by Laura McNeal
“Why don’t you wait and see? Give her time to bring it back?” Even to Sonia, it sounded crazy.
Dr. Stober gave a little explosive laugh. “Give her a big head start, you mean? Bigger than the one she already has?”
“I’m sure she means it,” Sonia said, forcing herself to picture the sweet, honest face of the girl she liked, not the conniving gypsy of Dr. Stober’s description. “She wouldn’t steal,” she insisted. “She could have taken it a long time ago, when she wasn’t so near her confinement. Why didn’t she go then?”
“Free medical care, I imagine,” Dr. Stober said. He was gathering things up and setting them down, looking for something.
Sonia wasn’t sure why she felt so defensive of Aldine, but she did. Perhaps it was her own judgment that she wanted to defend. “If she doesn’t bring it back, I’ll be responsible.”
“What in the hell do you mean by that?” he asked. He’d found the papers he wanted and was stuffing them into a satchel.
“I mean that I’ll pay.”
Dr. Stober laughed incredulously. “For the car? Why would you do that?”
Sonia couldn’t think how to formulate her reasons for Dr. Stober. She’d imagined her life taking a new turn with Aldine in it: a substitute daughter and grandchild, a late compensation for what had been denied her in marriage. If Aldine brought the car back, Aldine would come back, too, and Sonia wouldn’t live alone in the back part of her childhood home as an increasingly frail and unwanted landlady. Dr. Stober surely suffered similar visions of his fate: no wife, no children, an empty house, year after year after year.
“She’s like a daughter to me,” Sonia said, not looking into Dr. Stober’s face as she said it, fearing his laugh. “If she doesn’t bring it back, I’ll stop charging you rent.”
“You’ve been hoodwinked,” he said, not laughing this time, but his voice still contemptuous. “You’ve been fooled.”
“Then let me be the one who pays.”
Dr. Stober was quiet. When she forced herself to look at his face, he massaged his throat and said, “Wait for her to return it, huh? Like a library book?”
He set the satchel on his desk and looked up at the clock. “It’s almost time for my first patient. Perhaps you should leave before I change my mind.”
85
In the morning, the sun was almost too bright. Aldine felt dizzy looking at things in the room, which were exaggerated by the strong winter sun and her pure pleasure in being here. It was as if she were now living in a world dipped in ammonia and wiped clean: the skin of Ansel’s hands, the hair on his arms, the blue cotton of the body-warmed quilt, the brass bed, the flecked mirror, the irises of Ansel’s eyes when he opened them and saw her staring—it all shone, it all glittered. “Good morning,” she managed to say.
He pulled the blanket higher and held her tighter. “Good morning,” he said, warm, dry lips to her neck.
The cold air reminded them, in time, that they were hungry. Ellie had meant to leave nothing edible behind, but Ansel followed mouse droppings to a burlap bag of white beans tucked into a dark cupboard corner. Only a handful of beans remained. Ansel said they could be washed and cleaned, but it was barely a meal, and after soaking and boiling, tomorrow’s meal at that. It was Aldine who thought of Sonia Odekirk’s house. “She said no one was living there, not even her hired man,” she told Ansel.
“But why would she have left food there?”
“They were too heavy, she said. All her jams and such. She meant to find someone who could fetch them.”
Ansel opened the lower cupboards again, leaning his long body down to check the back of each one.
“We’ll keep track of how many,” she told Ansel. “Treat it like a loan.”
The cupboard doors were gummy from the layers of paint and dust. They wouldn’t quite close.
He didn’t answer her, but pressed his arms against her and his face into the back of her neck.
“It’s just until spring, anyway,” she added. They had talked about the spring, when he would dig up the kitchen garden and they would plant the seeds that lay small and dry in their capped jars in the kitchen drawer.
They couldn’t eat the sunshine, and they couldn’t eat the air. He had to go. But how to get there, how to get back? They had passed few cars last night, it being so late, but in daylight neighbors would drive to town, do their business, note who was going where and doing what.
“I could drive the tractor,” Ansel said. His fields met Sonia’s eastern perimeter. The only house visible from Sonia’s fields was the Tanners’, and Sonia had told Aldine that Mrs. Tanner had taken her sad, overgrown boy and gone to live in Nebraska with a sister.
When he’d gone, Aldine stood blinking a few minutes in the kitchen, which was dustier than other parts of the house. She found a crack in the windowsill, a place where the outside air breathed in. She worked a ball of wax in her fingers until it softened, then pushed warm plugs of it into the crack. She thought of uncovering the radio and turning it on, but it seemed too much of Ellie, and she left the sheet draped as it was, a ghost in the corner, faceless and eyeless and yet somehow sentient. Aldine turned her back on it and swept up the mouse droppings; then she filled buckets with water and wiped the wooden counters and the black stove with wet rags, wringing and rinsing and dragging until it felt as if her body were a pump handle, and if she bent over one more time the baby would simply plunge out of her. The smell of wet dust was everywhere, and surfaces had a hazy gleam that she couldn’t trust. Each time she wiped a thing, the wetness made it look clean, but as the water dried on the countertops or the red tin canister lids, a streaky whiteness revealed itself, one more invincible layer of dust, and then one more. Ellie and Charlotte had always gotten things clean, really clean, and she wondered what it meant that she could not. Twice while she was working, she glimpsed something moving along the floor and turned to see a mouse vanish under a door or around a corner. When she lay down on the sofa to rest, she heard a scritch-scritching from within the walls, and the ghost radio watched her in silence.
Ellie had not wanted Ansel anymore. She had not wanted this house anymore. That’s what Aldine told herself. Ansel had told her a bit about the café, how happy Ellie was being in charge of it, like a different person entirely.
“What did you tell her about coming here?” Aldine asked.
“I said I was coming to check on the house. To see if things had changed at all.”
Aldine was silent. She didn’t ask, “Did you tell her about me?” but he answered, anyway. “She doesn’t know about the baby,” Ansel said. “I think she knows the rest.”
Ellie was happy where she was, running the café. Ansel was happy here, on the farm. The weather would change and a normal spring would make it possible for her and Ansel and the baby to live here somehow. The exact manner—would a divorce happen, could it happen, could he marry her?—was too hard to figure out. For now, it would be as if the two of them had immigrated to a new and solitary country. The baby would bring them a fresh start and a fresh start was all they needed.
The view from the kitchen window was the same as it had been when she was a boarder: the brown ridge of the hogback, an empty corral, the tiny narrow house that was the bog, leaning a bit since they left, and the barn with its lone cottonwood tree. It was the same and not the same, because Ellie wasn’t here resenting her, unless you counted the radio crouched under the dusty sheet.
With a sharp pang she wondered what Leenie looked out on when she did her dishes, and what she would do when she read Glynis’s letter. Would she try to find Aldine? Would she feel about Ansel as Glynis did?
What have I done? she thought unwillingly when Krazy Kat appeared beside the cottonwood, stalking something in the dry grass.
Leenie would inquire, certainly, would start with Mrs. Gore and Glynis herself. The trail would lead to Sonia and Dr. Stober. To Dr. Stober’s car, to this house, to the two of them hiding like criminals.
Dr. Stober�
�s car needed to go back, that was the first thing.
Ansel must drive the car to Emporia at night when he was feeling well enough and park it right where they’d found it, then come back by train. Between now and then they would never add a single dent or mile. But when should he go? What if the baby started to come when she was all alone?
He couldn’t leave her.
And yet the car must go back.
She was heating water for a bath when she heard the distant throb of the tractor. Oh, how she hoped Sonia Odekirk’s pantry had been lined with red, green, and amber jars, a rich, gleaming mine of food. The clattering tractor noise rose, and the baby shifted inside her like a stone in a subterranean stream. She went to open the door eagerly, to welcome him home, to replace her terrible fears with his physical being. His back was to her, his colossal, comforting back, and she could see as he steered the tractor toward the barn door that boxes lay in the wagon he was pulling, and in those boxes were gold-lidded jars and plump sacks.
86
The Fallbrook Enterprise reported in the column “About You and Others” that Mr. Ansel Price had gone to his home state of Kansas on a business trip but was expected back for the nuptials of his eldest daughter, Charlotte, that the William Bartlett family had gone to Julian over the weekend to enjoy the snow sports, and that Clare Price had shattered his left thigh and was recovering nicely at home. “Visits, especially from local damsels,” it noted, “would doubtless be appreciated.”
Lavinia Gulden sat in a desk on Wednesday, November 8, and listened while Melanie Quail read aloud this old news (it had already spread through the grapevine) at the first after-school meeting of the Junior Red Cross League. Melanie, Myrtis French, and Candy Armstrong had only formed the league, Lavinia thought, so they could wear white nurse’s caps and starched arm bands while making a big fuss about themselves, but Lavinia had joined because you had to belong to at least three clubs to make the dean’s list.
“Well, we’re damsels,” Melanie said. “Maybe we should take young Clare Price his homework.” The white hair on her arms, a fine blond airy meadow, stood up in the shaft of sunlight. If she had not been so pretty, people would have remarked more on the excess of hair. That was Lavinia’s opinion.
“Maybe I could give him some oranges,” Candy offered. Candy’s father had a grove full of them, but it was late for Valencias and early for navels and, besides, the crops were so valuable now, after the hail and hard freeze, that Lavinia doubted very much that Candy would get away with free ones.
“I have to go right by there on my way home,” Lavinia said. “I could take his books to him.”
For a moment they all turned to her, as if surprised that she was still in the room.
“Well, I doubt he needs you to take his books,” Candy said. Why did her trim rectangular teeth seem to make what she said irrefutable? “His sister’s the home ec teacher,” Candy added.
Lavinia lifted her chin and tried to stop blushing. “I thought Melanie just suggested we take his homework.”
Candy, Melanie, and Myrtis regarded her, and she looked back as steadily as she could. They sometimes asked to borrow her Latin and English notes because they didn’t pay attention in class, and they pretended to be nice to her when they bought things on credit in her father’s IGA, but they didn’t really like her.
“Are you sweet on him?” Candy asked, giving Lavinia a slow, condescending blink. “I think Lavinia’s sweet on Clare, girls. I spy with my little eye a Clare-catcher.”
Lavinia looked at Candy’s rouged cheeks (or was that Candy’s natural skin color, the color rouge aspired to be?) and shrugged.
“Why not let Lavinia take him her extra-tidy notes,” Melanie said to Candy. “He’s too Kansackian for us, anyhow.”
Her way of saying, Let’s leave him for the sappy girl from Iowa.
Myrtis said, “He’s a demon in trig, though. And I heard he won a bet reciting ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ beginning to end.” And then when Candy and Melanie stared at her, Myrtis said, “It’s probably not true, though.”
Lavinia bet it was true, based on what she’d seen of Clare Price in Latin class, but didn’t say so.
They talked about making centerpieces for Miss Price’s wedding luncheon, which was going to be held at the Practice House, and about how to make some kind of present for each grammar school child (which even Lavinia had to admit was charitable) and when the meeting was at last over, Lavinia was free. She walked to the school office, then to Clare’s homeroom desk, and then to the street.
Fallbrook was practically chartreuse when you squinted. The rain and hail had been followed by a sudden heat spell, which was normal in winter, but Lavinia still wasn’t used to it. A rain would fall, cold and fitful, and then a dry Santa Ana wind would rattle the windows all night, sweeping every drop of moisture from the air and every foggy hollow from the ground. The Sleeping Indian would turn from brown to violet and the empty lots in town would fill with meadows of yellow sour grass. The sky became a vast blue kiln. Lavinia often had the feeling, as she walked slowly down Ivy Street, that she had moved to another country when they left Iowa three years before.
The road from the high school led to her father’s store, where she worked every empty, sun-filled afternoon.
When she walked by the windows of the IGA, her reflection rippled and she thought of Clare Price lying in a bed with his shattered leg. She felt the weight of her books in the canvas bag, and the naked, smooth motion of her own unbroken body. As soon as she walked in the store, her mother stood up behind the counter and started to untie her apron. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d be late? I have to mail something before the post office closes.”
“I’m sorry,” Lavinia said. “There was a meeting. Innyhoo . . . want me to mail it for you?”
Her mother didn’t even consider it. “No, if I don’t get a breath of fresh air, I’ll scream.”
Alone behind the cash register, behind the long wooden counter that she liked to stroke with her fingertips, Lavinia opened her Latin book, but thought about Clare Price instead. She liked in particular to think of him doing chin-ups in his gym uniform, lifting himself over and over. Veni. She had seen him doing that one day, on her way past the gymnasium, and she’d counted to forty before he stopped and turned. Vidi. Clare’s brown hair combed neatly flat, his smooth, alert face, his light brown eyes, and his muscled arms distracted her in Latin and English. It was what she waited for, when she was in charge of the store: the tinkling of the bell at the door and the sight of his bare forearms, the possible brush of fingers as she handed him sugar or flour or coffee beans for the café. Vici.
She began to walk down the aisles, thinking of Candy’s offer to take oranges to Clare. The store wasn’t big, and the shelves were unevenly stocked because ranch people and even those with gardens in town were trying to live on their own canning. Bliss Coffee, Post Toasties, Blue Rose Rice, Cloverbloom Butter. She chose a box of White King granulated soap. There seemed to be a lot of that. Asparagus tips in a square tin because she had wanted to open it and see if they were lying in there like people in a bed. A box of powdered sugar because you could always use sugar in a café. Then she selected a package of Christmas candy that she had secretly hoped, but not expected, to find under their own tree. She hid the packages in her school bag and tucked them under the counter.
“The Red Cross League nominated me to visit Clare Price,” Lavinia said when her mother returned and started dusting jars of jam. “I have to take him the lecture notes.”
Her mother raised her eyebrows. “My Lavinia? The one who scorns all girls’ clubs?”
“I still do. But I have to be in three clubs for the dean’s list.”
“So you joined a boy-visiting club. Velly interesting.” Her stupid Charlie Chan voice. But there were no customers and little to do, so she let Lavinia go.
The day’s last light shone on the queen palm tree across the street. Through the window of the Sleeping Indian Café,
she could see Mrs. Price serving coffee to Dr. Quigley. She stopped in front of the glass door and felt idiotic. She couldn’t go into the room of a boy if he was alone, and he was going to be alone if his mother was serving coffee and his sister was still at school. The teachers always stayed late, it seemed like. Mrs. Price in her odd getup, black dress and white apron, saw Lavinia and waved, so there was no other choice: she had to go in.
“Hi, dear,” Ellie said.
“Hi, Mrs. Price,” Lavinia said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Ellie said. “Can I get you something?”
Lavinia felt Dr. Quigley watching her. Now what should she say? Lavinia never ate or drank anything in the café. She couldn’t afford to. Though the lemon meringue pie on Dr. Quigley’s plate looked wonderful.
“I was just wanting to ask about Clare,” she stammered.
“Oh, how nice of you,” Ellie said.
“He’s going to be flat on his back for at least six weeks,” Dr. Quigley said, smiling at Lavinia and then at Mrs. Price. “In boy time, that’s roughly six years.” For this, he received a sad smile from Mrs. Price, and then he took up another forkful of lemon pie.
“But he’ll be all right,” Ellie said. “That’s the important thing.” Actually, the important thing, Ellie thought, was trying not to picture the way the openings in Clare’s leg oozed, the look of the nail disappearing in flesh. Clare actually moaned from the pain in his sleep at night. Days, though, he suppressed it. Dr. Quigley had shown her how to give him shots and she tried not to think of the bills. She tried not to think of Ansel’s silence. She’d sent a cable to the farm days ago, and she hadn’t heard a peep out of him.
“I have the lecture notes for him,” Lavinia said, her face coloring. “From Latin and English. If he feels like it, but maybe he doesn’t.” If Mrs. Price told her to leave the notes in the café, what about the soap and tinned asparagus? What was she going to tell Mrs. Price about that?
“Maybe he’d like to see a friend,” Mrs. Price said. “Charlotte’s sitting with him.”
