So Maas leaves the women and turns back to the house.
The next morning, he bolts a split birch trunk together and it bleeds.
Theirs, a country-quiet life, is satisfying or should be. His daughter hoped something would happen and it did in the shape of a man blued by symbols that crinkled when he tensed his arms. Maas watched shapes rustle on the man and saw, too, that his wrist was wreathed—royal; and he was not young; he was ready to inherit.
Opalesce is a gauzy word to describe what the sky is doing. From the picture window Maas follows winter colors: whites, slates, steely skies, and yellows. He puts his hand out to the show and feels the cool glass against his palm and is steadied by the sensation. His lovely boxed life: snow falling outside, very pretty, while he stands inside, well and warm, entirely comfortable in comfortable shoes. The past sleds behind him. Door County, 1951: poking raw squirrel over smoky coals, washing the meal down with whiskey. Scant comforts. Even indoors the scratchy camp blankets felt wet. He was most often cold. Early morning whooping into Lake Michigan then gibbering back to a tasteless breakfast of something gluey they ate with a spoon. No cream to cut his coffee. No cushions for the austere chairs on which they sat, Maas, butt-numbed and dumb. 1951. The year he met his wife.
He hears his name, but has no desire to know how he might be described in the future: a glass of water, a flavorless man, at best, at best, on a white tablecloth a goblet of melted ice with the slightest curl of lemon in it. Through the blinds a blade of sunlight cuts the glass in half and shows up dust.
Where You Live? When You Need Me?
Out of nowhere, Ella, a mound with no known address, a swaying mystery, swollen hands, swollen feet—did she sleep in the playground? Ella simply appeared. No phone, but a tiny notepad, a tiny pencil: Where you live? When you need me? Like the Mister Softee sound, Ella drew children to her under the shawl of her arms. Ella was a house in the park for an afternoon, an afternoon that often faded into later—No trouble. Anytime. Where you live? When you need me? She wasn’t a bargain, but she was worth every penny. Besides, Anne Byrnne, who first used Ella, said the woman spent her money on treats for the children. How else to explain the matchbook trucks I found in my sons’ pockets?
Uh, Ella?
I like it, they’re happy.
Me too, but you need the money!
That was the summer when little parts of little bodies turned up in KFC buckets in Dumpsters in the city, the summer of 1984, weeks of record heat and brown air. Colonies of plague-ugly rats partied under park benches, hauling off big finds, pretzels and buns, acting bold. Ella watched the children by the playground sprinklers, then picnicked in the park when the sun was down and the grass blue, the rats less visible. I saw Ella sometimes in the north meadow, a squat teepee, circled by the Byrnne boys chasing the little Flemming girl with squirt guns, getting sopped. For a while we fretted over losing Ella to the Flemmings. Everyone shared Ella. She had work every day if she wanted. No, Ella said, I don’t leave, then agreed to two weeks in July with the Flemmings in Nantucket even though by her own admission she couldn’t swim.
Ella brought out something in the mothers I knew, brought out something in me, so that I, we, all of us recklessly employed someone about whom we knew next to nothing in a summer when the streets at night looked greasy and baby body parts were being found. No one who hired Ella that summer ever knew with any certainty her last name, let alone her address—even the efficient Anne Byrnne was unsure. Ella asked to be paid in cash.
Anne Byrnne probably did know Ella’s last name, but she was gutting an apartment on Fifth—taking out walls, putting in new windows—and she was living in the apartment at the same time with two boys, five and twoish, which, when I think about it now, was clearly unsafe. The barricades were useless; the boys ducked under. I see her younger son now toddling toward an open window.
What a summer. A third and last reported bucket was found downtown, off Bowery. As with the other bodies, the head was gone. Oddly, no report of a missing baby was ever made in any borough. Maybe the children were from out of state?
I came home later than planned one night and found Ella sitting in the summer dark, which was not so dark I couldn’t see her, but I wondered why not a light was on. She sat monumentally boulder-like, but alive, hands as big as soup bowls stacked in her lap.
Something else. At the end of the season I stood on a slimy ledge of a waterfall with my younger son when he stepped out and I grabbed his bib overalls just in time. What were we standing on? Why were we there? We were in the Berkshires renting a house on a small muddy lake is all I remember. That and the sound of water and its tinkly music over and over.
I believed in God back then, too. And nobody knows where he comes from.
Burst Pods, Gone-By, Tangled Aster
Young as they appear to be, the house painters have daughters old enough to complain about, which they do, to each other, across an expanse of a few feet on ladders at the south-facing second-story windows of the house.
From the start, Peg has stayed in the house and watched from different windows as the boys have painted. She just hopes Pat Farkey keeps sending these boys.
She can barely say hello to the house painters, so abashed is she by their hearty sweetness and the lives she imagines for them.
Peg talks to the kitchen chairs. She’s doped, of course, but the furniture is company. The young house painters lean against their truck and smoke. Smoking … she did that once.
Her husband Anders watches the boys smoke, says something, makes them smile, or are they grimacing a little? Has he cornered them or asked something off-color, personal—You getting any? That sort of thing. She’s heard his coarse approximations of street talk, young talk. She’s heard him asking girls, Now who’s your boyfriend? then lapping up their shy response.
Anders did the Rite Aid business today and—no surprise—got to talking with the pharmacist Stephanie. He likes Stephanie. “Girl’s open as a penny,” he says. True. But Peg can hardly face her.
Stephanie was the one to fill their daughter’s last newest failed prescription, the inflating and idiot-making pills that turned the girl into a parade balloon in need of handlers—chiefly her mother—the ones that made her quiet, helped her sleep, helped her wake, once a day, twice a day, twice a day with meals. Who doses her at Medfield? Peg doesn’t know. They’re not allowed to see her: the doctors think it best.
There’s nothing much to talk about over lunch but Pat Farkey’s painters, and yes, as far as Anders is concerned, they are the best on the peninsula, yes, he is happy with the job so far.
Anders catches the door before it slams and it seems he might say more but what she halfway hears is Anders calling Ridge or Rodge? Redge? What is it? She looks out the window over the sink and sees that Ridge is the one in a pirate scarf in a squat painting the railing. Okay. And hearing Anders, the boy springs up on ropy haunches, nods in greeting. She turns a knife in her hands and looks hard at this Ridge and then through the boy to the woods again and their neighbor’s field of brown stalks and burst pods, gone-by, tangled aster. She thumbs the blade, then uses the knife to skin the watery scum off the blackened breadboard, scrapes strings and stems into the compost bag and potato peels from dinner’s burger pie—my God, they do go on eating and eating. Maybe she’s pushing for earlier meals to make the days pass faster.
Your disappointments are mine: she had said this to Andie, to her daughter, Andie, in her boneless body—short neck, soft chin, smally featured moon face. What was a mother to make of such a face really? Say, It’s much like mine?
Peg knew the horrors of undressing, the crimped grooves of waistbands and camel-toed panties. A boy in school told Andie she looked like a muffin top, which Andie took at first to mean a good thing until her brother Carl told her, “It’s your gut hanging over your jeans.” What was the matter with him? Hurts, prickly, hive-like bites, little poisons Peg can’t scratch out: “Maybe it’s the moles on your face that make you l
ook old, Mom”—and the boy had said worse, but she didn’t always remember.
“They call Andie a gunt,” he’d said.
She doesn’t want to remember gunt but the hamburger grays in the pan; and the memory of gut, cunt, gunt, and Carl’s mouth, new beard, raw skin is upended by Carl himself loudly arrived—Hi, Mom—and behind him, his girlfriend Lee-Ann, both smiling as if they like her, as if they come by every day and are expected.
“Dad invited us.”
“He didn’t tell me.”
Anders points out the brushwork on the porch rail’s skinny spindles. “Come out and look!” The name Farkey is on his lips though it’s that kid, Ridge, the house painter, who’s done the work Anders praises. Peg watches Carl and Anders and Lee-Ann as they look up at the spindles and the scrolled eaves on the house, this old farmhouse, once, a hundred years ago, a teahouse for the quarry down the road. A plaque near the front door reads: Fern Cottage 1888. The name is Anders’s invention, a dainty tea-like name and a nod to the ostrich ferns that thrive in the dark borders of the lower garden.
What is Anders saying to these unexpected guests—so that now Peg has to double up on potatoes and cut limp carrots for a side dish to a stretched-thin dinner of gray burger pie. The business makes her angry, even as she puts out unsalted saltines and low-fat cheese, and when Lee-Ann reaches out her loose inky arms, Peg sees smeary numbers and a wreath tattoo. She doesn’t want to know what the tattoo stands for, doesn’t want to know much at all, it seems.
Now, for instance, Carl is talking about auto body parts online—alternators or motor mounts, belts. Something he can get cheap.
“I want a Jaguar,” Lee-Ann says.
“Hunh.”
Carl, who has been listening for anything Lee-Ann might say, takes up with Anders again about a Corvette he could fix if only …
“If Dad lends you money?”
“No, Mom.”
“Fixing cars,” she says, “costs money.”
“I’m talking about Hardy’s car.”
“I said, fixing cars …”
“You deaf? I’m talking about Hardy’s car. What he needs to fix it. I could fix it. I could make some money fixing it, Peg.”
“Don’t call me Peg.”
“Well, whoever you are, everything doesn’t have to do with money.”
“I’m not saying.”
“That’s all you’ve said, all you ever say is how much, how much. How much the painting’s costing and how Farkey’s never here but lets his kids do the work. Kids younger than me. I should be doing the painting, right?”
“Nothing to fight about now,” Anders says.
She says, “I like the house painters. They have children. They’re married.”
“Yeah, real grown-up, I bet, and living happily ever blah, blah.”
“You want to pick a fight, Carl?”
“Peg, please.”
“This is why I hate coming here,” Carl pushes away from the table and Peg makes for the boy, grabs at his shirt.
“Don’t you think you’re a little old for a teenager, Carl?”
Lee-Ann, the teenager, looks to what Carl does and follows him out, saying nothing as Carl talks loudly about Peg, the bitch. Is it any wonder Dad wants company?
Carl turned thirty-seven last March very quietly at the kitchen table over double-trouble chocolate cupcakes Peg has made for him for almost as many years. The girlfriend was missing, but Carl had seemed happy to Peg then, maybe not to her husband, Anders, no; maybe not as happy as the house painters, but celebrating in a house with a ghost for company, what could they expect?
Not much. He has an apartment. Anders helps with the rent because Carl’s only part-time at the dry cleaner. He’s otherwise, or says he is otherwise, taking mechanic courses at Ramapo. His nights, his days, his progress in the tech course, she doesn’t ask, Carl doesn’t report.
Peg makes the double-trouble cupcakes for herself as much as for him. A bowl-licker, a spatula-sucker, she doesn’t stint on sugar and it shows, even though the boy ate most of them. She hasn’t beaten the eat-healthy drum very loudly, doesn’t mention weight. Sleeveless dresses still chafe her arms, and underpants yank up her crack and hurt so that she stands still or moves hardly at all.
One year, the boy wanted cherry pie à la mode, and Peg made both, the pie and the double-trouble cupcakes.
Today she is barefoot in what Anders calls her farmer pants, bib overalls, softly comfortable, but loose as an old slipcover, and she is saddened to think she looks like a sofa, except that now she has no daughter to complain about—once, but no more.
Every time Peg looks at her right hand, she sees another kinked or swollen part visit her.
The Dot Sisters
In the windy city they sway on a bridge and let the wind get under their dresses, Claire and Julia, happy. Let them be happy. They have suffered. Their father abandoned them years ago; their mother rages past, shrill ghost. Swipe her away; stay with the girls on the bridge in the high wind in the summer of 1970. How cheerful they appear against the passing scene in navy, gray, or khaki. The sisters wear matching dot dresses, green ground for Claire; for Julia, brown. The river beneath them is tan, not brown, and the sky overhead is true blue. Probably they have been happy together before, but Julia is often melancholy and Claire is pessimistic, so it has been a long time since—or never!
Never?
Don’t be ridiculous, Julia says. They are simply happier than they have been in a long, long time. They’ve sold the house; the estate is settled. They think they will not come back.
They should pack tonight, take the train tomorrow. The Palmetto sounds breezy. Travel to the Carolinas to a tall white inn, tippy as a cake with balconies, shutters, netting, and flutter, where crystal chandeliers bejewel every room and on the bedside table a swan carafe of water; on the pillow, chocolates in foil. Let them be comforted. Please. Let them sleep. Not in every dream, unpacked, undressed, shamed. Enough with the nakedness and shit and sick pets sick in corners.
Oh, the Obvious
Mrs. Pall-Meyer, shortwaisted, stooped, breasts shrunk to teardrops, Mrs. Pall-Meyer was a dirty old woman, no matter she was rich. What good had money done her? She was traveling alone. They were both, Arden Fawn and Mrs. Pall-Meyer, traveling alone, but Mrs. Pall-Meyer had been at the ranch for over a month and would ride on long after Arden went home: Monday, next week, the first of April, home to an airbrushed county Arden once thought harmless.
Arden yanked at her reins and brought Doc into line while the old woman, Mrs. Pall-Meyer, held back her horse and put even more space between them. Mrs. Pall-Meyer was as friendless as Arden; no one would miss them.
They rode to the dried-out creek bed that devolved to a trail of ashy sand, charred wood, and trash not pictured in the ranch brochure—a strip of fender, a Pringles can—the rubbly blight of modern life, no green in sight but dust. At least for a time the sound of the horses was peaceable, but the hard floor of the desert came on with a clap. A wizened spring, the sickly prickly pear and organ-pipe cacti were so riddled with holes they might have been targets. Even the paloverde trees looked leached. They rode along a level path, fording dried-out riverbeds of chalky stones—pale landscape, white sun. She put on her sunglasses and the view, honeyed, was not so hard on the spirit, but her back still hurt; it felt as if she were tightening a belt of barbed wire around her waist—God almighty, it hurt, and the ride had hardly begun. Arden rode apart not so much by choice as that it happened. Terrain had nothing to do with it. Her horse was slow and she was heavy.
Mrs. Pall-Meyer, even farther behind, was a stick and rode as she liked. Now she went at a gentle pace and comfortable distance, for which Arden was grateful. In this way, far enough apart from all of the others, Arden could play on in her pioneering dream of self-sufficiency, even though her favorite part of the ride was when she was off the horse and walking to the ranch. Her legs felt used and wide apart then, and her walk was more a straddle.
“Kick him!” Mrs. Pall-Meyer cried. The old woman threatened to pass. They had fallen too far behind.
Arden’s horse started to lope then lapsed into a rough trot stopped at the earthy rump of the dentist’s enormous horse.
“Oh, hoh, my,” Arden moaned. Knocked against the saddle horn, her pubic bone stung and she pressed her hand between her legs: she felt her own heat and heard Mrs. Pall-Meyer spit. Mrs. Pall-Meyer had paused, as had all the riders, at the incline.
“How long have you been riding?” Mrs. Pall-Meyer asked.
“Oh,” Arden, said, shifting in the saddle, “all my life, but not a lot.”
Mrs. Pall-Meyer, the name suggesting a hyphenated importance, merely snorted and rode ahead.
The trail turned narrower, rougher, stonier although the redheaded wrangler—Red, for his hair—might have been asleep, so little did the ride’s danger impress him. How many times had he led folks up this route?
“Over five thousand acres gives a guy a lot of different ways to go,” he answered. “You’d be surprised.”
Mrs. Pall-Meyer said, “If I had something to ride on.” In this way, she simply went on talking to herself, making tough, irritated pickax sounds with words like crap, drink, think. For all the advantages she must have had, Mrs. Pall-Meyer was a coarse woman. She had made herself known in the morning, talking at the young Asbach boy, Ben, “My friends are dead. My sister is demented. I’m the last of my line, but I bet you’ve got a lot of friends.” Oh, the nuisance of them all was what the old woman meant to say in her supercilious voice. Arden had looked on at how Mrs. Pall-Meyer befuddled the boy and made him blush. Ben Asbach of the Asbachs—”There are eight of us here,” said the matriarch merrily. A granddaughter—slight as straw—called Mrs. Asbach Nana.
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