Miss Muriel's Memories

Tea tray. Tea cups. Teapot. Tea cosy. Sugar biscuits for Marlene and salted peanuts for Agnes.

Muriel arranged the accoutrements on the tea tray before her until they reached a satisfactory level of orderliness, then she called for Adam. The young man entered the kitchen at her call with a warm smile. He was cheerier than her last home aid, a robust man named Thomas who did not know crochet from crinoline. To be fair to the man, neither did his colleague, but Thomas’s snide comments about downsizing—his eyes raking over the contents of Muriel’s many stuffed closets with a mercenary eye—had been more than could be borne.

“In the parlour, Miss Muriel?” Adam asked, lifting up the tray with an ease that Muriel envied.

She did not miss much of her youth—years of tumult and tribulation, of catty theatre directors and preening prima donnas. But she did miss the ease with which her limbs once moved. The way she could spend a day or more crouched on the floor of her studio, pinning and draping until the costumes before her came to life. Now, she needed a walker just to rise from her parlour chair.

Adam set the tea tray down on the low table that sat between her chair and the couch. Muriel shuffled after him. The tennis balls on the end of her walker thudding on the plush carpet. It had been a gift from a paramour—a man with more money than sense and enough good taste for Muriel to forgive him for it. He presented it to her one rainy autumn day, yelling up to her apartment window in a way he thought was charming and Muriel thought was going to get her evicted from her building.

He’d run off with a soprano not two weeks after the gift.

Good riddance, Muriel thought as she sunk into the velvet cushion of her chair.

“Could you put Edith on for me, Adam?”

“‘Course.”

Muriel closed her eyes, resting her head back as Adam fiddled with the record player. She did not know how long she rested until a weight in her lap jolted her awake. The smooth leather of the photograph album was cool to the touch. She gave Adam a wry look. He returned it with a winning smile.

“No photos today?” Muriel huffed. The young, always so ready to jump from one thing to the next. She ignored him as she cracked open the book before her.

She started, as she always did, at the years of Paris. Her childhood had been dull, dusty, and dreary. A small town. An afeared father, for whom every new thing was something to shun. Paris had been the start of her true life. The only memories she ever wished to be her first, as if she had been born from the womb straight onto the pavements in front of the Palais Garnier.

She brought her fingers to touch the cheeks of the ballerina standing beside her in one of the photographs. Adeline. She had died of pneumonia two years ago at the age of eighty-eight. A spritely woman to the end, whose letters had always been returned with equal enthusiasm and interest in the life within them. Together they had gone to Egypt for the pyramids, to India for the Ganges, and to China for the wall. Adeline was laughter and all things bright. She had no fear when they lost their luggage or their wallets, and no shame when it came to what she did not know. She was a thousand questions to weary tour guides and a bold adventurer into the unknown.

Muriel turned the page. Her three children. Marcus, with his stern face. Helen, her mouth open in a song brought silent by the camera. Ethan, serving spoon in his mouth. Muriel’s own hand at his arm ready to strike as he defended himself and his bottomless stomach from motherly exasperation. Gregory was also in the shot, lurking at the edges of it. Agnes had taken a black marker to his face and body, scrubbing even this small record of him from sight. Muriel turned the page more quickly than she had the last, lest the memory of her husband linger.

The doorbell rang just as Muriel found a photograph meant just for her arriving guests. She turned the album towards the door, holding it before her as a shield as Marlene and Agnes entered the parlour.

Agnes squawked in rage.

“You told me,” she started, as she unwound the scarf from her neck and eased from her towering height onto the low couch, “that there was no evidence!”

“You say this every time, Aggie.” Marlene chimed in, as she wheeled herself to the space between the couch and the chair. She pulled at a lever at the base of her wheelchair, locking it in place. Marlene was missing two more fingers.

“Do I? The point still stands. Remove it from my sight,” Agnes said, slipping into the imperious tones of Lady Macbeth, “or I shall part thine head from thine shoulders.”

“Sounds terribly messy.” Marlene said, as she reached forward for her first sugar biscuit.

Muriel closed the album, hiding the photograph of Agnes tumbling offstage at her first opening night so many decades ago. Marlene’s own form diving towards her friend’s descent. Muriel had been in the audience, just that once, her camera ready for her friends’ triumph. It was perhaps her favourite photograph.

She called for Adam and handed off the album to him. Many years ago she had no time for such quiet contemplations of the past. She lived. Loudly and without pause. Her photographs mere incidental happenings. She had not bothered to look at them until her sixtieth birthday, when her bones began to ache and thoughts of retirement plagued her waking hours. At first, she had looked at them with a simple heart. Placing the photographs in the album as she laughed and raged at the contents within them. Photographs of her best work, of friends and foes, of opening nights too hellish to remember fondly.

Nowadays, she clung to the photographs like lifeline. Something to keep her afloat on brewing seas.

Adam thought she did not notice, when his smile pulled tight after she spoke. The way he did everything to keep her calm and unafraid of what was happening to her mind. But Muriel was no fool. She knew. She knew it by the way Adam hovered. The way she was the one to correct herself and he never dared to.

Agnes and Marlene knew as well, when Muriel stumbled. Repeated herself. Told them of their school days as if they were yesterday. They had none of the wariness of Adam, however. They corrected her, laughing at and with her. You old biddy, they would say, that was fifty years ago, as Muriel nodded and pretended to know that too.

Muriel poured the tea, handing one cup to Agnes and another to Marlene. Agnes took hers without pausing as she told them of a director who had once given her the task of looking bereaved but not without an air of allurement, as he had said. Marlene and Muriel laughed as they always did when Agnes told this story. Muriel settled into her chair as Marlene took up the next story, of the actress who tried to sabotage Marlene's debut performance. Their memories, some warm, some cold, settled over Muriel as she sipped at her tea and bid her friends to tell story after story. Letting their words wash over her.