His head lolls back. “Ah,” he says, coming forward, index finger up. “‘Never Been to Spain.’ The group?”
“Three Dog Night. I’ve had it blasting away all day.”
“Never mind,” says Louis Shaw.
“Never mind?”
“A hit in, what would you say, the 1970s?” He touches the rim of his glass to hers. “To success.”
Nina sits upright in her chair. “Success in what?”
He cocks an eye. “Finding whatever you’re after.”
“What makes you think I’m after anything?”
“‘Never been to heaven—’” He’s quoting the song again.
She laughs and holds out her glass for more.
The cactus wren, an insect in its curved bill, scoots across the ditch to the brush on the other side. Nina notices a segment of barbed wire fence she hadn’t seen before.
Louis Shaw says, “I surmise you’ve intuited that I’m a man who can’t control his words. Why did you offer the wine? You weren’t frightened? Insulted by my remark?”
She feels the buzz. “No.” She was flattered in the skewed way that happens in between the times you know what you’re doing.
“At our age,” he says, “we haven’t time to waste.”
“Indeed.” She rethinks his plainspoken words. I want to make love to you. She misses sex. She glances across at the man who knows she’s looking. He’s put his glass on her camper step, taken off his hat to fan a fly away from his face. She wonders what his penis is like. She thinks about the shapes and textures of some she’s known. One blunt, fat, and rubbery as a wine stopper. Another sharp, with that mean little curve that the man liked to use, holding her up so that her back arched and he could see the shape of the head of his penis inside her. How thin she was then, all hip bones and a recessive pelvic floor. The one that felt too thin, too long, her vagina unable to get a grasp on him, slippery in other ways too. She had loved looking at the penises, lifting them to study the undersides. It seemed a miracle of construction, the way a penis connected to the testicles and the testicles connected themselves to the body.
The cactus wren, perched on a eucalyptus in the distance, calls in its harsh, unmusical syllable that starts low and gathers speed. When she does go home to Oregon, she will miss the sound of that bird.
The air has cooled. Trucks rumble past with running lights on. Nina touches her shoulder. A star is working at being seen. She looks across at Louis Shaw, who smiles as though he shares her thoughts. She nods, acknowledging that he, too, has a history.
His fingers mesh to keep the twitch at bay. “I want,” he says. “I am compelled to say it again. I want to make love to you.”
She understands that he has a tic and that he is not a dangerous man and that his words mean merely the natural connection between a man and a woman. “I can imagine it,” she says. “You would be good.” She drinks. Whatever attempt at sex she and this odd man might undertake would be memorable only in the odours and awkwardness, the ordeal of removing underwear in such a small space, the two of them struggling.
“In Oklahoma, in Arizona, what does it matter?” She moistens her lips, settles back in the chair. Says, “Oh, God.” She holds the glass in front of her face to keep back a wayward laugh. “Oh, God,” she says, closing her eyes.
He makes a sound like a chuckle. His mirthful sound, a burble of good feeling, makes her smile. The cactus wren picks up the pace with its cha cha cha. A light goes on in the Prowler. A rustle of warm wind lifts her hair.
She wakes early, dabs the grit out of her eyes with water, runs her fingers through her hair, smears on a pinkish lip coating, and steps outside. The Prowler is gone, as she knew, of course, it would be. “This ain’t no thinking thing, no left brain or right . . .” Country songs, she’s finding, give solace and advice. She throws the chocks in the bin, checks the hitch and stabilizer, and heads for the California coast, to find a special place at the ocean, another request of Miriam’s.
Nina dries a brush with a rag and lays it by her paint box, lifts the phone, and dials. Waiting for Miriam to pick up, she looks out at the sky above the roof next door, a riotous blue, streaky with clouds. Mourning doves coo and strut on eaves. The phone on the other end rattles. Nina waits. She listens to her mother’s breathing. Nina asks, “Are the birds at the feeder yet?”
“I’m taking my time this morning.”
“Are the finches there yet?”
“I don’t know.”
The feeders are new. Nina put them up for her mother’s amusement. “Can’t you see them from your chair?”
Now Miriam isn’t talking.
“Mother?”
“I’m in bed.”
“Why are you in bed?” Nina knows why Miriam is still in bed. Parkinson’s is building in her brain like the flow of bad news on TV.
“Never mind,” her mother says. Hangs up.
Nina has rented a one-room apartment, close to Miriam, the travel trailer parked out back. She glances at her easel, a watercolour sketch of the Catalina Mountains with a focus on Table Rock. She did it plein-air. Not bad, but she has yet to capture the quiet observance, some as-yet-undefined quality inherent in them that makes your eyes look up. Wherever you are in Tucson, you are aware of the Catalinas. She dials again, takes a breath. “Is now the time? Should we go now?”
“Yes.”
Online, Nina reads: “The Gentle-Ride Suspension U-Haul moving trucks ensure that even your most delicate possessions benefit from gentle cross-town or cross-country transportation.” She loves the phrase “even your most delicate possessions.” Frank would laugh. She drives over to the U-Haul outlet, signs the papers to rent the seventeen-foot Easy Loader, the cargo van with the widest and shortest ramp. She practises driving in a supermarket lot. Inside the supermarket, she steers a cart through the aisles, buying supplies.
Miriam has told Nina that she “just wants to look at the ocean one last time” before being carted down the hall to seriously assisted living, the part of the residence where they put you in diapers, she says, because it’s less trouble for them than to inch you to the bathroom every—oh, in Miriam’s case, every hour, and that’s on a good day. If Nina will only drive her out of the desert, across the Laguna Mountains, west to San Diego and north to a secret cove Nina found, Miriam will say her farewells to the ocean. Nina has discovered that everyone who lives in the desert dreams of the ocean. She imagines Miriam has in mind the scene from the movie Little Big Man, the one where the tired old chief climbs a hill, says his prayers, and waits to die. Instead, it starts to rain and the old man gets up. Miriam probably believes her own plan will work, due to her especially strong will. She’ll sit in her chair, the oak chair with legs ending in toes of lions; she’s already told Nina that much. The feel of the sea rising and falling, swirling around her ankles and feet, no matter the condition of those feet—the bunions, the scabs, the gnarly ingrown nails—none of this will matter, because when the first wave breaks, Nina imagines that Miriam believes she will be cured of this life and die. “Ah,” Miriam says and closes her eyes.
“Are you practising?”
“What? What? I’m an old woman half asleep.”
Nina is perched on the ottoman changing the batteries in Miriam’s TV remote. “I’m hoping we see a green flash.” She visualizes a riotous, no-holds-barred sunset for Miriam, with that special spark at the end, a flash of green as the sun disappears over the horizon.
“What? What?”
Nina interprets these grunts as questions. “A green flash is when the refractive light . . . curvature of the earth . . .” She stumbles around in the definition. Frank would explain it so charmingly a kindergarten child could understand.
“I miss him too, you know,” Miriam says as Nina hands her the remote.
Nina’s eyes smart at the suddenness of Miriam’s statement. She recalls a couple she met on the Oregon coast, checking out of the motel the day after they’d arrived. The woman, wearing a head bandage
and an eye patch, had brain cancer. Too tired for a vacation. “God’s will,” her husband had said. Nina waved goodbye and ran, frantic and beside herself, across the sand to the ocean’s edge, where she railed against God. As the sun slid below the horizon, she saw a green flash.
Miriam is pounding her little fists on the chair. “I have never in all my years of living on the ocean seen a green flash.” Miriam was raised in Washington State on the Olympic Peninsula, and to hear her tell it, she practically lived at the beach. Nina has heard the stories many times, the families—cousins, friends—packing the cart with real dishes, real silver, the horses and their driver arriving after the Studebakers. Summer at the shore, in tents. Under umbrellas, the women fanned their plump faces while the children played in the sand. The men returned to the camp on weekends.
“Maybe this time,” Nina says. The slatted blinds at the open balcony door rustle. The air smells of orange blossom.
It’s mighty strange for a U-Haul the size of the one Nina rented to show up at the residence entryway when no one has died and a family isn’t hauling out furniture. The patients parked in their wheelchairs in the shade of olive and ash trees think they may have missed some news: “George was watching the TV one minute, then gone the next.” That’s the story they like to hear.
Nina carries an empty suitcase up the carpeted elevator to her mother’s room, packs the clothing Miriam has managed to lay out, sweeps the counter of creams, lipsticks, and the pastes to hold teeth in, and treks down. Up again, she drags the chair with the lions’ feet to the elevator, and sails down. Her mother’s chair has a broad, strong stance and a tight, black leather seat cushion. She pulls it up the ramp, into the back of the van.
“There,” she says to those gathered.
“You need to bungee it,” an old man points out, finger shaking.
Nothing gets past these people, but Nina has thought of that too, as well as two single foam mattresses, bedding, pillows, a porta-potty with stabilizers, and a cooler loaded with bourbon that her mother likes, with water, and vodka and tonic for herself. Crackers. Wheat thins, her mother’s favourite. Saltines. Smoked oysters, toothpicks. Cottage cheese with pineapple pieces. A jar of pickled eggs.
The group watches as Nina helps Miriam out of her wheelchair, pushes the chair up the ramp, and straps it down. Nina brings a step stool around to assist Miriam into the van. When her mother is settled in the passenger seat, there’s a smattering of applause from those not holding on to walkers. By now, jokes fly about Miriam’s journey.
“I’m serious!” Miriam says, her voice thready. But they get it. The ocean is everyone’s dream. Some even belong to the Neptune Society, an organization that will come for your ashes, wherever they wind up, and take them out to sea.
“Bon voyage!” Miriam’s friend calls. “I hope I never see you again.”
“I should be so lucky!”
“You two are sounding like an old Jack Lemmon movie,” Nina says.
Five miles along, they get stuck in traffic on the way to the I-10.
Miriam says, “I’m thirsty.”
Nina remembers Miriam saying her bladder is the size of a pea. She says, “No water until we get somewhere.”
Miriam laughs.
They spend a night in a motel in Yuma. They can hear dune buggies buzzing most of the night. Driving west again, between pleasant silences their conversation is sketchy. Nina asks, “Do you want a new set of sheets when you move? I can get the ones with flowers if you like.”
“No. Too cute. Get something else.”
“I brought an elegant taupe for the camp-out.”
“Goody,” Miriam says.
Over the Laguna Mountains, past splashes of daisy-like yellow wildflowers: “Are you going to miss the tapestry sofa?” Miriam’s assisted living suite will be smaller.
“I bought it after the divorce. I thought it had class. What did I know? I’ve hated it for years.”
“You didn’t tell me.”
“You had a busy life.”
Frank again. “Yes,” Nina says.
Traffic jams in San Diego, the sky a gauzy blot, tail lights for miles: “From the sounds of it, you didn’t choose much in life.”
Miriam snorts. “Life happens. Then one day you choose the ocean.”
Nina manoevres around another moving truck the size of hers. The whole state is restless.
“I didn’t choose to live in a room with my name on the door, either,” Miriam says. “In case you’re wondering.”
They stay in a hotel on the ocean, one that Miriam says is “fancy.” They eat filet mignon and scallops for dinner. The meal makes Miriam’s digestion uneasy, but she says the taste was worth it. She trots to the toilet so fast her walker barely touches ground. The next morning, room service brings breakfast and Miriam is back to plain oatmeal, albeit garnished with a nasturtium.
Nina carries the heavy oak chair, propped against her hip, to where foam fans the beach. The air is tangy with hints of seaweed. Miriam waits at the U-Haul, tucked along a gravelly spot in a cove. When Nina returns, Miriam leans on her and moves toward the sea, groaning, which hurts Nina’s heart. Miriam settles in the chair, the breeze catches her thinning hair and the surf swirls around her bare ankles. Soon her feet are buried in sand; she makes a squat silhouette—a perfect photo if you were standing far enough back—and out beyond her, a generous but ordinary orange sunset, smeary due to haze and smog.
Later, Nina and Miriam lay side by side, mattresses on the ramp, their heads on goose-down pillows. Miriam settles with a sigh, bony fingers caressing the wonderful sheets. The last gulls cry, stars glisten. They hear the rhythmic rumbling of waves. “Thank you,” Miriam says. The jaw lets go its grip. Miriam letting go causes Nina to lie awake, tears drying on her cheeks. She adores her mother’s whistling snores. Frank would love this story.
Back at the retirement complex, an audience has gathered to see Miriam in her new digs. She’s down to one room and a bathroom. “New wing, new view, less housekeeping,” Miriam says. She’s in her chair, salt stains on its legs, and behind her, on the shelf, her prized blue and white Ming-style vase. She is dressed, as she would say, to the nines, her hair freshly permed. Nina is serving tea on TV trays. She’s brought chairs for the guests from the nearby dining room.
“You don’t look transformed to me, kiddo,” says one of Miriam’s friends.
Miriam pauses to look around the room, her chin raised. Gradually people hush each other and turn toward her. Miriam makes her announcement: “I have seen the green flash.”
Nina raises her eyebrows.
“It was a miracle, a sunset to end all sunsets.” Miriam’s lips may slide over consonants, but in her unwavering gaze is the glory of the green flash captured at long last. An old man wants to know what in tarnation a green flash is.
Nina says, “Well, it’s refracted light—” Miriam coughs into the back of her hand. Nina stops talking and passes a bowl of oatmeal cookies. Eager hands reach out. She locks eyes with her mother. Miriam gives her the thumbs-up.
Nina hands the bowl with what’s left of the cookies to the old man. His eyes blink with pleasure. She walks around so she can stand behind Miriam’s chair and places her hands on her mother’s shoulders. She clears her throat. “It was unbelievably lucky,” she says. “We parked in the perfect cove and had plenty of time to get out to where the sand meets the waves.” Then, to satisfied murmurs and munching and sighs, Nina paints the scene. Describes a gull wrestling with a saltine wrapper, pelicans at dusk in formation above the dappled sea, and the moment the sun, the rich, deep colour of a tangerine, dropped from sight, a miraculous spark of green flashed on the horizon, like a wink.
Bingo
Driving on a freeway in central California amid cattle trailers and freight trucks bound for Sacramento, Mary noticed a softening in her chest, the only warning that tears were on their way; one of her crying jags was coming on. She missed her mother and, incongruously, missed her mother’s ancie
nt cat, with its ratty, patchy fur. By the time Mary moved back into her mother’s house—her mother preferred to be called Mrs. Garrity—to look after her when the Alzheimer’s became incapacitating, the calico tabby (never in the best of moods even as a kitten, as Mary recalled) had become grouchy and cantankerous. After Mrs. Garrity died, the cat had hissed at Mary as though it was her fault. Mary’s intervention hadn’t made a life-changing difference to her mother or the cat; they carried on, as usual, their mutual complaints like a moaning Greek chorus, a backdrop to Mary’s cheery, high-strung helpfulness.
She signalled, batted her arm around in the hard wind out the window for emphasis, and pulled over, the brakes on the travel trailer squealing. A smell of burnt rubber rose up. She crept along the shoulder to the rest stop, where she slipped in between the big-rig cargo trucks. She was exhausted and had let herself run out of propane—without propane the fridge and stove wouldn’t work. The rest stop had the basics, restrooms and snack machines.
Yes, she was glad her mother was gone; Alzheimer’s takes a terrible toll. But whenever she had told anyone, whenever she had spoken that simple truth out loud, heat rose to her cheeks and the words felt reprehensible, as though her time in the pit—her two years of dealing with the bathing, insults, tantrums, and doing her best—didn’t count.
Mary lay on the bed strewn with open state maps and a Woodall’s camping guide, and cried and blew her nose. Whenever she managed to focus on precisely where she might be, the sobbing would begin again.
After two Snickers bars, a 7UP, a bag of chips, five hours of listening to the whine of generators keeping produce cool, and the screech of air brakes as trucks drove in and out, her tears dried up and her vision cleared. She was staring at an RV map of central California when she realized that down the road a few miles south, a stone’s throw away, an RV camp awaited, a camp situated on the Sacramento River.
It was a hallelujah moment. The nature of suffering—she had worked her way through two boxes of tissue—is that you can’t see beyond it. Misery exists to make you truly miserable. Thinking these thoughts, she climbed back onto the freeway, joined in the flow, and pulled off a few exits later. She drove under the freeway and onto a country road lined with sycamore and eucalyptus trees, with fields beyond. She followed the signs, made a wide turn, and took a small road down a hill. At the bottom was a little clapboard office that needed paint.
South of Elfrida Page 9
