by Jo Barney
“So we are post-post menopausal,” Madge said. “Very, very wise. What are we called?”
“Old.” Lou couldn’t resist.
That evening, they lit blue candles, read aloud from Jackie’s books about potions for reviving one’s liver, one’s love life, one’s outlook. Lou, feeling she needed to add a literary aspect to this ritual, rose, began to recite.
“Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” She pointed to the sand dunes “… boundless and bare /The Lone and level sands stretch far away.”
She sat down, amazed that the words still resided somewhere inside her. “Shelley,” she added, “Ozymandias.”
“Depressing,” Jackie said. “The poem and the fact that you can remember it.”
Then they each held in her palm an object she found on the beach, a crab carapace, a sea rock, a clamshell, and predicted where she would be in five years.
“Five years hence,” Lou insisted.
“Forsooth, I foretell a toothsome novel written by me, astounding the world,” Madge said.
“Ergo,” Joan intoned, “you’ll finally be rich and famous.”
“I take umbrage,” Jackie said. “And I’ll take a little more wine along with it.”
“Call the wait-ress,” Lou advised her.
“She’s on the matt-ress in the pant-ry.”
“God, remember?” Joan asked, her voice suddenly solemn. “How we smoked away our days wishing for a real life?”
“I’ve learned to be careful what I wish for,” Lou said, into the murmur of the fire lighting the room. A bitter sting made her blink, look away.
“What?” Joan shifted, met Lou’s eyes.
“You might get it.” Lou never did this, ever, whine, except at midnight, except with these women.
Her friends waited.
“And?” Joan urged.
It seemed safe to admit now, to herself, to them. “Sometimes I am drenched in loneliness.”
“Yes.”
“Sometimes I wonder if I should just give in, go to LA, tough it out, be a man.”
“And then?”
“Then moments of sheer joy flood in, reading Auden at dawn, watching an iris open, lying in the dewy grass near the cabin and counting satellites and shooting stars. And then I understand why I chose what I chose.” Lou brushed a hand across her eyes. “Hell, where is the tis-sue?”
* * *
The tubroom was finally finished, its rough cedar boards sending waves of clean, fresh scent through the house, and Lou began planning the garden. She had planted decades of bedding plants and zinnias at their Seattle house. This land, though, was primeval: old growth firs advancing their shadows daily across the one spot of sun and its spiky rye grass on the south side, sword ferns and Oregon grape bulking up the fortlike walls at its edge. Her book had no advice on forest gardens, and after turning over one shovelful of pungent soil, she set aside her tools, knew she wasn’t ready.
The small community, at the bottom of the road leading to the cabin, included a gas station, a tavern, and a multi-purpose store, a large bulletin board at its entrance. One day, after searching for fresh lettuce in the bin of wilting vegetables, salads having become the centerpiece of her diet, she saw a notice. “Master gardener offering consultation on high altitude, rocky, shaded gardens. You may not believe this, but I ripened tomatoes last year. Really.“
Lou gave Susan Ridge a call, invited her to coffee, asked what she charged. “Let’s see what you’ve got first,” a congenial middle-aged voice answered.
Susan was as frizzy and maroon-haired as Lou was straight and white-haired. Lou imagined that they would be a perfect do-over ad, she “Before,” Susan vibrantly “After.” Susan swelled in places that on Lou bones protruded, but her fingernails were black with dirt, just like Lou’s.
The Master Gardener was intrigued with the possibilities of the barren, occasionally sunny spot Lou showed her. The problems, of course, were the acidic fir needles padding their footsteps, the rocks bubbling up from the dry ground, the ostentatious red rhododendron. The answer, it became apparent to Susan and then to Lou, who was both impressed and bemused by the Latin flowing from this woman’s lips, the solution was to create a meadow, a mountain meadow with wildflowers, perhaps gentian, fireweed, fox glove, bears paw, a mound of wild iris to lift the spirit. Others for their color, but no zinnias. No chrysanthemums, no tight cushions of marigolds no matter how hearty they might be. A ground cover of wild strawberry and violets and buttercups. In the summer, ferns would spring up, enjoying a few moments in the sun and the watering system Susan would install.
“How about it?” she asked, and Lou answered, “Let’s do it.”
Perennial gardens take three years, according to gardening lore. The first year results in disappointing green knobs, the second, a promise of what will come, the third, if one’s planned well, a surfeit of pleasure.
Surfeit it was, that third summer. By then Lou and Susan were friends, both of them up to their elbows in the soil and rocks of Lou’s now mystic circle of light. Only the ugly red rhododendron remained, an invader in this lush landscape. And only the rest of her life.
It’s your turn now, Lou. You have the words
and the courage to finish this story. Only bears
frighten you. M.
* * *
Lou gathers up the pages crumpled under her foot, shakes the sand from them, then pauses before she gets to her knees in order to stand up. The hollow she crouches in is warm. And she is warmed by Madge’s words. Is she ready to face the chilling winds, her friends, let them understand what her story means? And is she willing to tell the rest of it, the secret she’s held tight for forty years.
Chapter Twenty
Sunday Morning: Turbulent Skies
Jackie
“So where’s my folder?” Jackie has decided to read her story and get it over with. What the hell, it couldn’t be worse than the story of this weekend. “And is there any wine left?” She opens the drawer looking for the corkscrew and remembers that Lou has put it somewhere.
Joan, brought inside from the deck by the morning’s cool breeze, lifts her eyes from the manuscript in her lap and points to the papers on the trunk. “Read first, then wine.”
“I can read and drink at the same time, you know.” Jackie’s not sure whether she’s still angry or working up a panic attack. Just about when she thinks she’s finally gotten her life in some sort of order, she’s expected to jump out another window. Not alone, this time, but just the same.
Joan says, “Uh, uh.”
“Shit.” Jackie takes her folder into the bedroom and slams the door. She props up three pillows against the headboard, settles into their softness, and pulls out twenty or so pages. She reads.
Chapter Twenty-One
Whatsoever Things Are Honest:
Jackie’s Story
My friend, your complicated, wondrous life can’t be
captured on a few pieces of paper and certainly no one
but you can finish this story. I wish I could be
there to hear the ending. M.
Jackie cannot think of what to do next, or first. The thick envelope settles on the floor, its contents quivering under her hand until she lays the paper down on the table and stops trying to focus on the words. She already knows what it says. Ron called the day before and warned her. Well, not warned her as much as advised her to open her mail for once. She’d stopped looking at her mail when she realized she wasn’t getting any, except catalogues and ads for new windshields. Until today, that is, when this letter-headed sheet of paper will officially inform her that her stepson Ron is divorcing her.
Fred, her husband, doesn’t know that their marriage is on the rocks. Fred doesn’t know anything, except the lies his son tells about her. Fred is about as senile as an eight-five-year-old can get and still sit up. Jackie reminds herself one more time that she should have suspected that smile on Ron’s face at the news of their marriage ten years ago. Obviously, he
r husband’s son had known something that she didn’t.
* * *
Some weeks before the wedding, her priest friend Xavier had taken her out to coffee and asked why she was marrying an old man and Jackie answered that she liked Fred. He made her laugh. He treated her well.
“He makes you laugh? That’s why you are marrying him?’ Xavier broke apart a scone and gave her half.
Jackie couldn’t think of a better reason. She needed to be married. She was tired of being alone, by which she meant, not exactly alone, she had lovers, but no one as cheerful and kind as Fred. Kneading her arthritic knuckles, she said, “He will take care of me.“ She should have knocked on wood, despite the pain, and rolled her eyes. Instead, she got up to get another scone. It didn’t hurt, she added, that Fred had enough money for the both of them, a nice house, an antique silver service, and oil paintings and Persian rugs, not only in the living room but also the bedroom. These items had been chosen by Fred’s deceased wife, but Jackie didn’t mind. After all, she assured Xavier, she would bring things from her past life into the house, including her massage table and sheets and towels and the music system with its Wyndham Hill tapes and an assortment of oils and creams.
“That’s how I met Fred,” she explained. “He came to the Whole Health Clinic for a massage and exercises for his new knee, one of those silver fox guys, thick white hair, eyebrows hovering like doves over green eyes?” Jackie smiled remembering. “He wanted to dance again. He flexed his deltoids under my fingers, wiry, a wiry guy all over. I admired his body. ‘Irish?’ I guessed. He laughed, and said, ‘Gypsy?’ back at me. I rattled my earrings at him and got out the almond oil. It wasn’t long before he was visiting my table three times a week.”
Xavier grinned. “You’re turning pink just thinking about him.”
“He cheers me up. And after two months, he swung his seventy-five-year-old healed knee off the table and said it was time to start boogying again. Would I join him at the Cristal Ballroom Saturday night? Yes, I would be delighted. And later, yes, I would be delighted to marry him. Why not?”
“Why not?” Xavier repeated, looking at her over the edge of his coffee cup, smiling, she thought.
Jackie took this as a blessing from her priest so she stopped trying to explain—how she loved the elbow held out to her in that old-fashioned way as they walked into the crowded dance hall. How he had whispered, as they slow-danced, that her strong body, as tall as his, was Junoesque. She made him feel young, he said. That night as they made love for the first time she closed her eyes and could imagine him twenty years younger, his poetic moanings about moonlight and orifices as sexy as his fingers, stroking her into a state she had not experienced in a long time.
When he proposed, her two oldest daughters, each a thousand miles away in different directions, told her to go for it. Fred sounded okay, they said. As they moved into their thirties, they had begun to experience a few blips in their own marriages, and their voices had trembled with envy and sadness. However, her youngest daughter, Sally, an uptight young woman, wrote from her all-white San Francisco apartment that this relationship disgusted her, some old man on his death bed, was her mother crazy? She resurrected a couple of past involvements Jackie had confessed to in moments of believing her daughter cared about what happened to her, relationships that curdled or blew apart at the whiff of rings or next year, and advised her mother to cut out the foolishness and act like a grandmother for once.
That was hard to do, Jackie wrote back, when her children and their resulting children had elected to live as far as they could from her. Just wait, she warned Sally, you’ll find out what it’s like to be fifty-five and alone. And the two of them hadn’t written or emailed until Sally called, months later, to tell her mother she was pregnant and that she and her partner, Billie, were ecstatic. Jackie blinked at this new information, regrouped, and said, “I’ll be happy for you and your girlfriend, kid, if you’ll be happy for me and my husband.” And the deal was sealed.
Life was not all almond oil in Fred’s house. After a couple of weeks of feeling spied on, Jackie blinded first-wife Margaret’s photo hovering over their bed with a silk scarf. She couldn’t remove the picture outright because Fred’s son, Ron, had taken to dropping by unannounced. Under the guise of checking the plumbing or the sprinkling system, he circuited the house, commenting on furniture that had been moved, asking the whereabouts of the teapot mother brought from Germany, as if that deified it or her, and noting other items Jackie had done away with. One day he said, “You’ve changed the bedspread,” just after she had raced him to the bedroom to un-scarf his mother, and Jackie moved in on him wanting to strangle him.
“You have no right to be in our bedroom,” she snapped.
He stepped back into the hallway with a gentle smile. “We’ll see,” he said as he called a goodbye to his father who sat watching a different conflict on CNN and heard nothing of this one.
“You have to help me,” Jackie told Fred, after Ron left and she finally got her husband’s attention. “This is our house. Put your foot down.”
Fred answered that he imagined that it was hard for a son to get used to his father being married. “He’s just a kid. He’ll get over it.”
The one thing Jackie didn’t like about Fred was that he never got angry, the juices required for such an effort all used up, she guessed. “A kid! He’s forty with his own wife and children,” she yelled, trying to whip him into a response, but Fred had begun punching the buttons on the remote by then.
* * *
After five years, Jackie was surprised she’d become taller than her husband. Then, after a couple of microwave and frying pan flameouts, she understood she could no longer trust him to cook his own lunch. Fred stopped dancing, even in their Persian-rugged living room, choosing instead to push back into his lounger and listen to his story tapes, a routine that sent her out into the back yard with a magazine until she thought to buy him earphones. It wasn’t the stories that got to her, it was the speed at which Fred set his player, the voices wobbly, unintelligible prehensile growls. When she asked why, he told her he was listening slower nowadays.
He still liked sex, “playing around,” he called it, but Jackie found herself doing most of the playing, and as a rule, their gropings ended with rumbles of contentment sounding deep in his sleeping throat after which she would work on her fingers on the folds of her own body.
The words “old man” popped out of her mouth the day she tried to talk about all this to Xavier. He listened in his calm way and didn’t refer to their premarital conversation, except to remind her that marriage was in sickness and health, which also meant old age. He encouraged her to find new activities that would brighten her life. “Perhaps a job?” he suggested. “You liked working here at the monastery in our care center.” Then he glanced at her hands.
Fred wasn’t the only one changing. Jackie’s body was as strong as ever, but her fingers were morphing into swollen hooks. She could barely tie her shoes. She wore nothing with buttonholes. “Arthritis, an occupational hazard,” her doctor informed her. “You’ve worked your hands hard for forty years. They’re tired.“ Then he added, “Good thing you’re married. You’ll not make a living doing therapy anymore,” as he wrote out the prescription. “This might help.” It hadn’t, and Jackie went back to her homeopath whose brown bottles now lined up like squat warriors on the windowsill in the kitchen.
“What’s all this?” Ron demanded during one of his inspection tours. He picked up a bottle. “Glucosamine? Gingko? St. Johns Wort? You’re not treating Dad with any of this voodoo stuff, are you?”
And Jackie, her aching hands behind her back, answered, “It’s none of your business.”
That’s when he let her know that it was his business. How the night before Xavier married them, his father had signed the papers that made him his father’s legal guardian. “For just this reason,” Ron said, waving a hand at the capsules and powders on the sill. “My father is declining und
er your so-called care.” Then he opened the recycling bin and pointed at the wine bottles clattering inside it. “You’re an alcoholic. You sedate my father with this stuff. Don’t interrupt,” he said, as Jackie tried to explain. “I don’t think you are capable of taking care of him.”
Jackie slammed the bin shut. “You sidle in here looking for a reason to get me in bad with my husband, and what you’re really afraid of is that he‘ll die and leave me his money.” Those wine bottles had been collecting there quite a while, she was pretty sure.
Ron nodded at the den door behind which Fred was snoozing, tapes rambling in his ears. “This is criminal. You have stuck him in a chair, plugged him in, mushed his brain. If I have to, I’ll go to court and remove him from this house.” Ron’s angry face glowed pinkly, piglike, a trait he must have gotten from his mother since Jackie had never seen Fred in such a state.
She decided to tell him. “Ron, I have a pre-nup contract with your father in which he agreed that if our marriage ended by death or divorce, I will get this house and a monthly allowance to support me. Your father insisted on this. When he dies, most of his money will go to you and your family.” She touched his coat sleeve to let him know she’d won. “So, see? Nothing for you to worry about.”
Ron’s fat cheeks wobbled at her. “No way in hell are you getting my mother’s house!” He thrashed into the den. Fred reached for the pause button, but left his earphones on. He hated to interrupt a good story. “You been having a conversation?” he asked, smiling vaguely at them both.
