Wait Until Tomorrow (12 page)

That was a long time ago, and yet I still have pockets of shame and guilt. The girl on the blue bike is one of them.

AUTUMN 2005

My Uncle Dave died in the summer of 2005. He was the second of the “Field kids” to go. We didn't go to his service. It had been many years since Mother had seen him, but she was saddened by his death. She had often told me the story of how he had searched the waterways around their town in a rowboat after the hurricane of 1938, trying for days to find a friend of his who had disappeared with his boat. The boat was found, but not the friend.

 

In early September, in a year of hurricanes and floods, Hank and I decide to strip and re-varnish our back deck. We've been putting it off for several years while humidity, rain, snow, and neglect take their toll. We can wait no longer. The wood is turning green, and I worry it will soon begin to rot beneath us.

We have the television on constantly that weekend. Hurricane Katrina is battering New Orleans and the vicinity, and like most people we are horrified and fascinated at the same time. Coming from Florida, we have a deep respect for hurricanes. We feel the same way about alligators. They're scary and unpredictable and yet they somehow define us—or at least they did. We no longer live in Florida or anywhere near a coast, and we do not envy the people in the path of this storm.

The weather is balmy in Charlotte—perfect for working outdoors. While I stand on the front porch admiring the clear Carolina blue sky, a large cobalt-blue butterfly with black trim etched on its wings comes dancing in front of me. Though I come from a family of rationalists, I tend to believe in signs, omens, messages from the gods. This butterfly making hieroglyphs in the air makes me think of transitions and transformations. Mother's health, physical and emotional, is so erratic, that I wonder if the universe is sending me a warning. But when I speak to her later that day, she sounds fine.

Hank gets out the power washer. The work is long and laborious, and the green gunk so ingrained that I have to hold the hard, pulsing power washer just inches away from the wood. I shred much of it. It's good to have something to do besides watch the bungling in New Orleans that's costing people their lives. I am full of outrage, but like most people I don't have much to offer besides a paltry monetary donation.

The hurricane passes and, though it was a bad one, it seems not to be as devastating as had been feared; the country will soon resume business as usual. Our televisions will return to their regularly scheduled programming, or so we think.

My life, at the time, seems to be on an even keel. A week earlier I went to a “radical forgiveness” workshop. The afternoon of the workshop I was piled on the floor with about thirty other people like puppies, everyone touching two or three other people in a human chain. Somehow in that moment I managed to let go of forty-something years of anger toward my father. I did this by letting myself remember how I felt about him when I was a little girl. Because he'd left us when I was so young, I didn't know him well, and yet at one point I had loved him. I had loved him because he was my daddy and I didn't know any better. I had loved him unconditionally. This was something I had not allowed myself
to feel for him in all these years—simple, uncomplicated love. It didn't matter that he was a shitty father. It didn't matter whether he deserved it or not. I simply let myself feel what I had once felt for a brief time in my younger life, and it was good—like something black and putrid had been scrubbed from my insides.

 

On Monday the levees break in New Orleans and the poorest people in our land are left to drown before our eyes. My husband and I have the deck stripped and next we have to apply coats of varnish. At night we can't work and so I stay glued to the TV, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. We are all culpable in this travesty.

Eventually I turn away and go to bed. I wake up at 3 a.m., completely alert. Hank, who is often up all night, is nonplussed when he finds me working at my computer.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I can't sleep. For some reason I'm wide awake.”

And so I work until morning when I take Emmy to school and then go to Mom's apartment to tend to her needs. I wash her feet, put ointment and Band-Aids on her toes, and put on her compression hose. Then we sit in the warm light from the windows, talking about hurricanes. One family story is that my mother's favorite grandmother, Gammie, was so frightened by an enormous hurricane that hit Connecticut in the summer of 1938 that she died of a heart attack soon afterward.

Around eleven that morning, the phone rings at my mother's apartment. I answer it. It's my brother Jo.

“I need to tell you what happened,” he says in a gentle voice. “You can decide when and how to tell Momma. You know whether or not she can handle it. Daddy is dead. He died in the hospital this morning at 2:45 a.m.”

I hang up the phone and something completely unexpected happens: I burst into tears. “Daddy's dead,” I say. I kneel down and
place my head in my mother's lap, and I let her comfort me. My father, whom I hardly ever thought about, is gone.

We drop our plans for the day and drive over to a coffee shop. As I sit there with my cup of cappuccino, I feel such grief. My mother also grieves. She grieves for the years she lost to this man who demeaned and vilified her, this man who slept with his students and brawled with men whose wives he took a liking to. She grieves for the brilliant young woman she was, whose musical talents overshadowed her husband's, much to her chagrin and his rage.

She starts to tell me one of the stories, but I stop her. I've heard them all—the burned manuscripts, the master's degree she earned at Yale but didn't take so as not to be his “equal,” the sly insults that came from his charming mouth. I do not want to drink from that bitter cup on this day: Tuesday, September 6, 2005. We go to my house. I head upstairs to work, leaving her on the front porch to enjoy the weather. When I come back out, she's sobbing.

 

A couple of weeks later, my brothers and I meet in Jacksonville for my father's memorial service. He always said that when he died, everything he had would go to me and my brothers. He didn't have a lot when he died except for the Steinway. What else there was of value (a Cadillac and a condo) belonged as much to his wife as to him. We thought it might have been nice to have some of his books (he had an extensive library) or some token to remember we actually had a father. Then, after the service, a middle-aged man we have never met before comes up to us and tells us our father “had been like a father” to
him.

“Well, I'm glad he got to have that experience with
someone
,” I respond, glancing at the widened eyes of my brothers.

“When they moved to the beach condo, he gave me all these books,” he tells us. “I didn't know what to do with them so I donated most of them to the library.”

What I learn is that my fate at fifty is to be needed but not necessarily wanted. Is there any cliché my life is not fulfilling, I wonder, dabbing hormone cream on my neck each night to prevent the heat coil inside me from glowing red. I spend my evenings playing Scrabble with my elderly mother so she's not lonely. Mornings and afternoons I drive my teenage daughter to school in a seven-year-old station wagon that makes a horrible squeal, which no mechanic can identify. I stand in the checkout line at the supermarket with an enormous package of incontinence pads, resisting the urge to explain to the cashier that they're not for me. I get a perfunctory kiss and squeeze from my husband before I totter off to bed each night.

This is not how I envisioned my life. Perhaps that's the problem. I didn't have a real vision. I didn't make a plan. I set goals for various accomplishments, but I didn't really have any idea beyond “write and publish a novel.”

Lest it seem as if I do nothing but measure my life in coffee spoons, I should add that morning drives to school with Emmy are respites of light and laughter. We blend in with the morning traffic, and I explain “lane science” as I shift from one lane to the next. We listen to her music—CDs by Bright Eyes or the
Almost Famous
soundtrack. Early on, I explain what's going on in Conor Oberst's lyrics in the song “Lua” when he says to the girl, “[You] just keep goin' to the bathroom, always say you'll be right back.”

“She's doing drugs in the bathroom, baby,” I tell her.

We have a special street we like to look down as we crawl past it. It's called English Gardens and it looks like it leads to some lovely alternate dimension where no one has any worries.

We also talk about whatever she has to do that day. One day
she begins to recite the “5 C's” of public speaking. When she gets to “confidence,” we spontaneously break into
The Sound of Music
: “I have confidence in me!” We're laughing like lunatics by the time she gets out of the car to go to school. Then I go over to my mother's and she's a crying wreck.

I'm going through my mother's things. She's always wanting help with “all these papers.” So many letters. So many people who admired her over the years. I open one of the cards from one of her
Lost Colony
friends and begin to read.

 

…I've been listening to our performances of '80 & '81: Vivaldi's Gloria and Faure's Requiem. Although the recording quality pretty much sucks, the phrasing & musicality, artistry & passion, still shine through profoundly. I want very much to obtain recordings of us doing Haydn's “Mass in Time of War,” Vaughan Williams's
Serenade to Music
that we sang in the gardens for Princess Anne. If you have copies of these, could you, would you make a copy for me and send it? I miss it all so much.

 

There's no date on the card. The writer is probably one of her many gay friends who died of AIDS. She gets sad when she thinks of them. I don't show her the card, but I can't bring myself to
throw it away. I place it in a box of other letters and cards—a reminder of who she is.

She needs reminders because in her present circumstances she feels like a nonentity.

Emmy has the same problem. Her second year of high school proves challenging. The seniors who had been her saviors the year before have graduated. She tries to find friends in her own grade, but most of them simply don't know what to make of her. Emmy sometimes imitates the girls' reaction to anything that doesn't conform with their idea of the world: “Different . . .is, well,
different
.” And different isn't a good thing to be. She does find some friends but they are not among the “double-names”—the pretty girls who all wear their blond hair parted on the same side. One boy manages to really get under her skin. As they sit outside after school, he brags about all the expensive cars his father owns. And then I pull up in the carpool line in my station wagon with the annoying squeal and the two fist-sized holes in the back bumper where an SUV rammed me; instead of fixing the car, I used the insurance money to pay for one month's tuition.

But Emmy manages. The theater continues to be her refuge and her source of friendships. We ultimately realize why this school is worth the money: the drama program is innovative and exciting and driven by the students themselves. It is there that Emmy is introduced to experimental theater with its intellectual and artistic challenges. There she finds her métier.