by Mary Gordon
She was afraid of Moe Schultz with his bloody hands and his red cheeks that made you think there was blood too close under the surface, too much blood, and it would come spurting out at any minute, all over the place if someone crossed him, if he got too excited. And then he had a German accent. He had come from Germany. Veronica didn't know exactly when, but she knew that when you thought of Germany, you had to think of blood, of soldiers, of dead bodies, white, in piles. So she was standing up to all that when she looked at the coins, greasy, grown fattish themselves from the touch of Moe Schultz's fingers. She thought that there would be smears of blood on the coins if you put them under a microscope.
There should have been a quarter and two dimes in her hand, forty-five cents, and instead he had put only two dimes there. She felt in her flat palm, dry, warm, the absence of the quarter, which was of all coins the one that she liked best. Pennies were a children's coin, inconsequential. Nickels seemed coarse to her and common, workaday, dependable, but without uses, capable of purchasing nothing that could bring excitement or real joy. You would have to think, think hard, about spending a nickel. “He counts every last nickel,” was something she had heard people say. She could imagine a gray-faced man with begrudging eyes and tired felt hat and gloves with no fingers. She imagined him at night, when he came home from work to his ugly room in a boardinghouse, a room with no pictures, maybe even no window, or if there was one it brought no light. He would come home, take off his rodent-colored hat, hang his jacket, also rodent colored, on the coat tree (he would have no closet) and before he sat down at the table that, except for the bed and the dresser, was the only furniture in the room, he would reach into his pockets, lint covered perhaps because the linings of his pockets had begun to shred, and take out three or four nickels that he would add to others in a box that he took from the dresser, a flimsy box that would break one day from the weight of all those coins.
Dimes seemed to her deceitful; she would never have been surprised if, handing over a dime one day, a shopkeeper would say: “But these won't do at all, you know, don't you know they're worth nothing.” Dimes in their lightness, their flimsiness, made her question the whole idea of worth. It seemed an impossible question to her— what was something worth— and she resented dimes for making her consider it.
Quarters, though, were the coins of the great world. She always imagined them with high, piled, shining hair, in furs, trailing behind them a scent that was strong but not floral, making their way through anything, taking with ease and calm assurance what they knew to be their rightful place. Sometimes she couldn't imagine anything a quarter wouldn't buy, so desirable, so complete in its attractions, did each seem in itself.
So when Moe Schultz put into her hand only the two greasy dimes, she felt the absence of that quarter, strongly, as if she'd been deprived of a delicious meal that had been promised, that she had every right to expect, and had been presented instead with a plate of dry leaves. She felt the absence of the quarter in her mouth in just that way; the lack of it made her begin to salivate. And she saw the blood on Moe Schultz's hands, around the outlines of his nails, and she thought of the soldiers in their brown coats and the piles of corpses, and her body, too light to contain it, was filled with wave after wave of swelling anger. She had no choice but to speak.
“Excuse me, Mr. Schultz, I think you've given me the wrong change.” “I've given you what is owing,” he said, staring her down with his brown eyes, also meat colored, also overfed by blood.
“I got one and three-quarters of a pound of hamburger, that's a dollar twenty-five, and a quarter pound of bologna, that's twenty cents, which makes a dollar forty-five.”
“You got two pounds of hamburger. Give it to me. I weigh.” She knew that he would put the meat on the scale and then put his fat thumb beside it and it would look like she was wrong.
“I think you made a mistake, Mr. Schultz. I think you forgot I only asked for a pound and three-quarters.”
He took the quarter from the cash register, whose keys he pushed with a violence Veronica knew was meant for her. He threw the quarter on the sawdust-covered floor, beside her shoes. She looked at the coin, shining though defiled, beside her round-toed navy oxford. She tried to think of a way to get the coin without looking clumsy, without, as her aunts would say, “giving him the satisfaction.” She would not give him the satisfaction. So she bent at the knees, keeping her spine straight, keeping her eyes on the butcher, although he had turned his back on her. But she knew he could see her in the mirror that covered the shop's wall. She reached for the coin without taking her eyes from the butcher's enormous back. Not looking at the floor, not once, she fingered the coin, scooped it up, and put it in her pocket, not saying goodbye as she pushed open the door and heard, upon her leaving, the falsely cheerful tinkle of the bell.
It must have been Mrs. Gallagher who told her grandmother about it. She was glad the news had come to her grandmother rather than her mother, because it was the kind of news that would have made her mother feel afraid. Her mother was not a strong person. Veronica sometimes felt that in the process of being born, she and her brothers had pushed out all their mother's strength and left it in a bloody heap on the hospital floor. And their mother had not recovered. Her mother wore glasses all the time; Veronica had no image of her mother without glasses, and they made her eyes look swimming, as if they were always on the verge of tears. She wore her hair in a bun at the nape of her neck, but little wisps of hair were always escaping, and she was always, nervously, ashamedly trying to put the stray hairs back into place. Her chest under the apron, limp and floral, that she always wore, seemed caved in, as though someone had given her a blow to the back where her waist was, and she had never again been quite able to straighten up.
She was afraid of so many things: things she had failed to do and things she could not possibly keep from happening. You could never leave the house without her running in once more to be sure she'd turned the oven off or not left the iron plugged in. When a high wind came you could see the look of terror on her flushed face. She didn't trust the house to keep them; when she asked Veronica's father to double-check the windows, he was cruel, and he said he would not, she must practice self-control.
Her father was afraid of nothing, but nothing pleased him either. He was never happy, and he resented others’ happiness, particularly his wife's in those rare moments when she had some. If he came home from work and saw her and the children playing cards on the dining room table, he threw down his coat and accused her of indulging herself rather than seeing to his dinner. Soon he was in a rage. He responded to Veronica's excellent report cards as if they were a trick she'd pulled to show him up. Her mother would give her a nickel for an ice-cream cone as a reward; her father predicted her brains would bring her nothing but bad luck.
He might have been a bit afraid, Veronica sometimes thought, of her grandmother. Veronica's mother would deliver the good report cards to Delia and Delia would say, “Isn't that great, then,” and her father would have to pretend to be pleased.
Delia told Veronica she must study hard, that if she studied hard the world was her oyster. Her grandmother used phrases that pleased Veronica but which she in no way understood. She had never seen an oyster, but she knew it was a kind of fish, something like a clam, and she knew that it was gray. What that had to do with the world, or something good about it, was nothing she could imagine. Another time Delia had said, “I wouldn't be too quick about marrying. Marriage isn't all beer and skittles.” She had no idea what skittles were and she hated the taste and smell of beer. She associated it with her father and her father's anger when he drank, so maybe the angry behavior of men was what her grandmother was talking about. But she was saying marriage wasn't beer and that other thing, so what could she possibly have meant?
Her puzzlement about the things her grandmother said added to her unease about Delia's favor. Delia liked her for things like standing up to Moe Schultz and preferring what she called “s
ums” to dolls and dress-up. Veronica was pretty sure that Delia assumed it was because she was “practical” rather than “dreamy” that she liked adding numbers. What she would never know, because Veronica would die before she let her know, were the dreams that went on in her head when she was adding numbers. That she wanted the quarter, not only because she was angry at being cheated, but because she wanted who the quarter was. That she liked writing numbers in a column because each of them was a person: two was a prince, five a jaunty boy, and eight a tender mother. Seven was a card-sharp and a cowboy, six was a fool who deserved nothing but to be deceived. And somehow the new number that could be born by adding the others up brought to her a world of couplings, connections she would dwell on endlessly. If her grandmother knew all that she would never take Veronica with her on errands.
So between feeling bad that her grandmother had chosen her on false grounds and sad about how the way her coming into life had sapped her mother's strength and hopeless that everything she did seemed to her father a theft from his account, she often wished she could be somewhere else, brought up among some other people. She was mostly alone, watching things, making up stories. The only sense of Tightness came from being with her grandmother, when Delia called her “partner.” And even then, when she heard those words, she felt that she had stolen grace.
Her aunts and uncles didn't like her except for Johnny, who did like her, because she was happy to listen when he spoke about Korea. And she liked the slippers he'd brought back, and the paper parasols and the tops and the toys made out of paper that no American children could figure out. She thought they were meant to be looked at rather than played with. The word “toy,” she thought, must be a mistranslation. She was sure Johnny had misunderstood. She never told him that; she always asked him to take out his things from Korea and show them to her. This made everyone think she was showing off; she could tell they wanted to say something about it to her, but they were too afraid of Delia to let their dislike of Veronica show. But the Bordereaus, Nettie and her brother Phil (his real name was Philippe), didn't see any need to change anything they did because of something about Delia. They said, right out, and no one stopped them, “That kid gives me the creeps,” and “What the hell's she staring at like that?”
There were a lot of Bordereaus around after a while, because within a year of Nettie's marrying Johnny her whole family had moved to Queens from Watertown. There was Phil, an electrician, and an older widowed sister, Adele, who was a nurse. A practical nurse. “An L.P.N.,” Nettie had said, quickly, casually, pretending it was something she wasn't really proud of. For a long time, Veronica thought Nettie was saying “elpienne,” that it was one of her French words, and Veronica thought it had something to do with the Alps, that Adele was some kind of mountain climber, although this was hard to understand because she was very fat and always complained about her sore feet. But by not asking, by listening— although the way it happened was a mystery to her— Veronica learned that L.P.N. were initials standing for licensed practical nurse. She didn't know either when or how she found out that an L.P.N. wasn't a real nurse, they didn't get paid as much, they couldn't give injections, and they almost never worked beside the doctors.
Phil and Adele and Mrs. Bordereau moved into the top floor of a house two blocks from Delia's. It was a house built on a slab of concrete; there was no grass at all, only one slab in the front and another one in the back, which Phil said was a relief because if there was anything he didn't need it was mowing. The house was very dark on account of something called blackout shades, which weren't really black, but dark green, and Veronica knew they had something to do with the war, but she didn't know what.
Mrs. Bordereau almost never left the house. She wore a white net over her hair and her glasses had no rims. Light bounced off them more than ordinary glasses. She made up special medicines and gave people “treatments” but no one ever went to her except Veronica and her family. Nettie said it would take a while for her to build things up, but then you wait and see, there'd be lines up the block, like in Watertown. Veronica did not believe her.
But for some reason, Delia did believe in Mrs. Bordereau's medicines. She took a bitter liquid in a spoon every morning and she had “treatments” for her back three times a week. She paid a dollar for the medicine and another dollar every week for treatments. Veronica was surprised: Delia was careful about money and two dollars a week seemed like a lot, particularly when she couldn't understand what happened in the treatments or what was in the liquid in the brown bottle with the cork for a stopper, wrapped in white paper and a rubber band.
With Delia getting medicine from Mrs. Bordereau and Phil coming by sometimes to take Aunt Maddie to the movies, the Bordereaus and the Nolans saw quite a lot of each other, enough for Veronica to know how much they didn't like her. Except for Mrs. Bordereau, who never said a word.
For a long time she believed they had no reason to dislike her. But then something happened and she knew they had a reason and she knew exactly what it was. She had seen something; she had seen something she wasn't supposed to see.
It was the middle of the afternoon. If they wanted to do something they didn't want anyone to see, Veronica thought, they should have waited till the sun was down. Anyone could have seen what she'd seen if they'd happened to be passing by. It was an accident that she was the one passing.
And she didn't move away because she didn't understand what she was seeing. She knew it was Philippe Bordereau's back; she could tell by his hair and his green work shirt that said “Phil” above the pocket in yellow script thread. He was pressing Aunt Maddie up against the side of the piano, the side that was like a little wall, narrow and solid; she had put her hand against it sometimes when Aunt Maddie played; she'd liked it very much that she could feel the music.
She knew it was Aunt Maddie because she could see her shoes, which always looked like Minnie Mouse shoes to Veronica. The shoes were pointy, but not pointy enough. Aunt Maddie had heavy legs and big hips. She wasn't fat, everyone said that, but she was a large woman. “Handsome,” people said. The top of her body was smaller than the bottom half. Her feet went with the top of her body; they were too small for her legs, and although Aunt Maddie bragged about being a size five shoe, Veronica thought she shouldn't have talked about it. Sometimes it made her look down on grown-ups when she, a child, knew better than the grown-up the category of thing that should not be said.
Phil Bordereau was moving his hips in a circle, urging Aunt Maddie's back up against the piano's side. Veronica was thinking that it must have hurt Aunt Maddie; she didn't know why she was letting him go on doing it. She thought it must be a kind of kissing, although their mouths weren't joined. She could see Aunt Maddie's face (her eyes were closed) and Phil's wasn't near it.
Suddenly Phil moved away from Aunt Maddie. When he did that, she could see Veronica. “Phil,” she said and pointed.
“Jesus Christ,” Phil said and walked out the front door, letting it slam behind him.
Aunt Maddie walked past Veronica, up the stairs to her room. Veronica could see that the front of her dress was wet, as if she'd peed on herself. She couldn't imagine what Phil had done to Aunt Maddie that would make her pee. Whatever it was, she knew it was, more than anything that had happened to her, something she couldn't talk about.
She was pretty sure Phil had told Nettie about it. About what Veronica had seen. She got the idea when the two of them backed her into a corner.
“Now listen here,” they said, “we want to talk to you. We want to say something.”
She thought it was a little foolish that they believed those sentences were different from each other, that both of them were required. It made her feel, for a second, that she didn't have to take them seriously. But they stood very close to her, and kept taking steps even closer, so she had to take little steps back if she didn't want her feet crushed. They did that until none of them could go any further because Veronica was standing with her back against the wall.
Nettie shook her finger in Veronica's face. It was very close to her eye; she had to keep blinking it was so close.
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” she said and then the two of them walked away. Veronica could tell they felt satisfied. As if they'd accomplished something. She wanted to tell them they'd accomplished nothing, nothing new had happened on account of what they'd done. She was never going to say anything, but it wasn't because of them, it was because of who she was and the things she'd always known. Long before she'd ever heard of them.
Delia stopped by to get Veronica. “Come with me, partner,” she said. “We're going to take your Aunt Maddie over to Mrs. Bordereau's for a treatment. She's been a bit under the weather.”
For a minute Veronica felt bad that Delia had asked her and not her mother. But she wanted to go too much to think about it for long. It would be interesting to go to Mrs. Bordereau's and find out what a treatment was and what it meant that Aunt Maddie was under the weather. She liked that about words, that they could hide what they meant, but not forever. In her experience you could always find out what they meant. Like when Nettie said, “Curiosity killed the cat.” It meant they were mad at her for having seen Phil and Aunt Maddie when he did that thing to her that made her pee. It had nothing to do with cats, just as what was wrong with Aunt Maddie had nothing to do with weather. But you had to make the picture first. First you had to see a cat looking into something, then you had to see something springing out of it, maybe a bigger cat, a tiger, and jumping at its throat. Then you saw the cat dead. And you saw Aunt Maddie under a heavy, wet cloud, pressing her down, covering her almost entirely, until all you saw was her thick ankles and her little feet in their not-quite-pointy shoes.
“Ready, partner?” said Delia, pressing her foot down on the gas pedal. Her grandmother always wore only one kind of shoe, the shoe that all old ladies wore, black, with a rounded toe and a little heel and laces.