Life After Life (16 page)

That is
wrong
! Saint Marge of the Negative Vindictive Sisterhood (or so Toby calls her) often says about Sadie leading people to indulge in fantasy, which she also thinks is sacrilegious. Marge is negative about everything, her doughy face permanently etched in a frown, every suggestion and thought negated unless it involves her relationship with Jesus who to hear her tell it, thinks
she
walks on the water. Rachel has suggested Sadie make a picture for Marge where Marge is the Madonna or maybe Marge hanging on the cross, Marge rising from the dead.

“I can make you a memory and I can make a dream come true,” Sadie had said. “But I cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.”

“She’s a sow all right,” Toby had said, and gestured toward Marge, who was ushering in a whole flock of children from her Sunday school class. They had come, she said, for fun and fellowship with some senior citizens and to get credit at their schools. They had the lovely idea that everyone should name his or her apartment or room like you might a home at the sea or a bedroom in a bed and breakfast. “For instance,” Marge said, and held up her hand to get everyone’s attention. She was wearing a faux-denim pantsuit with lots of swirls and paisley designs appliquéd that reminded Rachel of the one and only time she ever went to Las Vegas. Art had a business conference and won several thousand dollars. She played the slot machines and sat by the pool and complained about how garish it all was the one time she reached Joe on his work line. It was snowing in Boston and Rosemary was up for a few days. They were having a friend of his in for dinner and she couldn’t help but wonder which friend. Someone she knew? It made her so jealous to hear and yet there she was in Vegas with her husband; there she was with a sack full of quarters and tickets for several shows and a heart as dry and empty as the desert. Why does she remember such things, bits of memories popping in like little commercials of another time? Why does she feel so strongly that split-screen life of gray wet snow and hot blinding desert?

“Listen now,” Marge said again, louder and clearly getting annoyed at that crazy old Stanley Stone who was asking those children to feel his thin white bicep. “You will all choose a name that means something special to you. For instance, my apartment will be called—”

“The Extralarge Marge Barge,” Stanley called out, and all the children laughed. “The Kingdom of Boredom.”

Her face flushed a deep pink and she heaved a big sigh. “I will pray for those lacking social graces and I will name my apartment Camelot, because I have always been told that I bear a striking resemblance to Jacqueline Kennedy.”

The polite people looked away when she said this, but Stanley and all the children and Toby started laughing and couldn’t stop. “She was Catholic, you know,” Toby said.

“But there were things to admire, too,” Marge said. “I am more open-minded than you think!”

“Yeah, right. But here’s some more real history for you,” Toby offered. “Speaking of presidential places. FDR first called Camp David ‘Shangri-La,’ like in one of my favorite novels,
Lost Horizon
by James Hilton.”

“Toby is one of the smartest people living here,” Sadie told Rachel, and before she could say that this was quite obvious, one resident had named her suite Shangri-La and another named hers Camp David. Then one pounced on Tara and another Twelve Oaks, leaving several other unimaginative ones disappointed. The one who got Tara now spends her time striking a pose and saying things like “I’ll never be hungry again!” only to have Stanley Stone reply with “That’s because you eat all the goddamn time. And not even good stuff. I see you eating old mess like Twinkies.” The young girl assigned to him suggested he name his place something that spoke to his legal profession, but he said his apartment is called Hell in a Cell, like what he saw on wrestling. He said he planned to invite people in for matches. He winked at Rachel when he said this and she ignored him. “My second choice is the Love Machine or A Taste of Honey after my favorite song.” He winked and again she ignored him. When he heard that her given name was Rachel Naomi Gold and that she then married a Silverman, he said that she was sliding downward in the elements. “Looking for Mr. Bronze, I suspect,” he said. “Third place. However, if you keep on sliding, then eventually you’ll find me—the Stone.”

“Thank you,” she said. “The Stone Age makes sense for you.”

The Barker sisters, who Sadie says never married and ran their family’s laundry service for over fifty years, didn’t understand the assignment and were thinking of names of candy—gumdrop, jelly bean, SweeTarts. Butterfinger, Milky Way, Snickers. Sweet and lost in their dementia, they are always sitting by the front door to greet whoever enters, the bands they wear on their wrists and ankles to keep them in the building often setting off alarms. Daisy, the younger of the two, a dainty-faced little thing with a great big bottom, crochets all different kinds of cookies and sells them for a quarter; then she gives all of the money to Millie, the one with Down syndrome, for Pepsi-Colas. The older sister, Vanessa, is overweight and nearly blind, her yellow white hair slicked back and often held with a little pink barrette. She sat dozing through most of the discussion only to pipe up at the end to say “Mounds,” which is what the sign on their door says.

Back during the bicentennial when people were hot to put out plaques and name their homes, Joe said he would love to put a sign up in front of his house that said
YE OLDE PIECE OF SHIT MORTGAGED TO THE MAX
—so when they asked Rachel she said, “My Apartment”; she whispered to Sadie, “Piece o’ Shit,” and they both got a big laugh. “My Apartment or Piece o’ Shit” she announced to the soured-looking girl assigned to her. “You pick.”

Toby said she was was torn between the Ponderosa and the Little Chicken Farm, which was from one of her very favorite movies based on the favorite novel she had already mentioned. She said she used to always have her English classes watch the Frank Capra version of
Lost Horizon.
She chose the Little Chicken Farm, which relieved Rachel not because she gave a damn what the name was but because Toby was able to make a quick decision. Rachel hates indecision and always has. She gets so impatient when they go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth; some of these around here cannot make a decision or deliver a plain simple sentence to save their lives. You ask what they had for dinner and they have to go back to childhood to explain why they have never liked spinach and so on. It takes goddamned forever to tell one simple thing that ought to take thirty seconds; and everybody has to talk whether they have something worth saying or not. Rachel wants to say:
Don’t call me until you have reduced your thoughts to the lowest common denominator. Call with something definite. If I hear you wandering and stammering and figuring while I’m sitting there, I’ll shut the door or hang up on you. Life is too short to listen to all that mess.

“You never could’ve sat through a faculty meeting at my school,” Toby told her. “You’d’ve blown a big gasket for sure.”

The other thing that has gotten on her last nerve lately is the way so many people say MassaTOOsetts. Joe did that, too; it was the only thing wrong with him that she could tell. She wants to scream MassaCHOOsetts, choo choo choo, not TOO. And now this. Rachel never would have imagined that she would someday be a service project for adolescent girls and then there came one tapping on her door wanting her to make some ridiculous origami representation of herself. “You know,” Rachel told her. “The real Christian thing would be if you children just came and visited and listened to what we could teach you. Come because you like us and want to spend time with us, not to get your stupid points for school that you’ll talk all about in your college-entry essay. Don’t bullshit me—I know what this is all about. I have lost some of my physical abilities but none of my mental ones, okay? If I were the real reason you were coming, then we would be doing something I am interested in. Maybe we would read and discuss current events or we might decide to buy a lottery ticket and be creative with our number selection. Maybe we would watch something like
It Happened One Night
or read something like
The Scarlet Letter
or
The Awakening
and discuss the ever-evolving roles of womanhood in film and literature?” The child stood and glared back at her, a clipboard in her hand with all kinds of fancy origami paper. “Like that girl over with Sadie? She comes all the time. She isn’t assigned to come, she just does it. And do you know why? She likes us. She likes to be with us.”

“She’s a loser,” the girl said. “You old guys are her only friends.”

“Well, she could do a lot worse,” Rachel said. “And we all are crazy about her. We all think she is”—she paused, that little priss not backing down and not even blinking those big blue eyes—“better than any child who has ever entered this place.”

C
LOVER
D
EN.
T
HERE’S
a nice name. That was one of the spots they met a couple of times, a little dark hole in the wall, but it was risky, near Scollay Square, a little too close to where she might see someone she knew. But now she thinks that if she had decided to participate, she would have made a sign that said
CLOVER DEN
, and the picture she would love for Sadie to create is one of herself with Joe, the two of them sitting back in that dark booth on a late-winter afternoon. They were such an unlikely couple and there is such power in the relationship that never takes place in a permanent way, the “mights” romantically overwhelming all that likely would have been truth. But still you hold on. Even now, she hears his slow, easy speech, the way it rolled like waves that pulled her in close only to then push her back, rolling with temptation and trepidation. She remembered everything he had ever said to her and was always looking for hidden messages; even now, she is looking for messages, thinking she might find something meant just for her in one of his favorite places, the same way she pored over the obituary that arrived in her mail one day—his return address in Fulton, North Carolina, but not his handwriting—a typed and copied note attached with a paper clip:
Your address was in Joe’s book.
And then there he was, a photograph much younger than when she knew him. He was born and raised there. He had two children. He was survived by a wife. She heard Art coming up the front steps and so she tucked it away in a copy of
Jane Eyre
she pulled from the shelf and did not come back to it for several days. She had to wait for a good time when she knew Art would be gone and would not come in to find her there, maybe crying, who knew? The plotting to read and reread his obituary was not unlike all the times she had plotted to meet him. And then just about the same time Art got sick, another letter came from that same address; that time it was the obituary for Rosemary—a short, simple paragraph of facts—no note attached, and she couldn’t help but wonder if whoever sent it knew who she was. Perhaps Rosemary had asked that it be sent to her. She had no idea just as she didn’t know how much time she had left with Art, but what she did know was that now she could venture southward if she wanted. She could explore all that Joe had ever told her about and no one on the face of the earth would know who she was or why she was there.

And so she is
here
—as the sign up front tells her—here at Pine Haven—home of lard, Jesus, sugared-up tea and enough meshuggeners to fill Fenway Park. She is here, in the land of Joe.

Sadie has said that Stanley Stone used to be one of the finest most dignified gentlemen the town had ever seen though that is hard to believe given his unkempt appearance and the hateful way he turns on people. One minute he will wink and smile at Rachel and then the next minute say something completely insulting and rude.

“He knows everybody in town,” Sadie said. She told how he also grew up there, a very distinguished lawyer with a lovely wife who was known for her rose garden and the way she opened it to June brides to come and pick what they needed. He himself was in the Kiwanis and was always the chief pancake flipper for their big Pancake Supper once a year. But who would know that now? There’s some cruelty for you. He’s still handsome but not always together in the mind.

“Together in the mind?” Rachel said. “How about insane, crazy as a bat.” She was about to recount how she heard him talking to his son like the young man might be a slave or a dog—
you don’t know shit from Shinola,
he said—but then she thought better. “Did you say he grew up here?”

“Yes, and his parents before him.” And then Sadie put down her scissors and glue stick so she could clap her hands. “If anybody in this town ever knew your Art, he would be the man,” she said. “And every now and then he remembers. Every now and then I see a glimmer of the old Stanley Stone. And you’re both lawyers. “And”—Sadie lowered her voice—“I see him watching you all the time lately. I think he has a little spark for you.”

Rachel felt her face flush and it surprised her. She has certainly noticed him ogling her but also thought he might be half blind or something since so many of them are. Besides, no matter what he used to be or how physically attractive he could be if he tried, what in the hell would she do with some angered lunatic? Who needs a lunatic? Unless, of course, he would remember Joe. And whatever he remembers might be worth a little of her time. She has plenty of time. “Well, maybe I’ll ask him, then.”