Court of the Myrtles (3 page)

The night Alice's water broke, her husband was in the middle of a breaking-and-entering arrest down at Paulie's Pizzeria and couldn't be at the hospital. Neither could
Alice's mother, babysitting Alice's four
other
kids. So on that rainy night, when Alice pushed her fifth child into this world, she decided that if it were a girl, no matter how alone she felt, if nothing else, her daughter was going to get a joyful name.

And she did. Eight pounds and nine ounces of bouncing baby “Joy” was born.

It was the third Friday of the third week in March that I got to thinking: “The month of March—it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb…” just like my mom, Rosie, used to say when the wind whipped outside our window, while we sipped hot cocoa on the inside, watching Jerry Lewis on the
Movie Loft. Cinderfella
was my favorite. Mom would iron, Grandma would fold, and I'd stretch my tongue as long as it could go, licking the marshmallow from the tip of my nose timed to the laugh track of the movie.

I snap back to reality. To denial. To feeling helpless. What I'd give for just five minutes to do that again. Mom was right. Today is 65 degrees, truly a ‘lamb' day. And I'm feeling like a lost one.

My hand-held hoe hangs idly from my fingers as I stand over the damp soil from last night's rain. What shall I plant? The sun struggles through the folds of an overcast sky. April is only a week away, though I feel I ought to plant my mother's flowers on her grave now, since everything else on the list has been done. Obituary written: check. Black dress bought: check. Casket: check. Wake, funeral: double check. Stop by cemetery every week and linger: check. But a desire, a desperate longing to do something more… the box is unchecked.

Not much left to tend to aside from this two-by-four-foot patch of soil around her grave. Wonder how she'd feel about a nice hydrangea? Though she was more a yellow rose kind of gal. Wonder if she's even noticed the little stone whale I put in the muddy soil? Wonder if the cemetery caretaker would let me plant a couple cherry trees around the outskirts of her stone? Maybe put in a bench for people to sit and meditate?

“You don't happen to have a watering can in your trunk, do you?” a voice hollers.

It's Alice. I should have known. Four rows over at her daughter Joy's grave, waving at me, all smiles, like a clown with her cropped red hair. Reluctantly I wave back. Man, I think to myself, that woman needs to get a life. If it just rained last night, what the hell does she need a watering can for, anyway?

“Oh, hello, Alice,” I say. “No, I don't have a watering can. Sorry.”

I pretend to busy myself, move the dirt around between my fingers. Anything so Alice will think I'm occupied. I mean, look, I can't help but feel sorry for her, but still, this isn't about her and
her
daughter. It's about
me
and
my
mother.

Since I didn't have a father or siblings, my mom was everything. I was an only child, used to being loved, heard, and cared for, exclusively and unconditionally. Now that unconditional love was gone forever.

There's a shadow standing over my left shoulder. God, this woman doesn't know when to quit.

“Why do you suppose people write ‘Beloved Wife, Mother and Grandmother' on the person's stone?” asks Alice.

I don't know, why don't you ask them? I think to myself.

“I mean, what if that woman wanted to be remembered for her opera singing or her painting skills?” explains Alice. “Maybe she wanted to be an individual. Not somebody's
beloved
mother.”

“I suppose…” I say, still refusing to engage her and busying myself with nothing.

“Know what is the stupidest thing people say at funerals?”

“Ummm…. She's in a better place?” I say sarcastically, digging harder.

“Exactly. She's in a better place. Well, how the
fuck
do they know?”

I'm snicker, startled by her outburst. Okay, I might not like her, but this woman is funny.

“Pardon my French. I'm fluent,” she says, and then bows.

“I was just thinking,” I say, unconsciously tapping the ground next to me.

“Oh yeah?” says Alice, sitting down without a second thought.

I'm surprised to find I don't mind. Her words have suddenly made my self-pity dissipate. For the moment, anyway.

“When people ‘she's in a better place', at funerals, I want to say ‘she's in a better place, huh? Well, then maybe
your
mother should die tomorrow so
she
can be in a better place, too,” I say. “If heaven is an eternity, couldn't it have just waited ten or twenty years more?”

“People are always amazed when they see how strong we are at the wake or how in control we look at the funeral,” says Alice. “The big secret—that you and I and anyone who has ever lost anyone share—is that the funeral is your last moment to do something right for them. Like you, Marla. I bet right now, right this very minute, you're wondering what you can do for your mother now that everything else is done.”

She's figured me out, I admit to myself, not entirely pleased at the realization.

“Oh and I like the whale ornament,” Alice adds, tapping the top of its spout. “Can you make it spit water?”

“Would have to leave a hose hooked up to its spout,” I say, pointing my hand digger at the nearby community water spigot with the rusted iron handle. “But, thanks for noticing. Got it at the garden center.” I say. And I launch into full-speed thoughts: “You know, Alice, the guilt is a killer. Especially when it could have been avoided.”

“You mean the ‘Maybe if I was there. Maybe if I could've, would've, or should've, she'd still be here?'”

“Exactly.”

Alice looks away, face into the wind. Abruptly, she changes her tune. “Hey, what do you mean ‘alone'? Haven't you any siblings?”

“No, only child, remember. And apparently that makes me an orphan.”

“No father either?”

“Never knew him.”

“No children of your own?”

“Not yet. I'm not sure I ever will want them. I don't want a life controlled by the needs of others.”

“Hmmm. That's a bold statement,” says Alice. She seems to be hit hard by my words.

“Although with a dead mother, I feel like my life is controlled by an outside force anyway.” She looks at me as if I've more to say. And I have. “Like when I make arrangements to meet somebody for the first time—even yesterday when I had to meet
this guy in the bank about a loan—I want to say, ‘I'll be the attractive one with long brown hair who just lost her mother.' Or when I run into somebody at the drycleaners and they say, ‘How are you today?' What am I supposed to say? ‘Oh, I'm crappy. My mom just died.' It's as if her death is a part of me, some extended limb, an attachment I can't get rid of. Don't even
want
to get rid of. There's before mom's death and after: the line that divides the Marla that I was and the Marla that I am now.”

“Do you ever talk to heaven?” Direct as ever.

“All the time,” I say. “But nobody answers.”

“She will. When the time is right.”

“Sure. I hear all these stories about how a loved one will find peace in the hereafter and talk to the living in our dreams when we sleep, to tell us they're okay. Well, what's she waiting for?”

“Maybe she's—”

“Mom was always singing. She‘d sing this old Fred Astaire song and do a silly tap dance around our kitchen floor. You know the one. It's famous: ‘Heaven, I'm in heaven, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak…' Well shit, Alice, I hope it's like that. I hope she's dancing on a cloud. She was the happiest person I know—but so afraid of death. And to die the way she did…” I muster up the courage to add, “It should have been me.” And now I glance to heaven.

“Don't say that. I lost a child. There's nothing worse. She'd have wanted it to be her.
I
wish it had been
me
instead of Joy.”

Here come the tears. I should have taken out stock in Kleenex. I reach for my pocket to find a crunched-up tissue.

“Look, when you're ready to tell me, I'm all ears,” says Alice.

“Maybe we fear what we don't know? What's on the other side,” I say, changing the subject.

“Maybe we're more afraid of the choices and decisions we have to make now while we're alive.”

“Maybe…” I gather my shovel and garden gloves and rise up. It's time to make my way to the car. “Looks like the clouds are moving in. Wanna ride?”

“No, I'm fine. Gonna stay a while longer.”

“Okay, then.”

“See you next Friday? Same time, same place?” says Alice.

I'm reluctant to commit but then suddenly find myself spinning around. “Hey, Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for today. The things you said, I mean. Sometimes I feel like nobody understands what it's like. You're the first person I can talk to who seems to just…” and after searching for a better word, I say, “gets it.”

“Maybe we can help each other to get it. You with a lost mother, me with a lost daughter.”

“Maybe. Next week, then?”

“You betcha,” says Alice, giving me a thumbs-up through her muddy garden glove.

“And Alice?”

“Yeah?”

“I'm truly sorry about Joy.”

“I know.”

And then it's as if our minds synchronize.

“But she's in a better place!” we say together.

She shakes her head and I smile for the first time in weeks.

Julia and I met on the very first day of first grade. Swinging our lunch buckets we stood in a lazy line awaiting the sound of the copper bell. Recess was only moments away as Julia stared at me with that vague white-bread-girl look that I'd grown accustomed to whenever I did something that didn't fit conventional life, like chomping on a chewy piece of rosewater-flavored Turkish delight, its powdered sugar falling onto my navy plaid skirt.

I knew Julia was about to ask me why I was eating
that
instead of a Snickers bar, but before she could, I held my sticky hand to her face. “My grandma makes it, okay?”

“Your grandma
makes
candy?” Julia made a googley-eyed expression. “I wish
my
grandma made candy. I wish I
had
a grandma.”

Not what I expected to hear. I even stopped chewing. How do you compete with that?

“Can I try some?” she asked.

“I suppose,” I said, half willing to share, and then rethinking it. ‘Half a piece.” And so I bit into a fresh candy and handed her the smaller half, our fingers sticking together in between, instant sugar-sisters.

“It's good,” was all she could say.

And just like that, we were best friends.

Midway through second grade, and several pounds of Turkish delights later, my mother Rosie decided to break free from grandmother.

“I'm leaving,” she announced to Grandma, who wiped her hands on the dish towel before snapping back, “Leaving? For
what
? Are you crazy? You have everything here. A television, card games Tuesday nights, bingo at the church hall, every comfort you could want…”

Nobody mentioned the comforts
I
had, entertaining Uncle Zaven with my dance routines—the ones I'd perform off-beat to Mario Lanza's albums blaring from the old turntable in the parlor. Grandma would stand in the doorway while I invented Irish jigs after running out of jitterbug moves. Her eyes would narrow, her shoulders slump, fists clenched at her sides, a stance that only an Armenian grandma could make. “You're just like your mother!” she'd holler. It was never clear to me whether she intended this as a compliment or criticism.

All our belongings were stuffed into a couple old plaid-maroon suitcases. This was it. We were leaving.

Then, Mom dragged a small wooden stepladder to the attic door. Up on the shelf, tucked in a hiding place I'd never have noticed, sat a metal container, an old turquoise-colored candy tin that depicted Peter Rabbit on parade. Mom blew dust from its top then put her finger to her lips. It was just a
candy tin
, for gosh sake! What could possibly be inside? Candy!

Our new apartment was smaller than Grandma's house. So small that our orange, velvet divan had to serve as a sofa by day and a bed by night. For the both of us. That sofa was
the centerpiece of our tiny domain, surrounded by five Casey & Hayes moving boxes of books, an avocado folding tube chair, a half-dead spider plant and the poster of a curly haired blond woman in a blue sailor suit that read, “Go Navy.”

The radiator spit cold air instead of heat, but the air-conditioning came cheap and naturally, just by raising the window. Stick your head out and you were sucked into a vortex of Boston noise pollution, bus fumes and Motown. Tip your head down to the courtyard below and you could spy a trio of Afro-haired brothers pulling their Cadillac up for a polish, their radios pumping out Smokey Robinson or Marvin Gaye. Mom wasn't a “Tracks of My Tears” kind of gal, so she'd position herself in the middle of our living room on an imaginary center-stage and await the next song—“I Second that Emotion”—moving slowly at first, her unsteady hand dripping martini onto the gold shag carpet. She'd sip, move and spill, sip, move, and spill, until eventually handing me the near-empty glass so she could strip down to her lace bra and panties for the finale. I know, I know… but I loved her lack of inhibitions.

Grandma would have vetoed this behavior in a heartbeat, of course, and that's why we were here. The apartment lease had Mom's name on it and Mom would proudly proclaim, “I only answer to the person who pays the rent!” And then she'd point to her chest and tip her head back in mad laughter.