For I have done with thee.
Delia stands and leaves the theater. She goes into the restroom. She thinks she might leave, but in the end she does not. She washes her hands in order to justify her trip to the restroom, and then returns to the theater and sees the play through to the end, winces but stays in her seat when her granddaughter as Lady Capulet shouts, “O me, O me! My child, my only life, Revive, look up, or I will die with thee! Help, help! Call help.”
Yes, she thinks. Yes. Or I will die with thee. This is exactly what it feels like.
And later:
“This sight of death is as a bell, that warns my old age to a sepulchre.” She understands that too. The death of her son had shriveled her, and there it is. The end. Finis.
The curtain goes down and then it rises upon the members of the cast, who are now smiling and holding hands. Romeo and Juliet are now risen from the dead and bowing. An old man in the front row stands and is presenting Mae with a small bouquet of tulips wrapped in colored cellophane and he, Delia realizes, is the grandfather. The father of Virginia. And there is the grandmother, there is Lilly, beaming and kissing her granddaughter’s cheek. Delia turns away because she hates them for having had for so long what she does not, and never will.
The patrons are moving into the lobby area, where there is a small bar with wine for sale. Delia surprises herself by buying a glass. It is terrible; it tastes like the inside of an apple juice tin. The conversation rises around her, and Delia stands there, her fur coat making her uncomfortably hot. Sweat trickles down her back. She looks out at the banks of snow and imagines herself stripping off the jacket and flinging it into a snow bank, then coming back in and speaking to the girl. She gets the same feeling she had in the café, when she was imagining what it would be like to live in a place like Gananoque.
Impossible. Because Delia knows there is no chance the girl will love her, let alone like her. That once the townspeople realize who she is, no one will want to be her friend. The casual waves will stop. The bleakness will advance again. Because this girl, this Mae, is not hers. She looks nothing like her son. She is a stranger. Delia looks at her from across the room one last time, just to be certain, but it’s true, all of it.
She turns and leaves the play house. The cold air is a relief. She does not drive out of town and fling her key but instead goes to get her bag at the hotel, as she always would have. She leaves the key on the dresser, tells the girl at the desk she is leaving but they can charge her for the night, of course.
“Of course,” the girl says, smiling her vacant smile.
“I didn’t get to try the pancake machine,” Delia finds herself saying. “I overslept this morning.”
“Then you should just stay.” She is suddenly animated. “It’s really a can’t-miss.”
“I have to go,” Delia says. “I have a family engagement.” This is a lie, but it feels good. She should do this more often, pretend to other people who don’t matter to her at all that she is more than what she is. Perhaps she could derive a bit of pleasure from that.
It has started to snow, and her car, a Jaguar, is lightly dusted. She gets in the car and takes off her jacket. She folds it and places it in the passenger seat, where it looks like a dead animal. She thinks about how Mae told her she thought she was a bear, and how she laughed. She knows she will never wear that jacket, not ever again.
~~~~
Back in Ithaca, after a few days have passed, Delia telephones the mayor of Gananoque, and she tells him what she wants. She wants it to be erected anonymously, she tells him. She is a patron of the arts, she says, but she does not like to draw attention to herself. Yes, she so enjoyed the play.
And she did, it’s true. Especially the part where Montague said, “For I shall raise her statue in pure gold.” It gave her the idea. She wants a statue, she says to the mayor, of a young man and a young woman, somewhere near the river, holding hands. And because there is truly nothing, or at least almost nothing that money cannot buy (happiness; it’s true, it can’t buy that, and Delia knows this more than anyone), Delia is eventually assured that the statue will be raised.
It is some comfort to her, in the years that follow, to know it is there. A dim monument, but a monument no less. A testament to her suffering, evidence of her grief, a shrine to the fact that she felt something, once.
Sonny’s Wall
Paula Young Lee
Across the street, Sonny’s building a wall. He’s not building it for himself. He’s building the wall for my neighbor on the kitchen side of the house. I doubt he’s getting paid for the work. I think he’s doing it for the privilege of leaving his mark on the world, one gravestone at a time.
At 80, Sonny’s grizzled and tattooed, with tufted thin hair that sticks out from both sides of his head. He’s podgy in the belly, carrying all his weight in front like a lot of old men do. He’s lost most of his hair to old age, one kidney to infection, his gallbladder to gallstones, his thyroid to cancer, and his colon to irritability. Thanks to a pair of unusually strong forearms and a permanent forward stoop, he looks like Old Popeye and talks like him too, with lots of yarls, murls and other unintelligible burrs. After he got out of the Army, he went to work as a gravedigger. The stones he’s using came from the cemetery where he used to work.
A half-century of manual labor has created calluses so thick Sonny doesn’t need gloves. With arthritic fingers so stubby they look as if they’ve lost their tips, he tests each stone for qualities I cannot discern. He lifts each one—a small boulder, really—hugging it close to his body as he carries the stone pregnancy hunched over and bowlegged, walking it the few yards to the spot where it goes. Carefully, he fits the stones together with such precision that the thinnest slick of mortar helps them stick together. Gravity does the real work.
Every day, rain or shine, what’s left of him goes out and adds ancient stones to the retaining wall keeping four feet of rising dirt from turning into mud and sliding into the road. Does it matter that he’s building the wall for a jerk? The Jerk’s house sits in the middle of a quarter-acre of land seeded with beer cans. Every night, The Jerk’s brood sits on the picturesque porch, smoking whatever’s handy. Drunk, the boys like to flick cigarette butts at our house, hoping to accidentally start a fire.
The wall doesn’t care. Neither does Sonny. Stone by stone, hour after day after month after year, the wall rises. He is in no hurry. This wall cannot be rushed. He is building it to stand long after there is no one to take care of it.
~~~~
As Sonny’s wall rises, Maggie’s house falls.
Sonny’s wall is an L shape, buttressing an irregular plot that rises into a hill, then flattens out on the back side of the house. My house faces the long arm of the L. Her house faces the short arm.
Masking tape holds the windows of her house together. Hanging off their hinges, the shutters swing in the breeze. The roof is going bald. The siding is peeling off in great sheets, airing out the rotting wood slats underneath. It’s like seeing a face with its skin removed, exposing a precarious armature of tendons and bones. The entire caboodle seems ready to collapse at any moment.
Maggie’s a demented old lady with a miniature terrier. Obese and ill-tempered, Skipper greets the day by evacuating his bowels in my backyard. Thanks to the odd physical configuration of my neighborhood on the pond, the back windows of my dining room are eye level with his butt, giving me a daily eyeful of the doggie squat from underneath and close up. I tried shooing him away, but Maggie just leans over and peers through the window, making me feel like a fish in a bowl as her mouth moves in silent mutters. I’ve gotten used to seeing Maggie’s pale wrinkled face pressed up against my windowpanes, angling for a better look at the strange sight of two people breakfasting while naked.
Abruptly, John’s head pops out from behind The Wall Street Journal.
“Do you hear that?” he demands. “Somebody’s stuck.”
“Yah, I heard it.” I nod, just in time to catch a glim
pse of Maggie’s ghostly face vanishing from the window. I just figured it was Sonny. Yesterday he was hauling off debris.
Grumbling, John rises from the table, wraps a towel around his waist and thuds onto the porch. A few minutes later, he comes thudding back into the house with his lips drawn down in a deep scowl.
“Go look,” he says dourly. “A really big one is out there.”
Every winter, delivery trucks end up stuck in the road running between my kitchen and Sonny’s wall. But yesterday it was 80 degrees. There’s no ice on the ground and no snow narrowing the roads. Yet there it is: a full-sized furniture delivery truck. Thoroughly stuck.
Screeeeeee! the spinning wheels complain.
Pulling on my bathrobe, I stick my face out the door to the front porch and declare to nobody in particular: “There’s no way they’re getting out of there without a tow.”
John looks out the windows and scowls again.
“Hey!” he yells loudly, and storms outside in a towel before I can stop him. “Stop taking apart the wall!”
The truck drivers have tried pulling. They’ve tried pushing. And now, they’ve taken logs from our woodpile and rocks from Sonny’s wall. The plan seems to be an attempt to build a teeter-totter out of the pilfered materials. By the back tires, they’ve erected a sort of cairn using Sonny’s stones. By leaning our firewood on the makeshift fulcrum, they’ve created a lopsided ramp.
I can hear the drivers halfheartedly apologizing for stealing our materials, but mostly they’re thinking that John’s an asshole. John storms back inside and calls the cops.
CRUNCH!
Splintered wood is scattered in the street, but the big truck is now forward a few feet and no longer stuck. It trundles away, leaving a great pile of smashed wood and broken stones in the middle of the road. It looks like the corpse of a homicide victim.
~~~~
A group of neighborhood women are standing outside Maggie’s house, milling by Sonny’s pile of stones. I go outside to find out what’s going on.
“Maggie died last night,” my neighbor June says directly. “Do you want Skipper?”
“No thanks!” I reply, flustered. “I, uh, I don’t like tiny dogs!”
June sighs. “Her sisters are trying to get me to take it. But I can’t.”
“Someone will take it,” I lie. No one will take Skipper, because he’s a horrible, horrible dog. “Do you know if the sisters have plans for lunch?”
“I don’t know,” June says hesitantly.
I head over to Maggie’s front door and poke my head in.
“Hello?” I call out.
There’s no answer, but the remnants of the screen door are propped open. The regular door is swinging loosely, barely clinging to the jamb as it dangles from badly rusted hinges. Gingerly, I push the door all the way open and find myself staring at a kitchen that looks as if it hasn’t been cleaned for several decades. Grime coats every surface. The linoleum is peeling up in great, dirt-encrusted chunks. The interior is stuffed full of garbage.
And yet there are signs of the woman she used to be: a china cabinet lined with porcelain teacups, a collection of curio cats, embroidered tea towels, piles of hardcover books. Most touchingly, there are crude watercolors scattered atop great piles of junk. They are paintings of the swans on our pond. Maggie’s living room window is clouded, broken and patched with sad strips of masking tape, but I can see the swans through them, swimming whitely on the water sparkling in the late summer sun.
“Hello?” I call out again. “Anyone home?”
“Hullo?” A small cream-colored woman bustles into the kitchen to greet me. She is British in accent and demeanor, a slight smile playing around the corners of her mouth, topped by apple cheeks. She has the British trick of wringing her hands ever so slightly and phrasing every statement as a question. “I’m Elaine?” she says helpfully.
“June told me you’re Maggie’s sister,” I say.
Elaine nods.
“I’m one of the neighbors. The brown house with all the stuff on the porch.” I point in the general direction of my house. “I’ve made noodles and a pie. Would you like to join us?”
“Oh, thank you,” she replies politely. “But we’re going to Pam’s for lunch, then we’re coming back to do more with the house.” She clearly thinks I know who Pam is, but I don’t have a clue.
“You’re not trying to… clean?” I ask uncertainly. Maggie was a hoarder in full depths of her illness. Ages ago, for one reason or another, she began using jars instead of plumbing. It smells in here.
“Goodness, no!” she replies. “The junk man is coming on Thursday to take everything out. Then the house will be razed.” As she chats, another woman comes down the stairs. Much younger than her sister, she is wearing rubber utility gloves and has the air of someone used to tackling big jobs with good cheer.
“I’m Linda,” she says in friendly tones. Maggie’s other sister. She waves instead of extending her hand on account of the rubber gloves.
“Did you come from England for the funeral?”
They both nod. “I never visited her before,” Elaine says wistfully. “Now I wish I had. Everyone is so lovely.”
“Oh yes,” I lie. “We’re all just wonderful!”
I learn that Elaine and her sister both live in England, and they share the same father as Maggie but not the same mother. They hardly knew each other because they were barely born by the time Maggie left home.
This explains the sisters’ marked lack of bereavement. Some of that is stiff upper lip and all, but a good chunk is simply that Maggie was someone they really didn’t know. I didn’t either, though I lived right next door.
~~~~
If Maggie wouldn’t stop staring at me, Sonny would never look at me. I thought he was just unsocial. A conversation finally began when I came out and asked him where he got the stones he was using for his wall.
The pile of rocks is Sonny’s work too. It’s not made up of discarded headstones smashed up out of respect for the delicate sensibilities of the dead. His raw materials are a combination of fieldstones, bedrock and discarded chunks of granite. When you dig up a plot, rocks turn up. They must be removed. It’s not that different from tilling soil for crops, except the coffins going into the ground are never meant to grow.
The task of building a wall wants good, longish, flat stones of high quality, not crap rubble made of plaster and cement mixed with gravel. He’s found good stones and hauled them to his spot, dumping them out of his pickup and spreading them around as the dust flies up, covering him with a fine white powder that gets in his ears, up his nose, makes him cough.
“Used to smoke,” he tells me. Quit after the cancer started up in his lungs.
To the naked eye he looks positively robust for a man of 80-odd years who survived on account of cussed stubbornness and not much else. He got experimental treatment at the VA, turning him into a walking cocktail of elixirs and drugs keeping death at bay. It’s a miracle he gets out of bed, but he does, building this wall, moving stones, ton by ton.
He’s a veteran of the Korean War. I’m Korean. He didn’t know what to say to me. Thankfully, he didn’t try the little bit of the language he used to use to pick up girls in Seoul. He’s not the chatty type. The wall is his sermon. His apology to the child he wished he had instead of the one he actually did.
His son’s a disappointment. In and out of jail. Vandalized John’s car. Sonny didn’t know what to say to him.
“It’s like a three dimensional puzzle,” I say. “Your wall, I mean. You probably don’t know what Tetris is, but it’s like that, fitting the pieces together, figuring out where they’re supposed to go.”
“It’s not so hard,” he mumbles. “You have to watch the cracks. Do some chinking as it goes.”
“I’d ask you to teach me,” I joke, “but those things are too heavy for me to lift.”
He eyeballs me, confused. Breaking stones with a sledgehammer is not the kind of thing that small
women generally take up as a hobby.
His wife is a recluse who became an invalid. She’s sick.
Of what? I don’t know. Of life, I guess.
“It’s beautiful,” I say seriously. “Your wall is a work of art.”
“It’s almost finished,” he mumbles. Embarrassed, he turns away, and resumes carrying his heavy, heavy stones.
~~~~
John comes home with an armful of tiger lilies in fresh bloom.
“I took them from Maggie’s lawn,” he says. “I don’t think she’d mind.”
Maggie’s house is rapidly turning to mush, reminding me of a very large dead elephant decomposing in high temperatures. The front lawn is turning into a jungle of grasses too tall for the small patch of lawn. The short path to her door is being swallowed up by weeds. While she was alive, she didn’t do much to keep the place in order. Now that she’s gone, the overgrowth has sped up. Her sisters have returned to England, and junk mail is accumulating.
You’d be surprised how often mail doesn’t get forwarded when the recipient is deceased.
It’s already dark when two police cars pull up and stop at Maggie’s house. They pull out flashlights, go into the house and start poking around. The lights move, shining out through broken windows. Curious, I go outside to ask the officers why they’d decided to investigate.
“Someone reported that the door was open,” the first officer replies flatly. He sounds like Detective Friday on Dragnet.
“It’s always open,” I say, shrugging. “The door doesn’t close.”
“How long has it been open?” the officer asks.
“It’s always open,” I repeat, “because it won’t shut. Uh—you do know that the owner died?”
A second officer emerges from the house and joins the conversation. “She’s right. The door won’t close. It doesn’t fit in the frame.”
Legacy- an Anthology Page 11
