He nodded, but then he was obviously besotted with Marsha. He would have agreed to carry me home through the storm on his shoulders if she’d asked him to. Nevertheless, I raised my own cup of cider in a toast to both of them. “Thanks.”
“There’s no charge for the speeches.” Marsha smiled.
“MaryDell Paine says the clients will be, in her words, perfectly harmless. Do you think that’s true, Marsha?” I included him in the query. “Joe?”
They glanced at each other, and Marsha said in a rueful tone, “Jenny, who can tell? You might go along for years with nothing happening out of the ordinary. All sweetness and light. Or you might get a couple of suicides, or attempted suicides. You might get clients going into psychotic episodes and attacking each other, or staff members, or, hell, we might as well admit it, the neighbors. When you hear that psychiatry is not an exact science, you’d better believe it.”
“Would you welcome the hall next door to you?”
“Yes,” my friend said seriously, “I sure would.”
“When your children are here?”
She leaned her head back and laughed again. “That sounds like the old line, ‘but would you want your daughter to marry one?’ Yes, even with my children here, I’d be happy to have that hall—provided the clients were well screened and the place was well run—right next door. You want some more cider? The defense rests.”
“No, thanks. The prosecution’s got to get some rest, too.” I untangled myself from her couch, and we padded in our stocking feet to the front door. Joe said good-bye at the door of the recreation room and then retreated tactfully to the kitchen. As I redressed for the blizzard, I said to her, “He’s cute. Intense, but cute.”
She whispered, “He hates to be called cute.”
I gave her one of our old straight lines: “Would you call me a taxi?”
“You’re a taxi.”
We hugged. I trudged home.
On the telephone-answering machine, there was a new message from Geof, advising me not to wait up for him. A second message, from Derek, asked me to call him back.
“Jenny,” he said when I reached him, “I went over to Tenth Street tonight, but I couldn’t find any really violent opposition to the recreation hall. It makes them a little nervous, I’d say, but they seem pretty impressed by MaryDell and her group; they seem to feel she’ll do a good, safe job of running the place.” Derek sounded nervous himself. “Besides, like they told me, it’s the sort of neighborhood where there are already a couple of halfway houses—one for parolees, I think, and another for druggies—so this sort of thing is not all that new to them, so it’s not so threatening. And the few who are opposed seem to have been talked into it by Perry Yates.”
“Who?”
“Wayne Newton. The cigar with legs. Anyway, they seem willing to listen to reasonable people with reasonable ideas. I’d say that as far as the neighborhood is concerned, all systems are go, Jenny.”
Except for the pig lady, I thought.
“That’s great, Derek.” All of his systems seemed to be on go as well, as if he might be making a last-ditch effort to keep his job. “That was really above the call of duty to go out in the storm tonight. Thank you.”
“Glad to do it,” he said, in an overly hearty tone of voice. “Well, good night, Jenny. Stay warm! I’ll see you at the office in the morning!”
He really was trying very hard, so hard that his eagerness made me cringe a little. For some reason my mind made a fleeting connection between him and Joe Fabian, but what was it? Granted, they both fell into the category of cute, but Joe seemed a stronger, more intense, possibly even more intelligent man than Derek. I couldn’t, in that instant, put my finger on what it was about each of them that reminded me of the other.
“Good night, Derek.”
I ran an exceedingly deep and hot bath and remained soaking in it for a sinfully long time. Then I switched on both sides of the electric blanket and crawled into bed, feeling fairly relaxed. I hated the thought of the pig lady being so frightened, I thought drowsily. Tomorrow, tomorrow I’d visit her again and try to assure her that …
9
I woke up the next morning to find that the storm had whirled away from us. It was now out over the Atlantic Ocean, having left behind a clear blue sky, freezing temperature, and fierce sunshine that glistened on the eight inches of snow on the ground. We hadn’t even seen Halloween yet; it was beginning to look like a long winter. But it was beautiful, the first snow of the season is always beautiful, the way Southerners imagine it should be. This was a fantasy snowfall, where everything sparkled so that it hurt my eyes to gaze too long at it. Do Southerners, the ones who’ve never seen snow, realize that you have to wear sunglasses on days like these?
I discussed such weighty questions over breakfast at the kitchen counter with Geof that morning. We were having an actual meal—unusual for us toast-and-coffee people—of scrambled eggs, bacon, orange juice, and toasted bagels. It was fuel for navigating the ice floes, I guess, for killing seals, pounding blubber.
I also told him about Derek, about encountering Michael Laurence again, and about the recreation hall project. He told me how many times he’d signed his name to paperwork the previous day, and then he said, “I don’t suppose he’s gotten ugly while he’s been gone?”
“What? Oh, well, no.”
“Probably looks all tanned and healthy, one of those disgusting Colorado types. Wears cowboy boots and blue jeans. Turtleneck sweaters and tweed jackets. Grew a mustache and a beard that he trims every morning. Drinks Coors. Eats Grape-Nuts cereal. Plays the guitar. Walks around with a pickax over one shoulder.”
“Right. Rappels down the side of tall buildings, catches mountain trout in his bare hands, hunts elk with a bow and arrow, sits around campfires with John Denver.” I grinned at him. “You’ve got him pegged, all right.”
He grunted, took a drink of his coffee.
“You’ve also got me.”
He smiled. My husband was looking particularly sexy this morning, in brown corduroy trousers and a green-and-yellow plaid flannel shirt that made him look, ironically, like one of the western outdoor types he had just mocked.
“Geof,” I said, “what would be the police attitude toward this recreation hall of MaryDell’s?”
“Changed the subject, didn’t you? You can’t fool me; I used to be a crack detective.” He considered my question while he chewed and then swallowed a chunk of bagel that he had slathered with blueberry preserves from the state of Maine. “This policeman’s attitude is that it would probably be a good thing because it would get some people off the streets.”
“Would you worry about an increase of crime in the neighborhood?”
He shook his head and cocked an eyebrow at me. “You’re not talking about the criminally insane, are you?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
“Well, then no, why would we? They won’t be any more likely to steal hubcaps than your average citizen. They’re only crazy, not criminals, right? If anything, the crime rate might decline, because we’d patrol there more often just to keep things copacetic. In fact, you can promise the neighbors that, if you like. It might calm down some of the irate ones. It could also discourage them from doing anything unfriendly, like that fellow you said Derek calls the cigar with legs.”
“Perry Yates.”
“Yeah. And your pig lady.”
“I don’t think she’d hurt anybody.”
“You said she strangles pigs from her ceiling.”
I laughed. “Porcelain pigs, Geof.”
We exchanged buttery kisses. We helped each other on with our overcoats and then supported each other on the icy walk to the garage. He guided me out of the garage; I made tracks in the snow for him to follow. We waved good-bye to each other. It was nice. It was married. I liked it.
I liked driving in the snow a lot less. The storm had moved on too late for our road crews to clear the streets in time for rush-hour traffic.
<
br /> My car slipped and slid for three blocks, with me alternately holding my breath and gasping at each near-miss. It finally fishtailed one too many times for my nerves, and—while staring at the bumper of the Chrysler with which I had nearly collided—I decided the better part of valor was to abandon my car.
I’ll take the bus, I thought, and call it research.
So I let the Accord slide into a semicleared area of an elementary school parking lot, got out, and locked the doors. Derek could bring me back to get it later, assuming he managed to drive his own car all the way in to work. I set off for the nearest bus stop, which turned out to be four arctic blocks away.
Already, the bitter cold was forming a thick crust on top of the snow, so that with every step there was a moment of suspension before my boot crunched down into the softness beneath. I lurched forward—pause, crunch, oof, pause, crunch, oof—wondering if Southerners have any idea how exhausting it can be to walk through a winter wonderland. Thank God I’d put on boots, I thought, instead of just wearing heels and counting on the protection of my car. Without boots, the crust would have bit and sawed at my ankles like alligator’s teeth, an image that probably shows only how little this Northerner knows about swamps.
At the bus stop, I stamped my feet and clapped my gloved hands to fend off frostbite. I felt like a backup dancer in a Russian folk ballet. Finally, a big gray belcher hove to, crunching snow under its tires and farting air from its brakes.
The doors folded open, inviting me inside.
“Good morning,” I said, looking up to the driver.
“Not so’s you’d notice,” she replied, gazing stoically down at me. She was a bruiser of a woman, middle-aged, bulky and tough-looking, wearing a yellow ski parka, unzipped, over her black uniform, and brown leather driving gloves. I climbed the rubber-coated steps. The folding doors whooshed shut behind me. The floor around my feet was puddly with melted snow from the other passengers’ shoes.
I hadn’t taken the bus in years, so I had to ask her what the fare was. She gave me a look she might have given a Martian, before saying, “Six bits.”
“I’ve only got a dollar bill.”
“The company don’t let me make change.”
So I bought a token and lost a quarter in the deal. What that told me was that we’d have to be able to provide change—or tokens—for the clients at the recreation hall.
“Hold on tight,” the driver advised me, assuming a more friendly manner once I was a paid customer. “It’s bumper-car city this morning.”
I heeded her advice as I sat down on the bench directly behind her. Although there were quite a few empty seats on the bus, it seemed full, what with the passengers swaddled in thick coats, wool hats, boots, gloves, and mufflers. Some of them stared curiously at me, the newcomer, not one of the regulars. I felt like the heathen who only goes to church at Christmas and Easter. Well, hell, they’d have to tolerate me—I had, after all, put an extra quarter in the collection plate.
I looked over the driver’s broad and padded right shoulder, and out the front windshield. Everything out there looked white and confused.
If I had, as I hoped, picked the right bus, our route would take us near Tenth Street, by the old church basement. I didn’t think that many of the hall’s clients would have cars, so they would need easy access to public transportation.
As we crossed Ninth Street—and I had nothing else in particular to think about—I tried to imagine what it might be like to be just out of a psychiatric ward and nervous about being back in society. I imagined myself as a middle-aged woman who was taking this bus to a place where she might feel more comfortable than any place else, where she could be with maybe the only people in town who’d really understand her. It made me—imagining myself as that woman—feel comforted, safer, to know the recreation hall awaited me at the end of my bus ride.
The bus approached Tenth Street, which I had only intended to view from inside the bus. But suddenly I had an urge to live out this fantasy of mine a little more.
When the bus screeched to a halt at the intersection of Tenth and Jefferson, I got off. Dodging cars, a couple of which honked at me, I jaywalked across Jefferson and started down Tenth.
The first house I passed was brown and, even under the snow, almost obsessively neat—Perry Yates’s home. When I glanced at it, trying to see it through the eyes of the mental patient I was pretending to be, I felt waves of hostility flowing from it toward me.
It was startling and a little scary.
If I were the woman I was imagining, I would have walked past that house as quickly as I could, with my hands in my pockets and my head down, trying to look inconspicuous so that I wouldn’t cause offense or attract Perry Yates’s venomous attention in any way.
I did just that, playing the role.
The woman I was pretending to be felt nervous, and she felt as if she were being watched. Was he glaring at me through one of his windows? Would he come out on his porch and shout at me, frighten me, and embarrass me? Why did he hate me so?
Once past the brown house, “I” felt as if I had narrowly escaped something.
I scuttled along the sidewalk, but it was difficult to make any speed through the crusty snow. And suddenly I realized that I, Jenny, was better fed and in better shape physically than she’d be, that I could step more lightly and breathe more easily in the cutting air than she would be able to do.
I slowed to her pace, breathing through my mouth, becoming “her” again.
Trudging now, I passed two more houses, keeping my head down, and knowing I was going to have to walk past the pig lady’s house. I felt like a child who had to walk past the neighborhood “witch’s” house every day. She was frightened of “me”—my friends at the recreation hall had told me so—but I was a lot more frightened of her. Please, I thought, just let me get past her house one more time without any trouble. I didn’t want to cause trouble, I didn’t want anybody—not any of my friends—to cause any trouble. I needed the recreation hall. I needed some place to go every day, some reason for getting up in the morning. I didn’t have any place else. Sometimes it seemed like it was the only thing that stood between me and being crazy again. Please, don’t let there be any trouble.
Was the witch watching me?
I wished that mean boy across the street would hurry up and move out of his house. I remembered boys like him—younger boys, but just like him anyway—who always looked like they were going to throw rocks at me, or trip me or push me down, and call me ugly names. The names hurt more than sticks and stones, that was for sure. Sometimes, when I was alone, I thought of names to call them back, but it was always too late to do any good.
To erase the thoughts about the mean boy, I looked up at the house where the artist lived, the pretty lady who even brought her children over to play with us now and then. It was so wonderful to be around children. A lot of people wouldn’t let their children even talk to us, but she would. I liked her. Her children were so cute and funny. I hoped she liked me.
My muscles bunched up with cold as I crossed in front of the vacant lot where the wind blew unobstructed. Maybe “we’d” have Softball games there with the staff, next spring. “I” hoped nobody would ask me to play, I’d be too scared and clumsy, but it would be fun to watch. Only a few more yards to go now to reach warmth and safety. I’d got past the brown man again, and the pig-lady witch, and the mean boy across the street, and if I just hurried a little more, I’d be inside where nobody from the outside could get me and hurt me.
The front doors of the recreation hall beckoned to “me,” but they also repelled me. The staff would smile at me and try to get me to smile back at them; somebody might tell a joke that I didn’t get; and what if they wanted me to help in the kitchen today? I might drop something, or break something, or they might ask me to cook something, and I wouldn’t know how! And somebody was always wanting to carry on a conversation, when I could barely remember the beginning of my sentences by the time I g
ot to the end of them. Oh, everything was so hard. Even the mostly good times, they were just so hard. So hard. But I had to try. If I didn’t want to get crazy again, I had to try. I would. I’d try. They’d be proud of me. I’d show them. But I was still scared. Everything was scary. Life was scary.
So immersed was I, Jenny, in my imaginings that at first it didn’t seem odd to me that the double front doors of the basement were slightly ajar. Somebody, some client, had just forgotten to close the doors, that was all, and the staff would be proud of “me” when I remembered to do it. By the time the fact of the doors being ajar finally registered with me, I had nearly stepped right into the bloody footprints in the snow.
“What?” I was myself again but shocked and disoriented. With my eyes, I tracked the footprints to the front doors. There were smears of blood, looking vaguely like handprints, on the doors.
I didn’t scream, but I did turn and run like hell to the home of the artist next door.
10
I joined the artist at the bay window in her living room to watch for the police cars that would soon pull up in front of the bloody basement. The artist’s name it turned out, was Marianne Miller. When she had discovered the nature of my errand, she had sent her two little girls into another room with the instruction, “You will watch ‘Sesame Street’!”
“What do you think happened in there?” she asked now, in a scared, excited, whispery voice.
I could only shake my head and stare.
She, very kindly, had handed me a cup of strong coffee as soon as I had hung up the phone from calling the police station. While I was at it, I had also called my office, so that my secretary, a born worrier, wouldn’t be concerned about me. I didn’t tell her why I was so late—that would really have given her hives—only that I was delayed and that I would be in the office fairly soon.
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