Of course Cochran’s is packed, with locals stopping by after work. (She forgets that not everyone is on vacation.) More and more Latinos have migrated north to the proliferating vineyards. Half the video rack is in Spanish and Marian is grateful for the increasing assortment of tortillas and salsas. Then there are the tourists—campers at the state park, couples staying in the upscale nouveau inns—who, like her, are on last minute errands. The River has become popular in recent years. Still, their secluded, funky cabin is far from town. “A healthy hike,” she used to tell her daughters when they voiced adolescent complaints about having been “kidnapped to nowhere.” She looks around for lettuce.
Annie Cochran waves to Marian from the register.
She nods and smiles widely in return, taken aback by her pleasure in being recognised, in belonging.
Cochran’s has expanded over the years. They’ve added racks of comic books and stands of sentimental greeting cards. Rows of hardware and housekeeping items. A wall of local wines.
They’ve always had a decent produce section and Marian rolls her cart there first. Musing over the lettuce—Annie’s field greens look fresh and those romaine hearts are usually OK—she hears a woman talking to a kid.
“Now we’ll want some parsley and basil for the pasta.” The patient, careful tone of domestic tutoring.
How often has she brought the twins here? She turns to smile at mother and child.
The blond woman studies a bunch of semi-wilting parsley.
The flaxen-haired child looks up.
Marian is startled to see an eight or nine-year old girl with severe birth defects: bulging eyes, wide jaw, flattened nose.
“Hi there,” Marian swerves into insincere cheerfulness.
The child slurs something in return.
Her mother glances over and apparently finding Marian harmless, returns to the parsley.
Marian passes on the romaine, selects some purple onions and slides down to the mushrooms. She knows she’s lucky to have two healthy daughters. Certainly this makes up for a slimy ex-husband who she’d take back in a second and nurse through snakebite, scorpion sting and compound fractures.
The mushrooms are pretty fresh; she carefully chooses ones where the membranes from the caps are still attached to the feet. Sam taught her that on their River honeymoon. He taught her most of what she knows about cooking, for she grew up in a non-garlic, non-fungal family.
“Yes, that’s it,” the young mother advises her daughter. “And now, Samantha, we need mushrooms. Maybe ten. Can you count ten mushrooms and bring them to me?”
The girl nods vigorously, wiping back a strand of her fair hair.
Maybe she’s not retarded, thinks Marian. Maybe in a few years surgery will repair her face and speech. Why is she so moved by this child? She doesn’t feel so much saddened as lightened by her presence. Marian’s hands shake as she secures a red twisty on a plastic bag.
Bread, she pulls herself together, remembering she had promised Pam a whole wheat baguette and Sue a sourdough loaf. Their boyfriends have distinctive palates.
As Samantha reaches into the mushroom tray, Marian is tempted to counsel her about avoiding the ones with broken membranes.
The girl embraces her task with enthusiasm, haphazardly tossing the white, spongy objects into a bag.
Toadstools, Marian muses. Do they have toadstools in the Amazon? Maybe Sam’s girlfriend will croak on a lethal kebab.
Mineral water. Sorbet. Cheese. Yes, there were a few forgotten items. When Marian reaches the bread section, the young woman is standing by two other little girls, pretty kids with the same light blond locks as their older sister. They are mulling over the rolls—rosemary and olive? Walnut paprika?
Marian spies her baguettes. She wants to tell the woman she admires her—for coping, for treating her damaged daughter matter-of-factly, for having two more children, for being sanguine about the uncommon assaults of every day life.
But Annie Cochran saves them all from embarrassment, waving broadly to Marian from the cash register. “Is the whole family coming up this year again?” she inquires cheerfully.
“Oh, yes,” says Marion, not missing a beat, telling Annie about the boyfriends’ different tastes in bread. The whole family, yes, membership rearranged. This self-pity is getting old, but she’ll hang on to her pleasurable spite with Sam and his floozy.
Annie is talkative.
Marian unloads her heavily laden cart. This is not the simple errand she anticipated.
As Annie chats about the other summer people, Marian spots the woman and her daughters zipping along the adjacent check-out counter.
The girls are all laughing over there. Their mom is no more than thirty—about the same age as the post-modern garage architect who is now expiring in the Amazon. Marian would have understood if Sam had run off with a steadfast woman like this young mother.
“On vacation?” The other clerk asks the family.
“Oh, yes,” says the mother, “we’ve been looking forward to the river all year.”
“Ri-ver?” asks Samantha in a slow monotone.
“Yes,” says her mom. “River. You remember. Swimming. Floating in the tube.”
The child thinks.
All the other patrons seem to freeze. Listening.
“Splashing,” Samantha says finally. “Splashing in the water.”
“Yes,” her mother laughs and sisters giggle.
“Splashing,” Samantha shines with sheer happiness.
Vacation. Swimming. Floating. Wiggling toes in the river. Splashing, Marian imagines herself splashing, as she waves good-bye to Annie and carries groceries out into the hot evening air.
She smiles, anticipating her daughters and their young men, feeling luckier than she has in months. Sam is like those poor Russians. He doesn’t know what he left behind.
The Night Singers
Your first impression is prison. And they’ve locked up the wrong person.
Obviously it’s not that terrible and you’d never make the comparison to Cecilia, who has been visiting an inmate on death row for years. Death rows because they keep shifting Luis from facility to facility. Luckily, Cecilia says, the prisons have all been in driving or train distance for her. Texas has so many prisons.
More of these senior homes, surely. Of its genre, Lurline Vista is one of the nicer models, but the bleak colour of the common room and the frugal furnishings alarm you. How does Cecilia feel about giving up her cozy home on the hill after fifty years, a good marriage, three children, two thousand political potlucks? Does she feel confined in Lurline Vista?
She greets you at the door with familiar playfulness. A smaller woman today. You remember meeting a trim, handsome, and yes, it must be said, short Professor of Philosophy thirty years ago. Now she’s a few centimetres slighter each time you visit. Under five feet. Partially it’s the bowed legs. And the normal shrinkage of an eighty year old spine. Today she looks tiny, as if she’s sat in a hot bath for too long.
Hugs.
Exclamations of delight.
“Henry, how well you look,” her brown eyes examine you critically.
“Thanks.” Maybe she notices that the paunch has gone since Maynard needled you into working out at the gym.
She hugs you tightly.
“You look great too!”
Her trade mark smile is exhilarating. The hair is still red as fire while yours is distinctly grey. With an exaggerated flourish, you present her favourite purple and pink asters.
She embraces you again in her sturdy arms.
“How about a tour?” she cocks her head ironically.
First the small living room with a French door, armchair, computer. In the adjoining dining area, papers are scattered and stacked on an oak table. A tiny kitchen is crowded with old pots, dulled from time and residues of her herbal medicines. The health food store should name an aisle after her. You’re startled by the old pots, which look a little dingy in this newly painted apartment. But why
would an old woman buy new pots, you can hear her ask.
Sucking in your lower lip, you think about the gorgeous copper sauté pan Maynard bought you for Christmas. Cecilia would not appreciate your sadness, grief, about her kitchen utensils.
The tidy bedroom—books piled high on the glass stand—opens to a patch of veranda. There her children have placed a huge potted cactus. Also a small wrought iron table and chair. The banister will prevent her from falling twelve floors below. Do some people jump? Next door, neighbours have installed a gas barbecue so you imagine there are some evenings when vegetarian Cecilia keeps her patio door shut and bolted.
“That’s it!” she says brightly. “I’ve been wanting to pare down for years and here they certainly give you the opportunity.”
King Lear should have taken equanimity lessons from Cecilia.
“Will Madame join me for a walk?” you ask, extending an elbow.
“As soon as Madame pulls herself together.” She rummages around her micro-home for purse, hat and jacket.
You think how she used to have so much more to pull together, how when you met your dissertation advisor three decades before, she was wonder woman, teaching university, writing books, raising children, agitating to end the war and reform the prison system. She was what your own students today would call a “mentor.” You didn’t know that word then, wouldn’t have used it. Cecilia was more a second mother, although at the time you had a perfectly good mother—a heroic woman from another country, class and time.
Cecilia fostered your unlikely academic ambitions while your own mother worried about your fiscal solvency. Despite her responsibilities to the large world, Cecilia always had time for you. Over the years, she’s read your books in draft, scoffing at the grammar (you finally learned to write “as if” instead of “like” in your mid-thirties) as well as making cogent intellectual interventions. She attended your wedding, understood your divorce, invited you to dinner with an array of girlfriends and boyfriends, bragged about you to her colleagues. Once even helped you get a job. In recent years, she quit teaching, but continued to write and visit Luis on death row, to march, write protest letters and to keep in touch with you long distance. You’ll never forget that evening five years before when she phoned you during a London sabbatical just because you might be lonely. And of course it had been one of those bitter, rainy, desolate English evenings. You visit her whenever you come south, every four or five months. It’s been over a year, this time, you realise abruptly.
Now Cecilia is putting her purse—a transparent cosmetic bag, no doubt suggested by a senior helper—as well as her jacket and hat, into a paper grocery sack. What happened to the charming carrier bag you brought her back from Santorini?
Off you go.
“So how is Maynard? Are you settled in the new house?”
Walking slowly down the overly bright corridor, she pats your shoulder affectionately.
“Yes, yes,” you tune in. “We love the place.” You’re smiling at the thought of your boyfriend’s bald black head under the reading lamp.
“And is he still making up for your shameful lack of industry in the garden?”
“He wanted to send you flowers, all the way from New Jersey,” you laugh.
She smiles. “Give him my love.”
It dawns on you that the elevator takes its time because the doors need to remain open long enough for the careful residents to embark and disembark.
Finally outside, you’re relieved to see that Cecilia is still a good walker, but short legs take short strides.
Each time you reach a curb, you’re sure Cecilia is going to trip. You remember walking with your own mother along these streets, alerting her. “We’re coming to a curb, Mom.” Even now you can see her indignation. So many things you did wrong in her last years. She was 10-15 years older than your friends’ parents and there weren’t any models, you absolved yourself then. Really, all you had needed was patience.
With Cecilia, you’ll do things differently. You pointedly hesitate as you reach a curb, then step down deliberately. She doesn’t seem to notice. More importantly, she doesn’t fall.
Cecilia wants to walk in the cemetery.
But it’s only twenty minutes to the regional park where the two of you used to hike together until you got tired.
“We could go to the hills, hike there, if you like.” Immediately you regret the invitation because of errands and other visits before Clarence’s dinner party.
“No thanks, Henry,” she waves those knobby fingers impatiently. “I’ve been having some trouble with my hip. The cemetery is flat. It’s close. Furthermore, I know you don’t have all day.”
You shrug, guiltily, wondering if she heard reluctance in the invitation, and open the car door for her.
“Besides, they have such lovely flowers there.”
In the one o’clock heat, you wish you had brought a hat. The drought has taken care of the flowers. And the grass. Cecilia strolls steadfastly, her faith in exercise larger than faith in any god. You notice her sturdy new tennis shoes and stop fretting about the curbs.
Mid-day, mid-August, is not the time she’d choose for an amble, but you’re the busy one now. This is the time slot you had, between flying in this morning, going to the archives, and seeing other friends later today. She talks about Luis in the new facility, the restrictions, his last parole board meeting.
You ask a few questions.
Most of the conversation is Cecilia talking, talking. Sometimes repeating, but then don’t you do that yourself?
In the crowded cemetery monuments tilt precariously toward each other, as if in drunken stupors. Because of the earthquake?
She tells you for the third time about moving from her home, packing, giving away, storing, abandoning.
So many headstones. Some 19th century deaths. Then a lot of fatalities from World War I and the flu epidemic. Mostly WASP names until recent years. Now more Latinos. Here you noticed a Leung. And there—a cenotaph covered in Chinese calligraphy.
Cecilia is striding ahead and you hurry to catch up. Why does she like this place? (Years ago she told you about her bargain contract with the crematorium. No sense taking up room in the city once you’re dead, she had hooted.) Does she find companionship here? No, Cecilia has never been sentimental. Flat. The sidewalk is flat. Her hip hurts.
Driving back to Lurline Vista, you ask, tentatively, how she likes her new home.
“Not much.” She closes her eyes.
“I’m sorry. Maybe there’s another …”
“No, they’re all pretty much the same. I checked. You know, it’s funny, old people used to shop for coffins and I thought I’d saved myself all that trouble. But old people are older now and we shop for retirement homes. It’s a sellers’ market.”
Coffins for the living, you hold your tongue.
“So do you take any of the craft classes?”
“No, so far I’ve been too busy going to the prison, visiting the grandchildren.”
“Great that you’re so busy.”
She shrugs.
“And is it quiet down here, in the middle of town, to write, to sleep?”
“Sometimes it’s loud in the evenings—all the banging of car doors after the last movie. Shouts from the street. And on Saturday nights, a group of young people gather in the park next door to sing.”
You’re about to protest, to offer to speak to the manager of Lurline Vista. Finally, something you can do for Cecilia.
“They have lovely voices,” she muses. “I don’t know where they come from, the young people, I mean. It’s nothing formal or organised.” She tips her head back reflectively.
Is she imagining these concerts? Old people do create their own worlds as they head off to …
“Yes, this is Saturday. I have the music to look forward to tonight.”
Hugging Cecilia, you’re reluctant to release her. You have a full life: a splendid partner, a great job, good health, but you miss Cecilia’s—wh
at to call it—Grace? Magic? This is ridiculous. Everyone has to let go sometime. And it’s not as if she’s sick or dying. You’ll visit longer next time. Holding back tears, you manage, “Love you.”
“I love you too, Henry.”
Now you’ve lost interest in errands at the university, coffee with Bobby, dinner with Clarence. You hold her tighter.
She steps back, smiling enigmatically. “Did you wish to say something, Henry?”
You want to ask if you can sleep on her couch tonight, with the window open, listening to the night singers.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful for residency fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. I also acknowledge support from The McKnight Foundation and the University of Minnesota.
Many thanks to the writers who gave me invaluable responses to drafts of these stories over a period of years: Margaret Love Denman, Heid Erdrich, Pamela Fletcher, Jana Harris, Lori Lei Hokyo, Helen Longino, Leslie Adrienne Miller, Martha Roth, Lex Williford and Susan Welch. I appreciate the excellent editorial help of Lori Hokyo and Andria Williams. I thank publisher Ross Bradshaw for inviting me to be part of this inaugural series of short fiction.
The following stories have appeared in journals or been broadcast (sometimes in a slightly different incarnation). I am grateful to my fine editors. “On Earth,” The Virginia Quarterly Review; “Until Spring,” Witness; “The Palace of Physical Culture,” BBC Radio 4; “Japanese Vase,” The Berkeley Fiction Review; “Impermanence,” BBC Radio 4; “Flat World,” Gargoyle.
About the Author
Valerie Miner is the award-winning author of fourteen books, including novels, short fiction collections, and nonfiction. Miner’s work has appeared in the Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Salmagundi, New Letters, Ploughshares, the Village Voice, Prairie Schooner, the Gettysburg Review, the Times Literary Supplement, the Women’s Review of Books, the Nation, and other journals. Her stories and essays have been published in more than sixty anthologies. A number of her pieces have been dramatized on BBC Radio 4. Her work has been translated into German, Turkish, Danish, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, and Dutch. She has won fellowships and awards from the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, the Heinz Foundation, the Bogliasco Foundation, Fundación Valparaiso, the Australia Council Literary Arts Board, and numerous other organizations. She has received Fulbright fellowships to Tunisia, India, and Indonesia. Winner of a Distinguished Teaching Award, she has taught for over twenty-five years and is now a professor and artist in residence at Stanford University. She travels internationally giving readings, lectures, and workshops. Her website is www.valerieminer.com.
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