Life After Life (6 page)

“I danced the hootchie kootchie nekked every chance I got,” he said. “And the girls sure did like that.” He stood and acted like he might unbuckle his pants, but Sadie held one hand up and shielded her eyes with the other. She used her best teacher voice and told him to sit down and behave that very instant or he would be sent home and not allowed to return. When she looked up he was seated again and staring down at his fists.

“What I was saying is how I was thinking that we’re neighbors all over again but this time we seem to speak and talk more than we ever did in our other lives.”

“Yes.” He was calm again and so Sadie waited a long time as he sat and seemed to relax. Her ceiling fan clicked and clacked and sometimes what she hears it say is
I think I can, I think I can
just like the Little Engine That Could. Now that is a powerful message for children to hear and learn. Where do people think the president got it in the first place?
Yes we can
is just another way to say what the little engine said a long long time ago. Most everything worth saying has already been said so the trick is to make it sound new, something a child will find interesting or funny.

“I miss my other life,” she told Stanley, and worked to arrange the Undertaker’s hands so it looks like he’s choking Stanley, which is what Stanley requested. “I miss my kitchen and my black-and-white linoleum floor. My children liked to play hopscotch there. Roger would get a beach towel and throw it over a chair to make himself a little Indian tepee and he would always sit cross-legged and run his Matchbox cars round and round it while making cute little sounds and talking to himself. Do you remember your little Ned at that age? The way a child will make all sorts of sounds with their teeth and their tongues, sounds that nobody else is following.”

“I do.”

“I move room to room through my old house. I see the brightness of a late afternoon. I hear the rumble of the air-conditioning there in the window in the den, what these days they call a family room, which sounds nice, too. I see the hollyhocks at my window, tall and staked upright with their big powder-puff blooms and then just as suddenly I might smell the fire in the fireplace and hear Horace chopping wood. Do it, Stanley. Close your eyes and start wandering.” She waited until he closed his eyes and then she continued; she couldn’t wait to get back. “You will be amazed at what all you can see, how the seasons change, the light and temperature and then people come into the room and you hear the sweet voices of your young children or I smell the cologne I wore for almost twenty years—a gift from Horace every Christmas—Shalimar—just the word made me feel important. One day when a little girl—Susie Otis there in bright-colored dungarees—told me I smelled so good, I had the whole room say Shalimar.
Shalimar,
and they waved their hands like they held magic wands. I can smell the grilled cheese sandwiches my kids loved for me to make. I cut them in the shape of stars and hearts and I let Goldie wolf down the scraps.

“Sometimes it snows. It gets so quiet and beautiful in the snow. Horace is always there when it snows.

“And sometimes I hear Horace clear his throat. I see him pat his chest for heartburn. He said it was just a little heartburn. Oh, why didn’t I know? So many people get the heartburn and especially at Thanksgiving with all that food. Oh, why didn’t I know it? I have to get past that, I have to tiptoe past him, I have to get back to a good place and oh my goodness, there is that silly, silly Paul wearing a costume I made him one Halloween. He’s a sea monkey. All he wanted to be was a sea monkey and I made him a funny merman looking suit complete with a scepter and a crown, and there I am right there in front of Horace’s mother’s old upright piano. I am holding his little hand and telling him that he is the best little sea monkey there ever was.
Yes you are, oh yes you are, sweetheart.
Lord, would you look at what shoes I’m wearing! I haven’t thought of those in years. Bandolinos. Everybody thought it was something to have an Italian shoe being sold right here in Fulton and they had little different-colored straps trimming them out, otherwise it would have just been another plain old Mary Jane. They were soft. Mine were black with red straps and I always wore them when I had cafeteria duty because they were so comfortable and I could slip up on somebody doing something he ought not to be, like dotting his milk straw into his beets so he could shoot out little purple cubes at the girl beside him. Oh, Lordy, what a mess. I need to get back home and there I am back in the den and our little breakfast nook. A lot of people don’t like pine paneling, but I do. I love it. My children saw all kinds of things there in the knotholes—so creative. There was a deer and a little elf. I’m not sure why, but our daughter, Lynnette, always called that elf Doo-Doo and she was scared of him and would say at almost every meal for about a year, “Doo-Doo is watching me.” Sadie paused, remembering where she really is—Pine Haven, wheelchair, Stanley Stone across from her. This has started to happen more and more. It takes a minute to know where she is. She opened her eyes, expecting him to roar out some nasty expletive as he often does in the dining room if anyone mentions anything to do with body functions. But instead his eyes were filled with tears, his mouth opened in a silent cry. “Oh, Stanley, I’m so sorry.” She has always known how to comfort others, but she didn’t know what to do with somebody like Stanley—an intelligent, prosperous, and independent man who probably never cried in front of others in his whole life.

“I had an ugly brown car Ned called Doo-Doo,” he said, and they both laughed, Sadie relieved that the word hadn’t taken him off in the wrong direction and that she wouldn’t need to find a way to give him a hug or a comforting pat. “And remember that guy they called Doo-Doo Pendergraft? Ran the Gulf station?” She did indeed. Doo-Doo was in her class in school and so was Boobs Walters and Goat Baumgarten. She laughed to say all those names, to imagine what somebody from out of town, like Rachel, would think.

“I miss my toolshed,” Stanley said. “That’s where I went when you started talking and asked me to imagine. Ned once painted the walls without asking, he painted his name and he painted an airplane.” He sat forward and put his face in his hands. “He loved when we played airplane. I’d lie on my back and he’d hold my hands and press his stomach against my feet, and then up, up, I’d lift and he’d hold out his arms and make engine sounds.”

“Children love to paint,” Sadie said. “And they all love to fly.”

“I made him scrub the walls of my shed and then paint it all white,” he says. “I’m pretty sure I took a belt to him for not asking.”

“But he turned out really fine, Stanley. A fine boy.” She watched him slump forward again, his face hidden and shoulders shaking. “He hit a rough patch, but most of us do.” She was rolling toward him, her hand outstretched, but then he sat up so fast with an awful glare on his face that it made her drop her glue stick.

“But not as fine as the goddamned Undertaker,” he said. “This ain’t the Sistine Chapel, woman, get the lead out.”

“I take my art seriously,” Sadie said, her hand to her chest, still catching her breath. “I don’t do cheap and sloppy work and I never have, so if you are feeling impatient, perhaps you should take a recess and let me get back to you.” She pointed to her glue stick where it had rolled under a table. “And pick that up before you excuse yourself.”

“Hell, you got a whole line of people in the hall waiting for some idiot picture.”

“And I will see them all and I will do so with polite kindness.”

“Don’t you get tired of this shit? Don’t you want something for yourself?”

“Of course I do. I have a whole scrapbook of me.” She reached her hand for him to hand her the glue stick and then carefully went back to work, applying a thin line and then gently blending it. She blew to help dry the glue and then handed him his picture much sooner than she normally would. “Hold the edges or you’ll ruin it. I could show you sometime—my pictures.”

“Yeah, all right, whatever.”

“The first one I ever did was to put myself with my mother. She died when I was four. I only have a few pictures of her so she looks just the same every single time, but I keep getting older and bigger until now, there I am with my beautiful mother and I look like her grandmother. Isn’t that funny? I always try to fix it so we’re holding hands.” She looks up, but he is gone and the clock on the wall says it is ten o’clock, which is milk break at school. It costs three cents a carton and she keeps a jar on her desk to pay for those who forget their money. The note on the wall says not to forget to go to lunch.
Do not forget. Do not forget.
But Stanley left and then there was Toby wearing those cute puffy boots she loves to wear. She is traveling the world and already has pictures of herself in Rome and London and Paris and Tel Aviv and of course the Amazon and the Taj Mahal and she has even been on the moon with Neil Armstrong. This one is tricky, though. Toby warns Sadie that her new request is likely to be hard. She is taking a break from traveling and wants to do all kinds of different sports. Today she wants to be a jockey. She has brought beautiful pictures of horses, but the real trick will be taking the Polaroid with her legs all pulled up close and her arms holding the reins. She might need to get up on the footstool or daybed to get the right angle. “How many others do I have in line?” Sadie asks, thinking she might need to make Toby last even though Toby is her very best customer.

“Three.”

Sadie asks them in and their requests are pretty simple and ones she can accept and work on later in the day. One wants to go back to the Ocean Forest Hotel at Myrtle Beach like she did as a child, which will require the assistance of Abby, who can print old things off the computer. She is pretty sure that the Ocean Forest got torn down ages ago, but they will find it or something very similar. Another wants to be in the family portrait of her husband’s family. “It was when his mama turned eighty,” she says, “And it was the best day of my life, but I volunteered to take the picture so it looks like I’m not there and I
was
there and I want to be back there on the back row between my husband and his brother, Buddy.”

“That’s a tough angle,” Sadie tells her, “could you be on the other side?”

“No. I never got along with his sister and don’t want to stand near her.”

That poor child, Millie, is there, but all she wants is change so Sadie tells her to take what’s there in a little bowl by the door. That’s why the change is there in the first place, but of course she doesn’t tell her that or it would be a constant thing. She handled candy and colored paper clips this same way in her classroom. And then there’s Abby, who says she just wants to curl up in the chair or at the foot of her bed and talk. She loves that child dearly and she loves Benjamin and clearly things at home are getting worse. Clearly his illusions just are not working, and she plans to call him this very day to say that he needs to take better care of his child. You need to put her first, she plans to tell him and she plans to use poor Stanley Stone as an example of a father who did not do a good job and is lucky that Ned got through the trouble alive and is now a kind and prosperous man. She will tell Benjamin how one look on the girl’s face can tell you everything you need to know and she is even older than eight! She is twelve—almost a teenager—and old enough to start hiding behind makeup and music and acting silly and she is doing none of those things. She will tell him it might be now or never.

“I’ll be quiet while you work,” Abby says. Her hair needs to be washed and is yanked back in a lopsided ponytail and the T-shirt she’s wearing is big enough for two people. She is carrying some of those flyers with her lost puppy.

“Of course, sweetie,” she says, and motions over to her bed or the big velvet chair beside it—Horace’s chair. On a good day when she lets her room get a little too warm and humid, she can smell his pipe smoke in the fabric. There are some pistachio shells and an old ballpoint pen down under the cushion that she has not been able to throw away. If only she had found them when he was alive, she would have. But she found them late one night with Rudy on her lap and Johnny Carson on the television and she let them be—relics, touchstones, and even now she will reach and grip the pen or rub the smooth pink shells and the clickety clack of
I think I can I think I can
becomes Sadie? Sadie? Are you awake?

“Sadie?” Toby waves her plump hand back and forth. “Yoo-hoo, Earth calling Sadie.” She looks over at Abby and they both start laughing. “I can come back later if you’re needing a nap.”

“Heavens no!” she says. “I have never been a napper! I was just thinking about the best way to capture your wish.” She turns to the girl. “And actually I have some work for you if you’re up for it. I need a picture of the Ocean Forest Hotel if you can find it. And if you can’t, just find some big brick building, like in Charleston or Savannah, and we’ll make do. And I need a good picture of what was called the Old Man of the Mountain as a surprise for Joanna Lamb, who mentioned that not too long ago, I think she’s the one said it. It was somewhere way up north and the rock jutted out just like a man’s profile, and it, too, is no longer there.”

“He lost face,” Toby says, and claps her hands; honestly, she has the loudest laugh Sadie has ever heard, could nearly wake those over there in Whispering Pines. “I read about that. Face fell right off the cliff.”

“Oh, and hang the closed sign on the door,” Sadie tells the girl. This is the right thing for now, keep her busy and they can have a little heart to heart talk when it is just the two of them. The cloakroom was always a good place to have a little talk in confidence, sweaters and jackets falling to either side and muffling the words so others couldn’t hear. She once bought a cross-stitch sampler with a quote the real Mama from
Little Women
liked to say:
HOPE AND KEEP BUSY
and that was good advice. In fact, she bought it on the same trip when she herself saw the Old Man of the Mountain. The children were little and Horace was alive. She is thinking that she’d like to go back, she’d like to take her mother there, and perhaps if she can go back to that place, with her mother present, she might be able to explain what she was feeling there.
Hope and Keep Busy!
It was not an easy time and she has not wanted to look at it.