The High Cost of Living

Most of the members of the Oldtimers Club are gone by attrition, their ashes thrown to the wind and water, freed from their aches and woes. Only three of us remain. All in our 70s, we are more afraid of death as each year passes, but who isn’t? We avoid the end of the road by not thinking about it, by just traveling it in search of some small joy, beginning with waking another day. My sister, Ida Lupino, says it would be a joy if we enlist new old members. She decides we need a man to join our club, all the men have died, and so she finds Larry Sousa at the beach one day, dragging me there on a late afternoon to meet him. Our club has rules of course, not unfair but decidedly unconventional, and loyal members can’t be squeamish.

My sister is named after an actress famous in the Forties for being bad. A femme fatale of film noir they called her. When we were little, we lived on a farm. To escape the backbreaking regiment of milking cows, collecting eggs, and slopping and slaughtering pigs, our mother dreamed of furs and moneyed lovers. She always wore a cheap rhinestone comb in her hair, pinned behind her ear to secure a gardenia from the garden, just like a movie star would. By the time Ida was born, her dreams were as faded as her looks so, resigned to her harsh life, she projected her dreams onto Ida. Not ever onto me. I am five years younger than Ida, and by the time I was born, my mother had withered, a hothouse gardenia whose tears could not water the dying bloom of youth. Our father is a clouded memory to me. I believe he beat our mother, but she never said. We only saw the way she rubbed her aching jaw with her red, raw hands, and how she gingerly smeared the pig grease onto angry bruises like fingerprints marking her thin arms. I don’t remember him ever loving us.

My name is Gladys. I am not sure if my mother was influenced by the Welsh word Gwladys, that I am a princess, or the Latin one, that I am a small sword. It is a practical name more popular in the early 20th Century, before such names as Allison, Tiffany, Lennon and Lacy. I am the practical sister. You have to be practical when you are old, although Ida is not practical at all. I clip coupons and buy food in bulk, frozen and meted as needed. My shoes are sensible. I would never spend the money for a dye job, my hair is gray, like a fox or the sky on a dreary day. Ida presses the back of her hand to her forehead when she speaks, her dyed dark hair carefully coiffed to match the actress she is named for as she poses in her high-waisted leopard print shorts and halter tops, a vision from the 1940s. Her knees and face and upper arms sag, her skin too tired now to cling to the muscles and bones beneath it, but in a good light, I can see why an old man might find her attractive. It’s Florida after all; you can wear leopard print shorts to grocery shop at Publix. Nobody in a beach town challenges an old lady’s fashion sense.

I never married. I alone am steward of all my manless years, spent teaching other people’s children while drifting toward the end. I suppose I was too timid after the acrid smell of hopelessness that permeated our mother. In time, maybe men smelled it on me too. Ida is a luckless believer, married five times. Always to men flawed like our father, taking much more than they gave. They say it often goes that way with love. They say you are insane if you continue to repeat the same mistake and expect a different result.

This afternoon the sun’s heat undulates in visible waves above the scorching sand lining Passe-a-Grille beach. It’s so hot, a man’s brain can bake if he’s not careful. We shield our eyes and Ida points. Our gazes follow the shore along the jeweled water, which is beginning to darken from aquamarine to sapphire this late in the day. I spot a man, foamy surf lapping at his flip-flops, a khaki fisherman’s hat pulled low over his forehead. He swings his Excalibur metal detector slowly, deliberately, side to side in front of him, listening for a signal that treasure sleeps below. That’s him, Ida says.

My sister drags me forward, greeting him for both of us. I learn this: He is retired now, and fond of gentle pursuits. If you should ask him if he’s found treasure today, he’ll smile and speak to you. He’ll ask your name, and get you talking. If he senses that you are unhappy, or lost, or afraid, he’ll reach for a plastic bag tucked inside his pocket, pluck from it a battered and corroded penny he found metal detecting and press it into your hand. It’s mounted on a square of white cardboard, on which he’s printed SHIPWRECK PENNY. He will tell you that the greatest treasure he’s found today is not beneath the sand; it’s you.

In this life, Sousa cultivates his beach ministry, attends Russian language lessons to maintain his proficiency, strums his ukulele, and builds bird houses festooned with flashy costume jewelry he finds metal detecting. Bird house bling he calls it. But in the life he lived before, fifty years ago when America was divided by a fault line of racial hatred and free love, Sousa killed people. A decorated career Marine, he served two tours in Viet Nam as a Green Beret. “I never killed anyone out of anger or hate. And I never killed anyone by mistake,” he says.

“Is it easy to kill someone?” I ask.

“That’s what they give you medals for.”

He'll do I tell Ida.

***

The Old Timers Club meets once a month for dinner, a festive gathering to remind us that we are still alive, to feed those cravings for a good stew and a human hug. We meet at Mary Margaret Corrigan’s house, built during the 1960s boom, all sparkly white stucco with a two-car garage like a giant mouth pasted to the front, the doors and shutters painted aqua to mimic the color of the morning Gulf. Mary Margaret’s dead husband used to drink at the bowling alley bar and lose his way home because all the houses look alike.

“Mr. Corrigan left me well-fixed because he wanted me to be comfortable when he passed,” she always says, her crepe paper face powdered white, since she rarely takes the sun. She is fervently religious, losing the Lord briefly in her twenties to worship a man, but wracked with sin and guilt finding him again in her thirties, soon before she married Mr. Corrigan. Her constant admonitions about his sinful drinking and her fervor for the Bible probably killed Mr. Corrigan, who later in his marriage escaped quite frequently to the bowling alley, his chosen private heaven. She tells us that again today, as we sit in a circle around her white iron table on her screened back porch sipping mango tea and nibbling from a plate of crackers Ida found and smeared with cream cheese before plopping the plate on the table, where it rattled and settled. Mary Margaret is reading. She pushes her black-framed, coke bottle glasses back up to the bridge of her nose and turns her open magazine face down, cracking the spine with her palm. What are you reading, I ask her after spying the cover’s title, Wesleyan Missionary Notices dated September 1847. “The Reverend John Watsford’s report from Bau, Pacific Islands, where the natives were cannibals,” Mary Margaret says. “Visitors from other villages hauled a cooked human over one shoulder and a pig over the other as a convivial contribution to shared community feasts. Apparently, they preferred baked human meat, which they called long pig because it is similar to, but not as gamey tasting as the wild pigs.” Mary Margaret pretends to haul a heavy load over her shoulder for emphasis. “Did you know that the last known report of cannibalism in Papua New Guinea was in 2012. So I guess they are no longer eating missionaries.”

Ida rifles through her handbag, digging from the bottom her hammered aluminum flask on which her initials are engraved. She adds a hearty splash of Barbados rum, Stiggers Plantation Pineapple to be exact, to her icy, sweating glass of mango tea. Mary Margaret mumbles for Jesus to enlighten Ida concerning the godliness of sobriety. Defiantly, Ida adds a few more splashes, drinks, and adds some more. “Maybe they’re shtill eating mish-missionaries, and that is why, oops, no ‘lil ole reports since 2012,” Ida adds, waving her glass in the air.

The comparison to the Oldtimers Club is starkly apparent to its intimate members, all of us at this table filled with the unspoken irony of it. Then Mary Margaret begins to whimper, her upper body collapsing onto the table as if she is a dummy filled with sawdust and someone pulled the plug. Ida and I reach to console her. I rub her scarecrow back and say, “Mary Margaret, the way we run the Oldtimers Club should comfort you. Think of it as similar to when you take Communion at church. Sigmund Freud calls it totemism. You eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, don’t you? In Totem and Taboo, Freud says that by absorbing parts of the body of a person through the act of eating, we came to believe that we also possess the properties which belonged to that person.”

Ida sloshes most of the rest of the rum into Mary Margaret’s half full glass of tea. This will help she says. Mary Margaret’s tears slide down her bloated face into the glass while she drinks. “It isn’t even all about that,” Mary Margaret manages to say between hiccup sobs and gulps. “I just hate the way life takes everything from you in exchange for another day, each more dreadful than the last. It takes what you love. Poor Mr. Corrigan who suffered with the stroke. It takes our youthful dreams and health, leaving us with canes and pains and should-have-dones. It takes our hope, our dignity, and leaves us like….this! With just despair, despair, despair. Maybe the Oldtimers Club is doing those young people a favor. I want to die now.”

“It’s the high cost of living,” Ida says, more sober and subdued.

Mary Margaret considers this and nods, wiping her red nose with a tissue she pulls from the bosom of her flowery dress. “Is there any more of that? I feel better now,” she says to Ida, pointing to the flask.

***

Mary Margaret attaches her bling-encrusted bird house to her mail box, which makes the mailman smile. Ida and I keep ours inside to protect it from the harsh Florida sun and the greedy hands of pilferers. Larry fits our group like a comfortable old shoe. When I finally explain the rules of the Oldtimers Club to him, he says in Russian ‘Срань господня’ in English ‘holy shit.’ We laugh a little about that. I had referred to Freud to ascribe a deeper meaning to the club, deeper than economizing food purchases, deeper than what Mary Margaret said about doing young people a favor. I had retrieved my dog-eared copy of Totem and Taboo, grouped on my bookshelf with other books by Freud, and find what I am looking for on page 122. The origins of cannibalistic totemism probably stem from brothers banned from a cruel father’s horde, who return as a group to kill him and eat him. “This totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions, and religion,” Freud had written. In this, a chosen animal is revered and cared for, but then sacrificed and eaten at periodic celebrations. On page 117, Freud wrote: “The sacrificial animal was treated like one of kin; the sacrificing community, its god, and the sacrificial animal were of the same blood, and the member of a clan.” Larry likes that, the idea of a family celebration, a shared Sunday dinner, roasted meat bathed in creamy gravy re-moralized as the centerpiece for Homeric human tradition, around which in peace and affection we all give thanks together. He confesses to me that the Chinese for years have processed human fetuses into a powder, consumed as a protein source for great vitality, which he tried during his military service abroad, finding it to his liking.

I tell him Mary Margaret’s story about the New Guinea cannibals and their penchant for long pig. “There may come a day when we will see long pork chops, long pork loin, long pig’s feet, packaged in bright yellow Styrofoam containers, wrapped in cellophane and sold at Publix to household cooks,” he says. It doesn’t seem any more absurd to me than Ida’s grocery store fashion choices.

***

Larry finds the Lamb wandering on Pass-a-Grille beach while he is metal-hunting and passing out his SHIPWRECK PENNIES. She is pink and soft, and about twelve, with white-gold curls sticking to her head in the wretched Florida heat. He gives her his spiel about being the best treasure he has found today. She stares blankly at him, and he knows at once that she is shell-shocked. Bereft, unreachable, weighted with some evil perpetrated on her at so tender an age. He somehow knows she feels far, far worse than he ever felt when he was seventeen and they made him kill other boys or else be killed himself. Her eyes are true sapphire, the color of the Gulf at dusk, although they do not communicate the magic and awe of that vision under an orange-striped sky as the sun and moon pass each other on their way toward the impending night. The windows to her soul show only deep despair behind them. He brings the Lamb to me.

“Little Lamb,’ I say to her. “You are skin and bones and we will fatten you up and take care of you,” I offer tenderly.

In time, I learn that she had run away from her Ohio home because she didn’t like her mother’s rules. The lonely nights at twelve were terrifying voids filled with navigating the world as it was. A faux nice lady had shown interest and from that she became a victim of human trafficking, a captured runaway forced to provide sexual favors to ugly men with dirty unclipped toenails who smell of yeast and beer. She is billed as a virgin, time and time again. Despair wells from her pores, sinks and settles into her bones. I try but cannot think of a way to make it better. Larry’s SHIPWRECK PENNY cannot make it better. Ida’s careful commiseration concerning the selfishness of men cannot make it better. Mary Margaret’s invitation to accept God’s son as a savior makes it considerably worse. God abandoned the Lamb a long time ago and in Old Testament fashion he waits only for her to be sacrificed.

She has no drug habit. She is scarred by angry burns from lit cigarettes pressed along her arms, which does not negate that the meat is young and tender and untainted. Parameters for tenderness exist, the prey is ripe but not too tough, between babyhood and twenty. Babies are always tender, although they must be considered for their size. The Lamb is perfect. Plump now from gobbling the buttery cakes and breads I’ve given her, the fat beneath her skin apparent, sweetly rippling along her thighs and breasts and buttocks. Young and plump and suffering, she acquiesces finally that death would be a relief from all the horrors haunting her. I can help her with this.

Our mother taught us how to slaughter pigs. When it was time, we spiked their feed with a sedative to render them unconscious. We learned to gently slide them one by one into a holding trough, where we hung them upside down on an overhead rail system, still peacefully unconscious, dreaming pig dreams of milk-sogged bread and cereal, day-old doughnuts, congealed gravy, carrot shavings and apple scraps. Your knife must be sharp enough to split a hair so death comes humanely, our mother told us. I unsheathe the razor-sharp knife and hold it to the sleeping Lamb. I slide the blade into her neck soft as butter and twist my wrist with skill, cutting the jugular and carotid artery. Blood fills the trough beneath her, signaling eternal sleep. Mary Margaret says the Lamb is an angel now, flying in some netherworld with her gossamer wings and golden curls, watching over us from heaven.

***

I rock gently in the covered swing on our verandah, making a menu for our monthly dinner and watching our calico stalk the birds of early spring. She rises gracefully onto her hind legs, fluffy tail swishing, pawing the gnarled trunk-like vines and gauging whether she can circumvent the thorns up the bougainvillea to the nest of chirping baby cardinals. She can’t, I know. I scribble on my notepad. The side dishes will be seasonal: field peas, asparagus, homemade jelly using mint from our garden. We’re serving leg of Lamb. I look up to breathe the majesty of spring; the riotous papery blooms bursting from the bougainvillea, the sun on my bare legs and feet, the jasmine perfume, mother nature’s scent. Our calico jumps seven feet to the top of the wrought iron fence, catwalking over the iron spears piercing the top rail between the stucco pillars. She pauses dead even with the bird’s nest, now within her reach, and before I can stop her, she knocks them out and down. The chirping turns to terrified calls for help from absent parents. She eats them with great relish, burying two for later, just as a young lizard in camouflage skin bites an unsuspecting bee in two. The way of animals; we win and lose at life. We all must eat, I sigh aloud.

I sometimes wonder what Sigmund Freud would think of me. I see myself passing through the door of his ancient stone apartment in Vienna, gargoyles guarding the entrance. I lie on his green velvet divan draped with Oriental carpets, my errant feet fidgeting, dangling over the edge. I tell him my dream. He strokes his pointed, snow-white beard and nods encouragingly.

In my restless dream I hold the knife, a small sword, before I strike and wake in a sheen of sweat to find my fingers balled into a fist around its imaginary hilt. I am hungry for something. You are Gladys, a small sword, Sigmund Freud tells me. Cold and sharp and deadly. I’ve never been a princess, although I’ve longed to be.