“Me, too,” says Mildred. Then, laughing, “Lotsof times.”
“How are things going with Jim?” Flo asks Teresa, and then covers her mouth.
“It’s fine,” Teresa says. “I told them all about him. They’ve been giving me some good advice.”
“Oh, they have, have they?” Flo asks, a mite jealous.
“Sure,” Mildred says. “I was telling Miss Cynic here that thereareways to keep love alive.”
“I’ve read that you should introduce yourself to each other every day,” Mimi says. “Meaning don’t assume that a man who has come to know you keepsonknowing you. Or you him. Because you both change, over time. You need to keep on checking in with each other.”
This reminds Flo that she must write to Ruthie about that one last thing. She’ll excuse herself soon to go home and tend to that.
In the meantime, look how animated and comfortable Teresa is with Mildred and Mimi. When Flo is gone, all of them will each have a lovely new friend. Flo feels a kind of soft landing inside, a kind of laying down of satisfaction mixed with just a little sorrow.
I’m up from a long nap and out on the porch and it’s evening time, the light not quite drained from the sky. Dusk, I guess it’s called, but I always did prefer evening time. Dusk is too short and choppy a word for such a languid time of day. It’s a Northern word when you need a Southern one. But whenever this time of day comes, I turn on my porch light. It’s not for safety, whoever did believe some puny porch light would scare off anything? No, I turn it on to offer a beacon against the darkness. And I guess I turn it on for Terrence, same as I used to when he was alive and out working, and long about this time I would miss him so, and I would turn on the light to welcome him back to me. Still do miss him, as I must have made clear. Still do. I turn on the porch light most nights and it gives me a bit of hope, unreasonable though it may be. And whenever I flick the switch, I always think of the lyrics in that beautiful song, “Jesse”:And I’m leaving the light on the stairs, No I’m not scared, I wait for you.
I believe I have to stop telling you about this and that, and that and this. I’ll end up turning 105 and still be writing this letter. Maybe that’s why I am writing this letter! Here’s my guardian angel tapping her watch, her feathers likely to plum dry out and I’m saying hold on, one more thing. But you know I don’t think she’d be angry, I think she’d understand, maybe because she too was reluctant to let go until she finally came to that moment of readiness. I spect I might be ready but for thisstubborn holding on to so many things, light moving up my kitchen wall like my own personal sundial, and words in the newspaper that I can’t hardly read anymore but there they are dutifully reporting. And I love receiving my new friend Teresa and watching my old friend Champ lumber over for his visit. Oh, Ruthie, it’s true that at the end everything becomes precious. Thus I tell you stories about certain things in my house, how you should at least have a meet and greet before tossing. I’m sure you’ve had enough and I understand.
But if you will permit one last thing.
I was raised Catholic, and I had to go to confession every Saturday. It used to nearly wear me out trying to remember my sins, so when I was about nine years old, I came up with a list of initials to help me remember my sins: PGFJC. Forgot my morning or evening prayers, gossiped about people, fought with my best friend, got jealous of others, didn’t always pay attention in church. Those were my sins, I still remember. It seemed bad enough to me, but when I think about what people might confess these days! Some of those people, if they told their sins, the priest might fall right out of the booth. There’s so much violence and hatred in the world and if I didn’t have the inconvenience of dying coming up, I might just try to do something about it. On a grassroots level. Why, I’d put a kindness booth on the sidewalk in front of my house if I thought I could get away with it. A kindness stopping off point, you come down the street and stop in front of my booth and I tell you something to make you feel good. Or give you a donut or a flower, your choice. I wish I could do that, Ruthie, just thinking about it makes me feel better. I never saw an angry person didn’t respond at least a little to kindness. Itreminds me of this one dog I used to pass on my walks, every time I went by he’d yank at his big old metal chain and bark and bark and snarl nasty. I used to hustle up to get by him but then one day I stopped and stood before him and I said real soft, Are you a good boy? He stopped barking and just looked at me. Are you? I said. I’ll bet you’re a good boy on the inside. He cocked his head like dogs do. You can’t hardly not like a dog when they do that. So I ventured a step closer, and he watched me with danger and fear in his eyes, and the fear is what surprised me. You’re a good boy, I told him, and every day from now on I’m going to stop and talk to you and maybe you’ll let me pet you someday. I tried taking one more step closer but he commenced his usual barking and growling and pulling hard on his chain so I walked away. But when I was some distance down the sidewalk, I chanced to look back at him, and he was looking after me and I figured he was thinking, We’ll see, old lady. We’ll see. And I figured he might lie on the rug in his living room when he went in, and put his chin on his paws and just think things over.
Well, once again I have gone on and on about something that is not the thing I want to talk about. I want to end this letter (FINALLY, I’ll bet you’re saying!) by telling you a very important thing I’ve kept from you. And that is what I was burying in the backyard all those years ago.
Let me see how best to proceed. From the beginning, I guess. And the beginning is that I once came upon Terrence’s open jewelry box. I was surprised to see it open. He was careful about always keeping it locked to guard against theft. I once teased him about that, saying that all the thief would have to do is lift up the jewelry box and stick it in his gunny sack.Terrence said, Well at least he’d have a hard time getting it open after he got it home. We’d been out to a kind of fancy party the night before, and Terrence had been digging in his jewelry box, trying out cufflinks. He was not a vain man, but he did like a nice set of cufflinks and whenever he wore them, they would have to be the right ones. So I was standing in the bedroom with my coat on telling Terrence to hurry up, we going to be really late, and he kept coming out with this pair of cufflinks or that to ask me about and finally I grabbed him by the arm and said, Let’s GO, the ones you have on are FINE.
We got home very late and Terrence got up early in the dark and went to work. Later, when I went into the closet to hang up the shirts I’d ironed, I saw the open jewelry box. I was scared at first, thinking, Oh Lord, a thief came when we were sleeping. But all the cufflinks were there, there didn’t seem to be anything missing. Then I saw something sticking out from between the liner and the side of the box. I thought, What is this, a note? It wasn’t a note. It was half a dollar bill. And you know, I got a prickle run up my spine and I knew this thing had some import. That night at dinner, I showed it to him. I said, What’s this? He hesitated just for a second and then he said where did you find that? In your jewelry box, I said. You forgot to lock it last night. He reached for it and I held it back. There was a deadly silence and then he said, That is from a long time ago. It is something a friend of mine gave me. And I still want to keep it, so give it back. I gave it back but Why? I asked. Why do you want to keepit?
Don’t you have some old things you kept that are not my business? Terrence said. I did have some old love letters but they were no secret. He knew I kept them tied up in a blueribbon in a cigar box that I kept on the closet shelf. He could have read them, but he didn’t, and I guess I was glad. But this secret that he had kept from me made me uncomfortable. I felt like a cold wind was blowing through me. Still, I decided to forget aboutit.
And I did, until one day years later when a letter came to the house addressed to Terrence from Paris, France. It wasn’t securely sealed and that was too much temptation for me and I opened it. Inside was half of a dollar bill. The other half. And there was a note that said, “For so many years I have waited for nothing. Au revoir.”
Well, I made an apple pie for dinner and after we’d eaten it for dessert, I told Terrence, Let’s go in the living room. Not the porch? he said. We were in the habit of sitting on the porch after dinner which you well know because you used to join us sometimes to show us your drawings or a new toy you’d gotten or your scabs. I never did see a child so interested in showing off scabs.
Anyway, me and Terrence in the living room. I straightened my housedress beneath me. I cleared my throat. Uh-oh, Terrence said. And I said Yes, uh-oh, and my heart was torn between love and rage. I held up the half of a dollar bill that had been in the letter. He sighed and said, This is about that half of a dollar bill again? I nodded and then I held up the envelope and said, But it’s about this half of the dollar bill, and I handed him the envelope. He looked at it and read the note inside and got quiet and clasped his hands and hung them between his knees. His head was lowered and his shoulders sunk down. Then he looked up and he said, I’m going to tell you everything. I don’t really believe that you need to or should shareevery cotton-picking thing in a marriage but I have shared every cotton-picking thing with you but this. And maybe it’s time, it’s been over thirty years.
He sat back in his chair and breathed and breathed. And then he asked me, Could we go out on the porch to talk? He wanted to change the channel to be more normal. I said I thought that what we were about to talk about was too private for that. I’ll talk low, he said, and I said well I might not. He looked over at me and smiled but it was such a weary smile, so careful and sad, and never mind that I was so mad at him, it made me feel sorry for him. We can go out on the porch after, I said. Just tell me. And tell it all.
Well, he did tell me all. He started at the very beginning, how she had rushed out of a crowd of French people welcoming the Americans into Paris and kissed him. Lots of women were doing that, rushing up to soldiers and kissing kissing kissing them, they were so joyful, so teary relieved, so grateful that Paris had been liberated and that the War in Europe was over. He said he didn’t want to think much of her kiss, he and I so newly married and him so deep in love with me. He said she didn’t want to think much of it, either. But something happened for both of them, when they shared that kiss. It hurt me bad, Ruthie, to hear him say “both of us” referring to him and another woman. There I was waiting at home for him, minding my p’s and q’s, just dying for him to come back. But he and Simone had that kiss and then he said they just stood there looking at each other and then she took his hand and led him away from the crowd. He said he was sorry to tell me but in that moment after the kiss he felt alive after he had beenfeeling dead inside for so long. What we had been through, Flo, he said, that awful war, what we had been through and—
I interrupted him then, I said I get the point, go on. He told me out all the rest in a rush. How they went to her apartment where she said she had never felt something like this, what she had felt instantly for him, and she didn’t care that he was married. He said he had wanted to say that he cared, but then one thing led to the other…
Tell me, I said, cold. Tell me what led to what. Tell me in detail.
Oh, Lord, the look he gave me, Ruthie. But he did tell me. They went out onto her balcony with glasses of champagne. They toasted. Then they came in and commenced kissing, she started it but he went along, he went right along. They went to bed, it was late afternoon, and they didn’t get out of that bed until the next morning and then that night they were back in it. This went on for three days and then Terrence was scheduled to come home. He said he had very deep conversations with her and I guess he heard the silent question in my head which was what about our conversations and he said their conversations came from what they’d been through in the war and it was hard to explain. But Simone said that they were soulmates. She said that her name meant heard by God, and she truly believed that God had at last heard her entreaties for a love higher than any she had known or expected to know, and Terrence the American had been sent to her. There he was. But he was married. And he was leaving. On the day Terrence left, he took a dollar bill out of his wallet and he tore it in half and told her, Here, you keep this half and I’ll keep the other,it’s light, we can always carry it. She said, This is the end, then, and Terrence said no he needed time, but he told her take this torn bill as a symbol of their togetherness.
By now my heart felt squeezed to death, but I had demanded the truth. I asked Terrence, Did you think about divorcing me and marrying her instead? He waited a while to answer and then he said, At first, I did. But on the plane ride home I came back to you, Flo, to you and me together. I vowed to forget about her. But the truth is I never did. And once or twice a year I would call her. And…
Then came a silence so deep and I knew. I said, You have a child with her. He said, I do. A son.
I lost all my air inside. I couldn’t hardly move. I believe both of us were hurting real bad at that moment. But then I said, Let us go out on the porch and not talk any more just now. I believe I need the open sky to hold all I’m feeling. Terrence said, I’ll stop all communication with her, and I said all right but didn’t her sending you the half dollar mean she was stopping with you? He said he supposed that was right. I asked did she marry someone else and he said yes. So at least I had that.
We went out on the porch and I near about rocked a hole in the floor. But I had made that vow that if Terrence came back home to me after the war, nothing would ever make us part. Nothing. So what I decided under the evening sky that turned velvet black with only the light of the stars coming out is that I would forgive him. I knew it would take time, but I would forgive him. And I’m so glad I did. He offered to throw that dollar bill away and I said no, I said it represented an important part of his life and he should not deny it. Keep it, I said, only don’t put it somewhere where I might find it again.
He reached for my hand then, Ruthie, and I took it and it was warm and solid and it was Terrence’s hand, and he was there withme.
Now. I spect you think you know what I’m going to say here. Stand by your man, and that awful thing in the movieCarouselwhere Julie Jordan tells her daughter that when her husband hit her, it didn’t hurt at all. I bout threw my popcorn at the screen when I heard that. No, if a man hits you, you got to go. But that’s not what your man did, Ruthie, I’m sure of it. And all your complaints about your Jonathan that day we took a walk together? I’m sorry, but they don’t add up to much. They are things you can fix, seems like small things can assume such a great size in a marriage, it’s ridiculous. Why, one time I got so mad about Terrence’s being late for dinner two nights in a row (he didn’t appreciate all I did for him, he thought I was his maid), anyway I got so mad I thought that’s it, I’m getting a divorce, and then I imagined being in front of the judge and saying well he was late for dinner two nights in a row and the judge smacking his forehead and saying go home, you two, get out of my courtroom.
