DEERFIELD, ILLINOIS SEPTEMBER 2019

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The nursing home on Waukegan Road, next to the old Sara Lee cake factory. The place is called Sunshine or Sunrise. I can’t keep it straight. They shut down the plant years ago. All that’s left are broken windows, smokestacks, and a vast parking lot. Yet the sugary reek of industrial cake still permeates these windows that are otherwise screwed shut. Babs calls the place Joliet.

She’s stopped eating.

One of my earliest memories is of Babs feeding me family cars. We’re in what they call the dayroom. I dip a plastic spoon into a carton of Yoplait.

“Open wide for Lou’s cherry-red Lincoln Continental Coupe, doors as big as Rhode Island!”

“Why are you shouting?” Babs says.

It all reverses. History repeats itself backward.

With disgust, she accepts the spoonful. Again, I dip the spoon in the carton.

“Vroom, vroom! It’s your own ’83 Seville. Two-tone paint job and that weird hump of a trunk, remember? Like you could stuff a body in it? Open, Babs, open . . . ”

We’re surrounded by strangers in wheelchairs haphazardly parked like bumper cars. It’s midmorning. Some doze. Some slurp cold coffee. Others stare at the wall. At a table in the corner, they’re playing cards. That serious murmuring. Nobody here is waiting around to die. They’re waiting on lunch. Except Babs. For her, lunch can come and go and come and go. Next time, on my way here, I’ll pick up canned peaches. She always had a thing for canned peaches.

I’d take a canned peach over a peach peach.

Lou always said that was the Depression talking. And for the same reason, he said, he wouldn’t touch a canned anything anything.

Babs and Lou. Lou and Babs.

We called them by their first names.

Eyes closed, her head droops. She’s sitting in a plastic chair. She says she wouldn’t be caught dead in a wheelchair. I’d said, At Sunrise or Sunshine, that makes you immortal. She’d nearly laughed. That was months ago.

“Babs. Don’t sleep.”

She’s become frail. Years she worried her mind would go before her body. A former dancer, she’s always taken such good care of her body. Now her mind’s intact and her body’s so weak . . .

Eyes still clamped, she says, “And you know something?”

“What?”

“There’s not a single soul here I like.”

“What about Sylvia Weinstein? Did you two get over that thing?”

“Weinberg. What thing?”

“Didn’t you have a tiff with Sylvia Weinstein?”

“Don’t you listen?”

“But you like Sylvia, am I right?”

“Sylvia’s dead.”

“Sylvia Weinstein’s dead?”

“Weinberg!”

“When?”

“Two days ago. Two months ago. What’s it matter?”

I heap the spoon again.

“Open up for Solly’s Gremlin.”

“Solly’s what?”

“You don’t remember Solly’s blue Gremlin? Like a Pinto but even worse. Huge man, itty-bitty car. Lucy said Solly didn’t drive his car, he wore it.”

She opens her eyes.

“Your teeth are yellow,” she says.

“It’s the stress.”

“What?”

“The discoloration is caused by stress.”

“That’s absurd,” she says.

I cram the spoon between my grandmother’s lips.

“Couple more. What about Aunt Judith’s VW Bug? Didn’t she have a convertible Bug? Didn’t she once drive all the way to Chicago from Seattle with the top down because the mechanism was broken? She said it only rained on her in Nebraska.”

Babs bats the spoon out of my hand. Yogurt scatters across the parquet. The card players look up, briefly, from their game.

“Don’t talk about Judy.”

Her eyes lucid, furious.

I leave her and go into the men’s room in the hallway. A bathroom in a nursing home. Disinfectant. That little red string you pull if you need help. We all end up here, one way or another. I yank some paper towels from the dispenser. When I come back, she’s looking out the window at the remains of the defunct plant.

“It’s like a crematorium,” she says.

I stoop and wipe up the yogurt.

“Look, I just want you to eat a little more. Nurse Tabitha said you need more protein and more—”

“Who are you anyway?” She shields her eyes with her hand as if there’s a glare.

“Babs.”

“Oh, what difference does it make? You could be anybody.”

She leans forward and squints at my face as if she’s suddenly taken an interest in something else she sees in it.

“Jed.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t you have a wife?”

“We never married.”

“Where is she?”

“Around.”

“Around? What does that mean?”

“It means she’s around. Shouting distance. Just a little more, will you?”

I’m running out of cars. My father’s Mercedes 280SE with the bloodred seats, the one we called his Nazi staff car. My own crap-ass Civic that’s in the shop . . .

“Shouting distance?” Babs says. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“It’s like you speak some other language.”

“Please, Babs, Nurse Tab —”

“She dropped you.”

“Nurse Tabitha?”

“Your wife.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Gave you your walking papers.”

Those deep-set eyes and that nose, not so much big as prominent. First thing you noticed about her. Fleshy, bulbous, direct. Babs always said she had her father’s nose, a Hodash nose. Her tailor father had a little shop on Plymouth Court, near Dearborn Park. He died when Babs was eleven. She said one of her few contributions to the Rosenthal family was the introduction of the Hodash nose into our gene pool. Lucy and I both have her father’s nose.

“Hanna and I are separated. But nobody dropped anybody — I’ve got an apartment a few blocks away. It’s a trial separation.”

“Trial is right. I know that Hanna without the h.”

“It’s just an alternative spelling.”

“That’s what you say. Isn’t there a baby?”

“We’re co-parenting.”

“What?”

“Parenting alone, together.”

“I’m starting to feel woozy,” she says.

“Times change. People evolve.”

“You think I don’t get it?” she says. “You think I don’t know what it’s like?”

“What what’s like?”

“To be dropped!”

I’ve basically been dropped, but why go into it with my grandmother.

“The separation was a mutual, informed decision on both sides, which is why we’re sharing responsi–”

“It’s in your eyes.”

“What?”

“Dropped. Right there in your sky-blue eyes. Nobody in the family has such eyes. I’ve always found it suspicious on the part of your mother. Irises like yours don’t just appear” — she takes a look around the room, lowers her voice —“and they’ve never been very Jewish-looking.”

“Babs.”

“And you know what else?”

“Tell me but open up for Lucy’s new Mini Cooper.”

“She dropped us like old shoes.”

“Who did?”

“Who?” She turns her face toward the saloon doors of the dayroom like she expects whoever she’s talking about to saunter right through them. “You’re asking me who?”

“Who?” I say. “Who?”

“Who who? Everybody knows who who. And who who would take one whiff of this place and swish away to the Arts Club or the Union League or the Cliff Dwellers or the Alliance Française even though that woman couldn’t speak a word of — ”

“Essee?”

My grandmother flinches. The name alone still jabs.

“Visit? Out here? Lower herself? And you know she hated the suburbs with a venom only she—”

“Essee’s dead, Babs.”

“You think I don’t know?”

“At least fifteen years.”

“Longer.”

And she clenches her eyes as if she can’t shut them tight enough, out of sorrow, out of rage, it’s hard to tell. And there it is, the old wound.

“Babs?”

She shakes her head. No, no more talking.

I remember thinking, not then, later, after Babs died, about the fact that she’d used the word us. Dropped us like old shoes. Babs and Lou? The two of them had always led such entirely disconnected lives. I thought about my grandparents’ separate twin beds. Rock-hard mattresses. Jumping from one to the other was like jumping from concrete to concrete. Stub your toe if you landed the wrong way.

Us?

Not that us.

Essee and Babs, Babs and Essee. The idea of them. The two once-inseparable friends. Two friends joined at the hip for decades. In their teens Babs and Essee danced together around the city as chorus girls in shows and theaters and movie palaces like the Oriental, McVicker’s, the Illinois, the Chicago, the Selwyn, the Edgewater Beach Hotel . . . They high-kicked side by side together at the Century of Progress in ’33. Maid of honor at each other’s weddings. And their husbands, too, weren’t they the buddiest of buddies?

In the dayroom, the card players murmur, the sleepers sleep. When I finally stand and zip my jacket, Babs, eyes still closed, reaches up with her long fingers, claws my chin. And her voice like a claw, too, clawing at the air between us.

“When Judy died that bitch didn’t send a card.”

That was a Tuesday. A week and a half later she was gone. She was one hundred and one and four months.

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From The Gossip Columnist’s Daughter by Peter Orner. Used with permission of the publisher, Little, Brown and Company. Copyright © 2025 by Peter Orner.