The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  Kath was Blue’s mother. We walked on Monday mornings. Her idea. You’ll have to show me the real neighborhood, Lida. The Claveries lived out in Ladue. Frank and I could certainly have afforded to, but he’d enjoyed walking to work and—I don’t like saying this; it sounds ugly and self-congratulatory—we couldn’t see raising Pam so the only black people she met were the ones cutting grass.

  Kath Claverie knocked precisely at ten; Kath Claverie was always on time. I had an unkind theory about that—not about Kath, specifically, who I did like, but about her brand of woman, the ones who’d managed homes instead of careers. They tend to make a grand thing of punctuality. It’s a way of showing that their time also matters. I hollered for her to come in.

  “You don’t lock your door?” Autumnal light spilled in with Kath, followed by her subtle bloom of expensive scent. Some women—and I feared sometimes I was one of them—figured out what worked on them makeup-wise very young and then altered their faces very little from one decade to the next. Not so Kath Claverie. She looked current and put together but never actively done up.

  “I unlocked it, Kath,” I said. “I knew you were coming.” There was a border when it came to makeup, a one-way crossing. We used it to make ourselves look older and then we used it to make ourselves look younger. Barbra died right on that border’s cusp.

  Kath bent to hug me upon entry to the townhouse; the Claveries are a very touchy family. They’re all tall too; I stood just at the level of Kath’s neck. The usual gold chain encircled it. Eight pendants dangled, running left to right. A tourmaline, an emerald, a topaz, a pearl, a sapphire, another topaz, an opal, and a ruby. One birthstone for each grandchild, strung in order of their arrival. I keep telling the kids to have at it in May, went Kath’s favorite joke, purple’s my favorite and amethysts are cheap.

  I zipped my house key and credit card into a fanny pack. Hideous things, fanny packs, but I’d done my research. The two forms of ID I would need to open a P.O. box were tucked away inside. I had regular mail service, naturally, and I liked that I was the sort of woman who knew my mailman’s name. But—and I’m sure you don’t need me to spell this out, Clarence; you always were a clever one—I didn’t want you knowing where I lived. To Kath, I said, “I’ll want us to swing by the post office. I need stamps.” Kath gave a cheery thumbs up. She knew I liked tacking errands onto our walks. They felt less frivolous that way. I never told Frank this given his love of running, but motion for motion’s sake could seem so silly.

  We walked, skirting the park where fall colors—my favorites—were just starting to creep in. I’m not tall, but kept pace with Kath, who carried most of our conversation. She was good at it; some people naturally are. I apologized and told her, truly, that I hadn’t slept well. It felt good to be telling her something simple and true. Not that I was questioning myself. I’d made up my mind. Another saying of Ma’s who, for all her farm-wife quaintness, hadn’t raised her girls to be ditherers: May bees make no honey.

  Kath and I passed a bakery we’d discovered a few walks previously. I liked the Lida I was with Kath. With Kath, I was a Lida who frequented tucked-away bakeries; under my own steam I’d have grabbed a regular loaf at my regular grocery. “I’m getting a post box too,” I told her. “Isn’t that silly? But I can’t get that white powder out of my head.”

  “Anthrax.” She shuddered. I think it surprised Pam, how well Kath and I got on. But there was a proper spine to Kath Claverie, and a kindred sort of nerviness, though Kath, in all honesty, bore up with more grace than I. There were four Claverie children, three girls and then Blue. I suspected Kath and Bill, God rest, were the sort of old-fashioned couple who’d kept trying till they got their son and heir. And then, his blindness. It took a lot of gumption to carry on in the face of something like that. To get what you dearly want, but in a way that’s horribly wrong: Clarence, you know I am no stranger to the scenario.

  The post office hummed with industrial light. Everything inside—even the postmen—was linoleum colored, pallid and speckled with bits of brown and gray. Kath and I were their only customers. She paused to inspect the wall of wanted criminals. She was tall and immaculate and wore snazzy workout gear. I remembered that high school era trick of Barbra’s. If you’re up to something mischievous, do it alongside someone more memorable than yourself.

  Discounting Kath, a wall display of stamps was the room’s only source of real color. I did have stamps at home, left over from Pam and Blue’s wedding, but they were hardly suitable. They were heart shaped. They had doily edges. I couldn’t possibly use them for you; I was embarrassed even putting them on bills. I picked up an alternate pack. Illustrated trains burned through rectangular landscape. I couldn’t go with those. The energy they provided, the motion, the promise of escape. And you liked trains. I remembered your hand capped over Pamela’s on her second Christmas, running a model train around the lip of the table. She tried to mimic your choo-chooing. “No, no, Pammie Clare,” you corrected, “it’s not a sneeze.”

  Maybe Fruits of America. You’d had years of industrial kitchens, legally bound to sustain, but laboring under budget constraints. They’d make do with the bounty of cans. These might work. I could have you eager for that last meal, drooling over cancelled postage.

  But your letter to Pam on her ninth birthday: You thanked her for sending color to latch onto, and a bit of sky. All she’d sent was a grade school photo. That false cloud background. That fuchsia sweater she’d loved. The hippo ballerina embroidered beside the buttons. The pink curve of her Peter Pan collar.

  You didn’t deserve the brightness of these fruits.

  Nothing was right. A top-hatted, bell-ringing baby honored the turn of the year. A dove drifted across a blue background, commemorating NATO. And then the set commemorating American glassworks, stamps that showed brittle, brilliant, empty vessels. My sister collected vases. Glass ones because she liked that glass was never what it seemed: not solid, but liquid, imperceptibly flowing. I picked up a package. You would remember. My sister, who lined windowsills with vases. In the afternoons her rooms glowed with colored light.

  And you were prohibited glass. Your palms must crave the weight of objects, the things your life had once controlled. I hoped you dreamt of shards, liquid fragments that could never flow back into a solid whole. Even the smallest bit could split open a vein. I grabbed a pack.

  “I’d like a post box too,” I said at the counter. You sped toward your last appeal. “I don’t think I’ll need it more than six months.”

  The postman tugged at his collar, letting in a bit of air.

  On the forms he gave me, I listed Maisie Keller as a minor child who might also be receiving mail. Just thinking the name pleased me. You wanted letters from a stranger. You’d get them. Letters from that girl in the chair when I heard what you’d done, whose broken smile hid behind my bathroom mirror. I wrote her name clearly and with a deliberate hand. No one was going to give me any trouble. Even with the world ending, minors didn’t carry ID. And it was a modern world ending. People—people with manners, in any event—knew better than to fuss over families with mismatched surnames. I grinned, turning in the paperwork. In some ways I have a dangerously readable face. Kath, I hoped, would take my expression for relief. Another step removed now from an envelope of white catastrophe. You would know better, Clarence. Barbra’s face could be readable in much the same way. The postman gave me my key. It caught the light.

  6.

  I had never learned to type properly. This was deliberate—the best way to ensure I never wound up a secretary was to be in perpetual need of one. I would write to you by hand. I gathered a notepad, an envelope, and the bouquet of pens that occupied an old soup can that eight-year-old Pammie had pasted over with bits of construction paper. A Mother’s Day craft project brought home from school. A hard day, that, and Father’s Day too. Every year. But of course we couldn’t flounce about and insist Pam’s classes ignore it. That bit about the squeaky wheel is true only to a po
int. Perpetual squeaks fade into so much background din.

  I set up at the dining room table, where I’d left my purse. Inside it, stamps waited, shining beneath plastic. Dear Clarence, I wrote. You’d been twenty years alone. Always so eager to be well thought of, so easy with the charm. You’d go weak at the knees for a girl who called you dear. My script was lovely. In school I’d won penmanship prizes. The narrow bow of the C and the D’s full-breasted arc seemed to beckon, fragile and alluring, against the notepaper’s lines. Prison must be all right angles. How you must long for curves. I want you to know that in writing you I presume nothing about you. I try to be open and fair in everything and am better at being told things than I am at guessing. I am willing to hear anything you have to say.

  No. Absolutely not. I ran my fingers comb-like through my hair. A new sheet. Willing to hear was a phrase from Pamela’s adolescence, our girl skulking in past curfew, smudged makeup ringing each eye like a bruise. We’re willing to hear your reasons, Pammie, if you have them. Maisie Keller couldn’t talk like that. Maisie couldn’t have it in her to judge. Not yet. I am here to listen to whatever you want to say. I will be here if that is what you want. I’m not really sure what prompted me to write a stranger. Maybe it’s that my own life is good and that I am happy in it and I thought that if I wrote you I could pass that on in some small way. My tongue slicked along my teeth, stretching my lip. I looked like any one of my clients after their final visits. Everyone licks their own teeth once the brace is gone. They can’t help it; they’re not yet accustomed to the absence of restraint. I am twenty-three and just at the beginning of things, really, I wrote. Pammie’s age, which would gut you. I laughed. The only small advantage of living alone. No one about to pry into a private chuckle. Twenty-three. Only off by forty years.

  All my life, I had looked as though, given a year or so, I would turn out beautiful. I’d been a plain, round-cheeked child with wide light eyes, good thick hair, and a smile completely devoid of dental caries. I still had the same full face and even features, now undeniably scored with lines. But I liked my wrinkles. They lent me a new sort of appeal. I still wasn’t quite pretty, but now I looked as though I had been once, and not too long ago. A change for the better, without question, now that I was rid of that element of waiting. And maybe I had been, briefly, a looker and never noticed. What an idea.

  But Maisie Keller I would make dazzle, and not just by virtue of youth’s firm skin and the still-firm bits it encapsulated. She would be another Barbra, face a smooth and near-perfect circle, hair a shining easy mess, limbs quick and bird-boned. Adopted, Korean—why not?—like the real Maisie Keller, that patient in my chair, the last pair of eyes I’d looked into before hearing what you’d done. For Barbra, I would give Maisie Keller high, full breasts. For Barbra at ten, twelve, nineteen, waiting, waiting. Her impatient voice. “I’m such a Patty Pancake. I’ll be a Patty Pancake till I die.”

  Pretty words from pretty Maisie: I can tell you a little bit about my life if you think it would be of interest. If you decide to write back and let me know what you’re really interested in hearing, I promise I won’t yammer on about myself so much. When I was little, my parents called me Little Miss Me-Me. My last ex called me something similar (ha ha) but with more adult phrasing (maybe you can imagine).

  My profession gave me some advantage here. I’d dealt with the world’s Maisies at their most vulnerable, lying wide-mouthed in my chair while I remade them in subtle, painful increments. They called themselves names before others had a chance to. Railroad tracks, zipperface. The jokes of the young are painful, and not just because they are never as funny as the teller believes them to be.

  Maisie continued: It’s strange to share my big major flaw with someone I don’t know at all, but maybe that’s how a stranger becomes not so much a stranger, and your letter showed your share of vulnerability (which is why I picked it). I bet we could have a good conversation.

  About me: I just moved back to St. Louis (I bet you guessed that from the postmark) after college and am trying to figure out what I want to make of my life. I’m living with my Mom for now and even if she sometimes forgets that I’m no longer her little girl, we’re getting on fine. I love her to death. To death. Maisie Keller was young enough to be that kind of callous. In her next letter, she’d see the crassness of it and apologize. You’d like that. Mom does know I’m writing you and she isn’t too thrilled about it. She thinks it’s a scam and that if I tell you I’m not sending money or dirty pictures you won’t write back. I hope that when I’m old I don’t automatically think so badly of people. Anyhow, I promised her I would tell you I am not that kind of girl. So consider yourself informed! She’ll still be put out when I send this. But everyone has parents, I guess. If she wasn’t upset about this, she’d find something else.

  This letter seems so small and I am sure you’d rather think of bigger things since I guess that’s the sort of letter that will stop you from being bored. I’m sending it on anyhow in hopes that bigger things will follow. I am sorry if this seems flakey,—

  A word I learned from Pam. Authentically twenty-three.

  —I really am. Next time I’ll do better. It’s just that I have no idea how I’m supposed to go about writing to a stranger.

  Which was what you were, Clarence. Even to me. Even when I thought you were family. I felt feverish. Excited too. The paper showed it. By the letter’s end my penmanship-prize writing looked harsh. Each character dark, each curve gouged into pulp. I traced the imprints, pen canyons beneath my fingers, like Braille in reverse. I’d have to redo them; Maisie couldn’t seem angry just yet. And the perfect script at the letter’s start wasn’t quite right either. Old-fashioned, it pained me to admit. Even if you didn’t recognize my hand, you’d recognize my age. I began to rewrite, making each letter lighter, looser, almost slovenly. I would tack on a postscript, apologizing for the sloppiness. Schools these days offer such cursory instruction in penmanship.

  7.

  On the anniversary of her mother’s death, Pammie and I met for lunch. Her idea. She didn’t mention the occasion when we made our plans, but the twenty-fifth fell on a Thursday that year and Pamela worked full time. Pamela has always been one to take her responsibilities seriously; she wouldn’t take time off without reason.

  She beat me to the restaurant; I’d had a horrible time finding street parking. She stood outside, blowing into her hands. She’d turned out precisely as I always expected: not pretty enough to cause trouble, not plain enough to be troubled by it. She spied me and walked my way. She hadn’t put on makeup and had abandoned her usual ponytail; her hair fell loose and thick beyond her shoulders, crackling silvery blond in the wind. She approached with purpose, her arms pumping, her strides loping and precise. This precision was nothing new. She’d had it as a child, though back then she took timid steps, elbows glued to ribs, shoulders rounded down. I shook my head. Astounding how that long-ago Pamela, who tried to move unseen from one interval of stillness to another, had become this approaching woman, erect, confident, the easy swing of her arms slicing through the air between us.

  “Pammie!” I called.

  “Here I am,” she said. No one uses the word merry anymore, not outside of Christmas, but it was the apt one for her smile. I’d done such a good job with her teeth.

  “Yes,” I said. “Here you are.” We hugged. She’d changed shampoos. This new brand had lavender in it. I stood on tiptoe to kiss her forehead. The freckles I’d assured her would fade—as Barbra’s had—I now had to admit never would. Your eyes in her sockets glittered. She offered my hand a quick squeeze.

  “Cold,” I said, and gave an exaggerated shiver; I didn’t let go of her though. “I should give you my driving gloves. The Saab’s steering wheel never gets as chilly as the old—what?”

  “If my life were a drinking game, we’d all have to do shots every time you started solving problems that weren’t even problems.”

  “You shouldn’t be drinking, Miss. Not ti
ll you’re forty.”

  “Root beer only, cross my heart.”

  “Or coffee,” I said. Her preferred vice.

  “Been cutting back, actually.”

  “Heaven forefend.”

  “Thought you’d be thrilled. Good for the teeth and all.” She tapped her incisors lightly.

  “Wise woman. But aren’t you tired?” She looked it, actually.

  A shrug.

  “You look a little pale.”

  “There’s a cold going round the center.”

  “I’ve got oranges at home. Organic ones. I’ll save some out for you.” The oranges were from Green Mother Grocery, a neighborhood gem I’d happened on while out and about with Kath, where the fruit had never been in the vicinity of pesticides and looked more curated than actually for sale. My regular checker knew me by name. She was a year out of college, taking Mandarin classes part-time, and saving for a China trip in hopes of tracking down her birth mother. She’d dyed her hair the most electric pink and always stood birdlike on one foot. In my own head, I called her Flamingo.

  Pam said, “You know that’s not worth the extra money, right? An orange is an orange. I’m just tired. We’re swamped at the center, that’s all.”

  All that work. All day, outside. Dog hair clung to her coat sleeve. And I couldn’t see how Blue would be much help by night. No wonder she was run down. We reached the restaurant. I made sure to hold the door. “I’m sorry Blue couldn’t join us,” I said, though I had no idea how he’d have got himself here. Pamela’d done wonders with his dog, of course, but there were limits.

  “Blue wasn’t invited,” said Pam, hip-checking me. “Just us girls. You can flirt with him at linner.” Linner was a Kath Claverie word. She held them every Saturday. Any family, she liked to say, can have brunch. It takes a Claverie to have a linner.