I met Carol Wobig through RedBird-RedOak Writing. In person, she’s an amazing, calm, and kind soul. Her writing reflects the same with stories that are quietly funny yet full of great images and emotion. At a recent book launch, she read from her collection, POACHED IS NOT AN OPTION, and I asked–almost immediately–if I could share an excerpt here. After she agreed, my only challenge was choosing which story to highlight; they are all excellent.
Tying Up to the Pier
Rachel lives in town. She takes me shopping on Wednesdays, which I do appreciate. She’s the youngest of my kids, and the bossiest. She has a list of things I should do: sell the cottage, move into town, fix my bunions, cut my hair. I look like the old lady that I am, my grey hair in a scrawny knot, my fat covered with polyester pants and flowered tops from Wal-Mart.
She supervises me all day long when we shop.
“Mom, do you see that curb? Mom, do you need to use the rest room? Mom, don’t order that. It’s full of fat.”
I’m only seventy-eight, not a hundred and eight.
So, it’s Wednesday and I have to put away these groceries, but first I need to get these loafers off. I only wear them when I go out to keep Rachel happy, and I do look with love on my old tennies when I walk in the door. Wally cut holes in them to relieve the pressure on my bunions.
It is odd to come home to an empty house. Wally’s coffee cup still sits on the counter with a spoon standing in it, a “Gone Fishing” note under its edge, the paper yellow and curled. It was his dream, this cottage. We moved out here for good when he retired. I love it, too, but yesterday I noticed that the front porch is leaning forward a bit. Maybe it needs to be propped up. What would that cost? And I can’t really keep up with the outside work. The trees are starting to drop their leaves. Next will be the snow. What will I do about that?
Another problem. All summer, I’ve slept on a lawn chair out on the porch. Some nights I start out in the bedroom, but before long I’m out on the porch. It isn’t death, that Wally died in the bed. I knew it was coming, and in the end found myself wanting it to come for his sake and mine. I’ve washed everything, aired it out for weeks, but still can’t breathe when I lie down in there.
And my worst problem is the pictures. Not only did Rachel take dozens at every Christmas and birthday, but she fixed them in frames, brought them over and hung them on the walls and arranged them on every flat surface in the cottage. Even in the bathroom. Now I have to walk through the place like an old horse with blinders. They’re attacking me. I could just take them down, but she’d have a fit.
Lots of the pictures are of Wally and his best buddy Willy. I know, Wally and Willy, the teasing never stopped. Willy’s tying up at the pier right now. He just threw a stringer of fish out of the boat, is hoisting himself up onto the pier.
I meet him at the fish table by the back door. “Nice catch.”
“Got a couple of perch.” He holds them up by the gills.
I sit on an overturned bucket, rest my back against the warm shingles. Scales fly up his arms and into the white hair fuzzing up over his undershirt.
“Just one’ll do,” I say, when he hands me four fillets.
“Sometimes I forget he’s gone.”
“Not me,” I say. “I’ve got all of these damn pictures looking back at me day and night.”
“Just take them down. I can do it for you.” He wraps his fillets in newspapers and hoses down the table.
“It’s not that simple.” I sweep the fishy water out onto the grass.
“Rachel?”
“I’m afraid of her.” I laugh, but it’s the truth. “I’m afraid she’ll think I’ve gone off the deep end and haul me off to the home.”
“I’ll stand up for you,” Willy says and buttons up the plaid shirt he’s taken off before he cleaned the fish so Shirley didn’t get mad at him. He has his fears, too.
“Thanks,” I say. ”We’ll see what happens.” I stand at the top of the stairs and watch him walk back down to the lake, the bundle of fish under his arm. He looks up and waves before he pulls away from the pier.
That night, the temperature drops. I wrap myself up in two of the kids’ old sleeping bags, and add one of Wally’s knit hats and a pair of gloves to my ensemble. Cold as it is, one lost mosquito buzzes around my neck until I give up and let the damn thing bite me. I can’t sleep anyway. The cottage. The leaves. The snow. The pictures. The cold. If I move the wrong way, the cold sneaks in and I have to readjust everything.
In the morning, warm in my cocoon, I listen to the radio I keep out here. A cold front is on the way. Now what? I don’t really want to wake up under a blanket of frost. Wally died on May 12th, almost six months ago. I do know what Oprah’s advice would be: I should kick myself in the butt and move on. The other day she said that if you want something, you should imagine it first.
So, I get dressed and take my coffee down to the lake, sit on our old boat that’s pulled up on the shore, close my eyes, and try to get my imagination in gear. The sun warms my face, the lake laps the shore, and next thing I know I fall asleep and dump the coffee in my lap.
“Hey, Anita,” Willy putters up to the pier, cuts the engine “I need to talk to you.”
I walk out on the pier. My wet pants slap against my thighs.
“I forgot to tell you yesterday,” he says after we have a good laugh about my pants, “I told Wally I’d take care of the yard for you, and the snow.”
“Oh, yeah?” I fold my arms and look over toward the island so he doesn’t see my eyes fill up. “That’ll be great. I was worried.” Wally, my sweet Wally, taking care of me from the other side.
“And I’ll see if I can find somebody to brace up the porch before it snows,” Willy adds. He pulls the cord on the motor and backs away from the pier. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks,” I say and watch him guide his boat out to the middle of the lake and drop a line.
All that’s left is the pictures. What would Wally want me do? He’d want me to be comfortable in the cottage he loved. Protect me from Rachel, I say to him and walk back up the hill.
I carry all the pictures out to the kitchen table, open up frame after frame, and drop the photographs into plastic grocery bags. The frames I stack in a box for Rachel and wait for her daily death call. At 11:01 the phone rings.
“I’m out shopping.” she says. “Do you need anything?”
“I do,” I say. “A bucket of white paint.”
“What are you going to paint?”
“I want to do some touch-up work.”
“Not in the living room. You’re not going to take down all those …”
“Oh, I’m losing you,” I say and hang up. My people on “The Guiding Light” do that all the time, but it’s a first for me. Feels good, until after lunch, when I hear the crunch of tires on the gravel in the driveway.
. . . .
Carol Wobig spent a few years in a convent and many more years working in a pizza factory, before she retired and started writing. Her monologues were performed in community theater, and her stories attracted fans in Gray Sparrow Journal, Clapboard House Journal, and on Milwaukee Public Radio’s Flash Fiction Friday. Contact Carol at carolwobig415@msn.com. You can purchase a copy of POACHED IS NOT AN OPTION, on Amazon, on Nook, and at Milwaukee’s East Side independent bookstore, Boswell Books.