The Living End Read online

He sits down beside me on the paisley couch. “Did you like it?” Eagerness fills his eyes.

  “Yes. It’s perfect.”

  “I wrote that for my uncle. I wanted to tell him of my longing.”

  “You captured it exactly.”

  “You want to get started on your lesson?”

  I shake my head. “No, just play for the rest of the hour. We’ll call it inspiration for the next time you come.”

  Matthew complies, a Spanish hue warming the tones. I awaken later to a dark and quiet room, the fire on the hearth burned down to curious coals. The darkness settles around me, and I fumble toward the bedroom and my tote bag. I dreamed about the yellow socks, you see, and I wish to wear them here, right now. I lie down on the double bed.

  Normally these days, sleep comes upon me when she wishes, but as the clock in the living room chimes nine, I take sleep for my own, refusing to say good-bye, praying that she guides me back to Joey, the now literal man of my dreams. At times he seems so real, as if he’s not simply a dream, but that he inhabits one. I woke up laughing the other night, my voice warming the silence with a mirth only Joey could provide.

  I close my eyes, seeking the peace once more.

  It is eleven o’clock. No dreams. No sleep. As if I thought I could control something so arbitrary. I turn on the light, squash a square of nicotine gum against my molars, and pick up the latest journal of Joey’s. About to read, I look outside at the stars over the pine treetops, and I actually think maybe God notices I’m here after all. I heard heaven earlier today, and it ushered me into a peaceful, unplanned sleep. Surely times like these do not happen by accident.

  Then again, maybe they do.

  May 15, 1966

  JHU, Baltimore

  I’ve never heard the name Pearly before. It suits her, the girl with the perfect skin and pale green eyes. She glows inwardly with kindness. I’m not sure how I became privy to this fact, but I recognized it from afar, even as she walked toward our group as we sat singing. Yet I know she is not one of us, has not fallen at the feet of the Redeemer, but I believe she bears the mark of someone set aside for future reference. Good heavens, reducing her to research terms. I must be overly involved with my thesis. I asked her out as I walked her over to Kashka’s for some coffee. To my delight she said yes. We meet tomorrow after classes. Pearly and Joe. Good heavens, it sounds positively Salinger. Or even Steinbeck, main characters of course. Although Pearly would be the name of a man. Some man with dusty trousers and worn-out overshoes lapping in a summer rain in Monterey.

  Funny, I love the English language, but tonight, despite the scent of Mom’s old roses on the lot shifting in the breeze, an opaque, darkened city sky and the tender spring of the cushion beneath my head, the only bosom I’ve known for eleven years, I cannot think of a thing to write. Perhaps her name is enough, for now. Pearly Anne Kaiser. What delights will she hold? And why does she make me so bold as to believe that I will be the one to grasp them for my own?

  I’m on a three-year voyage through infested waters, truth be known. I dream of falling over the side of this new boat, bearing the shock of the chill fluid piercing my aches and pains, my swellings, my ischemic will to survive. I can tell you I’ve already nixed the idea of jumping off the Bay Bridge. See, with my terrible luck, I’d survive the fall and drown, which is suffocation, which I refuse to bring upon myself. Imagine: If fortune kissed me, my lungs would fill up, stifling the burning sensation caused by the lack of oxygen. But I have survived the fall. Luck has snubbed me once again, and my epiglottis has folded over my windpipe, banishing the water from my lungs. My legs, of course, hang broken, or my arms. Or all four appendages. Or one of each on the same side. Lets go with that. It’s the worst-case scenario, as it would force me to swim in circles. So there I struggle in the Chesapeake Bay, cars whizzing like arrows overhead on the bridge. Under the water now, I can’t hear the sounds of the sirens approaching for the rescue. Good, because in the time it takes for my air to be depleted, I’ll recognize the glory of life, and they won’t reach me in time. But see, that’s just my survival instinct crying out against my sealed fate, not me.

  No, not drowning. There’s too much time to ponder while the clock ticks against you. There’s got to be a better method. Something quick and decisive and easy to administer myself. I definitely won’t allow someone else to do the dirty work for me. How selfish. Imagine!

  I set down Joey’s journal, swing my legs over the side of the bed, and reach into my tote bag. My fingers brush the box of green tea, and I smile.

  Yes, green tea will do nicely.

  Joey’s watch glints in the lamplight. I slip it onto my wrist. The battery still powers the golden hands, moving them past the numbers again and again, the battery Joey changed and planned on changing again and again and again. It’s so real, so connecting.

  Desolation comes upon me, and I hold the watch to my ear, the ticking piercing my brain, stabbing my heart.

  Goooooo-oooo-ooone. He’s goooooo-ooone.

  He’s really gone.

  Joey’s never coming back.

  I kiss the watch, feeling the absence of his body heat, and I wonder when this battery will lose its power, and I decide that truly this is all I have left of Joey. When it dies, I will too. List or no list.

  Relief relaxes my muscles. One way or another, I can see an ending.

  Making the tea now, I am renewed. Tomorrow I will walk the hills, and I will begin living the end with all the gusto and verve Joey would have lived his, had he known it was just around the bend.

  “Pearly?”

  “Yes ma’am?”

  I am twelve years old today! The morning sun streams through the kitchen curtains Mom pulled back before she put on the percolator. She calls the morning light “nature’s first jolt.” She calls coffee “man’s attempt at morning light.”

  She turns away from me as I sit down, and I know what’s coming. After opening the icebox, she whips around with a bowl of chocolate ice cream! “Happy birthday, Pearly!”

  And she sings the song, doing a little side-step with the bowl in one hand and a spoon from the good silver in the other. “Happy birthday to you!” She ends the song, with a ball-change, a shuffle, and a tap of her heel. She tap-danced on the radio once when she was a kid. And the final, silent beat is a kiss, right smack on the lips.

  We rub the kisses in.

  “Twelve years old.” She sits down catty-corner from me and rests her forearms on the tabletop as I eat. She watches me, examines me, and any moment she’ll say, “It seems like only yesterday …” and she’ll tell me about the day I was born. “January is such a lovely month to begin a life …” Always the same. Five weeks early, but still six pounds one ounce; the way I held onto my own ear, ripping it partially on the way out; the big bandage, still a cutie-pie though; how I peed on Daddy the first time he held me. Always the same story, told the same way, ending with tears overflowing from a heart so filled with love and thankfulness I swear sometimes, on nights when Daddy forces her to let my brother cry himself to sleep, it will be her undoing.

  Anyway, my mother should have been on Broadway. She has a certain wild devil-may-care attitude. This thirst for anything and everything possible. And sometimes impossible.

  One night at dinner she told us she thought sure Vienna sausages in lime Jell-O would be a good combination. “Combines both the meat and dessert in one fell swoop.”

  We all gagged on the first bite, and she whisked it off the table, gagging too. “I don’t know what I was thinking. Let’s have ice cream for dinner instead.”

  I bet my father wonders whether he really imported a Martian and not a Baltimorean out here to the Eastern Shore. He loves her though, in his quiet way. He’s out in his fields a lot, but that doesn’t stop Mom. She takes his lunch out there to him, and they eat it together. Of course, Mom stopped the farm tradition of a big meal at lunchtime once I went off to first grade. She didn’t have much of an upbringing, so having us all together for
the day’s big meal is important to her.

  She sits there across from me, and she lights up one of her Lucky Strikes. Oh, she looks so classy and smart! Mom always pulls her hair back in a scarf, and she wears those cute pedal pushers with sleeveless blouses in the summer and sweater sets in the winter. Little flat shoes grace her slightly large feet. She is elegant yet somehow manages to fit in with the farm wives around here. I suspect it’s because she’s always asking them for advice. People like to feel smart and needed, and my mom knows how to make them feel that way. She’s a genius.

  There’s also my Mongoloid brother, Harry, to consider. He’s such a sweetie pie. I think folks feel sorry for her, burdened with a child she’ll never get rid of. But Mom doesn’t seem to mind. She says Harry is the way all humans were supposed to be before they got too big for their britches. I’m not sure when that exactly happened to mankind, and she says she’s not either, but it was sometime after World War I when one group of people thought they had the right to play God and put their own wants and desires over another group of people. I don’t want to tell her that’s been going on for forever. Mom graduated eighth grade and never went to high school because her parents were so poor and needed the money she could make at one of the canneries over on the other side of the harbor. She says she barely listened—even in grammar school! But as I said, she’s a genius. I mean, what other mother serves ice cream for a birthday breakfast? None that I know of. She’s always telling me how rich we are, how she and her friend Ida Johnson would get old issues of Hollywood-type magazines from Ida’s aunt’s beauty parlor and they’d look at the pictures of the stars. “All I ever wanted, Pearly, was to have a few nice things. And your father gets them for me. I don’t need much. Just a few nice things.”

  Dad’s sure proud of Mom. Grandma loves her too, even though Mom’s not a churchgoing type. I think she hoped Dad would pick a church girl, but Dad says he leaves that up to Grandma. So we get dressed up on Sundays after the morning chores are done, and we go for drives up to Salisbury or Princess Anne, or we even take the ferry out to the Island of Tangiers. She puts her arm in his and they strut, everything swinging in perfect rhythm. Harry stays with Grandma on Sundays. She takes him to church with her, and boy does he love Jesus the way she does! Dad’s not so sure about all that. “How can that boy be making an educated decision about what religion he wants to be?”

  “Let him have the comfort, Carl,” Mom always says. “That’s what religions for anyway.”

  I used to go to church with Grandma too, but just when I was really getting interested in going to Sunday school, they took me out. It was a nice little white Methodist church. Grandma’s told me lots of times about the revival meetings they had over here on the Eastern Shore when she was a girl. “People gettin’ saved left and right, Pearly!” she’d say, eyes looking heavenly. But now I go with Mom and Dad, and we have us a good time.

  I spoon more ice cream into my mouth. This is such a fun tradition. My mom’s full of them.

  Harry’s guttural, “Mama!” sounds from the bedroom. He won’t get out of bed until she gets him. Has always been that way. She pulls in one last drag on her cigarette and snuffs it out in an ashtray I made in first grade out of modeling clay. “Time to go get the boy!”

  “What jammies did you put on him last night?” I ask.

  “The race car ones.”

  “I love those!”

  For some reason, it’s become very important to us that Harry should wear a different pair of pj’s every night of the week, and all cute. Well, actually, we know the reason. It’s important to Harry. And we don’t know why, but it’s okay with us.

  Dad walks in. “Happy birthday, Pearl the Squirrel!” And he kisses me softly on top of the head.

  “Coffee’s done, Dad!” I jump up and pour him a cup. “It’s a cold day out there. What’re you gonna do?”

  “Feed animals. Wanna come?”

  “Yep. I’m almost done with my ice cream.” I pour his coffee, then hurry through the rest of my breakfast. “Will you wait until I change and get on my boots?”

  He nods and sips his coffee. Harry lets out another odd sound from upstairs, and I see Dad shudder, and I see him try to hide his distaste. He smiles. “Hurry up, missy! Time’s awastin’!”

  Happy birthday to me! I run up the stairs, my bare feet thumping like a racing kitten across the wooden floor of the hallway.

  By the time Matthew gets here, I’ve got the progression to “Louie Louie” down. A-A-D-D-E-E-D-D. Of course the tempo is dirge-like, but that’s okay.

  “This is the only thing I know on the guitar,” I say. I don’t tell him I used the chord chart that came with the guitar to remember what Joey taught me. Nor do I tell him it took me four hours to do so!

  He laughs. “Oh, Mrs. Laurel, that’s not as bad as you think. You can play a whole bunch of songs with those chords.”

  “That’s what my husband told me.”

  “So he was pretty good on the guitar?”

  I nod. “I didn’t hear him play all that much. He mostly used to practice on his lunch break.”

  “Now doesn’t that make you mad?” He says this casually, because he can’t know how true this is.

  “Kind of selfish, I think,” I answer.

  “I mean, if you can’t share music with the people you love …”

  “You play much at home, Matthew?”

  He nods. “I practice all the time.”

  Happy birthday to me!

  I tromp through the hills breathing heavily, of course. Drat these dirty lungs. And my legs? Atrophy reigns. Yes, Happy birthday, Pearly Laurel, one year older chronologically, ten years older in every other way.

  When Joey was alive, I’d daydream I was on assignment to some dangerous, war-torn land—Pearly Kaiser, renowned photojournalist, ready to risk life and limb and even her special Leica to capture the truth on celluloid. After a few years of marriage, I couldn’t rightfully say what country I was even in, I’d removed myself so completely from world politics and unrest. I used to care so much about the world around me.

  Oh, but …

  I had found joy in loving someone. It was enough then. But it can’t be now, or should it be? Yet I have a purpose now, a fulfilling one as I winter here in the Blue Ridge on this mountain.

  I rest on an outcropping of rock that overlooks the south fork of the Shenandoah River. What loveliness. What a gentle hand painted this scene. What a sensitive ear engineered these sounds: this singing, jazzy winter breeze, the staccato slick of the branches as they respond in perfect rhythm. But the silence in between when the wind dies down fills me with wonder. How can so much be so still?

  Dignity lives here. And I feel honored not only to observe but to be a living, breathing part of this immense moment. I am here, that is all, and it is large and wonderful.

  Sean is something! I love sitting around and watching him rail against the government, bunch of pigs they are. Those poor children over in Vietnam. They’re just slaughtering them. And for what? It’s none of our business.

  I watch his mouth, full bottom lip over teeth that are either naturally straight or were braced into perfection, speak passionately and with more conviction than most of these kids around here. He’s talking about a sit-in here at JHU. I’m game. Exams are done, and I’ll be leaving for Christmas break tomorrow. I’ll just postpone my departure a day.

  Oh, wow. He’s looking right at me! Are his eyes lighting up? I think so! I could be mistaken, but I know men and their glances. He’s uttering that phrase I keep hearing, “Make love, not war.” And he’s looking right at me!

  I am in Sean’s arms. He isn’t my first and I’m under no delusion he’ll be my last. I’m only a freshman, so there’s lots of time left for me. Thank goodness Mom slipped me the Ortho-Novums a couple of years ago. I think briefly about Marsh Cinquefoil back home, our fumbling experiments. And I miss him.

  It’s 11:00 A.M. He’s probably out on his dad’s boat right now, cold wind
curing his sweet face to someday match his father’s. I love watermen.

  Sean is more of the soft type compared to Marsh, but he’ll do. I’m lonely, and I’ll be going home, and Marsh and Betsy will be announcing their engagement. I told him he didn’t have to wait for me while I was in college, but I didn’t think he’d take me up on it.

  Sean kisses me, and I make sure I respond like I mean it. He is one of the most popular guys here. I should be glad for the privilege, the adventure even. I want it all.

  Matthew brought me a guitar strap today so I can learn to play without looking down at the strings, my guitar turned up like a platter. “That’s plain unnatural, Mrs. Laurel.”

  It is February, and we are out on the deck overlooking the river. The branches of the trees clack, and the smell of a warm winter day clings in my nostrils, much like the buttery scent of cinnamon rolls or a good beef stew. The music of the mountain prompts awe, and we are about to add our own bit. Somewhat of a desecration really, at least on my part, for I haven’t exactly made great strides in learning this instrument, but I’m trying, Joey, I’m trying.

  Matthew attaches ties that look like shoelaces to the head of my instrument as he speaks. “The first time I ever played standing up, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Oh yeah. This is so much fun, Mrs. Laurel. Just wait and see.”

  Finishing the job in seconds, he hands me the guitar then grabs his own out of the opened case on the deck. “Okay, let’s put them on.”

  “Do I have to do this, Matt?”

  “Have I steered you in the right direction so far?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “Okay, then trust me to know what I’m doing.”

  I must. He’s the only teacher around that I know of, and besides, learning from a teenager cuts out all the pomp and importance. Matthew just makes it fun.