With a spot of light to aim for, Caddie trotted the rest of the way. She wheeled into Nana’s room. White! Her eyes hurt—she squinted in the sudden dazzle. White!
“Oh, my heavens.”
“Dear Lord.”
“What on earth?”
In the center of it all, Nana squeezed her cane and kept trying to smile, smile, but uncertainty started her lips quivering.
She’d painted everything in the room white. Everything. The wallpapered walls, the bureau and everything on top of it, her bedside table, her desk, her clock, the ottoman, both chairs. The bed! The picture frames on the white walls, the lamp and the lamp cord, the bookshelf and the spines of all the books in it—the windows! Her clay statue of David! Everything. Everything was white. The floor—no, thank God, thank God, she’d put white sheets down on the beautiful old wood floor.
In the stunned silence, Caddie made a mistake. She said, “Oh, Nana. What have you done.”
Her grandmother’s face collapsed. In an instant she went from apprehensive to devastated, and it was all Caddie’s doing. She reached out to her in a reflex, but Nana yanked away before she could touch her.
“Out, then! Get out, all you philistines. It’s for purity, but you wouldn’t know. Everybody out of my room. Get out, get out, get out, get out, get out.”
They were going as fast as they could. Brushing against the door frame, Doré let out a squeak—the shoulder of her umber tunic came away with paint on it. “I think it’s latex,” Caddie called, “I’ll wash it!” Brenda was walking out with the others—Caddie stopped her by grabbing her hand. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ll fix this, I’ll get it all cleaned up. Anything that’s ruined, I’ll pay for.”
Brenda, the soul of calmness, could hardly make her mouth work. “We’ll talk.”
Thea was the last to go. She didn’t want to leave; she asked Caddie what she could do to help. “No, you, too,” Nana snapped, and began moving toward her in a menacing way, herding her out with the shelf of her bosom. As soon as Thea was out, she slammed the door behind her.
That was the last straw. “Nana!”
“What?” She limped in circles around the room, striking the white bureau with her cane on every other pass, muttering. “It’s for purity, how could they be so stupid, how could they be so stupid? I don’t know why I’m surprised. I don’t know why I thought they’d get it when it only came to me this morning.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t figure it out for the longest time. I even asked people, what’s the bottom line on oldness? What’s a symbol for longevity, for lasting and surviving, for elderliness. Cornel said a coffin, but that’s death. What is the essential form of age?” She waved her arm around the room. “And here it is, purity and light, the return of innocence. This is it.”
“But—”
“But what?”
“But, Nana, for the Lord’s sake, couldn’t you have painted a canvas white?”
“You don’t get it. Of course not, how else would you get the feel?” She held her hands out, then clutched them to her heart. “I don’t understand, I swear I just don’t understand. How people could be—”
“You really don’t? You truly can’t understand why people, most people, would think this is completely nuts?”
“Ohhhh, Caddie.” She tuned her voice to a low, deep, guttural accusation, the very sound of betrayal. It would’ve destroyed Caddie, but it was the same tone Nana used to use before Finney was housebroken when she’d come upon one of his accidents.
“Nana, I’m sorry, but we’re in trouble. I don’t even know if Brenda will let you stay here after this.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s my room, isn’t it?”
“No!”
“Well, I’d like to know what we’re paying an arm and a leg for every month if it’s not. All right, all right, all right. All right!” She cupped her ears with her hands. “Stop talking. Stop reasoning with me. You’re just like them—you get out, too. To think I raised you. You’re even worse, because you’re a fraidy-cat and a philistine. Fraidy-cat, fraidy-cat! Scared of your own shadow!
“No, don’t leave! I don’t know what I’m even saying.” Her shoulders slumped. She took her hands from her ears and put them over her eyes. “Oh, God, look what I’ve done.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Caddie went to her and led her over to the bed.
“No, don’t, it’s still wet!”
“Who cares, Nan. It’s only paint.” She plopped down on the sticky cotton quilt, ignoring the squishy sound.
Nana hesitated. “Oh, hell,” she said, and collapsed beside her.
Foot-wide tracks from the roller had left white diagonals on the quilt, obliterating the gaily colored squares. Nana should’ve put on two coats; red and blue were starting to bleed through in patches. “Well, here we are,” she said, “and I’m losing my mind.”
“No, you’re not.”
“It’s why I wanted to come here in the first place. So you wouldn’t see.”
“You mean you came here because of me?”
“Sometimes I know, sometimes I don’t. Caddie, don’t hate me.”
“Never.”
“Don’t remember me like this.”
“But you’re all right. You’re the same as always.”
She shook her head, chuckling and sniffling at the same time. She’d been leaning back on her hands. She brought them into her lap, holding the white palms up, as if to say, Look, here’s proof. She touched Caddie’s face with her fingers and looked into her eyes, straight on, showing herself.
“You are,” Caddie insisted. “A little eccentric, that’s what you are.”
She gave Caddie’s knee a squeeze, leaving a palm print. “I didn’t mean what I said. Whatever it was. I can’t even remember.”
“Never mind.”
“But that’s what I’m talking about,” she declared, anxious again. “Don’t let them kick me out, don’t let them send me home, because I don’t want you taking care of me. Listen to me. Listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“Do not, do not take me back home. Shoot me first. It’s not funny! Are you listening?”
“I’m listening.”
“I will not be a figure of fun. I’m an artist.”
“I know you are.”
She pushed her away. “No, you don’t, you think I’m crazy, you’ve always been ashamed of me. Ever since you were a little girl, you’ve been my shadow, my little black cloud. Oh, I don’t mean that—I’m so tired, I’ve been working so hard to get ready—”
“I know. It’s all right.”
“How am I going to sleep in here? You see?”
“I’ll ask Brenda—”
“I didn’t think about it once, the aftermath. You see? You’re right, everybody’s right, I’m losing my brain.” She fell forward, rocking herself over her knees.
Caddie put her arms around her and rocked with her. “You’re all right, Nan, don’t worry, everything’s all right, it’s all right.” The stink of paint was making a spot in her head ache. Nana had painted three bobby pins on top of her bedside table white, as well as the cover of a paperback book, an emery board, and her reading glasses. Under the bed, the heels of her furry slippers poked out, white. The closet door was shut; no telling if she’d painted her clothes. “It’s really…it’s really amazing, Nan. So this is old age.”
“A symbol.” She sat up. “It’s a flop if I have to explain it.”
“No, I get it, I think. Purity, just as you said. Getting rid of all the things you don’t need.”
“Till you’re nothing but light.” She frowned. “Maybe I should’ve used a lightbulb. A roomful of lightbulbs—you walk in and bam. Or the whole house! Or, I know, fire instead of light…”
“Nan.”
“If I could’ve set the house on fire, then—”
“Nana—”
“You don’t even know when I’m kidding.”
“Oh.” She let her g
randmother poke her in the shoulder and cackle at her. They leaned against each other.
“Don’t let me forget any of this,” Nana said presently, her voice wistful. “Remind me. Because I might forget.”
What a blessing that would be, Caddie couldn’t help thinking. Maybe the worst of this was ending for Nana just as it was beginning for her. It felt like quicksand, the thought of losing Nana, like sitting in a sinking boat. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be, it was backward. Don’t leave me, Nan, I’m not ready. She’d been planning to tell her about the baby tonight. She’d been looking forward to the relief of that, the naturalness of sharing the news of her baby with the woman who might as well be her mother. Now she couldn’t, she wasn’t sure why but she couldn’t, not now, and maybe it was the beginning of not telling Nana things.
“This shouldn’t be how it works.” Nana sighed, and Caddie smiled because she’d read her mind. “It should get brighter at the end.”
“It will. It’ll get brighter.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Wet white paint made a squishy sound when they clasped hands. Nana held on so hard, it hurt.
21
August gave out and September took over without much energy. Fall wasn’t “in the air” yet, as Mrs. Tourneau had claimed this morning when she and Caddie had come outside for their newspapers at the same moment. “Isn’t it?” Caddie called back in a cheery and-that’s-final voice, not because she agreed but because that way Mrs. Tourneau couldn’t capture her.
Something was changing, but it wasn’t the weather, which dragged on hot and humid day after day, blurring outlines in haze and sapping initiative. Everything looked tired, from the strawlike lawns to the blackish-green leaves on the maple trees overhanging Early Street, tired and too heavy to hold themselves up. Dreary limbo time, when summer was dying but autumn was still gestating, or perhaps hadn’t even been conceived yet. Dregs of days. Burnt-out fag ends of days. Days like hunks of barely smoldering charcoal—
Jason Newbinder shrieked a note on his A string so far out of tune, Finney whimpered under the piano. “Let’s try that one again,” Caddie advised, speaking so gently she amazed herself. Because what she really wanted to do was throw Jason’s violin out the window into the bare front yard, bare of sculptures, bare of everything but weeds, and then throw Jason out after it.
“I don’t get why I have to play these stupid scales anyway.” He was seven years old, an azure-eyed, towheaded angel sent to torment her. Too young for violin lessons, but his mother had insisted. And Caddie needed the money.
“I don’t see why, either.”
He looked at her narrowly, suspecting a trick, but she was serious. If he packed up his instrument and went home right now, she wouldn’t lift a finger to stop him. She’d hold the door for him.
She got a grip on herself and turned in his music book to “Frère Jacques.” “Let’s try this, then. Let’s see how much better you can play it this week than last.”
“Okay,” he said, brightening. He began to saw away, and something in the way he pressed his tender cheek against the chin rest, gripping the bow in his stubby fingers and sticking his tongue out between his sucked-in lips, punctured a hole in Caddie’s exasperation. She felt it leak away until nothing was left but a peculiar achy wistfulness, like waking from a sweet dream you can’t quite remember.
Jason’s lessons were only for half an hour, but even that was too long for a seven-year-old. When he started playing more clunkers than right notes and her effusive praise stopped cheering him up, she suggested they finish up with lemonade and a duet on the front porch. That cheered him up too much; she didn’t yell, “Don’t run!” in time, and he banged his instrument on the edge of the screen door on his way out. “Uh-oh,” he said worriedly, showing her the scratch beside the tailpiece. “Don’t tell my mom, okay?” Caddie promised.
“What’s that?” he asked while he slurped his lemonade, pointing to a pile of paint supplies under the porch swing.
“That’s paint. And brushes and stuff that I haven’t had time to clean yet.”
It had taken all weekend, with some help from Brenda and Claudette, to put Nana’s room to rights. Before Nana had painted them white, the walls had been papered with a dark floral print no one liked anyway, so Caddie had repainted them a pretty shade of peach. She’d put a second coat of white on the furniture, used paint remover on objects with hard, nonporous surfaces, and thrown out the rest, including the bedclothes and the curtains. Result: a fresh, airy-looking room, much brighter than before. Really, a tremendous improvement. She kept saying that to Brenda in hopeful tones, but the older woman’s face had remained circumspect. “We’ll talk later,” she’d replied every time Caddie apologized, which was frequently.
Even out on the porch, Jason’s attempt to play double stops was painful. Not many students, maybe three in all Caddie’s years of teaching, had ever tempted her to wear earplugs, and he was one. She didn’t like Mrs. Newbinder, who was pushy and insensitive and wouldn’t listen—but it was a relief when she pulled up in her tan station wagon and beeped the horn, leaning down low to wave through the window and holler, “Jaaaa-son.”
“You were great today,” Caddie fibbed, helping him snap his bow back in the case. “I saw so much improvement. Didn’t you? Did you have fun?”
He grunted; he wasn’t much of a talker.
“Next week, I know—if you practice your new piece really well, we’ll save five minutes at the end and make root beer floats. If your mom says it’s okay. How’s that?”
He was so young, so little, yet already he’d mastered the art of the put-down. “Yeah, maybe,” he said out of the side of his sweet angel’s mouth. She watched him rumble down the walk with his miniature tough-guy slouch and thought again how unsuited he was to the violin. Mrs. Newbinder should make him take guitar lessons. Heavy metal.
At least he was her last student for the day. Standing at the kitchen sink, cleaning the paintbrushes she’d been too tired to deal with till now, Caddie thought about the meeting she’d finally had with Brenda last Sunday night. They’d had it in Brenda’s office. She’d dragged her chair out from behind her desk and put it next to Caddie’s—not a good sign. Caddie could never guess Brenda’s age; she might be a haggard forty-five, a spry sixty, or anywhere in between. She was a widow with a married daughter out west someplace, but much more than that Caddie didn’t know.
Caddie had started by apologizing again, saying how sorry she was for Nana’s “brainstorm,” as she’d taken to calling it, and how she hoped it wouldn’t lead to any drastic measures—by which she meant Brenda kicking Nana out of Wake House.
The older woman had listened patiently, leaning forward with her large hands folded around her knees, dark eyes sympathetic, until Caddie ran down. “The thing is,” she began, “nothing’s changed since the last time you and I talked about this. Wake House is still struggling along, under-funded, overtasked, and we’re still not equipped or even safe for taking on residents with dementia.”
“But aren’t there degrees? You don’t get rid of somebody for forgetting to come to lunch, there must be levels. The white room was bad, I know, but now it’s fixed, and—it’s not like Nana’s taking her clothes off and running around naked, she hasn’t set fire to anything, she hasn’t threatened anyone. I promise I’ll never sue. Would that help? If she hurts herself or gets lost, I promise not to hold you responsible. Nana doesn’t really bother anybody, most people like her—”
“I like her, I’m very fond of Frances, I think she’s a stitch. And yes, there certainly are degrees. She doesn’t have to go tomorrow, I’m just—” She blew her bangs out of her eyes tiredly. “I’m alerting you to the probabilities, Caddie. For the future. It wouldn’t hurt to start looking around for another place for your grandmother.”
“A nursing home.”
“There are some nice ones.”
“Not like Wake House,” she’d argued childishly. She imagin
ed telling Nana she had to leave, had to move to a real home. “I don’t know if she’d even go.”
“It’ll be hard,” Brenda had agreed. “I’ll help all I can.” She’d pressed her middle fingers against the sides of her nose, as if she had a headache. “You can’t imagine how frustrating it is. I’m trying to get Edgie back into the house, we’re working on an arrangement, but there are so many obstacles, legal, logistical, you just don’t know. I want this place to be a home, not an institution, but the insurance goes up and the repairs never stop, and then I have to raise rates again. It feels like a losing battle.”
She’d stared at Caddie bleakly. “I’m trying to keep people, not throw them out when they need help the most. But the more you do the more you’re regulated, and the more you’re regulated the more it costs. My late husband used to say I was too idealistic. I don’t know. But I love old people. Most people don’t. I like trying to make life nice or even decent for them after they’ve had to give up just about everything they have. Their lives shrink down so. They live in these little rooms, Caddie, sleep in single beds, they eat when I say they can eat. They had homes of their own, families, people used to need their help. Now the best I can do is let them live with me in my house. And I don’t know how much longer I can do that.”
Caddie had gone home that night feeling more burdened down than before. She had one person to worry and fret about, Brenda had twelve. Life was too hard. She’d had to get up and play the piano for an hour that night before she could fall asleep.
The phone rang. She answered it with dripping, paint-stained hands.
“Caddie! Are you in the middle of something?”
“Hi, Thea—no, my last student just left. Great timing.”
“Good, because we need you. Mrs. Brill’s granddaughter’s here, or maybe it’s her great-granddaughter, yeah, I guess it’s a great, the sweetest little thing, and her parents gave her a violin for her birthday yesterday and nobody even knows how to tune it. So here the poor thing is, visiting Granny and just dying to play something for her on her new toy, and nobody has the least idea how the thing even works. So we need you to rescue her. Her name is—well, I forget, how embarrassing. A senior moment. Her name’s…”
The Goodbye Summer Page 29
