by Joan Opyr
“Instead of exchanging phone numbers,” Abby said wryly, “you ought to ask for letters of reference. There’s a pattern here, if you would but look.”
“I see it all right. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“Why don’t you think long and hard,” she replied. “Ask yourself why it is that all of your relationships come to grief.”
“‘This grief is crowned with consolation.’ Antony and Cleopatra.”
“Don’t you Shakespeare me. I’m wise to your tricks.”
She pulled into the driveway of my grandmother’s house and turned off the engine. The yard was immaculate, masking the chaos within. How my mother and Nana could keep the sidewalks edged and the borders trimmed while packing the interior like a pair of wharf rats was a mystery to me.
I hesitated, my hand on the door handle. “I warn you, it’s like threading your way through the ruins of Pompeii.”
“You’ve warned me. Now lead the way.”
I looked at my watch. “We told them we’d be here at seven. It’s now a quarter past. That doesn’t matter because they’ll still need another forty-five minutes to get ready. We’ll have to sit and wait.”
“Okay,” Abby said, “what’s the problem? Do you want me to blow the horn and give them time to take down the Confederate flag?”
“Don’t be a jackass. I just . . . I never thanked Hunter for that car, Abby. I just took it. All I said was something rude about it being a death trap. His response was to tell me that all of that stuff about the Pinto being dangerous was horseshit. He said if you drove one car up the ass of any other car, of course it was going to catch fire. We had a fight about a car he gave me. I fought with the man over a present.”
“You were angry. He drank too much. You were getting ready to move out. He was getting ready to leave. You were both trying to pull away.”
“He did leave. And I left. We pulled away from each other, but all I can remember now is fighting with him. It’s the last thing I can remember us doing together. I didn’t stop fighting with him until he was too senile and too demented to fight back. There was never any kiss and make up with us. I fought with him the day my mother and I had him involuntarily committed. I fought with him at Jean’s wake, for God’s sake.”
Abby put her hand out and waited.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want any human contact right now. I want to wallow in guilt and self-pity.”
“Too bad. Take my hand.” I took her hand. “Now listen to me. A man who was like a father to you—a better father than the rotten one you had, anyway—is dying. He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even close. But when you didn’t want to kill him, you loved him. Dying is absolute hell on the living. The feelings you have, they won’t stop until you kick the bucket yourself, but they will fade. Over time.”
I hesitated. “What are you going to do with Rosalyn’s ashes?”
“Hell if I know,” she said. “Maybe I’ll put them on the fireplace mantle. Maybe I’ll sprinkle them on Mount Hood. I might put them in the back of a closet and try to forget about them. They’re not Rosalyn. Rosalyn’s gone.”lay
We sat there and waited. I laced my fingers with hers and she gave me a reassuring squeeze. Finally, I let go and opened the door.
“There’s no Confederate flag,” I said, “but my grandmother does have a set of Mammy salt and pepper shakers.”
“I knew it,” she replied.
Chapter Twenty-Five
It was the Friday before we were due to leave for the beach. I was mowing the grass again. In the summer, it had to be mowed at least twice a week, and, if the weather had been particularly humid, three times. I’d finished the back yard and was starting on the front. I began on the outside edge, next to the sidewalk, and worked my way around in decreasing circles, blowing the green onions, dandelions, and grass clippings into the center of the yard. My grandmother’s azaleas—pink, red, and white—were the envy of our neighborhood. Our grass was not. The Savas used a lawn service that sprayed a terrifying concoction of chemicals onto their grass every month. It looked great, smooth, uniform, and entirely weedfree, but I wouldn’t have walked on it barefoot for any amount of money. Besides, I liked the smell of the onions. Mowing the grass had a cumulative, heady effect, like walking an aromatic labyrinth. I let my mind wander, lulled by the smells and the rhythmic drone of the lawnmower engine.
It was nearly halfway done when I saw Jean. She was down on her hands and knees, poking around at the bottom of one of the juniper bushes that marked the boundary between our yard and her driveway.
“Hi, Jean,” I called.
She’d always been Jean to me rather than Mrs. Sava, and even my grandmother didn’t consider this a shocking lapse of manners. Mike insisted on being called by his first name as a matter of professional habit—no one wanted to buy a car from someone they called mister—and Cookie Turnipseed was Cookie because he hated formality. I called Jean by her first name because, despite the fact that she was forty-four, she didn’t seem old enough to be addressed by anything else. She was perpetually jejune. Sober, she was nervous and scatty. When drunk, she was bumptious.
I liked her anyway. I often found her ingenuous and engaging. She assumed a casual friendship with everyone she met. She hoped you’d like her—she thought you probably would—and she hoped you’d help her. Jean was utterly without shame. She’d ask anyone for anything, a ride home, a kidney, or help tying her shoe. Whatever she asked, she presented it as a reasonable request, and most people seemed to find it hard to refuse her. My mother was one of the few exceptions, but then, my mother had been vaccinated against charm.
I stopped and switched the mower off. “Are you looking for something?”
Jean rocked back on her heels as if the juniper bush had spoken to her. “Oh, honey, I’ve lost one of my diamond earrings. Mike gave them to me for my fortieth birthday. They were antiques, and I’ll just die if I can’t find it. Would you help me look?”
I had hoped to finish mowing the grass before the sun reached high noon. It was nearing its apex now. “I’ll help,” I said. “Must be an epidemic. Hunter lost his Masonic ring a few weeks ago.”
“No!” This was delivered in tones of deepest horror, though it didn’t escape my notice that the instant I crouched down to look, Jean stood up.
“Don’t worry. We found it behind the toilet.”
“The bathroom!” she cried. “I didn’t even look there.”
“When did you first notice it was missing?”
She closed her eyes and thought. The sun was beating down on the top of my head and beads of sweat were rolling down my forehead. Fresh as a daisy, Jean took her time. “Just now,” she said. “The phone rang and when I reached up to take my earring out, it was already gone. As soon as I hung up, I looked all around in the house, and then I came out here.”
“Okay, where else have you been?”
“Well, I went to the Winn Dixie to buy some steaks for dinner—you don’t think it fell out there? Anyone could have picked it up!”
“I don’t know. Why don’t we retrace your steps?”
“What a good idea!” More thinking. “Okay. I came home and put away the groceries. I pottered around in the kitchen for a while, and then I came out here to get something out of the car, something I’d forgotten. That’s when the phone rang. I ran inside to get it and then . . . what was it I forgot out here in the car? I don’t believe I got it. That phone distracted me.”
I opened the door to her car. “I’m guessing that what you forgot was your pocket book. It’s here on the driver’s seat. And here’s your earring, right beside it.”
She flung her arms around my onion-smelling, sweaty, grassstained self and hugged me as if I’d just saved her life. “Good heavens,” she said, drawing back, “you’re hotter than a fritter. Come inside right this minute and have a glass of iced tea.”
It felt nice to sit in the cool, air-conditioned kitchen, and Jean made good tea. She made it the Southern
way, dissolving the sugar in it while it was hot and then diluting the resulting syrup with ice and water. No lemon. I drank two glasses while she moved around the kitchen, pounding steaks with a little metal hammer and mixing up some kind of marinade that took at least a cup of bourbon. Inevitably, she also filled a glass with ice and poured another half-cup of bourbon into it.
“Susan says she’s going to the beach with you next week,” she said. “That’s nice, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Yes, yes it is.” She was leaving for the Hilton Head detox the next day, and not a moment too soon. I didn’t want to hang around any longer. I finished off my iced tea and stood up.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I get so bored cooking all by myself. Stay and talk to me. Have some more tea.”
“If I drink any more, I’ll float away.”
She laughed and sipped her bourbon. “It’s so nice to have a young person around the house. Susan doesn’t have any time for me anymore. She’s always busy, always off doing something with somebody. She doesn’t come home on the weekends like she used to. I wish I’d had more than one child, I really do. Mike only wanted the one, though. ‘Only children have all the advantages,’ he said. He’s one of six—did you know that? His mother wouldn’t stop having them. Just kept on and on until she wore herself out.”
“I need to finish mowing the grass, Jean . . . ”
“Only children are lonely, don’t you think? No one to confide in, no built-in playmates. I was an only child. I had an older brother, but he died in infancy. Polio—this was before the vaccine—if he’d lived, he might have been crippled or in an iron lung. You don’t see people in an iron lung anymore, do you? Still, he would have been someone to talk to, someone to share things with. It would have been even better if I’d had a sister. I would have loved a sister.”
She sighed and took another drink. I had no intention of keeping Susan’s mother company while she got plastered.
“Thanks for the tea. I really have to get going. The sun’s already so hot, and the grass . . .”
“It’s a dangerous business falling in love with your best friend,” she said suddenly.
I stood there, dumbstruck. Condensation from the glass in my hand dripped down my arm. Jean finished her drink and poured another.
“That’s not what they tell you,” she went on, gesturing emphatically with her drink. “It’s supposed to be a good idea. My mother said, ‘Marry your best friend, and you’ll always be happy.’ Mike and I met in college, at Appalachian State. He was getting a business degree, and I was studying to be a schoolteacher. I wanted to teach elementary school. Can you picture that? Me, surrounded by five year-olds.”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling slowly. “I can picture that.”
Jean laughed. “I would have loved it, I think. I love children. Their little sticky hands and faces. Susan was the cutest little thing. You’ve seen the pictures of her in the hallway? Our hall of fame, Mike calls it. Are you sure you don’t want another glass of tea? You’re awfully red in the face.”
“No, no thank you.”
“Well, I’ll take your glass, then.” She took my glass and put it in the sink. Then she sighed. “Mike. He dotes on Susan. He dotes on me, too.” She shook her head. “When I met him, he swept me right off my feet. We spent every waking moment together. I stopped spending time with my girlfriends, quit my sorority and all of my clubs. I put all of my eggs in one basket, and now see what’s happened. He’s off at work six days a week, sometimes until nine o’clock at night, and here I am. No more children to raise, no grandchildren on the horizon.”
“You have your job,” I said. “Avon and Cutco.”
“Sales.” She rolled her eyes and polished off her second drink. “Going into people’s houses, abusing their hospitality, and then asking for their money. Can you feature it? When I visit people, I want to talk to them.”
Hilton Head, I thought. I planned to call Susan that night and warn her. All we needed was Jean disappearing on another wild bender. Then Susan would have to cancel and the beach trip would be off, or, worse yet, my mother would come.
“I’m going to go now,” I said. “Thanks again for the tea.”
She shook her head sadly. “If the marriage doesn’t ruin the friendship, the friendship ruins the marriage. It really does. You cut yourself off from everyone else, and then where are you? Sad and lonely.”
“You didn’t warn me,” Susan said.
“I got distracted. By Hunter. That was the night he came back, bringing me a car. He’d been AWOL for three days, remember? He came sailing home as if he’d just been out to the grocery store, all smiles, and handed me the keys to that Pinto.”
“I don’t suppose it would have done any good. Nothing I could have done would have stopped her.”
“I know. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, you know, the old time machine question. I can’t change anyone now, so why do I think I could have changed them then?”
She yawned.
“It’s getting late,” I said, yawning in response. “I should probably go.”
“Don’t. You still haven’t told me why it was that my going out with Brad again upset you so much. You knew about him—it didn’t mean anything.”
“I don’t suppose it did.”
She slid down the couch and sat beside me. When she put her arm around me, I didn’t move away. I didn’t move at all.
“I wasn’t ready to come out,” she said softly. “You must understand that. Think of what my father was going through. I didn’t want to be something else for him to worry about. I know I didn’t express that to you properly. I didn’t say the right thing. But we hadn’t talked for more than a month.”
“Not since the night you left the beach house, after your father called to tell you what had happened.”
“I shouldn’t have run out like that. I should have stayed to talk to you, to tell you that it didn’t matter, that we’d work it out between us.”
“But it did matter,” I said, pulling away slightly. “Not to me, I’ve told you—but it mattered a lot to you. I left messages on your answering machine. I wrote to you. I drove over to Chapel Hill and knocked on your door. I made a complete fool out of myself, and when I finally saw you, you were with Brad. You were on your way out. I asked what you were doing and why you were doing it. I was angry.”
“That’s when I said . . .”
“That your father could only handle one disaster at a time. I was another disaster to you.”
She winced. “I don’t remember it that way,” she said. “I don’t mean that you’re wrong—I’m sure that’s what I said, but I didn’t mean to suggest . . . you weren’t a disaster to me. Our relationship wasn’t a disaster. Never. I meant coming out, telling my father that I was a lesbian. Surely you can see that now. It was a misunderstanding.”
“A misunderstanding that’s gone on for seventeen years?” I shook my head. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to hurt me. We were having problems before all that happened. I didn’t see it very clearly at the time. I was walling you in. I was possessive, jealous. I was young. You were looking for a way out, and Hunter and your mother blasted a hole big enough to drive a truck through.”
“We might have worked it out.”
“I was seventeen. You were nineteen. Not good ages for a lifetime commitment.”
She sighed. “I’ve never been good at commitment.”
I laughed. “You and me both. Tell me, before you left for Yugoslavia, were you seeing anyone?”
She gazed at me shrewdly and then smiled. “How insightful,” she said. “But then you always were. Yes, I was seeing someone. We’d been together for nearly a year. She wanted to move in with me.”
“And you didn’t want that.”
“In the end, no.”
“Yugoslavia?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time. I meant what I said the other night about wanting to do something useful.”
“I believe you.
Did you love her?”
“Not enough.”
“That’s always the problem, isn’t it?”
She took her arm from behind my back and sat forward. “I think I’m going to put the rest of this wine in the kitchen. If you don’t want any more, that is.”
“No, I’ve had enough.” She stood up. I reached under the sofa and retrieved my shoes. I was tying them when she came back into the living room.
“Are you okay to drive back to your hotel?”
“No, but that’s okay. I’ll crash with Nana tonight.”
She hesitated. Then she said, “You could stay here.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“I meant the guest room.”
“I know.”
She stepped closer and waited. I held out my hands, and she took them. I pulled her to me and embraced her.
“Tell me,” she said, leaning back to look at me. “Have you ever loved anyone enough to live with them? I mean to really commit.”
The answer came easily. “Yes,” I said.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t asked her.”
“You mean there’s someone now?”
I nodded dumbly. Susan stepped back. Had I been blind? There had always been someone. I relied on her, I couldn’t live without her, I loved her.
“You might have told me,” Susan said, a slight sulkiness in her tone.
“I’ve only just realized,” I said. “My god, I’m stupid.”
Susan didn’t disagree.
“So this was your bedroom,” Abby said. “Has it changed much or is it an untouched shrine to your youth?”
“Apart from the fact that someone’s taken down all my posters of The Police, it’s an untouched shrine, but not to my youth. This is a shrine to my grandmother’s optimism. She really believes she’ll get around to ironing that pile of clothes. It was there when I first moved here back in 1979.” I looked around. “Same bed, same dresser, same carpet. You can see less of all three now, thanks to the assortment of accumulated shit. What the hell is this?” I picked a doll up off the dresser.