Tiny Little Thing

He fingered her hair, which smelled like a garden. A garden at night. Gardenias? He didn’t know much about flowers.

  Without lifting her head, she said, muffled in his jacket, “You probably hate crying women.”

  “You’d be surprised. A lot of men cry out there. In the field. At night. The younger kids, missing their mothers.”

  “But women. Women crying. Most men hate that.”

  “I don’t give a damn. Cry all you want. Anyone would cry, after a thing like that.”

  “But not you.”

  “Well, I’ve seen worse. But if I hadn’t, I’d probably be crying right along with you.”

  She didn’t answer, only sat there curled up into his shoulder, as if she were too embarrassed by the loss of composure to lift her head. Cap went on stroking her hair, and not just because it felt so damned good, because she felt so damned good, firm and soft and dainty and strong and wet and fragrant, a gardenia-scented bouquet of tender female limbs tucked into his sofa and his body. No, not just because of the pleasure of stroking her hair, but because it was the only thing keeping the awkwardness at bay, between two strangers like them. The only thing to comfort her.

  She could be crying with anyone. She could have gone to her mother or her best friend, she could have gone to a grandmother or cousin or sister or brother, if she had them. She could have gone to her fiancé. She should have gone to her fiancé, a day like today.

  Why had she come to him?

  She shivered a little, the way you sometimes did after a long cry, when the heat and the energy fled and you were left with nothing to keep you warm. He went on stroking her hair, feeling her breath in his shoulder, trying not to think about having sex with her.

  She turned her head, freeing her face, and sighed. “I guess you’re probably wondering why I’m here.”

  “The question crossed my mind.”

  Tiny sat up. “Do you still have that handkerchief?”

  “Right here.”

  “Thanks.” She stood up, with her back to him, while she made busy with the handkerchief, fixing her face. His gaze fell to her calves, slender and graceful, curved with firm muscle beneath her stockings. He closed his eyes and tried not to picture them wrapped around his back.

  “So. I was wondering, Cap . . . I was hoping . . .”

  He opened his eyes. She was facing him again, eyes red and puffy but surprisingly composed, surprisingly put back together. You couldn’t ruffle Miss Tiny Doe’s dignity for long. Even her hair seemed to have fallen back into place, or maybe that was the stroking of his hand.

  “Yes?” he prompted, when her voice faded away.

  Her shoulders rose bravely. She knit her hands together in front of her tiny waist, folding the handkerchief in the smallest possible square between them.

  “Do you know how to make a person disappear?”

  Tiny, 1966

  When I was about five years old, my parents nearly divorced. I doubt either of my sisters remembers this; they were practically in diapers still. Daddy had come back from the war, shot in the groin, and for a long time, he didn’t seem to be getting any better. I remember how he used to sit in his chair atop some sort of odd-shaped blue cushion, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, looking as if he might curl up against the upholstery and die at any moment. I wanted to climb on his lap and hug him, but I couldn’t. His wound.

  Eventually he started getting up and about, and went back to work at the law firm in which he was a partner, and that was when he found out Mummy was having an affair. (This part was explained to me later; at the time, all I knew was that there was fighting and tantrums, that Mummy and Daddy didn’t seem to like each other anymore, and I had to remain very, very quiet in my room or I might make it worse.) After they went to bed, invariably in separate rooms, I would slip out and clean up all the messy cocktail glasses and the cigarette butts. I would get up early and bring Mummy her coffee, I would tidy my room, I would mix Daddy his martini, because you never knew what might help. You never knew what might make them love you enough to stay together.

  Looking back, as a worldly adult, I suspect Daddy was so upset because of the injustice. Due to the nature of his injury, sexual activity was impossible for some time. I think there were specialists involved, delicate surgeries, until things were back in working order, but in the meantime he was unmanned, and there was Mums, dissatisfied as ever, seeking satisfaction the only way she knew how. The only way they both knew, really, because I also happen to know that he slept with other women when he was overseas: Mums once told me about the letters she found in his kit that came back with him. (They liked to do that with me, amassing evidence against each other, in case I should ever find myself having to choose sides.)

  Anyway, Mums had her revenge, and Daddy couldn’t revenge her revenge, and everything balanced precariously for a while, and I don’t know why they didn’t divorce. People were divorcing by then, it wasn’t all that big a scandal anymore. Maybe Mummy and Daddy had married into an expectation of discreet infidelity, as rich people did back then, and they came at last to an understanding. Maybe they really loved each other, and found the grace for forgiveness. Or maybe neither of them wanted to give up the apartment on Fifth Avenue. (New Yorkers are practical like that, especially when it comes to real estate.) Who knows, really? Only the two of them. Eventually the fighting simmered down, the balance of power was restored, and life went on. They remain married to this day, God help them both, and are even sometimes happy with each other.

  But I’ve never forgotten that year on the brink. I’ve never forgotten what a small thing I was, tiny and powerless in my bedroom, afraid to shout out and ruin everything. And I’ve always been amazed by my younger sisters, who are never afraid to shout for anything they wanted, not the least little bit.

  • • •

  Take Pepper, now. Pepper walks into the Hardcastle breakfast room four days later like she owns the joint. She kicks off her shoes and settles in, beneath a watercolor seascape executed by Granny Hardcastle herself in 1934, during her blue phase, and she says, loud and fearless: “Did you know there’s an old car out there, buried in the shed?”

  I look up from my coffee. “What shed?”

  “The one near the elbow of the driveway. Covered in brambles.” She reaches for the toast rack. She smells fresh and salty. Her hair is done up in her cheerful yellow head scarf, and she hasn’t taken off her sunglasses. A good thing Granny Hardcastle eats breakfast in her room. “Where is everybody, anyway?”

  “It’s Monday morning, darling. Frank’s gone into Boston, trawling for campaign money, and his father’s back at his desk. For work,” I add, with a slight emphasis on the word work, because isn’t that what Pepper’s supposed to be doing right now? Working. In Washington. Not here.

  She peels off her sunglasses—masculine wire-rimmed ones, like those worn by fighter pilots—and smiles. “Don’t you fling those dirty four-letter words at me.”

  “You’re welcome to stay as long as you like, of course,” I say. “But aren’t they expecting you back in the office by now?”

  “Oh, we understand each other, Washington and me.” Pepper gnaws her toast, glances at the buffet laid out behind us, and reaches for the coffeepot. “About this car, though. I think you should have a look. It’s very old and lovely. I’ll bet it’s worth a mint.”

  “What do you know about cars?”

  “More than you think.” The old sidelong wink.

  It occurs to me, as we strike out across the damp grass of the driveway oval, that if you told me a week ago I’d be tolerating this—striking across grass with Pepper, striking across anything and for any length of time with Pepper, for that matter—I’d have smiled politely and reached for the telephone to dial up the loony bin. Percy trots at our heels, in the wary wedge of space between us. “Just how did you happen to be poking around there, anyway?” I ask.

 
“I’m nosy.”

  “Well, I knew that. But you’ve only been here four days. Don’t tell me you’ve already exhumed the Big House of all its secrets.” I picture my underwear drawer. Surely not.

  Pepper waves this away. “I might have made a wrong turn last night, coming back from the tennis courts.”

  “I can’t imagine how.”

  “Anyway, I came back this morning with a crowbar—”

  “You didn’t!”

  “Useful little darlings, crowbars. And look!” She points across the remaining few yards of grass and into a patch of brambles, which, on closer inspection, obscures the gray weathered boards of an old shed.

  “I’ll be damned,” I say.

  “Tiny!” Pepper is shocked. Shocked.

  I pace a slow half circle around the bramble patch. Why have I never seen this before? Or perhaps noticed is a better word. After all, I’ve driven past these brambles countless times, in Frank’s yellow roadster, in my own staid blue Cadillac. (And then in another car entirely, on another day I would rather not recall.) The bushes tangled into vines, which tangled into the shade of the birch trees that protected the Hardcastle property from the curious public road, from the photographers looking to make a buck. For some reason, the groundskeeper has simply allowed this descent into wilderness.

  “Well, it’s odd,” I say. “This isn’t like Fred at all.”

  “Not a bramble man, our Fred?”

  “It’s not the brambles themselves. You perceive this whole mess is supposed to block the view from the road, after all.” I wave my hand in the direction of the pavement, on the other side of the trees, from which a telltale drone of engine obligingly raises its voice to a roar. “The more brambles, the merrier.”

  “The shed itself, then?”

  “Yes.” I pick my way through the brambles to the wide door, which stands ajar, presumably because of Pepper’s crowbar. The air is cool on my bare arms, shaded by the layers of vegetation. “If Fred weren’t using the shed, he’d have had it torn down, instead of letting it collapse on its own.”

  “It isn’t collapsed.”

  “Not yet. Was it locked?”

  “Yes.”

  I turn my head and raise my eyebrow at her. She shrugs an innocent pair of shoulders. “That’s what crowbars are for, Tiny.”

  “I suppose you’d know.” The door is only cracked open. One of a double set, taking up almost the entire end of the shed. The other door still lies flush with the wall, held in place by the encroaching brambles. The doors are made of vertical boards, in contrast with the rest of the shed, clad horizontally. A rusty lock lies in the matted grass at my feet, still attached to its mottled metal plate. I can see the scars on the edges of the doors: fresh unpainted wood against the peeling gray.

  “Well, go on.” Pepper prods my back. “Open it.”

  Like when we were girls. Like when she or Vivian would dare me to peek in on Grandmother Schuyler swimming naked in the pool on Long Island, or to lick the frozen lamppost outside our Fifth Avenue apartment. A rush of trepidation overcomes me, a premonition of . . . no, not evil, not exactly. But something. Something behind that door. Something rather formidable, something complicated. Something I’d really rather not face at the moment.

  But it’s too late for nonsense. I stick out my hand and haul open the door.

  The hinges shriek in shock. A gust of air greets me, cool and musty, smelling of black grease. I wave my hand in front of my nose, imagining mildew. “I can’t see anything.”

  Pepper is struggling with the other door, pushing hard against the brambles. “Hold on. Here comes the sun. Ouch! God damn it!”

  “Splinter?”

  “No. Thorns.” She sucks on the pad of her thumb and gives the door a last almighty shove, and lo! like magic, or divine benediction, a shaft of pale morning sun finds the exact angle between the branches and brambles and open door, and turns the air to gold.

  Illuminates the dusty chrome points of the object that fills the shed.

  “You weren’t kidding,” I say.

  “Would I jest?”

  I step forward and rest my hand on the hood ornament, a delicate three-pointed star enclosed in a circle. “It’s a Mercedes-Benz.”

  “You don’t say.”

  I turn my head. Pepper’s still standing near the door, backlit by the sunshine, one leg propped against the doorjamb, her arms crossed beneath her breasts. A speculative posture.

  “Oh? And what do you know about Mercedes-Benzes?” I ask.

  She pushes off from the doorjamb and strolls along the side of the car, drawing a trail along the endless black hood. “Oh, this and that. Not the sort of machine a Schuyler would be caught driving, would it? Rich and glamorous.”

  “And terribly German. The wrong kind of German.”

  “That, too.”

  “How old do you think it is?”

  Pepper circles the sloping rear like a trainer inspecting a Thoroughbred. “Oh, thirty years at least. It looks like the kind of thing Göring would have driven around Berlin, doesn’t it? Look at the curve of the fender. The way it swoops down from the front tires like that. It absolutely screams sex, doesn’t it?”

  I release the star and step around the left front wheel. Two slender exhaust pipes extend from the side of the hood and into that glorious swooping fender, like Adam’s ribs. A canvas sheet is draped atop the open cockpit. “Hard to tell under all that dust,” I say.

  “Oh, you’re better than that, Tiny. Even you can see what’s beneath. The curve of this rear.” She shapes it in the air with her hands, just so. “Can’t you just imagine driving this gorgeous beast down some lovely old road? Miles and miles. To the middle of nowhere.”

  “You? The middle of nowhere?” I lift the canvas sheet. A slow drift of dust slides down the other side, like snow. “Anyway, it can’t possibly start.”

  “Who says? Let me help you with that.” She moves to the passenger side and grasps the opposite end of the canvas.

  “In the first place, the gas tank will be empty.”

  “How can you be sure of that?”

  “Evaporation, darling. Thirty years of it, probably.” We fold up the sheet in perfectly synchronized movements, lengthwise and lengthwise again, and then we meet at the top of the hood to bring the edges together. “And oil.”

  “What do you know about oil?”

  “I know cars need it, so the parts don’t stick together.”

  “Oh, an expert, then.”

  I fold the sheet over my arm and turn back to the car. “I suppose we’ll have to call somebody in to fix it. Or else tow it to a garage.”

  “Don’t you dare!” Pepper walks back down the hood to the passenger door. “Just look at this leather, Tiny. All brown and soft. The dials.”

  “Don’t open it!”

  But it’s too late. Pepper tries the handle and—much to my surprise—the door gives way fluidly, without a squeak, a miracle of Teutonic engineering. She lowers her body inside and closes her eyes. “Oh, Tiny. Come inside.”

  “You’re a dope.”

  My sister leans her head back, eyes still closed, mouth curved in a luxurious smile. “Better than sex,” she says.

  “Surely you’re having better sex than that, Pepper darling.”

  She cracks open an eyelid. “Better than what you’re having with old Frank, I’ll bet. Nice married under-the-covers missionary sex.” She pats the driver seat. “Come on in. You know you want to.”

  I swallow back my outrage—well, she’s right, isn’t she? Hit the old nail smack on the head—and set the thick square of folded canvas on top of the hood, just behind the ornament. “I do have work to do, you know. At least a dozen notes to write, and Frank wanted me to look over his speech while he’s away—”

  “Oh, screw the housewife routine, just on
ce.” She pats the seat again.

  I exhale the heavy sigh, just to show her how large a favor she’s asking, and swing around the side of the car to the driver’s side. This door sticks a little, or maybe it’s just me, sticky and incompetent, but Pepper reaches over and gives it a shove, while I tug, and at last the latch gives way and the door glides weightlessly outward. I hold my skirt beneath my thighs and slide downward into the driver’s seat.

  “You see what I mean?” says Pepper.

  The scent of leather rolls around me in a masculine fog. I place my hands on the steering wheel, two o’clock and ten o’clock. The thick dust on the windshield obscures my vision. Behind me, the seat molds itself around my back and legs, the curve of my buttocks, like a pair of large and skillful hands.

  “I see what you mean.”

  Pepper’s opening the glove compartment, the ashtray. “Look at this!” she exclaims, holding up a cigarette butt, rimmed in pink lipstick.

  “Good Lord.”

  She revolves it between her fingers. “Can you imagine? I wonder who owned it.”

  “One of the Hardcastles, obviously.”

  “Do you think so? A German car like this? A special order, I’m sure, right from the factory. You would have had to be some sort of European aristocrat to get your hands on this. Anyway, the Hardcastles were like the Schuylers, especially in those days. Nice reliable Packards and Cadillacs and Oldsmobiles. Nothing too flashy.”

  I run my hands along the white steering wheel. Pepper sets the cigarette back down in the ashtray and starts rummaging through the glove compartment. I say, “It’s not flashy, exactly.”

  “All right. Sexy. Glamorous.”

  “Well, Granny Hardcastle was a bit more fun before she married. So they say. You know she brought money into the family. Her father was in textiles, a self-made man.”

  “Hmm. I didn’t know that. Interesting.” Pepper’s curious head is still tucked down, at a level with the glove compartment. The yellow ends of her scarf slide around the nape of her neck. “I guess it fits. I always thought there was something not quite us about her. The way she works at it all.”