Short Story / Cliche
Every night she slept alone, but she was used to that. In fact, she didn’t really mind at all. She never felt alone. She had many friends, and she wasn’t afraid of being called an old maid or even taken pity on by the other women at church. What did they know?
“We all have our little roles to play,” she said each morning, a kind of mantra, whether standing in front of the bathroom sink or over in front of the mirror by her dressing table. It was something her father used to say as he stood in front of his chiffonier while choosing his cufflinks, her alarm clock, she called him, his soothing voice muffled through the wall and telling her when it was time to get up for school. It had been such a wonderful childhood and, quite frankly, a wonderful life. Except for one very sad moment, Elvira felt she nothing to complain about. It was true, she might have liked a few children, but she grew up when single women did not think of adoption, and now, well, it wouldn’t be fair to a little boy or girl to have everyone think her mother was really her grandmother, especially if the child were already battling a racial barrier as most of these children had to these days. No, that would never do. The boys and girls in her Sunday school class were enough, and she made a point of being involved in their lives as much or as little as their parents wanted. She would never impose. A few of her young friends had stayed close over the years. She had been blessed to watch them grow into young men and women. She had been to many a graduation and wedding. Elvira had a good life, she knew; she simply wished others knew as well.
Take Mr. Sussman, a dear man and a deacon. He took his job as outreach minister up at church as seriously as anyone in recent memory. No doubt, they were all concerned, but it had been such a little stroke, the side effects barely noticeable. Elvira saw it coming, not the stroke, but the aftermath, the extended care home talk, the abundance of dishes she still needed to return after her first few weeks back from the hospital; even the oil man hadn’t sent her a bill for the last delivery. It was all understandable and sweet of them, but she had no intention of leaving the planet anytime soon or changing her life and people might as well know and get used to it. That very morning up at church, just before the service, when Mr. Sussman had asked if he might stop by for tea, she knew what he wanted to talk about. That a brochure on adult communities had magically appeared in its own little custom display by the church bulletin board had not escaped Elvira’s notice. She noticed everything. It wasn’t hard; she had lived in the same house and walked the quarter mile to the same church along the same road for nearly seventy years. She had named half the trees along the way and often said hello to them. She had chaired the remodeling committee how many times? Her ability to remember things was just fine, thank you.
“Probably another reason people think you’re a bit off,” she had said to the mirror that morning; and then, “Coming,” when she heard the knock at the front screen door.
She had opened the entire house after church, such a beautiful, warm day in early May, the Wisteria had been blooming since Friday. The fragrance wafted through the kitchen, there was no other way to describe it, wafting in warm blankets of sensation, down the hall and out into the parlor, across the entire length of the front porch and then down the steps. It lingered in the living room, posited in the parlor, adorned the dining room and ascended the staircase up into all of the bedrooms. The scent of Wisteria filled the house.
“What is that smell?” Mr. Sussman asked as Elvira opened the wooden door.
“Wisteria,” Elvira said, “It’s my favorite scent.”
“A beautiful day,” Mr. Sussman added, thinking he should have said “scent” and not “smell”.
She liked Mr. Sussman. He was different. The congregation had settled into so many people who looked and thought and acted alike, when Cynthia Bennet first introduced him one morning as her fiancé, a Jew, and one who looked very Jewish, people were, well, they were surprised. Elvira had smiled to herself that morning; thinking that twenty years ago they might have been shocked and not just surprised. It was a liberal crowd nowadays; at least, they all thought of themselves as liberals. Everyone was oh so PC about it. Of course, there was a little gossip, Cynthia Bennet was a looker and well on her way to a successful medical practice. The fact that Mr. Sussman had money did not go unnoticed. But Elvira knew what she saw in him, a complete man, a real partner, not a child who might have a fifty-fifty chance of becoming so. She and Cynthia were both on the same wavelength in more ways than one. That he was shorter than she was simply adorable. Elvira was also tall, nearly five foot ten, and slender as the day of her sixteenth birthday. She also thought Mr. Sussman might be well endowed. Just because she had never married did not mean she was ignorant of such considerations.
The two of them now, Elvira and Mr. Sussman, walked down the narrow hall with it’s bright wooden floor and into the big kitchen, not stopping until they entered the back porch. It was a cozy space, screened in on three sides, up above the lawn on an old, wide board crawl space with natural, time worn painted beams and a cedar roof. Elvira called it her decompression room. There were plants everywhere, hanging plants and potted plants and wrought iron furniture that did not mind the rain. A slider with green cushions, one of those lounges that rock front to back, stood along the far wall. The only wood, really, was the cherry table and chairs that a man had made for the family ages ago.
“I love your kitchen,” Mr. Sussman said as they stepped down into the porch, “It’s so…American.”
“How do you mean?” Elvira asked.
“Well, you know, it’s the butcher block and that big white sink, the pump in the corner, that old refrigerator. I can’t believe that thing still works.”
“The refrigerator?”
“Yes, what else would I mean?”
“I fear it’s one of those things they truly don’t make like they used to,” Elvira said, a smile both shy and wise that made Mr. Sussman look down and blush. She was the perfect grandmother, he thought, just one, tiny problem. It was why he was there.
“So, Ms. Hendrickson…”
“Oh please, call me Elvira.”
“Then you call me Simon.”
“I shall do that.”
“So, Elvira,” Simon started again. He had a pitch all rehearsed and quite good, he thought, logical and compassionate. The logic he had learned at his job as a actuary; the compassion from being a member of Old First Church. A few of his friends who had married outside “the tribe” had gone Unitarian. He and his wife had attended a few services when they were first were married but something had been missing. It felt more like PTA meeting than a church or temple service. When they’d gone back to Cynthia’s church, a UCC congregation, Simon felt an instant connection – not with Christ, of course – but with the people. I’m probably the only Jew in New Jersey who belongs to a Baptist Church, he thought, taking in all the plants on the old woman’s porch. “Elvira, some of us on the outreach committee are concerned about you.”
“You are?” Elvira said, “Isn’t that precious. I can assure you, I’m having no problem with my walk.”
Her elderly friends had advised her of the rumors. “You’re one of us, now,” Evelyn had said over the phone. Rose was one of the church’s three octogenarians.
Elvira had started using a cane after the stroke, for her walk up to the church. She had a car but seldom used it. A neighbor did most of her food shopping these days. She didn’t exactly need the cane, but outside of the house it felt good to tap the soft ground or the gravel drive every other step, just to know it was there. It was a lovely cane. It had been her mother’s, white ash with a carved rosewood handle. She was touched that the outreach committee thought about her. Of course, since she and John, the minister, weren’t speaking these days – closet Republican that he was - the job did fall to them.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt,” Simon said, smiling back at her kind and open eyes. He didn’t know what to say next. It was so nice sitting there, the sun outside on the dappled lawn, the feel of the worn but well kept cherry table and chairs, chairs that were made by someone who knew how a chair was supposed to feel, and that smell, that aroma, like the perfume of a beautiful woman, so thick you could almost bottle it . “That is an incredible smell, I mean, scent.”
“Isn’t it?” I’ve nurtured those vines every year since I can remember. Tea?”
“Excuse me?”
“Would you like some tea? And I have some of Sharon Dorn’s biscuits she brought this morning,”
Elvira got up to go into the kitchen. Simon observed closely, looking for any unsteadiness or sign of the stroke. His wife, an orthopedic surgeon, had been clear on what to watch for. “I’ll just be a moment,” Elvira said, and walked briskly up the two steps leading into the house.
“Well, I guess you know why I’m here,” Simon said after her, raising his voice to be heard inside. The breeze chose that moment to kick up; it blew the afternoon sun through the screens, reaching down the back of his neck and in through the cuffs of his long sleeved shirt.
“Oh yes,” he heard her say, but he was reveling in the scent flowing out of the back yard. Reveling, that’s what it was. Then a strange sound like a hinge squeaking and water going down a drain followed by a puckapuck each time the squeaking stopped began coming from inside.
“That works, too?” he said upon gaining the kitchen door, curious, to find Elvira filling a blue tea kettle from the hand pump in the corner.
“Oh yes, just had new leathers installed so it’s a little noisy. Simon, did you think I was living in destitution here?”
Simon watched her cross the kitchen with the kettle, standing before the stove in her simple, powder blue dress, striking a safety match and turning on the burner. A strong blue fire and hiss of gas came up as she placed the kettle down on the stove, a torch you could heat metal over, not the weak blue flame at his own house that took hours, it seemed, to boil a pot of water. His eyes went back the pump.
“Could I,” he said, raising a finger and pointing in its general direction, “Try it?”
“The pump?” Elvira said.
“Yes, the pump.”
“I see you haven’t lost your youth, Simon. The children always ask if they can try it.”
He felt a little funny, walking across the yellow linoleum floor to the big white wash sink and green cast iron pump. It was set in the corner, near a pantry door. Simon could now see little farm animals cast along the flange, four rusted bolts holding it down to the thick, wooden counter. The counter had knife marks into the thousands. Simon immediately began calculating the hours then days and then years it took to accumulate so many cuts and scrapes - but stopped – he had been trying recently not to see the world as a series of predictable events and equations. He grabbed the solid handle, raised it up and pushed it down. A perfect, clear stream flowed from the squared off spigot, like a sugar scoop sticking out of the pump’s body. He bent down, placing his lips near the rim, and pumped again. The water was ice cold.
“Is that filtered?” he said, standing up straight and wiping his chin on his sleeve. “My teeth hurt.”
“The lord filters that water,” Elvira said, going to another counter in the corner and pulling an old, enameled cake stand out of a shadow. Simon saw Sharon Dorn’s cookies piled high inside the glass cover. Nobody missed a dinner invitation at the Dorn’s, ever. The woman’s cooking was almost like sex.
“Ah yes,” Simon said, “Sharon’s cookies.”
He suddenly blushed, realizing the double entendre, then blushed again because it was Elvira and he assumed…oh Christ, he really needed to learn to think before he opened his mouth. He looked up again, but Elvira seemed intent on which plate to serve them on, as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Why don’t you go outside and visit the Wisteria?” she suggested.
“Sure. Good idea.”
It felt refreshing to get outside, not that it was going to help. What an ass he had been. She was right, he had expected some rundown, in need of a cleaning, faded drapes and broken furniture cliché of a seventy-nine year old woman’s house. That was the thing, and it confused him. Maybe she was old and as plain a Jane as ever had been and yet, there was something so seductive, so alive in her. The house felt more like a movie set. The perfect home, as if her children were simply gone as all children do, out living their own lives, raising their own families, one of them sure to stop by that weekend, Every square foot of wall space had a painting or photo; every room perfectly clean and ready for company. And that kitchen, it was geared to feed a dozen. There had to be twelve chairs at the table. Naturally, he had counted. A setting for twelve clearly showed through the glass paneled doors in the wall cabinets, so much storage; an oven you could crawl in.
It was a bad sign whenever he started thinking like his mother. Simon focused on the yard. The property was bordered by trees, the back yard maybe a full acre. Oaks and pines and maples scattered about; big, mature trees with patches of spring time shade and lots of light, the kind of yard it took years to build. Simon guessed the place looked positively voluptuous in full summer. There it was again, why was he thinking of everything in terms of sex? A small, shingled barn sat near the back corner, the yellow gravel drive leading up to a deep blue sliding door closed beside an open window, both trimmed in white. And there to the left, clinging to what may once have been an arboretum, a wall of delicate lavender climbed to an incredible height, stretching off at least the length of the barn like a great blue wave rising up from the orchard and crashing down over the building’s corner and the lawn. The Wisteria, like frothing surf, hung down in great surges, a painting captured in mid moment. The scent was overwhelming, sweet and thick like the women’s counter at Macy’s. It clung to his clothing, filled his nostrils, clogging the back of his throat. His eyes began to water.
“It is so lovely,” he heard Elvira say.
He turned to see her standing there. She saw the tears running down his face and immediately pulled a handkerchief from a pocket in her dress.
“Why Simon,” she exclaimed.
He let her think it was the emotion and not his allergies at work. Shameful, yes, but somehow fine in the moment. ‘They really are beautiful,” he said.
“Yes, they have given me many beautiful memories.”
The two of them stood on the lawn, feeling the warm breeze and smelling the beautiful Wisteria.
“Tea is ready,” Elvira declared, turning to go back inside. Simon took one more look before following. The breeze ruffled the vines like delicate, purple feathers, sunlight filtering yellow and white. Simon watched as thousands of petals fell from the sky and sprinkled the fresh cut lawn.
It took him several minutes and two paper napkins to clear his head. He listened as Elvira went on about the history of the particular tea she had fixed and Simon did his best to rally the troops and get back to the reason he came. He watched her face now as she spoke, noticed how the two silver curls beside each ear must have been set and placed with great care, that she wore just the hint of make up, and at one time must have been rather pretty with pure white skin and blonde hair. His wife had blonde hair. His Jewish friends had made enough jokes about it. She was slender like Elvira, or rather, Elvira was slender like his wife.
“Is that stuff magical?” he asked suddenly.
There was just the hint of a smile, a twinkle in her eye; he was sure that he saw it.
“The Wisteria?” she said, the hint now extending into full, unabashed joy. “Whatever do you mean?”
Simon sat back. There was no way this woman should be in a home. There, he’d said it, the word his wife had coached so long and hard to avoid. He wanted to say it out loud. Elvira, you shouldn’t go to that place, ever. He tried to imagine her there in the facility dining room, the plastic tray full of food, surrounded by all the other old women, getting introduced to their children or hearing stories about ungrateful others who never came to visit, the tearful remembrances of husbands gone twenty years already - the bulletin board full of activities. This woman would wither and die in a place like that. He watched as she lifted one of Sharon Dorn’s cookies to her lips, taking just enough to press back beside her tongue. She broke it off without a single crumb, and then placed the rest back down on the side of her saucer, half the raspberry center still clinging along the edge.
“Do you like the tea, Simon?”
“Oh yes, very much.”
“Must be the aroma. I haven’t seen you taste it”
“Oh, right,” he said. It was useless to pretend.
“Would you like to hear a story, Simon?”
“A story?”
Elvira stood from the table and walked over to the glider, motioning for Simon to come and sit with her. It seemed to Simon, right about then, he would have liked anything she suggested. Sitting down at the opposite end the glider moved suddenly and slammed back into the sill, creating a clutter of tea cups and metal frame on wood.
“It takes some practice,” Elvira offered.
Simon saw by the look of the sill he was not the first novice there.
“You know, just because I’m seventy-one and had a stroke doesn’t mean my life is over.”
“I thought you were seventy-nine?”
“You caught me. Seventy-nine…”
I don’t think anyone meant that…”
“No, not intentionally.”
She reached across to touch his hand. Goose bumps ran up his arm and across the back of his neck, all the way down his spine. Grateful now for that long sleeved shirt, he managed a smile.
“I know that I’m loved, Simon. I know how my playing each Sunday lifts the congregation, and how the candle light service at Christmas will be the stuff of memories in people’s hearts long after I’m dead.”
She removed her hand, settling back in the lounge. He did lover her playing. The old pipe organ they had purchased from Radio City back in the ‘50’s had base pipes eleven feet tall. The sound could shake your very soul. You are so out of your league, Simon said to himself. He had never met anyone who knew who they were, totally, the way we all wished we could. His wife came close; it was why he married her, why he endured his mother’s wrath and his friend’s comments. Why, ultimately, he no longer went to Temple. Simon decided right then and there he’d better stay silent and just listen, maybe for the first time in his life.
“I was quite beautiful once upon a time. I had beaus and rides in jalopies and drove my father crazy, just like any good daughter should.”
She smiled at some memory. Simon picked up his teacup and took a sip. It was the best tea he had ever tasted, he was certain it was. Whether or not it really was didn’t matter, he thought. It was simply the moment that was perfect, and anything contained therein followed suit. Perhaps tea was simply a way of being, a way of sitting with someone else. The thought surprised him. Not a single number came to mind.
“I fell in love once,” Elvira continued, “He was a fighter pilot. It was near the end of the war, World War II that is, and he was going overseas. In fact, the anniversary of his leaving is next week, and the anniversary of his death the week after. This was before people wrote about such things, so it wasn’t cliché, to fall in love with a valiant young man who went off to war to die…nothing in that war was cliché.
“Elvira, you don’t need to tell me this if you don’t want to.”
“Oh no,” she said, rather abruptly, “I love to talk about him. My friends know that about me. And now that you are becoming a friend…”
“More a fan, I think.”
“Well, the little girl in me will never deny those things, but a friend, I think. Don’t you?”
“Elvira, I don’t know what to think.”
“It’s the Wisteria. It affects some people that way.”
“So he was killed?” Simon said.
“Yes, on his first mission. I’m told most of the boys went that way. If they managed to survive three or four they had a good chance of getting through.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“Oh, you should have seen the town that day. He’s buried up at the church, you know.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I stayed in my room for weeks. And then one day my mother brought in the last bloom of our Wisteria. It was quite a vine, even back then.”
“I can imagine.”
Simon watched as she drifted off a moment, her features all the more delicate now in the waning light, the warmth of the tea inside him now and sweet taste of powdered sugar lingering on his tongue. He couldn’t recall a recent time when he’d felt so content.
“I think she knew,” Elvira sighed, not more than a whisper.
Knew?” Simon said.
“My mother, I think she knew we had made love there.”
The old woman looked at him, like a little girl with a wonderful secret, bursting to tell it. It hit Simon all at once; hit him so hard he caught his breath. Elvira smiled. Simon, now a co-conspirator, sat back in his chair. He guessed they really were friends now. He suddenly worried that maybe she was telling him all this because she knew she was going to die, or perhaps she was trying to get him on her side and stop pushing the nursing home. Get a grip, he thought, you’ve just never met someone who no longer worries how others may think. That was it. That was what she had. Simon had never met anyone so free of it all. He sat back in the glider, noticing how it was made for a more relaxed posture – it did not like formality – and started to use his foot to gently rock them back and forth
* * *.
It was nearly five o’clock when he left. The sun was low and the lawn in shadow, the Wisteria lit up in a fluttering, flaming mass of pale purple dancing with soft yellow shadows and brilliant white spaces. The lawn in front of the vine was covered in lavender flowers. Elvira commented, as they left the porch, that when all the blossoms finally did come down the lawn would be thick as powdered snow.
“Elvira,” Simon said as they stood at the top of the steps, “It has indeed been a lovely afternoon.”
“Yes, you must come by again soon. I’ll invite Evelyn Hartman. Now there’s a broad with a few good ones to tell.”
By now he was used to her zingers; some of the stories she told him that day were simply priceless. He shook his head.
“I wasn’t always a nerd.”
“I’m sure you weren’t.”
She offered her hand. He wanted to kiss her cheek, but thought better.
“See you next Sunday,” he said, taking her hand.
“Yes, you will,” Elvira told him, “And for many more to come.”
* * *
Two weeks later, with a new moon in the night sky and the air getting warmer and warmer, the Wisteria dropped its last pedals, forming a carpet inches thick. Elvira’s back yard fairly glowed at midnight. Simon and his wife were on their way home from yet another fundraiser. They drove down Kings Highway, deserted now; passing the church and the graveyard with its long, broken black iron fence, and Simon said a little prayer for the son of one of their members deployed in Afghanistan.
“Don’t they call these things Moon Roofs?” he said to his wife, pointing up through the top of the car.
“Yes, they do,” his wife said, watching it now, blinking full and bright through the trees.
They past Elvira’s drive. Simon glanced down the tree lined lane.
“What are you smiling about?”
“Elvira, she’s quite a broad.”
“Simon.”
“That’s what she and her friends call one another.”
“I can’t believe you chickened out on that,” his wife said. Simon knew it was the doctor talking, imagining the worst case, trying to boil down the best treatment for the most good.
“She’s fine,” he said.
“I hope so.”
“Wanna hear a story?”
“You, a story?”
“And I promise, no numbers.”
“My husband can still surprise me?”
“It’s about a beautiful young girl who’s in love with a dashing pilot. The night before he goes off to war they decide to make love. It’s midnight, and there’s a full moon, and out in the back yard is a Wisteria vine that’s just shed most of its pedals.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Yes.”
“I knew it.”
“Knew what?”
“She seduced you.”
“Cindy, she’s seventy-nine years old.”
“You always were a sucker for tall blondes.”
Simon looked over. His wife looked serene, secure in the knowledge that she was the center of his universe, as he was hers. But what she didn’t know, what Elvira had told him, was how every year when the Wisteria bloomed, when the stars warmed and the moon was full, she ran naked in the night, falling down into an airy bed full of blossoms. She was too proper to elaborate, but it wasn’t hard for Simon to imagine a scent so thick she could feel her lover’s arms around her once more and the sound of his voice and the moment he entered, both the pain and bliss of it, and the coming, and his promise that would will never love anyone else, not ever, not as long as he lived, and her own promise in return, and being a woman who knew herself, and one not to lie, the one promise she kept, what she taught Simon to feel that afternoon.
“Yes,” she said that night, as Simon and Cynthia whooshed down the tunnel of trees that lined the road in front of her house, as she reveled in the blossoms and felt their cool softness caressing the back of her thighs and under her shoulders, “Yes, and yes again, yes and forever, ever and ever my love.”
Forever, Simon thought, such a short time in the light of eternity. Infinity. Damn, I promised.
“What?” his wife asked.
“Nothing.”
When they found her body the next day she seemed more asleep, curled up like a child in the blossoms and grass in the back yard, than an old woman who had suffered a second stroke. His wife told him later, after the coroner and police had gone, she had looked positively happy.
“I know it sounds clichéd,” she mentioned, as they all stood about in little circles that Sunday at the reception after the memorial service, “but that is how she appeared.”
“Well,” Simon said, “They didn’t write about such things in those days.”
The remark flew right them, but then it would, Simon thought, thinking how Elvira might have said it. He happened to glance up to see Evelyn Hartman, just a few feet away, talking with the minister, looking off for a moment, smiling to herself.
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felt she (had) nothing
The racial barrier – “these children” you mean adopted children? “these” is vague to me
As their parents wanted = how about as their parents allowed? It fits with the following about never imposing. Her involvement is with their permission, not their behest.
they were all concerned – would it be troublesome to add “for her” here? It took me a blink to understand what they were concerned about.
I understand its place and significance in the story, but still not sure Wisteria should be capitalized. Otherwise, so should Oak, Pine, Maple, etc
oh-so-“PC” I truly don’t know but it looks like it’s missing something
Elvira knew what she saw in him – I would use Cynthia’s name here to avoid confusion
as a(n) actuary
“Isn’t it? I’ve nurtured…” There’s an errant quote mark after “it” in the piece
In case it matters, you’ve used biscuits in one place and cookies in another.
“The lord…” Lord is capitalized. Shame on you…
“…stop by that weekend, Every square” I don’t know if there’s suppose to be a period after weekend, or the e lower-cased. Either way would sound okay, and I know you like longer sentences
I don’t think anyone meant…” = needs an open quote
He did lover her playing = love
His friend’s comments = friends’
“…nothing in that war was cliché… = needs a close quote
Knew?” Simon said. = needs an open quote
He promised… not to think in quantifying terms right? Re: infinity and forever…
“I know it sounds clichéd,” = no “d” on cliché?
“gently rock them back and forth” needs a period
The remark flew right (by) them
I love this one too. I will be able to do a better job given time to emotionally distance myself. The characters are great, Elvira is adorable, the church folk and environment just like at home (wish I was there!). Just a note, since she plays, teaching lessons would be another good way for her to maintain relationships with the children. Don’t touch it storywise, but the pessimist in me wonders if her fly-boy lover would have been as faithful.
::more hugs::
Shiara
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