Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life. Barry Martin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ that. I also started realizing how much alike we were. Edith didn’t sugarcoat things. She told you right out what she felt. I’m not so different. I see things pretty much in black and white. If something’s not right, it’s wrong. People can do what they should do, or they can not do it, but there usually isn’t much question about what the right thing is. I felt really connected to Edith because, it seemed, she felt the same way. A little later, she would tell me stories of how she took in all these war orphans in England, and when I heard them I thought, What makes a person do something like that? But for her, it was simple: You do what has to be done.

      I think I’m a lot like that. I hope I am, anyway. You do what needs to be done and you don’t worry much about why or how you feel about it. You just do it. I think that’s why it was so easy for us to talk. We shared something deep and true: an assumption about how you live your life.

      Of course, it wasn’t always easy to talk to Edith. One afternoon I saw these two guys coming down the street. They were quite a sight – both of them in their sixties, but still trying to be hip. Or some circa-1970 version of hip. One of them had a jacket and slacks and tie that looked like they came from three different secondhand stores. The other had gray hair and little round John Lennon glasses, like a refugee from a Woodstock reunion. To top it all off they were struggling along with a big hulking old video camera, and I guess they were going to interview Edith. Or thought they were, anyway. I figured it was about the same thing everybody always wanted to talk to her about – how she was standing up to the horrible developers and all that guff – but when I introduced myself to them and asked them what they were up to, I was surprised by the answer.

      “Well, you know she used to be a spy,” the guy with the glasses said, as matter-of-factly as if they said she used to be a telephone operator.

      “Well, no, I didn’t know that,” I said. “Did she tell you that?”

      “She sure did, man,” he said. “And we have confirmed it through independent research.”

      Now, to be honest, these guys didn’t seem to me like they had both oars in the water, so I didn’t put much credence in what they were telling me. I left them to their business and went about mine. Later that afternoon, when I went over to chat with Edith in her front yard – I don’t know if she’d ever talked to the guys or not, but they were gone now – I came right out and asked her about it.

      And she came right out and told me to go to hell.

      “Mind your own business!” she said. She was pulling some weeds and didn’t even bother to look up. “Why the hell people dwell in the past is beyond me.”

      I thought, well, okay, I guess we won’t go there today.

      I was still thinking about Edith when I drove up to see my parents that weekend. I usually go up every couple of weeks. It’s a pretty nice drive, once you get over the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which is about halfway to their house. After that the roads get smooth and winding, following a serpentine route along the Hood Canal. You can see the canal and the Olympic Mountains behind them, and I don’t think I’ve ever taken the drive without stopping to take a picture, of the fog rising up, or snow on the high peaks, or the clouds piling up and rolling over the mountains. Or the beaches, all covered with sun-bleached oyster shells. Every time it’s a different view.

      The traffic was light, so I pulled up to their place in a little over two hours. Their house is in the woods, on the thirteenth green of the Alderbrook golf course. Not a lot of manicured lawns up around there – there’s too much rain. The biggest crop up here is moss.

      I’m not sure if being with Edith made me want to see them more. When you spend time with someone who’s a good fifteen years older than your parents, you start imagining them getting old, and I guess you start feeling guilty for not spending more time with them. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was the way my dad had been changing recently that made me feel like I really wanted to go see them more often. Mom and Dad both used to golf a lot, but lately Dad was going less and less. There were other changes as well: he had given up bridge altogether, for example. He’d make excuses about why he was quitting that stuff; they didn’t ring true, but you didn’t want to press him. I mean, if he doesn’t want to talk about it then he doesn’t want to talk about it – but you’d still walk away feeling kind of puzzled and confused.

      It probably wasn’t the best day to spend together. My dad and mom were bickering all day – or to be honest, my dad was doing most of the bickering. I don’t know why, but he was picking on my mom over the strangest little things, like the milk wasn’t where it was supposed to be in the refrigerator. Or she’d left the clean laundry in the laundry basket instead of putting it away.

      Late that afternoon we sat down in the family room, and I looked out the sliding windows at the thirteenth green. It was vacant right at the moment. Dad stretched back in his leather recliner and started telling me a story about the time he was eighteen and went on a NOAA ship to Alaska, to map the bottom of the ocean, at about the time a volcano was erupting there. Only, he couldn’t think of the word volcano. Suddenly, he started acting angry at me: “Randy, what do you call that thing, for chrissakes?”

      I don’t know what freaked me out more: the fact that he was cursing (because he never cursed), the fact that he called me by my brother’s name instead of my own, or the fact that he couldn’t think of a simple word. It was scary, but I just let it go. “A volcano, Dad,” I said. “Right. A volcano,” he responded. “Well, you can imagine how excited I was. Eighteen years old and headed for Alaska! What an adventure.”

      As I listened to him spin the tale, my mother came in with a couple of cold glasses of water. As she bent over to put one on the little table next to Dad’s chair, she paused, for just a second, and gave me a look, as though she was trying to tell me something. When I drove home that night, I remembered that look. I wondered what she was worrying about, and whether it was the same thing I was worrying about, too.

      Lately, I’d been kind of impatient with my dad. I was just miffed at him. I couldn’t put my finger on why exactly, but as I’d started the project in Ballard, I’d been getting more and more calls from my mom about him. Little things, mostly – the things couples argue about when they’ve been together, like my parents had, for more than fifty years – but it seemed like in the last few months there’d been more arguments than usual, and they’d gotten a little more serious. She noticed that he was flying off the handle more, over nothing, like I’d noticed when I’d been at their house. I’d tell him a story, and he’d mention it a little later, and my mom would correct him because he’d get the story mixed up, and out of nowhere he’d start yelling at her. It would just last a second, and normally you wouldn’t think anything of it, but it was a little different from the way he usually was. My dad was the kind of guy who was always in control of everything.

      I wouldn’t show him that I was miffed, of course. I was raised to respect my elders, and that carried through to when I was an adult. I always did what he told me. I didn’t always like it, but I didn’t talk back. It’s just the way we were raised. So even if I was getting pissed off now and again, I didn’t say anything to him about it.

      I don’t think any of us is prepared for our parents to start to decline. I know I sure wasn’t. It’s denial, I guess. It’s not that I didn’t know what was happening to my dad. It was that I didn’t want to know.

      It was about six weeks after I took Edith to her first hair appointment that she asked me to take her again. I went over early that afternoon, and from the moment she entered the living room, I could tell that she was loaded for bear.

      “I just want you to know I didn’t appreciate that call this morning,” she said, her voice full of venom. “You СКАЧАТЬ