Thomas McGuane - Driving on the Rim

I wished this recollection had waited, because little old Mrs. Haines was closely supervising my work as I prepared to scrape and mask around the window frames. “I’m just not going to put up with careless work,” she said. I hung on the ladder with a gallon can dangling from my other paw trying to find a place for my scraper, my sanding blocks, and my masking tape. I didn’t really need the paint yet; it had been a mistake carrying it up here imagining I had a place for it, but I was reluctant to let Mrs. Haines see me reverse course and return to the ground. I should have suffered that loss of face, because in attempting to rest the bucket on the shelf at the top of the ladder, I lost control of it and it fell to the ground, followed by my tools, making a big, terrible splash of Spicy Chrysanthemum exterior paint and setting off the most god-awful caterwauling from Mrs. Haines, as well as the barking of Mr. Haines, who asked, “Do you know what you’re doing?” That was the first I’d ever heard from him.

“I’ll replace this myself,” I cried out to the old bat.

“What about the grass you’ve killed?” the vicious old whore inquired. I told her that it would recover in no time. “Why did we ever decide to trust you to paint our home?” she wailed.

“Yes, why?” the husband inquired from behind the screen.

“I quit,” I said. This brought them to their senses. The hubby emerged.

“But what will we do?” she asked, eyes wide with fear of the current half-finished project. The spineless hubby suggested that we let quieter heads prevail, which brought out the obsequious side of the devious banshee, who allowed she thought I was doing the best I could. I told her she could bet her ass on that one. The old couple tried laughing at my careless vulgarity. I aimed the bristles of the brush, still miraculously in my hand, at the bargain-hunting couple and said that I would proceed to finish the job if I could do so without supervision and that I would do the best job I was capable of in accordance with our original work agreement. “Now let’s see a couple of smiles.”

What actually happened was that I finished the job in what I thought to be an adequate fashion. I did not stop by for my paycheck or even reimbursement for the paint, on the grounds that these dim bulbs had suffered enough in my pursuit of folly and sublimated frustration. I accepted that my nostalgia for plain folk was challenged by the experience and acknowledged that by any ordinary standards I was flailing — yes, flailing and making a fool of myself.

Because of her faith, my mother faced mortality with something approaching glee. At the end, she had so many things wrong with her that I, her physician, and other doctors ended up lumping them under some lupus-like autoimmune disorder that produced terrific suffering including joint pain and widespread rashes. Then the adult-onset asthma and bacterial infections in her lungs started her down the road to the end. I had called in Blake Cohen, an internist who died several years ago, and Blake did everything in his power to help my mother; he was at her bedside more often than I. My mother accepted her suffering as little more than the clarion call of approaching Rapture. Making the rounds of other sick, even terminal, people, I had to consider the great emotional protection my mother’s faith had provided her. In my then scientific turn of mind I wondered whether biology and evolution hadn’t produced this endorphin engine. However, I was tempted to exempt my mother from my scientific worldview. In fact, I did exempt her. That is, I concluded that her physical discomfort was cured by death though she died contradictions intact, with her last breath calling solicitous Blake Cohen a kike. I regarded her corpse as a troublesome object she was well rid off. The most important aspects of my mother seemed to have gone on, flitting about with all those waves and signals I held between my hands. Her voice, that semiliterate Arkansas twang, was clear as a bell.

I tried to understand why the fiasco of house painting triggered such a painful state of mind. It felt very much like loneliness, but I didn’t think it was, and I was nearly bent over with an aching heart that manifested itself in all sorts of ways, loss of appetite for one and a conversational style that turned casual encounters into occasions for gruesome discomfort and stampedes of fleeing acquaintances. I locked all my doors, drew the shades, selected the room closest to the center of the house, sheltered by the most walls, and abandoned myself to a kind of objectless grief. This proceeded on a futon in a storage room. It was far easier to acquire a futon than to get rid of one, and this one had languished in an unused room for a long time. A leak only recently repaired had soaked it, and the damp seeped into my clothes, discomfort overcoming my grief. This turned out to be an excellent thing, since grieving over apparently nothing was disorienting me and suggested that in terms of my mental health I was a pickle short of a jar and had better get a grip before my large problems became even larger. I did have one commonsense thought, which was that I just wanted to go back to work. I stood on the futon and said “work” out loud, bestriding the waterlogged pad with a defiant air. I was imagining myself useful again.

I actually caught family members of Ernest Leeteg, b. 1928, d. 1989, moving the flowers I had planted at my parents’ graves to that of Mr. Leeteg. I made sure they saw me arrive before I went over to stand wordlessly before them, two women old enough to be the sisters of the deceased, rural in appearance and handy with their trowels. One looked ready to argue but the other, sharply elbowing her in the side, directed the restoration of my flowers into the uncovered holes the pair had left behind. I did not say a word.

I was not much for prayer, though as admitted, I did sometimes give it a try, but my reason for regularly visiting the graves of my mother and father was to think about them. I felt that so long as I did this, they continued to exist in some way and of course I still loved them. So many people did likewise that it must have been instinctive. Contrary to appearances or the sort of representation such activity might get in books or movies, we did not stand before the final resting places of our parents eaten up with lugubrious and undifferentiated piety. What we did was try to figure out who they were and what they were doing together. I doubted anyone was deterred by realizing we’d never get to the bottom of it, that their lives and our inquiries would travel on parallel courses until no one remained to pursue the matter. But all this flower tending at the cemetery seemed to help a lot of people with their sadness, as though death was a jeweled bower through which you skipped on your way to glory.

The woman I found at the graves of Cody and Clarice turned out to be Cody’s mother. I thought I’d breeze by with a few absorbing glances, wiggling my fishing rod absently, but just as I passed, she said firmly, “Hey.” A pair of picnic chairs faced the headstones. “Have a seat.” I looked again at the direction in which I had been arbitrarily traveling, as though I had other business than passing this way. But I sat down and learned that the woman, who looked to be about my own age, was named Deanne. She seemed slightly mature for the clever T-shirt she wore: “Make Awkward Sexual Advances, Not War.” Or the open-toed shoes and the tiny stone in her nostril.

Staring at the words “Cody” and “Clarice” cut in stone as I sat with Deanne felt like entrapment, not helped by Deanne’s saying, “I know you.”

“Do you? Maybe you’ve seen me come to look after my folks’ graves.”

“I’ve seen you when you come over here for a look.” Deanne was quite tall, as tall as me, and had becoming gray streaks in her thick dark hair. She might have been fifty. She wore some kind of insulated jacket over a black turtleneck shirt and Carhartt work pants with a loop for a hammer above her right thigh. She lit a cigarette and left it hanging from her mouth as she talked. “Naw, there’s more to it. You were at Cody’s funeral. You’re the doctor?”