Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  “Excitingly beautiful all of a sudden,” he repeated to his other self, but instead of silently as he had meant it to be it was in a firm if much puzzled voice, aloud. Everyone heard it. It sounded loudest to him, of course.

  He gulped at his drink, and went on diplomatically, “That was in Bahia, I mean … a most interesting case of blackmail. She was a native girl, of course, the sister of the mistress of my colleague and best friend.

  “Of course I lived very well … didn’t need the thousand allowed me for rent, but took it so that the next chap after me would get it too in case he had a wife and twelve kids. Three stories high, with all the servants’ quarters and kitchens outside … damn good system. I had carved hardwood furniture … designed it myself … got it for nothing from the local carvers. People don’t appreciate that anymore. I tried to sell it in the States after my retirement. Nobody appreciated it. Like my Maxfield Parrishes … wonderful collection, not originals of course, but nobody appreciated them.”

  “And the girl.” Mrs. Glenn’s voice thrust like a small mean knife into the fruit of his reminiscence, cracking it the way a blade will a ripe watermelon. He jerked with annoyance, and a little sticky cola ran over his hand.

  “The girl. What did you do to her, Mr. Judd? What kind of purge did you use on this one? Did it kill her?” Mrs. Glenn spoke almost tenderly, with precision, and leaned toward him with her eyes very wide. Her brother reached down to take the bottle of tequila away, but without glancing at him she put her hand against his wrist, commandingly. He shrugged, and sat down again in the shadows near the well in the center of the patio.

  Mr. Judd looked at all the faces. They were turned to him, listening, and he felt stronger and healthier and more interesting than he could remember for years, maybe forty or more.

  “She got ideas she could blackmail me. She used to be there all the time. She’d play my records. I had the best Victrola in Quito then … or was it Bahia? Well … she’d be there all the time, even when my friends came, the other chaps in the Service.

  “Finally I went to Apolidor. He was Chief of Police. I’d done him a good turn or two … bought some papers from a young German I played tennis with … that sort of thing.…”

  “And was the young German ruined?” Mrs. Glenn asked gently.

  “It all blew over.” Mr. Judd smiled. The skinny woman, sitting so still in the cool night air, could not bother him now except by her beauty. He felt strong. “It all blew over. Took a few years. He finally joined the army in Peru, I heard.”

  Now it was as if he were really talking intimately, the truth for the first time, to whatever it was in Mrs. Glenn that made him feel he talked to his intimate truthful inner self. He was confiding at last, and the relief of it hurried his tongue. He turned closer to her, but still spoke to all the listening faces.

  “So Apolidor … Poli … who used to come whenever he wanted and drink my wine and eat whatever was in the ice-chest, said that he could fix everything. He found that the girl had a lover … engaged, they said … who collected rents for my house. It was of course a frame-up between her and him.

  “ ‘No scandal, Poli,’ I said to him. ‘Remember, this is the Consulate.’ ‘Never worry,’ he told me. ‘I know the newspaper editors like my own brothers. I know the Mayor. There shall be no scandal.’ ”

  Young Finnegan carefully poured some rum and cola into Mr. Judd’s glass, and sat down silently again by the well, as if he were exhausted.

  “Thank you, young man,” Mr. Judd said. “Permit me to drink to you, Mrs. Glenn.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and clicked her glass against his with a small clear ringing sound.

  “That night I was going down in the city elevator … only city in the world, Quito, or perhaps I mean Bahia, that has an elevator that drops you straight down three hundred feet or so and lets you out right in the city again. It’s run by the municipal chaps, of course … very profitable.

  “The girl, this one who kept playing my records, suddenly ran after me into the elevator. She pulled at my hands and cried out and made a really scandalous, really scandalous fuss. You know … she said she loved me and could not live without me, all that dramatic stuff. And all the time I knew that Poli had found out about her and the good-looking greaser who collected my rent. She was beautiful, too … beautiful smooth hair. She was making a nasty fuss.…

  “I commanded the elevator to stop … to go up and let me out. It was against the law … but they knew who I was. And I was sure Poli was taking care of things.

  “When we got to the top, I shoved her into the back of the car, and I ran out.”

  The silent air in the little patio settled down like a thick warm rain, so that a mariachi-band playing at the other end of the village sounded suddenly near and intense. All the people seemed to be straining their ears toward it through the immediate silence, but when Mrs. Glenn sighed, they all sighed too, as if that was what they had been waiting for.

  She put down her glass at last, and folded her hands cautiously in her lap, and asked, “Tell us, Mr. Judd … what happened to that girl?”

  “There never was a breath of scandal,” he said confidingly, talking along in a cozy way to his inner self, but aloud because of Mrs. Glenn who was that self. “Poli had arranged it perfectly. The elevator went down as usual, and discharged its passengers. But she was never seen again. She and her pipsqueak prettyboy were never seen again.” He laughed a little, finished his drink, and added casually, as the masterly fillip to the anecdote, “They were put in an insane asylum, I think, at the other end of the country.”

  Mrs. Glenn stood up almost as casually as he said it, but young Finnegan leaped nervously to her side, so that his glass crashed on the pavement.

  “Do you need any help?” he asked in a hard low voice.

  “Of course not,” she answered irritably.

  Then she spoke to Mr. Judd, and was not irritable at all, but only too precise, unfolding her words with voluptuous drunken pleasure into the silence.

  “Mr. Judd,” she said, “I must say good night to you now. You may be informed by my wary watchful family here that I am leaving the patio at this especial time because you have reminded me that my husband is in an insane asylum for the abnormal span of his life and I have been overcome by connubial grieving and the accumulation of tequila’s insidious and peculiar potency. Perhaps my not being used to this exotic altitude will be added to the list of loving excuses made for me.

  “But, my dear Mr. Judd,” she went on slowly and carefully, as if the words boiled in her mind with a frightful intensity that must be controlled and forced into order at any cost, “my dear Mr. Judd, the reason I cannot stay to bid farewell, to say goodbye to you, is not because my husband has gone mad and I am drunk.” She stopped, and smiled distantly, politely. “No, Mr. Judd. I cannot stay because I am covered with fleas. There are dozens of hungry fleas on me. I must go away, that I may scratch myself. I must scratch myself for at least ten minutes, and you will be gone when I return. So good night, Mr. Judd.”

  She walked haughtily from the patio, rather like the Hindu laundress, with an invisible burden stiffening the muscles in her thin long throat.

  Mr. Judd left soon after. And as he walked down the street and across the little plaza, where flickering lamps shone on the rows of flowers on the filthy pavement, spread out to sell for the Saturday night mating-march of the young men and girls around the bandstand, he felt suddenly that he had said goodbye forever to that inner self so long his one true companion. He was alone.

  By the time he reached the hotel, and walked into the bleak dining room, tears of sadness were rolling thickly down his cheeks.

  Billy stood wiping the bar, as he had in Saigon and Trinidad and Quito. Everywhere, Mr. Judd had called him Billy, and had drunk two Martinis. Now Billy watched him with familiar compassion as he turned his face shamedly away. How long was it since Billy had last seen him cry? Forty years? More? Less? And for what?

  Mrs
. Teeters’ Tomato Jar

  The jar is made of clear hard glass, hand-blown into six sides but rounding at the top to a perfect open circle. It is about ten inches tall and five wide, at the bottom, and holds ten cups of anything. Probably there are others like it in collections of early American glass, but I’d wager that there is not one colored so delicately a subtle mauve, from lying under the desert sun between Indio and 29 Palms on the California sands. Except for the shadow of a bubble on one side, it is flawless. How did it last so long without a chip or crack or, more probable, complete shattering in a storm or any other violence?

  I take good care of it, aware of its neat umbilicus left by the blower, and of its fine functional design that tapers from many-sided to round in one pure topping, and especially of its unattainable coloring. If it could have lain on the hot sand for another few decades it would surely have turned a deep purple, as good glass used to do. But then or even now it would have been bulldozed by a subdivision road-builder, or crushed by a dune buggy.…

  A few days ago it looked especially beautiful, with a few late-blooming lilies in it. Their stems, paled through the lavender glass, were pearled with tiny gleaming bubbles. The long golden light of late September shone on one side of the vase and straight out the other. A friend exclaimed, “Oh, it’s from Venice, from Venezia-Murano one hundred years ago! Where did you find it?” And without even thinking, I said, “Yes, that’s Mrs. Teeters’ tomato jar.” And it was then that I realized that I am probably the only person in the whole world who now knows about Mrs. Teeters, and that I had better explain, while I can, a little about how her jar came into my hands.

  (Everything in this report is either plain fact, hearsay, surmise, or wishful fantasy, a heady combination when there is nobody to say me nay! The jar is certainly a reality, and it was given to me by a real man named Arnold in about 1940.)

  When my friend brought me the jar, he had filled it over many years with layers of colored sands, from flashing white to dark grey-browns and reds, all seen through the pale lavender of the sides. It weighed several pounds, and in a few years I emptied it onto yet another desert floor, and from then on it has held all kinds of weeds and flowers, and once some fine shells, but never cooked tomatoes.

  Arnold was a reformed desert rat. Late in his life, he mended his lone wild ways for a round little woman and then their two little round daughters, but until Lina roped and tied him he was probably one of the last real “rats” to drift silently through Western lands where no sane person could survive. He and the other shadowy men, refugees from one form or another of imprisonment, lived then and perhaps still do live in ways that the rest of us do not comprehend; like the bleached snakes and mice and spiders of the great deserts of this country, they know where to find matching shadows: a leaf, a rock. They know how to drink cactus-water, and one drop of dew, and above all when to let it touch their lips. They can survive for many days without swallowing. They become aloof and silent in the hottest months, and it is only at night that they emerge, like all the other creatures of their world.

  As winter sets in, though, and the sun is kinder, they begin their walks toward legendary gold mines, hidden treasures cached by the conquistadores, veins of amethyst and opal. They walk endless miles, their worlds on their backs and in their dreams, and Arnold told me that although they don’t talk much, in case they might let some clue slip about hidden booty only they must find, they like to rest and eat together.

  One fall I was sitting in a hamburger joint with Arnold, in Indio where we went to buy dates, and two strangely faded men with wrinkled faces and pale eyes stood looking through the window, plainly communicating with him but without moving more than a few muscles. I asked him if they would come in for coffee, and he said, “Not on your life! That’s two buddies of mine. They’re on their way out, with supplies. I may see them next spring, if they make it.” I said they looked like sand, only browner, and he said, “We kind of dry up. But when we can, we sure eat! It never shows.”

  And it seems, from what Arnold told me over many more seasons, that there once was a Mrs. Teeters who knew most of these wordless desert ghosts, and fed them. That was why he brought me her tomato jar, he said: we were both good handy women at the stove.

  (From now on, having settled that there was this woman and that she did leave one beautiful jar lying on the sands, the rest of what I feel is her story is verging on surmise, based on Arnold’s hearsay. Perhaps fantasy is already taking over. Who will contradict me, at this point?)

  Mrs. Teeters, who lived and died on the desert before Arnold’s time there, which was probably from 1918 to 1935, was an Eastern Yankee who came out to the California sun after a Southerner shot her young husband in the lungs in about 1864. They kept to themselves, and lived in a couple of nice tents outside the Indian village at Palm Springs, until he died of consumption. Mrs. Teeters packed up and moved east to Indio, where she bought some land with a good spring on it, and built an adobe cabin. She kept to herself, but had good Indian friends. She started a little garden patch and in season sold baskets of snap beans and tomatoes and a few foreign herbs to people who wanted them enough to come fetch them.

  It got so she put up more and more of her garden stuff, in big jars that she had brought from Back East. She made summer pickles and relishes that kept for a few months, but mostly it was plain whole peeled tomatoes. From what I know of home canning and of summer heat on the deserts of Southern California, it is a miracle that such volatile supplies did not soon blow up or start flashing strange livid lights in the dark, or at least kill off everybody who tasted them. Mrs. Teeters probably used Kerr or Mason jars by the turn of the century, as did almost every other frontier cook in this country, and kept her big outdated jars like mine for her own storage uses. Mine has no indication of what kind of lid might seal it, and I assume that she used waxed paper and tight string and a prayer.

  Mrs. Teeters began to lock up her little house as soon as the garden patch had finished its annual dance. She packed her wagon with jars of canned stuff and supplies, and headed down toward Death Valley or northwest toward 29 Palms. Once she decided to stop, she set up her own small tent and a kind of airy cookhouse, with the help of Indian friends, and then waited for business.

  The cookhouse was actually nothing but a sturdy canvas roof that could be rolled back in sudden storms, with one side flap that could be moved according to wind and weather to protect a portable stove. This was sometimes a newfangled coal-oil burner and more often a small wood stove that heated well on scraps of sage-root and mesquite. Under the canvas shelter there was a trestle table that would seat eight men comfortably, with an extra bench for waiting, and a swinging lantern above.

  It seems, I was told by Arnold with my own later embroidery, that once the camp was set up, no matter where, and from about 1870 until shortly before he started roaming in perhaps 1917 or ’18, word spread fast. Silent bleached men knew that they could head for the camp and sit under the lantern and eat good fresh honest-to-god food from Mrs. Teeters’ supplies and deft ways of dealing with them. No matter which direction she decided to head in, come the end of the summer picking and preserving, the desert rats knew where to find her, whatever piece of pure wind-clean land that she had pitched on.

  When I asked Arnold what she looked like, he shrugged. Nobody had ever bothered to tell him. I see her as strong, certainly, but she could be tall or short. I am sure she was thin: women on the desert tend to dry up almost as fast as men. I suspect, both from Arnold’s hearsay and my own surmise, that she remained exactly as her husband had left her, resolutely untouched by anyone else. What she apparently needed to do in her solitude was garner what her own land grew and then feed it to other hungry wanderers. This she did for several decades. I do not know how she was rewarded.

  It seems that she had a way with tomatoes, both in the wild hot soil of Indio and in her preserving, so that when she brought out a jar of them for three or four men who had drifted wordlessly toward her
tent in January, say, they were as odorous and desirable as any girl ever forgotten. Mrs. Teeters would make a kind of minestrone from her supplies that you could stand a spoon in, mostly potatoes and then her foreign herbs and beans, and dried pasta a neighbor made for her in Indio. She had a way of simmering any meat the men would bring to her, like a tender young jackrabbit built like a kangaroo or a dainty antelope, and then dumping in a jar of her green beans and another of the tomatoes.

  The best was when she made salt-rising biscuits. Then the ritual was for the men to crumble them into big tin bowls of her rich red lumpy soup, and spoon it up forever.

  Now and then she would hitch up and ride back to her place, to buy more hay for the horse, more supplies. She would pack jars from her stores into the wagon, and amble at her own speed back to the cook-tent and the wanderers who on their own silent signals emerged again from the silver-grey sands they had come to look like. She would have fresh flour for more biscuits, and the rest of that year’s harvest of preserves.

  Apparently Mrs. Teeters kept moving and cooking and planting and putting up until she died, and when and where that was I can only guess. I hope it was one bright winter afternoon, in perhaps 1908. That day she made stewed tomatoes, and a couple of good batches of cornbread for a change. One of the silent withered men washed up for her, which meant scrubbing things with old newspaper because there was no water except for the horse. It seems logical that she walked out in the failing light of an early-winter day, with one of her big tomato jars to scrub out with some fine sand, and she died. Some of the men found her light dry old body and carried it back to Indio in her wagon, and the tents blew away, and the jar lay there long enough to turn a delicate peculiar lavender, before Arnold found it and much later gave it to me.