“Hello, Ella.” He flushed.
We stood rooted a second, awkward, before reaching out at the same time for a handshake. I’m sure, if we hadn’t had the time in my territory, if he’d really been only Birdie’s uncle, I’d have offered my cheek for a kin-kiss, he’d have given me a familial hug. I wondered if our children sensed this new unease between their parents. Wondered, also, what he’d said to his boys about his trip.
“Hi, Uncle Rufus,” Birdie said loudly, making everything seem natural. “I came to take care of Granddaddy.”
“That’s good.”
“Hi, Aunt Ella,” Borden and Bailey said at the same time. Both were dressed as if for church, in blazers with shirts and ties, pressed slacks. Both also wore running shoes, perhaps on the theory that no one in a hospital bed would be looking at your feet. They’d risen when Daddy and I came into the cozy intensive care waiting room, where the half dozen other visitors sat reading People, Newsweek, Texas Monthly, appearing to be managing, hanging in.
Then the nurse signaled me, and I followed her into the ICU, to the glassed-in room where my mother lay partially propped up in bed.
“Hello, Mother,” I said, tucking my hair behind my ears in order to look neater when I leaned toward her.
“It’s Ella, isn’t it?” Her voice sounded hoarse, as if she’d had a tube down her throat.
“Yes, Mother. It’s me.”
“They think I don’t know Terrell is gone.” She had an IV taped in the back of her hand, and wires monitoring her. “But I do. Apparently I tried to explain to the doctor what a sweet baby she was, such a pretty thing, and worth it after all.” She made a faint smile. She wore a hospital gown and her hair had been brushed for visitors, but flattened and parted on the wrong side, the auburn color faded. Someone had even applied some of her own coral lipstick to her mouth, but in a too-thick, overgenerous manner. No wonder sick people did not look themselves. Her breath had a faint metallic odor.
“You look good,” I told her, in a clumsy attempt to be positive. “Your color is good.”
“Time gets—scrambled—when you lose a snippet. I was back there somewhere.” Her voice was weak, but she looked in good spirits, somehow younger.
“I’m glad you’re here.” I reached up a hand to twist my hair back. What a dunce. I hadn’t meant here, in the hospital, I’d meant—
“I don’t know, dear, the present is overrated.” She again smiled, with effort. Then, shutting her eyes, waved me away. “That’s enough for now,” she whispered.
Outside her room, the nurse checked her monitor, one of a row of monitors, each with an undulating line. Back in the waiting room, Daddy was explaining to his grandchildren that the first three days were the danger period, that sometimes things went wrong after a stroke at that time, like a stretched rubber band snapping back. Birdie stood by his side.
“How is she?” Red asked.
“She’s—” I couldn’t find the words. Her tone had been different, girlish. “—Quite lucid.”
The cousins stood in a clump, waiting to go in. Borden, once tall as my daddy, now taller by a bit, looked panicked. He reached up a hand to smooth back his hair. “What do you say in there, Aunt Ella? Dad? What are we supposed to say?”
What, indeed, to one’s grandmother in intensive care. “Tell her—tell her she looks good,” I instructed.
Daddy made a few deep sounds. He seemed worn out but not yet wound down, and refused to sit, waiting for his turn to go in again. “I’m getting into gear to start walking,” he told me and the waiting room at large. “You can bet this scare with your mother waved a red flag where the two of us are concerned.”
“You must be thirsty,” I suggested.
“Swallowing—” He looked around, anxious, as if for a water fountain.
I located four quarters and sent him to the machines past the nurse’s station.
Alone, Red and I found a small upholstered sofa and sat, watching the doorway. “Your dad’s holding up,” he said.
“You think? He hasn’t stopped talking—”
He looked around the room. “This place wipes me out. My dad used to be a regular, in the old wing. First he broke his thigh bone, falling off a ladder, and was mad as an ox till it healed, then he got blood poisoning, which the doctor, a kid just out of Baylor Med, had never seen a case of, then his heart wore out. My mom gave up on him, so I was the one who came around.” He smiled at me. “I’m glad to see you, even in this not-so-great surrounding.”
“I’m glad to see you.”
“I started to call a dozen times.”
“I wish you had.”
“I didn’t know what to say.”
I nodded.
“I didn’t know where we’d left it—” He looked a question at me.
“You got what you came for.” I tried to sound as if that was fine.
He was in a white shirt, the sleeves rolled up, looking much as he had when he’d driven away from my house. “True. Some validation that it wasn’t all my fault.”
“Oh, Red, it always takes two to mess things up.”
He met my eyes. “This isn’t the right place, and your dad’s in no shape to consider the idea, but I’d like to come courting.” He smiled at using the old-fashioned term.
I drew in my breath, caught unaware. Pleasure swept over me. Keeping my voice steady, I suggested, “I guess at our age, we have to ask the children.” I watched a woman supported by two younger women pass by in the hall.
“I’m asking you.”
“But how can we—see each other, that way?” Though I so much wanted to, to be back in that car with Red, leaning against the door, in that space with no one else there, everything easy, him close enough to touch, talking about things we couldn’t tell anyone else. Past that? Past that, I couldn’t let myself think. The idea of telling my mother that Terrell’s fine husband was seeing Terrell’s scruffy younger sister, that I could presume to have designs on my sister’s man, the father of her fine children. I shut my eyes at the thought. Seeing her face propped up on the pillow in ICU, her hair too flat, her mouth out of boundaries, a mother I never knew, back in a happier time.
“I don’t know,” Red said. “But I’d like to try.”
“Your boys?”
His eyes watched the door. “The boys and I had a talk. I told them, after the crash, that I’d rent out the house, her house, their house, for a year, and then we could sell it and put the money into their education, or we could hold it for them to live in. When I came back from seeing you, both told me, ‘Sell it, Dad.’ I think they could see they weren’t going to go back, just the two of them, once they were out of school.”
“That’s tough for them, dealing with that.”
“For all of us.”
Then the children swarmed into the waiting room, looking keyed up but relieved to have paid their proper respects to their grandmother. Past them, in the hall, I saw the nurse snag my daddy and lead him into intensive care.
Borden, his handsome fair head bobbing up and down, wanting to report, said, “I told her, like you said, Aunt Ella. I told her, ‘You look good, Grandmom,’ and, sort of, she did—”
Bailey interrupted, his jacket hanging loose on his thin frame, his cowlick turned skyward. “She said she had a picture of us, on her desk at home.”
Birdie stood on tiptoe, hair tied back, between the two tall cousins, adding her part. “Grandma said, ‘Imagine, I started all this family,’ the first thing, when we walked into her room.”
Then the trio fell silent when Daddy stumbled in, gazing all around. His face streaked, an open can of orange juice in his hand, he came toward us.
“Hey,” I said, rising and putting my arms around his heaving chest. “Hey, there. Come sit down.”
The tears soaked into his thick beard as he sank onto the small public sofa. “Your mother asked me just now, looking square at me, ‘Wasn’t she the most beautiful baby, ever?’ ”
17
I could
n’t have imagined a house more different in every way from the one where my sister had lived for most of her married life than the one Red had moved into with his sons. He’d given me directions, penned on the back of a hospital napkin—out 1-35 north to Farm-to-Market 1825 east—and I found the limestone house with little difficulty, in the old part of Pflugerville where, he said, there hadn’t been a new real estate listing in decades. Places having been handed down in families for a century, farming families not about to sell to strangers. And I could see that to my nephews, used to the luxurious hills, woods, lake in West Lake Hills, their relocation to what in my day had been just a tiny German wide-spot-in-the-road must have seemed an exile to the ultimate boonies. But then, in my day, that parcel of land where Red had moved his life wasn’t yet the hub of a techno-strip that stretched in all directions, bringing whole new communities with it. It was just a little burg that published a weekly newspaper called the Pflugerville Pflag.
Standing on the wide porch, Birdie at my side, arriving as invited for an early supper, Daddy still keeping watch at the hospital, I tried to imagine Terrell here. Terrell driving here, walking in the still-baking, early-evening heat across the rocky yard through a stand of live oaks. It stopped me in my tracks. I could not envision her ever setting foot on this ground. And wondered if that fact, her total absence here, was a relief to the boys. Or, if, instead, it made the place unbearable.
“You found your way,” Red said, opening the door to the cool stone house.
“I used to come out here, to Pflugerville.”
“In school?”
“Beer drinking in some dance hall with Buddy. Don’t tell my folks.” It didn’t seem all that long ago: I was dressed the same, in a long skirt, and my hair was the same, wild.
“If you won’t tell them I live here.”
“Too late.”
“Uncle Rufus,” Birdie said, “I brought something for supper.”
“No fair. We’re having barbeque.”
She laughed. “Not to eat. That would be bad manners. This is like a, you know, present you bring if you’re having supper at somebody’s house.” She’d worn her Amish dress, which she’d packed, along with her best baggy shorts, for our trip. At home, she’d asked did she have to bring the awful elephant-gray jumper, then she’d asked me if I was going to take my green linen dress, the dress she’d worked so hard to help me find at the thrifts. When I claimed I’d lost it, she said, “Okay.” A good daughter, knowing when not to ask questions.
Red sent her back to the kitchen to find the boys, then he and I stood a minute while I looked around the vast living room, with its old four-person sofa, four stuffed chairs, a rug or two. It could have been someone’s grandparents’ house in the Hill Country. “They hate this, don’t they?” I asked him.
“They do.” He’d changed to jeans and a T-shirt, and could, I thought, in his wire-rim glasses, with his cropped dark hair, have just come back from Dell or Compaq or IBM or Texas Instruments. All he lacked was the pocket full of pens. “Borden is counting the days till he leaves.”
“And Bailey?”
He shook his head. “He says no way he’s commuting an hour a day to graduate West Lake Hills High and no way he’s going to transfer to P-f-Pfucking Pfluggie, as he calls the local school.” He looked dejected. “If he drops out, I have to hold myself responsible.” He shoved his hands in his pockets.
I crossed my arms, still awkward with him, still very aware of the two of us alone, talking of real matters. This evening, we had held back from even shaking hands. “In hindsight,” I asked, “should you have stayed in West Lake Hills for his last year?”
“I wasn’t there when she died. I’d moved. It wasn’t a matter of staying. Should I have moved back in? Should I have moved my stuff into that bedroom we’d shared? Eaten at that dining table? Been reminded every day?”
I shrugged and smiled. “Probably.”
“Sure, probably. In hindsight.” He seemed somewhat cheered, just to talk about it. “Anyway, we can still find you a beer out here in the sticks.”
“Good. On the bayou we serve only white wine.” I was still hugging my own arms, like a girl on a first date.
He led me on a tour of the house on the way to the fridge. He pointed out a leak in the roof, one of three left from his daddy’s day, although not a problem in a rainless era, a couple of ancient but functional bathrooms, three musty oak-floored bedrooms with solid oak doors, a kitchen with no amenities except vast space, a rear porch once used for churning butter and for storing the wringer washing machine. And, out back, in the cleared yard away from the shade of cottonwoods, pecans, and sycamores, away from a low-growing catalpa, a stand of pink, purple, and red hollyhock blooming away in the bone-dry twilight.
In the dining area opening off the kitchen (a space bigger than my front sitting room), the boys lounged with Birdie seated between them. Like mannerly males, they rose, then sat again when I entered the room. Borden, in navy cargo pants and a navy polo, Bailey, in khaki cargo pants and polo, with a matching bucket cap. All their clothes from Abercrombie, so my daughter had reported. I wondered if they had girlfriends? Surely, at their age. But what did I know about boys who had all the accomplishments and achievements it took to get into the Ivies? Terrell hadn’t mentioned girl or even guy friends, just their sports records, their academic honors. To me, now, their body language unmistakably said: We’re truly pissed to have ended up here.
Taking my longneck, icy cold, I tarried behind Red, who’d gone back into the living room. Lingering in the wide hall so common to old houses, I eavesdropped a bit.
“I’m having a Dutch beer and pica-brain here is having a Mexican beer, but we can’t serve you one, because you’re only fourteen.” This was Bailey speaking to my daughter.
Birdie answered, “That’s all right. I’m not a beer drinker anyway.” I imagined her lifting her immense fan of frizzy hair. “I like orange juice, and if you don’t have that, I like Snapple.” She paused, then said, “My mom drinks iced coffee.”
“She asked for a Lone Star.”
“Then I guess she’s having a date with your daddy.”
“She’s not having a date with our dad, Birdie.” Borden’s voice rose. “She can’t, because she’s our mom’s—,” he stammered. “Was our mom’s sister. That’s incest.”
“No, it isn’t, or my mom wouldn’t do it.” Birdie made a noise as if moving her chair. “Who’s cooking supper?” She changed the subject.
“Nobody cooks here.” Borden sounded glum.
“Nano-brain means that we buy stuff and bring it home.”
She explained, “I cook lunch on the weekend at my house, and my mom cooks supper. That’s what we do at our house.”
Wandering out of earshot, I joined Red on the wide sofa, tucking my long blue-and-black skirt behind my legs.
“And the topic was—?” he asked.
“Whether it’s incest if we’re having a date.”
He looked away. “Ouch.”
“I know.”
We rose, not looking at one another, in unspoken agreement, I suppose, that sitting alone on the sofa drinking beer was not a great idea. “Want to see what I’m working on?” he asked.
“Very much.”
Following, I told him that Daddy had gone home with us, got changed into another starched blue shirt, and another yellow tie, and gone back. That they were moving Mother to a private room tomorrow. That he wouldn’t hear of leaving her and would spend the night, as before, in the waiting room.
“I’ll stop back by to see him. The logistics of Borden’s leaving have slowed me down.”
“Will he fly?”
He sighed, talking to the air in front of him, me trailing behind. “If he flies, I have to crate up all his essential possessions; if we drive, I can load up the car.” He brushed that away with his hand.
We went into what must, in his parents’ day, have been the master bedroom, the room where his mom and dad slept. It had window
s on the front of the house, through which we could see the stepping-stones and, past the front yard, two cars going slowly by. On the east wall, facing us as we came into the room, he had a blowup of the famous sixties Valley Citrus Workers march. The men (all men) in work pants, wrinkled shirts, bandanas tied around their necks to keep off the sun, worn shoes, carrying (at least for the newspaper photo) banners. On the north wall, facing the front windows, he had a similar blowup of a group of men and women, mostly Mexican in appearance, some Anglo, at computers, their screens detailing wages and hours at the orchards. Around the walls he had computer stations and chairs.
“Who works here?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a computer whiz borrowed from Dell, Chinese woman, who’s training a core group to go to the plantations and teach the workers.”
I made a slow turn around the room. “Where are the oranges?”
“Oranges?”
I was thinking of seasonal workers like myself, untrained workers who learned on the job. Of gardeners like Henry, whose hands and eyes “knew” the plants he tended, knew how to dig those trenches to drain them, how to breed them and feed them, who knew their family histories back to Eden. And who taught me. “You remember the head rose gardener at Belle Vue,” I said.
“Henry, right? I guess I envied him a bit, his work.”
“Well, if you were talking about Henry, you’d have to talk about roses, how much he loved roses. The same way that these gardeners must love oranges. Must be able to shut their eyes and tell from the smell and feel of the fruit what kind of orange they’re holding.” I thought of old roses the color of mandarin oranges, and then of tangerines, of clementines, of marmalades, of perfumes made from the precious bergamot oranges of Italy and Spain, of orange-blossom weddings in the Rio Grande Valley. “Think about that killing freeze of eighty-nine,” I reminded him, “the orange gardeners covering the trees with tarps, putting those little smudgy pots under the wraps. And then losing not just the fruit, but losing every tree. One by one the trees dying at the roots. And then losing their jobs. Think of Henry, if all his roses died. If he had no roses and no job.”
Ella in Bloom Page 11
