The Dream Peddler

by Martine Fournier Watson

  Inside the store there were other customers, and she tried to skirt them unnoticed. Once they saw her, the unease would thicken around them all like a plaster, taking the mold of their shapes. There was Mr. Jenkins behind the counter adding up a purchase, and Mrs. Jones, who had not seen her yet, fingering the cotton percale she was considering to make some new sheets. Mrs. Edison and Mrs. Winters turned toward her, in the midst of some harmless gossiping giggle, and it died away there behind the canned goods in their witless rows of tin. Evie smiled at them, looked away from the strain of their own answering smiles, and went up behind Mrs. Jones to place her order. Mrs. Jones was normally a hale, loud woman who was always laughing and sighing over her nine grandchildren, and she was a very hard worker in the church and a beloved woman in the town.

  “Oh, Evie,” she started when she turned around. “I’m sorry, dear, I didn’t even hear you come in.”

  “I didn’t mean to startle you,” murmured Evie.

  Mrs. Jones laid her plump brown hand on Evie’s arm. “You must come around for tea and cake,” she told her. “You are wasting away now. We can’t have this.” She frowned up and down Evie’s figure.

  Evie let the warm pressure of well-meaning Mrs. Jones sink into her skin. “Thank you. Maybe I will do that.”

  “Of course you will. You will come tomorrow at three o’clock.”

  Unable to think of any excuse, Evie nodded helplessly as Mr. Jenkins wrapped the cotton in paper and tied the package. “All right. All right, I will.”

  With her goods nestled safely in her basket, Mrs. Jones plumped her way out of the store, pleased with herself.

  Now it was Evie’s turn.

  “Hello there, Evie Dawson. It’s very nice to see you. I hope you’re well.”

  Evie’s throat constricted around her answer as if it were an egg. She realized she had lost the control over her body she was supposed to have, used to have, that still she might frighten people by crying or screaming when she was only supposed to exchange pleasantries. They were already frightened of her enough.

  In the end she swallowed down the egg while Mr. Jenkins stared patiently at her forehead.

  “I need two pounds of sugar, Tom,” she said. “And five pounds of flour.”

  “Certainly, coming right up.”

  She knew he was grateful to turn away from her, fill the paper bags from the bins with his dark tin scoop. The sugar hissed as it slid into the hill of itself. The flour was almost soundless in its turn, like falling snow.

  The ladies in the corner had resumed their conversation, but more quietly, as if Evie were a sleepwalker and they did not wish to wake her. Mr. Jenkins had finished sealing the paper bags and was watching her while he clutched them. She wished he would not speak of it, but she understood people needed to give her sympathy; it was all they had to give. They tucked it into her like crumpled paper into mouse holes, until she was nothing but cracks and flutters.

  “Evie,” said Mr. Jenkins, and he rumbled down in his throat as if he were turning cement in there, as if the speech would harden and set without constant movement. “I never had a chance to speak to you . . . at the funeral . . . and to tell you how sorry Mary and I are. And if there’s anything we could do for you and George during this time, you must be sure to ask us, if you think of anything.”

  He looked away then into the far corner of the store, so she had a chance to observe his face up close, in a way she never had before. Toby and Cora got their red heads and freckles from their mother, while Mr. Jenkins was brown in hair and eyes. But she had never noticed before that he had long eyelashes. He was not as rough as the farmers who spent all their days being scoured by the wind and blistered in the sun, but still he had creases as fine as hairs around his eyes and mouth corners. She had never thought of him as a handsome man, but she noticed it now, and she wanted to laugh out loud at the strangeness of noticing such a thing, in such a moment. What would he think of her?

  “Mary wanted to be sure you knew that,” he was saying. How like him his son Toby was, awkward and kind.

  “I know it, Tom,” she told him. “There really isn’t anything, but of course I will. If I think of something.”

  “Mary sent down that basket of muffins for you when George stopped in the other day. Did you get those?”

  “Yes, of course. They were very good,” she lied, for she had not tasted them. George had eaten them.

  “Oh, good, that’s good.” He reached across the counter around the big paper sacks, tapped her wrist stiffly, then drew back and shoved the bags toward her.

  “I think you will be all right, Evie,” he said, turning his profile to her and tucking his chin into his neck, as if it sealed the thing. “You and George, you’ll be all right. It just takes time.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She would say this in response to every stupid thing she was told.

  She took the bags into her arms like two brown, wrinkled babies. They did not seem heavy now, but she knew they would on the long walk home, and her arms would burn with them. She thought about time and taking time, and what did that really mean? Would giving up enough of it, passing enough time in sadness, entitle her to something else? Was there time in the swaying wheat fields of late summer—did time even exist in them? Time for Benny with his last breath freezing in his chest, burst under the ice with the shock of having gone down, and being mortal after all? Was the agony over in an instant, or did it go on forever? She would never know.

  She had made up her mind she would seek out Robert Owens, make an appointment to buy from him. There was something from him she needed, and she thought if she could have it, maybe it would be possible. To leave behind the Evie that was, for this was the only way she could go on into the rest of her time. There had been an Evie before, who had a child, and his name was Ben. But this was a different woman now, with the weight in her arms and none on her legs, the woman with the dwindling frame and ugly dress like a big blue sack. She noticed her own heartbeat below that new hollow in her neck. It picked up speed as she pushed out the door with her tight-folded arms, the bell jingling overhead to signal her passage. And Robert Owens’s place on the bench was empty, as if he’d been spooked back to that other world he came from by the pealing sound of her coming.

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning Evie took her blue dress over to the sewing machine and stood considering it with her cup of coffee in hand. She wore her nightgown and an old fuzzy sweater of George’s, and she had pinned the dress the night before down the new inward curve of her waist before taking it off. The slivers of metal pins darted the light down its sides where they pinched the fabric. She drained her cup, felt the coffee roll acrid back to her throat, and swallowed. With the empty mug to watch her from its ring on the nearby table, she sat at the sewing machine and worked her dress under the needle. Her foot began to pump the treadle below, like rocking a cradle, as if some little creature might be comforted by the motion.

  Dressed later in her newly tailored blue, she considered herself in the mirror. In her mind the transformation of her body had a meaning: that if she tried, she could become this unfamiliar person, this childless woman. She was again reminded of her youth, before she had even begun to bleed, before her hips had widened and her chest swelled. Until that happened, she had been lithe, her limbs light like hay. Now she encountered this forgotten girl-figure again. If she ignored the few gray hairs and wavy tidelines across the forehead, this was her, the very same, insides untouched and never lived in.

  She passed the rest of the morning in her usual way. She dusted the furniture carefully, moving her cloth over the knobs and legs she knew so well. She watched George through the window, out in the fields cultivating, for it was the warm time and long working days had begun. Part of her missed him, but deeper down was a gladness for his absence, that wanted no witness to her pain. She knew that it was something th
ey shared, but still she preferred to keep it to herself, curl into it and smother it with her back turned to him.

  Her arms were sore enough today that they reminded her with every movement. At first she wondered why, then remembered that long walk home with the bundles of sugar and flour. They had felt light until she left the town behind and entered the fields, and then like any burden they’d grown heavier as she walked. It was as if they were expanding in her arms, like they were living things and time was passing faster than usual. By the time she turned in to her own lane, they were fifty pounds apiece, and she was afraid to set them down in case she could not pick them up again, and the ground moisture would seep through the paper and ruin them while she ran to get George. She didn’t have his strength for these kinds of things, although she used to have those thick, round limbs, and people thought she should, thought she could probably bale the hay and pull up the stumps right alongside him. How George would have laughed at the lightness of the weights that had defeated her. She had always hated to be laughed at.

  She would never let George know now how she had struggled with them. She kept quiet and fried pancakes this morning for his breakfast and kissed his syrupy lips the way she used to. In the early days of their marriage, she used to kiss him whenever he ate something sweet and tell him he tasted like candy. And he would squeeze his hands on her breasts and tell her there was more where that came from, and she would laugh in the way that was part panting. They wouldn’t bother to finish eating, in their hurry to make love before the cows lowed heavy and miserable.

  “Me first,” she would whisper toward his ear while she held his hands on her waist. “Take care of me first.” And he always did.

  Watching the distant blur of George bending now down to the fields, she was suddenly shy of herself in the old blue dress she’d taken in. She suspected that George wouldn’t like her being so thin, that he would worry. But knowing now it wouldn’t change, she simply had to alter the dress or she wouldn’t look in her right mind. People would say it was her mother all over again, floating around in a dress too big and looking downright unkempt and not even caring. She penciled George a note about her invitation to the Jones house and left it by his plate. She went out and into the woods by the back way, so he wouldn’t see her running from him as he pulled his big boots through the fields, his knees lifting unnaturally over the damp ground places, squinting ahead toward his home as though he’d been gone for years and was no longer certain he recognized it.

  * * *

  * * *

  Evie took her time walking into town again. She passed the tall grove of maple trees, their heights swaying a bloodred mist of buds. The forsythia had burst their yellow blooms along the roadsides. There was still little shade, as the trees held back their soft leaves from the eager sun, and she felt a narrow tickle of sweat finding its way down her back between her shoulder blades.

  In her chest was that ache she brought everywhere with her, like a loyal dog who can’t be left behind. Sometimes it struck her how odd it was that others couldn’t see it. As she neared the town and began to encounter more people, she had the feeling there was a knife sticking out of her chest. But everyone passed her by in spite of it, ignored her as if she were part of a street-fair magic act they did not want to stop for. She was the woman being sawed in half, her head and feet parting swiftly in their two painted boxes, her audience watching quietly and without surprise.

  There was a broad, empty berth around her now, but there had always been something like it. A lapping space, a drift. Her mother had this thing, this turning-away effect on people as if she embarrassed them, and now Evie had caught it, too, through her own misfortune. Now she thought back on her girlhood and realized she’d had so few close friends. She had rarely brought anyone to her house, and only because of her father’s standing had anyone invited her to theirs. When Evie married a farmer, the other farmers’ wives did not know what to make of her. They imagined that a decent man had crooked his finger and Evie had jumped, and now she must billow her fancy skirts out to sit on their plain wooden chairs. George never noticed. Dutifully Evie went to the quilting bees and the church suppers, and the other young wives were cordial with her.

  Now that she had lost her son, that space around her only widened a little. Tragedy was a catching thing, like disease. The bereaved must carry on with their lives in a kind of quarantine. Irma Jones was a well-meaning woman, but Evie had made up her mind about where she must go, and it was not to the Jones house.

  Chapter 12

  Whenever Robert Owens passed a quiet afternoon at Violet Burnley’s, his thoughts were stitched with her sounds like a needlework sampler—her whispery sweeping of the floors, the satisfied bang of oven and cupboard doors. It didn’t bother him; rather he enjoyed how they worked their way through whatever book he was reading, the scrapes and thumps in the background, a coverlet of sounds if he lay down to nap.

  Today he listened to the sibilant sounds of Violet wetting and starching clothes while she ironed them. There was the frustrated hiss of the hot iron searing damp cloth, the thunk as her hand set it upright while she shook out a shirt and changed its drape across the table. She had offered to do Robert’s laundry with her own as part of his board, had noticed the yellow soil creeping along the back of his collars when they went too long between halfhearted scrubbings with a washboard and pail in his room.

  Robert was at his leisure while Violet worked, and most days he read one of her books, but today he wandered, unable to settle. He peered into the kitchen, looking for talk. When he saw the way she frowned to herself, brow taking on furrows as if it lifted them straight from his shirts, he went away silently. He was drawn then from window to window but did not go out, as if the house were a cage. Watching to see if any new customer might come, this was how he happened to see Evelyn Dawson walking down the street toward him. He stepped quickly back from the glass, then darted again to the kitchen.

  “Vi,” he said, “do something for me.”

  Violet looked up from the pillowcase she was ironing. “What’s that, now?”

  “It’s Mrs. Dawson—Evelyn—she’s coming up the lane.”

  “Oh, I wonder how she’s been. I wonder if she will stop in? I wish I hadn’t given all those scones away to the Andersons.”

  “No, no,” he said. “You can’t let her in.”

  Violet was folding up the case, pressing it flat. “Of course she must come in.”

  “But I don’t want her to know I’m here.”

  “For pity’s sake. Even if this is where she’s stopping. Why not?”

  He waited for her to look up at him. “It’s me. I think she’s coming to me, for a dream. And I don’t want to sell her one.”

  Violet clucked her tongue. “You can make her up a dream as easy as for anyone else, can’t you? If that’s what she wants. Weren’t none of you could give her that boy back, so it’s the least you could do for the poor soul.” She turned back to her work.

  “No,” he said again. He looked down at the iron dithering over the board. “I won’t take her money,” he said.

  “There’s no law says you have to take money,” she told him. “Why don’t you just give it to her, then? If that woman wants to dream about something, if she wants a bit of escape, I think you should give it to her.”

  “If she knocks here, I want you to tell her I’m not in.”

  She wet her finger impatiently and tapped the iron’s dull face, then tipped it back onto the stove to warm.

  “Fine. I’ll do it for you. If she comes to this door, I’ll tell her you’re not in. But if you’ll take my two cents”—they smiled at each other because they both knew he had no choice in this—“if you’re never going to mix her a dream and that’s what she wants, you may as well tell her that now and get it over and done.”

  He kissed her on the cheek. “I won’t have anything to do with her.”

/>   Surprised, Violet had no answer. In a moment she heard him jumping the stairs two at a time, like a boy, and then the knock he had predicted. She went to the door, fixing her face against lying. In the kitchen the black iron waited, losing heat quickly.

  Evelyn Dawson looked as if she’d left half of herself behind somewhere. Grief should be a private thing, thought Violet. Let it scour away at your insides if it must, but what Evie was missing now had taken its piece of her in no uncertain terms, and the shape of her showed the loss.

  She looked at Violet steadily with her dark-rimmed gray irises. Under her lower lashes, there were shadowed hollows now, as if she’d given up sleeping.

  “Well, what a surprise,” said Violet.

  “I’ve come—I was invited to Irma Jones’s place.” Evie twisted her wedding band around on her finger and looked past Violet into the dimness of the hall and the gleam of the polished stairs leading in dark-light stripes up to the landing.

  “Were you, now? Wonderful. Such a lovely woman. And the whole family, really, fine people, and the children always underfoot . . . well . . . It’s such a cheerful place. . . . ” Violet trailed off, unsure if she should be talking about having children or feeling cheerful. “Will you come inside?”

  Evie shook her head. “I have to be getting back home, and it’s a bit of a walk—”

  “Have you walked all that way? You really should ride, you know. You’ll wear out your constitution.”

  “But I’m not tired.”

  Violet would have liked to show her a mirror and ask her to repeat herself, but she let Evie go on.