“I know,” Morris said. “I’m not even sure how much of me is here now. But I’m glad that you told me. It’s something that I wondered about, and I’m very glad you told me.”
“So am I,” Joan said, and shut her eyes. She heard the creak of the wood and the straw as he stood up and then felt his hand fondle her hair. She reached up, her eyes still closed, and pulled the hand close to her cheek. She felt the roughness of it, and smelled Dial soap and cinnamon. “You’ve been cooking again,” she said.
“A new type of apple pie,” said Morris. “An experiment. As usual, I won’t know whether it’s come out until you taste it. Do you want to come with me? You can tell me if you like it and we can have it with coffee.”
Joan kissed his hand, and let it go. “No,” she said. “No, you’d better go.”
She felt his lips against the top of her head. “Okay,” Morris said.
“Say hi to Steve from across the street if you see him,” she said. “Tell him thanks again for helping with the air conditioner.”
“I will. See you around, honey.” And he was gone.
Joan sat there for a moment more, unwilling to let the moment pass. She finally took a long breath and opened her eyes. And smiled.
He had left her the ladder-back chair.
The Sad Old Lady
A story of Sheila Hirsch, Chana’s daughter-in-law
1929
When she was four years old, Sheila Mandel found out that something awful was going to happen. She knew because, just that night, she had a dream about an ugly old lady with white, flyaway hair and raggedy clothes who cried inconsolably, the same way Sheila had cried when she lost her favorite doll.
Somehow, in the dream she knew that the old lady was 54 years old, an unimaginable age, way older than even her parents. She thought that the old lady might be her grandma, who was older than anyone else in the world, and lived in a small apartment in a building in another part of the city. Sometimes, Sheila’s parents would take her to visit, and leave her there with her grandma while they went to do whatever it was adults did on their own.
It made Sheila sad to think that her grandma might be that lonely old woman. So one day, when she was having her afternoon milk and cookies at her grandma’s small kitchen table with the bright flowery plastic tablecloth, she looked up and asked, “Grandma, do you cry sometimes?”
Her grandma, who had been listening to The Goldbergs on the radio, looked up and said, “Darling, everyone cries sometimes.”
“But I never see you cry.”
Her grandma smiled. “Grown-ups try not to cry in front of children,” she said. “They don’t want to frighten them, so when they cry, they do it when the children aren’t there.”
This sounded reasonable, and explained why the old lady was crying by herself. But Sheila persisted. “Grandma, when will you be 54?”
This made her Grandma laugh, for some strange reason. “Kindele, I was 54 a long time ago. But what a lovely thing to say.”
Sheila didn’t understand this remark at all, so she put it down to the weirdness of grownups. However, it also convinced her that her grandma wasn’t the sad old lady. She decided to keep a look out, so that if the old lady did show herself, Sheila could run away as fast as possible.
* * *
Sheila’s first period came when she was 12, and had just gotten home from summer camp. She had read all the books and had The Talk with her mom, so when she found the dark spots on her underwear, she knew what to do. And, quite frankly, it was something of a relief, since she had started to worry that she’d never menstruate, and that she’d have a baby’s body for the rest of her life, and never grow breasts and be as beautiful as the actresses in the movies.
She was sitting on her bed, looking at an article in one of her movie magazines, which had photos of some old-time silent film stars and what they looked like now. Some of them still looked okay, but most of them looked old and awful. And then, suddenly, as she glanced from the photos of the young, beautiful people to their later selves, Sheila realized who the old lady in her long-ago dream was.
It was her. She had dreamed about her own future.
For one awful moment, Sheila couldn’t breathe. All she could do was listen to the blood thumping in her head. It was inevitable, as inevitable as her own death. One day, it would happen. She had no power over it. One day, she would be that ugly crying old woman.
She was terrified. It was as if a witch had cursed her, and there was no good fairy or handsome prince who could remove the spell. There was no way to change it or escape it.
Or perhaps there was. Sheila tried to calm down and think. She had time ahead of her—enough time to make sure that she got married, and had lots of children. And she had Carl, her older brother, who would also get married, and have lots of children. Carl could be a pain at times and didn’t like her to bother him when he was with his friends, but he was okay (as brothers went). And if they both had children, then there’d always be people around, and there would be no reason to cry like that. Even if she had to become old and ugly one day (although that was incomprehensible), at least she wouldn’t be sad.
She pulled out one of her school notebooks, grabbed a pen, and wrote firmly in large letters:
How To Not Become Old, Ugly, and Sad
1. Be nice to Carl so that he’ll help you when you need it.
2. Get married to a really nice guy.
3. Have at least three children, maybe four.
4. Make lots of friends
5. Create a different life.
That seemed to be at least the beginning of a plan. She pulled the paper from her notebook, folded it up, and put it in the tin candy box that her Aunt Esther had brought from Germany. She kept some old childhood treasures in there—bird’s feathers that she had hoped would be magic, the leather collar of her pet cat who died the year before, and a tiny china poodle—and now she put the paper in there, sure that it would prove a valuable talisman.
* * *
“Honey, it’s Carl.”
It was Aunt Esther who called. Sheila had gone up to the Catskills with some college friends for a winter weekend; she had been saving a part of her salary (she worked weekends at her uncle’s drug store) for weeks in order to afford it. So when the woman who owned the hotel knocked on her door to tell her there was a phone call, she knew that it had to be something serious.
The telegram had come a few minutes before. Carl had been somewhere in the Pacific, they didn’t know where, exactly. The wording, though, was unambiguous: “…killed in action in performance of his duty…”
On the bus going home, all Sheila could think was that, somehow, it was her fault. She was heading toward that lonely, crying old woman and her brother had been killed to make that possible. If she hadn’t been born, her brother wouldn’t have died.
Her parents hugged her hard and frequently, but otherwise didn’t say much. They sat on wooden boxes, the mirrors covered, while neighbors bustled in with food and sympathy. Sheila, unable to keep still, chatted with some of her cousins or sat in her bedroom, trying to study and pretend, for a few hours at least, that it wasn’t true, that a mistake had been made, that a soldier would show up at the door with another telegram saying that her brother had actually been taken prisoner, or found floating on a life raft.
But nothing of the sort happened. The next day, they went to the synagogue. Sheila sat in the women’s section, still pretending that everything was normal—and then her father stood to say kaddish. At that moment, she suddenly felt her throat constrict until she could hardly breathe; her face grew hot and her eyes wet. For the first time, she truly realized that the kid who had always been there when she was growing up, who had taken her to the playground and taught her how to cut a worm in half and told her which teachers to avoid, was gone forever. A step in her life had been taken, and there was no going back.
When she got home, she found the tin box, which she had hidden at the bottom of her closet, and g
ot out the list. Almost ceremoniously, she drew a line through the first entry.
* * *
Her parents insisted on a large wedding, although Sheila thought that the money would be better stashed in their savings account than spent on a large hall and caterers. But when she suggested something more modest, her mother nearly burst into tears. “Never,” she declared. “You deserve a nice wedding. It’s seldom enough that we get to celebrate something, we should do it up proud.”
Sheila felt she had chosen well. Sidney was a stocky but athletic young man, with the assurance of somebody who didn’t care what others thought of him. Having spent the war years designing airplane parts, he found work after the war as the head of a manufacturing concern, and was ready to settle down. And he had a close-knit family made up of two parents and a married sister, all of whom welcomed Sheila with open arms.
Sidney seemed happy to go along with the elaborate preparations, although Sheila had always thought that grooms hated large weddings. “You don’t understand,” Becky, Sidney’s sister, confided to her one day, as they were sorting out invitations. “In this family, if anyone doesn’t get invited to a wedding or a funeral, it can result in generations of yelling over the dinner table. This way,” she grinned, “everyone comes, eats your food, says ‘Mazel tov,’ and goes back to arguing about politics like usual.”
Happy to accede to their wishes, Sheila allowed the two sets of parents to plan her wedding—and her future. Which was, she thought happily, bound to be rich, busy, and unburdened by the ghosts of ugly old ladies.
* * *
Their first child was a large, healthy and squalling girl named Debra after Sidney’s maternal grandmother. Debra inherited her father’s healthy physique and love of sports rather than her mother’s introspection. Sheila was ecstatic; not only was she the mother of a lovely, thriving child, but her campaign seemed to be working. Sidney was moving up in his firm, they were on good terms with the rest of his family, and life was proceeding well.
The second child was a boy, much to the delight of Sidney, who, though he loved his daughter, was hoping for a son. They named the baby Carl after her brother.
The children grew with all the minor emergencies, small rebellions, and occasional bumps that follow the progress of reasonably well-adjusted kids. There were the two terrifying days when Debra ran away from home at the age of 14, and the night that Sheila screamed at Carl when she found a pint of vodka in the glove compartment of their car. But on the whole, things were going well.
Until Carl’s senior year in high school, when his grades plummeted. At first, Sheila was convinced that he was just slacking off because he’d already made it into a couple of decent colleges. But it was more than that. Carl started spending more and more time lying on his bed, staring at the TV. She asked Debra, who had always been close to her younger brother, to intervene, but Debra said that when she asked him what was the matter, he just shrugged.
When he started digging a hole in the back garden because the voices told him to, his frantic parents took him to the hospital. After months of testing and visiting doctors, Carl was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia.
* * *
The breakup, when it finally came, wasn’t a surprise to anyone. The arguments about Carl’s illness had become long and nasty. Sheila sought refuge in hours of research on experimental treatments, while Sidney converted to a Christian sect called the Church of Good News and put his faith in prayer.
Eventually they were divorced. Sidney remarried less than a year later and moved to the Midwest, leaving Sheila with Carl, the house and a large portion of their savings in lieu of alimony. Debra, who had finished college and was embarking on a career as a magazine editor, refused several jobs so she could live nearby and help care for her brother.
Sheila found work transcribing recordings of financial meetings—it was tedious, but regular and paid reasonably well. The rest of the time, she took care of her son and continued to search for some kind of answer to his illness. Every once in a while, she brought out the tin box and stared at the list, her hands trembling slightly.
A year after the divorce, one of Carl’s doctors found a medication that seemed to work. Carl stopped hearing the voices, got his long-deferred high school diploma, and took classes at a local two-year college. He was so improved that when Debra was offered a promising new job in San Francisco, Sheila encouraged her to take it. Debra thrived there, and brought a boyfriend with her when she visited for Thanksgiving. The sad old lady began to recede once again. Escape still seemed possible.
Then one night, Carl woke Sheila about 2 a.m. and earnestly asked her to lock her door, because his voices were angry with her and were starting to insist on unpleasant measures. Sheila knew better than to ask him to ignore the voices; instead, she told him to ask them why they were angry, and whether there was something they needed. Meanwhile, she locked away all the kitchen knives and called the local police, who knew about her son’s condition.
About ten minutes later, just about the time Carl began looking frantically for his father’s tool kit (because the voices told him that he needed a hammer), a police officer and a social worker came to the door. They managed to persuade Carl to come with them by telling him they would see if they could find a hardware store on the way. Sheila followed in her car, weeping.
Sidney flew in from Utah and helped her find a comfortable private facility that they felt they could afford. Debra called the day after they checked her brother in. She said she had talked to Carl and he denied having threatened anybody. She said that Sheila should have paid more attention to whether he was taking his medications, and that she had gotten Carl locked up only for her own convenience. Debra ended by declaring that she’d never speak to her mother again.
That night, Sheila got completely, thoroughly soused for the first time since she was in college. She put on the TV—weirdly, “It’s a Wonderful Life” was playing—and, sick with fear, poured herself several juice-glasses of bourbon. She was terrified to look in the mirror lest she’d see the old lady staring back at her.
No, she thought, not yet. The kitchen didn’t look quite right—although her memory of the dream wasn’t all that clear anymore—and her hair was still a rich brown, although an occasional strand of silver could be found if she searched for it.
She took out the list and stared at it, dry-eyed.
“The hell with you, old lady,” she finally told the TV set, as Jimmy Stewart went running through the town, looking for his now not-wife. “If I can’t do anything to keep you away, in the meantime, I’m doing what I want to do.”
* * *
Six months later, Sheila moved to a small town in upstate New York, where a couple of college friends had settled. She rented the top floor of a rambling old Civil War-era house and spent the rest of the money that was left from the sale of her home to lease a tiny store just off the main shopping avenue.
It started as a used bookstore (stocked from the boxes of science fiction and history books that Carl had bought almost obsessively), but after she was approached by a few of the locals at a party her friends gave, she started also stocking sweaters, painted teacups, and other crafts. Soon customers started asking for more gifts, so Sheila solicited a few professional craftspeople to let her sell their wares. Eventually, the remaining used books were moved to a small area at the back of the store, along with a coffee machine and some chairs.
She started holding book readings and hosting local musicians, and much to her surprise, found that the store was paying for itself within a couple of years, and was even pulling a small profit.
Sheila drove down to visit Carl every weekend—and when that became too arduous, every other weekend. At first she considered moving him to a facility closer to her, but he seemed so comfortable where he was that she decided to leave him alone. She wrote her daughter an email to that effect, and suggested that if Debra disliked how her brother was being treated, she was free to take over his care.
<
br /> She lived quietly. She spent as little as possible, eating modestly but well, dressing in jeans and sweatshirts, and putting away as much money as she could against her eventual retirement. She found a neat little adult community nearby, and kept in touch with them in the hope that she could afford it when/if she needed to. She met with friends, babysat their grandchildren, joined one or two local civic associations, and accepted her role in the community as the somewhat weird but respectable woman from downstate.
She was, if not happy, then content.
* * *
One morning, Sheila was brushing her teeth when she looked in the mirror, stopped, and stared. It had been a busy week, and she had cancelled two appointments to have her hair trimmed and colored. Now, it shone silver in the artificial light.
She rinsed her mouth out and examined the image in the mirror critically. It didn’t, she decided, look all that bad. If she cut her hair a little shorter, and dressed a little neater, she’d actually look distinguished. The idea made her smile.
With a start, Sheila remembered the small tin box that she had saved from her childhood, and that sat at the back of the linen closet where she had put it when she moved upstate. She went to the closet, reached in and pulled it out.
Wanting a cup of tea, she took the box into the kitchen and put it on the counter. She set some water to boil, and while she waited, opened the box. Amid several feathers, a small china poodle and a strip of rotting leather, she found the list.
She pulled it out and read it slowly, carefully, as though it were something written by a stranger. And then, helplessly, without meaning to, she began to cry—not for herself, but for the frightened young girl who had, with all the faith of adolescence, drawn up a plan for her life.
That’s when the child appeared.
A small girl about four years old. Dressed in soft yellow pajamas decorated with tiny figures of Mickey Mouse and stained with what was probably chocolate ice cream. Sitting in the center of the kitchen table, thumb firmly in her mouth, staring at Sheila with an expression of dawning horror.
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