Chapter 3 #2
In February, she threw her idea box away.
This was an Easy Spirit shoe box that she had kept for decades, crammed with torn-off bits of paper she meant to turn into poems one day.
She put it out with the recycling on a very windy evening, and by morning the bits of paper were lying all over the street.
Neighbors kept finding them in their hedges and on their welcome mats—“moon like a soft-boiled egg yolk” and “heart like a water balloon.” There was no question as to their source.
Everyone knew about Abby’s poems, not to mention her fondness for similes.
Most people just tactfully discarded them, but Marge Ellis brought a whole handful to the Whitshanks’ front door, where Red accepted them with a confused look on his face.
“Abby?” he said later. “Did you mean to throw these out?”
“I’m done with writing poems,” she said.
“But I liked your poems!”
“Did you?” she asked without interest. “That’s nice.”
It was probably more the idea Red liked—his wife the poet, scribbling away at her antique desk that he’d had one of his workmen refinish, sending her efforts to tiny magazines that promptly sent them back. But even so, Red began to wear the same unhappy expression that Abby wore.
In April, her children noticed that she’d started calling the dog “Clarence,” although Clarence had died years ago and Brenda was a whole different color, golden retriever instead of black Lab.
This was not Abby’s usual absentminded roster of misnomers: “Mandy—I mean Stem” when she was speaking to Jeannie.
No, this time she stuck with the wrong name, as if she were hoping to summon back the dog of her younger days.
Poor Brenda, bless her heart, didn’t know what to make of it.
She’d give a puzzled twitch of her pale sprouty eyebrows and fail to respond, and Abby would cluck in exasperation.
It wasn’t Alzheimer’s. (Was it?) She seemed too much in touch for Alzheimer’s.
And she didn’t exhibit any specific physical symptoms they could tell a doctor about, like seizures or fainting fits.
Not that they had much hope of persuading her to see a doctor, anyhow.
She’d fired her internist at age sixty, claiming she was too old now for any “extreme measures,” and for all they knew he wasn’t even in practice anymore.
But even if he were: “Is she forgetful?” he might ask, and they would have to say, “Well, no more than usual.”
“Is she illogical?”
“Well, no more than …”
There you had the problem: Abby’s “usual” was fairly scatty. Who could say how much of this behavior was simply Abby being Abby?
As a girl, she’d been a fey sprite of a thing.
She’d worn black turtlenecks in winter and peasant blouses in summer; her hair had hung long and straight down her back while most girls clamped their pageboys into rollers every night.
She wasn’t just poetic but artistic, too, and a modern dancer, and an activist for any worthy cause that came along.
You could count on her to organize her school’s Canned Goods for the Poor drive and the Mitten Tree.
Her school was Merrick’s school, private and girls-only and posh, and though Abby was only a scholarship student, she was the star there, the leader.
In college, she plaited her hair into cornrows and picketed for civil rights.
She graduated near the top of her class and became a social worker, what a surprise, venturing into Baltimore neighborhoods that none of her old schoolmates knew existed.
Even after she married Red (whom she had known for so long that neither of them could remember their first meeting), did she turn ordinary?
Not a chance. She insisted on natural childbirth, breast-fed her babies in public, served her family wheat germ and home-brewed yogurt, marched against the Vietnam War with her youngest astride her hip, sent her children to public schools.
Her house was filled with her handicrafts—macramé plant hangers and colorful woven serapes.
She took in strangers off the streets, and some of them stayed for weeks.
There was no telling who would show up at her dinner table.
Old Junior thought Red had married her to spite him.
This was not true, of course. Red loved her for her own sake, plain and simple.
Linnie Mae adored her, and Abby adored her back.
Merrick was appalled by her. Merrick had been forced to serve as Abby’s Big Sister back when Abby had first transferred to her school.
Even then she had felt that Abby was beyond hope of rescue, and time had proven her right.
As for Abby’s children, well, naturally they loved her.
It was assumed that even Denny loved her, in his way.
But she was a dreadful embarrassment to them.
During visits from their friends, for instance, she might charge into the room declaiming a poem she’d just written.
She might buttonhole the mailman to let him know why she believed in reincarnation.
(“Mozart” was the reason she gave. How could you hear a composition from Mozart’s childhood and not feel sure that he had been drawing on several lifetimes’ worth of experience?) Encountering anyone with even a hint of a foreign accent, she would seize his hand and gaze into his eyes and say, “Tell me. Where is home, for you?”
“Mom!” her children protested afterward, and she would say, “What? What’d I do wrong?”
“It’s none of your business, Mom! He was hoping you wouldn’t notice! He was probably imagining you couldn’t even guess he was foreign.”
“Nonsense. He should be proud to be foreign. I know I would be.”
In unison, her children would groan.
She was so intrusive, so sure of her welcome, so utterly lacking in self-consciousness.
She assumed she had the right to ask them any questions she liked.
She held the wrongheaded notion that if they didn’t want to discuss some intimate personal problem, maybe they would change their minds if she turned the tables on them.
(Was this something she’d learned in social work?) “Let’s put this the other way around,” she would say, hunching forward cozily.
“Let’s say you advise me. Say I have a boyfriend who’s acting too possessive.
” She would give a little laugh. “I’m at my wit’s end!
” she would cry. “Tell me what I should do!”
“Really, Mom.”
They had as little contact as possible with her orphans—the army veterans who were having trouble returning to normal life, the nuns who had left their orders, the homesick Chinese students at Hopkins—and they thought Thanksgiving was hell.
They snuck white bread into the house, and hot dogs full of nitrites.
They cowered when they heard she’d be in charge of their school picnic.
And most of all, most emphatically of all, they hated how her favorite means of connecting was commiseration.
“Oh, poor you!” she would say. “You’re looking so tired!
” Or “You must be feeling so lonely!” Other people showed love by offering compliments; Abby offered pity.
It was not an attractive quality, in her children’s opinion.
Yet when she went back to work, after her last child started school, Jeannie told Amanda it wasn’t the relief that she had expected. “I thought I would be glad,” she said, “but then I catch myself wondering, ‘Where’s Mom? Why isn’t she breathing down my neck?’ ”
“You can notice a toothache’s gone too,” Amanda said. “It doesn’t mean you want it back again.”
In May, Red had a heart attack.
It wasn’t a very dramatic one. He experienced a few ambiguous symptoms on a job site, was all, and De’Ontay insisted on driving him to the emergency room.
Still, it came as a shock to his family.
He was only seventy-four! He had seemed so healthy; he climbed ladders the same as ever and carried heavy loads, and he didn’t weigh a pound more than he had when he’d gotten married.
But now Abby wanted him to retire, and both the girls agreed with her.
What if he lost consciousness while he was up on a roof?
Red said he would go crazy if he retired.
Stem said maybe he could keep on working but quit going up on roofs.
Denny was not on hand for this discussion, but he most probably would have sided with Stem, for once.
Red prevailed, and he was back on the job shortly after being discharged from the hospital.
He looked fine. He did say he felt a bit weak, and he admitted to getting tired earlier in the day.
But maybe that was all in his head; he was observed several times taking his own pulse, or laying one palm in a testing way across the center of his chest. “Are you all right?” Abby would ask.
He would say, “Of course I’m all right,” in an irritated tone that he had never used in the past.
He had hearing aids now, but he claimed they were no help.
Often he just left them sitting on top of his bureau—two pink plastic nubbins the size and shape of chicken hearts.
As a result, his conversations with his customers didn’t always go smoothly.
More and more, he allowed Stem to deal with that part of the business, although you could tell it made him sad to give it up.
He was letting the house go, too. Stem was the first to notice that.
While once upon a time the house was maintained to a fare-thee-well—not a loose nail anywhere, not a chink in the window putty—now there were signs of slippage.
Amanda arrived with her daughter one evening and found Stem reinstalling the spline on the front screen door, and when she asked, offhandedly, “Problem?,” Stem straightened and said, “He’d never have let this happen in the old days. ”
“Let what happen?”