Miss Understood
“Mary, wait! I know it sounded like I said you were stupid to feel like that, but I didn’t mean…”
Her voice trailed away, echoing off the receding back. Why do I always say the wrong thing?
Her life was littered with receding backs, stiff shoulders, jerking knees, and clenched hands. Littered with crumpled faces, teary eyes. Her ears burned with the sting of hot words. Her back bowed under their weight.
She fell into the chair, her joints loose with sadness. Her hands covered her white face, blanched with regret. The years behind her stretched in an unbroken line of hurt feelings, angry faces, and tears. No wonder I’m alone. Fifty years of being misunderstood weighed heavily on her aging frame.
Humor, compassion, understanding lived in her, she knew. It was only her Judas tongue that betrayed her. Try as she might, she couldn’t control it.
“Think before you speak, Louise,” her mother always said.
Louise tried. Soft words, gentle ways to soothe feelings were in her, but never, never did they emerge. Acid flowed where balm was meant. Pain spewed from her lips even as her hands reached in sympathy. The lash of her tongue was never still, ever vigilant to scourge where healing should be. Too many people turned away at her approach. Too many tongues spat her name. Too many hearts were broken in her wake.
Louise’s heart was broken, too. Broken after years of anguish and frustration. Broken after years of recrimination, shaking heads, stiff backs, and pain.
Doctors didn’t help. Drugs either. Louise tried. Religion wasn’t the solution. Congregations merely offered new fodder for destruction. Therapy, classes, groups, hypnosis—Louise had tried them all. She kept journals, kept silent, kept trying. Trying to be nice, to be caring, to be human for God’s sake.
Louise’s hands dropped from her face. She picked up a pencil and pad from the table beside her and began yet another journal.
“August brings another screw-up,” she wrote. “I tried to tell Mary how I felt. I hurt her. Made her angry. Drove her away.”
Louise wrote and kept on writing. The sun set, and still she wrote. Her fingers cramped, and still she wrote. The phone rang; she let the machine pick up. Throughout the night, her pencil flew. She made a sandwich and ate it while writing. Louise drank gallons of water, made tea, and wrote. She wrote while sitting on the toilet. She filled her journal—100 pages—before dawn. A ream of paper near her computer fell victim to her hand. The unlined sheets gave permission, invited freedom. She wrote big; she wrote small.
Days flew by. Louise stopped talking, even at work. Papers peeked from her pockets and her purse. They cascaded across tables, off shelves, and carpeted the floors. Nothing escaped her flying pencil: the backs of bills, the margins of newspapers, envelopes, receipts. Any space of white larger than a postage stamp grew words. Louise laughed. Louise cried. And she wrote. Opinion, fiction, poetry, anger, sympathy, spite, bile, music, humor, love, all spilled out of her fingers.
In a month, she lost fifteen pounds because she forgot to eat. In six weeks, she lost her job because she either forgot to show up or neglected to do her work. She cut her nails only so she could keep holding her pencil. She opened and paid her bills only for the wealth of fresh places to write the inserts and stubs offered.
Louise sat on the top step of her porch, sipping iced tea and waiting for the mailman, hoping for junk mail. It was cool and shady there in the late-August humidity. The sound of the neighborhood children playing ball next door drifted sweetly into her ear.
A much-used baseball rolled to a stop at her feet. The youthful voices silenced on an indrawn breath. Louise looked at the gray-white ball nestled in her flowers. She set down her tea, picked up a pencil and paper, and wrote.
“Miss Haines? Louise?”
She looked up to see her next-door neighbor—Sara? Sally? What was that woman’s name? — standing next to the flowerbed as if poised to flee.
“I’m sorry the kids’ ball rolled into your garden. I’ll just get it.” The young woman stretched and retrieved the ball with her fingertips. “There. And I’ll ask them to play in the park. Sorry.” And she spun on her toes to escape the expected wrath.
“Why don’t you toss them their ball and sit with me for a minute?” Louise said. “I made sun tea. I’ll pour you some.” She got up and reached for the sweating pitcher and a glass.
The young woman looked around as if expecting an ambush. “Uh, okay.” She sat down gingerly and slid over to the side of the step, ready to make a getaway.
“Here you go,” Louise said. “I hope you like it.” She resumed her seat. “I don’t like sweet tea, so there’s no sugar in it. I could get you some, though.” And she rose.
Sara or Sally took a sip. “No, no, this is fine.”
Louise turned to her and smiled. “I was just writing about how beautiful your yard looks this summer. You and your husband sure put a lot of work into it.”
“Thanks.” She smiled back. “Jeff works hard at it, and I love my flowers.”
“It shows. I was wondering if you’d like to help me divide my perennials one afternoon next week. I think some of those Black-Eyed Susan next to the garage would look great by your fountain.”
The stunned look on the young woman’s face made Louise sorry for all the years she’d missed being part of life because of her inability to say the right thing. Her fingers clenched her pencil, the words of a story about a lonely woman having tea on a shady porch with her neighbor straining to be released.
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“Any space of white larger than a postage stamp grew words. Louise laughed. Louise cried. And she wrote…”
I just love Louise. She’s tongue in cheek funny and my kind of girl. We would make great neighbors. But clearly Sara, or is it Sally..? has that covered.
You ARE such a fine writer. Every descriptive word was perfect. I like the redemptive ending for that damaged soul.