Sun poured through the slider and lay in her hair. “You know why this was done, don’t you?
“Yes, ma’am, I do.”
Chick, in a voice marked with doubt and disappointment, said to her, “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Do I, John?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ll never have to worry about me.”
She opened the slider for air. “Some cleaning up to do here, John. Also a disposal problem. May we leave it in your hands?”
“I’ll take care of everything,” he said flatly.
Chick ejected the clip from the pistol and wiped the weapon with a paper towel. “While you’re at it, John, get rid of this..”
“See you back in Lawrence,” Chick said with a glance at Louise. “Yes, eventually,” she said.
Chick left by the front door, and she departed by way of the deck, beneath which she paused to let a sickness pass.
Ben Baker stood as if catatonic on the edge of an interstate highway, where the traffic could deafen a person, and was nearly swept away by a fifty-thousand-pound rig that roared by at a fantastic speed. Youths in an open car swerved into the breakdown lane and threw empty beer bottles at him. None hit him, but some shattered nearby. A priest in a car bearing New York plates offered him a ride, but something in the clergyman’s manner alerted him.
He began walking again, unsure whether he was going west or east, toward Mallard Junction or away from it. His silk ascot had loosened and fluttered outside his shirt like a little bird under his chin. He was tramping over grass now, ignoring the vibrations from the highway, the chaos in his head, the weariness in his legs. He concentrated only on forging ahead while cursing the greatest injustice in life: loss. When his feet refused another step, he took deep breaths and stared at the river of traffic as if waiting for the strength and the proper moment to plunge into it.
He did not see the red pickup truck gliding toward him, half on the grass, two faces swimming in the sunstruck windshield. Not until the truck pulled alongside him in a small fluster of dust did his eyes fly up. Mrs. Mennick’s face poured out the passenger window.
“Thank God we found you, Mr. Ben.”
The door winged open, and Mrs. Mennick’s reedy legs dangled free, then the rest of her, like a large ball ready to bounce at him. He stood stationary, the greater part of him paralyzed by fatigue. “Lou’s gone,” he said simply.
Mrs. Mennick approached him with arms ready to reach out, as if she thought he might bolt. “No, Mr. Ben. We heard all about it. It was Bonnie Snell got killed. You remember her.”
The name Bonnie Snell no longer meant anything to him. He watched Mrs. Mennick’s brother climb out of the other side of the truck and stand motionless with a face totally bare of expression, which he found vaguely unsettling.
Mrs. Mennick said, “How did you get here, all this way?”
Walked. How else could he have got here? He had walked and walked. When she asked whether he had planned to do anything foolish, he did not reply, as if he were beyond explanation. When she reached for his hand, he recoiled.
“Don’t you want to go home, Mr. Ben?”
“No,” he said.
She looked around. “I need your help, Howard.”
Together they forced him into the cab of the truck, where he sat scrunched between them, his nostrils filled with the fertilizer smell of Howard’s clothes. He took an elbow in the stomach when Howard shoved the gearshift into drive with unnecessary force, and he nearly fell into Mrs. Mennick’s arms when the truck lurched onto the highway. It sped from one lane into another.
“Take it easy,” Mrs. Mennick said, and Howard flipped her a look of disgust.
“You care more about him than you do your own,” he said.
“We both live pretty well off them, remember that,” she countered easily.
He hunched over the wheel. “It’s more than that with you.”
“Think what you like, Howard, but where would your business be without Mrs. Baker?”
Ben, listening, said, “I know what you two are saying.”
“No, you don’t,” Mrs. Mennick said, stroking his head. “That’s the problem, Mr. Ben. You really don’t.”
• • •
Emma Goss walked the length of Mount Vernon Street, something she had not done in years. She avoided the voices of children, but with a boldness that sent a chill into her ankles she nodded to the man watering his patch of lawn and went out of her way to speak to the woman checking her mailbox. The woman, who twice a year knocked on doors for local charities, responded perfunctorily, “And how are you, Mrs. Foss?” Emma did not correct her.
Wind chimes sounded from a front porch, though she was unaware of a breeze. Two boys oblivious of her drifted by on bicycles, their language foul, which did not bother her. She felt there was nothing she could not push out of her mind. The only real bother was her body, for no matter how many times she bathed she did not feel clean.
At the end of Mount Vernon, corner of South Broadway, she entered the drugstore, where early in their marriage Harold had bought condoms, a month’s supply at a time, which would last a year, not because he had lacked ardor, but because he had been a pinchpenny and washed them out after use. When she had learned where he was buying them, she stayed away out of embarrassment, despite her craving for the sweets at the soda fountain. Now, surely, it was safe.
But nothing was the same. She remembered space, and there was none. Instead she found herself poking claustrophobically between tall displays of brightly packaged products that had a tinselly smell.
Gone, or at least hidden from view, was the mammoth penny scale on which she had weighed herself, always with anxiety immediately justified by the reading. She lifted her nose. Gone was the intoxicating scent of chocolate.
“May I help you, ma’am?”
The voice was a boy’s, so handsome he was, with glossy black ringlets fringing his forehead and eyelashes so long she imagined herself brushstroked in his gaze. He stood in a vanilla jacket behind a glass counter, innocence in his early adolescent eyes. Moving toward him, she saw herself in the mirror behind him and wished she had done something with her hair, which was a fright, and had worn a different dress. The one she had on looked as if it had been passed on to her.
“I don’t see the fountain,” she said, and the boy screwed up his Byronic face.
“Ma’am?”
“The soda fountain,” she said, her eyes shooting here and there, but she could not remember where it had been situated. Everything had been rearranged and juggled, and too much was in the way.
The boy said, “No soda fountain here.”
She pointed. “There. I think it was there.”
The proprietor peeked out from the back room. He had cropped silver hair, a crimped forehead, and a warm voice. “Twenty-five years ago at least,” he said, “I had it taken out.”
“It seems only yesterday I — ” she murmured, and stopped.
“That’s the way it goes,” he said, smiling. “When you’re young time floats. Then it flies.” He paused. “Sorry about your husband.”
He recognized her, remembered her after all these years, and she flushed, half with pleasure and half with embarrassment, and remembered she had never been totally indifferent to his smile. Turning quickly to the boy, she said, “I’d like some aspirin, please.”
The proprietor said, “Good to see you again.”
Trees were dropping their shadows when she trekked up Mount Vernon Street with a lighter lift to her step and with her mind reaching far back to better days, though for the first time in her life she questioned whether they had been that good. Had her parents not been so protective, she might have had choices beyond Harold, and had Harold not feared the expense of fatherhood she might have had a daughter to warm these late years. Had things been different she might even have learned to drive an automobile. As she neared the Whipples’ house, she heard the clip of high heels in the driveway and then, plainly Mrs.
Whipple’s voice.
“Good to see you out and about, Mrs. Goss.”
She immediately felt shabby and humble against the gloss of Mrs. Whipple, whose gray-blond hair had just been done and whose summery dress was conspicuously expensive. Her sense of uncleanliness intensified from a whiff of Mrs. Whipple’s scent. Silver car keys dangled from Mrs. Whipple’s hand.
“I’m out to do a little shopping. Then I’m meeting my husband for dinner at Bishop’s. Have you eaten there, Mrs. Goss?”
She shook her head. She had never set foot in the place, but she knew that Harold had occasionally lunched there with men from his department and brought leftovers home in a distinctive doggy bag. Mrs. Whipple seemed to be circling her, floating around her in a scent of Estee Lauder and viewing her from all angles with curiosity and amusement.
“The food’s fabulous. You ought to get that handsome nephew of yours to take you.”
Emma recoiled as if a pin had been pressed into her face. It was not the tone of Mrs. Whipple’s voice, but something in the eyes, an insinuation, as if she, Emma, had a taste for the shameful.
Mrs. Whipple said quickly, “Was there a ruckus around here late last night? Something woke my daughter.”
Emma stood utterly motionless, with no feeling in her face, and chose ambiguity over a lie. She watched Mrs. Whipple bounce a hand over her hair.
“The whole neighborhood’s getting noisier. I suppose it can’t be helped. It’s getting younger, have you noticed?”
“Yes, it’s inevitable,” Emma said in a rush of breath, glad to have said something, proving that she had a voice, a thought, an opinion. That she was more than a widow and a victim. “I must be going,” she said.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Whipple, gazing over at Emma’s house. Henry was in a window, his good hand pressed against a pane as if he meant to push it out. “Your nephew looks impatient.”
With no fear in her face but with a drag to her step, she entered the house through the breezeway and averted her eyes from the mess in the kitchen. Henry confronted her near the bathroom.
“You could have at least told me you were going out.”
“I don’t have to tell you anything,” she said.
“I’m burning up, Mrs. Goss.” His voice was a whine. “Feel me,” he pleaded, and she clamped a hand over his brow and felt the heat.
“Good,” she said with her first smile in a long time.
Louise Baker, cruising up the drive, was glad to be home, and she breathed deeply of the air, her eyes soaking up the colors of the flowers and the green of the lawn. “This is where I belong,” she murmured aloud. “No other place.” Her hands, which had been trembling on the wheel, were now steady and firm upon it. She steered toward the khaki figure of Mrs. Mennick’s brother, who was stacking landscaping equipment into the back of his truck. He did not stop his work until she climbed out of the Porsche and declared herself with a bright smile. “Everything looks grand,” she said with a thrilling sense of proprietorship. “You do a good job, Howard.”
“I do my best,” he said in his buttoned-up way.
Louise looked toward the house, manorial in its size and setting. “I should’ve been born to it, Howard. It would’ve been easier.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said with a slight change of tone that made her glance quickly at him.
“Anything wrong, Howard?”
“I’ll let my sister tell you,” he said.
She entered the house, cool with its clean smells of polish and care, rich in heirlooms that would stir the genitals of any antique dealer. The Persian carpet softened her step. She called her husband’s name and was answered by Mrs. Mennick from the west side of the house, where the late sun was flooding the windows. Mrs. Mennick and Ben were in the room that Ben’s mother had assigned exclusively to herself for writing letters, perusing the better magazines, and taking to the sofa under a goose-down throw during her time of the month. Louise walked by the open door.
“In here,” Mrs. Mennick said.
Louise turned back and looked in. Ben was sitting on the sofa, wrapped in the folds of the throw that might have still borne his mother’s scent. His eyes were squeezed closed as if he were afraid to open them. Mrs. Mennick had her arms around him.
“He’s all right, Mrs. Baker. His teeth were chattering for no reason, but he’s better now. Open your eyes, Mr. Ben.”
He opened them with a grimace as Louise entered the room. Then his face swelled in a wave of emotion, and he gazed at her as he always did, as if she were a flower in a slender vase. “Are you alive, Lou?” Are you really alive?”
“There was an accident on the highway,” Mrs. Mennick explained swiftly. “He thought it was you.”
“I’m quite alive, Ben. Let him be, Mrs. Mennick.”
Mrs. Mennick loosened her embrace and, careful not to disturb him, pulled herself to her feet. “I was afraid to give him a sedative on top of his medication, and I didn’t want to call the doctor either. Only you can make him right, Mrs. Baker.”
“You’ve done fine,” Louise said, a bit short. “You can leave us alone now.”
Mrs. Mennick lingered. “The man from the chicken farm told me and Howard about the accident. It was terrible, terrible. Would you like to hear?”
Louise tossed up a deferring hand. “Is it something that affects my life?”
“No,” Mrs. Mennick said, slightly put out. “Not your life.”
“Then tell me about it later.”
Left alone with him, Louise stared at her husband with a critical eye. He was waiting for a kiss, but she could not bring herself to give him one. Her stomach was churning too emphatically, and her head was hot.
“Do you have to have that thing around you?” she said.
“I’m cold,” he said, his eyes verging on tears. “You shouldn’t have stayed away so long. You know how I get.”
Her eye turned harder. “Was this your mother’s room, Ben?”
“Yes.”
“I’m not your mother, am I?”
“No,” he said. “You’re not. You’re my wife.”
“How old are you?”
He smiled. “You know.”
“I want you to tell me. Say it out loud.”
“I’m fifty-one.”
“How many feet do you have?”
He smiled. “Two.”
“Good,” she said. “Stand on them!”
Later he followed her upstairs to her bedroom, but she shut him out. She took a long hot bath in the luxury of the sunken tub, her head thrown back, her legs stretched to the limit. With a prodigious effort of will, she cleared her mind of the day’s events and thought only of distant things. The times she and Barney Cole had made out in the back row of the Central Theater, their mouths sore at the movie’s end. The week she had labored to teach him to dance so that he could take her to the senior prom. The Sunday evenings spent watching television in his living room, his father treating her like a princess. She remembered elevating his father to a man of means despite the inevitable hole in the heel of his sock.
The gauze pad taped below her collarbone tore loose in the water and floated up in front of her. She plucked it from the suds and flung it over the side, then traced an exploratory finger over the wound, no more than a round puckering, ugly in its colors and intriguing in its symmetry.
Clad in a gown of thin flannel, she propped king-size pillows and slipped under the covers to await supper in bed. Mrs. Mennick came in presently with a tray bearing lentil soup, crackers, a slice of buttered French bread, and a pot of herbal tea. “Are you sure that’ll be enough?” Mrs. Mennick asked, her feelings still bruised.
“Plenty,” Louise said, glancing up. “I’m sorry I was short with you, but I’ve had a hard day.”
“Not just you, Mrs. Baker. I’ve had a hard time too. All the while you were away he was needing constant care. I even had to have Howard help me.”
“I said I was sorry.”
“You don’t know what he’
s like when you’re gone.”
Louise looked at her sharply. “Who do you think keeps this ship afloat?”
“Truth be known, Mrs. Baker? We both do.”
As Mrs. Mennick left with the air of someone vastly unappreciated, Louise made a mental note to amend matters later. She rearranged the tray closer to her and crushed crackers into the soup. With no appetite, she ate for the nourishment. Chewing on bread, she felt a coolness in the air and then heard the light fall of rain, which she thought was fitting. A cleansing. She was drinking her tea when Ben looked in.
“May I?” he asked, and advanced into the room like a puppy that had been punished and partially forgiven. His hair was wet-combed, and she suspected Mrs. Mennick had done it. His expression was contrite.
“You were right to talk to me that way.”
“I’m glad you understand,” she said, and patted the bed for him to sit, not too close because of the tray. “You’ll never be a complete person unless you understand a lot of things, especially about yourself.”
He sat on the bed’s edge and looked at her full in the face. “I’m never going to be right, Lou. I know that. It’s my chemistry. Nothing to do with my mother or anybody else. I know that too.”
“With medication you can function. Do you also know that?”
He nodded, his eyes humid but clear. His neat mustache was darker, the probability strong that Mrs. Mennick had applied eye shadow.
“Then why don’t you take it like you should?”
“I try, Lou, honest, but it drains the strength out of me. It makes me feel less, like somebody else is in charge, and I don’t have any say in my life.”
“What happens if you don’t take it?”
He glanced away. “I do silly things.”
“So you have to take it. You have no choice.” She put her teacup down and used a napkin. “I’m tired, Ben. Would you take the tray away?”
“You want me to go,” he said, springing up. The tray rattled in his grip. “Have a good night’s sleep, Lou. I won’t bother you.”
When he shut the door behind him, she closed her eyes and sank deep under the covers. Fatigue took hold of every part of her body except her brain, which stayed lit, leaving her with little confidence that she would fall asleep easily. More than an hour later, the room dark, she was still awake. She groped for the phone and rang up Barney Cole’s number. Within moments, he was on the line. She had caught him at a bad time, which she disregarded. Dropping her head back, she said, “Just talk to me.”
Goldilocks Page 19
