Crossing the Tracks (9781416997054)

by Stuber, Barbara

  I put out the light, crawl back in bed, and stare out into endless farm fields washed in moonlight—feeling like no more than a speck in the middle of God’s dirty thumbprint.

  “Avery, Marie requests a bath later this afternoon,” Mrs. Nesbitt says to her son at breakfast.

  Marie gnaws a crust of toast under the kitchen table. Her fur is a dull, gritty mat, shaved bare in spots from her afternoon in the operating room.

  Dr. Nesbitt glances at Henry hooked to the back of his mother’s chair, then back at her. “Oh, so now you’re Marie’s spokeswoman, her handmaiden,” he replies. He rubs his eyes and stretches. “Believe me, Mother, no one knows better than I the dismal status of Miss Marie’s toilette. I inhaled it all night. My diagnosis? A tawdry life of bathing in dry creek beds and stagnant swamps.”

  We assess Marie. She assesses us right back. Her stray eye, which I had not noticed until now, makes it hard to look her in the face. She raises her leg to scratch her torn ear, but yelps and sinks to the floor.

  Dr. Nesbitt rolls his eyes. “A bath can only improve so much, Mother.” He cracks her poached egg and spreads plum jam on her toast.

  “I’ll do it,” I hear myself say.

  Mrs. Nesbitt turns to me. “Iris?”

  “I’ll give her a bath.” My offer sounds even more incredible the second time.

  “Why, dear, that would be lovely. Do you have a dog at home?”

  “No, ma’am. I just…” My hands get clammy. Why did I say that? I have no idea how to wash a dog.

  “After wrestling with Marie, you’ll need a bath too, Iris!” Dr. Nesbitt remarks.

  The fact that he used “bath” and “Iris” in the same sentence is so utterly embarrassing I could die. I stare at a pool of cold egg yolk. How could he say it without picturing it? “I… I didn’t mean I wanted a… I mean, I don’t need a bath, I mean, I probably do need a bath, but…”

  Marie whines for more toast. We’ve switched places, I think—the smelly dog is so at home in here. I’m the one who should crawl out the door.

  Dr. Nesbitt stands, clears his throat. “Thank you, Miss Baldwin. There’s a tub in the garage.” He says this with a tone of doctorly authority. I think he’s sorry he embarrassed me.

  Outdoors, Dr. Nesbitt and I situate the tub near the windmill pump. “Keep a close eye on Mother, Iris. Until yesterday, I hadn’t seen her out of that wheelchair in… She’s been so…” He looks away. I sense a painful scene in his mind’s eye, maybe more than one. He turns to me. “Don’t say a word about her wheelchair. Might break the spell.”

  After breakfast, when Dr. Nesbitt goes to his office in Wellsford, Mrs. Nesbitt invites me to her room to water her plants and dust.

  She seems lost in her thoughts as she taps down the hall, her hair a fine gray stream flowing over the satin collar on her robe. In her room, she strikes a theatrical pose against apricot-colored wallpaper covered with jungle flowers. The room smells of jasmine perfume and mothballs.

  I know I should say something—compliment the elaborate decor, or ask just the right questions while I’m watering her violets and dusting her collection of seashells. But I feel as misplaced as Cecil Deets would be in this leafy habitat of hers.

  I try to be quick and efficient with my first official housekeeping chore. I make her bed easily enough. If I barely wave the feather duster over her things I have less possibility of breaking them. I swipe her mahogany headboard—a gorgeous carved swan, so graceful it could glide right out the window. I try to ignore Mrs. Nesbitt’s wheelchair, parked at the foot of her bed, with a worn-down pillow in the seat and a terrycloth bag attached to the armrest.

  I dust silver frames on her nightstand with photos of men in uniform—her son, maybe, or Mr. Nesbitt—and then move along to an intricate pagoda on an ebony stand that spins.

  Seated on her vanity chair, she watches my every move. I cannot wait to be finished. I turn to her. “Mrs. Nesbitt, I meant to thank you for the stationery and all. It was so nice. I already have a letter to post.”

  “You’re very welcome. We’ve not had a houseguest, except Marsden, in so very long.”

  A guest?

  In no time I’ve gone over everything—perfume atomizers, a porcelain hatpin holder, even her gold slippers. She sighs, a sound more exasperated than satisfied. I lower the duster. Something’s wrong.

  She looks out the window. I fear she’s blinking back tears.

  What?

  What?

  She won’t look at me. She dabs her eyes with a hankie. Should I clean her glasses? Get on the next train? I just stand there—a feather duster in one hand, a flannel rag in the other.

  After a terribly long moment she asks, “Iris, your mother has passed, hasn’t she?”

  I look down. “Yes.”

  “I’d love to see her picture. Did you look alike?”

  “I didn’t bring one. I…”

  She gives me a glance. “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Your father?”

  “He’s gone… I mean, off… to Kansas City, and I…” I wouldn’t think of bringing a picture of him.

  I look at the clutter around us, wondering why, if she hates dust, she has so much stuff to collect it. She sits, head bowed, when without warning these words come out of my mouth: “Mrs. Nesbitt, would you like me to dust… again?”

  She nods, her bent hands crumpled in her lap. “Yes. Please.”

  I raise the window shade. I carefully shake out the dust cloth and move it like a snail over everything I have already dusted. I polish her tortoiseshell hand mirror. I hold glass figurines for her inspection. “My husband’s mother gave those to me,” she says. “I never liked them, but I do now.” I tilt the photos to the light for her. She doesn’t want to hold them. “My hands are too lame. But please arrange them in a circle so we’re all facing each other.”

  One by one, my hands and the rag cherish her things for her.

  After a while she says, “I find that dusting brings out memories, Iris, the way rubbing a magic lamp releases the genie.”

  I nod to be polite, but… but what if your genies are asleep, or dead? What if your memories never had a chance to get made?

  “My mother has passed on too.” Mrs. Nesbitt looks heavenward, her eyes glistening. “We’ll need to dust together every day.”

  “I’m bigger than you, Marie, and smarter, so get in here.”

  “You forgot to mention that Marie’s teeth are bigger than yours,” Mrs. Nesbitt says. We’re behind the house. She sits on an overturned bucket, wearing a yellow sunhat, waving off the flies with a fan. There’s not another house in sight, just a skinny, lone telephone line linking us to the neighbors, wherever they are. I hear bugs and the drone of a tractor. I shudder, picturing fat, greasy Cecil sitting on it.

  I hoist Marie into a giant tub full of soapy water.

  She yips, but thankfully doesn’t scramble to get out. With one dog paddle, she’s out of my reach. I kneel with one knee on an anthill and the other in the mud. The strap of my smock slips off. Flies find us, because Marie, even underwater, smells like a pile of horse manure.

  Mrs. Nesbitt and I decide Marie needs a long soak before any scrubbing. The thought of accidentally touching her bare stitches or her tail stub is disgusting. So is the muck already floating in the water. She seems perfectly happy to let us pamper her.

  With bread and breakfast scraps as an incentive, she splatters us through two grubby washes and a rinse which Mrs. Nesbitt insists we scent with perfume. Wet, Marie looks like a drowned river rat, but she trots around like Venus before settling into a sunny puddle of driveway dirt.

  I dump out the tub. My smock and hair are soaked. I’ve got grit under my fingernails and dog hair in my mouth. “I take that back about who’s smarter,” I tell Mrs. Nesbitt. “I’m the wet dog and she smells like jasmine.”

  CHAPTER 6

  June 2, 1926

  Dear Leroy,

  I have been in Wellsfo
rd for one whole night and day. This is what I have accomplished so far:

  killed a bum

  amputated a dog’s tail

  drank brandy

  took an eye test

  and ate a peppermint.

  Ha!

  If you want details, write back.

  Please tell Carl I donated my reverse-leather suede boots to the Burlington Railroad.

  Say hello to Mrs. Andrews.

  How’s your new ice delivery job?

  Have you started to miss me?

  Your friend,

  Iris Louise Baldwin.

  (Who you plan to come visit very soon.)

  P.S. They keep a shotgun by the kitchen door. I wonder if it’s loaded.

  Blood is everywhere—the sheets, the ticking, even my pillowcase!

  I’ve stuffed a bath towel between my legs, so now I’m ruining it, too. The only other choice is Mrs. Nesbitt’s hankie.

  “When it happens, keep it to yourself,” Mrs. Andrews had warned when she explained menstruation to me last year. The conversation lasted less than a minute, with no time for questions. “It’s a nasty medical condition, a curse on women. Do your utmost to guard against leakage, odor, accidents…”

  So far, I have failed. How can I keep this a secret?

  I turn on my side, stare out the window. Shifty wind brushes the corn rows—green then silver then green again.

  There’s a war in my stomach, or is it my back, or both?

  I would like to die.

  For the last two years I’ve worried about it to death—that I’d start in the middle of Latin or physical education. Then I feared it wouldn’t ever happen. But why didn’t I think it could start here? How could I have packed my whole trunk and brought nothing—no rags or pads?

  Outside our shoe store window I used to watch ladies, some of them mothers of girls in my class, go into Lowen’s Pharmacy and come out with a bulky sack—their “silent purchase.” The store had a system—you put money in a box and took a package of Kotex pads off the counter without saying anything to anybody. I was so dumb not to do that. My stupidity doesn’t go in a cycle. I’m stupid all the time.

  Dr. Nesbitt’s got an office full of gauze bandages and clean rags, maybe even a stack of diapers somewhere. But I can’t sneak in there… stupid, stupid. His office is so tidy, he’d notice if I borrowed a safety pin.

  I rearrange the towel. From the kitchen come Dr. and Mrs. Nesbitt’s voices and the clink of teaspoons. I smell coffee and toast. Dr. Nesbitt is cooking breakfast. Then he’ll do the rest of my jobs before he goes to work.

  I’m trapped. Even if I pretend I’m sick, they’ll see the ruined towel and know. If I had three wishes in the world, they would all be for a box of Kotex and two safety pins.

  Oh, God… here comes Marie. Her toenails clickity-click on the strips of hardwood beside the carpet runner. She bumps my door open and looks at me cockeyed. I can see sunlight through the tear in her ear, but she’s definitely fluffier now, almost shiny. I sniff her jasmine perfume.

  She puts her front paws on the mattress and sniffs me. “Ugh. For God’s sake, Marie, git. Go get some toast.” I flap my hands. “Shoo!”

  But she just sniffs more. She does some doggy circles like she’s contemplating what to do next. I swear she seems to be thinking.

  She trots outside the dining room door and barks.

  “Shut up, Marie. Bye-bye!”

  She barks again, this time more shrilly.

  Help. Please, please, don’t anybody come in here.

  “Scram!”

  She minds me by scramming right back into the kitchen and barking her head off.

  An eternity passes. The phone rings—a short and two longs. Not the Nesbitts’ code. Roosters, robins, everybody is up and running but me. I hear tap… tap… tap.

  It’s Henry.

  In another eternity Mrs. Nesbitt peeks in the door. I’m completely turned inside out, all smelly horribleness.

  She assesses the scene in an instant. “Bottom drawer.” I stare at her, uncomprehending. She nods toward the chest. “We’ll do wash this afternoon instead of dusting.” She leaves, shutting the door behind her.

  In the bureau are three dark blue boxes with white crosses and one word printed on them: Kotex. My hands fumble trying to pin the thick pad into clean underwear. The wallpaper goddesses watch. What help are they, flying around in their see-through gowns? You don’t read myths about this.

  I roll my dirty clothes and pillowcase, and the stained towel inside the sheets so that not one speck of red shows, and waddle down the hall, all the while praying, Please, God, have Dr. Nesbitt be gone by now. I walk on the outsides of my feet. The pad feels like a bale of hay.

  “He already left,” Mrs. Nesbitt says with a sympathetic smile when I step into the kitchen. I set the laundry pile on the back porch and shrink into a kitchen chair. She shrugs. “A wash with bluing will take care of it. How are you feeling?”

  Mrs. Nesbitt and Marie silently watch me sob into a napkin. But it’s not my “time of the month” making me cry, it’s their motherly help. Like magic, they turned awful to easy.

  “I’d rather wash you in that tub than wash sheets in this,” I tell Marie after breakfast. The Nesbitt’s washing machine is yellow with two wooden tubs—one for washing and one for rinse. There’s a wringer that’ll scalp me if one hair gets caught in it. It already squished a grasshopper, leaving a smear of yellow-green on my pillowcase. Mrs. Andrews’ washer was electric. This one’s got a gas engine that sputters grease.

  When I’m finished the sheets aren’t shredded, nor are they perfectly white, but they’re close. I’m sure there are traces of grease and grasshopper guts and my time of the month if you took a magnifying glass to them.

  Mrs. Nesbitt has gone inside to take a nap. Dr. Nesbitt should be back soon. There is no way he will just say hello and go in his clinic without noticing my sheets—giant banners announcing, Hear ye, hear ye, Iris Baldwin has her period.

  Thank goodness there’s a breeze. I shake the sheets and wrestle them over the clothesline. I don’t hear the horse and wagon until it’s all the way up our drive.

  Cecil Deets.

  He just sits up there on the wagon bench with a smug look. “Strange. Not their usual laundry day,” he remarks, chewing a wad of tobacco. His eyes dart around, probably looking for Mrs. Nesbitt. “You look like you could use a hand.”

  “No,” I say too sharply. “No, thank you.”

  He jumps off the seat, glances at me, and rubs the hem of one of my sheets between his grimy fingers. “Where’s the lady of the house?”

  But before I can answer, Marie leaps off the back porch and charges at Cecil, her teeth bared. She acts part wolf, part bear. Cecil kicks at her, then hops back in his wagon. “Holy shit!” He squints at her, and says, “Oh, I know you. You’re the stinkin’ mutt beggin’ scraps around my place. Your dead hobo musta underfed ya.”

  A strip of fur down Marie’s back rises. Her ears flatten. Despite the cuts and bruises she looks ready to attach her teeth to his ankle.

  “Marie, stop that,” I say. But she doesn’t.

  “Marie?” Cecil makes that burpy laugh. “Huh!” He gives the sheets a good once-over, and then gives me the same. He raises his eyebrows, lowers his voice. “Yep, you’re more matured than my Dot. Just how long they hired you for?” I look away without answering, desperate to hear Dr. Nesbitt’s car.

  The three of us are caught together for a long, awful moment.

  “You ever need any kind of help around here when the doctor’s gone, just let me know, Miss Iris Baldwin.” He shakes his head, as though I must be confused. “It’s surely a puzzle—you out here with the laundry instead of Dot.”

  Go away…

  He spits in the dust, clucks his horse, and as slow as a slug, turns his rig around.

  . . . and never come again.

  “I will not report the events of this day to Leroy in my next letter,” I tell Marie, sitting on
my bed later that afternoon. She’s pooped. No wonder—she’s been taking care of me all day. “Yesterday I would have put you through the washing machine and the wringer, and today you’re my new best friend.” I rub her head. “What happened between you and Cecil Deets?” She looks up at me. “You know something, don’t you?”

  I lie back. Every part of me either aches or drips or throbs. Mrs. Nesbitt’s still in bed too. She doesn’t seem to feel well today, either.

  I have three thoughts—a good one, a new one, and an awful one. The good one is how Mrs. Nesbitt planned for me, looked forward to my coming with the stamps and body powder and Kotex she bought.

  My new thought is that I never once considered she’d be curious about me; that she’d talk, much less ask questions; that we’d have anything in common.

  Now the awful thought. If Mrs. Nesbitt didn’t go to town for my silent purchase, which I’m pretty sure is right, then who did? I shudder. “Oh, please let it be a catalog order,” I say to Marie, “or even Dr. Nesbitt.

  “Anybody but Cecil.”

  “Supper from Miss Olive Nish tonight,” Dr. Nesbitt announces, unloading two covered containers on the kitchen counter. “The perfect trade-off for trimming her ingrown toenails—yams marinated in sorghum molasses and green beans in bacon grease.”

  My stomach lurches. Mrs. Nesbitt walks into the kitchen with Henry, rested and smiling. Dr. Nesbitt starts to grab her arm, then stops himself. Instead he pecks her on the cheek. After a day of toenail trimming and God knows what else, his hair still looks like he parted it with a scalpel.

  “How’d you get along today?” he asks, kneeling beside Marie on the floor. He feels her ribs, parts her fur and examines her stitches and her tail. “Looks like we missed a spot on your ear, but, all in all, you look beautiful.”

  “And strong,” I say.

  Dr. Nesbitt sorts through the mail. Marie sighs—a long, satisfied sound—and falls asleep. Mrs. Nesbitt suggests we plant marigold seeds by the front stoop. I don’t mention Cecil or the cranky washing machine. I just listen to a soft summer rain drum the back porch roof.