by Annie DeWitt
The blowing out of the house that summer was a family project. Mother hired a contractor to knock out the exterior wall of the house and install a band of modern floor-to-ceiling windows, large sheets of dual-paned glass, which she said would invite some of the outside world in. The contractor’s team was comprised of several high school boys who stomped around the living room in tank tops and works boots, flexing and sweating to the radio. Occasionally, they went into the yard to smoke a cigarette with Mother. What the blowout plan lacked in insulation, it made up for in Mother’s joy.
Once the windows were in, Birdie and I were given large soft-bristled brushes and sent to the sides of the house out of view of the road where the stucco finish had been abandoned in favor of wooden paneling, each panel thin enough that we could follow the grain and cover the entire width with a single stroke. When it came to painting, Father said the side of the house was all about getting on a good cover. Overlooking the marsh, appearance didn’t much matter.
It was after a Separatist’s meeting that the necessity of blowing out the house had come about. Birdie and I had spent a good part of the day at the Starlings’, swimming in their pool. Ruth and Ray Starling were our closest neighbors and Mother’s only friends on Fay Mountain, a fact established by proximity and common denominator; they were the only other couple under sixty living on our road.
Ruth and Ray had come into their marriage late in life. Ruth had lost her first husband early to heart failure. Ray’s wife had left him when their children were grown. To their second marriage, both Starlings brought a horde of children and a fierce sense of autonomy. They smoked and drank and swore at each other. At the holidays, the whole brood shored up in one house and had it out over various cuts of venison that Ray had hunted.
Ruth and Ray were the only couple over fifty whom I knew to have a visible sex life. There was something of the tongue in the way they treated each other. Even when Ray was drinking and Ruth was yelling there was an intimacy between their bodies that felt comforting. Though age had left its indications—Ray had a case of beer tired around his middle, and Ruth blonded her hair—the pair were compact of body. After a day of mowing and tending the property, Ray would stumble, shirtless and sweaty, down to the pool where Ruth was watching us swim. The Starlings owned acreage. An outdoorsman and daytime drinker, one had the feeling Ray celebrated this fact to considerable advantage. At the end of the day, despite his sunburnt stupor, he retained a buzz and an eye for his wife’s figure. This fact was known to anyone who visited them. Ruth often went about the house bare-chested, her low cut black one-piece barely pulled up over her nipples, the straps hanging loosely at her sides.
Those afternoons I spent with them, the two often retired around the pool in adjoining lawn chairs. After exchanging words, Ruth poured herself a drink from the bottle in the storage shed and returned to nuzzle her feet in Ray’s lap.
Ruth was an RN at the local hospital. According to Mother, she assisted one of the young transplants living on the other side of the mountain fresh out of his residency in the city. Ruth was said to have delivered most people in the town and accompanied a good number of folks to the other side as well. A lapsed Catholic, she lent a practical eye toward good health and clean living. She dismissed the Separatists as new age voodoo practiced by thick-bodied women and closeted leftists. To Ruth, matters of the heart were an issue of protection. Ray himself said she’d married him on the off chance she ever found herself in a situation.
An ex-marine, Ray was scheming to avoid the order of the world. Bosses, like government, fit him like hand-me-downs. Most nights he worked late at his barbershop, a hole in the wall he’d set up on the corner of one of the little side roads in town where it emptied out into highway. He’d bought the place off the young couple living in the house next door when they were looking to finance their first baby. It had once been their garage.
Ray was a man who had lost his sport. What he had left of life was his gut, his gun, and the second woman he’d ever let into his home. With his first wife, he’d given birth to three incidental beauties. One in particular had that kind of drop-dead quality. At the holidays she was always bringing around men who seemed to slide off the couch and into her arms. Their suits had that cheap sheen. Bank managers. Owners of franchises. The last one I’d met sold pharmaceuticals and tended bar.
Ray claimed he bought his first Colt to protect himself those nights he closed up the barber shop. He never went far without it or his whiskey and kept a box of bullets under the sink in the kitchen. Father said Ray figured on protecting what beauty he’d brought into the world.
Unmoved by Margaret’s invitations, that summer Ruth watched over Birdie and me more weekends than not.
There was something of the devil in Mother the night she ignited the blowout plan. It was dark by the time her Camry pulled up in the Starlings’ drive. Mother beeped twice. This was outside the boundaries of her character. It was her habit to ring the bell or come in for a cup of tea or coffee. That night, she was in a hurry. Ruth shooed Birdie and I down the driveway toward the headlights. Mother hardly looked herself in the car. She had recently cut short her hair. Her long brown waves were now shorn in a modish bob that she blew straight and wore tucked behind one ear. Mother had the bone structure of an aristocrat and a tongue to match. Father said her nose alone could stop traffic. The recent cut seemed to take advantage of these assets. Under the porch light, she and the car acquired a certain celebrity. Together, they were waiting to shuttle us off to some greater fate.
The Bottom Feeder was dark as we pulled into the drive leading up to it. Mother had neglected to leave the porch lights on, her normal habit of protection. She said she liked to come home to a house that looked like it had people living in it. The three of us made our way down the gravel toward the house. The sound of the coyotes howling in the distance lending the air around us a vacuum-like quality. A knot grew in my stomach.
I clasped my hand around side of Mother and linked my thumb over top of her belt, fingering the pant loop. I felt the waifishness of her body, the hawk-like way her hipbones darted out from her skin as she walked. Despite all impediments to glamour, she wore belts that highlighted the trimness of her waist. That evening she was wearing the brown snakeskin with the brass buckle. She’d bought it with Granny Olga in the city.
The front door was unlocked. The bolt had caught on the frame, but hadn’t yet slipped into the notch to secure the house. One push from Mother and the door swung wide. The foyer inside was dark. Mother’s windows at the back of the house were open. A good breeze was coming in. Normally, the ventilation would have delighted her. That night Mother was quiet. I felt the side of her ribs expand as she drew in a breath.
“Get in the car,” she said. “There’s been a break-in.”
The light from the Starlings’ television lit up their kitchen. They kept a small portable on the counter so they could sit around the table and listen to the late night shows while they played cards. Mother was up the stairs before Birdie and I had time to catch her. “Get inside, girls,” Ruth said, shuffling us into the house.
The floor around the table in the Starlings’ kitchen was covered with newspapers. Bits of cut glass and foil. The air smelled of copper. Those nights Ray was too drunk for cards, Ruth had taken to craftwork. That summer, she was designing a line of lampshades.
“Sit down and make yourselves busy,” Ruth said to Birdie and me. She removed several wire frames from the chairs and ran to the front of the house to call upstairs to Ray.
Mother was still on the phone when Ray was rummaging around under the sink in the kitchen. The back of his shirt glowed red in the thin light of the lamp over the table, one of Ruth’s creations. He straightened up and slipped the revolver into the sheath which hung from his belt. The front of his undershirt was stained with a brownish liquid.
Mother came in from the living room. Her face was blotchy and bloated. She
wrapped the phone cord around the palm of her hand.
“I’ll just have a look around,” Ray said.
Mother stared at his gun.
“I’m going with you,” she said.
Birdie and I were asleep when Ruth drove us home. The house looked like a bomb had blown up inside it. There was a light on in every room. They’d turned the Bottom Feeder end over end looking for something criminal.
Father met us halfway down the drive. He and Ruth exchanged glances. He carried Birdie toward the house. I followed behind.
“I’ll send her out now,” he called over his shoulder.
Ray was in the living room with Mother. An ashtray half-full between them. Mother’d been crying. She looked at us as Father carried Birdie upstairs to bed.
In that moment, Mother appeared entirely outside of herself. The image of Father carrying Birdie up the stairs seemed at odds with her capacity. I often wondered if Mother would just as soon curl up in Father’s arms than bear a daily maternal impulse. We were all fearful to admit this. On the outskirts of the town, Mother was removed from something vital.
“I felt some kind of disturbance,” I heard her say to Ray.
The Amtrak station stood in back of the supermarket two towns over. It was the first of the rural stops on the northern route. The line originated in the city where Sterling had once taken up in the hotel. Ruth and I drove Mother. Nothing was said between us in the car. Ruth took a cigarette when Mother offered it. They smoked in silent communion. After that we listened to the static of the radio.
“It’s just a little breather,” Mother said to Ruth as she released the passenger side lock and stepped out into the parking lot at the station.
“Sure,” Ruth said. Mother looked at me through the open window of the car. “There’s a key under the deck in case anyone gets locked out,” she said.
The tracks were dark. The train was not due into the station for an hour. Ruth pulled the car into the shadow of a dumpster to wait and watch. Mother stood in front of the board that hung in front of the station. She stared at the list of destinations, waiting for her number to come up. She was headed to the city under the guise of visiting Granny Olga. The flutter of the board seemed to help her locate some resilience. Here was evidence that the world was still churning. She’d just been outside the reach of its progress.
Mother had grabbed the old wicker traveler she’d brought to the hospital when she’d given birth to Birdie. She’d kept the suitcase packed so that she’d be ready, she’d told me, when the time came. Now she kept the case close to her body as she sat down on one of the benches facing the track. The station hovered, silent and anonymous. The yellow halogen of the Mobile sign next to the junkyard glared several streets over.
A pack of teenagers gathered on the bench next to Mother. For a moment I feared they would recognize her. Mother pulled her coat up around her face. I heard the crack of beer bottles where the teens hurtled them across the tracks. I was attracted to the violence of it. It reminded me of a gun going off. For months, Mother had kept the small television in the kitchen on the news. She was ready to be moved by a national story. I often wondered if she was searching the stations for her old flame.
When the teens had wasted all the bottles they started kicking around a hacky sack. I smelled smoke in the air and heard the familiar sound of a sack of beads where they lifted it from the ground. The bag landed not far from where Mother was standing. Mother shifted her weight. I remembered a story she had once told me about riding her bike to work one summer as a teenager when she worked the obit column for the Schenectady news. The city center was bustling and notoriously congested. She’d realized at once that her own survival depended on her ability to keep going. “It didn’t help to stop amid traffic,” she’d said.
A deafness gripped me as the train’s engine halted. The conductor threw wide the steel door and descended the tracks. A scream erupted at the back of my head and flooded my eyes in one weightless, arid rush. I found myself opening my mouth and forming a hollow at the back of my throat as if I were about to release a long vowel sound the way Mother would when she reached for the high notes at church.
“All aboard, Ma’am,” the conductor called into the darkness.
Mother clung to the railing as she mounted the stairs. It seemed as though her body hardly belonged to her.
8.
The morning after Mother’s departure no one woke before noon. Father fumbled in the kitchen with bowls and boxes of cereal. Birdie and I poured glasses of juice. The three of us ate in the living room. Father put paper down on the carpet so Birdie and I could sit close to the television.
At that hour, the light coming through Mother’s windows was strong. It cast a glare on the screen. Father papered over the window nearest the television with a few sheets of newsprint and some tape, shading the box so we could see.
It was break-back hour. By then we were Otto’s boarders at the barn. Father’d bought that gelding that Otto had been telling him about. A flighty little Arabian. Not much more than fourteen hand. Green as hell. Still trying to throw the saddle. Otto called the horse The Sheik on account of his nervous side and his four white socks. “Reminds me of one of those Sultans over there in the Gulf. Nothing more than a bunch of snake tamers and criminals.”
“Now that’s the beginning of a good animal,” he’d said of The Sheik the first time we saw him. “Headstrong. With a dose of healthy athleticism.” It had been Sunday and raining. Father had driven the Bronco into the paddock where the trainer was lunging The Sheik on a long orange lead. In place of a vet, Otto had come with us to examine the animal and shake out any shadiness. The only thing that mattered, he’d said, was how a horse trotted out. The rest could be trained away or treated. “Horse people,” he’d assured us in the car on our way to the stable. “Shy as hell the whole lot of them. Dog trainers. Now those bastards’ll bury you in the quick.”
After the trainer had trotted the horse several laps around the paddock, Otto got down on one knee and flexed the horse’s front hoof in his hands, bending the joint back at the pastern. The bottom of the horse’s nail touched the tip of his leg where the hair shot out. He held the horse like this, putting some strain into the joint.
“Lame as a carriage horse,” Otto had said to the trainer. “How much to take this dog food off your hands?”
As it turned out, The Sheik was a gravedigger. No space was large enough to appease him. At home in the pasture, he crawled the fences, circling the lot all day as if running the track. In the stall, he pawed furiously. We had to pad the clay floor with mats which stank each morning from the pools of urine. The only place where the shake settled from The Sheik’s muscles was when you took him out on the trail. Confined by the brush and the branches, his body hurtled toward the opening in the trees as he steadied into a forward throttle.
The Sheik’s was the only profile missing from the lineup the morning after he arrived at Otto’s stable. When Father started into his stall for the bucket, The Sheik was hovering near the window, nosing at the rusty grate. His coat was matted and salted. The previous day’s sweat had dried into peaks of crusted fur. The sill was thick with flaking paint and dried pigeon droppings. He licked the grate for salt.
“Knock on Otto’s door,” Father said. “Ask him for a carrot and a bottle of molasses. Anything sweet, if he has it.”
Otto was a hobby man. What few interests he’d stumbled across in life, he wasn’t apt to part with. Even the old junk he didn’t quit easily. His porch was nearly full with broken machinery, stray chairs and random board games. An array of hulahoops and a pair of roller skates sat in the corner, amid the wicker porch furniture covered in a thin green mold.
A plastic hobbyhorse hung from the bike rack. Missing its spring, the horse pitched back and forth whenever you opened the screen door. “Callie” was spray-painted in silver script on its rump.
&nbs
p; Wilson answered my knock.
“In here,” he said in the odd hollow way his voice sounded once he got the words out.
I could smell His Helene from the doorway. Her stench had a full-bodied clinginess to it. The minute I entered the kitchen it invaded the inside of my nose and stuck to the fronts of my teeth so that when I ran my tongue along them, I tasted an acrid decay that I couldn’t stop nursing on despite the impulse to retch. Even the kitchen itself smelled like an armpit after a night of anxiety and sleeplessness, a mixture of sweet onion and old wound.
His Helene had her tail up. The house was in heat. Everyone in it was facing death ass-first to the wind. The haze of morning hadn’t yet lifted. The curtains were drawn and the windows were open. What little light there was in the room existed only when the wind blew open the drapes creating nervous patches of light on the wallpaper. If it weren’t for the glow of the switch on the coffee pot, I would’ve thought I’d woken someone.
“Bath time,” Wilson said.
His Helene emerged from the bathroom. She appeared no thicker than one of the strips of light on the wall. There was so little left of her to hold on to that Otto seemed to carry her without notice, her arm draped over his shoulder as her feet dragged beside him on the carpet. Her frame could’ve easily been mistaken for a trick of the eye created by some movement of the curtain. Her gown hung open exposing several growths on her back which reminded me of the way roots stretch when the earth starts to erode: shallow, spread thin for air.
“What you lookin’ for, Petunia?” Otto called over his shoulder to me as he steered His Helene toward the bed that opened out from the couch.
“Sweet stuff,” I said. “The Sheik’s off his food.”
“In a minute,” Otto said. “Give me a hand.” His Helene never said, “Hi love.” Or, “Come join us baby.” What she said was, “So, you think you can play. Otto says you think you can play me a sonatina.”
