One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Ruth Doan MacDougall

  While I ladled out the hard punch, and Grace ladled the soft, I remembered David’s and my going down to Lexington with Susan and John and Pam and Lucy to sort things out when Ma died. The old streets, the trees, the big white house with a vine-darkened porch. Indoors, the smell was the familiar smell of overstuffed chairs and china closets. On the hall table was the glove box which had been my great-great-grandfather’s, and beside it, as always, was the mail. A letter I had written a few days before lay on top, unopened.

  At first Lucy had broken down; no longer efficient, she wandered lost and weepy around the house. So the rest of us had had to begin making the decisions. All the things, all the things, everything Ma and Pop had treasured for sixty years together, from their wedding presents all the way to the TV tables David and I had given them their last Christmas. Sixty years of accumulation.

  I remembered how Susan and I walked through the house, Pam trotting along behind us. First hesitantly, then more courageously, we put tags on the things for Lucy and the things for ourselves. The good pieces of furniture, the books, the cut glass, the china and silverware and linen and doilies, the new vacuum cleaner Ma had just bought, the sewing machine and pictures. And we chose the things we loved, the candy dish still full of hard candies, as it always was, a fringed lamp, snapshot albums, a gold thimble, and the scrapbook of sample scraps from Ma’s wedding gown and trousseau and her bridesmaids’ dresses.

  After the divorce, I gave Susan all of my things of Ma’s. And now they would someday be Pam’s, and then Pam’s children’s.

  Grace was saying to Joanne Webster, the art teacher, “As you can see, we’re going to be having a vacancy here. You wouldn’t by any chance be looking for a new apartment?”

  “Well, yes,” Joanne said, selecting a pink petit four, “but the trouble is, I’m looking in Massachusetts, I’m going down to Massachusetts, I’ve had it here.”

  “Oh,” Grace said.

  There wasn’t any funeral; Ma hadn’t wanted one, after the ordeal of Pop’s. She was cremated, like Pop.

  I said to Grace, “There’ll be the new teachers, they’ll be frantic for apartments.”

  “I suppose.”

  And the debate continued within me: How could I bear another year in this apartment with Grace and some girl who would replace Kaykay, another year and another year and another—

  I had been extremely startled when our marriage had brought presents to Brompton. I hadn’t even thought about presents, just about living with David at last, but the presents came, from relatives, from friends of Lucy’s and friends of Ma and Pop’s. In our shabby apartment David and I would unwrap them wonderingly, a silver cake plate, towels, a bean pot, candlesticks. A silver bonbon dish, too; we’d unwrapped it, laughed and laughed, eaten our supper of tuna wiggle, and David had picked up his books and gone off to work at the gas station while I washed the dishes and settled back down at the kitchen table, which was also our desk, to do our Advanced Grammar homework.

  Bob came in as the women began to leave. “Were you surprised?” he asked Kaykay.

  “Oh, yes!” she said, although I didn’t think she really had been. “Come see everything. Good-bye, Barbara, and thank you again, good-bye, Darlene, thank you, good-bye, Cynthia, goodbye, Joanne, good-bye good-bye thank you thank you thank you.”

  When they all had left, Kaykay and Bob knelt on the rug and she showed him each present. Grace and I picked up the paper plates and crumpled napkins and began to clear off the counter. Grace ate one of the leftover sandwiches and stood watching them.

  I looked around the avocado kitchen, seeing instead our funny kitchen in Brompton, where the sink was tacked with an oilcloth skirt and the refrigerator wore its motor on top.

  I made a drink and wished that Cliff would hurry up and arrive as he’d promised. All at once I wanted desperately to get out of here.

  “Let’s leave the dishes,” I said to Grace. “I’ll do them tomorrow.”

  There was a knock on the door, and Cliff came in. “How’d it go?”

  I said, “Fine, lots of loot.” We kissed.

  “Come see!” Kaykay said, and he went over and admired everything. He took a swallow of my drink and asked, “Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, and then I did. Someplace not white and silver; someplace dark and dingy. “Let’s go to Dot’s, I haven’t been there for months.”

  “Lord, I haven’t been there in a year. All right, Dot’s it is.”

  We finished my drink. As I put on my jacket, Kaykay looked up from studying a casserole dish and said, astonishingly, “Kind of depressing, isn’t it?”

  Bob said, “Well, thanks a heap.”

  “Oh, you know what I mean,” she said. “Can we come along with you two?”

  “Sure,” we said. I said to Grace, “Come with us.”

  After a moment, Grace said, “Thanks, but I’ll stay here.”

  Kaykay said, “Do you mind the mess, Grace? I’ll pack it tomorrow morning.”

  “No, I don’t mind,” Grace said.

  We followed Bob’s car. The cool June evening. Downtown was still busy with the last of the Friday-night shoppers, the neon signs brilliant in the twilight.

  Even though classes were over at UNH, Dot’s was jumping, the jukebox bellowing, the pinball machine crashing, actors roaring accusations at each other from the television, and people yelling and laughing.

  “Hi, kiddies!” Dot shouted. “Jesus Christ, Emily and Kaykay, I was beginning to think you’d left town. Hi there, Bob, hi”—she paused only briefly before she came up with his name—“hi there, Cliff. Buds for everyone?”

  She tramped out to the kitchen, and we sat at the bar. “My God,” Cliff said. “She remembered my name.”

  I said, “She’s a computer bank of names, I’ve seen her greet old alumni like they were just in here the day before,” and over the noise there was the high shrill bark of a puppy. Tiny and black, it emerged from under a booth and bobbed and barked at the occupants, demanding attention.

  Dot plunked down our Budweisers. “Anybody want a glass?”

  “No, that’s fine,” we said.

  I said, “Whose puppy is that?”

  “You want one?” she asked. “Larry over there, the kid with the mustache and the striped pants, the fellow he works for was going to drown them—”

  “Oh, no!” Kaykay cried.

  I said, “Them?” and then saw another puppy, blond, sound asleep in the corner.

  “So Larry took them,” Dot said, “and now he’s trying to give them away. Want one?”

  Cliff glanced at me. A puppy; he was offering me a puppy, too, as well as North Riverton.

  I said, “My sister has a border collie. Do you like border collies?” and I remembered how once I had seen a flock of grackles land in the field across the road from Susan’s house and Bruce jump up from the doorstep, check the road, and dash across to chase them. The grackles flew away, yet Bruce kept running. The sun was shining on the green field, and Bruce was running, no reason for his running now except pleasure, a gay rhythmic lope, beautiful, which sang that he did not know there was anything else but life.

  Cliff said, “Yes, I like border collies, we had a couple when I was a kid.”

  Bob said, “Hey, Dot, how about a bag of Beer Nuts?”

  She yanked one off the display card. “The wedding must be almost any day now, huh?”

  “The twentieth,” Kaykay said. “The day after school’s over.”

  Dot said, “Well, if I don’t see you before, I wish you all the happiness in the world.” She said this formally. Then she looked at Cliff and me speculatively.

  “Another Pabst, Dot!” somebody yelled.

  The closer the time came, the more I didn’t want to go to Brompton for Kaykay’s wedding, not even with Cliff as a buffer against our years there.

  The black puppy pranced over to investigate us, and Kaykay picked him up. She and Bob began talking about Witherell; they had take
n jobs there and found an apartment. She was saying, “And if we like the jobs, we’ve got to buy a house. I hate to rent, it’s such an awful waste of money, and unless it’s a new apartment, there’s the mess people leave and you find their bobby pins in the dust.”

  Cliff’s hands, the hands like David’s, toyed with his beer bottle, making thumbprints on its coldness. “My mother phoned tonight,” he said. “She and my father have pretty much come to a decision. They’re going to move into town. She says she’s fed up with being stuck out in the country, she wants a smaller house she can take care of more easily and have a new stove and all that and visit her friends in town and everything, but I think the real reason is that the place has got too much for my father.”

  “Oh, Cliff, I’m sorry.”

  “She wanted to know if I wanted to live there. If not, they’ll rent it.” He gave me a cigarette. “We could live there, Emily.”

  I said, “I have a thing about cigarettes, I like to light my own.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  The match he tossed at the grimy ashtray ignited a strand of red cellophane. I poured beer on it. “I don’t know,” I said. I felt very brave, and continued, “I don’t like chairs pulled out for me, either, and I hate to wait while you open a door for me, it makes me feel like a well-trained dog. Which that one isn’t,” I said. The blond puppy had awakened and was creating a small puddle.

  “You little bastard!” Dot bellowed, and rushed out from behind the bar waving paper towels. “Larry, this damn puppy of yours—”

  Kaykay said, “Dot, you’re scaring him,” and handed Bob the black puppy and slid down off the barstool and scooped up the blond puppy just as Dot started shoving his nose in the puddle. “It’s all right,” Kaykay crooned, “she’s a meanie, you’ll learn, won’t you, sweetie?”

  Cliff said, “All you had to do was say so,” and watched me light my cigarette. My diversion was ended. He said, “What about the house?”

  The house I’d sought in Thornhill. And Susan had said that of course I must take back my things of Ma’s whenever I wanted, she would just look after them, I could get them and probably his mother would leave some things of hers or his grandparents’ and they would merge, and we would have a home and a tradition. No more mock-traditional furniture in a brick-faced building surrounded by other brick-faced buildings overlooking the Miracle Mile.

  And North Riverton was in the part of New Hampshire I liked best, and he was the teacher I liked best to work with, so why wasn’t I saying okay?

  He said, “As my mother pointed out, the place’ll be mine someday, anyway.”

  “Do they really want to move?”

  “Yes. I believe they really do.” He made another thumbprint. “We’d keep it just the way it is, we’d never sell any of it.”

  Kaykay was back on the barstool. Stroking her puppy, she leaned around Bob who was stroking the black puppy, and said, “Emily, what do you think, how long should I work before we have a baby?”

  “Good Lord, I don’t know.”

  “I think a year,” she said. “Bob thinks two years.”

  Bob said, “And that means it’ll be a year.”

  I hadn’t mentioned Cliff’s proposal to Kaykay or Grace, but Kaykay had seen me studying the application form and asked me what school it was for, and now she said suddenly, “You two, what you ought to do is get married and have a baby and stop all this nonsense, like us.”

  Bob said, “For God’s sake, Kathleen Harrison, mind your own business.”

  “A baby?” I said. I looked at Cliff, stupefied.

  He said, “Maybe I’m too elderly.” He was, I’d learned, thirty-four, a year older than David.

  Bob guffawed. “Hey, Dot, how about another round and some more Beer Nuts, and haven’t you got some milk or something for the puppies?”

  While he and Cliff argued over who was paying this round and Kaykay set a bowl of milk on the floor, I tried to sort my thoughts out of a strange tranquillity spreading over me. A baby. I had never ever wanted a baby. Back then, it would have been a nuisance, like unwanted company, when all I wanted was David, and it would have interfered with writing. Now? Why not now? I could stay home and be married and have a baby to take care of. I thought of Ann carrying David’s.

  Cliff looked up at the television and hummed, “Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh.” Then he said, “I gather if you didn’t have any, you don’t want any.”

  “Do you?”

  “It’d be okay with me.”

  We wouldn’t sell any of the farm, and someday it would be the baby’s, even if it had to be only a summer place.

  What would Cliff and I look like, all mixed up together?

  “When?” I said.

  “Whenever you want. Never, if you don’t want.” He laughed and said, “What a peculiar place to be having this discussion,” and we listened to the pandemonium around us.

  For the first time in my life I tried to picture myself pregnant. A taut balloon. Inside me, something from a physiology book, a polliwog growing eyes and arms and toenails. Once Pam asked Susan, “When I was in your tummy, did I get food on my face when you ate?” I thought of the new clothes I could buy, those mysterious skirts with elastic pouches. I thought of baby things to buy, and remembered saving up enough money to buy Susan, for Pam, an electric food warmer decorated with a picture of Little Miss Muffet and an amiable spider.

  David and I had driven over to the Cate hospital to see Susan and the pink bundle named Pamela. On the bedside table, among the gifts of flowers and frilly little dresses and bonnets, was a copy of Good-bye to All That, Robert Graves’s book about World War I. I’d said, “What on earth is this doing here?” and Susan laughed. “The trenches,” she said. “To put things in perspective. John read it to me while I was in labor.”

  And I remembered a couple of years later, Susan and I were shopping in Cate’s colonial-façaded supermarket, and she said, “I never thought I’d be lugging around crayons and dog biscuits in my pocketbook.” She smiled her sweet smile, but her tone was bleak. The shopping cart contained Pam, short legs dangling, as well as groceries. Abruptly, Susan halted the cart beside a table of geraniums for sale. Red geraniums. She looked at them for a long time. “When I was in the fifth grade,” she said at last, “my school desk was near the windows and every day I sat and watched a geranium dying beside me. Finally I couldn’t stand it and sneaked it home in my lunch box. Remember? Lucy gave me holy hell and made me apologize to Miss Wheeler, but Miss Wheeler said that if I could revive it, I could keep it. It revived. I was mighty proud.” And what revived at that moment was her interest in plants, for she bought two geraniums, and from then on it was her passion, she studied plants, she saved every spare cent to buy plants, and she manufactured a new Susan who was not merely Pam’s mother, Bruce’s mistress, John’s wife. Susan was plants.

  Now Kaykay, having watched the puppies lap milk, let them scamper off and hoisted herself up on the stool. “Does everyone get panicky and depressed and all that, just before they get married? Did you?” she asked me. She reached for her beer. I’d never until now seen Kaykay blush. She said hastily, “I mean, it’s stupid, here I’ve known this idiot two years, I certainly know what I’m getting into—”

  “So do I,” Bob said, grinning, and Kaykay said, “Oh, go to hell, it’s just all of a sudden I don’t know—I want, I want—I don’t know. Those damn casserole dishes. Thank you again for the Galloping Gourmet’s cookbook, Emily; if it had been A Hundred and One Ways to Cook Hamburg, I’d’ve burst into tears.” She brightened. “Look at him.” The black puppy had come back and was licking her toes in her sandals.

  She picked him up. “I’ll be all right once the wedding’s over with, I’ll be all right.”

  When we left, the black puppy left with Kaykay and Bob. They drove off to Bob’s apartment.

  What am I going to do? I thought, as we drove along Main Street, the stores dark and silent now. Everything was dark.
We drove up the one-way street between the factories, and nothing was alive but the lunch wagon, a rattletrap van parked in an alley, where people from the bars down the side streets waited in line for sobering-up food. FRENCH FRIES 19¢ STEAMED HOT DOGS 25¢. Cliff swore, and stepped on the brake. Out in front of us lurched a thin man followed by a fat woman wearing a ragged cardigan over a cotton dress. The man was shoving a hot dog into his mouth, and in his other hand he gripped a greasy paper bag, and the woman was screaming at him. “You asshole!” she screamed. “Can’t you wait till we get home?” He opened the bag and took out another hot dog and crammed that into his mouth, and she kept screaming, “You fucking asshole!” as they staggered down the dark street past the old brick factories.

  Champagne, at last. So very much champagne. Kaykay had said, “The biggest sum of money spent for my sister’s wedding was spent on oceans of champagne, that’s what made it such a huge success, and that’s the way mine’s going to be.” It was, although to me, terrified of making a mistake, the ceremony itself was a hushed white-and-yellow trance, and even immediately afterward I couldn’t remember anything about it except the one real thing that happened, the little flower girl’s keeling over in a faint, and the instant reaction of her mother, Kaykay’s sister, the matron of honor. She dropped her bouquet and picked up the child and handed her to her husband, who came running from a pew and took her outside, all so swiftly and quietly that Kaykay in front of us, eyes on the minister, didn’t know what happened until we told her later. Which proved that Kaykay too was in a trance; would the ceremony be to her as dim a memory as a performance in a senior play in high school?

  But at the reception in the Twombly Park Clubhouse, there were the oceans of champagne, and people drank and danced and drank and drank and drank, and the flower girl contentedly munched wedding cake. Grace, very flushed, danced with ushers and with Kaykay’s father. And I danced with Cliff, great exaggerated swooping glides around the room, and we laughed and laughed at each other. The afternoon was hot, and the smell of heated deodorant mingled with the smell of flowers and perfume.