Oh I am tired now, Ruthie, but I’m going to finish. This is what I’m telling you. The things you get mad at about your husband, sometimes it’s not him you’re mad at, sometimes it’s you. Sometimes you’re just about boiling over with a frustration you can’t quite put your finger on and there is your husband nearby and why not put it all on him. But what you need to do is talk to him. Let him in. And come to forgiveness of him and you.
I believe that forgiveness is our holiest sacrament. You know my friend Teresa told me the three most common thingsthat people say to others on their deathbed. They are I forgive you, I hope you forgive me, and I love you. In the grandest scheme of things, what else matters more? We need not to sanction bad behavior. Just forgive it. And admit that Lord, we are all messes sometimes. Let us strive for better. Let us strive for good.
I got more to say but I am going to have to lie down. Here is my prayer, to wake up one more time so that I can tell you out the rest. What I did besides forgive. What is buried by the roses.
Flo walks slowly over to open the shade to look out at the street and her heart is heavy with love for all that is out there, but it is hard to see, mostly what she sees is light.
She goes down the hall and into the bathroom to wash up and to get ready. Hard to see! She feels for her little pot of rouge in the drawer and rubs some on her cheeks. Too much? She looks in the mirror. Can’t tell. She feels for her lipstick and puts someon.
Back to her room and she finds what she wants in the closet. And then she slowly dresses and makes her way downstairs. It’s hard to make it down the stairs. But she wants to finish. She remembers a blind man she met named James Monroe, who told her he could still write letters because he put a ruler on the page and wrote the best he could above it. And it was good enough. People could read it. Flo goes to the silverware drawer and feels for a knife to act as a ruler. Then she stations herself at the kitchen table and all the heaviness she has been feeling begins to lift.
I was telling you about Terrence and Simone. After Terrence and I came back into the house that night, he threw the letter and the envelope away. We went to bed and lay in each others’ arms, sorry and grateful and sore and tender all mixed up together. In the morning, after Terrence went to work, I fished that letter out of the garbage and I wrote to Simone. It was a short note saying I’d heard about her and I knew she’d had a baby by Terrence and although it may sound funny could I ask for a picture of him. I told her I had not been able to have children and I would like to know what Terrence’s son looked like. I wouldn’t say it was a nice letter, but it wasn’t mean, either. I left it unsealed and I went to the post office and got a box and the little key and I added the return address to my letter and mailed it and then I waited. I told myself that I would wait three months and if I didn’t get an answer I would turn in the key to the post office box and that would be the end of that. But I had to try because I knew otherwise I would wonder all my life about that child.
As it happened, I only had to wait two weeks. On the day I got a return letter, I had gone to the post office for stamps and then stopped as usual to look in the box. There it was, a little square envelope, and I opened it right then and there and it was a card with birds and flowers on it, a right pretty card. And there was a picture of a young man in there, and he was handsome as all get out and he had Terrence’s eyes anddimples exact. I stared at that photo and then I read the note that came with it, which I have memorized from reading it so many times. It said, Here is the photograph you requested. I am sorry for your pain but I am not sorry for Jean-Claude. I hope you are not angry at Terrence after all these years for what happened between him and me. He is a man who is part angel, I saw that right away. It was the end of the War, we were swept up in it. But I am sorry for your pain and mine. I love my husband, but I will never forget Terrence. Such things happen. I wish you well.
I brought her letter home and hid it in an old Kotex box and I looked at the picture of Jean-Claude many times. And after a few days I wrote Simone back, thanking her for honoring my request. And then she wrote back to me, and I to her. I did not tell Terrence about our correspondence; I did not want him to think about Simone anymore. I thought for the sake of us I would keep this between me and Simone. And it’s funny, she and I seemed to need to talk in this way. Maybe it was a kind of exorcism. She told me a lot about Jean-Claude, how he was a doctor and a father himself now. She told about life in France and I told about life in America; she had never come to visit the country. Oh, we shared quite a few letters, there was a flurry of mail, and then after a while, it stopped. We said our own au revoirs. And I took her letters and the photo she’d sent of Jean-Claude and I buried them. I didn’t want them in my house anymore but I didn’t want to throw them away. I thought about showing the picture to Terrence, but I didn’t want us to go through all of that again. So I buried them in a pretty rosewood music box I found at a thrift store, and you can dig them up and read them if you want and see howsometimes something that seems unforgivable isn’t. I don’t think it’s too strong to say that Simone and I became friends, in a way.
Now I want to say something else.
You were ever a hot-headed person, Ruthie, I think you’ll admit to that. Your poor high school boyfriends, you put them through the mill. Now you know I love you but you are a hot-headed person. And I’m going to tell you to think, Ruthie. To think hard before you bust up what is probably a good marriage. I don’t know why marriage doesn’t come with a warning sign, because it is hard. But if you can overcome something together, you will be stronger. Take your own man on your own front porch. Ask him to open his creaky heart, and you open yours, Ruthie, without vengeance. See what happens.
Oh, Ruthie. In some ways the world is so vast and unknowable, all the things in the water and in the sky and all the things walking along the crust, mostly not minding their own business—man or beast, seems like we seek to interact one way or another. In other ways, though, the world seems very small, very small and dear, like something you could put in your pocket.
I am sorry to leave with summer coming, all the little kids running breakneck up and down the block, the little girls with their tops off just like the boys. I remember when you were about eight years old and your parents told you that you would have to start wearing a top, you were too old now not to. I heard you yell GOD A’MIGHTY, WHY?? and you got a spanking for your language. Afterward, you came stomping over to my house and sat on the front porch step and said I do NOTwant to go along with THAT one, it is stupid and when they aren’t looking I’m taking my top right back off. I don’t even have any titties. Then you asked would I like a mudpie you’d made earlier that morning. Of course, I said, and you brought over a mudpie decorated with a dead moth which you said was pretty and there was no need for it to go to waste. But don’t eat this, you said and I said I would not. It’s just for lookin’, you said and then you sighed in that forlorn way you sometimes had. I said I had butter brickle ice cream and we could eat that and you said yes ma’am and asked if you could have a cone, too. We ate our cones and ice cream and you were near the bottom of your cone when you said, Well, I can’t eat another bite!!! but then you finished it. I believe you had just wanted to say that, maybe you heard someone else say it and it sounded fine to you. You did that sometimes, just quoted something you’d heard. Cash on the dollar, you once said, and I said what does that mean and you said heck if I know and skipped off.
Flo rubs her hands, her eyes. Then she continues.
I would say you needed me, Ruthie, and I needed you too. It’s gone on a long time, our needing each other in one way or another, even now. I guess especially now.
I wish you would right about now show up and knock at my door and I would shuffle on over and let you in. I would put this stack of papers in your hands and I would kiss your cheek just like I always do when I first see you again. Kiss your cheek and hold your face between my hands to take a goodlook at how you have changed and how you have not. I don’t guess I’d have to say a word. Course I know that’s not going to happen so I’ll just leave this letter (I wonder would it get in the Guinness Book for the longest letter) setting here on the kitchen table and hope it gets to you. I have made arrangements for my new friend Teresa to mail it and I believe I can trust her.
A breath. Two.
And now I guess I will say goodbye, Ruthie. I’ll miss you. Well, probably not because I’ll be in a different zone but you know how it is, people all the time saying what they’ll miss when they die. That Norah Ephron said she’d miss a certain kind of bath salts. And pie. I’ll miss hot cross buns every Easter and the flowers bowing in their gardens in the late afternoon and snow that looks just like falling lace. I’ll miss the pretty piano music comes on the radio for free. I’ll miss the rumble of thunder and rain-mottled sidewalks and the tall green trees. I’ll miss the surprise of what each day might bring which we so often forget about, those surprises that can delight us. I once saw an ant walking down the street and his shadow was beside him and it made my heart expand like an accordion and to this day I still can’t really say why. And there are surprises that come unexpectedly that can save our lives, too, there are! An idea you’d never thought of before that pulls you out of the drowning pond.
Well, I wish everyone well, everyone I know and everyone I don’t know. And I wish everyone peace, a quietness of spiritthat we don’t seem to have enough of, but maybe if we all hope for it, lo and behold it will come to pass. Wouldn’t that be something. Like a strange and brilliant light in the sky that zings the place that needs zinging.
Oh, I just remembered one last thing! There is a big boxin
Dear Teresa McNair,
Thank you so much for sending me Flo’s letter. I was so very sorry to hear that she had died, even though she had prepared me for it when we last spoke a few months ago. At that time, she had not yet been diagnosed, but she had not been feeling well. She lived a good long life, and I suppose that’s some compensation for those of us who loved her.
I am deeply appreciative of Flo leaving her house and its contents to me. It came as a complete surprise, though I know Flo and Terrence had no relatives or children, and that in some respects Flo thought of me as her daughter.
Flo’s house is very important to me, but I cannot manage things in person—my husband and I are in the process of buying a new house here in California. There is a realtor there named Sandy Bellman (she owns the self-named agency) whom I have contacted, however, and she assures me that all the necessary paperwork for selling Flo’s house can be done electronically. Sandy will also manage an estate sale.
In her letter, Flo told me about the significance of some things that are in her house. It was beautiful to read, and I am returning the letter to you so that you can read it, too. There are a few things I will ask Sandy to send me: Flo’s silver spoons, her Mrs. Hen mug, her old teddy bear, her pearls, her embroidered dishtowels, and the little white box wrapped in red ribbon that has an elastic band inside—she kept it in her kitchen drawer. If you think there is something you (or anyone you know Flo liked) might want, please contact Sandy and askher to let you into the house before the estate sale—I believe you must have been a good friend, and that Flo would want you to have anything you like. There is a good woolen blanket that she mentions. I wonder if a shelter could useit?
I wish I’d have been able to offer a final thanks to Flo for what she gave to me as a child growing up next door to her, and as a friend to me for all my life. She was ever a kind and generous person—and a very wise one. I wish she could know how much she helped me by writing me this letter.
Thank you, Teresa.
Warmly,
Ruth Eimers
“Look, honey!” the young woman says, pointing to a footprint in the concrete. “I wonder if this is of the man who lived here.”
