Edisto Revisited Read online

  I wonder, before going to bed, if a revelation like this could lead to anorexia nervosa. Truth is, I have been a little overweight, right around the middle. On the other hand, one more drink and it would be time for breakfast—ravenous for eggs and bacon in the salt air, and seething resentment for General Sherman despite myself, and just about strung out enough to call someone up and weep on the phone about the Wawer. It’s all attractive, on Thompson Time.

  4

  THE NEXT MORNING I went down to the shack. When you decide that place is fallacy, not part of the solution to the vague, friendly unrest that we all have, all who don’t have specific, unfriendly unrest—and why more of us do not have specific, unfriendly unrest I’d like to know (did Elvis feel vague angst? No. The King did not. He felt he needed many pills—what’s wrong with that?—and he felt he should have a bowel movement sometime soon, to stay on his once-a-month schedule, which Nichopoulos Hippocrates had deemed adequate for a country boy of durable stock)—what you do when possessed of the notion that place is not the answer is get meaner place, so I went down to the shack.

  It was mean. The tar paper had given up outside, dry, gray rips of it showing rusty-nailed diagonal wood underneath, and inside, the newspaper was still on the walls but it was very yellow, nearly tobacco-colored, and I found it hard to believe I had once been able to read the stories. The copy I had read easily as a child was not to be read now. I didn’t know if the yellowing had been accelerated by the cabin’s vacancy or what, or if, like the Sistine Chapel, it just needed a good wipe down. The shack smelled like a rat, a big, dry, clean, country rat, but still a rat. I closed it back up. In front of it was a chair and I took a seat. The surf was brilliant and rough and very pleasing. The sun was … round. I wanted something but did not know what. Why do we want what we do not know we want? Where did we pick this trick up? Is it the evolutionary mark of humanness? Imagine a dog, even a monkey, wanting something he just can’t put his finger on. A broad-backed, ebony-faced lowland gorilla saying, “It’s on the tip of my tongue …”

  I want to know what is going on. That is what I want. Then I’d reason what to want. What is going on. What the big picture is here. It seems to me trivial whether you won or lost the Wawer, or like the Audi over the BMW, or are a lesbian staked out with wet-leather thongs by U.S. government Indians instead of a bride picking out her silver, if you don’t have the big picture. I do not have the big picture.

  What I have to do, I suppose, is not want the big picture. That would free me to elect the BMW, the Chantilly, the tomato futures, the European Wanderjahr (it’s my time, I’m afraid), the partnership with the post-and-beam revival boys in Litchfield or the I-beam-and-skin boys in Atlanta; to contribute to the forest fund, elephant fund, whale fund, turtle fund, United Negro College Fund, UNICEF, Save the Children, Band-Aid, Pro-Life, Pro-Choice, choice, choice, choice.

  The sand at the feet of the chair is damp, clean, squeaky in its shearing with my feet. It is like sugar, but tastes more, I know, of salt. A few million cubic tons of the world’s finest rock salt. I’m on it. Squeaking my feet in it. This is the picture I have, the only picture I have. No one should have to suffer life with a head this small. There’s a shark a hundred yards from me in four feet of water who could eat me alive, who knows more than I do. He certainly knows his big picture. Mr. Shark is a sharp and fortunate fellow.

  I think of something yellow, yellow and tasty: it is time—the little picture comes in clear—for those eggs.

  A phrase of my old man’s: “Manage the screw-up quotient. That’s what life is. Deft management of the screw-up quotient.” But that son of a bitch knows what goes in the denominator and what goes in the numerator, and I do not. He knows what’s going on, in other words. I dislike him. He’s okay, you understand. But … no. There’s another way. For now, soft scrambled eggs, heavy pepper, neat whiskey.

  Before I get to discover there are no eggs or anything else solid in the house, the phone rings. I am accustomed to the answering machines of friends at school, the screens. We don’t have a screening machine down here at the beach. I pick it up.

  “I thought you’d be there,” my mother says.

  “I am.”

  “I can tell.”

  What? She’s a drinker, not a drunk.

  “Your father,” she intones, “wants to go up for your commencement.”

  “Tell him I have commenced.”

  “He won’t have it.”

  “Sure he will. Tell him to come down here and plan my future. That’s what he really wants to do. Tell him I have commenced the planning.”

  She laughs—much more herself.

  “I plan to scramble some eggs. I plan to have you all restock the liquor larder. I plan to wear a pink dress when he gets here. I plan hallucinations. Seriously, there’s no real booze here. Why don’t you come down?”

  “Athenia had a stroke.”

  “What?”

  “Athenia had a major stroke. They say she’ll never move her left side again. I don’t know how they know that.”

  “I thought you didn’t know where she was.”

  “I didn’t. They surface.”

  “Seems they do.”

  The hangover I did not have when squeaking clean ocean sand I suddenly have listening to details of the incarceration of the invalid poor. The state has named a holding facility for the invalid poor Turtle Creek. I will be going, imprudently, but as certainly as I stand with a phone in one hand trying to massage both temples with the other, to this Turtle Creek. As carefree as a white rabbit, I will be going to Turtle Creek to see some hopelessness, some urine where you wouldn’t think it fair.

  “Mom”—she’s talking about something—“Mother, that fellow who served paper down here? Involved with Theenie leaving, it seemed? Her daughter, or something—”

  She says something that again makes me wonder if Thompson Time is all the time: “Blue suede shoes. Don’t judge me.”

  “What?”

  “I wouldn’t go.”

  “Go where?”

  “To see Athenia.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. But you’re telling me so I can go. I am the naïf. That’s my job in this outfit, is it not?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I was wondering what happened to that guy—”

  “I don’t know what happened to that guy.”

  She’s very deliberate, careful, betraying herself in the repetition. She’s sensitive about this old lover. I was right all along. She might as well be a schoolgirl trying to conceal a crush. I could ask her point-blank about others and get a straight answer, I think. I think to try her.

  “Hey!”

  “What!”

  “Where is Jules Windham these days?”

  “Selling funerals for Bilo Windham, as always.”

  Yes.

  “Do you want to hear about Turtle Creek if I go?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t let anyone know I’m here. Tell him I’m in Atlanta looking for a job. I will be there looking for a job until further notice.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “Right here. Looking for a job.”

  “Good.”

  The Doctor hangs up. She likes the idea of that son of hers holed up in an empty house. I don’t mind it myself. There are lots of jobs here—small ones that contribute directly to human comfort, such as removing the snowdrifts of sand and locating fresh eggs and fresh liquor, and large, cerebral ones that contribute directly to discomfort. I shall do a bunch of the small and a few of the large. Blue suede shoes, indeed. Do not step, I inform the Atlantic Ocean, on my blue suede shoes.

  5

  IT DOES NOT MATTER that I have not seen Theenie in some fifteen years, but I think it will matter when I wade into the halls of misery at Turtle Creek. Important, important to spot her in her wheelchair from twenty yards and smoothly, directly, confidently approach her, with a smug I-knew-you’d-be-parked-right-here look and an athletic grade int
o squatting during the final approach so that you land at her level, a hand on her arm to prevent more awkward intimacies or awkward lack of other intimacies. This business—intimacy warding off—you see the importance of when you walk in and a woman in a wet nightgown, backlit so you see her skeleton through it, declares, “Help me! What took you so long!” and approaches with her arms outstretched and with the determination of a living-dead zombie, and you look to the attendant escorting you to dissuade the woman, and the attendant politely steps back to let the woman have at you. You politely ease behind the attendant, who says, “What the matter with you?”

  “I don’t know that woman.”

  “They change in here, child.”

  “I’m looking for a black woman. They change that much?”

  The attendant chuckles and abruptly leaves, and you, a step later, follow, the begging woman not two feet away with her outstretched arms. Every patient—you’ve already been told they are not to be called inmates—who can recognize anything recognizes you as someone dear to her, all the way down the halls and through the big rec rooms.

  I mistook two or three patients to be Theenie because I did not want to disappoint her by not recognizing her. Picturing her heavier or lighter, her hair perhaps thinner, bluer, her teeth perhaps gone—it was easy to see her in three or four other failing black women in wheelchairs. On the basis of one visit I will hazard a racial generalization: Incapacitated white women are indignant, certain of rescue, depressed, and angry; the black women beside them are at peace, not anticipating rescue, and not angry. They are not saying, in their postures and grasping and yelling, If we’d known it would come to this. … They are saying, We knew it would come to this. Somebody help them white bitches. Make ’em shut up.

  So there I am.

  “Which?” the attendant is saying.

  “None which in here,” I say. I’m tired of this woman laughing at me, and I’m going to use a little language to fend her off.

  “What her name again?”

  “Athenia Small.”

  “Small. Small.”

  “Small.”

  “She new?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come on.”

  I seem to have gained a measure of respect, or credibility, I can’t tell. There are things going on here I can’t even apprehend, let alone comprehend, I’m sure—I’m likely to start crying, for one thing. There is something profoundly wrong with acres of women weeping and fouling themselves and recognizing salvation in strangers. I get the feeling there is something unusual in visiting itself, but beyond that that there are not too many white boys coming to see a black woman, unless it’s some kind of odious, sentimental thing just like my visit is. This boy she raised come in once, they will say. “They” are the black women at the desk. Behind them, hidden, somewhere, are the white men in charge. I am one of them, in the final scheme of things. I know this, but in an atmosphere of confusion—a woman on the floor here, one weeping into drapes here, one addressing invisible kitties here, and all through all of it the urine smell—in this atmosphere I don’t feel like acknowledging any racial deferences or subtleties. I am in a place where survival is the issue, and everyone but me and my bossy, chuckling escort has missed the boat, and I am worried not about the delicate social minuet between me and her but about me getting out intact.

  We turn into a room.

  “That her?”

  It is. Unmistakably; though depredations there have been. I cross to Theenie and deliberately do not acknowledge my escort. Theenie recognizes me instantly and tries to say, “Lord! Who is that? I raised you but I don’t know who you is! You ain’t been to see your Theenie in … a criminal time. Like you a secret. What is you, a military secret? Come on in. You want a Coke?” It does not come out that way. Her right arm, which resembles a deer’s leg drawn up by a slow fire, and the left side of her face, drawn down toward her shoulder by a permanent spasm of muscle, move rhythmically, and a sound comes out of her, but it is a sound I have heard only once before, from a dog hit by a car. Hurt badly but not killed, it sat on its useless hind legs and waved its head and moaned.

  6

  SHE’S TUCKED IN, IN a neat hospital bed, but a smell hits me and I detect damp edges of the sheets and have small outrage—what is wrong with catheters? I turn to the escort to make some demands and she is, of course, gone. This would be difficult enough, Theenie and I alone doing whatever we are to do, but there’s more: a woman I just now notice, sitting in the corner, stands up and approaches me very formally. She is well dressed and so self-possessed that it occurs to me she may be the mysterious administration herself. “I’m Athenia’s sister,” she says, and shakes my hand.

  “I didn’t know she had a sister,” I say.

  I glance at Athenia, who is more agitated now than when I walked in. Her eyes are reeling from side to side and she is trying to talk.

  “May I see you outside?” the woman asks.

  “Certainly.”

  I give Theenie a gesture of conspiratorial assurance that I am just humoring this woman, anticipating correctly, somehow, that what she—Athenia—is trying to say is, the woman is not her sister.

  Out in the hall, the woman makes a presentation that convinces me she is a sister. It goes something like this:

  “I assume you are one of the families she has worked for. Am I right? Well. This is distressing—”

  “I didn’t know Athenia had family.”

  “That does not surprise me. She removed herself from us many years ago. She had everything. It has been a mystery and a painful thing for us. She threw away … she did not have to do with her life what she did. And now—”

  “She did not have to work … as a maid?”

  “No. My father had a lot of money, in—”

  “But you’d think she’d have mentioned—”

  “She is inscrutable. Here.”

  She hands me a business card, her husband’s, a dentist in Florida. I look at the woman. The resemblance is there. I recall the one piece of family about Athenia there was: a portrait of her mother wearing a headdress of some kind that suggested very vaguely to me as a child, and I can be no more specific now, “the islands.”

  I am back in the room, the woman having granted us a private session. Athenia cannot move her mouth or talk in any way, but she manages to say, with her eyes and some breath, clamping my hand with her good one, “Not my sister.”

  “I know.”

  She shakes her eyes back and forth—her No, I am learning.

  I go into diagnostic check mode. Her Bible is by the bed.

  “Can you read?” I ask.

  Eyes say No.

  “Even if it were held up for you?”

  No.

  “I take it you can understand everything said to you?”

  Eyes don’t move: Yes.

  “Well.”

  Yes. Well. What now? I am a tit on a boar hog, is what now. Of what value am I? I, whose family employed this woman for twenty years, standing here like a mourner at a funeral, who has not to this point had the wit to see that the woman claiming to be a wealthy sister is the salvation if there is one … and the woman claiming to be the sister is gone. She has stepped out for a snack or she has stepped out for a plane to Florida, her mission, whatever it was, abrupted and altered by me. And not inappropriately, I think: white people have been in that woman’s way all her life, in a way directly opposite to the way her sister, Athenia, had them in her way. I am in the middle of a large political and racial family spat, with some bizarre contours to it, if Theenie has elected servitude as the woman suggests. If she has thrown things away: and that is a terrible thought, when the woman making the accusation has the demeanor of a bank president and the throwing-away accused had the demeanor of a bandannaed Jemima, before her veins blew out. I am made a little nervous by these speculations. Worrying about catheters and euthanasia was easy compared to this. I want to run, withal, before any more can happen, and basically, I do.<
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  If you have emptied yourself of sympathy, you get blunt. I say to Theenie: “Athenia, this looks pretty bad.”

  Eyes still.

  “But you told me the solution years ago.”

  Eyes still.

  “You don’t have to do anything in life except die and live till you die.”

  Eyes still, then back and forth.

  I wonder if it is not, somehow, salubrious news. All she has to do is rot in sores and piss until she dies, and I have told her so.

  On the curb, outside, I discover I am not empty of sympathy. It is that you must distrust sympathy, and cruelty is more suitable. Sympathy is the only emotion you have in a Turtle Creek, and it will overwhelm you if you let it, and you would be, though perhaps medically more fit, no more mentally adept at survival than the patients, among whose wheelchairs you would go down in a weeping heap. On the curb I look at the gutter which my feet hang over as if I am surfing. I could start crying if I allowed myself to, and not stop. If you were to start, you would not stop.