Shaken and Stirred Read online

  “Belvedere wants in,” I interrupted.

  “Belvedere can wait.”

  “Poor dog. Are you really going to make him stand there on his stiff old joints?”

  Abby had long since perfected the nurse’s glare, the one that said, “You can have the problem, or you can have the solution.” She gave me a healthy dose of this, but she got up to let Belvedere in. I feigned oblivion.

  “Fine,” she said. “We won’t talk about Dolores. How about your other source of discomfort—any resolution yet?”

  “I am not going to talk to you about that either. Stop asking.”

  “Don’t get testy. I’m a medical professional. You can’t shock me. I get paid to ask about these things. Besides, it’s not like it’s a personal failing. Constipation is routine after surgery.”

  I looked out at the Japanese maple. “Nice weather we’re having.”

  “Water and walking, that’s the cure—or an enema.”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said firmly, “I thought I’d order a pizza tonight. Pepperoni with extra cheese. I may need some help with that. I can’t remember where I put my checkbook. I also seem to have trouble holding a pen. Do you think I’m losing my fine motor skills?”

  “No,” Abby said. “I think you should lay off the damned painkillers and, while you’re at it, you might stop laying women in uniform. Your checkbook’s in your left-hand desk drawer. No, stay where you are, all hopped up and comfortable. I’ll let the dog in. I’ll get your checkbook. I’ll even call the goddamn pizza parlor. Just pepperoni?”

  “And extra cheese. And maybe onions.”

  “No onions. They give you heartburn.”

  “Fine.” I shifted in my seat and felt an unpleasant pulling sensation. “I might be hopped up, but I’m not comfortable. I can’t sit up straight. I think that fucking doctor has sewn the top of my vagina to the bottom of my lungs.”

  “I wish she’d sewn it shut. Is Old Chicago okay with you? They do the best deep dish.”

  “I prefer thin crust.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “I like deep.”

  “I’m paying.”

  “I’m ordering.”

  When Abby sat back down, Belvedere climbed onto her lap, his head and tail hanging over the arms of the chair. They both closed their eyes. Gingerly, I lifted first one leg and then the other up onto the sofa and settled a cushion behind my head and shoulders. I’d just eased onto my back when the phone rang.

  “You want me to get that?” Abby asked, her eyes still shut.

  “No.”

  “What if it’s Crazy Cop?”

  “I’ll tell her you said hello.” I picked up the phone.

  “Poppy, is that you?” My grandmother’s voice crackled across three thousand miles.

  “It’s me. Hi, Nana.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you. You’re all out of breath. Why are you up? You said you were going to have someone there to take care of you. I told your mama we should fly out there and make sure you don’t—”

  “I do have someone with me. Abby’s here.”

  “Abby.” My grandmother hesitated. “Abby. Do I know . . . ?”

  “Abby Johnson,” I said wearily. “We went to high school together, and college. She moved with me to Portland five years ago. It was a four-day trip by U-Haul, and her dog kept throwing up in my lap. Nana, you’ve known Abby for twenty years, since she and I were thirteen years old.”

  “Oh, your black friend,” said Abby.

  “Oh, your black friend,” said my grandmother.

  “Yes,” I said simply. “How are you, Nana? And how’s Mama?”

  “We’re just fine,” she said. “I went to Asheville last weekend with my Sunday School class, and we went to the Biltmore House. Twohundred-and-fifty rooms and sixty-five fireplaces, can you imagine? I like the gardens best of all. Someone famous designed them.”

  “Frederick Law Olmsted,” I said.

  “I can’t remember who,” my grandmother continued without a pause. “They charge an absolute fortune to get in. My ticket was thirty-six dollars. I tried to get your mama to come, but she said she’d rather stay home and watch some old movie she’s seen a hundred times.”

  “Oh? What movie was that?”

  “Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof.”

  I covered the receiver with my hand and repeated this to Abby.

  “Of course,” Abby said. “Elizabeth Taylor and Zero Mostel. It’s a classic.”

  My grandmother said, “I told your mama she could buy the video, but she said no, so I had to share a room with Daisy Burt. She was up and down all night long with colitis. I didn’t get a wink of sleep. Do you remember Daisy Burt? Her son is the one who killed himself. Went upstairs one day and blew his brains out with a shotgun. He was only seventeen. How are you doing? Are you still constipated? If you would just take two tablespoons of mineral oil . . .”

  “How about this one?” said Abby. “Father of the Bride of Young Frankenstein. No, wait. Blazing Cleopatra.”

  “Would you shut up? No, not you, Nana.”

  “Now, when your mama was just a little thing, I used to give her Fletcher’s Castoria, but I don’t suppose they still make that.”

  “I am fine,” I said loudly. “My plumbing is working just fine. Is everyone well at home? Is Mama there?”

  “She is,” said my grandmother. “Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Sure.”

  The sound of the phone clattering to the floor, and then being picked up and dropped again, was followed by the sound of Nana shouting to my mother as if they were separated by the Berlin Wall.

  My mother said, “I don’t know why she hollers like that. I’m standing not three feet away from her.”

  “I hear you skipped Daisy Burt’s colitis tour of the Biltmore House.”

  “I did. I had a weekend all to myself. I watched movies, I read books, and I cooked exactly what I wanted for dinner.”

  “Meaning you ate a hamburger steak junior from the Char-grill every night?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So, what else is happening?”

  “I was getting to that,” she said. “First, how are you feeling?”

  “I’m up and about.”

  “Well, that’s good. And everything’s moving along now?”

  “If you mean am I still constipated, the answer is yes, but don’t tell Nana. I’m not taking mineral oil, I don’t want an enema, and I have no idea what the hell Fletcher’s Castoria is. I don’t care if I never go again, I just want to stop talking about it.”

  “Fletcher’s Castoria.” My mother made a shuddering sound. “No, you don’t want that.” There was a pause, and then she said, “I don’t mean to worry you while you’re recovering, but your grandfather is in the hospital, Poppy. He has pneumonia.”

  “Good lord. Is it serious?”

  “Probably. If you can manage it, I think you should come home.”

  My mother’s tone was always deadpan. She felt things more keenly than she ever let on, but in order to know what she was feeling, you had to listen to what she said rather than how she said it. I’d left home at eighteen, but no matter how far away from Raleigh I’d lived, my mother had never asked me to come home. Not that she wasn’t glad to see me when I did—it was more that she liked to feel that the visits were my idea, something I did out of a genuine desire to see her rather than a sense of obligation. This, of course, had the opposite effect of making me feel guilty by scrupulously trying not to make me feel guilty.

  “I think I could pull myself together in the next couple of days,” I said carefully. “Why the hell did Nana waste time telling me about Daisy Burt and the Biltmore House? Has she gone off the deep end?”

  “Denial,” my mother said. “Or Alzheimer’s. Hunter doesn’t just have pneumonia, Poppy. There’s something else going on. We’re meeting tomorrow with a lung specialist. There are dark spots on his X-rays.”

  I put my hand over the receiver. “Black spots on
his lungs?”

  “Lung cancer,” Abby said. “How long did he smoke?”

  I did some quick math. “Sixty-nine years. From age eleven to age eighty.”

  “I heard that,” my mother said. “It’s what I thought.”

  “Is he in any pain?”

  “I don’t think so. He’s breathing hard, but he’s on morphine. He’s out of it. He didn’t even wake up when we went by this afternoon.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying to shake off the effects of my own painkillers. “Call me tomorrow after you meet with the lung specialist. I’ll hop a flight out of Portland as soon as I can, sometime in the next few days. Don’t worry about picking me up at the airport. I’ll rent a car. I think I’ll get a hotel room, too.”

  “Uh-uh,” said my mother. “I understand the impulse, but I wouldn’t if I were you.” She dropped her voice to a near whisper. “Nana has already cleaned out your old bedroom. She’s moved the ironing pile and made up the bed. If it gets to be too much, you can always go over to Susan’s.”

  “Susan?” I said blankly.

  “Didn’t I tell you? She got back about a week ago from wherever it was she’s been these past three years.”

  “The former Yugoslavia,” I said.

  “That’s it. The war is over and now she’s home. Here to stay, too, or so she says. She was on call when they admitted Hunter, and I can tell you, we were glad to see her. She’s so calm. Nothing seems to faze her.”

  I wished the same were true of me. Abby and Belvedere were both staring at me.

  I took a deep breath. “She’s staying with her father?”

  “For the time being. She’ll be right next door. You can pop over whenever you need a break, just like you used to.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  My mother sighed. “That was all a long time ago, Poppy. None of it was your fault, any more than it was hers. Susan couldn’t have been more professional with your grandfather or friendlier to us. She asked about you.”

  “Did she?”

  “Of course. I told her where you were and what you were doing. She said she’d like to see you. It’s a shame you two lost touch, but, well . . . we’ll talk when you get home. I’ll let you go now. You’re probably tired.”

  “I am. Good night, Mama.” I hung up the phone and settled back into position on the sofa. Abby and I looked at one another. The doorbell rang. Abby shoved Belvedere off her lap and got up to answer it.

  She set the pizza box down on the coffee table. Without looking at me, she said, “Susan Sava returns and you’re on the first plane back to Raleigh.” There was a long pause. “You’re not fit to travel.”

  “I know that, but my grandfather . . .”

  “Which is why I’m going with you.”

  “What? Abby, you can’t. You’ve just taken a week off.”

  “I can,” she replied firmly. “I have a million hours of annual leave, and I intend to use them. The ICU is fully staffed. I won’t have any trouble getting someone to cover for me. I’ll stay with my mother.”

  I laughed. “Oh no, you won’t. Your mother’s favorite game is fingernails on a chalkboard. You wouldn’t last five minutes. Listen, my grandmother be damned, I’m not sleeping in that hard little bed next to her ironing pile. You and me, we’ll share a room at the Velvet Cloak Inn, my treat. It’s the least I can do.”

  “I suppose it is,” Abby agreed. She handed me a slice of pizza, took one for herself, and sat back down. “You’ve just compared my mother to Captain Quint in Jaws.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have given her top billing.”

  Abby sighed. “I’m not saying that it’s not accurate, only that it’s not nice. So, you can also spring for the plane tickets. I want the window seat. You can have that cramped one in the middle with no armrests.”

  Chapter Two

  Sometimes I think my story is about slutty Avon ladies. And not just one—one I could chalk up to chance. Two slutty Avon ladies feel more like a curse than a coincidence.

  Today, the Avon lady is an anachronism, like the vacuum cleaner salesman or the Fuller Brush man. The only thing people sell door-to-door these days is eternal salvation, but when I was a kid, “Avon calling” was a regular event. A woman stopped by at least once a month, and whatever my mother happened to be doing, she put it aside for half an hour to sit down and sample the hand lotion, lipstick, and perfume. Like most of the women in our blue-collar Michigan neighborhood, my mother didn’t wear a lot of makeup. She was a low-maintenance woman. At our house, the Avon lady’s profit margins were small. The only thing we bought on a regular basis was Skin So Soft body splash. We used it to take fleas off the cat.

  Avon lady was a high turnover job. We seemed to have a new one every six months. I could never tell them apart—not, that is, until Karen Rostenkowski.

  It was the first day of summer vacation, and I had big plans for the three months before I started eighth grade—softball, swimming, and building myself a mini-bike. I’d bought an old frame for five dollars at a yard sale, and my mother said I could have the engine from the broken lawnmower in the back of our garage. My father had forbidden me to use any of his tools, but I didn’t care. My friend Jack Leinweber’s father had died back in January, leaving him unrestricted access to a two-tiered mechanic’s chest.

  I was on my way to Jack’s house when the phone rang.

  We lived in a three-bedroom ranch just outside of Detroit. The houses in our subdivision were small brick bungalows, built so close together that when our next-door neighbor stood in his bedroom and blew his nose, we could hear it in our kitchen. Everyone on our street knew everyone else’s business, and there was a well-established telephone tree for up-to-the-minute reportage.

  The caller was Jane, Jack’s mother. Grief had done little to dull Jane’s interest in neighborhood events. Grief had done little to Jane, period. Like my mother, she was a transplanted Southerner. Jane was from rural Georgia, my mother from Raleigh, North Carolina. They’d both married Yankee men, moved north with them, and lived to regret it. My parents’ marriage was far from happy. Lately, I’d gotten the distinct impression that my mother envied Jane. God knows I envied Jack.

  “Listen, honey,” Jane said. “Jack’s waiting for you out in the garage. I don’t know what all mess ya’ll are fixing to make, but I don’t want any more oil on that concrete floor. After Bob died, I spent a month of Sundays cleaning up the drips from his motorcycle, and I have just finished painting in there. I’d rather you did whatever it is outdoors, but Jack says you have to be inside. Bring some cardboard or newspapers to put down, would you? I told Jack, but he won’t remember. Takes after his daddy.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Good girl. Now, is your mother handy? I want to speak at her.”

  My mother sat at the kitchen table reading a book. I held the phone out to her. “Are you handy? Jane wants to speak at you.”

  “And she means that literally,” my mother replied. “What does she want?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Hell’s bells.”

  My mother put the book down and pulled off her left earring. I handed her the receiver. Jane and my mother had a love-hate relationship. Jane loved to talk; my mother hated listening to her. Their friendship was based on close proximity, cultural affiliation, and my mother’s thinly stretched politeness.

  “Hello, Jane,” she said, settling in for a long haul. “What’s happening?”

  I leaned against the back door. Jane often had an interesting tale to tell, and, thanks to the volume of her voice, it was easy to eavesdrop on her phone calls. Only the odd word or two escaped me.

  “Well,” Jane declared, “the new Avon lady just left here. I sent her across the street to Janice’s house in case you needed time to straighten up. She caught me by surprise. I can’t imagine what she must have thought—my kitchen looks like the junk room on the Titanic.”

  “I’m sure it was fine, Jane.” My mother glanced
around at the collection of disasters that comprised our own kitchen. It was 1979. My father had begun installing green patterned wallboard in 1976. He’d put up two pieces, one on either side of the window, and then stopped. The floor was dirty, the table was covered with newspapers and coffee cups, and the sink was full of dishes. Sensing what was about to happen, I opened the back door.

  My mother held up her hand. “Stop,” she said, and then, “No, not you, Jane.”

  “I just thought I’d give you a heads up,” Jane went on. “Is Eddie at home?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, let’s just say that this Avon lady is quite a change from Mrs. Orlicki.”

  “No mustache?”

  Jane laughed. “No mustache, honey, and no babushka. She wouldn’t want to cover up that Farrah Fawcett hair-do. A piece of work, let me tell you—about as trashy as they come. Her name is Karen, but she pronounces it Kar-ahn.”

  “Good lord. What’s her story?”

  “She wants to be a model. She doesn’t have a prayer—she’s strictly Barbizon and boat show—but she thinks she’s big time. If I were you, I’d send Eddie to the store for a pack of cigarettes or some toilet paper. Men are fools for the peroxide bottle.”

  “Hmph,” said my mother. “Thanks for the warning, Jane, but I don’t think I’ll bother. Eddie’s asleep. It would take an earthquake to wake him up. You’d better let me go so I can vacuum.”

  “Of course, but call me back with a full report,” Jane insisted.

  “Okay.” My mother turned to me as soon as she’d hung up the phone. “You know the drill,” she said. “You pick up the random debris and vacuum the living room. I’ll whip through the kitchen and bathroom. And here,” she picked the cat up off the counter and handed him to me. “Shut Fonzie in your bedroom. He can’t resist the smell of Avon lady. He’ll be up on her lap as soon as she sits down.”

  “But Ma,” I objected, “Jack and I are . . .”

  “Jack can wait.”

  The cat didn’t take kindly to being relocated. Sucking on a freshly bitten finger, I cleared off the coffee table, emptied the ashtray, and kicked my father’s work shoes underneath the sofa. I could hear my mother in the kitchen shoving dirty dishes into the oven. I’d just taken the vacuum cleaner out of the coat closet when she came in carrying a can of pine-scented air freshener.