Islands (8 page)

“You really are a nurturer, then,” Henry said. “That’s good. So is Camilla, but we’ve about worn her out.”

“Not going to happen,” Camilla said from the semidarkness of the old rope hammock where she had nested. “Speaking of nurturing, though, I’ve been through the most awful thing I’ll ever go through this week. I had to move Mama into Bishop Gadsden. There was just no way she could stay on Tradd anymore, even with Lavinia there all day and me and Lydia taking turns at night. If you turn your back, she’s out the door; Margaret Daughtry found her out beside their fish pond last week, and that’s on Meeting, a couple of blocks away. She was wearing her fur over her nightgown. How she got that far without somebody seeing her and bringing her home I’ll never know. Well, except that the streets are full of tourists, and I guess for all they know, all old Charleston ladies regularly run around in their nightgowns and minks. And last week she put a pot on the stove and turned on the burner while Lavinia was in the bathroom, and the smoke alarm went off and the fire department came. Lydia and I get almost no sleep at all when we’re there with her. Listening for her to start that awful shuffling around all over the house that she does at night. I can’t let her fall down those narrow old stairs and I refuse to lock her in in her own house. And there’s just no way we can have her at the house, not and keep on working, and Lydia has her grandchildren full time after Kitty…well, you know. So Charlie pulled some strings and got her in, and I took her over there day before yesterday. Oh, God, she thought she was going to a garden club meeting; it was just horrible. And it’s a lovely suite, and a lot of her friends are already there, and Lydia or I will go every day, but I’ll never get over feeling guilty. When I left she cried and said, ‘When can I come home?’ and I cried all the way home. Because I know what she means. She wants, by God, her own place, the place she’s made beautiful and welcoming all these years, and her things, and her friends, and the street she knows, and to live by her own rhythms and call her own shots, and, most of all, not to walk down a hall or into a dining room and see a sea of old people who all look alike and smell like talcum and pee, none of whom she can recognize. Of course she wants that. And I just don’t know how to give it to her.”

“Dementia,” Lewis said. “It’s a killer. I think I’d shoot myself, if I was still compos mentis enough to know I had it. Can y’all see Anny changing my diapers?”

I could. I could do that, I thought. As if he had caught the thought, Henry looked at me and smiled.

“It’s something we’re all going to have to face, if our parents live that long. And I guess we’ll face it ourselves one day, and our children will feel the same way you do, Camilla,” Lila said. For once she did not sound cheerful and perky.

“I just damned well refuse,” Fairlie said tautly. “I’ll be a bag lady before I let somebody dump me in a place I don’t know, with a bunch of people I couldn’t care less about, and I’d kill anybody who came near me with diapers.”

“It’s not something anybody wants to think about,” Camilla said. “I guess I never did, until it came up. But I’m going to start planning now. I don’t know what the plan will be, or how I’ll make it work, but my children are not going to have to go through that with Charlie and me.”

Camilla’s two boys lived on the West Coast with their families, and did something unimaginable in Silicon Valley. I did not think Camilla and Charlie saw them very often.

We were silent, watching the moon leave its silver snail’s track on the water. I knew that all our thoughts dwelled in some painfully bright, sterile place far in the future, a place that was inimical to life. A little wind off the inland waterway sprang up, and all of a sudden sun-reddened shoulders felt chilled. People began to stir and stretch. I did not want this magical day to end in that cold place.

“Let’s just all move out here together, and take care of each other,” Fairlie said. “We have all the medical help we need, and God knows Simms could get us enough drugs to keep us happy until the Rapture. There are stores just over the bridge and the hospital is twenty minutes away. We could easily find somebody to cook and clean and run errands.”

She looked at me. I looked back, levelly.

“It’s an idea, isn’t it?” Lila said. “Not necessarily here…the weather’s just too uncertain and we could get blown over to West Ashley in one night. But somewhere really nice, with a lot of rooms, or even little villas, with a central living and dining area. There are a lot of resorts like that around on the islands. I could start looking tomorrow.”

“No resorts,” Simms said. “I’m not spending my golden years on Hilton Head.”

“No, really, I’ll bet I could find something in a month,” Lila said.

“We don’t have to decide where now,” Charlie said. “But we can decide to do it when the time comes. We could even find something where we could spend a month or two together and see if we can stand each other. Later, of course. Right now this house is perfect.”

The mood lightened, and the talk drifted to the bizarre and ridiculous things we might all do together. Form a geriatric outlaw band and steal toilet paper out of hotels and motels. Storm Wal-Mart and have a sit-in in our wheelchairs. Skinny-dip in whatever body of water was near—for water must be part of it all—and raise such a scandalous commotion that property values in a three-mile radius would drop.

“Play doctor on the beach,” Lewis said.

“You can do that now,” Charlie honked, and we all laughed.

The idea hung just over our heads for the rest of the evening, like ripe fruit dangling. One by one we lapsed back into silence. Then Camilla said, “Let’s do it. Let’s just agree to do it. If it doesn’t work out, nobody’s bound to it, but consider the alternative. Between us, we’ve got just about all the resources to make it work.”

“And a new member who’s a good fifteen years younger than the rest of us. What about it, Camilla? Haven’t you always wanted a maid?” Fairlie said.

This silence was not contemplative, not peaceful. My ears rang. I heard Lewis draw a breath to say something in reply. I knew that it would be destroyingly angry.

“I have a maid,” Camilla said. “But I would love to have a daughter.” And she smiled at me, her archaic, V-shaped smile that so suited her medieval beauty.

My eyes stung and I smiled back, and the moment was averted.

“Call for a vote,” Henry said, staring at Fairlie, who had the grace to look ashamed. “All in favor of the Scrubs fading into the sunset together, say aye.”

And we all cried, “Aye!”

“Done and done,” Henry said. “Now let’s swear on…what? What’s our most sacred thing?”

“The wine closet!” “The key to the big upstairs bathroom!” “The fishing tackle!” Each offering was met with a chorus of jeers.

“What about the photograph in the hall, over the coat rack?” I said hesitantly. The photo was of them all, much younger and less worn, but recognizable, grinning by the front door of the house while Camilla held up a big, old-fashioned key. It had the look of beginnings to it.

“Perfect!” Camilla cried. “That was the first time we all came out together. Remember? How it rained, and the toilet backed up, and Lila got stung by a jellyfish?”

A chorus of approval rose, and I felt a ridiculous swell of pride, and Henry got the photo off the wall and held it out to each of us in turn.

“Swear,” he said, and “I swear” we all said.

“What if some of us…aren’t around when the time comes?” Camilla said. “Does the one left get to come, or what?”

“One for all and all for one,” Lewis said. “If only two of us are left, or three, or whatever, we still do it. This is not about couples. It’s about the Scrubs.”

We gathered our things and filed out into the night. The last ones out—Lewis and I—locked the door. Lewis put the key into his pocket. They all had keys.

Fairlie hung back. When I came abreast of her, she said, “Good choice. I wish I’d thought of it.”

“Thanks,” I said, but she was already gone, with her dancer’s flat-footed stride, and she did not hear me.

“Well done, Anny Butler,” Lewis said, and kissed me on the back steps down to the dunes.

Lewis and I were married that September in the tiny white slaves’ chapel at Sweetgrass. There were not many people: the Scrubs; his daughters, looking pleasant and closed into themselves; my sisters and brother; Marcy from my office; Linda and Robert and little Tommy, beaming. Linda made her she-crab soup for the wedding party. Everyone stayed late and drank a great deal of champagne.

When we were planning the wedding, Lewis had asked me where I would like to go on our honeymoon.

“Anywhere but Sea Island,” he said, and I gathered that was where his marriage to Sissy began.

“The beach house,” I said. “I want to spend it at the beach house.”

And he laughed at me, but that’s exactly what we did. The rest of the Scrubs came out for the weekend, bearing food and wine and tawdry, wonderful gifts, never for one moment considering that they might be intruding. I did not consider it, either. I was a Scrub. We were a unit.

Lewis had said that he thought perhaps we might want to open the big house on the Battery and live there, but on the last night of our honeymoon before the others came, I said, “Do you really want to?” and he said no.

“Me either,” I said, weak with gratitude that I would never have to try and live up to that house. “I’ve been so scared of it.”

“I’ve been so tired of it,” he said. “We’ll just live on Bull Street and Edisto and here, for the time being. You can take your time deciding where in Charleston you want to live permanently. Or even if.”

“We’ve got to have some kind of reception or party for all your people—and that’s half of Charleston,” I said.

“Well, we will. After we’re settled in. We’ll use the Battery house for that. Its last hurrah.”

But somehow we never did it.

I have always heard that marriage changes you, and, of course it does, but not always in the way the conventional wisdom would have it. With Lewis, the shape of my life did not change appreciably. The little house on Bull Street, though graceful and beautifully detailed, was not all that much larger than my apartment, so that from the very beginning I had no sense of rattling and creeping around in great spaces. I did not bring much with me to Lewis’s house, so it did not bulge with furniture. What there was, he had brought out of the Battery house after the divorce, and it was old and beautiful and lustrous with care, but he had no great baroque pieces, no hivelike crystal chandeliers hanging over the small English dining table, not a fringe, not a tassel.

“Go over to the Battery anytime and pick out what you want,” he said. “The hysterical society won’t hassle you. Camilla’s on the board.”

But as lovely as the old house was, I did not want to go into it. I did not even like to pass it on my sporadic jogs. The Battery stank of Sissy to me, if not to anyone else.

“I don’t want anything except what I have,” I said, meaning it in all respects.

“Me, either,” he said.

Our external lives did not change. I continued to work early and late at the agency, ferrying around the Shawna Sperrys of my world and attempting to corral their feckless mothers; begging discreetly and sometimes not so on the telephone for funds, services, homes, treatments for my flock, making speeches, attending grindingly tedious meetings with my board, accounting for paper clips and paper diapers instead of young lives anchored. As I always had, I fretted about it at home.

“Why don’t you just quit?” Lewis said. “You don’t have to work, you know. You could volunteer, or start a business of your own. We could have a baby.”

I looked at him.

“I have about twenty of them right now,” I said. “And you have two. Lewis, even if we started now, you’d be close to seventy when our first graduated from college. But you know, if you want to think about it…”

“I don’t,” he said, grinning. “I don’t want anybody but you. I just don’t want you to go all broody on me down the line.”

“I’ve been taking care of children since I was eight years old,” I said. “I don’t want to go back to the diaper phase of it.”

And so we did not have children of our own. Until very recently, I did not miss them.

Lewis continued to keep his hideous hours at the clinic. Dinner, if we could manage it together, was often at nine or ten o’clock. On weekends we usually left on Friday for Sweetgrass and stayed over Saturday night. On Sunday we went to the beach house. That seldom changed.

No, the armature of our lives was not altered appreciably. But at least for me, the interior changes were profound. I learned to laugh. I learned to play. I learned to lose my temper, yell, sulk, behave irrationally. I learned to cry. When we had our first fight, over Lewis accusing me, unfairly, of neglecting to pay Corinne, our cleaning lady, I shouted at him and burst into tears and ran upstairs. I lay on our bed, heart hammering with the enormity of my outburst, waiting for him to come coldly up and end our marriage. Of course he didn’t; when I crept back downstairs hours later he was reading the
Post and Courier
and eating cold pizza.

“Did you take a nap?” he said.

“After all that stuff about Corinne?” I asked, incredulous.

“Oh,” he said. “I found her check in the pocket of my lab coat. Want some of this?”

I realized then, for the first time, that marriage is about all of you, not just the best parts. Nothing in my child’s or grown-up’s world had taught me that. The liberation was like learning to fly.

We went to a lot of parties in our honor that first year, and I went to King Street and bought a few things that I thought would serve, though I never attained the elegance and brio that marks a downtown Charleston party, and when the first of the charity ball invitations came, I cried.

“Lewis, I can’t,” I snuffled. “I just can’t. I can maybe do the smaller stuff but I can’t do a ball.”

“You don’t have to. I gave them up when Sissy left. Nobody expects me anymore. We just won’t.”

“But we’ll have to reciprocate for all the parties this year, sooner or later,” I said.