Sand in My Eyes, page 7
beloved wife, loving mother, devoted daughter
mother, daughter, lover and friend
we will see your smile in all things beautiful
It made me think about what Fedelina’s mother had written in that letter, that a woman has the freedom to change, and left me questioning my own titles, thinking about how I had been going about my days, how I wanted to continue them, and who I wanted to be by the time I die.
I sat down on a wooden bench that was in the shade and, with lizards dancing at my feet and ants marching by, I tried conjuring what I wanted inscribed on my own tombstone one day. But other things quickly came to mind, like, why did my husband do what he did, driving that stake into my heart? I realized then a woman can go from room to room of her house trying to escape the noise and the clutter, and then go outside that house to one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the world, and the clutter and the mess that’s in her mind will find her.
I closed my eyes and tried focusing on the sounds of the Gulf of Mexico, which I could hear from the other side of the trees, not far from where I was sitting. It struck me that, just as those waves hit the shore every moment of every day and night, so, too, was my mind always thinking of things it had to do, parties it had to plan, items I had to buy, people I had to call, and so on three hundred and sixty-five days a year, without stopping.
I got up from the bench where I was sitting and gathered sea-grape leaves off the ground and the gravesites, picking only the deeply colored ones—mahogany, red, a few deep orange—trying to conjure the titles I wanted to define my life.
woman, mother, wife
woman, mother
woman, mother, maybe wife
a living being aware of life’s beauty
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
BELVEDERE
YOU HAVE A BITTERSWEET look to your face right now,” Fedelina said to me.
I looked up from the story I had written. “Do I?”
“How are those children of yours?” she asked.
“Grown,” I said, “and living their lives.”
“And you, what are you up to, other than looking around for a town house?”
I didn’t want to admit that since Marjorie left for college all I do is go to work and then come home and twiddle my thumbs, wondering how I’m going to muster the energy to do anything significant with the rest of my life. I didn’t want to bore her, burden her with my woes. “Finishing this novel is all, finding closure for it,” I told her, hoping she might give me feedback, tell me whether she liked what she had heard so far. When she said nothing, I added, “I’m thinking of leaving my job.”
“And then what?” she asked bluntly.
“It’s crazy. I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “I’m nowhere near retirement and, even if I were, I have no intentions of sitting on the sidelines. I need a change. I just don’t know to what or how.”
“What are some things you like?”
“Coffee,” I said with a laugh, “and I will admit, there’s this bookstore in the city. It has a coffee shop. I think about that sometimes, but I don’t know. I’m indecisive. Maybe I’ll travel the world, see places I’ve never seen. Work with children. It’s never too late, right?”
“Look at it this way, Anna. If you live to be as old as me,” she started, “then right now you’re only a little past being halfway through adulthood, so no, it’s not too late. You’re ending a twenty-year cycle, that’s all.”
“You have a way of putting things into perspective,” I told her with a laugh. “So what about you? What have you been up to?” It was a dumb question to ask a woman in a nursing home.
“I just finished training for the Boston Marathon.”
“Really?” I asked, knowing she was kidding.
“Obviously, Anna, I don’t lead the same life I used to. The titles that once defined me no longer consume me.”
“But you’re still you,” I told her, “upbeat and pleasurable.”
“Who were you expecting, a bored, miserable woman?” she asked. “Get me a glass of water, will you, please?”
I jumped up and looked around the counter for a glass, but the medical equipment made me nervous, and I felt clumsy, knocking the glass over once, then filling it too high, then not enough.
“I’m not thirsty,” she said as I put the glass in her hand.
“Didn’t you just ask for water, or am I losing my mind?” I asked.
“I asked for the water because I know my body needs it,” she explained. “But I’ve lost the sensation that makes me feel thirsty.”
“Oh,” I said curiously as I watched her slowly take a few sips, and then lick her lips.
“This nursing home is filled with bored and miserable women, Anna,” she said as she handed the glass back to me. “When you leave, glance in the door to my right. A bored and miserable woman lives there, always yelling at the nurses, saying rude things to the volunteers, griping when children come to visit, but you know what?”
“What?”
“From what I hear, she was miserable at age thirty. Listen, Anna, a thirty-year-old grump turns into a fifty-year-old grump, and a fifty-year-old grump turns into an eighty-year-old grump. If I wasn’t a grump at eighty, there’s no way I’m going to become one at one hundred. Negative young wretches turn into negative old wretches if they don’t do something to pull themselves out of their misery. But I’m no preacher and I don’t want to lecture.”
“As far as I’m concerned,” I told her, “anyone your age is an expert. You can say as much as you like.”
“You make me feel good. You’ve always been kind, listening to my rambling.”
“You’ve never rambled,” I told her. “I’ve always found you interesting—in-depth.”
“I try,” she said. “I enjoy contemplating life deeply.”
“Not everyone does that, you know, lives profoundly.” I checked my cell phone for the time. “Doesn’t anyone come by to check on you?”
“My God,” she said. “They don’t leave me alone. Before you got here, they were in here, poking and prodding, hovering over me—had me believing in alien abductions! I finally told them to get out and leave me alone.”
I laughed and it felt good. “And to think,” I said, “when I walked in here this morning, I didn’t know if you’d remember me and all those talks we once had. I didn’t know what to expect.”
“I remember,” she said, but then yawned and I knew I had kept her awake long enough. “Most people only scratch the surface. But you and I made a point of going deeper,” she went on. “I remember most of it—the things we agreed on and …” She stopped and I held my breath, hoping she wouldn’t go there now, to the major disagreement we once had, the one that silently sent us down diverging paths, putting an end to our friendly garden chatting.
Back at the hotel I pulled the bedspread down and off the bed and did a sort of Nestea plunge onto the mattress. At one time in my life I would have paid a hundred dollars to have an evening all to myself and to sleep through the night in a darkened room. At this stage, personal time was beginning to feel like infinity. And too much of a good thing diminishes its value, I thought as I lay on my back, staring at the ceiling with humility, wishing I had done a few things differently in my life. It’s what too much time alone does to a person, makes them think of all the things they should have done and didn’t, and makes them count the hours of their life, tallying up those that mattered, were truly worthwhile, versus those that were meaningless.
I wondered, too, whether the hours I put into the writing of my story were worthwhile or if they were wasted hours of my life. There was a vulnerability to me, having flown to Indiana like I did to share my story with Fedelina. I had never read it to anyone before and, to me, she represented the world. It was hard sharing my creativity with the world.
I finally fell asleep, but as a result of my vulnerability dreams of being naked started, and I spent the hours of the night running in the buff down Periwinkle Way, the birds gawking at me, flowers whispering, and raccoons chasing at my heels. Even the alligators had parked themselves in my path, forcing me to leap over them, and the sight of a menopausal woman hurdling naked over the back of a gator had the island’s wildlife roaring loudly.
“To this day,” I said to Fedelina when I arrived at the nursing home the next morning and pulled a rose from the bouquet of flowers I had brought, “whenever I smell one of these, I think of what you told me.”
“I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve said in life,” she said with a dumbfounded look on her face. “What did I tell you?”
“Don’t worry,” I told her as I placed the flower in her hand, and then pulled my manuscript from my bag. “I’ve got it all right here, all that you said about roses.”
“Hope I didn’t bore you.”
“No. You inspired me,” I told her, “You said roses aren’t always in bloom, nor can I be.”
“I’m remembering now,” she said, “but it wasn’t me who came up with that.”
“I know,” I told her. “It was your mother. I wish I could have met Cora. I feel like I knew her—all those letters you shared with me. Would you like to hear what happened next, after I left the cemetery on Captiva?”
“I was hoping you’d read more,” she said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I TOOK THE SEA-grape leaves with me as I walked out the white picket gate of the cemetery, wanting never to forget that one day those leaves would be falling on me. The leaves inspired me, made me want to go home and do something spectacular with my time. And because my children were gone, all I wanted to do was write—turn the story I had started into a novel, and finish it by the time my children returned.
“How hard can it be?” I asked myself as I drove down a long stretch of road with a view of the Gulf of Mexico on my right. “A woman can build an empire—she can do anything she puts her mind to—in a distraction-free week to herself.”
As I turned onto the sandy road to where I lived, I felt my creativity lifting me off the ground as if I had the wings of an osprey. In a private frenzy I tiptoed quietly past my neighbor, who was working in her garden. Small talk of any kind, even big talk, would ground my mood for writing.
“Hello, Anna,” I heard as I started up my steps.
This is your week in which to do what you want, I reminded myself, acting as if I didn’t hear her. And no one is getting in your way!
I heard a couple of more “hello Anna’s,” and wanted to tell her of the profound impact her mother’s letter had on me, but fully in the mood to write, I pretended I didn’t hear her and hurried into my house—the rental house that would further inspire me. I knew the first time we toured it, walked its wooden floors and looked at the banyan trees out the windows—their branches and aerial roots hanging in lieu of curtains, creating a canopy of shade, making me feel like a creature ready to take flight, stirring creative forces within me—that it was too small for a family of five, but that it was wooing me, playing with my mind, telling me, “This is the house in which you will do it, the bird house in which you will write something good!” There is no way one could live tucked within a banyan forest and not write a short story, a poem at least, or, like Cora, emotional, heartfelt letters to her children—even if they weren’t a writer and had never written before, I thought as I went to my bedroom and turned on my computer.
While waiting for it to warm up, I took the letter my neighbor had given me from my pocket and set it on my desk for inspiration, then pulled my clothes off and rummaged through drawers in search of anything comfortable to wear. There was not a single clean garment to be found in my house, so I stood on my tiptoes and reached high in my closet, pulling down the box in which, long ago, after the birth of the twins, I had stashed my sexy items. The long, red, silk nightgown I wore on our honeymoon was no longer my style, but, oh well, it was clean, and Timothy wasn’t home to see me looking ridiculous in it, I thought as I sat down at my desk and put my fingers to the keys.
I sprinted past the conference room and out the front doors of Anchorage Publishing Inc. like a woman whose feet were freshly unshackled and set free. As I ran into the parking lot, I pulled the happy, competent, confident mask off—the one with the smile and the expression that said that I loved my job and that I was fine, my life was fine. And as I put my key in the ignition, I felt shame for having let things bother me to this point without voicing it, without changing the things I did not like and for letting the stress of my job root its way under my skin. I had been operating for too long like a vehicle in perfect working condition, but there had been lights flashing in my head, strange noises in my mind, indicating a problem for months and cautioning me to slow down. But I hadn’t. I kept going.
“I can’t go on like this—running on empty,” is all I said as I sped out of the parking lot, fleeing my career.
Like the orchid, I no longer wanted a stressful environment. It’s why I quit. I did it for myself and must never forget the story of why I left my job behind. There won’t be room on my stone someday for the whole story, but there won’t be room for a phrase as big as “publicist extraordinaire,” either. I don’t think it would be hard to fit “mother,” and I could shorten it if I have a smaller stone. I could just have “mom” or, if really pressed for space, “ma.”
I wrote until the wee hours and, after dropping into bed, let my subconscious think about what to write next. And the next morning in the little yellow room, there was an orchid sitting in the early sun, and a woodpecker having fun hammering its beak into my tin roof, drilling my nerves. I went to my window, wondering how I might steer the bird toward my neighbor’s roof instead. People her age go to bed at dusk. They don’t mind birds waking them at the crack of dawn.
And there she was out my window, this older woman watering roses and loving her life, and the sight of it got me to thinking about the story I was writing. I no longer believed that a story about a young woman bemoaning her life was anything the world would want to read, nor was it the life I wanted to live. “Fedelina, Fedelina, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?” I thought as I stared out at the colorful varieties of flowers that had newly opened. Then, with the letter my neighbor shared with me lingering in my mind, I sat down and began to write again.
A cattleya will always be a cattleya whereas a woman has the ability to change, constantly adjust who she is, how she thinks, behaves, reacts, and so forth. This freedom and ability to change is why I quit my job and moved my family down south. The problem is, moving to an island didn’t fix my problems. It didn’t repair my glitches.
After a few paragraphs, I got up and walked over to the stack of books I kept in the corner of my room—books I once promoted. I picked one up and stared eye to eye with the author on the back cover.
“Anna Hott—best damn publicist in the country,” the author had said to me. “I see now why a book can live or die in your hands, and it’s you I thank for turning me into a best seller, so what the hell were you thinking quitting as you did?”
From the bedroom of my stilted house in Florida, I questioned myself for having left behind the job I was good at—all that professional praise. But then I heard the voice of another one of the authors I had promoted—the demanding, egotistical, publicity-obsessed type.
“Get me on this show, that show, and every show in America! My book is perfect for them all, Anna!” She would call me five, six, seven times a day for months, stalking me. I took hold of the spine of her book, pulling it from the stack.
“You looked like a fool,” I said as I flicked her glossy photo, “and nearly damaged my credibility by going behind my back, stalking the producers on your own like that. You wrote a book on baking muffins! I’m sorry, but a book on muffins is not controversial news.”
My room was turning warm and stuffy, and I feared the orchid might wilt, so I opened the window, the one without a screen, and I tossed the book out much the way I had my career. Then I walked over to the stack of books and picked another up. “I know you thought every living, reading creature in the universe ought to buy your book,” I said to the four-color author photo as I carried it to the window, “but you put unrealistic expectations on me and couldn’t care less that an in-house publicity department is a hectic place, that I was swamped, that I had fifteen books at a time to promote!”
I threw his book out my window and walked back for more. I couldn’t stop. “Bad publicity is still publicity, Terry,” I said waving to another book as it landed in Fedelina’s hydrangea bush below. “I told you a thousand times to stop calling me up, moaning over the negative review in the New York Times.”
I turned from the window—and from the should-haves and could-haves in my mind—wishing that instead of exhausting my energy all those years in a non-lucrative, anxiety-producing, adrenaline-rushing, coffee-addictive career as a book publicist, promoting fifteen egocentric authors at a time while running on fumes, that I might have instead written something myself. With this in mind, I sat back down at my computer and started to write again.
