Sand in My Eyes (20 page)

“Are you sure you’re not writing a book?” Gwendolyn asked again.

“No,” I said firmly on Fedelina’s behalf. Gwedolyn needed to hear a firm “no.” She was a strong personality and it was only strong “no”s that got through to her. And besides, I didn’t want Fedelina to slip and tell her about her mother, and all those letters and the gardening notebooks. Gwendolyn would eat it all up, take it back to New York, digest it, and, within a year, Cora’s intimate letters would be sitting on bookshelves nationwide. As wonderful as it sounded, I didn’t want Gwendolyn to be the one when it was me privately reading them and inspiring ideas of my own.

“So, Anna,” Gwendolyn said next. “What is Timothy getting you for your birthday?”

“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to reveal anything about my marriage. “It’s a surprise.” I plucked a petal from a daisy I was holding beneath the table.
He loves me
. I wanted to believe. But I couldn’t.
He loves me not
. I knew that as I plucked another.

“My Oscar, he never told me he loved me,” Fedelina said, “in all our years of marriage. ‘I’m still here, aren’t I?’ he’d say when I asked him. He was a hard man to figure. It’s why, from time to time, I had to stop and ask him what he was thinking.”

I plucked another petal.
He loves me
. Nope.
He loves me not
.

“Why don’t we sing to Anna now,” Gwendolyn announced. “I do have to get going.”

“Skip it,” I insisted. “Cut the pie.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gwendolyn said, looking at her watch. “Like it or not, we’re going to sing.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

BELVEDERE

A FEW MORE MOUTHFULS
and I’ll be done,” Fedelina told me early the next morning, when I stopped my reading and looked up. She had a tray propped over her and was slowly eating what smelled and looked like pancakes.

“Take your time,” I said, setting my manuscript on the floor and sinking more comfortably into the armchair beside her bed. “So how was your night? Did you sleep okay?”

“Yes, other than wondering whether this is going to be the night,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The night that I die,” she told me.

“Fedelina!” I said in a scolding tone.

“It’s okay, Anna. When you’re my age, that’s how you think—you think about how you want to exit the world. And if you really want to know, I hope I pass in my sleep. It’s what I wish for now.”

I didn’t know what to say. I had wished for all kinds of things throughout my life, but never gave thought as to how I wanted to exit the world.

“I don’t want to die in the morning,” she went on. “I like mornings. I never know who might show up for a visit. But sometimes when my family, and now you, come and sit in that chair, I feel pressure, like I better
have something good to say, and not talk about the pancakes that I’m eating for breakfast.”

“I don’t mind hearing about pancakes,” I said. “Are they good?”

“They’re soggy and I’d rather be eating pie,” she said. “I told my children when they started looking, searching for a nursing home, that my number two criterion was good food. Would you believe they sampled the breakfast at each facility, and this place was the best? Would you like some?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I had a coffee and biscotti at the hotel.”

“I know it sounds bad, Anna, but I’m not always in the mood for talking or entertaining,” she went on, “or saying anything good. Sometimes I want to listen. It’s why I enjoy it when all my children come at once. I can then passively lie in my bed and listen to them all talking, not to me, but to each other. It’s my favorite form of entertainment.”

I didn’t want her feeling like she had to say anything good or maintain a conversation with me, so I sat there, not saying a word, watching as she spooned pancakes into her mouth. It was the first time I had seen anyone eating pancakes with a spoon. Then again, they didn’t look like pancakes are supposed to look. They looked more like mush.

“You’re quiet today,” she finally said, after wiping her mouth with a napkin. “What’s wrong, are caterpillars eating your herbs?”

“I was letting you eat,” I said with a laugh.

“Well, I’m done. Help me slide this tray away, will you?”

I did, and then sat back down, watching her fingers fidget at the sides of her bed as they had the day before, and I knew she was looking for the remote control. I also knew where it was, wedged between the bed rail and the mattress the way her glasses had been the day before. I handed the remote to her, and it felt good being helpful. Helping her wasn’t hard. I was learning her routine, and a simple routine it was.

“I’m glad you’re back,” she said. “I woke up looking forward to you showing up. Just don’t ask me any of life’s big questions.”

“Why would I do that?” I smiled.

“It happens when you’re as old as me—people look at you like you’re an exhibit in a museum. I just hope, if they stare at me long enough, something
I say might make sense or sound wise so they can go home and feel content, like they got their money’s worth coming to see me in the first place.”

I didn’t want to tell her that, while sitting here, I too was expecting to catch from her mouth a falling morsel or two of life’s precious insight. It’s what people hope for when talking to a woman of her age.

“To tell you the truth, Anna, the older I get the more I realize how little I know.”

“You might think you know very little,” I told her, “but I think you know a lot.”

“I may
know
a lot,” she said, “but there’s very little I am certain of. There’s a difference between the two.”

“What are you certain of?”

“I don’t want to bore you.”

“You couldn’t bore me,” I insisted. “No one is bored by what a nearly one-hundred-year-old woman has to say.”

“Jobs, Anna, they end. People disappoint, and children grow up, but there’s this song—this simple childhood song that I can’t get out of my head. I find myself humming it all the time now, especially at night, when it feels like everyone in this place is sleeping but me.”

“What song?”

She took a big breath in and let it all out. “It goes like this, Anna, if you really want to know.” And in a cracking voice she sang the words, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”

I wanted to join in, for I knew the lyrics as well, but I didn’t. I listened, and, when she finished, I told her how beautiful it was.

“Nothing too scholarly or profound,” she said. “Nothing I had to search the world over to discover. It’s just an old childhood song, and, as old as I am, I cling to it. You can add that to your book if you like,” she said.

I took hold of her hand, not knowing what to say.

“Read me more of your story,” she said, and so I did.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

FUNNY HOW THE “HAPPY BIRTHDAY”
song—one sung to me thirty-seven years in a row, one of the happiest songs there is—could suddenly sound different, sad. I didn’t want tears dripping down my face in front of Fedelina and Gwendolyn as they festively gave it their out-of-tune all.

“Make a wish,” Fedelina said when it ended.

I closed my eyes and tried, but what is a woman to wish for when none of her ridiculous little impractical dreams has come true?

“She’s giving this serious attention,” said Gwendolyn. If only they knew that for years I had been longing for the same thing, and how, when I turned thirty-one, I gave myself one more year for it to come true, and when I turned thirty-two I put an extension on the wish, and when I turned thirty-three, I did it again, and how I gave up on it for a few years. Now that I was turning thirty-seven, time was up.

“We’d love to know what you’re thinking of, Anna,” Gwendolyn said.

But I would never tell. I could never tell anyone of my wish to write, my longing to add a simple piece of literary art to the world, and about how many times, while blowing out candles, I had said, “This is the year.” Rather than planning, brainstorming, outlining, or talking about what I might write, I wished for nothing more than to write, to find the time in my crazy, hectic life to write!

“The look on your face, dear, has us wondering,” my neighbor said.

I could never tell them I was wallowing, not wishing, and grieving the
realization that many wishes a woman has for her life never do come true. And despite the story I had started this week, at thirty-seven, if it hasn’t happened yet, if I haven’t penned a slightly good novel or written a pleasant short story, well—I didn’t want my candles burning out, so I started hoping instead for more attainable things, like a more adult-oriented, spa-like bathroom, with a scum-less round tub and no pirate toys. Oh, and love, the romantic kind I hear about in songs—the ones that make me cry.

I opened my eyes and, to my astonishment, felt my latter wish coming true, for there he was—the kayaker I bumped into in the water, Fedelina’s son, Cora’s grandson. Now I believed—believed that somehow the two of us were meant to meet, that there was a reason, unbeknownst to me, but a reason. And he was looking at me oddly, in a way that Timothy never did, like he could see through me and was reading my mind, and had heard what I was wishing for. I wondered whether he could detect the liking I had for him, the liking I could feel on every level of my existence.

“It only comes around once a year,” he said, “Don’t let me stop you.”

“Stop me from what?”

“Blowing out your candles.”

“Oh,” I said. I could feel my mind getting away from me, floating to the top of a nearby Brazilian pepper, and Brazilian peppers are bad, nonnative and intrusive, and should be pulled from the island, and my feelings for him were bad, too. They didn’t belong in the mind of a married woman, a mother of three! And I wondered whether he was feeling it, too. I think he was. The laws of science don’t allow a powerful reaction on one end without an equal or opposite reaction on the other, and if it wasn’t scientific—the effect he had on me—I don’t know what it was, only that a connection so strong doesn’t exist on one end only. But as I blew out the flickering flames representing the years of my life, he looked away like he didn’t care at all.

“I’m heading to the hardware store,” he told his mother as she pulled the candles from my pie. “I’ll be working on your stairs today.”

“The stairs aren’t so bad, Liam,” his mother said. “Why don’t you relax?”

“They lean to the left. It’s dangerous,” he told her, casting me a glance.

I quickly nodded, like I agreed with his assessment of her stairs, and with anything else he might have to say—his views on politics and religion, too. I think I would have nodded and smiled had he told me there was a bobcat about to jump into my lap.

“You need anything from the store?” he asked her.

“No,” she told him, and I felt like blurting out, “Nails.” Suddenly there was nothing more I wanted on my thirty-seventh birthday than general household nails, and to run off with Liam to the hardware store. I don’t know why, but there are things in life no one will ever understand, things that are beyond our comprehension, defy logic, and make no rational sense, like why did the cat run away with the spoon?