ALL OF US AT THE SAME TIME
Chapter 6
Walking in Circles
No matter where I lived or what was happening in my life I’d always carved out time to walk. Placing one step in front of the other soothed my mind, focused my attention, and also, I'd convinced myself, gave me a free pass to grab a maple bar or piece of apple pie at no dietary cost.
But the road past the farm was too busy, the snow too deep, for a satisfying walk. Only the driveway was cleared, and it was too icy. I longed to walk in the woods but that meant a sweaty struggle through crusted snow, one heavy foot forward at a time.
I told Kipling how much I missed walking and the next day when I drove in after a trip to the grocery store, I found him shoveling a circle around the little house through a foot of old snow. “It’s not exactly a scenic route,” he told me, “but you might be able to get up a little speed.”
It took him most of the day to shovel and smooth out a two-foot wide path. “Once I get the crusty snow out of here, I can use the snowblower to keep it open,” he said.
I paced off the track and one circle was 280 feet long. Therefore, nineteen circles equaled one mile. Every day I walked thirty-five to forty circles, learning the minute slopes of the earth, the angle of the curves, the view from every inch.
“That’s where I used to ride my bicycle,” Louise told me sadly, remembering.
I’d forgotten. One summer, when I was a teenager, Louise had decided to lose weight, enrolling in what she called her “Fatso Club.” Mike found and repaired a heavy old single-speed bicycle for her. She painted it bright blue and rode it around the little house with her usual determined dedication, circling and circling for hours until she had scarred a narrow crater the width of a bicycle tire in the grass. Her track remained for years. And now, without knowing, Kipling had shoveled out almost the same circle that Louise had pioneered.
The birds grew accustomed to my circling presence and didn’t even flap away from the feeders as I passed beneath them. Morris sometimes sprawled across the trail, waiting for me to scoop him up and perch him on my shoulder for a few rounds. “Some people carry weights,” Kipling observed. “Some people carry cats.”
Otherwise, I grew trancelike, mechanically counting the laps on my fingers: left hand for fives, right for ones. Louise or Mike waved from the window, often every circuit, as if they’d forgotten they’d already encouraged my passage, round and round.
In the post office, the clerk looked at the return address on a package I was mailing my daughter, then at me, and said, “Oh yes, you’re the lady who walks in circles.”
1929 Got up early and did a big washing – dog tired. Now that Mrs.B. thinks I might quit she makes me work twice as hard – hah.
Went to the Tower with Bill and saw Greta Garbo in “White Orchids.” Then he stayed in my room till 5:30. Mrs. B. doesn’t know. Bill really wants to get married. Later on. Maybe?! No time to rest because Mrs. B is having a big dinner at 7 tonight.
What we hoped was the final blizzard of the year raged off Lake Michigan and onto land. “Lake effect snow,” the weatherman called it, with a “wind chill of minus forty degrees.” Windows rattled in fierce gusts that shrieked between the pine boughs and around corners. Drifts blocked the path and my trail filled in and disappeared as the landscape turned monochromatic. There wasn’t a bird in sight and the bird feeders swung back and forth, spilling seed. Kipling worried about Morris and found him in the barn curled beneath old hay, in a state akin to hibernation, uninterested in emerging or eating.
There was no traffic on the road: somewhere snowdrifts had blocked it closed. Visibility, when you could keep your eyes open, had decreased to only a few feet.
It was a good day to hunker down and wait for the weather to change. Kipling and I bundled into our heaviest winter clothes and crossed the driveway to Louise’s, bracing ourselves against the stinging blasts of wind. We planned to make hot chocolate to share with them, “If they haven’t already gone back to bed,” I warned him.
Louise and Mike sat at the table watching us enter, dressed, not just clothed for the day, but dressed for a winter day outside. Boots, coats, woolen caps and scarves. Even mittens. Gathering their heavy clothes and wrestling into them, between Louise’s arthritis and both their confusion, had to have been a monumental task. How long had they sat swaddled there in the warm house, waiting for us when we’d had no plan to join them?
“Oh good,” Louise said, rising, pulling a purple stocking cap over her ears. “We’ve been waiting for you. Let’s go.”
“Where?” I asked warily, afraid to hear what they believed had happened.
“Outside,” Louise said sharply, as if I were simple. “This is perfect.”
Uncertain but game, Kipling and I helped them outside, he on one side of Mike and me on the opposite side of Louise, the two of them clutching each other. The wind nearly whipped the door from our hands. Both were unsteady in the fierce gusts and uneven ground. Snow blasted against us and Louise’s voice was barely audible when she said, “Stop.”
So there we stood, faces to the wind, snow pelting our bodies. I turned toward Aunt Louise and tried to see through squinted eyes what it was she wanted. But she had closed her eyes and lifted her bare face to the weather, letting the wind and snow pummel her. She was holding Mike’s arm and they were both smiling.
Later in the day as we discussed the storm that was beginning to blow itself out. Mike said dreamily, mainly to himself, “It snowed and blowed, snew and blew.”
But for some reason, that reminded Louise of the cruelty of her bath, now days ago, and she refused to speak to me except to demand tissue after tissue, certain that being forced into the bathtub had given her a deathly cold. Each time I passed her a fresh tissue, she wiped her nose once and threw it on the floor.
1929 I had the most terrible dream last night – that I died. I was DEAD. It was so horrible and I haven’t been able to get over it all day. Such a sensation – to die. Black and empty and cold. I’m sorry we have to do it. Billy called and I told him about it. He laughed. It’s not funny, I tell you.
The sky had sluggishly begun to lighten the following morning as I walked across the driveway to make coffee. A school bus passed and I made out figures of children in the lighted and steamed windows. The wind rose and fell, stirring up clouds of snow like sand storms across the white fields. My heart stuttered at the desolate loneliness of the scene.
I stepped into their house as Louise emerged from the bathroom. Seeing me before she was prepared for my presence now only angered her – what was I doing “sneaking around?”
I slipped behind the door out of her sight and watched while she returned to the sleeping porch.
There she pulled a blanket from her own bed, tottered to Mike’s bed and spread it across his shoulders and back. He slept on, unaware, and she leaned down and kissed his head before she climbed back under her own covers.
1929 I’ve quit my job and moved to Harper Avenue with Bill. He said, “Let’s just get married,” but my mind isn’t clear yet and I don’t think I’m ready to get married. It feels so final but I can’t tell Mother I’m living with Bill. He told me not to worry about finding me a new job. But I’m restless. I cook and clean and then what? Went downtown with Sylvia.
Food Fights
I tried to pull back from Louise and Mike, reminding myself we were meant to be reliable and steady for them, but I failed miserably. I found myself riding Louise’s roller coaster, up when she was up and careening wildly out of control when she did.
In their eyes, we weren’t guests; our presence wasn’t essential. Seeing us constantly and not quite understanding why was a different kettle of fish than being her goddaughter/niece and dropping by for occasional coffee and cozy chats.
I brought them a meal of pork chops with orange sauce. Louise picked at her chop, then shoved it scornfully to the other side of her plate. “I don’t like lemon with my meat,” she announced. “Mikey, do you like lemon with your meat?”
“No!” Mike emphatically answered, sopping up more orange sauce with his bread.
“You cook too fancy,” Louise accused me.
“Do I cook better than Meals on Wheels?” I was foolish enough to ask since she’d frequently complained about her lunches.
“Sometimes,” she said huffily. “Not usually. I like my food plain. We’re just plain people. You don’t eat like this all the time, do you?”
“Yes,” I told her, not exactly true, but feeling my irritation rise. “We usually do.”
“Then you must be a lot fancier than we are. Fancy, fancy, fancy.”
This from the woman who was a former gourmet cook, who’d prepared sublime dishes without recipes, whose cakes and breads were unattainable standards. She’d only had to taste a dish once to be able to dissect it and recreate it with more flair than the original. My meals were pallid in comparison to her exotic fare. Exasperation got the best of me. “Maybe we are fancier,” I told her. “We live a different kind of life than you do.”
Now of course I’d escalated the exchange. I was embarrassed by my childish nyah-nyah-nyah-ing and ordered myself to stop it, to grow up – I didn’t possess enough moxie to one-up Louise, even during her most impaired days.
And indeed, she gazed at me imperiously, dismissively. “We don’t need two hot meals a day from you. We can have sandwiches. I don’t want you to fix meals for us.”
“It’s no problem, Aunt Louise. I only bring over whatever we’re eating. I don’t fix anything extra for you; sometimes I just make too much.” That was the line I’d often pulled out when our assistance struck her as suspicious.
“It’s too much. We’ll eat sandwiches.”
“But . . .”
“I want sandwiches.”
I gave in. “Whatever you want, Aunt Louise.”
When I returned to the little house, Kipling listened to my complaints and commented, “It’s a long winter. We’re all tired of the weather. I haven’t seen the ground in two months.”
This was his first winter in Michigan and I refrained from telling him he couldn’t count on consistently seeing the ground for another two months, either. Instead, I donned my mittens and scarf and walked my circle twenty times in the dark.
The next morning Louise turned up her nose at her usual bran muffins. “I’m tired of bran muffins. Don’t bring me any more. I don’t want them.”
“Would you like me to take them home with me?” I asked, but she bridled and said, “Just leave them here.”
Uncle Mike refused to take his pill. I’d left it on his placemat beside his coffee cup as usual. “I already took it,” he claimed.
“Here it is,” I told him brightly, tapping his pill with my finger.
“That’s to remind me to take it tomorrow,” he said and clamped his mouth shut.
I let the subject rest and escaped to the bathroom to set out a towel for Louise’s bath. When I sat down again, Mike had moved his pill to the middle of the placemat where I usually sat.
“Are you going to walk your circles?” Aunt Louise asked me.
“Yes.” At last, the subject was shifting to the world outside.
“At least someone around here can still walk.”
That evening, with her complaints about dinners being too fancy in mind, I prepared a meal of hamburgers. As I carried in the basket, she sniffed the air and asked, “What’s for supper?”
“How do you feel about hamburgers tonight?”
She looked at me in disbelief. “You’re joking.”
But still, she tucked into her hamburger, requesting mayonnaise, olives and honey mustard, outright rejecting catsup and plain mustard. “Is it snowing out?” she asked as she began the second half of her hamburger.
“No, it’s clear.”
“You and Kipling are lucky you haven’t had to move any snow yet.”
“We’ve shoveled snow at least ten times now,” I told her.
“There hasn’t been enough snow this winter to shovel,” she challenged.
I opened my mouth to protest and then for once, let her misstatement pass. Mike sat quietly without looking up, accustomed, I suspected, to disappearing inside himself when she used that crisp-edged voice.
She grew angry when I ran water to wash the dishes. “You don’t need to use hot water and soap. You’re just too fancy and too clean. Do you make Kipling be that clean?”
I ungritted my teeth and struggled to speak in a conversational tone, “You know, Kipling’s much fussier when he washes the dishes than I am.”
Louise loved Kipling. He was that nice man, a charming guest, unlike her pushy niece. She immediately defended him. “There’s nothing wrong with being clean. You can’t be too clean.”
Then she shoved away her cup and ordered imperiously, “I need to practice my handwriting. Give me a pencil and paper.”
Her right hand had weakened since a stroke a few years earlier but she still used it, gripping utensils between her thumb and palm. As I washed and dried the dishes, Louise sat at the table and struggled over the lined notepaper I’d pulled from a drawer, occasionally sighing or expelling her intently held breath in a rush, but happily not making any more comments or complaints. I couldn’t wait to finish cleaning up the kitchen and get out of there. Think small and quiet, I told myself.
“Enough of that,” she finally said. “I’m going to sit in the living room.” I was glad to see her go.
After she’d left, I glanced at the paper she’d been concentrating on so vehemently.
I love you, Jo Anne, it read, and I’m happy that you are here.
1929 Bill bought me a train ticket home. Maybe my restlessness made him crazy. Oh well, ho hum to that. I left Chicago at 7:30 and Frank met me at Ludington. Mother and Dad good. Frank and I rode Dad’s new horse. Fields are beautiful green still and the wildflowers are out along the roads. Mother’s worried about Tofelia. I’m not. That sister can take care of herself.
The next day was Sunday and when Louise saw the day written on her note, she held it up. “It’s Sunday. I’d like to attend mass.”
I hadn’t been in eleven years, since my father’s funeral. “Of course I’ll take you and Uncle Mike,” I told her, excited to hear her initiate an outing.
“I want to see those clouds that Indian painted behind the altar. Beautiful, just beautiful. People came from all over to see them.”
Uh oh. The clouds she was talking about were beautiful. They’d been the parish’s pride: clouds painted the blue of Lake Michigan, billowing from floor to ceiling framing the altar, drawing the eyes upward.
I’d recently read an article about the painter, written long after his death. His work, said the author, was considered to be “one of the finest representations of North American Indian primitive art.”
But that small wooden church that held the beautiful clouds had burned almost forty years ago and been replaced by a modern brick and glass building with streamlined fixtures and pews, single-colored pebbly glass windows instead of stained glass.
There was no point in explaining this to Louise. “I’ll change clothes and be right back to help you get ready,” I told her, hoping she’d forget the old church during our drive.
When I returned to help her dress, wearing one of two skirts I’d brought with me, she still sat at the kitchen table and for a moment her expression was totally blank as if were trying to conjure up my identity. “Do you feel like wearing a dress or pants?” I asked. “I love that blue dress on you.”
She shook her head and waved a tissue. “I have the sniffles. You go and put in a good word for me.”
She couldn’t be convinced otherwise and took up her station by the window, surveying the little house and the driveway, so I convinced Kipling, who’d never been inside a Catholic church, to go, too, and we waved as we drove away. Louise smiled and cheerily waved us on our way as if she were sending us off to do good deeds.
“We don’t have to go,” Kipling said as we neared the church. “We can watch the Lake, or have a cup of coffee.”
“Just my luck she’d remember and ask for a report,” I told him.
The congregation had dwindled. The babushkaed Lithuanian women who’d approached the communion rail on their knees and stayed after Mass devoutly telling their rosary beads in low murmurs, the bent and capped old men, were gone. So were the nuns, and the school had closed. But others, whom I hadn’t seen in ten and twenty years, greeted me by name, as if I’d only missed mass last Sunday.
It was so simple to fall back into that ritual: standing, kneeling, the incense, the Offertory. The reader, now bald and tremulous, had been the reader as far back as I could remember. The organist’s mother was once the organist. During the sermon, I felt that if I turned around my father would be impatiently shifting in the last pew, waiting for communion to be finished so he could slip out the door.
After mass, a woman who looked vaguely familiar touched my arm and said, “I knew you were one of the Dereskes because you all have that…” and she made a motion with thumb and index finger across her cheekbones and eyes.
When I told Louise that she’d been asked after at mass, her face filled with surprise and hurt. “I would have liked to have gone to mass.”
“But I asked you,” I blurted.
“I don’t remember that,” she said indignantly. “Was I asleep?”
1929 Frank took me to a dance at Bonnie Belmont at Long Lake. My, the “water” was flowing outside and inside. Nobody hides it. The fellows seem to be so cheap and drunk. I’m used to city ways now. The mailman brought me two letters from Bill.
I went to mass with everyone. Mother kept patting my arm like I might sneak out.
That night, hoping to salvage the day, and the past few days, I made a festive Sunday dinner, including roast chicken and an apple pie. With pomp, Kipling and I carried it over to eat with Louise and Mike. The snow was dirty and crusted, appearing defeated, and we hoped we were witnessing the end of winter. “The days are getting longer,” I told them. “We’re heading toward spring. That’s worth celebrating.”
But Louise was still feeling injured over my not inviting her to mass. “My hands won’t work,” she complained as we arranged the food on the table. “I can’t cook. I can’t even break an egg.”
“It’s not hard to break an egg,” Kipling told her as he cut the chicken. “You just drop it.”
Louise broke into paroxysms of giggles and her depression instantly lifted. She began complimenting Kipling for the dinner. He explained that I’d cooked it. She ignored his words and praised him for the perfectly seasoned chicken, the tender scalloped potatoes. Kipling shrugged and after a few more disclaimers that I'd cooked their dinner, not him – which she ignored – he played along with her.
I might have turned invisible as she went into rapture over “his” pie crust. It was silly but I couldn’t stop myself from fuming. It was obvious from Kipling’s expression that I was doing a poor job of concealing my irritation.
“That was a perfect meal, the best I’ve ever had. Thank you, Kipling. Thank you. As a reward you don’t have to do a lick of cleaning up.”
Which of course left only me. Kipling began to protest and stood to begin clearing the table, but she gripped his arm. “No, no. You’ve worked too hard already.” He looked at me in appeal but I was busily banging plates and running water for dishes.
As we left the house, she thanked Kipling again and again for that wonderful meal. “You’re a good kid. I’m glad you’re here.” She didn’t say a word to me and turned her head away when I tried to give her a customary goodnight kiss.
It was back out into the night to walk in circles until finally the absurdity of it hit me and I fell into laughter over the scene of me drudging over dishes while my aged aunt flirted with my husband. At least she’d momentarily forgotten the past sorrowful days. I heard a door open and looked up to see Kipling framed in the doorway of the little house, Morris rubbing against his legs. He raised his hand in an apologetic salute.
1929 Got a special delivery from Billy and will leave for Chicago in the morning to surprise him. I’m lonesome here. The mailman said he wished I’d get more mail so he’d see me more often.
Next Tuesday, Chapter 7: We consider admitting defeat Read More