Hilda and Pearl

by Alice Mattison

  Hilda and Pearl

  Alice Mattison

  DEDICATION

  FOR JANE KENYON

  AND DONALD HALL

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  HILDA SAID SHE’D TAKE THE PLUMS BACK TO THE COTTAGE with her, because if she left them at the lake no one would remember to bring them. They were the tart red plums of July. Frances, who had eaten one a while ago, didn’t care whether her mother took them.

  “Come on,” said Aunt Pearl, who had started quickly up the hill but then turned to wait, watching Frances’s mother, who didn’t hurry. Aunt Pearl’s freckled arm was raised and her hand shielded her eyes. She looked restless to Frances, who was watching from a little way into the water. Aunt Pearl didn’t wear a beach jacket, just her blue bathing suit, and when she was ready to leave the beach, all she had to do was walk away, but Hilda put her terrycloth jacket on over her bathing suit, then gathered up her knitting. Next she leaned over for the paper bag of plums, which was on one of the Adirondack chairs. When Hilda leaned over, her beach jacket opened and her breasts looked big. Frances, who was eleven, did not yet have breasts.

  Hilda caught up with Aunt Pearl, and Aunt Pearl stretched her hand out: she wanted a plum. Frances knew that she would eat two or three on the way back to the cottage, her free hand under her chin to catch the juice. Now Hilda fed her the first one, reaching up to offer it. Aunt Pearl was tall.

  They hadn’t suggested that Frances come along. Of course, they were only going to the cottage to change their clothes and start supper. Her mother wanted to eat early because people were coming from one of the other cottages after supper to sing or play cards.

  Frances’s teenage cousin Simon, Aunt Pearl’s son, stood at the edge of the lake in his shoes and socks and trousers and shirt, looking straight ahead at the water, not answering when Uncle Mike shouted at him. “Stupid,” said Uncle Mike, and Frances’s father, Nathan, who was sitting in an Adirondack chair at the edge of the beach, flinched. Uncle Mike had stopped shouting for a while but now that the women had gone up the hill he began again.

  Frances liked sitting on the rock because her feet stayed wet. She liked listening to Uncle Mike too. She didn’t mind when he shouted at Simon, though she knew she ought to be angry with him. Mostly she found it interesting, and waited almost eagerly for the next thing he’d say. Her parents would never talk that way. It gave her the edgy, excited feeling that some permission had been granted—to both herself and Simon—though Uncle Mike shouted at him not to do things. She had stayed in the water longer than she would have if Uncle Mike hadn’t been criticizing Simon for not going swimming at all.

  Simon stood so close to the water that although his shoes looked dry, Frances thought there wasn’t room between his shoes and the water for so much as a pine needle. He would not go into the water or even put on a pair of swimming trunks, though his parents had gone to the trouble and expense of buying a bathing suit and bringing it from the city. His family had been at the lake for three days—visiting Frances’s family, who stayed for a month—and so far Simon hadn’t gone into the water once. It was shameful not to learn to swim, and Simon could barely swim. It was hot, and anyone with sense would want to cool off in the water. Uncle Mike shouted all this at Simon’s back.

  Years earlier, Frances had been lying in bed one night, supposedly asleep, listening to her parents talk through the slightly opened door. “Mike takes his belt to Simon,” her mother had said.

  “No,” said Nathan. Frances had known what her mother had meant. It was a strange way of talking, to take your belt to someone. It could mean that Uncle Mike carried his belt across the room and gave the belt to Simon, but it didn’t. She had wanted to question Simon about this subject, but she never did. She was five years younger than he was, and he was kind to her, but they didn’t talk much.

  She was facing the shore. When she looked up she saw her mother and aunt, now far along the dirt road that went to the cottages. There were many cottages, and theirs was far away. She knew how her mother and Aunt Pearl would walk: slowly, talking all the time, sometimes giving each other a push if one of them made a joke. They would stop when Aunt Pearl wanted another plum, and Hilda would open the bag and hold it for her, teasing about how much Pearl ate.

  Simon was looking out at the lake. Frances thought he was trying to look as if he had something on his mind and hadn’t troubled himself to notice who Mike was talking to. At the edge of the beach, near where the grass started, Frances’s father turned his hands over and over on the arms of the Adirondack chair.

  Nobody but their family was at the lake, even though there were many cottages and it was a hot day. It was after five o’clock, that was one reason, but none of them could figure out any other reasons. She and her parents sometimes talked about what the other people were missing. Frances’s father liked the beach the most. He would take a long swim and then sit in the sun, moving his chair as the shade advanced in the afternoon. He said he needed many hours of sun to bake the winter out of him, and Frances pictured him in his classroom at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, where they lived, teaching history in his suit, always chilly, waiting for summer, when he could spread out his bare arms. He was glad to see his brother, Mike, and Mike’s wife, Pearl, and their son when they visited, but now he looked unhappy, studying Simon’s back as if he were trying to read something written on it.

  “Worthless,” said Uncle Mike. He hadn’t said Simon was worthless, but something else. Frances ran her mind back to see. Uncle Mike had said it was worthless to talk to Simon. Just then, carefully timing his first movement to a moment when it would not seem responsive to anything his father had said, Simon turned around and began to walk back toward the cottages.

  Uncle Mike snapped his head around quickly, watching Simon. Sometimes he looked like a young man. He was much younger than his brother, Nathan, and he looked younger than he was. His hair was not gray, and it swooped sideways across his forehead. His bathing suit was the tight kind with a bulge in front, not like Frances’s father’s trunks, which were loose like shorts. Mike was smoking a cigarette, and now he dropped it and kicked sand over it with his bare foot. For a moment he looked as if he might order Simon to stop walking, but he didn’t. He moved forward now and stood at the edge of the lake where Simon had stood. When Simon turned around, Mike had been in mid-sentence, saying, “I’m not the kind of father who …” but he stopped and seemed to swallow the sentence like something coming out of his mouth that he’d now rather keep.

  His face worked as if he were going to speak again.

  “Daddy,” said Frances, “do you want to watch me float?”

  Now she would have to get wet again. She didn’t know why she had said that. Her father stood up slowly and came toward the edge of the water, and Frances got off her rock and pulled her bathing suit down where it had crept up on her backside. She walked out to where the water reached her knees. This part of the lake was in shade now, in a shadow cast by trees at the side of the beach, and the water was dark, but it felt warm. She lay down, arching her back, tipping her head backward. Her hair streamed out. She held her body as still as possible. She could see one cloud, a rough triangle, and trees far away across the lake behind her.

  “Very good,” he
r father said sadly, but loudly and slowly, so she could hear.

  She stayed still as long as she could. Sometimes her legs would go down and she would give a little kick. After a while she heard Uncle Mike’s voice again. Her ears were in the water and she couldn’t hear what he said. Now her father spoke again and this time she couldn’t hear him either. They were angry. They were probably arguing about Simon. Frances rolled over and began to swim. She would do more laps, slowly and carefully, keeping her elbows close to her body when her arms were underwater. She swam back and forth next to the rope until she was tired. As she swam, she wondered if Uncle Mike might praise her, but when she finished and stood up—so tired that her legs were unsteady for a moment—neither of them was paying attention to her. It had to be late. There were deep shadows.

  “A whole way of looking at things,” Mike was saying. “An entire way of looking at things. It’s not just McCarthy.”

  Frances came out of the water and wrapped a towel around her shoulders. She was cold. She tied the laces of her sneakers together and put them over her shoulder, one in front, one behind. She didn’t want to hear about McCarthy. Uncle Mike was holding an imaginary saxophone in his hands, his feet planted far apart as if he were playing, his fingers moving. But he was talking. “Never understood the way you look at things. Never could see it.”

  Mike had a regular job but he had wanted to be a musician. He had played saxophone in a jazz band during the Depression, when he was a young fellow, but he couldn’t make money at it. He still played with some friends, not often, or he practiced at home. But his hands often played an instrument that wasn’t there.

  Frances started to walk, and the sneakers bumped her chest and back rhythmically as she climbed the short rise away from the beach. In a book about old times, a girl might walk barefoot on a dirt road with her shoes bumping her chest and back. The towel could be a shawl. The road was hot and stony. Frances had to place her feet gingerly when she took a step, and that seemed wrong for what she was imagining, for the girl walking barefoot.

  Frances moved to the edge of the road, where the lawn started, because it would be cooler and more comfortable, but it was the dirt and stones that had made her feel like an old-fashioned girl. Her suit was still wet and the middle of her body was cool, but her arms and legs felt hot now. She came to a shaded place and she stepped off the lawn even though the stones would hurt her feet. She almost wanted the stones to hurt her. In front of her, a little to the side, a brown striated stone stuck out of the ground and came to a point. Frances deliberately ran her foot over that stone, and put her weight down so the point pressed into her arch. It hurt. If the stone cut her, she could get blood poisoning and even die.

  It was dishonest to imagine dying—though it was interesting. One day, when Frances was on her way to Macy’s with her mother to buy a coat, she had heard a woman crossing a street in New York say, “Nobody believes he’s going to die.” When Frances looked into her mind, she discovered it was true of her: although she knew everyone died, she didn’t believe she would die. She didn’t know it in the obvious, ordinary way she knew that she lived on the third floor of an apartment house, the way she knew that if she rang the doorbell, her mother, Hilda Levenson, would open the door.

  It seemed wrong not to believe in something true. Whenever she thought of dying after that, she made sure to tell herself over and over that someday she was going to die. Once, she had felt herself just about to believe it, and to her surprise had pulled her mind away quickly the way she might pull her foot from a stone.

  She was almost at the cottage. She came to a place where the road was soft sand and easy to walk on. “I’m going to die,” she said out loud in a low voice, and with some excitement she heard herself differently, as if another ear had opened in her body. The words went straight in and she knew they were true. She looked at the trees and the gray cottages, and still knew she was going to die, and didn’t have to keep telling herself. She had thought that if she ever believed it, it would be for only an instant, and if she wanted to believe it again, she’d have to work just as hard.

  She crossed the short lawn in front of their cottage. Her mother’s brown slippers, which she wore to the beach, were drying on the step. Frances climbed the wooden steps and caught the screen door just before it banged.

  The cottage was dim and quiet. Simon was not lying on the cot where he was sleeping this week, on the screened porch. In the living room, the daybed where his parents slept was closed, and nobody was there. Frances dropped her sneakers in the living room and went to the doorway of her bedroom, but as she stepped inside she saw Simon stretched out on her bed, apparently reading, looking as if he’d been there for a long time, propped on one elbow with his back to her. He didn’t turn around. “I’m going to die,” she said in a low voice, but his back, in a white shirt, seemed to be telling her in a quiet but clipped voice to go away. His legs were bent at the knees, and behind him on the bed were her clothes, her shorts and halter and her underpants on top. Maybe they were where she had left them, and maybe he had pulled the pile of clothes closer to the end of the bed so he’d have room to lie down. Frances stepped forward, just to take the pile of clothes. She would go into her parents’ bedroom, which was on the other side of the living room, the side that got the sun in the afternoon. Frances opened the door without knocking, then remembered her mother and Aunt Pearl.

  The yellow cotton curtain had been pulled across the screen, and the room was dim and still. Heat struck Frances’s face as she stepped in, as if someone had reached out a flat palm. There was the sweet smell of talcum powder, and a cloud of it in the air. Frances’s mother was facing away from the door, naked, her fingers curved and close together. She was going to apply powder to Aunt Pearl’s back. Aunt Pearl, also naked, had her back to Hilda. Her skin was red on either side of the white lines of her bathing suit straps, and in between the lines. Now they both turned slowly and some of the powder in Hilda’s hand drifted to the floor. She leveled her hand to save it and applied it to her own body, lifting her breast and stroking her chest underneath it. “What is it, baby?” she said.

  “I need to change out of my bathing suit,” said Frances. “Simon’s in my room.” Her mother’s breasts were larger than Aunt Pearl’s, and hung down, so there were those little rooms under them, secret places. Her mother’s belly was round and full of folds, and her belly button, in the middle of it, seemed mournful.

  “Come on in,” said her mother. “We were just taking a little nap.” The air was rich with sleep. It seemed to Frances that it would be easy and delightful to lie down on the rumpled, bare sheet—the blankets had been pushed to the floor—and fall into her mother’s nap, Aunt Pearl’s nap. The sun was coming through the curtain and the air was yellow, and it did seem as if yellow was the color of naps, and if she just pulled off her wet suit and lay down, she could enter the nap where Hilda and Pearl had left it.

  But she felt small and naked, even though she was wearing her bathing suit and Hilda and Pearl were not wearing anything. They were wearing their flesh. Aunt Pearl was tall, with short blond hair. Her breasts were smaller than Hilda’s and her belly was not so large, but her rear end was large. Her body swelled below her waist, and her buttocks were like a chair, firm and broad, yet with that line down the middle that looked childlike to Frances.

  She hesitated. If she left, there would be nowhere to change but the bathroom, and there the floor would be wet, and she would see a spider while she was undressed and have to put her clothes on before she could run away.

  “Are you sunburned?” said Aunt Pearl. “You look as if you’re peeling a little.” And she stepped forward and turned Frances around to examine her back and shoulders.

  “Do you want some powder, honey?” said her mother, and now it was as if Frances had been standing on a step or a little stool, just above the room, and she deliberately stepped off it into something fragrant and soft. “My stomach hurts,” she said, making her voice sound as i
f she were younger than she was.

  “Are you constipated?” said her mother. “Did you go to the bathroom today?”

  “It’s not that,” said Frances. “It’s like something rubbed on my stomach and made the outside hurt.” Her bathing suit had cotton ties that went into loops and made a bow behind her, and she reached back and undid the bow, and then worked the suit down her body.

  “Is it a mosquito bite?” said her mother.

  “I don’t know.” There was a bite on her stomach, and her mother squatted in the dimness to look at it and said that was it. Frances wanted to lie down on the bed but she didn’t. She sat on the bed and Aunt Pearl sat down next to her. She was still behaving as if she were younger than she was, younger than eleven. “Mommy’s fat,” she said.

  “No, she’s not,” Aunt Pearl said. “I’m fat. I have a fat tush.”

  “Mommy has a fat stomach.”

  “I think it looks nice,” said Aunt Pearl. The truth was that Frances thought it looked nice, too.

  Frances’s mother stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself, but the mirror was too small, it showed only her head. She picked up her hair. “I used to be thin,” she said. “When I was in high school, I had to have an extra hole made in my belt.”

  “Well, I never had to do that,” said Aunt Pearl.

  “You’re still thin,” said Hilda.

  “Except for the backside,” Pearl said. “That was pretty small, too, until I had a baby.”

  Frances tried to imagine Aunt Pearl pregnant. She had been pregnant with Simon. Her belly would swoop out in front, but Frances didn’t see why her backside would get bigger. There was a towel lying on the bed and Frances dried her stomach and what she could reach of her back. She was only a little damp. Aunt Pearl took the towel, though, and dried the part of her back Frances couldn’t reach. Then she rubbed powder on Frances’s back. Her hand felt large.