Go Ask Alice…when she's 94

Alice has a new admirer. Unlike Mr. Fickle, he wears clothes that fit. “Sometimes he turns his collar up,” she told me. He is not tall, but his posture is admirable, shoulders back, arms like drumsticks at his sides. His “good head of hair,” precisely combed, is a pleasing shade of gray. His shoes are polished. He’s new at The Place and she doesn’t know his name. She calls him The Dapper Man.

The Dapper Man, one of the very few men in residence, took immediately to gazing at Alice from across the dining room. Last week he stopped by her table and greeted her and Irene. He said something to Alice that she couldn’t quite hear, but instead of saying her hearing failed her, she smiled and appeared to agree with him. She almost regretted this when he nodded and walked away slowly and more confidently than she felt the occasion deserved. Since then she’s been watching him to see if he continues to watch her and to observe what he’s up to.

The other night when she got to her table in the dining room, she found a brightly wrapped cube of chocolate atop her napkin. She looked around to see if anyone else had received such a gift. None within her range of vision. She asked Aurora at the next table if she got a chocolate wrapped in a fancy way, but Aurora shook her head and joked that Alice must have a secret admirer.

Alice wondered if it might be Mr. Fickle. She has been annoyed with him lately because when he walks past her table he turns his head in the opposite direction and peers into the post office across the hall. He has done this so many times she’s been driven to rehearse comments she could, if she wanted to, call out while he looks into the three-sided mail room the size of a large closet. “Who are you looking for?” she might ask. And then she thought she could dispose of that question and simply say, “She’s not in there.” Or she might even chance saying, “I’m over here.”

She tested these out on me, and I knew very well she wouldn’t say any of these things but was having fun thinking them up. Finally, she decided that she would simply ignore Mr. Fickle the next time he looked her way.

The very next day brought an opportunity. He passed by during lunch, running his hand along the wooden railing that skirts the dining room. Whenever he’s done this in the past he’s gotten results. He runs his hand slowly along the smooth blonde maple and hesitates for just a few seconds when he reaches the section of railing directly next to Alice’s table. This action usually earns him a smile and a greeting, but this time Alice turned her head and pretended to be looking at something, or someone, across the room. When he continued on she watched his back to see if she could read any disappointment there. She couldn’t conclude one way or the other by his body language if he cared or not. But she presumed he did. “I showed him.”

So when the fancy chocolate appeared, she thought there was a good chance Mr. Fickle was trying to win her back. She got all set to smile at him on her way from the dining room to her apartment. But when she passed through the Rosary room where he busied himself setting up chairs in a circle for prayer, he turned his head aside and pretended not to see her. “He showed me.”

“Maybe The Dapper Man left the chocolate,” she told me tonight, adding that she hoped not because it turns out he’s a terrible flirt. “Worse than Mr. Fickle even.” She’d seen him grab the hands of some of the younger aides and hold on to them.

“Well then, could it have been The Dancing Man?” I suggested. When we’d gone shopping on her birthday, she’d told me about another newcomer who rocked along the aisles of The Place in such a swingy style with his walker that it looked like he was dancing. She moved out into the aisle at Sear’s to give a demonstration. She threw her weight on one leg and then the other, swaying her hips from side to side and moving forward in little hops.

But no, she didn’t think The Dancing Man left her a piece of chocolate. “He’s too young. And he’s little. He doesn’t look at any women. He just dances along with his walker.”

Best to stop wondering where the colorfully wrapped chocolate came from, she decided. Maybe someone had been sitting in her dining room chair earlier in the day and left it there by mistake. “It probably has nothing to do with me,” she said, sounding only slightly let down,”but I ate it and it was sure good.”

As for me, I’m still curious. How do you think it got there?

Copyright 2010 Andrea Carlisle