Birdy’s eyes were closed.
“He saw you last week too,” John said. “Thursday you took fifteen. Friday you’re out, nothing’s short. Saturday, same thing. Today you’re back. Bingo! Twenty short!” He held out his hands. “But that’s not even why …”
“No!” she cried, lunging at Getso, trying to shove her hand down his pants. “That’s where …”
“What the … Jesus Christ,” Getso hollered, grabbing her wrist.
In a quick scuffle, Birdy and John had pulled her away. “Stop it! Do you hear me? Just stop it!” Birdy was trembling.
They could say what they want say what they want her name over and over repeating her name Martha Martha Martha please say what they want as she stuffed her pocketbook with the contents of her basket, the red ceramic mug with the white “M” Birdy had given her on her birthday, a Good Housekeeping magazine, a small bag of birdseed, a box of shortbread cookies imported from Scotland, and her plastic container.
“Hey! Martha!” John said as she charged grimly around the counter, head down, shoulders slack as it all fizzled away.
“Where you going? It’s a two-week notice!” He put his hand on her arm.
“I have to go,” she said, jerking back so quickly that her purse flew open and her mug fell and shattered on the floor.
She stepped into the hot dusty sunlight, then paused, certain Birdy would say something. Anything.
“This means she’s quitting! This means no benefits! You’re all witnesses,” John raged in the sigh of the closing door. “Goddamn screwball, gives me the creeps!”
“Did you see where she tried to grab him?” Mercy squealed.
“I told you she had the hots for Gets,” Barb said.
Getso was laughing.
Panting, she darted through the park, zigzagging on and off the path to avoid people. She ran across the street and into the boardinghouse, relieved to find the sunny front parlor empty. The Aid Bus had brought the ladies to the senior center. Where was Claire? She would have to tell Claire. No, she couldn’t tell Claire, couldn’t tell anyone. She’d just pack her things and go.
She ran upstairs. She threw open her closet door and yanked her clothes off the hangers. She emptied the drawers, jamming everything into two shopping bags and the bird feeders into an overnight bag. Bending over her tiny sink, she splashed cold water on her face, then patted down her heat-frizzed hair. Her face dripping wet, she put on her glasses, picked up her bags, and took a deep breath. The hair on her arms bristled and a cold itchy sweat prickled her scalp as she stepped into the dark hallway. On the top step she paused, then hurried back into the room. She smoothed the wrinkled bedspread and picked up the wire hangers from the floor. She wiped the sink dry with wadded tissues, then ran them over the bureau top and headboard. When the tissues crumbled, she used her shirttail to dust the windowsill. She moved the lamp over the brown tea ring on the white plastic porch table she had used as a nightstand. “I’ve been a good boarder,” she said under her breath as she backed out of the room. “A very good boarder. I’ve been a good boarder, a very good …”
Downstairs, in the kitchen, she pressed the telephone to her ear.
“I can’t come now,” her aunt Frances said. “Besides, I thought two …”
“Two’s too late!”
“I didn’t mean …”
“Now! I need a ride now!” She stamped her foot. “Right now!”
“Martha! Calm down! Tell me what happened. John let you go? Didn’t he give you notice? Didn’t he give you two weeks?”
“I quit.”
“Quit, why’d you quit?”
“Because I did.”
“Oh God.”
“Are you coming?” she asked.
Sighing, Claire Mayo came through the back door, her dingy apron sagging with dirty rhubarb stalks.
“Martha, I’m in the middle of something. You can’t expect me to just …”
“Forget it. I’ll just take the bus.” She hung up quickly. “That’s what I’ll do.”
“Trouble?” Claire asked. She dumped the rhubarb into the long soapstone sink.
Martha shook her head. She still hadn’t moved from the phone.
Claire ran cold water over the rhubarb. She glanced at Martha. “What’s in the bags?”
“I’m going home,” Martha said.
The old woman’s head whipped back. She turned off the water and stood by Martha, wiping her hands with her apron.
“I got fired!” Martha blurted, her face twisted in disbelief. “And I’m his best counter person. I give good service! I look right at people right in their eyes,” she said, tapping the lens in her glasses. “And I never even blink. Not once. The whole time they tell me what they want—Starched! Folded! Hangers! Pre-spot! Waterproof!—I keep looking right at them.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
She sat on the rough concrete bench at the corner of the park. She had been waiting for the bus for well over an hour. It embarrassed her to have the same people pass by and see her still here. Every few minutes, across the road, the curtain parted slightly in the parlor window. She had missed the first bus because Claire Mayo had blocked the doorway, trying to talk her into staying. When she heard the bus coming, she got so upset she pushed the old woman out of her way.
She dug into her bag now for her magazine and hunched forward, pretending to read. A young woman in tight shorts came through the park pushing a double baby stroller; the redheaded twins, a boy and a girl, banged their feet on the metal footrest. Alarmed by the noise, Martha held her finger to a line, stabbing it into the page.
A car blared its horn. “Hey, Martha! Martha! Wanna go for a ride?” boys’ voices called in a blur of arms whizzing past. She got up and hurried across the street to the pharmacy, where she hid her bags in the dusty lilac bushes by the steps. Once inside, she felt better. The bags marked her. People saw them and they knew she had been fired, knew she had no friends, never had, never would. She stood by the window, turning the card racks. From here she would be able to see the bus coming.
A pale-pink card embossed with a white rose caught her eye. I’M SORRY, read the gold script. The card was blank inside. She took it to the cashier, a fat girl with earrings of yellow feathers. She set down the paperback she had been reading and turned over the card. “Dollar forty-eight,” she said as she rang it up. Martha picked up the card and opened it. What would she write? She had already apologized for the other night. If anything, Birdy owed her an apology.
“Ma’am? Excuse me. Miss Horgan? You still want the card?”
Her head shot up. “No!” She slapped it down on the counter and hurried outside. All she could think of was Getso’s brazen face while he lied. And Birdy’s blank expression. Did Birdy really believe she would steal from her best friend? That she had been stealing all along? Maybe it wasn’t too late. Maybe she could still set things straight. She went to the phone booth at the bottom of the steps.
“Cleaners!” Mercy Reardon answered on the first ring.
Martha hung up. Birdy must be on break. She waited a few minutes before she called again.
“Cleaners!” Again, Mercy’s voice.
Just as she hung up, she heard Birdy laugh. She had one coin left.
“Cleaners!” Mercy answered irritably.
“May I speak with Birdy, please?”
“She’s not here.”
“I know she’s there. This is very important. It’s an emergency, tell her.”
“She … she stepped out.”
“But I heard her. I know she’s there.”
“She went to the bank.”
“It’s only noon. She doesn’t go till one-thirty.”
“Martha, today she went early. Okay?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Martha?”
“Will you tell her I called? If she wants, she can call me back—at my aunt’s. Well, tell her to wait a while. I’m not there yet.”
“Where you calling f
rom?”
“A phone booth.”
“Where? Which one?”
“The one by Marco’s. The drugstore.”
“Oh!” Mercy sounded relieved. There was a hollow silence as if she’d briefly covered the receiver. “Hey, look, I’ll tell her you called. And, listen, you take it easy now, Mart. Keep your chin up, kid. Okay, now?”
She dragged her bags out of the bushes and started walking north on Main Street, past the big old homes that had been converted into antique shops and real-estate agencies. When she heard the bus, she would flag it down.
Maybe Birdy had gone to the bank early. She must have. Otherwise she would have come to the phone.
Uneasily, she remembered that wire-hanger salesman Birdy had dodged all last winter, hiding in the ladies’ room when he delivered, not taking his calls. It had been a riot, the way she had enlisted them in the conspiracy. The thing Martha liked best about Birdy was the way she incorporated people into her life, the good and the bad, her happiness and her troubles. But with Getso it had obviously gotten out of hand. And for some reason, Martha was the only one to see it.
A red pickup truck slowed, then pulled to the curb, and Billy Chelsea leaned across the seat. “You heading home, Martha?”
She stared, flattered, not knowing what to say. She hadn’t seen him in months.
“Come on, I’ll give you a ride.” He waved.
Just then the bus roared past.
“I gotta go see Frances for a minute anyway,” he said as she climbed in.
“Hear you been working in town!” he said, and she nodded, licking her lips, her eyes struck by the sun through the windshield and the hot dust of the dashboard. She cleared her throat. “Yes, I have,” she finally managed.
He glanced back at her a few more times, then seemed to realize the lead would have to be his.
“I been doing some stuff for Frances,” he said as he drove. “Different things. Plumbing. Some wiring. That deck is next. The steps gotta be replaced, and some of the boards. That’s gonna be the biggest job. She wants it done before Steve Bell’s big birthday party. It’s tough now too. My little girls’ sitter quit. Most people don’t mind, though, if I bring them along. They’re pretty good. They read comics and color and stuff like that in the truck.”
She caught his glance in the mirror. “How old are they?” she asked slowly, so she wouldn’t stammer. She listened carefully, hoping for some clue what to say next.
“Five and four.” He laughed. “You gonna be up the house tomorrow morning?”
She nodded.
“Then you’ll meet ’em. I figured I’d mention it to Frances while I was dropping some stuff off,” he said, gesturing at the lumber in the back of the truck. “Think she’ll mind?” He looked at her.
Unsure of his meaning, she shrugged.
“Well, it’s that or nothing, I guess,” he called over the engine and the rush of air through the windows and the rattling lumber. “For a while anyway. Lately it’s sort of a package deal with me. Till I get a full-time sitter anyway.” He glanced at her bags. “You still working at the Cleaners?”
With the sting of tears in her eyes, she took a deep breath. “It’s very hot today, isn’t it?” she said.
“What?” He leaned toward her. “What?”
When she repeated it, he called back, “Sure is. I guess summer’s finally here after all.”
She held on to the door as the truck sprang up and down over the narrow mountain-road.
“But, then, we don’t have much choice in the matter, do we?” Bouncing on the seat, he smiled over at her. “Just take what we get.”
“I guess.” She winced. That was dumb.
He lived a couple of miles down the road from Beecham’s in a small white farmhouse. She used to see his wife walking or picking berries, with the baby sacked on her back and the older girl lagging alongside. She had been a handsome young woman, with bunned hair and a hardy smile. And then one day she died in an accident, on her way to the dentist. After that, the vision that soothed Martha to sleep at night was of herself and Billy Chelsea, wading hand in hand through a brilliant field of black-eyed Susans and Indian paintbrushes. But whenever she actually saw him on the road or in town, she always looked the other way before he could.
His sideburns were just starting to gray, and his eyes and mouth were deeply lined. His belly sagged over his jeans. “Here we go,” he said, turning into the driveway. Of the three cars parked there, the only one she recognized was Steve Bell’s low black Jaguar.
He pulled in front of the huge brick house, then jumped out and opened her door. “Let me give you a hand. Here,” he said, taking her bags.
“No! That’s all right,” she said, snatching them back. After all, he was here on business, and she didn’t want to waste his time. “First things first,” she muttered as she hurried toward the house. “Take care of business and the business’ll take care of you.” The door slammed, and she realized she hadn’t even thanked him.
She was surprised to find the cool dim tedium of Frances’s house so soothing. Last fall she had vowed to never step foot in here again. Peering through the sheer bathroom curtain, she could see four people sitting on the patio. Behind them the swimming pool shimmered. With his hand shading his eyes, Billy Chelsea stood talking to Frances, who sat in the pale-blue shade of the table umbrella, her long legs crossed, a thin white sandal dangling from her foot. Across from her sat two women with their backs to the house. Also facing the women was Steve Bell, in white bathing trunks and a bright-pink shirt. He seemed to be looking right at the window.
She hurried out of the bathroom. To get up to the garage apartment where she and her father had always lived, she would have to walk past them, and right now she didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially Frances’s gushy friends.
“Martha,” a woman called softly from the end of the hallway. A tall slender figure came toward her. “I’ve been hearing such good things about you,” she said, lightly touching Martha’s arm.
Martha smiled. She liked Julia Prine, who was the only one of Frances’s friends who ever hung in long enough for Martha to get past her self-conscious miseries.
“Home for a visit? You’ve been on your own for quite a while now,” Julia said, walking with her. “I think that’s wonderful.”
“Well, not … n-n-now,” she stammered, flustered to see Frances come into the kitchen. Their last time together in this room had been the day of her father’s funeral. In her rage, Martha had dumped all of the drawers onto the floor. She remembered clattering through silverware and ladles and knives as she had stormed out.
Frances turned from the sink, where she was filling glasses with ice cubes. Her face was already deeply tanned, her wide, full mouth coated a startling pink. People were always amazed to find out she was fifteen years older than Martha.
“She’s through with that place, thank God,” Frances said to the tiny, bright-eyed brunette who sat down at the table and lit a cigarette. They called her Betty. Martha had never met her before.
“They’re a weird bunch in there,” Frances said, as she swept toward Martha in a jangle of bracelets and gold chains and lifted her cheek to be kissed.
“Especially that John Kolditis.” Betty shuddered. “One look at him and I swear to God I almost quit. I mean, really! How did he EVER get in?”
“Maizie,” Frances explained, naming John’s wife. “Old, old money,” she said with an airy wave. They were all members of the Atkinson Country Club.
Arms folded, Martha waited awkwardly to leave. She felt bruised inside.
“God. It’s scary, isn’t it?” Betty grimaced.
“Betty Mestowsky, you are such a snot!” Julia Prine said, laughing.
“It’s the nouveau riche in me,” Betty sighed. “I can’t help it. New money, new furniture. It makes someone like me very insecure and very nasty.”
Julia laughed, and Frances smiled uneasily.
“I mean, the only antiques I own are
the ones I’ve bought,” Betty whispered. “Not like Frahnces here. Tell me, Mahtha, are you old money or new, dear?”
“Mustard!” Frances said. She wet her fingertip and dug furiously at a spot on Martha’s sleeve. “How do you do that? How do you get mustard on your shoulder? Explain that to me. I’ll bet you were the Cleaners’ best customer.” Frances glanced over at the women. “What about the Ramshead, then?” She checked her watch. “I’ll make reservations for nine.” Suddenly she turned back, her mouth open. “Your hair! My God—it’s been chopped.…” She reached toward Martha’s head.
“Don’t.” She stared at her aunt. “Don’t touch me again.”
The garage apartment was hot and airlessly stale. Except for the dust, it felt as if she had never been gone. She moved from room to room now, pleased to find her father’s clothes still in his closet and dresser. The narrow bathroom closet was filled with his shaving gear and his medicine bottles. She had never realized how cramped each room was, and she had lived here all her life.
When Martha was a year and a half old, her mother died. Unable to be Horace Beecham’s caretaker and also raise a toddler, Floyd Horgan sent for his pretty teenage sister, Frances. For the next few years, the three of them shared these small dark rooms, until Horace Beecham fell in love with Frances and, flaunting all propriety, moved her into his big brick home. They were married when she was twenty-one and he was sixty-one. Five years later, Horace died, leaving Frances a wealthy young widow. To the end of his days, unveering in his rigid veneration of duty, Floyd Horgan insisted on staying here in the caretaker’s apartment. It was the taciturn man’s hard-earned station, and to have sought more would have been a violation of Horace Beecham’s trust. This sense of uneasy tenancy had continued to dog brother and sister all the years since Beecham’s death. They were the dirt-poor Horgans, who through some sleight of Fate’s hand had been transported from the dark hard Flatts to this spectacular mountainside. They didn’t have to tell Martha how her peculiar ways tolled their past. She had always felt it.
She went into her bedroom. Most of her clothes were Frances’s hand-me-downs, which she seldom wore. Her favorite things were big and baggy and sexless. Dressing quickly now, she changed into an old shirt of her father’s and a pair of his work pants she had cut at the knees.
A Dangerous Woman Page 5