Retribution

Nora went to a memorial service Sunday for the husband of one of her bridge club ladies, Sylvia, and it was like reentering the past if the past were some kind of a haunted house with distorting mirrors, ghostly shapes, and elusive images. Because almost every one of the two or three hundred people there—yes, it was huge, spilling out of doors on both sides of the meeting place—looked as though they were extras on a set of “The Night of the Living Dead.”

Old, old, old. When one doesn’t see people for three to four to five to ten years and everyone is pushing eighty, the changes time wreaks are startling. Cruel, too. The man who died, Charles, had been 85. His widow, Nora’s friend, Sylvia, was the same age. She looked like the Indian from that movie long ago with Dustin Hoffman who kept going out to the butte or wherever for the Great Spirit to take him but it never came. Sylvia was bent like she’d stood in a gale-force wind too long, and brown as a piece of jerky, about as lean and fleshless. Her hair was white and looked fake but it wasn’t. She had dark areas about her eyes caused by the bony sockets of her face sinking in deeper. Yet her spirit seemed to remain indomitable which is often the case with people who’ve lived many, many, winters.

Another old friend of Nora’s was pointed out to her by someone, and Nora almost said that couldn’t be her. But there was something recognizable, even though the features of her face were worn like a scrap of cloth left out to flap on the line. Her body was ungainly, like a shipping package that had been abused. She stood with the help of a cane. Nora went up to her. Her name was Mamie. “Do you remember me?” Nora asked, and Mamie croaked back, “Oh, of course, how are you?”

So they visited, although Nora was distracted by the sprout of hairs on Mamie’s chin and wished she’d thought to bring a tweezers. And a strange thing about eyes—they fade so, even brown ones.

The next person from her past Nora met was a woman who’d scared the living heck out of her when they both were younger. A wealthy, snobbish, withering type of person with whom Nora had never been able to coexist at numerous meetings throughout the years at cocktail parties, ski outings, country-club sightings. A fire-breathing dragon. She was standing alone, looking strangely bowed, in a muted plaid jacket and camel-colored trousers.

Nora went up to her. “Is this who I think it is?” she’d leaned by now to say as an opener.

The woman, Sophia, cackled something as Nora peered into her bowed face. Her head drooped like a heavy blossom gone bye. Indeed, it was the very same old dowager who’d made the young Nora feel gauche and socially inept. Nora chatted at her, with a newly found glibness, but Sophia didn’t say a whole lot. It suddenly came to Nora that perhaps or even surely she wasn’t exactly all mentally there. Nora felt mingled emotions at this realization: a shard of pity but also, it must be confessed, a shaft of glee to see her adversary so reduced. (Nora later felt appropriately guilty.)

So the afternoon went, filled with faces and figures of bent, warped people from the past, who by some fluke or mishap of the grim reaper’s schedule, hadn’t shown up on his rolodex yet. Nora shuddered a bit inwardly. She gloated a bit inwardly. Because she felt herself to be haler and heartier. At least upright, mentally present, not needing the oxygen tubes that snaked out of many of the nostrils she’d seen or the appurtenances for walking. But she scolded herself. But not too severely. Because she remembered how these very same people had intimidated her so, some fifty years ago when she’d tried to move among them as their equal. Now the years had meted out their revenge, the playing field had been leveled; they’d been finally reduced from their loftiness.

But, driving home, she felt little jubilation. She recognized in herself the smugness that, in her saner moments, she deplored. She’d received many comments this day upon how “well” she looked. But that could change. This very night, as is told in the good book, her life could be taken from her. She could suffer a stroke, a cerebral hemorrhage, a heart attack, a convulsion, a fall, or collide at a corner with another vehicle. So she should not take pride in the fact that her enemy had been laid low. Her own time would come. She did reflect that when she died, the gathering for her would be very small, nothing to rival today’s multitude. Because she hadn’t so many friends and acquaintances but also because she’d presumably be in her high nineties.

It’s all in the genes, she decided, returning home, anticipating the watching of a couple of Sunday night TV shows and having something nice to eat for supper. And, of course, her pony of beer.