I gasped, yipped and jumped back as if she was a rattlesnake, exclaiming, ‘Wilma Lou?’
I couldn’t believe me. I mean, yes, it was sort of Wilma Lou, and no, it was sort of not her, but the point was that she had lived next door to my house for freaking ever, had probably been right there spying when LeeVon had died, and my muddling, doodling mind had broken through my stupidity, had come up with a possible way to find out about him, while—
At this point, my logical, sensible mind woke up from its nap and complained, ‘Well, why didn’t you think of that before?’
Because Wilma Lou was the last person in the world I wanted to deal with, that was why. But my dreaming mind and my crafty hands had put me face-to-face with her on my easel, leaving me no choice but to realize: I needed to coax the truth out of my damned interfering religious bigot of a neighbor. I needed to have a long talk with Wilma Lou, and it wasn’t as if she would welcome me.
EIGHTEEN
I responded to this challenge in the only humanly possible way: I went back to bed. But not to hide my head under the pillows. I lay on my back in an orderly fashion, as if I were practicing being viewed in a casket, because I find it works better to think horizontally. The position seems to slosh my thoughts into flowing more helpfully. Examples: peace offering. I would need one to get past Wilma Lou’s front door. Brownies? Custard pie? Nuh-uh; anything I could cook, she could cook better. Fresh hand-painted picture? Definitely not the one I had just created; it was unflattering, all too clearly advertising that I didn’t like Wilma Lou.
Why didn’t I like Wilma Lou? Because she was narrow-minded and intolerant, that was why, whereas I was quite the opposite. I was broad-minded, tolerant, non-judgmental to the max.
So, being a broad-minded, tolerant, non-judgmental person, shouldn’t I stop judging Wilma Lou?
Ouch.
Didn’t tolerance mean I should be able to accept Wilma Lou as she was and find some common ground with her?
Sheeesh. While processing that, I stared at my ceiling. I had painted it as a velvety blue moonlit night sky with stars and comets and angels – not Christmas card angels, but beings made of energy and light, like the angels in some of Naomi Walker’s paintings. As one of my Jewish friends had once told me approvingly, these were angels with no Christian iconography. They didn’t even have wings, not exactly, but something more like auras of flight light, because, after all, they did have to fly. I knew that with great certainty, even though I did not know whether I believed in angels any more than I believed in ghosts … but what I believed did not seem to matter, did it?
Practically since the beginning of recorded time, I mused, people had made traditions including beings of brightness who were messengers of good. Eldolils, Tolkien called them, as far as I could remember. Fairies, peris, elves. Then to the Jews, then Christians, then Muslims, they were angels, some with eight pairs of wings. And now, arguably, they were the ETI, extra-terrestrial intelligence, of urban legend. I would love to see one sometime, some inexplicable manifestation of golden-white light, maybe, or a shadow moving against the wind, or woodland foliage forming a green face. But what Wilma Lou would think if she ever saw my kind of angel, I couldn’t imagine—
Wait.
Yes … yes, maybe I could imagine.
I cradled a concept in my supine mind for several moments longer, trying not to jostle it until I felt sure of it. Then I sat up, shoved my feet into my sneakers and headed across the hallway to the office-cum-craft room for the shoebox in which I kept things such as my oyster shell and frothy deer moss and the wings off fallen butterflies, if they were not too battered, and dried teazel heads, and tiny seashells, and maple wings, and the burry balls that sycamore trees seem to specialize in. Sorting through my happenstance collection, I found almost everything I needed. On a crafty roll and feeling fairly well chuffed, I strode toward my car and drove away from my home to go get one thing I lacked.
Ten minutes later I was back with a bouquet of tiger lilies from near a neighbor’s pond. Earlier in the year I would have used the rain lilies that sprang up in my yard or the Easter lilies that grew wild along the dirt roads. But tiger lilies would work nicely, and their color would complement the antique gold of the passionflower seed pod. I got out the hot glue gun and plugged it in.
I chose the largest tiger lily blossoms, trimmed their stems off, then slipped them into each other and glued them that way, staggering the petals, to form a kind of fantastic but fairly sturdy skirt atop which I glued the smooth egg-shaped seed pod for a torso, then a live oak acorn on top of that. On to this ‘head’ I layered pine cone scales to form shining brown hair extending halfway down the back. I hesitated over the wings, because butterfly wings seemed too easy, a cliché. I ended up feathering multiple translucent dragonfly wings together, and the way my little pantheistic angel’s wings shimmered in the light made me start wanting to keep her for myself. But I knew she wouldn’t last. The lilies would wither. My angel was ethereal, a gift to the Now.
Who would think I could ever offer such a heartfelt gift to Wilma Lou?
For the arms, I used maple wings. Their seeds formed shoulders, and then they hung like wide sleeves. After I was satisfied with the arms, I felt the need for a break. While not exactly tired, not physically, some inner oomph I depended on was about to rebel, and I knew from sad experience that, even though my peace offering needed only a few finishing touches, if I continued working on it, I would mess up. So I left it on the craft-room table and went to get myself something to eat, long overdue; I’d had no lunch and it was nearly suppertime.
But there was a lot of sunlight left in the long summer day. As it began to slant and glow more yellow toward sunset, bestowing cool shadows on my yard, I went outside and picked the tiny white four-petaled flowers that salted the grass, then sat on my back porch to make them into miniature daisy chains. This was twiddly work, but I managed to put together a flowery sort of sash for my angel to wear around her waist, and another by way of a necklace. Back in the craft room, after placing the flowers on my brain-baby, I painted a face on to her acorn head with my very smallest brush.
A lovely sunset was forming in the sky as I took my peace offering and walked across my yard toward Wilma Lou’s lawn (much more respectable) to ring her doorbell.
Although Maurie fully intended to remain faithful to Rob until death did them part, she had not taken his last name but kept her own: Vernon. She and Rob had a marriage of love, yes, surely, but also of ambitions: theirs was a career-driven partnership with benefits. They conversed easily and passionately about financial planning, global crises, rising stars in the arts, trendy travel destinations, politics both national and workplace, networking, contacts and hipsters and frenemies. They had fun together, laughed often, cheered each other on. But Maurie had never asked for Rob’s help with a family matter. In fact, they seldom talked about their families at all.
Well, there was a first time for everything. Maurie made sure she got home first and mixed drinks to serve as a conversational lubricant. When Rob let himself into their condo, and, as always, dropped his briefcase to the floor with a wham, she handed him a martini as she kissed him hello.
Rob ogled it and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Relativity.’ Maurie guided him toward a sofa and sat next to him.
‘Which relatives?’
‘My mother and Aunt Gayle.’ Sipping from her own daiquiri during the several minutes it took to fill him in, Maurie told him all about it, from skeleton to portrait to psych ward.
‘Usually,’ ventured Rob, ‘when you tell me crazy-making stories, you say you don’t want me to do anything, just listen.’
‘This time’s an exception. I need your professional advice.’
‘Regarding your mother?’
‘No! Just leave my mother out of it!’ The vehemence of her reaction caught her by surprise, and she saw that it flummoxed him as well. ‘My mother is my mother,’ she tried to explain in a more reaso
nable tone. ‘She makes me nutsoid and I don’t want to play her goofy game, but if she insists on pretending she has an imaginary spooky friend, if that makes her happy, then fine. I am not going to interfere and Aunt Gayle absolutely has no right to interfere. She is so far out of line she’s practically in orbit.’
‘I thought you liked your Aunt Gayle.’
‘I did. Before. But now I’d like to smack her bony ass with a lawsuit.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Yes! For illegally trying to railroad Mom into psych-ward limbo.’
Rob frowned. This in no way detracted from his appearance; he was a good-looking man, and his frown conveyed deep thought and concern such as he was accustomed to display when addressing a jury. After a suitably timed silent moment he said, ‘Illegal how?’
‘Conniving with Mom’s neighbor. Trying to put Mom away based on hearsay.’
‘Although an argument could be made …’ But Rob dropped that argument, in quite an atypical and unlawyerly manner, to ask a question instead. ‘Maurie, what’s your main intention? Are you mostly trying to punish your aunt, or are you mostly trying to protect your mother?’
‘Some of both. I guess protecting Mom is more important.’
‘Good. Because your aunt would probably win a lawsuit, given that you yourself said your mom was acting goofy.’
Maurie felt her blood pressure rise along with the hair on the back of her neck. ‘But—’
Rob interrupted smoothly. ‘But your Aunt Gayle doesn’t know that. She would probably run away with her tail between her legs if you just threatened to sue.’
Trying to imagine what Aunt Gayle would choose to wear by way of a tail, Maurie began to smile.
Holding my peace offering delicately in both hands, I walked across my yard and on to Wilma Lou’s lawn – quite a different, more meek and well-behaved sort of house frontage to mine – and across her boring homogeneous grass to her front door. Another ranch house structurally identical to my concrete bunker, hers had been upgraded with a veneer of brickwork, foundation plantings, window boxes, shutters and other extras such as a doorbell. I pressed it, then wished I hadn’t, hearing chimes within the house play ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ This was so damn Wilma Lou that it nearly made me lose my carefully maintained smile.
When she opened the door and saw me with a friendly face and a gift in my hands, she gasped, staggered back and clutched at the gold cross she wore around her neck, holding it up as if to shield herself from a vampire. ‘Git away, Devil worshipper!’ she squeaked, sounding much more panicked than righteously wrathful.
Without even rolling my eyes, I said, ‘I’m not a Devil worshipper, Wilma Lou, and I don’t hold any grudge against you for trying to get me taken away and locked up.’
‘Y’all ain’t got no business messing around with dead people!’
‘I don’t mess around with dead people. Look, I brought you an angel.’
‘That thing?’
‘It’s an angel made of examples of what I believe in – like maple seeds and wild lilies and dragonfly wings and Innocence—’
‘Innocence?’ Wilma Lou shrilled. This was the name of the tiny white flower from my yard, but why try to explain?
‘Of course, Innocence,’ I reassured my rigid neighbor. ‘I believe in the goodness of nature, Wilma Lou.’ Including snakes, although not necessarily poisonous ones. ‘You see that beautiful sunset?’ I tilted my head toward the sky behind me, where the play of light on clouds was quite a lovely sight. ‘That’s the kind of thing I believe in. Not dead bones or devils.’
‘But she said—’
‘The woman on the phone? She lied to you. She’s not my sister. I don’t even have a sister.’
I saw her lower her guard slightly, the hand holding her cross sagging, while her facial contortion eased from frenzy into its more normal obstinacy. ‘Y’all sure y’all don’t hold no grudge?’
‘No, not at all. I just want to be a good neighbor. Why do you think I brought you an angel?’ I lifted the gift in my hands, offering it again.
Eyeing it, she looked more than ever stubborn, doubtful. ‘Y’all believe in angels?’
‘Of course! Don’t you?’
‘That there don’t look like no proper angel.’
‘It’s a pantheist angel. You don’t like it? You want me to leave it here outside the door?’
She hesitated, the expression on her face teetering on some moral cusp, but finally her innate Southern hospitality trumped her dour religiosity. ‘No, no,’ she said, dropping her cross and lifting her hands as if in despair, ‘y’all’s a nice person to bring it to me. Come on in.’
NINETEEN
Finally done in the cafe for the day, snug in her cozy upstairs living quarters and just settling down in her secondhand La-Z-Boy to watch some TV, Cassie said ‘Damn!’ when her iPhone tootled into a jazz saxophone riff. Picking it up, she blinked in disbelief when she saw her sister’s name on the caller ID. For Maurie to call her at all was rare; for Maurie to phone her twice in one day was unheard of. Thumbing the little green button, she demanded, ‘Berthe, is something wrong?’
‘Why should anything be wrong?’ Cassie needed to hold the phone a few inches away from her ear as Maurie’s voice rose, more excited than angry. ‘Listen, Mary Cassatt Vernon, you and I are going to neutralize the hell out of Aunt Gayle, and Rob helped me brainstorm a plan. We …’
Maurie spoke on for a considerable length of time before Cassie could get a word in. ‘A lawsuit?’
‘You haven’t been paying strict attention, sis. No, we don’t want to actually file a docket under the circumstances, but to get Aunt Gayle to retract her claws, we want to convince her we might. However, we don’t want to send her anything in writing because that would give her something to show a lawyer. So what we need to decide is how best to confront her. I could contact her by phone, but I think it would impact her more if you went to see her personally—’
‘Me?’ Most of Cassie’s ire flipped to incredulity.
‘Why not? You live close to her. All you have to do is fire a lot of legalese at her very sternly. Rob made me a list of buzzwords: civil litigation, punitive damages for mental anguish, wrongful detainment, religious discrimination, harassment, libel—’
‘Then you go see Aunt Gayle,’ said Cassie.
‘But I’m trying to finish an article for the Journal of Greek Prehistory! I’d have to take time off, drive down there—’
‘Excuses, excuses. You’d find time if you wanted to go shopping with her. What’s the matter, Berthe? You having second thoughts?’
‘What? No! I’m so pissed at Aunt Gayle I feel like an IED on feet. If I get in the same room with her, I might kill her.’
‘Then I’ll go with you, all right?’ said Cassie. ‘We’ll both go. Period.’
I had never actually been inside Wilma Lou’s house before, although she had barged into mine often enough. So, after handing her the angel-cum-Trojan-horse that had gotten me inside, I was able to establish myself as a nice visitor by looking around her living room and complimenting everything from her pseudo-crewel drapes to her waxed wooden coffee table with a piecrust edge, meaning a carved ruffle. I bet myself most of the furnishings had come from Ethan Allen, especially the severe brown sofa and its two repressively tall and dignified brass lamps on matching end tables.
‘Such nice tables,’ I said. ‘Solid wood. They don’t make tables like that anymore.’
‘Ain’t that the truth. I had ’em since I was married. Would y’all like a glass of sweet tea?’
‘Yes, that would be lovely.’ Good. I was going to be allowed to stay in her deadly dark parlor and – oh, Christ, there was a large picture of a blond Aryan Jesus on the wall, but also something even more incongruous: a smallish crucifix with a Jesus who looked like a clothespin?
As soon as Wilma Lou turned her back to go get the tea, I moved in for a closer look. Yeppers, mercifully blank-faced, Jesus was made of a clothespin, all right, split in
half by removal of its wire spring, then reversed with its flat sides facing, ingeniously forming a bifurcated figure with round head, a torso of sorts and tapering legs. His arms were made of the narrow ends of another clothespin glued at the appropriate suffering angle on to – oh my God in whom I did not believe, the cross was made of clothespins too, segments glued side by side and puzzled together with their narrow ends overlapping.
Bearing two tall glasses of tea, Wilma Lou returned from the kitchen to catch me peering at the grotesque thing.
‘My daddy made that,’ she said proudly. ‘He was a real artist.’
Doubtful. But to be fair, the clothespin crucifix was arguably no tackier than my makeshift pantheist angel.
‘Why don’t you have a seat, Beverly.’ Yet Wilma Lou regarded me doubtfully as I perched at one end of her sofa, and she blurted, ‘I ain’t never gived sweet tea to nobody who wasn’t no Christian before.’
I said cheerfully, ‘Well, there’s a first time for everything. Thank you.’ I sipped the tea. ‘It’s very good.’ If you enjoyed drinking a big glass of candy. ‘You mentioned your father, Wilma Lou. Was he from around here?’
I wanted to get her talking, which she did with gusto. Of course her father was from Skink County, as was her whole family, so during the next hour I heard a great deal about all of them, plus Wilma Lou’s long-deceased husband. I kept her garrulously reminiscing until I hoped she’d more or less forgotten her reservations against me and until the right moment offered itself.
She was holding forth about how her father and her then-fiancé had built the house she still lived in, and I perked up. By now I had drunk enough sugar to make me manic, eyes wide open. With unfeigned interest, I prompted, ‘So you moved in right after you were married?’
‘Yeppers. Folks didn’t need no honeymoons back then.’
‘Weren’t you lonely? My place wasn’t built yet, was it?’
‘No, Papa done that soon after. He said now he knew how to put up a house, he’d go ahead and make him an extra one to rent. I wish he wouldn’t have done that.’
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