After Cousin Martha died, it fell to me to go through her home of more than
fifty years. The only very sketchy instructions she had left, plus her pack rat habit made the task long and tedious. In her bedroom I came upon a box of letters, half of a correspondence, all signed “Love Vanessa”. I don’t remember Cousin Martha ever speaking of a friend Vanessa. From her letters she is or was quite a character. What Martha replied to these letters remains a mystery.
It is hard for me to imagine this friendship. Perhaps it was a safe outlet for
Vanessa and a vicarious one for quiet, timid Cousin Martha. The letters are
not dated but clearly had been written over a number of years, probably
beginning when both were older. From references in the letters, I have
tried to put them in chronological order but I am frequently left guessing.
I hope you find this peek behind the curtains interesting and amusing....
Christmas with Clarence
Dear Martha,
Clarence, always a bit peculiar, in old age is getting really strange. He wants meatballs and spaghetti, lots of Parmesan cheese please, for Christmas dinner. And by the way, as his Christmas present, he’d like me to check if I can get the cataract surgery, I had done last year, reversed. I tell him the “return by” date has passed but he keeps yammering on about it. He just doesn’t like that I can now see dust bunnies as they roll across the floor. He threatens to quit vacuuming altogether. “Then you’ll have to get a cleaning lady”, he says. He knows how much I hate having strangers in the house. So I shut up and put up with his eighty percent rule.
I test the wine, a glass or three before putting it in the spaghetti sauce I’m making. The opened bottle has been sitting on the pantry shelf at least three months. I don’t tell Clarence. He has a thing about wine losing its flavor if left open more than two days. I figure it is just his excuse to finish a whole bottle in one sitting. As long as it hasn’t turned to vinegar, I don’t taste the difference.
Which reminds me of the New Year’s Eve we brought up a bottle from our then “wine cellar”. It was part of several cases we had gotten years before on a trip to DC. I guess we let it age for too long. It was ultra sour vinegar…as was every other bottle in the three cases. All went down the drain. We decided to console ourselves with a bowl of shrimp and cocktail sauce. But the dog got there first. While we were tasting and dumping, he scarfed down all the shrimp and was licking his way through the cocktail sauce when we caught him.
But as I was saying about this wine, I just dump an extra dollop in the sauce and figure Clarence can open another bottle if he wants to drink some with the dinner. I’ve probably had enough already. But what the heck, it’s Christmas so we can celebrate.
Actually, neither of us can drink much anymore. I get red faced with one glass of wine and Clarence gets a hangover headache on a bottle of beer. I remember when we first met. He got stinking drunk and I wrote a poem about it later. He was funny back then. Still is, but boy can he be a pest. I always say separate bathrooms and separate studies of you want to keep a relationship from falling apart.
Now the dog has us both figured out. He snuggles up to me at every opportunity. He even wakes Clarence in the morning so he can jump in next to me. I confess I love it. I’ll take a cuddle any time. With Clarence, it’s man time. They go off on long walks through the woods; come back smiling that secret macho male grin. Then Clarence takes a shower and a nap and I’m left picking ticks off the dog. Where did he stick his head to have all those ticks racing for his face like the Marine Corp Marathon? He never gets any ticks when I walk him.
The meatballs and spaghetti are a hit. Clarence compliments my thoughtfulness in buying a real chunk of Parmesan cheese. True it’s a struggle trying to grate it over the plates. But the sprinkles on the red Christmas tablecloth look rather festive – like it’s snowing even though we live in Florida. It does taste better than the canned cheese I sprinkle on the dog’s food. I’m not sure why I bother with that. The only thing the dog doesn’t like is oranges. He even lapped up hot sauce when I spilled a bottle on the kitchen floor. I guess I feel a bit guilty that he eats the same dry kibble every day. I’ve never tasted it but it doesn’t look very appetizing.
So here we are now, sprawled out in front of the fake fireplace, over stuffed after eating the apple pie and butter pecan ice cream I couldn’t resist buying for dessert. We should have quit with the meatballs and spaghetti, which by the way, was delicious. Even the dog is soused after licking our bowls. He is on his back yipping and waving his feet in the air batting and snapping at invisible balls.
That was the best dinner I have had in a long time. I think I’ll open another bottle of wine to put in the pantry for next Christmas.
Love,
Vanessa
House Cleaning
Dear Martha,
As you may remember, Clarence and I long ago agreed on a division of labor in the house. He takes care of the floors and I anything above ground level. That has worked fine for years. I’m not into super-clean. Moderate is as far as I will go. So I leave Clarence to his devices. He has a closet full of them – assorted tools to perform his share of the household tasks – vacuum cleaners, mops of various sizes and shapes, a shelf full of chemicals to spray on the mops, a steam cleaner, distilled water and other obscure items that he has either abandoned using or hides until I’m not around, they being his secret weapons.
All this was fine until after my cataract surgery when I realized that his eighty percent rule was really more like fifty percent. I try to ignore the grit and spots, dust bunnies and dog hair, but it is really difficult. I’ve begun sneak cleaning. I don’t want Clarence to think that he can quit and I feel a bit neurotic myself about the clean. I wonder if I’m losing it. Where is Winky when I need him?
Last week I spent an hour on my hands and knees rubbing dog hair off the little Turkish rug in my study. What really made it weird was the dog laying in the middle taking up half the rug. I had to work around him – I mean lift his tail and each of his legs. He had pasted himself to the spot and was spreading out like a puddle of maple syrup oozing over the floor, impossible to gather up or move. When Clarence saw me as he walked past, he gave me that questioning look. “I’m thinking”, I said, but it didn’t sound convincing.
Now when he catches me on my hands and knees with a rag or a dustpan in my hand I say, “I dropped an earring and I’m trying to find it.” He’s caught me at this several times and now says he believes my coordination is deteriorating. He wants me to start doing exercises to improve my dexterity. He says I should start trying to write with my left hand. Aside from the fact that the problem isn’t my dexterity, I don’t see how it would help. When I broke my right arm years ago, my left-handed writing was chicken scratches, impossible to decipher.
Reluctantly I’m going along with Clarence’s recommendation. I know he is concerned about me and I want him to keep doing the floors. So now in addition to the muscle strengthening and balance exercises he has me doing, I have to fit this left-handed chicken scratching in and be more careful to clean when Clarence is out of the house. I have less and less time to do the things I enjoy – like sitting on the couch with my feet up reading a book and petting the dog; which in truth just adds to the unending supply of fresh shed that spreads into every crevice of the house.
If I could just get a grip on my need to have a clean house, I would be much more relaxed. I have a friend who has several very large fluffy haired dogs. About every two to three months, she opens all the doors of her house and blows the fluff out with her leaf blower. Now that’s how I’d like to be. Who cares what the neighbors say. Let them close their windows and doors when they see me with my leaf blower.
Love,
Vanessa
What To Do For Family
Dear Martha,
Last week I got a call from my second cousin Sylvie. I haven’t heard from her in years. She met her husband Fred at a hippie love fest. They went to live on a commune until it broke up and then outside Valdosta making and selling trinkets. Fred died recently and she has been getting in touch with family members, trying to reconnect, I think. You might remember her from grade school. She wore her hair in pig tails with giant red bows that were always coming undone. She said St. Agnes of Rome did it to protect her. Actually, it was Warren Finch who sat behind her in class. But she insisted it was “her saint”.
Anyhow, Sylvie fills me in on the last forty years of her life in more detail than I really want to hear. She had seven children, named each in order of the letters in the alphabet. She got as far as Grady and then decided that was enough children. But Fred was slow to put the brakes on so she had three more. She blamed it on the alphabet. Said it took over her life and was beside herself that she would go on popping babies until she had all twenty-six letters. She decided to short circuit the process by calling number ten Zenia. Well it worked and that was her last child.
Now they are all grown and gone and living all over the world doing nice normal things, which surprises me considering how they grew up. Only Zenia took her parents’ moon worship and dancing to heart… but she took it to a different level. Which is really why Sylvie is making all these calls. Zenia studied math and engineering in college. Then she went on to grad school in aeronautics and now works for NASA.
That doesn’t sound to me like something terrible, but Sylvie’s mind is different. She believes the alphabet has placed a curse on her for skipping all those letters and is going to cause something terrible to happen to Zenia. She is calling all family members to help her. She wants each of us to pray to Thoth, Egyptian god of writing, who is responsible for the alphabet. She wants us to ask his forgiveness for ignoring all those letters she skipped over.
She figures he is the only one who can undo the curse. Sounds to me as if Sylvie has gone completely off her rocker and needs some help, but not from Thoth.
Zenia is now an astronaut and is scheduled to take the next space flight. Sylvie is convinced Thoth and the alphabet will claim Zenia to himself and pull her space ship out of orbit to crash land on the moon. “Even if she survives the crash, how will Zenia get back to earth?” I tried to reassure Sylvie that NASA wouldn’t send up a space ship if it wasn’t safe but she just began ranting about O-rings. “That was a warning”, she says.
Sylvie believes that if the entire extended family prays to Thoth on the night of the full moon it will change the gravitational fields and Zenia won’t be sucked into the moon. She wants me to go to the park lake and pray to the ibis that lives there. Apparently, Thoth has the body of a man and the head of an ibis so it is a sacred bird and will carry the message. If I could do it in private, like from inside the house or in our garden, even though it’s nutty, I might agree…just to humor Sylvie and calm her down. But no, Sylvie insists I must prostrate myself on the bank of the lake and ask the ibis for forgiveness.
Can you just picture that… me stretched out by the lake, getting grass stains on my knees and the police come by and want to know what I’m doing? They will never believe me and I’ll end up in the nut house. I asked Clarence to call his friend who is a psychologist but he says Sylvie is my crazy cousin, he’s not getting involved. Now I don’t know what to do. According to the calendar there is a full moon in ten days.
Love,
Vanessa
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