by Jon L. Breen
I started walking backwards, to my own driveway, thinking, pitifully, that there must be some misunderstanding between us, that she surely couldn’t mean to ignore me. But as the car sped away, all I saw of the old woman was the shadow of her profile: oversized sun-glasses, small, straight nose, gloved hands gripping the steering wheel through her closed-up window.
I awoke on the telephone’s first ring. The shadows of the silver maples in the old woman’s yard stretched into the road. The old woman had finished the mowing. Her Buick was gone from the driveway.
Barry was on the phone. “Cathy,” he said. “What’s wrong? You weren’t sleeping, were you?”
I heard accusation in his voice. This child, his only one, wasn’t normal. He would only sleep a few hours a day, almost exclusively in the daytime, like a miniature vampire. Barry, who could lie on the bed or the couch, close his eyes, and be dreaming in thirty seconds. Barry, who needed twelve hours sleep at a time and would spend the night in his truck to get it if the baby cried too loudly or too long. Somehow it was my fault.
“I tried to put him down early last night,” I said. “I thought that maybe if it was still light outside, he would sleep.”
“They want me to move on to the next one straight from here,” Barry said. “Down to Trimble County.” The next one. The next Taco Fiesta. Barry installed the special Mexican floor tile the restaurants used, traveled with a construction crew. He’d been working on Taco Fiestas for months.
“How long, Barry?” I said. “I’m tired of you being gone.” I wanted him home, to feel his warm body next to me in our bed, even if I had to lie awake, listening, listening, listening to the baby make toneless noises from his crib while Barry slept. But another part of me, a small voice in my brain was saying “This is good, Cathy. This is easier, Cathy. This is for the best.”
“Two weeks,” Barry said. “Maybe two and a half.”
We sat, quiet, the hundred miles of phone line humming between us.
“Take him back to the doctor, Cathy. Find out what the hell is wrong with him.”
Suddenly I hated Barry, this man who’d given me this damaged child, who’d left me here in this godforsaken house with its unfinished garage and treeless yard. This man who said he didn’t know if he was ready to be married, even though we had the house, the kid, the bills. Even though he’d said that he loved me a thousand times.
“You’re not here, are you, Barry?” I said. “I’ll do whatever I damn well please.” I slapped the phone into its cradle. I knew I would regret doing it. I always did.
The baby howled from his bedroom. Days like this when he slept for three or four hours in the afternoon were the worst. It meant maybe one or two cat naps in the night, twenty minutes, nothing more.
I lifted him from the crib. He gave me a small, hesitant smile. At six months old, he was too young to reach out. But it was enough that he was happy to see me.
“You’re lucky you’re so cute,” I told him. “Or we’d have pitched you out with the trash a long time ago.” And he was cute. He had a peachy, old-fashioned look to him, round cheeks and blue eyes. Blue eyes bright like carnival glass Christmas ornaments with a sparkle that let you know that he would soon be up to mischief. “That boy’s got the devil in him,” my mother said. But she was wrong. The devil wouldn’t waste any time on a darling like my baby. If the devil were to come on the earth, he would take the form of someone with an empty heart, someone cold like the old woman.
I fed the baby his heated oatmeal and a jar of peas for dinner. I cleaned his hands and face and put him in the stroller that sat waiting on the front porch. There was a thing I’d been wanting to do for a long time.
The old woman’s Buick was still gone. Wednesday evening. She was always dressed up the same way on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings—tiny hat, white gloves like I wore when I was five years old (I could imagine the plastic pearl buttons at their tops), carefully ironed dress, matching handbag and shoes—which told me that she must go to church. Baptists go to church on Wednesday nights, I know. Barry’s parents are Baptists.
More than six months we’d lived across the street from the old woman and I didn’t even know her name.
Nervous, I pushed the baby up the road some, just short of the next house nearly a halfmile away. I walked back on the old woman’s side of the road and stopped at her mailbox. Going into another person’s mailbox was some kind of crime. My hand shook as I pulled at the latch.
A pile of mail lay inside. I pulled it out carefully and fingered through it. Nutter was her name: Mrs. Charles Nutter; L.E. Nutter, the Nutter Family. One piece from a mail-order steak place (imagine—mail order steak) was addressed to The Natties at 125 Elm Grove Lane.
Nutter. Nutty. Nut Case. Nutty-as-a-fruitcake. I laughed out loud, startling the baby who was pulling at a flowering vine that the old woman had trained around the mailbox post.
I couldn’t find her first name on any of the envelopes.
The Boston Shoe Company catalog, with the initials L.E. in the address, was the closest I could get to it. I tucked the shoe catalog into the stroller’s pocket and slipped the rest of the mail back into the box.
Nighttime. The coffee maker shorted out when I tried to put a second pot-full of water into its already-filled reservoir. There was a loud pop and the kitchen lights flickered. Water splashed onto the counter and my feet, soaking my socks and the kitchen rug. Coffee, with a little splash of Bailey’s Irish Cream, was my comfort. Now there was no coffee and no comfort. Just me and the night and the baby and the old woman.
The old woman’s lights went out at twelve fifteen. First, though, she walked through the house and secured all the window latches. I watched as her hand reached through the curtains, window after window, her fingers feeling for the lock and then disappearing. I don’t know why she did it every night. I never saw her open windows except to clean them, which she did, every single one of them, every two weeks. After she’d secured the window locks, she switched on the floodlights planted in the yard. They bathed the house in light like it was some sort of palace. Every shutter, every gutter, every nook was outlined in broad light and shadow. Except for one space on the right side of the house. That bulb had been burned out for several days, but I don’t think she knew it.
Now that I had her name, I could look up her phone number in the book and call her to tell her about the burned out light: “Hi, Mrs. Nutter. It’s Cathy . . . Sure you know me. I live across the street . . . No, I really do. We haven’t met. I’m the one with the baby . . . Sure, I’d love to come over sometime . . . Can I bring anything? Coffee cake, maybe? . . . Your really are too nice . . . Well, I just called to let you know that one of your floodlights is burned out . . . Yes. Neighbors do have to watch out for each other.”
The baby was calm, lying on the floor, watching the ceiling fan spinning overhead. I lay down beside him and stroked his arms and legs, his soft, soft skin. I massaged him gently with my fingertips like the baby book said and he lay almost hypnotized with the quiet whir of the fan and the touch of my hands. It was so peaceful in the house, I wondered that he could resist sleep.
I slept for one minute, maybe five. I dreamed that I lived in a one-room cabin that had no ceiling. Storm clouds sailed over in the sky above, but never rained on me. My mother came to the window and handed me pies and baskets of soap until there was no longer any room to move around. I cried for her to stop. When I awoke, the baby was staring at me, his curls ruffling lightly in the fan’s breeze. He stared and I wondered what he saw in my face. I wondered if he would remember how my face looked at this moment years from now.
He began to cry.
Two A.M. The lights in the old woman’s house had been out for almost two hours. The Home Shopping Channel played on the television. The baby’s swing clicked back and forth beside my chair. I drank a cup of strong tea to make up for the coffee. If they’d been selling coffee makers on the television, I’d have bought one.
At three, I ga
ve the baby a bottle and he fell asleep in the middle of it, his fists balled up under his chin. But as I lowered him into the crib, his eyes opened and he screamed as though I were doing him some harm.
When the newspaper came at five, tossed onto our porch from a rusting Datsun that was sorely in need of a new muffler, I was strapping the baby into his high chair for his next bowl of oatmeal.
I wasn’t hungry. I ate a couple of spoonfuls of the baby’s prunes from a jar just to taste their sweetness on my tongue.
I thought about the old woman across the road. She was probably still in bed. Alone, like me. There had been a husband. Had there been children? Had she ever sat in a creaking rocking chair feeding a baby who looked up at her with eyes that had never held a look of fear? Maybe she was the sort that scared children. Maybe I wouldn’t like her at all. She was cruel the way she never waved back at me. I always waved when I saw her. It was unfair of her not to give me a chance. Thinking about her made me angry. Maybe she was waiting for me, waiting for me to break, to beg for her friendship. What kind of person was she? What made a person mean like that?
The baby sat spinning the bright blue and green clown toy that was suctioned to his highchair tray. Such an angel. Truly one of God’s miracles. He was innocence itself. Why would the old woman reject him, too? The bitch.
Standing at the kitchen sink, I saw several bursts of light in the window, brief, high flashes that streaked through the receding dark. Shooting stars, I thought. A present for me. A chance to make a wish. Then I saw more bounce off the stark white kitchen cabinets that Barry had installed by himself. I knew then that the flashes were in my head.
* * *
I heard the phone ringing in the house as I buckled the baby into his car seat. I was sure it was Barry, worried that I hadn’t called him to apologize. Let him wonder, I thought.
As I opened the driver’s door, the old woman came out of her house, pulling the front door shut, hard, so that the knocker clanked once behind her. Out the front door, in through the side door. Like she was superstitious. She also kept her house key under a flower basket next to the side door. A stupid, old-fashioned habit for someone who double-checked her locked windows each night.
Why did I choose that morning to follow her? I don’t know. I’d meant just to run to the grocery to pick up some formula and diapers.
I followed her down our street and through the surrounding neighborhood. She drove with a heavier foot than I would have expected, barely slowing at curves where I had to downshift to stay on the road. Once, I let another car come between us so that she wouldn’t become suspicious of seeing my Honda constantly in her rearview mirror.
We ended up at the big Baptist church in town. When I saw her put on her turn signal, I slipped into the lot of the dry cleaner next door. I had a clear view of her as she parked and got out of her car. She took off her sunglasses before she opened the front door and went inside.
I waited a good twenty minutes. I wanted to know what she was doing in the church. Was she a Sunday School teacher preparing lessons? Maybe she was giving the preacher advice. Old women liked to give advice. How galling, then, that she could see me every day, struggling with this angel-darling baby, and not want to rush over to help, to tell me what I should be feeding him, how often to change his diaper, how to make him sleep like other babies.
When she came out, she was carrying a Manila envelope, which she dropped onto the passenger seat of her car. The baby started fussing and I reached backward, feeling for his mouth to stick the pacifier in it. I almost wasn’t able to catch up to the old woman, who had sped out of the parking lot.
She went next to a copy shop, where she walked in with the envelope and came out empty-handed.
The baby began howling and pulled at his hair.
“Go on,” I said. “Go to sleep.” I rubbed his foot as we drove, letting go only when I had to shift gears. It was a danger letting him sleep in the car. At home, he might sleep for two to three hours, his longest sleep of the day. My only chance to sleep. But sleep didn’t matter. I needed to be close to the old woman. I needed to know what she was doing. I was hungry with the desire to know, to be there. My heart was pounding the way it had when I would wait at my apartment for Barry to pick me up for a date. It was the anticipation that something was going to happen and I wanted to be awake and alive to it.
I knew in my heart that there was something not quite right about this, that maybe the old woman might be unhappy if she knew what I was doing. But I had a right to do this, to make up for her lapse, to give her the chance to be a better person.
We drove to a shopping center across town. The roads were unfamiliar and I had to follow closely. I really wanted to stop for coffee and maybe a donut. I was getting hungry despite the nervous state of my stomach.
The old woman pulled into a space in front of a dress shop that had a small fountain out front and no clothes at all in the window. An expensive place.
I parked two rows over and shut the engine off. The baby was asleep, his mouth slightly open, the pacifier in his lap. His finger twitched.
I rummaged in the glovebox for some crackers or something but came up with only a packet of ketchup. I nipped the edge of the package with my teeth and tore off the corner, careful to put the plastic bit in the ashtray. The ketchup was warm on my tongue. I sucked at it. I was thirsty, too.
I thought about Barry. Maybe we would break up. Perhaps I hadn’t loved him as much as I thought I did. We used to spend hours, whole days together in bed. Days like dreams that had no purpose, no reason to them. Just aimless happiness. Days when we would sleep and eat and make love. But I was having trouble imagining myself having days like that again. Everything had become difficult, complicated, new. Hard: The harsh morning light that flooded our white (blindingly, damnably), white kitchen; the unflinching bitterness of the old woman’s soul; the brittle ring of the telephone; Barry’s voice, cold and accusing.
The old woman came out of the store. A saleswoman carried out something on a hanger, a dress, maybe, or a suit (the old woman wore a lot of brightly-colored suits, despite her garish hair) covered with an opaque plastic bag. She hung the bag in the Buick and nodded to the old woman. Then the old woman smiled.
The bitch actually smiled.
All at once, I felt that the months of waiting were over. I backed the Honda out of its space and drove right up behind the Buick, blocking the old woman in. My foot slipped off the clutch and the car shuddered to a halt. I felt my pulse beating in my ears. Now was the time! I imagined myself getting out of the car, walking up to the old woman and shouting at her, telling her what a mess she’d made of my life. How her cruelty had hurt me.
How they stared at me. Did I seem crazy to them? The saleswoman’s slender face wore a look of frank curiosity. Disdain, too, I thought, for my old car. But the old woman just hid behind her sunglasses, her lips pursed. Uninterested.
I looked away and started the car and drove home as quickly as I dared.
Barry left three messages that day.
Pleading. “Cathy, pick up the phone. Talk to me, Cathy.”
Angry. “I’ve taken about all of this shit that I’m going to take, Cathy. I’m sick of your games,” he said. “Bullshit, Cathy. This is bullshit.”
The third call came about midnight. He sighed into the phone, a long, drawn-out breath that sounded sad, regretful. He hung up.
We ran out of baby formula about two in the morning. I thought about Marie Antoinette and her words, “Let them eat cake.” The baby was laughing at a shadow on the wall. We had plenty of grape juice.
The shooting lights that I’d been seeing showed up again and again, falling like a shower as I sat in my chair and watched the old woman’s house through the night.
I filled the useless coffee carafe with water to its ten cup mark and drank from it until the water was gone.
The old woman turned the floodlights out sometime early in the morning. But her curtains stayed drawn.
/> Around noon, the baby started screaming. I held him in my arms and tried to give him a bottle of grape juice, but he turned his head to the side and pushed my arm away. It wasn’t me he didn’t want, I knew. It was the old woman’s fault that I’d forgotten the formula. The baby’s screams faded in my ears, becoming just a background, like roughly textured music.
The old woman left her house in the late afternoon. She turned her head ever so slightly to look at my house, my window, my face.
Click. Click. Click. The baby slept in his swing, the sun warming his tired little body. My angel.
The phone rang. My mother’s voice on the answering machine. “Cathy. Barry called me. You’ve upset him terribly, Cathy. Call me,” she said. “How’s my baby boy?”
It was late when the old woman came home. She checked the windows and turned on the floodlights.
The phone rang about one in the morning as I opened the front door. Barry’s voice on the answering machine. “Don’t, Cathy,” he said.
The key, of course. The key like an invitation for welcome friends. The kind of friend I would be. Would have been.
As I put my hand on the old woman’s doorknob, I thought of gloves. Plastic kitchen gloves were all I had, orange rubber things that would have been clumsy and overlarge. If I’d worn gloves, it would have said something about intention, wouldn’t it? I was just visiting. I wasn’t intending anything.