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

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СКАЧАТЬ holding up pretty well so far, but soon enough he’d start having his own problems. I think if it weren’t for the things I started learning from Edith, I wouldn’t have known how to handle or accept what was happening to my father. Or how to help him.

      But for the moment, I put those thoughts aside. Everybody’s got their problems. I had plenty of my own.

      I had a shopping mall to build.

3

      There’s a lot of sitting-around time at the beginning of a project, especially one like this that begins with tearing down buildings to make way for the new construction. There were two buildings on the other end of the lot from where Edith’s house stood that we had to get rid of. I’d given the crew their assignments, and now the best thing for me to do was stay the heck out of their way and let them do their jobs. So I found myself wandering from my trailer over to Edith’s front gate, not forty feet away. Now that I’d figured out what pushed her buttons – or thought I’d figured it out, anyway – I started approaching her a little differently. I only went over when I saw her outside, when it didn’t seem like I was checking up on her. And I kept it casual, chatting about the weather and the transients and whatnot. Pretty soon we were hanging on the fence like any neighbors, poking fun at the way teenagers dress these days, what we recalled about Ballard years ago, trying to remember the names of who ran which store, that sort of thing.

      As we talked, day by day, little bits of her past would seep into the conversation. Once we were talking about something we’d heard on the radio, another dumb government botch-up. “It’s not just here, believe me. When I worked for the British government, let me tell you, there were some royal mess-ups there as well.” A van turned off the overpass and drove by with its muffler roaring; I had to wait for it to pass before I could ask, “You worked for the British government, Edith?”

      “Yes,” she said, without missing a beat. “It’s how I wound up in the concentration camp in Dachau.”

      Well, that threw me for a loop. I wanted to ask her about it, but before I could say any more, I saw that her eyes were moist, that tears were starting to form. I had this overwhelming feeling like I wanted to hug her, but of course I didn’t. I realized why I was feeling it, though. Because in that moment, looking at Edith, I felt like I was back in the presence of someone I loved as much as I’ve ever loved anyone: my great-grandma Mimi.

      I flashed back on the time when I graduated from eighth grade, and my sister was graduating from high school. My dad rented a 35-foot cabin cruiser. The whole family, including my great-grandmother, went on the boat and cruised through the Canadian San Juan Islands for a week. That trip made a real impression on me. I loved watching my dad steer that boat. He was so smooth and confident and in control, it made me feel really safe on the water. I still carry that with me.

      And I loved having all that time with Great-grandma Mimi. I could sit and listen to her tell stories all day. Great-grandma Mimi came to Washington State in a covered wagon. A covered wagon! I could just see her – in a kid’s mind, of course, your great-grandmother is always an old lady – but I’d try to picture her as a young woman, and as she’d tell me her stories, I’d imagine what it must have been like at those moments of her life – when she first heard a radio, when she first got a telephone. She was there when the automobile was invented, when men went off to the First World War, and when they came home. And there I was, just a kid cruising on the open sea between beautiful islands, the cool Canadian breezes giving you a little chill, even on a summer’s morning, the sun gleaming off pristine green waters, and my great-grandmother Mimi touching my cheek and telling me what it was like the first time she heard a phonograph.

      A few years back, I was talking with my kids about the moon landing. It was the fortieth anniversary or something like that, and it was all over the TV, and they were asking me about it, and I told them to try to imagine what it was like for my great-grandmother that day. She came to Washington State in a covered wagon, and now she was watching a man walk on the moon. That’s really something. I know people talk about all the technological advances we have today, with computers and all, but to me it’s nothing compared with what my great-grandmother lived through. The changes she saw unfolding around her.

      I looked over at Edith. She had turned her back to me; to gain her composure, I thought. But then I noticed a little dog in her yard, and Edith was walking toward it.

      It was a cute dog, one of those Lhasa Apsos, only about seventeen years old, missing most of its teeth, and blind as a bat. It was a stubborn little dog, too. There was a cart out in the front yard, and the dog was walking along and, because it was so blind, it bonked into the cart. Instead of going around it, the dog just walked forward and bonked its head on the cart again, over and over. It would be a while before I figured out that the dog had got its stubborn streak from its owner.

      “What’s your dog’s name, Edith?”

      “Oh, that’s Mimi,” she said. “Mimi’s been with me forever.”

      “You’re kidding! That’s was my great-grandma’s name. Mimi.”

      Edith smiled. She seemed to take some kind of special pleasure in that coincidence.

      For the next hour or so, we chatted about nothing. Edith wanted to know all about my family: my son, Willy, who was sixteen, pitching and playing middle infield for the baseball team; and my daughter, Kelsey, a year older, who was into what they call competitive cheerleading. I would never in a million years have heard of competitive cheerleading if my kid hadn’t been into it, but now I was becoming something of an expert. And of course my wife, Evie, the one who holds us all together.

      When I mentioned Evie’s name, Edith’s eyes opened wide. “That’s just quite remarkable,” she said. “One of my best friends was named Evelyn. We called her Evie, too. One of my best friends in the world. That was back in England, of course. Those were some days we had, Evelyn and myself.”

      It all started to make sense, in a way. I hadn’t put two and two together the first time she mentioned she worked for the British government, but from the way she spoke, not with an accent but with such precise and unusual diction, you could guess that maybe she had lived somewhere else for a long time. “When did you live in England, Edith?” I asked.

      “Yes, yes,” she said, not really answering my question. “I haven’t thought about Evelyn in a long time. You know, these kinds of connections are important. People think they aren’t, but they really are.”

      It was comforting, in a way, hearing Edith talk like this. A little like being back with Great-grandma Mimi. I didn’t feel right then that I could ask Edith any more about Britain and Germany and all that, but I knew it would come up again. I got a little bit of the thrill of anticipation: I couldn’t wait to hear more of her stories.

      I suppose it had been a long time since anyone had hung around Edith’s fence just to pass the time of day. I think maybe when you get old, people make assumptions about you – that you’re crochety, or solitary, or that you don’t want to talk to people – and then those assumptions get in the way. In Edith’s case, I guess she’d given people lots of reasons to make those assumptions – but still, as I got to talking with her, I realized that there was a lot more to her than just that. Maybe it was just like the mall project that was taking shape behind her house: in spending afternoons talking the way we had, we managed to clear away some old obstacles, to break some new ground. It was a nice feeling. Like starting out on a long walk, and knowing you’re headed in the right direction.

      Maybe it was because of all that, or maybe not, but about 10:30 one morning, СКАЧАТЬ