Vinegar Hill

by A. Manette Ansay

  “How long does this plastic stay on?”

  “Five minutes. The plastic stays for five minutes, how come you can’t remember that?”

  “I have always had a poor memory for things. You are the one with the memory. You were always the smart one. You were the one they stood up in front of the church to recite, and then half way through your hair lifted up off your head. All that bacon fat and it still wouldn’t lie flat. There you were with your hair stuck straight up and shining with grease.”

  “They that hate me without a cause are more than the hairs of mine head: they that would destroy me, being mine enemies wrongfully, are mighty.”

  “You always had the good memory,” Mary-Margaret says, but Salome isn’t listening. The cowboys are weeping over the dead cowboy. It seems there has been a mistake; the girl cries too, and her blond hair whips the wind like a flag as a cowboy minister prays over the body. Even on TV you can see how the Bible speaks the truth. Even a cowboy who looks like all the others will be counted by God and recognized.

  “Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters.”

  “There’s no call to show off, that’s what Mama always said too. There’s nothing worse than a show-off, she said, and that afternoon, when we got home from church, she let you have it good. Putting on airs in the house of God, waving your arms like you was acting. We’d hoped you would marry that Federmier boy, but no one would have you after that. Everybody remembered you waving your arms and your hair shining with that stinky grease. Everybody remembers a show-off!” Mary-Margaret shouts.

  “Five minutes is up,” Salome says. “Go over by the sink, I’ll wash it out.”

  “That was no five minutes.”

  “Five minutes.”

  “Turn off the TV. If you’d pay some attention to me you would know when it was five minutes, but you’ve been watching that thing all along. Turn it off, turn it off!” Mary-Margaret says. Salome turns off the TV and stares at the yellow-flowered curtains drawn tightly closed. She remembers the recitation: the dress she borrowed from her cousin, white like a bride’s, with a plain scooped collar and full skirt, and the flickering candles, and the solemn, weighted feeling of her feet as she approached the altar, step by step, stopping before she reached the red carpet, which girls were not allowed to touch. Outside it was a brilliant May day; inside the church was blurred and dim with shadow. The faces in the congregation were like faces she had never seen before, and even now she remembers it: the wonderful feeling of knowing no one and no one knowing you; the wide open space of all that.

  “Now it’s been five minutes,” Mary-Margaret says. Salome leads her to the sink and bends her head beneath the faucet. Mary-Margaret’s neck is tender as a bird’s beneath Salome’s thick hand. “Oh, it hurts my back,” Mary-Margaret says. “Wash it out, wash it out, hurry.”

  Salome adjusts the water temperature and rinses Mary-Margaret’s hair, the way she did when she was a child and Mary-Margaret was always younger, always more helpless, always more frail.

  Your sister isn’t strong, Mama told her again and again. Versprich mir. Promise you’ll take care of your sister. Salome coaxed Mary-Margaret to eat and helped her with chores. She rinsed her hair with chamomile and wrapped it up in rags so she would have curls for Mass each Sunday. She sewed Mary-Margaret’s wedding dress and assisted Mama at the birth of Mary-Margaret’s children. All her life, Salome has kept her promise.

  Versprich mir.

  “I’ll put in some of that blue rinse you like,” Salome murmurs. “Here, I’m almost done.” But the psalm is singing inside her; she can remember every word, spread out before her clear as on any printed page, and feel the suck of her breath, the cold stare of the congregation. Let not the water-flood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me. She finishes the blue rinse and wraps a towel around Mary-Margaret’s head, helps her to stand straight.

  “I’m dizzy,” Mary-Margaret says. “I think I’m going to faint.”

  Salome guides her back to the chair and begins to towel the thin mat of pale blue curls, taking half-breaths to avoid the ammonia smell. “Now ain’t this nice?” she says, making her voice penny bright. “I believe this is the nicest one yet. You got curls like a schönes Mädchen,” but Mary-Margaret will not be comforted.

  “There are times I still miss Mama,” she says, and she twists her mother’s ring round and round on her finger. “Oh, don’t you miss Mama sometimes?”

  The hands toweling Mary-Margaret’s hair freeze for a brittle moment. Salome keeps no yellow flowers in her own lonely kitchen. She has emptied her mind of everything but God, who does not let a sparrow fall from the sky unnoticed, who mourns a cowboy who looked just like the rest, who will certainly remember Salome on the Day of Judgment and welcome her home. Reproach hath broken my heart; and I am full of heaviness: and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none.

  “Hold still,” Salome says.

  4

  Ellen comes through the front door with a crash, carrying two grocery bags and clutching a jug of milk. Amy trails behind with a box of laundry soap; she holds the door for Herbert, who is dreamily swinging a loaf of bread. All of them pause when they see Mary-Margaret. She sits in her chair beside the window, crowned by a a halo of wispy blue curls. Salome is bundled up in a tattered coat, her big black purse hanging from her shoulder.

  “Auntie Salome,” Ellen says, looking studiously away from Mary-Margaret. The room smells of ammonia. “If you give me a minute to unload these groceries, I’ll take you home.”

  “Powdered milk is cheaper,” Mary-Margaret says, looking at the milk jug. Her eyes are red behind her bifocals, and the veins in her forehead stand out in a pattern that reminds Ellen of stained glass. “How come you took so long?”

  Ellen shrugs. She has been at her mother’s, but she does not tell Mary-Margaret this and neither do the kids. When James is traveling, Ellen has to borrow Fritz and Mary-Margaret’s car, and they complain whenever she uses it for something more than the usual household errands. Everything else is frivolous.

  Wasting gas. Money doesn’t grow on trees.

  “It stinks in here,” Amy says.

  “Beauty has its price,” Ellen says, and she herds them quickly into the kitchen, leaving her coat on. She is busy putting away the perishables when she feels Salome’s finger against her neck. She jumps; Salome has always made her nervous, the way she moves, silent as a cat, the way she will stare directly at you saying nothing. Senile old bat, Fritz calls her, and Mary-Margaret does not object. Ellen tries not to look at her ankles, which have swollen over the edges of her sneakers. She wonders how Salome manages to walk all the way from her apartment downtown, which she does faithfully, every other month, to give Mary-Margaret her permanent wave.

  “I don’t need the ride,” Salome murmurs. “I wouldn’t trouble you.”

  “No, really, it’s no trouble.” Ellen searches for a lie. “I have another errand to run.” She closes the refrigerator to find Salome emptying out the remaining grocery bag. She uses two hands to lower each can unsteadily to the counter. “You don’t have to do that,” Ellen says. A can slips away, thumps to the floor just inches from Bert’s foot. He picks it up, studies it carefully.

  “Green beans,” he says. “Mom, look. I can read it.”

  Amy says, “You didn’t read it, you just looked at the picture.”

  “Green beans,” Ellen says, watching Salome.

  “Read this word,” Amy tells Bert, grabbing the can. “This one word right here.”

  Salome is putting cans of peas and kidney beans into the sink. She opens the oven door, loads the racks with fruit cocktail, tomato paste, rolls of toilet tissue. She sniffs the bars of Ivory and slips them into the silverware drawer.

  “Beans!” Herbert shouts.

  “How quickly this goes with someone to help me,” E
llen says to Salome, grateful that the kids haven’t noticed. Salome’s heavy face is perspiring, and Ellen sees that she has been paid for the extra trip downtown. For years, Salome worked as a domestic, keeping house for a doctor in Whitefish Bay. Now she lives by herself on Social Security, with no family left except Mary-Margaret. Ellen realizes she must be lonely, and she makes up her mind to stop over for a visit now and then on her evening walks. Odd Auntie Salome. Mary-Margaret’s sister. It’s hard to imagine either of them as children, wide-eyed and sturdy, bending over some game with their heads nearly touching, the way Amy and Herbert do. But perhaps that’s what Ellen needs most: glimpses of Mary-Margaret as a child, a sister, a teenage girl, a young woman with two children and a husband already angry, distant, beginning to stoop from seasons of hard work. There must be a way to pass through Mary-Margaret’s bitter cloud and grasp hold, a clumsy embrace, if only for a moment. “Thank you for your help,” she tells Salome.

  “You are welcome.” Salome’s stern voice is a warning; the collar of her house dress flops loose like the ear of a dog that has been in a fight. Ellen wonders what to talk about on the drive back to Salome’s apartment. The children, maybe? Cutting hair? The science project Ellen is helping her class set up at school? She folds up the empty grocery bags and tucks them under the sink. What she wants is a real conversation, one adult to another, and it occurs to her that she is the one who is lonely. The days end and begin again without a seam, a wrinkle, a welcome dropped stitch. She keeps the house, shops, cooks, goes to work, takes care of the children, reasons with Mary-Margaret and Fritz, worries over James’s increasingly silent moods. There’s no time left over for renewing high school friendships or chatting with the other teachers in the lounge after school. Sometimes she phones her sisters on weekends, and it’s good to laugh with them for a while, but when she tries to explain how she’s feeling, they simply assure her that things will get better. And perhaps they’re right; after all, they’re older, they’ve been married longer, they’ve lived through their own empty times. Certainly, women like Salome have survived worse, caring for families that are not their own, raising children they’ll never see again, all for minimum wage and, perhaps, a small bonus for the holidays.

  Outside, Ellen hovers next to Salome as they cross the icy driveway to the car, wanting to hold her elbow, but knowing it would only hurt Salome’s fierce pride. Today at her mother’s, she helped clean the pantry from the floor to the very top shelves. Mom noticed how quickly Ellen claimed the ladder. “You think I’m too old to climb up there?” she said. She is seventy-two. “Get down from there,” she said, and for the rest of the afternoon she played the acrobat while Ellen cleaned the cupboards down below. This had always been the chore of the youngest child, the one not yet trusted with heights, still forbidden to touch the china cups peering down from the top shelf. The pantry was a small, windowless room off the kitchen, cool in summer, warm in winter, smelling of vanilla and soft cooking lard, a favorite place to hide with a doll or a diary. A child crouched on the floor could imagine herself in a secret passage, each irregular cupboard a false door, an intriguing deception filled with possibility. There was sugar to lick from the tip of a wet finger pecked into the bin behind the door. There were dried apples, prunes, sour-skinned pears; sometimes there was a bundt cake, untouchable yellow moon, or a tall white-frosted angel food gleaming from the top shelf like a star.

  Once, during a summer visit home from Illinois, Amy disappeared for almost an hour. Ellen and James searched the house, the barn, the chicken coop; they called out into the fields, double-checked the wooden seal on the old well. “Where could that child have slipped to?” Mom said, coming up from checking the cold cellar, and hearing the old phrase, slipped to, Ellen suddenly knew. There in the pantry, tucked into the same narrow cupboard that had been Ellen’s secret place, was Amy, fast asleep beside a burlap bag of cat chow. “James,” Ellen hissed toward the kitchen, wanting someone else to confirm that this was a flesh-and-blood child and not a ghost, the shadow of her own childhood self preserved by a trick of light, a modern-day miracle.

  Sneaking glances at Salome, Ellen wonders what ghosts have been left behind in the house she and Mary-Margaret grew up in, the only daughters in a family made up of six brothers, a father known for his skill at farming, a mother who had once taught school. Sometimes Mary-Margaret speaks of her mother with such longing that it’s hard to believe she’s been dead since James was small. Yet Ellen has never heard Salome talk about anything more personal than the weather, the homily at last Sunday’s Mass, her sister’s fresh-curled hair.

  They arrive safely at the car and Ellen gets in, relieved. She starts to put on her seat belt but Salome shakes her head, fixing her gaze on Ellen, who realizes, shocked, that Salome’s eyes are a beautiful marbled blue, like the pictures of the world in the children’s science books. “If it is your time to die,” Salome says solemnly, “these things here won’t help you.”

  Ellen’s hand automatically releases the seat belt; this is something her mother might say. Out at the farm this afternoon, she noticed a crisp blue sticker pressed to the old Frigidaire: God Is My Pilot. Then where are you, Mom? Ellen thought to herself as she wrestled the children out of their coats, trying not to imagine the empty cockpit, the long plummet down to earth. No matter how hard she might try to believe, doubt would tear her from the sky in a fiery scream. The thought felt hollow in the pit of her stomach. How could she even think that she didn’t trust God? Perhaps this was a test of her faith. Perhaps this was the same sort of temptation the saints felt so long ago—an odd thought that quickly took root, burning with poisonous flowers.

  “Where did you get the sticker?” Ellen asked her mother, piling the coats on the radiator.

  “I won it at Bingo.” Mom kissed the children hello and they clung to her possessively until she thumped into a hard-backed kitchen chair, pulling them along into her lap, a gesture as fluid, as easy as breathing. “My snickle-britches,” she told them over their chatter, and when Ellen looked back at the sticker it suddenly seemed reasonable. Only God knew what was in store for her. Only God could make decisions based on all the facts.

  Yet lately God seemed so far removed. While the children were playing out in the barn, she had tried once more to explain to Mom about James, how badly things had been going.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she told her, flushing, because even as she was speaking, she knew she would wish she had not. “I work full-time plus take care of the kids and his parents too, but when I ask him to help me, he won’t.”

  “If you’d quit your job, you wouldn’t need to ask for help. And you’d have more time to spend with him. It’s not like you need the money to pay rent.” Mom had never approved of Ellen working after the children were born.

  “But he doesn’t want to spend time with me. The other night, I suggested we go out to dinner, just the two of us, and he said, Money doesn’t grow on trees. That’s exactly what he says to the kids when they ask for something. It’s as if he doesn’t see me anymore, Mom. It’s like I’m invisible.”

  Mom got increasingly busy polishing the flour canisters. She restacked the cups and saucers. She worked a stray toothpick from between the shelf and the wall. “Are you doing your wifely duty?” she said. It took a minute for Ellen to realize what she meant. It had been almost a year since James had been interested in wifely duties of any kind. Once, she’d slipped naked into bed beside him, nuzzled her chin against his neck. I’m too tired for this foolishness, he had said in the voice he used with the children whenever they made too much noise. It was hard to approach him after that; in fact, her body did seem foolish to her: doughy lumps for breasts, dark raisin navel—a cookie doll the children might make at school, decorate with sweet sprinkles, and crumble into their mouths.

  “He’s…not willing,” Ellen said. She was lining the cupboards with fresh paper, and her voice sounded hollow, caught deep in the wooden bins.

  “Lose some weight,�
�� Mom said gruffly. “Or gain some. Find out what he likes.”

  And Ellen had agreed, wanting so much to be close to her mother the way her older, more traditional sisters were. The advice she got from them was the same: “Disguise yourself. Don’t say what you feel.” This was the key to a happy marriage, the key to a strong faith in God.

  Driving home, she had stared out across the empty fields. Clouds formed a low, drifting ceiling above them, gray and white and darker gray; the distant farmhouses were also gray, the occasional sunflower shape of a windmill sprouting beside them. She passed a weathered barn, a herd of black-and-white Holsteins exhaling somber, smoky puffs. Frost heaves slashed dark lines across the road, some so neatly parallel that they looked like painted cattle guards, but Ellen drove across them without flinching, watching for the clumps of pines that marked the boundaries of each field, hungry for that deep dull green that seemed like a promise somehow, a wish, a prayer. Summers, working in the fields with her sisters picking stones, driving tractor, casting down each new, fine web of seed, she would squint into the distance at the next cool clump of pines where they might break to rest and drink clear jars of sweetened water. They sang as they worked, their skirts knotted high between their legs, moving from north to south so that the sun was never directly in their eyes, and the cows in the neighboring pastures moved with them, bells tolling like voices. There is no bitterness in her memories of these fields, the long hours spent inching over the land, the same life that James remembers with such distaste. His children will never put their hands into dirt. His children will never know sunburn, chilblains, the numbing repetition of the hoe.