“Dad.”
“Really. I’ve got just three words for you.” He raises his fist before he considers how this was Martha’s old joke with the kids. I have three words for you, she would say in an angry loud voice that was so foreign to her mouth, and then after much clamor and question, she would scream out in the same angry tone, I love you.
“Just three,” he says again. “Match dot com.”
“No.” Ned starts laughing. “God only knows what you know about Match dot com, but it’s not for me, not yet, at least.”
“Too good, huh?”
“No. Just not interested.”
“Why don’t you call your wife. She might at least be good for some sex.”
“Nice thought there, but she remarried,” Ned says, and Stanley can tell he’s getting to him, though Ned still doesn’t lash out with what would be so easy, how he has told Stanley that a million times, how he has told how she has a two-year-old and is pregnant with another. Ned cried when he told Stanley about it, maybe hoping for some sympathy, but Stanley was unable to reach his hand out and do anything. He couldn’t afford to blow his cover so all he said was good riddance, bet those are some ugly children. Now Stanley wants to say something that isn’t too mean but will still convince him to leave and stay gone at least until tomorrow.
“She wasn’t right for you,” he says. “Everything that happened was a blessing. Something to celebrate.”
Ned takes a deep breath, face red and fists curled. “It was not a blessing,” he says. “I don’t even know why I try.” He looks at the portrait of Martha as if she is the one he is talking to. Maybe he promised Martha that he would make amends, maybe this is all about some kind of deathbed promise and Ned hates it all as much as Stanley does.
“I don’t know why you do either,” Stanley says. “And she sure as hell doesn’t know.” He points to Martha. “She’s as dead as a doornail. Remember? You were there.”
“Nice. Thanks, Dad.” He stands and pulls an envelope from his back pocket and places two tickets to an upcoming wrestling event on the table beside Stanley’s magazine. “If you need someone to go with you, I’ll be glad to drive,” he says, no eye contact.
“You sat there and cried, remember? Cried like a two-year-old.”
“Yes. I remember,” Ned says, his voice a little louder, jaw clenched. “And I remember how you just sat there.” He leaves, letting the door slam behind him, and when Stanley is absolutely sure he’s gone he leans forward and cries. This plan is not working the way he had hoped it would.
Toby
WELCOME HOME, GIRL. Toby is relieved to get back in her own space, her little cottage filled with belongings she has known her whole life: her mother’s furniture and china and the big dark mantel clock that had belonged to her father’s father. She pulls out her yoga bolster and eye bag and leans back to do some deep breathing, each breath a way of ridding herself of all those bad feelings Marge Walker left her with. You think you’ve got your skin grown nice and thick and healthy and then it starts sliding right off of you, like a snake or a burn victim, leaving you tender and exposed.
Mr. Thornton Wilder once said how people who have lived in it for years know less about love than the child who has lost a dog yesterday, or something like that, and she knows it’s true. Just looking at poor Abby sitting there, she knows everyone is helpless to heal her; only time can do that. And that is a truth for everyone, even old large barge Marge. Everyone has a hurt. Everyone has a weakness and how humans can live with devoting time to rubbing salt in and on another, she will never ever know.
Ommmmm. Ommmmmm. She is playing a CD she bought at Walgreens called Global Soundings and there’s all kinds of things in there, thunder and waterfalls and birds and lions. She likes to close her eyes and just follow along just like she does when she visits Sadie. Poor Sadie. It does wonders for her to have guests posing for this and that and Toby faithfully shows up to ask for something whether she really feels like it or not. Some days she just likes to read and smoke cigarettes—her little secret. It’s why she won’t wear the nicotine patch but opts to keep smacking on Nicorette instead. Allowing herself to cheat and smoke every now and again is one great pleasure she has in life. Inhale, exhale. Inhale, exhale. She tries to do the kind of breathing so many of the people in her old yoga class did, breathing there at the back of their throats with what almost sounds like a growl. She has trouble doing it and always has, but she likes how it sounds kind of primal and wild in there just like what she hears on Global Soundings.
When she lies here like this with the sun warming her patch on the floor like a raft in the midst of the cool air-conditioning and the white noise of her system, her mind floats in and out and she is always amazed by what snippets it calls up that don’t have anything to do with anything. It’s almost like being haunted by little past moments and what would that mean? One of hers is of being in the parking lot of her high school on a day so hot the asphalt is soft under the tread of her shoes and the underside of the maple leaves look silver. This one has recurred many times, a free-floating little particle that is detached from any sense of a particular day or event. And another is from her childhood on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store near her home and it is gray winter light, again detached and meaningless like part of a memory looking for a home. There are so many memories looking for a home like when Toby and Sally lived together while they were studying to be teachers and how it was different from all the other friendships she knew. She tried to talk to Sally about it, but it was clear she wasn’t going to be able to do that and what had happened on those rare dark nights would remain there, like those free-floating snippets of memories, nothing to attach them to a particular story or cause or effect. They happened and yet they remained removed from life and all that came after. Sally got married to a man who provided her with a very comfortable and good life and she traveled all over creation and had two beautiful children. Toby is godmother to the oldest and to this day never forgets to acknowledge her: Anna Clarice Martin (now Tolar) of Mt. Pleasant who has a doctorate degree in history and now a baby of her own. Toby is almost certain that the Anna of her name came from her own Annabelle. Sally had always told her how much she loved her name even though Toby had said it had never ever fit her her whole life, like asking a muddy unruly child to step into a designer evening gown and satin high heels. Toby told Sally that she loved her and Sally always said she knew, that she loved her, too, and patted her hand the same as she did her German shepherd and, later, other women friends who went with her on her many trips. Toby went on the one to Greece and the one to Spain and they were both fun trips and both served the purpose to remind her of how distant and long ago whatever it had been was. Free-floating particles. Bits of life. She breathes in and she breathes out. It has occurred to her that someday she might ask Sally what she made of it all, if she ever thinks about it. These days so many young people experiment with who they are and it isn’t the big deal it was when she was young. But she suspects they are all still very vulnerable. After all love is love. Sometimes you just have to believe that love is love and accept that it manifests in many different ways. Accept the great fortune of seeing it at all.
Notes about: Martha Marie Anderson Stone
Born: September 5, 1935 Died: January 2, 2008, 11:30 a.m.
Fulton, North Carolina
It was a beautiful sunny day, clear and cold. At least twelve cardinals gathered near the birdfeeder outside her window, bright red creatures in the leafless oak. She loved her birdfeeders and her rose garden and she loved her box collection. She liked to hold and look at her special boxes, a collection of tiny Limoges containers with special dates and events scripted within. The top is broken on the one to commemorate her older son’s birth and she has glued where the body had split in two. “Ironic,” she said as she showed them. “Ned’s box is whole and Pete’s is broken.” She asked to see the one for her anniversary—white and gold alone on its own shelf—and pointed to where a
tiny chip was missing. “But not bad,” she said. “Salvageable.”
She was a beautiful young woman—photos all over the house—May days and graduations, debutante parties and a large wedding portrait over the mantel in the living room. She loved to dance and she loved to garden. Her favorite time of the year was June when she opened her garden to graduates and debutantes and June brides to come and gather roses of all varieties for their little luncheons and brunches and teas. “There is nothing quite like an armload of roses,” she said. Her favorites were ‘Marchesa Bocchella’, pink and so fragrant, and the creamy white ‘Penelope’ with their large pink hips come fall. She liked telling the histories of the various roses to the young women who came seeking them. She told me to please come back in June and take some. “If I’m not here”—she paused, knowing the truth and letting it sink in—“Then you just help yourself. Tell Stanley and the boys I said so.”
Her sons were with her at the end, the whole handsome family pictured all over the house in photographs at various holidays and seasons like scenes from something like Ozzie and Harriet. Pete was making arrangements and writing things into a little leather-bound notebook he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket. He asked his mother what songs she wanted sung and were there scriptures she wanted read. Her look the first time he asked was one of shock, but then she came forward to answer: She wanted “Softly and Tenderly” and Psalm 23. “I know that’s not very original,” she said, “but neither is death.” She smiled, but none of them were able to respond; they were not looking at her.
The younger son, Ned, came and sat beside her, but he always put his head down near her hand and then stayed there, shoulders shaking as she patted and comforted him. Her husband had continued to talk to her like it was an ordinary day and she would be getting up any second now so that life could resume as normal.
Toward the end, she talked about where she grew up there in downtown Richmond, and she talked about her mother and father and her girlhood friends. She named rose after rose with a vivid description, calling their names like old friends: ‘Ferdinand Pichard’ and ‘Mabel Morrison’, ‘Baroness Rothschild’ and ‘White Wings’, until finally her husband told her it was okay to let go. Her husband did not want to tell her good-bye. He did not want to tell her that it was okay to go, but she waited until he did so.
“Our whole marriage has been about me making the decisions,” he said when asked to help her, to give her permission to go. “Do you really mean she can’t die without me telling her to?”
This was a house full of sadness—a silent sadness broken only by that flock of cardinals with their calls of cheer, cheer, cheer. He went to her bedside and she died within seconds. Roses and cardinals and fragile little boxes—these were her obvious, easiest, loves, and what will always hold her in my memory.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Martha Stone
Her boys are here—such handsome boys—and Stanley. Stanley Jefferson Stone. She had their names painted in a little porcelain box when they got engaged. He could have married anyone but he married her and she carried a large bouquet of ‘Cecile Brunner’, “the sweetheart rose,” and trailing ivy and baby’s breath. He married her. Distances, distances, years make distances. She tried silly things, the negligee, the champagne, the fragrant petals shed from a ‘Charles de Mills’ leading to the bed where she waited in the sheer nylon gown in high heels he said cost too much. He shook his head and asked how much did they cost. They are in the back of the closet reminding her what not to do, what never to do again. He laughed and said she looked ridiculous and she cried the rest of the night. She was only thirty-five and that seemed so old then, but no, she was only thirty-five—the boys at a little sleepaway camp. She was trained in all the good ways to be a good wife and a hostess and a mother, but she wanted to be more, too. She wanted him to keep looking at her the way he did in those first weeks they met, the way he looked at her before the first night she undressed and waited there beneath the sheets, her heart pounding. When would she ever wear those shoes, he asked. Ah, come on now, he said. Jesus. He got quieter and kinder when he learned she was so sick, but that day, that day she stood in her new high heels and lovely sheer gown wishing she were somewhere else. There had been other boys, other paths. She had known many fine boys. Boys will be boys. She told him she didn’t like him to spank their boys, she didn’t believe in doing that, a lot of people don’t do that anymore. Please stop. Please stop. And he never liked her collection, he said look at all the clutter, look. Right here. Right here. Here, here, here. He swept the shelf clear and her beautiful collection she had collected her whole life, went everywhere. Right here! Right here! He puts his hand on her arm and tells her it’s okay for her to leave. She wants him to say stay, but he says it’s okay to leave now. You can leave, Martha, it’s okay. He says, Right here, right here, and here, here, here. He speaks her name because there are rose petals all over the room where she put them like it said to do in a book—here, here, here –he says and she opens her eyes to see.
C.J.
C.J. PICKS UP KURT and drives home, waving to the kid manning the window of the Dog House, a seventeen-year-old girl who makes her feel old with all her talk of vampires and how she’d love to get her own teeth filed sharp. I’m the old one in this picture, C.J. thinks, and it makes her laugh. That’s a first and by way of thinking about age and feeling old, she can’t stop thinking about that old shark, Rachel Silverman, out there talking to dead people like she was on a picnic or something. One of these nights, maybe C.J. will pull out the Ouija board and gather up a bunch of the old guys to have a séance. She bets they’d get a kick out of that and she’d probably hear some really crazy stuff. Hell, they talk crazy stuff anyway so it would just be a little extra. She once worked as a psychic so she can play all that stuff pretty good and truth is she does believe. In what? Who knows, but she does. It’s something she and Joanna talk about often, those times when you are so aware of not being alone, so aware of something big and beyond this life.
And truth is she really likes Rachel Silverman and wouldn’t mind hanging out with her a little or driving her around town, though God only knows what it is she thinks she’ll see. She seems smart enough and still in touch with reality so maybe she really could give some legal advice. C.J. has nothing to lose and maybe a little something to gain and what else does she have to do anyway other than hanging out with Joanna, which is fine but does get a little boring from time to time. Joanna is kind of settled in a way that’s probably good but still could use a little heat or excitement. Like maybe you’re scared of guys or scared of getting hurt, C.J. has told her. Maybe that’s why you never meet the right one.
C.J.’s friend, Sam Lowe, keeps trying to ask her out, but she has managed so far to keep that from actually happening; why risk fucking up the one friend she has who is close to her own age and she certainly can’t tell him that technically she is seeing someone. She has been tempted to tell Joanna about a thousand times that she does have a boyfriend—or man-friend whatever—but keeps chickening out. She’s scared of making the wrong move and he reminds her often how they really have to be very careful and so her big worry right now is about tonight and what to wear and where to meet. All those cryptic little notes are driving her fucking crazy and today—just like yesterday—there was nothing there at all. He’s a grown goddamned man. He like slices people open and saves them and shit, jump-starts their old bum hearts and he can’t even pick up a telephone or leave a real note on her door at home or at work to say what he needs to say? He made her promise that she would never ever call him and she has kept her promise. He says he has been leaving notes, but where are they? He accuses her of taking them and not responding; he said he didn’t like her fucking with him. How stupid would that be? She’s the one who needs him. And how creepy is it anyway that he makes her walk that path out near where her mother is buried because anytime she is out there, it feels like she’s being watched, that her mother is out there
watching, and now she’ll feel like those Carlyle people are watching and listening to her, too, which is really fucked up, like who wants to star in her own horror show? She certainly doesn’t. She has had more than enough of her share. She even told him how she hates to go out there so it’s like he keeps testing her and how mean is it that? Maybe it made sense when they first got together, but that’s been a year and half ago. She loved how after they were together that first time that he immediately told his wife he thought she should give herself a break and have their house cleaned every week—maybe even twice a week—instead of every other and how he thought she should go to a spa somewhere or traveling with friends the way he knows women always like to do. Before C.J. could even blink she had a brand-new cell phone she didn’t even have to pay for and a television and nights of him sneaking her in and out of his house—a huge house with a Jacuzzi and stereo speakers in the ceiling of every room.
But it scares me to walk back there, she told him when he kept insisting they leave each other notes in the cemetery. I don’t like it.
You, he said, unzipping her jeans and reaching in, have no choice. She was six months pregnant and he had already given her a big roll of money for the month and that’s the way it went for quite a while. He is still angry at her for moving into Joanna’s little apartment over the Dog House and not needing him so much. He said that place was not nearly so discreet and it smelled bad, too, like onions and old grease. She thought he would be pleased, proud that she was working and making deals that were aboveboard and helping her to be independent. She got the job at Pine Haven all on her own by responding to a help-wanted ad and then auditioning by shampooing several residents and doing their nails. She thought he’d be pleased, but he had not been happy at all and everything has slowly gone downhill since, no matter how many times she has explained that she wants him to be proud of her. She wants to feel proud of herself.
Life After Life Page 21