Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  “Let’s do it, then,” she said. “I haven’t stayed out there overnight but half a dozen times since she moved back here.” She bent down and hollered at her mother. “YES, FINE.”

  Doll beamed and then pointed to Knox’s grave, indicating that we should pay our respects.

  The polished black double headstone was etched on one side with Knox Calhoun’s name and dates. The other side was shiny and blank, awaiting those of his wife. Next to his curved tomb-shaped mound lay a flat grassy rectangle, also waiting. I turned to Harriet, to see how she was taking this.

  “I didn’t put my name on it,” she said. “I think that’s ghoulish, creepy. When you see the spouse’s name and birth date, then a blank space left for the death date. Besides”—she glanced at me and smiled—“who knows? I might not even end up here. I might be Mrs. Some Young Man’s Wife by then.”

  I studied her, so trim and youthful, so lively and lovely in her shorts with her long tanned legs. Talking of the new man, she seemed the schoolgirl she’d been long ago. As if time had changed nothing.

  “I put up a single stone to Nolan,” I told her. “A copy of an old one that Fannin had taken a fancy to—it has one of those kneeling lambs on top, you’ll see. She had some memory of herself and George when they were little, playing around the plots. She wanted her boys to grow up with that.”

  Harriet’s eyes filled. She said, “How often is she going to drive the Gospel Quartet—excuse me, Quintet—over from Atlanta anyway?”

  I wanted to bite my tongue. How thoughtless, to talk about my daughter wanting the boys to have an old-fashioned stone of their grandfather’s. When Harriet’s feelings were still bruised from Pammy’s news.

  There must have been fifty people clustered about the grounds. All coming together on this Saturday because some woman married some man named Sloane way back when the world was raw and unsettled. Family tracing was a complicated foolish business, which must have at its heart a denial of death. We and our loved ones may not be around forever, but this place and this kinship will. Our old parents rest under a stone which says THEY WERE THE SUNSHINE OF OUR HOME. Our beloved wife under one which claims TO LIVE IN HEARTS WE LEAVE BEHIND IS NOT TO DIE.

  Just then someone in a red jump suit rang the dinner bell, and Harriet’s Uncle Bob, her dad’s younger brother, came trotting over to escort us to the tables under the tent. He must have been in his late seventies, only a couple of years younger than Doll, but he seemed another generation in his windbreaker and jeans. How was it some people got old, I wondered, so much sooner than others?

  “Hiya, Doll, who you got here?” he asked. “Besides my favorite niece.”

  “You’ve met Sarah,” Harriet told him. “My old friend from South Carolina.”

  “Sure have. Sorry about your husband, young lady. Sorry for both you ladies. Fellows that age, a crying shame.” He gave us all big smiles and smacking wet cheek kisses. “Happened in my wife’s daddy’s family. A man outlived all four of his boys. They died from one thing after another, TB, the war, colon. It doesn’t seem right.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”

  “Chow down,” he told us, holding out his arm to Doll.

  There were gallon jugs of iced tea, and soda pop for the youngsters, and two plank tables laden with food. I tried the chicken and dumplings, which Doll had brought, roast pork, fried hominy, coleslaw, yeast rolls, hush puppies and sweet potato biscuits. At Harriet’s urging I went back for a smaller dessert plate with a sample of a gooey layered lemon cake called “Better Than Sex,” and a meringue, pecan, raisin and whipped cream confection called “So Good Pie.” She helped herself to two pieces of the devil’s food cake and a bite of the walnut fudge.

  “My chocolate fix for the day,” she said.

  When all of us had tasted all we could, I asked Harriet, “Should we drive your mother home?” I felt suddenly frayed, peopled out.

  “Uncle Bob will take her. She likes to stay until the very end. She’ll have to have seconds and thirds.” She looked across at her mother, a table away. “Then he’ll help her make a slow tour of every stone, telling her who’s buried where—she doesn’t need a hearing aid anymore to know what he’s told her so many times—just as if she were the matriarch of this whole clan. It slays me. Then she’ll sit back on that bench and watch them lay out pea gravel and rake neat lines in the ground where the grass won’t grow. He’ll have to stop and debate with a couple of cousins whether to cut down a weeping willow that’s putting out unruly roots. It’s an all-day party for her. And, except for church, I think it’s the only time she goes out of that house all year.”

  “I need a nap,” I confessed.

  “We’ll go to my house. I want you to see how I’ve made over Knox’s room anyway.”

  I noticed with amusement in the parking area that someone had taped a hand-lettered sign over the red pickup’s offending bumper sticker. This one read POTHEADS AND HOT HEADS: ONLY AT U.T.

  WE DROVE THROUGH La Salle, a tiny bit of Texas history which now consisted of one historically marked county courthouse, one Stagecoach Inn on what had been the old cattle-drive trail, one monument designating the spot where the famed explorer, for whom the town was named, had died. Most of the homes lined the main street, which ran south to north; the rest, like Harriet’s, were scattered about in the woods outside of town.

  I saw that Harriet was keeping a nervous eye on the rearview mirror, and wondered if this was in reaction to the afternoon at the cemetery. It would be enough to make you think someone was after you, seeing all those tombstones, especially one with a polished place just waiting for your name.

  “I didn’t wear my jewels,” I told her, meaning it as a joke.

  “They follow new cars,” she said, serious. “Don’t think I didn’t watch out when we were leaving the Houston airport. I’m totally spooked. I admit it.” She lit a cigarette. “I didn’t tell you what happened yesterday. I could have been a statistic—”

  “Tell,” I said.

  “I was hurrying to meet up with Birthday Club for our morning walk, wearing a blue T-shirt and my white short shorts, working those muscles. My mind was wandering. I was thinking how we tend to look back, all of us, how we replay old tunes, screen old film clips of our earlier lives. I mean, if you think too hard about the fact that more of your life is behind you than in front of you—and it’s a little hard to pretend that fifty-five is middle age—it can be a downer. I was trying to pep myself up.”

  “I’ve been looking back a bit myself—” I said.

  “Just then an unmarked tan van drove by me. The kind you just know belongs to thieves who are out to get an early start lifting a whole suite of furniture or an entire office including wastebasket and light bulbs. You wouldn’t believe the gall they have: stealing everything for a weekend at a hunting camp down to the steaks and beer, or every item to furnish a love nest including silverware and wine coolers. I’m not kidding. The driver was a black kid, the passenger a white boy with bad skin. They must have been all of seventeen. When they passed me, the redneck hollered out the window, ‘Hey, skinny legs.’ That made me so mad, so disgusted at their type, I yelled back at him, ‘These are Betty Grable legs, kiddo.’ ”

  I laughed because I could just imagine the scene, Harriet with her hands on her hips, shouting at the vandals. “Did they turn around?”

  “Thank God they did not.”

  “You were lucky.”

  “Wait till you hear how lucky. It was in the county paper the next day. In the ‘Crime Stop’ column. Two perpetrators driving a tan van apprehended in the middle of a robbery at a private residence not two miles from my house. They took everything that would plug in or turn on. The sheriff’s office reported that they’d confiscated two Tec-9 assault-type semiautomatics. I just about fainted. I’ve read up on my guns, you know. That’s a 9-millimeter with a ventilated five-inch barrel and a thirty-two-round magazine. The kind terrorists use in the movies. Can you believe I stoo
d there in the middle of the road talking back to criminals carrying weapons like that?”

  “I can,” I said.

  Harriet seemed pleased at my response. Throwing her cigarette out the window, she said, “If I’d been carrying a weapon myself I might have shot out their tires.” She made a pistol out of her thumb and index finger, pointing it at the window. “The white boy was so young you could see the Clearasil.”

  “Would you really have shot at them?”

  “You don’t know what you’d do until you get there,” she said, pulling the car around the back of her house, parking out of sight of the street.

  Going in the house, I saw that there were now two locks on a door that, to my knowledge, had never even had one before. Surely this was a result of having Knox gone. Surely her whole sense of danger was at suddenly living alone.

  The kitchen, as always on my visits, was filled with flowers. Terra-cotta pots with fragrant paperwhite narcissus sat everywhere, on the terrazzo floor, the counters, the wrought-iron table, on the windowsills beneath the green-and-white-checked curtains. Yet the house seemed altered. I couldn’t put my finger on why. It had an abandoned air, as if the owners were away. Yet, outwardly, nothing was different. Knox could have been playing golf. Still, there was an absence here. Used to picking up the messages of rooms, I turned in a slow circle, stopping to face Harriet. “What a scare you’ve had,” I said.

  She stashed her handbag and hung up her keys. “Let’s take a little something to drink upstairs with us. What would you like? Those better-than-sex covered-dish dinners are always drier than a creek bed in August.”

  “I think I’d like an iced tea,” I said.

  “I’ll have a little gin and orange juice, then. Get my vitamin C.”

  “The flowers smell wonderful.”

  “You won’t recognize Knox’s room. I’ve fixed it up like a country inn. You’ll see. I couldn’t stand it until I got it redone. It was like living across the hall from a mausoleum.”

  “I always liked that room, from back when it was Dwayne’s. Sunny, with that window seat.”

  Upstairs, shoes off, we sat on Harriet’s green satin spread, three pillows behind our heads, drinks in hand. I noted the deer rifle propped in the corner behind the lamp table. It was the first time I’d ever seen a gun in her bedroom and it made me uneasy. Harriet was indeed frightened.

  “Do you really want to take a nap?” she asked, in a voice that meant she’d like to visit.

  “No, I was just having trouble with so many people. It’s been a crowded few weeks.”

  “You seem to be doing great. Straw hat and all. I mean, you seem just the same.”

  “Did you think I wouldn’t be?” I was surprised. We hadn’t been together since the men had died, but for the most part our friendship had existed before, around and past our husbands.

  She rattled the ice in her glass. “I worry myself sick that I’m different, that I’m turning into a Widow. Capital W. I’m terrified that I’ll turn into one of Them. There are two other women in Birthday Club who’ve lost their husbands, each about two years ago. And they started to lose their shapes overnight. I’m not kidding, Sarah. They started to lose their hips and waistlines and get those flat fannies and thick middles you see on old women.” She leaned close and dropped her voice. “They began to look just like their mothers. They dress like their mothers and sound like their mothers. And both of them—this gives me the creeps just talking about it—wear turtlenecks all the time. Whenever I’m around them, I can feel myself reaching up to my throat, tugging at the neck of my shirt. I keep peering in my closet, terrified that turtlenecks are going to start reproducing in there.”

  I smiled. “I should have given you a fright by stepping off the plane wearing one.”

  “Which you don’t own.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Theirs are beige. That awful 1950s carpet beige. And aqua, they have them in 1950s kitchen-counter aqua.”

  I slid down flat, thinking I could have slept until morning. A new grandbaby. What on earth was my daughter doing?

  Harriet reached for an ashtray and her cigarettes. “I hate it, actually, being Birthday Club’s widow number three. The group has got morbid enough already. All of us talking about our health. We’ve already had three bouts with cancer and lost one. Plus we’ve got one member going through what they call ‘dose-intensive stem-cell rescue.’ And all of us know somebody—a friend of a friend—who’s had a stroke and is using a walker when last week she was jogging, or who’s got high blood pressure right out of the blue, or developed migraines when she never had a headache in her life, or needed an emergency hysterectomy when she’d just the week before made a speech about all the unnecessary surgery. Or someone who’s come down with the depression that eats your insides like a rat.”

  “But you’re all right?” I asked, studying her, so tan and glowing.

  “I am. I am definitely Birthday Club’s poster girl.”

  “With the Betty Grable legs.” I laughed.

  “Don’t remind me. That was so dumb.”

  “I think it’s our age,” I said. “The fifties. It seems to be some obstacle course. Once you make it through it’s clear sailing. Look at our mothers: they made it and they’re heading for eighty. Look at our men: they didn’t make it.”

  Harriet said, “I went for a mammogram to this woman in Houston we all go to, who’s so short she has to stand on a stool to examine you. She said my bosoms were as transparent as glass. She showed me. She put about two dozen X rays up against the light for me to see, and it was amazing, the difference. Some looked like cotton candy, some like lumpy mashed potatoes, some like banana pudding, some like scour pads, and it had no connection to size. No wonder they can’t always tell. I had no idea. Did you ever see that?”

  I shook my head. I knew I should have such preventative procedures done, including mammograms—the heavy breasts went with the heavy hair in some genetic way. But I hadn’t even been for a checkup in several years. That was the luxury of getting your children grown; you could forget about your health. They could get along without you. You didn’t owe your children longevity.

  “Did you know I heard him hit the tree?” Harriet’s voice cracked. She stubbed out her cigarette. “I did. Years after I’d quit lying awake listening for the sound of a car in the drive, the way you worry about your kids for half your adult life, waiting for them to get home in one piece, scared to death you’ll hear the doorbell and there’ll be some highway patrolman on your porch. You finally get them grown, and then you like cars again. I’d just got myself the sapphire blue Buick Park Avenue. Then—”

  “I remember,” I said, “all that worrying over ours when they were teenagers.”

  Harriet took off her bow, smoothed her blond hair, clipped it back on her head. “We’d had those rocky times you have, you know. When the children were babies and I couldn’t think of anything but them, and when he was moving to a new bank and that took all his time, I mean, every waking moment. Later, I had those yeast infections, before I got on the estrogen, and he had his prostate problems, the way men do. Those were natural things and I thought we’d got past them. I thought everything had been turned around after that wonderful trip to Aspen we took for our twenty-fifth. You remember. Knox took day hikes with me, and we went to all the pricey restaurants, and he held down his drinking. And we had that divine suite, with two bedrooms and two baths and a view of the mountains. And when we decided to take separate bedrooms when we got home, that seemed a great idea. No more picking up each other’s wet towels or opening the cabinet to each other’s medicine. No more seeing each other a mess in the morning, me without my makeup and him with a hangover. And no more having to sleep next to each other when things were messy or not in working order. You know?”

  “I never saw you happier than after that trip,” I said.

  “That’s what made me so mad. Him plowing himself into a hickory tree on a curve he drove twice a day. I kn
ow they did an alcohol count and it was high, but even a heavy drinker like Knox could navigate his way home blind. He’d done it too many times to count, driving home from bank parties that went on too long or from out-of-town trips to see Houston clients. It was senseless and awful, his dying that way.”

  “It was a hard time to lose him.” I was stretched out on what I thought of still as Knox’s side of the bed. His end table had always been piled high with Civil War books, his escape reading, stacked beside his half-glasses and a coaster and gold Cross pen. He looked, had looked, much like a Civil War general himself: dapper, small, trim, with wavy brown hair parted in the middle and a neat mustache. Who had he cast himself as? I used to wonder. Robert E. Lee?

  “I didn’t mean to get morbid,” Harriet said, her cheerful self back in control. “It’s the idea of being alone. I don’t know how to start over. What do women do who aren’t in those movies with the improbable plots on some golden pond or travelling alone by the fountains of Rome? Maybe Club Med? Can’t you just picture a tropical beach crawling with a herd of flat-fannied women in turtlenecks, searching for men?”

  “But you said you’d met a young man.”

  Harriet tucked her feet under her and turned to me. “Ah. I did. I have. His name is David. David McCord. I swoon—whatever happened to that word?—every time I think of him. I couldn’t figure out at the beginning what made him so attractive. Then I had to laugh. I’d been around men my age and up for so long I’d got to thinking they only came bald, fat, diabetic, emphysemic, depressed, or courting cirrhosis of the liver after forty years of hard drinking. It dawned on me the reason this man was so beautiful was because he’s so young.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “It was the strangest thing. I owe this one to Dad, of all people. He, David, is an oral historian, at the university. He’d been to see Dad, to tape his story about that damn radio. You remember that? Of course you do. Can you believe it, someone driving through the Thicket to get that down on tape?”