Sanibel Scribbles (5 page)

Vicki shut the freezer lid and plunged the silver scoop into the well, splashing herself. She laughed, then nearly cried thinking of all the times her father used to shake water at her as they worked side by side. She looked around. No one was watching. She pulled two thumbtacks off the board behind her and stuffed the label that read “peppermint” under her shirt. Her mother had once painted each of the flavor labels by hand. She peeked under the wooden counter holding the cash register. Good, her family’s scribbles still marked the wood. One night they had written silly little notes on the counter, as if marking their territory. Scribbling down dreams was a family tradition. The scrawl in blue magic marker she immediately recognized was her own ten-year-old handwriting:
Scoop Ice Cream Forever!
She shook her head, realizing how much her goals at ten had changed to become her current goals. She couldn’t dip anymore. Her life there was no more.

Pulling napkins out of the silver holder, she felt sticky fingerprints all over it. Vicki had never let that thing get dirty. No, the napkin holders in her parent’s shop never stayed sticky for long, not when she worked there. Just then, she glanced out the window and spotted a shapely pair of female mannequin legs hanging from a second-story window of the boutique across the street, and she laughed at the ploy to lure shoppers. Only in Saugatuck!

Then the bus slowly turning the corner caught her eye. It couldn’t go without her. In a panic, she darted out the door, never leaving a dime behind for her cone and ran toward the bus, screaming, “Wait for me!”

The bus stopped, and when she caught up to it she clambered up its entry steps. The bus driver grinned at her, but she was too out of breath from running to reproach him. She reclaimed her seat by the window as
the bus rolled forward again, and glanced back at the ice cream parlor falling behind, suddenly remembering she hadn’t paid for her cone. Somehow guilt evaded her. In her mind, she had done the boy’s job for him. She had earned it. Melancholy seized her. She had worked there for years. Where would she work now? How could she possibly work anywhere else for the summer? Just about every summer of her life she had spent scooping in that pink shop.

The bus continued past the area where she grew up, and she could picture her home, standing right next to the Red Barn Playhouse. Every morning she would wake to the sound of actors singing and rehearsing for plays such as
The King and I
, or
Camelot
. The house was so perfectly and acoustically situated next to the theater that she didn’t need a stereo. There was always music in the summer when the windows were open. It was a happy house, but now she pictured it weeping. Yes, she decided, houses could weep. She imagined yellow and green paint running down the shutters as the new owners desperately painted over it with the ugly white they chose. The house hated the face-lift. This she knew. She wanted to break into the warehouse where everything her family owned was stored away temporarily and tear open the boxes. She worried about the geographic scattering of the American family and the evaporation of hometowns. If only she could become a hermit crab, carrying her home with her, switching shells only as she grew and needed to switch shells.

Eyeing ducks flying north through her window, she became caught up in the irony. Who heads south in the spring? Her trip south seemed like a defiance of nature, of everything seasonal. She closed her eyes. Her head slumped forward until it rested against the cold, misty-morning glass of the window. With each bump, her forehead banged against the pane. She liked the bumps. The repetitive thumping seemed to replace the pain of leaving everything comfortable behind.

Gazing out the bus window, she didn’t want to leave. She felt like a potted plant turned upside down and getting hit. She wasn’t ready to be repotted. There was still room to grow right here. She’d rather sit outside the local bakery on Butler Street early in the morning and read the paper with the other locals. Then again, with the businesses sold and her parents
gone, she could no longer classify herself as a local.

She watched Saugatuck, with its mammoth, rolling dunes to the west and the rich hues of the orchard country to the east grow smaller. She noticed her memories growing larger as she left behind the place where she grew up, the place she called home. Just a half a mile south, the bus entered the village of Douglas, and she caught a glimpse of the S.S.
Keewatin
, a passenger steamship that once sailed the Great Lakes, before it became a floating maritime museum. She longed to stay anchored there with the Keewatin.

She didn’t want to leave the Great Lake State, the eleventh largest in the country. She loved Michigan. The Great Lakes formed most of its boundaries to the east, while Ohio and Indiana bordered the south and Wisconsin bound the west. She didn’t want to leave her hometown. It was like a mitten on the map. The mitten felt cozy and comfortable to her now. She didn’t feel like taking it off.

Should she have stayed? Should she have talked longer with Rebecca’s mother? Would there be a funeral? Of course there would be, and she would miss it. She had no choice, like a dislodged plant. She had a flight to catch in Chicago. If she could have hopped into the ice cream freezer and numbed herself for a few hours, she would have.

As she boarded the plane, she imagined the way her good-bye with Rebecca was supposed to have happened.

“Hey, I want you to do something,” Rebecca would have said, standing in the gate area. “I want you to give me that good-bye wave sort of thing you said your grandmother always did.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It was the last thing I saw her do before she died.”

“Please,
por favor
. Give me your grandmother’s good-bye.”

“Okay. Here it goes.”

Vicki would turn her back to her friend, kiss her forefingers, extend her arm backward and wiggle her fingers. Just like Grandma, she would never look back, since that would break the rules of the backward good-bye wave. Her tears dripped shamelessly like drops of melting ice cream as she walked down the long hallway, not looking back, as if doing so might
turn her into stone.

On the flight to Florida, she pulled her credit card out of her purse and picked up the phone attached to the seat in front of her. She would call Till Midnight to see if someone had saved the tablecloth with the scribbles on it. How ridiculous! She chided herself, especially with all the chocolate stains. No doubt the waiter had dumped it. She put the phone back.

She opened her purse and pulled out an envelope addressed to a woman living on Sanibel Island in Florida. Vicki had kept this particular letter in her purse for months now and didn’t know what else to do with it, so she flipped the long letter over and started writing on the back.

Dear Grandma
,

You once told me that the letters I wrote kept you up late at night, more so than any of the books in your paperback collection. You said my lengthy, embellished letters added spice to your life and that they kept you going. Well, I wish you had been more patient because my last letter simply got lost in the mail without a stamp. You should have waited a couple more days, and it would have arrived
.

I promise to keep you going. That’s why I’m writing, to keep both you and me going
.

You won’t believe this story! A twenty-one year old and a seventy-four year old, both full of life, both now dead from attacks in their sleep just a couple of months apart. My mind watches reruns over and over again-episodes of the younger one, and of the older one. In my imagination, I talk to them both as if they’re still alive, and they talk to me
.

I can hear the one named Rebecca warning me that we spend half of life counting down to a long-awaited event, and the other half looking
back, remembering. I hear the feisty grandmother reminding me not to worry about things I cannot control. I got so upset that time I visited you on Sanibel, and it rained every day. Now I’d give anything for a rain-spent day inside with you, Grandma. No, we cannot control rain or death. I guess this all means there will be no more summer nights of eating Heavenly Hash ice cream with you, Grandma, and, now, no sipping espresso in Spain with Rebecca. And Grandma, just before you died, you told me you had discovered the recipe to instant gratification and that you were going to send it to me. Now I may never know what you were talking about
.

P.S. They say you’re not “dead.” You’ve simply “crossed over,” I know it’s true, but it doesn’t make it any easier for me
.

She folded the letter, then opened it again. She had to write about the time Grandma walked the streets of Saugatuck in her pink, fuzzy robe and slippers. She had to write it down because someday, when she would be rocking back and forth with a box of tissues, freckled arms and purple hair, she’d at least have her letters to Grandma to comfort her. They would describe the details her mind might forget, and they would keep Grandma alive forever.

Dear Grandma
,

Remember the time city cousin Michelle from Chicago spent the entire summer scooping ice cream in the shop? We were short employees and needed the help, and besides, Michelle loved you and wanted to spend time with you. The three of us night owls teased each other. Michelle and I used to call you “sexy woman,” and you’d blush, saying, “Now, now girls.” One night Michelle and I worked until midnight in the shop. The tourists kept coming, and I stayed open an hour later because it was the family business, and because I felt we could rake in extra cash
.
One of the bars at Coral Gables had closed, and crowds were migrating from that bar to the Sand Bar. Luckily, our shop was situated right between the two. We were nice when we scooped ice cream, and that night we got so many tips that, when we finally did close down, we decided to hang out for late-night, thin-crust pizza across the street at Marro’s
.

It was then that we heard loud pounding on the window near our booth. We looked out, as did everyone else in the restaurant, and to our shock, there you stood, Grams, with your pink robe and pink slippers. You were waving your forefinger at us, and pointing to your wristwatch. We should have told you we were going for pizza that night. You were up and waiting for us in your little apartment behind the shop. We should have told you. You probably would have liked a pizza and beer yourself. I know you only drink beer with pizza and would not eat pizza without a beer
.

Oh, Grandma, your refrigerator stored nothing but Kit-Kat bars, Swiss cheese, ham, butter, and thinly sliced rye bread. As for Rebecca, I haven’t meant to ignore her in this letter– well, she kept our apartment meticulous. She alphabetized her books and fed her plants a weekly dose of Advil. They were gorgeous plants, growing out of control. Rebecca spoke Spanish to them
.

P.S. And to think, Rebecca is now speaking with God. I wished she were here speaking with me instead
.

Vicki folded the letter, then closed her eyes. She felt butterflies flapping about in the pit of her stomach, their wings—normally used for courtship, regulating body temperature and avoiding predators—now entangled and crumbling apart. They had danced about so many times through her life that she knew their choreography by heart. At times, they made her nervous
for no good reason at all. She often feared they might be bats, but how ridiculous!

CHAPTER THREE

VICKY HAD ARRIVED AT
Fort Myers International Airport many times during her life, always to visit her grandparents, who spent their winters living on Sanibel Island. After Grandpa died, she visited even more. She didn’t know how she would like Florida now that one of its most treasured seashells, her grandmother, would no longer be found on its beaches.

“Well, she should stop searching for seashells on the Sanibel seashore,” she slurred silently as she stepped off the plane. She was in no mood to recite silly little tongue twisters, but two little girls seated in the row in front of her had been tongue twisting for nearly the entire second hour of the flight, and as hard as she tried not to become infected, everything was more contagious on a plane.

“She should instead safely start the summertime stingray shuffle near the Sanibel seashore,” she said slowly as she stumbled over someone’s small suitcase in the gateway and stopped. She said it again, faster. “She should safely start summer’s stingray shuffle near the Sanibel seashore. Sea should shave … she should safely shart … shit … stop saying such silly stuff,” she said. “So shut up.”