“Patience is right, ya know,” I say as we stroll down the hall. “Cancer is a hard row to hoe alone.” Thinking that this must be the hospital’s party line and that I’m out to pitch the support group too, she withdraws her arm and quickens her pace down the hall. “Do you have family nearby?”
Tess nods.
“They must be takin’ this real hard.”
“They don’t know. Well, my husband does, but my children….”
(Obviously, I’m already aware of this. I’m just trying to draw her out of her shell.)
“You got anyone else that you could lean on?” I ask. “A close friend?”
She shakes her head.
“Parents?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Siblings?”
“I have a sister, but I can’t reach her.”
“Oh, that’s a real shame. Sisters can be a great help under these circumstances.” I pause to let that sink in. “Speaking of which, perhaps you’ll have lunch with me and mine today.”
She says, “Oh, that’s really nice, but I can’t today,” as she rabbits past the elevator toward the STAIRS sign, but what she’s actually thinking is that lunching together is entirely too familiar and completely out of the question. A passion for patient care gone amok. She flings open the stairwell door and begins her rabid flight down the steps. “I’ve got some important things to do.”
As we fly past floor numbers two, then one, and exit into the lobby, I ask, “Like what?”
“Oh…you know,” she says as she explodes out of the hospital doors. “Stuff.”
I catch up to her at the side of the Volvo where she’s struggling to insert the key into the sticky old lock. “Allow me,” I say as I lift the chain out of her shaking fingers and open it easy peasy. “Maybe you could put your “stuff” off for an hour or so? We’re having corn and crab bisque and bread straight out of the oven, and…and I already called and asked my sisters to set another place at the table. They can’t wait to meet you.”
As she slides behind the steering wheel, she whispers, “I love homemade bread and corn and crab bisque is my favorite. And sisters…,” she’s become misty-eyed, “I adore mine.”
“I know that, Tessie,” I tell her as I settle into the passenger seat. “I know.”
We were careening through the streets of Ruby Falls, almost halfway to our destination, before it occurs to her that she hadn’t told me her nickname. Nobody but Birdie calls her Tessie.
Sisterland
There’d been heated discussions during numerous church coffee klatches about what to do with the abandoned convent that sat not far off from St. Lucy’s Church and School. They all knew that the point was moot because the ultimate decision on what would happen to the building would be made by those more powerful than the parishioners, but that didn’t keep them from arguing. Oddly, Will who loved the past, spearheaded a group that believed the two-story Gothic building should be razed. “It’s an eyesore.” But the aging students who’d attended school at St. Lucy’s in the previous decades were up in arms about leveling the home of the Dominican nuns. “It’s an historical site worthy of preserving same as the old mill and the covered bridge!” Tess agrees with that bunch because during Halloween time the parish uses the convent to stage a “Holy Haunted House!” to raise funds to buy books for the school library, new playground equipment, and field trips for the kids. The woods that surround the decrepit building are stocked with local teenagers dressed in ghoulish costumes, skeletons hanging from trees, big ol’ dangling spiders, and the like. Artistic Tess contributes Styrofoam gravestones for a pretend cemetery because Halloween is her second-favorite holiday next to Easter. (Since she spent so much time wandering around Holy Cross Cemetery as a child, she grew up feeling much more comfortable with the dead than the alive.)
“Right this way,” I say as we enter the backdoor of the empty convent. I take Tess’s puffy parka from her and set it down on the back of a peeling black ladder-back chair after she absentmindedly plugs in the large space heater that warms the bottom floor of the house during the Halloween festivities. Despite my offer to further lighten her load, she won’t hand over her lucky purse because the location is unnerving her, even though she’s the one who’s selected it.
I say, “That’s my sister, Hope, that I mentioned to you on the ride over,” and point to a sweet-looking, thin-faced woman in a black habit who’s stirring a soup pot at an avocado-colored stove. A crown of pink orchids is nestled on top of her wimple. “And that,” I nod to a middle-aged roly-poly woman wearing a grass skirt over her black dress who is standing at the entrance of the dining room, “that’s Faith.”
Tess has a serious case of sphenisciphobia—the fear of penguins—but she needs the nuns in order to work on her new To-Do List, especially number seven: Have a religious epiphany, so number eight—dying—will be okay with her. But she hasn’t figured that out yet, so she hides behind my skirt and says, “Your sisters are sisters? Oh, shit,” as she is swept back to her and Birdie’s days at Blessed Children of God School.
The Finley girls would’ve put their mother on the top of their fear chart, but the nuns were number two with a bullet. The women with the excellent posture and rosary beads holstered at their sides reminded Tess and Birdie of a gang of Western-movie bad guys who rode into town tall in the saddle with nothin’ else but murder on their minds. And they weren’t the only ones who quaked in their boots at the sight of the sisters. All the students at the school lived in terror of the mysterious and law-enforcing ladies who were the subject of many a recess conversation.
“I heard they aren’t born with boobies and that’s how they know that they’re s’posed to be nuns,” a kid would say during one of their numerous chats on the blacktop. “And they can’t have babies either because after they sign up they get hung upside down in the bell tower and their delivering holes are filled in with cement by the Archbishop,” the son of a mason would toss in. “Do you think they have hair or not?” Not, according to Hughie Fitzpatrick whose father owned the barbershop on 79th Street. Hughie had heard that after the nuns’ tresses were shorn, the cuttings were swept up and saved in a special “hair” room located in the basement of the school until enough had been gathered to call in the midget priest from St. Cecilia’s, who would spend all night weaving their locks on a spinning wheel into sharp-looking pork pie hats that got sent to pagans in steaming hot Africa as an added incentive to convert to Christianity.
My laugh interrupts her flashback. “Yup, my sisters are sisters. And that’s our dog.” A fine-boned golden retriever, the spittin’ image of Garbo, is lying in the corner of the pretty peach-and-green dining room. A white Frisbee imprinted with purple letters—St. Lucy’s…we’ve got one heck of a Lost and Found Department—cradled between her legs.
Sister Hope enters from the kitchen and sets an ornate soup tureen down on the pine dining-room table that’s been laid out with care. Pink peonies sit in a Depression glass vase. The china pattern is a replica of Tess’s, same for the silverware.
“Grace tells us that you have two children,” Sister Hope says as she takes her seat.
“A boy and a girl?” chubby Sister Faith asks as she settles across the table with an “oomph.”
Proud mama Tess beams. “Henry and Haddie.”
I ladle out the soup and place the bowl in front of my friend, who places a pale-pink napkin on her lap, and plunges in. The corn is roasted, and the crab is fresh, like it’d been picked off a beach moments ago. The loaf of potato bread is warm on the inside and crunchy on the outside.
Sister Hope asks Tess, “Do you taste the basil in the soup? We grew it in our garden.”
That’s Sister Faith’s cue to rise abruptly and sweep aside the chintz curtain hanging across the four-pane dining-room window. Outside, no more than twenty feet away, there’s an amazingly detailed re-creation of Tess’s garden complete with white picket fence. “Can you imagine what this looks like in the summer?” the nun asks he
r.
“Ha!” I say with a snort.
(She came up with all this, didn’t she?)
Tess nods and says, “I love gardens. They’re good for the soul, but…not always.” Before she can even try to stop the flashback, the summer of ’60 comes barreling into her brain.
It was the summer you couldn’t go anywhere in Milwaukee without somebody saying, “Hot enough for ya?” Even in June, a month that usually took its time to warm up, the Finley sisters perspired so profusely in their duplex bedroom on 66th Street that they had to take turns sucking on ice cubes and blowing on each other’s backs to stay cool.
When Tess’s little feet hit the ground the morning of June 8, she was fired up. She couldn’t change the fact that her daddy was gone, but she’d come up with an idea that she believed would at least help her recapture some of what the Indian podiatrist had mentioned. Her “passed life.” After seeing The Time Machine movie at the Tosa Theatre, Tess wished for two things. That she had hair like Yvette Mimieux’s, and that she and Birdie could leave the here and now and travel back in time to the Sunday afternoons that they’d spent with their gammy and boppa who they missed so much after their mother had struck them from the lives.
Normally, eleven-year-old Tess and her sister were inseparable, but the morning that she decided that they didn’t need a fancy, futuristic machine transporting them to the past, that a garden would be just the ticket, she had to get the ball rolling on her own because Birdie and Bee had slept over at Doris Franken’s house. The kid had an “imaginary friend” too, named Jane Doe, so the girls had that in common. (Doris’s father was a police officer.)
Tess jotted down the details of her plan on a piece of scratch paper while she ate a quick bowl of Wheaties.
GARDEN TO DO’S
Get permission from Louise and Mr. Lloyd.
Borrow a rake and a shovel from neighbors.
Buy seeds from the Five & Dime.
Water and weed every day.
The owner of the property, Mr. Hank Lloyd, lived downstairs from them, but they rarely saw their landlord because he kept his curtains closed tight after his wife of thirty-one years got hit by a car on her way home from the Red Owl food market last year, so Tess wasn’t sure how he would feel about her digging up his backyard. Her fingers were crossed as she rinsed out her bowl and went in search for her mother, who she found in the backyard hanging wash.
Louise’s auburn hair was pulled atop her head like a cresting wave. She was wearing white Bermuda shorts to show off her shapely, tan legs, and her matching sleeveless blouse clung to her full breasts. Like always, Tess was filled with wonder when she laid eyes upon her gorgeous mother. She guessed that just like people said, you could never judge a book by its cover.
After she told Louise the garden idea, she quickly added on, like she hardly cared one way or another, “Just an idea. No big deal,” for she had learned the hard way not to reveal her innermost desires to her mother. If she discovered what was really in Tess’s heart, she would figure out a way to use it against her.
“What about tools? Seeds?” Louise asked slyly as she jammed wooden clothespins into the collars of Leon’s work shirts. She was attempting to stump her daughter, and in a way she had. Tess was stunned to learn that she knew anything about growing things.
“I’m gonna borrow tools from the neighbors and they got seeds at the Five & Dime. I’ll use money from my piggy bank,” Tess said with a shrug.
Louise smirked and replied, “No skin offa my nose,” and went back to her hanging.
Tess thanked her many times, as was required, and was sure to add on, “Could you please be sure to ask Mr. Lloyd if it’d be all right with him?”
She skipped up to the Five & Dime, planning out the rows in her mind. She selected carrots and radishes because she and her gammy loved them with a little salt. And there’d be daisies, her sister’s favorite flower, and climbing morning glories would cover the falling-down fence between the yard and the alley.
When Birdie and Bee returned from their sleepover at Doris’s later that morning, the three of them went looking for donations. Mrs. Jackson contributed an old shovel and Mr. Glovarnik from the next block over told Tess she could borrow one of his hoes, but to not leave out in the rain. Mrs. Wily gave her a rusty sprinkling can.
Since Tess spent half of her nights fretting over her “weird” sister or feeling guilty for not trying to save her daddy on the day he drowned, and the other half making hand shadows on the bedroom wall or singing Favorite Things because she needed a talent when she entered the Miss America contest, most mornings she got up on the wrong side of the bed. But once she’d sowed those seeds in the backyard? That child was joyful, and in tune with the Creator again. She’d race to the garden, stroke the carrots’ fragile green tops, and imagine them pushing their pointy orange ends down into the dirt. The fast-growing radishes were doing great, and the daisies weren’t dawdlers, not like the morning glories that had barely begun to find purchase against the back fence.
When the Assumption rolled around—the important August 15 feast day when Catholics celebrate the Virgin Mary’s ascension into Heaven that also just so happens to be the day of the Finley sisters’ shared birthday—Tess woke Birdie up with a tickle and a joke, the same way their daddy always had on their special day. She told her, “Be right back with a surprise!” then scrambled out the back door to pick the daisies that she’d planned to set in a jelly jar on their bedroom dresser to celebrate, “Their day.”
An exuberant Tess was singing the chorus of her daddy’s favorite fishing song, “Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream,” but as she peeled around the corner of the garage on her way to the garden the song got stuck in her throat. Where the morning glories had been doing their darndest and the daisies had been begging to be picked, a three-inch thick, six-foot square block of cement held three brand new aluminum garbage cans that were so shiny that she could barely make out the tops of the flowers that’d been crushed from the waist down.
Tess let forth a scream that was so bloodcurdling that it even managed to penetrate her mother’s self-absorption. Banging out of the backdoor of the house, Louise marched toward her shouting, “Pipe down, for godssakes! You’re gonna wake the dead. What’s wrong?”
Tess lifted her small, quivering arm and pointed.
The beauty of the garden had been so pure and sincere that the destruction of it dented even someone as hard as Louise. She yelled, “Goddamn it,” and even felt a moment of fleeting guilt for not asking the landlord’s permission to create the plot the way Tess had asked her to. Like a peasant asking a king for permission, she’d told herself. The hell with that.
She grabbed Tess by the wrist and stormed to Mr. Lloyd’s door.
He answered the irate knocks in shiny black pants, cracked leather bedroom slippers, and a T-shirt splotched with food stains. Grief dressed him now, not his lovely wife.
Yes?” he said like he hadn’t used his voice for a while, or like he wasn’t exactly sure who they were.
After Louise finished her tirade, Mr. Lloyd slowly reached deep into his pocket and gave her mother something. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I…I didn’t know,” and closed the door softly in their faces.
For a moment, Tess thought Louise might cry, but she thrust out her chin and told her, “Let this be a lesson to you. This is what’s important to people. Open your hand.” She dropped into her daughter’s palm what Mr. Lloyd had given her to make amends for the demise of a little girl’s heaven on Earth. It was a fifty-cent piece.
Tess bolted out of the yard and threw the coin down an alley sewer along with the religious medal she wore around her neck. She didn’t return home until dark. She might’ve never come back if she didn’t need to check on Birdie.
“Tessie?” I place my hand on her arm to bring her back to the convent dining table.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Did you say something?”
“That’s such a sad, sad st
ory in so many ways,” Sister Faith says as she passes the bread their guest’s way.
Tess rips another hunk off the loaf that never seems to dwindle. “Yeah. Well. Took me a lot of years before I got up enough courage to try growing something again.”
After Sisters Faith and Hope share concerned looks with one another, I slide back my chair and say upbeat, “How ’bout we continue our chitchat in more comfortable surroundings?”
The convent living room has been decorated with a Hawaiian motif because my friend is attempting to work out a coupla things that’ve been troubling her for a long, long time. It goes back to the volcano picture on the cover of The Freaks of Nature that always reminded her of her mother. Tess has nightmares set in Hawaii. Sexy scorpions surfing waves of lava chase her through jungles of smothering orchids. Lepers limp after her through the streets of Molokai, their begging mouths lying in their outstretched hands. Nothing quite so horrifying today, just Don Ho and his ukulele giving it their all on the pointy-legged blond hi-fi. Tiki torches burn in all four corners. Palm-tree shaped pillows are arranged on nearby armchairs. The room smells of warm sand and a large body of water, and a coconut-smelling breeze ruffles Tess’s long bangs as we sit side by side on a couch the color of a conch shell.
After Sisters Faith and Hope get cozy in the overstuffed armchairs, I withdraw from the pocket of the parrot muumuu I’m now wearing a small green box that I set atop the driftwood coffee table. “The sisters and I want you to have this, Tessie.”
“Really? How nice. You didn’t have to,” she says. Giving the moment its due, she slowly lifts the top off the gift box, carefully removes the contents, and let’s it dangle from her fingers. The medallion is swinging from a lovely gold chain that’s a replica of one that Will had given her on her fortieth birthday.
I ask her, “Do you remember?”