These Granite Islands

by Sarah Stonich

  “Skip the plants, Thomas. I only want pots and dirt. Vermiculite. A few grow lights.”

  She wrote a letter to Robert that evening. Put my grandchildren to work. I want bulbs and seed pods from my garden, anything that blooms white.

  In the fall she found a volunteer position at the new performing arts theater, and on Saturdays she altered and patched costumes and kept the production wardrobes tagged and in order. It was an endeavor she imagined Louisa would have chosen herself.

  There were free tickets for her work, and she saw productions of Shakespeare and Beckett. Dickens was so overdone during holidays that by January the Cockney accents went up her spine. She never wanted to see another Tiny Tim costume.

  She liked Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, Edward Albee, and Mr. Wilder. She went back to watch Williams’s plays twice, sometimes three times — of all he seemed to have the best insight into the human condition, could understand the depth of grief.

  She was polite with the actors but rarely spoke to them, didn’t care to know them outside their roles. She admired their work onstage, then she brushed out and pressed their costumes and stitched seams they burst in their gesticulations of bogus ardor, or fury, or joy.

  She kept moving, kept her apartment spotless, fed coffee grounds to the potted ivory azalea, ground up nutshells for drainage under her pale impatiens. Scraping pigeon droppings from the tile on her terrace, she mashed them into the soil of troughs containing velvety flowers that bloomed in hues of eggshells and bones.

  After a year she was able to organize her photo albums, but she did not let herself linger over any image of Louisa. The cold midnights of February were worst. The whine of tires skidding, the sounds of sheet-ice cracking, invaded her dreams.

  In her free balcony seats she watched ballet and modern dance, and she felt the constriction sealing her own bones as the elastic bodies of young dancers soared like shot liquid. They spiraled over the stage, over each other, and she envied their ease, the beautiful leaping of them.

  It was a progressive theater, and so tradition paused to allow performance art and experimental theater, and she didn’t dislike all of it, was even amused by the vast narcissism, the incredible focus and self-absorption it took to expose aberrant lives to audiences in the name of art.

  It was nice, the theater, the excitement. The prop builders and stagehands called her Gran, and she didn’t mind. She looked forward to the ballet season, though the dancers propelled their near-naked bodies through the wardrobe room on the balls of their feet and said outrageous things. They liked Isobel, she knew, but she imagined they enjoyed the thought of shocking her, by using words like fuck or fag, or by leaving the bathroom doors open when they loudly vomited up their lunches in fits of bulimia.

  The dancers were ambitious and focused boys and girls, but Isobel was dismayed that people so young could be so neurotic. When the boys augmented the front pouches of their tights with layers of tissue and gauze, she offered up handfuls of cotton batting as being a more natural-looking substitute. She tried not to smile. The young men went by the full names their mothers had given them, never nicknames; always William, Andrew, or Christopher, though occasionally they called each other pet names like Stella or Kitten. By the end of a run they would all sign her programs and always promised to remember her once they were famous.

  Sunday mornings she took a bus to Como Park, where she wandered through the zoo and watched the apes and giraffes. She bought paper cups of chum to feed the seals. She rested among the warm boulders of the Japanese garden, and on cold days she stayed inside the great glass conservatory, breathing in the odors of dirt and foliage and sneaking pinches of crushed Rice Krispies from her pocket to feed the white carp swimming under the bridge.

  There was a woman in the conservatory gift shop who looked a little like Louisa. Isobel’s refrigerator door grew crowded with the magnets and postcards emblazoned Como!

  Weekday mornings she walked, and in the afternoons she went to the library, where she read the paper in dusty squares of light fallen through the great grid of skylights.

  Thomas complained she was never home.

  The edges and borders of Cypress began to soften in shadow, as if set farther back on her shelves of memory. Glassine envelopes of images pulled forward less frequently. As the sting of Louisa’s death diminished and grief became less stabbing, Isobel began to enjoy the routines and habits she’d adopted.

  She avoided staying in her building during the day. Senior housing. The very name wearied her, and she could think of nothing less natural than being housed with a hundred people her own age. Nearly all were women.

  She heard their conversations in the lobby, in the laundry, passing the game room. Volleys of one-upmanship as to who might have suffered most, proudly crowing their widowhood and relaying bouts of ill health as if they were their most defining moments. All seemed to have children who did not visit often enough and ailments that never healed. Isobel knew some of them must have had children who had died, but she would not let herself get close enough to compare losses. She remained stubbornly aloof and avoided these women who scheduled their days around soap operas and spoke of the characters as if they were family members or personal friends.

  When they died their replacements were nearly identical.

  She considered moving to a neighborhood, to get an apartment in a smaller building with families or students or couples. But Thomas wanted her to have the convenience of elevators and the shuttle bus to the grocery store, the safety of bathroom handrails, the emergency buzzer in her bedroom. Just in case.

  She relented. The building was adequate, the utter quiet of deep carpets in her hallways pleased her. Her twentiethfloor windows looked out over the state capitol and the somber dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, with the city fanning beneath. She could walk to the river, the corner store, the theater, and, of course, the library.

  An asylum. The entrance to the library was like the vestibule of a church, darkly paneled and soaring; the reference room was as serene as a parlor, despite its size. Puddles of hushed light from table lamps colonized small areas, and people bent into these tiny sanctuaries, the concentration on their faces reflecting the pages in front of them; pondering, amused, confused, enlightened.

  The librarians were always kind, always a “Good afternoon, Mrs. Howard,” sometimes a “Beautiful day, Mrs. Howard.”

  She learned their names, and from hushed, overheard conversations she knew a little something about each of their lives — when one was having trouble at home, when another was gone sick because she’d had her uterus removed. She knew which ones hated their mothersin-law, and which were only mildly annoyed by them; she knew which were worried about their children, or were having affairs, or were otherwise overwhelmed. It amused Isobel that they knew nothing of her. They never asked questions, as if only accustomed to answering.

  She sat near the main desk and listened to the strange and varied requests from patrons. Information that the librarians retrieved as if it were absolutely vital to know how to eviscerate a shrew mole, what the capital of Bolivia was, where to find the statistics on incest in rural Canada, or how to spell Ceausescu. Three librarians retired during her tenure. At holidays she left them small parcels — handkerchiefs or soaps, sometimes candy — but she knew by their puzzled smiles that they would probably never use the soap or eat the candy. She didn’t care. Their curious thanks were enough.

  Her presence impressed them mostly for its longevity. Three or four days a week, years compiling first into one decade and then another, she could be found in the same corner, a well-dressed elderly woman, reading or just sitting. She was a stooped figure in the afternoons, as much a fixture as one of the worn leather chairs. Isobel’s presence affected the librarians and regular patrons even if they did not know it — when she was settled near her table, everything was as it should be in the great room.

  Ever older, always with a fresh flower on the lapel of her overcoat, even in winter.
Always a white flower. Her face shadowed by the brims of her odd, outdated hats as she bowed into her newspapers, licking her pencil to begin the daily crossword, looking up only when the sun shifted or slanted away from the glass skylights above.

  She stayed away from the library on rainy days. Those days she mended or did laundry, wrote letters, or cooked things to freeze for the next week’s meals: a stack of Welsh pasties, a pot of soup. Once a week she made bread.

  The making of bread was a reflex. The recipes for German rye or Vienna loaves were imprinted somewhere in her so that she was hardly aware of tapping out the proper amount of yeast into water. She didn’t count handfuls of flour, simply stopped when there was enough in the bowl. Testing the dough for air bubbles and kneading them down were memories in her hands. Baking was a task of the body, its remembered motions a kitchen waltz, steam rising from the brown loaves like so many notes.

  Her health held, but with an odd exception. At the close of three singular winter nights in three consecutive years, Isobel was hospitalized with breathing difficulty. Thomas took her to the emergency room after she’d called in the middle of the night, gasping and nearly incoherent. By the third trip he had grasped the connection the doctors never could. All of those nights were threaded together by the possibility of ice, the air cold enough to freeze lakes, even rivers. All shared the same sapphire cold stillness as the night Louisa died.

  On fine mornings she walked the city, leaving her building promptly at eight o’clock as if due at an appointment. She was downtown by eight-thirty, when people were still streaming in from the suburbs.

  Men poured from car pools and vans in front of office buildings, their posts of low or middle management obvious by the cut of their off-the-rack suits. The CEOs and bankers arrived later, faces less harried over their crisp collars, camel lapels, cashmere scarves.

  Unless it was very cold no one wore a hat.

  St. Paul was usually a quiet city, so she relished this frenetic early hour. Delivery trucks double-parked to incite choruses of honking and the hiss of hydraulic brakes. The mornings smelled of diesel fumes, fresh tar, and a prickling coolness. She walked past the office buildings, greeting the security guards and the other familiar faces she encountered — doormen, policemen, the old German at the newsstand who always called Guten Tag as she passed.

  She took care of errands in these hours, making her bank deposits, dropping off dry cleaning, paying utility bills. The last time she renewed her driver’s license the clerk’s eyes had widened in shock when reading the numbers on the date of birth line. Isobel rose up on her toes to lean over the counter.

  “Don’t look so frightened,” she reassured him. “I don’t actually drive anymore.”

  She knew the blocks of the city, the facade of each building. After reading books on architecture she could pass buildings and assign them styles: Italianate, Federal, Gothic, Baroque. Certain gargoyles caught her eye, and she nodded to them in stony greeting, wondering over the generations that had walked under their gaze. Thousands of people walking thousands of steps. As many histories.

  Jack’s long-ago words had stayed with her, and she often said them aloud like a credo. Take note of small, seemingly inconsequential things. She watched and opened herself to what the streets offered and discovered the endless small tableaux that made up the city.

  Crossing the green square of Rice Park she would sit to watch the people. Sometimes when a certain old man passed she was reminded of Victor. He would’ve enjoyed the squirrels. She followed their progress for him under the ginkgo trees; autumn after autumn the idiotic creatures buried their stores in the same spot — just where the skating rink would ice over to seal their food away from them. Whenever she saw a tall elderly couple she could not help but scan for relics of Jack or Cathryn in their profiles. Who was to say that some ancient woman might not turn from the arm she was linked to and exclaim, wonder in her lined face, “Isobel Howard, as I live and breathe!”

  She smiled at herself. Lottery odds.

  Thomas didn’t like her being out in winter and encouraged her to use the enclosed skyway system, but she wouldn’t. The skywalks were loathsome carpeted tunnels with uneven heat blasting at her. He saw he was defeated and so took her to a medical supply store to at least buy her a cane to help her along outside. He’d watched her gait degenerate to a shuffle, but he knew she still wandered heedlessly along the icy streets and cobblestone alleys. She was indiscriminate in her routes. He saw bags in her kitchen from a fruit vendor and thrift shop on the other side of the river, the wrong side. He knew she looped through the warehouse area on her way home in the dusk, as if she hadn’t enough sense to know she might stumble in some remote alley.

  She stood blinking at a display of rubber-tipped canes and walkers. After five minutes she turned and walked stiffly out of the store. Hurrying after her, Thomas couldn’t hide his impatience.

  “Ma.”

  “Don’t call me Ma. That’s what a cane looks like now? So ugly, those aluminum things. And did you hear that god-awful clanking? They sounded like the monkey bars at the playground.”

  She smiled sweetly at Thomas. “I’d rather fall.”

  He opened his mouth, ready to raise his voice, when she turned away from him, the conversation over. She could be that obstinate.

  He sent away for a catalog from a London manufacturer of wooden canes and umbrellas. He chose a polished lilac-wood walking stick with a sterling orb he thought would fit well in her small hand. When it arrived it looked so much like a weapon he was almost afraid to give it to her. He turned the polished handle to show her the engraving of her initials on one side.

  “Oh, now isn’t that something?”

  She kissed his cheek. It looked like something Cathryn might have carried. “It’s lovely Thomas. It’s almost too nice!”

  She winked up at him. “It’ll be a shame if I have to bludgeon a hobo or a river rat with it.”

  The rat comment wasn’t so far-fetched. In the year before her stroke, the river became her most frequent destination. Now, almost daily Isobel drew a straight bead through downtown, tapping her route with her new walking stick to one of the three great bridges. On fine days she could watch the boat traffic for hours, cars whizzing just behind her, the city throbbing to the west.

  She imagined living on one of the barges or houseboats beneath, tidy existences of labor and rest, constant maintenance against wind and wave and rot, the enforced economy of space, the leisure of floating. She thought of a life unfettered, days ruled less by reason or ambition than by eddies and currents. She could easily picture Victor on such a vessel, his curious gaze always ahead, anticipating what might present itself around the next bend, the next mystery. She could see him, grey and gliding into the future.

  Perhaps the two of them living on a boat. Wouldn’t that be a picture. Carried along, watching the sky and everchanging riverbanks.

  She came to sense when the river was about to freeze, noting the changes in glassy motion below the bridge trusses. Water slowed to undulate in sluggish swells before forming the thinnest vellum of ice. She wanted to see it freeze solid before her eyes, but it never did. Cold would drive her back to the shelter of the city, and the hard freeze would happen in the night. If she were younger, hardier, she would have posted herself on a bridge for a night to witness it, to be there the very instant water would cease being water.

  A sunny May day — her last in the library — Isobel faltered even as she stepped through the revolving door. Something was off. Shadows tipped oddly over the polished floor, and when she looked up she saw the workmen walking in the air. Figures tiny for their distance, their forms greyed by dirty glass, they balanced just over the grid of skylights on external catwalks, laying a false roof over the panes.

  She read the public notice salted with words like liability and danger. As if laying tiles on a game board, the men floating above darkened one square of daylight after another. For a long time Isobel stood in the large room gaz
ing up at the sections of sun being extinguished. The great room had no other source of light save the table lamps. Suddenly her underarms were damp, her throat closed against the smell of old books, and she was swept backward to see herself awaiting a storm, gazing up to count the panels of tin ceiling in the tailor shop. Liam Malley stepping through the door to tell her Cathryn was gone.

  As the workmen laid the last tile she heard a low moan and looked around before realizing it had come from her own throat.

  One of the librarians touched her elbow. “Are you all right, Mrs. Howard? Can I get you something? A glass of water? Tea?”

  She did not break her gaze from the ceiling. She felt her ankle churn sideways, the heel of her shoe pressing oddly into the terrazzo, as if her body were bearing the weight of the past.

  She blinked and looked at the librarian as if to say, I know where I am. She spoke slowly, “They’ve closed its eyes. This room will grow blind.”

  “But the glass wasn’t safe, you see? I’m afraid it’s very old.”

  The librarian looked at her with the soft pity reserved for the ill.

  Isobel peered squarely at the young woman. “I am old. Older than this room, in fact. I am ninety-nine years old today.”

  ~ ~ ~

  Thomas had a thin manila envelope tucked under his arm. He set it on the bed.

  “Mother, where’s the oxygen tent?”

  Her lids fluttered. “I made them take it away.”

  Someone had put an electric blanket over her, yet her wrist felt icy under his touch. He frowned and sat down. “I have something for you.”

  “Hmm?”

  It was becoming difficult to swallow. “You remember I told you I had to go to Chicago on business?”