Duet for Three (7 page)

“That's good, June,” she nods finally. “That wasn't nice, but you're definitely improving.”

“Well, you know, at least we should go look at the place.”

June's error; Aggie is alert and upright again. “What place?”

“You know.”

“But say the words. How do you think you can get me there, if you can't even say the words?”

It is extraordinarily, surprisingly difficult. Even in her own mind, June's hardly used them. She can see the place, so why say it? How difficult do things have to be? “I think, Mother,” she says carefully, “that we ought to both go and have a look at the nursing home.” There.

“I see.” Aggie pauses. “Well, you may. It might be good for you to see what you're talking about, but I never like going into places I might not get out of. Who knows, you might not bring me home. They might not let me out. Anyway, I don't have time to waste.”

“An hour, Mother. What's an hour?”

“At my age, maybe all the time there is.”

Well, why doesn't she have the grace to die, then? Soon June herself will be old, and when exactly is she supposed to have a life? Time never seemed so precious until the last few days, when she could begin to see it as her own. And it's slipping away, just — slipping. Her whole life seems to have seeped away, without her noticing particularly.

“You do realize,” Aggie says, “that if I weren't here, you'd miss me.” What on earth is she talking about? Miss all this? Miss a whole lifetime of memories, the past that Aggie is, just sitting there? It's like being a perpetual child, living with your mother, it's like always being dragged back, a quicksand of the past. Where's the future in it?

This greedy old woman eats up a life the same way she consumes a pie.

“What would you do with all those hours you spend just being mad at me, if I weren't around?” Aggie asks.

“Oh, I'd find something.” Intending to sound airy, June hears that the words have come out grim. In the first year or so of Aggie's absence, she might just sleep. She might wake up to find, like Sleeping Beauty, that everything was changed.

They sit in silence for a few moments. Then, “Tell me,” Aggie says in the bland voice that warns of a trick question, “what do you think death is, anyway? Do you ever wonder what it's like?”

Well, that's one of the benefits of faith: that one knows. Death is a passing, painful or peaceful, to a different world, where one is either punished or rewarded, with eternal pain or eternal bliss. That's what one knows, with faith, although what either eternal pain or eternal bliss may feel like remains a divine mystery.

“I think,” Aggie continues, “that you just die. Then eventually you turn back into soil. Remember when Frances came home from summer camp, that song she'd picked up? ‘The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout,' remember that? Maybe after all the most important thing is eating right, so you turn into good soil. Do you think?”

“I think you shouldn't make jokes. Also, it would be a lot easier if you had faith.”

“But of course it would be easier. Doesn't that make you suspicious? It's like following a recipe: a cup of sugar and three tablespoons of old clothes for the Salvation Army, a quarter-pound of butter and a cup of prayer.

“You know, June, when I was little, learning to cook, I had to follow recipes exactly to get anything to turn out, and I used to watch my mother slap pies together any old way and they'd be so much better than mine. Because the ingredients came so naturally to her she didn't really have to pay attention — a lump of this and a dash of that, while I had to measure so carefully. But finally it got to seem natural to me, too, and I didn't have to measure either.

“But you, you have all those rules like a recipe, and you never get comfortable enough to forget about them. You always have to keep checking. I'd never have been any kind of cook if I'd needed to look up how much sugar a banana cake needs every time I went to make one. I just
knew
. Why don't your rules come naturally to you like that, after all these years?”

“Oh, Mother, leave me alone. Why do you have to think about food all the time?”

But of course faith
is
a recipe. It's not a bit like cooking, though. Even June can make a cake or a pie fairly well by eye, but if there's a little too much flour or sugar, or not enough, it's not particularly important. There's a range of acceptable taste. Faith is different. It's one thing or the other, good or bad, enough or not enough. If a cake turns out badly, you can throw it out, but no one takes such a risk with eternal life.

June does have the feeling, though, that her faith these days is falling short. There are flaws in her motives: a lack of generosity, a shortage of will to cast away her own life, in the manner of martyrs.

The good thing, the best thing, is not to pray for herself, but for Aggie, for a revelation, a redeeming moment for her. No doubt it is wicked to resent any intrusion by Aggie into her prayers. Also to resent the possibility that He might in fact hear her, and provide Aggie with salvation. What would have been the point then of all June's efforts, her scrutiny of the rules, if an old sinner like Aggie could win grace at a snap of divine fingers?

Anyway, at the moment there are chores to be done. She leaves Aggie sitting downstairs while she tackles the plastic sheet. It crackles as she fixes it around Aggie's mattress. She supposes it will soften, get broken in one way or another, but meanwhile Aggie is going to find it irritating.

Later, over supper, she looks across the table, watching Aggie's head bent over her plate, cleaning up the first course quickly, eager for dessert. If she could have chosen, who would she have picked as a mother? Not too many people spring to mind as possibilities.

Not her aunts. The members of Aggie's family always struck June as loud and alien. Aggie's favorite, on the rare occasions when they visited that farm, seemed to be her younger sister, Edith, but June could never see anything special about her. To her they were all, men and women, too brawny for comfort, although in time her own mother became easily the brawniest of them all, and even that farm family seemed a bit taken aback by what she turned into.

The men, Aggie's brothers, were big and rough, and in the evenings leaned back on their wooden kitchen chairs, tilting them onto two legs, and laughed and sometimes sang old Scottish songs, bellowing out the words, or crooning them. Occasionally a work-roughened hand would ruffle June's fine blonde hair, but she was timid and didn't interest them much. Sometimes when they sang the Scottish tunes, she saw tears in their eyes. “Road to the Isles,” she remembers. She didn't see why they would feel sad, especially when none of them had ever been to Scotland.

The women would cook and serve and eat, and after June had gone to bed in the small dark room that had once belonged to the sisters, she'd hear them talking below in the kitchen. There was a stovepipe hole in the floor of the bedroom, and up through it floated odd words, and occasionally laughter.

There was always far too much food there, heavy and bloating. During the day, June's cousins would race through the fields. They dared her to leap the creek, but she shied like a horse at the idea of landing in the cold rushing water with the nasty sharp pebbles beneath. She couldn't possibly climb those ladders into the hay mows, going straight up and so high, with round wooden rungs that a foot could so easily slip on. Nor did she like rolling in the straw; bits of it got into her hair and down her neck, and she'd be forever picking it out, while it scratched. She always went home injured in some small way.

On the other side, on the other hand, was a family she never met, but with whom she feels perfectly familiar. Her father's parents, about whom he told stories and of whom he showed pictures, lived in England, just outside London, and there he had left them to come here to a hard, raw country, where somehow he found her hard, raw mother. Then there was neither time nor money to go back even for a visit, and he never saw them again, and June never saw them at all.

But there is something peaceful just about the idea of them. Partly it's England, old and experienced, with a certain overview, a perspective of centuries of making and observing history, so that June feels the country itself must move more slowly and gracefully.

Also, there's a picture of his mother that June's father kept on his bedside table, and that is now on June's own bureau. It shows her standing in the rose trellis of a garden, with her hand resting lightly on a bloom. It's just the way she would have touched June, if that had been possible: lightly and with affection. And that's how her voice would have sounded, too, speaking to her only grandchild.

What her father described of the three of them remains June's picture of the ideal English life: a little cottage, with a little green property, and roses, dozens of roses. His mother won prizes with them. He recommended her to June as an example she might follow. “She's a lady,” he always said, “a real lady.” Dainty, and wearing white gloves, June imagined.

June pictured her father: a sweet little boy in the gardens, his mother nearby, squatting, working in the earth around the roses, clipping, weeding. They would talk gaily back and forth, quietly, no irritation in their voices. He'd be wearing short pants and a white blouse, maybe knee socks, and his fine blond hair would be a little long, with a wavy bit slipping over his forehead. His mother would be wearing a long white dress with a matching broad-brimmed hat, a picture hat. This is the picture June has in her head, although she knows, of course, that no one tends roses in a long white dress.

Of her grandfather, the picture is less clear. He was a haberdasher's clerk who went off each morning to work and returned home at night, as fathers do. “She's the one who sacrificed so that I could get an education,” June's father said. “She scrimped and saved and did without things, clothes and travel, she always said she'd like to see the continent, but it all went for me and my education.” They must have loved each other very much, to have given up such a lot.

“She was also the one who said I should leave, start over in a new country and make something of myself,” he told her. “It was hard.” Well, June could hear how hard it must have been. Why was it for her he saved his stories and not for her mother, who was, after all, a grown-up and his wife?

But he was teaching June what is important: duty and a sense of sacrifice. He was passing on a legacy of courage; the way other families pass on silver spoons and cake plates.

Every month her grandmother wrote, her letters in neat round handwriting on fragile lilac paper. They spoke of weather, and the deaths, births, and marriages of people entirely unknown to June. It was puzzling, how a letter might complain of rain while here the snow was deep, and so her father taught her about climates and how different they were in different parts of the world. It made them seem even farther away, not even sky a common factor.

What would he have written about in his letters home? Probably his work, the weather, and June. She can't imagine what he might have told them about her mother.

He sent them photographs of June, and her grandmother wrote back saying what a lovely little girl she was, and how they longed to see her. She longed to see them, too. She imagined herself there, in an entirely different life. There would be tea in the afternoons and quiet times in the garden, and voices would be soft and fond.

Instead, they were all separated and sad. She pictured that couple, her grandparents, in their garden in the evenings, greying and alone, speaking of their much-loved son so far away. “Oh, they must miss you,” she said, and cried a little, and her father hugged her. “You have a tender heart, you're like your grandmother that way. She could never stand things to be hurt. She'd never kill anything, except for bugs, and getting rid of moles in the garden.”

Even a child could tell that her own mother lacked certain of these qualities: that she was not a person with a tender heart, and had no real gift for sadness, regret, or sacrifice.

June would still like to go and see where her father grew up, visit his school and the house where the three of them lived together, walk through the tended gardens, touching the roses her grandmother grew with such care. That might be something she could do with freedom.

But they've been dead for so long, and by now everything must be changed and gone. It will all be in different hands.

And right now there are dishes to be done, and another evening just the same. She sighs, and stands, and says to Aggie, “I bought a plastic sheet today. I've put it on your bed.” She would have liked to be the kind of person her grandmother was, but circumstances have not, after all, permitted her to be gentle and tend roses.

SEVEN

Aggie wasn't entirely teasing when she told June she doesn't have hours to spare. So it is frustrating and infuriating to have gone through an entire day of wretchedness. Beginning with damp sheets, proceeding through maundering memories of a wedding and high hopes, then George's visit and the unpleasantness with June — she does not have time to waste this way. She would like to be achieving grace, but finds herself stuck dealing instead with mere discomfort.

Fed up with the past and anticipating George, she at least hauled herself to the kitchen to bake. Still, she let George know when he turned up that he should have called first. It's the sort of thing you have to put a stop to right away, this insulting business of being bypassed, ignored; something that can happen too easily if a person's old or infirm in some way. People start talking over your head, making arrangements, not consulting or asking, as if you're a thing to be shifted about, organized behind your back. You have to put your foot down firmly.

“I'm sorry, Aggie, you're right.” She likes someone who can admit he's wrong.

“Never mind. Just don't do it again.”

“Fresh cookies! Can I have one? Then I guess we should have a little chat.”

A chat is one way of putting it. Settled in the front room, he begins an interrogation of sorts. At least it's George, and not a stranger. She remembers the first time she went to him, after her old doctor, the one who delivered June and later Frances, died. “I guess your husband's been gone quite a while, hasn't he?” he'd asked, and she'd laughed.

“Gone? My husband was gone when he was alive. If you mean dead, yes, he's been dead for years.” As she was leaving that first time, George told her, “You're an interesting woman, you know. My most interesting patient, I think.”

She was pleased, proud to be interesting. It made her trust him more, and assume his support and possibly even his affection. So now it's odd to be wondering what side he may come down on.

“This business, these accidents,” he begins, “how often have they happened?”

“Just twice.” Once was huge and appalling; twice is terrible, but perhaps can be made to sound trivial.

“Do you remember anything about it? Did it happen in your sleep, or were you aware at all?”

Oh dear. She takes a deep breath. “The first time, I remembered the next day that I'd had this thought that I was saving June and me both a lot of trouble. Not waking her, you see, to get me up. I can't explain that at all. It was just being stupid in the middle of the night, you know how fuzzy things are then. I remember when I was little, dreaming I was falling and then waking with a thump because I'd rolled out of bed. I think it must have been something like that.”

“Is that what happened the second time, too?”

“No.” This is more difficult. “No, I don't remember a thing.”

“Mmhmm,” and he frowns. It's the sort of “mmhmm” she sometimes used with the teacher when he was explaining something about an event they had to go to, or people they had to entertain; or when June was telling her some event from school. That vague, busy-with-my-own-thoughts mmhmm.

“Do you have any ideas, George?”

“Not yet, but I'd like to check you out as thoroughly as I can today. The usual sorts of things, blood pressure and so forth, and some samples as well.”

It turns out he means both urine and blood samples. The first requires her to pee into a little jar he pulls from his bag. How awkward it is, in the bathroom, squatting over the thing, unable to see where she's holding it, doing it all by touch and missing quite a bit, and keeping her balance, too.

“What next?” she asks brightly, handing it over.

“Do you have something else you could slip into that would make things easier? Or a sheet, could you wrap yourself in a sheet?”

“What on earth are you planning to do?”

“For one thing, an internal. It's the same as in my office, except it saves you the trouble of coming in.”

It's quite a struggle, getting out of her dress on her own. At one point she traps herself inside it, stuck with her arms up, pulling, with it wrapped around her head. A bit terrifying, until she gets free.

The moment of panic over, she wedges her arms under the straps of her brassiere, pulling the hooks around to the front to get it undone. She has to sit on the side of her bed to roll off her panties and stockings.

She pulls a spare white sheet around herself, although it seems to gape somewhat at the back. She can feel, sitting on the edge of the bed, air on the flesh there. It makes her uneasy, as if she's open for anything: a knife coming up behind.

Funny, that. When did she go off nakedness? There was a time when she felt most invulnerable in her own skin, and now it doesn't seem enough.

George, with his stethoscope, is leaning over her, listening, prodding, not speaking. She looks at her thighs spreading the sheet wide, and wiggles her toes, all gnarled — how did her toes get so old, without her noticing?

Oh, it's a disgusting old body, sure enough. June keeps saying, “For heaven's sake, Mother, have you no pride? Don't you care?”

She might have once, but that was a good long time ago. Regarding her body as flesh, she can certainly see it is unattractive; quite gross, in fact. But looking at it from the inside, as its inhabitant, she finds it pleasing and comforting, cosy, like a warm house. There is a sharp Aggie like a needle safely embedded inside this rippling pincushion, and there is an imposing Aggie whose bulk is perfectly expressive.

And isn't that thought pretty fancy for somebody who, when it comes down to it, just eats too much and weighs too much? She starts to laugh, and George straightens, removes the stethoscope. “Am I tickling?”

“No, just a private joke.”

Is that a doubtful or suspicious glance? Does he find it very odd, a patient laughing at her own thoughts?

Examining her body, does George agree with June that, after all, it is too much to manage? He may also find it repulsive, but then, he's seen it before, and anyway, what need does she have to impress a young man with her eighty-year-old flesh?

“Your body is a temple,” June likes to say, and so it is in a way, but more of a monument, really.

His hands on her body are impersonal, as undesiring as the teacher's ever were. But more intent. Also, he has more flesh to probe than the teacher did.

The internal is an interesting procedure. Not arousing, naturally, but speculative: how might this sort of thing have felt, in other circumstances?

“Am I hurting you?”

“No.” Her eyes are closed; more interesting to feel than to see.

A nudge in one direction, a shifting in another. What does George feel? Mere hidden bits of body, she supposes, a case in which hands do the work of the eyes. What he touches must mean something to him, but to her it's vague and far away.

Surely she had more feeling down there once? Lucky Frances, who says, “I'm sorry, Grandma, I don't really know how to describe it. It's kind of a heat that all gets concentrated in one place and everything's just there. And then it fades.”

And Frances makes her living with words? Still, Aggie remembers dreams of young men coming to her bed.

“I can't find,” George says, pulling away, “anything wrong there.” He strips off the glove and puts it in a plastic bag, which he tosses into his medical bag. She pushes the sheet back down over her thighs. Oh, those thighs! Tree stumps her father might have needed a team of horses for, to haul out of the earth. And her poor white wrinkled overburdened feet sticking out, all flat and, for some reason, sad.

“Now, I think, some blood samples.” She does not look away as the syringe draws her blood into a tube.

“You seem to have brought the full kit with you, George.”

“Well” — he smiles briefly, glancing up — “I thought it would save you some trouble.”

“More?”

“Just a couple. Temperature and reflexes.” He begins tapping at her knees.

“You'll have to hammer harder than that for me to feel very much.”

Finished, he stands and packs his bag. “Can you get yourself dressed? I'll wait downstairs, if you can manage.”

What is going to come of this? She is not used to being frightened. To lose control, to no longer be able to say, Now I shall stand, I want to go here, or there, eat this or that, watch such and such a program, or turn the TV off and read this book — to face losing that is a fear. Age and bulk, those are restricting enough. She can no longer say, “I'd like to run down the road,” or even “I feel like getting out of bed,” and then do it. But still, she has her preferences and routines.

And what would she do for food, living elsewhere? Who would offer plates of cookies and slices of cake throughout the day? She might go mad with the lust for sugar. Forbidden fruit, or, in her case, forbidden tarts and muffins and cakes. If there were a reward for getting old, it ought to be to have no cravings. Surely that's not much: to have small desires filled.

Well, it's all fear. And the fear, finally, is of dying, loss of control carried to the extreme, in an unchosen, inadvertent, unwilling moment of a whole life whirling away. So that what may happen is a startled, stubborn expression some undertaker has to work at, to mold into something more peaceful and accepting.

Should she bother putting her stockings back on? No point, really, for George. Except to prove she can. Sighing, she sits on the bed and begins to pull them up. So difficult, trying to reach her feet.

Speaking of undertakers, she ought to write down and make clear to June just what she has in mind, so there's no misunderstanding. She has no wish to have people staring. She's had quite enough of that, just walking down the street. A closed coffin and incineration will be fine. She would give away her organs to the needy, but they'd hardly be worth salvaging. Also, she doesn't want some minister, particularly of June's choice, speaking sanctimonious, irrelevant words over her. It would be nice if a few people wept. Probably she can count on Frances for that. June may shed some tears, but for more equivocal reasons.

Well, it's human enough to want to be remembered, isn't it? But she won't be, not past June and Frances. So, then, something eye-catching in the way of a headstone, to make people think, “I wonder who she was, then?” Something arresting and succinct, with a little punch to it?

Something like,

IN THE WRONG PLACE

AT THE WRONG TIME

WITH THE WRONG PEOPLE

Of course, not everyone would see that as her final joke, her last laugh.

She is chuckling as she edges down the stairs, holding the banister firmly. Too late, she sees George below, watching her. He must think she spends all her time alone heaving with lunatic amusement.

“I was just making up tombstones,” she explains. “I always think the ones with just names and dates are so dull, don't you?”

This does not seem to unwrinkle his little frown. Really, she must pull herself together. There are more ways than peeing the bed to dig a hole for yourself, it seems.

“So then,” she begins firmly in the front room, when they've gotten their tea and more cookies, “what do you think?”

“Your blood pressure's a bit high, not bad considering your weight, but we'll give you something for it. I'll get the samples to the lab, and we should have the results in a few days, if there isn't too much of a backlog. If something does show up, we may want to do more, because we do want to be sure about things, don't we?”

“Speaking for myself,” she says drily, “certainly I do.” George, it occurs to her, may be losing his appeal. Speaking to her as we, as if she were some other, more malleable and meek old person. She bets a nursing home would be just like that, all the we's and dear's, condescension from the mouths of babes.

“At this point,” he goes on, not noticing, “I only have a couple of suggestions. The practical one is, don't have anything to eat or drink after, say, eight o'clock at night. That ought to help. Can you manage that?”

“I expect so. Although, you know, I'm not used to being hungry.”

He smiles. “No, I don't imagine you are.” It is disquieting to expect a comradely grin and get a professional smile.

“The other suggestion is a bit more vague, and I don't know if it'll help. But, you know, it's an interesting thing about the mind, the way it sets up patterns. Usually that's good, it's how we learn things like typing or playing the piano, or a lot of surgery for that matter: doing the same movements over and over until the brain snaps into place and follows the right routes without your having to think. Unfortunately, it works the other way, too, I guess what we call bad habits. You do something — unfortunate — and that sets you up for a pattern, so it happens more easily a second time.”

“Well, that's cheerful. What do I do, stay awake all night?”

“No, of course not, but maybe if you concentrate when you're awake on not having it happen when you're asleep, it'll help. Somebody like you, with a sharp mind, it might work. Anyway, something may show up in the tests that's perfectly simple to fix and we'll have you right back as if none of this had happened.”