Abigail on the Classics

These will be my last words.

My doctor thought I wouldn't last through June. I believed him for the most part, why wouldn't I? - but I sensed a hedging within me when he said this, a reluctance to obey. I am still here.

But not for long. The doctor who tosses up his hands isn't quite sure now when I will depart but I can sense that it will be soon. Tonight, perhaps. It would be nice if it was tonight. I've always wanted to die in my sleep.

Clarissa is writing this for me and we just had to stop for a moment so she could complain about my choice of words. She is done complaining. Off we go again.

Lauren used to tell me I was a woman tethered to my regrets. She doesn't say that anymore. I don't think I am the same woman I was when hired her to transcribe Mercy's diary. I waited a long time for someone like Lauren to give the diary to. Deep down I think I knew that when I did find that someone, when I was finally able to let the diary go, I'd finally be able to let go of a lot of things.

I don't hate my father anymore for his manifold unkindnesses to me. He missed my mother.

I don't hate myself for marrying Edward Swift. I missed the father I wished I'd had and the man I wished I'd married.

I don't hate myself for not loving Graham enough.

I don't hate anything more.

I've discovered that there are things you carry with you into the world beyond this one. Everything that resides in your heart makes the journey with you. I don't want to make the crossing with hate in residence.

I've tried to thank Lauren for her part in my coming to this place. She is always trying to minimize the difference she has made in my life. I suppose it is too much to consider how things would have turned out if she had not answered the ad. I realize now she almost didn't. And she cannot bear to consider that. And I would not be the same person had I not met Clarissa, had not opened this crypt of a home to these girls. If Lauren had not answered the ad, I would not have met either of them. And who knows what might become of Mercy's diary, then? What would have become of all of us?

Clarissa has left the room. She needs a minute. I think I can finish this on my own. Yes, I think I can.

I leave you with this: Zora Hurston, writer and anthropologist, penned this. I read it some time ago and forgot it for many years: "Love makes your soul crawl out out from its hiding place." Our crooked souls are bent on hiding until we understand how beautiful it is out from under the rock which we think protects us, but in fact, presses us into the dust.

I see that now. It is beautiful here in the vastness. It always has been. I just had my back to it. God in His mercy, and oh how extravagant is mercy, waited for me to crawl out of my hiding place and see it for myself.

How strange to think people will say I died in my sleep. I will wake in my sleep.

I am ready.

Abigail on the Classics

I am starting to feel my mortality.

I can sense within me that there is an intruder and that my own body has surrendered to it. Have you seen how an animal who has no will to fight lies down in front of its competitor and exposes its tender belly? Inviting its own defeat? This is how I see it, almost like a spectator watching from the last row in the arena. I am not in a war with the cancer. I am its spoils.

Lauren has stopped asking me to at least consider treatment. The treatment is not a cure, my dear Lauren, I told her, more than once. It will only delay the inevitable and fill those extra days with nauseating frustration. Besides. We are all appointed a time to exit. Most of us don't have the odd gift of knowing when it is. It is odd. And it is a gift.

Mercy's diary will probably be published after I am gone. I am quite fine with this. I won't have to wonder if Lauren and I did the right thing and not being able to do a thing about it. Even now
I still wonder.

The gallery is under construction and despite my money, influence and daily badgering, I may well be in my grave when it is finally finished, too. I am not quite so fine about that. Lauren took me to see the progress made so far. It is a great scraping of the earth and a huge slab of cement at the moment. Hard to believe it will be beautiful one day - a great white edifice of art and music and literature.

I am re-reading my favorite books while I still have the time. Today I am reliving the melancholy magic of Wuthering Heights. I can almost smell the heather . . .

Abigail on the Classics

My humblest apologies. It is my fault that I am so late in writing this. I lacked the energy when we returned to Santa Barbara after our little retreat to the Pismo Beach house, and then I lacked the motivation.

It's not that I didn't have a lovely time with my girls. I did. I was unmotivated because I had such a lovely time. I didn't want to come home to this house where my mother died when I needed her most and where my father died sputtering he didn't need me at all. I know I will probably breathe my last in the same room where they both left me - fifty years apart. Tell me you'd race home to embrace an imminent future like that one.

Clarissa says if I am going to spend my last few months here whining about the past, she's leaving. I don't think she is serious. Well, actually, maybe she is. In any case, when she said that, I realized I really don't want to think of this house as the place where I will die. It is, but I don't want to think of that being its purpose. It is the house where I made most of the choices that have defined me, good or bad. It is the house where I learned what I could change and what I couldn't. I met Lauren in this house.

It is the house where I lived.

So I had my coffee on the patio this morning. The birds were singing to the day and the sun was coaxing the morning glories into a most narcissistic display of splendor. And I just sat and sipped. Clarissa saw me there before she left for class and I think she realized she does not have to think about finding a new place to live.

Lauren is getting a package today. She told me the galleys for the diary are ready and she is going to be going over them word by word. This is the last time she and I will have a chance to weave Mercy's words into the tale that will be her legacy.

I am glad the sun is shining today.

Abigail on the Classics

I have spent the last few days reading literature that simply doesn't thrill me in the least. In fact, it has left me feeling rather depressed. And for pity's sake, who has time to read depressing literature when there are so many wonderful books, begging for attention?

I certainly don't have time. So I am putting away the literature on what happens to your body when the cancer within lays claim to your insides like a greedy Monopoly player who simply isn't content to own hotels on Boardwalk and Park Place. I am through reading about obstructed this and blocked that and stents and stomas and grains of sand in the hourglass.

Today, I feel lovely. I have no sense of the Intruder today. And today is all I consider anymore.

We are reading A. A. Milne's When We Very Young, the girls and I. Dear Ryan, the girl-with-the-boy-name who I regret I haven't learned to love yet, held up her copy today and announced with disdain, "This is Winnie-the-Pooh."

No, it's a book of poems written by the man who created Winnie the Pooh, I told her.

It's a kid's book, she said.

Would you prefer some adult literature? I asked her, and I handed her the 50-page treatise on treatment options for advanced ovarian cancer.

She closed her pouty little mouth.

Didn't think so, I said.

When We Were Very Young is a collection of forty-four poems. It was the first of the books Milne wrote featuring Pooh and Christopher Robin, and when it was published in 1924, only a little more than 5,000 copies were printed. It seems to me Dorothea and I had one of those copies. We read it at the Pismo Beach house, I think. I just remember reading it with her in the sunshine. With sand between our toes. And there was lemonade and cherry tarts.

I don't have the book now. Makes me think maybe it was Dorothea's book. And nothing remains from her childhood; nothing except the memories I have of it.

I am going to suggest we girls discuss the book over a weekend retreat at the Pismo Beach house. Weekend after next. I shall have Esperanza call the property manager to air it out.

It will be relaxing and peaceful. How can it not with sand between our toes?

And there shall be lemonade and cherry tarts.

Abigail on the Classics

I apologize for my tardiness. I am not one to take an appointment lightly. You can be sure I am late because there was nothing I could do about it.

I have also never been one to pretend something is true when it isn't nor have I been the kind of person to suppose everything will turn out fine when it is quite obvious it won't.

What is "fine" anyway? We say something is fine when the thing in question is as it should be, when nothing about it is amiss, when it's the way it was before anyone wondered if something might be wrong with it.

I am not exactly fine. Something is amiss, in fact.

I have been diagnosed with cancer. Ovarian. It can happen to old women like me who've never had children. My little nests of eggs have exacted a kind of justice for having been kept from performing their sacred duty. It's not that I didn't want children. I did. But the only man I was married to did not. After he left me, I was too old and too single to consider waltzing into motherhood on my own. Besides, I had Graham, right?

The girls do not know. I haven't even told Esperanza, even though she has taken me to my doctors' appointments of late. They all suspect something. I can see it in their eyes.

I don't plan on keeping anyone in the dark. I shall tell them soon. After I have a chance to decide what I want to do.

And amazingly enough I do have some choices.

Isn't that just fine?

Abigail on the Classics

Did you know that when The Bell Jar was first published, Sylvia Plath used the pseudonym Victoria Lucas? It was only after she took her own life that the book that would become her definitive work was published under her real name.

I feel sorry for the poor girl. She wrote The Bell Jar - the story of a gifted woman who wars with thoughts of suicide - from the standpoint of someone intimately knowledgeable. She wanted anonymity. Perhaps some would say it does not matter now. She is gone. She is not here to demand Victoria Lucas be known as its author. And she is not here to need her privacy. But I believe if it mattered to her while she lived, it should matter just as much to us in her death. Who is to say what we believed to be of great importance while we lived ceases to matter at all when we die.

I have read that while in college, Sylvia wrote in a letter: "I've gone around for most of my life as as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar." I took enough science classes in high school and college to know what a bell jar is for, at least the kind I think Ms. Plath was talking about. This kind of jar has a rounded top and a bottom that is open. Put it on a snug base with a firm seal and you can create a significant vacuum. And of course, that lovely clear glass allows wonderful visibility to lookers-on. Whatever is being tested under the vacuum will have a ready audience.

I do believe I can relate to what life is like inside the bell jar. It can suffocate you. Some cannot break the glass and get out. I just learned that from the inside you can paint the glass black so that at least no one can see in.

But then, you cannot see out, can you? So which is worse, I ask you?

I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow. Esperanza is taking me. Something is not quite right. I kind of wish the glass around me wasn't so dark. . . .

Abigail on the Classics

The wheels are in motion.

I have sold a sizeable amount of stock to finance the Mercy Hayworth Memorial Arts Center, much to my lawyer’s shock and awe. He tried to convince me to wait and see how I feel about this project in six months – nothing good happens when we are impulsive, he said. Ha. I didn’t tell him I certainly know all about the regrets you live with when you act on impulse only.

But I told him that in six months I could be dead. Highly unlikely, he said, referring, no doubt, to my robust contrariness, the kind of which has kept codgers alive and kicking well into their centenarian years.

In any case, it’s my money, my estate, and I can do what I want. So I did. I have also asked my lawyer to draw up the necessary paperwork to set up a land trust so that the parcel of land I am donating will always and forevermore be a monument of sorts to Mercy.

Lauren’s father’s company is taking care of all the contracting. I have nothing to do now except watch it grow.

It’s a beautiful piece of land, really. I’ve had developers after me for years, wanting it. You can’t see the ocean from the land, but you can smell it. You can feel it. On extraordinarily quiet nights, you can hear it.

In the meantime, Graham is at last gainfully employed. I wonder every day if this will be the day when he decides he doesn’t like working and will quit. That’s not your problem, Clarissa tells me. So stop wondering. I think there are days she’d like sock Graham soundly in the head. I wonder if maybe that isn’t what he has needed, all these years - for someone to care enough about him to knock some sense into him.

I am glad Clarissa is staying at the house with me this summer. I would never tell her this, but she makes me feel brave.

Ironically, if she knew, I think it might scare her off . . .

Abigail on the Classics

I feel very strange today, light-hearted. Hopeful. It’s been a long time since I have felt weightless like this. Even when I read Tom’s poem to me and knew I had his forgiveness, I still felt the weight of the choice I had made all those years ago. But today it feels different.

Lauren showed me the publishing contact today for the diary. I told her she was under no obligation to show it to me. I gave Mercy’s diary to her to do with as she pleased. But she wanted me to see it. And I suppose, deep down, I wanted her to want me to.

The money this publishing house is offering is a nice amount. Clarissa said it was enough to make her want to write a book, and I imagine she was only half kidding. For Lauren, of course, it has never been about the money. Lauren is an heiress to millions. When Clarissa asked what she would do with “all that money” she turned to me and asked if I remembered that proposal she helped write for her father last year, the one for the non-profit literary and arts center. Perhaps you also remember it?

It was to be a grouping of galleries all in one place, connected thematically and centered on a garden in the middle. There was to be a viewing library of rare books, and a museum of antique musical instruments, and a gallery of rare china and furniture. Lauren envisioned readings of the rare books, concerts with the instruments, and meals served with the antique china and furniture. Everything was to be displayed as if it was in current use. She envisioned classrooms for lectures on art history, music, literature, design, textiles. I told her I did remember it. Lauren told me she wanted to find a new investor for that project and use the money from the publication of the diary as an endowment so that anyone of any socio-economic class could become a member of the center and enjoy its offerings. She asked me what I thought of that idea.

I told her it was an idea worthy of thought and contemplation and I asked her if I could think on it and get back to her.

The thing is, I can’t get that project out of my mind now. I am thinking. . . I am thinking I might want to be the investor to plunk down the millions to see this center become reality. I have some property right here in Santa Barbara that is just sitting here doing nothing. Developers come to me every so often asking me to sell it to them. And I have always turned them down. I have stocks that I could easily sell to fund the center. I could make it happen in a heartbeat.

The thought of doing something so spontaneous and expensive and, I confess, memorable, is making feel like I’ve had too much Dom Perignon.

I think I might do it. I think I just might. . . Would you?

Abigail on the Classics

I am in no mood to discuss anything with anyone.

I've a fever and a headache and Esperanza is hovering over me, suffocating me with worry and tortilla chicken soup.

Lauren knows better than to treat me like a child, Ryan is plain afraid of me and my germs, and Clarissa is simply too elated not to have to discuss As I Lay Dying with me. Oh, the irony in that. As I Lay Dying.

It's obvious to me Clarissa didn't like the book. I never expected her to like it. It isn't a story to be liked. It's the writing that is likeable, for pity's sake. You don't have to like Hannibal Lecter to appreciate the intricacies of his character.

I really don't have the energy or initiative to expound on any of this. I just want a hot cup of tea, Sonnets From the Portuguese, and solitude.

It's not like I wish the girls weren't here in the house with me. I didn't say I wanted silence. I can hear them getting ready for class and dates and work, and I don't mind the sounds that I hear.

I just want to be alone as I listen.

Leave me.

Abigail on the Classics

When I was a young girl, before cancer stole my mother away from me, she’d send Marcella home early on nights when my father was out of town and we’d make dinner for just the two of us. Marcella was Esperanza’s mother and an exceptional cook, but this was when I was quite young - many years before Esperanza was born, and before Marcella was even married.

My mother wasn’t terribly adept in the kitchen. I didn’t know it then, but she was a much better hostess and philanthropist than chef. She wasn’t a chef at all, actually. I didn’t realize until much later she could barely make toast without burning it.

Once we made Crepes Suzette, only because I had heard them mentioned in a book and I liked the name. We picked the oranges for the sauce from our own tree in our backyard.

Did you know the first Crepes Suzette were the result of a mistake made by a fourteen year-old assistant waiter 1895 at the Maitre at the Monte Carlo's Café de Paris? He was making a dessert for the Prince of Wales when the cordial on the crepes caught fire. The flames crisped the sauce but the Prince was waiting, so the waiter, whose name was Henri Carpentier, served them anyway. It is said the Prince like the crepes so much when he was done eating them with his fork, he used his spoon to get to the last of the sauce.

They were named at that moment after one of the ladies sitting at the Prince’s table, Suzette. Henri is quoted as saying that the dish could turn a cannibal into a civilized gentleman, it is that exquisite.

And all from a little mistake caused by a novice in a kitchen.

My mother thought that was such a fun story. Our Crepes Suzette were dreadful, gargoyle-looking things. Crepes are difficult to make beautiful, especially for someone as unskilled and unlucky in the kitchen as my mother was. But I didn’t care. They tasted like a mistake somehow made beautiful.

To this day, I can’t eat them without thinking of my mother. And the mess we made in the kitchen that night. And how dilapidated they looked.

And how enchanting they tasted.

I shall have to tell Esperanza it’s time to have them again. I think my girls would like them . . .

Abigail on the Classics

It's been a long time since there were young voices in my house. Lauren, Clarissa and Ryan have been here more than a week. Sometimes the house is electric with their noise and movement. Sometimes it is like they aren't even here.

There have been moments since they moved in when I have felt like a very old woman; when they dash down the stairs with little white earphones in their ears, and when they pour a bowl of cereal while punching numbers on their tiny phones, and when they decide at 10 p.m. to go out for orange juice.

There have been as many moments when I have felt like time has worked its way backward and I can almost seeTom Kimura stepping in off the patio and telling me the hummingbirds in the hydrangeas have hatched.

I was the age they were when I told Tom I didn't love him even though I really did. Funny thing: I can't imagine a one of these girls being as foolish, and yet they seem much younger than I was.

I have let Ryan use the Kimuras' old gardeners cottage for her studio. I don't know why I still think of it like that. There hasn't been a gardener living in it since the 1960s. And that man wasn't even a Kimura. It was a musty mess when we cracked open the door, but these resourceful young women had it cleaned up in no time. I am glad there is nothing left in it to remind me of when Tom and his father lived there. And yet, I am reminded anyway very time I poke my head inside. I want to give the girls their space and Ryan certainly doesn't need me interrupting her painting, but now that the cottage has been aired and open, I am drawn to it.

I loaned Clarissa another book, As I Lay Dying. She told me it sounds incredibly depressing. I told her it is actually more about how to live than how to die. And she said she'd read it and see for herself.

I picture a long conversation in the cottage when she finishes.

Abigail on the Classics

Another year has come and gone. Another stretch of moments packaged to be remembered are waiting to be forgotten.

That’s how I used to look at the passing of one year and the birth of another. It’s different this time around.

This January is not like Januarys of the past. Things are different.

For one thing, Tom Kimura is in heaven and I am here but I have his forgiveness and the poem he wrote for me.

For another, Mercy’s diary is less a reminder of every mistake I’ve made and more a tutor on hope. Having it locked up in my safe all these years, afraid to look at it, was like keeping a diamond buried in a vat of mud. I had mistakenly assumed it had no ability to dazzle me. I saw only the mud.

And lastly, I am not alone. At least not on Sunday afternoons and Thursday nights. Lauren comes to visit me then and she often brings Clarissa with her. We share a meal and talk about books and life and love. And yes, it’s true. I have invited them to come live with me. I’d forgotten what it was like to care about people. I am well aware that caring about people lays you bare before a buffet of risks, but there are risks to every undertaking. Even being alone. We all have to choose which risks are worth taking. They are hesitant, the girls. Lauren tells me Clarissa wants to add a third girl to the mix to even things out, meaning, I think, that Clarissa feels Lauren is too much like me.

I don’t know whether to laugh or weep.

I am fine with a third girl coming if Lauren is okay with it.

Graham pretends that he thinks it’s a great idea. I can tell he does not. He thinks the girls will somehow take advantage of me. He might think this because until recently that was his sole pursuit, even on days when he wanted to be doing something else. He might also think I am only doing it to keep him out of the house and in that little condo I bought for him. It wouldn’t be appropriate for Graham to be living in this house with three single college-aged women.

Esperanza says it’s my house so I can use it however I wish. But the girls will be in her kitchen. She knows it and I know it. Esperanza has had that monstrosity of a kitchen all to herself for decades. Besides, she likes it when Lauren hovers in the kitchen to watch her cook. And I am quite certain Clarissa would benefit from a few cooking lessons. The girl eats ramen noodles raw for heaven's sake.

They will let me know next week what they have decided. I will be quite all right if they choose to stay on campus. I am an old woman and I live in an old house. Besides, change is never easy for anyone who has seen eight decades of it. But I’d be lying if I said I do not hope they say yes. And the house seems to echo my longing. If I sit still and silence even my breathing, I can hear the house sighing in anticipation.

Will they come?

Abigail on the Classics

Abigail here. I read in the newspaper this morning that Polaroid will discontinue selling its magical film. By this time next year, it will only be found on e-Bay and in museums and in stuffy old houses like mine.

I was just a teenager when the Polaroid camera came out, late 30s, I think. Of course my father had to have one. We got another one in the 1950s and another in the 60s. The Polaroid camera never failed to mesmerize me. Watching life materialize on that little black square was like watching a memory being tattooed onto my brain. It was like something from another time and place, beamed our way by a friendly but highly advanced life form on another planet. There was nothing else like it.

Few things could be so instantaneous back then. Now everything is that way. Lauren takes all her pictures on a camera that looks just like my old 35mm, but there is a little screen on the back that shows her the image the moment she has taken the shot. If she doesn't like it, she can press a button and it disappears.

I wonder how she knows so quickly which pictures aren't worth keeping. Time has a way of redistributing value. But she is young. . .

I've decided to read The Crucible again. It's been awhile. Reading it always makes me a little grumpy, though. There are so many little things that I don't think are quite right but I can't prove any of it. It's just a gut feeling I have. And really, does it matter? The Crucible is less about the Salem Witch Trials and more about McCarthyism anyway.

Still. Makes me wish we had a few Polaroids of what it was really like to live when Mercy lived. To see what she saw.

I will let you know how grumpy I am this time around. In the meantime, I'd buy up Polaroid film if I were you. . .

Abigail on the Classics

My name is Abigail Josephine Renata Boyles. I am an 83-year-old retired librarian and the former owner of Mercy Hayworth's diary. Mercy was my cousin, eight times removed.

Some might call me eccentric; it is a word widely used to describe old women who aren't afraid to loudly express an opinion. I've seen many a three-year-old loudly express his or her opinion and no one whispers that the pint-sized troublemaker is eccentric. No, we are told they need a nap.

Call me what you will. What is an opinion for if not to be shared? What is an opinion's impact if it is not defended?

I've a library bursting with books, so Lauren tells me, and I've read everyone of them. I've an opinion on every one of them. I've been invited to share them with you. And I shall do it. Let this be my legacy then, since I no longer own the diary. I will share with you my vast wealth of loud opinions on books you should be reading. Now then. Shall we begin?

I've a handful of friends, not many, who prefer movies over reading a book. Slightly less than a handful, actually, and I guess they really aren't bonafide friends. They are people I know and wonder about.

Take Audrey. She loves the movie My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn. Adores it. A stuffy London professor (eccentric maybe?) transforms a Cockney-voiced seller of flowers into a beautiful woman who speaks like the queen. Surely you've seen it.

Did you know the movie is based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion? I mentioned this to Audrey once and she told me I certainly had my facts mixed up. There are no pigs in My Fair Lady. Perhaps I was thinking of Animal Farm, instead?

Dear Audrey, I said, Pygmalion gets its name from Ovid's Metamorphosis. When disenchanted Pygmalion finds himself fed up with real women with real flaws, he sculpts a statue of the perfect woman and falls in love with it. The goddess Venus smiles down on Pygmailion and brings the statue to life.

But tell me what happens when you take something square and make it round to fit in a round hole? All you've done is made transportation possible. When the square thing arrives on the other side of the round hole, and it is lying here on a vast plain of open space, it suddenly has no need of its newly rounded edges. It begins to grow its points again.

What? said Audrey

There is a line from Pygmalion that goes like this. Eliza says it after her outward transformation is complete and inside, she is still the same girl . . .

Eliza! That's the same name! Audrey interrupted.

Yes it is. It goes like this. Eliza says, "I sold flowers. I didn't sell myself. Now you've made a lady of me I'm not fit to sell anything else. I wish you'd left me where you found me."

But she and the professor fall in love at the end.

Do they? I said.

Abigail, you haven't seen the movie, Audrey said.

Oh but I have.

Then you've forgotten. Audrey smiled sweetly.

Audrey is 60-something. Younger than me.
She thinks I am eccentric.

Who can really say that all is well at the end. Who can really say Eliza stayed round. Learned to be round. Inside, where no one can see. Who can say?