“Now, Priscilla,” said Billy calmly. “I’m gonna try to forget you said that. As a matter a fact, there’s a whole lot about you I’m gonna try to forget. So why don’t you go on home and do the same thing?”
“Not until the photographer gets here,” said Priscilla. “I called up the newspaper.” She had, indeed, phoned the Watertown Weekly. A good article about her plight, if it had just the right heading, could do miracles for her mission. CHRISTIAN CONFRONTATION AT THE CROSSROADS was one alliterative suggestion Prissy had scrawled earlier and would gladly give to any interested reporter.
“The newspaper?” asked Billy. “Why do that, Priscilla? There’s only seven of you. Six and a half, really, when you consider old Sarah-Tom who’s partially dead.”
“What’d he say?” asked Sarah-Tom.
“And all you’re doing is standing out here in the cold annoying folks,” Billy continued. “You got a minister there who ain’t used to snow and cold and would probably be better off with a vodka in him. You got his spindly-assed wife and two gag-toothed girls. Old Sarah-Tom’s bound to get pneumonia and finish dying. And behind you is Wilma Fennelson, so frigid herself she don’t even know it’s cold out here.”
“What a vile mouth,” Wilma Fennelson said, but Billy ignored her. He was in the midst of his cocksure act, well aware of the appreciative spectators behind him.
“Now, we all know that nature was cruel to Wilma,” Billy went on. “So I’ll say no more. But you, Priscilla, tell me the honest truth. When was the last time you took a laxative?” Prissy’s face was already red, one of those Irish faces you see in advertisements for soap or booze. But Elsa Carr blushed deeply.
“We never had a watering hole in this town before,” said Prissy. “And the only reason we got one now is that Maurice here is too lazy to get a real job.” Maurice’s face was still pale enough to show chagrin. His honorable profession was being attacked.
“It’s a living,” Maurice said weakly.
“Pssst!” Wilma Fennelson leaned from behind Prissy and motioned to Sally. “I’m in charge of turkeys for the Thanksgiving Day Co-op Dinner sponsored by the Women’s Auxiliary,” she whispered. “Can I put you down for one?”
“What?” asked Sally. “Are you crazy? You’re trying to close me down on behalf of one organization and asking me to cook a turkey on behalf of another.”
“Two birds with one stone,” Wilma said.
“Well, someone needs to take that stone away from you,” said Sally. “You’re dangerous.”
“It’s too cold to stand out here arguing with these poor lost sheep,” said Booster. “I’m going inside for what I come here for in the first place, a drink. And now I intend to have me a double.”
“Go on home, Priscilla,” Billy urged, “and take this ragamuffin group with you. You’ll be the laughingstock of the county if the newspaper shows up.”
“No we won’t,” said Prissy. “Seven people will more than fill out a newspaper picture.” But the darn paper hadn’t turned up for the Last Temptation of Christ picketing either, since only Prissy and the minister’s girls had managed to make the protest. Prissy knew that scores of people were willing to sign things, but when it came to marching for the Lord, her army was small. That was fine. Prissy had been keeping notes for years, and when Judgment Day finally arrived, she would be most happy to turn the list of earthly shirkers over to their Maker.
“You might end up on the same page where they advertise them strippers from Canada,” Billy said. “How’s that gonna look?”
“The blood of our children drips from this building,” Prissy said vaguely. She raised her red Windex bottle as if she might shoot. Billy shook his bottle of beer vigorously, thumb squeezed over the end, and aimed back. Behind him he heard Ronny and Pike prime their own bottles, backup guns.
“We ain’t just gonna spray these at you,” said Billy. “We’re gonna make you drink them.” Prissy stared at him. She’d heard the stories of what sometimes happened to nuns in lonely convents when barbarians raped and pillaged, although, when you consider the Catholics, those nuns had probably asked for it. But Priscilla didn’t believe any of them had been forced to drink beer.
“Come on, Mrs. Monihan.” The minister finally spoke, a thin sorry-to-be-here voice. “We’ll settle this at the town meeting.”
“Yes,” said Elsa, and blew on the ends of her fingers. Billy was surprised. Didn’t these southerners know about frostbite? He could tell they weren’t used to picketing in cold weather. And all that Bible stuff took place over there in the Holy Land, where it was two hundred degrees at noon, and so they had no guidelines. Billy wondered suddenly if Ronny had porked any Jerusalem broads while he was double-dating with Uncle Sam.
“You been like this ever since Mrs. Fogarty read us Charlotte’s Web, back in the second grade,” Maurice said to Prissy. He had retreated to a safe position beneath his Crossroads sign. A cold wind rustled his flannel shirt and bit through the thermal underwear inside. Maurice trembled. Prissy lowered her Windex bottle.
“Mrs. Fogarty shouldn’t have read us that story,” she told Maurice. “God’s spiders don’t talk.” A little lump caught up in her throat as she remembered Charlotte’s inevitable death, her spiderlings gone off on the wind.
“No, they bite,” said Billy. Ronny and Pike lowered their weapons and drank from them. Prissy cast one final glance down the road to Watertown, but there was no sign of newspaper people with eager cameras. She made a mental note of the editor’s name, Julia Bayly, so she could add it to her snitch list on Judgment Day.
“I’m Friday’s paycheck,” said Billy Plunkett. “I’m gone.” He and Ronny and Pike disappeared back into the warm womb of The Crossroads, that forgiving maternal belly of the bar.
“The Bible says to ‘drink wine with a merry heart,’” Sally shouted at Prissy’s narrow back. “So there!”
“Bitch,” Maurice added, a word not found in I Corinthians.
***
“I still say someone should give Prissy Monihan a hysterectomy,” said Booster Mullins, and shook a generous amount of salt from a shaker into his glass of beer. It foamed up nicely. “Whether she wants one or not,” he added.
“She’ll be okay for a while,” said Billy. “She got a lot out of her system out there today.”
“Speaking of female plumbing,” Sally said, putting the salt back in place next to its spouse, the pepper shaker. Some of her customers liked pepper on their microwave pizzas. “I got some fibroid tumors in me the size of tennis balls. Dr. Brassard says they grow on the womb and that the womb oughta come out.” Booster grimaced. Billy Plunkett decided this would be a good time to play “All My Ex’s Live in Texas” again. Pike stared at the stuffed Canada lynx and tried not to think of his genitals, which had begun to ache sympathetically. Maurice decided to wipe down the bar. Didn’t Sally realize that this kind of talk belonged somewhere other than in the sanctity of a country barroom?
“Oh, come on, you guys,” Sally went on. “Why do you get all uncomfortable with female talk? I’ve heard you discuss other parts of the female body in words that weren’t exactly medical. What’s the matter with talking about tumors and wombs and periods?” Maurice himself blushed deeply over this last one, the menstrual jab. Sally was his sister, after all.
“That’ll be enough now,” Maurice said. His wiping grew erratic. What had become of women who once had the decency to walk into stores and ask for a box of cornflakes when they really wanted Kotex? Maurice had seen a sea of changes among the females in Mattagash, Maine. And that Gloria Steinem woman, he felt quite sure, probably had a New York hand in most of it.
“Yup,” said Sally. She was clearly enjoying her power over them. “I told him we might as well take out the ovaries while we’re in there. Get the whole shebang.”
Billy had played his quarter’s worth and was now back at the bar.
�
��I’d be careful,” he said, remembering just what he believed to be the start of his and Rita’s marital problems. “Taking the ovaries out of a woman is the same thing as taking the spark plugs out of a pickup truck. You might say it douses the fire.”
“I ain’t afraid of dousing my fire,” Sally said. She zipped up her jacket. The bar was now officially in Maurice’s hands. “Besides, I got plenty of coals to start another one.”
“You know what else can happen to you when you lose your ovaries?” Billy asked.
“What?” asked Sally.
“It’s a little-known fact,” said Billy.
“What?” asked Ronny.
“Something I saw on Nova,” said Billy.
“What?” asked Maurice.
“It’s been scientifically proved,” Billy added.
“What?” asked Pike. Billy smiled. Good old Piko. You put a bone in front of a dog and he’s bound to jump for it.
“You start getting skunked at cribbage,” Billy said, and bobbed his chin at the infamous skunk list.
NO SKILLS NECESSARY: THE MIRANDA ACT
“He never would’ve been a drinker if he hadn’t got hooked young on that darn Vicks Formula Forty-Four.”
—Prissy Monihan, explaining her brother Fred’s addiction, Amway presentation in her home, 1987
During the first days following Sicily’s departure, Amy Joy had gone into a whirlwind of what should have been spring cleaning, boxing up clothing she hadn’t worn in years, washing curtains, putting the basement in order. She had even attacked all the cabinets in the house, emptying drawers that held pencils with no erasers, pens that had dried up years ago, old keys that seemed to unlock nothing, not even the memories of what chests they might belong to, what doors. With the panicky cleaning over, she was finding it more and more difficult to relax in the big old house. Not even the Bangor Daily crossroad puzzle gave her its usual pleasure. Guilt washed over her each time she picked it up and realized that she now had it as she’d always wanted it: pristine, without Sicily’s hen marks and erasures, free of the foolish answers. Five-letter word for “insect genus”: scary.
The local weatherman, his voice scratchy on the old tube radio, was promising a light snowfall as Amy Joy sat with a cup of tea and stared out at the gray jays, the evening grosbeaks, and the blue jays. They were busy popping open sunflower seeds she had scattered at the base of the old birch. Amy Joy was restless, but she’d already had her outing on snowshoes, had filled all the bird feeders on the back mountain and at the edge of the field.
“All right,” she said. The cat looked up at her and meowed softly. “Even the cat agrees. I can’t put it off anymore. Either I get a job and leave Mattagash, or I don’t. But I have to decide now.”
She went upstairs to her bedroom and found the empty cigar box, one of her favorite souvenirs from Ed Lawler, and opened it up. There were her precious pamphlets, some ordered from magazines, some from newspapers, some a year old, some nearly twenty years old. Amy Joy unfolded the most recent and read the words again. “You Too Can Be a Nanny in the English Tradition,” the headline promised. “Let us train you in a mere six months. Both English and American openings with prominent families.” Amy Joy folded the paper back into its neat little square. What could she have been thinking of when she ordered it from that magazine at Dr. Brassard’s office?
“Mary Poppins I’m not,” she decided. And what of the other brochures she had been so sure would provide her a gateway to the world? She thumbed through them quickly, stopping at “Agency Seeks Live-in Companions for Invalid Professionals.” Amy Joy had called an 800 number for this particular advertisement, and before she had time to slip it into the cigar box, Sicily had pounced upon it. “It’s a sin to live with someone and not be married,” she had warned, waving the brochure. “Invalid or not. Besides, this is nothing more than dirty old men chasing their so-called companions around the house in wheelchairs.” Amy Joy smiled. Sicily had her moments. But now, with her mother gone, the brochures did seem silly. “Secretarial Jobs in Saudi Arabia.” What would the climate be like? The few times the temperature in Mattagash had risen to ninety degrees, everyone had conniptions. Electric fans were the hottest item going at LaVerdiere’s Drugstore in the heat of July. Amy Joy wished that the indomitable Sicily were shuffling about the kitchen at that very minute, muttering some gossip. Her mother’s presence had always been such a large incentive, had made even the nanny job, even wiping the snotty noses of little brats, sound like work at NASA. With Sicily gone, it appeared that Amy Joy Lawler had to face one large, terrifying fact of her life which had never presented itself to her before.
“I’m scared to death,” she whispered, but this time the cat lay curled in a warm ball and ignored her. But Amy Joy knew it was true. Three days earlier, she had phoned the Bangor Daily News to place an ad: “House for Sale. Built at turn of century. Spectacular view of the Mattagash River. 50 acres of pure country.” Twenty minutes later, she had called back and canceled it. Whatever she did, she needed the old house, with its birch bark insulation, its family histories, its river beating along outside the back door. She needed a place to come back to, if she ever did get up the nerve to leave. And so much of it depended on Bobby Fennelson, didn’t it? Would he and Eileen get divorced now? Would he and Amy Joy take up the notion of life together? Would Bobby want to live in Mattagash?
Amy Joy closed the cigar box. Maybe if she took a little trip, it would help her decide what to do with her life. She had always wanted to go to Boston, because Boston had such a nice ring to it. That’s where the old loyalist ancestors were, in the 1700s, before they crossed the border into Canada, before they came to found the town of Mattagash, Maine. After Amy Joy became interested in genealogy, thanks to Aunt Pearl, the name of one of those ancestors had always swum around in her head, like an anxious little fish hoping to spawn somewhere. This was Sarah Bradford, who married John Webster Diamond in 1775, down there in Boston, right in the heart of the new colonies. But no one knew anything more about her—just the name, like a soft, sad song. If Amy Joy visited Boston, maybe she could spend long evenings poring over facts in some dusty archives. Maybe she could bring Sarah Bradford’s life back out of obscurity if she only looked hard enough. Would some future genealogist, a niece or nephew many generations removed, look for an Amy Joy Lawler, in some distant 2089, only to pencil in spinster and then barren next to her name on the family tree, on a branch that ran nowhere, a dead-end nodule? Genealogists could be so cruel.
“Amy Joy?” It was Priscilla Monihan on the phone, and Amy Joy was almost glad to hear her voice, to hear someone’s voice, until she remembered why Prissy would be calling. For the third time in a week, Amy Joy Lawler politely told Prissy Monihan that she was not interested in signing her Christians Versus The Crossroads petition.
“Just because you’re childless,” Prissy said, and then, remembering the latest gossip about Miss Lawler, “at least for the time being,” she added, “don’t mean you shouldn’t take an interest in this issue. Next thing you know, Maurice will want to put a lottery machine in there to encourage gambling. People like Paulie Hart will go broke in a week. First the lottery, next bingo. You mark my words. We’ll be as bad as the Catholics before this is all over. We’re living in the shadow of Sodom and Gomorrah now.”
“We’re living in the shadow of six months of snow, Priscilla,” said Amy Joy. “And that makes Sodom and Gomorrah sound like nice little junket cities in the Caribbean.” Maybe they would need nannies there too, and live-in companions for dirty old men in shiny wheelchairs.
“So you won’t sign?” asked Prissy. She had always known that Amy Joy Lawler, like her father, Ed, before her, was living right next door to blasphemy, on the corner of Atheist Street.
“There’s the teakettle whistling,” Amy Joy said quickly. What were the excuses she’d used for Prissy’s two other phone calls? Someone’s at the door and There’s th
e teakettle whistling. Priscilla had gotten the teakettle excuse twice already that day. But rather than come right out and accuse the falsifiers, she resolved instead to add their names to the burgeoning list of religious shirkers she would turn over to the Supreme One on Judgment Day. Their teakettles would whistle in hell, whether they wanted them to or not.
Hoping to forget Prissy and her nonsense, Amy Joy settled into Sicily’s big armchair and opened the newspaper to the classifieds. She had to do something. She couldn’t just sit around and fret her days away. She could at least circle those jobs in the paper that sounded interesting. But the No Skills Necessary section seemed to cry out for dishwashers and motel chambermaids. The only ad that remotely answered Amy Joy’s expectations was for a driver of the Aroostook County Bookmobile. She wondered if she should cut the ad out and save it. Sicily would die of embarrassment, it was true, to learn that a McKinnon descendant was peddling books as easily as loaves of bread up and down the roads of northern Maine.
It was when she went into the kitchen to find the scissors that Amy Joy heard a soft knocking at the door. Too bad Prissy hadn’t waited five minutes. Amy Joy could’ve truthfully used the Someone’s at the door excuse. She glanced out the small window over the kitchen sink and saw a tall woman, her head lowered, standing on the front porch steps. It looked like Mary Felby, Ernie’s widow, the hippie woman from the back settlement. There was a small splatter of wet snow falling lightly, something the weathermen had predicted would dissipate shortly, amounting to nothing. But Amy Joy saw that it had accumulated on Mary Felby’s thin shoulders, and on her dark stringy hair. Mary wouldn’t have any organic vegetables or fresh berries to sell at this time of year. Maybe she was selling something she’d canned. Amy Joy imagined chaos in the Felby family budget with Ernie gone.
“Mary, what in the world are you doing out on such a day?” Amy Joy asked as she opened the door. But when the thin figure lifted its face, it was not Mary Felby after all but a young girl, maybe twenty years old. The face seemed familiar, except that Amy Joy knew she had never met this person.
The Weight of Winter Page 30
