Dusting Time/Pearl’s Wisdom
By: Anne Chisom
Tags: Short Story, Old Age, Life, Fiction, Elder Care

The dusty rocking chairs lined up on the front porch of Field’s Home for Older Adults move slowly in the late afternoon breeze. A stranger coming upon the scene of the chairs softly swaying may be forgiven for thinking the chairs’ motion comes from their being recently vacated by residents of the Home. But the only people who disturb the chairs’ dust are those who come dressed in their Sunday finery to make brief visits to elderly relatives.

The residents feel the cold outside the front doors of the Field’s Home for Older Adults is too much to test, even when their visiting relatives assure them the temperature outside is in fact “as hot as Hell in August.” The relatives do not realize the gravity of these words.

Within Field’s Home, nothing much changes from day to day. There are no extreme changes in temperature, in anything. Some days a resident may whisper reverently that the swish of the silent black vehicle from Oakley’s Funeral Home has been noticed at the back exit, but most days this disturbance does not happen.

If that same stranger looks past the soundlessly rocking chairs toward Field’s front door, she might spy Pearl Weaver. Pearl is barely bent with her ninety years. She stands almost erect, almost defiant, gazing outward at the porch, the motion of the chairs, and at the world beyond.

One might see a nurse approach Pearl, urging, “Now, Pearl, what do you think you see that’s changed since the last time you looked out yesterday?”

Then, Pearl would likely answer in her usual, almost sardonic manner, “O, Caretaker Mine, I’m just looking to see if I recognize any of my old friends in the dust on these chairs. I hope you are extra careful when you dust these.

“You do know that all the dust in the world is just the residue from all the people who have lived before us, don’t you?”

“Pearl, you stop that. You’ve got all the other residents upset with your talk. Poor old Mrs. Booe won’t let us dust her furniture anymore, since you told her the dust in her room is her husband come back from heaven for a visit. Letty has to sneak in to dust while Mrs. Booe is eating in the dining hall.”

Pearl laughs delightedly, then cocks her head to one side.

“I wonder,” she muses aloud, then moves off toward Mrs. Booe’s room. She appears to be almost skipping.

“Good afternoon, dear Dora Booe. I’ve been thinking about your poor husband’s dust here in this room. Maybe you should start locking your room when you leave. Suppose someone gets in. Poor Herbert’s dust could be vacuumed up in the sweeper and taken off to God-knows-where.

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“Or, look there! Can you see the dust motes dancing in the shafts of sunlight? I wonder who he’s dancing with. Oh, never mind. Forget I said that. You may not care if Herbert gets scattered all over the other women’s rooms.

“See you, dear,” Pearl adds. “Do drop over sometime, won’t you?”

Autumn advances. Life and death at Field’s Home for Older Adults continues in its meandering, dust-covered way. Mrs. Dora Booe has taken to locking the door to her room. She refuses to let the maintenance crew dust or vacuum. Since she becomes tearful, almost to the point of hysteria, and starts chanting that she wishes she were dead, it has been decided to let the dust accumulate for now.

The only other change worthy of notice is that the troublemaker Pearl breaks into laughter more often without any apparent cause. Pearl either knows a joke that she is keeping to herself, or she may be reaching a stage of her life that she has predicted to Letty.

She has told Letty often that her parents should have named her Almost Pearl. She has always been ‘almost’ tall enough or ‘almost’ pretty enough or ‘almost’ smart enough. She now feels she is ‘almost’ crazy and she is certainly ‘almost’ dead.

Pearl adds to Letty, “I might be almost dead but since I’m still only almost crazy, everyone needs to just go away and let me get on with seeing which happens first. Will I become all dead first or all crazy first?”

As Thanksgiving approaches, Mrs. Booe tells the staff she has decided to tidy her room a little so that she and Herbert can enjoy Thanksgiving dinner there together. Letty and the other caretakers are afraid to ask for details. Letty simply assures dear Dora that she has permission and tells her that everyone hopes Dora and Herbert enjoy themselves.

At last, Thanksgiving Day arrives. Since most of Field’s Older Adults and the staff know of Dora’s planned celebration, they find reasons to linger in the vicinity of her room.

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Pearl sits near the door, shuffling a deck of cards and playing solitaire.

Occasionally, she nods at passers-by, greeting them with “Good day for a fete, isn’t it?”

One could almost think Pearl is the sponsor and hostess for this party. She certainly appears to be almost happy with anticipation.

Letty approaches Dora’s door and knocks. Dora admits her to leave the lunch trays she has brought. Letty scoots back out.

There is silence for 57 minutes, the number of years Dora has said she and Herbert were married before he passed over.

Then music is heard through the door. Dora has found an old recording of “I Love You Truly, which she is playing and accompanying in a thin reedy voice. She can be heard to be moving around the room, so it is supposed that she is dancing to the music.

Suddenly, coughing erupts. Mrs. Boo has stirred up the accumulated dust in the room so much that it has surrounded her in a thick, suffocating fog. What starts as ladylike coughing quickly progresses to unrelenting great whoops of inhaled and exhaled dust. She coughs herself into tears, then into breathless gulps for fresh air. The movement that started as dancing can now be heard to be uncontrolled, escalating to desperate.

After two or three moments lost in shocked disbelief that nothing so unscheduled, so amiss, could happen in this place, in Field’s Home, and certainly not in harmless Mrs. Booe’s room, Letty and others break in.

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They are too late to bring Dora back. They are too late to save Dora Booe from suffocation by the dust. But even though there is dust enveloping everything in the room, and this dust is already beginning to settle on the body that was Dora Booe, there is also no feeling of any fear pulsing in the atmosphere.

Life settles again like dust into an old pattern at Field’s Home for Older Adults. Autumn passes into winter. The air is colder, the breeze is brisker. New residents appear on the front porch, causing the chairs to sway as they pass their way into the entrance.

The wind always seems to blow harder though at the back exit, where the local funeral parlor, referred to as Sticks and Bones by Pearl, comes for carryout.

Pearl now walks with a more defeated stoop. She feels more of her 90-plus years. She laughs to and with herself more than ever. She still plays solitaire but no one seems to be able to keep up with the new rules she constantly declares.

Pearl has asked that one of the rocking chairs from the front porch be brought inside. This chair now sits at the window in her room. Pearl sits for hours, rocking, obviously thinking, then upsetting the peace of Field’s with her loud, barking laugh.

One day, as Letty comes in to dust Pearl’s room, Pearl turns her back on the window.

She faces Letty, and asks, “Do you think I killed Dora with my joke about the dust?”

She turns her back on Letty to face the outside window’s glass again.

“I didn’t mean to kill her. Don’t you think it’s funny that the one time I managed to do something more than almost all the way, my joke killed someone? That makes me laugh sometimes. Do she and Herbert thank me, do you think? Or did I help her farther from shore on the River Styx and abandon her there?

“I can almost believe most days that Dora got what she wanted. That is enough to tempt me to try dust-snorting as my new hobby. I’m tired of Solitaire.”

Letty fills the hollow emptiness of any words she could say to Pearl and wisely remains silent. She senses that Pearl is almost displaying some of the wisdom her name has always implied, but this wisdom is a close neighbor of the craziness Pearl has always felt lurking near. Letty steals away, leaving Pearl alone.

That night Pearl passes, leaving an unexplained pile of dust beside her peaceful remains.