Hazy
written by: Dani Brokaw
@daniiswriting
Hazel Gray craved order.
At eighty-three, widowed for ten years, she spent her orderly days in a small terraced house on the outskirts of London, its poky rooms neat as pins. The kitchen smelled faintly of bleach and boiled fish and fastened to the fridge was a piece of paper detailing Hazel’s weekly menu – Monday; fish pie and peas, Tuesday; frozen beefburgers, and so on. She consulted the menu each morning, even though it hadn’t changed in forty years, because her memory was beginning to fail, fading like the embroidered threads of the floral cushions on the living couch. Her sister, Jill, had given her the cushions years earlier.
Hazel had one daughter, Pauline, and a grandson, Joe. It had never bothered her especially since they lived miles away. Then Pauline divorced her husband and announced she and Joe were moving to London.
“This way I can keep an eye on you,” Pauline said. “Or at least Joe can while I work.”
Hazel didn’t want anyone keeping an eye on her. “Doesn’t Joe work too?” she asked. “He’s twenty-three, isn’t he?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Surely he has better things to do than babysit an old woman.” A pause followed. Hazel stared at the wavering bars of winter light on the table. Her kitchen windows were so clean that birds regularly flew into them and died on the patio.
“Joe’s moved here with me because he needs a fresh start,” Pauline explained. “He’s been in a little trouble and he’s out of work.”
“Oh,” Hazel murmured.
Two days later she opened the front door and her heart stood still.
“Hazy,” Joe said.
He’d called her that since he was a baby. Hazel hadn’t seen him in five years. He’d grown to look so like George, his grandfather and her dead husband, she felt faint looking at him. His nose was a beak, his brown eyes too close together, but somehow his features added up to a unique, illogical beauty. George had kept his curls in check, cropped down to stubble, but Joe’s sprang free, forming an exuberant halo of frizz.
“You’d better come in,” she said.
In the following weeks, Joe popped by almost every day, disrupting and disturbing her routine like a tumultuous weather event no one could have predicted. He’d frowned at her tidiness and laughed at her weekly menu. One day he’d brought food, small white boxes containing fluffy, aromatic rice, tender steamed vegetables, spicy chicken drenched in an amber sauce. The unfamiliar tastes danced on her tongue.
“Have you ever traveled, Hazy?” he’d asked.
“Once,” she replied. “To France on a day trip. Your grandfather’s idea.” The memory of that day surfaced in her mind like a layer of scum; she’d got sick on the ferry, then she and George had quarreled over lunch when she refused to try the cheese.
Joe brought gifts – a light catcher to dangle in the kitchen window and a surreal picture of hot air balloons floating through an alien sky, which he hung in the living room. Once he brought a pair of bizarre cookies, one neon pink, the other emerald green.
“Macarons, Hazy,” he said.
“I hate coconut,” she shuddered.
“Macarons, not macaroons.”
She’d chosen the pink one and the crisp sugar melted tenderly on her tongue, zesty and delicious. Her eyes widened.
Joe’s visits woke something up in her head. Her thoughts refused to lie still. She remembered the rubbery scrambled eggs she’d make for herself and Jill on the nights their mother left them alone. Then she frowned – had she forgotten Jill’s birthday this year? Another memory blossomed. Jill had died years ago.
She saw George driving them home after the ferry docked in Folkestone, his face stiff with disappointment. Regret crushed her. She wished she’d tried the cheese and marveled with him at the Frenchness of everything instead of sulking because he’d dragged her out of the house.
Joe arrived one morning – Hazel wasn’t sure of the day – as she sat at the table with a cold cup of tea watching shards of jeweled light spinning through the kitchen.
“Hazy,” Joe said. “Do you ever want to see the world differently?” He set a box of sweets on the table, translucent fruit gums.
She looked at him suspiciously. “They’re not drugs, are they?”
“They’ll relax you. Make you happy.”
Happiness had been so elusive during her life. “There you go,” Joe said, when she took one.
After he left, her head felt as if it were expanding. Bulging with memories, like a cupboard so filled with junk the doors no longer shut, the memories slipping free one by one and falling to the floor.
Jill lying still on a hospital bed.
George’s shuttered, disappointed face as he turned away from her.
The tapping of her mother’s high heels as she hurried to leave the house.
Hazel floated into the living room. The cushions on the couch were new again, the colors blazing fiercely. She turned to the picture Joe had given her and studied the hot air balloons drifting through the sky above a pink, luminescent sea.
How odd.
The balloons were moving, and there were people in them. Hazel’s nose touched the picture as she peered into it. George was in one of the balloons, waving madly at her. She spotted Jill in another, also waving.
She gasped aloud, then waved back, delighted.
They were smiling. Tears clogged Hazel’s throat. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I love you!” George called.
Hazel took a step back and tumbled onto the sofa. George and Jill, watching from their hot air balloons, floating amongst neon pink clouds, burst out laughing.
Hazel began to laugh too, seeing the absurd beauty of it all – emerald green cookies, the sparkling lights in her kitchen, the echo of George in their grandson Joe, whose hair bounced on his shoulders like a cloud. Her days were slipping away, but each one was a gift.
