I called, “Lucy?”
“Emily?” Her voice came from upstairs. I went into the front hallway, which was the same as ever, furled umbrellas, walking sticks, the deacon’s bench and telephone table dark under the stairway; but on the hall table was my great-great-grandfather’s glove box that used to be on Ma’s hall table.
Lucy rushed down the stairs. “Darling, how wonderful!”
We kissed, and I said, “Cliff brought me, Cliff Parker, the guy I wrote you I’ve been going out with.”
She was wearing one of her summertime-vacation-time outfits, but her usually crisp blouse was limp with heat, and there were streaks of dust on her linen skirt. Her face was shiny with perspiration; her hands trembled.
“How wonderful,” she said. “How wonderful.”
As we went into the living room, Cliff turned from looking at the mantelpiece photographs.
She was startled by his beard, not so frequent a sight here as down around Hull. I hadn’t thought to mention it, but I myself was startled that she showed her reaction. “Cliff,” she said, and held out her hand, then noticed the dust on it and laughed shakily. This wasn’t all caused by the beard. “We’d better not shake hands, had we? I’m covered with dust, but I’m so glad to meet you.”
Cliff said, “And I’m very glad to meet you.”
She said, “Kaykay’s wedding was today, wasn’t it? How did it go?”
“Just fine,” I said.
“Have you been here long? I was up in the attic, then I thought I heard someone calling—”
I said, “This isn’t exactly the sort of weather to be up in a hot attic, is it?”
“I wanted to get some things done—come, let’s go out to the kitchen and find ourselves a cold drink, and I’ll wash up.” This reminded her; she was definitely rattled, or she would’ve mentioned it sooner, for, after years of children’s bladders, she always immediately offered company the bathroom, mortifying Susan and me. She said, “Do you want to wash your hands, Cliff? The bathroom’s upstairs.”
“Thank you,” he said, and went into the hallway while Lucy and I went out to the kitchen. She said, “There’s some bitter lemon in the icebox.”
Since when had she started drinking bitter lemon instead of tonic? “No, there isn’t,” I said. “I’ll check the pantry, you probably forgot to put it in,” and in the pantry there was a warm six-pack of bitter lemon sitting on the breadboard.
Lucy brushed at her skirt, her dusty hands making more streaks. “Well, with ice cubes, it’ll be cold enough.”
“You’re just getting more dust all over you,” I said. What the hell was the matter with her? “You’d better wash up first, then use the clothes brush.” I went back into the pantry and found the clothes brush where it always was, dangerously mixed in the clutter of shoe brushes and shoe polish on a bottom shelf.
She dried her hands. “How long can you stay?”
“Oh, we’ll have to leave soon.” For where? I yanked the ice tray out of the refrigerator; it was a fiendish ice tray, and I slammed it around in the sink and turned on the hot water, the only way I’d ever been able to part it from its cubes. “How are things in town? What’s new?”
“Carol’s youngest boy fell out of a tree and broke his arm. He was building a tree house. Remember when you and Susan built a tree house out back?”
“Susan did most of the building. I decorated.”
She said, “He seems a nice boy, Emily.”
“I thought you said he was a classroom disruption.”
“Not Carol’s youngest. Cliff.”
“Cliff. Yes, he is.”
She removed her glasses, patted her face with a Kleenex, and took a little folder of glasses-cleaning tissues from where it always lay on the kitchen table near the pepper mill and the salt shaker which had rice added to its salt every summer to combat humidity. She tore off a tissue and rubbed her glasses. When I was little, I hadn’t liked to see her do this, to see her face unfamiliar without her glasses, and even now I glanced away, but not before I saw how the violet wrinkles beneath her eyes sagged with tiredness. I was shocked.
I said, “Are you sure you should work at the summer session and take that course this summer? Why don’t you have a real vacation for a change?”
She put on her glasses. “I’m going to.”
“What? Well, that’s marvelous.”
“Emily, you know Mildred died four years ago. Sinclair’s wife.”
Sinclair Flanders was the lawyer who had married us. “Yes,” I said. “Remember those Christmas cakes she used to make and give for presents, snowballs, that’s what she called them, angel cake and whipped cream and lemon gelatin all mixed up and rolled in coconut—”
She said, very fast, “I planned to phone you, and phone Susan, tomorrow, and tell you now that it’s settled. Sinclair and I are getting married July eleventh.”
The gin bottle was Gilbey’s, frosted, not smooth, so it didn’t quite slip out of my grasp.
Cliff came into the kitchen. “There you are,” he said.
I said, “Gin and bitter lemon?” and handed Lucy and him each a glass. “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.” I went out through the dining room and living room to the hallway and up the stairs.
The attic door was ajar. I climbed the attic stairs into hotness so intense it was almost visible. Sweat poured down me. Lucy had forgotten to turn off the attic light, something she would scold us for. I smelled mothballs.
When we used to play here, there was one trunk that was always locked. Lucy’d said she had lost the key. A big trunk, tantalizing, a mystery, though Lucy told us it contained only her old school books. It was open now, and in the cartons surrounding it on the dusty floor were its contents. Not school books.
Ned’s clothes. I tried to remember noticing their disappearance from the closet in the big bedroom, but I couldn’t. Everything else downstairs had remained the same—the pictures, his own books, boyhood books, school books, yearbooks, his skis and snowshoes and fishing gear and guns—all at first reminding, but then with the years becoming again part of the house.
Shirts, trousers, socks, underwear, pajamas. His fishing hat, the old floppy hat with flies still stuck in its sweatband. I picked up his canvas jacket and thought that very faintly through the smell of mothballs I could smell fly dope.
There were slow footsteps on the attic stairs.
I said, “Why did you stay in Saundersborough? You could have gone home to Lexington.”
She said, “I could have gone anywhere, Emily. It wouldn’t have made any difference where I was.”
We stood in the suffocating heat. Then I put the jacket back in the carton, and she knelt to fold it more neatly.
She said, “But you and Susan. You were so young. I thought that leaving Saundersborough would truly kill him for you, and I didn’t want that.”
“This heat,” I said. “Let’s go downstairs.”
She still fussed with the jacket. “I’ve never been on an airplane, I got thinking in case something happened I should clean out this trunk so you or Susan wouldn’t have to do it.”
“Airplane?”
“We’re going to England and the Continent, three weeks of rushing around being tourists. We decided we might as well; it’s now or never.” She stood up.
I said, “I left Thornhill.”
Practical, she said in her old matter-of-fact way, “You could hardly have stayed, could you? You wanted a job; did you want to take over the English position David vacated?”
“Lucy. You knew he was in Pleasantfield!”
“I met his mother once downtown, and she mentioned it. He’s bought a house.” She scrutinized me. “How did you know?”
“I met him by accident, this spring. Flying a kite at the beach.”
“I see.”
“He asked after you. He’s bought a house?”
“Yes,” she said. “He’s not starting afresh, Emily. It’s impossible. But he must have found it necessary to conti
nue differently. Mercy, this heat!”
We went down the stairs, and she turned off the light and closed the door. She said, “You left Thornhill. Did it make any difference?”
“I’ve got to go in here, I’ll be right down.”
In the bathroom, I looked at my face in the mirror. My summer face. Freckles. I seemed to be breeding more and more freckles as I grew older. Living in North Riverton, I would find more freckles each summer when I looked in the mirrors at Cliff’s farmhouse, freckles and summers, summers of gardens, as at Thornhill, summers of suppers on the porch, summers of hikes and fishing and picnics. It would all be the same as Thornhill, except for the house and a baby. Except for Cliff.
Out in the hall, I paused at the doorway of my bedroom, but I didn’t go in. I could see my little desk, where long ago I had sat and written poems to David, poems with too many words like “silver” and “mist” and “bamboo.”
Downstairs, Lucy and Cliff were sitting at the kitchen table, discussing remedial reading. The ice cubes in my glass on the sink counter had melted.
I asked, “Where will you live when you come home?”
“Here,” she said. “Sinclair sold his house three years ago, and he bought one of those chalets in that new development, but he’s pretty disappointed with it, in the winter it leaks from backed-up snow on the roof, and anyway, I refuse to live in a chalet. Holiday homes,” she snorted.
I said, “Lucy’s getting married, Cliff,” trying to recall who Sinclair and Mildred’s children were, a boy and girl much older than I.
“Just a small ceremony,” she said. “We’d like you and Susan to come, if you don’t mind seeing a couple of old fools—”
“Naturally, I’m coming,” I said.
“What fine news,” Cliff said to Lucy, but he was looking at me. “My best wishes.” He raised his glass, and I sensed he was going to say something about our getting married.
His brown-and-gray curls, tousled from the swim; his blue eyes smiling. I could not make him into David. I must not try. He was not David. It would always be wrong because he was not David.
“No,” I said to him. “No.”
“What?” Lucy said, puzzled, and I quickly lifted my glass, but I couldn’t think of a proper toast, so I said, “Happy days.”
“Thank you, darling,” she said. “Now, can’t you stay for supper? I was going to have some consommé, and I believe there’s some cheese—”
Cliff got up and put his glass in the sink.
Lucy said, “We could make Welsh rabbit, or is it too hot?”
I said, “We have to be starting back.”
“Back to Hull?” Cliff said.
I said, “If you want to go on to North Riverton, I can get back somehow myself.”
“There’s no point in my going alone, is there? I can just as well telephone.”
His voice was quiet, polite.
Lucy, watching us, said, “What are your plans for the summer, Emily? Are you going to write? If you want to stay here—”
“Thank you,” I said, and used the first excuse that occurred to me, “but I’ve got summer school, I’m taking a couple more courses.”
She beamed. “Are you really? Have you applied to graduate school so they’ll count toward a master’s? Let’s see, you’ve got six credits already, and if you take two courses this summer and one each semester for—”
I kissed her. “But I’ll be up July eleventh. What should I wear?”
“Oh, any summer dress. Maybe not so short as the one you’re wearing? Cliff, it’s good to have met you.”
We went out to the car, and I remembered to look back and wave at her as we drove off.
Cliff’s knuckles were white knobs. We drove in silence. My teeth were clenched so tight I couldn’t have spoken. He didn’t take any back roads, but drove directly south and got on the new turnpike east to Concord. Darkness came.
We were nearly back to Hull before he said, explosively, “Jesus Christ, Emily, Jesus Christ.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, I who knew that this was beyond apology.
We drove up the prism-colored Miracle Mile. It was frantic with traffic; the discount department stores were still open, their parking lots jammed with cars. The enormous Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket spun hypnotically, inviting us all to come in.
When he stopped the car in front of my building, we sat for a moment. He said, “Divorce is not death. Is it going to take you twenty years, like your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
He got out and gave me my suitcase and garment bag. I went indoors, hearing the car drive away.
Grace was watching television and eating a beet sandwich. “Hi,” she said. “Everything went off well, didn’t it? Even the flower girl—”
I stood and looked at the furniture which was not mine. Here I was.
I remembered how when Pop died, Ma left his room the way it had been, and in the living room his pipes still rested on the mantelpiece, and his armchair was still slick with their ashes.
I remembered our living room in Thornhill, the roll-top desk, the old sofa, the faded carpet, the walls of books.
I looked at the mock-traditional furniture, and everything seemed to stand out like those cut-out scenes I used to have when I was a kid; you unfolded them, and the trees and people popped up each alone against the background.
It didn’t matter where I was.
I went into my bedroom and lifted the banjo out of the case. I began to play, listening to the clear high hiccup of the fifth string ringing.
The next day, after Grace had left for the car wash and her Sunday dinner, I went out to the Falcon. I’d studied the route to Pleasantfield so often I didn’t have to get out the map to check it. I drove through scrubby woods, past the outskirts of poor towns. It was such dismal country; why had David come here?
While I drove I thought about how I had been when I first arrived in Hull and wondered what I’d be like now if I hadn’t met Warren and Cliff.
At the sign for Pleasantfield, I turned off the road and drove along the main street. There were some houses which needed repainting, a dirty gas station, a general store with a beer and ale sign. And there was the school, a yellow clapboard building and a playground of empty swings and jungle gyms.
I drove back to the general store and sat, getting up courage to go in. When I did, I saw a telephone on the wall, and a phone book. Lewis, David E. The E meant Edward. 37 Warner Street.
“May I have a pack of Pall Malls, please?” I said to the man across the counter stacked with Sunday newspapers. “And could you tell me where Warner Street is?”
“First street on your left, young lady.”
“Thank you. And the school down the road, is that the high school?”
“It used to be, but it’s just the elementary school now.”
“Where’s the high school?”
“Out there on the main road. Keep on going half a mile, you can’t miss it. It’s one of them fancy ones. There’s what they call the middle school, and there’s the high school.”
“Thank you.”
I sat in the car and lit a cigarette. I would look at the high school first, and maybe that would be enough.
I drove on, and when I saw the sign BLUE POND REGIONAL, I knew immediately why David had come here. I parked in the driveway and looked at the spread of buildings, all brick and glass. I had heard of Blue Pond Regional. It was the sort of school you heard about, very experimental, so experimental for the towns it served that it was very controversial as well. An open-concept school, I remembered. Few walls, and the kids did a lot of sitting around on floors. Independent study. The teacher could decide whether or not his class should meet. The nucleus of the school was the library—no, not “library” but “learning center.”
I looked at the school, trying to remember everything I’d heard. Here David came every day and was allowed to teach the way he wanted to teach and allowed to wear whatever he wanted to wear. How he used
to hate having to wear a jacket and tie. I wondered what the teachers’ room was like. A far cry from the boiler room at Thornhill, no doubt. Maybe it even was carpeted. Did Ann pack him a sandwich, as I had, or did he nowadays buy his lunch in the cafeteria? All the Spam sandwiches I’d made.
Seeing this wasn’t enough, of course. I drove back to the main street and turned onto a street of old houses. I counted house numbers until ahead there were cars parked everywhere and I smelled hamburgers grilling on a barbecue. I parked where I was hidden by all the cars.
On the side lawn of an old cape, people were playing badminton, small children were playing croquet while a frenzied dog darted among them after the balls, and other people milled around drinking beer and eating hamburgers and hot dogs. David, beer in one hand, spatula in the other, presided at the grill. He was wearing a T-shirt and Bermudas. I’d never been able to talk him into buying Bermudas; he’d thought his legs looked ridiculous. There was Ann, more pregnant than ever, at the picnic table, spooning macaroni salad onto a paper plate for a little boy.
A party to celebrate the end of school. Teachers and their families, come one, come all.
I considered the cape, the motley patches of shingles where the roof had been mended at different times during the years, the paint flaking off the clapboards, and I saw that David had begun what would probably be his summer project, scraping and repainting.
He had always been so wary of buying a house. I remembered a party at the shop teacher’s house in Thornhill; people were talking about buying homes, and David, drinking beer, was saying to an earnest social studies teacher, “Think of the upkeep. There’ll be a leak in the attic or rot in the sills or rewiring for a clothes dryer, there’ll be ten million things. Just ask me, I know all about it.”
One Minus One (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries) Page 16
