One evening Mary Ann rings their doorbell in tears. “Ivy’s gone, have you seen her?” Soon Mary Ann’s whole family, including her older brother and sister, are out with flashlights, and all the neighborhood kids, too, including Samantha with Steve, calling, “Here, Ivy!” “Treat, Ivy!”
Ivy is spotted the next day, high on a power line. Mary Ann, crying, shouts up to Ivy that she’ll give her a whole peanut butter sandwich with jelly, a package of Oreos, fries from McDonalds. Ivy stares down. A bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Red Vines. Fritos. Someone rushes into Mary Ann’s house to get the treats, and someone else runs home to call the fire department. Mary Ann stays in place pleading with her pet. Before there is time for Oreos or sirens, Ivy tilts her head at them, as if she has a question they’re not answering, then flashes away into the tips of the firs in a couple of springing vaults, and no one will ever see her again.
A CENTURY OF PROGRESS
Portland, 1970
Samantha comes from the suburbs to sleep over at Vera’s place once a year. It happens like an eclipse, an event that temporarily alters the balance between light and shadow, the texture and grain of the world. The visits started with Stevie, Vera’s offer to help when Carl and Kay were moving house. Then she’d take him for a day or two whenever Kay was especially frazzled with the new baby. When he outgrew coming, and Samantha was old enough, it was her niece’s turn. The children have always seemed eager to come. Favorite Auntie, her brother Carl dubbed her, and she tries not to disappoint.
The morning comes, and very early, Carl dropping his daughter on the way to work, but Vera is up, she has her coffee percolating and her old, sticking window cracked to hear the city birds, and the snap shade raised to see the sky outside, still gray with dawn.
Carl refuses coffee, has his thermos in the car, left it double-parked, must beat the worst of the traffic to Swan Island and the shipyards. When the door closes after him and it’s just the two of them, Vera experiences a seismic shift in the day, now a day tilted toward taking care of another, when she’s lived all these years since Ernie’s death as a person who looks after only herself.
The bag is placed beside the sofa, where Samantha will sleep in the hideaway bed. Carl is several blocks away by now, his new Volkswagen—a car Vera can’t seem to fit into properly—darting in and out of the morning rush hour, heading toward the great skeletons of ships he will solder and bolt.
“Have you eaten, dear?” She has to relearn mothering each time, but feeding, she knows, is basic. Vera brings out the white bread and the sugary cereal bought for this visit, knows better than to suggest filia. The girl got a whiff of its sharp sourness a long time ago and has not considered it since. Vera’s filia comes from a very old starter; every time she makes a new batch she removes a small amount to stay warm in the rear corner of her cupboard. The starter might actually go back to the one her mother brought over from Finland. Is that possible? Probably not. She remembers the voyage, or has made up or been told what she doesn’t remember, but cannot place the jar of starter in the scene, though of course her mother would have packed it in a trunk, swaddled from breakage until it arrived in the new world.
Anyway, it’s an old starter, and Vera likes to think it came directly from Lehtimäki, an unbroken line of nourishment that began with milk cultured from a cow chewing grass growing in that faraway loamy soil, and why not, it could be true. A starter doesn’t die if you’re careful, if you keep it warm enough. Like a child, it becomes hardy.
Samantha chooses toast, and Vera did buy a small jar of Welch’s grape jelly especially for her. For herself, Vera puts a cinnamon husk by the side of her coffee cup, and spoons out a dish of filia, to drizzle with honey and top with a few berries. The mistake was in letting the child smell it before she tasted it—a smell full of death and life rolled up together.
Vera washes up their few dishes and Samantha dries. She pours herself more coffee. They have chatted about her niece’s family news: Her big brother, Steve—still Stevie, in Vera’s mind—off to camp this week, this time as a junior counselor; and the fact that her mother will now allow her to take her bike across 182nd Avenue this summer if she walks it in the crosswalk.
“I’m trying to picture where,” Vera says. The trouble, she thinks, with numbers instead of names. The outskirts where the family lives consist of miles and miles of numbered streets.
“It’s the big busy road that crosses with Division and runs by the high school. You know, Rockwood Plaza, where there’s Kienows and Rexall and Grants? It’s not that busy. It was stupid that I couldn’t go alone before now.
“It’s funny how almost all my friends live across 182nd,” Samantha continues. Vera detects a whiff of complaint accompanying this information. As her niece continues talking about the houses of her friends, she intuits that they are of a different standard than the one Samantha and her family live in—of a bigger, more luxurious type, with rooms that have names denoting their special functions: sewing room, rumpus room, den. Carl and Kay own a ranch on a street of ranches. To put their mark on the property they planted their own boxwood hedge and pair of spruces on either side of the picture window. Vera remembers being shown these improvements and more: the patio her brother poured, the redwood picnic table they acquired to place on it along with a matched set of webbed folding chairs, the shed he built to house the mower and shovels. It’s twice as big as their Wygant Street house was, and there is nothing in the world wrong with it, if you like living that far out, but Vera understands that they are on the wrong side of 182nd, and that Samantha has recently discovered this. Their house has a kitchen, a dining room, a living room, a bathroom, and three bedrooms. Not one room requiring a special name.
Vera likes the image of Samantha walking her Schwinn across the busy street, mixing in with rumpus rooms and their self-satisfied inhabitants. Vera was just sixteen when she went door-to-door in Hi Bug—the fancy part of Red Lodge—volunteering with her wartime conservation pledge cards. She never once went there as a hired girl, always knocked at the front entrance. At all times she wore her white gloves and fox stole, bought on employee discount from the Grove, her first job.
“They sound like lovely friends,” Vera says, removing her dishwashing gloves and draping them over the drainer. “Just be on the lookout, won’t you, when you cross.”
***
They have time to kill before the stores open. They sit on the couch together, Vera with the newspaper her brother brought upstairs for her, Samantha curled up with her book. The paper is full of ugliness, as usual. Vera has never seen a year of such bad news. More and more student strikes since last month’s shootings in Ohio. Terrible thing—soldiers shooting at young people just marching. But Vera’s seen it all before: seen strikes, seen soldiers shooting at the marchers.
Samantha makes a sudden sound of impatience, startling Vera out of her reading. She was just about to turn to the lighter pages, garden hints and fashion sightings. Her niece plucks her glasses from her face, the new wire-rimmed frames that were so argued over with her mother for months, so begged for, and thrusts them away from her. They teeter on the edge of the coffee table where she precariously placed them, then drop soundlessly to the carpet. This is what Kay had been afraid of: rough treatment. The old plastic frames were so much sturdier. Vera saw Kay’s point, and yet she certainly sympathized with Samantha’s wish to choose her own frames, keep up with fashion. But she stayed neutral at the Sunday dinner when she was polled; she has learned better than to get in the middle of controversies between Kay and her daughter, or Kay and anyone, for that matter. Her sister-in-law retreats so easily and stubbornly into hurt feelings, silent grievances.
“Is there something the matter with them, dear?” Vera asks.
Samantha is rubbing her face in exasperation, muttering something about the glasses. The basic text is that she hates them and that they are stupid. The girl has barely arrived and is already unhappy, the reason for it not completely clear. But here
she is, curled on the sofa, disconsolate, her face hidden. She was rousted out of bed very early; that might have something to do with it. But the glasses are somehow the culprit. Or maybe it’s just being on the verge of eleven. Not so much a child, yet not the next thing, either.
Vera gives her a pat on the arm that’s meant to be comforting. Seeing her hand next to her niece’s young skin reminds Vera that she’s old. She knows she is, but the contrast is quite shocking. She was the second-oldest girl in their brood, and Carl is a decade younger than she. He started on children when he was nearly fifty, almost no business doing so then. Better late than never, she supposes. Nevertheless, this all makes her the age of a grandmother to Samantha, not an aunt. Her veins stand up on the back of her hands like a system of plumbing; her tapered nails underneath the clear lacquer have a yellow cast; her skin is spotted. It is a crone’s claw and she withdraws it from the plump young arm because it looks so defiling there.
Vera has become bored with her niece’s moodiness, thinks the problem with children now is how the fits are indulged, examined, made to seem important. Her mother and father certainly had nothing to do with such behavior. You’d be out in the snow before you knew what was what, a shovel in your hand to clear the path, even if it didn’t need clearing. An hour of that would clear up a snit.
After a while she announces that it’s time for a walk, raising the window higher to check the summer temperature. Portland washes itself regularly in sweet, mild rain, the air scrubbed perpetually by the river and pines. Vera’s lived in several places and could recognize them all by the air alone, eyes shut. There was the alpine tang of their little outpost of Scotch Coulee, Montana—mineral with cold in winter, pungent with sage and juniper in the warmer months. The hot breath of the coal mine there, where sometimes she let a boy walk her down the slope after a dance, just for a little kiss. The acrid smell of Detroit. The grassy tang of Indianapolis. She can’t recall the scent of Lehtimäki, but thinks if she breathed it again she would know it. Actually, she does know: birch sap, sweet and minty, and charcoal. And in winter the zero smell of snow, a kind of cold that scours out all else.
This morning they are going first to Meier & Frank, and Samantha is watching the sidewalk, with its embedded particles of glitter. She knows that Vera doesn’t have the answer about those particles; they have wondered about them together before. Vera guessed mica, or glass, but it’s almost better not knowing. The sidewalks take on a different sheen depending on the light. There are only certain blocks on Broadway that have them.
They used to hold hands, Samantha’s little sticky one in Vera’s gloved hand, but not, of course, for a few years now. With her niece recently shot up to almost Vera’s height, there is a definite shift in the balance of things. Vera feels that if she stumbles, or is taken by the wave of dizziness that comes upon her now and then, she would reach for Samantha’s arm to steady herself. Just last year, that wouldn’t have been the case. Now there is this tall person, who is definitely slowing her steps on Vera’s behalf, on whom she could lean.
Her niece stops in front of an optician’s window to stare at the display of quarter-sized contact lenses. Vera is confused until she realizes they are that large for display purposes only. They come in oddly vivid colors—lavender, imagine—and are disconcertingly plastic.
“You don’t mean you want those in your eyes?”
Samantha nods vigorously.
“I’m getting them when I’m thirteen.”
This is still some time away, so Vera doesn’t ask whether this is a decision Samantha has privately taken on her own, or one she has already wheedled her mother into accepting. She decides it’s safer not to investigate.
The walk to the center of downtown is ever so slightly downhill and adds to the optimistic feeling one has when going there. Vera feels a certain strengthening in her person when she approaches a department store, any department store, the way a doctor must feel when stepping inside a hospital. She knows the workings. Her retail career was in other cities, but when she first moved to Portland, widowed, she worked in Meier & Frank part-time to keep herself occupied. If she wanted, she could step in and learn the inventory procedures in an hour; could carry on a brisk conversation with the buyers; train the floor help, write an advertisement, dress a window. She doesn’t want to do any of these things now, but feels, nonetheless, a more important person when setting foot on the marble floors, the ceiling above high enough to permit a soaring feeling, an elixir of scents rushing to meet her from the cosmetics counters, the voices low and courteous and elegant.
She wonders suddenly if the girl is too old for the toy department. It is their long-standing tradition, a toy and an outfit that they will pick out over the course of a morning’s shopping. As they step on the escalator, she thinks perhaps that for the first time they should proceed simply to the clothing section.
But Samantha turns left, to toys. It shouldn’t matter to Vera, but she is relieved. Some things are still the same. Next year, in all probability, they won’t be. Maybe the girl will even decide it’s time to stop coming to visit. It’s a thought she should tuck away, be ready for, just in case.
Vera had expected the toy department to be tedious, but it feels suddenly precious. She will find a chair to sit in and watch her niece move up and down the aisles, surveying merchandise on every shelf, even the items meant for boys, and the ones for younger children. Samantha asks politely, as she is trained to ask at home, about limits. Vera doesn’t think there is anything here she can’t afford, certainly not as Favorite Auntie, and the pleasure of dismissing the question as unimportant, as having no particular answer, is worth whatever risk might be attached to it.
Samantha pulls a stuffed dog—she chooses the middle-sized, not the enormous one—and a Barbie doll off the shelf and deposits them in Vera’s lap while she continues her survey. These are two of the finalists. Vera could buy her both, but while she enjoys setting no limit on price, she thinks it would be a mistake to bestow more than one thing. Years from now, when Samantha is remembering her—for this is what it is all for, isn’t it? To live on in the mind of her niece, carried forward into a future she won’t live to see and has no child of her own to see for her?—when this time is being remembered, it will be the doll or the stuffed dog that will be the image of it. If it were to be the two together, Vera senses some subtle risk of blurring, or dilution. That is the trouble with everyone these days having enough and more than enough. Nothing about more than enough is worth remembering.
What it means to have one thing: your first fine pocketbook, say, maroon alligator in a loaf shape with a gleaming brass clasp that snaps shut with authority. An equilibrium to it that feels both weightless in the crook of your arm and also as if it has the power to ground you. This was her first purchase in Detroit, as a bride, freshly removed from Red Lodge. The ceremony of watching it wrapped in tissue, slipped into a stiff bag emblazoned with the Klines name. Vera had wrapped countless objects in the same kind of tissue at the Grove back in Red Lodge, and followed the salesgirl’s fingers with critical attention as they centered, folded, tucked. Yes, that was the way.
One fine handbag, not a dozen cheap ones. And not even, when Ernie’s trucking business had begun to flourish, not even five fine handbags. One at a time, or two—one for evening, one for day. When the corners finally roughened, when the satin lining frayed, the clasp developed a gap, you considered carefully whether it should be mended, refurbished, or pressed into service for another day. If the answer was no, you found someone younger, poorer, maybe the girl who took out your washing or the one who greeted you in the bakery where you bought your pulla. Then you presented the used handbag, still perfectly serviceable, much more than the bakery girl or the laundry girl could afford, distinguished enough to go well with any dress or suit, even a working girl’s poplin or serge. You presented it in saved tissue, folded nicely, in a saved store bag, so they could have a way to carry it home, their own moment of unwr
apping.
This was the way to give a gift, and anything could be a gift if it suited, if it was carefully matched to the recipient. It didn’t have to be new, and if it was new, it didn’t have to be expensive. But it had to be allowed its due. And the way, now, to do that, is to have the girl choose just one item, and not two.
Vera grows drowsy. The toy department is quiet on a summer weekday morning. Her upholstered chair is comfortable. The stuffed dog occupies one side of her lap; the Barbie in the box, the other. Samantha winds up and down the aisles methodically. She brings over some kind of kit in a box with a photograph of a crocheted purse on the cover.
“Maybe this,” Samantha says.
Vera studies the picture of the small square pocket on a strap, a simple button-and-loop closure. “We don’t need the kit, Samantha. I can make you one of these in an afternoon. I’ll teach you.”
“Really? You can just look at the picture and do it?”
Vera nods. “This is very easy. You can make them for your friends.”
Samantha returns the box to the shelf and glides by the baby dolls without a glance. Just last year she had picked one with jewel-blue eyes that blinked shut and opened wide again. Her niece had had a long run with baby dolls, even going so far as to buy them real bibs and rattles from the drugstore. She always liked everything to be authentic, the better to pretend.
Vera had never played with dolls. As one of the older children in a brood of nine, ten if you counted the one born blue, she’d had plenty of babies to help mind, all too real. Diapering, rocking, soothing, spooning, bandaging—she’d had it all to do as a girl, and as a bride wanted none of it. Ernie said wasn’t he the luckiest bastard on earth to have a gal who wanted to have a little fun first in the big city—this was Detroit—before they started all that family stuff. The thing was, even when they threw the precautions away, nothing happened. She went on working at Kresge’s, they went on dancing at the Boblo, going to Belle Island, taking in baseball, motoring to Niagara or on visits home to Montana, then Oregon when her family moved. They went on with their card games with friends and their drinking, first the bootleg Ernie trucked in, and then, when it was legal again, the stuff they bought from the corner package store. They lived their lives, Vera turning twenty-five, then thirty, the years ticking by one after another in suddenly accelerated fashion because she had started paying attention. And no babies, ever. And none for her sister, Celia, and none for her brother Walter, and none for Hank, though he didn’t really count insofar as he had never married.
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