They walk down the street, and everyone looks away from them. People hate to see what the human body comes to—the sags and droops, splotches, humps, bulging stomachs, knobby fingers, thinning hair, freckled scalps. You’re supposed to say old age is beautiful; that’s one of those lines intended to shame whoever disagrees. But every one of my clients disagrees, I’m sure of it. You catch them sometimes watching children, maybe studying a toddler’s face or his little hands, and you know they’re marveling: so flawless! poreless! skin like satin! I doubt they want to be young again (“Youth is too fraught,” was how Maud May always put it), but I’m positive not a one would turn down the chance to be, say, middle-aged.
“Fifty was nice,” Mr. Shank told me once. “Fifty was great! Sixty was too. And sixty-five; I was doing good at sixty-five. But then somewhere along there … I don’t know … I said to my wife, Junie—this was when Junie was still living—‘Junie,’ I said, ‘you know? Some days I’m afraid I might commit suicide.’ And Junie, she just looked at me—she was one of those zestful people; energetic, zestful people—and she said, ‘Well, Fred, I’ll tell you. Sometimes I’m afraid I might commit suicide myself.’ She didn’t, of course. She passed away in her sleep, God rest her. One morning I woke up and I knew without even looking; it felt like our bedroom was quieter than it ever was before. But, now, what was I saying? What point was I trying to make? Oh. If Junie could feel that way, such a zestful person as Junie, then I don’t see as there’s any hope whatsoever for the rest of us.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, like someone delivering a weather report. And then turned in his chair and looked out the window, absently smoothing his kneecaps with both hands, the way he always did when he sat idle.
And Mrs. Cartwright: now, this was just the kind of thing I was referring to. The reason she wanted her guest room cleared out was, she had arranged for a live-in companion. Some woman from a classified ad. Companions generally mean a lot fewer hours for Rent-a-Back, but that’s not what bothers me. It’s that once they’ve moved in, they tend to take over. They leave their magazines lying around, and switch channels on the TV without asking, and throw out perfectly edible food, and smell up the air with strong perfume. I’ve heard it all! Still, it’s not our place to argue. Mrs. Cartwright said she had to face the fact that she hadn’t had a good night’s rest since her husband died. Every little creak sounded like a footstep, she said. So we’d been called in to clear thirty years of clutter from the guest room, and the following week a total stranger was coming to keep her company.
By the time I got there, Martine had emptied the bureau and started on the closet—knitting supplies and sewing remnants and half-finished squares of needlepoint. “How was Maud May?” she asked, and I said, “Old,” which made her pull her head out of the closet and give me a look. But instead of speaking, she tossed a ball of yarn at me. I dodged, and it landed squarely in the garbage can she’d set in the center of the room. “Ta-dah!” she said.
“Sure, at that distance,” I told her. I moved the garbage can farther away and reached past her for another ball of yarn. It always soothes my mind if I can get some kind of rumpus going. And Martine was good at that; she was kind of rowdy herself. We started slam-dunking every dispensable item we came across, and maybe a few that weren’t. A jar of buttons, for instance, which burst when it landed with a gratifying, hailstone sound that made me feel a whole lot better.
But then Mrs. Cartwright called out, “Children? What was that? Is everything all right?”
We grew very still. “Yes, ma’am,” I called. “Just neatening up.”
After that, I sank into a mood again.
We were dragging an unbelievably heavy footlocker out to the hall when I asked Martine, “Have you ever thought of changing jobs?”
“Why? Am I doing something wrong?”
“I mean, doesn’t this job get you down? Don’t you think it’s kind of a sad job?”
She straightened up from the footlocker to consider. “Well,” she said, “I know once when I was taking Mrs. Gordoni to visit her father … Did you ever meet her father? He’d been in some kind of accident years before and ended up with this peculiar condition where he didn’t have any short-term memory. Not a bit. He forgot everything that happened from one minute to the next.”
I said, “Oh, Lord.”
“So he was living in this special-care facility, and I had to drive Mrs. Gordoni there once when her car broke down. And her father gave her a big hello, but then when Mrs. Gordoni stepped out to speak to the nurse, he asked me, ‘Do you happen to be acquainted with my daughter? She never visits! I can’t think what’s become of her!’ ”
“See what I mean?” I said.
“That kind of got me down.”
“Right.”
“But then you have to look on the other side of it,” Martine said.
“What other side, for God’s sake?”
“Well, it’s kind of encouraging that Mrs. Gordoni still came, don’t you think? She certainly didn’t get credit for coming, beyond the very moment she was standing in her father’s view. Just for that moment, her father was happy. Not one instant longer. But Mrs. Gordoni went even so, every day of the week.”
“Well,” I said. Then I said, “Yeah, okay.”
Martine wiped her face on the shoulder of her shirt. Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, and her house key swung from the wide leather band that circled her wrist. It wasn’t designed to circle her wrist. It should have been hooked to a belt loop, but since she didn’t have a belt loop, she wore it like an oversized bracelet instead; and all at once I was fascinated by how she’d come up with this arrangement. The workings of her mind suddenly seemed so intricate—the wheels and gears spinning inside her compact little head.
But when she said, “What,” I said, “What what,” and bent to lift the lid of the footlocker.
Just as I had suspected, I found stacks of moldering books cramming every inch. Nothing’s heavier than books. These had bleached-looking covers in shades of pink and turquoise that don’t even seem to exist anymore. Lets Bake! Fun with String. Witty Sayings of Our Presidents. The Confident Public Speaker.
“Mrs. Cartwright?” I called. “Are you around?”
Of course she was around. She was wringing her hands at the bottom of the stairs, probably longing to come supervise if only her heart had allowed. “Yes?” she said, craning up at me.
“How about those old books in the footlocker? Shall we toss them?”
“Oh, no. My son might want them. Just put them in the basement.”
Yes, and that’s another thing: the possessions choking the basements and clogging the attics, lovingly squirreled away for grown children. The children say, “We don’t have room. We’ll never have room!” But the parents refuse to believe that the trappings of a lifetime could have so little value.
We put the footlocker on a scatter rug and slid it—a trick I’d learned my first day of employment. Martine backed down the stairs ahead of me. Mrs. Cartwright stayed planted in the foyer, tugging fretfully at her fingers as if she were pulling off gloves.
When we got back to the guest room, Martine grabbed a broom while I consulted Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “ ‘Move night-stand in from room across hall,’ ” I read aloud.
“I already did that.”
I stepped aside to let Martine sweep where I’d been standing. She was raising a little dust cloud—too enthusiastic with her broom. Wiry tendons flickered beneath the skin of her forearms. Really her skin was more olive-colored than yellow; or maybe that was a trick of the light. I glanced back down at Mrs. Cartwright’s list. “Did you turn the mattress too?” I asked.
“Not yet,” she said, “because I wasn’t sure what that meant. Turn it? Turn it how?”
“Flip it to its other side,” I told her. “Haven’t you ever done that? It’s usually part of spring cleaning.”
“It isn’t part of my spring cleaning. I’ve never turned a mattress in my li
fe. Do you turn yours?”
“No, but I’ve done it lots of times for clients,” I said.
Then—I don’t know why—I started feeling embarrassed. It was something about the word “mattress.” I almost wondered, for a second, if that was one of those words you shouldn’t say in mixed company. (These notions hit me every so often.) I hurried on. I said, “Especially back when Mrs. Beeton was alive. About once a month, I swear, her kids would be phoning up: ‘Help! Get on over to Mama’s! Mama’s talking again about turning her …”’
Maybe I should call it a pallet. Was that too much of a euphemism? Fortunately, Martine didn’t seem to be listening. She had propped her broom in a corner, and she was moving toward the other side of the bed. “In fact,” I told her, “that happens to be how Rent-a-Back began. I bet you didn’t know that. Mrs. Dibble’s mother was turning hers one day, and it got away from her. When Mrs. Dibble came to check on her that evening, she found her flat as a pancake underneath it.”
Martine’s eyes widened. “Dead?” she asked.
“No, no; just mad. Mrs. Dibble said, ‘You should have hired a man to do that,’ and her mother said, ‘I can’t hire a man just to turn one … mattress!’ and Mrs. Dibble said, ‘Well, I fail to see why not.’ And she went home and dreamed up Rent-a-Back.”
“Grab an edge, will you?” Martine asked me.
I did, finally I heaved my side of the mattress upward and came over to the other side to help Martine support it. We were standing so close that I could hear the clink of one overall clasp when she drew in her breath. I could feel that concentrated, fierce heat she always gave off; I could smell her smell of clean sweat.
She said, “How do you get your mouth to curl up at the corners that way?”
“Practice,” I said. And then, “Whoa! Look at the time.” (Although there wasn’t a clock to be seen.) “I promised to meet Sophia for lunch,” I said. “We’d better hustle.”
Martine let her end of the mattress drop. For a moment I had all the weight of it before I let mine drop too.
In the truck, she started a fight. It wasn’t me who started it. She claimed that I had promised to drive her to her brother’s. Her brother’s wife had had a new baby. But I had promised no such thing; this was the first I’d heard of it. “How could she have a new baby?” I asked. “I seem to recollect she was pregnant just a while ago.”
“She was pregnant just a while ago. And now she’s had her baby.”
“See?” I said. “This is why I should have got a car of my own. Something used, I could have bought, with the rest of my Sting Ray money. Instead I’m having to split this dratted truck.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” Martine said.
“Besides, a truck’s a problem for old folks to climb into. It’s not appropriate! That high-up seat, and Everett’s silly fur dice—”
All at once, Martine reached over and swiped the dice off the mirror in one quick motion. Just snapped the string that held them, tossed the dice in the air, caught the two of them one-handed, and stuffed them into her jacket pocket.
“Satisfied?” she asked me.
“Well, hey,” I said.
“You think it’s easy for me, letting you keep the truck at your place? Begging you for a ride anytime I need to go somewhere? But I don’t have any choice! I don’t come from a fat-cat family! I can’t just waltz out and buy myself a car if I decide a truck’s not ‘appropriate’!”
“You don’t need to bite my head off,” I said.
We had reached her house by now, and I pulled over to the curb. But Martine stayed where she was, poking her sharp yellow face into mine. “I don’t know why I bother hanging out with you,” she said. “You’re sarcastic and moody and negative. You think just because you’re good-looking you can take up with any woman you want. You think you’re so understanding and sweet with those poor old-lady clients, but really you just … hit and run! You have no staying power! You couldn’t stick around even if you tried!”
I was astounded. I said, “Huh?” I said, “Where did all this come from?” And when she didn’t answer, I said, “You’re the one who fixed it so you’d have to rely on me for your rides.”
“Now, that is just exactly what I’m talking about,” she said. Making no sense whatsoever.
Then she jumped out of the truck and slammed the door hard behind her.
I took off, with a screech of my tires. I went on fuming aloud as if she were still there. “Maniac,” I said. “Lunatic.” I asked, “Didn’t I say all along this truck scheme would be a pain?”
Anyone who heard me would have thought I was demented.
“WE ARE PROBABLY the only family in America eating a potluck Thanksgiving dinner,” my mother said, gazing around the table.
“Oh, surely that can’t be true,” Gram said. “Good heavens! Many’s the time, in the old days, I was asked to bring my marshmallow-yam casserole when Aunt Mary had the dinner at her house.”
“That’s one kind of potluck, Mother. The organized kind, where the hostess assigns a dish to each guest. But I’m talking about the other kind: catch as catch can. Pot luck, with the emphasis on ‘luck.’ Who else would be doing this?”
Mom’s own dish was a redundancy; that’s why she was annoyed. She had made one of her famous pumpkin chiffon pies, which turned out to be what Wicky had made too. (Using Mom’s recipe. I could see how that might have been a faux pas.) Also, there was no turkey. At Jeff’s insistence, he and Wicky were hosting the dinner this year, and so everybody assumed that they would supply the turkey. But they hadn’t. Wicky said her oven was too small for a turkey that would feed ten people. It seemed all her efforts had gone instead into the decorations: twists of crepe paper in harvest gold and orange festooning the dining room, and an entire family of Pilgrims marching the length of the table, with lighted candlewicks sticking up out of their heads. Plus, at the start of the meal she had made us all join hands and sing “Come Ye Thankful People, Come.” Except that she and Sophia were the only ones who knew the words beyond the very first line.
Our menu was: two pumpkin chiffon pies, Gram’s marshmallow-yam casserole, Sophia’s Crock-Pot Applesauce Cake, and a salad that Opal had tossed with a vinaigrette dressing. This was nice for Opal, because we were all so glad to see something nonsweet that her contribution was the hit of the day.
Me, I’d chosen the easy way out and brought four bottles of wine. I guess I could have complained myself, since I had specifically purchased a wine designed to complement turkey. But hey. This way, I figured, I would probably get to carry a couple of bottles home with me.
“I did inquire,” my mother was saying. “I asked Wicky at least two weeks ago: ‘Wicky, what category of food should I bring?’ But, ‘Oh, whatever you want,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it will all work out.’ ” Mom trilled her fingers in a breezy manner, apparently mimicking Wicky. “ ‘We’ll each of us just do our own thing,’ was what she told me. ‘That will be much more fun, don’t you feel?’”
I’d have taken umbrage, if I were Wicky, but Wicky smiled obliviously and handed J.P. a carrot disk from the salad.
“Oh, well,” my grandpa said. “The important thing is, we’re together. That’s what Thanksgiving is all about! Everyone gathered together. Wouldn’t you agree, Jeffrey?”
My father said, “Eh? Ah. Yes, indeed,” and poured himself more wine. He tended to remove himself when Pop-Pop started one of his homilies.
“And we’ve all got our health, knock on wood. Mother’s blood pressure’s under control; my eyesight’s no worse for the moment. Opal is with us this year, and she’s turned into a young lady! J.P.’s been upped to a booster seat____”
Evidently Pop-Pop was proceeding in order around the table. Some Thanksgivings he went by age, but today he began with Gram, at his left (wearing her sequined turkey T-shirt), and then himself, and then Opal and J.P. on his right—J.P. in a miniature business suit, already smeared with pumpkin.
Next came my brother, at the head of
the table. “Jeff is on the road to being a stock-market millionaire,” Pop-Pop said, and Jeff leaned back with a genial laugh and laced his hands across the front of his suit. The successful patriarch; that must be the image he was aiming for. I don’t know why I hadn’t understood that till now. The only patriarch in Jeff’s acquaintance had been our Grandfather Gaitlin, a big-bellied man who’d loved a good cigar, which would explain why Jeff was nursing an imaginary paunch and letting his laugh trail off in an emphysemic wheeze. “Well, not exactly a millionaire,” he was saying through a smoker’s cough. No wonder he was so keen on hosting all family gatherings!
Pop-Pop moved on to Mom. “Margot here’s the new chairwoman of the Harbor Arts Club,” he said, while Mom gave a Queen Elizabeth smile, first to her left and then to her right. “And Jeffrey, of course, continues to set an example for all of us with his philanthropic activities….” My father winced, bowed, and took another sip of wine.
I never could tell who, exactly, Pop-Pop was conveying his information to. We ourselves already knew it. God, maybe? I glanced up at the ceiling.
“Sophia, Miss Sophia, is sharing our Thanksgiving for the very first time,” Pop-Pop said, “but we’re hoping it won’t be the last, by a long shot.” Sophia flushed and directed a smile toward her bosom. She was wearing her hair drawn up high on her head today, which made her look formal and elegant.
“We credit Sophia with helping a certain young man begin to settle down,” Pop-Pop said. “Speaking of who …” And then it was my turn.
“Didn’t I always tell everyone Barnaby would be fine? He’s a good, good boy,” Pop-Pop said, leaning across the table to gaze earnestly into my face. “In fact, I think some might say he’s found his angel. Hah? Hah?” And he sat back and looked around at the others. “Wouldn’t you agree?”