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Colophon

ALSO BY BAILEY WHITE

Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Sleeping at the Starlite Motel

Quite a Year for Plums

Title Page

Copyright

SCRIBNER
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2008 by Bailey White

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or
portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Scribner Subsidiary Rights Department,
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

SCRIBNER and design are registered trademarks of The Gale Group, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, Inc., the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-2128-3
ISBN-10: 1-4391-2128-1

Dedication

For Linda

STORIES

Meals-On-Wheels

The Long Black Veil

What Would They Say in Birmingham?

The Progress of Deglutition

The Telephone Man

Miss Wigglesworth’s Bull

Bus Ride

Return to Sender

Lonesome Without You

The Garden

Nothing with Strings

The Green Bus

Almost Gone

Nothing with Strings

Meals-On-Wheels

IDA DIDN’T KNOW what to do in late September when the morning glories began taking over the living room. She had first noticed it in early July, just a little tendril nosing in between the screen and the window frame, but now a thicket of morning glories trailed along the picture molding and swagged down over the windows. “Heavenly Blue,” but the blossoms faded to a kind of purple and left exotic violet smears wherever they fell.

“Why don’t you just cut them off at the window and drag the vines away?” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “This purple will never wash out of your slipcovers.”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl irritated Ida sometimes with these thorough and practical suggestions. “Why don’t you just…” with the just implying that it would be the simplest thing in the world for any person of even the most meager intelligence, and only an old fool would not know what to do when Heavenly Blue morning glories came into the house and stained the furniture purple.

“Cut them off at the window,” Ida said to herself, and she actually did stand by the window for just a minute with a pair of big orange-handled scissors. It was nighttime, and there were no open blooms, just the drooping, spent ones from that morning already turning purple at the edges. But then the telephone rang. It was Judy, saying, “How was your day?” just like she always did. All Judy really wanted to know was if Ida was still alive and well enough to answer the telephone. There was always a sigh of relief from California after Ida’s hello, and the “How was your day?” was just extra talk really.

“Everything is fine,” Ida said, then she told a little story about Mr. Rice down at the birdseed store, so Judy could hear that her mind was still sharp and her speech not slurred. When they finally said good-bye and Ida went back into the living room, she noticed tomorrow’s fat, spiraling buds, and she put the scissors back in the drawer and went to bed.

In the morning Richard Nixon was in the kitchen again, scrambling eggs and then scrubbing out the frying pan with Dawn dishwashing liquid. He had ruined three frying pans so far. Ida lay in bed looking up at the white ceiling. There wasn’t anything she could do about these thoughts after all, but just think them and let them go on. By the time she washed her face and put on her dress and went into the kitchen, she had it straight. There were her frying pans hanging on their hooks, and everything was just as she had left it the night before. It was only that Richard Nixon dream again, she told herself.

That afternoon there was a new Meals-On-Wheels girl. The first thing about her was, she didn’t come to the back porch and bang the screen door and bellow out, “Meals-On-Wheels!” This new girl knocked on the front door, and when Ida opened it, she didn’t come bustling in, clutching the styrofoam tray against her bosom. Instead, she just stood in the doorway gazing at the morning glories.

“Now that is the prettiest thing I have ever seen in my life,” she said, and right then Ida realized why she had not been able to just cut the vines off at the window and drag them out.

The new Meals-On-Wheels girl didn’t just set the styrofoam tray down on the kitchen table and arrange the plastic spoon and fork and paper napkin with little twitchy, snatchy movements, then flounce out with a “Have a nice day!” The new Meals-On-Wheels girl got one of Ida’s good plates out of the dining room cupboard and rummaged around in drawers until she found a proper spoon and fork. “You shouldn’t have to eat off plastic,” she said. Ida had to wash the dishes after she ate, but she didn’t mind. It was nice to see her grandmother’s old Flight and Barr Worcester again. The new Meals-On-Wheels girl had reached it right down off a high shelf.

The next day the new Meals-On-Wheels girl brought Ida a little iced cake she had made herself. “Just because you’re old, that doesn’t mean you should have to eat this goop,” she said, and she threw the Meals-On-Wheels Jell-O into the garbage. She stepped on the little lever so hard that the lid flew up and then popped shut with such a snap that Ida grinned and said, “Ha!”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl dished up the rice, meat loaf, and beans on yesterday’s plate and got a dessert plate from the china cabinet for the little cake. Then she sat down and crossed her arms on the table and watched Ida eat.

“I’m a good cook,” the girl said. “I used to cook for prisoners. ‘Just because you shot a clerk at a Jiffy food store for a six-pack of beer, that doesn’t mean you should have to eat instant mashed potatoes for the rest of your life,’ I used to tell them.”

Ida stopped with the fork halfway to her lips.

“I used to bake little cakes for them. Each prisoner got his own individual cake. I put a different flower on every single cake—red, yellow, blue; green leaves. I have a pastry tube.”

“She used to make little cakes for prisoners,” Ida told Judy that night.

“That’s nice, Mama,” said Judy.

“She has a pastry tube.”

“She sounds like a nice little friend for you, Mama.”

“Sex,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl. She was ironing one of Ida’s linen napkins. “I gave it up.” She pressed the napkin from the back, against a folded tea towel, so the corded letters ICW would stand up high. “I just lost interest in it. Turned forty, that was it. Poof. Gone. Elvis has left the building.”

“Oh,” said Ida.

“I don’t miss it though. Now I have more energy for other things. My mind is freed up.” The girl folded the napkin in threes with the raised letters in the center, poured jasmine tea into Ida’s blue-and-white teacup, and put three little biscuits on a dish. “Devonshire scones,” she said. “They’re flavored with rose water.”

Ida had forgotten how beautiful good tea looked in a fine cup, the gold against the white. She took a sip, then she said boldly, “Sometimes your mind can be too free.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. Sometimes your mind might tell you that Richard Nixon is in the kitchen cooking eggs late at night.” Ida had never told anyone about Richard Nixon; they had put her old friend Louise into Shady Rest Nursing Home after she told her niece that John James Audubon was living in her attic, and it had been all downhill from there.

But the Meals-On-Wheels girl didn’t even flinch. “Fried or scrambled?” she said.

“Well,” said Ida, nibbling on a scone, “they were scrambled eggs.”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl said, “You couldn’t pay me to eat an egg cooked by Richard Nixon!”

Ida smiled and the Meals-On-Wheels girl smiled back. The whole room smelled like a flower garden.

The next morning Ida noticed that the Heavenly Blue morning glories had made the long span from the last living-room window, and a little slip of vine was balanced on the top of the bedroom-door molding, reaching for the light. She got out of bed and put on her slippers, but instead of creeping down the hall clutching her bathrobe at her neck and peeking around corners, Ida marched right into the middle of the kitchen with her arms crossed and said in a strong voice, “You couldn’t pay me to eat an egg cooked by Richard Nixon!”

“Do you know any old songs?” asked the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “I play clawhammer banjo, bump-ditty strum,” and she did a pretty little dance across the porch. “‘I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground’? ‘Pig in a Pen’? ‘Praise God I’m Satisfied’?”

“I used to know ‘Once I Courted a Waxful Maid,’” said Ida.

“And?”

Ida hesitated, rocking in the rocking chair for a while, then she said, “‘With dark and roving eye.’”

“Whoo, baby! Keep going.”

“My daughter, Judy, hates those songs because the women always end up beat to death or stabbed in the heart.”

“Judy! What does she know?” The Meals-On-Wheels girl sat down on the swing with a pad and a pencil. “Sing me the whole thing.”

“I just think you’d enjoy your afternoons more over at the senior center, Mama,” Judy said that night. “A trained staff, planned activities, little craft projects to make you feel useful—”

“‘And deep into her bosom he plunged the fatal knife,’” sang Ida. “I just remembered! ‘Way down in lone green valley.’”

“—crocheting baby booties for newborns,” said Judy.

But Ida wanted to get off the phone so she could write it all down for the Meals-On-Wheels girl before she forgot.

“Look at all this nice stuff,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl, looking into the hall cupboards. “It’s a shame the way this silver is all tarnished, and this linen yellowing along the folds.”

“It’s my arthritis,” said Ida. “I can’t do all that rubbing.”

“What good is that daughter of yours out in California?” The Meals-On-Wheels girl took down the silver pitcher and turned it in her hands. “Look at this pretty thing, it’s plumb black.”

“She calls me up on the long-distance telephone every night.”

“To see if you’re live or dead, that’s all she wants to know. I bet she doesn’t even come Thanksgiving.”

“Well, she has her family.”

But the Meals-On-Wheels girl was rummaging under the kitchen sink for the silver polish and a rag. “You sit down and keep me company while I work. Talk to me, sing me some songs.”

It had been a long time since Ida had kept anybody company. It felt good to sit and talk about just anything at all. “My neighbor Louise thought John James Audubon was living in her attic,” she said. “That’s why they took her off to Shady Rest.”

“John James Audubon was a born liar,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “He never told the truth once in his whole life. I wouldn’t want a man like that living in my attic. You couldn’t count on him.”

“That’s exactly what Louise said. He would talk all night, trying to get her to go up there with him and all those dead birds. But when anybody else came, he wouldn’t say a word.”

“He’d lay low then, wouldn’t he?”

“Louise told them, ‘Go on up there, you’ll see him.’ And they did, but all they saw was a dead chimney swift, so they took her off to Shady Rest.”

“The lying dog,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl.

At the end of the afternoon all the forks and spoons were polished and gleaming in their rosewood box, and the Meals-On-Wheels girl left with a basket full of linen to wash with Clorox. “I’ll bring it back andiron it tomorrow and we’ll sing. I love to sing when I iron.”

“How was your day?” said Judy that night, and Ida said, “Everything is fine.”

By early November the Meals-On-Wheels girl had polished all the silver and washed all the dishes from way in the backs of cupboards and closets, and laundered and ironed all the tablecloths, napkins, and piles of useless little lacy things, heavy with embroidery.

“I’m going to start in on you next,” she told Ida. She took out a tape and measured Ida around the waist and down the back from the neck to the knee. “Bet you didn’t know I could sew. What’s your favorite color?”

“It’s blue,” said Ida.

“Heavenly blue, I should have known that.” The Meals-On-Wheels girl held one of the morning glories up to Ida’s cheek. With the cooler weather they were putting on their last lavish display of bloom, and all the windows were draped with garlands of flowers.

“Everything is fine,” Ida told Judy. “The Meals-On-Wheels girl is making me a blue dress for Thanksgiving. We’re going to have a picnic in the park.”

Thanksgiving was a perfect fall day, bright, cool, and windy. “Come look,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl, opening up a white box on Ida’s bed. Heavenly blue—the dress was exactly that color, as if the Meals-On-Wheels girl had tucked and pleated several yards of October sky. It was lined with white like the throats of the morning glories, with a shiny silver band sewed into the insides of pleats and folds, so that silver flashed from hidden places. The Meals-On-Wheels girl held it up high and put it on over Ida’s head. “I made it like an eleven-o’clock morning glory.”

Ida could see that the fabric relaxed into graceful folds, like a morning glory right before noon, when it just begins to droop. “It’s the most beautiful dress I’ve ever seen,” she said.

“You’re right about that. I worked my fingers to the bone on that thing.” The Meals-On-Wheels girl stood back, turned Ida around and around, then clapped her hands and laughed out loud. “Now come with me to Paradise,” she said.

It was nothing but Paradise Park, Ida knew that, just a grove of pine trees on the edge of downtown. But they went all the way along the azalea path to the Nat Williams Memorial Daffodil Garden in the middle of the park.

On the slate table the Meals-On-Wheels girl had spread Ida’s grandmother’s damask tablecloth with the embroidered crest and the ICW. The table was set with the panel Dresden china Ida hadn’t seen in years and the repoussé silver. There was the newly polished water pitcher, the wineglasses with the gold rims, and the silver epergne, with morning-glory leaves trailing along its branches.

“Look at us,” said the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “Aren’t we pretty?” They sat down on the concrete bench and drank glasses of wine while the Meals-On-Wheels girl played “Swannanoa Tunnel,” “In the Shadow of the Pines,” and “The Mermaid Song” on the banjo. After that, Ida couldn’t keep up with all that went on. There was laughing and talking and the rosy light filtering through the dogwood leaves, and for no reason at all Ida began reciting the names of old daffodils—Butter and Eggs, Hoop-Petticoat, Campernelle, and Pheasant’s Eye. Then there was a different kind of wine, and suddenly they were eating a clear golden soup with little green lemony bits floating on top in the silver consommé dishes, and the Meals-On-Wheels girl sang out, “All the flavor is in the feet!” After that, food seemed to appear out of nowhere—snowy mashed potatoes, little green onions, crackling bread, and greasy collards. Everything that should have been hot was hot, and everything that should have been cold was cold. At one point between the creamed Jerusalem artichokes and the caramel custard, Ida and the Meals-On-Wheels girl held hands and danced around the liriope border, singing “Way Down in Lone Green Valley.” The Meals-On-Wheels girl’s long red skirt twirled around her ankles, and she swayed and bowed and pranced out her little feet over the dormant daffodils.

Ida woke up in the morning with the feeling that she had grit under her eyelids. Her feet were cold, and she lay in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. But before she had time to think, she heard, “Meals-On-Wheels!” bellowed out from the back porch, then heavy walking, and suddenly there was the old Meals-On-Wheels girl standing in the bedroom door.

“I’m back!” she said, then made a slow turn with her hands on her hips. “Now you’ve got you a mess. And don’t be asking me to go at it with the 409 and a rag; you’re going to have to get the professionals in here for this.”

Slowly Ida pushed back the covers and put her feet on the floor. It had turned cold in the night, the first freeze. All along the walls the dead morning glories hung, festooning the windows in slimy tatters, and smearing the woodwork and windowpanes.

“But,” said Ida, “what about…where is…” But the old Meals-On-Wheels girl was already back in the kitchen laying out the styrofoam tray and the plastic fork and spoon and talking about surgery.

“There I was, cut open from here to here, and them telling me to get up and walk up and down that hall within twenty-four hours. I was hanging on to them railings, I can tell you that. They said two months, it’s been two months, I’m dragging, but I’m here; now get on up, honey, you need to eat you something, I got to get over to Miss Eunice.”

“But what about my little friend,” said Ida, teetering in the kitchen doorway in her slippers, “who made cakes for prisoners, a different flower on each cake, with little leaves—”

The Meals-On-Wheels girl stopped and looked hard at Ida. “Honey? You all right?”

“That other Meals-On-Wheels girl, the one whose mind was freed up; she had energy for other things.”

“Honey, there was nobody but me, and then Richard and Albert each took half my route when I was out, and now I’m back. Listen, I’m going to get Doris to come see about you. Where’s my list? What was that daughter’s name out in California—Judy, what was it? A-something.”

“Auerbach,” said Ida, creeping down to the hall cupboards. “Come look,” she said to the Meals-On-Wheels girl. “She washed all the linens, she polished the silver, we danced on the daffodils and sang ‘Where Roses Bloom and Fade’ and drank soup flavored with chicken feet. You’ll see.” Ida opened the cupboard doors.

But instead of neat stacks of linen tablecloths and napkins smelling of Clorox and sunshine, there was nothing but a square of white shelf paper slid crooked, with one corner folded up against the back wall. “Here,” said Ida, opening up the china cabinet. But there was no silver pitcher, no Royal Crown Derby tea set, no Flight and Barr Worcester, no rosewood box—just air, smelling slightly of camphor.

From the kitchen Ida could hear the Meals-On-Wheels girl talking on the telephone.

“You might be wanting to think about another level of care….

“I’ll get Doris from over at Shady Rest, if you’ve done the paperwork….

“Yeah, but she’s got a mess here in the house now, some kind of plant died on the walls.”

Then Ida began remembering flashes of things: the gold thread in the Meals-On-Wheels girl’s swirling red skirt, the red wine in the gold-rimmed glasses, the glowing dogwood leaves, the dew on the silver pitcher, and the glint of silver from the heavenly blue dress.

“Yeah, she’s talking good, but she’s not making much sense. Here she is,” said the old Meals-On-Wheels girl, and she handed Ida the telephone.

“Mama?” said Judy.

Ida smiled and said, “Everything is fine.”

The Long Black Veil

EVER SINCE HER mother died of Alzheimer’s disease a year ago, Charlene has been plagued by suitors. Charles from the furniture store, who came to deliver her new sofa and then didn’t want to leave; Big Jim, who drops in to quote from the Bible about men and women; Larry from down the street, who comes over on his riding lawn mower and talks about Mars. These men are not skillful wooers. They remind Charlene of big, obsolete machinery—a cane grinder or cottonseed press.

“Now, if you got anything big you want moved, I can come back after work,” says the furniture man.

“No,” says Charlene, “everything is exactly where I want it, thank you.”

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