Before We Sleep

by Jeffrey Lent

  Oliver went to work on a Monday morning. The evening before Ed and Jennie invited Ruth and Oliver for Sunday dinner. Oliver shaved twice beforehand and so had dabs of tissue stuck to his throat and right cheek. Wearing the pinstriped suit he’d arrived home in but filling it out a bit more. Ruth wore a yellow summer dress with short sleeves she’d owned since before she was married but had saved, best she could. They ate a bleeding-raw rib roast with new asparagus, mashed potatoes and a salad of black-seeded Simpson lettuce drizzled with cider vinegar, a rhubarb fool with sweet clotted cream for dessert. Over the rhubarb fool and coffee, not seeming to notice that her son had sweated through his shirt, Jennie reached an index finger to dab up the last of the cream from her bowl and said, “We’re thinking, it works out, we’ll change the name. Drop the mercantile altogether. Just E & O Snow’s. Sounds good.”

  “Well, now,” Ed said. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Mother.” He turned to his son. “It’s a nice suit. But tomorrow wear plain trousers and a shirt. If you want to wear a necktie that’s fine. But if you do, roll up the sleeves of your shirt. People come in because they feel comfortable and we want to keep it that way.”

  Ruth stood. “Let me clear. No, Jennie, please. More coffee, anyone?”

  He left the house each morning at ten minutes before eight and returned at quarter after six. War Time had ended the fall before but it was June, after all, and the days were long. The walk home longer because of the hill. He ate a sandwich at noon that his mother had made, identical for her husband as she’d been doing for years. Ruth prepared an evening meal. He’d come in and kiss her and then go draw a bath and emerge half an hour later and sit to eat, his wet hair grown out enough to show the raked tracks of the comb. He wore his old clothes then, shirts and trousers from before the war and she sat across from him and saw how he filled those clothes a bit more, even as his cuffs—shirts and pants—rode a bit high. The first evening she’d been waiting at the road, watching him climb toward her, and when he drew close enough she ran the dozen steps and circled his head with her arms and said, “How’d it go?”

  “I don’t know,” he’d said. “About how I expected.”

  She almost asked what that was, then caught a quick look at his pale hardened face gazing past her and was quiet. She ran her hands up and down his back and said, “It’s bound to feel strange, your first day. Are you hungry?”

  He’d looked at her and smiled. He reached and touched her face and said, “I am.”

  At the end of the week he brought his pay envelope home and placed it on the table, before her. “There’s that,” he said. “Monday morning take it to the bank, put what you can against the house and some in savings and hold out what you need for the week, otherwise.”

  “I’m off for the summer but I get my salary straight through, every two weeks. Had you forgotten that?”

  “No.” He paused and looked off toward the range. She had a skillet supper of rice and canned corn, topped with slices of Treet, pressed out of the can and fried in bacon grease, a spoonful of chili sauce stirred into the rice. And a salad from the garden, strawberries and whipped cream for dessert.

  He said, “I’d think it best if you put your salary against the house.”

  “I was thinking to save for a new electric range, also a Frigidaire, once they’re available. The paper says it could be early as this fall.”

  He took a deep breath, let it out slow, then said, “I said put what you can in savings. But Dad knows the dealer in Barre. We’ll get what you want quick as we can. But I want to pay the house off. We own it, no one can ever take it away from us. Everything else we can do as we go.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do that.” She rose and went to the range. The kitchen was very hot though she’d made the least fire possible in the firebox. She heard his chair scrape back as he sat at the table. She served the food onto two plates, arranging it to give him more but make the portions look the same. Her back to him she said, “Bob Martin is back. Gladys stopped by this morning.”

  “I saw him. He was in buying cigarettes and beer.”

  “Well, he had a tough time, with his knee all busted up and that burn the side of his face. Anyway, Gladys wanted to know if we might like to go the Playhouse tomorrow night? The four of us?” She turned and placed the plates on the table, stepped to the tap and opened the spring line and filled two tall glasses that clouded fast with the cold, brought them to the table and sat. He’d diced the meat and mashed it in with the rest and was eating. She made a small noise, not quite a clearing of her throat. He looked up.

  “No. I’m sorry but no. You can go if you want.”

  “Oliver.”

  He finished his food and drank off half his water and looked at her. He said, “There’s windowsills gone punky on the south side where that cedar tree blocks the light. I aim to replace them tomorrow. Get started at it, anyhow.”

  “All right. But you’re not going to do that all night long.”

  He paused then. After a moment he said, “Aw, Ruth.” Then: “Ruthie.” He’d never called her that but would again. “All Bob’s going to do is drink more than he should and want to talk about things I don’t want to talk about. He’s not a bad fella, not a bit. But honey? It’s hard enough standing at the counter of the store and smiling and going on with folks about what they need and helping them and all the time feeling like I don’t fit. Not here. Not anywhere. Not in this life.” He paused again and said, “It’s terrible is what it is. And worse, because I ask you to understand what you can’t understand.”

  She placed her hands flat on the table and looked across, seeking his eyes that came and went. She said, “I’d like to understand, Oliver. And I bet one day I will. But there’s no hurry. I love you, is all you need to know.”

  He stood. Tears pouring down his contorted face. He said, “People.”

  After a long moment he sucked air and said, “I’m going for a walk up the hill. I need to be alone.”

  She wanted to hurl from her chair and drag him to the ground and whatever way she needed to, break him from this awful moment and knew she couldn’t do so and so only nodded and said, “I love you, Oliver.” Crying now herself, hating that she was crying.

  Shaking, he said, “I love you too, Ruthie. I’m just not sure what that means, anymore. But it means something, doesn’t it? It has to. Oh, what sense is there in any of it?”

  Then he was out the door and gone. She stood where she was, all of her in tremble. Slowly then she folded down to the floor. A glass broke free from her hand and rolled across the floorboards, throwing out a slop of water and then chiming hollow against a foot of the old range.

  The summer did not progress so much as lurch forward. Twice in the coming weeks Ed drove Oliver up the hill early, unexpectedly, to drop him off. Both times Oliver entered alone, his face pale, a sheen of sweat, not speaking as he went through and drew a bath, the door shut with a clear and decisive click. Not wanting her. Both times his eyes red and swollen. When he’d emerge later he’d be dressed in old clothes and go to puttering about the place, inside or out—whatever project was under way. She left him alone, although her own day was fractured and his presence was a heavy pressing shadow upon her. She’d fix supper and wait for him. Both times he appeared and sat to eat and spoke with her then about what he was working on, as if nothing untoward had occurred earlier. She felt she was almost breathless to catch up in a race set to terms that had never been made clear, rules hidden from her. He was pleasant and kind, solicitous of her. Other evenings he’d arrive home with a smile and often as not a fresh cut of meat wrapped in bloody brown paper, a small household gadget that they lacked or was new to the market or both. Most evenings after supper they sat on old chairs in the garden and watched the summer day fade from the valley below up to the hills above, not silent but in easy small talk, with easy silences in-between. Smacking black flies. Until they’d go in to bed. Or sitting up listening to the radio. He’d kneel before it, twisti
ng the knob, not interested in the regular programming but seeking the outer reaches of the dial, wanting music. Any music at all but most happy when he’d come across a broadcast of a symphony. He’d turn that as loud as the static would allow and they’d sit within the shroud of tonality. There were a handful of radio dramas that she liked but she was happy to sit with him, if he was happy. And nights he couldn’t find those broadcasts he was kind and would dial back to the programs he knew she enjoyed. Sometimes but not always sitting through them with her. She was comfortable with that: her own father had disdained those radio plays and so, mostly, she felt it was something about men. It didn’t escape her that most of the sponsors and advertisements for the radio plays were directed toward products that women would use. She was also free of embarrassment.

  More troubling was her stack of summer reading. Teaching tenth-grade history had proved to be wonderful, challenging and utterly exhausting; even before Oliver arrived back in March it routinely kept her up to midnight, working through student papers, preparing lesson plans, reading the assigned works ahead of her students. And so her own reading, the reading she did not only for pleasure but also to associate with the larger world, to feel herself as more than a lone drumbeat, heartbeat in the world, the pleasures and joys of books, all those had been put aside for the school year. The librarian, a spinster half again her age that she’d known since she was a girl just old enough to hold her own library card. Ginger Dana had suddenly become closer to her in age it seemed and also, once Ruth was teaching, would inform Ruth of new books that came in that Ruth would be interested in and quietly agreed to hold those books to be available for her, come summer. Mostly these were not recently published works, since the library didn’t have the budget for such acquisitions, but donated books or books larger libraries were discarding. Still, they were new to Ruth.

  For new fiction she read the Saturday Evening Post, purchased for years at her in-laws’ business. Other articles also. She loved Life for the photography that, starting during the war, had made the world smaller, brought faraway events and places close. And put faces and landscapes to the news broadcasts on the radio. She still had a passion for Screenland although after Oliver returned it was several months before she found the nerve to buy a copy and bring it home. And every few weeks her mother would pass along several recent issues of the New Yorker. Improbably, her father had come across the magazine somewhere in the late ’30s and taken a shine to it. As a young teenager Ruth had mostly only cared for the advertisements and about half the cartoons, others she didn’t see as funny or was puzzled by the intent. But now, this summer, she was able to read again, and widely.

  It was as if Oliver had never read. He ignored the stack of books on her desk, on the night table her side of the bed, the magazines that she ordered neatly as her mother had, on a low table before the old sofa in what Ruth grandly or hopefully called the parlor. She kept another pile of magazines in an old wooden sap bucket in the bathroom and if he ever so much as glanced at them she couldn’t know it—their order never changed except when she moved them about or added new issues.

  She thought perhaps he’d lost the habit, although she knew there had been a great and wide effort to bring reading matter, books and periodicals, to the men in the service. She thought it as likely that his distress, his obvious if quiet struggle to adjust to life after the war, had some way severed him from his old passion, one, after all, that they’d shared. Perhaps he’d forgotten the joy, the solace that could be found within pages, within the intellectual exercise of struggling to understand how and why people did what they did and how it made life more bearable. For this she knew—he was a man for whom life was a fraught trial.

  She was twenty-one years old. And so was he. As with so much else, she believed time would return him to himself.

  And there were times she believed that to be happening. One Thursday he laid an advertisement torn from the weekly paper before her on the kitchen table. Saturday there was to be an auction high up out on the Williamstown road. The last surviving of three spinster sisters who ran their family’s farm had died, with the contents to be sold. She knew the place, barely. The last sister had kept a cow and bees to the end and made occasional trips to town in spring and fall to sell honey in quart jars, ginseng root by the bundle, crates of preserves and also real mincemeat—beef and venison cooked with suet and raisins. She wore clothing a hundred years old and drove a single horse hitched to a buggy with a tattered canopy. The horse in blinders and with a beribboned straw hat with ear-holes tied to its head. She was not the only one so, but notable nonetheless. And now gone.

  Oliver said, “Dad says we can use the truck. I think we ought to go. No telling what we’ll find.”

  Ruth said, “I don’t know. There feels something tawdry about it. Grave-chasing.”

  Oliver said, “Well, Ruthie, she’s the end of the line. That family has been there since 1800 and froze to death, maybe twenty years before that. A long time. We can at least go look.” He glanced about, said, “We’re still a mite short of furnishings. If we don’t get it, someone else will.”

  Saturday, as promised, they took the truck and walked through before the bidding started. It was much as Ruth expected: a broad array of old stuff no one used anymore. Then Oliver motioned to her and took her aside and waited until they were alone and knelt to pull a blanket from a desk with bowed legs and a perfect surface with a small rise at the back that held three drawers, all fashioned from bird’s-eye maple. Dovetail joints fine as babies’ teeth held it together, with draw pulls of ancient brass the color of moss. “When it comes up,” he said, “we aren’t interested. At first.”

  “It’s lovely,” she said.

  “What we do, is find some other things, interesting but ordinary, that we buy first. So no one catches on.”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “It doesn’t really matter. Box lots. Whatever catches your eye. But buy a couple of them, not quick. Put some space in between.”

  They were crouched down next to a slew of cardboard cartons and old milk crates. She was reaching box to box, fumbling around. One held old ten- and twelve-stick tin candle molds, another empty glass and clay inkwells, empty stoppered jars of ink, a third heaps of sap spigots.

  She said, “The inkwells. They could be interesting in school. Different from what the kids use, but they would understand them. And, well, I like them myself. The clay ones particularly.”

  “Good. Buy em. But find something else. Maybe that old apple-corer. Those old ones work well. But only if it doesn’t come up too soon after I buy the table.”

  She looked at him. “What is it? What else did you see?”

  He sniffed the air. “Someone’s cooking hamburgers. Let’s go get one.”

  They walked out of the house into the yard where a tent was set up and chairs arrayed. The auctioneer was testing his microphone and speaker powered off a car battery. Beyond the tent was a hardwood fire burned down to coals and a metal grate laid atop it, hamburg patties and hot dogs cooking on the grill. A washtub of ice with bottles of soda to one end. He bought them both burgers and bottles of orange soda and together they strolled away from the crowd out into the reaches of the yard. Old maples lined the drive and an elm towered over the yard and they stood in its shade and ate. She wiped her mouth and said, “All right. Tell me.”

  He glanced around, then said, “There’s six real old dining room chairs. Not all clumped together and some missing back-spokes and some missing a foot support or two. But nothing that can’t be fixed. Could be the best of what’s here. My guess is they’ll come up as a lot—that auctioneer ain’t a fool but they look rough. So I aim to go after em. If they come up first, we got to forget about the table—people will be on to us. But it works like I hope, we might just hit a ringer, today.”

  She drank the last of her soda and dropped the bottle in the grass. She said, “However it goes, you want me to keep bidding on the inkwells, the apple-corer?”<
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  “Unless I wave you down.”

  “How do you plan to do that?”

  “Any lot we’ve talked about, if I pass on it and jam my hands in my pockets, we’re through.”

  “All right. I think I got it.”

  The auctioneer hie-de-hoed. People milled back to the tent and they both turned. As they were going in, she caught his arm. He stopped and bent back, talking to her ear as many others also were doing. He said, “What?”

  “Oliver? Is there anything else you’re wanting today?”

  He was quick but she saw the dart of his eyes. Then back and he said, “No, ma’am. Let’s see how far we get, as it is.”

  Then he drifted, leaving her, plunging into the crowd.

  And she wondered what he’d seen that he’d not spoken of.

  Some days, some moments, seem charmed. As if a measure of grace swept down and along, throughout the entire day. Time they drove off, late afternoon, they had not only the desk and the chairs, the box of inkwells, roped down in the bed of the truck, but also a trio of matched coal-oil lamps with brass fittings and frosted glass globes about the chimneys with snowflake patterns cut through the frost, for, he said, when the power goes out; and also, his pride in hiding them from her until he’d bought them, a glow over him as if he held the sunset of the summer day within his cheeks and forehead: two crates of books. Complete late-nineteenth-century sets of Dickens and of Hardy. Calf bindings and onionskin pages laid in over the engraved illustrations, the spine titles in gilt relief. He showed them to her only as he was loading them and she lifted one out and held it in her hands as they drove home. Martin Chuzzlewit. The cover soft and elegant as a glove from another time, calling her to pull it on, to take it in.