Next, perhaps I’ll tell you about the way your father’s generous smile absolutely ruined every good ounce of sense I ever had.
Love,
Mom
There—at last! There it is. The first mention of my Ivan and how it was we came to find each other. I think of Bryan and Allison reading this account and hope they will feel the same sense of wonder I found all those years ago.
I also consider that Allison might (upon reading this letter) realize that some misunderstanding—even a terrific and terrible argument—is something auspicious and meant to let fly.
I crush the letter to my chest, letting tears fall willy-nilly down my face and onto the front of my blouse. At last, I’ve found my beloved and he lives within a few words written, front-to-back, on two pages of flowered stationery.
In spite of the day with its myriad distresses, I fall asleep with thoughts of Ivan’s hands on my body. In the morning, I’m puzzled to wake up fully dressed, my letters scattered in a wobbling trail from the closet floor, and, most disturbing, a suitcase squatting like a small, dark gnome in the middle of the living room.
I write a reminder in my notebook to ask Bryan if I’m going somewhere.
Chapter Ten
It’s turned now into those late summer days when the back garden gasps in the heat; I can nearly hear its great heaving discomfort. I go to the garden shed on the back side of the house to find my garden gloves and sun hat. Then I drag out my tools and my little gardening stool, intending if nothing else to clip a few heat-sodden flowers and bring them inside to the air conditioning. I select a few blossoms still fresh enough to grace the kitchen table, scooting my little stool along the edge of the flower bed as I go, placing each cut bloom in a basket. On I go. Clipping. Scooting. Gathering.
I’m troubled by the simple task of controlling where my clipping hand lands. I’ve lost the ability to pick a spot and then command my hands or my feet to end up there. I suppose some part of my broken brain is causing damage to my relationship to things outside my own body, causing me to move and drift now in confounding ways. Even holding a flower stalk in one hand doesn’t keep my other hand from clipping at the blank air beside it in clumsy, empty strokes.
I notice a flower, a long-legged aster, lying on the ground, gasping, crippled now at its knee and sadly a victim of my heavy foot.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, little flower,” I say into its purple petals, its orange center. I’m certain it’s a childish thing to speak aloud to a flower, but I nearly expect the poor, broken creature to answer. I’ve stepped on the dear thing, most likely expecting I was stepping somewhere else. I take the mute and dying flower into my hand and try to straighten it at its crushed and broken place. It won’t stand and instead falls loosely at its bend, oozing liquid from its mortal injury onto my gloved hand.
“So, so sorry,” I say.
“Mom?”
“Oh, Bryan. I didn’t hear you.”
“You okay?”
“Certainly, dear. But I don’t think this poor flower is doing very well.”
I add the aster to the bundle of other flowers in my basket—a few roses, their edges curled from the heat, a couple of sun-bleached hydrangea large as lions’ heads, some lavender and yellow freesia—all stricken, first by the heat, and now by the clippers in my hand. So, so sorry.
I stand. I’m sure there’s most likely a look of guilt on my face, but if so, Bryan seems not to notice.
“Here, Mom, let me get those for you.”
“Oh, my. I’m afraid I’ve really mangled these unfortunate little flowers. I’d hate to hurt your nice suit too.”
“I’m good. I’ve got a genius of a cleaner.”
“It’s nice to see you, dear,” I say.
“Let’s go inside. It’s too hot out here for you.”
“Is it? I hadn’t really noticed.”
I follow Bryan inside and watch as he places the flowers into a vase and pours cold water over their wounded legs. He sets the vase on the kitchen table and we sit down, the bouquet a sad commentary between us.
“I talked to the doctor today,” Bryan says.
“Would you like some tea?” I ask. “Or maybe it’s time for wine. It must be time for wine.” I take off my sun hat, hang it by its strap on the back of my chair and move to rise from the table.
“It’s still morning. Really, nothing for me. I need to get back to the office. I just thought I’d stop by and tell you about my conversation with the—”
“Oh right. The doctor… how is she? Dr. Alli… something, isn’t it?”
“Dr. Ellison.”
“Oh, yes. Sure I can’t get you something? Lemonade?”
“No. I just came by to talk to you.”
“That’s so nice of you, dear.” I sit down again. “How’s work going for you? Do you like your new office?”
“Mom, I’ve been there a year and a half.”
“You have? That long? My goodness. How do you like it? Here, let me get us a couple of glasses of wine. You can tell me all about it.” I stand again and move toward the refrigerator. “Chardonnay for you, right?”
“Mom! Please. I just want to talk to you about the doctor.”
“The doctor? Well, why didn’t you say so?”
Bryan looks up at the ceiling, then back to me. “Here, come, sit down.” He pats the seat on the chair next to him.
I shuffle back to the kitchen table. Bryan places his hand over mine as if to keep me pinned to him; his eyes look like the world has jumped into them. “Okay, here’s the deal. Your latest MRI shows definite shrinking of your brain. It’s especially obvious in the hippocampus region, pretty much confirming what we already know. It’s obviously been shrink—”
“Shrinking? My hips? Oh, goody.” I clap my hands in mock delight. “Every woman wants little hips.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m sorry, dear. I know… I know this means I’m still heading downward.” I look at the flowers with their heads now slumped over the side of the vase. I wonder how long it will be before their petals fall onto the table, how many days before their heads are gone?
“Yes, you’re moving a bit southward. It’s to be expected, I guess.”
“I’m, in spite of it all… I’m okay, though. Are you okay, dear? You look a little peaked.”
“I’m all right. It’s just that this is really so sad for you… for us. But the doctor was hopeful. She wants to try a new medication… maybe even submit you for a trial.”
“I have to go on trial? Whatever for? Did I do something wrong?”
“No, of course not, Mom.”
“Oh, good. How about cookies, then? Would you like some cookies? I might have some in the cupboard… I don’t know.”
“No. No cookies. No tea. No wine. No lemonade. No nothing. I just stopped by—”
“I know. Just to tell me what the doctor said. What did she say again?”
Bryan brushes his hand over the petals of the fallen astor.
“She said you’re sick.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. I don’t know why I’m sick. I mean, everyone gets sick now and then. I remember one time when you had a fever and—”
“Let’s talk about this later. I tell you what. I’ll stop by tonight and check on you.”
“Oh, that would be lovely, dear. I’ll make my famous Southern spaghetti. You can call Allison, maybe. I haven’t seen her in such a long time.”
“How ‘bout I bring pizza? Does that sound good?”
“Wonderful.” I stand abruptly. “My goodness. I need to dust if I’m going to have company tonight. What time did you say?”
“I’ll be here around six. And no dusting, you hear? It’ll just be me.”
“And Allison?”
“Don’t worry about Allison. Here, sit down. I’ll make you some tea before I go.”
Bryan stands and walks to the stove on legs that seem to have turned into slender, broken flowe
r stalks.
“Bryan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m okay, you know. I’m okay with being sick… it is part of life, you know. It’s a shame I’m so clumsy with the flowers, though.”
“You should have a gardener. I’ll get you a gardener.”
“No. I don’t need a gardener. Just new feet and, well, maybe a new brain.”
Bryan brings me a cup of tea and kisses my cheek. “We’ll be okay.”
“Of course.” I look at the vase. “We’ll all be okay.”
After Bryan leaves, I drink my tea and talk to the flowers on the table. “I guess we’re all going to lose our poor little heads pretty soon, aren’t we?”
The silence from a vase of too-late-in-the-summer flowers is my answer.
I spend the rest of the afternoon looking through letters from the cedar box. I find the next letter about Ivan and let its words take me back, back, back.
Dearest children:
Your father, my Ivan Daniel Glidden, was a beauty! On the day we met—my first day in college—he leaned into me with those great blue eyes of his, eyes that could cause a mountain to cleave in half. His was a smile stronger than the wind that blew the upside-down snow at The Blowing Rock. He was a beauty, all right; a third-year student determined to leave behind the simplicity of the Appalachians for the complexity of anywhere else. Your father pulled me into his whirling vortex of life and left me gasping for more. That first day of school, he caught me up by the hand and never let go until the day he died, twenty-eight years, two children, and one massive heart attack later.
Ivan held me close to his chest on the day that Ma died of heartbreak for her eyes and he held me even closer when Pa died just six months later from a lungful of Carolina sawdust and his own blind and broken heart. He helped me box up memories and books and scoop up John Milton the Cat so I could hide that poor old cat in my dorm room because I couldn’t bear to leave him behind. When it came time, my Ivan helped me bury John Milton in the yard of your MeeMaw and PaaPaw’s silent and ghostly house. Then, he let me cry bitter tears across his shirt when new people moved into the only home I had ever known.
Five days after I graduated from college, Ivan took me once more by the hand to marry me forever and ever, amen. I had no Pa to walk me down the aisle or lift my veil to kiss my face goodbye, so Ivan simply eliminated the aisle. We stood at The Blowing Rock, surrounded by a generous spring wind and blessings smiled from the lips of Pastor Lonigan as we gave ourselves to one another.
I swear I could feel your MeeMaw’s eyesight finally blowing up from the bottom of the gorge in time to watch her only child become a woman.
Your father cared for me like no other; I cared for him the same. On the day of our wedding, standing beside The Blowing Rock, our fingers trembling with the thought of one another, he brushed the hair from my face with such tenderness I thought I would die right then. If the wind had not had the sense to blow upward, it might have carried me right out over the gorge and far into the Appalachian Mountains before anyone could have caught hold of the hem of my dress. I swear, that fierce wind blew into our faces and forced its way into every crevice of our young hearts. It caused us to hold to one another until we knew that no wind we ever encountered would ever be stronger than the wind from the bottom of John’s River Gorge. It made us wrap our arms about one another until it was impossible to separate us—through early days of our marriage when I was pregnant so quickly we had to laugh and gasp and then, through the next pregnancy that happened so quickly again, we could only look at each other large-eyed and incredulous. We were wrapped together completely; there was no crevice for any wind to come between us, nothing wild enough to pull us apart—not babies that stole our sleep and consumed every waking moment, or jobs gained and lost, or the tiny worry over sniffles and chicken pox, or the larger, fearsome worry when you two were teenagers.
We held each other tightly through every crashing thing and every joyful thing. We held each other when Ivan’s job fell out from under his feet and it took three months of painful doubt before he landed every man’s dream job as Chief Financial Officer at Clive and Ulster. Gosh, they took good care of your father.
Then, we clinked glasses together when my job as a simple high school English teacher thrust me upward to serve in the English Department at American River College. We whooped through the house like wild hooligans and got drunk on wine and possibilities when The New Yorker bought one of my poems.
Your father was the skin on my body and the sense in my days. And so, when his heart suddenly stopped and refused to come back, I was ill-prepared for the force of death that causes a woman to suddenly breathe alone. Twenty-eight years of standing with him arm-to-arm made me notice his abrupt withdrawal along every inch of my skin and deep within my lungs. There is nothing of me that doesn’t miss him.
There is everything in me that will miss him as long as I breathe.
You children may think of your father with different thoughts, different memories. Maybe you think of your own little hands caught up in his, or maybe you concentrate on those rare fatherly scowls when you were in trouble and only his withering look could straighten it all out. But he was as good to you as he was to me. He was good to everyone around him and it is nothing but cruelty to us all that he let go of our hands and took hold of heaven’s grasp when he did.
I’ve gone on much too long, so I’ll end here.
With gentle love,
Mom
I’m suddenly tossed. Shifted. Turned inside-out and shaken loose from whatever goodness there had been throughout the day. The usual comfort of standing in the center of my closet, of unfolding and refolding my little letters and poems, of recalling the history that has kept my feet like roots in nourishing soil, now twists along the length of my bones. The years it took to reconfigure my life without Ivan are vanished, and the grief of his loss is as present and palpable as if it were just today he died in my arms, out in the yard, under the pecan tree. I remember the grass was flattened and scorched under him as if he had tried to put out a fire with his body.
The letter flutters from my hand; losing my memory altogether might not be such a bad thing after all.
I decide I would be happy if there might be starfish in my brain, sticky-footed creatures frolicking under the surface of all these saltwater tides of tears. Yes, that should be it. Starfish, slowly feeding on my darkest memories, especially those of my Ivan’s terrible death, on the grass, under the pecan tree. Sticky, sticky starfish, eating up my words, my thoughts. I imagine them growing larger, more plentiful.
Stickier.
Chapter Eleven
A spider has made a messy web in the corner of my bathtub. Somehow, in the privacy of my mind, I know this spider has something important to tell me. No one else would know about the gravity of a spider in one’s bathtub. But I know. I know.
I clap my hands for joy. I run to the kitchen where I take hold of a chair and drag it to the bathroom. I place it across from the spider and sit carefully, like a lady. Her legs tremble as I scrape the feet of the chair a bit closer.
I don’t know what to do about her and her serious eyes. She is quick, busy with her web, until she sees me. Then she stands tall, waving her front legs like a joyful hello to a long lost friend. Her mouth is a wide declaration, a smile, perhaps. Her shiny black body, like patent leather, seems sturdy, impressive.
I’d like to take her up into my hand, bring her to my lips, but I decide against the gesture.
After all, what kind of a fool converses with a spider? She should be killed and then swirled with the hottest of water quickly down the drain. She might bite. Everyone knows there is certain destruction when a spider takes over the corners and crevices of one’s house, leaving webs with flies, stuck and sucked dry. But I can’t destroy her. Not with her legs trembling like this, or her mouth opening in surprise at my approach, or the hopefulness that takes up the entire length of her body and spreads out
across the expanse of the web she has crafted.
She is magnificent and we are making friends.
“Well, hello,” I say in my loveliest lilt. “You shouldn’t be afraid of me. I wouldn’t hurt a fly, although I’m sure you’d be delighted if I were to serve you a nice large fly specimen for your dinner.” I laugh and settle in for a morning’s conversation with my new friend.
She tells me secrets.
I hear her. It surprises me because of the constant buzzing that has recently taken over my ears. Sometimes I nearly cry out because of its horrid annoyance. Buzzing, buzzing always. But it doesn’t seem such a bother, now that I hear the high, tremulous voice of this spider. There it is, in a pitch just slightly above the night-and-day radio wave of sound that fluxes deep within my ears.
I hear the voice of a spider and I am enchanted!
We soon exchange names and the pleasantries of the day. She prefers her married name, Mrs. Bird, which I find amusing since any bird would snatch her up if given the chance. I mention that she is lucky to have found a spot where she is safe. She measures the distance between us and says she could very well say the same for me. We laugh and laugh over that one.
She dips her head as she mentions she is a widow. I brighten with our common state. As it turns out, we are both widows, with children, but without any close lady friends.
We talk and visit until morning turns itself over to the sensitivity of afternoon and its changing shadows. Reluctantly, I leave Mrs. Bird to her churning business while I drag my chair back to its place in the kitchen. I busy myself with pushing a sponge across an array of dirty dishes. It’s a difficult task these days to keep ahead of my own messes. I sweep toast crumbs toward my hand, only to miss and watch them flutter to the floor.
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