by Sue Miller
“Help you?” he asked.
He was a skinny man, and he hadn’t shaved yet. His beard prickled white on his chin and cheeks. He must have been around fifty. He was short, shorter than I was, and he seemed to be wearing three or four heavy shirts, underneath which I could see, grimy at his neck, a whitish T-shirt.
“You’re Mr. Brower?” I asked.
“I’d be a liar if I told you no,” he said and smiled.
I smiled back, politely. “I wonder if I could come in for a few minutes,” I said. “I think I have some business with you.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Of course,” he said, and stepped back to let me pass into the almost total darkness of his hall. The cat odor was overwhelming as he shut the front door.
“Come on this way,” he said, passing in front of me. He walked to the back of the dark hall and pushed aside a blanket hanging over a doorway. He held the blanket back for me until I caught it, and then we moved into the room. We were in the kitchen, and I had to squint against the sunlight which flooded the room from a series of grimy windows. They faced out on an overgrown meadow where several rotted-out wheelless cars hunkered down in the tall grass. It was cold in the room. He moved over to a small table.
“Sit down here,” he commanded, pointing to the chair opposite his. A cup sat at his place, with a tea bag and spoon resting in the saucer. A spotted white tin canister sat next to it. Obediently I sat opposite him and looked around the room. It was hard not to stare. It was filthy. The walls were decorated with dozens and dozens of out-of-date calendars featuring country scenes, antique cars, pouty women of the Thirties and Forties in one-piece bathing suits. Five or six cats were in motion over the flecked and littered linoleum floor, and half a dozen others snoozed in the bright patches of sunlight. What seemed to be trash was heaped in the corners of the room. Against the wall twenty deep were cat-food cans, some empty, some with food in them. Several of the animals were picking their way among the cans, eating in that gingerly dainty way cats have.
Brower stood at his place. “You want some tea?” he asked. The rotten fishy smell of the cat food mingled with the odor of cat piss and something else in the kitchen. “No,” I said. “Thanks.”
He sat down and raised his cup. “Well,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
“You are a notary public, Mr. Brower?” I asked.
“Well, there are several of us, of course,” he said. “But I’m one of them. Plus,” he set his cup down, “deputy police and now fire marshal too. So you see.”
“You must be very busy,” I said, and reached into my purse for the letter.
“Oh, I just got the fire marshal thingy. I had to pass quite a test up at East Shelton for that, I’ll say. Quite a test.” He eyed me expectantly.
“Oh?” I said. A mistake.
“Yes indeed, I’ll tell you. They used the entire basement of the Elks Hall for this test. Fire station wasn’t big enough. This test was a national test.”
“Well, it’s wonderful you passed.” I set the envelope on the scarred and greasy-looking table. Brower drank some tea. His lips seemed to reach for the edge of the cup and he made a sucking noise as he drank. He set his cup back in its saucer.
“Well, it wasn’t easy, I tell you,” he said. “Point number one, you’re blindfolded. Point number two, they fill the room with this smoke. And you’ve got to wear one of those breather masks, you know.”
I nodded. A cat sprang into my lap. I patted it carefully while Brower talked. It turned around several times to get comfortable, and I had to arch my head back and away from its uplifted tail, its wrinkled pink anus. I stopped patting it when I noticed clumps of loose hair flying off into the dusty sunlight with each stroke, but the cat nestled on my lap anyway and shut its eyes.
“Then you’ve got to crawl around this obstacle course,” he was saying. Where were those famous taciturn New Englanders when you needed them? “Pulling a two-hundred-pound sack of sand—to be like a body—while they drop bricks and wood all around you, even a couple of buckets of water.” He looked at me, his graying eyebrows raised, and waited for a response.
“It sounds awful,” I murmured.
“Wearing your hat, of course,” he added.
I nodded again, as though this had been my assumption all along.
“The point being, as you can no doubt tell, that it’s got to be like what you might one day go through. They don’t want people who don’t know what they’re doing, what they might be up against, fooling around in a real fire.” His expression was stern.
“No.”
“I tell you, that was a rough one.” He shook his head, then slurped some more tea. “Makes that police test look easy.”
“What I came about, Mr. Brower,” I said quickly.
“Oh, you can call me Sammy,” he interrupted. “The people around here generally do. You’re not from around here,” he said, narrowing his eyes.
“No, I’m from Chicago.” In the distance I could hear the yowl of a cat starting a fight.
“I thought so. Somewhere out west, I thought to myself. I’m a good one with accents.”
“What I came about,” I began again, “was getting something notarized.”
“Well, you came to the right place. I can surely do that for you.”
I felt a little wave of relief.
“As long as I can find my seal,” he said. He looked around the kitchen with a befuddled air. My eyes followed his. Then, “These are the documents?” he asked. He was pointing to the envelope I’d laid on the table.
“Yes. I’m supposed to sign them in front of you.”
“That’s right,” he said. “That’s the way you do. Now I assume you’ve got some proof of identification?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. I got out my wallet and found my license. As he took it I noticed that his fingernails were untrimmed, there were black crescents under them. He frowned and stared at the picture on the license.
“Seems like you might have a different color hair in this picture.”
In the distance the yowling intensified, like the crying of a baby. “Yes. Well, no. Not really. I had a permanent then, and it makes my hair look lighter. Made my hair look . . .”
“Now look here,” he grinned suddenly. “Don’t explain. I was just teasing you.” I saw that his teeth and gums were utterly false, front to back, some dentist’s dream of the perfect mouth.
He set down the license and reached over to pick up the envelope. He opened it, spread out the documents over his legs and began to read. I looked down at the cat sleeping on my lap. A flea emerged from the hair around one eye and sat on its eyelid. I remembered reading somewhere that fleas travel daily to their host’s eye for water. I lifted the cat from my lap and set it down on the floor. It looked startled for only a moment, then shook its head vigorously and sat down to lick itself. I realized abruptly that I was breathing unevenly, trying to avoid the smells in the room.
Brower looked up, “These are divorce papers,” he said.
“Yes,” I confessed. In spite of myself, I felt oddly ashamed.
“I don’t hold with that,” he said sternly.
I shrugged. “Well, these things happen, though,” I said. “Do you want me to sign them now?”
“There’s too much of that nowadays, to my way of thinking,” he said. He looked into his teacup. He sloshed its contents around and tilted it down again. He went back to reading the papers.
I found a pen in my purse. “I’m just going to sign them now,” I said, and held out my hand to take them from him.
“Don’t be in such a hurry,” he said. He turned quickly in his chair, as though to deny my claim on the papers. A ripple passed among the cats, five or six of them shifting position suddenly in response to his motion.
For a moment I sat silently watching him. A cat eating out of one of the cans scraped it gently across the floor. Brower’s eyes moved slowly back and forth across the lines of print. “Well, the fact is I am in a hurry .
. . ,” I said. I had been planning to say Sammy, to strike a note of camaraderie, but at the last moment I couldn’t bring myself to do it, and there was an embarrassing sense of blankness where his name should have been. “I’ve got my little girl waiting for me in the car.”
He nodded, tightening his lips, as though this were something he might have expected of me. “People these days,” he said, “think that the minute things get a little bit rough, they can just walk out. Just leave.” He wouldn’t meet my eye. “Children and all,” he said. “It makes no difference to them.”
“I really need to get going, Mr. Brower,” I said. “I have to get these things in the mail by noon.”
“There’s a fee for this service, you know.” He stared at me suddenly with cold eyes.
“Well, I guess I assumed there might be,” I said. I was struggling for control. Make nice, I thought. The tip of my stomach pinched with tension and nausea at the mingled smells. I got out my wallet again. “How much will it be?”
“The set fee is five dollars.”
His eyes followed every move of my hands. I had a five-dollar bill; I laid it down on the table. He set the papers down and picked up the bill.
I reached out and set my hand on the papers, I slid them over the sticky table to me. He watched. “I’d like to sign these now,” I said.
“It won’t do you no good to sign them unless I can find my seal,” he said.
“Perhaps I can help you look,” I said, desperate. I stood up, as though ready to begin poking through the heaped-up trash, the finger-smeared cabinet drawers. Several cats recoiled in waves from me, arched, frozen in fear.
“You’ll just scare these animals,” he said, looking up at me. There was some threat in the way he said it. “You’d best sit down and let me do it.”
Obediently I sat. To my relief, the skinny man actually got up, went over to the cabinets, pulled out the top drawer. It seemed to be full of jumbled utensils and crumpled papers, old letters, cat-food cans. As he pawed through the debris, he talked to me. I understood that I was to sit and listen. There was no possible response. His back was to me, and the seat of his pants was slick with wear. “In my day,” he said, “we married for better or for worse, and that’s what we meant. Came illness; came poverty; none of it mattered. We stayed. That’s what marriage meant, in those times. Why you people even bother to make those vows is beyond me, when you’ve no intention in the world, none whatsoever as far as I can see, of keeping them. Just so many words to mouth.” He shook his head. The contents of the drawer rustled and clattered as he pushed them around. “Just mouth service. Lip service,” he corrected himself.
It wasn’t in the first drawer. He pulled out the second one and continued his monologue. His voice went on and on. I felt fury rising in me as I listened, and slowly I realized that it had to do not just with how long it was taking to get him to notarize the papers, but with exactly what he was saying, and a rush of defiance I felt against the sense of shame it triggered in me. Everyone in my world had been understanding about the divorce, sympathetic, politically correct. But this man was talking to me as my parents or grandparents might have, and I felt the rebellious, self-righteous fury that an adolescent feels when she’s caught in an act which she knows to be morally doubtful. This was the opinion of the world I’d emerged from, the world I thought I was shaking off. The more he made me feel ashamed, the angrier I got. Twice he turned to me and asked if I had no sense of duty. I’m not sure what I answered. A cat rubbed purring against my legs; the muted yowling continued in the distance. I watched Brower’s trembling dirty hands rifle one drawer after another and tried not to listen to his words, his stupid words. Finally he extracted an immaculate nickel device from the flotsam in the fourth drawer down. For a moment, it looked oddly like a speculum to me, but that was a connection, I later realized, that my sense of shame, of exposure, made for me. He turned and walked slowly back to the table and sat opposite me. He stared at me for a moment, and then his eyes narrowed. “I see you’re still wearing your rings,” he said.
I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t start to cry. “Mr. Brower,” I burst out. “If it’ll make you any happier, I’ll take them off.” I began to pull at the rings. He watched me steadily, his eyes as flat as Molly’s when she was angry. They wouldn’t slide over my knuckle and I finally had to lick my finger and ease them slowly over the slick joint. His eyes took it all in. “There,” I said, putting the rings into my purse. “There. Now I’m going to sign the papers.”
His grizzled face was blank. He would give me no permission.
“I’m signing them now,” I repeated, as though speaking to an idiot, a child. I wrote my name on each one where the lawyer had left a blank for me. Brower pretended not to watch. For another moment we sat in silence. Then I slid the papers and pen over to him.
Slowly, as though aware that this was his last moment of any power over me, Brower picked up his seal and the papers. One at a time, elaborately, he signed and sealed the papers and handed them back to me. The minute I had the second one in my hand, I got up to go. “Thank you,” I said reflexively, in spite of my rage. My mother would have been proud. I tried to think of something more, something cruel and conclusive, but couldn’t. I lifted the blanket and passed through to the hallway.
It was black and close after the bright cold light of the kitchen. I sensed cats moving around my feet. I shuffled slowly through the dark stink, feeling along the walls until I came to the front door. I ran my hands down to the knob, turned it. The door wouldn’t open. I turned the knob again, pulled. Nothing. A cat rubbed against my ankles. I thought I felt the multiple light caress of fleas jumping on my shins. I rattled the door, near desperation.
Suddenly, a dim light entered the hall from behind me. I turned. Brower stood in the kitchen doorway holding the blanket partway back. His shape was outlined against the light from the kitchen windows. “Turn that latch right,” he said curtly.
I found the latch in the dim light and turned it right. The door still wouldn’t open.
“Too far,” he said, and the hall darkened again as he dropped the blanket and walked towards me. I stepped aside and let him work the latch. Light and air rushed in as he swung the door open. I walked past him, saying nothing. Just before he closed the door behind me, he whispered, “You should be ashamed.” I turned, but the door was already shut. Four or five cats had dashed out with me, and I stood on the porch a moment, watching them disperse over the flattened dirt of the yard. Then I started back to the car.
I think that even before I really looked at it, I knew something was wrong. But what I saw as I began to run towards it was that the door to the back seat was hanging open, that my jacket, the one I’d used to cover Molly, was lying on the ground just outside it. I nearly tripped across a cat in my haste; it shrieked and fled off into some bushes.
Incredibly, she still lay in the car. Or not still, I realized, but again. Again. She had been out, and had climbed back in. Now, even dirtier than before, her grimy face striped white with the wash of tears, she lay, sucking in air on each breath with a shuddering sound that told me she’d exhausted herself crying. Looking for me. I thought of the distant yowling I’d heard as I sat in Brower’s kitchen. How long had it gone on? Five minutes? Ten minutes? Her pacifier curled in her hand near her mouth. Her eyelashes were gummed into points, as though she were wearing mascara. Her soft flesh swelled slightly over a long bloody scratch on one cheek.
“Molly,” I whispered, and pulled her to me as I clambered in. Her body began to shape itself to mine, to cling to me, even before she really woke up. “Molly,” I said. “Molly.” And then suddenly, with consciousness, her grip tightened and she started to cry, screaming in sharp pain like a child who’s just fallen, who’s bitten her tongue, who’s put her hand on a hot kettle, who’s lost.
“Mommy!” she screamed, she cried, and held me tighter even than I held her. “Mommy! Mommy!” she shrieked as she would over and over in my memory of this mome
nt. And I sat hunched in the back seat with her in my arms until she was still, feeling only that I could not do this alone, I was not strong enough, good enough to do this alone, I could not do this.
Some things worked out the way I had told Molly they would. Nearly as soon as we got back to Cambridge, her father arrived and found us in the new apartment. It was still full of unpacked boxes, awkwardly placed furniture, stacks of books and kitchen utensils, but I left him and Molly in it, as we’d arranged ahead of time, and went to stay at a friend’s house for the weekend. Brian drove me there in my car. I sat in back with my suitcase. Molly was in front, next to Brian in her car seat. This rearrangement—when we were married, the car seat was always in the back, and Brian and I sat together in front—seemed a reminder, lest we forget, of the deeper disturbances going on in our lives. I wished I’d thought to put the car seat in back before the trip.
It must have made Molly uncomfortable too, because she kept trying to turn her head to see me, and then she’d stare soberly over at Brian. He sat silent at the wheel. The water sparkled deep blue in the river. In our other life he or I would have been pointing out to her the stiff white wings of sailboats, the brightly bobbing ascent of a kite. Instead, from time to time, I’d lean forward and tell Brian about some quirk in the new apartment—you needed matches to light the stove, the toilet handle sometimes needed jiggling. “Okay,” he’d say without turning his head. “Thanks.”
The road swung out of sight of the river; we drove past Mass. General and up onto the highway. Molly stared down at the piers and miniature buildings sprawling far below her. Then abruptly she turned to Brian. She had a brave coquettish smile on her face, and she said, “I really hate my mom, don’t you? We hate her, right?”
My heart seemed to squeeze tight with pain, though I knew it was out of her own hurt and confusion that she spoke: she didn’t know quite what was being asked of her with this changing of the guard. And if she had to choose between us, she’d pick Brian, the one she didn’t see enough of, the one she yearned after. I was just the medium she lived in, as familiar to her, as taken for granted, as air and food.