Old Ladies
Stories
Nancy Huddleston Packer
2012 • John Daniel & Company, McKinleyville, California
“Night Noises,” “Two’s Company,” and “Untangled” were first published in Epoch. “Regulars,” “Her Men,” and “Dust Catchers” were first published in Sewanee Review. “The Pioneer Women” was first published in North American Review, Vol. 287, No. 6. “A Woman and His Dog” is scheduled to be published in Cold Mountain Review.
Copyright © 2012 by Nancy Huddleston Packer
All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-1-56474-761-7
The interior design and the cover design of this book are intended for and limited to the publisher’s first print edition of the book and related marketing display purposes. All other use of those designs without the publisher’s permission is prohibited.
Published by John Daniel and Company
A division of Daniel and Daniel, Publishers, Inc.
Post Office Box 2790
McKinleyville, CA 95519
www.danielpublishing.com
Distributed by SCB Distributors (800) 729-6423
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Packer, Nancy Huddleston.
Old ladies : stories / by Nancy Huddleston Packer.
p. cm.
ISBN [first printed edition] 978-1-56474-527-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Older women--Fiction. I. Title. PS3566.A318O53 2012
813’.54--dc23
2011045745
For
Emily,
Will,
Charlie,
and
Julia
Contents
Night Noises
Her Men
Charade
The Pioneer Women
Squaring the Circle
Two’s Company
Bridge
Untangle
A Woman and His Dog
Dust Catchers
Regulars
Night Noises
For the three months following Cal’s death Louise kept hearing strange noises at night in the empty house. A file scratching metal, footsteps rustling on the stairs, sibilant breathing outside her locked bedroom door. She woke up several times a night and sometimes lay awake until dawn, listening to nothing.
“I’m getting dotty,” she told her daughter, Sibyl, over the telephone. “I keep hearing awful noises at night, and I can’t sleep. Cal always said I had an overactive imagination.”
“Why don’t you move up here to Seattle,” Sibyl said, not for the first time. “I’ve found a lovely retirement community out on Lake Washington not fifteen minutes from our home.”
“Well, I hope it’s a good fifteen years from mine,” Louise said.
Sibyl didn’t laugh. Like Cal, she didn’t always appreciate the joke. “Then why not get someone to live there with you?” she said and then gave a little gasp as though the idea had just come to her, which, Louise thought, meant she’d been pondering it for quite a while. “What about Dad’s study? Private bath. Outside entrance. Perfect.”
Louise didn’t say anything for a moment. Maybe that could be the solution. She was worn out with all the noises, and she sure wasn’t ready for a retirement home. “Well, maybe,” she said.
***
Edward was the first to answer the advertisement Louise put in the Palo Alto Weekly. He was a small man with a pale unmarked face and lashless eyes and twig-like arms hanging from his short-sleeved shirt. Appearance seemed an unfair reason to deny him the room, so Louise told him that since the early bird gets the worm, he could have Cal’s study. She chuckled to herself: he looked more like the worm than the bird.
He brought a microwave and a computer and some other machines she couldn’t identify, and in his first and pretty nearly only words he said he worked at home, was that okay?
“He’s a funny little fellow,” Louise said to Sibyl after Edward had been there a week. “Not a speck of color in his face, not even a faded freckle. Never leaves his room. Never sees the sunlight. Just sits out there tapping on that computer.”
“And the night noises?”
“Gone. The house is as silent as a tomb.”
“Didn’t I tell you?” said Sibyl. “Perfect.”
“If you like the smell of pizza,” Louise said.
Every evening Domino’s delivered a pie that Edward microwaved for dinner and then breakfast and lunch the next day. Louise found herself sniffing to see what topping the pizza had. Sometimes she smelled spicy pepperoni, sometimes sausage grease, and sometimes the acrid odor of cooked olives.
One night lying in bed sniffing, she realized that the pizza fumes were invading her entire house, clinging to her curtains, seeping into her clothes, hovering like an invisible cloud ready to rain down cheese and tomato sauce and soggy crusts on her very own head. Edward had to go.
When Louise told Sibyl, Sibyl gave out a long-suffering sigh. “It made me feel better knowing you had someone with you, just in case,” she said.
“Oh, if I croak, you’ll be among the first to know.” Louise laughed so hard she had to apologize. “I know you worry, I’ll find someone who doesn’t eat pizza.”
***
She tacked the second advertisement on the post in front of the supermarket, where there would be no chance of Edward’s seeing it. A furniture store deliveryman named Leo was the first to apply. Leo didn’t look at all like Edward. He was overweight and soft, and his 49ers T-shirt was stretched tight over his belly, and his pants hung so low on his hips that the frayed cuffs dragged the ground under his heels. Probably sucked in that mammoth belly when his pants were hemmed. “I don’t allow a microwave,” she said.
“I ain’t got one,” he said, “so I guess we’re all set.”
The first afternoon after Leo had moved in, Louise was in her garden enjoying the sunlight and the late summer breezes, and reading the newspaper, when Leo walked up the path and planted himself on the edge of a lounge chair and said in his low, slow voice, “I know you been wondering how come I’m living here.” Not for a moment had she thought of it, but she politely cocked her head to show an interest.
He told her he had moved out of his apartment and sold all of his furniture because it just crunched his heart to be there without his wife. She had left him, he said, for his old high school football buddy. “We were the grunts,” Leo said, “him right me left upside the snapper.” Louise had no idea what he was talking about, but she nodded sympathetically.
After that every day when Leo came home he took a seat on the lounge chair, folded his hands, and rehearsed his troubles with his wife. He was like a top spinning in a groove. The discoveries, the entreaties, the quarrels, his wife, his buddy, his buddies—for apparently the football buddy wasn’t the first or even the second.
At first Louise found him touching and pitiable, and she was interested in his stories of lives so different from hers and Cal’s, of people who acted on impulse and lived at the top of their lungs. But after three weeks of hearing the same litany of woes, she began to dread the sound of his footsteps. To escape one day, she slipped from the garden into her house as he approached. But he went to the front door and knocked and knocked until she answered. After that, wherever she was he sought her out. She knew it was her own fault for listening to him the first time. Now there was no escape without hurting the poor fellow’s feelings.
And then one afternoon after Leo had lived there for five weeks, he came walking through the garden gate grinning. He told her that his wife had come by the furniture store and said she wanted to get back with him. Telling this, he looked sheepishly pleased, as though he had been the miscreant and had been forgiven.
“You’ll love
her,” he said. “She’s coming this weekend.”
The next evening Louise called Sibyl and told her the saga of Leo and his wife and the buddies, and that now he wanted to install his wife in the study with him. “Next thing I know they’d both be spending their days telling me their disreputable stories and then squabbling all night, keeping me awake. I told him the room couldn’t hold the two of them.”
“Don’t be too hasty,” Sibyl said. “Maybe you could help straighten her out.”
Louise blew out an indignant puff of air. “I’m not a social worker and I’m not a preacher and I’m not a policeman.” She could almost hear Sibyl’s disappointment wafting along the telephone wires. But she wasn’t going to ruin her life just to save Sibyl five minutes of worry a week. “It would be worse than the pizza, worse than the night noises.”
After a long silence, Sibyl said, “If you want me to come down to help you find someone suitable…”
“I think I’m capable of finding someone suitable,” Louise said in a huffy voice. So she had made two little mistakes, so what. To cover her irritation, she changed the subject. “How’re my little rascals doing?”
That set Sibyl off at once and she filled Louise in on her two daughters and Scouts, school, and soccer. “They’d love for you to come up for Thanksgiving,” she finished, “and so would Ross and I.”
During the years Cal was sick, Thanksgiving had been slices of turkey from the deli and a little can of cranberry sauce. It would be fun to help Sibyl prepare a real dinner and have a game of Scrabble with the girls. “I’ll sure be there,” Louise said.
She hung up the phone with a wry laugh. Imagine looking forward to helping someone cook and to playing games with two reluctant little girls. As a young woman she had dreamed of being an actress or a writer, something creative and special, but she had married Cal and moved to Palo Alto where he worked for Hewlett-Packard, and she had soon had Sibyl. Not exactly what she had yearned for, but a good life all told, far better than most people had. And Thanksgiving in Seattle would be a nice change, rain and all.
***
She thumb-tacked the next ad on the bulletin board at the university’s housing office, pretty sure Leo wouldn’t be looking there. The first to telephone was a woman named Ingrid Something-Scandinavian, who said she taught seventh grade at the local middle school. Louise didn’t think a little female schoolteacher was much protection against the noises, and so she said the room was taken.
At three-thirty that afternoon, Ingrid Svendsen appeared at Louise’s front door. Her bushy hair was the color of raw pine and her face was round and flat as a plate. She was over six feet tall and her shoulders were broad, her hips were wide, and her legs, ensconced in purple tights, were thick and mighty. Louise thought maybe such a Valkyrie would be okay.
“The fellow I told you about changed his mind,” she said.
“I figured as much. Show me the room.”
Louise led the way into Cal’s study, and Ingrid banged the doors and flushed the toilet and bounced on the bed until it clanged. When she stood up, she pointed at Cal’s gallery of family photographs on the wall. “You’ll have to get rid of those,” she said. “Also these trinkets on the desk.” She swept into her hand the little souvenirs Cal had collected on his travels.
“Now just a minute,” Louise began. The pictures belonged on the wall, the souvenirs on the desk. Edward had probably not even noticed them, and Leo had said they made the place homey.
Ingrid turned her longshoreman’s shoulders and brightly painted moon face to Louise and her expression said nothing on earth could deter her so don’t even try. “And I’ll get a sack for those,” Louise finished. She had always thought the trinkets were a nuisance to dust.
***
When Ingrid moved in on Sunday evening, a man helped her. “This is my boyfriend, Thomas,” Ingrid said. “He teaches at the high school.”
Thomas was a good six inches shorter than Ingrid, as wiry and twitchy as she was solid and planted. While they stood talking, he kept combing his fingers through his scraggly beard, and when he laughed—a quick nervous whistle through clenched teeth—he looked downright daffy. What a pair.
As Louise was preparing herself a cup of tea the next afternoon, Ingrid gave a quick little knock on the door that separated her room from the kitchen and barged right in. “Tea!” she exclaimed, plopping herself down across from Louise at the little kitchen table. “My favorite’s Earl Grey, but I’ll drink that stuff,” she nodded toward the package on the counter, “if it’s all you’ve got.”
Louise frowned. What right had this woman to burst in uninvited and criticize her tea? But Louise didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot, and so she covered her annoyance by shaking out a few more of the butter cookies she had as a snack every afternoon. Then she poured the tea.
After Ingrid had eaten three cookies and drunk the tea in two swallows, she leaned back in her chair and said, “Show and tell. What’d you do today?”
Louise shrugged. “Watched a few soaps, took my afternoon nap, read the newspaper.”
“Soaps, naps, newspapers,” Ingrid dismissed all that with a flick of her wrist. “Waste of time.”
Now Louise was truly annoyed. “It’s good to stay abreast of the news.”
“Abreast of the news?” As Ingrid roared with laughter, her belly bounced in and out. “Don’t you know you can’t stay abreast of the news? By the time you finish reading one edition, everything’s changed and you have to wait for the next. You never catch up. I want you doing better than that.”
Louise was on the verge of telling Ingrid she had to leave right then, but she imagined having to admit to Sibyl that this one had lasted only one day. “Now it’s my time to tell.” Ingrid said an eighth-grader had been thrashing around out in the play yard with an iron pipe, scaring the hell out of the other kids, and Ingrid had wrestled it from him and dragged him by his ear to the principal’s office.
“The kids cheered like hell.” She wiped a cookie crumb from her chin and stood up. “You get a D-minus for show and tell.” And back she went to her room.
That evening after a PBS nature show on the lives of cheetahs, Louise went to the kitchen. As she gathered up the dirty plates to put them in the dishwasher, she became aware of a moaning from the study, and her first thought was that if Ingrid had fallen she would never be able to lift her up. She’d have to call 911. Then she heard Ingrid say, “Oh, Thomas, you’re so marvelous,” followed by a few little yelps and then a deep loud groan.
Louise went straight up to her bedroom and sat down at her dressing table. Her face felt warm, and she was trembling a little. Were they…? Were they actually…? Surely not, with her in the next room. Ingrid probably had fallen and Thomas was struggling to pick her up. Or perhaps they were shifting the furniture. When people were moving something heavy, they did sometimes grunt.
***
The next afternoon Ingrid walked into the kitchen, this time without even a single knock. “Earl Grey,” she said, holding out a tin box with a painting of a Victorian woman sipping daintily from a teacup. “We’ve got to improve your palate.” She thrust the little box into Louise’s hand.
Louise was quite offended. There was nothing wrong with her palate or her tea. She was pretty sure that, Sibyl or not, Ingrid wouldn’t last as long as Edward, let alone Leo. “I’ll make tea with this, then,” she said, allowing herself a tiny sarcastic twist to her voice, “unless my method isn’t good enough for you.”
Ingrid flapped her hand. “Oh, now,” she said, “you’re too nice to go all hoity-toity on me just because I don’t like your tea.” Then she laughed with such good humor that Louise felt a little ashamed, and so she smiled, to show she’d just been kidding.
Once they had drunk the tea and finished off the rest of the butter cookies, Ingrid rocked back in her chair until it creaked so loudly it seemed about to splinter. “I’ll start the show and tell.” She told Louise that a pushy mother had demanded that her d
aughter be given the lead role in the class play they were casting. “I said to her, You got one-half minute to get your butt out of my classroom if you want to keep it attached.”
Louise gave a little gasp. “You said that in front of your students?”
“Boy did they have a good laugh watching her skedaddle. Especially her daughter.” She broke off her laughter and eyed Louise suspiciously. “Your turn. I bet you watched TV and then read the whole damn newspaper including the want ads.”
After lunch Louise had watched a female TV judge lambasting a frail, greedy old woman and had listened to a talk show with a bunch of goofy-looking wrestlers, and then she had taken the newspaper out to the garden. But she had certainly not read the want ads. “I certainly did not,” she began in her haughtiest voice, but to claim credit for not reading the want ads would be demeaning, so she shifted in mid-sentence to “not read the newspaper. I read a book.” Good grief, I’m telling a lie, she thought. But she was too far in to stop. Might as well push it a bit, show Ingrid her life wasn’t just television and newspapers. “War and Peace,” she said.
“Heard of it. Never read it,” Ingrid said. “Tell me about it.”
In the first year they were married, Louise and Cal had started to read the book aloud to each other but after three or four pages Cal either fell asleep or got amorous and then fell asleep. Cal finally admitted he couldn’t keep the Russian names in his head, and they had not read past the second chapter, though Louise had always intended to go back to it. She said, “It kind of alternates. You know, war and then peace.”
“I’m familiar enough with war, God knows, teaching kids,” Ingrid said. “So what’s in the peace section?”
“The peace section?” Louise repeated. She felt her face warming. How had she gotten herself into this mess? “Well, this Russian woman…”—she paused—“runs away with an army officer.” Maybe that was Anna Karenina. Or Dostoevsky. She quickly got up and turned to the stove. “Want another cup?”
“Nope. What happens to them?”
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