“It’s a couple in their forties,” Carmen said. “He works at the post office, and she’s a kindergarten teacher.” Her voice sounded steady, so maybe her tears were already over.
Or maybe she needed a little more time. “Well, I wish the one across the street would sell,” Julia said, still facing the window. “It’s been empty for almost three months. At least someone could come mow the lawn. It’s not the most scenic view.”
“A woman went through it yesterday with a real estate guy,” Carmen said. “She was in an SUV with a Florida license.”
Julia laughed. “Where does she work?”
“I don’t know, but I’m guessing something medical. She had on blue scrubs and white rubber-soled shoes.”
Julia said, “Well, I’m going to sit on the back porch and read a little while.”
Carmen got to her feet. “Uh, Aunt Julia, there’s more . . . if you want to ask more questions. I mean, I didn’t tell you every detail, so . . .”
Julia held up a hand. “No, we’ve talked a long time. You’ve told me enough.”
Carmen hesitated, then said, “Well, maybe I’ll take a warm bath if it’s okay.”
Julia nodded, and Carmen turned and left. Seconds later Julia heard the tub water running in the hall bath. She couldn’t name all the feelings inside her right now, but she knew one of them was fear at the thought of how close she had come to turning the girl out. And another was relief that she hadn’t. And mixed in was a good bit of anxiety about how all of this was going to work.
• chapter 10 •
SINGING TO PLANTS
July and August passed in a swelter of record-breaking temperatures, but the first week of September brought with it a welcome mildness. They needed rain, but at least there was a break in the heat, a reminder that cooler days were coming. Of all the seasons, Julia had always liked fall best, with its colorful drifts of leaves and earlier evenings. She also liked fall because it was when school started again and she could return to her comfortable routine. Not this year, of course, but every passing season would bring her closer.
She was feeling especially restless right now since it was the first week of classes at Millard-Temple and she wondered how her courses were going. She wished she could make herself invisible and sit in on some of them. On second thought, she didn’t wish that at all, for what if the interim teacher was too good, what if his lectures were too engaging, the students too attentive? No, it was safer to pretend that things were going poorly, that the best students were waiting for her return to sign up for her classes.
It was the Friday after Labor Day, going on toward lunchtime, and Julia and Carmen were sitting on the back porch together, Carmen on the glider looking through job listings in the newspaper and Julia in the wicker rocking chair with a book of essays in her lap. The radio was on, tuned in to NPR, and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite was playing, though too softly for its full effect.
“Hey, here’s a job I could do,” Carmen said from the glider. “It’s a companion for an elderly gentleman. That’s what the ad says—‘companion needed for elderly gentleman.’ Isn’t that quaint? That might be interesting.” She took a slurpy sip of her coffee, which was mostly warm milk with a dribble of coffee and lots of sugar.
Julia looked up from her book. “Interesting? More like dangerous. Remember the elderly gentleman who was on the news the other night for killing his neighbor and dumping his body in a well?” The man had looked like a harmless old grandfather.
Carmen cocked her head toward the radio. “Wait, did you hear that? Didn’t that part sound like something from Peer Gynt? I wonder if Stravinsky did that on purpose? Who came first—Stravinsky or Grieg?” She looked over at Julia expectantly.
Julia had heard nothing that sounded like Peer Gynt, but she hadn’t been listening closely. “Grieg, I think,” she said, “but I’m not sure. I’m not the expert on music you seem to think I am.”
Carmen looked back at the newspaper. “The ad says ‘Good pay,’ so he must be rich.”
“And the elderly gentleman in Columbia,” Julia said, “who ran the meth lab and had a whole stockpile of explosives he was planning to use to blow up the governor’s mansion . . . remember him?” They had seen him on television a few nights ago, being led from his house in handcuffs, the stereotypical Southern redneck. Scruffy beard, missing teeth, beer belly, wife-beater shirt.
Carmen took another sip of her coffee. “But nobody like that would advertise for a companion, would they? He didn’t look like he knew any words that big.” She set her mug down. “And don’t forget that poor old man in Greenville who drove his car into the Burger King and killed those two people. Of course, you have to feel sorry for somebody like that. He wasn’t a criminal. It must be a horrible thing to live with—running over somebody by accident that way.”
How quickly a conversation could go awry. Julia pretended to be reading again. Maybe Carmen would take the hint and stop talking. Or at least change the subject.
But she didn’t. “If he’d had somebody to drive him around,” she continued, “it wouldn’t have happened. If he’d had a companion like me, for example, he could have said, ‘Hey, Carmen, I need you to take me to Burger King.’ And I would’ve said, ‘Okay, sure, Mr. Elderly Gentleman with slow reflexes, I have my driver’s license now, so hop on in, let’s go.’” She picked up the paper and rattled it. “So, see, I might save somebody’s life by answering this ad. Or maybe a bunch of people. Maybe this elderly gentleman is going to smash into a playground full of children if he doesn’t get a companion to drive him around, or . . .”
Julia broke in. “That reminds me. I’m going to need you to drive to the post office after lunch to mail that package for me.” The driver’s license was a new acquisition for Carmen, as were a new social security card and a copy of her birth certificate from the county seat in Wyoming where she had been born. She was especially proud of the driver’s license. Almost daily now she ran some kind of errand for Julia.
“Sure,” Carmen said. “And don’t worry, I’m not going to answer any ad to be a man’s companion, elderly or otherwise.” She turned over several pages to the crossword puzzle, then neatly folded the newspaper back and picked up a pencil.
“There’s really no need for you to rush into a job,” Julia said. “It’s not as if you’ve been lazing around all summer. You’ve kept busy around here.” And it was true. The girl had made herself useful not only at the stone house but also at other houses up and down Ivy Dale.
• • •
WITH Carmen, you knew why it was called striking up a conversation. She didn’t hold back. She knew most of the neighbors by name now. She had washed their cars, mowed their yards, weeded their gardens, even helped a single mother and her two little girls move into the house across the street.
She often played with the girls in their yard for hours on Saturdays to keep them out from under their mother’s feet. Julia sometimes watched her from the kitchen window as she gave them piggyback rides, taught them jump rope jingles, drew chalk pictures with them in the driveway, read books to them on the front steps.
After learning about Dr. Boyer’s knee replacement surgery, Carmen had offered to walk his dog, bring his mail and newspaper to the door, and get his groceries. Over the past two months she had exchanged more words with Dr. Boyer than Julia herself had in over twenty years. Almost daily she came home with a new French phrase, something she had asked him to write down for her.
A few weeks ago she had even rung the doorbell of “the White Ark”—Julia’s name for a two-story monstrosity erected ten years ago in an empty lot on the east end of Ivy Dale, which looked totally out of place among the smaller, older, more tastefully appointed homes. The residents of the White Ark were a reclusive older couple who rarely showed themselves outdoors. Year-round their eaves were strung with Christmas lights, the kind that were supposed to look like icicles, and until very recently a collapsed inflatable Santa had been puddled in their front yard, a
mass of dirty red-and-white plastic, which was the purpose of Carmen’s visit.
The woman who answered the door that day opened it only a few inches and, without saying a word, shook her head at Carmen’s offer to clean and fold the Santa, then shut the door firmly. The next day, however, the Santa was gone from the yard and part of the red plastic could be seen spilling out the top of the garbage can in the driveway.
“That woman has the palest, bluest eyes,” Carmen had told Julia, “like one of those Siberian husky dogs. She looked a little . . . furtive. But, you know, she might be deaf now that I think about the way she stared at my mouth while I was talking. And she has a kind of a hooked nose—aquiline, is that the word? She’s tiny, with this long, wavy silvery hair. But kind of pretty, in an odd, dreamy sort of way, like a confused fairy who’s forgotten how to fly, and . . .” These descriptions could go on and on.
All this from a fifteen-second conversation through a three-inch crack. Carmen could make a story out of a stick lying on the ground. Sometime recently she had taken to writing things in an empty journal she had found on one of the bookshelves. Julia had no idea what she wrote. Maybe it was simply a diary of things she did and saw every day, like descriptions of neighbors with aquiline noses.
She studied the girl now, carefully penciling in letters on the crossword puzzle. She always went slowly so as not to have to erase anything. She was sitting with one leg tucked under her, the other swinging back and forth. Her shoelaces were untied but bunched up between the eyelets so the ends didn’t dangle and trip her. She claimed that tied laces made her feel trapped in her shoes. These were new sneakers, but not expensive ones. She had refused the ones Julia had wanted to buy her, insisting that she didn’t want any at all if she couldn’t have the cheap ones.
Julia wasn’t ready to drop the subject of a job. “In fact,” she said, “you’ve stayed so busy I’m going to run out of projects around here before long.”
Carmen said nothing. She was frowning now, tapping her pencil against her foot. “‘Dr. Johnson’s pal’?” she said. “Seven letters, the fourth one is a w.”
“Boswell,” Julia said. “He wrote a biography of Samuel Johnson.”
Carmen gave a sniffy laugh as she filled the letters in. “Okay, thanks. I wouldn’t know either one of them if I met them on the street.”
“You won’t be meeting them on the street. They’ve both been dead for over two hundred years.”
“Yeah?” The girl looked up. “Have you ever thought about how everybody’s skeleton looks basically the same? I mean, there are little differences in size and all that, but if you just had everybody’s skeleton lined up side by side, it would be impossible to tell a famous person like Barack Obama from a mailman named Joe Schmoe. You know?”
“I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it,” Julia said. Carmen could be very silly—Julia had told her so more than once. At other times she was witty in a way you knew wasn’t accidental. Other days, she was neither silly nor witty, but grave and tense as if listening for something. But even on her quiet days she was polite, always polite.
• • •
JULIA went back to her book. She turned a few pages and saw an essay by Edith Wharton. She liked Edith Wharton. It came to her now that she would like to read Ethan Frome again. She couldn’t remember much about the plot except that it involved a young girl and an older man and it was set in New England. Maybe she and Carmen could read the book together.
She suddenly thought of something else that had been on her mind for many weeks now. This seemed like the right time to mention it, as it would support her point about a job.
“You don’t want to get a full-time job right now anyway,” she said. She didn’t expect an answer, for Carmen was slow to speak when she thought there might be more coming.
Head down, Carmen kept her eyes on the paper, but she was clearly waiting, her pencil poised above the puzzle.
“I want to take a trip sometime in October,” Julia continued, “and I’d like you to go with me. You wouldn’t want to have to ask an employer for time off so soon.”
Carmen looked up. “What kind of trip?” She looked worried, as if she thought Julia might be broaching the subject of a trip to Wyoming again.
“To New England,” Julia said. “I’d like to visit the homes of some American authors during my sabbatical. That part of the country is full of them. Frost, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Mark Twain . . . well, you already know—you lived up there.”
Carmen wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “You can go. I’ll stay here and work. I’ll help pay for all the things you’ll have to charge on your credit card.”
“I thought you liked New England. You’re always talking about all the history up there.”
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Carmen said. “I know, I know, that’s Dickens. His house isn’t up there.”
“Well, I don’t want to go by myself,” Julia said. “There are other homes I want to see, too. Edith Wharton and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott and . . .”
“I once met somebody who slept in Louisa May Alcott’s bed,” Carmen said.
At times Julia ignored these leaps in a conversation, but at other times the new turn was irresistible, as now.
Julia closed her book. “What are you talking about?”
It was a girl Carmen had met on a train somewhere in New England. This girl—Fawna was her name—was “bumming around for the summer doing random stuff just for fun.” One day she went on a guided tour through Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts, the house where Louisa May Alcott lived when she wrote Little Women. Somehow Fawna managed to slip into one of the groups without paying, and then she kept the guide off balance the whole time by asking funny questions like what they used for toilet tissue back then.
When the guide was finished with her speeches in the upstairs bedrooms and everybody else moved back downstairs, Fawna stayed behind and hid under Louisa’s bed, waiting for the house to be locked up for the night. Or so she said.
“Why?” Julia said.
“She hated that tour guide. She said the woman talked so fast nobody could understand her. And she didn’t have an ounce of fun in her bones, got all mad about the questions, told Fawna she was out of order and couldn’t ask any more.”
“So she hid under the bed to get even with a tour guide?”
“Yeah, I know, it was dumb. But it was hilarious the way she told it. She tried on an old dress that was on top of the bed, and she sat at Louisa May Alcott’s desk, and she went through all the books in the bookcase and drew pictures of Charlie Brown and Snoopy in them. She could draw all the Peanuts characters perfectly. She showed me. And she took a ceramic owl off a shelf as a keepsake. I think Louisa May Alcott collected owls.”
“Sounds like she was stringing you along,” Julia said.
“She showed me the owl.” Carmen laughed. “Yeah, I know, she could’ve been totally making it all up. Maybe the owl came from Walmart. But I think she really did it. That girl was crazy. She took a picture on her phone of herself sitting at the desk wearing the dress. She showed me that, too, but it was kind of dark and blurry.”
Julia said, “A place like that would have some kind of security system.”
Carmen shrugged. “But she didn’t break in, see, so why would an alarm go off? In the morning she just hid under the bed again and waited for the tours to start so she could crawl out and blend in with them. She said it was a different guide that day. He was nicer and talked slower.”
Julia rocked back and forth ever so slightly in her wicker chair, studying Carmen for any small sign that she might be teasing.
Carmen shot her a wide-eyed, innocent smile and took another sip of her coffee before bending over the crossword puzzle again.
“Then there’s always the possibility,” Julia said, “that you never met anybody named Fawna on a train. Maybe this is just another one of your stories.”
/>
“I still think about her,” Carmen said without looking up. “Lots of times I stop and say, ‘I wonder where Fawna is now and what she’s doing?’” She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment. “Oh, I know this one. It’s easy. Five letters, starting with A. ‘Tree kin to birch.’ A-s-p-e-n, aspen.” She looked up and smiled. “That’s the name of a ski resort in Colorado, too, did you know that?”
• • •
JULIA got up and went inside. She returned the book of essays to the shelf in the living room and came back to the porch door. “How about going somewhere for a quick lunch?” she said. “You drive, and then we can run by the post office and library.”
Carmen put the newspaper and pencil aside. “Okay, but my treat this time. Dr. Boyer paid me yesterday.” She stood up and stretched. “I’ve been to Mark Twain’s house. Did I ever tell you that? I didn’t sneak in, though. I paid. Did you know Mark Twain’s bed was switched around backward? He slept with his head up against the footboard and his feet down by the headboard. Said he wasn’t going to spend all that money on a fancy carved headboard unless he could look at it while he was in bed.” She laughed. “Funny guy, Mark Twain.” Then, abruptly serious, she added, “Too bad he was such . . . an infidel.”
Julia went to get her purse. When she returned, Carmen was stooped in front of the plant stand by the screen door, singing to one of the African violets, the one that was supposed to have frilly fuchsia flowers, though it hadn’t yet bloomed. They had recently heard a story on NPR about a former opera singer who experimented with her prizewinning houseplants by singing to them in different languages. She claimed that singing in French produced the largest blooms. Carmen had been fascinated by the story.
To See the Moon Again Page 12
