by Lisa Samson
This naturally disgusted Prisma, thorough as an IRS agent and twice as particular. “What am I going to do with you, Mrs. Summerville?”
“I was just so relieved they were safe, is all!”
She threw a heavy, ropy braid the color of aged hemp over her shoulder. Silver flashed along the strands of the wiry coil. “Like I said, I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”
Now, you may think I’ve lost control of my housekeeper, the way she browbeats me, but truthfully, she only does it because she knows I love her. “You don’t need to do anything with me, Prisma Ophelia Percy, with you sticking your nose into all of my business and making all my decisions without telling me!”
“Hmmm. Well, somebody had to follow up at the doctor’s for you!”
“I had planned on calling the very next day!”
“Like I even believe that, Mrs. Summerville.”
“H’m.”
“M’m.”
Argument ended nicely as usual.
What a pair we make! My stars.
She pulled on her braid, hand over hand. “Let me get dressed. You didn’t wake me up just to tell me the news. So they’re coming here?” She shuffled over to the bed on her gilded platypus feet.
“They’ve got no place else to go, do they?”
Prisma opened the door to her closet and pulled down a tweed skirt and a white blouse the size of a clipper ship’s mainsail. “Lark could go live with Newly.”
We laughed so hard we couldn’t keep from crying.
Lark
I GRIPPED THE HANDLE OF THE CAR DOOR, a primordial burble of nausea threatening to pop down in my throat. “Oh man.”
Shove it down, Lark. Shove it down.
Flannery pulled two sticks of gum out of her backpack and handed one to me. “It’s not like going back to Greenway is the end of the world, Mom. Right?”
Easy for you to say. “I don’t know about that, Flannery.”
“Hey, I just moved back in with my mother, and I don’t think it’s all that bad!”
But she’s wrong. Because I say, if life comes full circle at my age, then you know trouble’s sidled up beside you and tapped you on the shoulder with a smarmy chuckle. It means you failed at snipping the cord like you thought you did, that you left a small stringy bit of sinew, a stretchy thread that connected you more than you ever imagined to those from whom you desperately wish to separate yourself.
I folded the gum twice. “At least there will be the insurance money.”
“See? It won’t be forever.”
I placed the gum back on my right bottom molars. “And then maybe I can build that little cabin I’ve always wanted, right there in Hamilton.”
M’m, Juicy Fruit. I love Juicy Fruit. How bad can a world in which Juicy Fruit exists really be?
Wait! What about the insurance money? Had I paid that bill? Or put it off?
“See there? It’s not so bad.” Flannery latched on to my optimism like a nursing infant who slept through the night for the first time. “I’ll bring home a log home magazine tomorrow from Barnes and Noble. Although I gotta tell you, Mom, I can’t picture a log cabin in the middle of the city.”
“Why are you going to Barnes and Noble?”
I watched her pretty face smooth as she forgot the family tragedy and centered on herself. Good for her.
“I’ve got a job interview at Starbucks, to be a Barista.”
Naturally I needed a definition.
Blathering on about espresso machines and foamed milk, regular, skim, or 2 percent, chai tea, whatever that is, and extra shots—“Some people call them Depth Charges, some call them Red Eyes, and others call them a Shot in the Dark”—we blazed a homeward trail through the city, cutting over North Avenue and on up Charles Street. The pools of light illumined no activity save the wild, jerky mazurkas of bugs and moths. The city rested quiet. All the once-potential hangovers having been achieved, only Sunpaper trucks, bakery vans, and the occasional cop car stirred the misty soup of predawn air.
“Can you get just a cup of tea there?” I asked.
“Oh, Mom, you crack me up!”
“Can you?”
“Actually, you can. All sorts of tea.”
“What about just plain old Lipton or something?”
“There’s no plain old anything at Starbucks.” She reached into her backpack again and dug up a tube of lip gloss. “Want some?”
“No thanks. We’ll be there in just a few minutes, sweetie. I’m sure you’re tired.” I felt the tears sting my eyes, and I quickly looked out the side window.
Blink, Lark. Blink.
But Flannery knew because she sighed.
“Don’t worry, Mom, it will all be okay. And I promise I won’t say anything about the wiring to Grandy.”
“You always come through.”
You know how they say that like a good cook God wastes nothing? Well, it remains a mystery what He’s cooking up with all of this. What changes are ahead? And are they broiled, fried, or fricasseed? Because, I can tell you this, having all your worldly goods snatched away does not bode well for the comfort-food life I’ve lived these past few years. Did He have plans for a gourmet spread, or, heaven help me, grilled shish kebab?
John the Beloved could easily talk about “no fear in love” because he rested his head directly on the actual bosom of the Savior. I wonder if he would have been so confident if he’d never had that experience, if he’d muddled around in faith alone wondering if he’d be delivered only on the other side of heaven.
“Should I call Marsha?”
“I already did,” Flannery answered. “She said she’d call Father Charlie so he could start praying.”
That sounded fine with me. When God appoints a prayer warrior like Father Charlie to guard you spiritually, you’re not only grateful, but totally relieved. He’d better go overtime on the supplications, I reasoned, because soon I would be getting pretty miffed at the entire situation.
PRISMA
YOU’LL ALWAYS GET THE TRUTH FROM ME, whether it’s about myself, the Summervilles, or the president of the United States. So when I tell you that this big old house needs the bodies of Lark and Baby Girl around, you know I speak straight. I call Flannery “Baby Girl,” because nobody deserves a name like Flannery. Her mother thinks she likes it, but I know for a fact she went by Fanny in Chicago.
Fanny del Champ.
Goodness me!
You know if someone would rather be called Fanny over something else, that something must fall into the same category as used shoes. I know they called her Fanny because I’m the only one that ever traveled up there to see her during all four years of college. I owed that to Mr. Summerville’s memory. Mrs. Summerville refuses to fly anymore with her poor heart. Lark refuses to even leave Baltimore City since she totaled her car. That poor girl meets life with all the ferociousness of a lima bean. Been like that ever since living in San Francisco with that rascal Bradley del Champ. Lord forgive me, but I never could stomach the boy.
But the sight of my Baby Girl in her cap and gown made every awful sandwich I consumed in the train canteen car worth it! I cried enough tears to swell the Susquehanna River. And a woman my size can cry more than her fair share of tears.
Along with Mr. and Mrs. Summerville, I raised Lark, which, by all rights, makes Baby Girl my grandchild. And as Flannery grew up, well, I drove over to Hamilton in the Duster, and we had us all sorts of fun. Bowling. Miniature golf. Fishing. Sometimes Mrs. Summerville came too. Just not in the Duster. And not bowling, either. Or fishing, actually.
During those times Asil drove us up to Loch Raven Dam to feed those big ugly carp, or out to Westminster for lunch at Baugher’s and their hot turkey sandwiches made to put a shine in your eyes and an extra inch of bulge over your waistband.
Lark never joined us. “You all just go on and have fun,” she’d say with a wave from behind one of her library books. Someone like Lark should not read the crime novels she does, I can tell you that.
I looked out the kitchen curtains to our back lawn. Not much acreage here in the middle of the city, but we do own one of the larger lots. Almost an acre. Our gardener, who doubles as the chauffeur, possesses a green thumb that causes the whole neighborhood to break the “covet not your neighbor’s house” commandment. I know Asil will want me to rouse him so he can welcome the girls with flowers in their rooms. That man. Honest to Pete, one day before his rheumatism started flaring up on a regular basis I found him asleep in the greenhouse. I shoved his shoulder with my foot, and he started mumbling something about Easter lilies. What a fine way with flowers. And a fine way with womankind, other than we who live here on Greenway at Stoneleigh House. Asil Smitzer wears a bow tie with more business than any man I’ve ever seen, including my late Mr. Percy, who only wore a bow tie twice that I knew of—the day I married him and the day I laid him in his grave with one of Asil’s Easter lilies for company.
Asil lives above the garage and keeps the main house pretty much at bay. Mrs. Summerville says she can’t stand two things—dirty fingernails and white shoes after Labor Day. Asil hasn’t a prayer with either thing, because he’s always digging in the dirt and hasn’t bought new dress shoes since 1975 during his Earth, Wind, and Fire phase. We all keep praying he’ll wear a hole in those platforms, but so far God’s been silent.
My mind wraps itself around a list of things to do.
Open the windows. Hopefully that surly, chain-smoking old house painter with the low-slung pants and only three fingers on his left hand who took more breaks that I think decent didn’t paint them shut four years ago.
Change the sheets. No visitors up there in almost a year. Now what does that say?
Give the bathrooms a good wipe down with a Lysol rag.
Though I feel my age more each day, I still take pride in a clean-smelling bathroom.
I figure by the time they get here they’ll want breakfast, so I’ll get the sweet dough rising first. Nobody can make a sticky bun like Prisma Percy. And with a cup of my good, strong coffee for Baby Girl, a nice pot of tea for Lark, and a hug or two or ten, they’ll realize that more sorrow might have been heaped on their plates.
Four-thirty A.M.
Mrs. Summerville sleeps quietly on the sofa in the den. Lord help her, she had the best of intentions with that old photo album this morning. But she needs her sleep. I don’t like the look of her these days. Kinda tired and gray around the mouth. Ever since that heart attack a few years ago she worries me along those lines. Not that she’ll let me go with her to the doctor’s office. “It was a mild heart attack, Prisma,” she always says. As a first-class meddler, I do know when to quit attacking on the battlefield and initiate the guerrilla warfare.
First things first though. I stand by my sitting room window and look up at the thinning sky and I pray to Jesus. I picture His face there against the night, same color as mine, Him being Jewish and me being a potpourri of racial DNA, and I see His eyes and His love and feel the arms of eternity embrace me, and I see Him smile at me. And I think, “You’re up to something with all this, aren’t You, Lord?”
And He nods and says, “You up to it, Prisma, My girl?”
And I say, “It’s always been You and me, Lord. You and me.”
And Jesus says, “You got that right.”
Lark
SOMETIMES GOD RISES ABOVE AND BEYOND the call of duty. Okay, most times. Case in point: when I walked into Stoneleigh House to find Mother snoring like Elmer Fudd on the couch in the den. The scritch of Prisma’s fork across the pan as she fried the bacon in the kitchen defined my escape route. And I ran before the ants caught up with me, depositing them right there with Mother. Or tried to.
My life circled home to Greenway. To Stoneleigh House.
The ants crawled all over me anyway, my skin burned and my heart raced. Oh, Jesus.
Stay asleep, stay asleep, I silently ordered Mother as I tiptoed toward the flip-flop door leading into the kitchen. A thousand questions accompanied me, and I wanted to run away, to keep going. But where? Home no longer existed. Huge old, drafty old Stoneleigh House stood in its place. And how would I get to St. Dominic’s now? My license lapsed last year, and the thought of letting Asil chauffeur me around in the Bentley slightly abraded me, like wearing jeans with no underpants.
All I have left to wear on my feet are these stupid slippers too.
At times like this people say they feel like the carpet has been pulled out from under them. Right then, I felt as if the whole world had tumbled away from beneath my feet. And there I dangled on some swaying trapeze, gripping the bar but feeling the pain in my arms as my adult weight hung from fingers grown weak.
How do I describe my childhood here in Greenway with Mother? How do I describe wearing saddle shoes and plaid headbands while everyone else clunked around with wooden-heeled sandals strapped onto their feet and peacock feathers and leather held in their hair with roach clips?
And those sweaters Mother used to knit. She meant well. She said, “My mama never made a thing for me, Larkspur. Not one thing.”
The permeating feeling left over from my childhood lies there in a single word. Embarrassment. “Hi, Lucy!” the neighborhood kids would yell. “Where’s Linus?”
Get over it, Lark.
But walking through the door to my childhood home brought back those things forgotten for years. At least Jeff Siebert, who lived three doors down and told me to pull down my pants when I was five and he was nine, moved away years ago. Jerk.
I remembered my mother’s words over the phone the day she called to try and convince me to accompany Prisma to Flannery’s college graduation. “Larkspur, you never do anything halfway. First you’re in a rock-’n’-roll band, then you’re a hermit. My stars.”
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig.
I hesitated by the door, figuring out a suitable angle from which to explain all this to Prisma.
Faulty wiring! Faulty wiring! Not a new problem. Did I think they somehow healed on their own? Grew scabs? Regenerated their rubber housing? Had my maturity calendar stopped flipping in 1978? Would I ever learn?
I pictured the night I got pregnant with Flannery. The night before I left for college, the night I succumbed to Bradley’s pleading blue eyes. Sleep with me. Sleep with me. Actually he said, “Let’s seal the deal, Lark.” What a tip-off! And I placed my shaking hand in his, wanting to feel him closer than ever before, wanting him to have the sweetest of memories to cling to after we parted. Maybe I wanted to trap him.
But I’d be lying if I said it was wonderful. It hurt. It felt gangly and clumsy and all wrong. We improved during Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks, but it wasn’t until years later that I realized I’d danced upon sacred ground in mud-caked shoes. That I defamed myself in the process. After Jesus’ love rained down upon me, I realized the problems between Bradley and me festered like splinters beneath the skin, but as usual, I hoped they’d just work out on their own.
So upon finding Mother asleep and the morning breeze sifting in through the kitchen windows and with Prisma pulling me into her robust arms and saying, “Aren’t you glad your postcard collection got too big for your little place?” I realized that maybe I should learn from Flannery and Prisma and grab a handful of optimism.
“I’ll have to go up and get it. I got some new ones the other day.”
“I already got it down from the attic. It’s in your room waiting for you.”
That absolutely did me in. “Oh, Prisma!”
“I know, baby, I know.”
“It’s all gone.”
“I know that, too.”
Prisma might have said something like, “You still got Flannery and all the things that matter.” But she didn’t because Prisma is Prisma. Loss is loss. And your own loss is your own loss, and it hurts.
“You’re shaking like a leaf. Come sit down at the table, baby. I do believe the sky is just beginning to lighten. You should have seen Castor and Pollux last night. Just a sig
ht they were!”
She led me to the old square table that lay hidden beneath a yellow-and-white checked cloth that matched the orange juice. A plate of hot sticky buns without raisins awaited us, as well as a bowl of scrambled eggs in cream, a plate of bacon, and a dish of sliced bananas, sugared and swimming in milk. When Prisma released me after yet another hug, she turned around and whipped a cup of tea off the counter and handed it to me. The china cup matched the plates at the table. I noticed only two place settings rested there.
My insides began settling, finally, after hours of this feeling, and this room, with nary a change since my childhood, calmed me. I prayed to Jesus. Lord, please calm me down. I need to rest in You, and I just can’t do it on my own right now.
Prisma placed the kettle back on the stove. “I’ll bet you’ll want another cup.”
“Always room for tea.”
Ah. The sip of homey liquid inched its way into my torn spirit. Surely only momentarily soothing, but welcomed nonetheless.
I settled my cup onto the saucer. “Come on, Prisma, set up a place for yourself. Mother’s snoring, and you know that means she won’t be awake for at least another hour.”
Prisma wrinkled her nose, her fawn eyes practically disappearing in the marshmallow folds of her face. “I’m just going to have another cup of coffee, Lark. To be honest, I’ve already eaten a bunch of that stuff as I went along. I couldn’t eat another bite if someone put a gun to my head.”
“There’s always room for coffee, too.”
“You got that right, girl.” Prisma pulled me into her big arms again, her motherly bosoms soft and comforting against my upper chest. I reached around and settled my arms across her back, laid the entire weight of my head against her, and just stood. Oh, I just stood, so loved and supported by all that warm flesh she owns, and she kissed my hair and said, “You’re all right, baby. You are definitely all right.” And I stood some more and wondered why I didn’t come home to her more, why I hadn’t spent more time with Prisma, and she kissed me again, this time on my forehead as she swiped a hand over my head and pulled my face back to look into her glowing eyes, and she said, “I said, you’re gonna be all right.”