But life there was lonely and steeped in routine. All of her siblings had left and gotten married, and they rather expected Irene to remain where she was, taking care of her parents, providing them with company as they grew older, and with help during the busy times of year.
Once, a couple of years ago, at a wedding dance where she’d gone with her parents, a fellow named Bryce Polavik from over near Philbrook had danced with her and driven her home. He’d even kissed her and asked her out the following Saturday. She had bought some yard goods and sewn herself a brand-new dress, and Krystyna had put a new Toni home permanent in her hair and shared her excitement, and Irene had even bought a new pair of high heels with cut-out toes for the occasion.
But at the end of the night, on the way home from a dance hall called Bink’s, Bryce Polavik had pulled off the road onto a little trail leading into somebody’s woods and had kissed Irene like a sex fiend, and tried to unhook her garters, and unsnap her brassiere. When she stopped him, he became insistent, and zipped down his trousers and forced her to touch his privates, and then he’d used his superior strength to subdue her and touch her between her legs, where nobody had ever touched her. When she’d continued to struggle and fight him off and beg, no, no, please no, it’s a mortal sin, no, please, he had roughly thrust her aside, called her a stupid, fat cunt, and said she should be happy any guy at all would even want to screw somebody like her, and that it was likely the only time she’d ever get the chance, so don’t come begging him when she changed her mind, because he’d never so much as look at her again. Then he backed out of the woods so fast the car lurched into the opposite ditch before he changed gears and tore off down the gravel road at such a breakneck pace he’d scared Irene even worse than earlier when he’d tried to force her to have intercourse. Her parents’ driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, and he skidded to a halt at the end of it, reached across her and threw her door open. When she’d asked, “Aren’t you going to drive me the rest of the way?” he’d said, “Get out, fatso. The walk will do you good. Might wear off a pound or two.”
So Irene lived on at home, seeking social diversion primarily with Krystyna and Eddie, playing cards at their house, often eating supper there, talking gardening and sewing, loving their children while growing more and more afraid she’d have none of her own. She was the one who went to their house and took care of Krystyna for ten full days after each of the babies had been born. She had bottle-fed and burped them and changed many a dirty diaper. She made clothes for their dolls, taught them how to play jacks, bought them coloring books and took them out to the farm to spend overnights so that Eddie and Krystyna could have occasional nights alone. In spring she showed them where the best spreads of trilliums bloomed in Grandpa and Grandma Pribil’s woods, and broke off fresh bloodroot and showed them how it bled. She took them to the barn and showed them the baby kittens, and let them help her cut out sugar cookies and slice rhubarb with a paring knife for the first time, folding their small hands around the knife handle and cautioning them on how to use it. At Halloween she helped Krystyna make their costumes and carve their pumpkins. At Christmas the gifts she bought them were nicer than those she bought for her other nieces and nephews. At bedtime, when she was at their house, they ran to her scrubbed and fresh in plissé pajamas and kissed Auntie Irene goodnight with the avid abandon they gave their own parents.
Only they were not hers.
Irene envied what Krystyna had with Eddie. She envied their beautiful children, their house, their marriage, and his unmistakable love for her. She envied her his easygoing manner, his calm appreciation of all she did, the way he’d walk home from St. Joseph’s at any hour of the day, just to have a cup of coffee with her, then quietly draw her into the front hall away from the others to give her a goodbye kiss before going back to work. She envied Krystyna because Eddie was always doing things for her—improving the house in whatever way she asked, building things for her in his workshop, and for the children, too—their first high chair, doll furniture from Santa, a playhouse outfitted with a miniature table and chairs the perfect size for little bodies. When Krystyna asked him to put up a swing for the girls on one end of the clothesline pole, Eddie did it with a smile, then pushed his children on it, laughing with them. When Krystyna asked for a short white picket fence to surround her garden, he made it without a murmur of complaint, and the two of them painted it together, sitting on the front-porch steps while townspeople walked by and stopped to visit, and Krystyna would say, “Go on in and pour yourself a lemonade.” Or a cup of coffee, or have a doughnut or a cookie, she’d say, because their house was always open, and people wandered in and out of it as if it were a restaurant. When Krystyna asked if Eddie wanted to go to a “hard-time dance,” he put on the foolish costumes she contrived, made of onion sacks, and they went to Clarissa and won first prize, he shyly, she with the vibrance she brought to everything she did.
And once Krystyna had confided to Irene that Eddie had given her a bath. Filled the tub and picked her up and carried her to it and pressed her back until she was lying limp against the porcelain, and soaped her from head to foot and kissed her stomach, which was no longer tight and flat after stretching around two babies, and told her she was perfect. Perfect, mind you, Krystyna had said, when there were stretch marks bright and jagged as lightning running all across her stomach, and she couldn’t fit into the straight dresses she’d worn before Anne was born, and her fingers were often stained and cracked from all the chemicals in the permanents she gave.
Over the years that Irene watched the young married couple together, she grew to love them both even more. Her love for Krystyna was so pure and rewarding it would never have occurred to her to let her sister know she loved Eddie. And her love for Eddie—well, it had grown into a golden glow that filled her like a perfect dawn whenever he was near. In Irene’s eyes he was more than ideal. He was a god.
It was through Krystyna and Eddie that Irene had lived vicariously. Her joy at being with them and the children dulled the dread she carried at the prospect of life as an old maid. As long as they were there, their door and hearts open to her, Irene could escape to them and from the stunning mediocrity of her reality.
But now Krystyna was dead and there would be no more borrowing shoes, and giving each other permanents, and going to dances on Saturday nights. On the odd Wednesday or Sunday afternoon when the changelessness of life on the farm became suffocating, she could not drive into town and visit in Krystyna’s kitchen. Who would she laugh with? Remember her days in Long Prairie with? Tease Mother and Dad with (for Krystyna had been the one who could always make them laugh)? Who would lift her above the drudgery to that plane of companionship she’d never shared with anyone else?
On the morning of Krystyna’s funeral, Irene awakened and sat up in her childhood bed, feeling abject and targeted, as if some preeminent force had it in for her and was showing her how simple it was to remove every vestige of happiness from her life. Across from the foot of the bed a pair of tall, skinny windows nearly touched the white mop-boards. Through them she could see the sun, persimmon orange, nesting above the row of scrub willows clear down beyond the south pasture. How dare the sun shine on the day of Krystyna’s funeral? There should be rain, like there was in Irene’s heart.
She rose with an effort and cocked a hand to her head, where a swift throb reminded her of how much crying she’d done in the last four days. Downstairs her mother was making sounds in the kitchen. Her father, she knew, was out cutting hay, catching a couple good hours before dressing for the funeral: death didn’t halt the seasons, and though the saying had become cliché, it was true that a farmer had to make hay while the sun shone.
Irene shuffled downstairs, where she found her mother taking a cake out of the oven: there would be a dinner after the funeral at the Paderewski Hall with the ladies of the parish providing food, so even in her grief, Mary Pribil, like her husband, felt the demands of life pushing her from behind.
“Mama?” Irene said from the doorway.
Mary straightened with the cake pan in her hand and closed the oven door. She wore rimless eyeglasses over close-set eyes. Her thin gray hair was as short and curly as a Persian lamb coat. The broken collarbone she’d suffered had left her right shoulder sagging lower than her left, like an old, weathered wooden gravemarker that had once been a cross.
She set the cake pan on the cupboard and said, “Mornin’, Reeny.”
To her mother’s back, Irene said, “I’m going to take the old truck and go in early and help Eddie get the girls dressed. Fix their hair the way Krystyna would have liked it, okay?”
Mary refused to turn around. She stood a moment with the butts of her hands resting on the edge of the wooden cabinet. Then she pulled up her apron and used a comer of it to wipe her eyes inside her glasses. “You do what you got to do. It ain’t gonna be an easy day to get through, that’s for sure.”
Irene crossed the kitchen and kissed her mother on the side of her neck, and slipped her arms around Mary’s thick middle and rocked her awhile. Then Mary patted the backs of Irene’s hands and the younger woman left the room.
________
The funeral was scheduled for eleven A.M. It was shortly after nine-thirty when Irene crossed Eddie’s front porch and knocked on the door. Used to be she’d walk right in, because Eddie would be at work and Krystyna would be in the kitchen doing housework or setting somebody’s hair.
Eddie answered the door with shaving cream on one side of his face, dressed in black gabardine trousers and a sleeveless ribbed undershirt with a U-neck.
“Irene,” he said without his customary smile. Though he was a low-key man, he had a shy, lopsided smile with which he usually greeted people. Today he merely spoke her name as a flat, gleeless recognition.
“Hi, Eddie,” she said as he opened the screendoor to let her in. “Sorry I interrupted your shaving.”
He waved off her apology without a word.
“Pretty sad day, isn’t it?” she said when he’d closed the inside door.
“Yuh,” he managed while they both struggled with resurfacing emotions.
They stood in a shallow entry that stretched the width of the living room, separated from it by a wall with an archway flanked by two square white posts on set-in shelves that the children had called parapets, because that’s what the nuns called the ones at school. To the right, against the end wall of the entry, Krystyna’s treadle sewing machine stood with an unfinished project folded up on top of the boxy wooden cover. Off the left end of the entry a stairway led to the second story, from where the children’s voices and running water could be heard.
“I thought I’d come over and fix the girls’ hair and help them get dressed, the way Krystyna would have.”
Eddie took a beat to register what she was offering and to accept the fact that Krystyna was gone and would never fuss over the girls again.
“That’s nice, Irene. I appreciate that.”
“I didn’t think... I mean, I didn’t know if you, how you’d... I mean who’d...”
“It’s okay, Irene, I know what you mean. I hadn’t got around to figuring that out yet, either.”
“Then it’s okay that I came over?”
“Sure. And you’re right. Krystyna would have wanted them to be all dolled up.” He tried for a smile, but all dolled up was Krystyna’s expression, and the reminder only saddened Eddie and Irene the more.
“Well, listen, your face is drying. You go back and finish your shave and I’ll go up and help them get dressed and make up their bed, how’s that?”
He nodded despondently and headed upstairs. Halfway to the top he turned and said, “I wanted them to wear those little pink-and-white striped dresses, the last ones Krystyna made for them.”
“Sure, Eddie.”
At the top of the stairs, the hall doubled-back upon itself with a handrail overlooking the steps. The children’s bedroom was situated there, Eddie and Krystyna’s down the hall. One had to walk through Eddie and Krystyna’s room to reach the bathroom. The children came running through their parents’ bedroom, dressed in their cotton underwear. Lucy was squealing, “Daddy, Daddy, look at us!” They had painted their faces with his shaving cream. “We’re going to shave!”
“Auntie Irene is here,” he said. “She’s going to get you dressed and comb your hair real pretty.”
Irene watched the children run to him, bearded in white, their bare heels pounding on the hall runner. He stopped them and turned them by the backs of their heads, pointing them back toward his room. “Now you come back in the bathroom with me and wash that shaving soap off so Auntie Irene can get you dressed.”
They both peered around him, said, “Hi, Auntie Irene,” then he herded them away.
She stood looking after them, filled with a sense of loss complicated by the realization that Krystyna was gone forever and Eddie was no longer married. The smell of his shaving soap lingered in the hall, and in her mind the image of his wiry arms and the hair on his chest behind the strappy undershirt. Through the open door of his room she could see the foot of his bed, still mussed. She had never, in her entire lifetime, had access to the smell of a man’s shaving soap or the appearance of him or his tossed sheets in the morning, other than her father’s and the middle-aged men she’d worked for. She found it dreadful that she should be observing Eddie’s private morning routine at the expense of her sister’s life, even more dreadful to discover that she was enjoying the pseudo-intimacy.
She went into the girls’ room and made up their bed, picked up their dirty socks and pajamas from the floor and opened a tall chest of drawers that held their folded clothes. She and Krystyna had bought the chest at an auction sale when Krystyna was expecting Anne, and had painted it pastel green and put teddy bear decals on the fronts of the drawers. She straightened some stacks of undershirts and underpants and listened to Eddie and the girls. He was the gentlest, most loving father she had ever seen, and she felt she had the capability of being the same kind of mother. How perfect it would be if she could marry him and take care of him and the girls for the rest of her life.
Guilt swept down and smothered the idea. Krystyna wasn’t even buried yet and here she was wishing to step into her place. Was this what was meant by coveting? She promised herself she would go to confession next Saturday and ask absolution from her sin.
She wiped a tear from her eye with a small folded undershirt, looked up and whispered, “Forgive me, Krystyna. I’m so sorry.”
But she loved the children, and loved Eddie, and would fill in for Krystyna in a heartbeat, even if he never loved her back. And how could he love her, a fat, boring, farm woman who had none of Krystyna’s vibrancy or verve?
The children, at least, loved her: of that much she was sure, and that would be enough for her if it ever came to that.
But it wouldn’t, and she must never let Eddie know she’d had such thoughts, especially so soon after Krystyna died.
She dressed the girls in their full-skirted pink dresses with fluffy white petticoats underneath, and wide sashes that tied in the back. She found white anklets and let them buckle on their shiny black patent-leather shoes. Then she took them down to the kitchen and, in turn, stood them on the seat of a kitchen chair next to the sink where Eddie had made built-in cabinets with special triangular-shaped cupboards on either side of the window, with angled doors to make it easy for Krystyna to see the back of her hair when she was setting it and combing it. If Irene had thought of this last night, she would have come over then and set the girls’ hair in pin curls the way Krystyna always did on Saturday night, in preparation for Sunday Mass. Lacking fresh curls, she parted their hair on the side, drew a little tail to the opposite side, secured it with a rubber band, then trimmed it with a wide pink ribbon which she carefully tied in a bow. She knew right where Krystyna kept the ribbons and the rubber bands and combs—all in the kitchen drawer where her other paraphernalia for giving permanents was also kept. The s
mell in the drawer—of ammonia and wave set and the rubber bands that hung on the permanent rollers, half decomposed from the strong chemicals—brought back so sharp a memory of Krystyna that Irene had to struggle once again to keep from crying.
The girls were all dressed and combed when Eddie came downstairs in his black suit, a crisply ironed white shirt (Krystyna had always taken such pains with his shirts) and striped tie, wearing his Knights of Columbus pin in his lapel. He reached the doorway just as one of his brothers rang the first bell at St. Joseph’s, a reminder that in thirty minutes Krystyna’s funeral Mass would begin. The sight of Eddie sent a billow of longing through Irene, a visceral reaction that rolled along and lifted in much the same manner as the wind over a field of tall, green grain. As with the grain when the wind has passed, she stood straight and waiting, hiding what lay underneath.
“Well, I guess it’s time to go,” Eddie said.
“I guess so.”
“Guess we can walk over to the funeral home.”
“I g... guess so.”
“Folks’ll be getting there by now.”
She simply could not speak anymore, didn’t know how he could.
“The girls look...” He had to stop and compose himself before going on. His voice got even quieter. “Girls look nice, Irene.”
She touched them on the backs of their heads. “Go see your daddy,” she whispered.
They crossed the kitchen solemnly and took their daddy’s hands, and he thought that without those two small hands in his he might have sunk to the floor and refused to leave the house, refused to walk down the sidewalk and cross Main Street and see that precious face lying in the casket and watch the metal lid close over it forever.