by Lee Smith
I never tired of telling my students the story of the Mississippi River—how a scarlet oak leaf falling into Lake Itasca, in Minnesota, travels first north and then east through a wild, lonely landscape of lakes and rapids as if it were heading for Lake Superior, then over the Falls of St. Anthony, then down through Minneapolis and St. Paul, past bluffs and prairies and islands, to be joined by the Missouri River just above St. Louis, and then by the Ohio, where the water grows very wide—you can scarcely see across it. My scarlet leaf meanders with eccentric loops and horseshoe curves down, down, down the great continent through the world’s biggest delta, to New Orleans and beyond, past the great fertile mud plain shaped like a giant goose’s foot, and into the Gulf of Mexico.
“And what happens to the leaf then, Mrs. Scully?” some student would never fail to ask.
“Ah,” I would say, “then our little leaf becomes a part of the universe”—leaving them to ponder that!
I was known as a hard teacher but a fair one, and many of my students came back in later years to tell me how much they had learned.
HERE AT MARSHWOOD, A “TOTAL” RETIREMENT COMmunity, they want us to become children again, forgoing intelligence. This is why I was so pleased when the announcement went up on the bulletin board about a month ago:
WRITING GROUP TO MEET
WEDNESDAY, 3 P.M.
Ah, I thought, that promising infinitive “to meet.” For, like many former English teachers, I had thought that someday I might like “to write.”
At the appointed day and hour, I motored over to the library (a euphemism, since the room contains mostly well-worn paperbacks by Jacqueline Susann and Louis L’Amour). I was dismayed to find Martha Louise Clapton already in charge. The idea had been hers, I learned; I should have known. She’s the type who tries to run everything. Martha Louise Clapton has never liked me, having had her eye on Solomon, to no avail, for years before my arrival. She inclined her frizzy blue head ever so slightly to acknowledge my entrance.
“As I was just saying, Alice, several of us have discovered in mealtime conversation that in fact we’ve been writing for years, in our journals and letters and whatnot, and so I said to myself, ‘Martha Louise, why not form a writing group?’ and voilà!”
“Voilà,” I said, edging into the circle.
So it began.
BESIDES MARTHA LOUISE AND MYSELF, THE WRITING group included Joy Richter, a minister’s widow with a preference for poetry; Miss Elena Grier, who taught Shakespeare for years and years at a girls’ preparatory school in Nashville, Tennessee; Frances Weinberg, whose husband lay in a coma over at the Health Center (a euphemism—you never leave the Health Center); Shirley Lassiter, who had buried three husbands and still thought of herself as a belle; and Sam Hofstetter, retired lawyer, deaf as a post. We agreed to meet again in the library one week later. Each of us should bring some writing to share with the others.
“What’s that?” Sam Hofstetter said. We wrote the time and place down on a piece of paper and gave it to him. He folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket. “Could you make copies of the writing, please?” he asked. He inclined his silver head and tapped his ear significantly. We all agreed. Of course we agreed, we outnumber the men four to one, poor old things. In a place like this, they get more attention than you would believe.
Then Joy Richter said that she probably couldn’t afford to make copies. She said she was on a limited budget.
I pointed out that there was a free Xerox machine in the manager’s office and I felt sure that we could use it, especially since we needed it for the writing group.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Frances Weinberg started wringing her hands. “They might not let us.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Martha Louise said majestically. “Thank you, Alice, for the suggestion. Thank you, everyone, for joining the group.”
I HAD WONDERED IF I MIGHT SUFFER INITIALLY FROM “writer’s block,” but nothing of that sort occurred. In fact, I was flooded by memories—overwhelmed, engulfed, as I sat in my chair by the picture window, writing on my lap board. I was not even aware of the world outside, my head was so full of the people and places of the past, rising up in my mind as they were then, in all the fullness of life, and myself as I was then, that headstrong girl longing to leave her home in east Virginia and walk in the world at large.
I wrote and wrote. I wrote for three days. I wrote until I felt satisfied, and then I stopped. I felt better than I had in years, filled with new life and freedom (a paradox, since I am more and more confined to this chair).
During that week Solomon guessed “candy,” “ring,” and “Anacin.” He was getting better. I was not. I ignored certain symptoms in order to attend the Wednesday meeting of the writing group.
Martha Louise led off. Her blue eyes looked huge, like lakes, behind her glasses. “They just don’t make families like they used to,” she began, and continued with an account of growing up on a farm in Ohio, how her parents struggled to make ends meet, how the children strung popcorn and cut out paper ornaments to trim the tree when there was no money for Christmas, how they pulled taffy and laid it out on a marble slab, and how each older child had a little one to take care of. “We were poor but we were happy,” Martha Louise concluded. “It was an ideal childhood.”
“Oh, Martha Louise,” Frances Weinberg said tremulously, “that was just beautiful.”
Everyone agreed.
Too many adjectives, I thought, but I held my tongue.
Next, Joy Richter read a poem about seeing God in everything: “the stuff of day” was a phrase I rather liked. Joy Richter apparently saw God in a shiny red apple, in a dewy rose, in her husband’s kind blue eyes, in the photographs of her grandchildren. It was a pretty good poem, but it would have been better if she hadn’t tried so hard to rhyme it. Miss Elena then presented a sonnet comparing life to a merry-go-round. The final couplet went:
Lost children, though you’re old, remember well the joy and music of life’s carousel.
This was not bad, and I said so. Frances Weinberg read a reminiscence about her husband’s return from the Second World War, which featured the young Frances “hovering upon the future” in a porch swing as she “listened for the tread of his beloved boot.” The military theme was continued by Sam Hofstetter, who read (loudly) an account of army life entitled “Somewhere in France.” Shirley Lassiter was the only one whose story was not about herself. Instead it was fiction evidently modeled upon a romance novel, for it involved a voluptuous debutante who had to choose between two men. Both of them were rich, and both of them loved her, but one had a fatal disease, and for some reason this young woman didn’t know which one.
“Why not?” boomed the literal Sam.
“It’s a mystery, silly,” Shirley Lassiter said. “That’s the plot.” Shirley Lassiter had a way of resting her jeweled hands upon her enormous bosom as if it were a shelf. “I don’t want to give the plot away,” she said. Clearly, she did not have a brain in her head.
Then it was my turn.
I began to read the story of my childhood. I had grown up in the tiny coastal town of Waterville, Maryland. I was the fourth in a family of five children, with three older brothers and a baby sister. My father, who was in the oyster business, killed himself when I was six and Rose was only three. He went out into the Chesapeake Bay in an old rowboat, chopped a hole in the bottom of it with an ax, and then shot himself in the head with a revolver. He meant to finish the job. He did not sink as planned, however, for a fisherman witnessed the act and hauled his body to shore.
This left Mama with five children to bring up and no means of support. She was forced to turn our home into a boardinghouse, keeping mostly teachers from Goucher College and salesmen passing through, although two old widows, Mrs. Flora Lewis and Mrs. Virginia Prince, stayed with us for years. Miss Flora, as we called her, had to have a cup of warm milk every night at bedtime; I will never forget it. It could be neither too hot nor too cold. I was the one wh
o took it up to her, stepping so carefully up the dark back stair.
Nor will I forget young Miss Day from Richmond, a teacher, who played the piano beautifully. She used to play “Clair de Lune” and “Für Elise” on the old upright in the parlor. I would already have been sent to bed, and so I’d lie trembling in the dark, seized by feelings I couldn’t name, as the notes floated up to me and Rose in our attic room, in our white iron bed wrought with roses and figures of nymphs. Miss Day was jilted some years later, we heard, her virtue lost and her reputation ruined.
Every Sunday, Mama presided over the big tureen at breakfast, when we would have boiled fish and crisp little johnnycakes. To this day I have never tasted anything as good as those johnnycakes. Mama’s face was flushed, and her hair escaped its bun to curl in damp tendrils as she dished up the breakfast plates. I thought she was beautiful. I’m sure she could have married again had she chosen to do so, but her heart was full of bitterness at the way her life had turned out, and she never forgave our father, or looked at another man.
Daddy had been a charmer, by all accounts. He carried a silver-handled cane and allowed me to play with his gold pocketwatch when I was especially good. He took me to the harness races with him, where we cheered for the horse he owned, a big roan named Joe Cord. On these excursions I wore a white dress and stockings and patent-leather shoes. And how Daddy could sing! He had a lovely baritone voice. I remember him on bended knee singing, “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do,” to Mama, who pretended to be embarrassed but was not. I remember his bouncing Rose up and down on his lap and singing, “This is the way the lady rides.”
After his death the boys went off to sea as soon as they could, and I was obliged to work in the kitchen and take care of Rose. Kitchen work is never finished in a boardinghouse. This is why I have never liked to cook since, though I know how to do it, I can assure you.
We had a summer kitchen outside, so it wouldn’t heat up the whole house when we were cooking or canning. It had a kerosene stove. I remember one time when we were putting up blackberry jam, and one of those jars simply exploded. We had blackberry jam all over the place. It burned the Negro girl, Ocie, who was helping out, and I was surprised to see that her blood was as red as mine.
As time went on, Mama grew sadder and withdrew from us, sometimes barely speaking for days on end. My great joy was Rose, a lively child with golden curls and skin so fair you could see the blue veins beneath it. I slept with Rose every night and played with her every day. Since Mama was indisposed, we could do whatever we wanted, and we had the run of the town, just like boys. We’d go clamming in the bay with an inner tube floating out behind us, tied to my waist by a rope. We’d feel the clams with our feet and rake them up, then flip them into a net attached to the inner tube. Once we went on a sailing trip with a cousin of ours, Bud Ned Black, up the Chickahominy River for a load of brick. But the wind failed and we got stuck there. We just sat on that river, for what seemed like days and days. Rose fussed and fumed while Cap’n Bud Ned drank whiskey and chewed tobacco and did not appear to mind the situation so long as his supplies held out. But Rose was impatient—always, always so impatient.
“Alice,” she said dramatically as we sat staring out at the shining water, the green trees at its edge, the wheeling gulls, “I will die if we don’t move. I will die here,” Rose said, though Bud Ned and I laughed at her.
But Rose meant it. As she grew older, she had to go here, go there, do this, do that—have this, have that—she hated being poor and living in the boardinghouse, and could not wait to grow up and go away.
We both developed a serious taste for distance when our older brother William and his wife took us motoring across the country. I was sixteen. I loved that trip, from the first stage of planning our route on the map to finally viewing the great mountains, which sprang straight up from the desert like apparitions. Of course we had never seen such mountains; they took my breath away. I remember how Rose flung her arms out wide to the world as we stood in the cold wind on Pikes Peak. I believe we would have gone on driving and driving forever. But of course we had to return, and I had to resume my duties, letting go the girl William had hired so Mama would permit my absence. William was our sweetest brother, but they are all dead now, all my brothers, and Rose too.
I have outlived everyone.
Yet it seems like only yesterday that Rose and I were little girls playing that game we loved so well, a game that strikes me now as terribly dangerous. This memory is more vivid than any other in my life.
It is late night, summertime. Rose and I have sneaked out of the boardinghouse, down the tiny dark back stair, past the gently sighing widows’ rooms; past Mama’s room, door open, moonlight ghostly on the mosquito netting draped from the canopy over her bed; past the snoring salesmen’s rooms, stepping tiptoe across the wide-plank kitchen floor, wincing at each squeak. Then out the door into moonlight so bright that it leaves shadows. Darting from tree to tree, we cross the yard and attain the sidewalk, moving rapidly past the big sleeping houses with their shutters yawning open to the cool night air, down the sidewalk to the edge of town where the sidewalk ends and the road goes on forever through miles and miles of peanut fields and other towns and other fields, toward Baltimore.
Rose and I lie down flat in the middle of the road, which still retains the heat of the day, and let it warm us head to toe as we dream aloud of what the future holds. At different times Rose planned to be an aviator, a doctor, and a film actress living in California, with an orange tree in her yard. Even her most domestic dreams were grand. “I’ll have a big house and lots of servants and a husband who loves me so much,” Rose would say, “and a yellow convertible touring car and six children, and we will be rich and they will never have to work, and I will put a silk scarf on my head and we will all go out riding on Sunday.”
Even then I said I would be a teacher, for I was always good in school, but I would be a missionary teacher, enlightening natives in some far-off corner of the world. Even as I said it, though, I believe I knew it would not come to pass, for I was bound to stay at home, as Rose was bound to go.
But we’d lie there looking up at the sky, and dream our dreams, and wait for the thrill of an oncoming vehicle, which we could hear coming a long time away, and could feel throughout the length of our bodies as it neared us. We would roll off the pavement and into the peanut field just as the car approached, our hearts pounding. Sometimes we nearly dozed on that warm road—and once we were almost killed by a potato truck.
Gradually, as Mama retreated to her room, I took over the running of the boardinghouse, and Mama’s care as well. At eighteen, Rose ran away with a fast-talking furniture salesman who had been boarding with us. They settled finally in Ohio, and had three children, and her life was not glamorous in the least, though better than some, and we wrote to each other every week until her death of lung cancer at thirty-nine.
This was as far as I’d gotten.
I quit reading aloud and looked around the room. Joy Richter was ashen, Miss Elena Grier was mumbling to herself, Shirley Lassiter was breathing heavily and fluttering her fingers at her throat. Sam Hofstetter stared fixedly at me with the oddest expression on his face, and Frances Weinberg wept openly, shaking with sobs.
“Alice! Now just look at what you’ve done!” Martha Louise said to me severely. “Meeting adjourned!”
I HAD TO MISS THE THIRD MEETING OF THE WRITING group because Dr. Culbertson stuck me into the Health Center for treatment and further tests (euphemisms both). In fact, Dr. Culbertson then went so far as to consult with my son Robert, a doctor as well, about what to do with me next. Dr. Culbertson was of the opinion that I ought to move to the Health Center for “better care.” Of course I called Robert immediately and gave him a piece of my mind.
That was yesterday.
I know they are discussing me by telephone—Robert, Alex, Will, and Carl. Lines are buzzing up and down the East Coast.
I came here when I had to, beca
use I did not want any of their wives to get stuck with me, as I had gotten stuck with Harold’s mother and father. Now I expect some common decency and respect. It is a time when I wish for daughters, who often, I feel, have more compassion and understanding than sons.
Even Carl, the child of my heart, says I had “better listen to the doctor.”
Instead, I have been listening to this voice too long silent inside me, the voice of myself, as I write page after page propped up in bed at the Health Center.
It is Wednesday. I have skipped certain of my afternoon medications. At two-fifteen I buzz for Sheila, my favorite, a tall young nurses’ aide with the grace of a gazelle. “Sheila,” I say, “I need for you to help me dress, dear, and then roll my chair over here, if you will. My own chair, I mean. I have to go to a meeting.”
Sheila looks at my chart and then back at me, her eyes wide. “It doesn’t say,” she begins.
“Dr. Culbertson said it would be perfectly all right,” I assure her. I pull a twenty-dollar bill from my purse, which I keep right beside me in bed, and hand it to her. “I know it’s a lot of trouble, but it’s very important,” I say. “I think I’ll just slip on the red sweater and the black wraparound skirt—that’s so easy to get on. They’re both in the drawer, dear.”
“Okay, honey,” Sheila says, and she gets me dressed and sets me in my chair. I put on lipstick and have Sheila fluff up my hair in the back, where it’s gotten so flat from lying in bed. Sheila hands me my purse and my notebook and then I’m off, waving to the girls at the nurses’ station as I purr past them. They wave back. I feel fine now. I take the elevator down to the first floor and then motor through the lobby, speaking to acquaintances. I pass the gift shop, the newspaper stand, and all the waiting rooms.
It’s chilly outside. I head up the walkway past the par 3 golf course, where I spy Parker Howard, ludicrous in those bright green pants they sell to old men, putting on the third hole. “Hi, Parker!” I cry.