Po Strode was cutting flowers in her sideyard. She wore a sunhat wide-brimmed as a bicycle tire, a flat basket hooked over her arm. Ina waved and Po raised her snips, then snicked them twice in further greeting.
The stairs plummeted into shadow. Ina could see the first landing and beyond it more stairs, but everything seemed to get swallowed up down there; it was like looking down the long throat of a dangerous animal. The girlish excitement of the place was long gone.
She inspected the street for cars bearing young men. She did not dare look again at Po Strode; she was too embarrassed. If she turned back now she would become the woman who wandered to the head of the river stairs, in addition to being the woman who drank in the morning and the woman who enticed other women’s husbands.
She took one step down and then another. She kept one hand on the iron railing, which hummed against her palm, and one hand on her shoulder bag. More steps down and she looked back; she was out of sight.
Vincent had kissed her for the first time on the landing by the river. He was not especially shy, but very gentlemanly, and he had asked her permission, where Rudy had taken his first kiss from her almost as his right. Rudy had made her feel like property to be possessed. Vincent treated her like something that might chip.
Ina rested on the landing halfway down. She wasn’t tired, only terribly excited. She felt she was on an edge; moving too fast. At the top of the stairs was a rectangle of fading sky. Her phone might be ringing, Helene calling to gauge her sister’s progress. She would be heartened that Ina had left the house.
Continuing on down, she could hear the river. It was thick as slush even on the hottest days. The railing was cooler in the deepening shadows. She stepped onto the landing. Having arrived, she immediately made plans to depart. She would touch the landing as proof she had been there, then start back up. Helene would never know she had been missing.
But she was struck by how little the scene had changed over time. Even the trees had ceased to grow. The hearts drawn with chalk on the landing by her friends had only been made permanent with the spray paint of modern lovers. The opposite bank had the same look of muddy slickness, the same flakes of debris and used condoms caught in the roots of the trees. It made her feel at home.
She forced herself to remain a minute, a quick minute spent regarding her beating heart, her arms folded over her chest like sensitive monitors. She walked in a wary shuffle around the edge of the landing, looking for a clue as to why the boy had come down there. Perhaps it was an innocent errand; no bathroom handy. But at the corner farthest from the stairs she saw a dark line tied to an old boat-mooring hook. The line vanished in the water. A good hiding place, the hook was imbedded in a small cavity in the side of the landing; the line wasn’t visible unless you made a point of looking for it.
Kneeling creakily on the landing, she pulled in the line, wetting her hands. The catch at the end had the weight of an excellent day of fishing, but after she had pulled in enough line the mystery came to her eye as something golden, thick-legged, almost crustaceous in its unwillingness to be retrieved.
Then she had to laugh.
She was pulling in a six-pack of Coors.
Now she had to hurry. She had come upon something of value; the beer would be priceless to someone not legally allowed to possess it.
The cans dripped down the front of her clothes and onto her shoes. The six-pack was fastened to the line with a simple knot. She picked the knot open with fingers that barely functioned and pulled the cans out of the plastic rings so she could fit them in her bag. The cans were heavy; they would slow her ascent. The boys would discover her stealing their beer and throw her in the river. Helene would never get to the store. She would call and call, and when she got no answer she would chalk up Ina’s disappearance to an intemperate life.
Ina paused to rest at the landing and heard her name being called. The doorway of blue sky had reappeared at the head of the stairs, and Po Strode stepped into this space with her wide hat. She held her snips like a sword, and seemed prepared to hoist her basket of flowers as a shield.
“Hello, Po,” Ina said when she was six stairs from the top.
“Ina,” Po replied with a nod. Her look was a little embarrassed at being concerned about Ina, then finding her safe.
“Can you do me a favor?” Ina asked.
“What is that?”
“Is the street clear?”
“Clear?”
“Are there any cars approaching? Any maroon cars, in particular?”
Po Strode wheeled her hat to the left and to the right, taking in the neighborhood with a fresh suspicion.
“Everything appears to be in order, Ina,” Po said. “The street is very quiet at the moment. No one lurking, as far as I can tell. I think it’s safe for you to come up.”
Ina, clothes damp, completed her ascension. The street looked wide and airy after the dark constriction of the stairs and the river landing. Po Strode was regarding her queerly.
“I saw you go down the stairs,” she explained. She was a retired elementary school teacher, childless, and she wielded her snips like a pointer. “I wasn’t sure if you were in some sort of trouble. I’m relieved to see you’re not.”
Ina stepped close. “Can I trust you with a secret, Po?”
Po shifted to keep the basket between them. “How you spend your time is none of my business, Ina.”
“Let’s go into your yard,” Ina said. She hurried in her Nikes across the street. She knelt and placed her bag behind one of Po’s flowerbeds, and in standing up she felt safe and elated. She was once again an old lady killing time in a neighbor’s yard. But against all odds and expectations she had gone to the river and returned with treasure.
She worried a damp spot on her blouse. Po Strode caught up with her. She had dropped a rose in the road and gone back for it.
“Let me catch my breath,” Ina said.
A car cruised past driven by a man both old and handsome. Po, whose Hector was still alive, turned in her sunhat to regard the driver. She had always had an eye for men, Po. Her keenest watch was kept on Hector, both in appreciation and surveillance.
“You mentioned a secret,” Po Strode prompted.
“I did. But I’m wondering if I ought not keep it to myself,” Ina said with delicious reluctance. “I don’t want to expose you to any danger.”
“Who’d harm an old biddy like me?”
“Don’t you read the papers?”
“I get my news from TV. Or Hector.”
“Clair Berkey? Three blocks over on Alcott? Somebody beat her within an inch of her life for seven dollars. They used one of her good mixing spoons.”
Po Strode made a noise of distaste with her lips. The action produced a tiny bubble of spit that inadvertently floated away. The women watched it, amazed.
“I’m aware those things go on,” Po said. “I lock my doors. But I don’t need to know the details of every person’s misfortune.”
“It keeps me on my toes,” Ina said. She heard, across Po’s gardens, the phone ringing in her house; Helene already gearing her life to being alone.
“Are you in danger?” Po asked.
“I don’t honestly know.” She glanced at the bag at her feet, felt a thrill. She would have to be careful to wash the cans before pouring the contents into her glass.
“I was on my front stoop this morning,” Ina said. “A young man appeared at the head of the river stairs. He was rather good-looking—in an unkempt fashion. I sat very still and he didn’t see me. I’m positive he didn’t see me. He waited there and then a maroon car full of other young men arrived and picked him up. Naturally I was curious about what he had been doing down by the river. I went to look and discovered this beer.” She pulled the bag open for Po to see inside.
“You must go home,” Po exclaimed, giving Ina a slight push. “Those boys
will be back for their beer. Better yet, why don’t you put it back where you found it?”
Ina looked at the mouth of the stairway. No, she would never go down there again.
“They won’t be back until dark,” Ina said. “Maybe not even tonight. If they were old enough to have the beer, why did they hide it in the river?”
Po waved her away. “I can’t promise anything if they come for me.”
“Why would they come for you?”
“I just can’t make any promises. I wish you hadn’t told me.”
“I asked if you could keep a secret.”
“I didn’t ask you to put me—and Hector—in danger.”
“They’ll never suspect us, Po,” Ina said. “We are old. Our impression of helplessness gives us all sorts of freedom.”
Po Strode backed away, holding up a hand as if to deflect a blow. She checked the street for a maroon car. Some years ago, kids had decapitated the Strodes’ lawn jockey, and the little headless man stood there for a winter in his natty, fading outfit, holding out a small black lamp. Hector expected to find the head in the spring, but the snow pulled back without a sign of it.
Ina carried the stolen beer into her house by the back door. Two boys witnessed her; they were sharing a cigarette inside the Crabbs’ fenced lot. They scared Ina with their sudden presence, evidence of witnesses at every turn. She scared them, too, though; they clunked against each other in their haste to hide their illicit smoke. She estimated they were younger than the boys in the maroon car. But why were they present at just that moment? Were they sentries? Scouts?
She opened her icebox. Her Old Style was there, neat rows of cold cans. She counted her stock: eight. Enough for the night and into the next day. But rather than hide the stolen beer there, she carried it down into the basement. An old icebox stood there, unplugged, beneath the stairs. Vincent had bought her a new one several years before his death. The machine in the basement was perfectly good, merely old. Vincent had come home one afternoon followed within minutes by a department-store delivery truck. He told her he liked the way the new one made ice. A soft whirring in the door preceded the muffled rattle of perfect ice pieces (shaped not like cubes, but quarter-moons) being deposited in the bin. He paid the delivery men fifty dollars cash to lug the old icebox into the basement. He told Ina they might sell it one day.
She opened the door and was startled when no light came on. She put the beer on an empty shelf, changed her mind, and transferred it to the freezer compartment. Closing, the door snapped with a solid chunk! and bit the very tip of her trailing finger. She thrust it into her mouth. Vincent, who on occasion professed a belief in the humanity of inanimate objects, would have told her the old icebox had waited patiently to take its revenge for being jilted; it would have preferred a taste of Vincent, but settled for his widow.
Before returning upstairs, Ina checked the lock on the door leading from the basement up a short flight of stairs to the backyard. She had not used the door in ages, but when she turned the knob the door opened easily. She tried the knob from the outside and it turned. For the duration of her widowhood she had been living with her basement door unlocked. Each night before she took her glass to bed she painstakingly checked the locks on every door and window, and every night she had fallen into her beery slumber feeling locked up tight and safe, and the basement door had been wide open. She felt as if she had just discovered she’d been walking around for years with the seat of her pants missing.
Her phone began to ring again. She took it in the kitchen.
“I’m on my way. I’ve been sidetracked, but I’m on my way. Please don’t criticize me.”
“I’d never do that, dear. I was only worried about you. It must be dark by now.”
Ina checked the light. In fact, everything appeared brightly defined after the gloom of the cellar.
“We still have time,” Ina said. She told her sister, with a lilt of breathless daring in her voice, “I would’ve been over to get you by now, but I got involved in a little escapade.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you when I see you. I may be in danger. My phone may be tapped.”
“Ina, dear—”
But Ina hung up. Her sister would assume the escapade consisted of drinking more beer.
Ina went to a window that looked on the Crabbs’ lot. The two boys were still there. They were sharing another cigarette. She left by the back door, checking the front door first, checking the backdoor lock twice, checking for the coinish weight of her keys in the moist depths of her bag. A thick old oak grew in her yard near the sidewalk. She went to it, waited to catch her breath, then peeked around the tree at the boys across the street. They had not seen her; therefore she was still in the house, and safe.
Ina carried her shopping cart to the end of the block so its squealing axle would not betray her. At the corner she turned right, feeling wonderful to be out and on the move. She walked beneath the cool canopy of tall oaks planted two years before her birth and now grown majestic and bothersome in the way their roots buckled the old sidewalks and their leaves and acorns produced a debris of persistent aggravation. Two blocks on and she turned left, and then in another block she turned right onto Helene’s street.
Vincent’s initials were there somewhere. She walked with her head bowed, looking for the letters her husband had cut with a bit of stick in wet cement. She always thought she remembered the exact location of the initials, but she never did. In the moments before finding them she always feared they had been eradicated, had grown faint over the long years of no one looking for them.
Even Vincent had forgotten they were there, then one evening on a visit to Rudy and Helene’s he stood up and led them on an expedition into the darkness. Helene refused to go along, claiming she had dishes to do, and her disapproving look betrayed her hope that Rudy would stay put, too. Ina, seeing her sister discomfited, turned vivacious and enthusiastic about the idea. They filled their pockets with kitchen matches to aid in the search; Vincent said they were more romantic than a flashlight. Ina topped off her glass and they departed.
Ina could see the moon sectioned haphazardly through the trees overhead. Two houses down, Vincent stopped and struck a match against the sidewalk. Rudy, who believed he had etched his own initials in the same wet cement, said they had not gone far enough down the block. But Vincent was on his knees and an elbow, holding the match up, looking drunk, which he was not. He read like a blind man, with his fingertips, everything he touched a blur of punctuating stones and grit. He put out the match with a snap of his wrist.
The party moved on. Now Rudy felt the search was warming.
“We’re in front of the Griffins’ house—and we put the initials in their cement because they were such pricks.” Rudy fell to his knees and struck a match.
“But this isn’t where the Griffins lived,” Vincent said.
That set off a second argument. They could not agree on the location of the initials, and then the composition of the neighborhood changed even as they tried to fix it in their memories. The match burned Rudy’s fingers, and with a little yelp he disappeared.
Ina found the faint letters where they had always been, where Vincent finally had come upon them with a woof of triumph that night. They had been pretty old even then, the children grown and gone, their lives constricted back to the four of them again after the brief expansion of having families. They found the letters in front of Rudy’s boyhood home, which was only six houses down from where he and Helene had moved after they were married. They remembered the circumstances then, too; Rudy’s father mixing the cement to fix a crumbling panel in the walk, his stern warning not to mark his work, and then Rudy and Vincent sneaking back with the stick.
Rudy knelt with a match, rubbing his fingers over the letters. VL RB.
“I don’t know if he ever saw what we did,” he said.
Ina arrived at Helene’s house. The neighborhood lots were deep and narrow, with walks leading between the houses to niggardly back yards, then unconnected garages facing a common alley. On the front gate was a small silver sign: RUDY & HELEN WELCOME YOU. The sign was custom ordered, then Helene’s name botched. Rudy had made a stink until the company refunded his money, but he never corrected the sign.
Ina went around to the back door. There was a strip of lawn along the walk, an old flowerbed next to the fence on the lot line. A young family lived in the house next door. They were strangers in the impersonal age. But years back, what had their name been? Joost? One hot night the four of them had sat in the parlor with their cold drinks, playing canasta and listening to Mr. and Mrs. Joost make love next door. Rudy tugged at his collar as Mrs. Joost’s orgasmic shouts trumpeted through the screens. Vincent said in a fake British accent, “Seems a bit warm for that, what?” But he could not wait to get her home that night, could not wait to get her undressed and his hands on her.
“Is that you, dear?” Helene called.
She was sitting by the telephone in the kitchen. As if she had perfect vision, her eyes went immediately to Ina as she opened the back door with the key Helene had had cut for her and which Ina kept safety-pinned to the lining of her bag. She went to Helene and kissed her cheek.
“If it wasn’t, would I have said so?”
“I’d know you anywhere—your tread, your scent, your aura.”
“Poo,” Ina said. “Did you know,” she continued with a trace of amazement, “that I’ve been living with the cellar door unlocked since Vincent died?”
“Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“I didn’t want to,” Ina said. “That’s my point. I was checking the locks on the cellar door and I discovered it’s been unlocked all this time. Years!”
“Why were you checking the lock, dear?”
“I was nervous.”
“Why?”
“I’ll explain later. Do you have a list?”
“Up here,” Helene said, with a tap on her skull.
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