The Walking People

by Mary Beth Keane

  On June 29, the evening before moving day, Greta walked into the living room, where Michael was on the couch watching All in the Family, Eavan and James on the floor in front of the couch, begging him to change the channel.

  "No way I'm turning on that oven in this heat," Greta said. "I'm getting a pizza." At the news, James pumped his little fist in the air and Eavan clapped her hands together. "I need Windex as well. Anyone need anything?"

  Michael shook his head. "Need help?" he asked out of habit, and then shook his head as he remembered.

  James and Eavan looked at each other. "Ice cream?" Eavan ventured.

  "Yes," Greta said. "I think we can do ice cream on our last night ever living on Eighty-fourth Street." James and Eavan turned back to the television and were very still, as if afraid one false move might disrupt their streak of good fortune.

  "Julia?" Greta called toward the kitchen, where Julia was on the phone with her friend, saying how easy it was to get from Manhattan to Recess, how often the buses went back and forth, how it wouldn't feel like she'd left the city at all, how she could still do a birthday party if she wanted to, maybe in the country, on her new deck, why not give her friends a chance to get out of the city for a day. The girls could bring bathing suits and lie out on the grass.

  "Yeah?" Julia answered, covering the mouthpiece of the phone with her hand.

  "You want anything from the store while I'm out?"

  Julia shook her head. "You want me to go?"

  "No, I'll go. I need the walk. The house will be clean, I hope, when we get there. Do you think? No one said anything about that at the closing. Or if they did, I don't remember. They looked like decent people when we met them. They looked like clean, decent people."

  "We can always buy what we need when we get there, can't we?" Julia pointed out. "Worse comes to worst, we'll just clean it ourselves."

  "That's true," Greta said. "Yes, that's good. Wait and see."

  Julia finished her call right after Greta left, and she sat in the kitchen listening to Archie Bunker yell for Edith from the other side of the door. Her clothes had all fit in one large black plastic bag, the same type of bag Michael had used for the building's garbage cans before his duties had been passed over to the new management. In another large garbage bag were her makeup bag, her hair dryer, hot rollers, hairbrushes, and random pairs of shoes that had not fit in the box with Eavan's. In her backpack, which she would keep with her in her father's car, which she was in charge of driving, she had a few of the books she hadn't returned to the university bookstore, her wallet, the hand-carved wooden box an ex-boyfriend had brought home for her from New Mexico, and a framed photo of herself holding James on the day he was born, his face wrinkled under the cotton blue cap, Eavan beside her on tiptoes, peering up to see the bundle in her big sister's arms.

  Greta had reserved a truck for eight A.M., and Ned Powers was supposed to arrive at the apartment by seven-thirty for tea and bagels. Julia looked up at the wall where the clock had been for so long and then at the watch on her wrist. It was already past six, an hour later than they usually ate dinner. All day she'd been waiting for the fact of leaving the city to hit her. She waited for the tears, even stared at herself in the small bathroom mirror and instructed herself, once again, on what was happening. Sitting in the kitchen, she tried it again. They're going to knock down the walls of your home, she thought sternly, as if reprimanding herself for something. Someone else is going to pee in your toilet, look out your window.

  She left the kitchen and passed through the living room, where Eavan and James had climbed up on the couch and tucked in by Michael's feet. All three were staring at the flickering TV screen in perfect contentment, smiling at Dingbat, smiling at Meathead, smiling at Lionel Jefferson, who'd just come to the door. She passed James's room, his clothes for tomorrow already laid out on his bed, and headed down to her parents' room, which was still, with just a few hours to go, littered with odds and ends: new linens in their plastic cases, new undershirts for Michael, socks without mates, underwear, hangers, old cooking magazines stuffed under the bed long ago and recently rediscovered, presents received for various occasions too dear to ever be displayed. Julia picked up one of the smaller boxes and opened it to find a sterling silver baby spoon.

  "She's hopeless," Julia said, sighing. There was probably a name for this thing her mother had, this impulse to collect and collect but never let anything go. Without deciding to do so, after a few minutes Julia found herself sorting what was on the floor, making neat piles, shoving anything that looked like something her mother would never miss into an empty grocery bag hanging from the knob of the door. She took the last unused box from the hall and taped the bottom. Then she filled it with anything that would fit. Finally, when most of the floor was clear, Julia noticed at the back of her mother's closet the red tin cookie box. She picked it up and, moving over to the edge of the bed, held it in her lap.

  Once, when Julia was a senior in high school, Greta had forbidden her to go out with a boy she'd met in a pool hall on Seventy-ninth. They'd fought about it, Julia telling Greta she was going to a movie or shopping or over to the park to meet a girlfriend, Greta finding out about it each and every time, saying to Julia "You're grounded," though they both knew she had only a vague idea of what that meant. Greta disconnected the phone; Julia used a pay phone. Greta walked with Julia to and from school; Julia made up after-school activities and forged her teachers' names. "He's a bad one," was all Greta could say. "I can see it in his face." Back then, that was reason enough to go out with him, or at least to be seen going out with him. Four years later Julia knew what her mother meant. He was mean then, and he was still mean, what little Julia had heard about him. Once, as he was kissing her, he put his thumb against her throat and pushed, stopping Julia's breath in her lungs and trapping it there. Julia coughed; he pushed harder. Julia slapped his hand away, and he laughed. "You're an asshole," she said as she walked out, and he laughed her all the way out the door.

  Maybe here, Julia thought, looking at the box on her lap, is the answer to how her mother knew he was bad with one glance. There couldn't be too many secrets. She already knew that her mother had had her at sixteen. There would be no references to smoking up, dropping acid, all the things she should have been doing when she was new to America in the 1960s. Her mother, Julia decided, was underestimating her.

  Julia listened for the dead bolts of the apartment door, and once she was sure it was safe, she pried the lid off the box, easier this time, and reached for the same letter Greta had snatched out of her hands. October 16, 1966. She took it in first as a whole, with one glance, her eyes sweeping over the penmanship and the length before she absorbed any of the words. It was from her Aunt Johanna, her mother's only sister, the one who happened to be in Ireland when their mother got sick and had never left.

  This is going to be good, Julia thought, but before she let herself read the letter slowly from beginning to end, she lifted the tied bundle from the center of the box and broke the aging string.

  13

  JULIA, RIGHT HAND on the wheel at six o'clock, left hand out the window to feel the force of the air as it rushed by at seventy-seven miles per hour, eased the car left, left again, and left once more, onto the ramp that would bring them across the upper level of the George Washington Bridge. Greta, who'd adjusted her seat to the most upright position, sat on the passenger's side of Michael's Chevy Cavalier with her right hand gripping the handle of the door, her left in a fist that pushed into the worn vinyl of the bucket seat. Julia was a good driver, but aggressive, like a long-distance runner determined to pick off the runners in front of her one by one. She was a rare thing in the city, a lifelong Manhattanite with a driver's license and occasional access to a car. But she was out of practice and more used to the quick and jerky movements of city driving than the relaxed, we'll-get-there-when-we-get-there style of the highway. Eavan, holding tight to the single Barbie Greta told her she didn't have to pack, was quiet
in the backseat. James had gone in the truck with Michael and Ned Powers. "All boys in here," James had said as Greta took the end of his lap belt and pulled it tight, "girls in there." He'd pointed at Michael's car parked across Eighty-fourth Street. Julia had braided Eavan's hair for the occasion, but with the open windows up front Eavan could already feel pieces coming loose.

  "Hey!" she said after a while, dropping Barbie and using both hands to hold her hair in place. "Hey, Jule! The window! Mom!"

  But the same wind that plucked so many strands out of the tight braid and whipped them around her head also turned her voice into something small and soundless. She gave up on shouting and bent over to tuck her head between her knees. Don't cry, she warned herself. Do not cry. Thirty minutes, Greta had said when Julia first turned the key in the ignition. Twenty more to go. Then Eavan remembered: there were kids living on the block. An eight-year-old, an eleven-year-old, and who knows what others she hadn't heard about yet. They'd see her with her hair a strealy mess and think that's what kids were like who lived in the city. She held her breath against the pressure that was building behind her eyes and her nose, but like a dam where one small log breaks free, when the first tear came, the flood followed quickly in its track.

  "How many people were there?" Greta turned her head and shouted at Julia, whose long ponytail was lashing her headrest. Without waiting for an answer, Greta rattled off names, called them over the roar of the wind and the car's diesel engine. She ticked them off on her fingers. "There was Mr. Ricci and the other barber. What's his name? The assistant? And there was the five of us, of course. Ned Powers. There was Mrs. Strom, and Jackie, and Jackie's son Mel. Mrs. Kraus. Everyone on the first floor came out, didn't they? Was anyone missing? The Morgans from 220, and the Magstaniks from 216. Remember when their girl used to babysit you? She's all the way in Minneapolis now. Did you know? Who came from Eighty-fifth Street? Mrs. Levy and Mrs. Schmidt. Did I tell you Mrs. Levy found a lump in her breast? Is that it? Am I missing anyone?"

  "That sounds like everybody," Julia said, swatting at a tendril of hair that had gotten stuck in her lip gloss, swerving right to the ramp that led to the Palisades. She eased her foot off the gas as all three of them leaned into the curve. Her friends Bernadette and Mary had planned on coming to see them off as well. Earlier in the week, Julia had picked up two crisp copies of the Red & Tan bus schedule, stuck old Christmas bows on top, and planned on giving one to each of the girls. But after getting through more than half the letters in the red tin box before hearing Greta's key in the door, and then sitting through pizza and ice cream that the rest of them ate with plastic forks while Julia looked on in silence, she'd called her friends and told them not to bother, they were leaving earlier than expected. They had all summer to see each other and would see each other, Julia had insisted. Definitely. Lots of people commuted into the city from Recess every single day. Upon being uninvited, each had asked, "You okay, Jules?" Julia said she was just sad about leaving all of a sudden.

  After pizza Greta had to go out a second time for more packing tape, another box of plastic bags. When she went out the second time, Julia was tempted to go back to the box and finish what she'd started, but she stopped herself and plopped down with the others in front of the TV. Since then she'd felt in a daze, as if she were hung over, not sure if what she'd read meant what she thought it meant. How could it? Not possible. She'd misunderstood. There were other Julias in the family. Her paternal grandmother. A cousin, maybe. But the thought felt feeble upon arrival, and she'd felt dizzy all night and all morning.

  "It was lovely, really, for them to come," Greta said.

  "What?" Julia shouted, tilting her head to the right.

  "Lovely!" Greta shouted back, cupping her hands around her mouth as if shouting across a field.

  Julia reached down and turned the knob that brought up the window. "What?" she said again, quieter.

  Greta rolled up her window as well. "I said it was nice of them, wasn't it? For everyone to see us off?"

  "Oh," Julia said in the abrupt quiet, the trees outside rushing by silently now, the blue twinkle of the Hudson glimpsed between the branches somehow more removed without the roar of the wind.

  "Mom," Eavan said after a moment, her voice husky and miserable. She tried to lean forward to present her head between the two front seats, but her belt stopped her. "Look what happened." She took her hands away from her head and her hair fell in limp tendrils around her cheeks and neck. "I tried to tell you," she began bravely, but found she could go no further, and instead dipped her chin toward her chest and let the tears flow once more.

  "What's the matter with you, mo ghrá?," Greta said, turning as far as possible in her seat without taking off her belt. "Julia will do it again. It's not a tragedy. It's nothing to cry about. Isn't that right, Julia? Won't you do it again?"

  "Sure," Julia said, searching for the top of Eavan's head in the rearview mirror. "But why didn't you kick the seat or something? Why'd you let it get so bad?"

  In Recess, outside the white shingled house with black shutters, the medium-sized U-Haul was parked in the driveway with its nose facing the street. Ned and James were sitting on the step outside, and Greta wondered for the first time if people did that in Recess, if they sat on their front step like it was a stoop, like there would be people passing to whom they could say Good morning, and Hot one, isn't it?

  Only thirty minutes north of the city, Recess was a kind of in-between world. In Manhattan they called it the country as often as they called it a suburb, but it was quieter than the country as far as Greta could tell. There were no animals to snuff and grunt and squawk and bellow into the wind. There was the occasional bark of a dog, the meow of a hungry cat, but together these calls only emphasized the silence that fell in between. All paths and hedges were neat and trim, and there was a general tidiness about the town that had no relation to the shaggy, overgrown, rock-strewn country in Greta's mind. But it was lovely in its own way, like a picture of America she might have seen at home, posted up in a shop or in the church hall, sent by someone who'd left a generation ago and wanted to keep in touch. She tried not to think about what it had cost, what it would continue to cost for the next thirty years. Michael hoped to pay it off in twenty years, citing all kinds of factors Greta didn't quite understand and didn't believe Michael completely understood either. "Look it," he'd said the morning they decided, running one of his chapped fingers down a column of numbers, and Greta had nodded, keeping her eyes on his cracked and blackened fingernail. "I see," she'd agreed.

  But now, considering the house from the curb, she wondered if there had been anything in that long contract with the teeny print about a person getting laid up for weeks without pay. Though Greta put in as many hours per week as Michael, when they put their two paychecks together every other Friday and walked them up to the bank, hers came to only a third of his. He made a good salary when there was work, but when he was sick or when the equipment failed or when there was a layoff, he got nothing. And a man couldn't do that kind of work forever. It was a young man's job.

  "Michael's set up in the back," Ned said as he stood to greet them, and Greta got up close to him, pretending to peer at some part of the house glimpsed over his shoulder as she sniffed the air around him, inhaled the wake he'd left after him in his short walk over to where they now stood. To Julia, who took it all in from the driveway, it looked as if Ned had let himself be sniffed, had actually stood still for it, waited for the inspection to wrap up before moving forward. That morning Greta had been even more obvious about it, standing behind his chair as he sipped his tea and moving her head in a circle behind him as she filled her lungs with his scent. She'd watched with a grave expression as he poured the milk, dumped in two spoons of sugar, brought the paper cup to his lips and sipped.

  "You can handle the truck?" she'd asked.

  "No problem."

  "And don't forget James is going with you."

  "Aye-aye, Captain."


  Greta didn't smile, and later, after bringing out some of the heaviest boxes, Ned had peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt to work in his undershirt, and Julia had caught her mother plucking the shirt from the wood floor of the apartment and burying her face in its folds. When Greta saw that she'd been observed, she offered the shirt to Julia for a second opinion. Julia refused. "He's fine," Julia had said. "It's working its way out of his system."

  Greta still looked skeptical, but when the time came for the men and women to part for their separate vehicles on Eighty-fourth Street, Michael had put one hand on James's shoulder, the other on Greta's, and assured her they'd be fine.

  "Okay," Greta said now, clapping her hands, the inspection over. "Where do we start?"

  "A tour," Julia suggested. She had seen the house only once, a week after Michael's accident, when she'd driven Greta up to Recess to pick up papers and drop off something from their bank. The previous owners had invited them in, urged Julia to look around, but the house was full with their things, their kitchen table laid out with their place mats and cutlery. There were strangers smiling out from frames on the wall, and the smell of something sweet mingled with steam issuing from a pot boiling on the stove settled on her skin like a baby's faint breath.

  "Come on," Greta had urged, pulling Julia downstairs to see what would be her bedroom, her separate entrance.

  "Next time," Julia had said, turning her body into a statue Greta couldn't budge.

  Inside, after greeting Michael, who was settled in a lawn chair the previous owners had left on the deck, Greta led the group from room to room, announced which of them would sleep where, opened closet doors, lifted and lowered windows, pulled the string that brought down the folded ladder that led to the attic. First Eavan dropped off the tour to examine her bare room from corner to corner, then James went outside in search of caterpillars.