Charms for the Easy Life (22 page)

She said, “Shh. Mother’s got him.”

If he had known who and what lay in wait for him, he would’ve driven past our house, slowing just enough to toss our gifts in the yard without breaking anything. He called out, “Merry Christmas! Anybody home?” I heard him tell his mother to watch her step. He opened the door to the kitchen, and there stood my grandmother.

She said, “And a Merry Christmas to you and that other one you’ve got stuck up at the Sir Walter. Sit down and wait for me while I get your mother situated.” Then she called out for me to help her.

I asked my mother if she was sure she shouldn’t go in there with me. Her great dread had pooled around the corners of her mouth, showing deep creases I had never noticed. She said, “I told you,
Mother’s
got him. Just go do what she says.”

My grandmother was leading Mr. Baines’s mother to the big mohair chair, the one that was the size of the side-show lady, and shouting in her ear, “Look here! We’re going to drag a fern over by you. Enjoy yourself.”

After my grandmother and I had scraped the floor pulling the planter across the room, Mrs. Baines frowned at the fern and then at me and said, “This isn’t mine. Mine is pretty, very pretty. This one isn’t mine.” I could’ve been a nurse who’d brought her the wrong child to take home from the hospital. She kept on with how this wasn’t hers, how hers was very pretty, actually, very, very pretty.

My grandmother said, “I
know
this isn’t yours. Just pretend it is. Baby-sit it.”

Mr. Baines was waiting for us at the kitchen door. He asked my grandmother what she had meant. Who was at the Sir Walter? He sounded innocent. In fact, he sounded so thoroughly blameless that I would’ve acquitted him at that moment. My grandmother, having a much dimmer view of human nature, pressed him.

She said, “You mean to tell me you don’t know who just checked in at the hotel?”

He said he did not know, but he believed he was about to be told.

If my grandmother had had a whip, she’d have cracked it. She shouted out loud, “Sophia! Come tell him who’s at the hotel!”

My mother was barely in the room before my grandmother said again, “Tell him, Sophia. Tell him who it is who’s in town.”

Mr. Baines looked at my mother in a pleading sort of way. She said, “Richard, your ex-wife’s in town. She’s planning to stay for two weeks.”

He swore he didn’t know.

My mother asked how he could not know. She started to cry, and I pulled out a chair for her and one for myself. He said it again. He had no idea.

My grandmother said she didn’t believe him. A woman wouldn’t show up uninvited on Christmas Eve, flagging her ex-husband’s name around, carrying what must be two weeks’ worth of luggage.

He said, “Well, yes she would. She’s been having some problems lately.”

My mother asked him how he knew, and he told us he had talked to her recently. She called him after she received news of her brother’s death in Italy. “She was very blue,” he said. “Her father died early in the year. Her mother died the year before. This is her first Christmas alone. She said she wanted to come to Raleigh and visit, just visit for a while. I told her that would be inappropriate, but she’s always had her own ideas about what is and isn’t appropriate. So she came.”

I believe my mother thought he sounded a little too sorry for the woman. I certainly thought so. It worried me that all that compassion would get him into trouble. My mother laid her head on the table. She was struggling to cry without making noise, like a mad little girl who’s been made to keep her head on her desk during recess. I rubbed her back a bit, and then did something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I smelled of my fingertips. There was that same scent of baby powder that I used to smell on my hands as I lay in bed after I had rubbed her back at night. When I was first sent to school, I would only pretend to wash my hands in the morning, so I could then sit in the classroom and pretend to listen, with my fingers up in front of my nose. What a sight we must have made for Mr. Baines! My grandmother looking so murderous. Me sniffing my fingertips. He sat across the table from the three of us, squeezing his eyes together toward his nose the way men do when they’re trying to fend off tears. He asked if he could talk to my mother alone.

My grandmother said, “There
is
no alone here.”

He didn’t argue about that. He said he’d just wanted to explain things. Maybe he should go to the hotel. Maybe he should call. He didn’t know. He rattled on, explaining why he was having such difficulty explaining himself. My grandmother interrupted and said, “Just tell me this. Do you want Sophia or don’t you?”

He said he did.

“Well, that settles that,” she said. “You can’t have two. Having two is against my rules. Start the car. I’ll get my coat.”

He asked where they were headed.

She said they were going to town. She was planning to sit in the car and wait for him to tell the woman she was going back where she belonged.

“But it’s Christmas,” he said. He couldn’t let somebody down on Christmas. He pitied her. Didn’t we feel sorry for somebody who showed up like that, still using her husband’s name two years after their divorce?

My grandmother asked him if he realized how much gall it had taken for the woman to do this. She said, “Hell, I wouldn’t even do that. Neither would Sophia.”

Mr. Baines was careful not to sound plaintive when he asked again that the woman be left alone until Christmas had passed. He said he’d take her to dinner, and that was all, and if we were worried, we were welcome to come along.

My mother lifted her head. She said, “Richard, I’ve listened all I’m going to. I’ll say this once: If you don’t do it to her on Christmas, I’ll do it to you.”

My grandmother stood up and said, “She’s right. Go get the car.”

He asked if we had any idea how large a penalty would be charged to change a train reservation. My grandmother found her purse, made a check out to Seaboard Coast Line and handed it to Mr. Baines, saying, “I didn’t expect you to pay for this. They’ll take care of it at the front desk. That ought to keep tongues wagging in town for six months or more.” She explained that she could run a woman out of town on a rail on Christmas Eve, but she would reimburse her for her trouble. Mr. Baines said he couldn’t accept her money. He’d created the mess, and he’d pay to clean it up. My grandmother tore the check in two and tossed the pieces in the trashcan, saying, “Good. Now, let’s go.” As she tied her old nappy scarf under her chin, she said, “Sophia, I’ll be back in a little bit. Get yourself together while I’m gone.”

Mr. Baines tried to touch my mother on the arm, but she wouldn’t let him. “Get rid of her,” she said. “And don’t you ever do this to me again.” She ran to her room and slammed the door. We could hear her big, heaving cries.

So off my grandmother went, to sit alone in a dark car parked in front of the Sir Walter. I wondered whether she laughed to herself at how this hotel was now the place where two generations of Birch women had taken hold of their lives. I imagined her wondering whether someday I’d make my own trip there. As she had predicted, Mr. Baines needed very little time to sort out his life. He was in the hotel for twenty minutes. Of all the things we knew or thought we had known about Mr. Baines, there was one singular truth: He was too much of a gentleman to let an old lady wait a long time in an automobile. He would correct his life in a hurry and rush back to my grandmother, apologizing all the way home that he was sorry to have kept her waiting. This certain fact of his gentlemanly nature thus came in very handy for us all.

Mr. Baines’s mother and I listened to the radio while they were away. When I asked if I could get her anything, she said she wanted some cookies. She was very adamant about this. I told her we had none. She said, “How long am I supposed to be here?” I told her I wasn’t sure. She told me that if I intended for her to stay, I’d find some cookies. I remember staring at the Pasquotank mantel clock, hoping Mr. Baines and my grandmother would return in a hurry. When they did, Mr. Baines went directly to my mother’s room. I heard her door open to let him in, and that was all I heard for a time.

My grandmother sat down and engaged Mrs. Baines in conversation about past Christmases. The old woman started cataloguing every gift she had ever gotten or given—a true feat for someone whose life had been reduced to watering ferns and asking her son to tell her, one more time, exactly what his name was. She didn’t mention what had seemed to be an immoderate desire for cookies. She was describing a fleur-de-lis pin her husband had given her in 1920 when we heard my mother and Mr. Baines coming down the hall. He was carrying a suitcase. My mother was wearing a black tricorne hat and her sable jacket. She stopped in front of us and spoke with not a grain of emotion, the way she talked to my grandmother’s patients when she explained exactly what was about to be done to a lacerated foot or an abscessed gum. She said, “Richard and I are driving to South Carolina tonight to get married. Then we’re going to the Atlantis for a week. There’s nothing to do at the beach in the winter, but we’re going anyway.”

My grandmother asked who had thought of this. Mr. Baines said they had decided together. He had planned to propose the next morning and then have the service sometime in the spring, but they had chosen to go ahead now.

I asked my mother how she felt about these plans. She knew I was asking her if this wasn’t another version of the first one. How would she feel when the proprietor of one of those tacky chapels told her he didn’t accept checks or ration coupons, cash only? And how would she feel when his wife walked out of the back room to witness the ceremony, wearing curlers in her hair, bedroom slippers, smelling of cheap toilet water that might call up the raw-onion odor?

My mother said, “I’m okay. This is what I want. I’d rather have it this way than wait. Don’t worry about me. Just please look after Richard’s mother until her nurse starts back to work.” She wasn’t smiling, but she looked happy. Her pleasure was solid, bone-deep, the sort that outlives perfect proposals and ceremonies. Mr. Baines wore this same look. I remember thinking how good it was that their faces matched.

His mother came up out of her fog and asked where everybody was going. Mr. Baines squatted in front of her and calmly explained everything, and then said, “Remember when I asked if I could have the ring Dad gave you? Remember that?”

She spread the fingers of her left hand out and pointed to a large ring crusty with diamonds. She looked at it as though she were seeing it for the first time and asked, “This one?”

He said, “Yes, Mother, that one.”

She pulled it off her finger, and held it out to him, saying, “Don’t lose it, or I’ll flail you.” He promised he would not.

My grandmother apologized that she couldn’t donate a gentleman’s wedding band to him, the one my grandfather had worn, because she had already donated it to the war crowd. “And besides,” she told him, “it would have brought you only a world of ill luck, despair, and endless grief. When the war’s over, I’ll buy you a nice one. Do without until then.” Mr. Baines thanked her, and then he went out to his car and brought in gifts for my grandmother, his mother, and me. He put them under the tree, asking me to make sure his mother opened hers and understood whom it was from.

Every time my grandmother said, “Sophia, you’d better call me,” my mother promised to call from South Carolina.

When she was inside the car, my grandmother and I leaned in and held her. She snapped at my grandmother for knocking her hat off center and had me take the pins out and put it on straight again. When the hat was on right and the car door was shut, my grandmother was not by me. She had walked back to the house. She was standing on the top step, her hands somewhere over her stomach, lost in the folds and folds of dark brown crepe. I saw a hand emerge. It waved, then disappeared again.

That evening, my grandmother and I baked Christmas cookies. We decorated them using a hypodermic needle. It worked beautifully. Old Mrs. Baines ate the cookies faster than we could set them in front of her. We put her to bed in my mother’s room and went to listen to Mr. Roosevelt’s fireside chat. My grandmother stayed up for
Holiday with Strings,
but I dosed myself with some of my mother’s evening primrose and went to bed, nursing, as I was, the great hole in my heart. I lay there and worried that my mother had just ruined another memory for herself, and I worried that she would return, pack her belongings, move out, and grow too lonesome. I had my grandmother, but all my mother would have while Mr. Baines worked was the old woman, the radio, volunteer work, books, and magazines. There would be a gap where my grandmother and I had been. Especially where my grandmother had been. She took up quite a bit of room in one’s life. I worried what would happen when my mother started appearing at our door each morning, eager to stay there until it was time for Mr. Baines to come home from work. This was what I predicted for her. And I also foresaw big fights, when my grandmother would say things like, “Sophia! You finally have the life you wanted. Go live it!” I had to talk to my grandmother about this. I had to have her tell me how things would be, and so I went to her. She had turned all the lights off in the living room except for those on the Christmas tree, and she was sitting there rocking, listening to Britten’s
A Ceremony of Carols.
I told her all my worries. She said, “No. Sophia will be happy. So will you, and so will I. Go to sleep.”

W
HEN I AWAKENED early on Christmas morning to slip my grandmother’s presents underneath the tree, I saw that Santa Claus had come. My grandmother had laid everything out, and now she sat in the kitchen with Mrs. Baines. When my grandmother saw me, she patted Mrs. Baines on the hand, moved her coffee over, and put the cup between her palms. Then she got up, walked over, and whispered into my ear, “I got her talking about Lee. She remembers
seeing
him. Then I asked her what I’d fed her for breakfast.” My grandmother moved her hands as if she were releasing doves into the air. She said, “Gone. Gone entirely.”