Notes about: Gregory Luke Wishart
Born: October 14, 1957 Died: February 12, 2007, 12:25 p.m.
Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire
The day was dark and rainy, trees and roads glazed in ice, one of those days when it would be impossible to look out and know the time; morning could just as easily have been nightfall. The ropes on an empty flagpole at the school across the street clanged in the wind. He did not want anyone there other than David and Tammy and me, of course. He said I had to be there to take notes, that it was my job and we had made a bargain. He said this would be my test run for what I will do in the future. He said that I needed to describe the black silk nightshirt he was wearing and tell how sophisticated it looked, that I should always remember him looking so sophisticated and elegant in both life and death. His favorite color was green, the shade of moss, and his favorite food was cherry cobbler. He asked to hear Debbie Reynolds singing “Tammy” and he sang along, lips barely moving, I hear the cottonwoods whispering above, and otherwise wanted only classical—no words to get tangled up in. He said it was odd how he had loved that character Tammy, and why? “A rundown houseboat in the middle of some godforsaken bumf*ck southern locale.” He laughed. “What was that about?” He said that he must have been southern in a previous life and that I should definitely include that mysterious detail in my notes. He said that Eddie never should have left Debbie. What was he thinking? Sure, Liz was hot, but Debbie was Debbie, the good girl, the girl next door, the girl who would be a good mother and a good wife and a dear and loyal friend. He loved Debbie as Molly Brown, too. Unsinkable, he said, and pointed at me, just like you, thanks to Tammy, and he asked to hear the song just one more time, that scratchy 45 he remembered his parents buying and slow dancing to when he was a kid, and he sang along, eyes closing with the drift of that solo violin at the end. He pointed to the corner just beyond his grandmother’s old braided rug he treasured and said that it was very calm over there—cool and calm. But then eighteen hours passed and he said nothing at all, just reached out as if plucking feathers from the air, his eyes wide open and staring. It seemed his breathing was a little bit faster whenever David leaned close and twice he moved his finger along my wrist where a watch would be if I wore one. He always said I needed to wear one so that I will never ever miss anything again, but I will always miss him. Every day I will speak to him. Every day I will remember.
[from Joanna’s notebook]
Luke Wishart
The light on the lake skips and shimmers like glass he can walk over, slick cool shiny glass, and his body tingles and moves without him, slick and cool and there is barking and singing and lapping, lapping, lapping, waves on the beach, and there is the clanging of the boat rocking in its slip while he waits in the warm water with the light whispering above. His grandparents are there at the outdoor sink, scaling and cleaning the fish they caught, and his parents are inside dancing, feet turning slowly on that worn braided rug, and when it gets dark they will all squeeze onto the bench at the end of the dock and watch the lights over the lake—the stars and fireworks and distant island, the glowing face of his father’s watch he reaches and holds as he leans in close and closes his eyes.
Rachel
RACHEL SILVERMAN IS IN the South—God only knows what she was thinking—and yet she thought it and she chose it and now she’s here in the middle of nowhere, the land of quilts and doilies, yes ma’am and no sir, Don’t mind me, I’ll just take a little piece of chicken, I love the neck or a wing, please and goddamned thank you, hot as hell and surrounded by some sweet-tea-soaked idiots she’d just as soon slap as listen to. Thank God, they’re not all that way—goobers and hee-haw and Judgment Day—but there are enough that are so she sticks close to her neighbor, Sadie Randolph, in the suite across the hall and the little lesbian from South Carolina who loves tobacco products. They were both schoolteachers, both still capable of and interested in reading the newspaper, and they don’t judge their neighbors, or if they do, it’s a judgment Rachel absolutely agrees with like the other day when Toby bit off the end of a cigar and announced she was tired of people trying to save her soul. It’s insulting, she said. They don’t know my soul from a cat’s ass.
So Rachel is here, as the big X on the map in the front hall tells her. She is here, Pine Haven Estates—retirement village and assisted living—Fulton, North Carolina, not far from the ocean and minutes from Interstate 95, just seven hundred miles from where she spent her whole life in Massachusetts, which was also just an hour from the ocean and minutes from the same highway. She is here, her last adventure. She has come to see the hometown of her one great love—a man who was not her husband and who likely never would have been. She had three glorious months with him in the summer of 1970, which was the year she turned thirty-nine. Imagine, turning thirty-nine at a time when people still made reference to Jack Benny and found humor in a person never admitting he had turned forty. Now you’d be hard-pressed to find a young person who had ever even heard of Jack Benny and now thirty-nine sounds like someone barely living, still wet behind the ears, their muscles capable of doing all kinds of things they take for granted.
They met during one wonderful summer on the Cape, both there alone, and then after that there were occasional afternoons and odd Saturday mornings—some stretches of time more generous and giving than others—until the winter of 1976 when he was out of her life forever. Still, it seemed she talked more in those stolen hours than she ever had and likely the only comparable thing she has known (aside from friends of her girlhood) is her time with Sadie, a polite kinship growing each afternoon and evening to longer conversations and confessions.
Sadie is from this town and is well versed in the history and the natives and yet also seems somehow removed from it all—perhaps by her active reading life or maybe by her many years living alone. Solitude can do good things for a person, she has said. The interior life is sometimes the only life. Rachel could not agree more. It’s how people have survived adverse conditions through the ages, and though one might long for a physical touch, it’s not a bad way to go. Certainly there are far worse ways to go. I am never lonely, Sadie said just the other night, and Rachel realized that she and Toby both leaned in closer, as if about to hear some great wisdom passed their way.
His name was Joe, a simple, easy name for a seemingly easy man, but he was far more complex than what appeared on the surface and he made Rachel’s life complex for a very long time, the difficulties far outnumbering the comfort, and yet still she chose to continue. Several times he even said: “So just stop. Just end it.” But she never did. Now life is simple, and now she has come seeking his South, the place of his boyhood, the setting of all those stories he told her when they burrowed into the far back booth of a Duxbury deli or some small motel down on the Cape. That life was complicated and fraught. That life left her heart pounding and her sleep fitful, so afraid she might be caught, afraid she might speak his name in the darkness of the bed where her husband of so many years lay. That life involved long days at work where she was a lawyer—one of a handful of women in her firm and therefore needing to prove her value twice as hard as the men around her. That life involved dark winter days and snow shovels and raw hands and dry skin. And it involved those secret meetings—brandy-laced and delicious, the smell of wet wool and diesel fumes when standing and waiting for the train, suddenly intoxicating. Anticipation and deceit—lovemaking and lies—cases and stuffed files and somewhere in there a uterus that needed to be pulled out and tossed away, and the years of debating about adopting or not came and went, one day an obsession and the next a distant memory, the room in that first Beacon Hill apartment that would have been a nursery, stripped and shelved, a library guests asked to see, stopping and perching on the velvet-cushioned bay as she often did to glimpse the Charles River and distant spires of the Longfellow Bridge while they marveled at her impressive collection of first editions. Just before she migrated south, she had a taxi drive her back to that old apartment, and she stood on the icy sidewalk staring up at the library window. They had not lived there in years and she felt a wave of time sickness to see it, years of lost hope seeped into the cold red brick. She could almost hear their voices—her husband’s, her own, the heavy black wall phone in the kitchen, the radio on top of the refrigerator, always tuned to the educational network, rattles in the windows and rainbows cast by the warped bubbled glass of the panes. When she got back into the cab, she felt she was saying good-bye to something living and breathing, a life that would continue to exist, one that she could reach back and touch if brave enough to do so.
But now life is simple. Now life is about coffee in the morning. Life is about meals and books and memories and the occasional silly television show she doesn’t enjoy that much and yet finds herself drawn to all the same. She does not give a damn about who can dance and who can’t, and she doesn’t recognize a soul they say is a celebrity except, of course, Cloris Leachman whom Rachel saw in South Pacific on Broadway in 1954. Sometimes there’s a good movie showing or some interesting musicians passing through. Sometimes she joins a bridge game or conversation or has that young woman with all the tattoos and piercings give her a pedicure and foot massage. She was never a pedicure type of woman, so resisting what she felt it represented in her own young womanhood—a type of woman who was not an intellectual and not a part of the workforce. And Rachel Silverman was definitely a part of the workforce. She was quite simply a force. People in the firm called her the Shark and at that time the Jewish women she knew who were all into hair and nails were of a different ilk to say the least. She was explaining this to the tattooed pedicurist who sat and listened and followed every word only to then wave a hand and say, “Aww, but that was ages ago. Everybody likes a pedicure now.” The girl’s own nails were charcoal gray, which she says is the latest, but Rachel chose something less corpselike, a pale pink with no frost.
“Oh, come on now, Shark,” the girl said. “You can do better than that.” She leaned in close to whisper, her breath like cinnamon and her body soaked in patchouli like Rachel had not encountered in ages. “That’s what Marge Walker always gets. Come on. Where’s the Shark?” Marge is the queen of all the traits that get on Rachel’s nerves, a tight-girdled, self-righteous moron.
The girl persisted and now Rachel has deep burgundy toenails, the color of a nice Bordeaux. “Sexy,” the girl, C.J., told her. “You’re no church lady.” She swatted Rachel with a rolled-up paper as she was leaving. “You’re the shark.”
Rachel got a little way down the hall and decided to go back and tip her a twenty. She is a child herself and raising a baby who is sometimes in there with her. She is probably making minimum wage with nobody there to help her. Rachel has seen her out in the arboretum smoking, a lonely wild-looking girl who could be beautiful by conventional standards but chooses to use dye and studs and cologne in a way that might repel some. Rachel certainly understands the impulse that would lead a person to do such a thing.
“I can’t take this,” the girl said, and Rachel reached and balled her hand over the girl’s so all those others sitting there under the dryers wouldn’t make it their business to know what was going on.
“You can give me a ride some time, take me to see some things in town.”
“This town?” She wrinkled her nose and laughed then extended her hand, gray nails with little pink dots on them, all kinds of rings and bracelets jangling. “Sure, I’ll take you. I might need some legal advice sometime so maybe we could do some swapping.”
“It’s a deal.”
“Oh.” The girl held on to Rachel’s sleeve. “My name is C.J.” She paused before continuing. “I see you sneaking out in the cemetery a lot.”
“Rachel Silverman,” she said in her best attorney voice. “And I’ve seen you out there sneaking cigarettes.”
“Yes.” The girl leaned in and put her forehead near Rachel’s so they were eye to eye. “So we need to be good friends. I totally respect your need to get out of here.”
“And I can’t say I respect your addiction, but I do understand it. God knows, I smoked for twenty years and I loved every puff.”
SHE AND ART smoked Kents and Joe smoked Camels, and once when Art went to her purse to look for a cigarette he pulled out a pack of Camels and looked at her in the strangest way. Her mind slowed to mush knowing the nylons she had not taken the time to put back on were in there, too, as well as a ticket stub for The Godfather and the pack of Milk Duds Joe had greeted her with there in the darkened theater. “Oh no,” she said, “I took my client’s cigarettes.” She reached for her purse and pulled out the Kents, took the Camels, stuffed them in, and snapped it shut. “I’ll have to confess.” She did not let a beat fall but pointed out the window to the beautiful sunset and asked what he thought about eating out. She said she was starved for Italian food.
You’re one good-looking feminist, Joe had said the first time he ever saw her stripped down to a nylon slip. They were out on Highway 1 near that ridiculous steak house he liked to go where it was like you were in the Wild West waiting for a stagecoach, enormous fake cows littering the grounds. “You are one hot broad canned piece of feminist.” Who would believe that? And though his words made her angry, and though she felt a wave of respect and then guilt for the smart progressive-minded husband she was cheating on, she didn’t say a word and instead gave in to the moment. Truth was she was a little bit flattered and when had she ever had such sex? Never in her life and when had she ever eaten such a steak? Big bloody slab filling her plate and she ate every bite like a starving pig; she was ravenous and in that moment greedy, she could not get enough. The snow was falling in big wet flakes and those fake cows stood there stupidly under the glow of neon lights. She had thought of that place not long after she moved into Pine Haven and C.J. set up a Christmas village in the entryway of the building where there was an enormous decorated tree. Rachel had always had an aversion to the gaudy blinking lights and incessant Christmas music, but she found herself drawn to that little winter street, the diner all lit and warm-looking with a tiny blinking sign asking you to come in and eat.
“Don’t you just want to go in there and order something?” C.J. had asked when she saw Rachel looking. “I’d get a grilled cheese like that one on the sign.” At the time Rachel was not ready to be friendly to anyone and so she said absolutely not. She had just arrived and was thinking that this might have been the dumbest decision she had ever made in the eighty years of her life. Occasionally, she still wakes in the middle of the night, confused about where she is, and is shocked with the reality of it all. She woke not long ago and had a second or two when she was back in that first apartment, the morning light so familiar to another time, and it took a while to get her bearings.
And then other times, she thinks, where else would she rather be? Why wouldn’t she want her final home to be here, right next door to where Joe is buried. She goes two times a day—once in the morning and then again late afternoon—and she saves up lots of things to tell him. Of course he is buried alongside his wife, which feels a little awkward; Rachel never met Rosemary and only once glimpsed a tiny snapshot in Joe’s wallet, something he didn’t know she had seen, so out of character for her to snoop and look and yet she had done it. That was when she knew that everything had taken a turn; she felt curious and jealous and demanding, and yet she had her own separate life. She knows Joe would have left Rosemary if Rachel had asked him to. Oh, it was all so complicated. You have to be young to even think about such complications and then they age you so quickly. She flew down to see where he was buried, that was all, and then she found this place, and when she inquired, there was one vacant apartment and it faced the arboretum that led right there to the cemetery and his grave. It was one of those rare times in life when it seemed an answer dropped right in her lap and she wrote a check for the deposit on the spot. Her few remaining friends were surprised, to say the least; she told her only real relative, her older brother’s son who looked in on her from time to time but whose life was full and busy in New York, that she was interested in the retirement possibilities of the Carolinas—the good hospitals and all the universities—theater and ballet where you can easily get tickets—no shoveling snow, no fear of crossing the street. What was harder to explain was her venturing an hour east of the golf resorts and two hours south of the universities to a small town no one had ever heard of. It’s near the beach, she had said. I can get there as fast as I could get to the Cape. And the facility is excellent, she explained, and they all trusted her and why wouldn’t they? To their minds, she had never made a false move or stupid decision in her entire life.
Now she is here and ready to explore beyond the cemetery. And she has a date with C.J. for tomorrow afternoon. They will drive to the other side of town and find the house where Joe grew up. She wants to see the river he talked about so much and she wants to see the fields out from town where he worked in tobacco as a boy. The girl has even said that sometime maybe she could take the Pine Haven bus and take a few of them to the beach. Joe loved the beach and had told her she had to see it to believe it, that he couldn’t wait to take her there, that the Cape couldn’t compare.
“You’d have to pay of course,” the girl said, her baby boy strapped to her chest like a little papoose. “But my friend, Joanna, the hospice volunteer—you’ve seen her if you haven’t met her—owns a hot-dog stand and says I can always eat free. I live right above it.” Someday Rachel will explain to Sadie and C.J. what it’s all about, but for now she acts like she has come to claim her husband’s childhood world. Sometimes she tells stories about Joe, things he said and did, a memory of the one-armed man who owned the old ice plant where he worked as a kid, a man known for getting women in compromising positions when he asked for favors. “I really need a hand,” he would say, which came to have all kinds of meanings. Then there was a bridge out in the county said to be haunted—Heartbeat Bridge—where the heart of a woman, murdered by her jealous husband, was thrown and continues to beat. Joe and his friends used to go out there at night and sit and listen, wait for the heartbeats that would send whatever girl was sitting close by into their laps and backseats. She assigns these stories to Art, her husband of forty-five years.
“That Art was a rounder, wasn’t he?” Toby asked. “Every story you tell is sex sex sex. I bet you did some singing of ‘How Great Thou Art’ or maybe ‘How Great Art Art.’”
“That’s not true.” Rachel sat up straight but knew, even as she fixed her firmest look, that she had told quite a few stories that made reference to sex and then the teasing expression on Toby’s face, like a fierce mischievous little gnome with cropped coarse hair, made her laugh. “I don’t know Christian hymns other than ‘Amazing Grace.’”
“You’ve gotta be kidding!” Marge said, hands on hips.
“I say I got you on that one.” Toby laughed. “I see Freudian slips and leaps all the time. Should have been a shrink.”
“Should have seen a shrink,” Marge said.
“I did and he said stay away from people like you.”
“I went to Heartbeat Bridge a couple of times myself.” Sadie blushed, put her hand up to her mouth and giggled. Everyone else laughed except Marge who was still stuck on how Toby was sacrilegious for using the title of a hymn in such a way and they should all be ashamed for telling too much and talking about S-E-X.
“This from the one who announces bowel movements like a sporting event,” Toby said, and laughed until her shoulders shook and tears filled her eyes. She said she needed to be excused and would be right back else they’d need a mop. She said she had drunk over a gallon of water that day to purify herself.
“It’ll take more than that,” Marge said, and turned her attention back to Rachel. “When did Art die and why are you here?”
“Art died a year and a half ago,” Rachel said. “And I am here because he thought of this town as home.”
Rachel has Joe’s childhood address and where he went to church; she knows where his parents are buried and where there once was a pavilion over by the river where he loved to go as a child. Sadie has said that the movie theater is still there; it’s the very one that Abby’s daddy got back up and running not too many years ago. The old ice plant where he worked is still there, too, but it’s not an ice plant anymore, just an old empty building, or was last time she was out. But that old pavilion is long gone; it flooded and rotted away years ago. She said what puzzles her is that she never in her life met a boy named Art and she has always prided herself on knowing everyone in town. How could that be? Did he use a different name? Rachel said he visited his relatives and then acted like she couldn’t remember their names. Pleading to have forgotten something here at Pine Haven is well expected and accepted. But she has decided that soon she will tell Sadie that she remembered Art’s cousin’s name. “Art had a cousin by the name of Joe Carlyle.” She practices saying it without doing all those things she has read people do when telling a lie, looking away, swallowing excessively, twisting their hands. “Yes, that’s it. Joe Carlyle. Have you ever known of a Joe Carlyle? Joseph Edward Carlyle.”
This is what she will tell Sadie when most people have filed off to bed and it’s just the two of them there in one sitting room or the other. Sadie is in a wheelchair so she doesn’t venture far. She has a business she has created where she makes old photographs come to life, and she makes things that never happened happen. She said it was a natural progression since she has been doing this in her head her whole life. She is so good at it people often believe her and those with dementia make the leap so beautifully that they sometimes look like they have been to heaven and back after a session with Sadie and what she calls her magic scissors and glue stick.
That is wrong! Saint Marge of the Negative Vindictive Sisterhood (or so Toby calls her) often says about Sadie leading people to indulge in fantasy, which she also thinks is sacrilegious. Marge is negative about everything, her doughy face permanently etched in a frown, every suggestion and thought negated unless it involves her relationship with Jesus who to hear her tell it, thinks she walks on the water. Rachel has suggested Sadie make a picture for Marge where Marge is the Madonna or maybe Marge hanging on the cross, Marge rising from the dead.
“I can make you a memory and I can make a dream come true,” Sadie had said. “But I cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”
“She’s a sow all right,” Toby had said, and gestured toward Marge, who was ushering in a whole flock of children from her Sunday school class. They had come, she said, for fun and fellowship with some senior citizens and to get credit at their schools. They had the lovely idea that everyone should name his or her apartment or room like you might a home at the sea or a bedroom in a bed and breakfast. “For instance,” Marge said, and held up her hand to get everyone’s attention. She was wearing a faux-denim pantsuit with lots of swirls and paisley designs appliquéd that reminded Rachel of the one and only time she ever went to Las Vegas. Art had a business conference and won several thousand dollars. She played the slot machines and sat by the pool and complained about how garish it all was the one time she reached Joe on his work line. It was snowing in Boston and Rosemary was up for a few days. They were having a friend of his in for dinner and she couldn’t help but wonder which friend. Someone she knew? It made her so jealous to hear and yet there she was in Vegas with her husband; there she was with a sack full of quarters and tickets for several shows and a heart as dry and empty as the desert. Why does she remember such things, bits of memories popping in like little commercials of another time? Why does she feel so strongly that split-screen life of gray wet snow and hot blinding desert?
“Listen now,” Marge said again, louder and clearly getting annoyed at that crazy old Stanley Stone who was asking those children to feel his thin white bicep. “You will all choose a name that means something special to you. For instance, my apartment will be called—”
“The Extralarge Marge Barge,” Stanley called out, and all the children laughed. “The Kingdom of Boredom.”
Her face flushed a deep pink and she heaved a big sigh. “I will pray for those lacking social graces and I will name my apartment Camelot, because I have always been told that I bear a striking resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy.”
The polite people looked away when she said this, but Stanley and all the children and Toby started laughing and couldn’t stop. “She was Catholic, you know,” Toby said.
“But there were things to admire, too,” Marge said. “I am more open-minded than you think!”
“Yeah, right. But here’s some more real history for you,” Toby offered. “Speaking of presidential places. FDR first called Camp David ‘Shangri-La,’ like in one of my favorite novels, Lost Horizon by James Hilton.”
“Toby is one of the smartest people living here,” Sadie told Rachel, and before she could say that this was quite obvious, one resident had named her suite Shangri-La and another named hers Camp David. Then one pounced on Tara and another Twelve Oaks, leaving several other unimaginative ones disappointed. The one who got Tara now spends her time striking a pose and saying things like “I’ll never be hungry again!” only to have Stanley Stone reply with “That’s because you eat all the goddamn time. And not even good stuff. I see you eating old mess like Twinkies.” The young girl assigned to him suggested he name his place something that spoke to his legal profession, but he said his apartment is called Hell in a Cell, like what he saw on wrestling. He said he planned to invite people in for matches. He winked at Rachel when he said this and she ignored him. “My second choice is the Love Machine or A Taste of Honey after my favorite song.” He winked and again she ignored him. When he heard that her given name was Rachel Naomi Gold and that she then married a Silverman, he said that she was sliding downward in the elements. “Looking for Mr. Bronze, I suspect,” he said. “Third place. However, if you keep on sliding, then eventually you’ll find me—the Stone.”
“Thank you,” she said. “The Stone Age makes sense for you.”
The Barker sisters, who Sadie says never married and ran their family’s laundry service for over fifty years, didn’t understand the assignment and were thinking of names of candy—gumdrop, jelly bean, SweeTarts. Butterfinger, Milky Way, Snickers. Sweet and lost in their dementia, they are always sitting by the front door to greet whoever enters, the bands they wear on their wrists and ankles to keep them in the building often setting off alarms. Daisy, the younger of the two, a dainty-faced little thing with a great big bottom, crochets all different kinds of cookies and sells them for a quarter; then she gives all of the money to Millie, the one with Down syndrome, for Pepsi-Colas. The older sister, Vanessa, is overweight and nearly blind, her yellow white hair slicked back and often held with a little pink barrette. She sat dozing through most of the discussion only to pipe up at the end to say “Mounds,” which is what the sign on their door says.
Back during the bicentennial when people were hot to put out plaques and name their homes, Joe said he would love to put a sign up in front of his house that said YE OLDE PIECE OF SHIT MORTGAGED TO THE MAX—so when they asked Rachel she said, “My Apartment”; she whispered to Sadie, “Piece o’ Shit,” and they both got a big laugh. “My Apartment or Piece o’ Shit” she announced to the soured-looking girl assigned to her. “You pick.”
Toby said she was was torn between the Ponderosa and the Little Chicken Farm, which was from one of her very favorite movies based on the favorite novel she had already mentioned. She said she used to always have her English classes watch the Frank Capra version of Lost Horizon. She chose the Little Chicken Farm, which relieved Rachel not because she gave a damn what the name was but because Toby was able to make a quick decision. Rachel hates indecision and always has. She gets so impatient when they go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth; some of these around here cannot make a decision or deliver a plain simple sentence to save their lives. You ask what they had for dinner and they have to go back to childhood to explain why they have never liked spinach and so on. It takes goddamned forever to tell one simple thing that ought to take thirty seconds; and everybody has to talk whether they have something worth saying or not. Rachel wants to say: Don’t call me until you have reduced your thoughts to the lowest common denominator. Call with something definite. If I hear you wandering and stammering and figuring while I’m sitting there, I’ll shut the door or hang up on you. Life is too short to listen to all that mess.
“You never could’ve sat through a faculty meeting at my school,” Toby told her. “You’d’ve blown a big gasket for sure.”
The other thing that has gotten on her last nerve lately is the way so many people say MassaTOOsetts. Joe did that, too; it was the only thing wrong with him that she could tell. She wants to scream MassaCHOOsetts, choo choo choo, not TOO. And now this. Rachel never would have imagined that she would someday be a service project for adolescent girls and then there came one tapping on her door wanting her to make some ridiculous origami representation of herself. “You know,” Rachel told her. “The real Christian thing would be if you children just came and visited and listened to what we could teach you. Come because you like us and want to spend time with us, not to get your stupid points for school that you’ll talk all about in your college-entry essay. Don’t bullshit me—I know what this is all about. I have lost some of my physical abilities but none of my mental ones, okay? If I were the real reason you were coming, then we would be doing something I am interested in. Maybe we would read and discuss current events or we might decide to buy a lottery ticket and be creative with our number selection. Maybe we would watch something like It Happened One Night or read something like The Scarlet Letter or The Awakening and discuss the ever-evolving roles of womanhood in film and literature?” The child stood and glared back at her, a clipboard in her hand with all kinds of fancy origami paper. “Like that girl over with Sadie? She comes all the time. She isn’t assigned to come, she just does it. And do you know why? She likes us. She likes to be with us.”
“She’s a loser,” the girl said. “You old guys are her only friends.”
“Well, she could do a lot worse,” Rachel said. “And we all are crazy about her. We all think she is”—she paused, that little priss not backing down and not even blinking those big blue eyes—“better than any child who has ever entered this place.”
CLOVER DEN. THERE’S a nice name. That was one of the spots they met a couple of times, a little dark hole in the wall, but it was risky, near Scollay Square, a little too close to where she might see someone she knew. But now she thinks that if she had decided to participate, she would have made a sign that said CLOVER DEN, and the picture she would love for Sadie to create is one of herself with Joe, the two of them sitting back in that dark booth on a late-winter afternoon. They were such an unlikely couple and there is such power in the relationship that never takes place in a permanent way, the “mights” romantically overwhelming all that likely would have been truth. But still you hold on. Even now, she hears his slow, easy speech, the way it rolled like waves that pulled her in close only to then push her back, rolling with temptation and trepidation. She remembered everything he had ever said to her and was always looking for hidden messages; even now, she is looking for messages, thinking she might find something meant just for her in one of his favorite places, the same way she pored over the obituary that arrived in her mail one day—his return address in Fulton, North Carolina, but not his handwriting—a typed and copied note attached with a paper clip: Your address was in Joe’s book. And then there he was, a photograph much younger than when she knew him. He was born and raised there. He had two children. He was survived by a wife. She heard Art coming up the front steps and so she tucked it away in a copy of Jane Eyre she pulled from the shelf and did not come back to it for several days. She had to wait for a good time when she knew Art would be gone and would not come in to find her there, maybe crying, who knew? The plotting to read and reread his obituary was not unlike all the times she had plotted to meet him. And then just about the same time Art got sick, another letter came from that same address; that time it was the obituary for Rosemary—a short, simple paragraph of facts—no note attached, and she couldn’t help but wonder if whoever sent it knew who she was. Perhaps Rosemary had asked that it be sent to her. She had no idea just as she didn’t know how much time she had left with Art, but what she did know was that now she could venture southward if she wanted. She could explore all that Joe had ever told her about and no one on the face of the earth would know who she was or why she was there.
And so she is here—as the sign up front tells her—here at Pine Haven—home of lard, Jesus, sugared-up tea and enough meshuggeners to fill Fenway Park. She is here, in the land of Joe.
Sadie has said that Stanley Stone used to be one of the finest most dignified gentlemen the town had ever seen though that is hard to believe given his unkempt appearance and the hateful way he turns on people. One minute he will wink and smile at Rachel and then the next minute say something completely insulting and rude.
“He knows everybody in town,” Sadie said. She told how he also grew up there, a very distinguished lawyer with a lovely wife who was known for her rose garden and the way she opened it to June brides to come and pick what they needed. He himself was in the Kiwanis and was always the chief pancake flipper for their big Pancake Supper once a year. But who would know that now? There’s some cruelty for you. He’s still handsome but not always together in the mind.
“Together in the mind?” Rachel said. “How about insane, crazy as a bat.” She was about to recount how she heard him talking to his son like the young man might be a slave or a dog—you don’t know shit from Shinola, he said—but then she thought better. “Did you say he grew up here?”
“Yes, and his parents before him.” And then Sadie put down her scissors and glue stick so she could clap her hands. “If anybody in this town ever knew your Art, he would be the man,” she said. “And every now and then he remembers. Every now and then I see a glimmer of the old Stanley Stone. And you’re both lawyers. “And”—Sadie lowered her voice—“I see him watching you all the time lately. I think he has a little spark for you.”
Rachel felt her face flush and it surprised her. She has certainly noticed him ogling her but also thought he might be half blind or something since so many of them are. Besides, no matter what he used to be or how physically attractive he could be if he tried, what in the hell would she do with some angered lunatic? Who needs a lunatic? Unless, of course, he would remember Joe. And whatever he remembers might be worth a little of her time. She has plenty of time. “Well, maybe I’ll ask him, then.”
“Definitely you should,” Sadie said. “Maybe it will help me remember him. I’ll roll over there with you, too, but first I have to finish Toby’s picture.” She waved at the door where Toby was waiting, hands on hips, boots turned outward. Her fanny pack was full, pieces of cellophane sticking out of the zipper. “Look, Toby,” Sadie said. “Here you are at the Taj Mahal.”
“Wow, would you look at that.” Toby shook her head in awe and motioned for Rachel to look. “Thanks to Sadie here, I have been just about goddamn everywhere. “
“Everywhere,” Sadie echoed, and laughed. Rachel has figured out that Sadie is someone who never curses but loves to hear others do it. The two of them were waiting for her response, here at Pine Haven. Pine Haven, North Carolina, right beside Whispering Pines Cemetery where the love of her life is buried and where in a little bit she will slip away without anyone taking note and sit on a stump nearby and tell him all about her day. There is no snow outside. It is summer and the sun is shining and she has left the life she always knew to come here to Pine Haven. Sugar-filled tea and long, slow syllables and Jesus every way you can get him.
“See?” Toby tapped the toe of her boot waiting. “That’s me at the Taj Mahal. Sadie is such a good artist, nobody would ever see the glue that put me there. See?”
“Yes,” Rachel said, and stepped closer, feeling more like a schoolgirl than she ever did when she was one. “It’s the most incredible thing I have seen in years.” She paused, feeling for a moment like she might cry, which she has not done since leaving Boston, looking down from the plane with the knowledge that most likely she would never see that place again. “Really, Sadie, you are a beautiful genius.”
“Ha, told you,” Toby said, and Sadie blushed and shook her head.
“I am so flattered. Thank you so much,” she said. “I know there are people doing it all with computers. There is better work than mine, I am sure, but when I pick up my scissors and glue, I am transported to another place. It always happens to children that way. Just give them some glue and paper and crayons and they can make a whole wonderful world.” Sadie said she needed a little rest after all the work and excitement and she would see them at lunch.
Now Rachel pulls her door shut to My Apartment and makes her way down the hall. She will slip out the side door and then cross the parking lot. It’s earlier than usual, but whatever just stirred in her has left her feeling restless and anxious and a little bit sad. She passes the soda machine where Millie sits all day, guarding the machine and begging money. She gives her all the change in the pocket of her skirt and keeps walking. She hears the music long before she gets to Hell in a Cell. Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. He plays it nonstop and it puts her in a time warp each and every time. The door is half open and she can see him sitting in his chair and staring out the window; it’s unusual to see him so quiet, looking so handsome and pensive and normal in a way you don’t notice when he’s flexing his arms and talking about wrestling or acting hateful and rude. She walks fast so he won’t see her and call out something obscene.
“A Taste of Honey,” “Whipped Cream,” “Tangerine,” “Ladyfingers”—“Is this an album or a menu?” Art had asked. It was 1965 and they played that album to death. She pushes open the door and steps into the sunlight. There is a hearse parked and hidden in the shade of the tall wax-myrtle hedge; it seems there almost always is, someone leaving in a bag. It’s the kind of thing Rachel never mentions to anyone else. Why mention that elephant in the room. A gangly boy with long auburn hair is on a skateboard, and their little friend, the one that terrible girl called a loser, is sitting on the curb watching him. The children don’t see her and she walks quickly; she feels beckoned by the shade and damp moist undergrowth as she makes her way through the arboretum, the trumpet and cross vines in full bloom, jasmine, wisteria. It was 1965 and she and Art had attended Norman Thomas’s big birthday celebration the year before. They had sent him money for his presidential campaign. Art shook his hand and told him that his book, Is Conscience a Crime?, was a masterpiece. They applauded his stance on birth control, ironically since nature had taken care of that for her. They admired the way he stood against segregation long before it was even something in the news. They protested Vietnam. It was 1965, and she wore short dresses and leather boots and she had a shoulder-length fall that she clipped onto her own hair and then tied a long scarf up at her hairline. She was never into high fashion, but she did latch onto what suited her and then wore it in a way that made it all her own. Like the way she now likes to roll up her slacks in neat pedal-pusher cuffs. She did it so she wouldn’t pick up twigs and burrs in the cemetery, but then she got so many compliments from people like that young pedicure girl that she kept doing it and now others are copying her. Even Marge has rolled her pants up a couple of times, which says there may be hope for everyone.
“Green Peppers.” “Butterball.” “Lollipops and Roses.” It was 1965 and she had never even heard of Joe Carlyle. It was 1965 and life seemed easier. Her parents were alive and so was her brother; her bones were hard and strong and her vision perfect. She was a young married woman with a professional career and she thought that one day she would have it all, a career and a baby and a house on the Cape. It was 1965 and she was filled with hope, lush pots of ivy spilling from her window boxes as she leaned out late in the day to see the sunset, to smell the river, to watch her husband turn the corner as he headed home. She was so alive.