The Done Thing

by Tracy Manaster

  13.

  Frostmouth hadn’t lied. There was a speed trap after the merge. I was not pulled over. I have always been a careful driver. Even angry. Even seething. Even itching to be back home. I had paid to put in fine oak shelves. They bracketed the fireplace. My photo albums lined them: one per year, acid-free paper, meticulously captioned. Subject, location, occasion, and date. Last name and then first, and always correctly spelled. Frank liked to tease that the average architectural blueprint required less precision. It was kind of him to pretend it was the tic of a well-organized mind. But Frank knew me. He knew my tendency toward scorekeeping. He’d been with me in the parking lot. He had to see those albums for what they were: the marshaled evidence of a happy childhood.

  I parked the car. I was deliberate and careful doing so. The townhouse garage was narrower than the double one I’d shared with Frank. I locked the car. I locked the house. I went straight for the photo albums. It would be essential to be meticulous. Chronological order. Pammie in coveralls, helping to paint her bedroom the lavender she’d selected. Pamela, barefoot, writing her name in sidewalk chalk.

  Her senior year at Wash U, Pam and her roommate had hatched the Austin plan. Come graduation, they would move south. Neither girl had people in Texas. Not a job lined up between them. But they wanted someplace sunny and they wanted someplace young. Pamela’d met Blue her last semester and bailed on the endeavor; I supposed I would always owe him for that. But the plan stuck with me. To pack up and move on a whim like that was strictly the provenance of the young. No one in my generation would have done so. Certainly no one in your mother’s.

  Pamela in water wings and a ruffle-bottomed swimsuit.

  Pamela in an Endicott School Black Watch skirt and blazer.

  Frank and Pammie and a fresh-caught trout, my girl eyeing the fish warily.

  Your mother had no kin in these parts. But your mother, Clarence, had her reasons. Her words, Gatling gun in my mind: you don’t know what it is to be a mother. Her words, and Barbra’s: my hand to God, that woman’s favorite sentence is I told you so.

  Pamela’s face painted red, white, and blue for an Independence Day parade. Your mother could’ve been any one of the thousand passing patriots. Tracking my sweetheart. Taking notes.

  Pamela sans milk teeth in the second grade spelling bee. Onstage before a darkened auditorium where anyone could be sitting.

  I peeled the parade photograph from the album. It came away with the sticky sound of flypaper. I would need to find Frank’s magnifying glass and a very strong light. I would have to unearth Barbra’s wedding album—thank goodness I’d vetoed Ma on burning it—because there would be Marjorie pictures in it to cross reference. I removed the spelling bee picture too. Somewhere, surely, I had Pammie’s old school directory. I could phone other parents, ask for crowd shots from the inevitable reception after, put the magnifying glass to work once more.

  Pamela in her Girl Scout uniform. The den mom had been Cynthia Somebody. I could look it up. The Internet would help. She’d have records of the neighborhoods where Pam had sallied forth to offload cookies; from there it would be a simple matter of cross-checking ownership deeds.

  The pile of photographs grew: Sixth-grade graduation, Pammie in the Jessica McClintock she’d begged for, and who knew how many strangers milling about with sugar cookies and neon punch. Pammie and her bunkmates, parents’ day at Camp Discovery. Pam at Ted Drewes with her usual cup of butterscotch–graham cracker. A dozen folks in the background, queuing up for custard. Pammie’s first Cards game; Pamela, Frank, and I, in three of Busch Stadium’s fifty thousand seats.

  It was dark out, and late. I poured myself a bowl of muesli and took an idle bite or two. Pamela, about to board the bus for the all-state swim meet. Pamela, dolled up for dinner before her senior prom, where anyone with a reservation at Dominic’s could have seen her radiant in the green satin she had selected, the one I’d said could either be low cut or figure-hugging or short, but or only, given her age, not and.

  The piles covered the table. Loose photos. Yearbooks with their candids. The magnifying glass, though I wouldn’t muck about with that until everything was sorted and I could tackle it systematically. I went to bed and slept very little. Morning came; I brushed my teeth. I remembered: only the nicest shots had made it into the albums but thank goodness we kept all the negatives. I knew right where the boxes were. Spool after spool. So many crowd shots. I wished I was still in practice; I’d have the light board I used for X-rays, which would allow for a proper look. Instead, I held them strip by strip to the window. Thankfully it was a sunny day.

  I only realized it was afternoon when Pam phoned. It was Saturday and I had missed Kath’s linner. I told Pam I had a touch of the stomach flu. She accepted this without question, so I must have sounded spent and very strange.

  14.

  And then it was Monday. Kath Claverie showed up at our usual walkabout time, bearing a Crock-Pot of chicken broth. Acid rain could come, and race riots, and the Mississippi could churn thick with nuclear sludge, and Kath Claverie would still arrive promptly and bearing chicken broth.

  I hadn’t eaten. The soup smelled delicious and I told her so.

  “Parsnips,” said Kath. “They make it taste like it’s been simmering forever.”

  “I’m awfully sorry about Saturday.”

  “It was only linner. Where can I put this?”

  My townhouse was deliberately modern in its layout; airy, well-lit, and, in its common areas, predominantly wall-less. Ma’s old dining room table stitched kitchen and living room together, its warm wood surface buried beneath my weekend’s labor. I watched Kath take it in: the piled photographs, the magnifying glass, the photo albums I had not returned to their shelves. The forgotten bowl of muesli, and thank goodness I never could stand the taste of it with milk. A legal pad, busy with brainstorming. The yearbooks. The inexplicable compass and butcher’s twine that I did not recall bringing to the table.

  “Put it in the kitchen,” I said. “That Crock-Pot will need a plug.” I opened the cabinets for a pair of mugs. I had a fine set of soup bowls, porcelain with dainty handles, but I was meant to have been ill and there is something inexorably soothing about clear soup and a workaday mug. I passed one to Kath. “I’m sorry about the state of things.”

  “You scrapbooking?” Another reason I liked Kath: the slant of her mind toward the active, contained, and neatly accomplishable. Kath sewed Halloween costumes for the grandchildren. She gardened. She dried flowers from her garden and twisted them into wreaths.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  Kath gestured with the mug. “May I?”

  “Just keep it in order. It looks like chaos, but—”

  “Say no more.” She lifted a picture of Pam carefully by its corner. Kath Claverie knew about fingers. About the oils they secrete. She went for a second photograph. “Just look at that gorgeous girl.”

  Pam hadn’t been gorgeous actually, not in the lively, expansive way common to the Claverie grandkids. There was always a reserve. Had she had her mother’s vanity, she could have sported a ballerina bun and cultivated an air of continental mystery. To Kath, I made myself agreeable, saying, “Just look at those eyes.” Your eyes, Clarence. It has always hit me hard that her objectively best feature is the one she gets from you. Very early on I made a habit of praising them first. Better that than allowing the compliments of others to catch me barbed and unaware. I sipped. Kath’s soup was rich and warming, just the slightest bite of salt. A surge of feeling cared for. Cared about. “I was looking for her grandmother,” I said. I made my voice decisive. One of my mother’s sayings: talk bites trouble in two.

  “Renate?” Kath asked, picking up another picture. Ma died before Pammie and Blue ever met; Kath knew her name only out of kindness to our family. Her mother had been called Bette and her husband’s, Maxine; odds were even between Kath and me on that front.

  I paused a moment. I could speak my mother’s name; with the
name of my mother all would be smoothed over. I shook my head. “Marjorie.” It’s an ugly name, Clarence. No surprise it came out a croak.

  Kath set down her mug. The whole enterprise seemed foolish. My townhouse, a disaster. “Marjorie,” Kath echoed, tasting the unfamiliar sound.

  “Clarence’s mother,” I said, confirming what Kath Claverie was far too well-mannered to ask.

  “Okay then. Marjorie.” She offered a tight, social smile. “She’s . . .”

  Kath was waiting for an adjective.

  Instead, an adverb. “Here.” I felt like a magician, producing a rabbit from a hat. A stringy rabbit, palsied, thin-haunched. Sufficient only for stew. “She’s been here for years.”

  Kath waited. Naturally. A mother of four knows silence is best for chasing out the truth.

  “I looked her up online,” I said.

  Kath whistled, low and long. “That technology’s going to put PIs out of business.”

  I felt less on the brink, hearing her say that. This wasn’t futile and it wasn’t neurotic futzing. We were simply two women of a certain age discussing new technology as broth warmed the air between us. “We cut contact with her,” I said. It felt clean to be telling Kath. It felt right. “I just found out she followed us here. She’s in O’Fallon, just across the way. No reason but Pam for her to be there. So I’ve been looking through old pictures. Trying to catch her, sneaking in on the edges.”

  “Good Lord.” Kath clasped her hands like a child at prayer. “I’d have had a tail on her from the get-go. She could’ve come after Pam or—”

  “She didn’t.” How absurd, my taking your mother’s part against Kath. Kath, who offered no judgment for the way we’d sloughed off a whole side of Pam’s family. I should have been glad about that. I should’ve wanted to take Kath’s hand. Instead, I felt cluttered, my house and person, my mind itself, too cluttered even to remember whatever saying of Ma’s translated to if you feel like you’ve got away with something it’s because you don’t feel bad enough for the wrong that you did in the first place. The turn of phrase had involved corduroys. Patching them.

  “I’m sorry,” Kath said. “I don’t mean to second-guess you.”

  “You sound like a girl detective. Putting a tail on her.” I said this because it was true and because Kath had been second-guessing.

  “Paperback mysteries,” she said. “My guilty pleasure.”

  As if crime were a thing to be enjoyed from afar. Every cell of me soured. That crack of Kath’s about hiring a PI; as if a single disaster had turned our family into the kind of people with an impulse toward the seedy.

  Kath indicated the table. “Did you find her? What does she look like?”

  “She’s not there.” I hadn’t completed my inspection, but it felt true in the moment that I said it. “It was a silly idea. She has Pam’s eyes,” I added, remembering that this was Kath, who hadn’t the least notion she’d offended, who’d brought me soup when I was down, who said ten times a month that I was family. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say anything to her.”

  “Of course.” Kath’s turned back to the table. She honed in on the next-to-impossible pile. “You know what I’d do? Take a good look at all the shoes. Marjorie came up in the Depression, yeah? So you look for old-fashioned shoes. Especially ones that pop up year after year. I remember my mom. Women that age would sooner waltz down the street naked than pony up for a new pair of shoes.”

  I should have been the one to think of it. When Ma died, Goodwill scored pumps that had been re-soled two times, even three. Across the Mississippi, there was a Riverview closet and in it shoes that fit the feet of Marjorie Lusk. Thriftiness is a virtue—Ma’d had a saying about that too—but I couldn’t see giving Marjorie credit. “It’s not that they were any better than us with money,” I said. “Those women. It’s just that the shoes they bought were better made. They wore like anything. America had craftspeople then.”

  15.

  Maisie, today I had a long hard think about never writing you again. I don’t suffer cruelty any more than I have to, and your letter was cruel and it was careless and you admit that you lied to me. That’s a waste of my time and you know that time is my only commodity.

  Did you think I wouldn’t break out sweating when you go on about dying? Next time, think on your words. I’m a full person in here. I was a full person before you were ever born.

  I could tell myself, it’s just because Maisie’s a young one. No excuse. My daughter’s your age and her letters are never so mean. It’s a weakness that I’m writing to you at all. You know how badly I need friends. But if you’re going to jerk me around, don’t bother writing again. I can’t waste what time I have left on a little girl who lies.

  All that said, I am sorry about your father. I guess I’m glad you can talk about it with me. Maybe I’m getting a taste of the legitimate Maisie. Maybe you were sunshine sweet that first time because you couldn’t own up to the bits of your life that are sad. Don’t do that again. You forget who you’re writing to. Every day I face things worse than you will ever face.

  And don’t go expecting me to patch over the hurt that comes from missing him. I don’t know you much and frankly (I promised honesty) this isn’t a patch job I have it in me to do. My own daughter says I make up for every grade school penpal she had who never wrote back. That’s not the kind of heart-hole a father wants to fill. My wife’s folks shrunk me down so small in her eyes. It kills me. So think about how your father would feel with you looking for a fix-up. I’d bet he was a good man (you seem to think so and your mother seems to think so). Don’t punish him. Dying’s the only thing he’s guilty of, and that’s a crime we all do sooner or later.

  Or if you’re looking for a patch, don’t look my way for it. I’ve got a daughter already. Whatever I want from you, it’s not to be a father.

  Though now I’m going to act like one and give advice (my own girl’s got her head on right, so it’s rare I get the chance). Don’t try losing yourself in “somebody else’s story” as you say. Don’t dribble your one life away. Think about it like this. Every morning at seven the officers switch on our TVs. Stemble gets five channels. You have to fill out a form telling them which one you want. We’ve got to pay for TV ourselves. No money, no TV. I’ve got the credits but I won’t buy. Even the guards think that’s strange. But think about all the things we can’t be trusted with and then think about all the shards and wires a TV could be busted into even though they’ve got them mounted way up high on the wall. Think about why they’re willing to chance it. My mind’s just about all I’ve got worth keeping. I’m not going to let it die before the rest of me.

  Maisie, this isn’t a life you want to get lost in. I’ve got no windows. Only dirty light makes it in. It’s always hot. My daughter says it’s been cold in St. Louis. When you write back, tell me about the cold. I haven’t been cool in years. Even sitting still I sweat. We’re allowed three showers weekly and we’ve got to pay for our own soap. Twice a month I get a mop to clean my cell. Water pressure’s just about drool. Toilets clog. Ventilation’s shot. Fifty men in this cell block and you can’t imagine the stink. Some of my best dreams are of ice. And cigarettes. You asked if I smoke. I don’t anymore. This isn’t TV jail where you can rustle up whatever you please and it’s a nasty habit so don’t you get started anyhow. The officers are a bunch of pricks. They know most of us would swap an appeal for half a pack so they come on shift reeking of it.

  Every day in Stemble’s the same. Food carts wheel in at four AM. Officers with goggles and flak jackets, like the food’s actually worth protecting. They make all kinds of noise even though lights don’t come on till five. At six they go cell to cell for first count. By the time that’s done the food’s cold (if it was ever hot). Trays come through the locked slots. If you’ve ever been to the zoo you know how it works.

  Stemble rations are all starch and sugar. Men thicken up over the years. They gobble up everything because chewing gives them something to
do. Not me. I eat half of every meal, exactly half, which was something my wife used to do whenever she thought she should be slimmer. Our utensils are plastic. We don’t ever get knives. When meat comes it comes pre-cut, like I used to do for my kid. There’s a guy eight cells down who they say licks his door between every bite to get that metal taste you get off a real fork. I don’t know if this is true. The cells are laid out so you can’t see from one into any other. Not that you can see through Stemble doors. No bars. Like I said, it’s not the movies. Don’t go thinking it’s the movies. The door is solid metal, perforated with one hundred and twenty dime-sized holes. I wish like hell I was water and could pour myself out.

  The guards make pill rounds starting at seven. You get a Dixie cup for water. They give us swallow tests. Lift that tongue. You need permission for aspirin eighteen hours in advance. End of pill rounds means only four hours need filling till lunch. By then it’s eight o’clock and they count us for the second time. Two hours later it’s ten o’clock and count number three. Lunch comes at noon. Also at noon (I don’t mean to be crass here) Duane Pelly in the next cell pleasures himself when the weather girl reads her report. I don’t have a TV so I have no idea what about her does it for him.

  Afternoons are the hardest because that’s the longest stretch of the day and it’s when things happen that you hope for. All afternoon you hope it’s your turn outside. They never give you a heads up because they don’t want you able to plan. Count four at two o’clock. You hope there’s mail. Count five at three o’clock. You hope that dinner will be edible (unlikely). The trays start to come at five and then there’s nothing left to hope for until tomorrow. Six o’clock, count six. Eight o’clock, count seven. Nine o’clock and the TVs shut off all at once from the master switch. The silence is strange. It doesn’t comfort and it doesn’t last for long.