The Saving Graces (33 page)

He must've heard. He turned his back.
Terry took me outside in the backyard for a private word. He's all grown up, very tall and handsome; he's got Gary's blue eyes, but something of Isabel's softness in them. We don't really flirt, but he likes it when I joke about wishing he were fifteen years older.
"Thanks again for having this," he said. "It's really meant a lot to me." "I'm glad, but I didn't do anything." "I wish she'd had a regular funeral." "Well." I did, too, sort of. "But that's not what she wanted." "I know. Listen, Emma." He squeezed his nose between his fingers, a manly gesture of indecision. I just can't get over how he's grown up.
"What?" He looked away to say, "I don't know what the hell to do with the ashes." "Ashes." "I just have no idea. Should I bury them? They have places where you can do that, memorial gardens. But would Mom have liked that?" We shook our heads in agreement: no.
"Do you know if she had - a favorite place? I asked my father, but he didn't know. What do you think I should do? I thought of giving them to Kirby, but . . . I just don't know." "Hm." It was a problem. Terry would go back to Montreal, probably marry Susan, probably fly home once in a blue moon to see his father. What business did Isabel's ashes have in Canada?
"I was wondering," he said, looking at me hopefully. "I was thinking maybe the Saving Graces would, you know, like to have the responsibility." I was thinking the same thing. But I said, "I don't know, Terry. She gave them to you. She must've had a reason." "Well, she said I was supposed to do with them as I saw fit." "Hm." He'd given this some thought. "Did you say anything about this to Lee?" I was more used to her making the big group decisions.
He shook his head. "She's kind of wrecked. I thought I'd ask you." "Oh." I actually felt a little flattered. Imagine me being the grown-up. "Well, um. Okay, I think I can say for all of us, Rudy and Lee and me, that we'd be honored. So I'm saying yes, but I'll call you or write you and let you know what we're going to do before we do anything." "That would be great." He grinned with relief, and I got a hint of what a burden this had been to him. How funny. I guess it's understandable. But the thought struck that it was possible we Graces knew Isabel better than her own son did, and that he was mature enough to realize it. And he was handing over her remains to the ones she'd trusted most to do right by them. Was that sad? Or was it a comfort? Something to think about later.
Terry and I hugged, and cried a little, and I told him again how much Isabel had adored him, how proud she was of him. He said he regretted more than anything that she'd never met Susan. I said she'd have loved her, too, and we cried some more.
Back inside, the crowd was thinning out, mostly the hard core of friends left now. People thanked me some more, I thanked them for coming. Out of habit, I looked around for Mick-and found him right behind me. "Emma," he said, "I have to go." I walked out with him on the front porch. The sun was dying, sinking down orange and gold behind the houses on Nineteenth Street. It was late April, high spring, but still the cruelest month; the spent azaleas along my walk shivered in a frigid breeze, and my front lawn was still more mud than grass. I hugged my arms and thanked Mick for coming.
"I wanted to," he said. The absence of Sally curled around us like smoke. Where's your wife? I wanted to ask. Does she know you're here? Mick had liked Isabel, of course, but he hadn't known her very well. He'd come because of me.
"I liked what you said," he said.
"I talked too much." "No." "Yes. I embarrassed myself. I'm a writer, not a talker." That reminded him: "How is your-" "Don't ask." He smiled, and oh, my idiotic heart turned inside out.
A man and his wife, Stan or Sam and Hilda something, came outside. The husband had been in Isabel's cancer support group. He looked healthy enough now, I noticed with some resentment. "Do you have to go? Well, thanks so much for coming," "Yes, it's late, thank you for inviting us," "Good luck to you," "God bless you"-and so on while Mick stood aside, awkward, waiting until we could be by ourselves again. It seemed to me we did a lot of that. - Stan and flilda finally went away. Mick and I stood side by side at the porch rail and looked out at nothing, the car-lined street, the row house opposite mine. "You'll miss her," he said.
"I thought I was prepared, but I'm not. I miss her so much." "Yeah." I sighed.
"I've always envied you for that." "What? The Graces?" "There's a fellow I go trout fishing with every spring, up in the Catoctins. The rest of the year I see him maybe three, four times. I call him my best friend." "Oh, well, that's because you're a guy. Guys don't have friends the way we do. You have your-wives or your girlfriends for your best friends. We have each other." Oh, just keep talking, Emma, cram your foot all the way in. But it was mortifying to think he might think I was hinting around at the Sally question, when really I'd just been blithering, saying the first thing that came into my head.
"Emma," he said presently. I'd really missed hearing him say my name "Can I call you?" "What for?" He laughed, looking down at his hands gripping the white wood railing. He had on a brown corduroy jacket and a blue shirt. While he kept his head turned, I looked at the line of his profile, the curve of dark stubble his beard made on his hard cheek. I didn't feel elated by his question. All I felt was weary.
"Has anything changed?" I hated having -to ask. Anyway, I could see the answer in his face. "No, please don't call me, I don't want to see you. Oh, Mick. I hurt so much. If I added you-" "Okay. It's okay, Emma." I have never wanted anyone to hold me so much. But we didn't touch, not even our hands, and after a while it felt right, having absolutely nothing. Isabel was gone, and there was a hole in the world, and I had no hope of filling it.
Mick's bowed head moved me, though. His hair was disturbingly beautiful. I drew away from him abruptly-he looked up. Now his eyelashes, the curl of his nostrils, the shape of his mouth, everything about him was like a heavy weight pulling me under. I had to snap the line before he drowned me.
Luckily some more people came out on the porch, people I had to deal with. "Good-bye," I told him, and I meant it. He knew it-we both knew this-was it. I turned away and said all the obligatory things to the departing couple, nice people, one of Isabel's instructors and her husband. When I looked again, Mick was gone.
So then I went inside and said everything that was expected of me, including good-bye, to about twenty more people. You'd think I'd have gotten better at it, smoother, more facile, you'd think the word would be tripping off my tongue. Good-bye, good-bye. Good-bye. By the end, though, it stuck in my throat. - Rudy noticed. Oh God, Rudy, help me, I thought, but she knew already. She got rid of the last of them, and she stayed with me that night. "Maybe I should get a cat," I said, watching her with Grace, their easy, admirable, human-dog relationship.
"That's it," she said gently. She lit a cigarette and handed it over to me. "That's what we'll do next, Emma. We'll get you a cat." 29.

   Rudy.

   Nobody thought about the logistics of ash strewing until the time came to do it. "We'll sprinkle them out at sea," we said, not considering past those six words, which sound perfectly feasible, even romantic. Isabel would like it, we agreed; she loved the ocean, particularly the Outer Banks and Cape Hatteras, which was our place, the Saving Graces' special spot. Also she was a water sign (Pisces), and she believed in things like that, astrology and such. Strewing her ashes at sea would be just right.
But you can't do it, there's no such thing, at least not from the land. The wind blows the ashes straight back, inland, not at all what you intended. Luckily we- I should say Lee-discerned this before we opened the mother-of-pearl box, thereby saving Isabel's ashes from being blown back onto the Carolina dunes. Which wouldn't have been so terrible, I didn't think, but we really wanted them at sea.
Lee suggested we charter a boat and sail out a ways before strewing the ashes-she'd seen that in a movie, she recalled, and it had worked out quite well. Emma said maybe we could walk out to the end of the fishing pier in Frisco and strew them from there. But eventually both of these suggestions were rejected for the same reason: they involved the presence of other people. We wanted privacy when we said good-bye to Isabel for the last time.
The solution we hit on was another one that's a lot better in theory than practice. We put on our bathing suits and simply swam out as far as we could. The tacit plan was, we'd each say a few words, Lee would open the box, and the wind would take the ashes and blow them gently out to sea. Which it did, finally, but we didn't have time to say much of anything because Emma almost drowned. We'd swum out too far, and we'd forgotten what a poor swimmer she is. Those were our two mistakes.
"Have to go back!" she sputtered, dog-paddling, swallowing saltwater. "I can't go any farther. Do it now, Lee, do it now!" Lee swims like a dolphin-she'd gotten all that way out with her arms over her head, careful to keep the box out of the water. "Okay," she said, "well, wait, we'll do it here, then, this is far-" "Now, hurry! I have to go back!" "Okay. Okay-we commit these ashes of our dear friend to the ocean she loved so much when- she was with us. Isabel, we-" "Help!" I caught Emma by the hair just before she went under. "Hurry it up, Lee, just do it," I yelled, trying to pull Emma on -top of me. "Hold still, I've got you, I've got you. Say something."

"What?" Emma coughed up water and spat.
"Say something about Isabel." - "Bye, Isabel!" Lee glared at her, treading water strongly. "We commit these ashes to the sea. Okay, I'm opening it. Rudy?" "I'll miss you, Isabel. I love you. Rest in peace." I had something better planned, but Emma was going to swamp both of us. Lee opened the box-the wind caught the chunky ashes in a blinding, smoky billow, whoosh. They lay on the water for an instant, then melted like snowflakes. When the next wave came, they vanished.
"I'm throwing the box, too." "Oh, no," I said. "Well, okay. But I don't know. Emma, should she-" "Jesus Christ!" Lee threw the box, and I started back toward the beach with my arm around Emma's chest, towing her along like a lifeguard. I didn't even know I could do that. Lee stayed for a minute or two longer, then struck out for shore behind us.
You can laugh later at farces like that, and we did try to even then, but the truth is, we were upset. Maybe if we'd waited longer, a year instead of only two months after Isabel's passing, the perspective of time might have lessened our sense of failure. But we sat in the sand while the sun went down behind us, silent and miserable and, in Lee's case, mad. It wasn't our finest hour. What was supposed to have been moving and important and even cathartic had turned into an undignified fiasco that didn't do Isabel credit. We felt we'd let her down.
It was the first of our two nights at Neap Tide. We hadn't had time to shop for groceries, so we went out to dinner that night at Brother's, our old standby. But not even good, greasy, North Carolina barbecue could cheer us up. Too many memories. And I hadn't been drinking for the last three months, so I couldn't even synthesize a good time. - We moped back to the cottage, where things didn't look up. Nobody said it, but I knew we were all thinking, Why was this ever fun? What's special about sitting around playing gin rummy or watching silly television shows you wouldn't be caught dead watching at home, eating too much, reading books you can't concentrate on because somebody's always interrupting? With trivia and nonsense, not anything you'd really want to talk about, because you've already said everything you had to say on the interminable ride down and nothing's left but mindless chatter?
It didn't used to seem like mindless chatter. Maybe it hadn't been profound, but it wasn't mindless when Isabel was here. Maybe we were no good without her. Maybe the group was finished.
Maybe we'd keep meeting for a while, then gradually, imperceptibly, taper off, everyone pretending all was well, until one day we stopped meeting at all.
I always thought it was bossy, officious Lee who kept the Graces in line, kept us going. Had it been -Isabel? But she'd been so quiet. Emma said she was our "spirit." What if we were lost without her?

   "I think I'll go to bed," I said at ten o'clock. Emma and Lee looked up at me, hollow-eyed as owls, and then quickly away. Neither of them said, "So early?" "Night," we told one another dispiritedly, and I wandered downstairs.
I had a room to myself this time, the one with the bunk beds Emma and I had shared last summer. It was lonely by myself. I missed Grace. I'd wanted to bring her, but I'd asked Kirby to keep her over the weekend. Her back legs are too crippled with arthritis, she couldn't have made it up and down the wooden steps.
Lying in bed, I took it as a good sign that I felt homesick, considering I don't even have a home. I gave it to Curtis-yes, I know, after all that-and now I live in a big, sunny, one-bedroom apartment on the western edge of Georgetown. Curtis isn't fighting the divorce at all. But then, I'm not asking him for much. A cash settlement, that's all I want, enough to keep me on my feet until I start earning a living wage. (At what?) After that, we're done. Dissolved.
This doesn't sit well with Lee and Emma, all this magnanimity from me. Even Eric thinks I'm being hasty. It's worth it, though; anything to make this go smoothly. I'm terrified it's going to backfire. It's working too well, I don't trust my good fortune. I'm walking through a minefield carefully, carefully, panicky at the thought of a bomb exploding under my feet. I used up so much psychic energy leaving Curtis, I'm depleted. But slowly restocking. These things take time.
For instance, I haven't gone back to landscaping class yet. But I will, fall-term for sure. So what do I do with myself? I've been throwing pots again, and that's such a pleasure, I can't believe I ever gave it up. I've been keeping a journal. Seeing Eric. Not drinking. Taking long, slow walks with Grace. Doing some volunteer work.
Almost every day I uncover some new way in which Curtis. . . "exploited me" isn't right. Tricked me? Whatever-here's a miniature example. We liked different TV programs. All Curtis ever wanted to watch were CNN, CNBC, and C-Span. Period, nothing else. Me, I liked stories-plays, movies, hospital dramas, sitcoms, Masterpiece Theater-anything with a story in it. He knew this about me but he ignored it, never acknowledged it. Intelligent people watched the interior secretary address the Senate or the Ways and Means Committee chair give a press conference. And when those were over, intelligent people turned the television off.
The way Curtis got my passive complicity was to make fun of the kinds of shows I liked: they were trite, sentimental, melodramatic, banal, badly acted, phony, meretricious, sleazy-and he always pretended I agreed with him, that we were both above that kind of trash. I know I was a coward, but his scorn was so cutting and dismissive, I did agree with him. I lied. I don't know how to explain how he did this to me, all I can say is I was helpless. He made up look down. When I was under his spell, I'd have sworn black was blue if he'd wanted me to.
Now he's gone, and I watch E.R. and old movies and Seinfeld reruns. I'm a couch potato! It's not so much the programs that perk me up, it's the guiltlessness I feel when I watch them. I feel like a delinquent let out of reform school. I'm on probation, so I still- have to watch it, no acting out, no having too much fun. But I have something now I can't remember having for ages, maybe ever. Hope.
"Night, Em." "Night, Lee." They were whispering; they closed their doors softly, trying not to disturb me. Would they lie awake now like me, fretting and frustrated, mulling over their troubles and wondering why we three couldn't seem to connect? We don't trust ourselves as a group anymore. It's like - if you had four legs and one was amputated, you'd be in a lot of distress while you learned to walk on three, if you ever did. And you probably wouldn't like yourself very much, because you'd be so awkward, so. . . graceless.
I remember the last time I lay in this bunk bed, and Emma lay on that one, and we stayed up late and talked about our lives. Things were just beginning to change for me, I was just starting to feel stronger. Emma said, "Whoa, Rudy, you are a wild woman," when I told her about smoking in front of Curtis. That's when he must have begun to feel the change in me, right around then. So that means he had six months to be afraid of losing me-the old me, the dependent one whose whole life revolved around his-before he took the fatal step of telling me he was dying.
My God, what a desperate act. I still can't get over it. Pathological, Eric calls it. He says Curtis needs therapy a lot more than I do.
Yes, well, 1 think I've always known that; We were coconspirators in neediness, and it was only an illusion that he was in charge. We held each other up. You can call our relationship sick, but people do all sorts of things to survive, and at least we never hurt anyone but each other. I don't hate him. Eric and I are still working on what I feel, but it's not hate, it's not even anger anymore. I understand Curtis too well, I'm too much like him, I can't honestly keep vilifying what he did to me.
But I can't go back to him, and that proves there really is such a thing as change. For so long I thought there wasn't-well, all my life. 1 think it's the heart of despair, not being able to believe in change.
Now I've not only seen it, I've provoked it. I am a wild woman. I alternate between euphoria and stark terror, but it's not like manic depression, you know, it's more like- normal insanity. Garden variety neurosis, you could call it. How refreshing and delightful, theoretically.
But I'm frightened, and I need a lot of help, and it scares me to think the Graces might not be able to give it to me. Could that really happen? We're all in mourning, locked away in our private griefs. Isabel is our shared grief, but we have personal ones, too. Mine is Curtis, Emma's is Mick. Lee's is a baby.
Maybe we just need time to adjust to our threeleggedness. But I'm afraid. Not all change is good change. Oh, I wish you were here, Isabel! You wouldn't tell us what to do. But somehow, if you were here, we'd know.
30.