Charms for the Easy Life (23 page)

It occurred to me as we stood watching Mrs. Baines talking to herself, fumbling around for memories, that we’d not gotten her anything for Christmas. Mr. Baines had left that large box for her, but I hated the thought of her opening just that one thing while my grandmother and I opened the ten or twelve boxes marked with our names. I told my grandmother, and she volunteered to let Mrs. Baines open all her gifts, so long as she didn’t become attached to anything. So we called Mrs. Baines into the living room, exclaiming that Santa Claus had come.

I handed out presents, as this had always been my job. Then I sat down on the floor by the tree. There were several boxes left. I realized I had let my mother go without giving her my presents. They were all under the tree:
The G-String Murders
by Gypsy Rose Lee; a used though first edition of Edna Ferber’s
So Big
to add to her collection; a beaded purse; two pairs of stockings I’d stood in line three hours to buy; and a renewal card for
True Story,
a gift my grandmother lamented each year even though, I knew, she read it on the sly. My grandmother had been more practical. She had paid for the reading glasses that had recently been prescribed for my mother. These tortoiseshell glasses were with her in South Carolina. My grandmother had also given her money to have her teeth, hair, and fingernails fixed, and a war bond that she said would finance my mother’s shoe binges well into her dotage. I stacked all my mother’s presents in a corner, for her to open on her return, and tried to think nothing else of her. But it was difficult. What was my mother doing at that moment? I asked my grandmother how she thought my mother was getting along, what she might be doing.

She said, “Same thing everybody’s doing who got married last night.”

I thought of my mother in bed with Mr. Baines, sleeping. My mother, again, was having the time of her life. I left them there and joined the conversation my grandmother was trying to have with Mrs. Baines. It was about nothing more than the weather, but still, my grandmother had to take hold and drag the woman from subject to verb, as she strayed so wildly in between. Mrs. Baines was due to say which season she preferred, but instead she asked if she could open a present. I told her to go right ahead. She tore the paper off one of the boxes for my grandmother from Mr. Baines. My grandmother leaned way over into her, and when Mrs. Baines moved the tissue paper and uncovered the present, my grandmother shouted, “Good God! It’s Lee!” I halfway expected the General to come riding up out of the box on his horse, that’s how excited she was. She moved the box from Mrs. Baines’s lap to her own and pulled out a volume of the Douglas Southall Freeman biography of Robert E. Lee. Although she could’ve held forth at great length on exactly where the General had gone wrong and why, she had wanted to read this biography. I asked whether she had mentioned it to Mr. Baines. She hadn’t. He had read her mind. Mrs. Baines didn’t complain about having the present removed from her lap. She was already tearing into the next one. It was another volume of the Lee biography. My grandmother was thrilled. She offered to help Mrs. Baines with the other boxes, sure as she was that she’d find the other two volumes. They were both there.

My grandmother started going through the books with a ferocious intensity, so I told Mrs. Baines to open the big box from her son. What was in there? A small oil painting of a white-columned brick house with ferns hanging the length of the porch. She held it up and propped it on her knees, turned so I could see it. She pointed to the painting the way librarians do when they’re reading a picture book to a circle of children, and with a sudden clarity of mind she said, “This is my home. This is where I live.” Then she turned it back around and smiled at it. I could see all those tossed and tumbled memories doing her the courtesy of sorting themselves out and lining up, marching out for her.

My grandmother had stopped riffling through her books. She looked at Mrs. Baines’s face and then at the painting. I know she was seeing the same thing I was. Sitting there beside Mrs. Baines, she looked healthy and strong and safe in the knowledge that not one memory had ever left her. I doubted she would abide any slippage. She would demand to leave this world knowing everything she had ever known. As I sat by the Christmas tree, I realized how intimidating my grandmother would be to all those trillions of dead people who’d never met her.

Mr. Baines had been as kind to me as he had been to my grandmother. He gave me a crystal vanity box and a pearl bracelet. I opened all the presents I’d seen on the bed, and then my grandmother opened hers, or rather, Mrs. Baines opened them and my grandmother lifted them out of her lap. Nothing my mother and I gave her could compete with the Lee biography, but she was very gracious, making a fuss over each of the presents before she laid them to the side and started poring through the books again. My mother gave her a set of antique scalpels that had been used on Civil War battlefields. She also gave her a pair of kid gloves and a recently reprinted leather-bound edition of Poe’s
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
The latter was something my mother had most assuredly wanted for herself. She had achieved a reputation as an Indian giver. I gave my grandmother a pair of bookends, a copy of
The Years,
by Virginia Woolf, a writer for whom she had grieved the year before, and a framed snapshot Mr. Baines had taken of my mother and me a couple of weeks before. We were standing on our front steps, looking down at the camera. We had on matching Eisenhower jackets, and I was wearing the slacks my mother had bought and implored me to wear for the occasion. I hadn’t wanted to. Nothing, at the time, could’ve been more unfamiliar to me. I felt as if I were dressing up in a Halloween costume. My mother assured me that I looked grand, thoroughly modern. That may have been the case, but I couldn’t help tugging at the fabric between my thighs as I stood on those steps. Right before Mr. Baines snapped the picture, my mother reached over and moved my hand. “Margaret,” she said, “that looks obscene. Stop it. Smile.”

After lunch my grandmother said, “I’m bored. Let’s take a ride in the car.” We decided to drive out to the German POW camp that had just been established near Warrenton. Much had been made of the camp in the newspaper, and she was eager to see it. On the way there, she subtracted the year of Mrs. Baines’s birth from hers, and she concluded that although Mrs. Baines was only seventeen years older, she belonged to another age. She said, “If you count Mrs. Baines’s years with regard to what she has seen happen in the world, she’s much, much older than me.” When I asked for evidence of this, she said, “Appomattox, 1865. It was another age, entirely.” To me, it was not. I lumped everything that had happened from 1865 to 1929 into one pile. At school, time had been organized this way. I told my grandmother this, and she said, “No, it was another age.” For her to have divided time any other way would have made rough contemporaries of Mrs. Baines and her. She would have no part of this.

When we got about a mile from the camp, traffic slowed to the point that I felt as though I were trapped driving in the middle of a Christmas parade. Faces in the cars in front of us and behind us were glued to the windows. Even my grandmother was looking hard out of her window—one of those highly infrequent reminders that she could be like other people. Everybody knew the camp was empty, but this didn’t matter. We all just wanted to see where they would be. It would take four months for soldiers from Rommel’s crew in North Africa to get there and immediately astound the community by planting the grounds with zinnias, verbena, and rows and rows of hibiscus. I’m sure that for many spectators, it was merely something interesting to do between opening presents and eating turkey dinners.

A large package was waiting for me when we got home after dropping Mrs. Baines back with her nurse. It was from Tom. I gathered it had been delivered by his father’s all-purpose courier. My grandmother, miraculously, left me alone to open it. I read the card first. It said: “I couldn’t decide, so I gave you all my artifacts. I threw in the stockings for good measure.” Inside the package were a tiny ivory Buddha, an edition of Hawaiian love songs bound in hand-tooled leather, Chinese good-luck paper, a geisha fan, a program from the play
Pal Joey
signed by Gene Kelly, a ticket stub from the 1940 World Series, a snapshot of Tom’s mother beaming down at President Roosevelt as he handed her a small plaque, two arrowheads, a Broughton High School detention slip from 1937 marked “Two hours for general attitude,” a perfect report card of his, also from 1937, a pair of baby shoes, and a picture of him sitting in a goat cart, dated 1925. On the back of this picture was written: “Goat then ate Tom’s new gloves.” Underneath all this were two pairs of rayon stockings, which were scheduled for rationing and already in short supply. By the time I uncovered the stockings, I was crying so hard I could barely see them. I spread everything out on the kitchen table and called my grandmother into the room. When I asked what I could possibly give him in return, she told me to sit still until she returned. She brought me the easy-life charm the hanged man had given her. She said, “Meet him at the train station with it. Tell him how it was given to me by a revived man. Tell him it works, depending on your definition of easy.”

T
HE TRAIN coming in from Asheville the next day was late, as most trains were those days. I stood on the platform and waited. I spotted his sister, and then I saw the rest of his family. My grandmother had told me as I left the house that they would be there, and she had encouraged me to introduce myself and assert my right to be there. So that’s what I did. I walked over, held my hand out to his mother, and introduced myself. She was very gracious, saying, “Oh, how grand! Won’t Tom be pleased?” Everybody else responded with variations of “Yes, indeed!” Her husband took my hand, shook it firmly, and told me he felt he already knew me. He looked like those
Punch
caricatures of Winston Churchill. He was completely round, and when he finished shaking my hand, he didn’t return his hands to his pockets or to his sides. He placed them on either side of his stomach and drummed his fingers while he rocked back and forth on his heels. He had on very shiny shoes. Usually, wives tolerate husbands like this and hope they won’t get out of hand in public, but Mrs. Hawkings squeezed his arm, smiled, and reminded him that my grandmother was the one she’d been talking about. She seemed to like him enormously. She was wearing slacks and a suede jacket, and I could tell she colored her hair, although the work was becoming and apparently expensive. The ease of her movements, her good looks and style reminded me of my mother. Her four daughters looked wholesome to the core, that sort of outdoorsy, vigorous appearance common to affluent young women who ride horses, shoot skeet, sail, things like that. They had on no makeup. None was called for. Tom’s brother, whose slightly dissipated and world-weary expression I recognized from the society pages, seemed hung-over. His hand was weak and clammy. He acted as though he was afraid that if he extended himself too far, said or moved too much, he’d become ill. When his mother glared at him for not acting more thrilled to meet me, he moved away a few steps and lit a cigarette. If he had been wearing a sign around his neck, I could not have had an easier time recognizing the black sheep of this family. I was interested to see what happened when Tom arrived, how he fell into the group.

When he got off the train, he grabbed me and kissed me in front of them all. I remember I had so little idea of what to do that I sort of opened my mouth wide, like a fish, and let him take over. I wondered if our teeth were supposed to be clanging that way, and then I stumbled backward into his mother, causing her to fall into her husband. If he had been any less substantial, she would’ve fallen off the platform onto the tracks. The whole lot of them thought this hilarious, even the brother. Tom’s father boomed out, “Do you like her, boy?” Tom said he certainly did. My mouth felt numb, as though he had smashed the nerve endings, chewing my lips off. I could smell lipstick, and that meant it was smeared up to my nostrils. My hat was hanging off the back of my head. I had never felt happier.

When I tried to excuse myself to go home, they would have no part of it. They told me I was going to their house for oyster stew. Tom’s mother said, “And he’s got Santa Claus to open! I’m sure the Nazi prisoners didn’t give him any Santa Claus!” I told them I would go if I could call my grandmother when I got there. She’d be concerned about me. Tom’s mother said she could come over also. Her husband would go pick her up. She insisted on it.

With all that settled, Tom drove my car to his house. At the first stoplight we came to, I gave him the charm and explained how my grandmother had come to have it. He said it was a swell gift. He took my hand, and even when he reached up to change gears he did not let it go.

My grandmother would not come. She was waiting for a call to get through to my mother. I asked her if she thought my mother should be told where I was. She said she intended to tell her everything. It was the right time. She sounded lonely, and I promised to be home before dark. During dinner I excused myself to call her back. I felt so guilty there in this loud, happy room, knowing my grandmother was by herself, waiting for the phone to ring. When I called, the line was busy. I went back to the table and told them my grandmother must have been talking to my mother. I looked at Tom’s sisters and said, “She’s a newly-wed herself. She just married Richard Baines.” Tom’s father initiated a toast in her honor, and he insisted that I take a bottle of champagne home with me so my grandmother and I could do the same. The rest of the afternoon, I felt completely encircled by Tom’s family.

My grandmother was eating dinner when I got home. I showed her the bottle of champagne and told her what it was for. She told me we’d have to wait until she felt better. She said, “I’d hate to help you drink something that expensive and then have it come up on me.” I asked what was wrong, and she replied, “Nothing sleep won’t cure. Half the patients I’ve had could track their problems to lack of sleep.”