Notes about: Mary Grace Robertson
Born: November 19, 1912 Died: April 1, 2007, 7:45 p.m.
Watts Nursing Home Holderness, New Hampshire
It was a cool and rainy week, with no promise of spring anywhere to be seen, the yard of the low-budget home void of any life—a mud field with only a few tire tracks leading in. I sat with her every now and then, nothing formal, my own need to find those Luke had requested I seek out—those he called the lost and forgotten. I had asked to be called when they thought she was near the end, and she clearly was, her extremeties mottled and cool to the touch. Her roommate, separated by a curtain, cried incessantly. Her belongings included a large unopened tin of Poppycock popcorn, a Christmas bow still on the top of the can, and a crocheted throw made by a group at the local Unitarian Church. Her dentures were wrapped in tissue and in her drawer, along with an old family Bible. Her name is scrawled almost illegibly in the family tree at the beginning. Mary Grace Robertson. Daughter of William and Elizabeth. Born in Portland, Maine. And there was a wallet-sized school photo—in color but clearly of another time, perhaps the seventies, given the bushy cut of his red hair and the tinted aviator glasses. On the back someone had written: Pete age 15. No one working there knew who he was or anything about her, other than she was a charity case, someone abandoned to a clinic like a baby left at an orphanage, years ago, her mental state never any clearer or more reactive than it was at the time of her death. Her eyes opened only once during my last visit, first filling with what seemed recognition and then closing with a long sigh. After a day of trying to hold her hand, she finally clasped her fingers around mine and squeezed and then when the roommate fell asleep and the room was silent, she died. Think how many people die all alone, Luke had said when listing the many rules and guidelines he wanted me to follow. Never forget that single fact. Never forget how important it is to be there. Never forget those people. So what is there to remember? Charity gifts. Her full given name in that nearly illegible scrawl, cool gnarled fingers like roots holding on, the kind of night that can almost convince you spring will never come again. But it will. Once upon a time there was Mary Grace Robertson—daughter of William and Elizabeth—born into this world on November 19, 1912, in Portland, Maine.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Mary Robertson
She is running and running, the field outside the window, running and running. He says, Shut up and put this in your mouth, hold these rags, idiot. Kerosene is shiny, poured like liquor out the bottle and into the ditch, where he pushes her down and says, Hold these rags, Hold these rags. She says it’s Christmas, but he says it’s not. She says she has a family but he says not anymore. He says hold these rags and then the field burns blue and gold, blue and gold. Somebody spoke to her once, a boy from the school came and spoke to her and left his picture. He said his momma used to know her way back, way way back when the field was just the field and her father was out in it, when the field was just a field and before all the blue and gold and nothing, just nothing when she closes her eyes and closes her ears and stops running; he reaches his hand out and she takes it. He’s a boy from the school and he says, It’s okay, it’s okay, because he is there to help her.
Toby
TOBY TYLER CAME TO Pine Haven because she didn’t have anywhere better to go. She tells people how she pinned up a map and then threw a dart to see where it landed and that is entirely true. What she doesn’t tell is that she followed four darts before she got to this one, each time almost signing a lease in some retirement village and then getting cold feet. The fifth dart brought her here and just when she was having doubts she met Sadie who told how she had sent children to the library to check out Toby Tyler for years and years. I love Toby Tyler, Sadie had said, and just hearing those magic words sealed the deal. Toby had hoped for a sign and what could possibly be better than that? Not to mention the cigarette prices out there along I-95 were the cheapest she’d seen in a while.
For the most part, her life in Columbia had been good, but it was time to leave. It was getting too hard to keep up the little yard she had loved and tended for so long. The yellow maple she had planted and watched mature over a stretch of thirty years was as beautiful as ever, but she had come to dread the raking and the bagging; she feared slipping and falling even though she is still in pretty good physical shape. She goes over to the exercise room every single day and walks on the treadmill. She takes the chair exercise class even though it’s pretty slow and boring for someone like her. Still, she does it, all the while doing the different kind of breathing exercises she had learned in her old yoga class where she was the oldest member by at least twenty years. She could tell it made that cute little instructor nervous every time she reared back and tried to do a camel pose to the point she finally offered to sign a piece a paper that would remove all liability if she fell out dead on the floor. This made everybody in the class laugh and then they relaxed. They threw her a going-away party after she announced the next week would be her last class and she left thinking how odd that that was the first time she learned several of their names and yet she could have called on any one of them in a crisis. If she saw them in the grocery store or pumping gas, she liked to hold her palms together in front of her heart and say Namaste. Everybody found that hilarious, but it was honest, too. She did honor them and that place deep within where the whole universe resides, where you let go of all those bad things that can weigh you down.
But she feared a crisis, always has, and wanted to be prepared before anything happened. Toby Tyler has always lived by the rule of wanting to see trouble before it sees her. If she can see it coming, then she is smart enough and strong enough to come up with a solution. It might not be enough to save her life or change the world, but she could come up with something. She has kept framed and hanging on her wall something given to her when her mother was dying several years ago. Toby was good to her mother, always within an hour’s drive to do things for her, and somehow her mother knew not to quiz her personal life. At some point they turned a corner when her mother no longer asked if Toby had met someone or if she thought she might one day have babies. It was sweet that way, sweet the way her mother there at the end told her she loved her just the way she is, that in fact she couldn’t imagine Toby any other way than just who she is. Of course her mother called her Annabelle, a beautiful name to have been given in life but not one that ever suited her. And her mother loved to talk about how they used to love The Original Amateur Hour with Ted Mack on Sunday nights sponsored by the Geritol wannabe—Serutan—which they always told you was natures spelled backwards. Ted Mack was the first real American Idol and that was back when Toby had all kinds of notions in her head, one of them being that she fancied herself a singer and a dancer, kind of a Dale Evans/Gene Kelly thing she had worked out—the tapping cowgirl, they called her in her head. Sometimes she practiced her drishti while sitting with her mother, focusing her gaze loosely on some distant spot so that she could keep breathing and not lose her balance while slowly letting go.
She had long dreaded the day when she would not have her mother there to visit. Some of the teachers she worked with—the few she was closest to—knew she was struggling. The new kid, there to teach history while he was taking courses to get his master’s degree over at USC, left something in her mailbox, the story of a rabbi hearing the world was about to be flooded and every bit of life as it had been known would be submerged, changed, gone. And then he said to his people, and Toby could just picture this all so well—she gave him a hat and long beard and inflection in his voice—he said: Okay, my people, listen up. We have only twenty-four hours to learn how to live underwater.
Somehow, standing there in that crowded little mailroom back of the school office, something lifted from her and she kept thinking of all the things she had already learned to live with. And maybe this was the moment she had been building up to; like the real Toby Tyler running off to join the circus, she could go anywhere and do anything. And the plan she hatched was to step down as they’d asked and to keep seeing her mother as much as she could in those final weeks, and when the time came, she would just sell her wonderful little house she loved so much and head out into the new world. It would be just like in Lost Horizon. She might find her own Shangri-La or that’s what she told the yoga class. “I am moving north in search of paradise.” They all thought that was hilarious especially when she showed them the brochure for Pine Haven with a picture of what her little cottage would look like. Now she is here, and she does love it for the most part. She thought naming their spaces was kind of silly, too, but she immediately knew what hers would be. She said the Ponderosa to make people laugh, but she always knew it would be the Little Chicken Farm, which is right there at the beginning of the movie version of Lost Horizon, which that nice boy from next door who runs the movie house said he might screen here in the recreation hall. Toby had quoted the opening to him just like she did his kid who is always hanging out with Sadie and who had been assigned to her for the naming of spaces. In these days of wars and rumors of wars—haven’t you ever dreamed of a place where there was peace and security, where living was not a struggle but a lasting delight? Of course you have. So has every man since Time began. Always the same dream. Sometimes he calls it Utopia—sometimes the Fountain of Youth—sometimes merely “that little chicken farm.”
That little girl was so amazed at how Toby had it all memorized so well because the girl herself had had a terrible time having to learn lines for a school play and she hated in Sunday school when they made you quote things from memory. She said she had been assigned something from Psalms, the one about how your anger should only endure for a moment because Joy comes in the morning, one that for some reason Toby always confused with a verse of Wordsworth’s “Intimations on Immortality,” much of which she could also quote. She told the girl that her recitation of the chicken farm was just the beginning. She could do the witches from Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, Juliet’s balcony scene, the ending of The Glass Menagerie, several sonnets, and a truckload of Emily Dickinson. She also knew several Charlie McCarthy routines and was practiced at doing both voices; she used to have a dummy she was pretty good with, but then he started scaring her at night so she sold him when she moved. The girl laughed at that but said she could understand. She was once scared of a doll, too, and she wasn’t sure why that one and not the others.
“It’s just like people,” Toby said. “There is something in a face that can let you know all you need to know. Or the aura, you know? I have some experience with seeing the auras. Like I once knew this really nasty fella who was short, but people thought he was even shorter than he was because he had no aura at all. He had a sub-aura. People would hear that fella’s name and their hands would drop knee height like he might be a dwarf or a gnome.” This made the child laugh. “I kid you not,” Toby said. “I’m telling you that you can look at a person and most likely see all you need to know.”
“You think?” The girl was in the throes of an acne outbreak and boy did Toby remember that; who doesn’t, other than those lucky enough not to have been there? All those injected hormones out in the world are forcing children to cycle through things way too fast.
“Yeah, like in your face, I see a beautiful soul with great capabilities of memorization.” And then she went on to teach the girl how to memorize, how you can sing just about all of Emily Dickinson to “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and Bible verses are much easier when you understand in clear contemporary English what is really being said. For instance, her verse was kind of like “Don’t get mad, get Glad” (like the commercial)—you’re crying your fanny off right now but tomorrow it’ll all be behind you. Let the sun shine. Toby waved her arms and sang like she was in the cast of Hair.
“Joy in the Morning,” Toby told her was used for the title of a book and then there was a movie of the same title starring Dr. Kildaire and Yvette Mimieux. “I had the biggest crush on her,” Toby told the girl, and then added, “You know what I mean; I wanted to look like her.”
“Yeah, I want to look like Lady Gaga,” Abby said, and laughed; she was surprised that Toby knows who that is. But you can’t just go from years of living with kids to then knowing nothing at all. It would be too much of a shock to the system. She has a television; she reads magazines. She cares what is going on out there even when it’s not very pretty. Toby told Abby to slap some pork chops on her head and wrap herself in beef jerky and she’d be a dead ringer. By the end of that day, the child had her verse memorized and also could sing I died for beauty but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.
“Aren’t you kinda young to live here?” Abby asked.
“I’m the youngest of the oldest, that’s true,” she said. “But I have always been a little ahead of the others my age, you know?”
Now she takes a stroll over to the main building to find some of the others. It’s a high-class joint in many ways. She never in her life stopped what she was doing for formal meals and for tea in the afternoon, but now she absolutely loves it. It ends up getting kind of heated sometimes, which is what she loves best. People fight over chairs, things like that, things they taught you not to do in kindergarten, and yet everybody has circled right back around to it. I want to sit with so-and-so. That’s my chair. You’re in my chair. Wah-wah. Marge Walker always gets there early and plants her dressed-to-the-nines fanny in the big red leather wingback like she’s the queen. Often Marge is on a rant about how she’s tired of prisoners being treated like vacationers with hardworking taxpayers footing the bill, how those prisoners get to eat three meals a day and watch television and how she is also sick and tired of the foreigners taking up space in the produce section.
“The people?” Toby once asked.
“No. I mean all that mess that comes from Mexico or wherever, ten kinds of peppers nobody ever heard of,” her whole mouth twisted bitterly with the words. “Who wants that old mess?”
“Maybe I would,” one of the women who is on the kitchen staff said, and introduced herself as Mrs. Lopez. Toby told her not to be offended, Marge was someone who had been surprised that Lois Flowers had still not lost weight even with cancer.
Today Marge is saying how she isn’t going to sign a thing that turns anything over to her children. She said if they want to circle in like vultures for her money, so be it, but she plans to spend every single cent to stay alive as long as she possibly can. “I’m going to live so long they’ll be sorry.”
Toby asks Joanna, the hospice woman, what got Marge going and apparently it was that one of her sons was wanting power of attorney. Marge overheard and turned to Toby.
“He is in financial trouble himself,” she says. “He’s wanting his piece of the pie early. Now I do not mind helping my children. That is what my husband and I agreed on many years ago, but trying to take over my kingdom is not the way to go about it. “
“Good for you,” Toby says.
“If I start feeling like somebody is pushing me out before it’s time for me to leave, it makes me mad as hell and I will plant my feet and say I am not going.”
Sadie laughs to hear Marge cuss; they all do.
“I’m gonna live as long as I possibly can just to spite him. I want everything artificial that can be given to me for as long as there’s a pulse. Breath, food, the works. Mr. Walker and I worked hard all those years and I’ll be”—she paused, sputtering and stumbling over the d at the tip of her tongue—“durned if I let them hover like vultures.”
“I do not want to linger,” Sadie says.
“Well, that’s because you don’t have greedy, stingy children. I sat up just last night adding up what I saved them in babysitting hours and meals eaten and clothes washed.”
“You go, girl,” Toby waves to Abby, who is sitting there beside Sadie. Poor child’s dog is still missing and she is heartbroken so this laughing is good. “But damn, Marge, slow it all down, okay? ’Cause you’re making me want to like you.”
“Well, I don’t know if I want you to like me.” Marge opens her scrapbook, an amazing document for sure, every murder committed in the county for the past decade followed to a tee. She said it had begun as a way to keep up with her husband’s career and then her son’s. Her husband had a huge murder case nearly thirty years ago in which he sent a man to the chair for butchering his wife and child. He showed him who was in charge, Marge liked to say, and she had many times held the group spellbound with the horrible details of that case and how brave Judge Henry Walker had always been, not the least bit worried or intimidated by threats. Henry Walker had a reputation unlike anyone else in this area, she said. Henry Walker was a moral man unlike his son who seems a little bit too interested in my purse. Now she turns to a page about an awful murder out in the county where a man drove out to his girlfriend’s mama’s trailer and killed everybody there, even the dog. She points to the mug shot of the boyfriend who did the killing. “My son is representing him.” She looks up. “All the more reason not to give him any money.”
“That’s his job,” Stanley Stone says. “He’s the defense attorney and a damn good one, it seems.” Stanley is a total mystery—sometimes clear as a bell and then off the rail and mean as a snake like the other day. “Toby, why don’t you do something so she’ll shut up.”
“Do a recitation,” Abby says.
“Or tell us what makes you mad,” Marge says, and flips the page to a big headline that says MURDER SUICIDE IN SOUTH CAROLINA. “What makes someone like you angry.”
“Cat fight,” Stanley says. “Go put on your bikinis and let’s get muddy.”
“There’s a lot that makes me mad. Like I have an aversion to the moochers and leachers, the seekers and glommers of your soul,” Toby says, and Sadie says that sounds a little like the Sermon on the Mount. “And”—Toby pauses and takes a deep breath—“people like you make me mad, but right now I’d rather talk about something I think is worth talking about. How about that? Like I can tell you things about my life as a teacher—a damn good teacher, too—and how I told those young girls, don’t let me hear you complaining about your periods anymore ’cause if you’re not having one it means one of two things. Either some boy’s been parking overtime where he should’ve pulled out or you’re up to no good with your own precious bodies, starving and vomiting and messing up nature’s beautiful patterns.” She stops and goes to adjust the tubes leading to Lorice Boone’s oxygen tank. She tells Lorice that’s the payment for all those years smoking, that she herself might need oxygen one of these days because she also smoked like a fiend for many years. Yes, that was the price for having looked so sexy with a fag hanging from her lips while coaching the girls’ tennis team. “And, yes, I said fag ’cause it used to just mean a cigarette.” She looks at Abby and pretends to take a deep draw and exhale like she might be Bette Davis. “And there’s something else that gets my blood boiling, I’m so goddamned tired of all the words getting taken and twisted—what is that all about? I found that I was having a harder and harder time keeping up with the new slang the kids were using—bad and sick for good—things like that.”
“And the use of dig made such good sense way back when,” Rachel Silverman pipes up. She has dirt and straw all over the back of her pants like she might’ve been stretched out on the ground. “And bread, dough.” That Rachel is as tough and cynical as they come. Toby adores her and would love nothing better than to be her best friend.
“What about dish,” Stanley says and eyes Rachel’s body up and down. “Or puss.”
“What about pop?” Rachel aims an imaginary gun at him.
“That would make me”—he pauses—“stiff.” He blows a kiss her way.
“I am going to report this X-rated mess and a child sitting here in your presence.” Marge slams her scrapbook shut and stands up. “You all are damned to hell as far as I can tell except those two.” She points at the sisters, one crocheting and the other snoozing. “Blessed are the sweet and simple.”
“Wait, Marge, before I completely don’t like you again,” Toby says. “I can translate. He pointed to her face and she acted like she was going to kill him and then that would make him dead.”
“Hey, that’s cool,” Abby says. “That’s what you did with the Bible verse.”
“She what?” Marge says, but Stanley interrupts with croak and hooch and keister.
“I’m partial to groovy myself.” Stanley’s hair is standing all out from his head like he might have stuck his finger in a socket and his shirt is buttoned wrong so one side is hanging longer than the other. He has the cover of that Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album he plays nonstop and asks who would like to be the lucky damsel to wear a whipped-cream frock like the one on the cover.
“Damsel! Frock!” Sadie laughs and wheezes. “Those are some ancient words. Have you ever even heard those words, sweetie?” She pats Abby’s hand and holds on tight, and when the room quiets down from Stanley’s mess, Toby continues.
“I told those girls, someday you’ll be wishing for your period and I don’t just mean to make sure you aren’t pregnant—knocked up—and they looked at me with their mouths all screwed up like I was stupid and what could I possibly mean.
“I said when you get old like moi here”—she slaps her chest and grimaces, pulls her pants leg up over the top of her boots to show a white scaly-looking leg—“I told ’em, I said, everything stops—the faucet goes off. It’s like the scene in Lost Horizon that I had them watch in English class after reading the novel. I said, you want some fantasy? A real stretch of the imagination and yet something that still is real in all the right ways? I had them read Spoon River Anthology and The Glass Menagerie and Our Town because they could read the parts aloud and pretend they were there. At first they were silly and awkward, but the ones who got it got it. They are still young enough that sometimes you can snag one or two and set them on a new course before they dive back into those flimsy old paperbacks modeled after some silly television show or, most recently—like the past several years—something with wizards and trolls and vampires. But I made them remember that one scene in the movie where the beautiful woman is taken from Shangri-La and, poof, dries up to an old brown potato chip like what you used to find down in the bottom of the bag. Lays and most of them have corrected this, which is a shame because it was that old brown crunchy one there at the bottom that made me enjoy all the others more, you know? Like I pointed out to them you need to enjoy those smooth, pretty faces and natural-colored thick hair and breasts that are healthy and cancer free and don’t pull you down to Hades when you stand up, or as Emily Dickinson might say, I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true. True! Real!”
“You were some teacher,” Rachel says, and nods to Abby who is sitting there soaking it all up like a sponge. “I hope you have some teachers as good as she was. Good for you, Toby. I’m surprised they let you retire.”
“She was forced to retire,” Marge says. “And her name’s not Toby. She made that up when she moved in out here and everybody knows it.”
“Well, I don’t know it,” Rachel says. “All I know is what I learned when I met her and I learned her name is Toby. And I still say she must have been some kind of wonderful teacher, the kind of teacher children would benefit from having.”
“The jury’s still out on that,” Toby says. “Though yes, I think I did a fine job. I think I was a really great teacher.”
“And you’re so modest,” Marge says. “And no telling what you were teaching there in the locker room with those young girls.”
“I smell a cat fight,” Stanley says.
“You know what? You can’t hurt me anymore than I have already been hurt in life so just give it up. You’re ignorant and I’d rather be who I am and smart than who you are and ignorant.”
“Who you are is a sin.”
“Well, it’s nobody’s goddamned business who I am, Marge, and it’s official—I am back to not liking you at all. And you better watch out is what I’m saying to you.” Toby pats her fanny pack like there is something in it and then points her finger like a gun, says pow, pop, and then blows the tip of her finger. “You better watch out ’cause what have I got to lose? I didn’t have to come live here like you. I can still drive, still do pretty much anything I want to do, which is why I’m in an independent cottage and not over here in the next tier of living.” She puts her hand up to her mouth and then apologizes to Stanley, Rachel, and Sadie. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Stanley acts like he’s shaking something, either a martini or a can of Reddi-wip since he’s so focused on that picture of a woman with a whipped-cream dress. “We all know we’re has-beens.”
“Speak for yourself,” Rachel says.
“I got all kinds of rules for good living and she doesn’t match any of them,” Toby says. “For instance, I say you should be kind to others. I say ‘’tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.’ I say your pee should always run clear, which means you got to drink a lot throughout the whole day to keep yourself pure and cleansed.”
“The question is what you drink,” Marge says, and gets several laughs from the peanut gallery. She has settled back into her big chair, scared to death someone else will sit there, and reopened her scrapbook. No doubt about it, she’s done some fine documenting of all the mayhem and murder in the county. She has a real talent, a real eye for the macabre, which Toby does admire, but that doesn’t mean she has to like her.
“Always take the stairs,” Toby says because Marge is always using the elevator, and then turns to Sadie. “Unless you can’t, of course. Let’s see. Stretch your spine each day like you’re wringing out a sponge—just sit in a chair and go from side to side like this.” She demonstrates and they hear her back pop. “And think of at least one thing that makes you laugh loud and long.”
“For me it’s just an orgasm a day,” Stanley says, and Sadie immediately puts a finger up to her lips since Abby is sitting there so he lowers his voice and whispers, which makes the girl laugh. “Rain or shine. Every day.”
“There you go,” Toby says. “That’s the kind of laughing I mean, but none of us want to dwell too long on that image, do we? No sirree, we sure don’t. But I’ll tell you, I was a good teacher and it only started getting hard for me when everything changed. Like one day I was a normal teacher . . .”
Marge sighs and shifts around in her seat until Stanley asks does she have to use the bathroom or does she have Saint Vitus? Sadie whispers something about worms and needing to check her bottom, which makes several people giggle and makes Marge rise up like a cobra, but Toby can’t even stop to laugh.
“Then next thing I knew the children were coming in with names like Bandana and Eurasia and Montpelier. And I said, those are things and places, children, and you are people. What on earth is going on? And there were names I couldn’t even pronounce and I can guaran-damn-tee you that you don’t readily go calling names you can’t say—I’m looking for the Johns and Bills and Toms and they just weren’t there anymore. I had Lucaramel and Tahitia only it was pronounced Ta-HI-shee-Ah. I had to write a phonetic spelling alongside almost every child’s name by the time I retired.”
“Got fired,” Marge says. “But I was a teacher long ago, too, and I so know what you are talking about. I hated multiculturalism.”
“That’s not what I said,” Toby says. “I don’t hate multiculturalism. You are worse than FOX News.”
“I think you do.”
“It was the white ones, too. It was equal opportunity weird names. I’d hear mommas calling them in and it sounded like they were hawkers for a law firm: Parker, Ramsey, and Tate! Parker, Ramsey, and Tate! And next thing you know up run three little towheads like dandelion puffs, all decked out in little sailor suits.”
“You are describing my grandchildren who were just here,” Marge says. “How dare you use their names.”
“I did it because their daddy is trying to get you to die early so he can have all your money. He wants to buy those children a boat to go with their outfits.”
“You did it because you are the word that means a female dog.” Marge is red in the face, jowls quivering. “People like you are always frustrated now, aren’t you?”
“Only by people like you—the judges and the juries. Nothing about me has slipped. I just decided to move on in here early and get a good hard look at where I’m headed.” She unzips her fanny pack but doesn’t reach in. She has got a little tin of Skoal in there and cannot wait to get a bit of it up against her gum. She will be buzzing like a cowgirl riding the range and she cannot wait. Welcome home tapping cowgirl, where have you been? “And when I look at some of you, I can tell it ain’t a pretty sight,” she says. Her hands are shaking and she feels like she might cry, which makes her furious.
“Be sure your sins will reveal themselves.”
“Good,” Toby says. “I hope so. I am so tired of people like you—snowflake, lily white, holy roller”—she pauses looking over at Abby but then deciding to go for broke—“a*shole—who hear I did a little coaching and want to stick a great big stereotype on me, that I’m a certain way. You going to point to Rachel there and say she’s stingy or something about her beezer, her schnoz because that’s a stereotype or are you going to point over there at Suzie Mitchell and Mr. McIntyre and say they must be eating some fried chicken and watermelon all day while waiting on a welfare check? And Lottie there and Mrs. Locklear better stay away from the fire water. Mr. McIntyre has a tail and Rachel Silverman has horns on her head.”
“I would find that immensely attractive,” Stanley Stone says. “Her horns, that is, not his tail. No offense.” He nods at Mr. McIntyre who says none taken, all the while reaching his hand to rub the base of his spine to make certain there is nothing there.
“Well, first I am a person,” Toby continues. “I am a human, a woman; I was an English teacher and a bit of an amateur writer myself, but I’ll tell you things went so far off course I just didn’t even know where I was anymore. I think it was the beginning of the end, too. What once was generous compassion for high school students with all their angst and crap going on turned into pure agitation and fury. I didn’t get frustrated by who I am; I got frustrated by what they were reading and wanting to write about. I said, you’re too smart for all this shit. Dwarves and wizards and gnomes and vampires—big blue aliens with tails like monkeys. I said what I wouldn’t give for a good old-fashioned story about somebody losing his or her virginity or getting an abortion—Grandma died and for the first time I knew I was mortal or what about the one where the boy doesn’t want to kill a deer, but Granddaddy makes him so he can be a man. I was wanting to write something myself and it was dying to get out of my head but couldn’t find the door it was all so plugged up with that malarkey.”
“Malarkey is a fine old word,” Stanley says. “I want to know the derivation of malarkey.”
“I think of my head as my apartment,” Toby says because she is on a roll now, oh yeah; full speed ahead and that Abby soaking it up like a sponge and that is good. She won’t hear any of this in school, which is a disgrace. “I have lived up here in my head my whole life. I climb those steps every day and there is always a little voice saying, Welcome home, Toby. Come on in girl, you made it one more day.”
“I do something very similar,” Sadie says, and Rachel nods. “You know I do. Why Stanley and I were doing it just recently, weren’t we?” She nods and finally Stanley looks up and nods back, smiles at her and then at Rachel. They look at each other a little longer than normal until he grins, which makes her turn away. There is some chemistry between those two and Toby is hoping to stir it even if he is demented much of the time.
“Which is why”—she glares at Marge—“it doesn’t really matter where I live. The building and walls where I stay is just the foyer to where I really live.”
“Foy ay,” Marge corrects. “Some English teacher.”
“Whatever, look it up. I say foy yer. But I didn’t want to have to give it all up. I had worked so hard and all I was longing for was some whining little boy who didn’t want to kill a deer. I was craving one in fact, would’ve loved him and given him an instant A. Where did all the orphans go? Jane and Oliver and Pip? It’s an honorable and very dramatic position. And the girl who is upset to have a period. Where did she go? Or the one all torn up about losing her virginity? Where did she go? If they’re still out there, they’re keeping a low profile and hiding from all those getting boobs for Christmas and graduation and making themselves up to look thirty.”
“Yes,” Abby says. “That’s all some girls talk about. That’s all they want, too, boobs and a boyfriend.”
“Well, I’ll tell you what I wanted. I wanted dead deers and dead grandparents and busted condoms. I wanted anything other than a zombie or a shape-shifting demon wolf coyote bullshit. What am I to do with a bunch of aliens at Armageddon?
“I’d run like hell,” Mr. McIntyre said, and the sisters laughed and laughed, said they would run, too.
“Toby? Honey, I think you might need to settle down,” Sadie says. “This is not good for you. It’s in the past, remember? And now you are traveling all over the world on vacation and riding horses and such. Remember? And it’s recess now. Sit up straight and sip your tea.” Sadie is sweet and Toby loves her to death, but she still can’t stop. She has thought these things for a long long time and now it feels so good like opening Pandora’s box and getting rid of all that bad stuff.
“Some of them said about their papers, I meant to be vague, like that might excuse something that didn’t make a goddamned bit of sense. Or the one who said I just didn’t get what he was doing because it’s so brilliant. The aliens are from Erewhon, get it? And I said, Oh yeah, I get it and so did Samuel Butler who named a novel that over a hundred years ago and I suspect might have known how to write a sentence, too. Read and if you aren’t going to read at least do your Googling and maybe try to at least read about what has actually been written! I took my work seriously and where did it get me? Where? Where?”
“Fired would be my guess.”
“Yes, that’s right,” she turns, and steps toward Marge, Stanley meowing in the background. “Fired. There I was asking for a little reality and who wouldn’t be after Columbine? What teacher on the planet after Virginia Tech didn’t study her classroom windows and doors and the desk arrangements and hatch some plan for how she would protect all those young bodies, even the ones that got on her last goddamned nerve!”
“And then this one boy, meaning to push my button, this one boy named something like Montreal Fedora offered up some literary criticism on the death of Julius Caesar. He said and I quote: ‘Them dudes was mean as shit, weren’t they?’”
“And I said ‘Those dudes were mean as shit.’ That is what I got in trouble for. Some kid in there, probably Parker, Ramsey, or Tate went home and tattled, not about what was being discussed in class but that the teacher said shit. ‘Ms. Tyler, come to the office, please,’” she mimics. “‘Ms. Tyler, please come to the office.’”
“This had happened many times. I made a notch on my desk in fact every time it happened and one whole side looked like a fine-tooth comb. My principal was about fourteen and had never read Shakespeare. How do I know? I asked him one day. In that moment when I needed him on my side, I almost wished that I had not done that or that I had been a teacher who did not argue against prayer in my class, which I had done for years, or did not allow hats, but what in the hell did I care if they wore hats? Some of them might have been sporting bad haircuts they were ashamed of or keeping their lice locked in, what did I care? I didn’t tell on kids who refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance either. I figured we’d have plenty of battles to fight and I needed to choose the most important. I mean these are humans growing up and witnessing the Uterus as a competitive sporting arena. Who would’ve ever thought that? Irresponsible birth control will get you a TV show and a magazine cover. Octo, Sexto, Moron. Goddamn.”
“You should’ve been fired a century ago.”
“Et tu, Marge? I said to my principal, the boy king, I asked him, If I retire like you say I have to, who will teach these children? Who will guard the gate? Who can promise me they’ll tell the boys to keep their trousers zipped and tell the girls not to go promising things they do not intend to deliver. Who will teach birth control? Who will teach the value of literature? I said, Who will tell them nobody gives a shit about how dwarves and trolls have sex? If they had, the Brothers Grimm would have figured it out and already done it. They had every opportunity.”
“What I wouldn’t have given for a stained soul. One good stained soul story. Murder, suicide, adultery, a simple lie or betrayal. I wanted a stain or a tear in a soul and I wanted a vivid description of some place in the world that leaves me feeling like I was there. Like when Sadie tells us about her kitchen or when she takes us to places like India and Scotland. I mean we can all think of a place and we all have stains on our souls.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“I am. I am speaking for myself and you know what? I am proud to say that I have done so for most of my life. It might not have amounted to much, but I did my best. And these children with their new words and crazy names, God help them and love them, they are the next frontier and we have to trust that something good will happen. That someone like Abby there will remember me on this day and all that I have said.”
“I promise and swear that I will,” Abby says, and raises her pure sweet hand. It makes Toby feel like she might cry and she is already running short on breath and needs to pee like a racehorse.
“Thank you sweetheart,” she says. “You can save this world, Abby. You can make a difference.” She heads off to her room before anybody can see her cry. She waves her hand over her head, a signal that it ain’t over. She hears Marge say good riddance. She hears Stanley say, I love a woman with a good set of horns.
“Parents have also questioned your character,” the boy principal said that day in his office. He chose his word very carefully and he could not make eye contact.
“Oh really.”
“Yes.”
“And what is it they question? All these years and this is what I come to?” She stood still, waiting, and he still did not look up at her. She could hear students jumping up to peek in the high window of the door; she could hear bus duty announcements on the PA system and still he did not look up, his hand resting on a typewritten letter, a file folder with her name on it.
“A student reported you looked at her inappropriately.”
“Who said that?”
“I’d rather not say just yet,” he said to the blotter on his desk. “Does anything come to mind you’d like to say?”
“Sure. I say a lot of things and give them a lot of looks and who wouldn’t? Bare butt cracks with underwear that’s nothing more than a piece of floss running through. You want me to act like it’s okay for a young educated woman to squat and give a show? Is that what you would do? Sit there and watch while the young men are so torn, some looking away in embarrassment and others filling their eyeballs and then their pockets. All I did was say, Where is your self-respect, honey? Is it because I said honey? Was I wrong to call her honey? If so, let’s blame the South; let’s blame generations of sweet talk and euphemism.”
PEOPLE LIKE YOU, Marge had said. People like you. Like anyone even knows who she really is. No, the only thing she agrees with Marge about is the business about living as long as you can. Sometimes your only chance to beat out a prejudice is to outlive it. And she may not be able to live long enough for everything to be fixed and accepted, but she has already lived to see so much good change. And when all is said and done, that’s all that really matters, that’s all that is really important. She was a good teacher. She was a good daughter. She has some good friends and once upon a time she even knew real love. She drinks lots of water every day and she can recite important literature at the drop of a hat. She can climb the stairs of her head and give a recitation at any time of day or night. She has a good strong pulse and a heart like a V-8 engine. She has found the secret to living underwater. She has found her own Little Chicken Farm and if she had the chance to do it all over again, she would not ask for a different life at all. She has loved her life. But what she would ask is to be born into a different world; she would ask for an honest and accepting world. This is my letter to the world / That never wrote to me. Damn right, Emily, damn right.