358: May Castle met ...
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 15 continues
MAY CASTLE met Lorna’s train at the Babbington station. It was the last week of January. Snow was falling in fat, wet, heavy clumps. On the ground, the flakes turned to slush. May and Lorna greeted each other quickly, hugged briefly on the platform, and then rushed across the parking lot to May’s Chrysler, threw Lorna’s luggage onto the back seat, and climbed in.
“Whew!” said May. “What a night! Horrible! Just horrible! What a night to have to go through what you’re going to have to go through.”
“Good weather wouldn’t make it any easier,” said Lorna.
“No, it wouldn’t,” said May. “Nothing makes it any easier any more. I used to love a nice night, a clear night, with stars. The stars used to make me happy, but now — oh, now nothing makes me happy. Everything seems so miserable. Everything seems so hopeless.”
“May!” said Lorna. “Is that the way you feel? Does everything seem hopeless to you?”
“Well, yes,” said May. “I think it does. It was different when I was younger, at least it was different for me when I was younger. I think I thought I was going to live forever. No. That’s not it. I never thought about it at all — dying, I mean. Now, well, now dying is all anyone talks about. It’s all I think about. I look at myself in the mirror in the morning, and I think to myself, You’re dying, May. This dying woman you see in your mirror is you. Doesn’t that seem hopeless?”
“It sounds as if you’re upset about growing old, May, not about dying.”
“Well. Maybe. Maybe I am. I don’t know which is worse,” said May. “You either die or grow old — or both. It’s hopeless.”
Lorna burst out laughing. For hours, throughout the train ride, she’d tried to prepare herself for Ella. She had imagined the look on Ella’s face when she saw her, tried to imagine what Ella would be feeling, what Ella would need from her, and how she could come close to providing it. She hadn’t expected May, hadn’t prepared for her, wasn’t sure what she needed or how to provide it. “I’m sorry May,” Lorna said. “I’m not laughing at you. I’m just — I’m just nervous, I guess.”
She studied May’s face while May peered through the snow and concentrated on her driving. For the first time, Lorna saw beyond her remembered image of May as a gay and lighthearted girl. She saw the wrinkles around May’s eyes, the furrows across her brow, the vertical lines in her upper lip. She remembered the night after she had met the Leroy boys, when she had sat in the living room, alone in the dark, slumping under the weight of the feeling that she was too old to interest anyone as young as Buster Leroy, annoyed that she had lived to be older than she had ever wanted to be. “I know how you feel, May,” she said.
[to be continued on Wednesday, October 12, 2022]
In Topical Guide 358, Mark Dorset considers Transportation: Rail; Emotions: Hopelessness, Despair; and Hope versus Despair from this episode.
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