“You had your hair done.”
“What do you think?”
“It’s lovely,” Ina said, and touched her sister’s hair as further proof.
Helene persisted in tinting her hair at a small salon run out of a woman’s home down the block. Helene favored unflattering metallic colors—hard silvers, silver-blues, racy coppers—perhaps falling for the seductive names, having no idea how the colors actually looked. They were at an age when their few peers did not dare offer honest critiques of their appearance, knowing they themselves were vulnerable. A blind woman with hair the color of a saucepan was routinely assured she looked radiant. Ina did not feel she was one to argue. Vincent had cut her hair and become quite good at it. His gentle, busy fingers in her hair never failed to arouse her. Now she cut her own hair, sitting on a high stool before the mirror, but rarely consulting it. She cut her hair by touch; she was deft.
Helene asked if she had brought any coupons.
“No,” Ina said. “I don’t pay any attention to them.”
“They can save you money.”
“They clutter up the drawer,” Ina said. “You have to keep track of the expiration dates. I don’t want anything to do with things that expire.”
Helene huffed to register disapproval at her sister’s little joke, with its overtones of spendthriftiness. Ina had never had to worry about money. She just bought what she needed. Vincent had taught her that. He made money in a way that seemed almost effortless; not in amounts that could be considered lavish, but much more than enough to satisfy the needs and desires of his family. Helene resented this ability of Vincent’s, for her own husband had brought money in wrenchingly, a dollar at a time, each dollar logged and squeezed in place on the budget.
Helene snapped open a change purse and felt down inside its little cloth mouth for the money she had there: bills folded to the dimensions of small candy bars, a selection of coins. Ina would write a check.
The widows linked arms and set out. Helene took a seat on the bench in the backyard while Ina went to the garage for her sister’s cart. Helene had had two carts just like it stolen, malicious thefts of the rickety contraptions with their collapsible sides and cheap red wheels. No reason to take them other than pure meanness, a simple desire to inconvenience.
In the garage, Ina put her hand on Rudy’s car, an Olds Omega. Its blue steel coat was dusty and so warm the engine might have just been run. A man’s hat was on the front seat, resting alongside a pair of ladies’ gloves. She remembered the rides they had taken, the four of them, the way Vincent pressed ever so slightly against her on the seat, even after they had been married for years, even after she had been stretched far from her original form by two babies. He never lost that attentiveness. Up they would ride into hills Rudy found. He discovered the finest in elevated locations, where a breeze was sure to rise on the hottest evening. He amazed them. He gloated over this rare ability. The horizon was a line drawn with violet ink and straight-edge, but Rudy would have them soon enough in hills where they lost their stomachs flying over the crests. Helene would take her turn driving, Rudy close beside her. She was an excellent driver. She steered with both hands and Rudy poked like a kid at the side of her breast, or in the gap between her legs, as if he wanted her to flinch in self-protection and kill them all.
“Whose hat is that in your car?” Ina asked.
“Hat?”
“A brown hat and a pair of light gray gloves.”
“The hat is Rudy’s. The gloves are mine. I can’t picture Rudy in a hat.”
“When did you drive the car last?”
“Before I went blind—obviously.”
“You should turn the engine over occasionally,” Ina said. “It’s not good to just sit.”
“You’ve let me sit all day.”
“Oh, poo.” Helene took her sister’s arm and they went down the walk and through the gate. Each woman pulled a cart. Helene remarked on the chill of the shade. Her toe caught on a snag of raised concrete and for an instant her balance was gone. Then it wasn’t.
“Are you all right, dear?” Ina asked.
“Yes,” Helene said. She had paused to reassemble her courage to travel. “We’re at the corner.”
“Exactly.”
Ina warned Helene to step down for the curb and she did. The street had a much different feel than the sidewalk. It seemed to hum, and Helene felt endangered as she never did on the sidewalk or in her house. She hurried a bit against Ina’s lead and tripped jarringly on the opposite curb, again nearly falling.
“Easy, dear,” Ina said. “I looked both ways.”
They moved into the next block. Helene counted steps. The block was precise in her memory. The houses were either crisp or uncaring in their appearance. Each fence had a tilt of its own. The yards declared dog, no dog, yard mowed. All the time she had had her eyesight she thought she hadn’t been paying attention. But there it was like a movie, down to the shapes, sequences, and locations of the house-number plates.
“Here we are at Jansen and Edison,” Helene announced.
“No fair. You’re counting steps.”
“Tell me about your adventure,” Helene said.
Ina hushed her with that taste for the dramatic Helene found so annoying.
“It’s scary,” Ina said. “I let Po Strode in on it and now she fears for her safety—and wishes I’d never said a word.”
Helene, stung, said, “You told Po, but you won’t tell me?”
“Po was there, dear. She insinuated herself into my adventure,” Ina said. She mused, “Why do you suppose Po was blessed with a husband with longevity?”
“I don’t know,” Helene said, “that it’s such a blessing.”
“Bite your tongue,” Ina scolded, laughing. “Rudy is just crushed at this moment.”
“I was referring to Hector Strode,” Helene said. “Do you remember what a grim young man he was? Serious to a fault.”
“The serious ones last forever,” Ina said.
Helene, in talking to her sister, had lost count of their journey. But the rhythm of being blind ticked reliably within her and she began to count from 44. At 201, the number of steps in the block, they were at Jansen and Flamingo. She told Ina so.
“You are amazing.”
“I am. Now tell me what happened.”
“I was sitting on my front porch—thinking about Vincent, waiting for the mail,” Ina said. “I saw a boy come up the stairs from the river. His very appearance radiated a suspicious presence. He was menace personified. I hoped he would walk away, but he just stood there. I sat stone still. He didn’t see me. In time a car full of boys his age arrived and took him away.”
Helene, counting steps, turned left on Wilson. Preoccupied by her story, Ina followed.
“Do you remember that look boys got when they wanted to kiss you?” Ina asked.
“Only Rudy ever looked at me that way,” Helene said, somewhat stiffly.
“What about George Bigelow? And Heywood Harms?”
“They never kissed me,” Helene blurted, as if fearing a whiff of scandal fifty years after the fact.
“Never?”
“Rudy is the only man who ever touched me.”
“Well, you misremember, but I won’t press the issue,” Ina said judiciously. The had come to the outer rim of the supermarket parking lot. Helene stood, arms akimbo, glaring at the space she estimated her sister to occupy.
“Rudy is the only man who ever touched me.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I know for a fact that Vincent kissed you. Often.”
“He was like a brother.”
“Not before we paired off. I could’ve ended up with Rudy and you with Vincent. You can’t deny it.”
“I can and I will,” Helene said. “Rudy only had e
yes for me.”
“Dear, I’m not saying that he didn’t. But we could’ve switched husbands in the beginning and we’d still be standing today just like this—two old fools arguing in a parking lot.”
“That’s not the same. We’re sisters,” Helene said.
“Maybe if you’d married Vincent and I’d married Rudy, they’d be alive today,” Ina speculated. “Maybe we wouldn’t have worn the other out quite so fast.”
“You don’t know that,” Helene said.
As they walked on, Ina said, “I just remember my youth as a girlish series of brief flirtations. A kiss was the ultimate in vanity and self-expression. It meant nothing. But they surely made my blood gallop. We were together so much, I assumed your experiences were the same. You taught me everything.”
Men were at work in front of the store’s entrance. They shimmered in a cloud of dust and excruciating noise, cracking into the concrete with picks and a jackhammer. Helene made a sound, almost a peep of pain, that Ina barely heard. She saw a drop of blood on her sister’s leg where a shard of concrete had hit and cut through the skin of her nylons. Ina drew her into the store, where the air was cool, with music in the background.
“Wait, dear,” Ina said to her sister. “You’ve been cut.”
She guided Helene to a chair by the window. Other old birds perched there, catching their breath, fluttering their coupons. Ina knelt and dabbed with a tissue at the blood. It was the merest drop, a gay bright red that seemed more festive than dangerous. Blood had spread behind the nylons, darkened, and begun to dry.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little sting,” Helene said bravely. “Such a racket out there.”
“Men working.”
A cashier in a brown smock called a greeting to Helene, who replied unerringly, “What are they doing out there, Margarine?”
She waved a hand, an instant’s hitch in the flow of her work. “Putting up barriers,” she said. “You won’t be able to take your groceries to your car anymore.”
“We don’t drive,” Helene said.
“It’s just a symptom,” Margie said. “The neighborhood is shot.” She smiled innocently at her customer, a petite woman with huge, dewy black eyes and a matching bead in her nose. “They lose carts, so they fence us in,” Margie said.
“My food it will be stealing,” the customer chimed in with shy indignation.
“You’ve got that right, honey,” Margie said. “You leave your cart to go get your car and someone’ll take your groceries before you get back. We’re playing into their hands. We’re giving them a specific location to prey on us.”
She hit a final button and read the figure that appeared in angular crimson numbers in the register window. “Sixty-six twenty-nine, please.”
While the customer pulled her money from what appeared to be a satin pouch, Margie smiled wearily at the widows.
“So how you doing, Hellion?”
“I’m fine,” Helene said.
“You want a Band-Aid for that? We’ve got them back in the lounge.”
“She’ll be okay,” Ina said.
“Check out with me, when you’re done,” Margie said.
They went into the aisles.
“Why did she call you Hellion?” Ina asked.
“Don’t get me started,” Helene warned.
“Hellion is the nickname of a woman who kissed one man in her lifetime?”
“I worked here a long time,” Helene said. “Everyone had nicknames. Margie we called Margarine because men went through her like knives.”
Ina’s laugh drew the looks of other shoppers.
“And furthermore,” Helene continued, “you say I taught you everything—but I never taught you to be promiscuous.”
“You’re awfully touchy today,” Ina said. “And what does it matter now if I was promiscuous and you were chaste?”
Helene’s eyes snapped to, as if they worked perfectly. Ina set something she needed in the cart and directed her sister onward. People were listening and she felt exposed.
“It will always matter,” Helene declared.
“Do you think Mama knows about us now?” Ina asked. “Or Daddy? And say they do—do you think they smile more fondly on you than me?”
“I don’t care to discuss it,” Helene said. “You’re too strange today.”
Ina understood perfectly what her sister meant. She was pent up with something approaching sexual desire. She didn’t know if it was the fizz of the beer in her system or the exertion of going to the river, or the memories that journey had tapped, but she was itching for sensation in a way that was nearly adolescent in intensity.
“It was my adventure,” Ina said.
“Pish tosh,” Helene said. She walked with one hand on the cart. They followed the same route through the store every time; Helene had the steps down and could almost put her hand on each item that she needed. She said, “You saw a boy who looked suspicious. He didn’t see you. He drove away in a car. What a grand escapade.” She paused. “Do you need salt?”
“I need a block for the water softener,” Ina said. “Although last time, Hector seemed reluctant to carry it downstairs for me.” He had come over, old and skinny in his stained T-shirt and gardening pants, and Po watched so avidly for him to return you would think her husband was God’s antidote to widowhood. But he did have a pleasant stink to him; Ina had forgotten how good old men could smell.
“I went to the bottom of the stairs and stole those boys’ beer out of the river,” Ina said. “It’s in my cellar right now. That’s how I discovered the door has been unlocked all this time.”
“Ina Lockwood! Are you an idiot? Or a liar?”
“Neither,” Ina said. She loved to see her sister stew. It was new to Ina, the ability to shock her older sister. Blindness had made Helene innocent all over again.
“What if they come for their beer?” Helene asked in a whisper.
“Why would they come to me?”
“You live across the street from the stairs. Who else is likely to have seen them?”
“Po Strode. Or that young couple on the other side of Po and Hector.”
“They’ll go to Po and she’ll hold out for half a second—then she will point a finger directly at your house,” Helene said.
“They’ll think the line broke, or the knot came undone,” Ina said. “They’ll assume their beer is at the bottom of the river. There is nothing to tie the event to me.”
“Except their beer in your cellar—which they will find in the course of tearing your house to shreds,” Helene said. “The things young men do to old ladies these days. It’s not a pretty sight.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t be cruel, dear. It gives you wrinkles.” Helene turned the corner at the end of the aisle just as Ina was about to tell her to do so.
“Roxanne Dalrymple, poor soul,” Helene said. “They found her inside her icebox. Nobody to hear her scream. She suffocated.”
“I don’t know Roxanne Dalrymple,” Ina said.
“She was a year ahead of me in school? A vivacious little thing,” Helene said. “She was in chorus? And on the paper? And she ends up in her own icebox.”
“How did she get there?”
“She was shoved. Crammed. By a gang of young thugs—perhaps the very young men whose beer you stole. They were never caught. It was convenient to be rid of her. So in she went.”
“And she couldn’t even turn on the light,” Ina said.
Helene laughed in spite of herself. “Don’t make fun,” she scolded.
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
C
ROWS. Copyright © 1985, 2015 by Charles Dickinson. Excerpt from The Widows' Adventures copyright © 1989 by Charles Dickinson. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
A previous edition of this book was published by Avon Books.
EPub Edition SEPTEMBER 2015 ISBN: 9780062379917
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