The First Day of the Rest of My Life

by Cathy Lamb

  I also went with Granddad to a board meeting for Youth Avenues, a dinner at a fancy downtown hotel, to honor Portland area employees of his stores, attended another charity dinner for a hospital and wrote a huge check, and I wrote a column about lifestyle versus job. Basically: If you were going to be dead in a year, would you want to be where you are? No? Then what are you waiting for? Don’t die with a dead life in back of you!

  On Friday, May sent me a Bouncer. It was a bra with silver sequins sewn over the whole thing, with matching silver-sequined thong underwear.

  I had a feeling, from an adult perspective, that my momma would have grabbed that sequined bra and thong, wriggled her curvy hips, and danced around for my dad in them. Annie and I would have been able to eat my dad’s chocolate mint brownies and watch TV for hours.

  But me? No.

  I would not wear it. The Bouncer and thong would not, could not, be worn, as they were not a part of my armor.

  I put them back in the box. The box went under my bed.

  I could see my momma throwing up her hands in exasperation.

  On Saturday morning, about six o’clock, I left for The Lavender Farm. I had been up since four o’clock, anyhow, worrying the deep worry of someone who was being blackmailed. I watched the sun rise through a mist, noted that the mist seemed wistful, said good-bye to octagonal head man, and left.

  I drove down my winding hill, past homes that seemed to be built on air, hanging almost completely off cliffs, spindly stilts beneath them, past buildings, high and low, down two freeways, and out into the country. I passed orchards and farms and a big red barn that sells the best apples on the planet. I passed a creaky old grocery store, a cut zinnia business, a church advertising a spaghetti feed, and a café that sells fruit milkshakes.

  My granddad was up when I arrived. He believes that “being busy is being productive. Being productive is being useful. Be useful.” I waved at him across the field. He was chopping wood. He blew me a kiss, I blew back, then headed for the house. Granddad does not like to be interrupted when he chops wood. It’s his “thinking” time. He gives wood away every year, to all our neighbors. He owns a ton of stores, he’s a multimillionaire, and yet every year we troop around in his pickup and unload wood for everyone, more for families who are struggling.

  I made orange tea with milk and sugar, and an hour later, on the dot, Grandma rushed in. She was exquisitely dressed, as always—a sparkly brooch in place on her white blouse under a white sweater with jeweled buttons and pressed blue slacks.

  “Where is Ismael?” Grandma asked in agitated French. She pointed at a painting she’d created of two swans kissing on a pond. Behind them, the trees were on fire, a red and orange mass of destruction. “Where is he? Is he burning?” She sank into a chair at the table.

  “He’s not burning.” I kissed her on both cheeks, as we always have, as the French do. “But I still don’t know who Ismael is.” I smiled at Nola.

  Grandma abruptly stood up and banged her fists on the kitchen table, the huge diamond in her wedding ring catching the light. “Yes, you do! You know who he is! He’s your son. How could you not know who he is! Where is he? Is this a joke?”

  That hollow place in my stomach, perhaps that empty ache that so wished for children, spread a fire of pain. Where is my son? I don’t have a son. I don’t have a daughter. I have no children. I can’t even make love to a man. “It’s not a joke, Grandma. Here, I made orange tea, let’s have some.” I pushed a flowered, almost translucent teacup toward her.

  “No!” She banged her clenched fists again on the table, her eyes stricken. “We need to find Ismael and we need to hurry, we need to hurry, we need to hurry. I know where Anna is. She’s coming in with the swans, on their backs, to the lily pond. She’ll land on the lilies. Do you have her blue coat?”

  “No, Grandma, I don’t have the blue coat, but I’ll get it.”

  “We have to get the coat and we have to find Ismael. He had blood on him last time. Blood, don’t you know, don’t you know? Blood! We have to find him, carry him, he has to come with us and Anna, too, on the backs of the swans. They’ll take us to a new land where the doves talk, not the dogs. It’s almost too late. We’ve waited too long. The black ghosts are coming.”

  “We’ll bring them with us, Grandma.” I slung my arm around her shoulders as she banged the table again. Watching someone you love dive deep into dementia is like opening your own heart with an ax. Grandma had gone from being a vibrant, endlessly working, kind, joyful woman who loved painting and drawing illustrations for her books to asking me about a blue coat and my son, Ismael.

  “I’m so scared,” she whispered, leaning in close to me. “So scared. Everyone is scared. Even your violin is scared. That’s how it got the scratch on the back, at the bottom.”

  “How did it get that scratch?” I knew exactly what scratch she was talking about.

  “It happened when we were in the barn. We had to hide it in the hay and it scratched on a nail, don’t you remember? We have to kill them if they come for us. Like this!” She picked up the flowered teapot and threw it at the window, glass splintering everywhere. She screamed, slammed her hand to her mouth, then crawled under the table and hid. “Come here, Madeline, get down here before they see you.”

  Nola darted in, her face worried, followed by Annie, who had just arrived, as I scrambled under the table. They instantly understood what had happened.

  “Get down, Madeline! Get down!” Grandma whispered. “Hurry!” I hid under the table with her, and she held my hands with one of hers and with the other she put a finger to her lips and shook her head as in, No talking.

  I waited there with her, under the table, aching, saddened, until she whispered, “They’re gone, I think. We can run through the garden and hide. We can hide by the lavender.”

  “Okay, but let’s have some tea first.”

  “Tea won’t kill them.”

  “I know, but we’ll have some orange tea first, then run.”

  “We have to run. Anton’s getting the papers. I hear Ismael in my heart. I feel him, do you? He’s alive, I know he is, but I can’t find him.” Her face crumpled. “We’re lost from each other.” She started to sob, wrenching and raw, old tears and new tears mixed. “I can’t find him, Madeline! I’ve tried! I’ve tried! Sometimes I’ve thought I would lose my mind searching for him!”

  I rocked her in my arms, bending my head in misery. I can’t stand when my grandma cries, and I can’t stand her pain, her loss. I can’t stand that I know there’s truth among the fog, but I can’t see the truth.

  “Ismael is lost!” she wailed. “Help him! I want him, I want him. . . .”

  I hugged her close, then Annie and I settled her into her chair again. Nola poured another cup of tea and added the exact amount of sugar and cream that she liked.

  We watched her settle down, the torture gone, the fog still with us.

  “I’ll drink the tea,” she said, this time in German. “But we must run behind the lavender where the fluttering fairies and magical crystals will help us.”

  “We’ll do it,” I said. “Call Jess,” I whispered to Nola. She nodded at me. Jess was the handyman. He would get someone to come and fix the window.

  He could not, unfortunately, call anyone to fix anything else.

  I looked at Grandma’s painting. The broken glass had not damaged the swans kissing while the trees burned in an inferno of red and orange fire.

  Later that afternoon Annie and I made Chinese food with Nola for dinner that night. Nola can cook anything. She has taught us how to make all sorts of American and ethnic foods over the years. Her specialties are Indian and Italian. For desserts, she is outstanding at baking six-layer cakes that will melt your tongue out of your mouth and crepes that you know angels helped her roll.

  Nola is fifty-five years old, with dark brown eyes, and three sons who all graduated from Columbia University. They wanted to be together. Granddad and Grandma paid for her sons’ educations.
She has season tickets to the symphony and the Broadway shows. She has her book group here once a month, and she goes to Gourmet Club. All of her other time, minus vacationing with her sons, is spent at the farm.

  Many years ago Nola and her husband paid a “cougar” to take them and their two kids—one a toddler, one a baby—over the Mexican border to America. They were attacked, her husband was shot in the head in front of her and the kids, and she was raped. Nine months later another boy was born. He looked completely different from the other two. She loved all of them, they loved each other.

  When Grandma met her, she’d been in the country for a year, working at migrant camps. One night she was running away from one of the men there, who was drunk and dangerous. She burst onto the rainy street, Grandma’s car almost hit her, and that was that. Grandma put Nola in the car, took the safety off the gun she had in the glove compartment, and started shooting at the ground and above the head of the drunken jerk until he scuttled off. They went and picked up Nola’s boys and brought them to the house. The next day Grandma and Granddad called their longtime attorney and went about getting Nola citizenship. When she was legal, they gave her a job in their stores, where she worked her way up from the back in stock while she learned English, then was promoted to checker, manager, clear through to a vice president. Granddad says no one is better with numbers and money than Nola.

  Nola was not only gracious and kind, she worked harder than anyone. She was the one who insisted that she take care of Grandma when Grandma’s mind started to snap, crackle, and pop.

  “First she took care of me, now I take care of her,” Nola said, those dark eyes calm, caring. “As it should be.”

  Granddad wanted her in the stores, but he wanted her with Grandma more. He still consults her regularly, and she will eventually go back to her vice president’s job. But, for now, she has given our family a gift we can never repay: Herself.

  You can see why we all love Nola.

  “Now, don’t you get frisky with me, young man! There are children here!”

  “I’ll try not to,” Granddad said, so gentle, before bending to kiss Grandma’s cheek. “Even though you are irresistible, the star in my galaxy.”

  Grandma smiled coyly, the candles on our picnic table on the deck flickering in the cool nighttime breeze. “Don’t be naughty! Control your passions!”

  My granddad lifted Grandma’s hand and kissed it, then sat beside her. “I’ll control myself, but it is difficult around you, my delightful wife.”

  Grandma giggled. Granddad makes her giggle. Her mind might be confused, but her love is not. For Granddad, me, Annie, Nola, and all of the people who have been around our family for years—friends, neighbors, long-term employees—Grandma’s love has grown for all of us exponentially, as if her last gift is a blast of her enduring adoration. And, for Granddad alone, a blast of passion.

  Grandma reached for Granddad’s hand, held it between hers, smiled a seductive smile, and said, “Keep your hands to yourself until we’re alone! The making love will come later. Me on top tonight!”

  Annie and I exchanged smiles. Mr. Legs licked Annie’s chin. He was on her lap, his favorite place. Oatmeal and Geranium meowed at her. She meowed back.

  “I’ll do that, my love,” Granddad said, still holding her hand. She snuggled into him as a coyote howled, a horse neighed.

  My granddad, Anton Laurent, is tall, like an elegant, lean, plain-talking, semigruff giant with a shock of white hair. He always wears a dapper suit to work, and even when he’s in jeans or overalls and thick into the dirt or hay or horse poop on our farm, he always looks formal but friendly.

  To me, he is the kindest man I’ve ever known, besides my dad. My momma married a man like her father. Tonight, though, he looked exhausted and drained. He had aged rapidly in the last six months.

  “You look particularly beautiful tonight, Emmanuelle,” Granddad said to her, his brown eyes with hints of gold, like my momma’s, like mine, softening.

  “My heavens, stop!” she fluttered, patting her hair. “Stop that right now, Anton! All this flirting is getting me fired up, up, and away, and we have this lovely dinner to eat first.”

  She waved her hand at the fried rice, chicken chow mein, orange chicken, and egg rolls that Nola, Annie, and I had spent hours making.

  “I will try to resist from any more flirting,” Granddad reassured her.

  She patted his shoulder. “I know. It’s hard for you, always chasing me around, wanting me naked. Naked!”

  Tonight Grandma was wearing a very flattering red cocktail dress and a diamond teardrop necklace. Nola had told her that Granddad was coming home from a short business trip to his stores, so she dressed up. Nola had even done her hair in a ball on top of her head.

  “How was the trip?” Annie asked Granddad after we’d passed the dinner and chopsticks around, Nola had prayed, and Grandma had proposed a toast to “Anton, because he is so good and also yummy in bed.”

  In the distance Morning Glory howled. She does not like to be all alone without Annie, her mother.

  “Wonderful. I have the best employees in the world. The stores in southern Oregon are thriving. Our employees will be pleased with their bonuses and the community will be pleased with the grants we’re again able to offer the schools. Enough about me,” Granddad said. “Tell me about you all.”

  Now, Granddad is not the type who takes “We’re fine” for an answer. He likes to hear about Annie’s animals at home, the animals she’s taking care of, and her wood carving with the chain saw. He does not like to hear about her trips to Fiji. “The less I know, the better. Hell, be careful, Annie.”

  He asks me about my columns, which he reads regularly and comments upon with blunt honesty, my upcoming speech for the Rock Your Womanhood conference, my clients, everything. He is a man who is interested in others besides himself. He is a miracle.

  He talked to Nola and we heard all about her book group. They were reading Jane Eyre, and next month it was a Shakespeare play. What magazines was she was reading? The American Medical Journal. Where was she going for her summer vacation? New Zealand. The boys were taking her.

  “And now, my friend, Emmanuelle, it is time for your bath,” Nola said, getting up, as yet another coyote called out and Morning Glory howled from her house. “A hot bath with lavender bath oil.”

  “Oui!” Grandma said, smiling, as Nola helped her up. She turned and patted Granddad’s cheek. “I’ll go and get freshened up with strawberries and lavender so my V privates will smell scented.” She pointed to her crotch. “Scented like the lavender fields right out here that you planted for me because you’re a gentleman and a black ghost slayer.” She pointed into the darkness at the lavender fields. “Delicious!”

  Granddad’s face stilled, tight and taut, when she said the words black ghost slayer.

  “I’ll be in later, Emmanuelle,” Granddad said, his voice low and reassuring. He was never gruff with Grandma. With the rest of us, yes, but not her. “Until then.”

  She giggled and kissed him on the lips, stroked his shoulder. “You are so handsome. So very handsome!”

  “And you are a gorgeous woman. It is an honor to be your husband.” Granddad said this with all seriousness because he meant it in all seriousness.

  “She would understand,” Grandma said, her eyes suddenly intense as she bent to be eye to eye with Granddad. The wind picked up one of her white curls and carried it across her forehead. “We can share you later with her violin.”

  Granddad nodded as Annie and I exchanged confused glances. So much of what our grandma said lately was confusing, so alarming. When she started to slip initially, she couldn’t remember names for certain objects, began getting lost on our property and driving into town. There were some mood swings, nonsensical or roundabout talk. She lost understanding about her life, what had happened yesterday, two weeks ago, but then things had changed. I could almost pinpoint the time. I walked into her bedroom one night a few months ago and she w
as cradling in her hand a blue glass swan, keening back and forth. She kept saying, as if she’d been hit by a wrenching revelation, “Now I remember. I’ll never forget it. You can’t take it from me! You can’t!”

  It was right after that that the talk changed. She started telling part of what Annie and I believe to be her “real” story, mixed with the stories she told in her swan books, with a dollop of horror and violence thrown in. We’d tentatively, gently, asked Granddad about it, and he’d shut down, put us off. “It’s something best not talked about. It’s in the past and there it will stay.”

  Mr. Legs shifted positions on Annie, as if he was confused, too.

  “Yes.” Granddad’s eyes, eyes that had seen so much tragedy, so much laughter, were so very tired. “She would understand.”

  “It’s all right. We had to do it . . . and then, love. Between us, love,” Grandma said, dropping a kiss on his forehead. “We weren’t expecting it, we weren’t planning on it, but it came. Like the sunset, like the sunrise, even though the violins weren’t matching. Our love came on the backs of swans and blue jays carrying red hearts.”

  I remembered one of the illustrations my grandma drew for her books. There were swans and blue jays and they were carrying red hearts.

  “And we’re here now,” Grandma said. “Past the barns and hiding in rivers, over the mountains, away from the guns and the work moving rocks, and the no water and the lice, we are here.”

  “That’s right. Enjoy your bath, my love. I’ll be with you in a minute,” Granddad said.

  Grandma smiled, kissed him on the lips. “My V privates will be scented then.”

  Nola took her arm, smiling, and led Grandma away. I looked up at the sky and saw a star shoot down. The wind picked up a bit, ruffling my hair, my stomach in knots.

  In the distance Morning Glory howled again. She does not like to be all alone.

  Who does?

  Later Granddad put Grandma to bed. I knew their routine.