In the spring, she'd have sat down beside him, with more of a thwack than you'd have thought possible from her tiny body, and would have said, through the clicking of her gum, where the fuck did he get that wimpy shirt, and he'd have shrugged and felt OK, for it was wimpy—a thin white shirt with shiny stripes on it—and he was wearing it only this once, to please his mother, who had bought it the week before.
Instead he watched the leer of the driver and the astonishment of the other boys as this creature he felt he no longer knew at all made her way down the aisle, holding her own as the bus lurched forward, grasping with her fingers the metal bars above the leather seats. Then he saw a brief flash of painted nails and heard the swish of her skirt sliding on the leather seat behind him. He stared out the window, furious with her.
He felt in his mouth, for the first time in his life, the metallic taste of betrayal and longing. With it came the knowledge that the shape of things you had known and trusted as certain could be twisted, overnight, out of recognition.
I think you know. I think, of all of them, you're the only one who knows. You talk like you don't know, but I think you do.
I hear you scraping, scraping, and then you move the ladder. My window is always open. My world is what I hear. I can tell you exactly what time of day it is just by the sounds outside the window.
My life is nothing but this.
She washes my hair. She bends my head back in the sink. Her hands are rough. I am like an old person she has to care for.
I listen to your voice and T.J.'s. His is full of lies. You can hear them when he laughs. He once was in a car with me, and I let him touch my breasts. I opened my blouse, and there were other boys with him. I bet he never told you that.
There was a shimmer on the water. You sat on the ground with your knees up. Your arms were on your knees. You were growing your hair long to go away to school, you said. I made you look at me.
I said, Afraid?
You shook your head.
You said I might have been your sister.
THREE
THE WALK IS SHORT, SEVENTY FEET. THE LAWN IS DRYING, and he could even now be mowing it. He thinks: In an hour, I'll be doing that.
He has washed, changed into a pair of khaki pants and a dress shirt, rolled to the elbows. He walks with his hands in his pockets, a walk he made unthinkingly a thousand times in his youth. He heard her car in the drive when he was washing up in the bathroom, and the faint clatter of a screen door; like clockwork, she is home at two-fifteen each day. A dozen large rosy-brown hydrangea blossoms are strewn along the top of the long grass by the drive; the small tree, he notes again, took a beating during the electrical storm in the night. He can't imagine it will last much longer now. His mother planted it the year she and his father bought the house, forty years ago at least, and he has always associated it with his mother, its lush growth with her well-being. Now it seems to him its foliage has grown too dense for its spindly trunk and must soon topple over.
His heart is beating too fast when he reaches the back stoop. Annoyed, he takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. When he puts his foot on the first step, he feels it give—as if it had accustomed itself all these years only to her weight and could not bear a pound more. It has been nineteen years since he entered this house—and he is aware, as he raps quickly on the frame of the screen door, that he is stepping again into a scene from the past, even though he knows, from the encounters of the last several days, that it won't feel at all as he has remembered it.
She comes to the door at once, wary, then alarmed. Their eyes involuntarily flicker away from each other, in the manner of people who do not like each other much but feel compelled to be polite.
"Andy," she says, not opening the door.
"I came to say hello to Eden," he says almost too brightly, and with this greeting, he opens the door and steps up into the kitchen. Edith backs away from him.
"Eden's asleep," she says quickly.
She is still wearing the pinkish-gray silk dress she had on earlier, a color that immediately begins to fade as he follows her away from the bright sunlight of the doorway into the kitchen. The shades are drawn over the sink and over the window facing the drive, a detail he has not noticed before, coming and going in his car. The effect is of a kitchen shut up for a season, waiting for the summer people or the new tenants to enter. He has a powerful urge to raise the shades with a snap, to see her kitchen and her face in the sunlight.
"I keep them closed to shut out the heat," she says, noticing his glance toward the window. "It's cooler that way."
He stands in the center of the linoleum floor, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the interior dusk, waiting for a cue, but she gives none.
"May I sit down?" he asks.
With an odd nervous movement of her hands, she indicates the: chair. She offers to make him a glass of iced tea. She is at the sink and then the refrigerator, getting ice, her back to him still.
"Thank you for everything you did for my mother," he says, although he is not entirely sure exactly what was done.
"I feel badly about your mother," she says, turning now with two tall glasses in her hands. "I ought to have seen it coming on. She did say once she had headaches. And in June, I was in the market when Carol—you remember Carol Turner—Carol said your mother had nearly fainted in the store just the day before. But I thought it was the heat, not a spell."
A spell. He hasn't heard the word used this way since he lived at home and his mother spoke of his grandmother-to make him understand why she was sick and couldn't see him. She has these spells, Andy, his mother said. And so had his own mother, only there'd been no one at the house to know.
"We see them in the patients at the nursing home," she says. "They're small strokes, and there's medication that can be given. And I should have realized..."
"It's not your fault," says Andrew. He takes a sip of iced tea. It has been made from a powdered mix. It has sugar in it, which he doesn't like. Now that his eyes are adjusting, the color is coming up on the walls: a pale green he remembers now, a green of hospitals or of government buildings. He recalls that this particular shade of green, reflecting off the walls, changed the color of your skin. Or was it his mother who said that, shaking her head critically, and he noticed it himself later, coming for Eden or to collect his weekly money? A sickly green, he thinks now, though the effect is muted without the light.
The kitchen is like his mother's in its layout, and both have the same rounded Magic Chef stoves, but there is otherwise little resemblance. There are no signs on the counters or on the table to indicate that anyone ever cooks here, or ever comes here—not a crusted sugar bowl, not a toaster oven with crumbs on the bottom tray, not a misshapen pot-holder made by a child. On the wall beside the fridge, where in his mother's kitchen there is a framed collage of snapshots—most of them Billy as a baby—there is only a plastic wall clock. And most disconcerting of all, though perhaps troubling only to Andrew, who has missed the intervening nineteen years of the evolution of this house, there is no sign that Jim was ever here—not a trace. Always, he remembers, there were coats and felt hats on the hooks at the back of the door, a row of heavy leather shoes by the stove, a pile of magazines on the table—Life, Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics (this last a family joke in his own house)—and Jim's bowl of fruit, ready to be peeled, never empty. Not only is there now no fruit in the room; there is not a hint of anything edible at all. Perhaps it's different in the bedroom upstairs. He thinks of his father's dresser in his own mother's bedroom, kept intact, as though any minute his father might come back and need the items on the linen runner. The windows, he notices, have no curtains on them—just the shades. He tries to recall if this was always true.
"You'll be selling, then," she says. She takes a sip of iced tea. He remembers this trait of hers: how she is able to conduct entire conversations without ever once looking at you. He forces himself to study her face, and in doing so sees again, in the dim light, as
has been happening of late, the woman she used to be, the profile more defined, superimposed over the face across the table.
"Well, I'll have to sell," he says, knowing his steady gaze is making her uncomfortable. "There's no reason now to keep it."
"No," she says, touching her hair at the nape of her neck. "No, I suppose not. Though with new people coming..."
She doesn't finish her thought. Andrew repeats what he has said earlier. "I'm doing some things to tidy up the place—not much; just cosmetic, really. It's no trouble to lend a hand here too, while I'm at it. The grass, of course. And your back stoop needs fixing. It's dangerous. You could break your leg on it. And I could put back that shutter that's fallen from the upstairs window."
"Oh," she says, taken aback. "No. Not the shutter. I ... I haven't got it. And it's not necessary. The steps, if you like, yes. I'll pay you, of course."
"I couldn't—"
"I'll pay you," she says, cutting him off.
Her face, her aged one, comes clearly into focus. Beneath a faint dusting of powder, he sees a delicate calligraphy of lines around her eyes. Her eyes are hard to look at, but he would say, in telling someone about her (which he thinks fie may never have done), that she is still quite handsome. It is not simply that she has aged well (she seems not to have the deep scoring that so changed his mother's face these last several years); it is, rather, a particular something she holds in reserve—her shoulders held back—that something patient and waiting. He thinks, too, about all the longing there was inside her, so intriguing for a boy, from a distance, to observe. Where does it all go to, he wonders, when the person you long for dies?
He turns his gaze away from her. Despite the years, despite his discomfort here, he has a strangely familiar sense of this room. Sometimes when he dreams, this kitchen is the setting. The characters are ones who don't belong here: his boss at work; Billy; a woman he has seen that day turning a corner. They gather in this kitchen; or there will be, in the middle of another dream, a shift in place, so that he is here with them, unfolding a plot begun elsewhere.
"How is Eden?" he asks suddenly. His voice is louder than he has intended.
She looks at the sink. "Eden is not well. She tires easily." The sentence sounds rehearsed, or oft repeated.
"I'd like to see her," he says recklessly.
She shakes her head. "It would upset her."
"I wouldn't upset her. I would just..." He searches for a word. "Visit."
"Well, not today." She rattles the cubes in her glass, and her mouth tightens. She raises her chin.
"Why not?"
"She's sleeping. And I've found that memories from the past upset her," she says. "I have to contend with that for days." She brushes an imaginary strand of hair from her forehead.
"But does she see anyone?" he asks. (His persistence surprises him. Why is he being so rude? But he is in it now and cannot stop.) "Does she go anywhere? There must be programs, centers for the blind."
She stands up and rinses her glass at the sink. "I'm a nurse," she says, with emphasis on the last word, as if that should settle the matter. As if trying to make him again the neighbor's child. "As you must know, Eden was away for several years in the beginning, but we've found she does better with me here. We have a quiet life, and it suits her."
He is about to quiz her once more, when above him he hears a sound, like that of a chair leg scraping against the floor. Or he imagines that he hears a sound. Edith Close says nothing; he examines her to see if she, too, has heard anything. Then he hears another sound, the weight on the floorboards of footsteps moving from one side of the room to the other. Eden's room, in the corner, is above the kitchen. Or does she have another room now?
Edith Close walks to Andrew and holds her hand out for his glass. "Will five dollars an hour be enough?" she asks.
He looks up at her. He sees no point in protesting. He knows she won't let him do the work without an arrangement of some kind. He says, Fine. He gives her the glass, which is still nearly full. "And there will be lumber for the steps," she adds. "Shall I give you some money now?"
He shakes his head. He knows she wants him to go.
He stands up, and as he does so, he hears music from a radio. He freezes and listens. It is definitely a radio. She hears it too; he sees her shoulders hunch almost imperceptibly, as if wishing to ward off the sound. He thinks he hears a phrase of "Glory Days," then silence, then the voice of a disc jockey. He looks at the ceiling.
She touches him, a hand on his elbow, and the touch startles him. Her fingers are cold on his skin.
"I have to see a patient," she says, guiding him toward the door.
And though he knows this can't be true, and though he wants to say that Eden must now be awake, her touch—that cold, unwelcome touch—makes him feel as if he were a boy again, eager to get away, to be gone from the dark kitchen.
She walks him to the door. The radio voice follows them, seems distinctly louder, in fact.
"Thanks for the iced tea," he mumbles.
He backs down the steps with something like a wave, and she quickly closes the door. He forgets the rotting stoop, and with his weight, the bottom step cracks. He nearly falls backward onto the gravel, awkwardly catching himself on the railing. When he turns, his hands are shaking. He thrusts his fists into his pockets to collect himself.
He is almost to his own back stoop when he feels a prickling at the back of his neck. He stops and turns quickly. One, two. He sees first, at the edge of a shade in the kitchen, a swift settling; and then, in the upstairs window, a gentler movement, a slow blur of a turn, a faint afterimage of a blue dress and a thin white arm.
The image is gone in a second. But he stands straining after the open window, willing it to come back, unable to move away.
She can't have come to the window to see me, he is thinking. She must have come to be seen.
HE FILLS the mower with gasoline and checks the oil. He has no idea how old the oil is, or when the machine was last used, but he is too impatient to make another trip out to the gas station. Bending to the pull cord for the fifth time, he gives it everything he's got, more in frustration than with any common sense, and against the odds, the machine belches into life. The sound is harsh and satisfying, shattering the silence. He hopes the loud noise is irritating to the woman behind the drawn shades. He takes a deep calming breath. The noise soothes him. It is a sound that feels good, that he can understand—even though, ironically, it's been years since he has mowed a lawn, anyone's lawn.
The work, he thinks, is equally satisfying. You push the mower down a straight and even path, you look behind you and you see a neat swath, though he is only taking off the top two or three inches this pass—the mower set high, so as not to clog the blade with the damp clippings. He is throwing the grass out to the side; but later on, he'll put the bag on and go over the lawn again, trimming it shorter, picking up the clippings.
The sun is hot and dry on his face. He can feel the tension leaving his body, even as his arms vibrate from the machine. The trick, he thinks, is to keep moving, to move inside the noise, to let the noise drown out the thoughts in his head and the images behind his eyes, until they fade into something distant and manageable. He wants to shut his eyes altogether, but, of course, that isn't possible. He wouldn't mind, though, he thinks, standing just for a second inside the roar, his eyes shut, his face tilted toward the sun.
She was one fantastic-looking girl. You remember?
I remember.
Sometimes he felt as if he hardly knew her then, though he saw her every day. But he heard what was said about her. And he knew the stories. He watched her—as you'd watch a house you once lived in become transformed by new owners.
He saw her on the bus on the way to and from school; in the backyard, meeting in the driveway; in a corridor, stopping for a drink of water from the fountain. She liked to tease him, and he let her. He didn't know how to make her stop. Confronting her, as he did at first when her growing reputat
ion alarmed him, made it worse; he lost the verbal battles. His best defense, he decided, was to ignore her—though she persisted, drawling his name in a husky voice that seemed to have blossomed overnight with her anatomy and that, unhappily, carried the length of the school bus or across a room. And he sometimes wondered, when he was being honest with himself, if he didn't enjoy the odd status that her attention conferred upon him.
She's hot for you.
She is not. I've known her since she was practically born.
She's giving it away, man. Perillo felt her up at the drive-in four times in August. He says her boobs are—
She's only thirteen, for Christ's sake.
She's been doin' it since school started. A chick wants it, she wants it.
Why don't you guys leave her alone?
Leave her alone? Hey, you sure you're not getting any?
IT WAS as if she were changing to suit her body, was somehow growing into the body that was developing too fast for her. He had no other explanation. Or rather, he thought, the basic traits were still there—her nerve, her brazenness—but they'd veered off in a new direction so that she used her talents not to be one of the boys but to have power over them.