Life Estates

by Shelby Hearon

  Nolan’s grave was there, in the old Huntt-Cooper plot. There was no one left in his family to care: his parents were dead and his sister off in California. I had memories of going with Edith when I was young, us careful not to let our shoes sink in the clayey soil, careful not to stain our clothes on the bushes and vines. Memories of running my fingers along the iron filigree, the path a sort of treasure hunt with my daddy’s grave at the end. Our plot began with a stone baby on a stone bier on which was carved, faint now, all but rained away, the words PRECIOUS IN HIS SIGHT. And a six-foot granite cross entwined with granite Easter lilies and flowering vines, the COOPER etched at the base.

  “Doesn’t it give you the creeps?” Harriet asked, making a shudder. “I mean, having to drive right through here every day of the world. Well, I guess you don’t come this way; you go into town, to your shop. But still, every time you go into Greenville. It would give me the creeps. I haven’t been out to the Sloane plot since you were there. When I was scared out of my wits, about this trouble, the last thing in this world I wanted to see was that vacant chunk of soggy land just waiting for me.”

  I PULLED THE CAR into the drive, under the big oak, which curved toward the white-painted brick house with its four chimneys. Ben was racing back and forth in the fenced yard, happy to see my car. He had thought he was getting a drive when I stopped back by the house on my way to the airport to change out of my jumper into a brown skirt and sandals. And had looked heartbroken when I drove off again without him.

  There’d always been a dog waiting, I realized. When Harriet first started the annual visits, so many years ago, with her children in those early years, it had been Tracy, then Hardy, then Rogers, the first of my black labs. We had got together every year since all four of our children were babies still in cribs, still in diapers, still using strollers and playpens. (Where had playpens gone? I wondered. Now young parents got jumping chairs and bouncing swings and crawly walkers that even infants could scoot around in, shoving with their fat legs. Fannin’s boys had all of them, those robotic locomotions. Fannin’s home looked like a vast extension of Equipment “R” Us.)

  “Come on, Ben,” I said, getting the garment bag out of the trunk. “Calm down. Where’s your pal, hmmm? There she is, good girl.” I opened the gate.

  Harriet stepped back. She never liked to get too close to the pups, had always been uneasy with them, afraid they’d jump on her or try to lick her. Now, perhaps, it was just as well; certainly she didn’t need to be breathing dog hairs.

  “It always seems odd to me, Famous Edith’s girls having all these domestic animals.” She brushed at her short skirt. “Dogs, horses. Don’t naturalists make this big point of going out there in the wild and leaving things the way they find them?”

  “Mother always had dogs,” I reminded her, taking her in the front way.

  “That’s right. Boy dogs. I remember.” She caught her breath on the porch. “My, look at your trees. Even I can tell one from the other, or at least the plum from the peaches. And the apple trees, they don’t look the same at all.” She turned toward the road. “He’s got the apple trees, doesn’t he, your neighbor?”

  “We sometimes trade fruit,” I said.

  “It’s strange to be here this time of year instead of in the fall. I can’t get used to the trees with all the peaches on them. Remember how you used to make us all help you, when the kids came with me, back in the Dark Ages? Mix up those awful vats of beer, tea, Ivory soap, Epsom salts, and what all else. Tobacco, was it? Ammonia—I remember that because it stunk. And how the four kids would run around like idiots out here in their shorts, smashing those paper bats against the tree trunks, whooping like Indians.” Harriet turned and put her hand on my arm, breathing heavily. “Whatever happened to those kids, Sarah? However did they turn out the way they did?”

  I patted the dogs, nuzzling them, promising they could come in later, and took Harriet’s bag into the kitchen. “I sent off for some seeds this year,” I said, watching her, trying to gauge how she was doing. “From Seeds Blum, B-L-U-M, and Seeds of Change. Don’t you like the names? Yellow sugar snap peas, sweet potatoes of an older variety, tomatoes. I thought I’d make a try at a vegetable garden. I spend more time outside now; I have more time to spend. I get out there in my old sneakers, heavy red socks—folk wisdom says they keep the bugs off—khaki pants with ten years of stains, an old cotton belt to keep my shirt out of the way, a scarf. I’m a sight! That’s the best thing about living in the country—I’m sure Doll would agree with me—nobody circulates a petition to lock you up as the Madwoman of Chaillot.”

  “You like it,” Harriet said, stepping out of her heels and leaning against the counter. She was still out of breath. “You do all that stuff because you like it. It’s your escape.”

  “I do. I must. It’s satisfying work. The trees seem grateful to be looked after, protected against insects in the summer. And in the fall, the roots send up messages that they are direly in need of feeding before they have their snooze through the winter. I feel honored to tend them. The trees and the gardens give me so much more every year than I could ever give them. All but the weeding.… Sometimes I think I’m better at tending my life than weeding it.” I was talking on, to give Harriet a chance to regroup. Now I held her at arm’s length. “Let me get a good look at you. You look wonderful, honestly.”

  She smiled as if she had a secret. “I could use a little lift. How about a Bloody Mary? Or sherry. Even white wine is fine.”

  “Anything.”

  “Gin. Make me something with gin. Gin and a jigger of juice.” She watched me mix her drink, flexing her feet and looking sly. “You didn’t even guess, did you? I can’t believe that you didn’t figure it out.”

  “What?” I stood by her, drinking orange juice, glad to see her perk up for whatever reason.

  “I got an eye tuck.” She opened her eyes wide, then relaxed them, looking delighted with herself.

  “You didn’t.” How amazing. I couldn’t tell.

  “I did. Right in the middle of that ghastly radiation. I was going three times a week, and not worth shooting. When I asked the doctor if I could have one, he said that was the silliest thing he’d ever heard of. I said, ‘I don’t care whether you think it’s dumb, I just want to know: Can I? Will it make things worse?’ I mean, it’s a local they do it under. You sit up and you’re zombied out of your mind, but you’re awake. It’s not like I was going to get a general anaesthetic, you know, put that stuff in my lungs. When you kept saying I looked good, I wanted to crow. So it really worked. And the tan”—she stopped to swallow half her drink—“well, the tan comes out of a tube. What they can do now, with self-tanning cream, makes the sun seem puny. I slathered it on before I came. I thought, By God, for all this misery I’ve been through, I’m going to look like a million, a hundred thou anyway.”

  “You do.” I reached out a finger and gently touched the skin along Harriet’s lid and beside her eye. I couldn’t tell a thing.

  “State of the art,” she said. “The best in the entire country. I was going to do it when I turned fifty, but Knox …” She stuck out her tongue. “Let’s don’t even mention his name—”

  “Amazing,” I said. “I want to hear every detail. Let’s get you settled, then we can have lunch. You must be worn out.…” I didn’t want to exhaust her further.

  “Quick refill? A little less juice?” Harriet held out her glass. When she had another swallow of gin under her belt, she said, “I’m lucky you made me go to the doctor for that cough. If I’d waited until I started hurting …” She left it unfinished.

  “You had a scare.” I tried to pick up my cue.

  “You don’t know the half.” She wrapped her arms around her chest, as if around an injured friend.

  “I’m glad the doctor let you come visit—”

  “He was glad to be rid of me, I think. I’d nagged him so bad about the Aspen trip, but he wouldn’t back down. He said trying to take in enough of that thin air
might tear something loose and undo all the nasty work they’d done. I said, ‘Forget that idea.’ But when he said I could come here, I asked him, ‘How come South Carolina? They’ve got mountains, too.’ ‘Short ones,’ he said. ‘Midget mountains.’ ” She started to laugh, then stopped when it seemed to hurt. “He’s young and cute, to tell the truth, the doctor. That helps. Who wants a doddering old type getting familiar with your chest. No offense to your friend.”

  “I won’t tell Will.” I smiled at her feelings about a man of seventy. Where did that come from?

  She patted my hand, setting her empty glass on the counter. “I honestly think it’s good that you’ve got somebody who comes around and who can dog-sit when you’re out of town. Not just that, but someone you don’t have to hide your feelings from. We have to put on such a cheerful face for everybody, you know, the children, and our friends. But somebody who was there by Nolan’s bedside in the hospital, who must have seen you at your worst, your tiredest, that must be great. I didn’t have that. Not just didn’t I have the warning, the chance to mourn in advance, but I didn’t have anybody who was with me when I went through it. Knox took that away, breaking his damn neck so carelessly. So tell your Dr. Perry, your Will, that I didn’t mean him. There’s something to be said for fatherly types.”

  I put an arm around her shoulder. I hadn’t used Will for that, but she was right; I never hid my feelings from him. And she was right, he was there. What anger she had, what a sense of betrayal. And no way to speak to Knox about it. Sudden death was cruel in a way I’d not seen before. “I’m sorry your trip to Colorado was cancelled,” I said.

  “David has been wonderful.” She leaned against my arm. “Calling me, and sending me flowers when I looked a mess and felt like hell and didn’t want him to see me that way. We’ve moved our trip to the fall. We’re going to go somewhere flat. Sea level. I teased my doctor about that. I asked him, ‘How about Port Aransas?’ ‘How about South Padre?’ ‘How about Galveston?’ ‘Can I canoe down the bayous of the Big Thicket?’ But when you think about it, they didn’t go to the shore to recuperate, in books. They went to the mountains. For TB. I reminded him of that. I said that in all the novels you read in school, they’re up there at the sanatorium in the Alps recovering in the sunshine, eating that crusty bread and drinking that goat’s milk. ‘What do you think about that?’ I asked him. But he’s so young, my doctor, he probably thinks that The Magic Mountain is the name of one of Disney’s theme parks.”

  “I should have asked if you wanted to bring David—”

  “No, goodness. I just want us to have a real visit, like old times.”

  I picked up her bag and started upstairs. At the landing, she paused to catch her breath. “I brought us something.…” She was winded.

  I set the bag down, not wanting to seem in a hurry.

  “I brought you—us really—something darling, Sarah. A hostess gift.” Her voice had taken on a slight squeak. “David wanted to go back out to Mom’s—he’s going to put her and Dad in his book on oral histories of East Texas, and I’m really proud of that, whether Mom is or not. He wanted pictures of them, so we were looking through that old album, which mostly has photos of you and me. Anyway, I sneaked one of us, for a surprise.” She reached down toward her bag, then straightened up. “You look, there, in that outside pocket.”

  I pulled out two hot-pink T-shirts, each printed with a picture of the two of us in shorts, taken in front of the main hall at Pritchard’s, with a blooming dogwood beside us.

  “See?” Harriet reached for one, struggling for breath, and held it against her chest.

  I held mine up, too, noticing that it was a couple of sizes larger than Harriet’s. They were cute, the sort of things schoolgirls might sleep in. I put it over my arm and picked up her bag.

  At the top of the stairs, out of habit, Harriet turned left toward Nolan’s old room. It was a reflex, turning to go into the room where she’d stayed when she came to visit. Staring in confusion through the open doorway, she let out a yelp. “What on earth? Sarah, it’s a damn mausoleum!”

  I bit my knuckle. I hadn’t thought, not for a minute, how his room, just as he left it (or just as I had restored it after his illness), would hit Harriet. I’d grown so used to it. I had remembered as a child slipping in and touching my daddy’s shirts, his ties, even looking under the bed he’d shared with Edith. I remembered looking in the medicine cabinet that hung in one of those metal boxes on the wall to see if his shaving cream and brush were still there. The tangible objects had meant a lot to me. I’d wanted that for my grandsons. You couldn’t tell who remembered what at what age.

  I’d wanted that for my children, too. For George. Boys and their fathers were a complex labyrinth you couldn’t fathom. Whatever he needed of Nolan’s, I wanted it to be there for him. And for Fannin, too. It was hard, as I knew, as Bess showed, for a girl to lose her daddy. (When had Edith moved MacDonald’s stacks of papers, modest half-closet of clothes, old Underwood upright typewriter? I couldn’t recall. By the time I went off to boarding school, only the typewriter remained.)

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. I dropped the bags and gingerly threw my arms around Harriet. “Poor thing. First a trip through the cemetery and then the Nolan Rankin memorial bedroom. I should have said something to you on the way.…”

  I led Harriet into my room and helped her up on one of my high twin beds. “Are you all right?”

  “I never thought you, of all people—it’s like those ghastly rooms you read about where the kid has died and all the stuffed animals and his little pajamas with the feet in them are still on the bed. Jesus, Sarah, how can you stand it? I moved everything out of Knox’s room the very next weekend after the funeral. How long do you plan to leave it like that?”

  “I thought a year,” I said, stroking Harriet’s back lightly, afraid of hurting her. “You have to go by your instincts on these things.” I moved to hang her bag in the closet. “Of course the stupid side effect is that Will and I have to pile up on one of these single beds whenever he stays over.”

  “You’re sleeping with him? The old doctor? I don’t believe it. Don’t I know anything at all about anybody?” Harriet’s wail turned into a cough which shook her body until tears coursed down her cheeks.

  WE ATE LUNCH ON the porch. The peach-washing rains had chilled the air, and it was pleasant, cool for early August. I’d fixed open-faced ham sandwiches on salt-rising bread with green mustard, then worried, as I carried the plates out, that the fare was too heavy. Maybe I should have done a salad. But Harriet said, no, she had an appetite. She’d taken two pain-killers after a coughing attack which had left her hurting dreadfully. “Distressed passenger,” she’d managed to say. “Bring me a glass of water.”

  On the way outside, she had stopped in the living room, looking at the burled end table which held my grandmother’s collection of shoes, which I treasured. There was something about women and shoes, women and feet. The bound Chinese feet, high heels, pointed toes, nail polish, pedicures. (Whoever heard of a man getting a pedicure?) Most of these were salesman’s samples: a wedged sandal, a buckled pump, high vamped lace-ups. Some were actual size, some miniatures. There were a pair of cancan dancer’s legs in ankle-strap shoes, made of wood, a German porcelain lady’s boot no bigger than a doll’s.

  “I always forget how good you are at house,” Harriet said. “I mean, mostly I see you, and we’re somewhere else, and you don’t—no offense—take all that much interest in how you look. But this room …” She gestured to the rusty-red-and-gold paper, the rusty wood trim the color of the clay the pines grew from. The heavy draperies that came to the floor and spread out like a fan on the waxed planks.

  I looked about the room myself, seeing it mostly through the eyes of two younger women—myself and Katie, fifteen years ago—who used to clean it for parties, who knew every inch of the walls and wood. I saw it also as where I’d come from—like an attic where I’d stored those trunks of old velvets and waterma
rked taffetas, and hats with ostrich feathers. From another era.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I don’t really see it anymore. I’m afraid I only go past here on my way out to have breakfast or to watch the sunsets.” It’s time, I thought, I used this room.

  When we were seated in the porch rockers, Harriet said, “You’re so lucky, having your shop. I envy you that. Not that I’d actually want to have to be somewhere every day of the world, or to be a businesswoman myself, but, you know … I still get mad when I think about going to fat Freddy the accountant and getting the brush-off. As if nothing I’d done in my whole life counted for anything, because it didn’t make money. But that’s the way men think.…”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Harriet had stopped talking to catch her breath. She pinched off a bite of ham and popped it into her mouth. “They don’t understand—men don’t—that women simply aren’t used to charging each other. You know? I mean, isn’t that hard for you, with all those women who come into your shop? Men bill one another all the time: lawyers bill their doctors who bill their accountants who bill their bankers who bill their lawyers. But women don’t.” She looked up. “I’d think that having your job would feel the same as if I asked Birthday Club to chip in every time I set out refreshments when it was my month for them to come over.”

  She was right in a way; Katie and I didn’t bill. I hadn’t thought of that before. “We don’t actually,” I said, “send bills, now that you say it. We keep a ledger; our clients are responsible for paying what’s due.”

  “I wouldn’t mind that. Having a service, say, to tell widows how to put their best foot, their best leg, forward. Provided they just mailed me a check and we didn’t have to talk about money.” She kicked off her shoes. We had both pulled on the pink T-shirts with our schoolgirl likenesses on the front, but she’d left on her short skirt and hose and heels, and I’d left on my brown skirt and sandals. She rubbed her ankles, then tucked her feet under her in the rocker. “Not Betty Grable legs today,” she said ruefully, sounding hoarse again. “First I missed my morning walk—I’m still going half the distance with them—and then I had to cram myself into those airplane seats.”