If You Could See Me Now

by Peter Straub

  I glanced at the empty road and then back up to the tree line. The figure had disappeared. After a moment, the motorcycle entered my frame of vision.

  She was hanging on behind him, wearing a blanketlike poncho against the morning chill. He wore uniform black, jacket to boots. He cut the engine just after they passed out of my sight, and I wrestled myself into my bathrobe and hurried down the narrow stairs. I quietly stepped onto the screen porch. They were not kissing or embracing, as I had expected, but were merely standing in the road, looking in different directions. She put her hand on his shoulder; I could see his skinny intense enthusiast’s face, a wild face. He had long upswept old-fashioned rock ’n’ roll hair, raven black. When she removed her hand, he nodded curtly. The gesture seemed to express both dependence and leadership. She brushed his face with her fingers and began to walk up the road. Like me, he watched her go, walking along with her stiff Tin Woodsman’s walk, and then he jumped back on his bike, gunned it, wheeled around in a flashy Evel Knievel circle and roared away.

  I stepped back inside and realized that the inside of the house was as cold and moist as the porch. On my chilled feet I went into the kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. In a cupboard I found a jar of instant coffee. Then I stepped back outside onto the damp boards of the porch. The sun was just beginning to appear, huge and violently red. After a minute or two Alison reappeared, coming quietly around the side of her house, taking long slow strides. She crossed the back of her house until she reached the last window, where the light still burned. When she stood before it she levered the window up until she stood on tiptoe and then she hoisted herself into the bedroom.

  —

  After two cups of the bitter coffee, gulped while standing in bathrobe and bare feet on the cold kitchen floor; after two eggs fried in butter and a slice of toast, eaten at the old round wooden table with the sun beginning to dispel the traces of fog; after appreciation of the way cooking had warmed the kitchen; after adding more greasy dishes to those in the sink; after undressing in the bathroom and with distaste scrutinizing my expanding belly; after similar scrutiny of my face; after showering in the tub; after shaving; after pulling clean clothes out of my suitcase and dressing in a plaid shirt, jeans and boots; after all this I still could not begin to work. I sat at my desk and examined the points of my pencils, unable to rid my mind of that awful dream. Although the day was rapidly warming, my little room and the entire house seemed pervaded with cold breath, a chill spirit I associated with the effect of the nightmare.

  I went downstairs and took the photograph of Alison off its hook in the living room. Back upstairs I placed it on the back of the desk, tilting it against the wall. Then I remembered that there was another photograph which had hung downstairs—indeed there had been many others, and Duane had presumably packed most of them away with the furniture after our grandmother’s death. But only one of all those photographs of various grandchildren and nephews and children of nephews concerned me. This was a photograph of Alison and myself, taken by Duane’s father in 1955, at the beginning of the summer. We were standing before a walnut tree, holding hands, looking into the incomprehensible future. Just thinking of the picture now made me shiver.

  I looked at my watch. It was still only six thirty. I realized that it would be impossible to get any work done in my mood and at such an hour. At any rate, I was unused to doing any sort of writing before lunch. I felt restless, and had to get out of my workroom where the typewriter, the pencils, the desk itself rebuked me.

  Downstairs, I perched on Duane’s uncomfortable sofa while I sipped a second cup of coffee. I thought about D. H. Lawrence. I thought about Alison Updahl’s nighttime excursion. I rather approved of that, though I thought her company could have been better chosen. At least the daughter would be more experienced than her father; there would be no Dream Houses for her. Then D. H. Lawrence began to rant at me again. I had written much of the middle portion of the book, but I had saved the beginning and ending for last—the ending was fully outlined, but I still had no idea of how to begin. I needed a first sentence, preferably one with several scholarly clauses. From which forty introductory pages could eloquently, commandingly flow.

  I went into the kitchen, once again cold and damp. I lowered my cup into the sink with the other dishes. Then I walked around the table and took the telephone book from its shelf beneath the old wall phone. It was a thin volume, about the size of a first collection of poems, and on the cover was a pastoral photograph of two small boys fishing from a pier. The boys were surrounded by blue cold-looking river water nicked by a million ripples. Though barefoot, the boys on the pier wore sweaters. Across the river massed a thick unbroken line of trees—like an eyebrow across a thug’s face. When I had looked at it for longer than a second, the photograph seemed less pastoral than ominous. It was menacing. My own feet had been bare on cold boards; I too had been suspended above indifferent blue water. In the photograph the sun was dying. I folded the cover back and flipped to the page I wanted and dialed the number.

  While the phone trilled at the other end I gazed dumbly through the window facing the lawn and the road, and through the trunks of the walnut trees saw Duane already mounted on his tractor, plying majestically across the field near where the trees began. He reached one end of his course and made the heavy tractor twirl around as easily as a bicycle. On the third ring the receiver was lifted. She did not say hello, and after a moment I spoke myself.

  “Rinn? Is that you, Auntie Rinn?”

  “Of course.”

  “This is Miles, Auntie Rinn. Miles Teagarden.”

  “I know who it is, Miles. Remember to speak loudly. I never use this terrible invention.”

  “Duane said he told you I was coming.”

  “What?”

  “Duane said—Auntie Rinn, could I come up to see you this morning? I can’t work, and I couldn’t sleep.”

  “No,” she said, as if she already knew.

  “May I come? Is it too early for a visit?”

  “You know farm people, Miles. Even the oldsters get up and doing early in the day.”

  I put on a jacket and walked across the dew-sodden lawn to the Volkswagen. Condensation streamed off the windshield. As I swung into the road where I had seen the Tin Woodsman make her curious and emotionless departure from the boy who could only be Zack, I heard my grandmother’s voice, speaking quite clearly some words she had uttered in my dream. Why did you have to come back? It was as though she were seated beside me. I could even smell her familiar odor of woodsmoke. I pulled off to the side of the road and wiped my face with my hands. I wouldn’t have known how to answer her.

  —

  The trees which began toward the end of the rutted road to Rinn’s house, just where the valley begins to climb up into the hills, had grown taller and thicker. The pale early sunlight came slanting down, spangling the corrugated trunks and the spongy, overgrown earth. A little further along the narrow road, some of the rags of light struck the side of Rinn’s chicken coop, the top of which was fully illuminated by sunlight. It was a big barnlike structure, long and high as a two-story house, painted red; little comic-strip windows like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle arbitrarily dotted the side facing me. Further up the rise stood her house, which had once been of white boards but now badly needed paint. The three-room structure looked as though a cobweb had settled over it. The trees had marched right into her tiny area of lawn, and big thick branches wove together over her roof. As I got out of the car, Rinn appeared on her little porch; a moment later she opened the screen door and came outside. She was wearing an ancient blue print dress, calf-high rubber boots and an old khaki army jacket with what seemed to be hundreds of pockets.

  “Welcome, Miles,” she said, with that Norwegian lilt in her voice. Her face was more wrinkled than ever, but it was luminous. One of her eyes was covered with a film like milk. “Well. You haven’t been here since you were a boy, and now you’re a man. A nice tall man. You look l
ike a Norwegian.”

  “I should,” I said, “with you in my family.” I bent to kiss her, but she held out her hand, and I took it. She wore knitted fingerless gloves, and her hand felt like loose bones wrapped in cloth. “You look wonderful,” I said.

  “Oh, goodness. I have coffee on the stove, if you’re a coffee drinker.”

  Inside her tiny, overheated kitchen she thrust sticks of wood down into the heart of her stove until the iron pot bubbled. Coffee came out in a thin black stream. “You’re not always up so early,” she said. “Are you troubled?”

  “I don’t really know. I’m having trouble getting started on my work.”

  “It isn’t your work though, is it, Miles?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Men should be workers. My young man was a worker.” Her good eye, almost as pale as Alison’s and a thousand times more informed, examined me over her cup. “Duane is a good worker.”

  “What do you know about his daughter?” I was interested in her opinion.

  “She was misnamed. Duane should have named her Jessie, after my sister. That would have been right, to name her after his mother. The girl needs to be guided. She’s high-strung.” Rinn peeled a cloth off a plate loaded with round flat discs of a breadlike substance I knew well. “But she is much nicer than she wants you to think.”

  “You mean you still make lefsa?” I said, laughing, delighted. It was one of the great treats of the valley.

  “Lefsa and sonnbockles. Of course I make them. I can still use a rolling pin. I make them whenever I can see well enough.”

  I spread thick butter on a piece and rolled it up into a long cigar shape. It was still like eating bread prepared by angels.

  “Are you going to be alone this summer?”

  “I’m alone now.”

  “It’s better to be alone. Better for you.” She meant me specifically, not mankind in general.

  “Well, I haven’t had much luck in my relationships.”

  “Luck,” she snorted, and hunched further over the table. “Miles, do not court misery.”

  “Misery?” I was genuinely startled. “It’s not that bad.”

  “Miles, there is great trouble here now. In the valley. You have heard the news. Do not associate yourself with it. You must be alone and apart, doing your work. You are an outsider, Miles, a natural outsider, and people will resent your being near. People know about you. You have been touched with trouble in the past, and you must avoid it now. Jessie is afraid that you will be touched by it.”

  “Huh?” It was with talk like this that she had terrified the wits out of me when I was a child.

  “You are innocent,” she said—the same words my grandmother had used, in my dream. “But you know what I am talking about.”

  “Don’t worry. No matter how provocative they get, little girls don’t tempt me. But I don’t get what you mean by innocent.”

  “I mean that you expect too much,” she said. “I think I am confusing you. Do you wish more to eat or do you care to help me gather my eggs?”

  I remembered her comments about work, and stood. I followed her outside and through the trees down the slope to the henhouse. “Go in quietly,” she said. “These birds can be excited easily, and they might suffocate each other in panic.”

  Very gently, she opened the door of the tall red structure. A terrible stench came to me first, like ashes and dung and blood, and then my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw hens sitting on their nests, in tiers and rows like books on a bookshelf. The scene was a parody of my Long Island lecture halls. We stepped inside. A few birds squawked. I was standing in a mess of dirt, sawdust, feathers, a pervasive white substance and eggshells. The smell hung acrid and powerful in the air.

  “Watch how I do,” Rinn said. “I can’t see in this light, but I know where they all are.” She approached the nearest nest and inserted her hand between the bird and the straw without at all stirring the hen. It blinked, and continued to stare wildly out from either side of its head. Her hand reappeared with two eggs, and a second later, with another. A few feathers were glued to them with a gray-white fluid. “You start at that end, Miles,” she said, pointing. “There’s a basket on the floor.”

  She covered her half before I had coaxed a dozen eggs out of half as many unhappy hens. Duane’s thick bandage made for clumsy work. Then I went up a ladder where the air was even denser and stole more eggs from increasingly agitated birds; one of the last ones pecked me in the hand while I held her three warm products. It was like being stabbed with a spoon.

  Finally we were done, and stood outside in the rapidly warming air beneath the looming trees. I inhaled several deep, cleansing breaths. At my side, Rinn said, “Thank you for helping me. You might make a worker some day, Miles.”

  I looked down at the thin hunched figure in the outlandish clothes. “Did you mean to tell me that you talk to my grandmother? To Jessie?”

  She smiled, making her face look Chinese. “I meant that she talks to me. Isn’t that what I said?” But before I could respond, she said, “She is watching you, Miles. Jessie always loved you. She wants to protect you.”

  “I guess I’m flattered. Maybe—” I was going to say, maybe that’s why I dreamed about her, but I was hesitant to describe that dream to Rinn. She would have made too much of it.

  “Yes?” The old woman was looking alerted to a current inaudible to me. “Yes? Did you say more? Often I don’t hear properly.”

  “Why did you think I would get involved with Alison Updahl? That was a little far-fetched even for me, don’t you think?”

  Her face shut like a clamp, losing all its luminosity. “I meant Alison Greening. Your cousin, Miles. Your cousin Alison.”

  “But—” I was going to say But I love her, but shock choked off the startled admission.

  “Excuse me. I can no longer hear.” She began to move away from me, and then stopped to look back. I thought the milky eye was turned toward me. She appeared to be angry and impatient, but inside all those wrinkles she may just have been tired. “You are always welcome here, Miles.” Then she carried her basket and mine back up to the little house darkened by trees. I was already past the church on the way home when I remembered that I had intended to buy a dozen eggs from her.

  —

  I parked the car in the gritty driveway and went along the porch and through the front room to the narrow staircase. The house still felt damp and cold, though the temperature was now in the upper seventies. Upstairs I sat at my desk and tried to think. D. H. Lawrence seemed even more foreign than he had the previous day. Auntie Rinn’s final words about my cousin both thrilled and upset me. To hear another person allude to Alison Greening was like hearing someone else recount your dreams as his own. I riffled the pages of The White Peacock, far too nervous to write. Mention of her name had set me on edge. I had used her name as a weapon against Duane, and Rinn had used the same trick on me.

  From downstairs I heard a sudden noise: a door slamming, a book dropped? It was followed by a noise of shod feet hushing across the floor. Alison Updahl, I was sure, come around to flirt while expounding her boyfriend’s crazy philosophy. I agreed with Rinn, Alison was a far more agreeable person than she wished anyone to know, but at that moment I could not bear to think of anyone casually usurping my territory.

  I thrust my chair away from the desk and went thundering down the narrow steps. I burst into the living room. No one was there. Then I heard a rattling noise from the kitchen, and imagined her noisily exploring the cupboards. “Come on, get out of there,” I called. “You tell me when you want to come over, and maybe I’ll invite you. I’m trying to get some work done.”

  The clattering ceased. “Get out of that kitchen right now,” I ordered, striding across the room toward the door.

  A large pale flustered-looking woman appeared before me, wiping her hands on a towel. The gesture made her large loose upper arms wobble. Horror showed on her face, and in her eyes, magnified behind thick glasses.


  “Oh my God,” I blurted. “Who are you?”

  Her mouth worked.

  “Oh my God. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

  “I’m—”

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Please sit down.”

  “I’m Mrs. Sunderson. I thought it would be all right. I came in to do work, the door was open…You’re—you’re Eve’s boy?” She backed away from me, and almost fell as she stepped backward over the step down into the kitchen.

  “Won’t you please sit down? I’m honestly sorry, I didn’t mean to—” She was still retreating from me, holding the dishtowel like a shield. Her eyes goggled, the effect made even worse by her glasses.

  “You want cleaning? You want me to clean? Duane said last week I should come today. I didn’t know if I should, what with, I mean since we, since this terrible…but Red said I should, take my mind off, he said.”

  “Yes, yes. I do want you to come. Please forgive me. I thought it was someone else. Please sit for a moment.”

  She sat heavily in one of the chairs at the table. Her face was going red in blotches.

  “You’re very welcome here,” I weakly said. “I trust you understand what I want you to do?”

  She nodded, her eyes oily and glazed behind the big lenses.

  “I want you to come early enough to make breakfast for me, wash all the dishes, and keep the house clean. At one I’ll want lunch. Is that what you agreed to do? Also, please don’t bother about the room I’m working in. I want that room undisturbed.”

  “The room…?”

  “Up there.” I pointed. “I’ll be up and working most mornings when you arrive, so just call me when you have breakfast ready. Have you ever done any work like this before?”

  Resentment showed in the puffy face for a moment. “I kept house for my husband and son for forty years.”

  “Of course. I should have thought. I’m sorry.”

  “Duane explained about the car? That I can’t drive? You will have to do the shopping.”

  “Yes, okay. I’ll go out this afternoon. I want to see Arden again, anyhow.”