Sing It to Her Bones (2 page)

The first week, though, I was mad as hell. Poor Paul learned to lay low at home. He’d nursed me through all five stages of grief when I lost my breast, and he told me, in a good-natured way, that he wasn’t sure he could face starting all over again at stage one. In the evenings he would retreat to his basement workshop, where he’d bang away with a hammer or cut wood into curious shapes, coaxing hideous screams out of the table saw and claiming between trips upstairs to the refrigerator for a cold beer that the job didn’t matter. Even after the unemployment checks stopped coming and my severance pay was exhausted, even then, he insisted, if I hadn’t found another job, we’d manage. I knew we weren’t anywhere near qualifying for food stamps. Paul was a full professor, after all, with tenure. He taught math at the Naval Academy.

One evening several weeks later, as I was sulking in front of the TV—watching some gawd-awful made-for-TV movie and plotting some fantastic but improbable revenge involving Coop, Fran, handcuffs, cockroaches, hidden cameras, and the FBI—Paul’s sister, Connie, called. “The next time you need a wig, Hannah,” she complained, “call the Cancer Society first and get a recommendation. You have no idea how many shops I had to call before I found one that didn’t specialize in wigs and accessories for the transgender community!”

Mentally I smiled and added leather collars with studs to my revenge.

Connie wasn’t really as put out as she sounded. “Thanks awfully, Connie,” I told her. I could hear ice clinking in a glass as she drank. Her usual, I suspected, a diet Coke with lime. If she’d had what she called a Good Art Day, there’d be rum in it. “I really appreciate your help. I just wasn’t up to it, and I’m damn tired of wearing this stupid turban.”

“I thought you looked kind of cute in that psychedelic hat I gave you. Whatever happened to it?” The ice clinked again, and I could hear the TV in the background. She was watching the same movie as I was. While I was struggling to remember what I had done with that hideous hat, she went on. “It’s at Tysons Corner, this shop I found. A place called Brighter Day. We’ll go there tomorrow, then have a blowout lunch at the food court. That should cheer you up!”

How shopping for wigs could cheer a body up, I couldn’t imagine, especially when underneath one would still look like a nuclear accident victim. But when we got there just as the shop opened, Brighter Day turned out to be a friendly place, with racks and racks of special bras and swimwear, attractive head wraps on wall pegs, drawers of breast prostheses, and a large selection of bangs and wigs. You could practically build a woman out of all the body parts on display. It also had a private room to try it all on in. The saleswoman escorted us there, then left us on our own with a double quartet of heads. I sat on a bench covered with flowered chintz and tried on a cute blond number that, except for my brown eyes, made me look alarmingly like Eva Gabor.

“It’s discrimination,” I complained, half to Connie and half to Eva in the mirror. “Ageism, plain and simple. Or maybe the cancer.”

“They didn’t deserve you, Hannah.” She draped a shoulder-length pageboy bob over the tips of her fingers, smoothed out the bangs, then rotated her wrist until the too-black hair swung crisply back and forth.

“Twenty years of my life I gave them, Connie! Twenty effing years! I clawed my way up from lowly paralegal to head of Archives and Records. And this is the thanks I get? I even chaired the United Way Campaign, for Christ’s sake!” I snatched a halo of Orphan Annie curls off my head and arranged them crookedly on a styrofoam head that stared back at me, eyelessly.

“You’ve got a great résumé. You’ll land another job eventually.” Connie handed me the wig she was holding.

“I don’t have a résumé. I haven’t written a résumé in years! I don’t even
want
to write a résumé!” I studied myself in the mirror and decided I looked like I was auditioning for a part as an extra in
Miss Saigon
. I had to laugh.

Eventually I chose an ash brown, Princess Di-ish sort of do that looked very much like my own hair, back when I had some. Combed and styled by the saleswoman, I felt more normal than I had in weeks. With my turban stashed in a wig box, we left the store and headed for California Pizza Kitchen.

I had my mouth all set for the artichoke pizza, but Connie surprised me by walking right past the familiar doorway, forcing me to hurry after her, leaving my
favorite pizza lying forsaken and unassembled in the kitchen. Connie was being beckoned by an elephant, serenaded by a tree, inexorably drawn by steam rising from a tangle of jungle vegetation outside the Rainforest Café.

“Well, this is certainly different,” I remarked as Tracy the Talking Banyan Tree delivered a sober report on the harmful effects of deforestation. I wondered what Lord & Taylor thought of its new neighbor.

I pointed to a snake, its tongue flicking in and out. “It’s like a bad drug trip! Are you sure you want to eat here with all this, ah, wildlife?”

“C’mon, it’ll be fun,” she said. “I expect Tarzan will come swinging through on a vine any minute!”

I ordered a Rainforest Rickey while Connie went for Sheba’s Jungle Juice, an unlikely mixture of yogurt, coffee, and Oreos.

Later, over a grilled portobello mushroom sandwich served on an oversize platter—everything must be bigger in the jungle—I was trying Connie’s patience again by talking, half-seriously, about a lawsuit. Behind her, a huge reef tank was set into a pillar, the glass distorting its contents so that the fish swam around like fun house fish. “Oh, what’s the use?” I moaned. “They’ve got all the money and time in the world. I’d probably croak long before the case ever came to court.”

“You’re
not
going to croak! Besides, you have an obligation to spoil your grandchildren, whenever Emily and what’s-his-name get around to producing any, that is.”

I took a sip of my fruit juice. “Oh, Connie. Whatever am I going to do? No one wants to hire an old woman like me. Not with my medical history.”

Connie put down her cappuccino and touched my arm. “Your medical history is none of their goddamned business.” She leaned close, her breath sweet with cinnamon. “Give it a rest, Hannah. Take some time off to consider your options.”

“Gawd, Connie, you sound just like Fran.” I smiled to let her know that I was just kidding.

She ran her finger around the inside of her cup and licked off the foam. “Why don’t you come stay with me for a while? Hang out at the farm?”

The waiter had put a Chocolate Diablo on the table in front of me, and I had just taken a bite. “On the farm?” I mumbled through a mouthful of devil’s food. “What would I do there?”

“You could help me with my paperwork, Hannah. I’m useless at it. One day the IRS is going to catch up with me.”

“I never thought I’d be seriously considering working for my sister-in-law.”

“Well, the pay isn’t great, but the food is wholesome. I don’t do desserts like this, though.” For the next few minutes, we ate in silence, except for the twittering mynahs and the snarling leopards.

Eventually I stood, lifted my sweater off the back of the chair, and picked up the wig box. “Thanks awfully for lunch, Connie, but I’d like to go home now. I need to think, and I can’t do it in here with all those damn birds and monkeys chattering away.”

While Connie took care of the check, I watched the room darken as it had every few minutes since our arrival with the flashes and rumbles of a mock thunderstorm. A toddler waiting in line with his father cowered, clinging, to his father’s leg. I thought about Connie living all by herself, with no one to cuddle up to when the weather got bad. Connie had been married to a Prince Georges County police officer. Ten years ago they had moved back to the family farm near Pearson’s Corner, an old fishing community on the Truxton River in southern Maryland, to be with her ailing father. Then the old man had died, and Craig had been murdered by a fugitive bank robber following a routine traffic stop on Route 301. Connie had been a widow for almost a year, turning her grief inward and focusing on her art, all the while playing good Samaritan to me.

We walked out of the restaurant past a young man with a pair of macaws perched on his arms. The colorful birds were obligingly doing tricks for three small children who stood off to one side in a little huddle, apparently afraid to approach the birds any closer.

“I feel like crap most of the time,” I complained as we reached Connie’s car. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company. And what about Paul?”

“Paul’s a big boy, Hannah. He can fend for himself for a few weeks.”

“And my doctors? What about them?”

“Pearson’s Corner isn’t exactly the dark side of the moon, Hannah. You’ll be only a two-hour drive from Johns Hopkins.”

Connie had an answer for everything.

I had to admit that the offer was attractive. A quiet place to go where no one would bother me and I could wait, peacefully, for my hair to grow out.

Several hours and a long, hot bubble bath later, I’d convinced myself to do it. Paul could hardly object. Connie was his sister after all.

chapter

2

Paul didn’t seem to mind at all. “Sounds like a
good idea,” he said with enthusiasm. Too much enthusiasm, if you ask me.

“You could at least pretend some reluctance to see me go.” I was standing in front of the stove, stirring oatmeal. He wrapped his arms around my waist from behind and rested his chin on the top of my head.

“I’ll manage fine for a while.” He kissed my neck, then gave my bottom a friendly pat.

I turned and pointed the wooden spoon, gooey with oatmeal, at him. “You’re not exactly the world’s greatest cook, you know.”

“Trust me, I’ll manage. I can eat in the hall with the mids if I get tired of hot dogs and hamburgers.” He opened the cupboard over the microwave and pulled
out a box of Kraft macaroni and cheese. “This is always good.”

I laughed and ruffled his graying hair with my free hand. “Paul, you’re a prince.”

“Not really. Connie called and twisted my arm. Hard. She threatened to tell you all about Theresa Jane Delaney if I didn’t agree to let you come.”

“Who’s Theresa Jane Delaney?”

“The love of my life …” He paused just a fraction too long, long enough for me to pull a dish towel off the rack and snap it at him. He feinted to the left. “When I was sixteen! Long before I met you, sweet cakes.”

I kissed him firmly on the mouth. “I just love it when you talk dirty.”

On the long drive down Route 2 from Annapolis to Pearson’s Corner, I tuned the radio to WETA-FM and, between classical selections, listened with smug satisfaction to the traffic reports. An overturned tractor-trailer on westbound New York Avenue near Kenilworth at the District line had Route 50 backed up all the way to the beltway. Not my problem anymore!

As I drove, sipping McDonald’s coffee through a red stirrer straw I had jammed through the plastic lid, I recalled the time Paul first brought me to his family’s farm, in 1973, the year we were married. I was thinking that not much had changed in Chesapeake County since then, although yuppies from nearby Baltimore and Washington, D.C., were beginning to discover the area, seeking decent schools and a quiet, relatively
crime-free place to raise their children. The friendly communities, verdant fields, lush forests, and unspoiled water views that had drawn them to this quiet part of the county in the first place were still to be found in abundance. For the time being at least.

At Milford, just past the Maryland State Environmental Research Station, I slowed at the flashing yellow light and waited for a delivery truck to pull out of the 7-Eleven and onto the highway. At the next intersection I turned left on Pearson’s Road and left again almost immediately at the high school, where the road forked. I slowed to ease my car around the curve that skirted a pond, then accelerated past the old Nichols place. Within minutes, I spotted Connie’s mailbox, which had at one time been beautifully painted with irises á la Vincent Van Gogh and her name, C. Ives, in black gothic letters. Unfortunately the mailbox had been battered, almost beyond recognition, in a drive-by whacking. Rust was developing where the paint had been chipped away by the vandal’s bat. So much for low crime, I thought.

After the first long day getting settled in at Connie’s, it felt strange to crawl into bed alone. I missed Paul and remembered how odd it felt when we first slept together in the bedroom he had used as a child, right there on the plaid bed sheets surrounded by the memorabilia of his youth: his
Hardy Boys
books and old school texts, seashells from a class trip to Ocean City, a second-prize bowling trophy so ornate and improbably tall that it barely fitted on the shelf and made
me wonder what on earth the first-prize trophy had looked like. Like now, it had been spring, and we left the window open. I remember lying in his arms, listening to mournful owls, frogs clearing their throats, and the constant creaking of the crickets, sounds that kept his city bride from Cleveland wide awake.

Now most of those youthful trappings were gone, replaced by Laura Ashley curtains and matching bedclothes, the bookshelves full of art books, knick-knacks, and family photographs. This time the night sounds that drifted into the window on a soft, sweet-smelling breeze soothed me like a lullaby, and I fell asleep almost instantly.

I awoke refreshed with the sun on my face. I lay quietly for a while, listening to the birds argue in the tree outside my window and studying the shadowy, shifting patterns cast by the leaves on the wallpaper. The steady hum of a tractor drifted in from the Baxter farm just to the east. I plumped my pillow and sandwiched it between my back and the tall, carved headboard while considering the picture on the wall nearest my feet, an aquatint of Paul and Connie’s great-grandparents, looking severe. The first time we’d made quiet love in this room, Paul had turned their picture to the wall.

A few moments later I heard a toilet flush and the sound of running water. I lay lazily in bed until the sounds died away, then padded downstairs in my nightgown. The pine floors felt smooth and warm beneath my bare feet and creaked comfortingly in all the familiar places—the third step down from the landing,
just inside the dining room as you pass the buffet, the first board as you step over the threshold into the kitchen. Connie had the radio tuned to WGMS, where Pachelbel’s
Canon
was playing softly, but she wasn’t anywhere in sight.