Life After Life (23 page)

“Yeah, I want to look like Lady Gaga,” Abby said, and laughed; she was surprised that Toby knows who that is. But you can’t just go from years of living with kids to then knowing nothing at all. It would be too much of a shock to the system. She has a television; she reads magazines. She cares what is going on out there even when it’s not very pretty. Toby told Abby to slap some pork chops on her head and wrap herself in beef jerky and she’d be a dead ringer. By the end of that day, the child had her verse memorized and also could sing
I died for beauty but was scarce / Adjusted in the Tomb / When One who died for truth was lain / In an adjoining room.

“Aren’t you kinda young to live here?” Abby asked.

“I’m the youngest of the oldest, that’s true,” she said. “But I have always been a little ahead of the others my age, you know?”

Now she takes a stroll over to the main building to find some of the others. It’s a high-class joint in many ways. She never in her life stopped what she was doing for formal meals and for tea in the afternoon, but now she absolutely loves it. It ends up getting kind of heated sometimes, which is what she loves best. People fight over chairs, things like that, things they taught you not to do in kindergarten, and yet everybody has circled right back around to it
. I want to sit with so-and-so. That’s my chair. You’re in my chair. Wah-wah.
Marge Walker always gets there early and plants her dressed-to-the-nines fanny in the big red leather wingback like she’s the queen. Often Marge is on a rant about how she’s tired of prisoners being treated like vacationers with hardworking taxpayers footing the bill, how those prisoners get to eat three meals a day and watch television and how she is also sick and tired of the foreigners taking up space in the produce section.

“The people?” Toby once asked.

“No. I mean all that mess that comes from Mexico or wherever, ten kinds of peppers nobody ever heard of,” her whole mouth twisted bitterly with the words. “Who wants that old mess?”

“Maybe I would,” one of the women who is on the kitchen staff said, and introduced herself as Mrs. Lopez. Toby told her not to be offended, Marge was someone who had been surprised that Lois Flowers had still not lost weight even with cancer.

Today Marge is saying how she isn’t going to sign a thing that turns anything over to her children. She said if they want to circle in like vultures for her money, so be it, but she plans to spend every single cent to stay alive as long as she possibly can. “I’m going to live so long they’ll be sorry.”

Toby asks Joanna, the hospice woman, what got Marge going and apparently it was that one of her sons was wanting power of attorney. Marge overheard and turned to Toby.

“He is in financial trouble himself,” she says. “He’s wanting his piece of the pie early. Now I do not mind helping my children. That is what my husband and I agreed on many years ago, but trying to take over my kingdom is not the way to go about it. “

“Good for you,” Toby says.

“If I start feeling like somebody is pushing me out before it’s time for me to leave, it makes me mad as hell and I will plant my feet and say I am
not
going.”

Sadie laughs to hear Marge cuss; they all do.

“I’m gonna live as long as I possibly can just to spite him. I want everything artificial that can be given to me for as long as there’s a pulse. Breath, food, the works. Mr. Walker and I worked hard all those years and I’ll be”—she paused, sputtering and stumbling over the
d
at the tip of her tongue—“durned if I let them hover like vultures.”

“I do not want to linger,” Sadie says.

“Well, that’s because you don’t have greedy, stingy children. I sat up just last night adding up what I saved them in babysitting hours and meals eaten and clothes washed.”

“You go, girl,” Toby waves to Abby, who is sitting there beside Sadie. Poor child’s dog is still missing and she is heartbroken so this laughing is good. “But damn, Marge, slow it all down, okay? ’Cause you’re making me want to like you.”

“Well, I don’t know if I want
you
to like me.” Marge opens her scrapbook, an amazing document for sure, every murder committed in the county for the past decade followed to a tee. She said it had begun as a way to keep up with her husband’s career and then her son’s. Her husband had a huge murder case nearly thirty years ago in which he sent a man to the chair for butchering his wife and child.
He showed him who was in charge,
Marge liked to say, and she had many times held the group spellbound with the horrible details of that case and how brave Judge Henry Walker had always been, not the least bit worried or intimidated by threats.
Henry Walker had a reputation unlike anyone else in this area,
she said.
Henry Walker was a moral man unlike his son who seems a little bit too interested in my purse.
Now she turns to a page about an awful murder out in the county where a man drove out to his girlfriend’s mama’s trailer and killed everybody there, even the dog. She points to the mug shot of the boyfriend who did the killing. “My son is representing him.” She looks up. “All the more reason not to give him any money.”

“That’s his job,” Stanley Stone says. “He’s the defense attorney and a damn good one, it seems.” Stanley is a total mystery—sometimes clear as a bell and then off the rail and mean as a snake like the other day. “Toby, why don’t you do something so she’ll shut up.”

“Do a recitation,” Abby says.

“Or tell us what makes you mad,” Marge says, and flips the page to a big headline that says
MURDER SUICIDE IN SOUTH CAROLINA.
“What makes someone
like you
angry.”

“Cat fight,” Stanley says. “Go put on your bikinis and let’s get muddy.”

“There’s a lot that makes me mad. Like I have an aversion to the moochers and leachers, the seekers and glommers of your soul,” Toby says, and Sadie says that sounds a little like the Sermon on the Mount. “And”—Toby pauses and takes a deep breath—“people like you make me mad, but right now I’d rather talk about something I think is worth talking about. How about that? Like I can tell you things about my life as a teacher—a damn good teacher, too—and how I told those young girls, don’t let me hear you complaining about your periods anymore ’cause if you’re not having one it means one of two things. Either some boy’s been parking overtime where he should’ve pulled out or you’re up to no good with your own precious bodies, starving and vomiting and messing up nature’s beautiful patterns.” She stops and goes to adjust the tubes leading to Lorice Boone’s oxygen tank. She tells Lorice that’s the payment for all those years smoking, that she herself might need oxygen one of these days because she also smoked like a fiend for many years. Yes, that was the price for having looked so sexy with a fag hanging from her lips while coaching the girls’ tennis team. “And, yes, I said
fag ’
cause it used to just mean a cigarette.” She looks at Abby and pretends to take a deep draw and exhale like she might be Bette Davis. “And there’s something else that gets my blood boiling, I’m so goddamned tired of all the words getting taken and twisted—what is that all about? I found that I was having a harder and harder time keeping up with the new slang the kids were using—
bad
and
sick
for good—things like that.”

“And the use of
dig
made such good sense way back when,” Rachel Silverman pipes up. She has dirt and straw all over the back of her pants like she might’ve been stretched out on the ground. “And
bread, dough.
” That Rachel is as tough and cynical as they come. Toby adores her and would love nothing better than to be her best friend.

“What about
dish,
” Stanley says and eyes Rachel’s body up and down. “Or
puss.
”

“What about
pop
?” Rachel aims an imaginary gun at him.

“That would make me”—he pauses—“
stiff.
” He blows a kiss her way.

“I am going to report this X-rated mess and a child sitting here in your presence.” Marge slams her scrapbook shut and stands up. “You all are damned to hell as far as I can tell except those two.” She points at the sisters, one crocheting and the other snoozing. “Blessed are the sweet and simple.”

“Wait, Marge, before I completely don’t like you again,” Toby says. “I can translate. He pointed to her face and she acted like she was going to kill him and then that would make him dead.”

“Hey, that’s cool,” Abby says. “That’s what you did with the Bible verse.”

“She what?” Marge says, but Stanley interrupts with
croak
and
hooch
and
keister.

“I’m partial to
groovy
myself.” Stanley’s hair is standing all out from his head like he might have stuck his finger in a socket and his shirt is buttoned wrong so one side is hanging longer than the other. He has the cover of that Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass album he plays nonstop and asks who would like to be the lucky
damsel
to wear a whipped-cream
frock
like the one on the cover.

“Damsel! Frock!” Sadie laughs and wheezes. “Those are some ancient words. Have you ever even heard those words, sweetie?” She pats Abby’s hand and holds on tight, and when the room quiets down from Stanley’s mess, Toby continues.

“I told those girls, someday you’ll be wishing for your period and I don’t just mean to make sure you aren’t pregnant—
knocked up—
and they looked at me with their mouths all screwed up like I was stupid and what could I possibly mean.

“I said when you get old like
moi
here”—she slaps her chest and grimaces, pulls her pants leg up over the top of her boots to show a white scaly-looking leg—“I told ’em, I said, everything stops—the faucet goes off. It’s like the scene in
Lost Horizon
that I had them watch in English class after reading the novel. I said, you want some fantasy? A real stretch of the imagination and yet something that still is real in all the right ways? I had them read
Spoon River Anthology
and
The Glass Menagerie
and
Our Town
because they could read the parts aloud and pretend they were there. At first they were silly and awkward, but the ones who got it
got it.
They are still young enough that sometimes you can snag one or two and set them on a new course before they dive back into those flimsy old paperbacks modeled after some silly television show or, most recently—like the past several years—something with wizards and trolls and vampires. But I made them remember that one scene in the movie where the beautiful woman is taken from Shangri-La and, poof, dries up to an old brown potato chip like what you used to find down in the bottom of the bag. Lays and most of them have corrected this, which is a shame because it was that old brown crunchy one there at the bottom that made me enjoy all the others more, you know? Like I pointed out to them you need to enjoy those smooth, pretty faces and natural-colored thick hair and breasts that are healthy and cancer free and don’t pull you down to Hades when you stand up, or as Emily Dickinson might say,
I like a look of Agony / Because I know it’s true
. True! Real!”

“You were some teacher,” Rachel says, and nods to Abby who is sitting there soaking it all up like a sponge. “I hope you have some teachers as good as she was. Good for you, Toby. I’m surprised they let you retire.”

“She was forced to retire,” Marge says. “And her name’s not Toby. She made that up when she moved in out here and everybody knows it.”

“Well, I don’t know it,” Rachel says. “All I know is what I learned when I met her and I learned her name is Toby. And I still say she must have been some kind of wonderful teacher, the kind of teacher children would benefit from having.”

“The jury’s still out on that,” Toby says. “Though yes, I think I did a fine job. I think I was a really great teacher.”

“And you’re so modest,” Marge says. “And no telling what you were
teaching
there in the locker room with those young girls.”

“I smell a cat fight,” Stanley says.

“You know what? You can’t hurt me anymore than I have already been hurt in life so just give it up. You’re ignorant and I’d rather be who I am and smart than who you are and ignorant.”

“Who you are is a sin.”

“Well, it’s nobody’s goddamned business who I am, Marge, and it’s official—I am back to not liking you at all. And you better watch out is what I’m saying to you.” Toby pats her fanny pack like there is something in it and then points her finger like a gun, says
pow, pop,
and then blows the tip of her finger. “You better watch out ’cause what have I got to lose? I didn’t
have
to come live here like you. I can still drive, still do pretty much anything I want to do, which is why I’m in an independent cottage and not over here in the next tier of living.” She puts her hand up to her mouth and then apologizes to Stanley, Rachel, and Sadie. “No offense.”