CATHERINE ARRA - GATED, 55+

Catherine Arra is a native of the Hudson Valley in upstate New York where she lives with wildlife and changing seasons until winter when she migrates to Florida’s Space Coast to commune with alligators, palms trees, and the occasional rocket. She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently, Tales of Intrigue & Plumage (FutureCycle Press, 2017). A former English and writing teacher, Arra now teaches part time and facilitates a local writers’ group. Find her at www.catherinearra.com

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Gated, 55+
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​Margaret
            “Heart attack. Gone. Poof. Just like that,” she’d say, snapping her fingers, shaking her head. She sold the house in Maryland and headed south. Rented a condo on the first floor in a brand new gated, 55+ community in Florida named Heron Tree.
            The builder advertised the place as cruise ship living on land. Sales signs along the entrance displayed 55+ couples in pristine health with perfect skin and silver hair lounging poolside in white robes. The captions boasted: Elevate Your Life. Make a Splash.
            Margaret splashed, the best cannonball of her elder years, after her husband, after losing her only son too. She brought along a suitcase of photos and knick-knacks to remember them. She wasn’t ready to die.
            Margaret didn’t look anything like the poster couples. Most residents didn’t, but Margaret sure felt like them even though in her late 70s she was hunchbacked from osteoporosis, her spine and hips so misaligned that her legs could no longer navigate a straight path. Stiff and stilt-like, they flayed out when she walked, causing her to list from side to side. Her arms mimicked her legs in the opposite directions for balance. From a distance she looked like a windmill inching forward. The business of walking was hard.
            Margaret bought a Lexus, had the community license plate, white with a blue heron in flight, attached to the front bumper. She never parked in her designated spot flanked by other vehicles for fear she’d ding them in the wide berth she needed to get in and out of her car. Her steering wasn’t all it used to be either. She claimed a spot in the guest area “out of harm’s way,” she’d say.
            Margaret enjoyed eight years of elevated splashing, rebirth after “having her skin stripped off leaving her bare-bum naked,” she’d say. She loved to dress up for dances and linger over cocktails at the bar. Still a handsome woman, the years and her bone deterioration hadn’t stolen her smile or shapely, soft face. She was damn good at canasta and mahjong too.
            Life was good until one night after too many Amaretto sours; she side-saddled the clubhouse curb with her Lexus and capsized. The Jaws of Life extricated her from the car. The DMV extricated her license.
            Margaret remembered seeing a film at the clubhouse movie night, Love in the Time of Cholera, about an older man who finally wins the love of his life after years of waiting. “God knows he had sex with every woman walking in the meantime,” she’d say, but still, Margaret felt like him, young again in a more free and modern time. She remembered a line that haunted her too: something about how the first fall makes you old. The second one kills you.
            Margaret knew the accident, losing her wheels and means to get in and out the gate was the first fall. She adapted and kept on. She wind milled the quarter mile to the clubhouse and was always offered a ride home. If she wasn’t up for the walk, she’d sit on the bench outside the condo until someone gave her a ride. Around this time, Margaret never left her apartment without tissues, one always folded or crumpled into the palm of her hand ready to catch a runaway tear or a stifled sniffle. She got along fine this way until the certified letter arrived.
            That morning, she sat on the bench, wept and moaned, blotting tears, rocking forward and back. The investor who owned her condo had sold it. She received notice to vacate in 60 days. She held the letter in one hand, a wad of soggy tissues in the other. Her financial advisor told her she didn’t have enough money to buy anything in the community.
            To everyone who saw her that morning, she said, “The second fall,” and nothing more.
 
Jean
            “Do you see that big scratch on the side of my car?” Jean asks one afternoon on the front terrace. Jean is my 91-year old neighbor.
            I look down at her royal blue Ford Focus parked next to my rental car and can barely make out a dark streak along the side rear fender. “What happened, Jean?”
            “Well,” she shifts to grab the railing for support and points out toward the gate entry, “you know that traffic circle out there?”
            “Yes.”
            “Well, it’s very dangerous. I was going around in my own lane and this big black truck with Georgia plates came right into my lane and scraped my car and just kept going. And look what he did!”
            “Oh no! “When did this happen?”
            “Yesterday,” she says and repeats the entire story, this time with greater animation. “I was scared to death!”
            “That’s terrible, Jean. I’m so glad nothing serious happened to you or your car.”
            “I know. Well, you know, I’m taking it down to the Ford place today so they can buff it out or something. I mean thank God there’s no serious damage.”
            “Be careful Jean.”
            Jean’s 68-year-old daughter lives one street over and keeps tight tabs on her mother.
            “Does Regina know about this?
            “ No. She doesn’t need to know.”
            A few weeks later, Jean says, “Joe the handyman fixed my garbage disposal. It was jammed. The people who clean for me dropped a sponge or something down there. Thank god it just tripped the switch. No damage.”
            Another time. “The microwave just broke. I didn’t do anything.”
            And then. “When my grandson was here, he spilled wine all over the carpet. The cleaner is coming today.”
            I’m a snowbird. This year when I arrive, Jean’s car is not parked in the space next to mine. A few days later, I bump into Jean’s daughter.
            “Where’s your mother‘s car?”
            “Oh, hasn’t she told you?”
            I shrug. “I haven’t seen her. I thought she was away.”
            “Well,” she says, exactly like her mother; the same preliminary step into every story. “It was pouring rain and she pulled out of the grocery store into double lanes of traffic. Can you imagine? She’s lucky she wasn’t killed. The car was totaled. No more driving for her.”
            “How horrible. It’s good she has you near.”
            “Yeah, well, two weeks after that she fell and broke her arm.”
            “The first fall,” I say, but she’s already walked away.
 
Bruno Mars:
            DJ dances run from 7-10 pm, cash bar, bring your own snacks. 200 retired baby boomers arrive in eager promptness. The tunes are from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Conversations are about what already has been: living like trophies on a shelf, tchotchkes and shadow box mementos. I’m younger by 10 to 20 years and still work. I wonder: at what point does a person stop living and start reminiscing; are calendars overrun with doctor’s appointments; is the price of peas more important than a presidential election when all at once, the dance floor floods. They are line dancing to Uptown Funk, lead by the Zumba instructor.