“How awful,” I said.
Mary shrugged. “Coulda been worse if I hit a nerve or an artery. The doctor says I coulda bled to death on the floor right here, or been left a cripple with just the one hand left to use.”
It wasn’t meant to be a warning, and I didn’t take it for one. It was simply something to talk about.
My days were filled now with conversation. The other women talked about their men, and after a while they felt comfortable enough to ask me about Karol. It felt good to talk about him with someone other than George. I told them some truths, some half-truths, and some outright lies. For instance, I’d explain how my husband used to spend his free hours painting, but I lied about the subject of his paintings. Instead of landscapes, I said he painted portraits of me. I told them he made me into different characters: in one I was Cleopatra, and in another I was an Indian princess. That one made the girls laugh.
We talked about our children and our parents, our neighbors, our friends. The other women all lived in town, and I heard the same grievances from them that I heard from Iris and Edith, grumbling about how some people never bothered to pull their trash cans back from the curb after collection, how other people didn’t know how to park correctly on the streets downtown. The city needed to repave Troy Road. The post office always had a line out the door, and the side streets needed more lampposts to illuminate all the dark corners at night. One of the major topics of discussion was the new university. SIU had been founded a few years before, without a real home; it was divided in two, part of it over in East St. Louis and part of it up in Alton. Now the state had decided to send some money its way, and the school had purchased land west of town where the new campus was to be constructed. Folks were divided on how the school would change Edwardsville. “What am I supposed to do with a college?” Mary L. asked one day as we were cleaning up after lunch.
“I don’t expect you have to do anything,” the other Mary replied, “unless you plan on becoming the oldest coed ever to enroll at a university.”
“Oh, sure,” Mary L. said. “I’ll sign myself up for some courses.”
“Join a sorority, too,” Betty Ann said. “Get some nice young man to escort you to a dance.” She did a little twist, the rag in her hand flipping back and forth through the air.
“Just you watch, a few years from now I’ll be wearing a black robe and one of those funny hats.”
“What’ll you major in, hon?” Edith asked. “You can’t major in home economics, you know.”
“Sure you can.”
“Not at a university, you can’t.”
“Regular economics, then. I’ll figure out how to print money.”
“I could teach that class,” Betty Ann put in. “Anyone who’s figured out how to feed and clothe four boys on what me and Eddie make is a qualified economist, I’d say.”
“They’re going to need some professors,” I ventured. “Better put in your application, make sure you get in for an interview.”
“Are you kidding? I’m gonna go over there and run their cafeteria for them. Show them how it’s done. Ask for ten dollars an hour and I’ll make them promise not to ever have me serve anything that requires onion. I’ve cried enough tears for a lifetime in this here kitchen.”
I laughed along with the other women. I was glad the university was being built. Who knew? Maybe Joe or Debbie would end up going to college. It was a lot easier to imagine this happening when the school was a few miles away. Different futures were possible. You never knew what might change.
I usually left the school shortly after one o’clock. By one thirty, I was home, and George would come by if he was able. It wasn’t frequent, but we had grown bolder; we had to, if we wanted to see each other. Once every few weeks I’d hear the porch door open, and that sound would change the whole shape of my day. I’d hear the screech of the door hinge, and suddenly that hour would be jolted into some other category of time, some other way of accounting for the sun moving over the sky. I lived for those days, for that single hour. Our time together was still the one thing that was truest and best in my life.
But we weren’t together often enough. “That’s just winter,” he told me. “Soon as the season starts, I’ll be able to get over here more often again.”
Things would be back to normal, is what he meant. Normal was simply the way it had been for the first two or three months before I got the job at the high school, before winter swept the landscape clean and locked us all up in our houses with no excuse for going out alone, into the wind and the cold.
Do you ever think about what it would be like for us to go away together?
I never asked him that question, though I thought about it in an idle way. We wouldn’t ever do it, of course, but that’s not why I stayed silent. I couldn’t ask him because I didn’t want to know if the answer was no. I wanted to think that his mind was an open and free place, that things could happen there that wouldn’t ever happen in real life. I should have asked him to tell me about the dreams he had—what he saw and felt in them, whether he ever had the same dream twice. I would have listened to him describe landscapes of beauty and nonsense, and maybe I’d have thought, I can’t fathom you.
But I didn’t ask him about his dreams, either. I didn’t ask him many things. We didn’t have much time for talking anymore, and though I missed that old bond, I got my fill of talking at work. He came to the door on the side of the house and took off his shoes and then we went right to bed. I loved being touched. I loved every inch of his skin that pressed up against mine. It was cold in the room but warm under the covers, and while we were making love, George would throw back the quilt because it got so hot we were both sticky with sweat. Then, afterward, we would pull the sheets back over us again and for a few minutes we would lie still with our bodies pressed together. He would hold me to him like he was trying to get back to where we’d been just a moment before. And I would wonder, what were we doing, and how long could it last?
These were more questions that I didn’t ask.
Nate had got his rent payment to me in the late fall, and I paid off the loan from Rena and John Charlie. I wasn’t making a lot at the high school, yet it was enough to cover our basic expenses, and I felt comfortable for the first time since Karol had died. I wasn’t rich, but I had a little savings, and I didn’t think I’d have to go to them again, asking for money.
At the same time, I wasn’t quite happy with the arrangement with Nate. He’d lost me money, I figured, because he had gambled wrong. He was a good man—I didn’t think he was trying to cheat me—but he hadn’t listened when I told him how I thought the fields should be planted. At the end of the season, when he gave me the check, Nate showed me the receipts marking exactly how much he was paid for exactly how many bushels of corn. He’d got an average of ninety-eight cents a bushel, which was quite a bit lower than the year before. Of course, prices were down all over, and I couldn’t blame him for that. But sure enough, while the prices for soy were down, too, they hadn’t dropped as much as they had for corn. In other words, I’d been right, and Nate had been wrong. “He’s the one renting the land, Hazel,” John Charlie told me when I complained to him and Rena. “You have to let a man make his own decisions.”
All this was on my mind off and on through the winter. Then one morning in early February, when I was dropping off Joe and Debbie, Lydie came running out to the car to stop me before I pulled away. “Why don’t you come down here later,” she said, her breath puffing out in a little cloud by her face, “before the kids get home. George and I have got something we want to talk to you about.”
She didn’t look angry. I figured it had nothing to do with George and me—too late for my heart, which was already pounding. I told her I’d stop by on my way home, and she went back into the house, clutching her sweater over her chest.
When I got to their house that afternoon, I wasn’t out of the car before Lydie was at the front door. She held it open for me, even though there was a cold
bite in the air. The grass I walked over was wan and sickly looking, and it was hard to imagine that in a few weeks the crocuses would be pushing their way up through the earth. Harder still to believe that it had been a year since the first day George came by to see me, when we had been neighbors making conversation beside a clothesline flapping with sheets. I remembered watching his fingers as he fumbled a cigarette out of the pack. I remembered white, thin light and puddles of mud.
“You’ve got me curious,” I called to Lydie as I came up to the porch. “I don’t have a clue what this meeting is about.”
“A meeting. Come now, it’s not that formal.” She smiled as I climbed the steps. Lydie and George used their front porch as it was meant to be used; it was the main entrance, which gave the house a grander impression than ours. I always felt it on the approach: the sense of certainty and accomplishment, as if the very walls were made of some stronger substance than ours. Their house remained more or less as it had been ever since its construction, whereas ours was a patchwork job, bits and pieces added on over the years. The place I’d lived in my whole life had been an afterthought in its original conception—a cabin for some long-gone hired man, repurposed as the home my father bought for his new bride—but their house was a symbol of completion, of intention. The front faced away from our land and toward town, and with the little hillside of Christmas trees rising behind, an island of green in the flat bare fields, the house both fit the area and also stood a little apart. It was, in other words, a grand-looking place from the outside. Inside, it looked more or less like ours.
“Were you watching out for me?” I asked as I climbed the steps.
“I heard the car pull up the drive.” She tipped her head in the direction of the road. The house stood at the intersection of Fox and Sumner, but neither was ever very busy with traffic. “How was work?”
“Same as always,” I replied. “Those children eat like they’ve never seen food in their lives.”
In the kitchen, George was seated at the table with a mug of coffee resting between his hands. He glanced up as we came in, and I thought it was strange that he’d kept sitting there as Lydie came out to greet me on the porch. Everything felt odd, all our poses in the room arranged as if we were in a play or in the movies, one actor already onstage and two others entering from the right. Even George’s greeting felt rehearsed.
“Coffee?” Lydie asked, already taking another mug from the cupboard. In the moment she was turned away, I gave George a look, but he only shook his head.
So there we all were, sitting in a little circle around the Formica table with its spindly metal legs. In the mornings, with Joe and Debbie there, the table must have been pretty crowded. I wasn’t ever there to see it, though, and I suddenly wondered what I was doing, letting our families get so close.
“George,” Lydie said. “Why don’t you explain what this is about.”
He nodded slowly without looking at either his wife or me. A stab of nerves made my body seize and go cold.
“It’s just that spring’s coming soon.” He glanced from me to Lydie, and when she nodded, he went on. “And it won’t be long before it’s time to start planting. We’ve been talking it over, Lydie and me, and we just wanted to know, Hazel, how things are going with Nate. What your plans are for this year. What you’ve decided.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. George wasn’t looking at me, and the reason was that we had talked about all this the week before. I’d told him about how I wasn’t happy with the decisions Nate had made and the fact that he hadn’t been able to pay me on time. We’d talked about all of it, but of course I couldn’t say that now. “We haven’t come to any decision just yet.”
“You think he’s planning on it? I mean, you think he’s already planning to renew for another year?” Lydie shifted her weight in the chair and then said in a softer tone, “I don’t mean to make you feel strange, Hazel. We sure don’t mean to do that.” She put her hand on George’s wrist. “Why don’t you explain.”
For a moment everything seemed bathed in a bright and unnatural light, which is to say both familiar and strange. I was sitting at the kitchen table of my friend and her husband. They were the couple, and I was the outsider who somehow had business with them.
Then George looked me right in the eye. “We were thinking you might consider renting your land to us.” He removed his hand from Lydie’s and rubbed both of his together, massaging one wrist and then the other as if they ached. Perhaps they did; his joints sometimes made little popping noises as he lowered himself into bed. For that matter, so did mine. “We’d like you to consider it. Think it over.”
He wasn’t a pushy man. Not much of one for talking, either. Karol had always liked the sound of his own voice, how it could swell a room, make the very air vibrate like a single bass string. He’d liked to stomp his foot when he laughed to make the floorboards squeak. He’d liked telling stories and talking over his plans for our home and family, both in the near and long term, and I’d understood that it was because he loved me and he loved Joe and Debbie. And above all he loved the land that had become his the day we bought it, because before then he’d never owned the things he worked for, or the place where he slept. It was because of this, too, that he’d especially liked explaining how he wanted things done. If I undercooked his pork chop or if I let the feed pail get low in the henhouse, if I put his socks on the left side of the drawer instead of the right, he’d let me know. He’d tell me, he wouldn’t ask. He made statements instead of asking questions and spoke with a sureness that allowed no pause for consideration.
George wasn’t that way at all. I’d known it before, but I was more aware of it now, watching him move his hands around on his knees. He was uncomfortable, waiting for me to answer, tentative in a way that I hadn’t previously seen. I was afraid that if I didn’t speak right then, he’d keep adding qualifiers. I said the only thing that came to mind: “Can you handle all that land on your own?”
He glanced at Lydie and then turned back and started nodding. “You know we’ve got J.B. helping out”—J.B. was the son of a neighbor who made some extra money helping out other families during the busy season—“and in the summer Gene’s as good as any man now. Bobby, too, he’s getting to be a big help.”
“The fact is,” Lydie said, leaning forward, “we’re in a little bind here. See, J.B.’s said he won’t be able to do just the fall. He’s thinking of going out somewhere to see about factory work. Indiana, I think he said. Lord knows why he thinks there will be something for him in Indiana. But we don’t have enough work right now to keep him on until then, not for the whole season. Taking on your land, though, we would. And especially if you’d rent out your tractor, too—then George and J.B. could go at the whole thing double time. So you see, you’d really be doing us a favor.”
It was this last bit that made me understand what was going on. If it really would benefit them, she wouldn’t have brought it up; they’d have found another way to put it, talked around it some way. They were already helping me out by taking Joe and Debbie in the mornings. That was all Lydie’s doing, I supposed; she was the one making breakfast and getting them out to meet the bus on time. This business with the farm wasn’t as clear. It struck me that George must have been the one to come up with the idea. I couldn’t imagine Lydie explaining to him why he should take on the burden of an additional hundred fifty acres. Maybe J.B. was thinking of leaving, but if that were the case, then George could always find someone else to take his place. Taking him on for the entire season would eat up any profits George made on my land, especially after paying rent to me for the farm and the machinery.
Why would he propose it? And why would Lydie agree to such a thing? Surely she understood that the only benefit to her would be the good feeling that came of doing a kind deed by her friend. I was their charity case.
This realization came quickly, and it made me angry. It was this matter of two-on-one. I didn’t like it. I had my relationship with Georg
e, and I had my friendship with Lydie, and I didn’t like having to face them as a team.
I could tell they were both trying not to study me too closely, to give me a moment to sort through everything. Lydie took the opportunity to get up and retrieve the coffeepot, even though none of us had finished more than half a cup. She warmed us up anyway, and after she’d returned the pot to the counter, she stood for a moment looking out the window over the sink. It was a view of trees: the little hill of Christmas pines that sloped up from the bottom of the lawn. On the other side, a half mile down the road, was my house. You couldn’t see it from here. You couldn’t see it unless you climbed to the top of that hill or went driving down the road.
After a minute, she turned from the sink and suggested that we take our coffee and go out for a little walk.
George gave her a skeptical look. “Don’t you think it’s a little cold out?”
“It’s not that bad. And anyway, you’ve got coats.”
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked. She shook her head. Confused, I glanced from her to George. It was difficult not to communicate anything more with that glance, not to show that we had our own way of looking at each other when no one else was present. He gave a small shrug and turned away.
“It’s better for you, Hazel, to talk to George about the business side of things. Hammer out the details, see if it’s something you want to think more about.” The corners of her mouth turned down, and I wondered what was crossing her mind. Was it a tiny sliver of worry, an instinctive shiver at the thought that she was sending her husband out to walk alone with a woman? Did that concern have anything to do with me?
In any case, a few minutes later, George and I were walking over the front lawn toward the road. I’d thought we would go around back to walk up the hill, but George led us the other way, and then I understood: on the hill, we would have been visible from the kitchen window. Lydie could watch us going this direction, too, but it would take more effort; she’d have to stand in the dining room and sweep the curtains aside to see.
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