The Wintering

by Joan Williams

  “Come on, Amy.”

  The others were already at the car and thought she was following, then Quill called. Amy went back reluctantly the way she had come, seeing Borden sitting at the wheel and turning it grandly. “The dreamer,” Quill said, getting out and letting her slide into the front seat.

  “I didn’t realize you were ready to go,” she said.

  “Obviously,” he said. “We wondered how long you were going to stand there.”

  Amy settled in dreamily between them, mentally adjusting a long trailing gown: honored for something she did not bother to name; but even Mrs. Decker paid court. She remembered Quill’s once saying that she would be all right if only she knew what she wanted. Amy tried to think what he had meant by that remark, feeling she knew exactly what it was she wanted. She wanted to go wherever she had to go to find out whatever it was she had to find out. That made sense to her, though to explain it to Quill, or someone else, she knew it would sound evasive.

  Along the roadside were tangled wild-primrose bushes, devoid of blooms since spring. Tumbled among them now were black-eyed Susans, their strong yellow color more appropriate to the blaze of summer. Suddenly, the countryside ended abruptly at high shielding forsythia bushes. Borden, having driven through an opening in them, set up a clatter of metal that rang in the still country air. A dog barked off somewhere. The car seemed to have sunk down into the cattle gap. Silence came after the dog hushed, until Borden said, “This is his driveway.”

  Quill breathed one word that was not a question: “Almoner’s.”

  The three sat woodenly and staring ahead, like children transfixed by fairy stories. That might have been the gingerbread house ahead, with a pinched-looking roof and tall front windows and a narrow porch with an empty hammock. A shout seemed to ring out in the car, startling them.

  “There he is!” Borden had whispered.

  “Almoner,” Quill said, again hardly breathing.

  But feeling they were prying where they did not belong, Amy said, “We ought to go.” Borden had driven hastily off the cattle gap, grinding gears. The three seemed to cling together without touching. They must hear her heart beat, Amy was thinking. “I’m going to ask if he’ll just speak to us,” Borden said, climbing out; and too late, Amy reached across the seat for his coattail.

  She watched him go down the slope toward the grove of trees where they had glimpsed Almoner, who, by disappearing, seemed to be hiding. Watching Borden’s red head recede, she kept thinking how this silence and this waiting and this intrusion all were wrong, and nothing could be done about any of them now. Like a kite or a leaf blown, at the whim of the wind, she went at random anywhere, anywhere at all she was taken, without plans of her own. Then when things went wrong, there was nothing she could say, nothing at all. There was no one she could truthfully blame but herself, she admitted.

  Over the car’s hood, yellow moths hovered with their wings folded tricornered into sails. Then, like a flotilla of small boats, they floated away, at once, into the day. Amy, watching them, thought that she bore these moments of dread because she had borne silently so many other stresses in her life: not being the way her mother wanted, her father’s martinis, being an only child. Inadvertently and through some fault of her own, she had many times been embarrassed. Often she had been lonely or bored or felt forgotten. She had been tearful and had felt a stranger to happiness always. Only at unexpected moments did happiness ever overtake her.

  This time Quill’s whisper seemed loud inside the car. “He’s coming!” But the sound was as full of foreboding, to Amy, as storm wind. Thinking back to all her stresses, she knew she would somehow endure this one.

  Almoner came along the incline, brushing pine needles off his shoulders. He was neither as tall as she had imagined nor as elderly. Once he said something to Borden, who bent down to listen attentively. When they arrived at the car, it seemed part of the awryness of the whole afternoon that she could see nothing of Almoner’s face but his chin. Leaning down to the window, Borden said that he had apologized for their rudeness, and Mr. Almoner had agreed to speak to them for a moment. As if pulled by a string, bending promptly to the window after Borden’s speech, acknowledging their names, Almoner extended his hand past Amy to meet the one Quill stuck toward him.

  “This is a great honor, Mr. Almoner,” Quill said.

  “Thank you,” Almoner said.

  When he stood straight again, Amy could see nothing but his chin. She had neither spoken nor given him her hand. The intrusion made it seem not right to ask even that. With bent shoulders, Almoner was already going back down the incline and toward the sheltering trees.

  Amy never moved, though when Borden backed the car his elbow jabbed her uncomfortably. The flowerless tall forsythias gradually shut away the house. The afternoon had begun to darken. Their car wheels, on the gravel, sent startled birds into flight from weeds and left them swaying. Small brown rabbits ran in fear, helter-skelter, out of the way.

  Quill’s whoop seemed to shatter more than the quiet of the countryside, to ring out over the world. “He touched this!” he cried, raising his hand into the air. “Almoner touched this! I’m never going to wash it!”

  Amy, wishing she could close herself into silence, wondered why she had never noticed before how many freckles Borden had. When he leaned past her to speak to Quill, even his lips had an orangish tinge. She heard him in disbelief. “Almoner said he was tired of folks coming here to see if he was a freak,” Borden said. “And what was worse, he was for free. Nobody had offered to pay to look yet!”

  Amy kept on staring at Borden’s spotted face hanging in air before her, until Quill leaned around to look back at him. Then his face was like a ripe red tomato about to burst and kept growing redder as he laughed. They were laughing helplessly, their hanging mouths exposing fillings. Amy closed her eyes and sank on the seat between them, horrified.

  It was lonely; it was evening. The station inside had a dimness like lamplight long ago. The stationmaster stood in his doorway, his flowers now all faint and pale as first stars, seeming as evasive as the early moon. Bug-spattered street lights let out along the darkening streets lariat-thin lines of yellow. In fields and ditch banks, katydids and locusts screamed as if fearful of the night, which crept along and left visible the merest shadows of cotton. Clouds formed were mauve and black. Against them, Negroes seemed lean brush strokes, going home between cotton rows, children running ahead. Dim light was far-spaced cabins. Except for a single light in back, Dea’s house was dark. Passers-by, mindful of supper being eaten in the kitchen, might long themselves for home. Any light seemed something safe, Amy thought. With fields enveloped and the road darkened, she and Quill seemed to be travelling far reaches of black space.

  At her own house, shadowy evergreens seemed bent solicitously toward the windows. Apologetically, Quill said that he must hurry as he had a date with Lydia. “Coal Black,” he called her. He went out to his car, in his duck-footed way, then waited until Amy went inside. His headlights bent into shafts of yellow as he left and poked about the living room as a stranger might, searching. The house seemed ravaged when the headlights departed, at last, from the French doors, leaving them blank. Quill had admitted that Lydia never had anything important to say. Then he had cried, “But her hair is so coal black, it gets to me!” Amy felt not only deserted but mystified watching him go.

  When the car lights had gone, she tiptoed about appreciative of finding nothing, and no one, not belonging to the house. Touching a piano key, she sent into the silence a single sound. When silence again followed, it seemed that a voice had cried out and been stilled. The music lessons she had taken many years had abandoned her and Amy’s fingers came away from the keys. Rusty’s dog basket in the kitchen was empty; she mourned that he had not been let out merely to come back in. Though the icebox seemed empty, she ate finally something left over in little capped boxes and wandered further to perform before the hall mirror a half-remembered ballet step left from othe
r pointless and vanished lessons. In half-pirouette, she wondered whether she might wear rosebuds in her hair as an ordinary event. Climbing stairs laboriously, inexplicably exhausted, she accidentally found a note, which said that her family had left her but only to go out to dinner.

  In her own mirror, she found her face changed since that moment when she had been at Mrs. Decker’s dressing table. No longer did she have any look of belief, since Almoner was not to save her. But what was worse, she had brought him more suffering. Amy pictured him as always alone; even now he might be brooding, after supper, that again today someone had come to stare.

  With stealth equal to Quill’s headlights, she searched for Edith’s good blue stationery, hidden in her mother’s room from cleaning ladies who could not resist it. Amy wrote at her dressing table, her hands shaking so that she pretended hardship, that she was poor and in an unheated house in winter, drawing closer to the light bulb for warmth.

  Dear Mr. Almoner:

  I know you have a secretary and probably you will never see this but I have to write it anyway, as I am the girl who came there today when you told us not to, and I wanted you to know it was not for the reason you thought, to stare at you, but because I like your work so much. I am unhappy and I know you are unhappy too. I wanted to tell you you shouldn’t be so unhappy and lonely when you have done so much for the world. There were so many things I had wanted to ask you because I know you have thought and felt and suffered everything I ever have and I wanted to ask you the reason for suffering. Why some people have to and others don’t? In the end do you gain something from it? I knew after reading your books I could ask you everything and you would answer and I could tell you everything about myself, that my dog just got run over, and you would understand. Could I come again by myself? You don’t have to worry as I know all about your drinking and that doesn’t make any difference to me. My father drinks too. So don’t worry or be embarrassed. I hope I have not bothered you again by writing. But I couldn’t go on thinking that you thought I came there to stare when I so much did not come for that reason, at all.

  Sincerely,

  Amy Howard

  Light crept beneath the door as silently as an intruder, startling her as much. And standing there, Edith apologized and said she could not imagine Amy’s not having heard them come home. Who on earth was she writing that intently? Faint pink glitter in Edith’s dress matched the color of her shoes. Her breath came in puffs after the stairs. Around her middle, flesh folded over her belt.

  “I borrowed some of your good stationery,” Amy said. “Is that all right?”

  “Of course.” Edith looked expectant.

  “I’m writing to Leigh, that boy at school,” Amy said.

  “The one you like. Is he really going to come visit us sometime?”

  “He says he is.” Edith kept staring, and Amy moved her arm nonchalantly over the letter.

  Frowning to sort this day from another, Edith said finally, “You didn’t go to dinner with Quill?” Indifferently, Amy said that he had a date with Lydia. Did she care more for Quill than she pretended? Edith wondered. Why else sit there looking so friendless or lonesome, like an orphan crouched over its supper, and wearing those shoes? Good heavens! She did not like, really, having her good stationery taken and must remember stationery as a present for Amy at Christmas. Then Edith had another idea. “Are you taking your thyroid?” she said.

  “Yes,” Amy said, wondering how long her mother was going to stand there. Tipping the lampshade, Amy sent light in the opposite direction. Was it the letter her mother was staring at so strangely? She couldn’t read from that far away, could she?

  Did the light hurt her eyes? Edith wondered when Amy tipped the shade. Her eyes looked more haunted staring out from the shadows. Edith looked around at the chrysanthemums printed on chintz, thinking how she had created this perfect young girl’s room and that her daughter sat in it with a hangdog look, which was not inherited from her side of the family. Amy seemed never to have belonged to the decor, at all. She had tried so hard to impress on Amy that pretty girls were not necessarily popular, that personality counted. She would bet Quill had not asked Amy to dinner because she had not said two words all day. However, since Amy got invited places frequently, she must be different when she was out from when she was at home, Edith decided, sighing. Amy had looked down in the dumps even mentioning she was taking her thyroid. But Edith thought in a rush of emotion, My baby. When she went forward to kiss her, Amy bent a little backward over her letter, stiffening. Edith thought that she must smell too much like garlic and retreated to the door. “We ate at the new French restaurant,” she said. “I had snails. Delicious but garlicky. Whew!”

  Amy sat, without expression, listening while Edith told who else had been there and what they had had for dinner and about the decor, while Edith wondered what had made her eat so much when, leaving home, she had promised herself to eat hardly anything. She tried to perk up Amy by suggesting that she go to the restaurant; Edith told about the elegant dessert cart, thinking how when it had come by she had seen cheesecake, her favorite, and said, “Would just a smidge hurt?” and Mallory had said, “Help yourself, healthy to have an appetite,” then he had kept on staring at the girl in the jersey dress across the room until even the girl had become annoyed. “Homemade petits fours, hmm,” Edith said.

  “They sound delicious,” Amy said.

  And Edith thought how she had eaten what Mallory left of his petits fours when she had finished her cheesecake, how he had inclined his wine glass toward the girl, and how she had said then, “She is pretty,” and Mallory had said, all innocence, “Who?” Her thought then had been that the worst thing of all was being married to a fool. That was still her thought while she and Amy listened to him downstairs locking up and singing “Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking.” She and Amy listened, their eyes not quite meeting.

  Tired, Edith said, “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” and went out feeling lonesome and left open the door she had found closed.

  “I won’t,” Amy said, trying to smile.

  She wondered what her mother expected to find out by leaving the door open. Edith’s bedroom light switched on silently. The silver-blue glance of her room shadowed the hall; it made Amy sad, for when she thought of her mother, she thought of things that were lovely: her clothes and her perfume, none of which seemed in the end to matter. She wondered if her mother was happy. Taking her arm from the letter, which was slightly smeared, Amy hoped Mr. Almoner would not think she had cried writing it. Undoubtedly, he might think she was some kind of nut, anyway. What was it like, she wondered, to be her mother and to think about nothing but eating in the newest restaurant in town, considered the best only because it was the most overdecorated. Listening to her mother’s ritualistic night sounds, she thought it would certainly be easier to be her mother, or to be Lydia. Yet with all the difficulties of her life, she would not choose theirs. She would not fill up her life with inane things. Edith’s curtains were being closed, with their usual smoothly running little click, across their antiqued rod. Amy stared at herself in the mirror, seeing fear reflected in her eyes and something mischievous—some promise of womanhood at last, she thought. Edith’s heels crossed a bare section of floor and, afterward, came the ritualistic sounds of the manipulations of her little jars. Cleaning her face, straining her neck, her mother stared at herself in the mirror nightly, without thinking anything, Amy supposed. And knowing if she reread the letter she would never send it, Amy sealed it shut.

  Number three is the trees. Color some of them green. Color some of them brown. Put in touches of red. It is a fall scene.

  Edith’s brush hovered over the picture like a bee over a flower, as she was fearful of dipping the tip into the cup of red paint. Why had they made the picture so hard? If only the trees could be as easy as the grass and the sky. She reread: One is the sky. Color it blue. Two is the grass. Color it green.

  But the solidly blue top half of her picture, ru
nning and too wet, did not look like sky. The blue was beginning to streak toward the solidly green bottom half of the picture, which was grass. With her heart palpitating, Edith touched the brush tip to the red, then to the canvas. But a red dot on a brown branch did not look like an autumn leaf, at all. The mothball smell of clothes, however, being packed into Amy’s trunk meant winter and that she was going. She had not wanted Amy to see her unhappy. Leaving the room, she had said, “Do your own packing. You’re old enough.” Maybe she had spoken more sharply than she had meant to, for Amy had looked hurt. When she had come back from the grocery, everything she and Amy had laid out between them in the room had been packed but remoteness.

  Was it hopeless? Edith stared at the dots, her nose almost touching the picture. She thought how at Christmastime, Poppa had brought home barrels of apples and the house had been full of people and she had complained about always having to give up her room. Now, she watched squirrels run about the gutters and the sun slant over her silver toilet articles already polished to perfection and thought how gladly she would give up what once she had coveted, privacy and silence, having had enough of both. If only this house would swell with people and smell of December apples. Instead, it would grow more empty with Amy gone. She had said, “I hate to see you go. The phone never rings,” not able to say what she really meant. She wondered if Amy had understood.

  Amy sat on the front steps drying her hair in the early autumn sun and lifted her head as the postman came down the block whistling, as usual. “We always know when you’re coming,” Amy said, accepting mail.

  Amy had to get married soon, Edith decided, looking down at her. There would be grandchildren then and she would have something to do. She hated blaming Amy for anything, but why couldn’t she just be happy and married like the other girls? She looked so sweet and pretty, bent over a letter with her hair drying bright as brass in the glare. Only a few days, and she would have her whole house silent and empty, Edith moaned.