Still Life with Elephant

by Judy Reene Singer

  Morning came, and it was almost painfully ordinary. We got up together like we were both on autopilot, and brushed our teeth and showered and got dressed.

  “Please think about what I asked you,” he said. “Please.”

  I didn’t answer him, and we left the house together. He went to work, and I did my donut run. I marveled at how routine it felt. How almost perfectly right. How it could be like this again.

  All I had to do was say yes.

  But I was in too much of a rush to dwell on it for too long. I had to get up to the sanctuary to see Abbie, my wonderful Abbie, who was going to be all right, thanks forever to Matt. Then I had to come home and finish packing up the house, thanks again to Matt.

  “It was Pity Sex,” said Alana when she had come with her girls for their riding lesson later that week. “You were being generous. I know I told you to be generous, but the problem is, you wound up being generous with the wrong man. I meant Tom.”

  “It might have been Sex for Old Time’s Sake,” I said. “And now Matt thinks he can come back into my life.”

  Her girls had just finished riding Tony the Pony and were brushing his thick brown-and-white coat before I turned him back out in his paddock. It was my last lesson with them as the owner of my barn. My last afternoon of being able to look out at the horses while I served hot chocolate in my kitchen.

  “Creative,” Alana said as she watched me heat the cocoa and milk in the oven, in an aluminum fish-stick tray, since I had packed up all my pots and pans and dishes. “I never would have thought to make hot chocolate like that.”

  “Tell me what to do about Matt,” I repeated. “And that poor motherless baby.”

  “Interesting hint of haddock,” she said, sniffing her chocolate, then directing her attention back to me. “It all depends on what you want out of life.”

  “What should I want?” I asked.

  She took a tentative sip of her drink, then continued talking. “If you take Matt back, with his baby, you know you will always have Holly somewhere in your life, forever.”

  “I know,” I said. “I feel sorry for Matt and the baby.” I poured Alana more hot chocolate. “And I’m trying very hard to summon sympathy for poor, sad Holly-Mental.”

  She touched my hand. “You can have all the sympathy in the world,” she said. “Just don’t feel like you have to wrap your life around it.”

  Since Reese had been saving his money from the age of eight, he was able to pay cash, and a week later, the paperwork was complete. Matt and I sat next to each other, across from Reese and Marielle, and exchanged signatures and checks and enough paperwork to boost the logging industry for the next millennium. The house was sold, and it was time for me to move.

  I dreaded moving day. I wished I could have hidden out at the sanctuary and skipped the grunt-labor part and then just blithely gone home to my new apartment, but I had to direct traffic, all the removing of cartons and moving of furniture and erasing of memories as I bid my house good-bye.

  Reese generously offered to help. I rented a U-Haul, and it got loaded by the grace, muscle, and brawn of several of Reese’s college students. I paid them in cheeseburgers and pizza, which was all I could afford, and I even threw in a bonus of several boxes of donuts, although I was certain that Reese had added to their take with some actual currency. I left some of my furniture behind—with Reese and Marielle’s excited approval—a sort of start-up gift to the happy couple, who were very…well, happy.

  After the truck left, I walked through the house one last time as its official ex-mother, to reassure it that it was going to be all right.

  “Reese will take very good care of you,” I said to the bare and solemn-looking walls and staring, unblinking windows. Then I extracted a promise that it would take good care of Reese. That its furnace would not go out on cold nights, that the septic system would remain pure and flowing and not get spiteful and stop up some morning when Reese and Marielle were running late and rushing to get to work. Both those disasters had occurred during my reign, and after several large checks to a local plumber and a stern lecture to the pipes, Matt and I had restored the balance of power to ourselves. I wanted to make sure it remained that way for Reese and Marielle.

  I said good-bye to Mousi and Conversano. I had sort of given Mousi to Marielle. After a few lessons on him, she adored him, and I knew she would be a good mother to him. She moved Rocky, her retired gymkhana horse, a few days earlier, to his new stall in the barn, where he struck up an immediate friendship with Mousi. They were trading war stories over a pile of hay when I went out to say good-bye. I promised Conversano that I would find him a good home, and I gave Tony the Pony an extra hug. They would be fine, I knew. Marielle would be taking good care of them in exchange for lessons.

  I also advised Reese and Marielle to burn white candles in every corner of each room to cleanse away any negative energy left over from Matt and me. I wanted them to start with a clean slate. That last suggestion was courtesy of Alana, who also recommended smudge sticks.

  “It’s Native American,” she explained. “It’s so that your brother won’t get contaminated with your bad luck.”

  Like a New Age Mr. Clean, I had to light the smudge sticks and wave them around the house, putting the final, smoky touches on bringing in good fortune. I bought a dozen sticks, for good measure, and they smelled like sage and wild grass and reminded me of Tom and Africa. When I was finished, I walked through the house one last time before giving Reese the key and leaving.

  Fortunately I didn’t have to perform the same rituals in my new apartment, since Reese had always been happy there. Happy. Happy. Happy. I walked through the rooms after the U-Haul was unloaded and unpacked my coffeepot and a mug. A few minutes later, I was sitting in my new kitchen, sipping coffee and taking stock of things. It was a good apartment, I decided. It was only ten minutes more to the sanctuary, and five minutes from a spanking-new donut shop.

  Alley Cat hid under my bed for a week, and Grace and I whimpered together under the covers for several nights, but we soon adjusted.

  The apartment had new silences, new noises, but they had no memories attached to them. None at all. I lay in bed and listened to the wind rattling the shutters outside and the windows creaking, and thought about Tom, and wished I didn’t feel so alone.

  Chapter Forty-six

  LIKE IT was a patient in the ICU, I managed to get my apartment hooked up on life support within the week. Electricity was transferred into my name, phone lines, cable, Internet, mail delivery, all the vitals were plugged in and running.

  Since I had permission to use the backyard, Grace had a place to play, plus there was cracked white plastic furniture for me to sit on, so I could admire the view of a neighbor’s cluttered property. I had a refrigerator with an icemaker that, when prodded, spat ice across the kitchen like the character in The Exorcist, a stove that had two settings, off and incinerate, and a bathroom window that neither opened nor shut, letting the breezes blow the curtains apart, which I’m sure provided great amusement for the locals.

  I also had a new snake plant, courtesy of my mother. And a lot of raisin bread. The latter a bonus, because she had tried to drop off her usual dozen loaves at Loaves to the World and her archrival, Evelyn Slater, had beaten her to it, by dropping off a dozen pumpkin breads earlier that morning.

  “Evelyn Slater knows our regulars like my raisin bread,” my mother complained as she plunked an overstuffed white shopping bag onto the kitchen table. “But everyone filled up on her pumpkin bread and went home. So I had extra.”

  “Mom,” I asked, after peeking into the bag, “what am I to do with a dozen loaves of raisin bread?”

  “But you always liked my raisin bread,” she said, watching me stack it on the table.

  She had come for lunch, which she had packed into the shopping bag, along with the plant and the breads. Next, I removed the plant from the bag.

  “You know I don’t do well with plants,” I said by way of than
king her. I set the snake plant down in a corner somewhere.

  “That’s because you put them in dark corners,” she chided, picking it up and moving it to a patch of light under a living-room window. “And don’t forget to water it. The last plant I gave you turned dark brown.”

  “Isn’t dark brown the new green?” I asked as I unpacked a very nice lunch of crab-and-pasta salad and Key-lime pie.

  She gave me an exasperated look. “Next time, I’m bringing you a cactus. I don’t think you can kill cactus.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” I said. “I am never moving again.”

  She reached out and caressed my face with long, tapered fingers that always ended in beautifully manicured nails. I had always envied her nails, since mine were stumpy and shaped like garden spades, which I’m sure, was directly attributable to all the barn work I did.

  “Things will get better, darling,” she said. “You’ll have your own home again.”

  I shrugged and tried not to get teary.

  “Let me look around and see what you’ve done to the place.” She wandered off through the rooms.

  “All I did was fill it with cartons,” I called after her. “Not much of a decorating effort.”

  “Well, I think it’s a very nice apartment,” she declared, joining me again in the kitchen and pulling out a chair to sit down for lunch.

  “Stop trying to cheer me up,” I said to her. “Reese has been living here for four years, and you always told him you thought it was dingy.”

  “But you’ve done nice things with it.” She took a plate of salad from me. “It’s very nice now.”

  “All I did was hang a pair of curtains in the kitchen,” I said.

  “But they’re nice curtains,” she said.

  Alana brought me a housewarming gift, too: a set of Homer Simpson oven mitts, and a picture of her two girls with Tony the Pony, framed in cherrywood and gold, which I immediately set out on a side table to admire at my leisure.

  Alana looked around the apartment. “Nice apartment,” she said, while I made coffee.

  “Nice,” I agreed.

  “Is your landlord nice?”

  “Nice.” I said.

  “That’s nice.” She took the coffee from me. I burst into tears.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I don’t want nice,” I said. “I want to go home.”

  A few days later, Tom called me on my new phone number. “Are you still angry with me?” he asked as soon as I picked up the phone. I could hear amusement in his voice.

  “When was I angry?” I asked.

  “When I offered to buy your house for you?”

  “I wasn’t angry, I was just upset,” I said. “I was at loose ends with myself, but everything is all tied back together. It’s all moot now, where I live.”

  “Things are never moot,” he said. “Just when it looks the worst, something will come along and pull you up by your mootstraps.”

  I laughed. “I’m sorry for my attitude. I really should have thanked you a hundred times for your kind offer.”

  “Moot,” he said. “A hundred times would have been ninety-nine times more than enough. Is it okay if I come see you?”

  “A hundred times yes,” I said.

  He brought me a dozen roses. They were a beautiful shade of dark pink, edged with red; their colors glowed, and they filled the kitchen with a dizzying sweetness. I buried my face in them and took a deep, luxurious breath.

  “I love them,” I said. “They’re so beautiful.” I poured out the last inch of orange juice from a carton in the refrigerator and filled it with water, and put them in. “I haven’t unpacked yet,” I apologized. “But I think citrus is supposed to be good for everything.”

  He walked around the apartment, then stood in the doorway to the kitchen with his hands on his hips and his head tilted. “It’s half the size of your old house,” he announced.

  “But it’s still nice,” I replied. “Right?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not crazy about it.”

  “Oh,” I said, “but everyone else seems to like it.”

  He crossed the room and took me into his arms. I felt safe, like I was surrounded by a wall that would keep the world out. I rested my head against his shoulder. “You can be stubborn, Neelie,” he said, running his fingers through my hair. “Please let me fix things for you.”

  “I don’t want charity.” I said into his shoulder.

  “What’s the point of having a rich boyfriend,” he said, “if you won’t let him do anything for you?”

  I pulled back with surprise. “I have a boyfriend?”

  “You could,” he said, “if you allowed it.”

  There are boyfriends and there are boyfriends. I hadn’t even been to his apartment. House? Condo? Palace? The only things we had shared so far had been his tent, two elephants, several dinners, and my bed. It hadn’t been anywhere near a traditional relationship.

  “How would that work?” I asked.

  “For starters,” he said, “I take you home to meet my family, and then you take me home to meet yours. We do a few things together, and if we like it, we decide if we want to do more things together.”

  I looked up into his eyes; his gaze was steady and penetrating. I wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell him that I thought I was falling in love with him. That I wanted to be with him. I looked away. “I’m afraid—” I started.

  Tom interrupted me. “Let me kick things off. We can start by having you meet my mother,” he said. “Just say yes. She’s eighty-six, and I think you’ll like her. She loves horses. You can talk horses all night with her. She knows a lot of big names in the horse industry.”

  “I’m already intimidated.”

  “She’ll like you,” he said. “You’re smart and down-to-earth and funny and beautiful. She doesn’t like pretense. Just be yourself. And then you can take me to meet your family. How does that sound?”

  “Do you like bread?” I asked.

  We went for dinner and a movie, and returned to my apartment. I caught Grace mid-launch, just as she was ready to plant her teeth into Tom’s ankles.

  “She must be feeling better,” I enthused. “This is the first time she’s bitten anyone in my new apartment.”

  “Glad my ankles are so therapeutic,” he called after me as I headed for the bathroom to incarcerate her.

  “This must be so boring for you,” I apologized, coming back to the living room. “I mean, you go all around the world, and then you come here and we do such ordinary things.”

  “I think about you all the time,” he said. “I can’t wait to be with you and do more ordinary things.” Then he drew an envelope from his pocket. “Open it.” A mysterious smile played across his lips. “I have a few plans that may not be so ordinary.”

  I opened it. There was a little piece of paper inside with a cartoon airplane drawn in and a note that read, “We are going to Bretagne. Pick a date.”

  I had to catch my breath. France. With Tom. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Abbie is doing okay, and you need a break,” he said. “Say yes.”

  “But—”

  “Say yes.” He held his arms out to me, and I flew into them. “We’ll take things one step at a time,” he murmured into my ear. “I promise.”

  “One step—”

  “Only one step,” he said firmly. “I promise. So—what do you think?”

  “Nice,” I said.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  THE ORIGINAL Margo was almost as imposing as the elephant Margo. We were in her Park Avenue apartment, two floors down from Tom’s penthouse, where we had gone first so I could be inoculated against culture shock. His apartment was huge. And stunning. We stayed for only a moment, to pick up some wine Tom had ordered, but it gave me enough of a heads-up to brace me for his mother’s home.

  “I’m nervous,” I whispered to Tom as we took the elevator. Though I had gotten much better, I knew my ears still betrayed me
when I got nervous. My plan was to concentrate very hard and understand every word out of Mrs. Pennington’s mouth. I wanted to win over Margo Pennington as badly as I had wanted to win over Margo Pachyderm.

  “You’ll do fine.” He smiled at me. “Just do what comes naturally.”

  “I’m not sure that’s such a great idea,” I replied.

  Margo Pennington was certainly just as gray as the Margo I knew, and almost as wrinkled, though she had Tom’s gray-green eyes and very straight posture. Tom made the introductions, and though I almost expected her to banana-slap my hand, she shook it warmly.

  “I understand you were off on an adventure with my son,” Margo Pennington declared, leading us into a large, elegant living room filled with antiques.

  “Yes. I’d never been to Zimbabwe before,” I replied.

  “It must have been very novel for you,” she said warmly. “Did you meatball creature?”

  I hadn’t been there more than five seconds and my nerves were already betraying me. I looked over at Tom for help, then realized there was no way he could know what kind of help to offer. I took a shot at an answer.

  “Actually,” I said, “we ate worms.”

  She gave me a slightly puzzled look and sat down on a delicate ivory brocade sofa, gesturing for me to sit down, too. “He’s Tom right arm,” she added. “Ferry green coated. Don’t you think?”

  My mind was racing through dictionaries—English, rhyming, and foreign. I threw in the thesaurus and several encyclopedias for good measure.