it was funny when she sat in the butter cruelly spread on her
chair; later, she’d watched others court and be married, feeling
only the mildest envy.) That she had wound up with another
woman for a companion seemed perfectly natural and predict-
able to her, but she never considered it the like of other people’s love affairs.
Mostly, they displayed only passing affection, notwithstanding
Erma’s avowals. Only once had they breached that convention in
earnest, when news had come that Violet’s mother was dead.
A telegram had arrived at the house: an odd, archaic thing,
even then. In the kitchen, Violet slowly sat down. She handed the
paper to Erma.
It was strange: they’d lived together for years, and she hadn’t
known Violet’s mother was living.
That night, for the first time, they shared a bed.
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“My poor mum.” Violet trembled with grief. She lay on her
side with her face to the wall.
“Oh, dear one,” Erma said. “You dear thing.” The curtains,
gossamer, blue, did not move. With her own body, she traced the
curve of her friend’s.
No prayers were said in their house on that night. Together,
they breathed; one’s hand clasped the other’s. The sea could be
heard where it battered the cliffs.
About the small coastal village of Glass they were
known, traveling together in their pale yellow Beetle. Violet
drove; people waved as they passed; smiling back, she tooted the
horn. The car had been hers originally, as the house they lived in had been as well, possessed jointly since shortly after they met at the library, where Violet was in charge of collections and where
Erma had a habit of running up fines. You got to know people
in that line of work, as you did in Erma’s, too, selling paper and cards. They were friendly with local shopkeepers and clubs: with
Herville, the butcher; with the Women’s Institute ladies; with
Trilby, the florist, until she shut down.
Meals were their own form of intimacy, a shared time calling
them back to the body. Together, they cooked elaborate dishes:
meat pies and hearty soups every winter; grilled fish, potato salads in summer. They had large appetites and did not pretend otherwise, as Erma felt they both must have done in the past. In the
kitchen, as elsewhere, Violet directed, and though Erma was the
more experienced cook, she didn’t mind being told what to do or
even a harsh word now and then. Sometimes when it grew hot
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in the kitchen Violet would strip right down to her bra. “Don’t
mind, do you, love?” she’d casually say, and then ask for a spoon or a bowl that she needed. “Don’t find it’s too much distraction?” She might sing a song, do a shimmy. “Your Feet’s Too Big” or “Roll
Out the Barrel.” When Erma laughed, she covered her mouth;
when Violet did, she threw back her head and her whole body
tumbled in a beautiful manner, like water suspended for an instant in space.
And then, on the cusp of their twenty-first year, Violet’s
heart failed her as she’d been warned it would do. Through the
years, Erma had tried sometimes to institute diets, not wanting
one herself, nor to spoil their pleasure, but frightened of being
left alone in the end. Being younger by several years, she’d been
burdened by the possibility of that.
They’d gone for lunch to a café they liked by the sea. In the
sun, overlooking the long, rugged coast, the vendors and Ferris
wheel on the strand, they had eaten crab legs with buttered rolls
and white wine while gulls circled and landed nearby.
“I’d like anything you ate with a hammer,” Violet said. She
laughed and pounded the table. “All I need is a robe and a wig.”
Afterward, they walked a trail near the shore, and it was there,
in the dappled shade of an oak, that Violet collapsed, slowly, first to one knee and then further, with a plaintive glance over her
shoulder, until she was laid out, quietly prone.
Erma rushed to her, nearly crippled with panic. The space
around them was terribly still. She removed the cellular phone
from her pocket, shaking as she pulled it open and dialed. Later,
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she would not recall what was said or how long she’d waited that
way on the line. She would remember only how she held Violet’s
hand, which was moist and scarcely able to grasp.
“You dear thing,” she said. “Oh, heavens. Oh, lord.”
Soon, people came and shouted for help. A small crowd
gathered; she wished they would go. One man placed his hands
between Violet’s ribs and pressed while his wife held Erma away.
From their place on the ground they could see nothing of the
ocean and only the barest patch of the sky. Paramedics arrived
with a board and a gurney; they placed a mask over Violet’s
face. At some point, the top of her blouse was pulled open, and
Erma wailed, wanting to cover her friend, shy for her in this
state of undress, which only she herself had been allowed before
to see.
When, passing through the Mercy Hospital doors, she was
informed that Violet had died, Erma’s first thought was that the
end of her own life might as well come, and that, when it finally
did, she would never—not even once—have been kissed.
Violet had made a formal accounting, though she didn’t
own much beyond the house they had shared. The will was in a
safe deposit box in the city, which had to be opened by a long-
estranged cousin, a woman who did not resemble Violet at all and
who grumbled about the task, perhaps guessing that she would
be unmentioned in the document. Catharine her name was. She
came to the house, meeting Erma with a curious eye.
“I suppose I knew her quite well as a kid,” she said as they
drove to the bank.
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They had turned up Douglass, heading out of the village. A
thick fog was rolling in off the sea. Outside the butcher’s shop,
Herville was sweeping; Erma wondered if he had been told.
“Haven’t seen her for ages, though, really. I understand she let
things go in the end.”
Erma didn’t say anything. She hadn’t any idea what Catharine
could mean, unless she was referring to weight. The thought that
there might have been talk about Violet, even gossip, among the
unknown figures of her past was upsetting. Erma had not concealed
a world of family, old friends; she’d had none of those things when they met. That had been at a very low time, when she’d moved to
Glass with what money was left from her parents, two people who
had tried to be kind but who’d never managed to disguise their
disappointment with life. They had died some two weeks apart,
not because the one remaining (her father) could not bear to go
on without the other but because, in widowerhood, he had been
relieved of a burden and had no obligations left to the living. She felt her parents would have left their house and their money to
somebod
y else if they could have but had settled for her as they’d settled for other things, too: because it had been their duty to do so.
At the bank, Catharine entered the vault while Erma was left
to wait in the lobby. The floors were polished to a high, mirrored gloss; she squinted, avoiding the glare from the lights. She ate a mint from her purse, blew her nose. She would have liked very
much to be named next of kin. It had seemed only natural to her
that she should be, but it turned out there were rules about that.
In the days since it happened she had not managed sleep. It
was terrible to be in the bedroom, the empty twin bed beside her,
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sloppily made, as she’d so often reproached Violet for doing. In
the darkness there was only her own breathing, sometimes the sea,
and she longed for the sound of her friend’s muted prayers. She
could not even re-create them in her mind, unable somehow to
recall ever having made out a word of invocation. What she did
recall was the quietness of it and the stillness she had felt while she listened: Violet, the buoyant and riotous one, transformed in the
final moments of day.
The will, it turned out, contained a small curiosity.
Everything had been left to Erma, without specification,
excepting one item she’d all but forgotten. This was a damaged
rolltop desk, a large and cumbersome walnut antique, that had
been covered over with a dust cloth in the garage for as long as
Erma had lived in the house. It was to be given to a man named
John Killian, owner of the Green Man in Hart Street. Erma knew
at once who he was, having been sometimes for a drink at the pub:
a tall fellow, balding and painfully thin; he was friendly, an easy and good-natured man, but hardly someone they’d ever remarked
on.
He turned up at the funeral but drew no attention. He wore
black, placed a small bouquet of narcissus on the card table that
had been arranged for the purpose. She had settled on a casual
service, not lengthy or strictly religious, recalling that Violet had been brought up Catholic, but never having known her to confess.
(Her prayers, she reasoned, had been of a general sort.) Cremation had been Violet’s wish, a release from the body for which she’d
been known. Afterward, people milled about for a while. They
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took Erma’s hand, expressed their condolence, but stopped short,
it seemed, of treating her as a widow.
She wrote to him one week after the service: a brief note detail-
ing the gift, no query as to what its meaning could be.
Days passed. Life was dreamlike and strange. Evenings, she felt
odd attempting to cook; her hand gripped the knife where Violet’s
had, too. In the wash, some of her things were still there, the last time that would ever be so. In town, Mr. Herville sliced too much
bacon; Ault reached, by habit, for a bottle of Port, forgetting that only Violet had drunk it. She didn’t linger in those shops anymore.
It had been Violet, she saw now, who’d established their friend-
ships, Violet who’d been fun, flirtatious even, who’d pulled faces, winked, said clever things.
After dinner, she often went out to the garage and stood awhile
in the dim, fusty light. She regarded the desk, still covered at first, then with the dust cloth thrown to the floor. The finish was scarred, the wood chipped away; there wasn’t anything left in the drawers.
Returning to the house through the backdoor one night, she
heard the phone in the living room ring.
“Erma.”
She recognized Killian’s voice: high-pitched and roughened by
smoke in the bar.
“Thank you,” he said. “For letting me know.”
A foghorn sounded away in the harbor.
“Well, I only wanted to check. Ask you when the best time
would be,” he said.
“The best time?”
“To haul it away.”
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She was silent. He might have acted surprised. That would
have been the kind thing to do. It was all so strange; beyond
fathom, really. She said, “Oh, I’m sure I don’t mind.”
A puzzle, unfinished, lay spread on the table. Bruegel, a white
and wintry scene. Violet had laughed as she scoured the pieces,
hunting for bare buttocks, revelry, mischief.
“Come whenever you like,” Erma said. “It won’t make the least
bit of difference to me.”
And so he arrived in a tweed suit, a tie, a rumpled walk-
ing hat held in his hand. In the doorway he stood, nervous, irresolute; with a briefcase and a stack of brochures he might have been a beleaguered salesman, a proselytizer. He had backed a small van
against the door to the garage, the way she had instructed him to.
It was borrowed, he said, from a friend in the hil s, his own car not large enough for the job.
“You were the only other person named in the will,” she said
as she followed him down the front steps.
It was midday; the sun was high and benignant. She bent
down slowly to lift the garage door.
“Strange, that, wouldn’t you say? Of course, there were good
times had in the pub, but I wonder why this desk of all things.”
He looked down. “I admired it once.”
He’d brought a dolly for lifting the desk, and she helped him
tip the front end up off the ground. The old wood was heavy; she
was obliged to press her whole weight against it, to strain further as she helped him guide it into the van along a short metal ramp
he had borrowed as well.
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“I should have brought somebody with me to help,” he said.
She was breathing hard with exertion. They both were. Wisps
of hair clung to her face.
“It was wrong of me, making you do it,” he said. He slapped a
fly at the back of his neck. In the wake of their effort, his shyness had grown.
“Oh, no, no,” was all Erma managed. She did not want him
knowing how she minded it all: his coming, his driving away with
the desk, or the damage wrought by her realization—firm and
inescapable now—that Violet had been in love with him first.
Summer lingered and then finally broke; the trees
throughout Glass surrendered their leaves. Through all the
autumn months, she was visited by the humiliating thought that
the night spent sharing one bed with Violet had for her friend
been eclipsed by the love of a man. That she knew this man, had
spoken to him in Violet’s presence, made it all the worse. She
wondered if they had laughed about her in secret, for it was pos-
sible the affair had carried on to the end; she thought of Killian on the front step, hat in hand: Had he looked like a man whose
lover had died?
The first time she parked outside the Green Man was on a
gray evening in early November. The cobbles of Hart Street were
slick, iridescent; lamplight caught wide swaths of delicate rain.
That week, she’d seen a whale breach off the coast—a wild, heart-
rending, beautiful thing, rare because it was late in the season—
but no one had been there to witness it with her. On the radio,
&nbs
p; now, a program was on about a man serving a life term in prison
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whose paintings sold for fabulous sums. A critic said they could
move you to tears. She lifted her fingers to warm at the fan.
Idling, she regarded the pub: the Dutch door, the yellow fruit
machine light. She thought of Violet drinking there, years ago,
before they had met one another: laughing, leaning over the bar
to whisper something in Killian’s ear.
For her there had been the kind boy at school, as well as film
actors: Paul Newman and such. But those sorts of things were unde-
niably different. She had never cooked dinner with anyone else, never fallen asleep beside anyone else. It would not even have been worse to find that Violet had loved another woman in her life, because at least then she would know it hadn’t repulsed her to be touched by one.
A couple came walking out of the pub and turned up Hart
Street in Erma’s direction. They didn’t have an umbrella. The man
wore an overcoat, holding it open; the woman stood near while he
wrapped it around her. Erma turned the radio down. In silence,
she watched them move, hunched in the rain. It was nothing for
them, plainly, to stand close in this way, nothing to kiss, as they paused once to do. She could hear, as they passed, the sound of
their steps and of their voices: whispering, laughter. She could see the woman’s small wrists, her pale calves, and her face lifted to
the man’s—a bare offering—and all of it seemed ostentatiously to
proclaim, “We are lovers! We are lovers!”
She slouched down in the driver’s seat (a seat that still did not
feel rightfully hers) and listened until their footsteps had gone. She did not look again at the pub before pulling onto the wet, cobbled road, but she glanced up, just once more, as she passed it, heading in the direction of home.
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There would be other visits to the tavern that winter,
glimpses stolen through windows and doors of John Killian: serv-
ing drinks, changing a cask. If she stayed until close she could see him lock up, wave goodnight to any bar staff who might have
been on. He would pause then and turn up his collar, use it to
shield a cigarette from the wind. Sometimes, when he had got in
his car, she would turn the key softly to ignite her own engine and follow the glow of his lights at a distance.
Why she watched, what it was she was hoping to see, she did
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