Currency

ROXY MCAULIFFE INHABITS THE BACK-HOUSE on the alley, once a garage, what people now call a studio, with its miniature kitchen, concrete floor, and tiny windows with their decomposing putty. She can’t manage the craggy front steps up to the Tansy anymore. Tansy Art Dispensary. A place for women artists to live and sell their work. Her framed, sepia-tone photographs hang in the gallery. She sold enough to supplement working at the shirt factory, and later, when the shirt factory closed, she worked part-time at the public library. Not that she absolutely needed the money—Joe Bosko made sure of that. But she loved the work routines. Now she crumbles from within. Crumbling bones will be her demise.

She had an affair with a much older man years ago. Her last affair. She was a month shy of forty, a single mother with a six-year-old, in a green-card marriage, and he was a man who worked at a photography store in Cumberland. A developer of film, when she came in to buy supplies he would emerge from the darkroom as if he’d just woken up, blinking and blinking; they had talked a little, enough for her to know that he went to a Zen meditation group, a novelty in those days, but she suspects that now there are Zen meditation groups in almost every scruffy small town. How did he know that she was in the store? Perhaps the woman who worked the front alerted him. One thing led to another and before long she was spending one night a week in his apartment over the store. For decades, Tansy residents have come in handy as babysitters. What she remembers most of the time she spent with him is feeling free. Free to walk around the room at least half-naked. Free to let him know what she wanted. Once, she asked him about the difference between being his age and being her age. He said, “I live in memory more.”

That was sixty years ago. And now she lives in memory, too. Memory like a museum. Fusty. Bestrewn with YouTube videos.

HER GRANDSON NORMAN TELLS HER that she’s a super-centenarian. At one time, before she got pregnant with Norman’s mother, she might have been called a spinster. Norman’s wife Lulu decides that she’s more a thornback. Thornbacks, she says, are powerful women who never marry, as if her marriage of convenience to Mike Bosko never happened. As if pretending to get married when the war in Europe ended, that windy night on the beach in Queensland, never happened. Spinster connotes a dried-up woman with no memory of walking naked around the room in front of her lover, someone with a rosary in her lap and a penchant for African violets. “I see you with a thornback tat,” Lulu teases, “if you were the tat sort.” Roxy suspects that Lulu herself rues the day she married Norman. Marriage has a way of diminishing some women. Decades ago she might have said most women, but she has learned to temper her pronouncements. Lulu calls before six in the morning. They are friends, as well as in-laws, and they long ago established that it’s okay to call anytime. Roxy has been up before the birds. “Change, change,” Lulu says, “is in the air.” There’s a spurt of excitement in Roxy’s veins when she realizes that Lulu is coming to see her without Norman. Norman makes everything about himself. He bosses Lulu and the children. He talks about his art, his sales. He’s told her three times that the mayor of Harpers Ferry purchased one of his paintings. This is clearly to justify gouging her for money for art supplies. But when Lulu comes alone, or with the children, anything could happen.

There might be dancing. The hokey pokey. Laughter. Confidences that expose Roxy and Lulu to a raw intimacy. A miracle, at her age. They have told each other about the first time they had sex, about their most humiliating moments. Roxy has seen Lulu’s stretch marks like zebra stripes across her tanned belly and breasts. Once a year Lulu checks Roxy over, all over, for moles, to determine whether she needs a visit to the dermatologist.

The baby on her hip, Lulu rushes into the back-house, wearing a magenta scarf around her forehead: she always manages to impart an earthy—dare Roxy use the word tribal?—fashion sense. How does she know that Lulu might not be contented with Norman? She conveys this with glances that sweep toward Roxy under Norman’s radar. She loves her to pieces, as people used to say. Sometimes she’s not sure if what people used to say is common anymore. Surely no one says, “Hold your horses,” but Roxy finds it right on the tip of her tongue. It’s odd to be over one hundred years old and still functioning in this different world. She doesn’t want to say the wrong thing. She wants to use the right pronouns. She doesn’t want to be scorned or laughed at, even now. She doesn’t want to hurt anyone. She wants to keep those secrets coming.

Lately, she rehearses begging Lulu not to leave Norman and move back to West Virginia where her mama has a bed-and-cocktail, she calls it, in a former mining town. Lulu’s mama was a miner, one of the first women miners. Lulu was supposedly conceived in the mine; it’s her mama’s personal legend. Her arm was chewed up in an accident and she quit mining to run the bed-and-cocktail. Lulu probably feels as if her life story is slight compared to her mama’s; that may be why she dresses in outlandish clothes; that may be why she curses a blue streak. To take up space. The name of the mining town sometimes falls behind the wall in Roxy’s brain. The wall is freckled with straw. She loses the names of the simplest things back there—an egg-beater, an antihistamine. Or the name of a neighbor or a flower. She never tells anyone about the wall. Roxy doesn’t know when she’d ever see Lulu again if she went home to her mama, and Lulu and the children are her lifeline to the larger world, her salve, her joie de vivre. Sometimes she realizes she has said this thing out loud to Lulu one way or the other. Don’t leave the area without telling me first. What would I do without you?

The pregnancy test is in the pocket of Lulu’s dress. She pats the pocket tentatively, as if testing an iron for heat. Then she lifts out the test and shakes the box so that her bracelets rattle, like a shaman. She hands Roxy the baby—they call her Toots—and goes into the bathroom. She has dropped the boy, Nate, at kindergarten, only a block away. The baby squirms to get down; she’s ready to be on her own already, grinning and squeezing the corduroy of the sofa cushion tight until she’s stable on her plump legs. Then she pivots and plops to the floor. She accepts it. Roxy can see her deciding that crawling will suffice. She scrambles to a trio of pots and lids left out on the floor just for her. Lulu wails in the bathroom, and Toots bangs a lid on a pot. Lulu wails as if something heavy had fallen on her; she wails as if for help. She wails as if for her mama.

LULU LIKES TO CHANGE UP ROXY’S MUSIC. It keeps you young, she says. On YouTube she finds grainy clips (she calls them) of young people dancing to Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey; the dancers appear nearly boneless, confident, the men flipping the girls over their backs, the girls flipping their skirts. They wore ankle socks with sensible shoes. The music clears away the cobwebs and memories emerge more fully formed. “Ain’t She Sweet”—a favorite. “Ain’t She Sweet” takes her back to Aunt Marsha, a teacher in a country town north of Sydney. Teachers were supposed to conform to common-denominator decorum laid down by Scots-Irish congregations. But after their meager tea, Aunt Marsha would find a staticky radio station that played popular music for twenty minutes every evening except Sunday. They didn’t have a rug to roll up. They danced on the worn lino. It was plain as plain could be. The cheapest. Big cabbage roses. They would dance until they were out of breath. Then Aunt Marsha would make her a hot cocoa and pour herself an inch of whiskey from a bottle she kept among the cleaning supplies behind the curtain under the sink.

Aunt Marsha taught her that women could drink and dance and still hold their heads up high.

IN 1915 ROXY MCAULIFFE WAS BORN on a sheep station in New South Wales so remote that at first her mother was her teacher. After a few years, they sent her to live with Aunt Marsha, her mother’s sister, a girl teacher, untrained, but she knew enough to get them through long division and Charles Dickens. Roxy longed for secretarial school and moved to Sydney as soon as they would let her. That’s where she was living when her mother wrote to her, enclosing a black-and-white photograph, to say that her father had no choice but to kill his sheep. In the Depression there was no market for wool. In the photograph he’s sitting in the dim kitchen, his knees splayed out, his khaki pants and flannelette shirt splattered with sheep’s blood. They had dug a trench for burial, backed truck after truck full of sheep near the trench, and he had shot them one by one as they came off the tailgate. This went on for one long day. He hadn’t the awareness to know that her mother was photographing him. She had an urge to photograph workers. A station hand from Spain had set up a makeshift darkroom in a root cellar and shown her how to develop her own prints. He went off and forgot one of his cameras and her mother claimed it for herself. Now Roxy realizes that the station hand must have given her mother the camera, but such a gift might have been suspect at the time. Her “minnie” she called the camera. Miniature. Workers—station hands, horse trainers—were the people of her world. In the photo, Roxy’s father was stunned, a handkerchief to his sweaty face, weeping.

In that same letter, her mother sent her money to buy a camera. “Your life will surprise you,” she wrote. “Keep a record of it.”

All her life Roxy has photographed the natural world, but she has never grown accustomed to the puffy green mountains of Appalachia, her home since 1945. Recollections of the sheep station in New South Wales still occupy her, the curving hills, the gum trees, their medicinal scent in the dewy morning air, the windmill and its creak, the maggies chattering harshly to each other, a gargle deep in their shiny black throats. You get imprinted with images from babyhood. Most people long to re-turn to childish astonishment. That’s her theory, anyway. If they still have their wits about them, super-centenarians have loads of theories. Once Roxy found her way to Maryland, she rarely thought of leaving. Australia is so far.

She had enlisted in the Australian Women’s Army Service on May 11, 1943, at Neutral Bay. Her rank was gunner. The girls who didn’t go into the service probably regretted it. It was the grandest time. Stationed at Townsville, she lucked into a job driving a CO around and running errands. Freedom was hers, to a certain extent. That’s how she met Leo Bosko, a Yank. She was told to fetch him and bring him to the site of a radio signal meeting between Aussies and Yanks. From that day onward, they had a special feeling for each other. They recognized each other from afar the next day, and the next. They held hands when they could, until they had a private walk along The Strand, where they declared themselves sweethearts. That’s how she thought of it. The other girls razzed her without mercy. All the Australian girls wanted Yanks. They were a novelty. Roxy hadn’t even wanted one, yet there was Leo, young, only twenty-two, strong, handsome, with black hair and dimples when he smiled. Wondrous lost inhibition comes with love, if you’re fortunate, and lost inhibition is what she recalls of being with Leo. They would walk away from war. The coastal sunset would be broken up with gunmetal clouds crusted in orange. They discovered an old fish camp—a lean-to—near an estuary. Evening after evening, when they could arrange to be away, they added to the comfort there. An army green blanket. A lumpen feather pillow. A bedsheet. An ammo box containing a bottle of Bundy that scorched her chest going down.

I’LL BE SEEING YOU in all the old familiar places that this heart of mine embraces all day through all day through all day through. “Who is that,” she says to Lulu. The name has slipped behind the wall. A void she doesn’t want to fall into.

“Norah Jones. You remember Norah Jones. We’ve listened to this before.”

There is a neighbor, an old man, an elderly man, Lulu corrects her, who comes to her screen door and leans on his walker and listens. He is the kind of man who still takes care of him-self. Lulu says that he probably uses a little battery-operated thingamajig to clip his nose hairs. He keeps his shoes polished, the lenses of his spectacles clean. The old man is alone in the alley of his life. And she is alone in the back-house of her life. Never again would she fall in love, travel long distances, live among a boisterous gaggle of women. Oh, the women of the Tansy come one by one to see her, taking turns bringing her supper every night. The back-house isn’t meant for a crowd. She has a single bed, a television, a loveseat, and the tiniest bath-room imaginable, with just enough room for her and her walker. She still wipes herself, but she needs help to take a shower. She never wants to become the sort of old lady who forgets how good it feels to be clean.

Her realm has shrunk, no getting around that. It started when she was seventy-six and continued apace ever since, until one night at the kitchen table she told them that she needed to move to the back-house where Lulu could drive right up to the door on the alley when she took her out.

Lulu says that the old man has a crush on her. That is the last thing she wants, a man sleeping over, taking up room in the already-too-small bed, pissing in her bathroom, dribbling it on the rim, leaving up the toilet seat. Oh, there are geriatric couples in Whistle Pig. Lulu says they are adorbs. “My ass,” Roxy thinks.

In fact, when she still lived in the Tansy, she never liked for a man to use the bathroom. If one did, a guest, a workman, who-ever, she would grab a pail of cleaning supplies and hustle to the bathroom he had used and wipe everything down. Children, boy children, had to be accepted, but grown men—never.

Sometimes Lulu takes her to the senior center where there is a social director. She likes game night, playing double rummy, placing silly bets, macaroni pieces. They don’t trust them to use real money. When the social director gathers everyone together to bat a balloon around a tabletop with pool noodles, a game for idiots, Roxy asks for Lulu and she comes to fetch her. The social director is one of those women for whom holiday decorations are necessary. For Halloween she puts up door-size posters of ghouls with witchy hair and open toothless mouths. A life-size skeleton of plastic bones hangs just close enough to the dining room door that almost everyone rattles it coming to lunch. “It seems insensitive,” Lulu says. So many elders, so close to dying. But Lulu is quick to say, “Oh, not you, Rox. You’re spunky.”

Lulu searches her iPad for “In the Mood.” Never felt so happy so fully alive, jammin’ jumpin’ is a powerful jive. Oh, they were always in the mood.

Lulu bestows a seductive smile upon her to let her know that she understands being in the mood. As if Roxy couldn’t tell. She’s had two babies and there’s another on the way.

When Toots falls asleep at the breast, Lulu says, “I. Just. Can’t.”

“What goes through your mind when you think about it?” “Norman. He’ll own me.”

Roxy keeps this thought to herself: she never imagined she and Norman would ever be on the same side, wanting to keep Lulu restrained.

ROXY AND LEO WERE STATIONED in Townsville on the northeast coast of Australia, a town attacked three times by the Japanese. Still, life has a way of going on, Leo would tell Roxy. They couldn’t—shouldn’t—put things on hold.

During the war, Ella Flynn had come out to Townsville to help her daughter care for her deaf boy. The daughter worked in a pub and Ella stayed with the boy, who was four years old. They were waiting until they had the money to send him away to Brisbane to a school for the deaf. They had two coffee cans, one for the money and one in which they accumulated bacon grease for future use. Ella was in her sixties and her life had taken the sort of turns that made her wish ill on people. Some people triumphed over circumstance by singing hymns while they worked or by saying the rosary. Others, like Ella Flynn, have a homing instinct for occasions to hurt others. She longed to correct all their faults and mistakes; she thought people in general were liars and cheats. She had gone to Catholic school at a time when the nuns were repressed and taught meanness themselves. It’s different now; then, certain women did not question instruction to be stingy with affection and delight. But she could put on a good front, especially to make money. A seamstress, during her apprenticeship in Brisbane she had acquired a papier-mâché and plaster mannequin. It could be adjusted to the proportions of any client, within reason. Ella had coated the sections with casein glue. She paid a digger to haul it to Townsville and she determined to make dresses for the girls who were stationed there. Roxy learned all this over time. Ella Flynn was a talker once you got her started.

In 1944 dress material was in short supply. She had brought old dresses from Brisbane that she painstakingly ripped the seams from, washed, ironed, and folded into sheaves of what she told clients was like-new chiffon, gingham, and silk. “Like new, like new,” she would repeat. A booklet she’d gotten from a sewing machine company gave instructions on how to turn men’s suits into women’s suits. Before she left Brisbane, she went around to houses where she knew men had lived who died in the war and she offered to buy the old clothes. She practiced and knew how to take a boxy tuxedo jacket and make it trim and fitted for a woman. And some of the girls had people in the States who sent them material for dresses. “It’s quality,” she would say of her own material, hoping to sell them more than one item. “Ah, ye want quality, don’t ye?” The girls craved something new. They would go to dances with the Yanks or to the picture shows. Some of them were military. Some were civilians and worked during the day at the pink stucco Stafford Hotel, which had become the Australian Officer’s Club. At night they went out in their new dresses and flirted with the Yanks and Ella Flynn did not approve. But she wanted the money.

Leo’s mother had sent Roxy three yards of dress material purchased at Rosenbaum Brothers Department Store in Cumberland, Maryland, over 9,000 miles away. Sometimes, even now, if Norman takes her out to cash her monthly check, Roxy likes to go by what used to be the magnificent Rosenbaum Department Store, with its red sandstone facade and lion’s head medallions. Her entire life seems to have started there, unbeknownst to her, when Leo’s mother Marge went to the basement level and purchased three yards of fabric.

Roxy had heard about Ella Flynn from her daughter who worked at the Everyman and Everywoman. Leo and Roxy would go there for a cup of tea on the rooftop terrace. They might have been to the show and then played table-tennis at the Y and then to the Everyman and Everywoman. They made the tea strong and there would usually be a little sugar. Someone might have a bottle of native rum and Leo might prefer that, in Coke. Ella Flynn’s daughter overheard them discussing the dress material and said, “My mum can make a dress for you. She’s good at it.” She gave directions to her house.

Roxy walked out The Strand, the beach, way past their trysting spot, to where the walkway ended and the footpath began, in her regulation Army shoes, with their regulation one-inch heels. Her ankle socks slipped down and sand got in her shoes. She shaded her eyes with one hand. Sunlight glittered on the sand and on the sea. It beat down on her. Lunch hour was not the best time to be walking in the sun, but she wanted a new dress to wear for Leo. She carried a canvas haversack with the flowered rayon material inside. Sprigs of violets on a butter-yellow background. In the barracks, the night before, the girls had played “You Made Me Love You” over and over. Surrendering to love was something they teased each other about. Lots of girls had decided to stay in Sydney. Their lives sounded drab. The girls who enlisted were having the time of their lives, and Roxy was old enough to know it. She was thirty, older than most of the other girls, older, but not wiser, for she had fallen in love with a much younger Yank.

Ella Flynn the seamstress and her daughter had rescued a ramshackle building left by an evacuee when Japan attacked. A section of the exterior still bore the sooty smears of a guinea grass fire. They made it into a makeshift home with a rustic charm, the door painted light coral and set amidst palm trees against a stony outcrop: one room with bunk beds for the boy and his mother and a rollaway cot acquired from a hotel for Ella Flynn. An electrical wire that might have been illegal hung low behind the house. With one hip, Ella Flynn propped open the screen door and said, “So I hear ye got some dress material, lucky gal.”

Roxy said yes and went inside with relief. Ella Flynn offered her a glass of water, which she accepted. Shutters were closed against the sunlight; a table fan with one blade missing whirred on a windowsill. On the card table where they apparently took their meals was a lazy Susan and on it was a jar of honey and a few slim bottles of condiments, some of which Roxy had not seen since 1941. The place smelled of wet wool like a wet dog. The wringer washer chugged at the sink and nearby lay piles of men’s wool suits. Dead men’s suits. The boy was still in his pajamas, with oatmeal smeared on his chin and his red hair, red like his mother’s, sticking up in back like a rooster’s comb. Ella Flynn said, “We’re saving money to send him to Brisbane to the deaf school.” That gave her a virtuous sheen. It said to Roxy that the money she spent on the dress would go to a good cause.

Ella Flynn had a treadle Singer sewing machine. An entire dining room table had been given over to the dressmaking: pinking shears and shoeboxes of thread and rickrack, patterns, a palm-size gingham pincushion in the shape of a rabbit. Ella Flynn told her about going around Brisbane to acquire the suits of dead men for a song. She had tuxedos of black wool flannel and gabardine business suits.

Roxy tugged the material from the haversack. It was still wrapped in the brown paper Leo’s mother had mailed it in, her return address in the corner. She was not aware of Ella Flynn intentionally memorizing the address. It might have been sim-ply that she had a very good memory. She had excelled in school because of that. She might have felt a little guilty. When Roxy commented on her little shrine to the Virgin Mary, she felt a need to tell her that she had the highest average in religion in her 8th grade class. Her memory made her a good seamstress, for she could go into a shop and try on a dress and eyeball the seams and darts and walk out knowing exactly how the dress was constructed. She would go home, make some notes to her-self, and then she would sew up a dress exactly like the one in the shop. It was her gift.

She said, “She must like you quite a lot to send material.”

“They’re close,” Roxy said, meaning Leo and his mother. “So will ye marry the Yank?”

“I don’t know about that.”

Then Ella discreetly pulled back a curtain over a tier of shelves. She took out a box of tea. Roxy glanced away, but not before spying can after blue can of Bully Beef from Adelaide and stacks of Arnott’s Sweet Biscuits. Her mouth watered at the thought of the sugar filling and the delicate wafers. So Ella was black-market. So much the better, she thought at the time. Ella had the spirit to take care of her own, in any way she could. There was no man around, and from what Roxy had seen of the daughter, a pitted-faced redhead with rotting teeth and come-hither glances, there would not be any man around for long. They would come and go. She could see all that in a glance.

Later, Roxy heard that the black-market goods were acquired by the daughter, whose waitressing job was a front for her presence at a bordello that served Yanks. She didn’t want to get involved. She refused tea and said that she only wanted to pick out her pattern, be measured, and go. She was to meet Leo at the Y. She told Ella Flynn this.

She stripped out of her uniform so that Ella Flynn might measure her.

Tape measure in hand, Ella Flynn said, “How old’s your Yank?”

Mostly a good Catholic girl, Roxy told the truth. “He’s twenty-two.”

Later, she imagined that Ella Flynn brooded over this. Her own daughter was twenty-two. Why wasn’t this Yank with the likes of her? She might have imagined her daughter marrying a Yank, moving to the States, the boy in a deaf school there, her-self with a dressmaker’s shop of her own. She wondered how she could transport the tailor’s mannequin to the States. There had to be a way. She probably brooded and took out her dressmaker’s notebook and wrote down what she’d memorized: Mrs. Marge Bosko, 310 South 3rd Street, Cumberland, Maryland. USA. “Not serious, are ye?” she had said to Roxy, while she stood on a chair in her cotton slip. “A fellow so young.”

“It’s wartime, Mrs. Flynn. Who knows?” “I would think not.”

Later, Roxy considered her remarks, as she dressed for the show. She dabbed on the Coty lipstick his mother had sent, a color like eggplant, not her color, but she was grateful to have a new lipstick. She had sent presents to his mother. Books about Fiji and the Aborigines. A boomerang. Leo wanted to marry her, but she sensed that there would be trouble later on, be-cause of their age difference. She couldn’t imagine it—being fifty when he would be forty-two. Fifty and past the change. Fifty and possibly arthritic, the way her own mother was. Or fat. But she could not imagine being fat. Lulu tells her that fat is not an acceptable word now. She will try not to use it again. She was compact, with legs that Leo said were great in shorts. And other fellows had said that she had beautiful eyes. Leo al-ways said they were magnets. Magnets for him. That’s what she thought about, getting ready for the show, his coaxing voice that had probably never said such things to a girl before. There was a special thrill because it was all new to him. Sometimes she thought, Why shouldn’t I be happy? Why shouldn’t we get married? When she tells Lulu this, Lulu says not to say girl.

The day the war in Europe ended, Leo received word that he would ship out to Manila within twenty-four hours. He had trounced the chaplain at poker and went to the chaplain and offered to return all of his money if the chaplain would marry them on the spot. This was against all rules. They were sup-posed to have waited six months, and permission was needed from their commanding officers. But the chaplain, a wizened man with smoke-stained teeth and a boozer’s red nose, grabbed at the chance to get his money back. Leo Bosko and Roxy McAuliffe were married near dark, down on the beach, in a high wind. She wore the butter-yellow dress. Leo placed a ring on her finger that he had purchased at a trash-and-treasure market. The ring fit his little finger; it nearly fit her ring finger. It would have to do. “Don’t we have papers to sign?” she said to the chap-lain. He would get the papers to them. What they had done was illegal and severe military disciplinary action was threatened if you married without permission and without the cooling off period. This deepened her casual willingness to break rules. What she felt for Leo occupied her beyond the rational ability to make clear-headed decisions. Most rules have seemed arbitrary to her ever since. Leo shoved a wad of Australian bills into the chaplain’s hands. Their one witness, a nurse she’d befriended early on who felt she owed her, skedaddled back to the barracks. A storm was brewing.

The bottom fell out of Roxy’s world. They had spent fourteen months together. He was in Manila; she thought of going back to Sydney, to be near cousins. But the military did not see fit to accommodate her. Admiral Nimitz said that if the Emperor Hirohito’s palace should be bombed, he hoped they would spare the Emperor’s white horse. The admiral wanted a victory lap riding that white horse. The higher-ups had plans that did not include people like her.

“We’re married,” Leo said, in his letters from Manila. The letters were written in pencil. He had gone to Catholic school and had lovely handwriting. “In our hearts we’re married.” Once Japan surrendered, there were no more letters.

He did not know that she was carrying Lily, Norman’s moth-er. Leo went home to Cumberland; he married someone else, spur-of-the-moment, possibly on a bender, when they’d gone to the tracks for a good time, a girl he’d known growing up on the south side, where his mother and father owned a corner grocery and lived upstairs. His mother died around the same time. Roxy knew all this because Leo’s father—Mike Bosko—picked up their correspondence. When she told him that she was pregnant, he was determined that she would be on that war-bride ship. She couldn’t bear to tell her parents. They had grown taciturn and sorrowful during the Depression. Her mother had repeatedly said that if she were to get in trouble she would disown her and never speak to her again. And she cleaved to that. She never visited Roxy in the United States; she never expressed interest in Lily. Some people have backbone laced with toxic stubbornness. Mike Bosko wasn’t about to give up his first-born grandchild just because Leo had gone off half-cocked, he said, and married someone else. He did not approve of the girl Leo had married; her family was Evangelical United Brethren and Republican. Mike was Catholic and a lifelong Democrat, a near Socialist, a union man, although he hadn’t belonged to a union since he was young. Mike said that Leo’s mother had gotten to Leo and convinced him Roxy wasn’t right for him. An old maid. Their babies might be deformed in some way because she was so old. Ella Flynn had written to her about their age difference and that mattered to Marge Bosko.

The sea voyage was rough and seemed endless. Her roomie—a girl from Perth, engaged to a submarine repairman from Oregon—struck up a flirtation with a sailor and at night Roxy had to listen to them under the coarse manchester. Decorum flew out the window. Girls had dysentery. They traveled in a malodorous haze. She finally slept on deck, among the women who cradled their babies in their arms; she clung to a quart jar of drinking water. She was desperate for drinking water.

She had disembarked the war bride ship in Los Angeles and was immediately shuttled onto a passenger train to Washing-ton, D. C., where she waited almost twenty-four hours in Union Station, that vast, gray terminal. Once or twice she went out through the front doors to the fountain. How she wanted to sit on the edge of the fountain with her sore feet in the cool water. But she was keenly aware of being in a new country. She was confused, dehydrated, and longed for her mother.

Mother. She was to be a mother. A mother with no father for her child.

Mike Bosko met her train in Cumberland on a humid fall morning. He had a nest egg. That’s what she thought at the time. She had never heard the words embezzlement or racketeering spoken out loud. She didn’t connect those words to the Arnott’s Sweet Biscuits in Ella Flynn’s cupboard. She got to know Leo’s father pretty well. He was single, a man who slapped on after-shave daily, a man who liked to play the ponies, a man who said the rosary a few times for the repose of his wife’s soul, and then he got on with things. And what he got on with was marrying Roxy. It was a formality. For her green card. It never occurred to her that he had a secret reason for putting the decrepit Tansy Hotel in her name and her name only. At that time most women did not own property. Most women could not secure loans from banks. The employment ads in the newspaper were divided strictly into Help Wanted Men and Help Wanted Women. In these early days she never had to apply for a job. She never had to file taxes. Mike Bosko took care of all that. As Lulu might say, her life was on the down-low.

Whatever red tape had to be done away with, Mike would have a friend in a high place to take care of it. Once in a while, she would wonder about those marriage papers the chaplain in Townsville had promised that windy night. But he’d been reassigned to Manila. Leo was in Baltimore, with his new wife and his children, all born-again, baptized in a river. His father-in-law had set him up in a blacktop business that sounded surprisingly lucrative.

And Mike, although he passed away twenty years ago, has looked after her. He left money—cash money—hidden in the cellar of the Tansy in a fireproof box and money in the bank. And he never laid a hand on her. In return, she let him visit with Lily, take her to Mass on Sunday and to a horse farm for pony rides, and buy her fancy dresses that she often dragged through the mud or ripped on a fence. When she was seventeen, he gave her the money to backpack around Europe with friends. He paid her college tuition. In return, Roxy minded the store when he made frequent trips out of town on business. He’d send a car for her, a salt-rusted De Soto from before the war. She never questioned it. Now she knows he was part of a slot-machine ring. And beneath the slots were other murky sources of income. Young women were probably involved. Route 301 was the main artery before the interstate came in. Tourists, truckers, ne’er-do-wells, anyone passing through might have contributed to her upkeep. Mike had shortcomings; he wasn’t troubled by using the women to his own ends. They never talked about it directly, only obliquely. Mike needed to confess, the way he might to a wife. Toward the end of his life he would come late at night and she would go out and sit in the car with him, in the greenish light of the dashboard, sipping bourbon from a pint bottle, and she would listen hard and gather all Mike’s secrets to her heart. At first Roxy had daydreamed that Leo might show up at the grocery when she was minding it for his father. Now she can’t even remember the address of the grocery. Their eyes might have locked in a meaningful way. There wouldn’t have been greasy teenage boys hunching over the pinball machines in the side room behind a beaded curtain. Leo might have desperately reached around and untied her white butcher’s apron and tossed it aside. They might have turned the CLOSED sign to face the street and had sex in the back room, among the stock. The odor back there was vinegary and sweet. There were wooden mouse traps smeared with peanut butter in the corners. But Leo never came to Cumberland, so far as she knew. Mike went to Baltimore to play the ponies; he saw his other grandchildren then. And after that one older man, she lost interest in sex. It was too messy. Too fraught.

LULU KNEELS ON THE FLOOR changing the baby’s diaper. The baby tugs at her braids that hang straight down as if meant to be tugged. Her body and the baby’s body are one. Roxy thinks of those women with dysentery on the war-bride ship. The way, after a certain point in a woman’s life, her days and nights are partly about cleaning up shit and semen and vomit and blood.

Like a swoon, a gentle dying, Roxy’s nap comes begging. She pinches her upper arm to stay awake.

The Tansy was nearly falling down when Mike moved her into it. Whistle Pig is about sixteen miles from Cumberland and that seemed a long way in 1945. Now, it’s not. People speed around the mountains at all hours of the day and night. And soon, she’s told, there will be driverless cars. She doesn’t trust that one iota.

Lulu grins sheepishly. She says, “It’s not his.”

Ah, a secret. An outsized secret. Currency. Currency she might spend.

“But you want it,” Roxy says. How she tries to keep her voice neutral. If Lulu knew how much she depends on her and the children to keep her alive she might vamoose.

Lulu opens her iPad to swing dancers at the Denver airport. A flash mob, she calls it. She props up her iPad on the coffee ta-ble and snugs up close beside Roxy. She wraps her arms around her, making little bounce-dance moves, while Toots crawls back to the cooking pots. Roxy loves the girl in the video with long orange hair. She has faith in all the young people. Lulu does not hesitate to hug her, touch her. It’s something they don’t tell you about old age, cronehood, thornbackishness—people stop touching you.

“I want to be free. I don’t want to be tethered to love.”

Roxy thinks, That ship has sailed, honey. You’ve got babies.

But she says, “My suite’s empty. In the big house.” “Norman would kill me,” Lulu whispers.

Norman could hold a grudge for life. Roxy herself no doubt has a short life, so let him. Lulu will be her very own. She whispers back, “He’s never wanted for a woman long.”

The old man sidles into view beyond the screen door. She hasn’t admitted to Lulu that she knows who he is. At the Senior Center he, too, departs when they start with the pool noodles. He’s wearing a baby blue cardigan; his knuckles are gnarly on the walker handles; he keeps time with the swing dancers by tapping one foot.

His presence reminds her of the time she met Albert Einstein at the lake. Mike Bosko had taken her and Lily up there for a holiday. Lily was still a baby; Mike had asked the resort clerk if she were free to babysit after her shift. People did these things then, left their babies in the care of strangers in exchange for a few hours of freedom. They went to a party at a log cabin. It was early fall and chilly at that altitude. Mr. Einstein had asked her if she wanted to go for a walk and she said yes. Outside they did not walk farther than a half-hidden stoop on the side of the cabin. Piles of dry leaves had pitched up there. Mr. Einstein said, “This seems inviting,” and he made a little bow and thrust out one arm to encourage her to sit down. She hadn’t thought of him in such a long time. It was 1947. People were beginning to feel optimistic about the war being over. It was a time in her life when she still wanted the attention of men. Lulu hasn’t burned herself out yet. She changes her earrings every day. She doesn’t walk; she sashays. In spite of breastfeeding Toots, another man, not her husband, has gotten his hooks into her, and she’s pregnant. She has a low-key flirtatious manner, even with the man who sells lamb chops at the farmer’s market. At times like that Roxy fades into the background, almost as if they had agreed to it. After flirting with Mr. Einstein and the affair when she was almost forty with the man at the camera shop, Roxy had felt burned out. Back in that time women didn’t always want to keep on. It was work, the fragile dresses, the girdles, the Toni home permanents, the nail polish, the nylon stockings and garter belts. Mr. Einstein had taken off his cardigan and draped it around her goose-pimpled shoulders. She had felt an erotic twinge because of his kindness. He was old; she had thought of herself as getting old.

“I thought you wanted to learn to play the banjo,” Roxy says to Lulu. “I’ll give you one for your birthday.”

That’s all it takes.

In this way they decide that Lulu will join the others, the women of Tansy. All the ramshackle spaces are supposed to be reserved for women artists, and right now Lulu is making babies. Over the years, the women of Tansy have had babies. But life is long. As Lulu might say, “It’s early days.” Some night when she’s exhausted from nursing Baby #3 back to sleep, she might have an idea. A creative worm. Turning the compost of her disparate thoughts. Lulu, Lulu, Roxy silently petitions. The day I die I hope you’re finding me a flash mob and pouring me a glass of red wine. What’re friends for?

-Patricia Henley