by Elaine Ford
“You have it easy, compared to me. Don’t thumb your nose at your luck the way your mother did.”
“I won’t, Gam.”
Ethel looked at her granddaughter’s thin arms, her tangle of wheat-colored hair, the secretive downcast eyes that were altogether too much like Ruth’s. Under her grandmother’s gaze, Amy pulled a damp dish towel from her shoulder and threw it on the table.
“You haven’t finished here, Miss. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Nowhere. Where is there to go?”
Down the hall the girl’s bedroom door opened and slammed shut. Ethel made herself a cup of tea and sat at the table, thinking. She felt a pain inside her, imagined the mouth of a worm attached to her stomach lining.
Ruth, the beloved child of her middle age, somehow grown up wild and defiant. Wanting it all and wanting it now, and see where it got her. Ethel groaned and heaved herself out of the chair. In a kitchen drawer, amid a jumble of rubber bands and thumbtacks and milk-bottle wires, she found an old key. She carried it into the hall and turned it in the lock on her granddaughter’s door.
Amy heard the rough scrape and whine. For a second, absorbed in her notebook, she didn’t understand what the sound meant. Then she ran to the door and pounded on it. “You can’t do that! Let me out!”
Silence. Just crickets in the crabgrass outside her window, the television set in the neighbor’s house, the faraway drone of a lawnmower. She lifted the window as far as it would go and pulled at the rim of the screen, but it was rusted in the frame. Frantically she searched the room for something that would cut it. Everything blunt in here, soft and bendable, as if she’d been deliberately stripped of weapons. Finally she took her nail scissors from the top of the dresser and jabbed them into the screen. While she was cutting she thought about her mother. Now Amy understood how her mother had been driven to pay such a price—her baby daughter—for her freedom. So what if in the end she’d died alone in a rented room? At least she’d lived first.
Amy took with her a few clothes in a plastic shopping bag, the dangly gold earrings that had been her mother’s, and her birth certificate. Climbing down through the pricklebushes that grew against the foundation, she scratched her arms and legs. For once in her life she was grateful for the overgrown cedars under which the house cowered in darkness, since their thick branches hid her from prying eyes. She got her bicycle out of the shed, stuffed the bag of clothes into the saddle basket, and rode away.
They stopped for gas just over the state line, and she used the pay phone to tell her grandmother not to worry about her. She would be needing her money, Amy said, the money she’d been working for every summer, which had been saved in the bank for her future.
“You won’t see a dime of that money,” Gam said. “Not unless you come to your senses.”
Amy was sick into the toilet in the Ladies. She rinsed out her mouth under the tap and combed her hair and ran out to the truck where Jack was waiting for her, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel. He didn’t ask what her grandmother’s reaction had been, and she didn’t say. It was September, and already the leaves were turning, and as they drove along the mountain roads the smell of wood smoke drifted in Jack’s open window along with the chilly, foggy air.
For three days they stayed in a motel on a back-country route. Their cabin had two metal lawn chairs out front, which they never sat in on account of the bugs, and plastic flowers in a vase on the bureau. They ate carry-out meals sitting on the chenille spread of the saggy double bed—he’d drink beer and she’d drink sodas—and a dozen times a day they made love. She’d wake him in the night she was so hungry for him. She never felt like she got enough.
On the fourth day they went to a justice of the peace in a nearby village, and Jack took a plain ring out of his jacket pocket and put it on her finger. They’d bought the ring in a secondhand shop, must have been gold-plated, at least, because it didn’t turn her finger green. It was a little too big, and she worried she was going to lose it.
After they got back to Holland, to the cape hastily furnished with things bought at flea markets and the thrift store in the basement of the Union Church, he asked about the nine hundred dollars in her bank account. Bills coming due for the chain-link fencing, the concrete, the wood planks that lay stacked in the yard.
“I won’t be able to give it to you, after all.”
He thought she was kidding.
“When I called her from the pay phone, she said if I married you I wouldn’t see a dime of it.”
“She didn’t mean it. She flew off the handle, that’s all.”
“She meant it, Jack.”
“But the money’s yours,” he said. “You earned it.”
“What can I do? The account’s in her name.”
“Get your grandfather to help you.”
“Gapp always does what she tells him.”
Jack walked out of the house and she heard the rented machine start up. He was drilling post holes for the first lot of fencing. All afternoon he worked without stopping, and she thought the sound of the drilling was going to drive her crazy. She felt her bones vibrate, thought her teeth would be shaken out of her head.
Later, in bed, he said, “The old witch will come around.”
The next Sunday she got Jack to shave with a new razor blade and to put on a dress shirt she’d laundered by hand and hung out to dry on a rope strung between two trees in the yard, then pressed with a clumsy, heavy old steam iron from the church thrift store. He combed his hair with water. It was chilly as they drove along Gooseneck Road, the swamp maples flaring red, a touch of frost on the dry weeds in the meadow. The love she had for him was like the way you feel when you haven’t eaten breakfast. A vague uneasiness, something’s missing or forgotten but you’re not sure what.
Jack parked the pickup in front of the house on Knollwood Lane and turned off the ignition. It’ll be okay, she said to herself. I’m not like Ruth, my mother, coming home with a bastard baby in my belly, itching to take off again the minute the kid is born. Jack is nice-looking, well spoken. He’ll listen to Gapp talk about the new press, imported at great expense from some foreign country. He’ll clear his plate and say yes to seconds, praise Gam’s cooking. They’ll see how serious he is about their future.
She ran up the front steps and took her house key out of her purse. But she couldn’t make it go in the lock. “What’s the problem?” Jack asked.
She laughed. “I’ve been gone so long I’ve forgotten how to work the key.”
“Let me do it.” He tossed his half-smoked cigarette into the bush under the window and fiddled around with the key, turned it over and tried it upside down. “You sure this is the right one?”
“Of course,” she said.
He swore under his breath. “They must have had the lock changed.”
She couldn’t believe Gam would do that. She rang the bell, rapped on the door. They never went anywhere on a Sunday morning, that’s why she picked Sunday for the first visit. Gam would be in her housedress, scraping the vegetables for midday dinner. Gapp would have reached one of the back sections of the paper by now. There’d be a pot of cold coffee on the stove, the smell of meat roasting in the oven, fat sputtering into the pan. Always enough food for leftovers on Monday, for the sandwiches Gapp took to the shop.
After about five minutes the window next to the front door was raised a little. Furtively Gapp leaned down into the crack and said she’d better come back another time.
She saw that the unshaven stubble on his cheek caught the light like grains of white sand. His eyes were watery, the sockets the color of a bloody cloth soaked and wrung out. How much he seemed to have aged in only a couple of weeks. “Gapp, open the door. It’ll be all right.”
“She says when you come back, come by yourself.”
“Tell her I’m not going to do that,” Amy said.
Turned out she did, though. She needed cold-weather clothes from her closet, her winter boots. And the truth was she felt homesick for Gapp, and for her grandmother too, couldn’t bring herself to make a complete break. At the beginning of November she drove the pickup to the house, ate a meal with them. Before she left Gam rummaged through the kitchen cupboards and gave her an old mixing bowl Amy had always liked, the color of caramel with a blue stripe under the rim, a well-seasoned iron skillet, a handful of mismatched utensils. But her grandmother wouldn’t talk about Amy’s husband, refused to hear his name mentioned.
“What about the money?” Jack asked when she got back.
“I didn’t bring it up.”
Anyway, even if she’d been able to talk Gam out of the nine hundred dollars, it wouldn’t go very far, she realized. She knew she’d have to look for a job, and before long she found one, pecking out contracts and letters to clients on the old Underwood in Ewell Dyer’s law office. Only paid minimum wage, but she didn’t even have a high-school diploma, and she guessed it was better than cooking up burgers in a truck stop.
She thought it was the flu, because it was March, and everybody was talking about how bad it was that year. She couldn’t put anything on her stomach, and she felt faint as she stood at the stove frying Jack’s bacon. She had to sit on the toilet with the cover down and put her head between her legs, the wretched fatty smell of the bacon seeping around the bathroom door.
“What’s eating you?” Jack asked. “You look like death warmed over.”
“I must be coming down with something. The flu.”
Ewell Dyer’s wife had it, and the woman Amy talked to sometimes in the laundromat. Amy overheard somebody in the post office say it had killed her mother in the nursing home. Some kind of special Asian strain of virus nobody had any resistance to.
“Well, for Crissake don’t give it to me,” Jack said, thinking about Rosie in heat and the appointment he had to keep with her down in Massachusetts. How was he going to drive down there with the flu?
So that night, and the night after, Amy lay on the couch in the living room, trying to sleep, listening to the black bitch Rose of Tralee whining in the kennel outside the window.
Amy didn’t come down with the other symptoms—sore throat and fever and cough—and gradually she realized she wasn’t going to get the flu. Her nipples chafed inside her bra. She felt pressure in her bladder. In the late afternoons, sitting at the old Underwood in the office, she felt so exhausted she thought she’d be able to sleep with her cheek resting on the keys.
Then it was April, and one day, with that tiny clump of life in her belly, she got in Jack’s pickup and drove way out in the country, somewhere north and west of town. Now if she looked at a map she’d never be able to trace the route, and she couldn’t have at the time, either. It was almost as if she invented the countryside as she drove along and it disappeared after she passed through it.
She left the pickup by the side of an unpaved road and walked through a field. It wasn’t soggy, like the open land on Gooseneck Road, and everywhere in the field some kind of tiny wildflower was blooming, acres of billowing white. She thought it was a sign that it would be okay, he wouldn’t mind. He’d be pleased, even.
When she got home she blurted out the news. The dirty dog food pan he was carrying dropped into the kitchen sink and clattered against the enamel. “Well, you’ll just have to do something about it,” he told her, “because we can’t afford it right now.” He bent to unlace his boots. “You know that as well as I do.”
Silently she went to the sink and picked up the dishrag and started washing out the pan. Her neck muscles would be clenched, her jaw tight with the effort of not speaking. A strong streak of the martyr in her, he thought, annoyed. “It’s the wrong time, Amy. Maybe next year.”
She couldn’t press him, she mustn’t. After all, it was her own decision to be here, she could blame no one but herself for that. And she knew he was right, they couldn’t afford a child. Later he made love to her. She felt his heart beating hard an inch away from hers and the rough snake of stitches winding across his spine.
The next day she asked her friend in the laundromat if she knew a doctor who’d understand a woman’s problems, and the friend understood what she meant and wrote a name on the back of a candy wrapper she found on the laundromat floor. At the office Amy looked up the name in the phone book and called and made an appointment.
She tried not to think about it, but couldn’t get rid of the image of the little black-handled paring knife she’d bought for a quarter in the church basement. She pictured the knife coring the offending cluster of cells, like a rotten spot in a piece of fruit. Afterward she felt sick for days, dizzy and sore and passing clots trailing scarves of membrane, but went to work anyway.
Not long after the abortion she tripped on the stoop and chipped a front tooth. Punishment, she knew.
Rose of Tralee had her pups, five coal-black wriggling blind babies, at the end of May. The summer was the hottest in living memory. In July a nearby barn burned, and the fire spread into neighboring fields. Jack told Amy to get in the pickup. “I’m not going to leave you,” she said. “The hell you aren’t,” he replied. He loaded Rosie and the pups into the truck bed, ordered Amy to drive fast as the vehicle would go to the opposite end of Gooseneck Road. He stayed and held the hose, ready to douse the kennels if the fire should leap from tree to tree through the marsh and reach their place. When the firemen finally got the blaze under control and it was safe to come home, she found Jack drinking a beer in the kitchen. Specks of cinder had fallen from the sky and burned tiny holes in his shirt.
She wanted to talk about it then. Say something like: Shouldn’t we stick together in times of trouble? Impossible to come up with just the right words, though. She knew how irritated he’d get by what he labeled “hearts and flowers.” And she was afraid if she asked who he’d been rescuing from the fire, her or the dogs, he might tell her something she didn’t want to hear.
In August Gapp retired from the print shop. The owner planned on throwing a party for him at the big Italian restaurant out on Broadway Extension, all the workers and their families invited. Amy told her grandmother she wouldn’t go without Jack, and Gam said she wouldn’t go if Jack went. In the end it didn’t make any difference because Gapp died in his sleep a few days before the party. Just like him, Amy thought. Never liked being the center of attention. Couldn’t stand fuss.
After Gapp was in his grave the arthritis that had troubled Gam for years grew worse. With cold weather came attacks in her knuckle joints and knees, in her spine. Other pains came out of nowhere, stabbing her for no reason in heart or groin. She took to using a big black cane she found in the attic, could hardly make it as far as the corner store.
Jack complained about Amy’s spending so much time at Knollwood Lane.
Now they had three bitches, a yelping gaggle of half-grown pups. He could use more help hosing down dog runs, mixing up the vitamin-laced puppy mash the vet recommended, brushing the dogs’ coats. “The more you wait on the old bag, the more she’ll demand,” he said, and Amy answered, “I have to. She doesn’t have anybody else.”
Amy couldn’t explain it to Jack, but she discovered a kind of pleasure, or maybe it was only relief, in trying to make up for past sins.
March. At the house on Knollwood Lane there was still a crust of snow, tough and dense as asphalt, under an overgrown cedar in the yard. In one trip Amy hauled the two bags of groceries from the pickup—enough, she hoped, to keep her grandmother going in the week until her return. All week Gam pored over the ads and coupons in the supermarket flyers that came in the mail, making lists of instructions for Amy to carry out at the IGA and the Super Value. Lists written in her crabbed, nearly illegible hand, the pen pressed down so hard it punctured the scrap paper.
Most of the stuff Gam didn’t even need. Squirreled away on closet sh
elves, in the attic and down cellar, she had toilet rolls and bars of soap and cans of food enough to last her a hundred years. She must figure she’s immortal, Amy thought. Yet in a way Amy could understand the kind of hunger that fueled Gam’s hoarding. Things don’t go away and leave you. Things don’t die.
“That you, Amy?” Gam called from the den, where she’d probably been dozing in her chair.
“Yes, it’s me.” Amy shed her coat and carried the kettle to the sink to fill it. She was dying for a cup of coffee. Tedious day in the office, and then the hassle of two supermarkets, crowded as they always were at that hour of the day.
While the kettle was coming to a boil she began to unpack the groceries onto the counter and kitchen table. She didn’t put them away, since Gam would examine each item and check it against the list. Each week something was wrong, Amy had made some mistake. She’d be doomed the following Wednesday to stand in line at the customer service counter in Super Value or IGA with the flyer and the offending item in hand. The kettle whistled thinly, and Amy fixed two cups of coffee.
Her grandmother, wearing a crocheted hair net like a fish seine and flesh-colored cotton stockings, limped into the kitchen. Leaning on the big black cane, of a size made for a man, she lifted her cup from the table and slurped the milky coffee. “You didn’t get boric acid, I suppose.”
“Boric acid? It wasn’t on the list, was it?
“I didn’t realize I was almost out until this morning.”
No point in asking why she didn’t call the house. Jack might pick up the phone. Or the office—the woman they had answering the phone needed a hearing aid, Gam claimed, she couldn’t understand a word Gam said. Instead, Amy was supposed to be a mind reader. “I’ll bring some by tomorrow.”