The Sisters Montclair

by Cathy Holton

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Stop interrogating her, Adeline. I don’t come to your house and interrogate the help.”

  The help. Stella blushed again and followed Janice into the kitchen. The whole time she stood listening to Janice give instructions on how to make meals, Stella was thinking, I won’t be back.

  But later, as she was leaving, walking past the library door, Alice called to her, “Are you coming back tomorrow?”

  Something hopeful and hesitant in her voice made Stella stop. She raised her chin and stared boldly at Adeline, and then at Alice, giving her a tight little smile.

  “Of course I’ll be back,” she said, lifting one hand carelessly, and turning, she walked out.

  They watched her through the library windows climb into her small rusty car and drive away. The January sky was darkening, pressing down on the roofs of the houses across the street.

  Adeline said, “She has a tattoo.”

  “It’s the Sanskrit symbol for peace.”

  “The what?”

  “The tattoo. It’s Sanskrit.”

  “She has a ring through her lip.”

  “They all do these days.”

  “Only the bad ones. Did you hide the silver?”

  “I like her,” Alice said. “I think I’ll keep her.”

  All the way back to Josh’s apartment Stella rehearsed in her head what she would say to Charlotte. She would tell her another job had come up. She would tell her her school schedule had changed. But then, in the middle of imagining what excuses she would use to not take the job, Stella remembered her promise to Alice. She remembered Adeline’s expression of open dislike and she felt a tremor of resentment. All her life, people had been looking at her the way Adeline had looked at her.

  As if being poor was a crime.

  It was one of the reasons why, despite the odds, she’d gotten her GED. It was one of the reasons she’d enrolled in college. To make something of herself, to rise above poverty and hardship through her own merits, without any help from anyone. To use education to get what so many people around her seemed to take for granted; a good job, a roof over her head, food on the table.

  A life of her own.

  Josh was sitting on the sofa playing Halo when she got home. The apartment was a townhouse, with a living room and dining room in front and a kitchen in back, and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. The downstairs was crowded with several sofas and easy chairs that Josh had picked up from neighbors who were moving out. He was a packrat, but he paid the rent on time and kept food on the table, which was more than her previous boyfriends had been able to do. The sex wasn’t great, but it was good enough.

  “Did you get the job?” he said, without looking up.

  “Have you ever seen that movie, Driving Miss Daisy?”

  “Yeah.” He frowned. “I mean, I think so.”

  “Okay. Well, I’d be the Morgan Freeman character.”

  He chuckled but she could see that he had no idea what she was talking about. He kept his attention fixed on the screen.

  “Why aren’t you at work?”

  He glanced at her and then back at the TV. “I stayed out late last night and didn’t feel like going in. I called in sick.”

  “Nice.”

  “You can do that when you’ve been gainfully employed for awhile.”

  She refused to let him rattle her. She said benignly, “One of the perks of full-time employment, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You should try it.”

  She went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, pulling out a beer. She stood for a moment at the kitchen window, staring out at the hard-packed dirt yard and the roofs of dilapidated houses and the distant ridge tops, dark against the winter sky. This part of Chattanooga was hilly and well-settled, with small shotgun-style cottages perched on the sides of steep ravines, and here and there, a rambling old Victorian cut up into small apartments. After a few minutes she went back into the front room and slumped down in one of the overstuffed chairs facing the TV.

  “Did you pick up some more beer?” he said, without looking up from his game.

  “No, I forgot.”

  “You can run out later.”

  She hadn’t forgotten. She didn’t have the money for beer. She didn’t have the money for anything. She owed him two months’ rent, which of course, was what he was pissed about.

  “So when do you start?”

  “If I took the job, I’d start tomorrow.”

  He glanced at her and then back at the TV. “What do you mean, if you took it? You have any other job offers recently?”

  Asshole. He knew she’d been looking, had been trying since Christmas to find a part-time job to supplement her meager work study earnings. Still, it couldn’t be easy for him either, having to support her. He worked as a computer tech for a local insurance company and although the money was good, it wasn’t good enough to support two.

  She felt a mind-numbing weariness come over her. She stared moodily at the screen, remembering Alice’s statement to her sister. I don’t come over to your house and interrogate the help. The help. That’s what she would be; a servant at the beck and call of a rich old lady with a little silver bell. How humiliating would that be? Still, compared to everything else she’d faced, was facing now, what difference did it make?

  “I’ll probably take the job until I can find something else,” she said.

  “Good girl,” he said. “What’s it pay?”

  She told him. He shrugged, not looking at her. “Not too bad. That should buy a few groceries.” He seemed in a better mood now that he knew she’d have some money coming in.

  She put her head back and closed her eyes. In the apartment next door, a child began to wail.

  “Speaking of groceries,” he said. “What’s for supper?”

  I don’t know, fucker, what’s for supper?

  That’s what she wanted to say. She spent a lot of time fantasizing about saying things like that to him. But reality kept her mute. She was tired of sleeping on the flea-infested sofas of people she barely knew.

  She got up and, without another word, went into the kitchen to see what she could make.

  Alice was already dressed and sitting up in bed when Stella arrived the following morning. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn yesterday and she had a crossword puzzle book open on her lap.

  “Good morning, Alice.”

  Alice looked up. “Oh, hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Stella. The new girl.” The room was large and sunny and filled with twin beds and assorted pieces of French Provincial furniture. Through a door to her left, Stella could see a small bathroom.

  “Oh, you’re the new girl. I don’t know anything. I just do what they tell me.”

  “Okay. I’m going to clock in now.”

  “You better clock in,” Alice said. “What’s her name just left.”

  The night caregiver, a young woman named Elaine, was waiting for Stella in the kitchen. She rolled her eyes and said, “We’re having a difficult day today.”

  “Oh?” Stella said.

  The girl looked like she might cry. Her hair was long and dark and she wore it in a thick braid down her back. “Well, to start with, she wouldn’t change her clothes. She has a bad habit of wearing the same thing over and over again. I try to explain to her about germs but she won’t listen to me.”

  Stella thought, What’s the big deal? The old woman had been around for ninety-four years and if germs hadn’t killed her by now, they probably wouldn’t.

  “Promise me you’ll try to get her to pick out something clean to wear,” Elaine said, giving her a dark, reproachful look. “You’ll have to lay her clothes out when you get her ready for bed. See if she’ll let you pick something clean.”

  “Sure,” Stella said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  After Elaine left, she walked through the sunny rooms of the spacious house, marveling at their size and cleanlin
ess, the perfect order, the dark mahogany furniture and oriental carpets, the smell of lemon wax and leather. Books and flowers and silver-framed photographs filled every room. Everywhere there were crystal bowls and silver trays inscribed with thanks from Alice’s various charities; Big Brothers Big Sisters, The Salvation Army, the Little Theater. In the valley below, the city of Chattanooga sprawled along the banks of the Tennessee. Stella went into the library and helped herself to Billy Bathgate and a biography of Jackie Kennedy, taking both into the glass-walled sunroom to read. There was a baby monitor on the table and she could hear Alice turning the pages of her book, whispering under her breath the words she was trying to find in the crosswords.

  A few minutes later the bell rang and Stella walked to the other side of the house. Alice was sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I’d like to go to the bathroom, please,” she said and Stella hurried over with the walker. She had been told to keep the walker on the other side of the room so Alice couldn’t get up without assistance. It seemed a dirty trick to play on an obviously independent woman, to put her walking aid where she couldn’t reach it. But so did hovering outside the opened bathroom door and waiting for Alice to relieve herself. Whatever you do, don’t let her go in there alone and close the door, Janice had said. But don’t let her think you’re spying on her either. We try to give her as much privacy as we can.

  Alice went to the sink afterwards and washed her hands. Then she hobbled out, sliding the walker in front of her. Stella went into the bathroom as discreetly as she could and flushed the toilet and turned off the light. She picked up a wet bath cloth from the edge of the tub, and emptied the clothes hamper of a towel and pair of white cotton panties. Janice had told her to take the laundry down to the basement first thing every morning.

  She walked down the steep basement stairs holding the clothes in front of her. The basement was cool and dark and smelled of mold. She followed a narrow corridor that opened on one side to a small low-ceilinged bedroom with twin beds and, further on, a half bath. Servant’s quarters, Stella guessed. Not the kind of place where you’d stash family members although it was certainly nicer than some places Stella had slept. Further on down the corridor to the left, was the laundry room.

  A gray, slanting light filled the room, falling from high dusty windows. Beneath the windows, a laundry rack stood covered in hanging towels and bath cloths. On the adjacent wall, a washer and dryer crowded beneath a pair of cupboards, and beside them stood an old galvanized soaking tub. In the bottom of the tub was a shallow plastic pan filled with soaking panties. Stella dropped Alice’s underwear here and sprayed them lightly with presoak. She hung Alice’s towel and bath cloth on the rack. The room was dark and strange-smelling. This part of the house, low-ceilinged and cramped, was different from the rest. There was a feeling here of lives lived in quiet desperation, of secrets kept, and old sorrows unaired. Standing there Stella was overcome by a sense of despair, a sudden desire to flee not only the basement, but also the house.

  She shivered and stepped back, and turning, hurried along the corridor and up the steep steps to the kitchen, fighting an overwhelming urge, the whole time, to turn and look behind her.

  Alice was to exercise twice a day, taking five laps around the house which, owing to the size of the rooms, was a good distance. On that first morning, she rang the bell around nine-thirty and Stella hurried back to the bedroom.

  “Are you ready to exercise?” Alice asked, rising unsteadily to her feet.

  “Sure,” Stella said, positioning the walker so she could reach it.

  Alice pushed the walker in front of her, the wheels complaining softly. Someone had stuck tennis balls on the back legs of the walker to make it easier to push along the darkly polished floors. Stella walked just to the side and slightly behind her, trying to make sure the walker didn’t catch on any of the oriental rugs. While she walked, Alice complained about Elaine, the night caregiver. “She’s terrified of germs,” Alice said. “Oh, Alice, you can’t wear that,” Alice mimicked in a high falsetto voice. “That dress is crawling with germs.”

  Stella wasn’t sure whether to laugh or comment, so she stayed quiet. As soon as she could, she changed the subject. “Do you like exercising?” she asked Alice.

  “I guess so. I don’t mind too much. These are the exercises they wanted me to do at Cantor,” Alice said. “I told the doctor I could do them just as well at home.”

  “How long ago were you at Cantor Hospital?”

  “How old am I?”

  “Ninety-four. I think.”

  “Okay, then. Four years ago. Sometimes I forget things. The doctor wanted me to wear one of those patches that make you remember all the time but I told him, if I can’t remember something I’ll just call my friend Weesie or my sister Adeline. Between the three of us, we have a pretty good memory.”

  Stella laughed.

  “I lived by myself until I was ninety.”

  “Really?” Stella said. “That’s awesome.”

  “Ninety years old and I’d never fallen a day in my life, and I’m walking out of a restaurant with my grandsons and I just fell over. Just fell over backwards and hit my head on the pavement. Can you believe that? Anyway, when I woke up I was at Cantor Hospital on the wing where they put the stroke victims. And they slapped this patch on my arm and it made me sick as a dog. I haven’t thrown up since I was eight years old and all of a sudden, I’ve got the dry heaves.

  When the doctor comes in, I say, ‘Doctor, why have you put this patch on my arm?’

  And he says, ‘Why, Miss Alice, that’s to keep you from losing your mind.’

  And I say, ‘Well, I’ve already lost my mind. And it makes me so sick I can’t stand up. I will not wear it.’

  And he says, ‘Now, Miss Alice, I’m the doctor and you must do as I say.’

  I say, ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘Well, as soon as you go to the bathroom on your own, I’ll release you. But not until then.’

  ‘I will not go to the bathroom here. I have a perfectly good bathroom back at my home.’” (She stopped walking and looked at Stella, shaking her head at the unfairness of this memory.) “They wanted me to use a bathroom women and men had used.” She shook her head fiercely, her cheeks pink with indignation. “Well?” she said. “Would you use a bathroom strange men had used?”

  Stella couldn’t bring herself to tell Alice about some of the bathrooms she had used. Alice had no understanding of the desperate ways some people lived. That much was apparent.

  ‘The doctor says, I won’t release you until you’ve used the bathroom on your own. And it says here on your chart that you’re refusing to do your exercises.’

  ‘I can do my exercises at home.’

  ‘The therapist says you’re having trouble with that hip. You know we can replace that hip if it’s bothering you.’

  ‘Doctor, I came in to this world with all my original parts and I plan on going out with all my original parts.’

  ‘Well I can’t release you until you go to the bathroom and do your exercises.’

  ‘They tell me you got your medical degree from Alabama.’

  ‘That’s right. The University of Alabama.’

  ‘Isn’t that where they train doctors by letting them practice on animals?’

  He never batted an eye. ‘That’s so we’ll know how to deal with crotchety old patients who won’t do as they’re told.’”

  Alice looked sideways at Stella. A crooked grin spread slowly across her face.

  “I knew then I was going to like him,” she said.

  After they’d finished walking, they did Alice’s calisthenic exercises in her bedroom. Her “Slide and Glides,” she called them. She stood in the bathroom doorway, holding onto the frame, and slid one foot out ten times, followed by the other foot. Stella did the same, standing in the bedroom doorway. When they had finished, Alice sat down on the edge of her bed and stood up again, ten times.

  “What do you call this
?” Stella said, mimicking her with a series of squats.

  “Jump ups,” Alice said.

  She was breathless. When she finished the jump ups she sat for a moment on the edge of the bed, catching her breath and rolling her head slowly on her neck. “Whew-ee,” she said. “I’m worn out.”

  Stella helped her put her sweater back on and then got her situated in bed with her crossword puzzle book opened on her lap. Heading back to the kitchen, Stella paused in the doorway, looking at Alice curiously.

  “So who won? You or the doctor?”

  “What?” Alice said.

  “At Cantor Hospital. Who won, you or the doctor?”

  Alice gave her a sly look. Her eyes were blue and cloudy as seawater. “Who do you think?” she said. “When my son, Sawyer, came to visit I told him about my conversation with the doctor and how he said I couldn’t leave.”

  ‘Pack your bag, Al,’ Sawyer said. ‘We’re breaking you out of here.’”

  The day followed a strict, invariable routine. After exercise, around 10:30, came snack, a diet coke in a bottle and a packet of Ritz crackers with cheese, carefully cut open along the side, both served on a white paper napkin. Alice preferred to spend her mornings in her room, sitting up in one of the twin beds with her crossword puzzle books spread out around her. Between the beds stood a small nightstand holding a lamp, a clock, her snack, and a little red Salvation Army bell that she rang whenever she needed Stella.

  Lunch was at 12:30 and was basically deli or convenience food heated up and served at a carefully set table in the kitchen. The table was actually a desk facing a wall of built-in glass shelves filled with photographs and collectibles and a few tarnished golf trophies. Alice preferred chicken and turkey to beef and fish, and along with this, two vegetables, a fresh fruit cup, cider or lemonade, followed by a scoop of ice cream. Alice’s appetite was hearty but she preferred small portions, and Stella, looking at Alice’s binder and realizing that a lot of the caregivers gave her the same thing every day, tried to spice up lunch by including a few fresh herbs and tomatoes, a variety of canned vegetables.

  “Oh, how pretty it looks,” Alice said, looking down at the plate Stella had made and waiting for Stella to pull the chair out so she could sit down. Stella felt her face flush with pleasure. She had brought a peanut butter sandwich for lunch, and had set a place beside Alice’s, and after Alice said a quick prayer, she picked up her sandwich and began to eat.