by Anita Shreve
Pull yourself together, she tells herself, a week is nothing.
—
By the fifth day without a car, the pantry holds only canned ravioli, a box of macaroni, a dozen Campbell’s soups, a jar of jelly, and half a box of cornflakes. Grace calls her mother and asks her to bring milk.
Her mother, chauffeured by Gladys, brings with her a carton full of fresh vegetables and fruits and hamburger and milk and bread and cookies she baked herself. Grace receives it as if she were a desperate refugee. She puts on the kettle and the two older women, both in sleeveless dresses, their arms white, the skin loose and damp, sit at the table. Claire climbs up onto her grandmother’s lap, and Tom wanders over to Gladys with a curious look. Gladys produces from her purse two sets of keys and dangles them in front of the boy, who takes them and sits at her feet to play with them.
“Bad luck not having the car,” Gladys says to Grace.
“Especially now that the town pool is open,” her mother adds.
Grace pictures the deliciousness of falling into the water, feetfirst, and having it close over her head.
“But,” Gladys points out, “having two children who can’t swim at a pool might be more work than staying at home.”
“Worth it to get out,” Grace says, pouring iced tea into glasses. She unwraps her mother’s plate of cookies.
This is help, Grace thinks. This is the help that might have come to her rescue at the stone wall. Right here in her kitchen. With the children underfoot, she might even now be able to convey to Gladys and her mother her fears for her own and the children’s safety. Gladys would think her overwrought; her mother would reassure her that once the car came back, she’d be herself again. Both would say as they left that it was only a matter of time.
Time until what? she’d want to ask.
—
On the seventh day, Grace calls the auto repair company. “Hello, this is Mrs. Holland. I’ve been wondering if you were able to fix my car.”
“Yep, we fixed it good.”
“What was wrong with it?” Grace asks, curious.
“There was a heck of a lot of water in your gas tank.”
“Water?” As if in slow motion, Grace falls onto the chair by the telephone table and bends her head to keep herself from fainting. Sweat breaks out on her palms and face, and she thinks she might vomit.
She sees it with absolute clarity. A man. A garden hose. A Buick.
“You still there?” the repairman asks.
“Yes,” she says. “I’m here. Can you drop it off and I can pay you what I owe you?”
“But…well…your husband didn’t tell you? We sold it.”
Grace stands and spins with disbelief. “You sold it?” she asks incredulously. “But it was mine! That was my car!”
“You’re a mister and missus, aren’t you?” the mechanic asks.
“Well, yes.”
“What’s yours is his, I guess. I called this number to tell you it was ready and he answered and he told us to get rid of it. We did. It’s gone now.”
Grace swallows. Her disbelief turns hard.
—
Grace walks down the driveway, across the street, through the cut grass and pebbles, and screams into the roar of the surf.
—
That night, after the children have brushed their teeth, the reality of her situation penetrates. If she is not a prisoner behind bars, she is one in a house she now can’t abide. Every night she will have to sleep in the nursery with her children and the door bolted. The ugliness she has seen in Gene will intensify. Whatever was good in her—as a mother, as a person—will begin to shrivel in confinement.
Grace reads to the children, watches them fall asleep, and then lies on her own cot. She guesses it safe enough to leave the screens open as she did before, but she knows not to let down her guard, not to give in to the pleasure of the gentle breezes that so seduced her on the night she woke with Gene standing over her. She tries to remain in an alert state. She listens to every sound in the house, but all she can hear are the waves crashing on the rocks across the street.
—
In her dream, she’s a child again, and her mother is knocking on the door. No, it’s her birthday, and her mother’s banging on the door so that she won’t miss her birthday party. Grace sits upright and knows that the person on the other side of the door is Gene. He bangs hard, and the children wake. He keeps up the pounding. Claire jumps out of bed and races to Grace’s cot. Tom, standing, tries to climb out of the crib. Gene shouts, “Grace! Grace! I need you!” A fist on the door again, over and over and over. Grace lifts her children, one to a side on the narrow cot, and holds them tight so that they won’t fall out. Tom crawls on top of her. Claire whispers, “Is that Daddy? Why is he doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Mommy, please make it stop!”
“Shhhh,” Grace says.
Gene begins to wail, a sound that starts softly and then rises in ghastly volume. The cry is so haunting that she presses Tom to her chest, Claire to her side, and covers her daughter’s remaining ear with her hand.
Yes, maybe Gene is owed a piteous wail. But not here, and not now. Maybe he wants his life to go back to the way it used to be, but it can’t ever. Grace knows it’s a ploy to get her to open the door.
She has seen his anger, his bitterness, his deception. She believes him capable of anything. He might hurt the children if he thought it would crush Grace. He would certainly hit Grace, she knows that now. If she opens the door, he won’t again believe in her calm voice suggesting they descend the stairs to go to his room where they might this time have sex.
The wailing continues. She wishes she could cover her own ears. Claire makes scurrying motions as if she would bore deeper into her mother. “Make it go away!” she begs.
“It will go away,” Grace says, trying to calm her daughter. “I’ll protect you, no matter what. Just try to go to sleep.”
“I can’t go to sleep. Make him stop!”
“Shhh,” Grace whispers, but inside she’s trembling.
—
Before she is even out the door, he grabs her by her upper arm. His grip is strong. He puts his weight against the top post of the banister, pulling her along with him. She knows that if he loses his balance, she’ll fall to the floor, too.
“I want answers,” he demands.
“Keep your voice down. The children are scared to death.”
“It was the only way I could get you to come out.”
“Don’t you care about them at all?”
His face is red, and his hair is dirty. His yellow pajamas have stains on them. He doesn’t look like a man who has been lying calmly in a bed.
“I asked about the razor blade, and you didn’t answer me,” he says.
She doesn’t answer him now, either.
“I asked you about the piano, and you brushed me off. A piano doesn’t just float through the air and take itself down a flight of stairs.”
“And a gas tank doesn’t just suddenly fill itself with water!” she exclaims with fury, knowing instantly it’s a mistake to mention the car.
“How did you buy it?” he asks, shaking her arm.
“I worked for it,” she answers, bracing herself with her feet apart.
He seems surprised, but he doesn’t lessen his grip. “You worked? I don’t believe you. Where?”
“In a doctor’s office.”
“That injun?” he asks, his eyes narrowing.
“Yes, that man.”
“I see now. The razor blade was his.”
“No. It isn’t. I don’t know whose blade it was. Are you really imagining I would get a job and bring the boss home to live with me? I worry for you, Gene.”
“You’ve been lying to me all along,” he insists. “How could you not tell your own husband that you once had a job?”
“How could you not tell your wife-to-be that you were marrying her because she looked like your true love?” she co
unters.
“That’s ancient history,” he says.
“Not to me,” she says. “It’s a fresh cut to me.”
“You want to discuss that now?”
Beyond Gene’s back, Grace sees the door open and Claire put her head outside. Grace shakes her head back and forth in an exaggerated manner and says a loud, “No!”—the message not for Gene but for her daughter.
“I have marital rights,” Gene states, but Grace is unable to respond. She wills Claire back into the room. Go inside and shut the door, she begs in her mind.
“You can’t ignore that,” he adds.
With growing horror, Grace sees that Claire is all the way out of the bedroom and moving toward them.
“Let go of Mommy!” the girl cries as she pushes out her hands.
—
The fall is so brief, so light, that she doesn’t have time to be afraid. The weightlessness is shocking, the house soundless. Did Claire cry out? Possibly she did. Grace can’t hear Gene. Did he fall, too?
She touches a middle step with her foot, another step with her hip and thigh, and then shoots into the far corner of the landing. She lies still. Messages of pain begin to reach her brain. She grabs the banister and tries to pull herself up. She can’t stand, but she can turn her body enough to see that there’s no sign of Claire. She hears the distinct rhythm of two-stepping below her. Gene, descending.
—
By the time Grace crawls up the stairs and into the bedroom, she finds Claire on her cot lying faceup with her own blanket over her. Tom is huddled into her side, sucking his thumb and sleeping deeply. Pain hits her. Left wrist, right ankle, and a searing all along her right hip and thigh. She crawls to the space next to the cot and lies down on the floor. She doesn’t have to move right this minute. She needn’t disturb her children just yet.
—
Claire, subdued, doesn’t mention the night before, even when Grace is icing her ankle in the kitchen. When Grace looked at herself in the bathroom, a purple bruise spread from her hip to her thigh. Her left wrist is swollen and will need ice as soon as Grace is done with her foot.
How to explain to a child that a push against one person can knock the next person down? What must seem like magic to Claire has to be explained to her. She guesses Claire feels responsible for her mother’s fall. Grace can’t let her daughter go another hour with confused feelings.
“Claire,” she says, smiling, “I need to talk to you.”
Her daughter shyly walks to her. Grace smooths her hair and lifts her chin so that they can look into each other’s eyes.
“I won’t pretend that last night wasn’t scary,” Grace says. “It was. But your daddy wasn’t going to hurt me.”
“Yes he was! I saw.”
“He had hold of my arm because he wanted me to pay attention to what he was saying. I understand why you came out of the bedroom—you were curious, and you were afraid for me. Those are good instincts. And what you did wasn’t wrong at all. You pushed into Daddy so that he would let go of me. And that’s exactly what happened. He let go of me. But because I lost my balance, I fell down the stairs. Your daddy didn’t push me. It was just an accident. Do you understand?”
Claire responds by moving closer to Grace, laying her head down on her lap and flopping her arms over her mother’s thighs.
—
With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other.
—
She waits two days until the throbbing in her foot has subsided and she can put weight on it. She dresses the children in matching summer suits and informs them that they are going on a bus ride into town. Claire, who seems to have forgotten the incident in the nighttime, follows Grace from dresser to closet to dresser as she gets ready, asking questions about the bus. Do we ride up high? Will we have to sit with other people? Can you buy candy on the bus?
—
Because Tom and Claire fight for space at the window, Grace makes them kneel on the seat and share the view. A headache that started with the fall onto the landing seems, with successive days, to have lodged deeper into her brain. She wants to lie down and sleep for a week, but the urgency of her mission in addition to the need to keep the children from falling off the seat keeps her alert. They pass empty land where houses have not yet been rebuilt but where wildflowers and tall grasses provide a kind of lush landscape. The soot from the fire has been an effective fertilizer. Both children are silenced when they reach the city: so much to look at in so short a time. Tom leaves sweaty handprints on the window.
From the bus stop, Grace takes each child by hand and crosses a number of streets in search of Jensen, Jeweler to the World. Jensen greets Grace with a quizzical look. Claire seems dazzled by all the watches and rings and bracelets and necklaces in the cases. Grace’s purse is heavy with the bounty from Merle’s clothing, and when she tips the contents onto the top of the glass case, she feels more like a thief than she ever has. Jensen is at first skeptical and stares at Grace as if she might be a fence. She tries to keep her own personal guilt from showing on her face.
“My family and I have to move to Boston in order to find work,” she tells Jensen. “We have no house to sell; we have only this jewelry that my disabled husband inherited from his mother. You remember when I was in here before.”
“Yes, of course,” he says. He stares at the jewelry for so long that Grace thinks he might ask to see the will. When he glances up, his face is lit.
“Let’s write out an inventory first,” he says.
Grace glances at the children. Claire is holding Tom up so that he can see the diamond rings.
Grace checks the inventory against the items on the counter. Jensen walks to the front door and flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. When he returns, he begins to assign a number to each item, numbers he shares with Grace. There are fifty-seven pieces. Jensen uses his adding machine to arrive at a total. He rips off the slip of paper and lays it on the glass counter so that Grace can see the sum.
$45,655.
If Jensen is cheating her, Grace doesn’t care.
“I’ll have to sell these first before I can pay you,” he says.
“I need some of the money now.”
“The best I could do today would be a check for five thousand dollars. I’ll send you the rest as I sell the pieces.”
Grace studies the man and makes a critical decision. “I trust you,” she says. “I’ll take a check for seven thousand dollars now, and in a week or two, I’ll send you my address. I would, however, like a receipt for the lot.”
Across a counter sparkling with precious gems, Jensen and Grace shake hands.
—
“Claire, how about we spoil our lunches with ice cream cones?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” crows Claire, knowing she must use her words.
Tom, sensing something great in the air, claps his hands and smacks his mouth.
At the bank, the children, sated, are content to sit in the chairs provided for customers. Grace asks to speak to the manager and explains to him, when he arrives from a back room, what exactly it is that she will need.
—
The weight of her purse lessened from having transformed jewelry into paper money, Grace walks the kids to the used-car lot. Ralph Eastman, in stained seersucker jacket, rushes out to greet them.
“I know you,” he says, pointing a finger at Grace. “The Little Sister. Does the Little Sister want to buy another car? What happened to the old one?”
“The Buick is just fine,” she says, “and I’ve come to pay you the balance of what is owed to you.”
“Well, honey, you just made my day. Don’t have too many customers like you. These your little ones?”
Claire has turned suddenly shy and won’t look at the salesman. Good taste, Grace thinks.
“I’d like to buy a car for my mot
her,” Grace announces. “I’ve been happy with the one you sold me, and now she wants one of her own. Something small. Not as expensive as mine. A sedan.”
Ralph pretends to think. “I’ve got a ’forty-six Ford that might be just the ticket.”
“How much?”
“For you, seven hundred.”
She can probably talk him down to six. “You can bring it around.”
—
Eastman steps out of a black Ford and calls Grace a Sweetheart. After a quick test-drive, during which he refers to Grace as Sweetie, Good Girl, and Nice Mommy, Grace buys the car for six hundred dollars. The Ford smells like spilt beer and dirty ashtrays, which Claire and Tom complain about. Good, thinks Grace. If Claire is complaining, she’s back to being herself.
—
Her right foot throbbing, Grace drives the children home, but parks a block from the green Victorian that Gene Holland owns. When Claire questions her, Grace answers that driveway cleaners are coming in the morning and that they’ve asked her to give them some room to do the job. She prays that Gene is not up and around. Claire, perhaps wanting to distract her father, might blurt out, “Mommy bought a new car!”
But Grace thinks Claire will not blurt out anything to her father. More likely than not, her daughter will walk into another room.
—
That afternoon, while the children sleep in Merle’s bed, Grace uses the telephone on the dressing table. She speaks softly so that she won’t wake Claire and Tom. She reaches the clinic and asks for Dr. Lighthart.
“Grace,” he says with some surprise.
“Hi. I need to talk to you.”
“Shoot.”
“Could you come to my house?”
“I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“Don’t drive up to the house. Go just past the house, and I’ll meet you at the bottom of the driveway.”
