by Elaine Ford
But in only a few moments the old woman was stirring, the rubber tip of her cane punching the linoleum as she braced herself, hobbling. “Thought I heard somebody in here,” she said in the doorway. She eyed the knotted plastic in the wastebasket. “I could have used that bag to protect my winter coat.”
“But you never wear your winter coat.” Amy poked a hook into the tough, tightly woven material. “You never go outside in winter anymore. Or in summer, either.”
“What if I had to?” Gam said. She made her way to the shabby upholstered chair that was once Gapp’s favorite. A puff of dust rose from the cushion as she took possession. “The trouble with you is, you do things without thinking.”
Impulsive girl, Amy. And stubborn. Never satisfied. Her mother’s girl, through and through. What’s in the marrow can’t be knocked out of the bone.
“Sorry,” Amy said, not sorry at all. The last hook in, impaling the last pleat, Amy pulled a footstool over to the window and climbed up, the heavy curtain dragging from her arm. She took a deep breath and, reaching up, maneuvered the sharp end of the hook into the metal eye dangling from the rod. One, two, three hooks into their eyes. The curtain felt a little lighter on her arm. But a muscle near her elbow trembled, unused to this kind of job. Four, five, six, seven, eight. The coarse fabric, stinking of dry-cleaning chemicals, chafed the skin of her inner arm. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. That’s one panel up. Three to go.
Amy stepped off the footstool and picked up the second panel. Her grandmother’s eyes were three-quarters shut, the old woman peaceable as a toad sunning itself on a rock. Then she leaped. “Your husband’s looking for you,” Gam said.
“What?”
“Called me on the phone, Sunday I think it was.” Amy’s cheeks flushed, and for a moment Ethel thought she was going to fall right off the footstool. “Said you’d left him a year ago or more. That true, Amy?”
Amy pulled out a hook that wasn’t straight, forced it back into the stiff buckram. “Yes, it’s true.”
“Where’ve you been living, if you haven’t been with him?”
“I took an apartment. Over by the old gas works.”
“You’ve got a room here.”
Whenever she had to open the door of that room Amy was sickened by the odors of unaired bedding, cold rusty water in the radiator, nail polish remover, pink acne cream, underarm odor, dime store cologne, foot powder spilled in the rug. The drawers of the imitation-maple dresser were stuffed with bras and slips and blouses that fit a young-for-her-age seventeen-year-old. A True Confessions magazine must still be hidden inside a sanitary napkin box in the closet, along with the spiral-bound notebook she’d bought with grocery money on her way home from the print shop. The lined pages filled with her backhand would be yellowed by now, her gushing dopiness humiliating to reread, even to recall. She detested the faded pink wallpaper splashed everywhere with daisies, so busy it made the room seem to close in on you.
“You could’ve come here,” Gam repeated.
“I thought it would be good for me to learn to live alone.”
That possibility hadn’t occurred to Ethel, though God knows she’d spent enough time mulling over the situation after the shock of the man’s news wore off. Maybe there was some merit in what the girl said. Ethel could not live forever. She limbered her fingers by rubbing them, the way her own mother had done, and watched her granddaughter stretch to work a hook into a metal eye that dangled from the rod. To Amy’s back she said, “Make sure you don’t give that man any money. Remember how he tried to get mine away from me.”
Gam was confused. That was Amy’s money Jack hoped to wangle out of the old woman. But what difference did it make now?
The doorbell surprised her. It was a buzzer, actually, in a metal box mounted in the stairwell. The noise was shrill and threatening, and Amy resolved not to answer it. Who’d come calling on a Sunday morning? Probably Jehovah’s Witnesses or somebody trying to find a tenant who’d moved out a long time ago. Then the buzzer went off again, and she knew. Gam must have spilled the beans. No, she thought, she wouldn’t see him. He could send her a letter if he had something to say.
A third time the buzzer rang, a long high-pitched bleat that was probably going to short out the wiring and continue to scream forever like a deranged car alarm. She set her empty coffee mug in the sink and went down the two long flights. Through the glass pane in the door she saw Jack’s face.
His hair was thinner. He smiled in that way he had, mostly with his eyes, his tongue lodged against the lining of his cheek. “Hello, Amy,” he said when she opened the door.
There was a pause, and because the porch was down a step from the doorway where she stood, their heads were at the same level. Finally he said, “Can I come in?”
She smelled the raw turpentine odor of spruce gum on him. He must have been felling trees around the place, the way he’d done when he first bought the property. Hard to wash off, spruce gum. So many times she’d felt the stickiness on her skin when he took hold of her body and probed it. She backed up into the dark hallway, her heel catching on a curled loose end of flooring, and said, “I’m just going out.”
He guessed she was lying. “I don’t have to stay long.”
“A few minutes.”
Jack followed her up the two flights of narrow steps and into the apartment. Early spring light seemed to give the room a greenish cast.
“Not enough room in here to swing a cat,” he said. The sink was the kind on legs he remembered from the crummy apartments his mother rented when he and Lee were kids. Surprisingly, there was a small stack of dirty dishes in the sink. He sat on the couch, from behind which the wall sloped toward a sharply pitched roof. It gave him the feeling he’d crack his skull if he sat up straight.
He failed to understand how she could prefer this pokey attic room to the house in Holland, which might not be a palace but at least you had air to breathe. She always did enjoy the role of martyr, though, being the victim of other people’s failings.
He took a pack of cigarettes out of his jacket pocket but didn’t light up. For a while they listened to the toilet tank dribbling behind the flimsy partition, a baby crying somewhere, her cheap battery-operated traveling clock ticking away on the window sill. Finally she said, “What is it you want, Jack?”
He would have asked her to sit beside him on the couch but was afraid if he laid a hand on her she’d stiffen. Arch her back. His mouth felt dry. “I’m having a hard time . . . ” He realized that he’d bunched the rug up under his feet. With the heels of his work boots he made an effort to straighten it.
“I don’t think I can help you,” she said.
Pollen or something in his eyes, like somebody’d tossed grit into them. He dug at the inner corners with his thumbs. The room looked blurry. “Jesus, Amy, you’re my wife. Why don’t you just come on home with me?”
Home. The alders in the marsh would be strung with catkins, the shadblow soon to unfold its delicate blossoms.
“Things could be different. If you came back, my luck would turn.”
“We don’t make other people’s luck,” she said. “We make our own.”
He got up from the couch, his work boots heavy on the floorboards. “Think about it, okay?”
“I’ll think about it.” She figured she must owe him that much. She heard his footsteps receding down the two flights.
Amy found her grandmother in the yard, on her knees, the cane beside her on the ground. Over her house dress the old woman was wearing an ancient cardigan that used to be Gapp’s, and in her hand she held a serving spoon. “Gam, what in the world are you doing?”
“I buried it here, but now it’s gone.”
Amy shifted the grocery bag to her other arm and saw a shallow depression that her grandmother had managed to scrape out of the cement-hard soil. “What? What did you bury?”
“Mon
ey,” Gam said. “Silver dollars in a tin box. Twenty of them. I know I buried them right in this spot. He stole them.”
“Who?”
“You know who,” she said. The hole looked like a dog made it, scratching for a bone.
“Gam, please stop. You’re going to catch pneumonia.”
“You know who. He came in the night while I was asleep.”
Amy set the bag on a front step and came back and crouched next to her grandmother. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“That man you were married to, he took my money.”
“But that’s crazy. How could Jack know you had money buried here or where to look for it?”
Her grandmother’s neck was bent, and sparse hair was escaping from under the crocheted hair net. The backs of her legs were shiny, hairless, yellow. Feebly she tried to clean dirt from the spoon with her gnarled fingers. “He must have found out,” she muttered. “Evil men have their evil ways.”
“Jack’s not evil, Gam. He’s just ordinary.”
Her grandmother tried to answer, but Amy couldn’t make out the words. The only sound that came from her throat was a weak gurgle, like congested plumbing. The old woman struggled to heave herself to her feet, fell back, tried again. Then she allowed her granddaughter to help her up and brush the dirt from her knees. How light she felt, leaning on Amy’s arm, as if suddenly she weighed nothing at all. The cane was left lying by the hole.
Knollwood Lane was a one-block dead-end street south of the river, not easy to find without a map, but Jack had been here once before. The houses were frame, mostly two-family, with straggly scraps of lawn. Nothing special about any of them, except the one down at the end. A bungalow with dark brown siding, hunkered down under enormous shaggy evergreens of some kind. He stopped the truck and turned off the ignition.
The last time he was here was right after they came back from getting married. They’d walked up the front steps and Amy tried the door. Wouldn’t open, her key didn’t fit the lock. Amy rang the doorbell, knocked on the frame. He’d said, “Come on, forget it, let’s go,” but then a grizzled old guy lifted a window. Looking scared, he’d said to Amy, “You better come back alone. Some other time.” Jack hadn’t known if the old witch was lurking inside or not.
Now Jack pocketed the keys to the pickup and started down the sidewalk. Snow had fallen during the night. The neighborhood seemed deserted. No traffic on the street, no other cars parked on it, even. No sounds coming from any of the houses. All the windows dark.
The brown bungalow was the quietest of all the houses, almost swallowed up under those huge trees, the branches scraping against the windows. He mounted the steps and pressed the bell, but no one came to the door. Why didn’t she answer? Maybe the bell was busted. She had to be here. “Paid her last month’s rent back in July,” the landlord told him yesterday, when he went to look for her. “Went home to nurse her grandmother. Stroke, she said.”
The door was warped or locked. Either way, he couldn’t pull it open. The windows on either side of the door had venetian blinds, and the slats were pulled tight. Jack trudged around to the back of the house, shoving through interwoven branches, clumps of wet snow pelting him like clubs. One window back there had its blind raised, but it was too high for him to see in. Amid the junk in a falling-down shed he found a lawn chair, the old-fashioned metal kind that didn’t fold, made no compromise with your spine. The chair reminded him of the motel they’d stayed in when Amy ran away. He hadn’t known what to do with her, but after three days of serious fucking, what else could he do but marry her? Just a kid, counting on him. He dragged the chair through the snow to the window and clambered up through the pricklebushes that guarded the foundation.
Inside, an ugly old woman wearing a black string hair net sat propped up in bed. Her head lolled to one side, her mouth open. Amy was lifting a spoon to it, cupping the old woman under the chin, gently tipping the contents of the spoon onto her tongue.
Jack rapped on the window and Amy turned toward him, the spoon in her hand. Her hair had grown long enough to pin up off her neck, darker than it used to be, the color of buckwheat honey. She was no kid anymore. He wanted her like he’d never wanted her in his life.
He imagined breaking the glass with his fist, climbing inside through the shards of glass, smothering the old witch in her bedclothes, carrying his wife to the pickup and back to the house in Holland. “Look,” he’d say, showing her around. “The plasterboard is up in the kitchen. The front walk is mended. There’s brand-new asphalt tile on the bathroom floor.”
Amy didn’t turn away from him, and for a moment he believed it would be all right. She’d understand how determined he was to make a good life for her. But as he gazed at her, something in her expression, as sealed and self-contained as an egg, let Jack know that she was simply not taking him in. He was no longer real to her. Her thoughts were fixed on a point far in the distance, a place much farther away than he could ever reach.
BENT REEDS
Approaching the crest of Spindle Hill, Grace saw seven or eight cars parked higgledy-piggledy on the left-hand shoulder of the road, as if the drivers had dropped everything to respond to some emergency. Wonder what’s going on at Millard’s? she thought. She didn’t stop to find out, though; she didn’t want the milk to turn or the eggs to poach right in her knapsack. Instead she headed for the house across the road from Millard’s, wheeling her bicycle over the crushed stone that had recently been dumped in Owen’s driveway. She leaned the bike against a popple tree and wiped her forehead in the crook of her arm. Maybe I’m getting a little long in the tooth for this form of transportation, she thought. From the rear of Owen’s house came the sound of steady tapping. Finally getting those last shingles up. Two hammers at work, she judged. She went on into the house.
When she’d unpacked the groceries she climbed the stairs to the back bedroom and poked her head through an open window. “What’s transpiring over at Millard’s?” she asked.
The land was lower on this side of the house than in front, and below her, balanced on some rickety scaffolding, nails sprouting from his mouth, stood Owen. Also Perley Pinkham, one of the deacons. Owen didn’t look so good. His face seemed kind of pinched. Oughtn’t to be outside in this heat, on that bad leg all day, but just try to keep him from working on his house. Perley shifted his weight to hammer a nail and the scaffolding swayed. “Garage sale,” he said.
“What did he do, clean out his attic?” Grace asked.
“Guess so,” Perley said.
“Whoever heard of doing spring cleaning in August?”
The two of them looked so uncomfortable she thought it must be more than the cockeyed plank they were perched on or the heat. Perley spoke. “You know Millard don’t do things by other people’s calendars.”
Owen took the nails from his mouth and said, “Did you remember to pick up that extension cord, Grace?”
“Course I remembered. Got you some eggs, too; I saw yesterday you were almost out. Owen, why did Millard clean his attic?”
“Reamed the whole house out,” Perley said. “Stem to stern.”
“Why don’t you go on over there and take a look?” Owen said, rummaging in the pocket of his carpenter’s apron. “I bet he’s got some great bargains.”
“If you fancy old junk,” Perley said.
“Owen, I want to know what’s going on.”
Owen positioned a nail and focused busily on the shingle in front of him. Tap tap tap. “He’s moving,” he said, not looking up.
“What do you mean, moving? Where to?”
Perley took out his handkerchief. He lifted his feed cap and mopped the crown of his head. “Going to live,” Perley said, “with his married son. Over to Aurora.”
“I don’t believe it. Millard always says the only way they’ll get him out of that house will be in a pine box.”
Perley gl
anced sideways at Owen. “I reckon his boys want him where they can keep an eye on him,” Perley said finally, “on account of his ticker.”
Then she got it. Owen was the one supposed to keep an eye on old Millard; that had been the unspoken agreement when Millard sold Owen the parcel of land across the road at a price well below its market value. But since Owen’s operation . . . “Maybe Millard’s jumping the gun a little,” she said. “Plenty of life left in the old geezer, seems to me.”
Perley shook his head. “Nobody tells Millard what to do.”
Including his boys, Grace thought, though his “boys” must be pushing sixty. Funny that Millard would knuckle under without a fight.
“Any red tomatoes out yet at your place?” Owen asked.
“Tom says next week.”
“If it don’t turn cold and rainy on us.” Perley stuffed his handkerchief into a rear pocket of his overalls and resumed hammering.
She could stand a break in the weather, she thought, as she drew her head back into the bedroom. The room still smelled of paint, a dazzling yellow, picked out by Owen himself. Whichever parishioner painted it had left a handful of brushes soaking in a coffee can full of turps, figuring women’s work: let one of the women come along and do the tidying up after. With a sigh Grace stooped and lifted the can. She wasn’t in much of a mood to do somebody else’s scut work, but she’d better get it out of the way so Owen wouldn’t go stumbling over it in the middle of the night. She had an idea he didn’t sleep much, that he spent a lot of time wandering in his house after everybody’d gone home. Thinking over ideas for sermons, maybe. Or just thinking.
Down cellar, she found some rags and drenched them in turps and began to clean the brushes. Fumes made her remember the hours she’d spent down here late in the winter, February it must have been, when Owen was still in the hospital. She’d volunteered to dip the shingles that Owen wanted on his house in that preservative stuff. Quite a job it turned out to be, clipping the wire on the bundles, discarding the split ones, dousing the shingles one by one in Cuprinol and standing them in rows in a piece of plastic gutter she rigged so the excess would run back into an empty can. Splinters. And small cuts the Cuprinol would find and work its way into, in spite of her rubber gloves. And the fumes, enough to knock you out, nearly.