“This must be terrible for you.” Her name, she said, was June.
“Yes, m’am. It’s terrible for all of us.”
“Is there something you want to say? Something you want other mothers to know?”
“M’am?”
June crossed her knees and Mavis saw that this was the first time she had worn the white high-heeled shoes. The soles were barely smudged. “You know. Something to warn them, caution them, about negligence.”
“Well.” Mavis took a deep breath. “I can’t think of any. I guess. I.”
The photographer squatted, cocking his head as he examined the possibilities.
“So some good can come out of this awful tragedy?” June’s smile was sad.
Mavis straightened against the success of Sal’s fingernails. The camera clicked. June moved her felt-tipped pen into place. It was a fine thing. Mavis had never seen anything like it—made ink on the paper but dry, not all blotty. “I don’t have nothing to say to strangers right now.”
For the second time the photographer adjusted the front window shade and walked back to the sofa holding a black box to Mavis’ face.
“I understand,” said June. Her eyes went soft, but the shine was like that of the neighbors. “And I do hate to put you through this, but maybe you could just tell me what happened? Our readers are simply appalled. Twins and all. Oh, and they want you to know you are in their prayers every single day.” She let her glance sweep the boys and Sal. “And you all too. They are praying for each and every one of you.”
Frankie and Billy James looked down at their bare feet. Sal rested her head on her mother’s shoulder while she clenched the flesh at Mavis’ waist.
“So could you tell us?” June smiled a smile that meant “Do me this favor.”
“Well.” Mavis frowned. She wanted to get it right this time. “He didn’t want the Spam. I mean the kids like it but he don’t so. In this heat you can’t keep much meat. I had a whole chuck steak go green on me once so I went and took the car, just some weenies, and I thought, well, Merle and Pearl. I was against it at first but he said—”
“M-e-r-l-e?”
“Yes, m’am.”
“Go on.”
“They wasn’t crying or nothing but he said his head hurt. I understood. I did. You can’t expect a man to come home from that kind of work and have to watch over babies while I go get something decent to put in front of him. I know that ain’t right.”
“So you took the twins. Why didn’t you take the other children along?”
“It’s a weasel out back,” said Frankie.
“Groundhog,” said Billy James.
“Shut!” Sal leaned over Mavis’ stomach and pointed at her brothers.
June smiled. “Wouldn’t it have been safer,” she continued, “with the other children in the car? I mean, they’re older.”
Mavis slid her thumb under her bra strap, pulling it back over her shoulder. “I wasn’t expecting no danger. Higgledy Piggledy is just yonder. I could of went to the Convenience but their stuff sits too long for me.”
“So you left the newborns in the car and went in to buy some chuck steak—”
“No, m’am. Weenies.”
“Right. Wieners.” June was writing quickly but didn’t seem to be crossing out anything. “But what I want to ask is, why did it take so long? To buy one item.”
“It didn’t. Take long. I couldn’t of been in there more than five minutes, tops.”
“Your babies suffocated, Mrs. Albright. In a hot car with the windows closed. No air. It’s hard to see that happening in five minutes.”
It could be sweat, but it hurt enough to be blood. She didn’t dare swat Sal’s hand away or acknowledge the pain even slightly. Instead she scratched the corner of her mouth and said, “I’ve punished myself over that, but that’s pretty near the most it could of been. I walked in there straight to the dairy section and picked up two packs of Armours which is high you know but I didn’t even look for the price. Some of them is cheaper but just as good. But I was hurrying so I didn’t look.”
“You were hurrying?”
“Oh, yes, m’am. He was fit to be tied. Spam ain’t nothing for a working man to eat.”
“And wieners are?”
“I thought about chops. I thought about chops.”
“Didn’t you know your husband was coming home for supper, Mrs. Albright? Doesn’t he come home for supper every day?”
She’s a really nice person, Mavis thought. Polite. She didn’t look around the room or at the boys’ feet, or jump at the crashing noise from the rear of the house, followed by a toilet flush.
The sound of the photographer snapping his cases was loud when the toilet stopped. “Got it,” he said. “Real nice meeting you, m’am.” He leaned in to shake Mavis’ hand. His hair was the same color as the reporter’s.
“Get enough of the Cadillac?” asked June.
“Plenty.” He made an O with thumb and forefinger. “You all be nice, hear?” He touched his hat and was gone.
Sal left off squeezing her mother’s waist. She leaned forward and concentrated on swinging her foot, only occasionally hitting Mavis’ shin.
From where they sat no one in the room could see the Cadillac parked in front of the house. But it had been seen for months by everybody in the neighborhood and could now be seen by anybody in Maryland since the photographer had taken more shots of it than he had of them. Mint green. Lettuce green. Cool. But the color wouldn’t show in the newspaper. What would show would be the size, the flashiness of the place where babies had died. Babies forever unseen now because the mother did not even have a snapshot of their trusting faces.
Sal jumped up and screamed, “Ow! Look! A beetle!” and stomped on her mother’s foot.
Mavis had said, “Yes, m’am. He come home for supper every day,” and wondered what that would be like: to have a husband who came home every day. For anything. After the reporter left, she wanted to go look at the damage Sal had done to her side, but Frank was still in the bathroom, asleep probably, and it wasn’t a good idea to bother him. She thought to clean the potato chip crumbs from the seams of the plastic covers, but where she wanted to be was in the Cadillac. It wasn’t hers; it was his, yet Mavis loved it maybe more than he did and lied to him about losing the second set of keys. It was what she talked about last as June left, saying, “It ain’t new, though. It’s three years old. A ’65.” If she could, she would have slept out there, in the back seat, snuggled in the place where the twins had been, the only ones who enjoyed her company and weren’t a trial. She couldn’t, of course. Frank told her she better not touch, let alone drive, the Cadillac as long as she lived. So she was as surprised as anybody when she stole it.
“You all right?” Frank was already under the sheet, and Mavis woke with a start of terror, which dissolved quickly into familiar fright.
“I’m okay.” She searched the darkness for a sign, trying to feel, smell his mood in advance. But he was a blank, just the way he had been at supper the evening of the newspaper interview. The perfect meat loaf (not too loose, not too tight—two eggs made the difference) must have pleased him. Either that or he had reached balance: enough in, enough at hand. In any case, he’d been easy, even playful, at the table, while the other children were downright bold. Sal had Frank’s old shaving razor unfolded by her plate and asked her father a series of questions, all starting with “Is it sharp enough to cut…?” And Frank would answer, “Cut anything from chin hair to gristle,” or “Cut the eyelashes off a bedbug,” eliciting peals of laughter from Sal. When Billy James spit Kool-Aid into Mavis’ plate, his father said, “Hand me that catsup, Frankie, and Billy you stop playing in your mother’s food, you hear?”
She didn’t think it would take them long, and seeing how they were at supper, enjoying each other’s jokes and all, she knew Frank would let the children do it. The newspaper people would think of something catchy, and June, “the only lady journalist the Courier had,” woul
d do the human interest.
Mavis tried not to stiffen as Frank made settling-down noises on the mattress. Did he have his shorts on? If she knew that she would know whether he was looking to have sex, but she couldn’t find out without touching him. As if to satisfy her curiosity, Frank snapped the waistband of his boxers. Mavis relaxed, permitted herself a sigh that she hoped sounded like a snore. The sheet was off before she could complete it. When he pulled her nightgown up, he threw it over her face, and she let that mercy be. She had misjudged. Again. He was going to do this first and then the rest. The other children would be behind the door, snickering, Sal’s eyes as cold and unforgiving as they were when she was told of the accident. Before Frank came to bed, Mavis had been dreaming of something important she was supposed to do, but couldn’t remember what it was. Just as it came to her, Frank had asked her was she all right. Now she supposed she really was all right because the important thing she’d forgotten would never need doing anymore.
Would it be quick like most always? or long, wandering, collapsing in wordless fatigue?
It was neither. He didn’t penetrate—just rubbed himself to climax while chewing a clump of her hair through the nightgown that covered her face. She could have been a life-size Raggedy Ann.
Afterwards he spoke to her in the dark. “I don’t know, Mave. I just don’t know.”
Should she say, What? What you mean? What don’t you know? Or keep quiet? Mavis chose silence because suddenly she understood that he was talking not to her but to the other children, snickering behind the door.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe we can fix it. Maybe not. I just don’t know.” He let out a deep yawn, then, “Don’t see how, though.”
It was, she knew, the signal—to Sal, to Frankie, to Billy James.
The rest of the night she waited, not closing her eyes for a second. Frank’s sleep was sound and she would have slipped out of bed (as soon as he had not smothered or strangled her) and opened the door except for the breathing beyond it. She was sure Sal squatted there—ready to pounce or grab her legs. Her upper lip would be raised showing eleven-year-old teeth too big for her snarling mouth. Dawn, Mavis thought, would be critical. The trap would be agreed upon but maybe not laid yet. Her sharpest concentration would be needed to locate it before it sprung.
At the first hint of gray light Mavis eased out of the bed. If Frank woke it was all over. Clutching a pair of red pedal pushers and a Daffy Duck sweatshirt, she made it to the bathroom. She took a soiled brassiere from the hamper and got dressed fast. No panties, and she couldn’t go back in the bedroom for her shoes. The big thing was to get past the other children’s room. The door stood open and, although there was no sound coming out, Mavis chilled at the thought of approaching it. Down the hall to the left was the little kitchen–dining room, the living room to the right. She would have to decide which way she was headed before she ran past that door. They would probably expect her to go straight to the kitchen as usual, so maybe she should shoot for the front door. Or maybe they counted on her changing a habit, and the trap was not in the kitchen at all.
Suddenly she remembered her purse was in the living room, perched on the television cabinet, which, when the set broke, had become a catchall. And the spare keys were pinned under a tear in the purse’s lining. Holding her breath, eyes wide to the darkness, Mavis padded quickly past the other children’s open door. With her back exposed to that much danger, she felt feverish—sweaty and cold together.
Not only was her purse where she remembered, Sal’s galoshes were lying at the front door. Mavis grabbed the purse, stuck her feet in her daughter’s yellow boots and escaped onto the front porch. She did not look toward the kitchen and never saw it again.
Getting out of the house had been so intense, she was pulling the Cadillac away from the curb when she realized she had no idea of what to do next. She drove toward Peg’s; she didn’t know the woman all that well, but her tears at the funeral impressed Mavis. She had always wanted to know her better, but Frank found ways to prevent acquaintance from becoming friendship.
The one streetlight seemed miles away and the sun reluctant to rise, so she had trouble finding Peg’s house. When, finally, she did, she parked across the street to wait for stronger skylight before knocking on the door. Peg’s house was dark, the shade of the picture window still down. Complete quiet. The wooden girl in the petunias, her face hidden by a fresh blue bonnet, tilted a watering can, a family of carved ducks lined at her heels. The lawn, edged and close-cut, looked like a carpet sample of expensive wool. Nothing moved, neither the tiny windmill nor the ivy surrounding it. At the side of the house, however, a rose of Sharon, taller than Peg’s roof and older, was shaking. Stirred by the air conditioner’s exhaust it danced, roughing blossoms and buds to the grass. Wild, it looked wild, and Mavis’ pulse raced with it. According to the Cadillac’s clock it wasn’t five-thirty yet. Mavis decided to drive around for a while and return at a respectable hour. Six maybe. But they would be up, too, by then and Frank would see that the Caddy was gone. He would call the police for sure.
Mavis swung away from the curb, sad and frightened by how dumb she was. Not only was the whole neighborhood familiar with the car, a photograph of it would be in today’s paper. When Frank bought it and drove it home the men on the street slapped the hood and grinned, leaned in to sniff the interior, hit the horn and laughed. Laughed and laughed some more because its owner had to borrow a lawn mower every couple of weeks; because its owner had no screens in his windows and no working television; because two of his six porch posts had been painted white three months earlier, the rest still flaking yellow; because its owner sometimes slept behind the wheel of the car he’d traded in—all night—in front of his own house. And the women, who saw Mavis driving the children to the White Castle wearing sunglasses on cloudy days, flat-out stared before shaking their heads. As though they knew from the start that the Cadillac would someday be notorious.
Creeping at twenty miles per hour, Mavis entered route 121, thankful for the shelter of darkness left. As she passed the County Hospital, a silent ambulance glided out of the driveway. A green cross in a field of white slid from brilliant emergency light into shadow. Fifteen times she had been a patient there—four times for childbirth. During the next-to-last admission, when the twins were due, Mavis’ mother came from New Jersey to help out. She kept house and minded the other children for three days. When the twins were delivered, she went back to Paterson—a three-hour drive, thought Mavis. She could be there before The Secret Storm, which she had missed all summer long.
At a Fill ’n Go gas station, Mavis checked her wallet before she answered the attendant. Three ten-dollar bills were folded behind her driver’s license.
“Ten,” she said.
“Gallons or dollars, m’am?”
“Gallons.”
In the adjacent lot, Mavis noticed the window of a breakfast diner reflecting coral in the early light.
“Is that there place open?” she shouted over highway truck roar.
“Yes, m’am.”
Tripping occasionally on gravel, she walked toward the diner. Inside, the waitress was eating crab cakes and grits behind the counter. She covered her plate with a cloth and touched the corners of her mouth before wishing Mavis a good morning and taking her order. When Mavis left, carrying a paper cup of coffee and two honey dips in a napkin, she caught the waitress’s broad smile in the Hires Root Beer mirror by the exit. The grin bothered her all the way back to the gas station until, stepping into the car, she saw her canary-yellow feet.
Away from the pump, parked behind the diner, she put her breakfast on the dashboard while rummaging in the glove compartment. She found an unopened pint of Early Times, another bottle with an inch or so of scotch whiskey, paper napkins, a teething ring, several rubber bands, a pair of dirty socks, a battery-dead flashlight, a tube of lipstick, a Florida map, rolls of breath mints and a few traffic tickets. She dropped the teething ring into her purse, twist
ed her hair into a sad little ponytail that stuck out from the rubber band like hen feathers, and smeared the stranger’s lipstick on her mouth. Then she sat back and sipped the coffee. Too nervous to ask for milk or sugar, she’d ordered it black and could not force herself to take a third swallow. The stranger’s lipstick smirked sloppily from the cardboard rim.
The Cadillac drank ten gallons of gasoline every ninety miles. Mavis wondered whether to call her mother or simply arrive. The latter seemed smarter. Frank may have called his mother-in-law by now or might do so any minute. Better if her mother could say truthfully, “I don’t know where she is.” Paterson took five hours, not three, and she had four dollars and seventy-six cents when she saw its sign. The fuel gauge touched E.
The streets looked narrower than she remembered, and the stores were different. The northern leaves were already starting to turn. Driving underneath them, in the dappled hall they made, she felt as though the pavement slid forward instead of retreating. The faster she traveled, the more road appeared ahead.
The Cadillac shut down a block from her mother’s house, but Mavis managed to coast across the intersection and incline the automobile against the curb.
It was too soon. Her mother wouldn’t be home from the preschool till the afternoon children had been picked up. The door key was no longer under the reindeer, so Mavis sat on the back porch and struggled out of the yellow boots. Her feet looked as though they belonged to somebody else.
Frank had already called at five-thirty a.m. when Mavis was staring at Peg’s rose of Sharon. Birdie Goodroe told Mavis she had hung up on him after telling him she couldn’t think what the hell he was talking about and who the hell did he think he was, dragging her out of her sleep? She was not pleased. Not then and not later when her daughter tapped on the kitchen window looking like a bat out of hell, which is what she said as soon as she opened the door. “Girl, you look like a bat out of hell what you doing up here in little kiddie boots?”
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