Home Another Way (6 page)
“Fool city girl,” I heard behind me. “Got the flue closed.”
Through teary eyes, I watched a very short, very fat woman clomp over to the woodstove and turn a small knob at the base of the chimney. She then opened another window before plopping down on the sheeted couch. Dust puffed around her. She swatted perspiration bubbles from her upper lip.
“Uh, who are you?” I asked, somewhat perturbed, despite the rapidly dissipating smoke.
“Memory Jones, I am. Memory Jones, and you ain’t never gonna forget me. No one does—that’s for sure. Boy, you sure are rude. Just like folks say. Not even a thank you or nothing. Nope, not nothing. You ain’t like your pa, no, no, no.”
She hauled herself to her feet with a grunt and “Amen,” then banged her heels against the wood floor, knocking the ice from her grubby boots. She shook her dark blond hair, the kind that always looked unwashed, and thin, so her ears poked through.
“You need to get yourself a grateful spirit, yep. Ain’t never gonna be happy without one.”
“Look, I’m not trying to be rude or ungrateful,” I said, though I was clearly being both, and was quite unbothered by it. “I just wasn’t expecting . . . visitors.”
Memory’s fleshy cheeks rolled up over her eyes as she laughed from her gut, mouth wide open and full of white teeth. “Miss Mary-Margaret didn’t tell you we was coming?”
“Who?”
As if on command, a gaggle of women poured through the front door, tugging on mops and pails and empty cardboard boxes. Maggie led the fuchsia-coated parade; I counted seven out of twelve grandmas wearing that fashion atrocity.
“Sarah, cleaning is no fun alone,” Maggie said. “So I got some of the ladies from the church to come help you.”
“How did you know I was here?” I asked.
“Maggie’s got spies all around,” Memory hooted.
I stood there and shook hands as Maggie orchestrated introductions. Beatrice Rawlings had the smooth, soft hands, Editha DeMay’s hands were gnarly tree roots; I gave up trying to remember after that. Instead, I watched as strangers dusted furniture, washed windows, and cleaned out closets and cupboards. Memory scrubbed the wood floor on her hands and knees, ample belly sopping up soap.
“What would you like done with Luke’s clothes?” someone asked me, the woman with the nicotine-stained fingernails. Abby? Alice?
I shrugged, looking at Maggie.
“We can give them to Doc White, if you don’t mind, Sarah,” she said. “He can pass them out during his rounds.”
“Fine,” I told her.
“Box them up for Doc, Adele,” Maggie called.
Adele. Right. Adele, with the yellow fingers.
“What about this fiddle?” Adele asked, holding up a peeling leather case.
“Leave it,” I said without hesitation, without thought.
The pine-scented cleaner clogged my sinuses, and I stepped onto the front porch, surveying the land. Naked trees clawed the overcast sky. Gray branches stuck up from the snow, dead leaves clinging to the tips. I was those leaves, shivery and desperate, waiting helplessly to be swept away by the slightest breeze.
“We’re about done in there,” Memory said, coming out onto the porch wearing a scarf and mittens, no coat. The boards croaked under her weight.
I didn’t answer.
“I said, we’re about done in there,” she shouted close to my ear, her wide face webbed with capillaries.
“I’m not deaf,” I huffed.
“Then don’t act it,” she said. “Oh, it’s chilly out here. I best be getting back to my boy. You coming for supper?”
“What?”
“Not deaf, eh? I said, are you coming for supper?”
“Is that supposed to be an invitation?”
“I seen what you got in those cupboards. You need some hospitality. Ain’t you never had anybody be nice to you?”
Not recently.
“Thank you, Ms. Jones, but I still have things to do here.”
“I ain’t Miss anything. I’m just Memory—don’t you forget.” She snorted at her repeated pun. I didn’t.
“Well, thank you anyway, Memory.”
“I expect you’ll be by when you’re not so busy. Have fun eating those noodle things in a can. Don’t know how you do. Look like worms to me.” She slapped me on the shoulder and shuffled to her car.
The other women spilled outside, each hugging me or patting my cheek. Maggie invited me to dinner, too, but I pleaded fatigue and locked myself in the cabin.
I screwed new batteries into the flashlights and unrolled my sleeping bag onto the couch. The sun had dipped into the mountains, soaking the living room in deep purple shadows. I added two more logs to the fire and settled down for the night with a six-pack of Diet Coke and a bag of chips.
One hundred and seventy-nine days of hibernation left to go.
Memory hobbled and huffed up the nine stairs to her house. Some days she wished for less—like five, or better yet, two—but most days she was thankful she could manage the nine without her lungs bursting like paper firecrackers.
The storm door on the three-season porch had no handle; Memory kicked the bottom until it bounced open, and she stuck her elbow inside. The frayed screens and hole in the roof rendered the porch useless in any season, from springtime thunderstorms to pesky summer mosquitoes, to the heap of icy pine needles Memory now stepped over to get to the front door.
It hit her as soon as she walked into the living room, the smell of disinfectant, tinged with urine. It didn’t matter that Memory scrubbed the house until the bleach water pickled her hands. The smell remained. She blamed the pressboard floors—the porous wood sucked in odors, held them, grew them—and had started making rag rugs. The Bethel Baptist Church, two towns west of Jonah, had a bag day at its thrift store on the third Wednesday of the month, two dollars for as much clothing as she could stuff into a plastic grocery sack. Memory took only the stained T-shirts. Still, the feeling lingered that, maybe, it was a sin to cover her floors with shirts somebody might still be able to wear.
The rugs didn’t help, anyway. They prettied the house and made it warmer to walk barefoot but did nothing to reduce the offending odor of a grown man’s diapers.
She found Beth in front of the fireplace, reading to Robert from a Beatrix Potter storybook. Robert’s bloated tongue hung out of his mouth.
“I’m home, sweet boy,” Memory said, kissing his forehead.
Beth closed the book. “I think he’s getting hungry.”
“To be sure. It’s nearly three.”
“Do you want me to stay?” Beth asked.
“Nah. You worked all morning. You must be beat like a potato.”
“You, too.”
Memory smoothed Beth’s hair tenderly. “You go home.”
Beth nodded, zipped her coat and tied her boots. “How’d it go today?”
“That cabin is shiniest in Jonah.”
“I bet, with all you ladies going at it. What about Sarah?”
“Bristly as my legs when I can’t afford a razor.”
“I’m praying for her.”
Memory nodded. “That’s ’bout the only thing that’ll help that girl.”
After Beth left, Memory went to the kitchen to prepare Robert’s lunch. Hers, too. She pulled two cans of Ensure formula from the cupboard, and then took leftover split pea soup from the refrigerator. After heating the soup in a pot on the stove, she poured it into a plastic bowl, which she put on a tray with the formula, a spoon, and a catheter tip syringe.
“Are you hungry, Robert?” Memory asked, putting the tray on a small table next to his bed. “I sure am.”
She unbuttoned the bottom of her son’s shirt, exposing his gastrostomy tube, filled the syringe with one can of formula, and inserted it into the tube. Slowly, she depressed the syringe, just a little. Then she said grace and spooned some soup into her mouth. For an hour, she told Robert about her day, until both cans of formula were gone. The green pea puree went mostly uneaten.
Everyday she did this, every four hours, around the clock. The state insurance wouldn’t pay for a continuous feeding pump. Memory cleaned Robert’s face and swabbed around the g-tube with warm water. The incision looked red and sore, so she dabbed on some Maalox antacid and covered it with gauze.
Memory heard Robert’s snore, a wet wheeze familiar to the point of maddening. Then she changed his diaper. She always did so, if possible, while he slept. The doctors kept telling her, in their faithless, starched-coated way, that he had nothing going on in his head. Still, cognitive or not, no thirty-one-year-old would want his mother wiping his rear.
I spent five days on the couch, eating myself out of my jeans and into sweatpants. The cushions had molded around my body, and I got up only to go to the bathroom, add logs to the fire, and grab more junk food. With just a few packages of instant soup left, my insides rancid from lack of substantive nutrition, I would have to venture out of the house soon.
I know I slept more than I was awake, a combination of exhaustion, boredom and sheer escapism. During those rare times my eyes stayed opened, I stuffed my face and watched Luke’s 15-inch television. The old, gray box had rabbit ears and picked up one scratchy channel. The daytime lineup—hours of pet psychics, voyeuristically televised blind dates, and
Who’s My Baby’s Daddy?
talk-show episodes—was more effective than any therapist I’d seen. Clearly, I was not the most dysfunctional person on the planet.
The knocking had begun my first morning at the cabin, and continued well into the evening of day two. Some people pounded steadily on the door for minutes at a time, others rapped softly, once, twice, and then were gone. A few called my name. I figured someone would soon break a window and climb inside, worried I had hung myself or been eaten by wild dogs, so I nailed a note to the door:
I’m fine, go away
. After that, there were just footsteps as those concerned townsfolk tromped up the snowy steps, then tromped back down after they had read my admonition.
I checked the fire, shoving in the last two logs I had stacked next to the woodstove. I unlocked the front door and nudged my head outside, seeing only three logs on the porch, and added firewood to the list of necessities.
Smelling of stale laundry and the mothballs I found tucked in the couch crevices, I wandered into the bathroom and started the water in the tiny shower. The stall’s door was glass, transparent and icy. I soaped and shaved under the steaming water for almost an hour. My clothes, however, were still crumpled in shopping bags. I put on a bathrobe and, wrapping my hair in a towel, scooted to the living room closet where I had piled the bags.
Crouching on the cold pine floor, I scoured through the sacks, selecting wool socks and a velour jogging suit. Kicking the clothes back inside, I knocked over the fiddle case, which I ignored as I yanked the socks over my frozen toes. I couldn’t shut the door, though; the case blocked it. I bent over to nudge the instrument into the closet, but found myself popping open the latch. Inside, cradled in musty gold velvet, was a violin. I picked it up, hands trembling slightly, and turned it over. The one-piece maple back was deeply flamed, the varnish muted with age. I peered into the f-holes to find the label. There was none.
Lifting the violin to my chin, I ran the bow over the strings. Flat, but just a little. I tweaked the boxwood tuners and tried again. Brilliant, sinewy tones resonated through the house. This instrument rivaled my own vintage Leon Mougenot. Of course, I had hocked that violin last year.
Taking a deep, shaky breath, I began Bach’s Concerto in A Minor, a piece I’d memorized in junior high school. I played the first movement, hands and arms tense, strings cutting into my skin, calluses having peeled away months ago. However, as the
allegro moderato
rolled into the
andante
, I melted into the music, and my fingers remembered.
I completed the
allegro assai
, and immediately shifted to something more befitting my mood, the brooding Shostakovich concerto from opus 99. I skipped the first two movements and began with the
passacaglia
. Pounding away at the accents, jerking my head until the towel unraveled and my hair flopped around my face, I played until I had the eerie feeling of someone watching me.
I spun around.
Jack leaned against the front door. “The door was open, and I heard you playing, and . . . wow,” he blurted.
Gathering my robe tight at the neck with one hand, I fumbled to get the violin in the case with the other, saying, “I found it in the closet.”
He moved a few steps closer. “You don’t have to stop.”
I closed the instrument in the closet. “Did my—Luke play?”
“Not like that.”
“I’m out of practice. It was awful,” I said, my face hot and prickly.
Jack shook his head faintly, “No, it was, wow. Wow.”
“You said that.”
“I know. I mean, Sarah, you’re wonderful.”
I brushed away the compliment with a brisk “Thanks” and picked up my jogging suit. “Excuse me. I was about to get dressed.”
Jack, realizing suddenly that I wore only a bathrobe and socks, blushed and turned his head. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice.”
I locked myself in the bathroom. There was only one mirror in the house, the medicine cabinet above the sink. I climbed up on the vanity and, kneeling precariously on the Formica top, obsessed over my puffy stomach, which I pinched and pulled for several minutes. I would have to add lettuce and prunes to my current I-hate-my-life diet, or six months from now I’d leave here looking like Memory Jones. Well, half of her, anyway.
Fortunately, my running pants had a drawstring waist.
Jack continued to wait for me in the living room. I heard him sneeze a couple of times. Sitting on the edge of the toilet, I leaned forward and squished my head between my knees, hoping to soothe the uneasiness in my gut. I never played like that in front of people. My public violin performances were terse and controlled, with impeccable technique and counterfeit emotion. Privately, music provided my only means to love, to grieve, to rage, and to be utterly vulnerable.
Now I felt like a fool. I had poured myself into that music, and Jack had heard. I couldn’t have been more exposed if I had opened my robe and flashed the good reverend.
