It was already too complicated to explain to Jewell, to say it so Jewell would see she had to get away no matter how. It all boiled down to two stupid sentences, that she was going off with somebody she didn’t know, and it was somebody who’d advertised in the paper for a wife. She could hear Jewell’s dust mop on the stairs, and hear a truck straining up the hill. Uncle Ott bringing more machinery or equipment for his new property. He’d brought over a bulldozer two days earlier, a hulking mud-covered thing that made a noise like turkeys when it started up. It rolled down off the truck bed and stood huffing in the field of dandelions of the same matching yellow, in the coarse new grass.
‘I’d like to know what he thinks he’s going to do with that,’ said Jewell. ‘He says he wants to plant corn. I never see a farmer use a bulldozer for a plow or a seeder. Loyal would have a fit to see that thing in his field.’
The heavy idling echoed from the dooryard, there were steps on the porch and a knock. Not Ott, after all, who’d opened the door all his life.
‘Hello. I’m looking for Mernelle Blood.’ A steady voice, wired with doggedness.
She could hear Jewell’s dust mop pause on the stairs. The heat of the May morning struck through the screen door, the smell of grass and white blossom pressing in past the figure on the other side of the screen. She recognized his stance from the newspaper photograph. A flow of air drifted into the kitchen, filled it with the scent of mock orange, the sour exhaust of the stuttering car in the yard. Through the screen she could see knots of flies hovering at the tips of the pin cherry branches, the curve of blue metal.
‘Oh God, I’m not ready. I haven’t washed my hair.’
‘I couldn’t wait until the afternoon,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t wait.’ The screen door rattled faintly under his trembling hand.
Jewell, listening on the stairs, guessed at most of it.
20
The Bottle-Shaped Tombstone
HE HELD OPEN the car door for her and she slid in behind the driver, a heavyset woman with cascades of curly grey hair sweeping down her back and wet eyes the color of tea.
‘This is Mrs. Greenslit. She’s the reporter for the Trumpet that wrote the story.’
‘Just call me Arlene. Yep, this is my story and I’m sticking with it. You two kids are the guests of the Trumpet — within reason. That includes dinner and a movie tonight and Miss Blood, you don’t mind if I call you Mernelle, do you, you can stay over at my place free of charge until you kids see how this thing is gonna go. The only people there are me and my husband Pearl and Pearl’s brother Ruby. They don’t care if I bring home the bald-headed sword swallower. It’s all in the day’s work for a reporter. Oh, the stories I covered Mernelle you wouldn’t believe. I was telling Ray here while we were waiting for you about last year when this amazing truck driver with no arms, drove with his feet, rolled into town and I rode with him all the way up to Montreal. Caught the train back. He was just wonderful how he could manage, steer and everything. He stayed over too. Slept in the same bed you’re gonna sleep in. I did a big Human Interest story on him. That’s my specialty, Human Interest. So this story, the story of you two kiddies, is a natural for me. Oh yes, I seen it all. This is nothing. From my own life and everything else. I just naturally run into these stories. I was born in New York state, but came across the lake with my family when I was three. Grew up in Rouses Point. My father was a heavy drinker. You know, when he died my mother had his tombstone made over in Barre in the shape of a whiskey bottle. Six feet high. I went back to show it to some people I know a couple of years ago and somebody had stolen it. So I did a feature story on it, “The Stolen Tombstone” and the paper got a tip that a certain gentleman down in Amherst, Massachusetts, a college professor, was using it for a coffee table. The police got it back for us. The Massachusetts police. Of course we had to go down there with a flatbed truck and pick it up. My husband had a few choice words for the college professor. I wouldn’t repeat them. You can’t push Pearl around. The thing that surprised me was it had been gone a couple of years and my mother didn’t even know it. And how did he get it down there? He would not say, but denied it was a truck. I did a story on a bat-shoot. Know what that is? Well, I guess you don’t read the Trumpet, because it was one of the most popular stories they ever ran. I don’t know how many letters they got on that story. It was about this hunting and fishing club and how they wanted to shoot clay pigeons on the weekend, but they couldn’t get ’em, just couldn’t get ’em here, so this one guy has bats in his attic, see, and he goes and gets them in the daytime when they’re sleeping, puts them in this box, pokes holes in it so they can breathe, and then brings it to the club. They let the bats go and that’s what they shot since they couldn’t get the clay pigeons. They stopped though when there was a man wounded. The bats flew low. You know Mr. File, Fred File, that’s the editor of the Trumpet thought you kids might want to go out dancing after the movie – dinner at Bove’s, Italian, all you can eat, the lasagna is great, then the movie, I forgot what’s playing, oh no, I remember, it’s I Can Get It For You Wholesale with Irene Dunne or somebody. A comedy, supposed to be hilarious. But the dancing, there isn’t any tonight so you might just have to walk around. Stroll. The important thing is to get to know each other. I was telling Ray here on the way over, that’s the most important thing in the world, getting to know another person, and probably the hardest thing, too. One of the best stories I ever did was about this guy who fell in love with a friend of his mother’s, she was, I don’t know, maybe twenty-five years older than him, had white hair and all, but he was crazy about her. Of course the only thing he knew about her was what he saw when she came to visit his mother. She was always very nice and I guess that’s what he liked. His mother drank, I think, and wasn’t too kind to him. So one day this friend of his mother comes in and he gets down on his knees in front of her and says “I love you,” and she thinks he’s flipped his wig, she gets up and starts to go into the kitchen to get his mother, and he grabs her and she shoves him so he goes in his bedroom and gets a gun and comes out and says “If I can’t have you nobody can” and shoots her. Shoots her dead. And the mother’s in the kitchen through all this stirring up iced tea. So the point is to get to know somebody as well as you can before you drag them off. Right, Ray?’
Mernelle and Ray MacWay sat in the backseat like pillars, each conscious of the heat of the other’s body and hearing, not Mrs. Greenslit’s waves of talk, but the sound of breathing. Over the mildewed upholstery Mernelle could smell soap, shampoo, pinewood, warm skin, Dentyne chewing gum. Her stomach growled and she hated it, willed it to shrivel.
In the kitchen a bumblebee that had mistaken the gap between the screen door and its casing for nirvana flew at the windows, seeking to enter again the familiar world, visible and near, but walled off by a malignant force.
Mernelle was back again in a week, banging the screen door against the house as she backed into the kitchen. She carried a cardboard circle with a store cake covered with coconut as thick as fur. The rumble of the exhaust in the dooryard stopped, car doors slammed.
‘Happy Mother’s Day, Ma. It’s me and Ray. Mrs. Greenslit’s here too.’ She hugged Jewell around the waist.
‘Well, fill me in on the news,’ said Jewell, startled at the way Mernelle had changed, guilty at how little she had worried about her. Mernelle wore a long-skirted blue suit and a pink rayon blouse. She had on high heels and her face was made up. Her black hair cut and crimped in a permanent wave like a helmet of sheep’s wool. She looked taller, even more gawky, but there was a sureness in her that estranged her from the old child’s life.
‘Tell you quick before Ray and Mrs. Greenslit comes in, Mr. Trueblood wouldn’t marry us.’ Murmuring, half-whispering. ‘He said it was a publicity stunt and he wouldn’t marry us until we’d known each other for a year. He said “quick courtship, quick divorce.” Ray gave him a swat and he called the sheriff. So we all had to go down to the sheriffs office in Billytown, and Mrs. Greens
lit busy writing it all up. Well, another story come out in the Trumpet and we got all these letters from other ministers who will marry us, including one up at Rouses Point that done the funeral service for Mrs. Greenslit’s father when he died. So I guess we will go up there. Ray wants to see her father’s tombstone anyway. So we’re going up there today and want you to come. Mrs. Greenslit will bring you back. Ray and me is going on a honeymoon to Montreal. The Trumpet is paying for some of it. Ray don’t like them to pay for it all. He’s got some money saved up.’
Jewell put on the kettle for coffee. The commotion in the kitchen seemed immense. Mrs. Greenslit, arranging paper plates, putting out plastic forks and knives. ‘Hello, hello, hello! Here we are,’ she cried. Mernelle shuffled through the chipped dishes, picking out the four nicest. ‘There’s ice cream, too. Strawberry. Butter pecan. That’s the new flavor. You’ll love it.’
Ray came in carrying a waxed tissue twist and held it out to Jewell. ‘The Trumpet didn’t buy them,’ he said, and smiled. His stiff face broke in half, showed bad teeth. There were a dozen tea roses the color of boiled shrimp. She unwrapped the paper, as green as new popple leaves, filled a cream jug with water. ‘Been a good many years since anybody gave me flowers. Flowers from the florist, that is,’ remembering Mernelle’s hot bunches of daisies and vetch, violets with half-inch stems, wilting lilacs.
‘I’m happy I can do it,’ said Ray and sat down beside Mernelle. Mernelle handed Jewell a package in flowered paper. She made a fuss over the prettiness of the paper, smoothing and setting it aside. There were two pairs of nylons, 60 gauge, 15 denier, ‘Piquant Beige’ on the label. Eating the cake Jewell looked at Ray from under her eyelids, looked at his forgettable face, his thin arms, his hungry eyes. She thought with melancholy of roguish Dub, of handsome Loyal, lost or stunted in their lives while this one got ahead. Ray cut more cake, Mernelle doting on the sawing motion of his hand. The frosting hung off their forks. Mrs. Greenslit jabbered. Jewell felt how fierce she had grown in her solitude. But she smiled and said, in her kindest voice, the cake was a treat, said she would ride with them up to Rouses Point for the wedding. And went to the attic with Mernelle to find a certain silk handkerchief edged in handmade lace.
‘It was your father’s mother’s when she was married, and she had it down from someone else. I believe it came from Ireland. It’s very old.’ They sat in the dusty attic chairs in front of the trunk with its freight of old schoolbooks, awkward clothing, a ruined buffalo robe, family papers and photographs, a parasol in tatters.
‘I don’t suppose there’s anything I can tell you that you don’t already know,’ she said. ‘There’s things you’ll learn that nobody can tell you.’
‘Well,’ said Mernelle. ‘It’s not that I know so much but that I trust Ray. I know he’ll never hurt me. I’ve never seen him loose his temper.’ Her voice vibrated. It was pitched lower as if she had been singing for hours every day. ‘So, I mean, I guess I didn’t grow up on a farm for nothing. But there’s something I wanted to know for a long time.’ Her voice wheedled. ‘About Mrs. Nipple. What it was about Mrs. Nipple and Toot you never would tell me?’
‘My Lord, that’s not anything to talk about now. Supposed to be a happy occasion and that morbid story’s enough to depress an angel. It would spoil your day and poor Mrs. Nipple would roll over in her grave. Spoil my day, too, digging that up. Let’s go on down and have a happy time of it.’
‘It must be something pretty awful,’ said Mernelle, half sulky. She’d been up to plenty, thought Jewell.
‘You know, I’d say it was. Now I’m going to go put on my new nylons and see if I can’t show up the bride. And there’s something else I want to give you. The money from the farm that was left after the bank and all was paid out, I divided it up equal so’s me, you and Dub and Loyal all get a share. It’s not much, comes to two hundred each, but it’s something. If I was you, I’d just put it aside in the bank or something, don’t say nothing to Ray, not that he’s not a nice fellow, just put it aside for your own little nest egg. You can’t tell, you might want it someday.’
‘Ma, that money’s to keep you. Ray and me’ll make out o.k.’
‘Don’t worry about me. I may have grey hair, but there’s life in the old girl yet. Ronnie been teaching me to drive so I can get a job. You ought to know how to drive soon’s you can, Mernelle. It’ll make an awful difference in your life.’
‘Ma, we don’t even have a car. We been going around with that reporter woman, Mrs. Greenslit, and if we ever get rid of her I’ll be so thankful I won’t mind crawling on my hands and knees. But Ray’s saving up. I got to get a job too. What are you going to try for?’
‘In fact, I already got two jobs. It’s funny. Ronnie’s been taking me over and picking me up as part of the driving lessons. If you’d come yesterday you wouldn’t of found me here. I was working down to the cannery. It’s just cutting up vegetables that come in on the trucks, carrots all week. They say they get everything, broccoli, celery, beans. In the evening I been knitting stockings for the Ski Shop or whatever they call it, Downhill Shop. Long stockings with a fancy design knit in the leg and contrast color cuffs. I made a pair with red valentine hearts all over like that hat I made you when you were in the eighth grade, and they went crazy over them. The two women that run the place, Jo-Jo, the young one, says she is taking the valentine stockings down to New York. Thinks they’ll be good sellers. It seems funny to be knitting wool stockings in summer, but that’s how you get the stock built up, they said. Anyway, it’s enough for me to make out on pretty good. Where are you going to live?’
‘We found an apartment. Can’t afford our own house for a long time. Big old place down by the lake, this old house that’s divided up into eight apartments. There’s real big windows. It’ll take just yards and yards to make curtains, but I don’t want to leave them bare.’
‘Just dye some sheets the color you want and hem them up. Cover the biggest windows in the state. Listen, Mernelle, you keep this money to yourself. In case you ever have an emergency. Or it can be a start toward education money. For your kids.’
But Mernelle told Ray MacWay on the way up to Rouses Point, whispering in his ear, while up front Mrs. Greenslit talked about her father’s tombstone and the armless trucker. Jewell saw the woman was a miserable driver, treading on the brake for every curve, forgetting to shift down on hills until the car bucked.
21
The Drive
ONCE RONNIE GOT her through the tricks of the clutch and gear shifting, it seemed she’d been driving for years. She had a feel for it, and by August her license was in her new brown purse and she ventured onto roads she’d never traveled. Her fear was that the car would stall on a hill in traffic and she’d hold up the parade while she tried to start it again, would flood the engine, forget the brake and roll down backwards into an ambulance.
At first she stayed on valley highways, but after a few weeks began to pick mountain roads where she could lean into the corners or nurse the old heap up the slope to a pull-off at the top and take in the panorama through her new eyeglasses. Continuity broke: when she drove, her stifled youth unfurled like ribbon pulled from a spool.
There was the idea of what outsiders saw in ‘views’ – when you went somewhere you wanted to see something, when you’d been driving with your eyes on the road for hours, you wanted to let them stretch out to the boundaries of the earth, the farther the better. All her life she had taken the tufted line of the hills against the sky as fixed, but saw now that the landscape changed, rolled out as far as the roads went, never repeating itself in its arrangement of cliffs and water and trees. View was something more than the bulk of hills and opening valleys, more than sheets of riffled light.
When she turned the ignition key and steered the car out of the drive, the gravel crunching deliciously under the tires, she went dizzy with power for the first time in her adult life. The radio played ‘Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White,’ and she was glad. She felt sh
e was young and in a movie when she drove. She had never guessed at the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take, where to stop. Nor the rushing air buffeting her face and whipping her iron hair as though it were child’s hair. As though they had given her the whole country for her own. Did men, she wondered, have this feeling of lightness, of wiping out all troubles when they got into their cars or trucks? Their faces did not show any special pleasure when they drove. Men understood nothing of the profound sameness, week after week, after month of the same narrow rooms, treading the same worn footpaths to the clothesline, the garden. You soon knew it all by heart. Your mind closed in to the problems of cracked glass, feeling for pennies in linty coat pockets, sour milk. You couldn’t get away from troubles. They came dragging into the mirror with you, fanning over the snow, filled the dirty sink. Men couldn’t imagine women’s lives, they seemed to believe, as in a religion, that women were numbed by an instinctive craving to fill the wet mouths of babies, predestined to choose always the petty points of life on which to hang their attention until at last all ended and began with the orifices of the body. She had believed this herself. And wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink’s furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life.
Coming back from her journeys, from seeing houses set in a hundred positions, some beside the road, some back in a knot of trees like a brooch on a hill’s breast, her own house showed up as a slatternly lean of paintless clapboards, the porch slipping away like melting butterscotch.