by Susan Choi
“Quit fussing, Louise,” Dolly says. As usual, an exercise in sharing Mrs. Fowler’s excitement has given way to irritation. Like Jenny, Dolly tends to disappear from the house when Mrs. Fowler gives tours; this is one of the reasons Mrs. Fowler so regularly comes to tea.
“No, thank you,” Jenny says, trying to make a casual grab for the envelope and instead falling sideways into one of the porch chairs.
“There’s lemonade. Miss Dolly’s famous lemonade, of course,” Mrs. Fowler says, waving the envelope around busily, in the style of a symphony conductor. She winks over her shoulder at Dolly.
Dolly ignores her. “I bet it’s all those fumes you’re working with,” she tells Jenny. “What about those fumes in the porte cochere? I don’t know if you should be using that paint-stripper stuff on the porte cochere. It might be bad for my bluebirds.”
“Your bluebirds!” exclaims Mrs. Fowler.
Miss Dolly regards Mrs. Fowler remotely. “The bluebirds that nest in the porte cochere,” she says.
“That’s so darling!”
“That’s what birds do,” Dolly says. “Did you hear me, Iris? If those fumes are making you look so green, I bet they’ll fry those little birds.”
“I had no idea you had nesting bluebirds—I’ll have to add that in to my tour. I thought they said those PCPs or whatever they are have killed off all the bluebirds. Oh, did you want to look at this, Iris? What do you say, Dolly? Should we let her look?”
Once Jenny has the envelope in hand she tries standing up. “Excuse me,” she begins.
“Oh, no.” Mrs. Fowler pushes her, gently and firmly, back into her chair. “Miss Dolly and I have been climbing up the walls with curiosity, haven’t we, Dolly? You’re so mysterious, Iris. Won’t you just tell us a thing or two? Where in the world did you meet this young man? You never seem to have pals or go out or do anything except shop for paint. Tell us. Dolly, make her tell us.”
“Please recall our agreement,” Dolly says instead, in her bland, unoiled voice. “Regarding room and board.”
Jenny nods. “Of course,” she says.
Mrs. Fowler blinks at Dolly. “What agreement?”
“Regarding room and board,” Dolly says.
“No male visitors,” says Jenny. “This man wasn’t visiting—I don’t know him. He must have made a mistake—”
“Oh, Miss Dolly. That’s so unromantic and unrealistic. This is 1974. The girls are going to do whatever they want no matter how you try to stop them. I know that with my girls, I’d much rather have the boyfriends coming by the house than taking them out God knows where. Just the other day Maureen—”
“Even if he was a boyfriend, which he wasn’t,” Jenny says, “because I don’t even know him, I would never have him visit—”
“Please correct me if I am somebody’s parent,” Dolly says. “So far as I know I am nobody’s parent. Whenever I have taken a boarder at Wildmoor I have forbidden lady visitors if the boarder was a male, and male visitors if the boarder was a lady, and it hasn’t been because I’m somebody’s parent. It’s because it’s my house!”
“Of course it is,” says Mrs. Fowler.
“No matter how many folks come tramping in and out at three dollars a pop. It’s my house.”
“And thank goodness for that!” Mrs. Fowler exclaims. “When I see some of these lovely old homes come separated from their owners it just breaks my heart. Like at the old Bellingham place? When the last Bellingham finally gave up and sold it to the state for the back taxes? They turned it into a park, and they didn’t even give it a budget for oversight or preservation or anything, just stuck an ‘Open, dawn to dusk’ sign at the gate and a line of Porta Potties on the drive. You go over there now and there are all these people who haven’t got anywhere better to go barbecuing hot dogs on the lawn. Remember that mosaic of lovely little colored tiles in the bottom of the fountain? Somebody’s pried those up, every single one of them. It doesn’t even matter because the fountain is practically a public swimming pool. It just breaks my heart.”
Miss Dolly lets this discourse dribble off into silence. “All I’m saying,” she concludes at last, “is it’s my house.”
After a time Mrs. Fowler says, brightly, “More tea?”
“I’ll take a splash,” Dolly says. “Iris, I need to hear how things are coming for the Fourth.”
“Good,” she says cautiously.
“Have you got my ball?” By this is meant the yellow croquet ball. The yellow croquet ball supernaturally vanished last summer, at Dolly’s yearly Independence Day picnic. Even the determined bushwhacking of dozens of guests at the time, and the denuding of the ground through the subsequent winter, have failed to produce the lost ball. It has been one of Jenny’s most urgent tasks to locate someone who will sell her a yellow ball pro rata, as Dolly is reluctant to buy a new set—this was the errand that had taken her down to Poughkeepsie this morning, returning from which she had found Frazer waiting for her—but so far she has not been successful.
“. . . no,” she says.
“No?” Although the project has been ongoing for some time, without any progress, Dolly seems newly amazed by this setback. “No? How hard can this be? Did you try Buell’s in Rhinebeck?”
Jenny nods. She had not wanted to try Buell’s in Rhinebeck—she hadn’t wanted to try anything in Rhinebeck. Being the nearest large town, Rhinebeck is a place she has sought to avoid. But the demanding nature of the yellow ball quest has sent her into nearly all such dreaded places, one after the other.
“What did Buell say?”
“He said if he gave you the yellow ball, then his set will be missing the yellow ball and he won’t be, able to sell it.”
“Did you tell him who it was for?”
“Yes.”
“And he still wouldn’t do it?”
Jenny shakes her head.
“Did you tell Buell he’s not invited to my Independence Day picnic this year?”
“Oh, Dolly,” says Mrs. Fowler.
“Well, fiddlesticks,” Dolly says. “And by that I mean something much worse.”
“I’ll try again tomorrow,” Jenny says.
“I think you’d better go down to the city. They’ve got to have some outfit that replaces croquet balls. Haven’t they got everything in Chinatown? You’d know your way all around there.”
“At this point you could get a new set for the cost of her train fare,” Mrs. Fowler says, rashly.
“Unfortunately, you don’t know half as much about this as I do,” Dolly snaps. To Jenny she says, “You go down to Manhattan tomorrow and I bet you’ll find it. We’ve got to get this thing taken care of. There’s a lot else to do.”
“Of course,” Jenny says. At the thought of going into Manhattan her heart must have sped up, but it feels more like it’s beating through sludge. Thump . . . Thump . . . “Excuse me,” she murmurs.
“You are excused,” Dolly says, lifting her teacup.
Making her way off the porch and back into the house, and holding the envelope as inconspicuously as she can, she hears Mrs. Fowler say, “I wanted to find out about her boyfriend.”
“I don’t pay her to have boyfriends,” Dolly says.
In truth, Dolly almost doesn’t pay her at all. She is frightened by how much Frazer seems to know about her—that her situation isn’t good but truly bad, that she’s far from indifferent to money. When Dolly hired her they’d agreed that her pay would be room and board plus a small hourly wage for her work, and that she would keep track of her hours. For the first few months Dolly had paid her, but now, whenever she tells Dolly she has worked, say, one hundred fifty hours this month, or thirty hours this week, or any chunk of time, large or small, Dolly tells her to wait until she reaches a good round number, because it’s such a production to go to the bank. Meanwhile giving her a very small allowance, which keeps her in groceries and train fare and gas and supplies for the housework—which keeps her, Jenny knows. Period.
She has to light a ci
garette before she opens the note, and then she has to smoke the whole thing. Her nails are so bitten she can’t get a hold of the envelope’s flap and finally, in a burst of irritation, she just rips the end of it off with her teeth. The tiny piece of paper inside says, in Frazer’s childlike scrawl, RHINEBECK MOTEL ROOM 10 PLEASE COME TRUST ME HEAR ME OUT
—FRAZER
FRAZER’S FRIENDS Dick and Helen, a professor and his aspiring-writer wife, had lived in Riverdale, the Bronx. Frazer had met them during his brief career as the athletic director of the famously incendiary little college where Dick still taught, halfway upriver between the Bronx and Wildmoor. Jenny had gotten the sense Dick liked knowing Frazer but didn’t like Frazer, while Helen disliked knowing him as much as she disliked him, but they were both the kind of people determined to feel they were daring. They had subscriptions to the Evergreen Review and season tickets for avant-garde theater. Dick’s specialism was the nineteenth-century American novel but he was really an experimental poet, as yet unpublished, whose heated defense of one of his contemporaries against the assaults of a rival professor was being published, letter by letter, in the journal of the Modern Language Association. It would be Jenny’s task, among others, to archive these letters for a book Dick thought he might publish. Helen had been a housewife until the past year, when their youngest child had gone off to college. This was the change that had prompted them to do something they would never have dreamed of otherwise, and hire a housekeeper/assistant, so that Helen could go every day to the tiny Greenwich Village apartment she’d rented for use as a study, to work on her novel.
Frazer had told Dick and Helen that Jenny “needed a place to lie low for a while” and that it was best if they didn’t know more. She had to admit he’d been skillfully vague. He’d made it seem, on the one hand, that she might have a boyfriend who’d gotten abusive. On the other hand, he’d implied she might be a bona fide fugitive from the law. Either way Dick and Helen couldn’t say no to her without seeming hard-hearted, or square. Together they had worked out her story: Jenny was the daughter of old family friends, living with Dick and Helen to establish residency so that she could apply to a New York State school. Her name was Sally Chen. She planned to be a doctor.
Dick said to her, “One of the truly great things about academic life in this country, Jenny, is that it has always embraced people of every race and every nation. White, black, yellow, red. So it’ll make perfect sense to our acquaintances that Helen and I would have known Chinese people. Sally. Sorry. Should we celebrate?”
Dick and Helen made a point of living their lives as much as possible free of American commercialism. They had just been to the South of France, and had brought back—smuggled back, in two suitcases taken over empty for the purpose—quantities of handmade cheeses as well as brandies and wines that weren’t available for sale in the States. “The artisanal aspect of cuisine is being completely effaced,” Dick said, cutting into a round of cheese carefully, like a surgeon, to create extremely minuscule wedges, “by the corporatizing of agriculture, by commercialism—basically, by all the wonderful social ills our nation is so good at manifesting and spreading to other parts of the world. Have some cheese, guys,” he said to Jenny and Frazer. “And wine. Let’s not forget about the wine.”
“Right on,” Frazer said. They lifted their glasses.
“Can you taste that?” Dick cried. “If you had a more acidic wine, the cheese would taste chalky. That’s what’s being lost, all this knowledge—this culture. To freedom,” he added belatedly.
The arrangement lasted for barely six months. “I think,” Dick said to her one night, choosing his words with ostentatious care, “that you are a person of substance. A person that, under better circumstances, I could imagine as a very close friend. Don’t you think?” And another time: “The whole thing with not knowing your story has gotten kind of hard for Helen, because she tends to assume the worst. If you feel the same sort of respect for us that we feel for you, you might clarify things and put Helen’s mind at ease. I mean,” he held his hands surrender-style, laughing, “just a hint. By all means please don’t tell us who you are! Just the broad strokes. Are we talking multiple felony indictments or, ah, first offense? Maybe just a bad vibe that made you want to get away for a while?”
And then at last she had woken with him in her room, leaning into her bed, his old-cheese-and-tobacco breath hot on her neck. She’d sprung up. “Are you sleeping okay?” he had whispered.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, and cringed from him until he went back to his room.
The next morning, after they’d both gone to work, she packed her bag, put on her cleaning gloves, and wiped everything in the house. It took hours. She went through the kitchen drawers and wiped every fork, knife, spoon, and utensil. She wiped the spices in the spice rack and the Tupperware containers in the fridge. She went through the apartment room by room wiping even things she’d never touched before: the Rockwell Kent engraving in its frame, the Paul Robeson records. She saved the bathroom for last. When she arrived there she stood over the toilet she had cleaned once a week on her knees. She felt as if she’d never really seen this toilet before. Then she wiped it, for the last time, and left.
SHE’D CHOSEN Rhinecliff at random: She’d decided to go where one fourth of her money would take her. It was not very far. In Rhinecliff she had stood for a long time on the deserted station platform with her duffel bag and her accordion file, looking out at the river that had lain alongside the train the whole way from New York. She smelled rotting vegetation, but also brine. She sniffed, hard. It was low tide, and the ocean smell somehow seemed stronger, though the ocean was now two hours farther away. She’d finally walked out to the front of the station, called a taxi, and asked for the nearest motel. There had only been one, miles inland near a town called Rhinebeck. Everything riverine, rhine-something. The motel had subtracted another huge chunk of her funds, but then the ad for the Wildmoor job had appeared in the Rhinebeck Gazette the next day. Later she would learn that the ad had been running for months without any responses, because Dolly rarely made payments, a fact known all over the town. But she was an immigrant, unknowing, without options. She agreed to take board as a part of her pay. Late October, 1972. She would remember the Nixon placards at the ends of the secretive drives that slipped off through the yellow-leaved woods from the long country road.
She chose Red Hook for her post office box because it was barely a town; the post office sat by itself just past a desolate intersection, and served scattered farms, or so she guessed reading the flyers on the bulletin board. She called herself Iris Wong and subscribed to the Rhinebeck Gazette. Once it started coming she drove to Red Hook two or three evenings a week, after the post office window had closed, and took the slim accumulation of papers to a neglected little park on the river with a lone vandalized picnic table. She never saw anyone using this table and she didn’t use it, either. She read the papers in the car. She would tackle the AP capsules first, whipping open each of the two or three papers to the national news page and skimming it with eyes narrowed and head slightly averted, as if she expected to be struck blind by the newsprint. After she’d gone through them all without finding any mention of herself she’d start over, a little more calmly, and actually read, from beginning to end. There wasn’t much to be learned about the state of the larger world, or even about the state of the Rhinebeck area, from this newspaper, full as it was of church spaghetti-dinner announcements and tips for keeping Canada geese off the lawn. But she perversely enjoyed that aspect of it—enjoyed the sense it gave her that she, too, was imprisoned. She couldn’t be expected to do anything for now but familiarize herself with her cell.
November, December. The New Year, January. Her ritual with the paper had turned into a lazy indulgence. She would leave the engine on, blast the heat and the radio, slowly smoke at least a half a pack of cigarettes. One day at the beginning of February she read in the paper dated January 28, 1973, that cease-fire agreemen
ts had been signed in Paris, to end the war in Vietnam. The article had been reprinted from the Times: Mrs. Nguyen Thi Binh, Foreign Minister of the Vietcong Provisional Revolutionary Government, wore an amber ao dai with embroidery on the bodice, an unusual ornament for her. Mrs. Rogers, wife of the Secretary of State, wore a dress with a red top and navy skirt. The man she loved was in prison, and she herself was a fugitive for the things they had done to protest—no, demolish—this war. Now it all had been calmly concluded, the outfits of the various parties described as if for a society column. She remembered letting the paper fall into her lap and lighting a fresh cigarette, then pulling the cuff of her shirt up over the heel of her hand to wipe away the condensation on the windshield. The sun had just set on the far side of the river, the afterglow a cool wintertime pink, like the flesh of a melon. The leaves were all gone from the trees, and against the suffused evening sky the bare branches formed a dark filigree. She heard, somewhere near the river’s surface, the frantic honking of geese settling down for the night. It had occurred to her that perhaps she should keep this article, as a memento. After one more cigarette, and one last look at the fading sky, she’d thrown away the rest of the papers and driven back to Wildmoor, but when she got there she threw away the article, too. It seemed empty, a memento of nothing.
BEFORE, IN her previous life, she had been a bomber. She and William had bombed several government targets, mostly draft offices, always deep in the night when no one would be killed. They’d known nothing better seized attention than violence, and that the rightness of theirs would be obvious, dedicated as it was to saving lives. They’d meant to persuade the most hawkish, resistant Americans, and been sure that they could—but after she’d gone underground Jenny realized they’d never known quite what they faced. They had known only like-minded people. Even so-called conservatives around the Bay Area had held views not so different from theirs. Jenny’s life at Wildmoor was the first time she was ever submerged in that part of the country she and William had meant as their audience, against which they’d fought with such hope, and so little success.