Pity, my grandmother remarked, without dropping a stitch, that you can't shut up your relations in a closet, like preserves. Her knitting needles clacked steadily and she occasionally adjusted the afghan with a sharp flip of her elbow. Aunt Vi and Aunt Pearl nodded in agreement, Ayha, they both said at once with small, discreet smiles. Nana was in what my daddy used to call a "snit" and the sisters knew better than to contradict her. My mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, her face tight with anger. And what exactly is that supposed to mean, she demanded. It means, my grandmother said calmly, precisely what I said. My mother stalked back into the kitchen and with a clatter began washing the breakfast dishes. Nana glared at her knitting and sighed. Among other things, she said clearly, preserves don't eavesdrop. There was a curse from the kitchen, followed by the sound of the old cast iron skillet being flung against the wall, and then the slam of the back door. From the sunporch I could hear the dogs barking at the sound of an engine and the spray of gravel as my mother drove off and up the driveway. She surely does favor a dramatic exit, I heard Aunt Pearl say quietly and my grandmother and Aunt Vi agreed in unison, Ayha.
This little drama, or some re-mastered version of it, played itself out repeatedly among the women on my mother's side of the family. Casting continually changed - sometimes you were an extra or had a small cameo part, other times you were the lead but the dialogue was constant and reliable - recriminations, accusations, cheap shots and blame until finally one of the players left the stage. Relationships built on alcoholism and conflict are painfully predictable and as I got older I began to wonder if it was generational - had my grandmother and her mother been at each other's throats as she and my mother were, as my mother and I were? Was there some competitive and twisted strand of DNA that was present and actively at work? There was no one left to ask.
All storms, even those made up of hurricane force winds, blow over eventually, and that night my mother returned by the time supper was on the table. She was disheveled and tipsy, a little unsteady on her feet, and she climbed the stairs to her room using all her tricks to be quiet. Nana pointedly ignored her, telling me, There will be great weeping but it's just for effect, and then suggested a game of dominoes. The next morning, my mother was haggard and apologetic but my grandmother wasn't buying and by lunch the cold and fragile courtesy between them was gone, both were white faced and stiff with anger. Neither would concede, compromise or yield a single inch of ground and they each made a point of avoiding the other. It seemed silly to me at the time, and I couldn't help but think of two, old and battle scarred tomcats, circling each other, spitting and hissing until they launched at each other and became a whirling, howling centrifuge of teeth and claws, refusing to let go until someone doused them with a bucket of cold water.
We are all - at least in part - the best and worst of where we come from.
Ezra and Izzy had never had time to marry. They lived together for over 50 years in a small house on the square and raised goats, rabbits and four daughters. Until Izzy took ill, they had never spent a night or much of a day apart - all four girls had been conceived and born in the tiny back bedroom except for the first, who Ezra always claimed had come into being on the kitchen table after a particularly spicy meal of fried shortribs and Spanish rice sent to them by an old friend of Izzy's on the mainland. Izzy had a reputation for living on the domestic edge and was always willing to try something new and different but the story of the Spanish rice and the kitchen table was told and re-told on countless front steps and around multiple old black stoves and each time she blushed and hid her eyes.
The girls were named for the months in which they were born - April, May, January and June - each was delicate and slender, petite with dark hair and eyes and tiny feet, except for the first, who grew taller than both parents and who had a mass of caramel colored curls in contrast to her sisters' dark brunette and perfectly straight locks. Probably the Spanish rice, Ezra liked to tell folks, and Izzy would blush and hide her eyes.
Jan was different from her sisters in more ways than her hair and her height. April, May and June were homebodies with no great curiosity about the world beyond the the small island. All four girls were home schooled but resisted Izzy's carefully planned out lessons and reading lists, except for Jan who sought out anyone with books she could borrow. She read poetry, history and two versions of the Bible, all the local, discarded paperbacks the summer people brought, every classic the one room school had to offer. She read cookbooks and novels and magazines and seed catalogues and carried a pocket dictionary in her back pocket. If it was in print, she read it, learned it, retained it, despite the teasing and affectionate name calling from her un-curious sisters. Spanish rice must be brain food, Ezra told everyone and Izzy blushed and looked away.
By the time the girls reached their teens, the small house on the square was under siege from an onslaught of young island boys come to call. They eagerly helped Ezra with the chores, were always on hand for Izzy's errands, and they brought gifts - a box of maple sugar candy wrapped in brown paper with a makeshift bow, handpicked wildflowers or a piece of carved and polished driftwood, a jam jar of fragile, earth colored shells, a second hand book of old Scottish hymns. In exchange for cold milk and strawberry pie in Izzy's kitchen, they chopped firewood and repaired fences, rehung windows and fed the rabbits, learned to shear goats. Ezra watched all this with a mix of amusement and pride. Somethin' sure does draw a crowd to this kitchen, he told Izzy and his daughters all laughed except for the first born who blushed and hid her eyes.
By the time Izzy got sick, all four girls had scattered to make their own homes and their own lives although they returned often with their children and the little house was rarely empty. April met a soldier and moved to Annapolis,
May married a fisherman and moved across the passage, June found a job in the big hotel on the mainland. Only Jan stayed on the island, settling into a small house around the cove and dropping in on Ezra and Izzy daily. Goats and rabbits were replaced by grandchildren and a visiting nurse who came weekly. All was according to plan until one fine summer day when the ferry brought a strangely familiar figure - a tall, dark eyed, dark haired, slender and handsome man with a camera, a photographer who had spent time on the island when Ezra and Izzy were just starting out, a man now dying of terminal lung cancer, so it was said, a man who had come to make amends and die with a clean conscience. He sought out the small house on the square, then each of the girls in turn, except for the first born. It was said he stayed to a dinner of short ribs and Spanish rice with Ezra and Izzy and that he left behind a book of photographs but all that known for sure was that he left the following day.
On the day of the Izzy's funeral, while searching for one of her mother's treasured lace edged, lavender scented handkerchiefs - her only real extravagance - Jan came across a book of photographs concealed among a drawer of cotton nightgowns and practical underthings. There were pictures of fishing boats and rock formations, sunsets and seagulls and groups of old men in leather aprons and work gloves. There were pictures of flowers and driftwood scattered along the rocky coasts, abandoned shacks and lily ponds and families on front porches. And there were pictures of Izzy - dozens of pictures of Izzy, gathering shells in the secluded cove, wading through the creek above the cemetery, swinging on the old tire behind the schoolhouse with her petticoats showing. Izzy, with sparkling eyes and pale, unlined skin, young and laughing, without a care in the world - almost in love, Jan thought. It was a side of her mother that she had never seen but knew well from her sisters and feeling as if she'd intruded upon a hidden cache of very private memories, she decided to replace the book as she'd found it and promised herself to make no mention of it to anyone. She didn't hear her father's steps coming down the hall, didn't hear the bedroom door swing open until it was too late and she turned, picture book in hand, to see her father standing in the doorway. Come, January, he said gently, It's time. He took the book of photographs from her and placed it back in the drawer. Your sisters are waiting.
That night, as friends came to cook and tend the grandchildren, Ezra and his daughters sat on the front porch and watched the tides. April, May and June talked quietly while Jan, having no idea where to begin, leaned against her father's knees and breathed the scent of lavender. After a time, the three sisters kissed their father goodnight and went inside. Papa, she began, I need to know. Ezra sighed and dug for his pipe, took his time about lighting it and then spoke to his firstborn. There are things in this world that are better left untold, January, he said softly.
Here, my grandmother fell silent and when I opened my eyes to look at her, she had returned to her rocking and her knitting. That's it? I demanded of her, That's the end? But what happened to them? What about the photographer? She waved off my questions with a shake of her head and an enigmatic smile. Sometimes, she told me softly, we make mistakes and someone else has to make them right. Some things are better left untold.
Now and then someone drifts into my professional life who's flat out spooky. For no good reason, he or she makes my skin crawl and I want to avoid them as much as possible. They don't have unsettling tattoos or gold teeth, don't dress in any way out of the ordinary, don't carry a machete in their back pocket, don't look evil or even dangerous. But close contact with them sets off all my primeval instincts. They're just garden variety weird - oranges in a sea of apples - not threatening or unbalanced, just somehow wrong and not to be confused with the true community eccentrics or those temporarily on the loose due to the generosity of day passes.
The eccentrics arrive with a touch of flamboyance and flair - a tall, too thin scarecrow of a man in a black cape and velvet fedora. He carries a silver handled cane and doesn't enter as much as he sweeps in like a strong wind, commanding attention and scattering those in his way like confetti. A stick figure of an old woman wearing clashing colors and stage makeup arrives in a wheelchair - her parchment skin hangs from her bones and she has the ghastly smile of a crackly old crone. She is like a fragile, breakable bird - decrepit and nearly transparent with age but still able to snap orders with a brittle and sharp expectation of being obeyed. A mother-daughter team, arm in arm and both reeking of whiskey and old money, storm the door as if prepared to meet resistance. They share a private joke and their laughter is high pitched, verging on hysteria and hormonal imbalance. The true eccentrics are colorful and move about in worlds of their own making, dismissing conformity and accepted behavior as nuisances.
The day pass people travel with only a hint of reality for company. They tend to be shy and often hesitant, fearing eye contact and always careful to be courteous and deferential. Conversations with them require constant focus as they tend to drift and are easily distracted. In a world where noise rules, they are quiet. In a world where there is much pushing and shoving, they are trampled and not noticed. They come and go with timid apologies and no real hope of finding their place in line. They are almost always harmless, traveling on unfamiliar ground with light, quick steps - a little wary, a little uncertain of their surroundings and usually medicated to some degree - journeying on their own yellow brick road, in constant search for the wizard.
Neither the day pass people or the eccentrics unnerve me but let one of the dark, weird people appear and I feel a sudden apprehension, a shiver of something close to but not quite fear. It's an anonymous, random anxiety that I want to dismiss as ridiculous but can't. Everything about them is run of the mill normal except for the fact that it isn't, there's a suggestion of wrong here, an invisible aura of disturbed. I inexplicably find myself thinking of serial killers and old Vincent Price horror movies, troubled childhoods and schizophrenic stalkers. I watch the most recent of them enter the shop - he wears khakis and a cardigan and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. His coke bottle glasses have slipped down on his nose and he pushes them up with a deliberate gesture. When I summon a smile and ask if I can help him, he looks at me for a very long time and then when I'm just about to decide that he might be a mute, he says ever so softly, No, and I realize that he's one of them. His eyes peer at me through his glasses, his arms hang loosely at his sides and I have the eerie thought that he might be evaluating me as his next meal. Eventually his stare shifts to the wine shelves and this is worse because now I think he may be considering what wine pairs best with a medium well redhead. I am saved by a ringing telephone and leave him motionless and silent in the bustling store, an island of weird in a sea of Christmas chaos. I'm too spooked to offer to help him again and pray that he will make a selection and leave. In time, he does just that - wandering out the back door, a bottle of blood red cabernet held casually against his chest. Customers instinctively clear a path for him, moving aside on reflex. He stops in the doorway and turns to give the shop a final, steady and predatory gaze before melting away into the mall. The atmosphere in the shop immediately clears and returns to normal and I give myself a sound scolding for giving way to my imagination and go back to business.
Even so, I look both ways when I leave and cross the dark parking lot. Imagination notwithstanding, anything can happen on a foggy, starless night before Christmas and it's best to be prepared and pay attention.
Okay, here's the thing.
I can tolerate people who think it's perfectly all right to hang their 8' by 8' club banner over several sections of the wine shelves. They've rented the wine shop for a private party and consider it their property, never mind that retail business is still being conducted.
I can tolerate and even be pleasant to the overdressed, overly made up women in their Gucci shoes, flashing oversized diamonds and painted nails as they gossip and snipe about where they're going for the holidays and how much it cost.
I can tolerate their husbands complaining about the price of jet fuel and the rising costs of tuition for private, European boarding schools.
I can tolerate catering to the rich and being treated like a scullery maid.
I can even tolerate watching the fake embraces and air kisses - it's so terribly continental.
However, when I watched a mildly well known doctor and his wife inspecting the half dozen gift baskets awaiting final wrapping and delivery for other customers and then open and read each of the six hand addressed and private gift cards as casually as they might read their morning newspaper, something snapped in me. I excused myself from pouring champagne and manoevered my way to the gift baskets and with the best smile that I could manage, asked Can I help you with something, doctor? Putting his arm around his wife's shoulders, he shook his head and hurried her away.
Money doesn't buy class.
A clap of thunder woke me from a sound sleep and the small brown dog dived beneath the covers in a panic. Lightning cracked and I could hear rain on the roof, a steady, hard pounding rain, likely to last all day. Cat calls were already coming from the kitchen and the black dog was awake and anxious.
Both dogs arrived at the back door in a mindless rush of pre-dawn barking, took one look outside and fled for the safety of the bedroom, but knowing a trick or two myself, I walked to the front door and at the sound of the latch, they were at my heels and then outside in a flash. It was too early for traffic and I knew they wouldn't go far. I felt bad about taking advantage of their theory that it only rains in the back yard but by the time the cats had been fed, they were back on the front steps, rain soaked and shivering but none the worse for their small adventure. I toweled them off and began my own day.
There is a stark quality to this day. The branches of the crepe myrtle are clearly defined against the sky which is gray but also strangely bright although not with sunlight. It's warm for December, and the air is still and filled with damp. It feels like snow somehow, despite the temperature. One street down from me, Christmas Lane is beginning to take shape - each house erects a decorated tree and sets it in a neat row on either side of the street and at night the entire block is glittering with bright, colored lights. To and from work I pass arrays of angels and reindeer, sleighs and candles, made from white lights that glow and shimmer when the sun goes down. Some houses simply hang a wreath on the front door, others revel in a wretched excess of the season. Poinsettias seem to be on every doorstep and porch and the church bells play an endless reverie of chimes and carols. No matter the geography, it's the holiday season everywhere. The dogs don't know this, of course, neither has ever seen a real snowfall or even a Christmas tree and I suspect they share my feeling that Christmas is just another day.
After a certain age, I wonder if there's not a little humbug in all of us - a result of shattered illusions and reality. If they want to think it only rains in the backyard, so be it.
Nose poked through the mini blinds and every nerve quivering, the black dog suddenly erupts like an overheated volcano and begins a prolonged bout of frenzied howling. The small brown dog immediately joins in and startled cats jump for cover while I curse the flood of coke and ice that I have spilled onto my lap. It could have been a cat or a dog or a neighbor, the slam of a door or a blade of glass moving ever so slightly - she is a small powder keg of fear and tension, prone to random explosions without cause or warning. Once again I chase, corner, and calm her, all the while listening to my own heart pound with leftover shock. She wearies me beyond words and again I find myself thinking of a life without this wild, unpredictable and made of fireworks animal. And again, I know I cannot do it - we are chained, she and I, bound by the fact that it's not her fault and that I can't bring myself to end her life on account of a behaviour problem, despite the peace and quiet it would bring to the household. I would miss her too much.
The experts tell me her aggression is off the charts and based on fear, dominance, and the illness she suffered as a puppy. She is damaged and untreatable, every regrettable instinct she has exaggerated and heightened by misfiring circuits in her brain. She simply doesn't understand discipline or correction, doesn't respond to repetition or training, can't comprehend the word "no". She doesn't make the connection between actions and consequences, good or bad, has no impulse control and sees each cat she lives with as just another moving target. She is like a two year old in a perpetual and self sustaining tantrum - indestructible, inexhaustible, incomprehensible. And yet,
there is about her an endearing need to be loved and kept safe. She is never far from me, and were someone, anyone, to make a threatening move toward me, there would be severe consequences - she fights fiercely and blindly for what she loves with no thought of her own well being.
This is not your average dog, not anxious to please, not content to sleep in front of a warm fire and let the world go by, not able to discern good behavior from bad. She is over anxious and menacingly jealous, fearful and hostile, certain to bite without provocation, suspicious to the point of paranoia, and demanding of attention. She lives in a friendless and alien world and never lets down her guard. It may be that it is all these qualities that make me love and protect her so.
Sometimes I wonder what that says about me.
The ocean in November is white capped and choppy, churning with the winter wind and dark colored with threat. The boats rise and fall on waves, lifted and dropped as if weightless under the overcast skies. The coastline is shadowy and sadly deserted, grimly missing the sunshine and warm days of summer. Winter is a constant storm, cold and gray with something close to menace in the air. Snow is on the way - not the glossy picture postcard kind, but heavy and crippling and endless. The glory days of green grass and afternoon picnics seem impossibly far away. Summer homes are shuttered and closed up, lightless and vacant with only a parttime caretaker to look in on them now and again. It's a long, lonely season for a small ocean side fishing village and wolves are at the door.
I stood in the front yard of this now desolate place, hearing only the wind and the waves. The family home had been sold for back taxes and I was trespassing on a stranger's property. I had come to say a final goodbye, come in a month I hoped would be just as it was, with no summer voices to call my name, no bread baking in Nana's beloved kitchen, no music playing. The house itself was cold and lifeless, shades drawn, locked and empty. The windows were grimy and the grass grew high and wild around the doors. The playhouse door was scarred and hung off it's hinges and the swing set lay on it's side, overgrown with weeds. Even the flagpole seemed defeated, patchy and in need of paint and a new halyard. The ferry was making it's slow way across the passage, fighting the currents and stubbornly clinging to it's course, a single pickup truck it's only passenger. The ocean churned and sent sprays of salt water over the scow, battling back with a persistent fury but the ferry continued it's steady progress. It docked and the pick up truck rattled off, passing me. The driver, a face I didn't recognize, gave me a small, cheerless wave as he drove by because in small villages like this one, everyone is acknowledged whether you know them or not. I nodded back and he drove off, turning onto the Old Road and disappearing in a minor dust storm.
I drove the length and breadth of the island that day, paying my respects to the past and the places that were still there and lingering at the ones that were not. The tides came and went with a reassuring certainty, the only constant thing here was the ocean. People come and go, houses change hands, and life finds a way - through the cold and bitter times, the heartache and loss, the warmth and happiness and the forgotten things, the wounds and the recoveries, life finds a way.
If bootlegged whiskey was not to be had on a Saturday night, the young fishermen raided island kitchens for vanilla extract. The process of getting drunk took longer but the effect was still the same - oblivion. They were proud of achieving this state, as if it were something of a contest and a medal might be awarded at the end. Hangovers were a warped measure of status and the bragging rights to an all out drunken brawl were hotly debated in the days that followed. Any undesirable behavior was shrugged off under the guise of "kids will be kids", any consequences were taken as "learning a lesson". None of it was considered dangerous or even serious and it was rare that anyone even considered intervening in these rites of passage.
A few days ago as I watched, for the second time in as many weeks, a co-worker determinedly drink herself into a staggering daze, I thought how little has changed. She walked in sober and bright eyed and in a matter of less than an hour was slurring her words, unable to keep upright, propositioning anyone with a pulse and crashing into the furniture. No one paid her much mind, she was just one more sloppy, knee walking drunk. Waiters weaved their way around her, customers caught her when she fell, and the bartenders kept pouring. At the end of the night, even the musicians on the small stage were keeping an eye on her, fearing that she and her drink would stumble into an amplifier or a microphone.
As the musicians packed up their equipment, she tumbled and sprawled out in a chair next to mine, throwing her arms around my neck and apologizing through wails of laughter. Her drink spilled, sending olives and alcohol splashing over both of us and unexpectedly she began to cry, harsh sobs that shook her thin shoulders and hurt my heart. I held her until she stopped and then took her keys. She didn't protest as I led her outside and into my car and I hoped with all my heart that she wouldn't get sick on the drive home.
The mind of an alcoholic is a maze of paths leading nowhere except to the next drink. I doubted she would remember the end of the evening but I was quite sure she would repeat it.
She is 20-ish and beautiful, living with an out of work electrical engineer turned tattoo artist, going to school and working nearly full time. She is bright and funny, self confident and assertive, quick to learn and unafraid of life. But behind her stunning smile there is a frightened child, estranged from her family and struggling for every hard earned dime, willing to accept far less than she deserves and uncertain of every step she takes. She is a mystery, getting straight A's in her college courses while not knowing the meaning of dozens of everyday words, so when she asked me to teach her how to do crossword puzzles, I readily agreed. A word looked up, my daddy told me time and time again when I would ask him the meaning of something I'd read, is a word remembered. The gold bound Webster's was always kept on the top shelf of the bookcase and it's pages were stained and worn with use.
So, I mused, how to teach someone to "think in crossword". How to explain how it is that you simply know a word is right when a half dozen other words fit the same space and work equally well. I reached back in my memory to my daddy's instructions - Start with something you absolutely, positively know can't be anything else, he told me, like here, three letters for "A Gerswhin". Neatly, I filled in "Ira". Build on it, he continued, remember a plural clue must have a plural answer and that words have different meaning according to their useage. Don't think just nouns when the answer might be a verb. He nodded as I filled in Gnat, four letters for "pest", beginning with "g". And there''re crossword rules - an abbreviated clue will mean an abbreviated answer, a clue in capital letters will mean an answer in capital letters. I filled in RSVP for "words on an invitation and he smiled. A clue in a foreign language will mean an answer in a foreign language, he added. And if you're stuck, think in context and use it in a sentence. Work around the obstacles. I filled in more and more blank squares with him providing occasional hints and re-direction, prompting me with praise and encouragement. Sometimes there's a theme, watch for it. And remember, every puzzle ever devised has a solution though it may not be what you first think or what you want it to be. You have to get into the mind of the maker. It was a very long time before I realized that he'd been teaching far more than just how to solve a crossword puzzle.
Of course, he had never met this pretty, young thing tapping a pencil on the counter and frowning with concentration.
I doubt he ever imagined someone who would see the clue "coup d'____" and fill in "vile" for "coup d'vile".
Then again, he'd have been laugh out loud delighted with seeing her mind at work. They put erasers on pencils because people make mistakes, he'd have reminded me. And he'd have been absolutely, positively right.
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