Pockets Full of Change
I walk on unsteady legs into the post office to pick up my mail. Laura tried to talk me out of staying with her for a few days, but I know a thing or two about being in a house alone with the specter of the departed. Although I pried open the window to allow my mother’s soul to fly home, her presence was still evident in the house for days, in a whiff of the Estee Lauder powder she used to wear, or the snatches of Tangerine she used to hum. My skin would detect a change in the air when I walked out to the screened porch where she used to feed her dogs. Once, I swear, I saw her bending over to dump a can of Friskies into the dog dish, but of course there was no dog dish. The dogs had been gone for years. And then, she was gone too. And Laura is right. It was a relief. I want to be with Laura now, to help her let Fred go.
Having the mail delivered to a post office box seemed like the best choice when Roger and I moved back to Los Altos. We still can’t figure out where we want to live, so for now home is a rental apartment on Los Altos Avenue.
“Good morning Mrs. Russell! I just put another letter from Spain in your box.” Frank Lee, the postmaster, does not know the meaning of the word discretion.
Were I a secret member of a seditious cell group plotting to fund Basque separatists, it would quickly become the topic of conversation at every Bridge game in town. Fortunately, not many people are aware of the political unrest in that part of the world.
“Had a pretty stamp on it too, Dee. I haven’t seen one like that before.”
“I’ll cut it out and save it for you, Frank.”
Frank is a stamp collector. The only thing I collect is past lives, although they are converging rapidly. The letter from Spain will be from Alaya, who still lives in Navarre--Navarra I call it when I visit her.
I met my twin sister for the first time in Bakersfield when we were forty-seven years old. My daughter Valerie was the one who finagled a way to introduce her mother to her aunt. It was Valerie who figured out Leora’s deception when she met Alaya by chance in a publishing house in Barcelona. Of course, I know now there is no such thing as chance. Father Mike taught me about providence. When I was finally ready to face the truth, God provided the answers.
Alaya and I have spent the last eight years getting to know each other. She comes here every two years, usually with her husband Elazar or one of their twin boys. The years she doesn’t come, I go visit her at Moragarena, our family home.
I never knew I had a family home until the day I met Alaya. The short story is that my mother and father split up when we were babies. Alonso took Alaya back to his homeland and Leora went on the road with me. My mother never bothered to tell me about this episode in her life, or about her big Greek family in New York, so it came as quite a shock to discover I had people all over the place. It has taken years to learn how to forgive, but now that I have what I thought I always wanted, I’m discovering that a feast of family can be a plate of problems.
I pull two par avion letters out of my box. Before heading back to the apartment, I walk into the park next to the post office and sit on a bench to read Alaya’s letter. The other letter from Israel I set aside. It has Roger’s son David’s return address, written in the Palmer perfect penmanship David picked up so quickly the few times we brought him over for a visit. Alaya’s handwriting is perfect too, where mine is a scrawl. We are mirror twins. I’m the left-handed one.
The breeze exhilarates, passing scents of Bay leaves under my nose, washing smells of rosemary and mint through my hair. Cocooned in my car coat, I read through the tissue-thin pages of Alaya’s letter again and again. It’s not good news. It gives me a lot to think about on the short drive to the apartment.
R
Roger is on the phone when I burst through the door. He cups his hand over the receiver mouthpiece. “I just heard. I’m on the phone with Valerie.”
I wind my finger in a circle to let him know to wrap it up. I want his full attention right now.
“Okay Valerie, your mother just got home. She’ll fill me in on the rest of the details. … No, I don’t want to put her on the phone right now but I will have her give you a call later today. … Yes, I promise.”
I plop down on the sofa like an overstuffed bag of groceries about to split and look up into the face of this man I married only six months ago.
R
Roger and I had conducted the classic office romance after my mother died. Well, it was classic in the sense that we had been secretive about our relationship. The day I quit my job there was no longer a need for secrecy, but there remained a need for discretion. Roger always respected my status as a middle-aged widow living in a conventional suburban neighborhood.
Then, I adopted a more unconventional lifestyle, living in a one-bedroom rental and running an art gallery in Carmel-by-the-Sea, and Roger took a transfer to the East Coast. We agreed that our commitment to each other was exclusive but we were unwilling to set parameters beyond that. To say that our bi-coastal arrangement put a strain on what we were both hoping would be a happily-ever-after outcome would understate the situation.
To everyone’s surprise, we hung in there for seven years, nurturing our romance with long weekends in San Francisco and New York City. Every year Roger would declare this was his last year with General Electric and every year they would promote him, pay him more, pile on the incentives and ply him with that one last project that would secure his position in the financial world’s hall of fame. Money and perks weren’t terribly big motivators for this talented man, but the chance to make a lasting impact on how business gets done tempted him every time.
Time slipped away. I was busy running the gallery and negotiating showings of my found-object collages. Invitations to teach, to speak, to jury art shows and to mentor young artists were pouring in. I was on the road so much it made me laugh when I realized, I’ve become my mother. But this was no laughing matter.
I took a quick trip back to Los Altos to explore this revelation with Father Mike. Leora sacrificed all her relationships for her work as an itinerant court reporter. She loved the life. When her health failed and she could no longer travel on the court circuit, she just shriveled up and died. I loved my life in Carmel, but was I willing to put Roger off forever?
Seek God’s will, Father Mike told me. He knows your heart better than you do.
Roger and I pondered all this in our weekly long distance telephone calls.
“Dee,” he would say, “let the gallery go. You don’t own it. You don’t need the money. Spend your time doing what you like to do.”
“Well that’s the problem,” I would say, “I like everything I’m doing. I like business and I like art. And now I find I like sharing what I know with other people. I just wish I had more time to do everything I like.”
Then we would spend the rest of our dimes talking about how much we missed each other and how much we wanted to be together, but we never made any real plans.
Father Mike cautioned me about putting my relationship with Roger on hold for too long. We experience God when we show our love to other people, he told me; an absolute revelation to a girl raised by a mother who pushed everyone away. A wonder, also, that such advice came from a man wedded only to his calling.
It was Leora who actually brought this dear Anglican Scotsman into my life, post-mortem. In her last years, she succumbed to a neighbor’s prodding and began attending Saint Matthew’s, an activity she hid from me for reasons I cannot fathom. Force of habit, I guess. Father Mike showed up to help me through a grief I didn’t know I had, and to help me connect with my family. I would have been content to file those faith lessons away for reference when I felt I needed them, but that’s the thing about God. He has this way of upsetting the file cabinet and resetting the agenda. I began to pay attention when Roger had a heart attack.
Because I was not Mrs. Roger Russell, I didn’t get a phone call. I let a few days go by after I didn’t get my Saturday morning wake-up call and then began dialing numbers at GE. I managed to locate one of Roger’s colleagues who informed me that Roger had just been moved from the new intensive care unit at Bellevue Hospital into a private room.
“Dee, I’m sorry I didn’t think to call you,” John said. “That was unforgivable of me. We’ve just been so busy with the quarter-end reports.” I hung up on him. Not my finest moment. After I got done blaming Roger for having a heart attack and not bothering to tell me, I cleared my calendar and called my travel agent. Two days later, I sat by Roger’s bedside fighting shock at how thin and pale he looked. It seemed like every bone in his body poked up beneath the lightweight blanket that covered him. Gray that had looked so elegant at his temples the last time I saw him now salted his thinning hair. Normally robust, he was wan and weak. It scared me.
I thought back to the shy man who boldly pulled me to him, the lover whose kisses ignited fire in places in my widowed body I thought had gone cold forever, and all the years between then and now that we missed waking up in each other’s arms. How foolish we had been.
Roger grew stronger every day. The hospital was the last place I wanted to be with him, but it gave us a bubble in time where our other commitments receded and we began to make our plans.
“Dee my darling, this is a real wake-up call for both of us.”
“Yes it is. You need to take better care of yourself. No more globetrotting. I’m sure your doctor won’t approve. Find projects that will keep you stateside.”
Roger sat up in bed, gripped my hand and held it between his. “Listen to me, Dee. I’m not going back to work. I’m done.” He saw the alarm on my face and laughed. “I’m not done for, honey, I’m done with this crazy life we’ve been leading. It’s time to get married and settle down. I know what I have to do to make that happen. You figure out what you have to do to make that happen.”
Six months later, I had trained my assistant to run the gallery and was unpacking boxes in the apartment in Los Altos when I heard a key turn in the lock. The door swung open and Roger walked through, set a bottle of champagne and two glasses down on the kitchen table and thrust a dozen long-stemmed red roses into my arms. Then he dropped to one knee, pulled a small velvet box out of the pocket in his bomber jacket, flipped it open, and slipped a dazzling, one-carat sparkler onto my finger.
R
Roger hangs up the phone and comes to sit beside me on the saggy couch we found at a garage sale. “Dee, I’m so sorry to hear about Fred. How awful for Laura. I’m glad you could be there for her, but I’m sorry you had to go through it.” He takes my hand and we sit in silence. How do I tell him there is more bad news?
I pull Alaya’s letter out of my pocket. “That’s not all. I stopped at the mailbox. There was a letter from Alaya. Domeka has been implicated in some kind of violence in the Basque Country and he’s going to have to stand trial.”
“What kind of violence?”
Roger knows that I have twin nephews but he’s never met them. They are young men in their mid-twenties now, as different from each other as they could possibly be. It wasn’t always so. Valerie met her cousins on her first trip to Spain. They were like puppies that followed her around Alaya’s farmhouse. Valerie told me how they vied for her attention by showing off their language skills and ability at sports. But it was Danel who managed to forge a bond with Valerie, despite the fact that she is ten years older that he is. Danel, child of his mother’s heart, was the one who accompanied Alaya on visits to the United States when Elazar was too busy with his coaching responsibilities. Although Elazar has aged out of Jai Alai competition, he stays busy coaching young competitors and working with the Olympic committee to get Jai Alai accepted as one of the competitive games.
Domeka is closer to his father. Elazar was pleased when Dom did well in amateur competition, but it was clear early on that he didn’t have what it takes to rise in the international spotlight the way his father did. Elazar radiates a personal alchemy that is rarely duplicated. He possesses raw talent, a ruthless desire to succeed, and an incredible sense of timing. He knows the exact moment to throw the switch that releases a personal charm that is genuine. It’s easy to see why he captivated my sister.
Dom is happy in the shadows. He loves nothing better than to poke around the orchards making sure the apple harvesting is progressing well, or putter in the out-buildings checking the cheese processing and inventing improvements. Basques, I have discovered, are very enterprising people. Elazar is no exception. It did not take him long to recognize the value of Domeka’s attention to the family business and gently steer him away from a career in sports. How shocking, then, that Dom should be accused of criminal activity.
“I don’t know what he’s gotten himself involved in.” I re-read Alaya’s letter for clues. “Alaya doesn’t give any details. She just says that she’s very afraid for him. She won’t be coming for Christmas this year like we’d planned, but she’s sending Danel over. She seems to think he’s not safe. It’s very confusing.”
“Does she say what date the trial is set for?”
“Sometime in the spring.”
“That will give us plenty of time to figure out what we can do to help. Certainly we can offer financial support for a good attorney.”
“They don’t need money, Roger. They need to be airlifted out of that country!”
Roger snorts a laugh through his nose, but this is no laughing matter to me. He knows very little about what goes on in that ancient region, split by the Pyrenees Mountains, commanding the lucrative resources of the Bay of Biscay. Historically, the region is a hornets’ nest of angry passion. It is neighbor against neighbor over the issue of whether the Basques should fight to retain their own language and culture by forming their own country. To be fair, I never knew any of this either until I discovered I was part Basque. I’m not sure whether this is the time to say what I’m thinking.
“I suppose it’s possible that Domeka has somehow gotten himself involved with the separatists.”
Roger turns pale. “You mean you think he might be a terrorist?”
By the time he completes that terrible sentence, his words have gained steam. He expels the accusation in a squeak that rises a full octave above his normally testosterone-fueled bass tone. I guess he knows more about the situation than I gave him credit for.
“That’s an ugly word, Roger.” I want to stop this line of thinking immediately. “No, I don’t think Dom is a terrorist. But it’s certainly possible he somehow ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time.” My sister must be frantic. “Roger, maybe I need to go over there now.”
Roger puts a hand on my shoulder as if he is trying to keep me from rising up in air and taking off into the sun now beaming through the skylight directly overhead. My stomach growls in response.
“You must be hungry. Let me go into the kitchen and make you a sandwich.”
We haven’t even talked about my plan to pack my things and go spend a few days at Laura’s. Roger disappears into the kitchen and begins rattling around in the refrigerator for sandwich makings. He calls to me, “Are you going to stay with Laura for a few days until the curiosity about what happened dies down and people leave her alone?”
Is this what people mean when what they say married couples think each other’s thoughts?
R