by T. Greenwood
“Come downstairs. Let me make you some coffee,” she said, ushering Ted down the stairs. He looked defeated now, as though he were somehow disappointed that his jealous delusions hadn’t come to fruition.
I returned to the bedroom and quickly scanned the room for evidence of our lovemaking, seeing her betrayal of him in the twisted sheets, in our clothes’ arms and legs tangled together in an orgy of denim and cotton. I pulled on some clothes and peered at myself in the mirror hanging over the battered old dresser. I looked for signs in my face that would give us away.
Downstairs I listened to their hushed voices and smelled the scent of strong coffee. His worries may have been appeased, but it was obvious he wasn’t going to return to Hollyville without her. This I knew. And this realization, that he’d stolen our last three days here, made my blood hot, my ears red; I was more determined than ever.
Later that morning, Ted took Eva and the kids home, as I knew he would. And as the car drove down the road, Johnny’s face pressed to the rear window glass, I paced. Chessy and Mouse didn’t seem to know what to do. It was as though someone had come along and ripped a beloved stuffed animal out of their arms. We were at a loss without the Wilsons. We were lost without them.
As the plane from Pittsburgh to Burlington taxis slowly to the gate, I feel the patter of my heart like a child skipping rope in my chest. My hands are trembling now. I can’t identify the feeling though. I can’t classify it: Excitement? Fear? It’s funny how emotions have become so muddy as I’ve grown older. The physical signs and symptoms are not always clear to read. I feel like an adolescent girl again, my body’s response to the world both confused and somehow portentous.
The Burlington airport is just as small as I remember it. There is only one terminal, just a handful of gates. I think I remember where the baggage claim carousels are, and I imagine Gussy will be waiting there. But instead, as I emerge from the jet bridge I can see her standing behind the wall of glass that separates the arrivals from those waiting to greet them. She waves wildly, as though she needs to get my attention.
She doesn’t look any different than she did when I last saw her two years ago. She hasn’t aged in any way I can see. (She still stands her full five foot nine inches; there are no new accoutrements of old age accompanying her: no walker, no cane, no wheelchair.) Her hair is still perfectly coifed, her clothes pressed. The rouge on her cheeks and the color on her lips is exactly what I expected. My sister. God, how I’ve missed her.
“Gingersnap!” she says, delighted, her happiness unrestrained. She holds her arms out, beckoning me to come to her with her fingers that wriggle excitedly.
I feel my legs moving faster to meet her, and then I am holding her, smelling her terrific, powdery scent. This emotion is one that is easy to identify; I feel so happy I could burst. How could I have hesitated? How could I possibly have considered not coming? I feel like an old fool.
“You’re home!” Gussy says. “I’m so excited! Let’s go get your bags. How was your flight? Don’t you just hate those little planes?”
I can barely get a word in edgewise. It’s as though we haven’t been speaking on the phone every single night since I last saw her. I think about my friend, Hugh, on the flight from Pittsburgh, what he would say when he finally got a chance to speak to his girl in person. Would it be like this? Or would they be at a loss for words?
We gather my suitcase from the baggage claim. It is one of the first ones that comes tumbling onto the carousel.
“Good Lord, how old is this thing?” Gussy asks, heaving it off the carousel for me. A gentleman standing next to her assists, and then offers her the rolling baggage cart next to him. I feel silly accepting his cart for one suitcase, but Gussy simply nods a thank you and loads that beastly suitcase on. We push the cart out to the garage, take the elevator up to the top, and find her car.
The sun is setting outside, and the sky is that indigo color that I have never seen anywhere but here in Vermont. Sunsets at the beach are dramatic, glitzy affairs, like the sun has something to prove, a showgirl accustomed to taking her bows before an adoring crowd every night. Twilight is more subtle here, more reserved. It couldn’t compete with the autumn foliage if it tried. Though as we drive back to Quimby, it’s too dark to see what I know is an amazing display of color.
“How’s the foliage this year?” I ask.
“Breathtaking,” she says. “Last year, it rained every day for a month. Just miserable. All the leaf peepers were disappointed. But this year, it’s been amazing. Especially up to the lake.”
I nod, thinking about Gormlaith, wishing that we were going straight there instead of to Quimby. I consider asking Gussy to just keep driving, to skip her house and just take me to camp.
“The chicken and dumplings should be ready just in time for us. I also rented that new Jane Eyre movie with what’s-her-name and Frank’s girlfriend, Judi Dench.” She says this with a roll of her eyes.
Frank had a bit of a schoolboy crush on Judi Dench, so much so that when he was dying, he kept confusing all of the actresses on the hospital TV for her. Is that Judi Dench? he would ask hopefully. If he hadn’t been so ill, I think Gussy would have smacked him.
“You haven’t seen it already, have you?” I shake my head. “I thought we could stay up late, like we used to. Catch up.”
“I just talked to you yesterday,” I say, and then worry that it’s come across as sharp.
“Well, it’s amazing what can happen in a day,” she says, sighing.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just that I’ve got some surprises up my sleeve.”
“I don’t know if you should be springing any big surprises on this old lady. You want to kill me?”
“Oh, hush,” she says, and we pull into her driveway, which is littered with fallen leaves.
Walking into Gussy’s house is, in a way, like walking back into our childhoods. Because I left Vermont at eighteen and married Frankie a year later, Gussy was the one who inherited all of our parents’ castaway things. And after they had both passed away, she absorbed the rest. The treasures: the cuckoo clock on the wall, the round oak table at which we both had sat for thousands of our mother’s meals. The china with its tiny roses, the Blue Willow tea set, the braided rug my mother made from my father’s old shirts.
I sit down on her worn sofa, picking up a copy of Consumer Reports from the end table. The address still bears Frank’s name. Something about this makes my heart ache. Frank’s been gone for ten years, but it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that she finally took Frank’s message off her answering machine, stashing away the little cassette tape that had captured his soft voice.
“So what’s the big secret?” I ask.
Gussy has always been terrible at keeping secrets. She is what my mother called an open book; what you see is what you get with Gussy. Christmas presents, surprise parties, pregnancies—not a single bit of exciting news was safe with Gussy. Secrets boiled up inside her like water in a teakettle, busting out of her like steam in an excited whistle. The only secret she has ever been able to keep was mine. It took every ounce of courage I had to tell her about Eva. Every bit of strength and trust.
She shakes her head now, tries to change the subject. “It’s nothing,” she says, which clearly means something.
“Gus,” I admonish.
“Let’s just say Johnny has something for you,” she says, exasperated, hoping to appease me with this meager offering.
“Like what?” I ask. I can’t imagine what he might have held on to, what possession of Eva’s he might think I’d like to have. I try to imagine Eva’s things: her scuffed blue heels, her dresses. The pins she wore in her hair. What would I do with a lipstick tube, a prosthetic breast, the jaunty little Girl Scout troop leader hat?
She shrugs and turns away from me, her eyes fluttering. When she looks back at me again, she seems flustered. She’s keeping something from me. “He’s asked me to wait. He wants to show you himself.”
I was still having such a hard time wrapping my mind around Johnny as anything other than an eight-year-old little boy slinging rubber tipped arrows from the treetops.
“Is it my letters?” I ask. I wrote hundreds of letters to Eva. I can’t imagine that they still exist. Most evidence of what was between us has been lost or destroyed.
Gussy shrugs again suspiciously, and I try to imagine what thing Johnny would have that he’d beckon me all the way across the country to give me. Couldn’t he have popped it in the mail? Doesn’t he understand that the things that belonged to her don’t matter? That the things I would want to keep wouldn’t fit inside an envelope: the smell of her perfume, the feeling of her soft cheek pressed against my hand. Her laughter, like a child’s. Her breath, her whispers in my ear.
“We’ll just have to see, I guess,” Gussy says, patting my leg, and then stands up. “Let’s have some supper.”
I nod. I am hungry now. But just as we are about to dig into our meal, the phone rings.
“Let the machine get it,” I say, but Gussy is already rushing across the room.
“Hello?” she says. “Oh, hi, Johnny. We were just talking about you.”
At the end of August, back in Hollyville, time seemed to have stood still everywhere but in my garden. It was overrun with vegetables, Frankie unable to keep up with the harvest while we were gone. He’d made an effort, but the garden looked like a jungle, a tangled mess of vines and leaves and vegetables going to rot. Untended, the garden was wild and unwieldy. I couldn’t help but wonder, as I hacked my way through the six-foot-high cornstalks and the voluminous leaves, about the other ways things would fall apart after I was gone.
The first two weeks back, while the children were at school, Eva and I picked green beans and swollen tomatoes and peppers. Rose sat among the labyrinthine rows of corn and cabbage, playing in the dirt. I spent hours in the kitchen boiling and canning until my palms blistered from the lids and my face burned from all that steam. Eva, in the throes of morning sickness, couldn’t bear the smell of the kitchen. I went to sleep at night dreaming of turnips and eggplant and squash, the scent seeping into my hair and my skin. No matter how many baths I took, I couldn’t seem to get rid of the smell of the earth.
But with each jar I placed on the shelf in our basement, I felt a sense of accomplishment, as though the colorful glass jars were evidence of my self-sufficiency. We would have a garden. We would feed our children with the vegetables and roots we coaxed from the earth. We could survive without grocery allowances, without the men.
Rose was three now, and had given up both her morning and afternoon naps. Eva resumed her position as troop leader with me, but Hannah insisted on continuing on as a leader as well, which meant that more often than not Hannah was with us at our meetings. We were never alone.
Aching for each other, we discussed the various badges the girls hoped to earn this year: Sewing, Cooking, Wilderness Survival. We reached for each other’s hands under the kitchen table as Hannah chattered on about plans for the flying up ceremony. We stole glances as we mended the girls’ old uniforms, and kisses in the pantry as we perused the unsold boxes of Girl Scout cookies and Hannah’s voice clattered on in the kitchen. Normally, this would have driven me mad. But now we had a plan. All of this was endurable, because there was an end in sight. We were only biding our time.
We knew that realistically we couldn’t go anywhere until the baby came. She needed to have a doctor, but once the baby was here, we would be free. And so as Eva’s belly grew, the distance between us and our future together shrank.
“I hope it’s a boy,” I said one day as we stood in the pantry together.
“Why?” she asked, leaning into me. Her breath skipped across my collarbone.
I shrugged. And I thought about the miscarriage. That lost baby that had first brought us together. I was certain it had been a boy. Here was our second chance.
“What would you like?” I asked, peering around the corner. Hannah was in the restroom freshening up. Her vanity had bought us endless stolen moments like these.
She shook her head. “Girls are easier when they’re little,” she said, shrugging. “But they have it so much harder later on.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, putting my hands on her hips, those two perfect bones.
“I mean, a boy has a chance in this world. To be someone. To do something.”
She was right. It was true. As much as I loved my girls, I feared for them. When I imagined their futures, it was not with excitement but trepidation.
Johnny was getting in trouble at school that year. It seemed like every other day Eva was getting a call from his teacher with one complaint or another about his behavior in the classroom and on the playground. He pushed, he shoved, he spat and kicked and cussed. Eva’s fear, though she never said it aloud, was that he was turning into Ted. That all of Ted’s rage had somehow been channeled into Johnny. That this was his inheritance, this violence.
One late September night, the kids were all outside playing kick the can or some such game. Rose was riding her tricycle up and down the sidewalk while the other children played. I checked out the window periodically, making sure that they were all staying out of the street.
I was canning the last of the beets, and my hands were stained magenta. Frankie was watching The Ed Sullivan Show in the other room when I heard the scream. My heart flew to my throat as I set down the tongs I’d been using to lift the jars out of the boiling water and ran to the front door. Frankie followed behind.
Rose was standing on our porch, pointing toward the street, where Johnny was standing over Mouse with his fist raised as if to strike her. I flew to him screaming, “Johnny, stop it right this instant!”
Frankie pushed me aside and went to Johnny, grabbing him hard by the elbow and dragging him onto our lawn. Johnny was nearly eight now, and tall for his age, but still clearly powerless to Frankie.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Frankie screamed in Johnny’s face. Johnny looked terrified. For all the trouble he’d gotten into at school, I believe this was the first time he’d been challenged this way.
Ted came out of the Wilsons’ house then and ran over. “Get your hands off my boy!” he said, pushing Frankie in the chest.
Frankie, startled, threw his shoulders back and then corrected his stance so that he looked like he was ready for a boxing match.
Ted towered over him.
Johnny was crying now, and snot was running down his face.
“You think it’s okay to hit girls?” Frankie asked Johnny, and Johnny shrugged. “You teach him that? That it’s okay to hit a girl?” Frankie demanded of Ted.
Ted pushed his chest out, and I watched as his face grew red and the muscles in his blocky neck strained. He looked at me accusingly.
I heard the Wilsons’ door open again and looked up to see Eva standing in the doorway. The hallway light behind her made her an eerie silhouette. “Ted, come inside,” she said weakly. But Ted was clearly not going to back down from this fight.
“What did she do?” Ted asked Johnny.
Mouse clung to my legs like she used to as a toddler. Chessy stood off to the side, her eyes wide.
“She took my bike,” Johnny said. “And she wouldn’t give it back.”
“Is that true?” Ted said, getting his thick face close to Mouse’s.
“Get away from her,” I hissed.
“Sounds to me like she was just about to get what was coming to her,” Ted said, laughing.
I felt anger ballooning inside of me, and all of the colors of Eva’s bruises swirled behind my eyes, the color of my own rage and his mixed together.
“Sounds like somebody needs to teach that girl a lesson about her place.”
At that, Frankie lost any composure or control he’d been trying to keep. While my fists remained at my side, Frankie’s were swinging. Then, before I knew what was happening, he jumped on Ted’s back like some sort of animal. He was half Ted
’s size, and he looked like a turtle fighting a whale.
I gathered all of the girls, including Mouse, rounding them up like animals and herding them back to the safety of our house, their necks straining to see what was going on in the street. Johnny stood on the sidewalk, looking baffled by this display, his mouth hanging open and his eyes wide.
Inside, I sat the children around the kitchen table and found the last few remnants of some cookies in the cookie jar. I poured them each a cup of milk and as they ate, I peered anxiously through the lace curtains at the two men in the street. The sun had slipped away, and the streetlights had come on. Their hulking shadows moved soundlessly, like some sort of prehistoric beast, up and down the street. It was the slowest fight I’d ever witnessed in my life.
Then I watched Old Man Castillo come out of his house, shaking his fist, probably threatening to call the police, and he put himself between Frankie and Ted, who seemed surprised by his sudden appearance. He stood between them like a referee, arthritic hands pressed against their respective chests.
Eva had gone inside her own house as well. And I worried that Ted would lumber back into the house now and use up all his remaining fury on Eva.
“Francesca?” I said, pulling a second bottle of milk out of the refrigerator and locating a last box of Girl Scout cookies in the pantry. “Can you keep an eye on the children?”
“Why?” she asked, glancing nervously toward the window.
“I’m just going to check on Eva.”
“Why?” she said again, her eyes filling with tears.
“Because I’m worried.” And I was. That was the truth, and Chessy seemed grateful for it. Ever since Chessy walked in and found us together, it seemed like lying to her had become a nearly impossible task. She questioned everything. She longed for the untampered-with facts. I had always appreciated this about her, but now it terrified me. I worried endlessly that that image (of our bare skin on those soft sheets, of the arc of Eva’s hips and my own nude body) would remain, memorized like all the other facts she stored like photographs in the album of her mind. And that someday, something would send her back to that moment, that she would pull that particular photo from the magnetic sleeve of her memory, hold it up, and suddenly understand the truth.
