not just unkind but unjust. What did Cathy expect Della to do? Divorce her husband after forty years of marriage? Get her own apartment and start dating strange men, the way Cathy was doing when they first met?
“You want to quit your job and go off to Florida, fine,” Cathy said. “But I have a job. And if you don’t mind, I’ve got some things to do before closing up.”
They had never had a fight before. In the following weeks, every time Della considered calling Cathy she found that she was too angry to do so. Who was Cathy to tell her how to run her marriage? She and Clark were at each other’s throats half the time.
A month later, just as Della was packing up the last boxes for the movers, Cathy appeared at her house.
“Are you mad at me?” Cathy said when Della opened the door.
“Well, you do sometimes think you know everything.”
That was maybe too mean, because Cathy burst out crying. She hunched forward and wailed in a pitiful voice, “I’m going to miss you, Della!”
Tears were streaming down her face. She opened her arms as if for a hug. Della didn’t approve of the first of these responses and she was hesitant about the second. “Now quit that,” she said. “You’re liable to start me crying, too.”
Cathy’s blubbering only got worse.
Alarmed, Della said, “We can still talk on the phone, Cathy. And write letters. And visit. You can come stay in our ‘resort.’ It’s probably full of snakes and alligators but you’re welcome.”
Cathy didn’t laugh. Through her tears, she said, “Dick won’t want me to visit. He hates me.”
“He doesn’t hate you.”
“Well, I hate him! He treats you like crap, Della. I’m sorry but that’s the truth. And now he’s making you quit your job and go down to Florida? To do what?”
“That’s enough of that,” Della said.
“OK! OK! I’m just so frustrated!”
Nevertheless, Cathy was calming down. After a moment, she said, “I brought you something.” She opened her purse. “This came into the store the other day. From a little publisher out in Alaska. We didn’t order it but I started reading it and I couldn’t put it down. I don’t want to give the story away, but, well—it just seems really appropriate! You’ll see when you read it.” She was looking into Della’s eyes. “Sometimes books come into your life for a reason, Della. It’s really strange.”
Della never knew what to do when Cathy got mystical on her. She sometimes claimed the moon affected her moods, and she invested coincidences with special meanings. On that day, Della thanked Cathy for the book and managed not to cry when they finally did hug goodbye.
The book had a drawing on the cover. Two Indians sitting in a tepee. Cathy was into all that kind of stuff, too, lately, stories about Native Americans or slave uprisings in Haiti, stories with ghosts or magical occurrences. Della liked some better than others.
She packed the book in a box of odds and ends that hadn’t been taped shut yet.
And then what happened to it? She shipped the box down to Florida with all the others. It turned out there wasn’t room for all their belongings in their one-bedroom at the hunting lodge, so they had to put them in storage. The resort went bust a year later. Soon Dick made Della move to Miami, and then to Daytona, and finally up to Hilton Head as he tried to make a go of other ventures. Only after he died, while Della was going through the bankruptcy, was she forced to open up the storage facility and sell off their furniture. Going through the boxes she’d shipped to Florida almost a decade before, she cut open the box of odds and ends and Two Old Women fell out.
The book is a retelling of an old Athabascan legend, which the author, Velma Wallis, heard growing up as a child. A legend handed down “from mothers to daughters” that told the story of the two old women of the title, Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’, who are left behind by their tribe during a time of famine.
Left behind to die, in other words. As was the custom.
Except the two old women don’t die. Out in the woods, they get to talking. Didn’t they used to know how to hunt and fish and forage for food? Couldn’t they do that again? And so that’s what they do, they relearn everything they knew as younger people, they hunt for prey and they go ice-fishing, and at one point they hide out from cannibals who pass through the territory. All kinds of stuff.
One drawing in the book showed the two women trekking across the Alaskan tundra. In hooded parkas and sealskin boots, they drag sleds behind them, the woman in front slightly less stooped than the other. The caption read: Our tribes have gone in search of food, in the land our grandfathers told us about, far over the mountains. But we have been judged unfit to follow them, because we walk with sticks, and are slow.
Certain passages stood out, like one with Ch’idzigyaak speaking:
“I know that you are sure of our survival. You are younger.” She could not help but smile bitterly at her remark, for just yesterday they both had been judged too old to live with the young.
“It’s just like the two of us,” Della said, when she finally read the book and called Cathy. “One’s younger than the other, but they’re both in the same fix.”
It started out as a joke. It was amusing to compare their own situations, in suburban Detroit and rural New Hampshire, with the existential plight of the old Inuit women. But the correspondences felt real, too. Della moved to Contoocook to be closer to Robbie but, two years later, Robbie moved to New York, leaving her stranded in the woods. Cathy’s bookstore closed. She started a pie-baking business out of her home. Clark retired and spent all day in front of the TV, entranced by pretty weather ladies on the news. Buxom, in snug, brightly colored dresses, they undulated before the weather maps, as though mimicking the storm fronts. All four of Cathy’s sons had left Detroit. They lived far away, on the other side of the mountains.
There was one illustration in the book that Della and Cathy particularly liked. It showed Ch’idzigyaak in the act of throwing a hatchet, while Sa’ looked on. The caption read, Perhaps if we see a squirrel, we can kill it with our hatchets, as we did when we were young.
That became their motto. Whenever one of them was feeling downhearted, or needed to deal with a problem, the other would call and say, “It’s hatchet time.”
Take charge, they meant. Don’t mope.
That was another quality they shared with the Inuit women. The tribe didn’t leave Ch’idzigyaak and Sa’ behind only because they were old. It was also because they were complainers. Always moaning about their aches and pains.
Husbands were often of the opinion that wives complained too much. But that was a complaint in itself. A way men had of shutting women up. Still, Della and Cathy knew that some of their unhappiness was their own fault. They let things fester, got into black moods, sulked. Even if their husbands asked what was wrong, they wouldn’t say. Their victimization felt too pleasurable. Relief would require no longer being themselves.
What was it about complaining that felt so good? You and your fellow sufferer emerging from a thorough session as if from a spa bath, refreshed and tingling?
Over
