Wait Until Tomorrow

by Pat MacEnulty

  “I’m sorry,” the woman at the front desk says, “you can’t go in there until you sign the lease.”

  “But . . .but our piano is already in there. And I’ve paid a deposit.”

  The woman at the front desk makes a phone call to her boss lady at home. I’m standing in this lobby, sweating from the September heat, beat up from an eight-hour drive in a bouncy truck the day before, muscles aching from packing and loading, toting barges and lifting bales. And they tell me, no, I cannot unload that truck today. I will have to wait until tomorrow. At that moment, I realize I am going to hate these people. And nothing changes my mind.

  THREE

  WINTER 2005

  As 2004 slides into 2005, I’m still earning a catch-as-catch-can living, and, at the same time, trying to keep my mother on an even emotional keel. I decide to offer a creative writing class to a few people who’ve been asking for one, and I bring my mother along to get her out of her apartment and around younger people. She’s not used to her social set being limited to the upper decades and so this is a welcome change for her.

  The group meets one evening a week. I assign writing exercises, and then we share what we’ve written. Then we write some more. Mother loves coming to the group. She’s working on a musical but mostly in the class she writes memories from her life. The others in the group enjoy hearing them. In the meantime I’m learning new facts about her life, especially her childhood.

  She explains that she was not named after the famous actress Rosalind Russell, who was in fact only eleven years old when my mother was born. Rather, she was named after one of her mother’s friends, Rosalind Brown Simons, an accomplished pianist who had studied in London. Skipper gave my mother piano lessons until she was five years old, at which time her instruction was turned over to Rosalind Brown Simons. When the Great Depression hit, the family could no longer afford piano lessons. But by that time my mother had learned enough that she could practice and learn new pieces on her own.

  “The Depression didn’t stop me,” she said.

  While in high school, my mother was offered both an art and a music scholarship to Yale. It wasn’t a difficult decision. She chose the music scholarship.

  “One of my best memories is when the dean told me that Paul Hindemith said I was the most talented student in the whole school,” she said. “I never forgot it.”

  Hindemith, apparently, liked to play with electric trains.

  “All kinds of people—Einstein, for example—would come play with his trains. Since they were all geniuses, it was very elaborate and you had to know what you were doing to keep the train on the tracks. It was an extraordinary place.”

  Sometimes I resent the fact that my mother left New England or at least didn’t take us back there after she divorced my father. My cousins still live there and get together for holidays. I wonder how different my life might have been. And yet, I do love Florida where I grew up. Even now I yearn for it and steadily plot a course out of my landlocked life, back to the swamps, rivers, and lakes of that endangered place.

  My mother’s depression stalks her like a big-game hunter in her apartment at the Landings. The doors to the outside are too heavy for her to lift, and the management is too cheap to get those automatic door openers for handicapped people. She feels trapped inside and she becomes alternately morose and frantic. Sometimes I come over and take her out in the car just to look at something besides the ivory walls. She loves the way the clouds bunch up on the horizon and turn psychedelic at sunset. Other times we’ll just go outside, sit on a wooden bench, and watch the sun set over the water treatment plant just down the road. Charlotte has lovely skies, and bare black trees where you can occasionally catch a fleeting glimpse of deer. During these times we talk. When you spend a lifetime getting to know someone, you think there is nothing left, but she still has stories.

  One day she explained that Skipper, which is what we had always called my grandmother, was not known as Skipper when my mother was a child. She was called “Mrs. Field.”

  “I thought it was awful never to be called by your first name,” my mother mused. “It’s like she was anonymous.”

  Mrs. Field was the consummate “lady” in spite of her Girl Scouting. Being a lady didn’t mean girlie, prissy, or even snobbish. It was a certain way of carrying oneself. It meant being kind, courteous, and dignified. Skipper’s mother, Gammie, on the other hand, took her ‘ladyness’ to an extreme.

  “She would never be caught carrying her own parcels. And she wouldn’t be caught playing cards on Sunday, especially since she always managed to slide them under the couch if company came,” Mother said with a laugh.

  Shortly after ice-cream cones came into vogue in 1904, Skipper played a not-so-ladylike joke on an insufferable relative by explaining that you ate an ice-cream cone from the bottom up.

  The thing my mother never mentioned until I finally asked about it (and I wouldn’t have known to ask if not for my cousin Roy) was that Skipper had had a boyfriend.

  “Oh, yes, he was my organ teacher,” my mother said. “But she was only doing it to get even.”

  “How old were you?” I asked.

  “Oh, about eleven.”

  “And she was still married to Lewis?”

  “Yes,” she said. Lewis, like my own father, was a philanderer, indulging in adulterous affairs without a qualm, and an alcoholic who once showed up at a fancy social function in Washington without his trousers on.

  “One time a little girl asked me if my father was Colonel Field. When I said yes, she responded, ‘Oooooh,’” my mother said, laughing. “His reputation was that bad.”

  “Really? I thought you meant she was impressed.”

  “No,” Mother said. “Everyone knew about him.”

  My mother remembers overhearing her father on the phone, fixing a trial.

  “Don’t worry. I know that judge. We’ll take care of it,” he said.

  That was how she learned how the system worked. He was an influential man, a skillful attorney who became a judge at a young age. According to my mother, the world turned a blind eye to his behavior. Or most of the world did. Eventually, after his divorce from Skipper, he was strong-armed into marrying one of his mistresses, the sister of his mafioso chauffeur. Or so the story goes.

  One of her worst memories involves watching a boy drown. It was a summer day, and people had gathered at the river to swim and picnic. The little boy’s leg got caught in the lock under the bridge.

  “The horrible thing is that there was a carpenter there who said he could break the mechanism, but the firemen wouldn’t let him do it,” she told me.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I suppose they insisted on doing it their way. It seemed to me that the carpenter was the only one who knew what he was talking about, but he left in disgust. The boy drowned, and there was nothing we could do but watch it happen when the tide came in.”

  As we sit on the wooden bench and the evening dusk rises in a wave of darkness from the horizon, I can see the pain of that memory etched on my mother’s face, her hazel eyes looking back at a life vanishing before her eyes.

  The director of the Landings is a bully, pure and simple. She’s reportedly got the owner of the place wrapped around her perfectly manicured finger. She cruises into work in her Cadillac and hurries off to lunch with her slightly smaller but no less blond assistant. They are always hurrying somewhere, blowing by in a hurricane of perfume.

  Fortunately we don’t have much truck with them.

  In her little apartment, Mom is claustrophobic and lonely. To combat both issues, she keeps her door open and plays piano, hoping to lure in admirers. She’s pretty effective at it. People wander by, hear Bach or Debussy, and stick their heads in the door, curious. Slowly but surely, she makes a few friends.

  One of them is a woman named Carol, a retired art teacher. My mother’s hobby for many years has been watercolors. Some of them are pretty good. Emmy still has the painting
of a clown walking a chicken on a leash that my mother made when Emmy was just a baby. So Carol and my mother decide to paint together. The Landings has an art studio. We saw it when they took us on a tour of the place. What we hadn’t noticed is that no one was actually using it. Like so many of the amenities at the Landings, it is only there for show. The tables aren’t placed at a convenient height for painting, and my mom, being handicapped, has great difficulty in there. But no adjustments will be made. Still my mother and Carol somehow manage to paint together.

  Carol has a daughter my age, and like me her daughter is constantly stopping by to help her mother with one thing or another. Mom gets confused and calls the daughter “Carol’s mother.”

  “Carol’s daughter,” I correct her.

  “Oh, yes. Of course,” she replies, but next time she does it again, mentioning something about “Carol’s mother.” And that’s what we are: mothers to our own mothers. I am constantly wiping my mother’s face, washing her hair for her, and exhorting her to get out and do things with friends.

  Emmy is also trying to find a way to fit in at her new school. She’s been pestering me to try to get her into the other private school, but it’s not doable. We’ve already received a scholarship at this place, and it would be way too late to get one anywhere else. She’s despondent, but one day she comes eagerly over to the car when I pull up.

  “There’s auditions for a play,” she says, her eyes bright. I can’t help but remember the three-year-old Emmy who stood on a fiveinch curb and exclaimed, “It’s a stage!”

  “Do you want me to come with you?” I ask.

  “Would you?”

  So I find a seat in the back of the auditorium to watch the auditions. The kids are good, but Emmy’s cold reading is brilliant. She’s funny and quick. The woman who will be directing the show is not actually a teacher. She’s been hired from a community acting group. After the auditions, she bounces back to where Emmy and I are sitting together. Her eyebrows leap to her hairline when she sees me. I’m the only mother there, but she seems friendly and enthusiastic about Emmy.

  “You’ve got a real instinct for theater,” she says to Emmy. Then, still smiling, “I’m not going to cast you in this show, but I hope you’ll audition for one of the shows I’m doing in the community. You’re really good.”

  Emmy and I are confused. If she’s so good, why isn’t the woman going to put her in the show?

  “It’s probably because you’re a freshman,” I tell her as we’re driving away. But later we find out that another freshman was put in the show. It’s baffling.

  Over the next few years Emmy will have her share of successes and crushing disappointments. For the disappointments, I usually trot out the old story about being a finalist in a screenwriting competition and being sure that I was going to Hollywood and then not making it and feeling like the air had been sucked from the planet, or the sun had suddenly expired. And then a couple of weeks later my friend Mikey died and I had to take over his classes and be there with my friends to help them as they grieved and suddenly not getting that award and that new life in Hollywood didn’t matter so much. I don’t think this story helps, but I tell it anyway.

  Although Emmy’s audition didn’t land her a role in that show, it did garner attention from the school’s young theatrical genius—a senior.

  “Your audition rocked my socks,” he told her in the hallway the next day. And as the director of the student-directed play that year, he took her under his wing. Emmy found herself ensconced with the nicest, smartest, most intellectually adventurous group of kids in the school. Hallelujah.

  But there are still a few bumps in the road.

  One day I pull up to the school to pick up Emmy. She lands in the passenger seat like a wounded bird.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask her.

  Immediately she begins to sob, heart-wrenching, wheezing, mucus-manufacturing, chest-heaving sobs. The story emerges in fits and starts.

  “There were these boys . . . in one of the classrooms . . . and I had to go in there to get a . . . book I’d forgotten.”

  Blood begins pounding in my head like African drums.

  “They saw me and they started laughing. One of them said . . . ‘It’s that girl . . .Emmy . . . she’s so weird.’ . . . and they kept laughing at me.”

  “What did you do, honey?”

  “I turned and ran!” she screams at me.

  So there are a lot of things worse than being laughed at, but at that moment, with my child sobbing in my car, I’m wanting to go kick some juvenile ass. Rage seethes through me like red-hot lava. I’m pissed off at these unknown boys but even more pissed off with myself for letting her come to this school full of rich assholes. (I know. Many of the parents turn out to be incredibly kind and some of these kids will become her lifelong friends, but none of that is registering in the moment.) I can’t do anything except try to stifle a terrible memory that suddenly surfaces.

  Our paths only crossed once. She was on a blue bike riding across the newly built wooden bridge that spanned the Willow Branch Creek. She didn’t have a “cool” bike with a banana seat like we did. She was not cool. She was blond and pale and plump. She wore the plaid skirt and plain white shirt of the Catholic School. My friend Carmen and I spied her. There were two of us and one of her.

  “Fatty Patty,” we taunted. She tried to ride past us, but as soon as she crossed the bridge and was on the concrete walkway, we closed in. “Fat bitch,” we called her. One of us grabbed her bike and the other pushed her and she fell to the ground. Perhaps she skinned her leg or the palms of her hands as she fell. But there she was on the ground while we stood above her. Tears streamed down her face in helpless impotent rage. She screamed at us to leave her alone as she stood and lifted up her bike. Tears streaked her red face. Even as she rode off on her blue bike, pedaling furiously to escape our insults, I knew she was—at that moment—far superior to us. My throat constricted. I wanted to call out, “I’m sorry. Please. . . .” I doubt I could have articulated what was in my heart. But if I could have, it would have been “forgive me”—anything to erase the sudden shame I felt. I was a kid with a heart full of pain and she was my mirror.

  I guess I figured that I’d see her again somewhere and I could make it up to her. But I never did see her again. She was probably afraid to come through the park after that—that beautiful city park with its old oaks, its thick carpet of grass, and the playground and basketball court just past the azalea bushes.

  My karma wasn’t exactly instant, but it came. In December Carmen and I and the park boys rode our banana-seat bicycles on a mission. We were headed to the barbershop that belonged to Harold’s grandfather, located in what we then called “colored town.” This was in the late 1960s, and the good folks who divvied up the tax dollars neglected to fix the roads in this area of town. When the front tire of the bike I was riding hit a pothole, I flew face-first over the handlebars, grinding my lips on the gravel road.

  Hours of plastic surgery restored my lips but left me looking freakish with oversized lips on my small face and a scar running down my chin.

  “You’ll grow into the lips and the scar will fade,” the plastic surgeon assured us.

  It didn’t matter what the future held. I became a pariah among the park kids with Carmen as their ringleader. They called me names. They laughed at me. They told me I was ugly. I had not yet read The Metamorphosis but I knew how it felt to wake up one day as a cockroach. Unlike the girl on the blue bike, I did not lash out angrily. I suppose I thought they were right. I was hideous to look at and not worthy of their company.

  Eventually I found a new friend. She also earned the disapproval of the park kids. She was a “rich kid,” they accused. But they kept their taunts in check because already she possessed something, some aura of redneck aristocracy that alarmed the boys and cowed the girls.

  Soon Carmen concocted an excuse for a fight. She claimed I was after a boy that she liked. I had no interest in the
boy and I didn’t want to fight Carmen though if it came down to it, I thought I could win. Carmen was soft and plump, and though I was small, I was wiry and came equipped with a gut full of rage.

  It came down to it. My new friend and I were playing tetherball, the one game I was really good at because I could smack the hell out of that ball, when Carmen showed up, like a gunslinger in a Western, and issued her challenge. I reluctantly followed her to a grassy spot behind the azalea bushes. The other kids circled around us, all but one of them rooting for Carmen. I felt like a fool standing in the circle. I wasn’t mad at Carmen. I didn’t hate her. But I was supposed to beat her up or get beaten up.

  My new friend stood in the crowd of park kids, arms crossed, green eyes narrowed, waiting to see what I would do. So when Carmen came after me, I balled my fist as if I were getting ready to smack the tetherball, and I hit her. Soon all was a confusion of yells, slaps, and punches. Then Carmen began crying, her face turned red, and the tears made a snotty mess of her face. She yelled that I had hurt her.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You go to hell!” she screamed.

  There was nothing I could do. My green-eyed friend and I walked away.

  That was a long time ago, and yet I still have pockets of shame and guilt. The girl on the blue bike is one of them.

  FOUR

  AUTUMN 2005

  My Uncle Dave died in the summer of 2005. He was the second of the “Field kids” to go. We didn’t go to his service. It had been many years since Mother had seen him, but she was saddened by his death. She had often told me the story of how he had searched the waterways around their town in a rowboat after the hurricane of 1938, trying for days to find a friend of his who had disappeared with his boat. The boat was found, but not the friend.