Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  “This is all we know at this point.” Joan lifts a long walking stick from the mantel and hands it to him. “We found this on the beach. It’s hers.” The stick, carved and notched, its handle dark with oil, a scruffy leather thong dangling from one end, the other end blunted by uncounted plunges into sand and rock, has seen long use.

  He rubs his fingers along the etched wood, across the notches marking its travels. “This is a very personal thing, this stick. Years old, I imagine.” He directs his question to the silent Lou. “If she’s gone off somewhere, would she leave it on the beach for just anyone to find?”

  Lou uncurls, loosens her hands. “No. Madge wouldn’t. It was at the tide line below the house.” She points to a stretch of sea grass at the edge of the dune in front of the cabin. “In the wet sand.”

  “And no note, like where she was going or anything?”

  Lou turns back to him, her eyes dark, unblinking. She shakes her head. “No.”

  “We haven’t really looked.” Joan places the stick back above the fireplace. “We keep thinking she’ll show up. But we panicked a little when we realized she hadn’t been here since early morning, and then we found the walking stick.” She sits down in the chair next to him. “That’s when we decided to call you.”

  “Her family?”

  “We haven’t contacted anyone yet. Her sons live on the East Coast. The man she lives with is traveling. Madge is a writer, spends most of her time in front of her computer in the city or here. This is her house, you know.”

  No, Lucius doesn’t know and it doesn’t make any difference, except that it probably means that the missing woman knows her way in the green hills that cup the village and isn’t lost. He glances down at the notes Liz has given him. Madge Slocum. “What kind of books does she write?”

  “Fiction. About women’s lives, mostly, love, children, getting old. Her last book was reviewed by The New York Times and sold quite well. She’s working on another…” Joan pauses, runs the tip of her tongue over her upper lip… “I’m not sure what it’s about.”

  The oak log has dissolved into graying coals. Lucius gets up, pulls the baseball cap from his pocket. “Well, we can’t do anything until tomorrow. How about a picture?”

  Lou hands him a book from the pile on the end table. Madge Slocum’s photo fills the back cover. Dark hair, pale skin, wide eyes and a generous mouth that seems to be saying, “Life is Good.” She looks about forty-five but so do most authors on their book covers, Lucius has noticed in the past. Even the males who write the thrillers he’s addicted to. “I’ll take the jacket. Probably won’t need it, but just in case.” As Joan follows him to the door, he asks her how they all know each other. He can’t think of four friends he’d want to spend a lot of time with, stuck in a small house like this one. Women are different. After three wives he knows this for a fact.

  Joan’s milky voice seems to smile at his question, at him. “We went to college together, then went our separate ways, our families grew up, and when our husbands died or we divorced them, we got back together, every few years, to compare stories. This year it was Madge who sent the invitations to come here to her beach house. She seemed very excited to see us.” As Lucius steps over the doorstep, she touches his arm, says, “That’s why this is so upsetting.”

  He is surprised by the woman’s gesture—intimate, unexpected. He wants to ease her mind. “Just keep a plate warm for her for when she shows up tonight.”

  Chapter Nine

  Saturday Evening: Squall

  Joan

  “Jackie! Come out here!” Joan shrieks in a way she knows Lucius could not have imagined possible after that little scene. By the time Jackie, already in her flannel pajamas, shuffles into the living room and sinks to a chair, Joan has pulled herself together. “You can’t do this again, Jackie. We need to present a united front. The sheriff is important to us. Do we have to drain the wine bottles?” At this threat, Jackie shakes her head and says no, and both Lou and Joan are relieved. At least Joan is. A few glasses of wine might be the only way they get through the next several days.

  Lou holds out a corkscrew tied to a loop of yarn. “This will be a little hard to sleep on,” she says, “but this is apparently my role here, sommelier.” She slips the ungainly necklace over her head.

  “There are always screw tops,” Jackie says, but without conviction.

  “And there are always screw ups. Don’t even think of it.” Joan’s eyes burn with fatigue. Except for a couple of hours in the middle, she’s been up since yesterday morning. Madge had needed to talk last night—a ramble through sixty years which Joan encouraged with throaty sounds and touches on a still shoulder. Madge confessed a short-lived affair with a poet long-dead, her anger at a husband who didn’t trust her enough to tell her the truth, the fear that every book she’d written had been wrapped in. Joan listened. And she wondered what she would do with these secrets. Now, as she turns towards the bedroom she shared with Madge, she thinks about her friend’s last words, and she realizes they were a precious goodbye gift, not to be shared yet, if ever.

  However, old ladies don’t do well without sleep. Not that she is an old lady yet, really. One has to lose a lot of herself to be an old lady. Joan can visualize one final thrust at winning before the losing starts happening. Arthritis in a thumb doesn’t count. Nor does having to go through part of the alphabet to remember a word like—those little green things one puts on salmon, damn. She rubs her eyelids. A. B. C. Capers, of course. The caper brain cell destroyed by who knows what, white wine, probably. Not like Madge, though.

  She undoes the top button of her jeans, takes a relieved breath. “Tomorrow we read Madge’s stories about us. Right now, we’re going to bed.” She doesn’t care if she sounds bitchy. She is, for good reason. “By the way, Roger called. While you were taking a nap this afternoon.”

  “Roger? My God! What did you say?” Lou still holds her wine opener bobble, its pointed screw shaking at Joan.

  “Careful.” Joan brushes past Lou to her bedroom. “That she was out on the beach and that I wasn’t sure when she’d be back.”

  “And?”

  “That I’d tell her he called. He’s staying at his mother’s, and I took the telephone number in case it’s not on Madge’s cell.” Joan aims a reassuring pat at Lou’s arm. “He asked how she was and I said fine.” Sitting on the bed, she pulls her legs out of her pants. At some point she’ll have to admit they are too tight, give in to baggy stretch waists like everyone else.

  “He should know, Joan.” Lou’s thin fingers clutch at the old quilt folded over the footboard, a defense against the evening cool. “He, of all people.”

  “He, of all people, should not know. Madge was clear about that. For his own good.” Joan wants to add that this isn’t the time for more tears. She’d like to give Lou a good shake, knock some backbone into her.

  “And when she doesn’t call?” Lou loosens her hold on the quilt, steps back, blinks her eyes dry.

  Skinny as a broom, always has been, quiet and at times surprising tough. Fearless, it seemed, when she left her marriage. Maybe Lou’ll be okay with all this once she gets a grip on her sadness. We all need to get a grip, Joan tells herself, or at least a few hours’ sleep.

  She takes a moment to pull her nightgown over her head. “He called again, left a message because I took the phone off the hook. We’ll get in touch with him again tomorrow.” She moves to the mirror over the bureau, inspects the gray pouches under her eyes. “God, I’m ten years older than yesterday.” Lou takes the hint and leaves, closing the door behind her.

  Chapter Ten

  Saturday Evening: Breakwater

  Lou

  Too empty to question her new role as her sister’s keeper, Lou wraps the corkscrew in toilet paper to keep it from stabbing her in the middle of the night, and settles on her left side, the side the orthopedist claimed opened the body best. She breathes the way Susan has taught her: count of five in, hold a count of seven, count o
f eight out. One concentrates on the count, the filling, the emptying, and one’s mind benumbs. The hip hadn’t been broken, only a sciatic nerve inflamed and healed, but the habit of counting her breaths is now a ritual and usually brings a sweet void and sleep, unless an anxiety storm sweeps through, creating havoc.

  Like right now. She shouldn’t have napped this afternoon; now she can’t even make her eyelids move toward each other. Jackie’s soft snoring on the pillow next to hers, little puffs at the end of each rumble, isn’t helping. This afternoon her bedmate had stayed awake, drinking herself into an out-of-body state of denial. At the moment, Lou would welcome Jackie’s alcoholic coma.

  The pillow lumps under her head, her neck aches, her thoughts swirl until she sits up, turns on the light, reaches for the book on the table next to her. But even Annie Proulx doesn’t stop the swirling. She switches off the light, lies back and sinks into a sea of ancient memories, the four of them, blowing smoke rings, French-inhaling, rolling eyes at each other, talking dirty at 2:00 a.m. in a darkened sorority solarium.

  Chapter Eleven

  1955: Hinterland

  Madge

  Madge has just that day cut her hair short, really short this time. The back of her head, in fact, looks like a boy’s, Lou has informed her. Bristly. Ten or so girls, young women, if they are talking sisterhood language, lounge on the floor and furniture in the solarium, once the original homeowner’s glassed addition to his large faux colonial house meant for the growing of exotic plants. No greenery has lived in this space for twenty years, filled instead with old spring-shot chairs and a couch shoved helter-skelter amid ashtrays and forgotten books. The house holds thirty Gamma Psi’s, most of whom have taken up cigarettes as prerequisites to college life. These days the solarium’s only blooms are flames at the end of matches.

  Madge feels eyes squinting at her through the gray air, assessing the new do. She looks back with a brave squint of her own. “I wanted something easy.” She runs a hand over the top of her head. Her neck really does feel like a boy’s, alien.

  “It’ll grow out. Mine did,” Jackie says as she flips a bang into the dark halo of hair curling around her face. “Don’t worry.”

  Madge doesn’t want to be the object of pity, especially from a girl whose unruly hair she’s envious of, grown in or not. She lights a cigarette and drags noisily, on purpose. “I like it.”

  A set of fingers pats at first, then begins to massage her scalp. “Just needs to be softened up a little.” Joan speaks with her usual certainty, her own blond hair contained in its perfect pageboy. Approval from Joan about hair, about a lot of things, means something, and Madge relaxes under the strokes of those confident fingertips.

  Joan is from California, and this weekend she knocked everyone out with her sexy blond hairdo as Sweetheart of Sigma Chi, not to mention her tulle and crinoline strapless and her popular escort, Tim Costas, captain of the basketball team. At Lee University, being from California is like being royalty on tour, college just a rest stop on the way to someplace spectacular. Joan and the three other California girls in the house are from San Mateo. How they found their ways to a Podunk private school in the middle of backwoods Oregon is not a mystery.

  Twenty years before, the University spawned a graduate from California who soon made millions building warships. He credited his college for this success despite the fact that he had majored in literature. In gratitude, he offered scholarships so that other Californians would have the same opportunity, but without the war, of course.

  Most people do not know about the alumnus since recipients of the money are asked to not reveal its source, lest he be bombarded by requests from poor non-Californian would-be Lee students.

  Then last spring Madge mentioned in the solarium that she might not be able continue on for her junior year unless luck intervened. Her father had been laid off and her mother, in desperation, had started working on the pear line at a cannery, the only job that met her homely resume. College tuition wasn’t on her parents’ list of necessities. She tried to joke about it. “I’m pretty sure that Miss Kilpatrick, the floor manager at Lerner’s, will be thrilled to have me back full time,” she said. “I hold the record for the fewest balanced cash register tapes ever recorded in the history of the children’s department.”

  Sally Olson was listening. Even though she was from the Peninsula, Sally was not on a California scholarship, since it was her father who administered the fund for the Big Alumnus and, out of ethical considerations, he had not tossed his daughter’s name into the Adansky Corporation scholarship bag. Sally, however, provided her father with occasional reports on the subsidized students, especially those who might need small reminders of who was paying the bill.

  Over the weekend, she called and informed him that Madge was as close to being a Californian as an Oregonian could get, and she needed a leg up. Sally’s family owned ten horses and a ranch behind Stanford, which accounted for the horsy allusion. A few days later, after a series of tearful goodbyes to her Gamma Psi sisters, perhaps her best friends ever, Madge received a letter informing her that she was among the very few northerners to ever receive an Adansky scholarship.

  That still meant, of course, brown-nosing Miss Kilpatrick at Lerner’s but just for the summer, pretending she could add, and begging her parents for extra items like the $85.00 formal she really needed for the Homecoming dance. She did both and she hated it.

  And that’s why, when she came back to school this fall, she cut off her hair. She would become a new person. Independent. She would do the shit work, she’d already signed up for the dishwasher job in the Gamma Psi kitchen, but she’d do it on her own terms. And no more begging willing but unable parents. No more Yes ma’ams into the iron bodice of a shop tyrant.

  An hour after she left the beauty salon, she changed her major from education to psychology, and then over coffee and a cigarette, alone at Sam’s Cafe, she decided not to hold out any more on her current steady, Ralph, not that she’d go all the way. Who wanted to get pregnant like Lily last semester, a nightmare for the sorority, her parents, and obviously, for Lily?

  However, tonight, under the calming strokes of Joan’s massaging fingers, the former Madge still lurks. That Madge is worried about money, feels stupid about Hemingway, knows that she talks too much to be a psychologist, and, worst of all, still nurtures an impossible dream of becoming a writer of stories that others will read and find a speck of truth within.

  She exhales, turns off that kind of thinking, and tunes in to the solarium’s swirl of smoke and voices.

  Liz Wyndam, a year older and decades more mature, a drama major, is drawing ovals in the air, the tip of her French cigarette glowing at the end of each swing of her arm. “It’s so over-valued,” she intones in her Barbara Stanwyck mode. Her cigarette swoops. “The penis,” she says. She drags on the brown stub and mashes it into the pile of butts in the ashtray in front of her. “A carrot works as well.” Liz leans back into the legs of the girl sitting in the chair behind her and waggles her eyebrows. “Of course, you all know this, right?”

  No. Madge is pretty sure that most of the giggling girls in the Gamma Psi solarium this night, despite their hoots and nods in agreement, don’t know. And if she does, no one is admitting it. Madge can picture it, the carrot. Actually, she can feel it. She thinks she would prefer a boy’s fingers, two last night, wiggling a little. Of course, a carrot might be longer or self-managed, not like the painful poke that brought the date to a halt. She leans forward, snags a cigarette from the pack in Lou’s hand, and turns to Jackie, who is always good for a laugh. “So how was skiing this weekend?”

  Chapter Twelve

  1955: Hinterland II

  Jackie

  Jackie needs a shower. Only the smoke in the solarium obscures the fact that her body is exuding an exotic scent. She hadn’t actually smoked the reefer that Billy offered her, like only one lungful. But the car reeked of it and she reeks of it. She doesn’t mind reeking of it, and she li
ked Billy’s smudgy kiss that started on one side of her face, tracked its way to her mouth, found the other ear. Doped kisses are messy but take in a lot of territory. She answers Madge’s question by pulling up a pajama leg and rubbing her calf. The purple lump has sloughed into a mauve and reddish lake that floods almost to her ankle, marking her, once again, as the crazy person in the house.

  “God,” someone gasps. “Is it worth it?

  “I had a great weekend,” Jackie answers. “Snow was great, the parties…” She stops. She needs to be a little discreet about alcohol despite or because of the fact that one of the senior officers of the sorority had been caught with a bottle of Chivas and a bucket of ice cubes in the basement just before Winter Break. Astonishment had run the gamut from how could she, right here in our house, to so why didn’t she invite me? These comments, of course, were not voiced during the Gamma Psi special meeting where the offending sister was grounded, lucky her. Several others in past years had been kicked out of the sorority for similar offenses, but this particular girl was six weeks from graduating mid-year and was a senior scholar in sociology/psychology with a minor in French. Jackie is inclined to believe that it was the French that impressed the presiding alum.

  She, herself, is not interested foreign languages, or sociology, or psychology. She is interested in skiing. And, in the other seasons, swimming and shooting arrows. She loves knowing about her body, other bodies, everything about why a muscle aches, a calf turns purple, how an arm can throw a perfect curve ball. In fact, she is in the midst of an intensive study on the throwing arm of a farm boy from Boise. They haven’t actually dated yet, but she has spent a few hours in the grandstands at the baseball field during practice, taking mental notes. She also likes his thighs and his slight overbite. Tomorrow she’ll walk back from the stadium about the time he will leave, wet from the shower, moving fast towards the Zeta house and dinner. Like she did today, only tomorrow she plans to catch up with him, start talking.