Duet for Three

by Joan Barfoot

  “Fine.” But isn’t she staring at June in a peculiar way?

  Peering down, June pats herself. “What’s the matter, is my dress ripped?”

  “No, sorry. I was just thinking.”

  What exactly, Aggie wonders, settled in her chair, is it she holds against June? Frances once sighed and said, “Isn’t it strange that Mother only sees two sides of things? Everything’s either good or bad; it must make life so simple for her.” But Aggie, however irritating she finds June’s righteousness, still can’t quite believe in it. After all, she’s bright enough, she’s a teacher and no fool.

  What does she think June still owes her? To be the daughter she wanted? If so, that’s both atrocious and absurd.

  Does she still owe anything to June? Surely not: she’s provided her with a home all these years, after all, when she certainly didn’t have to. That’s something a mother could do; something only a mother could be asked to do.

  The other obligation of a mother, though, is surely love. Now there is an unpaid debt.

  What would have become of her in the last few years without June, who has cared for her in the same unhappy slapdash fashion as the unhappy slapdash way Aggie cared for her when she was just a child. A poor, unloving bargain.

  But how difficult does Aggie intend to make it? Where’s her pride? “Where’s your pride, Mother?” June has demanded, in regard to Aggie’s weight. Now, how much pride will she sacrifice to punish June?

  Is that all this is, a punishment? How feeble that is. Also terribly simple, which makes it suspect.

  It may only, after all, be her body, letting her down at last.

  Dear old treacherous body.

  Which is getting hungry again. Butter tarts, she thinks, would be the thing. And maybe lemon pie, Frances’s favorite, at least in the old days. If there are raisins in the house, and lemons. Supplies have been allowed to run down.

  But there are. June will be surprised to find that, after all, Aggie has stirred herself in the kitchen. Frances, when she gets here, will take the food for granted.

  Anyway, it’s for her own hunger that Aggie is bending over this hot oven once again. Not even for any ulterior motive like proving capabilities, in a weekend when such proof may be required.

  She shrugs. There is absolutely nothing she can deliberately do to alter whatever happens. Either Frances will find out, or she won’t. Either Aggie will have an accident, or she won’t. Either June will tell Frances, or she won’t. Is it possible she won’t? That’s asking a lot.

  June, behind the lessons she is teaching automatically, is trying to prepare. Rehearsing lines for Frances. The difficult part will be finding the right moment when they’re alone; that and finding the words. “Have you noticed, Frances,” she might begin, “any changes in your grandmother since the last time you were here?” She might say, “I thought you’d have picked it up. Sometimes changes are clearer when you don’t see somebody very often.” Killing two birds with one stone, that would be: letting Frances know she isn’t home enough to understand.

  “Because,” she might continue, “she’s been going downhill rather quickly. It’s sad.” Pointing out that June, too, might pity Aggie, that compassion is not necessarily a quality only Frances has.

  “And,” finally, “I can’t manage her on my own much longer. She’s started having accidents in her bed, and I simply can’t cope.”

  Then she will have to manage those words: nursing home.

  Beyond that, it depends on Frances. Surely the two of them combined could outweigh even Aggie.

  But why can’t June do it on her own?

  Well, she hasn’t, has she?

  What, though, if her inaction extends even to words?

  Once, when she was a child, she was at a public swimming pool, watching a group of girls diving. From beside the pool it didn’t look so difficult or dangerous, and she thought if they could do it, perhaps she also could. Still brave, she had climbed to the diving board, which after all was not very high, just three or four steps up from the edge of the pool, and gone to the end and looked down. And could not move. Could neither go back nor jump. She told herself it couldn’t possibly hurt, and wasn’t far, and certainly wasn’t dangerous, but simply she could not do it. The action was right there, at the tip of her toes, at the edge of her mind, but refused to go further. Less a fear of hitting the water than terror of the space between the board and the water: the falling through air. Something terrible would happen, she could feel it, in that space.

  Then suddenly she was underwater, choking and grabbing frantically for the surface, and came up screaming. She heard children laughing. Impatient to get by, one of them had simply pushed her off. She couldn’t remember falling, or that instant in the air, or even hitting the water. Just being under it, swallowing and breathing it in, terrified and certain she would die.

  Now is there a possibility that words will freeze in her throat, that something will only happen if she’s pushed? If, for instance, Frances finds out for herself?

  The terror, maybe, is of what cannot be undone. Any irrevocable occurrence. The moment Frances knows, everything is altered, certain things are put in motion, and if they turn out to be a mistake, June can’t call them back, undo them, or begin again some different way.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Where do you want to start?” June asks, right after an early supper. They have, she estimates, just over three hours before Frances arrives.

  “Wherever. It doesn’t matter.” Aggie still sounds listless, but on the other hand she did bake today. The mixture of inertia and energy is puzzling to June; attracts pity, an emotion which for different reasons neither of them would welcome. She hauls over the first of the boxes.

  Aggie leans a little forward in her chair. Oh yes, those old school readers of Neil’s, which she put away to make more room for her own books on the shelves. June holds up one of the shabby, battered, faded little volumes. The Third Golden Rule Book. Inside the front cover are the spidery lines of his signature, so finely drawn with a nibbed pen. Aggie remembers the scratching of those nibs and the pauses while he dipped them into the black bottled ink. “Let me see, June.”

  The pages are yellowed and feel fragile. Aggie tries to recall the days when she was so painstakingly teaching herself the rudimentary lessons here. Imagine, just learning to read! “Oh, listen to this,” she says, struck by a once-familiar verse.

  “I am glad a task to me is given,

  To labor at day by day;

  For it brings me health and strength and hope

  And I cheerfully learn to say:

  ‘Head, you may think; Heart, you may feel;

  But hand, you shall work alway.’”

  “Good grief, that’s a grim thing to teach kids, isn’t it?”

  “What’s grim about teaching children to work hard? You always have, and I have. It’s something people ought to learn, that that’s what they have to do.”

  “Well, yes, to a point, but a little more might have been nice, don’t you think? More than just working? To have time to travel, maybe, see different things? The whole world there, and all we’ve ever seen of it is pictures and words.” Aggie has continued to flip through the book. “Listen to this one: ‘Attempt the end and never stand in doubt; nothing’s so hard but search will find it out.’ Imagine never standing in doubt.”

  “I don’t know, I think it sounds nice. That if you try hard enough, you can have anything.” This sounds so unlike June that they are both startled.

  “So what should we do with all these? Throw them out, or are they worth something, do you think?”

  June has reached for the book, is stroking its cover, turning it over, leafing to the page inside where her father’s name is written. The signature is faded now, and faint. Almost half a century ago. He would have been nearly ninety now, if he’d lived.

 
; What an odd thought: imagining him still alive. What would he be like now? Stern is the word that leaps to mind. Aged and frail, perhaps, but stern. June has a vision of a shrunken, angry old man; strange, surely, when her recollections are of tenderness? “No, I don’t want to throw them out or sell them. There aren’t so many of his things left.”

  Almost, Aggie thinks, as if June is intent on turning these old books of his into his body, here in the front room. How morbid.

  “Not a very effective beginning, then, is it?” she suggests. “By way of getting things cleared out?”

  June doesn’t answer; she has repacked the box, pushed it to one side, and hauled over another. “Oh, look, old pictures.” She unfolds the grey and brown paper frame of the top one. “It’s Father, when he was little. With his mother.”

  Aggie leans over to see. “You know, I could never connect him with those pictures of him as a little boy. Like he’d borrowed some other family’s photographs to bring with him.”

  “He looked happy, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he did. I used to wonder about his mother, what she was like. She seemed to be the only woman he ever admired.”

  Maybe it’s just June’s hearing, but she detects sadness, rather than bitterness, in Aggie’s tone. “I used to wonder about her, too. I used to imagine I knew her. Sometimes that I lived with her.” Now, why did she reveal that? She looks at Aggie anxiously, flinching from the anticipated crack.

  “You did?” No crack at all; just surprise.

  “In a way. When I was little, if I was unhappy.”

  “Were you so unhappy then?” Aggie remembers saying almost the same words, in another conversation, that one with Frances.

  June shrugs. “Sometimes.” She folds up that photograph and takes out another. “This one’s your family,” handing it over.

  The family portrait. There she is at eighteen, all their lives ago. The stern, mysterious faces of her childhood, and her own the most mysterious to her now. She would reach back and warn that hopeful young woman. The way she feels sometimes watching a suspense movie on television, where the dangers are clear to any fool except the hero, so that she wants to call out, “You idiot, don’t go up those stairs, can’t you tell there’s danger up there?” And to the small brown young woman in this picture she might say, “Stop and think. Be careful what you decide to want. Listen to your first impressions.”

  Although maybe not. Here she is, sixty-odd years later, her body crammed with food of her own making, her mind crammed with stories and with information that sometimes comes in handy, and she’s in her own living room with her daughter and a pile of boxes from the past, and her granddaughter will be here soon and she sometimes has accidents in her bed. Some things she might change, but maybe not so many, on the whole.

  There are only a few photographs in this box of Frances, and none at all of June’s childhood. Nor are there any of Herb. They seem to have left large parts of their lives unrecorded.

  The next box is quite large but not very heavy. “The old pots and pans from the bakery, remember, June? You took what we didn’t need day-to-day and put them away.”

  Here is a stack of bread pans tucked into each other; and pie plates and cake tins, with the levers on the bottom that swivelled around, neatly freeing the finished product. And pots for boiling fruit, and mixing bowls and measuring spoons and cups and flour sifters — all the equipment with which Aggie supplied herself as a recent widow for quite a different life. “Well, these can certainly go. Why on earth didn’t we throw them out at the time, June? Or maybe the Salvation Army would be interested. They’re a bit battered, but they’re still usable. Unless Frances might want them.”

  “I doubt it, she says she doesn’t bake and there’d be far too much here for one person anyway. But we can put them aside for the Salvation Army, that’s a good idea.”

  Another box contains piles of large black notebooks. These are the ledgers from the bakery, going right back to the beginning when she didn’t quite know how to keep accounts. Looking at them, Aggie can see the clumsiness and uncertainty in the early figures. Like learning to read, that was, a different language, arithmetic, adding up sales in one set of columns, costs in another, the numbers getting regularly larger until the business was a going concern.

  Here and in those pots and pans are more than forty years of batters being mixed as the sun rose, her hair slipping loose as she bent over the hot oven; hundreds and thousands of hours of stories, women coming and going with their tales of life being lived out there beyond her door. All her beautiful sweet food. And Barney, her friend. She feels tears stinging.

  Gradually things are being separated: what will be kept (the pictures and books), what will be given away (the pans and bowls and pots) and what will go to the garbage (all those ledgers). Aggie supposes it’s a good thing to have order emerging; and, really, it would be foolishly sentimental, and she loathes foolish sentiment, to hang on to any of this.

  They haven’t yet found anything Frances might want, but now they encounter several boxes of clothes: old dresses and sweaters, with rips in the armpits and unravelled elbows, a shabby black cloth coat so ancient the teacher was alive when Aggie bought it. She can’t imagine why she would have stored all this away so carefully. Really worn-out clothes she tore up to use as dustcloths. These things are merely damaged, but repairable.

  June is holding up a dress, a calf-length print with a ruffled throat and long sleeves flaring out from elastic at the wrists. “Good grief, Mother, was this yours?”

  Aggie remembers wearing it to go shopping, in the early days of being married. Its hem is coming down, but aside from that it seems in good enough shape. Why did she keep it, though? With the thought that at some point she would reach some peak of bulk and then begin to go backward until she could fit into such a dress again, once she fixed the hem? As if she had another body entirely, tucked away, waiting for her to come back to it?

  It’s something, finally, that Frances might like. This sort of thing is back in style.

  Aggie isn’t sure, however, that she wants to give it to her. Because, she thinks, Frances might treat it lightly, as a costume; whereas for her it had been a kind of uniform.

  June, feeling the shiny, thin material, is shocked. She has a memory of this dress, but the mother who wore it was young, and slim. All the times and ways she has remembered the Aggie of her childhood, she has forgotten to remember her slim; the way she must have looked when June was very small. She has been putting the wrong figure to some of her recollections, then; a disturbing discovery.

  “Do you think we should set the clothes aside for Frances?” she asks. “There’s still a lot of use left in most of them.”

  “I don’t think so. She has plenty of clothes. Let’s give them away, too.” Aggie thinks she would be much less unhappy to see these things worn by a stranger on the street than by Frances.

  Lying in the bottom of this box, for no apparent reason, is a small, thick white leather-covered volume. “What’s that?” Aggie asks.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake,” June breathes, reaching in, “I’d forgotten that. It was mine, when I was little. Daddy gave it to me.”

  Daddy? Aggie looks at her fifty-nine-year-old daughter with distaste. “A Bible, is it?”

  “He gave it to me for some reason. A reward for something. Learning verses in Sunday school? I can’t remember.” She stares at the inscription inside the little volume: “To my daughter June, with great expectations”.

  Not even “To my beloved daughter June,” which she might have assumed. And what were those expectations of his that were so great? What did he want from her?

  So even he had had grand visions, large demands. She feels suddenly hemmed in and surrounded. Also judged.

  What is Aggie smiling about?

  “Oh, I was just thinking about you, remembering you going off with your fath
er on Sunday mornings, holding his hand and carrying that Bible in the other. It was sweet, in a way.”

  Now Aggie laughs. “I remember you coming home one Sunday and telling me you wanted music lessons. Do you remember that?”

  “No.” June is puzzled. What’s Aggie getting at? Something, likely, with a twist.

  “Well, I thought you meant singing, because your father always said you liked the hymns.” (So they must have talked? They must have had ordinary conversations about their child? This comes as a surprise. She ought, perhaps, to consider this later: what other words she may have forgotten.) “Anyway, I was busy getting lunch and I just said, ‘Yes, that’s nice, if you like singing so much perhaps you should have lessons, we’ll talk to your father.’

  “But you said quite firmly, ‘Oh no, I want to learn to play the harp,’ and I thought for God’s sake what next, there can’t be a harp teacher within two hundred miles, who teaches harp? But I wanted to take you seriously, that you were interested in music, anyway, so I suggested the piano, because of course every little town is hip-deep in piano teachers. But you said a piano wouldn’t do either. You don’t remember any of this?”

  June shakes her head.

  “Well, of course I asked why it had to be the harp, and you know what you said? You said, ‘So when I get to heaven, I’ll already know how to play, so I can be a better angel right away. They don’t play pianos in heaven, you know, Mother,’ as if I were stupid not to know that.”

  June also smiles now. “But I didn’t get the lessons.”

  “No, so I’m afraid you’re stuck being just a beginner angel.” But this is said lightly, kindly.

  How very odd, what’s been put aside, and not merely in the attic. And the atmosphere is interesting too: like a Christmas truce in wartime.

  June hauls the trunk closer. “This looks like the last of it.”

  “You know,” Aggie says, “whatever’s in there will go away back. Things I brought from home. It’s queer, all these years piled up like this together in a heap.”