News of the Spirit (23 page)

“That’s enough!” several of them say at once. Martha Louise is standing.

But it is Miss Elena who speaks. “I cannot believe,” she says severely, “that out of your entire life, Alice Scully, this is all you can find to write about. What of your long marriage to Mr. Scully? Your seven grandchildren? Those of us who have not been blessed with grandchildren would give—”

Of course I loved Harold Scully. Of course I love my grandchildren. I love Solomon, too. I love them all. Miss Elena is like my sons, too terrified to admit to herself how many people we can love, how various we are. She does not want to hear it, any more than they do, any more than you do. You all want us to
never change, never change
.

I did not throw my baby out the window, after all, and
my mother finally died, and I sold the boardinghouse then and was able, at last, to go to school.

Out of the corner of my eye I see Dr. Culbertson appear at the library door, accompanied by a man I do not know. Martha Louise says, “I simply cannot believe that a former
English teacher
—”

This strikes me as very funny. My mind is filled with enormous sentences as I back up my chair and then start forward, out the other door and down the hall and outside into the sweet spring day, where the sunshine falls on my face as it did in those days on the beach, my whole body hot and aching and sticky with sweat and salt and blood, the wild ponies paying us no mind as they ate the tall grass that grew at the edge of the dunes. Sometimes the ponies came so close that we could reach out and touch them. Their coats were shaggy and rough and full of burrs, I remember.

Oh, I remember everything as I cruise forward on the sidewalk that neatly separates the rock garden from the golf course. I turn right at the corner, instead of left toward the Health Center. “Fore!” shouts Parker Howard, waving at me.
A former English teacher
, Martha Louise said. These sidewalks are like diagrams, parallel lines and dividers: oh, I could diagram anything. The semicolon, I used to say, is like a scale; it must separate items of equal rank, I’d warn them. Do not use a semicolon between a clause and a phrase, or between a main clause and a subordinate clause. Do not write,
I loved Carl Redding Armistead; a rich man’s son
. Do
not write,
If I had really loved Carl Armistead; I would have left with him despite all obstacles
. Do not write,
I still feel his touch; which has thrilled me throughout my life
.

I turn at the top of the hill and motor along the sidewalk toward the Residence Center, hoping to see Solomon. The sun is in my eyes. Do not carelessly link two sentences with only a comma. Do not write,
I want to see Solomon again, he has meant so much to me
. To correct this problem, subordinate one of the parts.
I want to see Solomon, because he has meant so much to me
. Because he has meant. So much. To me. Fragments. Fragments all. I push the button to open the door into the Residence Center, and sure enough, they’ve brought him out. They’ve dressed him in his madras plaid shirt and wheeled him in front of the television, which he hates. I cruise right over.

“Solomon,” I say, but at first he doesn’t respond when he looks at me. I come even closer. “Solomon!” I say sharply, bumping his wheelchair. He notices me then, and a little light comes into his eyes.

I cup my hands. “Solomon,” I say, “I’ll give you a kiss if you can guess what I’ve got in my hands.”

He looks at me for a while longer.

“Now Mrs. Scully,” his nurse starts.

“Come on,” I say. “What have I got in here?”

“An elephant,” Solomon finally says.

“Close enough!” I cry, and lean right over to kiss his sweet old cheek, being unable to reach his mouth.

“Mrs. Scully,” his nurse starts again, but I’m gone, I’m history, I’m out the front door and around the parking circle and up the long entrance drive to the highway. It all connects. Everything connects. The sun is bright, the dogwoods are blooming, the state flower of Virginia is the dogwood, I can still see the sun on the Chickahominy River and my own little sons as they sail their own little boats in a tidal pool by the Chesapeake Bay, they were all blond boys once, though their hair would darken later, Annapolis is the capital of Maryland, the first historic words ever transmitted by telegraph came to Maryland: “What hath God wrought?” The sun is still shining. It glares off the snow on Pikes Peak, it gleams through the milky blue glass of the old apothecary jar in the window of Harold Scully’s shop, it warms the asphalt on that road where Rose and I lie waiting, waiting, waiting.

Johnny is having a party.

Driving to the party with her fiancé, Drew, Paula still can’t believe it—as far as she knows, as far back as she can remember, Johnny has never had a party. In fact, her brother Johnny’s life has been the very opposite of
party
: a long awful jumble and slide of hospitals, group homes, rented rooms. And several periods of time when he was just not here, not anywhere,
missing
, and except for once when their dad flew out to Texas and got him out of jail, they never knew where he’d been. He’d show up again eventually, weeks or months later, grinning that grin, and you’d have to smile back at him no matter what. You couldn’t help it. Something inside you, some kind of a seawall that you
had built and sandbagged against disaster, would start to seep and give and then collapse, but by then you were so glad to see Johnny that you didn’t care, not even when the water came up and swirled around your ankles. You were still smiling when you started to drown.

Paula smiles now, even after everything, just to think of Johnny. She has not been thinking about him, on purpose, for almost three years. Maybe it’s time.

Drew reaches across the gearshift of the new Volvo station wagon which he is so proud of, and grabs her hand. “What is it?” he says. “I wish you’d share that thought with me.”

Paula stares at him. All her life she has hated people who say the word “share” out loud, she never in her wildest dreams imagined that she might end up with one of them, and certainly not that she could be so much in love with him, which she is. Drew squeezes her hand and smiles at her. His teeth are big and square, white and even, movie-star teeth. But they are real, like everything else about him. Drew is real. Paula has to keep pinching herself to believe it. Drew also has close-cropped, shiny brown hair and big brown eyes, dog eyes, much like the eyes of their Labrador puppy, Muddy Waters, in the very back of the station wagon behind his doggy gate.

Drew and Paula take Muddy Waters everywhere they go. He is in the bonding phase, and they are bonding him for life. This is how their instructor at the obedience class put
it, “bonding him for life”; it scares Paula to death. Because, okay, so they bond Muddy Waters to them for life, but what if they die? Or what if one of them dies? What if one of them is in a plane wreck and dies? What if one of them gets spinal meningitis and dies? “You mean, ‘What if this doesn’t work out,’ don’t you?” Drew said, right after the dog obedience class Tuesday night when Paula was freaking out in the parking lot. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s what I mean,” and then she cried all the way back to the new house which Drew has bought for them because it was such a steal. Drew is always on the lookout for bargains. He likes to strike while the iron is hot, and maximize his opportunities.

To Paula’s surprise, he seems to see Paula herself as an opportunity. Ever since they met when they were seated next to each other at a Leon Redbone concert, Drew has come on like gangbusters. That was six months ago. Already they have a house, they have a dog, they have a station wagon. They have a disposal in the kitchen, which dazzles Paula altogether. Sometimes when she’s in the house by herself, she’ll feed a whole head of lettuce into it just to watch it work. It’s almost soundless. It’s amazing. But Paula is amazed by everything these days, by Drew himself, by her gigantic good luck in having been selected by him from among all the women in the world. Just think, she almost didn’t go to the Leon Redbone concert, she almost stayed home with a book! Paula feels like a lady in a melodrama who has been saved in the nick of time, snatched back from
the cliff in the pouring rain just before she would have slid off the edge and tumbled endlessly into the mist.

But of course this idea is silly, this cliff stuff. Actually Paula was doing just fine before she met Drew; and before she met Drew, it never once occurred to her that she was on a cliff, or in the mist, or in any kind of peril. She can’t figure out why she feels so
saved
now. But she does, as she leans back smelling that new-car smell and holding Drew’s hand, lacing her fingers through his, while north Raleigh flows past her view in a river of burger stands and car washes and convenience stores.

“I was just thinking about Johnny,” she says. “We used to have a lot of fun, too, we really did, before all the bad stuff.” Paula takes a deep breath. “We were real close,” she says.

“I know you were,” Drew says. “I got that. Come here,” he says, and she leans over so he can kiss her. He nuzzles his face for a minute into her long curly hair.

She giggles. “We’re just like teenagers,” she says.

But they are not teenagers, she and Drew, not by a long shot. Paula has been a journalist, a petsitter, a waitress, a kindergarten teacher, lots of things, though she has never been married. Right now she’s a proofreader at a printing company. Drew sold real estate for ten years before he went to law school at Carolina. He had a whole other life, and another wife, who left him for her boss at a TV station. Drew’s first wife told him he was boring, and Drew thinks maybe this was true, especially while he was in law school.
Now that his practice is well established, he is trying to be less boring, by taking Chinese cooking classes, going to concerts, and jumping out of airplanes. Still, he can’t help being a very organized person. He just can’t help it. Drew finds Paula stimulating, he says, because of her varied interests, her checkered past. What he’s too nice to say is that she’s a
flake
, Paula thinks, but she is not, however, as flaky as Corinne, her mother. Maybe Corinne will come to Johnny’s party today, maybe Johnny has invited her. Maybe she will drive over from Rocky Mount with her new boyfriend.