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Authors: Cathy Lamb

The First Day of the Rest of My Life (19 page)

BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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“Never! I’ll never make an appointment with you again. You don’t know anything. I don’t know why you’re all famous and everyone thinks you know it all, you know-it-all-poop.”
“Think about what I said,” I said. Maybe I’d have two burritos.
Georgie sucked on her sucker. She is such a noisy sucker sucker. “Thinking can cause different philosophical and metaphysical thought processes to grow stronger, making you more one with the intelligence in the universe.”
“I’ll never think!” Corky declared again, red, sweaty, quivering. “Never!”
When she finally waddled out, Georgie said, “She’s vowed to never think. That’s a first.”
“Sure is. Make sure you charge her for the chairs she broke. Three hundred dollars each, at least.”
“Okeydokey.” I heard Stanley bark. Twice.
I went over and shook his hand, then hugged him. “Sorry about that, Stanley. Let it go.”
“He doesn’t like conflict,” Georgie said.
“You’re going to have to get used to it, Stanley. Life’s a conflict.”
Georgie rolled her eyes. “How about that shopping trip?”
 
I read an article about him in the
New York Times
that night. He was also in the
Boston Globe,
the
San Francisco Chronicle,
and so on. I cut them out, studied what he said, how he said it.
I wasn’t stalking him. Or spying on him.
I was merely keeping track of him and his life. That’s why I have a manila envelope full of his photos, articles, etcetera, which I peek at when the moon is high and feeling romantic.
I did not have tears in my eyes for any other reason than a bit of dust had gotten through a window in the house that I live in that I don’t like.
A bit of dust.
10
I
remember when we met Sherwinn.
Momma, Annie, and I were walking down the main street of our town near the ocean. Momma was wearing a purple and pink flowered dress and a wicker hat with a pink flower in it, her hair flowing down her back, like a black, feathered wing.
Annie and I were in matching blue jean shorts and matching pink T-shirts with butterflies. We were going to the ice-cream saloon. At that point, we loved ice cream. Chocolate mint, chocolate fudge, rainbow, and our favorite, peppermint, because it was pink.
“Whooaa,” Sherwinn drawled, stopping right in his tracks on the sidewalk and ogling Momma. “Lady, you are the finest looking woman I have seen in years.”
My momma gave him a hint of a smile. She wasn’t feeling “as bright and white as daisies,” as she put it to us, what with her headaches from crying and all.
“I had no idea the Cape produced such beautiful, can I say,
sexy
women.”
Sherwinn was tall, muscled, and good looking, with all the right words for a lonely widow. To many people, he would appear perfectly normal. He had moved to town to work in the fishing industry and had that tough-guy attitude so many women find irresistible, to their own peril. “If I had known that you were here, I would have moved sooner than I did. That was my loss, but we can always turn it into a gain.”
My momma said, “Heard it before, slick, and it’s not going to work,” but she smiled and he smiled back and he knew he had her. He had her. Like a gang of tarantulas, he had her.
 
Will you, Marie Elise O’Shea, have Sherwinn Barnes to be your husband? Will you love him, comfort and keep him, and forsaking all others remain true to him as long as you both shall live?
 
Theirs was a short, intense romance. Lots of dates, lots of intensity, enough so my momma’s brain whirled. Sherwinn spent money on her that my momma found out later wasn’t his money. As an adult, I understood what my momma temporarily liked about Sherwinn. She liked feeling alive again. She liked shedding the grief of losing my dad twenty months prior. She liked all of Sherwinn’s attention. He was a charismatic, compelling force, with that possessive, I’m-in-control sexiness. My momma, fighting fatigue, her headaches, her grief, her aloneness, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t put up a fight against Sherwinn’s overwhelming, take-charge personality.
And I know something else, something I shouldn’t know. My momma was the last of the virgins. She did not have relations with my dad until she was married. They only dated six months, after meeting their senior year of college in Boston, but he was a looker and, as my momma told me later, “I could barely restrain myself, darlin’, around your dad. That’s why we didn’t wait long to marry. I wanted that white dress and I wanted it to mean something.”
 
Will you, Sherwinn Barnes, have Marie Elise O’Shea to be your wife? Will you love her, comfort and keep her, and forsaking all others remain true to her as long as you both shall live?
 
One night, I got up to get myself another slice of my momma’s French silk chocolate pie and I saw my momma and Sherwinn under a tree. I saw them rolling, I saw what they were doing, and I closed my eyes and ran upstairs, sickened.
The next day, my momma cried all day, and the next day, too.
On the third day, she was engaged to marry Sherwinn. Now why a grown woman would feel compelled to marry a man simply because she’d had relations with him is something I don’t understand. But that incident under the tree, combined with the force of Sherwinn’s personality, well, it was a tornado that swept her up, up, and away.
Almost two years after our dad died, she married Sherwinn in the backyard of our house by the sea. My dad’s parents weren’t there. The grief of losing their only child had overwhelmed them and they died six months apart, starting three months after my dad died. Though I was not as close to them as I was to my momma’s parents, it was two more losses.
My momma was pale on her wedding morning, withdrawn. Sherwinn was grinning, happy as could be. His family consisted of his father, who got sloshy drunk and had to be hauled off by my dad’s relatives, a younger brother who had been released from the state pen two weeks before, and another who ambled in and hit on no fewer than three clients of Marie Elise’s French Beauty Parlor.
The night before the wedding, after the rehearsal dinner, I heard my grandparents talking to my momma on the porch. They spoke German.
“Honey, please don’t, it’s not too late to back out . . . what do you find attractive about this man . . . he resembles a good-looking possum with the education of a rancid pig . . . he might be sexy, Marie Elise, but there needs to be more . . . I don’t understand . . . we don’t understand, dammit . . . no, we don’t like him, we can’t pinpoint what it is, but there’s something there, a gut feeling, it’s killing me, something’s off, damn off . . . what about the children . . . now, don’t cry, Marie Elise, chin up, shoulders back, let’s fix this ruckus of a problem and send him off on his merry way . . . we know you’ve been lonely, we know you miss Luke, we do, too, sugar . . . this is not the answer, it’s a rat hole . . . for God’s sakes, Marie Elise,
what are you doing?
”
The talk degenerated from there, my granddad clearly furious and baffled as to why my momma would marry Sherwinn, and my grandma tried to cajole her daughter with gentle persuasion, but my momma wouldn’t listen. For once in her life, she wouldn’t listen to her parents. Later, we would blame our momma’s insidious grief and her medical issues for her colossal lack of judgment.
After the wedding, Grandma and Granddad called Annie and me to chat by phone, they sent cookies and gifts, but that fight with my momma was so bad, we didn’t see them again for what seemed like, to us as children, forever. Maybe momma told them not to come. Maybe they didn’t want to be around Sherwinn. But whatever it was, we felt abandoned by two of the people we loved best in the world.
Later, after what happened, they both apologized, their agony over not seeing what was happening to Annie and me, bringing them to their knees.
 
With this ring I thee wed, and all my worldly goods I thee endow. In sickness and in health, in poverty or in wealth . . .
 
The next day, the wedding day, it rained like someone had taken a machete to the turbulent clouds massed over Massachusetts and dumped all the rain in one place.
The wedding was moved indoors. The caterers burned the steaks Sherwinn insisted on. The minister came late because Shell Dee’s and Trudy Jo’s sons dismantled the minister’s engine so he wouldn’t make it. When he arrived, after running to the house, he said to my momma, “Are you
sure,
Marie Elise? Very sure?”
Dr. Rubenstein and his wife were in a minor car accident on the way over. Two mirrors fell off the walls and broke. Carman saw a black cat run across the grass.
And still, in our living room, my momma said, I do. Yes.
Interestingly enough, she did not change her last name. “We’re the O’Shea girls, that’s never going to change.”
Sherwinn’s eyes, from the moment he was in our house, moved all the way up and down my body, like a serpent. He snapped my bra strap when my momma wasn’t looking, wound my curls around his fingers and pulled. He patted my butt when he could, telling me not to be a “bad girl” and to obey him. “I’m your father now, Madeline. As long as you do what I say, we’ll get along.”
He could hardly quit hugging Annie, dragging her onto his lap and cuddling her.
But never when my momma was looking.
Oh, no, when my momma was around, he was careful. Fatherly.
He touched our momma. He’d hold her close, squishing her chest against his. He’d grab her boobs. He was always slipping a hand over my momma’s body, as if her body were his drug. She’d slap his hands away and say, “Not in front of the girls.” He’d come up from behind and grind himself against her.
Pretty soon the grind was on us.
 
. . . till death do us part.
 
Death did part my momma and Sherwinn.
Death parted Annie and me, physically, from Sherwinn.
But his demented spirit, the crimes he and they committed against us, that hasn’t left. It’s like I have Sherwinn still with me, still controlling part of my mind that I have tried to snatch back from his evil psychosis my whole life.
11
I
dreaded telling Granddad and Annie about the article Marlene was writing, as much as I would dread being run over by a pack of raging rhinos. But it was coming down the pike, and though Keith was throwing legal bombs the publisher’s way, he had no ground to stand on, and we both knew it. If I didn’t tell them, someone else would, like Marlene, or they’d hear of it when that blasted article was published.
In addition, in the last blackmail letter I had received, one of the photographs, of Annie and me, had been torn up into about five pieces. I got the point. Pay up, or our lives would be ripped apart.
I would not pay up, even though my air seemed to be hiding behind my organs, not swirling through my lungs as it should. I would not be threatened by any man, or woman, ever again in my life. I would not be told what to do. I would not be a victim again.
I waited on the deck of the farmhouse with Annie until Granddad and Grandma finished their stroll through the lavender plants, the late-afternoon sun breaking through the clouds. The day seemed cheerful but ominous. Foreboding.
I could see them in the distance, Grandma smiling, sometimes turning and stroking Granddad’s cheek, his smile warm, if not tinged with sadness. Watching Granddad deal with Grandma’s dementia had been so painful I thought my guts would split.
“Here we go, Emmanuelle,” Granddad said gently, as they walked up the steps to the deck. He looked pale and exhausted. “Let’s take a nap.”
My grandma smiled at him, coquettishly. “A nap?” She winked at him. “I’ll do it, Anton, let’s go and take a nap.” She glanced over at us, then put a hand over her mouth and giggled. “You mind your mouth! Keep this to ourselves!”
He kissed her cheek and said, “You’re right, let’s keep it to ourselves.” He put an arm around her waist. “I’ll be right back,” he told Annie and me.
Grandma turned around. “It will be awhile, dear. He doesn’t believe in rushing these things.” She said in French, “He’s a pistol. And the pistol has a certain . . . dance, shall we say? A certain rhythm.
Boom, boom, boom.
”
I laughed.
She added, also in French, to Granddad, “I love your rhythm. Rhythm me, handsome.”
I watched as they hobbled into the house, Nola opening the door for them.
They both thanked her, and Grandma kissed her cheek. “I love you, Nola.”
“I love you, too, Emmanuelle. You are my best friend.”
Nola followed Grandma inside. She would not interfere with their love.
About thirty minutes later, Granddad came out and joined us on the porch swing. I knew he had helped her to lie down, brought a comforter up and over her body, then hugged her until she went to sleep. “I have to have Anton’s arms around me in bed, or the nightmares come,” she’d told me. “He battles those nightmares away from me. Sometimes with a gun! Sometimes with a knife! Sometimes he hides me.” Then she whispered, “Sometimes he puts me in a barn or a shed or under a house and I stay quiet. Shhh. I am quiet. Shhh. Quiet so we’re not captured and filleted like a fish.”
I held Granddad’s hand as we swung back and forth. His hand was cold. I didn’t want to tell him what I had to say.
“Granddad, I’ve said it before, I’m gonna say it again,” Annie said, handing him a glass of lemonade. “You need to go to the doctor—”
“I’m fine.”
He wasn’t fine. We knew he wasn’t fine.
He brought his other hand up to his forehead and stroked it. Something was killing him, not just physically, but mentally. It was the atonement guilt he’d spoken about at Max’s.
“You don’t look fine.”
“Thank you, Madeline. You know how to make an old man feel older still, downright cadaver-like.”
“Any chance you’ll go to see Dr. Rubenstein?”
“I will not be going to the doctor. I don’t want to be shot, cut open, forced to swallow vile pills, X-rayed, poked or prodded, or told what to do.”
“Granddad, something isn’t right,” Annie said. “I’m not a medical genius, but I see it. You’ve got a pretty gray sheen to you.”
“That’s my makeup,” he joked. “I chose the wrong color. Girls, all is right in terms of the pattern of my life, of your grandma’s life. We’re old people. We’re getting closer to death. I have had a long, long life, and I’m ready to go, but I won’t go, I
refuse
to go”—he raised his voice, as if instructing God—“until after your grandma. I will care for her until she is no longer with us.”
I pushed my eyelids down so I wouldn’t make a mess of myself. See what I mean about their love?
“We love you, we need you,” Annie said. “Dr. Rubenstein could help—”
“And I love you girls, with all my heart, with all my being.” He lifted my hand, then Annie’s, and kissed them. “You are everything to your grandma and me. Everything.” His voice caught on his tears.
“Then stay with us, find out what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I am old. Old people die.”
“Something is . . .”
“Do you think that I, at my age, would treat anything that was wrong with me? I’m not going to do chemo. I’m not even sure I’d consent to an operation, with the risks of problems afterward, recovery, the pain. There’s very little I’d choose to fix. I don’t want to do the treatment. I don’t want to spend my last days ill, in a hospital, doctors and nurses flurrying around like hyperactive bugs, bothering me.”
What do you do with an older relative who is completely sane who won’t go to a doctor? Drag him there? Override his decision? Take charge? Take over his life? No. Not if he’s still with it, still able to make reasonable, cognitive choices.
Even as I fought off panicky grief at the very thought of losing my granddad, I understood him. If I were his age, would I want to be at the mercy of the medical establishment and perhaps lengthen my life but lose the quality?
“This is not a group decision,” Granddad said. “I am not a group. I make my own decisions. I will not listen to your arguments.”
“Okay, Granddad,” I said, holding his frail hand with both of mine, knowing I was going to cause him grave pain but also knowing I had to do it. “There’s something else I have to talk to you and Annie about.”
When I was done, Granddad was white. Annie was rigid, staring straight ahead.
The sad part was that I had told them only half of the problem. I hadn’t had the heart to tell them about the blackmailing or the photos with the two girls wearing vapid, defeated expressions, dressed in slutty outfits made from leather.
Click, click, click.
 
Lavender has medicinal uses.
Some say it can help with everything from fungal infections, migraines, aches and pains, insomnia, depression, anxiety, impotence, gas, and gum problems.
There is no conclusive research stating that lavender can whittle away at memories best left forgotten forever.
 
Annie did not want to talk about our conversation the next day. I accompanied her on a vet call to an alpaca farm, after she’d been on two calls already. One for a cow, one for a horse named Gotcha Baby. The alpaca farm is owned by Bertie Schouten.
Alpacas are beautiful animals. They seem to me to be a cross between Santa Claus’s beard, a horse, and a centaur with the black eyes of wet gumdrops.
Annie and I were there because Bertie Schouten said one of his alpacas, named Brad How, was sick.
“He’s uh . . . he’s uh . . . uh . . . he’s under the weather,” Bertie told us when we got to his house. Bertie’s house was designed by his architect brother, Eric Schouten. It’s open and bright with windows and glass doors everywhere. “It’s not enough that I live in the country,” Bertie told me one time. “My brother wanted the country inside my house. He wanted me living amidst all these hills and trees and rabbits and chipmunks and mountain lions running around here. I can almost feel the grass under my butt when I sleep. Look at these walls of windows. If I saw a bear outside I’d probably start running in the other direction and plow right through a sheet of glass to get away and bust my head open.”
Bertie is supersmart. He went to MIT. He flies in and out quite a bit, so he hires Annie to take care of his alpacas when he’s gone. We’re not sure where he goes, he’s very vague, but he has come back with a couple of not-so-fun diseases, his face has been mangled up a few times, an arm broken, and a leg smashed, so the guy is probably in and out of some third world countries getting in fights.
“He’s in Special Ops,” Annie told me, cracking her gum. “Highly trained, on-contract. He’s like Tom Cruise in one of his movies only he loves Alpacas. He’s a strange guy.”
“Brad How is coughing, too,” Bertie said, his face happy and shining with good glee. “But come on in first, I have lunch ready. You ladies need to sit down and take a break. How’s your shoulder, Annie? Better?”
“It’s fine,” she drawled. Annie had mentioned she scratched it in the woods on a horseback ride.
“Lunch’ll be great,” I said. I turned to Annie and grabbed her elbow as she hesitated. She was wearing jeans and a green tank top. Her arms are so built up with muscle she looks like a Barbie doll—Ken, the Barbie doll, not dimwitted Barbie the Barbie doll. Annie might look slender all dressed, but she is wiry and hard and gives her punching bag hell every night for about an hour.
Bertie opened the door wide. “I have your favorite soup, Annie, that artichoke chicken that you love from the café, plus a fresh shrimp and avocado salad from Darren’s Deli, those fluffy rolls from Chitty Chang’s bakery, and a fresh green salad. I went over to Sally’s and got some of her lettuce. I know you love her arugula.”
Annie managed a tight smile.
“And I bought a chocolate cheesecake. I know you like chocolate cheesecake, Annie.”
Such an eager beaver.
“Yum,” I said, pinching Annie’s elbow
She managed another tight smile. I saw her swallow hard. I pulled her inside.
“I’ve got the table set outside on the deck, Annie,” Bertie said, so delighted to have Annie for lunch. “I know you like the view. The weather’s perfect today. We’ll eat, and when you’re ready we’ll go and see Brad How.”
“You are so thoughtful, Bertie,” I said. “This is my favorite vet call of the day.”
It was the only call of the day that I was going on. The only one I’d been invited on so far. Truth was, every time that Bertie called because an alpaca was sick, Annie made me come.
Why?
Because Bertie is in love with Annie. He can hardly think he’s so in love with her, and she needs me as a buffer.
“Here, Annie,” Bertie said, pulling out a chair for her. Annie sat down, still silent, and he handed her a yellow cloth napkin. Cloth napkins. Can you imagine? A man who understands the value of a cloth napkin?
I sat down and Bertie poured both of us raspberry lemonade.
You might think that Bertie was very unattractive, like a sumo wrestler with two heads and a tail, which is why Annie won’t date him.
Or you might think that he has a terrible personality, perhaps psychotic or clingy controlly or deadly boring, which would explain why Annie won’t date him.
Perhaps it has crossed your mind that maybe Bertie has been married many times and has many bratty children and a leech-sucking momma, which would explain why Annie won’t date him.
“I hope you like it, Annie,” he said. “You, too, Madeline,” he added as an afterthought.
She smiled tightly. She swallowed hard.
None of those assumptions would be true.
Bertie is perfect. He’s tall, lanky, and strong with longish blond hair and rimmed glasses. He wears manly man sorts of clothes. He’s never been married, no kids. I’ve met his mother and father, and if I could adopt them, I would. His two sisters and two brothers live in the area, and they are so funny I wet my pants one time I was laughing so hard.
“I bought you some of that peanut brittle you like from Elga’s, when I was on the East Coast. I’ll bring it over later.”
See? He would bring peanut brittle over later. He wouldn’t give it to her now, no, he needed an excuse to drop by her house.
“Thank you,” she said tightly. I kicked her under the table. “That’s nice.”
Bertie’s face fell at her tone. He cleared his throat. He sat down, eying her, with more hope than he should have.
Bertie told me once that Annie was the most beautiful woman he knew. No matter how Annie has tried to play down her looks, she can’t hide perfect bone structure, puffy lips, huge eyes the color of a twirling blue-green sea, and hair that is thick and dark.
But it’s not her physical beauty he loves.
“Annie understands people, Madeline,” he’d told me. “She is one of the only people I know who is able to look past the surface and see people, see what’s inside. She can talk about anything, but she listens, too. No one listens anymore, but she does and she’s so damn smart. She’s gentle with everyone. I can relax around her. Sort of. I mean, I can hardly think when I’m with her. I want to talk to her, and make her laugh.” He put his head in his hands. “I’ve tried everything, Madeline. I asked her to go to a play with me in Portland, out on my boat, to a barbeque with my family, out to dinner and breakfast and lunch, even brunch. She won’t go. She doesn’t like me, does she?”
BOOK: The First Day of the Rest of My Life
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