Surely, the woman's cry came later.
I watch you with the sight of years ago. I hear your screen door, and I see you on the driveway. When you walked below my window, then, did you have a thought of me? You are a boy with arms as thin as wood. Your hair is growing longer because soon you'll go away. I teased you at the river, but you wouldn't touch me. You wouldn't touch the buttons or my skin, though I dared you to, and others had already. Which you knew. And when I made you look, your face was calm, though your hands trembled. And you said...
I see your collarbone beneath a plaid shirt. Your cuffs are rolled. There's a shimmer on the water.
She said your mother died, though I knew before she told me. She is waiting for you to go away.
I hear your car come in the driveway. It purrs before you turn it off, like a cat. I hear your feet on the gravel and I see you with your hair grown longer over your ears, and I know that soon you'll go away. I hear your footsteps to the road and see you looking over the cornfields. I am forgetting colors, but not the shape of your eyes. I remember how you smell.
TWO
IN THE EARLY HOURS, AN ELECTRICAL STORM ROLLS OVER THE cornfields and the pastures where in the daylight there are always cows, waking children with its thunder, illuminating darkened bedrooms with its flashes of lightning and causing even those who do not wake, like Andrew, to stir in their sleep and alter the course of their dreams. The rain drums against the shingles and tin of the farmhouses and along the smooth cedar shakes of the high ranches closer to town, against the long low flat roof of the mall near the highway and against the windows of the few shops still struggling in the village: the white stucco gas station, built in 1930; the luncheonette across the street, now owned by a Vietnamese couple; the old barbershop that once again gives crew cuts to boys; the small shop next to the barber's, where the TV repairman's sign is; and now, new to Andrew, a mini-superette next to the gas station. After the rain, near dawn, the storm moves out, leaving in its wake a chill wash of air, the first in more than a week, and in the palely lit bedrooms, the relief is palpable. Men and women, some with their children still in their beds, sleep their deepest sleep in days.
When Andrew was a boy, the town, no more than a patchwork of dairy farms with an undistinguished village at its center, was distinctly rural, devoted to the production of milk and butter and cheese and ice cream at Miller's Dairy. The men of the town, descended from Poles, Irish, Italians and migrating Yankees, tended livestock and cornfields, or they worked for the dairy. Their women hovered somewhere between farmers' wives and suburban matrons, and their children, like Andrew, grew up for a time thinking the universe was cornfields and cows and men who woke before dawn, until they were eleven or fourteen or seventeen and began to feel the first stirrings of a desire to get away, or the first flutter of fear that they might not have the courage to.
For Andrew, who knew for a certainty from an early age that he would go away to college (his parents, with no working farm to leave to him, were united in this goal), the town lost its menace before it had had time even to register, and when he was away, at school, or in the city, he felt, if not consciously thought of, his childhood years in the town as unencumbered by the ethics of a more sophisticated urban life. So much so that he often failed to notice on his visits home, these visits growing less frequent with each passing year, how much the town was changing.
But on this visit home he has observed, with more clarity than he has had before, that the town is not as it used to be. There is a highway now and the mall. There are subdivisions where once there were just farms. In the next town, six miles away, beyond the mall and the biggest subdivision, there is a large insurance company that employs more people than the dairy ever did and a factory that makes cassettes and videotapes. The old dairy itself, so shiny and new when Andrew's father was a foreman, seems hobbled now by time.
Sometimes when Andrew dreams, he sees the town as it once was—the street corners and playing fields and cornfields and railroad tracks that made up the landscape of his childhood. But there will be in the dream an anachronistic conversation, or a person not encountered until years after he left the town, or an object not invented yet when he was living there. And though he will wake from these dreams confused or, more likely, bemused, the dreams, more than his memories, resemble the truth.
Andrew wakes and doesn't want his clothes from the city; in fact, he needs work clothes, although he has brought none with him. He finds, though, a pair of faded jeans, ironed and neatly folded over a hanger in his closet. The cloth is as soft as velvet, and he can see the faint line where years ago his mother let the hem out. When he has put them on, the bell-bottom cuffs look silly and hopelessly old-fashioned, but since he has nothing else suitable to wear, he is glad his mother saved them all these years.
In the kitchen he has a cup of instant coffee and a piece of chocolate cake someone from the Ladies Guild has brought to the house. When he finishes this, he walks out into the yard, letting the screen door slap smartly behind him. He puts his hands in his back pockets and inhales; the air tastes of mint and sage from the tangle of herbs by the back stoop. He can see that the lawn, which badly needs cutting, has shrunk, yielding its borders up, year by year, to the thicket of bracken and fern, of blackberries and wild apple and dogwood marching toward the house—as if soon they will swallow the white clapboards. How quickly a house wants to sink back into the land, he is thinking, to give up the struggle against the grasses and the rain and the sun. He feels inappropriately fine. He circles the house, the grass soaking his old canvas sneakers in a matter of seconds. Perhaps his mother had been ill for some time, he speculates, surveying with more clarity than he's had in days the disrepair of the property he must now offer to strangers. A small bed of badly overgrown zinnias, dahlias and flowers with spindly stems and unattractive red blossoms is a mass of weeds and seems to have no distinct outline. The south wall of the house, he observes, is peeling badly. The shrubs and the hedge need a savage pruning, and there's the falling gutter that must be put right. He notices, with an unreasonable cheerfulness, a screen with an ugly gash that will need replacing.
He can offer the house as it is, he knows, and return to the city and his job—it is not as if he needs the few extra thousand that the fixing and mending will bring—but he finds the thought of the physical labor, the mental list of tasks, oddly appealing. It has been years since he has had such a list of chores. Even when he had a home of his own, in Saddle River with his wife and child, someone else did the work, such as there was, in that new, immaculate structure: a cabinetmaker, a plumber, a lawn service to tend to the shrubs and bushes there. He doubts that anyone in his hometown would ever contemplate buying such a service, just as the women here, he knows, clean their own houses. At best, like the Closes, they might hire a boy to mow. There were always plenty of boys who needed the money.
He should return to the office, of course. He looks at his watch. At this hour he would already be at his desk in a summer suit. There would be a pile of pink phone messages, and some would seem urgent. He would have about him an air of earnestness leavened by an unobtrusive wit he has learned to cultivate, fielding the puns that his boss, like a college sophomore, is so fond of. And he would feel a small pressure, around his shoulders and along the back of his neck, because there would be a deadline and surrounding it a manufactured sense of importance. Though he would not be able to escape, as he hasn't for some time now, a growing certainty that all the efforts of all the men, like him, in offices are merely an elaborate bit of theater, in which the principal actors have so long and so thoroughly played their parts (like the actors in a long-running television series) that they are known to each other—and perhaps even to themselves—only as this character or that.
He remembers, with a slight shudder, how narrowly he escaped accepting, from a woman in his office, an offer of a house in the Hamptons. He can think of practically no worse way to spend a vacation than with strangers in a town nearly a
s crowded as the city—or so it seems to him from here. He had thought of taking Billy camping in Nova Scotia, but Martha was being unaccountably difficult this summer, insisting that Billy not miss any of his expensive day camp and announcing that when camp was over she was taking him to visit her parents on Nantucket. Andrew likes his in-laws and thinks that Billy should visit them, and it was becoming too complicated to sort out when his mother had suddenly died and inadvertently solved the problem.
He looks north over the cornfields and finds he wants to say the word beautiful. The word is strange on his tongue. It is a word he has not said in a long time, and it is all the more strange spoken beside this ruined house—this house, once loved, falling into disrepair. Both houses are now shabby in the sunlight, the back steps of the other nearly rotted out, the privet climbing wild over the sills. He sees a large crack in a kitchen window—from a branch or a bird? he wonders; not now, surely, from a child—and that a shutter has been blown from an upstairs window.
Two women, two widows, living far from town, neighbors with a lifetime of history, but not women who liked each other much, he thinks, not women who called upon each other much for warmth or for talk. He sees now what he has been too preoccupied to see before—the obvious disintegration of two houses that have no men in them, houses patched up as best they can be by women of a certain generation who were never taught how to putty a window and who do not know the names of tools. They make their kitchens gleam, he knows, but if a shutter falls from an upstairs window, it is carried to the cellar and left to stand there.
He will begin with the scraping and the sanding, he decides. The grass cannot be cut until it dries out, and that won't be until late afternoon at the earliest—although he should take a look at the lawn mower before then to see what kind of condition it's in. An oriole darts from among the thick foliage of the hydrangea tree. He wonders if the scrapers are still kept in the same black metal drawer in the garage.
HE HAS been scraping for an hour, and his arm is already sore, when she comes out the back door, gingerly making her way down the rotted stoop. Reflexively he looks at his watch. Quarter to. He knows she works four hours a day, from ten to two, seven days a week, at a nursing home nearby. It was a detail among many in a letter or a phone call from his mother that he'd read or heard quickly, but now the detail comes back to him, and his mother's expression of bewilderment at anyone's willingness never to have a day off. "She even worked Christmas," he remembers his mother saying or writing.
He calls to her when she is at the bottom of the stoop. She looks at her car and then turns to look at him. Delicately, she brings a thin hand to the side of her brow to shade her eyes, for the sun is behind him, and he must be to her a black silhouette against a brilliant sky. But he can see her clearly, as he couldn't yesterday: a pinkish-gray dress, an upturned face, her skin as soft as chamois. Perhaps she forgot that he would be there, but she shows no surprise. He towers over her, and she has to squint to see him. Her hair is ashen, where once it was the color of her bracelets, and is still worn long, drawn back in an intricate knot at the nape of her neck. She has on a strand of pearls—incongruous on a summer morning, driving in a Plymouth to a nursing home, but so in keeping with how he has remembered her that even the greater incongruity of her careful grooming against the ugly ruined farmhouse barely registers on his consciousness.
She walks toward him, each foot grating slightly on the gravel.
"Mrs. Close," he says, and instantly regrets the childish greeting, when he knows her name is Edith and he ought to call her that now, at thirty-six; but he feels diminished in her presence, as if he were a boy again and she'd come out to give instructions. He begins to back down the ladder.
He sees that there are folds beside her mouth where her skin has fallen and that her eyelids are hooded now. And below her eyes, there are smudges indicating that she hasn't slept well; the smudges match the color of her dress. He wants to break free of his image of himself as a boy, but when he says, too loudly for just the two of them, "I thought I'd tackle your lawn too, Edith, while I'm at this one later," his voice seems uncharacteristically boorish and rude.
She looks around at the tall grass and the wild privet, a look of weariness passing over her face.
Again he feels the boyish compunction to please, the awkwardness he has always felt with her.
She doesn't answer him directly. "A fine morning," she says.
How strange that they are speaking to each other in just the same tones of voice, using the same polite vocabulary, as they might have twenty-five years ago—as if nothing had intervened or changed in all those years, as if there had not been all that death and the birth of his own son.
She nods, and there is something in the tilt of her head or the angle of her profile that gives him a sharp memory of the younger woman he remembers her to have been. He sees a woman's hand on a man's wrist, pulling him up the steps and inside, even though the laundry basket under the clothesline is still half full of wet sheets. He remembers knocking on the back door one afternoon when he was eight, carrying a basket of tomatoes from his mother's garden, bountiful that year, and Edith opening the door, flustered, a red blush staining her throat and chest where he could see it, her hair loose and damp at the temples. She was fingering the top of her dress, where the last two buttons were still undone, and he understood, if not entirely comprehended, that Jim was in the house somewhere, home early, and that they had been doing together something secretive and thrilling.
The knowledge had come before he had even known what it was or what it meant—the suggestion that there might be between a man and a woman something that set them apart, something that could not be shared by others and ought not to be seen from the outside.
And after that day, he would watch her carefully, as if important information could be had by examining her. For other boys in the town, boys who liked to climb onto the high leather seat in the dairy truck or boys he knew from the hockey rink or in the cold tiled corridors of the junior high school, the knowledge had come differently, more predictably, from girls seen naked on a dare in woodsheds or from pictures found in magazines. Sean O'Brien, who was the goalie when Andy and he were in ninth grade, and who would be killed only three short years later, had once told of finding lurid and wonderful pictures of men and women together in a drawer marked "Hinges" in his father's cellar; and later Andrew, when he had grown and had his own house, would sometimes have a fleeting and sad image of a middle-aged TV repairman retreating to the bowels of his house for furtive pleasure.
He was aware that she was different from his mother and from the other mothers—an awareness that was inadvertently encouraged by his mother's disapproval of her neighbor, which hovered somewhere between quiet outrage and thinly disguised envy.
"Edith is not discreet," his mother would pronounce, having caught sight of her across the yard, or remembering a gesture or a remark her neighbor had made that day. "Edith is sometimes quite careless," she would say, and his father would wisely just nod, although Andy sometimes thought he smiled. And one evening his father volunteered, "Well, at least they're well matched," and his mother had said, "Shush," indicating that the boy was in the room. Her tone alerted Andy to a sentence that otherwise might have gone unremembered, and caused him to save it, as children do, until he was old enough to understand it.
He understood also, with a child's unerring antennae, that the woman his mother envied loved only the one person and that she was indifferent to the world outside her door, as if she knew she must be careful not to squander her reserves. She had seemed, for example, always to be spectacularly indifferent to Andy, thinking of him only, he felt, as the neighbor's boy and then later as the fellow who helped with odd jobs around the house to earn money for college. He sometimes thought, in fact, that she didn't actually see him in the yard as he trimmed a blackberry bush or raked the leaves from the flower bed. He'd say hello and nod; yet she might just pass silently by, lost in her own vision, unawar
e of his presence.
She waves once just before she gets into the Plymouth, and Andrew climbs back up the ladder.
Jim, though, Andrew thinks to himself, did notice him as a boy. He never passed Andy without a greeting or a question or even a piece of gum for the boy in his pocket. When the adults were in the yard, absorbed in each other, it would be Jim who would break away and take him by the hand—or even play a game of catch with him.
Scraping and painting the side of the house, as his own father did every five years, Andrew remembers the way Jim would watch his father when he worked—hands in his pockets, restless, but feeling no urgency to tackle his own chores. Jim was a man who started things but never finished them—unlike the steady, slow progress of Andy's father. And Andrew can remember being asked each August to tidy up a vegetable garden Jim had left too long to the weeds. In the spring, Jim would begin with enthusiasm, having bought exotic seeds from the catalogues and coming home each Saturday morning from the nursery with a shiny new tool or a bag of peat moss. But as the spring wove into summer, Andy would see him on the back stoop, smoking, drinking a beer and listening to the radio as if he had forgotten entirely that there was anything in the yard at all.
He was a tall man, a genial alcoholic, a man whose charm and smile made people say he was good-looking—though he was not, with his long face and its flat planes, a truly handsome man. It was understood that he had appetites—most obviously for women and for drink—though he didn't look the part. He was said to be irresistible to women, and as a teenager, Andy sometimes wondered if his mother's envy of her neighbor didn't spring from an unspoken and unacknowledged attraction to her neighbor's husband. He remembers that sometimes Jim would goose his mother in the yard, and she would, as she twisted away from him, giggle and look girlish.