by Jane Rule
Something dangerous, or dangerously comfortable, about George’s or the young woman who ran it, so Rosemary Hopwood had thought when she first discovered it six years ago just after she’d come back to town. The line of an old rocker had clipped her vision at thirty miles an hour so that she slowed, drove round the block, and parked her rather too expensive car for the price she intended to pay right at the front door. Dina Pyros was alone in the shop that morning, crouched at the bottom drawer of an old chest, fixing the last of the brass handles. She went on working while she exchanged looks of appraisal with her customer. Rosemary Hopwood had time, therefore, to consider that face and the price tag on the rocker before she had to speak. There wasn’t, she was interested to discover, much margin for bargaining in either the price or the face, which she regretted briefly, knowing no other way to have a conversation.
“I’d like the rocker,” she said.
Dina stood up, squarely built, solidly balanced, in a heavy, dark sweater, other uncountable layers of clothing visible at the neck, lined jeans, and boots. She must have said something, but Rosemary’s memory of the transaction was that it was nearly wordless. She had the right change. Dina put the rocker in her car. That was all. The radio had been playing, surely. It always was.
The shop had never been empty again when Rosemary came in, once every two or three months, sometimes honestly looking for a piece of furniture, more often simply lingering at the paperbacks, accepting a cigarette or a cup of coffee, strong and bitter, boiled with its grounds in an old tin pot. Occasionally she met someone she knew: old Ida Setworth or Cole Westaway, the boy who had come to live with Amelia Larson. And the faces of those she didn’t know, collected around the stove, became familiar to her. For her, there was no conversation ever, just the hum of the shop, voices somewhere in it, from the radio or the people by the stove, and the owner’s square, drowsy courtesy. Rosemary would stay a little longer than made sense and go before she was ready to.
At first Dina had been no more than surprised by Rosemary Hopwood, who was not a woman one could reasonably expect to drop in at George’s or, for that matter, anywhere else in this bypassed, sea-sided town. That first day she was still dressing as she had in some other world, in black, with something bright and soft at her throat. Her hair was black—and her eyes—and she had a slow, very white smile. Dina was not so much aware of how little had been said as she was of Rosemary’s voice, low, with breakings in it. When Dolly asked Dina to describe Rosemary Hopwood, Dina could only say, “Around forty, about to age.” And Rosemary had aged in those six years, for Dina nearly at once when she discovered Rosemary’s name, which was as old as any name in town, then again when Dina discovered that she was a social worker.
“What if she’s looking for grass?” Dina asked Dolly.
“It’s not as if you were pushing it,” Dolly said.
“No, but you know… the kids.”
“So? They’re better by your stove than down on the docks.”
“Still, you can smell it.”
“Maybe she’s your type, is she?” Dolly asked.
Dina shrugged, as if to say she wasn’t particular.
“Sal wonders, are you coming over tonight?”
“Don’t know,” Dina said.
It would depend, as Dolly knew, on whether or not Dina got involved with a piece of furniture or a woman. If a woman, she might bring her along, but if a piece of furniture, she was lost to them. Dina never really planned her involvements, as long as they were in something of a constant rhythm, which somehow usually happened without her ever directly initiating anything.
So, for six years, Rosemary Hopwood had been coming into the shop, along with a number of other people, and Dina had got used to her, though never quite to the sound of her voice. Dina sold her a table or made her a cup of coffee or offered her a cigarette, that was all.
Sal, in the shop just a couple of months ago, saw Rosemary for the first time and said, when she had gone, “I wonder where she buys her underwear.”
Dina turned on the sander.
“I don’t believe a word you say,” Sal shouted uselessly. “You gray-eyed Greek!”
It was not a hard exercise in cynicism, since Dina spoke so few, ever.
Saturday morning was always a bad one for Dina because she drank every Friday night at Nick’s, partly out of family loyalty to her cousin Nick, partly out of immigrant loneliness for a country she didn’t remember, partly out of dull habit. It was a rest at the time, the place full of young men: college students and sailors off the few freighters that still did come in to port here. But she always drank too much. Dolly and Sal didn’t know why she opened up on Saturday, except to provide a place by the stove for the drifting kids. That was why. She seemed to herself, on Saturday morning, one of them. Often she did no work at all, sat on the back step with a bottle of beer, and stared at weed patches in the concrete. Even addressed, she might not respond, but George’s was open. The radio was on. The cats came in and out, over and around her.
“Shall I get the phone?” someone asked.
Dina didn’t answer.
“It’s Miss A, Dina,” the same voice said. “She wants to talk to you, if that’s all right.”
Dina put the bottle of beer down carefully between her feet, got up, and backed away from it. To anyone else, if she had bothered to take the call, she would have said, “I don’t repair furniture,” but to Miss A, Dina would say yes to whatever request. It was not that she had her eye on pieces of furniture in the house, though there were some she would have loved to buy. Neither Miss B nor Miss A would ever sell anything. It wasn’t, either, that the old Larson ladies were people no one refused, though that was true. Dina liked old people generally, particularly antiques like Ida Setworth. Still, she could say no to Ida Setworth. Miss A was, Dina tried to explain, “one of a kind.” Not her lameness, no, not that. And Dina had seen better faces. Miss A’s tended to pudding when she was tired. She was open and closed, open to know and still complete in herself. What she asked for was all that she ever wanted.
“Yes,” Dina said, “tonight as soon as I’ve closed the shop… No, not for supper, thanks, Miss A, but I’ll have a sherry with you before I go.”
The effort of that kept Dina from getting all the way back to the door. She settled in her old chair instead, a seat left vacant for her even when the shop was crowded. It turned partly away from the stove and the couch, not quite toward a remarkably orderly desk. From it, she could seem to turn her back and still watch the front area of the shop. And she could hear, without getting involved in, the arguments about baseball scores or narcs or how much it didn’t cost to get to Mexico, usually quietly going on under the sounds of the radio.
The street door opened and Grace Hill walked into the shop, a long-boned, expensive woman with migraine eyes and an unalterable mouth. She started a look toward Dina and then veered away. She was too nervous to browse with books. Instead she got very aggressive with chairs, shaking them, turning them upside down, even lifting one or two off the wall where Dina had hung several sets.
“How much are these?” she finally called.
Price is on the bottom,” Dina replied, without looking over or moving.
“I’d like to be shown,” Grace Hill said.
The others by the stove watched Dina for the moment before she moved, knowing it was a contest. Dina got up, walked over, and lifted half a dozen chairs off the wall.
“I don’t really want chairs,” Grace Hill said.
Dina yawned through her ears.
“Couldn’t you come and have a drink?”
“Don’t close the shop until six.”
“Perhaps I’ll come back.”
Dina did not respond one way or the other. Grace Hill waited, then turned and walked out.
“Tight ass,” one of the boys commented.
“Don’t be mouthy about her broads,” another said.
“What’s mouthy?”
“Tight ass,” Dina
agreed, and she reached out to pour herself and the others coffee.
If Grace Hill did come back at six, Dina was not there to know it. She had locked up at five-thirty in order to get to Miss A’s to pick up the chest and drink a glass of sherry.
Since Dina had wrecked her sports car two years ago and spent three months in the hospital in traction, she had not owned a car. She drove instead her ancient junk truck, a reliable traffic hazard, built before automobiles became the first self-destruct art object. Sometimes it was reluctant to start, but there was nowhere in town that Dina couldn’t get a push from a gang of kids or a bank manager. And, if she missed the light at M Street and therefore didn’t get a run on the hill, she could always turn the truck around and back up, a sight familiar to local drivers and accepted by the police. This evening she was lucky and arrived at the crest of P Street at a sturdy ten miles an hour, only five or six patient cars behind her. Because of the high hedges around the Larson house, Dina did not see Rosemary Hopwood’s car until she had turned into the drive. She sat in the high seat of her truck for a moment, leaning on the steering wheel. Then she cupped her ears in her hands, incidentally flattening the wings of her dark, strong hair.
“Hi, Dina,” Cole called, coming across the drive from the side garden.
She gave him a minimal salute.
“I came about the chest.”
“It’s in the front hall. I’ll help you carry it out,” Cole said. “Then Cousin A says you’ll stay for sherry.”
“She’s got company,” Dina said.
“Just Miss Hopwood about Kathy.”
“What’s the matter with Kathy?”
“Well, you know, it’s about time…” Cole said.
She followed him to the house, and together they carried out the chest either of them could have managed quite easily alone, but because Cole had nothing but goodwill invested in the gesture, Dina accepted it. She felt, with a dim kindness, sorry for Cole Westaway. He let so little out but goodwill. “The kind of guy to grow up to be everybody’s left-hand man,” her cousin Nick said, with some impatience, which Dina couldn’t feel. She swung up on the truck deck and let Cole hand the chest up to her. He waited while she roped it down.
“It’s a nice piece,” she said.
“It’s to be a present for Harriet Jameson.”
Cole consciously did not offer his hand as she came down off the truck, just as he consciously did not offer a hand to Cousin A in any of her gettings up and gettings down. But knowing what not to do only left him doing nothing nervously. He would have liked to make Dina a friend of his, but he saw no clear way of going about it. He dropped in at the shop occasionally. He saw her often at Nick’s, but he felt the distance she kept around herself from everyone, the kids in the shop, the women she drank with.
“Are you going to Nick’s tonight?” Dina asked, making a rare effort at a question.
“Probably. Are you?”
“Don’t know. Probably. There’s a Greek ship in.”
Dina wore nothing Cole could offer to take from her; so he led her at once down the hall to the library. She stood stolidly in the doorway for a moment, like the gardener or plumber; then she moved to the hands Miss A offered up to her.
“Dina,” Amelia said. “Do you know Miss Hopwood?”
“Yes, we know each other,” Rosemary said, offering only her very white smile. “How are you, Dina?”
“Well enough for Saturday,” Dina said.
“Did Cole show you the chest?” Amelia asked.
“Yes, I can have it done for you in about a week. Do you want me to bring it back here or take it over to Miss Jameson’s?”
“Well, yes, that’s a sensible suggestion.”
Cole was pouring her a glass of sherry, protecting himself from the silence in the room. Amelia listened to it as easily as if it were conversation. Rosemary was less comfortable in it, but what occurred to her to say, tested quickly in her head, seemed either false or forward. She reached for her purse and a cigarette, which signaled Dina to produce a pack from somewhere inside the layers of clothes she seemed to wear in all seasons.
“Thank you,” Rosemary said. “I always seem to be smoking yours.”
Dina shrugged, waited, and lighted the cigarette. Then she turned to Cole and her sherry.
“We’ve been talking about what to do when Kathy goes,” Amelia said. “Apparently there are more girls than places just now.”
“Grace Hill was thinking of taking a girl,” Dina said.
“Do you know her?” Rosemary asked. “Well enough, I mean, to know how it would be for a girl in her household?”
“A house full of boys,” Dina said. “A lot of work, probably.”
“She has come to see me,” Rosemary admitted. “She seemed…”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea,” Dina said flatly, to close the conversation.
But Amelia couldn’t accept that, in concern of her own. “Why?”
“Do you know Mrs. Hill?” Rosemary asked.
“No,” Amelia said. “I know who her husband is, of course, but I don’t know her.”
Dina had taken a seat across from Rosemary, her booted feet separately planted on the floor, her glass in a hand between her knees.
“Why, Dina?” Amelia asked again.
“She wants more than she asks for,” Dina said. “These kids … you need to be willing to take less… like you.”
“She said she’d had some training in social work,” Rosemary said.
Dina looked over at Rosemary.
“She’s an awfully nervous person,” Cole said suddenly. “I don’t really know her. I’ve just seen her in the shop a couple of times. But, if I were pregnant …” he stopped, half-amused, half-embarrassed.
Dina’s laugh was like the bark of a deep-throated dog. “I’m with you, Cole,” she said. “But you’re already in the best house for pregnant girls in town.”
For Amelia the conversation was both distressing and reassuring. Dina Pyros was no fool, and she was both young enough herself—probably not much over thirty—and in tune enough with young people to make such a judgment sensibly. Still, Amelia now was not the Amelia of six months or a year ago. She was older and heavier with grief. She was alone, with only the mirror of her sister’s diaries to look into, where before she had been able to look into her sister’s face. Other faces did not do in the same way and never would, much as she liked the two now turned toward her, the shrewd, gray-eyed Greek with her broad-planed face and the bred beauty of Rosemary Hopwood, as nerve-sharp as Dina was willfully bland.
“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “I just don’t know.”
“I don’t have to send Agate to you,” Rosemary said. “There are two other girls.”
“Agate?” Cole asked.
“A bright and angry twenty-year-old from downstate,” Rosemary said. “You’d like her well enough, but she’s obviously going to be a handful at times. And maybe …” She turned to Amelia.
“Let me think about it,” Amelia said. “Kathy has another three weeks probably.”
“The doctor today said maybe just another week,” Rosemary said and added, because of the surprise on Amelia’s face, “There’s a family history of complications.”
Dina stood up and put her glass on the table. “Thanks for the sherry.”
“Will you call me or Miss Jameson?” Amelia asked.
“Just as you like.”
“Call her,” Amelia decided.
“Good-bye, Dina,” Rosemary said. “I’ll have to stop in and see you one day soon. I’m looking for a bedside table.”
“Any time,” Dina said. “See you tonight, Cole.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll see you to the door.”
Dina went to Miss A, leaned down, and kissed her, not on the cheek, on the side of her brow, where the old, fine veins made a pattern.
“I like that young woman,” Amelia said, when she and Cole had left the room. “Do you?”
“W
hy, yes. Why would you ask?” Rosemary said.
“You seemed to have some distaste for her boots,” Amelia said, smiling.
“Sometimes you want me, just for a minute, to be Beatrice,” Rosemary said.
“Yes, it’s the shape of your head, I suppose.”
“But I like Dina’s boots. I like Dina. I confess that for some time I even tried to make friends with her, after I first got back.”
“Did you really? And couldn’t?”
“No more than you see,” Rosemary said.
“She hasn’t much talent for friendship. Cole tries, too. She doesn’t talk long enough.”
“No, though today she said more than I’ve ever heard her say before.”
“You want me to take Agate,” Amelia said.
“Yes, Amelia, I do, but I don’t want to force her on you.”
“What if I can’t handle her?”
“I don’t know,” Rosemary said. “You won’t have to if you can’t, of course.”
“Is Kathy going to have a difficult time?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just a precaution,” Rosemary said. “And, by the way, something I think you are getting too old for is the waiting room.”
“Nonsense. It’s the one thing I don’t feel too old for. And don’t you misjudge Kathy. She asks very little, but she’s going to need somebody there, and I’ll do. I always have.”
“Think about Agate. I’ll stop in again later in the week.”
“There’s plenty of dinner,” Amelia said.
“I know … with Kathy there always is, but I must go along.”
Dina and Cole were still in the driveway when Rosemary came out of the house.
“Anything the matter?” she called.
“A flat,” Dina said, “and I’ve left the spare at the shop.”
“Do you want me to drive you down to get it?”
“I can, Miss Hopwood,” Cole said.