But her left hand had refused to go where she wanted it. When she tried to hold it steady it started shaking. She got more and more frustrated, then depressed, then gave up in disgust. She drank a bottle of red wine and slept the rest of the day.
After Aunt Charlotte finished telling me this, I got my dumb inspiration. I asked her what she had done with her days on the island before she started painting. Thinking this would give her ideas on how to while away the time until her wrist healed.
She stared at me incredulously, as though I had switched to an alien language. “Well,” she said bitterly, “let me see. For one thing I could walk. I walked a lot. Up and down the beach. I walked until I got tired. And I went over and over my rotten past and gave myself credit for finally breaking free. I walked until I walked out of myself. Then, as I told you, I had jobs. I worked for the vet and then with Lachicotte. And, as you know from your mother, a job fills up your days. And then I saw that woman painting Grief Cottage and I thought, ‘I can do that.’ And I could.
“Now, however, I can’t walk and I can’t paint, and there’s—well, I have other responsibilities. And I’m twenty-five years older. This mishap is like a preview of old age. It’s a foretaste. I can see myself like Mrs. Upchurch in her wheelchair next door. And what’s the point in living on for that?”
By “other responsibilities” she had meant me. Her ominous follow-up question was even worse. How could I get us onto safer ground?
“But even if you were old and in a wheelchair,” I reminded her, “you’d still be able to paint.”
“One Grandma Moses is enough for this world.”
“Who is Grandma Moses?”
“An old woman who started painting in her seventies because her arthritis was too bad for her to embroider anymore. She lived to be a hundred and one and there’s a postage stamp in her honor.”
“What kind of paintings?”
“Oh, nostalgic country scenes that made people feel safe.”
She pronounced “safe” in such a sneering way that I thought it wise to drop my safer-ground plan. I could have simply shut up, or cleared the table, but something egged me on. Since I had already done the opposite of cheering her up, since her future in the wheelchair was getting us nowhere, why not go for her rotten past?
“Why was it rotten?” I asked.
“What?”
“You’re always mentioning your rotten past.”
“I wasn’t aware I was always mentioning it. I’ll try to curb myself.”
“But I’m interested. We’re from the same family and I don’t know anything about anyone in it! Mom kept things to herself, and the few times my grandma visited us she didn’t want to talk about the family, either.”
“Ha. I can well imagine. So what did my sister—your grandmother—talk about?”
“What Mom and I were doing wrong and how we could improve ourselves. And how well she had done for herself. After she left, Mom always cried for a few days. She never said why, but I don’t think it was because she was sorry to see Grandma leave.”
“I don’t think so, either. How is it that some people can make us feel worthless even when we know we’re seeing ourselves through their eyes? Certain humans are poison. If I had to sum up my past in a few words, I would say: ‘Beginning at age five I was poisoned.’ End of story. But I can see from your face that’s not enough. Well, here’s a shrink-wrapped follow-up. There are very few family stories in this world. My family story consists of a useless cowardly mother, a poison fiend of a father, and an older sister who chose to pretend there was no poison in the house. Take your pick of the variations, down through the ages, of the good old family horror story. Try the Greeks, try the Bible, try Shakespeare, or choose from the abundant pity-memoirs on your local bookstore racks. When you are able to shrink-wrap your family story down to a few words, Marcus, maybe we will exchange further notes.”
Aunt Charlotte’s screed appeared to have converted her despair into an angry energy. I was congratulating myself for the turnaround, but then she asked me to uncork more bottles of red wine because she had run through all the open ones. I must have displayed some qualm because she harshly added, “This is a bad patch, Marcus. Just do it.”
A day or so later, more cases arrived from the Myrtle Beach wine shop. She must have made the phone call while I was out on my bike. The delivery man carried the cases in and I later unpacked and stored them, continuing to uncork them as stipulated. But the number of bottles for me to leave in her studio had now increased to three. It was then that I started wondering if it was time to make a phone call to Lachicotte. But Aunt Charlotte would hear me if I made it on the house phone, and this was in the first years of the new millennium, before everyone carried a cell phone. I would have to wait until my next bike trip to the island grocery store, which had a pay phone.
But would a phone call to Lachicotte qualify as disloyalty—going behind her back—joining forces with “the nag”? I was starting to have an idea about what Lachicotte’s nagging had addressed. I had unpacked some more boxes from my former life and looked up fester in my dictionary. “To form pus to fight off a foreign body.” For there to be pus there had to be some foreign body that needed to be fought off. Mentally, that foreign body was her depression. Physically it was alcohol. Though I wasn’t exactly sure how that worked. Alcohol was supposed to numb your pain. Wheezer had told me how in the Civil War they poured whisky into a soldier before amputating his leg. But though alcohol-numbed pain, could it cause another kind of festering underneath the pain?
I tried to find a disloyalty comparison from my life with Mom. If a phone call to Lachicotte to snitch on my aunt’s drinking was a disloyalty, what were the ways my loyalty had been challenged when I was living with Mom? Well, Mom wasn’t a drinker for a start. She could hardly move when she got home. Her feet and lower back hurt. I gave her massages. (The thought of giving Aunt Charlotte a massage seemed not only improper but bizarre. I didn’t want to imagine what she would say if I were to offer such a thing.)
The weak spots in my loyalty to Mom concerned anything in our life that would reinforce Wheezer’s taunt that I was my mother’s little husband. In those last years with her, I was always torn between wanting to give her what comforts I was capable of giving (my last Christmas present to her had been a drugstore kit of massage oils) and feeling shame when the comforts recalled Wheezer’s unforgiveable assessment of my home life. Whereas with Aunt Charlotte the loyalty conflict was between what would be best for her and how much I would sink in her estimation if I went behind her back and reported on her to Lachicotte Hayes.
While I continued to fret over these options, Lachicotte dropped by one afternoon bearing an oyster pie.
“These are farm oysters, the season’s over (ovah), but they work perfectly (pufectly) well in a pie.”