Criss Cross (13 page)

The room had a small closet, which she had to share with a few of everyone’s out-of-season clothes, some winter boots, and a couple of boxes.

One of the boxes, a round hatbox, held Helen Pelbry’s collection of small figurines from when she was Helen Brandt. They were wrapped in tissue paper that had been wrapped and unwrapped so many times that it was soft and crepey with folds and wrinkles. The figurines were all dogs, of different breeds and made of different materials. Some porcelain, some wooden, some glass.

There was a small, heavy, rounded one with perky rounded ears, made of solid iron with blue-gray paint that had begun to chip and fall off, revealing dark metal and the beginnings of rust. There was another sitting dog, also of a geometric breed, but this one was tall and triangular, of creamy porcelain with polkaspots in undoglike colors: persimmon and yellow and lime green. A dog that had been carved barking straight up into the air to fit into the rectangular shape of a block of wood. A carved Irish setter, painted china collies, black and white Scottie dogs that were salt and pepper shakers. There was a whimsical dachshund, twisted and snipped from a hot glass rod, light and delicate. A marble schnauzer. A brass poodle.

Her mother never got them out and looked at them, as far as she knew. Debbie was the one who had unwrapped and wrapped them all those times, since first discovering the box when she was six or seven. She liked taking them out and looking at them. When she asked about them, her mother said they were just souvenirs; there was nothing special about them. All the same, she didn’t want Debbie to keep them out. She didn’t exactly say why.

Debbie arranged them on her desk, then wrapped them up again and put the box back down in the closet. Then she hauled out the other box and lifted it onto her bed.

This was also her mother’s. It was a cardboard carton filled with scrapbooks, yearbooks, photo albums, and other odds and ends from Helen Pelbry’s youth, her life before marriage.

In the official photo albums, the ones that were kept in the bookcase in the living room, Helen had a brief childhood. She began as a toddler in white muslin, trimmed with lace. Standing in a doorway, her chubby hand on the doorknob, her serious face and her little hand in a wash of sunlight. She was momentarily a ten-year-old, in braids and a cowgirl outfit. A senior in high school, pretty and composed in a sweater and a string of pearls. And then suddenly a bride, in a white satin dress with tiny satin-covered buttons from her wrist to her elbow, and down her spine. All of this happened in black and white, on three pages.

The cardboard box had more information, though still not enough. Debbie wasn’t sure what she was looking for, what she needed to know. Helen Brandt’s seventeen-year-old face smiled out of the yearbook page. She looked lively and confident. She looked poised. In some ways the past looked like a nicer place than the present. More golden, even in black and white, with less cruddiness. Probably that wasn’t true. She had heard about the Depression, polio and scarlet fever. About her grandfather coming home from work with his white collar gone gray, from all the soot and ash, just in the air, from the steel mills.

Still, the girl in the picture looked like she knew how to make things be golden for her. How did she do it? Maybe that’s what Debbie wanted to know.

She pulled a wad of pamphlets and programs out of the box, propped her pillow against the headboard, and leaned back. The one on top was a booklet of instructions for crocheting lacy collars to set on top of a sweater or a dress. It seemed a little like putting glitter on a grocery bag, but many people in those days only had one sweater or one dress. It was hard to believe, but that’s what her mother said, and that’s how they spruced up for special occasions.

The next booklet in the pile was a collection of recipes for faded holiday cookies, followed by a book put out by an aluminum foil company that showed a myriad of creative ways in which foil could be used, mostly unrelated to cooking and requiring dozens of square yards of foil. The effects were pretty spectacular. A swan centerpiece, for example, molded from crushed foil, holding a red rose in its beak, placed on a green tablecloth that was reflected, along with the light from two white candles, in every crinkle of the foil.

As she flipped through a calendar year of special occasions expressed in aluminum, the voices of her mother and their neighbor Fran entered the living room from the direction of the kitchen and filtered in through the flowered curtain.

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Helen,” said Fran. “It might never happen.”

“I’m not worried, really,” said Helen. “It kind of makes you wonder, though.”

The sound of squeaking couch springs. They were settling in for a chat.

Debbie picked up a program from the premiere screening of the movie
Gone with the Wind.
Apparently it had been a big deal. The program was fifty pages thick.

“By the way,” Helen was saying. “Did I tell you that Debbie is going to go down to old Mrs. Bruning’s house on Saturdays, to help her out with housework? I guess she’s getting very arthritic.”

Debbie’s ears pricked up when she heard her name and she half-listened to her mother’s version of the story. She usually sounded pretty good in her mother’s stories, though not quite like herself. The stories themselves were that way, too; more entertaining than what really happened, though close enough that you could think, oh, so that’s how it was, even if you had been there and it hadn’t seemed that way at all. You could find out in this way that something you thought had been a disaster had actually come out quite well.

In her mother’s version of the Mrs. Bruning story, Debbie was a take-charge kind of girl who saw a frail old woman in distress and went right to the rescue.

She didn’t mind being cast by her mother as a heroine. But the way it happened was more accidental. And it was more equal. Mrs. Bruning lived in one of the older houses near the bottom of Prospect Hill Road. Her house was on a corner lot, facing the side street. As you walked past it, up or down the hill, you could see into the backyard. The yard slanted up steeply away from a concrete patio, which was shaded by a corrugated fiberglass awning of faded yellow, held up by metal bars that enclosed ornamental scrolls, painted black, barnacled with scabs of rust. The house was built of gray stone and had a castle-y appearance, if you could sift it out from the awning, and the big doorway that had been fitted with plywood to accommodate a small modern door with a crescent-shaped window, the bent and cockeyed Venetian blinds hanging behind the leaded and stained glass windows, and the sun porch tacked onto one side, shingled up to the windows with roofing shingles in variegated shades of purple, brown, and green.

Despite all of its prostheses, Debbie thought that the ivy climbing up the stone, and the stained glass, and the small porchlike recess on the second floor with the crenellated half-wall gave the house an elegance and a personality. She had always wondered what it was like inside.

She saw Mrs. Bruning out in her backyard and waved. Mrs. Bruning waved back. Then she held her hand up, as if to say “Wait a minute,” and started making her way purposefully across the grass. She was short and solid, bottle-shaped. A bottle of vinegar, or Pepto-Bismol, with legs. She was one of those elderly women whose cleavage starts about two inches below her collarbone and your main response to it is an intellectual curiosity about how that can even physically work.

She moved toward Debbie with determination, but her steps were small, baby steps, and effortful, as if each one was costing her. It was a big yard, so Debbie stepped into it and walked over to meet her, to save time. Not that she was saving it for anything in particular.

Debbie knew two things about Mrs. Bruning. One was that she had never cut her hair. At least that’s what people said. It may or may not have been true, but her hair seemed as if it might be pretty long. She wore it in a heavy braid arranged around her head in a complicated way, held in place with bobby pins. The hair closest to her scalp was white and fluffy, but as the braid narrowed, it became carrot colored, then dwindled into a faded russet wisp weaving in and out of the pin-prickled coronet. It wouldn’t have been that surprising to see baby birds peeping out over the top of it.

The other thing Debbie knew was that, when Mrs. Bruning’s husband was still alive, the two of them had owned and operated the Idle Hour Restaurant. They were German. From Germany German. Although they had been in America for a long time.

“It’s going to rain,” said Mrs. Bruning as they met. She was short. She only came up to Debbie’s shoulder. It was an odd sensation, looking down at someone you felt you ought to be looking up to. Debbie was fairly certain Mrs. Bruning had been larger, in the past.

She looked at the sky, a dropped ceiling of soft gray wool. The air had a pre-rain stillness to it.

“Yeah,” she said. She said it pleasantly, but immediately wished she had said, “Yes,” or even “Yes, ma’am.” Mrs. Bruning had that effect.

“Yes,” she corrected herself. “I think it is. Going to rain.”

“I can’t get my laundry down from the clothesline,” said Mrs. Bruning.

“Oh?” said Debbie. She still thought they were just making conversation.

“Why not?” she asked. It seemed like the logical next line in the conversation.

“My hands,” said Mrs. Bruning. “And my shoulders. Arthritis. For some reason they were working better this morning, I was able to hang it all up. But now they are so stiffened up on me, I can’t do it. I can’t get the laundry down. And it’s going to rain.”

She looked at Debbie expectantly. She demonstrated how her arms would only go so high, how her hands would not do what she needed them to do.

“You see what I’m saying?” she said. She had bright brown eyes, like a bird’s eyes.

She didn’t actually ask for help, but Debbie finally realized what she was supposed to do here. She glanced at the lowered sky, the waiting laundry, and Mrs. Bruning’s knotted hands.

“Oh,” she said. “Let me help you.”

The first cold heavy drops of rain fell on Debbie’s shoulders as she carried Mrs. Bruning’s laundry into the house, where it was dark. Gray light hovered outside the windows, but it couldn’t penetrate the ivy. Debbie bent awkwardly over her burden, the big basket, piled high.