Authors: Ellen Gilchrist
“How could I do that?” She was sitting up, looking at me.
“Your daddy has plenty of money. He’d support you. Quit your job and start this month. Call the Kaplan people. You have to make a move, Winnie. If you don’t, you’ll get sick. This sort of thing makes people sick.”
Our cousin Tallulah was pretending to sleep in a nearby room. Every twenty or thirty minutes she would get out of bed and wander into the library to join us. “People aren’t supposed to die when they’re young,” she would say. Or “My heart is broken for you.” Or “I don’t know what we’re supposed to do
now. Maybe I’ll join the air force. I know how to fly. I’ve been to the Middle East. I went to a tournament in Dubai. I know people over there.”
“What do you want?” Tallulah would ask. “Tell me what I can do to help you.” Then she would fall back asleep on the floor, with her head propped up on Winifred’s knees. After a while she would go back to wherever she had been pretending to sleep.
“She’s hyper because she exercises all the time,” I told Winifred. “If she quits playing tennis for three days, her system doesn’t know what to do.”
“She’s a phenomenon,” Winifred added. “Did you ever get to see her play in college? She won all these awards for best sportsmanship, plus being All-American three years in a row.”
“I saw her once. I was awed, that’s for sure, but also because she looks like Grandmother. In the face she looks just like her when she’s playing tennis.”
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Winifred said. “Not tomorrow or for all the days after that. I can’t think of anywhere to begin.”
Tallulah was waking up again. “Go to medical school like Louise said to,” she put in. “The world needs people to use their skills. I’d go if I could do that sort of science. Louise is right. You have to go to work or you’ll die. It’s the only thing that will save you.” Then she curled back up on the floor. She was still wearing the clothes she had worn to the memorial. She hadn’t even taken off her panty hose.
O
F COURSE MY
brilliant cousin Winifred didn’t go right out and sign up for the Kaplan course and go back to pursuing her dreams of medical school, because that is not how shock and grief work in the world. The winter of 2002 wore on into spring and summer and the stock market didn’t really recover and neither did my cousin. She went to France and stayed awhile, and then she went to Italy and to Spain, and then she came back home and called me a lot in the late afternoons, but she wasn’t making much progress in stopping behaving like a widow. Her parents kept giving her money and acting like she was a child, something my aunt Helen is notoriously good at doing. Meanwhile, the rest of us moved on with our lives. Our doctor cousin, Susan, joined a clinic in Memphis and changed her specialty to internal medicine and then to surgery. Olivia ran her newspaper, Tallulah Hand became the tennis coach at Vanderbilt, and my uncertain career in the arts moved on by fits and starts.
My name is Louise Hand Healy, but I work under the name of Louise Hand because my mother’s sister was a famous writer and I thought the name might be a leg up in the television business. It turns out, of course, that the only legs that help a woman in television are the ones that are spread for a sixty-year-old producer with a pocket full of Viagra and breath mints.
Well, that’s unnecessarily cynical. There are lots of nice men and women in the business, and I know many of them.
I’ve made a start up the ladder. I made three documentaries for PBS, two of which actually got on the air, one about the
grave of a Roman soldier who a professor at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville believes is the biological father of Jesus, and one about a Civil War battleground in Tennessee that had been forgotten. Only twenty men died in the battle, but sixteen of them are buried there. It looks like I’m about to become the thirty-six-year-old woman specialist in graveyards if I don’t make a move soon. Maybe I should go back to calling myself Louise Healy and see if I can get a fresh start.
The events of that terrible September day are now nearly three years behind us, and I’ve been having epiphanies. Or awakenings, or hell, maybe I’m actually growing up at last. I think it started with a trip I made two years ago to Italy, when I was caught in a terrorist attack at Heathrow Airport. Or maybe it was the LASIK surgery I had last year that made me see like an eagle and freed me from my bifocal contact lenses. It might be the tooth-whitening procedure I had last month, or maybe it was dyeing my hair chestnut brown, mostly from despair when my third documentary got dumped on the cutting-room floor at WYBS and I decided my career had begun to tank. I don’t get depressed, but that film’s failure definitely cut a wedge in my self-esteem. I had to talk to a psychoanalyst to start believing it was the fault of their bad taste and not my bad moviemaking.
It was my favorite piece of work and took a year’s research. I was paid twenty-five thousand dollars, minus the 10 percent that went to my agent and the forty thousand it took me to live on and travel while I did the research. I hate to tell you what it was about or you’ll join the crowd who think I’m turning
into a ghoul. Okay. It was about how the fall trees turn yellow and gold above the Civil War graveyards in six different towns and how the graves look when they are covered with gold and red and purple and brown and black and yellow leaves. It was really a beautiful piece of work, with cinematography by a hot young Asian who used to be the art director at Random House but quit. It had a voice-over written by my cousin Olivia. The voice-over was the names and dates and ages and everything we could find out about the dead soldiers. I’ll admit Olivia and I stuck in some things we can’t prove, but my God, this is art, for God’s sake, not copyediting.
I couldn’t believe Olivia agreed to do it for me. I flew to Tulsa on a fall day and she met me at the airport and drove me to Fayetteville, Arkansas, to photograph a cemetery there that is about as beautiful as anything can be, rows of small white markers going out from a central monument, and covered in late October by golden maple leaves. Above the graves the ancient maple trees stand sentinel, still holding some of the gold leaves, and beside an iron fence a local school bus sits and waits for the afternoon. We read the ages of the young men who died on one long morning and afternoon and night, forty miles away in a pasture by a river. Nineteen, seventeen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-five, fifty-four, nineteen, eighteen, and on and on.
“They were hauled here in wagons after the battle,” Olivia said. “There are a few Cherokees. I’ve been here many times. There are three more Civil War cemeteries in the area, but none as beautiful as this.”
“Does nothing ever change?” I asked.
“The human race is just getting started, Louise. The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It’s still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.”
“A thousand? I don’t know, Olivia. There’s an awful lot of plutonium and uranium two thirty-five around, not to mention plagues and plastique explosives, not to mention global warming. I’m not sure we have a thousand years in us.”
“There are bright minds everywhere exploring and thinking and warning,” she said, looking out across the rows of golden-covered victims of the past. “Compassion and wisdom are already with us. But we have to spread the word of good things. When I wish on the first star at night, I wish for wise first-grade and kindergarten teachers. I pray for them when I pray.”
“Not me. I’m still half reptilian brain, Cousin. I wish to kill dope peddlers. I’m not very advanced. I want to personally catch and kill dope peddlers and child abusers. I swear I do. I think that way, but I know it’s because I watch too much television.”
“You need to get laid,” she answered. “Well, so do I, for what that’s worth.”
“Have you seen Bobby Tree?”
“Not in a while. I still dream of fucking him. How’s that for a reminder of what’s really going on? He’s doing well, Louise. He’s out of the marines and he has a construction company. But don’t talk about him. Keep cataloging the ages of these men. I want to use it in the piece.”
O
LIVIA NEVER TALKS
about her men. She’s had some great ones, including one of the best football players in the South and a bank president. But the main one has always been the one she married and divorced, a Cherokee with black hair who was her junior high boyfriend before my aunt Anna and uncle Daniel found her and brought her to Charlotte, North Carolina, to try to turn her into a southern debutante. That’s a long story and turned out okay in the end.
Bobby Tree is the name of the man she can’t forget. He pops in and out of her life, no matter how much distance she puts between herself and those days. He joined the marines the last time she dumped him, and then came back in one piece and covered with medals. I don’t believe that’s over yet, no matter how much she won’t let anyone say his name to her. If it was over, she’d be able to talk about it, or that’s my theory. I don’t believe you ever stop loving anyone you ever really loved. You have them there like money in the bank just because you loved them and held them in your arms or dreamed you did. You can forget a lot of things in life, but not that honey to end all honeys.
B
ACK TO MY LAST
failed video project. It lost a lot of money, including some of mine and some of my momma’s. I’m sorry about losing Momma’s money. That was retrograde. So now I have to find a better idea and a new backer and make a film that will get me some respect, or I have to admit I’m a
second-rate journalist who’d better start learning to live in the present. And maybe I’ll meditate.
Unless I get married and have babies, an idea that’s starting to seem more and more like a really good one. Except who wants to bring a baby into a world that looks like it’s exploding, not to mention the stock market tanking. Olivia says you really don’t have to watch the news. Just turn on a financial channel and see what the markets are doing.
More about me. My father is a stockbroker. My mother is a journalist who has written three bad novels that at least got published and stayed in print a few years.
Do you remember I told you about Charles Kane’s identical twin cousins who joined the marines the day after the tragedy? Well, yesterday afternoon I got a call from Winifred that deepened all that sadness. “Brian Kane just had his chin blown away in Afghanistan,” she said. “Carl, his twin, is still stationed in California, but they sent Brian on because he was the star of their basic training. He was a star in telecommunications, and all he was doing was riding in a tank and running the computers to tell them where to look for weapons. That’s all I know except the tank ran over a mine and blew up, and what I want to know is why we can’t make tanks that can withstand mines if we are going to ride all the good-looking, strong young men around in them. They’re flying him to Walter Reed as soon as they get him stabilized. I’m going there to help. So can you help me get a job in Washington? Who do you know there?”
“No,” I answered. “Oh, goddamn wars to hell. Are they those good-looking blond boys with the huge smiles who were at the funeral?”
“They sent Brian over the day he finished basic training. He was a genius with computers. He was at Massachusetts Institute of Technology when he and Carl joined the marines.”
“How old are they?”
“I don’t know. So how about the job? Can you get me one?”
“There aren’t any jobs for someone like you, Winifred. You’re overqualified for anything I can think up for you to do. You’d be in a perfect place in Washington to study for the MCAT. It’s nuts to give up on your dreams.”
“I might do it,” she said. “I might just do that. I could take the Kaplan and pick up a refresher course in organic chemistry at any of the schools near there. I’m going to stay in Washington and help with Brian as long as they need me. It’s my memorial to Charles. Their family isn’t very large. They don’t have a lot of people like we do.”
“Get a big apartment and I might come live with you, if you get a comfortable place without any cats and dogs. I’m sick of every childless woman I know having a house full of rotten spoiled pets.”
“Will you try to find a place for me? I need you to help me find somewhere to live.”
“I live in Baltimore, Winnie. I don’t know anything about D.C. except that everything is done by pull. You need to get
your daddy to call some senators or representatives or lobbyists. I heard that’s how it gets done around there.”
“Well, look anyway. I mean, see what you can do.”
“I’ll try. When will you get here?”
“In a few days. I’ll call as soon as I get an airline ticket.”
S
O OF COURSE
I got no sleep that night for worrying about where Winifred would live and where she should apply to schools and how she could find a part-time job. Finally, about three in the morning, I got out of bed and made a list of contacts; then I found the Sunday papers and put them in a pile to look for apartments. I wanted to move into D.C. myself but I’d been too busy to look for anything. I’d been living for three years in a garage apartment behind the home of the style section editor of the
Washington Post
. It’s comfortable but far away from any work I do. When I can find work, it’s in D.C., or I have to talk to people there: small pieces for magazines or papers, or pickup jobs at television stations. Anyway, I wasn’t looking forward to spending the rest of the winter driving into D.C. in bad weather and awful traffic.
“Epiphany,” I told Cousin Olivia when I got her on the phone the next morning. I always call her first thing in the morning because she goes to the newspaper at dawn, so she’s available. Plus, she’s maybe the smartest person in the family now that Aunt Anna’s dead.
“I’m going to find a place where both of us can live,” I
went on. “If Winifred needs to be in D.C. while she heals her wounds, I might as well help her. What else do I have to do with my empty heart and empty womb?”
“You don’t have an empty womb. You have a busy life. If you want a child, go find some sperm and get to work. A baby is going to slow you down, but who knows, it might spur you on instead.”