But the lace collar she had picked up at a secondhand clothing store in Portland was a different matter entirely. It was handmade, handwritten. The script was small and very even. Like the Spencerian hand she had been taught fifty years ago in the first grade, it was ornate but surprisingly easy to read. “My soul must go,” was the border, repeated many times, “my soul must go, my soul must go,” and the fragile webs leading inward read, “sister, sister, sister, light the light.” And she did not know what she was to do, or how she was to do it.
Sleepwalkers
John Felburne
I told the maid not to come to clean the cabin before four o’clock, when I go running. I explained that I’m a night person and write late and sleep in, mornings. Somehow it came out that I’m writing a play. She said, “A stage play?” I said yes, and she said, “I saw one of those once.” What a wonderful line. It was some high school production, it turned out some musical. I told her mine was a rather different kind of play, but she didn’t ask about it. And actually there would be no way to explain to that sort of woman what I write about. Her life experience is so incredibly limited. Living out here, cleaning rooms, going home and watching TV—Jeopardy probably. I thought of trying to put her in my characters notebook and got as far as “Ava: the Maid,” and then there was nothing to write. It would be like trying to describe a glass of water. She’s what people who say “nice” mean when they say, “She’s nice.” She’d be completely impossible in a play, because she never does or says anything but what everybody else does and says. She talks in clichés. She is a cliché. Forty or so, middle-sized, heavy around the hips, pale, not very good complexion, blondish—half the white women in America look like that. Pressed out of a mold, made with a cookie cutter. I run for an hour, hour and a half, while she’s cleaning the cabin, and I was thinking, she’d never do anything like running, probably doesn’t do any exercise at all. People like that don’t take any control over their lives. People like her in a town like this live a mass-produced existence, stereotypes, getting their ideas from the TV. Sleepwalkers. That would make a good title, Sleepwalkers. But how could you write meaningfully about a person who’s totally predictable? Even the sex would be boring.
There’s a woman in the creekside cabin this week. When I jog down to the beach, afternoons, she watches me. I asked Ava about her. She said she’s Mrs. McAn, comes every summer for a month. Ava said, “She’s very nice,” of course. McAn has rather good legs. But old.
Katharine McAn
If I had an air gun I could hide on my deck and pop that young man one on the buttock when he comes pumping past in his little purple stretchies. He eyes me.
I saw Virginia Herne in Hambleton’s today. Told her the place was turning into a goddamn writers colony, with her collecting all these Pulitzers or whatever they are, and that young man in the shingled cabin sitting at his computer till four in the morning. It’s so quiet at the Hideaway that I can hear the thing clicking and peeping all night. “Maybe he’s a very diligent accountant,” Virginia said. “Not in shiny purple stretch shorts,” I said, She said, “Oh, that’s John” Somebody, “yes, he’s had a play produced, in the East somewhere, he told me.” I said, “What’s he doing here, sitting at your feet?” and she said, “No, he told me he needed to escape the pressures of culture, so he’s spending a summer in the West.” Virginia looks very well. She has that dark, sidelong flash in her eye. A dangerous woman, mild as milk. “How’s Ava?” she asked. Ava house-sat her place up on Breton Head last summer when she and Jaye were traveling, and she takes an interest in her, though she doesn’t know the story Ava told me. I said Ava was doing all right.
I think she is, in fact. She still walks carefully, though. Maybe that’s what Virginia saw. Ava walks like a tai ji walker, like a woman on a high wire. One foot directly in front of the other, and never any sudden movements.
I had tea ready when she knocked, my first morning here. We sat at the table in the kitchen nook, just like the other summers, and talked. Mostly about Jason. He’s in tenth grade now, plays baseball, skateboards, surfboards, crazy to get one of those windsail things and go up to Hood River—“Guess the ocean isn’t enough for him,” Ava said. Her voice is without color, speaking of him. My guess is that the boy is like his father, physically at least, and that troubles or repels her, though she clings to him loyally, cleaves to him. And there might be a jealousy of him as the survivor: Why you, and not her? I don’t know what Jason knows or feels about all that. The little I’ve seen of him when he comes by here, he seems a sweet boy, caught up in these sports boys spend themselves on, I suppose because at least they involve doing something well.
Ava and I always have to re-agree on what work she’s to do when I’m here. She claims if she doesn’t vacuum twice a week and take out the trash, Mr. Shoto will “get after” her. I doubt he would, but it’s her job and her conscience. So she’s to do that, and look in every day or so to see if I need anything. Or to have a cup of tea with me. She likes Earl Grey.
Ken Shoto
She’s reliable. I told Deb at breakfast, you don’t know how lucky we are. The Brinnesis have to hire anything they can pick up, high school girls that don’t know how to make a bed and won’t learn, ethnics that can’t talk the language and move on just when you’ve got them trained. After all, who wants a job cleaning motel rooms? Only somebody who hasn’t enough education or self-respect to find something better. Ava wouldn’t have kept at it if I treated her the way the Brinnesis treat their maids, either. I knew right away we were in luck with this one. She knows how to clean and she’ll work for a dollar over minimum wage. So why shouldn’t I treat her like one of us? After four years? If she wants to clean one cabin at seven in the morning and another one at four in the afternoon, that’s her business. She works it out with the customers. I don’t interfere. I don’t push her. “Get off Ava’s case, Deb,” I told her this morning. “She’s reliable, she’s honest, and she’s permanent—she’s got that boy in the high school here. What more do you want? I tell you, she takes half the load off my back!”
“I suppose you think I ought to be running after her supervising her,” Deb says. God, she can drive me crazy sometimes. What did she say that for? I wasn’t blaming her for anything.
“She doesn’t need supervising,” I said.
“So you think,” Deb said.
“Well, what’s she done wrong?”
“Done? Oh, nothing. She couldn’t do anything wrong!”
I don’t know why she has to talk like that. She couldn’t be jealous, not of Ava, my God. Ava’s all right looking, got all her parts, but hell, she doesn’t let you see her that way. Some women just don’t. They just don’t give the signals. I can’t even think about thinking about her that way. Can’t Deb see that? So what the hell does she have against Ava? I always thought she liked her OK.
“She’s sneaky,” is all she’d say. “Creepy.”
I told her, “Aw, come on, Deb. She’s quiet. Maybe not extra bright. I don’t know. She isn’t talkative. Some people aren’t.”
“I’d like to have a woman around who could say more than two words. Stuck in the woods out here.”
“Seems like you spend all day in town anyhow,” I said, not meaning it to be a criticism. It’s just the fact. And why shouldn’t she? I didn’t take on this place to work my wife to death, or tie her down to it. I manage it and keep it up, and Ava Evans cleans the cabins, and Deb’s free to do just what she wants to do. That’s how I meant it to be. But it’s like it’s not enough, or she doesn’t believe it, or something. “Well,” she said, “if I had any responsibility, I wonder if you’d find me reliable.” It is terrible how she cuts herself down. I wish I knew how to stop her from cutting herself down.
Deb Shoto
It’s the demon that speaks. Ken doesn’t know how it got into me. How can I tell him? If I tell him, it will kill me from inside.
But it knows that woman, Ava. She looks so mild and quiet, yes Mrs. Shoto, s
ure Mrs. Shoto, pussyfooting it around here with her buckets and mops and brooms and wastebaskets. She’s hiding. I know when a woman is hiding. The demon knows it. It found me. It’ll find her.
There isn’t any use trying to get away. I have thought I ought to tell her that. Once they put the demon inside you, it never goes away. It’s instead of being pregnant.
She has that son, so it must have happened to her later, it must have been her husband.
I wouldn’t have married Ken if I’d known it was in me. But it only began speaking last year. When I had the cysts and the doctor thought they were cancer. Then I knew they had been put inside me. Then when they weren’t cancerous, and Ken was so happy, it began moving inside me where they had been, and then it began saying things to me, and now it says things in my voice. Ken knows it’s there, but he doesn’t know how it got there. Ken knows so much, he knows how to live, he lives for me, he is my life. But I can’t talk to him. I can’t say anything before it comes into my mouth just like my own tongue and says things. And what it says hurts Ken. But I don’t know what to do. So he leaves, with his heavy walk and his mouth pulled down, and goes to his work. He works all the time, but he’s getting fat. He shouldn’t eat so much cholesterol. But he says he always has. I don’t know what to do.
I need to talk to somebody. It doesn’t talk to women, so I can. I wish I could talk to Mrs. McAn. But she’s snobbish. College people are snobbish. She talks so quick, and her eyebrows move. Nobody like that would understand. She’d think I was crazy. I’m not crazy. There is a demon in me. I didn’t put it there.
I could talk to the girl in the A-frame cabin. But she is so young. And they drive away every day in their pickup truck. And they are college people, too.
There is a woman comes into Hambleton’s, a grandmother. Mrs. Inman. She looks kind. I wish I could talk to her.
Linsey Hartz
The people here in Hannah’s Hideaway are so weird, I can’t believe them. The Shotos. Wow. He’s really sweet, but he goes around this place all day digging in the little channel he’s cut from the creek to run through the grounds, a sort of toy creek, and weeding, and pruning, and raking, and the other afternoon when we came home he was picking up spruce needles off the path, like a housewife would pick threads off a carpet. And there’s the little bridges over the little toy creek, and the rocks along the edges of the little paths between the cabins. He rearranges the rocks every day. Getting them lined up even, getting the sizes matched.
Mrs. Shoto watches him out her kitchen window. Or she gets in her car and drives one quarter mile into town and shops for five hours and comes back with a quart of milk. With her tight, sour mouth closed. She hates to smile. Smiling is a big production for her, she works hard at it, probably has to rest for an hour afterwards.
Then there’s Mrs. McAn, who comes every summer and knows everybody and goes to bed at nine p.m. and gets up at five a.m. and does Chinese exercises on her porch and meditates on her roof. She gets onto the roof from the roof of her deck. She gets onto the roof of the deck from the window of the cabin.
And then there’s Mr. Preppie, who goes to bed at five a.m. and gets up at three p.m. and doesn’t mingle with the aborigines. He communicates only with his computer, and his modems, no doubt, and probably he has a fax in there. He runs on the beach every day at four, when the most people are on the beach, so that they can all see his purple spandex and his muscley legs and his hundred-and-forty-dollar running shoes.
And then there’s me and George going off every day to secretly map where the Forest Service and the lumber companies are secretly cutting old growth stands illegally in the Coast Range so that we can write an article about it that nobody will publish even secretly.
Three obsessive-compulsives, one egomaniac, and two paranoids.
The only normal person at Hannah’s Hideaway is the maid, Ava. She just comes and says “Hi,” and “Do you need towels?” and she vacuums while we’re out logger-stalking, and generally acts like a regular human being. I asked her if she was from around here. She said she’d lived here several years. Her son’s in the high school. “It’s a nice town,” she said. There’s something very clear about her face, something pure and innocent, like water. This is the kind of person we paranoids would be saving the forests for, if we were. Anyhow, thank goodness there are still some people who aren’t totally fucked up.
Katharine McAn
I asked Ava if she thought she’d stay on here at the Hideaway.
She said she guessed so.
“You could get a better job,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess so,” she said.
“Pleasanter work.”
“Mr. Shoto is a really nice man.”
“But Mrs. Shoto—”
“She’s all right,” Ava said earnestly. “She can be hard on him sometimes, but she never takes it out on me. I think she’s a really nice person, but—”
“But?”
She made a slow, dignified gesture with her open hand: I don’t know, who knows, it’s not her fault, we’re all in the same boat. “I get on OK with her,” she said.
“You get on OK with anybody. You could get a better job, Ava.”
“I got no skills, Mrs. McAn. I was brought up to be a wife. Where I lived in Utah, women are wifes.” She pronounced it with the f, wifes. “So I know how to do this kind of job, cleaning and stuff. Anyhow.”
I felt I had been disrespectful of her work. “I guess I just wish you could get better pay,” I said.
“I’m going to ask Mr. Shoto for a raise at Thanksgiving,” she said, her eyes bright. Obviously it was a long-thought-out plan. “He’ll give it to me.” Her smile is brief, never lingering on her mouth.
“Do you want Jason to go on to college?”
“If he wants to,” she said vaguely. The idea troubled her. She winced away from it. Any idea of leaving Klatsand, of even Jason’s going out into a larger world, scares her, probably will always scare her.
“There’s no danger, Ava,” I said very gently. It is painful to me to see her fear, and I always try to avoid pain. I want her to realize that she is free.
“I know,” she said with a quick, deep breath, and again the wincing movement.
“Nobody’s after you. They never were. It was a suicide. You showed me the clipping.”
“I burned that,” she said.
local man shoots, kills daughter, self
She had showed the newspaper clipping to me summer before last. I could see it in my mind’s eye with extreme clarity.
“It was the most natural thing in the world for you to move away. It wasn’t ‘suspicious.’ You don’t have to hide, Ava. There’s nothing to hide from.”
“I know,” she said.
She believes I know what I’m talking about. She accepts what I say, she believes me, as well as she can. And I believe her. All she told me I accepted as the truth. How do I know it’s true? Simply on her word, and a newspaper clipping that might have been nothing but the seed of a fantasy? Certainly I have never known any truth in my life like it.
Weeding the vegetable garden behind their house in Indo, Utah, she heard a shot, and came in the back door and through the kitchen to the front room. Her husband was sitting in his armchair. Their twelve-year-old daughter Dawn was lying on the rug in front of the TV set. Ava stood in the doorway and asked a question, she doesn’t remember what she asked, “What happened?” or “What’s wrong?” Her husband said, “I punished her. She has polluted me.” Ava went to her daughter and saw that she was naked and that her head had been beaten in and that she had been shot in the chest. The shotgun was on the coffee table. She picked it up. The stock was slimy. “I guess I was afraid of him,” she said to me. “I don’t know why I picked it up. Then he said, ‘Put that down.’ And I backed off towards the front door with it, and he got up. I cocked it, but he came towards me. I shot him. He fell down forwards, practically onto me. I put the gun down on the floor near his head, just inside the door. I went
out and went down the road. I knew Jason would be coming home from baseball practice and I wanted to keep him out of the house. I met him on the road, and we went to Mrs.—” She halted herself, as if her neighbor’s name must not be spoken—“to a neighbor’s house, and they called the police and the ambulance.” She recited the story quietly. “They all thought it was a murder and suicide. I didn’t say anything.”
“Of course not,” I murmured, dry of tongue.
“I did shoot him,” she said, looking up at me, as if to make certain that I understood. I nodded.
She never told me his name, or their married name. Evans was her middle name, she said.
Immediately after the double funeral, she asked a neighbor to drive her and Jason to the nearest town where there was an Amtrak station. She had taken all the cash her husband had kept buried in the cellar under their stockpile of supplies in case of nuclear war or a Communist takeover. She bought two coach seats on the next train west. It went to Portland. At first sight she knew Portland was “too big,” she said. There was a Coast Counties bus waiting at the Greyhound station down the street from the train station. She asked the driver, “Where does this bus go?” and he named off the little coast towns on his loop. “I picked the one that sounded fartherest,” she said.
She and ten-year-old Jason arrived in Klatsand as the summer evening was growing dark. The White Gull Motel was full, and Mrs. Brinnesi sent her to Hannah’s Hideaway.
“Mrs. Shoto was nice,” Ava said. “She didn’t say anything about us coming in on foot or anything. It was dark when we got here. I couldn’t believe it was a motel. I couldn’t see anything but the trees, like a forest. She just said, ‘Well, that young man looks worn out,’ and she put us in the A-frame, it was the only one empty. She helped me with the rollabed for Jason. She was really nice.” She wanted to linger on these details of finding haven. “And next morning I went to the office and asked if they knew anyplace where I could find work, and Mr. Shoto said they needed a full-time maid. It was like they were waiting for me,” she said in her earnest way, looking up at me.
The Unreal and the Real - Vol 1 - Where On Earth Page 21
