She Stopped for Death

by Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli

  “Garbage day,” Jenny said, enjoying bursting Zoe’s fanciful bubble. “Bob was late picking up.”

  “Humph,” was all Zoe answered, not used to having her uncanny nose for trouble brushed aside.

  * * *

  The first inkling that something was happening came with flashes of dim light along the street. Flashlight flashes, mostly pointed at the sidewalk, but from time to time sent out to the street, or to the bushes and trees lining front lawns, as if the person behind the light was nervous, keeping an eye out for dogs or cats or rabid raccoons.

  “Mom,” Jenny was the first to notice. “Look!”

  “I see her,” Dora whispered back.

  Zoe, holding still, mumbled, “So! We get to meet the Dodo Bird.”

  Dora hushed her and they watched silently as the light came up the street, stopping at Dora’s Little Libraries. They could hear the hinged top of one house open, saw the light flash inside, and then minutes went by without another sound.

  Dora got up quietly from her chair. She pushed the screen door open and stepped out to the top of the steps.

  Jenny and Zoe watched her in shadow as she stood still a moment, then moved down to the walk. Dora’s sturdy body—black against the night—went stealthily toward the light still moving at the library box.

  They heard Dora’s voice say simply, “Good evening, Miss Sutton.”

  That was all.

  The top of the box clapped shut. The flashlight turned away. The odd woman ran off up the street.

  Chapter 3

  The next day at 403 Elderberry Street began as Sundays there always began. Dora was off to church while Jenny lolled in her single bed, back in her childhood room, a room filled with childish things in childish sizes she hadn’t gotten around to throwing out. She meant to, if she stayed at home much longer and didn’t get her butt moving and find a job and a new place to live. If she didn’t quit acting like a coward, staying here with her mom after the awful divorce from Ronald Korman. She mumbled something under her breath about a thirty-something woman who didn’t have the backbone of a jellyfish and let a rotten, two-timing husband knock the stuffing out of her.

  She kicked the teddy bear sheet off the bed and thought about taking her Bon Jovi poster down. She would replace the thin, matching teddy bear quilt and sheets. Paint the walls and buy pretty linens. But that was like saying she would stay at home for the rest of her life. Get herself a couple of cats she’d dress in matching outfits. Buy a gardening hat and ten boxes of tea she would steep in a delicate silver tea ball.

  Anyway, she didn’t like shopping. Except for that one time. Back in Chicago.

  She and Ronald were newly married. A new apartment. She’d shopped for days, picking out fluffy towels and flowered sheets and basket-weave blankets and wildly colorful rugs and gold-edged dishes and on and on and on until she’d worn herself out and her last purchase had been a cheese grater shaped like a lady in a paisley skirt.

  Ronald hated all of it. He made a snide remark the first night in the new apartment about being married to a hick from northern Michigan, which dimmed the joy she’d taken in their new things and dimmed the joy she’d taken in her new home. And maybe started to dim the joy she’d taken in her Chicago-lawyer husband.

  The apartment had been too spare, not one damned floral teapot in the whole place. The furniture he ordered was all big, chunky pieces, cheaply made. And reproductions of modern sculptures were set on faux marble pedestals in every corner of the living room. Ronald trained bright ceiling lights down on his choices, masking every quality the work might have had with terrible shadows. A blank, modern painting hung—always a little crooked—over the huge sofa. The side chairs were all sticks—and not the Stickley kind of sticks. The apartment embarrassed her, although she wasn’t sure why she had the right to be embarrassed. It was just that something was missing. When she walked in it was never like walking into her own home. She saw it on people’s faces when Ronald showed them through the five rooms, then poured mediocre wines as the guests, mostly his employees, were made to ooh and aah over everything but her cheese grater lady—though two women did, proclaiming the grater “darling.”

  It was never a matter of money, his penuriousness. It was more a matter of his needs. He explained again and again that he had to dress well. And “After all, Jenny,” he’d said more than once, eventually setting her teeth on edge, “I’m not only your husband. I’m your boss. I have larger needs than you.” Which made her bite her lip hard enough to hurt. Maybe it wasn’t the apartment that bothered her at all but that she had become another one of his inexpensive possessions, one that needed to be told how to dress and act and stick her nose in the air. And by the way, “take care of me in bed,” he would have added if he’d dared.

  She shuddered and rolled over. Her feet fell off the end of the bed. Her arm hit the wall beside her, making one corner of the yellowed Bon Jovi poster come loose. The poster flapped and dropped dust balls on her head.

  What she didn’t want to think about too deeply was how upset her mother had been last night. Poor Mom. Standing there watching as that woman went flying up the street. Then walking up the steps with a hand over her mouth, tears running down her face.

  “What did I do?” Dora’d whispered as she hurried past Jenny and Zoe, into the house and into her bedroom, where she closed the door and wouldn’t answer when Jenny knocked.

  Jenny pulled clothes out of drawers and hunted under the bed for her sneakers. She was mad at herself for not getting up before Mom left for church. She should have been in the kitchen, saying things to make Mom feel better, instead of cowering in bed with a teddy bear sheet over her head.

  She always ran from trouble now, wanting life as smooth as a pane of glass. No cracks to fall into. Nothing threatening to blow her fragile ego into pieces.

  Her robe lay on the floor of the closet and had warped into a ball of terrycloth that required a good shake and a check for spiders before she could put it on. Drudge, she thought and tightened the belt tighter than necessary around her waist. Who could she blame for how she’d turned out?

  “I don’t run from trouble,” she assured her reflection in the dressing table mirror. “Just . . . just . . . I don’t go looking for it.” Which made her think of Lisa the Good, her younger sister, a filmmaker in Montana now, who always knew the right thing to say and do and made the people—all people—around her feel better about themselves.

  There was one good thing in Jenny’s interim life. Tony Ralenti. Well, not really in her life, but hovering at the edges the way a man does before zeroing in—if a woman lets him. If a woman could get over a lot of the things she had to get over first. Before she could trust again.

  She heard the back door open and close. Mom coming back from church. Or Zoe Zola climbing up on a chair to sit with Fida, her feminist dog, at her feet. Zoe, with a hundred and one things to say about everything that existed in this world and also in that odd imaginary world where Zoe lived all by herself.

  Jenny smelled the coffee. She had to get out there and face whatever the day was going to bring. First the bathroom, then back to dress—clean underwear, even if the bra was old and the underpants holey; a pair of white shorts; a yellow T-shirt with Save the Planet on it, faded but serviceable; those way-off-white sneakers—then down the hall to cheer up Dora’s day.

  Poor Mom. She’d once been a librarian until she married Jim Weston and moved to this small Michigan town without a library. How she loved literature and people who read books. Her greatest joy was the Little Library Jim surprised her with on their twenty-first anniversary. That was six months before he was killed in an accident out on the highway between Traverse City and Charlevoix, out where the pot-holed side road that led to Bear Falls ended.

  Jim was a traveling salesman with a line of farm equipment. He’d brought Dora to Bear Falls to live because the town was at the center of his territory, which stretched from Grand Rapids to the Mackinac Bridge. He had promised Dora t
hat he would do something about the no-library situation. And he did on that last anniversary, with the Little Library box that he’d built to look exactly like their green-and-white house with the brick chimney at one end, two dormers, and a screened porch running across the front.

  When she got to the kitchen, it was quiet except for the ticking of the wall clock. No Zoe. Morning sun poured through the thin white curtains at the wide windows. Mom, coffee cup in front of her on the table, had obviously not gone to church at all. She wasn’t dressed and sat with one hand holding her cotton robe closed at the neck, as if she were cold. Her brittle, ash-colored hair was uncombed. An open book lay in front of her. When she looked up, her eyes were puffy and sad.

  Jenny planted a kiss on her mother’s head, then reached down to hug her, holding her close as much for her own need as for her mother’s.

  “Everything will turn out all right.” She said words people always said when they didn’t have a clue how things would really turn out. “Emily Sutton’s a frightened bird. She’ll come around.”

  Jenny, not into coffee at any time of day, made herself a cup of tea and then took her cup to settle across the table from Dora.

  She nodded to the book in front of Dora and asked what she was reading.

  Dora looked down at the cover of the gray book, dropping her hand gently to it as if something in there could be jarred. “Emily Sutton’s poems. Beautiful work. Such a shame.”

  She put her hand up to stop Jenny when she began to protest. “I don’t mean about me and what happened last night, scaring the poor soul the way I did. I mean such a shame she stopped writing. I wonder what happened. How does a person stop doing something they were meant to do? How did she stop taking up a pen and letting words come out?

  “I found a poem that broke my heart. Listen,” she said. “It’s like she’s talking straight to me: ‘Escape is a place of vision, / where others cannot go. / It hides from darkness monsters, / and daylight tedium.’”

  She looked up, eyes gleaming. “I’m the darkness monster. She had to escape from me. I’m so ashamed of accosting the poor thing the way I did.”

  “Oh, Mom. Don’t torture yourself. Obviously there’s something wrong with her. All those years shut up in that dreary house on Pewee Swamp. Anybody would get a little screwy.”

  Dora’s eyes flew open. “Wrong! Screwy? Would you have said there was something wrong or screwy with Emily Dickinson?”

  Jenny thought a while. “Probably.”

  “Well, let me tell you, Jenny Weston, Emily Dickinson was a woman dropped into the wrong century and made to deal with Amherst matrons who spent their days gossiping and paying afternoon calls. Can you imagine Emily Dickinson in that world? All piety and jealousy? I’ll bet anything you would have hidden in your house, too. So much better to write poetry, bake black cakes for your family, and hide from tiny souls.”

  She ran her finger down the middle of the book lying open in front of her.

  “That’s what happened to Emily Sutton. Far ahead of her time. Ahead of a world of readers who can’t begin to understand her work. How much safer, I suppose, to be home with her sister these last twenty-five years or so. Imagine the quiet in that house. Quiet to write, without critics and sour poets snapping at her heels. I understand both Emilys completely.” She closed the book and took a deep breath.

  Jenny made an unhappy face. “Mom, think about that poem. She’s obviously talking about the mind, not a physical monster with a pretty face and curly whitish hair, like you. Come on. It’s Sunday. Let’s call Lisa. She’ll cheer you up. She always does.”

  Dora brightened at the idea of calling her daughter, who had just finished filming a documentary about children on an American Indian reservation.

  Just as it was every time she called Lisa, Dora’s first question was when could Lisa come home. Today Dora quickly used Jenny as bait.

  “I don’t know how long she’ll stay, Lisa,” Dora was saying into the phone while Jenny thought about the day ahead. If she was right, how things were going to come between her and Tony, he should be calling soon. At first it had been with excuses to come over: a Little Library house plan to show them, a new siding he’d found. But now it was almost like dating. They’d have breakfast at Myrtle’s Restaurant, where the French toast was always good. One day he had suggested a swim over at a beach on Lake Michigan. Another day she went into Traverse City with him, doing a paint run to Home Depot. And on the days in between, he was in their house more and more often, always looking for an excuse to stay a little longer, linger over a beer, talking and laughing the way people getting to know each other talked and laughed.

  “You should come as soon as you can,” Dora was saying. “Yes, I understand. But I’d so love to have the two of you here, together at the same time.”

  After Dora hung up, she smiled at Jenny and nodded, satisfied. “She’s going to try.”

  The next diversion was a knock at the back door.

  Zoe walked in with Fida in her arms. She set Fida on the floor, where the little dog ran under a chair to curl up and fall back to sleep. Zoe headed straight for the coffeepot.

  “Wouldn’t you know it?” Zoe scrunched her small face into disgust as she climbed on a chair by way of the rungs and settled at the table, placing the mug in front of her. “My printer won’t print and I have to go over the manuscript page by page before I e-mail it to Christopher. I require black words on paper, not only on a screen. That’s the way I work. I need the manuscript in front of me. Then a few days for editing. I’ll call Christopher and tell him. I refuse to send him anything less than my very best. He won’t take this too well, such a stickler for deadlines. He’ll talk about editorial and covers and time for blurbs and things only he cares about. But he’ll end by telling me to take all the time I need and to let him know when the book is finished. He wants me to come to New York sometime soon. I don’t know why, but I think Christopher likes me. He certainly seems to cheer up when he hears my voice. Starts laughing when I say hello. But, oh dear, first I need to get into Traverse City and buy a new printer. A new printer is of maximum importance. It is the finger in the dike. It is the dam in the stream.” She turned her alarmed face from Dora to Jenny.

  “I must have it today. Would you go with me, Jenny? A printer will be heavy and I could use some muscle.”

  “It’s Sunday, Zoe. I think Tony and I have plans for later . . .”

  “Oh.” Zoe’s face fell. “I suppose you’re not the muscle type anyway. But could you call Tony and check? I can’t do it alone. Maybe at the store. Someone there will help me, but when I get back . . .” She narrowed her round blue eyes. “Lunch will be on me. If a bribe can convince you. We could go to the Brew and sit among the clackers—the people on their computers. We can talk about anything we like and the people around us won’t hear a word. It’s refreshing to me, you know, not to be surrounded by eavesdroppers and interlopers.”

  Jenny smiled at Zoe’s exaggerated picture of the Traverse City coffee shop. Then she smiled wider at Zoe’s pursed red lips, naturally red cheeks, and bright-blue eyes. She melted. After all, some things were owed. Zoe was the first to offer Dora help when she was sick and needed to get into Traverse City to a doctor. She was the first to come over to welcome Jenny back to her hometown.

  “You just bought yourself some muscle.” Jenny got up to go call Tony and break their date—if they had one.

  * * *

  Zoe watched Jenny leave the room. She scratched at the end of her nose and shook her head. “Are you any better today?” she asked Dora.

  Dora shrugged. “I’m still mad at myself, if that’s what you mean. The woman’s got a right to walk around at night without being pounced on. I don’t know what I was thinking, accosting her like that. I acted like a star-struck teenager.”

  “That wasn’t accosting.” Zoe waved away the thought. “You were being friendly, wanting to let her know what her poetry meant to you. She’ll be back. Where else can she get poetry
books? In fact, I was thinking—you know what might be nice?”

  Dora shook her head.

  “What if Jenny and I stop at Horizon Books when we go in to get the printer? That is, if Jenny can go. There, Jill or Amy will give us ideas for books Emily Sutton might like. You know, maybe find her some great modern poetry. Just imagine all those years closed up in that house. She must be thirsting to know what’s been happening in literature.”

  Dora thought a moment before her face lit up. “What a great idea! But don’t buy her any Emily Dickinson. I’ll do that later.”

  “Great!” Zoe thumped her hands on the table. “On our way back we’ll drop the books off at her house. No knocking or anything. I promise.” She threw her hands up at the look Dora gave her. “Maybe just a single knock and off we’ll go.”

  “And don’t hide in the bushes spying on her.”

  “Why, Dora! I’m crushed.” Zoe sat back, looking more amused than crushed.

  “I want to pay you, of course.”

  Zoe opened her mouth to nix that proposal since they were all involved in last night’s fiasco, but Jenny was back, looking oddly confused.

  “I can go with you.” She shrugged in Zoe’s direction. “Tony said we didn’t have plans to do anything today. Too busy in his workshop, he said. He sounded funny. You know, odd. I have no clue. Anyway, let’s go.”

  Zoe slid from her chair as a great knocking came from the front of the house, and soon their neighbor, Minnie Moon, was standing in the kitchen with one fist in the air, waving slips of paper at them.

  “Found these in your library box, Dora,” Minnie said, setting the papers on the table. Minnie was dressed for the day in a purple muumuu and tennis shoes with rolled-down white anklets. She stood next to the refrigerator, chest heaving. “I’ve been collecting them the last couple a weeks but it came to me maybe you didn’t know anything about ’em.”