“Where should I put it all?”
“Beats me,” Lois called up. “Down here in the front parlor for now, I suppose.”
“I’m sorry, Noni. I don’t want to be a nuisance.”
“Leftovers all right? That’s all I’ve got.”
“Yeah, of course, Noni. I can go shopping for us tomorrow.”
“Good, we need a new AC for that room.”
Susan could hear her grandmother’s heavy steps to the kitchen. Outside her window was still that same live oak, its leaves big and green in the last of the sunlight. And there, behind the shelves of junk, was her small desk with nothing on it, like she was meant to come back to this room one more time, whether she wanted to or not. She grabbed the doll and a plastic helmet and three metal trucks and carried them quickly down the stairs, Lois calling to her from the kitchen, “We’ll have to get boxes for that crap.”
SUSAN’S HAIR was still damp from her shower, and she sat across from her grandmother at the same small table they had always owned in the same place it had always been, up against the kitchen wall beneath the window that looked out at the woods. That same lace curtain hung in front of it, too, but on the sill was a carton of Carltons and Lois’s ashtray and a stack of coupons and a white Bic lighter. The sun was down and Lois had turned on the overhead bulb, which was still too bright and so often had made Susan feel—if she’d eaten with Lois at all—that she was strapped down and being interrogated. And now her grandmother kept looking over at her. She’d warmed up their lasagna in the microwave, and even though it was dry and cool in places, Susan was glad to see that she was still cooking for herself. Lois sat back and sipped from her glass of Cabernet. “You cut it yourself?”
“Yeah.” Susan made herself smile. “Does it look like it?”
Lois seemed to want to say more on the subject, but she waved her hand in the air and said, “It’s none of my damn business, Suzie, but if you’re going to be here shouldn’t I know more about you and your husband?”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
Susan sipped her own wine. It was bitter and had begun to lose its flavor. Pushed into the center of the table between them was her old chair. When Don was alive, that’s where she used to sit, and it was strange how she never thought of him much, this kind man who so often had tried to be a buffer between her and Lois. If he was here Susan could probably just tell her grandmother the truth. I’m writing about my childhood, and I needed to come home and I don’t know if I’ve ever loved anyone, Noni.
“He’s the best one you ever had. You do know that.”
“Yeah.”
Lois stared at her a moment. Her grandmother’s hair had thinned so much over the years, and now she wore very little makeup and she had pockets of flesh under each eye that seemed to droop. It made her look more resigned about things.
“Well.” Lois pushed herself up and out of her chair. “I need a cigarette.”
“How much are you smoking, Noni?”
“Six a day. So what?” She picked up her wine glass and grabbed her ashtray and lighter. “Come out with me, if you want.” She disappeared into the rear hallway, and there came the opening of the door to the screened porch then the closing of it. Susan sat there feeling as if Lois hadn’t really meant for her to join her out there at all.
NOW SHE lay in the dark in the narrow bed of her girlhood. She was naked and sweating. Earlier she’d rested that World War II fan on her desk, plugged it in, and pointed it at her mattress, but it wobbled loudly and she was afraid the blades would come flying off. From the open windows came the smell of pine and jasmine. It was a night bloomer that Don had planted too close to their house, and Lois told him to cut it down because it stinks, though he never did. But Lois rarely went outside anyway, and she kept the windows closed and locked, the air conditioner on until those few months when she needed warmth.
Susan could hear the quiet hum of Lois’s air conditioner now. Lying in this heat, it was hard not to feel neglected or punished in some way, though just before they’d both gone to bed Lois had stood in the open doorway of her bedroom and said, “You can sleep in here tonight, if you want.” Behind Lois was the dim light of her bedside lamp, that dark comforter on her bed, and that even darker carpet on the floor. Until she was ten or eleven, Susan had slept in the same bed with her, her grandmother’s comforting warmth and weight beside her, the smells of cold cream and cigarette smoke. But to do so now, for even one night, would feel like a regression of some kind.
“That’s okay, Noni. I’ve got the fan.”
Lois had shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Then she closed the door behind her and called through it, “Good night.”
And it had been a good night. Out on the porch after dinner, they’d sipped their wine and Lois smoked two cigarettes and talked about the “mousy little bitches” who complained about her being this month’s inspector for yesterday’s Fourth Saturday Antiques Fair.
“They think I’m bossy when I’m just doing my damn job. At least Marianne sticks up for me.”
Then Lois talked about her awhile, her employee Susan had yet to meet. “She’s the best help I ever had, but she’s a prissy missy, I don’t know.” Lois waved her hand in the air again. It was a mannerism she’d always had. Like she was shrugging off not what she just said but anything that someone else might say back. It used to make Susan furious, as if she were forever being shut up before she could say a word. But tonight, it did not. They were both sitting in the near-dark, only the dim yellow light on over the door behind them, and watching and listening to Lois, her cigarette smoke wafting out the black screen into the night, Susan felt as if she were in a museum and the woman who’d raised her was some talking exhibit of what had once been but had really never changed. And the younger Susan would have been hurt by what Noni had just said, that Marianne was “the best help” she’d ever had, because how many hours, weeks, years had Susan spent behind the register of that depressing shop? But Lois was right too. All Susan had ever done was read there. She rarely dusted or greeted the customers or even looked up when one walked in, the bell over the door jangling. Smile at them, Suzie. You can at least do that.
Though she could not, and did not, and as Lois went from criticizing Marianne to telling Susan how she’d run off a young picker today who was trying to “steal” from her, Susan just sipped her wine and listened, grateful that Lois was leaving her alone for now, something she’d gotten surprisingly good at over the years.
But it was too hot in this room. Susan swung her legs off the mattress and turned the old fan back on. Its engine moaned just before the blades began to turn, and as she lay back down on her back, the warm moving air felt old too, like the past itself was making her sweat.
11
ELAINE MUIR is ninety-one years old and has her blood pressure checked twice a month. It’s three in the afternoon, the sun a high haze, and as Daniel opens the passenger door for her and helps her out of his truck, her hands small but strong in his, he can smell her lipstick and perfume and he does not let go until both her feet are flat on the asphalt. Daniel is sweating under his short-sleeved shirt, but she’s wearing soft-soled shoes, a gray wool skirt, and a white cardigan over a white blouse.
“Nobody’s like you, Daniel.”
“Don’t kid a kidder, Elaine.” Daniel takes her arm and begins to walk her across the lot. It’s newly paved, the white lines of the parking spaces too bright, and it gives off the hard industrial scent of black oil that begins to squeeze Daniel’s empty stomach. He’s tempted to hurry, but he won’t.
Elaine says, “Oh, if I were only thirty years younger.”
“Promises, promises.”
It’s the kind of flirtation Daniel can almost enjoy, though it sometimes leaves him feeling like a reformed arsonist reaching for a can of gasoline while eyeing the matches.
Elaine was still talking. “Were you, Daniel? You must have been.”
“I’m sorry, Elaine. Was I what?”
“Married.”
They are moving into the shade of the entrance now. An obese woman sits in a wheelchair near the glass doors smoking a cigarette. Her pant cuffs are rolled up, and her ankles and lower legs are swollen and purple and Daniel thinks of Tommy Banks at Norfolk having both his feet amputated because of his diabetes. After that, he got around in a wheelchair, and any con who owed him had to push him wherever he needed to go.
“No, Elaine. I never was.”
“That’s hard to believe, Daniel.” There’s a smile in her voice when she says it, but her words enter him like a gold coin dropped into a dank well. Elaine grips his hand harder as they take the one step up onto concrete. She raises her head and smiles at the obese woman. “Good afternoon.”
The woman exhales smoke and nods and flicks ash at her feet. Her toes are nearly black, and Daniel can’t look at them. He pushes the blue handicapped button on the wall.
“Don’t you agree, Daniel?” He and Elaine are in the elevator now. She’s been saying something about appetites—food and nicotine. “I try not to judge, but the addiction must be very strong indeed.”
“It is.”
“Did you ever smoke?”
“When I was young.” He’d started in Walpole at twenty-four. Why not?
“Was it difficult to quit?”
“Yes.” But it was a suffering he welcomed.
“Do you think he’ll be here today?”
“He usually is.”
“Oh, good.”
The elevator doors open, and Daniel takes Elaine’s arm and walks her across a shining corridor into the waiting room of a doctor who’s fifty years younger than she is, but her hair is set, her lipstick fresh, her skirt, blouse, and sweater pressed and matching. Daniel signs her in and soon a young nurse comes for her. She’s a hefty girl, and she smiles warmly at Elaine and compliments her hair and leads her slowly around a corner to the examination rooms.
Daniel sits in an empty chair and picks up a magazine without looking at its cover. A TV is suspended high in the corner of the waiting area, the volume turned low. It’s an afternoon talk show hosted by some psychologist in a blue suit, a big balding man with a mustache. He’s leaning forward in his chair talking to a young couple sitting across from him, two pale kids who look as if he’s just told them they do not really love one another and never have.
Daniel glances around the room. Five patients, all of them female, four women and one girl. Two are closer to Elaine’s age, and they sit side by side reading magazines through thick glasses. Near the door sits a woman from Daniel’s time, though she’s dyed her thinning hair brown, and a long varicose vein runs up her right calf. She has one of those small screens in her hand, and she’s squinting at it without reading glasses, flicking her finger across the glass over and over. Up against the wall have to be a mother and her daughter. The mother’s nice-looking, one of those minivan-driving women he sees so regularly in downtown Port City; they have the good skin and straight postures of the educated, but their hair always looks a bit frayed, and if you look closer you see they’re wearing tight gym clothing they haven’t had time to change out of before rushing to pick up their various children at their various activities. These mothers are always carrying water bottles or cardboard cups of coffee or tea, and they sip from them as they chat cheerfully with other women just like them, women at the height of their powers who seem to be giving all of it to everyone else at all times. This one’s wearing a sleeveless top, jeans, and sandals, her bare shoulders and arms lean and muscled as she studies the TV up in the corner as if it were revealing an important secret. Her daughter, in shorts and a Dartmouth T-shirt, is showing too much of her legs and she’s chewing gum while flipping the pages of a magazine so quickly she can’t possibly be seeing anything long enough to decide it isn’t for her.
The mother looks over at him. Daniel opens his magazine and puts on his glasses and reads whatever he first sees, though he isn’t reading at all. He can feel the woman’s eyes on him, and he’s aware of the skin of his own face, how thin it is, how it masks nothing, really. But can she see it? That he means her and her daughter no harm? And now there’s a burning weight on his bladder, but he stays where he is.
Behind the walls it was a joke if somebody said they didn’t belong there. Everybody who was there belonged there. And if you whined about your trial or your sentence you weren’t stand-up, so you just put your head down and did your fucking time. Even if it was for the rest of your life. But at Norfolk, smoking on the concrete stairs of the Twos or Threes after evening chow, guys would talk. One was Jay McGonigle. He had hair black as an Indian’s, and he kept it combed back with Vitalis when most of the cons were letting theirs grow out like kids did on the outside. McGonigle had meticulous sideburns and was always working the sliver of a fingernail between his teeth. He was handsome too, with the deep eyes and strong jaw of a film star. It was easy to see how he’d gotten women out on the street.
Except he hated them.
Another con would be talking about his wife or girlfriend back home, how she was a cold bitch for letting him down or she was a saint for putting up with him but now she was a fucking whore who couldn’t wait for him, and McGonigle said one time, “They’re all fucking’whores. Every last one of them.” It was the way he said it, his eyes on the steel mesh of the cage alongside the steps, though he seemed to be seeing beyond it to something he savored. His hatred. A dozen years earlier he’d killed three young women in ten days. He’d strangled them after he couldn’t get it up. That was the word about McGonigle, that he couldn’t get hard with a woman though he didn’t like boys, either. Something was dead in him and so he’d murdered those three girls for reminding him of it. Danny was smoking then. He remembers looking away from McGonigle and stubbing out his cigarette and walking up the steps past him to his room on the second floor of the Threes. Up the hill in Walpole, they called your cell your house. But at Norfolk, it was a room, and yes, Danny Ahearn belonged where he was, but not like McGonigle did. The only hatred Danny ever had was for himself. Especially those first years after Linda. Especially up the hill where there were no programs like at Norfolk, no morning schooling, no trade work in the afternoon, no house reps for each block house, no Debate Club or Quiz Club, the smartest or most educated cons competing against college kids who came in every few Saturday nights, the auditorium packed with inmates rooting for the Norfolk boys, who regularly beat brainy kids from Boston College and Northeastern, even Dartmouth and Harvard. It was a thing to see, and for days after a win there’d be a better feeling in the air of the shops and the schoolroom, the mess hall and quad, that maybe they weren’t a bunch of hopeless degenerates after all, that maybe something good could come from something bad.
“Good news, Daniel.” Elaine’s smiling down at him, the young nurse at her side. “One-thirty over ninety.”
“That’s great, hon. That’s real good.” He begins to close his magazine and sees for the first time what he’d been staring at. A man his age is fly-fishing on the bank of a stream under cottonwood trees. He’s graying, his eyes narrowed and his chin up, his line a whip out on the water, just a man relaxing in the setting sun of all his accomplishments.
Daniel sets the magazine back on the table. He stands and takes Elaine’s arm and thanks the young nurse, but as he leads Elaine out of the waiting room of women to the elevators, pretending to listen to all the nice things the handsome young doctor told her, there is the picture of Susan Dunn burned into Daniel’s head, her small lovely face, and he knows that as much as he does not want to, he needs to finish writing her that letter; he needs to finish it and then he needs to mail it to Professor Susan Dunn, Eckerd College, St. Petersburg, Florida. And this should happen sooner rather than later, for his bladder feels full when he knows it’s not, just another symptom of what his own doctor told him before Daniel stopped going to see him. And those Victorian chairs. He has to get those done too.
The elevator doors open, and Daniel gui
des Elaine into it, this old woman for whom each afternoon like this is a small gift she prefers to unwrap as slowly as she possibly can.
THE RAIN begins as Daniel is getting ready to cook supper. There’s a sudden drumming on his tin roof, then the smell of ozone coming through his casement screens. Out his kitchen’s front window a puddle is already pooling in the yard, and he kneels on his bed and rolls that window shut. Back at the stove, he dumps a can of beans into a pot over blue flames. He should boil a hot dog too, maybe some peas or corn, but he’s not up to it. On his Formica table sits his letter to Susan. He’d come home from dropping off Elaine Muir and just stared at it. Then he read it over and it felt to him like the truth. But who the hell really wants to hear it?
Daniel grabs his wooden spoon and stirs the beans. He can smell the bacon and molasses in it, and he thinks of Willie Teague. It was Teague’s favorite meal, but Polaski would make him lie facedown on the floor before he could eat it. Polaski tortured Willie. If Teague even grunted something under his breath, Polaski would punish him for it. He’d cut his TV privileges. He’d crank up the heat in Teague’s room, or if it was winter, he’d shut it off. He’d take his shower privileges or yank access to the commissary, especially when Teague was out of TP. He’d throw away Teague’s mail or tell him he had a visitor when he had none. When Teague’s meals came, Polaski would order a rectal search just for the fuck of it.
This went on for months because Polaski just didn’t like Teague, his sunken chest and underbite and gray eyes, this foster kid who went on to become a professional car thief. And so Teague just snapped. The day his wife smuggled in the gun, the metal detector was broken and there was no female screw on duty to pat her down. She had the .38 strapped up against her crotch under a loose dress, her cleavage showing up top.
When the shooting started Daniel was down in the barbershop cutting a CO’s hair. It was Johnny Sills, and when Sills heard the first shots he was up and running out into the quad right when Willie was coming out of the Threes, Polaski bleeding to death at the door to the cage. Danny saw the next part, he and a bunch of other cons. Sills had both hands up like he was trying to talk Willie into giving up the gun, but Willie pointed it and shot and the slug ripped through Sills’s heart and Willie was running into the Fives and seconds later came the last shot of that afternoon and Willie Teague was free of the place.
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