Winter Birds (30 page)

Except for the slightest pursing of her mouth, Mindy could be a statue.

“Do you know what the passage means?” I ask her.

She shakes her head. “It wasn’t in the part for today,” she says tightly.

“You’re right,” I say. “We’ll get to it later.” I turn back to the beginning of the play. “Here is the first question for today’s quiz,” I tell her. “Of what does the soothsayer in act 1 warn Caesar?”

And without hesitation she answers: “The ides of March.”

“And we shall see,” I say, nodding, “whether Caesar sails through the ides of March like Peter Pan and Superman. Or whether the wires break and he plummets to his death.”

For the briefest instant Mindy’s eyes flicker to mine. Surely, she must think, this old woman is losing her mind. And perhaps she is right.

Chapter 23

What’s Gone and What’s Past Help

Cardinals hold the standard for monogamy among birds. Mates for life, they stay together year round, feeding and nesting up to four broods each season. They are known for the harmony of their singing, one bird trilling a melody which the other picks up and completes
.

More than two weeks pass, and the calendar tells me that the real ides of March has arrived. It is late afternoon, but I have been awake since a troubling dream in the early hours of morning. In my dream Mindy tried to wrestle the sword away from Brutus in the senate house of Rome in order to save the life of Julius Caesar. She was gravely wounded and borne away, apparently dead, by an old man in a long white robe who called out over and over, “The argument of Time! The argument of Time! The argument of Time!” I slept no more but sat in my recliner and watched the sky grow light. I turned on the television and watched two episodes of
All in the Family
. I heard Archie Bunker and Meathead exchange many insults as the day dawned.

It takes no prophet to unravel my dream, for I looked at the calendar on my wall before going to bed last night, taking note of the fact that the next day, today, would be the ides of March. In my sleep I revised the death scene of Julius Caesar to include my pupil, and then, unable to let her die, fused the play with another,
The Winter’s Tale
, in which Hermione is thought to be dead for sixteen years but is revealed in the end to be alive. The old man, designated as Time in the play, is a curious character among Shakespeare’s colorful troupe, for he is meant to be symbolic.

It is my hope that Time will revive Mindy well before sixteen years have passed. She has already come and gone for her lesson today. We have now finished the study of
Julius Caesar
, have read Frost’s “The Death of a Hired Man,” and today concluded the discussion of two stories from the literature book: James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat” and “That Evening Sun” by William Faulkner, the first exploring the element of humor, the second dealing with terror. Though I still hold to my opinion that the book is overreaching its audience of high school students, I believe Mindy has understood more than she pretends.

I believe, for example, that she came close to smiling today when she read aloud a paragraph from the end of “The Catbird Seat” in which Mrs. Ulgine Barrows raves like a madwoman and tries to tackle the mild-mannered Mr. Martin, who has devised the perfect foil for her plan to reorganize his department at work. “If you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,” Mrs. Barrows bellows, “I’d think you’d planned it all.” One thing I said to Mindy after she read the paragraph was this: “Never underestimate what drab, ordinary little men are capable of.” To this she gave no response; indeed, I cannot explain why I said it. It is over now. Mindy came and Mindy left.

It has been a quiet day, the ides of March, a day as warm as June, though it is not yet spring. The children who live in the house behind Patrick’s are jumping on their trampoline. March is a fickle month in Mississippi, rain and wind appearing alone or together in varying quantities within a forty-degree span of temperature. Today there is wind but no rain. The children, three of them, squeal and tumble together on the trampoline.

For a while the smallest one, a girl wearing a bright red cap, does a jumping jack with each upward leap until one of the boys upsets her balance. She scrambles back to her feet and begins again. A ball appears on the trampoline, and they begin kicking it to one another, and then at one another, both games necessitating many trips to the ground to retrieve it. I think of the amount of energy being expended on the trampoline. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be so small and to bounce so high.

A strange coincidence: One of the boys grabs his sister’s red cap from her head and throws it high into the air. She looks up and reaches with both hands to catch it as it comes back down. And then I hear faint music on the television and someone singing. It is a song I have heard many times: “Who can light the world up with her smile?” I look at the screen and see a swift succession of vignettes: Mary Tyler Moore walking beside a lake, Mary Tyler Moore shopping for meat in a grocery store, Mary Tyler Moore on a crowded city sidewalk spinning around and tossing her hat into the air, then reaching up to catch it. “You’re gonna make it after all.” With these words the song ends.

I look at the clock. It is half past four o’clock, and on the television screen Mary Tyler Moore is walking into the newsroom in her short skirt, her long dark hair as springy as the children on the neighbor’s trampoline. She is about to encounter some small problem in her orderly world, and at the end of the program, before the kitten meows from the MGM logo, the problem will have been humorously solved. This is the way things happen on television.

I wonder how old Mary Tyler Moore is now, if she could still fit into such a skirt. I wonder if at the end of this day, today, she will feel that she has taken a nothing day and turned it into a worthwhile one. I wonder if she feels, looking back over her life, that she has “made it after all.” I wonder if she ever watches herself on television and marvels that she used to smile so much. I wonder if she laughs at how insignificant her television problems were compared to the real ones she has. For this is a certainty of life: If Mary Tyler Moore is still alive, she has problems.

I think of what my own life would have been like on the day this program first aired. I would have been a married woman at the time, a teacher by day, a typist for my husband by night. I would have imagined myself happy. I wouldn’t have known at the time, though all the clues were there, that my husband thought of me not as a wife but as a housekeeper and secretary. I would not have known what the drab, ordinary little man who was my husband was doing in his study at night, perhaps at the very moment this program was on television. I may have been in the kitchen clearing the table after cooking and serving a late supper, which was his preference. I may have been hoping that his desire would be turned toward me later in the night, that he would sleep in the bed with me instead of in the guest bedroom, where he claimed the mattress was more comfortable.

How foolish the little dreams of Sophie Hess now seem to me, an old woman gaining on eighty-one, sitting in a house that is not my own, passing my days in a recliner, entertaining no illusions concerning happiness. I try to think of what I have accomplished in fourscore years, and a favorite phrase of my father’s comes to mind: “A great big zero with the ring rubbed out.” This I often heard him say when he and Mother were talking about money.

I cannot claim the hundreds of students I taught as accomplishments. Only a few faces come into focus. I see my third-grade pupil Starr, her black eyes shining. But I know the truth: Neither Starr nor any other student I taught remembers my name today or spares me a thought. I accomplished no more in the classroom than I do in my recliner. If I had not taught my pupils arithmetic and verb conjugations, someone else would have. And later, in college classrooms, all those hours of instructing against vague pronoun reference, comma splices, murky topic sentences—they were but an echo in a canyon, an uncertain sound fading to silence.

So what worthy achievement would I choose if it were in my power? I can think of only one: A child of my own. Again I see Starr, her face upturned and laughing. Some other woman’s achievement, not mine. But what of it? I say sternly. I will not give in to regrets. Life is what it is, not a thing to be shaped by desire. “What’s gone and what’s past help should be past grief.” These are Paulina’s sensible words in
The Winter’s Tale
. How unlike the play is my life, however—no grieving husband, no surprise reunion with a lost daughter, no joyous blessing at the end: “Go together, you precious winners all.”

I turn up the volume to see what obstacle Mary Tyler Moore is facing this time. It seems that she has been given the task of writing obituaries for prominent local figures. In the event that they die, Mr. Grant tells her, the station will already have something on file. I watch the entire episode, in which a local celebrity named Chuckles the Clown does in fact die. I take note of the fact that much humor is derived from the subject of death.

I suddenly remember something: While on the back side of Patrick’s house children are jumping on a trampoline, on the front side cars are no doubt pulling into the parking lot at Wagner’s Mortuary. Tonight there will be a visitation from five until seven, with the funeral to follow tomorrow.

Three days ago I heard Patrick read the account of the woman’s accident from the newspaper, and then the next day, after she died, he read the obituary aloud. Tillie Flower was a woman my own age. Oddly, it was a name I felt I already knew when Patrick first spoke it, though I could not say why. The woman suffered a mishap in her car at a stop sign on Arnold Street; rather, that was the point of initiation. She was quite a distance from the stop sign at the moment of impact. According to her husband, who was in the passenger seat and sustained only a broken foot and cracked ribs, Tillie Flower had stopped the car, unfastened her seat belt, and reached into the back seat to get a tissue from her pocketbook to wipe a smudge off the rearview mirror. Such details the man reported.

“She was bad to take her foot off the brake,” her husband also told the newspaper reporter, and when he “let her know the car was rolling forward,” she accidentally “stepped on the gas instead of the brake” and “couldn’t manage to get her foot up off of it.” At some point in the article, he was quoted as saying, “She always did have a real heavy foot,” a fact that a better reporter would have omitted.

Though her husband didn’t relate this part of it, I can guess that his shouting only served to rattle her further. Witnesses spoke of the car jumping curbs, hurtling across lawns, and finally colliding head on with a mail truck idling down the street. The mailman, fortunately, was not in the truck, having walked up to hand deliver a package to someone’s door. This is the kind of accident I can imagine young people making jokes about. The day will come when they will know the fear of being unable to control their own bodies. But for now they laugh as if growing old is a television comedy show and they are the audience.

There is a flash of red at my window, and a male cardinal lights on the bird feeder. From what I have read about cardinals, I know the female is not far away. And then I see her, sitting patiently on a branch of a nearby forsythia, cocking her head this way and that while her mate feeds. My bird book tells me that part of the cardinals’ springtime courtship ritual includes feeding, the male presenting the female with morsels of food, which she takes from his bill as if they are kissing.

A picture fills my mind: Last week I saw Patrick lead Rachel by the hand to the kitchen table, where he seated her and then set before her a plate and a large paper cup. On the plate was a hamburger, wrapped in paper, also a handful of French fries. In the cup was a vanilla milkshake. I saw Patrick pick up a French fry and raise it to Rachel’s lips. I saw her open her mouth and accept it.

On the television screen I see June Cleaver at the front door of her big white house, wearing high heels and a dress. I see her waving to Ward as he leaves for work. I know that Patrick will soon be coming home from work and that Rachel will be wearing blue jeans and a shirt, not high heels and a dress. Patrick will take off his jacket, hang it by the door, and wash his hands. Then he will say to Rachel, “What do you need me to do?”

I hear Rachel in the kitchen now. She is running water at the sink. I hear the thump of a cupboard door and the whir of the new can opener that Patrick presented to her last week to replace the one she held by hand. Helping in the kitchen has enlightened Patrick in certain ways.

I do not want to hear more laughter. Perhaps the History or Nature channel will treat life and death with more respect than the TV Oldies channel. Reaching for the remote control, I accidentally knock it off the table and into the trash can. I pull the trash can over and lift it to my lap. It takes some effort to retrieve the remote control, for the trash can is quite full, Rachel’s cleaning schedule having been irregular of late. As I sift through it to find the remote control, I see the last issue of
Time
magazine I threw away, and it is suddenly clear to me why Tillie Flower’s name sounded familiar.

“DIED. TILLIE FOWLER, 62, once the highest-ranking woman in Congress; of a brain hemorrhage.” Tillie Flower and Tillie Fowler. Two dead women, both southerners with almost identical names, both of whom must have awakened on the day of their deaths with no intention of dying.
Time
magazine reports that Tillie Fowler was often called the “steel magnolia” in Congress, steel referring to her toughness, magnolia to her southern charm. Perhaps the U. S. Congress and
Time
magazine do not know that steel magnolias are nothing remarkable in the South. I grew up among them. Women able to stand by themselves but allowing men to assist them.

I have just closed my hand around the remote control and pulled it out of the trash can when I hear a shout in the kitchen: “Where is she?” There is a loud clang as of a lid being slammed onto a pot. Then, “I know she’s here! Where is she?” The voice has a maniacal pitch. I feel the onset of a nightmare.