by Lois Cahall
“Yeah, I know. I love school. I love the feeling of a classroom, putting a pen to paper, the smell of used text books, the breathing—even the coughing of the students…”
“Well?”
“Oh, I just march right on up to the nearest college and sign up, right?”
“Why not? I’m serious,” says Alice, tapping me on the hand with the hand digger. Neither of us speaks for a while, finding comfort in silence and gardening.
“Well?” I ask.
“Well what?” says Alice digging away.
“I know what the next question is going to be.”
“Okay, smarty pants,” says Alice. “Then answer it.”
“No, not anymore. But I had one. A love life…” I say, drifting off. “But we wanted different things.”
“Like?”
“He was a mailman. He delivered mail from exotic places. I wanted to visit them.”
“How long did you date?”
“For a while. Got engaged after Grandma died. We were to get married, but, well, it’s a long story…”
“I’ve always got time for love stories! And he was…?”
“Eddy.” I smile sadly. “Let’s just say we decided to take a time out.”
“That sounds smart. Leave it open for a chance at second chances.” Alice is down to the last plant in my tray. “Oh, look, you’ve got some myrtle tucked in,” she says.
“Myrtle?”
“Yes, in the tray. There,” she points.
“Is that what it’s called?” I say, examining the clay pot. “I bought it because I liked its little periwinkle flowers. And you have some planted there,” I say, glimpsing Joy’s grave. “So I figured it must be good.”
“It’s ground cover. Like a Pachysandra. From the Vinca vine family.”
“Why do I have a feeling that means it doesn’t like sun?”
“Can tolerate sun or shade. Its beauty is its low maintenance,” she says, shrugging her shoulders. “Like my Joy.” Alice runs her hand across its petite flower caps. “Usually used for hedges and—”
“Oh my God!” I say, grabbing at her arm. “So that’s why it’s called that!”
“What’s called what?”
“The Court of the Myrtles.”
“You’ve lost me, dear.”
“Well, after our wedding fell through…” I pause. “Fell through” probably isn’t the right words for what happened. But in the forgiving. In the aftermath, well… “Eddy and I made a promise to each. To reconnect…”
“…for that second chance?”
“Yes,” I nod. “This autumn would have been our one-year anniversary.”
“So call him.”
“This is going to sound silly.”
She shoots me a look. “Go on. I’m used to it. So. The Court of the Myrtles?”
“I always wanted to go back to the Alhambra. It’s in Granada.”
“Never heard of it.”
“In Spain. A fortress,” I say. “I did a work study there in my sophomore year of college, and it’s the most magnificent place I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t believe places like that existed. But forget all that. The point is, we figured that if we were both ready to reconnect, we’d meet at the Court of the Myrtles, this beautiful courtyard in the Alhambra Palace with a long goldfish pond right down the center. I always thought it was named Myrtle for some Queen, but I just realized it’s surrounded by myrtle hedges. And now I know why, for exactly the reasons you just said: low maintenance.”
“Now you’ve really lost me.”
“Bringing water to the Alhambra couldn’t have been easy in its day,” I continue, with a sudden enthusiasm. “I mean, how do you bring water to the top of a fortress, right? Since the grounds of the Alhambra were raised, they couldn’t get water without constructing channels. You with me? And in this particular courtyard there’s a very long pond surrounded by these myrtle things—like this—but the gardeners there formed them into pretty shaped shrubs.”
“Sounds lovely,” says Alice with a look that says she’s finally found my weakness. “Go on…”
“Well, the pond is so still that you can see the reflection from one side of the courtyard to the other. I figured if Eddy showed up, I could see his reflection in the water as he approached. Kind of romantic, right? Kinda silly.” My voice trails off, “Anyway, if it’s meant to be…”
“Well, is it? You lost me at the myrtles.”
“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. If Eddy shows up, he shows up, if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. I’ll have my answer then. Like I said before, he didn’t care much for travel. And knowing Eddy, he’ll pick the wrong courtyard.”
“There’s more than one?”
“Yeah, the Court of Lions is right next door.”
“Could be more fun than the myrtles…” she suggests. And then, seeing my expression, she says, “You’re still in love with Eddy, aren’t you?”
“I miss him dreadfully but now’s not the right time. Everything’s changed. I miss my mom more. I’m not in the mood for marriage, let alone happiness.”
“That’s crazy. It’s not Eddy’s fault that your mom died.”
“Oh, it’s not just about my mother…”
“Listen, Marla, you have to give the guy a second chance. Your mother’s dead but your life has to play itself out,” says Alice. “And it won’t stand still waiting for you to decide what to do next.”
“Yes, I know. But how do I live my life without my mother’s death always crippling my emotions? I feel like it’s wrong to enjoy the very things that she’s not here to see.”
“So it is about your mother, then. Shame. She’d have wanted you to try all kinds of things even if it meant doing them vicariously for her. How do I know? I’m a mother.”
“You’re a mother, all right!” I say, rising. “Okay, lady. That’ll be enough planting for one day.”
Alice play-jabs her small digger into my kneecaps.
“So, Alice, I’m supposed to go ahead and just get married…” I say, glancing over to my mom’s headstone. “But Mom won’t be there for the wedding day to zip up my white taffeta gown, or remind me to put sunblock on my own daughter’s shoulders at the beach, or…” I sigh. “There’s a long list of she-won’t-be-there-to-see’s.”
Alice gets to her feet and leans over to wipe the dirt from her pant legs. “You’re right, Marla. She won’t be there. Nobody will ever fill that void in your life the way a mother can. That unconditional love is something you’ll never have again.”
“Well, you sure know how to make a person feel better,” I say, whisking the dirt from my jeans, too.
I follow Alice to a nearby trashcan and watch her toss the empty plastic flower tray and little green cup holders. “Oh Marla,” she sighs. “Doesn’t matter how they die. Mourning comes and goes in cycles, and when we lose somebody—a mother, a child, or even a very alive Eddy—we go from denial to anger, then to confusion and finally, one day, acceptance. But every time something new or good happens in life, whether a new trip or the children you think you’ll have, the cycle of pain starts all over again, magnified by the fact that your mother won’t be there to comfort you, take the pain away. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.”
For the first time I’m speechless. Alice grabs my arm and looks me straight on, and I watch her mouth as she speaks. “Acceptance, Marla,” she says. “Time teaches us humility. And we succumb to the inevitable. In this case a dead mother for you and a dead Joy for me.”
“Yeah,” I gulp. I head quietly back toward my mom’s grave, gathering the tools left strewn on the grass.
“But don’t shut out the world, Marla,” hollers Alice after me. “Do the things she wanted to do and then some. Otherwise you’re not making her death worth it. Don’t give in to her death. Never.”
“Why not?” my voice escalates. “I may as well give in to my death, too. That’s how I feel. Nothing matters now.”
“That’s bull. I’d rather see you live your l
ife thinking that your mother will be there waiting for you on the other side, than live your life not thinking your mom will be there, and then she is. That would be two lives lost.” I’m listening now. She continues, “Think how a loss like this will toughen you. How loss will make you a survivor, make you strong to face everything life has to offer, good and bad. They say what toughens you also softens you. Softens you to be a good mother someday, too.” She’s in front of me now, pointing that damned hole-digger at my chest. “Your mom would have wanted that! Then you can become a mother as good as your mom was to you.”
“I don’t know, Alice…”
“Well, maybe I’ve said too much. I’m sorry. Should learn to mind my business. Hah. Never happen.”
I head toward my car, tossing the garden items in the trunk as she leans against the passenger’s door.
“Besides, the guilt doesn’t just disappear,” I say, “I keep thinking of all the things we can’t do together—not me, or her, but we,” I say. “We can never eat fried clams again. Or stick our toes in the sand. Or go to Nantucket again. It was her favorite place.”
“But that’s where the whale might be waiting. Have you thought of that?”
“No,” I say, stopping in my tracks. This old woman always manages to outsmart me. Has a line for everything. “No, I hadn’t.”
“Or maybe the whales are in Granada.”
“There aren’t whales in the middle of Spain.”
Alice just looks at me. “You sure about that?”
“Oh, I get it,” I say. “Make the best of it all. Anything is possible. Make it be whatever I want it to be. Kind of like making lemon meringue pie out of lemons, right?”
“Whales, lemons, it’s all the same. Unless they’re in a pie. You’ve got to go and find it. Live it. Live it for Rosie, if you must. That will help demolish your guilt.” She casts her eyes down toward the front seat of my car. “Can I have a piece?”
“Huh?”
“Candy. In that tin.”
“No, it’s not candy,” I say, opening the door and shoving the Peter Rabbit tin down to the carpeted floor as though I’m ashamed of it. “It’s nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Chapter Six
The summer I turned fifteen we had fifteen straight days of rain. Bored from endless romance novels and the required summer reading of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, I decided to experiment with make-up. I wanted to transform my green eyes into something as smoldering as the lash-batting Scarlett O’Hara. Locking myself in the bathroom, I removed the retainer that secured my front teeth, pulled my hair back into a tight ponytail, and rummaged through my mom’s make-up case until I came up with a mascara stick called “blackest black.” I brought the wand unsteadily to my lid and found that my lashes certainly batted, but not in a way that might suggest Rhett Butler just walked into the room.
Settling on some globs of midnight liner, I drew lines under and over my eyes and stood back to admire the mess. What stared back from the mirror was something sure to impress only one person: Alice Cooper. My hand reached for the tissue box grabbing one Kleenex after another, dabbing them into a container of Noxzema before wiping my face back to clean. When the red swelling finally subsided, I headed for the front door. Galloping down the cement landing of our entryway past the graffiti about who to reach “for a good time,” with one swift push of the metal door I was outside. “Free to be!” I could hear my mom’s words, and now I understood them. I was going to be just me.
Julia waited on the street corner in her midriff shirt, her chunky-white belly hanging over the waistline of her bellbottom denims. She swung her arm around the pole of the broken street lamp, humming the lyrics to “We’re an American Band”—Grand Funk Railroad. Young women from the wrong side of the projects shared a nearby bench, dangling cheap red stilettos off their blistered heels, waiting for some John that never showed up at the bus stop. They weren’t bad girls, just girls trying to score a buck, some love and cigarettes.
“Can I bum a smoke?” asked one with charcoal-smudged eyes and fake eyelashes. I longed to ask if she wanted to borrow my Noxzema. But Julia said no, because we didn’t smoke. Hell, we were frightened to even buy a pack of cigarettes since my mom found the Newport Lights in my panty drawer. She dragged me to the tub’s edge, forcing me to inhale the entire pack until I vomited. “Bet you’ll never do that again,” she had said. And she was right.
The project girls would high-five us down a straight row—our version of a receiving line—as Julia and I passed by them on our way to the convenience store.. Sometimes they got up and followed. I felt like the Pied Piper with my entourage behind because we were never afraid of those girls, Julia and me, despite being the only white girls in the neighborhood. Maybe it was because Rosie was now managing the downtown shelter, advocating for financial assistance in helping young mothers place their babies. And it was my mom that drew me to the convenient store in the first place, knowing that any moment she’d emerge with a box of popsicles for her shelter family. I saw her clipping coupons this morning. Affording the popsicles was one thing; getting them to the office freezer before they melted from the two buses and the one train it took her to get to work was another.
But she always snuck a few out of the box for those tough project girls who, upon seeing the box-tab ripped open, suddenly lost their edge, becoming the needy little girls they once had been. Mom would say, “Girls, there’s one for everyone—plenty of orange, so don’t just take the cherry and grape. Try a lime.” And then before you knew it, and probably because the bus was late, Mom had enough time to convince every last one of those girls to wipe the cheap rouge from their face, put on their sneakers and join her at the shelter for a free lunch. “Bologna sandwich and a Sprite if you help out with call-ins?” she’d coax them, sounding like some game show host with the option of what might lie behind door number three. And then there was mopping the corridors and dusting the book shelves, which everybody wanted to do because it meant popping a 45 on the old turntable and dancing their chores away. Of course the real motive was to get these girls off the streets, to teach them “to learn self-esteem and to make choices with confidence,” she’d say, while they nodded their heads over their straws poked in their Sprite cans.
I’d often catch my mom peeking around the corner with a sly grin to see the girls jumping from the desks to the chairs, using broom sticks for microphones, gyrating their hips to the Isley Brother’s and singing along to “It’s Your Thing.” Self-confidence was instilled as if by accident, a by-product of chores and fooling around. Sometimes I’d feel a twinge of jealousy, not wanting to share my mom with all these girls. But I realized that making less fortunate girls feel better about themselves made her feel better about herself and that in turn made me feel better about myself. Anytime the girls would start their day with us, she’d begin by giving each one a hug and a long line of praise. If a girl could read for the first time, my mother would say, “You’re so smart, you’ll be the first woman president!” If she could sing, Mom would say, “You’re going to go all the way to the Grammys!” They clung to her words, those girls, just as I did.
If that wasn’t enough, Mom practically adopted my best pal, Julia. Julia was only ten when her father went to jail for shooting the Santa Claus at the Jordan Marsh department store because he wouldn’t promise to deliver the dollhouse Julia’s dad couldn’t afford anyway. When Santa made Julia cry, her father pulled out a gun. Santa didn’t die from the gunshot wound, but still, giving Santa a heart attack didn’t go down well with the Little Helpers…
After that, Julia’s mother went M.I.A., usually drunk at some local bar over by the subway at Forest Hills Station. It sounded glamorous, “Forest Hills Station,” but it was actually the filthiest and most depressing subway line—the orange line—cutting through the armpit of Boston’s inner city.
Julia latched onto us right through her training bra phase and then her first kiss. She remained fai
thful to me, always content to be back-up singer, walking one step behind, even now as we headed up the hill past the school basketball court. We could hear distant singing. It was Crosby, Stills & Nash’s version of “Southern Man,” sounding muffled from the speakers, as if they were in front of a stadium audience.
We followed the music up the hill like the Three Wise Men following the star to Bethlehem, except baby Jesus turned out to be a dude with long black hair and a set of drumsticks that he tapped gently on his cymbal. We squatted outside the basement window in order to peek inside, the shadow on the screen making it difficult to make out the face below of Charlie, the drummer, gazing up at us. He was a little bit older, seventeen, but he was smoking hot.
After two weeks of waiting outside that basement during June’s longest heat wave in history, the keyboard player finally swung open the bulkhead door and said, “You wanna come in and jam?” As though we hadn’t been doing that all along?
We descended those plank-like steps into cooler air where a lone microphone stood in the center of the floor. The guys didn’t even ask my name. They didn’t care. Apparently their girl singer from the nearby town of Milton had been sent off to summer camp and I was all they had to pinch-hit. Mom couldn’t afford to send me to summer camp, and Julia’s mom spent all the money she had on booze, but these boys could afford instruments. “You ready?” Charlie winked. I smiled at him, nodded, exhaled, and then tapped the microphone, the way I’d seen Stevie Nicks do it at a concert on TV. The band nodded so I tapped again but a little louder, and the echoing vibration startled me.
When I blurted out the first line of a Fleetwood Mac song, Julia gave me a double thumbs-up from where she sat on the big speaker that reverberated under her butt. This was a far cry from the silly singing we did with my mom in our living room but maybe those silly routines were finally paying off. Maybe this was my destiny: a singer in a band in Charlie’s basement.
In August the band went on what they called a “road trip,” which really meant that their parents said “get a real job,” so my career was over. I was officially an unemployed singer.