My grandmother Maude had lots of funny sayings. “Maudeisms,” I now call them. I inflict them upon friends and workmates and feel tickled that I am keeping her irreverent humor alive. The world needs it. Just as the carload of old women used to need Maude to jolt them out of their somber quietness about 45 minutes into their Sunday drives. For that purpose, the ever-popular whoop of “Whoo hoo she cried and threw up her wooden leg!” usually did the trick. She never answered our questions about where such sayings came from. Maybe she didn’t know, but I’m convinced she simply preferred to keep them a mystery.
Maudeisms are one of the many things that my friend Beth and I laughed over and adopted for ourselves during the past 38 years, ever since we became best friends during our freshman year at the University of Michigan. We ended up living on opposite sides of the country and didn’t see each other often enough after graduating, and sometimes went a year without communicating. But all it took was hearing the other’s greeting of “Whoo hoo she cried…” upon answering the phone and we were smack dab right back into the thick of friendship, instantly, and as if we’d never spent a day apart.
Beth hailed from the Chicago area, her family being more well-off than mine with a long American history and full of college-educated professionals. My small-town Michigan roots featured an ancestry of German farmers on Mom’s side and English coal miners on Dad’s. My parents considered it a big step up to have bought a 100-year old house in Meekerville and to land jobs in the local auto parts factory. Maude, of the German farmer side, seemed happy to abandon farm life, divorce her cheating second husband, and move in with us to take care of the kids and house while Mom spent days and Dad spent nights working at “the shop.”
The first time I brought Beth home with me for a long weekend, I worried what she would think. I’d visited her family’s newly-built, lakeside home in Illinois and though welcomed warmly, had still felt out of place. I hoped my family wouldn’t embarrass me, and I hoped she wouldn’t find our old house weird and uncomfortable. In the 15 years we’d lived there, Dad had made some improvements, but Mom’s sense of décor lacked style and color coordination. And we had a lot of people living there. I wasn’t even sure where Beth would sleep.
Maude solved that problem. “I’ll sleep in the baby’s room on your old bed. You gorillas can have my room.” Maude made funny substitutions for ordinary words: gorillas for girls was one. Each morning she’d holler up the stairwell to the bedroom where my little sister and I slept, “Come on gorillas, your cocoa’s gettin’ cold.” And when we dawdled, “Some people die in bed, you know!” My little sister had just reached her teens, but Maude would call her “the baby” all her life. For Maude to offer to climb the stairs and sleep in the bottom bunk in the gorillas’ room, well, I was touched. And relieved. That meant Beth and I could luxuriate in Maude’s big double, peel back the emerald silk spread, sink into the feather topper, and raid her stash of DeMet’s Turtles and stacks of True Story magazines she kept in her top drawer.
Beth sat at Maude’s vanity table and twirled on the faux-fur-covered stool. “Your grandmother is really cool,” she said. “For a small town farm woman, she sure lives big in her own way, doesn’t she?” Before I could agree, she abruptly halted her rotations when her eyes fell on Maude’s portrait. “Wow, who painted that? Looks just like her.”
“I did.”
It did look like her; I was proud of that. I’d captured everything in the right proportion: her wide narrow half-smile (“Where did your lips go, Grandma? You look like Kermit the frog,” we’d tease); her long narrow nose with just the hint of a bump; her ivory skin and naturally pink cheeks, now wrinkled but still glowy; and her near-black eyes that always sparkled, sometimes with humor, sometimes with anger, and sometimes you couldn’t decide which. I’d painted from my favorite photo of her, standing tall in her favorite dress wool coat, light pink with dark sable collar, her wide but not fat body made even more impressive by three-inch patent leather heels.
Beth got up to take a closer look. “Really? You did it? I didn’t know you were an artist. Do you still paint?”
I shrugged. “Yeah, sometimes.” In truth, I hadn’t painted anything for over a year, since doing my oldest brother’s portrait shortly before he was killed in a car crash. No one had hung that painting. I wasn’t even sure where it was.
“And you’re not taking any art classes, are you? How come?” Beth was never one to just let a subject drop.
“Oh come on. I’m not that good. Besides, I’m going to be a journalist, not an artist.” I bit into a DeMet’s Turtle and grinned at Beth with chocolate-caramel-pecan teeth. “Want one?”
****
So it turned out that Beth loved my family, our house, my little hometown. And my family loved her. I left Michigan after graduating from college and she, after getting her PhD in microbiology elsewhere, returned to settle in Ann Arbor and run one of the university’s labs. Convenient for me in that whenever I made it back home to visit my family, I could also visit Beth. She would greet me at the airport, drive me to Meekerville, spend the night with us, and then reverse the procedure when it came time for me to head back to Phoenix or Seattle or wherever I was living at the time. I’d spend a night or two with her in Ann Arbor and jet off again. Other times she and I would hook up for a vacation together, take a trip up north to Mackinac Island, or tour the northeast in her VW Rabbit, staying with friends in all the big cities.
It’s a rare friend with whom I can travel and not wish the trip be shorter. And a rare friend who can melt into my family the way Beth did. To find both in the same person was a miracle. She would sit in the kitchen translating Mom’s measurements of gobs, plops and pinches, scientifically ferreting out the secrets to her baked beans and perfect pie crusts. With Dad, she compared notes on popular fiction and prodded him — okay, he didn’t need much prodding — to tell stories about his tryout with the 1936 New York Giants. My little sister said that when Beth was there it was like finally having an older sister who actually knew she was alive, and my older sister’s kids loved her as much as her own nieces and nephews did. Maude never failed to make us both laugh. She taught Beth how make a highball, play bridge and knit. And, of course, about a hundred Maudeisms.
The best trip Beth and I took together was the trip to Ireland. I’d been given a plum reporting assignment that required traveling to Europe, and she would be in Italy for a cancer research convention at the same time.
“Since we’ll both be there, let’s take a couple weeks off and tour Ireland,” she said over the phone.
“Me being in Germany and you in Italy is not exactly being in Ireland at the same time, Beth.”
“Don’t be so literal,” she told me. “We’re both flying through Heathrow, right? How hard can it be to add a flight to Dublin?”
“Shannon.”
“What?”
“Shannon. We’d probably have to go through Shannon Airport.”
“Hell’s bells, I don’t care which airport we go through. Don’t be throwing up roadblocks,” she warned. “It’s been a dream of yours to go there since that Irish lit class you took and we should just do it. You only live once. You want to be flying through London and not go to Ireland? That would be half-assed. And you know what Maude says…”
We said it together: “Never do nothin’ half-assed.”
The Ireland trip was memorable on several counts. For one thing, Beth was right. It had long been a dream of mine. An unexplainable dream, beyond romantic. Something about the Irish people, their words and art called to me. I felt silly telling that to anyone but Beth. And it made me leery of going, afraid the real thing could never measure up to my expectations. But somehow it did. The people, the scenery, the whiskey, the sweaters, the half-dissolved castles you’d suddenly notice, nestled in a field, when rounding a curve. Driving from one B&B to another was a great way to see the country, even if Beth did refuse to take the wheel once she was sure I could handle driving on the left side of the road.
“It’s pay back for when you made me drive all over New England,” she said.
I snorted. “Well, it’s a good thing I learned to a drive stick shift in the meantime, then, isn’t it?”
Funny that neither of us figured out what the knob Beth hung her purse on each day was really meant for, not until the last day of the trip. We were prepared to complain bitterly to the rental company that the stupid car took forever to get going in the morning, stalling several times and once nearly causing us to dump both it and us into Galway Bay. On that last morning it dawned on Beth. “Oh my god, it’s a manual choke!” We looked at each other, said “Well, huh!” in our best Maude imitations, and cracked up. No stalling on the road back to Dublin, but we did count eleven rainbows, three of them doubles and two triples.
We’d gone back to Dublin a day earlier than planned for two reasons. The room that houses the Book of Kells hadn’t been open when we were there at the beginning of the trip, and there was a painting in the National Gallery squirreled away in a dark upstairs room, away from harmful light, that the curator had agreed to let us view at an appointed time. Something about The Meeting on the Turret Stairs, 1864 by Sir Frederick Burton grabbed my gut. The contrast of the light, pure colors in the faces of Hilellil and Hildebrand and in their robes, against the dark stone of the stairwell. The inevitable loss and sadness. The way she turns her head, as if not looking at him will make the pain go away. Seeing it in person was worth the extra driving, worth everything.
We wandered through the public rooms at the Gallery after viewing Hilellil and Hildebrand, and I fell in love with the portraiture work of John Butler Yeats, especially the painting of his son, W.B.
Beth preferred the portraits done in sculpture. “I must say, though, I’ve never seen you look quite so alive as when you were studying those paintings,” she said later that evening, as we lay exhausted on our hotel beds. “Why aren’t you painting?”
I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk about it, but she was right. Seeing all that art had reawakened something in me. “I don’t know. Every time I try, it stirs up old stuff and I can’t put on paper what’s in my mind. It’s like trying to paint something while not being able to look at it.”
“Maybe there’s something in your life that you should take a new look at. Maybe you should see someone.”
It was getting dark and I could no longer see her face to see how serious she was. When I could see those green eyes of hers, I could always tell. “You mean see someone, as in a psychiatrist? Because I don’t want to paint? Is this my everything-has-a-scientific-explanation friend talking?”
“Just a thought.”
“And why is it such a big deal that I don’t paint? It’s not like I’m some social illiterate or psychopath. Painting or no painting, I have a life.”
“But life is not defined simply by not being dead.”
Now I was getting irritated. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
She took a deep breath. “Don’t get mad. It’s just that there are some of us who know and love you who think you have a gift and would like to see you use it. I think you’d get more out of life.”
I sighed and sat up. “It’s late. Let’s go get dinner.” We slipped on our shoes and headed out to see if Bewley’s was still open. I poked Beth in the ribs. “Besides,” I said, “I don’t recall anyone dying and appointing you my analyst.”
Six months later Maude died. It wasn’t a shock. She was 90 by then and fading. Except that I hadn’t been home in a couple of years, so it was more of a shock to me than others in the family, or to Beth, who had made it a point to go see her every now and then. Beth had attended Maude’s last birthday, which doubled as a family reunion. I had been busy with an assignment and couldn’t make it. She attended Maude’s funeral, because I couldn’t make that, either. Instead, I took the one day I had free and drove to Mt. Rainier to sit by myself, sketch book in hand, in a quiet spot where I could see wildflowers and glaciers and giant evergreens. But every drawing spiraled into dark angry strokes, tearing through two or three sheets of paper at a time. I couldn’t draw. I could barely cry.
Taking advantage of finally having no kids or parents to care for, Mom and Dad sold the house and moved to Arizona. That registered somewhere inside me as another loss, but I also felt relieved that I would never have to walk into that house without my grandmother being there. Another thing I could avoid looking at.
Beth sent me a box that Christmas. In it was a book she’d found called Ireland in Poetry, a collection of poems by Irish authors and paintings and drawings by Irish artists. On the cover was The Meeting on the Turret Stairs. The inscription she wrote read: “For Molly. In remembrance of an enchanting isle shared with the best of friends. Beth. P.S. Paint.” Her Christmas card said she had something else to give me, but she wouldn’t trust it to UPS and it would have to wait until she visited me in Seattle in the spring. What she brought with her were the portraits I had done of Maude and my brother Sherman.
“Where did you get these?”
Beth giggled. “You look absolutely flabbergasted. I consider this a success!”
I set the paintings against the wall and stood back. I’d not seen them in so long. There was Maude in her pink coat, dark eyes blazing. And there was Sherman, twenty-six years old, before his troubles got out of hand. Before he broke parole and fled to Nevada just because he couldn’t stand to stay in Meekerville a minute longer, before he took the wheel of some woman’s car and smashed into an oncoming truck. Before he broke my mother’s heart for the last time.
I looked at Beth and felt hot tears making their way to the surface. “Where?”
“Maude had it in her closet. The last time I was at your folks’ house, right after we went to Ireland, she dug it out and told me to take it and give it you the next time I saw you.” We exchanged looks. “If you ask me, I think she knew she wasn’t going to be around much longer.”
There he was, dark blue eyes staring back at me, the hero of my childhood. The brother I thought could do no wrong. Then, I would do anything to gain his love and approval and I stuck up for him when he went to prison—I was told it was for check forgery—even though I was disappointed and heartbroken, too. I still felt guilty for having fought with Sherman before he took off. I don’t remember what I was mad about. I just remember shouting at him, “I wish you’d hadn’t come back here!”
Beth interrupted my mental trip back in time. “What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know. Strange how a family can go through such tragic stress and when we’re kids we know so little of the details, but feel so much of the pain anyway.”
“Mmmm,” she answered. “Maude said you probably had some thing to ‘finger out’ about Sherman.”
“God, even with the most serious of subjects, she has to say things that way, doesn’t she?” I looked at her portrait. “I mean, didn’t she? I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“We should make a list of Maudeisms, so we never forget them.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We should do that one of these days.”
Beth’s visit wasn’t a long one, but she got to see the best of Seattle’s sights, and it didn’t rain more than half the days she was there, so she chalked that up to success number two. Not as big a deal, in her mind, as knocking me for a loop with the paintings, though. After she left, I put them both in my closet, behind the clothes that had gotten too small to fit, but that I couldn’t give up the hope of wearing again some day.
Beth visited me in Seattle one more time after that. But there were years inbetween. We both got busy with our individual lives, both ended up living alone, except for our dogs, in our own houses, she after a very long relationship with one decent guy and me after a series of hurtful, chaotic relationships with men that Maude would have labeled Charming Bastards. That was what finally sent me to seek the professional help Beth had once advised. I never told her the upshot of those years of therapy, the family discoveries we unearthed, among them the realization that my brother Sherman had molested both my older sister and me. My sister was old enough to have vivid memories of it; I do not. He got a fourteen year old girl pregnant, had a drinking problem, crashed more than one car and got into many a fight. When I “fingered this out” and realized all that the family had endured, I thanked God that we’d had Maude around to keep us laughing despite it all. To keep us sane.
Beth came to visit again just three years ago, thirty-five years after we met as college freshmen. She brought another painting, something she’d seen that reminded her of Ireland and thought I might like it. “It’s got that contrast thing going on that you like so much,” she said. It was a striking scene of a small, whitewashed house, bright in the sun, popping out amidst shadowy trees in the background and bushes in front, the greens so dark they were nearly black.
“It’s gorgeous,” I said. “I’ll hang it in the bedroom. It’ll look great in there. Thanks.” For the time being, I set it atop the bookshelf headboard and leaned it against the wall.
Beth had also brought news with her on this trip. We drove up to Snohomish to lunch at Mrs. Penneycooke’s Tea Room, the closest we could get to Bewley’s this side of Dublin. Over scones and a pot of Earl Grey, she told me.
“I have cancer, Molly.”
I stared at her.
“I’m going to have surgery as soon as I get back to Ann Arbor. Probably followed by chemo and radiation. It’s a strange tumor, in my abdomen, a kind that usually lodges in the lungs. They can’t figure out why I’ve got it where I’ve got it, but leave it to my body to do something new and different. Anyway, I’m hopeful they can get it all and that will be that.”
“God Beth. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. But you do have to promise to come visit me and you can’t wait ’til I’m well. You need to come when I’m going through chemo and feeling like shit.”
“Okay,” I agreed, already dreading it.
It was late November when I made the trip. We each spent Thanksgiving with our respective families, Beth’s sisters bringing their mother up from Chicago so that Beth wouldn’t have to travel. After they left, I spent a couple nights with her in Ann Arbor. I discovered that she’d saved the harder tasks for me, not wanting to bother her sisters with them. I hauled the artificial Christmas tree up from the basement, set it up and decorated it according to her instructions. I hung lights on the front of the house. I cooked chili and froze it in single Tupperware servings. I shopped and stocked her freezer, fixed a running toilet, and baked fruitcakes. (Fruitcakes??” I asked. “Yes fruitcakes!” she said. “I actually like the damn things!”)
The hardest task was accompanying her to her radiation treatment. “I don’t know which is worse,” she said. “The chemo makes me puke and makes my hair fall out. But the radiation burns my twat.”
“You sound more like Maude every day,” I told her.
The day before I was to fly out, we stayed home. We sat in front of the fire assembling a 1,000-piece puzzle, ate chili and fruitcake, walked the dogs, and settled in for a late afternoon nap on her extra long sofa, she on one end, I on the under, blanketed by afghans knitted with stitches Maude had taught her. We awoke to the vision of soft snowflakes falling outside the window.
“I think I will always remember this day,” said Beth. “Napping with dogs and people you love has to be the best thing in the world.”
“I think you’re right,” I said. “Kind of great being over fifty, isn’t it? This is when you understand what’s really good in life.”
The next year at Christmastime Beth emailed me to look up a website featuring an artist’s sculpture work she was impressed with. “The characters are so great. They remind me of Maude. Look on there and tell me which one you like best, which one is the epitome of Maude.”
I looked. She was right. And the artwork was expensive. The university may have great benefits, but she’d returned to work just months ago and money had to be tight.
I called her. “You’re NOT buying me a sculpture.”
“Of course I’m not. I’m buying myself a present.” She sounded like Maude, when you couldn’t tell whether she was amused or angry. “You will inherit it.”
When I was silent, she added. “But of course, that won’t be for many years to come.” And then the conversation turned normal and we were our old selves.
I saw Beth one more time in Ann Arbor, last May. We had another perfect day together. She wanted me to cook up a “shitload” of lasagna to freeze for when her bridge club next met at her house. The cancer was back and now in her bones, and she was hoping the new chemo drug would make a difference. She couldn’t walk her dogs anymore, the neighbor did that for her. But she could sit on a kitchen stool and direct my efforts at constructing the most complicated lasagna recipe I’ve ever seen. Then she insisted on going to Zingerman’s Deli for lunch. And the rest of the day we spent sunning on the deck, since it was an unusually warm day. We sipped lemonade, we reminisced. She tried to talk about death, but I wouldn’t.
“Everybody dies of something,” she said. “It’s part of life. I went through all that anger and disbelief stuff the first time I was diagnosed. I guess this time I’m accepting of it. It sucks, but I accept it.”
I nodded, and tried to think of the right thing to say. Instead I changed the subject. “Don’t you have a bunch of chores lined up for me this visit?”
“You bet,” she said. “I’ll work you so hard you’ll be sweatin’ like Maude’s butcher.” She led me upstairs, slowly. “Did Maude ever say why butchers sweat so much?”
I flipped the mattress on her bed and put on fresh linens. She showed me the rooms she’d recently had painted in designer colors, and the refurbished bathroom. She’d had a lot done to the house recently. Strange for someone who thought she would be dying soon. She must have more hope than she’s letting on, I thought. Maybe she’s just trying to get my goat. She’d also had the kitchen updated and a new deck added.
“The last thing I need you to do is move that little table in the dining room up to the bedroom so I can put the Maude sculpture on it.”
Yep, I thought. She is trying to get my goat. So I complied and didn’t comment much on the sculpture. It did capture Maude’s spirit, though, and it was the one I’d picked out on the website. An old fat broad, braless, in her full slip, legs crossed Indian style, barefoot, riding a flying carpet and having a ball, grinning from ear to ear. Living big.
Just a few months later Beth reached hospice stage. Her sisters came to stay with her and keep her at home as long as possible. I was in the middle of repainting my house. She’d inspired me with her designer colors, and though mine were not the same, they were reminiscent of her palette. Phone calls were disturbing to her irregular sleep and meds routine, so I emailed. She could no longer type, but her sisters could open her laptop so she could see it, or they would read to her. They set up a page on the Caring Bridge website, where loved ones of people with terminal illnesses can leave messages and upload pictures. Beth’s page received entries from all over the world. She had touched many lives; so many people loved and admired her.
I wrote to tell her about my paint job, how it was obvious that she and I had much better color sense than my poor mother ever had. I tried to be cheery in my blog entries. I knew she would want that. I started that list of Maudeisms, even though I knew her sisters would probably find it appalling.
For any reason at all, and at the top of one’s lungs:
“Whoo hoo she cried, and threw up her wooden leg!”
Before leaving the house to work:
“Oh, it’s off to work I go with my name stamped on the tail of my shirt ’cause I’m a natural born ‘osshole’ and have to work.”
When teaching a kid proper bathing technique:
“First you wash down as far as possible, then you wash up as far as possible. Then you wash possible.”
When a young person gives you any guff:
“Just wait til you get to be a hunnert years old.”
One I never understood until now:
“All my friends are dead or dying, and I don’t feel so good.”
That was as far as I got with the list.
A few days later I received a card in the mail, penned by one of Beth’s sisters. “Beth insisted I write this and mail it. Today we got her into the bath and I’m supposed to tell you that first we washed down as far as possible, then we washed up as far as possible, and then we washed possible. Thank you for your webpage entries. She still loves to laugh.”
I felt as if my whole life was in disarray. Having finished the painting but not having had time yet to resettle everything, or get pictures back on the wall, the inside of my house felt like my own insides. I took a sick day and stayed home to get things in order. I got out all the art I’d had up before the painting began. Most were photos I’d taken in Ireland and had framed. I made new, artsy groupings, starting fresh, with new eyes. I decided to frame the painting of the little whitewashed house that Beth had given me. Until the painting project, it hadn’t moved from the headboard. I found it, measured it, and went to buy a frame. While I was at it, I bought a frame for the one painting I’d done that I wasn’t totally dissatisfied with, a watercolor of a half-dissolved Irish castle. I spent the whole day framing, measuring and nailing things back up on the wall. I put the whitewashed house up in its new spot in the bedroom, then stepped back to gauge levelness. It was then that I noticed it wasn’t a house at all, but a small, unadorned church. I moved in close. The bushes in front weren’t bushes. They were tombstones. Beth had given me a picture of a fucking graveyard. I whirled around and smacked my elbow on the corner of the dresser. I dropped my hammer and it smashed my big toe. And the bawling finally commenced. I cried over Maude, over lost innocence, wasted years, and the big dog I’d had to put down because he also had bone cancer and dammit, Beth, I wanted us to be old broads together, riding around every Sunday hollering whoo hoo and what right do you have to die on me?
There had been a lot of crying during those years of therapy and bad relationships, but not much before or after. I was relieved to find that I had better crying skills now. A crying jag didn’t necessarily also mean a panic attack, though I still wouldn’t be able to get a mascara wand under my bulging eyelids the next morning. Beth died soon after that, and as days passed I tried to find the gifts in my life. She’d told me there are gifts in everything, no matter how sad or tragic. I’m still working on that.
I took Maude and Sherman out of the closet and hung them in the second bedroom, which I now call my studio. The Maude sculpture arrived yesterday, and that’s in there too. Maude grinning at me from her magic carpet. Just like her. Just like Beth.
And me? I think I have some painting to do.
Left To Write 