“I speak to you,” Eleanor said.
He was standing by the stove now, not as high, not nearly as high as the gas burners. His skin looked dry, yellowish, and his face somehow sad. She felt sorry for him.
“Where have you been living?”
He laughed. “Um-hm-hm. I live anywhere, everywhere. It doesn’t matter.”
She wanted to ask some questions, such as, “Do you feel the cold?” but she did not want to be personal, or prying. “It occurred to me you might like a bed,” she said more brightly. “You could sleep on the sofa in the side room. I mean, with a blanket.”
Again a laugh. “I don’t need to sleep. But it’s a kind thought. You’re very kind.” His eyes moved to the door, as Bessie walked in, making for her tablecloth of newspaper, on which stood her bowl of water and her unfinished bowl of creamy milk. His eyes followed the cat.
Eleanor felt a sudden apprehension. It was probably because Bessie had not seen him. That was certainly disturbing, when she could see him so well that even the wrinkles in his face were quite visible. He was clothed in strange material, gray-black, neither shiny nor dull.
“You must be lonely since your husband died,” he said. “But I admit you do well. Considering he didn’t leave you much.”
Eleanor blushed. She could feel it. John hadn’t been a big earner, certainly. But a decent man, a good husband, yes, he had been that. And their only child, a daughter, had been killed in a snow avalanche in Austria when she was twenty. Eleanor never thought of Penny. She had set herself never to think of Penny. She was disturbed, and felt awkward, because she thought of her now. And she hoped the creature would not mention Penny. Her death was one of life’s tragedies. But other families had similar tragedies, only sons killed in useless wars.
“Now you have your cat,” he said, as if he read her thoughts.
“Yes,” Eleanor said, glad to change the subject. “Bessie is ten. She’s had fifty-seven kittens. But three—no four years ago, I finally had her doctored. She’s a dear companion.”
Eleanor slipped away and got a big gray blanket, an army surplus blanket, from a closet and folded it in half on the sofa in the side room. He stood watching her. She put a pillow under the top part of the blanket. “That’s a little cozier,” she said.
“Thank you,” came the deep voice.
In the next days, he cut the high grass around the barn with a scythe, and moved a huge rock that had always annoyed Eleanor, embedded as it was in the middle of a grassy square in front of the barn. It was August, but quite cool. They cleared out the attic, and he carried the heaviest things downstairs and to the edge of the road to be picked up by Field’s. Some of these things were sold a few days later at auction, and fetched about thirty dollars. Eleanor still felt a slight tenseness when he was present, a fear that she might annoy him in some way, and yet in another way she was growing used to him. He certainly liked to be helpful. At night, he obligingly got on to his sofa bed, and she wanted to tuck him in, to bring him a cup of milk, but in fact he ate next to nothing, and then, as he said, only to keep her company. Eleanor could not understand where all his strength came from.
Vance rang up one day and said she had the pictures. Before Eleanor could ask about them, Vance had hung up. Vance was coming over at once.
“You took a picture of a chair, dear! Does he look like a chair?” Vance asked, laughing. She handed Eleanor the photographs.
There were twelve photographs in the batch, but Eleanor looked only at the top two, which showed him seated in the straight chair and standing by it. “Why, there he is!” she said triumphantly.
Vance hastily, but with a frown, looked at the pictures again, then smiled broadly. “Are you implying there’s something wrong with my eyes? It’s a chair, darling!”
Eleanor knew Vance was right, speaking for herself. Vance couldn’t see him. For a moment, Eleanor couldn’t say anything.
“I told you what would happen. Um-hm-hm.”
He was behind her, in the doorway of the side room, Eleanor knew, though she did not turn to look at him.
“All right. Perhaps it’s my eyes,” Eleanor said. “But I see him there!” She couldn’t give up. Should she tell Vance about his Herculean feats in the attic? Could she have got a big chest of drawers down the stairs by herself?
Vance stayed for a cup of tea. They talked of other things—everything to Eleanor was now “other” and a bit uninteresting and unimportant compared to him—and then Vance left, saying, “Promise me you’ll go to Dr. Nimms next week. I’ll drive you, if you don’t want to drive. Maybe you shouldn’t drive if your eyes are acting funny.”
Eleanor had a car, but she seldom used it. She didn’t care for driving. “Thanks, Vance, I’ll go on my own.” She meant it at that moment, but when Vance had gone, Eleanor knew she would not go to the eye doctor.
He sat with her while she ate her dinner. She now felt defensive and protective about him. She didn’t want to share him with anyone.
“You shouldn’t have bothered with those photographs,” he said. “You see, what I told you is true. Whatever I say is true.”
And yet he didn’t look brilliant or even especially intelligent, Eleanor reflected.
He tore a piece of bread rather savagely in half, and stuffed a half into his mouth. “You’re one of the very few people who can see me. Maybe only a dozen people in the world can see me. Maybe less than that.—Why should the others see me?” he continued, and shrugged his chunky shoulders. “They’re just like me.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He sighed. “Ugly.” Then he laughed softly and deeply. “I am not nice. Not nice at all.”
She was too confused to answer for a moment. A polite answer seemed absurd. She was trying to think what he really meant.
“You enjoyed taking care of your mother, didn’t you? You didn’t mind it,” he said, as if being polite himself and filling in an awkward silence.
“No, of course not. I loved her,” Eleanor said readily. How could he know? Her father had died when she was eighteen, and she hadn’t been able to finish college because of a shortage of money. Then her mother had become ill with leukemia, but she had lived on for ten years. Her treatment had taken all the money Eleanor had been able to earn as a secretary, and a little more besides, so that everything of value they had possessed had finally been sold. Eleanor had married at twenty-nine, and gone with John to live in Boston. Oh, the gone and lovely days! John had been so kind, so understanding of the fact that she had been exhausted, in need of human company—or rather, the company of people her own age. Penny had been born when she was thirty.
“Yes, John was a good man, but not so good as you,” he said, and sighed. “Hm-mm.”
Now Eleanor laughed spontaneously. It was a relief from the thoughts she had been thinking. “How can one be good—or bad? Aren’t we all a mixture? You’re certainly not all bad.”
This seemed to annoy him. “Don’t tell me what I am.”
Rebuffed, Eleanor said nothing more. She cleared the table.
She put him to bed, thanked him for his work in the garden that day—gouging up dandelions, no easy task. She was glad of his company in the house, even glad that no one else could see him. He was a funny doll that belonged to her. He made her feel odd, different, yet somehow special and privileged. She tried to put these thoughts from her mind, lest he disapprove of them, because he was looking, vaguely as usual, at her, with a resentment or a reproach, she felt. “Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“No,” he answered shortly.
The next morning, she found Bessie in the middle of the kitchen floor with her neck wrung. Her head sat in the strangest way on her neck, facing backwards. Eleanor seized up the corpse impulsively and pressed the cat to her breast. The head lolled. She knew he had done it. But why?
&
nbsp; “Yes, I did it,” his deep voice said.
She looked at the doorway, but did not see him. “How could you? Why did you do it?” Eleanor began to weep. The cat was not warm any longer, but she was not stiff.
“It’s my nature.” He did not laugh, but there was a smile in his voice. “You hate me now. You wonder if I’ll be going. Yes, I’ll be going.” His voice was fading as he walked through the living room, but still she could not see him. “To prove it, I’ll slam the door, but I don’t need to use the door to get out.” The door slammed.
She was looking at the front door. The door had not moved.
Eleanor buried Bessie in the back lawn by the barn, and the pitchfork was heavy in her hands, the earth heavier on her spade. She had waited until late afternoon, as if hoping that by some miracle the cat might come alive again. But Bessie’s body had grown rigid. Eleanor wept again.
She declined Vance’s next invitation to tea, and finally Vance came to see her, unexpectedly. Eleanor was sewing. She had quite a bit of work to do, but she was depressed and lonely, not knowing what she wanted, there being no person she especially wanted to see. She realized that she missed him, the strange creature. And she knew he would never come back.
Vance was disappointed because she had not been to see Dr. Nimms. She told Eleanor that she was neglecting herself. Eleanor did not enjoy seeing her old friend Vance. Vance also remarked that she had lost weight.
“That—little monster isn’t annoying you still, is he? Or is he?” Vance asked.
“He’s gone,” Eleanor said, and managed a smile, though what the smile meant, she didn’t know.
“How’s Bessie?”
“Bessie—was hit by a car a couple of weeks ago.”
“Oh, Eleanor! I’m sorry.—Why didn’t you—You should’ve told me! What bad luck! You’d better get another kitty. That’s always the best thing to do. You’re so fond of cats.”
Eleanor shook her head a little.
“I’m going to find out where there’s some nice kittens. The Carters’ Siamese might’ve had another illegitimate batch.” Vance smiled. “They’re always nice, half-Siamese. Really!”
That evening, Eleanor ate no supper. She wandered through the empty-feeling rooms of her house, thinking not only of him, but of her lonely years here, and of the happier first three years here when John had been alive. He had tried to work in Millersville, ten miles away, but the job hadn’t lasted. Or rather, the company hadn’t lasted. That had been poor John’s luck. No use thinking about it now, about what might have been if John had had a business of his own. Yes, once or twice, certainly, he had failed at that, too. But she thought more clearly of when he had been here, the funny little fellow who had turned against her. She wished he were back. She felt he would not do such a horrid thing again, if she spoke to him the right way. He had grown annoyed when she had said he was not entirely bad. But she knew he would not come back, not ever. She worked until ten o’clock. More letting out. More hems taken up. People were becoming square, she thought, but the thought did not make her smile that night. She tried to add three times eighty cents plus one dollar and twenty-five cents, and gave it up, perhaps because she was not interested. She looked at his photographs again, half expecting not to see him—like Vance—but he was still there, just as clear as ever, looking at her. That was some comfort to her, but pictures were so flat and lifeless.
The house had never seemed so silent. Her plants were doing beautifully. She had not long ago repotted most of them. Yet Eleanor sensed a negativity when she looked at them. It was very curious, a happy sight like blossoming plants causing sadness. She longed for something, and did not know what it was. That was strange also, the unidentifiable hunger, this loneliness that was worse and more profound than after John had died.
Tom Reynolds rang up one evening at 9 P.M. His wife was ill and he had to go at once to an “alert” at the Air Base. Could she come over and sit with his wife? He hoped to be home before midnight. Eleanor went over with a bowl of fresh strawberries sprinkled with powdered sugar. Mary Reynolds was not seriously ill, it was a daylong virus attack of some kind, but she was grateful for the strawberries. The bowl was put on the bed table. It was a pretty color to look at, though Mary could not eat anything just then. Eleanor felt herself, heard herself smiling and chatting as she always did, though in an odd way she felt she was not really present with Mary, not really even in the Reynoldses’ house. It wasn’t a “miles away” feeling, but a feeling that it was all not taking place. It was not even as real as a dream.
Eleanor went home at midnight, after Tom returned. Somehow she knew she was going to die that night. It was a calm and destined sensation. She might have died, she thought, if she had merely gone to bed and fallen asleep. But she wished to make sure of it, so she took a single-edged razor blade from her shelf of paints in the kitchen closet—the blade was rusty and dull, but no matter—and cut her two wrists at the bathroom basin. The blood ran and ran, and she washed it down with running cold water, still mindful, she thought with slight amusement, of conserving the hot water in the tank. Finally, she could see that the streams were lessening. She took her bath towel and wrapped it around both her wrists, winding her hands as if she were coiling wool. She was feeling weak, and she wanted to lie down and not soil the mattress, if possible. The blood did not come through the towel before she lay down on her bed. Then she closed her eyes and did not know if it came through or not. It really did not matter, she supposed. Nor did the finished and unfinished skirts and dresses downstairs. People would come and claim them.
Eleanor thought of him, small and strong, strange and yet so plain and simple. He had never told her his name. She realized that she loved him.
I Am Not As Efficient
As Other People
The shutters were the beginning of the crisis. Ralph’s depression, his sense of failure, had been going on long before the shutters, of course, maybe since he had bought the house, if he thought about it, but the shutters seemed glaringly to illustrate his incompetence.
Ralph Marsh worked in Chicago, had an apartment there, but he had also a country house which he called sometimes his cottage, sometimes his shack, twenty miles outside of Chicago. He was a bachelor of twenty-nine, and a salesman of hi-fi equipment. He had had raises and promotions in his four years with Basic-Hi, he knew his job and was his company’s best salesman, or so his superior had told him. Ralph knew the intricacies of a stereo set, and even considered himself reasonably good with his hands—not a genius do-it-yourself man, perhaps, but maybe better than average.
However, across Ralph’s ten yards of lawn lived the Ralstons, Ed and Grace, who bustled about every weekend, doing not merely useful and necessary tasks such as lawn cutting, fence painting and hedge trimming (their hedge was young and low, and Ed kept it cropped with the sharpest of corners), but more difficult jobs such as cement mixing for bricklaying, which in the Ralstons’ case had not meant simply piling one red brick on another: Ed had chipped into rectangles a number of large beige stones to create a low wall on the road side of his property. Part of the Ralstons’ garage was a workshop, whence came the buzz of Ed’s Black & Decker many hours every weekend. Ralph imagined Ed making furniture, repairing broken pipes, welding, doing things that Ralph would be afraid to attempt. Yet Ed Ralston, Ralph knew, was only a car salesman, probably hadn’t finished university. Ralph was not chummy with the Ralstons, they only nodded greetings in a neighborly way when they saw one another.
Ralph had realized, since his first weekend at his cottage, that he was going to be envious of Ed. For one thing, Ed had a wife, and a wife was certainly a help in a house. The Ralstons also had an apartment in Chicago, they had told Ralph on their first meeting, and they said they had bought their country place for next to nothing, because it had been an empty barn. Ed and Grace had chipped away at the stone façade of the barn to expose beautiful old mas
onry, had put in windows, and installed heating and electricity with the help of a couple of chums of Ed’s. They had bought their barn six months before Ralph acquired his house, and they were still at it every weekend, improving and adding things. Grace Ralston was as active as Ed, forever shaking out a doormat, hanging a wash on their plastic four-sided clothesline, or polishing windows.
Only when Ralph was tired around 7 P.M., wishing that he had someone to call him to a dinner already prepared, did he feel a little sorry for himself. Most of the time, he preferred to consider himself lucky. Ralph was at least six years younger than Ed, he earned more, and for all Ed’s expert stonelaying, Ed was stuck with a wife who was certainly a boring type, and stuck too with a tantrumy four-year-old daughter who didn’t look quite bright, in Ralph’s opinion, whereas Ralph was free as the breeze and had a mobile girlfriend of twenty-four who was fun and made no demands on him. She was a dark blonde named Jane Eberhart, married to an airline pilot. Most weekends she was able to come out to the country house and stay the night, perhaps three Saturday nights out of four. They could manage a few dates in Chicago, too.
But the shutters. Ralph had painted three shutters on three windows, meaning six panels in all, in matte black. Because of other chores, Ralph had had to take three swats at the shutters on various weekends, but finally they were done, and he meant to say casually to Jane, “How do you like my shutters? They look neater, no?” which he did say one Saturday morning around eleven, when Jane arrived. Then when he folded back the third pair, he saw that he had missed one upper third of what would be the inside of a shutter when it was closed. It was like a visual joke, the former sickly pale brown which he had not painted contrasting with the black, and Jane appropriately laughed.
“Ha-ha!—Ralphie, you’re a doll! Very funny! Hope you’ve got some paint left. But otherwise—sure, they look great, darling.” Then she strolled in her mustard-colored slacks and clogs towards the house door.
Mermaids on the Golf Course: Stories Page 16