GOING BEIGE

That new resident, Bea Watkins, heads toward us as we eat our dry meatloaf at Shady Oaks Assisted Living. Whenever I’m physically close to someone new, I must be wary. I still don’t know what causes my spells.

“Hi ladies, I’m Bea,” she says. “Okay if I join you?”

Katharine’s smile is genuine as she says sure, gesturing to Lydia’s empty chair. Lydia is still having meals in her room, recovering from pneumonia. My smile is plastered on, like Mama taught me. And Deb—she hoards her smiles. “Actually,” says Deb, “this is Lydia’s spot. We’ve all been eating together for years. We’re family.”

We are. The husbands are dead. My daughter: VP of a biotech firm three states away, no marriage or children. I’m fiercely proud of her. And lord, how I miss her. Katharine has grandkids she rarely sees—ongoing custody battles from the divorce. Lydia has no children. Deb’s estranged from her two children, has never seen her grandchildren. We don’t ask about it.

Katharine laughs. “They call us the Quads. You know, for quadruplets. But please, sit. Lydia’s not joining us tonight.”

Bea with her smooth, facelift face, mother of four children who helped her move in here, all grins and hugs. Bea is five years younger than me and I’m seventy-nine, the youngest of our group. Bea with her stylish green eyeglasses, large jade ring. But she sits too quickly, knocking her water over. Some spills on Deb who rolls her eyes, but doesn’t stand. Deb is large, and even with her walker, moving is a challenge. We seagull about her, white linen napkins hard at work. Then Bea brushes against me. And it happens.

My body prickles with angles, sharp edges scratching my skin. Colors throb in my head. Breathing is difficult. I sit, clutching the chair’s arms, images of Bea’s future architecting my mind. Escher’s staircase meets kaleidoscope: a violet and magenta pentagon containing a jewelry box, a Penrose staircase that looks like a Monopoly board, a triangle filled with angry wasps.

Before anyone notices my glazed eyes, I slam Bea’s future shut by focusing on the difficulty of putting on my compression socks. In my head, I chant the litany of devices I’ve tried to help me with those damn socks: HexoSlider, Sock Ox, Sonew, Fitplus. Over and over. I call it Going Beige, picturing the most boring things imaginable.

In the next month, Bea’s jewelry box is stolen, she beats everyone at Monopoly, and she’s stung by a wasp. In the next month, Lydia is back with us at meals and the dining room manager has moved us to a round table so we’re stuck now with Bea. I stay as far away as possible from her and there are only occasional future flickers, mundane things like Bea and her grandsons looking for worms after the rain. Which happens five days after I see it.

When I began having spells a few years ago, I couldn’t rein them in. Most were mundane images. But the baker. I’d Ubered to the bakery—no more driving since my seizure—to pick up raisin scones and chocolate cookies for one of my daughter’s rare visits. After the baker handed me the bag, colors and geometric shapes constructed themselves in my brain, the images filling in slowly: the baker picking up a handgun, raising it to his temple. The baker putting it down, shaking his head, drinking two glasses of scotch. The baker picking up the gun again. Opening his mouth. Putting the gun in. I saw him pull the trigger. A few weeks later, I read about it. I couldn’t leave my bed for days.

My best spell: the woman giving birth. She was a former neighbor with a cheery sunflower yard and I ran into her at CVS. She was buying a pregnancy test. I loved that her birthing image lingered. I saw not only the birth—that baby girl all wet and red and covered with waxy goo—but also after, wrapped in a blanket, pressed to her mother’s chest.

Oh, the hours I’ve devoted to finding a pattern to my spells. All 38 of them so far. Proximity is part of it. But they happen at random times. Related to my moods? The weather? Time of day or season? What the person is wearing? What I can be certain of—and for this I am grateful—is that a spell never happens with close friends or family.

Until it does. My sister and I are talking on the phone on a bright autumn morning when I see her driving alone at night in the rain. Struck head-on by a skidding truck. It happens so quickly in my head I can’t Go Beige. 17 days after I’ve seen it, the accident occurs. Oh, I do everything beforehand to prevent it. My sister and I have never been close, but I show up at her door, unannounced. Bea, the only one of us who still drives, gets me there, six hours away. Within a few days of my warnings, my daughter flies out. I’m hospitalized briefly in the psych ward. A nightmare of a coincidence, my daughter and brother-in-law say after the accident. What they don’t say: maybe somehow I caused it. I’m not allowed to attend the funeral.

In the months since my sister’s death, Bea has helped me master Going Beige—and other techniques. Her spells occur only once or twice a year, but they’ve gone on for so long that she’s developed plenty of techniques to stop them in their tracks. We agree this is just between the two of us—even though there is a bigger “we”: the Quints. Five at Monopoly with our debates about multiple hotels on Baltic Avenue vs. one house on Boardwalk and Park Place. Five in our walks in the butterfly garden: one three-prong cane, one walker (Lydia after her knee surgery), one wheelchair (Deb’s stroke; thank God her speech and upper body movement are good). Two walking without assistance: me and Bea. We walk through the garden arm in arm, through sage and milkweed and asters. Through goldenrod, bee balm, buckwheat, the butterflies flitting through the flowers: monarchs, swallowtails, crescents, and our favorite, a Mission blue whom we choose to believe remembers us.