Still Life With Bread Crumbs: A Novel

by Anna Quindlen

  “What difference does that make? You’re making this way more complicated than it needs to be. It doesn’t need to be complicated.” She looked fierce, the way handsome women do when they are confused, or angry, or embarrassed, or all three.

  “I was forty-four last month,” he finally said, putting his glass down emphatically.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, you missed my birthday.”

  “That’s not the point. Forty-four? Oh my God.”

  “Would fifty have been better?”

  “I’m sixty years old.”

  “Right. So what? You look great. Is that what I’m supposed to say?”

  “What?”

  “In my experience, if women tell you how old they are it’s so you’ll tell them how good they look.”

  “That was not why I told you how old I was. It was so you would understand how ridiculous it would be to—”

  “What?”

  “What?”

  “Ridiculous?”

  “Ludicrous.”

  “Ludicrous. Hell, that’s even worse than ridiculous,” he said, and with what seemed to be one motion he grabbed his dripping parka and walked back out into the snow. In what seemed to be one mental motion, Rebecca hoped that his truck would start, and that it wouldn’t.

  It did. The rumble of salvation became fainter and fainter. The dog whined and circled the room. Rebecca sat back down on the couch, heavily. For most of her life she had not been what anyone would call an emotional person, but at odd, quiet, unexpected times—the climax of an old film, a passage in a book, even the occasional insurance ad—sentiment got the better of her.

  “Oh, my goodness,” she said and burst into tears, and sobbed loudly.

  For a moment or two she consoled herself with the notion that she was drunk, but it was as little consolation as it had been to most sensitive people over time, although the hard-hearted used it for everything from meanness to manslaughter. The dog licked her face and made a sympathetic noise in his throat that sounded like a rusty hinge. The wind blew down the chimney. Rebecca cried, and cried some more. The Coleman lantern flickered slightly, turning the glass of whiskey Jim Bates had left next to it into a prism.

  Then the dog stepped back, sat down at attention, and let out one sharp bark. In a moment she heard the sound he’d heard, with his sharper ears, and wiped hard at her face with the side of her hand as she stood up. When the door opened so much snow blew in that there was a small storm in the living room.

  “This is ludicrous,” Jim said, and without removing his parka he put his arms around her and kissed her and kissed her, wet and cold and covered with snow as he was, until he had backed her into the dark bedroom and closed the door shut in the dog’s face.

  WHAT CAME NEXT–HER

  When she woke it was 7:00 A.M. The dog had been fed, the coffee made. Rebecca had not ever used, nor much heard used in conversation, the expression “feels like a million bucks.” But for some reason it was circling around her head like the digital news ribbon in Times Square:

  Rebecca Winter Feels Like a Million Bucks. Rebecca Winter Feels Like a Million Bucks.

  The bottle of Tullamore Dew sat on the dining room table with half an inch still in the bottom. She smiled at the bottle, felt foolish, got coffee, sat on the couch, and thought of various episodes from the previous night. The power had come back on just before daybreak, so that suddenly the two of them were pinned down by an unforgiving overhead light with a hundred-watt bulb, and not the soft-light kind, either. The dark, the dark, the utter dark had been her friend as she considered the slackness at the tops of her haunches, the cesarean scar on her belly, the creased skin of her cleavage. She had always been small-breasted, and all her life she had hated it until, in locker rooms looking around at the other middle-aged swimmers struggling out of their maillots, she had realized that gravity was more charitable to the flat-chested.

  Jim had gotten up to turn off the light, and when he returned he said happily, “Wow,” which was exactly the right thing to say. Fifteen minutes later they were both asleep again.

  “Don’t get up,” he said an hour later when he pulled on his pants in the half-light.

  She looked out the window. The truck was gone, the snow had mostly stopped falling. Her head hurt, but not as much as she would have expected. She put on her boots and went out with the dog. With the path cleared, the drive plowed, the snow that had seemed so terrifying and overwhelming the day before now seemed merely beautiful. The sky, the ground, the roof and trees, everything was one color, one faintly translucent and glowing shade of white, and it was beautiful in a way that no photograph could ever capture. A few flakes continued to fall, dipping, wheeling, what she’d learned in the tree stand to call riding the zephyrs.

  Rebecca made a snowball and tossed it into the air, and the dog tried to catch it and looked befuddled when it turned to dust in his jaws, and so she did it again and again, laughing, thinking about Jim Bates and how happy he’d looked when he got up to turn out the light. She was a sixty-year-old woman: she knew that she was supposed to be remembering what went here and there, who did what to whom, except that the truth is, what goes here and there and who does what to whom changes very little from event to event, even under the best of circumstances.

  And while she was indeed thinking of some of that, she mainly remembered how Jim Bates had looked in that unpleasant overhead glare for just a minute, the look a small boy has on his face at the head of the table when his mother walks in with the birthday cake, candles lit. She liked the feeling that she was the cake. She’d had sex before, many times, good and bad and indifferent, too. But she’d never before felt like the cake.

  He’d left a note on the table: “back tonight with lasagna.” She wondered what she would do when he walked in with the casserole dish. She wondered when and whether they would eat. All day long she rehearsed what she would say: Hello. Come in. Come right in. Oh my goodness. Oh my dear God. (She had said that at some point during the night, maybe more than once.) Go away. Please go away. Please stay. Everything sounded equally stupid. Maybe she should just open the door and see what happened next.

  What happened next was nothing. There was no lasagna, no casserole dish, no Jim Bates. “Wow,” and then he was gone.

  WHAT HAPPENED NEXT—HIM

  He went to his sister Polly’s house. It was a little jumped-up trailer on a piece of land with bad drainage and stony soil that someone had given Jim’s grandfather in trade for a new roof, years and years before Jim was born, and it had sat flat and empty and derelict until Jim bought a trailer and had it towed there. He had tried to make it pretty, with shutters and fresh paint and trelliswork around the foundation so you couldn’t see the concrete blocks. He’d plowed its stubby driveway the night before, before he’d plowed Rebecca’s driveway and then had the time of his life. But he hadn’t gone inside because all the lights were out, which meant his sister was blessedly asleep. Sometimes she stayed up for three or four days on end, and his phone would ring at all hours, ten, twelve times a night: Jimmy, do you remember? Jimmy, can you come? Jimmy, I hate you. Jimmy, I love you. When he’d seen the dull sheen of white paint against the white snow with no yellow glare from inside, no moving silhouette across the windows—pace, pace, stop, stare out, stare down, pace, pace—he’d felt relieved. He’d felt like he was free, for one night at least. That’s how he’d felt when he drove up the hill to the cottage. That’s how he’d behaved, like a free man.

  There was no sign of life in the dim morning light. No smoke from the pipestem chimney, no glow from the light in the cheap hood over the narrow stove. His sister had had a dog, the dog that Rebecca had now, but Jim liked dogs and he knew his sister was an unreliable owner so he hadn’t said a thing to either of them. Sometimes Polly remembered the dog, sometimes not. Sometimes she’d completely forgotten about him. Often she’d completely forgotten to feed him. The dog had filled out since he’d moved on to Rebecca’s place.

&
nbsp; Jim went inside. His head hurt, but not as much as he would have expected. He whistled through his teeth, and the whistle came out as a plume of white smoke. It was cold in the house. The sink was filled with dishes. His sister liked pie. Ice cream, too. It was hard to get her to eat decent food. It was like whatever lived inside her craved sugar, like a tapeworm. He wished it had been a tapeworm. Then the doctors could have gotten it out.

  The bed hadn’t been slept in. That good feeling he’d had from head to toe since he climbed out of the lumpy bed up the hill, like he had hot fingerprints from his feet to his face, went away in an instant, and now he was cold all over. He saw an odd shadow on the window, went closer, and saw there was a ladder against the back of the house. For some reason the snow had drifted off to one side of it, so the area around the ladder was pretty clear. It was the kind of thing his sister always took as a sign of some kind or another.

  Jim could go up a ladder fast but never as fast as he did that morning.

  If you didn’t know the flat roof of the trailer it looked pretty much like the flat roof of a trailer after a bad snowstorm. But if you looked closely you could see what looked like a snow angel near the middle, only instead of concave, it was convex. He dug with his hands. Her skin was pinker than the snow, but not much.

  For the second time that day he took a woman he loved irrationally into his arms and held her tight to warm her up. The second time it didn’t take.

  POLLY BATES

  Ah, Polly Bates. What a pretty little girl she’d been, the sort of blond, round-faced little girl who becomes accustomed to people remarking on how adorable she is, which often makes what comes after so painful, the metamorphosis from wheat yellow hair to mouse brown, from chubby cheeks to fat face. She was ten when her mother died, although all of that dying stuff was only words, as far as she was concerned: no one took her to the hospital or the funeral home or the cemetery. It was all considered too upsetting for a child. Her brother argued otherwise, but conventional wisdom prevailed, which was how she wound up thinking that her mother had merely packed up and moved away, perhaps impressed by a TV news story at the time about a woman who had done just that, left her five sons behind with their father and turned up later in Portland, selling real estate.

  When she was twelve Jim joined the Marines and was gone, more or less, until she was sixteen and their dad died. Emergency room, funeral home, graveside: this time she knew dead was dead. It took Jim about a month, back home with his new bride, to realize why everyone shut up when he walked into a bar or a bait shop. He put it down at first to their dad dying, the fact that they were orphans now, although the word sounded a little dramatic as far as he was concerned. It was his wife who figured out that Polly had been having sex with everyone from the guy who sat next to her in homeroom to the mechanic who fixed her car to the softball coach, who had triplets and no hair to speak of. She wasn’t picky, Polly. “The town bicycle,” Laura had said, “everybody’s had a ride,” and Jim came as close to hitting her as he ever had come to hitting a woman, before or since, even including Polly at her worst. By the time her dad died Polly had lost count of how many guys there had been, and some she couldn’t even remember, in part because she was usually pretty hammered when it was happening. There were drugs, too. Jim decided to send her to a place, a nice place near the Canadian border that looked more like a B-and-B than a rehab. It wiped out his savings and he took a second mortgage on the house.

  And that’s when Polly got sober, swore off sex, and began to talk about the voices in her head, and on the car radio, and from the squirrels in the woods, and the little china figurines on the shelf in the living room. When she stopped drinking and smoking pot it finally became clear: she was, in the words of those silent bar goers trying not to look her big brother in the eye, totally batshit. Not always, and not when she was taking the meds, which made her fat and lazy and stupid, so that when crazy daylight peeked around the edges of the pills she would stash them in the pockets of her housecoat and welcome her delusions back home. That’s when she would write, pages and pages of stuff that made no sense at all, about murders and rapes and the existence of God and the end of the world.

  “You ever do crazy Polly?” someone would say at the bar, but only after they’d looked around to make sure Jim wasn’t there.

  There’s a kind of casual cruelty in a small town, but there’s casual kindness, too. There wasn’t a lot of talk about Polly after the first few years; the situation settled into silence in deference to her brother. Sarah had gotten wind of Polly when she first came to town, and in her Sarah way she had asked a lot of questions until one morning the woman who ran the beauty salon said quietly, “I think you might want to leave that alone, sweetie.” And so she did.

  Even when people couldn’t leave it alone most of them tried to be nice about it. Jim would get home from work and listen to the messages on the phone, and sometimes there would be one about Polly: Jim, hon, it’s Elaine Wallenchinsky over at the tow shop? I’m not sure, but I think I just saw your sister on the road in her nightie. Although maybe it’s just a sundress, I was going pretty fast, rear-ender on the highway, you know, so I was trying to make up some time. Maybe take a look? Anyhow. That new downspout is a godsend.

  There’d been two golden years in there, years when a doctor had tried a new potpourri of pills and the thunderstorm between his sister’s ears seemed to die down to occasional rain. She worked as an aide at the senior center, began to go out with someone who had been a few years ahead of her in high school, a mechanic named Craig who put up with the snickers in exchange for regular meals, companionship, and the occasional sexual experience, since the meds that cleared Polly’s mind shut down her sex drive. They moved into the white trailer outside of town, at the bottom of the steep slope, and Polly planted impatiens and potato vines in two old cedar planters she found at the Salvation Army store and got an orange-and-white cat. Then something happened. The plants died from lack of water, the cat ran off, and Craig moved out after she kept waking him in the middle of the night to ask did he hear, did he hear the whispers, did he hear the people in the other room, the murderers, the rapists? “I got to get some sleep,” he told Jim. “She can keep the TV if she wants.”

  “Come home,” Jim said, but she sat on the couch, nodding off from the new meds, shaking her head slowly from side to side with her eyes at half-mast.

  Three times he almost lost her. Once she stabbed herself in the thigh. Once she went under in the tub. Once she took too many pills. Accidents, she told him after in the hospital.

  Every evening his sister got into bed with the pink stuffed bear Jim had won her at the Blueberry Festival the month before he’d gone into the service. She’d taken the bear up onto the roof with her. If she woke up she would say that was an accident, too, that she’d gone up there to look at the stars, to look at the storm, or, if it had been a bad night, to get away from the people who were breaking into the house, finally coming down the hill to get her. But she didn’t wake up.

  THE STORM

  The way Rebecca had lived during the storm was the way she lived after it. The way she had lived for the two days before Jim Bates showed up to plow was the way she lived for weeks on end, like someone under house arrest, wearing one of those ankle bracelets. She stayed in the cottage, she tried to work, she read some old books—Moby-Dick, Swann’s Way, the kinds of books you always meant to read and somehow never had. It was hard to get out, with the snow and the ice and the steep and curving country roads, and she avoided town most of the time, going to Tea for Two only occasionally now. She was afraid that if she ran into Jim Bates she would hiss “Lasagna?” For some reason it was the lasagna that especially rankled her, with its implied promise of domesticity and caring. It was one thing to have a man sleep with you and then disappear; it was quite another when he’d explicitly said he’d be back and bring dinner.

  She photographed the dog over and over again, until when she would go into the back room to get her
cameras he would sit expectantly in front of the couch, waiting. Lie down, she said. Stand up. Look here. He was a very intelligent dog. He knew exactly what she needed. Every night he heaved himself to the foot of the bed, to one side of Rebecca’s legs, so that he gave off a little warmth, as though she wasn’t really alone at all. Even though she felt as alone as she’d ever felt before. Sometimes it was like that whole night was something she’d read about, or imagined, except that in the back of the cupboard above the refrigerator there was a bottle of Tullamore Dew with a glimmer of gold in its wide bottom. She kept thinking she should heave it in the trash.

  It’s a funny thing, hope. It’s not like love, or fear, or hate. It’s a feeling you don’t really know you had until it’s gone.

  Three more nights there were big storms, although not as big as that first one, and she heard the sound of someone plowing her drive. She sat, and shivered, and breathed deeply in a way that made the dog sit in front of her and stare into her face. But she didn’t turn on any more lights, and she sure as hell didn’t go to the door of the cabin. She’d learned her lesson. Ludicrous. Ha!

  Nearly every day she forced herself to walk in the woods, the dog following a trail of scent ahead of her. She always brought her cameras, but it often happened that when they’d returned she couldn’t really remember where they’d gone or what they’d seen, and she hadn’t taken any photographs at all. There had been no more crosses, or at least none that she had found, even when the snow on the ground had mostly melted away. Twice, by mistake, or at least she believed it was by mistake, she found herself near the tree stand, but she could tell by the mounded snow atop the plywood platform that no one had been there in a long time.