A swimming pool in the summer pulls children like a magnet. They are helpless against it. The water is silk on their skin. They appreciate everything: the drops of a splash that refract into rainbows before them; the muscley pull of their own arms carrying them across the wide surface (shipwrecked! their brains scream); the sudden quiet and undulating view when they submerge themselves, the Walt Disney quality of their underwater voices. When you become a grown-up you mostly stay out of the water, sitting in an itchy plastic chair and reading a magazine, mildly irritated. You don’t go in unless you’re so hot you’re faint or you are playing with a child and therefore on duty. You have learned that the water is not jewellike, see-through blue; it is only that the sides of the pool are painted.
I’ve been staring at the phone, wondering if I should call Martin. This is the strongest the urge has been. But every time I reach for the receiver, something stops me. I guess it’s just not time. I guess I want to be completely finished before I start talking to him, so I’ll know the right end of my own story.
I stopped at a farmhouse today. I’d been on a country road, passing lush field after field of this or that. Once, I came to a field full of daisies, a beautiful white house set back from it, and there was a sports car with Texas license plates parked in the middle of the field. A young black man was sitting in the car, waving at another man who was taking his picture. The man in the car was smiling widely, so happy. I thought, later, he will look at that picture and think, God, that was a good day. Where was that field? I had a notion to stop and talk to them, to say what are you doing? Where are you going? What kind of car is that? But I didn’t, I kept on as though I had an appointment, and perhaps I did. Because at the next farmhouse I came to, there was a woman sitting out on a rocker on her front porch, a big white enamel bowl in her lap, a paper bag of something at her side. I thought, oh what if those are peas she’s shelling? What if she’d let me sit there with her? I turned down her driveway, a cloud of dust rising magnificently after me.
I stepped out of the car, and she nodded at me, smiling. “You from the phone company?” she asked, shading her eyes from the sun. I said no. “Oh,” she said, and took her hand down. “Well, I got a busted phone.” Then she looked expectantly at me, waiting for me to explain myself.
“I’m just … I was passing through,” I said. “I saw that you … well, it looked like you were maybe shelling peas.”
The woman looked into her bowl, then back up at me. She said, “I am. I don’t sell them. I’ll give you some, though.” I said oh no, thank you, that wasn’t it, it was just that I’d always loved the notion of sitting on a porch on a farm, listening to the sound of peas falling … you know … into a bowl …
She was looking at me a little funny. Not like she thought I was crazy. Just short of that. I took in a breath, shrugged. I said, Well, would you mind if I just sat here a bit? She said, I don’t know, I guess that’d be all right. She asked if I’d like a chair and I said no, the steps were fine. Drink? she asked, and I said no, really, I was fine.
She was quiet for a minute, then asked slyly, So are you one of them moviemakers or something? I said oh no, I was just an ordinary woman, out on a trip, Nan was my name. Eugenie, she said, pleased to meet you, and I heard the sound of peas kerplunking and I smiled. What, she said, smiling herself and I said, oh that sound, I just loved that sound especially when someone else was doing it. She said she guessed she was used to it, she herself preferred the radio, only that was busted, too. I asked her what kind of music she liked, and she said any kind that would come in. Although she was partial to that Tony Bennett fella. She liked fancy music, too, them violins. Right, I said, me too. She said, ’Course, when you’re shelling with someone, why then you talk, and that’s better than the music. She said there used to be a lot of women living around her who would get together on summer afternoons, shell peas for the dinners they would be making later—shell the peas, clean the corn, slice the tomatoes, peel the potatoes. “We’d all set out here,” she said, “getting a start on things. We’d talk so hard sometimes.” She looked away from me, out over the land in front of her. “They is every one of them gone, now, she said. Dead, or moved into one of them nursing homes.” I’m sorry, I said, and she said, “Well what are you going to do, got to get old and move along, make room for the next wave. I just always wondered who’d be the last one gets to stay in their own home. Turned out to be me. Huh! Sure did.”
I asked her how old she was and she said eighty-six on her next birthday, which was in a month. I guess I looked surprised because she said I know, I know, I don’t look eighty-six, everybody tells me that. We got good skin in the family, goes a long way back. Swedish.
Her phone rang then, and her head jerked up, eyes wide. Then, slowly, she went into the house to answer it. When she came back out, she said, “Danged if it ain’t fixed. And they never did even come here! Fixed it out … there, somewhere.” She shook her head. “I sure don’t understand how things work no more.” She rocked a bit, then said, “I ’spose you got one of them home computers.” I said yes, we did. What for? she asked. I said well, my husband used it for his work, and he did our finances on there, I used it to write letters … Write letters? she said. I said yes. She said, You mean you don’t write them on stationery? I said no. She said well pardon me for saying so, but that’s a crying shame. What with the stationery they got now. She said, I was in town the other day at the Hallmark, and the stationery they had there, it took my breath away. Birds and seashells and flowers and cut-lace edges, some designs so beautiful I felt the tears start. You know how they do, she said, when you like something so bad. I said yes. Well, she said, tell me true, wouldn’t you rather get a letter on that kind of paper? I said I guessed she was right. I didn’t want to get into the fact that it was a rare person who wrote a letter at all anymore.
I said, So what’s it like, being eighty-six?
She laughed, then rocked for a minute, thinking. I watched her feet, she was wearing blue Keds and the thin white socks that little girls wear. Finally, she said, Well, it’s painful, your joints hollering about something all the time, this thing kicking up, or that. She said, “Seems sometime like you get one thing locked out the front door, the other one sneaks in the back. But it’s not as bad as some folks make it out to be, folks like to exaggerate, makes them feel important. They got to make everything a red-flag emergency. You take this change of life thing, why, you can’t hardly pick up a ladies’ magazine and not see some big story about it, when it’s just as natural as a sneeze.”
I said, Well. I said, it probably depended on the person. Well of course, she said, everything depended on the person, but the meat of the thing was this: you accept change in your life or you might as well be dead.
I looked down, and I said perhaps it was difficult for some people to accept certain changes, that it took some getting used to. She stopped working and leaned toward me. I could smell peppermint on her breath. She said, “Oh. I see. You’re having a hard time with it, is that it?” I said I thought I was, but that I might be getting better now, that this trip had helped me. She said well, that’s good. Then she sat back and said, you know, I’ll tell you the truth. It hurt me at first, too. But then it was over, and I saw I’d just been scared of it, that’s all, big black thing coming down the road at me all dressed up like death hisself. But then! Why, I come to see it was just a little pocket in my life, a small place, really. I remember telling my friend Katherine about it, she was a few years older than me, she was out hanging the sheets and I was setting on her back steps. I remember thinking it was the last day she’d get to do this for a while, the weather was turning. Anyway, I said, Katherine? I think I’m over all that blue way of thinking. And Katherine, she had her clothespins stuck in her mouth and she took them out and looked at me and said, well now, what did I tell you? You were running around waiting for something so terrible to happen. Like a big wing was going to grow out your forehead, you’d be some kind of freak
, when the truth is, happens to every one of us. Think of the poor men, she said, they got to go bald. And then they can’t even do it no more and that’s about 99 percent of their lives!
Eugenie said Katherine had chickens on her farm, and there were feathers on the ground here and there. What could I do, she said, but stick one of them feathers on my forehead and then call Katherine? Yoo hoo, I said. Does it look very bad? We ’bout busted a gut, she said. Relief, that’s all, the two of us saying I’m right here with you, don’t you be scared. That’s one thing about people, Nan, you always got a lot of folks right with you.
Then she asked if I were one of them authors. I said no. I said I kept a journal, that’s all. She said, Well, come in the house anyway, I’d like to show you something.
I followed her in, and she handed me a thin stack of papers, folded into thirds and tied with a wide blue ribbon. These are poems my husband wrote me, she said—she pronounced it “pomes.” I’d like you to read them. I’ll make us some blackberry tea.
I sat at the kitchen table and read his poems and I had a thought to ask her if I could copy them, but I didn’t. They were beautiful things, I remember one was about him looking at the flowers in their garden. He wrote something like, what were we, that we got to witness such a thing. He said that when he saw the shade of burgundy on one petal progress to a pale shade of pink, he couldn’t do anything but stand there with his hands at his sides, and that the emptiness of his hands felt heavy. And that that was how he felt about Eugenie, he would be coming in from the fields at night and see the light on in the kitchen and his hands would feel heavy again.
I wish I had copied them. I would like to read them again now. Anyway, I told Eugenie I thought they were wonderful. She sat down at the table with me, nodded, said, Yes, I think he was a regular Shakespeare type. But you know, he never did show me them poems. I found them buried in his bottom dresser drawer. I think he thought they weren’t good enough. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes. Her lids looked like tissue paper, but the blue of her iris was still strong and clear. He was a good man, she said. I never did hear him complain. He never was the kind to worry about cold mashed potatoes, he would just eat them. You know.
I left soon afterward. I drove about a mile down the road and then pulled over and wept. I was thinking about Eugenie coming across those poems after her husband’s death, then sitting back on her heels to stare into space for a long time.
Dear Martin,
First, when I come home, I’m taking a nap. Then I’m taking a bath. Please make sure there’s some of that Damask Rose in the linen closet, that’s the one we both like best. Then I’m putting on that red dress you like, the one that pushes my boobs up to my chin. And my red heels. My black nylons. Like you like.
We’re going for dinner to the Capital Grill on Newbury Street and if we have to wait three hours to get seated, we’ll wait three hours. We’ll get drinks and talk, I have a lot to tell you.
I’m getting everything to eat, and I think you should, too. Appetizer. Dessert. After-dinner drinks. I like being in that restaurant, despite its nearly palpable male ambiance —dark oak walls, dim lights, a wide sense of red; even oil paintings of hunting dogs with dead birds hanging from their mouths, for God’s sake. It’s the place I’ve always felt the friendliest toward males—admired them, envied them their easy comfort and their generosity, their tendency to tip big and eat the same way. I’ve seen groups of men out to dinner there, sitting at a round table and, in the absence of their wives, cheating—with porterhouse, with fried onion rings, with cheesecake studded by chocolate chips. They talk loudly and laugh louder, move back in time to summer nights when they would meet at the all-night diner after they’d taken the girls home, to talk about what they got, to talk about cars, to talk about who was going where tomorrow. I got to do that once, hang out with the boys after their dates. I was visiting my aunt and uncle for two weeks one summer, and one of their sons was my age, sixteen. His job was to entertain me, and his notion of how to do that was to wordlessly bring me along with him everywhere he went. It was fine with me. It felt like rare privilege.
So I got to go to the all-night diner, and my cousin explained over his massive-sized cheeseburger that if someone came in with his shirt untucked, it was to cover the stain of him coming in his pants. I got to lie on the floor of my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, using their extension to quietly listen in on my cousin’s phone conversations as he paced in the kitchen below me; and I observed with a wrinkled-brow wonder how comfortable boys were with long silences on the line. I got to stay up late with him, watching black-and-white movies featuring angry gorillas, while he carped at his younger sister and brother to buzz off, to get the hell to bed. Once, alone, we tried kissing, but we frightened ourselves out of that in a hurry. We were envisioning offspring with three heads. Worse than that, we were envisioning confessing to our priests that we’d French-kissed our cousin, and gotten damp in the pants to boot.
I got to sit with the boys on the beach and hear what they said about every girl’s body that passed by and I have to say I usually agreed with them. I got to set off cherry bombs in rich people’s neighborhoods, although my slow running once nearly got all of us caught. I was called by my last name, just like one of the boys. And then one night when we were out cruising, I started making out in the backseat with Whitey O’Conner, and everything got ruined. I ended up staying home with my cousin’s younger sister after that, playing with her pet rabbit and wishing I’d kept my femaleness tucked in.
I don’t know if I ever told you this, Martin, but whenever we go to the Capital, I always want to be a man for a little while. I want to feel back in that circle. I want to be wearing a suit with a vest with the bottom buttons undone due to the deliciousness of my dinner. I want to be slouching back in my burgundy leather chair, my mouth making those fish movements in order to smoke my fat cigar, nobody around me complaining. My wallet would be thick with large bills. Men always carry more money than women, did you ever notice that, Martin? All other things being equal, a woman will have maybe forty-five dollars, a man will have a good hundred and fifty.
After the restaurant, I want to walk down Newbury Street, which you never want to do, you always just want to go home and walk around the house in your underwear and then watch the news. But this time I want to walk down Newbury Street in my heels with my hair up, holding hands with you and pointing to the artwork in the gallery windows, to the outlandishly expensive wedding dresses, to the books so attractively displayed in the windows at Waterstone’s you have to ball your fists to keep from smashing the glass and stealing them. Just be ready, Martin, we are not going home right after we eat. We might go the North End, drink cappuccino at the Paradise and hope some gangsters come in to use the pay phone.
I’ll pay for dinner at the Capital. I’ll sign the receipt with a drunken exuberance that makes my penmanship curly. When we get home, I’ll screw your brains out. Like we used to. You can leave the lights on now. I don’t mind anymore, I think I understand the purpose of my body. And then you can walk around in your underwear and I’ll walk around in my robe, Kleenex in the pocket in case I want to blow my nose to Ted Koppel. Our voices will be low and sleepy; only a few lights in the house will be on. The recliners built into our family room sofa will seem less a joke and more a necessity: we will be ourselves and loosely comfortable.
Also: some Sunday we are going to rent a canoe and paddle down the Charles. We are going to music festivals when we see them in the paper, and we are going to Harvard Square to throw money into the upturned derbies of the jugglers. Think of how many weekends we’ve spent going to the cleaners and to Lechmere’s, to look at things we already have. I am so tired of that. It’s so unnecessary.
Martin, I want you to do something for me. In the family room, there’s that picture of me when I was twenty. In front of it you’ll find a silk flower. I don’t know if you ever noticed it before. I think I put it there because I was grieving for the loss
of that self, it was like an altar offering to the person I used to be. Get rid of it, will you? Throw that flower in the garbage, where it belongs.
Love,
Nan
P.S. For the screw-your-brains-out portion of the evening, Martin, I wouldn’t mind your buying me a little something to wear. You know what I mean.
Last night, I was thinking about my grandmother. I was remembering a time when I was eleven years old, and lying under her kitchen table in my new pink pedal pushers and matching pink-and-white-checked blouse, my ankle crossed over my knee. I was listening to my grandmother and her five daughters—one of them my mother—talking. I loved doing that, and I knew if I kept myself under the table and out of sight it was likely that the talk would get looser. More interesting. Someone might swear. Oh, the red lipstick marks they left on their coffee cups, the way they were used to their bosoms! I was waiting so hard to grow up. It was a job, waiting, when you were eleven. Every morning you looked at your face in the mirror to see if the babyness had gone away. Every night in the bathtub, you stretched your legs out before you, seeing if they were longer. They felt longer.
It was a Saturday morning, that time in my grandmother’s kitchen. Sammy, the parakeet she kept on a TV tray by the kitchen window, was chirping happily. He liked the little symphony of voices he was hearing. He was very excited, you could tell, because he got a drink often out of his water dish—he always drank a lot of water when he was excited. His dish was one of those hooded glass ones, designs of lines on it. I thought it looked like a miniature urinal. I wondered how he could tell the difference. Later, he would die from flying into a pan where my grandmother was frying chicken. You couldn’t help but smile from the irony, even though you felt terrible for poor Sammy.