My heart lurched: yearning ran through me like a cramp. Perhaps my granddaughter-perhaps Sabrina looks like that now, I thought. Perhaps, perhaps not, how would I know? I might not even recognise her.
She's been kept away from me so long; she's kept away. What can be done?
"Mrs. Griffen," hissed the politician.
I teetered, regained my balance. Now what had I been intending to say?
"My sister Laura would be so pleased," I gasped into the microphone. My voice was reedy; I thought I might faint. "She liked to help people." This was true, I'd vowed not to say anything untrue. "She was so fond of reading and books." Also true, up to a point. "She would have wished you the very best for your future." True as well.
I managed to hand over the envelope; the girl had to bend down. I whispered into her ear, or meant to whisper-Bless you. Be careful. Anyone intending to meddle with words needs such blessing, such warning. Had I actually spoken, or had I simply opened and closed my mouth like a fish?
She smiled, and tiny brilliant sequins flashed and sparkled all over her face and hair. It was a trick of my eyes, and of the stage lights, which were too bright. I should have worn my tinted glasses. I stood there blinking. Then she did something unexpected: she leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Through her lips I could feel the texture of my own skin: soft as kid-glove leather, crinkled, powdery, ancient.
She in her turn whispered something, but I couldn't quite catch it. Was it a simple thank you, or some other message in-could it be?-a foreign language?
She turned away. The light streaming out from her was so dazzling I had to shut my eyes. I hadn't heard, I couldn't see. Darkness moved closer. Applause battered my ears like beating wings. I staggered and almost fell.
Some alert functionary caught my arm and slotted me back into my chair. Back into obscurity. Back into the long shadow cast by Laura. Out of harm's way.
But the old wound has split open, the invisible blood pours forth. Soon I'll be emptied.
The silver box
The orange tulips are corning out, crumpled and raggedy like the stragglers from some returning army. I greet them with relief, as if waving from a bombed-out building; still, they must make their way as best they can, without much help from me. Sometimes I poke around in the debris of the back garden, clearing away dry stalks and fallen leaves, but that's about as far as I go. I can't kneel very well any more, I can't shove my hands into the dirt.
Yesterday I went to the doctor, to see about these dizzy spells. He told me that I have developed what used to be calleda heart, as if healthy people didn't have one. It seems I will not after all keep on living forever, merely getting smaller and greyer and dustier, like the Sibyl in her bottle. Having long ago whispered I want to die, I now realise that this wish will indeed be fulfilled, and sooner rather than later. No matter that I've changed my mind about it.
I've wrapped myself in a shawl in order to sit outside, sheltered by the overhang of the back porch, at a scarred wooden table I had Walter bring in from the garage. It held the usual things, leftovers from previous owners: a collection of dried-out paint cans, a stack of asphalt shingles, a jar half-filled with rusty nails, a coil of picture wire. Mummified sparrows, mouse nests of mattress stuffing. Walter washed it off with Javex, but it still smells of mice.
Laid out in front of me are a cup of tea, an apple cut into quarters, and a pad of paper with blue lines on it, like men's pyjamas once. I've bought a new pen as well, a cheap one, black plastic with a rolling tip. I remember my first fountain pen, how sleek it felt, how blue the ink made my fingers. It was Bakelite, with silver trim. The year was 1929. I was thirteen. Laura borrowed this pen-without asking, as she borrowed everything-then broke it, effortlessly. I forgave her, of course. I always did; I had to, because there were only the two of us. The two of us on our thorn-encircled island, waiting for rescue; and, on the mainland, everyone else.
For whom am I writing this? For myself? I think not. I have no picture of myself reading it over at a later time, later time having become problematical. For some stranger, in the future, after I'm dead? I have no such ambition, or no such hope.
Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for, when they scrawl their names in the snow.
I'm not as swift as I was. My fingers are stiff and clumsy, the pen wavers and rambles, it takes me a long time to form the words. And yet I persist, hunched over as if sewing by moonlight.
When I look in the mirror I see an old woman; or not old, because nobody is allowed to beold any more. Older, then. Sometimes I see an older woman who might look like the grandmother I never knew, or like my own mother, if she'd managed to reach this age. But sometimes I see instead the young girl's face I once spent so much time rearranging and deploring, drowned and floating just beneath my present face, which seems-especially in the afternoons, with the light on a slant-so loose and transparent I could peel it off like a stocking.
The doctor says I need to walk-every day, he says, for my heart. I would rather not. It isn't the idea of the walking that bothers me, it's the going out: I feel too much on show. Do I imagine it, the staring, the whispering? Perhaps, perhaps not. I am after all a local fixture, like a brick-strewn vacant lot where some important building used to stand.
The temptation is to stay inside; to subside into the kind of recluse whom neighbourhood children regard with derision and a little awe; to let the hedges and weeds grow up, to allow the doors to rust shut, to lie on my bed in some gown-shaped garment and let my hair lengthen and spread out over the pillow and my fingernails to sprout into claws, while candle wax drips onto the carpet. But long ago I made a choice between classicism and romanticism. I prefer to be upright and contained-an urn in daylight.
Perhaps I should not have moved back here to live. But by that time I couldn't think of anywhere else to go. As Reenie used to say, Better the devil you know.
Today I made the effort. I went out, I walked. I walked as far as the cemetery: one needs a goal for these otherwise witless excursions. I wore my broad-brimmed straw hat to cut the glare, and my tinted glasses, and took my cane to feel for the curbs. Also a plastic shopping bag.
I went along Erie Street, past a drycleaner's, a portrait photographer's, the few other main-street stores that have managed to survive the drainage caused by the malls on the edge of town. Then Betty's Luncheonette, which is under new ownership again: sooner or later its proprietors get fed up, or die, or move to Florida. Betty's now has a patio garden, where the tourists can sit in the sun and fry to a crisp; it's in the back, that little square of cracked cement where they used to keep the garbage cans. They offer tortellini and cappuccino, boldly proclaimed in the window as if everyone in town just naturally knows what they are. Well, they do by now; they've had a try, if only to acquire sneering rights. I don't need that fluff on my coffee. Looks like shaving cream. One swallow and you're foaming at the mouth.
Chicken pot pies were the specialty once, but they're long gone. There are hamburgers, but Myra says to avoid them. She says they use pre-frozen patties made of meat dust. Meat dust, she says, is what is scraped up off the floor after they've cut up frozen cows with an electric saw. She reads a lot of magazines, at the hairdresser's.
The cemetery has a wrought-iron gate, with an intricate scrollwork archway over it, and an inscription: Though I Walk Through the Valley of the Shadow of Death I Will Fear No Evil, For Thou Art With Me. Yes, it does feel deceptively safer with two; but Thou is a slippery character. Every Thou I've known has had a way of going missing. They skip town, or turn perfidious, or else they drop like flies, and then where are you?
Right about here.
The Chase family monument is hard to miss: it's taller than everything else. There are two angels, white marble, Victorian, sentimental but quite well done as such things go, on a large stone cube with scrolled corners. The first angel is standing, her head bowed to the side in an attitude of mourning, one hand placed tenderly on the shoulder of the second one. The second kneels, leaning against the other's thigh, gazing straight ahead, cradling a sheaf of lilies. Their bodies are decorous, the contours shrouded in folds of softly draped, impenetrable mineral, but you can tell they're female. Acid rain is taking its toll of them: their once-keen eyes are blurred now, softened and porous, as if they have cataracts. But perhaps that's my own vision going.