WESTLEY AND ME were like two lovers, who, for some mysterious reason, couldn’t get it together. Something in the other always caused bad memories.
Take Evelyn. Started shaking when she was forty. Mother, Christina and Ethel, her sisters, talked non-stop about Evy’s condition. We’d go up and visit, Westley, Mother and me. She’d greet us at the front porch, her house dress buttoned lopsided and her cranium shaking like she had a washing machine motor inside agitating it. She’d be grinning yes, but her head jerked no, and every now and then java saliva would vein across her chin. We’d watch her shuffle through the shade-drawn rooms toward the cluttered kitchen like somebody twice her age, grabbing onto chair backs, brass floor lamps, sliding against the water-stained papered walls to steady herself. At her dinette table she’d begin speaking, and I’d look up at her thinking, Jesus, where in the hell’s the switch?
She needs for somebody to find that switch. She’s standing in the Fun House at Idora Park on one of those vibrator pads that shake your teeth, and when you try to speak, spittle shoots out at your friends. Aunt Evelyn’s one of those wooden toy puppets on a paddle dancing to somebody’s terrible joke.
My mother spoke to a doctor in Cleveland. He said he’d drill into Evelyn’s head, sever a nerve and the shaking would cease. Just like that. So all of us were very happy. We could now relax and look her in the eyes. The doctor was going to shut off that torturous tumbler. Once again she would speak like the rest of us with nothing sloshing out her mouth onto her soiled shift. She wouldn’t look like an inmate in the county sanitarium any longer. Because she was my favorite aunt. And no longer any fun to be around.
Mother accompanied her to the Cleveland clinic for the procedure, nursed her there for two weeks, then brought her back home by Trailways. I’d inquire how Aunt Evelyn was getting along. “Is she up and around now, Ma? Is she washing and ironing again? How soon can she drive the car and come up and visit us?”
“Be awhile longer,” Mother said.
Several weeks after the operation, I happened to come home early from school and saw Mother getting into our car. “Where you going?” I asked.
“To see Evelyn.”
“Can I come?”
“I suppose,” she answered.
At Evelyn’s house it was always customary to knock and wait. But this time we walked right in. A stale, musty odor hung in the living room as dense as its shadows. Out at the old table sat Evelyn, staring over her backyard, the afternoon sunlight lying like a warm puddle on top the oil cloth cover.
“Evy, it’s Margaret and James.” We stood at the sink board waiting for her to acknowledge our presence. “Evelyn, I’ve brought you some soup.” Like we weren’t there. Mother sat down alongside her and placed her arm about my aunt’s body. I stood in wonderment, watching the two sisters, one softly ministering, the other locked in a vacant conversation with something out in the willow tree, now both of them shaking bells whose clappers had disappeared.
Shortly she asked me to fetch Aunt Evelyn a spoon, then proceeded to pour shellfuls of hot broth into her open mouth. But I saw a beak. For both these sisters now looked to me like rarified birds, a mother bird feeding a crippled bird. The latter’s eyes caught in a quizzical glare, dumb to utter any reasonable sounds it once knew, only erratic squawks while attempting with all its energy to lift its bony talon off the warm oil cloth to shakingly, now in massive, explosive arcs, point at the thing she sees in the willow tree. That person to whom Mother and I are oblivious.
Evelyn’s body in a coffin didn’t frighten me nearly half as much as that final visit. Her house, which had long been a repository of good memories, a happy place where Westley and I always wanted to go on Sunday, preceded her in death that day. The willow tree secreted a stranger whom she clearly saw. Instead, her arm flapped about in the stale kitchen air like a swallow tethered to the table leg. Evelyn screeched and squawked, the saliva and warm chicken broth now rising rapidly inside her jaw trap, spouting over its outside accompanied by the unseemly odor of a vinegary urine rising up from somewhere under our chairs.