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The Moustache
By Robert Cormier
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At the last minute Annie couldn’t go.
She was invaded by one of
those twenty-
four-hour flu bugs that sent her to bed with a
fever,
moaning about the fact that
she’d also have to break her date with
Handsome Harry Arnold that night. We
call him Handsome Harry
because he’s
actually handsome, but he’s also a nice guy, cool,
and
he doesn’t treat me like Annie’s
kid brother, which I am, but like a
regular person. Anyway, I had to go to
Lawnrest alone that
afternoon. But
first of all I had to stand inspection. My mother
lined me up against the wall. She stood
there like a one-man firing
squad,
which is kind of funny because she’s not like a
man at all,
she’s very feminine, and we
have this great relationship—
I mean, I
feel as if she really likes me. I
realize that sounds strange, but I
know
guys whose mothers love them and cook special
stuff for
them and worry about them and
all but there’s something missing
in
their relationship.
Anyway. She
frowned and started the routine.
“That
hair,” she said. Then admitted: “Well, at least
you combed
it.”
I sighed. I have discovered that it’s
better to sigh than argue.
“And that moustache.” She shook her
head. “I still say a
seventeen-
year-
old has no business wearing a
moustache.”
“It’s
an
experiment,” I said. “I just wanted to see if I
could grow
one.” To tell the truth, I
had proved my point about being able to
grow a decent moustache, but I also had
learned to like it.
“It’s costing you
money, Mike,” she said.
“I
know, I know.”
The money
was a reference to the movies. The Downtown Cinema
has a special Friday night
offer
—
half-price admission
for high
school couples seventeen or
younger. But the woman in the box
office took one look at my moustache
and charged me full price.
Even when
I showed her my driver’s license. She
charged full
admission for Cindy’s
ticket, too, which left me practically broke
and unable to take Cindy out for a
hamburger with the crowd
afterward.
That didn’t help matters, because Cindy has been
getting impatient
recently
about things like the fact that I don’t
own my own car and have to concentrate
on my studies if I want to
win that
college scholarship, for instance. Cindy wasn’t
exactly
crazy about the moustache,
either.
Now it was my mother’s turn to
sigh.
“Look,” I said, to
cheer her up. “I’m thinking about shaving it off.”
Even though I wasn’t. Another
discovery: You can build a way of
life
on postponement.
“Your grandmother
probably won’t even recognize you,” she said.
And I saw the shadow fall across her
face.
Let me tell you what the visit
to Lawnrest was all about. My
grandmother is seventy-three years old.
She is a resident
—
which is
supposed to be a better word
than
patient
—
at the Lawnrest
Nursing Home. She used to make the
greatest turkey dressing in
the world
and was a nut about baseball and could even quote
batting averages, for crying out loud.
She always rooted for the
losers. She
was in love with the Mets until they started to
win.
Now she has arteriosclerosis,
which the dictionary says is “a
chronic
disease characterized by abnormal thickening and
hardening of the arterial walls.” Which
really means that she can’t
live at
home anymore or even with us, and her memory has
betrayed her, as well as her body. She
used to wander off and
sometimes
didn
’t recognize people. My mother
visits her all the
time, driving the
thirty miles to Lawnrest almost every day.
Because Annie was home for a semester
break from college, we
had decided to
make a special Saturday visit. Now Annie was in
bed, groaning
theatrically
—she’s a drama
major—
but I told my
mother
I’d go anyway. I hadn’t seen my grandmother since
she’d
been admitted to Lawnrest.
Besides, the place is located on the
Southwest Turnpike, which meant I could
barrel along in my
father’s new Le
Mans. My ambit
ion was to see the
speedometer hit
seventy-five.
Ordinarily, I used the old station wagon, which
can
barely stagger up to fifty.
Frankly, I wasn’t too crazy about
visiting a nursing home. They
reminded
me of hospitals, and hospitals turn me off. I
mean, the
smell of ether makes me
nauseous, and I feel faint at the sight of
blood. And as I approached
Lawnrest
—
which is a
terrible,
cemetery kind of name, to
begin with
—I was sorry I hadn’t
avoided the trip. Then I felt guilty
about it. I’m loaded with guilt
complexes. Like driving like a madman
after promising my father
to be
careful. Like sitting in the parking lot, looking
at the nursing
home with dread and
thinking how I’d rather be with Cindy. Then
I thought of all the Christmas and
birthday gifts my grandmother
had given
me and I got out of the car, guilty as usual.
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Inside, I
was surprised by the lack of hospital
smell, although there was
another odor
or maybe the absence of an odor. The air was
antiseptic, sterile. As if there was no
atmosphere at all or
I’d
caught a cold suddenly and couldn’t
taste or smell.
A nurse at
the reception desk gave me
directions
—
my
grandmother was in East Three. I made
my way down the tiled
corridor and was
glad to see that the walls were painted with
cheerful colors like yellow and pink. A
wheelchair suddenly shot
around a
corner, self-propelled by an old man, white-haired
and
toothless, who cackled merrily as
he barely missed me. I jumped
aside
—
here I was,
almost getting wiped out by a two-mile-an-hour
wheelchair after doing seventy-five on
the pike. As I walked
through the
corridor seeking East Three, I couldn’t help
glancing
into the rooms, and it was
like some kind of wax
museum
—
all
these
figures in various stances and attitudes, sitting
in beds or
chairs, standing at windows,
as if they were frozen forever in these
postures. To tell the truth, I began to
hurry because I was getting
depressed.
Finally, I saw a beautiful girl approaching,
dressed in
white, a nurse or an
attendant, and I was so happy to see someone
young, someone walking and acting
normally, that I gave her a
wide smile
and a big hello and I must have looked like a kind
of
nut. Anyway, she looked right
through me as if I were a window,
which
is about par for the course whenever I meet
beautiful girls.
I finally found the
room and saw my grandmother in bed. My
grandmother looks like Ethel Barrymore.
I never knew who Ethel
Barrymore was
until I saw a terrific movie,
None but
the Lonely
Heart
, on TV,
starring Ethel Barrymore and Cary Grant. Both my
grandmother and Ethel Barrymore have
these great craggy faces
like the side
of a mountain and wonderful voices like syrup
being
poured. Slowly. She was propped
up in bed, pillows puffed behind
her.
Her hair had been combed out and fell upon her
shoulders. For
some reason, this
flowing hair gave her an almost girlish
appearance, despite its whiteness.
She saw me and smiled. Her eyes lit up
and her eyebrows arched
and she reached
out her hands to me in greeting. “Mike, Mike,”
she said. And I breathed a sigh of
relief. This was one of her good
days.
My mother had warned me that she might not know
who I
was at first.
I took
her hands in mine. They were fragile. I could
actually feel
her bones, and it seemed
as if they would break if I pressed too
hard. Her skin was smooth, almost
slippery, as if the years had
worn away
all the roughness the way the wind wears away the
surfaces of stones.
“Mike,
Mike, I didn’t think you’d come,” she said, so
happy, and
she was still Ethel
Barrymore, that voice like a caress. “I’ve been
waiti
ng all this time.”
Before I could reply, she looked away, out
the window. “See the birds? I’ve been
watching them at the feeder.
I love to
see them come. Even the blue jays. The blue jays
are like
hawks
—
they take
the food that the small birds should have. But
the small birds, the chickadees, watch
the blue jays and at least
learn where
the feeder is.”
She lapsed
into silence, and I looked out the window. There
was no
feeder. No birds. There was only
the parking lot and the sun
glinting on
car windshields.
She turned to me
again, eyes bright. Radiant, really. Or was it a
medicine brightness? “Ah, Mike. You
look so grand, so grand. Is
that a new
coat?”
“Not really,” I
said. I’d been wearing my Uncle Jerry’s old
army
-
fatigue jacket for
months, practically living in it, my mother said.
But she insisted that I wear my
raincoat for the visit. It was about a
year old but looked new because I
didn’t wear it much. Nobody
was wearing
raincoats lately.
“You always loved
clothes, didn’t you, Mike?” she said.
I was beginning to feel uneasy because
she regarded me with such
intensity.
Those bright eyes. I
wondered
—
are old people in
places
like this so lonesome, so
abandoned that they go wild when
someone visits? Or was she so happy
because she was suddenly
lucid and
everything was sharp and clear? My mother had
described those moments when my
grandmother suddenly emerged
from the
fog that so often obscured her mind. I didn’t know
the
answers, but it felt kind of
spooky, getting such an emotional
welcome from her.