Virginia smiles when she says her ex-husband moved in near her. She’s not bitter that, after being married for 23 years, he left her for a younger woman, or that she only received one $25 alimony check. She’s not really bitter about anything. These are the best years of her life, the 88 year old says.
Ten red bracelets, matching her red shirt and cardiga, line her right wrist.
“It’s all very inexpensive but I couldn’t enjoy it more,” she says looking at her bracelets. “I’m kind of inventive, this one is really for the hair. But it’s effective this way.”
On this Saturday in the cafeteria at Golden Living of Point Loma, a retirement community, Virginia can choose from a meatball “sandwhich” or a salad. Her friend Walter can often be found erasing the “h” from “sandwhich” on the dry-erase board. Virginia shares a table with Dean, a brilliant pianist. One table over is Larry, an engineer-turned-poet. Beyond Larry is Barbara, who swears about doctors and makes sexual comments to visiting young men.
Some are friends. Some show her how she does not want to be. But her closest companion is a quiet, white-haired woman on the other side of the cafeteria.
***
Virginia was born in Sioux Falls in 1921.
“Iowa?”
“No! South Dakota!” she says.
She didn’t have siblings. A year and 10 months after her birth, her mother died from heart complications caused rheumatic fever, which she got at age 16.
“My father, I guess, was so stunned to be left with a baby daughter and to have his wife pass away that he couldn’t talk about it,” she says. “There were a lot of things I wanted to know. But the questions you have for your mother only your mother can answer.”
At age seven, like many children, she discovered that Santa Clause isn’t real.
Her grandfather, the head gardener and maintenance director at a packing plant, road to work with his best friend. He arrived at work, got out of the car, and walked around the back. His friend didn’t see him.
The friend backed into her grandfather, her grandfather fell down, and the car ran over him.
“Well” he said in the hospital, “I’ll be home for Christmas.”
“Well, you’ll be home but I don’t think in time for Christmas,” Virginia’s aunt Rita said.
“Oh no, not my earthly home. My heavenly home.”
He died Christmas Eve, Virginia says. Her uncle, who usually played Santa Clause for the children, was in no mood to perform. They broke the news.
“It’s quite a blow losing your grandpa and Santa Clause at the same time,” Virginia says.
***
She left Sioux Falls when she was 19, on the tail-end of the Great Depression and before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. She got a job at a jeweler, and soon hit things off with Melvin, whom she met at a dinner party. On their third date he bought her a star sapphire ring. He kept the charm going and by 22, she was married. It wasn’t long before she birthed her daughters Paula and Susan.
Around the time Lyndon B. Johsnon sent half a million troops to Vietnam, Virginia’s American dream seemed to come to a halt.
“Mel was a womanizer,” she says. “I always feel, attractive men, it’s not all their fault, because women throw themselves at them.”
“We need counseling,” she told Mel.
“If you want to go to counseling go ahead. But I’m not interested in saving this marriage,” he said.
They split and soon she got her first and last alimony check. It was the last she received.
She decided the star sapphire Melvin had given her would be more appreciated by Paula. Soon after the exchange, she lost the ring at the beach.
At 45, Virginia re-entered the workforce, getting a job at a Christian Science nursing home. But it wasn’t enough to make the payment on her house. She went back to Sioux Falls with her head low – her daughters in tow, her marriage left behind.
“I hated to go back as a failure. But I did,” she says.
She got a job as a nurse’s assistant at a nursing home, where she was fascinated with the residents.
“Everything happens for the best,” she says. “I don’t care what it is, if I hadn’t had to get that job … [as a cleaning lady] I wouldn’t have gotten to see how much you were loved and wanted by an elderly person.”
Four years ago she found herself on the other side of the sponge baths.
She moved into Golden Living with Joan, now 76, another divorcee who had already been there for years, and the two hit it off.
“When I moved in she was my first roommate, and I never regretted that,” says Virginia. “It’s always been just, how lucky can you get?”
They endure struggles together, racking their brains to figure out which combination of buttons on the black and gray TV remotes will bring the symmetry needed between the cable box and the small television to allow them to flip between channels eight and 10. On Sunday mornings they take turns reading passages aloud from the Bible, because getting to church isn’t as easy as it used to be. Her new companion plays a different role from her old one.
“You always have a special place for the person you’ve met,” she says referring to Melvin. “But you can meet more people that are special. But nobody ever takes the place of one that you dearly loved.”
The special people in her life, her friends, make her happy.
“Yeah, we have each other,” Joan says.
“Sometimes Joan thinks she has too much of somebody who cares,” Virginia says.
“Sometimes, yes,” Joan smiles.
Virginia’s ex moved in down the hall and around the corner. It’s more convenient for their children, now in their 60s, to visit. And she doesn’t mind.
“I still think a lot about Mel,” she says. “You can’t have two children with someone and not have feelings for him.” She says having separate rooms is a better living situation anyway, because they can’t annoy each other.
She reads, she makes crafts with buckets full of scrap paper and zig-zag scissors. She hangs plates, images of roses or the last supper, on her walls. She socializes in the cafeteria. She enjoys her life.
“I face my problems happily,” she says, “because … you have to make your own happiness. And once you learn that you can be happy, and you’ll have a lot of happy people around you.”
