Chapter 17

OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS

*

Day four since Scott had hauled the last of several boxes into the bed of his truck - burying the space that only a fortnight ago had been filled by a bitty fir tree that was currently shedding more than its share of pine needles over the Wyczenski apartment (Eric wouldn't let us take it down. He wanted to make up for not having one during most of December, I think) - and chugged out West. Into the sunset. Without me. I had maintained a safe distance during the loading, keeping vigil at a secluded window in the hall that either winter or my breath had continually fogged over.

It just so happens I did rally up the nerve to deliver my farewell- declaration-of-love in person. But it would have been mortifying to hang around and watch as it was read, like I was one of those saucer-eyed ragamuffin children who gazed out hauntingly from paintings. I hated those ugly brats. Maggie used to have two of them, a boy and a girl, nailed to the bathroom wall, of all places. Those little freaks just stared and stared whenever you got near the toilet. She'd finally taken them down when Jimmy had said what each of us was already thinking: he didn't particularly enjoy having an audience every time he had to take a whiz.

So, fearful of becoming a pesky spectator, I had kissed the envelope my letter was in, a corny impulse I could not restrain, and knocked on Scott's door, bombarding him with a jumbled explanation of what I'd come for and how I couldn't stay and would he please wait until miles away before he read my note? He'd agreed, and then I had made a scene and hugged him before scurrying off to hide and brood at my lookout window. And I had been hiding and brooding ever since.

Maggie was concerned with my loss of appetite. She said I was going to blow away in the wind if I didn't eat soon, and end up celebrating the new year in China or somewhere. That was a chance I was willing to take. China was better than apartment 17, where if you exited, turned left and strode a couple doors down, you would be standing in front of Scott's ex-apartment. And on the other side of the door was silence. Indeed, he had taken the music with him.

"I hope this visit gets you out of the funk you're in." Maggie tinkered with the windshield wiper lever until the blades flicked in response, dusting a powdery layer of snow from the windshield and leaving behind a design like wings of an incomplete snow angel. Zoned out, I let my mother's statement pass me by and went on studying the heavy, coin-sized flakes on the other side of our tiny Omni's passenger window, pondering what kind of weather they were having in California.

"Aww, Mom just said the f-word!" Eric called from the backseat, his tone a perfect tattletale pitch.

"No," Maggie spoke to his reflection in the rearview mirror, "I said funk."

"She did it again. I'm telling Grandma."

"Fuuunk. F-u-N-k." By now they were both giggling and Maggie began drumming her fingers against the steering wheel, singing, "Won't you take me to Funkytown?" while Eric tried to drown her out with his own tuneless chorus of "Potty mouth, potty mouth!" The tight space we were in caught his shrill voice and thrust it right against my ears, snapping me into the present.

"You guys are freaks," I commented, my first sentence in probably over an hour. I'd gone beyond the normal lull in conversation that accompanied most long car rides, and begun to borderline on a vow of silence. Nuns took vows of silence, I mused. Maybe I would join a convent. I already had the no- talking and fasting thing going for me, and I would never be getting married, anyway. I wondered, were nuns allowed to listen to Sex Pistols tapes?

"Says the mute," Maggie responded dryly. "You do know we have quite a piece to drive yet? Do you plan on making us look at that scowl the rest of the way?" She screwed her face up, one eye squinty, lip touching nose because she'd puffed it out so far, the bottom one curving down in a deep frown. I rolled my eyes and turned my face away when I sensed a smile ready to peek through.

"You should be watching the road, not me, Popeye."

In the backseat Eric snickered and serenaded us with a version of the Popeye ditty that had been reconstructed by generations of wicked schoolchildren who'd had far too much recess time on their hands- "I'm Popeye the Sailor Man, I live in a garbage can. I turned on the heater, it burned off my wiener. I'm Popeye the Sailor Man - toot! toot!"

For an unpredictable slip of a moment the only noise was the hum of a car in motion and the sporadic squeak of wiper blades against moist glass. Eric had just violated one of the most sacred rules of dirty playground rhymes: under no circumstances did you ever repeat them to adults, especially parents. The milder ones about greasy, grimy gopher guts and such were acceptable, but when the human anatomy and/or crass language was involved, that was best kept secret from anyone over the age of twelve or thirteen. (My personal favorite was Miss Suzy and her steamboat with the bell. I'd pretty much retired all the rest.) My brother and I waited with feigned trepidation to see how someone in her thirties would handle it.

"Well" - Maggie's eyebrows went up - "for funk's sake, who's got the potty mouth now?"

Despite my best efforts to remain sullen and melancholy, at least till we reached Grandma Corrie Jo's house, I laughed.

*

Being welcomed at my grandmother's house was like the end of every Beverly Hillbillies rerun I'd ever seen: door opens, handful of people emerge, and the cheerful wave fest begins. Unbeknownst to Aunt Shelia, who resisted the cold by staying in the doorway, Grandma's two high-spirited pugs, a tarnished-gold-colored one named Oscar and a chocolate-brown one named Ovaltine, had decided to join the greeting and galloped out into the snow, tumbling over each other, nipping at heels, and yapping their heads off at the car they only saw in their driveway about twice a year. Their miniature paws indented the snow as they raced, leaving behind a Connect-the-Dots pattern that seemed to spell out Ha ha, you can't catch us! Even Maggie chuckled when Grandma Corrie Jo made a few unsuccessful grabs for the rambunctious pair, then gave clapping and scolding a try. Good luck with that, Grandma.

Part of the problem was solved by Grandad Wilbur, who hurled a snowball at Ovaltine's head with impressive precision. Terrified, the pug flew indoors, yelping, tail between her legs. Oscar gave no indication that he even noticed his partner in crime getting beaned, but Grandma sure made a fuss. I opened the car door just in time to hear her cry, "Wilbur Dorsett!" with the intonation of a mother reprimanding her eight-year-old son.

Shivering with delight, Oscar scaled my outstretched legs like a ladder, reached my knees and gave a small leap that sent him careening into my arms, a flurry of snow and fur. Lick, lick, lick; a million wet little kisses.

"Hey, fella," I said, administering a light noogie to what might have been his head - he was so squirmy and flat-faced I could barely tell one end from the other.

"Don't you greet that scallywag before you greet your own grandmother." Corrie Jo trudged towards me with open arms, the snow crunching beneath her Asian-styled house slippers. Those were the other things she liked to wear a lot. If it wasn't bare feet or flats, it was slippers. Even in an inch of snow.

"That's a-girl, don't hang back. I ain't gonna bite you." Really, the last part blended together more like a single word: bytcha. I loved the way those normal, everyday phrases dallied on her tongue as if they were a bland stew she had sampled and spiced up with her much livelier Southern dialect. "Just come on over here and let me give you a hug." And even as she said it, I was being enfolded by two of the most capable, most affectionate arms in the world. "Mmm-mmm-mmm. Precious baby," she crooned, rocking me from side to side, prolonging the embrace. I could have stayed there forever. But I had to share her.

After I'd received a bone-crushing squeeze and an incredibly loud smooch on the forehead from Grandad Wilbur, followed by Aunt Shelia singing the praises of my beauty ("My Lord, child, you could be a model"), and after Maggie and Eric each had their turn with her, I got Grandma Corrie Jo back. Mine, and mine alone. We held hands and rushed to the warmth of the house as Grandad lugged Eric and Eric's twin sidekicks - the crutches - and Maggie and Aunt Shelia brought up the rear, gabbing like... well, sisters.

If someone would have passed by on the street and watched us, they'd probably never have guessed that nearly six months ago, on this very stoop, we'd had our own family feud, minus the buzzers and the "Survey says" and a host to act as mediator. And nobody won. The game had ended with Eric and me peering through the back window of our car as Maggie floored the gas pedal, peeled out of the driveway, and vowed never to return to "that woman's" house again. Meanwhile, That Woman, my Grandma Corrie Jo, had stood on her front steps, weeping, head bowed so that her lovely face, a face with a classic, dignified sort of beauty that made you want to respect her, was hidden behind a crop of vibrant strawberry blond hair. It had been like watching a rose struggling to survive a hurricane. I absolutely hated the image, but it stuck in my brain because it was the last one I had of her. Memories like that brought me dangerously close to hating Maggie too.

"You're skin and bones," Grandma said, helping me off with my coat. "We're gonna have to fatten you up right quick. What? What're you grinnin' at?"

I just shrugged, continued smiling, and allowed her to lead me, her hand at the small of my back, towards the delicious aroma of fried chicken and apple cobbler that was wafting from the kitchen into the dinning room. She'd made two of my favorites.

"That" - dramatically, she imitated my shrug - "is not an answer. Speak, for heaven's sake. God gave you a tongue and you're s'posed to use it. Conversation is a marvelous thing. I read an article about a girl your age who got a little tickle in her throat one day, and the next..." She fluttered her hand through the air, suggestive of a departing butterfly. "Gone. Lost her voice completely. You can bet she'd be thankin' her lucky stars to be in your place. You've got a perfectly fine voice, and I barely heard so much as 'Boo!' from you since ya got here."

"Boo," I said.

"Oh, clever girl." Grandma Corrie Jo gave me one of her looks, the kind Maggie often used while saying some amusing, nonsensical threat like "uh- huh, keep it up, Lip" after I'd made one of my sarcastic quips. The sly smile that followed was another thing Maggie had inherited, and I liked to think that maybe I had too. I wasn't sure if Grandma was aware of it, but I constantly studied her tiniest movements and expressions, hoping to link my behavior to hers in any way I could.

We were away from the others now, all except for Ovaltine, who had tagged after us to make up for the ecstatic welcome she'd been snowballed out of, her snip of a tail whapping back and forth so furiously it looked like she might wiggle her hind end loose. I stooped to pat her head and she made me feel right at home by gnawing at my pinkie (with the delicacy of a true lady, of course), then excused herself with a sharp, approving "Arf!" and trotted away to say hello to my companions. I straightened, caught sight of the laughter that glinted in my grandmother's lively pale green eyes, and began to giggle. "I think she likes me," I said.

"She ain't the only one." And Grandma Corrie Jo pulled me into another lengthy hug, our privacy giving her the freedom to hold on as long as she wanted to. As long as I wanted her to. While I was there I breathed in her scent, trying to memorize it, an idea that came to me thanks to a scene from The Parent Trap in which Hayley Mills sniffs the lapels of her grandfather's jacket because she wants to make a memory of what he smells like. I think she came up with something like peppermint and tobacco. I, on the other hand, was getting a pleasant whiff of tea and... a fragrance similar to cherry Coke mixed with... with...? It was a wholesome, cozy kind of smell. A Corrie Jo kind of smell.

"Are you wearing perfume?" I questioned. "Or did you take a bath in cherries?"

"You got a nose like a bloodhound." Grandma stepped back to look at me, a hand on either of my shoulders. "It's lotion. Cherry-almond to be exact. 'Originally produced by The Andrew Jergens Company in 1901,'" she informed me, probably reciting a line off the bottle. I had always been astonished by her keen memory. She only needed to read something once or twice to have it memorized, and she stored up trivia and useless facts galore. Grandad called her brain a sponge.

"If I've got the nose of a bloodhound, then you've got the memory of an elephant."

"Well." She clucked her tongue. "Thanks to Jergens I don't smell like one."

The giddiness of our reunion lasted a few minutes more, then finally wore off when Grandma Corrie Jo lowered her voice and peeked at the doorway that communicated between dinning room and living room, as if she suspected Maggie might appear there at any moment. That was very possible.

"How's your mama doin'?" she asked gently, her head tilted so her face was closer to my level. She swept a strand of hair off my shoulder with her finger. "You three been gettin' on all right? Tell the truth, now, sweetie."

"Yeah, we're okay."

Her eyes didn't stray for one second, and I could not look directly at her and lie. It was almost if she'd slipped me a truth serum that had already worked its way through my blood stream. Fine, I would be honest. But I wasn't going to tell her every nasty, unsettling detail. There were some things grandmothers didn't need to find out, just like there were things 10- year-old boys and mothers and fathers and next-door-neighbors didn't need to find out. There wasn't a living soul I could think of that I didn't keep secrets from. Not a single one.

"She was kinda bad for a while before Christmas," I confessed. "You know how she gets when she's off her medicine."

Grandma Corrie Jo nodded, her face drawn into a sad, sympathetic frown. She patted my arm and I got the feeling it was done not only to comfort me but her as well.

"We got through it, though. It wasn't..." Wasn't what? Hellish? Frightening? Painful? The worst Christmas in my life? Oh, but it was. It had been each of those. "It's better now. She's been taking her lithium regularly. She even makes sure I watch her do it." No amount of lightheartedness could make that last part sound normal or positive. Hey, Mom's a raving lunatic, but look on the bright side, Grandma: she's got me to play pill warden. And what about the day she fails to show up for inspection? Well, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

"Grandad and I are always just a phone call away if you need us," Grandma reminded me, though I had never put that invitation to use. I saw no point in disrupting their lives along with mine. They had heartache enough to last them from one of our visits to the next without me calling in the meantime to update them with tales of woe. "Don't be afraid to dial our number, y'hear me? I mean it, Abilene."

Corrie Jo's father had hailed from Abilene, Texas, hence the nickname. She only used it on rare occasions, which meant when my mother wasn't in earshot. Maggie wasn't fond of the handle. "I named her Abigail, Mama, not Abilene," she'd say. But the name belonged to me and I let Grandma call me whatever she liked when it was just the two of us.

"I know, Grandma," I mumbled, chin practically touching my chest because I'd lowered my head to avoid looking at her. Frankly, I wasn't the least bit angry when Maggie sauntered in and brought my chat with Grandma Corrie Jo to an end.

*

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I hadn't eaten more than a few bites of food a meal for the past four days, but the feast my grandparents had prepared tasted like heaven, and I gorged myself shamelessly. Grandad Wilbur wanted to know if I had a hollow leg, and Aunt Shelia cracked a joke about Maggie starving her children, which Grandma Corrie Jo did not laugh at. All in all, it was an enjoyable dinner we shared, and I was still recuperating from it half an hour later when my grandmother entered the living room with a photo album so full and thick with added pages that the covers could no longer close properly. I recognized it immediately, though it looked a bit more worn since the last time I'd seen it.

"Scootch," she prompted, dropping the heavy album into my lap. I groaned and sluggishly made room for her in the broad chair where I'd been reclining. It was a miracle I could even move, but I managed it somehow, and Grandma and I were soon nestled shoulder to shoulder, the album propped open against our thighs.

I didn't need to ask why she'd unearthed such a relic, nor did I feel the slightest bit concerned that I might be bored to death by its contents. Browsing through pictures with my grandmother was sort of a tradition, and I loved hearing her tell the special story behind each one. I knew most of them by heart already, but nothing compared to her vivid descriptions that brought to life the scenes that had been captured ages before I was born.

We perused the first few pages, Grandma Corrie Jo lovingly pointing out the tall, handsome young man who, despite the motionlessness required for those archaic cameras of his era, always seemed to be smiling. I'd never met my great-grandfather, but my grandmother spoke of him with such affection I knew he must have been a good man. Great-grandmother, however, had been a severe-looking woman, stiff and uncomfortable in every photo, her hair pulled back in a tight bun. It wasn't hard to tell which parent Corrie Jo had inherited her looks from.

Preserved for me in black and white was Grandma's progression from round, dimpled youngster to willowy and attractive adult. I adored the childhood pictures. Decked out in bows, Mary Janes and frilly little dresses with pinafores, she had looked like something right out of an Our Gang sketch, twice as cute as Shirley Temple. But it was the pictures of Corrie Jo in her early twenties and thirties that really fascinated me. She'd been nothing short of a starlet and had known how to pose like one too.

"You should've been an actress, Grandma," I said, holding down the page so she couldn't hurry past snapshots of herself in a striped two-piece bathing suit. (She referred to these as cheesecake photos.)

Grandma chuckled. "Well, I might've if I hadn't met your grandfather at such a young age. I was a wife and mother before I even had time to grow up myself and think about a... glamorous occupation such as actin'." She finally pried my hand away and turned to the next page, revealing several pictures of a romantic couple on their wedding day. Her smile grew fond and distant.

"Were you really only sixteen when you got married?" I asked, dubious as if I had never heard the answer to that question before.

"Yes, ma'am." She backed that up with a nod. "And it like to've killed my daddy. It was the first time I ever saw him cry."

"Didn't he like Grandpa Newman?"

"They got on pretty well, but Daddy said it felt like someone'd come right along and snatched up his baby. He didn't think I was old enough for the responsibility of startin' a family. And I wasn't. But no one was gonna change my mind, no sir."

I half-grinned, imagining my grandma as a willful, stubborn teenager, then, "Did you... do you ever regret it?"

Without a moment's hesitation, Grandma Corrie Jo tapped her fingertip on a photo of herself seated in the very chair we were lounging in now, but there was a different girl by her side, one with quite a familiar face. Maggie. Her wide eyes and equally wide smile were unmistakable. Judging by her size, the pigtails jutting out on either side of her head, and the limp rag doll clutched in her fist, she'd been about six or seven years old at the time. Even then her happiness had been contagious, and the twenty- something Corrie Jo in the picture was gazing at her with a mixture of joy and adoration. "Never," Grandma said. "Not in a million years."

I saved my next and final question for what was probably my most favorite picture of all. It was a little off center, probably because Aunt Shelia, eleven by then, had been the photographer, but the lens had still managed to capture its subjects with such clarity and at the perfect moment, that it seemed like a professional had snapped the shot.

According to Grandma, she'd been working in the kitchen that day, doing dishes, mopping, the whole shebang, when in traipsed Grandpa Newman and a nine-year-old version of my mother, muddy from head to foot after working in the garden. When Grandma had begun to throw a fit about them dirtying up her nice clean kitchen, Aunt Shelia'd started clicking away on the camera that had been her birthday present. Somewhere amidst the blinding flashes, she'd got a photo of Corrie Jo losing the battle, pulled into a tight, grubby embrace by Grandpa Newman. He had tenderly kissed Grandma's neck, his muscular arms encircling her trim waist, and she, with her head tilted in a luxurious manner, eyes closed, was smiling. Maggie had her arms thrown around both of them, not to be left out of the fun. I doubted either of the little girls had recognized the passion they were witnessing, but I liked to think the few years I had on them made me a bit wiser.

"You and Grandpa really loved each other," I commented knowingly, gazing at the photo, and Grandma's firm nod said it all. Watching her carefully, I went ahead with my inquiry. "Did you stop loving him, then? I mean, after he died and you married Grandad Wilbur?" I wiggled my foot, nervous that I might be prying where I didn't belong. "W-was it hard to love somebody else?"

Grandma appeared slightly shocked, but she recovered quickly. She seemed to know that it was important for me to get a thorough and honest answer, and for a split second I was tempted to tell her everything about Scott. And maybe someday I would. But not now.

"It wasn't easy, no..." Grandma Corrie Jo proceeded slowly. "I didn't think I could ever love anybody the way I loved John. And I do still love him. I always will."

"But what about Grandad?"

"Well, I love him too, of course," she said matter-of-factly. "Don't you believe that rubbish about people only havin' one soul mate apiece. I care about Wilbur just as much as I did John, but it's a different kind of relationship because they were two very different kinds of people."

"So you can fall in love more than once," I murmured to myself, breathing a sigh that bordered between disappointment and relief. It was a tad confusing, in my opinion, but I figured if anyone knew the truth it would be my grandmother. She'd married twice, and both times the marriages had lasted longer than anybody else's I knew of.

"Don't fret, dear heart." Grandma Corrie Jo consoled me with a pat on the knee. "You've got your whole life ahead of ya."

And after going-on-fourteen-years and all I'd learned about love so far, that was exactly what I was afraid of.