Tell Me

by Mary Robison

  They opened the door to a slender girl wearing rawhide work gloves and a pair of men’s pants. She was leaning on a shovel. “Howdy in there?” she said.

  “Howdy, out there,” Mr. Cleveland said, and laughed. It was an old joke.

  “Howdy’s not home,” Lola said.

  “I just need my pay,” the girl said.

  “Pay? For what?” Lola said.

  “For raking down the ravine,” the girl said. “And hauling off all the bottles and trash there. For getting the rest of the fence out, and digging up the posts. For rolling the barbed wire, and turning the earth over in the side garden back of the garage, and putting down the Vigorow.” She sounded tired and a little angry.

  “I don’t get it,” Mr. Cleveland said. “I pay a man for my gardening.”

  “You pay my father,” she said. “He had the chills and fever today and couldn’t do his work, so I did it.”

  “You’re Jack’s daughter?” Cleveland said.

  “Stephanie,” the girl said, nodding. She took off a glove and stuck it over the top of the shovel. “Howdy said start wherever Dad had quit. I did a lot, if you want to come and look at it.”

  “Lord, no,” Cleveland said. “You wait there, sweetheart.” He motioned for Lola to follow him back away from the door.

  “Her dad’s a drinker. I bet he’s home with the d.t.’s,” Cleveland whispered.

  “You pay him to do the gardening, you don’t expect his children to do it,” Lola said.

  “Well, maybe it’s all right for today. Today it was just the heavy work. I’ll sign a check for you to fill out, for whatever Howdy promised. But you tell her this is the only time. I don’t want an amateur trying to trim hedges or grow azaleas. That’s landscaping, and that’s why I pay Jack.”

  The M.G. revved in the driveway as Lola and Cleveland returned to the door. Howdy jumped out. He had colored paint all over his new jumpsuit and on the tops of his sneakers.

  “I’m glad you’re still here, Steph,” he said. He put his arm around the gardener’s daughter. “You’re staying for supper.”

  “I got to go,” the girl said.

  “No, you don’t. You pay her yet, Daddy?”

  “We had it in mind,” Cleveland said.

  “Good. Come on in, Steph. Let me show you around.”

  “O.K.,” Stephanie said. “Let me get these boots off.” She got down on one knee and worked the knot in her shoelace.

  •

  Lola shook garlic croutons onto a bowl of salad. At the dining table, she put down the salad, along with a bottle of lo-cal dressing she had carried in the pocket of her dinner smock.

  Howdy was saying, “So they asked the actor, who was impoverished, why he stayed in the best hotels, and ate only the most expensive food, and the poor actor said, ‘My body’s my business. I treat it as I’d treat a thoroughbred horse.’”

  “This soup tasted too good to be any good for me,” Cleveland said to Lola.

  “Nothing in it to hurt you,” murmured Lola.

  “If an actor gets sick—” Howdy continued.

  “Why on earth won’t you join us, Lola?” Cleveland said.

  Lola clattered the soup plates, stacking them. Stephanie had been using her soup plate for an ashtray. “Who’d bring in the food?” Lola said.

  “Where I was raised, we had a custom called buffet. Even polite people occasionally did buffet,” Cleveland said.

  “When the actor gets sick, he’s out of business. It’s his duty to stay healthy,” Howdy said to Stephanie.

  “I can see that,” Stephanie said.

  “You don’t pay me to sit and eat soup,” Lola said.

  Howdy scooped salad into Stephanie’s bowl. “Put a lot of salt and pepper on it, Steph. Lola doesn’t salt anything, because of Dad’s diet, so it all tastes bland until you get used to spicing it yourself. Everything’s done for him around here.”

  “Sure,” Stephanie said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” Howdy said.

  “Excuse me,” Cleveland said. He rose from the table and helped Lola carry plates into the kitchen. “What is Howdy talking about? What’s going on in there?” he said. “And what’s biting you? If you don’t come and eat with us, Lola, I really will fire you. I mean it.”

  “You might,” Lola said.

  Cleveland glared at Lola, who was using a fork to put tuna salad on a sesame roll. She folded the bread, bit into it, and munched furiously.

  “Howdy’s got a girl, that’s all,” she said when she finished chewing. “He mentioned something about her on the way home from the store today. I just forgot about it. As for me, nothing is wrong except I’ve got too much to do. Cleaning, cooking meals, reading, and now I’m serving food to a dinner guest.”

  “Then sit down and eat with us and take a load off, and you can help me deal with my son,” Cleveland said. “He’s twenty-four years old and still three feet off the ground. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, or what he’s going to do, and this artist junk is fine, but it won’t take him anywhere. You’ve seen his paintings. And now he’s got a girl. Just thinking about it all makes my blood boil at his damned Irish mother for leaving us high and dry.”

  Lola was sitting on the counter. She sipped coffee from a mug and gently kicked her heels against the cupboard below her.

  “He’s not ready to take on a girl, even part time,” Cleveland said.

  “You make it sound like he’s hiring her.”

  “Listen, Howdy doesn’t realize how attractive he could be to some people, and thank the Lord. Because of his money. You can’t tell looking at Howdy or listening to him that he’s a rich kid. He doesn’t know it himself, bless him, so he’s never used it to—to cure his loneliness.”

  “That’s true,” Lola said.

  “He’s been very lonely, and it’s his own fault. He drives girls away with his dumb clothes and his chatter, before they can find out about his dough. My dough, I mean.”

  Lola was nodding and sipping coffee. “He’s not so bad,” she said.

  “Oh, yes he is,” Cleveland said, “but it’s not his fault. I feel sorry for the poor wretch.”

  “Give him a chance,” Lola said.

  “I will, but not with Jack the gardener’s goddamn daughter.”

  Lola put down her coffee mug and jumped off the kitchen counter. She opened the broiler door and, using a dish towel, pulled out a long pan. She fanned away smoke, and scowled at two rows of burned chicken breasts.

  “Well, that’s a first,” she said, sighing. “It’s been a long day.”

  “Does Howdy look to you like he’s thinking of marriage?” Cleveland said. “I need to know.”

  “It beats me, Mr. Cleveland,” Lola said wearily.

  “I think he told me he doesn’t believe in marriage. He says it’s ‘stultifying.’ Can you believe it? That’s his screwball mama talking.”

  Lola put the blackened pieces of chicken onto a platter and took some rolls out of a bun-warmer. She and Cleveland carried the food into the dining room. Lola took off her smock and sat down at the table next to Stephanie.

  “For this fall, I’m thinking about Europe,” Howdy said. “Neither Steph nor I have been.”

  “Nor have I, since the war. It was a very untidy continent then,” Mr. Cleveland said. “Anyway, what about your classes?”

  “What war?” Stephanie said.

  “Think about it,” Lola said.

  “Oh,” Stephanie said.

  “Europe costs a fortune,” Mr. Cleveland said. “Dan and Billy Willinger just got back, and Dan told me they paid eight dollars for a sweet roll and a Coke in Paris.”

  “God,” Stephanie said.

  “Dan Willinger’s head of quality control for me,” Cleveland said.

  “We’d bicycle and backpack and stay in youth hostels. We wouldn’t go to Paris,” Howdy said.

  “Still, it would be a little money, wouldn’t it? Your fares over and back, and so forth,” Mr. Cleveland said.


  “You could work all year, save your money, and go in the spring,” Lola said. “Work nights, even.”

  “Oh, sure,” Howdy said. “That’s one way. Steph can do lots of things. I heard about a good job I can get reading best-sellers onto tapes for the blind.”

  “Perfect,” Lola said, and looked at Mr. Cleveland. He was chewing slowly, with his elbows on the table and a piece of chicken in his hands. He looked at her over the chicken.

  “I’d like to go, too,” she said.

  “To be sure,” Cleveland said. “They’ll need somebody to see to their clothes, and secure their reservations, and shop those markets over there without getting robbed, and to put some decent meals together at roadside after the long days of bicycling in the Alps, and to figure out that foreign money. It’d be good for you, Lola—chuck your college degree. Who wants to be a sociologist?”

  “I can’t go yet,” Stephanie said. “Maybe not for a long time. Somebody’s got to take care of my dad, see?”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Cleveland said.

  “Scratch Europe,” Howdy said cheerfully.

  “It’s a dirty shame,” Cleveland said. “I was getting all excited about going along myself. I know just where my passport is. I’d only have to collect my luggage and oil up my bicycle.”

  “You’d have to go, if Lola went,” Howdy said. “You couldn’t make out here without her. In fact, after all this time, I don’t know if I could.”

  Lola had torn a roll in half and was beginning to spread it with butter. “I think you’re both beginning to learn,” she said.

  6

  I Get By

  RIGHT AFTER THE WINDUP of the memorial service in the hospital chapel that evening in February, the principal of the elementary school where my husband, Kit, had taught approached me. Enough of a crowd had gathered and passed that I had to inch over and strain to hear him, because the chapel doors had opened. From down the hall there were metal bed and tray noises, buzzers and dings, and doctor-paging voices, as my husband’s mourners made their exit.

  My mother-in-law, Rennie, still sat in the pew behind me, arm-rocking the baby, who was sounding little pleas. The principal was talking to me. “I think I’ve found a replacement for Kit,” he said.

  I had to let that remark hang there for a beat. He meant another teacher. He was either too cruel or too vacant a person to have prefaced what he’d said in some way. He told me, “Her name’s Andrea Dennis. Came down from Danbury for interviews this afternoon. Knocked us sideways, actually. You two might get in touch.”

  I said, “Isn’t that nice.”

  My kids, Ben and Bibi, helped me up from the pew. The principal mentioned he’d tried to call with his condolences. Possibly he had; I had unplugged all three of our phones.

  •

  After we got home, Ben and Bibi lingered in the backyard. It was snowing by now—a friendly snow, scurrying in the floodlights behind the house. Rennie took over the couch. She had the baby and our whole stack of pastel sympathy cards. “Going to read these,” she said, as though someone ought to do more than open the envelopes and nod, acknowledging the signatures.

  I warmed a bottle of formula in hot tap water, and watched my children through the window over the sinks. Bibi had fitted into the tire swing somehow. She is broad-bottomed at eighteen. The swing’s rope, knotted around a limb of the weeping willow tree, was stiff with ice.

  Ben was only a few feet away, urinating onto a bump of snow. I had to look twice, to be sure. He was eleven, almost eleven, and peeing in view of his sister.

  Bibi had just colored her hair, but I wasn’t ready to accept her as a champagne blonde yet. She looks familiar, I’d think, whenever I happened onto her.

  The Saturday morning we learned about Kit, the Old Hadham police visited. So did two station wagons from television news teams. I took a confirming call from the idiot aircraft-company people who’d rented Kit the light plane in which he died. After the call, I snapped the telephones out of their plastic jacks, and Bibi chain-locked the door of the upstairs bathroom and stripped away the hair color nature had given her.

  •

  I met Andrea Dennis. I was at the school, sorting through two decades’ worth of teacher paraphernalia, looking for anything personal in classroom cupboards and in Kit’s mammoth oakwood desk. I found a comb, his reading glasses, a Swiss Army knife, and a hardback copy of Smiley’s People, bookmarked halfway. This was on a school day, but after classes had adjourned. Andrea pushed open the heavy door and found me. She introduced herself in an inquiring way: “I’m Andrea?”

  We talked some. We didn’t say anything I thought to commit to memory. I spilled Elmer’s Glue-All all over. The white glue moved thickly across the desk blotter. “I’d better take care of that,” Andrea said. “Let me fetch a sponge or something from the lounge.”

  I used to be entirely comfortable in the staff and faculty lounge.

  Old Hadham Elementary had gone up in ’64. Inside and out, the building was an architectural oddity. Kit’s classroom (he’d had half of sixth grade), for instance, was in the shape of a semicircle. His huge desk and his roller chair faced out from the straight wall. The room had three rising rows of student chairs with attached laminated writing arms. The floor was covered with jewel-blue linoleum. The curved wall wore a band of pale corkboard.

  In the couple of weeks Andrea Dennis had been teaching, she’d tacked up stuff for the lull between Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day. There were pen-and-ink drawings that looked like student self-portraits to me. Some printed quotes were pinned up—sayings of statesmen and explorers. There were two science charts: one explaining the pollination of a flower, the other an illustration of polar and equatorial weather movements. Left over from Kit’s days here were the usual flags—Old Glory and the Connecticut state flag—and some empty hamster cages with empty water fonts and play wheels. I planned to leave all those behind, of course, as well as Kit’s globe, showing the continents and oceans in their proper cloudy colors. Kit hated globes with countries done in pink or purple.

  I had to admit Andrea Dennis was an appealing woman. She had clearly put a lot of clever thought and effort into presenting herself at her best. She had on a touch-me-please cashmere sweater and a soft wool-blend skirt with a lining that rustled. Her sheer nylons gleamed. She had hair long enough to toss.

  I had noticed something about us. Whenever I mentioned Kit, I nodded at his desk. When Andrea referred to him once, she gestured north. Toward the forest where the plane fell?

  I hung around for fifteen minutes. Andrea didn’t return with the sponge. Anyway, the glue had hardened by now. I pictured her yakking away with young Mr. Mankiewicz or flirting with old Mr. Sonner.

  I packed Kit’s things into a blue nylon gym bag. I bundled up and walked home—a matter of a mile or so—in the road. My part of Connecticut has no proper sidewalks. I kept stumbling. Ever since the baby, and then especially after what happened to Kit, I had been sleeping sporadically and then only in short spurts. That was part of the reason I’d been so clumsy and had flubbed with the glue. My getup was pretty cockeyed too. I had forgotten to wear socks, and yet the shoelaces on my Nikes were triple-bow-tied. Beneath my parka, my sweater was lumpy and had the smell of Johnson’s baby products, as did the whole interior of our beautiful saltbox house when I got there—baby oil, baby powder, baby’s softened-fabric bunting.

  Everywhere I looked was bright with baby things, baby artifacts.

  I went into the kitchen, grateful for Rennie, who’d tidied up. Rennie had almost never stayed with us when Kit was alive. We’d seldom gone to see her. She lived alone on what once had been an apple orchard, near Darien. She cared for the big central house there, and there were two barns and two brown outbuildings on the land.

  Her husband had long ago put himself into a VA hospital. He was a troubled, haunted man. I had witnessed some behavior. He’d sit for long afternoons with his head in his hands. He would roam searchingly over the yards
and meadows. He’d seem to hide beside the shadowy brown barns. Other times, he’d pitch and splatter hard apples furiously against the fallen-in stone walls around the borders of the orchard.

  Thinking of him, I made a bet with myself I hoped I wouldn’t win. I bet that Rennie connected Kit’s accident with his father’s illness. That would have been unfair.

  •

  March came. We’d get a couple more snowstorms in Old Hadham, I suspected. Spring wouldn’t arrive in any decided way for weeks and weeks. But I was seeing new grass and there was dry pavement. April would be breathtaking along our road. There’d be arbutus, hepaticas, downy yellow violets. In the living room, Rennie had sections of the local evening newspaper strewn around. The baby was in the playpen, wadding and tearing a Super Duper coupon page.

  “Where’s the baby’s dolly?” I asked Rennie.

  She said, “Ask Ben.”

  “Ben? Ben has Susie Soft Sounds?” But I didn’t call up to Ben. Every day, it seemed, there was more about him and Bibi that I didn’t care to know.

  They had identical rooms, across the hall from each other—identical except that Bibi’s wallpaper showed jazz dancers against a mint-green background, whereas Ben’s had ponies grazing in a field. The night before, I had happened past the rooms and heard Bibi say, from behind Ben’s door, “I am safely buzzed.” Next I heard the pop-tab of what I assumed was a beer can.

  “That’s your third!” Ben had whispered.

  Another curious moment was when I noticed something in among Bibi’s hand laundry; she had borrowed my push-up bra.

  Bibi talked a lot about Andrea Dennis these days. Andrea, it turned out, sometimes snacked after school at the Nutmeg Tea and Sandwich Shop, where Bibi waited tables. It seemed as if Andrea was always with someone I knew well, or had known. I could never resist saying, “Really? What did she have on? Did she look tired? Who picked up the check? Did they have desserts or entrees? Did she have that fruit cup?”

  •

  I was driving home with Rennie and the baby. We’d been to the lawyers’. The airplane company’s insurance people had investigated and decided to settle some money on me. I liked it about the money, but what I wanted just now was my bed, pillows, the electric blanket. For three days, a quiet sleet had been falling on Old Hadham.