"You know this guy she's with, Meena? You know him? What's he like, is he a good person? A troublemaker? Smart? Stupid? What?"
"Fox Dow. I'm afraid I don't really know him, Mr. Grandon."
"Dow. Well I guess he can't be too stupid if he's managed to shack up with my daughter. She's something else, that kid. Pretty. Smart. But angry. Boy is she angry. Slamming doors and calling everybody names. You know what she said? 'I wish you were dead.' Said that to me. Said that to her mother, too. It was all I could do not to take a hand to her when she said that. All I could do. You want some dessert? Ice cream? Chocolate mousse? They have a terrific chocolate mousse here."
He waved to the waitress again, called her over, ordered you a chocolate mousse, and you all but licked the dish clean.
Upstairs, in his room, he made a big deal of writing a check for the full amount that was owed, plus an extra fifty thrown in for your trouble. A tip, sort of. Interest, if that felt better to you. He signed it with a flourish, ripped it from the book, and all the while he was telling you about how he was glad to do it, more than glad, it was nothing, really. Really. It was, he said, "the least I can do."
You stood at the window and looked out over the river at the lights of the cereal plant, the packing plant, the railroad tracks downtown. Mr. Grandon handed you the check, took your hand again, leaned close, and said, "Thank you." Even as he paid his estranged wife's grocery bill, he was thanking you. For your loyalty, he explained. For your steadfast friendship. For all you'd done for him—and for his daughter and for his family and for his wife.
You wondered: Did he know who was driving the truck with all his stuff in the back that day?
"She's not herself," he said, meaning Mrs. Grandon. "Hasn't been herself for years." He shook his head and sucked his teeth and frowned.
But if Mrs. Grandon was not herself, then who was she?
He was still holding your hand. He got so lonely sometimes, he said. He drew you closer to him, wrapped his arms around you, held you for a moment, and you allowed him to do this, you did not protest. You felt sorry for him, maybe. Or maybe you liked it, the warmth of his embrace. He was sorry for what he'd done, he said. He didn't want to be there. He wanted to go home. He trembled. Was he crying? He moved his head, and you felt the burr of his cheek against your skin, the warmth of his breath in your hair. He had slipped his fingers under your sweater and his hand slid up over your belly to cup your breast. His mouth covered yours, he was kissing you, and then you were tipping your chin and you were kissing him back.
You wondered: What would Faye Grandon think, if she knew her husband was holding Meena Krejci and kissing her this way? And what would Josef Krejci do?
You dreamed: You and your father came home in the evening after work, after closing up the store, and Libbie's mother was still there, she'd been waiting for you. She'd been there all day, picking up, polishing, and playing solitaire, and she'd made dinner for you, too, one of Josef's favorites—pork chops and gravy, green beans and potatoes, buttered bread and cucumber salad and pie. You sat down together, just the three of you, a real family gathered at the kitchen table, telling each other about what you'd done that day, talking about the weather, the news, the war, the astronauts, the moon.
July 2006
Meena wakes to find herself curled on a blanket on the floor in front of the Aspenglo hearth, but the fire is out, only embers glowing, and the cabin is cold around her. It is the middle of the night. She shivers and sits up to peer sleepily into the shadows of the room. She holds her breath and stiffens, works to keep herself still, to listen for a sound of someone else here in the cabin with her. Someone who is waiting. Breathing. Watching her.
This is a new feeling, this sensation that maybe she is not alone, after all. As a child she lay in her bed at night and she listened, just as she is listening now, tried to imagine there was someone else there, someone who was standing in the hallway just beyond the door, or crouched inside the shadows of the closet, or pressed against the window pane and longing to be let in. Listening, watching, waiting. Just out of reach.
Maybe it was her father or maybe it was a dream. Maybe it was the ghost of her mother or maybe it was Julia Bell. Or maybe it was no one other than her own still self.
Now she is staring into the shadows, and she is holding her breath, and she is waiting, listening for some sigh of movement, straining to hear the whisper of another's presence, feeling for a pulse that might be other than her own.
"Holly?"
No answer.
And then that silence, falling over her like a shroud. Her worst fear, realized—that here she is, after all: alone.
She stands, her joints stiff and aching from her hike of the day before, knees, hips, shoulders—she is getting old. She is old. And yet... She puts her hand on her head, feels the scruff of her new hairdo. She stands there for a while, in her nightgown with the blanket wrapped around her shoulders, posed and staring at the last glowing embers of the fire. Indecisive and unsure. Should she get some more wood and build the flames back up again, fill the room with light and heat? Or creep over to the bed, slip in under the warm down comforter, tumble back into a more forgiving oblivion of sleep?
In the window glass her ghost is reflected back, a dim outline shapeless and indistinct. And beyond that, the trees, the forest surging forth.
Meena will choose to rebuild the fire. She will leave the cabin and go outside to the log pile. There is the path up toward the wilderness, shining through the trees. The pine needles are soft against the soles of her bare feet. The moon seems to be friendly and her newly cropped hair makes her feel lightheaded. Small. As if she might have become a girl again, after all.
She stands at the woodpile, considering it. The neatly split logs have been stacked in the space between the two trees that stand as bookends on either side. Meena lifts one from the top and cradles it against her chest. The blanket slips off one shoulder and she yanks it back up, tucks it in around her, but as she reaches for another log there is a sound. Something in the woods is watching her. A deer? A fox? She peers toward the trees, thinking to see the twin disks of eyes again, but nothing. She waits until the sound begins to seem like a memory, or something that she has imagined for herself.
Another log, and then another. She has turned back toward the cabin when she hears it again, the sound. Gentle thud of shifted weight, brief snicker of teeth. Flurry of ruffled fur, pant of animal breath, whisper of paw, click of claw. She carefully sets the logs down on the ground and turns her body fully toward the path. The blanket slips from her shoulders and puddles at her feet. She should be cold, but she is no longer shivering, she is no longer feeling the chill that's in the air. The white fabric of her nightgown shimmers in the moonlight.
Overhead the sky is black but at the same time bright, aglow with the gleam of more stars than Meena has ever seen before. There are the constellations that John Grandon once pointed out to her—scorpions and crabs and belts and bears—and what she was unable to decipher in them then now seems completely clear—shapes and beings made manifest in a measured placement of stars.
They are the dead saints leaning close, their faces welcoming and kind.
They are her dead mother, reaching out with open arms.
They are her dead father, howling in his loneliness.
And there is Matka, too, and she is rising, a full-blown powdery moon.
"You are a miracle," Matka said, holding her granddaughter in her lap, nestled against the generous spill of her bosom so that the coarse dark wool of her dress chafed the little girl's cheek.
"Your mother is a princess, she is an angel, she is a star. And your father? He's a king!"
"Remember who you are," her father said.
And now, Meena Krejci, alone in the forest, cries out to herself, she calls out her own name, and it echoes back to her through the thin air, clearly:
"Meena?"
"Meena!"
Come With Us
1969
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It was June, and you were still the grocer's daughter. You were eighteen years old, a recent high school graduate, a working girl. If asked, you would have said that you were happy enough, you guessed, overall. As happy as you'd ever been, at least. You had your whole life ahead of you, and you were taking it very seriously. You had been given certain responsibilities. You had a regular paycheck, you had a checking account and a savings account, and you stood to inherit your father's business for yourself one day. Some of the older customers who still came into the store to shop would note that Meena Krejci—in her brown skirt and her blue blouse and her sensible shoes—had grown up to become the very picture of her mother Agnes Krejci there at the desk beneath the stairs. And maybe your father had noticed this, too.
It was your job to keep track of the accounts for him—you wrote bills, addressed envelopes, tallied payments, and prepared the deposits that your father would be taking to the bank. He didn't let you handle any of the cash yet, that was still his department.
But it was only a part time job, and at noon your day was over. Then you'd put away the files, turn off the lamp, lock up the drawers, and leave your desk to walk home. You'd stop at the mailbox on Vernon Avenue to drop a stack of letters in, then turn the corner at Otis Road and climb the low hill toward the house. You'd fix yourself something for lunch, you'd take meat out of the freezer for dinner, you'd vacuum the carpet in the living room, start the laundry in the basement, change the sheets on the beds upstairs.
At your desk, you chewed on your pencil, shifted in your chair. Looked upward as a sound of footsteps crossed overhead, the ceiling creaking under the weight of someone walking, or was it someone dancing? At that time of the morning? Had they been up all night? Faint sound of music, dim pounding bass. Your watch said eight-thirty. You looked up to catch your father's eye, see his frown. So he'd heard them up there, too.
Libbie and Fox, Fox and Libbie. Inseparable, they were always together, they were in love! They both worked downtown now, at the used bookstore near the tracks, selling incense and candles and books and records to the hippies and the high school kids, and maybe he was selling a little pot on the side besides, or maybe not. He had money of his own anyway, family money, he was a Dow after all and the Dows were rich. He drove a yellow Mercury convertible, with the top down and the radio turned up loud and Libbie beside him in a long gauzy skirt and halter top, peasant blouse, leather sandals, round-rimmed red plastic sunglasses, a floppy purple felt hat with a paper daisy in its brim. Trippy!
She often came into the store to buy groceries—milk and cigarettes and cereal—and usually she smiled at you, but she almost never stopped to talk. You two had gone your separate ways, it seemed. And Libbie was in a hurry. Besides, what was there to say? Fox lingered outside, sitting on the back steps, smoking. When he saw you he smiled, too, and flashed you a peace sign, but you ducked your head away, embarrassed, your face in flames. He called out your name, but you wouldn't turn, you'd pretend not to have heard. Why couldn't you stop and talk to him? Why not smile and flirt, why not come up with something clever to say, something that would let him know that you were more than just that plain timid girl who sat under the stairs with her numbers and her books, that girl who just happened to also be Josef Krejci's daughter. Much more.
Furious with yourself—with your shyness and awkwardness and ugliness and stupidity—you pinched your own inner thigh, hard. "Stop it! Stop it!"
Maybe they thought you disapproved of them, that you supported the war in Vietnam and agreed with Spiro Agnew and Richard Nixon, that you ignored Libbie and Fox because you were prudish and straight and believed yourself to be morally and mentally superior to them, but that wasn't it at all. No, it was that just then you had problems of your own.
For one thing, you had signed up to take a few night classes at Linwood Community College in the fall—not a full load, nothing like that, because you weren't going for a degree and you weren't trying to find a career, you were just thinking that a continuing education might be something that would keep you busy, and hadn't you always been good at school, if at not much else? Good grades, good reports, honors in some classes, and high scores on tests. If you'd had the money for it, you would have gone away to a university somewhere. But as it was, you'd registered for a survey of American literature, a general philosophy seminar, and introductory Czech—why not, maybe that would please him, although he didn't speak the language anymore himself.
But you had yet to tell your father about these plans that you'd been making, because you were sure he would object. If you were bored, he could think of something else for you to do to make yourself useful. Plenty else. He'd give you more hours at the store, more responsibility, was that what you wanted? Or, more work at home. You would have liked to find some way to stand up to him about it, you'd have liked to have your own way for once—it was your life, wasn't it?—but talking to him about yourself, about anything, was too hard.
Maybe that wasn't Josef Krejci's fault. He wanted only what was best for you, you knew that. But his opinions were strong, and the way he thought, the way he reasoned when he argued, he always made it seem that you were wrong. Ridiculously so.
And, maybe he was right. Maybe such classes were a waste of time, and money, for a person such as yourself. You should have been studying accounting instead. And even if you did agree to do that, what for? You already had a job. He could teach you anything you might need to know. The grocery store was a business that some day would be yours to run on your own. Or to sell, if that was what you decided you'd rather do with it, when the time came.
Josef Krejci, in 1969, was already an old man, after all. And he couldn't live forever. Could he?
If all this was not enough to drive you to distraction, there was more. Because for another thing—that check that Mr. Grandon wrote to pay off his wife's account? It had come back. Insufficient funds.
You thought first of phoning him. Not from the store, where your father might walk by and overhear and wonder—what were you doing? Who were you talking to? About what? You'd have to wait until you got home. But then what were you supposed to say? "Mr. Grandon, I guess there's been some kind of a mistake." Though you were pretty sure it wasn't a mistake. He knew what he was doing, and it wasn't fair, that he'd done this to you.
Your anger boiled up. How dare he? When he'd told you how grateful he was for your friendship and your kindness. When you'd trusted him. You'd known him just about all your life, and to you Mr. Grandon had been, if not like a father exactly, at least like some kindly uncle. And he'd said it himself, you were like a second daughter to him. When you'd trusted him enough to let him touch you, and to kiss him, because that was what he'd needed just then, wasn't it? And when you stopped it there, because he was drunk and lonely and weak and didn't know what he was doing and would only have been sorry later. Wouldn't have been able to forgive himself, if anything else had happened. Which it hadn't, thanks to you. You could have made it otherwise. Easily.
You wanted to scream, storm around, break things, slam doors, make a scene, but you didn't dare do that, because what would your father say, if he knew? You had the feeling he was watching you already. Eyeing you from his place at the register, sensing something was wrong, but what? You held yourself together—biting down on your anger and resentment and humiliation, chewing on it, feeling it burning at the back of your throat first, then in the pit of your stomach, later it would roil ferociously through your gut and leave you moaning—and you went off at lunch, as usual, carrying your bundle of letters and bills, as always, making sure that there was nothing odd-seeming about your behavior, nothing your father might pick up on, nothing he would notice, nothing that would cause him to stop you, ask you, "What's wrong?"
You smiled at him, waved goodbye, slipped out and walked the three blocks to the mail box before you turned, not east toward Otis Road, but west toward downtown. You walked all the way down to the real estate office, sweating in the midday, midsummer heat,
rehearsing what you would to say to him: "I guess there's been some mistake. I'm sure you never meant for this to happen. You must have so many things to look after, and probably this is the least of your worries. I'm sure you have bigger fish to fry!" You were not your father's daughter for nothing. "But you've put me in an awkward position, see, and I'd appreciate it if we could take care of this right now?" You meant to walk over to the bank with him, right then and there. Have him pay you in cash. If not all of it, at least some.
But the real estate office was closed. Door locked, lights off. In fact, it looked like it had been closed for some time. Yellowing newspapers had piled up on the pavement outside, and the For Sale sign in the window seemed to be offering up the business itself rather than the properties pictured in the photos and the flyers on the bulletin boards inside.
You couldn't believe it. You took hold of the door handle and shook it, rattling the glass, uselessly. You stepped back to the middle of the sidewalk, looked up and down the street as if you thought you might find him there, even though you knew it was impossible. It was too late; you had missed him. Mr. Grandon was gone.
Meanwhile the Iowa sky had clouded over, and now it opened up, releasing a lazy downpour of hot summer rain.
The lobby of the Fielding Hotel was rich and warm and bright, and outside the sidewalks were slick with rain, greased with neon light. The doorman in his stiff brimmed hat and braided jacket opened the door, stepped aside, smiled at the serious young woman who whirled past him. You were there to visit your father—that's what the doorman believed as he watched you stride past the front desk toward the elevators—and that would be Mr. Grandon, a nice man, big tipper. Sold houses, didn't he? And had been having some marital difficulties, that's why he was living at the hotel. It was the times—so much freedom, so much chaos in the world, everybody was getting into some kind of trouble, it seemed.
The Minor Apocalypse of Meena Krejci Page 24
