November 7, 1999

Moss--

I know I should have called before I left. At the very least I should have written a note. Both, actually--neither would have taken more than ten minutes. I can't say why I didn't, except that something came over me on Thursday, a terrible feeling of panic and dread and the desire to simply drop everything and get away, as fast as I could. This strange compulsion to flee grips me every now and then; it's another reason you should probably think twice about being with me, staying with me. More on that later.

I'm here at Aunt Vinnie's until Monday or Tuesday, I'm not sure which. I'm calling in sick at work; maybe they'll fire me, maybe that's what I want, I don't know. At any rate Aunt Vinnie seems glad to see me--she's the only person in the world I would simply drop in on this way. She took care of me and my brother for a while when my mother died, did you know that? It was summertime, I was ten; my mother had died in May, just before we got out of school, and my brother and I were spending the summer playing this stupid Bermuda Triangle board game over and over, sitting at a card table we had set up in the living room. Over and over, not saying a word. You moved this sort of Ouija board like device with a magnet on it over these ships and sucked the unlucky ones up. We'd stop for "The Gong Show" and then go right back to the game. It was mesmerizing--and weirdly consoling. But it drove my father crazy; he said we were losing our minds. So he called up Aunt Vinnie (she was my mother's favorite aunt) and asked if we could go there for a few weeks. Both my brother and I resisted furiously, but in the end we caved in. And it was the best thing we could have done. Because she was wonderful to us, though not in the way you'd expect an old lady to be--no sweet-talk, no nonsense about angels and heaven and Jesus. We didn't talk about Mom much, actually. Aunt Vinnie was painting a mural with a sea theme on the walls of the front hall, and we worked with her on that. We memorized a poem every day. We made egg cremes--odd unexpected things. Right before we left she gave us some photographs of my mother when she was a young woman--henna-haired, spry, laughing, sitting on the sofa of the old Dobson house downtown next to a bunch of old ladies in black--the bridge club, Aunt Vinnie said. When we went back home we didn't touch that Bermuda Triangle game again, ever.

Now she's old--85 this past October. Have I told you how odd it is to have an old person in our family? We don't live long--not many of us. My great-grandmother committed suicide at 45 or so; my grandmother died in her 30's; my mother died at 38. And my grandfathers didn't last much longer than that. My father's 60 this year, but he's already had two bypasses. Very likely he wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for Margot. I don't have much use for her, never have since he married her when I was 14, but I have to give her that: she keeps him going. My mother became ill at 35; I'm only five years away from that now, did you realize that? When you've had a parent die young, you always measure your lifespan by that of your parent who died. I'm 30, that means I've got eight more years tops, and so on. Morbid but I can't help it. They say there's a test to see if you're predisposed to get the kind of cancer my mother had. I can't decide whether I want to have it done or not.

Anyhow, Aunt Vinnie. She's awfully frail, doesn't eat enough--just picked at the supper I threw together for us last night, spaghetti with black olives I found in the cupboard. Enough canned food to last for a whole summer, but the refrigerator's full of half-rotten vegetables and fruit. Drink on the other hand is a different story; happy hour starts at 4:00 here (Jim Beam), and then she has elevenses before noon--a shot of cheap brandy. I can hardly keep up with her. She doesn't guzzle--her drinking's very ladylike--but she's got one going from dusk till bedtime.

We don't talk about the past. We don't talk about her children, Dorothea and Maury, who live in New York. I get the sense that they hardly ever visit or call. I recall meeting Dorothea once long ago once when we came to visit--a tall gaunt woman, upright as a Cherokee, with iron-gray hair in a pigtail. She played the piano, a Chopin mazurka, dressed in a strange flowing poncho-like thing. As soon as she was done she excused herself and spent the rest of the time of our visit in the garden, planting bulbs. Maury's a super in operas or something. By day he has an office job. Probably gay. It's odd that they're not around more. Maybe she wasn't a good mother--too flighty, too preoccupied, maybe? She was always going on trips whenever she got the chance: Tibet, Egypt, Rome. I don't know what happened.

Actually what we talk about is death. She's reading "Final Exit," that book about how to do yourself in by taking drugs and putting a bag over your head. She laughed at my reaction when she told me. "Don't worry, darling, I'm not ready to pack it all in yet." But she thinks about it. The other morning over breakfast she said to me, "you know, I think mother was right to do what she did. Just to go on and get it over with when you realize no more good is going to come your way." And then she looked at me--she has very clear blue eyes in a face with big knobby cheekbones and an oddly small heart-shaped mouth that always has a little smile on it--and said, "Because it's all death, in the end. It's all death."

We've been out riding today--I took her to Food Lion and then to the pharmacy and the post office. We passed the old family place near downtown, a Queen Anne with shingled second story, and a wide veranda around the front, and a sort of turret up top. It's been turned into law offices now. Somebody is writing legal briefs and filing papers in the room where my great-grandmother took poison. It's a beautiful day--the poplars are all flaming, and the hills in the distance--you can see them from the post office--are a red gold. Aunt Vinnie's napping now--she fell asleep in the easy chair reading a book about the Masai. She's been talking it about it all day.

I don't think I can come back to you. No. I can't. Can't come back. It's better this way. I'm messy and half-crazy and thinking horrors half the time and it's not fair to you. You've already put up with enough from me, I can't ask more of that from you. One can't in good conscience. You need someone like that blond girl we saw sketching in the cemetery that day, do you remember? She showed us all her sketches of this big oak tree with a group of graves beside it. None of them were any good but she was so, I don't know, open and guileless about it. "I think I'm getting closer," she said, "but I haven't gotten there yet." When we were going out the gate I imagined you making love to her there in the grass, so sweetly and tenderly. And you know, it didn't bother me in the least, that image--it seemed right, it seemed good. It filled me with a strange happiness. I shouldn't be telling you this but I've never held much back before--why should I now now?

Don't call me. Don't write. Not now anyway. Not for a week at least--please. After that, I don't know. Perhaps. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know anything right now. I don't even know where I'll be staying when I get back. If I get back.

Aunt Vinnie's waking up--I hear her clinking around in the kitchen. So I should go. She doesn't have email, thank goodness, otherwise I'd be madly checking it all day.

Love (can't help myself),

Mary Renfroe

P.S. Please water that African violet on the windowsill above the stove--it's very dry. I meant to before I left but I forgot. I can't remember anything these days, as you know.