The End of Always: A Novel

by Randi Davenport

  A single blade of grass as sharp and green and plain as day blew slowly in the wind. It ruffled with all the others. There were stones next to it and beyond the stones, a small pool of gray water puddled with a greasy aspect, as if someone had drained cooking oil on the ground. The sound of the interurban came and went and after that the town came back to me. William Oliver stepped back and reached into his pocket. He dabbed at the front of his pants with his handkerchief. Then he told me to get inside and get to work, that I had made my bed and now I must lie in it. He told me that we weren’t through, not by a long shot, but when he said this, something in me splintered and fell. I pushed my shoulders back and stepped away from the wall. I told him that I was married now. My father had given his blessing. I did not work at the laundry anymore. He should take any wages I had coming and give them to my father for the upkeep of my two sisters. We would not meet again.

  In the street I wiped my eyes and lifted my chin and walked along the wooden sidewalk. A few women watched me, their faces curious and unsurprised and sympathetic and not unkind. They smiled at me as I made my way along the storefronts and nodded encouragement. One reached out to touch my arm as I passed alone among them.

  A Menominee woman in a dark blue skirt with fringe at the bottom walked in front of me, a child in each hand and each child bundled in dark red plaid flannel. When I passed her, I saw that her face had been burned and a wide smooth scar lay over one cheekbone, shiny like the skin on my arms where the laundry vats had burned me. I could feel William Oliver’s hands on me. I imagined everyone who saw me could see them, too, huge handprints scorched into my dress. I thought that I would now be known to everyone as the girl who had let this happen to her. And then I remembered what the talk had already been, that I went into the woods with men, that I was some kind of a whore, and I knew that no one would have any sympathy for me.

  There is only one thing to do on an occasion like this. You must have some sympathy for yourself and then you must get on with things. So I set my mouth and walked in long strides and told myself that everything would soon be all right. I would never see William Oliver again. This hour would be over and behind it would come another and soon there would be half a day and then a whole day between me and William Oliver. Before I knew it, he would be a memory, and after he was a memory, he would be someone I would remember only when something caused me not to forget. I promised myself that this was what would come true.

  Of course, I also recognized that I was lucky to be alive. There are many girls who meet a man like William Oliver and do not survive long enough to teach themselves to forget.

  When I got off the streetcar in front of the dry-goods store, I passed a tea shop where a woman straightened red-and-white-checked curtains in the window and looked out over the street as she worked. I passed the bakery where August must have bought our morning rolls. I looked around for the greengrocer and found it on the corner, its awning shading barrels of spring onions. Everything neat and clean and happy and fluttering in the sunlit wind, as if this was a place where nothing bad ever happened.

  Past the greengrocery, the houses were closer together and painted with milk paint, white and yellow and baby blue. They sat back from the street at the top of trimmed yards, as if each had land to spare for nothing but decoration. Big trees shaded the lawns. A man with a mower whirled the blades through the grass. A baby cried. The woman who must have been my next-door neighbor sat on her front porch.

  I saw Edwin at the top of the drive. He sat hunched on the back steps, but when he caught sight of me, he unfolded his tall thin frame and came toward me. He reached for my arm and I did not stop him. He patted my arm and smiled and said my name.

  I looked around at the neighbors’ houses, where the windows had been pushed open and clean white curtains blew out over the sills, where the woman sat on her front porch. I tried to imagine what she would say, if she saw me talking to Edwin in the yard. The neighbors would be afraid of him. They would not understand. I barely understood myself.

  “You had better come in,” I said. “We cannot stand out here.”

  Edwin ducked through the doorway and looked around the nearly empty room. I flushed and said that we had just moved in and I had not yet had time to fix the place. I gestured at the couch and chairs and he sat on one of the chairs and leaned forward, looking pained and happy all at once.

  “Do you want some water?” I said.

  He shook his head. “I saw you,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “No,” he said. “Downtown.”

  “At the courthouse,” I said. “I know. I saw you too.”

  He gave me a haunted look. “You were coming outside,” he said.

  “Let me get you some water,” I said, but he stood and waved me away with his hand. He paced from one side of the room to the other, moving his lips, patting his leg to a song only he could hear.

  Finally he sat heavily in his chair and looked at me. “Did you get married?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  His eyes were liquid and dark then, his expression that of a man from whom the most important thing in the world has been stolen.

  “Edwin,” I said. “It is all right. August is a good man. And you will always be my friend.”

  He groaned.

  I glanced at the windows and wondered if the neighbors could hear him. If August would find out.

  “Why can you not like him?” I said. “He has many good qualities if you would only take the time to give them consideration.”

  He gave me a tortured look.

  “Edwin,” I said. “Please.”

  He reached over and took my hand. “You come with me,” he said.

  I understood what he wanted. In the faint candlelight under the church, we had found someplace not even the disciples could reach and were hopeless together in the darkness beneath the earth and in that hopeless togetherness found peace. Edwin could not have been comfortable on that cold floor, but he never complained. He listened while I told him everything. He did not tell me that I was wrong. That I was foolish. That I was making a mistake. That I had bad ideas or ideas I should not have or ideas that would only get me in trouble. He did not tell me I was stupid and he did not tell me to shut up and he did not tell me to get to work. In the last minutes before sleep, when I was suddenly empty and lay on the cot like an unfilled bag of floating skin, my bones dissolved, my organs soft as sand, he made it seem that the world could be a safe place after all. In the morning, he smiled at me and I knew he believed it was only a matter of holding to the thing between us, this single truth.

  I pulled my hand from his. “I am married,” I said. “I cannot.”

  “You come with me,” he repeated in an exhausted voice.

  “No,” I said softly. “I am sorry. I cannot.”

  He started to cry.

  When I did not say anything more, he hugged his head in his arms and howled. Then he turned and ran through the door. I heard his footsteps on the gravel drive.

  Whenever I looked out my living room window, my only view was into the rooms of the house next door. A pretty young woman lived there with her young husband. She had pictures of dappled landscapes in gilt-edge frames on her walls. A silver tea service on her glossy buffet. A breakfront full of crystal and fancy china. I could even see the picture she’d had made at her marriage, which stood on the top of a gleaming piano. She stood in a column of chiffon, her hair pinned up under a cap stitched with pearls, and gazed out into an invisible world. Her expression was easy to describe. It was that of a woman who is confident that each thing that has happened is certain assurance of the many good things yet to come.

  Now she stood at the top of my driveway and waved.

  “Come see my yard,” she called. She wore a pretty white blouse trimmed with tatting and a navy blue skirt. She had left her shiny brown hair loose under a pink velvet hairband.

  She stuck her hand out. “I’m Bertha,” she said.

  I was very
aware of my stained blouse, soiled by William Oliver’s hands, and of my shabby skirt, also soiled by William Oliver. My mother’s old shoes on my feet still molded to the shape of her step. The shoes had begun to hurt and I felt oafish beside Bertha, like a dumpy girl who does not know how to dress herself. I had not even had a chance to wash my hands.

  “I am Marie,” I said. I touched her cool, clean skin with my dirty hand and then dropped my hand to my skirt and wiped it on the folds.

  She told me that she and her husband had been married for seven months. Her husband worked for a bank, and they had been very lucky to find this house even though the bank still owned everything but maybe half of the living room because they’d had to take a mortgage. She said that she did not worry about that much because you had to start somewhere. Then she laughed.

  Red roses scrambled up an arbor nailed to the porch. I followed her dumbly while she showed me her glads and hydrangeas. She pointed to a garden bed that she’d just had dug. She explained that she would lay out the plants so the pinks and blues would be separated with white, so the foliage would alternate dark green and pale silver, so everything would be orderly and contained. The best part was that she would always know from month to month what was about to bloom. She planned to fill her whole house with flowers. Every room would be resplendent with summer. She repeated this in an enthusiastic voice, as if she liked the sound of the word.

  I smiled to show her that I understood what she meant by resplendent. I was not just some filthy girl who had moved in next door by mistake. I tried to imagine being the sort of woman who planted flowers to fill the house. The very thought made me shy and a little surprised, as if Bertha had a secret but right away had let me catch a glimpse of it.

  We sat on white wicker chairs on her front porch. She served lemonade in tall glasses that she carried out onto the porch on a silver tray. Each glass was topped with a sprig of mint and a stick that pierced a slice of canned peach. She had done the canning herself. She offered me a plate of sugar cookies, each cookie shaped like a heart. She laughed and said how fortuitous it was that she had baked these cookies, in this shape, just that morning.

  “Isn’t being married wonderful?” she said.

  I smiled. I thought of August and the way I felt when he touched me. I thought of our love like a bottomless well, always ready to swamp us with joy. It was more wonderful than I could hope to put into words.

  She grinned. “No one ever tells you how good it’s going to be,” she said. “It’s like one big fat riddle that you can’t figure out until you’ve said I do. But the thing is, everyone knows. They all keep it to themselves but they know. I don’t know why they don’t tell us beforehand.” She stretched her arms over her head and then dropped her hands back into her lap. She gestured at the plate. “Have a cookie,” she said. She picked up a heart and made a big show of taking a bite. “Delicious!”

  I looked out at her manicured yard, where nothing dared step out of line. My own house had crabgrass running up to the foundation. No curtains at the windows. Dissipated gravel on the drive.

  Bertha raised her glass and offered a toast to the coming summer. To our great happiness and joy, newly married as we were, starting life together in this good place. We clinked glasses. She picked up the plate of cookies and held it out to me again. “These are so good,” she said. “Completely sinful. You should try one.”

  I shook my head. My dirty clothes stuck to me as if shaped by sweat. I wondered if I smelled.

  “You are far too good,” she said. “I see I can’t corrupt you.” She set the plate down and then picked up a second cookie and took a tiny bite. Sugar flaked into the air. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m going to be very bad today. Just don’t let my husband find out. He’d hand me a fate worse than death.” She laughed.

  There was no food in the house and I had no money so I set to work sorting my clothes into the wardrobe. I hung one skirt on one hook and one blouse on another and I hung the green dress with the fading black velvet ribbons on a hook by itself. I left my nightgown and my spare chemise and my underwear and my stockings rolled together in little balls in the valise. I slid the valise under the bed. I took my shoes off and stepped out onto our porch and slapped the soles together so that dust flew. When I got back to the bedroom I took my blouse and skirt off and shook them out hard and hung them from the wardrobe door. I thought about hot water for a bath but I hadn’t seen a coal scuttle, nor had I seen a washtub or a bucket. I was very tired. These questions seemed too much for me to answer. I lay down on the bed and rolled over on my side and hugged the pillows. August’s scent came to me in a rich wave and happiness rose in me like a tide rushing to shore. I buried my face in the pillow and lay there and breathed him in.

  When I woke, it was well past dark. I could see lights on in Bertha’s house, and through the filmy sheers over her windows, I watched a man walk from one room into the next and then come back to the first room, where he sat down in an easy chair and picked up the newspaper from where it had fallen to the floor. He spread the pages out before him. I watched for a time but could not see Bertha. Eventually, the man stood and stretched and walked out of my view and did not come back. I imagined the two of them having dinner together in Bertha’s gleaming dining room, where she would use her luminous pale china, the plates trimmed with wide gold bands, painted flowers decorating the centers. And there would be a roast and dumplings and a platter of sausages and a big tureen of beets. Afterward she would give him brandied peaches and that plate of sugar cookies and make fresh coffee. They would sit at the table together and talk. He would hold her hand and tell her that he loved her, there in the bright light of that very clean room.

  I rolled over and sat up and hugged myself. I was very hungry and the room had grown cold. When I pressed the light switch, no lights came on. When I looked in the icebox, the shelves were empty. I walked back into the bedroom and sat on the bed in the dark and picked up the pillow that smelled of August. I hugged it. I set it down. I picked it up again. Then I threw it across the room.

  In the morning, pastel light gave shape to the wobbly washstand and the iron bedstead and my valise now open on the floor. I buttoned my old blouse and fastened my skirt and walked out to the door to pick up my shoes. I sat on the edge of the bed and fastened them hook by hook. My chest felt light and open with anger and fear. I had no idea where August was. I walked back and forth from the wardrobe to the bed and folded my clothes back into the suitcase. I smoothed the tattered fabric and thought of my mother, who must have brought the valise with her from Rügen. What had she really carried and what had she tried to leave behind? She always looked away whenever we asked her about her life before. She just told stories about the horrible dwarves who stole the miller’s daughter and kept her locked up and laboring underground. For years and years, underground and in the dark, alone except for the dwarves, who owned her exactly as if she had been a slave.

  None of this mattered now. When I thought of August, I felt a doubt that I could not quite manage just by remembering the way I felt when he touched me. For a brief moment, it struck me that Martha might have been right. There was some small possibility that I had not known him well enough to marry him. The idea flickered through me like a flame I did not want to fuel. But it was impossible to ignore. How could he promise to come home and make love to me and then never show up? How could he be the August I loved and also be this other August, a boy who stayed away?

  I did not understand anything. I can perhaps be forgiven for my naïveté. There are two things that all seventeen-year-old girls have in common, and one is their naïveté and the other is their belief that they are not naïve. When I was with August, I was like a honey-drunk bee, a dog that has gotten into the beer. When he was gone, I was blank as a bedsheet. His absence was like a nail pounded through a board that had seemed perfect and true. It felt new, an unwelcome surprise that I could not have seen coming.

  I closed the valise and bu
ckled its straps and lifted it and carried it to the front door.

  He came up to me as soon as I stepped out of the house. He put his arms around me and fell to his knees sobbing. He begged me not to leave. The sun had just begun to rise. I stood in the driveway and let him put his arms around my legs. I let him bury his face in my skirt. I let him cry and say things I could not understand. Finally he looked up at me, his eyes running with tears, his mouth swollen and sticky. He clutched my skirt. He said that he would love me forever.

  He was so drunk he could barely walk. He pitched up the steps to our door and fell hard against the railing. I had to grab the back of his shirt to keep him from going down. He stood breathing heavily and swaying by the door so I reached past him and turned the knob. He stumbled into the room and staggered to the couch. He tried to sit on the couch but sat down hard on the floor instead. He fell back and lay there.

  Outside, birds had begun to call. Early light made the room gray and then the gray brightened.

  “Marie,” he said. He slurred the word and gestured at the air over his stomach.

  I wavered at the sound of his voice and my anger migrated to a distant place, leaving only a little trail behind, like it was already just a memory of anger and the memory itself would soon be gone. But then I decided I must be firm.

  “I am hungry,” I said tightly. “I am cold. You left me here alone. I have no money. I have nowhere to go. You are responsible for me. Do you understand?”