by Karen Brown
I let them stay, a mistake I can admit to now. At the time, it seemed the only thing to do. None of the other patrons minded. We put on a movie on the TV over the bar, one that was only partly appropriate, and they propped their heads in their hands and watched. The patrons coughed loudly or placed tobacco-stained fingers over the girls’ eyes when an actor swore or during a love scene. Someone brought them bags of potato chips. Someone else gave them lollipops that stained their lips red. Lenore dribbled her Sprite down the front of her nightgown. Darla sipped her one drink, making an effort not to overdo it. And the patrons gave her advice. Some told her to give them up, that it was the only way she’d ever see them again. Darla’s eyes grew puzzled. I saw that this had not ever occurred to her, that giving them up was something she could not understand and I admired her foolish resolve.
Lenore fell asleep at the bar, her head on her folded arms. I waited for Dr. Chambley, for her husband to come in and find them. I had expected he would, that they would search for them here first, but Darla confided in me that she had left a note claiming she had taken the girls to Orlando, to her mother’s.
“Just to buy time,” she said.
“Where will you really go?” I asked.
Darla put her mouth to my ear. “Louisiana,” she said. “To my best friend’s house in Shreveport.”
I was surprised that she had a plan, that she was so calculating. I thought then that she might succeed, that she would get away with keeping them despite the husband’s sober authority, his judge’s order. Darla looked at me and smiled, tentatively. She put her two hands out and held my face in them, a mother who knew how to administer love.
“I’m going to keep them,” she said. “No matter what.”
When you are alone, you become used to not being touched. You become suspicious and learn not to relent. Maybe, you let one person take you in, like Dr. Chambley, a man of extreme patience, with practiced hands. But even then, it is only partway, only a piece of yourself you give up, your body during sex, and that is it. Darla let her hands fall. I glanced away and busied myself with stacking the glasses, with the patron at the far corner, sliding off his barstool. I would not look at Ada, whose eyes followed my movements with a silent expectation. Somewhere, in a town I fled, a child I might have known slept. She would have a bed with cotton sheets and a blanket, even now in summer. I know the smell that comes through the window screen, chilled and sharp, the flowers beginning to fail in their blooming. I know the room where she sleeps, with its dormer window and its eastern exposure. I see the sun on her face. I see, too, her chest moving with her breathing. Her hands are still small and childish looking, grasping the edge of the sheet. She is only eight and unburdened with worry. Her dreams tell her nothing about me. I am not even an absence to be missed. I am unremembered.
Near the end of the night, Dr. Chambley came in. He stood in the doorway and his eyes lit on me, filled with a curious disappointment. He told Darla, “in no uncertain terms,” that she must go with the girls. They were both asleep by then, and one of the patrons carried Ada slung over his shoulder, her little batiste gown sliding up her skinny legs. Darla carried Lenore, her face buried in Lenore’s shoulder so I could not see it. I left the bar and the patrons and their demands, and walked them out to Darla’s car, a Mercedes she was awarded in her divorce, battered now, covered with months of dust. I cannot say what compelled me to do this. I watched them all pile in, the two girls in the back, both of them awakened, but groggy, struggling to find comfortable positions amidst the luggage stacked behind the seat. The air was warm and carried the star magnolia and the smell of the cigarette smoke clung to our clothes. I leaned into the driver’s side. Darla’s mouth was set, a thin line, and she tried to smile to say good-bye.
“Wait,” I told her. And I turned and walked past the patrons gathering in the lot with their drink glasses, their bottles of beer, past Dr. Chambley who had now come out to witness their infraction. He raised his hand to take my arm, but I brushed past. Behind the bar I took the bills from the register drawer. All of them, a nice stack of twenties, tens, a few fifties. And I brought the money out to Darla and handed it to her. No one made a move to stop me, not the patrons, whose mouths opened and then closed, giving me their assent. Though I knew the money meant nothing to Dr. Chambley, I expected he would object to the principle of giving it away, of aiding their escape, and I dared him to stop me, like one of the dogs in his old office, its teeth bared. Darla took the money from my hand, her own hand soft and lingering on my arm. The car idled, and I felt the air-conditioned space inside. The girls called good-bye, their small voices rising out of the darkness of the backseat, and Darla put the car in drive.
I sway and totter on my heels, watching the taillights disappear, knowing I cannot call them back. The car hurtles away. It will stop at service stations with unkempt and despairing attendants. The girls will eat small packaged doughnuts coated with confectioner’s sugar. I can only hope Darla will not panic and pull over for a drink. I feel a blinding terror for them, encased in the metal of the car, their delicate limbs, the veins and skin covering them, their soft mouths, their wildly beating hearts. There is no surety, no safety, just Dr. Chambley’s eyes on me, his hand reaching out to steady me where I stand on the crumbled shells, ready to be loved.
pins & needles
It began in snow. Annie met him outside of Wegman’s. He pulled off his knit hat and spun around when he saw her. His friends kept walking toward their car, making groaning sounds, like they were used to this. The snow made lacy patterns on his peacoat’s shoulders. She didn’t like the way he wet his lips before he talked, as if he worked hard over what to say to her. What he had to say to her didn’t matter. He was a boy from the college, and she was a married woman with a newborn. Her husband was home waiting for a can of tomato soup and some saltines, and her baby was sleeping. The furnace thundered on in the damp basement. Dust skirted the kitchen’s linoleum threshold. Outside the windows the snow fell cleanly on ragged cornfields. All of this went on while the college boy spun in his tracks.
He held his hat to his heart. He had a southern accent she thought, at first, was fake.
“Darlin’,” he said. He wet his lips.
She stared at him, surprised. Later, she would not be asked what made her do it, but if she had she would have said that his calling her darlin’ wasn’t it. As she stood in the falling snow, watching the college boy press his hat to his heart, she had a feeling. She waited, watching him. The bag boys with coats thrown over their smocks slid in their boots around the parking lot, retrieving the carts. The blown snow melted on her cheek.
“It’s cold out here,” she said, sounding like the girl she used to be in high school—aloof, impatient.
“I’m wondering . . .” he said, slowly, dropping his hat to his side. His voice was mannered and low. She thought of southern things she’d seen in movies—plantations, and pecans weighing down branches, and azaleas flourishing along white-painted porches. Women brushed past them, intent with their shopping lists. Their coats smelled of apples, or woodsmoke, or roasting meat. It was a Sunday. That morning, she’d listened to the Presbyterian church’s bells and thought the snow falling made them sound different. She’d sat on the couch in their rented house and waited for the baby to wake up. Her husband worked early each morning distributing the Cortland Standard, then day shifts at the nearby Clark’s Market, slicing deli meat. Her mother told her to sleep when the baby slept, but Annie always awoke—this time with the snow falling into the streetlight’s beam, to the passing of the long trucks carrying tree trunks on Route 13, to the windows shaking in their frames. She thought she’d heard noises on the back porch—someone stomping snow off their shoes, trying the storm door, quietly depressing the latch. She sat with her hands clenched in the sleeves of her sweatshirt, scouting the room for ready weapons.
“I’m wondering, too,” she said to the boy. “I’m wondering who you think you are to stop me, and talk to me like this.”
He wet his lips in earnest, the words he wanted to say caught somewhere below their surface. She felt sorry then, and she shifted her feet and sighed. She turned and would have taken the step that triggered the automatic door into the store, but he reached out and took her sleeve, and she stopped and looked back.
“Don’t go,” he said. He was sincere, and then embarrassed. She saw these things mark his face in succession.
“Why?” she asked him.
He hesitated. She saw his eyebrows come together. “You’ll think I’m crazy, but you look exactly like my dead girlfriend.”
She paused. She pushed her hands deeper into her pockets, and looked out at the snow covering up car hoods and windshields, lying piled and perfect on the Meadow Street guardrails. Back at her house it blanketed the rusted car that refused to start, the shed with its fallen roof, the row of trash cans, the decaying firewood, the bed frame and mattress they slept on before her mother bought them a new one. The snow blew under the ill-fitting storm windows and into the house’s windowsills, where it melted and pooled. She had chosen to drive here, fifteen miles from Clark’s. She had not meant to, but she had gotten into the car and found herself on Main Street, passing Moss’s funeral home and the Agway, then over the bridge, unable to suppress the impulse to keep driving. All along Route 13 the snow drifted across the pavement like sand. Now, it clung to cars’ tires, and the tires made a dull crunching sound as they passed.
“When’d she die?” she asked, doubting him, but pretending not to.
“August,” he said. His voice, solemn sounding, had a honeyed ring. She imagined him clutching a girl’s fragile hand on the white-painted porch, the night balmy and scented with wisteria.
“What happened to her?”
He shook his head and looked down at his boots.
“Oh. I see. You can’t talk about it,” she said.
He must have sensed then that she didn’t believe him. He looked up at her, his eyes beseeching and sorrowful. The way he looked at her stung her. As if it might even be true, that she resembled a dead girl he had once loved. They stood this way, letting the snow melt on their sleeves. The cars’ tires crunched past. The people chose their steps carefully across the parking lot. The smell of snow was strong in the air.
“Your friends will be waiting for you,” she said.
“So?” he said.
And then the car pulled up, and the passenger window slid down, and his friend called out to him through a cloud of exhaust, “You coming?” and the boy waved him away and turned back to her. She watched the car drive off, its taillights red at the stop sign, the tires sliding a bit when it accelerated out of the lot.
“I have to go,” she told him.
“Why?”
His face looked pained. Even his single-syllable words sounded like music. He kept his eyes on her face, looking for something.
“What exactly do you want?” she asked him. She tugged her arm free from his hand.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Would you like to know my name?” she said.
“It’s not Katie Beauchamp,” he said softly, sadly.
And she closed her eyes for a moment, feeling something indefinable. “What if it was?” she said. “Is that what you want?”
His face changed, and she imagined his heart thudding beneath his wool coat.
“Where do you live?” she asked him.
He explained he was house-sitting for a professor. He asked if she would give him a ride there. She tipped her face up and felt the snow on her mouth.
“No,” she said. “I don’t think I will.”
They stood there a moment longer. She didn’t care that his friends had abandoned him. She stepped away and the door sprang open. The smell of baked bread came out.
“Katie would never have left me like this,” he said.
She stopped and turned back to him. His face had reassembled itself. He held his arms lifted, and his coat’s shoulders bunched up. She knew that when she came out he would still be there, and when she drove away he would watch her. That when she heated up the soup at the stove in her drafty kitchen, slipped the bottle’s nipple into her daughter’s tiny mouth, she would see his eyes, his brownish hair. When her husband slid across the sheets to her out of reluctant need she would remember his wet lips, the timbre of his voice. It was already done, she saw.
She drove him home. He sat beside her in her husband’s car, fiddling with the bottle opener he’d found in the console, the crushed pack of cigarettes.
“So you’re a smoker and a drinker,” he said, laughing, holding the things in his two hands.
“Those aren’t mine,” she said.
He pressed the car lighter in and when it popped out he held it to the corner of the cigarette pack and watched the cellophane smoke.
“Stop that,” she said.
His coat smelled of wet wool. He gave her directions, but he didn’t say anything else. The house was a red shingled two-story in Lansing. It was an older, renovated home, with new casement windows and a black-painted door. The driveway had been plowed, but the falling snow filled it in.
“I appreciate the ride,” he said.
He got out of the car and went up the cleared path to the front door. The times she was dropped off her ride always waited to be sure she got in safely, so she did this now, the car’s exhaust chugging out. She saw him hesitate at the door, and then turn, and come back down the walk. He opened the passenger door and leaned in.
“You want some hot cocoa?” he asked her.
She looked at his hopeful face, and then behind him to the house. No one in the world knew where she was. “Is that what Katie liked?”
“It sort of goes with the weather,” he said. “She’d never experienced snow before.”
She turned off the car and slid the keys into her pocket. She followed him up the walk to the door.
“Have you ever experienced snow before?” she asked him.
“No,” he said, turning to her. They stood face-to-face. The front of their coats touched. “This is my first.”
She felt his breathing on her cheek. Then, he turned back to the door and fitted in the key. Inside it was warm and immaculate. The door opened onto the staircase. To the right was the living room, the couches upholstered in cream-colored fabric. Potted plants lined the top of a bookshelf. A baby grand piano stood in a corner, and shelves of old-looking books, the titles on their spines in faded gilt, took up one wall. An Oriental carpet covered the wood floor. They slipped off their shoes at the door, and she followed him into the kitchen. A set of sliding glass doors looked out onto a wooden deck. The backyard was a wide, white expanse that connected to the various neighbors’ yards. To the right on a trailer sat a huge boat with a brilliant green bottom, the color of photos she’d seen of the sea in the Caribbean. The snow fell gently onto its tarp.
He stood and looked out at the yard, the boat. He shook his head. Then he turned to her.
“It’s a Bertram,” he said.
She nodded. On Cayuga Lake, fishing with her father when she was small, she’d seen all kinds of boats, but this one seemed built for something else—a seacraft, a yacht intended for long passages. Its name, painted on the back, was Pins & Needles.
“It’s the professor’s ex-husband’s,” he said. “Well, hers now.”
The boat stood under a stand of pine, their branches soft as brooms laden with snow. Annie said “Oh.” She didn’t know what else she was supposed to say.
“Hard to believe that last summer we played croquet on that lawn.” He turned back to the kitchen and perused the cabinets. “I’ll admit I have no idea how to make cocoa.” He shrugged off his coat and held out his hand for hers. She handed him her coat and he hung them both on pegs on the opposite wall.
“We don’t really need it,” she said.
He slid onto a stool and folded his arms on the countertop. He wore a heavy wool sweater that looked hand knitted. She had on the T-shirt she’d slep
t in and a pair of old jeans. She stood by the porch door and felt the cold radiate off the glass.
“So,” he said.
She looked at him. “Yes?”
He laughed. She smiled back. “Come here,” he said.
This was a nice boy, from a good family, she determined. He had a wishful hope that she had come for sex, and she admitted to herself that maybe she had, but she knew she would not give in so easily, even if it was what they both wanted. She turned back to the view of the backyard.
“So, you were here in the summer?” she asked.
She heard him slip off the stool, felt him move up behind her.
“Yeah,” he said. “Melissa, the professor, was in England. She’s in Islamorada right now.”
He put his hands on her shoulders. He was cautious with his hands’ placement. She let them stay there, warming her up.
“She forgot her boat,” she said.
The boy laughed. “She got that in the divorce. She hates boating. It was her husband’s way of evening the score.”
She felt his head dip down, his mouth move to her neck.
“Why do you get to stay here?” she asked him.
“Melissa knows my mother,” he said, his voice muffled against her skin. “They were old friends in college.”
There were two cats that he fed, he told her. And he watered the plants. On Tuesdays a maid came to clean. In the summer, there was a gardener who came as well. His hands slid up and down her arms as he talked. She watched the snow make its pile on the porch rails. She shrugged his hands off and stepped away. “So, where are you from?” she asked him.
She saw the look in his face—a flash of something, irritation, then acceptance. He stepped back, too, and told her he was from Baton Rouge. He hated the cold. He could never get warm, he said.
“I can see that,” she said. “Look how you’re all bundled up.”
“My name is Joseph,” he said. “Since I’m filling you in on things.” He took it in stride, as if the discussion was provisional.
“Well, you know my name,” she said.