Life After Life (5 page)

The business was suggested to her by Joanna, who sometimes comes to visit after she has left the nursing wing where she has helped someone cross over. She has told Sadie that some days—especially with those she has grown close to—she has to reenter life slowly, like someone coming up from a deep dive slowly so she won’t get the bends. “I get it,” Sadie was able to say. “I know what you mean.” Lord, the bends. She has learned so much from that crazy Paul that she wouldn’t know otherwise. He loves to scuba dive and he has jumped from a plane, too, which scares her to this minute to imagine so she never thinks about that, and if her mind tries to, she conjures up little Rudy with his scruffy flat face and maybe sings a song in her head. Lots of times all she can think is those instrumental songs from that album Stanley Stone plays all day long each and every day, an album that was popular back when her kids were little, Herb somebody or another, loud drum beats and lots of horns. It gets stuck in your head and won’t go away—catchy songs that make her want to sip a highball or smoke a cigarette—things she has only done a couple of times in her whole life.

Stanley Stone suggested Sadie call her business
Indecent
Exposure, and of course she politely told him she would do no such thing. It is hard to watch him decline so and she goes the extra mile to be kind and courteous. She has known him her whole adult life—a highly intelligent and respectable man—who now late in his life says all kinds of things—ugly things—the kinds of things you would hear teaching junior high school, which she did once in 1965 and then went running and begging to be placed back with her third graders.

“There’s a lot in this place that
is
indecent and
needs
to be exposed,” Stanley said one day when they heard that one of the Barker sisters had been drugged so she didn’t wake up for eighteen hours. “And I am not talking about old breasts and asses. I’m talking about laziness, negligence, and incompetence.” He sounded just like a lawyer and then all of a sudden he looked at his poor son, Ned, who has had enough troubles of his own, and threatened to expose himself right there in the dining room. The only person who laughed was Toby Tyler, but she laughs at just about everything. Toby taught school her whole adult life, too, so often they talk about the classroom even though Toby taught high school English and coached field hockey as well as drove an activity bus. Toby grew up in South Carolina but chose to retire here because she threw a dart at a map of Georgia and the Carolinas with the idea she would go wherever it said. Her given name was not Toby, but she gave it to herself because she said that as a child she always wished she could just run off and join the circus. She said at first she just pretended she was related to the real Toby Tyler since they shared a last name, but then one day she thought,
Why don’t I just be him?
She said as soon as she changed her name, she felt so much better.

Sadie told her that’s what her business is all about. She invites people to bring in their photographs and make a wish, maybe talk about something that might’ve happened but didn’t or a place someone might’ve visited but hadn’t. There is a power in what you see. Seeing is believing. Bennie Palmer, who without a doubt is her very favorite student from all of her years teaching, still comes to see her and they talk about such things. He is a skillful magician and has been since he was a child and he also works as manager of the movie theater even though his wife is eager for him to do otherwise. He was in the same class as Joanna Lamb and he was as loud and cute as a button as she was quiet and kind of lost. Now he seems lost and she is confident, though neither of them fully memorized the opening of the Gettysburg Address as they were supposed to do. Only two children in all her years mastered that whole first part. One is a bank president in Omaha, Nebraska, and came to see her when in town for his mother’s funeral, and the other was a girl who got pregnant and dropped out in the tenth grade, a beautiful girl who just never had a chance coming out of the kind of squalor she lived in. It would break your heart to see and know what some children come from. Bennie, or Ben they call him now, has a daughter, Abby, who also visits all the time. She is an angel, looks just like him and is such a nice girl. It’s hard to say the same for his wife. The wife is that kind of girl who will cheat on a test or steal something from another child’s desk and then act very haughty if she gets caught, no sense of right or wrong or moral guilt. It is clear that Bennie is not very happy and he needs to talk about it more than he does, but that’s a boy for you; a boy will hold in so much bad stuff sometimes until it makes him sick to his stomach, and Sadie believes wholeheartedly that our society is to blame for that. If people would let little boys spend more time with the dress-up clothes and doll babies, it would help, but even Horace was funny about all that, not really enjoying when Paul used to like to wear an apron and rock his sister’s Betsy Wetsy.

Sometimes she and Bennie talk about the things that happened about a hundred years ago when he was in the third grade, but usually they just talk about how they both create illusions and how this can make a person who is feeling sad feel a little better. Sadie believes that this is the conversation that might lead him to open up his heart one of these days soon.

This is her craft and it is the craft she started when everyone else was doing scrapbooks. The most famous scrapbook at Pine Haven is that of Mrs. Marge Walker who keeps a murder and crime scrapbook. Her husband was a judge for years and years and so it all comes natural to her she says, just like Lorice Boone believes she is the best haircutter because her father was a barber. Lorice had a booming business among those who are out of touch with reality until management confiscated her scissors. Rachel Silverman is the one who reported her after seeing her snip away the waist-length braids of someone on the nursing wing without asking. Sadie wanted to ask why Rachel was even way over there in that part of the building, but she hasn’t yet. Rachel is very secretive about her comings and goings and has to be treated with great care. There was always at least one child in class who needed this kind of extra attention. They appear so strong and tough and yet you know there is a tender place just aching to be healed—so tenderhearted you could tap with a knife and it would fall right off the bone.

“You have to stop her,” Rachel said when reporting Lorice. “Otherwise this place is going to look like Auschwitz.”

Stanley Stone said he’d never heard of Auschwitz and asked was that the new grocery store out on Highway 211, and Rachel Silverman raised her open hand like she might slap him and then said something about him being a g-d demented idiot, marched into her apartment, and slammed the door so hard that the plaque with her name on it fell off.

“I did a good thing,” Lorice told management when they came to take her scissors. “She looks a sight better with a haircut.” Lorice pointed to the woman who was dozing in the solarium, not a hair on her head longer than a half an inch. If the woman had family that ever visited, Sadie suspects they’d be upset, but as far as she knows, no one has visited that woman in years. Lorice said the sisters, especially Vanessa, had never minded if she cut their hair, especially if she gave them cookies. Rachel Silverman had made Daisy, the other sister, cry one day, saying she did not want to crochet or buy or eat a g-d cookie, and then Sadie explained to her that the sisters are sweet as can be, would never hurt a flea, which is why they allow Lorice to do their hair in the first place, and so now Rachel is so good to them, always buying those crocheted Oreos and Fig Newtons and then slipping them back into Daisy’s bag when she’s not looking so she can sell them again.

Rachel Silverman says she has no family either, which makes it easy to make all kinds of big decisions. Sadie is getting closer to her, no doubt about it, like luring a stray cat or dog into your home. Rachel is not very trusting and you can see it. People get old, but in the eyes they might as well be eight—always they are about eight—and so Sadie is well versed in eight-year-old fear. She knows the heart of eight-year-olds and believes when all is said and done and hard times come, that’s how old we are in the heart—forever eight years old. She used to love to set up the abacus at the front of the room and have children tell what they know of their lives one bead at a time. Holding to the little round wooden bead gave them confidence as they spoke the facts of their lives. I was born in Hamlet. I have a sister and a dog. I love grits. I hate mayonnaise. Things like that. They loved seeing the beads accumulate, transferring over to the ten spot. It was a lesson in math and English. It was a lesson in socializing.

Marge Walker is the only person Sadie has difficulty socializing with. Marge is lately fixated on the way people are stealing copper wiring out of air-conditioning units, most recently a church in town, and she is quite certain the Mexicans have done it. Mexicans or coloreds. She says all this loud as the PA system at school and there sits any number of people of different races from different places.

“How stupid is that?” Rachel asked in a loud voice, and Sadie was the only one who returned her gaze. She allowed eye contact, which said,
I am listening to you. I am hearing what you say and I am in agreement.
Sadie bets it won’t be anytime at all before Rachel shows up with a picture or two, and if it turns out she doesn’t have photos either, it’s no problem at all. For those who have no pictures—as sad as that is, it is sometimes true—well, Sadie has a Polaroid camera her oldest son sent her and so she takes the photo herself and then puts the person on a backdrop of a particular place. She put the woman who got all her hair cut off (before it all got cut off) out on the grandstrand on a beautiful sunny day pictured in
Southern Living.
She used her Sharpies to turn the wheelchair into a beautiful red beach chair and then added a little yellow sand pail as if the woman might get up and go hunt for shells any minute.

Paul said to slow down on the film, it’s getting hard to replace and thus very expensive. He says he will teach her how to “do digital and print,” which she has no idea about, but Abby does. Twelve years old and the child knows all about digital and print and all sorts of other things you might plug in that Sadie has never heard of.
What will you do when the power goes out?
Sadie has asked her, but nobody seems too worried about that. Sadie’s children all send her travel magazines and such and call so many times during the week she can’t keep up with it all. Paul wants her to move to where he is, but
no,
she keeps saying
no;
she says Horace is next door and this is her home. She did not tell them where to move and live and they owe her the same consideration. Paul is stubborn and keeps trying, but in the meantime he just reads every word of her monthly bill from Pine Haven, makes phone calls and asks lots of questions as she taught him to do and, of course, best of all, sends pictures of the children and all the brochures from conventions and retreats for ophthalmologists so she can send a customer anywhere in the world. There was even one trip advertised to go down the Amazon and she pulled it out to show Benjamin and Abby just the other day because he knows that
The African Queen
is one of her very favorite movies and he has promised to bring a copy for her to watch someday soon. Toby saw that photo and claimed it immediately because her whole room is decorated with her travels around the world, compliments of Exposure and Sadie’s skill as an illusionist, which is what Ben calls her. Just yesterday she took Stanley Stone’s photo and put him in the ring with a wrestler man he called the Undertaker, a horrible-looking big man with long stringy hair and ghoulish eyes. His picture was in a wrestling magazine Stanley’s son, Ned, had brought to him hidden in a bag. She doesn’t blame him a bit for hiding it.

“Stanley, how is Ned doing?” she asked while cutting and gluing.

“Okay, I guess. He’s teaching at your old school—weren’t you at Sandhills Elementary?”

“I was indeed except that one year they sent me to junior high. Forty years at Sandhills,” she said, so relieved to feel like the old Stanley was back. He was relaxed in the chair, his eyes closed. “You know, isn’t it funny how in life our paths didn’t cross too much. I mean if you needed a hammer, you went to our store, and I suspect if we’d needed your kind of legal advice we would have gone to you.” She had to pause to carefully cut out the Undertaker, who was so ugly it was frightening. He was one who might be served well to run into Lorice with her scissors, that stringy old mess of hair and Stanley is starting to look a little unkempt himself, though she is not quite ready to tell him that. “But we went to different churches and between my teaching and doing all I did at home, I didn’t venture very far so I really never knew Martha at all except to say hello at the store. I didn’t get to teach Ned; he was in Renee Bingham’s class, but I recall all the children saying how he made everybody laugh.”

“He was definitely the class clown. He had a hard time in those early years.” Stanley opened an eye and then it was like a switch flipped and something blew into him, and he sat up and started talking about the wrestling event he was going to have right there in the common room. He shook his fist and all signs of nice Stanley were gone. “I’m gonna take somebody out,” he said, and she waved her hand, tried to see if she couldn’t lure him back to where he had been. It just breaks her heart to see him this way. Sadie grew up with Stanley’s older sister, but he was several years younger so they ran in different circles. Still he was a person people heard about. “I remember when people were talking about you getting married. First in your law school class and marrying a beautiful girl from northern Virginia. People said how lucky Martha was to meet such a smart and handsome fellow and they hoped she was good enough for you.” Sadie hates when people say such things, but they really did say that at the time and she thought he would like to hear such a fine compliment about himself. “You were the golden prize of this town, Stanley. They said you were Phi Beta Kappa and the best dancer in your fraternity house.”