ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching
Book Two, Chapter 255: Bella Again
I turn a corner in the lobby, headed for our building’s elevator, just as Bella comes out the elevator.
An accidental meeting. We haven’t talked to each other in months and months. Mainly, I’ve been writing. But tonight I step onto the terrace with her, where our neighbor Connie already awaits her, and we three talk.
The rattle of cicadas is so loud in the nearby holly trees that I can barely hear Bella. She bends nearer as I bend nearer — she knows my hearing is diminished — and continues talking.
“I’m quieter than I used to be,” she says. “I’ve noticed this about myself. When I’m with other people, I talk less. I listen more. But I feel empty at times when I’m with people I’ve known for years. I feel restless.”
Connie has known Bella for years. “You need a vacation,” she says.
“Vacations don’t change anything. I come back, and I’d still feel restless. I need a change, not a vacation.”
Then she talks of moving to Florida, to a beach community with a farm market and art galleries and restaurants and shops. She’s lived there before, and been miserable there before, but then her life was different; she was escaping an unhealthy marriage.
“What do I want?” Bella asks. “A man?. . . I’m not inspired to write. I don’t want to do another play.” She wraps a chartreuse sweater about her shoulders, swaddles herself. “I’m not cold; I’m being bitten.” She adds, without elaborating, “I’ve shut down Match.com.”
“You don’t want to feel stuck,” I say. “That was your fear last summer, too, after you saw the Hotel Marigold movie.”
“Turning seventy really hit me hard,” she says. “I didn’t think it would, but it has. I need to shake up my life while I still can. I’m bored. I think that’s what it is. I can fill my time, but I don’t want to just fill time. I want excitement.”
“I try to take the next good step,” I say. “I don’t look too far into the future. One day at a time. One step at a time, for me. Any more than that, and I start to feel overwhelmed.”
“Try Florida for a month,” Connie says. “If it doesn’t feel right, come back.”
“I can’t stay with my Florida friends for a month,” Bella says. “One’s married, and the other is crazy and has an even crazier parrot. Maybe I can do a week. That’s what I’ll do. A week.”
I say good-night to Bella and Connie and ride the elevator to my place.
Perhaps Bella’s steps will lead her to the Florida beach community. Maybe she’ll find a transplanted New Yorker who’ll take her to the opera, to the art galleries, to the restaurants . . . and take her to his heart. She’s willing to go there. Maybe this time she’ll listen to her heart and find a heart akin to hers. Maybe she won’t feel restless anymore.
But then again, restlessness comes from within, and nothing from without will still it for long.
