"That's the one," said Beverly.
"O-12!" The caller shouted. "O-12!"
"Bingo!"
Two rows behind Marietta a woman with a brown pageboy haircut and horn-rimmed glasses on a chain around her neck got so excited she knocked her bingo card off the table. She bounced in her chair a couple of times and held up her card.
"Bingo! Right here!" The woman shouted again and waved her card in the air. "It's me! Bingo!"
"We hear you," said Beverly under her breath. Then she whispered to her tablemates: "Her prize is nothing but a tile trivet anyway. She's so excited, just because it's painted by some artiste from New Mexico!"
Marietta and the redhead exchanged a polite grin. Nearby an elderly woman started hacking and sneezing, and blew her nose into a pink handkerchief. It was cold season. Throughout the hall, the air was densely sweet with the scent of mentholated cough drops.
They had seen Ethel two months earlier, when she had to pack up her aunt's belongings. It turned out their house had a lien against it. Constance had put herself in debt over the years, moving her tailoring business to Skillute and starting over from scratch in a town where most women made do with a few blouses and t-shirts, a couple of pairs of slacks and a good dress for Sunday. She had trusted a local insurance broker with her investments, and lost her nest egg when the firm went out of business. The Burneys never caught up, even with both women working part-time at a fabric shop in Kelso.
"How did she meet Burt Sanders?" Marietta asked.
"I introduced them," Beverly told her. "I had Ethel to my place for supper a couple months ago, right after she closed up her aunt's house. You know how she felt about Constance passing away. Anyway, she was pretty low, so I invited her over. Burt stopped by to talk with me about a couple of odd jobs I asked him to do. It's a trial keeping my place in good condition without a man around the house."
"So you tried to cheer Ethel up and Burt happened to stop by?" Marietta asked.
"Mm-hmm."
This was a supper to which Beverly had not invited Marietta. Over the years Beverly had started putting each of her friends into a category. Marietta belonged in the lunch date and bingo category. In fairness, these had originally been the times of day when Marietta had no trouble lining up a babysitter for Henry, when he was growing up. Marietta's status had not changed, although Henry was in his early twenties now, and starting his fourth sales job in a row. He was drifting but he wasn't a child any more. Marietta was free to meet her friend any time she liked.
Ethel, maybe because she worked so many hours at home, doing alterations into the night sometimes, had become the friend in Beverly's holiday and special event category. That would change once Ethel became a common neighbor.
"Burt's a loner," said Marietta.
"What does that mean?"
"He likes to be alone, as far as I can tell. That's what people say."
"Well," Beverly said. "Who doesn't like to be alone? I do. So do you. So does Ethel."
"I've heard Burt drinks quite a bit."
"So does Ethel."
"I don't think so," Marietta said, her violet eyes fading to pale gray in the stark fluorescent light.
Beverly nodded and mimed taking a swig from a bottle. She turned her attention back to her cards when the caller on stage shouted:
"L-9!"
Beverly touched two of her cards with a pink dauber. She grinned. No one was calling a winner this time.
"L-9!"
"How do you know these things? Did Ethel talk to you?"
Beverly glared at her.
"I have eyes, Marietta. Ethel needs a man in her life. She works too hard. So I introduced her to Burt, and they hit it off. He isn't ideal. I know that. Burt may be a cracker. I haven't met a man in Skillute who isn't a cracker, but he's a man with deep feelings. He's in love with Ethel," she said. "That's better than nothing."
The redhead laughed. Beverly turned toward her and smiled. She nodded toward the redhead's cards.
"You're not doing very well today, are you?" She said.
The redhead bit her lip. She kept her eyes on her cards for the rest of the game.
"D-3!"
"I don't think Burt and Ethel have that much in common," Marietta said after a while.
"D-3!"
"Name a man and a woman who have anything in common," Beverly said. "The trick is to find somebody with a good job who doesn't get on your nerves all the time. That's what a happy marriage is."
The eighty-three-year-old man had decided to go home. He had collected his toaster and was making his way between the tables, heading for the exit.
"You have fun with that!" Beverly called after him. To the women at her table she said:
"He'll never use that thing. What the heck is an old man, living alone, supposed to do with a four-slice toaster?"
"You think Burt and Ethel will be happy?" Marietta suggested.
Beverly wasn't listening.
"J-12!"
Beverly jabbed one of her cards with the dauber and flashed a big smile.
"Right here!" She shouted. "Bingo!"
Part Two
Ethel
Ethel never told anyone what happened the day she and Beverly and Marietta sneaked into the woods to take an oath against having babies. As far as Ethel knew, no one suspected what the girls had done. It was a silly game that got scary, but no harm done, she told herself. No real harm. Marietta had a son, if any proof were needed. Obviously they were not doomed to be childless, unless they wanted to be.
Yet it stayed with Ethel, the afternoon and the oath and what happened after that. She had tried to convince herself, over the years, that she had been dreaming when she heard scratching on the walls. Or maybe it was a squirrel or raccoon looking for a way inside, a path to food and away from the storm. Or maybe Beverly was right when she said it was a prowler. These were reasonable explanations, but they didn't account for the charred jawbone Ethel and Marietta had found, or the sense of dread Ethel had carried home with her that day. No matter how she tried she could never shake the feeling that something was following her, just out of sight.
When she was a girl Ethel had made up her mind not to get married. She knew some of the people in her hometown would make jokes at her expense. They would call her an old maid, and speculate about what was wrong with her. That prospect wasn't any worse than the things people had said about her all along while she was growing up: the mouse, the orphan girl with glasses, whose shiftless parents died from smoking cigarettes in bed. It was pitiful and dumb. It didn't make a good story, even in hindsight. Her parents' death was commonly considered an example of bad living. Stupid people doing stupid things and getting what they deserved for it.
"You might change your mind about getting married, when you meet the right man," Beverly teased Ethel, when they were young. She must have said this a hundred times.
"Might, but won't," Ethel always replied.
Lonely as she was, she shied away from anyone who took an interest in her. A look that lingered more than a second would cause her to become self-conscious. The idea of being with another person for the rest of her life gave her a chill. She could remember the voices of her parents climbing, shrill and hateful, into the night.
Shirley would end most fights with a shriek of disgust. Then she would stomp off into the woods to smoke and ignore her middle-aged husband and the daughter she didn't want. The more often Shirley had followed that trail away into the shadows and the night, the more she had seemed to resent having to return to their trailer home with its dust bunnies, its grimy sink, and its corners filled with crumbs.
"Why am I cleaning up after you all? I've got better things to do with my time!"
"Name one of those things, sugar," her husband would ask, and then the vodka would flow until they were either screaming at one another or grunting and crying out behind the locked door of their bedroom.
Ethel wanted nothing more than quiet, a clean house, music on the radio, an unin
terrupted TV show, weekends free from confusion and terror. She found these things with her aunt. She returned Constance's kindness by being polite, neat and grateful. She was never a problem. She never stayed out late. She completed her homework and her household chores on time and without complaining. She followed instructions and learned to assist Constance in her meticulous work.
Clients routinely stopped by for a fitting or to drop off a bag of clothes for alterations. Ethel greeted them and offered them coffee and a magazine if they wanted to wait. She lingered nearby in case they needed anything. She wore her best dresses to show them what a fine seamstress they had employed. Constance never asked her to do these things. She took it upon herself to behave impeccably.
All of this made sense to her and seemed to come naturally, when she was a girl. It only dawned on her many years later that she was trying too hard. In her mother's absence she was still trying to win favor. As an adult she looked back at her child self and felt a wave of sadness and pity, although she didn't recall indulging in self-pity when she was little. Only with the maternal instinct of a grown woman could she think:
"If I knew myself as a child, now, I would love me. Why didn't she?"
There was some distance and strength in this recognition but no release, no real joy. What she was admitting above all was that Shirley had failed her in every possible way. Ethel spent half a lifetime absolving and ignoring her mother's persistent cruelties. Now that she was old enough to care for a child, she realized with a shiver that her mother was a heartless bitch. Distance, yes. Maybe even wisdom. But what could she draw upon, for tenderness? Aunt Constance, yes, but Constance was not her blood mother, her source of life, the woman whose love she had first learned to seek, whose love she could never stop seeking, no matter how old she became or how much she changed in other ways.
Time and again she caught herself thanking waitresses until they grew weary of her and stopped meeting her gaze. She over-tipped and said thanks again on her way out.
A saleswoman with kind eyes talked her into buying a full makeup kit she never used. It was so expensive she couldn't bring herself to throw it away until years later, when the mascara and foundation had dried up in the bottles and the powder broke into solid bits like clay.
At a yard sale she let an elderly woman sell her a hideous sweater, an off-white thing with bits of sparkling ribbon in the weave and large, unflattering shoulder pads. The woman had hauled it out of a box and insisted she try it on. She had placed it on Ethel's skinny shoulders and gently smoothed the arms and back until Ethel was lulled into a state that felt hypnotic. When the woman saw she had made a sale, she upped the price to ten dollars. Ethel gave her twelve and took the sweater home, where she immediately stuffed it into the trashcan and then cried for half an hour.
She tried, over the years, to imagine herself as an infant in her mother's arms. Her photos had been destroyed in the fire. So she scrambled through the few remaining family pictures, the ones Constance had received now and then.
Ethel turned the photos this way and that and studied her expression. Was she happy at three years of age? Was she smiling at one and a half, in her hand-me-down clothes, standing in front of a three-foot-tall aluminum Christmas tree? Yes, her lips were smiling, vaguely, but her eyes were fixed on someone outside the frame. Her eyes revealed uncertainty and trouble as early as one year, as early as ten months. It was a revelation, then, the day her aunt located a birth announcement buried in a box of old greeting cards.
Constance opened the soft cover and handed Ethel the photograph taken at the hospital soon after she was born: Ethel Rosalie Burney, seven pounds, two ounces, and her birth date was listed. Here was the proof: A newborn face, plump and round, eyes closed but her whole face was smiling. Happy, she was happy to be alive and in the world.
According to family legend, Shirley was heavily sedated and unconscious for the first twenty-four hours of Ethel's life. So here was proof of happiness, joy, before Shirley got her hands on her and began to teach her without a doubt that she was not wanted.
The first time she met Burt Sanders, Ethel felt at ease. Not untroubled, not free from a grain of doubt. The worry was permanent, she knew. Talking with Burt, laughing with him over the foolish things they both did and said, laughing sometimes for no reason, seeing the quiet and unfaltering acceptance in his eyes, was as close as she thought she would ever come to peace and joy. That was reason enough to marry him when he asked.
Burt
Burt Sanders was pleased with himself, for a change. Bumping along the no-name road in his truck, avoiding the worst of the potholes, he hoped Ethel would be in a good mood when he reached home. It was too much to expect her to be happy. That would only come with more time and patience.
This area from the freeway to the forked road that led to Burt's house was full of remnants. There were houses partially built during the last boom and left to rot after the crash that followed. In the past couple of years real estate reps from Portland and Seattle had repaired a lot of rundown houses, replacing all the fixtures and the roofing, finally selling them for a decent profit as second homes.
Nobody lived on these lots. They weren't homes. They were investments. Young people earning money in the city could eventually cash in their retirement portfolios and settle here, but more likely they would sell the houses and retire to some place more interesting. Burt imagined his life might have been like theirs, if he had studied computer programming the way he wanted when he was in his twenties. He might have moved to Seattle to go to school, if he had sold his dad's house and put Skillute behind him. He might have been one of those geeky guys who worked at a software firm and made a ton of money.
Burt laughed. These were idle fantasies. He was too old for the world at large. The one time he had spent a couple of weeks in the city people had made fun of the way he talked, the chaotic traffic drove him crazy and all the women he saw had weird hair and pierced noses. It was like a cartoon.
Skillute had dwindled while Seattle was beginning to thrive again. Small local companies had gone under, if they hadn't sold out in time. Big companies had been through layoff after layoff. The best timber, the boom period, the motels that dotted the highway and catered to people taking family road trips, that was long gone. There were roads plowed up for miles, ending nowhere or gradually narrowing to footpaths. There were all ages and sizes of fir and cedar, clusters of hemlock trees, devil's club in patches scattered between the cultivated lawns with their Japanese maples and tulip beds. The land was dotted with abandoned cabins, trailers and sheds, even a few remaining outhouses and run-off trenches. In some spots railroad grades were cut thirty feet deep through hills now exposed as shelf upon shelf of many-colored earth, with roots sticking out of the dirt walls like fingers in the sullen rain.
Burt was used to the rain, of course. He'd lived in the Northwest his whole life. For a few years he'd lived with his mom in Tacoma. He had only moved back to Skillute when his father died. Secretly he had hoped the old man was sitting on a bag of gold or a hundred shares of Microsoft. No such luck. Joe Sanders left him a ramshackle house badly in need of repair, on an acre of land that wasn't fit for much.
Most of the town appeared to be collapsing. Well, you couldn't even call it a town. A couple of intersections with a dozen or so retail shops, a boat building company and a train station. What was that? He didn't think of it as a community, exactly, since people never congregated for anything outside of church. Despite their reputation for being closed-mouthed and diligent, however, the locals sure did like to gossip. They did it at particular times, over supper, after church, and especially at the bingo hall, as though keeping it segregated from the main portion of their lives made it less hateful and made them better people.
Skillute was a pretty messed-up place, Burt realized. He hadn't missed it during the years in Tacoma after his parents split up. He had stayed on after his dad died because he could offer Ethel a home where she had friends and clients. Having to
relocate would have been the final straw for someone as fragile as she was. She was good at giving the appearance of strength, probably always had to wear a mask, thanks to her crazy parents. Burt could see how much of the time she was just getting by. He could see the effort it took for her to do the simplest things. It made him angry, made him wish her parents were alive so he could punch both of them right in the face.
Once he had settled in, Skillute felt uncomfortably familiar but not intolerable. The social options beyond his marriage were limited, to say the least. He didn't like church, so his chances of making friends were even lower than they might have been.
At least no one pestered him to shoot things any more. His father had hunted deer, elk, and grouse all his life. Burt hated shooting animals. His one recent attempt at being a hunter had landed him on his backside in a ditch full of elk droppings in a town whose name he couldn't remember, somewhere in Montana. And that was the highlight of the trip. By the time he dragged his weary soul back home three days later he had sworn off hunting, microbrews, and any human being with the nickname "Mudflap."
Ethel had laughed at that story. At least it was worth something.
"You gave it a good try," she said. "Now maybe they'll leave you alone."
She was wrong about that. Every time Burt ran into Mudflap at a convenience store or buying lumber at Rudy's, the guy slapped him on the back and asked when Burt wanted to hit that Elk Slide again. He laughed good-naturedly enough, and he always had a decent word of advice for Burt about practical matters like roofing repairs. He didn't seem to mean any harm, with his lame jokes and corny songs. Burt kind of liked the guy. As long as they didn't talk politics or religion or football they got along pretty well.
Now Mudflap had done Burt another good turn by telling him about a site a few miles from his house, where a road crew was punching through a new route to the freeway. There had been a lot of reconstruction between here and Mount St. Helens when Burt was young: New bridges and roads, reclamation of the land around Spirit Lake, the dredging of the Cowlitz River. Not a lot of change since then. Just more commuters than anybody ever dreamed possible.
Knock Knock Page 8