To Your Very Good Health, My Dear “I will have me my little glass of wine,” she said. “Just a taste for my digestion.” She brought out of her bag a bottle of MadDog and started fishing around in her shopping cart, mumbling a catechism of material possessions as she shifted bags and probed into the middle of A&P’s contribution to urban society. This was an orderly shopping cart, everything in its place, categorized and combined according to her Rubik’s cerebral. “Here we go,” she brought out a Quaker Oats box, nodding her head metronomically, like the little plastic bird that dipped, dipped and dipped in the window of the Five and Dime when she and I were kids. “I just have the one wine glass, honey. Will you drink out of my coffee mug?” “No, Girl. No wine for me. Gives me the runs, don’t you know.” “Well, then, you just sit right here on this bench while I pour.” She settled herself in a spread of skirts and coats and pulled from the oatmeal box a glass the fragility of November ice, etched with stars, a lip of gold thinned to faint traces of elegance consumed. “Allow me, madam,” I offered, taking the MD 20/20 from her lap and unscrewing the lid with what I hoped was a flourish. It was enough. “Why, thank you, sir,” she said, straightening her back, lifting her head and becoming, for the moment, The Lady. Girl and I had first seen The Lady when we were both ten years old, running the streets at the end of the Depression. “Let’s go look at the swells,” she would shout and we would run from the neighborhood where the fabric of life was rough and basic and slide into the alleyways of the big houses on Piedmont where days slipped by in a slow satin fall. Through the side windows, we could hear piano lessons done by orderly, well dressed children, drinks prepared by orderly, well dressed servants. On verandas sat ladies and gentlemen, taking tea and conversing. There was one big house Girl preferred, white with green shutters and a green roof, white lattice work around the porch with wisteria hanging purple and heavy. Two sisters living there had weathered the Depression like weeping willows, ragged round the edges but still sweeping the air with grace and resilience, taking their tea in the afternoon, conducting their conversations in gentle innocence. Girl and I would crouch below, holding out our little fingers to sip ordinary tea, conducting conversations in pantomime genteel. Delivering my papers one summer morning, I saw a lady arriving at the Sisters’ house, put out of a truck full of watermelons with her tapestry bags, hat boxes and trunk. No sister or servant stood to receive her. Leaving her trunk on the sidewalk, she struggled to remove her boxes and bags onto the lawn and approached, mousey timid, the great porch and leaded glass doors. While I watched, she arranged her hair, hat and clothes with desperate deliberation before ringing the bell and stepping back to fold her hands and incline her head, a posture of prayer. I had to finish my route and so did not see who came to receive her and how it was accomplished. In the afternoon, Girl and I slipped into the alleyway of the Sisters’ house and crouched beneath the wisteria vines to hear about The Lady. She was Cousin Laura, it turned out, from Savannah, come all this way to Atlanta in first a mail truck and then a watermelon truck. It was not until I came of age and visited the cemetery where the three ladies reposed that I realized that her name was Laura, for the sisters addressed her as Cud’n Lay-ura. I imagined her mother spying out the name and choosing it for her only daughter, “Lay-ura, what a beautiful name.” And so Laura Jane Dubarre came to live with the sisters and their afternoons changed as we watched from the heavy shadow beneath them. We called them The Sisters and The Lady. The Sisters, as a habit, and all of their life was by habit, took tea at 4:00 in the afternoon. With the tea, they had toast and preserves in the winter by the fire in the library with their father’s books. In the spring, summer and fall they ate cookies with their tea on the porch with their mother’s wisteria. Shortbread cookies in the spring. Lemon Lace cookies in the summer. Gingersnap cookies in the fall. It was summer when The Lady came. The first month she was there, she moused around in that poor relative come to town way that ladies had. “No, no, nothing for me, thank you. No please, don’t trouble yourself. I don’t want to get in the way.” Then one day, while we sat in the cool dirt of the shade, we heard her say, “Have you never taken up the practice, dear cousins, of a taste of wine to aid the digestion?” “Oh, my dear. Wine, you say? Why, no, my dear, no, we have not. Is that something that Savannah ladies do?” “Oh, yes,” she replied. “My daddy always said a bit of wine puts a bloom in your cheeks. Mama always had wine of an afternoon.” “Well, I swan” and “Lordy, me” said the Sisters. “We have a bit of sherry wine put by for the holidays and Cook always makes Concord wine for her people after we have enough jelly, but we only take tea.” Girl and I looked at each other, speculating in mime about the likelihood of tea turning into wine. The next visit we paid to the Sisters and The Lady, we found them in mid-giggle, measuring out tots of purple wine into crystal glasses with silver stems. We climbed into the magnolia in the next yard so that we could take in the change. No teapot, no cookies. They sat erect and held their glasses out to clink the rims and say, “To your very good health, my dear.” And they laughed at the stories they told as if they had never heard them before, although we knew that they had because we had heard them told above us more than once. The coming of The Lady changed the habits of the Sisters. And the habits of Girl and me. We turned 11 in the heat of August, clinking magnolia cones and mouthing, “To your very good health, my dear.” It was the last summer that Girl and I ran together in the streets. In a different year, we drank beer in the back of a pickup and groped each other. In other years, she attended the funeral of my father and I attended the funeral of her husband. And in this year, the year of 1996, I came up the stairs from the subway and found her sitting by her A&P carriage in the December sun. We conversed in a manner most genteel as she raised her crystal wineglass to me. “To your very good health, my dear.” The scent of wisteria and cool dirt came round me as Girl and I remembered The Sisters and The Lady and the shady days beneath the porch on Piedmont.
Posted on: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 13:49:49 +0000
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