by Tabitha King
“How about that?” she asked Travis.
“That’s some secret,” Liv said, and let out the breath she had not realized she had been holding.
“Far out,” Travis said. “Really awesome.”
Liv shot a rueful smile at Miss Alden.
Miss Alden laughed. Then she was suddenly very serious. Bending to meet Travis, eye to eye, she sealed her lips with a forbidding finger. “Remember now, it’s a secret.” She crossed her bosom in a familiar childish gesture. “Hope to die if I should tell,” she said.
Travis crossed his bosom in solemn imitation.
“Shall we go back down?” Miss Alden asked.
“Please,” Liv said.
“The conventional route or the secret way?” she asked.
“The secret way,” Travis said, his voice high and squeaky with excitement.
Miss Alden bowed slightly to them, gesturing to the secret door.
“Find the key, Travis,” she said.
Travis stepped up to the wainscoting and studied it fiercely. He began to slide his fingers along the molding, pressing as he went. He felt something give under his probing, and the door began to swing open. He looked up at them, face shining. Then he bowed slightly, gesturing toward the door.
The two women ducked into the darkness and he followed them.
“Thanks,” he said to Miss Alden, when they were back in the living room again and the secret door had closed behind them so that no one would ever suspect it was there.
He drank off his second glass and with a quick look at his mother for permission, snatched another cookie from the tray and stuffed it into his mouth. With his cheek still lumpy, making crunching noises as he chewed, he slithered back across the floor to the hearth.
Miss Alden picked up her tea but did not sit down with Liv again. She walked stiffly, using her cane again as something besides a prop, to the piano. Setting her glass of tea on the top, she opened the piano and began to play a rousing medley of marches.
Travis looked up and grinned. He marched a pair of mounted cavalry through the air in time to “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Liv could not help laughing.
And then Miss Alden shifted to slower, more soothing music, movie scores and love songs of modern composition. Travis grinned at Liv when he recognized “Chariots of Fire.” The old woman’s ungainly hands with their broken nails moved over the keys with predictable authority but with an astonishing feminity. For the first time Liv could imagine the sexual relationship between this woman and the afflicted Betty, and it did not seem grotesque at all. It seemed a romance, and like all true love had come to a tragic end.
Miss Alden began a new song, a piece Liv had never heard before. Almost at once it was unbearable, suffocating. It seemed to vibrate in Liv’s teeth and bones. She covered her eyes, and to her own horror, began to weep silently, but quite uncontrollably.
The music stopped. There was a brief silence and then Miss Alden exclaimed, “Liv!”
Reaching for her cane, propped against the piano, she knocked it with a clatter across the floor. She did not stop to pick it up, but stalked, rather stiffly, to the sofa, on which she collapsed awkwardly and gathered Liv against her bony collarbone.
Miss Alden fumbled a large cotton handkerchief from her breast pocket and thrust it into Liv’s hands.
“There, there,” she said briskly, as she must have said numberless times to undergraduate women in the throes of love or academic failure or menstrual cramps. “Get it all out.”
Liv sniffed and snuffled and fought to regain control of herself. She peeked anxiously at Travis.
He seemed not to have noticed, too wound up in the war he was fighting across the hearth, to his own sound effects, soft explosions. “Ptuiee! Pkoo!”
“What is it?” Miss Alden said, brushing Liv’s hair out of her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” She fumbled. “The music, the song. It’s the saddest song I’ve ever heard. I feel so stupid, crying over a song.”
“ ‘Elise,’” Miss Alden said. “ ‘Für Elise.’”
The old woman came to her feet quickly, rubbing her hands together.
“I used to play it for Betty,” she said distractedly. “Elizabeth, you know. Elise.”
Liv blew her nose violently in Miss Alden’s handkerchief. “I’m sorry to be such a baby. I don’t seem to have any stuffing anymore,” she said.
Using the back of the sofa as a crutch, Miss Alden retrieved her cane, returned to the piano, and closed it carefully. She took down her glass of tea and came back across the room. The ice tinkled delicately in the glass in response to the irregular rhythm of the cane. She sat down in a wicker chair arranged at an angle to the sofa.
“How’s your headache?” she asked.
Liv sat up straighter. “Better, thanks. All gone, really.”
A moment’s silence marked a new tension between them: Miss Alden had touched Liv in a familiar way, and was afraid she had offended her; Liv was conscious of Miss Alden’s discomfort and equally embarrassed, but by her own emotional display, not because she had been hugged by an elderly lesbian. She tried to think of a way to tell Miss Alden she had taken the hug for what it was, comfort, not a cheap feel or a come on, without making her feel like a bigger fool than she already had.
Miss Alden sat straighter, too.
Liv admired the old woman’s unflinching courage even as she dreaded the questions she knew Helen Alden was going to ask her.
“What’s really wrong?” Miss Alden asked.
“I’ve had some teeth capped. One of them abcessed. I’ve had it out, but now I’m having something called ‘ghost pain,’” Liv told her. “It’s supposed to go away anytime. I really do believe it’s fading.”
Miss Alden nodded. “Is that why you’ve lost so much weight?”
Liv grinned. “You don’t miss much, do you?”
“When I’m paying attention. But I’ve been distracted. Now I feel rather self-indulgent. Here you are, clearly not feeling very well, and haven’t been for some time, and could have used some help or some company,” Miss Alden said. “One ought to be a better neighbor.”
Liv felt a rush of guilt and compassion. Miss Alden’s sin was her own. Miss Alden, too, had been lonely and unhappy, and had had no one when she needed someone.
“Oh, Miss Alden,” she said (she would never be able to use Helen without a conscious effort), “if only I’d known.” Then embarrassment overcame her. She lapsed into confusion. “I didn’t want to be a burden on anyone.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” Miss Alden said. “We’re much of a kind, I’m afraid.” She did not disguise her curiosity. “And you’ve been keeping this from your husband as well?”
Liv smiled. “I tried. He knows now.”
“But he’s not here. You’re still alone.”
“I’m okay now. My worst problem is insomnia. I can manage. He has a contract to meet.”
Miss Alden slapped her big hands onto her thighs. “I’m being nosy.”
Liv shrugged and smiled shyly. “I invited it, bawling my head off, didn’t I?”
Miss Alden stood up. “If you need help again, you will call me, won’t you?” It was not so much a question as a statement. “For now, why don’t you put up your feet and rest? Travis is having a fine time. It would be a shame to interrupt him. It’s cool here, and I’ll leave you to yourself. I’ve some work to do in my shop downstairs, but it won’t be noisy.”
Liv opened her mouth to make a conventional protest. Travis looked up at her, beaming. She shut her mouth. As she was taking her sneakers off, Miss Alden disappeared through a door under the stairway, and Liv heard the cane tapping on the cellar stairs, then movement in the cellar below. There was a smell of hot metal, as from a soldering iron, and clanking noises.
Miss Alden in her cellar chamber, thought Liv blearily. Bricking up the windows. Or someone. The Cask of Amontillado. It was enough to make her giggle. But the smells were wrong. Forging someth
ing. Down there in hellish heat, fire reflected in her eyes and in the bloody smoke she wears like a cloak. Metal fangs to close on some pitiful half-wild creature. Crushing and rending the fur and flesh and bone. There would be a dreadful shriek and dust settling like smoke on glazed eyes. Something she was supposed to tell Miss Alden. But Miss Alden already knew. It was no longer necessary to struggle against the lid of darkness. She closed her eyes and fell heavily asleep almost at once.
When she woke the room was shadowed with the advance of the sun over the house. Miss Alden and Travis were sitting cross-legged on the hearth together, in earnest discussion. Travis was showing her his G.I. Joes, identifying them for her and acquainting her with the contents of their personnel files, which he had memorized from the dossier cards Liv had read him from the backs of their packaging. Miss Alden was relating rank and speciality to the toy soldiers, who were being replaced, one by one, in their packing box. Liv listened to them drowsily a few minutes before struggling to her elbows.
“Sleeping beauty,” Miss Alden said to Travis, gesturing toward Liv.
Travis laughed. “Liv,” he said, “you were snoring.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Liv said. “We’ll have to tape record the next session and see if we’ve got a hit record.”
“Actually they were quite ladylike snores,” Miss Alden said. “Now I am a great snorer, Travis.”
Travis looked up at her.
“Why I’ve blown down trees,” she boasted.
Travis giggled.
“A tent, too, and it wasn’t any little Boy Scout one, either. It was a circus tent.”
Travis hooted.
“And once,” Miss Alden said darkly, “I blew down a whole house.”
“Nooo!” Travis squealed.
“I did,” she insisted.
He considered this cynically. “Sounds like a tease to me.”
Miss Alden glared and arched one eyebrow. “Well,” she said, “a little. Tease.”
Travis snickered.
Using her cane for support, Miss Alden clambered to her feet. “I rather like little boys,” she said to Liv. “It’s when they get their growth I can’t stand them. Do me a favor, Travis.” She ruffled his hair. “Don’t grow up.”
Travis grinned. “I have to,” he explained cheerfully.
“Ah,” said Miss Alden. “That’s the rub.”
“I’m afraid so,” Liv said. “Say thanks, Trav.”
Travis did and they took their leave, both of them sneaking quick looks at the secret door panel, trying to remember just where it was. And then at each other. They really had seen it and not imagined it. Hadn’t they?
They took Miss Alden’s unlisted phone numbers, for both the Dexter house and her home in Massachusetts, with them, and her sterm injunction not to be strangers. Liv went away feeling almost decent for the first time in weeks. The visit had been therapeutic, whether because she had talked to someone, or cried, or napped, she could only guess.
Next day she took over an orange date cake, but though the Plymouth was in the yard, Miss Alden did not answer the door. The cake, left on the porch, was acknowledged with a rather coldly polite postcard, and Liv decided Miss Alden had repented of her neighborliness. Somehow it wasn’t surprising. But she had a persistent sense of unfinished business. There was something about which they should have talked, something from which she had been distracted.
Chapter 4
No sooner had the light and noise of the party diminished behind them, as if it were in another zone of night, than The Poor emerged from the brush to trot almost soundlessly by their sides all the way home. By the time they were home, Pat was almost sober. The cat twisted between his feet as they entered the house, and he scrambled, cursing, to keep his balance. The Poor shot into the interior darkness. Pat disappeared toward their bedroom.
Liv stopped in the kitchen to read the notes pinned to the refrigerator door. They were pinned under magnets that looked like real food, but which functioned as a form of editorial comment by Sarah.
A slice of bacon underlined: “10:37 Bayard called. Said he would be up late, please call back.”
Under slice of dill pickle was: “9:05 Your mother called. Will call again tomorrow.” Sarah and her grandmother had never been simpatico, not even in Sarah’s infancy when she never failed to spit up or wet through her diapers onto Marguerite Dauphine’s tailored silk suit. Marguerite in her turn seemed always to encounter Sarah at her worst—sullen, whiny, or in a tantrum. Now that Sarah had arrived at adolescence, Marguerite was in a constant state of barely restrained disapproval. And Sarah had taken to reminding Liv just who was responsible for inflicting stiff-necked, impossible Marguerite on her by referring to her grandmother always as “your mother.”
A slice of tomato, redder and juicier than any supermarket tomato, pinned: “8:50 Jane called. Catch you tomorrow.” No messages from Sarah about Travis or herself. She had left snack dishes in the sink. Liv cleared them into the dishwasher and turned off the lights.
She went not to her own bedroom but toward the children’s, on the opposite side of the house.
Sarah sprawled open-mouthed on her bed, in a T-shirt and bikini underpants printed with blue whales, still wearing the Walkman’s earphones. Liv found the cigarette pack–sized tape player half under Sarah’s pillows and turned it off. She pulled up the top sheet and kissed Sarah’s forehead, just as she always did. In her sleep, even with a mouthful of braces and earphones for a headdress, Sarah was already a beautiful woman. A twenty-first-century woman, barbaric with her wired mouth and skeletal electronic diadem.
Travis was curled up in the glow of the nightlight, with his thumb in his mouth. His fine hair was matted darkly to his skull with sweat, the pillow under his head, damp with both sweat and drool. He drew a deep sobbing breath around his thumb. Very gently, Liv tugged the thumb from his mouth. Travis turned onto his back. Liv drew his top sheet lightly over him, and kissed him, too.
On the way back through the house, she found The Poor curled up on the couch. Picking her up gently, Liv took her to the back door and put her out.
When she came in, Pat was still in their bathroom. She heard the sound of vigorous toothbrushing, which meant he still wanted to make love.
Though he had grown up poor enough to have used salt to brush his teeth, he was casual to the point of benign neglect in their care. The well water he had drunk as a kid had been naturally fluoridated, enough to discolor his teeth to some degree and leave him entirely without cavities. For him it was sufficient to have his extremely sound, if somewhat crooked, teeth cleaned of nicotine stains twice a year. He seemed mildly amused at the fuss she made about the kids’ cleaning their teeth, the fluoride drops when they were babies, the regular dental exams, or her own compulsive flossing and brushing. Seeing that on the same diet and with the best home hygiene she required more dental care than he did, he had come round to the idea she might indeed be cursed by heredity with soft, cavity-prone teeth. But he retained a child’s attitude of footdragging suspicion of the dentist. The dentist was a fabled monster who never failed to hurt the helpless victim in the chair. More important, Pat had never had a toothache in his life.
But she had made it clear when they were first lovers that she found the taste of his cigarettes on his breath unpleasant, and so he brushed his teeth and used mouthwash faithfully before lovemaking. It had become a reliable signal between them.
Liv shucked her cardigan, T-shirt, and bra, and pulled a light summer nightdress over her head. She unzipped her jeans and dropped them to her ankles, then stepped out of them. Tossing them into the hamper, she reached for her hairbrush, part of a silver-backed set her parents had given her for her sixteenth birthday, when her initials had still been OAD, for Olivia Anne Dauphine. The OAD were traced on the silver in a pattern so elaborate it was nearly abstract, like the swirling, curving forms on Persian carpets that had been vines and leaves in their ancestral designs. Sometimes similar forms turned up as designs on h
er pottery, frequently skewed and chopped into further abstraction. The brush and comb were in their usual place on her vanity, but her hand mirror was not. Before she had a chance to wonder where she had left it she saw Pat open the bathroom door behind her, in the oval mirror of the dresser.
“Don’t stop,” he said. “There’s nothing I’d rather watch than you brushing your hair.”
“Bayard called,” she said. “He’ll be up late if you want to call him back.”
Pat started to reach for the bedside phone.
“Why bother?” she asked, putting down her hairbrush. “He can’t possibly want anything that won’t wait until tomorrow. Or that you could do anything about until then.”
Pat’s hand hovered over the phone, then went to his shirt buttons. “Right,” he said.
Liv went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. Her hand mirror was on the counter next to the basin. After she had brushed her teeth, washed her face, had had a pee, and washed her hands, she stared down into the hand mirror. It was glass side up. She picked it up and blew off a few fine grains of white powder. She carried it back to its place on the vanity.
Pat had undressed and was sprawled naked across their bed, smoking a cigarette. She was conscious of him watching her as she moved about their bedroom, folding her sweater and putting it away, putting their sneakers into the closet.
“Lady,” he said, “come to bed.”
She sighed. Afraid to look straight at him, she walked to the bed like a woman pushing a wire basket in a supermarket, her mind full of the ripeness of avocados, her shopping list, the sheaf of coupons in her handbag. No seductive twitch, no heat under her lowered eyelids. Standing over him, she pulled her nightdress off, over her head.
He held up his arms to her.
God knew she was horny, had been a long time without sex. Not a very noble motive, but she was not going to kid herself it was not important to her.
He seemed to have no sense of how terribly angry she was with him. She wanted to beat him with the bed pillows and scream at him. But she had never denied him love in a fit of anger. Sometimes the only thing that had kept them from irrevocable words was lovemaking. When all else failed them, in the lee of lovemaking they had always been able to talk again, to bridge the gaps between them. This time it might be the last chance, their last stand together.