Seen It All and Done the Rest (26 page)

FIFTY-TWO

Z
ora had a date with her friend from Morehouse. Victor was having dinner with Betty for the second time this week, and Abbie had gone to Tybee for a weekend visit with Peachy, who had stepped up his lobbying efforts with Louie. For his part, Louie had agreed to finally come down and see the place after three days of watching the Weather Channel to be sure there was no sign of a tropical storm. With everybody so scattered, Aretha and I decided to use the time to do some detail work on the inside of the house. We were painting the trim in the dining room a delicate shade of ivory. The pornographic graffiti was a distant bad memory, and the new windows we opened wide allowed light and fresh air in abundance.

I was sitting cross-legged on a cushion, painting an old-fashioned floorboard, and Aretha was perched halfway up an aluminum stepladder touching up the ceiling trim. I liked working with Aretha. We talked about everything and nothing with an ease that surprised me, given the thirty-year difference in our ages. Sometimes we didn’t talk about anything at all, like today, but the company still made the job go faster. We’d been working in silence for a couple of hours when Aretha suddenly asked a question as if we’d spent the afternoon in conversation.

“Your son was Zora’s father, right?”

“Yes,” I said. “His name was Ira. He was an actor, too.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Did you find it hard to balance being an artist with being a mother?”

I laughed. “Impossible.”

She laughed, too. “Thanks a lot!”

“I was lucky. Ira’s father was able to take on the primary responsibility for raising him and did a much better job than I ever would have done.”
Although he blamed himself for Ira’s drinking until the day he died.

“Joyce Ann’s father is really hands-on, too.”

“Well, then she’s a lucky little girl.”

“Did you ever regret it?”

No point in lying to the girl. She already knew the answer to that question. “Constantly, but I never thought I could be a great mother. I
knew
I could be a great artist.”

And that was the unvarnished truth, in all its selfish glory. “And I was.”

“And you are.” She smiled.

I smiled, too. “Do you miss spending more time on your work?”

“I do,” she said, “but I had a lot going on in my life and I needed to take some time and sort things out.”

I remembered the pictures of her and her husband in
Dig It!
It couldn’t have been easy to come back from that with sanity and optimism intact, but she had done it. I wondered how.

“Abbie helped me realize that it takes time to figure it all out and that the most important thing for me to do was to be patient with myself and take the time I needed to heal.”

“Easier said than done.”

Aretha grinned and turned back to her painting. “Not once you start doing it.”

FIFTY-THREE

W
e spent the day refinishing floors inside the house. Buffing off all the gunk was hard work, but at the end of it, we could finally see the beauty of the wood again. I congratulated Victor on a job well done and he actually smiled at me. He was spending more time with his mother, and although he hadn’t said it, I think they were both circling around the idea of him moving back in with her again.

Zora was babysitting for Aretha so I had the house to myself for a few hours. My plan was to take a nice hot shower and then fix myself some dinner, but first I decided to retrieve two messages that had come in to the cellphone I never carry with me.

Howard’s was the first one. “Oh, my darling, I can’t believe you’re not picking up! What is the point of a cellphone if you never take it out of the house with you?”

He sounded stressed and annoyed.

“Well, they have lost their minds over here. Everything is up in the air. I’m on my way to Paris for the weekend, but I think that weasel critic from the paper has your number and will probably call you. Somebody at the theater gave it to him. Three guesses who, but do not talk to him! No matter what he says, do nothing until you hear from me!”

I wondered what the hell was going on.

“You’re a star,” Howard said, his voice trembling with indignation. “They don’t deserve you!”

That didn’t sound so good. I couldn’t even imagine what he was talking about. I saved the message and went on to the next one.

“Hello, Miss Josephine,” said a voice I recognized as belonging to the snide little drama critic who was François’s girlfriend’s biggest booster. I realized that it had been days since I’d ever thought about the theater wars and wondered what kind of progress Howard was making. “Are you there? Well, call me back as fast as you can. I’ll pay, but I can’t go to press without a quote from you since The Human Theatre Company has just announced that they’ll be closing their season with a brand-new mounting of
Medea.
”

I sat down.
Do nothing until you hear from me.

“François will direct, of course.”

Of course.

“Consuelo Rivera will be starring, which is the big news!”

The really big news.

“So call me, please. I need a reaction and I’m on deadline. Oh, and congratulations on that reality thing you’re doing. Everybody’s talking about it.
Ciao!
”

The house was quiet and empty. Zora wasn’t around and obviously neither was my good sense. Here I was, scraping years of crap off a bunch of filthy floors, and my artistic life was being snatched right out from under me. It was time to fight back. I picked up the phone and punched in the number. He answered on the second ring.

“It’s Josephine Evans,” I said. “I didn’t miss your deadline, did I?”

FIFTY-FOUR

I
think I just burned a very big bridge,” I told Abbie the next day as we strolled along the aisles of the nursery Abbie had dragged me to at the crack of dawn. She justified the insane hour by telling me that all the best plants would be gone by nine o’clock since the West End Growers Association gardeners all knew about this place, too.

“And you know how they are,” she had said and rolled her eyes. I had no idea how they were, but that didn’t save me from having to accompany Abbie on her early-morning mission.

Of course, I grumbled, but only because I didn’t want her to make a habit of these outings. I’d been getting up earlier since I was usually too worn out to stay up very late, but I still considered myself to be a night person. Repairing old houses was a temporary blip on my screen. I didn’t want to undo a lifetime of getting acclimated to theater hours by turning everything around. The truth was, I enjoyed these early-morning excursions. The smell of the wet dirt, the racks and racks of seeds, and the tiny seedlings that always looked too fragile to safely leave the greenhouse were all exotic to me. The only thing that was familiar was the absolute nature of the whole process.

Theater is like that, too. There is room in some performances for a little improvising, but that is a tightwire act best left to geniuses. For those of us who are merely mortal, the theater is a place of absolutes. You either know the line or you don’t. You either understand the character or you don’t. You can hit your mark, pick up your cue, and arrive for rehearsal on time, or you can’t. Ultimately, whether you do or don’t, at eight o’clock on any given evening the house lights will go down, the spot will find its mark, and the audience’s collective wish that you will indeed make magic hangs in the air like the smell of hashish in an Amsterdam coffee house. Abbie had explained to me that gardening is like that, too. If you don’t get the plants in by Good Friday, no amount of good intentions will produce tomatoes by the Fourth of July.

“Sometimes you have to burn a few bridges to keep from crossing the same river twice,” Abbie said. “What’d you do?”

“I told the biggest drama critic in Amsterdam that François had completely lost his mind and his vision, that his board was clueless, and that his girlfriend couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag.”

Abbie looked surprised only by the last point. “I thought you said she was talented.”

“She wants to close the season with
Medea.
”

“François would never do that.”

“He’s directing.”

Abbie stopped in her tracks. “You’re kidding, right?”

“I wish I was.”

“Well, that’s just tacky. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” I said, watching two women who were easily eighty-plus pushing along a cart filled with potted calla lilies. Despite their age, their gait was more stride than stumble. They nodded as they passed us and we nodded back. “I guess I’ll have to wait and see what Howard says. He’s kind of my general on the ground.”

“What do you want to do?”

Once again, Abbie hit the damn nail on the head. She knew it, too. I could tell from the grin that was slowly spreading across her face.
What do I want to do?
Be invited back to do one more
Medea
in a long line of
Medeas
? Work with François on something we had already explored fully, and then some? Throw cold water on his girlfriend and hope she’d melt like the witch in
The Wizard of Oz
?

“I have no idea what I want,” I answered her honestly, surprised at how comfortable I was with such real uncertainty.

Abbie nodded. “Well, you’ll figure it out.”

“I better figure it out,” I said. “I’m out of work, in debt, and in doubt.”

“You left out the most important thing,” Abbie said, picking up a calla lily to put in our cart.

“And what is that?”

“Free,” she said happily. “You’re absolutely free.”

FIFTY-FIVE

Z
ora and I left work on the house to Victor for the day and went over to the antiwar demonstration in West End. It was an overcast morning and both of us were quiet on our way to the park. I don’t know what I expected, but the crowd was pitiful. A few old radicals, some students, a few curious bystanders, and a homeless man whose rest we were disturbing. We were gathering in the community park on Abernathy, but nobody seemed to be in charge. There was a small stage set up with a podium and a microphone, but no one had approached it, even to play roadie and say “test, test,” to see if it was working. Everybody was kind of standing around waiting for some more people to show up and feeling a little foolish for being there.

I felt a little silly myself. Where were all the throngs of angry, politicized people, come to do battle with their government and emerge righteously victorious? These folks looked frail and tentative. There was none of the energy of the antiwar demonstrations in Paris and Amsterdam. There was none of the feeling here that our presence as citizens could really affect anything our government did one way or another.

“They should have tried to flash it,” Zora said, breaking into my woolgathering.

“What?”

“Where you put it on the Net that we’re all going to gather at a certain time and place and do a certain thing and then go home.”

“You call that flashing?” I said. My use of the word ran more toward seedy men in trench coats, opening them to treat innocent passersby to a glimpse of the family jewels.

“Not flashing,” she said, smiling as she always did at my continuing ignorance when it came to all things Internet. “Flash mobs. It’s just something people were doing for a while. They would all show up at a store or something and just do something together.”

“Something like what?” I said, watching the homeless man gathering up his things, muttering darkly about us all being a bunch of communists.

“I don’t know. Clap their hands, sing something. They went to a toy store in New York and everybody gathered in front of this big elephant they had and bowed down to it.”

“That’s crazy.”

Zora shrugged. “It wouldn’t have to be for something silly. People could come together for something like this. Something good.”

I nodded. “Well, then I’m sorry they didn’t do it, too.”

When Abbie and Aretha pulled up together in the truck, they saw us immediately in the small group and waved. Zora and I waved back as they got out and started in our direction. Aretha had on her overalls and work boots. Abbie was wearing an orange jacket and purple pants. She had on turquoise Chinese shoes with pink roses embroidered on the toes. In the middle of more conservatively dressed people, she looked like a tropical bird that had just flown in to jazz up the proceedings.

“Who’s in charge?” she said, after we all hugged our greetings and she had a chance to look around. Four or five more women arrived, two carrying signs that said
WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER
.

“You are,” I said, only half kidding. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

“No problem,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation and headed for the stage, which was really just a slightly elevated platform.

Zora reached into her bag for her technology and started taping.

Abbie walked up to the mike and smiled at the valiant few. “Good morning,” she said. “I’m Abbie Allen Browning. I am an American citizen and I am against all the wars that are currently being waged in my name around the world.”

There was scattered applause. Aretha and I clapped loudly and Aretha even whistled like people do at baseball games. I smiled to myself. Abbie was working her citizenship show again.

“I am a peace activist,” Abbie said. “That means I am always active for peace. As a citizen of a country at war, I am determined to show by my words and my actions that I do not support violence as a solution to human problems.”

More scattered applause. Still sparse, but people were moving forward a little at a time. Abbie smiled encouragingly.

“So does anybody else want to say anything about why you’re here?”

Everybody looked around like kids do when the teacher asks a question about an assignment nobody’s read. I looked around, too, but Aretha was already moving to the microphone. Abbie smiled at her and stepped aside. Aretha smiled back and faced her fellow citizens.

“I’m Aretha Hargrove and I’m here because my daughter Joyce Ann is only four and I want to make a better world for her to grow up in.”

Aretha moved over next to Abbie and they both looked at me. I headed for the mike.

“I’m Josephine Evans and I’m here because people in other countries need to know that not all Americans support the war.”

I stood there for a minute, wondering if there was something else I should say, but another woman was already heading for the mike, so I stepped aside.

“My name is Margaret Hudson,” she said. “I’m here because my daughter is stationed in Iraq and nobody can explain to me what she’s doing there other than getting shot at by a whole bunch of people she doesn’t even know.”

People were starting to line up at the foot of the stage. The impromptu testimonials were starting to draw a modest crowd. I looked at Abbie and she grinned at me.

“Be careful what you ask for,” she whispered.

“My name is Harold Hoskins,” said a man with dreadlocks and an old green army jacket. “I’m here because I was in Nam and this is the same damn thing all over again, ’scuse my French, ladies.”

“Tell the truth, brother!” a man said from the front of the platform. “Tell the truth!”

As each person said why they were there, they joined the group of us standing with Abbie, nodding at each other like you do at Sunday-morning church services.

“My name is Tamara Williams and I’m here because my brother is in Afghanistan.”

“My name is Edward Dennis and I’m here because we got no business over there in the first place.”

“Excuse me,” the woman behind me whispered as we applauded Mr. Dennis. “Don’t you have a messed-up house on Martin Luther King?”

I turned to look into her face. “Yes,” I said, wondering how she knew me.

“Well, I think it’s great what you’re doing,” she said. “It’s about time somebody took a stand. We watch you all the time.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “Keep up the good work.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We will.”

By the time we got to the end of the line of people who wanted to testify, there were almost fifty people on the stage and everybody was grinning like we had just marched over to the Pentagon and shaken our finger in some general’s shocked face. I guess we hadn’t done much if you measure the morning objectively. Gathered up a few people for an antiwar demonstration in a neighborhood where almost nobody seemed to notice. Nobody except those of us who showed up like the good citizens Abbie keeps telling us we have to be and spoke up for peace. In public. In the company of our neighbors. One by one until we all stood together. Stronger, even if just for that moment. A little stronger.

Zora was the last one in line, her technology still in hand. She swept it over the group and then stepped up to the mike.

“I’m Zora Evans,” she said. “And I’m here because there’s no place else I’d rather be.”