Follow Me (56 page)

Hearing about the accident from Harriet, my mother wondered if she’d underestimated my grandmother. She had always thought
of Sally as a simple woman, easily categorized, raised in provincial circumstances, poorly educated, with naïve beliefs and
limited experience of the world. Sally loved soap operas, Cracker Jacks and canned salmon, gaudy wallpaper, bargain-basement
clothes. She had traveled the length of the Tuskee River and no farther. If she ever read a book, it was the
Reader’s Digest
abridged version. She didn’t drink often, but when she did, she didn’t know when to stop. She smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes
a day. My mother had always harbored a little bit of secret embarrassment about her mother, a feeling that through her childhood
had become focused on Sally’s singing. She loved to hear her mother sing, but she hadn’t loved it when her loud singing kept
the neighbors awake. It seemed to my mother that my grandmother had no idea when she was acting foolish.

Thanks to Harriet, my mother realized that there was more to my grandmother’s life than she’d assumed. There was an old boyfriend
who’d been killed in an accident. There was Benny and his anger.
He beat her up good
. If there was this much my mother hadn’t known about my grandmother, there must have been more.

My grandmother had given her daughter the impression that she’d lived a relatively quiet life. For her own sake, she chose
to cast her experiences as too ordinary to retell. And through most of her last two decades, she did live quietly, if you
don’t count her easy habit of singing as she moved around the house. She worked three days a week as a secretary in her husband’s
law firm. She kept a small vegetable garden out back. One spring, pumpkin seeds from the compost pile rooted, and she let
the vines spread out across the yard. She harvested ten pumpkins that first year and thirty the next.

When my mother returned from law school, she was hired as an associate in Arnie’s firm. She bought a house of her own in the
suburbs, and I moved in with her. But I continued to stay over at my grandmother’s house at least one night out of the week.
Despite having only a seventh-grade education, she took out stacks of books from the library and taught me to read. When I
was nine, Arnie lugged home an old IBM Selectric typewriter that had been replaced by an office computer, and my grandmother
taught me to type. She said to me when I complained about the difficulty of matching the letters to the keys:
a girl can never know too much
.

Though she didn’t use those same words, I imagine she was thinking them when she finally decided to confide in me. I could
never know too much. Therefore, my grandmother was obliged to tell me everything she knew.

She’d been through surgery and two bouts of chemotherapy by then. Although her prognosis was encouraging, she probably realized
that her thoughts were becoming increasingly scattered, with her memories getting mixed up with her dreams and even with some
of the songs she sang. If she was going to communicate a long story coherently and include everything relating to the mistake
of my conception, she’d better do it soon.

Her story was as long as the Tuskee and as full of surprises, she said to me. I was twenty-seven that year. I’d come home
to the city of R and was living with Sebastian in an apartment on Westminster Street, working for an ad agency while I tried
to figure out how to put my typing skills to better use. My grandmother would invite me over for a glass of sherry in the
afternoon while Arnie was off playing golf. She told me about her various stops along the river, her different names, the
adventures of her new beginnings. She told me who my parents were. She assured me that my father had gone on to find another
woman to love, though she didn’t offer to tell me where he was living, and I didn’t ask. She made it clear that she didn’t
want me to repeat her story to anyone. But she did suggest that I go ahead and write a history of the Tuskawali — that would
be a worthy subject for a book, she said, just as long as I pretended that I’d made it all up.

S
pring officially arrived yesterday. Today is Good Friday. I’m just off the phone with my father, who called to say that he
and Tracy and Marcia have arrived and checked in to the hotel. Now all our guests are in town, and we’re ready for tomorrow.
There’s a full moon tonight, strangely veiled by a thin mist of snow. Earlier today I saw a flock of robins on the edge of
the field by the reservoir. It’s late. I’m alone. My fiancé is with his brothers, who have traveled from Oregon and New Mexico
to be here. I’m staying over at my mother’s house. She’s gone to bed. I’m in the bedroom that used to be mine. My mother has
talked about selling the house and downsizing, but she hasn’t gotten around to it. She’s been run ragged ever since the scandal
hit Albany and the governor resigned. His tawdry fall will probably cause my mother to lose her job as the director of the
urban renewal fund. At the very least, there will be no money to distribute. The state is going broke. The country is going
broke. We are spending ten billion dollars a month to press on with the war in Iraq. There have been between 80,000 and one
million casualties since the war began in 2003 (the number varies among studies). The cost of a barrel of crude oil has reached
an all-time high. ExxonMobil and Chevron are the most recent oil companies to post record profits. Truckers can’t afford to
fill their tanks. Railways can’t afford to make repairs, and the trains are derailing. Our lakes are spiked with antibiotics
and sex hormones. The earth is heating up. The frogs are dying. The bees are dying. The bats are dying. Floods follow droughts.
Droughts follow floods. Tibetans are storming embassies on horseback. Darfur continues to burn. The crisis of hunger in Africa
is matched by the crisis of obesity in North America. Gangs are using AK-47s to settle their scores. Average life expectancy
is declining. Investors are worried that the subprime mortgage crisis will spread into other sectors of the economy. There’s
talk of a recession. The earth, astronomers inform us, is going to be sucked into the sun one day. We’re all complaining.
I can’t find a decent-paying job since I left the ad agency. Sebastian, who teaches music in the city schools, is worried
that he’ll be a casualty of the impending cutbacks.

But tomorrow we will gather at the Lantern Restaurant by the falls, and we will celebrate. We’re going to raise our glasses
in defiance. We’ll stab cheese cubes with toothpicks and scoop crackers in dip. Though snow is in the forecast, our guests
will stroll along the pedestrian bridge. Feelings will be revealed and new commitments made. Lovers will toss coins into the
river and make a wish. They will follow the new path leading through the ruins of Boxman’s Mill. They will look at the huge
mill wheel nestled between stone walls. They will walk along the metal grate that runs across the old race and hear the water
surging below their feet. They will look deep into a pit lined with icicles and see the river below, boiling and foaming through
the diversion. And when the harsh wind comes sweeping over the falls, they’ll run back inside and grab drinks from the bar.

Some of our friends have formed a band for the occasion, and they’ve promised to play music that will make everyone get up
and dance. We will spin across the room. We will grow giddy. We will ignore all the predictions. We will forget that we were
ever worried.

Tomorrow we’re getting married, and we’re going to celebrate at a reception by the river with our family and friends. We’ll
toast to love and kiss whenever a spoon is clinked against a glass. We’ll put on a show to demonstrate once again that joy
is possible. We’ll guzzle champagne. We’ll remember the dead. We’ll tell stories and laugh at every joke. No one will be blamed
for mistakes or accused of being sentimental. When the band begins to play, Sebastian and I will lead the way onto the floor.
My mother will be there. My father and sisters will be there. Music will fill the room, and we will dance.

Joanna Scott is the author of nine books, including
The Manikin,
which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize;
Various Antidotes
and
Arrogance,
which were both finalists for the PEN/Faulkner Award; and the critically acclaimed
Make Believe, Tourmaline,
and
Liberation
. A recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Award, she lives with her family in upstate
New York.