by Joan Barfoot
“Don’t borrow trouble, June,” Aggie says. So smug she is, so settled, in her big broken chair, with her cup of tea and her plate of cookies.
“We have trouble, Mother, there’s no borrowing about it. Something has to be done.”
“Tests are something.” George, unhappily trapped, is now flinging his hands about as if batting crisis out of the room. He may deal with physical issues of life and death with reasonable skill and equanimity, but this sort of thing is more difficult. Like a policeman called to a domestic dispute, he’s in the centre of old, unknown passions, right in the middle, where it’s most dangerous.
It’s a bit much, the two of them looking at her with what, in Aggie’s case at any rate, must be a deliberate and studied, detached and academic interest; as if it were nothing to do with her. “Go ahead, June, say what’s on your mind, then.”
“Well, what about me?” But that isn’t what she meant to say, nor is it the tone she intended. The words have twisted out bitter and sad, too much a plea and too little a statement, but now she can’t change or stop. “It’s too hard. I can’t do everything, and then something like this happens.” She could weep, except that she never would, in front of Aggie.
In her grey skirt and yellow blouse and charcoal cardigan, in the black low-heeled shoes she wears for comfort, standing all day as she does, she takes a step toward them, threatening or appealing, and then steps back, with no threat or appeal to make.
They should never have let it come to this.
But her own skin is yellowing like old paper. It has become fine and wrinkled. There are purple veins that stand out in her legs. Even in these shoes, her feet hurt at the end of a day, and her hair has turned grey and lacks life. She is aging, she is almost old.
“Listen,” she says, although she may mean to say “Look”.
“I can’t go on teaching and looking after the house and worrying about Mother. It’s awful, coming home and wondering if she’s been all right. And I don’t weigh half what she does, but I have to help her out of bed, and then if anything happened, I’d never be able to lift her. I’m just not young any more, and I’m not strong enough. What am I supposed to do?”
There’s silence for a moment as they look at her. What do they see? Someone pitiable?
Not Aggie. “I’ve never known what you were supposed to do, June,” she says. “You’re the expert on that. You’re the one who always knows what everybody’s supposed to do.”
George, however — maybe drawn by June’s passion? — says, “I can see it must be hard for you. But there must be a solution that would suit you both.”
Oh naive, hopeful, cowardly young man. “That would be a first,” Aggie says.
“Well, there are homemakers who come in, or the VON. I could probably arrange for somebody, say once or twice a week, even if it’s just to keep an eye.”
“Look, this is my home,” Aggie objects firmly. “I don’t want to be knee-deep in strangers. Let’s get this straight. I do understand it’s hard for June, I do realize she’s getting on, and I know I’m not easy to deal with. After all, I’m the one who carries this,” gesturing across her body, “all the time. I know better than anyone how heavy I am. But I’m hardly helpless, and I’m not about to leave my home. You’ll get it eventually, June, but I do feel you might wait.”
“Now, now,” George says, his hands patting the air, tamping something down that insists on bobbing up again, “there’s no need, not until we know just what’s wrong. And then I’m sure things can be worked out, it just takes some giving on both sides.”
“That’s your only advice?” June asks, the sharpness of her tone, she realizes as soon as the words are out, offsetting her advantage.
“Well, I’ve made a suggestion or two to Aggie. I’ve got to go now. You two talk things over, and if I can do anything by way of arranging a homemaker or whatever, just let me know. And I’ll let you know, of course, if we need to do any more tests.”
Aggie starts in as soon as he’s left. “Well, June, it seems you do have things to say for yourself. I must say, you express yourself quite plainly when you put your mind to it.”
“We have to do something. You must see that. And anything could happen. Anything.”
“My dear girl, I’ve been telling you that for years. Why pick now to believe me?”
There is no nodding white-haired gentleness in Aggie now, with her little pig-eyes snapping out from the pouches of flesh. The bigger she gets, the smaller her features seem. Now she looks like one of those gingerbread cookies she used to make, just raisins set in for eyes.
“Look, June, it’s my risk after all. It’s my death you seem to be worrying about. And as I said before, it’s my house. You may stay or go as you please, but I stay.”
But this house is in June’s blood. This is the one place in the world she belongs. Here is where her father came through the door at night, and where he told her stories and read to her. Here is where she later felt his spirit hovering. She still has some idea of at least a part of him here, watching out for her. The one time she did leave, she found herself exposed, unsafe. She distinctly remembers her mother saying, years ago, “I hate this goddamned house.” That was when June’s father was alive, so maybe she wasn’t talking exactly about the house. But June loves this place, the home of her earliest, best self.
“So, June, what’s it to you if I’m willing to take the chance that if I stand up, I might fall down, or if I try to move too fast my heart will stop? I don’t see you’d have to actually do very much if you came home and found me dead on the floor. Make a couple of phone calls, maybe. But then you could step right over me and make yourself a cup of tea and be out of the room in no time, and by the time you looked again I’d be gone. One minute I’d be there, dead as a doornail, and the next minute you’d be free to do whatever it is you think you want to do. Think of it as a kind of climax: not a moment you’d want to miss, surely.”
How can she make jokes about death, or even speak of it so lightly?
“Be serious, Mother. We have to do something. I think,” and here is inspiration, “even Frances would agree with me there.”
It seems to work. For once, Aggie is short of words, a little shrunken. Had she not thought of that, of Frances finding out? Had she not considered her admiring granddaughter knowing she has accidents in her bed at night?
“That’s good, June,” she nods finally. “That wasn’t nice, but you’re definitely improving.”
“Well, you know, at least we should go look at the place.”
June’s error; Aggie is alert and upright again. “What place?”
“You know.”
“But say the words. How do you think you can get me there, if you can’t even say the words?”
It is extraordinarily, surprisingly difficult. Even in her own mind, June’s hardly used them. She can see the place, so why say it? How difficult do things have to be? “I think, Mother,” she says carefully, “that we ought to both go and have a look at the nursing home.” There.
“I see.” Aggie pauses. “Well, you may. It might be good for you to see what you’re talking about, but I never like going into places I might not get out of. Who knows, you might not bring me home. They might not let me out. Anyway, I don’t have time to waste.”
“An hour, Mother. What’s an hour?”
“At my age, maybe all the time there is.”
Well, why doesn’t she have the grace to die, then? Soon June herself will be old, and when exactly is she supposed to have a life? Time never seemed so precious until the last few days, when she could begin to see it as her own. And it’s slipping away, just — slipping. Her whole life seems to have seeped away, without her noticing particularly.
“You do realize,” Aggie says, “that if I weren’t here, you’d miss me.” What on earth is she talking about? Miss all this? Miss a whole lif
etime of memories, the past that Aggie is, just sitting there? It’s like being a perpetual child, living with your mother, it’s like always being dragged back, a quicksand of the past. Where’s the future in it?
This greedy old woman eats up a life the same way she consumes a pie.
“What would you do with all those hours you spend just being mad at me, if I weren’t around?” Aggie asks.
“Oh, I’d find something.” Intending to sound airy, June hears that the words have come out grim. In the first year or so of Aggie’s absence, she might just sleep. She might wake up to find, like Sleeping Beauty, that everything was changed.
They sit in silence for a few moments. Then, “Tell me,” Aggie says in the bland voice that warns of a trick question, “what do you think death is, anyway? Do you ever wonder what it’s like?”
Well, that’s one of the benefits of faith: that one knows. Death is a passing, painful or peaceful, to a different world, where one is either punished or rewarded, with eternal pain or eternal bliss. That’s what one knows, with faith, although what either eternal pain or eternal bliss may feel like remains a divine mystery.
“I think,” Aggie continues, “that you just die. Then eventually you turn back into soil. Remember when Frances came home from summer camp, that song she’d picked up? ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout,’ remember that? Maybe after all the most important thing is eating right, so you turn into good soil. Do you think?”
“I think you shouldn’t make jokes. Also, it would be a lot easier if you had faith.”
“But of course it would be easier. Doesn’t that make you suspicious? It’s like following a recipe: a cup of sugar and three tablespoons of old clothes for the Salvation Army, a quarter-pound of butter and a cup of prayer.
“You know, June, when I was little, learning to cook, I had to follow recipes exactly to get anything to turn out, and I used to watch my mother slap pies together any old way and they’d be so much better than mine. Because the ingredients came so naturally to her she didn’t really have to pay attention — a lump of this and a dash of that, while I had to measure so carefully. But finally it got to seem natural to me, too, and I didn’t have to measure either.
“But you, you have all those rules like a recipe, and you never get comfortable enough to forget about them. You always have to keep checking. I’d never have been any kind of cook if I’d needed to look up how much sugar a banana cake needs every time I went to make one. I just knew. Why don’t your rules come naturally to you like that, after all these years?”
“Oh, Mother, leave me alone. Why do you have to think about food all the time?”
But of course faith is a recipe. It’s not a bit like cooking, though. Even June can make a cake or a pie fairly well by eye, but if there’s a little too much flour or sugar, or not enough, it’s not particularly important. There’s a range of acceptable taste. Faith is different. It’s one thing or the other, good or bad, enough or not enough. If a cake turns out badly, you can throw it out, but no one takes such a risk with eternal life.
June does have the feeling, though, that her faith these days is falling short. There are flaws in her motives: a lack of generosity, a shortage of will to cast away her own life, in the manner of martyrs.
The good thing, the best thing, is not to pray for herself, but for Aggie, for a revelation, a redeeming moment for her. No doubt it is wicked to resent any intrusion by Aggie into her prayers. Also to resent the possibility that He might in fact hear her, and provide Aggie with salvation. What would have been the point then of all June’s efforts, her scrutiny of the rules, if an old sinner like Aggie could win grace at a snap of divine fingers?
Anyway, at the moment there are chores to be done. She leaves Aggie sitting downstairs while she tackles the plastic sheet. It crackles as she fixes it around Aggie’s mattress. She supposes it will soften, get broken in one way or another, but meanwhile Aggie is going to find it irritating.
Later, over supper, she looks across the table, watching Aggie’s head bent over her plate, cleaning up the first course quickly, eager for dessert. If she could have chosen, who would she have picked as a mother? Not too many people spring to mind as possibilities.
Not her aunts. The members of Aggie’s family always struck June as loud and alien. Aggie’s favorite, on the rare occasions when they visited that farm, seemed to be her younger sister, Edith, but June could never see anything special about her. To her they were all, men and women, too brawny for comfort, although in time her own mother became easily the brawniest of them all, and even that farm family seemed a bit taken aback by what she turned into.
The men, Aggie’s brothers, were big and rough, and in the evenings leaned back on their wooden kitchen chairs, tilting them onto two legs, and laughed and sometimes sang old Scottish songs, bellowing out the words, or crooning them. Occasionally a work-roughened hand would ruffle June’s fine blonde hair, but she was timid and didn’t interest them much. Sometimes when they sang the Scottish tunes, she saw tears in their eyes. “Road to the Isles,” she remembers. She didn’t see why they would feel sad, especially when none of them had ever been to Scotland.
The women would cook and serve and eat, and after June had gone to bed in the small dark room that had once belonged to the sisters, she’d hear them talking below in the kitchen. There was a stovepipe hole in the floor of the bedroom, and up through it floated odd words, and occasionally laughter.
There was always far too much food there, heavy and bloating. During the day, June’s cousins would race through the fields. They dared her to leap the creek, but she shied like a horse at the idea of landing in the cold rushing water with the nasty sharp pebbles beneath. She couldn’t possibly climb those ladders into the hay mows, going straight up and so high, with round wooden rungs that a foot could so easily slip on. Nor did she like rolling in the straw; bits of it got into her hair and down her neck, and she’d be forever picking it out, while it scratched. She always went home injured in some small way.
On the other side, on the other hand, was a family she never met, but with whom she feels perfectly familiar. Her father’s parents, about whom he told stories and of whom he showed pictures, lived in England, just outside London, and there he had left them to come here to a hard, raw country, where somehow he found her hard, raw mother. Then there was neither time nor money to go back even for a visit, and he never saw them again, and June never saw them at all.
But there is something peaceful just about the idea of them. Partly it’s England, old and experienced, with a certain overview, a perspective of centuries of making and observing history, so that June feels the country itself must move more slowly and gracefully.
Also, there’s a picture of his mother that June’s father kept on his bedside table, and that is now on June’s own bureau. It shows her standing in the rose trellis of a garden, with her hand resting lightly on a bloom. It’s just the way she would have touched June, if that had been possible: lightly and with affection. And that’s how her voice would have sounded, too, speaking to her only grandchild.
What her father described of the three of them remains June’s picture of the ideal English life: a little cottage, with a little green property, and roses, dozens of roses. His mother won prizes with them. He recommended her to June as an example she might follow. “She’s a lady,” he always said, “a real lady.” Dainty, and wearing white gloves, June imagined.
June pictured her father: a sweet little boy in the gardens, his mother nearby, squatting, working in the earth around the roses, clipping, weeding. They would talk gaily back and forth, quietly, no irritation in their voices. He’d be wearing short pants and a white blouse, maybe knee socks, and his fine blond hair would be a little long, with a wavy bit slipping over his forehead. His mother would be wearing a long white dress with a matching broad-brimmed hat, a picture hat. This is the p
icture June has in her head, although she knows, of course, that no one tends roses in a long white dress.
Of her grandfather, the picture is less clear. He was a haberdasher’s clerk who went off each morning to work and returned home at night, as fathers do. “She’s the one who sacrificed so that I could get an education,” June’s father said. “She scrimped and saved and did without things, clothes and travel, she always said she’d like to see the continent, but it all went for me and my education.” They must have loved each other very much, to have given up such a lot.
“She was also the one who said I should leave, start over in a new country and make something of myself,” he told her. “It was hard.” Well, June could hear how hard it must have been. Why was it for her he saved his stories and not for her mother, who was, after all, a grown-up and his wife?
But he was teaching June what is important: duty and a sense of sacrifice. He was passing on a legacy of courage; the way other families pass on silver spoons and cake plates.
Every month her grandmother wrote, her letters in neat round handwriting on fragile lilac paper. They spoke of weather, and the deaths, births, and marriages of people entirely unknown to June. It was puzzling, how a letter might complain of rain while here the snow was deep, and so her father taught her about climates and how different they were in different parts of the world. It made them seem even farther away, not even sky a common factor.
What would he have written about in his letters home? Probably his work, the weather, and June. She can’t imagine what he might have told them about her mother.
He sent them photographs of June, and her grandmother wrote back saying what a lovely little girl she was, and how they longed to see her. She longed to see them, too. She imagined herself there, in an entirely different life. There would be tea in the afternoons and quiet times in the garden, and voices would be soft and fond.
Instead, they were all separated and sad. She pictured that couple, her grandparents, in their garden in the evenings, greying and alone, speaking of their much-loved son so far away. “Oh, they must miss you,” she said, and cried a little, and her father hugged her. “You have a tender heart, you’re like your grandmother that way. She could never stand things to be hurt. She’d never kill anything, except for bugs, and getting rid of moles in the garden.”