“I’m Elizabeth Abbott,” said the girl.
She had stopped on the grass. She waited while Mrs. Emerson dragged the rocker down the steps. Mrs. Emerson said, “Abbott? It’s funny, I can’t remember seeing you here before.”
“I haven’t been here. I come from North Carolina.”
“Oh, I have cousins in North Carolina,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Not to know personally, of course. Are you just visiting?”
“I’m going to see these people about a job.”
“A job. Goodness,” Mrs. Emerson said, “and here you are moving furniture. Do you usually go at things in such a roundabout way?”
Elizabeth smiled. The whole of her face smiled. “Always,” she said.
“I just hope you won’t arrive late, that’s why I asked. The last thing I’d do is interfere but I have daughters, working daughters, and I can’t help telling you: first impressions are all-important. Promptness. Neatness.”
She was looking at Elizabeth’s shirt-tails, but Elizabeth didn’t notice; she had moved off now with her chairs. “They don’t know to expect me, anyway,” she called back. “I saw their ad on a bulletin board in a thrift shop. I like getting jobs from bulletin boards. What they want is a mother’s helper, and I need to find out if that means housework or babysitting. Babysitting wouldn’t be good at all. I don’t like children.”
“Is that right?” Mrs. Emerson said. She was trying to remember if she had ever heard anyone else admit to such a thing. She puffed along with the rocker, taking short rapid steps to keep up. “Now, I would have thought you were still in school.”
“I am. I’m earning money for my senior year at college.”
“In September?”
“I’m taking a year off.”
“Oh, that’s terrible!” said Mrs. Emerson. They had reached the garage by now. She set down the rocker to stare at Elizabeth, who seemed undisturbed. “Interrupting like that! It’s terrible. Why, one thing may lead to another and you may never get back. I’ve known that to happen.”
“It’s true,” Elizabeth agreed.
“Couldn’t you get a scholarship? Or a loan?”
“Oh, my grades were rotten,” she said cheerfully.
“Still, though. It’s no good to have to stop something in the middle. What does your father do, dear?”
“He’s a minister.”
“Nothing wrong with that. Although a lot depends on the denomination. What denomination is he?” “Baptist.”
“Oh.”
“If this job is babysitting,” Elizabeth said, “I’ll just have to find me another bulletin board. But the friend that dropped me here said Roland Park was the likeliest neighborhood.”
She stacked her chairs inside the garage and reached for the rocker. Mrs. Emerson said, “Do you know the people’s name? The ones you’re going to see?”
“O’Donnell.”
“O’Donnell. Well, I’ve never heard of them before. If it’s people I don’t know they’re generally young. New young people buying up these old houses for a song and moving in with children. But children aren’t so bad. What is it you have against them?”
“I don’t like people you can have so much effect on,” Elizabeth said.
“What? Goodness,” said Mrs. Emerson.
They climbed back up the hill. It seemed to have grown steeper. Mrs. Emerson’s palms were sore, and two fingernails had broken, and her stockings were in shreds. “If only my boys were home,” she said. “If only I’d thought of this sometime when they were visiting. They’d have been glad to help. But I just never did, and then I asked myself, Why wait until they come? Why not do it myself, while the weather’s still warm and the sun so nice?”
She paused to catch her breath, one hand clamped to the small of her back. Elizabeth stopped too. “Would you like me to finish up for you?” she asked.
“No, no, I wouldn’t hear of it.”
“It’ll only take a minute.”
“I’m all right.”
They gathered up the next load and started back down. Mrs. Emerson’s heels kept slipping on dead leaves. This was all Richard’s fault. He couldn’t even rake properly. Slick brown leaves were scattered here and there, with moss or smooth earth beneath them instead of the grass he should have been growing. The chair she carried was knocking against her knees. Mean little tangled bramble bushes kept snatching her sweater off her shoulders. What would her husband say, if he could look down now and see how her life was turning out? She sighed raggedly, hitched the chair higher, wiped her forehead on her upper arm.
Then when they were just descending the steps to the garage, Mrs. Emerson caught her heel and fell. She landed on top of the overturned chair, scraping both knees and the palm of one hand. “Oops, there!” she said, and gave a little tinkling laugh. Tears were stinging her eyelids. She reached for Elizabeth’s hand and struggled to her feet. “Oh, how ridiculous,” she said.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course I am.” She jerked her hand away and began brushing her skirt. “I just caught my heel,” she said.
“Maybe you should rest a while.”
“No, I’m fine. Really.”
She lifted the chair again and one of its legs fell off—a white metal tube, rust specks seeping through a sloppy paint job. It clattered down the rest of the steps. She felt the tears pressing harder. “It’s broken,” she said. “Isn’t that ridiculous? It’s just not my day. And Richard gone, too.” She fixed her eyes on the chair leg, which Elizabeth had picked up and was examining. “If I had fired him tomorrow, now. Stayed in bed where I should have and kept my head under the covers and fired him tomorrow instead. Some days just anything I do is certain to bring ruin.”
“It can easily be mended,” Elizabeth said.
“What? Oh.”
“The screw must be somewhere around. I can fix it.”
“Yes, but—why did I fire him? What got into me?”
“You said—” Elizabeth began.
“Oh, that. He’s been tinkling on the roses for twenty-five years, not counting the war. Everybody knows that. It was just his flaw, something we avoided mentioning. Well, I would have, but I was uncertain how to bring it up, you see. What phraseology to use.”
“Now, was there a washer to this, I wonder?” Elizabeth said. “Or just the screw.”
“I certainly never meant to fire him for it!” said Mrs. Emerson. “I didn’t even know I was going to.”
She dropped to the steps, pulling a flowered handkerchief from her belt with shaky hands. By now the tears had spilled over, but she smiled steadily and kept a tight rein on her voice. “Well, I’m being very silly,” she said.
“Could you move your feet a minute?” said Elizabeth. She was patting the ground in search of the screw. Her face was turned slightly away; possibly she had not even noticed the tears. Mrs. Emerson straightened her back and blew her nose, silently. “All help is difficult, I suppose,” she said.
Elizabeth’s hands were square and brown, badly cared for, the nails chopped-looking and the knuckles scraped. But their competence, as they located the screw and fitted it into the chair, was comforting to watch. Mrs. Emerson blinked to clear her blurred eyes. “Emmeline was another one,” she said. “The maid. Now I’m having to make do with a girl from State Employment, a shiftless sort that chews tobacco. Half the time I can’t even count on her to come. And the house! I’m ashamed to look at it too closely. Oh, it seems I’ve just been left all alone suddenly. No one stayed with me.” She laughed. “I must be hard to get along with,” she said.
Elizabeth had pulled a red pocketknife from her dungarees. She opened out a screwdriver blade and began tightening the screw. “My,” said Mrs. Emerson, making an effort to lighten her voice. “Is that the kind with all the different blades? Corkscrew? Can opener?”
Elizabeth nodded. “It’s Swiss,” she said.
“Oh, a Swiss Army knife!” Mrs. Emerson blew her nose once more and then folded the handkerchief and bl
otted her eyes. “Matthew wanted one of those for Christmas once,” she said. “My oldest son. He asked for one.”
“They come in handy,” said Elizabeth.
“I’m sure they do.”
But she had given him, instead, a violin and a record player and a complete set of Beethoven’s symphonies. Remembering that made her start crying all over again. “I’m sorry about this,” she said, although Elizabeth still had not looked up at her. “It must be bereavement. The aftermath of bereavement. I just lost my husband three months ago. At first, you know, things are very busy and there are always people calling. It’s only later you notice what’s happened. After the people have left again.”
She watched the pocketknife being folded, the chair being set in the garage. “Goodness, that didn’t take long,” she said.
Elizabeth returned, dusting off her hands. “I’m sorry about your husband,” she told Mrs. Emerson.
“Oh, well. Thank you.”
Mrs. Emerson rose from the steps. All her joints ached, and her knees felt tight and stiff where they had been scraped. They started together up the hill. “My friends say it’s often this way,” she told Elizabeth. “The delayed reaction, I mean. But I never expected it now, three months after. I thought I had felt bad enough at the time. Sometimes this terrible idea comes to my mind. I think, if he was going to die, then couldn’t he have done it earlier? Before I was all used up and worn out? I could have started some sort of new life, back then. I would have had some hope. Well, that’s a stupid thing to say.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Elizabeth said.
It was this girl’s silence that made Mrs. Emerson rattle on so. Mrs. Emerson had a compulsion to fill all silences. In an hour she would be wincing over what she had spilled out to a stranger, but now, flushed with the feeling of finally having someone stay still and listen, she said, “And I can’t go for comfort to my children. They’re not that kind, not at all. Oh, I always try to look on the bright side, especially when I’m talking to people. That makes me tend to exaggerate a little. But I never fool myself: I know I’d have to attend my own funeral before I see them lined up on this veranda again talking the way they used to. They are always moving away from me; I feel like the center of an asterisk. They work at moving away. If I waited for my sons to come carry this furniture it would rot first, they never come. They find me difficult.” She climbed the front steps and turned to flash a very bright smile at Elizabeth, who was looking at her blankly. “Those auto rides,” she said, “with all of us crammed inside. ‘There go the Emersons,’ people would say, and never guess for an instant that behind the glass it was all bickering, arguing, scenes, constant crisis—”
“Oh, well,” Elizabeth said comfortably, “I reckon most families work that way.”
Mrs. Emerson paused; her thoughts snagged for a second. Then she said, “They live on crisis. It’s the only time they’re happy. No, they’re never happy. They lead such complicated lives I can’t keep up with them any more. All I’ve seen of my grandchild is one minute little black-and-white photo of a bunch of total strangers, one of them holding the baby. A lady I’d never seen before. Elderly. The last time we were all together was by necessity, for the funeral—and they left the baby with his other grandmother. Two of my boys live right in this area, but do I see them? Well, Matthew, when he can get away. Timothy never. The only one just dying to come is Andrew, and him I’m supposed to discourage because he’s a little bit unbalanced. He’s not supposed to leave his psychiatrist. He’s not supposed to come home and expose himself to upset. It’s unhealthy of him to want to.”
“It sounds,” Elizabeth said unexpectedly, “as if he’s in somebody’s clutches.”
For a moment Mrs. Emerson, who had already opened her mouth to begin a new sentence, had trouble following her. She looked up, startled, at Elizabeth’s earnest, scowling face. Then she laughed. “Oh, my,” she said, and reached for her handkerchief. “Oh, my, well …”
Elizabeth straightened up from the railing she had been leaning against. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll just take this last load of furniture down.”
“Oh, will this be the last?” Mrs. Emerson said. She had suddenly stopped laughing.
“There’s only these two.”
“Wait, don’t hurry. Wouldn’t you like to rest a minute? Have some milk and cookies? You said you hadn’t made an appointment. You could finish up any time.”
“I just did have breakfast,” Elizabeth said.
“Please. Just a glass of milk?”
“Well, all right.”
Mrs. Emerson led her into the house, through the ticking hallway toward the kitchen at the rear. “My, it’s so dark in here,” she said, although she was used to the darkness herself. As she passed various pieces of furniture—the grandfather clock, a ladderback chair, the chintz-covered armchair in the kitchen, all of them scuffed and worn down around the edges from a lifetime with children—she reached out to give them little pats, as if protecting them from a stranger’s eyes. But Elizabeth didn’t even glance at them. She seemed totally unobservant. She pulled an enameled stepstool toward the table and sat down on it, doubling her knees so as to set her feet on the top step. “I just don’t want to hit the O’Donnells at lunch,” she said.
“No, no, you have plenty of time,” said Mrs. Emerson.
She poured out a tall glass of milk. Elizabeth said, “Aren’t you having any?”
“Oh. I suppose so.”
Ordinarily she never touched milk. She only kept it for cooking. When she settled herself at the table and took the first sip she had the sudden sense of being back in her mother’s house, where she used to have milk and cookies to ease all minor tragedies. The taste of milk after tears, washing away the gluey feeling in the back of her throat, was the same then as now; she stared dreamily at a kitchen cabinet, keeping the taste in her memory a long time before taking another sip. Then she set the glass down and said, “I hope you don’t think I’m one of those people that gives notice all the time.”
“Notice?”
“Firing people.”
“Why should I think that?” Elizabeth said.
“Well, all this talk about Richard. And then Emmeline. But those two have been with me half a lifetime; it’s only lately that all this unpleasantness came up. They took advantage, knowing the state I was in. Oh, I don’t blame them entirely, I know I haven’t been myself. But how could they expect me to be? Ordinarily I’m a marvelous employer, people can’t do enough for me. You can tell by their name that family will have too many children.”
“Um—”
“The O’Donnells. Babies and toddlers and little ones in diapers, I’m just sure of it. I believe I know them. Don’t I?”
“I thought—”
“They’ll run you off your feet over there.”
Elizabeth finished her milk and set her empty glass down. She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I think you must be offering me a job,” she said.
“A job,” said Mrs. Emerson. She sat straighter and placed her palms together. “That is something to consider.”
“Are you asking if I’d like to work for you?”
“Well, would you?” Mrs. Emerson said.
“Sure. I’d make a better handyman than babysitter, any day.”
“Handyman!” said Mrs. Emerson. “No, I meant housework. Taking over for Emmeline.”
“Why not handyman? It’s what you need most. You already have a maid, you said.”
“But gardening. Painting. Climbing ladders.”
“I can do that.”
“Well, I never heard of such a thing.”
“Why? What’s so strange about it?” Elizabeth said. She had a habit of rarely bothering to look at people, Mrs. Emerson noticed. She concentrated on objects—pulling threads from a seam of her dungarees or untangling the toaster cord or examining the loose knob on the peppermill, so that when she did look up there was something startling, almost a flash, in the gray of h
er eyes. “You wouldn’t have to pay me much,” she said, looking straight at Mrs. Emerson. “If you let me live in I could get by on next to nothing.”
“It’s true, it scares me just to think of looking for another colored man,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Nowadays you can’t tell what to expect.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that.”
“But carrying firewood! Digging compost!”
Elizabeth waited, looking perfectly comfortable, picking leaves off the soles of her moccasins.
“I do get nervous at night,” said Mrs. Emerson. “Not that I am frightened or anything. But having someone down the hall, just another human being in case of—”
She fell silent and raised a hand to her forehead. This world expected too many decisions of her. The girl’s good points were obvious (calmness and silence, and the neat twist of her hands mending the chair) but there were bad points, too (no vivacity, that was it, and this tendency to drift into whatever offered itself). She sighed. “Oh well,” she said. “It can’t hurt to try you out, I suppose.”
“Done,” said Elizabeth, and reached a hand across the table. Mrs. Emerson was slow to realize that she was supposed to shake it.
“Now, I was paying Richard fifty a week,” she said. “But he wasn’t living in. Is forty all right?”
“Oh, sure,” said Elizabeth, cheerfully. “Anything.” How would she earn her way through college, talking like that? Then she stood and took her glass to the sink. She said, “I guess I’ll get the last of those chairs taken care of.”
“Fine,” said Mrs. Emerson. She stayed where she was. That was her privilege, now that she was paying. She listened to the front door slamming, the chair legs scraping across the veranda. Then she heard Elizabeth crashing through the woods. She thought of living in the same house with her—such a lanky, awkward, flat-chested girl—and she raised her eyes to the ceiling and asked her husband what she had let herself in for.