Sanibel Scribbles (4 page)

Vicki couldn’t look Rebecca’s mother in the eyes, fearful that she might drown forever in tears. She couldn’t imagine this woman’s depth of despair. Vicki felt the pain of loving and losing a friend. She didn’t know the pain of loving and losing a daughter. She stared through the window, at Michigan’s dark sky. How dare winter arrive in the season of spring? How dare it show up cruelly, catching everyone off guard? How dare a tulip wither before its time? And worse, how dare she pick one? Its life didn’t belong to her. She resented the weather and regretted picking the flower as she stared at the sky with disgust, watching as it turned a hue of orange, then finally blue. The fog lifted a little.

CHAPTER TWO

THERE ARE FOUR PARTS
to a symphony. There is silence between each of the parts. How dare anyone clap during a moment meant for silence? Vicki felt caught in this moment, not caring about making phone calls or pondering the night before, or crying or talking further with people who might have been in the room when the waves came crashing in, people who may have needed more details. She chose to be alone, solitary, refusing the comfort offered by others. She felt numb, a person trapped under a sheet of ice and nearly dead. She feared that any sort of emotional expression might cause her mind to become disconnected from where she was and where she was going. Then again, she wanted to forget what had happened the night before, and something about the silence between the four movements of the symphony only made her remember exactly what had just happened.

Nothing prepared her for this. Perhaps she had misunderstood. She had never heard the men in blue, nor any of the voices from the night before, mention the word “dead.” Maybe Rebecca wasn’t dead? What were the words they used? “Passed away,” “gone,” “didn’t make it,” but no one actually said “dead.” Vicki closed her apartment door, not bothering to lock it. No one would steal Rebecca’s boxes. No one would dare, not now. Her friend was gone, permanently.

She had much to do. She reached in her purse and pulled out a neatly folded list, aware of the fact that she lived life from dot to dot on her never-ending
list of things to do, and whatever didn’t make the list, well, those were the things she had no time for. She glanced over and over the list and couldn’t find perhaps the most important item of all. Hadn’t she written it down? Well, if it wasn’t written down, she wouldn’t do it. She couldn’t do it now. She couldn’t tell Rebecca how much she loved her as a friend and that she believed
her
dreams would come true as well.

Typically, when she missed an errand, she would simply add it to the next day’s list. Impossible. She would never have a second chance with this one. She walked to the bank instead and cashed out her money and closed her account for the summer, then stood in line at the post office, and after placing stamps on five envelopes, she dropped her pile of credit card bills in the mail. She ran into the coffee shop for a tall mocha, not that she wanted to sip it in leisure at a time like this, but if she didn’t consume the exact amount of caffeine on a daily basis, she would soon experience a pounding headache, worse than what she was already feeling. In fact, she wanted to order a plain black cup of coffee but wasn’t sure if it had enough caffeine. The woman behind the counter had never made a caffè mocha before, and it was only her second day of work. Vicki waited as the woman harvested the berries, then dried them and removed the flesh from the hard stones inside. Her head began to pound as the woman treated the beans, then roasted and brewed them.

Finally, with her hot mocha in hand, Vicki passed the dry cleaners, remembering she had a blouse to pick up, but first, her hot drink was scalding her hand, so she stopped in another coffee shop and grabbed a protective sleeve before going any further. Then she remembered she desperately needed toothpaste and had forgotten to borrow someone’s, so she stopped at the drugstore for mints.

Once each errand was crossed off her list, she rushed back to her apartment, grabbed her suitcases, and started to walk the block to the Greyhound bus station. She scolded herself for packing too much and blamed it on her wooden shoes. Why bother to bring them to Florida, where it would be too hot to wear eight pairs of socks and wood on her feet? She started opening the suitcase to dump the shoes, just as a friend driving by spotted her.

“Vicki, we all offered to drive you to the bus station. And Jamie said she’d take you all the way to the airport.”

She felt like a dog hit by a car, shocked and running down the road, away from everyone trying to help. “I know, I know. I need to be alone right now. Thanks so much. I’m fine,” she said in the tone of someone under quarantine. She didn’t want to be with anyone. She had declared herself legally isolated, not wanting to spread her shock, anger, denial, pain, and guilt to anyone else.

“Are you sure you don’t want to cancel your flight and stick around? I’ll help you with the arrangements.”

“I can’t. I’m fine. Thanks.” She was glad when the car turned the corner, and she could no longer see the woman full of common sense and legitimate offers.

She sat down on a bench near the bus station and across the street from where she had sipped her last coffee with Rebecca the night before. She sat at a distance, staring at the same row of red tulips. Now, with a few minutes left in Holland, Michigan, the tulips reminded her of the green costume with white lace she had sold two weeks before. Dutch-blooded or not, it had never mattered. Every spring she had danced down the streets in the tulip festival anyway.

The tourists never knew her secret. She didn’t come from Holland at all. She came from Chicago. They photographed someone they assumed was Dutch, but she was Irish, English, and Czechoslovakian. They left Holland by the hundreds on tour buses, taking photographs of the Dutch dancers with them.

As for the residents of Holland, well, many she knew never left. Why would they leave their hometown? Why would anyone? Leaving a hometown is like burning the fingerprints right off one’s hand. Arriving in a new town, someone else’s hometown, is like asking to borrow someone else’s prints. Vicki had started school in Holland at age nine. Back then she had felt like an outsider stepping into someone else’s hometown. Even the tulips belonged to the ethnic background of her friends—her friends who participated in family devotions after every dinner and went to church twice on Sundays. As a child, she lied about her family working on Sundays
and refrained from saying things like “holy cow!” at slumber parties. She wanted to make the strange new place her home and, gradually, living there became so comfortable that she stayed through high school, and now college. She had felt safe in Holland then, and she felt safe there now. She didn’t feel like leaving this comfort zone and that was why she stole the tulip. She wanted to grab onto something comfortable.

She glanced down the same street she used to dance down in wooden shoes. She stepped and swept that street with pride, a trait she borrowed from Dutch ancestors who were not her own. Looking at the tulips, she marveled how they always opened just in time for the annual Tulip Time Festival, as if the little bulbs could hear the Dutch dancers clomping down the street in practice before they started. Now they stood tall and proud, not wanting to disappoint anyone. They lined up obediently, not a single flower out of line, and their God-given costumes came in all colors, yet not a single alteration, washing, or ironing was ever needed. The red stood with the red and the purple with the purple and the yellow with the yellow, and they did this well. Now they only had to remain standing long enough for their performance, their season. Somehow she knew their sturdy stems would allow them to do so.

Then, even from a distance, she noticed the one and only stem not wearing its uniform. It stood out like a child on stage for a school performance, the only one not properly dressed and someone else was to blame. Yes, the festival would go on without that flower, just as it would go on without Rebecca this year, without noticing she had died. That’s what festivals did – carried on.

She stood up and started walking to the bus, ready to say good-bye to more things she loved.

As the bus slowly passed the campus, Vicki wanted to ask the driver to accelerate. The flowers outside her window streamed endlessly along, rows upon rows, and as the bus moved on their colors blurred into a masterpiece fit for a museum. She braced herself for a bus ride through the Art Coast of Michigan.

Just south of Holland, the bus headed into Saugatuck, a harbor village
thriving among towering sand dunes, framed by the winding Kalamazoo River. It passed by the public restroom, famous for its walls painted with post-impressionist Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.” With this sort of charm, some said the village belonged in a Thomas Kincaid painting, while others called it the Martha’s Vineyard of the Midwest. Vicki called it home. As the bus passed the park overlooking the harbor, Vicki laughed as she spotted a young girl in a red velvet dress standing in the gazebo, answering questions into a microphone. She couldn’t hear the answers. No, she couldn’t
remember
the answers, her own answers that long ago won her Princess of Saugatuck, a title she had held for one year.

As the bus made a couple of turns and headed down Butler Street, lined with art galleries, boutiques, restaurants, and bed-and-breakfasts, Vicki stared at the nineteenth-century architecture, realizing the charm of the city would never die.

The bus stopped, and Vicki knew she only had about twenty minutes, so she got out and ran past everyone who might stop her to talk - past Tweetie sitting on the bench in front of the corner drugstore, and Old Dave rounding the corner with a cane in one hand and the morning paper in the other, and Greg biking down the hill with books in his basket, always ready to talk to anyone who felt like listening. Yes, she knew this place, and she loved its people.

Vicki rounded the corner of the one-hundred-year-old pink building, once her family’s ice cream shop, and went inside. She knew by heart where all the fifty flavors stood displayed in the glass freezers, and she made sure the new owners hadn’t changed them around. Mint Chip, her older sister Ann’s favorite, belonged next to Chocolate Turtles, her mother’s favorite. Dad, a John Wayne sort of man, liked to have the rugged, nutty, chocolate ones down near the windows. Vicki’s favorites were two from each cooler. She could never decide on one, so she always insisted on scooping a cone with at least five flavors packed together.

Now, on the customer side of the counter, she knew how to order so as not to aggravate the person scooping. After all, the shop got so busy at times that, if customers didn’t specify plain, sugar, or waffle cone … single or double … French Silk Chocolate … Chocolate Turtles … or plain
old chocolate, things got held up.

She didn’t feel hungry. Food might sicken her. Instead, she craved comfort, and ice cream brought her to a familiar place, a cozy state of mind.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the large mirror that covered the wall behind the counter, and then ordered in the tone of voice reserved for someone requesting a tissue to dry her eyes.

“I’ll have a double dip sugar cone with Chocolate Rocky Road on the bottom and Chocolate Turtles on top, please.”

She chose these two flavors because Grandma had loved the first one, and her mother loved the second, and she missed both right now. Since her family had sold the business, she knew that, for the rest of her life, licking ice cream could never simply be an innocent, mindless act. Each flavor generated a memory.

The teenage boy holding the scoop did not smile. He did not say a thing.

“Give me that scoop, please. I’ll do it myself,” insisted Vicki. “My parents used to own this place. We sold it a couple of months ago. You’ve got to let me dip my last cone.”

“Sure. Whatever. I need a break anyway.” He dunked the silver scoop in the water well, shook it off and handed it to her.

She ran around to the other side of the counter. “Thank you.”

She dug hard and deep inside the box, making sure to rub her arm against the side. She had to get coated with ice cream one more time. Closing her eyes, she smelled the freezer, the ice. That ice she had scraped down once a week every summer for years. At the short age of nine she could barely reach inside, so her mother had her stand on a bucket. Now she recognized the work that had to be done: the box needed scraping and that boy shouldn’t have been taking a break. She wanted the job. She longed to scrape with such intensity and passion that her father would reap more profits because she could gather more ice cream off the cardboard. Instead, she had a bus to catch. No, more than that, her family no longer owned the shop, the bed-and-breakfast upstairs, or the luncheon parlor next door. Someone else now wore the apron for the job she once had and loved.

She scooped the bottom dip bigger than the top so it wouldn’t be top-heavy. Her dips never fell off. She knew how to dip ice cream the right way. She glanced at the old-fashioned pink radiator set against the window, and, for a moment, she could see her grandmother’s frail little body dressed in purple, sitting there as she always did. Osteoporosis hadn’t allowed Grandma to dip, but she always stuck around the family as they worked the business together.