This Time Might Be Different

by Elaine Ford

  “Suicide,” Bev says briskly.

  Home fries with eggs and sausage flash before Frances’s eyes. He wanted to taste home fries once more before . . .

  “But we’re getting off the track here,” Bev continues. “I said there was something wrong with him. I did not say he’s about to do himself in. Quite the contrary.”

  “But—”

  “People contemplating suicide get rid of things. They give their gold watches and bowling trophies to their loved ones. They might take trips to the dump with their old love letters. They do not make trips to the dump to collect more junk than they already own and haul it away with them.”

  Under the snow near the shed are some lumps, unharvested cabbages. Frances watches a tree sparrow land on one of the lumps and then flit away. “Please do tell me what you’re talking about,” she says wearily.

  Bev takes a deep breath, the way she does when she’s about to explain the Pythagorean theorem or the causes of the French and Indian War. “Well, in case you’ve forgotten, the happy day of my retirement from Stony Harbor Elementary is a mere three months away.”

  No, Frances hasn’t forgotten. At one time, before Lyle talked her into marrying him, she and Bev were going to go off to the condo in North Carolina together. Leave the ice and mud behind for good and all. She’d contributed her share of the down payment on the condo and everything.

  “And you know,” Bev goes on, “how I’ve been going from room to room, deciding what I want to take with me to North Carolina and what I’d just as soon leave behind. Like that mahogany parlor suite I’ve always hated, but Mother would rise from the dead and smite me if I sold it or gave it to the Salvation Army.”

  “Yes,” Frances says with a pang, both because of the thought of Bev’s leaving and because she’d once looked forward to living with that furniture, especially the marble-topped occasional tables and the footstool with the Scottie dog done in needlepoint. She’d had no idea Bev hated it.

  “Well, it’s not going. Cost a fortune to move it, and Mother will have a hard time finding me in North Carolina.”

  Frances thinks about putting in a bid for it, but that wouldn’t be appropriate right now, considering how worried she is about Lyle. And anyway, she’s not sure she’d enjoy the tables and the Scottie dog without Bev. They’d only make her sad.

  “So,” Bev says, unwrapping a date square from its waxed paper, “one way and another I’m finding a good deal of rubbish to give the heave to, and I’m hauling it out to those Dumpsters on Flat Bay Road, because you never know what the trash men will be so kind as to pick up and what they won’t. Considering the taxes we pay—”

  “Bev, not the parlor suite. You’re not putting the parlor suite in the Dumpster.”

  “Of course not. Some fool will give me good money for it. But as I was saying, I drive out there early in the morning, before school. After school I’m too bushed to lift a pincushion. Yesterday around six a.m. I was pulling into the spot where the Dumpsters are, you know, where the clamdiggers park their vehicles, but there was only one car there because the tide was in. And guess whose car it was.”

  “I don’t want to guess, Bev.”

  “It was your car, Frances. And there was Lyle, big as life, hanging over the side of the Dumpster. At first I thought he was being sick into it. I was so flabbergasted I just sat there, smack in the middle of the road. Anyone could have come along and rammed right into me. Then I realized he wasn’t being sick at all, he was rooting around in there. And do you know what he came up with, finally?”

  “No, Bev.”

  “A doll. A stark naked bald old doll. I couldn’t believe it. He looked at it for a while, turning it over and over in his hands. And then he put it in the back of the Caprice and started the engine. He had to drive around my car to get into the road, but he never even saw me. Now what do you think of that?”

  Frances turns away from the window and stares at Bev. “I don’t know what to think. What can be happening to him?”

  “Beats me,” Bev says, zipping up her galoshes. “I’m going to be late for fifth period hygiene if I don’t get a move on.”

  Lyle told Billy he couldn’t work this afternoon. No excuses, he’s beyond that. What’s Billy going to do, fire him? Anyway, there’s not much to do around the office now, just sit at his desk amid the taped cartons and drink instant coffee and listen to talk that’s like flies buzzing on a ceiling, like the hum of a distant highway.

  He’s been waiting impatiently for this day, the third Monday in the month, when Frances goes to her Current Events Club meeting. At half past one he rounds the side of the house and sees, to his frustration, the Caprice still parked in the driveway. It’s not like her to skip the club meetings, and he worries that maybe the arthritis has kept her from going, or the fear that her enemy Mid Flowers, all set to loll on a beach in Florida, will be the current event topic of the afternoon. Cautiously he opens the kitchen door and calls her name. But there’s no sound except for the furnace kicking on in response to the blast of chill air from the open door, and then he remembers Frances mentioning that one of the other members was going to pick her up, something about a tray of cupcakes. He shuts the door again and slogs out through the mud to the shed. The glacier of drifted snow there is retreating. He sees the yellowed tops of cabbages, the spine of the stone wall, the cross-plank of his sawhorse.

  He has two hours, maybe two and a half if the girls linger to gab, but he can’t count on that. He unlocks the padlock and swings the shed door wide open, forcing it over a crust of ice. He needs the wheelbarrow, but there’s such a jumble in the shed that it takes him a while to shift things enough so he can extricate it. He scrapes his knuckles on the underbody of a Royal portable typewriter, which has long ago been separated from its case, and a splinter from the wheelbarrow handle jabs into his palm. When he has loaded the wheelbarrow as full as is practical, he trundles toward the house. It’s slow going through the bog, and an alligator handbag bounces off the top of the heap and lands in the mud. He’ll be able to wipe it off, though; luckily, it’s simulated, not the real thing.

  Damned tricky getting everything into the house. He doesn’t want to take time to pull on or pry off his rubbers every time he crosses the threshold, and Frances would surely notice an accumulation of mud in the rag rug by the kitchen door. So he kicks the rug out of the way and resolves to scrub the linoleum when he’s done. Two more wheelbarrow trips, and he’s ready to haul the whole hodgepodge to the attic.

  But his heart is beating uncomfortably with the exertion and with the possibility that Frances might come home early with a sick headache or some other complaint. He pours himself some water out of the glass jar in the refrigerator and makes himself sip it, slowly, until his pulse is under control. He thinks about taking his blood pressure and then rejects the idea. He can’t stop now, with the kitchen floor piled high with rubbish: even if his b.p. is out of sight, he’d just as soon not know about it.

  He unzips the moldy old suitcase and begins to cram whatever will fit into it. The battered unabridged Funk and Wagnalls dictionary and the stone doorstop painted to look like a sleeping cat make it weigh half a ton, never mind all the other trash he wedges in there, but at least he’ll have to make fewer trips upstairs. He’s had the foresight to filch the suitcase from the cellar under the insurance building way back when he first got his idea. Billy was up to something with that suitcase fifteen years ago, but then whatever it was came to an end, and Billy stowed the suitcase in the cellar and forgot about it. At the time, Lyle had felt sorry for Mid—getting cheated on—little knowing that Marilla was going to do the same thing to him, and worse, and that one day Mid would triumph at everybody’s expense, including his own. Thinking about the worm turning that way gives him a perverse sort of pleasure, and the strength to lug the suitcase up the two flights with only a brief pause on the landing.

  They don’t heat
the attic stairway, or the attic, and as he opens the top door the cold, close, dusty attic pinches his nostrils. It’s dim under the rafters and the windows at the gable ends are covered with cobwebs. He sits on the sheet-covered couch to rest a minute before unpacking the suitcase. Gradually he finds his eyes adjusting to the gloom.

  Lyle hasn’t been up here since he and Bramley Johnson, who he hired for ten dollars, moved all of Marilla’s things up here the week before he and Frances were married. Frances wasn’t going to live with Marilla’s odds and ends of furniture, she wanted matching. When Frances said she wanted to get rid of the stuff he’d thought she must mean burn it. He got a bonfire permit from the town office and bought a quart of charcoal lighter to douse the upholstery with, and he and Bramley were just struggling out the kitchen door with the old brown couch, when Frances dropped by to see how they were coming with the move, and yelled bloody murder, and made them haul the couch back through the kitchen and up to the attic. And all the other furniture with it. She was shocked he was planning to burn the stuff, and he was shocked she wanted to save it. You might call that their first quarrel, with half-witted old Bram Johnson standing there on the back stoop grinning like a maniac.

  That couch they had in the trailer on Seal Neck Road, he and Marilla. He lifts the sheet, and puts his nose down close to the coarse wool material, and imagines it still smells the way the trailer smelled all those years ago—of kerosene, and cooking oil, and the soap Marilla used. He remembers making love to her on the couch soon after Hannah was born, and they had to snatch a few moments between feeds. He remembers the milk in her breasts, how swollen they were, how the milk would leak out on its own when she was in his arms. Now he wonders whether Marilla was happy with him, even then. He’d believed she was, she never said otherwise, but with women, how are you going to know for sure?

  He wishes to hell Frances hadn’t come by that day and he’d burned the whole caboodle once and for all.

  He doesn’t bother to unzip the suitcase and empty out its contents. He knows now he couldn’t possibly stand on his front lawn and bargain with tourists over Marilla’s things, or Hannah’s, or even the sticks and oddments belonging to strangers. They’re too private, it would be too painful. He’s amazed that he ever thought he could make a living that way.

  He lugs the suitcase down the two flights and loads it, as well as all the accumulated trash from the shed, into the car. When he returns from his trip to the Dumpster he sees that the wheelbarrow has made six slithery ruts, like the trails of snakes, in the mud. Carefully he smears them over with his rubber. He’s just replacing the rag rug over the clean linoleum by the kitchen door when Frances unlocks the front door and cries, “Halloo, I’m home.”

  MILLENNIUM FEVER

  The ladies are talking about RVs. The Maine winter builds character: they have long taken this on faith. But as they age, they’re more and more tempted by temporary escape. Mordina’s been campaigning to buy one of those cute motorhomes so she and her hubby can drive down to Florida and have a place to stay once they get there. So far, Ed has put up a resistance on account of the expense, Mordina reports, but she senses that she’s wearing him down. The other ladies cheer her on.

  “What about you, Carlene?” Mordina asks. “Fancy spending the winter under palm trees?”

  Carlene laughs. “Chalkie thinks a day trip to Ellsworth is a big deal.” She’s placing baskets of hot bread at either end of the four long tables, which have been set up with checkered tablecloths, forks and spoons, and paper plates to go under the soup bowls. Behind her a gaggle of crockpots are plugged into a multi-outlet extension cord on the counter. Today, for their monthly public luncheon, the church ladies are offering a choice of fish chowder, minestrone, split pea, or chili. Five dollars a head, and that includes coffee and a slice of homemade pie. The minestrone is Carlene’s, made of vegetables she canned herself.

  Their first customer of the day comes down the steps and opens the door to the church basement, bringing with him a gust of snowy wind. He’s alone, a lanky grizzled fellow wearing a watch cap. Because she doesn’t exactly recognize the man, Carlene wonders whether he’s a member of the crew installing the new furnace in the town hall. But he looks familiar, somehow. She watches him hand a twenty-dollar bill to the money-taker and pocket the change. Casually he hangs his parka over a folding chair, walks to the counter to select his soup. As he’s lifting the glass lids, contemplating the possibilities, Carlene realizes that this is a person she once knew very well.

  She slips into the kitchen, her back to the counter, and plunges her hands into the dishwater. She doesn’t want him to notice her, rack his brain to remember who she is, stumble over her name, ask what she’s been up to for the past forty-odd years. She scrubs some utensils and holds them under the tap, drops them clattering into the drainer. What is he doing here?

  Carlene whispers to Mordina that she’s got a wretched headache. Startled, Mordina says, “You better go on home then.” Carlene grabs her coat and runs up the steps.

  Chalkie pushes aside his dessert plate and lights a cigarette. The doc says if he doesn’t quit smoking it’s going to kill him, but Chalkie’s not one to listen to doctors. “How’d the lunch go?” he asks.

  Carlene finishes the coffee in her cup, rises to clear. Hoping for leftovers, Bob, the old yellow tiger cat, plummets from the radiator. “I didn’t stay long. I had a headache.”

  “A headache?” Like Mordina, he looks at her as if she’s sprouted a sausage at the end of her nose. “You don’t get headaches.”

  “Today I did.”

  “You aren’t coming down with something, are you?”

  “By the time I got home it was gone,” she says, evading Bob, who is endeavoring to wind himself around her legs. She carries dishes to the sink. “I doubt there was much of a crowd, anyway, on account of the weather.”

  Limping, Chalkie takes his cigarette to his easy chair in the next room. Years ago, before they were married, even, a chunk of the innards of some vehicle fell on his foot and it didn’t heal right. A few pieces of mail await him on the side table. “Letter from Jill, I see. What’s it say?”

  She refrains from telling him to read the letter himself: she’s not his interpreter. “They hope to come up for Thanksgiving, if Ron can take the time off work.”

  Chalkie grunts. It’s a sore subject, how both his sons left town the minute they graduated high school, neither having any interest in a partnership in their dad’s garage. Them boys never liked to get their hands dirty, Chalkie would say. He’d think they were pansies if they hadn’t married, and sometimes he wonders even so. Chalkie’s narrow-mindedness irks Carlene, but on the other hand she can see his point. He worked so hard to make a go of the business, and he can’t help taking his sons’ indifference as a slap in the face.

  On Sunday Dana Cox comes to church. He strolls in after the choir has already sung the introit, sits in a rear pew, doesn’t take communion. The Coxes were never churchgoers; Carlene wonders if Dana has experienced some kind of conversion along the way. However, he doesn’t know the words to the responses, appears more curious than devout as the service unfolds. She knows he’s observing her up in the choir, because their eyes meet for a second when she happens to glance his way. It’s strange and unsettling to see how he has aged: the gray beard and thinning hair, the slight stoop of his tall frame.

  As she starts the walk home, he eases into step beside her. Sunlight reflects brilliantly from a fresh layer of snow and the air is so cold it tightens her throat. Without saying anything, they pass the library, the Masonic Hall, Chipman’s boatyard. Damned if she’s going to be the first to speak.

  Finally he says, “Here’s what I imagined about you. You taught school for three or four years, then got married. You had two children, a boy and a girl.”

  She doesn’t tell him there wasn’t a daughter, though she keenly feels the lack. A son is a son t
ill he takes him a wife; a daughter’s a daughter all of her life. Nor does she explain that she went back to teaching when Matthew started kindergarten, first to make ends meet, then to be somebody other than Chalkie’s wife and the boys’ mother. She taught for thirty years altogether, until Chalkie insisted that she retire.

  “Am I right?” Dana asks.

  Now they’re on the bridge, their boots clanging on the iron grate. She always thinks she’s going to catch her heel and go flying. Below them, visible through the grate, the tide pours upriver. To their right sea smoke boils off the bay.

  “Near enough.”

  A van enters the bridge, and they move against the rail to let it pass. The bridge trembles under the van’s weight.

  “They tell me you married Chalkie Hutchins.”

  They? Who’s Dana been talking to? “That’s right,” she says, walking on. She knows what he’s thinking. An ordinary person, nothing very remarkable about Chalkie Hutchins.

  They’ve left the bridge now and turned onto Bay Road. Her house, the white farmhouse, is at the top of a rise. “Here’s what I imagine about you,” she says. “You stayed in the navy for a hitch or two. Then you got restless. Worked one job after another. Picked up some education in night school, maybe. Moved around a lot. Every place you lived you had a girlfriend, a waitress or a schoolteacher or a clerk in a department store. You were good to her, and she thought sure you’d settle down, but that never happened. Am I right?”

  “Carlene—”

  “Goodbye, Dana.” No, she is not going to invite him to stay for Sunday lunch, eat her pie, chew the fat with Chalkie, as if nothing had ever happened. She hurries up the driveway, her boots unsteady on slick, hard-packed snow.

  The next day, three days before Thanksgiving, Carlene is in Spinney’s Hardware for flashlight batteries, and Fran Spinney tells her that their old classmate was in the store. “You just missed him,” Fran says. “Bought tarpaper, caulking compound, plastic window insulation, you name it. He’s fixing up some old cabin used to be his cousins’, way in back of beyond. Nobody but a crazy person would live out there this time of year.” Carlene watches Fran load D batteries into a paper bag. She doesn’t need to ask, “Out where?” She sees the threadbare pink quilt, feels the plank floor hard against the bumps of her spine.