“I’ve never heard of her. I’m brandnew here as of yesterday.”
He looks behind him, at what I don’t know. “Great!” He scratches his head and sighs again. “I need to find Ramona’s daughter. Another tenant in my building said she lives on this street, but he couldn’t remember her name and I can’t either.”
I cross my arms to keep warm. “I have no idea. Did he say if she’s married or has children? That could narrow it down.”
“She’s single.”
“I think the woman who lives on the other side of me is single, but I’m not sure. I can’t even remember her name.”
“Her name’s Melissa,” Ethan says, wedging in next to me.
“That’s her!” the man says. “Ramona’s daughter is Melissa.”
“Then that’s her place,” I say. He turns to step off the porch. “She’s not home right now. I saw her leave a few minutes ago.”
If it’s even possible, his chest shrinks even more. “Do you know how to contact her?” I shake my head. “Okay, this has been a”—he sees Ethan and stops—“rotten morning. When she gets home, would you tell her that her mom died and I need her to come clean out her mom’s place?”
Ethan snaps his head to look up at me, and I feel letters burbling up, but none of them are coming out as words. “What? No! I only met her for the first time yesterday. Don’t the police make that sort of notification?”
“The police came late last night when Ramona wouldn’t answer her phone. The old dame’s hand turned the stereo up blasting loud when she keeled over and died. Had every tenant calling me to take care of it. She wouldn’t answer the phone or the door so the police went in and found her.”
“So why can’t they notify her daughter?”
He popped a cigarette into his mouth like it was an M&M. “I told you,” he says, lighting the cigarette and puffing. “Nobody knows Ramona’s kid. Hard to contact next of kin when the dead woman never said she had kin. If I hadn’t heard them screaming at each other a few times I wouldn’t even know it.” He turns to leave. “Tell her I’m giving her one week to go through her mother’s things and then I’m dumping all of it.”
“I’m not going to tell her,” I say to his back.
He turns to look at me. “Tell her I’m being nice. I could just rummage through that junk and keep what I like.”
I nudge Ethan to get back into the house and I stand out on the porch, closing the door. “I can’t tell her that. You need to leave a note on her door.”
He won’t turn back to look at me. “I’ve been out here for an hour knocking on doors.” He tosses his hand in the air. “I’m done.”
Ethan is staring up at me when I step back inside. “Who was that guy, Mom?”
“A landlord,” I say, busying myself by putting away the cereal.
He picks up his football and tosses it from hand to hand. “Who died?”
Emma looks up from her soggy bowl of cereal, frightened. “Somebody died? Who died?”
I cross to her and kiss her head. “Our neighbor’s mom.”
“Oh.” Ethan tosses the ball up and down now, and I try to ignore it as I go back to work in the kitchen. I’m not in the mood for the whole football-in-the-house argument. “You don’t like her very much, do you, Mom?”
Great! Caught not liking someone by my own child! I stop my work to look at him. “What makes you say that? She seems fine.”
He tosses that confounded ball higher into the air. “You don’t talk as much to her as you do other people.”
“I just don’t know her very well yet.”
The ball goes up again. “You talk long with other strangers.”
“Please take that ball out of the house, Ethan.” He tosses it back and forth all the way to the front door before tossing it out into the yard.
All the big kitchen items have a cupboard to call their own, but the counter space is littered with things that will eventually wind up crammed into a drawer or shoe box: rubber bands, pens, old address book, two small picture frames, sticky pads, cow-shaped eraser, handful of magnets, Magic Markers, a whistle, two batteries, a tube of ChapStick, a purse-size package of tissues, a ruler, and a stack of cards we received after Kyle’s accident. I fan them out in my hand, not knowing what to do with them. I see a small, empty box and stack them in a corner of it, pushing the rest of the stuff from the counter on top of them. I sigh, setting the box on the table. There’s so much to do, but I know Kyle’s accident and the move have been a lot to take in for the kids. I wander through the hall to their bedroom and peek inside. Emma is using one of her baby blankets to make a bed for Sugar, and Ethan is pulling children’s books out of a box.
Whenever Kyle was home the kids would beg him to read to them every night at bedtime. I always read using inflection and different, even if sometimes weak, voices, but Kyle had a certain flair when he “read” Charlotte’s Web or Goldilocks and the Three Bears. In Kyle’s translation, Charlotte the spider spun the words armpit, nose hair, and burp into her web. Ethan and Emma especially liked burp because Wilbur the pig then walked through the barnyard belching. For Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I could hear Ethan’s high-pitched belly laugh as Kyle read, “Then Mama Bear said, ‘Somebody’s been pooting on my chair,’ and then little Baby Bear said, ‘Somebody’s been pooting on my chair and blew a hole right through it!’” It didn’t matter how many times Kyle read that story, the kids would howl like it was a brandnew telling. I watch the kids and pray. I’ve never prayed so much in my life. I wash the dishes and pray. I fold laundry and pray. I shower and cook and scrub the floor and pray. It keeps me tethered, grounded, buoyed, or from going insane.
I hang on to their door as I stick my head into their room. “Hey! Do either of you know where the box of games is? We could play something.”
“Right now?” Emma asks, pushing Sugar’s head hard into the blanket.
“Sure.”
“I thought you were busy,” Ethan says.
I step into their room. “Why don’t we get the books and games and everything put away in your room and then it will be totally done! That should only take a few minutes. Then let’s play a game.” I feel the crush of things to do, but know I need to spend time with them.
We finish their room and we celebrate by playing two games of Candy Land and then one of Sorry! and then Battleship with Emma before Mom picks them up to take to her house to eat lunch and spend the rest of the day. Hopefully, by the time they make it home tomorrow I’ll have most everything in order. “Are you sure you don’t want me to stay and help you?” Mom asks.
“You are helping by giving the kids a break from tripping over of all this stuff,” I say, waving my arm into the living room. “Hopefully, I’ll find a spot for all of it.” I kiss Emma and Ethan and resist asking them to stay with me so I can see them, touch them, and hear their voices. My throat tightens as I wave to them from the front door.
I haul out the final empty boxes from the kids’ room and feel good that their bedroom is organized. I make a quick trip to the school to take the kid’s shot records and fill out the rest of the enrollment papers and then spend the rest of the day working in my bedroom and organizing the linen and laundry closets. I walk through the condo and know I need to put up some Christmas decorations soon. The sight of lights, evergreen swags, stars, bulbs, the tree, and nativity will make all of us feel better. The first Christmas after my parents divorced I hated putting up the tree and dragging out the nativity, but once they were up, my feelings changed. I search for the boxes filled with all things Christmas so the kids and I can start decorating in the next few days.
The stack of flattened boxes is growing at the front door, and I start to take them out when I see the neighbor’s car pull into her driveway, so I close the door before she sees me. Through the window sheers I can see her walking to her mailbox. I set the boxes down. I’m not going to the curb now. If I see her, I’ll wonder if anyone has told her about her mother and then be plagued with gui
lt that I didn’t tell her. I shake my head. What a preposterous situation!
This place is too quiet without the kids. I fall into bed and dial Mom’s number to say good night to them but discover they’re too busy to come to the phone. “They’re distracted,” Mom says. I smile. She’s always been very distracting, and right now that’s a good thing. I hang up and stare at the ceiling, thinking of my neighbor. Kyle would have told her her mother had died. Even if his world had collapsed in on him, Kyle would have pushed his way up through the rubble and done what he was supposed to do.
“Someone has to tell her,” he’d say. “If the landlord is a coward, then someone needs to step up.” Kyle would get out of bed at this very moment and go knock on her door, but I turn the light off and pull the blankets up to my neck.
The Good Dream
Donna VanLiere
Ivorie
I didn’t set out to be an old maid. When I was in my early twenties there was, according to my mother, “still hope for me.” But when I got into my late twenties the hope all but left Mother’s eyes. “Lord have mercy, Ivorie,” she would say. “What is going to happen to you when your pop and I leave this earth?” I was, in her opinion, doomed to a bed-of-nails existence without a man.
Mother had always been fire and sizzle but there was something used up about her the last two years of her life. Her arthritis grew worse; gnarling her small, freckled hand into the shape of a claw and taking care of Pop wore what was left of her away. One afternoon, she came to me in the garden where she rested that crippled hand atop her cane and looked at me with those sad, cornflower blue eyes. “What about Lyle Hovitts?”
I nearly toppled the basket of beans I was picking. “That melon-headed man with the fat stomach and stumpy legs?” I threw my head back and laughed. “Mother! What have I done to you?”
She waved a bony hand in the air and rolled her eyes. “I’m just saying, Ivorie. You’re a pretty girl.”
I wiped the sweat off my face and squatted back down to my work. “Well, I don’t know why every pretty girl in Greene County isn’t lined up outside Lyle Hovitts’s door. What girl wouldn’t want that old, saggy butt crawling into her bed every night?”
“Oh, Lord have mercy, Ivorie! It’s too close to Sunday for such talk.”
I laughed and tossed another handful of beans into the basket. “You started it, Mother. Lyle Hovitts. I’m surprised you didn’t say Garth Landis.”
“There’s nothing wrong with Garth Landis.”
“He’s a tall, lanky goon! He’s got that sloped nose and those gangly arms with the hairy hands at the end of them. Plus—he must be fifty!”
“He’s a fine-looking man.”
My gallbladder shook I laughed so hard. “Well, his beauty must be the kind that’s magnified by liquor!”
“He’s tolerable,” she said. “Not all men are tolerable but you could tolerate Garth.”
I grabbed my head. “Is that what marriage is, Mother? Tolerating somebody?”
She looked at me like I was a kook. “Well, it has a lot to do with it! If you don’t get sick looking at somebody, you’re halfway there in tolerating them.”
I couldn’t even respond to that. She started to hunch down and I waved my hand in the air at her. “Don’t get down here. I’ll have a world of a time getting you back up. I’ll finish these. You just commence to worrying about which sad, lonely buck I need to hook my horns into.” And when she leaned her bent, tiny frame over her cane and looked out over the garden I knew she was doing just that!
Mother was my closest friend. We spent our time working in the garden, canning, cooking and baking together and we’d talk about Pop until we were both giggling like girls. We loved sitting down at the table and eating a slice of pound cake with a cup of coffee while we listened to Maxine Harrison read the news on the radio station out of Greenville. We’d shake our heads over the obituaries and talk about the poor, old widow who was left behind, or make a high-pitched noise in our throats on hearing about the birth of a new baby. Mother didn’t wear a watch; she didn’t need one, she just knew when it was coffee and cake time. It didn’t matter where we were or what we were doing—if we were stooped over in the garden, Mother would say, “Coffee and cake time” and we would stop our work and sit down to listen to Maxine. I always knew when Mother was thinking she needed a rest with a glass of sweet tea and she could sense when I needed to pick up a book and hide out on the back porch. I’ve always been too impatient with myself and others, my expectations of them too high but Mother just loved people, plain and simple, warts and all. Her hope was always cell deep and child simple.
My six brothers were all married with children. By the time I was born, (when Mother was 42—a miracle anywhere) my oldest brother Henry was settled down with two children. Shoot, at my age Mother had had six of her seven children. Whenever I looked at her and Pop I could hear time speeding by me. Tick: There’s a man! Tock: Better grab him! Tick: Time’s running out! Tock: Too late.
Morgan Hill, Tennessee is just seventy miles north of Knoxville but it’s as far from the city as it is the ocean in my opinion. It’s not big enough to be a city or even a town; we’re a community—the Morgan Hill community. We’ve got Walker’s Store, which my brother Henry owns, the Langley School Building, the church, and that’s it (not exactly a hotbed for available suitors) but I can’t imagine living anywhere else. These hills and farmland are home.
Pop served in Africa during the Great War and while there he held a piece of ivory in his hand, claiming it to be the prettiest thing he’d ever seen. He brought it home with him and laid it on the chest-of-drawers in his and Mother’s bedroom. Mother held that piece of ivory the night I was born. I didn’t come easy. “You about ripped me sideways to Christmas,” Mother said. When Mother grasped for the sheets her friend Nola threw the ivory into her hand to give her something to hold onto. She and Pop named me Sarah Ivorie. I claimed Ivorie as my first name during my second year in school when another girl, a pinched-face, puckered-lip thug was also named Sarah. She was so sour that her cheeks turned red as a plum when she got mad. I told my mother that from here on out I would no longer share the name of Sarah with that brutish blob of a girl but would only answer to Ivorie. “Pretty name for a pretty girl,” Mother said. Imagine the heartbreak when years later that pretty name wasn’t attracting a husband.
In the early years, right out of high school, the people in Morgan Hill still held out hope for me: Which young man do you have your eye on? Have you seen the way that Carl Winters makes over you? Before you know it you’re going to have three or four proposals. But when I hit twenty-four and was still living at home it threw the whole community into crisis mode. A distress signal spread throughout it: Awkward Walker girl doomed to manlessness. Gasp! I went from resident old maid to queen of the downtrodden parade. There I was, sitting high on my float and just waving and blowing kisses to the sorriest line-up of the lonely and cripple-hearted I’ve ever seen. The phone rang off the hook. Have you met my nephew, Lenny? He’s the man with dropsy over in Midway. Have you ever met my Uncle Lew? His wife died two years ago and he’s got a house full of good chil’ren. Have you met Harold over at the Co-op in Morristown? He’s that real nice man that works there with the eye patch. Real funny man. Nice head of hair.
For the longest time Ed Popper would visit on Sunday afternoon, bringing three oranges with him. We didn’t get oranges too often in Morgan Hill so Ed would pick them up each week when he drove into Knoxville to visit an ailing aunt. Ed was five years older than me with a head as big as a hippopotamus and a face almost as ugly. His stomach rolled over his belt like a sack of corn meal and his feet always looked freakishly tiny and too narrow to hold up all that weight. We’d sit out on the front porch—Mother, Pop, me, and Ed Popper and we’d share those oranges and talk about the weather or who died, who was getting ready to die, or who we thought already died and as I watched orange juice drip down Ed’s massive face I wondered why I couldn’t die.
Mother was thrilled with Ed’s attention. He grew, these were her words, some of the prettiest tobacco in Greene County. Well slide a ring on my finger so I can be Mrs. Pretty Tobacco! Ed visited every Sunday for months and sat with his manure caked shoes pointed at opposite corners of the porch. All I had to do was take one look at those nasty shoes and my stomach would knot up. I have no idea why he came back as long as he did because I never gave him any reason to believe I wasn’t anything other than completely bored. I was as comfortable with him as a frog is in a bottle.
One Sunday, Ed brought a watermelon to us and I took it from him, marching it inside the well house where I set it on the floor and then closed the door on it. Ed swayed from foot to foot like an overweight pendulum for a while as Mother groped for something to say, her mouth gaping like a carp. Ed resigned himself to leaving and Mother rose to her feet. She said, “You didn’t offer Ed Popper one slice of his watermelon and now he’ll never long to come here again.” If I had known that’s what it would take to stop Ed Popper’s longing I would have thrown his fruit in the well house months earlier.
Two years ago, in 1948, when I was twenty-eight and we buried Pop after eighty-two years of living in Morgan Hill, the community gave up on me. Polly Jarvis married Ed Popper, making her Polly Popper, a ridiculous name for a grown woman, and that marriage ended the community’s hope to marry me off. People started referring to me as that poor old thing. I heard them whispering at church or when I was shopping in Henry’s store. “Ivorie just sits down there and takes care of her mother. That poor, old thing, I guess she’ll never marry.” I laughed out loud at a church picnic when I overheard two women, a cabbage-round faced one and skinny, ropy-armed one mumbling about my plight over a plate of fried chicken. “That poor old thing has never been with a man,” Ropy Arms whispered.
“Well ain’t that her good fortune!” Cabbage Face said.
The Christmas Shoes (Christmas Hope) Page 12
