Sing to It Read online

  Yesterday, where someone had dumped a cat-scratched leather recliner in the weedy empty lot around the corner, an elderly man was found sitting in the chair, quietly disoriented. The recliner looked like a seat on an Amtrak train, in Coach. The man did not seem to know where he was, or how he got there, but he was not fearful, just quiet. He was able to recite his son’s email address and list the son’s many accomplishments to the police whom someone called to help. They were kind when they contacted the man’s son in another state. But this won’t go well, I thought, and chose not to follow the story.

  Cloudland

  And the children in the apple-tree

  Not known, because not looked for . . .

  —T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

  I remember thinking: There will never come a time when I will not be thinking of this. And I was right. And I was wrong.

  *

  The locals say that in Florida, you have to go north to be in the South. It is January and seventy-five degrees, and there are citrus trees in the yard. Tomorrow I am going to pick pounds of kumquats from one of those trees, and make marmalade from a recipe that requires me to procure a twenty-quart pot and a set of tongs to lift boiled-sterile jars from the boiling water, and another tool to secure the lids to the jars. This if the pectin does its job and the shredded kumquats cohere without forming clumps. I already know that something as simple as a longish wait at a stoplight on the way to the “culinary arts” store for the above will be enough to send me back home to admire the kumquats dotting the lush tree, and never take a step closer to pick them.

  No one expects me to make such a thing. Aren’t there whole stores devoted to the sale of marmalade? Whole malls of marmalade, and not just from this country? I thought it would be fun to surprise a few people. Though there are other ways to surprise them, and probably a better idea not to surprise anyone at all. I know I have had all the surprise I can take.

  “Happy New Year,” people call out wherever one goes.

  Sure, I’ll play along: “Happy New Year,” I say back.

  Had the last year ended?

  What if you are someone who does not know when something is over? What if you are the last one standing when others have left the concert, the theater, the crime-addled city, the busted love affair? What if you look for a sign and a sign doesn’t come. Or a sign comes but you miss it. What if you have to make a decision on your own and it feels like a body blow, falling back on yourself.

  *

  I get by working two to three days a week, and not even a whole day at that. There is no state income tax in Florida, housing costs are low, and after a four-week course of study I had a certificate that allowed me to sign with an agency that sends me to private homes and “senior” communities where, as a home health aide without an RN, I can wash people’s bodies and help them get dressed; I can take a temperature and wrap a cuff around an arm—sitting, then standing—to get blood pressure readings. I get groceries and do laundry, and heat up soup and make a grilled cheese sandwich. No chance of the sleeve of a patient’s robe brushing the flame of a gas burner. I can show a family member, if a patient has one who visits, how to reposition their relative to avoid strain on the back. I keep records of new things I notice about my patients. Not trained or certified to diagnose or prescribe, I can at least render clear descriptions of what I see that was not there before. That is all the responsibility anyone should want me to have. It’s no matter; there is dignity in work.

  A woman of her word can do what she signed on to do. As I do now with those in my quasi-professional care. I’m a good listener, I’m told, so I get asked back; the agency is glad for the good word-of-mouth. I find the work easy and pleasant, unless someone with a frontal lobe injury acts out. Mr. Davis, that is, an eighty-year-old newly moved into assisted living after he went on a cruise to Alaska with a friend. About to go into bankruptcy, he opened a line of credit aboard the ship to buy a diamond ring with which he proposed to the captain’s wife. He still feels misunderstood: “Everyone likes to be flirted with,” he insists every time I visit.

  I could not live on this salary outside of Florida. Which is largely why I moved here from New York. Too young to retire, I left the profession of teaching English in high school—a good, private school for girls in Manhattan—in a denouncement of ambition. That is the way I tell it. All these women breaking glass ceilings, and I found one firmly in place. Not to suggest that helping older people manage is not a valuable use of time. But it was not a calling for me; it was a default position, something I could nominally train for that would barely support me after feeling that I had been ambushed, though what happened was entirely my fault; I had gone off the tracks.

  Parents are cautioned against becoming their children’s friends. They are meant to be parents, and make unpopular decisions for the well-being of their children. But teachers are not warned against this, and I was a friend to many of my students. So when I invited some of them to my apartment for tea, and one of them produced cocaine, and I had a tiny bit right along with them, I did not blame the girl who reported this to the headmistress. I was allowed to leave without charges being filed, though there would not be a reference should I want to teach elsewhere.

  I left quietly, moved out of state. I still wanted to be of use, hence the four-week preparation to do the job I now do, with no interest in advancement. I drove to Florida in my old Toyota Camry that still had the bumper sticker I had long ago affixed: I BRAKE JUST LIKE A LITTLE GIRL.

  The school where I taught exceptionally bright girls had been able to pay serious writers to come in and talk to them, to read to them and take their questions. For the twenty years that I taught there (my first job after grad school), I insinuated myself into the company of creative people; I asked them what to read, and how to construct a bigger picture of what was available to a person with curiosity and a need—at the time—to be more than she was. Many obliged.

  *

  I have to be available on short notice every other weekend when the aides with seniority can choose a less intensive schedule. That does not present a problem. I have to give the agency thirty hours a week. In exchange for contracting to do this, the four weeks of training were free; some kind of government grant covered the costs.

  My off-hours, which are many, are given to home maintenance. If I had known what would be involved, I would not have rented this house—suspiciously cheap, even by north Florida standards. The owners saw me coming. They saw that I had not lived here before, and so would not know what was normal and what was not when it came to keeping up a place. I had been given a further small reduction in rent for agreeing to keep up the pool in place of the pool company the owners hired. I knew nothing. I said sure. I liked Banana Land—the area off the small patio that was planted with sandy bananas, and frequented by black racers, please God, not a coral.

  The neighbor across the street enjoyed telling me that a coral snake had turned up in the woodpile between my house and the one next door, and did not offer to tell me that this happened twelve years earlier; I had to pull it out of him. I could tell he was trying to frighten me so that he could offer to help me out. After I mentioned the flooding from the bathtub my first week there, he showed up at my front door with a length of rusty tubing—a snake. He wanted to perform a test on the drain, uninvited. I turned him away, saying the plumber had performed this very test, though I didn’t know if he had or not. It took some doing, getting the neighbor, eighty-eight by his declaration, to take away his snake.

  One is not supposed to fear the snakes, or the gators, though one must stay clear of them. The latter appear to be sunning themselves, indolent, but they can move suddenly and quickly. They are mascot to a team, to a school, and puns abound: the slogan “For the Gator Good.”

  But I don’t mean to make fun. I like it here. A friend said this once about California—the running joke to make fun of Los Angeles—but he loved the place; he had kicked a habit there. I’d say I’m getting better he
re, but that might be premature. I am not getting worse is what I should probably say. What’s the old song—“You may get better but you’ll never get well.” It’s the name of the song or the refrain. I heard a man play it on a piano in a barn, and a number of other people knew the words to it too.

  *

  “If something is too good to be true, it is.” But maybe I had not yet learned this saying as a girl of eighteen. Or maybe I needed something to be that good. Many people must need something to be good enough to get them out of the worst trouble they have gotten themselves into. Especially when that trouble includes another person, one who had no say.

  A former colleague at school said he could imagine himself a father only from the moment he claps a young man on the back and says, “This is my son—he’s a freshman at Harvard.”

  But I was humorless at eighteen. I might have ended things as so many others did. I had no sense of the sanctity of life. I judged no one who did not see it through. The baby’s father remained with his family. I loved him, and he loved women, told me he would rather look at a woman than look at the Grand Canyon. So I chose not to tell him what had happened. Sometimes I forget why I did not end it. I think that if I could not find a place I felt at home, I was carrying someone who was at home, at least for those months.

  I had to take the doctor’s word for it. The nurses concurred: the child was a girl. She is healthy, they said, and they carried her from the birth room. It was a scene from a hundred years ago—a young woman not prepared to keep the child, bearing the child in a Maternity Home in the shameful shadow of yore. The mother not allowed to hold the swaddled infant, just left alone in a sweat-soaked bed to find her breath and dry her tears and get her strength back and leave the home without the child, leave the other young women about to do the same. And never learn the names of the people who were going to take them in—these children left behind—though we were required to send the home money for a time to ensure the continuation of care in case they were not chosen to join a family right away.

  I never thought I was one for fantasy. I never dreamed up scenarios that could not occur in real life. Instead I replayed moments of previous happiness, glad to be reminded of joy or contentment in a lovely place. The lovely place was usually a beach, one with clear, warm water—the Caribbean. Often I picture myself floating facedown in shallow water the temperature of my skin, eyes open to see the rippled white sand and reach for oblong shells the color of clementines. Places were safe to conjure; there was always the chance of returning to a charmed beach. Less safe to call up a person who could not be reached, would not welcome being reached, and thus set in motion the horror of longing. Which word sounds worse—“longing,” or “yearning”? I used them interchangeably when they were what I felt, and felt for a long time.

  But a fantasy for someone else is different; it’s a kind of conceptual gift. I had given myself over: I was all-out, all-in, when I pictured the life of that child. Sometimes a day at a time, each day of her life, and other times I would let my attention leave a lecture or a play, even a good one, and watch a life play out, a life I had had no way to follow once I made the decision that seemed to me to be the one that was better for her. Oh, and better for me too—no pretending it wasn’t better for me, as well.

  I pictured her with animals—if not growing up on a farm, then living in a place with dogs and cats. Healthy, of course, with friends who were loyal and parents who did no harm. Parents who could not believe their luck at getting this girl to raise, who would give her an heirloom ring when she turned sixteen, not a moment of hesitation in giving her that ring.

  I would call up the moments that had made me happy, and I put her in those moments, and savored her responses, and in this way she grew up with me. She was with me in the Michigan dunes of the Upper Peninsula in the summer, in a motorboat on a Great Lake, her adoptive father making room for her to stand at the helm and push the lever up to go faster, and down to slow down. Flies and mosquitoes were unseen in these visions. So were sunburn, seasickness, and fear of deep water when the boat was anchored and the ladder let down in the stern for those not afraid of dark water to swim within range of the boat. Swim and then come back aboard for pink lemonade from a thermos filled at home. And though I was a child who had no use for a life jacket, she is wearing one every time she steps off the ladder into the lake.

  *

  I have heard jokes about impossible things to joke about: the Holocaust, AIDS, the attack on the Twin Towers. Shouldn’t I have heard a joke by now about what I did? Not to say it would be the equal of these horrors. Just that the joke, were there a joke to be made, would have been on me. Would have been at my expense. And rightly so.

  *

  The night before a freeze, I asked a clerk in a nursery what plants she would recommend I wrap. She told me she had grapefruits and kumquats and Meyer lemons, and she did not plan to wrap any of them. “A freeze will make them sweeter,” she said, but it sounded as though she did not want to bother. I don’t plan to wrap the kumquat tree in my yard so I can test her claim. There are two kinds of people, the clerk said—those who peel the tart rind off, and those who eat the kumquat whole. The rind is the point, is what I think.

  I didn’t plant this kumquat tree, of course. The owners of the house did. But why did they stop there? They had four young children, I knew, and wouldn’t those children have liked to drink orange juice from their own tree?

  Dozens of other trees on the property were cut down as I watched. Three men from the utilities company cut bamboo that reached an electrical wire, that according to them caused an outage that interfered with a neighboring church’s mass. Service, I think they meant; it’s an Episcopal church. The utilities workers knew nothing about cutting back trees. They butchered them gratuitously, leaving jagged branches and broken limbs for me to clean up. Left broad openings in the protective hedge.

  I heard of a man near here who bought ten acres of forest, and one morning discovered that the utilities company had cut a swath across his land, had cleared a huge path in the trees, for no reason he could see. He threatened to sue, and the utilities company said to go ahead and sue. At a certain point, it would seem, you have to stop caring, and stop trying to protect what someone else is set to destroy.

  *

  It’s exhausting to see things grow so fast. That is, if you are trying to maintain separation between nature and a house, are trying to keep what belongs outside, outside. There is no dormant season here, no downtime in which to rest up for spring and the cleaning and purposeful work it calls for. Up north, one raked leaves onto tarps and, with the help of a neighbor, hauled them off to the woods or filled tall, sturdy brown paper bags and lined them up on your lawn near the street for pickup. “Whew. I’m stuffed!” is what’s printed on these bags stocked in home improvement stores.

  In some neighborhoods here, people on the block that has an abandoned house on it take turns mowing that house’s yard.

  The most beautiful yard I ever had was near a beach on the East End of Long Island. I had rented the place with three friends for a summer. We let the backyard go, and by August, the long grass was swirled by winds and deer bedding down into patterns that must have been even better seen from above, by tourists in a glider, or in a hot-air balloon, or a pilot slowing to land a small plane on the next town over’s airstrip.

  *

  I am rested enough to be the conduit for pleasing others—donating clothes to a clothes drive, taking a patient’s dog to swim in a dog park pond, sweeping the sand off the walkway to the front door. This last will please the neighbor who bicycles over to sell the Lions Club chicken dinners. I point out the improvements to the easement in case he has not noticed, since he sometimes drives by after dark.

  It would be something if it turned out the Lions Club gave money to places like the home. But maybe that is the last place the Lions would support. And now that I have made the effort to look them up, sure enough, their good works abound. They collect u
sed eyeglasses to donate as needed, they are a secular service organization, they figure in disaster relief as far away as Japan (earthquake victims), they plant trees, they repair playgrounds, they conduct health screening and food drives, they help schoolchildren in Uganda.

  *

  And now people are overcome as they mourn the death of a genius performer. The sadness is made larger because the death of Prince was unexpected, and the grief is mixed with joy—there are pop-up tributes around the world, and people find themselves surprised by tears, and good works surface only now because he did not advertise his philanthropy. I have often given his CDs to patients; even the ones who already knew his work were glad to have it in hand. You want to be choosy about what you let into your soul when you are likely not long for this world.

  *

  “The geese in chevron flight”—these are Joni Mitchell’s words, and I hope the girl got to see this. In my mind, she sees this over and over, every year at the right time of year. The sound is part of the vision, of course, and part of Mitchell’s haunting song “Urge for Going.” I played it countless times. Sound calls up yearning more than anything you can see, and is why I no longer listen to the much-loved song.

  Music: taken. Perfume: taken. Candles: taken. Velvet shirt: taken. Fireplace too. Used to, used to.

  You can shut it all down. Every last thing you defined yourself by—you can give it up, and go without, and put up a front that gets some traction. You must keep your gaze turned outward. Pay attention to others. Don’t fall back on what is waiting to take you down. Or choose to fall back on it, with arms flung out at your sides.

  *

  Picture a painting of water on a wall—a painting of a lake is framed on a living room wall, and water from that painted lake is coming in the open door. Water is leaking into a corner of the room; it pools and spreads toward the center of the room. The painting is titled Water Damage, and the artist got it right. I would be happy to look at this painting every day, and I can; it has been reproduced in a book. I would be the better for it, sharing the artist’s vision.