Stocks & Blondes
7
Following in her footsteps
YOU NEVER REALLY KNOW a person until you’ve lived her life. I can’t actually live Georgia McFearin’s life, but I’m getting a picture of it that is pretty intense. If I could just talk to her.
Putting on Peg
I spent the night at an airport hotel in Savannah. Now that was irritating. This beautiful city was spread out before me and I was in a commercial, sterile chain hotel that shook every time a plane took off. It was about seventy degrees and raining when I got there but the guy at the hotel desk said it wasn’t likely to last long. It would get up near eighty in the afternoon. Wow! When I left Seattle, it was in the thirties. According to the Weather Channel, it was forty-five there and raining.
I went straight to the hotel Saturday night and checked in as Deb Riley, a young curly haired blonde. I had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which I was surprised to discover was pretty popular on Saturday night. Go figure. Of course, my body was telling me it was only six o’clock when I started trying to get myself ready to sleep. Part of my nighttime ritual was cleansing everything as deeply as I could. Ages in a hot steamy bath, beauty mask, carefully removing my nail polish and makeup. Just me, au naturel. When I got up in the morning, I was a fresh blank canvas ready to paint a portrait of Peg Chester on. Breakfast was delivered by room service at seven along with the Savannah Morning News. By that time, I’d already filed my nails to a no-nonsense length and applied polish—a pinkish pearl called Champagne Toast.
After breakfast, I started on my face and hands. Even though at twenty-seven I think of fifty as being kind of old—sorry about that—significant aging on most women doesn’t start to show in the face and hands until later. You don’t turn into a wrinkled old hag at forty-nine. Unless you’re my mother. The creams Stevie gave me tighten skin or loosen skin. I have to be careful where I use them. When I applied a combination of skin loosening under my eyes and skin tightening on my cheeks, I naturally developed puffy little bags under my eyes. I stretched the skin at the corner of my eyes and applied a latex base, holding the skin tight while it dried. When I let go, there was just enough extra material there to wrinkle. The good part is it wrinkled in the exact same places every time—basically wrinkling where I’m going to wrinkle someday.
I used a slightly darker base than I would normally wear as Deb. It gave my skin a slightly more weathered look. My cheekbones got highlighted and so on. Doing the full face and neck took maybe ninety minutes. Of course, if Stevie were helping me it would have gone a lot faster.
Then the hands. Nothing is a faster giveaway that you aren’t what you appear than a mismatch between your face and hands. Latex is the ticket. I made a tight fist with my hand bent forward at the wrist and applied latex across the entire back of my hand and well up onto my forearm. I let it dry thoroughly before I relaxed my hand. All the little wrinkles and veins were accented. I blended each finger from nail to knuckle, using the same method. I don’t normally wear finger jewelry but was sure to erase any sign of my watch. I did less with makeup on the palms—just relaxed them. The first inclination when a person holds out her hand is to stretch the fingers out straight. Nothing says young more quickly than that. When I show the back of my hand, I keep it relaxed so the fingers are slightly curved inward. Relaxed fingers allow the puffiness of the skin to enhance the depth of the natural wrinkles.
After I added suitable clothing—a skirt and hose, conservative blouse, and cardigan sweater, I pulled on my wig. This one is a simple ash brown bob with about twenty-five percent gray. I popped in my brown contacts and I was a new woman. I checked out electronically and left by the side entrance. People only remember what they see, not what they didn’t see.
Grover pulled up to pick me up in an older model Honda Accord. It was time to go to work.
Losing my identity
Grover didn’t recognize me until I stuck my head in the car door and said, “Uncle Grover?” You’d have thought he was a fish the way his mouth was working. I figured he’d need some time to get used to it, so I suggested we have lunch before I checked into the bed and breakfast Grover reserved for me. The entire drive to the restaurant was filled with Grover dodging cars on the freeway and repeating to himself over and over, “I don’t believe it. Are you really you?”
“Look, Uncle Grover,” I said patiently, “it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. It’s understandable that you can’t believe how much I’ve changed in all these years. But you must remember that I’m Peg and forget you ever met anyone in Seattle. I’m your niece and I’m going to take care of Georgia’s affairs for you. Why don’t you start by telling me all about Savannah and where she played, went to school and church, and who her friends were. I didn’t know most of the people she knew. I’m going to find a reason to visit each and every one of them that still lives in Savannah.”
I have to hand it to the old guy. He adapted pretty quickly. Then I had to do some adapting. There is nothing that will make you feel middle aged as quickly as eating at some super buffet restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. The Hog Corral or something. It seemed this was one that Grover frequented most weeks because the hostess greeted him by name and smiled at me when he introduced Georgia’s cousin from Cleveland. I couldn’t do justice to the amount of food available on the buffet, but Grover more than made up for my appetite. He packed away plate after plate of turkey and dressing, roast beef, salads, sweet rolls, and coffee. The coffee was pretty weak and I resigned myself to not having a decent cup until I got back to Seattle. I knew I wouldn’t get one in Cleveland either.
All through the meal, Grover talked about Georgia. He started out just reciting facts he thought I should know but with just a little prompting on my part, he started reminiscing about what she was like as a girl. It seemed to be a relief to him to talk about her. We were at the restaurant for a good two hours while he kept going back for another helping and then talking around a mouthful of fried chicken.
“Georgia and Clarice—oh they were always together—they must have been about thirteen when they decided to hold a séance in the attic,” he laughed. “I slipped up before they started their little ritual and appropriately thumped and rattled when they asked the ghosts to appear. The girls were so frightened, they fled from the attic and hid in Georgia’s bed for the rest of the night.”
After the long lunch, Grover took me to the Queen Vicky Bed & Breakfast next to Forsyth Park. The couple who run the B&B were very nice and also knew Grover fairly well. They didn’t recall Grover having a niece, but he mentioned his wife’s sister back in Ohio and they nodded their heads. He was becoming a natural at this.
Then we went to Grover’s house on Duffy Lane. Oh my. At one time, this was undoubtedly a beautiful old Victorian home. Grover said his wife died some twenty years ago and the place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since. The exterior paint was peeling and the bushes overgrown.
“Georgia moved home after college to help take care of her mother,” he sighed. “Then she stuck around and took care of me, I guess. I wasn’t worth much after Martha died. She lived here until five years ago when she took the job in Seattle.”
I suddenly had a dread of walking into the dead woman’s room. If she inherited her father’s housekeeping skills, I was going to hire a service and sit back to supervise. Packing up personal belongings and hacking computers was one thing. Cleaning house was not included in my fee.
Entering Georgia’s room was like entering a different world. Grover hadn’t disturbed anything since she left home but Georgia had been back in the fall and cleaned everything up the way she liked it. Grover just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the house.
“She planned to come back after she’d worked there a while.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“Oh, she bought the place from me,” Grover said. “She loved this place. She assumed the mortgage and has been making payments ever since. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I have to come up with the mortgage payment by the first of the month, don’t I?”
So, that’s why Georgia was making the mortgage payments. She bought her family home and was keeping it paid for as long as her father was alive. I wondered if she really intended to ever come back. The poor old guy. He let me in her room and said he’d make us tea in an hour or so but now he needed his Sunday nap. After all he ate for lunch, I imagined he did need a nap. I watched him enter a room down the hall and heard a television come on with a football game. I was alone in Georgia’s world.
I had time to completely absorb Georgia’s life. As neat as the room was, it was far from empty. I started by taking pictures of everything. I wanted a record of where each item was when I first saw it. I did general pictures first and then close-ups of everything. Grover had prepared a stack of packing boxes in the hallway and I brought the first one in to start packing. I figured it would be best to start with clothes. What a treasure! There were clothes a woman my assumed age had worn. It was obvious some of them were years old but Georgia had good taste in clothing. They’d look great on Peg. I boxed them up and addressed them to Peg Chester in Cleveland. I’d get these out in the morning and have a more extensive wardrobe when I got back. My Peg Chester clothes amounted to three outfits and two pair of shoes. These clothes would help a lot if I had to maintain the character for long. And Grover was paying me with Georgia’s estate.
I paused to consider if Grover realized that agreeing to pay me with Georgia’s estate meant the house would belong to me. This could get complicated. Of course, I wouldn’t leave him homeless but I didn’t relish the idea of paying the mortgage on a place 4,000 miles from Seattle, either.
I got so absorbed sorting through Georgia’s life and packing it up that I didn’t realize how much time had passed until Grover tapped on the door. I’d turned on the radio next to Georgia’s bed and had been listening to gospel music for the past two hours. It was the station the radio was tuned to. It was six-thirty and Grover said he had tea and popcorn ready. That was all he fixed for dinner. No wonder he ate so much at the buffet. We ate and talked for a while.
“Grover, you could have packed up all this stuff without me, you know,” I said.
“Yes,” he answered. “But there are things a father shouldn’t know about his daughter.” I had to nod my head at the wisdom of that. After we’d finished our tea and popcorn, I left to go back to the B&B. Grover offered to drive me but after my harried experience with him in traffic this afternoon, I just said I needed some exercise. It was a pretty straight shot across Forsyth Park to get to the B&B.
I hadn’t counted on it getting dark.
The warm weather and longer day here in the South had lulled me into a false sense of spring. There was scarcely nine hours of daylight at this time of year in Seattle but Savannah is so far south that it was closer to eleven hours here. It was dusk when I left Grover’s house but full dark before I was halfway across Forsyth Park. I almost stepped on an old man next to the path before I saw him. I don’t know who was startled more.
There is something about homeless people that tugs at my heart. I’m no Pollyanna. I wade through throngs of homeless every day in Seattle. Some of them even know Maizie by name and I usually have a dollar I can give them. I know Dag must have done so and they shouldn’t suffer just because he’s dead. But when this guy looked up at me, he was shy and looked apologetic. He held out his hand—I thought a typical panhandler—but he had a flower in it. No, it wasn’t just a flower. It was a perfect rose. A perfect brown rose. The light from the streetlamp was dim but I could see this wasn’t actually a rose. It was a piece of art. I thought at first it was carved out of wood but realized it was actually something like straw or grass that was carefully folded, bent, and tied to look exactly like a rose. I was enthralled.
“This is beautiful!” I said. “You’re an artist.”
I sat down on the bench next to where he sat on the ground and rummaged in my bag. I pulled out a $10 bill and handed it to him. His eyes got so big I thought they’d explode. Then he bobbed his head and said, “God bless.” That’s all he ever said.
“You’re an amazing artist,” I said again. “Do you travel around much?” He nodded. As I’d been walking through the park, limping because of the bump in my left shoe, I’d been thinking about how hard it was to remain in disguise. Here was a guy who traveled around and I bet didn’t even have an ID. “Nobody stops you from being whatever you want to be, do they?” I said more to myself than to him. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to just abandon who I am forever and be nobody. I suppose that doesn’t sound exciting to you. You are nobody to just about everybody but you can still make this incredible work of art.” I sat there silently for a minute and so did he. Then I got up and kept walking. I didn’t look back at him because I couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping out under that bench or wherever he sleeps. At least it’s warmer here than in Seattle.
I’m back at the B&B now. Got straight to my room without having to deal with the owners. They’re watching some variety show on TV. Now I’m ready to sleep. I’ll have to deal with them at breakfast, I’m sure.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
