Astrid was nearly my age, and her vision was still crystal-clear, her hand steady. She could identify someone by the slant of a letter in a signature, could find fraud in the lazy smear of an erasure in a ledger book. In 1966, she’d once cracked a case in six seconds just by scratching her thumbnail against a dot of Wite-Out, revealing a telltale decimal point. But her confidence, a key element of discovery, had weakened. Crimes now were solved by computer experts tracing digital paths or summoning up echoes of old conversations—deleted chat logs and e-mails in the recesses of a computer’s memory. Communication had become a bowl of alphabet soup, with the illiterate shorthand of text messages and the millions of fonts at everyone’s fingertips. Where in all of that was the mark of the primitive individual?
What can you tell us? we asked, holding forth the plank of wood.
“Inconclusive,” Astrid said. She said the scribbles could be those of a young girl. Or not. She said they could be Daisy’s effort to simulate a child’s writing. Or not. “It could be something,” she said, “or it could be nothing.”
But the images of the plank, the words and half sentences, ran in newspapers and on websites around the world, resulting in new lines of scrutiny—the words became pieces of puzzles and sources of theories. One man, after deciphering the words and applying numbers based on the letters’ places in the alphabet, devised a code that revealed Lenore’s approximate whereabouts (a blue rowboat in a Southern river at a crumbling dock in a weedy delta), while another man interpreted the language as poetic prophesy predicting Lenore’s own abduction. And a handwriting analyst—a practitioner of the mumbo-jumbo Astrid ridiculed—gauged Lenore’s personality by studying the direction of her cursive. Lenore was impulsive yet cautious; tough yet delicate.
All the new speculation, and the reporters’ pursuit of Daisy to speculate on that speculation, sent Daisy into a new period of solitude. One day, on what became known as Blue Sunday among the Lenorians, Daisy threw them all from her home. She grabbed them by their arms and shoved them toward the door. She yanked at their collars and slapped at their backs. The Lenorians, particularly the young ones, the runaways driven to the Crippled Eighty to escape addiction and cruelty, had no idea where to go.
Part
SIX
· 30 ·
On Thanksgiving morning, Tiff appeared to levitate above a makeshift stage in the dining hall of the nursing home. She wore silver slippers, pajama bottoms patterned with pink elephants, and a fake-fur shrug over an old T-shirt. Yellow feathers were clipped in her hair. She lay back on a thin board above two trick folding chairs.
Doc and Tiff had performed magic at the Willow House every Thanksgiving morning for the last four years—their showstopper was a dollar bill bursting into flame to light Tiff’s exploding cigar. Usually I stayed home to cook, but this year Ivy had insisted on hosting Thanksgiving in her home. She’d spent the week sprinkling glitter on pinecones for decoration and experimenting with mincemeat-pie recipes culled from old cookbooks.
So Tiff had dragged me to the Willow House, where I refused to remove my coat. I kept my purse in my lap. Not only were these people close to my age, some slightly older, some slightly younger, but I’d known many of them for years. Some had been prominent members of the community—there was a park in our town named after one of the men, and one of the women had owned a café on one corner of the town square for fifty years. I’d written the obituaries of some of them already and filed them in a folder marked Impending Doom.
It’s not what you’re thinking. I’m actually opposed to what I call the itchy-trigger-finger method of obit writing—before a celebrity has even choked out his famous last words, the writers of the world thrill to be the first to bear bad news, so they keep obits of the notable written and at the ready. But, in all modesty, I’ve written obits of the local elderly only because they’ve asked me to. I’ve been in the business for so long, since my girlhood, that I’ve created portraits of these people’s grandparents, their parents, even some of their children. I’m as much a part of the traditions of death as a gilded lily.
Doc ran a large silver hoop over Tiff to demonstrate that there were no hidden wires. People kindly applauded, but no one seemed amazed. Doc released Tiff from her hovering, lowering her to the chairs. She extracted herself from the illusion, stepped to the front of the stage, and curtsied. “Thank you, thank you, ladies and gents,” Doc said, pulling a bouquet of ugly flowers from his top hat.
“Essie?” said someone to my left. There stood an old, old woman, still quite lovely, with thick gray hair and wet blue eyes. She wore a silky white gown, and she put her hand on my shoulder. Was she the angel of my own impending doom? To die while visiting a nursing home, how perfect, I thought, but there were any number of perfect deaths for a writer of obituaries. Any end would be fitting. To simply slip away some night in my sleep would seem almost ironic.
“Bernice,” she said, reminding me. Of course. My dear Bernice, who had, since our youth, always been the prettier of the two of us. Her life had been a dream, every minute of it unmarked by tragedy, so, naturally, we’d drifted apart years before. With my own life having been so slipshod, I must’ve been a nagging reminder that, in a heartbeat, everything good could be lost.
I took Bernice’s hand, just for a friendly squeeze, but she held on to mine, so we stayed that way, holding hands, as we spoke. “I thought you’d moved in with your kids,” I said.
“I did,” she said, “but I just kept falling, falling, falling. Breaking things, breaking myself. I’m just skin and bones anymore. And not good skin and not good bones.”
It did feel as if, even with my weakling’s grip, I could shatter the bones in her hand with little effort, and maybe that was what made me feel so overcome with affection for her just then. I wanted to take her home with me, where we could live our last days as eccentric relics, doddering and afflicted, our once-a-week curl-and-sets falling apart lock by lock together. We could endlessly reminisce, live in the past to an unhealthy degree, then politely kill each other some winter night before bedtime, stirring poison into our cups of whiskey-spiked chamomile tea, wearing party hats. Then, nervous about our double homicide, we could lie in bed together, holding hands again, frightened and waiting, still wondering, after all these years, if we even believed in our own souls.
Bernice pulled her hand away. “Well, you take care, Essie,” she said with what I interpreted as a privileged tone of dismissal, and just like that, my fantasy of our last-ditch life together dissolved. Bernice shuffled off, content with how things had gone for her. She had no need for a pact of any kind.
And neither did I, damn it. I would not be one of those people, weepy and spiteful, who they had to drag, kicking and screaming, to her hole in the ground. It was someone else’s turn to have a long life of writing obituaries. I did indeed, I was certain, have it in me to bow out gracefully. I vowed right then to retire, to leave them all wanting more. I’d write my last obituary—for Bernice—and I’d tuck it into my file of impending doom.
· 31 ·
At Ivy’s, Doc and Tiff set the table for the Thanksgiving dinner they dreaded—Ivy had prepared a menu based on a mid-nineteenth-century cookbook, and from the gamy smell of things, they didn’t know what to expect. Skinned porcupine? Doc had whispered to Tiff. Pickled oysters? Tiff had whispered back.
Doc stood at Ivy’s china cabinet, running his finger along the rim of a wineglass. “All these wineglasses have chips in them,” he said. Ivy had bought the glasses, and the cabinet, and the whole dining room set, just days before at a garage sale. A week ago the dining room had had nothing in it but a folding chair and a card table with Tiff’s sewing machine. Now there was a long table that seated eight, eight creaky, scuffed-up chairs, the cabinet full of someone else’s best china, and a reproduction of a painting, in a gold-painted frame, of an old man praying over a loaf of bread.
“Those glasses are chipped?” Ivy said. She wiped her hands on her apron as she walked in
from the kitchen. “I thought I had checked them over good.”
“I’ll just call Granny and have her bring some of hers over,” Doc said.
“Granny’s already here,” I said, stepping in, still in my fur coat, my purse on my arm, leaning on the umbrella I often used as a cane. “But I’m on my way out already. I’m not staying.”
Too dramatic, I confess, but I also confess that it felt satisfying to silence the room. I’d been dramatic before, certainly, sending everyone scurrying for remedies. A banal palpitation you’ve known since youth can seem, in old age, morbidly foreshadowing. I’ve had a very occasional nervous twitching in my eyelid, for example, since grade school, which first reared up during a math test—now I can manage to convince myself that that slight flutter has never been harmless at all, but rather a sign that I’m about to go blind.
“I want to visit my sister,” I said. “Her nursing home is about an hour’s drive each way, and I don’t want to be driving in the dark, and it gets dark so early.”
“She won’t know you, Essie,” Tiff said, tilting her head with concern.
“Sometimes she knows me,” I said. “No one else is going to visit her today.”
“We should never have taken you to the Willow House,” Doc said. “It’s made you morose.”
“We’ll drive you,” Tiff said.
“No, absolutely not,” I said. “Your mother’s been cooking.”
“I’ve been cooking for three days,” Ivy said, pressing her thumb against the chip in the wineglass. Her dinner was derived from the Thanksgiving depicted in The Plumes and the Feathers, one of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch’s first novels—some bit of hard-biscuit prose about the mail-order German bride of a crotchety homesteader and the serenity she finds in her dying turnip patch—originally published in serial form in an early-twentieth-century women’s magazine.
Ivy’s interest in Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had risen from a harmless, useless literature course she’d once taken at the university, for self-improvement. She had regularly left Tiff with Doc to drive the three hours to campus on Tuesday nights, but by midterm, she hadn’t been coming home until Thursdays; by November, she hadn’t been coming home at all. By finals week, she’d booked her flight to Paris, where she would serve for the spring semester as a research assistant for her lit professor, a noted Myrtle Kingsley Fitch scholar. Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had left Nebraska for Paris in the 1920s, and she’d lived there, with a lesbian chef, until she’d died. In Paris were original documents in private collections and college libraries—handwritten love letters to and fro, royalty statements, notes penciled into the margins of books, an incomplete, unpublished erotic novel written under the nom de plume Mme. Marie Moth-Scryff. When the professor’s sabbatical had expired that August, he’d returned to Nebraska and his faculty wife, and Ivy had stayed in Paris to write him long, poetic letters promising an ugly suicide while she’d clerked in a boutique on the Champs-Élysées, selling perfumey French-milled soap to tourists. For years, Ivy had written those urgent suicide notes.
I’ve been cooking for three days, she had the nerve to tell me when I told her I was going to visit my lonely, dying, twisted sister on Thanksgiving. Three days is absolutely nothing, I wanted to answer. Then I wanted to say, No, it’s worse than nothing. It’s something, then it’s gone in a blink.
But instead I said, “I promise to be back before everything’s completely ruined.” I turned and left before Doc even thought to offer me his car to drive.
I would return in one piece, but only just barely, just after dark. But before that, while I sat shaken on the roadside in my pickup, my heart pumping at a troubling beat, petting the fur of my coat for ease, my family waited for me. They all sat at the ornate table, complete with tarnished silver napkin rings, not eating a bite as Ivy’s complicated sauces clotted in their pans in the kitchen and the wind outside picked up. The wind chimes rattled like they were being rolled down a hill. Doc and Ivy drank from the wineglasses, careful to avoid the chips in the rims.
“Fold your hands together,” Tiff said, her sketchbook in her lap.
“You’re drawing me?” Doc said.
“No, I’m doing a self-portrait,” she said. “But I need to see how the fingers go.”
So Doc posed without another word, slouching like Tiff slouched. He was always telling her to sit up straight.
· 32 ·
My sister always used to fall asleep in the car. One time, when we were young women, and neither of our boyfriends had cars, I’d driven us all toward a far-off lake. Lydia had slept in the backseat in her swimsuit, a beach towel across her knees, and she’d wakened just long enough to say, “The last time I drove, remember, Essie? I fell asleep at the wheel. I woke up and thought we were driving through a forest of spindly trees, but it was a cornfield, and we survived.” That was all she’d said before dozing off again.
“Do you remember that, Lydia?” I asked her as I sat next to her in the TV room of the nursing home. Like the Willow House, the building was noisy with the squawking of television after television in room after room. I often felt that my house was too quiet, even with music on, but if I lived in a place like this, I would scream for complete silence. I’d beg for the quiet of the grave.
Lydia took a deep breath and rocked in her wheelchair. “I’ll tell you a little about what I know, then I’ll tell you a little about what I don’t know,” she said, but then she didn’t say anything else.
“It’s a holiday, Lydie,” I said. “I bet that’s something that you know. Your Thanksgiving dinners, you remember those, I know you do, you can’t not remember those. You were the best cook anywhere in the world. I never could’ve predicted how much I’d miss your cooking. It’s heartbreaking how much I miss it. Your fried chicken! How’d you get it that way?” I playfully, lightly slapped her wrist.
“Follow the recipe,” she said.
“I’ve tried, Lydie,” I said.
“No, you’re afraid to use enough shortening,” she said.
“Ivy made something terrible today, I just know it,” I said. “The house smelled like fish. I wanted to blow my brains out. Is this the way it’s going to be? From now on? If I have any Thanksgivings left?”
“Ivy is your sister?”
“No, Lydie, you’re my sister.”
“My sister died,” she said, dismissive, returning her gaze to an episode of an old cop show, everyone in bell-bottoms.
“I know you don’t mean that,” I said. I tugged at a loose thread in the seam of the sleeve of her housecoat. I twisted it around my finger and pulled at it more. “Your hair looks pretty,” I said. “You must’ve got it done.”
“I’d love to have her fried chicken again,” she said, sighing. She helped me tug the thread from the seam. “Wouldn’t you? But my sister died, and she made it the best. It was something terrible, though. Smelled like fish. She used too much shortening.”
A man who I could’ve sworn was the late Edward Mack, an area farmer, shuffled by in flannel pajamas, a bandage wrapped tight around his head. Not only had he died, I was certain, but I’d written his obituary. He’d perished rather memorably, ignobly, a few months before, in a freak accident involving an augur and a loose shoelace. Had I somehow jumped to conclusions? Maybe I was the senile one. Maybe I lived here, always in my fur coat, my purse always on my arm, poised for home.
“You’re getting everything confused,” I said. “You were the cook. You weren’t just good, you were a genius. You could’ve cooked for kings, Lydia.”
“It’s so very, very slight, but you really notice it,” she said. “Golden delicious. The apples in your stuffing. It makes all the difference. Anything other than golden delicious in there, and you end up with something you don’t want.” She put her hand on my wrist. “I’d fix you something before you go, but I always fall asleep in the kitchen.”
“No,” I said, “you always fall asleep in the car, not in the kitchen.”
“Well,” she said, sighing again, retur
ning her gaze to the TV. “I guess you’d be the only one who’d know.”
It was getting dark even earlier than I’d expected it to. “I need to get home, love,” I said. “I promised the kids.”
“The kids,” she said, sneering. “When you’re a kid, they tell you, Better enjoy it now.”
“And we did, Lydia,” I said. “We really did. We had a hell of a time.” I stood, kissed her cheek, and wished her a good night.
On the way home, driving slowly on the interstate, I thought it such a shame that our culture had not devised a way to defang old age. A sophisticated civilization wouldn’t ridicule senility, it would elevate it, worship it, wouldn’t it? We would train ourselves to see poetry in the nonsense of dementia, to actually look forward to becoming so untethered from the world. We’d make a ceremony of casting off our material goods and confining ourselves to a single room, leaving all our old, abandoned space to someone new, someone young, so that we could die alone, indifferent to our own decay and lost beauty.
In my midnight letter to Muscatine, I would write, If I told you I was driven off the road by a truck just then, as I was distracted by my thoughts of nearing death, would you even believe me, especially considering the tidily ironic conversation I’d just had with my sister about her sleeping in cars? Would you believe, no less, that my typewriter, my tool in chiming the death knell, sat next to me on the seat of my pickup? I’d retrieved the typewriter just the day before from the jeweler on the town square who always repaired it for me—its carriage return had gone glitchy—and I’d not yet returned it to my desk. There’d been no recent deaths in the county to report. As my pickup left the pavement and bounced across the hard dirt, the typewriter’s keys clacked frantically, and its bell rang, as if speeding to meet a deadline.
The Coffins of Little Hope Page 9
