MaineCourse

Pennslyvania

“Michael, I need to show you something.”

I was cutting through the yard of my elderly neighbor, Dolly, on my way to the protected wetlands project, and listening to her slapping her hands together, shouting, “Pumpkin, Pumpkin, here Pumpkin.” The neighborhood chuckles when it hears her calling her cat, but Dolly swears Pumpkin comes. Diane swears, it’s not often right away. Incidentally, her cat had a crush on Skunk (our cat) and even now, over a year since he died, Pumpkin will sit in the yard staring, waiting for Skunk to come out and play.

“Sure, Dolly, what’s up?”

“You asked what Smitty did for a living and I want to show you.”

I walked up the three worn steps of her porch, and into her kitchen, which other than wear, looks just as it did when the house was built in the early fifties. Pink Formica counters, banded in Desoto-like chrome, impossibly soft vinyl on the floor, that gives back to your footfall. Dolly continued into her living room where we both sat, next to a coffee table with photos of her blonde, stunningly attractive daughter, Debbie, and Debbie’s daughter, Tory. No pictures of Smitty, her husband.

“Smitty painted story boards,” Dolly said as she reached into a shopping bag full of foam core backed, watercolor illustrations.. She handed me one, then, pushed the entire bag at my feet. “You can have as many as you want. Take them all.”

I was still trying to remember what a story board was as I looked at the same hand that had drawn the picture of Matt, Tulum and me. Oh, yeah, advertising. His illustrated themes were then translated into glossy magazine advertisements.

“You don’t want to give them all to me.”

“Sure, I don’t need them.”

“Dolly, I’d love to have these three.” I held them up so she could see which ones, “but I can’t take them all. They’ll get lost in my attic and no one will see them.”

“No one sees them here, either.”

After posting Smitty's illustration of Matt climbing the ladder, I tried to remember the exact date he died. Not out of morbid curiosity, but to help me determine how old Matt was. So I asked Dolly,

“Dolly, when did Smitty die?”

“Seven years ago?”

“Seven...no, Dolly, it was longer ago than that. It must have been eleven,
maybe twelve.”

“It wasn’t that long ago, was it.?”

“Dolly, you don’t know when Smitty died?”

Kind of a cruel question, I realized too late, but I’m perhaps too accustomed to my mother’s impeccable memory. Besides, I thought widows marked their lives by the passing of their husbands’.

“No, honest and truly, I don’t.” Dolly uses “honest and truly ,” as often as Flo, “Oh, dear God.” Dolly stood up and walked upstairs, perhaps to the same room she keeps the story boards, and returned with Smitty’s newspaper obit, sealed in plastic.

Dolly handed it to me and said, “You read it, I don’t have my glasses.”

July 3rd, 1993

“Ten years ago, Dolly.”

“It was that long ago?”

---

On my last day in the wetlands, after which I could return to wearing colors that didn’t match the marsh grasses, I was again taking a short cut through Dolly’s yard when she came out of her house to ask:

“Michael, I might be going to Pennsylvania, can you watch my basement? I don’t like to go that far, but I should see my granddaughter.” She meant great granddaughter.

“Sure, you mean your sump pump.” Dolly keeps close track of the water in her sump pump hole, no matter how often I tell her the pump will do its job.

“No, the basement.”

“Sure, when are you going?”

“The end of the month. Or next month. I hate going that far, six hours on the plane.”

“Pennsylvania?”

“Phoenix. It wasn’t so bad when they lived in Pennsylvania. And Michael, you know I do think about Smitty.”

I didn’t have time to apologize, or tell her I wasn’t suggesting that she didn’t think about her husband.

“Sometimes, when I’m falling asleep in front of the TV, I’ll call out, ‘Smitty, tell those men to go home!’ “

Maybe I keep Dolly on her toes, but she does the same for me. I didn’t want to sound like I didn’t know what she was talking about, so I answered, “Like his card playing friends were staying too late.”

Dolly looked at me quizzically. “No, you know,” and she put her fingers to lips, feeling the bump her doctor told her not to worry about, "I’ll be falling asleep and shout, 'Smitty, tell those men to go home. ' ”

---

Diane and I were talking about Dolly, and she was wondering why I would expect her to remember when Smitty died. I again said, because I thought that would become some kind of milestone. Women would count the years their spouse had been gone. I told her Ms Cass didn’t know how long she had been married before her husband had died. In the hall, after class, she had said “Forty-seven, or forty-four.” Then she began to do the addition from the wedding date.

Diane - “How long have we been married?”

Me - “How long? That’s not the point, I’m a guy.” Flustered, I continued, “But, I could figure it out. We were married in 1983, so that’s twenty years. Look, I don’t know why I assume women keep track of these things, I just know they do, and when I hear otherwise, it confounds me.” I continued to blab on, and Diane sat patiently in the cane chair in front of our sliding kitchen doors, until finally she interrupted,

“We weren’t married in 1983.”

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Michael,
I love this story. It is the 1950's, when cutting through people's yards, and getting invited in, still happened. It is the present, with a keen, ongoing assessment of what is slipping away, in the elderly, in ourselves. It is Di and Matt and Skunk and Tulum, all feeling real. It is a look at marriage. It is funny.
Ginger

Posted by Ginger.

Very nostalgic, and it scares me to think about being old and alone. Love the cat part (of course). Have you learned yet how long you've been married?????????????????

Posted by jan queijo.

I love this story. Pennsylvania...Phoenix, it's all the same to her. Go on a plane and go somewhere. The cat part is sweet. You should get another cat so Dolly will have a new friend close by. Try not to kill this one. And for the record, you and Diane married in June of 1984.

Posted by elephantgirl.

Ginger, I never left the 1950’s. And about that inclusive pronoun ... .

Jan, I think I can handle the old part as long as dottering Diane is at my side. (Diane, I don’t mean to imply that you are dottering now).

Elephantwoman, that would have been my next guess.

Posted by michael.

Ginger's comment captures the true gems of this story.

And as for structure, I'd give you an a for:

- Paragraphs & spacing.

- Signalled transitions

- Yes, even commas.

Well done.

Posted by The Editor.

Posted by Michael at November 22, 2003 10:59 AM