by Joan Barfoot
She dropped the hammer where she stood and he drove her to the place, where she saw for herself the desperate, pale efforts of men on ropes and chained platforms, wielding shovels and even bare hands, clambering over the silo and into it and back out, faces and clothes coated in corn dust and horror. While behind the blank, grey, curved silo wall was her Dolph, his long bones being crushed, his golden skin gone battered and dark, his story-and-word-bringing voice choked into silence. There were police, there was an ambulance, there was a woman in a brown dress with small pink printed flowers trying to put her arms around Greta; but Greta would not be touched.
There were no words in any language for the white light of How can this be? As Greta sat trembling later before the girls, they may have thought her as mysteriously and terribly vanished as their father. As Dolph. Who had been beautiful.
They did not see his body. The undertaker said that would not be possible.
To have this thing that there could be no undoing, no way back, no hope forward—it was as if she was as broken as Dolph. Also more lonely and frightened than she had ever supposed to be possible. Three girls and all up to her—what was she to do?
She thought first of going back to where she and Dolph came from, where there were people who could comfort and support her, and help with the girls; but their families had already given the help of sending her and Dolph here. Their circumstances were improved, but defeat lasts a long time, and they still did not find it easy to care for even themselves.
More important, her girls belonged here, with their names and futures and her own and Dolph’s hopes.
And that is how she learned to grieve and manage, mourn and cope, all at the same time. This was possible. She was more Bäuerin than Dolph or she had ever dreamed.
She left the rented house for a cheaper apartment on the second floor of one of the town’s old brick homes. She considered her skills, which were to cook adequately, clean sufficiently, sew somewhat, love and try to comfort and keep safe her children—what could she do, heartbroken young foreign widow, with any of that?
When she first recounted this, Sylvia said, “How awful for you,” and even Ruth added, “Tragic.”
While George said, with raw, singsong clarity, “Too bad, so sad.”
Now, in the sunshine of this deck, it is the absent George that Sylvia inquires about. So many years. Does one betray long-ago interests in favour of new? Perhaps yes. Greta nods finally. “Ah,” Sylvia says in her dry way. “You astonish me.”
So.
In the nights, Greta watched Dolph struggling hopelessly against a storm of corn raining down. In the days, she went knocking on doors. Up and down the main street and side streets she went, from hardware to florist to bakery. People leaned close, frowned, shook their heads. Language was a difficulty; or rather, accent. History also, she was curtly given to understand at certain shops. She knew there would be no purpose in trying to say that she was herself guilty of nothing; that yes, certain events must have occurred, but she had not herself known or done anything; that she had been young, not quite grown up.
George Hammond frowned too. “Do you have experience selling?” No, she did not. “Do you know anything about shoes?” No, although she had bought shoes for the girls from George Hammond himself.
“I will learn fast,” she said.
He told her about sizings and the related subject of tact. He showed her stitchings, lasts, tongues and soles, and spoke much about service. She could think of customers patiently, as her children, she told him, and he said, “Then that’s who you can deal with. I’m not always good with the kids. They get bored and start acting up. Although sometimes the mothers are worse.”
“And you—” she risked smiling—“are good with them.” Well, he would be, wouldn’t he, a handsome lean man bending over their delicate arches and toes?
A man, too, of a certain courage. “All right, let’s try it, we can see how it goes.”
Oh, at last.
He paid her not a large salary, but with care they could manage. Some entertainment was free: at the kitchen table in the evenings, homework spread out, the girls grilled her with words. “Regress,” Sally or Emily or Patricia would call out while Greta did dishes or ironed, “what’s regress, Mum?” They would read from the dictionary. “It means movement back.” She learned with them, in this hopscotch fashion, malfeasance. Enlighten. Mortality. Uvula. They laughed, making nonsense sentences together. My uvula is regressing. My mortality is enlightened by malfeasance.
To be happy would be different from laughter. Even so, there came glittery moments when Greta could see peace in her kitchen, and even gladness to be there. Those were not the moments, which were fewer and fewer, when she could place Dolph among them. Memory is harsh in that way. It is true that some wounds will not close, but it is also true that the first shredded, soft skin around them will finally toughen. During the days she was smiling and helpful, obedient as she reached down to small feet, reached up the racks of shoeboxes to find the right sizes and styles. She knew a need to be careful. People could so easily take a dislike: to her foreignness, her circumstances, her very flesh, bones and voice. Anything.
George called her Greta. She called him Mr. Hammond. It was impossible for her to be very interested in shoes, although he was. “This is working out fine, don’t you think?” he said after a year, and gave her a raise. Another after her second year, and again after the third. This by no means meant an end to frugality. The girls grew into and traded each other’s clothes and got discounts on shoes. Sometimes when she got home they had made a tuna or macaroni casserole for their supper. They quarrelled and teased and played jokes, but “We must look after each other,” she told them. “We have only ourselves.” They did jobs ordinarily done by neighbourhood boys: delivered newspapers, mowed lawns, shovelled snow. That money they kept for movies and treats, birthday gifts for their friends. Unlike Greta, they were not without friends. She did not, as she saw it, have time.
Also she remained fearful of the long memories; the grudges of time that might still be turned against her.
Her girls, easy with their fitting-in names, compared their changing bodies, dated boys, went to parties and sleep-overs. Sometimes the apartment was empty but for Greta, even her youngest, Patricia, with a life of her own.
They must have looked after, leaned on each other, more than most had to.
Then. It is a little bit shocking how unanticipated affections can be. Greta would not have dreamed of making first moves, but first moves having been made (unexpectedly, inexplicably—inexplicable: incapable of being accounted for—during inventory in her fifth year in his employ, as she rose from counting shoeboxes on a dusty lower shelf while George hovered above with a clipboard which he put suddenly down on a higher shelf, the better to take first her elbow, then her shoulders, her chin, her head, her breasts in his hands), she found in herself a sudden flare-up of hope.
She took this to be desire, as it was; but desire deriving abruptly from hope. She was in that moment not struggling foreigner, widow, mother of three, but a woman standing on her two feet, reaching upwards: to George Hammond, with his deep brown, intensely interested eyes, which had not been so obviously interested before, and his long trousered legs, his shiny, top-of-the-line shoes. He had a half-smile even then. “I was watching the back of your neck, and I couldn’t resist. You probably don’t know how tempting it is, do you?” No, she did not know; although in her own bathroom, using a hand mirror and the one over the sink, she tried later to see what he saw.
Of course she had met Alice and Colette many times in the store. Husbands may be taken at any time, however, in any way, by any hand, God’s included. Then why not by her?
Not that she could take George. There was no question of that. There were her girls. There was scandal. What he said was, “My marriage is, well, it’s a marriage, I guess, but I love Colette down to the ground.” Once he explained down to the ground, Greta understood precisely. In the sa
me way, her love for her daughters had a ferocity that was in a separate category from adult interests, and could not be shaken by adult vicissitudes—vicissitude: a fluctuation of state or condition.
This, although in shorter, more restrained form, is what she has now described—should she have?—to Ruth and Sylvia in the warm balm of the sunshine on Sylvia’s deck.
“Where did you go?” Sylvia asks.
It is bad to say, but “a motel, most often. The ABC.”
“The ABC, oh my God!” and Sylvia claps a hand over her mouth. Of course, even someone like Sylvia will have heard stories of the ABC on the outskirts of town, with its incurious management and its parking lot hedged by cedars guarding it from too-easy roadside view; although she cannot know how, over decades of people like Greta and George as well as unwary travellers, it grew shabby; worse than shabby, with mildew around windows, and peeled paint, and sheets that smelled musty although surely they were not.
George said, “It’s not very nice, I know, but it’s private.”
The surprising, secret pleasure was what mattered, not comparings; the luxury of unwrapping each other’s long limbs, rediscovering warm skin, which George said applied to him as well as to her. To belong, that was a grace in itself. She told him he was beautiful, although in different form from Dolph and his beauty. George said, “Men aren’t beautiful. We can be good-looking, or handsome, but beautiful’s a woman’s word.” Perhaps he was correct, but she thought he was not.
They captured their moments between obligations, as when Emily had a school concert or Sally a play or Greta an interview with a teacher regarding Patricia, or when Colette was suddenly sick. Although other demands—on George, not Greta—came, in time, to injure. An anniversary dinner Alice was planning and counting on; that sort of thing. He said, “I wish we could fall asleep and wake up together,” because it was hard having to leave the ABC by a respectable hour, and “If I could get away for a weekend, could you?” Yes, twice there was walking hand in hand in a distant city, going to a movie boldly together, dining in a restaurant at a table for two. But how many reasons could a shoe-store owner devise for leaving town on his own? How often could Greta leave her growing-up girls to look out for each other? Twice only. There was a fear, which neither of them could speak, of disastrous event in their absence: burst appendix, accident, fire.
“What about your daughters,” Sylvia asks, “did they know?”
A good question. They did not inquire about, among other things, the woman friend, unknown to them, with whom she said she went away on those two weekends. Perhaps that was delicate of them, not incurious, but “No, I do not believe so. Nor George’s daughter.”
“The precious Colette.”
“Yes. Precious Colette.”
“But even now,” Sylvia adds, with an odd, angry laugh, “there are the children to worry about, don’t you find?” Greta is puzzled, more by Sylvia’s tone than by her words. And although of course it would not be good if the girls learned now of George, it would be far, far worse if they ever learned of what followed. “Why Greta, you’re blushing.”
Yes, but not for George.
“How long did it go on?”
“Almost seven years.” Which is altogether too much and too little to tell.
“You must have loved him, then, did you?” Ruth asks. So personal a question, is it not?
“We said so. It was long ago. Some feelings, they are hard to remember.” So they are. But whatever they were, Greta cannot truthfully say she has often regretted them. Because she and George, their entanglement—entanglement: the condition of being deeply involved—helped make her brave again. It also gave shape and touch and plot, when she most needed those things, to her days. Flesh and bones. An adult attachment to life. “I cared as well as I could.”
“Then that’s good,” Sylvia pronounces. “That’s what counts.” A surprisingly romantic remark from a woman who was herself, after all, someone’s wife for a very long time. “What happened?” To bring an end, she must mean.
One by one Greta’s clever, hard-working girls left with their scholarships and loans and ambitions for futures that were not to be in this town. “I love you, I am proud, your father would be so proud as well,” Greta said, waving goodbye. By the time Patricia left, Greta was forty-six. How young that seems now. All her girls are older than that.
Then Greta and George no longer needed the ABC Motel, but could be in Greta’s apartment with food at her table and each other in her bedroom. Her apartment without the girls was a terrible vacancy, but in those hours with George there was the consolation of desire and familiar affection. For him too, he said, because by then Colette also was gone.
Perhaps too easy, those consolations and comforts. Someone noticed George’s car, although he took care to park around the corner on a shorter, less-travelled block than hers. Someone remarked—took the trouble to remark—on this to Alice. “I made up something about dropping off a special order of orthotics at a customer’s on my way home, but whoever it was has seen the car a few times. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was just her, but there’s Colette. It doesn’t matter she’s left home, I can’t have her finding out. I’m sorry, but I can’t take any more chances of everything going right down the tubes.”
From which, although she wasn’t sure of right down the tubes, Greta understood that here was something she had failed in all their time to perceive: that while George liked, even perhaps cherished, their parallel life—why would he not?—Alice had powers that rooted him in his other world in ways not, after all, to do with Colette. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he probably was. He even put his head on her shoulder and for a few moments wept.
“And that was that,” she tells Ruth and Sylvia. “But life goes on very well.” Which was not true, of course.
Her experience in sales, and perhaps the familiarity of years in this town, got her work in Alf Stryker’s drugstore. She was astonished when George said, “But there’s no reason you can’t keep on working here”—was he so stupid after all, or so cold?
Then what happened? Then, having learned the virtues of home and repentance, George maybe settled down with refreshed attentions to Alice, who would be surprised to find him permanently restored to her kitchen table and bed; or he found someone else, a series of someones, with whom to journey to the highway and the grimy charms of the ABC Motel—who knows what George decided to do? They had used the word love, but what is that? People think love is naturally scattered about in everyone’s hearts, as thick on the ground as shiny bits of sand on a beach. It is not. It is rare as gold, as emeralds, as compassion.
“It’s dicey, for sure,” Sylvia says.
In no way has Greta expressed to them those years. Even now there is no replacement for touch, although she must try to make herself content with the soft spilling, row by row, of yellow-and-red scarf into her lap. “Please do not tell George what I have said.”
“Don’t worry.” This is Ruth. “We have to trust each other. We must take care of each other.” What is in her tone? Some passion beyond the words. This is the difficulty—one difficulty—with learning a language: not always knowing if words contain more than they say.
“Yes, of course we won’t say anything,” Sylvia says, but then suddenly she is laughing. “Although—Old gran spills lurid secrets, how’s that for a headline?” As if what Greta has said matters only as an amusement? Or as if Sylvia and Ruth have already begun keeping a secret, which is a better, nicer, warmer idea. Because they are friends, another word, it may be, that can contain more than it says.
13
MEN WITH KNIVES AND TELEPHONES…
EVERY DAY, ten minutes or so before every meal, people begin lining up at the two dining-room entrances. Are so many Idyll Inn residents persistently gullible, does hope really spring eternal that this time, contrary to all previous experience, mealtime will bring something different or new?
But darned if today there isn’t something different and new:
a man with two knives.
Occasionally there are these disruptions, although others have been less compellingly public. Two staff members have quit, having discovered a serious distaste for the old, and one was fired abruptly amid reports that she was rough in her handling of residents and then made a dangerous mistake in the distribution of meds. Nobody wants that sort of person on staff, not only those on the spot, but distant, lawsuit-leery doctor and dentist investors. As well, there have been three sudden deaths—two heart attacks, one huge stroke—with doctors and ambulances called, stretchers wheeled in and out as discreetly as possible, but death isn’t exactly disguisable so everyone knows, and they all feel the chill.
Then there are residents’ own eccentricities to contend with. Poor old Amy Perry, for one, who used to be a town librarian, but more recently, like today’s man with two knives, suffered a food-related downfall; because at the Idyll Inn, where presentation is reasonably dainty, the butter and margarine come formed into little yellow balls on small flowered plates, and Amy Perry took to furtively picking up the butter plate at her table and dumping its leftovers into her pockets and purse. “It was gross,” Ruth heard from Diane, who said that another aide, collecting laundry, “stuck her hand right into a pocketful of nasty old putrid butter. I guess Adele screamed, and then she got kind of mad. When she asked Mrs. Perry what she thought she was doing, Mrs. Perry said she was collecting it for her knees—she’s got arthritis, like you. So Adele said, ‘You were going to put it on your knees?’ and Mrs. Perry said no, when she had enough she was going to slice them open and put the butter—she said margarine was no good—right inside the bones so she wouldn’t hurt any more, and now Ms. Walker says Mrs. Perry is too dotty to stay and has to go to a nursing home. And everybody’s supposed to make sure the butter plates are off the tables as soon as first course is over.”