Rock of Ages

by Howard Owen

  CHAPTER TWO

  October 18

  Even before Georgia took her sabbatical, before she packed what she could in a hurry and drove south, the monkey was on her.

  She used to be a world-class sleeper.

  If thunder or snoring awakened her in the middle of the night, no matter. Five minutes later, she would be out again, sometimes stepping back into the same dream as if picking up a novel she had just put down. It was a pleasure to look at the bedside clock and see that she had two more hours, or even just one, before the alarm rang.

  “If they ever make sleeping an Olympic sport,” Phil would say, “Georgia’s got the gold wrapped up.”

  Recently, though, a strange noise or a full bladder has meant she might as well get up and write a letter or grade some papers. Even on nights when she felt she never wanted to rise again, she could not get back to sleep.

  In her father’s time, the monkey would “get” tobacco croppers on a hot and muggy Carolina day. The phrase stuck with Georgia and has evolved perfectly into the beast that sits on her runaway heart and whispers all the worries of the world into her nocturnal ear.

  She writes some of it off to the onset of menopause, some to the losses and worries that seem harder to shake every year.

  Something like Jenny’s death just makes the monkey weigh a little more and jabber a little more insistently.

  She looks over at the bedside clock. She’s been awake for at least an hour, and it’s only 4:30. The little gadget that approximates the sound of rain on the roof roars away, but it only makes her want to get up and go to the bathroom.

  Why am I here? Why did I come at all? I could be worthless as shit up in Montclair, without the bother of packing and moving.

  When it came to her late father’s house, Georgia never really had a plan.

  It was built in the 1890s. Its kitchen and bathrooms were last modernized 30 years ago.

  It is a fine example of a North Carolina farm dwelling belonging to a family that was able to replace what needed replacing and careful or lucky enough not to burn it down. Vinyl siding covers the old pine boards, and the red tin roof is only 12 years old. The windows are modern and double-paned; Georgia had them replaced only seven years ago, after consecutive tenants had complained about water leaking in and warm air leaking out. There is central air conditioning and gas heat.

  It has two stories, five usable bedrooms, a living room, dining room and kitchen, plus two baths. The back porch is screened; the front is not. It sits on as good a hill as East Geddie has to offer.

  Georgia started renting it to strangers because Kenny Locklear said he knew someone who wanted to move out to the country and would pay a relatively good price. She always balked at selling, even if it was the last place on Earth that she would ever want to live.

  But the renters started staying for shorter and shorter periods, opting for a mobile home or an apartment in town, and the gaps between them seemed to widen.

  Twice, despite Kenny’s best efforts, thieves broke in while the house was unoccupied.

  The first time, they got some of the old furniture stored in one of the downstairs bedrooms, things Georgia didn’t want to sell or move, and the dining room chandelier.

  The second time, they took copper pipe from underneath the house and an old bureau that had been in the family at least since her father was a boy. They also stole, apparently for meanness, old annuals and other books that had been in the plunder room for decades. That time, just three months ago, the intruders evidently had been so put out by the lack of theft possibilities that one of them had defecated in the middle of the living room floor.

  “I’m sorry,” Kenny had told her when he called her that time. “If I could catch the bastards, I’d shoot ’em.”

  That was in August. Georgia saw it as a sign. She had told Justin, who was as much at liberty as she was, that she planned to sell the farm, or as much of it as they still owned. He surprised her by offering to go down and get it ready to show. He had become quite handy in the Peace Corps, and there were many things that needed attention.

  And Leeza, already five months pregnant then, seemed eager to go with him. Perhaps they welcomed the chance to be somewhere by themselves, Georgia thought, under some roof that could at least temporarily be theirs alone.

  The open house came and went with no serious interest, and the farm has been on the market for a month and a half now. Justin has repaired doors and windows, painted the inside and had the siding power-washed. He has kept the grass mowed and the bushes trimmed. He has overseen the repairs to the plumbing and has even put a fresh coat of paint on the carhouse—a fool’s errand, Georgia thinks, the way old wood drinks paint, but it will look good for long enough, until some other fool buys the house, the outbuildings, and the few dozen acres around it.

  She hadn’t meant to come herself, other than for a necessary weekend or two. But, as she told Cathy Rayner while she packed up the smallest U-Haul trailer she could rent from the Amoco station two blocks away from her brick rancher, you never know.

  “Never know what?” Cathy said. She had been trying for days to talk Georgia out of doing “anything rash.” She had warned her of decisions made in grief and haste.

  “Anything,” Georgia had told her. “You never know anything.”

  The SUV to which the trailer was hitched was a high-riding monster whose driver and passengers were so far off the ground that it made Georgia feel mildly dizzy sometimes. She had never liked it and should have sold it already, but it was Phil’s when she first met him. He had loved it, even if the roughest obstacle it had to muscle over was the speed bump in the grocery-store parking lot.

  Georgia backed out onto the cul-de-sac, waved once to Cathy, who was shaking her head as she waved back, and she was gone.

  What the hell, she wondered before she came to the first stop sign, am I doing?

  The first Thursday in October, she had awakened at 5:15 from a dream so real that it would rub against her all day. She tried to go back to sleep, but after half an hour, she knew it was hopeless.

  She had gone back to sleeping in the king-size bed they had shared, and now she thrashed around on it, lost in alien territory, sometimes opening her eyes to find she had drifted 90 degrees or more from where she began the night before.

  The dream was about Phil and her. She was trying to save him, somehow, jumping from the telephone to his prone body to the phone again. He was saying something, but she couldn’t remember the words later. Finally, she was running, trying to scream for help. But her legs were like lead and her mouth was silent, and she woke up tired and hopelessly tangled up in the bottom sheet, crying and saying, over and over, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  The dream would stay there on the periphery of her consciousness all day, a ghost always just out of reach.

  After she gave up on sleep, she showered and dressed, then made herself some coffee, ate her cereal, and took her vitamins. She was supposed to be working on a book (the official reason for her break from teaching), something on the early, uncollected short stories of J.D. Salinger. By 8 o’clock, though, she knew she could not face a day at the keyboard.

  She lay on the living room couch, switching channels 20 times, picking up and putting down three magazines and two books, dozing off twice, and taking a desultory lunch of uncooked wieners and half a large bag of corn chips with chive dip.

  She still kept a little marijuana around, a habit as dated as psychedelic album covers and bell-bottoms, she knew, but it made her feel good from time to time. She rolled a sloppy, out-of-practice joint and smoked it all. After that, she spent the rest of the afternoon watching one live-audience television show after another. She ate a dozen of the small chocolate candies that she had bought in anticipation of Halloween.

  When she started to come down, just in time for the 5:30 news, she got the blues. She put on a George Winston CD that reminded her of Phil and cold weather, and she burrowed farther into the couch. She felt she cou
ld not have moved if the house had been on fire.

  By 8:00, she had managed to rouse herself enough to entertain the thought of doing at least one positive thing before the day was lost forever. So she went to the bedroom and started looking for her exercise clothes, thinking about the Stairmaster down at the YMCA, or maybe a swim.

  But by the time she had packed her gym bag, it was 8:30, and she couldn’t remember whether the Y closed at 9 o’clock or 10, and she was feeling a little light-headed, so she said to herself, screw it.

  But then, half-dressed, she thought of something she had done years ago, during her first marriage. One Halloween, she had surprised Jeff Bowman by slipping out of her clothes and into a raincoat, then going out the back door and around the house to ring the front doorbell. When he had answered, she flung open the raincoat and said “Trick or treat, mister.” They made love three times that night.

  Maybe it was the memory, or maybe it was just a wild hair. Georgia took off the gym shorts, panties, tee-shirt, and sports bra and walked over to the window. She peeked out through the closed blinds. It was dark, and Georgia was known, among her friends, to get a wild hair now and then.

  She put her running shoes back on, no socks, and picked up the house key off the dining room table, just in case she locked herself out. Just one lap around the house, she told herself, for old times’ sake. To prove I’m still alive.

  She went out the back door and almost turned around, but she’d had enough false starts. She ran across the yard, wearing only the shoes, then turned and sprinted through the area between her home and the Wyndhams’ next door, ducking under a dogwood limb, dodging the rose bushes, the cool early fall breeze tickling her bare skin, her heart thumping. She could hear a television and the drone of porch voices. She made the turn into the front yard.

  She didn’t even think about the motion detector until it came on. She froze like a deer in some car’s headlights for an instant, and then she heard the voices stop.

  The light, bright as the sun, stayed on, and would not go out. She had just recovered enough to start running again, with her hand shielding her eyes, when she heard Sally Wyndham call across the side yard, timidly, “Georgia? Are you all right?” Bob had to be out there, too, sitting and rocking on their front porch, a country quirk in a neighborhood where everyone else retreated to the back.

  “Fine,” she called over her shoulder as she sprinted away from them. “I’m fine. Really.” She reached the darkness on the far side of the house and finally, mercifully, the door from which she left. So much, she thought to herself, for spontaneity. There was a time when she would have evoked a little excitement among the neighborhood husbands if she had been caught naked in her front yard, a naughty scamp who might do anything, who wasn’t afraid of anything. Who, though, wanted to see a 51-year-old English professor’s tits and ass? She could imagine the whispering, the head-shaking, the pity. Poor Georgia. She ought to get some help.

  She didn’t think her body was that bad, although she could hardly bear to look at what gravity and age had done to it when she was safely inside again, and she didn’t really think she was having a breakdown, no matter what anybody said. But people would think she was a pathetic, addled, menopausal hag, and that threw her.

  She sat up late, listening to some old rock ‘n’ roll now, dipping into the bourbon, not answering the phone. She was still there at half past midnight when she finally figured that she had to go, that she could not let every bit of the past leave her without some kind of illogical, nostalgic gesture.

  Do something, as Phil would have said, even if it’s wrong.

  Part of it, she thought later, was the realization that nothing, not one damn thing really, kept her in Montclair except ennui and fear. She had a little money, she was relatively fit (though not young enough, she conceded, to live on raw hot dogs, corn chips, chive dip, marijuana, bourbon, and Almond Joys, certainly not young enough to be caught buck naked in her yard). She could travel to Nepal, or join the Peace Corps like Justin, or take off and see America, the whole country, and take months. Hell, she could live in the back of Phil’s suburban assault vehicle.

  She could do all of that. Maybe East Geddie would be a start at least.

  She did worry a little about herself. Justin, before he left, could not get her out of the house except for a handful of safe, familiar places, all in Montclair itself.

  Today, a trip around the house buck naked, she thought. Tomorrow, a drive down to North Carolina. The next day, who knows? Before losing Phil, she had long enjoyed describing herself as counterphobic. She had always tried to attack, to embrace that which scared her.

  That night, she thought that maybe what scared her was the world itself.

  It took her two days to get everything more or less in order, and on the third day she left. Cathy Rayner was still waving, a little sadly she thought, as she turned a corner.

  Now, eight days later, Georgia lies defeated on her marshmallow mattress.

  She is thinking about Jenny, about Justin and Leeza, about how anyone could possibly want to buy this old house, about yard sales and the strange noise the gas heater is making and Forsythia Crumpler and then back to Jenny.

  She finally gets up in the dark and turns off the artificial rainfall. She sits in a chair and reads by the bedside lamp for another hour, listening to the old house’s arthritic creaking, then rises to shower and make her breakfast.

  She is in the refurbished kitchen, which will always be too small, but at least it has bright counter tops and late 20th-century appliances, even a dishwasher. By the time Justin comes in, she has made some coffee and is slicing a grocery-store bagel.

  He mumbles a good morning and leans against the counter. He is a handsome boy, except Georgia has to stop thinking of him as a boy. He’s 27 years old, and has lived in what she thinks of as the wild for two years. But with his hair uncombed and the sleep still on him, he might be the fifth-grader she always had to call at least twice before he would rise for school. He has her eyes, bright and full of life, her cheekbones, and her tan, aided by the Guatemalan sun. His hair, unfashionably long, flips up at its ends the way hers does.

  “Still can’t sleep?” he asks her.

  “Not always. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I can nap.”

  “What that old lady said …” he begins.

  Georgia pours her son a cup of coffee. “She was right. Hell, I should have done more. I should have nagged you to go see her. I just didn’t know how bad off she was.”

  She looks out the kitchen window. It’s barely dawn now, and individual trees cast long shadows in the golden light. It’s as lovely as East Geddie gets. A rabbit hops—safe for now from Kenny’s beagles—across the back yard. It disappears in the tall grass behind the old shed where clothes once were washed with lye soap.

  “What was she like?” Justin asks. “I don’t really remember her very well.”

  “Cousin Jenny? Well, she was quiet, kind of country-seeming, I guess. Her husband Harold was kind of a mean redneck, although I don’t think he ever hit her or anything. I just remember him using the N-word a lot and being kind of a bully.”

  Actually, Georgia admits to herself, she never really cared that much for Jenny, despite (or maybe because of) all that Jenny did for her over the years. She was her first cousin, but she was 27 years older, more like an aunt. She sent Georgia birthday money, no more than five dollars ever, until she was well into her 20s, and Georgia would feel obligated to write her a thank-you note.

  Once, Jenny asked her to please not mention the birthday money to Harold, who was known to be close with a dollar.

  What it came down to, Georgia knows, is that Jenny reminded her of everything she always wanted to leave behind. Jenny had looked after her mother after her father died, forcing the tight-fisted Harold to build a room for her on the back of their house, connected by a walkway. When Century died, Jenny was at her bedside not driving away from East Geddie as fast as she could, damn glad to b
e out of there.

  On Georgia’s visits to East Geddie before her own father’s death, old neighbors and friends would come by to visit, or—on rarer occasions—Georgia would visit them. Jenny was one of their few common points of reference.

  That Jenny McLaurin, everyone agreed, was a good woman.

  Georgia would nod her head, knowing that the very things that made Jenny good made her bad. Jenny stayed. Georgia left. Jenny looked after her parents. Georgia deserted hers to move up north (Virginia being for all intents and purposes Yankee country from the East Geddie perspective). Jenny endured with a quiet smile, never saying more than was absolutely necessary. Georgia found, especially on visits back home, that she couldn’t shut up, that she always somehow hoped she could give old acquaintances enough amazing detail about her life to make them understand why she didn’t stay.

  Nobody ever asked her why she couldn’t be like Jenny. They didn’t have to.

  Jenny, she wanted to tell them, didn’t have a chance to do what I did. If she’d had the chance, she might have done the same things, might have loved it, like I did, might’ve never wanted to come back and spend the rest of her life among bedpans and Wednesday night prayer meetings and neighbors who know every time you go out for groceries.

  Now, watching the rabbit reappear and continue its rounds, stopping dead still suddenly at the sound of some perceived, faraway danger, Georgia shakes her head.

  “You know, Justin, you have to live with some guilt sometimes, or it will drive you nuts. You can’t do everything. You can’t sacrifice your life for other people’s happiness all the time, or it’ll just make you crazy.”

  Justin laughs, and she turns sharply toward him.

  “What?”

  “Well,” he says, “that sounds like what I said when I told you Leeza and I weren’t going to get married just yet and you got so upset.”

  “I wasn’t upset.” Liar. “I just thought it would be better, you know, for the baby and all. I just didn’t want my grandchild to be illegitimate.”