Who are the recluses and what are their reasons? Who are the people who decide to limit their frame of reference? The walls of her room became a boundary, the door frame a threshold it became difficult for me to cross. I stood there often, watching her sleep. Marlene Dietrich was bedridden for the last eleven years of her life, Proust the last three. People feel sorry for the house bound, but it can be a position of strength, a refusal to meet the world on its terms. Emily Dickinson was a recluse; she gardened at night. Emily Brontë, Greta Garbo. The recluse decides when and to whom she will speak, access is limited.
At times I felt that the children of immigrants were lucky, not in so many matters of social and economic security, obviously, but in the matter of understanding their parents. Behind those parents stood a whole country, somewhere to go for deeper insight into who they were before they came to America. Who was my mother before she went upstairs? I barely know and there is no place to go where I can ask questions. I have a few stories. I have a memory of her wearing a yellow shirt in sunlight when I was young and her hair was very long. I have the year we took walks and the autumn she taught me to drive.
I’m not unhappy, I only want to understand what happened because I, too, have spent a day upstairs, drifting in and out of sleep, staring at the light shifting across the room, holding a book but not reading, and still felt by dinnertime ready for more sleep. Who’s to say there won’t be more such days? I have a fear of rooms where people spend too much time, especially if there is a bed in them. Xavier de Maistre’s book-length memoir, Voyage Around My Room, is witty to some, but reads like a horror story to me. When you are alone in a room, time is slow and not particularly nice. It will wait in the dusty corner and taunt and try to convince you there’s not much point in doing anything. Stay, rest. Wait it out. Penelope waited upstairs. So did my mother. I do not want to do the same.
Fortnight Friends
In April Sue and I worked in the beds around the library, filled mostly with mature rhododendron and hydrangea, some of my favorite plants on campus. The tall winter stems were hanging with curled, wilted leaves that looked like sleeping bats. We were cutting them back and mulching.
“Have you seen the paper?” Sue asked.
“Not today. Why?”
“That reporter is either trying to make you famous, or . . .” Sue frequently got herself into these comparative binds.
“What?”
“She’s written a piece about some rich guy in Paris who was inspired by your hashtag.” Here Sue stopped shoveling mulch and stretched her back.
“Not mine.”
“Yeah, well, he sold his apartment and most of his belongings, everything except what he could fit into a suitcase—an extremely expensive suitcase—and a leather backpack. He just turned forty and has decided to downsize his life and focus more on his friendships and experiences. Sound familiar?”
“How much was the suitcase?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars! He’s a tech entrepreneur or something. He doesn’t have a home or a base of any kind. He just travels from friend to friend.”
“Oh. Does he have a lot?”
“The article didn’t say.”
We worked for a few minutes.
“Aren’t you curious how it’s going?” Sue asked.
“I guess.”
“His friends are miserable! Apparently he keeps terrible hours and the wife of the first friend ended up making his bed and doing his laundry. That visit lasted a week. The next one, where he ended up just taking his friend’s clothes, only lasted three days. It’s just so typical. He took your idea—which, Maria says, and, I don’t know, maybe she’s wrong, but she says it’s about visiting your friends to see their lives, not to impose your life on theirs—and turned it into something else, something that’s all about him.”
I was moved by the idea of Maria and Sue discussing me. “Well, it’s a work in progress,” I said.
I almost told her I’d named Grendel, but I was stuck on the cost of the other suitcase. I was also impressed by Maria’s understanding. I didn’t remember outlining my thinking so clearly. But it had occurred to me that one of the questions I most wanted to ask my friends was: Can I see an average day in your life right now? A real day, not one curated for social media or filled with the best activities to entertain a visitor. On the one hand, it’s a simple question. On the other, it’s almost too intimate. And it might be impossible, because the presence of a visitor changes a day, no matter how close the friends are. Destinations are planned, observations made. It’s the way we function when people come to see us, often because the trust required to really let someone see your life is rare. Even Henry James felt the need to take good friends for a view of the sea when they came to spend a day with him.
“Well, I hope he has a lot of friends,” I said.
“He won’t when this little experiment is over.”
Sue lost her footing and stumbled against a rhododendron, bending to the breaking point a long stalk with many buds. “Shit,” she said softly to the plant. “I’m sorry.”
* * *
—
I READ THE ARTICLE later and everything Sue had said was accurate. I did a little Googling and realized that the hashtag had persisted into the new year. It had survived the backlash and was now a fairly regular meme, due in large part to the efforts of Abby Mara, who was now a stringer for a major newspaper.
Mara had gotten people talking again about the Dunbar number—the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships—and how, despite predictions, it hadn’t gotten any bigger in the age of social media. Related articles discussed how social isolation seemed to be killing us and how the platitudes of contemporary friendship (the status update, the tweet, the hashtag) were not enough because it is ultimately shared, face-to-face experience that we need to feel understood. Someone had shown that a touch on the arm between friends increased endorphin production by three times the rate of a heart-eyes emoji. The term “radical friendship” had been coined and was being bandied about in essays short and long. And for the first time in its history, Facebook was having a sustained dip in its share price. With personal days, vacation days, or by whatever means they had, people were making plans to spend more time with friends.
If radical friendship and the popularity of #fortnightfriend continued to grow, it seemed possible someone would eventually want to come and stay with me. Before bed, I took a good look at the guest room and concluded it needed work. For one thing, Hester had been sleeping in there and the bedspread was covered with cat fur. She was curled up now against the pillows and raised her head to look at me while I stood in the doorway. Outside I could hear a spring robin, a melancholy sound more searching than song to me. It’s not my favorite harbinger of the season.
“Come on,” I said to Hester, and carried her upstairs to sleep in my room.
Banyan Tree (Ficus benghalensis)
As the yew is to the churchyard, the banyan is to the marketplace: For centuries people have gathered in its deep, wide shade to barter and trade. It would be a good memorial, but we’d have no luck with it in Anneville. They are easily damaged by frost and are therefore best grown in warmer climates. Another problem is that the banyan requires a lot of space. It should not be planted near foundations, driveways, streets, or homes, as its canopy and aerial root system can spread quite far. The largest banyan tree in the United States is in Lahaina, Hawaii. It was planted in 1837 as an eight-foot sapling and is now sixty feet tall with sixteen major trunks and a canopy circumference of a quarter mile. One thousand people can stand in its shade.
It is possible to grow a banyan as a houseplant. They are surprisingly well adapted to indoor environments and are often used in bonsai, as the shoot tips can be pinched back to promote branching and control size.
But I’m not going to mention this to my father. As a memorial, this
would be enormously problematic. If I became sick or incapacitated, bequeathing it would be difficult. Better to let nature do the maintenance.
The Airport Road
The first Thursday in May my father and I missed our dinner at El Puerto because he wasn’t feeling well, so I suggested Sunday brunch at a new place, his choice. He picked Cracker Barrel.
“When did we get one of those?” I asked, unable to conceal my disdain.
“It’s good,” my father said. “I’ve been a couple of times.”
“When?”
“With Janine’s family. She invited me.”
We took the airport road. The pear trees (Pyrus calleryana) in the median, to which I have a mild allergy, were in bloom. When I was little, I called them popcorn trees because of all the small white flowers. Now every year my father points at them, I nod, and we both smile. I wondered if he’d told Janine that story when she drove him on the airport road. In conflicts around the world, it’s very important who controls the road to the airport. Sometimes the road is shut down and that’s always a sign the conflict is escalating.
At the restaurant the wait was ninety minutes. My father said he wasn’t hungry anyway, so we drove home. I made us eggs and toast and we took sections of the newspaper out to the backyard to enjoy the mild weather.
Before I took my first bite, I heard a thud. I lowered the paper and saw a starling on the grass about ten feet away. It moved its head once and then was still.
My father looked up from his paper. “The little guy snapped his neck on that cable wire.”
We stared at the bird. A warm breeze ruffled a wing feather.
“Does this kind of thing happen often?” I asked.
“Well, Janine and I buried another one behind the mock orange last week.”
My father turned back to his breakfast, but I’d lost my appetite. When he was finished, we buried the bird behind the mock orange (Philadelphus coronaris), right next to the other fresh little mound.
* * *
—
A FEW DAYS LATER Janine and I pulled out of our driveways at the same time. Janine drives a Honda minivan. She has two children under five, one dog, two cats, and a husband whose shifts at the hospital are incompatible with all of that. And yet she has time to spend with my father. Leo told me he remembers American tourists coming to his town when he was a boy. They worried excessively about the roaming, homeless cats. They wanted to feed them, name them. What a luxury, his mother would say, to have time to worry about cats.
At the stop sign at the end of the street, Janine turned right over the railroad bridge and I followed. As we approached the light at Founders Avenue, she turned right again. She was headed toward the university. I guessed she was going to Barracks Mall, a frequent destination of young mothers as it has both a twenty-four-hour pharmacy and one of the most popular cafés in town. I held the wheel at ten and two and looked straight ahead. Janine was wearing sunglasses and I couldn’t tell from the angle of her head if she was glancing in her rearview mirror or not. I turned a couple of times to admire the dogwoods (Cornus florida) in the median. They were just starting to bloom, and while I never would have planted them in a pink-and-white alternating pattern, they were lovely.
We drove the length of Founders Avenue. She was going ten miles over the speed limit, but I kept pace. At the end of the road I prepared to keep straight, anticipating her upcoming left to Barracks, but she took the right fork toward the hospital and merged fast.
I was surprised. The children weren’t in the car with her. Had something happened to one of them? Or her husband? It also seemed at least possible she was pregnant again. Maybe something was wrong?
She pulled into the visitor’s lot and I took the spot next to her. She was not in a rush to get out of the car. In fact, she was finishing her breakfast. She stopped chewing and did a cinematic double take when she saw me. We held each other’s gaze while simultaneously lowering the car windows between us. I watched as the reflection of the sky in her driver’s side window disappeared, revealing Janine’s young and shiny face. She had very good skin. She must have seen a reflection of the hospital building in my passenger-side window give way to my face, which had a spring sunburn.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
At first Janine looked surprised and almost happy to see me, then confused. She finished chewing and swallowed. “Why? What happened?”
“You’re at the hospital.”
“I volunteer here.”
“Oh, that’s great.”
“I read to the kids in the Ambulatory Care unit. Sometimes I do a shift in the gift shop.”
“That’s so great,” I said. “That’s . . . really helpful.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I just wanted to thank you for helping my father bury the bird.”
“That was so sad,” she said.
“And taking him to lunch?” I’d meant to suppress the question mark, but it forced its way out.
Janine frowned a little. “We really enjoy spending time with him.”
“That’s great,” I said, painfully aware of how many times I’d used that word.
“He’s great,” she said. “He gave me some of your mock orange branches and told me how to force them.”
I nodded.
She glanced at the clock in her car. “I should go. So, um, May, you followed me to thank me?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m visiting a friend. A friend who’s in the hospital.” I looked past her car to the rows of hospital windows.
“I hope everything’s okay.”
“Me, too,” I said, and started preparing to get out of the car. “Anyway, thanks for spending time with my father.”
I could see in my peripheral vision that she was staring at me. “You know, sometimes they just need to feel useful.”
“They?”
She sighed. “You know what I mean.”
“My father’s name is Earl.”
* * *
—
THAT NIGHT I ASKED MY FATHER if he’d like to try Cracker Barrel again the following Sunday. We could leave earlier and beat the rush. Confusing it with Crate & Barrel, however, I called it Cracker & Barrel. My father either didn’t notice or didn’t mind. He accepted happily.
Mock Orange
The first time I smelled the blossom of the orange tree (Citrus sinensis) I was thirteen years old. It’s one of the most fragrant flowers in the world, and in Florida millions of the waxy, white flowers perfume the air in the spring. My mother, brother, and I stepped out of the Fort Lauderdale airport into that sweet-smelling air. We’d come for the christening of my new cousin, my mother’s sister’s new baby. The christening had become the occasion for a rare family reunion at my maternal grandmother’s house.
I knew some things about my grandmother. I knew that on my mother’s eighteenth birthday a friend of the family gave her a beautiful watch that my grandmother liked so much she took it for herself. I knew that when I was six she wanted me to say “I’ve had an elegant sufficiency” before I could be excused from the table. I knew that when I was in elementary school I often came home to find my mother crying in the kitchen, a letter in her lap, the return address always her mother’s.
The first two days of the trip passed comfortably. Everyone ate breakfast at different times and occupied themselves for the morning. The walls of the condo were covered with photographs of my grandmother in her prime. In most of them she looked like a 1940s movie star, which she had been, briefly. There were only a few pictures that included my mother, but I understood that was because my mother hadn’t come to live with her until she was eight years old. Before that, my mother lived with her father, my grandmother’s first husband, and didn’t know her mother at all.
The night before the christening, I came to the dinner table with my hair down
. At the time, I had long hair and usually wore it in a ponytail. I’d been swimming that afternoon, though, and when I got back to the condo I’d showered and washed my hair in order to be ready for the christening the next day. I brushed it out neatly and left it down to dry.
When my grandmother saw me, she told me to leave and come back with my hair up. I hesitated, unsure whether she was serious, but then she shouted it was rude to wear one’s hair down at dinner, she couldn’t believe I didn’t know better, I had no manners. I looked at my mother, but she nodded at me to go.
I returned to the table with the highest ponytail I could manage, so tight it was hurting my scalp. I concentrated on the candle flames and listened to my grandmother’s voice. She spoke in bursts that waned as they lost momentum, as if the initial idea were long harbored but began to fade as soon as it was released. She attacked everyone at the table. It wasn’t until the end of dinner, when my aunt started clearing and my grandmother demanded another bottle of wine, that I began to understand.
My memories of the last two days are hazy. I remember the blue dress my grandmother wore the day of the christening; it matched her beautiful eyes. I remember the new lavender dress my mother had bought me as a surprise. My grandmother drank all afternoon and by dinnertime served us a burned casserole, helping herself to bites from the ladle between slapping portions onto our plates. No one bothered to light the candles.
The next day it thundered all morning. My grandfather drove us to the airport, his mood quiet but not gloomy. The last thing he said to my mother was “Your mother loves you.” She had been about to open the car door and step out, but when he said this she paused. She looked pale and sad, the way I grew accustomed to seeing her. I thought she was going to respond, and I waited. Years later it occurred to me that when someone says what my grandfather did, what they mean, what would be far more accurate, is “She is trying to love you as best she can.” This might be okay with you, or it might not. It might not be what you need at all.
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