The Goodbye Summer

The first Caddie Winger ever heard of Wake House was when she was helping her grandmother get her drawers on over the cast on her leg.

It was Nana’s second day back from the hospital. “If I was at Wake House,” she said, lying flat on the sofa and holding her bunched-up nightgown over her lap for modesty, “somebody who knew what they were doing would be doing this.”

“What house? Awake?”

“Wake House. That place on Calvert Street across from the thing. The thing, where you go with papers. To get signed.”

“The notary? Put your good foot in here, Nan. Are you talking about that old house with the tower and all the porches? I think it’s a boarding-house.”

“Before. Now it’s an old folks’ home.”

“Oh, you don’t need to go to a place like that, I can take care of you fine.”

“Ow.”

“It’s a learning curve.”

Nana mentioning a nursing home, imagine that. For the rest of the morning Caddie pondered what it might mean. When the old lady across the street went dotty and her children put her in a nursing home, Nana was aghast. “Shoot me if you ever want to get rid of me that bad, you hear? Take me out in the backyard and fire away.” Caddie assumed the subject of nursing homes was off-limits forever.

That afternoon, though, out of the blue, Nana brought up Wake House again.

They were on the front porch, Nana slumped in her rented wheelchair, resting her broken leg on a pillow on top of the low kitchen stool. Caddie stood behind her, braiding her hair. Nana had long, pretty, smoke-gray hair and, before it softened with age, a long, bony, sharp-featured face. She loved it when people told her she looked like Virginia Woolf. Nobody ever added, “If she’d lived to seventy-nine instead of walking into the river.”

“What’s-her-name died there,” she said, breaking a drowsy silence.

“Who died where, Nan?”

“Wake House. What’s-her-name, you know. Pink hair, Tuesday nights.”

Hm. Back in Nana’s Buddhist period, when she’d led a chanting service in the dining room one night a week, an elderly lady who dyed her hair pink had shown up occasionally. “Mrs. Pringle?”

“Inez Pringle, thank you.”

“She
died
at Wake House?”

Nana shrugged. “You have to die someplace.”

Caddie leaned over to see if she was joking. Her eyes were fixed on something out in the yard—Caddie followed her gaze to what was left of
George Bush in Love.
That’s how she’d broken her leg, by falling off the stepladder while putting a final cowboy boot on top of her phallus-shaped, seven-foot-high lawn sculpture. Nana was an artist.

“Are you serious?” Caddie asked.

A moment passed. “About what?” Nana said dreamily.

Caddie smiled and went back to braiding her hair. How were they going to wash it? This old house had only one bathroom, upstairs, and right now Nana couldn’t stand up at the kitchen sink for longer than a minute or two. Maybe one of those dry shampoos, they were supposed to…

“About Wake House? Damn right I’m serious. Call ’em up, find out how much it costs to stay there.”

Her next pain pill wasn’t for forty minutes. She’d broken her leg in two places, but luckily the breaks were simple, so her recovery was supposed
to be long and tedious but not tricky or dangerous. The pain made her irritable, though. That’s all Caddie could think of to account for Nana’s sudden interest in recovering anyplace except the house on Early Street she’d lived in for fifty years.

“Wake House. I even like the sound of it.”

“You do?” It made Caddie think of a funeral home.

“It’s not like one of those places, it’s not a mick…mick…”

“McNursing Home,” Caddie guessed.

“This place is going to the dogs.”

“Our house?”

“The whole neighborhood. It’s not even safe anymore.”

“Yes, it is.”

“No, it’s not.”

Caddie stopped arguing, because she never won, but Nana was exaggerating. Early Street might not be what it used to be, not that it had ever been that much, but it still had decent, hardworking families with fairly well-behaved children, plenty of old-timers rocking out their afternoons on the shady, crooked front porches. Crime was still pretty much in the vandalism category, boys breaking things or writing on things. It was getting older, that’s all. Everything got older.

“Wake House,” Nana resumed. “I bet it’s got an elevator. Ramps, wheelchairs with motors. People giving you massages.”

“Oh, boy.”

“I’m a senior citizen, I deserve the best. This place is a death trap.”

“Only about half an hour till your next pill, then you’ll feel better. Want me to play the piano? You could listen through the window.”

“Look it up in the yellow pages. Better yet, take me to see it—I always wanted to go inside that place. It’s not just for old folks, you can get well there, too. Conva…conva…”

“Nan, I know you don’t want to, but if you would just go
upstairs,
this whole thing would be a lot simpler. I really think.”

“No way.”

“You’d be near the bathroom—you know how you hate that climb up the stairs four or five times a day. You could sleep in your own bed instead
of the lumpy couch. You wouldn’t have to move every time one of my students comes over for a lesson. You could have a bell or a whistle, and I’d come up anytime you needed something, I wouldn’t mind a bit. It just makes so much more—”

“No.”

“But why?”

“I told you, I’m not going up there.”

“But why
not
?”

“Once you go up, you never come down.”

“Nana, you only broke your
leg.
”

“That’s it, I’ve made up my mind. Wake House. I used to know the family, you know.”

Maybe Caddie could take one of Nana’s pills for the headache she was getting. “You knew the Wakes?” Her back cracked when she arched it to stretch out the stiffness.

“Well, not knew as in
know,
as in sit in the parlor and drink tea and eat cucumber sandwiches.” She cackled; she cracked herself up. “The whole town knew the Wakes. The old man owned the Bank of Michaelstown. It used to be on the corner of Maryland and Antietam.”

“It still is.”

“Yes, but Wakes don’t own it anymore. They were the big cheeses around here, like the, the—Hyannisport—”

“Kennedys.”

“Kennedys, till the old man lost all the money. After that they just disappeared. Dried up and blew away.”

“Well, anyway—I still think if you’d go to bed and not move for about two weeks, your
own
bed, it would give you a good start. On healing. Remember, the doctor said—”

Her grandmother stuck her thumbs in her ears and wriggled her fingers while she went
pbbbbbb
with her lips.

“Well
—honestly,
” Caddie said, offended, then saw the two boys out on the sidewalk. Neighbor kids; she knew their faces but not their names. They stopped in front of the house, arrested by Nana’s raspberry. One had a skateboard slung over his shoulder, the other had a silent boom box; like little men coming home from work, Caddie thought, only with toys
instead of rakes or picks on their shoulders. “Hi!” she called out, with a cheery smile, waving. “How’re you doing?”

“Miniature thugs,” Nana said too loud.

“Hush.” They already thought old lady Winger was a witch. “How’s it going?” Caddie called gaily. “What’s happening?”

The one with the skateboard finally lifted his hand in a belligerent half-wave.

“Have a good day!”

They jostled each other, swaggering off down the sidewalk.

“Nana,
why
do you—”

“Hoodlums.”

“You don’t even know it’s them.”

“If it’s not, it’s one of their com…you know, com…”

“Comrades. Compatriots.”

George Bush in Love
wasn’t Nana’s only artistic creation in the front yard, not by a long shot. It was starting to look like a playground out there, or a wax museum. Her most attention-getting artworks were
Earthen Uterus
and the long, cylindrical
Passionate Ones United.
Mysterious additions that infuriated Nana and mortified Caddie appeared on or near the sculptures in the night, things like scattered sanitary napkins or used condoms; once somebody hung a toilet seat over the scrap metal head of
Fecund Goddess.
The sculptures weren’t popular on Early Street, but they were legal—the neighbors had found that out after a lot of complaints to the police, the city council, the Neighborhood Watch.

Finney, Nana’s Jack Russell terrier, scratched at the screen door to come out. “Okay,” Caddie told him, “but only on your rope.” Otherwise he’d take off after anything that moved.

“Jane, put him up on my lap.”

“Sure?” She’d long since stopped correcting Nana when she called her by her daughter’s name—Caddie’s mother, who’d been dead for twenty-three years. “Won’t it hurt your leg?”

“You kidding?” She knocked on the fiberglass cast under her denim skirt. “Can’t feel a thing.”

“You know, if you went to a place like Wake House, you probably wouldn’t be able to keep Finney,” Caddie said, lifting the dog onto her
grandmother’s lap. He was only two and a half and still a holy terror, but if Nana petted him, he’d sit still for hours.

“Maybe, maybe not. Inez said they have cats.” She stroked the dog’s silky ears and kissed him on top of his head. “Now, listen to me, Caddie Winger. You’re…oh, shoot.”

“What?”

“How the hell old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“I knew that.”

“Course you did.” She finished with her grandmother’s hair, gave her a quick hug, and came around to sit on the porch rail. The sun felt good on her back. Spring was finally getting started. She batted a bee away. It was a soft, shimmery-blue afternoon, and the neighbors’ yards were sprouting tulips and azaleas and dogwood blossoms. In Nana’s yard the sculptures made of dirt were sprouting bright green, spiky-soft grass, like Chia pets.

“We went to the movies on your birthday,” Nana recalled.

“Yes.”

“Now that is a fine thing, going to a movie with your grandmother on your birthday.”

“I thought you liked it.” Caddie had worried a little about the profanity; it was a gangster movie.

“It was okay. I give it one thumb up. But that’s not the point.” She frowned, trying to recall the point. “The point is, when’s the last time you went out on a date? A real date, not violin practice with that Adolphe Menjou guy.”

“If you mean Morris, he was my stand partner in the orchestra, and anyway, he’s gay.”

“
That’s
the point. I’m holding you back. I see it all now, it came to me in the hospital.”

“Boy, you must’ve been high on those painkillers.” Caddie laughed weakly. “Because that’s ridiculous.”

“Look at you. It’s my fault.”

“What’s wrong with me?” She had on her gray pants and her black sweater, which was speckled with Finney’s little white hairs. But everything
in the house was speckled with Finney’s hairs, it was like they were coated with an adhesive.

She should never have asked, because Nana squirmed in her wheelchair, searching for a more comfortable position, and proceeded to tell her what was wrong with her. “You don’t look like other girls. I’ve been watching a lot of tube lately, I know what I’m talking about.”

“Soap operas in the hospital, that’s not—”

“You don’t put yourself out. You’re invisible. Look at your hair, it doesn’t have any
oomph.
Blondes have more fun, but not if they don’t even try. Are you having fun?”

“I’m having plenty of fun.”

“How tall are you?”

Caddie sighed. “Five eleven.”

“Five eleven!” she exclaimed, as if this were brand-new news. “Five feet eleven inches tall, and look at you. Sit up straight, make your shoulders go back. Let’s see your bosoms, I know you’ve got some.”

“Yikes!” Caddie jumped off the rail and whirled around, turning her back on her grandmother. “Quit picking on me,” she wailed, laughing along with Nana’s wheezy
haw-haw.
“What’s gotten into you?”

Funny, though, that Nana would use the word “invisible.” When Caddie was little, pretending nobody could see her had been her favorite game. And later, like a song hook in the back of her mind had been any version of
I could’ve fallen through the floor,
or
I wished the earth would open up and swallow me.
Maybe Nana was right; maybe she’d succeeded so well that at last nobody
could
see her.

“Nothing’s gotten into me, I’ve seen the light. I’ll go to Wake House and you go to a whatchamacallit, garden apartment, handsome men hanging over the balcony looking down at the girls in the swimming pool. Everybody’s single, nobody’s got a job.”

“No more TV for you.”

“You think you’ll be lonesome. That’s why you’re against it.” When they focused, Nana’s eyes could look unnervingly shrewd. “You’ve never been on your own, so you’re scared.”

“I have, too. Graduate school, when I got my music master’s.”

“Two years,” she said dismissively, “and you didn’t go very far away, did you? How’d you like it?”

“Fine. I liked it fine.”

“I bet.”

“What does that mean? What does ‘I bet’ mean?”

“I bet you had the time of your life.”

“I did not. I mean…” She forgot what side she was arguing on.

Nana’s lined old face sagged. “Caddie, honey, I’m the old lady, not you. I’m the one who’s supposed to not want anything to change.”

“That’s not right.” She wrapped her arms around herself. “I want plenty of things to change. About
me,
though—I don’t see why
you
have to do anything.”

Caddie didn’t get the joke, but for some reason that tickled her grandmother. She went into her wheezy laugh again,
haw-haw-haw,
bobbing Finney up and down on her lap. “Oh, me.” She pushed her knuckle under her glasses to wipe away a tear. “I’m only talking for a couple of months, you know.”

“Oh. A couple of months?”

“While my leg heals. I can’t even pee down here.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why going upstairs makes so much more—”