“What, then?”
“I’m saying—if, that’s all. Never mind, it’s silly, I was just thinking out loud.” She felt embarrassment and the beginnings of hurt. Which was ridiculous. Still, new as the idea was, it came as a shock that Thea might not want to be her baby’s godmother.
“Sweetheart.” Thea crossed to her, holding her hands out. “All I’m saying is I don’t want to make a deal. Or a promise, even if it makes it easier for you.” She smoothed a long, wet lock of hair behind Caddie’s ear and cupped her cheek with her palm, holding gently. “Don’t think about me or anybody else when you make up your mind. Look inside, nowhere else.”
“Okay.” She felt comforted and rebuffed at the same time. Was the true, adult goal to be strong all by yourself, never to ask for help from the ones you loved? Presumably Thea knew best, but maybe Caddie didn’t value autonomy as much as she did. The important thing, though, was not to feel rejected. Because that would really be stupid.
“Why don’t you stay here instead of going home this late by yourself? You could sleep on the couch in the sitting room, it’s very comfortable. I’ve taken enough naps to—”
“I can’t, I have to get home to Finney.”
“I forgot about him.”
“Thanks for showing me the secret porch.” Caddie found her purse and put the strap over her shoulder. “That was great.” Did she sound stiff? After they’d just danced together half naked in the rain? Thea was looking at her out of narrow, concerned eyes. “Really great,” Caddie repeated, and hugged her. When she’d have let go, Thea held on.
“I don’t even care what you decide, except for you,” she said into the air over Caddie’s shoulder. “I want you to feel proud of yourself, with no regrets. You deserve to be happy.” She squeezed tight. Caddie didn’t understand the glaze of tears in Thea’s eyes, but she was glad for them.
Firing up the Pontiac, watching the wipers smear the windshield with rain and blown honeysuckle blossoms, she reflected on what an interesting person she was these days. How varied and complex her reactions. Thea didn’t care to be her baby’s godmother, and she was okay with that. She was mellow with that. Fairly. Magill, on the other hand, had invited her to marry him just so the baby could have a name, and she’d snapped at him. She’d all but ended their friendship! She patted her chin, fingering the tender place where the pimple was. Must be hormones.
20
The Gray Gurus scheduled a program for the third Friday of every month, at eight P.M. in the Blue Room. Doré Harris, the self-appointed coordinator, said twelve programs a year was a serendipitous number, since Wake House at capacity housed twelve residents. Some people were on their second and third presentations, while others, like Cornel, who called them the Gray Geezers and considered them irrelevant by definition, had never given one. Audience size varied. For Nana’s program, “Spots on the Turtle, Rings on the Tree: Musings on Oldness in Words and One Big Picture,” the Blue Room was packed. Standing room only.
There wasn’t a lectern; presenters stood or sat behind a card table in front of the fireplace, the audience gathered around on folding chairs. At eight-ten, Doré, sitting next to Caddie in the second row, stood and went to the card table.
“While we’re waiting for our speaker, who I’m sure will be here any second, let me take this opportunity to tell you all about our delightful schedule for the next few months.” Doré always dressed up for the presentations; tonight, presumably because the subject was artistic, she wore a long, fuzzy, umber-colored tunic dress with a necklace of heavy, clanking wooden stars and quarter-moons. “In September, we have a returning favorite—Bernie’s going to show slides and tell us about his cruise to the Panama Canal.”
Cornel groaned, sliding lower in his front-row seat. “Cripes, not again.”
“I know we’ll enjoy this new program, which shouldn’t be confused with Bernie’s trip to Puerto Rico, which was fascinating and which we heard about last March. And then in October, it’s going to be my turn again. Doesn’t time just fly?”
“Not fast enough,” Maxine Harris, seated on Caddie’s other side, said in a low but carrying voice. “Just so she doesn’t do another ‘Scenes from Excalibur.’ I’d need my nausea pills to get through that.”
Magill, lounging against the door post, had a coughing fit.
Doré’s thin nostrils flared. Her mouth turned down before she straightened it with a freezing smile. “Then in November, we’ll hear from Maxine, who’s doing something about insurance, I wasn’t quite clear on the—”
“ ‘The Wisdom of Term Life,’ ” her archenemy spoke up loudly. “My son, Stewart Ray Junior, is one of the top-selling life insurance agents in the eastern region. They give him bonus trips to the Caribbean every time he turns around.”
“Well, idn’t that nice. I’m sure we all can’t wait to hear that.” In case this sarcasm was lost on Maxine, Doré slowed down her southern accent to a sticky-sweet crawl to add, “There’s nothin’ I personally love mo-uh than somebody’s secondhand report on a teeny-tiny part of their son’s boring career specialty.” The freezing smile flashed again before she went back to her chair and sat down.
Caddie stared at her fingernails and tried to ignore the sensation of heat rolling in on her from either side. From the corner of her eye she saw Maxine uncross her legs and plant both Dr. Scholl’s sandals on the carpet. “It’s better than feet.”
Better than feet? She caught Thea’s eye by accident and had to look away quickly. This was no laughing matter.
“It’s better than doctoring people’s feet all day,” Maxine clarified. “Pays better, too, I’m sure.”
Oh, now she remembered—Doré’s daughter was a podiatrist. In the front row, Susan Cohen and Mrs. Brill looked at each other and rolled their eyes. Brenda cleared her throat in a soft, tolerant, voice-of-reason way.
Doré tinkled a laugh. Caddie quailed when she turned to her, reaching out to give her a confidential pat on the hand. “Idn’t it sad,” she murmured, “when people have to hold up the accomplishments of they-uh children because they-uh own are so sparse and pitiful?”
“Idn’t it sad,” Maxine mimicked, “when people’s children move clear across the country to get away from them?”
Doré gasped.
“Idn’t it sad, Caddie, when people think ‘Dodo’ is an endearment?”
Doré’s wooden necklace made hollow, knocking clacks when she drew herself up tall. “What’s sad—”
“Idn’t it sad”—Maxine’s voice shook with suppressed rage—“when people who’ve broken up three marriages in a row tell you straight to your face, Caddie, that they’ve never cared about material possessions? Don’t you find that sad?”
“I’ll tell you what’s sad, it’s women who can’t hold on to a man and have to blame everybody else—”
“Not everybody else, just the jezebel responsible for breaking up her happy home!”
“Happy home! Ha!”
“Happy home! Till somebody wrecked it. Somebody who calls that romantic—only she’s not like Romeo and Juliet, she’s like Lady Macbeth!”
Doré was gathering herself for a counterattack when Bea Copes burst out from the back of the room, “Stop it! Shame on both of you, shame!”
Caddie turned around with everybody else to see Bea hauling herself to her feet with the help of Mr. Lorton’s chair in front of her. Visiting her sister every day had made her haggard and sunken-eyed, and thinner than Caddie had ever seen her. But she was so angry, her braided hair looked like sparks were shooting out of it. She shook her fist!
“You idiotic women. How much time have you wasted, how much of my life have you wasted with your sniping? What kind of fools are you?”
Doré said, “Well now, just a—”
“How could you not know what you’ve got? I’d like to bop your two heads together!” Caddie was pretty sure she would have if they’d been sitting next to each other. “Do you like being alone and lonely? That’s what you are, but
you don’t have to be, and it purely burns me up. If you could see two inches past your own nose—” She swatted at her cheek, angry at the tears. “You could save each other if you had any sense, let go of some of that poison. Lord, if you only knew.” She flapped her hand at them and let her shoulders sink. “Oh, hell.” She collapsed in her chair and started rooting in her pocket, her sleeve; people turned away so that she could compose herself in private.
Magill detached himself from the wall and went toward her with something white in his hand: a clean tissue. She put her cheek on his shoulder when he knelt beside her chair. Then Caddie looked away, too.
On either side of her, Maxine and Doré stared straight ahead with their hands in their laps, so quiet they didn’t seem to be breathing. Their silence sounded shocked and regretful, or at least that’s how Caddie interpreted it; but the silence in the room sounded vindicated, like a courtroom after the jury comes back with a popular verdict.
Eventually Brenda said, “Well! Why don’t I just go see what’s keeping our—oh! Here she is.”
Nana loved making an entrance; Caddie probably should’ve warned people she wasn’t going to be on time for her program. She looked a bit frazzled as she limped into the parlor with a cane instead of her walker, clutching a bundle of loose papers in her other hand. What was she wearing? It looked like a sheet. It was, a white sheet, wrapped around her tall, droopy frame like a toga and tied around the waist with a white cord. She had on white tennis shoes, too, and her white enamel earrings that said “Truth” on one and “Beauty” on the other. Were the smudges of white paint on her hands an accident or part of the costume?
She’d been working on something all afternoon, an artwork that was to be the finale of her program, but it was very mysterious, she wouldn’t talk about it except to say it would be “simple.” Good, Caddie had thought, and what a change from her usual, all-encompassing artistic visions. Whatever it was, she planned to unveil it at the end of her formal remarks, which were to be merely introductory; the big project was upstairs in her room.
She poked her way to the card table–lectern and peered around near-sightedly. “Well? Who’s introducing me?”
There was a moment of uncertainty while Doré, Brenda, and Caddie all hesitated, then started to rise, like mystery guests on that old quiz show—but before anybody could get up Nana said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll just start in.” Her glasses were hanging from a chain around her neck; she lifted them from the bosom of her toga and stuck them on her nose. She rearranged the order of her papers. Cleared her throat.
Caddie broke the death grip she had on her own hands and took a deep breath. In, out, from the diaphragm. Only one thing made her more nervous than performing in public, and it was watching her grandmother perform in public. The old sinking feeling descended, same as always, the compulsion to run away, disappear, anything but sit through another writhing, palm-sweating embarrassment brought on by Nana’s need to make a spectacle of herself. Why did Caddie care so much? She was thirty-two years old, when was she going to grow up? Never. It was too much a part of her, like her molecular structure, her fingerprint. Nana was periodically going to make her cringe with shame until one of them died.
“Oldness. What is oldness? Let’s say it’s purity. Old age, a purification process. The sloughing-off of all things unnecessary, getting down to the bone. Mummies. Indian burial ceremonies.” Nana thinned her lips and turned a few pages, rejecting what was written on them.
“Cycles. Closer to wisdom, rising in spirals higher and higher. Where does it end? Some say in eternal contemplation of the face of God, a mystical experience I myself have had, and I’m sure I’m not alone here. I can tell you it’s not boring. It sounds boring, yes, but it’s not, it’s like sleeping with Montgomery Clift, or Leon Russell, it’s like very good sex all the time. It’s perfect.”
Apart from some shifting of position, the uncrossing or recrossing of legs, there wasn’t a sound in the room.
“Hard to believe, I know, because youth owns everything. They always have, but nowadays it’s completely out of hand. We’re like Israelites crying in the desert. We’re ghosts. People look right through us like we’re Saran Wrap. But where youth goes wrong is, they think death is the end—so that’s why we depress them so much. Even the religious ones think that, deep down. You have to get old to see the light, or maybe it’s that the light only shines on the old. Who believes in God?”
It took a minute for people to realize this wasn’t rhetorical. All hands went up except Cornel’s and, to Caddie’s surprise, Brenda’s.
“See, we all do, it’s unanimous,” said Nana, who could always see what she wanted to see. “So what’s there to be scared of?”
Caddie wondered if she was going to start preaching. This was a new side of Nana. She’d always dabbled in religions, the further from the mainstream the better, but her spiritual searches had seemed more for entertainment than enlightenment. Then again, she was a pragmatist, and everything served her art; if God helped justify whatever her new creation was, she’d use him as readily as a number-ten paintbrush.
“Put up or shut up, either God saves or he doesn’t. Either we go to heaven or we rot in the ground, but either way, like the T-shirt says, no fear. No fear.” She smiled and turned her head from side to side, as if conferring a benediction. It made her lose her place.
“Oldness. What is the essence of oldness? Is it decrepitude? Is it decay? Yes and no. Take a worm. Please. A worm eats to live, same as we do, but we call a worm corrupt. That thing from Milton—I was going to look that up, but I forgot. But a worm’s the same as a bird or a butterfly. Underground, aboveground, God made the ground. Creatures above or below, what’s the difference? Corrupt this, that’s what I say.
“Anyway, the essence of oldness is purity, that’s the key. A thing is born, it exists, it ceases to be. It’s a dead parrot. What’s so bad about that? Why make everything so personal? Oh, poor me,” she said in a weepy, mock-pitiful voice, “it’s so sad, I’m going to die, we’re all going to die, my best, sweetest friends, all the people I love so dearly, oh, it’s so sad, so sad.
“It’s bigger than us,” she resumed in a brisk tone, “so suck it up and be strong. Buddha said—something something—anyway, look beyond this vale of tears, people. It’s not about you, you’re a flea, a fleck. It’s all going to be all right. One way or the other. We worry too much is the problem. Well, me, anyway. You Baptists, you don’t worry enough.”
Mrs. Brill bridled.
“The whole point of oldness isn’t despair, it’s victory. We won! Aren’t we here? Aren’t they in the ground? The thing is, now they’re catching up because you get old faster in the ground. I mean a lot faster. Me, I want to be cremated, then there’s no contest. Talk about your purification, am I right? Think of your skin melting right off the bone. Think simplicity. Think ready to meet God, whoever she may be. Your soul is now a gigantic eyeball. Are you with me?”
Magill was the first to realize it was over and to start clapping. Pretty soon the others joined in, and to Caddie’s surprise and intense relief the applause sounded genuine, not polite or just relieved because Nana’s speech was finished. They’d enjoyed it.
Sorry, she couldn’t take questions, her work would have to speak for itself, she said when Mrs. Brill raised her hand to ask what she’d meant about the Baptists. It was time for the unveiling of her “installation.” She’d wanted to serve white wine in plastic glasses in her room, like an art opening, but Brenda had vetoed the idea on the grounds that it wasn’t a house-sanctioned holiday. “Wait for me in the hall, don’t anybody go in without me!” Nana instructed as the group broke up and people headed for the stairs or the elevator. “Very interesting,” Mr. Lorton waylaid her to say. “Who’s Leon Russell?” And Brenda said she’d made some “very unusual points.” Nana basked. Caddie was dying to know what Magill had made of it, but when she looked around for him he was gone. He was avoiding her.
She and Nana rode u
p in the elevator with Susan Cohen, who wanted to tell them about the Jewish burial rite. Nana tried to look attentive, but she wasn’t listening. Too excited. She hadn’t been nervous for the talking part of her presentation, but whatever was waiting in her room was making her mash and massage the handle of her cane like biscuit dough. That was funny, because now Caddie wasn’t nervous.
The odor of paint had been faint but definite in the elevator, but when the door opened on the second floor it became a stench. Maxine was grumbling, “I won’t sleep a wink with this godawful smell,” in the group milling outside Nana’s door. Nana hurried down the hall toward them, thump-thumping with her cane, her toga-sheet billowing like laundry on a line. “Caddie,” she threw back, “you stay there and turn out that light when I say.” The crowd parted; she waded through it and stood with her back to her bedroom door, legs braced, holding her cane in both hands like a nightstick.
“This is a visual experience. We can talk and talk about the essence of oldness, which is the essence of us, but a picture’s always worth more. That’s my creed and that’s my philosophy. And now—here’s my vision. I’m not saying anything else.
“Except don’t come in till I tell you.” She reached behind her for the doorknob. “Caddie, turn that hall light out now.”
Caddie hesitated, worried about plunging all these old folks into darkness, people tripping and bumping into things, falling. Magill could lose his balance and hurt himself.
“Caddie!”
She turned out the light.
Sounds of self-conscious laughter. Nana’s door opening. Her saying, “All right, come on in but be careful. Just come in, there’s nothing you can trip over. The light goes on when we’re all in.” Movement, shuffling feet.
Caddie hesitated again. Was she supposed to stay here? Did Nana mean this light? They should’ve had a dress rehearsal.
“Come on, everybody in,” Nana was saying. “Okay, are we all here?”
Caddie started to call out, “I’m not,” but her sense of the theatrical, dim as it was, warned her that might hamper the start of the show. Using the wall to feel her way, she crept down the blackish corridor, and in the next second the light in Nana’s room clicked on, throwing a slash of yellow onto the hall carpet, the opposite wall. Inside: gasps.