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FINAL FLING
Like his home in suburbia Larry has settled in his foundations. At forty-seven his ambitions have descended gently to the level of his abilities. He is a good actuary who can quickly calculate the life span of the average client. Averages are his forte; extremes make him uncomfortable. His last attempt at promotion won him praise for reliability and a resounding silence on the question of initiative. He won’t throw his hat in the ring again. He has an index-linked pension to look forward to and a further 24.3 years with his family.
“’Bye, Dad,” His oldest boy, Lawrence, leaves the breakfast table to go to school.
“Work hard,” Larry mumbles, his liberal mouth full of toast. He looks at his son. It’s a surprise to see him filling the doorway.
His wife, Sue, sees Lawrence to the porch, her hand on his shoulder. “I’ll pick you up at four. Have you got your gym stuff? And don’t overdo it. If you feel a wheeze coming on use your inhaler.”
Larry heaves himself from the table and collects his briefcase which contains only sandwiches; the upwardly immobile don’t bring work home anymore. But he doesn’t escape that easily.
“Don’t forget your mother is coming for dinner,” Sue says. “Could you pick up some coleslaw in the deli near your office?”
“Sure thing.”Larry has a pang of conscience. He will really have to persuade his mother to come live with them. At seventy-six she can’t be left rattling around on her own in that flat in Queen’s. But she’s so stubborn, so keen to parade her independence …
“And Larry, please do something about that tree at the front of the house. It’ll fall on the roof one of these nights. We’ll be killed in our beds this winter, I’m sure of it. Call someone today to cut it down.” Sue doesn’t nag as such but she does tend to dramatise. Because he’s so slow to act she has to invent alarms and excursions in the hope of lighting a fuse under him. And since he has grown more ponderous over the years she has reacted by becoming more excitable.
“I’ll see to it.” He pulls his hat low over his rubbled face and kisses her briefly.
Outside, he looks at the offending elm tree in the garden. The rot has spread up the trunk and into the branches. It is almost dead and certainly dangerous. But how, he wonders as he sits into his car, can you pronounce a tree dead? For some reason he’s reluctant to cut it down. Lawrence’s tire used to hand from it and they used to dress it with lights at Thanksgiving and Christmas. He remembers too the time they hung a bird house from one of the lower branches and discovered that squirrels were raiding the birdseed. Lawrence, who was only five or six then, asked why the squirrels had to be chased away. He couldn’t grasp the difference between vermin and animals. Neither could his father.
Larry grins as he remembers the squirrels. But there’s something noble about that old tree and it sort of lends substance to the house with its painted plastic siding. Still, it will have to be felled sooner or later, though his actuarial mind can’t quite predict the right moment ….
Refusing as always to be collected, his mother makes her own way to the subway at Queen’s. A stranger puts a hand under her elbow as she edges towards the escalator. She shrugs it off, then forces a smile to soften the rebuke. A billowing draught precedes the train which comes like a huge plunger down the tunnel. She boards a graffiti-covered carriage.
A small neat woman, her hair is grey and fluffy; she used to put a blue tint in it but doesn’t bother anymore. Her glasses dangle down the front of her overcoat on a silver chain Larry gave her two, or was it three, birthdays ago. She notices how the young women in the carriage wear their hand-bags like Sam Brown belts secured around their necks. She refuses to carry her purse like that, reckoning that at her age she is mug-proof. Against her doctor’s advice she’s left her walking stick at home.
The train moves off in a wheezing surge, the walls of the tunnel beginning to stream and flow as the speed increases. A man strap-hanging by the door glances at her and looks away. There was a time men used to bother her in crowded carriages, but not anymore. She feels more relief than regret. The subway seems less noisy than usual; maybe her hearing has slipped another notch. That too has its own compensations; there’s a lot she doesn’t particularly want to hear or hear about these day.
Although she’s visited Larry and Sue almost every Wednesday since God knows when, for some reason this particular evening doesn’t seem to be part of her normal routine. There is something different about this Wednesday evening but she can’t put her finger on it. In the surrounding silence her mind is restless, raking the past for memories, the important ones, those that may make some sense of the happenstance of over half a century. She is operating on nervous energy like that surge of adrenaline when her first child, Frank, was born. She’d gone through thirty hours of drug-free labour and had no intention of sleeping once she saw the wrinkled face like a raw frankfurter.
Drawing on that same reserve now, she sits and doesn’t bother much with the passing stations or the people getting on and off. She looks forward to dinner and walking in on Frank, surprising him. That silly grin as if he’d been caught out …. Wait now …. Not Frank. It’s Larry she’s going to visit. Larry. His hair is almost as white as her own. Mistaken once as her husband, he wasn’t amused at all. Although Frank is the oldest he looks younger than Larry despite his misspent youth. He never worried as much as poor Larry. What a rascal Frank was, impulsive to a fault. Set has mattress on fire once in a fit of temper, then hid in the laundry chute and got stuck. It took the fire service to cut him free and then her husband, Jack, had laid into him. But after it was all over Jack and she had laughed in private. For some reason they always got a kick out of Frank, though they never let him know how much he brightened up their lives. Maybe now was the time to set the record straight. Where was he now? Billings, Montana, probably selling snake oil. He was always on the move. It would be so good to see Frank again.
As she moves through the tunnel the idea takes root and puts out tendrils in all directions. Without realising it, her fingers grope for the credit cards in her purse. She hardly ever uses them for her small amount of grocery shopping, but for something big like this …. She knows the idea is crazy but it just won’t go away and, besides, at her age she’s entitled to go off the deep end. By comparison, dinner in Brooklyn suddenly loses its appeal. Sue would be fussing and clucking and making Larry do the dishes as if she had a point to prove and talking about that old tree that needed to be cut down ….
Jack was impulsive like Frank and he never stopped to think either. That winter he got his first stroke it didn’t cost him a thought and he died quick and clean when it was his time. Frank is so like him it’s uncanny, even the way he cranes his head forward as if walking into a gale, not looking right or left. She must tell Frank this, all of it. The reason he didn’t get on with his father was because they were so alike. It’s all so simple and yet she never fully realised it before. Now in her seventy-sixth year it’s as if she can look down on the family from a height and see all the interrelationships at a glance.
She could call Larry from the airport. He would say she was mad and try to talk her out of it; so she would have to be firm. She mustn’t let his worry rub off on her.
At the next stop she gets to her feet a little unsteadily. It must be the excitement. She doesn’t fully realise that she’s made up her mind until she finds herself outside the station trying to hail a cab. A policeman with a night-stick tips his cap to her and helps her flag down a taxi.
She hasn’t been in a cab since Jack died and the walls of her life closed in, confining her to the local store where she gets milk and eggs, and the library where she scans the papers and borrows Agatha Christie’s. She can read these again and again because she forgets the plots another compensation of sorts. But she can’t knit anymore because her hands are too stiff now. Those hanks of wool Larry keeps bringing her are just piling up in a closet.
“You okay there, lady?” t
he cabbie asks.
“Yes, Frank.”
“Joe. The name’s Joe. Meeting someone at Kennedy?”
“No. I’m going on a trip. To see my oldest boy in Montana.” She tries to keep her voice matter of fact. The driver shrugs. Some old broads never quit.
The city slips by. She’s forgotten how big and bright it is. Snow begins to fall, the flakes drawn to the headlights like fleeting memories scoured away by the wipers which work to the rhythm of heartbeats. It’s warm in the cab and she opens her coat and angora cardigan. When Frank was small he used to be fascinated by her fox fur, the lacquered claws on one end, the glass-eyed head on the other. He borrowed it once for a school play and lost it. Jack must have been away on business because she had to take care of the punishment. She stood in front of Frank who was already a head taller than her, and swished the malacca cane. He looked down at her and said, “You must be kidding, Ma.” She walked away trying to keep a straight face.
Approaching the airport, excitement stirred in her. She felt young again. It was good to cut loose from her old friends many of whom had gone funny and mean. Marge had become a miser, squirreling everything away like a bag lady. Lillian spent her days rocking in a chair in a home; it was painful to visit her. Men were luckier; they died quickly, at the right time, while they still had dignity. They went without a thought, like Frank jumping off a diving board before he could even swim.
“Your change, lady,” the cabbie said.
“You may keep it.” Frank and Jack used to tip big. They also liked gambling. Once when heavy-set men came to the door she had to pay off a debt for Frank. Larry recouped her afterwards which was strange since he was always careful about money. But he lectured her and she suspected that he also lectured Frank.
A skycap gives her directions to the reservations desk. She pays for her ticket with a credit card, feeling that she’s defrauding someone with that bit of plastic.
“Where’s the plane?”
“You have to check in first, Ma’am. They’ll tell you which gate.”
She’d been on a plane only once before when Jack had used his winnings to take them to Glacier Park. Frank got lost looking for bears and a kindly Indian handed him over to the Park Rangers. It will be only a few hours before she sees him again. Life can be a miracle at times.
The stewardess helps her fasten the seat belt. “Enjoy your flight, Ma’am.”
“Thank you, dear.” She is tempted to add, “Don’t fuss. I may be old but I can still get around.”
Her spirit soars as the plane takes to the sky; she should have done this years ago. It feels like Thanksgiving with the whole family around her. Frank will be so pleased to see her and hear what she has to tell him. She looks out at the peaceful sky, the vast space above the clouds. God is old too. She could have met Him at the Senior Citizens and played a hand of pinochle. She closes her eyes and dreams. Frank is waiting at the end of the line and in a way Jack is too. She smiles in her sleep.
“Frank never came to the funereal,” Larry said after the last mourner had left the house.
“Well, he was away on business,” Sue answered without much conviction.
“Why was Mom going to see him anyway? What came over her?” Larry held his face in his hands, feeling lost, beyond tears.
Sue put her hand on his shoulder. She knew the old lady had gone on a blast, probably even knowing it would be her last. And Frank had always been her favourite; she doted on him. But Sue couldn’t tell Larry after all he had done for his mother over the years.
Larry had the standard three days compassionate leave from the company. He tried to keep busy; that was always the best remedy against moping. On the third day he asked Lawrence to help him cut down the tree. He lopped off the top branches first; the bracelet of the chain saw just slid through the rotten timber. Then he bent to the trunk, cutting out a wedge from the side furthest from the house. The gentlest push brought the bole down with a muffled crash. The sky looked brighter but less interesting and the house was exposed, as he feared, in all its modest plainness.
Gathering up the dead wood, Lawrence asked, “What are those?”
Larry knelt on the ground, “I’ll be damned.” He counted five little elm shoots springing up through the new grass. It was much too early in the year and, he would have thought, much too late for the tree which was surely dead by now. He was glad he hadn’t taken Sue’s advice last week about cutting down the tree. There was something to be said for not acting on impulse.
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Wheeze Momma
A Gift
Better than Monet
Eileen and True Hunger Page 5
