Her Last Words

by Jo Barney

  Susan kneels at the edge of the iris bed and tugs at yellowed spears. She clips away at spent blooms. A pile of limp debris lies at her side, and I get up and bend towards it, intending to add it to the compost barrel behind the alders.

  “Look.” Susan points to a white blossom peeking from under an iris. “We have a visitor. A globeflower. Trollius laxlus, something. The word must be out about our great B&B for wildflowers. Last month I discovered two trilliums, remember?” She looks up at me. “Who knows what will come next?”

  I kneel next to my friend. I stroke each velvet petal, tell myself I am ready. I raise my hand, trace the curve of bone from Susan’s ear to her cheek, as soft as the flower. Susan turns her eyes, her lips, toward me. “Who knows what will come next?” she says once more. Her hand touches mine as she leans forward to learn the answer to her question.

  We will not live together. We each desire days of silence among the first growth trees, the still glow of dawn through a familiar window. We will be together, as we choose, when we choose.

  So when I receive a blue envelope inviting me to a coming-together with my three college friends, the ones who still speak my patois, whose lives I have watched over the forty years since we dispersed into our next places, I ask if Susan will come with me, and Susan says she will not. She also has a past, like me, and the past is lived separately and is impossible to share. When I protest, say she will love these friends, Susan answers, “I love you. That’s enough.”

  I will drive to the coast without her. I stop at Susan’s house on my way down the mountain and leave in her roadside mailbox a dried spray of hydrangea, pressed flat, a bookmark between the pages of A Journal of a Solitude.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Sunday Evening: Calm Before

  Lou

  Lou folds the sheets of paper and looks at the silent women at either side of her. Joan, still leaning against a floor pillow, her head at Lou’s knees, has closed her eyes, her hands in her lap. Jackie, at first slumping into the cushion of her chair, pulls herself upright.

  “Cool,” she says.

  Joan’s eyes blink open at Jackie’s voice. Then she says in her soft, warm way, “Cool. Why didn’t I think of that? To find love, that is indeed cool, my friend.”

  Lou is not sure whether she will cry or laugh, especially when Jackie moves next to her on the couch and starts playing with her hair. “It’s standing straight up like in a comic book. Are you frightened? No bears around here.”

  She pats and pushes and Lou lets her for a minute. Then she swats at the patting hand and says, “Only when you fondle me.”

  Lou feels both Joan and Jackie pull away. Jackie gets up and lays a last piece of wood on the fire. Joan resettles on the other end of the sofa. The dim air swirls with uncertainty, and Lou regrets her awkward joke. What made her say it? To match Jackie’s light-hearted acceptance of her confession? To back away from any further revelations? To end the discussion?

  “I’m sorry,” Lou manages to say. “I’ve embarrassed my best friends and myself.” She starts to get up, but Jackie won’t let her.

  “No fair.” She holds up a palm, points a “sit” finger. “I finally have a close lesbian friend and I have some questions.”

  “Jackie!” Joan protests. “My God! We’re not in the solarium anymore.”

  “Feels a lot like it. And this information wasn’t covered in your midnight readings, or anywhere else back then.” Jackie looks at Lou. “Okay?”

  Lou knows that Jackie is capable of outrageous questions. She’s curious how she’ll answer them. “Shoot.”

  “Dildo?”

  “Carrot.”

  “Missionary?”

  “If two female missionaries do it.”

  “Go down?

  “All over.”

  “Orgasm?”

  “Why not?” The inquisition goes on for another question or two, when Joan clears her throat, licks her lips, and asks, “Front to back?”

  Lou frowns. “That still confuses me. Joan, bring the book next time we get together. We’ve got to review Dr. Van de Velde’s list again.”

  The questions end when Jackie moans, “Damn, we were innocent, weren’t we?” She has lain down on the floor, a pillow under her head. Lou coils in the corner of the couch, her arms around her narrow knees, feels her white hair springing up again as she sighs. Joan is chipping away at her red nails.

  “Lambs to the slaughter,” Lou says.

  “That first night we met at the dorm at the cookie shine, you know how it felt, like the world was new and just out there waiting for us?” Jackie’s voice is that of the young Jackie Lou remembers from that first meeting so long ago.

  “We were all scared, I think. Stayed that way for a long time, maybe still are for different reasons.” But not so much, Lou thinks. Not with Madge’s stories to inspire us in this next place. “Madge was our center, wasn’t she?”

  Joan looks up from her nails. “Still is. Will be always.” She might have gone on with that thought, might have also reminded them that the alarm was set for 4:30 a.m. and a few hours of sleep wouldn’t hurt, but she also undoubtedly knows that memories of that Friday firelit evening will invade their dreams, cause their eyelids to refuse to close, their eyes to peer hopefully into the darkness, to search for Madge.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Friday Evening: Tsunami

  Madge

  That first night together, after the dishes have been cleared away but not the uneasiness that had flavored each forkful of Costco lasagna, Madge tells them to get comfortable. “You’ll need more wine. This might be a long evening.” She reaches for a folder lying on the table in front of her. “I need your help.” Her glance, steady now, takes them all in as she pulls out its contents, places the papers in her lap. “To finish my latest book. I began writing it almost two years ago. I call it Think on These Things.

  “This is the first of four stories about four old friends. Us. Your stories are not finished. However, this one will be, tomorrow.” She pauses, picks up the pages in front of her, adjusts her glasses. “This is my story. Please forgive me if I stumble once in a while. You’ll soon know why.” She begins to read. A slow flow of words fills the air.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Whatsoever Things Are Of Good Report:

  Madge’s Story

  Roger has assured me that I am still good looking, that my dark hair, lit with streaks of blond to cover its creeping grayness, is as lovely as it’s ever been, but sometimes I look into the mirror, search for my sixty-five-year-old cheeks, and what I see is a blurry double exposure. A young face veils the one I have now, expectant black eyes, big toothed grin, almost a beauty. A face that just missed being May queen by a couple of hundred votes, didn’t become Sweetheart of Sigma Chi despite a boyfriend’s ardent promotion of my best qualities, hair, I think, maybe breasts, although back then I’m told they called them jugs. I came in fourth for Homecoming queen.

  “Handsome,” Roger says. Handsome, in fact, is appropriate for a woman my age but not the accolade I sought in those days.

  Those days. I return to those days often lately, stepping through a strange fissure that has developed between then and now. Escaping the now, perhaps.

  “There, done. Shall we send them out today?” Roger looks at me. “The invitations to the Solarium Club. Isn’t that what you used to call yourselves?”

  I breathe, try to untangle myself from my thoughts. “Mark the weekend on the calendar. Maybe we can cross off the days as we get closer?” I smile at this man I adore and add, “Knowing what day it is, is helpful.”

  Roger’s big-knuckled hand leaves a large X on a square on the calendar that is tacked to the wall in the kitchen. “This is today,” he says. He circles a Friday several rows of squares below the X. “This is when you’ll see your friends.”

  Good. I still have time. To try to think this through. To decide.

  I sit in the nook, cutting up the peppers and those brown things whi
le Roger fixes dinner. “What’s this?” I ask.

  “Mushrooms, Madge. You like them.”

  “I know I like them. I just don’t have their name,” I answer, and in front of steaming plates, I have discovered that smells trigger memories. At the moment, the beef is taking me to a Saturday evening a long time ago. Not with Roger. With another man, Jerry, my then-husband. The scene floats in the air between the nook’s clicking forks.

  * * *

  “I’m in love with someone else.”

  Jerry and I are using our new steak knives, like butter, he has commented, cutting into the fillet mignon I splurged on that afternoon.

  I am aware of the candlelight, the rifts of music in the air, the quaking of the deep fault line between us, a critical shift.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Somehow it doesn’t.

  * * *

  “Ready?” Roger asks. “To go for a walk?”

  “I think so.”

  We walk, my arm on his, without speaking. Amidst the quiet tickings of feet on pavement, another path appears.

  * * *

  A rain soaked trail to a football field, the young Madge says, “Ugh, I hate wallowing in muck.” One of the girls at my side snickers. “Anyone else would have said slipping in the mud.” I go around the puddles, walk slightly forward of the others, know I should keep my mouth shut. At sixteen I have more words than anyone I know. I have to be careful not to use them.

  * * *

  Ironic now. I squeeze Roger’s arm. “Did you ever feel odd?” I ask as we leave the yard.

  “I’ve always felt odd,” he answers.

  “And what do you did you do about it?”

  “Nothing. It didn’t bother me.”

  “You didn’t care what other people thought of you?” I can still feel the twist in my stomach that signaled that step into the muck of unpopularity “I can’t imagine not caring.”

  “Do you care now?”

  “I don’t know. Seems as though I should.” We arrive at the post office and stand in line to buy stamps.

  “I used to go to the same clerk every time I came here. She was my good luck charm and she always knew what I meant by ‘Inside and outside postage, please.’ I would close the envelopes with her wet sponge, and when she piled my manuscripts one on top of the other and toss them into the bin, she’d always say, ‘Hang in there, girl.’ She had red lips, a big blond, half glasses perched on the end of her nose. Her painted fingernails clattered like birds’ feet against the desktop. Silver with rhinestone diamonds at Christmas; pale pink with purple swirls in the spring.”

  “And did she bring you luck?”

  “I won my first writing contest after one of those ‘Hang in there’s.’” I glance down the row of windows. “I think she’s been gone a long time.”

  We step up to the counter. When the pimpled clerk asks me if he can help me, his fiercely bitten nails distract me. My own hands are empty of a manila-wrapped manuscript. I look at Roger who pushes the blue stack of envelopes across the wood surface. “We need a book of stamps,” he says, “and will you take these?”

  The man’s eyes do not look up from the screen at his right. He nods, points to the little electronic box that tells us what we owe him. In a moment we are walking away from the building, approaching a group of young people sitting at the tables on the sidewalk outside Coffee Time. “Something to drink?” Roger asks. “We odd ones will fit right in here.”

  “You don’t have enough metal …stuff…poking…into your body,” I say as I sit down and push a rumpled newspaper to one side. It’s getting worse. Two words lost in one sentence. A whole sentence gone at the place we have mailed the letters. If I start with A and work my way through the alphabet, I can sometime bring the word forward, but it’s not often that reciting the alphabet fits in, time wise.

  “Earrings, piercing.” Roger says. Of course. Earrings. We ordered lattes, a word I have not lost. The unimportant words are disappearing first, not the ones I need to function—like “latte.”

  * * *

  Months ago, we looked up Alzheimer’s on the Internet, borrowed books from the AD Association. We went to homeopaths, ingested ginkgo, tried cross word puzzles. I cried, of course, and Roger held me, told me not to be afraid. Then one day I blackened the kitchen with a forgotten frying pan on high heat, and Roger took over most of the cooking. Now, when I try to follow recipes, I cross off each ingredient as I stir, or I will not remember where I am in the process. Roger and I have worked out a system of notes to remind me of the day’s schedule, of the location of my phone, my purse (always at the end of the drain board), my keys, while I still feel comfortable driving. I can read, but my fingers have forgotten the keyboard. My mind drops words like cherry blossoms. This, of course, is the greatest tragedy.

  * * *

  A sip of coffee. A lovely room. Tea not coffee. A man smiling across from me hands me a folder. I open it. Read it. Sign a paper. Receive a check. Am suddenly very afraid.

  “Sisters is just right,” the man says. “The next one will be even better.” Another person sits at our round table, nodding.

  “Madge is the real thing,” he says. My agent

  The two men grin at each other, then at me. I am crying, using a cloth napkin to blow my nose.

  * * *

  “Tell me again about Sisters,” I say. Roger sighs. I know he has performed this favor before.

  “What made you think of it?” he wonders.

  I raise my cup. “The round table. My excitement, maybe. I’m looking forward to the beach party with my friends.” Triggers. Perhaps I’ll write a novel entitled Triggers. I will let my mind take me wherever it wants to go, free rein, see where I end up. If I go back far enough, I will be in utero, wordless. Almost like now.

  “Your successful debut into mainstream women’s novels. It made you almost famous.” Roger reaches for my hand when he says this. “It was set in the early Fifties, a young woman goes off to college, poor and innocent and scared. She is asked to join a sorority, a kind of hardship case, and since she’s never had more than one good friend at a time, a house full of sisters seems unbelievably right.

  “And things are pretty idyllic for a couple of years. Then one of the sisters is found crying and bleeding in the housemother’s bedroom, the housemother frantic. Lily has inserted a pom-pom stick into her vagina to try to dislodge the lump that is preventing her from getting the curse. The lump lives, as does the sister, although she’s no longer a sister, having been unpinned and sent home. Five years later, our heroine meets the shamed woman by chance and discovers that she has more in common with her than she ever suspected. Her husband of two years, ex-student body president and recipient of a Fulbright grant, is the father of Sammy, the lump.”

  “Ah, now I remember,” I say. “And she didn’t have an abortion?”

  “1950’s,” Roger explains.

  “Of course,” I answer, a glimmer of past conversations instructing me.

  We talk, Jerry as close to tears as I am. He calls a friend to ask how to go about it, his pale skin stretched like a rubber mask across his cheekbones.

  “You could go to New York,” he whispers to me.

  “Ryan says that he knows a doctor. . .” Then he stops, settles the phone in its cradle, lowers his head into the bowl of his hands

  “We need to get married, don’t we?”

  * * *

  “Jerry and I were married a long time,” I say.

  “Eighteen years. Two sons, Jim and Grant,” he adds, just in case.

  I am tired of remembering. Besides, I need to get busy making plans for the party, the friends who will be visiting me soon. I push back my chair, stand. “Time to go,” I say, and Roger laughs.

  * * *

  Madge stops reading, tried to clear away whatever it is that was closing her throat. A swallow of wine doesn’t help. Perhaps this will be the most painful, impossible part of the plan, this baring of
herself. Perhaps this was where it will all go awry, years of work stricken down by a voice that had dried up like an old well. The others watch, still, waiting. Then Joan reaches out, takes the folder from her hands, says, “It’s okay, Madge. I’ll finish for you.” She reads.

  * * *

  Some days are better than others. Today I haven’t had to follow the list of housecleaning chores as I moved from room to room. I’ve even set last fall’s dried apples to soaking in order to turn them into the applesauce with cinnamon that Roger enjoys over his cottage cheese. Two people phone, and I let the answering service take the messages as I finish the vacuuming. My summer garden is exploding with coreopsis and zinnias and delphiniums and I pick an armload of stems to fill the entry hall vase. I know the flowers’ names because Roger and I have labeled each mound, the copper frames of the cards so attractive that visitors to our garden have copied them.

  Then I relax with a cup of coffee and listen to the messages. My agent, Harry Macken, is getting a little worried about the deadlines for Think on These Things, my next book. Bob has called him. Is something wrong?

  Bob. I start with A, find his last name in the G’s. Bob Gordon, my latest editor at Macmillan, my creaking mental Rolodex tells me. That’s what I am supposed to be doing, not cleaning house. Finishing the four stories. I go to my desk, find the hard copy of what I’ve done so far. Damn, where is Roger?

  Next message: Hi, this is Ruth. We are hoping you and Roger are still coming to dinner Saturday night, Madge. The group will be interesting and quite lively, especially if you guys are there. Please let me know.