“Pearl”

Pearl

by Ted Kooser

Elkader, Iowa, a morning in March,
the Turkey River running brown and wrinkly
from a late spring snow in Minnesota,
a white two-story house on Mulberry Street,
windows flashing with sun, and I had come
a hundred miles to tell our cousin, Pearl,
that her childhood playmate, Vera, my mother,
had died. I knocked and knocked at the door
with its lace0covered oval of glass, and at last
she came from the shadows and with one finger
hooked the curtain aside, peered into my face
through her spectacles, and held that pose,
a grainy family photograph that could have been
that of her mother. I called out, “Pearl,
it’s Ted. It’s Vera’s boy,” and my voice broke,
for it came to me, nearly sixty, I was still
my mother’s boy, that boy for the rest of my life.

Pearl, at ninety, was one year older than Mother
and a widow for twenty years. She wore
a pale blue cardigan buttoned over a housedress,
and she shook my hand in the tentative way
of old women who rarely have hands to shake.
When I told her that Mother was gone, that she’d
died the evening before, she said she was sorry,
that “vera wrote me a letter a while ago
to say she wasn’t good.” We went to the kitchen
and I sat at the table while she heated a pan
of water and made us cups of instant coffee.
She told me of a time when the two of them
were girls and crawled out onto the porch roof
to spy on my Aunt Mabel and a suitor
who were swinging below. “We got so excited
we had to pee, and we couldn’t wait, and peed
right there on the roof and it trickled down
over the edge and dripped in the bushes.
but Mabel and that fellow never heard!”

We took our cups into her living room
where stripes from the drawn blinds draped over
the World’s Fair satin pillows. She took the couch
and I took a chair across from her. “I’ve had
some trouble with health myself,” she said,
taking off her glasses and wiping them,
and I said she looked good, though, and she said,
“I’ve started seeing people who aren’t here.
I know they’re not real but I see them the same.
They come in the house and sit around
and never say a word. They keep their heads down
or cover their faces with cloths. I’m not afraid
but I don’t know what they want of me.
You won’t be able to see, but one’s right there
on the staircase where the light falls through 
that window, a man in a light gray outfit.”
I turned to look at the landing, where a patch
of light fell over the carpeted steps.
“Sometimes I think that my Max is with them;
one seems to know his way around the house.
What bothers me, Ted, is that they’ve started
to write out lists of everything I own.
They go from room to room, three or four
at a time, picking up things and putting them back.
I’ve talked to Wilson, the chiropractor,
and he just says that maybe it’s time for me
to go to the nursing home.” I asked her
what her regular doctor said and she said
she didn’t go there anymore, that “He’s
not much good.” “But surely there’s medicine,”
I said, and she said, “Maybe so.” And then
there was a pause that filled the room.
 
After a while we began to talk again,
of other things, and there were some stories
we laughed a little over, and I wept a little,
and then it was time for me to go, to drive
the long miles back, and she slowly walked me
to the door and took my hand again—
our warm bony hands among the light hands
of the shadows that reached to touch us but
drew back—and I cleared my throat and said
I hope she’d take care of herself, and think
about seeing a real medical doctor,
and she said she’d give some thought to that,
and I took my hand from hers and waved goodbye
and the door closed, and behind the lace
the others stepped out of the stripes of light
and resumed their inventory, touching
the spoon I used and subtracting it from
the sum of the spoons in the kitchen drawer.

Peace, dwight