Taking Emma home

The second extravaganza from Self-Evident: We Hold These Tooths

Taking Emma home

It seems there is no escape.

The title of this little confabulation was suggested by a friend, last night, in an e-mail and refers to another Emma entirely. So, Other Emma, if you happen to wander in here, this is not about you.

So thanks, “M” (and you know who you are). I was hoping to wax fictive, and I will give it a shot, but “Emma” reminds me of Aunt Emma, a real person, though not my Aunt. Aunt by association, like guilt. And Auntie Em was often to be taken home, hence the inescapable memory peg in the aforementioned e-mail. And heaven help me¹ this tracks right back to teeth. Tooths.

[Note: I went back and inserted Aunt Emma into the first story after receipt of the e-mail referenced above. Memory is a two-way street.]

Emma was redolent of Eleanor Rigby, only rather than wearing a face, it was her teeth that she kept in a jar by the door. As to who it was for, well, obviously for herself. A body has to eat. And I would have to say that she was one of the lonely people. The door in question was that of her bedroom, not the front, which one supposes was Rigby's thing. “Putting on a good face,” to deal with the public. [Ask a Beatle®. Two still kicking at this writing.]

The question emerges, “Why didn't Emma take herself home?”

Polio at a young age left her hobbled and, late in life, fully wheelchair-bound, with one lung and one kidney.² I oft carried her to a car and then from auto to living room, awkward but not difficult. She couldn't have topped 80 pounds. She was a real dear, a little shaky toward the end in a vaguely Parkinsonian fashion, with slightly impaired speech. Always eager to share a “Tup of tea.” Fond memories.

Having been dragged back into nonfiction mode I'll just go ahead and tell another true one and take a stab at actual “story telling” later.

You people.

Here's the thing. Relatives can get pretty screwy after a funeral. I am going to use fictitious names here. Just in case. Legal trouble is not a major attraction to your author. So let's go with Sister A, Sister B and Brother C, okay? Emma was the eldest of the four siblings and the first to kick it. All expired now. But I don't want to risk lawsuits from surviving progeny.

The family had been “old school.” When polio took Emma they were deeply embarrassed to have a cripple in the mix. They never let her go back to class, so what she'd learned in just a few years of grade school had to suffice. They kept her indoors most of the time, not wanting neighbors to see her struggling to walk. A child spawned on the isle of misfit toys. Finally they sent her to some sort of workshop where she learned to sew and then she was able to make her way as a seamstress, taking in mending and alterations and such.

All that happened long before I ever knew her which was in the last decade or so of her years. She may have done a bit of needlework at the beginning of our acquaintance, but she soon retired.

This had been a farm family and Emma lived in the old farmhouse. A, B & C lived within a one-block radius, having built homes in what had been developed as a suburban neighborhood. No doubt sale of the farm property had helped fund their house construction. All of red brick as versus the weathered clapboard structure of Emma's residence. At least they'd seen to it that she was housed, and more power to them for that.

Just to set this up geographically, A&B lived side by side one block distant from Emma, while C lived right next door.

Then Emma died, as do we all. As do we all.

Intestate.

The whole family were inveterate euchre players and it was soon agreed that A, B & C would each draw a card, high card the winner, and then divvy up Emma's stuff in order, each in turn claiming an item until all the heirlooms and more modern appurtenances were distributed.

A & B were inclined to sentiment. C saw dollar signs. As did Spouse of C. Maybe we should call them C₁ & C₂? Well, they drew the cards on a Sunday afternoon and agreed that the parting out would occur the following weekend. B, then A, then C₁ & C₂.

C₁ & C₂ groused. They just knew that B & A would grab all the good stuff in the first round. (One item at a time? Really? From a poor old woman's effects?)

Here's the kicker. When the siblings assembled the following weekend it was immediately apparent that C₁ & C₂ had, convenienced by next-doorness, snuck in and shlepped with the TV, the microwave, a radio and the coffee pot.

A just shook her head. B, it is said, exploded, though like A she hadn't the least interest in the merch. B's first choice was one of the only extant pictures of their mother, a faded black and white in a simple frame. A's a quilt Emma had stitched by hand. Round and round. Greed in its never-ending battle with matters of the heart.

Some people just bite.

And back we are to self-evident tooths.

Loath I am to waste all this blank space for no good reason, and memory rang up from sometime in the late 1950s. Mistaken memory, of course, but clanging and banging nonetheless. I remembered the following poem as titled “Emma,” but a quick search on the wonderful Web informed me it is

Eliza

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell, —
We must buy a filter.

- Jocelyn Henry Clive Graham [1874-1936]

From: Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes

*****

Note per footnotes: Substack renumbers when I post, but footnotes sometimes refer to previous super important stuff in the print version, so originals are in [#].

1 [20] Irony again.

2 [21] Which often reminded me of that childhood version of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” … “my Bonnie has only one lung ...” and so forth.

Copyright© 2020, Cecil Bothwell, All rights reserved.