Sand in My Eyes (40 page)

I could hear the kids waking, the television on, the refrigerator door opening, the carton of milk dropping to the floor, my sons feuding, and
Marjorie whining. It took me a long time, but I knew now who I was as a mother—nutty and crazed and always in a dither, but a woman falling in tune with the beautiful chaos. I no longer knew who I was outside the cuckoo’s nest that was our home—a woman who no longer knows how to walk in high heels or spray her hair or pull nylons up without ripping them or carry on adult conversations with anyone over age five and under age eighty.

“I’m sure you knew this was coming,” he said.

I felt as if I no longer knew how to use my mouth, as if I had a beak instead, and I was glad when an osprey in a nearby nest started making noise and the children came running out onto the front porch to find us.

“We’re going to the post office,” I announced to my kids. “We’re going to buy a stamp, one stamp. A stamp costs thirty-four cents, so I need you to dig through your piggy banks, put your pennies together and count out exactly thirty-four, okay? Can you do that?”

They hurried inside, kids on a mission, and I went, too, a woman driven by a dream, believing what I wanted to believe regardless of how unrealistic it was. I went into my bedroom, turned on my computer, and printed the letter I had been working on for months, the query I had written with regard to my story. I needed an agent. All writers need agents. But I wasn’t done writing the book and didn’t believe I deserved representation, so I addressed the letter to my editor friend instead. She worked in acquisitions, and they always say it’s not what you know but who you know. I always disagreed, choosing to believe the opposite, that it’s what you know, but I was now desperate.

My old editor friend, despite having seen me picking daisies in my nightgown that day, would tell me the truth about whether the story I was working on was anything the world might want to read. And if it wasn’t, she would reject me softly, using the gentlest words.

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

BELVEDERE

I HAD STOPPED READING
the day before when I noticed Fedelina’s eyes closed. I didn’t say good-bye but left her room quietly and returned to my hotel. When I returned early the next morning, I was surprised to find her bed—Fedelina in it—parked in the hallway outside her room. She wore a brightly colored cotton gown and had pretty decorative combs in her hair. “I know what will make it better,” Fedelina said when she saw me.

“Make what better?” I asked.

“Your story.”

“You do? What?”

“The butterflies,” she said. “You’ve got to see them. They’re in the courtyard. The nurses are going to wheel me in there. I told them I wanted you to see them.”

A couple of women, along with their daughters, showed up next. They introduced themselves to me, told me their girls were homeschooled, and that they volunteered at the facility a couple of times a month.

“It’s so many lessons at once,” said one of the mothers. “The girls see living history, and hear with their own ears the stories these women have to tell.”

Then one of the young girls walked over to Fedelina’s side, kissed her on the cheek, and, with the formality of a reporter, asked a question. I
wondered whether she had the maturity to come up with it on her own, or if her mother had prompted her to ask it.

“You have lived a long time,” the girl said to Fedelina. “I’m curious, what’s one of the biggest changes you’ve seen in people as a whole throughout your lifetime?”

“That’s a good question,” Fedelina told her right away. “I’ll talk in terms of flowers because, as you know, it’s the easiest way for me. Back in the old days, when I was growing up, people knew flowering shrubs needed time to grow a solid root system before producing blooms. Today,” she went on, “people want to purchase plants already in full flower. They expect the instant landscaped look. They want things in life, and they want them right away. And another thing,” she said, “You gals today have more choices than my generation had. It’s good, but harder, too. Along with more choices comes accountability for the way our lives turn out.”

“Thank you,” the little girl said quickly, and I wondered whether she understood it all. I did and was rummaging through my bag for a pen, wanting to write it down, add it somewhere in my story.

“And women today,” Fedelina started up again, “especially my own granddaughters, they’re emotionally consumed with looking young.”

“What I’d give to look thirty-six again,” was all I said.

“I was thinking the same about eighty-six,” Fedelina said, and we laughed. “But it’s harder in some ways for you women living in today’s anti-aging society and probably easier, too, with all those products and things you can do to put off wrinkles and reduce the signs of aging. When I was younger, if you really want to know, I’d mix laundry detergent with water and rub it into my face as an exfoliant. Back then, for me, that was pampering my skin, so I’m not opposed to modern science and doing what we can to look our best. But in my day, we hardly talked of it. I guess we welcomed wrinkles with wisdom.”

“Now there are support groups for women with wrinkles,” said one of the mothers. “Anywhere you go, it’s not uncommon for it to come up in informal conversation, and for women to commiserate together.”

“You see this dress I’m wearing?” Fedelina asked us, pushing the blanket down so we could see it. “I always wondered why old ladies wore these
things, and now I know. They slip right over the head. No buttons, no zippers, and they come in a zillion different colors and patterns. They’re so darn comfortable. That’s important to me at this age, you know. At my age, comfort is more important than how I look.”

“Are you comfortable?” one of the school girls asked, and I felt bad for not having asked her this myself, and sooner.

Fedelina reached for a tube of lotion beside her on the bed, took the cap off, and started rubbing it into her arms. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Not all the time. My skin is dry. I’ve got itchy spots on my buttocks, knees, and elbows. I have tingling in my hands, and pain. It’s worse at night. I have trouble digesting my food, but constipation is the worst. Everyone does his or her best, and it’s like a team effort to keep me comfortable. I’m grateful for all the effort. I don’t want to disappoint the nurses and my family, especially all you girls who come to see me.”

“You could never disappoint us,” the girls told her.

“She’s a beautiful person, isn’t she?” I said to them.

“Thank you,” Fedelina said to me, and then focused her eyes on the girls. “You are beautiful, too,” she told them. “You are living, breathing masterpieces, created by God. Don’t let the world trick you into thinking you are not beautiful, because you are, and true beauty never fades, never dulls.”

The nurses took her bed, and, like an organized procession of people, we started to parade through the halls of Belvedere Nursing Home. Fedelina was quiet but had a look of pride and festivity in her eyes as if she were riding on a float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. I think she got a kick out of the entourage surrounding her, and she started blowing random kisses to women in the rooms we passed. They were waving back, and a few called out her name.

I looked at my old neighbor being wheeled through this final stage of her life and promised to pay older people more attention—because tomorrow I will be old, too, and what might I give then for a young person to show up and ask me my story!

“My friend Anna, here, she’s a writer,” Fedelina was saying to the girls, “and I’m one of the characters in her story!”

“Everyone has a story,” I told the girls. “Whether you build an empire from the ground up or raise a child, your lives are worthy books of their own.”

We rounded a corner, turning down a hall that had no rooms and was quieter. “We’re about there, aren’t we?” Fedelina asked me, taking hold of my hand.

“The butterfly garden?”

“No,” she said. “The end of your story.”

“Sort of,” I told her.

“What do you mean ‘sort of’?” she asked.

“I don’t have an ending,” I told her. “I could never think of one that was good.”

By then we had reached the indoor courtyard, once a patio, but over time it had been transformed into a haven featuring a walking trail, a trickling fountain, and fragranced flowers and plants. The little girls opened the gates for us, and I, along with the nurses, pushed my friend’s bed in.

“This is remarkable,” I said to the volunteers.

“It’s brought a lot of joy to this facility, and it all began with Fedelina’s flower boxes.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“The ones she insisted on bringing with her the day she moved in. She hardly brought anything else, just flower boxes, and the nurses thought she might be losing her mind. But she wasn’t. Turns out she had a plan.”

I shook my head, as amazed now as I was the day I heard about it on national radio. She had recruited children from local schools to come by and help her turn those flower boxes into a haven for fluttering butterflies.

“A woman is never too old for flowers,” Fedelina said. “If I were younger, if I knew then what I know now, that old people like me still crave beauty in their lives, then I would have worked to implement such courtyards in facilities nationwide. But I didn’t know back then …”

“Know what?” asked one of the girls.

“That one day I’d be old, really old. I had no idea then what being old was all about. It’s just an extension of being young.”

We broke up laughing, but as I watched the girls prance about, their arms extended, hands opened wide, waiting and hoping for butterflies to land on their palms, I knew that later I would give more thought to what Fedelina had said about what being old really was.

I extended my arms like the girls and let butterflies land on my palms. “You know what amazed me most about you back then, when we lived next door to each other? And what still amazes me now?” I said to my friend.

“No, what?” she asked.

“You have a way of showing me that getting old isn’t all bad.”

“Did you imagine it all bad?” she asked, and I gave her an honest nod, “yes.”

“This garden,” she said, “is designed to sustain the entire life cycle of the butterflies. But metamorphosis is not finished, Anna, with the production of a butterfly.”

“It’s not?” I said, looking at the winged creatures gathering on my palms, then back at my friend on her bed.

“No. One might think this is the end. After all, what more is there after becoming a butterfly? But let me tell you, Anna, the butterfly is the beginning. Metamorphosis is a cycle.”

I thought about it a moment. “Thank you,” I said then, tears welling in my eyes.

“For what?”

“I have an end to my story.”

“Well, we haven’t reached that point yet,” she reminded me. “Why don’t you read more?”

“You mean when we get back to your room?”

“No,” she said. “Right here, read to me right where we are.”

“Okay,” I said as I sat down on a black cast-iron bench and pulled out the manuscript I had in the bag that had been slung over my shoulder all this time. I started to read where I left off last, about my children and me, and their last day of summer.