Never Tell a Lie

by Hallie Ephron

  “The lady wants to play doctor? I can do that, too.” David sat beside her, aimed the light at the bottom of her foot. “Here, Stretch. Make yourself useful.” He handed her the flashlight and pulled the tweezers from his pocket.

  She aimed the beam.

  “Aha! I see. A little this way.” He gestured with his chin. Then he hunched over her. “Hold still.” With a swift, sure motion, he touched the tweezers to the tender spot, closed down, and gave a firm yank.

  Ivy felt the pinch and a stab of pain. She strained to see the bottom of her foot. In the spotlight was a bright red carbuncle of blood. Ivy touched it with the hem of her robe, and the blood wicked into the terry cloth. She squeezed out some more blood and then pressed the fabric against the spot to stanch the bleeding.

  “And here,” David said, holding up the tweezers, “we have the culprit.”

  The half-inch-long sliver of glass glowed lime green in the flashlight’s beam.

  3

  The Sunday paper isn’t even here yet,” David grumbled the next morning as he thumped and dragged the canister vac up to the third floor, the tube draped around his neck like a languid boa constrictor. He was still in his pajamas. “Sheesh, and the sun’s not even over the yardarm, whatever the hell that is. Have I mentioned that I think you’ve gone more than a little nutty?”

  “That’s what Jody says.” Ivy followed him into the attic, trying to keep the weight off the sore ball of her foot. “And I’m sure that in a few weeks vacuuming will be the last thing I’ll feel compelled to do.”

  “But for now you’ve decided to suck it up”—David wasn’t too sleepy to crack a truly dreadful pun—“and you’d advise me to do the same.”

  David set the vacuum cleaner at the top of the stairs and gave her a weary salute. His face was still creased from sleep, and a herd of cowlicks stood at attention on the crown of his head.

  “Go back to bed, you handsome thing, you,” she told him.

  She plugged the cord into an outlet on the landing, then pulled the machine into the unfinished half of the attic and turned on the light. There was a rough floor and, overhead, bare roof timbers. Pink insulation was tacked between the studs in the walls and the ceiling joists.

  Two days ago the space had been filled with what had once been other people’s possessions. Now only a box of books remained.

  She kicked the switch, and the machine roared to life. There was something satisfying about how cobwebs shot onto the mouth of the vacuum, something Zen-like about how grit crackled on its way to oblivion. The occasional sharp tink and the ache in her foot reminded her of the piece of broken glass that had gotten stuck in her. She wondered what had broken as she worked around the edges of the room and then crisscrossed the middle.

  Ivy turned off the machine, anchored her hands on her hips, and massaged her lower back with her thumbs. Then she dragged the vac into the finished half of the attic. She knew from early photos that the room had once had double-hung windows. Now the openings were covered over inside with sheets of wallboard, a clumsy repair, and shingled over outside. Maybe the previous owners had wanted to be sure that the young man who’d been cared for up there didn’t throw himself out a window. One day, if Ivy and David ever had cash to burn, they’d have the windows restored.

  Ivy kicked the machine on again. Despite the boarded-up windows, light streamed in through the arched window set high in the eaves. As she worked, she noticed the dings and dents in the linoleum floor. Like skid marks on a highway, they testified to a past. Six deep gouges formed a rectangle against one wall—probably from a bed. Four circular indentations in the room’s center. From a heavy table of some kind? She envisioned a mahogany pool table, green fringe hanging from the edges, in pride of place in the center of the room—though she couldn’t imagine how anyone could have gotten it up the stairs.

  When she was done, she took a deep inhale and blew out. Cleansing breath. That’s what Sarah, their childbirth instructor, said to do after she and David had hut-hut-hutted their way through breathing exercises for transition, the dreaded period of intense contractions between active labor and pushing.

  Everyone’s labor is different—that was the popular wisdom. What would hers be like, she wondered. Long or short? Would there be sharp pains, as she’d suffered during her miscarriages? Or merely “discomfort,” the benign term Sarah favored. Would any of the exercises they’d practiced help? Ivy had no problem asking for pain medication, but she’d rather manage without if it meant that the baby would come through even a little bit healthier.

  How had it been for her mother—

  Ivy stopped the thought in its tracks. It would be a sure sign of dementia to think that her mother would be anything but trouble if she were still alive.

  Ivy had been ten years old when her mother started going downhill. That was when they found out that Ivy’s father had pancreatic cancer—a diagnosis that made people avert their eyes. Something like 96 percent of those who got it died within five years. Her father had succumbed in six months.

  Ivy realized now, and even a little back then, that getting drunk was how her mother numbed herself. But what had started as a coping mechanism turned into a way of life, and her mother didn’t stop drinking for more than a week or two until, a decade later, she ran her car off the road and into a tree. Ivy had been twenty-one when the call came, fall semester in her junior year at UMass.

  Years before that, she and her mother had moved in with Grandma Fay. “Just temporary,” her mother had assured her. But by then Ivy had stopped believing the fantasy that they’d ever move back into the charming Victorian house she remembered from her childhood, or the small ranch-style home they’d moved into after her father died, or the condo they’d lived in after that, or even the one-bedroom rental on the top floor of a triple-decker that they’d been evicted from by a landlord who’d expected to be paid.

  Ivy had stood in the ICU with Grandma and watched her mother fade. She could still smell the sweet antiseptic, hear the hums and hisses, the beeps and clanks of all that equipment designed to keep alive people who were trying to die.

  “Admit that you are powerless over the alcoholic”—Ivy had whispered her own version of Al-Anon Step One. Then her corollary: “Just because she’s your mother doesn’t mean you’re going to become her.”

  For days and on into weeks, they waited for her mother’s labored breathing to stop. It had been like waiting for zeros to queue up on an odometer. Ivy had been afraid to look away.

  And then, just like that, it was over. Her mother was dead. No more crazy middle-of-the-night phone calls. No more ruined holidays followed by tearful apologies that Ivy knew were heartfelt and accompanied by promises that, time after time, Ivy let herself believe.

  The baby shifted, pressing what must have been a foot into Ivy’s ribs and bringing her back to the present. She hoped that this little girl she carried would never feel the emptiness toward her that Ivy felt toward her own mother. Because by the time her mother died, that’s all she felt. Well-meaning friends had assured her that one day she’d grieve, but she never had.

  Ivy could see Grandma Fay shaking her bony finger. Focus on what you can control, let go of what you can’t. That had to be what this cleaning frenzy was all about. Because normally Ivy was a distracted housekeeper at best, impervious to clutter and content to let piles of dishes overflow the sink. Yes, indeed—she poked the vacuum nozzle under the bureau—when the spirit moved her, she could vanquish dust balls with the best of them. A regular Martha Stewart.

  When she was done, she gazed about the room. Short of hosing down the place—and then David would have been justified in calling in the white-coated men—she’d done what she could.

  She sneezed, and a second later the baby kicked. Bada-boom, bada-bing. Sometimes it felt as if she were playing straight man in a comedy duo.

  Later, maybe that afternoon, she’d tackle the basement.

  Then what? Ivy closed her eyes to stave off a wave of pan
ic. Her maternity leave officially started that day. Symbolic of the disconnect, when she got home Friday she hadn’t even bothered to bring her laptop in from the car. Her PalmPilot said it all—on her normally long to-do list were only doctor appointments, a baby shower at Rose Gardens on Tuesday afternoon, and a lunch date with Jody the following week. Period.

  Not that she was going to miss getting up every morning at six and fighting her way into Cambridge. Not that her colleagues weren’t perfectly capable of writing updates for the Web site and issuing press releases without her for the next eight weeks at Mordant Technologies, one of the few dot-com survivors.

  She sneezed again, wiped her hands on her jeans, and headed down to the master bedroom. She pushed the door open. Warm air oozed out, and she inhaled David’s musky presence. The top of his head was barely visible under the quilt.

  Give the poor guy a break—once the baby was born, it would be a rare morning that either of them would be sleeping in.

  She left the door ajar and went downstairs. At the base of the stairs, a foot-high bronze statue of a woman was mounted on the elaborately carved newel post. David’s cap with its sweat stains and Rose Gardens logo hung from the statue’s upraised arm. Ivy ran her finger through a dust-filled groove in the figure’s flowing gown. She’d been meaning to remove Bessie, as David called the figure, from her perch and rinse her down. Maybe later.

  She continued into the kitchen and chugalugged milk straight from the carton. Amazing how the human body craved what it needed. She grabbed a handful of salted nuts. What essential vitamin or mineral in cashews made them this year’s chocolate, while her favorite dark, dark chocolate bars made her gag?

  The green and white placard that Theo had dropped off was propped against a lower kitchen cabinet. SPYRIDIS FOR STATE SENATE, it blared. In the upper corner was a head shot of Theo, reeking gravitas and somber determination. Theo, trying not to look like the supreme egotist that he was. Theo, drained of his individuality and stripped of his best and worst traits. He’d even cut off his long ponytail in preparation for the senate run.

  “Where did you find that impostor to pose for your picture?” Ivy had asked him.

  “Didn’t you know? I have an evil twin,” Theo had said with a wink and a grin.

  Ivy picked up the campaign placard and carried it to the front door. She stepped out onto the front porch. The sky was cloudless, and the air had the kind of crystalline clarity that only fall brought to New England.

  She planted the sign in the grass, shaded her eyes, and looked back at their home. Eyesore indeed. When the real estate agent first showed them the house, the exterior hadn’t been touched by anything but weather for so long that it had looked sandblasted. Fresh paint—three layers of it—had done wonders. Chelsea Mauve around the windows; Corn Silk for a band of fish-scale shingles between the first and second floors; Smoke Green for the latticework under the porch and in the roof peak over the magnificent arched, multipaned window that looked out on the world like a beneficent eye.

  The interior had been something else entirely. As the newspaper ad had promised, the condition was “pristine.” That was because decades earlier, like some light-averse mole, the former owner, Mr. Vlaskovic, had retreated to the kitchen. There he’d set up a cot and a wood-burning stove and made do with a single lightbulb. He shut off the water and electricity to the rest of the house. The annual electrical bill for the enormous house had come to a whopping $96.31 the year before the house went on the market. The water bill was even less.

  Three years ago Ivy and David had moved in with no clue what it would take to heat the place. They couldn’t even flush the upstairs toilets or bleed the cast-iron radiators before signing the Purchase and Sale. Making the down payment that wiped out their savings had been a huge leap of faith.

  Ivy picked up the newspaper from the lawn and returned to the porch. She dragged the rocker to a sunny spot and lowered herself into it. She closed her eyes and leaned back. The insides of her eyelids glowed red, and her muscles relaxed and expanded in the sun’s warmth.

  Though they lived in a busy suburb, on a Sunday morning the occasional whoosh of a car going by couldn’t compete with the cacophony of birds. There was the whistled call and response of a pair of cardinals. The raucous cawing of crows. Chickadees chattered from a neighboring yard, and from far away came the bell-like chime of a blue jay.

  Ivy opened her eyes. Insects hovered about the shimmering white flowers of the rose of Sharon bushes that David had planted in front of the porch. He’d dug out overgrown yews and replaced them with these, shrubs he’d propagated from cuttings he’d taken years earlier from specimens he’d been stunned to find growing wild along a streambed in New Hampshire.

  Across the street a woman pushed a double stroller with toddlers, like a pair of Pillsbury Doughboys, bundled up in it. Ivy recognized her from the yard sale. The woman waved, and Ivy waved back. She really should get up, introduce herself, and chat. Other than elderly Mrs. Bindel who lived next door, Ivy barely knew any of her neighbors.

  So why was she opening the newspaper and hiding behind it?

  Once Sprout was born and named and Ivy was out there pushing her own stroller, she rationalized, there’d be plenty of time to get to know the local stay-at-home moms. For now her center of gravity lingered in the working world with friends who were busy at their desks the whole week, friends whom she’d begged not to call with questions about whether she’d had the baby yet. “Yet,” she’d instructed one and all, was not a word to be uttered in her presence. She and David would e-mail just as soon as the newest Rose had made her entrance into the world.

  Ivy had just started reading the paper when she heard screech-scritch, screech-scritch. Then a pause. The sound came again, another pause.

  Next door, Mrs. Bindel backed into view. She was hunched over and, in spurts of effort, tugging a wicker trunk down her driveway. Poking along at her heels was Phoebe, a dog of indeterminate breed with a fat sausage body, skinny legs, and the black jowls of a bull mastiff. The dog’s snout was studded with white whiskers, and her fur was brown and threadbare in places, like a well-loved plush toy.

  Ivy put down the paper. “Good morning,” she called out. “Need help with that?”

  Not waiting for an answer, she got up. The dog listed to one side and did her snort-grunt routine at Ivy as she walked across the lawn and up her neighbor’s driveway. Phoebe was lame, nearsighted, and usually even-tempered, but those jaws were designed to crunch bones. Ivy would have to watch out when her daughter, God willing, got to the ear-pulling stage.

  “Hello, you little monster.” Ivy leaned forward and held out a tentative hand, ready to whip it back if Phoebe snapped instead of slobbered. “Remember me?”

  Phoebe sniffed at Ivy’s hand and wagged her stumpy tail. The dog’s one redeeming virtue was that she didn’t sniff Ivy’s crotch. Maybe, after a certain age, dogs no longer needed to scratch that particular itch.

  “You…inspired…me,” Mrs. Bindel said between efforts, her platinum bouffant slightly askew.

  Phoebe tacked sideways, supervising, as Ivy pushed the basket from behind and Mrs. Bindel tugged from the front. They wrestled the trunk out to the street, leaving white scuff marks on the asphalt driveway.

  Mrs. Bindel held her hand to her chest. “Don’t…know…why,” she huffed, pink from exertion, “I’ve been holding on to…these old things.” She pulled a tissue from the sleeve of her sweater. “Where’s a man when you need him?”

  “Sleeping,” Ivy said. “But I’m sure he’ll be glad to come over later and help if you’ve got more stuff to drag out.”

  “No. Thanks.” Mrs. Bindel took off her glasses and cleaned them with the tissue. She dabbed at her forehead. “Phew! This is the last of it.”

  Phoebe sniffed at the cardboard boxes already lined up in a tidy row on the strip of lawn between the sidewalk and the street in front of Mrs. Bindel’s house. One box had the handle of a frying pan sticking out of it; another
overflowed with lengths of pipe and white porcelain plumbing fixtures. A third was filled with a lifetime supply of neatly nested plastic deli containers.

  None of it was nearly as intriguing as the wicker trunk, its back wall slanted as if it had been designed to fit into a ship’s hold. A pair of metal hinges along one edge fastened the trunk lid to the base; the opposite edge had a padlocked metal hasp.

  Ivy bent closer to read a tattered, yellowed tag, a shipping label handwritten in Cyrillic characters and tied to the hasp.

  “Looks pretty old,” she said.

  “It was old already when Paul’s father asked us to store it in our garage for him, and that was years and years ago.”

  Paul? It took a moment for Ivy to realize that Mrs. Bindel was referring to Paul Vlaskovic, the previous owner of Ivy and David’s house.

  That seemed odd. Their huge Victorian had much more storage space than Mrs. Bindel’s trim ranch house with its replacement windows and pale blue vinyl siding, which she hosed down every spring and fall.

  “Mr. Vlaskovic didn’t want this back when he moved?” Ivy asked.

  “I never asked. Too late now.” Untroubled, Mrs. Bindel picked up a little sign made from a shirt cardboard and a stick and planted it in the grass up against the wicker basket. The sign read FREE HELP YOURSELF. “This trunk must have come over from the old country with Paul’s father, back in the twenties.”

  Ivy’s mother’s family had come over from Russia in the early part of the century, too. Ivy had recorded her grandmother’s voice telling of the difficult crossing, of their five trunks, including one filled with zwieback because Ivy’s great-grandmother knew they’d find nothing kosher to eat on that boat. They’d arrived with only the clothes on their backs, because by the time they reached Ellis Island, Ivy’s great-grandmother had had to sell the trunks and everything in them in exchange for water. Another week and they’d have died of thirst, like some of the others.