I’m also nervous because I haven’t made date squares in I don’t know how many years. I can’t remember the last time I did
any
baking, for that matter. I’ve got a whole Tupperware container full of index cards and torn magazine pages and spiral-bound church cookbooks, but I never look at them. The box is an artifact from a previous life, when I had people to bake for.
Besides, most things you can buy. They taste just as good and look so much better. Icing smooth as glass. Nuts chopped finely as sand. Loaves with splits running down the centre like healed scars. That’s the convenience of modern life for you. I remember my mother baking up a storm. It was work to her in a way it isn’t to me. She’d be appalled at my laziness. She’d tell me to take pride in my efforts. She’d say something about tasting the love in homemade goods. Mother died when she was only fifty-eight. Heart attack. My father died of leukemia at sixty the following year. I don’t think he knew how to live without her. For reasons completely unknown to me, I’ve somehow outlived them. Last month, I turned seventy-two.
In spite of my reservations, I decided to make something from scratch for Louise. It was the least I could do, given the unfortunate circumstances around her death, although I don’t think she’d care one way or another. She wasn’t much of a baker herself. We used to bowl on the same team. That was back in the late ’80s, when I decided to make an effort again. I’d spent too long inside the house, roaming from room to room, my grief a worn carpet trail. I needed something to take my mind off things, even if it was only for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon. The league was called the Silver Balls. Charlie had a comment or two about that. I bought a pair of ugly shoes, a carrying bag and a ball that looked like Jupiter. I’d make small talk with the other women, concentrate on the crimson arrows and dots painted on the alley’s floorboards and bring my arm down in finger-snapping frustration every time I missed a spare—which was most of the time. Sometimes, after the game, we would all go to the bowling alley’s restaurant for coffee and club sandwiches. They’d talk about their children and grandchildren and I’d listen, jabbing my thumb under the table with a cellophane-tipped toothpick.
Louise had big hair back then. It was burgundy—much too dark for someone her age. Some women think they can keep up the same styles as their younger days. She had silver rims around some of her teeth, and her fingertips were always slick with nail polish. She was a good bowler. And a nice person. The last time I saw her was a few years back in the watch department at Sears. Her battery had run out.
“No replacing it this time,” I say out loud. I sit up and swing my legs to the side of the bed. It’s necessary that I sit still like this every morning for a few minutes. If I stand up too quickly, I get dizzy. My blood is thinner these days and takes longer to get circulating. Salmon swimming upstream.
The end of August. Summer is about to take its final bow for another year. Thank god. The humidity has been terrible this year. I felt claustrophobic every time I went outside. I asked Fern one sticky afternoon if she thought the weather was getting worse. She said no. “It’s
us
who are getting worse.”
She has a point. In any case, the fall weather can’t come soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. I need a change. I’m looking forward to wearing jackets and going on a bus trip or two before the snow settles in and traps me. Helen says she wants to go to Turkeyville. It’s in Michigan, although I’ve never heard of it. I’d rather go see a musical. Something robust with good-looking young people and smiles so wide their ears disappear.
“What’s in Turkeyville?” I asked her.
She frowned. “Turkeys, I suppose. Although that doesn’t seem like much of an attraction, does it? Let me check with Joan Franklin. She went a few years back and raved about it.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“Don’t think too long. These trips fill up fast, you know.”
Yes. I’m sure turkeys are as popular as the pyramids.
There’s a throbbing in my left leg. My varicose vein. It bubbles under my skin, a river of jelly. The heat makes it worse. I go to the window and open the blinds. Mr. Sparrow’s bedroom blinds are up. Good. It’s our way of checking in on one another. If the other person’s blinds aren’t up by seven-thirty, something is wrong. One day last fall, I forgot to open my blinds. At eight o’clock there was pounding on my door. It was Mr. Sparrow. He stood on my front porch with a baseball hat perched on his bald head, small chest heaving, his eyes darting like goldfish behind the thick frames of his glasses.
“Your blinds,” he gasped.
I apologized profusely.
“Just glad to know you’re okay,” he said. “You can’t be too sure anymore. Too many crooked people are running amok these days. I told you about my bird bath, didn’t I?”
I’ve heard the story a dozen times. It happened last summer. “And you’re sure someone stole it?”
“It was either a burglar or a very powerful chickadee, Joyce.”
Mr. Sparrow’s blinds are usually up before mine. The man is an eighty-seven-year-old firecracker. I don’t know where his energy comes from. Eileen died over forty years ago and there were never any children, so I think he fights off his loneliness by keeping busy. He tends to a massive garden in his backyard. I’ll open my front door to find a basket of green peppers or beets or carrots on my porch at least once a week. It’s sweet of him, but I end up throwing most of it away. What am I going to do with eight peppers? Still, those baskets are a comforting sight. Someone, it seems, is taking care of me. But I live in fear that Mr. Sparrow will one day discover his vegetables rotting in my garbage.
I make my way to the bathroom with Louise’s demise still on my mind. I should have bars installed next to the toilet and the bathtub. I’ve gotten in the habit of using the towel bar for support, but it’s not sturdy and certainly not meant to withstand the precarious balancing of a senior woman stepping out of the shower. Outfitting the bathroom would mean having someone—a stranger and likely a man—come into my house. I don’t like that idea. There are lots of ideas I’ve grown to dislike, now that I’m older. Driving is one of them. I was never the most confident driver, it’s true. Charlie was the one who made me get lessons after John was born. And I got by. I even remember driving to Andover a few times with Helen. But since Charlie’s death, I’m afraid of driving. I’m fine on my routes: to the bank, to Sears, to church, to the grocery store. But anywhere beyond that is treacherous territory, the highway especially. I close my eyes and imagine speeding trucks, teenage boys tempting fate, darting wildlife. Sometimes, death is only a rabbit away.
I hoist my nightgown around my waist and ease onto the toilet. My sparse pubic hair creeps like a half-hearted weed down my inner thighs. I never shave my legs higher than mid-calf anymore.
My stool is loose this morning, which alarms me. This is the second day in a row. I think back to what I ate yesterday, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. Shreddies and juice for breakfast. A salmon salad sandwich for lunch. A chicken breast cooked in cream of mushroom soup with broccoli for dinner. Had that been everything? I try to remember. My short-term memory is getting worse. Details slip down a steep hill and land in a pile too large and tangled to sort through. But I have to remember. Sometimes, the smallest detail can have the most significance.
Two loose stools mean nothing, I assure myself, and promise I’ll throw open the worry floodgates if tomorrow’s stool is similar. I don’t remember when I starting worrying about such foolish things. I reach behind and flush, imagining my anxiety spiralling away. Helen calls this “visualization.” She read a book about it and it’s all she can talk about. She gets that way. Fixated on things. She wouldn’t eat bread for the longest time. Then she joined that mall-walking group. There was the choir last winter, the one where they forced children to sing old songs alongside old people. She took a six-week Chinese cooking course that culminated in a single dinner of pebble-sized chicken balls and rice dripping in soy sauce. She hops from one thing to the next, informing me each time she lands on something new, passing on her insight. I don’t know what kind of response she hopes to get from me. Sometimes I think she wants me to jump up and down in gratitude. Other times I think she wants me to tell her she’s the stupidest person on earth. I give her neither response, which perhaps frustrates her more.
Her latest is visualizing things into existence.
“See what you want, Joyce,” she said to me. “Picture it in your mind and concentrate very hard. Feel as though you’ve already received it. The other day, I lost my keys. You know I’m bad that way. I searched high and low but I couldn’t find them anywhere. Dickie was no help, of course. I worked myself into an absolute frenzy. Then I stopped, sat down on the sofa, closed my eyes and visualized those keys. In less than a minute, I found them.”
“Where were they?”
“In the front door.”
“Haven’t you left them there before?”
“Yes. But I’ve never found them so quickly. Tell me something you’d like to happen, Joyce.”
I’d like this to end
.
That’s what I wanted to say. But Helen would’ve thought I meant the conversation. Then she would’ve taken offence and cut the conversation short. A few days later, after she had sufficient time to turn my words over in her head, she’d call.
“The other day,” she’d say slowly. “What exactly did you mean? Are you feeling down? I don’t want to see you get like that again.”
My sister isn’t good with things she can’t fix. She needs solutions, even if they’re fleeting.
“I’d like to go on a cruise,” I told her instead. “Eat my way through a buffet and then stretch out on a deck chair and count the stars.”
Helen asked me to find a picture of a ship. “Tape it to your medicine cabinet mirror. Every morning, close your eyes and
smell
the sea air.”
“Or I could call a travel agency,” I said.
I turn on the kitchen radio to catch the tail end of the morning news. I’ve missed the big stories. Not that there are many in Balsden—sometimes a fire or a burglary. Every once in a while, a murder. Drugs seem to be at the root of most problems. Or love gone wrong. Good intentions can turn down such dark paths. Mostly, the news has been about the refineries shutting down. Unemployment has skyrocketed. People wonder what’s going to happen to this place.
I used to love my kitchen. It was my favourite room in the house. I redecorated it after Charlie’s death eight years ago. I needed a distraction. I went with a butterfly theme and it worked out nicely. There are butterfly patterned curtains that match the butterfly chair pads that match the butterfly wallpaper border that match the butterfly tablecloth. The butterflies used to comfort me.
Now, they look old and faded. Wallpaper borders aren’t in style anymore and my chair pads are too thick and bulky. Most of the strings that tie to the spindles have ripped off. I can’t be bothered to fix them. I haven’t sewn anything in years.
Helen had her kitchen redone last winter. She took an interior decorating course at the college.
“It made me think about space in an entirely different way,” she said.
Now, everything in her kitchen is so clean and sparse. Her countertop is granite. Her cupboards are cream coloured. Her floor is ceramic tile, hard and smooth and cold. Dropped plates explode like land mines. But that’s how “everyone” is doing things these days. Laboratory kitchens.
Swap Shop
comes on while I’m eating my cereal. It’s a radio show where people call in to sell their items. One woman is offering a hardly worn purple velour pantsuit, size 16.“I got it in Vegas,” she says, as though this will motivate the fence-sitters.
Another caller, a man, sounding like he’s chewing a mouthful of crackers, wants to sell a birdcage. It’s in good condition, he assures the host. He’s asking twenty dollars and offers to throw in two boxes of birdseed to sweeten the deal.
“Do you mean
tweeten
the deal?” the host asks with a chuckle.
“Pardon?” cracker man asks.
I should call
Swap Shop
, but I’d be on the air for an hour, going through all the things I need to get rid of. Last fall, Helen and I went through the shelves and closets in the basement. There were winter boots and flannel sheet sets and a brown-speckled toaster oven and a set of 1984 Olympic commemorative glasses that Charlie bought at a gas station.
“Why do you still have all of this junk?” Helen asked. She was wearing a strand of old Christmas lights like a boa.
“I don’t know.”
She
was the one who had suggested a purge. I was fine to leave everything as it was. It was all stowed away, at least. “Charlie couldn’t throw anything out. He always thought something might come in handy again.”
“I’m all for frugalities, Joyce. But three dozen margarine containers?”
“We used them for …” What did we use them for? “I suppose your house is just spotless. Helen. Clean as a whistle.”
“Well, it’s certainly better than this.” Her face softened then. A hand went to my arm. “Have you called that real estate agent I mentioned? He sold Pat Kipling’s place. She said he was very patient with her.”
“I have his card somewhere,” I said, rearranging a box of newspaper-wrapped mugs.
“Well, don’t delay things too long. The market is very good right now. Especially for Balsden. You don’t want to lose out.”
Lose out
.
Helen thinks I’m going to sell my house and move into her basement. She and Dickie had it finished while Mark was living at home. There’s a bathroom and a bedroom and a kitchenette.
“It’s got everything you need,” Helen told me. “Even your own entrance. You can come and go and I’ll be none the wiser.”
I resisted the idea at first. Rejected it completely, in fact. The possibility of living under Helen was unimaginable, especially after all these years. But this past winter weakened me. The snow piled up to my back door. The neighbour boy I pay to shovel my driveway was sick for two weeks. I couldn’t get out for food. I sat crying in the living room with a bag of stale oatmeal cookies. Where would I be in another five years?