“I’m going for a walk,” she says.
“Why?” Herbert says.
“I need the exercise,” she says, although that is not the only reason. She kisses him, and then Amy. Their skin feels warm against her lips. “If I’m not back by eight-thirty, put yourselves to bed.”
“But you’ll be back by eight-thirty, won’t you?” Herbert says.
“I’ll try.” She leans over to kiss James good-bye and accidentally blocks the screen. He looks at her irritably, then controls himself.
“Have a nice walk,” he says, and he lets himself be kissed. Amy looks from Ellen to Mary-Margaret, then back at Ellen. She is built like her grandmother, tall and thin, with long willowy arms and legs she hasn’t grown into yet. Over the summer, she shot up three inches; her face lengthened; her freckles lightened to match the color of her skin. Now her braid reaches down to where her waist dips inward, the first suggestion of a woman’s graceful shape. Her eyes are James’s dark, worried eyes.
“What?” Ellen says. She is sweating in the heavy coat, edging toward the door.
Amy tosses her head and her long braid swings. “Herbert gets scared when you’re gone.”
“Mama’s boy,” Mary-Margaret says. “Hasenfuss.”
“I’ll be back soon,” Ellen says to Amy. They both ignore Mary-Margaret, who speaks in rapid German to Fritz, beginning a long complaint that needs no translation.
Ellen almost trips on the threshold in her hurry to get outside. The cold air tastes sweet; she closes the door and breathes deeply, chasing the sour smell of the house from her lungs. These after-dinner walks are the only time she can take for herself, but even so, as she walks down the steep, narrow driveway, she feels terrible, as though she’s stealing. By walking, she’s not making sure the kids finish their homework; by walking, she’s not available to James if he needs her. And she has papers to grade, one stack of them on the dresser at home, another waiting on her desk at school. Her classroom has three tall windows, each with a chip of stained glass crowning the top. She loves to work there in the late afternoons, composing lesson plans as the sun drizzles gold between the hanging plants, the last echoey voices of the children fading toward home. But grading papers depresses her: this far into the year, she doesn’t need to see them to know what grade each student will receive. It seems so unfair, so hopeless. Sometimes she buys brightly colored stars and pastes them on each of the papers just because you’re all nice people. But the kids don’t buy it: nice doesn’t get you anywhere, nice doesn’t count. Looks count, and the right kind of clothes counts. Two plus two equals four counts.
From the street the house looks peaceful: 512 Vinegar Hill, a pale brick ranch set too close to the street. The lamp in the living room window glows red; an eye peering back at her, curious but calm. The heads of Fritz and Mary-Margaret are just visible, and they could be the heads of any older couple, sitting side by side. They could be very much in love. They could be talking instead of watching TV, discussing Nixon’s re-election, the situation in Vietnam, the weather, the supper they have eaten.
That was a good roast, the man might say. Delicious.
Oh no, it was much too dry.
No, really, it was good.
Or maybe the woman wouldn’t answer the man. Maybe she would smile, just a bit, just enough for him to see that she was pleased. There would be history in that smile, and he might reach out to touch her hand, to twist the gold band on her finger, and the feeling between them would be so strong that a stranger walking by would notice the pale brick house set too close to the street and, inside it, the backs of two gray heads, and perhaps would imagine the woman’s smile.
But there is nothing between Fritz and Mary-Margaret that might cause a stranger to notice, to slow and watch and wonder without really knowing why. At night they sleep in narrow twin beds as neatly as dolls, flat on their backs, chins raised in the air. Often, before they go to sleep, their voices rise and fall in the singsong way of a prayer. Fritz knows something terrible about Mary-Margaret that he ultimately threatens to reveal, and this threat ends the fight instantly, with Mary-Margaret saying No, no. There are secrets everywhere in this house. Ellen walks around them, passes through them, sensing things without understanding what they mean.
She heads toward the downtown past other ranch-style houses, each centered primly on its rectangular lot. The doors and windows, the chimneys and driveways are all rectangular too, and the quiet streets cut larger rectangles that cover the town like the neat lines on a piece of graph paper. The most easterly line is formed by Lake Michigan; the coast curves gently until it reaches the downtown, where it juts inland to form the harbor. Perched on the bluff, Saint Michael’s Church overlooks it all—the harbor, the downtown shops and businesses, the rows of rectangular houses that sprawl to the west for a quarter of a mile—the clock in the steeple like a huge, patient eye.
As a child, Ellen was afraid of that clock, that steeple, the gaunt cross at its peak. Strings of smoke from the electric company rippled behind it like the shadows of large birds, and she was always relieved to go inside, to sit between her mother and her sisters in their usual pew down front. The altar shone like a holiday table, decorated with flowers and white linen; the air was scented with incense, shoe polish, the sweet odor of women’s perfume. Often she’d sleep with her head on her mother’s purse, lulled by the murmur of the congregation’s responses and the slow, steady thrum of the hymns. The church was no less familiar than any room in the house where she, like all of her sisters, had been born, fifteen miles north of Holly’s Field. They came to Saint Michael’s for Mass on Sundays, for Wednesday night Devotions whenever they could, for plays and recitals and long days of school, for holiday celebrations. Every Christmas Eve, their mother drove them up and down the streets of Holly’s Field to see the Christmas lights, ending the tour at Saint Michael’s parking lot—the grand finale—where a twenty-foot wreath opened the darkness like an astonished red mouth. This was a treat they waited for all year, talked about for weeks afterward. And yet, Ellen always felt a sweet, secret relief at folding back into the blackness of the countryside, heading for home, the quietly lit farmhouses spread out from one another as if they’d fallen to earth, a shower of meteorites, each still faintly burning.
Now, though it’s less than a week since Thanksgiving, Holly’s Field is already strung with decorations. Plastic Santa Clauses wave from front lawns; nativity scenes glow between the bushes. Looking back, Ellen notices that only the house at 512 is dim, giving off the frail light of an ordinary table lamp. Fritz refuses to pay for the extra electricity; he doesn’t want the bother of putting up a Christmas tree. Other years, visiting for a few days at Christmas, Ellen didn’t mind. After all, there were lights and decorations and a fresh-cut tree at her mother’s house for the children to enjoy. But this year it was different because 512 Vinegar Hill was home.
“Lights?” Fritz said to James, when Ellen mentioned it at the table one evening. “Is this where your money goes, Jimmy? Lights!”
“It’s my money too,” Ellen said. “I work too,” but Fritz ignored her.
“Gals, they are quick with our wallets,” he said, and he thumped the table next to James, laughing. Ellen looked at her plate because she was afraid that, if she looked up, she would see James laughing too. Then she got up and began to clear the table, lifting the fried potatoes away just as Fritz reached out to take some more. He stared at her. His eyes were bright and small. Pigs’ eyes. You expect me to be afraid of you? she thought. The potato dish burned in her palms.
When she’d first seen the scars on James’s back, she hadn’t known what they were. She traced one with her finger as he sat on the bed. It was several days after their wedding, and the first time she had seen his upper body in the light. She took her finger away when she realized he could not feel it.
“Pa was good with his belt,” James said, and it was several years before Ellen saw him without his T-shirt again.
Now she
stood in front of Fritz, hating him as James would not. Weak old man, she thought, dizzy with contempt.
James wiped his mouth on his napkin. “Pa’s not finished,” he said quietly.
“We’re on a budget, remember?” Ellen said, and she put the potatoes on the counter.
You know I’m right. Fight him. Don’t fight me.
But James got up and brought the potatoes back to the table, back to his father. Then he sat down and all of them, even the children, continued the meal without her.
Later, as they got into bed, James said, “We never had Christmas lights.”
“What do you mean?” Ellen said. “We had lights last year, and the year before that, in the crab apple tree outside the…”
Then she realized the we was them.
“I am your family,” she said.
She could feel the weight of his body in the bed, and she wanted to stretch out her leg, kick that weight far away. “I am your family,” she said again, so angry she did not know what else to say. She snapped off the lights and rolled to the far edge of the bed, imagining long dialogues that left James overwhelmed by her devastating arguments, her cool distance, her glib responses to his apologies. She woke to the alarm in the morning feeling as though she hadn’t slept. Still, she knew that she had; James was pressed against her, an arm flung over her stomach. She tried to get up but the arm tightened, and they cuddled up then the way they had on weekend mornings in Illinois, dozing and waking, discussing the week’s small misunderstandings, laughing over meaningless things. If we just had some time to ourselves, she thinks, we could talk to each other the way we used to. Maybe about nothing in particular at first, but even that would be a start.
Turning on to Main Street, she wants so much to have a good Christmas, a Christmas that will be the way they remember themselves, she and James, when they look back and remember the children as children, and themselves as young; when they sit in a lighted window at night with only the backs of their gray heads showing while strangers pass by and wonder who they are and who they were. So far, there have been few memories they can actually share. When Amy was born, James was in Ann Arbor. When Bert was born, he was north of La Crosse. Christmases and Easters, birthdays and anniversaries, James is usually on the road. Ellen never used to mind. He’d call from motel rooms, from gas stations and restaurants. What’s new? he would say, and she’d bring him up to date. But lately she’s realized that he doesn’t listen, or if he does, he quickly forgets. It is a lonely thing, remembering for someone else, and she’s grown to envy her sisters, whose husbands come home every night for supper and sit down in the same places, their own places, at their tables to eat.
Ellen’s father died when she was five, and for several years his place at the table was left respectfully empty. But the table was small and soon Heidi’s elbow jutted where his cup once stood; Gert switched her chair with his to accommodate her new, wide hips. One night, Ellen realized she couldn’t tell where Daddy used to sit. Everyone except Miriam, who had married, was spread evenly around the table; Mom, Gert, Ketty, Heidi, Julia, and herself. Without the space there, she could not remember what her father looked like, and she cried while Mom tried to console her; her sisters, all much older, said she was too young to remember him anyway. Ellen thinks now that she should be used to absence, that James’s long trips shouldn’t bother her because at least she knows he will come home. But his place at the table disappears as soon as he’s gone, casually, as if he’d never really existed.
This year he missed Thanksgiving; he was somewhere in South Dakota. Ellen left Fritz and Mary-Margaret watching the Macy’s parade on TV, and drove the children to her mother’s for Thanksgiving dinner. The barns and the house were strung with lights; a blinking gold turkey sat on top of the purple martin house in the courtyard. Ellen’s sisters were already in the house with their husbands and most of their children and grandchildren. Miriam beckoned to Ellen from the kitchen radiator; Ellen sat beside her on the warm metal bars. A tangle of children fought over dominoes at their feet as Mom’s dog barked and spun in circles like a bobbin.
“How are you, Sputzie?” Miriam said, using Ellen’s old nickname. Her gray hair was tucked up in a bun at the back of her head, and she wore the hearing aid her husband and grown-up children had chipped in for.
“Okay,” Ellen said. It always took her a while to shake off the quiet of Mary-Margaret’s house, to reorient herself to the commotion of her family. Her voice felt cramped and thin beside the voices of her sisters, and she wondered if, once, she had talked in the same expressive way, her hands slicing the air as she spoke instead of pinning her arms to her sides. Julia came over with her baby and kissed Ellen wetly on the cheek. Ellen and Miriam made room for her, and they laughed at the tight fit, remembering how, once, there had been room for all six of them to sit on the radiator together.
“So how’s life with the in-laws?” Julia asked.
“It’s awful,” Ellen began, relieved to be asked, but Miriam started to laugh.
“I remember when me and Henry were living with his folks,” she said. “It was after George and Petey were born. We all stayed together in the guest room; me and Henry got the top of the bed, and George and Petey got the bottom. Henry’s ma had cancer, and everywhere I turned, there was somebody giving me orders….”
She spoke as if she were telling a funny story, something she had overheard or was making up on the spot. This really happened to you, Ellen wanted to say. How did you feel? How did you cope? But she did not ask; it would be wrong to encourage Miriam to complain, un-Christian, perhaps unwomanly. Even Ketty, whose husband drinks, never complains about her marriage. “Remember that you love him,” was the advice she had given Ellen when she married James. “Sometimes you’ll forget, but you do.”
Thirteen years ago, Ellen thought marriage meant love. Now she believes that marriage means need, and when the need isn’t there, what comes next? On her wedding day, she had looked across the street from the church to the cemetery and imagined all the women who had come before her, who had married and borne children and died. Some day, she thought, that same peace will be mine. But perhaps what she saw was not peace, but silence. Perhaps those women entered the ground because they were tired and had nowhere else to go. Peace and exhaustion would look the same from where she had stood at age twenty, at the top of the church steps, high above the cold ground.
At the crosswalk, she stops and waits for a slow line of cars to pass. The downtown is larger than it was years ago when she and James drove around on restless spring nights, turning right, then right, then right again, making bigger and bigger squares, Chinese boxes swallowing the space where they’d just been. Snow begins to fall, smoothing away the cracks and wrinkles of the sidewalks and streets, re-creating a world without sharp edges, without color, without sound. Ellen crosses to the other side and finds a perfect trail of footprints from a woman’s neat boot. She places her own feet carefully, following in the footsteps of this stranger so that she herself leaves no tracks, no trace, no sign that she has ever been here.
“Anything might happen to her,” Mary-Margaret says, and though Amy feels her stomach tighten, she keeps her expression the same.
When nobody looks away from the TV, Mary-Margaret says, “You know, she walks down by the lake. That’s where they found that girl. I told you about that, Jimmy, and I told her about it too. That girl, she’d been strangled with her own hair, and it was weeks before they found her. For all you know, there might be more girls going to be killed, and then Ellen, she don’t listen, she goes walking down there at night without a brain in her head when there’s men out there who would wrap a sweet girl’s braid around her throat.” She strokes her own throat, her fingers pushing deep beneath the pink collar.
“Mom’s hair isn’t long enough,” Amy says, making her voice deliberately calm. “Mom’s hair is shorter than Dad’s. How are they going to strangle her with that?”
“You just listen to her,” Mary-Marg
aret says. “Jimmy, you just listen to your daughter.”
James glances at Amy but he doesn’t say anything. Amy does not expect him to.
“Out walking in the dark where anything might grab her. She don’t think, she don’t use her head. And that girl, she didn’t have a stitch of clothes on either. Schrecklich. It was weeks before they found her.”
“Is Mom okay?” Herbert says. He sucks his thumb; saliva leaks down the side of his hand.
“Don’t listen to her,” Amy tells him. “She wants to scare you, that’s all.”
“Jimmy, just listen to your daughter.”
“She wants to scare you.”
“Enough,” Fritz says. “You kids don’t want to watch the TV, you go in the other room.”
“Walking down there in the dark. There’s dogs down there too, dogs gone wild. They say them dogs will attack anything, half of them sick with the rabies, and then Ellen goes down there without a brain in her head.”
Herbert starts crying; Amy shoves him hard.
“She’s teasing you,” she says, though she isn’t always absolutely sure. She knows that bad things can happen to anyone at any time, but wouldn’t they happen easier in the dark when you can’t see them coming? “Dad, tell him,” Amy says.
James does not say anything.
“So thoughtless of her to go out in the dark. Anything might happen, but she can’t think of her children, no, not her husband either. She goes down to the lake front without a brain in her head and they don’t find what’s left of her for weeks.”
Herbert screams.
“Jesus Christ,” Fritz says. “You kids get in the other room!”
“She’s teasing you, Herbert, she’s being mean.”
Vinegar Hill Page 2