Sand in My Eyes (9 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BELVEDERE

OH, ANNA
,
I
MISS
her so much,” Fedelina said when I stopped reading and looked up from my manuscript. “It doesn’t matter how old a woman is, she will always miss her mother.”

“Not a day goes by when I don’t miss mine,” I told her. “She died before I had my babies—never got to meet any of them.”

“That’s hard,” Fedelina said, pausing before adding, “I can’t believe you put that letter from my mother in your story!”

“Do you mind?” I asked. “Because I don’t have to use it if you don’t want me to.”

She fidgeted around the side of her bed until she discovered her glasses and put them on. “I don’t mind,” she said. “But I don’t remember seeing any ambulance in your driveway that first day I stopped over.”

“I thought that’s why you came by, because you were concerned.”

“No, I didn’t know it came to your house until you told me. I came by for another reason.”

“Oh?”

“Your fire alarm—I kept hearing it go off.”

“My fire alarm?”

“I’d be out in my yard chopping vines and I’d hear it—the same time
every day, always around breakfast.”

“I was making eggs,” I told her. “And my stove top was crusted. I never found time to clean it.”

“That’s what I figured. I came by that day to share a trick with you, to ask if you knew about putting foil around the burners.”

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Oh, you looked like you were already self-conscious.”

“I did?”

“Yes, that your kids weren’t quieter, your house cleaner. The last thing I wanted was to make you feel embarrassed, and besides, the alarm wasn’t so bad. The noise of it had me chopping at my vines faster and harder.”

“I know about foil on the burners now,” I told her. “It’s taken me twenty years to figure it out.” I felt sweat forming on my forehead and wondered whether it was from all this talk of fire alarms. “Is it hot in here or is it me?” I asked, pulling off my cardigan.

“I was thinking it was rather cold.”

“Then what’s wrong with me?” I asked, not expecting a real answer.

“Menopause!” she said matter-of-factly, using the same diagnostic tone she had used years earlier when letting me know I was suffering a full-blown case of motherhood. “You look surprised. Am I telling you something you didn’t know?”

“No, I kind of figured that’s what it was,” I told her, “especially after my daughter sent me a book from college, a book on menopause—how dare she?” I laughed.

“Marjorie, did she really?”

“Yes, I think she noticed all the words I was forgetting. And not sophisticated words, but basic words, words no one should forget. And I have been getting these hot flashes, I admit, but my denial has me blaming global warming. Gosh, I can’t believe I’m there,” I told her. “The big ‘M.’ How can life be going by so quickly?”

I put my cardigan back on and walked over to a blanket folded on the counter. “Of course it’s menopause. I’m a dummy to think it’s anything else,” I said, and handed her the blanket.

“My body temperature goes up and down and I forget my words all the
time,” she said. “I wish it was menopause, but it’s not, Anna.” She picked up the orchid that had been on her stomach all this time and slowly started to caress it with her fingers.

“You remember what kind it is?” I asked her.

“A blooming cattleya,” she said, her lips curving into a smile. “Some things a gal never forgets. So what happened next, after you read my mother’s letter? Did you find a spot in your house suitable to the orchid?”

I picked up my manuscript and started to read where I left off last.

CHAPTER TWELVE

WHEN I
CLOSED
THE
letter my neighbor’s mother had written to her, I noticed the orchid starting to hunch, as I had for months, walking around with my neck lowered, shoulders wilting. Of all the things I dreamt of having, an orchid never made the list. But it was mine now, as was the challenge of keeping it alive and getting it to flower.

“How difficult can it be,” I told the poor-postured stem, “to give you what you want, to get you to flower?”

I had to act fast. I knew it wanted a pleasant spot in my house, suitable to its needs, as much as I had for months wanted, needed, pleaded with my husband to allow me an itsy-bitsy amount of time for myself — an hour, maybe two—but all he did was make me feel guilty, or give me an hour of “personal time” locked up in my room folding laundry. It took me falling apart at the seams for him to grant me this week to myself.

I carried the terra-cotta pot with me into the kitchen and placed it on the window sill above the sink. But then a red-and-green card stuck by magnet to my refrigerator caught my eye. I pulled the Christmas card, postmarked December and stamped in four different states before arriving months late and one house over, off the refrigerator. I needed to tear it to shreds, get rid of it, should my neighbor stop by, should she come in. I would cringe if she saw it, and if she saw me that day standing in the road, holding the opened poinsettia card, reading the handwritten letter inside, meant for her, the one in which her friend wrote about a lunch she had with a group of ladies,
“mostly widows like us who get together every month, and how we wish we could all wake up and find the holidays over!”

You have to pretend to enjoy it, the holiday season. You have sun and warmth and none of this heavy, wet, white stuff. We got four feet yesterday. You were wise to get out. Hope your heart behaves and you feel well. Do your best to have a happy Christmas, not too easy these days
.

I don’t know why I opened mail that wasn’t for me. Loneliness has a woman do strange things. Despite it being written from one senior to another—and I was nowhere near the age of a senior and at a completely different stage in life—I could relate. It’s why I kept it all these months, I thought as I took a pair of children’s scissors and started cutting it to pieces. I, too, had pretended—for the sake of my children—to like the holidays. And I, too, had wanted to fall asleep and wake in the new year. The letter, and my lack of enthusiasm for this past Christmas, was one more reminder that life does lose its magic. Once a girl grows up and becomes a woman—especially a mother—there are incalculable balls she juggles, tricks she pulls, alterations she makes behind the curtains, and it all diminishes the wow effect of the magic, making it tough for her to stay awake and enjoy the show.

And I too was lonely, as strange as it sounds for a mother of three young ones to be so, but I was in a different sort of way—hungry for adult talk and all those big, juicy, sophisticated words. But none of this justified what I did the day I stood in my street opening and reading the letter addressed to her. I should have taped it shut and put it in her mailbox where it belonged, but I didn’t. I hung it on my refrigerator instead, where it had been ever since.

When I finished cutting it to shreds, I went for the orchid on the sill. “This room is too quiet,” I told it as I left the kitchen on a quest to find a more suitable spot, and to find who I was as a person. After all, what my neighbor had said to me made sense, that like the orchids, we need to know our kind—who we are—before we can properly care for ourselves.
So who am I
? I asked myself as I headed into the great room like a woman
sailing across the sea, with no extra arms weighing me down, or temper tantrums to navigate through. I no longer felt like the neat freak I once was, or like a beautiful woman, happy wife, or publicist extraordinaire as I had been called at work.

I am that woman who, during the holidays, hustles and bustles for the sake of her children yet never feels she does enough and, despite those seconds of glee on their faces, goes into her room and cries herself to sleep out of exhaustion. And the woman who goes six months without changing the polish on her toenails, and who, when she feels something is wrong with her body, finally makes a doctor appointment only to reschedule six times, and who hasn’t read a novel in years, and whose personal measure of contentment is how clean the house is and, because it is never clean, is never content. I am that discontented woman who spots herself in the mirror at the store and sees she only got around to putting mascara on one eye, and who pours herself a cup of coffee at seven and has lost it somewhere in the house by seven-fifteen and who finds it by nine and downs it cold. And that woman who drives the way I do—purposely in the middle of the road, so my tires go over the bumpy reflectors and put my baby to sleep. I am a woman who fantasizes about life as a cloistered nun—the silence and solitude of it.

“You know who you are, what you like, you cattleya,” I told the orchid as I set it on a coffee table in the great room, close but not too close to the fan. “And I know who I am, too.” It all depends on the morning, I thought as I plopped down on the sofa where my husband typically slept. Some days I was the little engine that thought she could, and other days I was Old Mother Hubbard and often the woman who lives in a shoe, the one with so many kids she doesn’t know what to do. I could accept being all of that, but who I didn’t want to be was the one my daughter would look at soon enough with eyes of justice, declaring mommy “mean” for making daddy sleep in his makeshift bed.

I got up, gathered his sheets and pillow, and threw them in a bundle on the floor, questioning which things in life a mother is supposed to tell her daughter and which she is not. Sharing with Marjorie the reasons for my wrath, that daddy is no good, would only put an end to the way in which
she giggles whenever he enters the room, and how she steps on his toes, waltzing along as he steps side to side.
Dance to your daddy
. It’s what I wanted for myself when I was young, and what mothers want for their daughters, to love their fathers madly. I would keep quiet about it all, but one day she would find out for herself how hard it is to be a wife, think back to those faces her mother made, and understand me better.

“It’s okay. Little girls don’t see it. They don’t see their daddy’s flaws,” I would tell her on that day, a long, long time from now, the day she learned of his immorality and started sympathizing with me for grudging poor daddy—the man she felt sorry for all those years. “But it’s easier for a little girl to love the man who is her daddy than it is for a wife to love the flawed man who is her husband.”

“This room is too overwhelming,” I declared as I took the orchid and stormed out, heading next into my bedroom. There, I set the flower on the bedside table and flicked on the overhead fan, recalling what my neighbor had said about orchids liking subtle breezes. But then I gave the night-stand a good shake. It was wobbly, and so was I, for there were moments in which I found it easier to stay with the father of my children, and others in which I knew leaving him would be best, and that the boys needed to know soon the sort of man their father was so they might never become like him.

“Should I sit my boys down one day,” I asked myself, “and tell them what their father did, let them see the hurt in my eyes, so hopefully they will never do it to their own wives?” But if I were to do that, it would only raise other questions, like why I didn’t leave him, and it would interfere with what I am trying to teach them—that when they do something wrong, there are consequences. Little boys need to know this. It’s the only way they can grow into men who are accountable for their actions.

I didn’t want to be wobbly-minded, and knew the orchid didn’t like wobbly tables. I moved its pot over to my writing desk instead. “This spot is just right,” I told the orchid, wishing my own contentment could be so simple. “Come morning, the sun pokes through this window, and you will be a happy flower.”

But what would it take to make me the happy woman I once was? I
walked out my front door, got into my car and drove to Captiva Island, to the cemetery that lies next to the library, beside the Chapel by the Sea. There was no better place for a woman to go when she was grieving and missing horribly the person she used to be, back when life was simpler and more carefree. As I opened the white picket gate to the cemetery and strolled in, I was overtaken by emotion, aware that I had been stumbling in circles for too long, trapped beneath a tarp of sleep deprivation, one that suffocates a mother’s spirit and smothers her ability to see both the beauty of life and her very own aliveness. And then I walked past sites belonging to babies, some with the same names as my own babies, and it was hard to see the names of my children on tombstones. Life can be short, I thought, and I wanted my children back
home again, home again, jiggety jog
. I reached up and pulled a white hibiscus off a low-hanging tree. Its petals were delicate as tissue and I could have used it to wipe my tears, but then I dropped the hibiscus and let myself be overtaken by emotion as I read the inscriptions for individuals living as far back as the late 1800s.