Rhododendron

by Jennifer Buxton

Anna Cabbot was a tiny old woman who had, in recent years, grown dry and thin as grass. But for some reason, when her ancestors showed up, neatly packaged in cardboard and bubble pak, she took it upon herself to haul them into the living room. This was no mean feat, either, as the two packages stood nearly waist-high and together might have weighed as much as she did. In the prime of her life, Anna had been a person of surprising strength. When her ten year-old son slashed open his leg on a wire fence, she carried him three blocks to a hospital, although her arms were no thicker than wrapping paper rolls, and didn't look much stronger. But recent years had changed Anna, and anyone who might've seen her haul the packages into the house would have found it quite out of character -- to say nothing of the way she let the delivery boy disappear without examining his eyes -- for such was her custom, ever since the death of her children, years before. She had learned to examine all strangers, doctors and police officers and delivery boys especially, because it was in the guise of these people that death always chose to visit her.

On this day, however, Anna seemed to forget herself entirely, perhaps because she was hard at work when the packages arrived. In early June she had agreed to ghostwrite a memoir for a local woman, a middle-aged person, named Mrs. Dickey. Though they had now worked together a full two months (meeting once a week in Mrs. Dickey's large, red living room), all Anna had to show for herself was a single sentence: "The rhododendrons were in full bloom that year." It was a fine sentence, Anna felt, full of flavor and possiblities. It spoke to her in a way she couldn't describe, and try as she might, she could not type anything past it. Sometimes she typed it afresh on a new piece of paper, hoping to build up some momentum and spill over to a new, and second sentence, but that never happened. She reached the period and stopped in her tracks. To make matters worse, Mrs. Dickey, in all their recorded sessions, had never, not once, mentioned any plant, least of all a rhododendron.

So whether it was concern for her lone sentence, or anxiety over her task in general (for Mrs. Dickey was a large, pretentious woman who drank gin and tonics and rattled her ice cubes loudly) something was distracting her on the day her ancestors' portraits arrived. She did not, for example, stop to wonder why they had come to her (why on this day, after so many years?) but rather, with the deft motions of a hostess, set about freeing the portraits from their packaging. She used a bread knife to cut through the cardboard packaging, then snipped away layer after layer of bubble pak, folding back the sheets of flannel which covered the faces. Only then, as she wiped the tiny flecks and fibers from the portaits' cheeks and noses, did she feel a familiar pang in her chest, right below her breastbone, and she recoiled.

In an instant she was at the screen, poking her soft, pearly head out into the sunlight, sniffing suspiciously at the morning air. Across the street, Mr. Katz was mowing his lawn, although he could no longer see well and had left large patches untouched. She smelled the cut grass, and some other clean scent, which reminded her of rain, but this was all. Death claimed no particular scent as its own. Rather, it had a quality of smell, a way of combining things. She didn't sense it now, but she wasn't satisfied. The portraits lay in a pile of scattered wrappings, like wounds losing their dressings. Anna felt afraid.

For many years now, she had lived alone. She had lost her children and her husband within a few years of one another, and as a consequence, the people who lived in Defiance moved rather gingerly around her. Grocery checkers took care not to rattle the paper bags, plumbers and repairmen worked in hurried silences, and even the librarian had difficulty stamping due dates on her books, as though something might bruise in the process. Anna was oblivious to this treatment. She had, in fact, grown used to the commotion of solitude, the way sounds amplified in an empty house, the way doors and windows banged shut of their own accord, and sometimes the eaves moaned with a human sound. She could sit in her living room for half the afternoon, listening to the rush of traffic, and the calls of birds, and the occasional voices of people passing--though at times she couldn't be sure whether she imagined conversations, and once found herself waiting by the window for her late son, who seemed to have cried, "I don't believe you!" moments before. Her house was full of presences, so full, in fact, that the sudden addition of these portraits frightened her. She didn't know how to accommodate them.

The paintings were tall, almost waist-high, and they weighed quite a bit, owing to their heavy gold frames. Though they had been done in oil on canvas, over two hundred years earlier, they showed no signs of age. If anything, the figures' features had grown sharper over the years. Anna could make out a thin, blue ribbon in the lace on Abigail's cap, and on Caleb, the slightest hint of a widow's peak, his sideburns longer than she had remembered. Anna had never noticed the flush in their cheeks, or the way Abigail's nose turned up at the tip. They were genteel people, well dressed, floating against a hazy black background. Neither of them showed their teeth, though they were smiling, rather apprehensively, Anna felt, as though they didn't feel welcome. She meant to welcome them. She meant to put them up. She called up her friend Albert, who sometimes helped her around the house, but as soon as his voice came across the line, her mind fell blank.

"Hello?" his voice went. "Hello, hello! Look, is anyone --Hello?"

Outside Anna's window, two robins tormented a squirrel, swooping and pecking. The squirrel ran zigzagging across the lawn, trying to find a place to hide.

Anna hung up the phone. The portraits shouldn't have come here, now, when she had no children to inherit them. For two hundred years these paintings had passed from mother to daughter to daughter. By rights they were Anna's. They had belonged to her mother, who died when Anna was a child. Some remote relative, a great-aunt or cousin (Anna could not have said for sure) had taken them and handed them down through that branch of the family until this day when someone had seen fit to give them back.

A breeze picked up outside and swept through the living room, bringing with it a whole host of smells: cut grass, hyacinth, truck exhaust, soggy newspapers drying in sunlight. These smells wound together in such a way as to remind Anna that all through the neighborhood, life was going on around her. She stood up and banged the windows shut.

That night, Anna worked on Mrs. Dickey's memoir. She set herself up at her typewriter (they had agreed not to use a computer, but to have the whole manuscript typed professionally when they finished) and turned on the tape from their most recent visit. While the tape ran on, Anna sat with her fingers poised over the typewriter keys, her head cocked to one side, eyes closed. "...It was my father who sent me on the cruise," Mrs. Dickey's voice began.

...He wanted me to see some of the world. I had fallen in love with my history professor, Mr. Whitlock, a Renaissance man. That is, that was his specialty. I don't mean the term in its usual sense, since his only interests were the Italian Renaissance and seducing co-eds. Not your usual combination, but what of it. He seduced me right across the pages of Machiavelli--page thirty-four, to be exact, in his office in the history department, room 125 on a Thursday afternoon. (Make sure you put that in, the room number. The public wants to know.) I remember the room so vividly. He had covered one wall with various renditions of the Mona Lisa. You know, the Mona Lisa with Woody Allen glasses, the Mona Lisa with braces...Really, quite irreverent, I felt. And perhaps that's what made him so appealing to me: all those Mona Lisa's in their variety. Here was a man who not only knew the great works of art from Western culture, but who was brave enough to make fun of them! I mean, can you imagine the Mona Lisa in a cheerleader's outfit? Pom-pons and saddle shoes! And here I was, a girl from Defiance--

There was a long pause here as Mrs. Dickey began to laugh in a breathy, wheezing way. This lasted for a minute, and then her voice began again, but was drowned out by something knocking and rattling against the microphone--Mrs. Dickey's drink, no doubt. The monologue picked up, but Anna could not make out any of the words, for all the interference, and she forwarded the tape. "...Yes, I've known a great many people, I suppose," Mrs. Dickey's voice continued.

"...Famous people. Heads-of-state. Gangsters. Magicians. Actors and actresses of the highest rank. Do you know I once was seated at a table in a restaurant in London where Ann Margaret had been sitting not twenty minutes before? I do mean it. And once I took the same cruise that Lionel Trilling was on. You know who he is, don't you, dear? That famous writer? Yes, well I went with my friend Luann Gaskill (the one from Manhattan) and while we were at dinner the first night, she leaned over and whispered that sitting right near us, at the very next table was Lionel Trilling. And so of course I looked around, expecting, you know, a Yul-Brynner-type, and I said, "Where?" and she said, "Right there!" All I could see was this little man, and I'm telling you, I was staring him straight in the face with this terrible look of disappointment. You see, I thought he was an actor, and --

Anna stopped the tape, suddenly, and typed,

The rhododendrons were in full bloom that year.

As soon as she had done it, she pulled her fingers away from the keys and looked around. The house was silent, except for the hum of the typewriter, and Anna couldn't think what to do with herself. She lay down on her bed in the dark, trying to imagine Mrs. Dickey's life. On their first meeting, Mrs. Dickey told her, "I want to preserve my life, you see." She tossed her head elaborately, as though shaking hair over her shoulder, though it was far too short and stiff to toss. Anna pictured Mrs. Dickey laid out in a beauty parlor chair, covered from chin to ankle by a dark, slippery smock. She would be looking up at the ceiling as she spoke to the woman rinsing her hair. Anna's sentence crept back into her mind, and this time it was followed by a second one: My mother and my father wore white summer clothes and liked to go for drives on Sunday afternoons. She sat up and turned on the light. There was no paper by her bed, so she padded down the hall to her study, but by the time she got there, the sentence seemed uninteresting. She couldn't think of anything to follow it. At the window, a moth was beating and fluttering against the screen.

Anna turned out the light and went back to bed.

DARLING!! Mrs. Dickey enjoyed shrieking when Anna arrived on Tuesday mornings. She was an enormous woman, Mrs. Dickey, not obese, or fat, even, but huge in presence. She draped herself in oversized African prints, and then loaded her wrists, earlobes, neck and fingers with jewelry made from stone and wood, much of it fashioned in the shapes of wild animals. This made Anna uneasy. Animals filled the house as well, stuffed ones, deerheads peering from the walls, frozen tiger faces, glassy-eyed pheasants and squirrels and jackrabbits, all of them arrested in some life-like pose, a paw extended, a wing unshrugged. "Preservation is an art!" she announced to Anna the first day they met. "And you, dear lady, are my artiste, my immortalizer."

On this day, Anna had come to confess herself. The portraits had been with her a week, and in that time, while they remained on the floor by the dining room, Anna had yet to write a second sentence. Worse yet, she had begun rewriting the first one, rearranging its parts, expanding, deleting. She meant to confess herself to Mrs. Dickey, surrender her job, return the money already paid, but for some reason, when she stepped into Mrs. Dickey's living room, she froze up like another stuffed wild animal.

"I was thinking next week," Mrs. Dickey said, pouring herself a drink. "For the first draft, you know. If that's all right with you."

"Oh, yes," Anna replied.

"Just a sketch, really. Nothing polished. Just so we can see how it's going. Drink?"

"No, thank you." Anna sat gamely in one of Mrs. Dickey's armchairs, which pressed up against her back and legs, as though refusing her. Mrs. Dickey's husband was a paparazzo who spent most of his time lurking outside the hotel rooms of celebrities and heads-of-state, and who had, at some point, chosen a thick, glossy red for the walls of their living room. Mrs. Dickey, apparently, preferred a Victorian look, and decorated with a floral love seat, overwrought footstools, various long-legged tables, and one stone bench with bear-claw feet. The effect was rather disorienting for Anna, who felt as though the room were swallowing her up.

Mrs. Dickey started a tape in the recorder, a gesture which tended to send her voice up an octave.

"I thought we might talk more about the cruise," she said. "Because really, I was quite depressed through most of it, and it would be a shame not to let that come out a bit. I was surrounded by all these skinny minnies who wouldn't eat a thing--the senator's daughter, as I mentioned, chewed the same damn grape the whole time! And then there were the vegetarians, squealing about the steaks, and--oh, yes!--the religious ones who couldn't eat pork, or couldn't have meat with cheese. And here I was, in the middle of all this, turning green."

"I see," Anna said, for no apparent reason.

Mrs. Dickey looked at her. It was not often that Anna interjected anything into their meetings, and so their rhythm was disrupted.

"Oh, no. Go right ahead," Anna said, after a moment.

"Well, it seems important. I think it says something about, well. They weren't just women, you know. Even the men were like this, fuss, fuss, fuss over what to eat. I mean, are there people starving in this world? Peel me a grape, darling!"

At that moment, Mrs. Dickey's monologue was interrupted by a door slamming. "Geri?" she called. A great deal of banging and rattling came from the direction of the kitchen. The two women sat through it, Mrs. Dickey listening carefully. There was a silence, and then Mrs. Dickey's teenaged son appeared at the threshold. He said, without any affect whatsoever, "What."

"Geri, what's the matter, honey?" Mrs. Dickey asked, turning slightly in her chair to see her son. "Don't you want to say hello to Anna?"

Geri, who had been named for Gericault, Anna knew, a favorite of the Dickey's, gave Anna a sullen, perfunctory glance. She had never seen the boy before, though she had heard him come and go, and knew that he attended a special school for problem children, over in DuChamps. She had imagined him as a motorcycle rider, a long-haired, scowling boy with a black leather jacket, but in fact he was thin and awkward, with short, non-descript hair, and a sullen, downcast expression. She found herself staring at him, as though she had never seen a teenager before.

"Geri, we're working in here today, remember? Anna is writing that article I told you about. What are you drinking?"

"Killian's."

"Geri, so early?" his mother said.

"So?" he said.

She pursed her lips.

"I need to relax," he told her, and kicked one foot against the doorframe, tentatively.

Mrs. Dickey let her eyes rest momentarily on the place where Geri's shoe had left a scuff mark.

"And what, pray tell, have you done, that requires such relaxation?"

"Ran into that asshole Eberhardt again."

Anna leaned forward to stop the tape, but Mrs. Dickey waved her off.

"I know you don't need me to tell you, Geri, that that 'asshole' can take away your license."

"I wasn't doing nothing, Mom. I ran a yellow, that's it. He just rides my ass all the time."

Mrs. Dickey closed her eyes and pressed her fingertips to her temples, sighing dramatically.

"Fine, Mom," Geri said, suddenly both furious and patronizing. "You just think whatever the hell you want. You're going to anyway." He held up one hand and pursed his lips impatiently, just as his mother had done. Then he stepped out of the doorway and disappeared.

"Geri!" his mother called. "Please, come back here." They could hear a loud, bashing music begin to play somewhere in the next room. "Geri!" she shrieked, and without a word to Anna, left the room.

Mrs. Dickey was gone for ten minutes, during which time Anna listened to a whole flurry of shouts and screams and smashings and bangings she couldn't identify, even during the intervals when the music was turned off. At one point she heard Mrs. Dickey shout, "You're so angry! Why are you always so angry?" but the answer (if there was one) could not be made out. Fights frightened Anna, and so she busied herself trying to study her notes. Today she had written:

It wasn't much, and she considered showing them to Mrs. Dickey, by way of confession, but Mrs. Dickey came back distraught, her mascara smudged beneath her eyes as though she had been rubbing her eyes with her fists.

"You'll have to go, my dear," she cried. "You'll simply have to make do with what we've got."

Anna stood up uncertainly. "Of course, if you'd like to postpone," she said.

"No, no," Mrs. Dickey replied, waving a hand in front of her own face, as though to dry her tears. "I want to see something. Bring in something rough. Bring it and read it to me, would you, dear? I need a little something. Do you think it could be soon?"

"Sooner than a week?" Anna said.

"No, you're right. I'm being rude. A week, then. A week from today. Now do go, dear. You understand. I simply must ask you to go."

Anna found her own way out, her heart thumping, her mind confused. She nosed her great white Cadillac out of the driveway and onto the road. The streets were narrow here, so she had to slow down for a young man on a bicycle, pedalling furiously up the long, steep hill. From a distance, she recognized Geri, standing up on the pedals, hunched forward as though he wanted nothing more in the world than to reach the top of the hill where the light was red. Anna felt a stab of embarrassment. As she drew closer, she saw that he was crying bitterly, his teeth gritted, his nose running. He wore khaki shorts and a t-shirt, tucked in. Anna could not bring herself to pass him. She drove along behind him until it seemed that would draw his attention too, and then she passed him, his body flitting behind her like a sheet of newspaper tossed on the wind.

The car had never felt so enormous. Wide, empty expanses of seats stretched out around Anna. In the rearview mirror, Geri grew smaller and smaller. Anna stopped at the light at the top of the hill and waited for the moment when he would coast up beside her and they would have to see one another. Blood was rushing to her face. She busied herself with the chipping formice of the steering wheel, the little pieces flaking onto her lap, and so she was not looking when Geri rushed past her without even slowing down. He reached the top of the hill and whizzed by, heading downhill, his shirt puffing out behind him.

Anna's eyes watered and her heart surged in her chest. Above her, the light had turned green. She had no idea how long it had been that way. She inched into the intersection, her heart thumping in an unruly manner. For a moment she forgot where she was going. Geri disappeared down a side street, and as he pedalled out of sight, Anna thought of her children, Nicholas and Kiersten, who had lived so far from home in those last years, she felt she hardly knew them. She had never even met Nicholas' girlfriend, though they had written to one another for several years after the accident. She thought of Geri, riding madly through these quiet, residential streets and wondered how her children had looked on the day of their deaths. Would someone else, some stranger who might have noticed them climb into Nicky's boat that day, thought how smooth and healthy their limbs looked, how the sunlight glinted off their hair? They would have carried themselves with that graceful carelessness young people have, and it never would have occurred to an outside observer that these children had parents, who loved them, and worried over them, and would miss them when they were gone.

That night, Anna began to write. She was very slow, pausing after every few words to consider what might come next. At the same time, she felt a strange sense of urgency, as though she knew exactly what to write, several sentences down the way, and if only she could finish this sentence, all the rest would come. None of it came easily, however, and she was up till dawn, pacing, typing, crossing out.

At one point during the night, she went downstairs for some crackers and passed the ancestors' portraits, which were propped up against the wall by the dining room. They managed to catch her eye as she passed them, those two polite emissaries from the past, but she could not bring herself to consider them. She left them there, untended--neither up, nor packed away. She didn't have the time to worry, not at midnight, with only a few paragraphs written.

From three until six, she slept, then retyped what she had written, so that she would have a clean copy to read from. She waited until 7:45 to call Mrs. Dickey (who had clearly not been awake) and ask when she might come over and read the piece. Mrs. Dickey said she was getting her hair done at ten, but if it really was that urgent, she could move the appointment. Anna thanked her, saying it was.

At her age, staying awake all night made Anna weak and trembly, a condition that was only exacerbated by Mrs. Dickey, who swept her into the garish red living room at 8:55, a few minutes earlier than planned.

"I was really taken aback by your call," Mrs. Dickey said, sipping on a glass of tomato juice. She looked different this morning, her hair softer and unstyled, her eyes pale, lost in the flesh of her face. Anna had never seen her without makeup. She looked like a different person, tired, and puffy, but with a kind of clarity that her makeup normally obscured. "I had no idea -- when you called this morning, I imagined -- well, of course I imagined the worst -- your notes had been burned or something." She laughed, a nervous, self-conscious laugh that made Anna's head hurt. "Do you need a drink?"

"Yes, thank you," Anna said, though she had actually drunk a bit of sherry before coming.

Mrs. Dickey poured some soda water, her jewels glittering on her fingers, then added gin. "Perhaps we should just get down to it, then?"

"Yes, quite," Anna replied, after taking the smallest sip of her drink.

"Terrific." Mrs. Dickey crossed her legs, then uncrossed them. "I'm all a-quiver," she confided.

Anna began to read. "'The rhododendrons were in full bloom that year.'"

"Oh, that's nice," said Mrs. Dickey.

"Yes, thank you."

"Rhododendrons. Nice, isn't it?"

Anna waited a moment, then began again.

The rhododendrons were in full bloom that year. My mother and my father wore white summer clothes and liked to go for drives on Sunday afternoons. The year was 1937 and no one knew my mother was dying. She had always been a small person, pale in the face, with skin smooth and white, like alabaster. My father said she looked like a Botticelli, though she was much too thin for the comparison to hold up. But she was very beautiful. Even when she took to her bed and couldn't eat, and the flesh around her eyes turned sallow, my mother kept her beauty. Her long brown hair would fall around her shoulders like a shawl, and when she felt cold she'd ask me to bring her tea, or to sit with her and rub her knees and ankles, which had grown tender in the joints.

We were not religious people, but I took to prayer at that time, believing that God lived in all the invisible lines extending from the edges and corners of things. I knew that if I didn't step on God in the cracks on the sidewalk, or didn't stand in doorways, but passed quickly through them, then God would not have his strength diminished, and could help my mother get well.

My grandmother came to live with us at that time. She arrived one afternoon with four trunks and two enormous oil portraits of her ancestors which she hung in the living room over the sofa. My grandmother had spent her entire inheritance to restore these pictures, she told me. She believed that my mother needed the spirit of the family around her at this time. My father, I am certain, saw them as angels of death.

Here, Anna took a quick sip of her drink, and glanced briefly at Mrs. Dickey, who was scowling in what was either concentration or gathering rage. She seemed about to speak, so Anna quickly ducked her head, and read on.

I did not realize for some time that my mother was dying. Most days when my father came home from the bank, he brought a flower to tuck behind her ear. Rhododendrons were my mother's favorite -- she had planted row after row of them in the front yard. If it was a red one my father brought, he might say how it set off her color. "Doesn't it bring out the pink in her cheeks?" he said once, and though her face was yellow and drawn, I told him, Yes, yes, she was the picture of health.

Once my father brought in a purple flower and tucked it carefully over my mother's ear, but when he stood back to admire it, his body went stiff and he made a strange sound in his throat. The purple brought out all the wrong colors in my mother's face. Just beneath the yellow pallor lay a faint purple shadow, deeper around her eyes and temples, and just beneath her cheeks. She looked bruised and jaundiced, and my father saw for the first time that my mother was dying.

I followed my father out of the house into the darkness of the front yard where he got down on his hands and knees and began digging furiously with his fingers. He picked up a rock and jabbed at the earth with such force that I thought he must be taking out his frustrations on the ground, but in the next moment I saw he was digging up my mother's flowers, grasping them at the base of the stems and tearing them out of the dirt. I had never seen him like this, my quiet father with his harmless jokes and unflagging good humor--destroying my mother's precious flowers.

Across from Anna, Mrs. Dickey let out a loud sigh and fussily rearranged herself in her seat. She cleared her throat. Anna glanced down at Mrs. Dickey's glossy, silver toenails, held up one finger, and kept reading.

Behind me, my grandmother came onto the porch and whispered, "Dear God. What is he doing?" She started down the steps, both hands on the railing, but she was too frightened to go further. My father continued to work, methodically, violently, not uttering a word. "Please," my grandmother said. "You mustn't." But my father didn't seem to hear a word. He dug up every last flower, then gathered them together in his arms and swept into the house. My grandmother and I followed him, heading straight for the sickroom. Grandmother said, "No, no! You mustn't!--" but my father never broke his stride. He disappeared into my mother's room and when I reached the doorway where God was living, I found him crouched down, face in his hands, Mother pushing herself up in the bed. Between them, the rhododendrons were strewn across the floor.

My grandmother began to cry, which frightened me, because I did not know who to console. My mother told me to take grandmother into the next room and so we sat on the sofa while the ancestors watched us carefully, saying nothing. "I will never forgive him for this," she cried. "Your poor mother, and with her life failing...." I kept one eye on the end of my mother's bed, just visible through the darkened doorway. Her feet shifted under the covers, and I realized that despite all pains, and for reasons I couldn't know, she was moving out of the bed, closer to my father.

Finishing her story, Anna began nodding her head faintly, as though the narrative were continuing somewhere out of earshot. She shuffled the papers back into order, laid them on her lap, then picked them up again and straightened the edges. At last she looked up at Mrs. Dickey, her eyes glittering. Mrs. Dickey was staring at her, the left side of her face struggling ferociously.

"Is that all you have?" she said, her body perfectly still.

"It does end a bit abruptly," Anna agreed.

"That's not the end."

"Oh yes. It is."

Mrs. Dickey leaned forward, hands clasped on her knee. "My dear lady, what have you done with the rest of the story?"

Anna cocked her head.

"The cruise! The yacht! Lionel Trilling! What have you done with the story?" Mrs. Dickey stirred quite suddenly, her bracelets jangling. "Have you had no idea what we've been trying to do here? I didn't ask you to make things up. I'm trying to preserve something."

"Oh, yes," Anna said reassuringly. But then she added, in a resigned tone, "Yes, well. Hmmm."

"Unbelievable!" Mrs. Dickey snatched the manuscript from Anna's lap and began scanning the pages, as though hoping to cull something from the text. "This doesn't even make sense. 'I looked for God in all the edges of things.' What's that supposed to mean?" Her temple pulsed. "And the mother? What's wrong with her?"

"She's dying," Anna began.

"She doesn't even mind that her husband dug up her flowers? Who is that supposed to be? Certainly not me. No," she announced, "this is all wrong." She dropped the pages on the table and folded her arms. "None of it means anything to me."

She stared levelly at Anna, who felt uncertain as to how she might reply. Anna ran her eyes along the edges of the carpet and up the corner of the room.

"The rhododendrons, you see, were the mother's favorite."

"Rhododendrons!" Mrs. Dickey cried. "They're not even flowers! They're hedges! And they're not red, anyway. They're blue. I don't believe this. What have you been doing all this time I've been telling you my story? It's like you've just gone and turned everything into -- into -- some kind of other thing."

"Yes!" Anna said, brightly, as though Mrs. Dickey had clarified something for her.

"You'll simply have to do it over. It's no good to me the way it is. You'll have to rewrite it."

"Oh, I couldn't."

"But you have to! You're the only one who can. You're the one I've told my story to."

"Yes," she allowed.

"I paid you money for this," Mrs. Dickey said, a note of panic entering her voice. "We had an agreement -- "

"You see, I've tried --" But she was not able to complete the thought.

Mrs. Dickey's face began to color. Her eyes watered with frustration. "But this isn't my life," she cried.

"No," Anna agreed. And then, as though it were just occurring to her, she added, "It's mine." Her eyes misted over and her throat grew hard.

Mrs. Dickey picked up a pack of cigarettes from an endtable, lit one, and drew in three quick breaths. She raked her hair from her face, stretched one arm along the back of the sofa, and looked at Anna. Neither of them said anything. Mrs. Dickey's fingers twitched. Anna realized that Mrs. Dickey was waiting for her to speak, that she was growing angrier by the moment.

Anna lifted her purse to her lap and began searching for a tissue. She pulled out a wad of junk mail, her glasses case, lipstick, two sugar packets and a package of saltines -- all the while shaking her head, as though engaged in a hushed, hurried dialogue. At last she found a tissue, blew her nose, and remarked, "My family is all gone now, you see."

Mrs. Dickey blew out a column of smoke. She blinked meaningfully at Anna, her nostrils flaring, and Anna began, carefully, to explain how her grandmother had used her only money in the world to restore the faces of her ancestors.