Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

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  White, square outbuildings lie scattered behind the house—four discreet retail businesses. Camille already knew of the locavore café; a shop selling expensive table linens, candles, and soaps; a hair salon, and Ink, a bookstore with the gravitas to attract top writers for events. The streets ranging on either side of the big house are lined with connected cottage-style condos, each with a small front garden and picket fence. In the distance looms a large, more institutional building, U-shaped, with one wing for assisted living studios, the other for terminal/hospice care. She had seen C Meadows, as the residents call it, when she visited Karen, a teaching colleague who sought help for blurred vision, only to be told she had a dinosaur brain tumor and two months to live. She’d lingered quietly for eight months, cared for gently by the hospice staff. After a visit with her toward the end, Camille stopped to pick up something to read at the bookstore and spotted on the used shelf—unopened—the books she’d bought for Karen. She bought again Guests on Earth, thinking, Yes, aren’t we? That’s about right.

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  Charlie stopped in front and hopped out to open her door. Camille placed her right foot—the bad side—on the gravel, then swung out her other leg and let Charlie hoist her up. Once standing, she was fine, but getting out of bed, a car, or a deep armchair sent hot nails of pain down her leg. Sometimes, in sympathy, the other leg hurt. “You look great, Mama. I like your hair like this.” Camille did look great. The extra fifteen pounds she’d accepted as her lot melted away over the months, and her skinny, tennis-player body moved with its normal grace again. One of her friends said recently and crudely, “Grief agrees with you.”

  “Bye, sweetie. You don’t need to come back. They run a shuttle to town. A little walk home would be all to the good.”

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  A woman in red pants and a swirly red and turquoise sweater paused at the beginning of the brick walk up to the house. She stared at the rows of begonias, pink-white-pink-white, bordering either side. As Camille passed, the woman said, “I would have preferred groups of pink, groups of white, and not in regiment rows.” Camille smiled.

  “I’m Susan Ware. Are you going to the freshman mixer in there?” Her hand felt solid and dry. Camille’s was the opposite. She liked Susan’s wide-open gray eyes, darker than her spiky silver hair.

  “Yes. I’m Camille Trowbridge. I hate straight rows of anything, too. Especially tulips because they’re bad enough!”

  Susan laughed, startlingly loud. “Yes! Someone who agrees with me. They look 3D printed! Can’t you see this bed interspersed with clumps of dusty miller, parsley, and lavender campanula?”

  “That would be very pretty. Oh well, at least the begonias will fill out and last into fall.”

  She followed Susan inside, where they were given name tags and introduced to the residential manager, Blair Griffin, a dead ringer for Hillary Clinton down to the neon blue pantsuit. She shook hands firmly and welcomed them. “We know you’ll love the lifestyle at C Meadows, ladies. Everyone does. You’ll hear all about it. Walk around the house, get acquainted, and have some coffee while we wait for late arrivals.” Her assistant handed them brochures and pointed them toward the coffee and pastries.

  “Don’t you hate to be called ‘ladies’? Oh, there’s Bitsy Sanford! Is she retired? I used to carpool with her a hundred years ago.” Susan walked over to the wing chair where a big-boned woman in a striped blouse with a bow sat slumped over her coffee cup. Camille wandered to the dining room and surveyed the croissants and bear claws.

  “Hey, good morning, those are as delicious as they look. I’m Julia Hadley but I shouldn’t shake hands—my fingers are all buttery.” They were. And she hadn’t noticed that her croissant had flaked over her navy suit jacket and onto the rug.

  Camille smiled and introduced herself, then reached for one of the croissants. “If we move here, I suppose we can have these every morning. Do you think they’ll deliver them to your door?”

  “Doubtful. And if they did, we’d have to double up on those dawn exercise classes.”

  “I’m just checking out the place. Are you moving here?” Camille asked.

  Julia paused. “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Then she shrugged.

  Camille thought, I don’t either. But I don’t have to do anything. I won’t do anything. Then Julia burst out, “I really do have to make a change…” She broke off and took a large last bite of the croissant.

  Other women and two men met over their china cups and talked in quiet voices. As though we are at a funeral, Camille thought. An image of her husband rose. His habit of running his fingers through the swatch of dark blond hair cutting across his forehead. Charles. Whose hands were sculpted from marble, whose earlobe she liked to bite. Charles, coming home, tossing his keys on the counter, shedding his jacket, heaving his bulging briefcase into the coat closet. Charles, his faint smell of rain and spicy cologne. No funeral. Memorial in the garden. After, after, he, after he was fire. Totally. He was fire and then consumed by fire. Wasn’t there a gauge, like an oven thermometer, or did she imagine that? Unimaginable, Charles a resin urn of ashes, chunks of bone. All of him, whose shoulders shook when he laughed. She and Charlie never scattered him. He’s still at home. A year and she still disbelieves her life is taken from her. Her mainstay. You are with someone. You plus him. Suddenly he is a minus sign. Disappeared. Not only him, but that third thing created, the marriage, broken as simply and loudly as a plate shattering on a tile floor. That greater-than-the-sum entity of plans, past, ambitions, sorrows, ecstasy, on and on. Everything we were. Dust unto dust. Elementary, but she can’t grasp the fact. She rotated her foot to shake loose the pain stabbing her knee. Maybe that’s why I lost my knee, she thought. One-legged me.

  Breathe in, breathe in.

  Her attention swung back to the high-ceilinged dining room with the large window onto a knot garden and a thin white wedge of the hospice unit. Is it just the formal décor, the Williamsburg style that keeps everyone stilled? Corner cabinets filled with silver compotes and crystal water glasses, the worn-thin Oriental rug, and the needlepoint bottoms on repro Chippendale chairs. Were the patterns on the chair bottoms all local flora? Someone’s wife put her eyes out over those. Ah, Camille decided, all this says old, enduring, family. And most everyone here is a woman alone.

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  “Seventeen, we’re all here, and I welcome you heartily to C Meadows.” Folding chairs supplemented the armchairs and sofas in the great living room, where Blair Griffin stood in front of the fireplace looking down on those gathered this morning to hear about life at the Meadows, to take a little tour, have lunch, and to decide whether to purchase units. The lunch would be special, a frisée salad and crab cakes, with a respectable chardonnay and an almond tart for dessert. Some would buy today. It was in her court. She smiled at the faces looking up at her. All were white except for an elegant woman in a purple sari shot with metallic thread, a Japanese woman with a walker, and an African American man leaning on a cane topped with an ivory horse head. “There’s a chair,” she said, motioning to him. One couple appeared to be just at the age fifty-five entry point. “Everyone comfortable? Let’s get started. If it’s time to turn a page, we hope you will love what you see here today.”

  Susan focused on the screen over the fireplace as appealing photographs seamlessly replaced each other, Ken Burns style. Exercise class in an indoor pool, then flowered chaise longues around an outdoor pool. Art class, a woman spinning clay into a pot. Two elderly women tottering down a garden path, dining room scenes with everyone raising a toast, the big house in snow lighted for Christmas, four youngish residents playing cards on a terrace: the active lifestyle beautifully curated.

  A small movement along the baseboard caught Susan’s eye and a black roach catapulted into the heat vent. “Seasonal menus
,” Hillary Clinton was saying. What was her name? Blair. “Chef Amos invites everyone to help take care of the vegetable garden. It’s early yet, but by June, the garden is humming!” Susan’s interest quickened. Up came photos of four women on yellow foam kneelers pulling weeds. Two others tying up beans on a wire pyramid. Susan looked around the room. Well-dressed women, mostly, with easy-to-care-for haircuts and little makeup. What would the world look like without hair coloring? She guessed everyone was fifty-five to eighty. Divorced? Mostly widowed? They wore casual sweaters and loose pants (Eileen Fisher?), or flattering wrap dresses, with a few wearing the die-hard Chapel Hill antistyle denim jumpers or shapeless long skirts with Birkenstocks, letting their gone-gray hair just hang and their faces show what the weather had done to them.

  She remembered when one of the new young salesmen at Ware Properties mistook her for a colleague. “I’m not Katie,” she corrected him. “I’m Susan.” He laughed. “All you middle-aged agents look alike.” It was then that she got the edgy haircut, revamped her wardrobe, started wearing bright colors with blingy costume jewelry and higher heels. She was the only person in the room in red, except for the vest of the man nodding off (narcolepsy?) three seats down from her.

  “That’s a glimpse,” Blair concluded. “Let’s each introduce ourselves and then visit the units. After that, we’ll go see what Chef Amos has for us. Just say a few words to let us know who you are, and your interests. Thank you for coming, and I look forward to talking with everyone. Any questions, just ask. Let’s start with you.” She gestured at Camille, who rose and glanced around the room.

  “I’m Camille Trowbridge. I taught—part time—in the art history department at the university until five years ago. I was married to Charles Trowbridge and…He. I lost him last year. We have a son who’s married and I have one grandchild. I like gardening, travel, and I’d be interested in the art classes. I used to paint a long time ago and still think of myself as a painter. Oh, I love reading and have been in the same book club for twenty-five years.” She shrugged, smiled, and sat down. God, she thought. That’s it. She hadn’t even said she liked to walk on the beach for miles, play tennis, watch Netflix with Charles after a good dinner and a bottle of wine, go to consignment and antique shops, fly up to Washington for exhibits. Liked to straighten closets and bookshelves, take baths, spend hours in the library, make soup, place bulb orders every late summer, write long emails to friends, water the grass on summer evenings, read Pippi Longstocking to Ingrid. The book club? It hasn’t met in over a year. And the painting? She’d quit teaching to try again, and is still putting off even buying supplies. She felt exhausted. The knee thing has been going on too long. And it’s not healing as fast as the doctor said. He made it sound routine. Well, maybe for him it was but it wasn’t for her, and it was scary, too. She’d read over and over about that first fall, harbinger of all to come. For a year, when she climbed stairs her knee had crunched like Velcro pulling apart, and then one day it buckled as she loaded groceries into the trunk. Eventually, inevitably: surgery. Next, she foresaw, the step-in shower and the downstairs bedroom. Ha, next the retirement center.

  She realized she hadn’t heard the next few intros, but Susan stood up, her flashy red outfit a cardinal among wrens. “Hey, everyone. I’m Susan Ware, born and bred here in Chapel Hill. I’m single—my husband died three years ago. Some of you probably bought a house from him. I’m still selling real estate but am thinking of quitting to pursue other interests. Those interests? Gardening. Anything to do with flowers. If I had it to do over, I’d be a landscape designer. Also, please don’t laugh, I’m into fishing on the coast, and I like trying all the new restaurants that are popping up in Durham. I have two grown daughters, both on the West Coast.”

  These weird summaries. Peepholes. Camille liked Susan right off. So, she’s alone. No mention of a current partner. Maybe if she were my neighbor here, it would be fun. She and Julia Hadley, too. What about the elegant Indian woman? Or the one who just spoke, Catherine something. Willowy and sharp-featured in an interesting way, her nose like a quartz arrowhead. Catherines were usually solid and this one was moving down here from Connecticut. Almost surely, she said, she would be signing on for a cottage today. First impressions are mysterious, how they happen quickly and certainly.

  Camille hadn’t heard anyone else that she felt a pull toward. Crass, hearty, diffident, morose, oversharing, timid, sweet, earnest, condescending—everyone put forth one quality, it seemed, and within a moment a reaction quickly set. Or perhaps it was more primitive, as Charles always had insisted: all attraction is based on smell.

  Now it was Julia’s turn.

  “I’m Julia Hadley. I’m from Savannah, and I’ve moved here only recently. I-I was married. I now mainly spend my free time reading because I’m deciding what to do next.” Oh, no, how lame. A drop of sweat trickled down her backbone. She pressed on. “I love to cook and that’s my passion—food. That’s how I’ve spent my career. I worked as an acquisitions editor at Mulberry Press. They publish beautifully produced books on food, not only cookbooks but cultural history, too, like life on the rice plantations. I also still do their recipe testing.” Oh, enough. Julia hurried on. “Ah, I like opera, photography, and sailing.” She sat down abruptly, as if she didn’t want to say another word. Sailing. She used to like sailing. Not now.

  Camille listened. The Indian woman was a heart surgeon who had to quit working because of early Parkinson’s. Another woman who looked like an older Audrey Hepburn was a psychologist who for years evaluated death-row inmates. Big-boned Bitsy ran a moving company for twenty years. Most everyone who spoke had worked; three claimed the title “homemaker.” Two described themselves as cancer survivors, and one mentioned her heart transplant. Freshman orientation it’s not, Camille thought. No one says they love Jack Kerouac, or that they’d spent the summer hiking the Appalachian Trail.

  She walked out for the tour with Susan and Julia. Small signs showed the cottages’ names: Vinca, Larkspur, Azalea, Marigold, Lantana, Zinnia. Unlike the first two units they saw, both rather generically furnished like a chain hotel suite, Morning Glory was an end unit, which allowed a view over the meadow and a side porch, along with the front garden. “Someone really likes narcissi,” Camille noticed, “and several varieties of them.”

  A hummingbird buzzed the purple throat of a hanging fuchsia. “Look! Bring on the hummingbirds! They really know how to make this place appealing.” Susan bent to smell one double narcissus that she knew to be fragrant. “Nicely done. Look at the hyacinths pushing up. Julia, can you see yourself on the porch, listening to ‘Nessun Dorma’ and rocking into old age?”

  Julia nudged Camille as they toured the interior. “Who wouldn’t like this little nest, huh?” If it were not lived in by someone off on vacation in Bermuda, she thought, she would plunk down her savings right now, run back to where she was house-sitting for a suitcase, and be cooking by nightfall. “I love the colors she’s used, that kind of icy melon with the sage—and that big comfy creamy white sofa.” All the cottages had open plans—large living area, corner kitchen with a chopping block island and wine storage beneath, plenty of room for a table, a midsized bedroom, surprisingly luxe bath, good storage. “I’d like to be whipping egg whites in that big copper bowl. Look at that!” The walls above the workspace were entirely covered with copper pots.

  “I’m smitten,” Camille admitted. As soon as she said that, her lungs deflated with a deep breath. Actually, the place looked miniature, as though recognizing that when you’re old you are to be reduced. Drink me, she thought, suddenly feeling too tall and ungainly.

  The last unit they visited looked so dreary that she wondered why it was shown at all. An enormous TV dominated the living room, with an equally enormous recliner parked in front of it. Bare floors, nothing on taupe walls, stacks of newspapers by the fireplace unsmudged by any soot. “I guess we’re seeing it because of the two-bedroom floor plan,” Julia
said, glancing at the bare kitchen. Blair rushed them through, saying something about the owner not settling in yet and directing them toward the view of a small pond where ducks glided about.

  Everyone loved the vegetable garden behind a white fence with an electrical wire ringing the top to keep out raccoons and deer. Rows of frilly lettuces ready to harvest, asparagus fronds waving behind clumps of healthy herbs, and grapevines sprawling across a long arbor unfurling tender yellow-green leaves. Rich furrows looked ready to plant as soon as the soil warmed.

  At lunch, Camille sat next to Blair. Everything was carefully, delicately seasoned and very tasty. “What’s your impression, Mrs. Trowbridge, or may I call you Camille?”

  “Oh, please! Of course. Everything seems perfect, just perfect. If this kind of situation is what you need.”

  “Can you see yourself living here, really thriving here?”

  “It’s fascinating to contemplate. I guess I’ll pay attention to how I feel when I’m back home today—see what that’s like.”

  This one obviously won’t leap today, Blair surmised. She stirred her iced tea. No chardonnay for her with all the work left to be done. “Most everyone who moves here wishes they’d done it sooner.”

  Camille looked down the table for Susan and Julia. Susan was talking to the man in the red vest, happily awake now, and Julia at the end of the table seemed to be looking at her companions left and right but not speaking. Maybe she was savoring every bite of the succulent crab and the tender greens with buttermilk dressing.

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