Vinegar Hill

by A. Manette Ansay

  “Jimmy!” Mary-Margaret says.

  James looks at Mary-Margaret uncomfortably. “Mother, he believes everything you say.”

  “Well, so do I,” Mary-Margaret says. “All that damp night air. She’ll come down with pneumonia, you wait and see. For all we know she’s lying there dead right now.”

  Herbert screams again, and Fritz gets up. “Enough!” he says, and he grabs Herbert roughly. But suddenly Mary-Margaret is there; she pulls Herbert away from Fritz and leads him back to her chair. Her voice is smooth, coaxing.

  “He’ll be quiet now, won’t you, Bertie? You’ll sit on Grandma’s lap and be Grandma’s little boy. Grandma will take care of you.”

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Fritz says, but he slumps back into his chair.

  “Herbert, you’re so stupid,” Amy says. Sometimes she hates her brother.

  “Jimmy, listen to your daughter!”

  “Quiet!” Fritz bellows, and they all are silent, staring at the TV.

  The downtown is crisp with light from the window decorations and the street lamps hung with wreaths. Ellen walks past the grocery store, the bank, the Fashion Depot, and several tiny gift shops selling Holly’s Field souvenirs. Each summer, people swarm up from Chicago to stay at the Fisherman’s Inn, to eat at the Fish Wish or the Seafood International, to hike the stone walkway out to the lighthouse and take pictures of the view. Ellen stops at the town’s only stoplight and waits for the WALK signal to flash. The fine for jaywalking is two hundred dollars. Only tourists learn the hard way.

  High on the hill, the steeple of Saint Michael’s is outlined in lights: an arm reaching toward God. Every Wednesday morning, Ellen walks her students from the school to the church for Mass. The inside is just as beautiful to Ellen now as it was when she was a child, with its carved wooden pews and reaching windows shining with stained glass. She marvels at how easy it is to believe in God when you sit in a church like St. Michael’s, breathing the smell of incense and wood, and the light warped a lovely color. Her sisters attend whenever they can; Ellen nods to them across the pews, and she smiles at her nieces and nephews, who are sitting with their own grades. Sometimes, she sees Amy and Herbert too, and then she feels that everything is as it should be. These are my children, I am their mother. But the feeling doesn’t last.

  She folds up the collar on James’s coat; she is walking hard now, swinging her arms. It feels good to move her body, to break into a sweat and flush with bright heat, her heart a steady song inside her. She spent most of her childhood working outdoors with her sisters, pulling thistles in the fields, shoveling stalls in the cow barn, carrying heavy pails of milk. Even now, her shoulders are rounded from the weight of those pails; her legs and upper arms brim with muscle. As she turns toward the lake, gusts of wind pinch her cheeks and she squints to see the moon rippling between the clouds, following beside her like a curious eye. The lake is rough, so she chooses the higher path that winds its way past the courthouse, past the band shell, past the water treatment plant, until it reaches the upper bluff park.

  Many years ago, a woman was found dead somewhere along this trail. She’d been killed by her husband, strangled with her own braided hair. People have seen her ghost here, but Ellen is not afraid. If she appears, Ellen will show her the outcropping of rock that looks like a cow, and the shadowy sumac with its soft, deer fur, and the moon’s odd dance through the clouds. She will remind her how there are so many things on the earth that are beautiful and good. Even a ghost must remember some happiness. Even in the midst of that terrible marriage, there must have been moments when she slipped away and swam naked in a nearby creek or walked along the lakefront picking up stones. The ghost will remember those quiet times; she’ll lead Ellen up the path, saying, This is where the wild strawberries grow thickest; this is where I came to braid my hair.

  But the ghost does not appear; soon Ellen has reached the upper bluff park. The trail ends beneath a clump of pines that overlooks Holly’s Field. Ellen feels the way she thinks God must feel, powerful and strong. The town below seems like a toy town: there is the fire department with its large, circular drive; there is the police station, the church, the tavern, the grocery store, and the mill. Tiny cars line the streets, tucked nose to tail, and the green paper trees are capped in white. The rows of houses twinkle with lights; each of them looks the same. If she reaches down and swings open the hinged walls, there will be the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, the cats and dogs, all with red-paint smiles. Ellen can almost believe this, standing beneath the pines.

  When she gets home, it is after nine. The house is dark; she lets herself in with James’s key from his coat pocket. The stale smell of the house swallows her in. She turns on the lights, hangs up her coat, takes off her shoes, all by rote. A toy house, she thinks, with toy children and toy mothers and fathers. She feels deliciously calm, self-centered. Her glasses fog and she takes them off, wipes them with a corner of her shirt. Without them, the room is softly blurred. She puts them back on and shapes snap into focus: couch, chair, coffee table, television, the Last Supper framed in mock gold. Jesus is stretching a hand out to Judas, who has already turned away. Ellen has often wondered what it was that Judas intended to buy with the thirty pieces of silver. Thirty pieces of silver must have been a lot of money. You could go away on thirty pieces of silver, far away, and never come back.

  But there is nowhere Ellen wants to go. James and the children are here; her mother and sisters are close by, and even though she doesn’t get to visit them often, she likes knowing that they are near. As soon as she and James have their own apartment, things will get better between them. And they’ll have visitors: Ellen’s sisters, old friends she lost track of when she moved to Illinois, new friends she and James will make together, friends of the children. She looks around the living room, realizing it won’t be difficult to move: nothing here belongs to either of them. Before they left Illinois, they’d had a huge rummage sale. After they’d sold what they could not fit in the car or send by mail, they found themselves with seven hundred dollars.

  “Think what we could do with this money,” James had said their last night in the house. They had sold their wedding bed and were lying on a pallet of blankets with the children. “We could take a trip. To Florida maybe. No snow; they say it’s cheap to live. We could get jobs—”

  “They say they need teachers in the South,” Ellen said eagerly.

  James looked at her and laughed. “You sound like you’re serious,” he said.

  “Aren’t you?”

  James stopped laughing. “Of course I’m not serious,” he said. “What could you possibly be thinking of?”

  She parts the curtains and cups her hand to the window, trying to replace the snowy pines with palm trees and hibiscus. She cannot imagine the neighbor’s Santa glowing in the warm, moist Florida night, the children growing up with tanned skin and soft southern drawls. Saint Michael’s chimes ten o’clock; she smooths the curtains closed and goes down the hall to make sure the children are sleeping. Inside their room, the air is sour. Herbert is curled up in Amy’s bed. When he hears Ellen, he sits bolt upright and turns on the small lamp beside the bed.

  “I thought you were dead,” he says. His eyes are wide and terrible.

  “I told you she wasn’t,” Amy says. Her face is in her pillow; she doesn’t move.

  Ellen picks Herbert up and carries him to his own bed. “What made you think I was dead?” she says.

  “You went out in the dark.”

  “There’s nothing in the dark that isn’t there in the light. There’s nothing to be afraid of.” She kisses him, tucks the blankets around his shoulders. “See?” She points to the lamp shade, which is decorated with angels. “Your guardian angel is watching over you, just like my guardian angel watches over me. Your guardian angel will follow you into your dreams and make them beautiful.” Her voice is low and soft, a lullaby. Already his eyes are closing.

  “What is he so afraid of?” she whis
pers to Amy. Amy still hasn’t moved; now she rolls over and stares at Ellen angrily. This child is no toy.

  “I’m not afraid,” Amy says.

  “Of what?” Ellen says. “How can I know if you won’t tell me?”

  Amy closes her eyes and does not say anything. She pulls away when Ellen kisses her good night. It is probably nothing. It is probably everything. It has been a difficult year for them all. Ellen watches her as she pretends to sleep, clutching her long braid in her fists.

  Memory

  3

  Mary-Margaret’s sister, Salome, has a marvelous way with hair. I wouldn’t dare go out of the house if it weren’t for Salome, Mary-Margaret says. Salome is a large woman, barrel-shaped and drum-hipped, with a pleasant face wrinkled as the leaves of a plant. Her swollen fingers flash and twirl through Mary-Margaret’s curls, scissoring split ends, pulling out loose hair. “It’s a gift you got,” Mary-Margaret says. “You’ve had it ever since we was girls.”

  They do not look anything like sisters. It’s a wintry Saturday afternoon, and they are in Mary-Margaret’s small kitchen, with Mary-Margaret sitting at the table and Salome standing behind her. The yellow-flowered curtains are drawn tightly closed; when the wind gusts particularly hard, they lift slightly, as if they were breathing. Salome sneaks looks at the portable TV on the counter while she divides Mary-Margaret’s hair into two crookedy sections, then divides those sections. The show on TV is a western, and the men all talk the same, look the same. Cowboys. It is difficult to find the plot, and as Salome studies the screen her wrinkled-plant face furrows deeper. She breathes heavily; she walked all the way from her apartment downtown and still hasn’t caught her breath.

  “I don’t know how you can do this right staring at the TV that way,” Mary-Margaret says. The yellow-flowered tablecloth is spread with combs, scissors, curlers, clips and bobby pins, setting solutions, a chipped hand mirror. Salome dumps a handful of tiny gray curlers into Mary-Margaret’s lap, where they whisper against one another. She rubs her swollen knuckles with Ben Gay, flexes, begins to roll the first curl. She is sixty-nine, five years older than Mary-Margaret. There is no plot to the cowboy show that she can see.

  “You were always the talented one,” Mary-Margaret says. “You were always the one to remember things. And strong! You were healthy as a horse,” Mary-Margaret says, and she shakes her head. “I was always frail.”

  “Hold still,” Salome says. She watches the TV, Ben-Gay chilling her fingers, its smell mixing with the smell of the setting solution waiting on the table, and Mary-Margaret’s gardenia perfume, and the underlying smell of the kitchen, which is stale and thick in the air. Her ankles are beginning to swell and she shifts, foot to foot.

  “I had no appetite. I would eat a chicken wing maybe, a piece of butter-bread. You ate more than the boys put together, and Mama would say how no man would want a wife bigger than he was. I was just a scrap of a thing. My health was always poor. Mama said I was slender as a willow, she called me her little willow tree.”

  “Hold still.”

  “I got colds, and flus and pleurisy. I got the chicken pox twice and I got measles and German measles and pneumonia and rheumatic fever. That’s what damaged my heart. I got to be careful of my heart, that’s what they told Mama, they said, For the rest of her life she will have to be careful. And they told God’s truth—the littlest thing and my heart does a flip-flop. Now Fritz, he has got a heart like a mule. Forty years together and there ain’t nothing I know to disturb that man. You were the same way, I remember you. Mama used to say how you had got a heart like a mule. She’d say, How’s that gal going to find herself a man with a heart like the one she’s got? I remember you, Salome, you never once got sick, you never cried, you were strong as a horse. Me, I was the sickly one, and when they told Mama I was going to live, that’s when she gave me her ring. She said, I always meant for you to get this when you were grown, but I want you to have it now.”

  Mary-Margaret fingers the ring, a gold band with a diamond chip. For all Salome can do with hair, she isn’t much for company, and the burden of conversation falls on Mary-Margaret alone. Fritz is at the Senior Citizens’ Center playing cards, Ellen has taken the kids to the supermarket, James is out of town. Mary-Margaret and Salome are alone in the house, in the yellow-flowered kitchen that Mary-Margaret has set up as best she can to resemble her mother’s kitchen. The silver is in the drawer to the left of the sink; the garbage is kept in a sealed green bucket. And the small yellow flowers are everywhere, on the curtains and tablecloth, on the crisp dish towels hanging from the oven door.

  “Remember how Mama loved buttercups?” Mary-Margaret says. “She had buttercups on her aprons and stenciled high up the walls and she stitched buttercups onto her pockets. In spring she’d fill the house with buttercups, and when I was sick she’d put buttercups in a jar of water by my bed. Or if there weren’t no buttercups, some other yellow flowers. Dandelions or paintbrush. When I got nervous upsets she dipped a buttercup in water and rubbed it under my chin and across my forehead and it made me feel cool and clean. You never got nervous upsets, you never cared about nothing, but my nerves were already frenzied when I was just a little thing. Willow tree, Mama used to say, You may bend but you won’t break, but when you and the boys and Pa slaughtered, I spent the week in bed. In winter Mama’d serve up pork pie and bacon and chops, but all I could think of was the squealing and the blood and I couldn’t eat a thing,” Mary-Margaret says.

  A gunfight breaks out on TV as Salome begins to roll the second section of curls. She pauses, mouth open. If there is a plot, she cannot find it. The two fighting are the ones she had thought were on the same side. But who can tell nowadays what side anybody’s on? Salome’s ankles are swollen over the edges of her sneakers. She shifts painfully, foot to foot.

  “I hope you got your mind on your business instead of on that TV,” Mary-Margaret says. “Do you want a chair? Those ankles look sore. I got a lady’s ankle; they haven’t swelled up on me either. The only times they swelled was the times I carried children, and let me tell you that was something awful. I swear, my ankles were swollen as melons and the color of melons too. You’re lucky you never married, you don’t know how it feels, but I tell you I don’t know how I got through it. And look, it’s almost Christmas, and Jimmy ain’t even here with me. Leaves me his wife and kids and drives away to who-knows-where. Well, let me tell you something, these here are my golden years. I don’t intend to spend my golden years baby-sitting Jimmy’s wife and kids.”

  “Hold still,” Salome says. She finishes wrapping the curls. She remembers the morning Mitch was born, the afternoon James was born. She remembers the night the others were born, twin boys, the ones who have not been mentioned since.

  “And that gal he married! She leaves him and the kids alone, and you know who has to take care of those kids? It’s yours truly, that’s who. Salome, she is like a child, now everything is Christmas, Christmas, it’s gonna be Christmas”—Mary-Margaret makes her voice pinched and high—“like a two-year-old. She goes and hangs tinsel on the TV set. You can’t see to watch with tinsel hanging there. She said it was a joke, but Fritz, he ripped it down and told her keep your jokes to yourself. I warned Jimmy what kind she was, but that’s how they reward you for all the grief you’ve gone through to raise them. They turn you a deaf ear after everything you’ve done.”

  Salome nods, intent on the TV.

  “You’re talkative today,” Mary-Margaret says. “You are about as talkative as this chair. How long do these stay in?”

  “One half hour,” Salome says. “How come you got to ask me that every time? How come you can’t remember one half hour?”

  “I never was good at remembering things,” Mary-Margaret says. “You were the one who could remember things. At school you were the smart one. Remember how you could recite the psalms? You were such a funny-looking thing, and they got you up there in front of the church to recite, I will never forget it. You had hair like a wild
mare, and it stuck straight up no matter what Mama put in it. Mama said, I can’t let you up there looking like a cyclone, and she greased it down good with bacon fat. Don’t let nobody close enough to smell you, she said, but we smelled you in the wagon and it was sweet.”

  “Tilt back your head,” Salome says. She squirts setting solution on Mary-Margaret’s hair from a small plastic bottle and checks the time.

  “The towel,” Mary-Margaret says. “I need the towel, it’s going to get in my eyes.”

  “Tilt back your head.”

  “I can’t breathe! It burns in my nose.”

  “I can’t breathe either. Keep your head back.”

  The cowboys are riding hard through the rolling hills of a prairie. In the distance is a dark speck that could be a bush or a rock or a bit of dirt on the screen but that turns out to be another cowboy. How do they know which one to chase? Fool cowboys all look the same, but this one is holding a girl, and her thin legs are like wings stuck out of the horse’s side. Salome cannot remember ever having seen a horse with wings. She has never seen a cowboy either, but they are not so different from the boys she grew up with. All of them spoke with the same flat voices. All of them looked the same way the cowboys do; there was no telling any of them apart. Hard stooped shoulders. Mean mouths.

  “You’re lucky that didn’t go in my eyes,” Mary-Margaret says. Setting solution runs down her neck; Salome blots at it with her apron. “What was that psalm you recited in front of church?”

  “Psalm sixty-nine.”

  “How did it go?”

  Salome wraps Mary-Margaret’s head in plastic. The lone cowboy is dead now, shot by the others. His chest is dark with blood that on a color screen would be red. But the color of the blood doesn’t matter; blood is blood, just like dead is dead. Salome can see on a black-and-white screen as good as on a color.

  “Save me, O God,” she says in a high school-girl voice, careful to smother her thick German accent, to pronounce her word endings and th’s, “for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing: I am come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. I am weary of my crying: my throat is dried: mine eyes fail while I wait for my God.”