Court of the Myrtles

by Lois Cahall

  But Joy was no longer threatened by their “telling” because by the time they could tell, it was way past their bedtime and they were fast asleep. Joy would force herself to stay awake, staring at the cracks in the ceiling that formed the shape of an elephant’s trunk, waiting until Alice, opened the door. That’s when Joy squeezed her eyes shut, mimicking sleep as Alice bent down to kiss her forehead. The scent of Coty’s Sweet Earth lingered in Joy’s nostrils long after her mother had left the room.

  Saturdays were special because at her father’s insistence, Joy was always included in the neighborhood game of “Red light, Green light.” When it came to Red light, Green light, Joy may have been chubby, but man she could hold a locked pose, suspending one limb in the air like a cat burglar caught in a flashlight shadow. When her brother said “Green light!” to go, she could feel the finish line of his left arm and breathlessly tapped him on the shoulder. But then he turned to her, narrowed his eyes and announced, “No way you’re it. I saw you move on that last red light.”

  “Did not!” she insisted.

  “Did too!”

  “Did not!”

  “Go back to the beginning of the line Fatty Patty.”

  “Will not!”

  “Then you’re out for good. Go home, Fatty Patty.”

  And then the other kids chimed in with “Fatty Patty” too. Joy hung her head low and went back to the starting point. “I’m not Fatty Patty,” she’d murmur under her breath. My name is Joy.”

  “I know that,” whispered Georgey Pfeifer, “I saw you didn’t move. You didn’t move.”

  “I know,” said Joy, grateful for just an ounce of validation.

  “Red Rover, Red Rover send…” anybody but Joy over. After a while, never chosen, she would slink back to her house. Georgey would call out “Hey Joy, where ya going?” but she pretended not to hear, instead heading straight for the kitchen. Nothing that a bag of Chips Ahoy cookies or a scoop of Harlequin ice cream couldn’t cure…

  It was from the pantry, during another snack-food binge, that Joy heard the slam of the backdoor screen and the sound of her mother dropping car keys on the counter. Joy rose from the floor and glanced out to see Alice facing the cupboard. Mechanically, her mother grabbed the scouring pad and flipped up the faucet handle. She scrubbed madly at the casserole dish crusted with last night’s potatoes au gratin.

  “Mommy? Mommy, you’re home!” But Alice didn’t turn around. As Joy approached her mother’s side, she just scrubbed even harder. “Mommy? Mommy, what’s wrong?”

  Alice dropped the soapy dish—spelled with a “y” not an “ey,” thought Joy despite herself—and watched her mother grip the side of the curling linoleum counter.

  “You go outside and play, honey.” said Alice.

  “But they’re mean.” said Joy, circling around to see tears streaming down Alice’s face.

  Joy sat on the edge of the hospital bed watching a clear tube dripping life into her father’s arm. Her brothers were lined against the drab hospital wall in a long row of silence. She knew it was serious.

  “Your father was doing a very brave thing,” explained Alice rubbing at her husband’s head. “He was trying to protect that woman.”

  A chaos of questions flooded the room. “When can he come home?” “Did the bullets hurt?” “Did Dad kill the guy who did it?”

  And then Joy piped up, her question silencing them all: “Is my daddy gonna die?”

  What Alice neglected to tell the kids was that their father would not have been shot if he’d stopped himself calling the woman’s husband “a stupid nigger.”

  By day three Joy realized that sitting on her father’s hospital bed allowed her the luxury of being near both her parents. Her mother paced the room and the hallways, every once in a while grabbing a cup of coffee from the cafeteria. Joy didn’t want to do anything to upset her mother so she sat obediently in the chair under the wall-mounted television, fighting off fantasies of a candy bar from the vending machine.

  Joy listened intently to her mother as she stroked her husband’s neck. “When did we stop finding time for each other?” No reply. “When you get out of here, let’s go on a date, like we used to, before the kids were born… park behind the drive-in and kiss for hours. When’s the last time we kissed? I’ll get all dolled up in your favorite dress, you know, the one you used to tell me made me look like Kim Novak—if Kim Novak were a redhead.” Alice’s fingers ran over the IV tube, tracing the tube up his muscle forearm to his vein. “I bet that dress still fits. I know you’re wondering why I kept it all those years. It’s because someday all those housewife dresses will be back in style. You just watch.” Alice’s ran her palm behind his ears, stroking his hair down from where it stubbornly stuck straight up. “Hey, remember the night you asked me to marry you—out on the boardwalk and I couldn’t hear you on account of the sea spray crashing against the pier? So you had to ask me four times before I understood what you were saying? Remember that?”

  Still no answer.

  And then Alice turned to Joy who was hanging onto her mother’s every word. Her look told her mother she couldn’t imagine who these two strange adults were. Certainly not her parents…

  “Sweet pea,” said Alice, “Stay here with your father. I’m just going down the hall to make a call. See what those brothers of yours are up to back at the house.”

  Joy nodded obediently and was left, a tiny mouse in a room of cat-like hissing machines. Some made a thumping sound, pumping oxygen to her father’s rising and falling chest, while Joy kicked the rungs of her metal chair to the rhythm of the bleeping heart monitor every time it flashed red. She quite liked the sterile sanity of her surroundings. No piles of washing, dirty plates, newspaper coupons…

  And then her dad mumbled something.

  Joy jumped from her chair and crawled to the metal rail at her father’s bedside His eyes were sealed shut, his lips smiling at the feel of his daughter’s sweet breath hovering onto his face.

  “What, Daddy? What did you say?”

  “Water—kid, go get…”

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Wa—water,” he mumbled again, the oxygen tube moving under his nose as he spoke.

  Joy slid down from the mattress, and went to the bathroom sink. She turned on the cold, her eyes searching the walls for a Dixie cup dispenser or a glass. None.

  “I’ll be right back,” she called out, and marched down the hall a little too loudly to where her mother leaned against the wall, dangling and stretching the phone cord at the nurses’ station.

  “Tell him it’s his turn to do the dishes!” Alice insisted into the receiver. “And be sure to have your brother put out the trash. It’s collection night.” She appeased Joy with a head pat and then turned back to barking at the wall in front of her. “No, not tomorrow morning. Didn’t I just say tonight? I said tonight, young man.”

  Joy tugged at her mother’s dress but Alice just put a finger to her mouth to silence her.

  “What did you say?” said Alice. “No, the dogs won’t get in. Not if you cap the lids tight.”

  Joy roamed around the nurses’ station, where flashes of white uniform scurried, a blur of clipboards and thermometers. Joy turned on the heel of her patent leather shoes and began tip-toeing in the squares on the hallway floor careful not to step on the gold cracks, until she picked up speed and raced back to her father’s room. But when she entered, she was met by a cold chill that, even so, somehow magically warmed her chest.

  An odd calm had descended over the room, enveloping her body as though she were on an invisible wave of peace. She felt lifted. She felt quiet.

  Moving cautiously to her father’s side, she watched as his features transform into an odd grin, as though somebody had just whispered him a secret joke, and he was holding onto the punch line for dear life. Then he gasped a gulp of breath as if he were just about to put his head under water.

  The machines kept pumping but the monitors stopped beeping. And then ev
erything flat-lined. Joy stared hypnotically at her father’s strange smile… a smile that seemed to indicate the existence of invisible others in the room who might be enjoying the secret joke too. Joy turned around quickly but nobody was there.

  It wasn’t until the nurses came charging down the hall that Joy began to panic as one nurse shouted commands at another who busied herself checking his pulse, his heart rate…

  Joy never knew whether it was a heart attack or if her father’s lungs filled with fluid from the second bullet. Or perhaps it was a reaction to the third bullet wound too close to a main artery in his neck. All Joy knew was that the last thing Daddy wanted was a cup of water and she failed to give it to him. So he died.

  The funeral was heroic. One hundred officers showed up and marched a procession through all of Watertown Square straight into Cambridge. The police station hung its flag at half-mast. There was a single gunfire in his honor, Alice was presented with a triangle of folded flag and his death made the headlines of every Boston newspaper.

  “He’s in a better place,” said Father O’Leary to Alice, patting her on the shoulder. “He’s in a better place.”

  Joy barely shed a tear, perhaps because of the guilt she harbored deep inside, or perhaps because she so desperately longed for her mother’s love, and with her father gone, Joy knew she might finally have it. Besides, a dead father was the best excuse in the world to explain why Alice never showed up at all those parent–teacher conferences.

  A few months had passed when Joy entered her mother’s room to find her clearing her father’s clothes out of his highboy dresser. Joy sank down on the bed. As her mother taped up the boxes shut one by one, she asked, “Mommy, you aren’t going to die, are you?”

  “No, Joy, not for a long time. Don’t you worry, sweetheart.”

  “How old will you be when you die?”

  “I don’t know. Eighty?”

  “Eighty? But that’s old!” she said, pulling her father’s flannel shirt up to her nose and inhaling his memory for the last time.

  I was the same age as Joy when I lost my father. But I can’t be sure if I could technically call him a father since I never knew him. And up until now he was a subject never discussed—a man whose politician face was plastered on television screens but not in the picture frames in our home.

  Eavesdropping from the fire escape of our apartment, I heard my mother only a few feet away at the kitchen counter taking my grandmother’s call—something about “Did you see Bernie Smith the politician—in the newspaper. Heart attack—such a shame—was indicted for money laundering,” and then, “I guess Marla will never know her real father.”

  I pretended not to hear, feeling a sense of shame for my mom, knowing good mothers and fathers were married. But even if my mom and dad weren’t married, and he’d gone and died on us, I felt sad for not missing a man that I never even knew.

  Later that night, feigning sleep, I watched my mom sit against the orange sofa click-clacking at the clasp on that ridiculous Peter Rabbit tin, before carefully re-tying its French bow.

  Chapter Five

  R. I. P.

  GUILT

  My wristwatch reads eleven past eleven. Eleven minutes past the time when Alice is usually here. Craning over the dashboard, I see no sign of Alice as I drive down the bumpy road, careful not to run over the sprouting heads of daffodils lining the rock wall.

  I park, open up my door and juggle a tray of flowers, one leg still in the car and one dangling out, dirt dropping from the tray bottom across my steering wheel and into the crevices of my leather seats. “Shit!”

  Dirt has also fallen onto the Peter Rabbit tin sitting on the front seat of the car. The one with the satin ribbon still intact, just as my mom always left it.

  At Mom’s grave, I drop down on my garden kneepad, put on my plaid cotton gloves and begin digging with a small shovel. Familiar footsteps and a voice.

  “Sssshhhhh!” says Alice, ducking down. “See him? Right there.” She points to a gravestone and I glance over. “Stay down,” she says. “See that Red Cardinal perched on Mrs. Smith’s grave? Like a king. Just look at him! Majestic!”

  “Morning, Alice,” I mutter, going back to my flower tray. I don’t see any Red Cardinal.

  “I noticed him when I was cleaning up the leaves blown into the Owens’ grave,” she says.

  “Alice!” Now we’re eye to eye. “Shame on you! You can’t just clean up somebody else’s grave!”

  “And you can’t plant those there,” says Alice, pointing at my attempt at floral design.

  “Oh, really? Who says?”

  “Well, anybody who knows Astilbes knows that they prefer cool temperatures—part shade exposure. Your mother’s grave is just too sunny. Like her, I guess.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “Brown-eyed Susans? Daylilies? Something that tolerates full sun.”

  “Fine,” I say. Pushing the tray over. “Plant these at Joy’s grave. Hers is always shady.” That may have come out wrong.

  “Well, thank you. I think I shall,” says Alice, ignoring my faux pas, and studying the feathery delicate ferns of the Astilbe whose pink tips form plumes. “Course there’s no more room around my daughter’s grave.” We both glance over for confirmation.

  “Really, Alice, I mean, really. Joy’s grave is starting to look like the recipient of last year’s gold medal winner for a Botanical Botch.”

  “Botanical botch, eh?” She teases but I’m not buying. I go back to digging.

  But Alice hunkers right down next to me. “So how is it that a young woman like yourself has so much time off during the week?” she asks. “Don’t you have a job? It’s April, you know. Don’t you at least have taxes to do?”

  “Don’t you have grandchildren you should be tending to?” I snap back.

  “As a matter of fact, seven. But they’re in school on weekdays.”

  “Spring break?” I shove the hole-digger in deeper, reminding myself to be nice, remembering that her daughter died. “I work for a museum gift store up at Plymouth Plantation. Okay with you? Friday is my day off.”

  “Why Friday? Is that when they polish the historical Rock?” She guffaws at her own joke.

  “Very funny, Alice,” I say. “No, it’s when I swap for a Sunday so another worker can have a weekend off with her kids. She’s a mom.”

  “Well, that’s mighty generous. So you help somebody else have a life.”

  I shoot her a look.

  “How long you been at that?” she asks.

  “A while.” There’s a pause and then I feel the need to defend myself. “I like the museum because it lets me live in the past. I like the past,” I say, falling back on my heels. “Though I’m getting tired of people turning up at the plantation complaining how the Plymouth Rock turns out to be way smaller than they thought.”

  “You mean some guy gets out of his station wagon, slams the car door and says, ‘I drove all the way from Kentucky for this?!’”

  “Exactly! ‘It’s even smaller than the Liberty Bell.’”

  Alice laughs, gets up and heads to my car’s trunk for the watering can, but then throws her arms up abruptly to the heavens and spins around to me. “So, you’re telling me that when you were a little girl you just woke up one day and said, ‘When I grow up I want to work in a gift store?’”

  “Well, not quite. I actually wanted to be a history teacher. American history. Or maybe a museum curator. But when I didn’t finish my degree I came up with a way that combined both. I started out as a tour guide for a historical route but then I got tired of that—and all the mud puddles I encountered on the dirt roads. Seriously. You know how many pairs of combat boots a girl goes through being a tour guide on a rainy day? So I moved inside to the museum shop. But at least it’s in Plymouth. Where our country all began. Kind of historical enough, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Why did you drop out of school?”

  “Boy, you’re just full of questions, aren’t y
ou?”

  “Am I being too nosy?” asks Alice. “I can stop,” she adds unconvincingly. “Well, you can tell me to stop.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I say, exhaling. “Especially now that I don’t have my mother’s questions…”

  I follow Alice to Joy’s grave to plant the tray of shade-loving Astilbe, wondering where she’ll find space for them. Near the Hostas there’s a spot where the “Y” in Joy’s name might now be forfeited.

  “Well?” asks Alice, squatting over a kneepad. I kneel down beside her, handing over the tools like a nurse handing a surgeon his instruments.

  “When I was in college, my grandmother—Rosie’s mother—she was elderly and couldn’t work anymore at the drycleaners. The steam machines affected her asthma and she had bad coughing fits. Then her knees gave way from standing all day. Problem was there were two words not in Grandma’s vocabulary: ‘nursing home.’ I’m from an ethnic family. We take care of our own. After spending every Saturday and Sunday at her house tending to the cleaning and yard work, my mom realized it was foolish to be paying rent at our apartment so we moved back in with Grandma. My mom had the job at the women’s shelter so one day, she just looked at me and said, ‘Honey, it’s only for a little while, but you may have to take a step back from your studies. Somebody has to watch Grandma and somebody has to work.’”

  “That’s just terrible.”

  “That’s when she needed a nurse to come in and help me to help her,” I say. “She didn’t even recognize me anymore. She kept staring deep into my face. ‘Rosie?’ she’d ask. ‘No, Grandma,’ I’d answer, ‘It’s Marla, your granddaughter.’ But she didn’t get it. She’d just yell at me and say, ‘There’s no such person.’”

  “And she never recognized you again?”

  I shook my head. “It was around two years later, she died. I was in my early twenties and had quit school. Funny thing is that my guidance counselor voted me most likely to succeed. But for now I’ve kind of filed it under things I gave up on.”

  “Gave up?”