And so he left. They always did leave.
She kept his registration form the way a child would keep a ticket stub as a souvenir of a special day. Honest as a brook in spring, the entire thing had been. She never looked him up on the Internet, nor was she ever tempted. Charlie Macauley was his name. Charlie Macauley of the unspeakable pain.
The next morning at breakfast Shelly did not acknowledge Dottie. Not even a thank you for the whole wheat toast. Dottie was very surprised; her eyes watered with the sudden sting of this. But then she understood. There was an old African proverb Dottie had read one day that said, “After a man eats, he becomes shy.” And Dottie thought of that now with Shelly. Shelly was like the man in the proverb; having satisfied her needs, she was ashamed. She had confided more than she had wanted to, and now Dottie was somehow to blame. As Dottie thought about this, going back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room, she saw Shelly Small as a woman who suffered only from the most common complaint of all: Life had simply not been what she thought it would be. Shelly had taken life’s disappointments and turned them into a house. A house that, with the clever use of the right architects, had managed to stay within the legal code yet became a monstrosity as large as Shelly’s needs. Tears had not popped into her eyes over her daughter’s obesity. No, they came to her when she reported the assault upon her vanity. She had won against her husband the War of the House, but it had not been enough. What Dottie had not said to her, because it was not her place, was that Shelly had a husband who would break into song at the breakfast table with her in a room with strangers sitting nearby, and that was no—excuse me, Dottie thought—small thing.
To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened. And Dottie thought that Shelly’s problems, her humiliations, were not large when you considered what was happening in the world. When you considered the people dying of starvation, getting blown up for no reason, being gassed by their own government, you choose it—this was not the story of Shelly Small. And yet Dottie had felt for her small—yes, Small—moments of human sadness. And now Shelly could not return the decency of even looking her in the eye. This kind of thing Dottie did not care for, she would like to know who would!
When Shelly did glance over her shoulder to inquire whether there was more jam to be had, Dottie said there was, of course. In the kitchen—and while it was a terribly conventional form of revenge—she spit in the jam and mixed it up and spit again, as much as she could gather in her mouth, and took some pleasure in seeing the jam bowl empty by the time the Smalls left. People had been spitting in the food of those they served most likely since the beginning of time. Dottie knew from experience that the ease this provided was very short-lived, but then most ease was short-lived, and that is how life was.
Shelly was out for the entire day, and the couple did not return to their room until very late. That night Dottie heard—and she was surprised—so much suppressed giggling coming from the Bunny Rabbit Room that she got out of bed and walked in her slippers down the hall. And what she heard was Shelly Small making fun of Dottie in terms Dottie found outrageous. These terms had to do with Dottie’s body parts ostensibly not having been made use of in quite some time, and Dr. Small, not surprisingly, was quite graphic during his part of the discussion and they had a very merry time doing this, as though Dottie was a clown on stage tripping over shoes too large; their humor was like that. And then began, as Dottie realized would happen, the sounds of people, as her decent Aunt Edna had put it, who love each other. Only Dottie did not hear the sounds of love—she heard sounds from the man that made her think how some women thought of men as pigs. Dottie had never thought of men as pigs, but this man did a good imitation; it was revolting—and intriguing—in the most ghastly way. Listening in the hallway, she did not hear the sounds of a woman enjoying the love of her husband. Instead she heard the sounds of a woman who would do anything to make herself feel superior to an old lady who was, as Shelly had put it only minutes earlier, so puritanical as to object to almost anything. In other words, the unhappiness of Shelly Small was something she could ease by being a sexual woman, unlike Dottie. But she was not a sexual woman, Dottie could tell. Shelly got into the shower promptly after, and to Dottie this was always the sign of a woman who had not enjoyed her man.
—
In the morning only Dr. Small was at the breakfast table. “And will your wife be joining you?” Dottie asked.
“She is packing,” he said, unfolding his napkin. “I’ll have the oatmeal again, and you needn’t prepare anything for her.”
Dottie nodded, and after bringing him his oatmeal she went to help check out the other couple that had been staying there as well. When she returned to the dining room Dr. Small was just standing up, throwing his napkin onto his oatmeal bowl. Dottie felt a deep sense of revulsion—she had been used.
Placing her hands on the top of a dining room chair, she said calmly, “I am not a prostitute, Dr. Small. That is not my profession, you see.”
Unlike his wife, who turned red quickly when surprised or embarrassed, this man turned pale, and Dottie knew—because Dottie knew many things—that this was a far worse sign.
“What in the world do you mean by that?” he finally said. He seemed unable to help but add “Jesus Christ, lady.”
Dottie stayed exactly where she was. “Precisely what I said is what I mean. I offer guests a bed, and I offer them breakfast. I do not offer them counsel from lives they find unendurable.” She closed her eyes briefly, then continued, “Or from marriages that are living deaths, from disappointments suffered at the hands of poor friends who regard their houses as a penis. This is not what I do.”
“Jesus,” said Dr. Small, who was backing away from her. “You’re a whackjob.” He bumped into a chair, and seemed almost ready to fall. He straightened himself and said, pointing a finger, shaking it at her, “You shouldn’t be dealing with the public, good Christ.” He walked into the living room, then headed up the stairs. “I’m surprised no one’s reported you, though I suspect they have. I’ll go online myself, by God.”
Dottie cleared the dishes. Calmness had come to her quickly and quietly. No one had ever lodged a complaint against her. Nor would Dr. Small, who most likely could barely use the Internet; his materials, she remembered, had been in a binder his first morning at the breakfast table.
Dottie waited until she heard the Smalls descending the stairs. Then she went and held the front door open for them; she did not say “Fly safely,” because she did not care if they flew right into the sea, but when she saw Shelly’s red nose, the drop of fluid hanging from its tip, Dottie felt momentarily sad. But Dr. Small said, as he pushed past Dottie with his suitcase, “What a goddamn whackjob, Jesus Christ,” and then Dottie felt the wonderful calmness come to her again. She said politely, “Goodbye now,” and closed the door behind them.
Then she went and sat behind her desk. The house was absolutely silent. In a few minutes she saw the Smalls’ rental car drive from the driveway, and then she took from the far back of her top drawer the slip of paper with the lovely man’s name on it: Charlie Macauley. Charlie Macauley of the Unspeakable Pain. Dottie kissed two fingers and pressed them to his signature.
Snow-Blind
Back then the road they lived on was a dirt road and they lived at the end of it, about a mile from Route 4. This was in the north, in potato country, and back when the Appleby children were small, the winters were icy and snow-filled and there were months when the road seemed impassably narrow. Weather was different then, like a family member you couldn’t avoid. You took it without thinking much. Elgin Appleby attached a sturdy snowplow to his sturdiest tractor, and he was usually able to clear the way enough to get the kids to school. Elgin had grown up in farm country and he knew about weather and he knew about potatoes and he knew who in the county sold their bags with hidden rocks for weight. He was a closed book of a man, he inhabited himself with economy, but his family und
erstood that he loathed dishonesty in any form. He did have surprising and sudden moments of liveliness. For example, he could imitate perfectly old Miss Lurvy, who ran the Historical Society’s tiny museum—“The first flush toilet in Aroostook County,” he would say, heaving back his narrow shoulders as though he had a large bosom, “belonged to a judge who was known to beat his wife quite regularly.” Or he might pretend to be a tramp looking for food, holding out his hand, his blue eyes beseeching, and his children would laugh themselves sick, until his wife, Sylvia, got them calmed down. On winter mornings he let the car warm up in the driveway as he scraped the ice from its windows, exhaust billowing about him until the kids tumbled down the salt-dappled snow on the steps. There were three other kids on the road, the two boys in the Daigle family and their sister, Charlene, who was close to the age of the youngest Appleby child, a strange little girl named Annie.
Annie was skinny and lively and so prone to talkativeness that her mother was not altogether sorry when the child spent hours by herself in the woods playing with sticks or making angels in the snow. Annie was the only Appleby child to inherit the Acadian olive skin tone and dark hair from her mother and grandmother, and the sight of her red hat and dark head coming across the snowfields was as common as seeing a nuthatch at the birdfeeder. One morning when Annie was five and going to kindergarten she told the car full of children—her brother and sister and the Daigle boys and Charlene—that God spoke to her when she was outside in the woods. Her sister said, “You’re so stupid, why don’t you shut up.” Annie bounced on the seat beside her father and she said, “He does, though! God talks to me.” Her sister asked how did he do that, and Annie answered, “He puts thoughts in my head.” Annie looked up at her father then, and saw something in his eyes as he turned to look at her that stayed with her always, something that did not seem like her father, not yet, something that seemed not good. “You all get out,” he said when he pulled up in front of the school. “I have to speak to Annie.” When the car doors had slammed shut he said to his daughter, “What is it you saw in the woods?”
She thought about this. “I saw the trees and chickadees.”
Her father stayed silent a long time, gazing over the top of the steering wheel. Annie had never been scared of her father the way Charlene was scared of hers. And Annie wasn’t scared of her mother, who was the cozier parent but not the more important one. “Go on now.” Her father nodded at her, and she pushed herself across the seat, her snow pants squeaking, and he leaned and got the door, saying “Watch your fingers” before he pulled it shut.
That was the year Jamie did not like his teacher. “He makes me sick,” Jamie said, throwing his boots into the mudroom. Like his father, Jamie was not a talker, and Sylvia, watching this, had a quick flush come to her face.
“Is Mr. Potter mean to you?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know.”
Jamie was in the fourth grade, and Sylvia loved him more than she loved her daughters; it was that he caused an almost unbearable sweetness to spread through her. That he should suffer anything was intolerable. She loved Annie gently because the child was so strange and harmless. The middle child, Cindy, Sylvia loved with a mild generosity. Cindy was the dullest of the three and probably the most like her mother.
It was also the year Jamie saved up his money and gave his father a tape recorder for his birthday. This turned into a terrible moment because his father, after unwrapping the present with barely any rips to the wrapping paper, the way he always unwrapped things, said, “You’re the one who wants a tape recorder, James. It’s indecent to give someone a present you want yourself, though it happens all the time.”
“Elgin,” Sylvia murmured. It was true that Jamie had wanted a tape recorder, and his pale cheeks burned red. The tape recorder was put away on the top shelf of the coat closet.
Annie, talkative as she was, did not mention this to anyone, including her grandmother next door. Her grandmother’s house was a small square house, and in the long white months of winter the house seemed stark and bare naked, the windows like eyes stuck open, looking toward the farm. The old woman was from the St. John Valley and was said to have been beautiful in her day. Annie’s mother had once been beautiful too, photos showed that. Now the old woman was stick-thin, and tiny wrinkles covered her face. “I would like to die,” she said languidly from where she lay on her couch. Annie sat cross-legged in the big chair nearby. Her grandmother drew in the air with her finger. “I would like to close my eyes right now and pass away.” She lifted her head of white hair and looked over at Annie. “I’m blue,” she added. She put her head back down.
“I’d miss you,” said Annie. It was a Saturday and it had snowed all day, the flakes big and wet and thick, sticking to the lower windowpanes in curves.
“You wouldn’t. You only come over here to get a piece of candy. You have a brother and a sister to talk to. I don’t know why the three of you don’t play together.”
“We’re not in the appetite.” Annie had once asked her brother to play cards and he had said he was not in the appetite. She picked at a hole in her sock. “Our teacher says if you look at the fields right after it snows and the sun is shining hard you can get blind.” Annie craned her neck to see out the window.
“Then don’t look,” her grandmother said.
When Annie was in the fifth grade, she began staying at Charlene Daigle’s house more. Annie was still lively and talked incessantly, but there had been an incident with the long-forgotten tape recorder—a secret she shared with Jamie—and ever since the incident it was as though a skin was compressed round her own family: the farm, her quiet brother, her sulky sister, her smiling mother, who often said, “I feel sorry for the Daigles. He’s always so grumpy and he yells at the kids. We’re awfully lucky to have a happy family.” All of it made Annie picture a sausage, and she had poked a small hole in the casing and was trying to squirm out. Mr. Daigle did not really yell at his kids; in fact, when Annie and Charlene took a bath he often came in to wash them with a washcloth. Annie’s own father thought bodies were private and had recently become red-faced and yelled—yelled hard!—because Cindy had not wrapped her sanitary pad adequately with toilet paper before putting it in the garbage. He had made her come and get it and wrap it up more. It caused Annie to tremble inside; the skin of the sausage was shame. Her family was encased in shame. She felt this more than she thought it, the way children do. But she thought that when she was old enough for this awful thing to happen to her own body she would bury the things outside in the woods.
So she went to Charlene’s house after school and they made large snowpeople that Mr. Daigle sprayed with the hose so they would turn icy and glasslike by the morning. When it was too cold to be outside, Annie and Charlene made up stories and acted them out. Annie’s father, stopping by to get her, would stand with Mrs. Daigle and watch them. Mrs. Daigle wore red lipstick, there was something fierce about her; Elgin Appleby got a twinkle in his eye when he talked with her. It was not a look he got when he talked to his wife, and one Saturday afternoon Annie said quite suddenly, “This is a dumb play we made up. I want to go home.” Walking back up the road to their house she still held her father’s hand, as she had always done. Around them the fields were endless and white, edged by the dark trunks of spruce trees and their boughs weighed down with the snow. “Daddy,” she said, blurting it out, “what’s the most important thing to you?”
“You, of course.” He did not break his stride. “My family.” His answer was immediate and calm.
“And Mama?”
“The most important of all.”
Joy spilled around Annie, and in her memory it stayed that way for years. The walk back up the road to her house, holding her father’s hand, the fields quieting in their brightness, the trees darkening to a navy green, the milky sun that was the color of the snow. Once inside the house she knocked softly on the door of her brother’s room. He was in high
school, and small hairs were on his upper lip. She closed the door behind her and said, “Nana’s just a mean old witch. Nobody likes her. Not one person.”