She lives at the nursing home in a padded wheelchair, legs curled up, feet bare. Wiry gray hair, teeth worn down from grinding. All day she barks, “Eh, eh, eh, eh!” In bed, she continues. Does she sleep or keep barking? I don’t know; I’m not there at night.
Her name is Carolyn. The staff and the other residents ignore her noise. It is part of the day’s sounds, along with carts wheeling down the halls, announcements over the PA system, and the eternal beeping of call buttons.
The first time, on my way out, I asked her, “Are you singing?” “Singing,” she said, and after a pause, continued to bark.
The next time, I stopped and said, “Hello, Carolyn. I’ll sing you a song.” I sang, “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”
“Sunshine,” she said, and moved her lips with some of the lyrics.
After one chorus and a verse, I said, “I have to go now, but next time I’ll sing you another song.”
“Thank you,” she said. A conversation. An appropriate response.
I was surprised. And I wept as I waited for the elevator.
Alex pulls the gray cap down over his eyebrows. This snow can’t last forever. His feet are wet and freezing in the sodden sneakers. Gram was right about the boots, but Alex had been getting high with friends so he clicked off her voice on his iPhone. Blah, blah, blah, that’s what they sounded like, Gram and Dad. Blah, blah, blah. Don’t you need your boots? It’s snowing! Have you looked for a job? If we give you money, don’t use it to buy cigarettes. Blah, blah, blah.
Alex walks past houses all lit up and glowing warm against the night and the falling snow. He imagines being inside with a happy, noisy family, and he knows he’d like it for an hour or so. But then he’d start to feel edgy, and everyone would be looking at him, criticizing his clothes or what he did, and asking him about his life. He’d have to leave. Like Christmas Day at Gram’s. All the noise and laughter and all those questions about plans and jobs and school. Blah, blah, blah. Alex had left before the pies and ice cream.
Alex says aloud, “I’m a survivor.” He knows he can stretch twenty bucks into two or three days of hanging out in town. His friend at the taco place slips him the leftovers. And the diner has a breakfast special that’s under $5.00. He gets by. His stuff is stashed behind the couch in the coffee bar. He doesn’t have much stuff. Alex is proud that he’s not attached to material objects. Except his necklace with the old house key. This is one thing he can’t lose. It opens the door to his mom’s loft in the City. Right now he’s pissed at her because she kicked him out. But he may want to go hang out there sometime.
Alex bums a cigarette off a drunk student who is leaning against the wall outside of the pub. He keeps walking. His iPhone dings with a text message. It’s from Gram. R U OK? Call me. Alex decides not to answer. He already has a place to stay tonight. He picked up this coed from NYU. It’s her last night before the dorms reopen down on Union Square. She’s got a friend whose roommate is out of town. Alex can sleep in the girl’s bed for one night. Lisa—that’s the coed’s name—says he can stay there if he takes a shower first. Alex needs the bed but he’s a bit insulted. Like he smells or something. How long has he been wearing these clothes anyway? When did he and Gram choose them at the Salvation Army? Was it a week ago? They picked out a good shirt, a jacket and tie, and a pair of black slacks. The clothes were supposed to be for job-hunting. Job-hunting. That’s another one of those interminable lectures: wash your hair, brush your teeth. Always check back with the secretary or the manager. Blah, blah, blah. They just never shut up.
Until I gave it away, I didn’t know that the mahogany china hutch was haunted. Varnished with a glistening chestnut brown, it loomed six and a half feet high in the dining room. For twenty years, it hunched over our meals like a black-headed vulture.
All I knew about the former owner, Eileen, my deceased mother-in-law, was that she had chosen this dining set sometime in the late 1950s. Eileen didn’t work because her husband didn’t want her to. She had few friends, and no activities aside from occasional ballet lessons. She was anxious and took Valium. Eileen only had the one child and a dog named Perky, who wasn’t. Here was an intelligent woman who apparently had no place but her home into which to pour her creativity. When I asked my husband to describe his mother, all he came up with was, “She was nervous.” One thing I did know, she liked imposing, dark furniture.
The china hutch and I did not get along. It was useful but darkly overbearing. Perhaps, I thought, if I sanded it down to the bare wood, and stained it, the hutch would cheer up. I bought a detail sander and some water-based stain. The project took hours and left my ears ringing from the buzzing of the sander. Red dust worked its way into every crevice, even into my nostrils, despite the mask.
Refinished, and stained a luminous blue pine green, the hutch still spilled its gloom over the dining area.
The newly refurbished hutch continued to shed its dreary presence. Or perhaps it was Eileen’s anger, not her gloomy sorrow, that oozed out of the wood. I could almost hear the hutch moan. One day at breakfast, I said, “You’re finished here.” I took some photos and posted them on Marketplace, asking $200 for the hutch. Considering all the work I’d put into it, and the beauty of the solid mahogany, I figured that was a reasonable price.
No one messaged about the hutch. At this point, I was determined to get rid of it, so I called the Restore at Habitat for Humanity. “No, we don’t take hutches,” the worker told me. “Nobody wants them.” The Salvation Army said no, too, because the hutch was over six feet high. At this point, I took desperate measures, and posted it for free on Facebook.
Suddenly, everyone wanted a free mahogany hutch. I texted “available” to the first messenger, a woman with an interesting name that sounded Indian. We messaged back and forth, and finally found a pickup time that worked.
When the couple finally found the correct driveway, the husband backed his large SUV up to our front steps. I asked if they were from India or Pakistan. “Sri Lanka,” the woman answered. These two sweet people didn’t know much about moving furniture. Eventually they wrangled the two heavy pieces into their car.
“I have two requests,” I told them. “One, love this piece as much as my mother-in-law did. And two, please don’t paint it. If you must change the color, sand it down and restain it. The wood is exquisitely beautiful.”
“Oh, I love this color,” the woman assured me. “It goes perfectly with our dining room.”
After their taillights turned away, I stood in the hutch-less dining area. The atmosphere felt light and fluid and free. OK, part of the feeling came from within me, but there was also a sense that the house breathed a sigh of relief. Eileen’s spirit had resided the hutch. Her frustrations and anxieties seeped out of the wood, like sticky sap from a pine tree.
The dining table and chairs and I shared a moment of pure liberation. The haunted hutch was gone.
Gram won’t let Alex sleep at her house. She says it’s because he smokes. Even if he smokes outside, he still stinks up the house. His dad lives there too, but ‘s Gram’s house and she calls the shots.
Alex remembers that there was a time he stayed in Gram’s house for almost a year. His dreams were loud in that house. Maybe because the house was so quiet. Except when he did something that pissed Gram off. Like the time he shaved his head and left hair all over the bathroom. He really believed he’d cleaned it up. Gram was so mad that after she cleaned it up, she dumped the whole trashcan full over his laptop. All those little bits of hair stuck between the keys.
And the time he lost his key to the front door. He came in through the basement window. Gram heard him thumping onto the floor. She almost called the police. Alex remembers how he looked up from the cold cement floor and saw Gram framed in the lit doorway. She was pointing her .22 right at him.
Alex smiles. He’s pretzeled up on a short sofa in a guy’s apartment. Alex can’t remember the guy’s name. They met earlier at the coffee bar. After a bit of friendly talk, Alex asked him if he knew a place where Alex could crash. So here he is. The apartment is pretty sleazy, but Alex has seen worse. And it’s warm, considering that outside it’s below freezing.
Alex thinks maybe he should try to stop smoking. Maybe he’ll tell Gram that he’s gonna quit and she’ll let him stay at the house. It’s nice there. The bathroom is always clean and Gram makes big pots of lentil soup.
The last time Alex asked to stay there, Gram said that the smoking was just one problem. She said she didn’t feel comfortable or even safe with Alex in the house. That he was unpredictable and he had a history of being violent.
Alex shifts his long legs and hangs them over the back of the sofa. Gram was talking about the time in the car, after he was released from the hospital. Dad was driving him down the Thruway to the City. But Alex didn’t want to go to his mom’s in the City. He wanted to get back on the street in town with his friends. He wanted to get back to the way things were before they got him picked up. So he grabbed the steering wheel.
Gram said Alex almost killed himself and his father. Alex doesn’t remember doing any of that. He was in the car and then he was back on the ward.
You belong to the universe in which you live, you are one with the Creative Genius back of this vast array of ceaseless motion, this original flow of life. You are as much a part of it as the sun, the earth and the air. There is something in you telling you this—like a voice echoing from some mountain top of inward vision, like a light whose origin no man has seen, like an impulse from an invisible source.
Your soul belongs to the universe. Your mind is an outlet through which the Creative Intelligence of the universe seeks fulfillment.
Tangled Magic 