Dreaming In Color

by Charlotte Vale-Allen

  "Okay," Bobby said, standing upright. "But we're just hired help here, honey. You've gotta remember that. Don't go acting like it's your place."

  "But we live here now," Penny said, frowning.

  "We live here, but it's not our house. Okay?"

  "Okay." Penny looked unconvinced as they entered the foyer. "I'm going up now," she told her mother, dropping to her knees to open her backpack for Where the Sidewalk Ends.

  "Take off your coat and boots," Bobby told her quietly. "I don't want you dirtying the carpet."

  Penny obeyed, then ran to the stairs. Bobby remained in the front hall watching her go, and winced at hearing Penny knock at Alma's door and sing out, "Granny, I'm home from school."

  Alma's gruff voice replied, "I've been waiting for you. Ah, you've got your book. Good."

  Exhaling slowly, Bobby went downstairs to unpack before dinner. She didn't know what to make of these people, and couldn't begin to imagine what they thought of her. But as long as they did their dissecting and analyzing about somebody else, she figured she could survive it. And Pen was settling right in, making herself a granny out of that tough old bird.

  Five

  "Where're you at?" Aunt Helen asked.

  "We're in Connecticut," Bobby told her. "I got a live-in job in a real … really nice place." "Joe came here looking for you." "I figured he probably would. What'd you say?" "I told him to get off my property, that I wouldn't tell him even if I knew.

  He didn't believe me, but I said I'd call the cops and he took off. You and Pen gonna be all right?"

  "We're gonna be fine. Listen, would it be okay if I give the post office your address for my mail? That way, anything important comes, you can send it to me."

  "I guess," Helen said. "Lemme get a pencil."

  Bobby gave her the address, then said, "Hide it somewhere safe."

  "Don't you worry. Just let me hear from you once in a while."

  "I will. And thanks, Aunt Helen."

  "About time you got yourself away from that man. He's gonna wind up killing somebody one of these times." "Yeah," Bobby said. "I know."

  After dinner, Eva worked in her office over the garage for a couple of hours, making up for some of the time she'd lost getting Bobby oriented to their routine.

  At eleven, she stored her chapter and turned off the computer. She jotted down a few points she wanted to remember for the next day, then switched off the lights, locked up, and walked through the dark garage to the kitchen.

  She unloaded the dishwasher, set the table for tomorrow's breakfast, laid out Aunt Alma's tray, and finally filled the coffee maker and reset the timer. She automatically checked the downstairs doors and windows before heading upstairs. Seeing the light still on in her aunt's room, she tapped lightly then opened the door. Alma laid her right hand across the page she'd been reading and looked up.

  "What do you think?" Eva asked, crossing to sit on the side of the bed. "Will she work out?"

  "She's afraid of her own shadow, but she didn't misrepresent her physical strength. She seems to have no problem at all with this old carcass. And it's nice being a granny again. I like that child. What do you think?" "She keeps reminding me of Deborah," Eva said, staring off into space for a moment. "They're not remotely alike, but I can't stop comparing them."

  "It's the psychology that fascinates you," Alma said cannily. "It always has."

  "I hadn't thought about her for years before Bobby came along. D'you suppose her real name is Roberta? Bobby is so … I don't know. It's so rural."

  Alma rasped out a laugh.

  Eva smiled at her. "Well, it is. Bobby's a name from the Appalachians or the Okefenokee Swamp." "Bitchy and elitist," Alma accused. "Both," Eva agreed. "And I'm longing to do something about that hair.

  Granted, it's hard to tell what she looks like, given the condition of her face, but I suspect she's actually quite pretty. She'd look infinitely better with a decent haircut."

  "Her hair has nothing to do with her capabilities," Alma insisted.

  Thinking aloud, Eva said, "It's almost like a self-imposed class barrier: women defining themselves by their hair." "Go to bed," Alma said, "and let me get to sleep." Eva leaned forward to kiss her aunt's cheek, then got up asking, "Anything you want before I go?"

  "Not a thing. I'll see you in the morning."

  Penny dreamed that she climbed onto the school bus and every single child was dressed up like a clown, with round red noses and big red mouths and little black teardrops painted on their white cheeks. The bus driver said, "Hurry up now and sit down. You know I can't start this bus until you're in your seat." Penny looked up and down both rows, unable to see anywhere to sit. She turned to tell the driver but when she tried to talk, nothing would come out.

  "You'll have to get off," the driver said.

  But how was she going to get to school? Penny asked her mutely.

  "If you can't find a seat, you can't ride the bus."

  Penny looked again at the rows of clown-suited children, all laughing and honking squeezy horns. Way at the very back was one empty seat, and she started toward it, smiling at the little clowns as she moved down the aisle. Maybe it was a special day at school and she was supposed to have a clown costume too. Why hadn't her mom known about it?

  Sliding into the seat, she held Mr. Bear to her chest as the bus lurched forward, feeling mad at her mom.

  "Keep it quiet, you kids!" the driver called back over her shoulder.

  The children turned to each other, giggling.

  Penny held Mr. Bear and smiled politely, her eyes on the front of the bus. She wished she had a clown suit and a red nose and a big painted smile, a polka-dot costume with puffy sleeves and a white ruffled collar. It was because it was a new school, she decided. And nobody had told her mom. Now she was going to be the only one in the whole school wearing dumb old jeans and a sweater. But maybe, she thought, feeling a sudden hope, maybe the teachers would be wearing everyday clothes too, and then it'd be okay.

  Bobby lunged awake into the darkness, not knowing where she was. Heart hammering, she reached out blindly, groping for the light on the bedside table. Got it on. Looked around. Penny had kicked off her covers. Taking short, shallow breaths, Bobby got out of bed and drew the blankets up over her daughter. Then she went into the bathroom and splashed cold water over her face, touched her wet hands to the back of her neck, shivering. Turning off the water, she straightened, her neck and shoulder muscles tight and aching.

  Sitting in the kitchen with a cigarette, head resting on her hand, she tried to remember when she'd last slept through the night. It had been so long she couldn't remember. She thought it was probably sometime before Grandpa got sick. A long, long time ago.

  Eva looked at the telephone on the bedside table, realizing another day had gone by and Melissa hadn't called. Nothing unusual. During the first few weeks of her freshman year, Melissa had phoned every other night. But after that, once she'd settled in, she'd let weeks go by before she called home. Eva wished she could hear from her more often, but she accepted the reality that her daughter's life was no longer tied to hers. She herself had been equally casual about calling home during her own college years. Now she wondered if Alma hadn't privately worried about her just as she couldn't help worrying about Melissa. Being young meant being self-absorbed. Perhaps Alma had always understood that, having spent most of her life dealing with the young.

  Eva had wanted to commute to Sarah Lawrence in Bronxville, but Alma had persuaded her to go to Bennington. "It'll be good for you," her aunt had insisted. "You need to get out on your own, fend for yourself, become accustomed to living alone." She'd made it sound as if she expected Eva to remain single for life, the way she had. And she would have argued, but her aunt's failure to marry was a sticky subject, one that Alma had usually dismissed as being unworthy of discussion.

  "I made my decision many years ago," her aunt said whenever Eva broached the subject, "and I have yet to regret it." She wore a particular ex
pression at these times that cautioned Eva against pursuing the matter. And having spent all but the first six years of her life in her aunt's care, she'd learned to recognize the warning signals. Alma would discuss men only in the abstract, never in the specific. She worked with them, socialized with them, even, Eva suspected, went to bed with some of them, but she never talked about them. And when Eva began dating, at thirteen or so, she sensed it would be wise to follow her aunt's lead and keep the details to herself

  Eva could vaguely remember a conversation she'd had with her mother when she'd asked why Auntie Alma didn't have a husband. Her mother had sighed and said, "My sister had a very unhappy love affair. The young man married someone else, and now Alma holds every man she meets responsible."

  It hadn't made much sense to a five-year-old, but the brief conversation stayed with her, and as she grew older the explanation seemed ever more viable. Some awful man had broken her aunt's heart and ever afterward she was skeptical and somewhat jaded where men were concerned. But her aunt didn't seem especially unhappy with her life, and Eva had concluded that while she herself aspired to marry and have children, it wasn't necessarily a given that all women would feel that way. Whether it was intentional or unwitting, Alma had taught her niece to understand that some women simply elected to live alone. She saw nothing wrong with it.

  When she met Ken Rule she knew she was going to be one of the women who married. He was destined to be her partner, and she was very comfortable with the knowledge that her life would be different from her aunt's.

  They met during her semester in London, at a pub in Chelsea where she'd gone with Deborah for a drink one evening. He'd been sitting with some friends at the next table and, upon hearing her accent, turned with a smile and said, "Hi. I'm from D.C. Where're you from?"

  She'd liked him immediately. He reminded her of her grandfather, who'd died when she was fourteen. Ken Rule was tall and soft-spoken, with heavy eyebrows like her grandfather's, and wonderfully open. She told him she was from Connecticut and introduced herself and Deborah, who smiled at Ken while giving Eva's knee a significant nudge under the table.

  Ken had worn a tartan vest that night and Eva had said, "That vest's just like my grandfather's."

  With a grin, shifting his chair so that he was now sitting at their table, he'd said, "As a matter of fact, this is your grandfather's."

  She'd laughed delightedly, and they'd started talking, exchanging information, until the barmaid called, "Time, ladies and gentlemen."

  While Deborah was in the loo, Ken said, "Give me your number, and say you'll go out with me Saturday night."

  He insisted on seeing the girls home in a taxi, told Eva he was looking forward to Saturday, told Deborah how happy he was to have met her, then went off, whistling, back to the waiting taxi. As they were climbing the stairs to their rooms, Deborah said, "I expect to be Maid of Honor, darling. Just, please, don't ask me to wear anything pink."

  She and Ken made love in her room after that first date. Thereafter they saw each other two or three times a week. In order to accomplish this, Ken put in extra hours at the office, trying to stay on top of his workload. His degree was in civil engineering but he'd been offered a job straight out of college working for an international carrier. At the time they met he'd been in London for a year and a half. He didn't say much about his work. "It would bore you to death," he told Eva at the beginning. "But it's a good jumping-off point. There's going to be room upstairs for someone like me."

  She had implicit faith in him. By the end of her semester she'd consented to marry him, and he flew back with her to meet Alma. They had only two days together before he had to fly back to London. Her last semester at Bennington went by in a blur. Somehow she got her work done, but all she wanted was to get back to London to be with Ken, and with Deborah.

  If Alma harbored misgivings, she never once expressed them, showing only satisfaction in Eva's choice of husband. She came over to London a week early, shopped with Deborah and Eva for a simple wedding dress, and footed the bill for the wedding.

  Almost a year to the day after they were married, Eva learned she was pregnant. Ken wept when she told him.

  "I've always wanted to be somebody's father," he'd said.

  "You're only twenty-six, for heaven's sake," she'd said, laughing. "How long is always to you?"

  "You know what I mean," he'd said. And she had, because she'd always wanted to be somebody's mother. She'd grown up without a father, and she'd wanted one. Ken's parents had been divorced when he was eleven, and he too had wanted a father. By creating this child they were each satisfying a deep-seated need to correct what they considered historical errors.

  Alma sounded awed when Eva telephoned to give her the news. Awed and possibly wistful. She declared she was overjoyed and wished there were some way she could be in London when the baby was born. But school was in session and it was impossible for her to get away.

  Deborah was on the road with the touring company of a musical but hoped to be back in time for the birth. "And," she'd announced momentously, "I may have some rather fabulous news of my own." She'd refused to elaborate, promising to tell all upon her return.

  As it happened, the baby arrived three weeks early. Ken was present for the birth, standing to one side of the midwife, holding Eva's hand at the moment Melissa left her mother's body. And the first thing he said upon seeing the infant was, "We'll have to do this again."

  "Give me a minute or two," Eva had gasped. And everyone had laughed.

  Melissa was six weeks old by the time Deborah got back to town, pregnant and with Ian in tow. And things were never quite the same afterward between Eva and Deborah. Although Eva made herself available, suggesting outings, there were no more lengthy rambling conversations over lunch or dinner. Just occasional chats on the telephone and, finally, that last visit to the house in Newington Green. Deborah's letters in the intervening years were reassuring; they constituted proof of their continuing friendship. And Eva elected to focus on her friend, setting aside her mixed feelings about the man Deborah had chosen to marry.

  When Ken was transferred back from London, Alma contributed to the down payment on the co-op apartment in Manhattan where Eva had continued to live until Alma's stroke the previous year.

  Oddly enough, in the aftermath of the stroke, Alma became quite loquacious about her early life and spent several afternoons in her hospital room telling Eva all about Randy Wheeler. She spoke without bitterness but slowly, enunciating carefully, recited the facts of the affair, and Eva listened, correctly suspecting that the only reason Alma was revealing her history at this juncture was because she believed she was going to die. Eva was certain that she'd live and, possibly, at some future date, regret making this confession. But for as long as it lasted, Eva drank in the details of her aunt's early life, as eager to hear it as Alma was to tell.

  Alma had never again mentioned either those hospital conversations or the young man she'd once intended to marry, and Eva guessed that her continuing silence was the only indication her aunt was going to give of her regret. Which was typical of Alma. She'd never been one to cry over spilt milk. She simply got on with things, putting whatever displeased her to one side.

  It was this ability to forge ahead, Eva believed, that had made her both a splendid teacher and a wonderful, albeit somewhat eccentric, parent. She expected Eva to learn from her mistakes and never rehashed past incidents in order to make her points. Eva sometimes wondered how she might have turned out if she'd grown up with her natural parents, but in view of the fact that she could scarcely remember Cora and Willard Chaney, it was usually a short-lived exercise. The fact was, Alma was her mother and had been for the past thirty-seven years. And Eva was devoted to her, perhaps more than she might have been to her actual mother who, so far as Eva could remember, was a little dithery and given to playing the helpless female. There was no question that her writing career was a direct result of Alma's long-term encouragement and support. Alma had alwa
ys been her fiercest ally and severest critic, urging Eva from the age of eleven to commit her thoughts to paper. "You've got the gift, Eva," her aunt had said over and over. "Don't be afraid to use it." So she had. She'd taken the things she'd seen and heard and thought about and shaped them into stories that her aunt had edited and critiqued. And, finally, a year after Ken's death, she'd published her first book. Since then there had been five more, and she attributed her success to her aunt's powerfully positive influence. Now she wished she could find a way to restore to her aunt some degree of the gusto she'd lost with the stroke; wished she could repay even a little of what Alma had given her.

  "I've fixed breakfast for you," Eva said. "This afternoon, while Alma's napping, you might want to take a trip to the supermarket, stock up on some food."

  "Okay, thank you," Bobby said, getting Penny settled at the table. "Anything I can do to help?" "Everything's done," Eva said. "I usually have coffee upstairs with my aunt. Just help yourself."

  Bobby arranged a plateful of bacon, eggs and toast for Penny, poured her some orange juice from the pitcher on the counter, and sat down with a cup of coffee while Penny ate. When she'd finished, Bobby got Penny into her coat and boots, pulled on her own coat, and walked with her to the top of the driveway to wait for the school bus.

  "You got your lunch tickets?" Bobby asked her. "Uh-hunh." Penny's eyes were on the road, brightening when she saw the bus approaching.

  "Okay. Starting tomorrow I'll make your lunches. You be a good girl, and I'll see you this afternoon." She bent to kiss Penny's cheek, then straightened as Penny clambered into the yellow bus. Bobby watched it out of sight, turned, and hurried back down the driveway to the house. There was snow in the air. It'd probably start falling sometime soon, and winter would set in for real.

  She rinsed the dishes, put them in the dishwasher, and stood by the window to finish her coffee while she waited for Eva to come down. It gave her a thrill to see the water right at the bottom of the property. Where the grass ended there was a drop like a little cliff down to the eight or ten feet of rock-strewn sand, and then the water stretching off to forever. She could hear the waves washing in even from inside the house. The sound made her feel clean and strong.