Lois & Ann & Nell & Mercy Watson

 

First, Lois.

You remember her? Or not? My chum who messaged me from Durham NC, stuck in a hospital waiting room?

Despite the flurry of people coming and going, the book she’d borrowed from somebody had her engrossed. “The first chapter is SO good,” she wrote, “I became absorbed in it!!! Read it, if you haven’t.”

Immediately I put the book on hold at our library—These Precious Days by Ann Patchett. I’d read Patchett’s Truth & Beauty: a Friendship. Also, The Dutch House.

Days later, Lois messaged again. “Bill’s recuperating. I’m glad to be home!!”

“And everything’s good?” I asked. “Whew!!” Now he just needed fattening up. At the hospital they’d not given him enough to eat. “I’m thick into Precious Days,” I told her.

“Wasn’t that chapter on her three fathers so amazing??!!”

“It was. I love it all. I’ve only just gotten to the Eudora Welty chapter. I have to savor things. I don't want it to end.”

My friends, this is a friend—somebody who finds herself sucked down a path to unknown ends, but surely dulcet, and then begs you to please come along.

Though it’s been a while, I haven’t quite moved on.

Our library’s jacketed copy of Patchett’s book—it has two front covers—may be lolling around now, forlorn. I’ve not looked. Possibly nobody’s pulled it down lately. So go hunt? Or if your library is somewhere else, check there? Find the 800’s shelves and run your eyes along the spines, in case there’s this collection. It just might jump out at you, pink powdered and hopeful.

 

Next let’s deal with Ann.

She writes like a normal person, not floridly—the style is plain yet gripping.

How can it be both? But it is. It just is.

In the next-to-last chapter, Patchett attends a luncheon of luminaries in New York, into whose prestigious club she’s not yet been inducted. After her subway ride, 14th Street to 155th Street, now the balmy wind, the Hudson River flowing by, and the people with famous faces streaming toward the Beaux Arts building, it’s like she went down and boarded the train in Kansas and turned up in Oz. She’s only there to receive an award. She’s not a nobody, not at all, except just a tiny little bit.

They’ve seated her beside John Updike. He’s kind. He’s chatty. Still, she writes, I could feel the strain in every seam of my composure. Overwhelmed as she is by his proximity, she’s worried she might suddenly seize his jacket lapels and yell Don’t you know that you are my god?

She signals to the male friend accompanying her, also at the table, and they flee the tent. They find an empty room in the building, latch onto each other, and try not to shriek. “I am sitting next to John Updike!” I scream-whispered. “You are sitting next to John Updike!” he silently screamed in reply.

John Updike died three and a half years later, writes Patchett, and she too will sometime die. The spectacular part, the day of the Beaux Arts luncheon, was the sky’s gusting, the moving river, the cigarette she smoked to calm her nerves (she quit that same summer). It was Updike’s kiss, too, at the lectern when he presented her award.

The award wasn’t the thing. It was the aliveness.

Somewhere else in Precious Days—I can’t find the page—Patchett says this thing about turns. For a novel to be good it must have a turn you never saw coming. Something’s up around the bend. Oh oh oh, yes. Her nonfiction, too. I kept going around the bend, going around the bend, and getting knocked over.

 

 

And then, Nell.

In Precious Days Patchett talks about Kate DiCamillo. Patchett had sometimes run into her, but that’s all. They were barely acquainted. Now DiCamillo was coming to a local elementary school to read her newest children’s title, and because Niki at the bookstore had told Patchett she must drive out there to the school with some lunch, Patchett did. She always listens to this Niki.

Patchett and DiCamillo and DiCamillo’s publicist sat in the school’s library, on little chairs at a little table, and ate their salads, and then, though Patchett hadn’t planned to, she stayed to hear DiCamillo’s presentation. The auditorium teeming with parents and children, DiCamillo spoke about a vacuum cleaner belonging to her mother and how it had sparked a story about a squirrel poet.

Patchett says that would’ve been the end of things. DiCamillo’d held everybody spellbound, but what did Patchett care about children’s books? The next day, though, a friend of hers, Nell, emailed.

Nell asked me if I knew Kate DiCamillo.

“Funny you should ask,” I said. “We had lunch yesterday.”

Nell went on to tell me that she had just finished reading The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane to her son, and that it had cracked them open and made them better people.

Patchett located a copy. Well well.

She returned to the store. She came home with additional books. She read. She read more. Eventually, she devoured everything of DiCamillo’s to be had.

Some friend, that Nell.

 

Last is Mercy Watson.

She’s a character in one of DiCamillo’s tales. Not anyone I ever knew about.

Thanks to Patchett’s swooning over Where Are You Going, Baby Lincoln? I needed to try the book. And just the other week when I went to the library, upstairs to the juvenile section, there sat Mercy in the stacks.

I didn’t spot Mercy on the book jacket—the front, I mean, the part I stared at. Instead, I saw an old woman, gray haired, and another old woman, blue haired and glowering, and in the grass, between the women, almost like they were playing monkey in the middle, a small, confused girl.

 

Was this girl Baby? She couldn’t be. Gray Hair was the one with the suitcase.

A few lines on the inside flap helped, some. Apparently, Baby’d always do what she was told. Apparently, Eugenia’d always boss. She’d tell Baby what to do and Baby’d say, “Yes Sister.”

Oh wow. This was going to get good.

Also, the words. Preposterously long things.

And now, the story here beside me, I’m a little bit in limbo, restive. When I can sit some child down to listen, their mouth will hang open. Mine too, even though it’ll be my third time through or fifth or some such number.

Eugenia wants Baby to go buy mouse traps. “We are on the verge of an infestation,” says Eugenia (italics mine). When Baby feebly protests, Eugenia says, “You must be firm and resolute, particularly with mice. You must brook them no quarter.”

Even I don’t know what that means, technically.

There’s Baby’s decision to disobey about the mouse traps. There’s her decision to go away, and to pack a book she’s been reading, The Inimitable Spigot, featuring a Detective Spigot who, so far, doesn’t seem to Baby to be particularly inimitable.

Then before Baby leaves she learns from that child on the cover—her name is Stella—that whenever Stella’s family goes on trips, her brother Frank brings his peanut butter sandwiches along. “He says that the peanut butter sandwich is infallible,” says Stella. “Do you like peanut butter, Baby Lincoln?” This causes Baby a niggle of worry. She’s not thought to pack food.

Baby doesn’t have enough money to get all the way to Calaband Darsh on the train. She can go only as far as Fluxom. On her ride—her necessary journey, as she thinks of it—she encounters a man with head allergies, a woman with jelly beans, a boy who’s nervous about wolves. At Fluxom, nowhere she’s never been, she descends from the train onto an empty platform, and in the eerie dark, all she can hear is a cricket. Then she sees, coming toward her, Stella and Eugenia. Oh the relief. Oh the joy.

And here’s where we run into Mercy Watson.

Eugenia is upset, Stella tells Baby. Nice as it was of Mr. Watson, the neighbor, to bring Eugenia and Stella speeding in his car to meet Baby and bring her back home, Eugenia didn’t get to hold the map. Stella held the map. Eugenia is upset, too, because she didn’t get to sit in the front seat. Mercy Watson did. Mercy and Mr. Watson are in the car, waiting, and on the drive home, if Baby wants, Baby can hold the map.

“This is all just ridiculous,” says Eugenia. “It is absurd! I can’t believe we drove with a pig in the front seat to the middle of nowhere.”

Just one more thing that knocked me over.

P.S. What else about the book: the cheeks of every last person in the pictures, some pouchy, have small circular spots that glint.

P.P.S. I don’t know if it’s intentional but the outlandish words seem to melt away as the story progresses. There’s monogrammed, and navigate, and crisis, and construction paper, but not the inexplicable inimitable ones that set your head spinning. The wonder is really Baby and Eugenia and Stella. And Mr. Watson and Mercy Watson—just plain Mercy. Oh, and the gleam on everybody’s ordinary cheeks.