by Pam Lewis
In the morning, she was aware of Will rising and getting dressed. The world had changed. She heard the roar of the Gravely when he started it up in the dooryard and then its fading sound as he moved slowly up the rise and down the driveway to the road, blowing snow. She shut her eyes, focusing on those last few minutes. Whatever, Naomi had said, but what had she meant? Whatever you want. That was the explanation Carole wanted. She stared at the ceiling. Whatever, as a way to avoid addressing Carole’s plea? That was the other possibility. But think of the apartment, the mess, the clutter, all that furniture. Not the apartment of a woman getting ready to move. Not at all. It was the apartment of a woman who felt like making trouble, who couldn’t control herself. And she’d made her position clear to Naomi. But really, the bottom line was that Naomi wasn’t up to a move. Naomi was a wreck. Naomi couldn’t move across the hall, let alone up here.
Will came back in, his black hair dusted white, and she listened as he showered, dressed, and slid the change from the dresser top into his pockets. He brought her coffee and sat heavily on the bed beside her. “I dug you out down there and turned the motor over. You shouldn’t have any trouble.”
She nodded. “Thanks, toots.”
“Trip go okay?”
“Mmmm,” she said, sitting up.
“You going to tell me what it was about?” Except for laughter, which from Will was frequent and so wide open it could swallow her up, he was hard to read. His face could look completely neutral, as it did right now, but he wasn’t being neutral, she knew. He was being careful. He was bursting with curiosity.
“A reunion,” she said. “We sang the school song and they asked us for money. None of the people in my class have changed that much. I don’t know. We had little glasses of sherry, and the senior girls sang pop tunes.”
“Sherry,” he said. “You’re kidding.”
“I told you, it was a hoity-toity school.”
“See any old boyfriends?”
“It’s a girls’ school.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “Girls’ school. So what was the big attraction? Are you going to tell me about the old friend?”
She loved his face. She could never get enough of that great big face, the wide lips, the high forehead and kind eyes with those chiseled-looking little eyebrows. “There’s not much more to tell, actually. That girl on the phone that morning, I talked to her, and I don’t think she’s moving up here. She’s kind of a mess.”
“A mess how?” The details of people’s lives fascinated him.
“She drinks too much, she steals, she has roaches—the insect kind—she can’t remember her boyfriend’s name. Shall I go on?”
“Sounds pathetic,” he said. Pathetic was the worst thing he could call somebody. Will’s ultimate dismissal. Once somebody had hit pathetic, he was no longer interested. “Hector keeps calling,” he said. “You never called him back the other day, and he’s hyperventilating. He wants you to come in before lunch today.”
Once Will left, she got out of bed, showered, and shampooed her hair because it smelled of the city. Then she dressed and beat it down the hill to her truck. Years ago, Earl had told her how fast things slide when the owner isn’t around, no matter how great the staff and how much you trust them. It’s human nature to slack off.
But the place was fine. Carole poured herself a cup of coffee in the kitchen, sat down at her desk in the alcove, the only private place there was, and went through some receipts.
“There you are!” It was Hector, dressed to the nines in a white suit and green bow tie. He gave her a swift kiss on each cheek. “So, what do you say, Carole. Was I right or was I right?”
“About what?” she said.
“The picture, you ninny!” He pulled the week’s menu from his jacket. “Don’t tell me you forgot!” He showed her the menu. It was on bright orange paper and folded in half. Inside was the menu, on the back were the puzzles, and spread across the front was a picture of a grade-school class, all lined up in front of a school building. Under the picture it said “Identify the people, the date, and the event. Win two free lunches.”
“The color is dreadful,” Hector said. “But the picture came out splendidly, if I do say so myself. They’re having a ball out there,” he said, pointing to the dining room. “It’s the fourth grade at Union Elementary, 1934. Lots of them out there are in the picture. Significantly changed, of course.”
She peeked out the door. Thursday lunches had started attracting leathery old farmers and their soft, plump wives since Hector had taken over the menu design in return for a few free dinners. He’d make up a crossword puzzle or a word jumble or connect-the-dots. You had to have lived in Montpelier as long as these people had to get any of the answers. Word had spread, and the Thursday crowd was always the biggest. It was the day the new menus came in. Carole was embarrassed about forgetting the photo. He’d spent some time as a school photographer, he’d said, all excited. Why not put those pictures on the menu and see who can get all the faces?
Carole looked around the restaurant. There must have been forty or fifty people. She did a quick mental inventory of the food they had on hand, what had come in on Tuesday, what was left for today. Cases of potatoes and lettuce. A forequarter of lamb, forty pounds of beef. Thirty pounds of fish. Enough.
“Come with me.” Hector pulled her to the bar, where he had laid out some photographs. There were the usual classes of kids lined up in front of schools, groups of Rotarians and Elks at tables, as well as miscellaneous shots—outdoor scenes with people standing around. “I want you to see the range. The caliber of the work.”
“They’re nice,” she said.
“You’re not even looking, Carole.”
She bent over them and took a better look. The Elks Club pictures were wonderful. They looked as though they were taken in the 1940s. The men had wide lapels and fedoras.
“I want to expand,” Hector said. “As I mentioned to Will, we can do so much more with the menus.”
“The puzzles and things were getting a little tired.”
Hector looked stung. “I don’t believe I said tired. I believe I said a change would serve us well.”
“Sorry, maybe I’m the one who’s tired.”
“That’s what you get for gallivanting to New York like that.” He sifted through the pile and drew out a photograph of a nude woman lying facedown in a clearing, arms outstretched and toes pointed in.
A chill shot up the nape of Carol’s neck. “Hector. Who is that?”
“Isn’t she a beauty? That’s the lieutenant governor’s wife. Nineteen hundred and forty-five.”
“She’s dead. How …”
“No, she’s not,” Hector said. “Quite alive. Still is, I believe.”
Carole studied the picture more closely. The woman looked like an alabaster statue. Like Rita. She had the same heft, the same smooth fullness of body, but her hair was jet black, and she was facedown, not faceup. Carole had a flash of precise memory of Rita in her grave. How disarranged she’d looked, with her limbs askew, knees up, her head forced down into her shoulder because the space was too small. This woman’s photograph had been taken in summer, in the heat. By now there had been many summers in Stowe. By now the heat had reduced Rita to nothing but bone.
“Lucky shot,” Hector was saying. “I just happened to be doing some work next door, and she just happened to be … well, one wouldn’t call that sunbathing, exactly. An odd woman, she was. Is. But a beauty too.”
She caught a glimpse of Rachel and Pepper. She hadn’t expected them, and the sight of them annoyed her unaccountably. Here it was a Thursday, and Pepper was again out of school, and not only that, but Rachel rewarded him for not going to school by bringing him in here, as if not going to school was some sign of great intelligence on his part and not just a misguided effort to please his mother. Rachel flopped back on the couch and began to nurse the baby again. He must have made a peep. Just the littlest thing, and Rachel would undo her blouse, which a
lso angered Carole. That couldn’t possibly be good for kids. All that feeding when the baby might not even be hungry, when he might want something else, like love and attention, was going to make the baby crave food just as Carole had when she was younger. Not that she could say anything, since she had no kids herself, as Rachel would be quick to point out. Carole knew this anger was because of Naomi, at least the root of it. It wasn’t as though Rachel was doing anything new, nothing she hadn’t done a hundred times before. But Carole didn’t want to even talk to her today. In fact, she didn’t want to talk to anybody. Not the staff, not Hector, not the customers. She hung back where Rachel wouldn’t notice her, wouldn’t yell out for her to come on over and join them. She didn’t feel like it one bit right now. Didn’t feel like being with children and babies. Not ever. She herself had been fitted for an IUD because she didn’t think people should have children unless everything was exactly right, which it wasn’t with her and would probably never be because, she thought, feeling like she would cry, what was she going to tell any child of hers about her life if she couldn’t even tell her own friends? What if her child wanted to know about school and growing up? What could she say? Kids had a right to know your whole past, or else what was the point of bringing them into the world? While Will had a full, lively history that went way back, hers just stopped. Any child she brought into the world would be a partial child. He would be the child of amnesia, and hadn’t she told Will that a hundred times?
She turned away before Rachel saw her, before Hector would need anything else. She took her parka from the peg and, coffee in hand, went down the back stairs. She might as well be taking speed again for the way she felt today, all jitters and good for nothing and needing—needing suddenly—some answers, to find out what had happened up there in Stowe after she’d left.
She had always known this day would come. It had loomed for years. Stowe, that shadowland to the west of Montpelier. Every morning on the radio she would hear the report from Stowe. Somebody skied down the mountain and told the conditions. Restaurants in Stowe advertised in the Times Argus and on the radio. There was the constant belief of the chamber of commerce that people going to Stowe would want to stay in Montpelier. But that was a dream. Stowe was another world. A rich world. It wasn’t a town at all. It was only an idea.
That she would go back to look had been ordained the day Rita Boudreau died, a given fact of her life. She sipped coffee as she drove, feeling, she thought, like someone going to the execution chamber, taking a last look at the world around her, full of dread but with a sliver of hope, too. Illogical, crazy hope as if something good was going to come out of this. It pulled her along. If she could just see the place again, she’d know. Know what, though? There the question went cold. Maybe she wanted to feel worse. Had she ever thought of that?
She had the radio going loud. There was only one station, and it played sappy music, but it took her mind off things. “My Eyes Adored You.” “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” How did people write that frivolous garbage? And then there it was. Stowe, straight out of a stage set. People walking around in Day-Glo ski clothes. The cars were shinier and bigger, with ski racks mounted on their roofs. She gunned the truck when the light turned green to keep her nerve from failing. She felt out of context, her mission unholy in this sparkling-clean place.
She had no idea how far it would be. Snaking around those turns as though at any moment somebody would jump out at her, she hoped the Double Hearth had burned down. The Snowtown too. It was exactly the way she hoped for different endings in movies she saw more than once. Every time she saw Bonnie and Clyde, she hoped this time they wouldn’t be deceived. They’d see the ambush and escape.
But no, the Double Hearth suddenly loomed ahead on the right, a big barn of a place with a silo. The sign read: DORMS. PRIVATE ROOMS. WEEKLY RATES. BREAKFAST. She pulled into the parking lot and snapped off the ignition to kill the radio, which was much too loud. The moment she opened the car door, she smelled the faint and slightly rancid combination of bacon and toast that had filled the Double Hearth the morning she’d come back here. She leaned against the warm truck, tasting bile.
“Can I help you?” a man inside asked her. He was sitting on a couch next to one of the hearths, glancing up at her over the tops of his glasses. She knew how she looked to him. One of those hippie chicks. People were used to her in Montpelier. Up here was another story. Steal the pictures right off the wall.
“I was here once before. Years ago. Just thought I’d—”
That did it. He gave her a big smile. “Oh, sure. We get people coming back all the time. Take your time.” He went back to his newspaper.
To the left was the doorway that had a thick blanket across it. She pulled the blanket aside and went up to the landing and through the door to the girls’ dorm. It was again the smell of the place that kept getting to her. Of cosmetics and deodorant and bedding. It was the same smell as when she and Naomi had been here. The rows of empty beds were in disarray, with blow dryers and clothing all over the place. She walked slowly down the aisle to the last pair of bunks against the wall. The lower was unmade, a pink flannel nightgown on the pillow, an open suitcase at the foot. She sat down on the bed and waited to remember, sure she was alone.
She lay back slowly on the bunk, then reached up and touched the coils of the one overhead that had been Naomi’s. She raised her feet and pushed slowly up, bowing the mattress above. A suitcase slid from the bed and banged to the floor, the contents spilling.
“Jesus,” somebody said, making her bolt upright. Other voices sounded up and down the room, and when she looked down the row of bunks, she saw faces here and there, groggy girls and boys looking for where the noise had come from. “Fuck you,” somebody said. “We’re trying to sleep.”
She bolted from where she was to the bathroom, remembering the girl with the chapped shins. She must have been about twenty to Carole’s sixteen. Twenty seemed young now. Twenty was nothing. There was a girl ironing her hair next to the sink, and the room reeked of singed hair. A boy came out of one of the toilets, paused to watch the girl at the sink, and then left. “You want the iron after me?” the girl said, looking at Carole’s hair.
“No, thanks,” she said, the intruder now, the outsider. An old lady. Back in her car the radio came roaring to life. Jim Morrison’s haunting voice sang “Break On Through to the Other Side.” The deadly, low beat of the music thrummed as she pulled out of the parking lot and drove the stretch of road she’d walked that night, unfamiliar now. It had been dark, pitch-black with bright stars. She remembered the sound of Eddie’s boots on the road, how he hadn’t waited for her, and the way he startled her by clapping a hand over her mouth. She should have known. She fiddled with the radio knob until she found “Hey Jude” and let it calm her.
The sign to the Snowtown was bright blue with gold letters, a joke for such a dump. She took the turn and drove slowly down. It had been dark that night, gray the next morning, but she was sure the drive hadn’t been paved as it was now. And then before her was the ring of cabins, all newly repaired, shored up and painted pale blue with white shutters, like dollhouses with porches and wreaths on the doors. In front of each one was a blue-and-gold sign. The one second to left was The Putney.
She cut the engine to kill the radio, feeling conspicuous, aware of how the old truck stuck out here in fairyland. But the place was deserted. She looked back up the road. She should leave. What in the name of God was she doing?
But there was no way not to look. She felt a compulsion unlike anything before. She had to see. Then she would leave. She was out of the truck and up the steps quickly, pressing her face to the glass to see through the shadows. She tried the door and it opened. Heart pounding, she entered the room. The two beds were unmade. The bureau opposite and the fake mantel held someone’s belongings. She willed herself to be caught at this. She willed someone to walk in on her as she opened the door to the bathroom and went inside. To punish her for this intrusion.
Breaking and entering. B and E, she’d heard Will call what she was doing.
It was all painted a pale blue now. The room was so small, but that night it had taken a lifetime to crawl across on her hands and knees away from Rita’s lifeless body and gather up her clothes. In her memory it was enormous. A sound somewhere made her jump. Then another. The sound of a door slamming.
Get out, she told herself. Get out of here now. But as if in a dream in which her limbs won’t obey, she stopped to see what she looked like in the mirror that would have held her reflection then too. Only then would she believe that she was here, and yes, the panic in her eyes, no matter how hard she tried to scare it away, there it was like somebody screaming. A woman in a black sweater, her hair wild in her face, eyes hollow.
She was down the stairs, but not into the truck as she knew she should, but off, around the side of the cabin, looking up the field in back. The sun was hot on her back, burning into her black sweater, the sky a brilliant, sharp blue. The ground was oddly smooth underfoot, a perfect white carpet, her boots pulling up perfect sole-shapes of snow, baring ovals of bright unnatural green. A rich kelly green, and the grass cut short like a crewcut. She stopped to look over the weird unwrinkled field.
It took several moments to realize she was on a golf course that ended at a parking lot far in the distance, glistening hotly with cars. She had a sense of total disorientation, as if she’d come to a place entirely different from where she’d intended or had leaped from some other reality into this, whatever it was.
The woods and the field of her memory were gone, stripped bare. They’d brought in bulldozers and backhoes and whatever else it must have taken to rip through the forest. Now the scene she remembered was gone forever. It was sealed over, taped shut inside herself. Somewhere beneath the glittering razzle-dazzle of what was before her lay Rita’s white bones and teeth. Her hair.