As if it was any of her business! Such a snoopy, idle old woman she was becoming.
Downstairs, her husband made his racket. Wood ripped and groaned. A saw started up, then stopped in mid-whine. Every so often something heavy collided, or dropped, and Beate waited for the noise to begin again so as to reassure
herself he had not had a heart attack. He was rebuilding the front door and entryway, installing new molding and etched-glass side panels. He had been remodeling the house in one way or another for the last five years. She had lived through the dismantled staircase, the floors stripped down to their joists, ceilings peeled away to the rafters, drywall dust, dishes washed in the bathtub, rooms navigated by flashlight, ladders tangling her feet when she went down to do the laundry. Always there were heaps of debris and supplies, his scattered tools. Someday, he said, they would want to sell the house and move on. The upgrades would make a huge difference in the asking price, and who could argue with that?
But this room was hers, her sewing room, and he was not allowed to interfere with it. Here was her cutting table, the big Bernina sewing machine, her quilting frame, the thread caddy, the cupboard set aside for knitting, the dressmaker form her children had long ago nicknamed Miss Swanky. Here she had good light and a comfortable chair, some framed prints on the walls, a radio for company. Here she spent her time, aside from house chores, and the eating and sleeping that too often felt like chores. She could close the door on the infernal noise and destruction her husband was intent on making, and if that was what the two of them had come to, each of them retreating into their separate spheres, well, they were used to each other, they didn’t fuss or argue, they were able to talk about normal things. There were worse marriages. You heard about them all the time.
She was working on a quilt of special complexity and magnificence, twelve appliqué blocks, each with a different pattern, pieced together, then bordered and bound and quilted. Three of the blocks remained to be completed. The finished blocks were pinned onto the flannel sheet that served as her design wall, where she could study them and decide their final arrangement. Intricate wreaths and vases of flowers and leaves, perching birds and twining vines. Pretty cascades of weaving waving blossom, more lush and artful than anything found in nature.
Beate smoothed the fabric of the tenth block. Tracing and cutting and pressing the fabric pieces had been the difficult part. Now she was ready to place and stitch them onto the background fabric. It was slow, meticulous work of the kind she liked best. She moved between the pattern diagram and the fabric square, comparing the two. Little Brown Bird, the blocks were called. They had a prim, somewhat antique look. So in places she had changed the pattern, added free-form elements, and there was some anxiety about how these might turn out.
Her husband’s noise rose and fell, rose and fell. She was used to it, it did not distract her. But the sound of a car horn honking in a cheery, shave-and-a-haircut rhythm made her put down her fabric and go to the window.
The children had climbed down from the truck bed and were playing a new game, tearing around the backyard in some giddy version of tag. The man sat behind the wheel and honked whenever one of them approached the truck, sending them shrieking and fleeing. The children’s mother must have gone inside, though Beate wasn’t certain. Her view allowed her to look straight down into their yard, although a portion of it was blocked by the fence line. She saw the smallest child, a girl of four or five, wearing her usual costume of grubby pink shirt and a pink tutu. There was a sturdy little boy who might have been a year older, and a long-legged girl who Beate guessed to be seven or eight. They ran and screamed and the truck’s horn blared, egging them on.
All the commotion had roused Beate’s ancient collie, Franklin; he stood at the fence, his plumy tail batting from side to side, adding his hoarse barking to the mix. She would have to go down and see to him. It was almost time to fix her husband’s lunch anyway. She was glad the children seemed to be having one of their good days, since children like these, through no fault of their own, began life with two strikes against them.
She called Franklin inside from the back door and he came reluctantly, hoisting himself up the steps and settling into his bed in the corner of the kitchen. “Bad dog,” Beate said, not meaning it. She cut bread from the bakery loaf, toasted it, layered on cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, the ham from their dinner two nights ago. For her own lunch she ate some of the ham and cheese without sitting down.
She went out to the front hallway, where her husband was rubbing sandpaper over a section of wood molding. The walls in the entryway were taken down to their studs and the floor was covered with a tarp. “Your lunch is ready,” she said. “I’ll leave it on the counter, unless you think you won’t get to it for awhile.”
“I’ll eat in just a bit.” He put the sandpaper down and looked around him for something he couldn’t find.
“You look like you’re making progress.”
“Ah, it’s slower than I’d like . . .”
Beate watched him lean the molding carefully upright, then search the floor for whatever it was he needed. She went back to the kitchen, covered the sandwich with a clean dishtowel, and climbed the stairs again. There was never any point in interrupting him when he was in the middle of something, although she had always put her own work aside when someone needed her attention. She did not really resent it; it was just the difference between men and women.
She was pleased with the way the quilt was turning out. Leaf and vine, blossom and bud. The finished, splendid quilt already existed in her mind’s eye. She would probably enter it in a quilter’s show, but after that she was unsure what to do with it, beyond storing it away with so much else she’d made. The house was already full of her quilts and coverlets and fancy work. Beate supposed that her daughter would eventually inherit much of it. Her resolutely unmarried daughter who did her best not to live the kind of life that made space for heirloom quilts. But neither would her son and his family welcome it. Beate imagined the unpleasant daughter-in-law looking askance at the quilt and declaring it hopelessly old-fashioned, unsuitable, and what in the world were they supposed to do with it? Beate tried to be nice to the daughter-in-law for her grandsons’ sake. They lived far enough away that Beate and her husband only saw the children on long-planned and exhausting holidays. That was not really the daughter-in-law’s fault, even if other things might be.
The next day, Sunday, her husband was still busy making his virtuous and necessary mess. Beate took Franklin for a walk. He was not yet such an old dog that he didn’t enjoy a walk. It was a fine summer’s day, with a blue sky and sailing white clouds. She should take walks for her own health more often, just as she should watch her blood pressure, remember her vitamins, and so on. Had age always required such vigilance, such scolding self-reminders? Were you ever allowed to simply let yourself be?
Several of her neighbors were out doing yard chores, mowing and weeding and sweeping their walks clean of grass clippings. She and Franklin stopped to chat with them and to allow Franklin to flirt and have his ears scratched. At the end of the block she intended to double back, but it was so pleasant to be out—really, she could make more of an effort to exercise—that she decided to walk a little farther and cut through the alley to her back door.
The alley was a clear line of demarcation. If Beate and her husband went out of their front door, their neighborhood was handsome and prosperous, lined with houses much like their own: older, well-kept, some with remnants of Victorian fretwork or gables set off by careful paint jobs. The plantings in the yards, hydrangeas, lilacs, rose hedges, grew leggy over the years and were pruned back with the same sternness that maintained porch stairs and railings, roofs, window frames, foundations. Without this shared vigilance (her husband surely did his part!), the street might lapse into shabby decline.
The view from their back door was less encouraging. The district on the far side of the alley had once held small workingmen’s cottages, built at the same ti
me as their own house, although they had not fared as well. Here and there it was possible to make out one of the original structures beneath the added-on porches and carports and bedrooms. But most of them had given way to the cheaper kinds of rental property, duplexes and apartment “villages” and stand-alone houses, all of which had begun to fall apart as soon as they were occupied. Rust dripped from the gutters, siding buckled, front doors were kicked open until they sagged on their hinges. Beate supposed she was a snob. She was wary of her less fortunate neighbors, of their shoutings and honkings and slammings, their lives so unnecessarily on public display, the occasional police cruiser moving slowly along their streets.
The alley held refuse cans and prowling cats. Older children sometimes gathered there to smoke and set off firecrackers and get into other semicriminal mischief. But this was Sunday morning and no one else was about. Birds piped. Tree branches hung over the back fences, and the fences themselves were thickly covered with honeysuckle and orange trumpet vine. Sections of pavement gave way in places to gravel and the gravel to dirt. If you blurred your eyes, you could pretend it was a country lane. She thought about nursery rhymes, their landscape of milkmaids and stiles and shepherd boys. Then she tried to follow the thought back to its origin, why it had come to her. Things that were not what you wanted them to be. Something about what it must have really been like, country life all those centuries ago, the smells, the mud, the pestilence, not some jolly rhyme.
She was almost at her own house when a man stepped out from the gate opposite hers, and Franklin, startled, began to bark and tangle himself in his leash. She recognized the man as the tenant, the owner of the pickup truck, who presided over the household of children. She had never spoken to him but she knew him by sight. He was tall and thin and hunched, with a wedge of slick blond hair and a sharp-edged moustache. He did some sort of shift work, and Beate saw him most often in the late afternoon, arriving home and climbing out of the truck in his dark blue workshirt, the fabric sweated through along his back.
Since it was the weekend, he wore other clothes, a white T-shirt and jeans. Whatever he had come out into the alley for, he stopped and waited while Beate tried to quiet Franklin. He was still barking and turning in circles, binding the leash around her knees. “Sorry,” she said. “He just gets carried away.”
“Here now,” the man said to Franklin. His voice was oddly high and nasal. “You quit that.”
“He’s actually very friendly,” Beate said. Franklin, excited by his own noise, was caught in an endless loop of ecstatic barking.
“He doesn’t listen good, does he? You give him to me for a week and I’ll teach him to mind.”
“He’s an old dog,” Beate said, unsure whether she meant it as an explanation or an apology or a reproof. She got herself free of the leash, unlocked her own gate and pushed Franklin inside. She felt the man staring after her.
By the time she got Franklin into the house and settled, and went back upstairs, she couldn’t see him from the window. The brief, unpleasant encounter stayed with her. How she disliked such men, who believed that the firm hand was the answer to everything, who regarded all forms of womanish coaxing or reassuring or soothing with contempt. There had been times in years past when she was forced to intervene with her own husband, who was not by nature at all angry or intemperate, persuade him that the crying, misbehaving child needed comfort rather than punishment.
She had to wonder about the children in the neighbor’s house and how they fared in his surly company. But then, who else but he would have bought them all those toys?
For some months the man had been the only one living in the house, and Beate had paid him no particular attention. Then the woman had become an occasional presence, her old brown sedan parked next to the truck some nights, the two of them walking out together in the mornings and driving their separate ways. The woman was tiny, with the kind of narrow, childish figure that made it hard to believe she had borne children herself. She had long, heavy black hair that she usually piled on top of her head and covered with a scarf, making a peculiar stovepipe shape.
She did not like to think of herself as nosy, but it had been difficult not to notice.
At some point the two youngest children had begun spending time at the house, mostly on weekends. Their mother would arrive with them midmorning and drive them back after supper. Who minded them when she spent nights away from them? A grandmother, or maybe the children’s father? Families these days were so distressed, so fragmented and badly rearranged, there was no telling. Then the woman and children had moved in, for all intents and purposes, and about that time the older girl began to make an appearance. A different car dropped her off and picked her up. School had still been in session then: it was likely that she had some living situation that was organized around school. Now that it was summer she had joined the others in the house across the alley, which scarcely seemed large enough for all of them.
“The mother almost never goes outside,” Beate told her husband that night at supper. He didn’t know who she meant, and she had to explain. “Don’t you think that’s odd? Sometimes she sits in her car and talks on her phone. Talks and talks. And sometimes it’s just the two little ones out there by themselves, and they’re simply too young to be without supervision.”
Her husband took another bite of his beef with horseradish sauce, chewed and swallowed it down before he answered. “Sounds as if you’re doing a pretty good job of supervising them.”
“Oh, thank you.” She only pretended to be offended. “I just wonder what she does in that house all day. Watches television, most likely.”
“Maybe she sews,” her husband said, another joke at her expense, but still nothing she had to take seriously. He was in a good mood because his work was going well.
Whatever misgivings Beate had about the man, it was true that he was the one who spent more time with the children, at least, in organized outdoor play. He’d come home from work, go inside briefly, then come back out to start tricycle races in the driveway, or pitch a foam baseball for the children to swing at. Whenever they connected and the ball went airborne, he led the cheering as the child ran imaginary bases. She really was a terrible snob. Why couldn’t she give the man some credit? People did the best they could.
Her husband still went to his office during the week. Someday soon he would retire for good, and there would be no peace or quiet under her roof. But for now she could enjoy having the freedom of the house. She lingered in the kitchen after the breakfast dishes were done, reading a magazine.
Once again it was the dog’s barking that interrupted her. She rose and went to the back door. He was standing on his hind legs, his front paws against the fence. It was a six-foot board fence but there were cracks in it, and someone in the alley was manipulating a long twig through one of them, wiggling it back and forth.
Beate went out to him, shushed him, unlocked the gate and opened it wide enough to see out. It was the girl from across the alley, the older child, her face pressed up to the boards while she poked at Franklin with the twig.
“Honey,” Beate said, and the girl stopped and gazed up at her, open-mouthed. “Don’t tease the dog. It’s not good for him.”
“I was just playing.” She had a small, snub-nosed face, freckles, two wings of lank brown hair. She wore a cotton shirt and shorts, and her bare legs had a couple of scabs that looked like scratched mosquito bites.
“That may be, but it gets him upset, and he’s too old to stand up like that.”
The girl let the twig drop, as if pretending it had never really interested her, then scooped up a small white teddy bear from the ground beside her. “Want to buy my bear?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Two dollars.” She wiggled it invitingly.
“No, I don’t need a bear. Why are you trying to sell it?”
The girl didn’t answer. She didn’t seem shy, only disinclined to speak. She picked up the twig again and put it to work tra
cing lines in the dirt. “What’s your name?” Beate asked.
“Kyra.” She spoke without looking up.
“Well Kyra, it’s nice to meet you. My name is Beate.”
She did look up then. “That’s not a name.”
“Yes it is. You see, I was born in Germany and I came to this country when I was just a little girl.”
The child looked dubious, as if Germany too might be something Beate had invented.
“How old are you?” Beate asked.
“Eight.”
She looked small for eight. Thin little legs and arms. “I was only five when I came here. I had to learn a whole new language.” She sensed Kyra wavering, reluctant to show any real enthusiasm but still loitering. “My dog is named Franklin. Would you like to pet him?”
Kyra said that she would, and Beate took hold of Franklin’s collar and let him stick his long nose through the gate. Kyra touched his nose, then pulled her hand back. “See, he’s a nice dog, you can play with him if you’re gentle.”
“Roger used to have a dog,” Kyra informed her. “It was black. His name was Tweaker.”
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