Eric looked over at the ampoule. It was half empty.
“That’ll be a headline story,” Madeline says. She sighs. “I’d have been so close to Eva. Would she have been in college when I had my first period? She’d have been a comfort. Maybe she would have been home on vacation. Celia would have given me ‘the talk,’ though. Is this embarrassing you, Eric? Girl talk?”
He doesn’t answer. He’s envisioning a swarm of police invading the backyard of a suburban mini-mansion, scrambling over the manicured lawn and draping the coiffed shrubberies and ornamental trees with yellow tape. Shovel and pick ax wielding workers attack a swimming pool. Chunks of aquamarine concrete and fresh red dirt pile up, and police officers surround a woman who clasps her pink robe to her throat—the human resources director. All stare at a gaping hole at the bottom of the destroyed pool. A police dog strains against a leash, barking into that void, where a hip-deep officer sifts blindly with gloved hands.
“Do you think I could have convinced you to get a puppy after Eva left?” Madeline asks. “A dog would have filled a pretty big gap. What’re you making there? That’s quite a box.”
“It’s a storage bench,” Eric says.
The next morning already? Eric, half-hidden by a drape, stands at the living room window, staring at the street. If he chances a dash to the mailbox, he’ll find the morning paper, flush with the details of the “Search for Lost Baby under Suburban Pool.” But if Larry Feldstein jogs by, Eric will have to explain about his lost job. Curiously, papers are piled under the box, as if someone thought he’d want souvenir copies. But if anybody knew, then wouldn’t the police? Madeline suggested that a cadaver dog might have brought the package to his stoop. Maybe a German shepherd would trot up his driveway right now. And here’s Larry—DMJ! His neighbor stops at the pile of papers, glances at Eric’s house, then kicks the extra copies onto the curb. He keeps jogging.
The guestroom door is shut. Eric doesn’t check the bathroom. Confusing messages flood the kitchen answering machine. Eric listens twice, then a third time. First is David—it’s been two years since he’s heard his son’s voice, though Celia keeps in contact: “Dad, we should talk. I’ll try again.”
Next is Eva; he doesn’t understand her message at all: “Sorry we missed you, Mom and Dad. Stephanie wants to show you where her tooth fell out. I think she’s hoping her grandpa is the Tooth Fairy. It’d be nice if she were right. Ryan says, ‘Go Yankees,’ Dad. I forgot—Mom is away, isn’t she? Okay, we’ll talk soon.”
Stephanie and Ryan? Who are they? The names are familiar, but placing them is like thumbing through a book written with a foreign alphabet. There are two more messages from Celia: “Toronto was great. Buttons galore. But now the gang is heading to Ohio for Button Week, if you can believe it, and I figure I’ve only got this one chance, so off I go. Defrost something for yourself, there’s plenty in the freezer.” His wife’s second message, the last on the machine: “Don’t ever let anyone disparage Cleveland. We had loads of fun, although I have to admit, I haven’t much use for that rock music hall of fame. But the word’s out about a private exhibit just outside of Denver. My friend Dierdre knows somebody who knows somebody, and we think we’ll be able to get a peek. This could be the experience of a lifetime! I’ll let you know how it works out.”
Certain he’s missed something, Eric is about to listen to the messages for a fourth time when the doorbell rings, and he freezes. The doorbell rings again. He isn’t dressed for company—he still wears the sweatshirt and pajama bottoms. And for how long has he been barefoot? He could step on something on the basement floor if he’s not careful. The doorbell a third time. Eric hunches and shuffles down the hall to the living room’s second archway, where he might be able to glimpse a visitor. There’s an elbow—yellow reflective fabric—Larry’s running suit. Both men hold still for nearly a minute. When Larry finally leaves, Eric exhales and drifts away.
That evening, Eric is sanding the pine bench when Madeline arrives.
“I’d have been a Girl Scout, like Eva,” she says from her usual perch on the steps. “Our projects never involved woodworking and race cars and things you made for a while when David was in the Cub Scouts. It was the Pinewood Derby car that made him hate you, wasn’t it? When he wanted to glue Eva’s Barbie to the top, and you hit him? I think it was Ballerina Barbie—she had a pink tutu.”
There’s a flap of torn skin on Eric’s knuckle, oozing blood—has he sanded through his flesh while lost in thought? But when he looks closer, there’s nothing there. Then he sees himself reaching toward young David. Blood drips from the boy’s nose onto his lip; the boy flinches from his father’s hand. His eyes shine with defiant tears.
“Just a slap—he moved into it—he wouldn’t stop whining about the doll. Like a broken record. A doll on a race car? We’d made such a beautiful car, and he wanted to ruin it.”
“That was the end of projects, wasn’t it? Did Celia even know? But you did sell Girl Scout cookies for Eva at your office. She was afraid to go door to door. You would have done that for me, right? But if I was still selling cookies, how would you get them to your office for my customers?”
Mention of doors reminds Eric of Larry at his. His neighbor will be back.
“That Mr. Feldstein must have run a million miles by now,” Madeline says, dipping into Eric’s thoughts. “Do you remember how Eva and David switched rooms because Eva thought Mr. Feldstein stared into her window? ‘Like I’m supposed to wave,’ she said. It was nice the way David always tried to protect her. Wasn’t that why she stopped selling cookies in the neighborhood? Didn’t Mr. Feldstein invite her in and ‘try something’? You said she had quite an imagination. I’m glad my room doesn’t face the street. Celia said you had to go over to Mr. Feldstein’s right away and get to the bottom of it. You said you didn’t know what to say. Your solution was to sell her cookies at work. Eva cried, and David switched bedrooms with her. Hey—how do you want to use up your cadaver scent?”
Eric squints at the ampoule. Not much is left. His throat is scratchy—sawdust clings to his lashes and covered his forearms. “You girls were always safe,” he croaks.
“Of course,” Madeline says. “You know what we could do? We could find some real killers, and we could use your fake scent to lead the police to them. Maybe make a trail from the perp to the hidden body. There are crimes everywhere, right? And bodies. You could be like Robin Hood, and I could be your sidekick. Robin Hood had a sidekick, right?
“He had Merry Men.”
“I thought he had a sidekick in a red outfit and mask that matched his green one. A kid. Both of them had bows and arrows—”
“That’s The Green Arrow and Speedy. From a comic book I read when I was a boy.”
“Un-hunh. Well, David would have read it to me. You saved your old comic books—that’s your legacy. With Eva I would have read Archie. The paper would have been musty and flaky. Do you think I’m more like Betty or Veronica?”
“Veronica,” Eric says without thinking.
“Probably. She’s a little bitchy, right? Eva’s more like Betty—a girl next door. Hey, you know, wouldn’t it be something if Mr. Feldstein was ringing your doorbell before because there was something wrong with him? Didn’t he have a heart transplant or something?”
“A triple bypass.”
“Wow—that sounds worse than a transplant. Maybe he came over because he was having chest pains and didn’t want to keel over alone in his house where nobody would find him. What if you’d let him in, and he’d sat down at the kitchen table, and you’d brought him a glass of water, but he slumped over and died right there—at the kitchen table.”
Eric pictures Larry, who’d never been in his house, lifting a glass of water toward worm-colored lips, then dropping it, the glass shattering on the table. The jogger’s eyes roll back, and he slips to the floor like s
hifting freight and lies spread-eagled. Does Eric dare call 911? Won’t the police find the mis-delivered scent? When Eric looks up from his fallen neighbor, he sees the blinking answering machine. He steps over Larry to play them back.
David: “Dad?”
Eva: “Dad?”
Celia: “The Pacific Ocean is beautiful, Eric—we should have made that cross country trip with the kids. I have no idea what the time difference is here in Honolulu, but I guess you’re asleep. The buttons are spectacular—coral and shell, like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“I think they’ll look for Larry at his place first, when somebody figures out he’s missing,” Madeline says. “Too bad about him. It’s a question whether he really deserved what he got.”
Somehow, the girl and Eric have switched places, and he’s on the shaded steps. Madeline scintillates under the fluorescent light, poised over his pine bench with his hammer in her hand. She’s so bright, so silvery blue, it hurts as much to look at her as it does the white boards of his project. What evening is it?
“Eventually, they’ll start poking around the neighborhood, and before long, they’ll be here. A dog will catch his scent. Or maybe the dogs will catch your scent—oh, but wasn’t yours theirs in the first place? It’s hard to keep track.” Blue Madeline pauses. Eric, wincing, sees that she points his hammer at the work table. “But all of your scent is gone!” From the stairs, Eric can’t make out the ampoule. “Now how are we going to be Robin Hood and Speedy?” She slides a pine plank into place, sets a nail down, and the hammer drops. The sound echoes from the concrete walls and floor. She sets another nail. How thin she is. Translucently thin. She pounds the second nail.
The lights dim, but Madeline is impossible to watch. Eric wants to tell her to hinge the bench top, not nail it. If it’s nailed, who will find whatever’s inside? But his tongue is thick, and she’s working so diligently he doesn’t dare stop her.
“But your scent was artificial, right? Now we’ve got the real thing, right here in storage. We’ll figure out a way to use it sooner or later—you know, for leading police to the bodies criminals have hidden.” Her words are hard to decipher. She might be holding nails in the corner of her mouth. But it sounds like she’s slipping into a different language. She keeps pounding away, and each concussion hurts Eric’s ears. He wraps his arms around his head, but the sound grows louder. He’s smothered himself in total darkness.
“You know—” the voice penetrates from above, the pounding now more like knuckles on a wooden door—only every few words are audible because of the knocking, “—it would have been . . . to have grown up . . . family. . . Spectacular!”
Snow Angels sans Merci
My sister-in-law’s got me trapped in my bedroom. Her soundless presence in the living room below competes with the silence of the snow I assume has been falling for hours. And Blanche’s sleeping like a stone on the sofabed. She’s been visiting for a month and shows no sign of leaving.
My wife lies beside me. I gaze at her with love, but I pity both of us. Who should have such a sister? Not Estelle—look what Blanche does to me! I sit on the bed’s edge and stare at my moon pale feet. To see them I lean to the side. I think of myself as round like a planet, not fat. Solid. It’s a matter of opinion. The fact that Blanche lurks downstairs whets my appetite for everything she keeps me from—my recliner, my entertainment center, my well-stocked kitchen. When I tell my wife how confined I feel, she scoffs.
“You’re joking,” she says, her dark eyes twinkling. “How could you be afraid of sweet old Blanche?” Estelle is eleven years younger than her sister.
The first morning after Blanche’s arrival I descended the stairs dressed for work, hungry for sweet rolls and coffee. I tip-toed past the sofa bed, where my sister-in-law lay hidden in a tangle of sheets. When my eyes adjusted to the half-light, I saw Blanche’s wild mass of hair inches from my thigh. One false step and I’d have explaining to do. I backed away and bumped into my recliner, pawing the blouse Blanche had flung there. I groped the stiff fabric of the bra twisted within it, panicked, and puffed back upstairs. I vowed never again to pass Blanche while she slept.
So I’ve been sitting at the edge of my bed mornings, an inflated version of Rodin’s thinker. I stare at a Brueghel print above the dresser—villagers skating on a pond. Each morning I expect to see one skater less. I search for a hole in the ice that a heavy fellow might have dropped through. One morning will I see a web of cracks, and the next find the ice broken into tiny floes like white cornflakes in ink? I have been hungry ever since Blanche’s invasion.
Frost clouds the glass, but through a clear strip I see flakes dancing like sperm. It’s Saturday morning, no work, but I don’t have the freedom of my house. I lay my hand on Estelle’s side. “How about breakfast?” I ask, afraid she’ll tease me again about her sister.
Blanche’s marriage ended a year after Estelle and I wed. I remember two things about Don, her ex. One is that he was brilliant. She’d met him while both were graduate students at MIT. Her field was atmospheric sciences. Don supposedly invented nanotechnology or discovered a theoretical entity lurking within black holes or formulated a multi-digit “constant” like those on charts referenced in high school physics classes. The second thing I recall about Don is that Blanche divorced him “because he wasn’t smart enough.” They had no children. A footnote on Don’s brilliance: we played Trivial Pursuit once, the four of us. Before we were married, Estelle brought me to Boston to meet the couple, and the game followed an unsatisfying vegetarian stir fry. Don had the first turn. He answered everything right. Whatever the question, whatever the category, Don responded as if he’d written the cards. No one else got a turn as he marched his piece indifferently around the board. I think he mistook the activity for a conversation. The details of Blanche and Don’s courtship are beyond imagining.
Blanche has kept an apartment in Cambridge since she and Don split up. Her share of the profits from his patented “processes” has left her financially independent, and she chooses not to work. She travels. Estelle receives postcards monthly from exotic locales—European spas, Asian capitals, unheard of Pacific atolls. Blanche’s cards mention only the weather. A note from Algiers backing a picture of blue-green water and blindingly white buildings, reads, “Unseasonably cold; temperatures in the low 60s during the day, 30s at night. Humidity imperceptible. Love, Blanche.”
I met my wife when I hired her as an office temp at my insurance company. It was a busy summer for thunderstorm damage, and Estelle was waiting for September and her first teaching job. I didn’t ask her out until her last day. During the month of August, I struggled to maintain my professional distance in the face of Estelle’s charms. I locked myself in my office, safe from the bright smiles she offered while pecking away at her computer. I trembled in her company, grumbling instructions with downcast eyes. I brought a second shirt to the office because the first was sweat-soaked by noon.
Five minutes before she would have walked out of my life forever, Estelle accepted my muttered dinner invitation. She told me over dessert that she’d thought I hated her, and, as I invented a company policy forbidding dating, a tear of relief welled up in my eye, spilled down my cheek, and slipped into the crease between my chins.
I cower behind Estelle as we negotiate the living room on our way to breakfast, but Blanche’s gaze pins me against the wall like a weather map. She sits cross-legged in her flannel nightgown. Her hair swirls in a black cloud; white streaks flash around her head like smothered lightening. She calls the style “natural.” Blanche’s face always surprises me. Though it’s precisely my wife’s, it’s capable of expressions unimaginable on Estelle.
“You two are down late,” Blanche says. “Nothing I wouldn’t approve of, eh, Rich-head?”
Estelle giggles like a middle-schooler. “He asked you not to call him that.”
Blanche’s been calling me “Rich-head” ever
since I asked her not to call me Dick. I told her Dick made no sense because I didn’t have a “D” in my name. Now I’m “Rich-head” at least once a day, and I hear “Dick” no matter what she says.
I clear my throat. “It snowed,” I say. “It’s still snowing.”
“Un-hunh,” Blanche grunts, feigning disinterest in the weather with professional ennui. “What’s for breakfast? Plenty, right?” She eyes my stomach, which I pat protectively. It’s rumbling. Her grin twists, as if to remind me that she’s not Estelle.
Estelle pulls aside the curtain. “Oh—” she gasps, “Look at the snow!”
We gaze together at the tumbling flakes—so many, too many. We look through their veil at the deepening snow, our neighborhood transformed. I draw Estelle close.
“What a waste, hey?” Blanche calls, and I jerk away from my wife.“What’s the point if it’s not going to get you off from work, right? What’s to stare at, Saint Richard? You’re not going to melt it away. That’s at least an hour’s work in near blizzard conditions.” She looks again at my belly. “Make it two hours.”
So now I’m a saint. “Not enough wind for a blizzard,” I mutter. Blanche, of course, knows this better than I do. Estelle has slipped away and crawls onto the sofa bed beside her sister, who takes hold of her wrists in mock compassion.
“Tell me all about it,” Blanche coos. “Is big, bad husband treating you cruelly?” She pats her baby sister’s tamer hair, streakless, but as black as her own. Alone at the window, I look at the snow. It’s overtaken the bottom step of the porch and half the next. Cars are buried. Trees and fence posts have sunk. Furrows from foolhardy motorists are filling in, as are the walks of the neighbors who have shoveled once already. And if I wait until the storm ends, it will be too deep for me.
Women of Consequence Page 13
