The Weight of Winter

by Cathie Pelletier

  “No!” Sicily said. “Don’t tell me.”

  “Every single night,” Winnie assured her. “I heard the girls say so,” she added for validation.

  “Imagine that,” said Sicily. “She was such a snob in her prime. Remember the fur coat she ordered through the mail? You’d have sworn all them little minks committed suicide just to be in her coat, to hear her talk.”

  “Them minks was from Germany or someplace, wasn’t they?” Winnie asked, as though the creatures were tourists.

  “Oh, to be sure they were,” Sicily said. “Our own minks weren’t good enough for her. And then, that was in the fifties. We was fresh from a war with Hitler, but there was Mrs. Faber wearing his minks.” Amy Joy imagined an army of tiny Nazi minks.

  “From snob to bed wetter,” Winnie said.

  “Are you sure they said Mrs. Faber?” Sicily rarely asked for documentation, usually taking Winnie at her word.

  “Every single night,” Winnie assured her again.

  “Back to being a baby,” said Sicily softly. “I guess that’s what the Bible means when it says the old will become young.” Amy Joy felt the social awkwardness that had inched in around the conversation. Old age pressing down on them like an anvil. Will this happen to me? Winnie and Sicily were asking themselves. Amy Joy could almost hear the unspoken questions running around and around in the coiled mechanisms of their minds. If this can happen to Mrs. Faber, how can it not happen to me? Even Amy Joy had begun to count, by tens, the number of years before she would be the same age as Sicily, as Winnie, as Albert, as Mrs. Faber.

  “They keep a diaper on her night and day.” Winnie’s voice was a child’s now, small and uncertain. “They feed her food mashed up tiny enough for babies.”

  “That arrangement of flowers is beautiful,” Amy Joy said firmly. Her voice was the voice of an adult, loud with pretense, a mother’s voice placating the children. Sicily stared at the flowers with relief. It was good to have Amy Joy around. Someone had to stop the train of memory once it got rolling, to slap a foot down hard on the brakes. Otherwise, one would slam into questions, doing a hundred miles an hour and unable to stop.

  “It’s like summer to have such pretty flowers,” Amy Joy went on, and certainty filled the air again. “There’s almost two feet of snow out there, after all.”

  “The staff ordered them,” said Winnie, her voice bouncing back from the horrible edge of that great, familiar void. “Someone had a birthday.” She was back to her old mocking self. She seemed to be staring at Amy Joy again, at her waist—no, her stomach.

  “Those mums are so colorful,” Amy Joy noted. She saw Sicily’s face finally relax, the troubling questions about the future flown.

  “They ought to spend any extra money in the budget on food,” Winnie said. “Not flowers. I doubt they paid for them out of their own pockets.” Amy Joy noticed that Winnie’s lips had grown thinner than she remembered them, as if they were disappearing.

  “She probably wore them out,” Amy Joy thought.

  “And you say the food is usually cold?” Sicily inquired, and then gave Amy Joy a plaintive look as Winnie described the culinary horrors at Pine Valley.

  “Absolute slop,” she finally summarized.

  “Well, Mama,” Amy Joy said. “Maybe we should go now.” She had seen Albert Pinkham twitching like an old leaf in his chair, quaking.

  “He cries all the time now,” Winnie whispered.

  “Poor soul,” said Sicily. “Don’t his daughter, Belle, ever come up from New Hampshire to visit?”

  “Not anymore,” said Winnie. “Not since her mother died. Nobody to drive her now. I hear she’s blind as a mole.”

  “Well, there’s a line in her family tree that goes back to old Caroline McGilvery. She brought an eye disease over on the boat with her from Ireland,” Sicily said, as though retinitis pigmentosa were something Caroline had packed. “The Giffords come down from them too,” Sicily reminded her friend, “and look at how many of them were always driving off the road or bumping into walls, unless they were stealing something. Sarah and Albert would’ve died rather than own up to them family skeletons, but Belle’s living proof.”

  “Sarah Pinkham did think she was a peg or two up the ladder, didn’t she?” asked Winnie.

  “I always thought Sarah would come back to Albert one day,” said Sicily.

  “Lord, woman!” Winnie was surprised. “You must be talking about a different Sarah Pinkham than I am. Sarah wouldn’t have took Jesus back under them circumstances.”

  Amy Joy had stood up and was waiting anxiously for Sicily to finish her chat. But this caught her. She could barely remember Sarah Pinkham, a pinched, thin-faced woman, or her daughter, Belle, who had eyes like a large, looming fish, eyes swimming behind thick lenses. And no matter that this incident had happened thirty years ago, this incident between Albert Pinkham and his wife. When it came to Mattagash gossip, time had no dimension, no limitations. Gossip curved somewhere out in space and flickered back. Gossip was an unbroken, unwavering line that touched generation after generation. It was a continuum. Mr. Albert Einstein would have had a field day in Mattagash, Maine.

  “She accused him of bedding down with that strip artist,” Winnie said. “Remember?” As if Sicily didn’t. As if any townswoman worth her tongue would, could forget one of the high dramas that, like supernovas, occur sparsely in small towns, if ever. “She’d never forgive him a thing like that,” Winnie added with finality. “Not Sarah.”

  “Poor Sarah,” said Sicily. “I hope she has peace, wherever she is.”

  “I hope that strip artist ain’t there too,” said Winnie. “If so, there won’t be any peace for anybody.”

  “I hope it’s warmer, wherever they all are,” Amy Joy interjected. “Could we please go now? It’s time for Winnie to have her supper.”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Winnie, and waved a hand to pooh-pooh the food.

  “You poor, poor thing,” said Sicily magnanimously. She looked at Amy Joy. “Just think of all the wonderful food we get to eat at home.”

  “I heard the food here was pretty good,” Amy Joy countered.

  “There ain’t nothing, though, like a home-cooked meal,” Sicily argued.

  “You eat TV dinners and pour hot water over packages of instant soup, Mama. I wouldn’t call that home-cooked.”

  “Sounds pretty good to me,” Winnie said.

  “It’s where you eat it that counts,” Sicily said scientifically.

  “How’s Lola these days?” Winnie knew why Amy Joy asked. She was saying, Why doesn’t your own daughter, your own flesh and blood, come and take you home to a fine dinner?

  “She comes in plenty to see me,” Winnie lied. “Them kids of hers are so big I hardly know them from time to time.”

  “How nice,” said Sicily.

  “They make me stuff,” Winnie lied again. But she imagined the sweet picture in her mind and smiled. “Mittens,” she said. “Crayon pictures. Cakes and cookies.” Her eyes misted. Amy Joy looked away, but Sicily rushed to her friend’s defense.

  “There now,” Sicily said. “Look what you’ve made yourself go and do. You’ve made yourself get lonesome for all them sweet grandchildren of yours.”

  “The dirty little devils!” Winnie cried out. “If they ever do make me a crayon picture, they can just keep the damn thing!” She was weeping openly now, loudly. A member of the staff came to investigate.

  “Mrs. Craft,” the young woman said gently. Her name tag read Nadine Auclair. “What’s wrong? Are you sad again tonight?”

  “No!” Winnie shouted. “I just won the damn lottery. Of course I’m sad, you nincompoop. I’m crying, ain’t I?” She turned to Sicily and grabbed her hand. “See? What did I tell you? They treat me like I’m a baby.”

  “Now you have Mr. Pinkham going,” Nadine said somewhat sternly. Albert had
suddenly burst into tears.

  “It would take a cattle prod to get Albert going,” Winnie cried. “So don’t you blame me.” She clutched at Sicily’s arms, and Sicily wrapped them around her.

  “Shh,” said Sicily.

  “They blame me for everything,” Winnie sobbed. “You know damn well that Albert Pinkham wouldn’t do a single thing unless he wanted to.” Nadine wheeled Albert Pinkham past the social hour crowd and disappeared down the corridor with him. His sobs followed them, echoing along the tiles until the door to his room was softly closed.

  “There, there,” said Sicily, and patted Winnie’s hand. Amy Joy reached into the pocket of her coat and found the woolen gloves she had crammed there. Nadine returned and beckoned her aside.

  “I don’t know what we’re going to do with her,” Nadine whispered. “All the others manage very well. They seem to enjoy themselves until Mrs. Craft stirs them up. I hope she doesn’t discourage your mother’s notion of Pine Valley.”

  “Discourage her?” said Amy Joy. “She lives for moments like this. Look at her.” Sicily had inched her way around to Winnie’s back and was massaging her neck as deftly as an expert.

  “Breathe in deep now,” Sicily was saying, and Winnie was doing her best to comply.

  “I can’t offer her this kind of melodrama at home,” Amy Joy said. “She’s pretty bored over there.”

  ***

  At the front door, Amy Joy and Sicily came face-to-face with Dorrie Fennelson Mullins, Lola’s comrade in good gossip and bad news. Dorrie had been most pleased over Amy Joy’s shattered wedding plans.

  “Why is it,” Amy Joy wondered, “that if you have only two enemies in your life, you’ll bump into them all over the world?” Lola and Dorrie were hers.

  “Well, Amy Joy.” Dorrie smiled. “It’s been absolutely ages.” She was wearing her padded stadium coat, which went all the way down past her knees.

  “Has it?” asked Amy Joy. She had run into Dorrie at the post office less than a month ago. Sicily hobbled past and began her descent down the front steps just as a small dark-haired woman appeared behind Dorrie.

  “Don’t fall, Mama,” Amy Joy warned. “I’m right behind you.” She was sure that this would be a signal to Dorrie that she was in a hurry. But Dorrie loomed before her, her body vaporous and vague and bulging with the work of having borne seven children. It had also kept David’s House of Doughnuts in Watertown operating quite nicely in the black.

  Nadine stood quietly, one hand on the door opened to the cold, and waited. Chilly air rushed in and met the warm, hoisted up Dorrie’s burgundy coat, exposed part of her meaty calves. She slapped the coat down and held it with her hand. The little dark-haired woman smiled.

  “You look well,” said Dorrie.

  “Shouldn’t I?” Amy Joy asked.

  “Oh, I guess so,” Dorrie said. “I keep forgetting that you got neither chick nor child to look after. If you had a house of kids driving you crazy, well, that’s a whole other story.”

  Amy Joy stared at her flatly. Dorrie, who had babies as though they were gold medals, prizes, tickets to heaven. Her house had always reminded Amy Joy of a picture she’d seen once of the old woman in the shoe: kids in the windows, kids on the front porch, kids on the roof.

  “I tell you what,” Dorrie said. “It’s a good thing all my kids is growed up, some with kids of their own. I needed the rest. I told Booster that if we had had one more baby, I would’ve become a Catholic. They probably would’ve made me a saint.”

  “On the other hand,” said Amy Joy, “they might’ve just burned you at the stake.” She imagined Dorrie’s ovaries popping, all her tubes sizzling like bacon. Dorrie let the slight drift by. She had a point she wanted to make, and stopping to be insulted would prevent it. Also, it was very cold in Mattagash. One had to be quick with one’s barbs in the wintertime.

  “And what about you?” she asked, her voice feigning a tender relationship with Amy Joy. “Good heavens, but your biological clock must be ready to blow all its springs. That clock’ll put you into orbit if you ain’t careful. You’ll end up on Mars.”

  “I’m not worried about it, Dorrie,” Amy Joy said. “So don’t you be.” She slid past the heavy woman, her purse held close to her chest, her scarf fluttering.

  “Come back soon,” said Nadine, all ashiver, and she closed the door to Pine Valley.

  Dorrie carried her hundred extra pounds over to the lounge and plopped down.

  “We’re here to see Claire Fennelson,” Dorrie said. “I’m her daughter and this here’s her daughter-in-law.”

  “She just went back to her room,” Nadine said. “It might be easier on her if you visited her there. The social hour’s over anyway.”

  “That’s just fine and dandy,” Dorrie said to her sister-in-law as they followed Nadine through the shiny halls, past aging legs dangling off bedsides, past wrinkly little men inching their way along the walls, tiny women standing in doorways. But Dorrie was oblivious to them all. “Amy Joy can be as sarcastic as she wants to. The whole town knows. Having an illegitimate baby at forty-four. Have you ever heard the likes?” Wrinkly men clung to their walls as Dorrie swooshed past, like a big, angry breeze. Tiny women shrank back from doorways. Legs stopped dangling and slid under covers.

  “How far along is she?” the sister-in-law asked. She was quite uninterested in Dorrie’s saga, but she knew she’d better ask anyway.

  “We ain’t really sure.” Dorrie’s breath was rattling in her chest like a train, her heart pulling all those cars behind it.

  “Mrs. Fennelson,” Nadine said, rapping on a door. “Your daughter’s here.”

  Claire Fennelson looked as though she’d been wakened from a shadowy, bad dream. Or perhaps she’d been pulled out of the safety of someplace warm and sweet, afforded her by her subconscious, only to be faced with the truth of life.

  “What day’s today?” she asked Nadine.

  “Sunday,” Nadine answered.

  “Mama, we come to visit you, sweetheart,” Dorrie shouted. Wrinkly men in other rooms canted their heads and listened. Tiny women scrunched up their faces.

  “This is Larry’s wife, Edie, that he met and married in the army. She come to visit you all the way from Worcester, Massachusetts. You remember Larry? Your oldest boy?”

  Claire Fennelson smiled. “Larry,” she said, slowly and surely, as if it were the correct answer to a tough question she’d been working on for years. She waited expectantly, her eyes on Dorrie’s face.

  “Poor woman,” Dorrie whispered to Edie. “You’d swear she was on the Wheel of Fortune. That’s what them contestants look like just before they buy a vowel.”

  “Where’s Larry?” Claire Fennelson asked, and looked above the heads of her visitors. She grew quiet as different images fluttered about in her mind: Larry at five, Larry at sixteen, Larry in his uniform—because memory, like the gossip in Mattagash, never ages. It simply grows larger and brighter. Larry!

  “Every time we come here,” Dorrie whispered, “we have to bury Larry all over again.”

  “Don’t tell her, though,” Edie said. “It’ll only upset her.”

  “Larry’s keeping house!” Dorrie boomed, and Larry’s mother smiled to hear this.

  “I wish the hell he was,” Edie thought. “Considering what I’ve spent on babysitters in my day.”

  “You mark my words,” Dorrie said, and opened the card she had brought with her. Happy Birthday to a Wonderful Mom, it said. She put it in the old woman’s hands and it wobbled there. “Amy Joy’s gonna wake up one morning and instead of being on a pedestal she’ll be eyeing ground level.”

  “Do you know who the father is?” Larry’s widow asked, and opened her own card. A Birthday Wish for a Special Mother-in-Law. “Did you say it was someone from town?” She needed to keep Dorrie talking. The visit would pass more quickly.

 
; “I’d give up a winning lottery ticket just to know,” Dorrie said and unwrapped some birthday underwear. “Lola thinks it’s Oliver Hart, our local war hero. But I got a feeling Oliver is more interested in Moss Fennelson than he is in Amy Joy. Moss took a bunch of dancing lessons at the college. Need I say more? Hey, come here a minute,” she said suddenly to Edie, who was unwrapping a cotton nightdress. “I got something to show you.” Edie followed her out of the room and down the hallway. Tiny women pulled back from doorways. Wrinkly men quaked in their pajamas. Feeble hands reached for the walls.

  “What room is old Mrs. Mathilda Fennelson in?” Dorrie asked the first staff member she saw. “I used to know, but I forgot.”

  “Are you family?”

  “I’m her granddaughter-in-law.” Dorrie was annoyed by the question. What did they think she was going to do? Steal an old person?

  “Room thirty-two,” the attendant said. “Down the hall, turn right, the first room on the left.”

  “She’s a hundred and seven,” Dorrie whispered as she and Edie stared down at the spindly shape. “She ain’t talked in years. Who knows what she’s thinking of, or even if she can think. But everybody in Mattagash is related to her a dozen times over. That’s why they’re gonna give her a plaque on Thanksgiving Day.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Edie.

  “She’s been here at the home since day one,” Dorrie said, pleased with herself for showing Edie, a bona fide city woman, a treasure her streetwise eyes had yet to behold. Dorrie left off with her whispering and returned to her usual boom.

  “Imagine that.” Edie fidgeted with a curl that had come loose inside her scarf. She had made several visits to Mattagash with the kids since Larry’s death. She felt she owed him that much. Now the children were all grown. If they wanted to visit the twisted horde of their paternal relatives, they could do so on their own. This was Edie’s last trip. She had, after all, remarried years ago. Enough was enough. “I guess my kids are her great-grandchildren, then.”

  “Naw, she’s Booster’s grandmother, not mine,” Dorrie said. “But she is my cousin in a lot of different ways. She was a Craft before she got married, and my grandmother was a Craft.”