Just yesterday Toby knocked and popped her head in, Rachel Silverman right there behind her. “Stanley? Where are you? Outer space?” Toby is one of those people who is always cheerful and he can’t help but wonder when she breaks. What does it take to bring that old girl down? He knows there is something. You can’t live this many years and not know the weight, the pull of some regret.
“Yes. Outer space,” he said, too tired for the show. Just too damn tired.
“You look sad.” Her voice was so level and calm—a depth that sounded so good to his ear. The last thing he wanted was for someone to see him cry, to blow his hard-earned cover.
“Of course I’m sad,” he said, and went to open his bathroom door. He stepped in and took a deep breath. “I’m sad there’s no guns in this goddamned place so I could pick off some old assholes who need a mercy killing.” He left the door open while he peed.
“I told you he’s testy,” Toby said. “But I still like him. We’ll come back another day, though. Sadie says if anybody in town can answer all your questions, Stanley is the man.”
“We’ll see,” Rachel said. “He’s not very dependable and not very nice and truth be told, I’ve probably had enough drama for one life.”
He had his hand on the knob to steady himself. He likes her. He doesn’t want to like her, but he really does.
“Well, I don’t have many friends here,” Toby said. “So I figure if I get the people I like to get to know and like each other maybe we can have a movie group or a book club other than that shitty book club they have here on Thursday night. I taught English literature for forty years and I am sick and tired of reading romantic sagas and inspirational how-to mess. Break out the good stuff.”
Rachel laughed and Stanley leaned just a little to the left so he could see them in his mirror, still waiting politely in the doorway. “I would love to join your club,” she said. “You and Sadie are the only sane people here as far as I can tell.”
“Don’t I know it?” Toby asked. “Do you ever chew or dip?”
“Chew or dip what?”
“Snuff, cigar. Sometimes I take a little dip or a chew, get a good buzz. I know it’s not very popular or ladylike, but I used to smoke like a stack—three packs a day and I still love to get something going in my system, you know?”
“Actually, I do know,” Rachel said. “I smoked a hundred years ago.”
Stanley wanted to open the door and say, You’ve come a long way baby, but even he was tired of his own show, so he just flushed and waited for them to leave. He eased the door shut and turned on the radio. He likes to listen to NPR. He likes the news and Garrison Keillor and he likes listening to classical music, the notes swaddling his mind without words, sopping up all that haunts him as he eases his tired aching body into his chair. And now he’s here again. Rachel Silverman passed by earlier going wherever it is she goes every single morning and every late afternoon. He watches her move across the parking lot and then dip into the shade of the arbor. He watches until he can’t see a trace of her and then he closes his eyes and allows himself to enter the house on Fifteenth and Winthrop. He walks down the carpeted hall to Ned’s room, pale blue walls and the heavy pine furniture Martha picked out for the boys; he finds Ned in there studying and tells him he should take a break, they should do something fun, something they’ve never done before. And when they pass by his toolshed and Stanley sees where Ned has painted an airplane and written his name, he says: Wow, would you look at that? And he doesn’t get angry at all. Really, when you back up and take a good hard look at it, there is nothing to get angry about and the way Ned looks at him from inside that soft kid body—a cowlick in his sweaty boy hair and a laugh that shows his teeth growing in at all angles—breaks what is left of Stanley’s heart.
Notes about: Mary Grace Robertson
Born: November 19, 1912 Died: April 1, 2007, 7:45 p.m.
Watts Nursing Home Holderness, New Hampshire
It was a cool and rainy week, with no promise of spring anywhere to be seen, the yard of the low-budget home void of any life—a mud field with only a few tire tracks leading in. I sat with her every now and then, nothing formal, my own need to find those Luke had requested I seek out—those he called the lost and forgotten. I had asked to be called when they thought she was near the end, and she clearly was, her extremeties mottled and cool to the touch. Her roommate, separated by a curtain, cried incessantly. Her belongings included a large unopened tin of Poppycock popcorn, a Christmas bow still on the top of the can, and a crocheted throw made by a group at the local Unitarian Church. Her dentures were wrapped in tissue and in her drawer, along with an old family Bible. Her name is scrawled almost illegibly in the family tree at the beginning. Mary Grace Robertson. Daughter of William and Elizabeth. Born in Portland, Maine. And there was a wallet-sized school photo—in color but clearly of another time, perhaps the seventies, given the bushy cut of his red hair and the tinted aviator glasses. On the back someone had written: Pete age 15. No one working there knew who he was or anything about her, other than she was a charity case, someone abandoned to a clinic like a baby left at an orphanage, years ago, her mental state never any clearer or more reactive than it was at the time of her death. Her eyes opened only once during my last visit, first filling with what seemed recognition and then closing with a long sigh. After a day of trying to hold her hand, she finally clasped her fingers around mine and squeezed and then when the roommate fell asleep and the room was silent, she died. Think how many people die all alone, Luke had said when listing the many rules and guidelines he wanted me to follow. Never forget that single fact. Never forget how important it is to be there. Never forget those people. So what is there to remember? Charity gifts. Her full given name in that nearly illegible scrawl, cool gnarled fingers like roots holding on, the kind of night that can almost convince you spring will never come again. But it will. Once upon a time there was Mary Grace Robertson—daughter of William and Elizabeth—born into this world on November 19, 1912, in Portland, Maine.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Mary Robertson
She is running and running, the field outside the window, running and running. He says, Shut up and put this in your mouth, hold these rags, idiot. Kerosene is shiny, poured like liquor out the bottle and into the ditch, where he pushes her down and says, Hold these rags, Hold these rags. She says it’s Christmas, but he says it’s not. She says she has a family but he says not anymore. He says hold these rags and then the field burns blue and gold, blue and gold. Somebody spoke to her once, a boy from the school came and spoke to her and left his picture. He said his momma used to know her way back, way way back when the field was just the field and her father was out in it, when the field was just a field and before all the blue and gold and nothing, just nothing when she closes her eyes and closes her ears and stops running; he reaches his hand out and she takes it. He’s a boy from the school and he says, It’s okay, it’s okay, because he is there to help her.
Toby
TOBY TYLER CAME TO Pine Haven because she didn’t have anywhere better to go. She tells people how she pinned up a map and then threw a dart to see where it landed and that is entirely true. What she doesn’t tell is that she followed four darts before she got to this one, each time almost signing a lease in some retirement village and then getting cold feet. The fifth dart brought her here and just when she was having doubts she met Sadie who told how she had sent children to the library to check out Toby Tyler for years and years. I love Toby Tyler, Sadie had said, and just hearing those magic words sealed the deal. Toby had hoped for a sign and what could possibly be better than that? Not to mention the cigarette prices out there along I-95 were the cheapest she’d seen in a while.
For the most part, her life in Columbia had been good, but it was time to leave. It was getting too hard to keep up the little yard she had loved and tended for so long. The yellow maple she had planted and watched mature over a stretch of thirty years was as beautiful as e
ver, but she had come to dread the raking and the bagging; she feared slipping and falling even though she is still in pretty good physical shape. She goes over to the exercise room every single day and walks on the treadmill. She takes the chair exercise class even though it’s pretty slow and boring for someone like her. Still, she does it, all the while doing the different kind of breathing exercises she had learned in her old yoga class where she was the oldest member by at least twenty years. She could tell it made that cute little instructor nervous every time she reared back and tried to do a camel pose to the point she finally offered to sign a piece a paper that would remove all liability if she fell out dead on the floor. This made everybody in the class laugh and then they relaxed. They threw her a going-away party after she announced the next week would be her last class and she left thinking how odd that that was the first time she learned several of their names and yet she could have called on any one of them in a crisis. If she saw them in the grocery store or pumping gas, she liked to hold her palms together in front of her heart and say Namaste. Everybody found that hilarious, but it was honest, too. She did honor them and that place deep within where the whole universe resides, where you let go of all those bad things that can weigh you down.
But she feared a crisis, always has, and wanted to be prepared before anything happened. Toby Tyler has always lived by the rule of wanting to see trouble before it sees her. If she can see it coming, then she is smart enough and strong enough to come up with a solution. It might not be enough to save her life or change the world, but she could come up with something. She has kept framed and hanging on her wall something given to her when her mother was dying several years ago. Toby was good to her mother, always within an hour’s drive to do things for her, and somehow her mother knew not to quiz her personal life. At some point they turned a corner when her mother no longer asked if Toby had met someone or if she thought she might one day have babies. It was sweet that way, sweet the way her mother there at the end told her she loved her just the way she is, that in fact she couldn’t imagine Toby any other way than just who she is. Of course her mother called her Annabelle, a beautiful name to have been given in life but not one that ever suited her. And her mother loved to talk about how they used to love The Original Amateur Hour with Ted Mack on Sunday nights sponsored by the Geritol wannabe—Serutan—which they always told you was natures spelled backwards. Ted Mack was the first real American Idol and that was back when Toby had all kinds of notions in her head, one of them being that she fancied herself a singer and a dancer, kind of a Dale Evans/Gene Kelly thing she had worked out—the tapping cowgirl, they called her in her head. Sometimes she practiced her drishti while sitting with her mother, focusing her gaze loosely on some distant spot so that she could keep breathing and not lose her balance while slowly letting go.
She had long dreaded the day when she would not have her mother there to visit. Some of the teachers she worked with—the few she was closest to—knew she was struggling. The new kid, there to teach history while he was taking courses to get his master’s degree over at USC, left something in her mailbox, the story of a rabbi hearing the world was about to be flooded and every bit of life as it had been known would be submerged, changed, gone. And then he said to his people, and Toby could just picture this all so well—she gave him a hat and long beard and inflection in his voice—he said: Okay, my people, listen up. We have only twenty-four hours to learn how to live underwater.
Somehow, standing there in that crowded little mailroom back of the school office, something lifted from her and she kept thinking of all the things she had already learned to live with. And maybe this was the moment she had been building up to; like the real Toby Tyler running off to join the circus, she could go anywhere and do anything. And the plan she hatched was to step down as they’d asked and to keep seeing her mother as much as she could in those final weeks, and when the time came, she would just sell her wonderful little house she loved so much and head out into the new world. It would be just like in Lost Horizon. She might find her own Shangri-La or that’s what she told the yoga class. “I am moving north in search of paradise.” They all thought that was hilarious especially when she showed them the brochure for Pine Haven with a picture of what her little cottage would look like. Now she is here, and she does love it for the most part. She thought naming their spaces was kind of silly, too, but she immediately knew what hers would be. She said the Ponderosa to make people laugh, but she always knew it would be the Little Chicken Farm, which is right there at the beginning of the movie version of Lost Horizon, which that nice boy from next door who runs the movie house said he might screen here in the recreation hall. Toby had quoted the opening to him just like she did his kid who is always hanging out with Sadie and who had been assigned to her for the naming of spaces. In these days of wars and rumors of wars—haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight? Of course you have. So has every man since Time began. Always the same dream. Sometimes he calls it Utopia—sometimes the Fountain of Youth—sometimes merely “that little chicken farm.”
That little girl was so amazed at how Toby had it all memorized so well because the girl herself had had a terrible time having to learn lines for a school play and she hated in Sunday school when they made you quote things from memory. She said she had been assigned something from Psalms, the one about how your anger should only endure for a moment because Joy comes in the morning, one that for some reason Toby always confused with a verse of Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality,” much of which she could also quote. She told the girl that her recitation of the chicken farm was just the beginning. She could do the witches from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Juliet’s balcony scene, the ending of The Glass Menagerie, several sonnets, and a truckload of Emily Dickinson. She also knew several Charlie McCarthy routines and was practiced at doing both voices; she used to have a dummy she was pretty good with, but then he started scaring her at night so she sold him when she moved. The girl laughed at that but said she could understand. She was once scared of a doll, too, and she wasn’t sure why that one and not the others.
“It’s just like people,” Toby said. “There is something in a face that can let you know all you need to know. Or the aura, you know? I have some experience with seeing the auras. Like I once knew this really nasty fella who was short, but people thought he was even shorter than he was because he had no aura at all. He had a sub-aura. People would hear that fella’s name and their hands would drop knee height like he might be a dwarf or a gnome.” This made the child laugh. “I kid you not,” Toby said. “I’m telling you that you can look at a person and most likely see all you need to know.”
“You think?” The girl was in the throes of an acne outbreak and boy did Toby remember that; who doesn’t, other than those lucky enough not to have been there? All those injected hormones out in the world are forcing children to cycle through things way too fast.
“Yeah, like in your face, I see a beautiful soul with great capabilities of memorization.” And then she went on to teach the girl how to memorize, how you can sing just about all of Emily Dickinson to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and Bible verses are much easier when you understand in clear contemporary English what is really being said. For instance, her verse was kind of like “Don’t get mad, get Glad” (like the commercial)—you’re crying your fanny off right now but tomorrow it’ll all be behind you. Let the sun shine. Toby waved her arms and sang like she was in the cast of Hair.
“Joy in the Morning,” Toby told her was used for the title of a book and then there was a movie of the same title starring Dr. Kildaire and Yvette Mimieux. “I had the biggest crush on her,” Toby told the girl, and then added, “You know what I mean; I wanted to look like her.”
“Yeah, I want to look like Lady Gaga,” Abby said, and laughed; she was surprised that Toby knows who that is. But you can’t just go from years of living with kids to then
knowing nothing at all. It would be too much of a shock to the system. She has a television; she reads magazines. She cares what is going on out there even when it’s not very pretty. Toby told Abby to slap some pork chops on her head and wrap herself in beef jerky and she’d be a dead ringer. By the end of that day, the child had her verse memorized and also could sing I died for beauty but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.
“Aren’t you kinda young to live here?” Abby asked.
“I’m the youngest of the oldest, that’s true,” she said. “But I have always been a little ahead of the others my age, you know?”
Now she takes a stroll over to the main building to find some of the others. It’s a high-class joint in many ways. She never in her life stopped what she was doing for formal meals and for tea in the afternoon, but now she absolutely loves it. It ends up getting kind of heated sometimes, which is what she loves best. People fight over chairs, things like that, things they taught you not to do in kindergarten, and yet everybody has circled right back around to it. I want to sit with so-and-so. That’s my chair. You’re in my chair. Wah-wah. Marge Walker always gets there early and plants her dressed-to-the-nines fanny in the big red leather wingback like she’s the queen. Often Marge is on a rant about how she’s tired of prisoners being treated like vacationers with hardworking taxpayers footing the bill, how those prisoners get to eat three meals a day and watch television and how she is also sick and tired of the foreigners taking up space in the produce section.
Life After Life Page 16