Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  I put my arm around her. “That’s a good wish,” I said. “And you will get her back in heaven one day, but you need another dream, one you can focus on in the meantime, sweetie.”

  I held my breath, fearful that tagging “sweetie” on to the end might be seen as belittling, rather than the term of endearment that I meant.

  “Do you have a dream?” Lilly asked me.

  “I do,” I said, although I hadn’t thought of my dream in some time.

  “What is it?”

  “To write,” I said. “I write all the time in my journal, but one day I’d like to write novels.”

  There were giggles and wiggles and whispers.

  “Proper ladies don’t whisper,” I said, and then remembered I had given up trying to teach the girls anything. “What are you all whispering about?” I asked.

  “I can’t see you ever writing anything significant,” declared Rose. She reminded me of the turkey that tried gobbling up all the other turkeys. It wasn’t that he was hungry, just empty, and eating took his mind off his emptiness. “Your journal was lying open on the floor in your dirty room one day, just waiting to be read, so I took a look, but there wasn’t anything good in it, so I closed it and slid it back under your bed where you keep it. Unless you go off to writing school, I can’t see it happening.”

  It was the last time I tried reaching the girls on a deeper level like that, which was a shame, for I had in me the desire to make a difference, to coach them, not into becoming ladies, but into pursuing what they wanted in life, but they were going to fight me until the end. If I had been running for my second term as president of the unladylike club, they’d urge the men of our household not to vote for me, that’s for sure.

  So from that day on, I started focusing on their most primary needs, cooking and cleaning and waiting on them, as well as Dahlia, Stewart, and my Uncle George. I waited on everyone hand and foot, and I felt as if I were aging rapidly.

  One morning I went for a ride on my bicycle, looking toward every seed-bearing plant and every tree that has fruit with seed in it, anything that might tell me what season it was. I was gone so long I grew hungry and laughed at myself, a woman with better things to do than say farewell to the spring of her life. When I reached the house, there was nothing I wanted more than to sit down and rest, but I couldn’t. There were too many chores to do.

  And those never-ending chores allowed my mind no time for living on a deeper, more creative level, for they meant waking up two hours before sunrise every morning to get the girls fed and dressed and out the door to school. And once I had the quiet house to myself, I worked non-stop just to get their clothes cleaned for the next day and dinner on their plates at night. It all made me miss doing chores side-by-side with my mama.

  As months went by, I noticed myself longing for solitary confinement, for then I’d have quiet time with nothing to do and I could fill that silence and time with writing. I guess life is bad when you start fantasizing about spending time in a prison cell.

  My cravings for a getaway spooked me, so out of my own guilty conscious I started making the girls get down on their knees every night to pray for one solid hour. It was an activity no one could critique me for enforcing. But at first, the girls tried.

  “Why do you make us do this every night?” asked Lilly.

  “You’ve each got three treasures—a heart, a mind, and a soul,” I said.

  “You’ve got to appreciate them. Don’t keep them locked up inside collecting dust. And your soul, it’s probably worth more than all the treasures put together. And your body is the chest that carries those treasures, so you want to keep that fit and looking good as well. And besides, without a body, you can’t ride a bicycle.”

  “We don’t like riding bicycles, and you can’t make us pray.”

  “Then, I feel sorry for you girls, having to spend eternities with the souls you neglected to care for while you had the chance.”

  I suppose good and bad traits get carried down from one generation to the next and all the rudeness got wadded up and those three girls were the by-product of that wadded up rudeness. That had to be the case, I told myself when they pushed me over the edge.

  “Your mother was insane. Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Insane like her?”

  “I hope,” I said. “Because I’d rather be insane like her than evil like you three. You think you got your evilness from your mother?”

  “Our daddy says you might turn crazy one day.”

  “Oh yeah? I think your daddy ought to instead be grateful he has me to care for you girls.”

  “He says it won’t be for long. His cousin Mary is coming from Alabama, soon. She’s going to take over, I think.”

  “Is that so?” I asked. “Then let us all pray for poor Mary.”

  I dropped to my knees beside them and truly prayed. I believed the girls were evil and needed all the prayers they could get. I don’t believe evil is handed down throughout the generations. It’s a choice, and those girls needed my prayers.

  I had been going through the motions of prayer alongside them but hadn’t actually prayed in some time. I felt bad for it, like something very important was missing from my life, and I felt ashamed, for my mama had done her best to instill in me the significance of constant, daily prayer. I felt distant from it and from all I once loved and who I was and where I was headed. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for distancing myself from God, for a relationship with Him isn’t inherited. It’s a personal choice.

  But tonight was different. The girls and I needed all the prayers we could get, even if they were only coming from me. “Lord God Almighty,” I prayed silently. “I’m thinking of committing a crime. Can you forgive me in advance?”

  Lydia

  My lunch break ended, and so did Ava’s writing. I put the journal back into my briefcase, frustrated that once again I was left hanging. Did she commit the crime? And what was it? I wanted to know.

  Poor Ava. I spun my chair toward the typewriter and started typing her an obituary.

  Ava Witherton, 21, of Kentucky and Sanibel, slowly and gradually died, the date is uncertain, while getting caught up in a life of tedious drudgery.

  She was a strong woman, surviving without a heart. And when she was living, truly living, she believed that anything was possible.

  I stopped typing there. Ava hadn’t died. She was the sort of person that walks outdoors in the burgundy air of night to listen for possibilities as if she were listening for owls. And although possibilities are sometimes invisible, she’d call out to them, and they’d come. They’d line up on a perch, and she’d walk right over and observe them.

  Ava was a faithful believer that all things were possible. Maybe she stopped writing in the journal and started writing a novel instead. And since I was now a journalist and tired of waiting for Marlena to send or not send me new pages, I decided to gather my own information. After work, I ran over to the public library and looked up novels by Ava Witherton. None. Poor Ava.

  And because I wasn’t an investigative journalist, but rather an obituary writer, my searching ended there. I would have to wait for Marlena, in her uncanny way, to send me more pages when she felt I was ready.

  In the meantime, I could only assume that Ava went on to do one of two things: either she committed that crime, and hopefully nothing too serious, or she went about life not really living and eventually died amidst the drudgery.

  Those were the only choices I saw Ava as having. But she was the girl who once believed that anything was possible. Maybe she would come up with more options.

  XXXII

  1960

  Lydia

  Buddy Holly, George Reeves, Lou Costello, William Bishop, Max Baer, Walter Williams, and Clark Gable were some of the famous obituaries to come across my desk over the next year, but none of them touched me more deeply than the one I had to write for my own father.

  Lloyd Isleworth, 54, of Chicago, Illinois,
died April 14th, 1960 in the arms of his daughter. He was best known for his contributions at Metropolitan Bank.

  My father was taking his last breaths when I arrived at the hospital. I missed his last words, which he spoke to the nurse just five minutes earlier but I got there in time to wrap my arms around him and tell him all that I had to say.

  Now that I had uninterrupted time alone with him in the hospital room, there was so much he needed to hear. I told him I loved him and that we had some things in common. He knew and loved my mother. I never knew my mother but loved her anyway. And as I rubbed my fingers over his cheekbones, which were high and prominent like mine, I thanked him, not for the things he bought me, but for the traits he gave me. Along with his cheekbones and high forehead, I had his stubbornness and determination, and those two traits of his, good or bad, would live on in this world through me, his daughter. And I told him I felt a responsibility in some way to keep parts of him remembered forever, and the only way I could think to do that would be as I once did with my mother, to write about him and, secondly, to remember the good things he taught me. I would store his lessons in my very own jar of wisdom and pull them out whenever they were needed.

  As I lay next to him in the hospital bed, I knew my personal time with him was running out. He no longer had to be at the bank in ten minutes, but he still had to go and I had to let him go. But, first, I had to tell him not to be upset with me for living my life like an unconventional woman. I liked the fact that he could no longer argue with me, but it didn’t make it any easier telling him what I had to tell him, for tears were pouring out of my eyes, and I was sobbing as I said my last words to him, and I tried my best to say it in a rationalized manner that I knew he’d like.

  “My ambition, Daddy,” I cried. “I got that from you. I, too, am ambitious, maybe not to your extent, but a much smaller percentage of your ambition lives on in me. I do want to figure out how to proportion it all, so that maybe I could find a way to spend 50 percent of my time pursuing ambitions and the other 50 percent loving or spending time with people I love. I’m not sure. I need to play around with those numbers and figure it all out. Maybe from where you are you’ll have a different perspective on it all, and you can help me with this.”

  I gained my composure and left the hospital room, but his death sent me crashing into a solemn mood for weeks, and despite having written hundreds, thousands of obituaries, his made me aware of my own mortality for the first time. And the reading of the will a couple of weeks later made me feel more alone than I had ever felt in the world.

  I received nothing. All of Lloyd’s assets, stocks, bonds, paper money, and the estate went to people from the bank he had worked with for years, including two of his long-term secretaries. He also gave a lump of money to three nurses who had helped after his heart attack and sums of gratitude went to teachers from his past, from grades kindergarten through high school. All I got was a letter.

  My dearest Lydia,

  The will is not my way of punishing you, but rather, my way of respecting you. I worked hard to give you all you might want in life but all you wanted was to do it yourself.

  My paying for your college education was all you needed, for you’re the type of woman who goes out and makes her own money in life. Now is your chance, dear, and I wish you the very best of luck.

  Sincerely,

  Your father

  “Bastard,” I mumbled to myself over the next several weeks. My father said nothing in his letter about continuing payments for the apartment he had set me up in. Rent was now my responsibility. I wasn’t making enough money at the paper to stay any longer in Chicago’s Gold Coast District; so, I placed ads in the paper and sold the nice furniture he had bought me and moved into something more affordable on the other side of town. I bought a double and triple-lock for the door and a pocketknife to keep under my bed. It was a cheap bed, one that served as a sofa by day. I never wrote to Josh. I never gave him my new address. It had been months since he last sent me a letter. I could have sent him another, but I didn’t. Life had me busy, and I knew better than to turn my thoughts back to the romantic fantasy of some ghost.

  The apartment was the size of a shoebox, but I could afford it fine. The only closet, converted into a sink and stove, left me no place good to hang my professional wardrobe; so, I hung it across the shower pole. When that broke, I laid it all neatly across the floor at the foot of my sofa bed. I used the kitchen table as a desk and told myself the place would be fine temporarily until I could afford something nicer. I would be saving a lot of money by living in such an apartment.

  It was noisy at night. There was music, children crying, a man and woman fighting. When I couldn’t sleep, one night, I gave in and reread the bundle of letters Josh had sent me. Those letters started me thinking of him again, and I didn’t know why I always did that, why I let my thoughts linger back to some guy I only knew for a summer and then wrote to for nearly three years after that. Maybe there was something wrong with me. A normal woman would have moved on by now.

  I gave serious thought as to why I held onto Josh so tightly. In a way, I had done the same thing with my mother, whom I never knew, yet thought of daily as a young girl. Maybe I had trained myself to hold onto the fantasy of someone because that is all I ever had. I again told myself it was time to let go of a guy so far removed from my real everyday life and place. Josh and I were over for good, I convinced myself. We as a couple were officially declared extinct.

  I felt a world away from him and lonely, and when I walked into work several months later with dark circles under my eyes and my clothes hanging on me, I considered writing an obituary for myself. Once I started budgeting for the sake of survival, I stopped buying the things I liked to eat and instead bought what I could afford. I had lost a lot of weight and gained a new appreciation of the value of the dollar.

  I started drinking three cups of coffee every morning and eating nothing but an apple for lunch, then rice and beans for dinner. Maybe I was grieving. I don’t know, for sure, but getting out of bed in the morning felt like too much of a task and it only made me want to fall back down again and rest.

  I no longer walked to work as I once loved to do, but now clambered up the steps of the bus and sat with my eyes closed until it reached my stop. “Bastard,” I still mumbled every time I thought about my father leaving me nothing, but then I suddenly stopped. For a word like that wasn’t mine. It was his. I had heard him say it a million times, every time he disliked someone at work. I swore I would never say it again. I wanted to be nothing like him in that regard. I wanted to be better. I felt a new inner energy the last week of July. At work it had me hurrying through the halls toward the elevator. It also made me smack into someone, sending all the papers in his hands crashing to the floor in a big mess.

  “Sorry,” I said, dropping to the floor to gather them up.

  He kneeled down as well and started to help. He looked to be in his late twenties, and he was handsome in a classic, stately looking way with wavy brown hair and matching brown eyes, and he was in a hurry by the way he shuffled through the papers, not caring that the edges were getting all ruffled.

  “I should have been at the convention ten minutes ago,” he muttered, hardly looking at me.

  “The Republican convention?”

  “Yeah. My intern was supposed to have made all these copies for me, but he never showed, so I had to borrow two interns from the human interest department, and they were slow as turtles.”

  “There’s a ton of copies here,” I said.

  “Thirteen hundred,” he said, shuffling a handful of the papers into a neat pile. “One for each of the thirteen hundred GOP delegates. Darn intern! So much for his resume.”

  “I guess you pay the price for having power at your fingertips,” I said with a grin. “But I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any interns.”

  We both stood up. He was over six feet tall and had to look down on me. He was handsome and intense-looking. “I’ve n
ever seen you before. I’d remember if I did. What do you cover?” he asked.

  “Obituaries.”

  He studied my eyes. “Aren’t you too pretty to be covering those?” “Watch it,” I said, offended. I handed the papers back to him.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I mean, you are pretty … but I shouldn’t have said that here at work.” He paused and said boldly, “Now if I bumped into you out on the street, I could say it and not get in trouble, right?”

  I laughed. “I guess.”

  “I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Ethan Blake.”

  I had seen and heard his name several times. He was fast gaining a reputation as a young and rising political journalist, and his byline was everywhere. “I’m Lydia Isleworth. Nice to meet you.”

  “I’m sorry for crashing into you like I did. I was in a hurry, still am.”

  “My fault,” I said. “Hope you’re not too late.”

  He started to turn and walk away, but then walked back. “I always wondered, do you people write obituaries at night or by day?”

  “Day mostly. There’s laws that don’t let women work that late, you know.”

  “Then you’re done for today?”

  “Unless someone important dies before I catch the bus, yes I am.”

  “How would you like to attend the convention with me?”

  Thoughts of my lonely little apartment rummaged through my mind and GOP delegates nominating Nixon sounded better than me collapsing onto my sofa bed as I did every night. “I’d love to,” I answered. “Although I’m not used to all the excitement of a convention. The department where I work is a bit quieter, you know.”

  He laughed and handed me a pile of the papers. “You mind holding this half?”

  “Not at all.”

  The convention turned out to be a lively and patriotic experience for me and, without any reference to political parties, it as a whole reminded me that freedom and self-government are for everyone, not just for some, and they are worth fighting for, if need be. The message was simple, I thought.