Rosary room to get to my apartment. Mr. Fickle was putting chairs in a circle getting ready for that bunch to come in and say the rosary after dinner. He came over and put his hand on my shoulder, and like a damn fool I said, ‘Did you miss me?'”
She was laughing, but I understood her to mean she was asking if he missed her while she had been in the hospital and then ill in her apartment for a while, therefore absent from the dining room where they often saw one another. But Mr. Fickle didn’t get it.
“No,” he said. “Have you been gone?”
That took her back, but she managed to tell him where she’d been. He stood so close, she said, that she could look right into his mouth. “I would have liked to say, ‘You know Crest has a pretty good whitener.’ But I just walked off. And then later I saw him kissing Mildred, whose name isn’t Mildred but something else I can’t remember so I call her Mildred. Anyway, as I was leaving the dining room after dinner, I saw him kiss her. I went on my way shaking my head inside my head so no one would know what I was doing. That’s not easy. Try it.”
“You’re quite the contortionist,” I said.
We talked for a while longer, and then this morning she called to discuss the matter further. “What should I do about Mr. Fickle? Should I go on? He doesn’t seem too interested in me. I don’t think I’d want to kiss him with those yellow teeth. I shouldn’t feel this way, but I do.”
“It’s okay,” I told her. “It sounds like he’s got plenty of people to kiss.”
“His pants are so baggy in the seat.” The man was, she lamented as she’d done before, a “far cry” from my father, whom she considered a sharp dresser. My father was sharp in other ways as well. He matched her wit. He played with her. They flirted. But we didn’t talk about any of that because she didn’t really want to miss him at the moment.
“If only the man’s clothes fit better. And those teeth…” She trailed off. “But you can’t have everything at my age,” she finally said. “At least he gives me something to think about.”
She was saying that the hours pass slowly, that she craves more from life than a small apartment in a strange city far from home. But she sensed my quiet sadness for her and wouldn’t allow me to dwell too long there. “Yes, it’s a good thing he’s here,” she said. “He keeps me on my toes.”
I pictured her little feet in the neon green footies with sticky rubber dots on the bottom that she got from the hospital and now wears around her apartment so she won’t fall. “Don’t stand on your toes, Mom.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll try not to.”
