Sister Age

by M. F. K. Fisher

  And then I began to think that the small neat figure just ahead of us in the narrow street to the hotel, or the bowed head with the chic hat in the prow of the canal taxi that had just slipped by, was actually Miss Pettigrew’s. Silent and shy, she was flitting behind me or ahead, filled with questions and sorrows that were really my own, hating me with my own hatred for having thus innocently thrust myself into her life, which, in turn, was becoming my own life. And I was in a kind of double focus, doubting my motives, wondering why I had been forced to be so generous of myself and of my helpless children—if I had done it because of a hidden hunger for the bird-like love and need of me, if I was indeed a ghoul! And then the questions were more mocking, and my brain went on shaping them this way and that, but always with Miss Pettigrew just ahead or behind, driven by something that had sent her after me, after us, to Bruges instead of northward to Amsterdam with the poor small body of her sister.

  Perhaps I’ll never know if the white-haired stronger sister reached Holland with her cargo, heavier than planned. I shall never know that she did not slip ahead of me in the dead streets of Bruges, or past me silently upon those silent, oily waters, as I shall never know if she hated me for being almost the last one off the ship.

  The Unswept Emptiness

  When the wax-man came around the corner of the house Matey was feeling sorry and alone, and that is why she cried out so warmly, “Why, it’s my friend the wax-man!”

  “Matey, Matey,” her little daughter said, in a dance of excitement, “a visitor for us!” And the three dogs were barking pleasurably, their tails like banners and the bitch too heavy and near her pup-time now to jump, wallowing like a happy tugboat in the wake of all the noise. Matey looked up with a quick smile, and because she was full of sorrow about many things and lonely too, for her husband was far away and she could feel him missing her and the two little girls and the dogs, she cried out, “Why, it’s my friend the wax-man!”

  She put down the trowel, and rubbed her hands stained with weeds and earth on the sides of her overalls, and as she climbed up the embankment toward the man she thought of what always happened when she saw him. It was the same problem every time, and even though he had not paid his annual visit to her for five years, since gas rationing began, it still gave her a familiar hysterical feeling not to be able to remember his name, and to know that when she finally did she would want to laugh. He sold wax and took orders for wax, the way people sold brushes. If he had sold brushes his name would not be Fuller, which would be logical, but Kent, which was also logical but in a less obvious way: Fuller brushes, Kent brushes, one made in America and one in England. But he sold waxes. But his name was not Johnson, which in the same way would be logical. So what was it?

  Matey tried not to feel gigglish and hysterical. She knew that before it was too late she would recall the wax-name that was the right one for him, and that then she must have a reserve supply of self-control, so that she would not laugh in his face with relief and amusement.

  She saw as she climbed up toward him that he looked generally the same as five years ago, holding his heavy black hat in one hand and his little suitcase full of samples in the other, standing motionless in the swirl of dogs and noise while the small girl hopped around.

  “Hello,” Matey said, keeping her voice as it had been at first when he surprised her in her sorrow and loneliness, not wanting to hurt him by a quick change to normal politeness after that first warmth, for he had indeed come once more up the long rough dirt road to sell waxes to her. “I haven’t seen you for a long time,” she said, standing beside him.

  “Who is this man, Matey?” her daughter asked in a gay excited voice, and the three dogs looked up at him gaily too, their tails still fluttering as they waited to know.

  Matey felt the hysteria loom inside her. It is not Mr. Johnson, she said firmly, helpless to tell yet what the name would be, the logical name for her friend the wax-man. “This is my friend the wax-man, Sarah,” she said, and then she felt shy and awkward, hoping once again as she always did that he would not find her rude to forget his right name, after his long ride up the hill.

  “Oh,” the little girl said, as if the answer were complete and deeply satisfying, and the dogs felt that too and sniffed courteously at his dusty black shoes, his creased pepper-and-salt trousers.

  “No, I couldn’t attend to my old customers during the war years,” he said in his familiar gentle voice, and he was breathing in a guarded way, as if he tried not to puff.

  “You’re just in time,” Matey said happily, as she always did to him whether it was true or not. It was ridiculous to infer that she was at this very moment almost out of the wax he had last sold her five years before, but it was so pleasant to see him unchanged and faithful, and to feel that she was one of his old customers, that she almost believed that the shelf in the broom-closet was indeed empty, and not well filled with bottles and jars of polish she had bought at the village hardware store. “I need gallons of stuff,” she said.

  She led the way through the patio to the side door, so as not to have the three of them tramping past the baby’s room to waken her, and sank down in her familiar place upon the couch with Sarah tense with excitement beside her, while the wax-man dropped expertly upon one knee and flipped open the same suitcase, with the same wares fitted into it. It was as if five years had folded back upon themselves, like a portable silver drinking cup she once had that snapped back into a single ring, flat for her pocket, when she pressed it. Sarah was not her child born since last she bought wax from this same man, but perhaps just a neighbor visiting. There was no baby sleeping close by. She would give the order she always gave, and watch him write it on a pad on his knee, and some time before he left she would remember his name, as she had always done.

  “Now this is a new product,” he was saying, “which I have supplied to many of my old customers, really very nice for kitchens and,” he hesitated, “for bathrooms too they all tell me, and you can see,” and he deftly held out an advertisement pasted to a sheet of cardboard, “here it is in the Saturday Evening Post of three weeks ago, very well displayed too I may say, one of our new products which I feel is a real addition to our list, as you will see if I may just give you a teeny-weeny hint of it,” and before Matey could stop him he had sprayed from the fat atomizer in his hand a little cloud.

  “Pee-ugh,” Sarah said.

  “Oh,” Matey cried, “what is it?”

  “We have Pineywoods, but this sample happens to be Arabian Nights,” he murmured.

  “Oh, it’s simply awful,” she said. “I’m sorry, but I simply can’t stand it.” She almost said, “It smells like a bad public toilet,” and she almost called him Mr. Johnson. She began to feel impatient with her lagging memory, and a little hurt that he had shot this stink into the air, and beside her Sarah bounced nervously. Matey put one hand on her child’s tiny knee, and said, “But I do need a lot of floor-oil and all that.”

  “Now here is something,” he went on in his soft sleepy voice, “that I am recommending personally for a really high polish.”

  Matey laughed a little, because he always said that and then she always replied as she did now, “But these old floors! Rough pine! No use trying to polish them!” Then, as always, she looked at his remote thin face, knowing that he would glance very quickly, without any change of expression, at the floor at the end of the rug he was kneeling on, before he looked back at his sample.

  Suddenly she was hot with discouragement, and almost overwhelmed by a rush of loneliness for her long-absent husband. If only he would unwind the red tape of discharge papers and such, and be home again, so that she would feel like a whole creature and be able to keep their house sparkling! If only he were home! Then there would be no dust, no murk of footprints on the oiled floors, no fluff of house-moss and dog hairs and untidiness under the piano. She leaned down in a welter of self-castigation and sniffed at the top of Sarah’s head, and sure enough it smelled like the head of a hot dirty
little girl. Ah, I should have washed her hair last Saturday, Matey thought morbidly. I am neglecting her. And she looked at the earth under her own fingernails, and then at her filthy old battered tennis-shoes sticking out from the faded overalls, and she felt unkempt and careless and desolate. When will he ever come home, she wondered, deep in a chasm of sadness.

  “Absolutely no use,” she said to the wax-man. “It’s your good old floor-oil I need, gallons of it.”

  “This polish is really fine for furniture too,” he went on softly. “I have always supplied it to my customers who value their antiques, you know.” And he flicked his eyes imperturbably at the front of the walnut-secretary-from-Matey’s-great-grandmother, all covered with smudges where the baby was learning to pull herself up.

  Matey almost said, “Oh, Mr. Johnson, I’ve had two children since last you came! Yes, Mr. Johnson, I have another little girl, almost a year old! Such changes, Mr. Johnson!” But she did not. She said, “A pint of it, then. I think just a pint.”

  “Yes,” he said gently. “Some of my best customers have always supplied themselves with it … Mrs. Huntington Logan, you must know her, such beautiful antiques, and Mrs. James S. Reed but of course you may not know her so far away always used it, and Mrs. J. Howard Burnham, so very very particular about her antiques.…” He put the sample back tidily, and marked the order-blank on his knee.

  Matey wondered, as she always had done at this point in their meetings, how he could kneel so long. She had read once that his company gave all its salesmen special training in such gymnastics. He folded down so neatly, and then at the end he stood up without making even a crackle or snap in his knee-joints, which she was sure she could never in the world have done. Perhaps Sarah could, but certainly not she. “And then of course a gallon of the regular floor-oil, for these horrible old pine floors,” she said. “No, two gallons, I think.”

  “Two, yes,” he murmured, flicking his eyes with no change of expression at the dust-blurred floors.

  Matey once more sank down in herself with misery, and thought of the gleaming parquetry of all his other old customers, the shimmer under the piano of Mrs. Huntington Logan, the shine under Mrs. James S. Reed’s maple dining table, the black glitter of antique oak beams under antique Mrs. J. Howard Burnham’s antique armoire. They all have husbands, she thought bitterly, husbands out of Washington forever, husbands home and with jobs. That is why they have polished floors, all right. That’s it, Mr. Johnson. “Two gallons at least,” she said, laughing.

  “I’ll just mark down two,” the wax-man said softly, licking the tip of his pencil. “I hope to be able to serve my regular old customers every six months now, since we no longer have rationing of gasoline. Two will suffice until my next visit.”

  In a daze, a glaze, of unhappiness Matey ordered two cans of wax for the icebox and the stove, and some liquid polish for the kitchen linoleum. They were goads to her, whips on her lazy slatternly back, sluttish hausfrau Matey. Never again will the wax-man oddly enough not called Johnson come here and see dustdustdust, smudges, smears, house-moss, she swore desolately. Never again, dear Mr. Johnson. She remembered as if it had been many years ago, five years ago perhaps, the light joy she had felt when he came this afternoon around the corner of the house, with all the barking and Sarah hopping excitedly among the dogs. How could she have felt so joyful, well knowing as she did that the house was filthy, filthy? How could she have been there in the sunlight, nonchalantly pulling weeds while the dust lay everywhere inside? Ah, if she could remember his name, then she would be more at peace with herself, she knew.

  They stood up, the wax-man flipping shut his sample-case and Matey and Sarah as like as two peas, grimy and healthy, and while the two females waited on the terrace, so that perhaps the baby would not wake for a few more minutes, and the two dogs and the tub-like gravid bitch flounced and floundered about the man’s legs, he went down to his old car for what had been ordered.

  Matey held her checkbook and fountain pen. His name his name his name, she prayed, figuring ways to find out, in case the customary miracle did not happen and pop it into her mind. She would ask carelessly, “Shall I make it out to the company or to you?” … something like that. “Just what are your initials?” she would ask carelessly, laughingly.

  Sarah said, “Matey, our old friend the wax-man is having troubles,” and it was true: he stood halfway up the path with cans and cans of polish rolling out of his arms, and a look of dismay on his face at this inexpert unpracticed unaccustomed untidiness, so that they hurried down to him and Sarah went yelling and chasing after a round box of wax.

  When everything was picked up and brought as far as the steps, Matey said, “Let’s leave it all here, and my husband will help me,” because even though she felt sure the wax-man knew that her husband would not be home for weeks-months-years she could not bear to have him come into the house again, for a nightmarish fear that he would fold down onto his knee and flick open his satchel and tell her once more about the clean sparkling gleaming homes of his other old customers.

  “Now for the check,” she said in a brisk voice that embarrassed her. What would happen? Would she have to ask his name? Would she remember, in a photo-finish? Was there still time for the familiar miracle, the name that was not as logical as it might at first seem, taken in conjunction with his profession as a wax-man, not as right as the name Johnson perhaps but still right, exotic, farfetched but right …?

  He slid a card onto the stone wall beside her checkbook, and then looked out across the valley, his back to her. He is discreet, she thought gratefully. He is a kind sensitive man. No wonder I welcomed him. The card, face down, said on its back “$12.56.”

  Matey filled in everything on her check but the name-line, and her stub and its name-line, and then asked in a voice that sounded a little too loud to her, “Shall I make it out to you? Would that be better?”

  He did not turn, as she could tell without looking at him, but said very softly, “Please.”

  She turned over the card, still waiting to remember what it would say. And even as she read it she remembered too, so that there was surely not a half-second between the reading and the memory. Of course his name was Bee, Mr. J. M. Bee. It was unforgettable: Mr. Bee sells wax. What other man with what other name could ever sell wax but Mr. J. M. Bee? Real laughter, not helpless hysterical giggles, loomed in her, and all of a sudden she felt so full of relief that she wanted to cry out to him, “Oh, Mr. Bee! I am so happy that you came back, Mr. Bee! I missed you, these five years. I have always loved having you come up here on the hill. You have always been so nice, to come clear up here onto this dry rocky place, when most of your old customers have nice large shining houses on the flat of the valley, with lawns in front and no dogs and no children. I am really delighted to see you, especially today, Mr. Bee!”

  She turned to him, waving the check like a flag. She felt young, triumphant, unconquerable. “Mr. Bee!” she cried.

  He shrugged his shoulders in their neat pepper-and-salt suit, without turning toward her, and she stood looking with him at the far quiet valley, the two ridges of hills, one brown and one bluish behind it, and then the climbing jagged mountains and the final snow. Above the inaudible sound of the words her mind was still calling out so gaily she could hear a gobble of turkeys from a distant farm, and the droning hum of a tractor. She could hear, indeed she did hear, the little girl Sarah sigh once, close beside her, as if with a world-weariness, while the dogs sat in a silent row on the terrace wall, the bulging bitch in the middle, watching.

  “Old Baldy,” the wax-man said. There was still no immediate sound, and below in the valley the tractor and the turkeys made their small heartbeat into the thin clear air. “Old Baldy,” he said again. “That old mountain always gets me, does something to me.”

  Matey still felt like telling him how much she liked him, because she was drunk with relief and amusement and well-being, at last to have his wonderful name safe in her mind. She thought
in a flash that she would tell him about the name too, about her annual, semi-annual trauma or whatever it might be that made her suffer so, remembering Fuller-Kent-Johnson and then always the final miracle of Mr. Bee. But he whirled around and looked sternly at her, and said in a harsh shocking voice, “Funny what these old mountains do to you, all right!”

  Matey saw in amazement, in a kind of horror, that his pale grey eyes were thick with tears, and that his mouth, which she had never really looked at, was trembling and bluish over his even white false teeth. She saw that his neat clothes were very loose upon his frame. He was old. He was much more than five years older than he had been five years ago, she saw. And then she remembered what she must have seen subconsciously in the living room, how he had stood up from his jaunty expert kneeling: he had unfolded in painful sections, in a kind of repressed agony of balancing and posing, of trying to maintain the good old wax-company stance, the tried-and-true ageless salesman’s limberness. Oh Mr. Bee, she thought, weak with compassion. She knew that she could not tell him now about the name. It would not ever be funny again for her. And now she would never forget it: that she knew.

  He blinked unashamedly, and a tear ran down one cheek and he licked it up with his tongue and surprisingly smacked his lips, the way the baby did sometimes when a whole bean got into the smooth puree of beans. It probably tasted awful, Matey thought … like alum.

  She held out the check to him. He folded it neatly, thanked her with a jerky bow, and turned away without any confusion for the way his face was streaked. It was as if blaming tears on a far snow-white mountain absolved him of weakness.

  Matey and Sarah and the three dogs watched him walk stiffly down the steep path to his car.

  “Goodbye, friend the wax-man,” the little girl called.

  He turned, and said in his new scratchy loud voice, “Glad to have served you again. Things have certainly changed all right. Faces in the valley have all changed. I tell you, I hardly know a soul. All the old customers have gone.”