Lilac Avenue

by Pamela Grandstaff

  All the while, Mamie inhaled Claire’s perfume and let it take her back to the days her grandmother had visited. Her loud, vivacious grandmother (“peasant stock” Mamie’s mother had sneered) had been so kind, so generous, and so lively. She had charmed every servant, every worker at the factory, in fact, everyone but Mamie’s mother. After she left, the house seemed both larger and colder.

  “What do you think?” Claire asked her, and Mamie snapped back to the present.

  Mamie squinted through her glasses at her visage in the mirror, but she could only make out the fuzzy shape of their forms against sunlight from the nearby window.

  “Well, it’s not the worst I’ve ever had,” Mamie said.

  “I’ll take that as a compliment,” Claire said.

  “It’s the only kind you’re likely to get,” Mamie said.

  Claire removed the cape and towels. She let the hydraulic chair down so that Mamie’s feet could touch the ground. Mamie had become so warm and cozy that she was loath to leave the place.

  “Do you mind if I just sit here a minute?” she asked.

  “Not at all,” Claire said. “Stay as long as you like.”

  “Thank you, dear,” Mamie said, before she could remind herself it was best to be impersonal with servants.

  Mamie sat there for a few minutes, just looking at the sunshine coming through the window, and resting. She was so tired, so deathly tired. She wondered how on earth she would be able to walk all the way home, up Pine Mountain Road to Morning Glory Circle. That hill seemed insurmountable today.

  With a heavy sigh, she used her cane and the arm of the chair to stand. She tested her weight on her left leg and it held. She walked over to the counter, picked up one of her tote bags and removed a bill. The thought of lifting and carrying all those heavy bags all the way up the hill made her feel so weary, but she must. Everything she cared about most was held inside them.

  “Don’t forget your change,” Claire said.

  She almost told Claire to keep the change.

  Almost.

  When Mamie finally got home she set down her tote bags, locked the front door behind her, and sat down to rest on the boot bench in the front hallway. She was short of breath and her heart pounded in her chest. Pretty soon she wouldn’t be able to walk up the hill, nor up her own front stairs. What then? If she sold everything she owned she might be able to afford to live in one of those homes where they put old people. Bad smells, crazy roommates, rude servants, and there she’d be, trapped like a rat in a cage, until she died.

  ‘I’d rather die now,’ she thought.

  She felt weary down into her bones. It took all of her strength to take off her shoes and put on her slippers. It was cold in the house. So cold. She leaned back against the staircase and felt time slip away.

  A knock on the door roused her from her nap. Gingerly she got to her feet, testing her left leg before she put weight on it. She leaned heavily on her cane as she slowly shuffled to the door. She looked out the window next to the door but couldn’t make out who it was. Someone small, a child, maybe, holding something.

  “Who is it?” she shouted.

  “It’s Kevin, ma’am,” the boy said. “From the Mountain Laurel Depot.”

  Mamie recognized the voice of the dimwitted young man who cleaned tables at the Depot. He seemed harmless enough. She opened the door and scowled at him. He backed up a step.

  “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “Phyllis sent your lunch,” he said. “On account of you missed your breakfast.”

  “She did, did she?” Mamie said. “Well, I didn’t order it and I’m not paying for it.”

  “No charge,” he said. “Honest.”

  “There’s no such thing as a free lunch,” Mamie said. “Well, don’t just stand there, bring it in.”

  He brought in the pan of food and sat the dishes where Mamie directed him to, on the side table next to her reading chair in the north parlor. Mamie felt around in her change purse and came up with a quarter for the boy.

  “Thank you, Miss Rodefeffer,” he said.

  “You tell Phyllis whatever she wants the answer is no,” Mamie said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said.

  Mamie took her most important tote bag, the one with the thin straps that had the new books in it, into the parlor and sat in her favorite chair. Out of the tote bag she retrieved her mail and one of the new romance novels, and then sat back, savoring the softness of her chair and how it enveloped her, embraced her. She took off her walking glasses and put on her reading glasses.

  Mamie opened the first envelope, only to find she couldn’t read what was written on the page inside. She used her page magnifier and tried again, but the words were still a blur on the page. Panicked, she dropped the mail on the floor and opened the new romance novel. Using the skirt of her dress, she cleaned the lenses in her glasses, and again held the page magnifier over the page.

  It was no use. She couldn’t read a thing.

  “Useless glasses,” she said.

  She took them off, and placed them on the side table. She put on her walking glasses and used her cane to balance herself as she pushed up and out of her chair. Her left leg gave way; she fell sideways, and landed on her side on the oriental carpet. The fall was so unexpected that she lay there for a moment, stunned, to try to gather her bearings. The telephone was over on the other side of her chair, out of her reach. There was no one expected to visit, no servants to whom she could call out.

  Luckily she had fallen in stages, almost in slow motion, down onto her knees, to her hip, then onto her hands and elbows, and finally onto her side. Nothing had snapped, or felt broken. The rug was a good one, thick and soft.

  “Well, fudge,” she said.

  That was something her last housekeeper used to say, for which Mamie would reprimand her. So lower-class, that chattering woman, always some family drama with all those children and grandchildren. She was constantly asking for time off. She had quit in a huff over something Mamie had done; what was that?

  ‘Oh, that,’ Mamie remembered.

  Not too long ago, on a particularly bad night of a trying week, Mamie had used her cane to strike her own great-great-granddaughter Grace, and had thoroughly enjoyed doing it. If certain nosy busybodies hadn’t intervened, she might have repeated the blow a few times.

  ‘Impertinent guttersnipe,’ Mamie thought.

  Mamie tried to move the leg that had given way. It was a dead weight, with no strength left in it. She closed her eyes, relaxed, and almost fell asleep. That wouldn’t do.

  Mamie rolled onto her stomach and pulled her right leg up under her body. She was able to get up on her one good knee and both hands, and then grasp the arm of her chair. She pivoted herself over to the chair so she could pull herself up with her weight on her right leg. She turned and collapsed in her chair, breathing heavily. Her heart fluttered in her chest, was silent and still, and then fluttered again. She put her left hand on the receiver of the phone and then stopped. Whom would she call?

  Emergency services would take her straight to a hospital, and ultimately they would send her to a nursing home. If she called Knox or Trick, her nephews would call Doc Machalvie, who would skip the hospital and send her straight to a nursing home, and probably not a good one. They’d waste no time, would immediately wrest control of her finances and sell everything, take everything. She’d never sleep another night in this house.

  In the nursing home she believed she’d be at the mercy of strangers, lower-class peasants being paid pennies per hour to change adult diapers. They’d steal anything they could get their hands on. If she fussed they’d drug her into a stupor.

  She might call Jeanette at the bookstore, or Claire at the Bee Hive. They were kind, foolish people who would be willing to help her. Unfortunately, that would only prolong the inevitable; neither of those women would take care of her long term. No one would, unless she could afford to pay.

  She thought of all the s
taff members she had employed over the years; every single one had left on bad terms. She had never cared; there were always more where they came from. Always so polite and solicitous when they started, but she soon taught them to cower and slink. She secretly liked the mouthy back-talkers the best. At least with them she could enjoy the frisson of antagonism and a good fight. Mamie won, of course, as the one with the most money always does. But she had a thimbleful of grudging respect for the ones who would not put up with her abuse, who left her before she could fire them.

  She turned toward her wall shelves filled with her books, the only things that she had been able to count upon to soothe her anxieties, to look forward to with pleasure. They were useless to her now. What would she do with her time? The television was fine when her eyes needed a rest, and she had a radio here somewhere. But what good was surviving without the escape into her book world?

  Her stomach rumbled, but she was damned if she was going to take a morsel of that charity meal Phyllis had sent. She could survive on her own for a few days if she didn’t eat much. There were still canned goods in the larder. She understood from hearing her servants talk that by using the telephone, one could order unhealthy food to be delivered for cash payment. She could sleep here in her chair and use the downstairs half bath for her toilette. She could crawl if she had to get to the lavatory.

  How long before someone even noticed she was missing?

  The house was so quiet; she could hear the steady click of the pendulum in the grandfather clock in the central hallway. It took six men to carry that clock out of the big house down by the factory, a cart with two horses to bring it up to Morning Glory Circle, and the same six men to carry it into the hallway of the new house. Her father set his pocket watch by it every morning when he wound it. Years later he had paid a man to come all the way from Germany to modernize it, so it did not need to be wound.

  She could hear the hum of the refrigerator all the way down the hall in the kitchen. When she was a child they had an ice house out back of the big house. Using his pocket knife, her brother would shave off slivers from the big blocks of ice, and then they would sit on the front porch in the summer and lick them.

  She could hear a bird outside, singing, “Bob White.”

  ‘Terrible pests, birds,’ she thought. ‘Probably nesting in the gutter, damaging the house.’

  Some children were playing in the park across the street; she could hear them calling, “Red rover, red rover, send Destiny over.” Destiny was a name for a heroine in a romance novel, not for what was no doubt some wild little beastie with sticky hands and a belly fat from all the candy and fluorescent-colored soda pop her parents fed her.

  Mamie had always been thin, and it was each new nanny’s duty to coax her to eat, to try to fill out her gaunt frame. Mamie had delighted in thwarting their attempts to fatten her up. The nannies got in such awful trouble over their failure to do so.

  Mamie shifted in the chair and the mail on the floor crackled beneath her feet. She would never know what the letter said; probably someone wanting money. It hardly mattered now.

  She was tired, so tired.

  She knew this was only the beginning. First it was this knee, then that hip, while every day her sight would worsen until the world was dark, and she was completely and totally at the mercy of her horrible nephews, their stupid wives, and the idiot peasants who worked wherever they put her. Everything gone to hell, and she would not be able to escape into her books.

  ‘This is the end,’ she thought. ‘If I don’t do it myself, while I still can, I will not have the strength later.’

  Her heart fluttered and was silent, and this time it was a bit longer before it fluttered again.

  “Go ahead and stop,” she told it. “Save me some trouble.”

  She laid her head back against the chair and thought about her father’s gun in the drawer of her desk in her bedroom. Her father had a servant named Berthold who had taught her how to shoot; she had once been quite accurate in her aim. It wouldn’t take great aim to kill oneself, only a firm resolve. But how to get upstairs and down the long hallway to her bedroom? It would take hours to crawl.

  She had been raised a Catholic, so she knew all about sin. She had faithfully attended Mass every Sunday for her entire life, but now she found she didn’t care about any of it. Hell seemed preferable to whatever lay in wait for her at the hands of her family and the strangers to whom they would consign her fate. Besides, her fate had been sealed the first time she lay on the warm grass with Nino, under the cherry tree down by the river. She had never confessed it nor asked for forgiveness. Actually, if given the chance, she’d do it all over again, only this time she’d stand up to her father and run away with her lover; they’d raise their child in poverty if need be.

  ‘I was weak and proud when I had the chance,’ she thought, ‘and look at me now.’

  She heard a key turn in the lock of the front door, and then the door opened.

  “Who is it?” she called out.

  No one answered.

  She heard the door close and footsteps on the wood floor between the foyer carpet and the Oriental rug in the parlor. The figure was fuzzy, but she could tell it was female.

  “Hi Mamie,” she said.

  “Sandy?” Mamie said. “Is that you?”

  The woman didn’t answer. She had come closer, and Mamie didn’t like not knowing what she was doing.

  “What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” Mamie said. “Identify yourself immediately or I will call the police.”

  “You know me, Mamie.”

  “I know that voice,” Mamie said. “Who is it? Don’t play games with me. I’m warning you.”

  “There’s no need to be afraid. Your nephew sent me over to see how you’re doing.”

  “Couldn’t be bothered to come himself, I guess,” Mamie said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Well, I’m sitting here wishing I were dead, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “Why? What do you want?”

  “Just to check on you, make sure you’re all right.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” Mamie said.

  “Your nephews just want to be sure you’re well taken care of.”

  “The joke’s on them, then. I haven’t got any money.”

  “You’ve got this nice, big house, though, and all these pretty antiques.”

  “I recognize you now,” Mamie said. “You never did have the brains God gave a goose.”

  “I’m a lot smarter than everyone thinks.”

  “Get out of my house,” Mamie said. “You’re trespassing.”

  “Your nephew gave me this key, remember?”

  “If you think he’ll appreciate this you’re a fool.”

  “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Well, I would like a cup of tea, as it happens. My staff has deserted me, as you can see. My heart is just about to give out on me, and I have a terrible headache.”

  “He said this is your favorite tea. I’ll go and make some, and then we’ll have a nice long chat.”

  “I don’t know how he’d know what my favorite tea is,” Mamie said. “He never takes an interest unless he wants something.”

  “He must care or he wouldn’t have asked me to come and check on you.”

  “He won’t take you back,” Mamie said. “He’s in trouble with the law.”

  “Money has a way of making troubles go away. You relax and I’ll get us some tea.”

  “I never thought I’d see you again,” Mamie said as she heard the woman’s footsteps going down the main hallway to the kitchen. “I hoped it, is more to the point. I never could see what Knox saw in you to begin with. She’s nothing but a gold digger, I told him, plain and simple. But he never listens to me. No one ever listens to an old lady. But I was right, as it turned out. You will never admit it, probably, but I was right about you.”

  Mamie’s mi
nd wandered as she waited for the woman to return. Her heart sped up, paused, and then beat slowly, reluctantly.

  “I might not be alive by the time you get back with that tea,” she called out. “My heart’s failing me.”

  She could hear the woman moving around in the kitchen, and then eventually coming back down the hall to the parlor. The tea service clinked on the tray.

  “Took you long enough,” Mamie said. “I don’t like tepid tea; I like it hot, with four cubes of sugar.”

  “I think you’ll find it very hot, very sweet, and very strong,” the woman said.

  The woman helped Mamie take the cup and saucer, which were both very hot.

  “What is this?” Mamie asked. “Smells funny.”

  “It’s a very expensive blend,” the woman said.

  “I’m parched,” Mamie said, and took a tentative sip.

  “This is terrible,” she said. “Tastes like medicine.”

  “It’s the herbs,” the woman said. “It will make your headache go away.”

  Mamie took another sip and although the warmth felt good as it spread down into her belly, the taste was bitter.

  “I had a nanny who used to give me medicine that tasted like this,” Mamie said. “What is it?”

  “It’s herbal,” the woman said. “Drink it all down and you’ll soon feel better.”

  Mamie finished the tea in a big gulp, with a grimace.

  “Nasty stuff,” she said. “I’d prefer a cup of Darjeeling.”

  Mamie felt a searing pain in her chest. She dropped the cup.

  “What was that?” she said. “Poison?”

  “Relax,” the woman said. “You’ll feel better soon.”

  The pain spread from her chest into her shoulders, back, and down both arms. It was excruciating. She drew up her arms to her chest to try to contain the pain, but it was overwhelming, sharp, and relentless. Unbearable. She cried out, but the woman did not respond, did not lift a finger to help her.

  Then the pain left as suddenly as it came, but when Mamie opened her eyes she found she was completely blind.

  “Where are you?” she called out, but there was no sound or any indication that anyone was with her in the room.