She points it at the TV and presses the button. Nothing happens. “This new TV Bennett got me isn’t worth a toot,” she says, as though Cathy, or someone, is still there to listen. “You have to turn on the TV and then this other box underneath. But even when I manage to get the darn TV on, I can never find any of my good shows.”
She has put down the remote just as Cathy emerges from the building, on the way to her car. Della follows her progress with perplexed fascination. Part of why she discouraged Cathy from coming out now wasn’t about the weather. It’s that Della isn’t sure she’s up to this visit. Since her fall and the hospital stay, she hasn’t felt too good. Sort of punky. Going around with Cathy, getting caught up in a whirlwind of activity, might be more than she can handle.
On the other hand, it would be nice to brighten up her apartment. Looking at the drab walls, Della tries to imagine them teeming with beloved, meaningful faces.
And then a period ensues where nothing seems to happen, nothing in the present, anyway. These interludes descend on Della more and more often lately. She’ll be looking for her address book, or making herself coffee, when suddenly she’ll be yanked back into the presence of people and objects she hasn’t thought about for years. These memories unsettle her not because they bring up unpleasant things (though they often do) but because their vividness so surpasses her day-to-day life that they make it feel as faded as an old blouse put through the wash too many times. One memory that keeps coming back lately is of that coal bin she had to sleep in as a child. This was after they moved up to Detroit from Paducah, and after her father ran off. Della, her mom, and her brother were living in a boardinghouse. Her mom and Glenn got regular rooms, in the upstairs, but Della had to sleep in the basement. You couldn’t even get to her room from inside the house. You had to go out to the backyard and lift doors that led down to the cellar. The landlady had whitewashed the room and put in a bed and some pillows made from flour sacks. But that didn’t fool Della. The door was made of metal, and there weren’t any windows. It was black as pitch down there. Oh, did I ever hate going down into that coal bin every night! It was like walking right down into a crypt!
But I never complained. Just did what I was told.
Della’s little house, in Contoocook, was the only place that was ever hers alone. Of course, at her age, it was getting to be a headache. Making it up her hill in the winter, or finding someone to shovel the snow off her roof so it didn’t cave in and bury her alive. Maybe Dr. Sutton, Bennett, and Robbie are right. Maybe she’s better off in this place.
When she looks out the window again Cathy’s car is nowhere to be seen. So Della picks up the book Cathy brought her. The blue mountains on the cover still baffle her. But the title’s the same: Two Old Women: An Alaska Legend of Betrayal, Courage and Survival. She opens the book and flips through it, stopping every so often to admire the drawings.
Then she goes back to page one. Focuses her eyes on the words and tracks them across the page. One sentence. Two. Then a whole paragraph. Since her last reading, she’s forgotten enough of the book that the story seems new again, yet familiar. Welcoming. But it’s mostly the act itself that brings relief, the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.
* * *
Like so many books Della has read over the years, Two Old Women came recommended by Cathy. After she left the College of Nursing, Cathy went to work at a bookstore. She was remarried by then and had moved with Clark into an old farmhouse that she spent the next ten years fixing up.
Della memorized Cathy’s schedule and stopped in during her shifts, especially on Thursday evenings when customers were few and Cathy had time to talk.
That was the reason Della chose a Thursday to tell Cathy her news.
“Go on, I’m listening,” Cathy said. She was pushing a cart of books around the store, restocking, while Della sat in an armchair in the poetry section. Cathy had offered to make tea but Della said, “I’d just as soon have a beer.” Cathy had found one in the office refrigerator, left over from a book signing. It was after seven on an April night and the store was empty.
Della started telling Cathy how strangely her husband had been acting. She said she didn’t know what had got into him. “For instance, a few weeks ago, Dick gets out of bed in the middle of the night. Next thing I know, I heard his car backing down the drive. I thought to myself, ‘Well, maybe this is it. Maybe he’s had enough and that’s the last I’ll see of him.’”
“But he came back,” Cathy said, placing a book on a shelf.
“Yeah. About an hour later. I came downstairs and there he was. He was down on his knees, on the carpet, and he’s got all these road maps spread out all over.”
When Della asked her husband what on earth he was doing, Dick said that he was scouting for investment opportunities in Florida. Beachfront properties in undervalued areas that were reachable by direct flights from major cities. “I told him, ‘We’ve got enough money already. You can just retire and we’ll be fine. Why do you want to go and take a risk like that now?’ And do you know what he said to me? He said, ‘Retirement isn’t in my vocabulary.’”
Cathy disappeared into the self-help section. Della was too engrossed in telling her story to get up and follow. She hung her head dejectedly, staring at the floor. Her tone was full of wonder and outrage at the ideas men latched on to, especially as they got older. They were like fits of insanity, except that the husbands experienced these derangements as bolts of insight. “I just had an idea!” Dick was always saying. They could be doing anything, having dinner, going to a movie, when inspiration struck and he stopped dead in his tracks to announce, “Hey, I just had a thought.” Then he stood motionless, a finger to his chin, calculating, scheming.
His latest idea involved a resort near the Everglades. In the Polaroid he showed Della, the resort appeared as a charming but dilapidated hunting lodge surrounded by live oaks. What was different this time was that Dick had already acted on his idea. Without telling Della, he’d taken a mortgage on the place and used a chunk of their retirement savings as a down payment.
“We are now the proud owners of our own resort in the Florida Everglades!” he announced.
As much as it pained Della to tell Cathy this, it gave her pleasure as well. She held her beer bottle in both hands. The bookstore was quiet, the sky dark outside, the surrounding shops all closed for the night. It felt like they owned the place.
“So now we’re stuck with this doggone old resort,” Della said. “Dick wants to convert it into condos. To do that, he says he has to move down to Florida. And as usual he wants to drag me with him.”
Cathy re-emerged with the cart. Della expected to find a look of sympathy on her face but instead Cathy’s mouth was tight.
“So you’re moving?” she said coldly.
“I have to. He’s making me.”
“Nobody’s making you.”
This was spoken in Cathy’s recently acquired know-it-all tone. As if she’d read the entire self-help section and could now dispense psychological insight and marital advice.
“What do you mean, no one’s making me? Dick is.”
“What about your job?”
“I’ll have to quit. I don’t want to, I like working. But—”
“But you’ll give in as usual.”
This remark seemed not just unkind but unjust. What did Cathy expect Della to do? Divorce her husband after forty years of marriage? Get her own apartment and start dating strange men, the way Cathy was doing when they first met?
“You want to quit your job and go off to Florida, fine,” Cathy said. “But I have a job. And if you don’t mind, I’ve got some things to do before closing up.”
* * *
They had never had a fight before. In the following weeks, every time Della considered calling Cathy she found that she was too angry to do so. Who was Cathy to tell her how to run her marriage? She and Clark were at each other’s throats half the time.
A month l
ater, just as Della was packing up the last boxes for the movers, Cathy appeared at her house.
“Are you mad at me?” Cathy said when Della opened the door.
“Well, you do sometimes think you know everything.”
That was maybe too mean, because Cathy burst out crying. She hunched forward and wailed in a pitiful voice, “I’m going to miss you, Della!”
Tears were streaming down her face. She opened her arms as if for a hug. Della didn’t approve of the first of these responses and she was hesitant about the second. “Now quit that,” she said. “You’re liable to start me crying, too.”
Cathy’s blubbering only got worse.
Alarmed, Della said, “We can still talk on the phone, Cathy. And write letters. And visit. You can come stay in our ‘resort.’ It’s probably full of snakes and alligators but you’re welcome.”
Cathy didn’t laugh. Through her tears, she said, “Dick won’t want me to visit. He hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Well, I hate him! He treats you like crap, Della. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. And now he’s making you quit your job and go down to Florida? To do what?”
“That’s enough of that,” Della said.
“OK! OK! I’m just so frustrated!”
Nevertheless, Cathy was calming down. After a moment, she said, “I brought you something.” She opened her purse. “This came into the store the other day. From a little publisher out in Alaska. We didn’t order it but I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down. I don’t want to give the story away, but, well—it just seems really appropriate! You’ll see when you read it.” She was looking into Della’s eyes. “Sometimes books come into your life for a reason, Della. It’s really strange.”
Della never knew what to do when Cathy got mystical on her. She sometimes claimed the moon affected her moods, and she invested coincidences with special meanings. On that day, Della thanked Cathy for the book and managed not to cry when they finally did hug goodbye.
The book had a drawing on the cover. Two Indians sitting in a tepee. Cathy was into all that kind of stuff, too, lately, stories about Native Americans or slave uprisings in Haiti, stories with ghosts or magical occurrences. Della liked some better than others.
She packed the book in a box of odds and ends that hadn’t been taped shut yet.
And then what happened to it? She shipped the box down to Florida with all the others. It turned out there wasn’t room for all their belongings in their one-bedroom at the hunting lodge, so they had to put them in storage. The resort went bust a year later. Soon Dick made Della move to Miami, and then to Daytona, and finally up to Hilton Head as he tried to make a go of other ventures. Only after he died, while Della was going through the bankruptcy, was she forced to open up the storage facility and sell off their furniture. Going through the boxes she’d shipped to Florida almost a decade before, she cut open the box of odds and ends and Two Old Women fell out.
* * *
The book is a retelling of an old Athabascan legend, which the author, Velma Wallis, heard growing up as a child. A legend handed down “from mothers to daughters” that told the story of the two old women of the title, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’, who are left behind by their tribe during a time of famine.
Left behind to die, in other words. As was the custom.
Except the two old women don’t die. Out in the woods, they get to talking. Didn’t they used to know how to hunt and fish and forage for food? Couldn’t they do that again? And so that’s what they do, they relearn everything they knew as younger people, they hunt for prey and they go ice-fishing, and at one point they hide out from cannibals who pass through the territory. All kinds of stuff.
One drawing in the book showed the two women trekking across the Alaskan tundra. In hooded parkas and sealskin boots, they drag sleds behind them, the woman in front slightly less stooped than the other. The caption read: Our tribes have gone in search of food, in the land our grandfathers told us about, far over the mountains. But we have been judged unfit to follow them, because we walk with sticks, and are slow.
Certain passages stood out, like one with Ch’idzigyaak speaking:
“I know that you are sure of our survival. You are younger.” She could not help but smile bitterly at her remark, for just yesterday they both had been judged too old to live with the young.
“It’s just like the two of us,” Della said, when she finally read the book and called Cathy. “One’s younger than the other, but they’re both in the same fix.”
It started out as a joke. It was amusing to compare their own situations, in suburban Detroit and rural New Hampshire, with the existential plight of the old Inuit women. But the correspondences felt real, too. Della moved to Contoocook to be closer to Robbie but, two years later, Robbie moved to New York, leaving her stranded in the woods. Cathy’s bookstore closed. She started a pie-baking business out of her home. Clark retired and spent all day in front of the TV, entranced by pretty weather ladies on the news. Buxom, in snug, brightly colored dresses, they undulated before the weather maps, as though mimicking the storm fronts. All four of Cathy’s sons had left Detroit. They lived far away, on the other side of the mountains.
There was one illustration in the book that Della and Cathy particularly liked. It showed Ch’idzigyaak in the act of throwing a hatchet, while Sa’ looked on. The caption read, Perhaps if we see a squirrel, we can kill it with our hatchets, as we did when we were young.
That became their motto. Whenever one of them was feeling downhearted, or needed to deal with a problem, the other would call and say, “It’s hatchet time.”
Take charge, they meant. Don’t mope.
That was another quality they shared with the Inuit women. The tribe didn’t leave Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’ behind only because they were old. It was also because they were complainers. Always moaning about their aches and pains.
Husbands were often of the opinion that wives complained too much. But that was a complaint in itself. A way men had of shutting women up. Still, Della and Cathy knew that some of their unhappiness was their own fault. They let things fester, got into black moods, sulked. Even if their husbands asked what was wrong, they wouldn’t say. Their victimization felt too pleasurable. Relief would require no longer being themselves.
What was it about complaining that felt so good? You and your fellow sufferer emerging from a thorough session as if from a spa bath, refreshed and tingling?
Over the years Della and Cathy have forgotten about Two Old Women for long stretches. Then one of them will reread it, regain her enthusiasm, and get the other to reread it, too. The book isn’t in the same category as the detective stories and mysteries they consume. It’s closer to a manual for living. The book inspires them. They won’t stand to hear it maligned by their snobby sons. But now there’s no need to defend it. Two million copies sold! Anniversary editions! Proof enough of their sound judgment.
* * *
When Cathy arrives at Wyndham Falls the next morning, she can feel snow in the air. The temperature has dropped and there’s that stillness, no wind, all the birds in hiding.
She used to love such ominous quiet, as a girl, in Michigan. It promised school cancellations, time at home with her mother, the building of snow forts on the lawn. Even now, at seventy, big storms excite her. But her expectation now has a dark wish at its center, a desire for self-annihilation, almost, or cleansing. Sometimes, thinking about climate change, the world ending in cataclysms, Cathy says to herself, “Oh, just get it over with. We deserve it. Wipe the slate clean and start over.”
Della is dressed and ready to go. Cathy tells her she looks nice but can’t refrain from adding, “You have to tell the hairdresser not to use crème rinse, Della. Your hair’s too fine. Crème rinse flattens it down.”
“You try telling that lady anything,” Della says, as she pushes her walker down the hall. “She doesn’t listen.”
“Then get Bennett to take you to a s
alon.”
“Oh, sure. Fat chance.”
As they come outside, Cathy makes a note to e-mail Bennett. He might not understand how a little thing like that—getting her hair done—can lift a woman’s spirits.
It’s slow going with Della’s walker. She has to navigate along the sidewalk and down the curb to the parking lot. At the car, Cathy helps her into the passenger seat and then takes the walker around to put it in the trunk. It takes a while to figure out how to collapse it and flip up the seat.
A minute later, they’re on their way. Della leans forward in her seat, alertly scanning the road and giving Cathy directions.
“You know your way around already,” Cathy says approvingly.
“Yeah,” Della says. “Maybe those pills are working.”
Cathy would prefer to get the frames somewhere nice, a Pottery Barn or Crate & Barrel, but Della directs her to a Goodwill in a nearby strip mall. In the parking lot, Cathy performs the same operation in reverse, unfolding the walker and bringing it around so that Della can hoist herself to her feet. Once she gets going, she moves at a good clip.
By the time they get inside the store, it’s like old times. They move through the shiny-floored, fluorescently lit space as eagle-eyed as if on a scavenger hunt. Seeing a section of glassware, Della says, “Hey, I need some good new drinking glasses,” and they divert their operation.
The picture frames are way in the back of the store. Halfway there, the linoleum gives way to bare concrete. “I have to be careful about the floor in here,” Della says. “It’s sort of lippity.”
Cathy takes her arm. When they reach the aisle, she says, “Just stay here, Della. Let me look.”
As usual with secondhand merchandise, the problem is finding a matching set.
Nothing’s organized. Cathy flips through frame after frame, all of different sizes and styles. After a minute, she finds a set of matching simple black wooden frames. She’s pulling them out when she hears a sound behind her. Not a cry, exactly. Just an intake of breath. She turns to see Della with a look of surprise on her face. She has reached out to take a look at something—Cathy doesn’t know what—and let her hand slip off the handle of her walker.
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