Vera wondered, in recent years when people started talking about poisons in the water and soil, about DDT, if it was something in the Scotch Coulee dirt where they’d had their cottage near the mines, between Bearcreek and Red Lodge. If the slack piles that drifted in the breeze had somehow sifted into her cells, or nestled in her womb, the way the cinders settled in the corners of all the dwelling places of her childhood. It was true that some of her other brothers and sisters had had children, her younger brother Carl having Samantha at the age of fifty-four—who was still, if you could believe it, trailing her fingers down the rows of stuffed animals.
But the fact of Walter, herself, and Celia childless, all of them teenagers during the same period, all of them crossing Washoe Hill near the mine to go to high school, then Walter dropping out to work full-time underground. She had fully expected, after having a carefree spell with her husband, after working and earning and knowing she could do that, to have a child. She wanted one. But the child never came and Vera’s mind now went back to the slack, the soot, the blackness that must have slipped in through their very pores.
Her niece has completed her inventory and returns to her side, silently stroking first the dog’s fur, then critically examining Barbie’s long straight hair, her flowered bell-bottom pants and sleeveless top.
The dog, the Barbie: One she will fuss over, feed, protect; the other she will—what? Be? Imagine herself as that rigid and perfectly smooth body? The child has a Barbie at home from a few Christmases ago, with a platinum bubble hairdo and several sheath dresses. That one seems much more sophisticated, a small painted smile, hardly a smile, really, just a moue playing about her lips. Heavy-lidded eyes. But this one grins wolfishly, eyes wide open, seems ready to try anything. Spirit of the times. When she used to babysit out at the house, Vera loved hanging the tiny clothes on the hangers in the wardrobe box, helping Samantha find both shoes to a pair and lining them up. There were tiny pearls and tiny clutches and lovely silk pillbox hats. The two of them dressed and undressed Barbie for hours. The boyfriend, Ken, always lay somewhere off on his side, of little interest to anyone.
Vera hears her niece’s unspoken wish to have both the dog and the Barbie, to have everything, but on this Auntie will stand firm. The girl reads the price tags, but Vera tells her again not to think about that. To get what she wants. But she will not offer both.
***
They have their rituals, up the escalator and now down, the toy dog in its tissue swaddling, the new outfit from the Junior Miss department folded in its separate bag. Across the marble floor with the attractive array of chiffon scarves and out again into the suddenly cloudy afternoon. She has no umbrella, but the sky is merely white, as if padded with cotton. Not a rain sky. Lunch next, at Manning’s with the steam table where they point to what they want, and the case of desserts. Samantha will always choose breaded chicken patty with green beans and finish with a chocolate ice cream sundae in a stainless-steel dish. The chicken and beans are just about the extent of the real food she will eat. Vera thinks the trouble with picky children is that they have never been truly hungry. If they had been, then any cooking smell, any offering, would tempt. But people who have never been hungry crave only sweets, and the girl would eat sweets the whole day long if permitted.
They take their seats at a table near the window where they like to be. Vera considers the turkey slices, gravy, and stuffing in front of her. Perhaps a little heavy for a June day, but it’s what appeals, and when you reach a certain age Vera believes in having exactly what you want. What her niece wants is to go straight to the ice cream machine, but Vera insists on lunch first. The girl eats her buttered roll, drinks her milk, nibbles at the chicken and beans. Says she’s full. Vera tells her to eat a little more. Samantha pushes the food around, darting glances at the big silver ice cream machine and the silver dishes waiting upside down on a tray with a cloth napkin.
Go ahead, Vera tells her, knowing that Carl and Kay often do the same, and wonders why her own mother and father were so capable of not allowing things, so happy to squelch a desire. What is it about this age, especially this decade, that makes it suddenly so much easier to say, Go ahead.
She watches her niece make a careful swirl of ice cream from the machine, top it with an equally meticulous spiral of chocolate sauce. They share the same instinct for doing things properly. Vera will have only coffee for dessert, a saccharin tablet stirred in from her enameled pillbox. Her niece returns with the sundae, fetches her the coffee, doesn’t spill any on the saucer as she walks. They watch the men hurrying by in business suits, secretaries in skirts and heels on their lunch break, shoppers more casually dressed. Vera always enjoyed being employed, never found it odd that she should be, even when Ernie was earning enough, and then more than enough. It all depended on your perspective. The women that she had waited on in the Grove, back in Red Lodge, lived mostly in Hi Bug: Their standard was to run a home with servants, mostly Finnish or Irish girls, and never dirty their hands. Their notion of working hard was to chair a Women’s Club meeting, or finish an embroidery project, or supervise a child’s piano practice.
Vera’s father’s socialism had been a thorn in her side, always marking her family out as suspect, but she’d grown up taking it for granted that a woman had rights and responsibilities like everyone else, that a woman would cast a vote, as they already did in Finland, and get a job. Now the times are catching up; you can’t watch the evening news without women marching over something or other, waving placards. But, of course, the poor women of the world always worked, then and now. The marchers today are the Hi Bug descendants, who’ve grown bored with, or been made crazy by, their embroidery.
Samantha spoons up the ice cream with devotion. She used to be the slightest bit chubby, at least by today’s standards, the magazine pictures of females of all ages always showing toothpick arms and legs. But with her new height she’s stretched out and become slim; she should try to stay that way. Vera’s own youth had coincided with rounder times; she was lucky in that regard. She wants to suggest that Samantha forgo the last of the ice cream, but she will not. She will leave that to the parents, though she knows what they would say: Go ahead.
***
As they head up Jefferson they pass a shaggy young man coming toward them with a large drum strapped to his back, another hugged to his chest. They are long, tapered, foreign-looking instruments made of wood and hide, nothing you’d see in a regular band. She’s seen this particular person before, circling the neighborhood, looking, presumably, for a place to plant his instruments and himself. He’s typical of the sort milling around the Park Blocks these days, kids spilling down from Portland State, all of them dressed somehow like people from another country: ponchos, caftans, tunics, sandals or bare feet—rough, woven fabrics that you’d never find in a department store. Just as they seem out of place, they seem also out of time—almost biblical in their long hair and beards. This boy, scruffy but too young for a real beard, doesn’t seem to recognize her—why would he?—though he himself is unmistakable with his drum baggage. His territory must be close to her own because of her frequent glimpses of him. Vera has nothing against these peaceniks, if that’s what he is. She is, in fact, in sympathy—doesn’t trust Nixon, doesn’t understand this war, came from a family that always went against the grain. But a simple bath, that seems basic. And all that drug business causes an alarm to go off in the back of her brain when she sees a face on the street that’s too dreamy, or eyes that are too sharp and darting. She feels Samantha staring, and instinctively puts a protective arm on the girl’s shoulder until the sidewalk is clear sailing again.
After the morning exertions, she’s glad to get home; she’s always happy with the sight of her stone-fronted apartment building, though the businesses on her block have gone downhill since she’s lived here. There used to be a millinery shop, a bakery, and a supper club. The millinery shop became a dry cleaner. The bakery is now a greasy Chinese takeout, which
Vera sometimes patronizes if she’s feeling lazy. The supper club on the corner was razed to be a pay parking lot. But her building stands, stalwart as ever.
The smell greets them like a doorman—a little cabbagey today, her niece is wrinkling her nose. The dingy wallpaper above the row of metal mailboxes is adorned with carriages and ladies with Marie Antoinette hair. It’s only when she has a visitor, like today, that she notices the general grime. The wire-webbed glass in the front door has triangles of soot in the corners. The brass sunburst on the square of marble floor is so dull it’s almost black. People’s hands and sleeves have grayed the wallpaper near the banister.
Vera lets Samantha open the mailbox—no letters, just an advertising circular for a rug store. She has enough rugs. The light dims as they climb up, no easy feat for her these days, though she makes herself go out every day despite the effort. The day she allows herself to refuse the stairs, she’ll become a prisoner, and she knows it. Her brother has already been after her to move somewhere—he means a rest home—where things will be easier, food on the premises, an elevator.
She will not tell him about stopping to catch her breath on each landing, and makes herself forgo the few seconds of rest now so her niece will not tell him, either. The price of this is the flare of an angina pain as she climbs the final flight, but she will slip a nitro tablet under her tongue when she reaches the top. Samantha has scampered ahead with the key and swings the door wide for them, the milky half-light filtering out to the landing. Vera intends to die in this apartment. She is not afraid of it happening when she is alone, the likeliest scenario.
***
General Hospital is the one story she won’t miss. Samantha knows that. They efficiently assume their positions: Vera in the easy chair, stockinged feet on the hassock, a cup of Sanka in her lap, what she drinks in the afternoon. Her niece is stretched out on the couch, sharing one end with the stuffed dog. She has picked her library book up from the table and is already immersed in it, oblivious to the serious conversation of the doctors on the screen pronouncing on their patients’ fates.
One morning Ernie sat with her at the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating toast. He had a big contract to sign that day with a grocery wholesaler and was studying the documents with his reading glasses down on his nose, his white shirtsleeves customarily rolled up to the elbows though he hadn’t left the house yet. Every time he removed his jacket he rolled them up in three swift practiced motions on each side. Then every time he was ready to put his jacket on he did the same in reverse. He couldn’t stand to have his shirtsleeves all the way down, even in cooler weather, nor did he like the short-sleeved shirts Vera had brought him home from Block’s, where she became a floor manager when they moved to Indianapolis. Her shift that day didn’t begin until ten, so she was still in her dressing gown. They each had half a grapefruit in front of them, but Ernie didn’t eat his, something she didn’t notice until after he left. She finished it. She didn’t wonder at his lack of appetite.
His departure that day—of course she went back to it obsessively. He’d complained of the heat, patted his brow with his clean cotton handkerchief, which he then stuffed back in his trouser pocket. One handkerchief out of sight to use, and one in his jacket pocket for show that Vera folded to a point for him. He carried his leather portfolio case under his arm—had never liked the kind with handles, didn’t want people to think he was a lawyer.
His kiss before leaving: dry, brisk, marital. Perfectly satisfactory, she’d thought at the time. Who needed more than that on a hot, sticky morning?
Their Indianapolis apartment remained cool through much of the summer, but by late August the thick stone walls and sidewalks never quite cooled off at night. That day the windows were flung open to catch any hope of a morning breeze; it was already humid and still. She had chosen a beige sleeveless linen shirtwaist to wear to work, though she would need a cardigan inside the store.
Vera had just finished her morning floor walk, making sure all cashier stations were properly opened and manned, that merchandise was perfectly arranged, and that employees were at their positions looking groomed and welcoming. The store was crisp from the air-conditioning, one of the few buildings in town to have it then. When she entered the steel-and-glass doors of the polished black marble building on sticky days, she felt as if she were stepping into a sanctuary.
The phone rang for her at 11:00 a.m., the precise moment when Vera had signed the log signifying that all was in order. She remembers the sober look of the young salesgirl who summoned her to the telephone to take the call telling her her husband had suffered a massive heart attack at his desk.
They kept Ernie on a breathing tube for a day while she waited by his bedside in the hospital for something to happen. The hospital, like Block’s, was cool and she huddled there in her sweater, not bothering to take it off when she stepped out for a cigarette, though the sidewalks by that afternoon could have fried an egg. They kept his heart beating. He never saw her. He might have heard her. She whispered things to him, all the important things she could think to say, before she allowed them to remove the tubes they said could do him no good.
***
Her niece snaps her library book shut with a force that Vera can’t interpret: Is it pleasure, or irritation?
“Can we switch channels, Auntie?”
Vera’s shows are over and she was just thinking about rising to turn it off. On her own, the next hour or two would drift by easily: She’d scrutinize a bill, or wash out some stockings; if she were feeling lazy she’d leave the television on and see who Mike Douglas had for a guest. But now she’s aware of time in the self-conscious way of the impoverished hostess: What in the world to offer?
“Of course, anything you like.”
Samantha gets on her knees on the rug to click the channel dial, makes a complete revolution, then clicks through more slowly till she chooses a stopping place, sitting back on her heels to appraise it. An unnaturally happy grown man with a shock of reddish hair, someone announcing himself as Ramblin’ Rod, has filled up the screen. Apparently, he is an impresario of cartoons. The camera pans to bleacher seats full of children. He brings his microphone over and asks the ones in the front row their names and ages. Some are struck dumb by the fact of Ramblin’ Rod’s too-happy face, and mumble downcast, incoherent replies to his interrogations. Vera wonders how many bladders have failed in his studio audience.
“Isn’t this a little kids’ show?” Vera finally asks. She doesn’t mean to sound critical. But the children are all six or seven years old.
“I still like cartoons,” Samantha says simply. “I was on here once.”
“You were?” Vera asks. “Did I know that?”
Samantha shrugs. “It was my Bluebird troop. We wore our uniforms.”
Why wouldn’t Kay have told her something so important? She’s quite sure she never heard about Samantha’s television appearance. Vera remembers meeting Kay in Meier & Frank to acquire the pieces of the Bluebird uniform—navy skirt and white blouse and red vest, beanie and neckerchief. There were white socks with bluebirds and a small enameled Bluebird pin. Vera had insisted on buying the uniform; it was entirely her pleasure. She’d been entranced by the fact of the club for little girls, with perfectly conceived uniforms, and the pledge or motto that had to do, she remembered, with “having fun” and “making things.” Kay let her pay, but also let her know by the set of her mouth that permitting this was not something she enjoyed.
Vera doesn’t know why Kay still can’t accept her money as the simple gift it is. Hasn’t it ever occurred to her that she is trying to make up for Carl’s deficiencies as a wage earner, his lack of initiative? If Kay could look at it that way, she could place the debt on the other side of the ledger: Vera trying to straighten accounts. Her little brother is charming, handsome, and kind. Good qualities, but not much for moving a man ahead in the world. How Ernie loved presiding over his little fleet, signing invoices and bills o
f lading, barking orders at a secretary, banging down the phone. His name, Killorn, in five-foot-high letters across the sides of his trucks.
“How is your mother doing?” Vera asks.
“The same.”
Samantha leans forward on her knees to fiddle with the color knobs; at home, Vera knows, she only has black-and-white. First she makes the faces of Ramblin’ Rod and his young guests go bright red like people suffering from extreme sunburn; then she twists them the other way until they’re lime with seasickness. The girl is searching for some perfect middle; just when she thinks she’s discovered it she finds herself unable to resist a degree of intensification, right or left. What Vera could tell her, but what Samantha will be unable to believe, with those knobs at her disposal, is that reality is a little bit dull; that flesh is only flesh, neither pink nor green. Just an ordinary human middle ground.
“Meaning?”
“Meaning she hates her job, is mad at everybody all the time, and tells all her troubles to me like I’m her best friend. I’m sick of it. I’d like to come here and live with you.”
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