Winter Birds (25 page)

I have never been to New England, but tonight I learn from
Time
magazine that there is a place in Boston called Heartbreak Hill. “DIED. JOHN KELLEY, 97, Massachusetts native who ran the Boston Marathon a record sixty-one times from 1928 to 1992.” He won the race two times, once at the age of twenty-eight and again at thirty-eight. Seven times he came in second.
Time
magazine reports that the city of Boston erected a statue in John Kelley’s honor in 1993 at the base of Heartbreak Hill. The obituary also tells that John Kelley carried with him a “lucky handkerchief” when he ran. I think about the irony of a statue on Heartbreak Hill in memory of a champion who carried a lucky handkerchief.

I wonder if the statue depicts John Kelley as young or old. Chances are, the sculptor aimed for middle ground. Strangely, sculpture often comes closer to depicting reality than photography. Sometimes I see a photograph beside a newspaper obituary and say to myself, “And who is this youngster? Surely this beauty is not the same ninety-year-old woman whose death is being reported.” I wonder about the implication of such a picture: “This is how we want her to be remembered.” If this is truly the family’s sentiment, does it not seem to suggest that they want to forget all the years between then and now, which in most cases would comprise the larger portion of the person’s life? Is a person in the prime of life of more value than when he is old? This is a question with a ready answer: Yes. I envision all the old people of the world gathered in one place, all of them holding signs: Dead Weight, Burden, Has-Been, Drain on Society, Albatross, Millstone, and so forth.

“DIED. RODNEY DANGERFIELD, 82, stand-up comic whose old-fashioned style of one-liners thrived in an era of hip young satirists.” His signature line, “I don’t get no respect,” will long be remembered, according to
Time
magazine. I think of all the comedians who have used old people as the target of their humor. At least Rodney Dangerfield, an old man himself, knew what he was talking about.

But as my mother used to tell me regularly, getting old is not funny. With her frequent reminders, I began to brood over my own advancing years. Having no children, I began to wonder who would take care of me when I got old and sick. Marrying Eliot distracted me somewhat from these concerns; however, since he was older than I by many years, occasionally I imagined the grim possibility of nursing an aging mother and a husband at the same time.

I think of the way people look past an old person, as if seeking someone younger and therefore more interesting to talk to. I think of how they smirk or yawn when an old person speaks, of how they discount the plain truth when it comes from the mouth of someone whose body is feeble, as if body and mind are one. I recall how my college students used to pass me on campus without a word of greeting. In their eyes I ceased to exist outside the classroom. I think of store clerks speaking their words loudly and slowly as if dealing with an imbecile or lapsing into a bored, mechanical delivery of their standard lines. I think of Mindy on Christmas Day, sitting at the dinner table with a look on her face that said, “Don’t talk to me and don’t expect me to talk to you.”

Mindy’s trip to the emergency room of King’s Daughters Hospital four days ago resulted in this: Her stomach was pumped. This Rachel told me when she returned three hours later. Mindy’s emotional distress of late is due to more than teenage moodiness, I have learned. It is due to a boy. A boy of whom her parents do not approve—a condition, I have noticed, that almost always leads to greater attraction between a boy and girl. Forbidden desire always burns hotter.

Steve and Teri have told Mindy she must give up the boy. They have told her she may not be with him, a difficult prohibition to enforce since the two of them attend the same school. Steve and Teri have requested the aid of the high school personnel to keep them separated, have asked to be called whenever Mindy does not report to her classes on time. The holidays have been full of turmoil for Mindy, being “stuck at home” and “watched like a hawk,” as she puts it.

All of this was reported to me by Rachel when she came to my apartment to get Veronica and take her back home. For over three hours Veronica had lain silently on my bed, drooling onto a large bib around her neck. Part of the time I sat beside her and stroked her arm, though she gave no sign that she was aware of my presence. She finally fell asleep. She continued to drool in her sleep and several times jerked and grimaced. I wondered if a child like Veronica ever dreamed. What would she dream about? I have read that dreams are necessary for life.

I have not seen Mindy for a week, not since Christmas Day. I think of the trouble she is going through. I know what she thinks: that if she could have this boy, life would be a glorious thing. I want to tell her to listen to what grown-ups have to say about the false hope of young love and the speed with which “bright things come to confusion,” as Shakespeare described it. I want to tell her that even in Shakespeare’s time romance without the blessing of one’s parents was never portrayed as happy. These words would fall on deaf ears, however. Even if she were to hear them, Mindy would consider the sources—an old woman and a dead playwright—and count them of no merit.

The house is quiet. It is almost eight o’clock. I take the
Time
magazine from my lap and drop it in the trash can, then turn up the volume on the television. I will see what my fifty-one channels have to offer on New Year’s Eve. Patrick has given me a recommendation. I want to ignore it because of the imperious way in which it was given, but I suspect I shall look into it, out of curiosity if nothing else.

Patrick came in with Rachel earlier tonight, when she brought my supper tray. “Aunt Sophie,” he said briskly, “we want you to come with us tonight. We don’t like to think of you sitting at home alone on New Year’s Eve.”

“Then don’t think of it,” I said.

“Go with us,” he urged. “It won’t be a long service, and then there will be sandwiches and desserts and games. You’d enjoy it.”

The idea of Patrick’s presuming to tell me what I would enjoy rankled me. “I am well accustomed to sitting at home alone,” I said. “That is what I enjoy. It suits me. New Year’s Eve is no different from any other day. It is only a day on the calendar.”

Rachel set a plate of meat loaf, black-eyed peas, and collard greens on the round table. I was pleased with the prospects, as my father used to say when Mother served collard greens at dinnertime. Though a native of New York, Daddy had taken to southern food with gusto, collard greens, corn bread, and black-eyed peas being three of his favorites.

“Well, then,” Patrick said, “if you insist on staying home, you need to watch something at eight o’clock. It’s a movie you’ll like. It’s on channel 35.” I told him I did not watch movies, but he brushed me off. “This is one you need to see,” he said. “It reminds me of Mother every time I see it. You’ll see. You’ll like the story.” I instantly made up my mind not to watch it, or at least not to like it.

At precisely eight o’clock I turn to channel 35 to see what it is that reminded my nephew of his mother—my sister Regina.

Driving Miss Daisy
is the name of the movie. Miss Daisy is Daisy Werthan, an elderly Jewish woman who lives in the South. I see at once why she would have reminded Patrick of his mother. Miss Daisy is a fine-boned woman with aristocratic carriage and strict standards of propriety. Though Patrick didn’t mention this, I see also that Daisy’s son, Boolie, and Patrick are alike in certain ways. Boolie speaks loudly and likes to take over. Like Daisy Werthan, Regina, though only a quarter Jewish, also employed a Negro man for many years, a man everybody in Vicksburg called Lingo.

Lingo drove Regina to the grocery store, to the meetings of her various clubs, to the doctor, to the library, and to Monk’s Department Store, where she worked four hours a day on the lingerie floor. Lingo also took Regina to both of her divorce hearings and waited for her out in the hall, then escorted her to the car and drove her home by way of the Dee-Lish Drive-in, where she ordered a chocolate malt both times. When Regina reported this fact to me after the second divorce, she said, “I think I’ll get a regular milkshake next time. I’m losing my taste for malt.” Her third husband died before she could divorce him, however, and by that time she had lost her taste for marriage, also. She lived as a widow for the remainder of her life.

Though Miss Daisy’s story is a good one, I keep losing track of the plot as I think about Regina. She was “unlucky in love”—this is how my mother referred to her and her three marriages. There was a time when I had no patience for Regina and her marital failures. This was before I married Eliot. Now I know how easy it is to misplace one’s affections. I am reminded of the answer to Falstaff’s question in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
: “Of what quality was your love, then?” The reply: “Like a fair house built on another man’s ground; so that I have lost my edifice by mistaking the place where I erected it.” So much is lost for all time when one mistakes the placement of his love.

Regina had two children, both sons, but she never understood either of them. One didn’t graduate from high school, and the other one turned religious on her. It was Lingo who found her dead on the floor of her kitchen when he arrived one morning to take her to the department store. After her death Patrick discovered a drawerful of unpaid bills. He learned that she had not paid Lingo for over a year. At her funeral Lingo was a pallbearer. Lingo and five white men. I believe out of all the men in Regina’s life, Lingo was perhaps the one who loved her most.

Before I know it, Miss Daisy and Hoke are very old in the movie. The world has changed around them, but they are still together. When Hoke comes to her house one morning, Miss Daisy has lost touch with reality. She believes she is a young schoolteacher with papers to be graded. The final scene shows Hoke visiting Miss Daisy in a nursing home, feeding her a piece of pie. The pleasures in Miss Daisy’s life have diminished themselves to Hoke and pie.

The movie ends and an advertisement for Hardee’s hamburgers comes on. So much of life comes back to food. I turn down the volume. I think of something I heard my small-minded nephew say recently through the kitchen wall. He was talking to Rachel at supper. “Just think!” he said. “God didn’t have to give us all these different things to eat—all the different flavors and textures and colors. He could have made it so that we just had to eat a brown pill every day or a fistful of grass to stay alive. Or he could have dispensed with the idea of food altogether and made our sustenance dependent on something else—like a special beam of light or dipping your finger in water or rubbing a stone over your forehead.”

“Or nothing at all,” Rachel said.

“Well, yes, exactly!” Patrick said. “God being God, he could have just made these mortal bodies to keep on ticking without needing any fuel at all! But he didn’t. He gave us the pleasures of taste and all this wonderful
variety!
”

And Patrick being Patrick, I thought, he will keep expanding upon this subject for the rest of the meal. He proceeded at once to prove my prediction true as he moved on to remark upon the marvels of variety in every food group, starting with the carbohydrates. He used the principle of variety to prove the existence not only of “a divine intelligence so vast as to defy the most brilliant human mind” but also of “a broad imagination and a profound capacity for fun.” If there is a God in heaven, I am sure he must be honored to know that Patrick Felber admires his intelligence, his imagination, and his capacity for fun.

The television screen suddenly fills with images of faces, too many to number, superimposed upon one another in continuous succession. A title finally appears:
THE YEAR IN REVIEW
. I can only suppose that channel 35 means to rehash the old year on the eve of the new one. It is a merry-go-round I do not care to ride tonight. The faces continue fading in and out. It is a wonder that Patrick’s recent speech, instead of stopping with food, did not proceed to Part Two: The Amazing Variety of People. Perhaps it would have if Rachel hadn’t suddenly begun coughing, if he hadn’t broken off with “Is something wrong? Are you all right? Here, take a drink of your tea.”

I can hear him now: “Just think! God didn’t have to populate the world with such a variety of heights and weights and hair and eyes—and
races!
He could have made us all exactly alike, with a different number stamped on everybody’s hand! But he didn’t. He made you and me and Steve and Teri and Aunt Sophie and Potts and billions of others, all of us different from each other!”

I think of Eliot and Toby and Mandy and Veronica and Mindy. Yes, his divine intelligence and broad imagination made it all. He made perverted men and kidnappers, he made deformed children, he made teenagers so heartsick they mix rat poison into a cola and drink it.

I change the channel to the TV Oldies and find that tonight there is a marathon of
Gilligan’s Island
episodes. I find no more pleasure in the thought of watching Gilligan and the Skipper on New Year’s Eve than of sitting through a review of the past year. I turn to the Nature Channel and find a program already in progress concerning the emperor penguin. An Antarctic bird, it is not featured among the six hundred species in my bird book. This is not a bird I will see at my feeder.

“In temperatures of forty degrees below zero, the father penguin balances the egg on his feet and keeps it warm with a flap of belly skin.” This is what I hear on the television. Imagine this, a father incubating his young. A picture of nesting penguins, apparently males, appears on the screen. They are huddled together over a field of ice—hundreds of black and white roly-polys peering out of masked faces, sitting patient and motionless.

“Meanwhile,” the voice continues, “the mother penguin is away for two months, feeding in the ocean.” I smile at the thought of the mother penguins frolicking on the beach while the men stay home to mind the eggs.