Rachel
LUNCH IS NOT SOMETHING Rachel ever in her life really looked forward to or participated in. As a working woman, she almost always worked straight through or used the time in her office to catch a cat nap. There were early years when she used that lovely hour of time to stroll Charles Street, all alone, window shopping. House things. Baby things. Clothes she imagined wearing and art she imagined on the wall. And of course since everyone knew she wasn’t someone who invested huge amounts of time in lunch unless there was a meeting of some sort she had to attend, then she was missing in action. This made it especially easy after she had met Joe and began meeting him in the middle of the day.
Business. Over lunch. She never liked mixing any kind of business with anything social. She is someone who likes firm boundaries. She has always wanted to be a voice in her community and someone actively participating, but what she never was able to tolerate was all the communication that went into it: who is doing what when. Where are you? What are you going to eat? What are you going to wear? Humans who get themselves all tangled up in that kind of thing must get something out of it, but she never did and so to get out on a city street all by herself where no one knew her felt wonderful. She feels the same way out in the cemetery talking to the dead. Just her and the long dead and the birds and the trees. And now C.J., of course, who scared the holy shit out of her, but she’s harmless, a good kid for sure. A sad good kid, all pierced and dyed and tattooed like somebody from the carnival, who will help her go where she needs to go.
Lately, Rachel finds herself looking forward to going to lunch. The food is pretty good and they serve the big meal in the middle of the day. Dinner—or supper as so many of them call it—is at five thirty. Who in the hell wants dinner at five thirty? You don’t have to be Einstein to figure out how a place like this works; a later dinner would require a later work shift for those in the kitchen and so on. It’s a business. Like anything else in the world, old age has become a booming business and—like any other endeavor—there are some who put their hearts in it and do a good job and there are those who need to be fired. Rachel is someone who came in reading the fine print on everything and asking enough questions and filing enough complaints that they would know she is someone not to cross—ever. So she has completely readjusted her schedule, eating her big meal in the middle of the day, which seems a small thing if you know your laundry is taken care of and the food prepared well and someone is keeping the place clean and scrubbed. At first she would come and get her food and take it with her, but now that she is used to being with Sadie and Toby, she just stays and eats right there with them.
The people at Pine Haven know that she is interested in a low-fat healthy diet—as they all should be!—and it has taken her weeks, if at all, to convince Sadie and Toby that frying a vegetable defeats the purpose of eating a vegetable. She orders unsweetened tea, but it almost always appears at her place as something that makes her body shake with the syrupy sweetness. There will be a whole new form of diabetes attributed to just that—gritty and grainy to the taste. Pure sugar. It’s a wonder that they don’t all weigh even more than they do especially with the lack of exercise.
When she asked what on earth the deal is, Sadie explained tea was just always sweet and then somebody, probably a doctor or somebody, said if people were tired of looking huge and dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes, they might think of laying off the sugar and all the lard intake. “Then people began to ask for unsweetened tea,” Sadie explained. “For as long as I can remember there was just tea and then unsweetened tea. If you asked for tea, it was sweet. I don’t know when all this fuss over sweet tea started. Now people say it all the time.”
“It’s quaint,” Marge Walker said. “People from the outside associate that with our homeland here in the South and I like it that way. Who here likes sweet tea?” she asked, and practically everyone raised a hand.
“I like a Long Island Iced Tea,” Stanley said. “That’s a northern drink. And, of course, tea is from China and I am part Chinese.”
“What part?” Marge asked, and everyone immediately looked away for fear of what might happen so she immediately added, “You’re about as Chinese as she is,” and she pointed over at Lottie who was working her tongue in and out of her mouth and shredding a paper towel.
“I am Chinese. I’m a terrible driver and I abused my children. I made them study all the time and called them bad names.”
“You’re a bigot,” Rachel said. It was one of those days when she could not put up with his ridiculous comments for one more second and didn’t even care what might come back to her. “You’re a racist idiot.”
“Speaking of bad names,” he said.
“Kindness,” Sadie said. “I believe in kindness. Be ye kind one to another,” and everyone got quiet as they usually do when Sadie speaks. The only one to continue was Stanley Stone who asked Rachel if she would like to come to his room for Saki and origami and she had to bite her tongue and sit on her hands so she wouldn’t try to break his neck.
Now Rachel stops by Sadie’s room, but Sadie is napping. Rachel almost wakes her but then changes her mind. For several days now, Sadie has been skipping lunch, taking long naps after a busy morning so that she is able to rally again late in the afternoon. The last time she came to the table, she was wearing her pajamas under a big sweater, which was not like her at all. She has also begun to talk to people who aren’t there, pausing to answer the invisible switchboard off to the side of her bed that she works to plug and unplug saying, Hello? Hello? Toby has seen this, too, but neither of them mentioned it for a while. It doesn’t happen very often and when it does, it doesn’t last more than a few minutes. Sadie will shake her head, laugh, and then be back as clear as a bell. Toby said she saw no reason to tell anyone about it, that she herself was very open to all the ways a person might communicate spiritually. “Who am I to say that Sadie doesn’t really have somebody on the line?” Toby asked, and Rachel nodded her agreement. Now she stands and watches Sadie asleep with what looks like an old grocery list in her hand and Harley purring at her feet. He stares at Rachel with big green eyes, ready to bolt if she raises her hand the way most do when they see him so she just eases back out with a whispered promise to come back a little later.
“DO YOU THINK anyone here likes potatoes?” Rachel asks when seated, and looks at her little daily menu, picks up the pencil to mark what she wants. “I see potato salad and baked potato and French fries. I see sweet potato pie.”
“Must you always be so critical?” Marge asks. She says that she is offended by the way Rachel criticizes the food and therefore the whole South and all the southerners in it and that she bets there are plenty of Jewish Yankee foods that they could all make fun of.
“Maybe,” Rachel says. “In fact, I am sure you could. However, here’s the difference. You don’t hear me sitting around and talking about it all the time or plastering it on the front of every local-yokel rag and filling up the menu with one choice. Gefilte fish, gefilte fish. Gefilte fish salad and gefilte fish fried. My my, wouldn’t I sho love me some gefilte fish.” She knows she is being mean even as she does it and yet she can’t help herself. Sadie’s absence almost always affects her this way, taking away her reason and desire to strike a more moderate tone.
“Let’s be prejudiced against unkind people,” Sadie had said when the conversation turned to stereotypes and got Toby so upset. “Let’s be prejudiced against those who act ugly.”
“The gefilte, now there’s a monster of a fish,” Stanley said. “I caught me a gefilte one time. Big-ass fish long as my leg, fought it for hours there on the coast of Israel.”
Even Rachel has to laugh at that and it helps to swallow back the discomfort she has felt since leaving the cemetery. The two of them hold eye contact for a second before he continues with his little rant. It’s not often you encounter such brazen and boisterous stupidity. And of course she has learned that anytime she makes eye contact with him and seems to have a moment of understanding, it flips him out into the most absurd place, like a kid determined to shock and steal the show. The behavior is unacceptable as hell. She watches him, waiting to see what will come next.
“At the state fair,” he tells, “they had fried sweet tea and fried Coca-Cola and fried beer, which required a current ID.”
“In case no one knew you were legal, right?” Toby asks, and the whole table laughs. Toby can almost always make that happen. What a gift. Just yesterday she told how that child from next door said her poor puppy once ate a monopoly piece and her Daddy boiled it clean once it came out the other end. Toby said it had a get out of tail free card. “Get it? Do you get it?” Toby asked, and laughed so hard she had to excuse herself to go to the ladies room. It made Rachel think of that movie, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which she hadn’t thought of in years, the part where the Danny DeVito character keeps putting a hotel in his mouth. Nineteen seventy-five. That was one of their movies there at a little theater in Arlington. Godfather, Exorcist, Jaws, Taxi Driver. Not a very romantic backdrop but lots of moments that made her jump and lean in to hide her face against Joe’s shoulder, his big warm hand on the back of her head pulling her close.
“Hey, cat got your tongue? Dreaming of gefilte fish?” Stanley is tapping his fork against her plate. He stares at her in a way that makes her uncomfortable, like he can read her thoughts. The T-shirt under his rumpled half-unbuttoned dress shirt says ROYAL RUMBLE and has a picture of one of those ugly wrestlers.
“Hey, I’ve got a question for you, Stanley,” Toby says. “Did you ever know somebody named Art Silverman?” Toby looks at Rachel and shrugs a what have you got to lose look.
“Is he a wrestler on the circuit?”
“No,” Rachel says. “He was my husband.”
“Does he live here?”
“No. He’s dead.” Rachel is sorry Toby brought it all up but is still trying to decide if she’s ready to make the next move, to ask about Joe. Now that C.J. has heard her talking to him, the whole secret is feeling a little off kilter. “But he used to visit here in the summer when he was growing up.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell. Why would I know him?”
“He was quite the ladies’ man,” Toby says. “And you’re about the same age so I figure he might have competed with you.”
“I have no competition.” He raises his eyebrows. “In anything.” He grins at Rachel and so she looks everywhere except at him. She watches the Barker sisters off in the corner eating sweet potato pie they have decorated with M&Ms, which one of them had in her purse. “However, to the best of my knowledge, in those days there were only three Jewish families in this town.” He slams his fist on the table. “Look at me when I talk to you or I’ll pin you to the mat, sister.” He leans in so close she can feel his breath on her face.
“Fine then.” She turns to face him. “I wouldn’t expect you to know a goddamned thing I’m interested in, but I will listen.”
“The Cohens lived beside us and old man Berkowitz lived on the way to the beach and the Friedmans who owned that old department store lived on the corner of Seventeenth and Pine. Sadie can tell you. She knew them all very well. Lots of Jewish families now, but back then that was it.”
“None of that helps me,” she says, and then without allowing herself time to think and change her mind, she continues. “Art visited a cousin of his who was not Jewish,” Rachel says. They all look up as if struggling to figure this out. “People do marry out of their faiths, you know.”
“Not people who are saved,” Marge says, and adds more sugar to her tea. “People who are not saved do all kinds of things. Commit horrible atrocious crimes. Steal from their own family members—even their mothers. What was the cousin’s name? If he lived here, one of us will know him. My people have been here forever. My people were here way before the Civil War.”
“Well, let’s get it on the hysterical register,” Toby says. “Your family is old as dirt.”
Rachel swallows and takes a deep breath before she allows his name to roll from her tongue. “Art’s cousin was named Joe Carlyle.”
“Oh dear Lord,” Marge sits back in her chair. “I sure know who he is. Everybody knows who he is. Even Sadie would tell you what a rounder he was. Cousin, huh? Well, those are not good lines I can tell you that. ”
“Might be where Art learned all his moves,” Toby says, and laughs.
“Yes, might be,” Rachel says, and feels them all looking at her. She wishes she were all alone on a busy horn honking street or in Filene’s Basement with women throwing clothes and bumping around or all by herself in a chair in her room. She feels like she might cry, which is something she rarely does and it surprises her.
“He went with anybody who would look at him. And that poor wife.” Marge has put down her knife and fork and has her hands up to her face. “I don’t believe in divorce at all, but I believe that was a case where God would have told Rosemary to go forth and get one. I don’t know if she was kind of simple retarded–like or just crazy from living with him.”
“Art never knew any of that,” Rachel says. “He couldn’t have. He visited when he was just a young man.”
“Well, then he didn’t know him very well.” Marge looks at Stanley for confirmation. “Joe Carlyle was bad news his whole life. And you should have seen his obituary.” Marge looks right at her and Rachel has to stop herself from saying she did see it, that she has a copy in a book right beside her bed.
“He clearly wrote it himself,” Marge continues. “He used words like matriculate, which people around here just do not say, and the article said he was intelligent in three different places.”
“Like in the bedroom? In the car? And where?” Stanley asks.
“Three places in the article.” Marge raises her voice and then squeezes her lips together, clearly wanting to call Stanley something. “He said he was intelligent three different times and we all know if you have to say it that often, then it must not be true.”
“Intelligent, once, twice, or thrice, who knows, but what I do know is that he was a real son of a bitch,” Stanley says. “Screwed everything in sight and never paid his bills. He always had some kind of moneymaking scheme he was in on and had enough slick charm to get a little ways with it if he were dealing with someone from out of town. People were always trying to take him to court. He was as slippery as that Jell-O they keep trying to make us eat.” Stanley sounds totally sane and clear and intelligent—too sane and clear—and then all of a sudden, after long eye contact with Rachel, shifts his attention back to Marge. “Hey, Marge, did you ever have a BM to improve your mood like that visiting priest advised you to do?”
“What!” She pauses with a forkful of potatoes. “How dare you turn that ugly crazy talk on me!”
“He was right there. Didn’t you see him? Shaved head, pink golf slacks? Didn’t look like a priest at all, said the two of you had a baby together back in the service, an ugly-as-hell baby, too.” Stanley puts his elbows on the table and sticks his tongue out at Marge; it is the kind of thing that on an ordinary day might make Rachel laugh, but right now she is feeling sick.
“You need to go away.” Marge holds her knife up and shakes it. “They need to haul you off somewhere with the other crazy people. There is no priest and I never had a thing to do with Joe Carlyle, though I can tell you it wasn’t for lack of trying on his part!”
“Joe or the priest?”
“I don’t know what in the hell you’re talking about with a priest. I have nothing to do with the Catholic church and I never have. We were talking about Joe Carlyle and that’s all.”
“Marge,” Toby says. “That language.”
“Art never said anything like this. In fact, he thought a lot of his cousin,” Rachel says. “Are you sure that you’re talking about the right person? He grew up on Chandler Street and went to the Methodist church.”
“That’s him,” Stanley says. “And he was always hanging out at the river, always had several gals on the line at once. He had to marry Rosemary because she was pregnant and her daddy would’ve killed him otherwise. Rosemary was a good kid, quite a bit younger, who wound up in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Then she nursed him all those years he was an invalid,” Marge says. “The church practically supported them because he had burned up every cent running here and there to Boston and DC and New York and Chicago. Bunch of worthless big talking hot air. My husband, Judge Henry Walker, who never judged anybody, claimed that there was a place for the likes of Joe Carlyle.”
“Not worth two cents,” Stanley adds. “But his wife stood by him.”
“What choice was there?” Marge asks. “She wasn’t trained to do squat and had children to raise. How humiliating. If he’d been my husband, I’d’ve found a way to get rid of him.”
“Oh yeah?” Toby asks. “What would you have done?”
“Read my scrapbook some time and you’ll see,” she says. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat.”
“Or kill a spouse.” Stanley spears his baked potato and holds it up. “Remember that famous potato that looked just like Richard Nixon? Who does this look like?”
Rachel pushes back from the table and stands. “That’s a sad story,” she says, and turns. “That’s not what Art believed at all and so I am happy he isn’t here to hear all of these stories.” She walks quickly, but she hears Marge continue. “Truths,” Marge says. “It’s all the Lord’s truth. A bad seed.”
Rachel walks as fast as possible, knowing someone is following her. She gets to Sadie’s door and then stands there, hand on the knob. She wants to hear her reaction to Joe’s name. She needs to be near someone kind.
“Hey, what’s the deal?” Stanley Stone grabs her arm and holds on. “I’m sorry if we upset you. Kind of hard to talk about somebody you’ve known your whole life and not be honest.”
“There is no deal.” She pushes him away and feels the tears filling her eyes. “My husband loved him, that’s all. My husband spent years of his life, loving and respecting Joe Carlyle and believing that he was a wonderful man.”
“And maybe he was,” Stanley says. “Maybe he was good to your husband and deserves a little credit for that.”
“It’s a lot to process.” She turns the knob and peeks in to see that Sadie is still napping, Harley curled up under her arm, his big fat head on her chest, so she eases the door back and then turns to go to her own room.
“I’m sure,” he says. “I’m really sorry.” He puts his hand on her shoulder and she lets him. He kneads her collarbone, rubs and pats her, and she lets him. She takes a deep breath and lifts the hem of her shirt to dab at her nose.
“Is there anything I can do?” Stanley asks.
She turns and looks him right in the eye and he doesn’t go off or anything. He pulls her collar back into place and pats her again. “Nobody is all bad. I’m sure there were good things about him.”
“Yes,” she says. “There would have to be.” She takes a deep breath. There would have to be. She was there. She saw and knew the good. She once saw him rush to help an old woman back to her feet, picked up all of her groceries. He gave money to beggars, talked to people in a way that made them feel important. He talked about how much he loved his children and wanted them to be proud of him. He said he had never loved anyone the way he loved her. She hears a door open and sees big floral arrangements being brought in to the chapel where there will be a service for Lois Flowers tomorrow. They announced it right before lunch noting that in the chapel there is a photograph of Lois with a remembrance candle burning and a guest book for all to write notes to her children. She is about to ask Stanley if he grew up with Lois, too, but realizes he is gone, never turning back to his ridiculous statements as he usually does but hurrying way down the hall with his shirttail hanging out and then disappearing around the corner. It is like she’s been robbed, that time has played a trick on her and not a funny one. There is nothing funny about what she just heard, the way that all she believed in has been called into question. It is like believing in the afterlife only to discover there is nothing there.
Joanna
WHEN JOANNA LEAVES PINE Haven, she sees Stanley Stone’s son, Ned, across the parking lot studying the bumper sticker on her car. It’s a sticker C.J. had made after Joanna told her how she hates all those brag stickers about “My child is an honor student” blah blah blah. Her sticker is bright orange with black lettering and says: MY KID IS AN ASSHOLE AND I BLAME SANDHILLS ELEMENTARY. Ned is wearing tennis shorts and flip flops and standing with his hands on his hips.
Joanna had waited with Kathryn Flowers until the funeral director and two workers arrived to put Lois on a stretcher and carry her away. Kathryn had continued, the whole time they waited, to reach for her mother’s hand, each time startling, as if surprised to find the lifelessness there. Joanna has seen this many times, the dull quiet of a room after the fact, all the energy raised to such a pitch suddenly gone. Places always feel so empty right after someone dies, the sensation of a whole lifetime of people and memories disappearing with that last breath, all the air sucked right out of the scene. Kathryn was exhausted and said so, the many weeks of watching and waiting closing in on her.
“Thank you,” Kathryn said, “please let’s stay in touch,” and Joanna nodded and said of course, hugged her close as she often had, and as always, she knew that they will not stay in touch at all. It is too hard to stay in touch, too heavily laden to revisit regularly. They will see each other from time to time, brief glimpses and greetings that last only seconds and yet pull in all that has fallen into the past four weeks and the routine they have shared while waiting for Lois to die. Joanna will be at the memorial. She said how much she is going to miss Lois and she will. How could she not? And selfishly she will miss her daily schedule and time spent in a room that allowed her to see Ben’s house while sitting with a woman who seems to her to have been the perfect mother.
“So what have you got against Sandhills? You probably went there yourself once, didn’t you?” Ned asks when she gets close. “And who is your kid? The a*shole could be in my class.”
“No kids,” she says. “A friend of mine made that as a joke.”
“Funny,” he says without cracking a smile. The silence is painful as is his not making eye contact with her and not making any moves to step away from her car.
“I’m Joanna.” She extends her hand. “I was the volunteer with your mother when she died.”
“I know.”
“She was lovely,” Joanna says. “I always think of her when the roses are blooming. She knew everything there was to know about roses.”
“You saw and heard it all, didn’t you?” he asks. “What did she say about me?”
“She was very private. She showed me all of her little boxes.”
“Her garden is gone now,” he says, and finally looks up, eyes red, a vein along his temple visible. “Paved paradise and put up a parking lot, something like that.”
“I know,” she says. “I was sad to see that.”
“And my dad is now completely demented and can’t even do it quietly like so many do.”
“I know.”
“So what don’t you know?” he asks, eyes the same piercing blue of his dad’s—eyes that most have learned to avoid for fear of getting flashed or cussed out.
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” she says, and moves to open the door.
“Did you know that I would have a kid old enough for elementary school if he’d lived?”
“Yes.”
“And did you know I got a divorce and had a breakdown, nearly drank myself to death and almost went to prison?”
“Yes.”
“And does it even occur to you to politely say you don’t know any of this?”
“Not really. We all have stories.”
“Yeah, like you, for instance. Married how many times? Seven? Eight? Always in love with the town magician who has taken my seat at all the bars in and around the county.”
“Didn’t know any of that,” she says, her face hot with anger and embarrassment and who knows what else. “So you win. Feel good about it.” She gets in and slams the door. She cranks the car and waits for the blast of air from the vents to go from hot to cold. He doesn’t move so she finally inches forward and cuts the wheels enough to get out. His hand is raised, maybe to say something else, but she ignores him, resisting the urge to flip him off and to swing around like she might hit him. At least he makes it easier not to feel sorry for him.
One of the many therapy sessions Luke insisted she take involved unpacking the heart. You close your eyes and take every person and every thing taking up space in your heart out and set them on your make-believe lawn. Every grievance and relationship and project. And then when the space inside is empty and clean, you survey the goods and decide what to put back. It was Luke’s favorite exercise and one that she and C.J. have talked about many times since, laughing over the notion of whole corpses exhumed and expunged, exorcised. Joanna had told Luke that her imagined yard looked like Gettysburg or like that scene in Gone with the Wind when the camera pulls back and there are wounded and dead bodies as far as the eye can see—enough emotional carnage to keep the buzzards feasting for centuries. And then how clear so much becomes, like pulling old unrecognizable food from the fridge. Of course you need to throw that away. It’s old. It’s curdled. It smells bad so why in the hell would you keep it? Why in the hell would you want to chew or swallow it?
“Did they give you a mantra to say while you unpacked?” Luke had asked. “Or like did you have a song playing in your head as you cleaned house?”
“Get the f*ck away from me,” she told him. “That was my mantra. That’s what I said to ninety-nine percent of what I pulled from my chest. Just get the f*ck away from me.”
“Sounds like Alien,” Luke said. “You know when Sigourney pulls that awful thing out of herself.”
“Exactly. That’s exactly what it was like.” Leave me the f*ck alone. That is what she wants to scream at Ned Stone who is still standing there. Just the other day, C.J. told her about how Toby was stretched out on the floor of the exercise room in corpse pose to meditate and yelled at several people who wheeled too close to her head. Get the hell away, she said. I’m doing my savasana. It makes Joanna laugh whenever she thinks about it and how one of the sisters put a hand up to her mouth and gasped, clearly thinking savasana meant something nasty. She can tell Ned Stone thinks she is laughing at him. Fine. He’s a jerk. A sad jerk but still a jerk. She would have loved nothing better than to befriend him, to take the time to talk about and remember his mother, but who wants to spend time with a jerk? Leave him the f*ck alone.
She drives and then circles, takes deep breaths. She turns and drives past Ben’s house, a big, beautiful, old house, the front porch crammed with all kinds of folk art and odd chairs. There is a big silver wooden box at one end of the porch and she recognizes it immediately as the disappearing chamber. And the blue Saab in the driveway is definitely the one she has seen these recent nights. C.J. said that Ben’s wife was a total bitch. “Worse than I even thought, I’ll tell you someday.” C.J. was always saying that, I’ll tell you someday, and Joanna keeps a running record of all she wants to know: Who are these men who used to call her that she kept notes on and who is Kurt’s father? Who is this guy Sam she has started to mention and where does she go all those nights Kurt sleeps at Joanna’s house? It’s clear that there is a lot C.J. keeps hidden; and it’s clear that there are some very old wounds she’s still nursing. If only the inner wounds really were visible to the eye, you’d know better than to depend on those held together with flimsy sutures or you would immediately recognize and avoid those leaking puddles of bitter bile. You would scream and beg for help when you saw someone helplessly bleeding out all over the floor.
C.J. once said that if she can find a person who would never—even at the height of anger—or the lowest low take the pulpiest part of your heart and use it against you, then she could see being in a relationship. That is the person I want, she said. Otherwise, f*ck ’em. Accept no subs. I want someone as true blue and faithful as the moon. That’s who I will love. That’s who I will let get close to Kurt.
“Who did you want to be when you were a kid?” C.J. had asked, another game they had played. C.J. had already said that she wanted to be the Little Mermaid, but then, when she realized she was never going to have a father or red hair or a good singing voice, switched over to Judge Judy. She liked the way Judge Judy took charge and told everybody what to do. It didn’t matter who you were, if Judge Judy thought you were wrong and full of shit, she said so.
Joanna had wanted to be the Scottish woman in that movie The Three Lives of Thomasina—a beautiful woman who lived alone in the woods and who took in stray hurt animals and was thought to be a witch. Joanna owned a copy and they watched it one night, C.J. fluctuating between saying it was beyond cheesy to how much she loved the cat’s voice narrating and the way the cat came back, eventually pulling all of its lives together. “So be her,” C.J. said. “Start taking in some creatures. My friend Sam has tons of dogs and cats nobody wants. Get some warm bodies around here.” Joanna was sitting in a rocking chair with Kurt hugged against her chest while she watched C.J. eat the last of the pizza and thought, I have.
C.J. had said when she worked as a psychic at the county fair she learned how to look in people’s eyes, noting breath and pulse. It wasn’t hard to read people, wasn’t hard to give the gift of hope. Sometimes when the two of them were sitting there on Joanna’s porch, mini lights and candles and jazz playing, anything was possible. Kurt loved it at Joanna’s house and she loved the nights C.J. left him there to sleep over.
Joanna told C.J. that if she ever marries again (she seriously doubts this but if) instead of getting gifts, she wants people to take things. She will throw a big barbecue and say that everyone must take something on the way out—a vase or bowl or glass, a trivet or mug or bookend—candlestick, clock, linens, a book, a plant. In fact, when C.J. comes over later, Joanna will remind her. She will say that since she will likely never remarry, C.J. should just take something now. Part of unpacking the heart is getting rid of things you no longer need. And some things are hard to let go of. For Joanna it was knowing she would never nurse a baby, never greet a partner with the exciting news that she was pregnant. She once dreamed she nursed a baby goat, grateful amber eyes seeking her own as her milk let down and she woke with a feeling of exhilaration, the tingling sensation still in her breasts.
“Gross,” C.J. had said. “What does that mean? Like aren’t goats the bad guys in the Bible? Like lambs are good and goats are bad? Or maybe it’s because your last name is Lamb.”
“Maybe it’s just a dream,” Joanna had said, a little sorry she brought it up because C.J. continued to interpret for days after. “Pay attention if anyone says a word like bleat or cloven to you,” she said. “Maybe you’re going to meet a guy named Billy.” And she went from Billy to Old Goat to the abbreviated O.G., which she still uses when there’s someone she thinks Joanna should meet. Now Joanna starts gathering a few things she thinks C.J. might like: a cut-crystal vase and a silver ice bucket and some bronze bookends, A and Z.
Lois Flowers gave a lot of things away. Her daughter said that her mother was famous for slipping a bracelet from her wrist or a sweater from her back to give to someone who had complimented her. “People learned to be sincere,” Kathryn said. “Otherwise you just might end up with a mallard green mohair hat and my mother eager to see you wearing it!” How hard to even sum up Lois Flowers in her notebook. She brought forward more stories than anyone has since she spent those last weeks with Luke. She had helped Kathryn work on the obituary. A whole life reduced to adjectives and a list of accomplishments. They placed a book in the chapel for residents to write their thoughts. The adjectives that spring to her own mind are vibrant and generous and fun loving.
Joanna could only imagine what her obituary might say if she departed right now and perhaps that is what haunts Ned Stone. He believes who he is based on all that is said about him. Joanna should have told him that she is considered the Patron Saint of Divorce. People talk about her. They have ever since she returned. You look exactly the same, they say, or almost the same. Your hair is the same—like it might still be 1975—and not too much gray at all. People talk and she doesn’t care. If she had cared she never would have been able to come back and she wanted to come back, she needed to come back. Luke helped her get to a place where she could come back. People say she is the ship that keeps sinking, the tire that keeps going flat, the wine that turns straight to vinegar. She is a matrimonial nightmare, but all of those titles are so much easier to handle than having them know the truth, how long it has taken to get herself back, how her marriage to Luke, as unconventional as it was, was the greatest expression of love she has ever known. Why they are so interested is the real curiosity and so now she has decided to answer back in all honesty and then some. She can give them more than their money’s worth. In a nutshell, she first married a really nice and conscientious person her parents were crazy about only to realize she shouldn’t have. Her parents were thrilled and even told people how he was the best thing to ever happen to their family. Then her mother never forgave her. It was embarrassing. Who gets married and leaves in a year? She had wanted to answer that by saying it’s the person who knew even as she said I do that she didn’t, that’s who. But at the time it seemed easier to get married than to have to face the town and return everything, all those gifts and the china and the shit nobody ever uses. Then she was off and running in all the wrong directions for all the wrong reasons. Running is rarely the best choice and running without thinking most likely a disaster.
“This is why I’m so proud of you for being a single mom,” she told C.J. “Don’t ever get married unless you are madly in love and know it is the best thing for your life.”
“You assume I had a choice there,” C.J. said, and then batted away all the questions that immediately sprang to mind. “Another day,” she said. “A lot more wine and another day and maybe I’ll tell the whole story.”
“I hope so,” Joanna had said, the weight of Kurt sleeping on her own chest feeling so good. C.J. had revealed nothing about who the father was or even if he knew about the child. But she did say she wrote everything down in case Kurt might need to know things someday. She said she writes and writes and deposits it in the special safe in her bathroom.
“So finish the marriage story,” C.J. said. “How many and how many men in between? I’m still counting.”
And she told all, one thread at a time, unraveling and unraveling the people who moved in and out of her life like waves until she married the man whose wife had died young, leaving two sweet babies she helped raise for over a year until he fell in love with someone else. And then, finally, hopeless and fed up with herself, she drove to New Hampshire, overmedicated, and fell in the busted hot tub and got rescued by Tammy and married Luke and then Luke died and she came home just in time to patch things up with her dad and here she is.
“That’s some trip,” C.J. said. “Damn. You could have a reality show. People in town say you broke up two homes. Married a lawyer. Married a queer. Married somebody dying just to get his money.”
“Oh yeah,” Joanna said, and reminded how just the other day at Pine Haven she had told someone. “And don’t forget the one in prison or the dentist in Pasadena. Don’t forget the one who eats fire in the carnival and the orthopedist in Denver.”
“An orthopedist?” one woman who normally was hard of hearing screamed. “And you left him?”
“I bet if you took better care of your hair and clothes you wouldn’t have lost so many husbands,” Marge Walker said.
“Or if you stayed trim,” another woman—very overweight and out of breath—added.
“Or if you learned to tell busybodies to shut up,” Rachel Silverman said.
“Amen,” Stanley Stone said. “I second the attractive Yankee-accented broad with the slight stoop in her posture.”
“Trust me,” Joanna liked to say. “I was married to a doctor. And a lawyer and an Indian chief. A butcher and baker and a candlestick maker.”
“And a queer, too,” Stanley said.
“Yes, and a gigolo,” Joanna added, and then said, “I have always been loved by children, the elderly, dogs, and the mentally handicapped.”
“Probably not the best announcement to make if you want to get a date,” C.J. said.
When Joanna first came back to town, she said this sort of sarcastic thing often when someone began to quiz her. It provided an imaginary shield and now, she realizes, is not unlike C.J.’s piercings and tattoos and the harsh makeup she wears. “I’ve lived on communes and on ranches and worked as a maid in a topless resort,” she once said in the checkout line at Food Lion. What she wanted to say was that returning to this place was likely the most masochistic thing she could possibly do but she had made a promise to her last husband that she would return and build a good life for herself and she is true to her word.
“Why do you do that to them?” her dad asked, one of those last days when his mind was clear and he wanted to explain to her the importance of keeping the Dog House a simple enterprise—no burgers or sandwiches of any kind—just hot dogs. The dog and bun are a given; the creativity and choice is all in the condiments.
“I’m just tired of their questions. Tired of their looks. One human makes one mistake—”
“One?” He held up one finger and cocked his head to the side, eyes tired but kind.
“More, many! But that’s what I mean, one mistake that is never forgiven or forgotten leads straight to the next and the next and the next. What I learned is how to forgive myself and what I learned is I don’t give a damn if anyone else ever forgives me or cares about me. That kind of caring is what ruined me.”
“Your mother felt blamed.”
“Because I blamed her. I did. But now I have let it all go. Please let it all go. I loved her, Dad, and I love you.”
All of my husbands have been very nice people. That’s another line she likes to use when being quizzed. First of all, people don’t like when you say they were all nice because they are hoping for some dirt and second they want to ask how many but then decide not to; you can hear the gears of their brains clicking, smell the wood burning, and then someone won’t be able to stand it any longer.
“Damn! How many times have you been married?” old Mr. Stone has asked numerous times.
“In which decade?” she asked. He thought this was hilarious and opened his magazine to a centerfold poster of one of those awful-looking wrestlers. He told her this was good husband material—a real man with the real goods. How about that package? he asked. It was hard to believe this was the same man she had had to coax to his dying wife’s bedside, and no wonder his son was such an angry a*shole.
“Do you have kids from all those husbands?” Toby asked, her fanny pack stuffed with candy and tobacco products. Mr. Stone stopped to listen and unfortunately so did his son who had just arrived. She said she had a stepdaughter named Tammy in New Hampshire and two stepchildren in Chicago. She said she loved the children very much, but it was not a good match, which would almost always be true if your husband falls in love with someone else. Mr. Stone guffawed again and slapped his son on the back. Ned’s face flushed with embarrassment, but they were both rescued by the continuation of Mr. Stone’s actions as he snapped his fingers and then extended his open palm to Toby who unzipped her pack and put what looked like a piece of Nicorette into his hand.
“You’re right!” he said chewing away. “I’m a lawyer and I know these things. Why would you expect an institution to remain constant? Jobs don’t, laws don’t. What’s right for you in 1972 might not be right for you in 1974 and so on.” He paused and held his hand to Toby again and this time she gave him a stick of Dentyne, which he sneered at but still put in his mouth. “What year is this? How do you and your ex-husband get along?”
“Which one?” she asked, and he bent over laughing, Toby and several others joining in.
WHAT SHE HAD longed for that night in New Hampshire was to just disappear—Beam me up, Scotty—she wanted to be erased, an unnoticed mark like that one Twilight Zone episode where the astronauts disappeared. When their pictures dissolved from the newspaper, all memory of their existence dissolved, too. That night she wanted the impossible, to have never existed at all. Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in the power of magic? Do you believe that a normal ordinary girl can disappear?
She did. But now each morning brings her the knowledge and relief that—thanks to Tammy—she failed. A cup of coffee, a walk, the weather. There is always something on the horizon. The people like Lois Flowers keep her feeling aware and alive just as Luke said they would.
She would have married David, too, if necessary, but it all worked out just fine. His recent letters are all about his smokehouse and his mother who still sends women to his door on a regular basis and someone he met who was working there for the summer and plays in a bluegrass band. He writes about his morning walks with Tammy who swims every day regardless of the weather. He said he plans to get a puppy in preparation for Tammy’s old age and Joanna sent him a copy of her menu and circled the Puppy—plain with ketchup or mustard.
“So four times you’ve been married or three?” C.J. asked.
“Three. But keep my secret. Some people, like Marge Walker who was my Sunday school teacher a hundred years ago, have it up to seven.”
“I hate her,” C.J. says. “it’s bad karma to hate I know, but it’s hard. She has the worst feet. It’s like her soul is represented there, you know?”
She and C.J. agree on just about everything—except of course on pedicures and wax jobs. Joanna does not understand a French pedicure. Why, she asked C.J. would you want to look like you were growing out your toenails like Howard Hughes. C.J. said she didn’t know who he was and Joanna told her a rich eccentric who wound up at the end of his life eating ice cream and growing out his hair and nails.
“Sounds like most of the people at Pine Haven,” C.J. said, “except of course the rich part.” Now C.J. will routinely say she has a date with Howard Hughes when on her way to soak feet and clip toenails and it makes them both laugh every time.
“But,” Joanna told her, “what I really don’t understand is the Brazilian wax job. Why would you want to look prepubescent? And worse, what kind of guy finds this attractive?”
“Yuck,” C.J. said. “I never really thought of it that way and now I’m really sorry I did.” C.J. said she really needed to meditate on this and would have to get back to her.
The box on Ben’s front porch is a far cry from what they had used—old pasteboard television or air-conditioner boxes they got down at Western Auto and then spray painted or covered in pictures from magazines. Joanna was in charge of decorating their props and she spent hours working on everything, always so hopeful he would notice every sequin and feather. And now ladies and gentlemen, Ben announced, I will make this normal ordinary girl disappear. Joanna crawled into the damp pasteboard box too many times to count and then she waited, humid breath trapped and held within. Her heart raced when she heard his voice: Ladies and gentlemen . . . In the photo, he stood behind the screen. In the photo, he exists but there is no way to read him, no way to predict what is about to come.
She circles again and now his wife is out on the porch in short shorts and holding a legal pad. And then Ben is there behind her for just a second before he steps back inside. She imagines he is waiting there behind the screen, watching her, taking note of her passing by his house just as he has passed by hers. Or maybe he doesn’t notice her at all. Now you see her, now you don’t.