by Joan Barfoot
Brave is perhaps not quite the right word for what Sylvia did, but since nobody knows about Nancy’s father, or at least her genetic father, no one can quibble.
And Greta? Courage isn’t something she has given much thought to. Her boldest acts have been, like coming here to this country, carried out thrillingly, heedlessly, blind to danger or, like finding work and raising the girls after Dolph died, or entering the Ritz on the main street for the first time, or heading to the Idyll Inn lounge the first day on her own, done from necessity, without a real choice. She has welcomed certain occasions and risen to others. That is not nothing, but is it the same thing as courage? She thinks it is not.
As for George, he doesn’t see the point of the question. A man can be scared or not scared, but either way it doesn’t particularly matter in a real life where a person does every day what he has to do every day. Like running a store, or cleaning up the yard after a storm—he makes the decisions that keep a comfortable life going along, while taking whatever other pleasures and freedoms he can as they come up. He has never had to go to a war. That’s where he imagines real bravery happens. Or rescuing a kid from fire or drowning—he’s never done anything like that, either. So he’s no hero, so what? He might have been, if he’d had to be. Although he guesses somebody brave doesn’t cry at the drop of a hat, especially without knowing why. That hardly happens any more, but it can still come as a surprise to find a tear plopping down, and it blurs the astonishing view of Greta and Sylvia obvious at his feet, working his legs.
Truthfully, it’s nice being a man among women again. Although it could be that just putting himself in their hands is brave enough these days.
Probably nobody kills, including in war, without being changed. Is Ruth brave, or the opposite? What should they call what she asks them to be?
Ruth notices everything. She has to. She notices Sylvia’s shifts into irritation and back, and George’s tear of the moment, and Greta’s small frown. She notices, too, that her friends are surrounded by a wavery nimbus of brilliant red-orange; for once sharing a common colour—outrage? unity? fear? But this vivid arc, almost certainly due to her stepped-up anti-inflammatories but useful just the same, doesn’t look fierce, only bright. Perhaps that is hopeful.
Lying beside Bernard when it was done, holding him—so swiftly a person departs.
Who would lie beside her?
There’d be no her. Just as, immediately, there was no Bernard.
Well, she can live with that. In a manner of speaking. She hears herself snort, as if she has turned into Sylvia.
“What?” Sylvia asks.
What indeed? “Look, it’s raining again.” So it is, in a gentle, pattering fashion not remotely like the fury that swept through in the night.
“God settling down, do you think?” Sylvia suggests, and she and Ruth smile, although neither Greta nor George can see why, exactly, and would wish for no further discussions of gods.
23
LITTLE COOKIES…
WITH AUTUMN, the leaves are beginning their creep from green toward orange, yellow, red and bronze, and some are already drifting to earth; tall riverside grasses are losing their vigour; Ruth-related discussions remain prickly and unresolved; and school has resumed, which means not only that the vacationing voices of grandchildren and great-grandchildren have mainly vanished from Idyll Inn corridors, but also that residents have been volunteered for a grilling by students.
Or as Sylvia puts it, “Oh, for God’s sake, now we’re projects.”
Which is to say that this afternoon a clutch of seventh-graders is pouring noisily through the front doors, notebooks in hand, forming up loosely around a teacher who doesn’t look much older than they are. These will be the youngsters Annabel Walker announced at lunch would be arriving for a study of “cultural history.” To which Sylvia remarked, not softly, “Loads of history here if anybody can remember it. Too bad about the shortage of culture.”
What fun.
Children of an age for seventh grade are not necessarily adorable. They look, the girls, anyway, far older than they are, and nearly, well, flagrant in their appearance. Many of the boys are still childlike, scrawny or padded in baby fat, but the girls wear sleek hair and tiny pants and scant tops that leave their navels exposed. Each table in the lounge, plus several in the dining room, gets one child. “Aren’t you cold?” Sylvia asks the taut, black-haired little girl who settles at theirs. She has thin bare shoulders as well as bare midriff, and looks to be wearing lip gloss and eyeshadow. Are there piercings? Tattoos? What is she, twelve?
“No. Why would I be?” Children’s instincts are sharp, that never changes; this girl looks Sylvia straight in the eye, defiant and potentially hostile. She sure wouldn’t have done that at one time, but naturally in her view she’s on life’s upswing while Sylvia, on the downslope, is inconsequential and can do no harm, and like all these crumpled-up oldies is good only for answering dull questions for a dull schoolroom assignment. According to the newspapers, little girls this age are handy with blow jobs—oral sex, as the papers delicately express it; surely not on these little boys, but then, boys change suddenly. One minute they’re children, next they’re tall, filled-out youths, perfectly available for blow jobs from willing little girls out to prove their affections.
Sylvia would like to suggest that it would be a fine thing if girls understood better their authority, not easily won, over themselves—that sort of information should count as cultural history, shouldn’t it?—and that deciding smartly in one’s own best interests isn’t a right to be thrown around, blown around, lightly.
Still, these children—what will their secrets be when they’re Sylvia’s age? Maybe they won’t need to have any. Maybe they’re becoming people who’ll be able to say airily, “Oh, your father’s not your father, but don’t worry about it, he loves you, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference. You weren’t a mistake, just the pleasing result of an experiment I conducted to remedy an outbreak of boredom.”
Speaking of poor decisions about what should be done with a body.
Carpe diem, Sylvia believes, meaning among other things that the young must seize the day as selfishly and hopefully as the old. Perhaps the states aren’t so different, despite—or because of—some obvious and mutual hostility. Sometimes, it seems to her, the old aren’t just in the way or even irrelevant to the young, but are subject to an active kind of anger for being the future made flesh. And vice versa, she supposes—the old furiously resentful that the young are, in a quite different way, the future as well?
At any rate, never, never say anything resembling “These kids today!” That’s so banal. Think of this as an opportunity.
Too late. The girl looks at Greta working away at this week’s bright green-and-purple scarf, glances at George smiling in his off-kilter way, and having already locked horns with Sylvia, fixes on Ruth. “I’m Sharon,” she says flatly—so unexotic and plain a name, her parents must have expected to find themselves raising someone rather less surly and bold. “So okay. I’ve got these questions I’m supposed to get answered, okay?” She waves a sheet of printed paper in Ruth’s direction, pulls up a chair and hunches with her pen at the table. “So, like, the first one is, were you a pioneer?”
What? How old does she—does her teacher, who must have had a hand in this—imagine Idyll Inn residents are? Ruth considers her for a moment, then smiles. “Yes, I suppose I have been, dear, in my own way.” This causes Sylvia to snort, and even Greta’s lips tip upwards as she bends over her needles.
There are no inquiries into the nature of Ruth’s pioneer-hood; no details sought on any subject, perhaps just as well. Evidently this project does not require curiosity, only the ticking of boxes and the jotting, briefly, of notes. How far did you go in school (university); where did you grow up (here in this city); how many brothers and sisters did you have (none); what did your parents do for a living (ran clothing stores); what did you do for a living (saved children if possible, fa
milies as necessary)—not even this causes a nibble of interest. Perhaps young Sharon can’t bear the faces she’d see if she looked up; or possibly she already knows something of what lies beneath the town’s smoothed-over surfaces. Were you married (yes); how many children did you have (none); were you ever in a war (no, not directly); what’s the farthest you’ve ever travelled?
“Oh, quite a distance,” Ruth says. “Farther than most,” and again Sylvia snorts, and again Greta smiles. While George is reminded what strange things women will laugh at. He’d like to be interviewed by one of these little girls, but at their table Ruth’s the one. Maybe she looks like the friendliest and kindest—if only they knew.
There’s something about him that scares children off. He’s noticed it with other people’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren too, how they won’t come very close even when he beckons and smiles. What keeps them away? Maybe what he half-sees himself in the mirror each morning: half of him a kind of mask; a man only half-working. He’d like to tell the children he’s just a friendly old grandpa beneath, just a man, but what fearfully clear-eyed child would believe him?
The little girl talking to Ruth—Alice wouldn’t have let Colette out of the house that way, all bare bones and skin. She insisted Colette look like a nice girl. Respectable. Well, he wanted Colette to be nice and respectable too, only Alice was in charge of making her that way. This poor kid—where’s her mother? Where are all the mothers, letting their daughters out looking like this?
Then again, Colette did grow up to be a nice, respectable woman, and fat lot of good it does him; or Alice, either.
“Clothes make the man,” Art Fletcher used to say, measuring George for new suits, years before taking up knives. Now George wears his slippers and stretch-waisted pants—what sort of man do his clothes make him now?
When she was here, Colette bought him five new identical-except-for-colour pairs of these pants. “These should do you for a while,” she said. He can hear again, although he would rather not, her high, jollying voice, all the bright questions that were no more looking for true answers than this Sharon girl is: isn’t the Idyll Inn grand, isn’t it nice to be among friends, isn’t everything so convenient and pretty, aren’t the staff just the kindest creatures on earth? Colette would not hear complaints, and by the time she left, with the embrace, the kiss on his forehead, the cheery “I know you’ll do better, do please just try to be good,” and another of her flashing little waves, he was exhausted; relieved in a funny way to return to his regular life. It makes him sad how Colette grows faint sometimes, in both distance and time. Now they get visitors like this girl, who could be Colette’s daughter and his granddaughter, or even great-granddaughter, but isn’t, and who is going down her list of questions, writing slowly, as if she’s as unfamiliar with words as he sometimes is.
“What’s the most important thing happened during your lifetime?” the girl asks finally, the last question reached, it sounds, with relief, the task of a dreary assignment nearly complete, escape from this creepy place and these see-through old people almost in sight.
So it feels.
But this could take a minute. Who would, or could, answer a question like that? “That’s a tall order,” Ruth says at last. “For one thing, I’d point out that my lifetime isn’t quite over. And you know, different people would have different answers because there’s so much to choose from. But barring something really extraordinary happening to change things during what you call my lifetime, I’d probably say all the many kinds of damage we’ve done to each other and the planet that are going to make your lifetime very difficult indeed.” Ruth has, when she chooses, a sweet, glinting, old-lady smile. Sharon painstakingly writes down Ruth’s words as if she has no clue what Ruth’s talking about. As she probably doesn’t.
She stands abruptly, in the same movement folding her single sheet of paper and clicking her pen closed. “Okay, that’s all I need.”
Oh. All right. “You’re welcome.” Ruth puts out her hand to be shaken, even though being gripped hurts quite badly. She must be trying to make the child pause, teach her something; manners, maybe. “Take care, dear.” The girl frowns. “Do please take care.”
“Yeah, okay, sure,” and she shrugs, turns away and walks off, with a little flick-flick of her low-slung rear end.
“My goodness,” says Sylvia. “I wonder what she’ll be like at fifteen?” That being roughly the stage when, in her observation, humans are at their most obstreperous and rebellious. Obstreperous, she explains to Greta: turbulent; noisily resisting control. “Although maybe, like everything else, that starts younger these days.”
“Not my girls, so much,” Greta says. Well, of course not Greta’s girls, those perfect angels, all grown in their absence to archangel stature. Sylvia does try, though, not to roll her eyes too noticeably; one of her periodic efforts at tact.
“Yes,” she says. “Lucky you.”
Colette, like Greta’s girls, would have been thirteen, sixteen, eighteen when George was leaving the house to meet Greta. He does not recall Colette being seriously rebellious or angry. He can hear raised voices, slammed doors, but that would be to do with Alice, not him. What was the word Sylvia just said? One that’s too fat for his tongue, that’s for sure.
“One does worry,” Ruth says. “I wish they knew more. But she’s still very young. And I suppose there’s no particular reason she’d be more interested in us than I was, frankly, in her. I find I’ve about run out of steam for inquiring into the lives of children. Who anyway, most of them, don’t need saving. They’ll come through just fine.”
No, they won’t. Ruth expects these young humans, Sharon, have no idea, and no inquisitiveness either, never mind fear, about how strong and adaptable and stubborn and clever they’ll have to be to survive. They’ll certainly need to be a lot slyer and shrewder, smarter and more skilled than they appear.
They’ll also have to not mind too much being poor, hungry, endangered, too hot or too cold.
On the other hand, she would not herself have dreamed, as a tumbling, springing girl, of the far more daring challenges she’d be required to rise to in time.
“I liked your answers.”
“Oh, I could have said anything, she wasn’t listening. It doesn’t matter, although it does take some adjusting, when it used to be that for at least a few children, what I said could change their whole lives.”
All right, maybe the girl was a dull-minded little cookie, but what a dangerous one Ruth is. Quite the dictator: changing lives, ending lives—it’s not fair, George would say, that you’d never know from looking at the smiley, curled-up little thing what a dark-seeing woman she is. Is there a word for that inside-outside kind of difference? It’d have to be another big one, so he can already tell there’s no way he’s going to come up with what it could be.
24
AT THREE IN THE MORNING…
LONGER BY FAR THAN ANY IDYLL INN CORRIDOR is the vast middle-of-the-night chasm between word and deed.
Or rather, words. So many of them spoken in recent months, often enough in different forms and with different meanings in different mouths, and including, but not limited to: struggle, guilt, sacrifice, power, extraordinary, precious, noble, heroes, freedoms, rights, suffering, dangerous.
Words trip over each other, they contradict and conflict. They do not by any means construct a high, steady bridge over the chasm to deed.
The most suspiciously alluring ones have been mercy and grace.
It is easy to be seduced by beautiful words; perhaps these three in the corridor tonight have been. They have, after all, each been seduced by forms of beauty before.
In the middle of still nights, words resonate in even darker ways than they do in the light. Tonight syllables would ring out like bells, they would roll rumbling like cannonballs down the length of the hall.
This is why silence is best; except for the whispered Courage repeated once more: a teetering, makeshift footbridge carrying them acros
s, one way or another, in the methodical direction of deed.
25
THANKSGIVING GOOSE…
SIX MONTHS AFTER THE IDYLL INN OPENED its doors to residents with healthy incomes but varying hopes, despairs, abilities and infirmities, and almost a year after she was hired to guide the place into existence, Annabel Walker remains stubbornly buoyant. She even continues to speak, although no longer with her old insistent sincerity, of “our one big happy family,” and either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care when this results in a certain rolling of eyes.
The point is, good cheer is good business. Word of mouth matters when vacancies arise. Annabel Walker’s basic criteria for residents are, necessarily, security of assets and degrees of health or ill health. Beyond that, it’s fingers crossed. Assessing for compatibility would be a luxury, and in any case that’s hardly predictable. People she wouldn’t have supposed would have a single thing in common will form their own impenetrable, inexplicable connections, it seems.
Turnover isn’t brisk, but it’s not exactly rare, either. There are systems for most eventualities, though, including for when somebody dies. Immediately an on-tap doctor is called to certify death behind the closed door of the deceased, a hearse pulls up during a time—meals are best—when residents are apt to be otherwise occupied, and zip-zap, the body is gone, and family members or staff get right to work packing up possessions and cleaning, while Annabel Walker surveys the waiting list. The aim is to keep disruptions to a minor shuffle and stir. It’s not, obviously, that death and the subsequent appearance of someone new can go unnoticed, but it’s pleasing to have a sensible process that makes transitions just as smooth and easy as they can possibly be.