She’ll steer clear of all those big columns and go back and get him, for goodness’ sakes. But why are her feet outside? Well, there’s no need to bring them back in, it looks like.
Carl watches, his mouth open. She seems to be steering. He decides just to stand and wait, because it looks like she might come on back around. Something tells him if he hollers, she’ll try to get out.
Here she comes. He sees the front left headlight as the car turns toward him. Then there is the full front end. The car looks like it’s smiling. Just over the steering wheel he sees the top of her head. Can she see? He sets the walker behind a column, takes a few steps so he’ll be on the driver’s side when she comes by. There are those gold slippers just under the open door. Now he can see her eyes above the steering wheel. Here she comes. Man, this is something. He starts walking beside the open door—breaks into a slow trot, puts his hand on the door. For a second he visualizes himself in the Secret Service.
“You need to put it in park,” he shouts. She’s looking straight ahead, frozen.
Wham! An explosion—and pain. He has run into a column. He staggers backward and then heads out after the car. He runs to the passenger door, jumps in, grabs the hand brake between them, and pulls it up slowly and firmly.
“Where’d you go?” she asks.
“Where’d I go?”
“Yes.”
“I didn’t go anywhere.” He touches his head. A bump is rising. He looks at his hand to see if there is any blood. No.
“Well,” she says, “you just disappeared.”
“You drove off without me, Aunt Lil.”
“Why?”
“I . . . That’s a good question. Here. Let me get the keys.” He reaches over, cuts the engine, and pulls the keys from the ignition. He looks at her. Her back is to him. He feels sorry for her, decides they can talk after he gets her to Rosehaven and they’re settled in her room and he has eaten a couple of Tootsie Rolls. She keeps Tootsie Rolls in her blue bowl for everybody who comes in. He buys them for her, along with bananas, apples, and sugar-free candy.
Through a Glass Eye Darkly
ON THE DRIVE BACK to Rosehaven, Carl thinks of Anna Guthrie, the social worker there. Maybe he can stop by her office and talk to her—about Aunt Lil and this driving business. She has experience with this sort of thing.
Anna, ten years or so younger than he, is exactly what—or who—or rather the kind of person he can see himself marrying, when he gets around to that, maybe before too long. He stops in and says a few words to her once in a while, words spoken with relaxed vocal cords, dropping the pitch of his voice a good bit—and the topic is always his aunt, of course. He never stays very long, because then he’d have to think up other things to talk about. That’s one reason he’s not married. He doesn’t like to sit with another person through silences, and he also doesn’t like to talk a lot. He pictures himself stopping in and saying to Anna, Let me ask you something: how do you tell them they can’t drive anymore? And then he’d tell her the whole story about the afternoon, along with those funny things his aunt Sarah once said about giving up driving. That will make Anna laugh. She has a good laugh.
She also has photographs on her desk of two little girls. But she doesn’t wear a wedding ring. The girls may be her nieces.
Marriage. The whole business of it. He’s not altogether sure he can make somebody happy. His mother and aunts and uncles hadn’t seemed all that happy in marriage, something he dimly felt—but never thought about—while growing up. He’d felt a sadness hovering around Aunt Lil and Uncle Tad’s marriage but never asked her about any of that.
And there’s something else, a simple secret. He doesn’t like the thought of undressing in front of a woman; but on the other hand, he knows he’s okay sexually—he had enough experiences during his stint in the navy to prove that.
That long period when he’d stayed with his mother a lot, while she was sick, didn’t help him get out and meet women, and some of the guys at work had given him a hard time about that—not out loud, but you could tell. For a while, at Andy’s Café, this guy around seventy brought his about one-hundred-year-old mother in for lunch every day. Carl had pictured them as himself and his mother—thirty years down the road—and had worried about that.
Now he figures he just needs some time to get to feel comfortable with somebody, and he is certainly comfortable with Anna—until she stands up. She’s taller, by three or four inches. Anyway, now that his family’s entire older generation has died except for Aunt Lil, his favorite aunt, the pressures to get married have actually eased up some.
BACK AT ROSEHAVEN, Faye Council, the physical therapist, holds the therapy room door open for L. Ray Flowers, her new favorite. He rolls in briskly, right leg propped straight out from his wheelchair. She is ready for his daily trick: after a strong shove on the wheels, he raises both hands as his wheelchair rolls toward the far wall. “Help! Help! Watch out, watch out!” He slows the wheelchair at the last minute, then maneuvers the chair back around to face her. “Howdy, Faye. What a day, what a day.” A white, forward-and-back hair wave covers the front of his balding head. He is fair, almost red-complexioned, and thin-lipped. His quick black eyes are set so deep he sometimes looks cross-eyed.
Faye doesn’t often take her work home with her, but the night before, over supper with her husband, Manley, she related Mr. Flowers’s version of his own life story—a story he told quite readily: he grew up dirt-poor, one of nine brothers and sisters in a Kinston, North Carolina, churchgoing Pentecostal family, became an evangelist, traveled to the Midwest, where he served, “pedal to the metal, a-healing and a-squealing, a-touching and a-feeling.” He even preached to Faye the opening of a sermon that came to him on the spot one time, standing at the pulpit. He said that happened a lot—something real good would just pop into his head. Then he’d go write it down and memorize it for some other time. The sermon opening was so different from any sermon she’d ever heard, she wrote it down herself and read it to Manley there at the supper table.
“Listen. Be good to your feet. You walk on them every day, if you’re lucky. Don’t be afraid to buy expensive shoes. I’m L. Ray Flowers. I’m a prophet; I’m a snake. I’m a salad; I’m a steak. I’m a gun; I’m a flower. I’m weakness; I’m power.”
He was married once, then not married—enough said, he told her. After he finished his calling out in the Midwest, he lived at the beach for a while, running a little church near Dove, North Carolina, and almost got eaten by sharks while fishing. Then he moved back to a small plot of inherited land in Hansen County to recover, so to speak, and started a furniture-building and -repair business as well as a substitute-preaching business before (1) having his “final” heart operation—“Sir, we can’t go back in there; it will kill you, I’m afraid”; (2) falling off a ladder while painting his shop gutters, severely injuring his knee; and thus (3) ending up at Rosehaven for physical therapy, which would be over as soon as he could bend the knee ninety degrees and also put his weight on it. And the sooner the better. The last place he ever envisioned himself, he said, was in a nursing home.
Faye told Manley how, at his second therapy session, Mr. Flowers asked her to move the exercise table against a wall so he could prop his feet high up, with his knees slightly bent, and then inch the foot of his bad leg down bit by bit. He’d learned about the use of gravity from moving furniture, he told her. She can’t believe she’d never thought of that foot-down-the-wall trick—what a great idea. In fact, she plans to write up the technique for JPT: The Journal of Physical Therapy.
L. Ray’s niece, Gladys Jenkins, whom Faye met in the hallway at Rosehaven, said to Faye on the day L. Ray was admitted, “All that stuff he did in the Midwest, all his nervousness and heart attacks and talking out of his head and stuff, is just the start of a slow brain rot that’s being caused by him near about getting eat by sharks. Me and my husband, Gerald, we’ve just moved to Topsail Island, and I can’t be bothered with him anymore at this late d
ate in my own pretty dern frustrating life with my children and all. I’ve got enough to look after.”
“Okay,” says Faye, “if you’ll roll over on your back, Mr. Flowers, we can finish our routine.”
“You can call me L. Ray, Faye. All day.”
Faye laughs. “Better not. Rosehaven policy. There. Now, let’s get you positioned. Okay, that’s good. Now, I’ve got to get over to Mrs. Osborne. I’ll be right back. You know what to do.
“Okay, Mrs. Osborne, let’s see if we can’t lift this arm a bit here. Now, here we—”
“I got more problems than China’s got china,” says Mrs. Osborne. She lies on her back on a therapy table, looking—unhappy and worried—up into Faye’s eyes.
“Well, we’re going to work on some of them right now.”
“Sometimes I wonder about people that don’t have no problems. What do they do with their time? I wish I could come in here one day and say, ‘I ain’t got no problems,’ just to see how it is.”
“That’s right,” says Faye. “What would we do then?”
L. Ray listens. That’ll make a good song title, he thinks: “Ain’t Got No Problems.”
OUTSIDE, CARL SITS in a porch rocker beside Aunt Lil while she smokes a cigarette. He scans the wide lawn, checks his watch. He needs to have that talk about her driving. He wonders if this is the time. Roman, the Rosehaven outdoor maintenance man, trims hedges at the front porch rail. Roman speaks only if spoken to. Carl has never seen him without sunglasses, outside or in. Mrs. Flora Talbert sits in her wheelchair by the door as if poured into a mold—a statue with moving eyes only. She has a large head, close-cropped white hair, and wears a pink housecoat. She also has a blue one and a yellow one. And a brown one that she doesn’t like, because it’s brown. She wears that one on gray, cloudy days.
Mrs. Talbert loves to look at shoes from her station by the door. Shoes tell a lot about the wearer. Some men’s shoes have little tassels. Anybody wearing shoes with tassels likely has loose morals. And some of the shoes on women that sashay by show way too much skin—so much skin that they aren’t even shoes, just straps. Mrs. Talbert is proud that all the shoes she ever bought for anybody in her family were good shoes, wholesome and solid. For men, a shoe without shoestrings is like a boat without a bottom.
BY THE OTHER SIDE of the door, backed against the wall in her wheelchair, sits Darla Avery. Darla is fifty-eight and knows she looks older. Much older. She is thin now but was overweight as a young woman. She has diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, and an immune-deficiency disorder that’s so hard to pronounce, she doesn’t try anymore.
And get this: a few days ago, she recognized L. Ray Flowers. He has not recognized her. Thank God.
It—the thing—happened in 1956, and that’s all it was, what he did. She ain’t over it and never will be. He looks a lot like he did back then, except for his white hair. He’s now about, what, sixty-one or -two?
It was the eighth-grade end-of-the-year dance. L. Ray was in the shop class, and shop met with Mrs. Waltrip down in the littler cinder-block building where they had electric saws and everything. In assemblies and parties and trips and all that, shop—back before it was called special ed—was considered eighth grade. When eighth grade went on a field trip, shop went along.
Darla had been a friendly, overweight eighth-grader, not the depressed, withdrawn type. She was like Miss Piggy, in a way—sort of like a Miss Piggy cheerleader jumping in the air, tossing flowers out behind her. She was that kind of person, always very happy, with lots of girlfriends, always talking, always giggling about the boys, and always full of curiosity about who liked who and who was going steady.
And for the entire eighth grade, L. Ray kind of liked her. She could tell, but at the same time she wouldn’t admit it to anybody, because L. Ray was in shop.
She made good grades too, and teachers liked her. She was not bad-looking at all. She never had the first pimple, if you can believe that.
Oh, my God, there he comes in his wheelchair. Big as day.
L. Ray Flowers rolls across the porch, leg outstretched. Glances her way and nods. He doesn’t recognize her. But who would?
Carl, sitting beside Aunt Lil, is deciding how to bring up her driving situation when up rolls the preacher, Mr. Flowers.
“Lord have mercy, Carl. Hello, Miss Lil,” says Mr. Flowers. “I think I’ve stumbled onto a country song: ‘Ain’t Got No Problems.’”
“Carl has got a roomful of country song albums,” says Aunt Lil. “He saw that movie . . . what is it, Carl?”
“O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
“Yes. How many times did you see that?”
“Four, so far.”
“I heard about that movie.” L. Ray turns his wheelchair a bit toward Carl. “Ralph Stanley’s in that one, idn’t he?”
Carl looks at Mr. Flowers. “He sure is.”
“So you’ve got a few Dr. Stanley albums?”
“Yessir, I do.”
“Do you have the one with the cross on the hill that has lightbulbs stuck in it all the way around?”
“I do.” Carl notices Mr. Flowers gently touching his stiff helmet of hair with his fingertips.
“That’s a good album,” says Mr. Flowers. “I’ve done a little gospel music in my time. Out in the Midwest, I was preaching all over and couldn’t get consistent music help, so I started a little group and we did right well. You play music?”
“Oh, no.”
“You took those lessons,” says Aunt Lil.
“That was a long time ago.” Carl remembers his song-writing notebook full of half-written lyrics, only two or three complete songs—which all sounded alike when he tried to put them to music.
“Aha, here comes some more of my little congregation,” says Mr. Flowers.
Along the sidewalk, from around the side of the building, comes—very slowly—two residents, Mrs. Maudie Lowe and Mrs. Beatrice Satterwhite, and an aide, Carrie Dillinger.
Suddenly the idea for that song, “Ain’t Got No Problems,” blooms full in Carl’s head. Pop—there it is. A guy has a bunch of bad luck, gets thrown in jail or something, then gets out, and everything goes just the way it should. He suddenly has no problems. Things are going so well that when he tries to . . . when he tries to write a country song, he can’t. There’s nothing to write a song about.
Mr. Flowers says—bellows—“Welcome to the porch, ladies.”
The aide looks like she’s ready for a break.
Carl checks Mrs. Lowe’s name tag. They are all required to wear them. He hasn’t quite learned these ladies’ names. Mrs. Lowe—Maudie—the very small woman. Her three-pod cane seems too tall, even though it’s adjusted to the shortest height. He pictures her sitting down in a rocker, imagines her feet not touching the floor.
He thinks about his song again. The guy in the song finds a job, his girlfriend hasn’t left him, his truck is not broke down, his lost dog is found. He’ll start writing it after supper.
Beatrice Satterwhite, the large woman, big auburn hair with a gray streak, wearing a nice dress and a gold Victorian mourning pin, pushes her three-wheeled walker onto the stepless porch. The walker has handlebars and hand brakes—a Cadillac among Chevrolets, thinks Carl. He wonders if he should say that to Mr. Flowers. In the center of her walker is a sturdy, turndown leather seat. Carl has seen her roll it from inside the building straight to the porch rail, take a little U-turn, and instead of sitting in a rocking chair, fold down the walker seat, lock the wheels, turn around, and sit facing the lawn.
Unless he takes Aunt Lil inside, Carl figures he can forget about their little driving talk. He needs to be getting back to work anyway.
“It just stays very wide open,” says Mrs. Lowe, “and very still, no matter what she’s doing with her other eye. I guess it stays open when she sleeps at night.” They have to be talking about the resident with the glass eye, a good buddy of Aunt Lil’s, though Carl can’t remember her name. . . . Cochran, that’s it, Mrs. Cochran.
“Well, Beatrice,” says Mrs. Lowe, the little one, “you say that word for ‘woman of the night’ every once in a while.”
“What word?”
“I’m not going to say it. When you talk about Walter Cronkite.”
“That’s not a curse word. That’s just what they are.”
“I think it is.”
Mrs. Satterwhite begins to rock slowly, making little grunting noises. Carl wants to say something to either his aunt or Mr. Flowers, but he also wants to listen in case the other two start talking again.
“Did you say it stays open at night?” asks Mrs. Satterwhite.
“What?”
“Clara’s eye—does it stay open at night, do you reckon?”
“I’m sure it does.”
“No, she’ll take it out at night.”
“Not if she doesn’t want to.”
“I’ve seen them that look more real. They move and everything.”
“It’s like they put hers in but they didn’t connect it to any nerves that can turn it.”
“I don’t think they connect it to the nerves, do they?”
“Well, they connect it to something, else it can’t move around in there right along with the other one.”
Aunt Lil is talking to Mr. Flowers about a squirrel almost getting run over in the driveway.
“Maybe they connect it to muscles,” says Mrs. Satter-white. “Nerves wouldn’t be able to move it, would they?”
Lunch at the Piccadilly Page 2
