Duet for Three

by Joan Barfoot

  People may talk about the miracle of life, but what about the miracle of death? Or maybe just a magician’s trick: a gesture, a word, and something greater than a rabbit or a dove appears and vanishes. She might say to June’s God, “What is the meaning of this, then?” in an angry tone of voice.

  She has, herself, been at times a splendid Aggie, a new woman rising to each occasion — what other Aggies might there have been in other circumstances? Now, however, she’s afraid that the next Aggie to appear will be the dead one.

  Was that a joke?

  There are moments when something — a clean laundry smell, a flash of a certain color, a word or an expression — seems to remind her of something. The sound of her mother’s voice, a dress she wore to church when she was little, the pattern on one of Neil’s ties — impressions flickering for an instant and then sliding away when she tries to grab hold of them. It’s one thing to have gained perspective, a sense of the sweep of events, but what are these memories that are only sensations? What mitigating circumstances may be lost in them? She may be on solid ground with what she does recall, but what about the rest?

  What if the catastrophe of wet sheets is just a signal of disintegration? Think of other lapses: forgetting her address, or telephone number, or what Frances does for a living, or who June is, or her own name. What if she looks at a book and can’t make out the sense of it, or watches television and can’t connect a plot? What if she looks at a clock and can’t tell the time, or at a measuring spoon and doesn’t know what it’s for?

  This happens, she’s seen it. That little Mrs. Ames from the grocery store was one: losing her mind, not violently or loudly, but quietly, in confusion, the identities of cans of peas and packages of ground beef slipping out of her grasp. Losing her mind like setting down a purse or a pair of glasses somewhere, and not recalling quite where.

  What if that happens to Aggie? This great old body wouldn’t be much at all, with nothing to interpret it. She shifts uneasily in her chair.

  This is the same old chair in which she spent so much time after Neil died; here and in the kitchen. She sees, from that time, pictures: still lifes and landscapes. But faded, the life burned out of them by years, like the old photographs.

  All those habits that no longer applied; it took some getting used to. She would find herself listening for his step, and then recall that there was no more step to listen for. She glanced at the clock and thought, “In two hours he’ll be home,” before realizing that none of those old standards for judging time passing applied. At the butcher’s, she might ask for three pork chops, or a roast big enough for three, and then have to revise down to just enough for two: June’s small appetite and her own. Sometimes she set his place at the table and then had to clear it away quickly, before June could notice.

  Poor little pale and hostile child. Aggie reached out to put an arm around her, or to touch her hair, and June glided away, out from under the embrace. There was no touching her.

  So much silence. Outside because of snow, and indoors because of absence. It didn’t seem to be only Neil who was gone.

  In the front room, she continued to skirt the space in the centre where he had lain for the two days between his dying and the funeral. Upstairs, his room was closed and musty. Almost every day of their marriage, she had gone in and out of this room, cleaning and tidying and changing his barely rumpled sheets, and now she was looking around at its dark walls, wooden closet and cupboards, and narrow stripped bed, and wondering who the man was who had slept here. Just a wall between them, but such a wall!

  “Get a grip on yourself,” she told herself, but felt as if she were slipping through her own fingers. Moving around the house, she found herself resting her hand on doorways, lamps, and walls, with an idea they might hold her down. When she looked in the mirror, she saw a full-fleshed woman with eyes that surely must be strange: like peering through a hole in a fence and seeing nothing but space on the other side.

  Other people, though, couldn’t have noticed. When she went out to shop, people stopped to talk. “You must let me know if there’s anything at all I can do,” beamed the minister’s wife. “Sad thing,” said the chairman of the school board. “We miss him. He was a fine man, an excellent teacher. Not an easy thing to find someone of his calibre. How are you managing?” So Aggie couldn’t have seemed odd or invisible to them.

  In books, people went on, leaving one thing for the next. In real life, it seemed one was launched willy-nilly into new circumstances without much decision or choice about it. Still, there was movement, however inadvertent. Was his death inadvertent? Or did she kill him with neglect, passivity, murder done simply by withholding something vital, like attention? Or perhaps just the force of her continuing ill-will had taken his breath away. Years ago would they have burned her as a witch?

  Anyway, it was done. There was nothing she could do now about death. Also there was nothing she could do about being free.

  What was she doing, sitting here? Surely she was not stupid. Where was the girl whose mother had once praised her wits, or the woman who had applied those wits to win small victories? Where was the woman who read books, and credited herself with a certain amount of information and worldliness and, as a result, some skepticism, if not yet wisdom? Apparently she did best with an opponent. He seemed to have been important to the sharpening process.

  That was infuriating. She would not depend on him. Well, of course in these circumstances she could not. But she was damned if she needed him, or the memory of him, for some fired-up version of herself. He was gone, winter was going, the past was the past and nothing to be done about it. There were little rivers of melted snow rushing down the street. Sounds were no longer muffled, and smells were lighter in some way too. Things were moving on, and here she sat. It was ridiculous, and irritating to be out of step.

  She could sit like a lump for the rest of her life, but what she was mourning — if it was mourning — was not the loss of him, or of love, but knowing that she had not known enough about him to miss him, and had made a mistake to begin with about love. She did not know if it made any sense at all to grieve for things that had never existed.

  On the other hand, she could be pleased about certain other things that had existed and now did not. For instance, she no longer had a headache. Also, she was a little hungry. Some of the hunger might be a wish to soothe, but some of it seemed to be actually a little appetite on its own behalf.

  She popped a chocolate cake in the oven and went out into the back yard. Soon, she could see, the grass would have to be mowed and the hedge trimmed. One of these weeks the garden would need to be turned over and planted. The white trim on the house was peeling and should be repainted. All these things would be up to her.

  That stopped her, pinned her right to that spot on the grass where she stood: “It’s up to me.” The idea gathered heat and grew into “It’s mine now,” and “I can do anything I want.” She could plant flamboyant sunflowers and poppies to replace the genteel roses and refined little lilies-of-the-valley. She could cut down a tree or two for more light, and cut windows in the walls of the house. Anything.

  Well, though, beyond ripping up the garden and the house, there were thirty, forty years. Inside again, she took the cake from the oven and made the obvious choice. It was exactly right, she thought: to make a living at what she was good at and enjoyed, and to do so in her own home. Which would be truly hers, because it required fundamental changes to suit her new purposes.

  But good heavens, she thought the night before the bakery opened, what if it didn’t work?

  Her ovens were new, and she had a cash register on one counter. The cellar contained bags of flour and sugar and bran. Everything was clean, her new stoves shone, and in the front room there was finally enough light. And she had no money in the bank, and owed a little to the carpenter.

  So it had to work.

  So it did work.
For whatever reasons — maybe, to begin with, out of pity or admiration — she had plenty of customers, but after that first rush, they returned for quality. Pity and admiration, she understood, would only go so far.

  A peculiar sort of freedom, though, and it made her laugh, such hard work for so many hours every day.

  It was still and black in the mornings when she swung her feet over the side of the bed and onto the old hooked rug. Slippering down the hallway to the bathroom, and then down the stairs to the kitchen, she felt like the only person in the world. The light flashing from her kitchen window was the only break in the darkness. That ought, she supposed, to make a person feel lonely, or maybe even frightened. What she liked was the calm and the stillness.

  This was so even though there was a great deal to do: bread dough to knead and batter to mix, supplies to haul up from the cellar. First the lights, and then the oven, and finally the sun warmed the room, heat expanding through the house.

  Her shoulders and her arms grew strong: pushing at the dough, whirling the batter in bowls by hand, bending over the oven, putting things into it in one state and lifting them out a little later as something else. It was like being a magician, this skill at transformations.

  True, sometimes by the end of the day the strong muscles ached, and her back gave her twinges, and her eyes were dry and scratching from all the words she consumed in spare moments. There was June, too, but really she was so quiet and removed, a person might even forget she existed; especially a person already very busy calculating demand and multiplying recipes.

  In the early days, she had to tell June so often that they couldn’t afford things for her. “It’s still a struggle. We’ll make it, but we have to be careful.” So no new dresses. Also, there was a school trip somewhere, and even though it would only have cost a few dollars, Aggie had to tell her it wasn’t possible. “Even if we had the money we used to, there’s still a depression, you know.”

  “Such a good girl,” said her customers. “And so smart. You must be proud of her.”

  Well, yes, Aggie supposed so. But surely only an idiot could have such a smooth surface, such pale eyes that said nothing; and June was no idiot. Who knew what sorts of explosions might be erupting inside? And these things built up, and eventually were manifested in messy ways. When she stopped to think about it, Aggie viewed June uneasily. Or maybe she was just what she seemed, restrained. Or perhaps God took the brunt of all her passions.

  In any case, Aggie was quite busy and had little time to fuss. She did, however, take the time to get books from the library on growing up, in preparation for the necessary talk with June. She tried to wing it a little on the pleasures of marriage, although June seemed neither to absorb nor to appreciate, and Aggie wasn’t sure how convincing she’d sounded.

  On Saturdays, she made June take over the cash register for a couple of hours while she slipped out to the library. It was good for June to face the business instead of skirting it, hiding away upstairs all the time. Well, of course it was hard on her when her friends came in. June didn’t like that: exchanging Aggie’s labors for money. She seemed to have some idea that the customers were buying more than bread and cakes, that parts of her were being purchased too. “I do honest work and I make honest money,” Aggie told her, but it didn’t seem to make a difference. “And I’m damned proud of it, and you should be too.”

  But June wasn’t proud, although she was skilful enough at bagging bread and slapping cakes smartly into their fold-up white boxes, and ringing up sales and making proper change. Aggie tried praise, and told her, “You’ve caught on very quickly,” but June only shrugged and returned to her room.

  So what could she have done about the child? June may now complain that she suffered a lack of attention, but she seems to forget that she refused any attention that was offered.

  Spending her days mainly in a world of women, Aggie heard great tales of other people’s lives. What did men talk about? Sports or business. They called the talk of women gossip. She looked up gossip in the dictionary, where it was said to be “familiar or idle talk; scandal”; and one who gossiped was “a babbler.” To gossip, it said, was “to tell idle tales about others, tattle; chat.”

  Enough to make a person suspicious of other definitions. How many words might she have learned from the wrong point of view? As far as she could see, it was sports and business that were idle chat and babbling. Even with her own business to run, she did not find finance very interesting.

  The women, her customers, who came in for a loaf of bread and stayed to talk, were the ones who got down to real events. The dictionary had it backwards. It seemed to her something like the difference between the books men wrote and the lives that people really led. All that fictional roaming and leaping from adventure to adventure had very little to do with changes that were really radical.

  She remembered the evening she and Neil arrived here, and driving past all those trim houses, assuming that lives were as neat as the lawns; and exploring this house, finding dustballs rolling on the trapdoor leading to the cellar and wondering if elsewhere there might be secret grimy corners also. As the teacher’s wife, she’d never known. As Aggie running a bakery, she learned a great deal.

  Back when Neil was alive, the man who was now mayor had been merely an alderman. His daughter was in June’s class. Aggie had heard the girl boasting once, “My father is going to be in parliament someday,” and June boasting back, “My father is going to be the principal.” Now June’s father was only a man who’d been dead a few years, and the other girl’s father was mayor, but not likely for long.

  “Poor Arnold,” complained his wife, Emily, “he works so hard. So many meetings and long hours.” The eyes of other customers met behind her back. She might know, or not, that poor Arnold, while he might well be enduring long meetings and hours, was also carrying on with his secretary. They had been seen, inevitably; his car in dark lanes and the two of them in unmistakable hideaways outside town. He would not be mayor again; the women had their votes. Emily would suffer too, a loss of pride, perhaps not altogether a bad thing. They would be kind to her afterward, although Aggie suspected that sort of pitying kindness would be the hardest to endure.

  And there was Audrey Sullivan, a tiny dark-haired young woman married to a garage mechanic, and well known as a shoplifter. So well known that proprietors of stores all over town watched for her and when they caught her leaving with, perhaps, a pair of stockings tucked into her blouse or a powder compact in her purse, they called her husband, who came and apologized and restored the goods or paid for them, and fetched her home. In the bakery, her small hand stole toward a tray of cookies while Aggie bagged a loaf of bread. Well, what did it matter? Poor Audrey surely ought to be permitted one place where her efforts were successful. What, Aggie wondered, happened at home when Audrey’s husband had been called? Did he try to persuade her, did he strike her or did he just sit wearily with his face in his hands? Did she weep and make promises?

  What was irritating was that she was so bad at stealing, and never seemed to get better. One would have thought she’d make some efforts to improve. Also there was no discrimination about it: the woman would take anything. As far as she was concerned, apparently, a pair of stockings from the five and dime were as enticing as Aggie’s oatmeal cookies.

  “Maybe if they had children,” the women said, diagnosing the source of Audrey Sullivan’s disease. Did they consider offspring a cure? Or, like hanging, a deterrent? Perhaps only, Aggie thought, that a child imposed an order, a structure, a system, that it was very difficult to escape. Medication for wrong-headed impulses.

  Unless, of course, children appeared outside the order, structure, and system. Then they were sin. Girls vanished out west for long visits with distant aunts. Their mothers were regarded uneasily; after all, whose daughter might not grow up to betray? There were so many unsavory pressures, not the least of them secret and sudden
impulses toward lust. Bodies were unpredictable, capable of grave errors in moments when judgment was in short supply. Whims led to tragedies.

  Aggie pictured prairies dotted with generous aunts, every home with a swelling eastern niece. Where did western daughters go? Not to eastern aunts, apparently. Much more broad-minded out there, people must be.

  She smiled to herself, thinking how fortunate she might be, after all, to have a husband who was dead and a daughter who was good.

  Elsewhere, she quite realized, people probably discussed her. She had a small curiosity about what they might be saying, but kept herself to herself with the women. Well, if she started, where would she stop? Would she say, “You remember my husband Neil? The teacher? We really couldn’t bear each other. My daughter says it’s likely my fault he died.” They might know things anyway, just from watching. It was remarkable what they knew. Someone had the flu but would be back on her feet in a couple of days, no doubt. Someone else sprained a wrist, slipping on steps, and came in bandaged, laughing about her clumsiness, although in fact, people said, she drank. Some people got cancer. News of deaths spread like wildfire.

  Between customers and in the evenings in her big chair in the front room, Aggie read novels and histories and textbooks. She read about other people’s lives, how they managed and how they were seen to have managed. She read about ideas, and about systems of ideas. She decided that people in groups were different from people in ones and twos. Masses became mobs, which had their own rules. Any revolution proved that; or any social gathering. Just she and June in a room together were different, she expected, from either of them apart. Also, she thought, primitive, death-dealing passions, anarchy, always lurked beneath the surface. And even God, if He existed, seemed to act to prove His own divinity. “Listen,” He said, shaking people up when their attention wandered.