by Peggy Webb
Jenny’s room is losing her fresh sun-and-wind scent. I can’t even detect the smell of the damp socks she always used to toss behind her headboard.
Where did all the years go? How did I end up here in the botanical gardens envying two people I don’t even know?
Overwhelmed with the scent of roses and loss, I start to cry, not heaving sobs that announce grief in a way that makes people stop and stare, but silent tears that burn a path down the cheeks and evaporate before anybody notices. Anybody except your best friend.
Without saying a word Jane takes my arm and leads me to a bench surrounded by thick ferns and half-hidden among a copse of wise-looking oaks, their ancient trunks covered with lichen, their low-hanging branches saying, Here, rest awhile. She digs around in her purse and comes up with a tattered pink tissue, obviously used.
I blow my nose while she waits in Madonna-like patience, hands folded and face carved with concern. A big sigh shudders through me, and I think the tears might start all over again, but they don’t.
“Go ahead,” Jane urges. “You didn’t even cry at the funeral. You’re due after what you’ve been through.”
“This is not entirely about Aunt Bonnie Kathleen. She’s at peace.”
And I am, too, with that part of my past. In her five-year battle with cancer, I was finally able to give back a small portion of the loving care she generously lavished on me.
“Okay, then. Do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”
“No…yes. That seminar was awful.”
“Yeah, but not that awful.” She shoots me a sly look, and suddenly we’re grinning, then laughing. In perfect imitation of Dr. Wiggs, Jane says, “Or-gan-ize. Pri-ori-tize.”
“Why should women cope?” I ask after we finish our laughter-is-the-best-medicine break. “Why can’t we grow wings and fly?”
“Because we have too much ballast to get off the ground?”
“No, really… Don’t you ever wish you’d done something different? Don’t you ever get the feeling that you’ve let the important things slip through your fingers?”
“I try not to think too much about it.”
Maybe that’s my problem. I think too much.
But I don’t say that to Jane because the implication is that I’m a deep thinker while she’s shallow, which is the exact opposite of the truth. Besides, we’d set out to Huntsville for the express purpose of having a relaxing getaway weekend, in spite of the seminar Howard insisted we book.
And here I am being a wet blanket, ruining our good time.
“Hey, we’ll never get through the gardens if we don’t hurry.”
I reach for her hand, help her up, and we finish our tour arm in arm.
That evening we decide to have supper at the Macaroni Grill, which sounds like a place that serves home-style cooking from a buffet topped with tacky plastic hoods that are supposed to keep you from breathing on the food, but don’t. Since we’ve eaten at the Macaroni Grill in Memphis, we know what to expect: fresh flowers in real Italian pottery, chefs in tall white hats tending a stone oven and the smell of baking bread that makes you forget everything except sitting at a table with a real linen cloth and dipping soft white rolls into garlic-flavored oil.
What I want to order is a wallowing-in-the-doldrums, get-me-knee-walking-drunk whiskey, but since this is a nice upscale restaurant I settle for a lovely, sophisticated Pinot Grigio. The first glass makes me forget about a stale marriage and the second glass makes me forget about lost dreams. By the third glass I’ve even taken the edge off sex. Or the lack thereof.
“Whoa, Beth. Since when do you drink like that?”
“Since I’m out of town and nosy busybodies can’t run tattling.”
I’m drifting along in a fog, and my slurred S’s sound exactly right.
“Maybe we should order now. You need food.”
Jane signals our waitress, a lush, porcelain-skinned young woman, who tells us she’s from nearby Decatur and wants to transfer from Calhoun Community College to Memphis State and study opera.
“Then you should do it,” I tell her.
I’m feeling wise and worldly, a woman floating above her former frumpy self, transformed into a cross between Solomon and Isadora Duncan. If I had a long silk scarf around my neck I’d dance on the table and twirl it. Instead I wave my arms about in a magnanimous fashion.
“Do it before you’re too old,” I say. “Do it now! ‘Enjoy your ice cream while it’s on your plate!’”
In the midst of my Thornton Wilder quote, my flailing arm crashes into a tray loaded with shrimp scampi and fettuccine Alfredo. The waiter sidesteps and tries to hang on to the teetering tray, but it’s no match for my Isadora Duncan performance. Noodles and shrimp sail across the room and land on pressed khakis, white shirts and lacquered hairdos. One fat, pink jumbo-sized morsel nosedives into the plunging neckline of a woman twice the size of Texas. Fascinated, I watch her hop around the table and smack her husband on the head with her Gucci handbag.
“You pig!” she yells, as if he had personally and maliciously dumped the shrimp in her cleavage.
“Can you believe she can move that fast?” I ask Jane, but she’s too busy settling the bill and hustling me out of the restaurant to reply.
“I wanted ice cream,” I tell her.
“Just hush.”
When we arrive at the Marriott, I discover I’ve left my legs at the Macaroni Grill. Jane props me against the side of the car, drapes my arms around her neck like a fox-tail wrap and drags me through the lobby where one of the guests is playing bad country music on the baby grand piano.
“Wait…stop. I know that song. I want to sing.”
“Bad idea. Your second of the evening.”
“Ha.”
My snit lasts until we enter the elevator and lurch toward our third-floor room. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
“Not here, you won’t.”
Jane quells my nausea with a look and then man-handles the stubborn lock on the hotel door without uttering one unladylike word. But when victory is in sight, she wraps my arms around the toilet, then marches out of the bathroom with her back stiff.
I heave up sour wine and regret, and then splash water on my face. I look like the aftermath of Hurricane Camille.
“Jane,” I call through the closed door. “Are you mad at me?”
She opens the door and stands there looking like something from the pages of Vogue in her red silk pajamas.
“I’m sorry, Jane.”
“You look like hell. Can you dress yourself?”
“Yes.”
I don’t know if that’s the truth, but I’m not about to be the source of any more trouble. I struggle out of my clothes and put on an oversize white nightshirt with a slogan that reads, Give In To Your Animal Instincts. I would take the advice of my own nightshirt, but in spite of tonight’s performance I don’t even know if I have animal instincts. My fear is that thirty years of routine have wiped them out.
Mourning for my extinct animal, I borrow Jane’s Mary Kay cream to remove my makeup while she brushes her teeth, and then we both climb into the king-size bed the Marriott gave us instead of two doubles. Lying under the same covers with the sound of a good friend breathing nearby sometimes helps.
Not tonight, though. There’s a hole in me that nothing can fill.
We lie there a while in the dark, then Jane says, “What time do you want to go home tomorrow?” Ignoring the real issue.
But I can’t. I picture Howard, the Real Issue, at the Radisson Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, where he’s attending a psychiatry seminar, going through files he brought from home, jotting notes in neat, precise handwriting. He’s probably glancing at his watch thinking he has one more hour to work before he goes into the bathroom for his fifteen-minute bedtime ritual—brush teeth, floss, wash face, fold his dirty clothes and stow them in the plastic bag in his suitcase, unfold his blue-striped pajamas, which he will wear two nights in a row, maximum.
Next he’ll glance at his daily planner to his notation on Sunday, May 25, written in neat block letters. ELIZABETH RETURNS. He’ll make a mental note of it, nod, then bury his face back in his files.
For Howard, my homecoming will be just another entry on his schedule, a small deviation from the routine that rules his life.
“Jane…have you ever thought of running away from home?”
Foolish question. Of course, she’s never thought of such a thing. She and Jim adore each other. They still hold hands after forty years of marriage.
“Every woman does.” Her response both surprises and vindicates me. “At least once in the marriage. I think it comes with the territory.”
If she’s right, then maybe this notion of taking flight is a passing fancy. Maybe I just need to get home and back to my normal routine. Oh, help. Awful, spirit-killing routine.
“I’m not going home.”
“You’re kidding. Right?”
“No. I’m going back to Tupelo, but not to stay.”
“You’re stressed out from years of caregiving and the funeral, Beth.”
“It’s more than that, Jane. I’ve been thinking about this since Jenny left.”
Three days after the funeral, when Howard announced that she was to spend the summer in Tupelo working in his office, she yelled, “You’re trying to smother me. I’m not fixing to turn into Aunt Bonnie Kathleen.” Then she declared her intention to spend the summer backpacking with friends in Arizona. At that precise moment I thought, If my daughter can run away, why can’t I?
It’s as if Aunt Bonnie Kathleen’s death unlocked a dam inside Jenny and me. But while my daughter poured forth her rebellion, I’ve been mulling it over, mentally testing the waters, vacillating between taking the scary plunge and pulling back to the safety of the dock.
Aunt Bonnie Kathleen left me all her worldly possessions—a 1950s-style cottage in Ocean Springs, a 1979 Oldsmobile Cutlass that hasn’t run in seven years, a closet full of hopelessly out-of-date clothes…and a quarter of a million dollars.
Who would have thought it? A modest, small-town public school music teacher. But then, she never spent a penny on herself. Never took a vacation. Never bought a new piece of furniture. Never indulged in a fancy, frivolous party frock—except that one time when she thought Mr. Weems, the high school’s assistant principal, was coming for dinner. I’ll never forget it. There she was, flush-faced and smiling, all decked out in a new blue taffeta dress with dyed-to-match shoes when he called and claimed his car wouldn’t start.
She wrapped the dress in tissue paper and mothballs, put it in the bottom of Grandmother Holt’s steamer trunk and never mentioned his name again, just put on that brave smile. If she was hurt or disappointed, nobody ever knew.
Long-suffering. That’s what she was. Or maybe she just never imagined a different life for herself.
But I do. I don’t hear the music anymore. I want to rekindle the song, reignite my marriage, reinvent myself so that my daughters and my granddaughter will have a role model who is brimming with life and joy and hope. I don’t want to die and have them say, Oh Lord, I hope I never turn into Mother.
After the reading of Aunt Bonnie Kathleen’s will I said to Howard, “Let’s take that exotic dream vacation we used to talk about. Let’s go to Paris.”
“Maybe next year,” he said. “After I get a partner to help me look after patients.”
I didn’t remind him that’s what he’d said last year when I suggested going to the Smoky Mountains, or the year before when I mentioned taking a long weekend at the Peabody in Memphis. In fact, I don’t remind him of anything anymore. I don’t have enough spirit to bother.
We’re in the grip of a strange malaise, Howard and I. It’s a pattern we’ve built through the years, and I fear that it will soon be set in stone, if it’s not already. I see us sliding into old age, bitter, silent people, shackled together by a legal document…unless I take drastic measures.
I look at Jane. “As soon as I get back to Tupelo, I’m leaving.”
I’ve rendered the unflappable Jane speechless. Now that the bold statement is out there floating in the silence between us, I’m terrified. Do I have the courage to strike out on my own at this age?
We forgot to close the privacy drapes, and through the sheer curtains I can see Saturn Five lit up and pointed straight toward the shiny new moon that hangs over this city of 160,000 people.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” Jane says. “Get a good night’s sleep, and in the morning we’ll stop in Decatur at the cute little breakfast place on Moulton Street.”
“This is not alcohol talking.”
She snaps on the bedside lamp, lifts herself on one elbow and stares at me.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes. I’ve made up my mind. This is my last chance. If I don’t leave now, I’ll never get up the courage again.”
“What do you want me to do?”
This is what I love most about Jane. She knows when to argue me out of my notions and when to lend unconditional support.
“Just don’t stop being my friend.”
“I won’t.”
She turns out the light, and in a little while I hear her soft, even breathing, but I can’t sleep. I’ve just turned my future into a blank page, and I don’t even know if I can still write.
CHAPTER 2
“If you’re driving your own car, are you still running away?”
—Beth
Highland Circle is a posh community where old money and nouveau riche live side by side in gracious, shaded lots deep enough for privacy but narrow enough to have close neighbors. People who move in tend to stay until they die, which means there’s not much turnover in residents. If you live by a grump, then you’re likely to have to put up with him for the duration. Fortunately my curmudgeonly neighbor was eighty when Howard and I bought our sprawling Tudor house, and when his Greek Revival home came up for sale, I couldn’t wait to tell Jane.
The downside of running away is leaving behind a dear friend who gave me a key to her side door when she moved here twenty years ago, and has never asked to take it back, even four years ago when I ran sobbing into her house at midnight because I’d called Howard at the Park Plaza in San Francisco and heard a woman in his room.
Jane gave me a cool washcloth for my face, a cup of hot chocolate for my soul and levelheaded advice for my peace of mind.
“Howard’s too orderly to engage in a messy affair. Did you ask who it was?”
“No.”
“Call him right now and ask.”
When I shook my head, she handed me the phone. “If you don’t call him, I will.”
The woman turned out to be Brenda Miles, a business associate from Oxford.
“Not only is Brenda in my room,” Howard had said, “but also Bob Atterford, Jim Mansfield and Stacy Beckman. We’re discussing business. Now are you satisfied, Elizabeth?”
I was satisfied that he wasn’t being unfaithful, but unsatisfied in so many other ways that even now the prospect of leaving Jane does not sway my resolve.
And I’m unutterably grateful that it’s possible. Many women who feel trapped have the desire but not the means. One of the compensations of age is having your own bank account, your own car and the luxury of time.
Standing in my doorway, Jane says, “You’ll call me when you get where you’re going, won’t you? You’ll keep in touch?”
“I will.”
I hug her hard then go inside and walk through my house. It has five bedrooms and three baths, so this takes a while. The walls are coordinating shades of blue and beige and every stick of furniture matches. It’s as colorless and plain as Aunt Bonnie Kathleen’s house in Ocean Springs, as sanitized and predictable as I feel. If this is the image I project, no wonder I can’t light Howard’s fire.
Maybe I’ll go to the Gulf Coast and redecorate the seaside cottage Aunt Bonnie Kathleen left me. I’ll paint all the walls purple, and not a single thi
ng will match. I might even buy lamps with red fringed shades.
The thought cheers me up, and I sit at the kitchen table to call Jenny on her cell phone.
“Mom, is that you?” My daughter sounds happy and very far away, her voice brimming with life.
“Yes, honey, it’s me. Are you having fun?”
“I’m having a blast. Is everything all right at home? How’s Dad? How’re you?”
“Dad’s traveling. And I just got back from my trip with Jane.”
“She’s a blast. Is Jacob still engaged to that snooty little witch, Bitsy Lynn What’s-Her-Name?”
Jacob is the youngest of Jane’s four sons, a brilliant and very fine young man doing his residency in pediatrics at the University of Alabama Medical Center in Birmingham. He broke all our hearts when he fell for a debutante whose goal is the perfect tan and whose major concern is the color of her fingernail polish.
“He is, and you be nice.”
“Nice would be Kate, not me.”
My older daughter is nice…and conservative to the bone. Like Howard. Telling Jenny about my decision is going to be a piece of cake compared to explaining my plans to Kate.
“You’re nice, too, Jen.”
“Daddy thinks I’m wild.”
“A little bit of wildness is not a bad thing. It stretches you, lets you grow.”
“Wow, Mom. Are you getting hip in your old age?”
“Maybe…listen, honey, I don’t want you to be upset, but I’ve decided to go away for a while.”
“Where are you going? Paris? You’ve always wanted to go there?”
“I don’t know yet. I just need to get away from home. Your dad’s gone a lot and I need…a little breathing room.”
“How long will you be gone?”
How long will it take to turn around a relationship? A life?
“I’m not sure. But I’ll call you every day, and you call me on my cell phone if you need me. I mean that, Jen. Anytime. Day or night.”