Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All by Allan Gurganus Page B

little thing. That’d be wrong—I’d rather sound too harsh. And yet, I admit, at times and from this distance, misrecalling sure is tempting, child. Especially about our house before my others rose. The wall under the clock was penciled with their heights (changing each six months) but their initials constant. From this narrow bed-wide cell here, these partitions of yellow plywood, I recall my own home kitchen as being so huge—half a train depot and full of eastern light and, with water boiling, chummy-sounding as a fishbowl-sized reunion.
    Once the twenty-odd pieces of breakfast toast were under way, once all lunch boxes and thermoses were lined up and latched shut, once each was tagged (Baby’s full of complexion food, Louisa’s with that extra sandwich she begged for despite her little weight problem), once the sun—following Lucy’s good example—got the idea and trudged toward its monitor’s position overhead,
then
I would allow myself a first cup of coffee. Dear God but it was excellent! Having done a bit of work already always made my java taste the better, child. At fifteen, I learned to take it black. That way you’re freer. Freer of expecting extras. I had just one cup for starters but savored so before rushing upstairs on my unpopular mission of waking.
    Throughout, I left the saucepan boiling away downstairs, on guard, chitter-chatter, giving itself away to kitchen air. Sometimes I’d refill the pan. I told myself such steam would be good for all our lungs … But too, I just liked the sound it made bubbling, a heart-to-heart with morning light, itself, me.
    At this Home, staff people heat things up. We got no microwave atLanes’ End Rest owing to six patients’ pacemakers. So even now, even in this world of rockets and all, water takes just as long to boil. Some things never change, which is good. Personally, I want to be cremated. Studying water’s boiling taught me how clean it’d all be. Fire will just have a conversation about you and with you, a real
thorough
conversation, I admit. You’ll meet fire. Fire will take a shine to you. You’re its subject. What will it say about you before it loses interest? I know how, in a quiet morning house, water makes party sounds, the angels of the elements all up and gossiping at dawn. Another-day-in-the-world’s shoptalk.
    If authorities let us have hot plates here in our cubicles, I swear I’d do me some water every morning of my life—just to smell and hear and feel it play across my face.
    Child, I sure miss boiling my daily own. You know what water is?
    Water’s family.
5
    MAYBE I told you how our charity Home got its peculiar name. All this property was once owned by a merchant family, name of Lane. Our leafy dead end of the road kept being called the Lanes’ End of it. And when this cinder-block, glass-brick, and asphalt-roofed thingum got built on the cheap in 19 and 49, the name stuck. Lanes’ End.—Nobody can tell me it’s a friendly title for a body’s final dwelling place. I don’t like to talk against the officials but I think it’s sloppy of them not to be a bit more sensitive and to change it. Might as well call it: Funeral Home Annex. Senility Central. Or something.
    Reading the wooden sign’s WELCOME TO LANES’ END when your ambulance pulls up, well, it’s harder on the new people. By now us veterans make jokes about it. You learn to. Maybe that’s
why
we been around so long. That, and the love of our daytime TV show,
My Children, Right or Wrong
, plus little hallway scandals, and a basic knack for laughing things off. The old ones that can’t, ofttimes they go first.
    He who laughs—lasts.
    RECENT-ARRIVED women tend to mix in quickest. Though sore from travel, they wonder, What
does
one wear to dinner? A sign of health. New-here men take so much to heart. They care too much for their old idea of dignity—the dignity of a thirty-five-year-old boy, not somebody eighty-odd or over.
    Darling, you got to keep revising