The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  They drove past The Mount Vernon Restaurant, the new grocery store, and the CVS drug store. Stella stayed on Broad Street just like Janice had instructed. They drove past store fronts, some dilapidated and empty, some renovated into charming shops. As they drove, Alice turned her head from side to side, remarking on the changes she saw.

  “That used to be Tanner’s Butcher Shop,” she said. “And that’s where the old grocery store was. The A&P, I think it was.”

  The downtown area was crowded with office workers and tourists hurrying along sidewalks framed by tall gray buildings. The city’s electric buses whirred along quietly, headed for the riverfront and the new aquarium.

  “This is where the street car used to run,” Alice said.

  They turned right on Fourth Street, heading up the ridge past the university toward the Arts District.

  “Oh, there’s the Junior League Office,” Alice said, pointing. It was a small, squat building with a large sign out front. “Adeline and I were both Junior League presidents. We had our pictures taken and later they hung them up in the hallway. We heard about the display and Adeline and I decided to go down there a few years ago and look at the photographs. Anyway, we walked in and there was this young woman and we told her who we were and that we had come to see our photographs.

  She looks at us and says, ‘Black or white?’

  Adeline and I just stared at each other. ‘Why, we’re white,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ the woman said. ‘What I meant is, is your photograph black and white or color? The black and white ones are hanging at the end of the hallway there.’”

  Fourth Street became Third. They passed the hospital on the left and turned right at the next street, past a nondescript building with tinted windows, one of those square cement monstrosities put up during urban renewal to replace some charming Victorian.

  “Turn here,” Alice said, and they pulled into a parking lot behind the building. The parking lot was nearly empty. A long ramp with metal guide rails led down a slight incline to a pair of sliding doors. Stella retrieved the walker from the trunk and helped Alice climb out. They walked slowly across the parking lot toward the sliding doors. As Alice approached the ramp, her speed picked up and Stella had to grab the frame to keep her from hurtling forward like a luge.

  There were only three patients in the waiting room, a bearded man and a well-dressed older couple watching Fox News. The office looked like a set from a nineteen sixties television show; shag carpeting, low squat Naugahyde furniture, big orange lamps with oversized shades. Alice sat down in one of the chairs while Stella went up to sign her in. When she got back, Alice had picked up a Ladies Home Journal with a headline that read, How to Love Your Job!

  “Here’s an article you might want to read,” Alice said.

  “I don’t need to read that,” Stella said. “I love my job.”

  “Ha, ha,” Alice said.

  Stella sat down and began to leaf through a People magazine.

  After a few minutes, Alice said in a loud voice, as if they were the only two in the room, “Here’s an article about a middle-aged woman who decided to get a raven tattoo. I think I’ll get a raven tattoo. Right here on my wrist.” She held up one heavily-veined arm for Stella’s appraisal.

  “Actually, I could see you with a raven tattoo,” Stella said.

  Alice continued to leaf through the magazine. “And here’s one about a woman who only had sex three times and still got HIV. She says, I only had unprotected sex one time and it turned out to be a disaster.”

  The well-dressed couple watching Fox News turned their heads and stared.

  “Keep it up,” Stella said. “And I’ll take that magazine away from you.”

  A bored-looking nurse stepped into the waiting room carrying a clipboard. “Matlock,” she said loudly. “Shirley Matlock.”

  The couple rose. As they walked past the woman slanted her eyes at Stella in a look of stern disapproval. It was obvious she felt Stella should do a better job of keeping Alice under control. Her husband, a portly, florid-faced gentleman, followed her, vainly attempting to button the top button of his sports coat. Alice looked up from her magazine.

  “Lord,” she said loudly. “I’d hate to have to feed him.”

  Stella stayed in the waiting room reading magazines while Alice was hurried off to the examining room. She was back there for quite awhile, until a harried-looking nurse came out and said brightly and with some relief, “Miss Alice is ready to go.”

  Stella followed her down a long hallway to a small examining room where Alice sat chatting with the doctor.

  “Dr. this is Stella,” Alice said.

  “I’ve been telling this young lady about my last vacation,” Dr. Monroe said. He was a pleasant-looking man in his mid-fifties.

  Alice chuckled and said in a sly, flirtatious manner, “He goes to Disney World with his wife and leaves the children at home. Have you ever heard of such a thing?” She obviously liked the doctor very much. Her behavior around him was sweet and simpering, unlike the belligerence she displayed toward his patients and staff.

  Stella helped Alice rise and go back out front to the payment desk.

  “Okay, Miss Alice,” the nurse shouted nervously. Her hair rose up over her forehead in an explosion of blonde curls.

  “You don’t have to shout,” Alice said.

  “Do you have your credit card?”

  “I wish I had a nickel for everytime someone’s asked me that.”

  “Ha, ha,” the nurse said, taking the card. She read over the doctor’s notes. “Okay, now it says here, your glasses prescription has changed and you need to step across the waiting room to the fitting room and we’ll get you fitted for a new pair.”

  “I don’t want a new pair,” Alice said. “I want the ones I’m wearing.”

  The nurse looked confused. She was obviously terrified of Alice. “Oh,” she said. “Do you want me to send those frames off and have new lenses put in?”

  “No, I do not want you to send them off,” Alice said. “How will I watch Wheel of Fortune without my glasses?”

  Stella stepped up beside her, smiling pleasantly at the nurse. “Look,” she said reasonably. “Just go across to the fitting room and pick out frames exactly like the ones she’s wearing and send them off.”

  “Oh, she’ll have to be fitted,” the nurse said. “We can’t just pick new frames and not fit her.”

  Alice stared at her with an expression of growing displeasure. “I am ninety-five years old,” she said.

  “Ninety-four,” Stella said.

  “I am ninety-four years old and I do not intend to stand here while you dither around.”

  Stella smiled sweetly at the nurse. “You sure you don’t want to pick those out yourself?”

  The nurse hurried off. Alice said loudly, “I hope she lives to be one hundred and two and goes blind.”

  “Behave,” Stella said.

  “Well, it’s ridiculous,” Alice said. She looked around for a clock. “How long have we been here?”

  The nurse came back a few minutes later carrying a set of frames that was a close match to Alice’s glasses. “How about these, hon?” she said. Her smile had a fixed, shiny look, as if it had been molded in plastic. Stella had to admire her stamina.

  “Oh, I don’t care,” Alice said. She sighed dramatically, and then sighed again. She looked at the nurse suspiciously. “What did you do with my credit card?”

  “It’s here,” the nurse said brightly. “I have it right here.”

  “I don’t want you to get it mixed up with somebody else’s.”

  “Oh, I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years and I’ve never gotten credit cards mixed up!”

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything,” Alice said.

  The nurse ran the card through the reader and brought it back to Alice for her signature.

  “Okay, hon, you done real good!” she said, avoiding eye contact and handing the receipt to
Stella.

  “Can we get out of here now?” Alice said.

  “Oh Miss Alice, you’re a pistol!” the nurse said.

  “I wish I had a pistol,” Alice said.

  “Now Miss Alice, do you want to go ahead and make an appointment for next time?”

  “Who says there’ll be a next time,” Alice said grimly.

  As they came out into the bright sunshine, Stella said, “Well, he seems like a nice enough doctor.” Dark clouds rode the horizon and there was a smell of rain in the air.

  “Yes, he’s pleasant enough. But that saucy little number he’s got working for him is something else.” In a high falsetto voice, Alice mimicked, “Why, Miz Whittington is that your good ear or your bad ear? Can you hear me? ‘Cause what I want you to do is put your chin down right here so I can check your eyes with this machine.”

  “Why would I put my chin down there?” Alice said indignantly, stopping to look at Stella. She was breathing heavily, her chest rising and falling. They were half-way up the ramp. “There’s no telling how many others have laid their chins down there.”

  “Maybe they clean it in between patients.”

  Alice shook her head and began to push her walker slowly up the incline. “I doubt it,” she said.

  “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  They walked up the slope to the rusty car sitting forlornly in the middle of the empty lot. One of the hubcaps was gone and the passenger door had a long, jagged streak where the paint had been scraped off. Stella helped Alice inside and then shut the door, putting the walker in the back and going around to the driver’s door.

  She slid in and fastened her seatbelt. “Shoot,” she said. “I forgot to get the ticket validated.”

  “Oh for crying out loud, don’t go back in there,” Alice said sharply, opening her purse and taking out a few coins. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Stella dropped the coins in the box and the parking barrier rose with a slow lurching motion. She pulled out into the sparse traffic, and then took a right, not realizing that she was taking a different route home. They passed the old baseball stadium on the left. Rows of tall Victorian houses, once prosperous but converted now into dilapidated apartments, rose on both sides of the street. Alice sat with her purse on her lap, staring out the window.

  “Well, look at the bright side,” Stella said. “At least you don’t have to come back again for another year.”

  “With any luck,” Alice said. “I’ll be dead.”

  They drove down Central Avenue past the edge of campus and the Fortwood Historical District. Stella took a right on a side street, thinking it would lead them back to Third, the way they had come, but she realized almost immediately that she’d taken a wrong turn. She didn’t know this street at all.

  “Do you know where we are, Alice? Because I don’t.”

  “Oh Lord. Are you saying we’re lost?”

  “No. I can turn around.” Stella pulled to the side of the narrow street so she’d have room to make a U-turn.

  The neighborhood was run down, a series of overgrown vacant lots and big trees and rambling, unpainted houses that had been converted into apartments. Alice lifted her hand and pointed to a large brick house with a maze of fire escapes running down one side.

  “Do you see that place? That was my great-grandmother Jordan’s house.”

  “No, Alice. Really?” It took up nearly the whole block but was as sad and dilapidated as its neighbors.

  “And there,” Alice said, pointing to a vacant lot across the street where a series of weed-choked brick steps ran up the slope from the sidewalk. “That’s the house where I was born. Or at least that’s where it used to stand.”

  They sat with the car idling against the curb, staring up at the old steps.

  “Are you sure?” Stella said.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “I thought you grew up on Signal Mountain.”

  “My parents had a summer home on Signal Mountain. During the school year we lived downtown. And later, after I was grown, my father bought a house in Riverview. Ash Hill, it was called.”

  “See,” Stella said. “Your mind is as clear as a bell.”

  “It comes and goes,” Alice said.

  Stella pulled away from the curb, driving slowly down the street. Now that Alice had recognized where they were, she saw no reason to turn around.

  She said, “How old were you when you moved away from here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can’t remember that.”

  A large, square house with a porte-cochère covered in trailing vines, stood on the corner.

  “That’s where the Bakers used to live,” Alice said, beginning to show some enthusiasm. She put one hand up on the window glass. “They had a daughter my age. Sarah. When she moved here and started at Miss Fenimore’s School, all the boys thought she was so pretty. All the girls hated her.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Later, she became one of my best friends.” She tapped on the glass, pointing out a tall stone wall. The memories seemed to be coming fast and furiously now. “Do you see that stone wall? We used to sit there and wait for the ice man to come around. He had a mule that pulled a wagon with a big block of ice in the back packed in sawdust. If you wanted ice for your icebox, he’d stop at your house and chip off a block for you. We children used to follow him around because sometimes he’d chip off smaller pieces for us. It was a wonderful summer treat.”

  “So you lived down here for awhile then?”

  “Until we built the summer house on Signal.” She spread her fingers on the glass, leaving a faint imprint. “Mr. O’Leary was the vegetable man. He used to ride through the streets in his wagon and we’d run out and buy tomatoes and corn and okra. Okrie my little sister called it.”

  She paused. Her hand slid down the glass and dropped into her lap.

  “Your little sister?” Stella said. “Adeline?”

  “No,” she said. “The other one.”

  Stella slowed down and glanced at her. “You had another sister besides Adeline?”

  Alice nodded her head. “Yes,” she said.

  “What was her name?”

  Alice turned her head and stared at her with a stubborn, affronted expression. “Why are you asking me that?” she said in a thin, querulous voice.

  Stella, taken aback by her reaction, said, “I don’t know. I don’t know why I asked.”

  “I don’t know either,” Alice said, turning again to the window.

  They drove down the street until they reached the campus and then they turned left. Alice was silent for a long time. Later, as they started up the mountain, she said quietly, “Isn’t it the most ridiculous thing?”

  Stella, lost in her own thoughts, said, “What? What’s ridiculous?”

  “I can remember the name of Mr. O’Leary the vegetable man. But I cannot remember the name of my own dear sister.”

  Driving toward the mountain, Alice felt herself awash in memories. Scenes from the past flashed through her mind like a magic lantern show, one fading into another and then materializing as something else. Watching them, Alice was filled with a sense of delight and vague but insistent foreboding.

  She saw herself as a girl lying in the grass on a summer day, reading. She had brought a quilt to lie on, and a pillow, and a pitcher of ice cold lemonade. She spread the quilt in the shade of an oak tree, at the edge of a forsythia bush. Cicadas sang in the heat and from time to time, a warm breeze stirred the tops of the tall trees.

  In those days the world had felt safe and full of wonder, both infinite and knowable. She had felt in her life a kind of divine presence, a shimmering state of grace that seemed to surround her like a shining light, guiding her, protecting her from harm.

  But all of that had changed. She had changed. She no longer believed in fairy tales.

  She had always been a person who lived inside her own head. Even now she knew that her visions of Bill Whittington were simply her own
lonely imaginings. They weren’t real. She never told any of the caregivers about his visits; she didn’t want them to think she was crazy in addition to being senile. Crazy old Alice talking to herself in the dark like a Norse witch. She wouldn’t give Elaine the satisfaction of recording such a thing in the book.

  Beside her the girl sat quietly, lost in her own thoughts. Her profile was strong and self-contained, but her arms and shoulders seemed frail; at the end of one sleeve a raw, ugly wound marked her wrist. She had grown so thin, insubstantial, as if she might be slowly fading away. The girl’s troubles pained her although Alice was unsure what they might be. The girl never complained; she was humorous and attentive, and yet there was some hidden sorrow that passed between the two of them, a connection that could not be explained, but was simply acknowledged and accepted.

  Alice’s memories flowed around her like a warm current while she drifted lazily, letting herself be drawn along. A Christmas morning blizzard, swimming in the cool waters of Rainbow Lake, Sawyer’s sweet freckled face as she bent to wipe his nose.

  A pale angelic face swam suddenly into view and she started in panic and kicked hard against the current, skimming away. Fear prickled her chest, a sense of being swept toward something she could not, would not face. She closed her eyes, willing it away, and then opened them again.

  It had begun to rain, falling in soft patters against the roof and the hood of the car. The brightly-lit stores of Broad Street glistened in the rain. Above them the eastern brow of Lookout Mountain loomed, as proud and jutting as the prow of a great ship.

  Alice opened her purse to search for a Kleenex. Growing old was not the peaceful letting-go she had once thought it would be.

  On the long drive home Stella thought about Alice’s mysterious sister, the one whose name she could not, or would not, remember. There was something willful in Alice’s forgetting. Weighed down by her own secrets, Stella recognized furtiveness in others, the turning away of the eyes, the deliberate and artful misunderstanding of questions. For no reason other than her own unsatisfied curiosity, it occurred to her suddenly that the portrait of the lovely blonde woman in Alice’s dining room might be this forgotten sister. Someone whose life had taken on tragic meaning; someone Alice no longer wished to think about or acknowledge.