Room Upstairs

by Monica Dickens

  ‘They didn’t start the road for a long time after that. Mother used to pull up the stakes, and they’d come and knock some more in. I wasn’t here when the twin oaks came down. I asked her. I wanted her to tell me there had been a scream or a thunderclap or something. I always was the morbid one.’ She giggled, glancing at Jess. ‘She said nothing. She’s never got over the road, you know. She wouldn’t talk about it. But I’ve often thought,’ Mary said, taking a little girlish skip as if she were out on the playground with the kindergarten class, ‘that somebody should go out and check some night, because why couldn’t you have a ghost of a tree?’

  ‘At the new moon?’

  Mary looked to see if Jess was laughing at her. ‘You should go down … I’m sorry. Have I scared you, honey? I didn’t mean to.’

  Jess had shivered, but there was sweat on her forehead. ‘I felt a bit odd. It’s nothing.’ She felt as if her outlines were blurred, her neck swelling, her legs insubstantial.

  Dorothy was outside, spraying the rose bushes she had planted at the side of the house where she had resurrected part of the old flower garden. ‘What took you so long?’ she asked. ‘I’ve left you the table to lay, and the salad.’

  In the kitchen, Sybil was feeding the cats. The bird was in his cage, casting seed wildly down at the crouched black and white and ginger backs.

  ‘What took you so long?’ she echoed, as if she and Dorothy had been discussing Jess together.

  ‘Aunt Mary was telling me about when they started the road.’

  ‘I’ll never forget the day,’ Sybil licked the cat-food spoon absentmindedly and threw it into the sink with a grimace, ‘when I looked out of the window and saw those men. Will you ever forget the day, Mary?’

  ‘No, Mother. I will never forget the day.’

  Sybil cocked her grey head to listen, as she always did when she spoke or thought of the road. ‘Listen to those maniacs. One day they’ll push each other right on off the end of Cape Cod into the sea.’

  ‘But if it hadn’t been for the road,’ Dorothy gave &e impression she had stopped in the back hall to listen before she came in, ‘I new would have come here, would I?’

  ‘That’s right, Dot.’ Sybil gave her an extra wide smile. ‘That was my lucky day, wasn’t it, girls?’

  ‘It surely was,’ and ‘Yes, Gramma, it was,’ Mary and Jess said dutifully, and Dorothy was able to run the taps, having heard her due tribute.

  But it was our lucky day too, Jess thought, for she might have had to live with us, the old lady, and God knows the beginning of marriage is tricky enough without that. However much you are in love. Especially if you are that much in love. You expect too much. You expect it will be the same among other people as when you’re alone. It’s not. We’re all right at the flat. It’s only when we come here that we begin to hurt each other.

  When she was alone in the dining room, setting out the silver in the English pattern that irritated Dorothy, a curious thing happened to her.

  In her head, she heard quite clearly three voices. They were in the middle of a random argument about a film she could neither recognize nor remember. She was all wrong in that part. She was lovely, I never knew she could sing like that. It was dubbed, stupid. It wasn’t. It was the crummiest film I ever saw.

  The voices wore all English. She listened to them detachedly, automatically walking round the table, laying down knives and forks, and realized that they were all her own.

  I told you it wouldn’t work. You didn’t. I did, I said leave it alone. It’s ruined. There was nothing wrong with it before.

  They were discussing a dress she had ripped apart when she was still at school.

  I never liked it anyway. That voice went through her head and sounded on the outside, but Sybil walked through the room without looking at her, as if she had not spoken.

  Perhaps I am going mad, Jess thought, but when Montgomery came, he said: ‘I think you’ve got flu, Jess.’ Don’t be so professional.’

  But he insisted. ‘Go on to bal. I’ll come up and take your temperature.’

  The voices were gone, but when she was in bed, small dynamos rotated in her head after she laid it on the pillow.

  ‘What time is it?’ The room was dark.

  ‘Quite late. I came up, but you wore asleep, so we had dinner.’ Mont switched on the light. She thought that Laurie would have come too.

  ‘The wind’s getting up, and Dorothy heard a storm warning on the radio. He and that sterile young man have gone to check the boat.’

  ‘I hope it sinks,’ Jess said bitterly.

  ‘That’s the spirit.’ He put the thermometer in her mouth, and stood looking down at her in such a way that she closed her eyes.

  When she opened them, he was still looking at her, his angular face softened, the low ceiling almost brushing his untidy mouse-coloured hair.

  Feverish, miserable, wanting Laurie, Jess thought in a panic: I have got to find a woman for him.

  Eight

  ‘In confidence,’ Dorothy said, ‘I think the old gentleman rather fancies me.’

  ‘Tell you what, Syb,’ Ted said. ‘I think she’s taken a shine tome.’

  ‘I knew a woman once,’ Dorothy said, ‘married very late in life. Something funny with her insides. They thought she’d been through the menopause, but she had a baby at sixty. How do you explain that, Dr Jones?’

  ‘Charming woman, Laurie, very charming. Your grandmother is smarter than I thought, finding her.’ Uncle Ted had brushed what was left of his hair carefully across the freckled top of his head, and had brought down his old quahogging sneakers to be cleaned.

  ‘Why hurry away?’ Dorothy asked him on Monday. ‘We can put you up for as long as you like.’

  We can put you up - in his own family house! ‘What’s she up to?’ Laurie asked Sybil. ‘Had one of us better tell her he hasn’t a cent!’

  ‘How can you be so unkind? Not everybody is as mercenary as you.’

  ‘Jess didn’t have anything. I had to pay her fare over to marry me.’

  ‘I didn’t mean her. But you’ll be glad of my little nest egg, won’t you?’

  ‘Don’t talk like that!’ He took her by the shoulders and held her stiff and glared at her. ‘You’ve never talked like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He let go of her, and she slumped. ‘I’m tired, I guess. I don’t know what’s gotten into me.’

  ‘And don’t say gotten,’ he grumbled at her. ‘Don’t revert.’

  ‘Don’t bully her, darling,’ Jess said. ‘It’s been a tough weekend.’

  ‘She loves to have the house full.’

  They talked back and forth across her as if she were not there, as people had been doing increasingly, with the years.

  ‘But so many of us. And that crowd coming in yesterday. And Mary getting her dizzy fit.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be sick yourself. Mont said—’

  ‘I’m all right. Mont isn’t God.’

  ‘Children, children.’ Sybil tapped the rubber of her cane feebly on the floor. She was indeed tired, and though Dorothy had been a marvel, coping, her very energy had sapped what little Sybil still had.

  ‘We are not children.’ His eyes were ice blue. ‘We are husband and wife, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Don’t talk to her like that!’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said to Jess. ‘Whose grandmother is it?’

  *

  Nevertheless, when somebody - Mary or Ted - raised the idea of taking Sybil to see her stepsister May, who was ninety, it was Jess who had to drive her there.

  Laurie was too busy. There was a big property case coming to court. He could not even spare a Saturday, because he had so much work to take home. It was true. But it was also tritely, music-hall true that you married your husband’s family.

  ‘I’ve half a mind to stay after all and come with you.’ Uncle Ted said. ‘Haven’t seen old May for years. She and I used to hate each other’s guts.’

  ‘Why don’t
you?’ Dorothy tried once more, but Ted had taken a scare after the bird called out: ‘Good morning, Teddy!’ in Dorothy’s voice, and one of the old men at his club had shed at the weekend, and he did not want to miss the funeral. He enjoyed funerals and the obituary notices of his contemporaries. ‘Another one gone, heh, heh!’

  ‘I wish I could,’ Mary said. ‘I’ve always had a fondness for Aunt May. I was called after her. But who’s to get Uncle ged back to New York? I couldn’t drive Mother, in any case, useless creature that I am.’

  ‘Grandpa paid for twenty driving lessons for her once,’ Laurie said, ‘and after the eighth, the man called him and said he was refunding the balance of the money, for the sake of his daughter and the rest of humanity. “Where is she now?” asks Grandpa. “I don’t know.” “Where are you?” “Back at the garage. I jumped out when she slowed for a corner and ran for my life.’”

  ‘How do you know?’ Mary gave Laurie her owl stare.

  ‘I was listening on the other phone.’

  ‘Yes … yes …’ Sybil began to nod her head vigorously, her teeth a little loose. ‘I remember. I remember that. Yes, ha, ha - oh, very good.’ She went off into cackles of laughter, and Mary said: ‘Silly old me,’ and smiled, but not convincingly.

  From what Laurie had told her of his grandmother, Jess knew about her understanding, her spirit, what excitement and fun they had enjoyed together when he was growing up. Where were the sweet sage old lashes of fiction? Being eighty seemed to bring out all the mean, childish things. Like gin.

  ‘I’ll be glad to take Sybil,’ Dorothy had said, but Sybil pulled Jess into the corner of another room and whispered: ‘Get me out of it. But don’t tell her I said so.’

  ‘She wouldn’t mind. She knows no one will drive with her.’

  ‘She might be angry.’

  Are you afraid of her? Jess wanted to ask, but the whole affair was making her head ache and her legs buckle. She knew that it would have to be her, but all she wanted now was to get back to she apartment and back to bed and make no plans for anybody.

  When she had recovered and was back at the office, she drove down to Camden House early on Saturday, and the three of them set off in the smothering heat to see Aunt May, who was in a nursing home at the other side of the State where her son had heartlessly ‘put her away’, said Sybil, although the son had an invalid wife and five children of his own, one of them a spastic.

  Sybil was rather feeble today. She sat at the back, because she said she wanted to doze, but it might have been because Dorothy wanted to sit at the front and watch Jess’s speedometer.

  She had told Sybil to put on her newest dress and her churchgoing hat, but Sybil had come downstairs, too late to go back and change, in a time-honoured cotton, starched and respectable, like a nice clean old customer in the geriatrics’ ward.

  Dorothy was very elegant. She wore her blistering pink suit with a straining white blouse which made her look more than ever as if she had stuffed a pillow in her front. Her small feet were puffed over smaller high-heeled shoes, giving her a teetering, topheavy appearance. She had see-thru nylon gloves and a nasturtium hat.

  She looked her best in the garden, her lurid lipstick forgotten, in an old smock and flat shoes.

  It was a three hour journey. Jess drove in silence, spinning idly through the thread of her memories, and pondering the turns of fate that had joined her to a man for ever, in a strange land, driving two nutty old lashes along the Massachusetts Turnpike to see another who would be even nuttier.

  She thought about her ‘past’, which was short but precious. The few years after school, whose fumbling encounters and tortured disappointments grew more romantic in the memory, more bitter-sweet. If she had not met Laurie, she might have drifted into Steve, who would stay in the Town Clerk’s office for years, until he ended up as Town Clerk, and Jess would have had a house like her parents and soon a figure like her mother, and a car full of kids with shiny red cheeks and whining accents they picked up at school, as she had.

  Goodbye to all that. She had started life again, burst through the amnion of mediocrity. The British pretended that background didn’t matter any more, but it did, oh God, it still did. Here, where no one honestly cared who your parents were, she was accepted for whatever she made of herself, admired for being English.

  Your delightful British accent, people said. But she felt herself talking more like Laurie. Thinking more like him. They sometimes started to say the same thing at the same time, and marvelled, for that did not happen to people until they had been married for years.

  She thought about Laurie, and seeing him for the first time with that forehead too broad for the rest of his face, and the bright unused blue of his eyes, talking too much and too fast, gesticulating, making a lot of spit, as he still did when he got going, sucking it back on a pause for breath. Luxuriously, she went yet once more through the saga of their London days, unreeling it inch by inch, like a film savoured over and over again. But before she got to the first very interesting scene, Dorothy had finished her newspaper, and that was it for thoughts.

  ‘Excuse me for being such poor company,’ she said, folding the paper into a square and casting it out of the window, for she did not believe in the fifty-dollar fine any more than she believed in the rules of the road. She stubbed out another cigarette into the stinking ashtray, and while Sybil snored gently in the back, regaled Jess with horror stories of the slave labour camp at the department store which she had favoured with her services for so many years. Why had she stayed so long if it really was that bad?

  ‘No one would ask that who lived through the depression. When you’ve known what it’s like to be out of a job - once is enough, thanks very much.’

  They pulled off the highway for lunch, and woke Sybil, mumbling on her teeth, and Dorothy drew out the metal liner of the ashtray, and emptied the heap of cigarette ends outside the door of the car parked next to them.

  After lunch, Sybil seemed brighter, though still vague. There were days when she should have been left alone to be an old lady with nothing expected of her, but Dorothy would not allow her to age before her eyes, as Sybil did sometimes, when she wasn’t trying.

  She gave her a grilling about her stepsister, sharpening up her memory and nudging and jollying her along so successfully that Sybil began to remember things she thought she had forgotten, and even, by the time they left the Turnpike at the town where May was ‘put away’, to look forward to the visit with some gusto.

  ‘May was the pretty one. Always so bright and pretty. And clothes! They were her religion, Marma used to say. I remember a dress she hard. She was going to a picnic, that was it. They were all crazy about bird watching then, and they’d go off on nature walks with this gentleman who could do bird calls. Pink, it was, with a big lace collar like a place mat, and her waist nothing. Her beau was waiting in the hall, looking up the stairs for her, and she ran down, just as light and beautiful, and I saw him kiss her, and then she saw me and said: “What are you gawping at, kid?” but she didn’t bawl me out like she usually did.’

  ‘Why not?’ Dorothy prompted, to keep her alert.

  ‘Because of the boy. She wanted to be cute. She could act anything the wanted to be. Oh, she was a barrel of fun, May was. I could tell you some tales.’

  ‘Do tell.’ Dorothy was caking her nose and cheeks with ivory solid powder, through which the veins would soon show mauve.

  ‘Oh … I forget She’ll tell you. It will be good to see her again.’

  At the nursing home, there had been some misunderstanding about the time. May was being given a bath and would not be ready to receive for half an hour.

  Jess went for a walk down the uninteresting road of shabby white clapboard houses with signs which said Optometrist and Podiatrist and Guests. The owner of the nursing home had a fine rose garden and Dorothy went with her to look at the roses, squatting over the labels and repeating the names know-ledgeably, as if she had them all at home.

&n
bsp; Sybil went to sleep in the car. When they woke her, she was vague again. ‘Go in where?’

  ‘To see Aunt May, Gramma.’

  ‘Oh yes - dear May.’

  On the ground floor of the nursing home, rooms opened off a square central hall, where a cocoon of old lady with bandage bows in her hair, and an old man smoking furiously, too close to his moustache, sat before a television screen shot with glaring zigzags.

  Dorothy went to adjust the knobs.

  ‘They don’t like you to touch it,’ growled the old man, and Dorothy drew back her hand and said: ‘Pardon me.’

  As they went across the hall, slowly because of Sybil, figures watched them hopelessly from the open rooms. A tiny old lady like a chimpanzee in a gay girlish wrapper stood just in the doorway as if she had been forbidden to come out, putting a slippered toe tentatively on the No Man’s Land of the hall tiles. Sybil smiled at her and nodded, and Dorothy said: ‘And how are you today?’ like the First Lady at Veteran’s Hospital.

  Upstairs, in a room which had two beds in it and a smell of faeces, Aunt May lay frail in bed, with rails up, although the outline of her body under the tidy covers looked too insubstantial to move, even as far as the edge.

  ‘Here’s your sister!’ said the nurse loudly.

  Dorothy pulled Sybil forward, holding her arm, and Jess hung back, smiling awkwardly at the second woman who was sitting beside the other bed, but getting no response, and then trying not to look, as she became aware that she was sitting on a commode.

  ‘I asked you, Elsie,’ the nurse said cheerfully, and drew the curtain clattering across the rail that divided the room.

  Aunt May lay flat as paper, and smiled up at Sybil with her gums, and Sybil leaned on her cane by the bed, breathing heavily, and looked down at her.

  ‘Well, who’s this?’ asked the nurse, who was big and kind and slate-coloured. ‘It’s your sister, see?’

  ‘Of course it’s my sister,’ Aunt May said, with a tiny spark of mettle, like a cigarette lighter in need of a new flint. ‘It’s my sister Sybil. You look wonderful, Syb. I’m glad to see you.’