Whatever Lola Wants (30 page)

Beyond the gate
Carney saw a large white-clapboard house, windows trimmed in green, a wrap-around porch, solar roof-panels. He turned in and parked on rough grass beside a brown van. He walked up a ramp to the porch. His shin, still strapped, ached not at all, despite the hot and humid July afternoon. He knocked.

Dr. Theresa Bonneherbe Magnussen unlocked the screen. “Glad you made it, Carney.” She set her chair in reverse, pulled the door open, and held it in place with the chair wheel. A solid handshake. A woman about thirty appeared behind the chair. “Feasie, this is Carney. Carney, Feodora. We alone get to call her Feasie.”

Feodora stuck out her hand. “Welcome.” She stood tall and well-rounded, as by country living and solid eating. “Come in.”

The screen door slammed and Carney entered Magnussen Grange. Pleasantly cool inside, out of the midsummer sun. Polite questions about the drive. Years ago, Theresa explained, Milton had moulded the old farmhouse to fit her needs and wishes—colonial furniture, many bookshelves still overflowing, shiny long-plank oak floors. The ramps between rooms on different levels were new and removable. After the stroke they'd moved to a smaller house outside Burlington. But she'd be staying at the Grange tonight. Milton too. Feodora offered cold sweet cider.

“Thanks.” Today, Carney noted, Theresa wore her hair in a single long white braid.

“Don't let her get riled, Mr. Carney. These days she blows up at a bird flying the wrong way. I'll be right back.” Feodora left.

Carney said, “Impressive library.”

“Only the rag-ends here, storage, reference, two more rooms upstairs, a lot already in the new place. This is the realm of my previous life. It's too scattered, can't ever find things I need. Last week I tried to track down what Augustine used for contraception, took me two days.” She nodded, chuckling at her reference, whatever it was. “Sit down, sit down—no, not there, here!”

“Theresa. Some calm, please.” Feodora set a tray with a jug and three glasses on a little table. “You know better.”

“I am calm, dammit.” She nodded at Carney. “Though sometimes I need to get mad.”

Feodora poured. “Avoid that, Theresa.” She handed her mother, then Carney, a glass.

Carney sipped. “Delicious.”

“Last year's.” Theresa gestured to the back window. “Great trees. Season's late this year, apples're scrawny. Perfidious acid rain.”

“Ti-Jean says he'll fertilize different this fall.” Feodora spoke in serene phrases, as if designing a tone to soothe her mother's vexations.

“He's smart, Ti-Jean.” She glanced over to her daughter. “You'll have to forgive Feodora, she's got a one-track mind about my health. Like Milton. He brought me back. From the stroke. They're both wonderful but they all think I'll live forever.”

Carney looked at her. “Milton did a great job.”

Feodora smiled and shook her head. “Theresa wasn't about to let go.”

“The donkey-doctors gave up on me. Chemicals to send me into gaga-space, turn my brain circuitry soggy.”

“Enough.” Feodora lay her hand on her mother's arm. “We're here, and it's a quiet day.”

Theresa nodded. “Some good trout in the stream. Did Milton say? Wish I could show you. Wonderful place, this Grange.”

Carney smiled. “I'd like to try.” Something easing about Feodora's care of Theresa.

Feodora said, “You'll catch.”

“We rebuilt the place. Ten-twelve years back.” Theresa looked around the room. “How long ago, Fease?”

“Theresa and Milton lived here a long time, they're still moving out. We live here now, Ti-Jean and me.” She smiled. “Milton and Theresa're staying a couple of days.” She glanced gently at Theresa. “They sleep on the couch down here now, Theresa can't really get up the stairs. They rewired it, replumbed it, insulated it, drywalled it. 1979, 1980.”

Carney nodded in sympathy, recalling his own version of gutting and restoring.

“That long ago. Huh! Milton did a lot of it himself. The kids helped, have to give them that. And now we got that monkey-dump Cochan down the road.”

Feodora scowled gently, then turned to Carney. “We're pleased you'll take another look at what Cochan's doing. Real lucky Theresa read your book.”

“A lucky coincidence.”

“Coincidence?” Theresa hunched toward Carney. “You believe in coincidence?”

“Don't you?”

She shook her head. “Over the long haul we create our coincidences. They're not out there waiting for us.”

Carney sipped his cider. “Have you been out to the Terramac site?”

“Me? He'd never let me in.” She shook her head. “You go. Find a way to stop him. Make that happen. Nothing happens if we don't make it happen.” Theresa Magnussen lifted her glass and sipped. “You put yourself in a certain place. Where you want to be, need to be. Wouldn't work for me with Cochan. But I am in the right place sometimes. If once in a while it's also the right time, I've got myself to thank. Not some coincidence.”

“So me being here isn't a coincidence.”

She snorted. “I read your book, I wrote you. Milton called you. Whatever it takes to lead us, yes and to confine us, we create that for ourselves, we choose it. We call it happenstance. And do we think this is wonderful? Course not. We step away, we say, ‘
Just
a coincidence.' We take no responsibility. Even for our hopes.”

“And if by some chance you hadn't read my book?”

“That'd be impossible. You wrote it for me. Thank you. There's a harmony to the strings of chance, friend Carney.”

Carney laughed. “The strings of chance?”

“Most of us, we let the chance slip by, we even push it away. And then it's too late.”

And how does her family deal with this woman of the impatient opinions? Carney turned to Feodora. “You were going to tell me about Terramac.”

Theresa answered. “Handy Johnnie owns the county.” She shook her head. “A slime.”

“Theresa. Please!” Feodora spoke sharply. Theresa shrugged, but nodded. Feodora said to Carney, “Some say he's our grand benefactor, others that he's destroying everything here.”

“I'll go see what's going on there now. But if he's playing by the rules—”

“He makes his own rules,” Theresa growled. “A slug who's oozed his way up from south of the line. Lexington.”

“Lexington?”

“You know. Cochan Pharmaceuticals. He sold it off. Remember the lawsuits? Birth defects. The buyer-boys ended up with pill bottles full of dynamite.” Though she spoke softly her cheeks had gone mottled. “Deserved it, the bastards.”

Feodora crouched beside the chair. “Want one of your soothants?”

Theresa nodded.

Feodora said to Carney, “Please, you won't talk to her till I get back?”

“Fease, I'm not unrelaxed, I'm only trying—”

“Mother. Please.”

“Yes, Feodora.” White blotched her reddened face.

Feodora left. Carney got up, looked around. Beside one bookshelf a wedding picture in black and white caught his eye. A broad man with black hair parted in the middle, heavy forehead, round face, large ears, a three-piece tweed suit, and paisley tie. And a lovely blond woman, bobbed hair an aura round her head, her tiny mouth dark, lips near to a bow, buxom, a slender waist. She wore a knee-length shirtwaist dress, light in color. Both were in their mid-twenties. She was holding his arm, looking up at his face, admiring. The young Theresa, a beauty.

•

“Holy shit,” I heard Lola whisper.

I turned to her. She glowed in purple light. Her eyes held mine. She was here, she was safe, she was listening. “What a way for a God to speak,” I scolded. But I did smile.

“She looks like I once did.” Lola shuddered a little.

I studied her face. Memory? “Maybe a little,” I conceded.

“What would I have come to look like over the years, I wonder.”

“Hard to say.” Something was seriously wrong here. Gods don't concern themselves with such questions. Had Lola lived she'd have been seventy-six this year. She died at thirty-six, resplendent as I see her now. She overdosed, they said; an accident. Her death turned out to be the second biggest news story of that year, 1963. I'd been up here four years already and had never heard so much commotion. She died in Connecticut, her big house on the Sound. It's at the southernmost edge of my down below, just about as far as I can see.

“Maybe something like Theresa,” she murmured. “That'd be good.”

I stared at her. Lola and Theresa.

“She's kinda amazing, you know. I would've liked to be amazing.”

“You were, Lola.” You still are, I said silently.

“All that range of emotions. Way more than pleasure. I don't even have a wisp of a memory of feeling anger and fear and those things.” She shook her head, marveling.

•

Theresa's eyes had
fallen closed. Her drawn-in cheeks reduced her. Carney sat.

She'd heard him move and looked over. “Married, Carney?”

“You should stay quiet.” He waited. “I used to be. Years ago.”

Theresa nodded. “One of the ravages.”

“Marriage, or its end?”

“Forty years, Carney. Can you imagine that? Forty years of living with the same man. That's a bond. You'll meet him at supper.” She did sound calmer. “Children?”

Carney cradled his glass. “Nope.” And a relief. “How many do you have?”

Theresa seemed to think about that. “Four?”

Carney grinned. “But you're not sure.”

“I'm sure I haven't been their happiness. They came along and each in turn endured me.”

“Feodora, and—?”

“One son, three daughters. Sarah was first and left the house first. Later she made a rotten marriage. Anyway that's over. The twins came next, Leonora and Feodora. Leasie and Feasie.” She grunted. “We labeled 'em the Noodles 'cause right away they grew tall, skinny too when you compare them with me and Milton. Feasie married Ti-Jean, good for her, widower, eleven years older than Feasie, raising a daughter by himself, great kid. You'll meet Ti-Jean tomorrow. He made Fease get some meat on the bones. Leasie never married, too late now.” She shook her head. “They're okay. And Karl, he's the youngest, he turned Catholic, can you believe that? After the blue-ribbon atheist upbringing we gave him. And after following his so-called dream, sowing more oats than's good for any man. And along came a couple of offspring. That he talks of.” She nodded to herself. “Two little girls. Nice kids.”

•

Lola's fingers found my forearm, as if to draw me back. “Ted—”

“Yes?” A touch from her set my bone-memories atremble.

“I need to interrupt for a minute. I have to ask you something.” She spoke softly, as if in fear of being overheard. She found my eyes with hers, so large and green, those shafts of purple.

I would tell her anything. Almost. “Yes?”

“Can Gods dream?”

“I don't know.” A scary question. “I doubt it.”

“I think I had a dream a little bit ago.” She smiled, pleased with herself.

“Oh?” I spoke as lightly as my throat allowed. “About what?”

“Myself. Me and my lover. From long ago. A very wealthy man, I knew that.”

“Ah,” I said. “And?”

“Nothing. I was with him. His face wasn't clear, nor where we were. Just him and me.”

I heard myself say, “Strange.”

“Yes, isn't it.” She took her fingers from my arm, dropped both her hands down to her lap, sat primly, stared ahead. “Well, I had to ask you that.” She smiled to herself.

A memory. A dream. A lover. It took a time, relocating my story.

•

Feodora returned with
a small brown bottle. Theresa scowled but took two yellow capsules and swallowed them with cider. Feodora said to Carney, “My daughter, Ginette, and her friend Yves will join us for supper. Like Theresa to show you the garden?”

“Good.” He turned to Theresa. “Not too hot for you?”

“Let's go.”

Carney reached for the wheelchair—

“No no, I can.” She flicked the switch, released a kind of clutch, pushed at a lever, and the contraption jerked forward.

They wheeled out the back door, down a short ramp, and across a broad lawn to a garden warrened with trails rolled flat to smooth the wheelchair's passage. First the orchard, twenty-one apple trees, then a large patch of kitchen vegetables, then a quarter acre of high corn. “Over there,” Theresa pointed, “Those are walnut. Unusual this far north. Bred for me by a French friend near Angoulême, in the Cognac region. We'll have the nut oil in the salad at lunch.”

Bees hummed and damselflies flitted in the hot still afternoon sunlight. A small squadron of whining mosquitoes located Carney and Theresa; she handed him some bug repellent. In the barn lived a dozen chickens, half of them laying, and three cows. One they kept for milk. Across the stream stretched a large-mesh in-water cage six feet by six feet and about three deep, the trout locker. “They eat whatever bugs and grubs wash through. In low water we supplement the feed. When we want trout for supper like in an hour, they're fresh.”

Behind the barn stood a small mill for grinding and pressing the walnuts, and immense grindstones for the corn they'd made their bread from years ago. Beyond the wheel the water dropped maybe a dozen feet, enough to power a little generator. “About all we ever need for electricity,” Theresa muttered. “There's batteries in the shed, for storage. The roof panels heat the water. And in winter the water heats the house. We've got three stoves for wood, they boil up the water when the cold turns intense. A backup in case of storms.” Theresa shook her head. “People think anarchy means chaos. Nitwits.”

Built and kept going by the family? If so, impressive. “All this, but no telephone?”