Neighbor Lady

We first meet Mrs. Gorden in the wake of a 20-inch snow fall, when she called the house to see if the kids could come over and shovel her out. She'd gotten our number from a flier my daughter had posted around town, trying to find odd jobs to help her finance her summer school. I finally met her face-to-face when she came around collecting for the Cancer Society. I invited her in & wrote as big a check as I could, mostly because I don't dare not to now, even though I spent all the years my husband was sick with cancer doing as much as I could and karma didn't seem to notice, he died anyway. But you don't take any chances. Mrs. Gorden came in and sat for awhile and took a keen interest in my situation. She's got nearly 40 years on me, but she's a widow two times over and has this all pretty well figured out by now and seems determined to show me how it's done. I must go dancing with her, she says, she goes every Sunday afternoon. Two hours for five dollars, and although the women there generally outnumber the men, the instructor will be busy with me at first, since I'll be a newcomer. I can learn the fox trot and the cha-cha. I think to myself that it's a crap shoot whether dancing with the elderly will turn out to be how I want to spend my Sundays, but I already know that how she is, is exactly the kind of old woman I hope to turn out to be. Eighty, ninety, cha-cha-cha. She dances at the community center in some nearby town, I think she said Pelham Mills. As she's leaving, she mentions to me that on Saturday nights, there's a singles' group that meets down in Painted Post, and I could go there, too. Her eyes light right up when she remembers that tomorrow is Saturday night! Why, I'd hardly have to wait at all!

Recently she called and asked my daughter to come over a few hours a week, hauling things up from the cellar, washing windows, the things she's slowed down now just enough to need help with. My daughter went over in the morning on her first day of spring vacation, expecting to be cleaning out the attic. She dreaded it; I explained to her that helping old women maintain their homes was a time-honored tradition for teenaged girls, practically a rite of passage. That morning, they spent most of their time standing on the kitchen counters, climbing up there on a rickety stool, while Mrs. Gorden explained to Maeve that her climbing around like this always upset her children. Together they cleaned out the kitchen cupboards; too cold for the attic that day, they said, too wet for the basement.

When she got home I asked whether Mrs. Gorden had talked all morning, and my daughter nodded her head and how and because my daughter is likewise a Constant Talker but also very respectful of adults, I imagine she kept herself silent the entire time, polite, listening. I know this would have been difficult for her. What did she talk about, I ask. Different things, said Maeve: She told me about the local historical society that she heads up, and a building here in town they want to buy. She wants you to draw a picture of it for her, one that would show how good it could look, if they got it. I tell her, let her know I can't do that, she needs an architect or at least a draftsman or maybe somebody with a good CAD program for that. Maeve continued: She told me the woman we bought our house from had a new boyfriend two months after her husband died. Yes, I said, I had heard that. Maeve adds, Mrs. Gorden said that people who had good marriages often want to get married again as soon as they can. She looks at me suspiciously. I've heard that, too, I say, I guess it makes a certain amount of sense.

Mrs. Gorden the historian does have spring cleaning on the agenda but something altogether bigger on her mind, and tells Maeve that the next project they're going to tackle is cataloguing the contents of her house. This is her plan: she will cut a little slip of paper for each item, she'll dictate to Maeve what to write down about it, and Maeve will then tape the paper to the underside of the object. Thus, on a crystal vase: My mother gave me this on my wedding day. I find this charming beyond my ability to say so. I think how her kids are going to feel, after she's died, when they wander through her house and find the rooms full of their mother's short stories like this. I know how I felt, going through my mother's things in the silent rooms of her house after her death. There are little Etruscan bowls that have come down to us with these kind of messages, inscriptions that, once we figured out how to read them, say: so-and-so made me.

She's got me thinking I should do the same thing with all of my stuff. When you really start to look around it's a bit of a surprise, the things it occurs to you to say about it all. For instance, on my copy of Sylvia Plath's letters: She was brilliant, but failed so early, I hope I did better than this. On the back of my diploma from Cornell: I was awarded this on the date set down on the front, but I have never once felt as though I really earned it. This is the post-it note I would attach to the bottom of my daughter's right foot: Your father and I got you on the night between our birthdays, exactly fifteen years to the day before he died. And to embroider on a slipcover to wrap around my son: After you were born, your father came home and wrote in his diary: "Wednesday, June 8, 1994. Wyatt came today. Partly sunny."