Our Daily Bread

by Lauren B. Davis

  Just as she gave up all notion of being drawn into Willa Cather’s portrait of Nebraska pioneers, the door opened, and against all hope her heart leapt with the possibility it might be Ivy.

  “You’ll go blind reading in that light,” said Mabel McQuaid.

  “Hello, Mabel. I was just closing up, actually.”

  “That little Ivy Evans isn’t here, is she? No? Good. I’m sure you’ve heard.”

  “I suppose I have.” Dorothy closed My Antonia with a sharp whack!

  “How’s the little girl doing?” Mabel settled, without invitation, in an upholstered armchair with caryatid arm supports. With her crinkled décolletage plumping out from the neckline of her slightly too tight floral dress, and with that smear of pink lipstick on her teeth, Dorothy thought she looked like the Queen of Tarts.

  “Mabel, I’m simply not going to gossip about this. Imagine what that family’s going through and have a little pity.”

  “I admire the noble sentiment, Dot, really, but how on earth is Tom going to keep living here when his wife’s run off? And you and I both know it’s not the first time she’s done this. I wouldn’t be surprised if neither of those kids is his. What’s wrong with that man? They need the church in their lives, they do.”

  Dorothy was, for once, utterly dumbfounded. Cramped between Mabel McQuaid’s suggestion that Ivy and Bobby were not Tom’s, and the information that, indeed, Patty Evans was with another man, Dorothy’s verbal ability simply shut down. She didn’t know which issue to address first and as her mind zigzagged between the possible options, Mabel McQuaid would not stop talking. She sat with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap, and looked as though a crowbar wouldn’t budge her.

  “I mean, I actually wonder if Tom’s not involved somehow. He can’t possibly be that blind. Maybe they have some sort of arrangement, if you know what I mean. I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the influence of Hollywood, for one thing. Everyone’s been talking about it for months. It’s one of the Corkums. The one that delivers oil. And other things, apparently.” She snorted. “Oh, no, of course you haven’t heard. Don’t give me that look, you know what I mean. That’s what happens when you make it so clear you don’t want to hear any of the news around town. You’re unprepared, aren’t you, for when the inevitable happens? I dare say if you hadn’t chased me out of here a while ago you might not be standing there like you are now with your mouth hanging open. She’s been seen with him in practically every motel within fifty miles. You know, I always thought his people were all right, churchgoing, not the type for this sort of thing. He has a sister who’s a geriatric aid and his mother was a terrific cleaning lady. She must be just mortified. Larry! That’s it. His name’s Larry. I used to let him cut my lawn in summer when he was a boy. Stocky, handsome in his own way. I’m almost sure it was him.”

  “You leave me speechless, Mabel.” At some point Dorothy had risen and now stood with both hands pressed firmly on her desk, as though she was afraid if she didn’t it might rise up of its own accord and hurl itself at the woman across from her. She looked down at her hands and saw her forearms were trembling.

  Mabel leaned forward and said, in a slightly quieter voice, as though afraid of being overheard, “You don’t suppose she’s pregnant, do you?”

  “Pregnant!”

  “Well, you’re the one who’s made such a little pet out of the other one.”

  “The other what?”

  “Don’t get me wrong, I think you’re a saint. I said as much to Reverend Hickland just the other day. You don’t see the least bit of bad in anybody, do you?”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Mabel. I wouldn’t say that at all. You’d be amazed at what I see.”

  “You won’t make me believe it. You are an angel to take an interest in that little girl. Look at the strikes she’s got against her. A mother like that, a father—well, he calls himself that—who can’t control his own wife. From the first day Patty Evans showed up you could see she’d break Tom’s heart. He was such a good boy. Can you imagine what his mother would have thought of that Patty being in her house? It makes you wonder, of course, what will become of the little one. Or Bobby, for that matter. Timing’s all wrong for him too, of course. Which makes Tom Evans either a saint, like you, or else he’s the biggest fool in the world. I’m beginning to lean the other way, to be truthful. I mean, you fool me once, shame on you, but you fool me twice, shame on me, and now this. Oh, Dorothy, I’m sorry. You can’t tell me you didn’t consider it? Not even Bobby? But you must have noticed when she first arrived. You can count . . .”

  “I never noticed anything like what you’re implying, Mabel. It wasn’t any of my business then and it isn’t now. And it’s not your business, either. Have some pity, for heaven’s sake! Have some empathy!”

  “Look at you. You look sick to your stomach. I shouldn’t go on, I guess. I didn’t mean any harm, honestly. I know you’re close to the family these days.”

  “I am feeling sick.” Dorothy moved out from behind the safety of the desk and flapped her hands at Mabel McQuaid, who stood, with a look on her face that indicated she was afraid Dorothy Carlisle might vomit on her. “Awfully, terribly sick. And I’m going home. Right now. Sorry, Mabel, but you’ll have to leave.”

  In the Evanses’ house that evening, Ivy stood on a stool at the sink and washed the dishes. Outside, the oak tree’s long-fingered, wind-rattled shadows scrambled across the backyard and made her nervous. Her father was in the living room, sunk in his chair, smelling of beer, staring at but not watching the television. Ivy knew he wasn’t watching because it was a television show on which people were forced to eat disgusting things like worms and cockroaches, and if he had been paying attention, he would have changed the channel for sure.

  Ivy was careful to rinse the dishes in hot water, getting all the soap off, before stacking them on the drain board. She changed the washing water often, for she hated the feel of wet bits of food on her hands and as soon as something floated to the surface she emptied the water and began again. Something moved in the yard and she nearly dropped a glass. It took a moment for her to realize what she was looking at. It was only the fox, the beautiful red fox with the black legs. Ivy opened her mouth to call her dad, but then she thought better of it, knowing he wouldn’t come. She watched the animal pad along the hedge-line, hunting for the baby rabbits who lived there, probably, or mice. She hated to think of her catching anything, for she loved the little wild rabbits, although she knew a fox had to eat, too, and may have babies of her own to feed.

  Just a fox. Just the wind in the trees. Nothing to be afraid of.

  But that, of course, wasn’t true at all. Fear was a fact of life. It had been this way even before her mother left, although fear had been mostly relegated to night, then. That dark time when bad things came out. She had to observe certain rituals in order to control the bad things. Lights must be flicked on quickly; steps run up before shadows formed into things more solid than just a place where light wasn’t. When her dad put in the new light switch, it had helped some. She hadn’t checked her hair so often to see if it had turned white. But of course she hadn’t told her father about the other things that scared her. Things about her parents’ fights, the words that flew around the house like plates. She never told him about the bullying. No one followed her anymore, not since Albert Erskine threatened Gelsey and Cathy that day, but in school they whispered things as they passed her in the cafeteria, or in the hall, or from behind her in class. Good never comes from bad, my mother says. Birds of a feather. Born in the blood. We don’t want you here. The broken-glass words were in her head all the time. Your mother doesn’t love you! You’re so ugly she left you!

  A tumbler slipped from her fingers, splashed into the sink and hot water spattered her face and neck. She wiped it away and did not cry. It was important that she not cry in front of her father. When the fighting b
etween her parents had been bad, she thought of the movie in which the little sorcerer’s apprentice had let certain spells get out of control. Before he knew it a tide of water rose, threatening to drown them all. The normal things of the house—the brooms, the teapots, the pots and pans—became possessed by magic gone terribly wrong. You had to be so careful with spells. You had to know all the right words, and she’d never known them. So she had kept quiet. She didn’t know how to name her fears, didn’t know what the words might be for the vaporous wisps of worry that slid around the doorjambs and riffled the curtains. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to know their names, for naming things gave them power.

  She tried once, a few months back, to talk to Bobby. She wanted to know if he got scared, too. He laughed and told her she was crazy, then opened his mouth wide to show her the chewed-up cookie he was eating. He was a teenager, and a boy, so of course he was oblivious to most things. He slept like a bear in hibernation; he never heard their mother when she wandered through the house as if she were a boat slipped from its mooring in the night.

  Even now, when their mother floated out into far waters, mysterious and lost as a rudderless skiff, and left them all behind in the haunted house, Bobby seemed only to be more like himself, careless, loud, sullen and needy all at once. Although he added to this his anger. Anger at their dad, mostly, but at her, too. Like tonight. “I’m hungry,” he whined, as though he was five and not fifteen.

  “You want Spaghetti-O’s and hot dogs?” she said.

  “Are you kidding? What crap. I’m not eating kid’s crap.”

  “Well, I’m hungry too, Bobby. Why don’t you make us something?”

  “Fat chance, freak,” he said, his face like a mask, “You want to take her place, play little mommy? Be my guest, but leave me out of it.” And then he stomped out the door and slammed it behind him and still had not come home.

  Maybe he was afraid after all.

  Her father was certainly afraid. And that in itself was a new thing to be afraid of, for if he was afraid—her big, strong dad—then he couldn’t reassure her any more, could he? How frightening it was, the way a person could be there one minute and gone the next. This is the way things are, though, she thought: uncertain, shifting, treacherous.

  Ivy drained the water from the sink and shook powdered cleanser onto the enamel to clean it. She liked the feel of the scratchy powder, scouring away all traces of oily dirt, liked the sharp, medicinal smell of the bleach.

  When she was done, she poked her head into the living room. Her father sat in his old lounger. Rascal lay sprawled on the carpet with his hind legs stretched out behind him and his muzzle resting on his crossed paws, but his eyes were fixed on Ivy’s father, who in turn stared at the television. On the screen, a man wearing nothing but a bathing suit and a pair of goggles lay in something that looked like a coffin, while two other men poured garbage cans full of rats over him and girls in bikinis squealed with disgust.

  “Dad?”

  “What is it, Ivy?”

  “Do you want anything? A cup of tea?” She noticed the glass of whiskey in his hand then, and the bottle on the floor next to his chair.

  “No. I don’t want anything.”

  “I’m going to go up to my room, okay?”

  “You do whatever you want.”

  Ivy did not want to do whatever she wanted. She wanted to be told what to do. She wanted to be told to do her homework, or come and sit on her father’s knee, or get out the Parcheesi board, or something, anything that would make her believe she wasn’t living in a house full of nothing but ghosts.

  “Fine,” she said, and turned away. Rascal roused and ran to the front door, toenails scratching on the linoleum. He wriggled and whined and Ivy let him out. The dog dove off the porch and raised a leg against the nearest shrub, releasing an apparently never-ending stream of urine. “Poor Rascal,” she said. “Good boy.” Her father, it seemed, was an invalid incapable of even letting the poor dog out. She waited and waited, such a long time even the dog looked embarrassed, but then, at last he was done and ran back into the house as if unwilling to leave the fragile, broken humans alone for longer than necessary. Not even the scent of fox in the night tempted him. “It’s all right,” said Ivy, closing the door and locking it, hoping Bobby had his keys, wherever he was. “It’s all right.”

  She schlumped upstairs, Rascal trailing behind her. “Good boy,” she said and took comfort in his warm fur under her fingers, the confident way he entered the dark hallway. Over the past weeks, the dog had become her shadow, following her around, sniffing in corners, looking for that absent-present person.

  In her room, Ivy looked in the mirror above her dresser. She looked at her curling brown hair, looked at her skin, which wasn’t like her mother’s, not a freckle to be seen, and wasn’t like her father’s, nothing pinkly burnt, not ever. And wasn’t like her brother’s, all milky pale, almost bluish sometimes. Even her mouth was different. Blubber mouth, they called her, fish lips, they called her. And her mother had said, “Pay no attention to them. They’ll all be getting collagen injections to get what you’ve got, all be getting tan out of a bottle to get what you got. Just like my grandmother, who was Spanish, you know, from Madrid.” Maybe that was where her mother was. Dancing with the Spanish gypsies in Madrid.

  Ivy took her rock collection from the shelf. She put the box on her bed and opened the lid. Each rock, so perfect, still and serene, tucked up in its little compartment, nestled in a fluffy piece of cotton, snug as little bugs in little rugs. Each one knew its place and stayed there. Biotite next to calcite next to fluorite next to galena next to graphite next to gypsum next to hematite. She picked up the quartzite from its cubbyhole at the end of the third row, next to the slate. It was pinkish, like burnt skin or a piece of petrified meat. Tough but brittle, a hardness of 7 on the scale. Its parent rock was sandstone, but the grains would not rub off like sandstone. She held it, gripped it tight, tight, tight, wanted to feel it bite her. She had seen a man in a movie once who held a piece of glass in his hand, held it hard until the blood ran out from between his fingers. She wanted to feel that, wanted to feel hot blood in her hand instead of cold rock, rock whose parent was sandstone. Sandstone, a mineral held together by compaction, made up mostly of pieces of other rocks.

  She opened her palm. The rock was still the rock, and her hand was still her hand, marked red, but not bleeding.

  Stupid rock. Stupid hand.

  Rascal sat and looked at her and cocked his head.

  “What are you looking at? Stupid dog,” she said. She thought she could throw the rock at Rascal and he’d still just sit there, waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to feed him, to let him out, to play with him, to cut burrs from between the pads on his paws. He was like her father, day after day, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to hear a key in a lock. Her father slept in the chair some nights. He had gone back to work, finally, but for days he’d called in sick, something he hadn’t done ever before as far back as Ivy could remember. “She’ll come home,” he kept saying, “She’ll be back. She loves us, loves you kids. She’s just gone off for a wee break. She’ll come home.” That was the rosary he said, and for a day or two Ivy had tried to believe him, but she didn’t, and after that she didn’t think he believed it either, and then he pretty much stopped talking altogether. He went back to work, but when he came home he went straight for the chair, straight for the bottle. He ate if Ivy brought him food, changed his clothes once every couple of days, and then Ivy washed them. Just like she dusted and made beds and swept the floor, and picked up Bobby’s towels from the bathroom floor and made her bed, but not Bobby’s—let him take care of himself that much. And through it all her father sat with one eye on the television and the other on the car lights that went past the window, but never stopped.

  Ivy wanted to shake him. Wanted him to be her father again
.

  Rascal cocked his head and whined. He opened his jaws, as though smiling at her, as though he was laughing. The one black patch over his eye looked like a target.

  Ivy threw the rock, not at the dog, but at the mirror. It had not been her intention to throw the rock, and certainly not to throw it at the mirror. Still, she had thrown it, and time slowed oddly. She experienced a certain detached surprise as her arm made its arc, and as the stone sailed so unnaturally weightless through the air there was time to wonder whether this gesture would bring satisfaction, for she had seen on television, and read in books, that this is what people did when they were at the end of something, and could take no more of something, and so on. Then the miniscule meteor impacted against the mirror and, even though she had watched it happen, and so could not be taken unawares of its inevitability, the sharp and nearly shrieking sound, and the drama of the results—the shatter and scatter of it all—made her jump, and then she was instantly filled with regret as a spiderweb of tinkling, distorted glass and silver-shiny backing, exploded into sparkling shards across the bureau, into the carpet, where surely tiny slivers would remain embedded for weeks, looking to punish her naked feet. The piece of quartzite bounced back and now lay, chipped, near her foot.