Camille, Julia, and Susan got off the shuttle at the same stop. The streets swarmed with students in T-shirts and shorts, as sure as daffodils a sign of spring. “My house is just a four-block walk from here,” Susan said. “Is it too early for a glass of wine? I would love to talk! Then I can drive you home.”
Camille didn’t know why she left the clock on Charles’s bedside table, or why she continued to sleep on the other side rather than in the middle. She had to roll over in the night and tap the face to see at what god-awful hour she’d awakened without the slightest chance of falling asleep again. She squinted at the luminous red 3:07, slid out of the covers, and lay on top of the cloud-soft duvet. She concentrated on floating on the downy pillows, arms out (plenty of room), fingers, toes, hair, every part floating (except that leaden right knee). She felt sublimely comfortable, raggedly awake.
If she moved the clock, that would mean Charles would not smack off the alarm at seven a.m. He would not anyway, that she knew, but did not know. She stared at the black squares of the window panes, watching one burning white planet traverse the middle glass and cross out of the frame. Like us, she thought. Brief passage of light. Speck. Then she sighed, tired of this stubborn default thought of death. Anything could set her off: flowers wilting in vases, the evening news of school shootings and terror, the crazy frizzy-headed woman who grabbed her sleeve at the grocery store and said, “I’m a survivor,” when clearly she was not.
She willed herself to think of something positive. Today was good. She met Susan and Julia! Susan’s house on Hillsborough Road was one that Camille, driving by, often had admired. A 1930s cottage expanded over time by several professors. Small rooms, intimate with southern folk art and Parisian taffeta draperies and thin kilims. Quirky girl, Susan, kneeling at the coffee table, pouring big glasses of New Zealand sauvignon.
Camille couldn’t remember when she’d last made a new friend. For a couple of hours, they’d laughed together, big laughing, not just polite laughing.
“Why are those retirement places always called ‘meadows’?” Susan had asked.
When Julia responded, “Because it’s where you’re put out to pasture,” they all laughed.
“Do you think you’re going to move there, sell this fantastic place?” Camille asked. She could imagine Susan in the Morning Glory unit with the appealing garden.
“I can and can’t see it. Can you? It’s like you’re checking in where there’s no checkout. Oh, sunny now, everyone going to water yoga, pottery class, and pulling up weeds for the chef.”
“Yeah,” Julia said, “I was always ready to go home after the second week of camp. I really didn’t want another braided lariat or plaster ballerina. But maybe it would be like college without the classes.”
“Or maybe like house arrest without the ankle monitor.”
“Gawd! Would it be like that? There are many accomplished, intellectual people out there, mostly women. Vibrant, too. They must not think so.” Camille held out her glass for another splash. “Or maybe they’re immensely practical people. What was it Blair said? It sounded benign, ‘ongoing care as we progress along the continuum of aging,’ yes, that’s what she said. Realistic people.”
“Continuum of aging! That’s just it, eeek, a mind-set. And remember she jokingly, ha-ha, said residents call the place ‘The Bubble.’ ” Susan emptied a bag of cashews into a bowl. “The place is pretty, but does it seem like the next big thing? Do you think you can breathe inside a bubble?”
Julia was ambivalent. “I love the place—and do I need sanctuary?—but do I want possibly thirty years of it? Hell, forty. I may live to be a hundred.”
Camille agreed. “I think there’s a lockstep set up and we’re supposed to find ourselves marching along. However, the place proposes a pleasant answer to that ugly question, ‘What if I am alone?’ ”
“When you put it like that—yes, it’s feasible. But thirty years. Obviously, we may well have a huge hunk of time to invent. What if you’re one of those at ninety-three who’s still in a book club, getting your hair done, and shopping the online sales at Saks?”
Susan’s Welsh terrier, Archie, barked to go out. “Maybe we’ve overreacted,” Julia wondered. She picked up her jacket. “Let’s do talk more. I’m stupid with confusion about many things! Can you come to my house for dinner tomorrow? I’m house-sitting while I figure out what to do. More on that later.”
* * *
—
Camille and Charles’s wide circle of friends began to dissolve about five years back. A strange movement started happening that reminded her of her early twenties, when you knew you’d keep in touch forever, but everyone suddenly scattered and took up new places. Recently, a few friends had died early. Horrible that Bing fell down a flight of stairs, and ebullient Alice felt one hard pang in her side and was Stage IV with pancreatic cancer. Little rocks on the moon are examined minutely, but not the thin wall of Alice’s sleek abdomen. Daisy was now far gone in dementia; best friends Frieda and Juan moved to a retirement community in Asheville, and almost at the same time Ellen and Vick—so many great trips together—bought a condo with a glass lanai overlooking Santa Rosa beach. Come anytime. We miss you. Colleagues fell away as the force of propinquity evaporated; after the job ends, gradually you’re not invited and you don’t invite.
Disappeared friends fill Camille’s contact list. She needs to delete, delete, delete. Neighbors she and Charles often had drinks with turned weirdly extremist and thought schoolteachers should carry weapons and Muslims were taking over the country. At Charles’s memorial, they suggested she get a gun to feel safe. “Well, you’re sweet to think of me,” she’d replied, though she wanted to say, Get a gun to feel safe? That’s an oxymoron, you idiots! She avoids a few acquaintances, too: the overly solicitous Mindy Sampson, whose condolences always included a reminder of how fortunate she, Mindy, was to have her Bill still on the golf course every Saturday. “I know you’re not thinking of anything now except for getting through the day, but you will find happiness again, maybe through web dating. I know someone even older than you who met her match that way. They’re on a cruise right now.”
Camille felt alarmed at Mindy’s opaque blather. “I’d hate cruising,” she’d replied, thinking, Now if she mentions the seven stages of grief I will have to smack her.
After Charles died, Camille was aware of her rising intolerance toward most of the living.
She always knew that anyone can be eliminated in an instant, but now she knew viscerally. She did not want to feel this way, knowing the root: her rage that Charles was gone while the rest of us are still standing. Some just get dreary, Camille thought, as they age. At this juncture, age sixty-nine, face it, she wanted to avoid people who’d previously slightly annoyed her. They now seemed irksome.
* * *
—
4:20. Her room turns chilly and Camille slips back under the duvet. New smart thermostats with minds of their own seem capriciously to decide on no heat in the middle of the night. Usually she had to wait out an insomniac night, running through memories (I’m home, he called out), but she dozed, snapped awake, dozed again.
The clean resinous smell of fresh-cut pine wood invaded her dream, or was she sleeping? Boards, a pile of them, and she is nailing them together into a long box. She paints the box in joyous colors, bright aqua; images flit by, she will paint orange sea urchins, a Greek blue evil eye, many-rayed suns. The bright, sharp hits of the hammer thud along her backbone. She closes her eyes at each strike—no, I can’t be sleeping, she thinks. Egyptian mummy lids with hieroglyphics, marble battles on sarcophagi—ah, yes, I am building my own coffin. She lacquers the boards a brilliant gold, with mauve mallow flowers and gloomy weeping willows always carved on old New England graves; she continues painting, a compass at the head, a ring of small keys, the box solid, rectangular, and, yes, smooth corners. Five feet, eight inches, just big enough. Am I sleepin
g, she wonders. That blue rubber beach ball I had when I was small, white rabbit, rattlesnake under the steps, swirled indigo marble of earth seen from the moon. She’s painting quickly, precisely, freely. A lighter layer of thought imposes. Not yet. I can upend the box and use it for storage. Nail in pegs for shelves to store blankets and Mother’s Wedgwood, and then, clever, am I not clever, later the four shelves can become the lid to close the box.
* * *
—
9:00. Charles has overslept. The windows glow with dewy April light. Late. But Camille’s hand swipes the cold side of the bed. Empty. She is half a body, cleaved down the middle. Her left side is missing. She must get up; she has physical therapy for her damn knee. The dream returns, that magnificent, horrible painted box. Charles was good at interpreting dreams. He always made them even more absurd than they were. What would he have thought? Not today. Not any day, Camille thought. We won’t know what he would have said, will we? She threw on her gym clothes and laced her shoes. Her knee felt better. No, Charles. I already know what the dream means.
Julia drove early to the Carrboro market because she especially wanted the olive bread from Chicken Scratch Farm, and a carton of their pale blue and malt and ivory eggs. From the minute Susan dropped her off at the professor’s house late yesterday, she’d started planning the menu for dinner with her new friends.
The blank weeks of the past three months spiral behind her. She wakes up full of resolve. By the end of her second coffee, the day seems endless. She knows no one in town but wait staff—and now Susan and Camille—and has no idea how to change that. When she saw the double-page ad in Chapel Hill Magazine for Cornwallis Meadows, what drove her to sign up for the tour was the appeal of structured days alongside others living structured days. No one else’s drama controlling the hours. Interesting things to do, friends, calm, a place to get her bearings. Who expected to be exiled from the life they’d made at age sixty? No, she’ll be only fifty-nine this year but the rounded 6-0 facing her in 2016, that infancy of old age, already seems upon her. Sometimes she wakes up in the mornings feeling that she is being slung centrifugally on a carnival ride, pushed by g-force, and unable to counteract the backward gravity. Free-floating anxiety, that’s all.
She walks early in the mornings and learns the streets lined with houses that look as though interesting lives take place inside. She bookmarks food blogs and reads the cheery banter of upbeat women who seem to spend half their days hovering over the stove, and the other half on social media posting stagy photos of plated food. A few inspire her. The stack of books from Mulberry Press, where she was an editor, keeps her company. She spends a couple of hours every day testing recipes for their history of southern relishes and pickles, the last project she acquired before she left. Paul and his son, also Paul, still send queries and share the designs for ongoing projects. They miss her and she misses them terribly.
At lunch, she tries lauded restaurants in Durham, food trucks, and Mexican dives, many so delicious. Some nights she has dinner at Crook’s Corner, the friendly mecca of southern food, where she sits at the bar and orders shrimp and grits. She signed up for a spin class but quit. Cycling like that emphasized the obvious: I’m spinning my wheels.
* * *
—
Julia is in Chapel Hill courtesy of Professor Hubert Ganyon, her sophomore year Humanities III teacher at UNC. He offered her his house while he travels in Turkey on a grant. She couldn’t quite remember his project, something to do with Greeks exiled there, a study of an abandoned village where they eventually were driven out. She had attended a lecture he gave in Savannah, noticed by chance in the paper, and had ended up having coffee with him after his remarks.
When he inquired about her life, she’d somehow mentioned that her marriage was unraveling (understatement), and that she had such fond memories of her college years in Chapel Hill. He was tiny now, bony, with a great flare of white, stand-up hair and eyes still as blazing as when he lectured about the Roman expansion across wide swaths of the world. A knowing look, too, in those pewter, glittering eyes, as she told him something of her life since his memorable class.
“If you want to leave, or need to, this is serendipity. I’ll be gone almost a year. The trip is my long-awaited retirement gift to myself. I’m going while I can maneuver those stony hillsides. My house is in walking distance of everything. There’s not even a cat. Nothing to do but keep the lights on, sort the mail, and remind the gardener to weed.”
Those unexpected gifts that come your way—best to take them. His offer was the impetus Julia needed to escape the excruciating, ludicrous situation her life had become.
She did not tell him about Lizzie, she could not speak of her Lizzie, just an abbreviated version about her husband, Wade, who’d flipped, who’d betrayed her, who’d lost his way, who was so far beyond her reach that she hardly could look at him. What confused her most was how foolish he seemed. In the face of what happened, this is how he reacted. Well, Julia thought, and I reacted by disappearing. Both of us a mess.
* * *
—
In his early eighties, Hugh lived alone in a book-filled, time-warped house just off campus. Two closed-off bedrooms of children long fled, still furnished with camp sailing flags and baseball trophies; a downstairs with high ceilings, old-world green brocade sofas to sink into, shutters letting in golden ladders of light, and only three photographs of the wife lost years ago to leukemia. Julia wondered if the high-necked lace wedding dress might still be wrapped in tissue in the attic. Hugh, young and vital, gazed at his bride in the photo, obviously mad about her. Taller, she looked out, head tossed back, into some confident future. A future confirmed every day by Hugh.
The house was neat, not dusty as she feared, thanks to the enthusiastic work of Belinda, who came twice a week and cleaned furiously for three hours. Julia spent hours browsing his books and moving on to the next one on the shelf. Medea, that rage certainly rang bells. Didn’t the ancient Greeks know everything? She dipped into Jung and copied in her notebook his idea that when a change needs to occur, someone will appear on the other side of the abyss and offer a hand. She read Broken Borders by Kit Raine, a biography of the indomitable Freya Stark. Traveling alone way back when into Arabian lands that no woman at all and few men had entered, she seemed braver than any Hollywood superhero. The Freya quotes set her dreaming. When Mehmet had given us our supper in the cabin of Elfin, we climbed into the dinghy and rowed about the southern harbor under the full moon. Three of the three hundred fishing caïques of Budrum were there beside us, the day’s catch of sponges spread out on the cut stone quay-side of Triopium. The boats themselves squatted dark in the headland shadow, their rough and tattered sailors all asleep. A haunted, a magical remoteness lay on the sleeping town…
I would like to be given my supper by Mehmet in the Elfin cabin, Julia dreamed, then to row at night, see the moon’s beams crossing like swords underwater, and far below ancient foundation stones “gnawed by the sea for more than two thousand years.”
She’d not read so much since college. This is why I’m here, she thought. I need a reading sabbatical. I need new ideas, stimulation, possibilities. When she fell asleep on the sofa, she dreamed she was rowing but not moving. She looked down and saw the anchor chain wrapped around her ankle.
She’d expected the rich trove of books, but the kitchen was a surprise, updated during Hugh’s romance in his seventies with a younger woman who cooked. He’d said the romance hadn’t lasted—she fell for a sous chef at the Carolina Inn—but Julia was grateful for a robust stove and the granite counters everyone preferred then. Had the girlfriend instigated the investment in All-Clad cookware not even scorched on the bottoms?
Julia brought with her from Savannah a box of Mulberry Press cookbooks and her own knives, her car a jumble of books, sweaters, an envelope of photos, letters, and her laptop flung on the backseat. She can hear Wade shouting as she backed out of
the garage. “Julia, get back here right now. You are going nowhere!” He clutched a crowbar in his hand, taken up from the tool table. Raised it. Surely he would not hit her, though he might hit the car. He gripped the iron so tightly that veins bulged all up his arm as she jettisoned backward into the street. Savannah was quickly in the rearview mirror. She shook halfway through South Carolina. Now, she lived every day with the relief of emptiness in the lively university town where life went on with her invisible participation. She did not open Wade’s emails or answer his calls. Someday she’d go back for the rest of her loved objects. She didn’t care about the furniture or the house, even though she grew up there, but she did want her bowls and platters. And her mother’s china, the rest of the photographs. The house legally belongs to her father. He turned it over to her and Wade not long after Julia’s mother died. He always said they could live there forever, then pass it on to Lizzie. Lizzie, doyen of a stately piece of the Savannah patrimony. Bizarre in the extreme.
* * *
—
She unloaded the bounty from the market: a bunch of ranunculus and freesias, eggplant and peppers to stack with mozzarella and tomatoes, big knobby garlic, the good bread, eggs, and a plump chicken to roast with lemon. She will cook! She will spend the morning roasting garlic for her wonderful savory soup, thumbing through her cookbooks to find an inspiring dessert, setting the table with the dead wife’s good coin silver and charming floral china.
“Susan! This is odd! Both of us living here for decades without ever meeting. And one day after we do meet, we run into each other.” They’re at A Southern Season. Susan is bending over the purple and white nicotianas and the mixed spring bouquets in the flower section just as Camille pushes her cart toward the cash register with cheeses to take to Julia’s dinner.
Women in Sunlight Page 4