The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  Even the children had caught on, saying the word home to each other but meaning Ireland, a place they'd never seen. "They don't have pizza at home, do they, Mom?" James had asked on his seventh birthday. He held the slice at an angle so that the oil formed a current down the center, leaked onto the plate, and made the thin paper almost transparent. "No, love," Greta told him. "They have delicious pig's feet."

  "Home," James said, "sounds disgusting."

  The side of the living room that became James's room got the larger of the two windows, so the portion of the room left over for the couch, the armchair, the television, and the low table they called a coffee table, though they usually drank tea, was at its brightest a rose-tinted gray. While it lasted, the light was perfect in its pinkness, in the way it airbrushed everything in the room, in the agile way Greta imagined the rays must have bent and turned to avoid the tall buildings up and down Eighty-fourth Street just to shoot an arrow into the Wards' ground-floor apartment. For roughly thirty minutes each day—slightly longer in the summer, slightly shorter in the winter—the living room was awash with pinks and reds. At all other times the room was a black-and-white photograph—the maroon couch, the deep-piled beige rug, the blue-and-white-flecked armchair, the navy-and-green-striped curtain—all reduced to a palette of grays.

  They had a single lamp in the corner, but Julia had told Greta recently that it wasn't enough; it would do more harm than good. Who ever heard of a reading lamp that only held a forty-watt bulb? It was this lamp that Michael inched closer to as he listened to Greta move back and forth in the kitchen, the girls' room, the hallway, his newspaper tilted to catch the light. Two weeks of physical therapy in the hospital had done wonders, but a dull ache still ran down his limbs when he craned his neck to catch sight of her. He had three more weeks of therapy to go, and those would be held in the suburbs, at a hospital he'd never seen.

  "Did you take your pill?" Greta asked as she crossed the living room to James's room, a single memory of a toy wagon becoming sharper with every step.

  "I did. Didn't you give it to me yourself?"

  "Oh, right," Greta said, pausing her search to rest her hand on Michael's forehead. She'd asked him to explain it to her a dozen times, where he'd been standing, the size of the cutters, how, exactly, his hood had gotten caught. No, he wouldn't get paid while he was laid up, but he was alive, he would walk, he would be back at work within two months if all went well. The walking boss had come to the hospital with his cap in his hands and said he never should have asked them to look at the mole, that was for the damn engineers to kill themselves over, he should have let those good-for-nothing engineers get injured for a change. The man pointed out that the company always needed someone to supervise the pumps, no matter what the funding situation. "You can read a paper, Michael. You can bring down one of them portable TVs. As long as you're there if the pump stops." Without the pumps, all their years of work would be washed away. It was as Michael had always believed: with the bad must come some good to balance things out. As the rest of the men got laid off, Michael tried to hurry himself to health so he could go back to work.

  "We could put off the move," Michael said as Greta took her hand away and he shifted to find a cool spot on the couch. "We could call and ask them if we can stay another month. After twenty-two years, what's another month? They could check with the new tenants to see if that works for them."

  Greta smiled, tried to remember what she'd been about to do when she asked Michael about his pill. They couldn't put it off; Michael knew that as well as she did. The new owner had the apartment scheduled to be gutted the day after they moved out. Plus they'd signed something saying they'd be out by July 1 and they'd have no further claim on the apartment. The management company, retained by the new owner, had already taken on all maintenance responsibilities. If they stayed now, after giving up their rent-controlled lease, they'd have to pay four times what they'd been paying since 1964. That—combined with the mortgage they were already paying on a house they hadn't spent a single night in yet.

  "I know we signed, Greta," Michael said as if reading her thoughts. "But most people are decent, and when they know what happened—"

  "We've put it off long enough, and we've a lovely house waiting for us, and we always said we wanted to be out before the heat of the summer. Julia and myself can handle it, and Eavan and James will do their part and that's that. And I've asked that lunatic Ned Powers to help if he's doing nothing else. He agreed in a heartbeat, which I suppose means he has the guilts about the accident though I didn't say a word. You can supervise. In fact, your first job can be to tell me how in the world I'm going to get all those boxes I've coming to me in one trip. I have to be at work at three o'clock and if I don't get them today they'll throw them out."

  They'd looked into hiring movers after Michael's accident, but the men Michael knew from the days of working as a mover had all gotten steadier work in different fields—construction, the phone company, heat and electric. Greta called a moving company she found in the phone book, and they sent a man over who looked in all the rooms of the apartment, opened and closed closets, got out his tape, and measured the apartment door. Greta was so shocked by the price he quoted that she felt her whole body flush. She stood speechless, staring at him, and he lowered it by fifty dollars. Just having him in the apartment made her panic, and she ushered him out the door as quickly as she could. She could fill the new house with furniture for the price he was asking. It amazed her to think there were people who would have agreed.

  "You need the old grocery cart," Michael said, trying to make out Greta's features in the dim light. Her dark hair was in a low ponytail. It had been a warm spring, and her arms were already brown from walking to work. She was still rail thin, and unlike Michael, she felt no temptation whatsoever when she passed a bakery with money in her pocket. More than twenty years in America, and Michael still hadn't gotten over all the different things there were to eat and how cheap so many of them were. At home he'd been beaten many times for being caught with his licked finger in the sugar sack, but in America he could pour packet after packet into his tea at no extra charge and no one would look twice. Down on Spring Street a man could eat like a king with just two dollars if he got his toasted cashews from one vendor, his paper box of noodles and pork from the next, a sweet bun from the next, and so on, until his belly felt tight as a drum.

  "I stored it in the basement," he told Greta. "The keys are on the ring behind the kitchen door." Sometimes he was struck by how much she had changed since she was a girl, how lost she'd seemed then, how adrift in the wide-open landscape of home and then the immense backdrop of New York City. More often he suspected that she'd only pretended to change, had memorized the pace and language of a new place and had learned to mimic it so well that she forgot she was only playing a part. He'd caught himself at it hundreds of times, barking his breakfast order across delicatessen counters in all five boroughs, pressing his fist against the car horn the instant the light turned green.

  Greta bent to kiss his elbow above the sling. She went to get up, but he grabbed her hand with his good arm.

  "It's not Ned's fault, you know. It's just the job. You've got to get that idea out of your head."

  "Well, then tell me how many had he on him when he met me at the hospital."

  "He never drinks on the job." He'd said the same to the walking boss when he'd come asking questions at the hospital.

  "But he drinks every hour of the day except the hours he's on the job? And didn't he come straight from the site to the hospital?"

  "He stopped off, and I don't blame him. He's been through enough." It had been just three years since Ned Powers's three-year-old son had fallen off the roof of their building in the Bronx. Up the stairs the boy went, up, up, ahead of his mother, who was weighed down with bags and an infant daughter in her arms. "Go easy," Kate Powers had called up the stairwell to her son, and then stopped to swap the baby from her left arm to her right. As she bent
to pick up the groceries, she heard the roof door slam shut.

  After, she woke up at night after night and accused Ned of watching her sleep, of plotting revenge. Eventually, because he couldn't think of anything else, they decided she should go back to Ireland, to her mother's house, until she felt better. She and the baby had been gone for two and a half years.

  "Anyhow, he quit the drink. He told me when he came to the hospital. He's given it up."

  "But Michael," Greta started, but then she noticed that he was wearing that expression he always wore when he was bracing himself for something, and she stopped. She freed her hand and crossed the room in three long strides, and a moment later the jangle of her keys could be heard moving down the hall to the apartment door, to the hall outside, to the door leading to the basement. A few minutes later Michael heard the tinny rattle of lightweight metal as she opened the cart in the hall.

  "I'm off!" she called into the apartment, and pulled the door closed. Michael listened to the squeal of the rusted wheels as she pulled the flimsy cart down the steps of the stoop, then turned right toward Second Avenue. I hope she remembered twine, he thought. I hope she knows enough not to be tempted by grocery stores or restaurants, however strong their boxes might look. He didn't want to carry roaches to the new house in the suburbs. In the suburbs, they would never peer under a cabinet to find a trail of egg cases, its cargo hatched and gone. In the suburbs, they would slide their feet into shoes without giving it a second thought. In the suburbs, they'd have 0.39 acres of rich brown dirt and green grass all to themselves.

  Back in late April, on the day Greta and Michael told Julia that they'd made an offer on a house in a town called Recess and that the offer had been accepted, Julia had spent a week's worth of tips on three pairs of shoes. One pair was absolutely necessary, black flats, slip-ons, easy to walk to and from the subway, easy to slip into her bag once she got to work or campus and wanted to switch to a pair of heels. The second pair, black leather ankle boots with a slim silver chain running along the top of the foot, would go with a lot of outfits and would be great on bare legs or with tights or with sheer black stockings or with anything, really, pants or jeans, short skirts or long. The third pair was the one Julia couldn't get off her mind as her parents were describing a sidewalk, a deck, a large front window, neighbors named Diane and Bill. They were cherry red patent leather peep-toe stilettos, and they'd cost seventy-five bucks. Why had she done it? Jesus, seventy-five dollars? That was a whole semester's worth of books, a jacket, an interview suit — all things she actually needed. She'd done a slow lap around the store in them and then stopped to stare at her transformed lower legs in the mirror. Cherry red! There were her toes, looking right at home and ready to be noticed. There were her slim ankles above the impossibly narrow spike of a heel. They seemed like things to show off under a spotlight, things to be propped up on a table and discussed. "You walk like a natural," the saleswoman had said. "You know how many girls can't go three steps in those babies?" And like that, one throwaway comment the woman had probably quoted from her sales manual, and the shoes were hers.

  "Julia," Greta had said, taking her hand and squeezing, "we decided you can have the bedroom downstairs. There's a separate entrance, and now that you're almost twenty-two, we thought you'd like that. You'll have to use the upstairs bathroom to shower, because downstairs only has a toilet, but look, it's a million miles better than what you have now, isn't it? Julia?"

  Julia blinked.

  "If you want to stay in the city, you can do that too," Michael said. "Visit on the weekends. We would understand. The bus leaves from the Port Authority every nineteen minutes during rush hour and every fifty minutes on weekends. You could come for dinner and be back here the same night."

  "Why would she want to stay in the city?" Greta asked. "She wants to come. Don't you want to come?"

  From Eavan and Julia's room came the sound of bedsprings, followed by the rasp of bare soles on the wood floors. Eavan should have been asleep hours ago, and Greta had taken the extra precaution of looking in on her before she and Michael told Julia the news. They wanted to wait until school was finished for the year to tell Eavan and James, but Eavan was quick, one of those children who noticed everything, and she had been quietly observing her parents for a full week, while Julia, thirteen years older than her sister, had daydreamed about new clothes, a boy in her accounting class named Ben, whether she should throw herself a birthday party when the time came.

  Julia watched her mother walk across the room to shut the hall door. As Greta returned to her spot on the couch, keeping wide of the side table that held the crystal lamp for fear she'd knock it with an accidental sweep of her arm, Julia saw it, one of those rare glimpses of her mother as she imagined a stranger might see her. Greta was young, only thirty-eight. She was young also in the sense that went beyond age, young in the way she moved and held herself, self-conscious of her thin limbs, as a teenager might be, holding her elbows to her side as if she was afraid of what might happen if she unpinned them and let them free. She was young in the way she glided carefully across the room in her strappy sandals, each step landing on the ball of her foot rather than her heel and giving the impression of a stealthy march, a creeping prowler, a person trying to sneak out of Mass before Communion. She was young in the way she flipped her dark mop of curls over her shoulder with one quick twitch of her head. Young in the way she looked at Julia and shrugged in that manner that asked, What can you do?

  "What do you think?" Michael asked his daughter.

  Julia almost asked, About what? But instead she nodded. "Yeah, okay." And then: "Wait, are you saying you're thinking about moving, or have you already bought a house?"

  "We made an offer!" Greta said, reaching over to squeeze Julia's knee. "And they accepted! We have to drive out there on Friday to talk to the man in the bank, and we thought you might want to come for the ride and take a look around. It'll still be a while before a closing. Maybe not until June."

  "I have a paper due Friday." It was an old reflex, mentioning school to close the door on further conversation. School was a fenced area of her life that neither Greta nor Michael ever tried to breach, and the reverence they had for the thick pile of books by her bed, the pads covered with rows of her slanted script, were like shields she could use whenever they wanted her to do something she didn't want to do. Only once had she wielded this power in a more tangible way: sophomore year, New Year's plans at a club with a steep cover charge, a party dress she'd seen at B. Altman that she absolutely had to have. She'd told Greta that she needed fifty dollars to buy a new biology textbook and had prepared a whole list of reasons why certain textbooks cost more than others, how she couldn't get a used one because the professor was using an updated edition, how the library copy had already been checked out for the semester. But her preparation proved unnecessary; Greta handed over sixty dollars and told her to get whatever book she needed to do her best in the class. Julia hadn't even been taking bio that semester, but she told herself that if they didn't have the money, they wouldn't have been able to give it to her, so it was no more deceptive of her to have made up a story than for them to always claim they didn't have it to give. Even the next day, the morning of New Year's Eve, when she heard Michael cancel an appointment to get new brakes on the car, she still managed to brush off the timing of her father's call and believe it had nothing to do with her. It was only when she kissed them goodbye, her new blue-sequined dress folded in her bag until she got to her friend Mary's apartment, and Michael handed her a ten-dollar bill and told her to be safe, did she swear to God she'd never do it again.

  "Next time, then." Greta had released Julia's knee. "We have all the time in the world." Greta turned to look at Michael. "Don't we, Michael? Don't be saying she mightn't want to come. Of course she wants to come. Who wouldn't want their own door to go in and out that no one else can use?"

  All Julia knew about the town called Recess was that it was considered by many people to
mark the beginning of that vast wilderness known as upstate. What did people do upstate? She'd been upstate a few times, once to Binghamton to see a friend who went to SUNY, and in high school on a class trip for honor students to see Niagara Falls. She'd been to the suburbs in New Jersey a few times when a new Macy's opened in Paramus and Greta, with her many years of retail experience, had to take the bus out there twice a week to train new hires. Julia knew moving day was approaching, and fast, but it existed on a calendar entirely separate from her own life. The idea of leaving the city to live somewhere else, somewhere north, was impossible to digest. There was too much that had to happen in the interim, and her days were just too fixed and familiar to believe they'd soon be gone. She rode the subway, muttered along with everyone else about the ten-cent increase now six months old, highlighted her textbooks, bought her usual coffee from the stand on Eighty-sixth, starched her blouses for work, washed her clothes for class, waited in the bakery for the day-old rolls, listened to the upstairs neighbors clack back and forth on their new hardwood floors in heels, hurried by the dry cleaners with her head down in case the owner's son asked her for another date, waved to the barber who spent his days framed in the door of his shop and called out each and every morning, "Julia! You are a sight for sore eyes!" And if Eavan and James were with her, "Eavan! James! How tall did you grow overnight? Your papa must put fertilizer in your shoes!"

  The rest of the family talked nonstop about the move, Greta and Michael describing the house, even collaborating on a rough sketch so Eavan and James would understand. Eavan colored the sketch with crayons to show the green grass her mother told her would feel like velvet under her toes, the black shutters, the white shingles, and then she stuck it under a magnet on the fridge. There was a driveway, a garage, five windows facing front. The sketch gave no hint of neighbors, and when Julia came home from work late at night, winded from a hurried walk from the subway with her keys clenched tightly in her fist, she'd sip apple juice at the kitchen table and wonder how far the next houses were. If they'd drawn the sketch from a slightly greater distance, say ten feet back, twenty, would she be able to see the start of their new neighbors' houses at the very edges? How much grass did one family need? The driveway, as Eavan had rendered it, was jet black, shiny with the wax of the crayon, and empty. Where did people walk to when they stepped out their front doors? Her father would no longer have to circle every block from Ninety-sixth to Seventy-sixth in search of a parking spot. No more planning days around alternate side of the street parking. No more yelling at each other to decide which of them would run out to Second Avenue with dimes if no street spots could be found.