Out of Peel Tree

The Last Old Lady on Blossom Street: Essie

108 The Last Old Lady on Blossom Street Essie Essie stood in her kitchen cutting up a chicken. It was a week before Christmas, and the first winter she’d had only herself to feed for as long as she could remember in her eighty-four years. For once she didn’t have to wonder who would turn up hungry next. All her life she’d been feeding people, from little sisters and brothers, to husbands, children, grandchildren, and plenty of chickens, dogs, and cats, plus the other varmints the kids brought home—rabbits, turtles, and a blue parakeet named Henry. Henry had to have a little mirror to gaze into and fondly peck—apparently a parakeet couldn’t bear to be alone, would pine away and die. Now Nettie, her neighbor across the road, was her only mouth to feed. Nettie would be waiting for her tomorrow, ready to eat whatever Essie brought her for lunch. Nettie had to be at least ninety. She made Essie feel young. She turned up the radio and sang along, “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas.” When she forgot the words she made some up. What did it matter if she got the words right? Snow was full of silence, silence falling. She remembered one white Easter—memories the last old lady on blossom street 109 flashed at her these days, vivid shards. That day, giant flakes had floated down from the sky like stars from a dream. Sitting on their front porch, she and Merle, her first husband, watched the dreamflakes melt as soon as they touched the budding dogwoods, the new blades of grass, and the outstretched palms of their daughters Eva and Darlene, who, wild with delight, danced about the yard. A commercial came on and Essie sang over it, “Just like the ones I used to know, where the tree tops listen, and children glisten, to hear raindrops in the snow.” She giggled, dropped the chicken into the pot of water, and started chopping garlic. Dolph, her second husband, had died this past June. For a while afterwards, Essie thought she would die, too. The house settled into a strange quiet without his little sounds—his wheezed breathing, the clunk of his cane, the squeak of the bed as he turned during his afternoon nap, and his worn voice, deep but getting small with age, as a nut shrivels inside its shell. Even with the radio on all day Essie heard a hollow silence after he died—a shell split open, the dried nut gone. The silence was worst when she went to her narrow white bed, so she had begun staying up through the summer nights. She drank coffee and sat in the kitchen doing the crossword, the way she used to wait for her girls to come home from a late movie. At night, nothing changed. The windows stayed black and she kept them open so she could feel the breeze and hear the crickets. The crickets rubbed out the hollowness Dolph had left. They chirred in a mesmerizing rhythm, as continuously as the ocean she had once visited, sounds to rock her mind to sleep by. Time seemed not to pass. She laid the electric clock on its face, though she was afraid to unplug it, as if a childhood song could somehow come true: “And it stopped, short, never to go again when the old man died.” Deep in the sonorous the last old lady on blossom street 110 night she would finally fall asleep, and wake up when birds called and light wavered through the branches of the hickory outside the window. Time was passing again. Then at the end of August, when she had carried in the season’s first bowl of wild sweet-sour grapes from the ramshackle arbor, there was Dolph—sitting at the kitchen table smoothing the checkered oilcloth. “What are you doing here?” she asked. He shrugged. “Nowhere better to go, huh?” She liked having him around again. Right away it was pretty much as it used to be, except she didn’t have to cook for him, and he fell asleep in odd places, like an old dog, curled up under the kitchen table, or on the back porch in a puddle of sunshine. Dolph had always been easy to get along with, just give him the sports section and a cup of coffee. It...