Standing in the Rainbow - Fannie Flagg [206]
At home he knew when it was fall. He smelled it. He raked it up in the yard. He and Norma had a routine. At the end of September she collected all their summer clothes and put them away in the bottom drawers and moved the sweaters up to the top. All the winter coats were brought from the back bedroom closet and put in the coat closet. Summer shoes were replaced with winter shoes. He could count on a month or so of everything smelling slightly like mothballs. Then when May came around, back they went. But this year the clothes did not change. Everything was still seersucker and short-sleeved. They only had a few sweaters but that was mostly for air-conditioning, not weather. Macky had read somewhere that a person’s ability to adjust was a sign of intelligence. So far he was failing the test. Not that he had not tried. In fact, at first he had been much more enthusiastic than Norma. But after the initial excitement, after he had done all the work on the new house, learned the neighborhood, and seen all the sights, it had slowly begun to dawn on him. Life as he had known it was all over. Life in a town where your family had lived for over a hundred years and everybody knew not only you but all your family was over. Here he was just another stranger. Just another transient. Nobody special. At home he had an identity. He was Macky Warren. Son of Olla and Glenn Warren. His father had owned and run the hardware store for fifty years, and then he had owned it and run it. For most of his life, whenever he had been anywhere where people did not know him and they had asked, as men do, What line are you in? he had been able to answer, I have a little hardware store back home. Now nobody ever asked what line he was in or what did he do. If they did ask, he had to answer by telling them what he used to do. What he used to be. Now what was he? Who was he? Just another displaced stranger trying to pretend that a get-together at the complex clubhouse was just like home only better.
Aunt Elner was making so many new friends her own age that she was loving Florida but Norma had problems with Macky. She came in after one of her flower-arranging classes and said, “Macky, I talked to my friend Ethel and she said that Arve went through the same thing and his doctor identified it as a male identity problem. And that what you need to do is to connect with your inner male.”
“Oh good God, Norma, what did you tell her?”
“Nothing bad, I just said that you were depressed, having a hard time adjusting to being retired. It’s not anything to be ashamed of, evidently a lot of men go through it. Anyhow, she talked it over with Arve and he went for help and she says it really helped him.”
“Norma, Arve is an idiot. Do you really think that wearing gold chains and sticking a curly black wig on your head at seventy-five is adjusting? He’s a joke.”
“All right, so he may be a little silly but he’s happy and isn’t that the point, to be happy? Anyhow I’m not going to argue about Arve; the point is she gave me this brochure for you to look at.” Macky took it and read where once a week, groups of men organized by Jon Avnet, Ph.D., gather to “reconnect with the warrior within, to drum, talk, weep, and tell their stories in a safe place.”
He looked up at Norma and said nothing.
The Ant
MACKY WANDERED over to Ocean Park, sat on a concrete bench, and stared out at the blue water. The world he had known was gone. Not only was he living in an alien place, but while he had been busy all these years making a living, someone had changed all the rules. For all he knew, he might as well have gone to sleep and awakened on the moon.
When he’d grown up, everybody had more or less agreed to a certain way of living.