Court of the Myrtles (10 page)

Two days before Mother's Day, I'm sitting on the grass by the side of my mom's grave hugging my kneecaps and rocking myself. “Can Mother's Day actually be worse than Christmas?” I ask her. “A holiday to honor a mother who no longer exists?”

I look at my watch—ever a clock-repairer's grandchild. 10:55—I'm five minutes early but so is Alice. Today I want to be alone. So do I really care? But before I can answer that…

“Hey there,” says Alice.

“Hey.”

“Ever read the epitaphs on some of these ole timer's graves?” Alice strolls from stone to stone, her eyes taking in the inscriptions. “No, really, I'm serious. Have you read them?” she asks. “I like that one—right over there.” Alice makes her way to a random, grey-granite stone. She begins reading it: “‘If there's another world, she lives in bliss. If there is none, she made the most of this.' Words to live by, if you ask me,” she says with significance.

I didn't ask you, I think to myself. Just let me withdraw into my own self-pity.

“Oh look,” says Alice, with typically inappropriate lightness. “They're preparing a plot.”

I glance over to view a green tarp draped over freshly dug soil. So what. Big deal.

“Funeral's tomorrow, no doubt,” says Alice. “I bet it's for old man Davis. You knew him?”

I shake my head, wiping the tears around my lashes. I don't care about ole man Davis or any of these people. I just want my mom back.

“Lost his wife a few years ago; used to be here all the time fixing up her grave. Explains why I haven't seen him in a while. Oh no, wait, it's not for him. I'm mixing him up with the bearded man who comes to visit his sister.” Now Alice is standing over where I sit on the damp ground. Still I say nothing.

“Rough one, eh?” she asks, rubbing at the top of my head. I recoil a bit though I hate to admit it feels nice to be mother-loved.

“The stages of grief never happen in the order they say. I mean the disbelief and the shock are always the starter but then it can go in any direction. Some folks feel yearning and despair first while others feel anger. Eventually we all get to acceptance.”

“I'll never accept it.”

“It takes time, Marla.”

“Even this…now,” I say, moving my hands around my head. “Talking to the dead is like a monologue between me and me. Ridiculous. Pointless. I'm sick of pruning and planting for no good reason, wasting all this emotion, words, time,
gardening
, on someone who's never coming back.”

Alice looks at the new seedlings popping up around my mom's stone before glancing to Joy's grave with its overabundant and firmly established garden. She frowns. “You're right, these graves are starting to look a little ridiculous,” she says.

“I just want her back.” I say. “No more flowers.”

“So you're doing rocks now?” Alice glances down at a series of stones that I've carefully laid out in a semi-circle.

“They're special—striped ones. See?” A smile suddenly forms on my face. “My rock collection. Mom got me started when I was about six years old at the beach. I thought it was a stupid idea when she introduced it to me. By age seven it was a hobby, by fifteen it was an addiction.”

“And now it's an obsession,” Alice teases. “This one's pretty,” she says, squatting down and touching a grey one with a jagged white line going down its center. “Looks like somebody almost painted it on. I bet your eyes go buggy trying to find a striped rock in the middle of all the solid ones on the shore.”

“It's a challenge. My mom liked to do lots of silly little things that didn't cost any money. She always said, ‘The best things in life
are
free… free to be!'” I pause a moment before wailing, “I miss her smell. I miss her hands. I miss her eyes squinting a smile at me for whatever good news I told her, even when it wasn't so good.”

“I know, honey,” says Alice.

“How am I supposed to live fifty more years without her? There's so much more I wanted to say to her. I thought our time together would be longer.” Now I'm sobbing like a small child.

“Oh, sweetie….”

“But I don't want to complain to you, Alice,” I say between sniffles. “You've been through something so much worse.”

“It's all relative, Marla. I may have lost a child, but truth is, you were closer to your mother than I
ever
was to my child.”

“Still…” I say getting up and brushing the damp from the grass off my bottom.

“Don't you have a meeting today?”

“Yeah, but how do you know?” I ask.

“You told me last week, remember?”

“I can't stay long. I just didn't want you hanging here wondering why I didn't show. I'm meeting with the college advisor about my schedule for fall semester. Besides, I'm not in the mood for cemeteries. Not today.”

“Had one of those days last week. Today I'm better.”

“I used to read those ads in the newspapers—you know the ones people take out on the anniversary of some loved one, post a photo from when they were twenty-one, even though they died at like age seventy and say, ‘Gone but not forgotten' and I'd think to myself, ‘It's been twenty years since that person died, aren't they over it yet?' Little did I know. You never get over it.”

“You just learn to live with it,” we both synchronize. And then she slaps my back a single time and rises up.

“You're almost through the holiday hurdles,” says Alice. “After Mother's Day you've got about five months off until Thanksgiving rolls around.”

“The Fourth of July doesn't count for much.”

“Unless you were the child of Thomas Jefferson.”

“No,” I chuckle. “I wish. But no relation.”

“Funny how we have to get
through
our holidays now instead of enjoying them.”

I head toward my car, pausing to snap a couple of lilac branches from a nearby tree. “You know, Alice, if I'd married Eddy, I'd have a husband now, a family to be there for me. You got me thinking about things. You ever think about the highlights and lowlights of your life, Alice?”

“I'm still working on them.”

I toss the bouquet of lilacs through my car window onto the passenger's seat.

“Hey, you can't do that,” says Alice. “Town property.” And then she winks.

“Yeah, whatever…” I shoo her off before waving goodbye.

“Bad girl,” she yells out. “So you
can
be daring after all…”

“If you call stealing lilacs a risky dare.” I say, opening my car door. “Look out world, here I come…”

“Hey, it's a start,” she hollers after me. “See you next week.”

But I've already turned over the key to the ignition.

My eyes darted around, following the flight pattern of a red cardinal as it swooped down to his mate on the branch, hovered over the rotting porch. The groove worn in the old banister is the only sign that my grandma once sat here in her wheelchair.

My focus shifted to my mom standing before me, struggling to pin a Virgin Mary medal onto the lace collar of that gown that once belonged to Grandma.

“Stubborn thing,” said Mom, determined to attach it. Then, “There, got it,” patting my chest. “Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue. Guess we got the blue and the old part right.”

“I wish Grandma were here.” And then I blurt out, “Okay, not really,” at the exact time Mom said it. We both laughed and then hugged tightly.

“She'd have hated you marrying Eddy,” said my mom, still holding me.

“Hated him,” I mimicked. “That part when the priest says, ‘is there anybody here today that can give good reason these two should not be wed?' she'd have chimed in about Eddy's Irish heritage, kicking and screaming as they removed her from the church.”

The slam of the screen door shifted our attention to two little girls who emerged, banana curls bouncing, puffy dresses floating, as they circled around me in a game of tag, tugging at my wedding gown.

“Girls! Now girls,” said my mom, hustling them back inside. “I want the two of you to go sit on the sofa like I told you. Where are your white gloves? You need to make
pretty flower girls for Marla.” Then she looked directly into my eyes, searching, “And my Marla is so very pretty today…”

“What is it, Mom?”

“You sure you want this? Eddy, I mean. I'm happy for you but only if this is what you really want. If that's the case, and you
do
want him then it's the happiest day of my life, too.”

Somehow I could tell that Mom was leaving out a whole lot of words in that sentence. She wanted more for me than a postman named Eddy. “Grandma used to say that the difference between an excellent man and a common man is that an excellent man makes great demands on himself and the common man makes no demands. Grandma said that Grandpa was both.”

“Your father,” she paused, thinking twice, “Your father, Bernie, was a great man but, well, he was kind of half and half—half common and half excellent. He was a politician and…” her voice trailed away.

“What was he like? You never speak of my father…” Even the word “father” sounded strange coming out of my mouth.

“Well,” she let out a big sigh. “I wish he were here today to walk his daughter down the aisle. But I was always wishing. Used to wish he'd been there to see you take your first step, see you step up the school bus, see you step up to the podium at high school graduation… I wished so many times I'd look up and Bernie would be there at my desk at the shelter when all my girls were bickering and driving me crazy. He'd magically appear, take me by the arm and say, ‘Rosie, I changed my mind. You're the
one for me.' Would have been good for the unwed mothers to see that, to have hope. But he never showed up. Only thing that showed up was my next case study.”

I'm not sure what I should have said at that moment, hoping the joy of my wedding day might over-ride her pain, so I said nothing.

“At least Eddy is there for you,” she continued. “I'll give him that.” Still, her words were missing something. “C'mon. Can't be late for your own wedding,” she said, tapping my back gently and then hollering: “Girls? Time for church! Let's take a look at you.” The screen door slammed behind us. The two little girls stood like tin soldiers flashing their white teeth, suppressing tiny giggles at the precise moment the plastic cuckoos emerged from their tiny gingerbread houses. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Eleven o'clock on the dot.

As the usher pulled the wrought-iron handle of the big wooden door, something that Sam, the owner of the hair salon had said while he ferociously ran his scissors over a customer's head, came into mine. I hadn't known what he meant, until now. “There is great practical benefit in making a few failures early in life.” I wasn't sure if my wedding was about to be an early failure or the avoidance of one. I tried not to over-think it, doing instead what I was instructed in rehearsals, robotically moving my left foot forward on the white crepe-paper aisle, all the guests turned in my directions, their smiling eyes focused on me.

I could hear a few sighs about how pretty I looked—me—the girl in the understated satin mid-length dress. My mom couldn't afford a full gown, but I still looked fabulous or at least felt fabulous.

My best friend Julia was already several feet in front of me in her lavender taffeta dress, the one from the same bargain basement as mine. Julia turned to stare at me over her bouquet of white roses. I tried to work out if her expression was meant to conceal a giggle, or something more profound.

Maybe it was the way she was holding her flowers at a droopy level that told me that she was thinking about Charlie, the guy from the band, and how his funeral was in this very church, how life is too short for mistakes, how every moment counts. Maybe it was the change in my mom's tone and way she stood tall in the first pew, a pasted smile on her face, her left hand clutching the railing more tightly than necessary, her right hand fiddling with the pearls around her neck. Long gone was the happy-go-lucky woman I once knew sipping martinis, dancing her drunken routines on the living-room floor. She seemed defeated.

But whatever it was, the minute that organ music played and I took ten steps down the same aisle that my friend Charlie's coffin went down, I changed my mind.

By the time I reached Eddy at the altar in his crisp white tuxedo, all smiley and in-control like a man who had it all figured out, I burst into tears, lifted my veil and said to him very matter-of-factly, “I'm sorry, Eddy. But I just can't do this.”

And with that, I turned and walked rapidly back down to the doors that seemed as far away as Dubai. About midway down, my heel tore the white crepe runner so I picked up my gown, flung off my white stilettos and just ran for it. I never glanced at the guests, not once, but I could hear the rise of commotion in their growing whispers. And I could feel my mom's eyes on my back, telling me I was doing the right thing, just like in the living room. Except I wasn't dancing, I was running.

Before I knew it, I had blown past the usher, plowed through those big wooden doors and was outside. “Free to be!” tossing my veil into the air as my bouffant hair came tumbling out of the bobby pins, blowing fifty directions into the wind.

Alice stood in the lavish guest room of Joy's future in-laws' home overlooking the veranda below. The garden was filled with fountains and flowers. “My, my, my,” said Alice, standing in the double French doorway. “Who do you suppose tends to those?”

“Gardeners, mother,” said Joy struggling to clasp the satin button row on her sleeve.

“Now that's what I call something old, something new, something with a fabulous view!” said Alice, before turning to pin something
blue
on her daughter's gown—an inservice medal that her father was awarded by the town mayor after the breaking-and-entering at Paulie's Pizzeria, the night Joy was born. “Must be that Philadelphia is further south,” Alice rationalized, “So flowers grow faster from the warmer climate.” Joy just shrugged and pulled at the length of her gown, bringing it down over her curvy, but slimmer, hips. Today she just wasn't interested in her mother's botanical babble.