by Michael Kun
“Calvin,” she says. She places her right hand flat over her heart. “I swear to you, with God as my witness, that next time I’ll call the police. I mean, thank God you’re here so I can talk to someone about it, so I can calm my nerves, but next time I won’t hesitate for an instant. The number’s taped right beside the telephone on one of those yellow sticky things.” She’s very resolute, Mrs. Hannah. She has three children whom I’ve never met. I’ve seen pictures, though. They’re all very tall, even the girl. They’re all in their thirties now, if I had to guess.
I sip at my own coffee, which is, in fact, quite hot, and then I take a seat across from Mrs. Hannah. I’ve heard Mrs. Hannah when she’s this way before, whenever she and Mrs. Minniefield are at it, and they’re at it again. This time it’s over the mail. The last time it was over a stick of margarine.
The two of them are always arguing over one matter or another, and I rarely miss out on this, living where I do, between them for all intents. Mrs. Hannah’s house is catty-corner to ours, and Mrs. Minniefield’s is to the left of ours, if you look at the two houses from the street.
This time, this afternoon, I was barely up the driveway from shopping before Mrs. Hannah dashed across her front yard and across the road, both hands holding her hair, and pinned me in my car.
“Calvin,” she said, huffing in an exaggerated way, putting her hands on her knees. “I have something to tell you. I need to talk. I need a man’s input here.”
“I’d be happy to help. I’ve got to get the groceries inside first,” I said, gesturing to the shopping bags behind me, “before everything melts.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay. That’s fine. It’s just that it’s happened again. She’s doing it again.”
“Who?”
“Martha. I mean, Mrs. Minniefield.” I address all the women formally, as Mrs. “This time,” Mrs. Hannah said, “this time she took the mail right out of my mailbox. Can you believe that someone would stoop to doing something so evil?”
“No,” I answered, “but my groceries,” and I invited her in for coffee. I put a pot on the stove, then I unpacked my shopping bags, which I took my time doing.
“I don’t know if you really should be bothering the police over something like this,” I tell her now. “They’ve got other things to be concerned with. Crimes, for instance.”
“That’s exactly what this is, a crime. And that’s what the police are there for. To protect the people. To protect the people like me and you.”
She wipes the flat of her hand across the tabletop, then brushes her palm against her skirt, and I pretend not to notice.
Where Ellie and I live, and where Mrs. Hannah and Mrs. Minniefield live, is a small neighborhood of about two dozen houses, though there may be more, as many as three dozen—I never really thought to count until now. I’ve lived here for four full years and a good portion of a fifth, the last fourteen months alone, although the place is a little roomy for one person, so much space to roam in.
This is where Ellie and I moved two months after we were married. We spent the first two months with her sister Lynnette while we looked for a place of our own. That’s where Ellie is now, at Lynnette’s. I’ve stayed here, packing away our belongings little by little in boxes I picked up behind the Safeway supermarket, taking care of the place the best I can. The living room is a pigpen, covered with old newspapers. The bathrooms are worse. I don’t mean that there are newspapers in the bathrooms, just that they’re messy. The rest of the house is fine, though. Clean enough.
Ellie and I agreed that I’d stay and put the house on the market and take care of whatever else had to be done. Technically, the house is for sale, though you wouldn’t know it if you read the real estate section of the newspaper. There isn’t a FOR SALE marker in the yard, either. And I’m still here, for the time being. It’s hard to put your life into boxes, to compartmentalize it. Plus, no one buys houses this time of year.
At first, Ellie liked the idea of living here. In the fall, the woods behind our house are as plush and colorful as those in Virginia, from the pictures I’ve seen of Virginia in brochures. They installed cable television in our neighborhood three years ago, so we get shows from as far away as Chicago and New York. Also, there’s a shopping center within walking distance with a Safeway, a drugstore, and a place that sells frozen yogurt.
The neighbors were very pleasant to us when Ellie and I moved in. Very hospitable. They brought us cakes and salads and meat loaf so we wouldn’t have to bother with cooking the first few days in the house. One of them—I don’t remember which now—even brought me some of her husband’s old golfing sweaters. He’d died a couple years before we moved in. “They’re just going to waste,” she told me. “They’re just sitting there in the bureau, and I thought someone should get some use out of them.” I wish I could remember which of the women that was, but many of our neighbors are widows.
If that bothered Ellie—the widows—she never said a word about it, at least not right away. She did some of her grocery shopping with the older women, usually Mrs. Minniefield, and she drove them into town for meetings and doctor appointments and never complained once. But then, without any warning, she became angry and bitter about the women, like something had snapped inside her. She stopped driving them into town, often making up poor excuses—“Tell me, Calvin,” Mrs. Minniefield asked me, “When did Ellie start painting the attic?”—and she started to call the neighborhood the “Menopause Projects.” She’d say, “Oh, another Christmas in the Menopause Projects.” Or, “I’m going to see Lynnette today. I’ve got to get away from the Menopause Projects.”
Then, later, as a number of deaths began to occur—Mrs. Linz and Mrs. Silverman, both within a week, then Mrs. O’Mahoney—Ellie stopped calling it the Menopause Projects. She took to calling it the “Waiting Room.” The Waiting Room to heaven or hell or the hospital or the mortuary or wherever. The Waiting Room, Ellie said, because no one was staying long.
Ellie moved out less than a year after Mrs. O’Mahoney died. “It’s like living in the middle of a retirement home,” she said. “It frightens me. It frightens me in a way I can’t explain. I try to think it out so I can explain it to you, so it’ll click in your mind, but it’s indescribable, the way I feel about this place now. These women—”
“They’re nice women.”
“I’m not questioning whether or not they’re nice, honey. I know they’re nice, but I just don’t think it’s healthy.”
“What?”
“To be here. It’s not healthy. I mean, they take advantage of you.”
“No,” I protested, “they do not.”
“Yes, they do. You just don’t see it. They make demands upon you, upon your time. They make demands upon your conscience is what I think it is.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I just don’t see it. And I don’t see any reason to move. Look around you. Look at the house. We’re settled, and our mortgage isn’t half bad.”
“Jesus,” she said. “You’re like your father. The apple never falls far from the tree.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean you have no energy.”
“I have energy,” I said. “I have energy. Just because I don’t do Jane Fonda workouts like you do doesn’t mean I don’t have energy.”
“That’s not what I meant. You know that’s not what I’m talking about, Calvin. You’re trying to switch the focus of this conversation.”
“This conversation doesn’t have a focus,” I said. I really didn’t know what she was talking about. I felt like I was being accused of something, only I didn’t know what, and Ellie shivered when she talked.
“It most definitely has a focus.”
“Then explain.”
“We need to move,” she said. “We need to pick up everything and get on with our lives.”
“I like it here.”
“I know you like it here. That’s the problem, exactly.”
“It’s pretty
here. And it’s quiet. And the shopping center…” I didn’t finish my sentence. Bringing up the shopping center wasn’t a very good idea, I could tell.
She didn’t say anything.
“Where do you want to move? I mean, do you have any place in mind, or is this just a whim?”
“I don’t have a particular place all picked out. A place like here would be fine,” she said, “only different. It can be like this, pretty and all, but there has to be something for us. Do you see what I’m saying?”
It wasn’t long after that that she was gone.
Younger couples, some with school-aged children, have moved in since, only Ellie hasn’t been around to see it. Who knows if it would’ve made a difference. The new neighbors barbecue and play volleyball in their front yards, and sometimes the men will wet down their driveways with garden hoses so the children can slide down in cardboard boxes.
Before, all the houses were dark by nine o’clock. Now, late at night, I drive by and I can see the lights from the television sets coming through the windows, almost like they were ghosts.
Yes, I think it might have made a difference.
It’s been a good minute since Mrs. Hannah has said anything. We just hold our coffee cups, and I look out the window onto the backyard. It really is beautiful. The leaves are just beginning to turn. It’s turning into Virginia again.
Finally, I say, “Don’t you think calling the police might be a bit drastic?” but Mrs. Hannah disregards me.
“Who knows what she took? She could have taken checks or packages from the department store or private letters, for all I know.” She says “private” in a way that suggests some sort of intimacy. “Mail is a person’s private business. It’s like underwear.”
“What makes you think she took anything at all?”
I pour a little cream into my coffee to cool it some, not because I like it that way, and I offer the container to Mrs. Hannah when I’m done. She waves it off.
“I saw her.”
“You saw her taking your mail?”
“Not in those exact words, but I saw her standing beside my mailbox looking very suspicious. You know the way she is.”
“That doesn’t mean she took something.”
“And it doesn’t mean that she didn’t, either.”
This goes on and on, my mind wandering off only to be dragged back again, until I convince Mrs. Hannah that she should head home and cook herself some supper.
“It’ll be good for your nerves,” I tell her, “to take your mind off all of this.”
It’s nearly five o’clock, but you wouldn’t know it because the sun is so high, hanging above the foliage like a pendant. I wish Ellie could see this.
That was how I knew I was in love with Ellie in the first place, when I would see things and wish she could see them too. Trees and animals and clouds and old photographs. There was one time when I was at the Atlantic Ocean with my brother Steve, and we were standing and talking, ankle-deep in the water. Splashes came out of the waves no more than fifteen yards from us, and then we saw them: two beautiful black dolphins leaping. More followed them, eleven or twelve in all, and we raced along the beach to try to keep up with them. “God, I wish Ellie could see this,” I said to Steve. “She’d love it.” And he said, “You’re going to marry her someday, aren’t you?”
I walk Mrs. Hannah to the door. She says she’s going to make spaghetti and meatballs and invites me to join her, but I tell her I’m too tired. When she’s gone, I make my way back to the kitchen, in fact very tired, and I wash out our coffee cups and leave them in the sink. I walk to the living room and sit in the recliner and push the arms back so the footrest kicks out.
I don’t know how long it is that I’m sleeping before the doorbell rings. It’s Mrs. Minniefield.
“I can’t believe that witch,” she says. “I can’t believe that witch would accuse me of something like this.”
I invite Mrs. Minniefield in, and she sits at my kitchen table, her hair matted, her dress as free of wrinkles as a sheet of metal. She considers the two chairs pulled from the table and runs a finger over the back of one. Her fingers are very thin.
“Do you have a young lady here?” she asks. “Am I interrupting?”
I can tell from her eyes that she hopes she’s caught me at something. She’s sixty-five or sixty-six.
“No, I’m alone,” I tell her, and she gestures to the coffeepot on the back burner of the stove. I fix her a cup. It’s still warm enough to serve.
“Anyway,” she says, “she’s always accusing me of something, and, Calvin, you of all people should know that she’s the one who’s always causing trouble. If it’s not one thing, it’s another with that woman.”
“Yes, but she says she saw you standing by her mailbox.”
“I was putting mail in,” she says, “not taking it out. The postman accidentally delivered some of her mail to my house.”
This would make some sense since their house numbers are separated by one digit: mine.
The doorbell rings again, and, as I’d expected, it’s Mrs. Hannah. She says she needs to borrow a can of tomato paste for her sauce, that she’d noticed that I’d bought some—I had, three cans—but I know better. I know Mrs. Hannah. I know that she was watching from her window, from behind the drapes, and saw Mrs. Minniefield come in. Nonetheless, I try to block her view at the front door. She spots Mrs. Minniefield and pushes her way past me and into the kitchen. I don’t offer much resistance.
“Mail thief!” Mrs. Hannah shouts. “That’s a federal offense. You’ll get fifty years in prison for this.”
Her voice is so shrill that it makes the doorbell chimes ring lightly, and I touch my fingertips to them to quiet them.
“I took nothing,” Mrs. Minniefield answers. “And you’re one to talk, aren’t you? You’re always taking the newspaper off my front porch.”
“You. You took a bag of groceries out of my station wagon. You took the hedge clippers out of my garage. Those were George’s.”
“You took the Christmas wreath off my front door.”
“You took the lightbulbs out of my porch lights.”
Their accusations go back and forth. They’re the same ones I’ve heard for years, and each woman waits for the other to finish before raising one of her own. Ellie hated this. She used to go up to the bedroom and lock the door, then turn the clock radio up high so she wouldn’t have to listen.
I move between the women and raise my hands in front of me to calm them down.
“Look, Mrs. Hannah, Mrs. Minniefield, enough is enough,” I say. I’m feeling strong. I’m feeling energy in me. “This has been going on too long.” I want to say, “You drove my wife away,” but I don’t. It’s not their fault they’re the way they are.
Instead, I tell them that I have an idea. It’s just the beginning of one, really. I tell them that I’ll flip a coin, and whichever one of them loses will have to leave, she’ll have to move out of the neighborhood for good. She’ll have to move out of her home, I tell them, and I fold my lips sadly.
The women turn to each other, and they surprise me.
“That’s fine,” Mrs. Hannah says.
“You won’t get any argument from me,” Mrs. Minniefield says. “Flip the coin and let’s have it done with.”
I push my hands into my pockets then pull them out, empty, considering what to do next. Mrs. Minniefield finds a nickel in her purse and hands it to me before I have a chance to think of anything. I rest it on my thumbnail, then flip it high into the air, almost to the ceiling, and Mrs. Hannah calls tails.
It lands heads on the linoleum. I’m not sure what to do.
When I pick up the coin, I notice how filthy the linoleum has gotten. “I guess you’ll be leaving soon,” Mrs. Minniefield says and smiles.
“I will not be leaving,” Mrs. Hannah says and she puts her hands against her hips. “Calvin always liked you best. He cheated.”
I can hear Mrs. Hannah’s sneakers squeaking as she
storms out of the house. The screen door clanks shut, and Mrs. Minniefield isn’t far behind, wagging her finger. They continue arguing out in the front yard, but I can’t hear what they’re saying anymore, only the buzz of voices you hear when someone’s on the telephone in the next room.
I walk to the living room and sit back in the recliner, reaching behind me to close the drapes. I sit there and look around the room. Photographs. Lamps. Books. Someday, when I sell the house, I’m going to have to put all of it in boxes.
I close my eyes tight and hum, thinking of Ellie, thinking of what she’s like, her black hair pulled back behind her ears, thinking of how her thin arms would get caught up in mine, thinking of how much she disliked living here, how many times she said, “Please, baby, don’t make me old before I’m old.” That or, “A girl can’t live like this.” I sit and think of her on her knees, dressed in old blue jeans and one of my T-shirts, filling cardboard boxes, wrapping the dishes and glasses in sheets of newspaper, folding her clothes. I’m thinking about when she left, how I helped her carry her suitcases out to the car. “Everything will be fine,” I said. “I’ll sell the house right away and come and get you. Give Lynnette my best.”
Then, suddenly, something hits me. I rush down to the basement, still in my socks. By my workbench, there are stacks of cardboard boxes that Ellie packed away, each taped shut and filled with remnants of our marriage. Occasionally she comes back with Lynnette to pick through them, but not very often.
There’s a box by my electric saw that she’s marked SUMMER CLOTHES. I tear off the packing tape, and that’s what’s in there: her shorts and bathing suits and floral blouses, all folded like they’ve just come back from the cleaner’s.
The one she’s marked BOOKS AND THINGS is filled with just that: paperback novels and knickknacks that she used to keep on the bookshelves. The one marked KITCHEN UTENSILS contains the extra set of kitchen utensils. The one she’s marked ANCIENT ROMAN RELICS is where I find Mrs. Minniefield’s Christmas wreath, Mrs. Hannah’s hedge clippers, and an assortment of things I’ve never seen before: a small ceramic pitcher in the shape of a cow, a paperweight Statue of Liberty, a pipe, a high-heeled shoe, a picture of someone at the beach, a pair of socks.
