YOU LOOK BACK ON LIFE, AND YOU WANT TO ASK WHAT changed you. You want to point your finger. You want to say it was because you met this man, or you didn’t meet that man, or maybe your mother died young, or she didn’t. Or maybe it was something smaller, like you took in a stray dog. For me, I could have pointed to James, or Wendell, or to Ann, or maybe that day Ivy pried me open a bit, or Raelene, or when Raelene’s little boy got sick, but in the end, I don’t think it makes too much difference. Because in the end, you can’t point. You can say this happened, and that happened. You try to say it, and you do say it, but you know the truth is you wake up one day and you’ve arrived somewhere else. You don’t know how you got there. But maybe it’s a blessing that you did.
When James sent me an airplane ticket to fly right into the New Orleans International Airport last year, I hadn’t seen him in a long time. Eight years. We hadn’t even talked or sent letters for about two years, so of course he hadn’t heard that Brent Quinn had died, and Ivy was back working more than part-time in the kitchen at camp. She wasn’t devastated by the loss. He’d been a good friend for a number of years, but even when they were married that was about all he was. In my opinion. Still, she missed him. She would stand with her arms crossed over her chest like she never did before. And you’d be talking to her and her mind would wander off, and she’d have to ask you to repeat yourself. And her hair finally turned completely gray.
Brent was replaced by a nice young fella from New York City who took the children’s well-being too seriously, and Ivy complained about it.
I was still teaching school when I got James’s card. I knew it would be my last year. I liked the job a lot. But it was too hard on me near the end. So many children with problems. I worked and worked for years trying to help them. In my own way. The way I knew. I took the loneliest ones home and fed them good food. Bought them books to escape into. Singled them out to be classroom helpers. Then, I started to get bone weary. A feeling of hopelessness would creep in. I knew it was time to step down.
Anyhow, James wanted me to come to New Orleans for his seventy-first birthday. He didn’t mention his birthday, but I knew.
It was October when that airplane ticket came in the mail. He had written a note. “You should come visit for a few days. James.” To see that sincere and loopless handwriting again touched me. I didn’t hesitate in my heart. My head hemmed and hawed a bit, but I knew I’d go. Not that I had any notion I was going to hitch up with James, because I wasn’t. That was one place I knew I’d never arrive. But you respect the history you have with a person, and the losses too, and maybe, when you’re older, it’s that history you have to honor. Even more than the love you have left.
Doreen Manchester drove me to the airport. Doreen in the Sideshow, as she liked to call her 1974 Buick Electra 225. Doreen said whenever she drives the Sideshow she’s scared a cop will pull her over. In certain up-and-coming parts, they pull you over these days if your car’s not from the 1990s. They figure you committed the crime of being poor.
She paid the money to park and came into the airport. We were almost two hours early. I never had been in an airport. I didn’t tell Doreen. She would’ve enjoyed that fact too much. She’d been in plenty of times and acted like my personal tour guide as it was. But I was glad she distracted me from the place. Personally I found it a terrible zoo. I don’t like so many rushy rushy types around me. And I don’t like the boy who bumped right into me. “Excuse me!” I said. “Kiss my ass!” he said. What the hell was that all about, I wanted to know. “The world’s just falling apart,” Doreen said. “That’s all.”
When I said good-bye to Doreen she got tears in her eyes. This is one woman who likes dramatics.
I said, “Manchester, I’m only going down there for four days!”
She said, “I know! I just hate good-byes! All good-byes! They remind me of other good-byes! They remind me of death! I hate good-byes and I always will.”
“Well, good-bye,” I said, walking away, and she laughed. She can always laugh.
So I fly to New Orleans. I wasn’t too glad to be up in that plane. I’m not a natural flyer. I’m not the sort who kicks back and looks down at the majesty of Earth. I mainly sat with dripping palms and thought how in the goddamn hell do they keep this goddamn plane up in the air? Yes, I had a whiskey sour. No, I didn’t chitchat with the gentleman to my left. They didn’t have stewardesses on that plane. In fact they had boys. Stewards, I guess they call them. Two nice stewards with curly hair. Flying was normal to them. It’s amazing what gets to be normal.
So James is there waiting for me at Gate 11. He’s dressed nice in a green long-sleeve cotton shirt. He looks older. Still good, with ruddy cheeks, but older. His hair was silver and white, and his face thinned out. He didn’t see me. Why is it sad when you see someone and they don’t know you’re seeing them? Because they can’t protect themselves. They can’t dress themselves up in their personality. They look naked and alone, and you’re sorry you’re seeing them that way.
A man you know all your life standing alone and looking for you in an airport makes your heart pound. I thought I might have a heart attack before I reached him.
He stood tall and thin with his chin lowered in that old way of his. His eyes moving to find me. Then he finds me. His face lights up. He walks over and takes my bag. He still basically had his same walk. Not jittery like some old men. I notice he notices my dress. I bought it new. Doreen dragged me to Divine’s Lounge Wear in town, a store that for the past twenty years everyone thought would go out of business. The merchandise never rotates. Everything’s in plastic bags. And Mrs. Peggy Divine’s a three-hundred-year-old hunchback with asthma. You want to tell her, “Go ahead and die, Peggy.”
The last dress I got there was for Wendell’s funeral. I just wanted to get out of there, away from the mothball smell. “Fine,” I said, “I’ll take this dress.” Off-white with miniature maroon roses. Fancy. I got out my black heels from another lifetime. I wore the whole outfit to that airport. And earrings. Doreen said, “Well don’t you look like you’re worth your weight in wildcats.” “What the hell that’s supposed to mean,” I said. She laughed.
So James noticed the outfit. Looked me right up and down. I was glad he did. And he took my suitcase and said, “You travel light.” And I said, “Always.” He smiled down at me. And then we walked side by side through that airport. Anyone looking would see an old pair. And I felt old. Everyone I know, they say they look in the mirror and can’t believe the old dame looking back at them is them. Well, for me it was an opposite story. The old woman I see now, she looks like me. Almost exactly. That young thing, she was the stranger.
James drove us to his house. It was a shotgun little house in a long row of other shotguns. That’s what they call them down there in New Orleans. The rooms are lined up all in a row, so if someone wants to they can shoot a gun right through the house. Don’t ask me.
James kept his house perfect. It was painted white with dark gray shutters. Trim green bushes out front. In the back, a garden in the moonlight. It was a James kind of garden, not too neat, and not too overgrown. Inside the rooms were painted white and the doors to the rooms were blue. It was night, and the light was dim, but I knew the place was clean. It had a watery smell to it. And another smell, which was like clean flannel shirts.
“Not a bad place,” James said, “but I don’t like the layout of a shotgun much. I don’t like a house on one floor. It’s too easy to keep it in good shape. Not enough to fix.”
“I don’t think it’s so bad,” I said. I didn’t. It appealed to me. The clarity. But I didn’t have to live there.
Next thing I knew he had two cold Budweisers and two glasses. We sat side by side on his couch. We set the beers on the table in front of us. Then he stood up and turned on a strange little antique mermaid lamp, came back and sat down and stretched his long legs out.
Then I surprised him. I took my glass and said, “Here’s to your seventy-first birthday, old man.”
He smiled, looking straight ahead. He didn’t look surprised that I remembered. He looked over at me for a second with his distant eyes. In one second the distance in his eyes was gone, then back again, then gone, then back. He was that way even back in the beginning. I laughed because he was so much himself.
“Happy Birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” I sang. He smiled.
But a kind of heaviness was creeping into the room. Call it the heaviness of our lives. A kind of uneasiness I didn’t count on. And since I wasn’t used to traveling, I wasn’t settled in myself. Last time I’d traveled was with Raelene and Hambone. Hadn’t heard from Raelene in a long time except for Christmas cards. Have to say I missed her down there in New Orleans. I missed her because I felt like a traveler, and she was the one who got me traveling all those years ago. The second day I was there, I got a postcard and sent it to her. I said I was having a good time in New Or’luns, as James calls it. I said, “Wish you were here” and meant it.
James had a lot planned for us. He wanted me to see his whole life, all the places he went and all the friends he had. I was unsure why he wanted this. But he did. One night I met two men he’d worked with for years on a shrimp boat. The men lived in an old-timer boardinghouse. JFK was framed on the wall in the hallway. The men were brothers named Yuri and Big. We went out and had what they call beignets. A kind of donut. And good black coffee. Yuri and Big were both recovered alcoholics, so we sat in a bright restaurant open twenty-four hours and drank coffee until we shook. Yuri would talk and Big would sit way back in his chair, and twist his mouth to the side of his face. I could see he was one of those people divided. One part of them doesn’t want to listen to much of anything, but the other part’s dying to hear it all. So he had to twist his mouth that way. Because Yuri was telling me his life story. He said he was in New Orleans because he was a jailbird at heart, and the original population of the city was jailbirds. Did I know that? No, I said. Oh yes, jailbirds, debtors, smugglers, and wayward Parisian ladies. That’s the history of this place. “So I knew it was for me, because I came from a town in Texas that was filled up with God fearers. And they tried to beat the fear into me with splintery wood till I ran away when I was fifteen years of age. I was already on the bottle then. . . . ” I noticed James looking at his friend with affection. I could tell these friends weren’t really friends. They were people he listened to. They were two men James could sit and listen to.
“So, Gladys, it was lovely meetin’ your acquaintance. Tell your boy here he oughta come see us more often,” Yuri said. “Yeah,” said Big. As it turned out, James hadn’t seen them in a year or so.
The next day I met his next-door neighbors, Donny and Betty Fortunato, and we went out to eat Creole food together that night. They were nice enough people. Donny was a wiry man who talked fast and choppy. Betty had a smoker’s voice and small blue eyes with drawn-on eyebrows. Both had dyed black hair and were about sixty-five. I got them onto the subject of grandchildren because I didn’t want to have to be the talker. I wanted to sit back side by side with James, like I did with Yuri. Well, turns out the Fortunatos’ oldest grandson’s a juvenile delinquent named Ronny. Betty went on and on about him in her old smoker’s voice. You’d think a story about a juvenile delinquent would be interesting table talk. Well, think again. Betty was one of these people who tell you all the details that don’t matter. Like “So I went down to the store because I wanted to take Ronny some candy when I visited him. Let’s see, that was about noon. No, that was more like one o’clock. Or was it noon? And so anyhow, I bought candy and I also bought baked beans and chicken. No, pork. I bought pork, that’s right, it was Thursday and Thursday it’s almost always pork.” You got the feeling Betty Fortunato was talking to herself, just trying to keep her ducks in line. After that dinner James and me were relieved to be just me and him.
We walked around in the warm New Orleans November night. I could smell the Mississippi. I could feel the marshiness of the air. Between us was an old sense of ease.
“I just wanted you to see my life down here, Gladys. It’s a good life. I feel at home here. I do. I feel this is a kind of home for me.”
Now, I know this man well. Well enough to hear any falseness in his words. And I heard some. I looked over at him and knew he really didn’t feel this was his home at all. But he kept talking that way.
“The weather’s nice and warm. I don’t know about you, Gladys, but I understand why older people go south now.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t tell him how I bundle up and chop my own wood in the snow. How my arms and back ache for days afterward, which I like. I didn’t tell him I loved snow more than when I was young. That I owned a man’s navy blue parka that came down to my feet. That cost a hundred bucks. I put on my man’s parka and Wellingtons and walk in the woods.
Maybe when I was seventy-one I’d understand.
“And it’s not like other cities in the country, Gladys. Other cities are all alike now. Homogenized. Not this place. This place has character you can’t even describe when you’re right in front of it.”
“Yes, it certainly does.”
We kept on walking. We were in a different neighborhood now. The shotguns were gone and now the houses were big pink things with iron balconies. Music was coming out of half the windows. I’d say mostly jazz. James went on and talked about all the good music in the city. And then he’s onto some sandwich you can get called a mufaletto. Then all the sudden something falls quietly out of his mouth.
“So Gladys, I was wondering what you’d think about moving down here. Down to New Or’luns.”
I should’ve seen the question coming, but it shocked me to the point where I stopped walking. And my heart sped up. Not because the question excited me.
“James, you took me off guard there.”
“I know, I know. Let me explain.”
“No, don’t.”
“Let me.”
We kept walking. He mentioned something about getting a drink in a corner café. Okay, fine. We walked a few blocks perfectly quiet. Then we get to the café. It’s out on the sidewalk. We sit down at a table too small for us, and too many people are crowded around us. James was used to that. Not me. But there we sat.
“I think you’d enjoy this town, Gladys,” James said. “Unless you’ve changed completely, I think you’d like it a lot.”
“I do like the town, James.”
“And I figure we could be a good friend for each other. As we get old. Allies.”
A young woman next to me burst out laughing, then said, “No, no, I never said that!”
“I can’t have this talk with all these strangers sitting on my lap,” I said.
So we got up and walked on.
“It’s that I don’t know anyone like I know you,” James said. I looked over at him. I looked at the side of his face as we walked. For a minute I felt his age, and the weight of his loneliness.
“If you’re still you, that is,” he added.
I didn’t say anything to that.
We walked until we were back to his house. We went inside and laid down on his bed. We had all our clothes on. We just laid on our backs.
“You’re different, Gladys.”
“I am. I’m doing better.”
“I know.”
“I’m not doing so bad, either.”
I reached for his hand. Now we were holding hands. My hand didn’t remember his. It was brand-new. I thought that was strange. But I lay there thinking how I was glad to be there. For now I was glad to be there in the dark with him beside me.
After a while he asks me, “Do you believe there’s any kind of life after death, Gladys?”
I didn’t expect a talk like this. I didn’t particularly want to go in that direction. But there he was, with an urgent voice, and holding my hand.
“I used to,” I said. “You know that.” And I lay there for a while remembering how I used to during the hardest years. “Not heaven. But I used to feel Ann out there in eternity. It was like she had hands and was pulling on my heart from eternity. I’d feel she was all alone out there. That’s part of what killed me.”
It was the first time I said Ann’s name without hesitating at all. I did it on purpose, to prove something to myself, and to James. But it didn’t necessarily feel good. Not bad, but not good, either. It was what it was.
He waited a few moments. Then he said, “And now you don’t believe there’s anything beyond this world?”
“I don’t have conclusions. I think there might be something. Some kind of place for your spirit. But I don’t know. Maybe the spirit’s just as homeless in the afterworld as it is in this one.”
I didn’t even know what I meant by that. I prefer not to talk about this kind of thing because I start coming out with things I don’t necessarily believe.
“I think there’s a place,” James said. “I don’t know what it is, but I think it’s there. Seems I’ve known it all along. Or so it seems. At least I’ve known we’re spirits in bodies all along.”
“I could see that too, but seeing it never helped me much. My spirit and body were too tied together, I guess.”
“I don’t think so.”
We lay there in perfect silence. I had an urge to put my head on his chest. I didn’t do it, though. It didn’t seem right, somehow. It was just an urge.
“I think of Ann a lot,” he said.
“And Wendell?”
“Of course. And you?”
“Of course.”
“What I try not to do is imagine what life would be if they’d lived,” he said.
“That’s a good thing to try not to do, James. It’s a good thing to try to live your life as it is.”
“It is a good thing.”
“I’m not saying it’s not the hardest thing to do.”
“I know you’re not saying that.”
“I’m not saying that some days you get hit with a feeling like it was just yesterday when you could hold your child.”
“I know.”
“And other days when you’re in a park and you see some family together with grown kids and babies and kids in between.”
We just lay there and listened to a siren outside, and a few people having a conversation on the sidewalk. My heart felt pierced. It was a sudden thing. I didn’t quite know why I felt it. Sometimes you all the sudden feel your heart pierced and you can’t say exactly why.
Then James said, “How’s Ivy?”
“Ivy’s fine. She lost her husband. It was hard on her. But she’s fine.”
“Is she working, still?”
“Still working. She has a lot of back pain, James, but you wouldn’t know it. This summer she burned her hand in the kitchen. It was after Brent died. She went and touched the dishes after they got out of the dishwasher. You know we got a hundred-and-ninety-degree dishwasher in there. Well, Ivy knows that as well as she knows her name. But she went ahead and grabbed a dish soon as it got out. It was a bad burn. Otherwise, she’s herself.”
He waited and thought about that for a bit.
“So they had some good years together, she and her husband?” he said.
“They were happy.”
“Did she love him?”
“Oh, I think so.”
I didn’t see the point of saying no, she didn’t really, she loved you, James. You were her real love. I wasn’t even sure that was true.
“Well, someday I’ll visit up there again. Maybe some Thanksgiving.”
“We’d love to have you. I can say that for sure.”
We were quiet.
“So I take it you’re not moving down here.”
“I can’t, James.”
He squeezed my hand and said he probably understood that even before he asked the question.
Soon enough, we fell asleep like that, and when I woke up in the middle of the night, he was turned away from me, far on the other side of the bed.
Flying home was different from flying there. I was filled up with the visit. With all I’d seen, yes, but mostly, with James. So my palms weren’t wet, not a bit. I sat in that plane looking down at Earth like I was born that way. It was a clear sky we flew through, so I had quite a view. I saw the tiny little houses, cars, and roads, the way it’s all divided. How there’s all these little lines drawn between yards and farms. So everyone down there with some luck and circumstance gets to stake out a little life on a little piece of rented ground.
Pretty soon I feel like I died and went to heaven. Heaven’s in the sky, right? So I’m up there in heaven looking down and seeing James sitting in his shotgun house. Sitting in the wake of our visit. Sitting and wondering if he’d ever see me again.
He could die tomorrow. I remembered his face in the airport, smiling. The strength of his hug. How he didn’t say the word good-bye, but just nodded. How he didn’t say the normal things like, “Have a good flight,” or “Talk to you soon.”
And then I thought about the middle of the night. How when I woke up and looked at him over on the other side of the bed, I considered getting up and taking his shoes off. But I didn’t do it. I turned away and went back to sleep. And let him sleep in his shoes.
It seems like a small thing, not taking off his shoes. Maybe it was being up in the plane that made it feel so big, so important. I had a feeling of regret that I could hardly stand. Why hadn’t I done it? Why hadn’t I gotten up and taken off his shoes when I had the chance? James from his deep sleep would’ve said, “Thank you, Gladys.”
I knew up there in the plane that’s how it would’ve gone. He would’ve thanked me from his sleep.
I pressed my hands over my eyes so I could stop the regret, stop the confusing tears.
And I stopped them. I took a breath. I took another breath, and looked out at the clouds. Couldn’t see a scrap of Earth anymore. Bit my lip.
Doreen and Ivy picked me up from the airport. I’d only been gone four days. But it felt like longer, and when I looked at Ivy’s face, it was like I saw her for the first time in years. She looked old to me in that airport. Maybe it was those lights. They make a person look green and tired. Or maybe it’s just the truth. She’s old. Ivy stood there at the gate, smiling. But something different was in that smile. She was trying too hard to hold that smile on her face. She hugged me hello, patting me on the back. She was wearing perfume she wore for special occasions.
That surprised me. Touched me.
Doreen was there with new red color in her hair and a bright silk scarf around her neck. She talked a blue streak as we walked out of the airport. I like Doreen. I will always like her. But she’s too often on a blue streak. And this time I couldn’t hear her. I heard the words coming out of her mouth, I can even remember some of them, but I couldn’t understand the meaning. “Larry bought a motorcycle even though I told him a hundred times I’d disown him if he did and now he’s taking those Keeley gals for rides down at that bridge where Tickle Abrams ran off the road last year. . . . ”
I walked, I heard her, but it was like the English language was foreign. Maybe because what I was really listening to is Ivy. Which is a strange thing to say, because Ivy was quiet. Not saying a word. Just walking on one side of me in a blue sweater and green pants. I kept stealing a look at the side of her face.
She stared straight ahead. I hadn’t really looked at her in a long time. Especially not from the side. Especially not walking in an airport.
We stepped out into the sunshine of day. Doreen’s onto another tale. This time Ivy’s laughing at it. It’s a tale about a date Doreen had with an old man who plays tennis. He took her out to the courts. Doreen slammed back every serve. Only she slammed them over the fence. She didn’t know she was so strong.
I was still mainly listening to Ivy.
Listening to her laugh.
Listening to her old cook’s hands, the way they pushed back her hair that didn’t have a trace of blonde in it anymore. Pure silver. Listening to her sigh when she sat down in the car.
Doreen drove us home, still talking. She never asked me how the trip went. She’s not the most curious friend. She cares that I’m okay. She tries to entertain. The people she likes, she wants them to be happy. She doesn’t care how they get there.
I thought I could feel Ivy’s curiosity. Before I left to go down to see James, I’d considered how Ivy would feel. She didn’t let on that she felt much of anything. She wished me a good trip. She didn’t want to talk about it, really. But now, in the car, driving back home, I thought I could feel her curiosity.
The ride was a long one. Because I wanted to be alone with my sister. I wanted us to be in our own house. So she could say, “So Gladys, tell me, is James doing all right?” And I could tell her. I could tell her in a generous sort of way. The way I’d want to be told. I rode in the car, looking forward to it. To being generous as possible.
Doreen dropped us off. That was a relief. We walked inside, I set my bags down in the bedroom. Ivy was in the kitchen.
“You want some coffee?” she called in. I said I would. So she made some coffee while I took a shower.
I came out, dressed for November. We sat at the table and drank coffee. And I didn’t wait for her to say, “How was your visit?” I just started talking, telling her everything. The color of his house, the way his face had thinned, his neighbors, the food we ate, even the way it felt.
Ivy didn’t look at me when I talked. She wasn’t smiling. Her eyes were lowered, her eyebrows were raised up. She listened to every word.
I talked on a bit more. And then I was quiet. Ivy said, “Well, it sounds like he’s doing pretty well down there, and it sounds like you had yourself a nice visit, Gladys.” She sighed, then smiled.
She smiled at me for a long second and I thought it was like she was suddenly on a plane, looking down.
“So how were your four days, Ivy?”
“My four days were just fine. A friend of Brent’s was in town for one night, remember Bernard? He came over and we played cards. It was a nice evening. Other than that, I worked.”
“How’s your back?”
“Still there last time I checked.”
“Why don’t we go out for a walk?”
She looked at me funny. It wasn’t something we’d done in a long time. In fact, last time we went for a walk together we were girls. Little girls in Delaware who laughed a lot. It’s true. That’s the last time we went for a walk.
But she went and got her old red coat. And we walked out the door, single file. It was four in the afternoon, November, not many leaves on the trees. But they were all over the ground. Mostly bright yellow, from the birches. It was beautiful the way the sun lit the leaves. We walked a long while, toward the road. Maybe we were headed into town. Don’t think either of us knew.
Some skinny teenaged kid ran up to us down near the road. All out of breath.
“You ladies seen a black lab?” he panted. He was a painful-looking kid, with his acne and Adam’s apple.
“No we haven’t, but we’ll be sure to keep our eye open for one,” Ivy said.
“I’d appreciate it,” he said. “If you find him, my numbers on the tag.” He ran off.
We walked around in the woods after that, looking for the dog. Neither me or Ivy said much. But I was still listening to her.
I was listening and thinking how you’re given a life, and certain people walk into it. Some make a small, but deep impression, like a kid from your second-grade class who shows up in your dream every three years. Others walk in and break your heart. Change you into who you are. You remember them every day.
Very few people, maybe one, maybe none, stay with you for the long run. It’s a kind of miracle if someone’s with you for the long run. A kind of miracle, I’d say.
Ivy hummed to herself, and tapped a tree trunk. She picked up a leaf and put it to her face. Smiled. She looked over at me and said, “I could never decide what my favorite season was, spring or autumn. Yours used to be summer. What about now?”
“Autumn,” I said.
“I knew it,” she said.
We kept on walking, half looking for that dog until it was almost dark.
We found the lab when we were out of the woods, headed home. He followed us right inside. We called that poor kid. He said he’d be right over. The dog went and curled up on the couch. The house was quiet, so we put on some music. Then the two of us started making some soup, and when the kid came for his dog, we invited him to stay and eat with us. He said it was the best soup he ever ate, and we were the best ladies around for miles.