“The people?” Toby once asked.
“No. I mean all that mess that comes from Mexico or wherever, ten kinds of peppers nobody ever heard of,” her whole mouth twisted bitterly with the words. “Who wants that old mess?”
“Maybe I would,” one of the women who is on the kitchen staff said, and introduced herself as Mrs. Lopez. Toby told her not to be offended, Marge was someone who had been surprised that Lois Flowers had still not lost weight even with cancer.
Today Marge is saying how she isn’t going to sign a thing that turns anything over to her children. She said if they want to circle in like vultures for her money, so be it, but she plans to spend every single cent to stay alive as long as she possibly can. “I’m going to live so long they’ll be sorry.”
Toby asks Joanna, the hospice woman, what got Marge going and apparently it was that one of her sons was wanting power of attorney. Marge overheard and turned to Toby.
“He is in financial trouble himself,” she says. “He’s wanting his piece of the pie early. Now I do not mind helping my children. That is what my husband and I agreed on many years ago, but trying to take over my kingdom is not the way to go about it. “
“Good for you,” Toby says.
“If I start feeling like somebody is pushing me out before it’s time for me to leave, it makes me mad as hell and I will plant my feet and say I am not going.”
Sadie laughs to hear Marge cuss; they all do.
“I’m gonna live as long as I possibly can just to spite him. I want everything artificial that can be given to me for as long as there’s a pulse. Breath, food, the works. Mr. Walker and I worked hard all those years and I’ll be”—she paused, sputtering and stumbling over the d at the tip of her tongue—“durned if I let them hover like vultures.”
“I do not want to linger,” Sadie says.
“Well, that’s because you don’t have greedy, stingy children. I sat up just last night adding up what I saved them in babysitting hours and meals eaten and clothes washed.”
“You go, girl,” Toby waves to Abby, who is sitting there beside Sadie. Poor child’s dog is still missing and she is heartbroken so this laughing is good. “But damn, Marge, slow it all down, okay? ’Cause you’re making me want to like you.”
“Well, I don’t know if I want you to like me.” Marge opens her scrapbook, an amazing document for sure, every murder committed in the county for the past decade followed to a tee. She said it had begun as a way to keep up with her husband’s career and then her son’s. Her husband had a huge murder case nearly thirty years ago in which he sent a man to the chair for butchering his wife and child. He showed him who was in charge, Marge liked to say, and she had many times held the group spellbound with the horrible details of that case and how brave Judge Henry Walker had always been, not the least bit worried or intimidated by threats. Henry Walker had a reputation unlike anyone else in this area, she said. Henry Walker was a moral man unlike his son who seems a little bit too interested in my purse. Now she turns to a page about an awful murder out in the county where a man drove out to his girlfriend’s mama’s trailer and killed everybody there, even the dog. She points to the mug shot of the boyfriend who did the killing. “My son is representing him.” She looks up. “All the more reason not to give him any money.”
“That’s his job,” Stanley Stone says. “He’s the defense attorney and a damn good one, it seems.” Stanley is a total mystery—sometimes clear as a bell and then off the rail and mean as a snake like the other day. “Toby, why don’t you do something so she’ll shut up.”
“Do a recitation,” Abby says.
“Or tell us what makes you mad,” Marge says, and flips the page to a big headline that says MURDER SUICIDE IN SOUTH CAROLINA. “What makes someone like you angry.”
“Cat fight,” Stanley says. “Go put on your bikinis and let’s get muddy.”
“There’s a lot that makes me mad. Like I have an aversion to the moochers and leachers, the seekers and glommers of your soul,” Toby says, and Sadie says that sounds a little like the Sermon on the Mount. “And”—Toby pauses and takes a deep breath—“people like you make me mad, but right now I’d rather talk about something I think is worth talking about. How about that? Like I can tell you things about my life as a teacher—a damn good teacher, too—and how I told those young girls, don’t let me hear you complaining about your periods anymore ’cause if you’re not having one it means one of two things. Either some boy’s been parking overtime where he should’ve pulled out or you’re up to no good with your own precious bodies, starving and vomiting and messing up nature’s beautiful patterns.” She stops and goes to adjust the tubes leading to Lorice Boone’s oxygen tank. She tells Lorice that’s the payment for all those years smoking, that she herself might need oxygen one of these days because she also smoked like a fiend for many years. Yes, that was the price for having looked so sexy with a fag hanging from her lips while coaching the girls’ tennis team. “And, yes, I said fag ’cause it used to just mean a cigarette.” She looks at Abby and pretends to take a deep draw and exhale like she might be Bette Davis. “And there’s something else that gets my blood boiling, I’m so goddamned tired of all the words getting taken and twisted—what is that all about? I found that I was having a harder and harder time keeping up with the new slang the kids were using—bad and sick for good—things like that.”
“And the use of dig made such good sense way back when,” Rachel Silverman pipes up. She has dirt and straw all over the back of her pants like she might’ve been stretched out on the ground. “And bread, dough.” That Rachel is as tough and cynical as they come. Toby adores her and would love nothing better than to be her best friend.
“What about dish,” Stanley says and eyes Rachel’s body up and down. “Or puss.”
“What about pop?” Rachel aims an imaginary gun at him.
“That would make me”—he pauses—“stiff.” He blows a kiss her way.
“I am going to report this X-rated mess and a child sitting here in your presence.” Marge slams her scrapbook shut and stands up. “You all are damned to hell as far as I can tell except those two.” She points at the sisters, one crocheting and the other snoozing. “Blessed are the sweet and simple.”
“Wait, Marge, before I completely don’t like you again,” Toby says. “I can translate. He pointed to her face and she acted like she was going to kill him and then that would make him dead.”
“Hey, that’s cool,” Abby says. “That’s what you did with the Bible verse.”
“She what?” Marge says, but Stanley interrupts with croak and hooch and keister.
“I’m partial to groovy myself.” Stanley’s hair is standing all out from his head like he might have stuck his finger in a socket and his shirt is buttoned wrong so one side is hanging longer than the other. He has the cover of that Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album he plays nonstop and asks who would like to be the lucky damsel to wear a whipped-cream frock like the one on the cover.
“Damsel! Frock!” Sadie laughs and wheezes. “Those are some ancient words. Have you ever even heard those words, sweetie?” She pats Abby’s hand and holds on tight, and when the room quiets down from Stanley’s mess, Toby continues.
“I told those girls, someday you’ll be wishing for your period and I don’t just mean to make sure you aren’t pregnant—knocked up—and they looked at me with their mouths all screwed up like I was stupid and what could I possibly mean.
“I said when you get old like moi here”—she slaps her chest and grimaces, pulls her pants leg up over the top of her boots to show a white scaly-looking leg—“I told ’em, I said, everything stops—the faucet goes off. It’s like the scene in Lost Horizon that I had them watch in English class after reading the novel. I said, you want some fantasy? A real stretch of the imagination and yet something that still is real in all the right ways? I had them read Spoon River Anthology and The Glass Menagerie and Our Town because they could read the p
arts aloud and pretend they were there. At first they were silly and awkward, but the ones who got it got it. They are still young enough that sometimes you can snag one or two and set them on a new course before they dive back into those flimsy old paperbacks modeled after some silly television show or, most recently—like the past several years—something with wizards and trolls and vampires. But I made them remember that one scene in the movie where the beautiful woman is taken from Shangri-La and, poof, dries up to an old brown potato chip like what you used to find down in the bottom of the bag. Lays and most of them have corrected this, which is a shame because it was that old brown crunchy one there at the bottom that made me enjoy all the others more, you know? Like I pointed out to them you need to enjoy those smooth, pretty faces and natural-colored thick hair and breasts that are healthy and cancer free and don’t pull you down to Hades when you stand up, or as Emily Dickinson might say, I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true. True! Real!”
“You were some teacher,” Rachel says, and nods to Abby who is sitting there soaking it all up like a sponge. “I hope you have some teachers as good as she was. Good for you, Toby. I’m surprised they let you retire.”
“She was forced to retire,” Marge says. “And her name’s not Toby. She made that up when she moved in out here and everybody knows it.”
“Well, I don’t know it,” Rachel says. “All I know is what I learned when I met her and I learned her name is Toby. And I still say she must have been some kind of wonderful teacher, the kind of teacher children would benefit from having.”
“The jury’s still out on that,” Toby says. “Though yes, I think I did a fine job. I think I was a really great teacher.”
“And you’re so modest,” Marge says. “And no telling what you were teaching there in the locker room with those young girls.”
“I smell a cat fight,” Stanley says.
“You know what? You can’t hurt me anymore than I have already been hurt in life so just give it up. You’re ignorant and I’d rather be who I am and smart than who you are and ignorant.”
“Who you are is a sin.”
“Well, it’s nobody’s goddamned business who I am, Marge, and it’s official—I am back to not liking you at all. And you better watch out is what I’m saying to you.” Toby pats her fanny pack like there is something in it and then points her finger like a gun, says pow, pop, and then blows the tip of her finger. “You better watch out ’cause what have I got to lose? I didn’t have to come live here like you. I can still drive, still do pretty much anything I want to do, which is why I’m in an independent cottage and not over here in the next tier of living.” She puts her hand up to her mouth and then apologizes to Stanley, Rachel, and Sadie. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Stanley acts like he’s shaking something, either a martini or a can of Reddi-wip since he’s so focused on that picture of a woman with a whipped-cream dress. “We all know we’re has-beens.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rachel says.
“I got all kinds of rules for good living and she doesn’t match any of them,” Toby says. “For instance, I say you should be kind to others. I say ‘’tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.’ I say your pee should always run clear, which means you got to drink a lot throughout the whole day to keep yourself pure and cleansed.”
“The question is what you drink,” Marge says, and gets several laughs from the peanut gallery. She has settled back into her big chair, scared to death someone else will sit there, and reopened her scrapbook. No doubt about it, she’s done some fine documenting of all the mayhem and murder in the county. She has a real talent, a real eye for the macabre, which Toby does admire, but that doesn’t mean she has to like her.
“Always take the stairs,” Toby says because Marge is always using the elevator, and then turns to Sadie. “Unless you can’t, of course. Let’s see. Stretch your spine each day like you’re wringing out a sponge—just sit in a chair and go from side to side like this.” She demonstrates and they hear her back pop. “And think of at least one thing that makes you laugh loud and long.”
“For me it’s just an orgasm a day,” Stanley says, and Sadie immediately puts a finger up to her lips since Abby is sitting there so he lowers his voice and whispers, which makes the girl laugh. “Rain or shine. Every day.”
“There you go,” Toby says. “That’s the kind of laughing I mean, but none of us want to dwell too long on that image, do we? No sirree, we sure don’t. But I’ll tell you, I was a good teacher and it only started getting hard for me when everything changed. Like one day I was a normal teacher . . .”
Marge sighs and shifts around in her seat until Stanley asks does she have to use the bathroom or does she have Saint Vitus? Sadie whispers something about worms and needing to check her bottom, which makes several people giggle and makes Marge rise up like a cobra, but Toby can’t even stop to laugh.
“Then next thing I knew the children were coming in with names like Bandana and Eurasia and Montpelier. And I said, those are things and places, children, and you are people. What on earth is going on? And there were names I couldn’t even pronounce and I can guaran-damn-tee you that you don’t readily go calling names you can’t say—I’m looking for the Johns and Bills and Toms and they just weren’t there anymore. I had Lucaramel and Tahitia only it was pronounced Ta-HI-shee-Ah. I had to write a phonetic spelling alongside almost every child’s name by the time I retired.”
“Got fired,” Marge says. “But I was a teacher long ago, too, and I so know what you are talking about. I hated multiculturalism.”
“That’s not what I said,” Toby says. “I don’t hate multiculturalism. You are worse than FOX News.”
“I think you do.”
“It was the white ones, too. It was equal opportunity weird names. I’d hear mommas calling them in and it sounded like they were hawkers for a law firm: Parker, Ramsey, and Tate! Parker, Ramsey, and Tate! And next thing you know up run three little towheads like dandelion puffs, all decked out in little sailor suits.”
“You are describing my grandchildren who were just here,” Marge says. “How dare you use their names.”
“I did it because their daddy is trying to get you to die early so he can have all your money. He wants to buy those children a boat to go with their outfits.”
“You did it because you are the word that means a female dog.” Marge is red in the face, jowls quivering. “People like you are always frustrated now, aren’t you?”
“Only by people like you—the judges and the juries. Nothing about me has slipped. I just decided to move on in here early and get a good hard look at where I’m headed.” She unzips her fanny pack but doesn’t reach in. She has got a little tin of Skoal in there and cannot wait to get a bit of it up against her gum. She will be buzzing like a cowgirl riding the range and she cannot wait. Welcome home tapping cowgirl, where have you been? “And when I look at some of you, I can tell it ain’t a pretty sight,” she says. Her hands are shaking and she feels like she might cry, which makes her furious.
“Be sure your sins will reveal themselves.”
“Good,” Toby says. “I hope so. I am so tired of people like you—snowflake, lily white, holy roller”—she pauses looking over at Abby but then deciding to go for broke—“asshole—who hear I did a little coaching and want to stick a great big stereotype on me, that I’m a certain way. You going to point to Rachel there and say she’s stingy or something about her beezer, her schnoz because that’s a stereotype or are you going to point over there at Suzie Mitchell and Mr. McIntyre and say they must be eating some fried chicken and watermelon all day while waiting on a welfare check? And Lottie there and Mrs. Locklear better stay away from the fire water. Mr. McIntyre has a tail and Rachel Silverman has horns on her head.”
“I would find that immensely attractive,” Stanley Stone says. “Her horns, that is, not his tail. No offense.” He nods at Mr. McInty
re who says none taken, all the while reaching his hand to rub the base of his spine to make certain there is nothing there.
“Well, first I am a person,” Toby continues. “I am a human, a woman; I was an English teacher and a bit of an amateur writer myself, but I’ll tell you things went so far off course I just didn’t even know where I was anymore. I think it was the beginning of the end, too. What once was generous compassion for high school students with all their angst and crap going on turned into pure agitation and fury. I didn’t get frustrated by who I am; I got frustrated by what they were reading and wanting to write about. I said, you’re too smart for all this shit. Dwarves and wizards and gnomes and vampires—big blue aliens with tails like monkeys. I said what I wouldn’t give for a good old-fashioned story about somebody losing his or her virginity or getting an abortion—Grandma died and for the first time I knew I was mortal or what about the one where the boy doesn’t want to kill a deer, but Granddaddy makes him so he can be a man. I was wanting to write something myself and it was dying to get out of my head but couldn’t find the door it was all so plugged up with that malarkey.”
“Malarkey is a fine old word,” Stanley says. “I want to know the derivation of malarkey.”
“I think of my head as my apartment,” Toby says because she is on a roll now, oh yeah; full speed ahead and that Abby soaking it up like a sponge and that is good. She won’t hear any of this in school, which is a disgrace. “I have lived up here in my head my whole life. I climb those steps every day and there is always a little voice saying, Welcome home, Toby. Come on in girl, you made it one more day.”
“I do something very similar,” Sadie says, and Rachel nods. “You know I do. Why Stanley and I were doing it just recently, weren’t we?” She nods and finally Stanley looks up and nods back, smiles at her and then at Rachel. They look at each other a little longer than normal until he grins, which makes her turn away. There is some chemistry between those two and Toby is hoping to stir it even if he is demented much of the time.
Life After Life Page 17