Home Safe (16 page)

twenty-four

H
ELEN AND
T
ESSA DO NOT SPEAK MUCH ABOUT
F
RANKLIN ON THE
plane; there seems to be a tacit agreement that to do so will make for emotions that do not fit into seats 11A and 11B. Instead, Tessa leafs through a magazine, offering commentary on this dress, that lipstick. Helen points to a blond man astride a motorcycle in an ad for jeans, and says, “Do you think he's handsome?”

“Don't start,” Tessa says. “Or I'll sign
you
up for Internet dating.”

“I only asked if you thought he was good-looking.”

“You want to know what I think?” Tessa says. “I think he's gay. I think every man in here is gay.” She closes the magazine and excuses herself to go to the bathroom. Helen picks up the magazine and flips through it. Tessa is probably right. But not all men are gay. Where do men who are not gay
go?
How does one meet them? Oh, how does one meet anyone these days? It seems to Helen that people have given their real lives over to virtual ones, that they spend most of their time asleep or interacting with screens. What exactly does Tessa do about the need for … touch? “Oh, God,” Midge said when Helen once talked about this. “You didn't ask her about
sex
, did you?” And Helen said no, as though she were outraged at the notion of having done so, even though the truth was, she had thought it.

“I think you need to take up needlepoint,” Midge said.

Tessa comes back to the seat and puts the magazine in the seat pocket. “Remind me to check around my seat for my personal belongings before I exit the aircraft,” she says, and Helen smiles. Then Tessa sighs and asks, “Did Grandma and Grandpa really meet in the back of a dime store?” and Helen tells the story they both know so well: how Franklin bumped into Eleanor and made her purse fall down, how they knocked heads when they both bent to pick it up and then went out for ice cream sodas, then to a movie, then for dinner, for a walk that lasted until dawn, and then separated to go get ready for work, but met for dinner again that night.

When the plane lands, they both fall silent, and Helen imagines that they are both thinking about the same thing: going into a house where Franklin no longer is or will ever be again. She remembers Tessa saying about Franklin, when she was six years old, “He's my favorite grandfather.” Never mind that he was her only grandfather; Dan's father had died before Tessa was born. Helen knew what she meant: he was her favorite grandfather of all possible grandfathers. As he was Helen's favorite father.

With Tessa sound asleep beside her, Helen looks at the clock: a little after two. She herself has not yet been able to sleep at all, and now, downstairs, she hears her mother running water in the kitchen. She'll be making herself a cup of tea, no doubt.

Helen quietly gets out of bed and makes her way down. From the darkened dining room, she sees Eleanor standing before the sink, staring out the window, the teakettle in her hand, the water running and running.

“Mom?”

Her mother jumps and then turns to her, and for a moment Helen has the terrified thought that her mother does not recognize her, that something has happened to Eleanor, too. But it is only that she was so deeply caught up in her reverie; she laughs, now, and says, “Want a cup of tea?”

“Sure.” Helen comes into the kitchen, squinting against the light; not long ago, Franklin had installed a bright overhead to help with his failing vision. “Your mother can't see like she used to,” he said, and Eleanor only rolled her eyes.

“Can't sleep?” Eleanor says, when they sit at the table together, and Helen shrugs. “Me neither.”

Helen takes her mother's hand.

“I'm all right,” Eleanor says. “Truly.”

“I just want you to know, Mom, that if you want to, you can come and live with me.”

Eleanor smiles.

“Really. I have plenty of room. The guest room—”

“Helen. Please don't be insulted. But the last thing I would want to do is move in with you.”

“What do you mean? Why not? I'm not saying you're not competent to live alone. You know I'm not saying that, right?”

“Well, I hope not! But no. Thank you. I don't want to live with you. I love you very much, but you'd drive me crazy.”

Helen's mouth falls open.

“Believe me, it just wouldn't work out.”

“Why not?”

“Well, to be honest, you're a little too …”

“What? I'm a little too what?”

Eleanor looks at her, considering. Then she says, “I like to have things the way I like them.”

“You could!”

“And I need my privacy.”

Helen says nothing.

“You know,” Eleanor says, her tone softening, “we're alike in some ways, but very different in others.”

“How?” Helen asks. “How do you think we're different?”

“Some of it is generational,” Eleanor says. “Our generation didn't … Well, we kept our own counsel far more than you do.” Helen thinks,
It's not just generational. Tessa is like you, she keeps her own counsel, too
. In many respects, in fact, Tessa is more like Eleanor than Helen is, and sometimes Helen is jealous of that.

Eleanor goes on. “We didn't need to air all our dirty laundry and run to therapists every five minutes. Life comes with problems, you just have to
accept
that. And you have to try to lead the simple life; to not constantly ask questions about the whys and the wherefores of everything. To do that is to invite trouble.”

“Well, I think a life absent of inquiry is not a life I want to live.”

“That's your choice,” Eleanor says. “But one thing I would say to you, Helen, is that you must respect the choices that others make.”

“I do! Don't I? You think I don't?”

“I think you need to let Tessa grow up. You need to let up on her. I've been meaning to say that for a long time. And as long as I'm being honest, I think you need to stand on your own feet a little better than you do. You're capable of more than you know. Ever since you were a little girl, you've had a habit of hanging back and letting others do for you what you should do for yourself.”

“Why didn't you say something about it, then? You were my mother!”

“I tried. But you were such a
dramatic
child. So quick to have your feelings hurt.”

“Well, I'm sorry I was such a disappointment to you.”

“Oh, Helen, stop it. This is what I mean! This is what happens—what has always happened—when someone tries to offer you constructive criticism.”

“This is not constructive criticism! This is an assault on my character. I can't believe that you—”

“Helen.”

“What?”

“Do you want more tea?”

And now she laughs and says yes, for what else is there to do? Her mother is right; she is terrible at taking criticism. At listening.

When Eleanor sits back down, Helen says, “Did Tessa ever complain to you about me?”

“I'm not going to talk about that. I think we've had enough of baring souls, don't you?”

“But just tell me. Did she?”

“Yes. And I defended you.”

“Why? You just told me how awful I am.”

“Oh, for heaven's sake. I suppose one of
my
faults as a parent is that I am not generous with praise; it's not the way I was raised, to carry on about every little thing a child does. But of course there are so many wonderful things about you, Helen, surely you know that I know that. And I will always defend you against anyone who says anything negative about you.”

Helen looks out the window into the darkness and sees her own face reflected back. “I sure am going to miss Dad,” she says.

“Yes.”

“And I can't help it; I'm worried about you being here alone, Mom.”

“Oh, Helen. I hurt, of course I do, as I know I will for a while. I look for him in the morning when I wake up, before I remember. But I am at peace. We knew it was coming. The only good thing about knowing death is imminent is that you have the opportunity to say some things you might not otherwise say. We talked about everything. My goodness.
Everything
.”

She offers no specifics, and Helen realizes she does not want her to. The glory in a good marriage is the things that belong only to the couple.

“Have you decided what to do about the house in California?” Eleanor asks.

Helen shakes her head no.

“Well, it will come to you, what to do.” When Helen looks over at her, her face full of doubt, she says, “It will! In time, you'll know exactly what to do. And you know what? Whatever you decide will be the right decision. I have a feeling that Dan's real gift to you in building that house will turn out to be your having a kind of faith in yourself that you've never had before. And once you have that, everything's going to be a whole lot better.”

Helen sighs.

“Really and truly,” her mother says.

In the chapel the next morning, Helen sits between her mother and her daughter, staring straight ahead at the many bouquets around the casket. She is thinking of all the people who ask that donations be made to this place or that in lieu of flowers, and she is glad her mother made no such request.

There is a great comfort, a pride, even, in seeing so many flowers. Everything that is done now is not for her father, of course, who is unequivocally not here, yet people have their stubborn ways of thinking.
Here you go, Franklin, this is for you, you always loved daisies
. One can't let go of everything all at once. A few days after Dan died, she lay in bed, fully believing that she could feel his presence, that he had come to see her on his way to wherever souls went. She had lain so still, her eyes closed, feeling him so intensely nearby that she was a little afraid of opening her eyes and seeing him, though if he
were
there, she would have wept with gratitude. Who doesn't long for one more time of seeing someone they've loved and lost? And yet what would you say, what would you do, if it were possible?

Her mother has said that she'll take home one smaller bouquet; the rest will be donated to a nursing home after the service—it's all been arranged: the home where the flowers will go, the person who will bring them there, and the time at which they will do so. Everything has been all arranged—the service, the luncheon afterward, the holy cards, the sign-in book. Helen did nothing but come to her mother's house and then come with her to this chapel, for this service. In the same way, Tessa did nothing for her father's service but attend it, weeping quietly from start to finish. It was exactly what Helen wanted, to spare her daughter from having to do things that would break her heart, but that in some respects eased Helen's pain. It gave her something to concentrate on. It was something she actually did well, planning Dan's funeral. It was the last time she felt truly competent, in fact. And now a thought comes to her, a thunking kind of realization: that she is the kind of person who must do things for or on behalf of another. For her, the taste of the ice cream, the red of the sunset, the humor in the movie must be shared to
be
.

The service begins and Helen hears Tessa sigh. She thinks about taking her daughter's hand, decides against it, then takes it anyway. She feels her mother take her other hand. The three of them make a little force against this big one.

twenty-five

A
GAIN
, C
LAUDIA IS NOT PRESENT IN CLASS, AND
H
ELEN HAS STILL
not heard from her or been able to reach her. None of the other class members know where she is, either.
Well, no point in shortchanging those who are here by dwelling on those who are not
, Helen thinks. She's hurt though, the kind of hurt that harbors a fair amount of anger. She feels Claudia is poised for something so positive to be added to her life, if only she'll step up and take it.

The assignment was to write a piece on loss. Jeff reads first, an affecting piece about his cocker spaniel dying when he was five, and how this was the first time he understood that all things die, himself included. He spent a lot of time sitting with his mother on the sofa that day, she trying to explain the hard ways of nature, he clutching his elbows and staring straight ahead, arguing against the need for anything to die: couldn't it just happen that everything here on earth now would just
stay?
Nothing his mother said made any difference until she asked her seemingly inconsolable little boy if he'd like to help her make cupcakes, and then he instantly laid down his sorrows for a chance to lick the mixing bowl.

Billy wrote about a car he had as a sixteen-year-old, a ′65 Mustang convertible he'd gotten into prime shape and then lost when his father took off with it. It was clear from his piece that the car was the bigger loss.

Henry wrote a kind of overdue eulogy for a soldier with whom he'd sat as the young man lay dying. It was during World War II, in Germany, and Henry reads,
He kept looking at the sky above him, a beautiful blue that day, and he held my hand and talked to me about how he could go home now, and see all the people he loved. And I didn't know what to say back to him, because I didn't know which home he meant, his farm in Iowa or heaven. I held his hand, I saw the color leave his face and I offered him sips of water, he was so thirsty. Just before he died, he looked at me and said, “It's not so bad, Henry,” and that was all. I closed his eyelids and felt a shaking start inside me but outside I stayed calm because I couldn't think about how I had just lost my friend, I couldn't think about his folks and his girl, I had work to do. But all these years later, I guess I just want to say something about the generosity of a man who, while losing his life, offered a kind of solace against the time when I would lose my own
.

There is a long moment of silence when Henry finishes, and then Billy leans back in his chair and says, “That was fucking good, man!”

Ella gasps. “You said a swear again! Now that's
enough!”
Billy looks over at her, laughing, but she looks right back at him and finally he apologizes in a manner more sincere than sardonic. “Try to use other words to express yourself,” Ella tells him. Then, turning to Henry, she says, “You made me cry. That's how much I liked what you wrote. When I cry is when I like things the most.”

Donetta reads a funny piece about the time she was at a mall and lost her purse—which, as it happened, was on her arm, hidden beneath a shopping bag. This was pointed out to her as she was frantically reporting the theft to the beefy man from security.

The last person to read is Hector, who has finally moved away from writing about himself and his job as a newscaster, and reads a piece about the loss of manners. He describes the way his parents brought him up to say please and thank you, to hold open doors for those behind him, to dress carefully. He describes an airplane trip his family took when he was a little boy, all of them outfitted with new clothes and his mother wearing her hat and white gloves, then contrasts this with the last plane trip he took, where several people were dressed in what looked like pajamas, and where one teenage girl not only was dressed in nightwear but carried a teddy bear. He ends his piece with a memory of his father sitting out on his porch last summer in his straw hat, his striped blue shirt open at the neck, his linen pants still holding a crease.
He offers a cordial “Good evening!” to everyone passing by. I watch the people who smile and speak back to him, and I wonder about all we have lost by our current lack of civility, and what might be gained by a return to it
.

Helen listens to her students read with a growing sense of pride and wonder: these people are launched into something all their own, and she helped create it. When class is over, she walks out with Hector, telling him that he should consider presenting this piece at the reading. “Really?” he says. And then, “Wow, it's coming up soon, isn't it? Only two weeks away. Did I tell you my wife is sending out engraved invitations?” He laughs, and then his face grows serious. “I'm sorry there's only one more class. I've really enjoyed this.”

“You should take another one,” Helen says.

“Are you teaching again?”

“Oh, no. No, this was just … I won't be teaching again.”

She minds admitting this; the class has offered her much more than she ever would have thought possible.