Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  These jokes usually started off with serious-sounding but absurd questions.

  Did you hear about the nun who went shopping for a meat grinder?

  Did you hear what the bride and groom went and ordered for dessert on their wedding night?

  The answers always came with a double meaning, so that whoever told the joke could pretend to be shocked and accuse the listener of having a dirty mind.

  And after she had got everybody used to her telling these jokes Roxanne went on to the sort of joke I didn’t believe my mother knew existed, often involving sex with sheep or hens or porcupines.

  “Isn’t that awful?” she always said at the finish. She said she wouldn’t know this stuff if her husband didn’t bring it home from the garage.

  The fact that Old Mrs. Crozier snickered disturbed me as much as the jokes themselves. I wondered if she didn’t actually get the jokes but simply enjoyed listening to whatever Roxanne said. She sat there with that chewed-in yet absentminded smile on her face, as if she’d been given a present that she knew she’d like, even though she hadn’t got the wrapping off it yet.

  Mr. Crozier didn’t laugh, but he never laughed, really. He raised his eyebrows, pretending to disapprove, as if he found Roxanne outrageous but endearing all the same. I tried to tell myself that this was just good manners, or gratitude for her efforts, whatever they might be.

  I myself made sure to laugh so that Roxanne would not put me down as an innocent prig.

  The other thing she did to keep things lively was tell us about her life—how she had come down from some lost little town in northern Ontario to Toronto to visit her older sister, when she was only fourteen, then got a job at Eaton’s, first cleaning up in the cafeteria, then being noticed by one of the managers, because she worked fast and was always cheerful, and suddenly finding herself a salesgirl in the glove department. (She made this sound like being discovered by Warner Bros.) And who should have come in one day but Barbara Ann Scott, the skating star, who bought a pair of elbow-length white kid gloves.

  Meanwhile, Roxanne’s sister had so many boyfriends that she’d flip a coin to see whom she’d go out with almost every night, and she employed Roxanne to meet the rejects regretfully at the front door of the rooming house where they lived, while she herself and her pick of the night sneaked out the back. Roxanne said that maybe that was how she had developed such a gift of gab. And pretty soon some of the boys she had met this way were taking her out, instead of her sister. They did not know her real age.

  “I had me a ball,” she said.

  I began to understand that there were certain talkers—certain girls—whom people liked to listen to, not because of what they, the girls, had to say but because of the delight they took in saying it. A delight in themselves, a shine on their faces, a conviction that whatever they were telling was remarkable and that they themselves could not help but give pleasure. There might be other people—people like me—who didn’t concede this, but that was their loss. And people like me would never be the audience these girls were after, anyway.

  Mr. Crozier sat propped up on his pillows and looked for all the world as if he were happy. Happy just to close his eyes and let her talk, then open his eyes and find her still there, like a chocolate bunny on Easter morning. And then with his eyes open follow every twitch of her candy lips and sway of her sumptuous bottom.

  The time Roxanne spent upstairs was as long as the time she spent downstairs, giving the massage. I wondered if she was being paid. If she wasn’t, how could she afford to stay so long? And who could be paying her but Old Mrs. Crozier?

  Why?

  To keep her stepson happy and comfortable? To keep herself entertained in a curious way?

  One afternoon, when Roxanne had gone downstairs, Mr. Crozier said that he felt thirstier than usual. I went to get him some more water from the pitcher that was always in the refrigerator. Roxanne was packing up to go home.

  “I never meant to stay so late,” she said. “I wouldn’t want to run into that schoolteacher.”

  I didn’t understand for a moment.

  “You know. Syl-vi-a. She’s not crazy about me, either, is she? She ever mention me when she drives you home?”

  I said that Sylvia had never mentioned Roxanne to me during any of our drives.

  “Dorothy says she doesn’t know how to handle him. She says I make him a lot happier than what she does. Dorothy says that. I wouldn’t be surprised if she even told her that to her face.”

  I thought of how Sylvia ran upstairs to her husband’s room every afternoon when she got home, before even speaking to me or her mother-in-law, her face flushed with eagerness and desperation. I wanted to say something about that—I wanted to defend her—but I didn’t know how. And people as confident as Roxanne often seemed to get the better of me.

  “You sure she never says anything about me?”

  I said again that she didn’t. “She’s tired when she gets home.”

  “Yeah. Everybody’s tired. Some just learn to act like they aren’t.”

  I did say something then, to balk her. “I quite like her.”

  “You qwat like her?” Roxanne mocked.

  Playfully, sharply, she jerked at a strand of the bangs I had recently cut for myself.

  “You ought to do something decent with your hair.”

  Dorothy says.

  If Roxanne wanted admiration, which was her nature, what was it that Old Mrs. Crozier wanted? I had a feeling that there was mischief stirring, but I could not pin it down. Maybe it was just a desire to have Roxanne, her liveliness, in the house, double time?

  Midsummer passed. Water was low in the wells. The sprinkler truck stopped coming and some stores put up sheets of what looked like yellow cellophane in their windows to keep their goods from fading. Leaves were spotty, the grass dry.

  Old Mrs. Crozier kept her garden man hoeing, day after day. That’s what you do in dry weather, hoe and hoe to bring up any moisture that you can find in the ground underneath.

  Summer school at the college would end after the second week of August, and then Sylvia Crozier would be home every day.

  Mr. Crozier still seemed glad to see Roxanne, but he often fell asleep. He could drift off without letting his head fall back, during one of her jokes or anecdotes. Then after a moment he would wake up again and ask where he was.

  “Right here, you sleepy noodle. You’re supposed to be paying attention to me. I should bat you one. Or how about I try tickling you instead?”

  Anybody could see how he was failing. There were hollows in his cheeks like an old man’s, and the light shone through the tops of his ears, as if they were not flesh but plastic. (Though we didn’t say plastic then; we said celluloid.)

  My last day of work, Sylvia’s last day of teaching, was a massage day. Sylvia had to leave for the college early, because of some ceremony, so I walked across town, arriving when Roxanne was already there. She and Old Mrs. Crozier were in the kitchen, and they both looked at me as if they had forgotten I was coming, as if I had interrupted them.

  “I ordered them specially,” Old Mrs. Crozier said.

  She must have been talking about the macaroons sitting in the baker’s box on the table.

  “Yeah, but I told you,” Roxanne said. “I can’t eat that stuff. Not no way no how.”

  “I sent Hervey down to the bakeshop to get them.”

  “O.K., let Hervey eat them. I’m not kidding—I break out something awful.”

  “I thought we’d have a treat,” Old Mrs. Crozier said. “Seeing it’s the last day we’ve got before—”

  “Last day before she parks her butt here permanently? Yeah, I know. Doesn’t help to have me breaking out like a spotted hyena.”

  Who was it whose butt was parked permanently?

  Sylvia’s. Sylvia.

  Old Mrs. Crozier was wearing a beautiful black silk wrapper, with water lilies and geese on it. She said, “No chance of having anything special with her around. You’ll see. Y
ou won’t be able to even get to see him with her around.”

  “So let’s get going and get some time today. Don’t bother about this stuff. It’s not your fault. I know you got it to be nice.”

  “‘I know you got it to be nice,’” Old Mrs. Crozier imitated in a mean, mincing voice, and then they both looked at me, and Roxanne said, “Pitcher’s where it always is.”

  I took Mr. Crozier’s water out of the fridge. It occurred to me that they could offer me one of the golden macaroons sitting in the box, but apparently it did not occur to them.

  I’d expected Mr. Crozier to be lying back on the pillows with his eyes closed, but he was wide awake.

  “I’ve been waiting,” he said, and took a breath. “For you to get here,” he said. “I want to ask you—do something for me. Will you?”

  I said sure.

  “Keep it a secret?”

  I had been worried that he might ask me to help him to the commode that had recently appeared in his room, but surely that would not have to be a secret.

  He told me to go to the bureau across from his bed and open the left-hand drawer, and see if I could find a key there.

  I did so. I found a large, heavy, old-fashioned key.

  He wanted me to go out of his room and shut the door and lock it. Then hide the key in a safe place, perhaps in the pocket of my shorts.

  I was not to tell anybody what I had done.

  I was not to let anybody know I had the key until his wife came home, and then I was to give it to her privately. Did I understand?

  O.K.

  He thanked me.

  O.K.

  All the time he was talking to me there was a film of sweat on his face and his eyes were as bright as if Roxanne were in the room.

  “Nobody is to get in.”

  “Nobody is to get in,” I repeated.

  “Not my stepmother or—Roxanne. Just my wife.”

  I locked the door from the outside and put the key in my pocket. But then I was afraid that it could be seen through the light cotton material, so I went downstairs and into the back parlor and hid it between the pages of “I Promessi Sposi.” I knew that Roxanne and Old Mrs. Crozier would not hear me, because the massage was going on, and Roxanne was using her professional voice.

  “I got my work cut out for me getting these knots out of you today.”

  And I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s voice, full of her new displeasure.

  “. . . punching harder than you normally do.”

  “Well, I gotta.”

  I was headed upstairs when a further thought came to me.

  If he had locked the door himself—which was evidently what he wanted the others to think—and I had been sitting on the top step as usual, I would certainly have heard him and called out and roused the others in the house. So I went back down and sat on the bottom step of the front stairs, a position from which I could conceivably not have heard a thing.

  The massage seemed to be brisk and businesslike today; Roxanne was evidently not making jokes. Pretty soon I could hear her running up the back stairs.

  She stopped. She said, “Hey, Bruce.”

  Bruce.

  She rattled the knob of the door.

  “Bruce.”

  Then she must have put her mouth to the keyhole, so that he would hear but nobody else would. I could not make out exactly what she was saying, but I could tell that she was pleading. First teasing, then pleading. After a while she sounded as if she were saying her prayers.

  When she gave that up, she started pounding on the door with her fists, not too hard but urgently.

  Eventually, she stopped that, too.

  “Come on,” she said in a firmer voice. “If you got to the door to lock it, you can get there to open it up.”

  Nothing happened. She came and looked over the bannister and saw me.

  “Did you take Mr. Crozier’s water into his room?”

  I said yes.

  “So his door wasn’t locked or anything then?”

  No.

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He just said thanks.”

  “Well, he’s got his door locked and I can’t get him to answer.”

  I heard Old Mrs. Crozier’s stick reaching the top of the back stairs.

  “What’s the commotion up here?”

  “He’s locked hisself in and I can’t get him to answer me.”

  “What do you mean, locked himself in? Likely the door’s stuck. Wind blew it shut and it stuck.”

  There was no wind that day.

  “Try it yourself,” Roxanne said. “It’s locked.”

  “I wasn’t aware there was a key to this door,” Old Mrs. Crozier said, as if her not being aware could negate the fact. Then, perfunctorily, she tried the knob and said, “Well. It’d appear to be locked.”

  He had counted on this, I thought. That they would not suspect me, that they would assume that he was in charge. And in fact he was.

  “We have to get in,” Roxanne said. She gave the door a kick.

  “Stop that,” Old Mrs. Crozier said. “Do you want to wreck the door? You couldn’t get through it, anyway—it’s solid oak. Every door in this house is solid oak.”

  “Then we have to call the police.”

  There was a pause.

  “They could get up to the window,” Roxanne said.

  Old Mrs. Crozier drew in her breath and spoke decisively. “You don’t know what you are saying. I won’t have the police in this house. I won’t have them climbing all over my walls like caterpillars.”

  “We don’t know what he could be doing in there.”

  “Well, then, that’s up to him. Isn’t it?”

  Another pause.

  Now steps—Roxanne’s—retreating to the back staircase.

  “Yes. You’d better just take yourself away before you forget whose house this is.”

  Roxanne was going down the stairs. A couple of stomps of the stick went after her, then stopped.

  “And don’t get the idea you’ll go to the constable behind my back. He’s not going to take his orders from you. Who gives the orders around here, anyway? It’s certainly not you. You understand me?”

  Very soon I heard the kitchen door slam shut. And then Roxanne’s car start.

  I was no more worried about the police than Old Mrs. Crozier was. The police in our town meant Constable McClarty, who came to the school to warn us about sledding on the streets in winter and swimming in the millrace in summer, both of which we continued to do. It was ridiculous to think of him climbing up a ladder or lecturing Mr. Crozier through a locked door.

  He would tell Roxanne to mind her own business and let the Croziers mind theirs.

  It was not ridiculous, however, to think of Old Mrs. Crozier giving orders, and I thought she might do so now that Roxanne—whom she apparently did not like anymore—was gone. But although I heard her go back to Mr. Crozier’s door and stand there, she did not even rattle the knob. She just said one thing.

  “Stronger than you’d think,” she muttered. Then made her way downstairs. The usual punishing noises with her steady stick.

  I waited awhile and then I went out to the kitchen. Old Mrs. Crozier wasn’t there. She wasn’t in either parlor or in the dining room or the sunroom. I got up my nerve and knocked on the toilet door, then opened it, and she was not there, either. Then I looked out the window over the kitchen sink and I saw her straw hat moving slowly along the cedar hedge. She was out in the garden in the heat, stumping along between her flower beds.

  I was not worried by the thought that seemed to have troubled Roxanne. I did not even stop to consider it, because I believed that it would be quite absurd for a person with only a short time to live to commit suicide.

  All the same, I was nervous. I ate two of the macaroons that were still sitting on the kitchen table. I ate them hoping that pleasure would bring back normalcy, but I barely tasted them. Then I shoved the box into the refrigerator so that I would not hope to tu
rn the trick by eating more.

  Old Mrs. Crozier was still outside when Sylvia got home.

  I retrieved the key from between the pages of the book as soon as I heard the car and I told Sylvia quickly what had happened, leaving out most of the fuss. She would not have waited to listen to it, anyway. She went running upstairs.

  I stood at the bottom of the stairs to hear what I could hear.

  Nothing. Nothing.

  Then Sylvia’s voice, surprised but in no way desperate, and too low for me to make out what she was saying. Within about five minutes she was downstairs, saying that it was time to get me home. She was flushed, as if the spots on her cheeks had spread all over her face, and she looked shocked, but unable to resist her happiness.

  Then, “Oh. Where is Mother Crozier?”

  “In the flower garden, I think.”

  “Well, I suppose I’d better speak to her, just for a moment.”

  After she had done that, she no longer looked quite so happy.

  “I suppose you know,” she said as she backed out the car. “I suppose you can imagine Mother Crozier is upset. Not that I am blaming you. It was very good and loyal of you. Doing what Mr. Crozier asked you to do. You weren’t scared of anything happening, were you?”

  I said no. Then I said, “I think Roxanne was.”

  “Mrs. Hoy? Yes. That’s too bad.”

  As we were driving down what was known as Crozier’s Hill, she said, “I don’t think he wanted to frighten them. You know, when you’re sick, sick for a long time, you can get not to appreciate other people’s feelings. You can get turned against people even when they’re doing what they can to help you. Mrs. Crozier and Mrs. Hoy were certainly trying their best. But Mr. Crozier just didn’t feel that he wanted them around anymore today. He’d just had enough of them. You understand?”

  She did not seem to know that she was smiling when she said this.

  Mrs. Hoy.

  Had I ever heard that name before?

  And spoken so gently and respectfully, yet with light-years of condescension.