Episode 15: The Girl at the Tiller
Celia Prewitt's Secret
Many thanks to for sharing this photo of Hubert (aka Chip) and allowing me to adjust it for ghostly purposes!
Episode 15: The Girl at the Tiller
Celia Prewitt has a secret, and that’s saying something in a place where, if you pass gas in an apparently empty aisle at the Apple Cart, at least one person will comment, from the next aisle over, You know, as we age our bodies can’t process foods like onions and garlic, to which someone else will add Yeah, older people should be careful about what they eat.
(That kind of comment really irritates Celia. She eats Lean Cuisines and Campbell’s soup most days, and the occasional scone from Bonnie’s Bakery. Do these busybodies think she’s in her kitchen whipping up an onion tart with wilted garlic scapes for supper? If they’re so concerned about what she and other “older people” eat, maybe someone ought to come over and cook something for her once in a while.)
So it would shock just about everyone to discover she has a secret.
It isn’t that she used to play the trumpet and the trombone, making a big cheerful sound at rallies and parades and even, for a few years, as part of the orchestra for the Looser Island Community Theater. Most people know about her musical background, and even if they didn’t they could have guessed from the fact that she still gives music lessons to a few select students. Anyway, far from shocking anyone, the islanders are tickled to think of diminutive Mrs. Prewitt tootling on the trumpet or blasting on the ‘bone.
And it isn’t that she used to be a teacher at the Looser Island High School. During the decades when Mrs. Prewitt was teaching, that was almost the only career open to a woman who worked rather than staying home with her children. Also, many of the adults who grew up on the island were her students, once upon a time. She was very strict, according to those who’d had her as a teacher, especially with the boys, but you have to be strict if you want to get anything through those thick skulls and raging hormones, Mrs. Prewitt always says.
Most people even know what she wanted to teach was math—algebra and geometry and pre-calculus, “the logical arts”—but that wasn’t what women did in those days. Women taught English or home economics or French or Spanish. So she taught English Literature and Spanish, and if some of Shakespeare’s more lyrical and powerful scenes got short shrift in her Lit class, and the students in her Spanish class never learned to trill their “r”s properly, well, that was what came of having a shortsighted principal who assigned classes according to gender rather than the teachers’ talents.
Really, Celia Prewitt doesn’t seem the type to have secrets, but if anyone had known she was hiding something, they might have wondered if it was somehow related to her granddaughter, Olga.
Olga has been taking the ferry to visit her Nona ever since she was about ten years old. The islanders loved the little girl with the tousled hair and the perennially dirty face and the never-ending stream of questions, and they admire the lovely and independent young woman she’s become. She’s impossible not to like, even if you’re an old grouch like Jens Jensen.
But ever since last fall, whenever anyone asks about Olga, even if it’s only When’s Olga’s next visit?, Mrs. Prewitt gets a vague look in her eye and her mouth goes a little lopsided, as if it isn’t sure whether it wants to smile or frown.
Mysterious, Alessandra whispers to her friend Mac one day, after running into Mrs. Prewitt on the Village Commons.
Poppycock, Celia mutters.
“Everyone watches shows on Netflickers or whatever it is and they think every person’s life is riddled with intrigue,” Mrs. Prewitt tells Ella a few days later. She’s in the hallway at the school, having been asked to fill in for the Spanish teacher after he’d gone home sick. Another teacher, milling about at the end of the day, suggested there was something “mysterious” about the Spanish teacher’s illness, at which Mrs. Prewitt clasped her hands and shook her head. “All those ridiculous shows on the television make you think life is like some kind of spy movie,” she says. “Well, it isn’t.”
She knows she’s lecturing, but with eighty-one years of life under her belt she feels she’s earned it. More to the point, as a teacher, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, advice has been her vocation and her calling for most of her life, and it’s too late to change.
Now, in the pre-dawn hours of a June morning, with her tea growing cold, Celia can’t remember why Ella’s colleague thought the Spanish teacher’s illness was mysterious. Was it important? Why can’t she remember?
Getting old is for the birds.
Except birds don’t get old, seemingly. They live short, wild, careless lives, and then they die, and you find their carcasses on the beach.
Celia wonders how much longer she has before she is a (metaphorical) carcass on the beach.
Which is why she’s guarded her secret so zealously no one even knows she has a secret. Because keeping the secret is the Right Thing To Do, and who knows how long it might be before she must account for her actions to the ultimate arbiter of all actions?
Believing her time is limited is also the reason she agreed to teach Charlie how to play the trumpet, even though she has no intention of putting any instrument to her lips ever again.
Reminder: You can find the Cast of Characters on this Substack or on The Dogs of Looser Island website here.
And now back to Episode 15 . . .
Celia was born to parents who had lived through the Great Depression. She was a toddler when WWII started, barely ten years old when it ended, but the war left its mark on her. As she grew up, and throughout her adulthood, she’d seen other military engagements that didn’t get such grandiose titles but still fit the statement War is Hell. In all the years her husband and then later her sons and later still her grandsons were of age, she prayed nightly, importuning the divine who sometimes seemed to be otherwise occupied: Please don’t take my young men to war.
She’d seen the ebb and flow of mafias and other violent gangs in the news, which made it feel as if violence was all around her. She’d taught scores of classes on Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Orwell’s 1984 and Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. She didn’t want to be sexist, and yet she couldn’t help but notice that in stories and in real life it was almost always men who started the violence, who drew the line in the sand and said, “You there, on that side of the line, you’re the Other, the Enemy.”
So when she was in the Mini-Mart at the end of May, picking up a box of cornflakes because she didn’t feel like walking all the way to the Apple Cart, and she saw Charlie struggling with his battered old trumpet, and she pointed out a different way of holding it, and he managed to ask her, with a minimum of stuttering and beating about the bush, if she’d give him lessons, she said yes.
Maybe this was one young man who would make music instead of war.
Maybe this was her last chance, before she left this earth, to make a difference.
Celia sits in her quiet living room waiting for Charlie to show up for his second lesson.
Sitting and waiting is no longer a chore, she’s found. She doesn’t feel the need to fill every moment with doing; just plying her memories like a faded slideshow is pleasant, most of the time.
After a few minutes, Hubert comes in to join her. Hubert is an overweight pug (-ish, mixed with something else, complete genetic background unknown), who also happens to be very good at sitting and waiting.
And dead.
Celia has never told anyone that the ghost of her dog keeps her company, though she suspects Olga knows.
“Look at that dust, Hubert,” she says. “I thought I was a good housekeeper, but you certainly couldn’t tell from the look of things.” Motes of dust rise and swirl and fall on invisible air currents, glittering briefly in the sunlight before subsiding and becoming once again merely dirt that escaped the dust rag. This old house where she and Irv raised their four children had never been properly insulated. During the winter months, the winds howling across the Strait of Juan de Fuca find their way inside the house, and even now, in June, the cool spring air creeping in around the edges of the windows and doors makes her bones ache as if a mischievous sprite had sidled in for the sole purpose of reminding her that she’s old.
“Puh,” she says to Hubert. “I already know I’m old.”
“Already know what?” Charlie says, walking into the living room and startling her. “I knocked, but you didn’t answer,” he says.
“Nothing,” Mrs. Prewitt says. “I’m glad to see you’re on time today.”
“I didn’t want to get y-y-yelled at again,” Charlie says, sounding peevish.
“I didn’t ‘yell,’ young man. I gave you a well-deserved scolding.”
“W-W-W-Well, I’m here on time,” he says.
“I appreciate that. Stand here, next to the piano, and let’s hear how you’re coming on those scales.”
Olga is also visiting this weekend, and about halfway into the lesson, she wanders through the dust-mote-dancing room, giving both teacher and student a welcome break.
“Going ssssailing today, Olga?” Charlie asks.
“Of course,” she says, nodding, and when she nods it makes her soft brown hair swirl as if a breeze is playing around her head.
Like just about every other young man of a certain age who had ever met her granddaughter, Charlie has a little bit of a crush on Olga, Celia knows, but she also knows he must realize it is hopeless.
Olga would of course overlook his stutter, so it’s not that. But he’s nineteen, and Olga is twenty-six, an almost insurmountable difference in maturity at this stage of their lives. He is socially awkward and desperately shy, and Olga is articulate, with an easy confidence. He is gangly and acne-scarred, with straw-colored hair that sticks out every which way, while some indefinable inner light makes Olga beautiful, even though she lacks many of the physical attributes typically labeled “beauty.” He is terrified of the water, to the point of avoiding trips to the mainland so he won’t have to take a ferry, and she regularly plies the Salish Sea, by herself, on her thirty-two-foot custom-made wooden sloop, Blossom.
More than one person has pointed out what a striking picture she makes: standing at the tiller of Blossom, with its gleaming teak and its peculiarly-colored tan-bark sails, her feet planted shoulder-width apart for balance, her hair inevitably flying free of whatever hair tie she’s used to pull it back before heading out on the boat. On those rare days when the air is warm, Olga prefers to wear a skirt and capri-length leggings rather than pants or shorts, and the fabric flowing around her slender legs just adds to the image of femininity and power as she faces the horizon, alone.
Jenny once told Alessandra that she thought Olga looked like a goddess, with the sun setting behind her.
Others think Olga’s the very portrait of a modern woman, expertly guiding the boat where she wants it to go, tacking to and fro, not just adjusting to the shifting winds but making the wind work for her.
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