by Jo Barney
Lou finds a mug and not waiting for the machine to finish, pours herself a cup. “It’s about five old women who decide to live together in an ancient house with a front porch and five rocking chairs. They’ve known each other forever, through husbands, lovers, and cancer. What one can’t do, one of the others can. The assisted assisting the assisted. Could be us, someday.”
“So they end up peaceful and content?”
“So they discover the one thing they aren’t willing to do for each other, at least the majority of them.” Lou looks down the neck of her pajama top, points at a red tender spot. “The corkscrew is back in the top drawer. Watch yourself, yourself.”
“You’re speaking of sex? My kind of book.” Jackie pours a cup of coffee and grins at Lou, who is rubbing a finger against the wound on her bony clavicle. “Perky, still, I see.” She turns to go to the living room, and coffee sloshes down the front of her robe as she bumps into Joan who has come up behind her.
“God, Joan. Watch it!”
To Lou, the words seem fueled with more anger than spilled coffee would inspire.
Joan has several folders under her arm, and she doesn’t react to Jackie’s dabbing at herself or her bad humor. “We have Madge’s latest project to finish today, just as she asked.” She moves past Jackie and goes into the kitchen. Reaching for a cup, she adds, “Remember? Our stories? Her new novel, Think on These Things.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“Jackie, we had to say it every week for four years.” Joan sets the folders on the counter and opens the fridge, takes out the milk. “I can’t believe you don’t remember. ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure,’ and so on.”
“‘If there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.’ Philippians 4:8,” Lou finishes the verse. “I used to choke up at the sound of our voices chanting those words.”
A candlelit room, thirty sisters standing in front of wooden benches, heads bowed, the concrete basement walls exuding a musty, exotic scent that used to make Lou almost sick to her stomach—chapter meetings.
Jackie shrugs. “You were probably reacting to the mumble from the back row. I never knew what came next, honest, pure, lovely, shitty, whatever, so I made up words.”
Joan sends a disgusted look at Jackie, apparently not in the mood to reminisce. California girl is stressed, Lou is surprised to see, a crack or two in the façade. Even her voice is brittle, chipped. “Besides her own story that we heard Friday night, Madge began three more. About us, only our stories aren’t finished. She’s asking us to provide the endings. We promised we would.”
“Damn.” Jackie’s cup sails across the drain board. “I’m sick and tired of your bitchy know-it-all-ness, Joan, the coffee soaking down the front of me, this whole impossible scene. I know I agreed to go along with it all, but this is way too weird. I’m taking a long, long walk.”
Joan’s arm blocks her retreat. “We have to do this, Jackie. Tonight. According to the Madge’s plan. We’ll have a ceremony. Candles.” She pushes a folder at her. “After you’ve read this, take your long walk and go to the store in the village and buy candles, a lot of candles. White, for hope.”
Lou clutches her cup, turns away from the wave of tension spilling into the room, says, “White is also the color of mourning.” Then, in the silence that trails her words, she sees the copy of Old Ladies’ Home and flips through a few pages. They’ll have to lighten up or they wouldn’t get through the next day or two. Maybe a laugh from Madge will help. She taps the book’s cover, tries to grin.
“Madge told me she was imagining us in our ancient years, together again, not in the solarium, but in an old house. We grow restless rocking endlessly on the long front porch and decide to kidnap a delivery boy, offer him mention in our wills, and coerce him into servicing us. When the word gets out, other young men show up at our doorstep, along with the police and a few irate mothers.”
She slides the book across the counter. “Madge could be very funny, you know.”
“Is, Lou, is,” Joan says. She is not to be diverted. Now Lou finds herself on the receiving end of orders. “You, my literary friend, will arrange the readings and songs. And snacks. I am in charge of Lucius, who will be here shortly. Our main job, though, is for each of us to read her folder, take a look at everyone else’s, and be able to say “The End,” by tonight.” Joan suddenly breaks into her admirable smile. “Am I being too bossy?”
Jackie meets Joan’s eyes with a reluctant blink. “Yes. But someone has to take charge and it isn’t going to be me.” She heads to the bedroom. “I will manage candles. And I’ll pick up the wine while I’m at it.”
* * *
Lou curls up on the sofa. She needs to go for a walk, too. The tide is out, leaving tide pools and waving sea anemones to poke at, live things, like her garden, and if she goes now, she won’t have to face the sheriff again. She moves to get up, sits back down when Joan shakes her head at her, and when the knock sounds, Joan answers the door. Lucius steps in, glances around, tips his baseball cap at Lou, and then follows Joan to the fireplace chairs.
“No word?” He chooses the same chair as before.
“I was hoping you’d have heard something. She might be hurt somewhere, on the point, or in the forest. We need help, Lucius. Now.” Joan leans toward the man who, according to the plan, will get them through this.
Lucius adjusts his body against an interfering pillow, leans a little himself. “We’ll organize the Boy Scout search team and send them out into the woods this afternoon. Some people in town will volunteer to help. They always do when there is the promise of some excitement.” He pauses. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that in an unfeeling way. How are you all holding up?”
“We’re worried.” Joan lowers her eyelids, her mouth trembling a little. Lou feels her mouth trembling also, a collaborative show of concern that Joan is good at inspiring. “The walking stick, you know. But if she’s hurt somewhere, she knows we won’t abandon her. Jackie is about to go out now, walking the dunes and on the road. Lou will be out there soon, too. I’ll stay here waiting for your call, keeping watch.”
Joan reaches out to touch the sheriff’s arm and then pulls back her hand. As she shuts the door after him, she turns and grins. “No need for overkill, is there?” Lou gives the performance a splatter of applause from her front row seat.
Chapter Eighteen
Sunday Morning: Accretion
Lou
Lou’s glad she’s wearing her sweatshirt. The breeze is coming up and even in the hollow behind the grass of the dune, the pages flutter and threaten to escape from the folder Madge has put them in. She turns her back to the wind, uses a shoe to hold the papers down and begins to read.
Chapter Nineteen
Whatsoever Things Are Pure:
Lou’s Story
This is the way I’ve imagined you. I hope
I’ve found some of your truth.
I will miss knowing how
your story ends, but I know your life will
be full of love and flowers. M.
The hand that covers Lou’s is crusty with dirt, its nails black, as befits the master gardener it belongs to. It doesn’t matter. Her own hand is as dirty. What matters is the tattoo of her heart against her ribs. Susan laughs, gives Lou’s fingers a squeeze, and pushes herself up as tall now as the old rhododendron they’ve been trying to yank out of the ground. Lou tugs one last time at the thick root at her feet. Perhaps she has imagined it.
“We’ll have to cut it down first, and then dig it out,” Susan is saying. “Don’t you think?” She wipes her forehead, leaves yet another crusty gray-brown streak on her face.
Lou takes her friend’s elbow. “Let’s have a glass of iced tea and talk about it in the shade.” The two women wash off under the hose and settle on the wooden deck chairs to sip their drinks.
“I love working with you,” Susan says.
Lou takes a long swallow of tea, looks up from her glass. “Me, too.” In her throat other words, risky words, clamor to be set loose. She silences them, says, “Let’s hire the Samson boy to take it out. Give ourselves a break for once.”
They’ve worked hard all spring on the garden, weeding and planting the one island of sun that appears each day within the wall of tall Douglas firs surrounding the cabin. At its perimeter, ferns, hostas, Solomon’s seal, astilbe, and hydrangeas keep a solemn green watch over the sunlovers, purple penstemon, nicotinana. Foxgloves and fireweed flaunt their colors on the center berm. The rhodie, a scarlet urban misfit, rises uneasily at the edge of the porch, planted by a previous owner inspired, perhaps, by its pale pink and white cousins in the woods a few feet away. The gardeners have agreed that this showy wad of bush is a city creature, belongs next to a large brick house with ten of its sisters, not at the door of a tiny log cabin, three miles off the highway and one mile from its closest neighbor.
The hiring of the Samson boy decided, they relax into the cotton cushions at their backs, and each shuts her eyes. She can’t guess what Susan is thinking, but Lou, for some reason, the rhododendron probably, is floating towards a spring more than forty years earlier.
* * *
Rhododendrons stood like fat sentinels at each side of the porch in the front of the Gamma Psi house. Rather than guard the young women inside, the shrubs provided a series of leafy love nests in which couples, urged on by the 10:00 p.m. curfew, worked furtively to satisfy their bodies’ burgeoning urges. The activities in the bushes were restricted by the Fifties mores as much as the uncomfortable edges of shiplap siding. Lou was not a regular in the bushes. She, lost in a world of others’ words, was barely aware that her body had urges. She spent her four years at Lee University under a pile of books, emerging only to go down to the smoking room, which the sisters called the solarium even though sunlight rarely penetrated its northern windows. Someone there was always ready to talk or lend her a cigarette.
That first year in the house, late at night, stoked on No Doze and nicotine, she sometimes recited a little of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or a few verses of Burns in an unlikely Scottish burr, and her audience would applaud and laugh. She had not caused anyone to laugh before, certainly not her solemn, Bible-infused parents, certainly not her younger brother who claimed he hated her.
Lou roomed with Joan her sophomore year, a streaked-blond Californian from the Bay Area who read Hemingway and Steinbeck in high school, authors Lou’s more provincial teachers considered unfit for teenagers and whom she discovered on her own a few years later. In the early smoky hours of one finals week, abandoning their stupefying Romantic Lit texts, the two of them created a patois that became the lingua franca for the inner sanctum of solarium friends. It involved the intense pursing of lips and touching of teeth. ”I need a tis-sue!” Joan enunciated, with a perfectly contracted moue.
“Why don’t you call the wait-ress?” Lou asked, cuspids tapping.
“Forsoothe, I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Henceforth do.”
”I take umbrage,” Jackie, emerging from a textbook torpor, objected.
“Soooooooo?”
Madge complained, “So, I am worried about my netherparts.”
“Aren’t we all?” Jackie asked.
By her third year, after a spate of Melville and her chronic dateless Saturday nights, Lou’s nickname in that midnight room became Ishmael, Call Me.
* * *
Lou turns a page, remembers these silly times, warms once again with a sense of inclusion. She had not felt part of a group before, lonely without realizing it, in the midst of her books. Despite the years that have followed, I haven’t changed much, she thinks, not lonely now, but choosing the simplicity of aloneness.
* * *
By her senior year, besides laughter, late nights in the solarium spawned secrets and shared angst. Mrs. T, the housemother, always retreated to her room after shooing the lovers off the front porch and locking the front door. Most of the sisters headed for their narrow beds on the sleeping porch soon after. Around midnight, Lou would shut her portable typewriter case and go to the solarium to find Joan and Madge and Jackie, maybe a couple of other nocturnal sorts, sagging on the old mohair furniture, filmy windows opened to bring some relief from the smoke. They would whisper because of the sleeping girls above them and because what they talked about was not supposed to be said out loud. Sex, mostly. They were virgins, of course. At least, no one ever contradicted that idea. By their senior years, they looked forward to summer marriages to med students, to grad students in universities thousands of miles away, to rich farmers from Idaho. They shared information about premarital examinations, diaphragms, the rhythm method. No one mentioned orgasms. Oral sex was still a raunchy joke, less so after Joan received a marriage manual from which she conducted midnight tutoring sessions.
“Smells are important,” she instructed, reading from a lightly underlined paragraph. “Absolute cleanliness is a must.”
“For who?” Jackie asked.
“Whom,” Lou corrected. She was having trouble finding a meaningful context for this information.
“Therefore, women should wipe from the front to the back.”
“Well, gaah!” Jackie exclaimed, but several others looked worried.
Joan, ever cool, said, “I think we should discuss this. Front to back, you say.” Another phrase blossomed, a kind of mantra, one that popped up every once in a while, even years later, unannounced.
Lou was not shy, only reluctant, around men. Quiet philosophy majors sought her out because she herself was a seeker of truth, her sources Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy, Theodore Dreiser, and Maugham, but she was open to any idea that might break through the confining walls of her mother’s devout Christian Scientist teachings. She preferred coffee and cigarettes at Billy’s Cafe to sorority dances, and luckily, so did some of these earnest young men. If there was a whiff of sex floating through these conversations, it slipped past Lou and probably by her Nietzsche-quoting friends.
Then, in the height of the search for meaning, and despite her desperate, resurrected prayers and reading of Mary Baker Eddy, her mother died. “Everyone dies, Louise,” her mother said, her last cogent sentence before she fell into the sleep that swept her into her God’s arms. Maybe that is the ultimate truth, Lou thought. So where does that leave a person?
By spring, Joan was married, and everyone else except Lou had a ring on her finger and plans for a summer wedding. Lou’s major professor, Dr. Elizabeth Wilton, advised her to go to graduate school. She had the makings of a fine researcher and writer. Her paper on Dylan Thomas was Master’s quality. Lou was flattered, of course, but she could not ask her bereaved and nearly blind father for any more tuition money. Besides, she would not need a Master’s once she found a husband.
She decided, in between spates of bridesmaid gowns, to become an airline stewardess. For no good reason, really, except that she’d missed the deadlines for graduate school, and she knew she’d be a really bad high school teacher. She flew the West Coast, lived in a small apartment in L.A. with another stewardess. Despite the exotic palm trees and constant sun, she was disappointed. The men who knocked on her door, took her to the beaches, tried to creep into her bed, bored her. “My roommate’s home,” she took to saying, closing the door quietly on hopeful grins. All she really wanted was a conversation with a man that didn’t begin with, “My boss doesn’t know shit about running a business.”
She found him in the first class section of a Seattle/LA flight. “Thanks, Lou,” he said when she gave him his morning juice and newspaper. He had been paying attention when the pilot introduced the attendants. When she returned a little later with his breakfast, she said, “Here are your eggs, Mr. Egan.” She had read the passenger list.
By the time they landed in LA, Mark Egan had penciled her phone number on the cover of his flight magazine, and when he called, she accepted his invitation to
dinner. He came in afterward, but only for a glass of Galliano. He talked marvelously, quoted Kierkegaard, Freud and Walt Whitman, sometimes in the same sentence. For the first time since college coffee dates, Lou could articulate her need to understand things to someone who had the same need. “What is all this about?’ she asked, flinging a hand into the unknown, nearly spilling her liqueur.
He laughed. “On Monday, when the sun is hot, I wonder to myself a lot: ‘Now is it true, or it is not, That what is which and which is what?’” Milne’s goofiness sent an unaccountable moisture flowing in her nether parts.
Mark was a pilot, and looked like one, not tall, but dark thick hair and intense green eyes that made height unimportant. She liked his teeth, overlapping a little in front, insinuating a puckish sense of humor. She liked his hands that, on their second meeting, reached for her with a reassuring hesitation. When she pulled away, mindful of her boney ribcage, her small breasts, he said, “I like narrow bodies.” Then he touched her in all of her narrow places. They spent their third date in the apartment, Lou, for the first time having warned her roommate to not come home till late. He deflowered her gently, a towel arranged below her, reminding her of some love scene she had read about years before. “Front to back” came to mind. She probably was thinking too much about the manual’s chapter on orgasms to have one.
Their lovemaking got better as the weeks went on, no elusive fireworks for Lou, but a warm, pleasing convergence of minds and body parts that might be even better, she thought. However, Mark’s ability to quote esoteric writers began to pale a little. At times, Lou wondered if he had any thoughts of his own, but not so much that she didn’t look forward to his calls, his hands surveying her valleys. Only once in a while did she wish that he would sit quietly with her, read a book, languor in the Beethoven album she had been saving for such moments. When they were married, she confided to Julie, her roommate, she would have her solitude during the day, and be glad to talk with him to each evening. Except that he was a pilot and wouldn’t be around every evening.
