At 3:00 A.M. I cried out when I opened my eyes to see a man bending over me. It was the inspector, Mr. Smythe, as we came to know him. “Just checking the air,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
* * *
Those inspectors were called Guardian Angels throughout the fire zone. Sometimes the floors of the basements they checked were so hot that the bottoms of their shoes got burned. For hours later their gummy soles would stick to the ground as they walked. Their testing equipment made use of little vials and long slender screwdriver-type things and made you think of the terrifying stories you’d heard about old-fashioned medical devices. But those inspectors were all we had to go by that it was still safe to live in our homes. We left our doors unlocked for them to come and go as they pleased and it was more than once that they saved our lives by getting us out of a house when the gases measured too high.
“We got to seal up the cracks, girl,” Gram would holler at me as we’d work to repair any we found in the house. When Gram learned that the gases came not just through cracks but also through the water pipes, she started covering all the faucets and drains with tinfoil each night before bed.
“Fat … lot … help,” Gramp would grunt as Gram went from the kitchen to the bathroom with a bag of the crumpled tinfoil she reused each night, shouting, “Use them sinks now, or go dry till mornin’!”
In the evenings Gram would get on the phone to her best friend, Mrs. Schwackhammer, and remind her to block up her faucets. Gram also let me know that she called to make sure Mrs. Schwackhammer was alive. “She got three kids and not one of ’em check on her. Now tell me, why’d she bother havin’ ’em in the first place?”
Mrs. Schwackhammer lived three blocks west of the Krupskys, which meant the fire was now below her house too, but it took the government a good two weeks to send her the paperwork slating her house for destruction.
On the day that Mrs. Schwackhammer got the paperwork, Gram had me go with her to deliver a pot of stew. “This news will hit Edna worse than a death in the family,” Gram said. “Still, alls you can do is bring food and your dolensces. Makes you feel a fool.”
Edna Schwackhammer was ancient, older than Gram, yet she towered over Gram even when she leaned crooked on her cane. No matter what the temperature, red spots surfaced in her skin like her blood boiled up. A lavender scent always stuck to her clothes and whenever she talked about her long-dead husband, Otto, her usually squinting, judgmental eyes would open wide and turn as blank and pleasant as a cow’s.
On the day we walked over to deliver the stew, Gram told me that Edna and she weren’t always friends. “Edna was top dog of the side seamers,” Gram explained. “No one could tell her what to do, not even Boss Betty, the floor lady. When I started at the mill Edna got the other gals not to talk to me and to this day I don’t know why. My first three months there were so bad I hoped I’d get hit by a trolley on my way home. The only thing to make my mind worse was right about then Gramp got sick. When Edna heard about it, she started helpin’ me out. She worked a shorter shift than me and she’d check in on Gramp on her way home from work. If one of the boys was sick she’d bring over some soup or whatnot. Did more than my own mother ever did, that’s for sure! My mother came to stay to help take care of your daddy when I first started at the mill. It worked out fine for a week or so. Then one day I come home from work and there’s your daddy, not more than a year old, alone and screamin’ in the crib. Turns out my brother’s wife had called askin’ Mama to come and help out with her kids. So that’s what Mama did. Took off to watch my brother’s kids and left mine alone. That’s what Mama was like with her boys. My brothers should finish school but I might as well drop out. ‘All you’ll ever be is a wife,’ she said. But I was the first one of her kids to buy my own property.”
Gram nodded her head and pointed to East Mountain. “That’s right, girl. I got my own piece of land up in them woods. And it was just last year I made the last payment on the house. Own it free and clear and my own name’s on that deed, girl, not just Gramp’s. You remember that. Ain’t nobody gonna look out for you but yourself.”
We stood still, staring off at East Mountain as if we could see Gram’s property and admire it from there. “But it doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Why was she so mean to you?”
Gram sucked at the space where she used to have a tooth. “She wasn’t nice to my sisters neither. But to me she was the worst. I got to think she was jealous of the way my daddy loved me. He used to call me his Sweet Rosy Ro. I’d a been a different person if he’d lived past my tenth birthday, I’m sure of it.”
It was hard for me to imagine Gram as a little girl being anything but like the Gram she was now. And it wasn’t so much that I didn’t believe her, but that her having a daddy who thought of her as being sweet was as unreal to me as the little angel Gram said sat on my shoulder and told God if I’d done something wrong. “I meant Mrs. Schwackhammer, Gram. Why was she mean to you?”
“I asked her that once and tears came to her eyes. She was sorry, she said.” Gram raised her head as far as she could with her hump. “That was all that mattered to me was her sayin’ that. I didn’t care why else she was mean. Her own husband died of the black lung. She said she was full of regrets over how she handled his sickness and that I looked about as bad as she’d felt then, so it made her feel a little better to help me out. It made her feel like she was helpin’ her own Otto in a way, is what she said. And she did help me out. But if you ask me she likes when things go bad. She’s drawn to it. Some folks are like that. Other people’s bad news makes somethin’ feel good inside them.”
We’d reached Mrs. Schwackhammer’s house, which was a wooden A-frame house with ivy growing all over it. When Mrs. Schwackhammer’s husband died, she’d let the ivy go wild because that ivy was the very same ivy she’d rooted from her bridal bouquet a million years ago and to pull it out, she’d often said, felt like she was ripping her marriage farther apart. “He’s already in heaven,” Gram would say to me. “How much farther could they get?”
As soon as we’d stepped into the foyer Gram started in on that ivy, lecturing as usual about its ability to get into the cracks in the foundation and spread them even more. Most times Mrs. Schwackhammer lectured back about the value of sentimentality and how Gram could benefit from caring about the meaning of things, but this time all she did was sob, “What does it matter?”
“’Course, ’course,” Gram said, a look of alarm tightening the wrinkles on her face. Clearly at a loss for words, Gram added, “Brought stew.” Mrs. Schwackhammer meekly nodded. “And tomorrow I’ll call the mayor’s office and the town council. We’re not goin’ to give up without a fight!”
Mrs. Schwackhammer sat in a wing chair that her large cumbersome body dwarfed. A pool of weak sunlight on the floor by her feet seemed to take all her attention. “Where will I go?”
“You got three kids with houses of their own who you could move in with any day of the week and you know it!”
Mrs. Schwackhammer turned toward the window that was veined with ivy. A moment or two passed before she openly wept.
Me and Gram met eyes, both of us taut with discomfort. “Well,” Gram said, reaching for the pot of stew that I still clenched between my hands. “I’ll heat you up a bowl. Nothin’ like a full belly.” And with those words Gram tromped off into the kitchen leaving me alone with Mrs. Schwackhammer who was trying to delicately wipe her nose on her sleeve.
Spying a box of Kleenex on a side table, I plucked several tissues and placed them on Mrs. Schwackhammer’s lap, catching a whiff of lavender as I did so. She grabbed the tissues and blew her nose. Then she looked at me. Her eyes were as red as her face and the yellow tint of her hair seemed to softly glow. “Been thinking about you finding that man,” she said. “What it must have been like that first moment you saw him. It must have been awful for you.” She leaned forward and swallowed as if I was about to feed her a spoonful of something delicious.
There was a clat
ter from the kitchen followed by Gram shouting, “Didn’t break!” There was something stealthy in the way Mrs. Schwackhammer’s eyes shifted from the hallway to the kitchen, then back to my face. “Been wondering who that man was who you found and what those detectives keep asking your grandpa.”
I stepped back, out of the pool of sunlight that had shifted toward my feet. Irritated by my silence, Mrs. Shwackhammer clucked her tongue. “Well, girl, you must know what they’ve been asking him. It must be something important. Your grandpa is known for his temper, isn’t he? Rowena doesn’t mention it, but I know he’s been to the county jail.”
“Everyone knows that,” I said.
“Don’t be fresh,” Mrs. Schwackhammer snapped, smacking her hands on the arm of her chair.
Gram clomped in the room. “Don’t go scrapin’ the bottom of the pot, Edna. I burned it. But it’s plenty hot for you to have a bowlful.”
Gram sat next to Mrs. Schwackhammer at the kitchen table while Mrs. Schwackhammer stirred her spoon through her bowl of stew and talked about the hutch her Otto had stripped and varnished, the shelves he’d built beneath the stairs, the bedroom window where he liked to sit to read his paper. “It feels like I’m dying,” Mrs. Schwackhammer said. “Losing this house makes me feel like I’m losing him all over again.”
“Nonsense,” Gram said. “You can only lose him once.” Gram steadily tapped her fingers on the table, looking anywhere but at her friend’s face. “Did I tell you John’s got blood in the stool?”
“No,” Mrs. Schwackhammer said, eyes brightening. “How much? What’s it look like?”
Gram gave me a knowing look and then gave Mrs. Schwackhammer an earful of gory detail. Afterward, on our way home, Gram stopped me beside a white fence smothered in yellow roses. “She asked you somethin’ about them cops and Gramp, didn’t she?”
I nodded. “But I didn’t tell her a thing.”
Gram looked back at Mrs. Schwackhammer’s house and her mouth scrunched like she’d swallowed something bitter. “Ain’t that a woman for you!” Gram gave me a sideways glance that was at least partly appreciative. “You was right not to say nothin’ to her. Ain’t none of her business what Gramp did or didn’t do, ain’t that right?”
I didn’t answer. My tongue felt heavy as if Gram’s words weighted it down and gave my own suspicions greater heft and shape.
Gram repeated, “Our business ain’t nobody else’s, right?”
I skipped off ahead, blocking out Gram’s voice as she called after me. Marisol and I were supposed to meet up at White Deer Lake to finish reading The Once and Future King and I couldn’t wait to plunge back into the world of Camelot and forget the one I was in now.
Twelve
My birthday fell on a Wednesday that year, but Ma threw my picnic party on the Saturday before. It was Indian summer, the first weekend of October, and the spectacularly red and orange trees looked strange in the hazy heat of the air. It was usually Indian summer for my birthday and I took this to mean that I had some connection with the Indians, even though Daddy had told me that Indian summer was just a slur, meaning anything the Indians did wouldn’t last long.
That day as I helped Ma set up the snacks on a picnic sheet in Pothole Park I wondered what the Indians who used to live here were doing on this very spot five hundred years ago. Pothole Park was named for the giant pothole at its center and Daddy said that the Lenape Indians who’d lived here had performed sacred rites around it. If that was so, I wondered what their sacred spirits thought of the trash that the campers and picnickers threw down the hole. But it wasn’t just any hole. It was the second-largest glacier hole in the world! The pothole was about forty feet deep and carved out thousands of years ago by a glacier carrying jagged rocks and stones. Whenever Marisol and I hiked in this direction, we always stopped by the hole and counted how many used condoms we could see clinging to the rocky ledges that spiraled down all the way to the bottom.
“Better not be daydreaming like that when company comes,” Ma said, handing me the potato salad container to open because she’d just had her nails done and could barely manage to light a cigarette. She’d had her hair done too in what was supposed to be a soft Jacqueline Kennedy style but it looked hard and helmetlike and I didn’t care for it at all.
Holding a compact to my face I checked out the eye shadow and lipstick Ma had let me wear for the first time ever. Desperately I wanted a compliment from Ma but I didn’t dare ask for it because I knew then she’d say something to make me feel dumb.
“Quit starin’ at yourself and help out. Believe me, you’re better leaving off boys altogether. They ain’t no road to happiness. When I was your age—” Ma breathed out her nose. She glanced off to the shadowy parts in the crook of a chestnut tree that shaded us. “Well, that don’t matter. You look real pretty, Brigid,” she said, but she got gloomy when she said it and the compliment, instead of making me feel good, just made me wonder about the sad places inside Ma.
Not far from us, Brother lay on a towel dozing in the sun. We were all tired. Mr. Smythe, the inspector, had gotten us all up at three in the morning because the air was bad and we’d had to stand outside in our bathrobes waiting for the house to air out and the danger to pass. More than once Ma had instructed all of us not to mention anything about last night. “And for cripessakes, keep your mouths shut about finding no dead body,” Ma instructed. “We don’t want them thinking we was bad luck.”
We were stabbing melon balls with toothpicks, planning when and how to serve the rest of the snacks, most of them bought fresh from Shnauer’s deli. In all my life Ma had never bought deli food so I couldn’t help but sneak a cold cut or a bit of pasta salad.
Shaking a cigarette from a pack of Parliaments, Ma nodded at a foot-long present wrapped in paper that was covered in roses. “You’ll be so surprised,” Ma said, “you’ll shit yourself.” She stuck a cigarette in her mouth and cupped her hand to light it.
I studied Ma’s face for the trick. Sometimes she teased to take me down a peg. There was a glistening sheen to her eyes though, which made her excitement seem pure. Still, I managed to keep my mouth shut and pretend I didn’t care what I got for my birthday. From the way Ma held the smoke before puffing it out, I could tell I’d pleased her. But where, I wondered, had Ma gotten the money for all this stuff? If she could afford deli food and a bakery cake and some fancy present and to have her hair and nails done, then why couldn’t she buy me shoes that fit and a bathing suit that wasn’t one of her hand-me-downs and didn’t cup my boobs like giant shells?
By the time Uncle Jerry and Aunt Janice arrived, Brother had woken and he and little Jerry played in the mushy part of the meadow, oblivious to the bugs sucking at their blood and skin. Uncle Jerry and Aunt Janice sat in two folding chairs they’d brought. Uncle Jerry sat forward in his chair as if he was about to leap onto the picnic sheet where I sat between the melon and cheese platter pouring spiked iced tea from a thermos for the adults. Aunt Janice sat with her back straight as a ruler, hands folded on her lap, the bun on her head so tight even the breeze cutting through the meadow couldn’t stir a single strand of it.
Ma sat facing them, an empty folding chair beside her for when Daddy came. When Daddy told her that morning that he’d get to the park when he could, Ma hadn’t said a thing. You could see the surprise hit Daddy’s face and then you could see him immediately hide it. Ma, I guess, wanted her brother to herself for as long as she could have him so she didn’t mind that Daddy was off betting on horses or drinking at some bar. And I suppose Daddy was just as glad.
Ma had taken care to have the chairs arranged in what she called a conversational circle, but the only conversation going on was Uncle Jerry complaining about all sorts of different things: the drive up from Allentown, the students who had nothing better to do than stage sit-ins, the building of the Berlin Wall. I watched Brother and Little Jerry chase ducks while Uncle Jerry recounted the downturn of this great country and the very real possibility of us all being
bombed to hell. He sat back and flicked his hands toward the tree as if it were the Soviets or Castro who he said were to blame.
The hair on his knuckles was as curly and dark as the hair sprouting above the collar of his T-shirt. He had pinkish white skin and little red veins all over his nostrils. From the angle I was looking at him, I could see nose hairs sticking out like antennae off a beetle, and I rubbed my smooth legs, shaved that morning for the first time ever, and got afraid that Gram might have been right when she’d shouted at me through the bathroom door: “You’ll be as hairy as an ape. Mark my words. Shavin’ it just makes it come in thicker and faster.”
“Bropey,” Ma interrupted Uncle Jerry’s tirade against desegregation. “You remember that’s what I called you?” Ma was referring to the name she’d called Uncle Jerry before their ma died, before their father remarried, and his new wife sent Ma off to an orphanage, sent Ma off and not Jerry because boys, that horrible woman had said, were useful to have around.
Ma reached into a cooler and picked up the cut-glass salt shaker that Gram usually kept on the dining-room table. “You remember a salt shaker like this? Don’t it look just like the one Ma kept in the hutch? Took me a long time to remember why I liked cut-glass shakers so much. But then it just came to me. Just all of a sudden I was back in our dining room seeing sunlight coming through the curtain, dust just hanging in the air, and all that dusty sun making the salt and pepper shakers sparkle.”
Uncle Jerry raised his upper lip, which drew deep creases down his cheeks and reminded me of the rats sniffing around where we used to live by the dump. “Well, would you look at that,” he said, standing up. He hitched his beige pants, which he wore so high the belt cinched the middle of his chest, and crossed to where Ma sat. The salt shaker had a curved womanly shape, and Uncle Jerry took hold of it lovingly, his fingers caressing its dozens of brilliant cuts.
“Looks like the shaker your mother gave us, Jerry,” Aunt Janice said. Aunt Janice added, looking from Ma to me, “For our wedding,”
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