Mones

By Sue Tatem

The novel is about cheating death by rejuvenation. Axa Potter enters a nursing home. A huge freezer is delivered. Four old ladies embark on a quest to escape the inevitable and, using hormones they call Mones, rejuvenate themselves. They become younger. Their adventure takes them from the pine barrens of New Jersey to the southwest to the Caribbean. While most old bags are packing it in, these unripening beauties create a new and heart-warming beginning. A charming cat named Varmint accompanies them on their adventure back through their nine lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 19, 2010
• ISBN: 9781477172896

Sue Tatem

The Toet (H. Randolph Tatem III, MD) wrote about Varmint, our beloved cat. Varmint was an odd-eyed white long haired cat. Sue Binkley Tatem, Ph.D. wrote about the colors and illustrated both stories. Sue also illustrated other childrens’ books: The Reluctant Racehorse by Kyra Knoll, and A Thousand Eyes by Paddy Fleming (a dog story set in Africa).

Book preview

1

Lady, won’t you tell me what the devil’s in that freezer? Thank God, that’s the last of it. How did you ever get permission to bring in that monstrosity? They serve dinners here. What do you need with a freezer? Boy, that sucker was a real ball buster, pardon my French, to get in here. I’m glad you didn’t choose a place on the third floor… and who needs a freezer? It’s colder than a witch’s tit out there. It was after all, January, in New Jersey.

These remarks were delivered with huffing and puffing, not by the big bad wolf blowing the house down, but by the delivery man as he squirmed his dolly from beneath the freezer. Outside, all was white and falling snow.

Axa opened her mouth to retort to the Federal Express man to mind his own business, that the freezer was her private property. The burly man wearing a brown uniform shirt was shifting his weight from his left foot to the right foot. A patch on his shirt had his name, Juan. Dark hair, dark skin, undoubtedly Hispanic, so why was he pardoning his French, and ball buster wasn’t French anyway? But then, maybe he was right in a way, that the devil was in fact hiding in that freezer, frozen, waiting to be thawed out.

Yessir, that freezer must have weighed a ton. Turning it on its side would have made it a lot easier to get through the door. He inserted the oversized freezer plug into its jumbo socket. There, that will get you going. Anything else? asked Juan.

I’m impressed you were able to move that, said Axa.

Federal Express, Worldwide Service, said Juan. Anything else?

Axa suddenly realized that the man was making conversation in hopes she would think of giving him a tip. Probably he thought she was too stingy, or worse, that she was too senile to remember to give him a tip. She turned to find her purse that was sitting on the drop-leaf table. She unzipped it and stuck her distorted right hand into its gaping maw. She searched around until she felt the smooth leather of her wallet. She withdrew her fat red leather billfold, which beeped when it wasn’t properly closed, extracted a portrait of President Jackson with his wild white hair and held it out to Juan.

He reached for Andrew but looked disappointed. Sighing, she drew out another twenty and placed it in his hand. He smiled.

Thank, you, why thank you ma’am. One last time, he wheedled, won’t you tell me what’s in that freezer? Juan had been curious about the freezer since he’d received it, wondering over it as he lifted onto his truck and rolled it on its steel dolly into the white painted truck interior with its translucent ceiling. He got a good look at it in the bright white even light of the truck. And what had made him curious about the freezer from the moment he had seen it was that it was locked.

Axa frowned and signed the pink paper Juan offered.

Well, I guess that’s your business. Thank you again. That’s a weird name, Juan said.

Axa didn’t explain. She just closed the door behind him.

Axa was Achsah. It was a Biblical name from 1 Chr. 2.49. In the posterity of Caleb, Achsah was the daughter of Caleb and his concubine Maachah. Achsah was promised in marriage to the captor of Debir. Othniel, the son of Caleb’s younger brother Kenaz, took the city and married his cousin Achsah. When she left for her new home Achsah requested and received from her father some water springs and land in the South. Axa hoped it was the fountain of youth. The word means anklet or bangle. Axa had no idea why her parents chose that name. They only said they wanted something different. Asa, she found, in Japan means born in the morning.

A little meow announced someone else in need of attention. Someone whose name was no mystery.

2

The apartment had fresh white wall-to-wall carpet and newly painted white walls. At least white hairs wouldn’t show. Axa’s new white and rose print sofa was stacked with brown cardboard Mayflower moving boxes. The boxes, and in fact the moving van, were marked with a green sailing ship logo. She felt like she’d just gotten off the Mayflower ship, with all her things, exhausted from her trip across the Atlantic. But Axa’s trip was not nearly so far, just from one small town in New Jersey to another. But still, it was a journey from an Old World, to a New World, although Hemlocks and places like it—Georgia Pines, The Palms, The Pines, Harvest Village, Covenant Village, all prisons with pleasant names—could be thought of as a New World in an ironic sense. Hemlocks was, after all, a place for the old, the aged, the elderly, a last station on the train of life. The caboose.

Axa viewed Hemlocks as Death Row in which she would be a resident of a pleasant cell. An inmate. Sentenced. And was it any different than frying in the electric chair? inhaling the gas? feeling the so-called pinch? of the needle? It never felt like a pinch at all, who were they kidding? Oh yes indeed, it was different. There was no quick merciful end in Hemlocks. No Death Warrant with a clearly spelled out date and time.

Cold gray light from the fading January afternoon illuminated the tumbled flotsam and the room through a double slider that opened out onto the porch.

There was another soft meow.

Behind Axa, the dark foyer connected with a bedroom, a bath, a living room, and a kitchenette—all painted white. A door to the left of the slider led to a walk-in storage closet. A door to the right of the slider hid the heater and air conditioning equipment.

She gazed bleakly around the white painted living room of her apartment. Unopened boxes claimed the floors and furniture. Pictures and a mirror leaned against the walls.

She thought about her house, well, the house that had been hers. Constructed of soft gold painted clapboard and natural gray stone, it was set carefully among its gardens in a forest at the end of a private lane. It had been sold. It was hers no more. Never mind that Axa also knew she was incapable of caring for it, that the steps were too slippery in winter, that she couldn’t shovel her path free of snow, that she could no longer drive the Ford Taurus parked in her garage. The Taurus had gone before the house, to her daughter, Rose.

What was hers now was a cubicle identical to other cubicles in an institution. She was boxed up like an old rug in brown cardboard stamped for shipping. This end up! She thought of her ruby Saruk that she had sent to her grand niece. The red rug was larger than the square footage of her space in Hemlocks. It was a real come down in so many ways. Axa sighed. She looked out the double slider windows, across her tiny patio with its green plastic outdoor carpet and molded white plastic chairs, at the red brick walls, dark windows, and green wood stained balconies of the other condominiums, other cells. It was a depressing view. She looked out at the ground.

The courtyard between the wings of condominiums was carpeted with rusting grass covered by worn snow. It was winter, and the snow had been followed by a melt and a freeze. Hemlocks was embedded in the middle of dirty gray ice. But even in autumn, when the colors should be gold and red, there wasn’t even a tree to brighten the landscape and to shed a colorful leaf. To reach Hemlocks, Axa had turned from a clogged highway littered with fast food restaurants, she had thought, into a macadam lane which led over a drainage ditch choked with Styrofoam coffee cups. Hardening of the highways, she might say. On a tree, a red sign bore handwritten white letters, Ye must be born again. Amen, she thought.

At home, huge brown oak leaves covered Axa’s verdant lawn and mulched her perennial flower beds in the fall. How she had complained about the leathery leaves. Too tough to shred, she had to blow them into the woods. Now, she wished she had thought of saving one of those leaves. She wished she had put one in a picture frame. She had said goodbye to the house last fall, the house that had been her home for more years than she cared to count. As she left there were still mauve and gold and white daisy colors on the mums though some of the flowers had faded. Now, in winter, the trees would be feathered white with the snow and the little birds she fed would be crowded around the feeder. The little seed suckers were her foul weather friends and had only deigned to grace her feeders when more natural fare was in short supply.

Home. She was in a home now. But it would never be a real home.

Axa found a lamp. She limped over to a wall and peered behind the boxes. She located an outlet. It was low, but only a couple of feet to reach. She bent and groaned at the pain that stabbed her lower back. She straightened, gritted her teeth, and tried again. Feebly, she poked the plug at the socket with the gnarly claw which passed for her hand. After several pokes she had the prongs part of the way into the socket. I can’t even put a plug into a socket. I’ve passed the last Go in the Monopoly game of life. She turned the lamp switch. Nothing. She limped into the dark foyer and felt around for a wall switch that she could not see. She ran her hands up and down the walls near the door frames. Finally she touched a switch and flicked it. Nothing. It was still dark. She tried again and found another. She was almost startled by the glare of the overhead light that burst on at the touch of her hand.

Axa pushed a box off a chair and creaked into the chair’s seat.

She looked at her hands that were now so weak she couldn’t plug in a lamp properly. Barely recognizable as hands, the lumpy digits of her crippled paws pointed at odd angles and were covered with dark liver spots. She could not believe that only a few years ago these fragile fingers could hold a Saint Bernard still for his rabies shots and wrestle a spitting cat to the examination table. Mini-vise grips, that’s what her husband had called her tiny strong hands.

How had it happened?

She reached up slowly and touched her hair. It was thin, so thin she knew people saw more scalp than hair when they looked at her. The few fine remaining hairs were a soft gray-white. Like cobwebs, she thought, her hair was like cobwebs in an attic. First she’d noticed she didn’t have to shave her legs very often or her armpits. Then she noticed her dark triangle was barely visible. The hair on her head, mercifully, had been the last to go, but it had hurt the most.

Where had the years gone?

What was time anyway? A melting snowman puddled? A pretty pony run away? To Axa, time had always seemed to clop along, a steady Lucy of a horse, pulling a hoist that raised a cement bucket, up and down, night and day, time without end, Amen.

Her hand dropped to feel the skin on her face. It was incredibly soft. It had crinkled to the finest crepe. She knew there were deep worry lines on her forehead, and that her upper lip was creased.

Old age is a woman’s hell. That quote Axa remembered as she remembered things now, in an odd jumble, where once they were filed in order, in time, like cards in a library catalog. Who said it? Axa looked in her Bartlett as she unpacked the book. Ninon de L’Lenclos 1620-1705?

Axa rummaged in a box. Not finding what she was after, she turned to another. With a sigh she pulled out an object, a rectangle that was shrink-wrapped in plastic. With a fingernail, Axa gnawed at the plastic wrapper trying to open the package.

Damn. She looked in vain for a perforation to tear it open. She scratched at the package. Finally, the plastic stretched into a welt under her claw and with further efforts she got it started. Then the wrapper came off easily but it was stuck to her hand with static electricity. Axa shook the wrapper onto the floor.

She examined the object. One edge was a wire spiral. She carried it to the kitchen and turned on the kitchen light. Mercifully, someone had left a nail in just the right place. Axa opened the calendar to January and hung it on the nail. It was a calendar with animal cartoons. But the days were marked out in large squares. Axa looked at the calendar.

Axa went searching for her pocket book. It was a beige nylon Sportsac she’d chosen for its wide web strap and light-weight and zipper closure. It was serviceable, manageable with her arthritis, rather than fashionable. She located it on the drop leaf table. Axa zipped open the bag and pawed in it. She brought forth various pens. Finally she found the red tube marker she’d bought for the calendar. She went into the kitchen and drew large red X’s through to mid-January. X marks the spot.

Six months. More or less. The doctor had said she had six months. That was near the beginning of January. She wondered whether that meant six months exactly, or approximately six months. She had been too stunned to ask. She thought of counting out six months forward to the end of June. The pen poised over the probable date of her death on the calendar—June 24. Maybe if she hurried she could make the Summer Solstice. Perhaps she should draw a skull and crossbones in the square. But in a way, the six-month sentence—an entire sentence? six months seemed hardly a clause, a phrase, or even a word in the day of her lifetime—was reassuring. She had a plan, but if it didn’t work, well, she’d rather not live on Death Row any longer than she had to, and it was reassuring that the end was in sight.

Six months, not much time. She’d better get cracking.

Not that the same doctor’s sentence for her older sister had been correct. Lucy, Axa’s sister, had been ten years older. Axa had watched Lucy step through her dance of dying. She had seen Lucy leave her house. Lucy lived in Hemlocks’s First Level playing bridge and going on the planned excursions in the Hemlocks bus for a couple of years. Then there was a move to the Second Level. Lucy was in a wheel chair then, and needed personal care services. That meant diapers, the reek of ammonia, chairs covered with chocolate streaks of crap, and institutional meals served on trays.

Lucy had liked to be alone, and spurned the offers to be wheeled to the communal television or dining rooms. Lucy said the other residents were talking about her behind her back. And they were. And about each other. That was all they had to talk about. Each other, their complaints about the food and Hemlocks, how their kids never visited them, their ailments. Even the weather ceased to be a topic when they stopped going outside altogether.

Axa could hardly blame her. The television played game shows and soap operas to a row of wheelchairs filled