Evie had smoked three packs a day until she had a stroke. Six cigarettes a day until, a year later, she had the second. Now she begged an occasional cigarette from the male night nurse, entered into somber-faced agreements with the doctor that such transgressions would stop. It was so difficult to come to terms with: fashionable Evie, with her once neatly permed hair, become a streaming-haired witch in layers of clothes as odd as the things teenagers wore at the malclass="underline" pleated skirts over skinny trousers; tights with rolled anklets; mismatched cardigans and blouses that dangled beneath the sweaters. Her conversations were equally dishevelled: ragged references to things in the present; slightly strange diction, so that the Queen of England became the London Queen, as in: What do I care how I look? It’s not as if the London Queen’s coming for a visit. Annus became “anus” as Evie summarized the London Queen’s travails for Sonja: O bad year of fires, marriages gone wrong, the doe eyes of her middle son’s babies bug-big in the camera’s flash, their redheaded mother smiling, her white teeth orthodontically straight, though her life had wavered. Much cleavage; a cuckolded husband; publicly nibbled toes.
Sonja, herself, was certainly not the London Queen. In fact, though her blue earmuffs had become her favorite winter hat, they were not coordinated with her camouflage boots and, unlike the Queen’s old-lady handbags with their small handles — handbags ladies hold the way children hold buckets of wet sand at the beach — the black leather bag with the drawstring Sonja carried slung over her shoulder had lasted over fifteen years. Once, among the sunken treasures on the handbag’s linty bottom, there had been a rather large zippered makeup bag, now replaced by a smaller quilted bag. When the black mascara dried up, Sonja had not replaced it. The bronze eyeliner had gotten lost somewhere; when she could not find the same shade, she had replaced it with dark blue. Now the makeup bag contained only a small bottle of aspirin, a stub of blue eyeliner. Tampons had taken over. Once the handbag had been a treasure trove of things she found necessary and interesting: compact corkscrews; miniature bottles of perfume; keys to many people’s apartments; photo books crammed with pictures of herself and her boyfriends, later a small foldout book of her wedding pictures, soon overlaid by pictures of friends’ children. Now the purse contained a travel-size package of Kleenex, and usually a few coupons floated around like buoyant bits of driftwood, along with deteriorating peppermint Life Savers and rumpled bills she’d forgotten to mail. The Mont Blanc fountain pen she had practiced writing her married name with over and over was long gone, lost somewhere, replaced by a felt-tip. Her wallet contained a single photograph of Marshall. On the flip side of the rectangle of clear plastic was her AAA card. She also had one credit card — one more than she vowed she would ever have — which she kept tucked in a separate compartment in her wallet so she wouldn’t be tempted to pull it out. On one corner was a hologram of a bird that flashed spectral colors and appeared to be flying as you jiggled the card. It seemed more suitable as an element of a mobile that might dangle over a child’s crib than as a plastic symbol of your own potential flights of fancy that could dazzle all the while you were depleting your bank account.
She was, she realized — with the notable exception of her involvement with Tony Hembley — rather conservative. A practical person who thought that if something was serviceable, it didn’t need to be replaced. And she had believed in recycling long before it became popular. Old tie-dyed T-shirts had been stitched into colorful foam-filled animals and donated to the church bazaar; trading beads she would no longer wear had been unstrung and added to light-pulls; embroidered free-flowing dresses had become summer nightgowns. Though maybe, come to think of it, it wasn’t judiciousness so much as a desire to make the past fit in with the present. Though it surely couldn’t be dovetailed, perhaps the past could at least unapologetically sidle up beside the furniture or clothes or philosophy of the present moment.
What, she wondered, had put her in this suddenly philosophical mood — especially on a day when the music she was listening to perfectly augmented the melting world outside, when she was driving familiar roads for familiar reasons? She thought, as Arrau softly played the notes whose near echo of sameness was the ending of the piece, that she must have subconsciously selected music that sounded haunted. It was the sound track for the morning after, music to soothe the sometimes-mad, adagio as antidote to a difficult day.
She passed the dry cleaner’s and forgot until she was at the intersection that she’d left clothes there she needed to pick up. She envisioned her recent progress in reverse: she couldn’t stop the mental image of her car turned back past the dry cleaner’s, retracing her route on Locust Avenue, which curved into Daymer Drive, then the turn onto snowy Hollowell Road, backtracking all the way to her driveway. And then what? Reenter the house and retrace her steps, return to the point where she was still curled in bed, snug and sleepy — act as if she had no obligations? After the visit to the nursing home, she would be driving to UPS to mail a box of clothes to the family in Appalachia she and Marshall sponsored, and after that she would try to get the car washed before buying groceries. One good thing about winter was that groceries could be left safely in the car for long periods while she did other things. She could leave them there and get on the highway and drive half an hour to Hembley and Hembley, find out if she was scheduled to show a house, then listen to the phone messages, hope that the one contract she had in the works was progressing without trouble, check the listings to see if anything had sold (not likely; in her position, it wasn’t necessary to keep posted on all the hysterical cover stories in the magazines, informing everyone that the boom days of ’80s real estate were over).
She turned into the parking lot outside the nursing home. Three places were reserved for doctors, six for staff, two for the handicapped. There were five cars in staff parking. The rest of the places were empty, though a motorcycle was parked horizontally at the back of one of the doctor’s spots. A red pickup was parked in visitor parking and a blue Chevrolet with Florida plates. She pulled her white Toyota in between the truck and the Chevy, thinking: how patriotic.
At the station inside the entrance she was greeted by a pudgy woman sausage-stuffed into a pastel-green uniform, who immediately announced it was her first week on the job, so she didn’t recognize anybody. The woman entered Evie’s name on the computer and, reading the screen, told Sonja everything was much the same; Evie was continuing to progress in physical therapy, her conjunctivitis was cured, and she had resumed sleeping normally. The woman spoke brightly, as if anything merely normal could be viewed as amazing progress. Evie had been such an active person all her life, and now she was only a person about whom things were said: she did this; she did that; this is cured; another day passed uneventfully. How slowly they must pass, Sonja thought. How very slowly they must pass. As Sonja sniffed a gardenia in a vase on the counter, the woman complimented Sonja’s blue earmuffs, which hung around her neck like Walkman headphones. In such settings, there were always so many things left unsaid, Sonja thought: the tacit understanding that we’re-okay-they’re-screwed was like an eyewink that didn’t have to transpire.
Evie and the other residents were at Time with Tots, a weekly visit from a neighboring preschool. Getting off the elevator, Sonja could hear the squeals. First the hospital staff had tried bringing pets in to cheer the nursing home patients, but that resulted in petty jealousies and despondency when the pets were trotted off; then they decided on children, which, surprisingly, the patients seemed not to project onto so much and from whom they did not expect so many things.