Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  Like right then, she thought. Between their two flight schedules, she hadn’t seen him for two weeks.

  “Are you sure he hasn’t left a message?” she asked Julie one night. She received a smug curled lip for an answer. After that, Lou didn’t feel comfortable confiding her worries to a person she saw at most a few hours a week, especially after that person yawned and started pushing back her cuticles in the midst of another’s misery. She longed for the late-night solarium, but those friends were sending letters addressed to Miss with return addresses of Mr. and Mrs. Somebody Somebody. Her sisters seemed to have forgotten their first names as they disappeared into their Good Housekeeping lives.

  Will I be like that? she wondered one call-less evening. Mrs. Mark Egan, Pilot’s Wife, waiting at the airport for his flight to come in? She lit a Kent and inhaled deep into her toes. She wasn’t doing well with the waiting part right now, that’s for sure. They had only known each other three months, and already her nails were down to the nubs.

  The next day, when the phone rang and it was he, she forgot these shards of worry in anticipation of his lovely hard nipples. This is the woman, she reminded herself as she turned the doorknob to let him in, who had trouble visualizing what Liz meant a year or so ago about carrots working as good.

  “Well,” Lou had corrected. She now knew what Liz was talking about, but a carrot didn’t have warm skin, knobs of muscle, bones that rose over one and descended in such a satisfying fashion.

  * * *

  When he was away, Lou missed him so much she was nauseous. When he was with her, kissing her eyelids, Lou believed she knew what the poets meant by passion and that she was capable of it. Mark loved her body, her mind, and her willingness to recite Gunga Din as she rode him. He told her this often in the surf of pillows and sheets in which they swam like happy porpoises.

  So when Lou, always irregular and scanty in her menses, told him in a moment of intimacy, that she had not had a period in several months, she was surprised at his reaction.

  “Oh, God,” he said. He didn’t call for two weeks, time enough for her erratic flow of blood to present itself, and Lou knew he’d want to know. She didn’t blame him if he were scared silly at the prospect of fatherhood. She was scared silly at the idea of motherhood. And it was really her fault that she hadn’t let him know before about her little problem.

  She needed to talk to him but he had not given her his number. “I’m never home anyway,” he had explained and she never questioned him about it. After all, he was an international pilot, headed away in any direction most of the time.

  She called United Airlines and because she was an employee, she was given his contact number. “Please tell Mark,” she said to the woman at the other end of the line, “that it’s all come out okay.” He would get the message, she thought.

  The man who loved her almost-flat chest never called again. She waited for weeks, called the contact number and hung up so many times that the woman blew up and said she’d report her. So there it was. She’d been his little secret, a willing fillip to whatever other life he lived. A mistress, if a person can be one without knowing it. Duped, for sure. Maybe he really didn’t like her flat chest. Would she ever find anyone who did?

  She did. A year later, she was introduced to Robert Hanley, a steady man with a sailboat on Lake Union, family connections and a businesslike view of life. No intellectual conversations, but also no complaints about his boss since he was the boss. No secrets. He had firm grip on how to proceed with life, an MBA directing him, like a leeward wind, allowing him to tack this way, then that way, to make a lot of money.

  A good husband, he climbed on the roof of their new house, cleaned its gutters, scraped moss off in wads that landed on the patio. She painted bedrooms, planted her first garden, and produced three boys in seven years despite her lazy ovaries. Her father died. Not able to get to his bedside at the end, she said her goodbyes to him as she cleaned out the cupboards of the house she grew up in. She had little time to contemplate the meaning of life. She had too much life around her, needing to be corralled, taught to eat with a fork.

  * * *

  At some quiet moment, twenty years and four houses later, several of the boys out with their father on a lake or a soccer field, she, in her new West Seattle kitchen, thumbing through a frayed copy of Joy of Cooking, felt the click of the next place locking in. Often, a recipe for six had to be cut in half. Two chairs sat empty at most dinners. The tide of her motherhood was ebbing.

  Soon she would be able to return to her own shoreline, walk its quiet sands.

  “I don’t understand,” Robert said when she tried to explain this epiphany. “We own a mountain cabin, have the money to send the boys to whatever colleges they choose, we’ve just finished a new, and expensive, I might add, remodel on the house.”

  Lou interrupted. “It’s not about any of that. It’s about me, my separate self. I know it sounds…”

  “Isn’t having three sons, none of whom have ended up in jail or on the streets, a portfolio that will keep us in our old ages, enough to make a person appreciate the shoreline she’s already walking?”

  She gave up trying to find the words. Instead, she took to knitting, the steady movement of her needles every afternoon bringing her close to the solitude she craved. Therapy, she realized later, when she recalled those gently clicking hours, tucked like fragrant sachets between the raucous late afternoon entries, the never-satisfied appetites, of her covey of males. Her hair had begun losing its black early on; her reflection in the bathroom mirror sometimes startled her. Who is that white-haired person? she’d wonder and knit another sweater, waiting to find out.

  One by one, the boys meandered off to their next lives, to women other than their mother, women Lou found quite curious for the most part. Why would Matthew like a twit like that? How on earth had Virginia brought Jeff to his knees? Well, the girl did have lovely feet, softly curving legs, and…Lou didn’t want to go into this sort of dissection, her own body almost as flat and angular as it had been in college, and now, if you judged by the skin on her forearms, drying up like an autumn leaf.

  Then Robert sold his business and the new owners asked him to stay on as a consultant in their home office in Los Angeles. He agreed, enticed away from their house on Puget Sound with its watery vista framed in snowcapped mountains, the home they had vowed would be forever, because he had been chosen.

  “I’ll set us up,” he said, not noticing her inability to breathe, to protest. Three weeks later, she flew to California, where he introduced her to his new life at a party celebrating the annexation of yet another telecom, another success. Afterwards, “Do you like it?” he asked, his arm levitating across the horizon of the high-rise loft he had leased, as if he were at that moment creating it just for her.

  If so, then he had chosen everything she hated: stainless steel and black leather and terrazzo entries, the sleek ambience of a space built for entertaining. The condo looked out from the twenty-third floor of a marble phallic thrust, rising in midst of everything she disliked about southern California, including the murky orange glow of an unreal sunset striping the walls.

  “Is there a garden?” Lou asked. “Or a walking path? Can I get to a evergreen tree without driving fifty miles?”

  After a moment, Robert said, “I’m not sure.” He seemed to be trying to swallow something bitter, unexpected, as he led her to the sharp-edged sofa. “This is the main chance for me, Lou, a great job at corporate headquarters, a car and driver, a salary plumped up with stock options. At my age, this will never happen again.”

  She understood all this. She wondered what it had to do with her, really.

  So Robert stayed in LA and Lou flew south once a month or so to clasp his elbow at company functions where it was important to have a spouse in acceptable garb. What might that garb be? Lou wondered, as she sorted through a closet of jeans and shorts and Adidas. Slinky would slide right off her body. Frilly? She’d look like a parfait. She
chose, of course, not being totally out of it, a black sheath, black heels (her first in ten years), and the diamond earrings Robert presented to her in gratitude for her agreeing to show up once in a while.

  When he asked again a year or so later if she would consider moving south, she answered, “No, never,” the first time in their thirty years of married life that she refused him so openly, so mindful of herself.

  The truth was, she loved being alone, her early morning walks around the lake, and her hours of quiet knitting and gardening, and the books that piled up beside the bed to be read long into the night, pages rustling, bed light shining onto the empty pillow next to her. She missed Robert, of course, as she sat poking at whatever she had found in the fridge for her dinner, his cheerful early-morning greeting behind the Wall Street Journal. She didn’t miss his penis and the pain it brought whenever it entered her in recent years. Apparently, her body also was unwilling to pretend any longer.

  He’s changing too, she thought, as she waved him away at the airport after a weekend intended to celebrate her fifty-seventh birthday. Instead of a self-congratulatory toast to the future during their expensive evening at Cafe des Amis, however, Robert had erupted in an unusual vent of frustration. He reached for her hand, held it against the white linen. “Every day is like walking into a shredder, Lou. If it weren’t for the money I’d be back here in a heartbeat.”

  Something about the male ego apparently allowed men to shred their lives for money, in this case, a cache intended to carry the two of them through the last leg of their trail together. The problem was, Lou thought, they stood at a Y in that trail, about to head off in two different directions.

  “Maybe you’ll get used to it,” she said, taking her hand from his, glancing around for a waiter to fill her water glass.

  A part-time job opened up in her favorite bookstore. For three days a week, she smelled books, shelved books, talked books. “Try Shreve,” she told a young mother. “I really liked The Reader,” she confided to a hesitant middle-aged browser. “Have you read Sebald?” she asked a bespectacled older man. She sat up all night to read Harry Potter. She stayed in all weekend to immerse herself in Doris Lessing. She waded into waves of words. Their coolness tingled at her temples, made her lips curve in new ways.

  Her sons and their wives dropped by occasionally and told her she was looking great. “When’s Dad coming back?” they asked at first and then not as often, as two years went by and Lou had convinced them that she was indeed okay. She knitted everyone, including Robert, a wool sweater for one of those Christmases. He left it in a drawer when he headed back to California after the holiday.

  Their marriage sloughed away, shedding bits of itself with each phone call, every three-hour flight. Lou knew its condition was terminal before Robert did, and she forced him to face it one Thursday night when he phoned to tell her how disappointed he was that she chose to not come down to have dinner with his boss and wife. “This is important,” he said.

  “I choose to not be married to you,” she answered. She had practiced the words but she hadn’t planned for her voice to crack and break apart, for her hand to shake until she settled her elbow on the desk in order to calm the phone at her ear. “I cannot do what you want me to do. Perhaps the milk of human kindness has leaked out, left me empty and of no use to anyone.”

  Robert flew home, of course, gathered the sons in the living room, asked her to explain herself. The boys shifted their long bodies, glanced at their photographs on the piano, stared at their fists as the father interrogated the mother. “Why? What have I done? Can’t you understand that what I am doing is for both of us? Do you know how selfish you are?”

  “I’ve told you all I can. I don’t intend to hurt anyone. The choice I’ve made is about me, not about you.” She looked at her sons, included them in that declaration.

  Finally David stood up. “You guys need a counselor or something, but not me, not us.” He nodded at his brothers’ silent faces, his eyes shining with tears, and Lou leaned toward him and wanted to take his hand.

  She sat back, tightened her lips, girded herself. Four men are telling me that I am wrong, she thought, that changing my life will disrupt theirs, that I have no right to make this choice. When, in all their changes and choices and growing up, did any one of them ever wonder if he were hurting me, ignoring my needs, leaving me behind?

  Her sons walked out. Robert remained seated in his big chair, his head in his hands. “So, now what?” he asked. “Do I stay here tonight? What are the rules?”

  “No rules,” Lou answered. “Stay. We probably need to talk about money.” It was ironic that their last conversation that weekend centered on the division of the very stuff that had eroded their marriage. Once he understood he could not persuade her otherwise, Robert took care of the business of the separation in his business-honed way. He gave her the little log cabin on the mountain, an allowance that paid for all of her needs including the old truck she would use to haul topsoil and lumber in, a portfolio of stocks. The wedding ring remained on his finger months after Lou had removed hers.

  * * *

  She spent the summer on the mountain. She brought Robert’s unused tools from his workbench and put them to work. She sawed new boards for the steps and porch, and sang long-forgotten camp songs as she drove the nails into aromatic cedar. She installed large rolls of pink insulation in the attic, breathing who-knows-what into her lungs, and determined that she could build a loft overlooking the front fireplace room, a cozy reading room, once she got the courage. She chinked in the spaces between rough logs and glazed windowpanes. One day she went into town and bought a table saw and, with the guidance of Jeff, learned to rip a 2 X 4 without cutting off a finger. Leaning over her youngest manchild as he guided the slab of wood through the spinning teeth, she saw that, at twenty-five, his black hair was whitening, just as hers had at the same age.

  Then Matthew arrived to instruct her how to build forms for the concrete foundations of the new room she wanted to add to the back of the cabin, a room which would hold the claw-footed bathtub she rescued from the alley next to a plumbing shop. That project could take a while, she conceded, as she tried to imagine cutting a doorway through the log wall in the bedroom. One weekend all three sons drove up with a chain saw and did it for her. Afterwards, they sat around the rough wooden table in the back yard and admired their handiwork. “We probably should cover the hole before we leave, Mom,” Brady said. “Unless bears don’t scare you.”

  “Nothing scares me,” she answered, “except bears,” and it seemed to be true.

  “Remember when Jeff was so afraid of water that he hung on to the bench during his swimming lesson screaming and wouldn’t let go?”

  “And the time you threw up on the Ferris wheel, and they had to stop it and let you off?”

  “And the time…” Her sons. Lou could not recall ever before loving them so much, could not remember when they loved her like this.

  A year later, Madge held a slumber party at her beach house to celebrate the solarium foursome’s sixtieth birthdays. These occasional comings together brought the friends back that early intimacy no matter how long it had been since they had seen each other. Joan admitted to having her neck tightened, Jackie to electrolysis on her chin hairs. Madge confessed to discovering that all of her parts still worked, with the help of a welder who also fixed her fence. The big news, of course, was Lou’s divorce. Each of her friends in the past year had received a phone call from Robert asking if she could explain Lou’s decision, had she seen it coming? He had sounded miserable, maybe a little drunk. They each had answered no.

  “I can’t explain it either,” Lou told them that first afternoon they spread a blanket on the sand and started talking. “I‘ve never felt as strong, wrong word, as full, whole, it’s a cliché, I know, as whole as I have this past year.” How could she explain the exhilaration of this new life? “I wake up at dawn, go to bed whenever I feel like it, work hard and get dirty every day.�
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  Her friends looked at her over their bi-focal sunglasses as if they were trying to visualize this life, whether they should believe her. “Let’s face it,” Lou said, “you all know I’ve always been a hermit, kind of.” Had her friends heard it, the waver in her voice, the click of uncertainty in those last words? She needed to change the subject. “What’s happening with you, Jackie?”

  “Definitely not a hermit,” Jackie shrugged. “More of a nursemaid, I guess. I marry an old guy, and Joan, you marry a young one. At least you don’t have to call home to see if he’s burned the house down with the microwave,” she said as she got up to use the cabin’s phone.

  They all had grandchildren by then. Everyone had photos stashed in her bags, even Lou, who brought photos of a wee little girl gifted with her grandfather’s blonde curls. “That’s Victoria, that’s Will,” naming these new persons, the new titles they themselves had acquired: Nana, Grammie, Mudgie, Gee Gee. By the end of the afternoon, they knew that at sixty they had come to a way station, a place to regroup, a time to consider their lives once more.

  “We need a recognition of this moment in our lives,” Madge said. “Maybe a crones’ ceremony.”

  “Aren’t crones bitchy menopausal women, like the warty witches in Macbeth?”

  “Post menopausal,” Jackie instructed. “Women who have lived long enough to be wise.” Jackie had gone through a spiritual phase a while back and had learned about crones and incantations, the result of one moonlit chant and a sexy new age-painter.