The End of the Point (40 page)

“Hot out?” asks a girl in a nursing smock she doesn’t recognize.

“Yes,” Bea says. “Even for August.”

“It’s September.” The girl laughs flutily. “Can’t keep track of it myself!”

Bea flushes. Of course—it’s Callum’s birthday. September fifth.

She is given a slice of cake and has a few bites before she slides the plate away. Her appetite has shrunk, though her size, somehow, has not. She has her oatmeal and egg in the morning, then usually nothing but tea and biscuits until suppertime, when her great-niece might drop something off after she picks her baby up from the child-minder down the street, or the Meals on Wheels comes, or the church ladies, or Bea heats herself a dinner in the microwave and eats in front of the telly with the cats. She falls asleep early now, wakes in the night for several hours, naps in the afternoon, though she makes a point of getting dressed and going out most days to visit with a neighbor or walk to the top of the street, often feeling pressed at the end as if she must return to Callum, though it’s been over a year since he moved out, first to ex-servicemen’s, then to Benholm Care (I can
pay
, she kept telling Callum’s son, finally resorting to ringing Jane’s and asking Paul to talk to him, Paul having sway from knowing about money and being a man).

The day Callum moved out was the first time in her life she’d lived alone, except for the brief stretch between when Agnes died and Kate and Callum moved in. Come live here too, said the lady director at Benholm, and Bea did consider it, to be with her brother, to not be on her own, but it turned out that there was something quite pleasant about having a house to yourself. The walking from the shower to the bedroom in nothing but your knickers, for one. The talking—to the cats, Agnes, Janie, herself, Mr. P. To God. The moving about of the shell frames and buying, now and then, a porcelain box or lace runner to put on a table. She has a basket of blocks for when her great-niece stops by with the baby. She has her phone card to call America, Old English Lemon Oil for polishing (her sense of smell has dimmed, but the tangy scent cuts through). She loves her house with a tenderness that makes it feel almost human and has hired a girl to housekeep once a week, though she tidies up before to allow for deep cleaning and not give the impression of a place let go.

“You’ll be having a birthday supper tonight with Ian and them,” she tells Callum. “I’ll come if I’m not too tired.”

“Ian’s had a baby,” he states. “With his girl.”

“Two. His babies are grown now. You’ve got great-grandbabies, remember?”

“Cake,” says Callum.

“He’ll be needing a shower and nap,” Bea tells the aide. “So he can go out with his son. And his nails could use a clipping, or else he digs at the eczema on his feet.”

The girl looks startled. “I’m on dining and recreation.”

“Oh, he enjoys a good nail clip!” Bea retorts, meaning it as a joke, but the girl just stares at her. They do their jobs, the young people, but nothing more.

“I didn’t get overtime for that weekend shift,” Callum announces bitterly, “which is a bloody shame.”

“A shame,” echoes Bea. She yawns. Two outings in one day—church and Callum—is more than she is used to. She’d like to lie down on the window seat and take a nap. She won’t go to the birthday supper tonight. The stairs to Ian and Marcy’s flat are uneven, and if she stumbles, they’ll pounce; they want her at Benholm “for your safety,” though she is plenty safe, the council having installed a peephole in the door and given her a Message in a Bottle—a plastic jar in the fridge with her details tucked inside it and a green cross on the outside, and on the front door, a sticker with a green cross, and on the fridge door, the same sticker in case she falls or has a heart attack or dies, but she is afraid of none of these things; she is in God’s hands (she pictures them like Mr. P’s). If only she could make her world a little smaller—bring Janie and Caroline across the sea, bring Agnes back, bring her mother—if only she could gather them all inside her house and Callum too, she would have indeed found happiness, but as it is, she is all right. Lucky, even, if a bit lonely, if a bit unsure, some days, as to precisely why she is still here. In less than two weeks, she will turn ninety-four, and unless He sees fit to take her in the next four months, she will see the century, the millennium turn, and she would rather like to live to be one hundred so she can receive a personal letter from the Queen.

“I’ve got to be off now, Callum,” she tells her brother, but he ignores her, in a babbling conversation with the lady across the table, the two of them going on about nothing. The room has nearly emptied while Bea was not paying attention, and now someone lifts the cloths from the tables; someone else plugs a Hoover in, the cord stretching, a menace, across the room. Bea gathers her purse, her cane, her hat, kisses her brother on the forehead, and he pulls her face down to him, aims for her lips, but she dodges and presents her cheek. She steps slowly over the cord and sets off for home, where, after changing into slippers and a housedress (its sash is Mr. P.’s red sailboat tie), she feeds the cats some liver treats, lies down on the sofa with the afghan Agnes made and sleeps for hours, waking only to answer the phone and tell Marcy that no, she won’t be coming tonight, and yes, she’s fine, just tired from a day out on the town.

As she hangs up, she remembers that she forgot to stop on Callum’s floor on the way out and ask someone to clip his nails, and she sees, as if in a dream, her brother’s child-plump hand laid flat across her own knee, the manicure scissors, the satisfaction of a job well done, and then she pictures the nails grown long and curved, yellowed as old cockleshells, for the nurses forget things at Benholm, which rankles her, and then she remembers that fingernails keep growing even after death, and she prays for such morbid thoughts to stop. The couch does not feel like the right place to be, but the bed is far. Betwixt and between, she is; she could do with someone pulling the afghan up around her shoulders in a gesture at once unthinking and full of love, singing to her, and there’s a bitter taste at the back of her throat, just the faintest trace of it, an aftertaste. Swallow hard (she swallows hard) and it will go. And then Pudding the cat has arrived, slit-eyed and calculating, to measure the distance between floor and couch—and jumped up and settled by her side. Bea pulls the old boy close until he’s curved against her ample belly, the motor of his purring running strong, and breathes with his breath until she sleeps.

IV

H
ELEN WAKES ANGRY
to voices down the hall, gets up without help, gets dressed—a wraparound skirt, tennis shirt and cardigan, her white sneakers, Velcro-strapped and big as boats—an abomination, orthotically prescribed. She puts on her glasses, her wig. The shades in her room have all been lowered, and she releases them with a snap. André, she vaguely remembers, came in earlier to take her blood pressure and give her pills. Now it’s dusk, bats swooping and rising along the lawn, against the sea. Would that she could join them—flap wings, fly blind, beat back her foul mood. Instead, toward social life, her son, his wife.

In early August, when Charlie and Rachel last came over for dinner, it went well, she must remember, but then Jane and Paul were there to grease the wheels. They’d played Dictionary. Helen had given Rachel a copy of her monograph on the New Jersey slave trade (it came out over a decade ago and is closer to a pamphlet than a book, though it received a bit of notice at the time). André had brought up the
Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly
article Rachel sent them about Charlie winning an award for Best Public Interest Lawyer of the Year, and Charlie said, “You
sent
that to them?” and Rachel said, “Sorry, sweetie—someone has to toot your horn,” and Helen said, “We’re so proud of you, Charlie!” (in fact, because he hadn’t told them himself or invited them to the ceremony, she was more hurt than proud). After dinner, they watched shooting stars from the porch, and Charlie brought up how she used to take him stargazing in the Beetle Cat, and Helen, listening, was close to passing out from tiredness but sat there watching and tremendously happy and part of everything—made of stardust—underneath the stars. “My god, she’s sleeping,” she heard Jane say at one point, and Charlie said, “I’ve never seen her asleep in my whole life,” and Helen—rising from a half-dream state—popped her eyes open and said “Boo!” and they all roared. The evening had been a great success, Jane assured her the next day. Still, a month had passed, and they hadn’t been back for a meal until now.

In the bathroom, she splashes water on her face. Her legs ache, her head too. She remembers something from a dream she had. A bloody diaper. Whose? She finds a tube of lipstick, applies a coral slash and smiles in the mirror, a mistake. Chin up (she hears her mother). Off you go, then (Bea). Sharpest knife in the drawer (her father, who has grown, in her mind, almost monumental, but did he hurt all the time? Did he hurt like this?). She pees and takes three Motrin. She will ask Rachel, again, if she can read her book, which is coming out later this year. She will ask Charlie about his case to limit solitary confinement. She has a present for Rachel, a book of drawings of seventeenth-century French peasants, if she can remember where she put it. In her skirt pocket, she has an article for Charlie about a judge who improved living conditions for prisoners, clipped from yesterday’s
Times
. No one can say she doesn’t try.

Tip-tapping, she walks down the hall with her cane. There they are, in the living room, talking, and as she stands in the doorway, she has the sense of peering in at a tableau of someone else’s life. André is sitting on the window seat, Rachel beside him in shorts and a flannel shirt, her knees tucked under her, her curly hair pulled back. Charlie is perched on the edge of the fireplace hearth, suntanned and handsome, his hand buried in his dog’s fur. Holly is there too, on the couch. Everyone is talking. She can be part of it; she just has to step inside. She enters the room, noisy with her cane; all heads turn in her direction. Hi, says Rachel, too brightly. Hi Mom, Charlie says. Helen sits down, and Holly, ever a little mother, leans over to fasten the Velcro on her sneakers.

“Not too tight,” Helen says.

“You slept a long time.” André brings an extra pillow for her back.

“Too long. I wish you’d woken me. Naps are the pits—they should be outlawed for anyone over three.”

“Oh, I love a good nap.” Holly stretches and yawns.

“So do I,” says Rachel.

“I’m with you, Mom,” Charlie says. “I almost never nap. When I do, I wake up feeling like I have to claw my way out of a black hole.”

“That’s exactly it,” Helen says. “I had a dream about a bloody diaper.”

As soon as the words leave her mouth, she regrets having blurted out this strange, intimate detail, but it’s too late.

“That’s terrible!” says Rachel.

“It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. It was just
there
. You know how dreams are. What were you all talking about?”

“The oil spill,” says Holly, and immediately Helen wishes she’d not released them into it, but it’s too late; they’re off, as if into the slick itself. It turns out it’s even more than sixty thousand gallons, says Holly. The spill has killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of birds and damaged ninety miles of shoreline, and no one even knows yet what the long-term damage will be. The workers should be wearing respirators, Rachel says. They’re cleaning up toxic waste. They’d give them respirators if they needed them; the worst chemicals come at the beginning, says André (the spill was in late April, just before they arrived). There will be criminal proceedings against the skipper and the company . . . the damages to the seabed can last for years. . . .

Helen looks out the window and wills the subject to swiftly run its course. Not long ago, she would have known how to jump in and turn things in a new direction, but she seems to have lost the gift. She slept through the roadrunners’ race, slept through the great-grandchildren photo. Her head throbs; their voices are magnified. Wine, she mutters to André, and he says something about her medication and gets her a thimbleful of wine and a cracker with cheese, and she downs the wine in one gulp (lets the cracker slide to the floor, where the dog inhales it) and asks for more, and he gets her water and sits down between her and Holly, putting his hand on her knee. She wants to ask about Rachel’s seventeenth-century midwife, to charm and impress her daughter-in-law, to tell Charlie about the tree swallows she saw earlier today. Not to talk about pollution, not, especially, the damn oil spill, which happened months ago and has, along with the Uh-Ohs’ mansion, monopolized dinner-party conversation ever since. Still they go on, about the cleanup workers, come all the way from Texas, some of them ex-cons, and how they’re taking care to scrub every rock, and how the dead bird count keeps mounting, and how many shellfish beds and nesting grounds are damaged (apparently a new report has just come out).

All summer, the cleanup crew has been fanning out across Ashaunt, parking trucks with giant vacuum tubes and hoses in Jane and Paul’s field, dressed in plastic yellow jumpsuits, hauling equipment, wandering like zombies, dropping cigarette butts on the road, and for what? Helen has seen the beaches at the Yacht Club; they are fine. She has seen the cormorants on the rocks, the pair of swans, arrived, as always, to spend the summer in the marsh. The tree swallows, butterflies, gulls. All fine.

“Don’t you think,” she says, “that it’s bit of a charade?”

They all look at her.

“What do you mean?” asks Holly.

“This endless ‘cleanup’ effort. Think of what those workers could be doing to help some truly endangered species—or in New Bedford, cleaning up the neighborhoods or making parks. Instead, they’re scrubbing our stones with toothbrushes. Actual toothbrushes! The children showed me a picture. It’s hardly the Exxon Valdez. I find it almost obscene, with all the real problems in the world.”

“I agree with you that it’s a terrible waste of time and money,” Charlie says. “But it’s not like there’s not a real problem that needs to be dealt with.”