Following in Her Footsteps

You never really know a person until you’ve lived her life. I can’t actually live Georgia McFearin’s life, but I’m getting a picture of it that is pretty intense. If I could just talk to her.

11:30 a.m.

I spent the night at a big airport hotel in Savannah. Now that is irritating. This beautiful city is spread out before me and I’m in a commercial, sterile chain hotel that shakes every time a plane takes off. It’s about 70 degrees and raining at the moment, but the guy at the hotel desk said it isn’t likely to last long. It will get up near 80 this afternoon. Wow! When I left Seattle, it was in the 30s. According to the Weather Channel, It’s 45 there now and raining.

I got off the plane last night and came straight to the hotel. Deb Riley checked in—young curly-haired brunette. I had dinner in the hotel restaurant, which I was surprised to discover was pretty popular on Saturday night. Go figure. Of course, my body was telling me that it was only 5:00 when I started trying to get myself ready to sleep. Part of the ritual for me is cleansing everything as deeply as I can. Ages in a hot steamy bath, beauty mask, carefully removing my nail polish and makeup. Just me au naturel. When I got up this morning, I was a fresh blank canvas ready to put on Peg Chester. Breakfast was delivered by room service at 7:00, along with the Savannah Morning News. By that time, I had already applied my nail polish, a pinkish pearl called Champagne Toast. I filed my nails down pretty short because Peg is a no-nonsense woman.

After breakfast I started on my face and hands. The thing is that even though at 27 I think of 50 as being kind of old—sorry about that—significant aging on most women doesn’t start to show in the face and hands until much later. You don’t turn into a wrinkled old hag at 49. The creams that Stevie gave me tighten skin or loosen skin. So you have to be careful where you use them. So, when I apply a combination of skin loosening under my eyes and skin tightening on my cheeks, I naturally develop puffy little bags under my eyes. I stretch the skin at the corner of my eyes and apply a latex base, then hold the skin tight while it dries. When I let go, there is just enough extra material there to wrinkle. The good part about this is that it wrinkles in the exact same places every time you do it because it wrinkles where you will eventually wrinkle. I use a slightly darker base than I would normally wear as Deb. It gives my skin a slightly more weathered look. My cheekbones get highlighted and so on. Doing the full face and neck takes, maybe, 90 minutes. Of course, if Stevie were here helping me, it would go a lot faster.

Then the hands. Nothing is a faster give-away that you aren’t what you appear than a mismatch between your face and hands. Latex is the ticket here as well. Make a tight fist with your hand bent forward at the wrist. Then apply latex across the entire back of your hand and well-up onto your forearm. Let it dry thoroughly and then relax your hand. All the little wrinkles and veins will be accented. You need to blend each finger from nail to knuckle into the fist. You especially want to erase any sign of a ring or watch if you wear one. Palms of the hand are at once easier and more difficult. I don’t do much of anything to my palms except relax them. Our first inclination when we hold out our hand is to stretch our fingers out straight. Nothing says young more quickly than that. When you show the back of your hand keep it relaxed so that the fingers are slightly curved inward. When you turn your palm over, let your fingers relax inward a little more. Relaxed fingers allow the puffiness of your skin to enhance the depth of your natural prints.

Well, after I added suitable clothing, a skirt and hose, conservative blouse and cardigan sweater, I pulled on my wig, a simple bob that is medium Ash brown with about 25% gray. I popped in my brown contact lenses and I was a new woman. I checked out of the hotel electronically and left by the side entrance. People only remember what they see, not what they didn’t see. What I see now is Grover pulling up to pick me up in an older model Honda Accord. It’s time to go to work.

9:00 p.m.

The encounters today were pretty interesting. Grover didn’t recognize me, of course, until I stuck my head in the door and said “Uncle Grover?” You’d have thought he was a fish the way his mouth was working. I figured he’d need some time to get used to it so suggested we have lunch before I went to check into the Bed & Breakfast Grover reserved for me. The entire trip to the restaurant, which was a pretty long one, was filled with Grover dodging cars on the freeway and repeating himself over and over, “I don’t believe it. Are you really you?”

“Look, Uncle Grover,” I said, “it’s been a long time since we’ve seen each other. It’s understandable that you can’t believe that I’ve changed in all these years. But you have to remember that I’m Peg and forget you ever met anyone in Seattle. I’m your niece and I’m going to take care of Georgia’s affairs for you. You can start by telling me all about Savannah and where she played, went to school and church, and who her friends were. I’m going to find a reason to visit each and every one of them that still lives in Savannah.”

I have to hand it to the old guy. He adapted pretty quickly. Then I had to do some adapting. There is nothing that will make you feel middle aged as quickly as eating at some super buffet restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. It seemed that this was one that Grover frequented most weeks because the hostess greeted him by name and smiled at me when he introduced Georgia’s cousin from Cleveland. I couldn’t do justice to the amount of food available on the buffet, but Grover more than made up for my appetite. He packed away plate after plate of turkey and dressing, roast beef, salads, sweet rolls and coffee. The coffee was pretty weak and I resigned myself to not having a decent cup until I get back to Seattle. I know I won’t get one in Cleveland when I leave here.

All through the meal Grover talked about Georgia. It started out as a sort of recitation of basic facts that he thought I should know, but with just a little prompting, on my part he started reminiscing about what she was like as a girl. I think we were at that restaurant for a good two hours while he kept going back for another helping and then talking around a mouthful of fried chicken about how funny it was when Georgia and her friend Clarice had decided they were going to hold a séance in the attic. Grover had slipped up before they started their ritual and appropriately thumped and rattled when they asked the ghosts to appear. The girls were so frightened that they fled from the attic and hid in Georgia’s bed for the remainder of the night.

After the long lunch, Grover took me to the Queen Vicky Bed & Breakfast next to Forsyth Park. The couple who run the B&B were very nice and also seemed to know Grover fairly well. They didn’t recall that Grover had a niece, but he mentioned his wife’s sister back in Ohio and they nodded their heads. He’s really becoming a natural at this.

Then we went to Grover’s house at 431 Duffy. Oh my. At one time, this was undoubtedly a beautiful old Victorian house. Grover said his wife died back in ’82 and the place looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since. The exterior was all pealing paint and overgrown bushes. When he mentioned that Georgia had lived with him after college until five years ago when she moved to Seattle, I suddenly had a dread of walking into the dead woman’s house. If she inherited her father’s housekeeping skills, I was going to hire a service and sit back and supervise. Packing up personal belongings and hacking computers is one thing. Cleaning house is not part of my fee.

But entering Georgia’s room was like entering a different world. Grover said he hadn’t disturbed anything since she left home, but that Georgia had been back in the fall and cleaned everything up the way she liked it. Grover just couldn’t keep up with the rest of the house, but Georgia had planned to come back one day.

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Oh, she bought the place from me,” Grover said. “She loved this place. She assumed the mortgage and has been making payments ever since. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I have to come up with the mortgage payment by the first of the month, don’t I?”

So that’s why Georgia was making the mortgage payments. She bought her family home and was keeping it paid for as long as her father was alive. The poor old guy. He left me in her room and said that he’d make us tea in an hour or so, but that now he needed his Sunday nap. I watched him enter a room down the hall and heard a television in that room come on with a football game. I was alone in Georgia’s world.

I had time now to completely absorb Georgia’s life. As neat as the room was, it was far from empty. I started by taking pictures of everything. I wanted a record of where each item was when I first saw it. I did general pictures first and then close-ups of everything. Grover had prepared a stack of packing boxes in the hallway and I brought the first one in and started packing. I thought it would be best to start with clothes and it was a treasure. Here were clothes that a woman my assumed age had worn. It was obvious that a lot of the clothes had been kept for many years, but there were a few items that were treasures. They’d look great on Peg, and I took the liberty of boxing them up and addressing them to Peg Chester in Cleveland. I’d get these out first thing tomorrow and have a more extensive wardrobe when I got back. My Peg Chester clothes amounted to three outfits and two pair of shoes. This would help a lot if I had to maintain the character for a long period of time. And Grover was paying me with Georgia’s estate.

I suddenly paused. I wondered if Grover realized that agreeing to pay me with Georgia’s estate meant that the house was going to belong to me. This was going to become complicated. Of course I wasn’t going to leave him homeless, but I didn’t relish the idea of paying the mortgage on a place 4,000 miles from Seattle, either.

I became so absorbed in sorting through Peg’s things and packing them that I didn’t realize how much time had passed until Grover tapped on the door. I’d turned on the radio next to Georgia’s bed and had been listening to gospel music for the past two hours. It was 6:30 and Grover said that he had tea and popcorn ready. He didn’t really fix much else for dinner. We ate and talked for a while.

“Grover, you could have packed up all this stuff without me, you know,” I said.

“Yes,” he answered. “But there are just some things a father shouldn’t know about his daughter.” I had to nod my head at the wisdom of that. After we’d finished our tea and popcorn I left to go back to the B&B. Grover offered to drive me, but after my harried experience with him in traffic this afternoon, I just said I needed some exercise. It was a pretty straight shot across Forsyth Park to get to the B&B and I could use the exercise.

I hadn’t counted on it getting dark.

The longer day here in the South had lulled me into a false sense of spring. There was scarcely nine hours of daylight at this time of year in Seattle, but Savannah is so far south that it was closer to eleven hours here. It was dusk when I left Grover’s house, but full dark before I was halfway across Forsyth park. I almost stepped on the old man next to the path before I saw him. I don’t know who was startled more.

There is something about homeless people that tugs at my heart. I’m no Pollyanna. I wade through throngs of homeless every day in Seattle. Some of them even know Maizie by name and I usually have a dollar that I can give them. I know Dag must have and they shouldn’t suffer just because he is dead. But when this guy looked up at me, he was shy and looked apologetic. He held out his hand—I thought a typical panhandler—but he had a flower in it. No, it wasn’t just a flower, it was a perfect rose. A perfect brown rose. The light from the streetlamp was dim, but I could see that this wasn’t actually a rose, it was a piece of art. I thought at first that it was carved out of wood, but then I realized that it was actually something like straw or grass that was carefully folded, bent, and tied to look exactly like a rose. I was enthralled.

“This is beautiful!” I said. “You are an artist.” I sat down on the bench next to where he sat on the ground and rummaged in my bag. I pulled out a $10 bill and handed it to him. His eyes got so big around I thought they’d explode. Then he bobbed his head and said “God bless.” That’s all he ever said. “You are an amazing artist,” I said again. “Do you travel around much?” He nodded. All the way through the park, limping because of the bump in my left shoe, I’d been thinking about how hard it was to remain in disguise. Here was a guy who traveled around and I bet didn’t even have an ID. “Nobody stops you from being whatever you want to be, do they?” I said more to myself than to him. “Sometimes I wonder what it would be like just to abandon who I am forever and be nobody. I suppose that doesn’t sound at all exciting to you. You are nobody to just about everybody, but still you can make this incredible work of art.” I sat there silently for a minute and so did he. Then I got up and kept walking. I didn’t look back at him because I couldn’t bear the thought of him sleeping out under that bench, or wherever he sleeps. At least its warmer here than it is in Seattle.

I got back to the B&B and went straight to my room. Fortunately I didn’t have to deal with the owners because they were watching some variety show on TV. Now I’m ready to sleep. I’ll have to deal with them at breakfast, I’m sure.