by Jamie Zeppa
Vera said, “But she can’t get a fresh start here, Frank. You know how people talk. If she goes down there, she can build a new life for herself. Look at Bridget May. She has her whole life ahead of her now.”
Frank sighed and said he didn’t know. He just didn’t know what to think anymore.
Later, washing the dishes, Vera said, “Grace, you need to go away where nobody knows you. And you can’t take the baby because you have to work.”
“I could pay someone to look after him,” Grace said, wiping the soapy tines of a fork. “I could find someone nice.”
“You wouldn’t make enough,” Vera said. She wiped her hands and got out a paper and pencil. “Come here. I’ll show you.” Grace sat beside her and watched her write $80 at the top of the paper. “Let’s say you make this much a month. This is how much you’d pay for rent. Then you’d have to pay for your bus fare. And groceries. And clothes for yourself.”
“I don’t need clothes.”
“You’d need clothes if you were working. You can’t go to work in your old housedress. And Danny needs clothes. Shoes. Winter boots. They outgrow things so fast. Plus other things—if he got sick, you’d have to pay the doctor. You’d have to buy medicine.”
Grace looked at the paper. Vera hadn’t finished. “Now you have to pay someone to care for Danny. Do you see?” There was less than no money left.
Grace saw. She was also suspicious. If there was no money left, how was Mrs. May’s daughter buying new hats and going to Niagara Falls? She said, “I can’t leave Danny.”
“Why don’t you just go down for a few months after Christmas and try it out?”
Grace said, “We’ll see,” which is what Vera said when she meant no but didn’t want to discuss it.
Vera seemed to think it meant something else, though, because as Grace was going upstairs, she said, “And don’t worry about your brother. I’ll talk to him.”
Up in her attic room, Grace sat with her head in her hands, trying to think of a way out, but all her ideas ended in rags and rooms with dirt floors and the Children’s Aid Society at the door. If she stayed, at least she and Danny would have a roof over their heads. She would just have to avoid fighting with Vera. If she didn’t fight with Vera, Vera wouldn’t fight with Frank, and Frank wouldn’t look pained and pinched when he told Grace to stop fighting with Vera. If she didn’t fight with Vera, she could be with Danny, which was all that mattered.
But not fighting with Vera was hard. Not fighting with Vera meant she couldn’t be with Danny anyway, because she was in the basement running clothes through the wringer or outside knocking icicles from the eaves while Vera took Danny to town and had his picture taken at Venini’s Studio. Not fighting with Vera meant Vera decided what Danny could eat and when he should sleep, where he could play and whether he was too old for Grace to be singing nonsense songs to him.
Danny’s legs were lengthening like crazy weeds; he climbed out of his pillow fortress on the floor and crawled everywhere, frowning at every object that came his way. When he recognized it, his face broke suddenly into radiance; then he put it into his mouth. “Danny!” Grace laughed helplessly, extracting the chewed-up leg of the woolly lamb. “You can’t eat that.” He babbled sweetly, just syllables, but sometimes, they matched what he saw. “Ba ba,” he said to the ball. “Ma ma ma,” he said to Grace.
At dinner, Vera told Frank, “Oh, and Danny called me mama today.”
Grace pushed her chair back, her face suddenly hot and her hands trembling. “He did not,” she said.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Vera said. “He doesn’t know the difference.”
“He knows who his mother is,” Grace said, her voice rising wildly. Vera told her to lower her voice, she would wake the baby. Grace wanted to weep and throw up all the words she had swallowed ever since Frank had said, “From now on, what Vera says goes.” She wanted to stamp her feet and pull out her hair and hit Vera over the head with the casserole dish of scalloped potatoes, crack her skull like an egg. “He’s my baby,” she yelled, and she flung her plate over the table onto the floor. Frank shouted, “Grace! That is enough! Go upstairs and don’t come down for the rest of the night.” In the living room, Danny wailed, and Vera rushed from the table. Frank pointed to the staircase. “Go,” he said.
Not fighting was impossible.
She took Danny up to her room and held him on her lap, stroking his dark blond hair. He played with her fingers and she told him that she had to go away for a while, to find work and a place to live, to see if it was possible for a woman with a baby to have a job and make a home. It would be unbearable for her, every minute, but she would endure it for him, and he must endure it for her. “Do you understand, Danny?” she asked him, and he wriggled deeper into her lap and nestled his head under her chin.
“Grace!” It was Vera at the bottom of the stairs. “Where’s the baby? You better not be up there playing with him like he’s a doll!”
Grace buried her face in her son’s neck and wept.
It was unthinkable. It boggled the mind and broke the heart. It ran against the running of all things. It was not doable, and yet she was doing it. She was putting clothes into the straw-coloured suitcase. Fold, fold, tuck. She had to stop every few minutes because her chest would begin to burn and the room would grow dim, and she’d realize she wasn’t breathing.
She looked around. “Now, make sure you have everything,” Vera said every time she came upstairs. “Your comb, your toothbrush. Did you pack those new blouses I made you?” There was still the photo of Danny in the frame, but she would carry that in her purse. The cupboard drawers were askew, empty except for scraps of paper and yarn. Everything Grace owned and nothing she wanted was in the straw-coloured suitcase. The only thing that mattered to her was the only thing she would leave behind.
Frank said, “I don’t agree with this. You don’t have to go away, Gracie. You just have to try to get along with Vera. Work more as a team. Give and take. She just wants what’s best—”
But Grace cut him off. “No, Frank. I am going.” That silenced him. She didn’t say that there was no give and take with Vera. Under her own roof, Vera would always win. She didn’t say that she hated Vera with such a black, implacable passion that she was afraid to stay.
Frank went down to talk to Vera. “I’m not saying she can’t look after her own child, for heaven’s sake!” Vera said, her voice rising up through the vents. “But should I stand idly by and let her do what we know to be wrong? I can’t do that, Frank. She has no idea, simply no idea.”
Up in the attic Grace could hear the strain of the mattress springs as Frank sat down heavily. “Well, I can’t fight both of you,” he said, his voice thickening.
“It’s the best thing for her,” Vera said, softening. “The longer she waits, the harder it will be. And it will do her a lot of good to get out on her own, learn what the world is made of.”
Grace already knew: the world was made of tiny pieces of nothing that flew together and stuck. One tiny granule met another in the great nothingness, and they longed for each other. There was no reason for it. No reason why one near-invisible fragment of glass in a plate should long for the other fragments, and why the other fragments should long for it, and yet it did and they did. If one fragment was lost, the plate fell apart in grief. It was pure desire that held everything together. Plates, rocks, trees, beetles, children. The world was made of pieces of nothing that desired to be together.
It was not necessary to leave to learn that. But there were other reasons to go. If a person had a child but no husband, a room but no house, a place but no home, a will but no way, and if a person was losing her son and herself, little by little, day by day, because she knew what she knew in her skin and bones but not what her sister-in-law knew in her books and pamphlets, then yes, it was necessary.
A FRESH START
Frank took her to the bus station in the dark. She didn’t wake Danny; it would have killed her to say goodbye.
Not that it would matter. She was dead already. The walking dead.
“Grace, do you have the ticket?”
“Yes.” The talking dead.
“You look very nice, Gracie. That suit is very becoming on you.” The dead wore new clothes, a navy skirt and matching jacket cut and sewn by the living.
“We wait over there,” Frank said. The moving dead. The standing dead. The dead could swallow coffee from a paper cup, but they could not taste it.
“You have your wallet? Keep your purse in your lap at all times.”
The dead could nod.
“Here’s the driver now,” Frank said. “Show him your ticket.”
“I’m coming back for him as soon as I get set up.”
“I know. I know you are. Don’t cry now, Grace. You know we’ll look after him like he was our own.”
The dead could cry. Water droplets fell from their eyes, but they could not feel them.
On the bus, Grace sat with her purse in her lap, her hands and feet like rocks at the end of stick limbs. The bus rolled forward. Outside the window, Frank waved his hat, and then he was gone.
Out on the highway, the light was grey. Bare black trees stood in pools of icy water and lifted their aching arms to the swirling, empty sky. The road cut through rock face crusted over with ice. Inside her was a raging thing that swallowed and recreated itself endlessly. Crying was no relief from it. Thinking was no help for it. It would not be talked to, it could not be tricked. She had left her boy. It was unbearable. It had killed her, and yet here she was, sitting on a bus, getting off the bus, dragging a suitcase down a frozen sidewalk. The dead did what they had to do.
“Now, when you get to Peterborough,” Vera had said, “you’ll be able to walk to your place. Isn’t that convenient?” She had drawn a map. “It’s too bad Bridget May moved to Niagara Falls. The bus terminal is here, and apparently there’s a bank right here, and then you turn here onto Brock Street. That’s your street, where the rooming house is. Mrs. Barr’s. Bridget May recommended it, and I’ve talked to the woman. She has a nice room ready for you.”
Mrs. Barr’s was a narrow wooden house painted an oily grey and surrounded by a wire fence. The walkway was treacherous with rutted ice. Grace knocked, and then knocked harder, and after a long time, a woman opened the door in a pink bathrobe and frothy pink slippers. “Why didn’t you ring the bell?” she asked. “Jeez, you could have been standing out here all night.” Her impossibly black hair looked like it had been whipped up into a confection of rolls and waxed. She blew out a long streamer of smoke. “I suppose you’re Grace Turner?”
Grace nodded.
“Don’t you look like a month of Sundays. What’s the matter, you have a bad trip?”
I am dead, Grace thought, but she could only shake her head. Mrs. Barr said to come in already, her heating bill was going to go through the roof.
She took Grace upstairs to her room, which smelled of cold cream and cigarettes, pointing out that the smallest room was always the cutest. She explained the use of the hot water tank, the rules for making tea, the ban on gentlemen callers, the meal schedule, the bath schedule, the laundry schedule and the ledger in which the schedules were recorded. She watched as Grace hung up her clothes and observed that Grace sure hadn’t brought much, and was she always this quiet? The other girls, Connie and Noreen, were a hoot. Grace would meet them at dinner. Grace said she was tired and if it was okay with Mrs. Barr, she would like to go straight to bed. Mrs. Barr shrugged. “No skin off my nose.”
When Mrs. Barr was gone, Grace took the photograph out of her purse. She couldn’t look at it. Instead, she lay down in her slip between cold, damp sheets and pressed the frame to her chest with both hands.
The dead could stay very still. If they thought no thoughts, they could eventually fade into sleep.
The problem with the dead was that when they woke, they had forgotten everything. They thought they were at home in their own bed, and they sat up, listening for their baby cooing or fretting downstairs. Instead, they heard someone telling Connie to hurry up already and felt a pain where the sharp edge of a picture frame had dug into their side. Then they remembered and had to suffer their death all over again.
The problem with the dead was they were not actually dead.
The first place, a motor factory, said she was too late: they had just taken on three. The cereal company said to go see McGarry at the end of the hall, but when McGarry introduced himself as Dan, Grace burst into tears. Dan McGarry waited until she’d found her handkerchief, then stood up and walked her to the door. “Goodbye, dear,” he said, and he called out, “Next.” The third place was the red brick clock factory on a hill across the river. A woman with smooth, glossy braids wrapped around her head sat behind a window in the office. Grace leaned close to the glass and said, “Hello?” but the woman kept typing. Grace rapped on the window, more loudly than she had meant to, then pressed her hand against the glass to erase the sound. The woman looked up. Her eyebrows were two long black wings; one arched up sternly. “Please do not put your hands on my glass,” she said.
Behind Grace, there was a giggle. She turned to see five women sitting on a long bench.
“If you’re here about a job,” the woman behind the glass said, and Grace shouted, “Yes! Yes, I am!”
More laughter.
“Take a seat with the others.”
No one on the bench moved to make room for Grace, so she stood until the door banged open and a tall, sandy-haired man hurried in. “Hello, ladies,” he said. He had worried eyebrows, and one of his shirttails was untucked, but his voice was full and dark and flecked with warmth. It reminded Grace of hot chocolate. “I’m Vanderburgh. Manager. This way, please.” They followed him to another room and lined up at a desk. He asked where they were from and where else they had worked, and when it was Grace’s turn, she said, “I worked at home,” which made one of the other women snort, but Mr. Vanderburgh said, “That’s fine.” He had hound dog eyes, kind but sad. “Now Theresa is going to come in and give you an aptitude test,” he said, taking a box out of the desk drawer. “She’ll only show you once, so watch carefully.” Inside the box, Grace could see screws and wheels and a clock face.
When Mr. Vanderburgh left, the woman in front of Grace moved to the back of the line. Grace, who had been third, was now second. The woman in first place looked at Grace and said, “I think I left my …” and then she too went to the back of the line. They want to go last, Grace realized, so they’ll have more time to learn to do it. A slender woman in a dark blue coverall seemed to spring into the room on long legs. She wore a dark blue kerchief over her copper curls, which were the same colour as her freckles. Even her eyes were coppery. “All right, girls. Step up so you can see. I’m going to assemble the clock, starting with this piece here.” Her hands moved quickly, laying out the pieces.
Grace remembered taking a clock apart after her mother had died, but she couldn’t remember how anything fit. She drew a long breath, and when her lungs were full, she tucked the air in and held it. Theresa picked up a small, square box and attached a screw, a spring, a wheel. She snapped them together. Another wheel, the face, the hands, the front cover, a butterfly key. When she was finished, Grace breathed out.
“Let’s start with you,” Theresa said, pointing not at Grace but at the woman who had left her something or other at the end of the line. The others pushed closer to the table, but Grace closed her eyes and listened to the scrape and clatter of metal pieces.
“Next,” Theresa said. Grace kept her eyes closed.
Next, next, next.
“Last one,” Theresa said, and Grace opened her eyes. She moved to the table and picked up the small metal box. She kept her mind empty and let her hands remember. They found the pieces, turned and fitted and snapped them into place.
“Good.” Theresa took the finished clock from her. “Thank you, ladies. You can go now.” She tapped Grace’s shoulder. “I’ll take you to the office. Mrs.
Thurman will have some papers for you to sign.”
“To sign?” Grace’s hands fluttered to her cheeks. “I have a job?”
Theresa laughed and pulled open the door for her. “You have a job.”
On the way back from the factory, she stopped at a department store and spent a long time looking at the toys. She ran her hand over painted wooden blocks: Danny already had blocks that Frank had made him. She plucked the strings of a small wooden guitar and pushed a train along a track. Finally, she picked up an odd plastic shoe on wheels. She ran it along the shelf, and suddenly the top flew open and a soft brown dog popped up. Grace paid with the money that Frank and Vera had given her to hold her over. She already had a job. She could already buy something for Danny. She asked for a box and took the toy straight to the post office.
Back at Mrs. Barr’s, she called home. “I have a job in a clock factory,” she told Vera. “How is Danny?”
“Already? That’s wonderful, Grace.”
“Is Danny all right?”
“He’s fine. He’s sleeping.”
“I sent him a present. It’s a toy dog in a shoe. For his birthday coming up.” It hurt her throat to say it when she wouldn’t be there for it.
“Why are you wasting your money, Grace? He has toys. Here, talk to your brother.”
Frank said, “Well, well. A working woman. Congratulations, Grace.”
“How has Danny been, Frank?”
“He’s been good! He was singing away in his crib this morning when I got up.”
“What did he do today?” she asked. She needed to know what time he had woken up, what he had played with, when he had eaten, whether he had made that face when he ate his carrots, because sometimes he didn’t. But Vera had taken the phone. “We’d better say goodbye,” she said. “This is costing you a fortune. Write us and tell us how you are doing.”
“I’m going to call later,” Grace said, “so I can talk to Danny.”
“Don’t be silly, Grace. He’s a baby. He can’t talk on the phone.”
