The running cleansed; it was impossible to think about anything else but the exertion. Beyond the park, cars sped along the turnpike. By the last lap I was gasping and my eyes and nose were streaming and I had to slow again to a walk.
“Come on!” Warren bellowed. He’d already finished, and, tall in sweatpants and sweatshirt, leaned against the bus. “Let’s get it down to nine and a half minutes this time!”
Christ, I thought, and broke into a jog. I’ll never make it, I’ll never make it.
“Slave driver,” I wheezed when I reached the bus. I took a Kleenex out of a pocket of my Levi’s and blew my nose. “Well, did I do it?”
He was watching a green MG which drove slowly past the tennis court. “What? Oh, near enough, you’ll do it tomorrow.” He handed me the towel he wore around his neck and I wiped my face; I’d learned to take off my eye makeup when I changed after school because it smeared so with tears.
He said, “Want to go to Dot’s?”
“Okay.” I climbed up into the bus, and, still panting and sweating, put on my jacket and buckled my seat belt. To have a beer afterward seemed a cancellation of some of the benefits of the running, but it was Warren’s habit and I usually went along.
“Beautiful downtown Hull,” he said as we drove up Main Street. It was a very crazy main street, complicated by being two one-way streets, so when you went shopping you had to study your errands carefully and then plot a route to keep from going around and around. Perhaps it was the annoyance of this that made the citizens of Hull drive like maniacs. We charged up the one-way branch which curved between the old brick factories on the river, and we jounced to a stop at the red light. The shoe factory was letting out. Tired thin men, hard-looking women in slacks, heavy women in kerchiefs and long coats, and young girls, chattering and laughing, moved along the crosswalk.
Then we had to turn and drive down the major branch of Main Street. The stores had lit their neon signs, but despite the brave pinks and greens and golds the street was gray and bleak. We drove past Adele’s Dress Shoppe, a Western Auto, Stan’s Submarine Sandwiches, Cohen’s Shoe Store, St. Pierre’s Bakery (TRY OUR CANADIAN PORK PIES!), a loan company, Bert’s Supermarket, Claire’s Card Shop and Light Lunches, Woolworth’s, and turned again and drove down a little side street. Factory housing, old brick duplexes, gray paint flaking on the clapboards of apartment buildings.
The unlit sign over the door of a tall crooked brown house said THE HI HAT. It came on just before Warren opened the door, so we were greeted inside by the sight of Dot’s broad bottom and sturdy legs as she climbed down from the booth seat she’d used to reach the switch. I was interested to see that she wore panty hose instead of a garter belt.
“Hi there, kiddies,” she said, smoothing her flowered dress. “How many minutes today?”
“Almost nine and a half,” I said. “I’ll never ever make it in six minutes,” which was what Warren ran it in, “and I’ll never ever run it without stopping.”
“Sure you will,” Warren said.
The place wasn’t too busy and noisy this time of afternoon; today there were just a couple of guys in a booth and three at the bar, UNH kids, all familiar faces by now. It was a cold room, the walls and battered wooden booths painted dark brown long ago, the ceiling brown from cigarette smoke, the dirty linoleum on the floor almost entirely worn through, but after a few visits it began to seem warm and homey. If, that is, you ignored the state of the bathrooms: I had been once to the ladies’ room and ever since I had controlled the need until I got home, and Warren said the men’s room (it had no running water, except the men) was the most unforgettable he’d ever known.
Dot said, “Well, I think you’re nuts, I wouldn’t let this idiot talk me into doing such a thing,” and she beamed affectionately at Warren and, large and solid, she tramped into the kitchen for our beers. We climbed onto barstools. There was a Kold-Draft system behind the bar, but for years Dot had served only bottled beer and she’d never rearranged things, in case she changed her mind and started serving draft again, so she had to fetch every beer from the kitchen we could see through the serving window behind the bar. Since there was nobody to hand the beers to through the window, she had to tramp back out and around to the bar carrying them. She plunked our Buds down and automatically reached for the two Planters Dry Roasted Peanuts packets we always wanted, and picked up the dollar Warren had laid on the bar. She sold potato chips and pretzels, too, and sometimes she made a sandwich for a kid or offered a serving of her supper. This afternoon she was cooking something in the kitchen which smelled lovely, something with peppers.
“How is it out?” she asked, taking her own bottle of beer from under the bar.
I said, “I can never tell after running, I’m too hot.”
“It’s nice out,” Warren said. “What you should do is you should get one of these bums here to mind the store and come run with us.”
“Ha!” she shouted, and lit a Chesterfield. She was a friend of Warren’s folks, had known him since he was born, took pride in telling me how she’d served him his very first beer here when he was at least five years underage, and it was through her and her talks with him that I’d begun to learn some of the things I couldn’t bring myself to ask outright. He’d been in the army after high school. Then he got a part-time job at WHNH and went to the university for a year, decided he liked WHNH better than UNH and went to work full time. He had become the Morning Man three years ago.
She said, “You ought to’ve seen the way I was running around this place last night, my Christ, was it busy. No wonder I feel so shitty today.”
“Tell you what,” Warren said. “We’ll get you a pedometer and see what you clock.”
The burly kid at the end of the bar who was writing something on a paper towel glanced up. “Okay, Dot, I’ve got that down, chuck roast, onion soup, one small can of mushrooms. What comes next?”
“It’s onion soup mix,” she said. “One envelope Lipton’s onion soup mix, the dry stuff.”
“Oh,” he said, and made a note. His hair was so long some of it had snagged under the neck of his tie-dyed T-shirt.
“Then you take a piece of aluminum foil,” she said, “and put the roast on it and sprinkle the soup mix all over it, dry, remember, dry, and dump the mushrooms on top and wrap it all up good and tight. Got that?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, scribbling. “Then what?”
Onion-soup pot roast, she was telling him how to make an onion-soup pot roast. David had loved onion-soup pot roast.
She said, “Then just stick it in the oven at say about three-seventy-five degrees and cook the hell out of it, an hour and a half, two hours. That’s all there is to it.”
I ate a peanut and looked up at the television on the shelf. It was a color set, but the program was Candid Camera, black and white. A car with a Candid Camera woman at the steering wheel was pushed into a gas station when the attendant wasn’t looking, and then the woman told him her car wouldn’t go and he opened the hood and there was no engine. The guys beside us began to laugh.
Dot said, “Isn’t that the limit?” and belched comfortably.
The attendant said, “Lady—”
“But I have to get to work,” the woman said, “can’t you do something to make it go?”
“Now look, lady—”
We were distracted by the door’s opening; almost everyone always turned to see who was coming in. This time it was Valerie, the practice teacher, whom I’d never noticed here before.
“Valerie!” Dot cried. “Where have you been keeping yourself, it’s been—” and she stopped.
Valerie hoisted herself smoothly onto the stool beside me and draped back her heavy curtain of long dark hair which had swung forward. “Hello there, Miss Bean.”
“Emily,” I said, feeling a hundred.
She said, “I’ve been working, Dot. I’m practice-teaching over in Millbridge.”
“That’s right,” Dot said from the kitchen, “it’s ma
th, isn’t it?” She brought Valerie a beer.
On the television the car was being pushed surreptitiously into another gas station. I ate my last peanut and looked at the clutter on the counter behind the bar, the bottle of catsup, the jars of mayonnaise and mustard, the copy of the Hull Courier, Dot’s knitting, a grandchild’s toy panda. Dot was a widow; I wondered, as I wondered about my mother, if she were ever afraid to look in the mirror in the evenings. But of course she and my mother had their children, and my mother had her schoolchildren, and Dot had all the kids who drank here.
Warren said, “Want another?”
I glanced at him. It was rare that he suggested more than one. “What the hell,” I said, “it’s Wednesday, the week’s half over. That’s something to celebrate.”
Dot said, “It sure is easy to see you love your work, Emily,” and went to the kitchen for the beers.
I ate peanut crumbs. “Tonight I have to correct two sets of general freshmen quizzes on pronouns, is that something to love? Then I’ve got homework I should do for my class tomorrow night.”
But Warren was having supper with me tonight, so first there’d be the lamb chops to cook and the salad and the coffee to make, and then after we washed the dishes we would sit, very domestic, in my little antimacassared living room and he would watch The Glen Campbell Good-Time Hour and Room 222, which was about a high school, while I partly watched them and partly did my homework, and then we’d go to bed. And I wouldn’t be alone and nothing, I’d be semen-drenched and scotch-scented under my landlady’s satiny turquoise bedspread.
Candid Camera was over now, and we drank our beers and watched some of an old Perry Mason show. A guy and girl came in and started playing the pinball machine. Dot, strangely silent, put on her glasses and picked up her knitting and sat down on the stool behind the bar.
I looked up at Warren’s profile, and something about it made me realize he wasn’t seeing Perry Mason and Della Street at all.
“Well,” he said. He drained his bottle. “You about ready, Emily?”
“Okay,” I said, and finished mine.
Dot said, “All set, kiddies? Take care,” which she always said to everybody leaving. But as we went outdoors into the afternoon-changed-to-evening, into the smell of smog and autumn, it seemed to mean more. There was a green MG parked behind the bus. Was it Valerie’s, did Warren know Valerie? Had she been the girl at the election-returns party? I felt blind panic.
Susan said, “But soy sauce doesn’t go with turkey.”
“I would like some, please, however,” Pam said. She was five, and helping us set Susan’s table for Thanksgiving dinner.
“Well,” Susan said, taking the bottle out of the cupboard and giving it to her, “I suppose it’d be like chicken chow mein. Sort of.” She opened the silverware drawer. “How many are we?” she asked herself absently, and then she seemed to remember that we were one less this year, for her roundish face flushed very pink as she counted out five forks. She wore her light-brown hair drawn back and fastened at the nape of her neck with a thong, and she looked like a Madonna.
It had been like this ever since I arrived, Susan too careful of what she said and too wary of what Pam might say. I knelt down and patted Bruce, the border collie, who was lying in the middle of the kitchen floor right in the line of our traffic. Then I noticed Pam. “My God, Susan, Pam’s drinking it!”
And she was, head tilted back, swigging soy sauce.
“I know,” Susan said, glad of the diversion. “She likes it. She also eats bouillon cubes.”
I said, “At least it’s not a sweet tooth.”
“She’s got that, too,” Susan said. “Once she wanted gingerbread and sardines for breakfast, didn’t you, you foolish child.”
We all three laughed. I got up and looked in the oven at the turkey whose golden-brown fragrance filled the entire house and even overpowered the smell of the plants—the hundreds of plants which made walking into Susan’s house like walking into a greenhouse, humid and lush.
It was about an hour’s drive from Hull to Cate. I had timorously driven up this morning, one of St. Pierre’s Bakery mince pies on the seat beside me. The road was frightening because it was fairly straight, so Massachusetts drivers still turnpike-dazed drove it far too fast, racing north; no doubt it would get more and more fast and busy as the ski season progressed. I must, I decided, figure out a back-roads route.
Sandy soil and pine trees. Billboards advertising motels, ski areas, ski shops. Then Mount Chocorua above its little lake, very beautiful. I was in the White Mountains now, but on the wrong side of the state and the wrong side of the national forest, not on the Connecticut River side which to me was the proper side because Saundersborough was there and, farther north, Thornhill. Yet the feeling of being up in the clouds was the same, the air was as clear, and I rolled down the car window and breathed it, icicle-sharp.
Everything was more barren over here, however. Cate was on a high plateau overlooked by mountain crests, not snug in the green river valley like Saundersborough and Thornhill. I came to the motels promised by the billboards; the roadside grew crowded with gift shops, restaurants, art galleries, antique shops, which Saundersborough and Thornhill had escaped until now because they weren’t quite close enough to the ski areas. Now new ski areas and A-frame developments were being built there.
Then I came to the main street of expensive clothing shops and coy country stores and real-estate offices with colonial façades. I drove past the brick high school where John, Susan’s husband, had taught math until this year, when he had become the assistant principal. I drove over a carefully preserved covered bridge, and down a long farm road. On the land between the rambling old white farmhouses many cheap little houses had been built, and some trailers had moved in, and, most recently, weekend skiers had put up A-frames and chalets. Susan and John’s rented house was one of the cheap little houses, a yellow one, looking as temporary as the trailer next door on the flat pastureland.
Postwar plywood, David used to call it. But rents were high in Cate, and the rent for this house was comparatively inexpensive, so Susan and John had found themselves staying on and on; this was their fifth year in it.
Now Pam said, “I do believe it must be time to eat, Susan.”
“Not yet,” Susan said, and Bruce barked and jumped up.
John called from the living room, where he was sharpening the carving knife out of the way of Pam and Bruce, “Your mother’s here.”
I looked through the plants in the window and saw Lucy’s pale-blue Volkswagen parked behind my car in the driveway. Lucy got out, and, laden with paper bags and a pie basket, came up the walk. We hurried outdoors, Bruce barking and jumping and wagging.
Lucy said, kissing Pam, “Good heavens, sweetheart, you smell like soy sauce.”
We unpacked things in the kitchen, and John, who was short and tough and startlingly good-looking, with tight curly black hair and long curly eyelashes, began making martinis out of the gin and vermouth one of the paper bags had contained. And there was a bowl of Lucy’s homemade cranberry sauce (David was free of that now, too, and probably having the canned jelly kind which he preferred; were he and Ann spending Thanksgiving with his folks or Ann’s folks right now? Where did Ann’s folks live?), and there was a homemade pumpkin pie, a bottle of olives, and some canned goods obviously grabbed from Lucy’s pantry—beef stew, deviled ham, ravioli. Lucy was so used to her daughters and sons-in-law being poverty-stricken on teachers’ pay that she continued to bring provisions with her when she visited and to slip us a ten-dollar bill when she left; it was a practice she’d begun when her own teacher’s pay hardly permitted it, and now, although teachers’ pay was beginning to be nearly like other people’s, it was a habit. We accepted it, because money was no longer a worry to her since her parents died.
We sat in the living room peering at each other around large plants and sipped our martinis while Pam lay on the floor with her crayons and paper, drawing weird pictures
and swigging soy sauce.
“You’ve moved the sofa,” Lucy said. “I think it was better where it was.”
Ever since Pam was born we had had Thanksgivings and Christmases in Cate. This was rather a relief to Lucy, who liked cooking special goodies but hated cooking entire meals. While we were still in elementary school, Susan and I were getting the breakfasts and suppers and packing our lunch boxes. Lucy, when inspiration struck, made things like cream puffs or apple chutney.
She was sixty-two, and no doubt would go on teaching until she was seventy; she loved it, and she loved little kids. She had taught six years before she met and married Ned, our father. Ned was still at Dartmouth then, and Lucy had moved to Saundersborough and taught there, living with my grandmother, Ned’s mother, in the white house on the tree-shaded street, and after Ned graduated and managed to find a Depression job in a sawmill, they all lived in the house. My grandmother died. There was no money, only the house, the beautiful house slowly declining, and they stayed, and I was born, Susan was born, the war was on, and Ned worked in a factory converted to defense. The war was over and Ned had a good job at a ski factory and I was eight and Susan was six, when the lumber on a flatcar he was having unloaded shifted and crushed him and two of his men to death.
Susan said, “I had to move the sofa. I had to change this room somehow after five years of its hideousness.”
“How about painting it?” Lucy said.
“It’d still be wallboard.”
Lucy said, “You haven’t found a house yet?”
“You know how it is around here, the prices are fantastic for anything we’d want.”
Lucy said, “It’s getting that way everywhere,” and crossed her nyloned legs. She always dressed very formally. Today she wore a suit of a color that was probably called toast, with a blue blouse the color of her eyes, always oddly innocent behind her glasses. Susan and I, in slacks and sweaters, felt, as usual, dowdy beside her, fashionably bell-bottomed though we were. Not only did Lucy wear this sort of clothes to school, but she also kept them on at home, girdle and all. I had seen her in full regalia, dress, earrings, brooch, heels higher than any I could bear, bustling around the kitchen, making dandelion wine.
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 4
