I’m strong, Jean thought, I’ll pull myself right out of this and have a good time at the party. She turned onto the rough graveyard road and passed the darkened concrete company. One bright light burned atop a pole near the trucks and the MITCH CONCRETE sign was dusted with snow. Making the blind turn up the cemetery entrance, past the stone pillars that looked so forboding, she felt shaky and ill again. Lord, what was wrong with her? She felt such a fool. She drove slowly along the narrow road and turned on the high beams to make herself feel less alone; finally she stopped beside the family plot. None of the stones had much meaning to her except the one that was off by itself; she’d just had it put there last summer. Graves: what did they mean? Her mother wasn’t even here, if people ever were; she’d hated funerals and left instructions she be cremated. But she’d told them what to put on a stone, when Jean and her brother and sister could bear the expense. And there was a wisdom to it; people had to have a place to make remembrance. Jean looked at the stone. It was smooth granite the color of pewter and relatively small, not even waist high. Yet it had a weight, a power: it marked a place. Jean’s brother and sister were much older and lived in distant towns. What family did she really have of her own blood, except this stone. She thought of the saying “you can’t squeeze blood from a stone” and heard it said in her mother’s voice, like a joking and fond reprieve.
She took off her mittens, flinging them down on the seat, and held to the steering wheel of the Nash. Aloud, she said, “Everything is all right. His business is doing well enough. We’re building a nice house.” Then she looked at her mother’s gravestone and began to weep. There was no one here to know; she wept loudly, hearing her own harsh sounds as though they were part of the weather, the cold wind. The Nash shook slightly, buffeted in the dusk, and Jean felt a silly fondness for the car; it was so new and big and blue, and signified such expectation. Somehow that fact made her sadder; she wept harder, and felt ridiculous.
Minutes passed. Snow blew across the stone like a moving veil. She couldn’t read the words from where she was, but she could see the writing. Well, yes, so it was over. Now what? She sat quietly, the weeping finished, and watched the passive movement of the snow. It was slow and ceaseless, as soft against the stone as the stroke of a hand. Jean heard a word in her mind, sleep or peace—she couldn’t tell which—and she was tired, so tired. Safe and tired as she hadn’t felt for many nights. She turned off the motor of the warm Nash and tilted the seat back. Bulky in her soft coat, she pulled her knees up nearly to her chest and lay her face on her open palm. She was looking at the stone as she fell asleep.
Mother and one of the other women were lifting her out of the car and onto the road. Nearly noon and the day was stifling. The women wore long-sleeved dresses and hats with veils; the palms of their white gloves were damp with sweat. Oh, there was such a crowd, like at church. People were dressed in their best clothes and moved along the dusty road in silence. Far ahead, pickaxes pounded rhythmically on the stone cellar walls of an isolated house. The other two women went on ahead, walking quickly; Mother walked with Jean and held her hand to keep her from stumbling. She couldn’t walk as fast as the grown-ups, and flies buzzed around her face; the air droned strangely with flies. The dirt road seemed long. People from nearby towns had been arriving for hours, and the road was solidly lined on both sides with shiny cars. High black doors above the dusty running boards glimmered in the heat. The chrome bumpers shone, one nearly against the other; between them, Jean glimpsed the overgrown fields. Mother smoothed Jean’s hair and they neared the crowd. Ladies passed them, walking back toward the paved road; they held handkerchieves to their noses and walked along wordlessly, unhurried.
Now the axes rang out.
People stood so close that Jean could see very little, but a wide pit had been dug along the stone house so that one side of the foundation was exposed; workmen had chopped big holes right through it. Stone and mortar lay round about the pit and there were several stretchers. One stretcher was covered with a sheet. An old man bent down and said into Jean’s face, “Not a pretty sight, little girl, but history is made here today.” “Imagine,” a woman’s voice intoned, “his own wife, his own children.” Jean felt her mother’s arms around her then and was lifted up into the warmth of an embrace. “Never you mind, Jeannie. Now we’ll go.” They had to walk along the very edge of the pit to turn back, out of the crowd, and there was a terrible cold rising from the dark earth where the workmen stood. The cold followed Jean and her mother, even in the bright light of the sun. “When suffering seems reasonless,” her mother’s voice said clearly, “people come together and want to understand.” Jean felt herself lowered to the dusty road. The dust was cloudy and yellow under her shoes. “We’ll wait in the car for the others. Now, hold my hand.” They walked on and the cold grew colder, so cold the light went out. Jean knew her mother was near but could feel nothing, her fingers were so terribly cold. She woke touching the slick leather seats of the Nash and found herself in darkness. She was chilled to the bone. Dear God, the party—how long had she been asleep?
The keys were still in the ignition and she started the car, then looked at her watch. Fifteen minutes, and the interior of the Nash was like an icebox. What a strange dream. What had she remembered? She pulled on her warm mittens and pressed their wool to her face. No matter. She remembered clearly her mother’s voice and the sensation of being lifted up. The heater of the Nash clicked and the fan hummed; Jean put the car in reverse and backed up in the dark; then she turned on the headlights and saw that a fleecy snow was falling. Wet, heavy snow. She must go back right away. Mitch might be sleeping but Gladys would have gotten home and started supper: Jean’s job. She didn’t let herself look again at the gravestone but simply drove, turning out of the cemetery onto the asphalt road that ran past the concrete company and back to town. From the hill here she could see the lights of Bellington, glowing behind the snow. She recognized in the silent lights something more than home and felt calm … as though her brief, deep sleep had been a journey to some lost place still existing alongside this one. This one began a new year, but the other played in the mind, repeatedly, selectively.
Jean passed the Parkette, a drive-in restaurant closed for New Year’s, and slowed to cross the railroad tracks. The Nash lurched, bumping over uneven ties. Mitch had never been one for talking. He was good-looking and older; he’d seemed quiet and dependable. He’d been back from the service nearly two years by the time they met at the VFW, a dance like the one tonight, except it had been no special occasion. Once they started going out, they’d seen each other every afternoon and night for three weeks; in the last week, they were planning their wedding. Jean hadn’t needed anyone to talk to then. She’d had so much to do—with her job and nursing her mother. Then she’d quit her job, and she and Gracie moved closer to the approaching death as though partners in it. After they realized there was no way out, they’d talked openly and freely about what might happen, how it would be: a mystery.
Main Street was nearly deserted, the street lamps on. Christmas decorations, red aluminum bells and flocked pine, swung heavily in the wind. The street, so familiar, was quiet and empty and clear. It was how every day had been, in every season, since her mother had died. There was no more talking, not really—no one whose past she knew, who knew her.
Even when Mother had been so ill the talking stopped, Jean hadn’t felt alone. Old Doc Jonas, Reb’s father, still practiced then. Gracie was one of his last patients: when the time came, just as he’d promised, he gave her drugs to stop the pain. Suddenly, it was as though all the consciousness she’d used to combat her sickness was now free to float forward and backward, witness to all that happened. Oh, Jean had felt things in those weeks that didn’t seem Christian, things she’d never tell anyone. Most nights she slept on a cot beside Grade’s bed, and she’d have such dreams, all through the fitful hours, and wake exhausted. She thought she dreamed her mother’s dreams, not hers. She’d empty the bedpan
, straighten the sheets, give her mother the morphia—then lie down and plummet into a sleep she never owned. She saw her father standing outside a baroque locked door, begging to be let in. He hadn’t had a thing to drink tonight, he promised, oh Gracie, this time he’d be gentle. Jean woke with her heart pounding in a rush of heat and panic. She’d check on her mother, whose thin body seemed pressed to the bed, oblivious.
It was a relief then to go downstairs and fix breakfast for Mitch, who by six had shaved and dressed and made coffee. It was a blessing to sit opposite him at the table and talk as though to an acquaintance. They talked about the concrete company, just started then by him and Clayton, or about some harmless gossip in the town. Sometimes, on those still-dark December mornings, they made love quickly in a downstairs bedroom, a small room behind the kitchen, where Mother had always kept household accounts. A tall wooden file cabinet stood sentinel beside the narrow bed; the drawers still held business papers from JT’s lumber mill, and sales receipts from the Depression years, after the mill had failed and they’d scraped along selling milk and butter and eggs to townspeople and renting the upstairs to roomers. Jean would turn from those dark knobbed drawers and press herself tight against Mitch as though fighting his weight, and the weight of the sickness above them. The fighting took her in until kissing him was deep and hard and unfamiliar, like kissing a stranger with whom she was trapped, with whom she was drowning. Behind her eyelids she saw the face in the bed upstairs, and she was able to cry. She never realized she’d cried until afterward, when her throat and temples were wet. Mitch and she didn’t speak about the crying, as though they’d made some agreement. All their agreements became silent ones. The four months they’d slept in the same bed, down the hall from Mother, seemed another life, and their four-day wedding trip to a hotel in Baltimore seemed long ago. Even then, what had they talked of? Mitch never spoke of his childhood, as most people did, or of the war. And Jean didn’t ask about what came between. He’d been thirty-seven when they married—he’d had experiences, of course, judging by the crowd he’d run with—but those years weren’t her business. Oh, what was it she wanted from him? What could she have?
Jean turned the Nash onto Gladys’ narrow street. The aching nervousness she’d felt all week, with Christmas a tinsel backdrop, had eased. None of her questions had answers. She parked the car and let it run, sitting a moment in the comfortable warmth, and looked with a placid curiosity at the modest, snow-sheathed houses. The houses were lovely, lit with yellow, each one a shelter private and alive.
Jean closed the front door quickly, trying to keep the cold out, and stamped her feet on the rubber mat Gladys put over the rug in winter.
“Hello at last,” Gladys said from her chair. She sat quietly, Jean’s party dress on her lap. “I was just about to put out an alert for one Jeannie Hampson.”
Jean turned to face her and brushed the snow from her shoulders guiltily. “I’m sorry I didn’t have dinner started, Gladys.”
“Doesn’t matter. There’ll be plenty of food at the VFW. You know how some of the wives show off at these parties.” She smoothed the full black skirt of the dress over her knees like a coverlet. “You’d think they never got a good word from their husbands, and most of them don’t.”
It was irritating sometimes, the way Gladys talked. “Gladys, for Lord’s sake,” Jean asked her, “how would you know?”
“I sell women’s dresses, that’s how.” Gladys was matter-of-fact. “They tell me everything, from start to finish, whether I want to know or not.”
Jean took off her coat and tried to fluff her dark hair dry with her hands. “I’m glad I work for men at the State Road,” she said. “They may be boorish sometimes, but at least I don’t get yakked at.”
Gladys smiled and held the dress up. “Jean, you’d better try this on so I can press the hem.”
“Oh, you finished the hem?”
“Sure I did,” Gladys said easily. “Didn’t take a minute. Mitch said you’d gone to get thread, but I had a spool of black silk in my desk.” She shook the dress out busily, but Jean saw the spool of thread on the arm of the chair. It was the same spool Jean had hidden; of course, Gladys had sat down and felt the small lump under the cushion. My God, she was impossible to deceive.
“Gladys,” Jean began, “I didn’t really go downtown. I—”
“Oh hush, it’s no one’s business where you went. You can’t tell everyone what you do every minute or you’ll have no peace at all.”
The two women exchanged a look, and then Jean took the dress and held it against her chest. “I’m sure it’s perfect,” she said.
“You’ll look wonderful. Black wool is so classic, and you have the complexion to wear it.” Gladys smiled. “You can show off that little waist of yours while you still have it.”
They heard Mitch in the hallway. The bathroom door closed and the spritz of the shower began.
“I’d better hurry.” Jean stepped out of her wet shoes and stood for a moment on the heating vent. The furnace blower had clicked on and the floor grate was warm.
“Yes, you had. He’ll have a fit if we aren’t ready in half an hour.” Gladys got up from the chair, rubbing her arms, and stood beside Jean over the heat. “Oh, I’m getting old. Arthritis is next, probably.” She fished in the pocket of her wool sweater and held out a small white bag. “Remember that tube of Fire Red you asked me to order at the store? Here it is, just in time.”
“Gladys, thank you.” Jean was unaccountably, purely happy. “Really, thanks so much.” She put her arm around the shorter woman and rested her face against Gladys’ stiffly permed red curls. Gladys came to Jean’s shoulder and smelled wonderfully of Tabu bath powder and cosmetics: twice a day, she rouged her cheeks with red lipstick and rubbed in the color with tissues. Mitch’s proper Aunt Bess would say Gladys was painted, but Jean thought suddenly how perfect Gladys really looked, those red cheeks a brassy declaration of gumption, even in the middle of winter.
Gladys chuckled and hugged Jean’s waist. “Here we are, two fools on a heat grate, 1949. Your mother is looking down and having a laugh on us.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. Gracie was a Danner, from Pickens, and there’s a special heaven for Danners.”
“But it’s not 1949 yet, not until midnight.” Jean watched Gladys’ profile. The round, lined face seemed delicate, the powdered skin colored carefully as a doll’s.
“Well,” Gladys sniffed, “if you want to be a stickler. You Danners are such sticklers.”
“I’m a Hampson now,” Jean said.
“You’re a Hampson legally,” Gladys corrected her, “like I’m a Curry. But you’ll be a Danner all your life—look in the mirror. You look like all the Danner women, dark-haired, dark-eyed—beauties, every one of them, and such sticklers. Stubborn and mannered as hell. Danners could be poor as church mice and walk around like heiresses.”
Jean felt herself smiling. “Gracie was like that, wasn’t she? She used to say I’d have no self-respect if my posture wasn’t perfect. Drove me nuts, lecturing about such things while we milked the cows.”
“Are the two of you going to this party?” Mitch stood in the hallway, his hair still slicked and wet from the shower, knotting his tie. He smelled of Old Spice and pretended to scowl impatiently. Their collective joke was that he, the man of the house, made heroic efforts to keep the two women on an even keel.
“We thought we might go,” Gladys said coolly, her brows raised, “if Prince Charming could ever let anyone else in the bathroom.”
The three of them rode through the snow in the Nash, seated in their usual formation: Mitch driving, Jean in the middle, Gladys on the passenger side, her window open a crack to vent the smoke of her cigarette. The night was dark and the storm worsening; the car seemed to coast like a sled on the deepening snow of the unplowed streets. Electric candles were triangular dots of light in the windows of houses.
“People ought to leave Christmas decorations up
all winter,” Gladys said. “Makes the cold more cheerful.”
“And the utility companies richer.” Mitch pumped the brakes gently as the car swerved around a turn.
“Oh well,” Gladys said contentedly, “if they don’t get money one way, they’ll get it another.”
“You should have seen the VFW club in Washington during the war, when I was in that nurses’ training program.” Jean heard the animation in her own voice, then spoke more softly. “We girls went every weekend. That place was always lit up like a birthday cake—mostly with candles, so as not to waste energy. It was an old hotel, and the floors of the ballroom were marble.”
The car was silent. Jean had completed a few months of training, then come home because of her mother’s illness. If things had been different, she would have gotten the degree. Maybe she would have lived in a big city. How exciting, to think of Baltimore, Washington, maybe even New York, where she’d never been.
As though in response to Jean’s thoughts, Gladys spoke up in her arbitrary fashion. “Being a nurse is no kind of life.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Mitch said.
Of course, he was talking about Red Cross girls he’d known in the war. They were brave, Jean supposed, and pretty; the men had all admired them. Did anyone, ever, admire a secretary? Well, she wouldn’t be a secretary all her life, that was certain. Someday, she’d find a way to finish college. Now, in the gently moving car and snow-blurred dark, the future seemed far away.
Machine Dreams Page 11