Chapter 6
ABBY FELT NERVOUS AT FIRST about the appointment with Dr. Wiss, but then she thought, “I can do this, because I’m so familiar with my mother’s Wiss pinking shears.
” And the exact, clunky weight of those shears instantly came to her mind, along with the too-thick handle loop that pressed uncomfortably against the bone at the base of her thumb, and the initial balkiness as the heavy teeth began chewing into the fabric.
But wait. Really, the one kind of Wiss had nothing to do with the other.
It was Nora who made the appointment. She had called her pastor for the name of a gerontologist, and then she phoned Dr. Wiss’s office without consulting Abby.
Meddlesome! She must have discussed it first with Red, though, because when Abby complained to him he didn’t seem surprised, and he told her it wouldn’t hurt to hear what a doctor had to say.
Abby was finding that Nora had started to get on her nerves.
Why, for instance, did she persist in calling Abby “Mother Whitshank”?
It made Abby sound like an old peasant woman in wooden clogs and a headscarf.
Abby had offered all her children’s spouses a choice of “Mom” or “Abby” when they first joined the family.
“Mother Whitshank” hadn’t so much as crossed her lips.
Also, Nora stacked the plates on top of each other when she was clearing the table, instead of carrying one in each hand as Abby had been taught was polite.
All the plates arrived in the kitchen with food stuck to their backs.
Yet she criticized Abby’s housekeeping! Or that was her implication, at least, when she blamed the dust in the rugs for Sammy’s allergies.
And she cooked fatty fried foods that were bad for Red’s heart, and she was much too lax with her children, and that queen bed she had requested completely filled Stem’s little room, barely allowing space for a person to edge around it.
Oh, well, this was just roommate-itis, Abby told herself. It was rubbing elbows at too-close quarters; that was why she felt so irritable.
She told herself this several times a day.
She also reminded herself that some of our connections are brand-new connections, unrelated to our past incarnations—new experiences to broaden our horizons. Maybe Nora’s role in Abby’s life was to deepen and enrich Abby’s soul; could that be true?
It wasn’t as if Abby were a difficult mother-in-law.
Why, look at how well she got along with Amanda’s Hugh!
A challenge, as Amanda herself admitted, but Abby found him entertaining.
And Jeannie’s Hugh, of course, was a sweetheart.
Some of Abby’s friends had a terrible time with their children-in-law.
Daughters-in-law more than sons-in-law, all of them agreed.
Some were not on speaking terms. Abby was doing way better than they were.
If only she didn’t feel so pushed aside. So extraneous, so unnecessary.
She had always assumed that when she was old, she would have total confidence, finally.
But look at her: still uncertain. In many ways she was more uncertain now than she had been as a girl.
And often when she heard herself speaking she was appalled at how chirpy she sounded—how empty-headed and superficial, as if she’d somehow fallen into the Mom role in some shallow TV sitcom.
What on earth had happened to her?
Her appointment with Dr. Wiss wasn’t till November.
(Long waiting line of problem oldsters, evidently.) Everything might have changed by November.
Maybe her minor little inconsequential glitches—her “brain jumping the track,” as she thought of it—would have disappeared on their own.
Or maybe she would be dead! No, shelve that thought.
It was only mid-September now. Still summery, the leaves barely starting to turn, the mornings crisp but not truly cold.
She could sit out on the porch after breakfast in just a sweater, gently toeing the swing back and forth and watching the parents and children walk past on their way to school.
You could tell it was early in the school year because the children were so nicely dressed.
Another month and they would be making less effort.
And some of the older children would have shed their parents, although Petey and Tommy were too young for that, of course.
They had set out with Nora several minutes ago—Sammy leaning forward in his stroller like a sea captain watching for landfall, Heidi prancing in front on her ridiculous great long leash.
Three little towheads glimmering away through the trees; so non-Whitshank-like.
Although Stem had been a towhead, so it was only to be expected.
The boys seemed to have settled easily into the neighborhood, zipping their scooters up and down the sidewalk out front and bringing playmates in for snacks.
They told her that the other children called their house “the porch house.” Abby liked that.
She could remember her own first sight of the house, back when she was a freckle-faced middle-schooler from Hampden and snooty Merrick Whitshank was her designated Big Sister.
That enormous, wonderful porch glimpsed from the street, Merrick and two teenaged friends lounging in this very swing so casually, so stylishly, wearing rolled-up blue jeans and gaily patterned neckerchiefs tied in jaunty knots.
“Oh, Gawd, it’s the midgets,” Merrick had drawled, because Abby had two of her classmates with her, Little Sisters to Merrick’s two friends.
They were supposed to spend a companionable, fun-filled Saturday afternoon learning the words to the school song and baking cookies together.
But that part Abby couldn’t remember now—just her awe at the sight of this porch and the impressive flagstone walk leading up to it.
Oh, and Merrick’s mother: sweet Linnie. (Or Mrs. Whitshank, as Abby called her then.) It had probably been Linnie who supervised the cookie baking, because Abby couldn’t picture Merrick doing that.
Linnie Mae Whitshank was pale and subdued, dressed in a wan flowered shift that could have been bought in a country store, but something about the tracery of smile lines at the corners of her eyes told Abby she might be taking in more than she let on.
Long after the Big Sister charade had petered out, Abby thought of Linnie fondly.
And then years later, when Abby started dating Red’s friend Dane, there was Linnie, as openhearted as ever, stepping out on the porch night after night to offer homemade lemonade to all the neighborhood gang.
Sometimes Junior put in an appearance, too—“Why, hey there! Boys. Girls.” He’d hang around talking, talking, telling the girls they looked mighty pretty this evening and rehashing Colts games with the boys, till Linnie touched his sleeve and said, “Come away, now, Junior. Time to leave these young folks to their socializing.”
Both of them dead and gone now; oh, my. Wiped off the face of the earth by a freight train, leaving not even bodies to mourn, just two closed caskets, and no one but the police to break the news.
So unsatisfying, so inconclusive. That bothered Abby more than it did Red.
Red was of the opinion that instantaneous death was a mercy, but Abby wanted goodbyes.
She would have liked to say, “Linnie, you were a good, good woman, and I’ve always felt sorry you led such a lonely life. ”
Abby had been visited, lately, by thoughts of all the people whose deaths she had been present for.
Two grandparents, her mother, her beloved older brother who’d died young.
Not her father, though. For her father, she had arrived just minutes too late.
But she had hoped, as she bent and laid her face against his, that there was some lingering vestige of him that would register her presence.
Even now, sitting on the porch and gazing down at Bouton Road, she felt her eyes tear up at the memory of his dear, whiskery cheek already cooling.
We should all go out attended by someone!
That was what she wanted for herself, certainly: Red’s large hand enclosing hers as she lay dying.
But then she reflected that this meant he would be without her when his own time came, and she couldn’t endure the thought of that.
How would Red survive, if she were the one to go first?
He always held her whole hand, rather than interlacing his fingers with hers.
When she was in her early teens, hearing from her more forward friends about the boys who reached for their hands at the movies, it was that enfolding clasp that she had envisioned, and the first date who surreptitiously threaded his fingers through hers had convinced her that hand-holding was not all it was cracked up to be. Till Red.
Maybe she and Red could die at the same time. Say, on a plane. They could have a few minutes’ warning, a pilot’s announcement that would give them a chance to trade last words. Except that they never flew anywhere, so how was that going to happen?
“The trouble with dying,” she’d told Jeannie once, “is that you don’t get to see how everything turns out. You won’t know the ending.”
“But, Mom, there is no ending,” Jeannie said.
“Well, I know that,” Abby said.
In theory.