When we got back to the house, I walked her to the front door. I still had never been inside the house, and I was kind of curious about how she lived in there, all alone all these years, but I wasn’t going to find out this day.
She turned and smiled. “Thank you again, Barry. That was very neighborly of you.”
“Not a problem. Let me know if you need anything else. Say, Edith?”
“Yes, Barry?”
“Your hair looks real nice.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, I had more visits with Edith, always in the front yard. But one morning, she wasn’t out where I expected to find her, so I knocked on her door, and she called from the kitchen for me to come in.
I will never forget that moment I stepped inside. Never. The first thing I saw was the end table. It was the table from my childhood. It was that classic fifties style – a plastic-laminate end table, dyed light tan to look like wood, small and rectangular, with a second shelf, half the size of the lower table, raised above it on two thin wooden side slats. On the higher shelf sat a lamp, and when I saw it I about fainted right then and there. Not only was the table the same, but this was the same exact lamp my family had when I was a kid as well. Same color and everything. It had a pink ceramic base shaped like an inverted vase, with little gold rods protruding from its top, and little gold metal balls on the ends of them. It was topped off with a wide translucent yellow paper shade, rimmed with a spiral metal edging and decorated with little brown palm fronds.
Looking at that table and lamp, this whooshing sensation came over me, like I was being transported back in time. And I was, really. For a second there, I was a kid again, walking into my mother’s house, half expecting to get offered a peanut butter and jelly sandwich or get hollered at for not wiping my feet.
When I got my bearings back, I took a moment to look around. I couldn’t believe how much stuff there was – all the books and records and CDs and figurines and photos – but still how very neat and tidy it all looked. Everything in its place.
The sun glinted off a metallic etching that was hanging on the wall. There were four of them, not quite gold, not quite silver; all street scenes from Venice. I wondered what the story was behind those.
When Edith came back into the room, I asked her about the etchings, but all she said was, “It’s an interesting story. I’ll have to tell you about it sometime.” A very polite way, I guess, of saying “None of your business.” So we moved on to other topics. She told me her friend Gail had stopped by earlier that day. Turns out Gail was just a kid growing up on the block when Edith first met her. In fact, Edith used to babysit for Gail and her sisters a lot. Gail had gone off to Alaska for a long time but came back a few years ago and now stopped by every now and then, and brought pictures of her and her sisters, all grown up now, and all of their children, all grown up as well.
It was nice to hear that her friend was still coming by after all these years, and, frankly, that Edith had some company besides me.
When I got back to the trailer I was surprised to see how late it had gotten. I’d wasted a good part of the morning with Edith, yakking about everything and nothing. I was finding it easier and easier to talk with her. Driving home that night, I thought about why that might be. What was it that was drawing me to her? You know how your kids spend an overnight at someone’s house, and they come home, and the parents tell you how well-behaved and polite and helpful your kids were, and you think, “Are you talking about my kids?” There’s something about kids, I guess, after a certain age, that they can relate to other people better than they can to their own parents. Maybe you’re too close, or maybe it’s their need to rebel, or something. Well, it never occurred to me that the same thing could still happen to you when you’re all grown up. Somehow, I was already finding it easier to have conversations with Edith than I ever had with my own mom or dad. I guess there were two reasons for that. For one thing, I felt like Edith didn’t take things personally the way my own folks would. I guess that’s just natural. Same with my own kids – no matter what they tell you, you can’t help flashing back on things you’ve done and wondering if whatever problems they have are your fault in some way. But it was more than 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,