“I doubt you know my son. He keeps to himself, pretty much.”
“What’s his name?” he asked again.
“Pete,” I said quickly.
“Pete what?”
Just then, the bell rang. The doors of the classrooms were all pushed open, and students began pouring noisily out into the hall. “I’m sorry,” I said, turning. “Got to beat the rush.”
“Too late for that,” he said. I glanced back over my shoulder and saw him considering me with what looked like a mean sort of glee. If I were to get a job in the cafeteria, I’d probably see him every day, and he’d soon know that I had lied when I told him I had a son named Pete at the school. The crowd around me was growing. I made my way to the end of the hall and turned right, in the direction the janitor had pointed. At least, I thought as I squared my shoulders, moving through the throng of jostling students, at least I didn’t give him a last name.
The cafeteria, when I found it, was empty but gave off the impression of recent abandonment. The trash cans were filled almost to overflowing, and the smell of cooked food still hung in the air. Balled-up waxed paper littered the linoleum floor. I tried to imagine spending my afternoons here, cleaning up and restoring to order this single large room where several hundred teenagers gobbled down lunch each day at noon; I pictured them descending all at once like a flock of birds on a field of corn, and I imagined myself as a sort of scarecrow waving them away and eventually being covered by all their beating wings. For a moment, I stood soaking up that stillness, and I thought that when the students came in, it must feel like an invasion.
Later, after I had been working there for some time, I would wonder how I’d gotten it so wrong. The cafeteria was itself only when it was crowded and noisy. The students coming in didn’t spoil the place, they woke it up. The room sat empty most of the day, and during that time it felt haunted in the way that a house is haunted when the family is gone; the walls seemed to stare at one another, amazed at the vast plains of unoccupied space between them. Every day, when the bell rang for first lunch and the doors were flung open, I would feel the cafeteria taking in the students as a body takes in breath, and I would feel a part of that body, and it would surprise me to think that there had ever been a time when I wasn’t.
That day, however, as I stood looking at the sandwich crusts and peas and bits of potato on the ground, a very short but sturdy dwarf dressed all in white, like a doctor, pushed open the doors from the kitchen and came out with a broom in her hand. “Can I help you?” she said, taking a few steps toward me. The broom was at least a foot taller than she was.
“I’m looking for Mrs. Brainerd,” I said.
“You’ve found her.” She raised her eyebrows and smiled, close-lipped, in a way that suggested a challenge rather than any goodwill. She was used to meeting others’ surprise head-on, I thought. Staking the broom on the ground beside her, she waited for me to speak.
“I hope I’m not a nuisance. I was told this was a good time to come meet you, with lunch finished.”
She kept her lips pressed together.
“I’d like to work here. That is, if you have any need. I’m a good cook.” I stopped, unsure of how to go on.
“Where have you worked?” she asked.
“At home.”
She laughed. “All right. Have you got an army to feed?”
“Just myself and my two children.”
I saw her take in the lack of a husband. Perhaps I had thought of getting that very response. She asked my name and I told her.
“The strange thing is,” she said, “that I find myself in need of an extra set of hands right now. Strange,” she repeated, shaking her head. “We’ve had one out to have a baby and she won’t be back till the New Year. Left a week and a half ago, earlier than she’d thought. Well, what can you do? It’s been a madhouse in here ever since.” With her free hand, she ticked a finger around the room, pointing at the full trash cans, the dirty floor. “I can’t promise you’ll have work in the spring, but if you want to finish out the semester, then we’ll see what happens. Do you have any professional references?”
I shook my head. “Not unless you want to talk to one of my sisters.”
She threw her head back and laughed with her mouth open, and I saw that she had a bridge on her uppers that didn’t fit very well. “You had a husband, I guess,” she said, closing her mouth.
“Yes. He passed away last year.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.” She began pushing the broom over the floor, lifting her elbows up to her ears to get enough thrust. “Come in tomorrow morning and we’ll give it a try. Seven a.m., sharp.”
14
Once I started working, George and I didn’t see each other for a time. Only an hour or a little more separated when I arrived home and when Joe and Debbie came walking up the road from the bus drop-off, and George still hadn’t hit on any good way to come over in the down season without raising suspicion. We didn’t meet and we didn’t meet and something cracked open inside me, a fissure down through my very core, a canyon of loneliness that seemed sometimes to whistle with the cold wind that ran through, and other times seemed filled with a hot, wrathful desire. I’d get home from the cafeteria smelling of cooking oil and industrial dish soap, and as I filled the sink with warm water to give myself a wipe-down, I’d try to telegraph my longing to George, to will him to feel what I was feeling. I imagined the door opening, his heavy shoes on the floor. I pictured the cloth dropping from my hand in the eagerness of our meeting. Sometimes I took my own pleasure, thinking of that.
One afternoon when I got home from the high school, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I called over to his house.
Lydie answered, and I bit my thumb. “I haven’t laid eyes on you except at church,” she said. “My nephew says he sees you in the cafeteria scooping peas.”
I closed my eyes and replied, “Sometimes I scoop corn. Or I do the meat. I use tongs for that.”
She laughed. “I’ll bet that’s exciting.”
“I’ve got bills to pay,” I said, opening my eyes again. It came out sounding harsher than I meant, almost like an accusation.
She didn’t take it that way. “You sure do, and you’re paying them. You’re doing everything you’ve got to do, Hazel. I hope you know it.”
What do you say to a thing like that—kindness where you least deserve it? There’s not much to do but change the subject. “What are you doing right now?”
“Just tying up this roast for dinner. Nothing much. Did you want to come down and visit awhile?”
“The kids will be home soon.”
“So bring them along. You know Joe’s down here most days at some point anyway. And I’d love to see Debbie. Hang on a minute.” There was a pause and a little rustling, and I knew she’d set down the phone. A minute later, she came back on the line and said she had plenty for supper. Why didn’t we join them?
“You shouldn’t go through the trouble.”
“What kind of trouble is it? You help me peel a few more potatoes, and we’ll thaw out another container of beans. It’s nothing fancy, mind you, but I should hope we can figure out how to feed seven people at once. What would our mothers think, worrying like this when they fixed meals for nine or ten every day?”
As she hadn’t said anything about George, I didn’t know if he was there in the house with her at the moment, or outside somewhere, or maybe he’d gone into town. Even if he were away right now, he’d be home by suppertime. I tried to imagine all of us gathering at the table together. We’d eat in the dining room, I supposed, instead of the kitchen, and Lydie would be seated at one end of the table and George at the other, and I would turn my head like I was at a tennis match to talk to one and then the other.
I thought about all this and then I thought that I would do almost anything to lay eyes on George, even if I couldn’t talk to him alone, or touch him in any way. There wouldn’t even be a handshake; women didn’t shake hands on meeting a friend. Only me
n did that. Curious—I’d never considered it before, how men wanted that touch and women didn’t. “I’ll be down in a little while,” I said now to Lydie. “Just as soon as the kids get home, we’ll drive on over.”
“Yahoo,” Lydie said.
This dinner would be the first time our two families met, outside of church, since George and I started our affair. Driving the short distance down the road to the house, I got myself into a state, something almost like panic. I gripped the wheel with both hands like it was the reins of a bucking horse. In the backseat, Joe was narrating the events of his day, and they equaled for drama those of a Shakespeare play. The big event in the fourth act was the game of tag he’d nearly won at recess. By the time we got to the Hughes’s house—not more than a two-minute drive, though it felt much longer—my heart was pounding hard enough in my chest that I worried a vein must be throbbing somewhere visible. As Joe opened his door and got out, I glanced in the rearview mirror. No throbbing vein, but I was pale. I pinched my cheeks for color, and when I glanced at the backseat, I saw that Debbie was copying me. She grinned, and it made me feel better at once.
Lydie stood in the doorway, holding open the door and letting the cold air into her kitchen. It was above freezing outside, but not by much. The glow of the lights from inside made the afternoon suddenly seem much darker; it was December, after all, and the days were still getting shorter. I thought of the previous year, with its warm weather at this time, and realized with a start that we would need to get another tree soon.
“How was school today?” Lydie asked as we entered the kitchen. She gave me a nod hello and then glanced down at my daughter to wait for an answer.
“We practiced spelling zoo animals and we drew pictures. I wrote ‘tiger’ and I gave it a long tail and it was purple.”
“A purple tiger, my goodness. I’ve never seen a purple tiger before. Green and yellow, sure. I’ve even seen a blue and white one. But never purple. What color are the stripes?”
“They’re purple,” Debbie insisted.
“There’s two colors,” I said, putting a hand on her head. “Mrs. Hughes wants to know what the other color is.”
Debbie thought for a moment. “I think it was red,” she said at last. “It was purple and red.”
“Goodness gracious. And you said you know how to spell the word tiger, too? Can you spell it for me?”
“I have to write it down,” she said seriously, and then, tipping her face up at me, asked if she could show us how.
Lydie went to fetch a pad of paper and a pencil, and I sat Debbie down at the kitchen table. “Now don’t go using up a lot of paper,” I told her. “You write small and cover the whole page, and then ask if you need to start another.”
She said she would, and when Lydie returned, Debbie set herself to the task of spelling out words with a quiet, determined seriousness while Lydie and I stood at the counter making another pie. She’d already mixed up the crust and had the bottom rolled out when we got there, and she stopped me when I began to protest that she shouldn’t go through the trouble. “What did I tell you?” she said. “As if it’s such a hard thing to fix a pie. I just need to get some apples from the cellar.” She moved to the sink to wash the pie dough off her hands, but I said I would do it. “All right, if you don’t mind going down there. I should have done it before I got my hands all covered in flour.”
I went out through the door, to the back of the house. Their house had two small cellars, as ours did, and I knew that the one at the side had an electrical cord running down to it to power the washing machine and the chest freezer they’d got a few years back. The one at the back of the house was where the other food was kept. The double doors were directly underneath a set of windows in the living room, and as I reached down to pull the handles on the cellar doors, there came a tap-tap on the glass. I glanced up, ready to see George smiling at me through the window, but instead it was Joe. Surprised, I shook my head, and he made a face and disappeared from view.
It was dark in the cellar, the only light coming from the open doors above. Shelves lined the whitewashed walls, and on those shelves were wooden crates piled with potatoes, onions, beets, and carrots. Crumbles of dirt covered the floor all around, and the space smelled of earth and the damp. There were two crates of apples, small knobby green ones, which were good for baking and terrible for eating raw. We had a tree of our own near the old pig shed, but I’d barely gathered any of them this year. The ground around that tree was covered with bruised fruit, and whenever I ventured close to it, I smelled cider vinegar strong in the air.
I hadn’t brought down anything to hold the apples, so slipping my arms out of the sleeves of my cardigan to make a bundle, I piled in a dozen or more and then carried them back up the stairs into the winter light. It was maybe thirty-five degrees outside, and I had gooseflesh on my bare arms. Bending down to close the door, I heard a voice behind me: “Someone tell you it was summer?”
I turned around and saw George. He’d just walked up from around the house, the side close to the barn. “I saw you come up out of the cellar,” he said, “and thought I’d stop and say hello. Before we sit down for supper.”
Words weren’t coming at the moment—I was thrilled seeing him right there before me, and at the same time it felt dangerous; anyone might see us, hear us, together. George’s breath was coming out as steam on the cold air, and I had to restrain myself from stepping into that cloud. I wanted to be caught up inside it, invisible together.
“Hazel?”
“Hello,” I said at last, and that was all I could manage. I’d seen him at church a few days before, but we hadn’t spoken because Debbie had left her coat in the car and started complaining about the cold, and we’d ended up leaving quickly. Church was about the only place we routinely saw each other now that it was winter. Every Sunday, I would tell myself I was going to listen to the sermon, that I needed to listen, to be chastised, washed like the inside of a basin, scoured until it was spotless. But the preacher was so dull I never kept to my goal. He delivered his sermons like he was reading a stock ticker; there was nothing holding the sentences together. Every now and then I would tune in and pick up a familiar Bible verse, but just as quickly I’d lose focus again. His sermons often featured a tale from his childhood in Pennsylvania; he’d grown up near Amish country, and their way of life was a constant source of inspiration for him. This should have been interesting, yet somehow he managed to drain it of all drama. And if it wasn’t a childhood story, it was something contemporary—a story from the news, or a reference to the season. The change from winter to spring, or summer to fall.
It was winter now, and I was shivering without my cardigan on. George glanced at the sweater I’d fashioned into an apple carrier and said he guessed I should get on inside if I didn’t want to catch cold.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Really.”
“You’re shivering.”
“Only because it’s cold outside and I’m wearing hardly any clothes.”
He laughed. “That’s just about right, I’d say. How are you?”
“I invited myself over for supper,” I said. “You should’ve heard how I pushed Lydie into asking us to come.”
“I did hear. I was there in the kitchen when she was talking to you. Didn’t sound like you pushed her into anything. You’re always welcome here.”
“You don’t feel strange?” I asked in a quieter voice. I glanced around to make sure no one was near. I hadn’t heard the boys, but they might have come outside while I was down in the cellar.
“Do I feel strange,” he repeated, though he made it sound like a statement. He squinted one eye, thinking. “No, I don’t believe so. I think if I had to find a word for what I feel, it’d be something like happy.” He turned his eyes down and suddenly looked bashful as a teenager, working himself up to saying more. I could imagine him as he must have been when he was courting Lydie years before: tongue-tied without even knowing it, because he’d never been asked
to put feelings into words, to name what was like soda water bubbling inside his chest. He lifted his eyes again and shook his head. “I have missed this sight,” he said. “I have missed your skin.”
Now it was my turn to feel bashful, and at the same moment I was suddenly sure that we had been talking too long. I started past him, half expecting him to reach out and touch my arm. But there was a wall of windows behind us, and he wasn’t a foolish man.
Back in the kitchen, I dumped the load of apples on the counter. “You found them all right,” Lydie said, opening a drawer to take out a couple of paring knives.
I took one and told her that I’d run into George on my way back into the house.
“And he kept you out there freezing without your sweater on?” She gave a rueful laugh. “There’s politeness for you.”
“I expect it was my fault.”
“Well,” Lydie said, and the subject was dropped. She wasn’t wondering why it had taken me five minutes to get the apples from the cellar, instead of three. She wasn’t wondering what I had to say to her husband. She was only thinking about getting the pie in the oven and serving dinner to two families and making her friend, the widow, feel comfortable in her own happy home.
At supper, I found myself seated next to George at one end of the table. Debbie was on my other side. Then came Lydie, and winding around the other side were the three boys. That was one way of looking at it. Debbie pointed out the other way: “All the boys are sitting together,” she observed after we’d finished the prayer and begun passing the food. “And all the girls, too.”
“Now, wait a minute.” Lydie drew back and looked at Debbie with feigned surprise. “Are you the one that put us down this way?”
Debbie giggled as she took a slice of bread from the basket. I took it from her and began spreading on the butter.
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