Seen It All and Done the Rest (21 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

A
fter I looked at the video of myself talking about the house, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“What is it?” I said, turning to Zora for some explanation that would make me feel better about my ramblings.

“It’s you, Mafeenie. In all your beautiful, unedited glory.”

“That’s just what I mean. What the hell am I talking about?”

“You’re talking about yourself. You’re letting us get to know you since we’re going to be spending the next couple of months with you. Once I put it together with the other footage, it will draw people right in.”

“Right into what?”

The whole reality idea was starting to spook me. I couldn’t just talk off the cuff and be expected to make any sense at all. That’s what writers were for!

Zora realized I was getting agitated. “Calm down, Mafeenie. This is the way it is now. Listen, there’s this old guy from England, he’s about eighty or something, and he made this little video about himself. Who he is. What he likes. His grandkids. He’s just standing there talking, needs a shave sometimes, but it’s so real, you can’t take your eyes off it. He gets hundreds of thousands of hits every day.”

She sounded excited, like an ingénue on the first day of rehearsal.

“There’s a way to do it live, too, and that’s even better because it’s really taking place right then, while you’re watching it. Anything can happen.”

That seemed to be the main draw of these excursions into reality entertainment.

“So what happened to the old guy?”

“Nothing happened to him. He’s still doing it. He’s a star!”

“What’s his name?”

Zora grinned at me. “That’s last century thinking. We don’t have to know his name. We know him.”

My head was spinning. There was a whole new way for people to communicate with each other and I was clueless. Zora looked sympathetic.

“Think about it this way, Mafeenie. How many performances of
Medea
have you done?”

“All together?”

She nodded. I started trying to add them up in my head. Let’s say thirty productions over the years. Thirty performances for each production. That would be about nine hundred performances? Could that be right? Almost a thousand nights saying the same words over and over? Doing the same blocking? Killing those two innocent little actors again and again, who I’m sure had to pay for years of therapy after the show closed.

Zora was still waiting for her answer.

“Close to a thousand.”

“Let’s estimate a sold-out house of five hundred a night.”

That was fair. All my
Medea
s were sellouts. “Okay. That’s about four hundred thousand people?”

“If you did it on YouTube, you could hit twice that many people in one day.”

“You can’t put
Medea
on YouTube.”

“Of course you can’t,” Zora said, looking disappointed in my inability to grasp what she was saying. “You have to put you.”

That was what happened to us technophobic old farts. Whenever we actually glimpsed the power of this new stuff, we freaked out and started telling you what it
couldn’t
do. Zora was patient, but firm.

“Mafeenie, things are different now. It’s not better or worse, it just is. You’re an artist. You have to be open to new ideas.”

It’s worse,
my old-fart brain said, but I held my tongue. She was trying to tell me something important if I could just listen to her.

“Go on.”

“What hasn’t changed is that people are still looking for stories, like you always told me they would. They’re just finding a lot of different ways to tell them, like you did when you were riding around Paris on that horse talking about the Amazon Queen. That was new and it worked great!”

“There was a war on,” I said. “I had to do something to get people’s attention.”

“There’s still a war on.”

I couldn’t argue that, but I also didn’t see what that had to do with me talking about Miss Simpson and my childhood notebooks.

“Have you talked to Miss Abbie about what she wants to call the gardens?”

“Where did you see Abbie?” I said, glad for a change of subject.

“Coming home this afternoon. She said you okayed doing a garden and we were going to call it the Martin Luther King Peace Garden Number One, but she couldn’t remember if she’d told you that yet.”

I laughed. “She’s already named it and hasn’t planted the seed first.”

“It’s a peace garden, Mafeenie, and she gave it a number. That means she expects there to be others.”

“Other gardens?”

“Of course. That’s the kind of stuff the Internet can do best. Give a bunch of people something to do that some other people are already doing. It makes them feel connected. Part of something. Abbie calling this garden ‘number one’ connects her to number two, which inspires number three, and on and on. Soon you got people all over the world planting gardens for peace because they saw you on our video planting sunflowers where Great-gram had her roses.”

“She told you I vetoed the roses?”

“Sunflowers will be fine,” Zora said.

I looked at her. “You’re good at this.”

She grinned at me. “Good enough for you to trust me?”

“I do trust you, it’s just that this is a lot to ask of one little video of one little woman on one little corner.”

She came over and plopped down on the couch and put her feet in my lap. “Listen, Mafeenie, you remember that Woodstock DVD we used to watch all the time?”

Zora and I watched all the sixties classic concert films during one memorable summer when Howard threatened to abandon us if we didn’t stop playing the Jimi Hendrix version of “The Star Spangled Banner” every morning as loud as we could crank it up.

“Of course,” I said, giving her a little foot massage.

“You remember that guy who was singing the antiwar song where everybody was supposed to join in?”

“Country Joe and the Fish,” I said, kneading the ball of her foot gently.

“Yeah, and when people wouldn’t do it, he got mad and said, ‘Listen, you fuckers, you gotta sing better than that if you want to stop a war.’”

“One of my favorite moments of the whole concert,” I said.

“Well, this is sort of like that. People just aren’t singing loud enough and anything we can do to make them sing louder is a good thing.”

“How long did you talk to Abbie?” I said, hearing the voice of the visionary coming through strong in the middle of a project that was supposed to be about getting a better price for a piece of real estate and now seemed to be about putting an end to war around the world.

“Long enough for her to tell me she wanted to make a short statement on the video about the gardens before we start on Monday.”

“What did you tell her?”

Zora stretched her toes. “I told her absolutely.”

“So I guess this means you’re the director?”

“Yep,” she said, grinning. “Which means you have to do everything I say.”

I grinned back. “You’re new at this, huh?”

THIRTY-NINE

A
retha brought T-shirts. We didn’t think she was coming since she had a few more doors to do, but when Zora and I pulled up bright and early Monday morning, she was standing in the yard talking to Victor, who was wearing a pair of jeans and a white T-shirt that said
RESCUE ON MLK
in big red letters on the front. Aretha was wearing one, too.

“I love it,” Zora said, pulling in behind Aretha’s truck and grabbing her little black bag of technology. She had tried to explain it to me a couple of times, but I was hopeless, so she gave me permission not to understand
how
she did it as long as I approved of
what
she was doing. I got out of the car and waved at my assembling crew members. The only person not here yet was Abbie and she had called to say she was on her way.

“Good morning,” Aretha said, giving Zora a hug and handing each of us a T-shirt. Victor stepped back a little and looked at Zora since they hadn’t been properly introduced yet. “I think a crew works better when it looks like a crew.”

“Me too,” I said, plucking a T-shirt from the pile she was offering. “These are great! I’m a sucker for a good costume.”

Zora pulled hers over the T-shirt she was already wearing and walked over to Victor. “I’m Zora Evans, Josephine’s granddaughter. Are you Victor?”

“Yeah. Victor Causey.”

She stuck out her hand and he looked over at me before he reached out to shake it. I realized that he had found a way to shave and removed the scraggly beard he had been sporting the other day. I smiled my approval.

“Thanks for working with us on this,” Zora said. “This house means a lot to me.”

“Not enough to live in it,” he said, still a little surly, even in his crew T-shirt.

“Not yet,” Zora said.

Before I could tell her she didn’t have to take any guff from Victor, Abbie pulled up in her little Volvo and tooted the horn like we might miss her. Victor sighed and sat down on the back porch steps. His quiet sanctuary had suddenly become a veritable beehive of noisy new arrivals, high expectations, and brand-new T-shirts. Zora sat down beside him and unzipped her bag.

“Am I late?” Abbie had on bright yellow sweats and a pair of red rubber boots.

“Of course not,” I said, glad for her familiar smell as she reached out to hug me.

“Who did the T-shirts?”

“I did,” Aretha said, handing her one, which she immediately pulled on just like Zora and I had done. We had all just added the T-shirts on top of whatever layers we were already wearing, so now we looked a little lumpy, but it didn’t matter. Aretha was right. We were now officially a crew. It was time to get started.

FORTY

T
he five of us gathered on the lawn, surrounded by the job that lay ahead of us. This was our crew: me, Zora, Aretha, Abbie, and Victor. The first thing I did was say a brief welcome and thank them for agreeing to help. Victor was getting paid, but I thanked him anyway. Zora had already gotten everybody’s permission to videotape any- and everything. Everybody except Victor, who objected vehemently until I suddenly had a flash of inspiration and offered him another twenty-five dollars a week. Zora promised to keep him off camera as much as possible. He still grumbled, but he agreed. I had made peace with the whole reality idea by informing Zora that I didn’t care how much footage she shot of me, I didn’t want to see any more pictures of myself doing whatever this was we were doing. All it did was make me feel self-conscious. She kept telling me how great I looked and sounded, but I was adamant, so she finally agreed.

“It’s important that we tell the story not just of this house,” I said.

“But of this moment.”

They all nodded, except Victor, who rolled his eyes.

I looked over at Abbie. “Did you want to say something about the garden?”

“Yes,” she said.

Zora, who had been standing next to her, checked the technology and nodded.

“Okay,” Abbie said, smiling at all of us, but talking to that unseen audience Zora had assured us would be watching too. “I’m not going to make a speech or anything. I just want to say that a lot of you may not think of yourselves as gardeners, but your country is at war. You have to do some things you might not do otherwise, just because it is your country, too. The first thing is, you have to love it, the essence of it, the goodness of it, not the people we have allowed to call themselves our leaders, but the country itself. We have to help each other the way good people always help each other. The same way good people always know when something is wrong because you can always tell if you’re really looking.” She stopped and looked at Zora and frowned slightly. “What was I talking about?”

The mysterious, private unknowable nature of human beings,
I thought. Of course Abbie and I were still friends. We were still doing the same work.

“Loving your country,” Zora said softly.

“Yes!” Abbie said, pleased to be reminded. “Of course. We have to find a way to do whatever it takes to reclaim our country. And it doesn’t have to be something big. It can be something that seems small. Something that helps you remember the good things. Focus on your neighbors. Focus on the mountains behind your house. Focus on any grandbaby you can find. Focus on music you sing with other people. Focus on growing something. That’s why we’re making a garden here and that’s why we’re going to call it the Martin Luther King Peace Garden Number One. Because if we can grow sunflowers on Martin Luther King Drive, maybe we can grow sunflowers in Baghdad, too.”

“And Fallujah,” Aretha said.

“And Kabul,” Zora said, behind the camera.

“And New Orleans,” I said, for Louie.

Victor didn’t say anything, but he didn’t roll his eyes either.

“Anything else?” Zora said.

Abbie shook her head and smiled. “No. I think that’s it for now.”

“Okay,” I said. “Then let’s get to work.”