The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci

by Susan Taylor Chehak

  Mr. Grandon's glass was empty. He stood and started across the porch toward the door. Mrs. Grandon scolded him. Libbie was still lying on her back in the leaves with her hands folded behind her head. She wasn't looking at her parents, she was gazing at the sky—clear blue, bundles of drifting clouds, dark swirls of smoke from the burning leaves down in the gutter—and as her mother's voice rose, Libbie closed her eyes. Mrs. Grandon's voice was shrill, but her husband didn't answer back, he just worked his jaw. What was she saying? It didn't matter. She was blaming him for something that he'd done. Or scolding him for something that he didn't do. Or he did it but he did it wrong.

  She was so much smaller than him, that was why her voice had to rise, higher, higher, up to meet him. She was standing in front of the door with her feet apart and her knees locked and her back straight, spine stiffened with resistance—she meant to stop him there, to block his path. He seemed to tower over her, although he wasn't tall, not nearly as tall as Josef Krejci. Was he smiling? Did he mock her? He said nothing, just set his glass down, reached out and put his hands on her, gently, one on either arm, just below the shoulder, and then he shifted her to the side, easily, away from him. He simply picked her up and he moved her; then he got his glass, opened the door and disappeared inside.

  This was how the Grandons's marriage had evolved. They'd always argued, bickering about one thing or another, and that was normal, wasn't it? But lately the tone had changed. Mrs. Grandon's voice rising, piping shrilly, and his face blank, a small smile playing on his lips, as if maybe he was vaguely amused by all the fuss, but not amused enough to answer back, just hard and silent now and moving past her, around her, on by. Ever since last summer, it had been like that between them.

  Ever since the week at Lake Vermillion. Ever since Mrs. Grandon started to talk about a job. At first that sounded like a threat. Maybe it had been going on already for a while, probably it had been, privately, but that summer it came out into the open where anyone who wanted to could hear.

  Ever since Marilyn Monroe was found dead in her bed with a telephone in her hand.

  The Grandons were driving to the lake in Minnesota, where Libbie's grandmother had a cabin and every summer they went to stay, and that year you had been invited to go along, too. It was a long drive then, nine hours in those days of two lane highways before the Interstate was built, and you and Libbie settled in the way back of the station wagon, facing backwards, propped side by side on pillows, watching the road roll off and away, grinning at the man in a car behind you, waving at him and giggling and waving again, until Libbie gave him the finger and he signaled, pulled around, soared away. John was in the back seat with Rags, and Mr. Grandon was behind the wheel.

  The voices came to you from the front seat: Mrs. Grandon's pitch rising, Mr. Grandon's voice deeper, his responses measured and slow. Libbie looked at you and raised her eyebrows.

  "Is it the money, is that it? You don't have everything you need?"

  "No, no, that isn't it at all, and you know it. I only want to get out of the house now and then. Is that so terrible? I just want something to do besides shop and play bridge and talk on the telephone all day."

  But what kind of a job did she expect to be able to get? Pretty little Faye Grandon, spoiled little Faye Grandon, who had never worked a day in her life. He was smiling when he said this, warmly, with fondness and amusement. He loved her for her frailty and her dependence upon him. He wasn't angry yet. He reached across the seat to touch her smooth cheek with his thumb, and she batted his hand away.

  "But I did too work, once. At Fairchild's in the dress department, that one summer when I was in high school."

  He smiled at this, too. Smiled and shook his head. Stepped on the gas, pulled out to swoop around a dawdling truck.

  What about holidays, what about summer when the kids were out of school, what about vacations, what about when Mr. Grandon was free and they wanted to take off, spend some time up at the lake, for example, like now? What about that?

  And what kind of a job would she be able to get anyway? What skills did she have? Housekeeping? Ironing? Telephone sales? Conjuring up the image of Mrs. Bell, working at the kitchen table at home, selling magazine subscriptions to strangers on the phone.

  "No," she screeched at him. "No! That isn't it at all!"

  But, he insisted, a woman's place was in the home.

  This was the summer of 1962. You were eleven years old, and it was the next summer after Julia Bell had disappeared, the summer you went to Lake Vermillion with the Grandons, the summer you got your period. You and Libbie were sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast—pancakes and bacon and juice. Libbie was sunburned, her shoulders red, her cheeks pink, her nose peeling, her hair whitened from the sun. You had broken out in a rash of prickly heat on the back of your neck that you couldn't keep from scratching even though Mrs. Grandon had told you more than once to leave it alone, not to touch it, scratching would only make it worse, and she'd given you some lotion to put on it, but you just couldn't help it, your hand crept up to the back of your neck and you scratched when you thought nobody was looking. Scratched and bled.

  You were in your bathing suits already: Libbie's two piece with the bumblebees, your old stretchy pink one that was too small because you'd been shooting up so fast. The straps curled in on themselves and bit your shoulders, the legs rode high on your thighs, and you had to keep tugging at the fabric, yanking it down to cover your behind.

  You were going to take the rowboat out, paddle the shoreline, explore the inlets and look for caves.

  John was wolfing down his breakfast. He ate and ate, helped himself to more, slathered butter on his pancakes, forked up syrup-soaked bacon, but he was still as thin as a stick, his mother liked to say. She stood back and studied him critically; with her arms folded and her head cocked, she eyed the gangle of his legs and arms, his narrow chest, his long neck, his bony feet.

  He ignored her. He had been trying to explain something important that he'd learned about numbers. He had been trying to tell them about the square root of two—about the sides of a right triangle laid out on a graph, one inch and one inch and the hypotenuse is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the two sides, even the Scarecrow knows that, but if you were to swing that hypotenuse over and lay it down on the graph: Where would it land? If the sum of the squares of two sides is two and if the square root of two is infinitely non-repeating, if it's an imaginary number with no actual place in space, infinitely divisible, infinitely inward?

  And hearing this, already Mrs. Grandon was upset. For some reason, the whole discussion had angered her. Why did John have to talk like that? Why did he have to say those things that gave an ordinary person a headache to consider?

  "Those ideas of yours make me dizzy," she said.

  "But," he explained, "they aren't my ideas." Scattered whiskers splintered his chin. His voice had deepened, his neck had thickened. "It's just the way things are," he said, "that's all. Everybody knows that."

  He grinned, gulped his juice, and reached for another helping of the pancakes, but she slapped his hand away and said he'd had enough and so had she. She started clearing away the dishes, scraping them into the trash, slamming them into the sink, and so when Libbie's dad appeared in the doorway, he looked at you and asked, "What's with her?"

  You shook your head and Libbie shrugged. "Who knows?"

  Already Mrs. Grandon was mad.

  She was standing at the counter with her hands in the soapy water, and she was staring out at the trees. Through the heavy leaves, at the end of the winding dirt path, the lake glistened, sunstruck.

  Mr. Grandon took a place at the table. He opened his newspaper and read for a moment before he looked up, stirred his coffee, and then said, quietly, "Marilyn Monroe is dead." So quietly that at first Mrs. Grandon didn't hear.

  She turned and peered at him over her shoulder, her hands still in the sink. "What did you say?"

  "Marilyn Monroe. Says
here she killed herself."

  And Mrs. Grandon—her dark hair was pulled back from her face with a stretchy yellow band, exposing her high forehead and accentuating the sharp frailty of her bones—she turned around completely and stared at her husband, but he didn't notice this. He had already gone back to reading his newspaper again—he snapped it open and then disappeared behind it.

  Libbie was asking, "How?"

  Not a gun, no blood, no gore. It was pills. Alcohol. It might have been an accident. Maybe she didn't mean to. They found her body on the floor, or was it in the bed? She was on the telephone.

  Mrs. Grandon's hands were still damp and soapy, so the dishwater ran down her forearms from her wrists to her elbows as she lit a cigarette. She seemed to be trembling slightly. She inhaled and started to cough, and her eyes filled with tears. Seeing that you were watching her, she turned away.

  Mr. Grandon lowered the paper, eyed her for a moment, then asked, "Faye? Are you all right?"

  But she didn't answer, and, coughing again, she raised a hand, nodded her head hard, crushed the cigarette out, pushed away from the counter. The screen door squeaked open, slapped shut behind her. Walking quickly, almost running, she crossed the yard and then disappeared down the path into the woods.

  Later she came back and shut herself up in the bedroom, where she stayed all day. Libbie knocked on the door and called to her.

  "Mom? You okay?"

  The muffled reply: "I'm fine. Go away. Go play. Have fun."

  Mr. Grandon went in and then came right back out again. He pulled the door closed after him. Looked at you and smiled. "Don't worry. She's a little upset right now, that's all."

  That night she rowed the boat out into the middle of the lake. Mr. Grandon sat on the dock, drinking scotch, watching the water, and waiting for his wife to come back.

  "She can't stay out there forever," he said. Then, "She'll get over it. Pretty soon she'll be fine."

  There was no moon. She was a white dot on the black water, hard to make out.

  "Why is she out there? What's she doing? What's wrong with her?"

  Mr. Grandon shrugged and frowned and shook his head. His look was one of helplessness. "Who knows?"

  What seemed like hours later, you and Libbie were lying on your cots on the sleeping porch upstairs, awake. Libbie was sunburned and you were itchy, and you were listening to the Grandons arguing downstairs. Libbie's face was pale, her hair was bright, and her eyes glistened in the dark.

  "My mother's crazy," she said.

  "She's just a sensitive person, that's all."

  "She's nuts."

  "Maybe."

  "I wish I could be like you, Meena," Libbie said. "I wish my mother was dead, too."

  Of course she didn't mean this. She didn't know what she was saying. She was upset, she'd had too much sun, and she was tired, that was all. In the morning she'd be all right. In the morning everything would be fine.

  You sat up, slipped off your cot, and climbed in close to Libbie. Then, cradled against each other, belly to butt, you slept.

  That's the way it was: Mr. and Mrs. Grandon argued, and you comforted Libbie. Your father walked, and Libbie said never mind.

  When Josef Krejci wasn't working, he was walking, and if you saw him, if you happened to be sitting near a window—in school, on the bus, in the back seat of Mrs. Grandon's car—if you looked up, looked out, and recognized your father's dark shape crossing the street, moving down the sidewalk, disappearing around a corner, then you would be squirming with embarrassment, and Libbie would have to tell you, again and again, never mind.

  And when you still frowned and fidgeted: "Let's follow him," Libbie said.

  You would just see what he was up to; you would find out where he went.

  You spent some time with disguises, made a game of it, putting on one thing and then another, throwing each item off until Libbie's bedroom was a mess that you knew her mother would punish her for later, but who cared. You dragged out the trunk of old dresses that Mrs. Grandon had long ago gathered for playing games of dress-up, and Libbie found there a little number that was short and tight, feathery and pale.

  You shook your head. No. He would notice her for sure if she dressed up in a bit like that. But Libbie was entranced, studying her reflection in the mirror—her thin shoulders, flat chest, scabby legs. She had slipped her feet into a pair of high heels, dove gray satin with the toes cut out. She cocked a hip, threw back her hair, which made you smile. But how was she going to follow him in those? When she couldn't even walk across the room without falling down?

  And yet you were pretty sure you'd seen Mrs. Grandon in that dress. It had been on some Saturday night, wintertime, when dark came early, before dinner, and they were going out to some party at the Club. Mr. Grandon in a black suit, with a bright blue tie that was the same color as his eyes. Mrs. Grandon at the mirror, fastening an earring, her head tilted prettily to one side.

  Forgetting for a moment what your purpose was, your gathered up your own hair and twisted it back, away from your face. You sashayed and pursed your lips. Ooh-la-la. But on you it was ridiculous.

  In the end, you settled on simplicity and decided to dress like boys. It seemed the best disguise. Most likely he wouldn't even notice you, or even if he did, he wouldn't know he had.

  Dark clothes: black pants and sweatshirts with the hoods pulled up and the cords drawn tight, your faces flat white disks. It was perfect: you were nobody or you could have been anybody; you didn't even recognize yourselves.

  Then there was nothing left to do but wait for him to leave. You knelt on Libbie's bed, watching from the window. You saw Mrs. Chadima arrive, dropped off by her husband at the bottom of the driveway. The climb up the hill to the house left her breathless; she balanced a bag of groceries in her arms. She let herself in through the side door. You saw John come out of the house, climb on his bike, and ride away. Leo Spivak was in his driveway across the street, washing his father's car. Old Mrs. Bickel was out sweeping her front walk.

  And then at last, there he was, your father, Josef Krejci. The front door had opened and he had stepped outside, was standing on the step, with his hands in the pockets of his coat. He looked up into the sky, took a deep breath and then seemed to gather himself in, as his heavy shoes trudged down the steps, down the driveway, to the street.

  Libbie was pulling up her hood, drawing the strings tight under her chin. You would let him get a bit ahead, then go after him, she said.

  Suddenly you were afraid. "I don't know, Libbie. Maybe we shouldn't be doing this."

  Libbie turned, startled. Her face, inside the hood of her sweatshirt, was a thin white mask. "What? Why?"

  "If he catches us..."

  "He won't catch us. And even if he does, so what?"

  You could feel your stomach turning with alarm at the prospect of your father's anger. "He'll be mad," she said.

  Libbie shrugged. "He'll get over it."

  Still you held back. What you were doing was a mistake, you were sure of it. Libbie stepped up close to you, reached and pulled the hood up over your head. "Come on. It'll be okay. What's the worst that could happen, anyway?"

  She took your hand and led you out of the room. You stumbled down the hall and down the stairs, as Libbie called out to her mother, who was playing solitaire at a TV table in the front room: "Bye! Bye!" But Mrs. Grandon didn't look up, only waved a hand, crushed out her cigarette, and slapped down another card.

  Libbie cracked the front door open and peeked around it—careful, quiet, sneaky, because what if he stopped and turned, what if just at that moment he looked back over his shoulder and saw her? You could feel the hammer of your heart. But no, he didn't notice anything, he just kept walking away, a big dark shadow getting smaller as it seemed to float down Otis Road toward downtown. One after the other, Libbie first, you slipped out, hurrying to catch up, then keeping a safe distance behind. Hanging back, ducking in and out of doorways, hiding behind hedges, fences, trees, and yo
u began to believe that your father wouldn't be able to see you after all, even if he looked, which he didn't. He was too absorbed in himself, lost in thought as he walked and walked—head down, hands in his pockets, eyes on the ground.

  What was the worst that could happen? If he did catch you, what would Josef Krejci do? Send you to your room without supper? Lock you in a closet? Beat you with his belt?

  No, worse. He would ignore you. He would pretend you didn't exist. The silent treatment, he called it. He would stop looking at you. He would stop speaking to you.

  "Dad?"

  You forget to take the trash down to the curb on Monday morning. You leave a pop bottle out on the table in the living room. You break the antenna on the TV set. And he gets quiet.

  "Dad, I'm sorry. Dad?"

  No answer. He stands up from his chair and walks away, as if he's all alone and nothing bothers him and you aren't even there. He goes into his study and shuts the door.

  And then when you're alone together later, eating the dinner that Mrs. Chadima has prepared, he still won't say a single word to you. He'll be reading the paper or focusing on his food, and if he does happen to glance up it will be as if he's seeing right through you, because you don't exist. He knows how to go for days this way, without looking at you and without speaking to you, and he is so good at it that after a while you will begin to believe him. You'll be feeling your own self disappear.

  It was early winter, and already there had been some snow, but most of it had melted by then. On a Sunday afternoon in Linwood the stores were closed and the streets were quiet. The sun had come out, and the day had turned warm. Josef Krejci's fingers worked at the buttons of his long wool coat as he walked, and then it was open and flapping after him, like wings. He was wearing a white shirt and dark pants and a thin, silvery tie. His big shoes splattered the sidewalk slush. At the corner of Third Avenue and Nineteenth Street he stopped and stood still, fishing in his pocket for his tobacco pouch and his pipe. He filled the bowl, then lit it, walked on. Smoke billowed around his face, his cheeks were rosy, eyes shining, greedy. He was hatless, and his pink scalp gleamed.