“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, sure 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.
Don’t question the Providence that offers shelter. Was it also Providence that put the gun in her hand? Or in his?
She and Jason have a little apartment, an add-on to the Hanningers’ house on Clark Street. I imagine that she keeps a photograph of her daughter Dawn in her room. A framed five-by-seven school picture, a smiling seventh-grader. Maybe not. I should not imagine anything about Ava Evans. This is not ground for imagination. I should not imagine the child’s corpse on the rug between the coffee table and the TV set. I should not have to imagine it. Ava should not have to remember it. Why do I want her to get a better job, nicer work, higher wages—what am I talking about? The pursuit of happiness?
“I have to go clean Mr. Felburne’s cabin,” she said. “The tea was delicious.”
“Now? But you’re off at three, aren’t you?”
“Oh, he keeps funny hours. He asked me not to come and clean till after four.”
“So you have to wait around here an hour? The nerve!” I said. Indignation, the great middle-class luxury. “So he can go running? I’d tell him to go jump in the creek!” Would I? If I was the maid?
She thanked me again for the tea. “I really enjoy talking with you,” she said. And she went down the neatly raked path that winds between the cabins, among the dark old spruce trees, walking carefully, one foot in front of the other. No sudden movements.
Hand, Cup, Shell
The last house on Searoad stood in the field behind the dunes. Its windows looked north to Breton Head, south to Wreck Rock, east to the marshes, and from the second story, across the dunes and the breakers, west to China. The house was empty more than it was full, but it was never silent.
The family arrived and dispersed. Having come to be together over the weekend, they fled one another without hesitation, one to the garden, one to the kitchen, one to the bookshelf, two north up the beach, one south to the rocks.
Thriving on salt and sand and storms, the rosebushes behind the house climbed all over the paling fence and shot up long autumn sprays, disheveled and magnificent. Roses may do best if you don’t do anything for them at all except keep the sword fern and ivy from strangling them; bronze Peace grows wild as well as any wild rose. But the ivy, now. Loathsome stuff. Poisonous berries. Crawling out from hiding everywhere, stuffed full of horrors: spiders, centipedes, millipedes, billipedes, snakes, rats, broken glass, rusty knives, dog turds, dolls’ eyes. I must cut the ivy right back to the fence, Rita thought, pulling up a long stem that led her back into the leafy mass to a parent vine as thick as a garden hose. I must come here oftener, and keep the ivy off the spruce trees. Look at that, it’ll have the tree dead in another year. She tugged. The cable of ivy gave no more than a steel hawser would. She went back up the porch steps, calling, “Are there any pruning shears, do you think?”
“Hanging on the wall there, aren’t they?” Mag called back from the kitchen. “Anyway, they ought to be.” There ought to be flour in the canister, too, but it was empty. Either she had used it up in August and forgotten, or Phil and the boys had made pancakes when they were over last month. So where was the list pad to write flour on for when she walked up to Hambleton’s? Nowhere to be found. She would have to buy a little pad to write pad on. She found a ballpoint pen in the things drawer. It was green and translucent, imprinted with the words hank’s coast hardware and auto supplies. She wrote flour, bans, o.j., cereal, yog, list pad on a paper towel, wiping blobs of excess green ink off the penpoint with a corner of the towel. Everything is circular, or anyhow spiral. It was no time at all, certainly not twelve months, since last October in this kitchen, and she was absolutely standing in her tracks. It wasn’t déjà vu but déjà vécu, and all the Octobers before it, and s
till all the same this was now, and therefore different feet were standing in her tracks. A half size larger than last year, for one thing. Would they go on breaking down and spreading out forever, until she ended up wearing men’s size 12 logging boots? Mother’s feet hadn’t done that. She’d always worn 7N, still wore 7N, always would wear 7N, but then she always wore the same kind of shoes, too, trim inch-heel pumps or penny loafers, never experimenting with Germanic clogs, Japanese athletics, or the latest toe-killer fad. It came of having had to dress a certain way, of course, as the Dean’s wife, but also of being Daddy’s girl, small-town princess, not experimenting just knowing.
“I’m going on down to Hambleton’s, do you want anything?” Mag called out the kitchen door through the back-porch screen to her mother fighting ivy in the garden.
“I don’t think so. Are you going to walk?”
“Yes.”
They were right: it took a certain effort to say yes just flatly, to refrain from qualifying it, softening it: Yes, I think so; Yes, I guess so; Yes I thought I would. . . . Unqualified yes had a gruff sound to it, full of testosterone. If Rita had said no instead of I don’t think so, it would have sounded rude or distressed, and she probably would have responded in some way to find out what was wrong, why her mother wasn’t speaking in the mother tongue. “Going to Hambleton’s,” she said to Phil, who was kneeling at the bookcase in the dark little hall, and went out. She went down the four wooden steps of the front porch and through the front gate, latched the gate behind her, and turned right on Searoad to walk into town. These familiar movements gave her great pleasure. She walked on the dune side of the road, and between dunes saw the ocean, the breakers that took all speech away. She walked in silence, seeing glimpses between dune grass of the beach where her children had gone.
The Unreal and the Real, Selected Stories of Ursula K. Le Guin Volume 1: Where on Earth Page 22
