Arbutus and Sea Gull
Arbutus And Sea Gull
My grandmother had an enemy named Mrs. Wilcox. Grandma and Mrs. Wilcox moved
as brides into next-door houses on the sleepy elm-roofed Main Street of the tiny
town in which they were to live out their lives. I don't know what started
the war, that was long before my day, and I don't think that by the time I came
along, over 30 years later, they remembered themselves what started it. But it
was still being waged bitterly.
Make no mistake. This was no polite sparring match. This was war between
ladies, which is total war. Nothing in town escaped repercussion. The 300-year-
old church, which had lived through the Revolution, the Civil War and the
Spanish-American War, almost went down when Grandma and Mrs. Wilcox fought the
Battle of the Ladies' Aid. Grandma won that engagement, but it was a hollow
victory. Mrs. Wilcox, since she couldn't be president, resigned from the Aid
in a huff, and what's the fun of running a thing if you can't force your mortal
enemy to "eat crow?"
Mrs. Wilcox won the Battle of the Public Library, getting her niece Gertrude
appointed librarian instead of my Aunt Phyllis. The day Gertrude took over was
the day Grandma stopped reading library books, "filthy germ things" they'd
become overnight, and started buying her own.
The Battle of the High School was a draw. The principal got a better job and
left before Mrs. Wilcox succeeded in having him ousted, or Grandma in having
him given life tenure in office.
In addition to these major engagements, there was constant sallying and sniping
back of the main line of fire. When, as children, we visited my grandmother,
part of the fun was making faces at Mrs. Wilcox's impossible grandchildren,
nearly as impossible as we were, I now see, and stealing grapes off the Wilcox
side of the fence between the gardens. We chased the Wilcox hens, too, and put
percussion caps, saved from July 4th, on the rails of the trolley line right in
front of the Wilcox house, in the pleasant hope that when the trolley went by,
the explosion, actually a negligible affair, would scare Mrs. Wilcox into fits.
One banner day, we put a snake into the Wilcox rain barrel. My grandmother
made token protests, but we sensed tacit sympathy, so different from what lay
back of my mother's no's, and went merrily on with our career of brattishness.
If any child of mine . . .but that's another story.
Don't think for a minute that this was a one-sided campaign. Mrs. Wilcox had
grandchildren, too, remember, more and tougher and smarter grandchildren than
my grandmother had. Grandma didn't get off scot free. She had skunks
introduced into her cellar. On Halloween all loose forgotten objects, such as
garden furniture, miraculously flew to the ridgepole of the barn, whence they
had to be lowered by strong men, hired at exorbitant day rates.
Never a windy washday went by but what the clothesline mysteriously broke, so
that the sheets walloped around in the dirt and had to be done over. Some of
these occurrences may have been acts of God, but the Wilcox grandchildren
always got the credit.
I don't know how Grandma could have borne her troubles if it hadn't been for
the household page of her daily Boston newspaper.
This household page was a wonderful institution. Besides the usual cooking
hints and cleaning advice, it had a department composed of letters from readers
to each other. The idea was that if you had a problem, or even only some steam
to blow off, you wrote a letter to the paper, signing some fancy name like
Arbutus. That was Grandma's pen name. Then some of the other ladies who had
the same problem wrote back and told you what they had done about it, signing
themselves, One Who Knows or Xanthipee, or whatever. Very often, the problem
disposed of, you kept on for years writing to each other through the columns
of the paper, telling each other about your children and your canning and your
new dining room suite.
That's what happened to Grandma. She and a woman called Sea Gull corresponded
for a quarter of a century, and Grandma told Sea Gull things that she never
breathed to another soul, things like the time she hoped that she was going to
have another baby but didn't, and the time my Uncle Steve got you-know-what in
his hair in school and how humiliated she was, although she got rid of them
before anyone in town guessed. Sea Gull was Grandma's true bosom friend.
When I was about 16, Mrs. Wilcox died. In a small town, no matter how much
you have hated your next-door neighbor, it is only common decency to run over
and see what practical service you can do the bereaved.
Grandma, neat in a percale apron to show that she meant what she said about
being put to work, crossed the two lawns to the Wilcox house, where the Wilcox
daughters set her to cleaning the already immaculate front parlor for the
funeral. And there on the parlor table in the place of honor was a huge
scrapbook, and in the scrapbook, pasted neatly in parallel columns, were her
letters to Sea Gull over the years and Sea Gull's letters to her. Grandma's
worst enemy had been her best friend.
That was the only time I remembered seeing my grandmother cry. I didn't know
then exactly what she was crying about, but I do now. She was crying for all
the wasted years that could never be salvaged. Then I was impressed only by
the tears, and they made me remember that day worthier of remembrance than a
woman's tears. That was the day when I first began to suspect what I now
believe with all my heart, and if ever I have to stop believing it, I want to
stop living. It is this:
People may seem to be perfectly impossible. They may seem to be mean and small
and sly. But if you will take 10 paces to the left and look again with the
light falling at a different angle, very likely you will see that they are
generous and warm and kind. It all depends. It all depends on the point from
which you're seeing them.
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